Current Events, scripture, Sermons

Homily, March 1

We read the story of the Man Born Blind today! 

What do these animals have in common with each other, and with YOU?…  We’re all a kind of animal called primates.

One of the things all primates have in common is binocular vision. Binocular vision means that what we can see with each eye, overlaps a lot – so when we look forward, most of what we can see we are seeing with both eyes.

That’s really good for depth perception, which means, telling exactly how far away something is. 

It’s good for animals that hunt, like canines and felines. 

And it’s good for animals that climb around in trees – like primates! It helps our primate cousins, and our primate ancestors, jump from branch to branch safely. 

The point of this little science lesson is that human beings are a kind of animal that is very dependent on vision – on sight. 

What do you think are the most important senses for your dog or cat?… (maybe smell, hearing)

What about for humans? …

You could argue that sight is our primary and strongest sense. It takes up the most space in our brains, by far!

Sight and seeing are so important to us that we use them as a metaphor a lot.

A metaphor is when we make a connection between two things, as a way to say more about one of those things. 

Here’s an example: what if you’re busy with homework or chores or a project, and somebody tells you, You’re a busy bee!

Do they really think you look like a bee?…

Why do they say that? … 

Here are some other metaphors you might hear: 

He’s a bull in a china shop. 

She was a deer in headlights. 

I felt like a fish out of water. 

Those are kind of obvious metaphors, because that person isn’t really a deer or a bee or a fish. 

But we also use metaphors we might not even know we’re using.

What if you’re trying and trying to figure out a math problem, and finally somebody explains it, and you say, Oh, I see!!! You’ve been looking at that math problem for an hour; you didn’t just see it. When you say I see!!, you’re using seeing as a metaphor for understanding. 

We use “seeing” as a metaphor for knowing, too, or for perceiving something that doesn’t actually use vision. 

Here are some more examples of when people say see but aren’t really talking about vision, seeing things with our eyes:

I just don’t see the point. 

I don’t know what she sees in him. 

I see an opportunity here. 

I’m trying to see your point of view. 

… You might notice or think of others. 

What does it mean to be blind? 

It means your eyes don’t work very well, right? Maybe you can see a little bit, maybe you can’t see at all. But your eyes don’t work well enough for you to be able to use vision to do daily tasks and move around the world, the way most people do.

Just like we use “see” as a metaphor to mean, know or understand, sometimes people use blind as a metaphor for ignorant or stubborn or closed-minded. Unfortunately, there are a couple of examples of this in prayers in our prayer book!

One prayer asks God to give us those things which “for our blindness we cannot ask.” It’s trying to say that sometimes we don’t even know what we need God to do for us, and that’s certainly true. But what does that have to do with being blind?

We fixed it in our version, but in the prayer book, the litany we use in Lent says, “Accept our repentance, Lord, for our blindness to human need and suffering.” What it’s trying to say is that sometimes we’d rather not know about people who are suffering, so we just choose not to learn about it or think about it. But what does that have to do with being blind??

We work on not using blindness as a metaphor in these ways because it’s not respectful of blind folks to talk about blindness as if it means willful ignorance or some kind of spiritual failure. 

Being blind doesn’t stop somebody from having a job, going to parks and concerts and restaurants, having a family or hobbies, and doing most of the the things sighted people do. And often blind people’s other senses get stronger, which is really cool – like a kind of superpower! 

But we do make it hard for people who are blind, like people with other disabilities and differences, to participate in our common life. Because of some laws and rules, there are things we do – on city streets, at jobs and restaurants and parks – that make it so that blind people can be there easily and safely. But there’s a lot more we could do if we really wanted to, together. 

And back in Jesus’ time, it might have been even harder for blind people to live normal lives. They didn’t have those laws and rules. And a lot of people thought that being blind meant that God was mad at you, or maybe at your parents! 

In this story, we have this man who was born blind. The fact that his parents show up in the story making me think he was still young, maybe eighteen or twenty. And Jesus heals him – makes his eyes work, so he can see! Sometimes in stories where Jesus heals somebody, we see that person ask Jesus to heal them. That doesn’t happen in this story. But he does seem happy about having been given his sight! His life is going to be easier now. 

But Jesus, or maybe John, our Gospel writer, or maybe both of them, want us to think about literal sight, seeing with our eyes, and metaphorical sight – being willing to accept something new that surprises us or goes against the ideas we already have. 

Who are some of the people in the story who are having a hard time accepting something new, that doesn’t fit their ideas?… 

  • The neighbors! Arguing over whether it’s really him. 
  • Maybe the parents: We know this is our son, we know he was born blind, that’s it. They’re too scared to “see” anything else. 
  • The Pharisees, who argue about it: Someone who is righteous would be resting on the sabbath, not healing somebody; but how could someone who is unrighteous have the holy power to restore somebody’s sight? 
  • And the religious leaders! They have some things they know: We know this man, Jesus, is a sinner. We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners. They know those things so hard that they can’t accept the idea that maybe Jesus is the real thing, even when the young man tells them the obvious facts: I was blind, and now I can see!!!! In fact, they get so mad about it that they kick him out of the synagogue, the house of worship. 

Right at the end of the story, Jesus says something about how he came into the world so that people who are blind will be able to see – like the young man he healed – and so that people who think they can see will “become blind.” He’s using metaphor to talk about people who think they have everything figured out, but refuse to believe something that’s right in front of them.

About eighty years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who opposed the Nazis, wrote a letter to some friends about Hitler and his followers. Part of that letter seems to me like it connects with this Gospel story. 

Bonhoeffer wrote about the problem of “Dummheit.” That word is often translated from German into English as stupidity, but I’ll stick with the German word so we don’t mix it up with what we already think stupid means. By dummheit, he means that people give up using their own judgment and thinking for themselves. They put someone else in charge of what they think – specifically, their great leader, Adolf Hitler. And if something comes along that doesn’t fit their ideas – HIS ideas – then they just shut it out. 

It’s not that people afflicted by dummheit are lacking in intellectual capacity. Many are very smart! Dummheit is a moral and social and political thing, not a brain thing. He writes, “The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly… fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances…. In conversation with [someone afflicted by Dummheit], one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell.” 

And someone under that spell, Bonhoeffer writes, “will… be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” As Bonhoeffer sees it, Dummheit is more dangerous than people who are trying to do bad things. 

Bonhoeffer says you can’t reason with people who are under Dummheit. If you tell them facts that go against their ideas, they just won’t believe you, or will say that those facts don’t matter.

But he cares about those people. They’re his fellow citizens. And he believes that the Dummheit isn’t a permanent or intrinsic part of who they are. He believes they still have their own inner insight and independence, buried in there somewhere, and that they need liberation – they need to be set free. 

All of that seems important to me. And it also seems important to me to stay aware of my own potential for Dummheit. We all have biases that make us more likely to believe some things than others, or that make us assume about other people that might not be true. We might have leaders or commentators or influencers whose ideas we rely on, or even substitute for our own ideas and opinions. 

Some people think that to be Christian is a kind of Dummheit. That we’ve taken on a whole mindset that we refuse to question, that we keep our beliefs over here and reality over here, and never the twain shall meet. But the Bible is full of people having their ideas and the way they think about the world challenged and stretched and transformed by Jesus and by what God is doing. Our great theologian Richard Hooker, back in the 16th century, looked at the rise of scientific research and said, God gave us brains, and the ability to wonder and to reason. So it could never be against God’s will to use our brains and seek out new knowledge and new understandings. 

As followers of Jesus, we are called to keep our literal and metaphorical eyes open. To seek and wonder, to observe and reflect, to listen and learn. To look for spaces of sharing and wondering, instead of spaces of unaninimity and conformity. To always try to better understand ourselves, each other, and the world. And to look for the surprising truths and hopeful possibilities that may be hiding in plain sight. Amen. 

 

 

Bonhoeffer on Dummheit:

https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%20Stupidity.pdf

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Sermon, Lent I, Feb 22

The book of Genesis has a really special place in my heart. As a freshman at Indiana University, I took a course called Genesis in Literature, a seminar taught by the sainted James Ackerman, a faithful Presbyterian as well as a professor of religious studies. We read Genesis closely, analyzing details of the text; we looked at parallel texts from other ancient peoples; and we read literature that uses narrative motifs from Genesis – like Steinbeck’s imposing novel East of Eden. As a senior, I got to be an undergraduate teaching assistant for the same class. Though I’d grown up in church, that class might have been the true beginning of my deep love for the Bible. The moment when I began to learn that we can take the Bible seriously without taking it literally; that its strangeness can be an invitation instead of an alienation; that even when historical, literal truth is uncertain or unlikely, deeper truths can be embedded in holy text. 

You may be relieved to know that the Episcopal Church does not expect you to take the creation story – and this story, sometimes called the Fall – literally, as the way things actually came to be. But it doesn’t follow that we find this story meaningless. In fact, I find it bursting with meaning.

In Genesis chapter 1, we get the seven-day creation story, culminating with God creating humanity, male and female, in God’s image, and then resting. Here in chapter 2, we get a somewhat different story. God makes Man first, and places him in a beautiful garden, called Eden. Every tree that gives edible fruit grew in the garden; there were also two special trees – the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As we heard, God warns Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge: “for in the day you eat of it, you shall die.” 

Now, the garden is very nice, but Adam gets lonely. God makes a bunch of animals, but none of them quite seem to be what Adam needs. So God creates Woman, Eve, from Adam’s rib. Adam is delighted! And listen, this bit is important: “The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they weren’t embarrassed.”

Then the serpent decides to stir up trouble. (Note that the text doesn’t identify the serpent with the Devil, though people often have.) The woman tells the serpent what Adam has told her: “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” But the serpent says, “You will not die; God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And she sees that the tree is to be desired to make one wise. And she eats, and her husband – who is right there with her! – eats too. And their eyes are opened, and they know that they are naked. They hastily sew leaf loincloths for themselves. 

That evening, God comes walking in the garden. Adam and Eve hide from God, in shame and fear. God calls out, Where are you? The man says, I hid from you; I was afraid, because I am naked. God says, Who told you that you are naked?… And then the whole story comes out, and consequences follow. The man and the woman are sent forth from Eden, to a life of heavy toil to get the ground to yield them food. 

It’s a story about the loss of innocence. There was a time when life was easy, when we didn’t have to work for food or worry about right and wrong. We just played, and rested, and then played some more. We were naked, and we didn’t care. 

And then… we grew up, right? As individuals, and perhaps as a species. We grew up. We wised up. We learned more and more, and the more we knew, the more complicated things got, and the more there was to worry about. Instead of sneering at our younger selves and their ignorance, their innocence, we kinda wish we could go back. 

Who told you that you are naked? The thing is: God and the serpent were both right.That’s the deep truth this story offers us – or one of them, anyway. Adam and Eve don’t drop dead on the spot when they eat the fruit, but there is death, there is loss, in what follows. Knowing good from evil turns out to be a burden that they can’t put down. The sweetness of their early days becomes a cloudy, wistful memory. Never again will they be naked, unashamed, and free. 

It’s Lent. And in Lent the church talks a lot about sin. There’s a sort of overview of some core church teachings in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, called the Catechism; it’s not, like, the official core doctrines of our church, but it can be a useful teaching tool. The Catechism says, “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” The church speaks of sin in our confessions, too: “We confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart;  we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” Or: “We have sinned against you, opposing your will in our lives. We have denied your goodness in each other, in ourselves, and in the world you have created.” 

All of this tends to reinforce a sense of sin as something I do (or possibly, fail to do). As individual action – and discrete action: something that happens today, or yesterday, or last year. 

That is one form sin can take, for certain. But Christianity has often over-focused on individual sin, and failed to grapple with systemic sin. With the ways our greed and fearfulness and smallness of heart have accumulated over centuries and millennia, have fossilized into social and economic and physical realities, so that we live and move and have our being within a fallen world. We’ve eaten the apple; we’ve taken on maturity, knowledge, shame, civilization and all its ills, politics, complexity, violence, inequality, the whole concept of morality, right and wrong, good and evil – for better and worse. We can’t just go back to the garden. 

One of our Confessions gestures towards all that: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us… and the evil done on our behalf.” At my seminary, our work understanding God’s call in our lives included trying to surface how race, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on, shape how we see the world and understand ourselves and others. Our professors used the metaphor of a fish that can’t see the water in which it swims. On other Sundays in Lent we’ll begin worship with a litany that names some of the toxins in our cultural waters: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives; our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people; our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts; our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us; our waste and pollution of your creation. 

None of these are matters we can mend through individual action. These are evils that bind and enslave us, and evils done on our behalf, in which we are complicit in countless ways, large and small. The writer Francis Spufford makes the case that the word sin has been corrupted by capitalism – sinful is something that advertisers say about chocolate! 

Instead, he proposes that we think in terms of the Human Propensity to Eff Things Up, or the HPtFTU. 

I appreciate the way that framing – the HPtFTU – encompasses both the individual and the collective, and the interrelatedness of the individual and the collective. I spoke recently with someone who was struggling with a perceived failure. In conversation, we unpacked the way that failure stems from things that are unresolved in their life and heart, things where God and their own deep self have something to say that’s going unheard. Stuff like that happen all the time. We miss the mark, we fall short of our intentions, we do things we later wish we hadn’t done, because something in us is hurt or broken or fearful or drained or unresolved. Now, we also sometimes mess up out of selfishness, pride, or sheer cussedness. But either way, our individual sins are bound up with, beholden to, our collective sins. 

This Lent I’m leading some folks from our diocese in reading and discussing the book Biased, by social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt; some of us read it together a couple of years ago. It’s a book about implicit bias – about the way our culture shapes our thoughts, perceptions, and actions. Eberhardt writes, “Our experiences in the world seep into our brains over time, and without our awareness they conspire to reshape the workings of our mind” – making us, for example, more likely to associate black people with criminality and danger. Implicit bias is a good example of the ways the water we swim in, and can’t even see, conditions us towards certain kinds of sin – like biased perceptions that lead us to accept systemic racial injustice as normal and natural. 

God calls us to righteousness. Righteousness as “trying not to do bad things” is a fine starting point. But learning to see the water is another path of righteousness. Working on this sermon, I found myself visualizing the burrs that grow on many parts of our church property. Raise your hand if you’ve gotten burred at some point! … You’re just walking around, weeding or playing with friends, and suddenly your pants or shoelaces are COVERED with burrs. 

It takes ages to pick them all out, and they leave tiny slivers of plant matter that continue to scratch and irritate. What if we think about righteousness as being someone who’s doing the lifelong work of trying to pick off the burrs of all the ways the HPtFTU clings to us? And! Those burrs are seeds, so we also have to make sure we don’t drop them where they’ll grow more burrs. 

I recall a moment within my own recent past where someone was hurt by something downstream of something I did. There was no moment where I chose to do something that would hurt somebody, but sometimes unexamined good intentions can end up accidentally aligning with dynamics in our common life that harm, belittle, and exclude. When I realized what had happened, I had to work so hard to just ride out the waves of defensiveness inside of me – I didn’t mean it that way! I couldn’t have anticipated that! I’m too smart and kind to hurt somebody like that! – until I finally washed up on the shore, ready to own what was mine in the situation, and seek to make amends and do better next time. To try and pick off the burrs, even though it can seem like there are always more… 

In this part of his letter to the Romans, Paul is trying out some complicated stuff with Jesus and Adam, and I’m not going to get into it. But he is, here and elsewhere, wrestling with the fact that he really believes Jesus has in some ultimate sense freed us from bondage to sin, but also: we still mess up a lot. Paul is convinced that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ means that the things that divide us, and put some in power over others, are abolished: In Christ we are no longer male and female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek. He spends his life striving for a Christianity that reflects that transformation. A church, a world, liberated from the HPtFTU. Two thousand years later, we’re still working on it. 

Lent always begins with Jesus being driven out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit, for a time of solitude and struggle. Lent can be our wilderness, if we choose to use it that way: a season for reflection and wrestling with ourselves. 

Alessandro Pronzato wrote this about the inner journey into the wilderness: “If you therefore go to the desert to be rid of all the dreadful people and all the awful problems in your life, you will be wasting your time. You should go to the desert for a total confrontation with yourself. For one goes to the desert to see more and to see better. One goes to the desert especially to take a closer look at the things and people one would rather not see, to face situations one would rather avoid, to answer questions one would rather forget.” (Alessandro Pronzato, Meditations on the Sand)

May we dare to enter the desert, and meet ourselves there. 

May we learn to see the water in which we swim. 

Amen. 

 

Source for Pronzato quotation:

http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/lent1a.html

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Feb. 15

A few minutes ago we heard our lector say, “A reading from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth.” As if we all knew who Paul was. So: who was Paul? 

We know about Paul from his letters, preserved by the first Christians until they became part of the New Testament – but be careful; Paul was so important that other people wrote letters in his name, saying things they wished he had said, and some of those made it into the Bible too. In addition to his letters, we know about Paul from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, a short history of the first decades of Christianity written by the same person as the Gospel of Luke. The details don’t always line up, but enough matches that scholars think we can take Acts as telling us more about Paul’s life and work.  

Paul was probably born a few years after Jesus, in the city of Tarsus, in Turkey. His family were observant Jews. Paul is also Roman citizen, through his parents, which suggests that at some point his family had been favored by a Roman emperor and granted citizenship, conferring some degree of status. 

I learned in Sunday school that Paul changed his name from Saul to Paul when he became a Christian, but scholars think it’s more likely that Saul was his Jewish name and Paul or Paulus was his Roman name – which he started using more regularly when he became an itinerant Christian missionary. His first language was probably Aramaic, a linguistic cousin of Hebrew that Jesus and his disciples also spoke; but Paul was also fluent in Koine Greek, the language used across the Roman Empire at the time. 

Paul was educated; as a young man he was sent to Jerusalem to study with Gamaliel, a great teacher of Jewish law. He also seems to have been familiar with the Greek school of thought known as Stoicism, which he draws on in some of his teaching, especially in trying to explain Christianity to non-Jewish audiences. 

But despite his education Paul doesn’t seem to wanted to become a rabbi or scholar of the Torah. There are hints that he may have joined the family trade as a leather-worker and tent-maker…. until the spread of the Christian movement, after Jesus’ death and resurrection around the year 33 AD, changed everything. 

Paul never met Jesus during his earthly life. He wasn’t a disciple, one of the group that followed Jesus around and listened to his teachings. In fact, Paul and his family were Pharisees – members of a reform movement within Judaism that wanted to call Jews back to more faithfully following the teachings of the Torah.

As we see in the Gospels, the Pharisees were interested in Jesus; there was some overlap in their hopes and concerns. But they didn’t like how cavalier Jesus could be about following the commandments. And once Jesus was crucified, and then his followers started telling everybody he had risen from the dead and saying that he was God – well, that was a big issue for Pharisees. Judaism holds a deep, fundamental commitment to the one-ness of God; you don’t just add on bonus extra gods willy-nilly, and the idea that the One God could somehow show up in some guy was not acceptable to many. 

That brings us to the year 35 or 36. Paul – Saul – is a zealous Pharisee, maybe 30 years old. Christianity is spreading fast, and Jewish leaders in Jerusalem are troubled. A young preacher named Stephen is arrested and brought before the Council. He accuses them of opposing God and misunderstanding their own scriptures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is condemned to death for heresy – speaking falsely about God. The punishment is stoning: a mob all throws rocks at him until he’s dead. But first, some people take off their outer robes, so they won’t get bloody, and lay them at the feet of this nice young man Saul to look after. Acts 8 tells us, with chilling simplicity: Saul approved of their killing him. In fact, Saul approves of it so much that he gets permission from the High Priest to go to another city, Damascus, and round up Christians there. Acts describes Saul as “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” But it’s on that fateful journey, on the road to Damascus, that everything changes. Acts 9 tells us, “Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.””

There’s more to the story; but what matters is that Saul, very suddenly and very completely, becomes a follower of Jesus. And not just a follower – but a leader: he begins to travel and teach, and soon is founding new Christian communities himself. Now, when I say, “founding churches,” you might picture someone laying a cornerstone. But for the first decades of Christianity, churches were groups of people who met in somebody’s home. Christian architecture, per se, doesn’t come along for a while yet. So: Paul is gathering new believers in various places, to become a local body that worships and learns and serves together. 

Within a couple of years of his conversion, Paul goes to meet with the leaders of the early church, Peter and James, in Jerusalem, and gets permission from them to preach Christ among Gentiles – non-Jews – a new frontier. He founds the church in Corinth sometime in the mid to late 40s.

Corinth was – and is – a Greek city, west of Athens. Fun fact: Corinth is also built on an isthmus! In Ancient Corinth, they used to have Isthmian Games every other year, and the winner would be honored with a crown of celery! 

So: In this letter, Paul is writing to a church he founded, that is struggling and conflicted. He probably wrote this letter in the mid-50s, possibly while staying in Ephesus. This wasn’t really his first letter to the Corinthians, it’s just the first one we still have. Scholars think he’d written to them about some of these issues already, and there was pretty clearly another letter – a very angry letter – sent between the letters we know as First and Second Corinthians. 

We’ve heard the first two chapters on previous Sundays, but I squeezed them into the Sunday Supplement today too. Let’s look briefly at what’s going on here. 

Paul begins – as he usually does – with warm greetings, gratitude, and praise. He reminds them that they’re called, blessed, and beloved. And then… he gets to the first issue he wants to raise. He’s heard that there’s some infighting among them – seems like his friend Chloe may have sent him a letter about it. Folks in the church in Corinth are splitting into factions, based on loyalty to Paul or to Apollos. We don’t know a lot about Apollos; this letter is one of the main sources. Like Paul, he seems to have been someone who became a Christian early on, and started traveling around to preach and teach. Paul and Apollos were probably not exactly chummy, but they seem to have had a cordial relationship; at the very end of this letter, Paul says that he urged Apollos to visit Corinth, but that Apollos was unwilling to go. Maybe Apollos felt that visiting Corinth just then would only reawaken the factionalism; maybe Apollos just didn’t care to take orders from Paul. But I do think Paul’s issue is more with the Corinthians’ behavior than with Apollos himself. 

In chapter 1 it sounds briefly like there are not two, but four factions: Paul writes, “Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’

But some scholars suggest that this is just a kind of escalation: Paul was operating under the authority of Cephas/Peter, head of the church, so what we’re really hearing is: “I belong to Paul!” “I belong to Apollos!” “Well, PAUL was appointed by CEPHAS!” “Well, Apollos was appointed by CHRIST!” It’s pretty clear elsewhere that two groups, loyal to Paul and Apollos respectively, are the presenting issue here. 

What does Paul have to say about it? Well, first, that he doesn’t want disciples. He doesn’t want anybody claiming primary loyalty to him. That’s the context for the wonderful bit where he’s trying to remember how many Corinthians he baptized! But his point is that his teaching and ministry point towards Christ, not himself. 

Second, he has a lot to say in chapters 1 and 2 about wisdom and foolishness. To some extent, that was just a core preaching point for early Christians – and perhaps still today. It’s pretty wild to preach a Messiah, a Savior, who was executed by the state; so at some level you just have to lean into foolishness. 

In this letter, Paul’s emphasis on this theme may also have been a response to Greek traditions of rhetoric, philosophy, and public argumentation that may have been part of the ambient culture in Corinth – perhaps why Paul mentions debaters and scholars. Paul is saying: Look, our teaching is not going to meet the Greek rhetorical standard, but that’s not because we’re stupid or wrong; it’s because something different, something paradoxical and impossible and holy, is at stake here. 

I think the foolishness and wisdom theme here is also Paul’s slightly grumpy response to unfavorable comparisons between himself and Apollos. Paul is, at times, a powerfully eloquent writer, but by his own testimony he was not an especially powerful speaker. Here we see him trying to make that a virtue. 

He says that he doesn’t proclaim the Gospel with “eloquent wisdom” – so that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power! A few verses later, he says, “My speech and my proclamation were made not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”

There’s a definitely a hint here that Apollos is a more compelling preacher than Paul, and that that’s part of why some folks in Corinth want to be on Apollos’ team. Paul has little patience with it. In today’s text, Paul offers them a couple of metaphors: Look, you’re like a field or a garden. I planted the seeds, Apollos is watering you, but we’re just servants; it’s God who’s helping you grow. Or think of a building: I laid the foundation, and Apollos is building on it. Paul may be casting a little shade here when he says that the other people building on his foundation may be building with “gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw”… it doesn’t really matter, because ultimately God will test the quality of each one’s work. The point is – Paul tries to wrap up this portion of the letter – that you shouldn’t be so focused on human leaders! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

First Corinthians is long. We read bits of it in Epiphany every year, which… is not the easiest way to take in its overall message? If you sit down to read the whole letter – it’s not that long – you’ll find that Paul is really just warming up, in these first three chapters. 

There’s sexual immorality, and legal wrangling, court, and misbehaving at Eucharistic meals, and it’s all a total mess. The factionalism is the tip of the iceberg, to be honest. 

All right. So what? This would be great preaching material for a congregation split by rivalries. We’re not that congregation. So what is there here to carry away?

I’ll tell you what I carry away. First, Paul is a person. That may seem obvious, but it really staggers me how much we can get to know him, his voice, his opinions, his insecurities and struggles, his faith, when we read his letters. That bit in chapter 1 where he can’t remember who he’s baptized is very funny, but it’s also so real; I’ve been the pastor wracking my brains to try to remember who to thank after a big event, or something! Paul was real. His work, his struggles, his love: Real, and real to us, when we spend time in his presence by reading the letters he wrote with so much care and so much urgency. A sibling in faith, across  2000 years.

Second: Paul’s faith undergirds my faith. Sometimes we have a vague sense that the church’s ideas about Jesus got more grandiose and elaborate through time. That if we went back to the very beginning, we’d find a simple man preaching kindness, and that it wasn’t until later that people with their own motives started saying he was God and forming a religion around him. 

Paul’s letters are some of the earliest texts in the Bible. The Gospels draw on earlier sources, but Mark’s Gospel was probably written down in the mid-60s, and the other three were written in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. First Thessalonians, probably the earliest of Paul’s letters preserved in the Bible, was likely written around the year 49 – only 15 or 16 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Christianity as a movement was just getting its learner’s permit. 

And what Paul shows us (among other sources!) is that from more or less the very start, Christians felt that in Jesus they had encountered God in a new way, a way that changed their lives and imaginations and also, somehow, changed the very fabric of reality. The church’s theological language doesn’t evolve later as a justification for hierarchy and power, but as an effort to describe what people experienced in Jesus, right from the start. 

Paul’s faith shines through his letters – a profound, costly faith in Jesus Christ and him crucified, at a time when it was not at all clear that this whole Christianity thing was going to go anywhere. The stakes were so much higher for him than they’ve ever been for me. And he’s all in, heart, soul, life. A faith like that is a bold and hopeful influence on my own faith. 

Third: God can use us even when we’re really messing up. 

Things in the church in Corinth were bad, and got worse. A few decades later there’s a letter from Clement, the fourth Bishop of Rome, rebuking the Corinthians for having fired some bishops; apparently it continued to be a church in conflict! I’ve had friends pastor churches like this, where suspicion and anger and division just seem to be in the DNA of the place. It’s sad and awful. 

It’s not that it doesn’t matter that this church couldn’t get its act together. I’m sure people were wounded and pushed away; I’m sure opportunities to preach grace were lost. I’m sure, too, because grace is resilient, that lives were changed for the better, even amidst the bitter brokenness of the church in Corinth. 

And: sometimes in struggle and conflict, we get clearer about what we stand for. We can also 100% get overly focused on the details, and that’s frustrating and exhausting. But sometimes, too, we manage to dig down and articulate what’s important. What feels like it’s at stake, and why it matters to us so much. 

Because Chloe’s people wrote to Paul, and then Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, and somebody in the church kept this letter, some amazing things have been passed down to us. 

Because the Corinthians were confused about who they belong to, we have Paul telling them that everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Because the Corinthians were messing up their practice of shared holy meals, we have the earliest description of the Eucharist, in chapter 11 – “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” And so on. A text that tells us that Christians have been doing what we do every Sunday for 2000 years. 

Because the Corinthians were doing a lousy job loving each other, we have one of the most famous and beloved passages in Scripture: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude… it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” First Corinthians chapter 13.  

The apostle Paul, in all his humanity, and from the depths of his utter faith in Christ crucified, speaks across twenty centuries to remind us who we are, and whose we are, and how to try to treat one another. Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Annual Meeting, Finances, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Jan. 25

Today’s passage from the book of Isaiah comes from the time when the people of Judea were returning to their homeland, after about fifty years – two generations – of exile in Babylon. This chapter promises return, restoration, and renewal – God remembers you, and will help you rebuild your city and your nation! But there’s also this beautiful, challenging word: “It is too light a thing [to simply restore what was before]; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” A light to the nations – something that shines out, that blesses and beckons. God says: I’m not giving you back your homeland, your comfort, your sovereignty, just for you to “get back to normal” and relax. I have big plans for you. 

When I look at the Sunday texts to start working on a sermon, I often look back at what I preached three years ago, six years ago, sometimes farther – times when the same readings came before me, in our three-year cycle. These lectionary texts came up in late January of 2020… and they were perfect for my Annual Meeting sermon that year! The final pieces of our big renovation project had wrapped up in November 2019. Even a major renovation doesn’t really compare with conquest and exile – but there had been chaos and confusion and dislocation, and some struggle, and some grief. It seemed like a season when we could finally settle in and start to enjoy the fruit of our labors. I preached on this text: God speaking to us through Isaiah to say, It is too light a thing to just move back in, tidy up, and get back to how things were before. Your renewal has a purpose beyond yourselves. This is a season to discern what comes next. 

And then… Covid arrived, and we shut our doors from March of 2020 to Easter of 2021 – and worshipped outside for months more. We finally moved back into our newly-renovated spaces in mid-2021 – weary, confused, diminished. Much more like those Judean exiles than we had been 18 months earlier. 

Since then, God has restored and renewed us. It was too light a thing for us to just get back to how things were before, for those who’d come through the ordeal. God started sending us new people, and new possibilities. Later in the same chapter of Isaiah, the text talks about how the restored city will flourish so much that people will look around and say, “Where did all these children come from!?” Some days the 10AM service feels like that! … 

When I look around St. Dunstan’s, I love the different generations of members I see. Folks who were here before me – some long before me. Folks who joined early in my time here, who are becoming old-timers now. Folks who joined in the later pre-Covid years… and those who joined after, and even during, the lockdown years. In so many of our groups and activities – the Finance Committee and Vestry, the Matthew study group, the Public Narrative Training group you’ll hear about later, the Outreach Committee, youth group youth, staff and volunteers, the Good Futures Accelerator folks – it is a mix of all those people, folks who’ve been around for decades and folks who haven’t been here a year yet, committed to showing up and being church for each other and seeing where it all leads us. 

And it is so easy to start listing the ways that we seem to be called to be a light right now, to shine out and share goodness and grace and generosity. We’ve talked a lot about our youth groups recently, as we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the current program. Isa shared in their annual report that there are forty youth currently connected with St. Dunstan’s, through worship, confirmation class, or youth group – and half of them are from the wider community. For years it’s been a true delight to get to work with the kids we’re raising up among us here, as they become tweens and teens. Now, somehow, something is shining out about what we’re doing here, blessing and beckoning. Bringing us new faces, new challenges, possibilities, and joys.  

We’re continuing our commitment to becoming not just an openly but an enthusiastically affirming parish for LGBTQ+ folks – which increasingly means not just celebration but support and solidarity. Deciding to put out our Pride signs in June last year was a little scary – but we also felt incredibly clear about shining our light in that way. Several of us are also working on a project to gather and train a group that can go out to other parishes in redder parts of the state and help normalize sharing church with nonbinary and transgender folks. 

I’m really enjoying sharing what we’ve learned here as part of the team for Roots and Wings, a program to help equip Episcopal clergy with tools for creating intergenerational worship. And a group energized by Public Narrative Training, led by new member Jake Schlachter, is eager to invite other motivated St Dunstan’s folk to join some kind of community response team, to train and prepare to stand by our immigrant neighbors when we’re needed. More on that later this morning! 

I can tell these are all the kinds of things God calls people to do, because they’re gracious and hopeful and at least a little bit scary. 

Let me say a word here about this year’s pledge drive – and our financial life in general. I want to make sure people realize what a big deal it is. A year ago right now, we had $276,000 in pledges in hand. We were hopeful that more would come in – it often does – so we adopted a budget anticipating $285,000. Even so, it was a deficit budget; we expected to spend about $7000 more than we would take in. This past fall, we looked at strong giving, and we looked at what we need, and we set an ambitious goal for our giving campaign: $300,000 in pledges. Y’all, that was a stretch goal. I didn’t really think we could do it. But we did. You did. We have $302,000 in pledges right now. We’re presenting a balanced budget today. 

That doesn’t mean our finances are all squared away for good, or that we won’t be stretched again in the future. We still have work to do on that front. But it’s a tremendous accomplishment and milestone. I’m staggered and delighted and humbled by people’s willingness to invest here – moeny, time, care, and much more. And I feel really confident that we, the givers, and God, the giver, hasn’t done this so we can settle down and relax. Being less anxious about money does matter – a scarcity mindset makes it harder to respond to needs and opportunities. But it would be too light a thing for us to have enough, just for our own comfort. God is equipping and sending us to be light. 

I think God is up to all kinds of things here, among us. And: we’re just a quirky little church (well, medium-sized church) trying to figure out what’s ours to do, and do it. 

In John’s Gospel, when he introduces John the Baptist, some religious officials come out from Jerusalem to see what he’s up to. They ask him, Who are you? And John says, “I am not the Messiah.” I AM NOT THE MESSIAH. I’m not the One Sent by God to save and restore and set everything right.

I’m not the Messiah. Such an important word for many clergy, but also for all kinds of folks who carry the weight of the world, who feel a lot of responsibility for other people and their community. I happen to know there are quite a few of you in the room. 

I’m not the Messiah. We’re not the Messiah. 

What does that mean for us right now in this moment? Three things come to mind for me. 

First,  we don’t have to do everything, or be all things to all people. Sometimes I see what another church or organization is doing and I feel a little FOMO – fear of missing out: it’s cool and I wish we could do that! Or I feel a little shame – that church is so much better at X than we are.  

I know that happens with y’all, too. You remember something from another church and think, Why don’t we do that here? And sometimes we can, and do! And sometimes it doesn’t fit – our priorities, our skills, our capacity, our calendar. And folks are disappointed. Some folks drift off elsewhere looking for that thing. But as people are constantly telling me, we do a LOT for a church of our size. We don’t have to do all the things; in fact, we can’t. We have to practice some discernment. We have to know what’s ours to do, and try to do that well. For me, that tends to come clearest by seeing where our shared energy and effort gathers and flows. Where two or three, or six or seven, gather together, readily and gladly, God is probably in the midst of them.

The second thing I am not the Messiah could mean to us is that we should anticipate seeking and working with partners, companions, and mentors. We’re part of a terrific new diocese, eager to support parishes. The Wisconsin Council of Churches is an amazing organization helping equip churches to do good together. There are other organizations and partners we can learn from and work with, on several of our emerging horizons. We don’t always need to build our own thing or reinvent the wheel. It can be work to find the right partners and develop relationships. It can be a different kind of work to adjust to other priorities, cultures, and habits, and let the common mission be more important than doing things our way. But the partnership, the togetherness, the capacity and connection have real value. 

Years ago I learned from friend of the parish Jonathan Melton that ____ always asked two questions about a new situation: What does the Gospel say about this? And, Whom can we ask for help? 

The third thing that I am not the Messiah means is that, well, we should expect God to be at work, among us and through us. That seem like it should be obvious, but we really do need to change our hearts to see where the Kingdom of God is coming near. Scholars of modern American Christianity sometimes talk about functional atheism – meaning, we talk as if we believe in God and expect God to be active in the world, but we do not act as if those things are true. Church consultant Gil Rendle explains, “While speaking of depending on God, the functional atheist actively depends on [their] own agency and the resources that can be produced.” Parker Palmer describes functional atheism as “the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with me.” 

Churches and church folk absorb from the wider culture this mindset that human actions alone shape the future. Even me! Listen, becoming a priest is not a promotion for being the most faithful layperson. So, I can look at all the obvious signs of God at work among us, doing far more than we could have asked or imagined, and still look at a new idea or need and think, Oh no, we couldn’t possibly. I still measure what’s feasible by what we’ve been and done yesterday, and not by what God can help us be and do, today and tomorrow. 

We’re not the Messiah. We shouldn’t, and can’t, do all the things. But we’re called to be light. And we’re not alone. God’s got us, and we’ve got each other. Let’s see where this new year leads us. 

Here’s one of my favorite prayers from the prayer book; let us 

pray. O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were being cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by the One through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Uncategorized

Sermon, Jan. 18

The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman has a wonderful book about the Psalms – the ancient songs of faith collected in the Old Testament book called the Book of Psalms or the Psalter. Brueggeman argues that you can break out the Psalms into three different types, or tones, or perspectives. First, there are the psalms of orientation, which express a sense of order and confidence: The world makes sense, I’m God’s favorite, things are great. Here’s an example from Psalm 16: “O God, you are my portion and my cup; it is you who uphold my lot. My boundaries enclose a pleasant land; indeed, I have a goodly heritage…  I have set you always before me; because you are at my right hand I shall not fall.” 

But life isn’t always like that, right? Which brings us to the psalms of disorientation – when the psalmist discovers that even with God at your right hand, you can still fall. Things are terrible; where are you, God? What gives? These psalms include lament, reproach, cries for help and anger at enemies. There are many such psalms; the most famous is probably Psalm 22, used in Holy Week. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest. Yet you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel… Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help.”

Among the psalms of disorientation are some known as the imprecatory psalms, which call down God’s wrath upon the poet’s enemies. Psalm 109 is a good example of the genre – 

“Let their days be few, and let others take their office. Let their children be fatherless, and their wives become widows. Let their children be waifs and beggars; let them be driven from the ruins of their homes. Let the creditor seize everything they have; let strangers plunder their gains…” … There’s a lot more. 

And then… there are psalms of reorientation, that describe life and faith after the crisis. God saved me; I’m sadder and wiser now; but I also know that I can trust in God at a deeper level. The chunk of Psalm 40 that we read today is a great example:  

I waited patiently for you, O God;  you stooped to me and heard my cry. You lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; you made my footing sure. Happy are they who trust in you! (Psalm 40)

Brueggeman maps out all this to help us pray the Psalms – because our lives tend to have moments when we’re deep in the pit, and moments when we look back at hard times from a place of renewal and gratitude. 

The church has a special relationship with the Psalms. It’s the only book of the Bible that’s fully included in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s the only book of the Bible that we read from at every service of public and private worship. Our liturgical tradition invites us not just to read (mark, learn, and inwardly digest) the Psalms but to pray them. 

And: I struggle with that sometimes! Often my mood doesn’t match the mood of the psalm appointed for the day. And there are specific psalms where I struggle to connect with the text prayerfully. But the Psalms teach us something really important about the breadth of what prayer is and can be. About the scope of thoughts and feelings we can bring to God in prayer. 

I want to talk about prayer, today.

I realize that I need to offer 100 words here on what prayer is, although that could be its own sermon. In general, prayer is any way of talking to God, or of listening for God. Prayer could be reading out loud from a book, alone or with others. Prayer could be talking or singing or journaling or knitting or painting. 

Prayer could be hiking or walking the dog or washing dishes or going to a protest. It’s not that everything is prayer. It’s more than anything can be prayer, if you do it with your heart and mind pointed towards God, open to the holy. Let me know if you want to borrow a book on prayer, or if we should gather to talk about ways to pray, sometime.

Last week we had our first-ever Stump the Pastor session after church, and a couple of people asked really important questions about prayer. I do not want those askers to feel singled out; these were both questions I’ve heard from others too, recently. And I do believe what our high school teachers told us: if you’re wondering about it, others are too. These were good, timely, important questions, and I’m taking another run at them today. 

First: What does it mean to pray for a political leader whom you believe to be causing profound harm? … 

Let’s start with what we’re doing when we pray for somebody – for anybody. Is praying for someone an expression of approval? I thought about my personal prayer list, in the Notes app on my phone. Some things on that list are situations I’m asking God to sustain, to keep the way they are. For my parents’ continued good health. For the continued flourishing of our youth program. For my college kid to have interesting classes again this term. 

But many things on my list are situations where I’m praying for change. For somebody to find a new, less toxic job. For somebody’s cancer treatment to be effective. For somebody to be able to move through grief. For a broken relationship to move towards resolution – one way or another. For someone’s heart to be profoundly changed, so that they stop causing harm. 

When I pray about something or someone, there are all kinds of things I might be asking or hoping for. I definitely don’t only pray for things and people I think are hunky-dory; far from it. 

Lots of our prayers are for change, of one kind or another. “Let their days be few, and let others take their office,” from Psalm 109, is a prayer. So is “Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore,” my favorite line from a hymn we’re singing today – a prayer for change in me, in us. 

Regarding praying for our political leaders, in particular… The Church of England, our mother church, was started BY a king, and founded as a national church. It’s not surprising that our way of faith developed with a strong bent towards praying for political and civic leaders. God save the king! The Episcopal church inherited some of that ethos, though we’re not a national church. 

Praying for leaders is Biblical, too. The Old Testament has a strong sense of leaders’ responsibility for the wellbeing and righteousness of the people. 1 Timothy calls Christians to “pray for kings and all in high positions, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life” – a prayer for boring, stable, non-hostile governance. 

I found a website from the Church in Wales listing all the prayers they needed to update recently from Queen to King: “We beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God; and that it may please thee to keep and strengthen thy servant Charles our King that he may serve thee in righteousness and holiness of life…” 

“We pray thee to guide and direct all who govern the nations of the world, especially our Sovereign Lord, King Charles…, that we and all [people] may be justly and quietly governed.”

“Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee to bless our Sovereign Lord, King Charles, and all who are set in authority under him, that they may order all things in wisdom, righteousness and peace, to the honour of thy holy Name and the good of thy Church and people.” These are prayers for the King; but they’re prayers for the King to be righteous, holy, wise, and just. And to do his job well. 

There are similar prayers in our Book of Common Prayer – like, “We pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world; That there may be justice and peace on the earth.”

In the Prayers of the People that we use right now, there aren’t spaces for specific names, but there have been times when our liturgy has had us praying for a Democratic president and a Republican governor, or vice versa, by name, in the same breath. 

Maybe our Prayers of the People needs a few more words, to remind our praying selves that when we pray for our leaders, our prayer is “that thy people may be justly and quietly governed.” 

It’s OK if there are people you just can’t bring yourself pray for. Truly. You can leave it to others. And – but – repentance and transformation are at the heart of the Gospel. It is the responsibility of the Church as a whole to pray faithfully for all people to turn from evil, and towards good; from cruelty, towards mercy; from greed and hunger for power, towards justice and righteousness. As a church, we will keep praying for our leaders – the ones we like and trust, and the ones we hate and fear. 

God save the king. 

The second good question from last Sunday was something like this: Isn’t prayer kind of passive, in the face of everything coming at us and our communities? … 

The question evokes leaders who, in the face of preventable tragedies and atrocities, offer “thoughts and prayers” for those affected. Prayer should never be an excuse for inaction about something on which you have the power to take action. 

Fury at those leaders who offer “thoughts and prayers” when they could offer real change is absolutely justified. I’m willing to call that blasphemy – a sin against the Holy Spirit. 

So, yes, there are people who use prayer as cover for pious passivity. But I’m not going to let those jerks ruin prayer for us. 

Prayer can also look passive in the face of the immoral use of violence. If people of faith praying at a vigil or protest are ignored, or mocked, or tear gassed, or arrested, that’s not the fault of the clergy or the moral order and convictions they represent. It’s the fault of the culture and movement and institutions that have decided that they just don’t care.

It is true, and can be frustrating, that historic Christianity (as opposed to white supremacist Christianity) has a difficult relationship with the use of violence. I took a whole class in seminary on Christian pacifism and just war theory. These are both huge bodies of writing and thought and policy and action. And a lot of it is an argument among Christians: between the pacifist position, that a follower of Jesus should never intentionally cause harm, and the “just war” position, that it’s incumbent upon Christians to be willing to use force in defense of the vulnerable. The course barely scratched the surface of these big issues, but I carried away a sense that pacifism is a fiercer and bolder position than I’d thought. Pacifism underlies the tools for nonviolent protest and organizing for change that have been so influential over the past century. 

Nonviolence is far from passive, and we don’t have to look back at Gandhi or King to see that in action. I watched a video this week from the Minneapolis suburb of Lyn Lake. Picture a cool little downtown corner, older buildings updated with current businesses, traffic flowing by; could be someplace in Madison. An SUV pulls up onto the curb in front of the corner building, under a neon pizza sign; several ICE agents get out. As the video begins, you can see maybe five or six people on the street. 

But within seconds, there are ten, then fifteen, then more, gathering around the agents, blocking the doors into nearby businesses, holding up cell phones to record, blowing whistles, chanting. Cars stop and honk their horns. People come out of the woodwork, rushing towards the scene – just ordinary people, who were just going about their days thirty seconds earlier. 

By the end of the video, there are fifty-plus people on the scene. It takes exactly one minute for that loud, obnoxious, angry, nonviolent crowd to convince the ICE agents to get back in the car and drive away – tossing a can of tear gas as a parting gift. 

If part of you is wondering, well, what if ICE was there to arrest somebody dangerous, one of those worst of the worst we hear about? … Well: the day before, that pizza shop hosted a fundraiser for local nonprofits helping those affected by the ICE presence in the Twin Cities, and raised $83,000. The co-owner of the shop told a reporter, “We probably put a target on ourselves… by helping people.”

Were any of those people praying? I don’t know. Probably. I would be. I will be. Praying for the dangerous moment to pass, unfulfilled. Praying for everybody to come out of this okay. Praying for clarity about what’s mine to do, and courage to do it. 

Nonviolence can be fierce; nonviolence can be effective. And nonviolence can be dangerous. 

Some of you may have seen a clip that’s been circulating of Rob Hirschfeld, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, speaking at a vigil the night after the murder of Renee Good. Bishop Rob spoke about Jon Daniels, a seminarian from New Hampshire who became a martyr of the Civil Rights movement. Then he said, “I have asked [my] clergy to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written. Because now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”

When I heard that, I thought, “Yeah, he has a point. We should find a lawyer and make sure we’re up to date.” The reason I can – sort of, kind of – take Bishop Rob’s advice in stride is that I pray. 

What does prayer do? Does prayer act in, or on, the world? Does prayer move anything outside of me? I find it untenable to think of God like a slot machine: if you put in enough prayer-coins, you increase your odds of getting the outcome you want. Many of us also know well that praying really really hard for something doesn’t make it so. There’s no qualitative or quantitative degree of prayer that gets you what you want. Does our prayer change something in God, or in the world? I don’t know. I’m not prepared to say no, but those answers lie in the terrain of mystery. 

But I do know two things. I know that prayer changes something inside of me. It helps me pay attention. It helps me be available to opportunities to say and do what needs saying and doing. It helps me be more grounded, more clear, more brave – which is not to say that I’m notably grounded, clear, or brave; just more so than I am when I’m not praying regularly. 

Prayer does things inside of me. And prayer, when it’s shared, does things between and among people. 

On Tuesday evening, with some of you, I tuned in for the Zoom vigil held by the Episcopal Church’s Public Policy & Witness staff and the Episcopal diocese of Minnesota. It was “webinar”-style, where you can only see the leaders, not everybody else on the Zoom, and the “chat” function, the place over on the side where people can comment and share, was turned off as we began. 

It started out as a pretty ordinary Compline service, and I admit, I was thinking: is this it? We do this several times a week here. Then they got to the prayers, and they had some special prayers read in various languages, for people at risk of deportation, for people living in fear, and so on… those were good; I saved some of them. But still, it felt a little flat. I wasn’t feeling like I was part of something. I was just sitting at the desk in my college kid’s bedroom, staring at a screen, alone. 

And then they opened the chat for our prayer requests. And there was a wash, a waterfall, a fire hose of prayer. In Zoom meetings, once that chat column fills up with comments, you have to scroll down to see more. I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and still there was a little red box that told me, “99+ more comments below.” I didn’t read every word but I wanted to read enough to be in prayer with thousands of other Episcopalians across the country and the world – praying for many, many things, but also praying, over and over again, for peace; for justice; for safety; for courage. For those in power to be just and merciful. For those vulnerable to be protected. For those standing by to be faithful, and brave, and ready. Someone wrote, For all of us trying to carry on with our lives despite our fear and griefs. Someone wrote, Forgive my weariness and fear. Someone wrote, Show us how to be. 

I read, and scrolled, and scrolled, and wept, because I wasn’t alone in front of a screen anymore. I was part of a great fellowship of prayer. I am part of a great fellowship of prayer. 

So are you. So are you. 

A lot of us have friends, family, connections in the Twin Cities; what’s happening there feels close and urgent and weighty. But I know, too, that for many of you, there are struggles on the homefront that have you keeping the news at arms’ length. Somebody’s not well. Money is tight or a job is toxic. A relationship is failing, or loneliness or grief haunt your days. 

I want you to feel prayer wash over you and your needs and struggles, too. I want you to feel grounded in practices of prayer that console and guide and encourage you. 

Prayer is a frustratingly elusive topic. I can’t tell you, Just do this. Nonetheless: this is a time for us to lean into being a people of prayer. Among other things, I hasten to add! But prayer should be near the top of the list.

Episcopal priest and writer Jim Friedrich wrote recently, “Prayer is a refusal to consent to an unredeemed world, and for people of faith it is foundational for an ethical existence…. Prayer breaks the silence, awakens the passive, and cultivates action, both human and divine. So don’t despair, or give in, or give up. Look for the ones who are called into the righteous flow of prayer and action. And join them.”

Amen, amen. 

 

 

Baptism, Faith, Sermons

Sermon, Jan. 11, 2026

When we are preparing to do a baptism, sometimes somebody asks what it means – a perfectly reasonable question! And there are libraries full of writing about what baptism is and does and means. But the ultimate answer is that we baptize because Jesus told us to baptize. 

There’s something about what John was doing, in his ministry of baptism for repentance and amendment of life, that was important enough that Jesus himself chose to undergo it. And then when Jesus sends his followers out to preach the Gospel and start churches, he tells them to baptize people, by water and the holy spirit, in the name of the Trinity.

So, early on, baptism becomes the Christian rite of initiation, the way somebody is welcomed into the assembly of the faithful. And likewise early on, baptism becomes connected with reciting the core teachings of the church, as a way to remind us all what the church believes, and to make sure that those being baptized are prepared to be part of a body that believes that stuff.

In the baptismal liturgy of the Episcopal Church, we say something called the Apostles Creed. It’s a little shorter than the creed we use most Sundays, but pretty similar. The creed we use most Sundays in Eucharistic liturgy is called the Nicene Creed – though technically it’s the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. That’s because the Creed took more or less the form we use today at a church council in Constantinople in 381, but those were only minor changes to the Creed agreed upon by church leaders gathered in the city of Nicaea – now in Turkey – in the year 325. 

Our bishop, Matt Gunter, recently wrote a reflection on the Nicene Creed that begins with concise explanation of why the Council of Nicaea was held. 

He writes, “[Jesus’] followers were convinced that his death and resurrection had reconfigured everything, bringing salvation from sin, death, and decay with the promise of a hitherto unimagined transformation of [humanity] and the world. Finding language to express that in ways that enabled people to experience that salvation and transformation was important. Was Jesus some sort of divine being sent by God at the mysterious heart of all reality? Was he something more? They had the scriptures, they had the church’s language of prayer and worship, and they had the baptismal formulae that were already the seeds of a creed… With all of that, theologians of the church struggled for decades – centuries – to make sense of and find a satisfactory way to articulate who [Jesus] was and why he mattered. Some ways of articulating that were deemed unsatisfactory, misguided, or even dangerous. This struggle and the debates it provoked became more public and more intense once Christianity was declared legal… [in the year] 313. Things came to a head with a priest in the city of Alexandria named Arius, who taught that, while Jesus was in some sense divine, he was still a… creature of God, [and that God] would surely not deign to be identified with the messy, chaotic material world by taking on mortal flesh. But his bishop, Alexander, preached otherwise – that Jesus was indeed the [earthly] incarnation of… God…  This set up an intense controversy. The Council of Nicaea was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine to address disputes about how to understand the person of Jesus and, thus, God, creation, humanity, and salvation.”

Astute listeners may be thinking: Wow, 325! The Creed just had its 1700th birthday last year!  How did you celebrate?…

I celebrated by listening to a talk on the Creed by Kathryn Tanner, one of the greatest theologians of our church, back in November. I really liked what she had to say; it made the Creed more interesting and more alive, for me. And I thought, I should turn this into a sermon sometime! And – because the Creed is kind of front and center in the baptismal liturgy – today is your lucky day. 

There’s some tiny little text above the Creed in our Epiphany booklets – because I’ve long felt that the Creed needed some explaining. Among other things, it says, “Many faithful people wonder about, or question, parts of the Creed – or all of it! If you have questions, know you’re in good company, and let’s talk.” I don’t get a lot of those questions, to be honest, but here are some questions I think people might have about the Creed. 

Question one might be: Am I supposed to know what all of this means? Because I don’t. Begotten, not made? Light from light? Of one being with the Father? There are a lot of terms and phrases in the Creed that I’ve always vaguely assumed had some specific technical or theological meaning. Like “true god from from true god” and “eternally begotten”. I figured they meant something specific and I just didn’t know what. 

Tanner says: Nope. This is just what happens when you create an important theological document by committee. The Council of Nicaea gathered church leaders from across the Christian world to try to come to consensus about core issues of diversity and dispute – especially, though not only, questions about the divinity of Jesus. The resulting statement is called a Creed because of the Latin word credere, meaning, to believe; it’s a statement of the Church’s consensus beliefs on these big issues. 

I’m sure many of us have had the experience of trying to craft a document – a statement, a report, a resolution – with a group of people with different views. It can be a real pain, right? Often the result doesn’t end up saying exactly what you wanted it to say, or as much as you wanted it to say, because other people had other opinions and priorities. What you end up with says less than everybody hoped it would say, in order to say something that everybody is willing to say. 

That’s what the Nicene Creed is. Tanner said: The Creed is vague and underspecified so that a group of people with diverse and emphatic theological views could all come to the table and sign off on it. If it got any more specific, then people would have started storming out of the room. The Creed’s language is poetic and open-ended in order to allow a variety of understandings to come together under its umbrella. It’s the most they could say, together.

The Creed is vague and metaphorical on purpose. It’s not that we’re missing something. And Tanner says that open-endedness is good, because it spurs further theological thinking and debate, in the centuries and millennia that follow. We keep wondering what it all means, what can we work out and what’s simply beyond human comprehension. 

Christians are not united by very specific theological positions, because those early, defining ecumenical Councils didn’t arrive at very specific theological positions. If they had tried to do that, they would have failed. Rather, says Tanner, Christians are united through processes of wondering and arguing. And that’s a good thing. You could almost say that some freedom of thought and conscience and practice is one of the core values at the heart of historic Christianity. 

Question two: Is this a checklist of things I’m supposed to believe? 

The Creed was not written to be a test of right belief for ordinary church members. It was written to get a bunch of bishops vaguely on the same page in the fourth century. It was also not created to be recited in worship every Sunday. Marion Hatchett, one of the core figures behind our current Book of Common Prayer, writes that in the early centuries, the Eucharistic Prayer functioned as a creed – the statement of faith shared every time the church gathered, to which people responded with a great AMEN. 

The Nicene or Apostle’s Creed have been used in baptismal liturgies and on feast days for a long time, but saying a creed every week seems have developed over the past few centuries. I found a statement from the Liturgical Commission of our sister church, the Church of England, arguing that using the Creed regularly in worship helps hand down the faith to subsequent generations, encourage theological exploration, and affirm unity with churches around the world. Sure. The thing is: I’m pretty sure there are more effective ways to do all of those things. For most of us, most of the time, the Creed is just something we march through on our way to the next more interesting part. 

In her talk, Tanner described the Creed as being like the Pledge of Allegiance. When we say it together in church, there isn’t time or space – any more than there is at the beginning of a school day – to unpack what it means or ask questions. Instead, it functions as a declaration of shared allegiance: we’re committing to something together – something that this set of ancient words gestures towards. 

Ultimately: Why do we say the Creed together in our Eucharistic services? Basically, because the rubrics – the instructions in the Book of Common Prayer – say that we have to.  

And maybe there’s something significant lurking there. Because the weekly recitation reminds us what kind of church this is. We are part of a church rooted in the teachings and practices of the early centuries of Christianity – which is what the Creed means when it says “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church”; that’s catholic with a small c, meaning, universal. As a church, we do the things that all churches did for the first millennium of Christianity. We have deep roots, even as we make many things new. And that rootedness is important, as ballast and belonging. 

Question three – or really more of a comment: The Creed doesn’t say the things that are important to me about church/God/faith. 

Tanner points out that the ecumenical councils were gathered around matters of division and dispute. The Creeds address and… somewhat settle… those core issues. But there were many, many things over which early Christianity was not divided. In his essay on the Creed, Bishop Matt lists some examples of matters on which the early church was pretty united: “The early church already took the teaching and example of Jesus seriously. They were contained in the scriptures, which were already read in worship every week. The church put love and compassion at the heart of its life and teaching. It organized social services for the poor, hungry, and needy. It founded hospitals. Its teaching reflected the example of Jesus in critiquing wealth, and violence. It advocated for hospitality to the stranger and foreigner. The dignity of traditionally marginalized groups like women, children, and the poor [and I would add, sexual & gender minorities] was honored in a way unprecedented in the ancient world… The church surely did not practice all of this perfectly, always, and everywhere. But none of the above was particularly controversial.”

I wish we had a Creed, a statement of faith, that reminded us of all that stuff week by week, The baptismal covenant, created for the most recent Book of Common Prayer, that we’ll say together in a few moments does some of this work, but I think there’s more we could say about the essentials of the Christian way, as our earliest faith-ancestors knew it and as we continue to strive to practice it today. 

Like: that there’s a Power greater than ourselves, that we call God, that works for good in the world, and that knows and loves us. 

That God came among us as Jesus, fully human and fully divine, and that something about his living and dying and rising among us extends salvation, rescue, healing, restoration, transformation, to us and the world. 

That Christians should try to live good lives. That much in our lives is unmanageable; that individually and together we get ourselves into messes that we need the help of a Higher Power to get out of. And that when we fall short of our intentions, we should repent, seek forgiveness from God and make amends with those we have harmed, and try to become people who will cause less harm in the future. 

That God doesn’t have a favorite kind of people, and neither should Christians. That we are obligated by our faith to welcome and honor and respond in love to everyone, regardless of gender, race, wealth or poverty, national origin or immigration status, health, illness or disability, criminal record, and so on. 

That God loves Creation and so should we. 

That we are called to help restore what is broken in the human and natural world, in the diverse ways given to each of us. To grapple with the the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, in the words of the baptismal liturgy. 

That living like this is hard, and so it’s best for us to do it together, provoking one another to love and good deeds, in that line from the letter to the Hebrews that I love so much. Supporting one another; sharing resources with each other, and pooling our resources to do good for others. 

That being beloved by God, and living rightly in God’s ways, doesn’t mean we’ll always be wealthy or happy or safe. That there are things that are more important that death, things worth dying for. That we’re called to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and that there’s no greater love than laying down life for a friend. 

That Love is as strong as death, and stronger. 

That more can be mended than we know, and that one day, God will wipe away all tears. 

Although churches always live out these convictions imperfectly, that’s a project to which I’m wiling to pledge my allegiance.

That’s an endeavor into which I’m glad to welcome Asher and Ezra today. 

We’ll continue with the baptismal liturgy. 

Some sources:

https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2025-01/gs-misc-1408-the-use-of-the-nicene-creed.pdf

https://www.diowis.org/bishop-teachings/nicenecreed1700anniversary

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Kid-friendly, scripture

Christmas Eve sermon, 2025

On Christmas Eve we always hear a beautiful reading from the prophet Isaiah: The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light! A prophet is someone who comes so close to God that they know what’s real and true and important. Sometimes God gives them words to speak to God’s people. 

The prophet Isaiah lived a long time before Jesus, but the joy and hope in this reading fit the way Christians feel about Christmas, when we share the holy story of God being born as a human baby, to live among human beings and share our lives and tell us how much God loves us. 

There’s a part of that Isaiah reading that’s a little strange, though: when it talks about the boots of the tramping warriors, and the bloody clothes, and about breaking people free from their oppressors, “as on the day of Midian.” It sounds like it’s talking about a war, or a battle. But what is the day of Midian?

The story of the battle of Midian comes from the book of Judges, from the early part of the Bible, a long time before Jesus and even a long time before Isaiah. The people who were becoming God’s people were living in towns and villages and farms, raising their crops and their sheep and their children. They wanted peace and enough to eat, like anybody else. But another nation who lived nearby – the nation of Midian – decided they wanted that land. They started to attack the the farms and towns and villages, stealing the animals and burning the fields, and killing people too. 

Slowly these people, the Midianites, started to take over and camp out on the land. God’s people had to struggle and fight and run and hide. People didn’t have any food. They had to abandon their villages, and go live in caves in the mountains. It was really terrible! The people cried out to God for help. Save us, God; we’re hungry, cold, and afraid, and our enemies are too strong for us! 

One day a young man named Gideon is preparing some wheat from his father’s farm; he’s kind of hiding so the Midianites don’t spot him. Suddenly, an angel appears! The angel says, Gideon! God is with you!

And Gideon says, I don’t know about that! If God is with us, why are things so terrible right now for my family and my people?… 

The angel tells Gideon that God has chosen Gideon to drive out the Midianites and free his people. But Gideon is not so sure. He’s not a mighty warrior or a powerful leader. He’s just some guy. He’s probably not even fully a grownup yet – maybe he’s eighteen or twenty, still working for his dad. So he think it’s pretty strange that God has chosen HIM to lead an army. He tests the angel to make sure they really speak for God. 

But eventually Gideon is convinced – and then he convinces other people to join him! The word goes out that God has called a leader to throw out the Midianites, and people start to gather to Gideon. Now, these aren’t soldiers – they’re just ordinary people. They bring whatever they can as weapons: maybe a kitchen knife, or a shovel, or the bow and arrow they use to hunt. And they bring jugs of water, because that’s always a good idea, and they bring a torch for traveling at night, and they bring some musical instruments, because you never know when you might want to have a little jam session.

Gideon looks around and he sees that now he has 32,000 people ready to fight. Does that sound like a lot? … 

But that angel is still hanging around, and the angel says, Gideon, you have too many fighters. Your army is too big.

Gideon says, what do you mean?? We are still outnumbered! The Midianites have 40,000 trained soldiers with real weapons!

The angel says: God says there are too many. If you go to fight Midian with this many people, you might think it’s your own strength that has saved you, instead of God. Tell your fighters: If you’re afraid of the battle, go home. 

Gideon doesn’t like that very much. But he does what the angel told him. He says: If you’re scared of fighting the Midianites, go home to your family! And twenty-two thousand of his fighters go home. How many does that leave?… 

Now Gideon looks at his ten thousand fighters and starts to think about how they’ll attack the Midianite army… but then the angel taps him on the shoulder and says, You still have too many. 

What noise do you think Gideon makes when he hears that?…

This time the angel says: See that pond over there? Send your fighters down to the pond to get a drink. Now, it’s not a good idea to drink water straight out of a pond or a river, but that’s how things were back then. If you were going to get a drink from a pond, how would you do it? Show me with your body?…

The angel tells Gideon: Watch how your fighters drink. All the ones who do THIS, who cup water in their hands – send them home. And all the ones who get down on their hands and knees and lap up the water like a dog – KEEP those ones. 

Out of ten thousand fighters, THREE HUNDRED of them lap up the water like a dog. That’s about three times as many people as there are in this room right now. It’s not very many!

But the angel says: Good. Now you have the right sized army! Go drive out the Midianites, in the name of God! 

I like what happens next because the angel doesn’t tell Gideon how to do it. It’s like God has given Gideon a puzzle to solve: How can I drive out an army of forty thousand, with an army of three hundred? Gideon looks at what his fighters have. They have various tools and weapons, and they have water jugs, and torches, and musical instruments – especially some trumpets. 

And he says: Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll wait till it’s nighttime, and use the darkness. We’ll drink all our water so the jugs are empty. We’ll put the jugs over the torches to hide the light, while we sneak up to the Midianites’ camp. Then all at once, on my signal, we’ll BREAK the jugs, and BLOW our trumpets, so that suddenly there’s a lot of light and noise. And then… we’ll see what happens. 

So that’s what they do. They sneak up close to the enemy camp. Then Gideon gives the signal. They shout, For God and for Gideon! They break the jugs so their torches shine out in the dark. They blow their trumpets loud and long. 

And the Midianite soldiers wake up in a panic! They don’t know what’s happening. They think they’re being attacked. They start fighting with each other in the dark; they don’t know who’s an enemy and who’s a friend. They’re shouting in terror and running away. Soon other fighters come to help Gideon’s tiny army, and they drive the Midianites all the way back to their own land. And for forty years, nobody else attacked God’s people, and they were able to live in peace. 

I don’t know why the prophet Isaiah mentions the battle of Midian, in the reading we hear tonight. It was about five hundred years ago, for Isaiah. And there are lots of stories of battles and surprising victories that Isaiah could have mentioned. But he mentions this one. He reminds his people about the time when they went up against a powerful enemy with almost nothing, and somehow – with God’s help – got free. 

Versions of this story happen over and over and over again in the Old Testament, the part of the Bible from before the time of Jesus. There’s a person, or a group, or a person who’s part of a group, who’s on the downside of things – vulnerable or unimportant, pushed to the edges, too old or too young or too sick or too poor or too weird, younger sons and women and people with dodgy reputations and people from somewhere else, folks living in wartime or under oppressive rule. 

And with God’s help, somebody unexpected is able to survive and grab hold of a little hope and possibility, not only for themselves but for other people like them. Sometimes they even manage to change things, for a while. 

It’s the story of Joseph, of Moses, of David, of Jeremiah and Tobias. It’s the story of Tamar, and Hagar, and Judith, and Ruth and Esther. So many versions of this story, over and over and over again: surviving, and seizing hope, against the odds. 

And when we arrive at the New Testament, at the Christmas story, the Christian story, it’s another version of that story. Jesus lived in a nation weak enough to be part of somebody else’s empire. A hostile and fearful local government, and armed occupation by the Roman Empire, were constant threats to ordinary folks. Jesus’ family was poor, and maybe had to move around some to find work. It seems like they didn’t have much family support; maybe people didn’t like it that Mary got pregnant under strange circumstances. 

But this is the family and the world that God chooses to come into, as a newborn baby. Who’s seen a newborn baby? Does it seem like they can help or save anybody, including themselves?… 

Wouldn’t it have all been much simpler if God had just decided to be born as the oldest son of the emperor? Or to skip the whole baby part and just show up as a mighty warrior-king? 

But this is what God does: God comes to earth as a human baby, poor and ordinary. God makes our lives, our world, holy, by living a life so much like ours. In the story of Jesus’ birth, God tells us, again, to look for grace and hope and possibility among people who are unimportant and powerless and pushed to the edges. 

The story that God is telling the world, the story God keeps telling in the world, is a story about people who aren’t rich and powerful and famous and influential. It’s a story about how those people really matter. They matter to God and they matter to the world. And God’s going to keep telling that story in the world, and through the world, until we build a world where everybody matters.

Now, people like to give presents at Christmas, and I always like to give a little present to the kids (and anyone else, while supplies last) at this service. When I decided to tell you about Gideon tonight, I had this BRILLIANT idea to give everybody little plastic trumpets! I did not ask myself what would happen if I gave everybody a little plastic trumpet in the middle of church. So I’m not going give everybody a little plastic trumpet in the middle of church. I’m going give everybody a little plastic trumpet at the end of church. Parents: I’m so sorry. 

But this trumpet isn’t just to make noise and make everybody sorry that they came to church on Christmas. This trumpet is to remind us that that music and noise and joy and even obnoxiousness can be a kind of power. We can be noisy to celebrate good things, and noisy to protest bad things. We can be noisy to let each other know we’re not alone, and we can be noisy to get attention when something is wrong. And like the day of Midian, sometimes enough noise and light can change the situation. 

So let’s keep telling God’s story about the strength and belovedness of ordinary people. Let’s shine some light, play some music, make some noise, and help people get free. Amen.

Uncategorized

Sermon, Dec. 7

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

In my favorite classic rendition of this scene, painted by 19th century Quaker artists Edward Hicks, two little children play together on a riverbank, watched over by a friendly bear, while another bear and an ox share some corn nearby, smiling at each other. Another child, plump and cheerful, stands with one hand on the head of a leopard and the other on the head of a lion. A wolf gazes at a lamb with profound disinterest. 

In the center of the image, a large ox and a regal lion both have mouthfuls of straw. The ox’s head is turned towards the lion, as if to say, What do you think?  

And the lion… looks utterly disgusted. Like he’s about to spit the stuff out. This lion is thinking, Give me a nice juicy lamb any day. Or a little child…  

What is Isaiah doing here, with this prophetic image, so beautiful and so absurd?… 

Isaiah is a long and complicated book – 66 chapters! It covers perhaps 150 years of Israel’s history, and was composed by at least two and probably three primary voices, building on each other’s words and images.

This text from Isaiah 11 is part of what Biblical scholars call First Isaiah – the voice of the original prophet of that name. He’s writing in Judah, the Southern Kingdom, during the time of the Assyrian Empire’s expansion. Samaria, the Northern Kingdom, has already been conquered, and Judah is under threat. Assyria’s aggression is understood as God’s punishment to Israel for forgetting God’s ways – again. 

Chapters 1 through 12 of the Book of Isaiah comprise a first section, with its own beginning, middle, and end. These chapters trace the same arc as many of the shorter prophetic books: introducing the prophet; describing how the nation and its leaders have gone wrong; calling them to repentance and renewed righteousness; predicting the doom that is coming as a consequence of their unfaithfulness; and promising that there is yet hope, and that God will restore and renew in time. 

So here in chapter 11 we are getting to the hopeful vision, as the text turns from afflicting the comfortable to comforting the afflicted. Here we have the promise of a new King better than any king Israel has ever had, who will have more than human power and wisdom. Who will attend to the needs of the most vulnerable, and not rule to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful. Who will bring righteousness and peace – a new age so transformed and gracious that not only the human world but the whole created order will be restored to the peace of Eden. 

So we’re at the end of that prophetic arc here, in these hopeful prophecies. But these texts take on their full meaning in light of the ten chapters that preceded them. Those chapters include calls to return to God and God’s ways – like in last week’s text from Isaiah 2: Come, let us walk in the light of God! That’s not just gentle encouragement but an urgent call back from the brink of doom. Those chapters have a lot to say about how Israel, and especially the powerful and wealthy of Israel, have gone wrong: over-concentration of wealth, worshipping false gods, violence, injustice, “grinding the face of the poor” (3:15), and general frivolity – listen: “Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!” (Isaiah 5:22-23)

Here’s a passage from chapter 10, about the kinds of leaders God’s people are stuck with now, by way of contrast with the righteous leader described in chapter 11: 

“ Doom to those who pronounce wicked decrees,
and keep writing harmful laws
to deprive the needy of their rights
and to rob the poor among my people of justice;
to make widows their loot;
and to steal from orphans!” (Isaiah 10:1-2, CEB)

Those chapters also include descriptions of what it felt like for the people in that time, threatened by enemies without and within, unable to trust their leaders or even their neighbors. Listen to these words from chapter 3, describing a society in which any sense of order, civility and trust have simply dissolved: 

“The people will be oppressed,

everyone by another and everyone by a neighbor;

the youth will be rude to the elder,

and the dishonorable to the honorable. 

Someone will even seize a relative,

a member of the clan, saying,

‘You have a cloak; you shall be our leader,

and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule.’ 

But the other will cry out on that day, saying,

‘I will not be a healer;

in my house there is neither bread nor cloak;

you shall not make me leader of the people.’ 

To paraphrase that last part: 

Someone will grab an acquaintance and say, “Hey, you! We need a leader, and you’ll do!”  But the other will cry out, “I can’t fix this! I have no resources to offer!  Don’t put me in charge!” 

It’s a simple but evocative description of the state of mind of the people Israel at this moment in their history: confused, frightened, angry; feeling unable to trust stranger or friend, wondering where to turn, looking for direction and leadership. 

I understand why the lectionary brings us the texts of hope, like Isaiah 11. But we need the fuller story too – that family story of resilience that encompasses struggle and survival as well as restoration and flourishing. The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman once said that church on Sunday shouldn’t be the happiest place on earth, but the most honest place. 

If events in our personal or civic lives lead us to feel confused, fearful, angry at each other, ourselves, our leaders, our God – that’s OK. God’s people have felt these things before. Those states of mind and heart aren’t strange to God. They don’t put us outside the story, beyond the pale. 

Reading the chapters that lead up to the Peaceable Kingdom passage make it both more meaningful – and more absurd. Isaiah is offering this vision of ultimate, creation-encompassing goodwill to people who feel like even families and neighborhoods are divided and shattered. It’s hard to imagine a wolf restraining itself from devouring a lamb, when it feels like every day brings us new ways for humans to devour humans. 

Our Advent collect for today calls us to heed the warnings of the prophets, but Isaiah isn’t warning us about anything, here. Instead he’s envisioning a great big animal jamboree. It’s like a Richard Scarry illustration in a Busytown book. It’s beautiful – I deeply love it. But part of the beauty is that it’s playful, almost funny. 

One of my kids is re-watching the Netflix/Dreamworks show Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. We watched it as a family when the kids were younger. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world infested with giant, terrifying mutant animals. Kipo is a human-ish girl who is trying to find her parents. On her long journey she encounters various challenging creatures – megabunnies, giant scorpions, a friendly but manipulative giant waterbear, a race of cranky tree-dwelling cat-people. Kipo’s approach, in all of these encounters, is to try to make friends. To try to understand the needs and motives of those trying to harm her, and see if there’s a way they can work together. It’s a great show; I think the prophet Isaiah would really like it. This week I started to re-watch it myself. 

The stories that comfort us and encourage us and remind us who we are don’t have to be Bible stories. They don’t have to be serious stories. What stories are nurturing your resilience, your responsiveness, this Advent? This season of seeking light as the darkness deepens? What favorite, formative stories – books, movies, whatever – could you dive into or revisit?  Not to escape the so-called real world, but to remember that you’re not alone in your questions or struggles? 

I preached on the Peaceable Kingdom – and, to be honest, said a lot of the same stuff – back in December of 2016. In circling back to what I wrote and shared nine years ago, I rediscovered a short story by the fiction author Catherynne Valente. Valente wrote a series of young adult novels about a human girl who helps free Fairyland from the power of an oppressive ruler called the Marquess. This story is a sort of micro-prequel, about a conversation among some of her characters on the day the Marquess came to power, after a bloody battle. Valente wrote it in November of 2016 – but she recently re-posted the story on her blog, so I’m in good company in bringing it back around. 

In Valente’s story, a wise Leopard gives some advice to a young Dragon about the power he has, even when he feels powerless… 

Catherynne Valente’s short story may be read here: 

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-beasts-who-fought-for-fairyland

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