Category Archives: Sermons

Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, February 12

You can read today’s lessons by clicking here! 

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

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

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

How hard can it be? It’s simple. 

It’s not simple.

We are complicated, and the world is complicated.

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

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

Doing good – choosing good – is hard.

Our Psalm names that in one evocative line:

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

To paraphrase loosely:

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

for me to consistently follow God’s ways!  

Deuteronomy says, Just do what’s right! 

Psalm 119 says, I wish it were that simple.

And then … there’s today’s Gospel.

Oh, Lordy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a sermon for another day! 

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

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

We know this. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we heard some pushback about that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They have competing values within themselves. 

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

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

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

Hard work – but such essential work. 

Doing good, choosing good, knowing good is complicated. 

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

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

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

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

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

Let me take another brief detour – about divorce. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I definitely have some questions for Jesus about all this. 

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

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

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

My Jesus understands that. 

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

Being good, doing good, choosing good is complicated. 

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

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

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

Turning is a foundational Christian practice. 

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

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

And our Sunday lessons are starting to lean towards it. 

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

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

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

Let me know if you would like a conversation partner. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen. 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Sermon, Feb. 5

Today we are celebrating Candlemas! 

Its other name is the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, which is the Gospel story we just heard.

This holy day comes deep in the winter, at a time of year when people are longing for spring and the return of longer days. 

So over the centuries – especially as Christianity moved into more northern regions with longer, darker winters – the holy day became a festival of light and a time to bless candles, to be burned in times of peril, storms, or sickness.

Candlemas is a minor feast of the church, falling on February 2. 

We bring it into Sunday church here because there’s a Candlemas story about St Dunstan, the saint of our church, and that makes it special for us.

The story goes like this… 

It happens about eleven hundred years ago! 

In the western part of England, where winters were long and cold and dark and sometimes stormy. 

And it wasn’t just the winters that were hard.

It was a time of violence, poverty, sickness, corruption, and unjust rulers. 

It was Candlemas Eve, and everyone in the village was at church. In the crowd was a young woman named Cynethrith. She was married and was expecting a child. 

She was a woman of deep faith, and she prayed every day that her child would grow up to be someone who could help her country and her people. 

So, everybody came to church for Candlemas, and they brought their candles to bless. 

This was before electricity, so they didn’t have flashlights or lamps with bulbs… just candles, and little lamps that burned oil or fat, and the fireplaces in their homes. 

Imagine a little stone church full of candlelight! It must have been beautiful. 

But! There was a big storm that night…. And suddenly, in the middle of the praying and singing, a gust of wind blew through the church and blew out everybody’s candles! Every single one! 

The church was in total darkness! Adults cried out. Children wept. The priest begged everyone to stay calm. 

Nobody had lighters or matches – they didn’t exist yet! 

But then, suddenly, there was light again. 

The candle that Cynethrith was holding had lit – all by itself. 

As if by magic. As if by a miracle. 

She shared that holy and mysterious flame to her neighbors, and the light spread until the whole church was lit up again. 

The lighting of Cynethrith’s candle was a sign of what her baby would become: Saint Dunstan, monk, friend of kings, founder of monasteries, and Archbishop of Canterbury, a leader who would share and spread Christ’s light in difficult times. 

And it was a sign of her own role as the mother of a saint, kindling God’s light in her son’s heart. 

Dunstan shined his light in the difficult times when he lived.

Just like Jesus says in our Song of Faith today: Be light! Be salt!  

This is part of a big sermon Jesus preached. 

We heard the beginning last week: A big crowd had gathered, so Jesus went up on a hill so people could see and hear him, and preached to the crowd. 

The people in that crowd weren’t rich or important or special.

They were ordinary people from the villages and countryside.

Matthew just told us that Jesus was healing people who were sick or disabled or hurt, so the crowd probably included a lot of people who were sick or disabled or hurt, and their loved ones. 

And Jesus starts his sermon off with a big surprise for everybody:

It’s not the people who are rich and important and special in their own eyes who are really on top of the world.

People who are grieving or struggling, people who feel hopeless, people who are full of frustration and yearning for a better world, people who take time to be kind instead of always pushing to get ahead, people who are bullied and bothered for doing what is right – those are the people who are especially held in God’s love.

Those are actually the people who really matter in the world, no matter how it might look on the surface.  

Then he goes on to tell this group of ordinary, unimportant people, including kids and old people and sick and disabled people and all kinds of folks – he tells them: 

You are the salt of the earth!

You are the light of the world! 

I want us to hear those words, that thing Jesus is telling us about ourselves – and I do think he’s speaking to us as well as that original crowd. 

What does it mean to be salt and light? 

Salt and light are both things where a little bit can make a big difference. 

Let’s start with salt. 

When food is flavored just right, it doesn’t just taste like salt, right?

Salt brings out the other flavors. It doesn’t dominate. 

But you can really tell the difference between food that has just the right amount of salt – or not enough – or too much! 

And this stuff Jesus says about salt losing its saltiness? 

That’s not a thing. Salt is very simple.  

It’s a sodium cation and a chloride anion. NaCl. It doesn’t go bad. 

There are two ways we can read what Jesus says here: 

Either he is surprisingly uninformed about salt,

Or he’s intentionally saying something that can’t happen. 

Like, if salt just refuses to be salt, then sure, it’s basically sand, and the best use for it is to scatter it on an icy spot. 

But it is salt’s nature to be salty.

Jesu says we can trust our God-given saltiness and just let ourselves get mixed in and spice up the world. 

A little salt can change and improve the flavor of the whole dish. 

And a room with one candle in it – or a sky with one star – is so different from total darkness. 

Who grew up with the song? 

“This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine!… 

Hide it under a bushel? NO! I’m going to let it shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine…”  

In my research this week I learned a fun fact.

Think about a lit candle in the dark. 

If you were in a wide open, dark space, and you turned around and started walking away from that candle, and looked back at it now and then, how far away do you think you could still see it? …. Two physicists studied this question, and they found that it’s about 1.6 miles. 

They did it by comparing it with the visibility of stars from earth! 

At about 1.6 miles, a candle flame is about the same brightness as some of the stars that we can just barely see from earth. 

1.6 miles is a lot farther than I would have guessed!

For those who know the local terrain: From here at St. Dunstan’s, it’s about 1.6 miles to the intersection of University Avenue and Whitney Way. 

Even a single candle can shine its light pretty far!…. 

In a commentary on today’s Gospel, The Salt Project says, “Like salt and light, God made you as a small thing that can make a big difference for a larger whole. God made you to spice things up — not to overpower the dish, but to enliven it… And likewise, God made you to shine, as only you can: a flame that can light up an entire room, or help guide a lost traveler home… But we do have to claim and embrace and live out these gifts. We do have to actually be salty and luminous…  [In the Sermon on the Mount,] Jesus does not say, Follow these instructions and you’ll be blessed.  Rather, he says, You are already blessed with gifts for blessing the world — so go and bless! Spice and shine!”

I love that. Spice and shine, dear ones!

But I want to explore one more thing before we move on. 

Light is one of the big themes of the season of Epiphany.

It’s in our songs and prayers and Scriptures all over the place. 

Over the past few years I have been trying to pay attention to how we talk about light – and especially how we talk about darkness. 

I read an article a couple of weeks ago by a Christian songwriter who’s been thinking about this too – Steve Thorngate. 

First, he lays out some of the tensions and complexities. 

He writes, “There is a long history in the church of using words like light, white, bright, and fair to [suggest] goodness in a straightforward way – and words like dark, black, shade, and dim to [mean] the opposite. Most instances… were not written for explicitly racist purposes (though some were). Still, this language has thrived alongside racism in White-dominated church contexts. And language—especially ritual language, repeated again and again—has great power among those who speak or hear it, [beyond] the intent of its creators. So there is a compelling case to simply avoid this whole family of descriptive language at church, [because] it can be and has been used to bolster White supremacy.” 

On the other hand, he says, “The Bible is chock-full of light/dark imagery, with much (though not all) of it presenting light as the positive side of the coin.”

Furthermore, he says, “[Light and dark] language, after all, is more than biblical: it’s elemental. It names a fundamental experience of all living things. The earth’s days and seasons are defined by the planet’s relationship with the sun’s rays…These cycles of darkness and light have shaped creatures, ecosystems, and communities across generations and continents, and the depth of this shared reality makes it a rich source for [Christian symbolic] language. This universal experience of time and of the created order… is fundamental to Christian [worship].” 

That’s an especially salient point here at Candlemas. 

You might know at least two other celebrations on February 2nd. 

Can anybody name one? … (Groundhog Day; Imbolc.)

February 2nd is important, is named and celebrated in all these ways, because it falls halfway between the winter solstice – the shortest day, the longest night – and the spring equinox, when the night and day are the same length; after that the days start to get longer than the nights.

So February 2nd is a human way of naming a planetary waypoint, a particular moment in the interaction of the Earth’s tilted turning in relation to the Sun. 

And we humans, observers and meaning-makers, have layered on all these feasts that are different ways of saying that we are yearning for light and spring and rebirth. 

Light and dark really do have this elemental, fundamental meaning. But that doesn’t free us from responsibility to be thoughtful in using this language, with its history of harm. 

Steve Thorngate writes that he has decided – for now – to keep using these images in his songs, but carefully, and with a few guidelines. 

For example: Think about what we mean when we talk about light. “Light can mean illumination, vision, transparency, openness, the revealing of secrets.” Those meanings stay close to the literal function of light. 

But let’s be careful about layering on more moral or value-laden meanings, like innocence, goodness, cleanness, purity. 

He also suggests that we be very cautious about using negative language for darkness – and look for opportunities to say positive things about darkness, too. He writes, “Fertile soil is dark. A dark sky without light pollution promotes healthy rest and… visibility. Secrets and mysteries aren’t always bad things.” 

And he urges us to work on broadening and diversifying the language and imagery we use in worship – the ways we talk about God and about our Christian vocation. 

I wonder what it would be like to spend a whole Epiphany exploring salt, instead of light? There would have to be lots of snacks!

Thorngate’s essay summed up a lot of things I’ve been thinking about – and I’ve been trying to follow similar guidelines for a while. But I am still thinking and wondering about it all. 

I invite you to think and wonder with me.

How we can use these images that are so central in our Scriptures and that are so natural to us as human beings who live on a planet that spins from dark to light, dark to light again; but also who live in a society with a deep and persistent history of sorting and ranking people based on their skin color, and using darkness to stand for ignorance or evil? 

I invite you to wonder and notice with me… and if you have ideas or questions or noticings, let’s talk about it. 

 

 

SOURCES

The Salt Project’s commentary on this Gospel: 

https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/2/3/salt-and-light-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-epiphany-5

About candle flames and distance:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/07/31/72658/how-far-can-the-human-eye-see-a-candle-flame/

Steve Thorngate on light and dark imagery:

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/features/should-we-avoid-liturgical-language-light-and-dark

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Jan. 15

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.

In our calendar of Sunday scripture readings, we’re in the year of Matthew’s Gospel. But this is one of the Sundays when we get a little chunk of John’s Gospel for some reason. 

Next week we’ll hear Matthew’s version of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples. That might be more familiar: Jesus walks along the shore of the sea of Galilee and calls these young men away from their nets and their boats. 

John’s version of the calling of the first disciples isn’t really a calling at all. It’s more of a sending. 

Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist. He’s already left home and work and family to follow a rabbi, a teacher. 

But then his rabbi, John the Baptist, tells him that Jesus is the real deal. The Lamb of God. 

So Andrew and another guy go follow Jesus. 

And Jesus, naturally enough, sees them following him and asks, What’s up?

Actually, he asks: What are you looking for? 

This question makes a lot of sense when we realize Jesus surely knew that these men – who may have been quite young, teenagers even – have literally just walked away from John the Baptist to start following him. 

This rabbi-hopping suggests that they were seekers, looking for someone to offer them meaning, purpose, hope, a way to spend their days. 

So he asks: What are you looking for? 

And they don’t know how to answer. 

I love that; it’s so real. I wouldn’t have an answer ready either.

I’ve had those moments, when somebody asks an unexpectedly profound or intense question, and I just stare at them and say, “Um. Huh.”  

And then maybe I say something like, “So where are you staying while you’re in town?”

Which is what Andrew and the other guy do. 

And Jesus says, Come and see. 

So they go with him to where he is staying. Some cheap first-century AirBnB or hotel room in a nearby village, probably. 

It’s clear that the where isn’t really that important.

The who is what’s important. 

The text notes that it was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe that means it was coming up on dinnertime by the time they arrived, so they decided to stick around. 

Some commentators think we’re meant to assume it was a Friday, so sunset and the Sabbath were approaching, and that these disciples ended up spending the Sabbath with Jesus – Friday evening and all day Saturday. 

I wonder what happened, during those hours. Was Jesus preaching or teaching? Were they just sitting together over some simple food and a little wine and talking, talking, talking about the world? 

Were they doing ordinary everyday things? Was Jesus, whom Mark describes as a carpenter, doing little woodwork to earn his keep? Maybe building a bench, or a storage box, or a cradle? 

Who knows? Just being around him, being near him, listening to him, awakened something in Andrew. 

Curiosity. Hope. Love. Loyalty. 

We meet someone like that, now and then, in life… Someone who earns our esteem or our devotion very quickly, for reasons it’s hard to put a finger on.  

And sometimes it turns out that our first instincts were wrong. Sometimes charisma misleads us; sometimes people who are compelling, who draw others to them, turn out not to have much substance, or worse, to be selfish, exploitative, abusive. 

But other times, when you keep abiding with that person, you find that they are what they seem to be, and more. Not perfect, but true. Not perhaps always nice, but good. 

A person who looks at you and you can see in their eyes that they really do love you just the way you are, but also, they’re not going to leave you that way. And you want to step up to being the person they know you could be. 

A person who you just want to hang around because they are going to make something happen, something that matters, and you want to be there to see it. 

Andrew finds something like that, in his hours abiding with Jesus.

Something that makes him give Jesus a particular name, when he describes him to his brother Simon: We have found the Messiah. 

John offers us a translation of Messiah, a Hebrew word. It means, the Anointed. (In Greek, that’s Christos – the source of the word Christ, which is a title we give Jesus, not part of his name.) 

What would that word have meant to Simon – to Andrew? To say that Jesus was the Messiah? 

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote a piece just this week about the history of the idea of the Messiah. The practice of anointing someone with oil as a sign of their taking on a new special, sacred role begins in the time of Moses, during the wilderness journey, with the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests to serve God in the tabernacle, the sacred tent.  

Anointing as a mark of a new status came to extend to kings as well as priests, in the following centuries. 

After the time of King David, the peak of Israel’s political and economic power, expectations that God would send an Anointed One focused on a King, a political leader who would bring back the good old days. Ruttenberg writes, “The hope for a Messiah was a hope to get back to how things should be soon in the current timeline.”

But as first the Northern Kingdom, then Judea, are conquered by the great empires of the time, hopes for an earthly king start to feel more and more distant. 

The Messiah becomes e a more otherworldly figure. Someone who will bring in the World-to-come, the coming Age. 

Our Isaiah text this morning hints at that turn: extending the vision for God’s Holy One beyond restoring Judah to its pre-conquest state, to bringing Light and Salvation to all nations of the earth. 

That’s the vision of Messiah that would have been circulating in Jesus’ time – someone sent by God to transform the world. 

That’s the name Andrew puts to what he is hearing and seeing and experiencing as he spends time with Jesus. 

That’s what motivates him to bring Simon along – Simon Peter, who will become one of Jesus’ closest friends and, later, the central leader of early Christianity. 

I want to turn back to Jesus’ words in this Gospel passage. 

What are you looking for? 

Come and see. 

I think John kind of means for Jesus to break the fourth wall, in theater terms, when he asks: What are you looking for? When he says: Come and see. 

I think John’s Jesus is looking directly into the camera when he says these lines. 

The Gospel writer we know as John is well aware that the readers of his Gospel will not have a chance to abide with the earthly Jesus. That’s why he’s writing a Gospel: to try to pass on something he finds so important, so compelling, so transformational, that he urgently wants to share it, to pass it on. 

He wants his readers to be drawn into this scene. To hear Jesus speaking to them. To us. 

And both of the things Jesus says – the question, the invitation – point towards an important word that’s hiding in today’s Gospel. 

The word is Abide. 

Well: In New Testament Greek, it’s meno. 

In reading about this passage, I saw somebody say that it’s a very Johannine word – a word typical of John’s Gospel.

Well, I didn’t take their word for it – I looked it up. There are tools for this kind of thing! 

That word is used three times in Matthew’s Gospel.

Twice in Mark’s. Six times in Luke’s. 

And somewhere in the ballpark of forty, in John. 

So. Okay. Fair to say this word matters to John.

In John’s often poetic and mystical writing style, there are lots of words that mean more than they mean. 

(That’s one of the reasons I wish we had a John year in the lectionary is that we could really explore that and follow through!)   

So Meno means remain. Also translated as dwell, stay, and abide. 

It’s an important term for John, somehow. 

I wonder if John chapter 15 is the key text for understanding what “abide” means. This is part of Jesus’ long speech at his last supper with his friends. 

Jesus tells them, Abide in me as I abide in you. 

I am the vine, you are the branches; the branches can only be sustained by the vine if they abide in the vine. 

As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love. 

I like that the NRSV, the Bible translation we usually use, chooses the word Abide here. 

It’s not an everyday word and it makes us pause and perhaps think about how abiding is different from just staying or remaining. 

“Remain in my love” just doesn’t have the same feel. 

But I wish that our translation used abide other places too, to make it clearer that this is a core word for John. In fact, by the time we get to the disciples staying with Jesus in chapter 1, verse 39, John has used meno three times already.

John the Baptist twice says that he saw the Holy Sprit abide on Jesus at his baptism. And the disciples’ question uses meno too – Where are you abiding? 

I find Abide to be a beautiful and evocative word. 

“Abide” is related to “abode”, a place where you live; “dwell” also captures this sense of really settling in somewhere with intention, not just hanging around between other things. 

For me “abide” – as opposed to “stay” or “remain” – has overtones of slowing down, being present, belonging, putting down roots. 

And even though John’s Jesus won’t talk about the deeper meanings of abiding until much later, his words in this Gospel text invite abiding. 

What are you looking for? 

The question takes our outward-bound energy and turns it inward: what’s this really about? What feels unfulfilled or insufficient in you, that’s driving your busy-ness, your seeking and striving? 

What do you really need? What do you want, deep down inside?

I don’t think it bothers Jesus at all that they can’t answer. 

That I can’t answer. 

It’s a question to sit with – to abide with. 

But in the meantime, while we’re asking ourselves, What am I looking for?… in the meantime, John’s Jesus says, Come and see. 

Next week we’ll hear the call of Simon and Andrew again. 

In Matthew’s version, Jesus’ first words to them are: Follow me.  

Follow me. A command, an invitation? A little of both?

Here, instead, John’s Jesus says: Come and see. 

It is a command, grammatically speaking. 

But it’s an interesting contrast with Follow me.

Follow me calls for movement: get up and go.

Come and see invites arrival followed by attentive presence. 

Follow me means decide, commit, NOW. Immediately. 

Come and see calls the disciples closer – calls us closer – but leaves the next step in our hands. 

In Greek as in English, the meaning of “see” spreads out beyond literal sight to mean understand, comprehend, experience, know. 

If we come and see – if we abide a while with Jesus – will we find something there that deepens our love, our loyalty, our curiosity? Our hope?  

There’s a lot to wonder and a lot to say about what it means to abide with Jesus when we can’t sit down for a meal or watch the sunset with the living breathing man, as Andrew could. 

But I’m grateful to know John’s Jesus.

I do strive to follow Jesus, with all the energy and direction that implies. 

But it is a balm to my soul to be reminded that movement and activity isn’t the only thing – or in John, even the primary thing – that Jesus asks of us. 

I’m grateful for Jesus’ invitation, here, to abide with my own deep self, to wonder what I am really looking for. 

And I’m grateful to be reminded that in my life with Christ, when I’m not sure where to go, it is sometimes okay to just be.

 

 

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the Messiah idea: 

https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/anointed

Baptism, Church Seasons & Holy Days, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, January 8

  1. About the Gospels.
    1. Start with basics; bear with me
      1. Bible – a collection of many kinds of texts spanning over a thousand years that, together, tell the story of God’s relationship with God’s people. 
      2. Old Testament – before Jesus, scripture we share with the Jews; New Testament – foundational texts of Christianity. 
      3. New Testament includes letters, sermons, prophetic texts, a chronicle of the early church, and four different accounts of the life, teaching, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. = Gospels. 
      4. Sunday lectionary (calendar of readings) – three of these get their own “year”. 
    2. Some folks find those many voices confounding. If all this Jesus stuff was real, why don’t we have one clear account of it? Why, instead, four, that differ on many details & some big stuff too? 
      1. I find the four voices of the Gospels very human, very real, and very reassuring. I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the anchors of my faith. 
      2. An analogy for us: Imagine a funeral, or a gathering before or after. 
        1. People share memories, stories, what that person was like and what they meant to them. 
        2. Some things – big events, oft-repeated stories – will be told much the same by everyone, though perhaps some differences – how you understood that person, your relationship with them, your own personality and perspective. 
        3. Other memories or impressions aren’t shared as widely – part of someone’s particular relationship with the deceased, or an experience that only a couple of people shared. 
        4. When you put it all together, you get a sense of who that person was. But no one person has the whole picture. And often people’s impressions don’t all line up neatly. 
        5. If you asked four people to write down that person’s life, those four versions would be pretty different. 
      2. Now, in our funeral analogy, those four people probably all knew the deceased. It’s unclear whether any of our Gospel writers knew Jesus directly. 
        1. The Gospels seem to have been written down between thirty and sixty years after Jesus’ death. 
        2. But let me clear up a minor pet peeve. You might have heard that the life expectancy in Jesus’ time was around forty. That does not mean that people dropped dead at forty! 
          1. Numbers like that are an average that includes infant mortality, which was really really high right up to the mid-20th century. 
          2. Most people who survived early childhood might easily live to 55 or older; and many lived to seventy, eighty, or ninety. 
          3. Many of Jesus’ followers were younger than him. The Gospel writers seem to have used earlier written sources, now lost; but they could also easily have known people who did know Jesus and were present at the events they describe. 
          4. And talking with people with different memories and interpretations could be part of why the Gospels are different. 
  1. Let’s talk about the voices of the Gospels.
    1. Seminary exercise: read the first verse of all four Gospels – gives you a good sense of their voices and agendas. 
    2. Baptism of Jesus kind of does too. 
      1. It’s in all four, which doesn’t go without saying. 
      2. Look at your sheet. Vaguely chronological order, though Matthew and Luke may have been written around the same time, or Luke may be a little later than Matthew. 
        1. How John the Baptist is introduced, and whatever is said about Jesus’ actual baptism, in all four. (There’s more about John in all four, and there are interesting differences – but beyond our scope!) 
  2. First, and briefly: what is happening here? 
      1. John was a prophet and religious ascetic – meaning he chose simplicity and poverty – who hung out in the wilderness outside Jerusalem. He preached a message of metanoia, to use the Greek word. I dislike the translation of metanoia as “repentance”; it feels limiting to me. 
        1. Fave translator, David Bentley Hart: “a baptism of the heart’s transformation”; John: “Change your hearts, for the kingdom of the heavens has come near!” 
      2. Baptism – an adaptation of Jewish practices of ritual washing or bathing. Greek word baptizo just means to immerse or dunk. 
      3. There’s a whole thing about how John’s baptism was just a water baptism, but Christian baptism is with water and the Holy Spirit. That is important but we will not go down that rabbit hole today. 
      4. In all four Gospels, Jesus’ baptism by John is the beginning of his public ministry. Apart from the birth stories and one childhood story, he has been invisible for thirty years, presumably living an ordinary life and waiting for the right time. 
  1. MARK
    1. First written Gospel, perhaps as early as 66 – soon after the death of the apostle Paul, whose letters are our earliest window into the beliefs and life of the early church. 
    2. (When we say 66, by the way, the Zero that we’re counting from is in theory the year Jesus was born. And he would have died around the year 33, give or take.) 
    3. Mark dives right into the story – Jesus is baptized by John in the ninth verse – the sixth sentence – of his Gospel. 
    4. Jesus is coming from Nazareth of Galilee – his hometown and region. About 30 miles to the Jordan River, depending on where exactly John was baptizing. Not just a casual day trip, or stopping by on his way somewhere else. 
    5. As he is baptized, Jesus has a vision, hears a voice: “YOU ARE my Son, the Beloved.” Affirmation and comfort. And then – immediately – the divine Spirit drives him into the wilderness. We get that story at the beginning of Lent, late in February!
    6. What’s Markan about it? Brisk, clear, no nonsense. Purposeful. It happens and the story moves on. 
  1. MATTHEW
    1. Matthew and Luke both knew Mark’s Gospel and used it as a source. 
    2. Matthew follows Mark pretty closely here, but adds this dialogue between John and Jesus: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then John consented.”
      1. Maybe this happened; maybe Matthew is capturing the testimony of an eyewitness that Mark didn’t have.
      2. But maybe Matthew adds this to address a discomfort that all the Gospels besides Mark seem to share. 
        1. Why would Jesus, God’s Son, the Beloved, need this weird wilderness preacher to shove him down in the water of this muddy river, as a sign of repentance? 
        1. Furthermore: There are hints in the Gospels that John had followers, disciples, and that his movement continued at least for a while beyond his death – which probably happened just a few months after Jesus’ baptism. 
          1. Some of John’s followers came to follow Jesus instead, but others may have felt like John was the real deal. The fact that Jesus came to John for baptism could seem to seal their guy’s position. 
        2. Jesus’ answer in Matthew is vague: Let it be so, to fulfill all righteousness. Okay, boss. John does as he is told. And again, Jesus has a vision – heavens open, dove-like Spirit, voice. 
          1. But this time the voice says, THIS IS my Son, the Beloved. Not YOU ARE. Implies a broader audience – not just Jesus hearing, but others receiving this revelation of Jesus’ true identity. 
      2. What’s Matthean about this? Not the most distinctive; John calling people a brood of vipers, a few verses earlier, is more on brand. 
        1. Emphasis on fulfillment – though usually Matthew has a specific passage from the Hebrew Bible that he describes Jesus as fulfilling. 
  1. LUKE
    1. Luke does not actually describe John baptizing Jesus. He says, “When all the people had been baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized…” I think that’s how Luke manifests his discomfort about this baptism – by kind of rushing past it. 
      1. Again, the heavens open, there’s a dove, there’s a voice. But this isn’t just Jesus’ vision anymore – the words “he saw” drop out. And the Holy Spirit descends IN BODILY FORM like a dove. Maybe Luke is trying to make sense of Mark’s metaphorical language and decides there must have been an ACTUAL REAL HOLY DOVE. 
      2. What’s Lukan about this? 
        1. “John son of Zechariah” – Luke is the Gospel that gives John a backstory. 
        2. Also: Luke doing this very Lukan thing of naming a bunch of government officials. He likes historical details, though he sometimes gets them wrong, and he likes contrasting the big global-empire scale stuff with the very local events he’s describing, which secretly have cosmic significance. 
  2. JOHN
    1. Confusing that this is another John. And the John of Revelation is yet another John. What can you do? 
    2. John’s language is cosmic and poetic right from the start. The first verse of his Gospel is, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That sets the tone! 
    3. What’s Johannine – John-ish – about this? Lots. 
      1. One of John’s themes: bearing witness. The role of the Church and her members – to bear witness or testify to what we have seen and experienced, and how God has acted in our lives. 
      2. John describes the Baptist’s mission: to testify to the Light, which is Jesus.
        1. Luke’s birth story for John the Baptist has a similar upshot – he is destined from before his birth to prepare the way for God’s Messiah. This is just John’s very Johannine way of saying the same thing. 
      3. John goes a step further than Luke and doesn’t “show” Jesus’ baptism at all; it happens offscreen, so to speak. 
        1. This is another John thing. I think John – the latest-written Gospel – assumes people have read one of the others and know the basic plot. So sometimes he doesn’t tell about the big events, but comments on them instead.
        2. The biggest example: the Last Supper. John’s Jesus has a long farewell speech that evening, but he does not describe the meal itself. He assumes you know. 
        3. Here – John’s John the Baptist tells about baptizing Jesus, bears witness to what he has seen and heard:  God’s Spirit descending on Jesus, marking him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
    4. So there we have it. The baptism of Jesus, the beginning of his public ministry, refracted through the lenses of four different Gospel voices. 
  1. VIII. The baptism of Christ – the Gospel event that the church always celebrates on the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany – raises a kind of riddle for the church. Jesus was baptized; Jesus told his followers to baptize people; but Jesus did not baptize people. Why not?
    1. One possibility: Jesus’ insight into how best to build his movement. In the early phases, you just need people to follow and listen and spread the word. 
      1. It’s later in the process of movement-building and eventually institution-building that you need a boundary rite, something to mark who’s fully committed, and who’s an outsider or inquirer.
    2. Second – there’s a cranky bit in one of Paul’s letters where it sounds like people are arguing about who’s most important, based on who baptized them. (Paul is disgusted and wants none of it.) 
      1. I can imagine that Jesus knew that kind of thing would happen, and that it would be counter to his hopes for equity and mutual service within the church. 
      2. He never baptized anyone so that there could not be people who would try to set themselves apart as having been baptized by Christ himself. 
    3. I think those are both good reasons. But it’s completely possible that there are other reasons we cannot know. It’s definitely on my list of questions to ask someday!
  2. What our baptism, the church’s practice of baptism, means for US is another sermon, or several. But let’s wonder briefly what Jesus’ baptism means to us. Why DID Jesus need – or choose – to be baptized by John? As John says in Matthew: Why are you coming to me? 
    1. There’s much of mystery here too – no clear or complete answers on this side of things. But when I put these four accounts side by side, I noticed something I hadn’t thought about before.
      1. In three of the Gospels, Jesus’ baptism follows some kind of birth story. 
        1. Luke has the one we all know best, with Caesar Augustus and the stable and the shepherds. 
        2. Matthew has the angel telling Joseph in a dream that he should take Mary as his wife despite her mysterious pregnancy; and he has the wise men, the astrologers, who come to visit the child, and King Herod trying to kill him, forcing the family to flee. 
        3. John’s birth story is very different, but it’s there. He names Jesus as the Word, and the Light; he tells us that from the beginning of everything, Jesus was with God, and was God. And then in the fulness of time, the true Light came into the world; the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. 
        4. And then there’s Mark. The only thing Mark says about where Jesus comes from is Nazareth. There is no birth story in Mark.
      2. Or is there? 
        1. When I’m talking with families about baptism, I like to say that baptism is, among other things, a symbolic birth. There’s water and mess and crying and joy and naming and welcome. 
        1. What if Jesus’ baptism is Mark’s birth story? 
          1. There is water, and there is rending open.  
          2. There is naming, and beginning. 
          3. There is a Voice crying out with joy: My Son! I am delighted with you! 
        2. I like thinking of Jesus’ baptism as another birth story. It helps ease the sudden jump in the church’s calendar from the babe in the manger to the full-grown man standing in the river. 
      2. Just as the other Gospels tell us that God chose to be born among us as a baby, Mark tells us that God chose to join that crowd gathered by the Jordan – the desperate, the confused, the curious, the skeptical, dusty and poor and weary and wary.  God chose to join that crowd, and then to step out from among them, and into the waters, to be born among us and for us. Amen. 
Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Christmas Eve, 4:30 & 9PM

A few months ago I stumbled on a book called “A Church Year-Book of Social Justice,” for the year 1919 to 1920. It was compiled by the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a spiritual community of lay and ordained women in the Episcopal Church. 

The book has a short reading for each day of the church year, exploring Christian thinking over the centuries and how it relates to “the great principles of social justice which preoccupy our own time.” 

As an Advent practice this year, I started posting the readings for each day on Facebook. That drew me into pondering what our siblings in faith were thinking and talking about, just over a century ago. 

1919 was a tough year. 

World War I had just ended – a shocking, brutal disruption. 

A deadly influenza pandemic closely followed the war, killing many children, healthy young adults and elders.

And then there were the ongoing struggles of poverty and unregulated industrial development. 

Upton Sinclair published his expose of the meat industry, The Jungle, in 1906.  

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 garment workers, was in 1911. 

The West Virginia Mine Wars, a series of violent clashes as mine workers struggled to organize for safer working conditions, began in 1912. 

There were big reasons that social justice was on the hearts and minds of people of faith and conscience in 1919. 

As I’ve posted readings from the Yearbook day by day for the past month, I’ve noticed that some don’t resonate – don’t “hold up.” But other passages have given me a vivid sense of standing with these siblings in faith a century ago. 

W. E. Orchard wrote: “In the anguish of the hour, when kingdoms are rocking to their base, the social structure of modern civilization is strained to the breaking point, and all hearts are full of fear…”

Who’s felt like that at some moment in the past few years?… 

In this era of climate change and the overwhelm of capitalism’s excesses, I feel like this text may be MORE relevant to us than it was when John Ruskin first wrote it in 1917: 

“Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? … The insects that we crush are our judges, the moments we fret away are our judges, the elements that feed us judge as they minister, and the pleasures that deceive us judge as they indulge.”

And then there’s this, from the great preacher Phillips Brooks: 

“The real question everywhere is whether the world, distracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be – or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already… It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever be repaired and stand just as they stood before. The time has come when something more than mere repair and restoration of the old is necessary. The old must die and a new must come forth out of its tomb.”

I resonate with every word of that passage. 

One day, when I posted some particularly salient snippet to Facebook, I asked: Is it comforting or disconcerting to know that people living a century ago also felt like civilization was strained to the breaking point? 

And some wise soul replied: Both. 

It’s comforting not to be alone with these feelings, to have the bold and hopeful and urgent words of these siblings in faith to encourage us. 

It’s comforting to know that humanity survived another century despite it all, and that some of the great challenges they faced are actually better now, thanks in part to the efforts of bold reformers who worked and fought for change. 

But it’s also disconcerting, the resonance of these texts with our present moment. 

The 20th century is hardly a consoling tale.

We know some of the costs and struggles to come. 

The Depression. Another world war, atomic weapons, the Holocaust. 

The bitter social strife, as well as the important legislative strides, of the 1960s. 

The recognition of environmental degradation in the 1970s. 

The rapid increase in economic inequality and incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Knowing that companions in faith a century ago also felt like their whole way of life was coming apart at the seams is no reassurance that our way of life is not coming apart at the seams. 

Dwelling with the 1919 Yearbook has made me think about time. 

We tend to think of time as a line that we’re moving along, in one direction. 

For example, we would draw the events I just named as tick marks along an arrow from 1900 towards 2000 and beyond. 

The Church brings another way of thinking about time alongside linear, historical time. 

Church time is all circles and cycles. Turning and returning. 

In the church’s time, it isn’t Christmas again; it’s just Christmas.

This Feast of the Incarnation is every Feast of the Incarnation.

[The Eucharist we will celebrate tonight is every Eucharist.]

We’re not recreating or re-enacting something.

We’re returning to something that has always been waiting for us. 

These are moments when we step into holy time, and meet the Divine present in our world in immediate and tangible ways. 

Thinking about the Yearbook from that perspective: It’s not just that people 100 years ago felt and thought similar things to what we might be feeling and thinking.

It’s that we’re all living Advent together. 

Brooks and Ruskin and the others are not just forebears but companions in this season of holy anticipation. 

Let me take this one step further. 

There’s everyday historical linear time and there’s the church’s cyclical time that returns and returns again. 

And then there’s God’s time.

Jesus, the baby we welcome tonight, when he grows up, will talk a lot about time. 

He will talk about two Ages, or Aeons, or Epochs, or Dispensations, or whatever fancy word you want to use for something we aren’t really equipped to comprehend. 

There’s the present Age, this messy ordinary world with all its problems; and then there’s the Age to Come, the Age of the Kingdom of God. 

The Age to Come is mysterious, distant, not yet fulfilled; and yet it’s not so far away that it’s irrelevant. 

It is, somehow, already dawning, already unfolding, within reach in small shimmering moments, in hopeful possibilities, in the thin places where grace breaks through. 

This kind of time isn’t linear time and it isn’t cyclical time. 

It’s more like, I don’t know, the before and after of a really good dream home makeover show: The way things are and the way things could be, transformed towards beauty and joy and wholeness.

In terms of the Present Age and the Age to Come, we are in the exact same Before situation not only as our early 20th century siblings from the Yearbook, but as Jesus’ first followers. 

We’re all watching and waiting and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

We’re all yearning for God’s great intervention in the confusion, struggle and suffering of our times.

Advent – the four-week church season that ended when the Feast of the Incarnation began at sunset this evening – Advent is a season of double anticipation. 

We anticipate Christmas; but we also anticipate the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the world. 

That holy After when Christ will return to earth and that new Age we have been taught to hope for will come to fruition. 

The theologian Fleming Rutledge writes, “In Advent, we don’t [just] pretend, as I once thought, that we are in the darkness before the birth of Christ. Rather, we take a good hard look at the darkness we are in now, facing and defining it honestly, so that we will understand with utmost clarity that our great and only hope is in Jesus’s final victorious coming.”

In Advent we pray, again and again, for the dawning of that new Age. It’s woven through our liturgies and hymns: our longing for God’s rescue, restoration, renewal. 

When we cry Come, Lord Jesus! in Advent we’re not just talking about the baby in the manger, although he is very nice indeed. 

We are praying for the end of the world, friends. 

At least, the end of the world as it is, and the beginning, in Brooks’ words, of a “quite new and different kind of life.” 

For something more than mere repair and restoration; 

For the old to die, and the new to rise up from the tomb. 

And yet when we arrive at Christmas – when we enter holy time to gather in wonder around the manger, gazing at that surprising, ordinary, luminescent child – when Christmas comes, we tend to let that second layer of our anticipation drop away. 

We act like what we were waiting for, has arrived.

And then – even if we have a really good, lovely Christmas – there will be a moment, tomorrow or Tuesday or next week, when we think, “Well, Christmas came, but we still have all the same problems. I guess all that praying and hoping and expecting didn’t really amount to anything.” 

Instead of faithful, joyful and triumphant, we may feel uncertain, weary and discouraged.

What I need from Christmas this year, and therefore what I’m offering you – because preachers are always preaching first to themselves, beloveds – is the reminder that God coming among us in love and mercy and fury is not a once-long-ago thing, friends.

It is always and it is already and it is not yet.

It is still and it is someday and it is surrounding us right now. 

We live in the world’s time, the relentless onward march of history, dates and events, wars and elections and pandemics, birthdays and graduations and deaths. 

We live in the church’s time, holy rhythms that circle and cycle and always bring us back to sacred moments and pivot points.

And we live in God’s time, as people of expectation, who know that things are not as they are meant to be. 

As people whose hopes and imaginations reach beyond the satisfactions and struggles of our present moment. 

People who believe that another world is not just possible, she is on her way. (Arundhati Roy)

And that our purposeful acts of mercy, courage, justice and generosity can help pave the path for her arrival. 

And sometimes our biggest fight is with the powers and principalities of the world as it is, and sometimes our biggest fight is within ourselves: with our own inner resignation to the broken reality around us, our honest skepticism that better is possible. 

What I want from Christmas this year as its gift to all of us is a profound sense of sacred incompleteness. 

The knowledge that what we’ve been waiting and yearning for is not here yet, and that it’s safe to say that out loud, to name that a lot of stuff still seems real bad, even on Christmas Eve.

And the knowledge, planted deep in our hearts, that the gulf between this Age and the Age to Come, between our long Before and God’s After, is itself a holy space, a space of promise. 

A space of darkness and unknowing and possibility. 

A space of birth. 

May it be so.

Amen.

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Kid-friendly, Sermons

Sermon, Christmas Eve, 3PM

This is a story about big and small. 

God is big. 

Not big like a whale or a tall building or the ocean. 

Big like you can’t even find the edges, where God begins and ends. 

Big like you can’t find the beginning when God wasn’t yet. 

Big like everywhere, like always. 

God is so big that nobody is more or less important to God.

God can know and love each star and every dog. 

God knows how many hairs are on your head, and still has time to be present with a parent grieving in Ukraine and an elephant giving birth in Botswana. 

God is big. 

But a baby is small. 

Who’s seen a newborn baby?

Who has held one? … 

They’re pretty small, right? 

Small and floppy and helpless. 

The heart of this story, the story we tell today, the reason it’s important, is this:

God who is big, SO big, became as small as a newborn baby. And why? To come close to us. 

It’s a big mystery, a strange thing to think about! 

It’s the kind of thing that is easier to talk about with poems and music and art, than to explain it like a lesson at school.

Let’s talk a little more about big and little. Let’s do a quiz.

Is an elephant big or little?

Is a chipmunk big or little? 

Is an ocean big or little?

Is a puddle big or little? 

Is ice cream big or little? 

Is a star big or little?

Is dawn big or little?

Is a sprouting seed big or little?… 

Has anybody ever grown a seed & watched it sprout? 

I learned something interesting a couple of weeks ago. 

The Bible wasn’t written in English. English didn’t exist yet! 

Parts of it were written in a language called Hebrew, and parts of it were written in a language called Greek.

And in Greek, there’s a word that can mean two things: 

It can mean dawn, sunrise. When the sun comes over the horizon and starts to light up the whole sky and everything under the sky.

Did we decide dawn is little or big? 

That Greek word can also mean a seed sprouting, breaking through the ground to stick up a tiny green sprout.

Did we decide that a sprouting seed is little or big? …

It says in the Bible that Jesus’ birth is like a kind of dawn.

Like the sun rising on people who have been sitting and waiting in the dark for so, so long.

And maybe Jesus’ birth is also like a sprouting seed. Like life springing up where you couldn’t see anything alive, before…

Dawn is big and a sprouting seed is tiny, but they can both be held in the same word. Pretty cool! 

The thing about dawn and a sprouting seed is that they both make you think things are going to keep happening, right?

Dawn is just the very very beginning of morning, of a new day.

And a sprouting seed is the very, very beginning of a plant. Maybe of a field, or a garden, or a forest. Who knows? 

There are so many things a sprouting seed could become.

You have to keep watching and pay attention and find out. 

In the Christmas story, when God is born as a human baby, God comes to us as something very small. 

But that’s not the only way God shows up in the little things. 

When we read the Bible and listen to the Spirit and learn from the saints and wise ones of the faith, we learn about God’s purposes, God’s intentions, how God means things to be.

Things like kindness and peace, justice and making things right, healing what hurts, building better ways and worlds, helping people have enough, helping people be their real true selves. 

When we watch and pay attention, we might notice the small ways God is nudging those things along.

And we might notice the little ways we have a chance to join in and help move the world towards kindness and justice. 

Like putting out food for the birds when it’s snowy. 

Or listening to someone who’s struggling. 

Or sharing with people who don’t have enough.

Or writing a letter to a leader to ask them to do the right thing. 

We need some big changes, too; we all now that.

But it’s important to tend to the little things.

Little things can be beginnings. 

Little things can add up.

Little things can matter in big ways. 

I like to give people a gift on Christmas Eve. My gift this year is to help you remember to tend to little things. 

It’s a little box, and inside is an even littler baby Jesus. … 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Dec. 4

The readings for today, the second Sunday in Advent, call us to attend to the relationship between Christians, Jews and Judaism. 

While perhaps not as loaded as Holy Week, Advent and Christmas raise these questions too: do we think Jesus fulfilled Judaism, completely and finally?  If so, do we see Jews as irrelevant, spiritually extinct? And if we don’t think that: Are we using language in church that suggests that we do? 

These questions matter. The consequences range from the kind of causal Christian cultural supremacy that results in public school classrooms being decorated for Christmas – to the kind of violence that means synagogues routinely hire armed guards to watch their doors during worship. And that my rabbi colleagues are still tending to the pastoral needs of families shattered across generations by the experience of the Holocaust. 

Today each of our Scripture readings raise questions of how Christians think about Judaism – in three different ways. We’ll start with our Gospel reading, from Matthew. 

In our 3 year cycle of Sunday Scripture readings, which we share with many churches, we have readings from one primary gospel each year – with chunks of John, the fourth gospel, scattered all around. We just started a new church year on the first Sunday in Advent, last week; and our gospel for this year is Matthew. 

Let me confess right now: Matthew is my least favorite Gospel – in part because of his often violent and frightening language. 

Why is Matthew like this? About thirty years after Jesus’ death, in the year 66, some of the Jews of Judea began to rebel against Roman colonial rule. The rebels never really had a chance against Rome’s military might, and the revolt quickly turned bloody. Rome crushed the rebels and burned Jerusalem. The Great Temple was destroyed. Many people died; many lost everything. 

This earth-shaking event profoundly shaped both Christianity and Judaism, from that moment onward. All the Gospels are marked by it – but perhaps Matthew most of all. His Gospel text boils over at times with his grief and rage. He seems to blame the Jewish leadership for what happened – feeling that it’s their rejection of Jesus that brought down this destruction, rather than the predictable eruption of the tensions inherent in colonial rule always and everywhere.

Turning to today’s passage: Matthew introduces John the Baptist. The Gospels are pretty consistent in their picture of John: A preacher who separated himself from society to live in the wilderness, wearing simple clothes he made himself and eating what he could find, and proclaiming that people need to change their hearts and their lives and turn back towards God and God’s ways – and to be baptized, a ritual washing, in the Jordan River. 

To all that, Matthew adds this angry speech against the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We know this is Matthew, because later, in chapter 12 and again in chapter 23, Matthew’s Jesus says almost the exact same thing, calling groups of Pharisees and Sadducees “brood of vipers” and yelling at them: “How can you speak good things, when you are evil?” And “how can you escape being sentenced to hell?” Those passages are NOT echoed in the other Gospels. 

Who were the Pharisees and the Sadducees? The Pharisees were a reform movement within Judaism at the time of Jesus, focused primarily on the common people. The Sadducees were an elite and privileged group who more or less ran the Great Temple in Jerusalem. The Pharisees and Sadducees would not have been natural friends; I suspect it’s Matthew throwing them together as enemies of Christianity in his eyes. 

Far too much of Matthew’s hatred of these groups seeped into Christianity as a general suspicion and hatred towards Jews – which in turn has spawned unimaginable violence. I read this passage with pain and repentance. 

It’s ours, but it’s not comfortable, and it shouldn’t be. 

Then there’s our Epistle – a portion of the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, written in the late 50s. Paul is writing here to the Christians of Rome, who included both Jewish and non-Jewish Christians, and he’s trying to help them respect one another and get along.

Before he became a Christian, Paul was not just any Jew. He had studied Jewish texts and scholarship deeply. He had become a Pharisee, a member of that reform movement that sought to spread more active and heartfelt Jewish practice among the folk of Judea. He was an up and coming young Jewish leader, when Jesus called his name and changed his life on the road to Damascus. 

Scholars have wondered, over the centuries, what to make of the fact that Paul was a Roman citizen, as we learn in the book of Acts. Maybe one of his parents was a Roman. Maybe his family was gifted citizenship, a major privilege, as thanks for service to the Empire. 

Either way, perhaps young Paul threw himself into his Jewish faith as a way to resolve the tensions of divided allegiances, of having ties to both subjects and empire. And perhaps it’s by growing up both Roman and Jew that Paul learned some of the skills of both/and living. Of holding ambiguities within yourself; of finding the value in different worlds and ways – even when they seem at odds. 

That’s the wisdom that Paul brings to this letter to the church in Rome, as he urges Jewish and non-Jewish Christians to welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed them. In today’s passage, he is trying to help the Jewish members of the Roman church see that it’s right and joyful! for God’s saving work to extend to non-Jews – without their having to first convert to Judaism. He quotes a series of texts from the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, that mention God’s intentions to also bring Gentiles – the nations, the goyim – into God’s saving purposes. 

A few chapters earlier he was urging Gentiles, in turn, to feel humbled and grateful for being grafted onto the living tree of God’s covenant people, the Jews. 

He concludes this passage with this beautiful prayer for the Roman Christian community in its diversity: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Paul is dealing here specifically with Jews who have become Christian, like himself. But Paul’s attitude towards Judaism is nuanced and interesting. He knows that he was called to something different – something more; but he honors the beauty and integrity of what he came from. He’d like other Jews to become Christians too, but I think he’d also like to see Christianity stay pretty Jewish. 

It’s complicated! But I do think a truly Pauline Christianity would have a much more open and humble heart towards Judaism than historical Christianity has had. 

For Matthew, Christianity fulfills Jewish faith – and leaves Jews behind. For Paul, it’s less clear: he loves his Jewish heritage and kin, but feels called to a new way of faith beyond Judaism.

Who’s right about God and salvation: Jews or Christians? What if it’s not up to us to decide – or even to know? 

One of the texts Paul quotes is today’s Isaiah passage: “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.”

Back in Lent of this past year, Father Tom McAlpine led us in a study of how Christians read the book of Isaiah. We were looking specifically at a set of texts from much later in Isaiah, known as the Suffering Servant songs. Today’s passage is somewhat different – focusing on a wise and righteous leader who will bring peace to God’s people – but it raises similar questions. 

Historically, the prophet Isaiah and his eighth-century-before-Christ audience probably thought this prophecy was about King Hezekiah of Judah. Hezekiah was a young king who called his people back to exclusive and faithful worship of God.  But it’s the nature of prophetic language not to be fulfilled or exhausted by any given historical figure or event. Hezekiah did big things – but his reign did not usher in a cosmic realm of peace. It’s possible to see elements of a prophecy fulfilled, while other parts still hang in the air, waiting and shining. 

This text is here, in our Advent lectionary, because Christians have assumed for millennia that it’s about Jesus. That he is the “shoot of Jesse” – meaning, a descendant of Israel’s great king David, whose father was named Jesse. 

Now, Matthew and Luke both make a point of the fact that Jesus is born into a family with links to King David. But listen: David lived in Judea a thousand years before Jesus. And he had a lot of kids. By sheer dint of math and time, a heck of a lot of Judeans could have claimed Davidic ancestry by the time Jesus was born. 

It’s so, so hard for us not to read these Old Testament texts backwards from Christianity, as as inevitably and exclusively pointing to Jesus. In Father Tom’s class we kept tripping over that, how deeply-seated our impulse was to read these texts and think: “Well, this is obviously about Jesus; how could it not be? What else could it possibly mean?”

Texts from the Old Testament, and especially from Isaiah, shaped the language and hopes of the Jewish people for centuries. The way they thought and spoke about a coming Messiah, a holy leader sent by God to save and restore God’s people. And these texts likewise shaped the ideas and language of the first Christians, especially those steeped in the Hebrew Bible – like Matthew, like Paul. They used Isaiah and other Hebrew Scriptures to help them make sense of what they had experienced in Jesus’ life and ministry, and in his death and resurrection. 

We think we recognize Jesus in these Old Testament texts because how Christians think and talk about Jesus has been shaped by these Old Testament texts, literally from day one. 

I would rather say that everybody’s right than that everybody’s wrong. And I think that’s more faithful to the mystery of how holy texts can speak and speak again in new times and places. 

This passage is about Hezekiah and it’s about Jesus and it’s about the promised Messiah whom our Jewish siblings still await and it’s about the second coming of Christ that we still await. 

What passages like this tell us about God’s purposes for Israel and for the world can help us understand the person and work of Jesus. We can rightly treasure these texts as Christians. But we need to hold them carefully, with an awareness that they don’t only belong to us. 

At the Beth Israel Center across town, when my friend Betsy’s congregation opens the ark where the scrolls of Scripture are kept, and take out the scroll of the Nevi’im, the Prophets, and remove its silver end caps and its embroidered velvet cover and unroll it on the altar and chant it aloud in Hebrew – Isaiah’s words resonate differently in that space than they do here. 

Not entirely differently, to be sure. But importantly differently. And some of the difference is history and humanity – and some of it is holiness and mystery. 

It’s important for Christians to grapple with the anti-Judaism embedded in our history, our texts, our practices. Good citizenship and good ally-ship are part of our call to love our neighbors and serve the common good. 

But for me there’s something more here too – something a little hard to put my finger on, but I’ll try.

I find a sense of joy and freedom and possibility in the idea that God’s saving purposes are bigger and broader and honestly messier than any human mapping. We can’t pin down the meanings of ancient prophecy, or the mechanics of salvation, to fit within our categories of belonging and belief, doctrine and truth. 

This is one of the fundamental themes of Advent: The God who came among us as Jesus of Nazareth is coming again. 

We are people of expectation.

People called to expect mystery.

To expect disruption. 

To expect redemption. 

To expect, someday, whether in this world or the next, to come face to face with the Living One who both fulfills and transcends all our scriptures and theologies.  

May it be so. Come, Lord Jesus. 

 

Sermons

Homily, Nov. 27

Gospel text: Matthew 24:23-28

Jesus has just told the disciples that the Great Temple in Jerusalem will be torn down.  And they want to know: what will be the sign that that’s about to happen? How will we know when you’re coming back and it’s the end of the age? Which means, the end of this chapter of the world, and the beginning of God’s time. 

The disciples are jumbling some things together. For the people of Judea, the Great Temple was the most important place to worship God. So even though it had already been destroyed and rebuilt once before, the disciples think that the Temple being destroyed must also be the end of everything. 

It turns out that the Temple WAS destroyed, about 30 years later; but that was not the end of this age of the world.  Lots of things have changed in 2000 years but we’re still living in human time and waiting for God’s time. 

It’s easy for us to look at the big dramatic or scary things happening in the world right now – whenever “right now” happens to be – and think, This is IT. Things can’t possibly go on from here.  Everything has to either COMPLETELY change – or end. 

And so far, over all the centuries people have been thinking that, we’ve been wrong. 

And that’s part of what Jesus is saying here. People are anxious, and don’t know how to understand what’s happening in the world. And there are always going to be people who try to take advantage of other people’s fear and confusion. Who’ll say things like, I know what’s going on! Or, I have the solution!

There’s a sentence in here that isn’t in the assigned text for this Sunday but I included it because I like it:  “Where the carcass is, there the vultures will gather.” 

Did you know that Jesus said that? Does anyone have that embroidered on a pillow at home? Maybe a tattoo? …

What’s a carcass?

What’s a vulture? …

“Where the carcass is, there the vultures will gather” is a true statement. It’s also a metaphor – that means something besides what it says. 

So what’s the carcass and who are the vultures? 

I think the carcass is anything that’s dead or dying in the world as it is. Old ways of being. Things that don’t work anymore. 

And the vultures are the people who think they can get something out of that death, to their advantage. 

I can give you an example. I know a lot of young people, including some in this congregation, who are helping us old people understand that gender is a little more complicated than everybody told us when we were kids.

When I was a kid, your body parts meant you were a boy or a girl, and if you were a boy you got blue shirts with trucks on them, and if you were a girl you got pink with frills, and if any of that didn’t feel right for you, good luck. 

Now we are realizing that there could be a lot more freedom for people to express who they are on the inside. That it’s really not important to have people divided up into Truck people and Pink people. Some old ideas about gender and about what it means to be a person are dying. 

Who are the vultures here, the people trying to take advantage of people who feel confused by all this? I think the vultures are the politicians and media personalities who want to make people feel afraid about those changes. Who say things like “I know what’s going on! I have the solution!” Because they think that people’s fear will give them power. 

A question Jesus has for us in today’s Gospel is: How do we know what voices to trust? When the world seems strange or scary, when it seems like the times are changing so fast, when we feel confused or uncertain or afraid: How do we tell the vultures from the prophets? How do we avoid running after or listening to voices that are just seizing this moment for their own purposes? 

There are a lot of ways to approach that question. But the answer Jesus gives right here in today’s Gospel is: Trust me, and wait for me. You’ll know me when you see me. You’ll recognize my voice when you hear it.  Things may get weird; things may get scary. Don’t be easily shaken or swayed. Wait and trust. 

Sermons

Sermon, Nov. 13

Image of the Peaceable Kingdom painted by Edward Hicks. A child sands surrounded by animals, with its arm around a leopard's neck. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent– its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

That’s the end of today’s Isaiah text. By an oddity of the lectionary, in just three weeks we’ll hear something very similar in Isaiah chapter 11, on the second Sunday of Advent: 

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

Today’s text, Isaiah 65, is referring back to this part of Isaiah 11. These passages are 54 chapters and perhaps 200 years apart. The original Isaiah was a prophet, someone who speaks God’s words to the people, living in the eighth century before Jesus. Isaiah 11 falls in the midst of prophecies, oracles, about invasion, conquest, destruction and loss – and promises that a faithful remnant of God‘s people will survive and be able to rebuild. 

This famous passage in chapter 11 moves from the historical to the eschatological. Eschatological texts are concerned with the end, or rather the fulfillment, of history. They’re about things that will happened in God’s time, not human time; and by God‘s power, not human power.

Isaiah 65 is alluding back to Isaiah 11, almost as a kind of shorthand –  from a very different historical moment. This writer is often called Second Isaiah or Exilic Isaiah. The consensus of scholars is that there are at least two, maybe three, main voices in the Book of Isaiah – but these later voices are so deeply steeped in the language and vision of First Isaiah that it really is all one book. 

By the time of Isaiah 65, God’s people Israel have been through invasion and conquest, destruction and loss.  Many have been killed; many have been dragged into exile in Babylon. Two generations later, the new boss of the world, Cyrus of Persia, allows them to return to their homeland and even funds their rebuilding.

This period is fascinating to me. The returnees were so full of hope, and of idealized visions of what Judea and Jerusalem were like in their grandparents’ day. But they had to deal with the reality that you can’t just recreate the past – and the past you’re trying to recreate may never have existed anyway. There were conflicting priorities and identity struggles and disappointment and disillusionment. 

Isaiah 65 was probably written when the great Temple in Jerusalem was at least partly rebuilt. God speaks through this prophet to call God’s people to a bigger vision than just getting back to some approximation of what they had before. 

Another text from this part of the book that may be familiar is Isaiah 60: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you! Nations shall stream to your light, kings to the brightness of your glory!” We often sing this text in the season of Epiphany.  It’s a vision of Jerusalem as much more than the capital of an independent nation, but as the holy heart of the whole world. 

Isaiah 65 pushes this vision even farther into eschatology: God says, For I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth! This isn’t just rebuilt Jerusalem, this is cosmically renewed Jerusalem. 

How would this have sounded to the rebuilding generation? Maybe it was a word of comfort: God’s power and God’s faithfulness are equal to the challenges of this time. Maybe it was a word of challenge: God has bigger plans for you than you have for yourselves. Either way, this prophet is intentionally bringing back – and building upon – the vision of Isaiah 11, of a promised realm of peace. Holding up this hopeful image, so that perhaps struggle and disillusionment may alchemize into a new determination to keep on building what is just and good and holy. 

Isaiah 11 is famous for its imagery – often called the Peaceable Kingdom. And it’s associated closely with the work of the artist Edward Hicks. 

Hicks was an American folk painter, and a minister and writer in the Society of Friends – better known as the Quakers. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1780. As a young man he learned the trade of painting coaches – and discovered that he had a knack for artistic or decorative painting as well. 

But at the age of 23 he became a Quaker, and married a Quaker woman. His new faith carried with it a strong commitment to simplicity and plainness in all things. The decorative arts were viewed with suspicion as worldly distractions. 

Though Hicks’ painting business was making good money and helping support his growing family, in 1815 he gave it up and attempted to support his family by farming.  

This was an unmitigated disaster.

In 1816 a friend approached him and convinced him to save his family from starvation by returning to painting. 

Hicks later wrote about this period in his life:  “I quit the only business I understood, and for which I had a capacity, painting, for the business of a farmer, which I did not understand, and for which I had no qualifications whatever. I verily thought then, and still think, farming more consistent with the Christian, and was willing to sacrifice all my fondness for painting. But it would not do, for notwithstanding I worked hard, I went behind hand daily. The cruel moth of usury was eating up my outward garment, soon to expose me a poor naked bankrupt.”

He continues:  “If the Christian world was in the real spirit of Christ, I do not believe there would be such thing as a fine painter in christendom. It appears clearly to me to be one of those trifling, insignificant arts, which has never been of any substantial advantage to mankind [but has been] the inseparable companion of voluptuousness and pride.” 

But at the same time, he admits, “there is something of importance in the example of the primitive Christians… to mind their calling or business, and work with their own hands at such business as they are capable of, avoiding idleness.” (Thanks, Edward, for tying in that difficult Epistle for me…) 

We may not share Hicks’ view of the decorative arts as inconsistent true Christian faithfulness. To a significant degree, Hicks’ Quaker faith was defining itself against our faith heritage as Anglicans, with our worldly fondness for beautiful buildings, stained glass windows, fine wines, and all that sort of thing. 

But I hope we can hear that this was a genuine conflict of conscience for Hicks… and respect his decision to use his God-given gift, rather than starving as a farmer. 

Having, in his own words, “been unsuccessful in every attempt to make an honest an honorable living,” Hicks settles in to be a painter for the remainder of his life. He does a variety of types of decorative painting – signage, landscapes, historical scenes. 

But he also starts creating art that expresses his faith convictions. As a Quaker, Hicks was deeply committed to peace and reconciliation. The Quaker tradition places a strong value on non-violence – and so these Isaiah passages – They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain! – are particularly meaningful. 

In 1820, at the age of 40, Hicks paints his first Peaceable Kingdom painting, an artistic rendering of Isaiah 11. Over the remaining 29 years of his life, he paints 62 versions of this scene. But close observers of his work point out that he wasn’t simply repeating himself. 

Hicks’ early Kingdom paintings had a naïveté and simplicity. Often in the background he would include a stylized depiction of some historical event that seemed to him to be a fulfillment of Quaker ideals about peacemaking – such as William Penn’s treaty with the Lenape tribe. 

However, in the 1820s, there was rising conflict among Quakers in the Northeast, leading to a schism in 1827. Hicks’ older cousin Elias Hicks was one of the core leaders of that struggle. 

This was very painful for Edward Hicks and other Quakers. Their religious movement, with reconciliation and peace as core values, couldn’t even work through its own internal conflicts. It must have felt like a profound failure of faithfulness and witness. 

Holland Cotter, art critic at the New York Times, observes that in this period – from 1827 into the 1830s – Hicks’ kingdom paintings become more expressive and strange. Cotter writes, “Additional children and animals crowd in. The carnivorous beasts — lions, leopards, wolves — grow in size. Where once they had cast their eyes docilely to the ground, they now stare out, alert, aggressive, challenging, even rabidly agitated… Occasionally animals are in conflict. But even when they aren’t, the assemblies have a jumbled, restive feeling. The ground beneath them is eroding…”

But then, Cotter observes, around 1840, when Hicks turned sixty, the mood of the paintings shifts again. Hicks accepts that the ideological battle will remain unresolved; the ideals at the heart of his faith and his life will not be fulfilled in his lifetime, and perhaps not in this world. The animals in his paintings start to look aged and weary. Sadder but wiser, perhaps.

Victoria Emily Jones writes, “Although Edward was initially hopeful about [humankind’s’ ability to establish peace on earth by simply exercising biblical principles, over time he became more and more cynical… The animals in many of his middle- and late-period paintings are tense or exhausted… Hicks wrote later in life that all the intrafaith dissension he witnessed had destroyed his hope of ever seeing established in the here and now a kingdom like the one Isaiah envisioned. But that realization only caused him to cling to Christ all the more tightly.”

Hicks never stopped painting Peaceable Kingdoms, despite struggle and disillusionment. He was still working on his final Peaceable Kingdom painting, a gift for his daughter, when he died in 1849. 

I really love Hicks’ Kingdom paintings. Their strangeness; their simplicity and complexity. The emotions that seem to swim within them – hope, yearning, ambivalence, frustration, a kind of wry humor. 

I wonder how Hicks’ contemporaries – his friends, his enemies – received these images of improbable peace. I wonder how we receive them. Maybe there’s comfort here: God’s power and God’s faithfulness are equal to the challenges of this time. 

Maybe there’s challenge: God has bigger plans for us than we have for ourselves. 

Either way, Hicks’ art makes him yet another Prophet Isaiah, carrying forward that eschatological vision of a realm of peace. Holding up this hopeful image for a new generation, and generations to come – so that perhaps, again, struggle and disillusionment may alchemize into a new determination to keep building what is just and good and holy. 

 

SOURCES

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hicks

https://artandtheology.org/2016/12/06/the-peaceable-kingdoms-of-edward-hicks/ – Victoria Emily Jones 

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/16/arts/art-review-finding-endless-conflict-hidden-in-a-peaceable-kingdom.html – Holland Cotter

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Homily, Nov. 6

Today I want to talk about the Communion of Saints. 

The outline of the faith in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, the official prayer book of our church, says, “The communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, … bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.”

I found a lovely description on another Episcopal church’s website: “All Saints’ Day [November 1; we’re celebrating it today] and All Souls’ Day [November 2nd] remind us of our belief that all Christians that ever lived, are living, and will ever be, are bound together in one Communion – the Body of Christ. All Saints’ and All Souls’ celebrates this bond as we continue the ancient practice of praying for the saints who have gone on before us and acknowledge that those saints in heaven are praying for us.”

(The Rev. Jeff Shankles, https://wearestalbans.org/celebrating-communion-saints/ ) 

The Communion of Saints binds us together with all Christians in all times and places. But at All Saints’ and All Souls’ we may be most mindful of the saints who have gone on ahead into the nearer presence of God. 

Of those holy ones whom the Church names as witnesses to celebrate and remember, and of our own beloved dead. 

There are several reasons the Communion of Saints is on my mind right now.

I think it’s no accident that these feasts of remembrance, this time when the Church and her people acknowledge that the veil between worlds feels particularly thin, comes at this turning time of the seasons in the northern hemisphere. 

Autumn is dying, winter is on the horizon. 

In the words of a favorite hymn: 

Signs of endings are all around us. 

These solemn feasts resonate with the cycles of the natural world; change, loss, transience and mortality are writ large everywhere we look. 

The second reason the Communion of Saints is on my mind is – of course – that it feels like our little St Dunstan’s chapter of the greater Communion has been growing, lately. 

Jane. 

Martina. 

Dan Geisler.

Dan Hanson. 

Scott Tyre.

Mike Vaughan. 

Mo Lewis. 

Sue Lloyd. 

All gone on ahead in 2022. 

Some more remembered than known, by today’s congregation, but some very much known and loved – and missed.  Absences keenly felt. 

I keep expecting to Martina to stop by and drop off some political buttons, or an email from Jane that starts with an error in the Enews but goes on with an update on her life, and kind questions about my family. 

It helps to remember that they’re still out there, somewhere. 

The third reason the Communion of Saints is on my mind is that I heard a great sermon about it recently, at our Diocesan Convention in early October, given by Bishop Matt Gunter, the bishop of our sister diocese of Fond du Lac. 

Bishop Matt challenged us to take that idea of the Communion of Saints seriously. To think of church as the momentum of all those holy lives pushing us forward, encouraging us. 

What if all those people we named at the beginning of this service – what if they are actually listening? Hearing our call, our invocation of their presence and prayers? 

Bishop Matt talked about how we might feel a sense of unease at the idea of being watched over by the holy departed. Surely they’ll judge our every small failure or unkindness!

But what if – he said – what if instead it’s the reverse? What if they break out in joyful cheers every time we manage to be patient or kind or generous in some tiny way? 

And what if the saints don’t just watch us like some trans-dimensional twitch stream? What if they’re an active presence in our lives?

Coming alongside us to whisper: You’re going to need to be patient, today. Pay attention in this conversation; there’s something here for you. Get some rest this evening; tomorrow may demand a lot from you. 

After all, the saints know what it is like to try to be people of justice and mercy and love in the real world. In ordinary times and in extraordinarily difficult times. 

Bishop Matt reminded us of the great theologian Augustine of Hippo, who lived in a time when the Roman Empire, the world as everyone had known it for centuries, was falling down around his ears. 

And Augustine writes this great work called the City of God, saying, This earthly city, this earthly empire, may crumble; but there’s another city that we really belong to, and that city endures, because God is the Founder of that city.

Julian of Norwich, a beloved saint for some people in this congregation, lived in the 14th century – in the time of the Black Death, the great plague that killed something like a third of the people of Europe. But she encounters Jesus in a vision, and Jesus tells her that despite the suffering she sees around her, the heart of the Divine is not judgment but deep, deep love. And Julian is able to say: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Not because the hard and terrible stuff isn’t real. But because it’s not as real as the love that holds her – that holds us. And it’s not as real as the joy that awaits us. 

These people lived in times that make what we’re dealing with look not so bad. But we may well have harder times ahead.

As I’ve gotten to know Bishop Matt, I’ve noticed that he carries a keen awareness that we may be moving into a difficult chapter in the life of the world – with worsening climate change, polarized violence, and pandemic disease. I find it – oddly comforting? – to hear a church leader name that.

And he makes the case that it’s important to anchor ourselves in what matters, in what’s deeply true and truly good, to face the coming times. Our understanding, our awareness, of the Communion of Saints is one aspect of that anchoring.

Because all these people – Augustine, Julian, Dr. King, Sophie Scholl, so many others – they lived in hard times too.They faced into it with love and courage. 

Bishop Matt told us: The saints remind us that we are part of a bigger story.  My part in the story, or your part, might be pretty small. But we’re called to play our part in the great story, in our time.

And what kind of story is it? Well: We know where the story is going. Because of Jesus, who comes into the story to give us a foreshadowing of how the story will end. The story ends with resurrection.  With restoration and renewal. 

It’s not a tragedy, no matter how it might look sometimes. It’s the kind of story that ends with laughter, with joy. With old friends and loved ones reunited. With feast and song. 

Knowing how the story ends might free us to see the hard stuff along the way in a different light. 

And as we continue to live the rest of our parts of the story, we can be assured that there is this great cloud of witnesses, the Communion of Saints, cheering us on. 

The St. Dunstan’s chapter, and all the others you’re thinking of today too – maybe a beloved grandparent, a friend from childhood, a mentor, a sibling or child – watching over you, praying for you, urging you on. Standing here beside you. Beside us. Accompanying us on the journey. 

Thanks be to God.