Category Archives: Sermons

Coronavirus, Ministries, Music, Sermons

Sermon, December 13th

An introduction from the Rev. Miranda Hassett…  I’d like to preface Deanna’s words by saying just a little bit about how she came to be preaching today. Over the summer, talking with colleagues about how things were going at their churches, I started to notice a pattern in what they were telling me: “My music director just quit.”  “My organist hasn’t been in touch since March.” And so on. Not everywhere, but in many churches, the music staff person just disappeared in mid-March. They didn’t know how to do their job – fulfill their calling – under our current circumstances, so they ghosted. I have compassion for that. But I also have a huge well of gratitude that that’s not what happened here. Deanna came to our changed circumstances with grief about the things we had to put aside for a season, of course, but also with curiosity and hope and a robust confidence that we would continue to offer music to God and one another, somehow. So I asked Deanna: what makes you able to face these times, these constraints, in this spirit? Is it something you could talk about and offer to others? I was thinking in terms of having her share with other music ministers of our diocese. But when she brought me what she had written, I thought, This could be a homily for our parish, as well. This message transcends Deanna’s particular role and vocation. The Biblical scholar Richard Swanson offers a paraphrase of today’s text from Isaiah: “Make a straight road for the God whose Name is Mercy, make it in the wilderness, make it in chaos, make it in our imaginations so that we can bear the hard, chaotic work that lies ahead of us.”  Here is Deanna’s story about developing the imagination to make a way through chaos. 

 

“Through all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing; it finds an echo in my soul; how can I keep from singing?”

These famous lines come from a hymn by Robert Lowry (1826-1899). It may sound familiar: we used them as our Song of Praise for a while this autumn. They also happen to be on the back of a high school choir sweatshirt that I still own, nearly two decades later.

You can read them as an earnest affirmation of music-making for its own sake, regardless of the circumstances. That’s not the only way I hear them, though. When I read these words on this particular sweatshirt, I also hear the start of an ethic of music-making while in crisis.

I hear it that way because crisis marked my high school choir experience. A choir director’s catastrophic failure of judgement left a vacuum of leadership in its wake – and a group of passionate teenagers committed to singing (and their equally committed parents) had to pick up the pieces.

My cohort ended up having 6 directors in 4 years of high school. It was hard in ways that still hurt 17 years later. And we also got through it. Not only did we all survive, but, during that first gut-wrenching year, both our concerts and our tour happened. They happened a little differently, but they happened. And choir continued – and we stayed connected.

That all happened in 2003 in suburban, affluent Phoenix, to a secular, public high school choir of passionate teenage musicians. Today I, and we, are living through another crisis that affects our shared music-making. It’s a very different crisis… but finding wisdom in those long-ago experiences, for navigating music ministry at an Episcopal church in Wisconsin in 2020, might not be as big a leap as you’d think.

Having been in that rag-tag band of teenagers, parents, and administrators negotiating uncharted musical territory gives me a way to hold the seriousness of our current situation for what it is, and to reflect on my role in helping navigate our current troubled waters.

Singing together in person in church is dangerous right now. The science is still emerging, but indicates that there is no completely safe way to sing together in-person. Singing, or playing some instruments, together in groups seems to be one of the riskiest things we can choose to do for everyone involved: musicians, helpers, audiences, congregants, and clergy alike.

The best we can do is to mitigate risk with masks, generous ventilation, limits on how many, how loud, how close, and how long. It’s a logistical nightmare for schools, colleges, universities… and churches.

We, as a member of the body of Christ, strive to welcome and serve and whole-heartedly include all kinds of folks – those confident in their ability to weather a Covid diagnosis; those who are at greater risk for complications and even death; and everyone in between. So our guidelines for music-making have to design for people at varying levels of health risk and of risk tolerance.

Our multi-generational congregations make us less like school or university music programs and more like community orchestras and choirs – and many of those community programs have canceled their in-person seasons, not just for 2020, but into 2021 as well. The Metropolitan Opera, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra and Chorus all made this hard choice. So can we.

That doesn’t mean we can’t still sing together. That doesn’t mean we can’t still play together. It does mean that we’re going to have to find a way to make community and minister through music differently.

I don’t say that lightly. Rewriting the script for what music ministry looks like is overwhelming on a good day. Our received ways of making music in church are familiar and beloved. And for me personally, the fact that I wasn’t trained specifically for a church musician role gives me extra room to second guess myself.

But I remind myself that back in high school, the well-respected senior who became the leader for our choir wasn’t the most obvious choice either. He wasn’t the most musically proficient performer, though his many musical and technical skills certainly helped him. What really made him the right leader for our group at that time were traits that had little to do with music. He was kind, attentive, honest, creative, flexible, generous, earnest, curious, and savvy. He was someone who tried to include everybody; who ran towards whatever’s broken; and who tried to make amends when he messed up.

All of those are traits I’m still working to embody. All of those are traits that characterize the church, at its best.

So how did we do it, back in 2003? What values and ways of being helped us keep doing what we felt called to do, when the way we had expected to do it collapsed unexpectedly?

One important way of being was Collaboration. Everyone contributed what they could to keep things running. Although one choir student was put in charge during that strange interim period, in practice, many people helped us keep going. I led sectional rehearsals with the piano, as did others. A friend who had access to the concert program files kept those up to date. Council members made sure each class had leadership. Singers continued to show up to class. Substitute teachers let us do our thing.

Today at St. Dunstan’s, we are exploring new forms of musical collaboration. People are contributing all kinds of gifts and skills, as we find new ways to make music together. It’s not just playing or singing that’s involved here: there’s so much happening behind the scenes to make sure that the technological and logistical aspects of this effort all work.

Another aspect of my high school choir experience was Sacrifice. We had to let go of expectations about the experience we had hoped to have. We weren’t going to have one great music teacher lead us through four years of growth, as others do, no matter what we did and through no fault of ours. If anything, we had that ideal deconstructed before our eyes in real time without a lot of terminology for what was going on or how we felt about it, and it hurt. But being able to feel those feelings and release them was crucial to being able to move forward together.

The way we’re doing church and making music together wasn’t anyone’s choice. Being in exile from our building hurts. Being unable to do many things we love hurts. Finding possibility in this time doesn’t mean that “Everything is fine.” But doing what we can so that we’re all still here when we can be back together in-person again is worth it.

By the same token, we also needed plenty of Patience. There was a lot of hurt, confusion, grief, and anger to process. It was sometimes hard to know exactly what we were mad at or sad about, just that we were. It came out sideways. It made us sick. Even the strongest among us weren’t immune. We had to learn to be patient with one another as we dealt with the impact, individually and collectively, of what we were going through.

Learning to work with practices meant to keep us safe has required a lot of study, discussion, discernment, and grieving. Learning to work with this technology has required a lot. But we’re working through it all. We’re still here.

Something else that helped us back in high school was Focus. It was easy to get upset and angry because there was a lot to be rightly upset and angry about. Watching your heroes fail spectacularly hurts. Losing an imagined future hurts. But the mission was clear: we would continue to learn about and make music together regardless of what was going on around us. We would do it with whatever and whomever we had.

For my work here, I’ve had to step back and ask, “What’s the most important thing?” My answer has been being part of the body of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin during COVID-tide. My job is to support that mission through music.

Perseverance: There were days where what we were doing felt impossible – but we didn’t give up on music or each other. Today, I’m the Director of Music Ministry at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church and a recently minted PhD from UW-Madison’s School of Music. Music is still central in my life – and many of the friends I went through this with are still on my Facebook feed.

We at St. Dunstan’s are not giving up on worshiping, and making music, together. We’re working through technological glitches and learning from them. We’re adapting our practices for these new formats and taking notes on how it goes.

Collaboration, sacrifice, patience, focus, perseverance. These are ways of being that allow us to collaborate with God and each other, to “hear that real though far off hymn that hails a new creation.”1 They come alongside those sturdy Christian standbys of faith, hope, and love, as reasons that “no storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging.” These behaviors are how I know that “Love is Lord of heaven and earth.” The skills we lack—or just need to practice a bit—will come with time, study, and play.

We may need to learn some things, and that’s okay. We might need to buy some things, and that’s okay. We may want to ask some people we never thought we’d reach out to questions that we never thought we’d ask, but guess what? That’s okay. We may need to try out some things that don’t work. That’s okay. We might need to reorganize our time and efforts and our liturgical aesthetics and our music-making spaces. You know what I’m going to say already: That’s okay!

Our Thessalonians text for today tell us, “Hold fast to what is good.”2 Honesty, kindness, patience, creativity, generosity, perseverance, flexibility, and so much more are good, and are already here. They are ways to “Rejoice, always, pray without ceasing [and] give thanks in all circumstances.”3 We sometimes just need to remember them; be given permission to use them; and bravely act with them in mind. Music is just one way we do these things, and it’s a great space to practice.

So, to quote a ready Music that Makes Community anthem (if there is one), “What we need is here.”4 Let me say it again: “what we need is here.”

Video Transcript:

(Instrumental Drone)

Let’s listen once.

“What we need is here, what we need is here.”

Join in as you’re able.

“What we need is here, what we need is here.”

Add in some harmony.

“What we need is here, what we need is here.”

Last time now.

“What we need is here, what we need is here.”

Let’s transition elsewhere.

It may take some time, but that’s okay.

(Instrumental transition to “How can I keep from singing?”)

“Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
it finds an echo in my soul;
how can I keep from singing?

No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging
Since Love is Lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?”

(Instrumental out)

—
1Also from Lowry’s lyrics for the same hymn.
21 Thessalonians 5:15.
31 Thessalonians 5:16-17.
4Words and music by Amy McCreath.

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Jan. 10

We receive today’s Genesis text at the Easter vigil every year and sometimes in the Sunday lectionary as well – it’s a fairly familiar story. But today I want to dwell deeply with the first few verses. Let’s look at them together in a few versions.  

1. New Revised Standard Version (the Episcopal Church’s usual translation): 

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

2. Robert Alter’s translation: 

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, Let there be light. And there was light. 

3. Everett Fox’s translation: 

At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters – God said: Let there be light! And there was light. 

I want to spend a little time with some of the most interesting words here. First, “the Deep” – translated variously as Ocean, Waters, Abyss. The Hebrew word is tehom. The waters before Creation. An image that makes me think of finding fossils in Door County – fossils from the Silurian period, 400 million years ago, when living things were just starting to take forms complex enough to be preserved in stone. An image that makes me think, too, of the watery darkness of the womb. 

This idea of “the deep” is part of ancient cosmology – how the ancient Hebrews, and other peoples as well, thought of the world. There were the waters above the dome of the sky; the waters here on the surface with us; and the waters under the earth. 

Sometimes tehom simply means subterranean water, an important resource in a dry land, like in Deuteronomy 8: “The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters [tehom] welling up in valleys and hills…” In the great flood in Genesis, it’s not just the endless rain that causes the flood; it’s also that “the great deep” bursts open. The waters under the earth rise up and overflow.

The Red Sea – which the people Israel cross as they flee bondage in Egypt to begin a new life as God’s people – the Red Sea is described using the word Tehom, in the song of triumph after the crossing and in Psalm 106, re-telling that sacred history centuries later: “God rebuked the Red Sea, and it became dry; God led them through the Deep as through a desert.”

Tehom is also used in many texts talking about the scope of God’s power and wisdom. In the Book of Job God asks Job how he dares to challenge God’s judgment, when God knows the very mysteries of Creation: “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?” (Job 38:16)

Tehom shows up a LOT in the Psalms; here’s an example from Psalm 33:  “By your word, O God, were the heavens made…You gather up the waters of the ocean as in a water-skin and store up the depths of the sea.”

So the Deep, Tehom, is both ecological and mythological… there’s mystery and power here, and danger. The deeps are something only God has the power to comprehend and contain. 

Let’s turn to the next evocative phrase – formless void, “welter and waste” – in Hebrew, tohu vebohu, tohu and Bohu. The Complete Jewish Bible renders it as: “Astonishingly empty.” One translation of the Septuagint has: “Unsightly and unfurnished” – like a poorly-maintained apartment… 

The word tohu is used other places in the Bible, and variously translated as formless, waste (as in both wasteland and wasteful), futile, vain, useless, empty, wild, chaos, meaningless, desolate, confusion. “Bohu” is not really a word on its own. It would be like saying “turvy” without also saying “topsy.” 

This exact phrase, tohu veboho, tohu and boho, appears three times in the Old Testament. The second and third times are both intentional allusions to this, Genesis 1, the first time. In Isaiah 34, the phrase shows up in an oracle against the land of Edom, a neighboring nation who who collaborated with Babylon in the conquest of Judea: “From generation to generation it shall lie waste; no one shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the hawk and the hedgehog shall possess it; the owl and the raven shall live in it. God shall stretch over it the line of welter, the weight-stones of waste.”

The prophet foresees – and/or hopes – that this enemy nation will be given over to the creatures of the wilderness, and returned to primordial waste. Just a few verses later comes a beautiful text we sometimes read in Advent: The wilderness shall rejoice and blossom… there shall be streams in the desert. 

Then, in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, a similar word is spoken to Judea herself. Jeremiah is the prophet of the conquest of Judea and Jerusalem. He spent decades crying out that God’s people, and especially their leaders, had gone wrong in fundamental and destructive ways, and that doom was coming unless they turned back to God and to righteousness. In chapter 4 the prophet speaks: “Your ways and your doings have brought this upon you…Disaster overtakes disaster, the whole land is laid waste…. I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no human there, and all the birds of the air had fled.”

God creates humanity… but in Jeremiah’s vision, there are no humans left. God speaks light into being… but in Jeremiah’s vision, all is dark. God creates out of waste and void… and in Jeremiah’s vision, collective human willfulness and wrong turns the earth back to waste and void. Tohu and bohu. 

That passage concludes, “For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.” We know – because we have 26 centuries of hindsight – that Judea and Jerusalem were destroyed by the armies of Babylon. It was unspeakably terrible. And yet God did not make a full end. There was, eventually, renewal and restoration. And God’s people learned new things about God and about faithfulness during their time of exile and grief.

The Deep, Tehom, and the empty wasteland of Tohu and Bohu, are distinct, but alike. Fearful yet fruitful. Beyond comprehension, yet full of potential. In many ancient myths, Creation involves violent mastery of some primeval chaotic force. Some god or hero fights and defeats the monster of the abyss, and gains the power to make the world. 

There is no violence in our creation story. God simply invites the light into being…. Let there be light! And everything else, after it. Genesis and Jeremiah tell us that God’s ongoing creation of the world involves continually inviting tehom and tohu, all that is wild and strange, without form or meaning, into purpose and life and growth. 

But it’s a delicate balance. There’s a temptation to read this as Order versus Chaos. But it’s nowhere near that simple. There are hints in Job and Isaiah and elsewhere that the wilderness and the creatures who live there delight God, even as they terrify humans. Chaos can be fruitful, and order can be evil. The Babylonian army, for example, was VERY organized. So was the Third Reich. Order is a core value of fascism. 

Andre and Mary-Anne Rabe write this about the first verses of Genesis: “[God] is more than what is known and ordered. This God is present too in the unknown, the unordered, the unformed, the unexplained…  The kind of order in which chaos is an enemy, becomes oppressive, manipulating and ever more rigid… 

The only way in which order can retain its beauty is by embracing chaos as a friend… It is in nurturing this playful relationship that new meaning, new beauty, and renewed order is possible. … The tohu wa-bohu is more than the opposite of order – it’s a different kind of order. It is more than nothing, it’s the possibility of everything…”

My friend, Rabbi Betsy Forester, introduced me to a story from the Babylonian Talmud, a holy text of the Jewish people that comments on and expands the Hebrew Bible. On a recent Sunday we had a reading about King David’s desire to build a house for God, a great temple, in Jerusalem. Well, the Talmud says that David got as far as digging the foundations for the Temple. But he dug down so far that he allowed the Deep – Tehom – to rise up and threaten to flood the world. 

David quickly wrote the Name of God on a potsherd and threw it into the Deep… which dropped down again, sixteen thousand cubits. The very name of the Holy One had the power to contain those chaotic waters. 

BUT – then David realized that the Deep had dropped too far. Those primeval, mysterious waters have to be close to the surface of the earth in order to provide water for springs and wells. So David composed a set of songs, known as the Psalms of Ascent, and the Deep rose up fifteen thousand cubits –

to settle just one thousand cubits below the surface of the land. Where those mysterious, threatening yet life-giving waters could continue to nourish life. 

(Source: https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/rabbinic-creativity-and-the-waters-that-would-consume-the-world/)

Which brings us to baptism. 

John is a prophet, in the grand Old Testament tradition. Wearing funny clothes, living in a funny place, telling people that big change is coming and if they’re smart, they’ll change themselves NOW and beat the rush. This practice of baptism he introduces – dunking people in the Jordan River, as an outward sign of their repentance and commitment to turn away from sin – it’s most likely an adaptation of some Jewish customs of ritual washing, which were also ways to set yourself right with God.

Christian baptism builds on this foundation – baptism as we practice it, and to the extent that we understand it, is about repentance and cleansing; it’s also about passing through Christ’s death and into his risen life, being named as part of God’s great family, and indelibly marked by the Holy Spirit. 

Placing these verses from Genesis alongside the baptism of Jesus calls forward a connection that’s there in Scripture but that’s easy for us to miss. John and Jesus both choose to spend time in the wilderness, a wild, desolate, empty place – a tohu place. And when people come to John for baptism, he wades out into the river with them, puts his hands on their head, and pushes them down under the water. Into the deep. 

The Biblical text doesn’t use that word there but our baptismal liturgy explicitly connects the waters of baptism with the Deeps before Creation and the Deeps of the Exodus from Egypt: “We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ.” 

Placing these verses from Genesis alongside the baptism of Jesus invites us to reflect on baptism – our baptism, which Jesus’ baptism foreshadows – as an encounter with chaos, void, primordial winds and waters.. through which God carries us safely.  

What we actually *do* in a baptism is not frightening. It’s calm and contained. Very little water is involved. (Although I am VERY ready to do a baptism in Lake Mendota or the body of water of your choice!) 

But just as in the Eucharist a bit of bread and a sip of wine are in some way beyond our perception also consuming the body and blood of Jesus Christ, 

given for us as a sign of complete self-giving love – so in baptism a little water poured upon someone’s head is in some mystical sense our journey into the Deep, a dive down into the rich and terrifying depths of Tehom. 

It is our sojourn in the wilderness, wild, empty, and unformed. And it is our journey back to the land of the living, enriched and transformed by those strange and holy primeval energies which offer us the possibility of everything.

With all that in our hearts, minds, and spirits, let us renew our baptismal vows.

Andre & Mary-Anne Rabe’s essay: https://alwaysloved.net/2020/03/30/tohu-wa-bohu-gods-relationship-to-chaos/

Coronavirus, Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Oct. 18

Today we are kicking off our fall giving campaign – what many churches call a pledge drive. We invite members and friends of St. Dunstan’s to make a pledge, which is a statement of your intended financial gifts to the parish over the course of the upcoming calendar year. Those pledges allow us to form a budget, since members’ pledged giving makes up the vast majority of our income. We do this every October and November; it’s a standard part of  how St. Dunstan’s, and most other Episcopal churches, function. 

Usually, on the first Sunday of the giving campaign, I preach about it, one way or another. To offer some context… some theological grounding… some reassurance and encouragement. 

There have been years when that felt hard. The year we decided to stop running $30,000 deficits and balance our budget. The year when we had just started a capital campaign – and we really didn’t know how many households were able and willing to do both. 

And then there’s this year. 

I can’t even imagine what October 2019 Miranda would have thought if I’d had the opportunity to tell her about the realities of October 2020. It was hard for me to even start thinking about this year’s giving campaign. It’s hard to imagine asking for your attention amidst the clamor of so many alarms – the pandemic, the election, the environment. Many of us feel chronically distracted and/or overwhelmed, and with good reason. It’s hard to imagine asking for your generosity amidst so much uncertainty and scarcity, when even those of us who are doing OK financially tend to add, “for now.” 

The wilderness journey stories from Exodus have been a strange blessing, over the past six weeks. We’ve listened to the Israelites, our long-ago faith ancestors, struggle with fear and frustration, hunger and thirst, boredom and weariness, uncertainty about where it’s all going and how long it will last, yearning for what they had before, struggling to trust that God is working for good through it all.

And their struggles have been our struggles, and, maybe, made us feel a little less alone – reminding us that humans have walked through many a trackless wilderness before. 

The book of Exodus took its more or less final form about 600 years before Jesus, in a time when the Jewish people had been conquered and dragged from their homeland to live among strangers. During those fifty years of exile, God’s people drew on ancient stories and traditions to create a set of holy books laying out their history and way of life. I’m sure that just as we do, those long-ago editors saw parallels between the wilderness journey and their own circumstances. 

Maybe that context can help us understand God’s sometimes-destructive anger, in these stories. Perhaps it simply reflects ancient memories of how people made sense of the hardships of their journey. And/or – for the exiles, God’s anger may have served as a reminder to stay faithful to their heritage and faith, on their own long journey. 

In today’s Exodus text, God does what every parent whose rage is spiraling out of control should do: God gives Godself a time out. Or tries to, anyway. God tells Moses, Look. You all should continue your journey; but I can’t go with you. For you are a stiff-necked people – a wonderful Hebrew idiom. Pause a moment and feel that in your body, that stiff neck; then release it, let your head fall. To bow your head in humility or to nod in agreement – both begin with releasing that stiff neck. 

God says, If I continue to travel with this people, stiff necks and all, we’re going to keep having these situations…. and one of these days I might actually destroy you all. 

If we think about it, we might find Moses’ and the people’s responses surprising. Why not take this deal? God has gotten them out of Egypt and provided food and water. Surely the onward journey would be easier without this demanding, terrifying Being traveling with them. Please note that by this time they have received the Ten Commandments; they have some idea of God’s expectations about how they’re supposed to live. Why not say, Thanks, God, it’s been great, we can take it from here? 

I don’t know why not. But that’s not what they say. The people’s reaction to the idea that God might leave them is grief. And Moses ARGUES with God –  “Oh no you don’t. These are YOUR people. And you told me that I found favor in your sight! Now you’re going to leave me to handle this on my own?”

And God relents, and agrees to stay with the people, and accompany them and protect them and provide for them as they continue their journey.

It is not all smooth sailing from here on out. Next week we’ll hear about that. But I think this is a really important moment in the long arc of the wilderness journey. It’s a moment of mutual choosing. Moses, and the people, didn’t get a lot of choice at the beginning of all this. But now, presented with an opportunity to shake hands and walk away, they choose God. They choose to keep being God’s people, even though it asks a lot from them. And God chooses to keep being their God. And they continue their holy journey together. 

Our text from 1 Thessalonians talks about choosing, too. This is the beginning of the letter, when Paul usually offers some encouragement and praise. To the church in Thessalonica, he says, Knowing of your choice…  The New Revised Standard Version, our usual Bible translation, renders that as, “knowing that Christ has chosen you.” But the syntax in the original Greek is unclear. It could be Christ’s choosing of these people, this church; or their choosing of Christ. Either – or both. But the choosing matters. 

When I’m preaching a giving campaign sermon, I usually find some thread that ties the Scripture texts to the campaign. Generosity. Commitment. Gratitude. Et cetera. This year, what jumps out at me is the choosing. 

It’s there in the texts, for sure, but maybe it stands out for me because I’ve also heard it from many of you in these months. That this has become, like it or not, a clarifying time, a season of discernment. The enforced limitations of our lives, and perhaps too the pervasive sense of risk and loss, has led to a lot re-evaluation of what matters and what we actually want.

I’ve heard about job changes and relationship changes. Changes in how people organize their time, who we stay in touch with, what commitments we keep, even our deep sense of personal direction and purpose. They are not all comfortable changes, to be clear! Some have brought a lot of anguish… even when it’s the right choice. Some of you are still hanging in the uncomfortable space between the old passing away, and the new taking shape. 

It turns out that we were all on auto-pilot about a lot of stuff. We kept doing it because we’d done it before. And when we had to stop and think, we un-chose some things. And we re-chose some other things. 

If you’re hearing my voice right now, that probably means St. Dunstan’s is one of the things you chose again. Or, in a few cases, chose for the first time – which is just amazing to me; such a blessing. 

The giving campaign is an opportunity to choose, again. To choose this faith community as one of the things that’s worth your time and resources and heart,

in this strange season and beyond. To choose to help St. Dunstan’s keep being here, for us and for others.  

Let me say just a few words about this year’s campaign. In recent years we’ve presented a detailed draft budget as part of the fall giving campaign, explaining why particular budget lines went up or down. That kind of work assumes stability. That next year will look a lot like this year, with some tweaks here and there. 

Well – 2020 blew that kind of thinking out of the water. We didn’t know what 2020 would be like. We don’t know what 2021 will be like. We know we’ve lost some beloved saints this year; we know some folks’ jobs and family circumstances have changed. So this year we’re asking for your pledges first, and then we’ll budget for 2021 when we’ve seen what we can do, together. 

This doesn’t mean your parish leadership bodies are slacking off!The Finance Committee and Vestry folks have looked at our numbers and talked about different possibilities. But it seemed both kinder and more responsible to start with what we are able to give, and build our budget from there. 

I am hopeful, beloved friends. I’m hopeful that we’ll keep broadening and deepening our practices of fellowship and prayer when we’re not in the same physical space. I’m hopeful that advances in understanding, prevention and treatment of Covid will allow us to begin to gather in person again in the coming months, in both familiar and fresh ways.

I’ve looked around at what other churches are doing, and we have done a good job of keeping being St. Dunstan’s. There have been costs to this season – no question. I know we have members who love this parish and just don’t connect with online worship. I ache for them. This long fast from Eucharist, and our beloved building, takes a toll. There have been blessings to this season, too – deepening connections within the parish family, building new habits of praying and reflecting on Scripture together, exploring ways for our kids to plan and lead worship. It has been a heavy lift. It will keep being one. But we’re doing pretty well. I’m proud of us. 

Keeping on keeping being St. Dunstan’s takes financial resources. That’s why we have to have a fall giving campaign, even though it’s hard. If you’ve pledged in the past and you’re able to sustain your pledge, please do. If you’ve pledged before and you’re able to increase your pledge, even a little, I hope you’ll consider it. If you’ve pledged before and things have changed and you can’t pledge at the same level – we understand. No shame, please! So much has changed, for so many people, this year. 

If you haven’t pledged before and you’d like to start, to help St. Dunstan’s plan ahead, that would be a tremendous blessing. New pledges are always cause for celebration – even more so this year. I also want to hold up the folks who pledged for the first time last year and plan to pledge again this year. What a time to join a church. Thanks for sticking around. 

Along with your pledge cards, we’re asking for two other things. First, please share your thoughts about what’s most important to sustain and build, with your Vestry and Finance Committee. This is a season of discernment for St. Dunstan’s, too. Let us know what matters, from where you’re standing.

Second, please share your hopes. Each pledge packet this year includes a couple of index cards. They’ll come with an explanation, but the gist is: Use a card to write or draw a hope you have for 2021. It can be a church hope or a life hope or a world hope. It can be a big hope or a little hope. It can be a general hope or a very specific hope. You can do several if you want – let us know if you need more index cards!

One of our members, Kate, suggested this, because, she said, holding hope together is one of the most important things we do as a church in a difficult and frightening time. I think there’s real wisdom in that. So, share a hope, or two, or five. Send them back with your pledge card. We’ll put them all together and share them at the end of the giving campaign. 

In the wilderness journey in Exodus, God’s people chose to keep being God’s people. God’s people in Thessalonica chose Christ and were chosen by Christ, to continue the work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope.

Beloved friends: I am so grateful that you, each and all, chose St. Dunstan’s and keep choosing St. Dunstan’s.That you chose, and keep choosing, the blessings and challenges of life together as a faith community. That you chose, and keep choosing, to walk this wilderness journey together. May the God who has brought us this far protect us, guide us, and give us wisdom and courage for the road ahead. Amen. 

Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 11

If you’d prefer to watch and/or listen rather than read, here is a video version of Rev. Miranda’s sermon from Sunday, October 11! 


Before we receive today’s Gospel lesson, I’d like to remind us how this works. We have the story of Jesus’ life and teachings in four versions, the Gospels. Each have their own slant; how they understand the Gospel depends on their experiences and hopes. The Gospel text assigned for today is kind of an intense illustration of that tendency. 

It’s one of many stories and teachings of Jesus that appears in both Matthew and Luke. Most scholars believe that both these Gospel writers used a now-lost collection of Jesus’ teachings as one of their sources – in addition to the earliest Gospel, Mark, and other possible sources. 

When Matthew or Luke use one of the teachings from that lost document in their Gospels, they may put it in different places in their narrative, and sometimes they also tweak it so that Jesus’ words fit that context. Let’s look at today’s parable, the Parable of the Banquet, in Matthew and Luke. 

READ the Gospel parable in both versions: 

Matthew: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=469184961

Luke: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=469184916

So, Matthew’s version is a lot scarier, right? 

An obvious next question might be, Which version is closer to what Jesus actually said? I believe Luke’s version is closer to Jesus’ words. Partly because Luke’s version has a lot in common with, for example, the parable of the Foolish Bridesmaids, and other teachings about the urgency of responding to God’s call. The message is simple, really: When God calls you – invites you – be ready! Show up! Don’t get distracted or put it off. 

I think it’s really interesting that in these stories, God’s invitation is to a party! That’s worthy of its own sermon sometime… 

But the clearer case for Luke’s version being closer to Jesus’ words is that Matthew’s version is so clearly Matthew’s version. There are lots of places where Matthew is different from parallel texts in the other Gospels because Matthew adds violence and judgment. Luke’s Jesus is often inviting in those at the margins, the crippled, the blind, and the lame; Matthew’s Jesus is often consigning people to the outermost darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

Why is Matthew like that? The Gospel of Matthew was written after the Jewish revolt and destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies in AD 70. Luke and John were almost certainly written after 70, as well, but Matthew seems to really carry the emotional and psychological scars of that terrible time. Think of him like a 9/11 survivor, whose PSTD and grief sometimes manifest as deep bitterness and rage. 

Matthew blames the religious leaders in Jerusalem, in part, for bringing down destruction upon the great city by not being truly faithful to their call as leaders of God’s people. Luke has Jesus tell this story at a dinner party. Matthew has Jesus tell it while he’s at the Great Temple. It immediately follows another parable about a landowner who builds a vineyard, then leaves it in the hands of tenants. The tenants are greedy; they don’t want to give the landowner his share of the money at harvest time. So when the landowner sends servants to collect the money, they beat them up and send them away.

It seems pretty clear that in that parable, the tenants represent religious leaders who get more invested in status, wealth and power than in actually leading on God’s behalf. That parable is very similar in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And for that matter, it has some close parallels in the prophetic books of the Old Testament –  In which a vineyard is often a symbol for God’s people… and religious leaders are often accused of hypocrisy and faithlessness. 

So Matthew takes today’s parable, about somebody desperately trying to find enough guests for his dinner party, and places it in that same scene. And he makes it a parable about God’s vengeance on the Temple leadership for conspiring to kill Jesus. Matthew says, Jesus was your invitation to God’s banquet, and you not only refused to show up –  you KILLED the messenger. And the King was so angry at your negligence that he destroyed your city. Everything we lost… it’s your fault. 

I want to take a sharp right turn here and talk briefly about our Exodus lesson this morning. First, let me say that this story gets redeemed, just a few chapters later. The golden calf is in Exodus 32. In Exodus 35, Moses calls the people to bring offerings to create a sort of holy tent – a place for people to honor God and make sacrifices, as beautiful and elaborate as possible for a people traveling through the wilderness. And just as the people gave their gold earrings to Aaron to make the calf, the people give their jewelry to make the golden ornaments for the tent of meeting.

I love that the text stresses that they made these gifts with stirred hearts and willing spirits… I preached this text when we were starting our capital campaign! Right now I just want to note that the people were hungry to give their gifts, and their hearts, to something. Aaron’s calf project filled a void. But when a better, more real option came along – they were ready. 

I think the thread that connects these texts – the golden calf and Matthew’s version of the banquet parable – is the question of what kind of god we want. And especially what kind of god we want when we are under stress. 

The Israelites were hungry and thirsty, hot, tired, anxious. Sure, God had miraculously freed them from slavery in Egypt, but maybe slavery wasn’t so bad; at least we had food. Sure, God has promised that we will have a homeland of our own some day, where we can live as God’s people, but all I see right now is rocks. 

Moses is up on a mountaintop talking to God, receiving the Ten Commandments, but the people want a god that THEY can see and touch and approach. A nice golden statue, like the ones they used to see in Egypt; those were so classy!  A nice small god, a god they could take with them wherever they went, instead of a God who tells them where to go. A god who will make manageable demands, and won’t get murderously angry at them for being impatient and bored and scared. 

I mean… God is not winning any Parent of the Year awards, in these wilderness stories. You can’t really blame the Israelites for considering an alternative. 

God is big and demanding and kind of scary. Even the things God does that help the Israelites – the plagues in Egypt, splitting the Red Sea, guiding them with a pillar of fire – are terrifying. And God’s insistence that they can and WILL become God’s chosen nation, prospering in their own land and following God’s ways, is asking a lot of them. That golden calf made from their own earrings… that might be a god they can handle. 

And then there’s Matthew. Angry, grief-stricken Matthew, who needs the Gospel story of God’s redemptive love for humanity to include violent judgment upon his enemies, please. 

Matthew wants a god who hates the same people he does. Matthew wants a god who either welcomes you to the party or throws you weeping into the outermost darkness. A god who’s keeping a list of who made the great city BURN… and will make THEM burn. 

The idea of a God who yearns for the redemption of the whole world, who in Jesus Christ seeks to reconcile all humanity to Godself and one another…. That might not be exactly the God Matthew wants. And we can understand that, kindly. But we don’t have to go there with him. 

Beloved friends: We are people of faith under stress. Walking through a wilderness, hungry, restless, anxious. Watching many things we loved and trusted burn. What god do we want? What god do we need? 

We, too, might want a small, safe god we can understand and control. A god who will smite our enemies for us if we email him a list. A pocket-sized god who is just there for comfort and reassurance, instead of a god whose purposes are beyond our comprehension. A god who offers pardon without renewal, solace without strength. A god we can use like a vending machine, insert a prayer and receive a blessing, instead of a god who is working inexorably for the greater good in ways often too subtle and slow for us to perceive. 

What god do we NEED? … A God who can hold us as we rage and grieve, who can handle our anger and anguish. A God who travels with us even on the hardest parts of the journey, and will be with us as we rebuild – or build anew – when eventually, inevitably, we arrive, somewhere … A God who can heal, transform, and redeem both us AND those we see as enemies. A God whose intentions for us are more beautiful and more demanding than anything we would ever choose for ourselves. 

May we seek and follow that God, rather than any small god of our own devising. Amen. 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Saints, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 4

The man we come to know as the apostle Paul, founder of many churches and author of letters to the first Christians, was born around 5 AD – making him a few years younger than Jesus, whom he never met during his lifetime. He was born to a devout Jewish family in the city of Tarsus.  As he says in today’s reading from the letter to the church in Philippi, he was “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews.”

Elsewhere he describes himself as “a Pharisee, born of Pharisees” (Acts 23:6) – meaning that both he and his parents were His family were Pharisees, members of a movement within Judaism to recommit to the faith practices of their ancestors.  He was sent as a young child to study with Gamaliel, one of the greatest rabbis of the time – and could easily have become a rabbi himself. 

In addition to his impeccable credentials as a faithful Jew, Paul was also apparently a Roman citizen by birth.The Roman Empire did not have birthright citizenship! If you weren’t actually Roman, citizenship was a privilege that you had to either buy or be given. 

It was unusual but by no means impossible for a Jew to become a citizen. Paul’s parents might have been offered citizenship as a thanks for service to Rome or to gain their favor if they were people of influence. Their citizenship passed on to their son. 

In short, the young Saul – his Hebrew name – or Paulus, his Roman name – had plenty of social and religious standing. Many paths and possibilities were open to him. The one he chose, in his early 30s, was to help stamp out a new religious movement that sounded to him like heresy. People who claimed to be Jews were saying that this rabble-rouser who had been crucified in Jerusalem was somehow God and had risen from the dead. 

Paulus witnessed the stoning to death of a Christian convert named Stephen. He held people’s garments while they committed mob murder, so their clothes would not get bloody. And he approved of the killing. (Acts 8:1) 

In fact, it seemed to inspire him to get involved in the persecution of Christians, raiding homes and dragging people off to prison. As he says about his former life in today’s reading: “As to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

When he ran out of people to arrest in Jerusalem, he asked the high priest for letters of introduction to the synagogues in the city of Damascus, so that he could hunt down Christians there too. Luke, the eloquent storyteller, describes Paul as “snorting out menaces and slaughter.” He gets his letters and sets out on his journey.

But as he’s approaching Damascus, a light flashes around him. He falls to the ground. A voice said, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Paul stammers out, “Who are you, Lord?” The voice replies, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

Paul’s story unfolds from there. He becomes a Christian; he becomes a preacher and founder of churches. He is despised by those who see his teaching as heresy. He is imprisoned and beaten. He brings to bear all the privileges of his younger life on his new lifework of building the Jesus movement. 

But this, the road to Damascus, is the pivot point. This is the moment when Christ Jesus makes Paul his own. The Greek is more forceful: when Christ seizes Paul, and sets him on a new road. 

Some 11 centuries later, a baby boy was born to a prosperous silk merchant and his wife, in the Italian town of Assisi. The baby was baptized Giovanni, but early on was given the additional name Francesco, perhaps because his father’s business dealings in France were going so well. 

Francis had money, status, and indulgent parents. As a young man he was handsome, popular, and fond of fancy clothes. He loved traveling musicians and performers, and lived a carefree life…  until he joined a military expedition against a nearby town and was taken captive for a year. 

This experience led to a sense of dissatisfaction and re-examination of his former life. He began to pray for spiritual enlightenment. One day as he knelt in the ruined chapel at San Damiano, gazing upon an icon of the crucified Christ, he heard a voice. It said, “Francis, Francis, go and rebuild my house.”

At first Francis thought this spiritual charge meant simply to have the chapel at San Damiano repaired. He stole some cloth from his father and sold it, and gave the money to the priest in charge of the chapel – who refused to take it. Legal and parental wrangling ensued – culminating with Francis renouncing his father and his inheritance, and stripping himself of all his fine garments, walking naked into a new way of life. 

As Paul wrote, eleven centuries earlier, “For [Jesus’] sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as garbage, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” 

Francis’ story unfolds from there. My favorite picture book about Francis, by  Brian Wildsmith, the source of these images, sums it up well: “From then on, I sought out the poor. I sought out the sick. I repaired God’s ruined churches. I loved all God’s creatures and called them my sisters and brothers.” 

Francis founded an order of men committed to holy poverty, peacemaking, and service to ordinary people in the name of Christ. He worked with his childhood friend Clare to create a sister order for women.

Francis died on October 3, 1226. His feast day is October 4. We honor and remember him today. 

For both Paul and Francis, life turned on a dime when Jesus spoke to them. It’s an unusual, but by no means unique, shape for a Christian life. There have been many saints, both well-known and long-forgotten, whose life includes a sudden and dramatic call away from their former life and to a new way of living in God. Such experiences are sometimes called a “road to Damascus” moment. I guess “chapel of San Damiano moment” is too much of a mouthful? 

We’re not, exactly, talking about conversion. Neither of these men abandoned the faith they held before their call. Francis was most certainly a Christian before San Damiano, though he may not have been the most devout. Paul’s relationship with the Judaism of his young life is more complex. In today’s text he claims to regard his ancestral faith identity as rubbish. But other passages suggest Paul continued to find value and meaning in his Jewish heritage. He sees Christianity as a new branch grafted onto Judaism, and grieves that his new faith separates him from many members of his first faith-family. 

The lives of the saints – the ones with days on the calendar and portraits in stained glass windows – can inspire us. They may also make us feel small and inadequate. I have heard from God, at particular moments in my life, but I’ve never been thrown off my feet by a blinding light and the voice of Jesus. 

I look at Paul, at Francis, at some of their kin among the communion of saints, and I see people driven by a crystal-clear sense of God-given purpose. My sense of God-given purpose is maybe 40% on a good day, and I’m pretty sure that even that puts me way at one end of the normal distribution. 

Paul and Francis encourage me not because I expect my life to look like theirs… but because for them, it wasn’t all about them. Paul and Francis weren’t the kinds of saints who were called away from the world, to lives of discipline and purity, in a wilderness cave or compound. Instead, Paul and Francis were called INTO the world. Specifically, they were called to gather and form communities – communities oriented around a new, or renewed, understanding of God’s purposes for the world.

After Damascus, Paul committed the rest of his life to founding, teaching, encouraging (and sometimes rebuking) churches in cities all across the ancient world. Franciscans, followers of Francis, didn’t build monasteries; they traveled around, preaching, teaching, and serving.

My life may not be like Paul’s or like Francis’s, let alone like Jesus’. But I can aspire to be – across the millennia – one of the people they called and gathered, encouraged and taught. 

Francis invites us to regard material possessions and wealth lightly; to strive for understanding and, where possible, peace, across differences; to see God in our fellow human beings, and to love God’s creation and creatures. 

Paul invites us – well, he covers a lot of ground in his many letters. But fundamentally I think he calls us to stick with the work of figuring out what difference our faith makes in our lives… and to looking out for one another. 

And both invite us to entrust ourselves to communities of faith…  to find, and be, faithful companions for the challenging work of living this way – and of making this way of living make a difference, for our neighbors and the world.

Sermons

Sermon, Sept. 13

I want to begin my homily today by reading you a story. It’s from a book called Tales of a Magic Monastery, by Theophane the Monk (Crosswood Publishing, 1988). The Magic Monastery is a strange and wonderful place. People come there seeking answers from the wise monks. Often what they get instead are questions – or the insight to realize that what they need is different from what they seek.

In this story, a monk from another monastery comes to the Magic Monastery. He’s fed up with his brother monks, and wants a time of retreat. As usual, the Magic Monastery gives him just what he needs. 

The story begins: The guestmaster looked at me carefully and led me to a room marked “Righteous Indignation.” “Good,” I thought. “Back home some people don’t understand me. They think I’m judgmental. But this man understands.” 

There wasn’t much in the room besides the four walls, and that was all right with me. I sat down and meditated a while. Then I read my Bible. I found myself looking at those walls. I read some more, then meditated, then looked at the walls again. 

Late in the evening, as I was staring at one of the walls, it became transparent, and I found myself looking at my own monastery. FAScinating. What’s more, as I watched, I found I could see right through its walls and into the church and cloisters. After a while I could even see inside the cell of each monk. I saw everything. I saw what each monk had in his room and what he was doing. I saw some praying, some sleeping, some reading. I could even see what each one was reading. Brother! Do you see what that one is reading? And look at the private property! Soon I could hear their voices. I could hear everything that was said – the complaints, the backbiting. My own name was mentioned. Huh! That one to be complaining of me! 

I began to take notes. I filled page after page. I had thought the place was bad before, but here were the facts – what they said, what they did, what they had. Nothing subjective – just cold facts. As I kept writing, I began to see right into their heads, to see their very thoughts. These also I wrote down. 

Once, when I was resting my eyes, the thought came to me, “I wonder what I would see if the other wall were transparent?” Perhaps if I kept looking at it long enough… well, it did open up and through it I saw the Magic Monastery, every bit of it. What an eyeful! I thought my own place was bad. Talk about individualism. I began to write that down too. 

I rang for the Brother and asked him to bring me some more notebooks. There was so much to get down. From time to time a further question would come to me, “I wonder what’s behind these other two walls?” I became uncomfortable. “Who is there? What are the walls hiding? Why don’t they let me see? It’s probably dreadful.” I took to starting at these walls. The Brother said that behind the one wall were the deceased members of the Magic Monastery, and behind the other were the deceased members of my own monastery. 

“Ah,” I said, “but why can’t I see them? I want to see them.” 

“You won’t like it,” he said.

“Truth, that’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I call it like it is. Show me!” 

“You’ll only get angry.”

“Show me. Bring me some more notebooks, and show me.” 

But he refused and hurried away. I was determined that when he returned the next day I would get the truth out of him. 

I did. I took him by the throat and demanded to know what was going on behind those walls. “Behind this one,” he gasped, “are the deceased members of your own community. They are all looking in at you. They are weeping and praying for you.

“Behind this other wall are the deceased members of the Magic Monastery. They are all looking at you and laughing.” 

I’ve loved this book for a long time, and this story is one of my favorites. It’s a story that points to the problem with righteous indignation.

Righteous indignation is a powerful, even intoxicating, feeling. Think back on a time you’ve felt it. Something was unfair. Somebody in power was wrong or hypocritical. Somebody said something stupid and dangerous.

Righteous indignation is important. It drives us to speak and act. It can drive us to stand up for what’s right, and against what’s wrong. But – as the story reminds us – there can be something both laughable and deeply sad about someone in the throes of righteous indignation. 

When we are seized by righteous indignation, it tends to be really hard to stay self-aware. To keep a sense of proportion about the situation. To be the person we mean to be. 

Both of today’s lessons have to do with righteous indignation. In this portion of the letter to the Romans, Paul is addressing a division within the church over faith practices, especially food practices. This is the passage where Paul calls me “weak” for eating only vegetables. 

Seriously: Meat was an issue for a couple of reasons. It might have been used in the rites of pagan temples; Paul addresses that issue extensively in 1 Corinthians. The animal might also not have been killed in accord with the practices of kashrut, kosher. In an urban setting where folks had to buy food instead of raising their own, the only way to be sure to avoid ritually impure meat was to avoid meat altogether. 

Paul uses the loaded terms “Weak” and “Strong” to refer to the parties here. The “weak” are concerned about whether their practices put them right or wrong with God. The “strong” know that all of that is details, and what matters is giving yourself, body and mind, heart and soul, to God through Christ Jesus. Their confidence might well put them at risk of judgmentalism and righteous indignation towards the “weak” with their tender scruples.

In case the “weak” and “strong” vocabulary doesn’t give it away: Paul agrees with the Strong, in principle. He says, “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.” But Paul has seen this kind of thing play out enough times that he knows that there’s no future in having one group within the church be RIGHT and another group be WRONG. People need to listen to each other, love each other, and grow together, slowly, into a shared understanding of their life in Christ.

Even Paul’s identification with the Strong here is a strategic act – he’s trying to take their sense of righteousness and massage it into compassionate consideration for others. The really strong thing to do here, says Paul, is to accept people as they are and let them figure it out step by step, instead of arguing with them about deeply-felt convictions. “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

And then there’s today’s Gospel. In which Peter wants to know what do to if somebody isn’t just sinful but is, like, super-duper sinful, over and over again. And not just generally sinful but sinful AGAINST ME. What do I do about somebody like that? Do I have to keep forgiving them as many as seven times?Jesus says, Not just seven but seventy-seven – a number that clearly means, “as many times as it takes.” And then he tells a story, a parable: 

A king wanted to settle accounts with his slaves. One slave owed him ten thousand talents – an incredible sum, a fortune. The slave, of course, could not pay him back. So the king ordered that the slave, his wife and children, and all his possessions, should be sold, to make up the lost money.

Let me pause and remind us that every king in a parable does not represent God! The king, the debt – all of this is just the situation Jesus sets up for the real point of the parable, which is about the human heart. Anyway. 

The slave, naturally, is horrified; he throws himself to the ground before the king and begs for mercy. And out of pity, the king releases him and forgives him his debt! An amazing gift of freedom from bondage and obligation! Imagine the slave’s gratitude and relief! 

But that same slave, as he’s leaving the king’s court, spots one of his fellow slaves who owes him 100 denarii. And he grabs him by the throat and says, Pay me what you owe. And when he can’t or won’t, the first slave has him throw in prison. People tell the king what happened, and he calls the first slave before him and says, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?”

I’m honest enough with myself to find the slave’s actions believable. He’s just been faced with losing literally EVERYTHING, because he doesn’t have enough money. He reacts from that desperate fear and sense of scarcity, even though the great debt has been forgiven; even though this second debt is literally one ten-thousandth of what he owed the king.

As much as anything, this is a story about self-awareness. If the slave hadn’t been awash with anxiety, he would have realized how senseless it was to make this demand from his neighbor. He might have said, “Hey, forget that 100 denarii! I just got my whole life back!” But that’s not what happens. Instead, he turns towards righteous indignation – You owe me, you good-for-nothing slacker! – as a release from his feelings of terror, shame, and inadequacy. 

The fundamental premise of righteous indignation is that somebody else is the problem. 

LOOK: SOMETIMES OTHER PEOPLE ARE A PROBLEM – in heartbreaking, terrifying ways, that touch many lives besides their own. Human beings can be both wrong and bad. And niceness is not a Christian virtue. Striving to follow Jesus by no means obligates us to tolerate abuse or to make peace with injustice and cruelty; quite the opposite. Jesus himself often corrects people and argues with people.

The lesson of the magic monastery, of Paul’s admonition to the Strong, of Jesus’ parable, is that part of the work is always, always self-work. 

There’s a prayer I’ve learned from a friend in the recovery community: Bless them; change me. So simple, and yet so hard to pray: Bless them; change me. 

Praying this prayer doesn’t mean simply accepting the other person as they are, even if they are dangerous to themselves or others. Praying this prayer is a recognition that I am only person I can control. And that even my capacity to maybe, possibly, begin to help that other person, or change that person, or change my relationship with that person, or change the circumstances in which  that person has power to do harm – all of that, too, has to start with my inner work. 

A couple of weeks ago a member shared a quotation from the great spiritual writer Thomas Merton, that’s been knocking around in the back of my mind ever since:“Those who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening their own self-understanding, freedom, and capacity to love, will have nothing to give others. They will communicate to others nothing but the contagion of their own obsessions, their aggressiveness, their ego-centered ambitions, their delusions about end and means, their doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.”

Merton doesn’t mention righteous indignation but it’s in there, right there at the center of the Venn diagram of aggressiveness and ego and delusions that WE are the ones who have it all figured out. 

Bless them; change me. It is hard to pray this prayer for the people who spark my righteous indignation. For the people who are most callous or clueless about the brutal impact of the Covid pandemic. For the people who refuse accountability for their role in institutions that harm and oppress. For the people who believe they are so righteous that they’re allowed to hurt God’s children in God’s name. 

But I try to pray it, even if I pray it with a little coda:  “… and also please change them too.” Because I know that the faith I preach and try to live is a faith that begins with metanoia: with a changed mind and heart that bear fruit in a changed life. The faith I preach and try to live is a faith that continues with self-examination, holding up our lives to the light of God’s loving purposes; and with confession, and forgiveness, and amendment of life.  I know that I am my own life’s work, in a way that is the opposite of self-centered or self-indulgent, because as Merton says, I have nothing to give others if I am not continually striving to deepen my self-understanding, freedom, and capacity to love. Because I can’t be part of any solution if I haven’t also taken a brave, honest look at the ways I’m part of the problem.

Righteous indignation is a powerful force that drives many human movements for a more whole, just, and merciful world. The nutshell version of this sermon is not that righteous indignation is bad. But that part of righteous indignation where we tend to lose our sense of self-awareness and proportion, and project the whole problem outward – that is risky. Because we are each our own life’s work. 

Comedian and kindness advocate Josh Gondelman says he has never been asked to give a graduation speech, but he wrote one just in case. It’s in his book Nice Try. Here’s part of it: “Every time you fail, or someone fails you, you could grow embittered and defeated and withdrawn. Or you could take some time to stomp around and curse heaven and earth before making the choice to become more resolute and compassionate and righteous and tender. Just because things are bad doesn’t mean you have to get worse with them. You don’t have to pretend things are good; you just have to believe they can get better…It won’t always be easy. In some cases, that will take a substantial amount of time, or effort, or support, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But you can always learn how to better stand up for yourself or for other people… You can become gentler and more relentless.” 

Faced with the inevitable failures and errors of people and institutions, may we follow the way of Jesus by choosing to become more more resolute and compassionate; more righteous and tender; gentler and more relentless for the sake of good. And may the God who calls us to this work give us courage, clarity, and grace. Amen. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Aug. 16

Read the Gospel here: Mt 15:1, 7, 10-11, 16-28 

I know this is a Gospel story – especially that second part – that some have strong feelings about. 

Jesus is being pretty snippy, frankly, for somebody who’s up on his high horse about what comes out of your mouth. 

Maybe we should just take it as a given that he is exhausted and overwhelmed. If we read what comes before this passage, we find that Jesus keeps trying to get away by himself to rest and pray, and he keeps being found – by crowds of desperate people seeking healing, or by antagonists who want to argue with him. 

I’m not going to tell you how I think YOU should read this text – but I am going to suggest how I think MATTHEW, the author of this Gospel, understands what happens here. 

Matthew gets this passage from Mark, the earliest of the Gospels. While Matthew and Mark don’t always tell things in the same order, these two pieces are together in both texts – Jesus’ little diatribe about what really makes someone unclean, and then this reluctant healing. But Matthew does tell things a little bit differently. (I encourage you to set them side by side & compare – that’s often pretty interesting! The Mark version is in chapter 7.)  

This month we are giving some attention to the ways we read, reflect on, and seek meaning in the Bible. Reading a passage out loud in different ways is a great tool; so is looking at a text side by side with a related passage from elsewhere in the Bible. Sometimes just reading a text closely and slowly makes you notice new things, too, even in a familiar story. We’ve found that with our Scripture reflections at Compline. And with some help from Bible scholar Richard Swanson, it happened for me with this Gospel – with the word Canaanite. 

Canaanite. When Mark tells this story, he says the woman is a Gentile – a non-Jew – and a Syro-Phoenecian. A descendant of one of the great empires that marched through Judea in ages past. But Matthew says this woman is a Canaanite.

Canaanite is a very old-fashioned word. The Canaanites were Israel’s great enemies in the time of Joshua and Judges over a thousand years ago. I had never paused on the word before because it’s a Biblical word; it’s familiar. But this is the only time this word is used in the New Testament… and for that matter, the last 2/3 of the Old Testament. The Canaanites mostly aren’t mentioned after the book of Judges – except when people are re-telling Israel’s early history, remembering how God brought them to the land of Canaan and said, This is for you; kill everyone who lives here and then move in and settle down. 

Calling this woman a Canaanite is like saying she’s a Redcoat. It’s recognizable as a term for an enemy we used to have – but it’s been a while since those were the bad guys. 

Why call this woman a Canaanite? The Canaanites were the peoples who lived in the land where the Israelites wanted to live. (Or – as archaeologists and Biblical scholars increasingly believe – they were the ancestors of the Israelites, whom the Israelites wanted to separate themselves from as they developed a new faith and way of life.) So this woman is a non-Jew who lives in a neighboring territory. Sure, call her a Canaanite. It’s not necessarily wrong; it’s just odd.  

Matthew isn’t making a mistake. He means something by using this archaic term. But what? 

Matthew is sometimes described as the most Jewish of the Gospels – the most grounded in the history and heritage of Judaism. Matthew believes, with the apostle Paul (Romans 11), that non-Jewish Christians should hold their faith with humility, knowing that they have been grafted onto a vine that was planted long ago;  that our life and vitality come from the deep roots and resilient growth of that vine. 

Matthew’s Gospel begins with a genealogy that doubles as a capsule history of Israel. He frequently shapes his narrative to present Jesus as a second Moses. In that light, Matthew’s use of the word “Canaanite” means to throw us back into the history of the Jewish people. He wants to evoke the time of Joshua and Judges, when the Canaanites were Israel’s despised neighbors, a constant cultural, religious, and military threat, to be resisted and, when possible, exterminated. 

Matthew’s deep commitment to Judaism may seem like it’s in tension with Jesus’ hostility towards the scribes and the Pharisees, Jewish religious scholars, in today’s Gospel. 

I’m sure Matthew is re-telling Jesus’ words here – potty humor and all. Jesus clearly had kind of a “frenemy” relationship with the Pharisees during his life. 

Matthew’s Gospel may lean into that antagonism because those tensions had become stronger in the decades after Jesus. 

Matthew is writing his Gospel, based on Mark and some other texts and memories and stories he’s gathered, around the year 75, give or take. 

It’s not long after the destruction of Jerusalem following a failed revolt against Roman colonial rule. 

Different Jewish groups are all trying to work out what faithful living looks like in this new time, after all that struggle and loss. The Pharisees are seeking the survival of their way of faith by calling people to daily observance of the ancient ways of Judaism. 

In contrast, Christians (at this point still a weird movement within Judaism) are seeking survival of their way of faith by cutting back on required practices, emphasizing heart and soul instead, and becoming a faith that actively evangelizes non-Jews. 

So these kinds of questions about what kind of life puts you right with God, and who Jesus’ mission and ministry were for, may have felt even more pressing and weighty as Matthew wrote down his Gospel than they did during Jesus’ life. 

I want us to notice that there’s a penny waiting to drop, between the end of Jesus’ diatribe against the Pharisees and the moment of his softening towards the Canaanite woman. 

He has just pushed back strongly on the idea that worthiness, holiness, rightness-with-God can be earned or kept through particular practices, things you do. 

He’s said, more or less, that his mission is not to restore Judaism as the Pharisees understand it.

But he apparently still thinks his mission is focused on Judaism, on the lost sheep of the house of Israel. On those descendants of Abraham who are hurting, hungry, helpless or hopeless.  

But then. 

I want to take a moment to honor this woman, this fierce mama whose fear for her child makes her fearless. She does something very familiar here – something that women in sexist systems and marginalized folk of all kinds sometimes have to do. She accepts the demeaning terms that are offered her, and makes her case anyway. Jesus says this flat-out racist thing, calls her a dog, and she says, Yes, sir. But you know, the thing about dogs is, when the kids are eating, the dogs are going to end up getting something. 

There are many little hints that make me think Matthew thinks Jesus’ heart changes, in this moment. It’s not just that Jesus is swayed by her feistiness and decides to make an exception, just this once. It’s that penny finally drops and the fully-human part of Jesus gets a little bit closer to understanding what the fully-God part of Jesus is up to. 

But right now I just want to circle back to that word, Canaanite. Remember that the Canaanites were Israel’s ancient enemy, to avoid and/or destroy. That a touchstone of their history is the story about God bringing them the land of Canaan, and telling them: This is for you; now, kill everyone who already lives here. 

Because Matthew calls this woman a Canaanite, suddenly this Gospel story is in conversation with Joshua and Judges. It’s not just that Jesus suddenly sees that his mission is to and for the Gentiles too. It’s that Jesus’ work and teaching, life and death and rising, are meant to mend and redeem a history of hatred, suspicion, and violence. 

By the way: Joshua – the great general of the campaign against Canaan –  and Jesus are the same name in Hebrew: Yeshua. Matthew knows this.

Richard Swanson writes,”The storyteller is staging a remembrance of the slaughter carried out by Joshua when [the Israelites] invaded the land [of Canaan].  This is not idly done. This remembrance makes this [Gospel story] a scene of historic repentance: the Canaanites are shown to be capable of real faithfulness… The argument for [the] slaughter [of the Canaanites] – that they will lead you away from true faithfulness – is revealed to be false.” 

This is a pivot point in Matthew’s Gospel. It’s in chapter 15, close to the halfway point of Matthew’s 28 chapters. In chapter 16, Jesus starts warning his disciples about what’s going to happen to him.* And chapter 17 contains the Transfiguration, the literal mountaintop moment that turns the Gospel story towards the cross. 

I think Matthew sees this moment as the fulcrum – the point on which the story pivots. On which Jesus’ understanding of his mission pivots. From seeking and saving the lost sheep of the house of Israel, to breaking down the walls that divide us, making whole what has long been broken. and embracing all those of any nation who seek God’s healing, redemption, and grace. 

Thanks be to God. 

Sermons

Sermon, July 12

Our Gospel today brings us one of Jesus’ parables – these stories he likes to tell. Why does he do that so much, anyway?…  In the verses our text skips, Jesus gives one answer, quoting the book of the prophet Isaiah: “The reason I speak to [the crowd] in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’” The purpose of the parables is to perplex people, to keep the truth obscured. 

I wonder….  I think Jesus probably really said something a lot like that. But I think there’s more more going on here. If you want to hide the truth, why preach to enormous crowds? In Mark, Jesus goes on to say, “Nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” So maybe parables are supposed to leave you wondering – until the penny drops and you say, “Oooh! I see what he meant now!” 

Telling stories can be a good way to get away with public speech that might upset the authorities. There are several moments in the Gospels where people suddenly realize that a story Jesus is telling is about them – and not in a good way! 

Telling stories is a great way to talk to people who aren’t in the habit of listening to sermons or lectures – and Jesus wanted to reach people like that. People remember stories; they invite you in and stick with you much more than an expository speech making the same point. I try to use stories in my preaching often, for the same reason. 

Stories can hold big, strange ideas in deceptively simple containers. This might be the main reason Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God mostly in stories. 

The writer Francis Spufford offers this overview of Jesus’ Kingdom parables: 

“When [Jesus] talks about [the Kingdom], it sips from analogy to analogy… Yeshua’s kingdom apparently exists in ever-changing resemblances. He does not say what it is, only what it is like. It’s like a tiny seed. It’s like a big tree. Like something inside you. Like a pearl you’d give everything to possess. Like wheat growing among weeds. Like the camel climbing though the needle’s eye. Like the way the world looks to children… Like getting a day’s pay for an hour’s work. Like a crooked magistrate, who has fixed the case in your favor. Like a narrow gate, a difficult road, a lamp on a stand. Like a wedding party. Like a wedding party where all the original guests have been disinvited and replaced by random passers-by. Like yeast in dough. Like a treasure, like a harvest, like a door that opens whenever you knock…. The kingdom is — whatever all those likenesses have in common. The kingdom, he seems to be saying, is something that can only be glimpsed in comparisons, because the world contains no actual examples of it. And yet the world glints and winks and shines everywhere with the possibility of it.” (Unapologetic, p. 123)

So there are lots of reasons Jesus might have spoken in parables. To fly under the radar; to catch people’s attention; to point at ideas and realities hard to capture with other kinds of language.  And Jesus’ parables do leave us thinking, and wondering. Even the “easy” ones, the ones Jesus pauses to explain, like the Parable of the Sower. 

In his explanation to the disciples, Jesus describes the different soils as different people. That’s a reading that makes sense in that moment, as he’s preaching his message to larger and larger crowds. Let’s just note the genius here: with this parable Jesus is doing exactly what he’s talking about. He’s tossing out this story like seeds into the crowd, knowing it will only take root in a few. And as he explains the parable to his friends, he is managing their expectations. He’s saying, Not everyone in that crowd is going to get it. And not everyone who gets it, will stick with it. But don’t be discouraged. Enough will get it. Enough will stick with it. Enough will go on to bear fruit. 

This is a parable that says something about results, about outcomes. When we are good soil, we bear fruit. Jesus talks often about fruitfulness. Those whose hearts and lives are changed by turning towards God are expected to live lives that are fruitful in some way. Not to earn salvation or God’s love by deeds or accomplishments! No; our deliverance, our belovedness are givens. But as our response, as our willing participation in God’s work of healing, liberating, and reconciling. 

These verses about bearing fruit can weigh heavily because we’re not sure what it looks like – and we may compare ourselves with others, thinking our garden should look just like theirs. I can be prone to that myself sometimes. But I think God expects our gardens and fields to be different. What fruitfulness God wants to see in your life is an intimate, prayerful question. For me, it means asking God often, What matters? Where should I be putting my best energy? And trying to notice, and follow, any holy nudges. 

Which brings me to the way I’d like to dwell with this parable a little together.

Jesus explains this as a parable about how the seed of God’s word lands in different people. But that might not be the only way to receive this parable. Parables are like that. As I read about the Sower and the seed, I notice that I have all those kinds of soil inside of me. Our lives are full of opportunities and invitations – to begin or deepen a relationship, to get involved with a project or process, to help or advocate or build or connect or learn or rest or share joy. To bear fruit for God’s kingdom. And we don’t take all those invitations. We can’t. God understands that. God knows our limitations better than we do. 

Take the seed that falls on rocky ground.This reminds me of the inevitable seed sprouting projects that come home from school with young children. The traditional Dixie cup, or even worse, the plastic bag… I love teachers, don’t get me wrong, but WHY do they do this to parents? Get a child invested in a tiny fragile living thing and then send it home, putting it on the parents to either transplant it – tearing up tiny roots that have nothing better to grow in than a damp paper towel or cotton ball – and try to nurse it along until the child loses interest and it dies, or leave it in the bag and hide it quietly and hope the child forgets about it. 

These plastic-bag seeds sprung up quickly! They had moisture and sun. But they do not have what they need to keep growing and become mature plants. 99% of the time, they are not going to get past the seedling stage. 

What’s like that in my life?… In these seedlings I recognize my temporary enthusiasms, things that are gripping and exciting and urgent for a day or a week, but then fade into the background. For whatever reason, they didn’t get rooted in my life. Maybe because I didn’t take the time to plant them well. Maybe because I’m not the right soil for that project. 

Right now I’m working hard – I think many of you are, too – to keep our renewed commitment to racial equity from being one of these quick-to-grow, quick-to-wither plants. Transplanting the seedling from that Dixie cup to a pot, with soil and drainage. Watering it, putting it in the sun. Committing to tending it for a season, and seeing what it may bear. 

Next there are the seeds that get established OK, but then get overgrown by weeds. Weeds that tangle around, stealing the sun and the water, crowding and choking the young plant. Oh my gosh, so many things are like that for me. There are a lot of weeds right now, y’all. The ongoing thrum of anxiety, stress, grief – over lost opportunities, lost people, lost normalcy – all of that is big stuff that we can’t turn off. It may weigh heavier some days and lighter others, but it’s always there. 

It’s why I’ve pulled back on some impulses to create LOTS of content and LOTS of opportunities in our virtual church household. Sure, some of us have more time now than we did in the Before-times – but most of us have less bandwidth, less mental, emotional, and/or spiritual capacity.  A lot of things we might like to do in principal are getting choked out by the cares of the world, as Jesus says.

And then there are the seeds that the birds grab before they even get rooted. I struggled a little with finding this in my life until I realized – these are the seeds that never even start to grow. These are the opportunities and possibilities that cross my path, but don’t even register. I don’t click the link. I have a schedule conflict and don’t make it to the event. I don’t ask the next question that would take the conversation somewhere deeper. I know these misses happen all the time – even though I try to pay attention and notice which of the thousands of things that cross my path have that glint or shimmer of holy possibility. 

Now and then I recognize a miss, and grieve it. But most of the time I don’t even know the misses happen. That doesn’t keep me up nights… much – because I trust in God’s Plans B, C, D, E, F, G, and so on. Maybe that seed bounced off me and got nobbled by a bird. But somewhere else – I hope, I pray – a seed landed in warm, rich, moist soil, soft and deep enough to send down roots. 

And that’s where this parable points us. It’s a parable of reassurance. Maybe only a quarter of the seed lands in the good soil. But the ones that land in the right soil at the right time – they grow enough that there will be a harvest. A banquet. 

As I was working on this sermon, my husband Phil was out in the garden picking the first fresh pea pods off our pea plants. He picked a quart of peas – and that’s just the beginning. And each of our happy, prolific pea plants started as one pea. One. Pea. 

Now, it was work to give those pea plants good, rich soil, and make sure they get enough water and enough sun – even cutting down some old dead trees a few years ago! – and to keep critters from eating the seedlings. But it’s not work to make the plant grow, or bear fruit. If the conditions are right, the plant just *does* that. 

Our lives are full of opportunities and invitations to be part of God’s work of healing, liberating, and reconciling. And some of those possibilities WILL land in good soil. The season is right; there’s just enough sun, just enough rain; and the seed takes root. When something is really rooted in your good soil, it uses the gifts and skills you already have – AND it calls you into getting better at what it needs from you. When something is really rooted in your good soil, you don’t have to talk yourself into doing it because your heart is already there. Maybe it feels easy, maybe it feels hard – but it draws you onward. It grows. 

Here’s an example of something I currently want to drop everything else and work on: Turning the last fourteen chapters of the Book of Genesis into a script and a virtual Vacation Bible School for August. It’s not a big or significant project by many standards. And there are moments when I reproach myself for wanting to put my time into something fun and frivolous.

But then I remind myself of the endgame, the harvest I’m trying to cultivate with projects like this: Nurturing kids- and grownups! – in this church whose consciences and imaginations are deeply formed by Scripture, and its call to be people of justice, mercy, and reconciliation. 

When something is deeply rooted in your good soil, you want to give it your time and energy and skill. It’s okay that not everything is like that. But it’s glorious that some things are. 

We all have rocky soil within us, friends – and weeds that tangle and crowd. But we have good earth too – rich soil where things can grow, where things are already growing, already bearing fruit, already turning one seed into twenty or forty or a hundred. We all have the capacity to grow something for God’s kingdom – watermelons or cherries, zucchini or chives or potatoes… After all, fruitfulness comes in all shapes, sizes and flavors, thanks be to God! 

Question: 

Is there something in your life that you want to weed around, and water, and give a little more chance to grow? …