Category Archives: Sermons

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. 

Inclusive church, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, November 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does Prisca have to say to us today? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Questions, Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Nov. 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week we elected our next president.

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

And a lot of big fears. 

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

Some folks have justified fears of being forgotten.

Some folks have justified fears of being targeted. 

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

Regardless: We are almost certainly facing big changes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Nov. 3 (All Saints)

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

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

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

So All Saints Day became a tradition. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wouldn’t mind having it read at mine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that those whom we miss are already there. 

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

But here we all are, living. 

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

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

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

And here we are on All Saints Day.

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

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

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

All eight verses. We only sang four today!…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen. 

Big Questions, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Annul the day that I was born, 

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

That day, let it be darkness. 

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

Let darkness, death’s shadow, foul it; 

Let a cloud-mass rest upon it; 

Let day-gloom dismay it. 

That night, let murk overtake it.

Let it not join in the days of the year, 

Let it not enter the number of months.

Let its twilight stars go dark. 

Let it hope for day in vain, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God heard Job; God will hear you. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, October 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phil Ruge-Jones’s commentary on this Gospel: 

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

Intergenerational Church, Sermons

Homily, Sunday, Sept. 29

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

Let’s wonder together about what that might mean! 

What is salt? ….

Jesus says salt is good. I wonder why! 

Do YOU think salt is good? … 

How do you use salt at your house?

Do you know about any other ways to use salt?

– Melting ice… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Does anybody like pickles?

Does anybody like bacon? 

How about cheese? …

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

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

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

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

What happens when food goes bad?…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does salt come from? … 

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

  • Seeing salt gatherers in Tanzania

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

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

Salt was sometimes used as a kind of money. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look back at what Jesus says. 

Salt is good.

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

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

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

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

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

Then Jesus says, 

Keep salt in yourselves and keep peace with each other.

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

Start popcorn circulating??? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symbols can mean lots of things at the same time.

But I think there might be one more thing.

Because I think Jesus is talking about food and flavor.

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

I am sending around some popcorn. 

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

Which one do you like better?… 

How would you describe the difference? … 

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

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

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

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

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

(Grumpy, sassy…) 

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

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

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

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

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

That means: we live in strange, scary times. 

Like Jesus lived in strange, scary times. 

Like Esther lived in strange, scary times.

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

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

And I want to show you a couple of them. 

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

This is the first one: “Hey!” 

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

Let’s try it!… 

And this is another Anti-Abyss exercise: Aaaah.

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

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

So let’s practice those again:  

Hey!

Aaaah. 

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

Amen. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Sept. 15

My sermon was written as an outline this week so this version is a little sketchy, but you get the idea! 

Proverbs, the Biblical book: A collection of proverbs – sayings about life and how to live it – from the ancient Near East. There are six or more sets or sections within the book, anthologized in the time of Exile or even later. Focus on teaching and instruction. Fundamentally pragmatic sense of wisdom as something that helps you understand self and others, make good choices, and live a better life. To the extent that God is present, mostly as the originator and maintainer of a system in which good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people… even if it sometimes takes a while. 

Artfully written and poetic. Mostly couplets, two-line forms. Lots of evocative metaphors. An example: “Bread got through fraud is sweet to a man, but in the end it fills his mouth with gravel” (20:17) Using this image to say that what you get dishonestly may seem great at first, but…! 

Some are shrewd and funny; some offer genuine insight. Many boil down to, “Work hard and make good choices,” which I guess is the kind of thing parents and grandparents have always told children and grandchildren? 

Chapters 10 to 22 claim to be the wisdom of King Solomon, in particular – some of the 3000 proverbs that he composed, according to 1 Kings.

Proverbs, the thing: A proverb is a short saying that condenses some general truth, guidance, or advice. Wisdom distilled into something portable and concise. 

These past couple of weeks I’ve been noticing how many proverbs circulate in my household and our world! We learn them from our parents. A few from my family of origin: Pretty is as pretty does. That’s why God makes Fords and Chevys…  We learn them from our friends. I’m particularly fond of “Clear is kind,” from Cecilie B… We pick them up from the culture. “The morning is wiser than the evening” – Regina Spektor song.

But! It’s not that simple. Just because something makes a snappy saying doesn’t mean it’s true or wise. “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle” is one that particularly annoys me. First, because it implies that anything bad that happens to you is God’s intention for you, which I do not believe. And second, because it’s manifestly untrue. People are dealt situations they can’t handle all the time. That’s why God tells to look out for one another.

When I was in my teens – series of fantasy books popular at the time – line: “No evil ever came of a thing done for love.” I loved that; carried that around for a while.  … Then at some point in my late teens or 20s, I thought, Wait. That’s actually not true at all. Evil comes from things done for love all the time. 

Some of the proverbs we’ve inherited might be a little conditional in their application. For example: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” – That’s meant for situations like discouraging gossip, or not telling your friend that her new dress looks awful. But it can be misapplied to discourage people from speaking up about actual bad stuff. Contrast that with Proverbs 10:10: “The one who rebukes boldly makes peace!” 

Turning back to the Biblical book of Proverbs… it’s really interesting to read through! There are proverbs that still work, all these centuries later… Robert Alter: some of the proverbs “appear to derive from shrewd and considered reflection on moral behavior and human nature.” (351) 

One of my long-time favorites: “Better a meal of vegetables with love than a fatted ox with hatred.” (15:17) – better to live simply with love, than to have material plenty but no peace in your family or heart. One I read this week for the first time: “Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or pours vinegar on a wound, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.” (25:20). Now, singing to someone sad could be nice, but I think the implication here is of somebody being aggressively cheerful at someone else who’s really burdened or struggling. We’ve all been there, and yeah, it’s rough. 

“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion.” (18:2) – We all know one of those… 

We had a youth retreat on relationships, last winter – Proverbs (and Sirach, another Biblical Wisdom book) had a lot of useful material! Proverbs 17.9: “One who forgives an affront fosters friendship, but one who dwells on disputes will alienate a friend…. 18: Some friends play at friendship, but a true friend sticks closer than one’s nearest kin…” Working with the youth: lots we could relate to! 

There are proverbs that we maybe CAN’T relate to so much, but that give us a glimpse into life 3000 years ago… “Cheating scales are the Lord’s loathing, and a true weight-stone His pleasure” (11:1) – several versions. Reflect a time when weighing things out was a key part of any transaction, and false weights was a major form of economic dishonesty. “If you find honey, eat just enough – too much of it, and you will vomit.” (25:16) Probably about more than just honey, but still makes me curious about the backstory.

And there are proverbs that make us grateful that times have changed… 11:22 – “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without good sense…” OK. 13:24 – “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them…” Meaning: You have beat your children to raise them right. Some of y’all were raised like that. But that’s not how most folks choose to parent today. 

And of course there’s a whole boatload of stuff that only sounds wise, but doesn’t actually hold up if you give it a hard look. A biggie: Proverbs’ confidence that if you work hard and do what’s right, you’ll get ahead in life. Robert Alter: “[Proverbs]… evinces great confidence in a rational moral order that dependably produces concrete rewards for virtue and wisdom.” That is just… not reliably true!! But we still speak and act as if it were, sometimes – thereby adding to human suffering.The book of Job, which comes along later this fall, will bring us some wonderfully complex wrestling with the idea that good people always have good lives.

Let me pause here for a brief detour into the book of Ecclesiastes, or Qohelet; I’ll use the Hebrew name because it’s less confusing, since there’s another Biblical book called Ecclesiasticus. Every adult here has heard a few verses from Qohelet: To every thing there is a season… Let people finish the sentence. That’s a lovely passage and some durable wisdom, I think. That life has different seasons can be a helpful reminder sometimes. 

But the book as a whole is interestingly ambiguous in terms of what lasting wisdom it offers. Qohelet written centuries after King Solomon, but presents itself as the voice of Solomon, late in life, reflecting back on life – and forward towards death. 

There’s a core word, throughout the text, that’s traditionally translated as Vanity – not in the sense of excessive pride in one’s own appearance, but in the sense of something futile or pointless. Listen to part of the first chapter… 

“The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?… 
I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.

I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’… [But] I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow…”

It is a loss that Qohelet is barely in our Sunday lectionary. It’s such a human text. Many of us have those thoughts and feelings at times. What is the point of it all? Where is the deeper meaning? And yet we might quickly find ourselves arguing with Qohelet’s sense that because death comes for us all, nothing matters and everything is pointless. I would love to do a study on Qohelet. I think there’s a struggle at the heart of that text with which we could be in fruitful conversation. But for now, let me just hold it up as another example of something that feels or sounds wise… and yet is missing something, at its heart. 

Proverbs are meant to distill wisdom – and there are different things that we call “wisdom.” Last week, we saw that Solomon’s “wisdom” included prudence, political savvy, strategic effectiveness. 

James – wonderful, vivid passage today on how much our tongues and our words can get us in trouble – follows that immediately with a passage we’ll hear next week, in which he says there are two types of wisdom: An “earthly, unspiritual, devilish” wisdom that has to do with envy and selfish ambition. And a wisdom from above, that is pure, peaceful, gentle, obedient, filled with mercy and good actions, fair, and genuine. You can recognize that kind of wisdom, says James, in a good life, and a spirit of gentleness. A person formed by this kind of holy wisdom will sow the seeds of justice through their peaceful acts. That sounds like somebody I want to be around. 

If we are lucky, and pay attention, we may meet a few people in life in whom we can see this kind of wisdom… and we might stumble upon and gather a few proverbs that capture that kind of wisdom. Bits and pieces we can carry with us to ground us and guide us. 

Beside my desk in my office, I have a cork board that’s covered with a lot of things – some proverb-length, some longer – that I have found to be true and reliable enough to use as touchstones, and that contain something of which I need to be reminded – something that’s not already built into my worldview and way of being. For example, there’s a simple prayer of gratitude and openness from Dag Hammarskjold – you can learn about him on our prayer table today: For all that has been: Thanks! For all that will be: Yes! 

There are other thing I carry inside me as sayings or songs – like the one that goes: You don’t have to know the way; the Way knows the way. These things meaningfully capture something important that helps me be a better priest and a better person. 

But I have wrestled a little, in these weeks of exploring the theme and the literature of Wisdom, with whether all this is God-y enough. Have I ditched my responsibility of calling us to turn our hearts towards the Love at the heart of the universe, in favor of insightful aphorisms and good advice? 

And yet! There is ALL THIS wisdom literature in the Bible. It’s a big chunk of the book, if you add it all up. And there are repeated reminders that Wisdom – true wisdom –  is a gift from God, even an emanation or aspect of God; and that the pursuit of wisdom is a holy and righteous path. 

God says through the prophet Isaiah, My thoughts are not your thoughts; but the Wisdom texts of the Bible suggest that there’s at least some overlap in the Venn diagram of God’s thoughts and our thoughts! 

And the fact that God gives us this capacity to become wise – to recognize and to share wisdom – true wisdom, the kind of wisdom James is talking about that’s peaceful and gentle and merciful and fair and genuine and just – the fact that God gives us that capacity is just such a beautiful sign of the intimacy and partnership that God wants with us. We were never made to be puppets or subjects, unquestioningly following divine degrees. We were made to be children, and co-workers, and friends of God, in the holy work of ordering all things well. 

Sermons

Homily, July 7, 2024

Today the lectionary brings us three lessons about power. 

What is power? Well, my background before becoming a priest is in the field of anthropology, and anthropologists think a lot about power. Here are a few elements of a definition.  Power is a measure of someone’s ability to control the environment and people around them, including the ability to make people think or act in certain ways. Power can take many forms: Coercive power – the power to make people do things. Persuasive power – the power to convince people to do things. Normative power – the power to get people to think that’s just the way things are…  

There’s economic power, institutional power, social power, and much more. Power is not something we only find at work in the realm of institutional politics but is woven through every aspect of life. Even the spaces where we intentionally set aside power and inequality are are formed and chosen over against the backdrop of the established power and status relations of our lives. 

Our first lesson today, from the second book of Samuel, is about political power.  We see David ascending to the kingship of all of Israel, all the tribes and territories of God’s people, after having already been king over Judah – one of the territories – for seven years. As soon as his kingship is established, David calls for an attack on what will become Jerusalem, which was inhabited by a neighboring people, the Jebusites. 

Why conquer and claim Jerusalem as the City of David, instead of naming a city within the existing territory of the people Israel? Conquering a new city to be his stronghold and capital was probably intended as a way to show boldly that David’s was a kingship of all Israel, not beholden to any of the existing tribes or territories. 

The next step will be bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the greatest symbol of God’s presence and favor, to David’s capitol city – as a sign of the divine rightness of his kingship. 

David’s ultimate project, here, is elevating what it means to be a king, in Israel, from basically being the biggest baddest tribal chief, to a settled institution with a capital city, a palace, a temple (eventually), the ability to command armies and levy taxes, and all that good stuff. Reading between the lines, we can see that the scope of political power itself is changing, in these chapters of second Samuel. 

We can ponder, too, the politics embedded in the way this story was written down and passed on to us. Last Sunday I gestured towards the fascinating paradox of the saga of David as found in Scripture: Much of it presents David as God’s chosen king, righteous and holy. But there are these cracks in the story that show us something darker and more complex – leaving us to wonder what we are to make of David. 

This particular chunk of the story, though, is sheer propaganda, legitimating David’s rule and lineage. The people flattered him, and begged him to be their king; how could he say no? How could anyone question his reign? … 

Next, we have the apostle Paul, author of our reading from the second letter to the church in Corinth, also talking about power. There’s a real contrast between the Paul we know from his letters preserved in Scripture, and the Paul of real life. In the letters, Paul comes across as strong, bold, and eloquent. But evidently – by his own testimony! – he was not very impressive in person, neither charismatic or compelling. 

People have speculated extensively over the centuries about the “thorn in the flesh” that he mentions here – presumably some chronic illness or disability, something that set him back and limited him. If people were drawn to Paul – and many were not! – they were drawn to him by the depth of his commitment to Jesus and by the hardships he endured because of that commitment. 

This passage contains of Paul’s deep learnings: that sometimes his weakness makes room for God’s strength, God’s power. This is an important truth, and one that I am on my own long-term journey with! 

I take a lot of delight in offering my capacities and capabilities to God for the service of God’s church. I don’t much like not being good at something, or not being able to do something, because it’s beyond my skill or capacity. 

Paul’s hard-won insight here reminds me of what I know to be true: that sometimes our weaknesses, failures, and inadequacies leave room for God to do something else with that situation. To unfold some other possibility that I would not have thought of. To let someone else step in and use their gifts. To let something not happen, which is also, sometimes, a necessary grace. 

Maybe some of you also need to sit with – to wrestle with – this truth.

Finally, our Gospel today is another story about another kind of power – the divine power of God at work in and through Jesus, fully human and fully God. 

Mark’s Gospel offers us fascinating glimpses of how Jesus’ power might have worked. Last week we heard about the woman who approached Jesus in the crowd, seeking healing. She touched the hem of his cloak and was immediately healed. The text says that the power goes out from Jesus – without his even seeing the woman; the holy, healing power within him just responds to her need. 

Today, we hear about the complaints and resistance of the people of his hometown. This passage has a life beyond the Biblical text because it’s such a familiar and human dynamic. Many of us know about going back to your hometown, literal or metaphorical, and having folks just be unable to see who you are now. 

Instead they see you through the lens of your family, or of who you were, or who they expected you to become, when you left town at 18.

God help you if you haven’t lived up to your perceived potential. 

And God help you if you’ve gone farther than expected – laying you open to the criticism of “getting above your raising.” These folks definitely think Jesus is getting above his raising. Who does he think he is??? 

These Gospel stories suggest to me that God’s power is eager to do good in us and for us; but seems to need some openness from us. We have our own power to block or deny. Which is not – I hasten to say – to suggest that if we’re not receiving healing or grace, it’s because we’re not thinking good enough thoughts. But it is, I think, an invitation to examine our own openness – and our own resistance – to the possibility that God might want to be at work in us and in our lives. 

Political power, personal power, divine power. The forces that shape our daily lives and our larger, common life … for the worse, or the better. 

We’ll continue now with our usual readings from American history – some familiar, some new this year. These, too, are readings about power. I invite you to notice that, as you listen. I invite you, too, if you like, to underline or note any word or phrase that particularly stands out to you… 

Baptism, Church Seasons & Holy Days, Faith, Sermons

Easter Sermon, March 31

This morning we get to celebrate the baptism of two of our members! Any day is a good day to get baptized. But Easter is a really special time to be baptized, because there are such close connections between Easter and baptism.

Jesus was baptized, by his cousin John, but in the Gospels he talks about his death as another baptism – something he has to go through, to immerse himself in. The word baptism comes from a Greek word that just means “to dunk in water.” So Jesus immerses himself in the waters of death – just like someone going down into the baptismal waters – and comes out, renewed. 

A lot about baptism is mysterious. It’s one of the things we do because Jesus told us to do it, so we ultimately just don’t know what it means or what it does. But that connection with Jesus’ death and resurrection is part of the Church’s understanding: that in baptism we die with Jesus, and rise to new life in Jesus. 

For the first Christians, Easter was when they baptized people – they’d prepare for baptism in Lent, like Kai and Safa have, and then be baptized at Easter, as part of a big celebration of resurrection and new life and joy. So Easter is a very special time for baptism! 

I read something recently about how Easter is kind of like baptism for the whole church. Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann wrote, “Even though we are baptized, what we constantly lose and betray is precisely that which we received at baptism. Therefore Easter is our return every year to our own baptism, [and] Lent is our preparation for that return… Every Lent and Easter are, once again, the rediscovery and the recovery by us of what we were made through our own baptismal death and resurrection.” 

So Schmemann is saying that over time, our commitment to living in God’s ways, our clarity about our belonging and belovedness as part of God’s family, gets dented and dimmed by life. 

And Lent and Easter offer us an opportunity to come back to those things, to recover and rediscover, every year. We can’t get baptized again, but we can immerse ourselves in the heavy days of Holy Week and arrive at the fulfillment of Easter. I love that idea – that today isn’t just Kai and Safa’s baptismal day, but it’s a baptism day for all of us who are Kai and Safa’s baptismal community. 

One of the ways we act that out is by joining our baptismal candidates in recommitting ourselves to life as God’s people. Every time there’s a baptism and sometimes when there isn’t, we reaffirm the Baptismal Covenant – a responsive version of the Creed, and then those five questions where we respond, I will with God’s help! Those five questions were written for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and have become very beloved and important to people. They offer a good list of practices that will help us stay close to God and each other and ourselves, and be the people God calls us to be for the world. 

But there’s another part of the service we might not know as well, because it goes by fast, and because only the candidates and their families and sponsors say it, not the whole congregation. That’s the Three Renunciations and the Three Affirmations. You can see them on your Sunday supplement – in the first part of the baptismal liturgy. A bunch of questions that start with “Do you”! 

The Renunciations and Affirmations are very old; they seem to go back to pretty early in the Christian practice of baptism. Basically, before you step up to be baptized, somebody speaking for the church asks you: Do you RENOUNCE evil? … RENOUNCE is a fancy word that means, I’m done with this! I won’t have anything to do with it anymore, ever! 

And then they ask: Do you choose to follow Christ? Are you turning away from this one thing, and turning towards this other thing? … 

I want to talk a little more about those Renunciations. There have been many versions, over 1800 years or so. In the version in our prayer book the renunciations move from the cosmic, to the world we live in, to our own interior life: 

Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? 

Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?… 

Sometime about 300 years after the time of Jesus, a church leader named Cyril of Jerusalem described what happens at a baptism – kind of explaining what it meant to somebody who has been recently baptized. Here’s part of what he said: 

“Then they told you to you raise your hand, and you renounced Satan, as if he were actually present…. This shameless, impudent demon, the source of all evil, chases you as far as the fountain of salvation. But the demon disappears in the waters of salvation.

That is why you were ordered to raise your hand and say to Satan, as if he were actually present: “I renounce you, Satan,  wicked and cruel tyrant!” … 

And you asserted: “Henceforth, I am no longer in your power. For Christ destroyed that power by sharing with me a nature of flesh and blood. He destroyed death by dying; never again shall I be enslaved to you. I renounce you, crafty serpent full of deceit! I renounce you who lurk in ambush, who pretend friendship but have been the cause of every sin! I renounce you, Satan, author and helper of every evil!”

I think we should consider adding all that! It’s pretty exciting. 

Now, listen: I don’t know if I believe in Satan – the Devil – or not. But there is sure lot of badness in the world. People who do hurtful things – and not just by accident but on purpose. 

There are bad thoughts and ideas and words and forces and systems. Things that shape people’s lives; things that get into our hearts and minds, that hurt us and hurt other people and hurt the world. There’s not really any question that there’s a lot that’s bad and hurtful – a lot that is evil – in the world. 

That’s one thing people mean when they talk about Satan or the Devil: a way to put a name on all that badness and the ways it causes pain and suffering. 

That is what we’re renouncing, when we renounce Satan. 

Schmemann writes, “To renounce Satan thus is not to reject a mythological being in whose existence one [may] not even believe. It is to reject an entire worldview made up of pride and self-affirmation… which has truly taken human life from God and made it into darkness, death and hell. And one can be sure that Satan will not forget this renunciation, this rejection, this challenge…  A war is declared!”

Cyril of Jerusalem says, “When you renounce Satan, you break off every agreement you have entered into with him, every covenant you have established with Hell…. Draw strength from the words you have spoken, and be watchful. For your adversary, the Devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” 

In baptism, we choose sides. We state our intention to be people who are for good, and against evil. 

I saw a wonderful Facebook post earlier this week about how it’s OK to go to church even if you don’t believe. Alex Griffin, a Canadian Anglican priest, wrote, ”As a society, we are grieving and afraid as our world breaks before our eyes, but there is so much pressure to keep going and pretend that everything is fine. The rituals of church—and especially the rituals at church over the [days of Holy Week]—hold space for that grief…. 

If you’re looking for a space to grieve and be comforted, it’s okay to come… It probably won’t change your life, but you may just find the moment of solace that you need.” 

I know that for folks outside of church or on the edges of church, it can seem like all those people in the pews must have something rock-solid and clear inside of them that they call Faith. And getting from here to there might seem impossible.

The reality is, of course, that for folks who show up at church regularly, faith can be messy and murky. There are plenty of people in any congregation who are here because they feel drawn to something they don’t feel they really understand – because they’re looking for comfort and connection in community – because they want to believe, even if they feel unable to make the leap. 

There are also people here with a strong, clear faith – but even for folks like that, it’s kind of like the weather, you know? The sun is always shining, but there are plenty of hours and days when we can’t see it. And even when we can: sometimes its light creates great beauty; sometimes it feels harsh or glaring…. or faint and inadequate. 

But one of the things we can be clear about, together, even in seasons when it’s hard to see the sun, is being a community that is for good and against evil. Haphazardly, imperfectly, always learning more about our own complicity and ignorance, always working to build our capacity to show up for what matters in our community and the world… 

But: Striving to be on the side of hope, wholeness, and delight. 

Years ago, a member of our congregation – long since moved away – told me that that’s what’s important about St. Dunstan’s for him. That when the world gets heavy – politics, climate, human pain, there’s so much – when it all really starts to weigh him down, one of the things that eases the burden is knowing that he is part of this group of people that are trying to be helpers. 

I think that’s one of the most important things about church. And that’s not a step away from God at all. Right from the very first covenant between God and Abraham and Sarah, God says that God’s people are blessed to be a blessing. Called, chosen, set apart to be for the good of others, and the world. 

Wait, one more thing: Mark’s Gospel has a really strange ending. You might see some more stuff tacked onto the end of Mark’s Gospel in some Bibles, but this is how Mark ends his telling of the good news of Jesus Christ: “And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” The women who come to tend Jesus’ body receive the good news of the resurrection – and they run away. Of course! How strange! How terrifying! Nobody’s going to believe them! 

And yet: We know that’s not how the story ends. We know, because the Gospel of Mark exists. So, the story got told.  

I really love this kind of open-ended, paradoxical ending. Because it invites us to wonder: How did these women, Mary and Salome and Mary, find their way through fear and confusion and grief, to being able to believe that love is stronger than death? And then to sharing that news, even if a lot of people thought they were stupid or delusional? 

And that question very quickly becomes a question that isn’t just about these women in Mark’s Gospel, but about me. About us. 

And about whether those spiritual forces of wickedness, those powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, are going to hold us bound by fear, by what’s sensible and rational and normal, or whether we can find the boldness to claim mystery and possibility and joy. 

[In just a moment/Later this morning] we’re going to baptize Safa and Kai. But first, let’s take just a moment to do what the prayer book doesn’t invite us to do: To say the renunciations together. Because there is something very powerful about not just claiming our positive intentions – as we will in the Baptismal Covenant – but also reminding ourselves of what we turn away from, what we reject and resist. 

It’s traditional in many places to face West for the renunciations – and to hold out your hand. You can try that out if you like! … 

When a baptismal candidate answers these questions they say, “I renounce them!” Because it’s their day to make that choice. But let’s say “We renounce them!” Right now – because this is work we continue together. 

Beloved of God! Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

We renounce them! 

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

We renounce them! 

Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

We renounce them! 

May God sustain us in these intentions, and bless, console, and empower us, as a people of courage, love, and joy, today and always. Amen.