Category Archives: Uncategorized

Sermon, Nov. 19

As I’ve wrestled with this parable this week, I keep thinking of the duck-rabbit. You’ve seen it: the classic simple image that could be one thing or could be another thing. Before I name the duck and rabbit I see here, let’s hear the parable again, and let’s make the setting a little more modern:

The CEO of MoneyCorp (note: I made up this name, but of course it turns out there actually is a MoneyCorp somewhere) is going on a business trip, maybe a long one; he needs to oversee operations in China for a while. So he calls in his three vice-presidents. (Of course a vice-president in a company is very different from a slave – but not entirely different. His position, his livelihood, even his future, depend on his boss’s goodwill.) So the three vice-presidents meet with the boss. And he tells the first one, “You’ve been doing good work; while I’m away, you’re in charge of $5 million.” He tells the second one, “You’re really growing into this role; I’m leaving you with $2 million to manage.” And he tells the third one, “…. You get $1 million.” And he leaves.

A long time later, the CEO comes back, and calls in the VPs to settle accounts with them, reclaim the company’s wealth and hear what they did with it. The first one says, “Sir, I used the $5 million to make another $5 million.” The CEO says, “Well done! You can expect a raise, and even more responsibility in the future.” And the second VP said, “Sir, I used the $2 million to make another $2 million.” And the CEO said, “Excellent! You’ll be getting a raise and a promotion too.”

And then the third VP comes forward. He says, “Sir, you left me in charge of $1 million. I know you; I know how you run MoneyCorp. I know that you’re a hard man, and that you’ve gotten wealthy by taking the profit of other people’s work. So when you put me in charge of this money, I locked the check in the drawer of my desk until your return. Here it is. Take it.” And the boss said, “You wicked and lazy man! You knew I was a hard man? You knew I profit off the work of others? Then why didn’t you at least keep the money in an interest-bearing account?! Listen, buddy, this is the way of the world:  Those who have a lot, get more, and those who don’t have much, lose the little they have. If you don’t want to play the game, maybe you don’t belong at MoneyCorp.”

Okay. The duck-rabbit. The rabbit – see the rabbit? – the rabbit is the better-known interpretation of this parable. It’s warm and fuzzy. Kind of. It says, God is our Master, and God gives us resources, and we’re supposed to use those resources to extend our Master’s domain and earn our Master’s approval.

The duck – see the duck? – the duck is loud and awkward and might bite you. The duck says, This Master is a horrible person who embodies the cruel and corrupt systems of this world.

It’s hard to see both the duck and the rabbit at the same time.You kind of have to choose.

Let’s go back to the parable – Matthew’s version, not mine – and see if we can find any clarity on the duck-rabbit issue. The narrative raises a lot of questions. How much is a talent? It’s a large amount of money. Translating it into millions isn’t unreasonable.

How would someone have used money to make money, back in Jesus’ day?Doubling your money always means you’re playing high risks, and sometimes means somebody’s getting cheated. The world of finance and investment was a lot smaller and simpler back then, but there were a couple of ways to win big. One was to put your money into the currency exchange business that happened in the court of the great Temple. The people who set the exchange rate can make sure they get a hefty profit from every transaction. We know how Jesus felt about that business. The other way was essentially high-risk mortgage lending. Historically, most ordinary Judeans were small-scale farmers. By Jesus’ day, many had lost their ancestral land due to poverty, and many more were on the edge of losing their land, due to the heavy taxes Rome demanded. When someone is desperate, you can loan them money at a high interest rate. We know how that usually works out.

As for investing money to earn interest: This parable is literally the only place in the Bible where someone suggests this as a good thing. For the entire Old Testament, taking interest income is proof that you’re an unscrupulous, greedy person. To be clear, I think it’s fine that our church gets interest on our invested funds. But Jesus had very Old Testament ethics about money. So the Master’s eagerness to earn interest is a clue to what Jesus meant by this story.

One more question: Why did the third slave bury the money? I spent a really happy couple of hours this week chasing this question deep into the Talmud. In 70 CE, about forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, as Roman troops crushed a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule. This was a big event for early Christians; even more so for Jews. What emerged from that great loss was Rabbinic Judaism – a way of being Jewish without the Temple as its center.

During the time of the Temple, there was a whole body of religious teaching about how to apply the laws of the Torah to all kinds of situations. That teaching had been curated and passed down at the Temple, but after the Temple, in the first and second centuries, it gets written down, so that it can circulate and spread among scattered Jewish communities. That’s the set of texts called the Talmud.

And it turns out that in the Talmud, being responsible for someone else’s property was a big legal and ethical issue. There were banks, but banking wasn’t widely accessible, and a lot of people didn’t hold their wealth as money; they had it as wine or grain or oil or sheep. If you had to travel, or if you had more than you could store, you’d leave your stuff with someone else, so it wouldn’t be stolen.  And of course being left in charge of somebody else’s stuff is a temptation. You could drink a couple of barrels of wine, and then when the owner returns, claim that they broke or went sour. So there is a lot of teaching in the Talmud about the moral obligation of looking after someone else’s property. And it turns out that when someone leaves you in charge of some money, burying it is RECOMMENDED by the Talmud. Rabbi Shmuel, who lived in the late 2nd century, said, “There is safety for money only in the ground.”

There’s even a story, kind of a case study, about a man who’s entrusted with some money by a friend. He gives the money to his mother, who puts it in a chest in their house; but a robber steals it. The question is, who is responsible for the loss? – and in the course of the discussion, the text says, Well, the man must not have told his mother that it was somebody else’s money, because if he had, she would have buried it.

Despite all this – and more; I could’t fit all my points into this sermon! – the duck-rabbit won’t fully resolve into a duck. I’ve spent a lot of time with this parable, over the years. And it just keeps being awkwardly both duck and rabbit. At least, that’s true in Matthew’s version. Luke has this story too, but his version is a lot stranger and darker. It’s not in the lectionary, so it’s less familiar. It’s in chapter 19 – check it out later. In Luke’s version, the Master is unambiguously a corrupt and cruel ruler, whose actions echo the acts of the brutal king of Judea who ruled during Jesus’ early childhood. There’s a strong case to be made that Luke records the story as Jesus told it – and that Matthew simplified it because the story made more sense to him as a story about how we should be good productive servants for Jesus.

But even though he stuck some rabbit ears on the story, Matthew retained its fierce heart, its ethical and theological core: that dialogue between the third slave and the master, which is much the same in both Gospels, and which I’m sure is much as Jesus first told it.

‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’

‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter?… Take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’

Do you know the old joke about the pastor who calls the kids forward for a children’s sermon? And he says, I’m going to describe something, and I want you to guess what it is! It climbs around in the trees… it has a big fluffy tail… and it collects nuts and buries them! And there’s dead silence; the children just stare at him. And he says, “Come on, you must know what it is, speak up!” And finally one child says, “I know the answer must be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel.”

I feel like that’s what we’ve done with this parable. I’ve read SO many commentaries and sermons on this story. And SO many of them say, “I know the Master must be Jesus, but he sure sounds like a jerk.”

Sometimes a squirrel is a just a squirrel, and a cruel and greedy master isn’t supposed to remind us of God.

Okay. Why does it matter? Duck or rabbit? We’re committing our pledges to the life of this church today. Is it duck church or rabbit church? We’re baptizing a child into the faith and family of Jesus. Is it duck faith or rabbit faith?

The rabbit message – it’s not WRONG. The idea that we should honor what we’ve been given – resources, skills, and yes, talents – and use them, and multiply them, in ways that add to the world’s measure of hope and wholeness and delight – the Gospel says that in lots of places, and I try to live that way, and I think you all do too.

But there’s a sense in which I don’t need church to tell me that.  A capitalist culture tells me to use what I have to get more. Human decency tells me to use what I have to serve others.

What I need to hear from the Bible, from the Church, from Jesus, is that there’s a higher standard and a bigger picture, beyond and above our culture and our systems and our norms. This isn’t a parable about obedience, or resourcefulness, or, God help us, productivity.  This is a story about power and courage. About resistance. Some commentators call this the Parable of the Whistleblower. I like that. The third slave says he was afraid, but there’s nothing cowardly about what he does. He refuses to play the game. And he doesn’t just opt out and vanish; he names the boss to his face as cruel, greedy, and ruthless.

This the duck’s message: When the system is broken, or fixed – it matters to God. When the powerful use their power to benefit themselves – it matters to God. When people just take what they want because nobody dares to stop them – it matters to God.  When “more” drives our common life, instead of better, kinder, fairer – it matters to God. It matters to God so much that God in Christ became the whistleblower, teaching and arguing and healing and dying – and rising – to tell the truth about our human systems of power and gain.

When the culture tells us, The rich and powerful run the show; your best plan is to play the game – when our human decency runs low because we’re tired and jaded and frustrated – then we need duck church, duck faith. We need a community gathered around Christ the Whistleblower, to comfort and encourage us, to connect us and reorient us. May we be both rabbit church and duck church for each other, my dear ones – a church worthy of our gifts, our children, and our hearts.

Sources & Further Reading… 

“Jesus As Archelaus in the Parable of the Pounds,” Brian Schultz, Novum Testamentum, Vol. 49, Fasc. 2 (2007), pp. 105-127

David Lose on Luke’s version of the story:

http://www.davidlose.net/2013/11/luke-19-11-27/

Another sermon on this parable:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-duncan/the-parable-of-the-liferi_b_6164642.html

Explore the Talmud at sefaria.org

The part in question is Section 42 of the Bava Metzia.

https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Metzia?lang=bi

And here’s a post that summarizes this portion of the Talmud:

https://www.torahinmotion.org/discussions-and-blogs/bava-metzia-42-where-is-my-money

Sermon, Oct. 22

Let me tell you that story again, with a few details filled in. Because it’s a terrific story. The Pharisees are increasingly fed up with Jesus. Their movement taught that the Jewish people should return to to the traditional practices of their faith, following all the commandments, as a way to separate themselves from the unclean pagan ways of the Roman Empire and to earn God’s favor. Sometimes they’re on the same page with Jesus, who also wants ordinary people to feel they can approach God in faith, and has a healthy disdain for Rome and its ways. But Jesus is disturbingly irreverent about the Law and the Commandments. He seems to think that many of them don’t matter at all.

Meanwhile, the Herodians don’t think much of Jesus either. The Herodians would have been folks who were cozy with Herod, the king of Judea – a puppet king, supported by the Roman army, and allowed to have power on condition that he keep his people in line and make sure money keeps flowing from Judea to Rome. These are the people who are managing to get richer under Roman rule, while the rest of Judea gets poorer. Now Jesus has been saying some pretty disrespectful things about leaders who are only concerned with themselves, and he’s stirring up trouble.

The Pharisees and the Herodians don’t get along. The Herodians think the Pharisees are weird fanatics. The Pharisees think the Herodians are self-indulgent sell-outs. But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend. They’d all like to take Jesus down a peg, and they stumble on a way to do it. They’re going to ask him about a hot-button issue: paying taxes to Rome.

The people of Judea were struggling under the burden of these taxes; they were wildly unpopular. And for the Pharisees and other observant Jews,  there was another problem: Paying taxes meant using Roman coins, which had an image of the Roman Emperor’s head on them, and text that named the Emperor as a god. The Emperor was very definitely NOT a god in the eyes of Jewish people, and these coins were tainted by idolatry. The question the Herodians and Pharisees pose to Jesus is a trap because either answer will get him in trouble with somebody. If he says, NO, we are God’s people and owe nothing to the Emperor, then he’s in trouble with the Romans – and maybe they’ll deal with him. If he says, YES, be a good citizen, pay your taxes, then the common people may turn against him, and the disruptive movement he’s started might lose steam.

Don’t you love their double-edged flattery? “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and you’ll always say what you believe is true no matter what the consequences might be…So tell us, IS IT LAWFUL TO PAY TAXES TO THE EMPEROR, OR NOT?”

Jesus is no fool. He sees the trap clearly, and calls them out: ‘You hypocrites! Show me one of the coins used for the tax.’ Somebody has one in their pocket, and they show him: Look, there’s the Roman emperor, probably Tiberius, with the inscription, “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus.” Jesus says, So…. Whose head is this, here on the coin? And they say, Um. The Emperor’s. And Jesus says, Okay, well, then, give the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor, and give God what belongs to God.

It’s such a good answer. He evades their trap by saying in one breath, Sure, pay your taxes, but the Emperor is a fraud. Because a crowd of Jews, no matter how religious they are, all know the answer to what belongs to God: Everything. Everything. Let the Emperor have his little bits of metal. Your lives, your souls, Judea, Rome, the whole wide earth: All God’s. And don’t you forget it.

One of the issues at the heart of this story is what money stands for.Money in itself is just a tool. It’s a way to trade one thing for another thing, at a distance of time or space. For example, money is what allows us to trade a portion of your work for electricity to heat this building. People often misquote Scripture – specifically, the first letter to Timothy – and say, Money is the root of all evil. But what that text actually says is, The love of money is the root, or source, of all kinds of evil. Some have wandered away from faith and gotten themselves into all kinds of trouble and suffering because they made money their goal and focus.  (1 Tim 6:9-10, Common English Bible, alt.)

Money in and of itself – if such a thing were possible – is pretty straightforward. It’s what money means to us that gets complicated. In this Gospel story, money is tied up with politics, with faith, with social status. That’s all true for us today, too, in various ways. How we feel about wealth, taxes, our community, our nation – all of that is bundled up with how we feel and think and talk about money. Moral assumptions about money, wealth, and poverty are at the root of our national debates over taxes, health care, and so much more. Money is also closely bound to our fears and anxieties. In uncertain times, money stands for security – and lack of money means vulnerability and struggle.

Charles LaFond, an Episcopal priest, writer, and stewardship consultant, says that despite our buying habits and reputation, it’s not true that Americans are greedy. The fact is that we’re overwhelmed and afraid, and consumerism is how we scream. I think he has a point; I know how it feels to read the news, feel my heart sink and my stomach clench, and then see an online ad for a children’s clothing company I like and think, Oh, that sounds like relief….! Let me go look at appliquéd hedgehogs for a while…

We’re coming into the heaviest shopping season of the year – when we all strive for balance between the momentary catharsis of buying a thing, and the longer-term security of clinging to our dollars –  just as St. Dunstan’s and other churches are asking their members to make financial commitments to the church for the year ahead. To give money away, getting little that is tangible in return.

Today we hand out our giving campaign packets. For those who are new to this system: during the fall giving campaign, we ask those who make St. Dunstan’s their faith community to look ahead to the next calendar year, decide how much they’d like to give to the church, and report that number to us. Those numbers – your pledges – are private; only our parish treasurers see them. But we add up all those pledges to give us an estimate of our expected income for the year ahead, which allows us to budget and plan. Nearly 90% of St. Dunstan’s annual budget comes from our members’ pledged giving.

There’s sort of an “Insert inspiring paragraph about where our church is going” slot in my sermon here. But I’m finding that this is a funny year for that kind of thing. In looking ahead to 2018, it feels like there’s simultaneously more and less to talk about, than in other years. More, because we are looking at so many possibilities. We may undertake a capital campaign, to raise funds to improve our main building and more, to better accommodate our ministries and everything else that happens here – or could happen here if we had a bit more elbow room! We will undertake a sabbatical together, using a substantial grant from the Clergy Renewal program to enable me to learn more about including children in worship, and you all to work on building intergenerational friendships. And even aside from those big, special projects, our full seats and full classrooms mean that in the year ahead, we may have to start getting creative about how to accommodate our overflowing life together as a community of faith…!

So there is a lot in the works for 2018. And yet most of it is still unfolding, still subject to our shared discernment and exploration. I can’t draw you a map; this is brand-new territory, friends. It’s not that I and your Vestry and other leaders aren’t thinking about it – we could scatter a handful of ideas and possibilities around, but other possibilities will emerge as we all walk the road together, with the Holy Spirit’s guidance. There’s so much that is simply still TBD – To Be Discerned, “discerned,” that churchy word for the shared work of wondering together, exploring possibilities, listening to each other and to God, and allowing clarity and direction to emerge.

So while there’s more to say about 2018 than an ordinary year at St. Dunstan’s – it will assuredly not be an ordinary year – there’s also less to say because we still have a lot of discerning to do. (Beginning, in a few weeks, with whether to follow this capital campaign idea another few steps along the road…!)

Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God… We actually do need some of the stuff with dead presidents on it, to pay the bills and keep this place running. That’s why we ask for your pledges and gifts. But the reason there’s a church here – a loving, lively, seeking, serving, growing church – is because people are giving God what is God’s.  If we had twice the money but nobody was giving their heart, there’d be nothing here. You are giving yourselves, your time and labor, your skills and gifts, your hearts and spirits, to this church, and to the work God is doing among us and through us here.

In today’s Epistle, Paul names the three great gifts of faith, hope, and love, but he turns them from abstractions into actions – praising the people of the church in Thessaloniki for their acts of faith, their labor of love, and their persistence in hope. Your actions of faith, friends – your work of love – your persistence in hope – that’s why new things are becoming possible here; and indeed why we’re able to keep doing some of the old things with care and faithfulness. That’s why in the face of uncertainties about the season ahead – wonderful, exciting uncertainties, but uncertainties nonetheless – I am not afraid. I’m excited, curious, and joyful, so joyful, about the people with whom I have the privilege to share this journey into God’s future for St. Dunstan’s.

Sermon, July 23

LORD, you have searched me out and known me; * you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting-places and are acquainted with all my ways.

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips,  but you, O LORD, know it altogether.

You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me.

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream, and I will swim away from you.” “If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

If I climb up to heaven, you are there. If I make the grave my bed, you are there also….

Margaret Wise Brown published The Runaway Bunny in 1942. How many people here heard that book in their childhood, or read it to kids in their family? …

How many of you really love it? ….

How many of you find it deeply unsettling? …

I haven’t been able to discover, with some casual poking around, whether Brown was intentionally riffing on Psalm 139 or not.  (If you’d like to look at the Prayer book version of the Psalm, instead of the verse setting we sang, it’s on page 794.)

Regardless of whether Brown intended it or not, the parallel is there. Not just the superficial similarity of content – but Brown nails the emotional ambivalence of being loved so relentlessly. There’s just no other word for it. Relentless.

Some people who find the book – and the Psalm – unsettling do so because it’s grounded in parent images, and their experience of parenting has not been so great. Maybe they were parented by someone whose love was conditional, intermittent, or who didn’t have a lot of capacity for love at all,  in which case these images of relentless love may simply feel unrealistic at a deep level. Maybe they were parented by someone whose love was controlling or manipulative, in which case these images of relentless love might feel realistic in the worst possible way.

People whose experiences of human parenting have been deeply flawed or damaging may find more solace and hope in other ways to imagine God, of which there are many.

But God as the persistent Mama Bunny is emotionally ambivalent even for people like me, who have been loved well by their parents and first family . Accept the premise that the Parent in storybook and psalm is a good parent, who knows and loves the child deeply and desires the child’s wellbeing. This is still a complicated little story.

The child – the bunny and the Psalmist – wants to run away. Seeks distance, space, freedom, autonomy. And the Parent – God, our Mama Bunny – says, Fine. Run. Go where you need to go, do what you need to do. But I’ll be there when you stop running.

The line between reassurance and threat is – very unclear. Our prayer book Psalter renders verse 4 of the Psalm this way: “You press upon me behind and before.” That verb in Hebrew is “besiege.”  Like someone surrounding a city to conquer it.  You besiege me on all sides, God.  No wonder the Psalmist goes on to say, How can I run away from you? Where can I go to escape this Presence, this scrutiny? …

I know that feeling, the hot prickly tight feeling of the push-pull between attachment and autonomy.  I think everyone who’s been either a child or a parent knows that feeling. The feeling when you run to your room and slam the door, and sit in there alternately hating your parents and hoping they’ll come check on you. The feeling when your child runs to their room and slams the door, and you stand there letting your blood pressure come down, remembering to breathe, remembering that the reason that little monster can make you so angry is because you love them so freaking much, and eventually, once you can trust yourself, once you’ve found one true, kind thing to say, you go knock on their door, and ask if you can come in.

It’s hard to know someone that well, as well as you know your child. Your parent. Your spouse. Your sibling or best friend.  It hurts to know and love someone deeply, and see them struggling – dealing with hardship, or making lousy choices. It hurts to know someone so well that you understand exactly why something is so hard for her, exactly why he’s making that particular lousy choice. And yet your love and your understanding can’t always save or spare them. The poignancy, the pathos of those moments, when we’re swamped with pity and fear and even anger for someone we love so much, and cannot save from themselves – that poignancy and pathos is one of our purest glimpses into the heart of God. Who knows each of us that well. Who loves each of us that much.

Being deeply known and deeply loved is a huge blessing, compared to any alternative. But it can feel stifling or overwhelming at times. That’s simply a human truth – and the source of the impulse to escape, in both storybook and psalm. And yet even in the frustration, the door slamming, the running away, there is deep trust. That’s why we can afford to struggle, to push away, to shout anger and defiance. Because we know that parent, that friend, will still love us afterwards.  We know there is something unbreakable there. Something steadfast. Something, yes, relentless.

Bunny and Psalmist both come to some resolution. The Psalmist lands at awe and gratitude, towards a God who knew him even when he was being formed in the womb, who numbered his days before his life began. The bunny ends at resignation, at acceptance: Aw, shucks. The dialogue between mother and child seems to defuse whatever conflict sparked the child’s initial desire to run away. Mother and child are reconciled, and carrots are shared, because the mother’s love was bigger than the child’s anger.

This morning we will baptize baby B, naming her as a member of God’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, and affirming her as a child of God. B is blessed with a human family that loves her deeply, with parents and brothers and a sister who will always have her back, who will honor her growth and need for self-determination, even as they continue hold her in safety and steadfast love. I hope the church will be another such family for her, and for all the children growing up among us.

But human families and human love are finite and imperfect. Sometimes parents aren’t equipped to love the way a child needs. Sometimes children run farther than a parent can reach.  Sometimes a person goes through a season in life in which it feels like there’s no person that can give them that fierce, trustworthy, unbreakable love we all need. But there is a Love that we will never wear out, never outrun, never outlive. There is a Love that will be the wind that blows us where we need to go, the tree that we fly home to. There’s a Love that is beside us in our darkest nights, That goes before us even into the depths of the grave. That is the Love in whose name we name B today, the Love that will encompass her growing, seeking, and striving,  all the days of her life.

Sermon, July 23

BunnyWind

LORD, you have searched me out and known me;  you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting-places and are acquainted with all my ways.

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, but you, O LORD, know it altogether.

You press upon me behind and before  and lay your hand upon me.

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

Where can I go then from your Spirit? where can I flee from your presence?

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream, and I will swim away from you.” “If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

If I climb up to heaven, you are there.  If I make the grave my bed, you are there also….

“If you become a fisherman,” said the little bunny, “I will become a rock on the mountain, high above you.” “If you become a rock on the mountain high above me,” said his mother, “I will be a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are.”

Margaret Wise Brown published The Runaway Bunny in 1942. How many people here heard that book in their childhood, or read it to kids in their family? …  How many of you really love it? …. How many of you find it deeply unsettling? …

I haven’t been able to discover, with some casual poking around, whether Brown was intentionally riffing on Psalm 139 or not.  (If you’d like to look at the Prayer book version of the Psalm, instead of the verse setting we sang, it’s on page 794.)  Regardless of whether Brown intended it or not, the parallel is there.  Not just the superficial similarity of content – but Brown nails the emotional ambivalence of being loved so relentlessly.  There’s just no other word for it. Relentless.

Some people who find the book – and the Psalm – unsettling do so because it’s grounded in parent images, and their experience of parenting has not been so great.  Maybe they were parented by someone whose love was conditional, intermittent, or who didn’t have a lot of capacity for love at all,  in which case these images of relentless love may simply feel unrealistic at a deep level.  Maybe they were parented by someone whose love was controlling or manipulative, in which case these images of relentless love might feel realistic in the worst possible way. People whose experiences of human parenting have been deeply flawed or damaging may find more solace and hope in other ways to imagine God, of which there are many.

But God as the persistent Mama Bunny is emotionally ambivalent even for people like me, who have been loved well by their parents and first family. Accept the premise that the Parent in storybook and psalm is a good parent, who knows and loves the child deeply and desires the child’s wellbeing.  This is still a complicated little story.

The child – the bunny and the Psalmist – wants to run away. Seeks distance, space, freedom, autonomy. And the Parent – God, our Mama Bunny – says, Fine. Run. Go where you need to go, do what you need to do. But I’ll be there when you stop running.

The line between reassurance and threat is – very unclear.  Our prayer book Psalter renders verse 4 of the Psalm this way: “You press upon me behind and before.” That verb in Hebrew is “besiege.”  Like someone surrounding a city to conquer it.  You besiege me on all sides, God. No wonder the Psalmist goes on to say, How can I run away from you? Where can I go to escape this Presence, this scrutiny? …

I know that feeling, the hot prickly tight feeling of the push-pull between attachment and autonomy.  I think everyone who’s been either a child or a parent knows that feeling. The feeling when you run to your room and slam the door, and sit in there alternately hating your parents and hoping they’ll come check on you. The feeling when your child runs to their room and slams the door, and you stand there letting your blood pressure come down, remembering to breathe, remembering that the reason that little monster can make you so angry is because you love them so freaking much. And eventually, once you can trust yourself, once you’ve found one true, kind thing to say, you go knock on their door, and ask if you can come in.

It’s hard to know someone that well, as well as you know your child. Your parent. Your spouse. Your sibling or best friend. It hurts to know and love someone deeply, and see them struggling – dealing with hardship, or making lousy choices.

It hurts to know someone so well that you understand exactly why something is so hard for her, exactly why he’s making that particular lousy choice. And yet your love and your understanding can’t always save or spare them. The poignancy, the pathos of those moments, when we’re swamped with pity and fear and even anger for someone we love so much, and cannot save from themselves – that poignancy and pathos is one of our purest glimpses into the heart of God. Who knows each of us that well. Who loves each of us that much.

Being deeply known and deeply loved is a huge blessing, compared to any alternative.  But it can feel stifling or overwhelming at times. That’s simply a human truth –  and the source of the impulse to escape, in both storybook and psalm. And yet even in the frustration, the door slamming, the running away,  there is deep trust. That’s why we can afford to struggle, to push away, to shout anger and defiance. Because we know that parent, that friend, will still love us afterwards.  We know there is something unbreakable there. Something steadfast. Something, yes, relentless.

Bunny and Psalmist both come to some resolution. The Psalmist lands at awe and gratitude, towards a God who knew him even when he was being formed in the womb, who numbered his days before his life began. The bunny ends at resignation, at acceptance: Aw, shucks. The dialogue between mother and child seems to defuse whatever conflict sparked the child’s initial desire to run away. Mother and child are reconciled, and carrots are shared, because the mother’s love was bigger than the child’s anger.

This morning we will baptize baby B, naming her as a member of God’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, and affirming her as a child of God. B is blessed with a human family that loves her deeply, with parents and brothers and a sister who will always have her back, who will honor her growth and need for self-determination, even as they continue hold her in safety and steadfast love. I hope the church will be another such family for her, and for all the children growing up among us.

But human families and human love are finite and imperfect. Sometimes parents aren’t equipped to love the way a child needs. Sometimes children run farther than a parent can reach.  Sometimes a person goes through a season in life in which it feels like there’s no person that can give them that fierce, trustworthy, unbreakable love we all need.

But there is a Love that we will never wear out, never outrun, never outlive. There is a Love that will be the wind that blows us where we need to go, the tree that we fly home to. There’s a Love that is beside us in our darkest nights, that goes before us even into the depths of the grave. That is the Love in whose name we name B today, the Love that will encompass her growing, seeking, and striving, all the days of her life.

Sermon, August 7

IMG_6078Welcome to Tobit. Some of us have been eating, sleeping, and breathing Tobit for weeks now, or months, as we prepared for our Evening Bible & Arts Camp, which ran its course this past week. Some of us have dipped into it a little – coming to a Bible study or an art workshop, or just browsing the book on your own time. Some of us have still barely heard the name. Which is fine. Most Christians have never heard of Tobit. But today, and next Sunday, we’re going to fill you in. I can almost guarantee you that St. Dunstan’s will soon be the most Tobit-literate congregation in the Episcopal Church, maybe in the whole United States.

Tobit is found in a part of the Bible called the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha is a set of books written later than most of the Old Testament – within the last few hundred years before the birth of Christ – and written in Greek, rather than Hebrew. Protestant churches by and large treat the Apocrypha as a secondary kind of Scripture. It’s not included in most Protestant Bibles, including the ones we have around here. These books are more likely to be found in Roman Catholic Bibles, and study Bibles often include them in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments – so that if your church teaches that they’re not really Scripture, you can easily skip them! We Anglicans have treated them as a sort of secondary Scripture, of historical meaning, not excluded from our study of the Bible but not included on equal terms, either. The Revised Common Lectionary, the calendar of Sunday Scripture readings that we share with many other churches, includes a few Apocryphal texts – but nothing from Tobit, though there is a Tobit passage listed in the readings appropriate for weddings – Phil and I used it in ours, actually!

I first encountered the Book of Tobit, not in church, but in a religious studies course at Indiana University, during my senior year of college. The course focused on Last Words in ancient texts. The wisdom and moral guidance that people pass on when they’re anticipating death. The Book of Tobit was an obvious choice because Tobit gives a Last Words speech to his son Tobias TWICE – once early in the book, when Tobit has prayed to God for relief from his suffering and anticipates that God will take him soon; and once at the end of the book, at the actual end of his life.

Reading the Book of Tobit for class, I discovered a rollicking, engaging story. It was a lot of fun to read and talk about. I remembered it. And fifteen-plus years later, as a priest, rector of a parish, helping run summer programs for kids, Tobit floated back into my mind. I thought, this would be a great book to explore with kids. It has two young protagonists, no older than their early teens. It has a demon, and an angel in disguise. It has fish guts and bird poop. What more could you ask for?

Now, for those of you who haven’t read it yet – well, you should; there’s a link to an online version on our website, and the people who have read it this summer have told me, It’s actually really interesting and easy to read! But you can’t read it right this second, so with a little help, I’ll give you a very basic outline of the story.

Tobit was a righteous man, a Jew, who lived in the northern kingdom of Israel, in the chaotic years just before the Assyrian conquest. He did all the things he was supposed to do, as a faithful Jew, even though most of the people around him didn’t care about following God anymore. He had a wife, Anna, and a son, Tobias, and he was reasonably well-off, wealthy enough to make generous gifts to the Temple. Then the Assyrians conquered Israel, and the family lost everything except each other. They were dragged off to live in exile in the city of Nineveh. It was a terrible time. Many Jews living there died of starvation or were killed by Assyrian masters. And Tobit would bury their bodies, even though he was forbidden from doing so by the ruler.

One night the family managed to scrape together an especially nice meal, and Tobit said to his son Tobias, Go out and find one of of our people in the street, somebody who’s hungry and in need, and call them in to share this meal with us. Tobias went out and instead of finding a guest, he found another dead body in the street. He rushed home and said, “‘Look, father, one of our own people has been murdered and thrown into the market-place, and now he lies there strangled.’ Tobit leapt up and rushed to recover the body. He wept for the misfortune of his people. And after sunset, he snuck out to bury this nameless victim. When he came back, he lay down to sleep in the courtyard of his home, so as not to disturb his family. And while he was sleeping, bird droppings fell in his eyes from sparrows nesting nearby, and caused him to become blind.

So Tobit became blind. And this misfortune on top of all the others was more than he could bear. He became bitter and angry. Finally on one especially awful day, he yelled at his wife Anna, who was working so hard to care for the family. And when Tobit realized how he was acting, he fell on his knees and asked God to set him free from his suffering, saying, “Command, O Lord, that I be released from this distress; release me to go to the eternal home… For it is better for me to die than to see so much distress in my life.” (3:6)

Now, at that very same moment, somebody else was also praying to God and asking to be set free from suffering. In another city, a young woman named Srah was in terrible trouble. She had been married seven times, but she was persecuted by a demon, who killed every bridegroom on their wedding night. People were fearful and suspicious of her, and there seemed to be no hope. Sarah was just as miserable as Tobit. She had even thought about killing herself, but she knew how terrible that would be for her parents. So instead, she asked God to set her free from her hopeless situation and the cruel words of others. She prayed, “Lord, I turn my face to you, and raise my eyes towards you. Command that I be released from the earth and not listen to such reproaches any more.”

And God heard these prayers, Tobit’s prayer and Sarah’s prayer, and God decided it was time to sort things out. Tobit expected to die, because he had prayed for death. So he sent his son Tobias on a journey. Tobit had a cousin in another city, far away, who was keeping some money for Tobit. Tobias would retrieve the money, and it would help him and Anna to survive once Tobit was gone. But the journey was long, and Tobias was still young; so he needed a companion. Almost as soon as he looked for a companion, he found this man named Azariah (so he said), who knew the way, and even knew Tobit’s cousin, and was eager to help out Tobias. Azariah was actually the angel Raphael in disguise, sent by God!

So Tobias and Raphael the angel in disguise set out. Along the way they stop to rest beside a river. Tobias went to wash his feet, and a giant fish jumped out and tried to eat his foot! They managed to catch the fish, and Raphael told Tobias to gut the fish and keep its heart, liver, and gall, which could be useful to drive away demons and to cure blindness.

So they go on their way again, with the fish guts. And Raphael tells Tobias about this young woman, Sarah. He says, She is sensible, brave, and very beautiful. (In that order.) And she is a distant cousin to Tobias, which in those days was the kind of person you were supposed to marry. Tobias says, I’ve heard of her; don’t all her husbands die? And Raphael says, Don’t you worry about that. Remember the magical powers of fish guts. We’ll be staying at their house tonight. I think she would be a perfect wife for you.

So they come to Sarah’s house. Sarah’s parents are delighted to meet them! The young people, Tobias and Sarah, like each other at once, and the families know each other, so just like that, Tobias and Sarah are married. They have a wonderful banquet, and then they go off to sleep.

Now, this is when the demon usually shows up! But Tobias burns the fish guts on the incense burner, and the smell drives the demon away, and Raphael chases the demon all the way to Egypt and binds it in chains, never to bother Sarah again. Tobias and Sarah pray for God to bless their life together, protect them, and allow them to grow old together.

Meanwhile, what Sarah’s father Raguel is digging a grave outside, just in case he has to quietly dispose of Tobias’ body! But when he peeks in and sees that Tobias is alive, he hurries off to fill in the grave again! [This is the scene we created in our photo project; take a look and notice all the details.]

Then there are two weeks of feasting and celebration, because Sarah is finally free, and she and Tobias are so happy together. The cousin with the money hands it over – we’d almost forgotten that, right? So everything has worked out… except that Tobit is still blind, and Anna, Tobias’ mother, is CONVINCED that her son is dead, because he’s been away for so long. Finally Tobias tells his father-in-law, I must go home! My parents will be so worried! So Tobias and Sarah and Raphael, and the dog, head home to Nineveh. There’s a very happy reunion. Tobit and Anna are delighted to meet Sarah. Tobias uses the fish guts to cure his father’s blindness!

And then in the midst of the rejoicing, Tobit says, Now, we mustn’t forget your traveling companion, this fellow Azariah. He’s been a great help to you; we must pay him from the money you got, and thank him. And then we get the great reveal: Raphael says, “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stands ready before the throne of God.” Raphael tells them, It’s God who is behind all of this, the transformation of your misfortunes into blessings. Thank and bless God always, and proclaim what God has done for you.” And he flies away, and is gone.

It’s a darn good story. That’s why I wanted to work with it. But what we have discovered, the Camp team and Tom McAlpine, who’s been helping us study it and will preach next Sunday, what we’ve discovered is that there’s more here than just a rollicking tale. There’s some real depth, some real meaning. Some surprising and powerful intersections with our lives, and our times.

There are actually many sermons possible based on the book of Tobit, many ways to bring its themes into dialogue with our lives. We were pretty far along in planning our camp, creating the the script for drama and developing art projects, when it dawned on me: Oh, these kinds of things usually have, you know, themes or morals or values that we are teaching the children. Maybe I should come up with some of those!… To my relief, it turned out to be quite easy to pull out some meaningful themes from each chapter of the story: faithfulness, prayer, resourcefulness, courage, gratitude.

Turns out, Tobit is actually a story intended for moral teaching. It’s a work of historical fiction – and has been understood as such since early on – with strong spiritual and religious themes. In some ways the book of Tobit – written more or less as a morally-instructive novel – speaks across the millennia more easily than other Biblical books, whose meaning is more tethered to their time and place. What Tobit can say to us, mean for us, is not all that different from what it said and meant for its first audience, Jews trying to maintain hope and faithfulness in exile or under colonial rule. It encourages people to sustain hope, mercy, and righteousness in difficult times, when bad people are in power. More on that theme next week, I believe.

And it encourages people to trust that God is working in our lives, even when we can’t see it. Even when it seems like everything is terrible, around us, or inside us. There are books of the Bible in which God is very visible as an actor – stepping in to save or destroy, speaking through prophets or miracles or a mighty voice on a mountaintop. There are books of the Bible in which God is entirely offstage – in which the action in the story is all in the lives of people shaped by God and by faith.

Tobit falls somewhere in between. The narrator only names God as a character in the story in one brief passage – when Tobit and Sarah’s prayers reach God, and God tells Raphael, Go sort that out. God delegates to the angel, who puts himself into the situation to see what he can do. Raphael in turn delegates to Tobias – Burn the fish guts! Marry the girl! – as the angel weaves the struggles of Tobit and Sarah together in such a way as to resolve them both.

The book of Tobit offers us a model for how God works in the lives of ordinary people – even people who, like Sarah and Tobit, have reached extraordinary depths of misery and despair. The story says, God sees you. God hears you. Even if it takes a while. Even if it seems like nothing is changing. Somewhere out there, possibilities are taking shape. Hope is being born.

Raphael the undercover angel has this in common with Jesus, God dressed in a human body: The Divine doesn’t show up in clouds of glory, guns blazing, overwhelming our human stories.  Instead the Divine might show up looking a lot like… your second cousin’s brother-in-law, whom you’ve never met but who sure came at the right time, and just happens to know something, or somebody, who can really help you out with this situation.

A big part of why I love the story of Tobit is that this just rings so true for me, this idea of God keeping an eye on us all, watching for the places where our needs intersect, giving a little nudge. Delegating the work of redemption, to angels and humans alike. Are there actual angels in disguise among us? I would not venture an opinion. But there have absolutely been moments in my life, my journey, when somebody has angeled for me, wings hidden under their sweater or alb or T-shirt, making the right connection, pointing me in a new direction, connecting me with fruitful possibilities. And I hope and pray that there have been, and will be, moments when I have angeled for somebody else. Been the agent and tool of God’s quiet intervention in human lives, God’s subtle work for hope, wholeness, and delight.

Over the past weeks, the Church Camp team, eating, sleeping, and breathing Tobit, has come up with some summaries of the book’s message. Like this one: “Always remember the restorative powers of fish guts.” Okay – maybe that one doesn’t apply to very many situations. The other one is, “Trust God; bring a shovel.”

Trust God; bring a shovel. The shovel is Tobit’s shovel, used to dig graves for the nameless dead in the streets, to offer them one final act of respect. A symbol of his stubborn faithfulness, his willingness to do God’s work when nobody else would. It’s also Raguel’s shovel, Sarah’s father – the one he used to dig a grave just in case the demon got Tobias, too! A symbol of… preparedness to do any clean-up that may become necessary?

Trust God, bring a shovel. You may need a shovel – or other tools – because God isn’t going to just make it all happen, burst into the story and clean things up and put everybody where they’re supposed to be. But – and – Trust God. God is keeping an eye on your story, and on the much larger story around you. Answers and possibilities and hopes may already be walking down the road towards you; or waiting for you when you set out to find them. Demons and bird poop may catch our attention, but there’s real wisdom in the Book of Tobit, to carry with us into our lives and our times. Pray your pain and struggle, as well as your blessings. Keep an eye peeled for angels – and for opportunities to do a little freelance angel work yourself. Be alert to the possibilities in everything, even fish guts. Take courage. Trust God, and bring a shovel.

All-Ages Sermon, Feb. 28

Jesus told this parable:  “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.  So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none.  Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ The gardener answered, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good;  but if not, you can cut it down.'”

Have a seat, and let’s talk about the story.

First, I have a question for our younger kids who were in Sunday school last week…. [show Mustard Seed image] What is this?…. What does the mustard seed do? …  This is one of the parables of Jesus. Parables are like little stories that you can just keep thinking about, aren’t they? Well, in Luke’s Gospel, in the story of Jesus the way Luke tells it,  the mustard-seed parable – AND the Yeast parable –  are close to another parable:  the parable of the Fig Tree. (They’re also very close to the time when Jesus calls King Herod a fox and himself a mother hen!…)

What we learn in the parables of the mustard seed & yeast is that things GROW! The seed grows into a big tree that is home for many birds; the yeast grows and makes bread big and fluffy and delicious. But sometimes things DON’T grow when you want them to… That’s the deal with this fig tree. It’s not giving fruit.

Giving fruit, in the Bible, is a metaphor.  A metaphor means we’re talking about one thing, as a way to talk about another thing. There are lots of places in the Bible where God’s people are described as plants – trees or vines… And when we’re bearing fruit, that means we are doing the things God wants us to do. Being kind and fair and loving. Caring for our neighbors and for the world. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting straight A’s or getting promoted at our job; but it means we’re making the most of what God has given us, whatever that means for us.

So the question Jesus is raising, with this story, is, What do we do about people who aren’t bearing fruit? Do we say, Too bad! They’re failures! They’re no good!Chop them down!  Or do we ask … why? Why aren’t they bearing fruit? Are they just lazy or selfish? Or is there a real reason?…

[Show them the kumquat tree]

We got this tree three years ago. I thought it would be neat to have a tree that lives inside that gives fruit. But it’s given exactly one kumquat in the time we’ve had it.  Have you ever had a kumquat?… Here, try one…

So why isn’t our kumquat tree giving us kumquats? See here, Tree! We want fruit! What’s the problem?!? Well… I know what the problem is. Or what the problems are.

This kumquat doesn’t have what it needs to bear fruit. Trees have to be happy and healthy to give fruit; otherwise they put their resources into just staying alive. Our kumquat is doing OK,  but it’s not flourishing. And that’s not the tree’s fault. It’s my fault.

What do plants need? You know this…

Water – yes. Okay, I think this is the one thing we do pretty well; we are pretty faithful about watering our tree regularly.

Sunlight. Yes. This tree gets OK light but not great light. It would be happier with more. It’s a warm-climate tree, so it needs to be inside for the fall and winter and spring. And while our building has a lot of windows, we don’t have windows where the sun really shines in. The architect probably did that on purpose, because human beings don’t like the sun shining right on us. But trees DO. And last summer – I am embarrassed to say this – last summer, when it could have lived outside for a few months, getting sun and air and warmth, I never got around to taking it outside. I owe this tree an apology. I’m sorry, tree! …

And another thing it needs – there’s a hint in the story: what does the gardener say she’s going to do? … Right – she’s going to dig up the soil around the tree and add some manure. What’s manure?… Why is the gardener going to put manure around the tree?… Do your parents talk to you about eating healthy food? Food with the right nutrients and vitamins in it? Well, trees and plants need particular nutrients too. To be healthy enough to give fruit, this tree needs fertilizer. When I got the tree, I got some fertilizer. But it’s not exactly the right kind, and I haven’t been careful about giving it the fertilizer regularly. So the tree hasn’t been getting the right kind of food for it grow well and give fruit. Just like us, if we’re not eating well, and getting our basic needs met, it’s hard for us to bear fruit and be the people we want to be.

You know what else this tree needs, to bear fruit? It needs a community. It needs other trees like it, and it needs pollinators – insects that will come to its blossoms and carry pollen from flower to flower, to fertilize the female blossoms so a fruit can start to form. And there, this tree is just out of luck. It doesn’t have tree friends here, and there aren’t the right kind of insects around to pollinate it. Two summers ago, when I did take it outside, it was happy and healthy enough to have some flowers! And I took a paintbrush and moved pollen from flower to flower, trying to do what a pollinating insect would do. And it sort of worked – it grew a few fruits, though only one of them managed to stay till it got ripe. But if it had friends, if it had the community it needed of other trees and insects, it would be a lot easier for it to bear fruit. Instead, it’s alone.

So this kumquat is like that fig tree in the story: it’s not bearing fruit. Do you think I should chop it down?

Do you think we should try to take better care of it, so that it will be a happier, healthier tree, and will give us fruit?

But remember, when Jesus and the Bible talk about trees, they’re not just talking about trees, they’re talking about people. So when we feel mad at somebody because they’re not being good or doing right things or helping other people as much as we think they should, maybe we should wonder Why. Is there something they need that they’re not getting, that’s making it hard for them to bear fruit? And is there any way we could help?

And when we feel mad at ourselves, for not bearing fruit the way we think we should, maybe we should ask Why too? Do we need more sunlight or more community or better food or something, to help us be the person we feel called by God to be?

Do you remember back in January, I taught you to bless each other, marking a cross on the forehead and saying, May God bless you and be the guardian of your body, mind, and spirit? Well, my daughter taught me another version of that, and I think it’s a good way to end today:  May God bless you and be gardening your body, mind, and spirit!

Bless each other while I put our tree friend away!…

Sermon, Jan. 10

Today we honor the feast day of the Baptism of Jesus. Just two weeks ago, he was a tiny baby lying in a manger; last week he was a sassy independent twelve-year-old; and today he’s a grown man, ready to step into the public eye and begin his life’s work.

And he begins by being baptized. By John the Baptist, who was preaching repentance and transformation, and dunking people in the River Jordan as a symbol of their desire to be cleansed and live a new life. Later, Jesus tells his followers to baptize new believers, making baptism by water and the Holy Spirit the rite by which one becomes a Christian.

There are libraries of theology about baptism, what it is, does, and means – as there are about the Eucharist – but ultimately it just is what it is, simple and mysterious, as is the Eucharist. Water, bread, wine, human hands, God’s grace; something happens – we do, we wonder, we trust.

The Gospel of Mark, the first, the shortest, the most to the point of our Gospels, begins and ends with the baptisms of Jesus.In the first chapter, Jesus’ baptism by John in the river Jordan, very much as Luke describes it in our Gospel today. And In the next-to-last chapter, Jesus’ death on the cross at the hands of the Roman government, which is what Jesus means in the Gospels when he talks about his baptism. This baptism, the baptism the Church celebrates today, was only the beginning. As our baptisms are only a beginning.

Who here was raised in a church that doesn’t baptize babies? That teaches “believer’s baptism”? In those churches – and there are many of them – what is normal for us, to baptize babies within their first year of life, is seen as a deeply mistaken practice. Christians in those churches understand faith as contingent on individual belief, on a person’s confession of Jesus Christ as Lord, so infant baptism seems nonsensical, even superstitious.

Those ideas go back to the time of the Reformation,the great time of religious change, creativity, and violencethat swept across Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. One of the great themes of the Reformation, was that ordinary people should be able to understand the Church’s Scriptures and rites, and participate as believers in the Church’s sacraments and services. Many of the Reformed churches that developed in those decades moved away from the Roman Catholic practice of infant baptism. It didn’t fit their emphasis on conversion and belief. How could a baby be converted to faith in Jesus? How could a baby participate in baptism as a believer?

The great minds who shaped our way of faith, the Church of England, the Anglican way, had to deal with all that. They shared many of those Reformation convictions, but instead of crafting new ways of worship, they adapted the ancient sacramental patterns that we still share with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.Those practices included infant baptism.

Thomas Cranmer, the early 16th century Archbishop and architect of our prayer book, and Richard Hooker, the late 16th century scholar who laid the foundations of Anglican theology, both dealt with Reformed objections to infant baptism by stressing that baptism is just a beginning, a first step in the life of faith rather than a completion – a life of faith that will be lived within the Church, the body of Christ, the family of faith, that will nurture and form that child into a mature Christian. They saw baptism as a moment of receiving God’s grace which is then grown into over a lifetime.  Hooker uses the image of baptism as planting a seed: “For that which we there professed without any understanding, when we come to fuller understanding later, we are simply bringing to ripeness the seed that was sown before.” (V.64.2, my paraphrase).

That theme of gradual development is key; elsewhere he writes, “Christ imparts himself [to us] by degrees… we are confident that we will eventually receive all of him.” (V.56) Both Hooker and Cranmer stressed that that ongoing, gradual growth in faith happens in the church, in and through its rites, teachings, and fellowship.  Hooker describes baptism as a birth, the Church as the mother that cares for and raises the child, and the Eucharist as the meals that feed and sustain. And Thomas Cranmer constructed a baptismal rite that intentionally reminds adults of the promises made at their own baptisms – as the rite in our prayer book does – to remind and call us to continue living into, and up to, our baptism.

So the wisdom of Cranmer and Hooker and the others who shaped our way of faith made us into a church that sees baptism as birth into a new life that, like physical birth, assumes there’s a lot of growth ahead. Baptism, in our church’s understanding, is both complete in itself – as our Prayer Book says, “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s body the Church” (298) – and it’s also a beginning, a birth, a threshold. Look at what the congregation says, after the baptism: “We receive you into the household of God.” There’s that image of joining a family, an oikos! The newly-baptized – regardless of her age – is welcomed as a newborn baby into the waiting arms of a family of faith that commits to care, feed, and teach.

Baptism, as a beginning, a birth, an initiation, leads us straight to discipleship. Discipleship isn’t a very Episcopalian word – it’s the kind of thing Evangelical Christians talk about – but I’m increasingly convinced that it’s an important word, with which to name the lifelong process of learning and growing, of receiving and becoming Christ. We use the word “disciples” to describe Jesus’ posse. Although I admit that I often refer to Jesus’ friends, instead – because disciples is a clunky awkward word, and we don’t really know what it means. But we should know what it means. And Jesus’ friends weren’t just his friends.They were his followers. His students. His padawans. He was their rabbi, their master, their teacher, their Jedi master, their sensei.

Disciple means learner, or student. It’s related to discipline – but please don’t think of spankings; instead, think of the discipline of an athlete or artist or a monk, anyone highly-skilled, highly-focused, highly-committed. Their discipline is the set of practices that make them able to do what they do. Discipline in this sense is close kin to training: improving our skills, extending our capacity, meeting and rising to new challenges. Being dissatisfied. Struggling. Improving. Failing. Keeping at it.

We are disciples.Try that on. I’m a disciple. Someone learning and growing, seeking and striving, to live as a follower of Jesus. We are disciples together, trying to discern and name and live out the ways Jesus calls us to follow him, in this time, this place. Because the first question of discipleship is, Well, what do I do? I want to be like you. I take you as my Teacher. I trust your Way. How do I begin? How do I act? How do I think?

Our baptismal rite maps out a path of Christian maturity, a way of living and being that flows out of baptism. It’s on page 304, if you want to take a look. Those five questions – our Baptismal Covenant – identify five hallmarks of living as followers of Jesus: faithfulness in worship; resisting evil and repenting when we mess up; proclaiming the good news of God’s love; serving our neighbors; and striving for justice and peace.

Those are some important guideposts to point us in the right direction on the road of discipleship. But I think we could get more fine-grained than that – both in terms of getting a little closer to the ground,talking about what baptismal living and discipleship look like in daily life; and in terms of getting more particular to this community, this oikos. Churches aren’t interchangeable; if you’ve ever been church-shopping, you know that. St. Dunstan’s is a particular church with a particular culture and call, just like every other church. The people who come here, and stay here, are connecting with something distinctive about this household of faith. We’ve made our homes here, some for decades, some for months, because of some sense of fit or belonging or finding what we’re looking for or finding a group that’s at least asking the right questions together. And once you’re here, once you’ve chosen this as your oikos, your household of faith, we interact. We shape each other. We become St. Dunstanites. So it stands to reason that the way we understand the path of discipleship, the work of living our faith, might be distinctive, different in some matters of substance or emphasis from the way it’s understood across the parking lot at Foundry, or up the road at St. Bernard’s or Advent Lutheran or Blackhawk, or even across town at our sister Episcopal parishes.

Up in St. Paul, Minnesota, an Episcopal parish, St. Matthew’s, went through a process together of mapping out their common understanding of the Way of Jesus.The path of discipleship that they share, as a household of faith. A small group led the congregation through conversations and other kinds of group reflection, over the course of several months, circling around questions of discipleship, following Jesus and living our faith, in daily life. Out of those data, they distilled a number of hallmarks that define how they understand and practice discipleship together. St Matthew’s list boils down to six words. I’ll give you just one example: Hospitality. That’s a core value that we can easily ground in Scripture, and that operates at multiple levels – individual, household, parish.You can see how this theme of hospitality would call forth people’s memories, stories and reflections; you can see how, having once identified hospitality as a central element of discipleship, that value would help guide choices and practices in the future.

In the next couple of months, we’ll go through a similar process here at St. Dunstan’s. We’re calling it the “Towards Discipleship” project. PLEASE don’t go Google St Matthew’s and look at their list – I’ve carefully not looked very hard at it myself! I really want our core values, our hallmarks of baptismal living, to rise organically out of our conversations and experiences, not to plagiarize another community’s list. We’ve started this already, through our Church, Faith, Life survey and conversations last summer. Some themes that have already started to emerge, and we will use those data, but we’ll also invite the congregation into some new conversations, over the next couple of months. The questions this time around will be similar, but not the same. I expect the conversations to be just as powerful and lovely as the ones we had last summer. I hope that even more us of will participate, this time around.

The goal, the endpoint we’ll be working towards is a simple, profound, powerful list of five or six or seven words – core values, hallmarks, touchstones of discipleship, as we know and follow that path here at St. Dunstan’s. Something to post on our walls, on our website. Not the same as a parish mission statement, but not entirely different, either – something we can refer to, to orient ourselves, to remind ourselves of what we’ve discerned together about what it looks like to follow Jesus in the world.

One way to visualize that endpoint is to picture yourself having that conversation. You know, the one where somebody says, “Christians are so creepy, I really don’t trust them,” or, “Your church seems like it’s really wishy-washy, are you real Christians?”, or, “Why do you go to church anyway? I just practice my spirituality on my own,” or even, “I wasn’t raised in a church, or the church I was raised in really hurt me, but church seems really important to you; can you tell me why?” And you can say,“Well, I’m part of a transformative and welcoming community that follows Jesus by practicing hospitality, and ….”

We are going to finish that sentence together, find those words, and get familiar with them, and internalize them. I’m excited and hopeful about this work.  I kind of can’t wait to see this list. To see the map we create, together, of the path of discipleship as God has shown it to us here. I think that map, that list, will help us both to identify ways to develop our daily discipleship,to live more fully as followers of Jesus; and I also think it will help us to name and affirm the ways we’re already living out our baptisms. I am 40 years old, a priest of the church for nearly seven years, with a seminary degree, and I am still learning how to name my spirituality, to name the moments and activities in my lifewhen I’m most in tune with the Divine and with God’s intentions and desires for me. I have a hunch that all of us have both areas where we’re called to growth, and areas where we’re already living out discipleship,and we’ll be deeply blessed by the holy voice of God speaking through our community to say, Well done, good and faithful servant; keep it up.

Jesus’ baptism was a beginning, a first step down a long and challenging road.Likewise, our baptisms were – or for some of us, will be – a beginning. A turning point. Crossing the threshold of the household of God. Baptism leads to discipleship, to a lifetime of learning and growing, being nurtured and challenged. May the God who has called us together here and formed us into a fellowship of faith, bless our work as we come to know ourselves as disciplesand seek to understand more fullythe walk of faith to which we are called. Amen.

Anticipating Advent

Advent is the season of expectation that precedes Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation; and it is also the beginning of a new church year! Advent materials, including candles and prayers for at-home use, will be available starting on Sunday, November 22.

Advent Virtual Book Group: Daring Greatly.  Starting on November 22, you’re invited to join a virtual book group. We will read Brene Brown’s bestselling book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way we Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, and share reactions and reflections in a Facebook group. We may also plan one or more face-to-face discussions if there is interest in doing so.  Sign up in the Gathering Area and/or join the Facebook group “Advent Reading Group: Daring Greatly.” Please let Rev. Miranda know if you need help getting a copy of the book. It is readily available at your local library or online, in new, used, Kindle and audio editions.

All-Ages Advent Worship, Sunday, November 29, 10am: We will begin the season of Advent with All-Ages Worship, exploring the symbols, stories and songs of this new season together. After the service, craft stations will be available for kids (and non-kids) to make small gifts for their loved ones.

The Poetry of Advent, Sunday, December 6, 9am: Bring a favorite Advent poem to share, or simply come to listen and reflect together.

Advent Mini-Retreat, Saturday, December 12: Watch this space for more information regarding a half-day quiet retreat, to help us enter into the season more fully. Talk to Rev. Miranda or Evy Gildrie-Voyles to learn more or get involved in planning.

Caroling Ministry: Would you like to join a small group of singers, prepare a set of songs and readings, and visit some of our homebound elders to sing for them, one evening near Christmas? Talk with Rev. Miranda or sign up in the Gathering Area to get involved in this new ministry, intended to share the spirit of the holy season and the love of this parish with those who are rarely able to worship with us.

Share your Christmas with our neighbors! St Dunstan’s will sponsor 20 people through MOM’s Sharing Christmas program this year. The tree with gift tags will be up by Sunday, Nov. 22nd. Please take one or more tags and purchase a gift. Wrapped gifts will need to be back at St Dunstan’s on December 13.

Sermon, July 19

Follow Jesus together, into the neighborhood; travel lightly. That’s the prescription – or the marching orders – for the Episcopal Church, offered by the Task Force to Re-Imagine the Episcopal Church, based on Jesus’ sending forth of the disciples to proclaim, heal, and serve, in the tenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. You’ve heard me talk about it in several sermons now. And our current, soon-to-retire Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, made this prescription the theme of her sermon at General Convention, the triennial gathering of bishops, priests, and lay people from all over our church to worship and pray and talk and shape our church’s future.

In a sermon studded with Star Trek references – our outgoing Presiding Bishop is kind of a geek! – Bishop Katharine laid out how these words might guide our church into a more vital, engaged, hopeful future. She concluded her sermon by returning the theme: Follow Jesus into the neighborhood. Travel lightly. All around me people were standing up, applauding her, her words, her vision, her years of faithful leadership; and I was clapping too, but I was also saying to myself, She forgot the Together! The “together” in “Follow Jesus together” – she left it out. She wasn’t the only one. Somebody had buttons made up for Convention, a set of three – Follow Jesus. Into the neighborhood. Travel lightly. Again: No “together.”

Maybe it sounds nitpicky, but I think the “together” is really, really important. It’s there because Jesus sent the disciples out in pairs, not alone. The Biblical warrant for the buddy system. And I know in my own life of faith, the “together” part matters a lot. As the pastor here, and as a paid staff member, my relationship with this church is somewhat different than all of yours’; but it’s not entirely different. You are my primary faith community, y’all, and I rely on you. Worshiping with you regularly, joining our voices in song and prayer; studying Scripture together and sharing conversations, casual or deep; encouraging and sometimes challenging each other as we seek the best ways to live out our faith in the world – I am a better Christian and a better human being because of this community of faith. Because I belong to you. You support me, you hold me up, you hold me accountable. I hope that the same is true for many of you.

The word “religion” has a somewhat murky etymology but the strongest theory I’ve heard is that it comes from a word for binding a bunch of sticks together into a bundle. Think about how easy it is to break one stick. Then think about how hard it is to break a bundle of sticks, all bound together. That’s us – ideally: just a bunch of sticks for God, fragile on our own, strong together.

Today we are celebrating a baptism, welcoming Lorne into the household of God. Baptism is one of the great sacraments of the church, those outward and spiritual signs by which we mark and acknowledge inward and spiritual graces. Lorne already belongs to God; he is already part of this fellowship of faith; but in baptism we name and welcome him as a fellow member of Christ’s Body, the Church, an inheritor – and builder – with all of us, of God’s kingdom.  And by the grace of the Holy Spirit, the things we say here today become true, or more true, or differently true – that Lorne belongs to Christ; that Lorne belongs to us; that we all belong to God; and that with God’s help, we will pray, repent, proclaim, serve, and advocate God’s Kingdom towards its fulness.

I don’t think  Lorne’s parents did this on purpose; but our Epistle today, our Scriptural lesson from the letters of the early Church, is one of the best possible readings for baptism – and for talking about Christian “together” – ness. The letter to the Ephesians may have been written by the apostle Paul, near the end of his life, or by a disciple of Paul in the late first century, writing after Paul’s death, and influenced by Paul’s thought. It’s fair to say that it’s a Pauline letter, either way.

Baptism, unity, and the “together”-ness of the church, are core themes of this letter. Last week the lectionary gave us some of the introduction. At our “Between Church” worship, we reflected on that text together, using the Message, a modern-language Bible paraphrase: “Long before God laid down the earth’s foundations, God had us in mind, and had settled on us as the focus of divine love, to be made whole and holy by God’s love…. It’s in Christ that you, having heard the truth and believed it, found yourselves signed, sealed, and delivered by the Holy Spirit.” Wonderful, exuberant language about God’s desire to make us one with God and each other.

And today’s Ephesians text contains one of my favorite verses in all of Scripture, one of the ones I carry in my head and heart as a source of comfort and inspiration: “So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”

The author is addressing a particular situation here: the urgent issue of divisions and conflicts between Jewish and Gentile Christians. The two groups had different backgrounds and cultures, and different ideas of what a faithful life looks like. The author of the letter to the Ephesians says,Your differences must not divide you, when God in Christ has made you one; honor one another and work this out.

But these are words that speak beyond their original context. We separate ourselves so often, so easily, from God, and from the communities that support and challenge us. In the words of the old hymn, “Come, thou Fount,” we are all “prone to wander, Lord, prone to leave the God we love.” These verses in Ephesians speak to those who are far off and those who are near – I might feel go from feeling far off to feeling near – to God, to human fellowship – within the space of a few hours. I often feel myself a stranger, uncertain of my connectedness or my belonging; I often make myself a stranger, separating myself the better to live out the double-edged virtues of individuality, competence and self-reliance. I’m hoping this isn’t just me – that some of you are thinking, Hey, me too!, and not just, Man, she really needs help!

This verse from Ephesians speaks insistently to that part of me that feels like a stranger, that even, at some level, likes being a stranger. So then you are no longer a stranger. You belong. You belong to God, and you belong to a community. Belonging brings inconveniences and obligations, no question about it. Bearing one another’s burdens sounds great as long as you’re the one with the burden to unload. Community sounds great until real differences emerge and the going gets tough. But belonging brings so many blessings, too. And it is the gift and challenge of the baptized life. Episcopal ethicist and scholar William Stringfellow writes, “There is no unilateral, private, insulated, lonely, or eccentric Christian life. There is only the Christian as the member of the whole body; the vocation for every single Christian is inherently [embedded in the life of the church]; baptism signifies the public commitment of a person to humanity.” [An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, p.61]

This text from Ephesians offers us three different metaphors for the togetherness we share, the togetherness into which we welcome baby Lorne today. First, we are citizens. Fellow citizens with the saints, the holy ones. This metaphor invites us to consider our Christian togetherness through the lens of civic engagement. What do we do as citizens?

[Show symbols: newspaper, ballot, tax form]

Citizens have rights and privileges – it was a big deal to be a citizen in the first-century Roman Empire, as it is for immigrants to the U.S. today. Citizens also have obligations, whether we fulfill them or not – to contribute towards the needs of the whole, to pay attention to what’s going on in, to participate in envisioning and working for the common good. Citizenship involves participation in the big, shared, contentious, ongoing conversation about what the Body needs, as a whole, and how to best use our resources, so that the goods of our common life are available to all. So that’s one aspect of our Christian togetherness: thinking of ourselves as citizens of God’s commonwealth, called to participate in building a better society.

The second metaphor offered by this text is that of bricks of a building.  “In Christ the whole structure is joined together…” Call up in your mind an image of a bricklayer building a wall – mortar, brick, mortar, brick, lining them up, pressing them together. Many small parts becoming a new thing together.

[Show Lego bricks] 

This image of togetherness is an image of subsuming my self, my separateness, into something greater, something new. For this text, for this vision, we are all just bricks in the wall – and that’s a good thing!

This image reminds me of a story our junior warden Rob shared as part of our giving campaign, a couple of years ago, about working on an Appalachian Service Project site and trying to finish the roof on a house before the week ended. They were so close – then the last day, it rained. Rob told us that was a powerful moment of realizing that it wasn’t about his team. Their accomplishment, their satisfaction. The next team would finish that roof. The important thing was being part of that larger mission. So that’s another aspect of our Christian togetherness: allowing ourselves to be small pieces of something bigger.

The third metaphor for Christian togetherness offered by this text is that we are members of a household. In Greek, the word is oikos – and yes, you’ve been hearing me use it lately, though I had no idea it was coming along in this Ephesians text. I’ve been trying it on as an alternative to the “church family” language we often use to describe our common life. Family, for us twenty-first century Americans, evokes the nuclear family unit – a parent or two, a kid or two – living in a home by themselves.

[Show toy house, put people figures in it]

The first-century household, or oikos, was a lot bigger and more complex. You’d have many generations living together, and possibly several branches of the family. [Start putting other critters in/around house]

You’d have servants and shirttail relations and close friends and apprentices and all sorts of folks, living an ordered and interdependent life together, day by day.

That word, oikos, household or home, is all through this text, much more so in Greek than in English – six times within these four verses. I tried to translate verses 19 through 22 so you can hear it: Therefore you are no longer strangers and guests, people who stay in a household but don’t belong; but you are citizens together with the holy ones and members of the household of God, a home built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ as the capstone, in whom the entire home, being connected together, is growing into a holy temple to God. In whom you also are being-together-home-builded (that’s what my Greek literal translation says!) into a home-place, a household, of the spirit of God.

Early Christianity was sometimes in tension with family and household relationships. Sometimes a whole household would join the new faith together, but sometimes they wouldn’t; and then, becoming a Christian could mean splitting from your family, and taking on your Christian community as your new family. That’s still true, if less dramatically – there are people in this congregation for whom their faith is tied up with family identity, something they share with their loved ones. And there are people here for whom their faith is a source of separation and strain from those they love.

The point of this image of church as oikos, church as household, church as home – is this: whether you come to church with your family or not, your church is another family, another household. This is Christian together-ness visioned as intimacy and complementarity. Living closely, sharing life’s ordinary moments and extraordinary occasions, with a motley crew of people of all sorts, some more like you and some less, some closely related and some less, some beloved and some less, but all living that shared, ordered life as a household, an oikos.

Citizen of a commonwealth; brick in the temple wall; member of the household of God – these are all my hopes and prayers for Lorne, as we name, bless, and welcome him today. These are my hopes for each of us, and all of us, that we may indeed find in God’s church, here or elsewhere, a commonwealth worthy of our engagement; a temple to which we can gladly lend our strength; and a place to call home.

Sermon, July 12

I want to tell you the story of Michal, daughter of King Saul, wife of King David. The lectionary gives us the end of her story; she is not mentioned again. But let’s go back to the beginning. Back to First Samuel 18, when David is first taken into King Saul’s household to serve him, after the defeat of the Philistine giant Goliath and the rout of the Philistine army. If you heard that story here a few weeks ago, you remember that it ended with Saul’s ambivalence and jealousy. He was glad to have David as a military leader, because of David’s successes; but he envied David’s popularity and feared that David would try to take his place. Remember the women of Jerusalem singing and dancing,  “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands”?  Remember how much King Saul loved hearing that? …. The text tells us, “All Israel and Judah loved David; for it was he who marched out and came in leading them.”

So Saul is keeping David around, on the principal of, Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But having David close by has its disadvantages. Because two of Saul’s children fall in love with David, the dashing, handsome young warrior, musician, and heartbreaker. 1 Samuel 18 tells us that Saul’s son Jonathan loved David as his own soul. Jonathan’s soul was bound to the soul of David, and he made a covenant with him.  And Saul’s youngest daughter, Michal, also falls in love with David. Now, Saul thinks maybe binding David to his family can work to his advantage, by increasing David’s loyalty to him and his house. He thinks, I’ll marry David to one of my daughters, and he’ll keep going out to fight the Philistines for me, and eventually the Philistines will get lucky and kill him, so that I don’t have to. The text puts words to Saul’s thoughts: “Let me give [Michal] to him so that she may be a snare for him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him.”

Now, David has always been well-endowed with hubris and self-esteem, but becoming the king’s son-in-law is a big step even for him. Saul’s servants are sent to tell him, “See, the king is delighted with you — [that’s a lie!] — and all his servants love you [that’s probably true!] — now then, become the king’s son-in-law.” And David replies,  “Does it seem to you a little thing to become the king’s son-in-law, seeing that I am a poor man and of no repute?” Among other things, he’s worried about being able to pay a suitable bride-price for the very important wife he is being offered. And Saul tells him, “Oh, don’t worry! …. All I want for a marriage present from you is the foreskins of a hundred Philistines.” And David says, Oh, is that all? …  1 Samuel 18 tells us, “David rose and went, along with his men, and killed one hundred of the Philistines; and David brought their foreskins… to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. Saul gave him his daughter Michal as a wife. But when Saul realized that the Lord was with David, and that Saul’s daughter Michal loved him, Saul was still more afraid of David. So Saul was David’s enemy from that time forward.”

Saul makes up his mind to get rid of David. But Jonathan and Michal are determined to save their beloved. Jonathan tells David, My father is trying to kill you; run away, hide nearby, and I’ll see what I can do. And Jonathan talks to Saul and reminds him of David’s loyalty  and all that he has done for Saul; and Saul decides not to kill David: “As the LORD lives, he shall not be put to death.”  But not long afterwards, a dark mood comes upon Saul and he changes his mind again. One evening while David is playing music for him, he tries to stab him with a spear. David escapes to his home, but Saul sends assassins to kill him next time he steps outside. This time it’s Michal who saves David; she helps him escape out the window, then creates a “dummy” David in the bed, the classic pillow-under-the-covers thing, plus some goat hair on the pillow. She used the “dummy” to put off the assassins – claiming David couldn’t come out because he was sick – long enough for David to get well away. When her father asked why she had helped David, choosing loyalty to her husband over loyalty to her father, she claimed that David had threatened to kill her.

The Scriptural text tells us far more about the love between David and Jonathan – using some of the most emotionally intense language found in Scripture – than it tells us about David and Michal’s marriage. It seems likely that David cared far more for Jonathan than he did for poor Michal. The text tells us twice that she loved him; it never claims that he loved her. He flees their home apparently without a backward glance, though he has a heart-wrenching farewell scene with Jonathan.

 

David flees to one neighboring land, then another; and as he travels, he gathers followers. Saul, more and more fearful, begins to slaughter anyone he suspects of supporting or helping David. The situation escalates into full-on civil war. It’s really exciting stuff – I commend it to you! I would love to tell you about the time King Saul stopped to pee in a cave, and David was hiding in the same cave. I would love to tell you about the rich and grumpy man Nabal, and his clever, beautiful, and opportunistic wife Abigail, who brought supplies to David’s troops against her husband’s orders, and, when he conveniently died ten days later, became David’s second wife. I would love to tell you of how King Saul, desperate for guidance and receiving no word from God, sought out a medium, a witch, at Endor, who summoned the ghost of the prophet Samuel to tell him, God is done with you; David will be king. But there’s too much story, not enough time, for one Sunday morning. Still: if you love Game of Thrones, the drama, intrigue, violence, and betrayal, I commend the books of Samuel and Kings to you.

During David’s absence, Saul had taken poor abandoned Michal and given her as a wife to another man, probably someone whose loyalties he hoped to secure in the face of David’s threat. Here’s how David finally claims his kingship: Saul and Israel’s army are fighting the Philistines, again. (In this time and place, as in many times and places, the king also served as general of his army, leading them in battle; this will be a plot point in another story in a couple of weeks!…)

And in this battle, the Philistines win. Saul’s sons are killed – including Jonathan. Saul throws himself on his own sword, committing suicide, to avoid the shame of being killed by the enemy. When David hears of it, he sings a great song of grief about the death of these valiant warriors, Saul the King, anointed of God, and his beloved friend Jonathan. Soon thereafter the people of Judah anoint David as their king.

But the last of Saul’s sons, Ishbaal, remained on the throne in Jerusalem; so more years of war follow, with David’s house growing stronger and Saul’s house growing weaker. Sometime during those years, in a moment of tentative peace, David asks Ishbaal to give him back Michal as his wife. I can imagine a couple of reasons for the request: because of the dishonor of having his wife given to another man; because of the potential power of having a wife of Saul’s line, and the possibility of one day being able to put a son on the throne of Israel who would combine the lineages of David and Saul. I can’t really imagine that David’s feelings for Michal were a third reason, because nothing in the text suggests he ever had any. Ishbaal agrees to David’s demand; Michal is taken from her second husband, Palti. The text tells us, “Her husband went with her, weeping as he walked behind her, all the way to Bahurim,” until Ishbaal’s general ordered him home. So Michal is given away a third time, taken from a husband who loved her and given to one who, like her father, sees her only as a pawn.

Finally a couple of enterprising warriors take it upon themselves to assassinate Saul’s son, King Ishbaal. David is not grateful; he still respects the house of Saul, and, frankly, would prefer to manage his own affairs; he has the assassins publicly executed. But when all the tribes of Israel come to him and say, Now you can be our King, he doesn’t object. So the kingdoms of Judah and Israel are united, with David as their great King. A great King who takes more and more wives and concubines, and begets a great many children.

And as kind of a gesture of national pride and unity, David and his army set out to bring the Ark of the Covenant to his new capital city, Jerusalem. Remember the Ark? From either the book of Exodus or the Indiana Jones movie? Not the one Noah built. The one crafted by Israel’s finest craftsman, during the wilderness years, to hold the stone tablets on which Moses had received the Law of God. A holy box to hold the world’s holiest treasures, stone tablets engraved by the hand of God. And as they enter Jerusalem in triumphal procession with the Ark, David and those who are with him are so filled with holy joy that they dance wildly, with all their might, to the music of lyres and harps, tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And David danced and leaped the most wildly, the most fervently of them all, dressed only in a simple linen skirt. I think we can take it as the intention of the text that the linen skirt was pretty skimpy, and that David was putting on quite a show, and probably really didn’t care. After all, if being King doesn’t mean you can dance naked in the streets now and then, what’s the point?…

Michal daughter of Saul looks out of the window, and sees David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despises him in her heart. She hates him, bitterly. And when he comes to the house, she confronts him: “My goodness, the King of Israel certainly honored himself today, showing off his privates like any vulgar fellow for the eyes of any cheap servant girl!”  David says, “I was dancing to please God, lady, not you – the God who chose ME over your father to be King of Israel, you may recall.” The text tells us that from that time on, Michal had no child. At my first reading, I thought, She is punished with barrenness? – that’s not fair! – and I saw other commentators make the same reading. But the text doesn’t say she was barren, just that she never had a child. I think it’s quite possible that this was the last time David and Michal spoke. That she lived out her lonely life unloved and untouched in some corner of David’s household, watching the rest of his wives and concubines talk and laugh and fight and nurse their children.

So what’s going on here for Michal, as her heart turns against a man whom she once loved? She has been through so much… Years of coldness, betrayal, loss, and never having what she actually wanted. Of course she’s jealous – that remark about the servant girls tips her hand about how much she minds all David’s romantic conquests. She’s also contrasting her husband with her father, Saul’s dignity with David’s extravagance. David is one of those people who is just – very. He’s extravagant in relationships. He’s extravagant in emotion – these flares of anger, joy, grief, desire. He’s extravagant in his ambitions. He’s extravagant in his piety. Michal just wishes he would act like a king. And David says, Deal with it, lady. I am who I am, and God likes it.

So why tell Michal’s story?… If this chapter, 2 Samuel 6, were all we knew about Michal, we would think she was proud and judgmental and kind of a witch. When we know the fulness of her story – beginning with her unrequited love for David; continuing with her using her intelligence and influence to save him, only to find herself abandoned; being given to another man who loves her, then taken again, as a pawn, into a household where she is now one of many, many wives – we get the fulness of the pathos of Michal. This is a sad story about a miserable, lonely life.

Why does the Deuteronomist tell us this story? The Deuteronomist is shorthand for the author/editor – singular or plural – who composed the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, sometime in the sixth century before Jesus. There may have been many people involved in the work, over many years, but there’s quite a strong narrative voice, actually, across those books; so we call that voice the Deuteronomist.

If all the Deuteronomist wanted us to hear was that Saul’s royal line ended with Michal, we might only get this part of the text. But the Deuteronomist gives Michal a backstory – not a lot of detail, but enough to be evocative. Enough to trace the contours of a life. And I think the Deuteronomist gives us all that because the larger story the Deuteronomist is telling us is about the failures and risks of human power and human institutions. About the way that ordinary people, and even not so ordinary people, get caught up- and ground up – in the machinations of the powerful and the ambitious. About how people lose control of their own lives, and suffer and struggle, because those in power, and those who seek power, are busy doing their thing and don’t count the costs.

Feminist Biblical scholar Alice Ogden Bellis describes Michal as both symbol, and a victim, of the conflict between her husband and her father. Another commentator, Katharine Sakenfeld, writing about Michal, concludes, “I mourn with Palti over Michal’s fate.”

So why do I tell Michal’s story? Why make space on a Sunday for this ultimately rather unhappy story? Well – a couple of reasons. For one thing, often people look casually at some of the awful stuff that happens in the Old Testament, and they are put off because they think that the text talking about that stuff means that the text thinks it’s OK. In fact, the text often doesn’t think it’s OK. The Deuteronomist thinks Michal had a miserable life, just like we do. Maybe he judges her a little harshly for turning against David here; but he also gives us all that context to understand her heart. I think that’s a really really important point for our engagement with the Bible in general and the Old Testament in particular: Yes, it tells about some awful stuff. Why is it telling about it? Not because it approves. The Biblical text contains much more complexity and narrative sophistication than you might realize. The Bible often doesn’t think that the terrible things it’s describing are OK.

For another thing… Ellen Davis, who was my amazing Old Testament professor at Duke, wrote a book called Wondrous Depth, advocating preaching the Old Testament. And in it she says that there are two kinds of Christians. One kind sees us as profoundly separated from the Old Testament. Set apart by an enormous gulf – in Davis’ words, “a vast chasm whose dimensions are not just historical but also moral and theological.” In this view, the Old Testament is interesting but also alien and dubiously relevant to Christian life. Lots  of folks take that perspective, consciously or unconsciously – including many, maybe most, Episcopalians.

The other kind of people see the Old Testament as “an urgent and speaking presence” that “exercises shaping force on Christian lives.” They see the Old Testament as a compendium of stories of human and divine relationships that have never lost their power and relevance.

The reason Michal’s story is compelling is that it’s not so strange or unthinkable. The stories of women never allowed to make their own choices, controlled by husbands, fathers, pimps or politicians – those stories still happen. The machinations of those seeking political power, and those victimized by their ambition – those stories still happen. The stories of relationships that start out sweet, then turn first sour, then bitter – those stories still happen.

The Deuteronomist tells us the story of Michal, among so many others, to teach us that kings aren’t the only people that matter. To history, to God. To teach us to hear and attend to stories like hers – the stories of those struggling in the brutal currents of human history – and to care about what happens to their lives and their hearts. That, too, is the message of the Prophets, who hold the greatest accountable for the wellbeing of the least.  That, too, is the message of Jesus, who once and for all placed God among the powerless and insignificant.

Two weeks ago, while I was away, Father John preached to you about a Gospel story that takes place a thousand years after the time of King David: the woman with the flow of blood, who has lived with this shameful affliction for many years, endured much under many doctors, spent all she had, and found no relief. Desperate to relieve the pain and uncleanness of her body,  the embarrassment and isolation of her condition, she approaches Jesus in the crowd, touches his clothing – and feels herself immediately healed. The bitter darkness she carried so long – released. She is made whole. The Gospel text doesn’t give the woman a name; she is often just called “the woman with the flow of blood,” which is hardly how anyone would want to be remembered. What if we were to name her, the better to celebrate her hope, her courage and her healing? What if we were to name her… Michal?