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.

In my favorite classic rendition of this scene, painted by 19th century Quaker artists Edward Hicks, two little children play together on a riverbank, watched over by a friendly bear, while another bear and an ox share some corn nearby, smiling at each other. Another child, plump and cheerful, stands with one hand on the head of a leopard and the other on the head of a lion. A wolf gazes at a lamb with profound disinterest. 

In the center of the image, a large ox and a regal lion both have mouthfuls of straw. The ox’s head is turned towards the lion, as if to say, What do you think?  

And the lion… looks utterly disgusted. Like he’s about to spit the stuff out. This lion is thinking, Give me a nice juicy lamb any day. Or a little child…  

What is Isaiah doing here, with this prophetic image, so beautiful and so absurd?… 

Isaiah is a long and complicated book – 66 chapters! It covers perhaps 150 years of Israel’s history, and was composed by at least two and probably three primary voices, building on each other’s words and images.

This text from Isaiah 11 is part of what Biblical scholars call First Isaiah – the voice of the original prophet of that name. He’s writing in Judah, the Southern Kingdom, during the time of the Assyrian Empire’s expansion. Samaria, the Northern Kingdom, has already been conquered, and Judah is under threat. Assyria’s aggression is understood as God’s punishment to Israel for forgetting God’s ways – again. 

Chapters 1 through 12 of the Book of Isaiah comprise a first section, with its own beginning, middle, and end. These chapters trace the same arc as many of the shorter prophetic books: introducing the prophet; describing how the nation and its leaders have gone wrong; calling them to repentance and renewed righteousness; predicting the doom that is coming as a consequence of their unfaithfulness; and promising that there is yet hope, and that God will restore and renew in time. 

So here in chapter 11 we are getting to the hopeful vision, as the text turns from afflicting the comfortable to comforting the afflicted. Here we have the promise of a new King better than any king Israel has ever had, who will have more than human power and wisdom. Who will attend to the needs of the most vulnerable, and not rule to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful. Who will bring righteousness and peace – a new age so transformed and gracious that not only the human world but the whole created order will be restored to the peace of Eden. 

So we’re at the end of that prophetic arc here, in these hopeful prophecies. But these texts take on their full meaning in light of the ten chapters that preceded them. Those chapters include calls to return to God and God’s ways – like in last week’s text from Isaiah 2: Come, let us walk in the light of God! That’s not just gentle encouragement but an urgent call back from the brink of doom. Those chapters have a lot to say about how Israel, and especially the powerful and wealthy of Israel, have gone wrong: over-concentration of wealth, worshipping false gods, violence, injustice, “grinding the face of the poor” (3:15), and general frivolity – listen: “Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!” (Isaiah 5:22-23)

Here’s a passage from chapter 10, about the kinds of leaders God’s people are stuck with now, by way of contrast with the righteous leader described in chapter 11: 

“ Doom to those who pronounce wicked decrees,
and keep writing harmful laws
to deprive the needy of their rights
and to rob the poor among my people of justice;
to make widows their loot;
and to steal from orphans!” (Isaiah 10:1-2, CEB)

Those chapters also include descriptions of what it felt like for the people in that time, threatened by enemies without and within, unable to trust their leaders or even their neighbors. Listen to these words from chapter 3, describing a society in which any sense of order, civility and trust have simply dissolved: 

“The people will be oppressed,

everyone by another and everyone by a neighbor;

the youth will be rude to the elder,

and the dishonorable to the honorable. 

Someone will even seize a relative,

a member of the clan, saying,

‘You have a cloak; you shall be our leader,

and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule.’ 

But the other will cry out on that day, saying,

‘I will not be a healer;

in my house there is neither bread nor cloak;

you shall not make me leader of the people.’ 

To paraphrase that last part: 

Someone will grab an acquaintance and say, “Hey, you! We need a leader, and you’ll do!”  But the other will cry out, “I can’t fix this! I have no resources to offer!  Don’t put me in charge!” 

It’s a simple but evocative description of the state of mind of the people Israel at this moment in their history: confused, frightened, angry; feeling unable to trust stranger or friend, wondering where to turn, looking for direction and leadership. 

I understand why the lectionary brings us the texts of hope, like Isaiah 11. But we need the fuller story too – that family story of resilience that encompasses struggle and survival as well as restoration and flourishing. The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman once said that church on Sunday shouldn’t be the happiest place on earth, but the most honest place. 

If events in our personal or civic lives lead us to feel confused, fearful, angry at each other, ourselves, our leaders, our God – that’s OK. God’s people have felt these things before. Those states of mind and heart aren’t strange to God. They don’t put us outside the story, beyond the pale. 

Reading the chapters that lead up to the Peaceable Kingdom passage make it both more meaningful – and more absurd. Isaiah is offering this vision of ultimate, creation-encompassing goodwill to people who feel like even families and neighborhoods are divided and shattered. It’s hard to imagine a wolf restraining itself from devouring a lamb, when it feels like every day brings us new ways for humans to devour humans. 

Our Advent collect for today calls us to heed the warnings of the prophets, but Isaiah isn’t warning us about anything, here. Instead he’s envisioning a great big animal jamboree. It’s like a Richard Scarry illustration in a Busytown book. It’s beautiful – I deeply love it. But part of the beauty is that it’s playful, almost funny. 

One of my kids is re-watching the Netflix/Dreamworks show Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. We watched it as a family when the kids were younger. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world infested with giant, terrifying mutant animals. Kipo is a human-ish girl who is trying to find her parents. On her long journey she encounters various challenging creatures – megabunnies, giant scorpions, a friendly but manipulative giant waterbear, a race of cranky tree-dwelling cat-people. Kipo’s approach, in all of these encounters, is to try to make friends. To try to understand the needs and motives of those trying to harm her, and see if there’s a way they can work together. It’s a great show; I think the prophet Isaiah would really like it. This week I started to re-watch it myself. 

The stories that comfort us and encourage us and remind us who we are don’t have to be Bible stories. They don’t have to be serious stories. What stories are nurturing your resilience, your responsiveness, this Advent? This season of seeking light as the darkness deepens? What favorite, formative stories – books, movies, whatever – could you dive into or revisit?  Not to escape the so-called real world, but to remember that you’re not alone in your questions or struggles? 

I preached on the Peaceable Kingdom – and, to be honest, said a lot of the same stuff – back in December of 2016. In circling back to what I wrote and shared nine years ago, I rediscovered a short story by the fiction author Catherynne Valente. Valente wrote a series of young adult novels about a human girl who helps free Fairyland from the power of an oppressive ruler called the Marquess. This story is a sort of micro-prequel, about a conversation among some of her characters on the day the Marquess came to power, after a bloody battle. Valente wrote it in November of 2016 – but she recently re-posted the story on her blog, so I’m in good company in bringing it back around. 

In Valente’s story, a wise Leopard gives some advice to a young Dragon about the power he has, even when he feels powerless… 

Catherynne Valente’s short story may be read here: 

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-beasts-who-fought-for-fairyland

This is – for me, for many of you – a very familiar Gospel passage.

We hear it twice in Holy Week, in different versions, on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. But on those occasions we get this scene as part of the whole, long story of Jesus’ last night and day. Today we get just this little slice. 

Reflecting on the text this week: trying to peel back the familiarity & many layers of the church’s understanding of what’s happening here, & notice what the text actually says…

Found myself noticing what it doesn’t say. 

First: Notice that it doesn’t really explain what’s happening at all. 

Doesn’t explain what crucifixion is or why it’s happening … or this Place of the Skull. Assumes the readers know.

Crucifixion means tying or nailing someone to a big wooden cross, and leaving them there till they die. Crucifixion was a form of public execution that the Roman Empire used to get rid of people they didn’t like, with the added benefit – from their perspective – of getting other people to shut up & go along with things, so it doesn’t happen to them. 

NT professor Robyn Whitaker: “Slaves, the poor, criminals and political protesters were crucified in their thousands for ‘crimes’ we might today consider minor offences. The types of cross structures might differ, but as a form of execution, crucifixion was brutal and violent, designed to publicly shame the victim by displaying [them] naked on a scaffold, thereby asserting Rome’s power over the bodies of the masses.”

The Romans crucified somewhere between 300,000 and two million people, over the duration of the Roman Empire. 

Being crucified was one of the least special things about Jesus. 

As for the Place of the Skull, it was probably a place outside the city walls that was commonly used for crucifixions. Jerusalem has grown a lot in 2000 years, so the site is now lost. 

The first Christian images of the crucifixion don’t start showing up till around 400 years after Jesus’ death. Scholars think this might be because crucifixion was seen as so shameful. The earliest image of the crucified Jesus we have kind of proves the point. It’s a piece of graffiti from around the year 200. It seems to have been carved by one Roman soldier to bully another Roman soldier, who was a Christian. It shows the Christian soldier, Alexamenos, standing before a crucifix with Jesus on the cross, with a donkey’s head. It has a caption: “Alexamenos worships his god.” So. 

None of the Gospels really explain what crucifixion is or what it meant in that time and place. That silence is an invitation to learn, but it’s also an indication of the horrible familiarity of oppressive violence, of murder by the state for any minor pretext, for the first few generations of Christians. 

Which brings me to another thing I noticed that the text doesn’t say: what the other two men crucified with Jesus had done. Two of the other Gospels actually say they were robbers, using a word that could mean brigands or highwaymen – theft with an element of violence and opportunism, not just stealing a loaf of bread in desperate hunger, Jean Valjean-style. Still, theft is often a crime of poverty, and we don’t know anything about these people except that the local Roman authorities had decided they deserved death.

While reading around about this passage, I read one commentary in which the writer assumed that when Jesus says, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” he is extending salvation to the criminal hanging beside him. That really surprised me – and then made me think about why I was surprised. I realized that It had *never* occurred to me that because these men had been condemned by the state, they had therefore also been condemned by God. I mean, they’re hanging next to Jesus. 

I always assumed Jesus was naming something that was already true – that whatever this man’s circumstances or failures, he would be welcomed into God’s great mercy at his death. 

It’s very easy – too easy – for Christians to equate criminal justice with God’s justice. It’s very easy – too easy – for Christians to forget that we worship a man who was arrested, condemned, and executed by the government. The church’s impulse to put Jesus on a throne definitely doesn’t help. 

Which brings me to the third thing this text doesn’t say: anything about what Jesus’ crucifixion and death mean or do. Someone was just asking me about the Episcopal Church’s view of salvation, and I felt a little bad about not having a clearer answer. Our way of faith tends to let there be mystery around such things, but I know that can be unsatisfying. 

Scripture itself is not definitive about what is accomplished, and how, by Jesus’ death and resurrection. And in 2000 years of Christian thought and theology, many different understandings have emerged. To begin with: Is it the death itself that saves? Or the resurrection, the return from death, the defeat of death? Or is it what happens in between – as in some Eastern Orthodox thought that doesn’t have Jesus lying peacefully in the tomb between Good Friday and Easter, but going down to Hell and fighting Satan and busting out all the dead who have been trapped there for aeons? 

The understanding that’s most familiar to many people – that Jesus had to die to make amends to an angry God for the sins of humanity – is not the dominant view in Scripture. It’s basically a reworking of some Temple sacrificial practices of Judaism, and early Christian writers used it as one *of many* images and metaphors they offered to try to describe what they experienced as the saving or liberating work of Jesus on the cross. 

This short Gospel passage is full of the language of salvation. He saved others; let him save himself! Save yourself and us! 

The Greek word there is sozo. It means to rescue, or heal – to save someone’s life, one way or another. Early on in the Christian movement, Christians start to use it in a more abstract and theological way – that there’s some kind of saving, some kind of salvation, in Jesus that transcends ordinary matters of life and death. But more questions quickly crowd in. What does this salvation mean? Is being saved the same thing as being promised a place with Jesus in paradise after we die? Or is it something closer at hand, some different way of some new way of being or belonging that’s operative in this world, this life? 

Save yourself and us! I think Luke, our Gospel writer, is aware of the irony of these taunts. The hostile crowds around the dying Jesus assume that saving, here, would look like Jesus climbing down rom the cross, his wounds magically healed. But there’s some deeper, larger saving at stake – one that doesn’t mean evading death. Whatever the meaning, the purpose, the efficacy of dying on this cross, Jesus has chosen it. He knew it was going to happen. He faced it with anguish and fear. He walked towards it anyway.

Today is Christ the King Sunday. It’s the youngest of our liturgical feasts – it’s actually its 100th birthday this year! It was established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in the aftermath of World War I. I looked back at the Pope’s statement at the time; there was a lot in it about how there would’t be so many wars if everyone in the world was a devout Roman Catholic, a hypothesis that I’m not sure is borne out by history. 

I do find value in this day and the meaning-making around it – that Christians owe their loyalty to Christ and the Kingdom of God above any national or ethnic loyalties; and that in fact being citizens of that kingdom unites us with people of other national and ethnic groups. 

But: it’s complicated. In the crucifixion Gospels, when people call Jesus a king, it’s a taunt. They’re mocking him. Christians easily get comfortable with power – political, social, economic, cultural – and start to forget the irony, the paradox. 

In the fourth century or so, when Christianity started to get comfortable with political power and vice versa, it was very easy for the church to start making art of Jesus using images of earthly power. Jesus as a king, with crown and scepter. Here’s an example – this is the first cross that St. Dunstan’s used in worship, back when they had church upstairs in the Parish Center in the late 1950s. He looks like a king, or a priest, or both. This kind of image is called a Christus Rex – Christ the King – Jesus on the cross, but all dressed in fancy clothes, and standing upright, not as if he’s actually being crucified. 

These images of Jesus Christ on the cross in royal splendor are intended to show his victory over death and suffering. They’re intended as images of triumph and reassurance. But objects and images always have meanings beyond what’s intended, or what the artist would say they’re trying to do. 

Take a look. Then, if you want, tell me in just a word or two what this image makes you feel…

When St. Dunstan’s built the new church building in 1964, they put a different image of Jesus at the front. A cross with Jesus on it, looking like he’s being crucified, is called a crucifix. This image is pretty familiar if you’ve spent any time in this space. These kinds of images, I think, are intended to call us into this moment in the Gospel story, as witnesses to his suffering. It’s a little unusual for an Episcopal church to have a crucifix at the front, rather than a plain cross. Some people say it it keeps us stuck at Good Friday, when every Eucharist ought to be a celebration of Easter. 

Take a look. Then, if you want, tell me in just a word or two what this image makes you feel…

Christ suffering on the cross, Christ risen in glory, Christ the condemned criminal, Christ the King: Bless us as we live with the questions and the tensions. May our wondering lead us towards you; may we find you eager to meet us, for the first or the fiftieth time. Amen. 

Robyn Whitaker’s article – this was an interesting read!

https://theconversation.com/the-crucifixion-gap-why-it-took-hundreds-of-years-for-art-to-depict-jesus-dying-on-the-cross-202348

I say this a lot, but if you’re new here: I don’t pick our Sunday scriptures – though I sometimes tweak them, or choose not to use one. The readings come to us from a three-year cycle or calendar called the Revised Common Lectionary, which is used by lots of churches and denominations. 

Which is why we have this very odd little reading from the Book of Daniel today. So odd that in looking back in my files, I don’t think I’ve even included it in the service before, let alone talked about it in a sermon. Well: today’s the day! 

This little snippet isn’t that weird, but if you go read the whole chapter, you’ll get descriptions of these strange and terrifying beasts, one of which has ten horns, and then grows an eleventh horn, which has eyes like the eyes of a human being and a mouth that speaks boastfully. And so on. Plenty weird. In the next chapter, Daniel has another strange vision – first he sees a great ram with long horns, and then suddenly a goat with a prominent horn between its eyes comes from the west, crossing the whole earth without touching the ground. Fortunately for Daniel, his dreams and visions also include mysterious figures who explain their meanings – though the explanations are also fairly cryptic, like, “The holy people will be delivered into the enemy’s hands for a time, times and half a time.” 

If you’ve read any of the Book of Revelation, this may feel familiar. Biblical scholars call these texts apocalyptic literature. They envision current events in the world as manifestations of a cosmic battle between good and evil, and express them through rich and strange symbolic imagery. There’s overlap with the prophetic literature, but apocalyptic texts are generally a few notches weirder. Their cryptic imagery has allowed them to be interpreted and reinterpreted over the ages, for better or worse. But their real purpose, in their original context, is to give hope to the hopeless in situations of danger and dire oppression. 

The book of Daniel tells the story of several young men – Daniel among them – who live in the time of the Babylonian exile, when God’s people were conquered, taken from their homeland and forced to live among peoples of other languages, cultures, and faiths. Daniel and his friends – the three young men of fiery furnace fame – are such bright young things that they rise to high stations in the Babylonian court. The story just before this chapter is a classic Sunday school tale: Daniel is such an effective administrator that the king plans to put him in charge of everything! But some folks get jealous of his success and contrive to get him sentenced to death, because he insists on continuing to pray to the God of Israel, instead of honoring the King of Babylon as a god. Daniel is thrown into a pit of hungry lions, but he miraculously survives. The king decrees that everyone should honor the God of Daniel. Chapter 6 concludes by noting that Daniel prospered, under the reign of this king and his successor. 

So Daniel is prospering! He’s doing great at work, he’s respected and valued. But… he has these terrifying dreams and visions about what’s happening, and what’s about to happen, in the world. The text tells us how these visions make him feel: Troubled. Terrified. Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Confused – unable to understand what it all means, and how to respond. 

So: We have Daniel – things are going pretty well for him personally, but he can’t shake a sense of impending doom. He’s working, socializing, resting, whatever, but that sense of being troubled is with him all the time. I think there are probably a fair number of folks hearing my voice right now who feel the same.

Compare the prospering-but-troubled Daniel to the person sketched out by the “woes” in Jesus’ sermon from our Gospel. People who have everything they need; people who feel cheerful and contented; people who are respected and esteemed. 

I think these verses are meant to pile up into a picture of a person who is both comfortable and complacent. Kind of like the rich man who steps over the suffering Lazarus every day, in the story Jesus told a few weeks ago. A person who has everything he needs, safe in his bubble. 

I went to a talk last week on politics in America recently, and one of the speakers said that people shouldn’t take politics so seriously,  because while things like elections and laws and policies can make people’s lives better or worse, they don’t represent an existential threat for “the vast majority of people.” 

Now, as a Christian, I feel bound to say that anything that represents an existential threat to even a minority of people should be a concern! And it’s pretty easy to start naming groups of people for whom current politics DO represent an existential threat – that is, a threat to a person’s fundamental ability to live in the world safely: Undocumented folks. Transgender folks. People who may need abortion care, or even help managing a miscarriage. People who may not be able to buy food starting this week. People whose health insurance coverage may increase in cost by five digits in the coming months. People at risk from climate disasters. And so on! 

I don’t want to be overly hard on that speaker, who said other thoughtful things, but that “politics doesn’t really matter” statement sounds to me like the voice of the person sketched out by Jesus’ Woes. I’M fine; so everything must BE fine; and the people who say it isn’t are making a big deal over nothing. 

What does Jesus mean by proclaiming Woe! on these folks? I don’t think he’s saying that they’re doomed or damned. I think he thinks they’re missing out on living the fulness of their own humanity… and that it’s going to hurt when their bubbles burst. 

And then there are the folks Jesus names as blessed! This is more of the upside-down-ness of Luke’s Gospel. People who seem lesser and lowly are actually blessed, precious to God. Even when hungry, poor, grieving, rejected, excluded, reviled. 

So you could say – I’m going to say – that our readings sketch out three groups of people. The blessed and struggling! The be-woed – content in their bubbles. And folk like Daniel – prospering but troubled. I expect all three groups are among our worshippers today.

All three kinds of people may have barriers to feeling like you belong, like you’re part of God’s work in this time and place. 

For the blessed-and-struggling, you just can’t. Your focus is on getting through the day, putting one foot in front of another. Keeping yourself and your loved ones alive and OK-ish. You don’t have energy or capacity to look around or do more. 

For the comfortable and unconcerned, there just isn’t a sense of urgency or need. As we say in the Midwest when somebody offers us something we don’t want, “I’m all set.” But – but! I note that there were such folks in the crowd listening to Jesus; I think there are probably such folks in this gathering today. There can be, if you will, a crack in the bubble. A sense that maybe there is a bigger picture that calls for attention and engagement, no matter how “all set” one may feel. 

For the prosperous and troubled, like Daniel: the barrier is the sense of overwhelm and helplessness. Not knowing what to do – what you even can do, in the face of the boastful horns and cosmic goats of our time. 

Today we honor the Feast of All Saints (though our observance here throws in some All Souls too). All Saints is a major feast of the church, and brings together a lot of different themes and meanings. In a few moments we’ll turn towards the sacred work of remembrance, honoring the saints who have shown forth God’s light in ages past, and our own beloved dead. 

All Saints also calls us to mindfulness of our own sainthood. In the early church – as you hear in our Ephesians reading – all the members were referred to as saints. You can hear that usage in Black churches today, too. At an event last weekend I heard Pastor Marcus Allen talk about his mom and grandma bringing him to church as a child, and how he “just fell in love with the prayers and the Bible and being among the saints.” I love that. 

Later we’ll sing the beloved and extremely English hymn, “I sing a song of the saints of God,” with its theme of everyday sainthood and refrain of, “I mean to be one too!” But in today’s lessons, sainthood isn’t something we aspire to; it’s something given. The reason we have this Daniel reading today is this sentence: ”The holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.” Our Ephesians reading leans on the concept of inheritance – that there are things that just come to us because we’re part of God’s family. The word shows up three times in this passage – like in the wonderful phrase,“The riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.”

And here – this is such a beautiful sentence, I wish we could add it to our baptismal liturgy: “In [Christ] you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.”

Baptism is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people. We are saints and heirs. There is, of course, always a call to live in response to grace – but the grace comes first. It’s not up to us. A few verses later, the author of Ephesians says, “You are God’s accomplishment.” All of us together – the struggling blessed, the all set, the troubled and prosperous – we belong. Named and claimed. We’re given hope. We’re given power. We’re given the riches of divine grace. 

I’m sure there are people hearing my voice who haven’t yet decided if you’re in on this whole church thing, this whole God thing. There could be hubris or intrusion or even a sense of coercion in me standing up here telling you that you’re part of something that you’re not yet sure you want to be part of. My theology puts a strong emphasis on free will, on our freedom to say Yes or No to what God invites us into and asks of us. At the same time, I know that often the barriers are questions of worthiness and belonging. Am I good enough? Do I know enough? Do I believe cleanly or clearly enough? Am I the right kind of person to be here, to be part of whatever this is? To belong to a church; to be loved by God? 

The emphatic answer of these texts and of the Gospel is that God’s welcome is eager and immediate and all-encompassing. The letter to the Ephesians is written to people who aren’t sure whether they fully belong in the church. After today’s reading, the text explores reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles in Christ, then comes to one of my favorite passages – I printed it in our bulletins: “So then you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household… In [Christ] the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.  And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by the Spirit.” 

There are mysteries of belief and belonging. But I feel bold enough to to say that it matters that you’re here. For you; for us; for God. Whatever is going on in our lives and our hearts, God welcomes us as saints and heirs. This is a holy and hopeful mystery: all of us, blessed and struggling, comfortable and woeful, prospering and troubled, the sure and the seeking, the bold and the ambivalent: right here, right now, part of of something beautiful that God is building. 

Read more about apocalyptic literature here:

https://matthewroot.ca/2023/05/03/understanding-biblical-genres-apocalyptic/

In the calendar of Bible readings that we use, we’ve been reading bits of the first and second letters to Timothy for several weeks. Timothy was a companion of the apostle Paul, the great early church leader who traveled around the ancient world founding churches. Timothy is named as a co-author in six of Paul’s letters. In Philippians, Paul writes, “I have no one like him.” 

The Biblical letters known as First and Second Timothy appear to be letters from Paul to Timothy. They are not. The author includes lots of details, trying to sound like Paul, but there are also MANY hints that this is NOT Paul. This is somebody writing after Paul’s death, in Paul’s name, to say some stuff they wish Paul had said – like that women should be quiet and submissive. They’re basically forgeries or deepfakes, and I’m not a big fan! (I found a good summary video about that, if anyone’s interested.) 

However. There’s one thing I think these letters do well, and that’s their emphasis on the importance of young people to the church. Today’s passage reads in part, “Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing… how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you.” This echoes an earlier passage from the first letter to Timothy: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young. Instead, set an example for the believers through your speech, behavior, love, and faith.” (1 Timothy 4:12)

Possibly the best thing these letters do is invite us to take young people seriously in church. Their hearts, their lives, their questions, their hopes, their fears, their faith. That’s a long-time core value for me, because I’m here doing what I do because some faithful adults took me and my faith seriously when I was a teenager. 

I could tell that story sometime, but I have a different story to tell right now. My family and I arrived at St. Dunstan’s in January of 2011 – almost fifteen years ago! At the time there were some big kids, like Rob’s older kids, who were around but not very active in the church, because there wasn’t much for them here. Our kids were one and five at the time, and they joined Simon and Isaac Gildrie-Voyles, who were maybe three and six, as the “regular” little kids at church. A couple years later, Cecilie and James showed up, with little Linus and Olive. There were other kids who were here for a while, or participated sometimes. Every year, I go into my photo software and create a little album of some of the best photos of church life that year, and in those early years there are some pictures of kids doing kid stuff at church – Christmas pageants, camp, and so on. 

And then we hit 2016. I don’t know why it was 2016, but it was. Sarah and Max showed up late in 2015. And then the Mayers came, with Zoe and Grace. Leonora came, with Anselm and Evangeline. The Behrens came, with Rachel and Levi. Andi showed up, with tiny Magdalena. And there were kids born into the church too – Mary’s kids and Rob’s younger kids, and Lorne and Blythe. I’m not suggesting that the households that have joined us since 2016 are any less important! It was just really interesting to look back at the photos, and realize that that really was a pivotal year. The year we hit critical mass – enough kids who were around often, to start doing stuff with them regularly. 

And one of the things we started was a youth group. 

When our youth group started – under the determined, faithful volunteer leadership of Sharon Henes, now moved to Connecticut, and JonMichael Rasmus – it was really really small. First we had two kids, then three. 

But kids invited their friends; almost right from the start we had kids in the mix who didn’t attend church here – kids like Alice and Tatum, who became deeply faithful members and still come back to join us for drama camps or mission trips when they can. 

Today our youth program has consistent relationships with 32 youth and young adults. That doesn’t mean there are 30+ kids over there every Friday evening – though it’s not uncommon for there to be 20+, across the middle and high school groups. But it does very much mean that more than thirty young people turn to this group, this space we’ve created, the faithful adults who invite and tend that space, as one of the things that anchor them in the demands and complexities of their lives. 

You’re going to hear a lot about the youth program over the next few weeks – because during Giving Campaign season we talk about the budget, and when we talk about the budget, we’re talking about the youth program, and our ongoing decision to stretch ourselves and see what’s possible. The scary thing about talking about the youth program is the fear that some people may feel put off by it. Because they don’t have an immediate connection, it’s not for them or their loved ones, so they may feel that when we talk about the youth program, that means that they’re less valued, less supported. And even for people who like the youth program, it could be easy to feel like it’s just for the youth, and doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the parish. 

I’d like to make the case today that the youth program is good for all of us, and for St. Dunstan’s as a faith community. A few months ago I took on the task of noticing ways the youth program benefits and feeds the church as a whole. There was a lot to notice. First, there’s stuff they do that helps and blesses us. Back in August I asked for help rearranging the furniture in the Nave, and four or five of our youth just took that on and got it done. 

Linus Ballard recently sang a solo for us as a musical offering; I’ve heard from so many people who loved that. This past summer Iona and Zoe took on organizing the costume collection; they did so much, so fast, that it kind of blew my mind, and they’re working on maintaining it, too. When I need child care help for a gathering, our youth are a ready pool of potential helpers, and often already know the kids they’ll be tending. In Sunday worship, we have two regular youth officiants, in addition to our amazing acolyte corps. As part of our recent work on emergency planning, Ruth Parks needed help identifying safe hiding places around our buildings; she worked with a group of our youth and found them to be great partners in that project – they’re familiar with this kind of thing from their schools, and they know ALL the best hiding places here! 

Then there are the ways the youth group brings folks together from the wider congregation, with events and opportunities for everybody. The youth role in our summer Drama Camp for younger kids has grown year by year until our high schoolers are substantially running big parts of it. The after-church all-ages Trick or Treat coming up in a couple of weeks is another example. So is our annual bake sale for GSAFE in early December. This year the youth group invited folks to a bonfire on Labor Day weekend for the first time, and more than forty people came out! It was a really amazing time to gather, connect, share s’mores and sing together. 

Then there are the ways the youth program draws people into the parish. Kids and their parents want to be here because they see opportunities for meaningful involvement in church, all the way through middle and high school. Younger kids see big kids participating, contributing, leading – and they want to grow up and become those big kids. I also hear from folks who don’t have kids, or whose kids are grown, that they value the joy and liveliness they sense here, and being part of a community that has – and values – young people. 

And those folks who come here, and stay here, because of the presence of kids and youth, bring so much as well. We have a lot of amazing adults in this church because of our youth group. 

Then there’s the leadership our youth offer us, and their care for our common life. Max doesn’t just keep an eye on the play corner; he’s keeping an eye on all of us and our safety as we worship. 

Isaac has been an amazing addition to our vestry, with lots of insight to share; you’ll hear from him in a couple of weeks, and you’ll see what I mean. As we keep up our commitment to putting out our Pride signs – made by the youth –  every June, folks beyond the parish tell us that they see and value that message. I hear things like, “I don’t go to church, but if I did…” 

Last spring, the high school retreat focused on mutual aid, and the kids came up with the idea of offering a fun special event for youth in the wider community that might be lonely and disconnected. On Sunday, November 2, our youth are hosting a big Capture the Flag game on our church property, as a first experiment in fulfilling that intention. Our youth minister Isa applied for a diocesan grant to fund the event. I’m on the committee that reads those applications. I don’t vote on applications from my own parish, but I can tell you that ours was the only proposal from a youth group, and that the team was really excited to get it, and to fund it, because it came from young people wanting to make a difference for their community. 

Our youth program gives so much back to our parish as a whole, in all kinds of ways. And: it does matter to the youth, too! Youth group isn’t just something we do for fun, although it is fun. It’s also sometimes really demanding, because it’s hard to be a tween or teenager, and kids are dealing with tough stuff, and Isa and JonMichael and our other helpers are choosing to be in that with them, with love and hope and creativity and courage. 

Between a third and a half of the youth who participate aren’t part of this parish; they were invited by friends, or found their own way to us. Our program serves queer kids, and neurodiverse kids, and kids from all kinds of backgrounds. When I was there with the Middler group in September, during the prayer and sharing time, one kid talked about feeling like they don’t have really good, solid friends at school. And the response from the group was instant and loud: WE’RE YOUR FRIENDS! 

It is expensive running a youth program. Most churches our size, and our budget, don’t have a quarter-time youth minister on staff. It’s a financial stretch for us to do this- though our diocese, recognizing the importance of what we’re doing, has been helping. Still: It’s expensive – the staff salary, the pizza and snacks, the special events, trips and camps – it all adds up. However, when a church chooses not to invest in kids and youth, that’s also expensive in the long run, as the congregation dwindles and fades. 

We are a church with a youth group, not a youth group with a church. There are lots of good things that are part of our life together and our shared engagement with the wider world. Long-term, deeply sustaining things; new, vital, exciting things. We’ll hear about some not-so-youth-y parts of our life as a parish in the coming weeks, too. 

And: The youth program is so much more than just something that happens in the other building on Friday evenings. It’s become one of the engines that gives energy and drive to this church, in a really special way. I feel joyful and hopeful and curious to see where that leads us together, in the coming months and years – raising up these young people among us who from childhood have known the sacred writings that instruct us in salvation, and who set an example for the believers through their speech, behavior, love, and faith.

Today’s Gospel is more complicated than it seems. This story is often preached as a invitation to gratitude. I don’t have a problem with gratitude! I feel grateful for many things on a daily basis. Gratitude is theologically appropriate and psychologically beneficial. But! It’s not at all clear to me that the nine who are healed in this story, but don’t return to Jesus, are ungrateful.

Let me offer some quick but essential context. These ten men have some kind of skin disease; it might or might not be the disease that we call leprosy, today. Way, way back in early Bible times, people understood that skin diseases can be contagious, can spread between people, even though they didn’t understand why. There weren’t doctors or public health officials, so the leaders they did have – religious leaders – had to be both of those things. The thirteenth chapter of the Book of Leviticus, the third book of the Bible, describes in somewhat unpleasant detail exactly what the priests should look for, when examining a skin ailment. If someone had a serious skin infection of some kind, they had to live on the edge of the community, avoiding contact with others; and the priest would check them every week to see if the infection was healing. If their skin cleared up, they could return to their home and family and normal life – but they had to get the all-clear from the priests to do that. This is public health before public health; it sounds cruel, but it’s better than letting leprosy run rampant through a village. 

This religious handling of illness and health is the reason our Gospel text describes this healing as being made clean. This isn’t just physical restoration, but social and spiritual cleansing.

So! These ten men seem to have formed their own little micro-community, since they’re not allowed to come close to other people; notice they keep their distance from Jesus. They hear that this famous teacher and healer is passing through, so they come to meet him. They call out for him to have mercy, and Jesus tells them, Go, show yourselves to the priests. 

It seems to me like it’s a significant act of faith that they turn around and set out, even though Jesus hasn’t obviously done anything yet. But as they go, their bodies are restored; they are made clean. 

Nine of them – we presume – continue on to present themselves to the priests. Which is the right and necessary thing for them to do! It’s the only way for their physical healing to be fulfilled by being restored to community and normalcy. There’s no reason for Jesus to be so snarky about them, here. 

I wonder if Jesus didn’t expect any of the ten to return. And when one of them does rush back – praising God loudly, throwing himself at Jesus’ feet, generally making a scene – he has to do something with that disruption. So he makes it into a little teaching moment about gratitude… even though the other nine, wherever they are, are probably also plenty grateful and expressing that in a religiously appropriate way. 

If the point isn’t gratitude – or isn’t only gratitude – what else is going on here? Both Luke’s Jesus and Luke himself make a point of the fact that the one who turned back is an outsider – a Samaritan. Which makes perfect sense, actually! Samaritans lived – and still live – in the region that used to be the northern Kingdom of Israel. They see themselves as descended from Moses, and sharing the same history and God as the Jewish people; but they believe that a mountain in their region is the holiest site on earth, not the Great Temple in Jerusalem. Tensions between Samaritans and Jews were high, after attacks on each other’s holy places in the decades before Jesus’ birth. So, this Samaritan was never going to go show himself to the Jewish priests. That wasn’t his faith, and he would not be welcome. 

Jesus wants his disciples, and the crowd that gathers whenever he stops to teach and preach and heal, to notice that the tenth man is grateful – but also to notice that he’s a foreigner. The Greek word is allogenes, literally “from somewhere else.” To put it in the simplest terms possible, Jesus wants his audience to take away two thoughts: Hey, I should thank God when good things happen, and, Hey, sometimes foreigners aren’t so bad. They can be just like us – or even better! 

Jesus’ calling his hearers’ attention to the righteousness of this foreigner is aligned with one of the great themes of the Bible. The Old Testament, the Scriptures from before the time of Jesus, are very clear that God’s people are to treat the stranger, the alien, the immigrant with respect and care, because they have been strangers and aliens – in Egypt in their early history, in exile in Babylon much later. The New Testament in turn is incredibly clear that God does not have a favorite kind of people; that followers of Christ are all one, irrespective of language, race, class, nationality, gender; that we’re called to love our neighbors, and that love is what makes someone a neighbor, not proximity or affinity. 

It’s easy to take for granted that we all know and understand this. But our lessons today point towards our faithful obligation towards the other, whether defined by ethnicity, language, national origin or immigration status. And even when we know where our church stands, it can be helpful to talk about why – especially when some of those others, those neighbors, are in danger. 

Last month was Treaty Day for southern Wisconsin. The UW Madison website explains, “In a treaty signed on September 15, 1832, the Ho-Chunk nation ceded Teejop (Four Lakes) [and much of southern Wisconsin] to the United States [government]… [That treaty is] what allows non-Ho-Chunk people to reside in Madison today… 

It was signed under duress…, and required [the Ho-Chunk] to leave Teejop. The treaty began more than forty years of attempted ethnic cleansing when soldiers and many settlers repeatedly used violence and threats to [try to] force the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin.”

I don’t know of anyone in our congregation who claims indigenous identity or tribal affiliation. That means that through the lens of Treaty Day, we are ALL people from somewhere else. 

And yet we’re seeing open hostility from a whole lot of other from-somewhere-else type folks, towards more recent arrivals – or those perceived as such. That hostility, in the highest levels of our government, is making some of our great American cities feel like war zones – not because of the residents, but because of the masked and armed outsiders thronging the streets, raiding apartment buildings and workplaces, seizing civilians with little or belated accountability to the rule of law, threatening those who protest or resist with escalating violence.  

Every week, when we pray for all nations and peoples, I pray for all migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, but always. There are so many reasons people leave one place and come to another – for study, for safety, for freedom, for work and opportunity. (Significant chunks of our economy depend on immigrant workers.) It’s often a mix of factors that drive a person or household to pull up stakes and set out for somewhere else. But it’s always hard, and risky, and it’s probably always at least a little sad. Deserving of compassion.

Latino New Testament scholar Eric Barreto writes, “The experience of the foreigner is unenviable. On the one hand, the foreigner’s new home is never quite home. Many will dream of returning to the land of their birth, but… for most, returning home is a dream; it is pure nostalgia that can easily rot into resentment, decline into despair. Their new home is their true home, [but] it may never feel that way.” 

Barreto continues by pointing out the centrality of the foreigner – and the experience of being in a place where you don’t belong – to God’s people in Scripture and history. He argues that to devalue and decry the presence of foreigners among us today, our more recently from-somewhere-else neighbors, is to turn away from part of our core faith story, to settle for an incomplete Gospel. He concludes, “The foreigner is a vital presence among us. The foreigner is a reminder of the pain of displacement many of us have felt. The foreigner is a reminder that God’s promises know no boundaries or borders, that God’s grace will not abide by the arbitrary lines we draw between ourselves and others.”

I have to confess to a failure of empathy here. I find it somewhat hard to understand those who feel resentful or threatened by the presence of more-recently-from-somewhere-else folks among us, because to me it mostly seems like a blessing. My parents are coming up for Thanksgiving week, as they often do, and as always, our planning for the week involves quite a bit of conversation – and some difficult choices – about where to EAT. The amazing Lebanese place over in Middleton? The new Mexican breakfast place down off Fish Hatchery? The South Indian place across from PetSmart with the excellent dosas? Taigu Noodle, down the road, run by the amazing Hong Gao, who leads the Chinese choir that practices here on Saturdays?  

Look, there’s a lot more to the complexity and ambiguity of the immigrant experience, and to being a truly diverse and affirming city, than having lots of interesting restaurants. Food is superficial; but it is also a real and meaningful way to notice how much we are enriched by our diversity. 

Last week I saw a snippet of video of ICE activity on the east side of Madison. In the comments under the video, several people were saying, Come to my town – naming other towns and cities in Wisconsin, implying that they’d like to see their immigrant neighbors tossed into unmarked vans and driven away.

One commenter said, Come to Beaver Dam. Beaver Dam is a small city is about 50 minutes northeast of here; its population is about 12% Latino. My friend Mike Tess is the pastor of the Episcopal Church there. Mike is a gringo like me, but he has a deep commitment to learning Spanish so that he can be in relationship with folks in his community, and potentially welcome them into his church. (He wants to take a group from our diocese to Mexico for a language immersion course next summer – let me know if you’re interested!) Imagine being a Latino person living in Beaver Dam, interacting with white community members, as you must, and not knowing: Is this somebody like my friend Mike, a person of warmth and curiosity? Or is this somebody like that person in the comments, who wants you gone, and doesn’t much care what becomes of you? 

The prophet Jeremiah writes to his fellow Judeans in exile in Babylon, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” I learned this text as, In its peace you shall find your peace. The Hebrew word there is shalom, a beautiful, dense word that means peace and welfare and flourishing, all wrapped together. 

Seek the peace of the city where you dwell as exiles, for in its peace you shall find your peace. This is a favorite passage, for me. I hear it as an invitation to citizenship in the fullest sense; to loving our neighbors by participating in civic life in ways that extend shalom to all. 

And I hear it as addressed to me, to us, even though Jeremiah is speaking here to exiles, to people-from-somewhere-else, about how to live in a place where they don’t belong. Because in the Christianity that has formed me, our true belonging, our deepest loyalties, are not to any city, state, or nation, but to God. 

We’re a few weeks out from Christ the King Sunday – a holy day created in the aftermath of World War I, to remind Christians to set aside nationalistic pride and ethnic antagonisms, remember that we are all first and foremost citizens of the kingdom of God, and live as gracious strangers, wherever we find ourselves. It’s an understanding of Christianity that’s almost diametrically opposed to the mindset of white Christian nationalism, espoused by some of our fellow Americans – some of my fellow pastors! – who see close alignment among Christian identity, Whiteness, and strong identification as American, for a certain definition of America. I find it a difficult ideology to understand, because the way of Jesus as we encounter it in the Gospels has nothing to do with either whiteness or America – and urges us to see ourselves as part of a body that transcends race and place. 

We belong here; we belong to, and with, one another. At the same time, we’re all strangers, all people from somewhere else, not only in the literal sense of our varied immigrant histories but in the theological and ecclesiological sense of belonging to something – to Someone – that rightly relativizes and releases other identities and loyalties. 

Seek the peace of the city where you dwell. 

Love your neighbors; pay attention to what’s happening to them, especially when they’re in need or at risk. 

Seek the peace of the city where you dwell. 

See in those recently from-somewhere-else a reminder that God’s grace will not abide by the arbitrary lines we draw between ourselves and others.

Seek the peace of the city where you dwell. 

Let the Bible’s commitment to welcome for the stranger discipline us to hospitality and to courage. 

Seek the peace of the city where you dwell,

For in its peace we shall find our peace. 

Amen. 

So there’s one big thing in this story that can be distracting or even scary. It’s the idea that when the rich man dies, he is sent to a place of suffering. A place of flames where he’s desperately thirsty and can’t get relief. That’s pretty scary, right? 

Some of you/the grownups might have grown up in churches that talked a lot about how our beliefs and actions in life might mean we go to Heaven – or Hell – when we die. 

(You may have noticed that’s NOT stuff we talk about a lot here!)

In the story that Jesus tells, the places where the rich man and Lazarus end up when they die are not Heaven and Hell. 

In Jesus’ time people had a lot of different ideas about what happened after you die – just like today. 

Some people thought nothing happened. 

Some people thought you would sleep for a long, long time. 

Some people thought that you’d go to the land of the dead. Some parts of that land were really beautiful and lush and comfortable – like the valleys of Abraham. And some parts of it were terrible and dry and scorched. And there’s a chasm – a great big split in the ground – between those two places.

Jesus is using that idea to tell this story. 

He is not answering The Big Question about what happens after we die, here. There are a couple of other places in the Gospels where he seems to be trying to say something about that – like when he says, In my Father’s house there are many mansions. But it seems like what happens after we die is pretty hard to explain. And he’s not trying to explain it, here.

That’s not what this story is about at all. 

The point of this story is not that the rich man should have been kind to Lazarus TO AVOID PUNISHMENT AFTER HE DIED. 

That is not the reason he should have been kind!

God does not want us to do kind and right and just things because we are afraid. 

That was the church’s idea, I think. 

Fear is not a healthy heart-reason to do good things. 

The point is that the rich man should have been kind to Lazarus because it was the right thing to do.

It was what all the teachings and traditions of his faith told him – 

As well as just basic empathy and humanity! 

So, the point of this story isn’t to make us worry about burning for eternity! But what IS the point of the story? 

What does Jesus want to make people think about, here? 

One thing he wants us to think about is what can happen inside of people who have too much money.

Is that a strange idea – too much money? … 

Right before he tells this story, Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money.” Only what he really says is, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” 

What’s Mammon? 

Mammon is an interesting word that shows up a few times in the Bible. It means wealth, like a lot of money – a LOT of money.

But it doesn’t just mean money. 

It means money that people are treating like a god. 

Mammon means that people are putting money at the center of their lives, instead of God or other people or the wellbeing of their community and world. 

The great reformer Martin Luther wrote about Mammon. He said, “Many a person thinks they have God and everything they need when they have money and property. They trust in those things, and boast of them so stubbornly and boldly that they don’t care about anybody or anything else. A person like that fixes their whole heart on their god Mammon, that is, money and possessions. Mammon is the most common idol on earth.”

I know people who have enough money to share and are very generous and thoughtful about sharing.

I don’t think I know anybody who is super duper rich. But it does seem like people who are super duper rich are not always very happy? … 

Jesus wants us to notice how Mammon is at the center of the rich man’s life. His wealth lets him make everything around him just the way he wants it – his home, his clothes, his food. 

Maybe he gets so used to having everything exactly the way he likes it, that when there’s something unpleasant – like a poor, sick man lying on the ground – he just doesn’t even see it.

It’s like he’s wearing special Mammon glasses. 

There is a lot going on in this story, even though it seems pretty simple, and there are a lot of things it might leave us thinking about or wondering. 

But maybe the thing Jesus would want us to hear in this story today is actually a word of consolation and reassurance. 

It could be easy to hear this story as telling us that we’re supposed to reach out and help people who are struggling or alone or in need… 

And then to feel guilty or ashamed or overwhelmed. 

Because we know about A LOT of suffering!! … 

I know the grownups and the big kids hear about news from all over the world. People hurt and sick and hungry and afraid in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Haiti. 

We hear scary or sad news from across our country, too. Acts of violence, communities under threat, ecological disasters. 

I don’t know what grade they start showing you news in your classrooms, but at some point even our younger kids start hearing about some of this stuff – from school, or from other kids, or from their parents and older siblings talking about it at home. 

A lot of us feel an obligation to stay informed. We’re citizens of a powerful nation; there’s not much that happens in the world where our country doesn’t bear some kind of responsibility. So, in turn, we feel responsible – to learn, pray, advocate, donate, vote. 

That is the righteous work of citizenship and community. 

 And also: it’s much more than the folks who first heard Jesus tell this story would have had to deal with.

They didn’t have a 24-hour news cycle.

They didn’t have Instagram reels from war zones. 

They might hear, eventually, about a famine in that country, or a plague in that region, or a battle over there. 

But most of the suffering people knew about was the suffering they could see. The needs and struggles right there in their community, in their neighborhood. 

The rich man in the story isn’t reading about Lazarus in the newspaper. He’s literally walking past him – maybe stepping over him! – on a daily basis. 

So much information comes at us about human suffering around the country, around the world. 

I think sometimes it can be really too much for us.  

We get overwhelmed, discouraged, paralyzed. Numb. 

Sometimes it might even have an impact on our capacity to see and respond to the needs and struggles that ARE close at hand. That we could reach out and touch. 

Nobody, nobody in this congregation, 

if someone were literally bleeding and starving on your doorstep, 

would just step over him and do nothing. 

Nobody. 

But maybe we need permission 

to lift our eyes from our doorstep, but NOT TOO FAR. 

What’s the human suffering… on my block? 

Within a mile of my home, my work, my school? 

To read our local papers, and wonder: what are the ways people are struggling or suffering in my city, my town, right here?

Sometimes people could feel like focusing more locally means they’re ceding responsibility or closing their eyes and hearts to big needs elsewhere. We all need to find our own balance, and feel deeply inside us what we need to carry and stand for. 

But there are good reasons to think locally about how to connect and help and serve. I’ve learned this from folks with a lot more wisdom and experience about how to respond to needs, tend folks’ humanity, and build towards a better future, so my list of reasons is not going to be comprehensive! But here are a few. 

Responding to local needs may mean we’re more able to make a real difference, because we have a better understanding of the stakeholders and the needs and constraints and possibilities.

Responding to local needs can build networks and relationships that will help us better respond to other situations in the future. 

Responding to local needs is wise – shrewd! – in a time when some of our friends and neighbors are under threat and living with a lot of fear – because local, real-life connections can be safer and more trustworthy ways to connect and help. 

In our Godly Play classroom we ask, I wonder where you are in this story? If the person in Jesus’ story that you feel closest to is Lazarus – if you are down or struggling, in pain or in need – I hope this community will respond to you with compassion and care. 

Maybe what we need to hear in Jesus’ story today is permission not to try to carry the weight of the whole world – that’s the consolation, the reassurance I mentioned. 

And instead, an invitation to look for who and what is hurting, in our neighborhoods and networks, and to ask ourselves and each other what we can do about it.

How we can help, even a little – not because we’re afraid of eternal flames, but because that’s the kind of people God made us to be. 

Not to step over a suffering neighbor, 

but to step into our shared humanity. 

May it be so. 

We are living in complicated times. Difficult times. Unprecedented times. I hear it so often – I say it so often – that the words start to feel like ashes in my mouth. And yet: it’s true. These are bitterly, deeply, foundation-crackingly complicated times in which to live. 

There are moments and places and circumstances where things feel crystal clear. Things like our desire to protect our trans and nonbinary friends, loved ones, selves; our determination to stand with immigrant neighbors; our outrage about threats to access to healthcare, huge cuts to lifesaving research, protections for the environment we all share.

AND there are also moments and places and circumstances when things feel incredibly murky – around and within us. Maybe you feel trapped in daily choices, compromises and constraints. Maybe it feels like your bedrock values, the ones that have led you to be who you are and do what you do, now have to be whispered – if not entirely silenced – instead of shouted from the rooftops. Maybe you struggle with knowing how to feel, let alone what to do or say. 

I’m hearing hints of this murkiness from folks who work for the federal government. From folks who work in education and health care. From folks with any kind of public profile or platform. From people just struggling with how to read the news and then get up and go on with their day. 

These kinds of conversations have reminded me of the idea of moral injury. Moral injury happens when life injures your sense of being able to trust your leaders and do what’s right. The concept arose out of studies of healthcare personnel prevented from providing care by institutional constraints, and military veterans who had experienced their leaders, friends, or selves doing things that felt wrong, in the moment or in retrospect. A PTSD diagnosis didn’t fully capture the moral anguish these folks expressed. 

The International Centre for Moral Injury states that moral injury “involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways,” and the experience of “sustained and enduring negative moral emotions – guilt, shame, contempt and anger – that results from the betrayal, violation or suppression of deeply held or shared moral values.” (All citations from Wikipedia, Moral Injury entry.) 

Moral injury seems like a pretty good name for some of the internal murkiness – and associated distress! – that people are naming to me. Today’s Epistle from the first letter of Timothy urges Christians to pray for our political leaders, “so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.” Pragmatic advice from a community at risk of political persecution – but I know that some of you struggle with how to respond to our liturgy’s invitation to pray for all those in authority, every Sunday. 

I know, too, that many have grappled deeply with how to feel, let alone what to say, in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk – whom some folks knew of as a Christian motivational speaker, and others knew as an incendiary voice who built his movement on targeting marginalized groups and stoking fear to mobilize outrage. Activist Gwen Snyder commented on Bluesky, “I think it is corrosive on a spiritual level to live in a world where we are so unused to justice that a political assassination feels [to some people] like cause for celebration.” Disciples of Christ pastor and writer Derek Penwell captured some of this corrosive confusion, writing, “Jesus says love your enemies. The timeline says humiliate them. I’m not trying to referee the news; I’m just trying to shepherd my own heart while the barometer drops. I’m stuck between the Sermon on the Mount and the comments section.”

Into all this disorienting murkiness, the Gospel of Luke drops this incredibly murky parable.

Some of Jesus’ parables have really clear messages! Like the lost and found parables: God loves us and will always seek us out! Good news! Some parables are a lot more perplexing, and this one is close to the top of that list. Not just for me! Every commentary I’ve looked at says some version of, Whoo. This one’s a doozy. 

Jesus tells different kinds of parables. They don’t all work the same way. For example, I often remind us not to assume that the king or the boss in every parable is a stand-in for God. Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Here, I think, no. This is a wisdom parable, not a kingdom parable – meaning it’s about the world as it is, not the world as God means it to be.

I suspect that the parable as Jesus told it ends somewhere before the word “Whoever.” It’s not clear whether that last little bouquet of sayings belongs with this parable, or not. Sometimes the Gospel writers added explanations to the parables, to make it clearer what they thought Jesus was talking about. Luke, here, is working with a source document consisting of a bunch of stories and sayings of Jesus. Sometimes he’s just trying to figure out how to string it together and fit it all into the Gospel narrative he gets from Mark. So these sayings may not match this parable at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus’ version ended with these words: “People who belong to this world are more clever in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light.” Or in the more poetic language of the NRSV translation: “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” 

Let’s make sure we understand the story. There’s a boss, a rich man, a master, and there’s his business manager, sometimes called his steward. And the boss gets word that the manager has been wasting his money. 

Fun fact: the same word is used for the prodigal son’s wasting or squandering of his inheritance, in the story that comes just before this one! We don’t know what the manager has been up to, but apparently it’s nothing that has made him any lasting friends, or provided for his future – no secret account in Turks and Caicos. 

The boss calls the manager in to see him. What’s this I’m hearing about you?!? Bring me the account books immediately, show me what you’ve been doing! And then turn in your keys; you’re out. 

Jesus’ storytelling is so wonderful as he gives us the manager’s internal monologue: What am I going to do!? I’m not strong enough to dig, to earn my keep by manual labor, and I’m too proud to beg. I know what I’ll do – so that when I’ve turned in my keys here, some people will still welcome me into their houses. 

And then he starts calling in the people who owe something to his master. Maybe tenant farmers who work on the master’s land, maybe just ordinary neighboring folks who have gotten into hardship and had to borrow from the local wealthy landlord. 

The manager opens the account books, where the record of what is owed is kept, and he starts changing the numbers. Jesus gives us a couple of examples – a man who owes nine hundred gallons of olive oil has it reduced to four hundred and fifty; a man who owes a thousand bushels of wheat has it reduced to 800. But we’re to assume that this happens over and over, with ten, twenty, fifty different debtors. 

Walk with me briefly into the weeds about these debts. It was and is against Jewish religious law to charge interest to other Jews. But we know from ancient records that people found ways to make a debt grow without calling it interest. The manager would likely also have taken a fee from every debt he handled. 

So we don’t know whether the cuts to these debts are reducing the principal, what was originally borrowed, or just taking off all the extra. If the manager is changing the debts back to the original amount – as some Biblical scholars think – then that’s very clever, because it leaves the master in a bind. It would be hard to publicly demand back all that that interest, forbidden by religious law. There’s a wonderful irony in that from the master’s point of view, this is yet more “squandering” on the part of the manager. 

The manager isn’t liberating the debtors entirely – he doesn’t just burn the files – but he is easing their burden somewhat. But he’s not doing it out of altruism. He’s doing it so that when he gets fired, in, like, ten minutes, he’s not public enemy number one. So that some people might give him a little food and let him sleep in their barn for a while. 

Who are we supposed to side with, here? The verses tacked on at the end include this question: “If you haven’t been faithful with someone else’s property, who will give you your own?” It’s easy to read this as a condemnation of the manager’s squanderings. But by making lucrative, predatory loans, the master has ALSO arguably been unfaithful with other people’s property. I suspect that Jesus himself did not care very much about people paying back their debts to the penny, especially in a brutally exploitative economic system that ground down the poor and enriched the wealthy and corrupted the middle management. And Jesus’ original audience, mostly working-class folks, probably empathized with the debtors – and appreciated the manager’s cleverness, even if his motives were skewed.

What are we supposed to make of this parable?…

In the translation we read today, the master commends the manager for his cleverness. In other translations, the original Greek word there – phronimos – is translated as shrewd. 

Shrewd is an interesting word. To call someone shrewd is a compliment, though sometimes a grudging one. It means someone’s good at understanding a situation and making things work out the way they want. But shrewdness is hardly a virtue – in fact it’s oddly amoral; we might equally note the shrewdness of allies or enemies. Likewise clever – it’s not necessarily praise. 

Phronimos, that Greek word, is sometimes translated as wise or wisdom. But it’s a very different wisdom from the more often-used Greek word sophia – wisdom as deep insight with a quality of moral rootedness and righteousness. Sophia-wisdom is associated with the holy, with God, with seeing things as God sees them. Phronimos is a much more contextual and ambiguous kind of wisdom – the wisdom of knowing which way the wind blows, and which side one’s bread is buttered on. 

What I’m hearing from friends, from family, from all of you who are both friends and family in this household of faith, is that the internal murkiness of this season is really hard. Living with moral injury, with ambiguity, with compromise and silence, with trying to make the best of a wide variety of bad situations – when it’s often really unclear what the best is, or what best is even possible. 

It feels bad and weird and gross. 

If, like me, you come from a middle-class white family, you may feel very deeply that standing up, being your authentic self, and speaking your truth – even if your voice shakes, as they say – is always the right and good thing to do. Your responsibility and your birthright. Holding back our words, keeping our opinions to ourselvses, can feel like fire shut up in our bones, in the words of our friend the prophet Jeremiah. 

Many of us face hard questions about how to be able to keep doing the most good we can, under our general and particular circumstances. And our information is imperfect; we just have to make our best guess, and try – and sometimes, that trying means that tolerating or participating in things that are deeply uncomfortable to us. That violate our values and sense of self. 

Back in May, I was invited to a gathering of clergy to talk about how to preach and pastor in these times. A number of Black church pastors were part of the group. Our Scripture theme was the turn from the Book of Genesis into the Book of Exodus. At the end of Genesis, Joseph has ingratiated himself with Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and he and his people, the Hebrews, are doing great, treated as part of the elite in Egyptian society. But a few generations pass and there’s a new Pharaoh, who doesn’t know or care about Joseph. And now the Hebrews, Joseph’s people, are enslaved, bitterly oppressed. 

At one point during our gathering, one of the Black clergy noted how surprised and distressed the white clergy seemed by our national circumstances. He leaned in and told us all – clearly, kindly – “We’ve always known we couldn’t trust Pharaoh.” 

It’s not news to us – he said, without saying – that the powers that be do not have our interests at heart. That the status quo was not built for our people’s flourishing, whether the party in power starts with an R or a D. 

One thing we can do – that white, middle-class “we” – in these frightening and murky times is to listen to those kinds of voices. To learn from people who have never assumed that they would be free to live as they please and speak their truth boldly. Who’ve had to be shrewd, clever, prudent, strategic – first to survive, then to build strength and move forward together.  

The little group here that’s been reading the work of 20th century Black theologian Howard Thurman together has appreciated grappling with and learning from Thurman’s mapping of the inner murkiness of life and ethics and humanity for Black folks in Jim Crow’s America. 

People who belong to this world are more shrewd in dealing with their peers than are people who belong to the light. We’re supposed to be people of the light, right? You are the light of the world; let your light shine, Jesus says elsewhere! But we also seem stuck being people of this world. And Jesus himself was, among other things, a man living in occupied territory. Shrewdness may not be a spiritual virtue – but if you read the Gospels with some understanding of the power relations of the time, you see Jesus being pretty shrewd. There’s a lot of strategic not-quite-saying things, a lot of ducking and dodging and plausible deniability – until the point when he’s ready for the final confrontation. Until he thinks his followers and his movement are ready to continue what he’s started without him. (If you’d like a fuller understanding of Jesus’ life and context, we’re planning a study on the Gospel of Matthew this winter; watch this space!) 

At the end of the parable, the master commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. Remember: The master in this story isn’t secretly God. But I still think it’s pretty interesting that Jesus ends the story with the master saying, You’re still fired, but that was pretty clever. 

And Jesus almost seems to echo the master’s grudging respect, as he observes – commends? – the shrewdness of the people of this world. He might be hinting that the people of light can be a little naive, a little idealistic, when it comes to doing what needs to be done in the murky reality in which we live. 

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they’ll need to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. The word wise there, in the Greek, isn’t sophia. It’s phronimos. Shrewd as serpents.  A little sneaky, a little slippery. 

What we have in this quirky, murky parable, I think, is – not an endorsement, but an acknowledgment of the necessity of shrewdness. Sometimes squeezing some tiny bit of strategic goodness, or at least less-badness, out of a lousy situation is the best we can do. 

I want to be clear that I’m not telling people that I think you should be more quiet, more careful, more strategic. I’m speaking to the many of you who are already feeling like you have to be quiet, careful, and strategic – and are struggling with what that means for your conscience, your heart, and your soul.

It’s a murky season, beloveds. 

But the people of light can be shrewd when we have to. 

May God help us live in the tension of these times, and help us be both serpents and doves, shrewd and wise, light-bearers and world-dwellers. Amen.

Today the lectionary, our calendar of readings, brings us two well-known and important parables of Jesus: the lost sheep and the lost coin. But there’s a third parable that completes the set – the story known as the Prodigal Son. The lectionary breaks them up; we got that one in Lent earlier this year. But in Luke’s Gospel, it follows these two simpler stories. It’s printed in the Sunday Supplement for those who may not know it! In brief: there’s a man with two sons. The younger one demands his share of his father’s wealth, then leaves home and wastes the money on profligate living. When he’s flat broke, friendless, and feeding pigs for a living, he realizes that he could just go home. He thinks, “Even if Dad makes me live like one of the farmhands, I’d be better off than I am now.” So he heads for home, rehearsing his apology speech as he goes. His father sees him coming and RUNS to embrace him. The son starts his little speech: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you… But the father isn’t listening; he’s giving the servants orders to throw a party. Soon everyone’s celebrating – except the older son. He’s coming in from working in the fields when he hears music. When he finds out what’s going on, he’s furious. His father comes out to talk to him. The older son says, I’ve been working like a slave for you for all these years, and you’ve never held a party for me, but you do THIS for that irresponsible scumbag? And the father says, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. 

It’s a complicated story; there’s a lot going on! But we grappled with some of that back in March. Today we’re looking at the set of three lost and found stories that appear here together – only in the Gospel of Luke. The similarities are obvious. Something or someone is lost – a sheep, a coin, a son. Someone is seeking what is lost – the shepherd, a woman, a father who stands on the road scanning the horizon. 

And when the sheep, the coin, the son is found – there’s a celebration. A party! The shepherd brings home the wandering sheep, and calls together his friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost!” The woman finds the coin, and she, too, calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.” Surely the party costs more than the value of the lost coin! And the father tells the servants, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”

I’ve heard, read, and preached sermons on these parables that focus on the straying, and the seeking. Back in March, a friend shared a sermon on the Prodigal Son story that focused on the celebrating. I’m going to share some of his insight today – from a sermon preached by Eric Biddy, rector of St. Paul’s, Augusta, Georgia. Eric writes, “Luke often gives some interpretation for a parable in the setting, the context, that comes just before. And here, the setting is scandalized religious folks. ‘All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Jesus tells three parables in response to their complaints… I think this context of offended religious folks can help us see that the first point of the parable is not the ways that we are prodigal or resentful [like the sons]. Rather, the first and main point of the story is about the scandalous love, mercy, and joy of God.”

Last week – just a few verses before this text – we heard Jesus say, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” and advising people to sit down and consider whether they really have what it takes to follow the way of Jesus.  

Whether they’re ready for everything that it could cost them – family harmony, earthly wealth and security, even their lives. It’s a pretty big pivot from all that caution, to all these parties. 

Yet these passages don’t clash, exactly. The invitation to join Jesus’ mission to seek and find the lost is deadly serious. Let’s peel away – if we can – the layers of religious rhetoric that treat lost as a shorthand for not Christian. Look at the people Jesus hangs around with: people who are pushed to the margins, seen as unimportant at best, unwanted and unclean at worst. For the sheep in the story, lost means alone and in danger from harsh terrain, weather, and predators. For the coin in the story, lost means that its value may never be seen and shared, that it won’t get to fulfill its purpose. For the sons in the story, lost means broken relationships, broken hearts, broken lives. 

When those are the stakes, the risks, the costs – then of course you throw a party when lost is found. When danger finds safety, loneliness finds belonging, pointlessness finds purpose. Last week I said that following Jesus isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs and s’mores around the campfire. But sometimes it is! 

Eric writes, “[God’s] constant love for us and for others saves us and unsettles us, but it also throws a party. And that party I think gives us another chance to locate ourselves in [the] story [of the two sons]. Because, sure, we are used to finding ourselves here as people who know we need mercy, or who resent the mercy given to others. But I think that we together, as the church, might be the party that God’s outrageous love throws, out of sheer delight of being with us. There is more here than just the salvation of individual souls. There is also a communal party that is a kind of spilling out of the father’s love and joy… At that party we are certainly not the father, the source of mercy and grace. We are the partiers, sharing and sharing in that mercy, love, and grace.”

Maybe last week and this week’s Gospel texts together invite us to hold two things together: both the seriousness and urgency of following the way of Jesus – and the possibility, indeed the responsibility, of joy. 

There’s not much joy in today’s Old Testament lesson from the book of the prophet Jeremiah – or the Psalm that echoes its themes of intransigence and calamity. Writing this sermon, I pulled out the folder from my seminary Old Testament classes, twenty years ago, to remind myself of Jeremiah’s story. 

Jeremiah was called to prophetic ministry, speaking God’s words to God’s people, in a particularly tumultuous time for Judea and Jerusalem. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been conquered; Judea has become a vassal state of the Assyria, under their authority, forced to send their wealth to feed the appetite of the empire. Jeremiah begins his prophetic ministry in the year 627 before the time of Jesus. He preaches through the religious reforms of King Josiah, and Josiah’s death. Through the Babylonian Empire taking over from the Assyrians, and the installation of King Jehoiakim as a puppet king for Babylon. Jeremiah preaches through Jehoiakim’s rebellion against Babylon, his defeat and death, and the first deportation, when the Babylonians took most of the upper classes away from Judea to live in exile, with the intention of further subduing the territory. Jeremiah preaches through King Zedekiah’s rebellion against Babylon, through Babylon’s invasion of Judea and destruction of Jerusalem in the year 587, and through the second deportation, in which most of the surviving population are dragged away from their homeland, their holy land. Jeremiah himself is taken to Egypt by a small group of survivors, but continues to correspond with the exiles in Babylon. 

My Old Testament professor, Ellen Davis, described Jeremiah as prophesying over Jerusalem as her night comes down. The looming destruction of Jerusalem and Judea – as we see it in the terrifying poetry of today’s reading – is the central theme of the first 30 chapters. The text is full of oracles of warning and judgment: Turn back now, return to God’s ways! Though Jeremiah seems to have little hope that this will happen, and rightly so. 

In this passage, Jeremiah has a vision of the future – a vision that will be catastrophically fulfilled by Babylon’s invasion, years later: darkness, death, and desolation. Cities ruined, land abandoned and barren. A future that feels inevitable because the people and leaders are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good. 

The Psalm picks up that theme: The foolish have said in their hearts, “There is no God” – meaning, here, that it doesn’t matter what I do, because there’s no power, no moral standard, to hold me to account. All are corrupt and commit abominable acts; everyone has proved faithless; there is none who does good – no, not one.  

There’s a kind of grace in encountering texts like this, sometimes – anybody else feel that? Because it makes us feel less alone in the chaos and bleakness of our times. When we feel untethered, unprotected, un-led – at least Jeremiah and the poet of this Psalm are right there with us?… 

Later in Jeremiah’s work – after the worst has happened – there is a shift in tone, towards imagining a future for God’s people beyond destruction and exile. This part of the book is sometimes beautifully called the Book of Consolation. In a few weeks, we’ll hear about Jeremiah buying a field while Jerusalem is under siege – a gesture of absurd hope. We’ll hear Jeremiah’s counsel to the exiles in Babylon: Live. Don’t give up. Your story isn’t over. It reminds me of a favorite line in a favorite song, Tom Rosenthal’s Throw the Fear: Keep watering the plants, love. 

Keep watering the plants, love. A gentle invitation to keep putting one foot in front of another. Not exactly a party. But: not giving in to despair, either. Holding onto life, love, the possibility of joy. And there are passages in the Book of Consolation that do imagine future celebration – like these verses from chapters 31: “Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O daughter Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with your tambourines and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers!”

Which is all just to say that the Book of Jeremiah is one great big lost and found story. God’s people had wandered off like that wayward sheep: torn by thorns, menaced by lions and wolves, endangered by storms and the harsh, stony landscape itself. Lost. 

But God does not forget them. 

God seeks them out, and promises to bring them home. 

God throws a party. 

Eric Biddy writes, “…This is what it means to be members of the party that is the church. We are not those who have lived so righteously that we have deserved an [invitation]… We are those who were dead and have come to life again, to share in the scandalous joy and mercy that has brought us back to life, and to new and deeper life.To be a community made by this outrageous grace of God makes us a little odd. It should mean that at times our convictions and habits surprise and affront some of our neighbors. Because it means that we live by the currency of mercy, rather than esteem; of forgiveness rather than debt; of hope rather than reputation. It means that we think by the logic of resurrection, where what has seemed dead can come to life as long as the love of God keeps spilling out of all the containers within which we try to enclose it.” 

There are a lot of metaphors for the church – the local parish church like this one, or the capital-C Church, the whole messy body of Christ’s people throughout the world. Maybe the church is like a family, or a household. The church is like a city, or a building, or a ship. 

I’m taken by this idea of the church as a party. An ongoing celebration. Rejoice with me! Because somebody or something lost is always being found. And part of what attracts me about this idea is how strange and challenging it feels to think of church as a party, church as a place for the intentional cultivation of joy, when we’re living through such difficult times. When we’ve lived through a difficult freaking week! Is it OK to laugh? To be playful? To be planning parties and talent shows and community meals? 

I think it’s okay, and more than okay. I think it’s necessary. My smart friend Kyle Oliver says, Joy is a catalyst for change, not a reward. Louie Crew, who spent decades patiently nudging the Episcopal Church towards inclusion for LGBTQ+ folks, lived by the motto, Joy anyway! Alongside the undoubted seriousness of striving to follow Jesus in difficult times, we need joy. We need the release of laughter, the comfort of friendly companionship. We need to feel cared for and celebrated, and we need opportunities to care for and celebrate others. We need the work that joy does inside us and among us. 

Eric concludes, “We have been brought back to life whether we deserved it or not, and we keep hoping for the same among others, even our enemies, whether they deserve it or not.”

We have to celebrate and rejoice, because what was lost has been found.

Joy anyway, beloveds.

Amen.