Text from Job here. 

Let’s pause here and talk for a moment about Behemoth, the creature – monster? – described in this passage from the book of Job. Behemoth eats plants, hangs out in rivers and swamps, and is incredibly, perhaps terrifyingly strong – does that make anyone think of a real animal?… 

Yes! Behemoth seems to be sort of a super-hippo, perhaps based on what this author has heard about hippos from travelers to Egypt and beyond. 

Who’s seen pictures or videos of Moo Deng?…  Moo Deng is the new baby hippo who’s taken the Internet by storm. She’s a baby pygmy hippo, who lives at a zoo in Thailand. 

She is small and very cute, and doesn’t really match this Biblical description! But she’s definitely having a moment. There’s all kinds of Moo Deng memes, merch, and fan art on the Internet. 

Okay. Why are we talking about hippopotamuses? It’s a very fair question, not just to me but to God, and/or to the author of the Book of Job. For 36 chapters, Job has been crying out to God, demanding an explanation for his suffering, while various “friends” tell him he can’t talk to God like that. 

In chapter 38, God finally speaks up…. And then talks for four chapters. Four chapters of nature poetry. 

But this isn’t poetry about how a field of daffodils made somebody feel better once. This is about how strange and wild and fierce Nature can be. 

God begins with the cosmic – the depths of the sea, the homes of darkness and light, the rules that govern the movements of the stars, the sources of rain and snow. 

Then God moves on to some of God’s favorite animals: lions, ravens, mountain goats. Wild donkeys, who wander the wilderness; they scorn the tumult of the city, and don’t have to listen to the shouts of a human trying to get them to cooperate. 

Likewise the wild ox, who will not spend the night in your barn or help you plow your fields. 

There’s a terrific passage about ostriches and how stupid they are – they lay their eggs on the ground, where they can easily be crushed, and barely take care of their young; and yet when an ostrich runs – it laughs at horse and rider. 

After describing Behemoth, we get to Leviathan, some sort of sea-monster or super-crocodile. God is really pleased with Leviathan and spends a whole chapter describing how badass it is. 

And that’s it, really. Job says, Okay. I hear you, God. There’s a bigger picture here that I didn’t understand.

Job says, I repent in dust and ashes – a ritual expression of humility. He has dropped his charges against God. 

God goes on to tell Job’s friends that God is angry with them because they have not spoken rightly about God, as Job did! As puzzling and unsatisfactory as God’s response to Job may feel, at least we see Job’s rage prayers ratified, as God smacks down the friends’ smug assurance about what God is like. 

I love the fierce nature poetry of God’s answer to Job. But in what sense does God answer Job’s anger and anguish? 

Bible scholar Robert Alter writes: “Through that long chain of vividly arresting images… Job has been led to see the multifarious character of God’s vast creation, its unfathomable fusion of beauty and cruelty, and through this he has come to understand the incommensurability between his human notions of right and wrong and the structure of reality.” (577) God’s answer, then, invites Job into appreciation of the bigger picture beyond his personal pain. 

On the other hand, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman writes, “After Job relates in great detail his anguish and pain and bewilderment, [God] responds, ‘Let me tell you about my crocodile.’ Any pastoral supervisor evaluating this act of ministry would say to [God], ‘You couldn’t stand the pain and you changed the subject.’” That’s fair. 

And yet. And yet. 

We do seek out mountains and beaches and stars. 

We do revel in the glory of a thunderstorm. 

We travel to volcanoes and glaciers. 

We’re drawn to the power and danger of apex predators.

My social media has been overwhelmed lately with people’s photos of the Northern Lights. Now, maybe 50% of that is the thrill of taking a cool photo and posting it online. But standing at the edge of a field in rural Wisconsin, looking up at the night sky, and knowing that the faint shimmering green you’re seeing is because there’s a storm on the Sun… can create a certain exhilarating sense of smallness. 

Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis points out that the natural phenomena God describes in Job are not useful to, and often not even friendly towards, humans. God describes a world, a universe, in which we – humanity – are neither center nor pinnacle. God loves the wild, the fierce, the mysterious. 

And – so do we, often. 

This remains true even in the deep shadow of the devastating impacts of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. As with every such event, it’s wise to consider the degree to which a natural disaster is also a human disaster: the product not only of natural systems intensified by climate change, but of poor planning and regulation, the failure of warning systems, political roadblocks to effective climate adaptation and adequate funding for relief work. 

There are no easy explanations for suffering, but part of the answer, surely, is that we choose poorly, individually and together. 

But even in the face of such loss, humans continue to find a strange consolation in the power and danger of creation. 

People will return and rebuild because they love the wooded wilds of the Blue Ridge mountains, and the moody glory of the ocean visible from vulnerable oceanfront homes in Florida. 

The thing about Moo Deng is that people don’t love her because she’s cute and cuddly.

People love her because she’s filled with rage.

She’s constantly trying to bite her keeper on the leg, or chase him around the enclosure. 

And it’s adorable, but also: Me too,  Moo Deng. Me too. 

God’s answer to Job does not explain or resolve Job’s pain, anger, and desolation. 

Go look at the stars, or Let’s talk about crocodiles, is not a good response to deep suffering. 

But it’s not the worst response, either? … 

There is an impulse here that we recognize. 

It’s something that sometimes helps, a little – turning our eyes and minds and hearts towards creatures and landscapes and cycles that are living their own vivid lives and care not at all about the things that overwhelm us. 

And there’s an invitation here, I think – embedded in the rich poetic tapestry of this text – to venture beyond the familiar and fallible moral frameworks of virtue and reward, into a sense of a sense of self and world and God that is stranger and riskier, less reassuring, more capacious and paradoxical.

Into the wild, fierce faith of Job. 

Today we begin a foray into the Wisdom Literature of the Bible. The Wisdom literature is a type or genre of text – like history, novel, love poem, prophesy, self-help, memoir, … 

What makes something wisdom literature? 

• Concerned with everyday life and how to live it well. Deals with the human condition, writ large. 
• Often makes playful use of metaphors from daily life. 
• Not much interest in history, politics, or, frankly, religion.  
• Focus on order and harmony – often, though not always. Wisdom literature can support or criticize the status quo… 
• Wisdom literature is descriptive, but looks for the deeper underlying truths and patterns of things, naming the things we don’t always name. 
• Wisdom literature does not appeal to revealed truth; it’s not grounded in what God has proclaimed to humanity, but in observation and reflection.
• But in the Biblical context, Wisdom is closely identified with God; it’s described as a gift from God, sometimes even an aspect or emanation of God, as in the beautiful poem we read together. And growing in wisdom is one path of faithful human response to God. Source:  https://www.crivoice.org/wisdom.html

Biblical scholar Ellen Davis, in her book on the Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, writes about the Wisdom literature – let me quote her at length: 

“The word ‘wisdom’ sounds slightly old-fashioned. We all know many smart people. Most of us admire people who have a good education… But stop for a moment and think: how many people do you know whom you would describe as wise? How many people can you say, without qualification, live their lives day by day, even moment by moment, in a way that glorifies God? …

For that is what ‘wisdom’ meant to the biblical writers: living in the world in such a way that God, and God’s intentions for the world, are acknowledged in all that we do. It sounds like a lofty goal, perhaps too lofty for ordinary people living busy lives. Such a goal of wisdom seems attainable only for great saints.… Yet this is not the understanding of the biblical writers… They consider wisdom within the grasp of every person who desires it wholeheartedly. Wisdom does not require any special intellectual gifts. The fruit  of wisdom, a well-ordered life and a peaceful mind, results not from a high IQ but from a [particular] disposition of the heart…

“So what is wisdom literature? It is spiritual guidance for ordinary people. Moreover, it comes from ordinary people, and this in itself makes the wisdom literature different from most of the rest of the Bible…. The sages make no claim to have received special revelation from God… Much of the instruction they offer is inherited from their fathers and mothers, both biological parents and ancestors in the faith.” 

The Wisdom literature, Davis says, offers “deep, imaginative reflection” – often in the form of poetry and extended metaphor – on the most commonplace realities of human existence: “birth and death, poverty and wealth, education and work, grief and joy, human love and love of God.” 

Another great Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggeman, writes, “Wisdom teaching contains almost nothing of salvation miracles or covenantal commandments, only the slow, steady pondering of the gifts and demands of lived life…. Wisdom literature asks about ‘what works,’ what risks may be run, what realities can be trusted, and where the practice of human choice, human freedom, and human responsibility can be exercised.” (232, Reverberations of Faith) 

These texts, says Brueggeman, contrast the wise with fools who lack wisdom and believe that life is an “anything goes” proposition… but people who follow only their own wills and impulses will not discover the hidden shape of reality, or find the path of living that is most congruent with God’s purposes for the world and our lives.

There are whole books of the Bible that really fit the bill as wisdom literature, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Job, and the letter of James.

There are other books that have sections or passages that have that quality. For example, the Psalms sometimes duck into Wisdom literature territory. And Jesus sometimes ventures into Wisdom teaching. 

Let’s cast an eye over today’s lectionary, from the perspective of the Wisdom literature… 

In our 1 Kings lesson, Solomon, Bathsheba’s son, becomes king after his father David. God offers Solomon a gift, and Solomon asks for wisdom. 

Solomon is a complex figure – more on that next week – but I sympathize with how genuinely overwhelmed he sounds here. When he says he’s a little child, he’s not speaking literally – he was probably somewhere in his 20s? – but he does not feel prepared to rule. Having him become king was his mom’s idea. 

He knows that he’s in over his head and has no idea how to do this job… a kind of wisdom in itself! 

So God gifts him with wisdom – AND with riches and honor. The text invites us to see Solomon as a king favored by God, like his father David before him. 

Note that even here, wisdom is not the same as revelation! God doesn’t just plant wisdom in Solomon’s mind and heart.

Rather, God gives him understanding and discernment, so that he will be able to look at the needs of his people, and rule wisely. 

This is not a wisdom text; this is just more Biblical history. But it gives us Solomon the Wise, an important figure for the Biblical tradition. FOUR full books of the Bible are presented as containing Solomon’s words and wisdom, in addition to what’s recorded in the chronicles of his reign in 1 Kings. 

First there’s the Song of Songs, which is not Wisdom literature; it’s more of an extended love poem.

Then there’s the book of Proverbs; we’ll duck into that in a couple of weeks. It describes itself as the proverbs of Solomon. 

There’s Ecclesiastes, which claims its author is “the son of David, king in Jerusalem,” and has a number of echoes of Solomon’s life, though it was likely written several centuries after Solomon’s time.  

Ecclesiastes is the source of a very famous snippet of Biblical wisdom: “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven…” 

Finally, there’s the book called the Wisdom of Solomon, which was written quite late, around the time of Jesus or a little earlier! – but also presents itself as the insights of King Solomon.

So, a whole lot of Biblical wisdom is attributed to Solomon, remembered perhaps as a greater sage than he was a king. 

Our second text, the poem of faith we read together, comes from the book I just mentioned, the Wisdom of Solomon. 

This is definitely wisdom literature even as it describes Wisdom itself – as a pure and beautiful hidden reality, available to holy souls who seek God. 

I don’t have a lot to say about this text except that I really love it! “In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets.” May we have many such among us! 

Then there’s James, the New Testament letter that we’ll be reading through over the next few weeks. James is one of my favorite epistles. The author names himself as James in the first verse. Ancient church tradition identifies the author as James, the brother of Jesus, who became the first bishop of the church in Jerusalem. And modern Biblical scholarship… says that’s not impossible. I like the idea, myself! – I really notice how much James sounds like Jesus. I like to think of him reinforcing and extending his brother’s teaching, in the decades after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. 

I love the Epistle of James because James has so many things to say that I need to hear, every time. He speaks to my heart and names my sins. He’s especially tough on the sins of superficiality and lukewarmness. It’s good to know that those were apparently struggles for first-century Christians, as well as 21st-century! 

We’ll hear from James over the next several weeks, but just in today’s short passage, we get these bangers: 

“Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” Ouch. 

Okay. Being mad about something doesn’t mean I’m either right, or righteous… and being mad in itself does not fix anything.

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” That image of looking at yourself in a mirror and then walking away and immediately forgetting what you look like! How many times have I named and confronted my sins, and then… just gone on my merry way? 

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” 

… Yeah. 

James sounds like Jesus in part because a lot of Jesus’ teaching and preaching springs from the Wisdom tradition, though he gives it his own distinctive spin. In Mark’s Gospel today we have Jesus doing a little Wisdom teaching! “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile… since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer! It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

That’s Wisdom teaching – playful use of a mundane reality (eating and pooping!) to talk about something more fundamental and universal: character and what makes somebody a good person. 

Notice that our Gospel reading skips a few verses. In those verses, Jesus accuses these religious leaders – the scribes and the Pharisees – of encouraging people to make big donations to the Temple instead of supporting their aging parents, even though “honor your father and mother” is one of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God. So this is a scene where Jesus is arguing that Jewish religious practice has grown beyond God’s original intentions, and become a kind of superficial piety that doesn’t change hearts or lives. That is a tendency of religion in general – not something specific to Judaism. 

And God knows that 21st century folks can certainly be weird and moralistic about food and what you should and shouldn’t eat! 

So this teaching may still have something to say to us. Eat what your body and your soul need to eat; but that’s not what makes you a good or bad person. Your behavior, that comes out from inside of you, is what reveals who you really are. 

Wisdom literature, as I’ve been describing it, is a concept from Biblical scholarship, a description of a genre of text from the ancient world. But the wisdom literature of the Bible contains some thoughts and perspectives that we might still describe as wisdom, two or three thousand years later. 

Wisdom is tricky to describe. To some extent we know it when we see or hear it… though there’s a lot of stuff out there that sounds like wisdom, but maybe isn’t really so wise.

Where do WE find wisdom? What wisdom helps ground and guide us, in our daily lives?…. 

In 1934, the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Today he might add, “Where is the information we have lost in content?”… 

It’s easy to think that Wisdom is rarer or more elusive today, amid the chaos of modern life. But one of the gifts of being in weekly conversation with an ancient text, as we are, is that we can see people thousands of years ago worrying about whether young people will make good choices, fretting about leaders who lack wisdom, and so on. 

I think maybe wisdom has always been rare and elusive.  And one of the things about wisdom is that the more you have of it, the less likely you are to put yourself out there as a font of wisdom. People who go around talking about how wise they are, often turn out to be con men or cult leaders… 

And when I think of the folks in my life to whom I turn for wisdom, I think they would quickly say, Oh, I’m not that wise. I’m just smart enough to know what I don’t know… 

We associate wisdom with age, to some extent. Life has a way of piling up experiences that can lead to a broader and deeper perspective. But it’s not a simple correlation. Everyone over 70 isn’t wise… and everyone under 20 is not foolish. I’ve learned things from my children, and our children, that have changed me. 

As we keep reading our way through some Biblical Wisdom literature in the coming weeks, I’d like to share a little parish exercise in thinking about wisdom in our lives and our time.

Below are some questions for you to consider; I invite your responses over the next few weeks. You can comment in the chat or email me. I can also send these out by email or put them up in the Facebook group, if that’s helpful…  

Let us pray – a prayer for wisdom from our Book of Common Prayer. 

O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and clarity rises up from confusion for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what you would have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in your light we may see light, and in your straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER… 

How would you define wisdom – or are there other words you connect with the word “wisdom”? 

Is there a person you think of as wise? (This could be someone you know, or a public figure, writer, leader, past or present…) 

Are there life experiences you think have helped you develop wisdom? 

Wisdom sometimes takes the form of proverbs or sayings that people pass around or pass down. 

Are there wise proverbs or sayings that you think of often, or that have been passed down in your family? 

You may share responses on our Google form here!

We’re in John chapter 6 – the Bread Gospels.  We’ve been reading this for a while; today I’m finally going to (sort of) preach on it. Next week we’re finally back to Mark, the Gospel we’re mostly following this year! 

I’m going to share four things that I struggle with about John 6, as we’ve been receiving it, and two things I like. 

1. The first frustrating thing is the way the lectionary spreads it over FIVE FULL WEEKS. 

It is really long – seventy verses – and detailed, and somewhat redundant! But at the same time, it is all one story. Jesus feeding the crowd leads into his preaching about bread, and the response of people who are curious… and then upset. 

John’s Gospel has several extended stories like this – the woman at the well; the young man born blind. Those are a little shorter – about forty verses each – but the lectionary gives them on one day, as one story. 

I don’t know why it breaks this one up so much. I know a lot of my fellow preachers have been really annoyed by it – have run out of things to say about bread.  Erin, our office coordinator, has been joking with me about using up all the bread hymns… ! 

2. The second frustrating thing is the way the lectionary breaks this story from the story of the woman at the well in John 4. 

In that story, Jesus meets a woman who is getting water. He tells her: ‘Everyone who drinks the water from this well will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ And the woman says to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

That sounds a lot like parts of this story, right? 

The author of this Gospel means you to read that story, then read this story, and have them build on each other. But the lectionary gives us that story in Lent of Year A; we’re in late summer of Year B. Eighteen months apart – literally as far apart as it can be, in a three year cycle of reading.  (We’ll read it next in March 2026!!!) 

3. The third frustrating thing is the way John talks about “the Jews.” Not in the script today but in the Biblical text the people who question and argue with Jesus are just called “the Jews.” 

Which is odd because Jesus and his disciples were Jews! Other Gospels name particular groups and movements within Judaism who had beef with Jesus in various ways. John is written a little later; maybe Christianity has begun to really separate from Judaism. Or maybe John’s community had their own reasons to cast Jews in general as the enemy. 

But it’s not true to the real dynamics between Jesus and the groups who opposed him, and it’s led to a lot of violence by Christians against Jews over the millennia. 

4. The fourth frustrating thing is the way Jesus talks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood is, in fact, kind of gross, right? Eugh. And he kind of goes on and on about it. 

In the other Gospels he says what he says at the last supper – we hear it every Sunday: “Take, eat, this bread is my body, broken for you… Drink this, all of you; this cup is the new Covenant in my Blood, poured out for you and for many…” 

But John’s Jesus really leans into the cannibalism thing. It’s no wonder that it turns some people off and they decide to stop following him! 

I snuck it into the script version of the text that we just read, but I want us to understand that the idea of drinking someone’s blood is EXTRA upsetting in Judaism. God’s people the Jews have special, holy food rules that they follow, that are very important for them. And one of those rules, from way back in the time of Moses, was not to eat or drink blood. The way they kill animals for food reflects that rule.  And of course Jesus knew that.  So he is saying stuff he knows will upset people – perhaps including some of us! 

But this starts to lead me into some of the things I like about this passage. 

5. I like the way there’s a kind of riddle here. 

What do we call the part of our service where I say, or we say, “Take, eat, this bread is my body, broken for you… Drink this, all of you…”

That’s the Eucharist, right? Or in our books it might say the Great Thanksgiving. Which means the same thing. Or sometimes we say Communion. 

In the Eucharist we tell the story of the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his friends, before he was arrested and executed, and how he shared bread and wine with them and gave them a new meaning that night. And he also told them, Keep sharing a special holy meal like this! Do this and remember me! 

Which is why we do it, and remember him. 

That story is really important for Christians. And it’s in three of our four Gospels – Mark, Matthew, and Luke. 

BUT IT’S NOT IN JOHN’S GOSPEL. 

John doesn’t show us Jesus creating the Eucharist. Instead, on that final evening, John’s Jesus washes the disciple’s feet.

People have wondered: Did John not know about the Last Supper and the Eucharist? Did he disagree that it should be a core practice of the church? Why isn’t it in his Gospel? 

Except… it kind of is in his Gospel! It’s just here, instead of on his last evening with his friends. 

John has Jesus talking about eating his body and blood, just like at the Last Supper. But he’s not giving people bread and wine, to say: These things become kind of a holy extension of me; you don’t actually have to eat anything upsetting. 

I think this scene makes it very clear that John knew about the Eucharist and thought it was important. 

Maybe he even thought it was so important that people should be kind of weirded out by it. 

And I think it’s interesting to wonder about why John’s Gospel tells us about Eucharist this way, instead of telling us the Last Supper story, which he knew. 

That’s an interesting riddle, to me! 

6. The last thing I want to say about this story is something I kind of like and also kind of struggle with, as a preacher and pastor. 

In this story and in the story of the woman at the well, Jesus says, basically: 

You’re drinking regular water, or eating regular bread.  

You’ll get thirsty again, and hungry again.

I am offering you water and bread that will satisfy you, forever.

That will keep you from ever being thirsty, or hungry.

That will bubble up inside you like a fresh spring…

That will sustain you so completely that you’ll live forever. 

The problem with this is it’s just not true, right? 

Not in a literal or earthly sense. 

Even the disciples, who received Eucharist from Jesus’ own hands, got hungry again and had to eat more meals. 

When we take Communion here, we’re still pretty ready for those coffee hour snacks!

There’s a really strong theme in John’s Gospel where Jesus uses something from the real world to try and talk about how things are in God’s reality. He talks about being born again.

He talks about the wind, and how that’s like God’s spirit.

He talks about water, and thirst; about bread, and hunger.

He talks about blindness, and what it means to really see. 

And much more. 

And people get confused. They don’t understand.

Some of them get curious and want to know more.

Some of them get mad and leave. 

So I understand that John’s Jesus is talking about a different kind of hunger, and thirst. 

Not the way you feel when your body really needs a drink, 

But the way you feel when the part of you that isn’t your body really feels dry and shriveled and needs to be refreshed. 

Has anybody ever felt that way?… 

Not the way you feel when your body really needs some food, 

But the way you feel when the part of you that isn’t your body just doesn’t have any fuel… any enjoyment… and really needs something that can sustain you and give you delight. 

Has anybody ever felt that way?… 

I have felt those things. I know what it’s like to have the part of me that isn’t my body be thirsty, or hungry. I know what it feels like when the part of me that isn’t my body gets that refreshing drink, or that sustaining meal. 

But it is hard to talk about, outside of those metaphors. And I know those metaphors might not make much sense to a lot of people. Just like they didn’t in Jesus’ time. 

So, I like it when Jesus says that what he’s offering people is something that will refresh and sustain the not-body parts of them. Like a cold lemonade and a delicious sandwich when you’re really hot and thirsty and hungry. 

But I don’t know how to give that to someone who’s looking for it. I don’t even know how to find it reliably myself.  It’s not as simple as handing someone a plate of cheese or cookies at coffee hour! 

All I can do as a pastor is say what Jesus says, more or less: There is something, here, that can offer relief and satisfaction to the hungry heart or the thirsty soul. 

It’s not easy to find it, for all kinds of reasons. 

But it’s there, and Jesus – who is God – wants to give it to us. 

And I think that’s good news.

Lord, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty; 

Lord, give us this bread always. 

Amen. 

Back in Lent a group of us read and discussed a book called On Repentance and Repair, by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. The book explores Jewish thinking on repentance, making amends, and forgiveness, based in the work of the 12th century rabbi Maimonides. 

Christianity has tended to emphasize the obligation to forgive – following Jesus’ lead to some extent! It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer, for one thing, and Jesus talks in strong and urgent terms about forgiveness at other times too. I think he’s pointing to the ways that holding onto our grievances and hurts can be a burden… but not at the expense of accountability and setting things right, which he also seems to care about! 

According to Ruttenberg, Judaism offers a much more victim-centered focus. The first priority is restoration of the victim, to whatever extent is possible. The second priority is the perpetrator doing their work to become someone who understands the harm they have caused, and beginning the work of becoming someone who won’t cause that kind of harm again in the future. 

Restoring relationship between the victim and the one who caused harm, including the possibility of forgiveness, is farther down the list. In Jewish thought it is not always useful or necessary, especially if it would further harm the victim to have to return to what they experienced. 

Ruttenberg lays out five steps in the process for a person who has caused harm. First comes naming and owning the harm. The perpetrator has to be able to recognize what they did and its impact.  This step may include public confession to an appropriate audience – which is to say, not necessarily the public per se, but some community that is affected or involved, or that has a stake in both the harm and the healing, here. Not just the victim. 

Note that one pretty common thing we see when public figures mess up is that they issue shallow, speedy apologies that reveal that they don’t really understand why or how their words or actions caused harm. A lot of potential repentance processes fail at this first step! 

The second step is starting to change – beginning the work of listening, learning, and working on yourself to become somebody who won’t do that again. 

The third step is accepting consequences and making restitution or amends, in whatever ways may be possible. When David says that the man who had his neighbor’s sheep killed must make restitution seven times over, this is what he’s talking about. The man in the story owes his neighbor seven sweet baby ewe lambs, to make up for the one that he cruelly took. 

The fourth step, in Maimonides’ process, is apology. We may well be surprised by how far along in the process this falls! But the group reading the book together found that this made some sense to us. Many of us have seen or experienced the frustration of premature and shallow apologies by a person or institution that hasn’t really made any effort to address harm or change the things that caused the harm. 

And the fifth step is to make different choices in the future. 

Forgiveness isn’t one of these steps because these steps fundamentally aren’t about the harmed person. This is about what to do when you have caused harm.  As we all have, and do. 

It’s a different framework from Christianity to some extent, but it’s also just a different lens or perspective. Christianity’s focus on forgiveness is centered on the person who has experienced harm. 

We may wrestle with elements of the approach laid out by Maimonides and Ruttenberg. But I do think there’s a helpful corrective here for Christians. 

Over the millennia Christianity has sometimes leaned so hard on the obligation to forgive that we have lost track of accountability, true repentance and change. 

Now let’s talk a little about David. 

It is a big deal that David is able to hear Nathan’s indictment, and repent. It’s a big deal when David says, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

But… is the Lord the only person David has sinned against?

Who else?….  (Uriah; Bathsheba; Joab; the other soldiers killed and their loved ones; arguably even the servant…) 

We read Psalm 51 a few minutes ago. A lot of the Psalms actually begin with little explanatory notes – about the music, or sometimes about the situation. Those aren’t included when we use them in worship, but they’re pretty interesting sometimes. And the heading in the Biblical text for Psalm 51 is, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

David NEEDS to repent to God – make no mistake. 

A fun thing I learned studying this story this year: When David writes to Joab to congratulate him on getting rid of Uriah, he says, literally, “Don’t let the thing be evil in your sight.” But then a few verses further on, the text says, “But what David had done was evil in God’s sight.” 

David thought – for a moment – that he could become the arbiter of good and evil. He was wrong. His repentance is – importantly – submitting himself once again to God’s sovereignty.  

So, yes, David needs to humble himself before God. But not only God, surely. We just listed dozens of other people whom David has substantively harmed, because of one evening’s bad judgment.

Yet right here in verse 4 of the psalm David says to God, “Against you only have I sinned.” The Common English Bible renders it this way: “I’ve sinned against you—you alone.” Robert Alter’s close translation of the Hebrew has, “You alone have I offended.” 

That verse makes it very clear, but the whole psalm is…. well, a kind way to say it is that it’s focused on restoring the vertical relationship between David and God, with zero attention to the horizontal relationships with other people. A harsher way to put it would be to say that it’s incredibly self-centered. David wants to get right with God so he can reclaim his mantle of righteousness, and “teach God’s ways to the wicked.” Despite knowing that the man in the parable should make restitution, there is no evidence in Scripture that David tries to do anything to mend relationships or make amends to Bathsheba, Joab, or anyone else. 

Can we imagine an alternate reality in which David came clean?Confessed, apologized, made amends? Acknowledged to his people that he had violated their trust and abused his power? Maybe he would have had to step down as king… but maybe he would have been happier as a private citizen. David remained king his whole, long life – but at the cost of tremendous personal suffering. The lectionary doesn’t give us much more of David’s story, but there’s actually a lot more to it. Read the rest of 2 Samuel sometime and see the many painful ways that Nathan’s prophesy plays out – “The sword shall never depart from your own house.”

What are we to take from all this? 

When our five young actors sat down for a table read of this script last Monday, Linus – our David – was the only one who hadn’t seen it already. When we hit the part where David starts planning to kill Uriah, Linus broke character to say, “Oh… I’m TERRIBLE!”

For a 3000 year old story there’s something surprisingly contemporary about David. The 20th and 21st centuries are littered with public men – in some cases, otherwise great men – who risked everything in the pursuit of what I will euphemistically call romantic interests. And not infrequently, there was some degree of uncertainty about the other party’s consent. And we are certainly familiar, in the modern world, with the principal that the coverup usually gets you into deeper trouble – as it did for David. 

I’ve been putting pressure on myself for weeks, maybe months, since we decided to work with the David story for Drama Camp this summer, to find something to say to the kids and youth about what is edifying or meaningful in this story. Which is silly, because they are perfectly able interpreters of Scripture! But still: it’s an awful enough story that I felt a need to explain why it’s in the Bible and in the lectionary. 

Now, I think I’ve been overthinking it. We should find in this story exactly what the ancient chroniclers meant us to find, when they recorded and passed down this unvarnished, ugly tale. 

A great man, chosen and anointed by God, can still mess up, and mess up badly – and dig himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

None of us are perfect, and nobody gets a pass. David, for all his intimacy with God, did not get to decide what’s right and wrong, or who lives and who dies. No human has that right and privilege.

David is writ large in every possible way, his mistakes as towering as his triumphs. But his message to posterity is simply: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that right and wrong don’t apply to you. And when you mess up, try to fix it instead of trying to hide it. And those – apparently – are lessons for the ages. 

Our Ephesians text today contains these words: “The gifts [Christ] gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…”

It’s a beautiful passage that describes something I get to see every day, with joy: the way God has gifted the members of this community in so many different ways, to be part of building up this body of Christ and equipping the saints – that’s you – for the work of ministry, of living out God’s love and justice in the world. 

This passage is also part of the rite of the ordination of a priest in the Episcopal Church. When I was ordained a priest in February of 2009, Bishop Michael Curry prayed these words before laying his hands on me and saying, “Give your Holy Spirit to Miranda; fill her with grace and power; and make her a priest in your church.” 

It worked!… 

This past Monday – July 29 – was the 50th anniversary of the ordination of a group of women known as the Philadelphia 11. 

Eleven women who were ordained as priests “irregularly” – outside the normal structures and processes of the Episcopal Church – two years before the Episcopal Church’s legislative gathering, General Convention, explicitly authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood in 1976.

Why was this action necessary?… It can be hard for folks attending an Episcopal church today to comprehend the institutional and cultural conservatism of the Episcopal Church sixty years ago. It wasn’t across the board or totally rigid; there were big steps towards ecological awareness and concern for civil rights and racial justice in the church in the 1960s and early ‘70s. 

But although there was no church law excluding women from ordination as deacons, priests, or bishops, there was a very strong custom against it. There had long been an order of “deaconesses,” separate and unequal from male deacons. In 1970, General Convention eliminated that distinction. But a resolution to open the path to ordination to the priesthood to women failed at the same convention – and then again in 1973. Support had grown, but wasn’t enough to overcome opposition.

Some women who felt called to priesthood, and their allies, began to plan other strategies to try to shake the church out of comfort and custom. One of the women said they felt like their vocation, their calling from God, was not to keep asking for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest. 

Ordination is what the church calls an episcopal act – meaning a bishop has to do it. You need a bishop to make a priest. A lot of bishops were sympathetic, but few were willing to rock the boat. 

Finally, three retired bishops stepped forward as willing to do the ordinations. (You only need one, but they wanted some extra juice!) In our church’s understanding of holy orders, once you’re consecrated a bishop, you’re a bishop for life unless you really mess up; but once retired, you have a little less at stake. 

In addition, one bishop who was not retired chose to participate in the service but not in the actual moment of ordination. I’ll say more about him in a moment. 

On July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Martha and Mary, a massive ordination service was held at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. Over 2000 people attended – imagine!!

There’s a part in the ordination service – like in the wedding liturgy – where the congregation is asked if they know of any reason why the service should not proceed. When that question was asked, several priests in attendance stepped up to read statements against women’s ordination. The bishops present responded that they were acting in response to God’s command, saying, “The time for our obedience is now.” And they continued with the ordinations. 

The Presiding Bishop at the time – John Allin – convened an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops, the body consisting of all the bishops of the Episcopal Church – at O’Hare Airport, for some reason? 

Initially the Bishops were going to declare the ordinations invalid – meaning, the ordination rite was void and those women aren’t really priests now. But the bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri, Arthur Vogel, a scholar and theologian, pointed out that that could be a problem in terms of church order. So instead, the House of Bishops declared the ordinations “irregular”… thereby ceding that these women might actually be priests now… but they also told the church at large not to recognize them as priests until General Convention met next in 1976 and decided how to proceed. 

(However, the Episcopal Divinity School, which thirty years later would become my seminary, hired two of the Philadelphia Eleven with full priestly duties in January of 1975!…) 

The 1976 General Convention finally approved the ordination of women to the priesthood, and opened a process for the full recognition of the ordinations of the “irregularly” ordained women. There’s so much more to this story… and there’s a new movie about it all that I would love to be able to show here sometime! This year, reading about it, my attention was caught by some of the men who were part of the story.

I noticed Bishop Tony Ramos – the bishop who chose to participate even though he wasn’t retired. In fact, he was quite young – only 36. He was from Puerto Rico, and had been appointed as the missionary bishop to the diocese of Costa Rica in 1968, at the age of 31. He resigned from that post a decade later to make room for a Costa Rican bishop to serve, then served the Diocese of New York as an assisting bishop for Hispanic ministries for many years.

Bishop Ramos died in 2019. His obituary calls him a “gift to the church and a prophetic voice… a life-long staunch supporter of women’s rights [who] fought for all marginalized communities.” As a result of his participation in the irregular ordinations in 1974, he felt “sidelined” and “exiled” by the church for much of the rest of his career – but he never wavered in his pride about having participated, seeing July 29, 1974, as a watershed moment for the church. Speaking about his participation at the time, he said, “The only way to do justice is to challenge injustice.” 

I noticed Dr. Charles Willie, who preached at the ordination service. Willie was African-American, born in Texas. He became the first tenured African-American professor at Syracuse University in 1974 – where he brought his college friend Martin Luther King Jr. to speak a couple of times. In 1974 he left Syracuse to accept a tenured position as a professor of education at Harvard. He was also appointed by both the Kennedy and Carter administrations to serve on commissions related to youth wellbeing and mental health. 

Willie was an active lay member of the Episcopal Church – so much so that he was elected the Vice-President of the House of Deputies in 1970. That’s the second-highest elected role a layperson can hold in the larger Episcopal Church, and he was the first African-American to hold that office. 

Because he had spoken out for women in ordained ministry, he was invited to be the preacher at the ordination service. In his sermon, he preached that it is a Christian duty to disobey unjust laws, recalling the civil rights movement: “It was an unjust law of the state that demeaned the personhood of blacks by requiring them to move to the back of the bus, and it is an unjust law of the church which demeans women by denying them the opportunity to be professional priests.” However, he said, the ordination must be celebrated “not as an event of arrogant disobedience but as a moment of tender loving defiance.”

When the House of Bishops declared the ordinations “irregular,” Willie resigned from his House of Deputies leadership role in protest – essentially saying that if the Church wouldn’t move towards justice here, then it didn’t get to claim the mantle of inclusiveness by having an African-American in a leadership role. 

I noticed Bishop Arthur Vogel, the theologian who persuaded the House of Bishops away from declaring the ordinations simply invalid. Vogel was born in Milwaukee, and studied at Nashotah House, the conservative Episcopal seminary outside Milwaukee. He served the Episcopal church in Delafield, and on the faculty at Nashotah House, from 1952 to 1971. He was elected bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri in 1971. In 1976 he offered the opening invocation for the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

I don’t know a lot about Vogel, but it seems likely that he held strongly Anglo-Catholic convictions – meaning that he was an Episcopalian who felt that the Episcopal Church’s liturgy and polity should be quite similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church, and not the warm fuzzy guitar-strumming Roman Catholicism of the 1960s, either. 

Maintaining Anglo-Catholicism within the Episcopal Church has long been Nashotah House’s heritage and focus. And Vogel was also very active in ecumenical dialogue between the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches, reflecting his desire to see them come closer and perhaps even reconcile. You may be aware that the Roman Catholic church did not then, and does not now, ordain women to the priesthood. 

But it was Vogel who pushed the House of Bishops not to declare the Philadelphia ordinations invalid. He said, in essence: These women had met the church’s criteria for ordination; they were ordained by bishops in good standing, according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer; we don’t have any church laws saying women can’t be ordained. So there is no solid ground for declaring these ordinations invalid. 

Why? Maybe because he was a careful, thoughtful scholar who was concerned about sloppy logic and knee-jerk reactions. Maybe because the retired bishop of his diocese was one of the ordaining bishops; perhaps there were conversations there. Whatever the reason: A smart, well-regarded man, who was not a progressive firebrand, spoke up and helped the church handle this… less badly than it could have? 

Bishop Tony Ramos. Professor Charles Willie. Bishop Arthur Vogel. Each for their own reasons choosing to become part of this story. The story that meant that by the time I was born – in February of 1975 – it was already becoming possible for a woman to become an Episcopal priest. 

I didn’t figure out that that was my path, my calling, Christ’s gift to me, until a whole lot later. But when I did, my church placed no barriers in my way because of who and what I am. 

I am grateful for that, beyond words. I’m sure there are other things I could have done with my life – but I sure love doing this, and it sure feels like what I was made to do. 

And: I wonder. 

I wonder who needs our support, our solidarity, today. In the church; in the wider world. 

Like Bishop Vogel, might we feel called to speak up for something that’s not our cause or our issue, just because it’s the right thing to do?

Like Dr. Willie, might we build a bridge from our own experiences and struggles to empathize with another person or community?

Like Bishop Ramos, might we even be called to risk status, potential, the esteem of our peers, to do the thing that feels necessary for the health of our soul? 

Christ still calls the saints – that’s you! – to building up the body of Christ, and to the work of ministry in the world, advancing God’s agenda of justice, peace, and love of neighbor, near and far. Christ still gives us gifts for the work to which we are called, each and all. 

May we hear. May we respond. 

Let us pray. 

O God of Persistent Grace, you called the Philadelphia Eleven to the priesthood and granted them courage and boldness to respond, thereby opening the eyes of your church to the giftedness and equality of all: grant us so to hear, trust, and follow your Holy Spirit wherever she may lead, that the gifts of all your people may flourish throughout the earth, through Christ our Savior. Amen.

 

Some sources:

Obituary for Bishop Ramos: http://www.evergreeneditions.com/episcopal-new-york-spring-2019?i=581805&p=30&view=issueViewer&fbclid=IwY2xjawEXH3JleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHcfmm1zGZyhll3xaLqg82181J-tAZUKeTSKMDNTkHTDqd0F_1LDayBOekA_aem_xYaNZV6VN1pvUiuRze_Q9g

The original Episcopal News Service press release: 

https://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/ENS/ENSpress_release.pl?pr_number=74200&fbclid=IwY2xjawEVx7xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXXM6SUJdpd5NoQLIaqrVe5xkMO0m5xgFljGcK5mvss2zeL7lF_RfOUobw_aem_jSOw1L_ph-2JeB1tUWhEJw

Charles Willie:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V._Willie

A homily for All Ages Worship. Readings here!

I wonder what it looks like, to live a life with deep roots in love? 

Let’s talk about that Gospel story for a minute. 

I want to talk about the kid, in the story. Did you notice the kid? … 

Andrew tells Jesus: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”

Five barley loaves and two fish. 

Does that sound like a little food or a lot of food? … 

It depends, right? How big were the loaves, and how big were the fish?

But it’s probably more food than one kid needs for lunch. 

And I don’t think the disciples just took this kid’s lunch!

I think he was probably bringing it to Jesus as a gift.

Maybe his mom or his dad said, Hey, take some extra bread and fish to the rabbi and his friends.

Maybe they were grateful because Jesus had healed a family member or friend. 

Maybe they were just excited by the things Jesus was saying and doing.

Maybe it was the kid’s idea!

Maybe he said, Hey, mom, I want to go hear Jesus preach! Can I take him some food? He and his friends are always traveling around, I bet they get hungry.

What do you think? Was it the parents’ idea or the kid’s idea?… 

If you had a chance to bring Jesus a snack, what would you bring him? … 

So this boy brings a gift to Jesus and his friends, and what does Jesus do with it? … 

He shares it! He uses it to feed EVERYBODY there!

Now, five loaves and two fish might be a lot for one kid. But it’s not that much for Jesus and his twelve friends. And it’s certainly not very much for 5000 people!

But Jesus takes the bread, and he gives thanks to God the Father, and then he starts giving people bread. And the same with the fish. 

And everybody eats as much as they want. 

And somehow… there is enough. And more than enough! When everybody is finished, there are enough scraps left over to fill TWELVE baskets! 

Have you heard the word miracle? 

A miracle is a word for when something good happens that it’s hard to explain. 

When something good happens that’s hard to explain. 

There are a lot of miracle stories in the Bible.

Some of us might have miracle stories in our lives too.

That could be an important thing to talk about another time.

But right now, I want to go back to the kid in the story, the little boy. 

This miracle started with his gift. With him and his family showing generosity. Showing love. 

I wonder what it looks like, to live a life with deep roots in love? 

In our other reading today the author of this letter, the letter to the Ephesians, says that they hope people who follow Jesus, people like us, will have strong roots in love. 

There are two words there: Rooted and grounded in love.

The word for grounded seems to be a building word – we’re talking about foundations and cornerstones, again.

But the word rooted really is roots in Greek,  like a plant’s roots.

Lots of people back then worked on farms or grew some of their own food in gardens. So they knew about roots! 

So, what are roots, for a plant?… 

What do they do?… 

Are roots important? … 

Here’s a big question: Which is MORE important, the part of the plant you see above ground, or the roots? … 

It depends, right? But a lot of kinds of plants can grow back from the roots. 

Some kinds of plants can grow back from the top part too, if you cut it off – but if they do that – you know the first thing they do? They grow roots. 

So this author hopes that followers of Jesus – people like us – will be rooted in love. 

What love? God’s love for us; Jesus’ love for us. Which is SO BIG – this author says – that it’s hard for us to even understand the breadth and length and height and depth. A Love SO wide and SO long and SO tall and SO deep!!!

That’s how big God’s love is. 

That’s the love that we can put our roots down into. 

And that’s the love we can share with other people. 

This past week eleven youth and young adults, and four not so young adults, went to a city called Racine together for our high school mission trip. 

This is the third year we’ve done a trip a lot like this.

And some things were a lot like other years. 

But a couple of things were different. 

On Friday, we helped out at the Hospitality Center, which serves breakfast and lunch to folks who live in downtown Racine, who can’t always afford to buy their own food. 

We have helped serve lunch before. But this year we had a chance to sit and talk with people for a while. We got to hear their stories, a little bit. We heard some hard and sad things, and we got to laugh together too. 

On Saturday, we worked with a group in Milwaukee that helps refugees make new homes in Wisconsin. 

Refugees are people who have to leave their home country to escape danger. It is hard to be a refugee, and it takes a really really long time to get to make a new home somewhere else. 

In other years we’ve done things like clean an apartment. This year we shopped for things that two families will need. We bought some toys for their kids, too! 

And then we went to a park and shared lunch with several families of refugees from a country called Afghanistan, who have been here for a few years already. 

There were some younger kids, and some teenagers, and some grownups. We talked, and the kids played soccer and frisbee together. 

It was the third year that we worked with this group, but it was the first year we got to meet some of the people who are making new lives here. 

I think those moments when we got to talk with people were really important to our group, this year. 

We’re always worked really hard to help out with any project that we’re asked to do. 

But now we know a few of the people who are part of those communities. We care in a new way. 

Now we can do what we do not just because it’s the right thing to do, but out of love. 

Rooted and grounded in love… 

Does anybody like Star Wars?… 

There’s a line from the movie The Last Jedi that I have been thinking about a lot. 

One of the characters says, “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate. But saving what we love.” 

Maybe fighting what you hate and saving what you love puts you on the same battlefield. 

But there is something different, deep down, I think, about operating from love. 

Mind you: Love isn’t just soft and squishy and nice.

Sometimes love has to be brave.

Sometimes love has to be fierce. 

If we love people who can’t always afford food –

If we love people who are unhoused –

If we love refugees who are building new lives in Wisconsin – 

That love will shape how we think and what we do. 

How we give. How we vote. 

I wonder what it looks like, to live a life with deep roots in love? 

A love SO BIG that we can’t even imagine how big it is?… 

Let’s keep wondering about that as we continue … 

Happy Evil Woman Sunday, everybody!

It’s not an official feast of the church; just my name for this day in the lectionary, our cycle of Sunday scripture readings.

Every three years, we get Michal getting the ick about King David, and these two women getting John the Baptist summarily beheaded. Let’s look at both stories briefly, and try to understand what’s going on…  

We’ll start with Michal. Poor Michal! She loved David, once. She is the daughter of Saul, Israel’s first king. Saul gives Michal to David as a wife, to bind David to him. When Saul and David’s relationship breaks down, Michal tricks her father to help David escape.

With David gone, she’s given to another man in marriage, who actually loves her. There’s no hint that David ever cares about Michal beyond her usefulness to him as a sign of Saul’s favor. 

Next comes that long, grueling, tragic civil war between Saul and David that we read about together a couple of weeks ago. Later, with Saul gone, David demands his wife back – as a source of legitimacy for his new kingship. Michal’s new husband, Palti, follows her the whole journey, weeping as he walks. 

Today’s lesson is the last we hear of Michal in the Bible. Michal has been through a lot. David has several other wives by this time. I doubt that she feels that her standing as the daughter of one king and first wife of another is being rightly honored. And she looks out the window and sees David dancing.

Among the many things you can say about David, I think we are to understand that he really really loves God. And here he is fully caught up in ecstatic dance to honor God. This isn’t something he has to do. He’s just caught up in the moment and this is how his devotion and awe are pouring out of him. 

Let’s be clear, though: he is not dancing naked, but he is not wearing a lot of clothing. And Michal looks at him and suddenly it’s the last straw. Partly it’s the lack of modesty; partly I suspect he just looks ridiculous to her. Whatever feelings had lingered: Gone. 

Later, they exchange harsh words. And then they’re done. 

The text says that Michal bore no children from that day forward. I don’t think we’re meant to read that as a punishment from God. I think maybe Michal and David just never chose to be in the same room together again. She probably lived out her life confined to the residence for the king’s wives and concubines, bitter and bored. And I wonder if the Biblical text, which can sound judgmental, actually wants us to feel some pity for Michal. 

Then there are Herodias and Salome. That’s a hair-raising story to read out of the Gospel book on a Sunday morning!

John the Baptist was a prophet who proclaimed that God’s chosen One was coming – and then named Jesus as that One. John precedes Jesus in teaching and preaching; he also precedes Jesus in arrest and execution. That’s our story today. 

There’s some confusion of names, here. Mark calls both mother and daughter Herodias. People do get named after their parents, but a historian of the time, Josephus, says that Herodias had a daughter named Salome who was about the right age for this story. So tradition uses that name for the younger woman, here. 

Salome is probably just a teenager – old enough to be asked to dance for her father and his guests; young enough to ask her mom for advice and to do what her mom tells her. 

Herodias, the mother, is the one primarily responsible for John the Baptist’s death. Although Salome does add the macabre detail of asking for the head on a platter!… 

So who was Herodias? 

Well, she was the sister of two different Herods, and probably married two other Herods. One of whom – this one – was the son of yet another Herod, the Herod who was king when Jesus was born. Reading this family’s history makes your eyes cross, truly. 

The Herodians were the royal family in a fairly limited sense. Under Roman imperial rule the various Kings Herod were pretty limited in what they could do. So they spent their time on scheming and dissipation. 

Josephus, the historian, tells us that Herodias had divorced her previous husband to marry this particular Herod, and he had likewise divorced his first wife.

That’s why John the Baptist has been telling Herod that this situation is a violation of Jewish teachings about marital fidelity.

It seems possible that Herodias and Herod actually loved each other. However, let’s not get mushy: Herodians killed each other all the time. In this extended family, people often protected themselves – or made opportunities for themselves – by offing somebody. 

Herodias probably isn’t worried about another divorce. Rather, she has a reasonable fear that if John gets to Herod, she and her children may just… disappear. 

Herodias didn’t plot to have John killed; this isn’t why she sent Salome to all those dance lessons.

But this opportunity drops into her lap – an opportunity to neutralize a threat, and to get her royal husband to prove his commitment to her – and she seizes it. 

Despite the horror and tragedy here, I can find it in me to feel sorry for Herodias… and for Salome, for whom it may have all seemed like a joke until someone handed her that platter. 

Michal and Herodias have a lot in common.  They have that strange combination of privilege and vulnerability that comes with belonging to powerful men.  They will never go hungry, or lack nice clothes or a warm place to sleep. But that doesn’t make their lives easy. These are people with few choices or opportunities to move towards happiness or self-fulfillment. And that shows up in their lives as dark and difficult emotions and actions. We can, I think, feel some compassion for that. 

Having laid all that out: I’d like to turn to Ephesians, the New Testament letter – epistle – that is the source of our second reading today. It’s a very different text, but there is an intersection point here. Bear with me. 

This passage is kind of a prologue to the letter, beginning to lay out how this author sees life in Christ. And I love the sense of a theology of divine generosity here. 

The author says: We were chosen before the foundation of the world. What an amazing thought.  God’s grace has been freely bestowed upon us in the Beloved, meaning Jesus. Grace, redemption, and forgiveness are lavished upon us. We have been adopted and made heirs, to receive a gracious inheritance as part of God’s family. And so on. 

Reading this text gives me such a sense of just being showered with divine love and grace. It’s an understanding of God’s relationship with humanity through Jesus Christ that I find beautiful and hopeful.

We’ll hear other parts of this letter in the coming weeks. Much of it is lovely, and you may recognize bits that are used in Episcopal worship, like, “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us…”

But. There’s a part of Ephesians that does not show up in our lectionary or our liturgy – that Episcopalians generally don’t read in church. It’s in chapters 5 and 6, and it’s sometimes called the “household code.” 

Let me say a little, first, about who wrote Ephesians. The letter begins, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus…” But a lot of Biblical scholars think this letter was neither written by Paul, nor to the church in Ephesus. There’s nothing in the letter that seems to speak to a specific church community, so it may have been meant to be passed around many churches. 

Hints in the text suggest that it was written 20 or 30 years after Paul’s death – maybe by someone who was a follower of Paul and learned faith from him. 

However, Ephesians is Paul-ish, even if it’s probably not really the voice of the apostle Paul. The language is similar to Paul when he gets poetic, and it dwells on some of Paul’s core concerns: unity between Jews and Gentiles, getting along with one another, staying focused on Jesus.

About 80% of critical Biblical scholars think that Ephesians was not written by Paul. So it’s not totally clear-cut. Thoughtful readers can disagree on this one. 

But I tend to think this is not Paul. And the household code is a big part of why. 

In the letters that we know are really Paul’s voice, we see hints of someone with pretty egalitarian views – in line with Jesus’ own teaching and actions. I talked a few weeks ago about how “Neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female,” is kind of a core refrain for Paul. And he collaborated with and praised female church leaders, and advocated for the freedom of a formerly enslaved man. 

But the household code in Ephesians offers a different vision, of a fundamentally hierarchical society in which many people’s primary duty and virtue is obedience. First, the text speaks about wives: “A husband is the head of his wife like Christ is head of the church… So wives should submit to their husbands in everything, like the church submits to Christ.”

The text tries to soften this, urging a husband, in turn, to love his wife as Christ loves the church. But nevertheless this is a vision of “Christian” marriage that just sounds like standard marriage in any patriarchal society. What Susan B. Anthony, in the 1876 Declaration of the Rights of Women that we read last week, called “the dogma of the centuries: that woman was made for man.”

Likewise, the household code continues, children should obey their parents “in the Lord, because it is right” (6:1). And as for slaves, “obey your human masters with fear and trembling and with sincere devotion to Christ… Serve your owners enthusiastically, as though you were serving the Lord and not human beings.”  

As with marriage, the text tries to make this mutual: “Masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Stop threatening them, because you know that both you and your slaves have a Master in heaven.” 

There was a lot of ambient anxiety in Roman society about whether slaves were going to turn on their masters. Slave revolts were a constant concern. There was even an ancient Roman saying: “Every slave we own is an enemy we harbor.” 

For this author to baptize that anxiety by saying that Christian slaves should be obedient and enthusiastic!… does not sit well with me. Nor does the endorsement of the kind of rigid gender roles and limitations on the autonomy of women that distorted and blighted the lives of Michal and Herodias… and so many others, over the millennia. 

Fundamentally: Bidding wives, children, and slaves to be obedient to their rightful masters was not a Christian vision of society. 

It was just… society. 

A few months ago, our resident historian of the Roman Empire, Leonora Neville, told our confirmation class about how quickly the fresh ideas of Christianity were tamed and conformed to the standards of the surrounding culture – first-century Judea and the Roman Empire.

Over the decades, Christianity made itself palatable enough to ease persecution and eventually become the religion of Rome. 

If this text was indeed written a few decades after Paul’s death, it fits in to that trajectory nicely, as it brings Christian language to bear to justify and defend the cultural status quo. 

A status quo, mind you, that must have been under some threat! If somebody is writing about how Christian wives and slaves should be obedient and submissive, it’s probably because some Christian wives and slaves have started to say, Hey, if we’re all one in Christ Jesus, how come you get to make the rules?… 

I want to conclude by saying three things about reading Scripture – reading the Bible. First: It is necessary and important to read Scripture, to read the Bible, in conversation with itself. 

The Bible is not one coherent thing; it doesn’t have one perspective or tell one story. Imagine sitting down with Michal and Herodias and Paul and the author of Ephesians – and hey, maybe Susan B. Anthony too – for lively conversation about whether women’s primary duty in life is really obedience to men. This kind of work, exploring where texts connect or clash, is an important part of reading Scripture responsibility and thoughtfully. 

Second, it’s OK to pick favorites! Be responsible about how you do it; try not to pluck things fully out of context; try to pay attention to the big themes – there are some – and let that shape how you weigh particular passages. But every faith tradition and every faithful reader of Scripture has some kind of “canon within the canon” – meaning, there are parts of the Bible that are more important to us than others. We don’t weigh it all equally or read it all the same way. 

I do really love the first couple of chapters of Ephesians – those are some core texts for me – and: I feel totally comfortable setting aside the household code. These voices were human beings, just like us; they got some things right, by the grace of God; they got some things wrong, for all kinds of reasons. We are all mixed bags. You can pick your favorite parts of the Bible. 

Third, we don’t read Scripture alone. We read it in community; we read it in conversation with tradition and history and, hopefully, with people who read it with different eyes; we read it, thanks be to God, with the help of the Holy Spirit, who keeps opening our minds and hearts to deeper wisdom and new understandings of how God has been at work in humanity’s story and is at work in our stories, individual and together, today. 

 

Sources:

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

https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/household code eph.pdf

The Gospels contain a good handful of stories about Jesus healing on the sabbath. There’s this one, the story of the man with the withered hand, here in the Gospel of Mark – and also told in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which use Mark as a source text. There’s another in Luke chapter 13, when Jesus heals a woman who has something wrong with her back; she is bent over and can’t stand straight, and has been living with this condition for eighteen years. In the fifth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus sees a man who has been disabled, and living as a beggar, for thirty-eight years, and he heals him; later on he also restores sight to a young man who is blind, also on the sabbath. 

In each of these stories Jesus is challenged about these acts, which some onlookers see as violation of sabbath-keeping. And he has a number of snappy responses. He says, “Shouldn’t this woman be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?” He says, “My Father is still working [today], and so am I.” He says, “It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” And in today’s Mark passage, he says, “The Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath. This is why the Son of Man is Lord even over the Sabbath.”

These many accounts make me think this is something Jesus really did. He healed and helped a lot of people, and sometimes he did it on the Sabbath, the holy day set aside to rest from work; and that upset some people, who felt that this was breaking the sabbath, or perhaps upstaging God on a holy day. 

To really understand these stories we need to pause and talk about sabbath. What does that mean? In Judaism, the Sabbath is a day, once a week, set apart for rest and worship. God practices sabbath in the Biblical day of creation – creating light, dark, earth and water, and all living things, then resting on the seventh day. 

Keeping Sabbath is mandated in the Ten Commandments, the way of life given to God’s people through Moses long ago: “Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you.” (Exodus 20:8-11, CEB).

For modern Jews who observe the sabbath, that means things like not flipping light switches or turning on the oven to cook a meal – because the Book of Exodus says, “You shall kindle no fire in your dwellings on the Sabbath day.” If you have a fancy lunch after Sabbath worship, members of your community can’t prepare it or clean it up.

It’s important for us as outsiders to understand that those practices – those restrictions – are not the heart of Sabbath. Those are outwards signs intended to move people into a way of being, a mindset of intentional rest. It’s a time of the week, Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, separated from the rest of life by a hard line – set apart as a reminder that they are a people set apart, called and chosen to honor God by their way of living. 

Many of us recently lost power for a few hours or a few days. Think about how you would organize your life if there were going to be 24 hours every week when you could not turn anything on. It would become an important rhythm in your life; you would orient much of your week around preparing for and protecting that holy time. 

So what does it mean when Jesus says that the Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath? 

It means, for one thing, that Sabbath isn’t something God needs. That’s a common theme in the books of the prophets from before the time of Jesus: God doesn’t need our religious observances.

The Hebrew Bibles states pretty clearly that none of the religious observances of God’s first people are set up to meet God’s needs. For example, God doesn’t ask for animal sacrifices because God is hungry. 

Rather, these practices are tools to form God’s people. That’s the reframing Jesus is doing about the sabbath – and it’s both radical, and consistent with the witness of the prophets before him. He’s saying that the point of the sabbath is to point us towards God. And if there are aspects of our sabbath-keeping that don’t point us towards God, then maybe change is needed. 

And Sabbath is also, fundamentally, explicitly, about rest – so that God’s people don’t work themselves to utter exhaustion and depletion. Which means that sabbath is also about human wholeness and flourishing. 

So there are two different ways in which the sabbath was made for humanity, as a gift: to help people turn back towards God, our loving Creator, and to provide a weekly pause, a time of rest and recovery. 

Matthew and Luke tell this story, from Mark, in their Gospels. But they don’t like this saying of Jesus! They’re comfortable saying that Jesus – the Son of Man – is Lord of the sabbath. But both of them edit out Jesus saying that the Sabbath was created for humans. I think they’re just too committed to the Judaism of their ancestors to feel OK about the idea that how we keep sabbath is less important than what sabbath does inside of us. 

For Jesus, refusing to heal someone – to offer them a physical restoration that they desire – because it happens to be the sabbath, feels like itself a violation of sabbath. He seems to feel that these leaders who are saying, “Just wait and do it tomorrow,” have a distorted sense of sabbath that’s no longer pointing towards God and God’s intentions for humanity. 

As our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry likes to say, If it’s not about love, it’s not about God. 

Let me gesture towards a couple of nuances! I want to be clear that the pushback on Jesus’ Sabbath healings seems to me like a religious leader thing, not a Jewish thing. As somebody who presides over public worship, I understand the feeling that there’s a decorum and an order and a purpose in spaces like this that can be disrupted, even by good things. I think we’ve gotten pretty good at handling joyful disruption here at St. Dunstan’s, but that has taken time and work, and it’s somewhat countercultural with respect to the wider church. Many of the people who feel called to roles like mine are people who like know what’s going on in the room and what’s going to happen next, and that’s probably true always and everywhere. 

The second nuance has to do with disability and healing. It’s not clear in every story, but I sure hope that these people approached Jesus seeking healing – and that Jesus didn’t see a withered hand or a crooked back and think, “Well, we gotta fix THAT.” There’s a big project underway, church, of shifting our understanding of human wholeness and flourishing so that it doesn’t presume bodies look or work in particular ways – or minds either, for that matter. 

There’s a book I’d like to read – maybe some people would like to read it with me – called, “My body is not a prayer request: Disability justice in the church.” There are good reasons for people to desire physical healing – especially in societies that limit and stigmatize on them. There are also good reasons for us all to come to greater respect for disabled people, and their presence, giftedness and worth. 

Okay. Back to sabbath. As Christians, we don’t keep sabbath. Just a few weeks ago we read about the early church’s active and somewhat contentious discernment process about what aspects of Jewish law should be binding for Christians. And Sabbath did not make the cut. People will sometimes talk about Sunday as our sabbath but we did not, in those early decades and centuries, take on the prohibitions and practices that would have really set apart Sunday as a true sabbath in that way. 

There are a few Christian groups that have more of a true sabbath practice, but it’s never been dominant in our faith. 

So does Jesus’ saying here – the sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath – have anything to say to us? 

We as Episcopalians are not sabbath keepers, but we can be a little particular about how we worship. We’re a few weeks out from our next General Convention, the every-three-years gathering of bishops and elected deputies from across the church to pass legislation on church matters. Which means we’re in the throes of another round of angst about liturgical revision. 

I will not get into the weeds about that here! It does not concern us much. But when we’re talking about altering our received patterns of worship – revising or editing the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, for example – we are very much talking about whether humanity was made made for the sabbath, or the sabbath for humanity. 

Are these ways of worship a requirement from Above that we must enact precisely in order to fulfill all righteousness, or are thee just tools to bring us into God’s presence, such that when they are not doing that very well, we should change them? 

As Anglicans, our way of faith BEGAN with one great big discernment that we needed to dramatically change our way of worship for it to actually bring people closer to God. 

Thomas Cranmer, charged by King Henry VIII with creating an English church, wrote in the preface of the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549, “There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted…” Sometime, grab a prayer book and read that preface in full; it’s in the Historical Documents section in the back of the book. 

It’s very clear that Cranmer’s motive for advancing worship in English instead of Latin, and for simplifying worship and including more Scripture in worship, was to help ordinary people develop their own piety and spirituality. Cranmer emphatically believed that the sabbath was made for humanity, and that time-honored practices of worship could – must – be changed in order to help humans approach the Holy. And he did not think he was creating the one thing that would work forever. He anticipated continued revision. 

I’m astonished sometimes by the degree to which some Episcopalians in the larger church can lose the plot on what makes us Anglican, and start to talk as if we were made for the 1979 Prayerbook, and not the prayerbook made for us. 

The purpose of liturgy, and how best to fulfill it, is interesting to me; it may be interesting to a few of you as well. If so, let’s chat; I’m thinking of re-gathering a liturgy committee later this year and maybe you’d enjoy being part of that. But let me turn to something relevant to more of us. 

Sabbath as a word and concept has escaped its specific historical and religious context and is used somewhat more broadly, in secular contexts. 

When I hear people talk about sabbath in that more general sense, I think they mean not just a break from the pace and demands of daily life, but a time that allows some restoration of what has been worn or depleted or damaged by that pace and those demands. 

Sabbath includes rest – sleeping and napping, or down time without much agenda. Space to do things you enjoy, things you can choose freely to do – or not.

Sabbath is different from vacation, because vacation can be its own kind of work, right? Keeping up with the itinerary, dealing with logistics, checking things off the bucket list, attending to everyone’s needs and expectations. Vacation can be exhausting. 

I try to take two days off a week – usually Saturday and Monday, my “weekend,” though there is sometimes church stuff on Saturdays. Like everyone else, I have a certain quota of adulting, of small and large responsibilities to attend to, during the hours that aren’t committed to my work as rector of St. Dunstan’s. 

It does not happen every week, but it feels so good when, now and then, I have enough time that I can finish doing one thing and the next thing isn’t already cued up: checking the bank account, doing laundry, making dinner. Instead, I can ask myself, “What would I like to do now?” 

That kind of time is hard to come by. But I feel like that’s an element of sabbath. Sabbath isn’t just a day off work to do all the other work that life requires. It’s time – a lot or a little – that’s somehow spacious enough that we can follow our hearts, and truly rest. 

And because God’s agenda for us includes human wellbeing and flourishing, this is not really a secularization of the concept of sabbath. This is just … Sabbath. Returning to ourselves; having time to tend to ourselves, and to people and activities we love. 

This week brings the end of the school year for some of our kids and their families. It’s a season when patterns and rhythms change, for many households – which does NOT mean more free time, and indeed can mean more scrambling, and less of the comfort of structure and routine. 

For me summer always feels like a ten-week struggle for the right balance between taking time at work for some bigger-picture thinking and planning for the year ahead, AND trying to work less and rest and play more. It has its own kind of intensity, and sabbath can be just as elusive as during the program year. 

Here on the cusp of summer, friends, whatever your circumstances, whatever the turn of the season means or doesn’t mean for you: it’s never a bad time to think about sabbath. 

To remember that God called God’s first people to pause, and re-center, and rest… and still calls us to the same. 

To wonder about whether and where we might be able, through some strategic saying No to this or Yes to that, to open up even a little bit of sabbath spaciousness in our lives and hearts. 

And to know deeply that what God wants for us, from us, includes rest, restoration, playfulness and joy. 

Our Acts lesson today is a slightly abbreviated version of Acts Chapter 15. 

This chapter of Acts, about the leaders of the church in Jerusalem deciding to endorse the mission to the Gentiles, is not in the Sunday lectionary. And I think that’s a shame, because it’s an important story! Most of us are here because the early church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, made this decision. 

Father John Rasmus and I talked about this story a couple of weeks ago, as we often talk about upcoming readings. With his extensive knowledge of Scripture, he helped me notice some things about this story. Luke, the author of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, is telling this story a certain way. Peter and James, core leaders in the Jerusalem church, are the main characters. Peter is shown as a strong supporter of sharing the Gospel with Gentiles. And Luke makes it sound like the church came to a clear and settled consensus at this meeting. 

But we have a lot of Paul’s letters included in the Bible as Epistles, and Paul tells this story a different way. He describes this meeting in Jerusalem, in Galatians chapter 2. In Luke, Peter says, “Early on, God chose me from among you as the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and come to believe.” Whereas Paul says, “…They saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised [Gentiles], just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised – for the One who worked through Peter making him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me in sending me to the Gentiles.”

Peter met a Roman once and said, “Huh, I guess you could actually become a Christian too!” Paul poured out his life preaching Christ crucified and risen to Gentiles, making disciples and founding churches. 

But: Peter was understood to be Jesus’ chosen leader for the early church. So Luke – writing this history later than Paul’s letters – tells the story in a way that puts Peter more solidly on the right side of history than he probably was at the time. 

In fact, Paul tells an additional story. Sometime after this big meeting, Peter comes to visit the church in Antioch, and at first he shares meals with the Gentile Christians there. But then he gets a rebuke or warning from people who are still saying that there’s something unclean about Gentile Christians who don’t follow Jewish law – and that Peter, as a faithful Jewish Christian, shouldn’t be sitting at table with them. And Peter stops sharing meals with the church. 

Paul calls him out for hypocrisy, and for betraying the Gospel! He says to Peter in front of everybody, “If you, although you are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, because though the Gospel you no longer follow the rules of our Jewish faith, then how can you force Gentiles to live like Jews?!?!” (Galatians 2:14). 

Now, Paul is telling the story in a way that puts HIM on the right side of history, certainly. But it complicates Luke’s narrative. Father John wonders whether they had to send some extra people to carry that letter because Paul disagreed with the letter and refused to be their messenger. In that letter, the Jerusalem leaders say that Gentiles need to avoid meat from animals sacrificed to idols – killed as part of the rituals of other religions. Paul writes about that issue a couple of places in his letters, and he thinks that’s nonsense – that those idols are false and empty, those rituals are meaningless, and that meat is meat. 

There’s nothing strange about all this; indeed it might feel all too familiar. People with strong opinions wrestling their way through big change. A complex, conflicted process being described after the fact as if it had been simple and clear. People in institutional leadership being retconned, or retconning themselves, into having always held the position that is now the correct position to hold. 

Change is messy. Consider the last 60 years in the Episcopal Church. Prayer book revision; the ordination of women; the movement towards the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people; working to decenter whiteness in a church with deep cultural roots in the white middle class. I could point to so many examples of big struggles and debates. Of movements for change and movements of resistance. Of leaders who feel uncomfortable with a particular change, but can see that it’s where the Spirit is leading the church. … And leaders who can’t. 

People on the vanguard are always frustrated with the people who are dragging their heels – like Paul’s frustration with Peter. But some of those dragging their heels aren’t just doing it for its own sake; whatever change is in the air just feels big and new and strange to them. 

In this gathering in Jerusalem we see an honest effort to hash out an issue that folks have very deep-seated feelings about, and to try to discern where the Holy Spirit is leading – even though it feels to some folks that the church is letting go of some really important, holy stuff. 

But people tell stories. And maybe even more importantly: People listen. And through listening and sharing, as much as though stating and debating, openness begins to emerge. 

The church begins to be able to make room for the new thing God is doing. It’s not easy; it’s not clear; it’s not settled. That takes much longer. But something breaks open, begins to unfold. 

This story makes me feel grounded and grateful – aware of the ways the Church today is a lot like the church two thousand years ago, and that somehow, in spite of ourselves, God keeps working with and through us. May it always be so. Amen.