Category Archives: Current Events

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

Current Events, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, September 7

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?” 

This is one of those Gospel passages that might make people reconsider whether they really want to be Christians! Jesus often uses hyperbole to get people’s attention. For example, in another famous passage, I don’t think he actually wants most people to gouge out their eyes. 

It is true that Jesus is not very interested in possessions or wealth, and has a keen eye for the way possessions and wealth can distort people’s lives and hearts. So when he recommends here and elsewhere that people should consider just giving everything away, he might mean it – in a “I really think you’d be better off if you did” kind of way.

But that’s not the main point of this little passage. This is a passage about counting the cost. 

About assessing what a project, an endeavor, a commitment, is likely to demand from you, before you begin. 

About choosing to try to follow Jesus with eyes open about where it may lead you. Because it’s not going to be all rainbows and puppy dogs and s’mores around the campfire. 

Jesus is not recommending hating your family as a way of life. But he wants his followers to be prepared for the possibility that committing to him and his way may impact even their most intimate and stable relationships. I know some of you are living that, bravely trying to talk with loved ones about how you understand the teachings and call of Jesus.

Following Jesus may lead you to take stands that make you and others uncomfortable – including, sometimes, people close to you. People whose feelings or opinions matter to you. That’s the situation faced by the apostle Paul, in the letter to Philemon. 

Philemon wasn’t part of Paul’s family. But it was a relationship that was important to Paul. Philemon was a local leader who hosted and oversaw one of the churches in his city, Colossae. He was probably a Roman Gentile Christian, rather than a Jewish convert. He was evidently a person of wealth and standing – a useful guy to know. 

Paul’s life work was traveling the ancient Near East, founding, teaching, encouraging, and sometimes correcting the new Christian communities of the region. His relationships with local leaders were crucial. Paul didn’t want his friendship with Philemon to break down, for a whole host of reasons. 

But Paul finds himself in an awkward situation. Philemon owns slaves, which was common for wealthy Romans. It seems that during one of Paul’s visits to Philemon’s church, one of his slaves, a young man named Onesimus, met Paul. Sometime after that, it seems, Onesimus stole some money from Philemon and ran away. The details are vague, but that seems like the simplest way to read between the lines of what Paul says here. 

Onesimus visits Paul in prison – which is pretty interesting! At this point Paul is in prison in Rome, awaiting trial and execution for his faith. I googled, how far is it from Rome to Colossae?, thinking, it’s probably closer than I think. Friends: it’s 1300 miles! Whether by land or by sea, it’s not close. It makes sense that Onesimus wanted to get far away from Colossae, and Rome was the capital of the world; but it took some effort to get there. 

Seeking out Paul in prison suggests more than a casual acquaintanceship. I wonder if Paul and Onesimus had talked, before; if Paul had, in fact, given Onesimus reason to start thinking that maybe his life had more meaning and value before God than his current enslavement. 

So. Onesimus visits Paul, and their relationship deepens, to the point where Paul refers to him as his son. And Onesimus becomes a Christian. But: Paul needs to smooth things over with Philemon, somehow – without sacrificing Onesimus. 

Not all the letters in the New Testament that are written in Paul’s name, were really written by Paul. But some of them were, including this one. And if you read them, you get such a sense of Paul as a human being, as a personality.

I love talking about this letter. I’m going to keep it brief and invite you to do your own close reading. The full text is here; it’s not long! Read it again, later, and notice how hard Paul is working to thread the needle. He wants to soothe Philemon’s indignation and get him to accept Onesimus back as a free member of his household and church. It is a big ask, and to be honest Paul is not particularly subtle about how he plays it. He lays on the praise: “When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus…” And: “Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.” He plays for pity: “I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus…” He reminds Philemon of his debt to Paul as his teacher: “I say nothing about your owing me even your own self.” Well – except you did say it, didn’t you, Paul? And he hints that if he survives this ordeal and gets out of prison, he might swing through Colossae and stay for a visit – a great opportunity to see how his son Onesimus is getting on. 

Paul lays it on thick – and it works. I feel pretty confident of that, because we have the letter. That means it was read and saved and shared. The alternative is that Philemon reads it, says some choice words, and tosses it into the fire immediately. 

I have written letters and emails like this. Not often, but often enough to recognize the kind of work Paul is doing here. 

He’s trying to do so much in one letter, a few precious paragraphs: to mend and maintain a relationship, to fundamentally change someone’s perspective, to bring someone along, even though it means some loss or sacrifice. I wonder how many drafts Paul wrote, before this final version? 

Following Jesus can mean being Paul, pulling out all the stops, using every ounce of your famous eloquence, to try to persuade someone to do the right thing. Effort, vulnerability, and risk. 

Following Jesus can mean being Philemon, being asked to do something you REALLY don’t want to do, something inconvenient or costly or annoying, because it’s what Jesus wants from you. 

Our first reading today from the book of the prophet Jeremiah offers us the vision of God shaping God’s people like a potter at the wheel. If the pot becomes misshapen, or just isn’t taking the form God wants, God can take it off the wheel, squeeze it together again into a ball of clay, and start over. God is speaking through Jeremiah to remind God’s people that God’s covenant relationship with them does not mean they can do whatever they want. Indeed, it means they are supposed to show forth in their manner of life, individually and together, what kind of God they serve – a God of justice, mercy, peace, and human and ecological flourishing. When that’s not what’s happening, God might just squash the pot and start over. 

This reading resonates with me right now because I recently joined a pottery studio. About every decade, since high school, I suddenly want to do pottery for a little while. And that hit me recently. So I joined this studio; but it’s been nine years since I last worked with clay. I had a lot of re-learning to do. I have worked on the wheel, like Jeremiah’s potter, but I’m more of a hand-builder. A few weeks back when I first started trying to put something together, the clay was just so floppy. It wouldn’t stand up or hold its shape. 

I had to read up and remember that with clay, you really have to manage how wet it is. Roll out your slab with the slab roller, and then let it sit for a little while, so it loses some moisture to the air and the absorbent table top. THEN you can cut your pieces and they’ll actually hold a shape. BUT that’s not all, because the other thing I had to re-learn is that I really need to be able to go to the studio two days in a row. Because you make your piece, and then you cover it very loosely with cling wrap, so it starts to dry out but not too fast. That second day is when you clean it up, because it’s harder now, but still soft enough to work with it. This stage is called “leather hard,” and in this stage you can carve it, or punch a hole through it, or use a damp sponge to smooth out rough edges. Once you’ve done that, you let it dry out all the way before firing it. That’s called greenware – and greenware is really fragile. You can’t work greenware; it’ll fall apart in your hands. 

So. I’m definitely extending Jeremiah’s metaphor here. But I’ve been thinking about all this as a kind of hands-on analogy for what kind of clay I want to be, for God. Not too flexible and floppy, but also not rigid and brittle. Right in that middle zone, workable, able to hold a shape, but also to be smoothed and given nuance and detail. Like Philemon – already formed as a Christian, mature in his faith in some ways, but not a completed piece yet, not ready for the kiln. With some important shaping and finishing still ahead, through Paul’s teaching and urging. 

Counting the cost could mean assessing what a new path or a new endeavor could mean in terms of resources, relationships, or status. But sometimes just being willing to change can feel like a huge step, a huge sacrifice. Letting God the potter continue to form us, smooth our rough edges, strengthen our connections, make us more beautiful and more useful.

Sit down first and consider. It’s the kind of advice we give to young people. Don’t rush into things. Think about the risks, the stakes. Read the fine print. Know what you’re getting into. 

It’s good advice. But there’s also something fundamentally unrealistic – something un-human – about it. If we could see, before we began, what our chosen career path would demand from us, in effort and stress and cost, we might never begin. If we could see, before we began, the cumulative costs of entering into any human relationship, we might choose to spend our lives alone. The best case scenarios involve loss and grief. 

The trouble with counting the cost is that there are so many unknowns – like love, and joy, and doing good for others even when it’s costly. Next week we’ll hear Jesus tell stories about God’s reckless love, defying human commonsense to seek out and welcome the lost. Is it a paradox to say that the Jesus of today’s Gospel is asking us to undertake a sober, measured consideration of our own willingness and capacity to become people of extravagant, foolhardy love? 

Last week, Bishop Craig Loya of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota shared a letter of comfort and encouragement to his clergy, reeling in the wake of the tragedy in Minneapolis. It’s a good word for Paul, for Philemon, for us. Bishop Craig invoked the Biblical image of Rachel weeping over her lost children, then wrote, “Now is the time for us to show up looking, sounding, and acting like the real Jesus in the world. Now is the time for us to remember that the stakes of the gospel are high, and that following Jesus asks something big of each of us. Now is the time to remember that [our] Eucharistic communities… are not nice gatherings offering maudlin spiritual comfort, but are in the business of subverting the world’s violence with God’s irresistible love. When we [stand] with clarity and courage, not everyone will be happy about it, and not everyone will want to come along. The inclusive gospel of Jesus… draws clear lines about what God does and does not tolerate. It is our job to keep pointing clearly and unambiguously to what God promises, and to what God asks of us. It’s our job to put up signs on the road that point to God’s promised reign of peace, so that our whole church becomes sign posters, ushering the whole world into a future where Rachel weeps no more.”

Amen. May it be so. 

Big Questions, Current Events, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, July 20

So what’s your favorite summer fruit?…

I don’t know what was in the basket in Amos’ vision, but for me one hallmark of summer fruit is that you’ve got to use it fast. We got some peaches this week from the folks who drive a truck up from the south, and Phil and I had to chat about how many to buy, knowing that even when they’re perfectly ripe, we can only eat them so fast. And if those peaches, or plums, or berries, sit around a little too long… you get bruises and fruit flies and puddles of goop. Summer fruit is a glorious thing while it lasts. But within days, or hours, it becomes a disgusting mess, no good to anybody. Eat it, freeze it, can it, but do something fast. 

Our text from the prophet Amos doesn’t really explain the meaning of the fruit. Old Testament scholar Tyler Mayfield says it’s based in part on wordplay: the word for “summer fruit” sounds very similar to the word for “end.” Just as ripe fruit can spoil quickly, the kingdom of Israel is approaching an end. 

Just one chapter earlier, Amos had another vision. God showed him a plumb line. Raise your hand if you know what a plumb line is?… Sometimes called a plumb bob. It’s a very ancient tool that’s still used by builders and surveyors today. You have a weight, usually lead, on the end of a string. And you let it hang. And once it stops swinging, gravity means you’ll have a straight up and down line that you can use to make sure your wall isn’t leaning. 

God tells Amos, I am setting a plumb line in the middle of my people Israel. As with the fruit, the image in the vision isn’t really explained, but we understand that something is askew, crooked, bent. The foundations are bad, or the build is shoddy. The structure cannot stand. Summer fruit and plumb line both point to the same deep truth about God’s people in Amos’ time: Something was deeply wrong –  rotten, askew – with terrible consequences in the near future. 

The book of Amos is part of the Old Testament; it’s one of the prophetic books, books that record the words of the prophets who spoke to God’s people on God’s behalf. The most famous passage of Amos comes from chapter 5: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream!” That famous line follows God’s frustration at a people who make offerings and hold festivals but don’t honor God by how they order society: “I reject your festivals; I won’t even look at your offerings of fatted animals; take away the noise of your songs!” It’s part of God’s call to stop making a show of faithfulness while wallowing in injustice. Amos, speaking for God, says, “Doom to you who turn justice into poison, and throw righteousness to the ground!… Seek good and not evil, that you may live; hate evil, love good, and establish justice at the city gate!…”

Amos was a shepherd and arborist who felt called by God to leave his home in the southern region of Tekoa to go speak God’s words to the leaders and people of Israel in the mid-eighth century before the time of Jesus. David’s united kingdom had split some time earlier, into a southern kingdom, Judah or Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital, and the northern kingdom, called Israel. Israel was enjoying a brief period of peace and prosperity… and apparently the wealthy and powerful used this moment to accumulate wealth and cheat the poor. We hear God’s accusation through Amos in today’s reading: “Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land!” God accuses the wealthy of being impatient with keeping holy times of rest, eager to get back to cheating the poor with false weights and poor-quality products, “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” 

Amos declares, “The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. Shall not the land tremble on this account, and everyone mourn who lives in it?…”

Prophets are called by God to speak God’s word in times when things are rotten or askew. God appoints a prophet to call the leaders and the people to repent, restore, repair, renew, to avoid the consequences of their current actions and their current path. Being a prophet is not an easy vocation! Right after the plumb line passage, someone tattles on Amos to the king, telling him that Amos is being a real downer and possibly committing treason. Amos is advised to run away and go prophesy in his home territory, for his words are not welcome in Israel. Other Biblical prophets are persecuted, exiled, or even killed. 

There are also beautifully comforting passages in the prophetic books, that offer assurance of God’s continued care and promise a future beyond suffering. The peaceable kingdom from Isaiah – the lion snuggling with the lamb – is one famous and glorious example. There’s a line we learn in seminary that’s often quoted in sermons: Prophets are called to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. But, you know, it’s not uncommon for the prophets of the Bible to afflict the afflicted, too – by saying, You had this coming. You brought this on yourselves. And that brings me to something I want to explore here: the concept of judgment. 

God’s judgment, divine judgment, is an important theme in Amos and elsewhere in the prophetic literature. And it’s an idea that I suspect a lot of us are pretty ambivalent about. On the one hand, I bet some of you prayed today’s Psalm pretty hard. The idea that God is watching, that cruel and evil deeds are noted, and that eventually, there will be consequences for leaders whom we see as evil and dangerous, has an understandable appeal. But we’ve also heard God’s judgment thrown around as a weapon and a threat against people we love. 

What are we talking about when we talk about God’s judgment? 

I think there are several axes that this concept moves along; we need at least a three-dimensional model! First, there’s individual versus collective judgment. Does judgment, and the suffering that may follow, result more from our individual choices and sins, or from the way we organize our common life, the injustice and suffering that we tolerate together? And does it land on people individually, or on the community or nation as a whole? 

Second, there’s the question of judgment in this world or the next. Do our bad actions (or failures to act), whether individual or collective, bring down punishment or consequences in the short to medium term? Or does the reckoning happen after we die? There are many jokes and cartoons that hinge on someone coming face to face with St. Peter at the pearly gates to Heaven, and discovering exactly what is written about them in the Book of Life. But that’s not a particularly Biblical idea. 

Third, and importantly, when divine judgment is not in our favor, there’s the question of whether the suffering that follows is a punishment, per se – something extra sent by God, the proverbial lighting bolt – or simply the consequences of our bad actions. The summer fruit rots; the crooked wall falls. 

We hear a lot from evangelical Christianity about individual punishment in the afterlife, in the form of damnation to hell. That’s actually a long way from the dominant concept of judgment in the prophetic literature. The prophets are much more concerned with collective judgment, though they’re also very aware of the role of leaders in creating or tolerating an unjust or rotten society. 

The prophets are not at all concerned with an afterlife; that simply wasn’t a very important idea in pre-Christian Judaism. They anticipate consequences in this world – though sometimes those consequences may take a generation or two to mature. 

The second book of Kings tells us about King Hezekiah: the prophet Isaiah tells him that his kingdom will be conquered, and his people, even his own children, taken into exile – but none of this will happen during Hezekiah’s lifetime. Hezekiah literally tells himself, There will be peace and security during MY life… so who cares? I think of that so often with respect to the climate crisis. 

So the prophetic concept of divine judgment is collective or corporate, and happens in this world, this life, though the timing can be mysterious. As for punishment versus consequences: that’s interesting. In the Old Testament, texts about judgment are often retrospective, trying to make sense of why bad things happened. How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? How did we bring this down on ourselves? Why is God angry with us? 

Often, the Old Testament names terrible events as God’s punishment for the people’s wrongdoing. As something God has brought upon them to discipline and correct them, to get them to recommit to living the way God has called God’s people to live. 

But often, it’s easy to see that suffering as a natural consequence rather than a punishment per se. For example, there’s the situation Amos rails against: leaders who are much more interested in enriching themselves than in building and tending a nation that manifests God’s purposes – justice, mercy, nobody hungry or desperate or excluded, dignity and safety for everybody. When leaders abandon that work, the foundations weaken; the nation becomes rotten, askew, vulnerable to disaster, attack, collapse. Which happened to the kingdom of Israel. 

What’s our relationship with the biblical concept of judgment? Thinking about that question this week, it’s really hard not to think about the floods in Texas, and the lives lost there. 

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a couple of notably bad takes emerged. Some people were quick to say that if people in Texas don’t like climate disasters, they should have voted differently in the last presidential election. Those voices weren’t invoking divine judgment, but it’s buried somewhere in that “eff around and find out” perspective. On the other hand, there were the usual voices saying that it’s inappropriate to talk about what went wrong, insisting that we limit ourselves to thoughts and prayers. The Biblical prophets also encountered leaders reluctant to heed warnings or change their ways. 

No person of good conscience thinks the children who died at Camp Mystic, or anyone else who lost their lives that terrible night, deserved what happened to them.The idea of divine judgment as individual punishment is clearly not helpful here. Not just because it’s awful, but also because it shrugs off any shared accountability. If I’m still standing, I must be OK! 

In many ways this is exactly the kind of event that we see Biblical prophets interpreting through the lens of divine judgment. It’s collective rather than individual, affecting a whole region – and implicating a whole state, a whole nation. It’s this-worldly, not an afterlife situation. And it’s pretty easy to see it as the consequence of intensifying weather due to human-caused climate change, and the choices and actions of leaders from the federal down to the very local level. Many layers of failure helped turn this natural disaster into a human tragedy. To point to just one: The guy at the regional National Weather Service office whose job was to coordinate local warnings in that area took Elon Musk’s early retirement offer a few months earlier. The NWS did their job that night; the right alerts went out. But the guy with couple decades’ experience working with local officials, the guy who knew how to tell folks, This could be a biggie, send out the cavalry, was gone, because of DOGE’s purge of federal employees. 

Would his presence have made a difference? There’s no way to know. That’s just one of so many ways that night could have gone differently. It didn’t have to be this way. 

This isn’t just an intellectual exercise in whether we can map a Biblical concept onto current events. Is divine judgment a useful framework for us? Does it help us make sense of calamity? 

I think it might. First, because there were (and are) prophets. We don’t serve a God who just spots a sinner and squashes them like a bug, end of story. In the Bible, when things were going badly wrong among God’s people, when things were dangerously rotten or askew, God sent prophets to try to tell leaders and people that the path they’re on leads towards struggle and suffering. Amos says, “Seek good and not evil, that you may live; hate evil, love good, and establish justice at the city gate!” Chapter four of Amos rehearses all the bad things that have already happened to God’s people, and their refusal to learn from them, with God’s frustrated, anguished refrain: “Seek me and live!” The Bible is full of texts like that, God speaking through prophets and saints to call God’s people back to better paths. 

The prophetic books are also full of texts describing in detail exactly where leaders and people are going wrong. Buying the needy for a pair of sandals is the tip of the iceberg. Judgment goes hand in hand with a reckoning: what happened, and why? Peeling back layers of responsibility, things done and left undone. Afflicting the afflicted by naming names and calling for accountability, with the goal of understanding and amending. Whether the calamity has already happened or can yet be prevented: there are things to learn, here, and things to repair. There’s a better path. Always. 

God sent the prophets; God sends voices in our time – investigative reporters, scientists, whistleblowers, community leaders, poets, occasionally even pastors. God gives us those people, those voices, so that we can heed, and learn, and change, and live. Because God wants better for us, and from us. 

And that points towards something else really important about divine judgment: it’s nested within the much bigger truth of divine love, divine mercy. The author of the letter to the Colossians talks about Jesus as this embodiment of God’s desire to reconcile and make peace with all people and all things in heaven and earth. 

Scripture and the experience of the holy ones through the ages bear testimony to that deep desire of God’s heart – to call us out of the harmful patterns we create for ourselves and each other, to reconcile and restore, to heal, welcome and celebrate. As we hear other prophetic texts in the coming weeks, I invite you to notice the recurring theme of God’s yearning, frustrated love. 

Judgment isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s more like someone who really knows you and really loves you, sitting you down at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and saying, Hey. I’m worried about you. Some of the stuff you’re doing is not good for you. I’m afraid you’re not safe. Except the you is all of us, and the stuff is big and complex and systemic and hard to change. We live in difficult, complicated times – as did our faith ancestors. 

Judgment is a hard, heavy word. It sounds like a door slamming; but in the Biblical context, it’s more like a door opening. The Biblical concept of judgment insists on interpretability: there’s something to understand here, something to learn, even in what may seem senseless and overwhelming. It insists on agency and possibility: if we can understand and learn, we can change course towards a better future. And it insists on relationship: even in calamity and disaster, we are held and loved by a Mercy larger than the universe. 

Current Events, Housing, Outreach

Notes on Housing Stability 101 Talk, May 28, 2025

Jill Bradshaw of WayForward Resources presents Housing Stability 101. 

These are Rev. Miranda’s notes; I did not capture everything and all details may not be correct! 

Definitions of homelessness: 

Federal government: people in shelter, transitional housing, or a place not meant for habitation, like a park or car. 

McKinney-Vento Act definition: ALSO people who are doubled up, couch surfing, self-paying in hotels, at imminent risk of homelessness. 

Dane County school districts estimate 2000 kids in doubled-up or transitional housing. 

The difference in these definitions matters a lot for funding!

WF serves a lot of people who are in that second category, so they don’t get funding from HUD. But that does mean that with the funding they raise, they have a little more freedom to use as needed to help people stay housed. 

Homelessness has risen to its highest reported level on record in the US – 18% increase in 2024, with a 40% rise in family homelessness. 

770,000 homeless people in the Point in Time survey in January 2024.  Certainly a significant undercount. 

A recent estimate suggests that people becoming homeless for the first time is a big driver of that increase. 

Dane County: PIT 737 people in Jan 2024; has been going up since 2009 (20% increase). 

Why housing matters

  • Eviction is a catalyst for economic distress, particularly for marginalized communities. 
  • Impacts kids’ physical and mental health. Traumatic childhood experiences can have lifelong impacts. Toxic stress. 
  • Adults: less access to stable employment, credit, etc. Harder to find housing again after being evicted. 

Mayors in Dane County – all agree: biggest issue is housing. 

Population of Dane County is growing – fastest growing county in WI. Estimates that we’ll hit 1 million in 2050. 

Housing growth is not keeping up. 

This leads to increased rents & housing prices. 30% increase in housing prices between 2020 and 2023 – biggest increase in the COUNTRY. 

Why is housing instability increasing? … 

Wisconsin overall: Household growth & housing unit growth are pretty close. 

But in Dane County: For every five new households, only four housing units added. 

The “Big Squeeze” … 

Gnneral rule of thumb: you don’t want to spend more than 30% of your income on housing (rent/mortgage).

There’s an area median income for every city/metro area

Housing for people who are at 30% or below of area median income… Over 13000 unit shortfall for people at that lowest level IN DANE COUNTY.  

Because of that shortage of affordable housing, everyone is trying to get into apartments/housing in the middle price ranges – but lower income folks have a hard time getting in, because they’re competing with people with more income, better credit, etc.

Dane County has a VERY low vacancy rate – 2%. Healthy is 5 – 8%. This means people have very few choices. 

In Dane County, 50%!!! of renters pay more than 30% of their income for rent. “Rent-burdened” or “cost-burdened” – means that people have less for food, health care, car repairs, everything else. 

In Madison metro area, you would have to work 3.6 full-time jobs at minimum wage to afford a 2-bedroom apartment. 

Housing and food are closely related because “rent eats first.”  We don’t want people to lose their housing. 

Lower income households are especially rent burdened.  HUGE group of people are spending over 50% of their income on housing. 

WayForward’s programs – two: 

  1. Housing stability program. Been around a long time. Case managers work with participants – have to live in their service area. (Anyone can go to the food pantry! I didn’t know that.) Funded through donations – grants, foundation gifts, individual donors. 
  2. Connections program – serves “Doubled-up” households. Newer, 2 – 3 years old.  Got a big federal grant (ARPA) through Dane County. Will run out in September. Hoping to keep it going, but continued grant funds in question. Case management and support with getting into stable housing. 

In 2024, WF served 729 households with housing stability funds; gave away over $500k.

(2019: 383 households.) 

WF is investing 344% more funds into housing than five years ago. 

Food pantry use has tripled; they think it’s very closely tied to the rent/housing situation in Dane County. 

Increase in demand has changed how they provide services. More wait time, because they’re at capacity. 

They have six full-time housing staff (!).  

As far as they can tell, 98% of the people they work with maintain housing for a year, without eviction. Very talented case managers. 

44 households have graduated from the Connections program – a year-long intensive program. 

Arizona Self-Sufficiency Matrix, a measure of stability:

General housing stability program: scores went up 7 points

Connections program: scores went up 15 points

There’s going to keep being a crunch – Dane County’s population keeps growing, and housing keeps not keeping up. 

What we can do? … 

  • Understand the crisis, and talk about it with others. 
  • Be a housing advocate! “Encourage more housing in your area, even as it brings change.” Speak up in local government and newspapers. 
  • Get involved beyond your community – write to elected officials – see National Low Income Housing Coalition website. 

Support WayForward’s work – 

  • Give financially
  • Donate welcome baskets or Connections Amazon wish list
  • Donate food or hold a food drive – that lets them buy less food & focus more resources on housing. 
Big Questions, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, March 9

Anybody else ever watch the TV show Alone? … 

It’s a reality competition show. Ten people with various survival skills are dropped into the wilderness, with limited equipment. They have to build shelter, and find their own food. They have special radios that they can use to “tap out” at any time – or they may get pulled out if their health becomes too poor. Whoever holds out the longest gets $250,000. 

I’m fascinated by the show because of what happens inside of people as they go through this ordeal. Some people just tough it out as long as they can by force of will. But a lot of people are driven to some profound self-reflection, by the isolation and the hardship. People who thought they could conquer Nature learn they have to cooperate with it. People who thought they could rely on their skills are forced to face their own limits. People who thought they were totally self-sufficient discover that they are profoundly lonely.

In today’s Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent, we see Jesus at the end of his Alone journey in the Judean wilderness – which is plenty harsh and lonely. And the Devil knows Jesus is vulnerable right now, and takes his shot. Let me say a quick word about who the Devil is, here. This is not the red guy with horns and a tail; that’s a much later image. In the Old Testament, the Devil has a role, a purpose, of testing the righteous, like Job – to see if their faith and piety and good deeds are only skin deep. That’s very much what’s happening here. 

As I said last week, the weird stuff in the Bible doesn’t especially bother me; but if you find it easier to imagine Jesus driven to self-reflection, Alone-style, I think this story works fine that way, too. 

Let me say a bit more about the third character in this story – the wilderness herself. There is a lot of literal wilderness in this part of the world – dry, rocky, hilly, and empty. 

The reason many ancient peoples of this region were pastoralists, keeping flocks of sheep and goats, is that a lot of this territory was lousy for farming. So, the importance of wilderness in the Bible begins from the geology and ecology of the region. 

And then on top of those realities, there are layers and layers of meaning that build up because of the kinds of things that happen in the wilderness. Abraham and Sarah leave a settled life in response to God’s call and set off into the wilderness. Hagar is driven into the wilderness to die, and instead meets God there. Jacob wrestles with an angel. Moses leads God’s people for forty years – struggling, starving, quarreling, but also, slowly, becoming a new people shaped by God’s purposes. David flees to the wilderness to escape King Saul’s rage, and eventually storms back from the wilderness, strengthened by its privations, to claim a throne. The prophet Isaiah dwells deeply with images of ruined cities, overgrown with weeds and overrun with wild animals – and with visions of wilderness redeemed, the desert blooming, rejoicing with flowers, as God returns to redeem God’s people and dwell among them. 

The wilderness is a deeply meaningful place, for the Biblical tradition. You don’t go there unless you have to. It’s a place of struggle and danger, a place where everything is stripped away, a place where you might die. And it is also a place where people encounter the Divine. A place of becoming, a place where people discover their purpose.

I think our Gospels have all of that in mind when they tell us that Jesus went to the wilderness, immediately after his baptism, to prepare for his public ministry, for the demanding three years that he spends in the public eye before he is arrested and executed. 

So. Jesus has been in the wilderness for forty days – not coincidentally, the same length as our season of Lent – and the Devil comes to tempt him. I’d like to talk about those temptations, one by one – what they meant for Jesus, and also what they might mean for us. Because we have wilderness seasons – individually, and together. Times of struggle, scarcity, and fear. Times when we’re not sure we have what it takes to get through, or what it’s going to cost us to survive. This season in our common life feels pretty wilderness-y for a lot of us, for a lot of reasons. So let’s think about what happens in the wilderness… 

Luke tells us, “Jesus ate nothing at all during those [forty] days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” For Jesus, the temptation here is pretty clear: to use his power to meet his own needs. We’re invited to understand that this is something Jesus could actually do. But if he starts down this road – a loaf of bread here, some more comfortable sandals there, maybe a convenient roadside inn with a hot tub after a long day’s journey – it could become a slippery slope! 

What’s the equivalent temptation for us, in our wilderness seasons? Years ago, a wise clergy friend told me that for pastors, people like me, our version of this temptation is to, like, tie a bow around the hard things, and try to make them meaningful and pretty. She said: It’s hard for us to accept that sometimes a stone is just a stone. I’m glad she named that; I think about it now and then. People become pastors because they want to help people find meaning, and it takes discipline not to rush to platitudes and superficial reassurances, to be able to sit with people when meaning or healing or resolution seems distant or impossible. 

There are versions of this temptation for non-pastors too. Maybe it’s the toxic positivity that rejects all difficult emotions. Maybe it’s the denial and avoidance of anything uncomfortable or scary. 

It’s tricky, because real blessings can emerge from difficult times. I feel gratitude and hope about our life together as a church, right now: the ways people here are stepping up to strengthen our care for one another and our neighbors, deepen our theological and Scriptural grounding, make sure our young folks feel fully accepted and loved. 

And: This is a really hard time for a lot of you, in many ways. A lot of folks are dealing with uncertainty and stress and risk that just flat out sucks. As your pastor, I need to be able to hold both the good things and the bad things. Some of these stones just are not going to turn into bread.

Luke writes, “Then the devil led Jesus up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

For Jesus, I think this temptation is about checking his motives – and abdicating responsibility. The Devil thinks that maybe Jesus is the kind of guy who’s just in it for the acclaim and the glory – and would be happy not to have to actually run things or do anything hard. So the Devil says: You can have the throne; just put me in charge. 

Jesus refuses. Because he’s not in it for glory, actually. And because he knows what happens when the Devil is in charge. The hard work ahead is his work, and he claims it. 

How would we scale this temptation down to our little, ordinary lives? I think we can also wrestle with the temptation to cede our responsibility, our agency – a word which hear means our our capacity to act, to do things that matter, even if they are small things that matter in small ways. I know a lot of folks are struggling with overwhelm: not knowing where to focus, what actions are worth the time and effort, how to balance ordinary life stuff with everything that is out of the ordinary right now.

If that’s your predicament – it is certainly mine at times – there’s a lot of good advice out there. Pick a thread and follow it. Act locally. Build and build on relationships you already have, places you’re already involved. Find people doing work that matters to you, and ask how you can help or support. There are so many ways we can invest in the world we want to live in, the world that aligns with God’s intentions as best we understand them. 

You may have heard the wonderful saying of Rabbi Tarfon, about the work of tikkun olam, repairing the world: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. (Though I like to remind us that sometimes caring for ourselves or our loved ones is the work before us for a while. Another wise sage, Lemony Snicket, writes, “It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.”) 

We need to be in ongoing dialogue with ourselves about what’s feasible and what’s appropriate for us. What is my work to do? 

If it would be helpful for us to convene some spaces of conversation where folks can wonder out loud about that stuff together, and share ideas, let me know; that could be fruitful. 

The important thing, I think, is to try not to get scared or overwhelmed or numbed into giving up our own authority, however local and limited it may be, and our agency, our capacity to act in the direction of our hopes. 

Luke writes, “Then the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'”

Note, friends, that the Devil is quoting Psalm 91, which is one of the psalms that says that if God loves you nothing bad will ever happen. The Psalms are sometimes wrong. 

What did this temptation mean for Jesus? I think Jesus knows from very early on that his path will lead him to death. I don’t think this temptation is about fearing death. It’s subtler than that. Jesus, as God temporarily confined to a human body, seems to have moments when he doesn’t know the plan, and struggles with exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, just like any of us. 

Here, the Devil is saying to Jesus, You’ve chosen a risky path. You sure must have a lot of confidence in the God you call Father, to believe that there’s some point to it all, that the Powers that Be won’t just crush you like a bug and your mission and message will be forgotten. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some assurance that God is actually on the job, here? To know you could really trust the Big Guy? Come on, just a little test; what could it hurt? 

But Jesus says: That’s stupid. I’m not going to put myself at risk for no good reason. I have work to do here. I have real risks to face – necessary risks. I admire Jesus’ clarity about his mission. And I wonder if, for a moment, this temptation got to him a little…  Wanting to know that it’s all going to be OK, somehow, despite everything, is so real. And that’s what the pinnacle-of-the-Temple temptation looks like, feels like, in my life: The desire to know that the people and things I love best are going to be all right. That God won’t let anything really bad happen to them. 

There’s a David Bowie song with the lyrics, “Give my children sunny smiles, give them moon and cloudless skies; I demand a better future, or I might just stop loving you.” I am almost certain Bowie wrote it as a prayer; I know it is when I sing along with it. I would very much like to be able to make some kind of deal with God, such that my dearest people, and my dearest church, will be safe, whatever else happens around us.

A side note that isn’t really a side note: Psalm 91, our psalm today, the one the Devil quotes, is one of the psalms used in Compline. When we started regular Zoom Compline during the first months of Covid lockdown, we found we had to edit out the verses of the psalm that say that even if ten thousand people die of plague all around you, God will keep YOU safe because God likes you best. It just didn’t sit well. 

I don’t think that’s the deal. It’s not the kind of world we live in. We’re not dolls in God’s dollhouse. Our agency, our responsibility, are real. We make choices. We shape the world. We can do real good; we can do real bad. When a lot of us work together, we can do BIG good and BIG bad. We’re able to inflict harm on one another, directly and indirectly, not because God wants to build our character through suffering, but because God made us free. I do believe God acts in the world, and in and through us, but that God chooses to make generous space for our freedom. 

When we talk about this in confirmation class – about how there can be a good and loving God and also a kind of messed-up world – I ask, Would it be good if parents were in total control of their children’s lives? Even good parents, who love their kids and mean well? Nobody has ever thought that that was a good idea. 

The 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich was once reflecting on sin and all the problems it causes in the world, grieving in her heart: All should have been well! Then in a vision she hears Jesus say to her tenderly: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I believe the truth of that vision. I believe that all is held in Love; that far more can be mended than we know. But that’s in the long term, and the big picture; all shall be well doesn’t mean in this world, or this lifetime. 

Here and now, we don’t get to know that everything’s going to turn out all right. Jesus had to undertake his mission, live out his call, without the assurance that everything was going to be OK, in human terms. So do I. So do we. 

The point of this whole story – the wilderness story, the Jesus story, the full scope of the Bible, four thousand years of humanity grappling with the God we know in Jesus Christ – is that God is in it with us. We are not abandoned in the mess; we’re not alone in the dark. 

There will be wilderness times – individually, and together. Times of struggle, scarcity, and fear. Times when we’re not sure we have what it takes to get through, or what it’s going to cost us to survive. There are stones that will stubbornly remain stones. 

And yet. 

People have always found purpose in the wilderness. 

People have always met the Holy in the wilderness. 

And every so often, rarely, beautifully, the wilderness blooms. 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Nov. 3 (All Saints)

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

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

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

So All Saints Day became a tradition. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wouldn’t mind having it read at mine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that those whom we miss are already there. 

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

But here we all are, living. 

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

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

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

And here we are on All Saints Day.

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

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

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

All eight verses. We only sang four today!…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen. 

Capital Campaign, Current Events, Outreach, Restorative Action

Community Project Fund proposals & voting process, January 2024

Here are quick links to the four organizations/proposals! Scroll down to read about the funds we’re giving away and how we got here.  To see the complete proposals, contact Rev. Miranda or call the church office. 

Ho-Chunk Supportive Housing for Young Families

Own It! Building Black Wealth Educational Materials

WayForward Resources Housing Stability Program

The Road Home’s Heart Room Program

St. Dunstan’s Community Project Fund: Housing Grants
In 2018, as part of Saint Dunstan’s capital campaign for a major renovation (called The Open Door Project), we recognized that our parish is committed to loving our neighbors in response to Jesus’ call. In this spirit, St. Dunstan’s committed a portion of the Open Door Project funds raised to serve the wider community after the renovation had been completed. These funds – amounting to $70,000 – were intended to be used to develop a new project to address a local need, and offer our members opportunities to learn, engage, and serve.

Following long delay in implementing this project due to the Covid pandemic, in 2023 St. Dunstan’s has discerned that these Community Project Funds are to be allocated to help address the housing crisis in Dane County. We anticipate awarding 2 to 4 one-time grants, each ranging from $10,000 to $25,000.

Why housing? 
In almost any conversation about issues and challenges affecting vulnerable communities, in Dane County and nationwide, housing comes up as a core issue. We are facing a housing crisis both nationwide and in Dane County. And housing ties in with lots of other issues: poverty, academic success and employment, transit (and therefore pollution and climate), and much more. To learn more, use the link below to access some articles (additional resources welcome!).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aXpovWIGn6ZtjPw-iIgi9X-N4Rrkh-g5PdQZyeoXkTg/edit?usp=sharing

What happens next? 
We have received four applications from local organizations that are doing work around affordable housing, reducing homelessness, and keeping people housed. In the weeks ahead, we plan to roll out information about each of these organizations and their specific projects. Please read about these groups as information comes out, in the coming weeks!

In mid-January, we will invite members of the parish to vote on which organizations and projects they would most like to fund. The congregation’s preferences will help the Vestry decide how to allocate the funds and send out the grants. We are committed to making that decision and announcing grants on February 1.

Finally: Because of the long Covid delay, our Vestry has decided that our priority is to get these funds out into the community. But we continue to hope that the Community Project Fund will lead to new opportunities for the people of St. Dunstan’s to learn, engage, and serve. We hope that everyone will take some time in the next two months to learn more about the housing crisis – whether here in Dane County, or where you live, for those in other areas. Many of housing solutions are deep in the weeds of local politics, and it matters to simply have more people who understand what’s at stake. New ways to get involved or help out may emerge out of our shared learning.

I’m new here. What’s this all about? 

The Open Door Project was a capital campaign and renovation project to make our buildings better serve our common life and mission. The extensive renovations of our main building and the Parish Center, the building at the end of the parking lot,  increased safety, accessibility, and comfort, and gave us more usable and flexible spaces for ourselves and community groups. You can read more here.

Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, February 12

You can read today’s lessons by clicking here! 

Today’s lesson from Deuteronomy in the Old Testament is one of the parts of the Bible that makes it sound like choosing right, choosing good, is very straightforward. 

You just do the good thing and not the bad thing.

You do the thing God tells you to do and not the thing God tells you not to do.

How hard can it be? It’s simple. 

It’s not simple.

We are complicated, and the world is complicated.

We don’t fully understand ourselves, let alone others; 

and we don’t fully understand the motives or consequences of our actions and choices. 

Doing good – choosing good – is hard.

Our Psalm names that in one evocative line:

Oh, that my ways were made so direct
that I might keep your statutes, your commandments!

To paraphrase loosely:

If only my path were clear enough, and my steps steady enough, 

for me to consistently follow God’s ways!  

Deuteronomy says, Just do what’s right! 

Psalm 119 says, I wish it were that simple.

And then … there’s today’s Gospel.

Oh, Lordy. 

Believe me, if most preachers could make our peace with just skipping this chunk of the Sermon on the Mount, we would. 

The divorce stuff is extra tough but all of it is tough. 

The idea that if you hate your terrible co-worker, that has profound consequences for your soul?… 

Jesus is using hyberbole and exaggerated language to make his point, here, as he does elsewhere. 

He likes to use big images that really get people’s attention. 

I don’t think we’re being faithful to his intentions if we try to take all this literally. I’m very sure that he doesn’t really want people to cut their hands off. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean that you’ll go to hell for hating your worthless jerk of a co-worker. 

Let me take a brief detour here to talk about Hell. 

The phrase Jesus actually uses here is “Gehenna of fire.” 

Gehenna or Hinnom is a valley south of Jerusalem, just outside the city. Its name in Hebrew means Valley of Lamentation. 

It seems to have been a place where the garbage of the city was thrown, over the centuries, and sometimes burned. 

By Jesus’ time the word Gehenna has taken on other meanings.  It’s not just a trash-polluted gully but a symbolic place of dread, of punishment and perhaps of purification. 

What we need to understand about Gehenna is, first, that this term does NOT mean Hell, an underworld of eternal punishment ruled over by Satan. 

That is a later idea built upon some fairly thin Scriptural foundations. 

And, second, that we don’t really know what this term meant to Jesus. He only uses it a few times. 

Bible translator and theologian David Bentley Hart says that in other writings from around the same time, Gehenna seems to have had many varied meanings – historical or cosmic; eternal or temporary; punishment or renewal. 

Given all that, we just don’t know what Jesus has in mind here, or how his original audience would have heard it. 

Hart also points out that there’s basically nothing about Gehenna, or eternal punishment in general, in our earliest Christian texts, the letters of Paul. 

He himself found that his close study of the New Testament, among other things, led him to universalism – a belief that everyone will be saved. 

That’s a sermon for another day! 

The point right now is that these references to Gehenna or hell seem to be more a way to convey the seriousness of the subject than an actual statement about ultimate destinations. 

What Jesus is talking about here, in this difficult passage, is the fact that being good is hard – and that one reason it’s hard is that insides matter just as much as outsides. 

We know this. 

We know that we are kidding ourselves if we think that hating our jerk co-worker doesn’t matter, as long as we are polite to them in public. 

Or that any other toxic or life-sapping relationship or situation is FINE as long as we all keep showing up and getting on with things. 

Hear me clearly: I am not saying that changing stuff like that is easy or light or even safe!!! 

I’m just saying what I think Jesus is saying: Insides matter.

What we’re thinking and feeling matters, even if on the surface everything looks fine or at least OK. 

Our Isaiah text from last week was about the same issue with respect to humans and God. People were complaining: God, we’re doing all the stuff we’re supposed to do, why aren’t you blessing us? And God says through the prophet: Look! You’re using your religious observances as an excuse to argue with your neighbor and oppress your workers. 

Your insides don’t match your outsides.
Your goodness, your rightness, is only skin-deep. 

Jesus knows – as Isaiah knew – that we can meet expectations about correct or appropriate behavior on the surface, while all kinds of messy or deeply corrosive stuff is going on underneath. 

Oh, that my ways were made so direct
that I might keep your commandments!

I waffled on whether to include this in the sermon but I decided a concrete example might be helpful.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a local faith-based summit on the housing crisis, to educate us and help us start to imagine ways that faith communities could help.

I knew we had a housing crisis, in Dane County, in Wisconsin, nationwide, but I learned that it’s much worse than I realized.

And of course it’s hardest for the poor, for people of color, for people with any kind of spotty employment or credit history, and for young folks who want to move into stable housing and build their lives. 

One thing I learned at the summit is that Dane County has a lot of good jobs, and people WILL move here for the jobs, whether there’s housing or not. 

If there isn’t housing close, they’ll live farther out – even in the next county – and commute. 

So to deal with that reality, we can either build more dense housing near jobs and along public transit routes; OR  there will be more and more people with long commutes – with negative impacts on their quality of life, our traffic, and the environment.

Here in Madison, the Council recently passed some new zoning that will allow construction of duplexes in formerly single-family home neighborhoods along certain transit routes. 

It’s intended to help add some more entry-level housing, and to reduce traffic and the environmental harm by making it easier for folks to use transit. 

And we heard some pushback about that. 

Some people who live in those neighborhoods were pretty upset about the way this might change the character of their neighborhoods. 

They don’t like the aesthetics, they’re worried about their property values, and I think there’s probably also some concern about who these duplex-dwellers are going to be.

As I sat in the housing summit, I thought about those folks and their discomfort and anxiety. 

I’m sure they are mostly people with genuine concerns about the wellbeing of less affluent community members. They don’t want young couples or lower income families to be unable to find homes. 

And I’m sure they are mostly people who really care about climate change, and about driving less. 

I’m not an expert on urban design or transit or real estate. 

But I do have some training in matters of soul and conscience.

And I think what those folks are facing is a difficult situation of choosing good.

They have competing values within themselves. 

Maybe they haven’t thought it all through, laid all those values and hopes and desires out on the table; but even if you do that, even if all it’s really clear in your head, sometimes the right action remains unclear. 

Sometimes – maybe often – we are conflicted. Our values and intentions and wants and needs can be at odds. 

It’s hard work to untangle it all and decide – discern – what to weigh most heavily in a given situation. 

Hard work – but such essential work. 

Doing good, choosing good, knowing good is complicated. 

If we want to be clear with God and honest with ourselves, and get things square with other human beings, let’s acknowledge that our insides and intentions matter. 

And they matter – in the words of Christian writer Kathleen Norris – not because “God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us.” 

God isn’t profiling us as likely sinners, looking for any excuse to pull us over. 

God loves us, and what matters to us matters to God. 

God loves us, inside and out, including our messy and conflicted intentions and needs and desires and hopes. 

Let me take another brief detour – about divorce. 

It seems like the historical Jesus took marriage pretty seriously, and didn’t like the idea of a marriage ending. 

It’s true that he was concerned with the vulnerability of abandoned women, but I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. 

It wasn’t the main thing for him by any means; he talked about other things much, much more. 

But this is heart- and life-stuff for many folks in this room, so even though it’s small in the Gospels, it may feel big to you. 

Matthew’s source here is the earliest gospel, the gospel of Mark. In Mark Jesus is talking specifically about remarriage, and this teaching reads more like a warning against leaving your spouse for somebody you like better. 

Matthew drops out the remarriage aspect, which makes this sound live more of a blanket condemnation of divorce. 

But even if we read this teaching of Jesus as, “Don’t leave your partner for somebody new,” it’s not easy to take on board.

I bet most grownups know somebody who was betrayed and deeply wounded by a partner who fell in love with someone else.

I bet most of us also know somebody who left a difficult or life-sapping relationship and eventually found a new partnership that has brought them renewal and joy. 

I definitely have some questions for Jesus about all this. 

But I also think that the main upshot of this whole passage is that we should try to live with clarity and integrity. 

And that probably means bringing our conflicts and hurts and grudges and unmet needs out into the open, and trying to deal with them as clearly and kindly and fairly as possible.

And sometimes the clearest and kindest outcome is that a relationship ends. 

My Jesus understands that. 

Oh, that my ways were made so direct
that I might keep your commandments!

Being good, doing good, choosing good is complicated. 

That’s why we named Turning as one of our core discipleship practices, back in 2016 – and in fact Turning is also one of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Ways of Love. 

The Way of Love materials say: “With God’s help, we can turn from the powers of sin, hatred, fear, injustice, and oppression toward the way of truth, love, hope, justice, and freedom. In turning, we reorient our lives to Jesus Christ, falling in love again, again, and again.”

Here’s what we said about turning in our discipleship practices: “We follow the teaching of Jesus Christ by being open to repentance, transformation, and call. The word “turning” springs from the New Testament word “metanoia,” meaning a change of mind that bears fruit in a changed life.” 

Turning is a foundational Christian practice. 

It’s like a fractal, the same shape at any scale – there are tiny opportunities on a daily basis, and great big life-transforming moments and seasons too – for individuals and institutions alike. 

Being open to repentance, transformation and call is always part of Christian life, but we are approaching the season of Lent – it begins in about a week and a half. 

And our Sunday lessons are starting to lean towards it. 

Lent is the season when the church prepares for the mystery of Easter, and it has long been observed as a season for self-examination, reflection, and intentional turning. 

Often people try on some disciplines or practices that they hope will become habits that make their lives more fully reflect their values and convictions.

Now is a good time, actually, to give that a little thought and prayer, if you feel called to take on a Lenten practice this year. 

Let me know if you would like a conversation partner. 

Choosing good – for ourselves, others, the world – often is not straightforward. 

If there’s anything I can wrestle from this difficult Gospel, it’s that we have to try to be as honest with ourselves as we can about what’s going on inside us – our sometimes-conflicting values and desires, intentions and needs. 

It can help to have a community, people who are in it with us.

Maybe it helps to have a season like Lent that invites us to acknowledge that we all have stuff we’re figuring out and working on.

And it helps to be kind – to ourselves, to one another.

In our Epistle today, Paul says: You are God’s field, God’s building.

Paul is talking about how the church in Corinth – like every Christian community, like every individual Christian – is a work in progress. A growing field that’s been planted and watered, but is still needs lots of sun and rain and time to reach maturity. 

A structure that’s being built up slowly up from the foundation – that’s in the next few verses beyond today’s text – and needs a lot more stone and mortar and work and care to be complete. 

It’s okay that we’re unfinished, imperfect, still working on it. 

We’re still growing, still being built. Each and all.  

And we belong fully to God in our incompleteness, our working-on-it-ness: God’s field, God’s building, God’s work in progress. 

Let’s hold that as we turn together towards Lent; towards wherever God is calling us. Each and all. 

Amen.