Our Easter Gospel today comes from the Gospel of Matthew – one of the four books of the New Testament, in the Bible, that tells us about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Over the past week, on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday, we have read a big chunk of Matthew’s Gospel, leading us up to this point – Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, greeted by excited crowds; his confrontations with religious and political leaders there; his last meal with his friends; his arrest, trial, and execution. And today: what happens next.

Our Bible study group read these chapters recently – and our attention was caught by a part of the story that our readings in worship skip over. Right after his enemies make up their minds that it’s time to arrest Jesus in secret and have him killed, Jesus is sharing a meal with friends in a village just outside Jerusalem. While he’s reclining at the table, a woman comes to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she pours on his head – a gesture of honor and celebration. Matthew tells us, ‘When the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me… By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”’

There are several things going on in this brief scene. It points towards Jesus’ death and burial. There’s a hint of a possible motive for Judas, the disciple who leads Jesus’ enemies to him. In the very next verse says, ‘Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?”’

And then there’s the clash between the disciples’ ethics, and those of Jesus and the woman who anoints him. 

The disciples feel that this expensive perfume should have been sold, and the money given to the poor. That view is reasonable. It’s righteous. It’s sensible and necessary, moral and correct. 

We’ve had conversations like this at St Dunstan’s, at times. Does it make sense to spend money on flowers and special treats and Easter egg prize bags when there are people struggling to make rent? What’s our budget for responding to human need? What’s our budget for joy, for holy celebration? Is there a correct ratio between those things?… 

But Jesus rejects that way of framing the question. He says, She has done a good service for me. The word good here, kalon in Greek, can be translated beautiful, right, fitting, excellent, precious. Far from being inappropriate, excessive, tasteless or senseless, he says that her action is so right that it will be remembered as part of the Gospel, the good news, as it is read and preached around the world. As indeed it is! 

The excess of this woman’s gesture isn’t waste, in Jesus’ eyes. It’s something else, something more. Something beyond sense or necessity. Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. Something more than human righteousness. 

There’s another moment in Matthew’s Gospel where righteousness falls short – way back at the beginning. Jesus’ mother, Mary, is engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, but before they are married, it’s discovered that Mary is pregnant. She says the baby was conceived not in the usual way, but by the Holy Spirit. Matthew tells us, “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly.” But before he’s taken action, an angel speaks to him in a dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Joseph’s plan to set Mary aside was righteous. He was under no obligation to marry an unfaithful woman. Plus, maybe her pregnancy meant she had affection for another man. He would give her back to her family, perhaps give them some money to provide for her and this mystery child, and go on with his life, find another bride. Sensible and necessary, moral and correct. 

But that’s not what happens. Instead, an angel speaks for God, telling Joseph: Take on Mary; take on the child. Take on shame and uncertainty. Take on mystery and possibility. Do something beyond righteousness. 

Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. 

What if beyond righteousness is a theme of Matthew’s Gospel – a theme of the whole Jesus business? 

One of the Big Questions people sometimes ask is: Why did Jesus have to die? And one of the Church’s answers, over the centuries, has been: Jesus died in our place, as a perfect sacrifice, to satisfy our debt to God because of our sinfulness. The logic comes from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, developed in the earliest years of God’s covenant relationship with the Jewish people. Certain animals were to be sacrificed – ritually killed – at the holy place, the tabernacle and later the temple. Those sacrifices were a means to ask God’s forgiveness, or seek purification and restoration. From the earliest days of Christianity, this ritual system has been one among many symbols and metaphors that Christians have used, to try to make theological sense of Jesus’ death on the cross.  

But the author to the letter to the Hebrews – the place in the Bible that most thoroughly explores the analogy between Jesus and those sacrificial animals – stresses that Jesus’ death on the cross doesn’t just fulfill or perfect the sacrificial system. Jesus’ death exceeds, transcends, overflows the sacrificial system, as he serves as both High Priest and perfect Lamb. 

Understandings of the Cross that make Jesus into an animal killed to buy off God’s indignation turn the whole business into a matter of ledgers and balances – something that we feel able to understand, and perhaps control. It makes Jesus’ death on the cross sensible and necessary, correct and righteous. It’s trying to lock down the grace and mystery and excess into a transactional system that makes sense to human logic.

We see grace and mystery and excess, again, in the gospel of the Resurrection. The earth shakes! An angel tells the women what they need to know – but then Jesus shows up with the same message! The woman rush away “in fear and great joy.” The word for “fear” there is used in the New Testament for the way people feel in the face of strange, divine, confounding things: not just fear but awe, wonder, holy overwhelm. 

Why did Jesus have to die? Why was his death necessary – and likewise, his resurrection? Maybe those are the wrong questions. Maybe “necessary” isn’t the right word or concept at all; maybe the words from the story of the woman with the ointment point us in a better direction – expensive, precious, costly, extravagant. 

Maybe there’s an order of rightness, of goodness, that we’re just not equipped to understand – not because we’re stupid, but because we’re human. There’s only so much we can perceive or understand. The excess, the gratuitousness, the extravagance of Good Friday, of Easter, of all of it – maybe we have have to suspend our efforts to make sense of it all, and just open our hearts to goodness and grace and generosity beyond proportionality or reason. Senseless excess like the beauty of a blossoming tree branch against a blue sky, or the crystals that hide inside a geode, or the way you feel inside when a baby laughs, or the joyful dance your dog does when you come home. 

Maybe Jesus’ dying and rising is so much more than balancing a tally sheet of human wrongs, something instead that this unnamed woman’s act points towards and foreshadows, an outpouring of something indescribably precious and fragrant, a celebration, a consecration. 

Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. 

More than human righteousness. 

Alleluia! Christ is risen. 

Why did Jonah run away? Why was he so grumpy about being sent to Nineveh, to warn the Ninevites that God wanted them to change their ways? … 

Well: Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and for a while it may have been the wealthiest city of the ancient world. Because the armies of Assyria had conquered so much territory, they could take the best of the best from all over the ancient world.

Some of our young folks may remember working with the story of Judith for Drama Camp last summer. Judith bravely helps save her town – and her country, including the holy city of Jerusalem – from invasion by the Assyrian Empire. But the Book of Judith also describes how the Assyrian army, led by their commander Holofernes, marched across a massive region, crushing any nation or tribe or city that didn’t immediately surrender. The book dedicates many chapters to that military campaign and associated destruction, but the summary from our Drama Camp script gets the idea across: “[They] looted Chaldea, and destroyed every city along the Euphrates. [They] seized the region of Japheth, and plundered the Midianites. [They] burned the fields of Damascus, destroyed their flocks, sacked their cities, and killed their young men.” And although it’s historically true that Assyria did not conquer Judea and Jerusalem, they did conquer the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and killed or dispersed the Jewish tribes who had been living there. 

It’s not clear when the Book of Jonah was written down – and I suspect it had a long life as a story people told each other, before it became a text – but certainly the text assumes that Nineveh, and Assyria, are the enemy. They are fierce and powerful. They take whatever they want. They worship the wrong gods. They are an existential threat to the Jews, their country, their way of life and worship. 

That’s why Jonah doesn’t really want to save them! Jonah doesn’t want them to be warned, to have the chance to repent. He wants God to smite them good. 

So when God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, he runs away. And the whole rest of the book is actually much more about whether Jonah will be converted, will change his heart, than about whether the Ninevites will. 

Because honestly? The conversion of Nineveh is a snooze. When Jonah finally gets there and starts prophesying to them about how God wants them to change their ways, this utterly improbable thing happens: Nineveh repents, fully and instantly. And God does what God so often does: God has mercy. 

The story of Jonah is one of the options for the Easter Vigil because Jonah being inside the fish for three days is a little like Jesus being in the tomb for three days. But there’s a bit more to it. 

In the Gospels, some people ask Jesus for a sign. Do something remarkable and impressive! Prove to us that you’re really God in the flesh! And Jesus says, I will give you no sign but the sign of Jonah. He doesn’t explain what he means, and the Gospels understand it differently. Matthew thinks it’s the fish thing, but Luke seems to focus more on the conversion of Nineveh.  For Luke, Jesus is making a little joke: Jonah gave no prophetic sign to Nineveh, he just walked around telling them that they were on the wrong track, and lo and behold, they repented. Jesus’ answer to the calls for a sign, then, is that there will be no sign; just an invitation to change your heart and your life. 

So, Nineveh repents. Even the animals! And Jonah? Jonah is FURIOUS. 

Jonah’s mission to Nineveh reminds me of other moments in the Bible when God invites people – often somewhat reluctant people – to be part of what God is doing. In an earlier chapter of the Exodus story, God appears to Moses as a burning bush and says, “I have heard the suffering of my people; I am going to save them; I’m sending YOU.” Moses is not pleased. In the story of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, sometimes read at the Vigil, God doesn’t just command the bones to stand up and come back to life; God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, and to call breath back into them. 

In the New Testament, God tells a man named Ananias to take care of Paul, who has just met Jesus on the road to Damascus and been converted to Christianity – and blinded. Ananias doesn’t want to do it much, because up until about five minutes ago, Paul was actively rounding up Christians for imprisonment and possible execution. 

God could presumably have just appeared directly to the leaders of Nineveh, or sent some of those cool angels with the flaming swords. But instead, God sends Jonah. Twice. 

God seems to want us to have a part in the holy work of proclaiming, reconciling, and redeeming. 

I love Jonah because it’s funny. It’s definitely one of the parts of the bible that’s funny on purpose, and in ways that cross the millennia. And I love Jonah because it rebukes me every time I revisit it. It asks me to reflect on to whom I extend compassion and care, where I draw the lines, and whether God would draw lines there too… 

Jonah has a tantrum about his tree. I get it! There are 100% certain trees that I care about more than certain people. And that is mine to repent of. 

The author of our Lent study book, For Such A Time As This, advises us, “Spot the signs of a person who is ready to change, and allow them to become that new person.” 

I would add: Bear in mind that sometimes that person might be you. 

Much like Jesus’ parable of the two sons – better known as the prodigal son – the book of Jonah feels unfinished. We are left to wonder how the indignant one responds – Jonah, or the faithful older brother. Perhaps, having found ourselves in the story, like it or not, we’re left to write our own ending. 

At the Easter Vigil and on Easter Sunday, we tend to use language of defeat, victory, triumph. Death is vanquished! 

Love wins!! 

But the Love that wins, at Easter, is a Love that extends beyond where we might want it to go, in our hearts of hearts. A Mercy that welcomes, reconciles, mends, reaches and restores…  even the people we would just as soon see God strike down. 

A Mercy that loves each of us just the way we are, but isn’t going to leave us that way.

A Love that yearns for universal redemption – that seeks repentance and transformation for Jonah and Nineveh alike. 

The Book of Jonah asks me: Am I bold enough, hopeful enough, kind enough and fierce enough, to celebrate the victory of a love like that, this Easter? 

Are you? Are we? 

In John’s Gospel, just before he dies on the cross, Jesus says, It is completed. A sense of his mission fulfilled. In Matthew’s Gospel, which we read last Sunday, Jesus cries out from the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? Meaning, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or, why have you abandoned me? It’s a quotation from Psalm 22, which we read earlier in today’s liturgy – a holy song of desperation and desolation. 

The Church’s understanding, for 2000 years and counting, is that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. How can God abandon God? 

G. K. Chesterton, an early 20th century Christian writer, has a wonderful reflection on this mystery; listen – 

“If the divinity of Christ is true, it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already. But that God could have God’s back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. 

Christianity has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. 

In that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt, and passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. 

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken by God. 

And now let the revolutionaries of the world choose a faith: they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Indeed, let the atheists themselves choose a God. They will find only one divine figure who ever gave voice to their isolation, only one religion in which Godself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” 

I love that. And this year, through our Lent reading group, I stumbled on something that took me deeper into this mystery. 

Over the past many weeks, a group of us read a book called For such a time as this: An emergency devotional, written by Hannah Reichel, who studies the German theologians who resisted the Third Reich, the Nazi regime. One figure she often mentions is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian – meaning, somebody who thinks and writes about God, and how God relates to the world and humanity, and what it means for people to belong to God. Bonhoeffer wrote about how to follow God’s ways faithfully when it’s hard, when it’s dangerous. Eventually, after deep soul-searching, he became part of a plot to try and assassinate Adolf Hitler, choosing to cause harm with the goal of ending greater harm. The plot failed, and many of the conspirators were arrested. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned, and eventually executed, just days before the end of the war. He was 39 years old. 

Reichel mentions that Bonhoeffer saw discipleship – the path of following Jesus, and trying to live as he taught – as solidarity with God in God’s suffering. That caught my attention, partly because it’s so different from the way many people have been taught to think about the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross. 

The Bible uses a bunch of different metaphors to describe what’s accomplished by the crucifixion of Jesus. One of those metaphors is that Jesus is a sacrificial lamb, like the animals sacrificed in the ritual practices of the Old Testament. The idea behind the sacrificial system was that the animal was an offering to make it up to God when you’ve done something wrong, to set things right and get back in God’s good graces. Even within the Old Testament, long before Jesus, we see the prophets saying, This isn’t working! You can’t just keep doing whatever you want and then sacrificing an animal to fix it; you’re supposed to actually live in God’s ways of justice, mercy and peace!… 

But Christianity gave the sacrificial system a new lease on life, in what’s called the penal substitutionary atonement theory of Jesus’ death. 

By this theory, humanity had messed up SO BADLY that no amount of animal sacrifice could set things right. But if God punished us directly for our overwhelming sinfulness, we’d be collectively wiped off the face of the earth. So God had to send God’s only son, Jesus, to die on the cross in our place, as the ultimate sacrifice, to buy off God’s rightful anger at the human race. This understanding gained dominance in the Middle Ages and beyond – probably because making people feel ashamed and unworthy and bad is a good tool for institutional control. It’s an interpretation, not inherent in the Gospels. An angry, punitive God is not the only way to try to understand Jesus’ death on the cross. I think that’s important for us to know. 

And that’s why Bonhoeffer’s idea about human solidarity with God caught my attention. A suffering God who needs us to stand with him is very different from an angry God who wants to smite us. And it’s different, too, from what I have preached and heard others preach: that in the life of Jesus, and especially on Good Friday, God stands in solidarity with humanity in our suffering. 

So I went looking to learn a little more about what Bonhoeffer meant. I learned that the core idea here comes from a poem he wrote. Here’s part of it:  

“People go to God when they’re in need, 

Pray for help, ask for peace and for bread, 

for rescue from their sickness, guilt and death.

So do they all, all, Christians and heathens… 

People go to God when God’s in need,

find God poor, reviled, without shelter or bread,

see God devoured by sin, weakness, and death.

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain.”

Christians stand by God in God’s own pain. When God’s in need. 

It’s a strange, surprising idea for me, but compelling. 

I learned that Bonhoeffer wrote this poem while he was in prison, awaiting execution. Things were exceptionally heavy and bleak. In letters written to his dear friend Eberhard Bethge, from the same season, Bonhoeffer laid out the idea of religious versus non-religious Christianity. Religious Christianity, as he explained it, was based on “the certain belief in a strong God, a stop-gap-God, recognised (and often greedily desired) precisely in view of his ‘all-solving’ power.” That description comes from theologian Deborah Sutera. Public theologian Tripp Fuller explains the same idea this way: “In our culture of quick fixes, technological solutions, and scientific explanations, we’ve created a “God of the gaps”—a divine problem-solver who exists primarily to intervene when human ability fails. Bonhoeffer saw this deus ex machina as religious wishful thinking, not authentic faith.”

In prison, alone, facing death, burdened by the immeasurable suffering of the world, Bonhoeffer found faith in God as divine fixer not just unsastifying or implausible, but dangerous. That God sounded too much like the Führer’s promises to be a strong leader who would solve everyone’s problems and sort out the worthy from the unworthy. (Similarly, German theologian Karl Barth wrote about his distaste for calling God “Almighty” – because Almighty is how Hitler wanted to be seen.)

Sutera writes, “Non-religious Christianity, on the contrary, lets man make the shocking discovery: his God is a [powerless] God. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian is called upon to [take on his own responsibility and agency] by letting the image of an all-powerful and resolving God collapse. It is precisely through his powerlessness that this God comes to place himself within human history and at the centre of earthly life. A fragile God, … a shattered God: yet a braver God, it seems.” Bonhoeffer wrote, “The Bible directs people toward the powerlessness and the suffering of God; only the suffering God can help.”

I find this idea of God’s need, God’s powerlessness, both moving and uncomfortable. Yet isn’t it exactly what we encounter on Good Friday? God helpless on the cross. God dying. God dead. 

Someone asked me recently, What are we doing trying to follow Jesus, when this is where it leads? …  I didn’t have an easy answer. But this late work of Bonhoeffer’s might be part of one. 

It’s not that Bonhoeffer has no sense of God as active, as saving;  but he does see human response and responsibility as a crucial part of how God acts in the world. Elsewhere in his prison letters he writes, “I believe that God can and will let good come out of everything, even the greatest evil. For that to happen, God needs human beings who let everything work out for the best… I believe that in every moment of distress God will give us as much strength to resist as we need. But it is not given to us in advance, lest we rely on ourselves and not on God alone…. I believe that God is no timeless fate but waits for and responds to sincere prayer and responsible actions.” 

But though Bonhoeffer believes in a God who can bring good out of evil, it seems that in his own moments of deep distress, what was paradoxically most comforting was to know God powerless, weak, suffering – like us, with us, as us. He reflects on the similarities between Christ’s suffering and his own when he writes, “It is immensely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to suffer in the freedom of one’s own responsible deed. It is immensely easier to suffer with others than to suffer alone. It is immensely easier to suffer openly and honorably than apart and in shame. It is immensely easier to suffer through commitment of the physical self than in the spirit. Christ suffered in freedom, alone, apart and in shame, in body and spirit; and since then, many Christians have so suffered with him.”

Sutera sums up Bonhoeffer’s thinking about the strange grace of encountering the powerless God: “Those who experience physical pain, psychic discomfort and their own human frailty often perceive God as powerless [or] absent… But it is precisely through this passivity and radical powerlessness that God makes himself unspeakably close to the man and woman walking in the dark night of pain…. The God with us is the God who abandons us and who in this abandonment is viscerally close: he is the God who suffers at the centre of human history… This same God, even in… complete powerlessness, can cross the darkness side by side with the man and woman immersed in the night.” In Bonhoeffer’s words, “God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.”

Meeting God in deep suffering – in shared suffering – makes faith a call into the world, not away from it. In these late writings Bonhoeffer says that it’s important to live a “profound this-worldliness” – writing, “By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.” Dwelling deeply in this world, present to both our own struggles and those of others around us – for Bonhoeffer, this is what it means to be a Christian, and a human. This is what it means to stand by God in God’s need.

The apostle Paul writes that the cross is foolishness to many – but to us who are being saved, it is the power and wisdom of God. 

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? 

God suffering. Alone. Afraid. Mocked. Abused. Dying. Dead. 

God powerless and in need. 

God abandoned by God. 

Our friend, our companion, and our hope. 

 

 

SOURCES

Deborah Sutera: 

https://unipub.uni-graz.at/download/pdf/10671501.pdf

Rudolf Von Sinner: 

https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2413-94672016000200006

Tripp Fuller: 

https://processthis.substack.com/p/standing-with-god-in-gethsemanes-7c4

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

A little messier than usual, but you get the idea! The readings for this Sunday are here.

Sermon, Feb. 8, 2026

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.