Back in Lent a group of us read and discussed a book called On Repentance and Repair, by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. The book explores Jewish thinking on repentance, making amends, and forgiveness, based in the work of the 12th century rabbi Maimonides. 

Christianity has tended to emphasize the obligation to forgive – following Jesus’ lead to some extent! It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer, for one thing, and Jesus talks in strong and urgent terms about forgiveness at other times too. I think he’s pointing to the ways that holding onto our grievances and hurts can be a burden… but not at the expense of accountability and setting things right, which he also seems to care about! 

According to Ruttenberg, Judaism offers a much more victim-centered focus. The first priority is restoration of the victim, to whatever extent is possible. The second priority is the perpetrator doing their work to become someone who understands the harm they have caused, and beginning the work of becoming someone who won’t cause that kind of harm again in the future. 

Restoring relationship between the victim and the one who caused harm, including the possibility of forgiveness, is farther down the list. In Jewish thought it is not always useful or necessary, especially if it would further harm the victim to have to return to what they experienced. 

Ruttenberg lays out five steps in the process for a person who has caused harm. First comes naming and owning the harm. The perpetrator has to be able to recognize what they did and its impact.  This step may include public confession to an appropriate audience – which is to say, not necessarily the public per se, but some community that is affected or involved, or that has a stake in both the harm and the healing, here. Not just the victim. 

Note that one pretty common thing we see when public figures mess up is that they issue shallow, speedy apologies that reveal that they don’t really understand why or how their words or actions caused harm. A lot of potential repentance processes fail at this first step! 

The second step is starting to change – beginning the work of listening, learning, and working on yourself to become somebody who won’t do that again. 

The third step is accepting consequences and making restitution or amends, in whatever ways may be possible. When David says that the man who had his neighbor’s sheep killed must make restitution seven times over, this is what he’s talking about. The man in the story owes his neighbor seven sweet baby ewe lambs, to make up for the one that he cruelly took. 

The fourth step, in Maimonides’ process, is apology. We may well be surprised by how far along in the process this falls! But the group reading the book together found that this made some sense to us. Many of us have seen or experienced the frustration of premature and shallow apologies by a person or institution that hasn’t really made any effort to address harm or change the things that caused the harm. 

And the fifth step is to make different choices in the future. 

Forgiveness isn’t one of these steps because these steps fundamentally aren’t about the harmed person. This is about what to do when you have caused harm.  As we all have, and do. 

It’s a different framework from Christianity to some extent, but it’s also just a different lens or perspective. Christianity’s focus on forgiveness is centered on the person who has experienced harm. 

We may wrestle with elements of the approach laid out by Maimonides and Ruttenberg. But I do think there’s a helpful corrective here for Christians. 

Over the millennia Christianity has sometimes leaned so hard on the obligation to forgive that we have lost track of accountability, true repentance and change. 

Now let’s talk a little about David. 

It is a big deal that David is able to hear Nathan’s indictment, and repent. It’s a big deal when David says, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

But… is the Lord the only person David has sinned against?

Who else?….  (Uriah; Bathsheba; Joab; the other soldiers killed and their loved ones; arguably even the servant…) 

We read Psalm 51 a few minutes ago. A lot of the Psalms actually begin with little explanatory notes – about the music, or sometimes about the situation. Those aren’t included when we use them in worship, but they’re pretty interesting sometimes. And the heading in the Biblical text for Psalm 51 is, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

David NEEDS to repent to God – make no mistake. 

A fun thing I learned studying this story this year: When David writes to Joab to congratulate him on getting rid of Uriah, he says, literally, “Don’t let the thing be evil in your sight.” But then a few verses further on, the text says, “But what David had done was evil in God’s sight.” 

David thought – for a moment – that he could become the arbiter of good and evil. He was wrong. His repentance is – importantly – submitting himself once again to God’s sovereignty.  

So, yes, David needs to humble himself before God. But not only God, surely. We just listed dozens of other people whom David has substantively harmed, because of one evening’s bad judgment.

Yet right here in verse 4 of the psalm David says to God, “Against you only have I sinned.” The Common English Bible renders it this way: “I’ve sinned against you—you alone.” Robert Alter’s close translation of the Hebrew has, “You alone have I offended.” 

That verse makes it very clear, but the whole psalm is…. well, a kind way to say it is that it’s focused on restoring the vertical relationship between David and God, with zero attention to the horizontal relationships with other people. A harsher way to put it would be to say that it’s incredibly self-centered. David wants to get right with God so he can reclaim his mantle of righteousness, and “teach God’s ways to the wicked.” Despite knowing that the man in the parable should make restitution, there is no evidence in Scripture that David tries to do anything to mend relationships or make amends to Bathsheba, Joab, or anyone else. 

Can we imagine an alternate reality in which David came clean?Confessed, apologized, made amends? Acknowledged to his people that he had violated their trust and abused his power? Maybe he would have had to step down as king… but maybe he would have been happier as a private citizen. David remained king his whole, long life – but at the cost of tremendous personal suffering. The lectionary doesn’t give us much more of David’s story, but there’s actually a lot more to it. Read the rest of 2 Samuel sometime and see the many painful ways that Nathan’s prophesy plays out – “The sword shall never depart from your own house.”

What are we to take from all this? 

When our five young actors sat down for a table read of this script last Monday, Linus – our David – was the only one who hadn’t seen it already. When we hit the part where David starts planning to kill Uriah, Linus broke character to say, “Oh… I’m TERRIBLE!”

For a 3000 year old story there’s something surprisingly contemporary about David. The 20th and 21st centuries are littered with public men – in some cases, otherwise great men – who risked everything in the pursuit of what I will euphemistically call romantic interests. And not infrequently, there was some degree of uncertainty about the other party’s consent. And we are certainly familiar, in the modern world, with the principal that the coverup usually gets you into deeper trouble – as it did for David. 

I’ve been putting pressure on myself for weeks, maybe months, since we decided to work with the David story for Drama Camp this summer, to find something to say to the kids and youth about what is edifying or meaningful in this story. Which is silly, because they are perfectly able interpreters of Scripture! But still: it’s an awful enough story that I felt a need to explain why it’s in the Bible and in the lectionary. 

Now, I think I’ve been overthinking it. We should find in this story exactly what the ancient chroniclers meant us to find, when they recorded and passed down this unvarnished, ugly tale. 

A great man, chosen and anointed by God, can still mess up, and mess up badly – and dig himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

None of us are perfect, and nobody gets a pass. David, for all his intimacy with God, did not get to decide what’s right and wrong, or who lives and who dies. No human has that right and privilege.

David is writ large in every possible way, his mistakes as towering as his triumphs. But his message to posterity is simply: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that right and wrong don’t apply to you. And when you mess up, try to fix it instead of trying to hide it. And those – apparently – are lessons for the ages. 

Our Ephesians text today contains these words: “The gifts [Christ] gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…”

It’s a beautiful passage that describes something I get to see every day, with joy: the way God has gifted the members of this community in so many different ways, to be part of building up this body of Christ and equipping the saints – that’s you – for the work of ministry, of living out God’s love and justice in the world. 

This passage is also part of the rite of the ordination of a priest in the Episcopal Church. When I was ordained a priest in February of 2009, Bishop Michael Curry prayed these words before laying his hands on me and saying, “Give your Holy Spirit to Miranda; fill her with grace and power; and make her a priest in your church.” 

It worked!… 

This past Monday – July 29 – was the 50th anniversary of the ordination of a group of women known as the Philadelphia 11. 

Eleven women who were ordained as priests “irregularly” – outside the normal structures and processes of the Episcopal Church – two years before the Episcopal Church’s legislative gathering, General Convention, explicitly authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood in 1976.

Why was this action necessary?… It can be hard for folks attending an Episcopal church today to comprehend the institutional and cultural conservatism of the Episcopal Church sixty years ago. It wasn’t across the board or totally rigid; there were big steps towards ecological awareness and concern for civil rights and racial justice in the church in the 1960s and early ‘70s. 

But although there was no church law excluding women from ordination as deacons, priests, or bishops, there was a very strong custom against it. There had long been an order of “deaconesses,” separate and unequal from male deacons. In 1970, General Convention eliminated that distinction. But a resolution to open the path to ordination to the priesthood to women failed at the same convention – and then again in 1973. Support had grown, but wasn’t enough to overcome opposition.

Some women who felt called to priesthood, and their allies, began to plan other strategies to try to shake the church out of comfort and custom. One of the women said they felt like their vocation, their calling from God, was not to keep asking for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest. 

Ordination is what the church calls an episcopal act – meaning a bishop has to do it. You need a bishop to make a priest. A lot of bishops were sympathetic, but few were willing to rock the boat. 

Finally, three retired bishops stepped forward as willing to do the ordinations. (You only need one, but they wanted some extra juice!) In our church’s understanding of holy orders, once you’re consecrated a bishop, you’re a bishop for life unless you really mess up; but once retired, you have a little less at stake. 

In addition, one bishop who was not retired chose to participate in the service but not in the actual moment of ordination. I’ll say more about him in a moment. 

On July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Martha and Mary, a massive ordination service was held at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. Over 2000 people attended – imagine!!

There’s a part in the ordination service – like in the wedding liturgy – where the congregation is asked if they know of any reason why the service should not proceed. When that question was asked, several priests in attendance stepped up to read statements against women’s ordination. The bishops present responded that they were acting in response to God’s command, saying, “The time for our obedience is now.” And they continued with the ordinations. 

The Presiding Bishop at the time – John Allin – convened an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops, the body consisting of all the bishops of the Episcopal Church – at O’Hare Airport, for some reason? 

Initially the Bishops were going to declare the ordinations invalid – meaning, the ordination rite was void and those women aren’t really priests now. But the bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri, Arthur Vogel, a scholar and theologian, pointed out that that could be a problem in terms of church order. So instead, the House of Bishops declared the ordinations “irregular”… thereby ceding that these women might actually be priests now… but they also told the church at large not to recognize them as priests until General Convention met next in 1976 and decided how to proceed. 

(However, the Episcopal Divinity School, which thirty years later would become my seminary, hired two of the Philadelphia Eleven with full priestly duties in January of 1975!…) 

The 1976 General Convention finally approved the ordination of women to the priesthood, and opened a process for the full recognition of the ordinations of the “irregularly” ordained women. There’s so much more to this story… and there’s a new movie about it all that I would love to be able to show here sometime! This year, reading about it, my attention was caught by some of the men who were part of the story.

I noticed Bishop Tony Ramos – the bishop who chose to participate even though he wasn’t retired. In fact, he was quite young – only 36. He was from Puerto Rico, and had been appointed as the missionary bishop to the diocese of Costa Rica in 1968, at the age of 31. He resigned from that post a decade later to make room for a Costa Rican bishop to serve, then served the Diocese of New York as an assisting bishop for Hispanic ministries for many years.

Bishop Ramos died in 2019. His obituary calls him a “gift to the church and a prophetic voice… a life-long staunch supporter of women’s rights [who] fought for all marginalized communities.” As a result of his participation in the irregular ordinations in 1974, he felt “sidelined” and “exiled” by the church for much of the rest of his career – but he never wavered in his pride about having participated, seeing July 29, 1974, as a watershed moment for the church. Speaking about his participation at the time, he said, “The only way to do justice is to challenge injustice.” 

I noticed Dr. Charles Willie, who preached at the ordination service. Willie was African-American, born in Texas. He became the first tenured African-American professor at Syracuse University in 1974 – where he brought his college friend Martin Luther King Jr. to speak a couple of times. In 1974 he left Syracuse to accept a tenured position as a professor of education at Harvard. He was also appointed by both the Kennedy and Carter administrations to serve on commissions related to youth wellbeing and mental health. 

Willie was an active lay member of the Episcopal Church – so much so that he was elected the Vice-President of the House of Deputies in 1970. That’s the second-highest elected role a layperson can hold in the larger Episcopal Church, and he was the first African-American to hold that office. 

Because he had spoken out for women in ordained ministry, he was invited to be the preacher at the ordination service. In his sermon, he preached that it is a Christian duty to disobey unjust laws, recalling the civil rights movement: “It was an unjust law of the state that demeaned the personhood of blacks by requiring them to move to the back of the bus, and it is an unjust law of the church which demeans women by denying them the opportunity to be professional priests.” However, he said, the ordination must be celebrated “not as an event of arrogant disobedience but as a moment of tender loving defiance.”

When the House of Bishops declared the ordinations “irregular,” Willie resigned from his House of Deputies leadership role in protest – essentially saying that if the Church wouldn’t move towards justice here, then it didn’t get to claim the mantle of inclusiveness by having an African-American in a leadership role. 

I noticed Bishop Arthur Vogel, the theologian who persuaded the House of Bishops away from declaring the ordinations simply invalid. Vogel was born in Milwaukee, and studied at Nashotah House, the conservative Episcopal seminary outside Milwaukee. He served the Episcopal church in Delafield, and on the faculty at Nashotah House, from 1952 to 1971. He was elected bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri in 1971. In 1976 he offered the opening invocation for the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

I don’t know a lot about Vogel, but it seems likely that he held strongly Anglo-Catholic convictions – meaning that he was an Episcopalian who felt that the Episcopal Church’s liturgy and polity should be quite similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church, and not the warm fuzzy guitar-strumming Roman Catholicism of the 1960s, either. 

Maintaining Anglo-Catholicism within the Episcopal Church has long been Nashotah House’s heritage and focus. And Vogel was also very active in ecumenical dialogue between the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches, reflecting his desire to see them come closer and perhaps even reconcile. You may be aware that the Roman Catholic church did not then, and does not now, ordain women to the priesthood. 

But it was Vogel who pushed the House of Bishops not to declare the Philadelphia ordinations invalid. He said, in essence: These women had met the church’s criteria for ordination; they were ordained by bishops in good standing, according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer; we don’t have any church laws saying women can’t be ordained. So there is no solid ground for declaring these ordinations invalid. 

Why? Maybe because he was a careful, thoughtful scholar who was concerned about sloppy logic and knee-jerk reactions. Maybe because the retired bishop of his diocese was one of the ordaining bishops; perhaps there were conversations there. Whatever the reason: A smart, well-regarded man, who was not a progressive firebrand, spoke up and helped the church handle this… less badly than it could have? 

Bishop Tony Ramos. Professor Charles Willie. Bishop Arthur Vogel. Each for their own reasons choosing to become part of this story. The story that meant that by the time I was born – in February of 1975 – it was already becoming possible for a woman to become an Episcopal priest. 

I didn’t figure out that that was my path, my calling, Christ’s gift to me, until a whole lot later. But when I did, my church placed no barriers in my way because of who and what I am. 

I am grateful for that, beyond words. I’m sure there are other things I could have done with my life – but I sure love doing this, and it sure feels like what I was made to do. 

And: I wonder. 

I wonder who needs our support, our solidarity, today. In the church; in the wider world. 

Like Bishop Vogel, might we feel called to speak up for something that’s not our cause or our issue, just because it’s the right thing to do?

Like Dr. Willie, might we build a bridge from our own experiences and struggles to empathize with another person or community?

Like Bishop Ramos, might we even be called to risk status, potential, the esteem of our peers, to do the thing that feels necessary for the health of our soul? 

Christ still calls the saints – that’s you! – to building up the body of Christ, and to the work of ministry in the world, advancing God’s agenda of justice, peace, and love of neighbor, near and far. Christ still gives us gifts for the work to which we are called, each and all. 

May we hear. May we respond. 

Let us pray. 

O God of Persistent Grace, you called the Philadelphia Eleven to the priesthood and granted them courage and boldness to respond, thereby opening the eyes of your church to the giftedness and equality of all: grant us so to hear, trust, and follow your Holy Spirit wherever she may lead, that the gifts of all your people may flourish throughout the earth, through Christ our Savior. Amen.

 

Some sources:

Obituary for Bishop Ramos: http://www.evergreeneditions.com/episcopal-new-york-spring-2019?i=581805&p=30&view=issueViewer&fbclid=IwY2xjawEXH3JleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHcfmm1zGZyhll3xaLqg82181J-tAZUKeTSKMDNTkHTDqd0F_1LDayBOekA_aem_xYaNZV6VN1pvUiuRze_Q9g

The original Episcopal News Service press release: 

https://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/ENS/ENSpress_release.pl?pr_number=74200&fbclid=IwY2xjawEVx7xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXXM6SUJdpd5NoQLIaqrVe5xkMO0m5xgFljGcK5mvss2zeL7lF_RfOUobw_aem_jSOw1L_ph-2JeB1tUWhEJw

Charles Willie:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V._Willie

A homily for All Ages Worship. Readings here!

I wonder what it looks like, to live a life with deep roots in love? 

Let’s talk about that Gospel story for a minute. 

I want to talk about the kid, in the story. Did you notice the kid? … 

Andrew tells Jesus: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”

Five barley loaves and two fish. 

Does that sound like a little food or a lot of food? … 

It depends, right? How big were the loaves, and how big were the fish?

But it’s probably more food than one kid needs for lunch. 

And I don’t think the disciples just took this kid’s lunch!

I think he was probably bringing it to Jesus as a gift.

Maybe his mom or his dad said, Hey, take some extra bread and fish to the rabbi and his friends.

Maybe they were grateful because Jesus had healed a family member or friend. 

Maybe they were just excited by the things Jesus was saying and doing.

Maybe it was the kid’s idea!

Maybe he said, Hey, mom, I want to go hear Jesus preach! Can I take him some food? He and his friends are always traveling around, I bet they get hungry.

What do you think? Was it the parents’ idea or the kid’s idea?… 

If you had a chance to bring Jesus a snack, what would you bring him? … 

So this boy brings a gift to Jesus and his friends, and what does Jesus do with it? … 

He shares it! He uses it to feed EVERYBODY there!

Now, five loaves and two fish might be a lot for one kid. But it’s not that much for Jesus and his twelve friends. And it’s certainly not very much for 5000 people!

But Jesus takes the bread, and he gives thanks to God the Father, and then he starts giving people bread. And the same with the fish. 

And everybody eats as much as they want. 

And somehow… there is enough. And more than enough! When everybody is finished, there are enough scraps left over to fill TWELVE baskets! 

Have you heard the word miracle? 

A miracle is a word for when something good happens that it’s hard to explain. 

When something good happens that’s hard to explain. 

There are a lot of miracle stories in the Bible.

Some of us might have miracle stories in our lives too.

That could be an important thing to talk about another time.

But right now, I want to go back to the kid in the story, the little boy. 

This miracle started with his gift. With him and his family showing generosity. Showing love. 

I wonder what it looks like, to live a life with deep roots in love? 

In our other reading today the author of this letter, the letter to the Ephesians, says that they hope people who follow Jesus, people like us, will have strong roots in love. 

There are two words there: Rooted and grounded in love.

The word for grounded seems to be a building word – we’re talking about foundations and cornerstones, again.

But the word rooted really is roots in Greek,  like a plant’s roots.

Lots of people back then worked on farms or grew some of their own food in gardens. So they knew about roots! 

So, what are roots, for a plant?… 

What do they do?… 

Are roots important? … 

Here’s a big question: Which is MORE important, the part of the plant you see above ground, or the roots? … 

It depends, right? But a lot of kinds of plants can grow back from the roots. 

Some kinds of plants can grow back from the top part too, if you cut it off – but if they do that – you know the first thing they do? They grow roots. 

So this author hopes that followers of Jesus – people like us – will be rooted in love. 

What love? God’s love for us; Jesus’ love for us. Which is SO BIG – this author says – that it’s hard for us to even understand the breadth and length and height and depth. A Love SO wide and SO long and SO tall and SO deep!!!

That’s how big God’s love is. 

That’s the love that we can put our roots down into. 

And that’s the love we can share with other people. 

This past week eleven youth and young adults, and four not so young adults, went to a city called Racine together for our high school mission trip. 

This is the third year we’ve done a trip a lot like this.

And some things were a lot like other years. 

But a couple of things were different. 

On Friday, we helped out at the Hospitality Center, which serves breakfast and lunch to folks who live in downtown Racine, who can’t always afford to buy their own food. 

We have helped serve lunch before. But this year we had a chance to sit and talk with people for a while. We got to hear their stories, a little bit. We heard some hard and sad things, and we got to laugh together too. 

On Saturday, we worked with a group in Milwaukee that helps refugees make new homes in Wisconsin. 

Refugees are people who have to leave their home country to escape danger. It is hard to be a refugee, and it takes a really really long time to get to make a new home somewhere else. 

In other years we’ve done things like clean an apartment. This year we shopped for things that two families will need. We bought some toys for their kids, too! 

And then we went to a park and shared lunch with several families of refugees from a country called Afghanistan, who have been here for a few years already. 

There were some younger kids, and some teenagers, and some grownups. We talked, and the kids played soccer and frisbee together. 

It was the third year that we worked with this group, but it was the first year we got to meet some of the people who are making new lives here. 

I think those moments when we got to talk with people were really important to our group, this year. 

We’re always worked really hard to help out with any project that we’re asked to do. 

But now we know a few of the people who are part of those communities. We care in a new way. 

Now we can do what we do not just because it’s the right thing to do, but out of love. 

Rooted and grounded in love… 

Does anybody like Star Wars?… 

There’s a line from the movie The Last Jedi that I have been thinking about a lot. 

One of the characters says, “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate. But saving what we love.” 

Maybe fighting what you hate and saving what you love puts you on the same battlefield. 

But there is something different, deep down, I think, about operating from love. 

Mind you: Love isn’t just soft and squishy and nice.

Sometimes love has to be brave.

Sometimes love has to be fierce. 

If we love people who can’t always afford food –

If we love people who are unhoused –

If we love refugees who are building new lives in Wisconsin – 

That love will shape how we think and what we do. 

How we give. How we vote. 

I wonder what it looks like, to live a life with deep roots in love? 

A love SO BIG that we can’t even imagine how big it is?… 

Let’s keep wondering about that as we continue …