St. Martin-in-the-Fields - Philadelphia, PA

Jan 23, 2022 |

Being in the Body

| Anne Alexis Harra

Being in the Body

Listen to this week’s story from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra, Minister for Children and Youth.

Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift

Today’s readings are:
1 Corinthians 12:12–20, 27
Psalm 19
Luke 4: 14-21

Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary

Being In the Body
Ms. Anne Alexis Harra
January 23, 2022

Good morning friends. I'm so excited to be with you all today.

This morning, we heard from our good friend the apostle Paul. And we’ve been hearing a lot from him lately, which makes sense because he wrote 13 letters after the Gospels. He had a lot to say. He wrote them to different churches and different people. And the passage we read this morning is from his first letter to the Church in Corinth, which is a place in Greece.

This particular letter is really special because it talks so much about how we can and should love one another. Paul talks a lot about baptism, and that's also really important, because we are given God’s love through baptism. And Paul also talks a lot about the different gifts, or different personality traits, that we are given through the Holy Spirit. Last week, Paul referenced the different gifts that we all have: some have the gift of teaching, or healing, or preaching, or a number of other gifts. But all of those gifts, even though they're different and they're different in each person, they all come from the Holy Spirit.

This week, Paul tries to explain it to us in another way. He talks about the body. And I don't know if you're learning in school about the different bones and muscles of the body, but they're all really important. He actually mentions parts of the body: our feet, our ears, our eyes. He talks about these body parts as a way of describing us. An eye does not make up the whole body, but it's really important because it helps us see things. One person does not make up the whole body of Christ, but he or she or they is an important part! All of us are part of this interesting, beautiful, unique whole body through Jesus. That is a beautiful gift.

This week, I invite you to think about being part of the Body of Christ. If you want, you can think about it like Paul did, and think about different body parts. Are you the hands of Jesus? Or, are you the neck, supporting the people around you? Are you the feet, walking with people? Or maybe you are the heart which can give and receive so much love to everyone around you. No matter which body part you are, though, remember that God loves you because you are important and you are part of the Body of Christ.

That's my good news for the week.

Amen.

Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Jan 23, 2022 |

Joy is our Strength

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Joy is our Strength

Revisit the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 23, 2022.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...

Please join me in the spirit of prayer.

Jesus sets a very high bar for preachers this morning. His whole sermon on Isaiah 61 was nine words long. No wonder he was a popular preacher in Galilee. I apologize. I can’t do that.

So my question to Jesus’ reading of Isaiah 61 in the Luke passage is, where did the vengeance go? Where did the heartbreak go? These are the questions that my Saturday Bible Study asked of the text when we looked at Luke 4 and then flipped back to Isaiah 61 and read the original. In the original text, where it says “the acceptable year of our Lord”, it follows immediately with “and the day of vengeance of our God.

So, “I’m here to proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord and the day of vengeance of our God”. Jesus leaves that out. Earlier in the passage where it says “I’ve come to bring Good News to the Poor” the next phrase is “and bind up the broken hearted.” Also, strangely, missing.

Maybe Jesus got a faulty scroll, who knows, but one of the class members made this observation: the sorrow is missing, the broken hearted is missing, the vengeance is missing. All the times in Isaiah 61 where grieving and mourning are, are missing. Why is that? And this Bible Study member reached into scripture and said “well when the bridegroom is present, we don’t mourn. “ When the bridegroom is with us we do not mourn.

The whole passage points to Jesus. “This has been fulfilled today in your hearing. All eyes are fixed on him.” He is the fulfillment, the consummation of Israel’s hopes. He is the promise of Israel's relationship with God come true. He is the healing of the Nations. He is the joining of humanity to God in their synagogue. The bridegroom is present so we celebrate even when we have cause to sorrow. We celebrate even when we have cause to mourn. “All eyes were fixed on him. Today this has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

I know for myself that I have learned through much painful experience to fix my eyes on him, to fix my eyes on Jesus. When my boat is rocking and swamping and being overwhelmed by the storm of life, when I am full of fear and despair and horror and hurt, I have learned to look up, to stand up in my rocky fragile boat and fix my eyes on Him who renews me. Who rejoices in my heart. Who fills me with the spirit again.

And when I fill my eyes with my loving savior moving towards me, I become resilient again. I become revived again. In my mourning, in my sorrow, in my fear, I can celebrate as well. Sorrow and celebration - these go together. We can be dragged down by one and lifted by the other and the gift of our life and faith is that that lifting factor comes from outside of ourselves.

Let’s see how this sorrow and celebrating plays out in Nehemiah and in Corinth. We see it on display in the Nehemiah passage (We get to hear Nehemiah once a year, so let’s do this). Nehemiah is describing the same group of people who are addressed by Isaiah 61, the people who’ve been returned from Exile back to Jerusalem. The first thing they’ve done is build a wall. They’ve rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem to secure themselves, to find that security these traumatized people desperately need. The next thing they're doing is gathering with all eyes fixed on the Torah, on the teachings of God, to renew their relationship with their Lord in this great public gathering of men and women and all who can understand.

Now, things are brewing for these people. These traumatized people are in conflict with each other. They’re debating the place of foreigners among them. Can people who do not speak the language stay, or shall we cast them out? For all those who married foreign women, do we cast out the foreign women and their children? They’re a community in conflict and they’re turning to the Word.

We don’t know which Word was read to them. Was it Leviticus? Was it Deuteronomy? We do know it took a really long time and they were standing out there for a long time, but whatever was read, this covenant with God was read and renewed among them. It caused them sorrow and weeping and mourning, and this is the sorrow and weeping and mourning of moral failure.

We all know that when we let ourselves down, when we do not live up to our ideals, when we fall short of our standards, we grieve. We mourn. We sorrow for the harm we’ve done to ourselves and others. This is the moral weeping of a people hearing how they have failed God as a special people set apart. As a special people set apart they know their story. By failing their obligations to God they have fallen into this state of despair.

But they’re not left there. That’s not the final word. The sorrow and despair causes them to humble themselves, to bend down and press their foreheads to the ground in that beautiful posture of supplication that we know so well from the mosque, if you’ve ever attended. And they’re devastated by God’s word to them, which also includes really stern words about welcoming the stranger, which they’re falling short of at that moment. They are then invited from sorrow into celebration. Don’t mourn but celebrate. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”

And if I want you to take home any word of scripture with you today, it’s that. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” God’s desire to connect with you through Torah, through instruction, through this beautiful law, revives your soul in this moment and gives you that next chance to live in relationship with God. So, in your sorrow, I will speak a word of celebration and it will literally raise you off your knees to become God’s renewed, revived community.

Now let's go to Corinth. Corinth, once again, sorrow and celebration. Corinth is this very sophisticated, very cosmopolitan city on this isthmus between Athens and Sparta. It’s a rich mercantile city and a great trade route location, and it’s one of the most argumentative and petty churches that Paul founded. And their big issue is that they cannot figure out how to be the body of Christ together when there are aristocratic elites and the poor all at the same table. They don’t know how to do this.

So, when the passage starts off with that great Good News, “In Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek”, the whole room can celebrate because they’re all gentiles. “Oh my God, we’re brought into the covenant, who would ever have thought this possible, thanks be to God.” But the next line kicks into sorrow - “neither the slave nor free.” Wait, what? This is the rub for the Corinthians. How do you sit as an equal in Christ with somebody you don’t even honor as a person? In the ancient world only the aristocratic elite were persons. They were the only ones who had that status. The slaves and the plebes were non-persons. They were often referred to as bodies.

Cleverly St. Paul takes this figure from the Greek world and turns it back on the community. This sophisticated group would have known how Plato and Aesop and Livy had used the image of a body to explain the State. Aesop had a great fable about this where the mouth and the hands and the teeth go on strike against the stomach. They all get fed up with feeding the stomach because the stomach gets all the food while they do all the work.

But in Plato and Aesop, the moral is get back to work and serve the stomach. Get back to work and serve the higher authority. In Paul it’s quite different. In Paul he’s using this common analogy to say, “no, we are all equals. You might think you’re the head. You might think you're the more honorable part of the body, but you’re on par with the less honorable.” (And he’s being euphemistic about genitals here. We’re an adult service, I can say this) “You are as dependent on them as they are dependent on you. In the spirit of God, in the church, in this community made by Christ we are equals”.

And this is a cause of sorrow and mourning and loss to those of high status, and a cause of celebration of low and dishonored status. But they are One in the spirit, so they celebrate and they sorrow together. The sorrow and the celebrating overcome the antagonism of rivalry, of being opposed to each other. We are called to be a community that remembers that we sorrow and we celebrate together. And in our celebration we remember all that God has accomplished for us that cannot be taken away from us. And in that knowledge of what God has done for us we find our resilience, our hope, our courage, our ability to support our brothers, our sisters, our siblings who sorrow and are destroyed.

I’ll never forget my great hospital chaplain supervisor Mark Grace (so well named) saying to me once in Supervision, “Jarrett, it doesn’t help the patient if you are as depressed as they are. Remember who is with you. You bring the risen Christ into that room and in that rising you both shall rise, sorrowing and celebrating in God’s eternal life.”

Amen.

Jan 16, 2022 |

The Circle of Mercy

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

The Circle of Mercy

Revisit the Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 16, 2022.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Apr/King.h...

The Circle of Mercy

The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

January 16th, 2022

Let us pray. Lord God, who showed your servant Martin Luther King the way of agape love, guide us in that way as we listen for your word today.

On November 17, 1957, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was sick. The doctor told him to stay home and rest, but he insisted he had to preach that day, so they reached a compromise. King would not go into the pulpit until it was time to preach, and after that he would go directly home and get in bed.

And that’s what he did, I imagine. But in the half hour or so that he stood at that pulpit, he preached on the call to love our enemies. He used the text from Matthew chapter 5 which parallels the one that we had from Luke today, but the ideas are the same.

Dr. King told the congregation that this was a topic that they had heard him address before, because he made it a point of preaching on it at least once a year, adding to it as he developed his thinking. It was at the core of his transformative work. His vision of the Beloved Community requires the transformation that happens to enemies when they are loved and forgiven.

He preached, “The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.”

And that is hard, he said. Very hard. But Jesus wasn’t playing, he said. And neither was Martin. That’s likely why dragged himself out of his sickbed to preach on the importance of loving our enemies. Because Dr. King poured out his love, and his health and his very life in a 24/7 commitment to creating a world not only where the enemies of justice would no longer had the upper hand, but where they might become people who no longer despised, oppressed, exploited, or lynched others. This is what he meant by the Beloved Community.

This image of Martin Luther King Jr., struggling with the challenge of illness and the call to preach, made me wonder what he might make of our COVID-soaked world today on the weekend of his 93rd birthday. What would he make of our fights over whether to vaccinate or wear masks to slow the spread of a killer virus? What would he make of the fact that racial injustice remains as deadly a problem as ever, or that it’s one of the reasons why our democracy hangs in the balance? What would he make of the lives that are threatened over our polarizations? What would he preach?

I think he would send us back to these words of Jesus: Love your enemies.

And he’d remind us what Jesus meant by this:

Do good to those who hate you, Bless those who curse you, Pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.…If anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.

Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Seventy years ago Martin Luther King offered the people of Dexter Ave Baptist, and us, some very practical suggestions for loving those enemies. We must start by looking at ourselves, he said, at our own participation in the creation of enemies, our own tendency to harm and to alienate.

He said, “Somehow the ‘isness’ of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals.”

That helps us to see our enemy as a mixed bag – just like us.

He said, “When you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”

Now remember that this was coming from someone who endured racial slurs, and violent attacks, fire hoses, death threats, jailing, a stabbing and a bombing of his home over his demands for civil rights for black people. Martin Luther King Jr. had enemies. And I'm not talking about where he stood on peace.

Another way to love your enemy, he told the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist church, is that, “when the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.” When you have that moment to get even, when faced with the choice to harm or keep someone from moving ahead in life, he said, that’s when you choose not to do it.

“That,” Dr King said, “is the meaning of love. … Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all... It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power”, he said, “you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”

And that is what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died doing – working to defeat those sinful systems that caught up people within them and made it so very difficult for them to love or to be loved.

As I considered the preaching of Dr. King this week, alongside the words of Luke’s gospel, the ideas of Bishop Desmond Tutu also surfaced for me. Because another word for the love of enemy is forgiveness – and there is no one who has witnessed more fully, painfully and effectively to the power of forgiveness than Bishop Desmond Tutu, who died three weeks ago today.

In The Book of Forgiving, which Desmond Tutu wrote with his daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu, the bishop wrote: “Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound with chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness; that person will be our jailor.

I recommend this book. It is powerful and practical, and honest. I recommend it to anyone who is either seeking to forgive someone or to be forgiven. The Book of Forgiving.

And I have to say that of late, I’m not sure that I have it in me to rise to the level of Martin Luther King’s agape love or of Desmond Tutu’s forgiveness. I’m not sure I’m up to the task of loving those that I find myself diametrically opposed to, in fierce social and political combat with, in heart-breaking alienation from. I’m not a saint like Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu.

I can’t, as the Gospel of Matthew suggests, Be perfect as my father is perfect.

But I may be able to do what Luke suggests: To Be merciful as my father is merciful.

I think, with God’s help and with your help, I can create a space where I can grow and develop that ability to love and to forgive, a patient space to live inside of and to live out of. I can create a circle of mercy.

Now Divine mercy is at the very core of God’s relationship with Israel. It is what makes an undeserving and sinful people into a chosen people – mercy is the patient and gracious time and space that God gives people to repent, to live into the covenant, to grow in love. It is not a time of empty waiting on God’s part, but an active time of calling, chastising, teaching, prophesying, lamenting and intervening. Mercy makes a space and opportunity for the undeserving to enter a place of loving relationship with God. “For he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” says Luke.

Having been both of those things in my life, I appreciate that about God.

What if I were to create a circle of mercy out of which I might be able to love my enemy and forgive those who have hurt me? What do Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu and the author of Luke suggest I fill that circle of mercy with?

I can start by filling it with prayer for my enemies, a desire at least for healed relationship. I can fill it with blessing for those I am in conflict with – that force of imagination that sees both me and my enemies as a mix of good and evil, all beloved of God despite our failings. I can make choices in my circle of mercy – the kind act, the held tongue, the stayed hand, the suppressed schadenfreude.

In the Book of Forgiving, Desmond and Mpho Tutu suggest four practices that lead to the love of enemies that we call forgiveness. These include telling the story of the harm they have inflicted outloud to another; and naming the hurts that resulted; and granting forgiveness in its time, and ultimately deciding whether to renew the relationship or release it.

Which is to say, that the patiently held space within the circle of mercy can be pretty full of things to do while we wait. It does not demand that we declare the love of our enemy before we actually have it, or forgive before we’ve named the harmed, or force a peace before there is peace. But it is a space where we ask God and one another to prepare for it, welcome the possibility of it.

Perhaps we can honor the life, and the death and the resurrection of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by committing to make within ourselves and our faith community such circles of mercy, to pray the “Prayer before the Prayer” as Desmond Tutu calls the prayer before one is able to forgive.

So I’ll leave us with the last stanza of his prayer by that name:

“Is there a place where we can meet

You and me?

The place in the middle

The no man’s land

Where we straddle the lines

Where you are right,

And I am right too,

And both of us are wrong and wronged.

Can we meet there?

And look for the place where the path begins,

The path that ends when we forgive?”

Amen.

Jan 09, 2022 |

Dr. Pepper and Redemption

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Dr. Pepper and Redemption

Revisit the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the First Sunday after Epiphany, January 9, 2022.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...

Please join me in the spirit of prayer.

Lord God, we give you thanks that through your word you address our hearts and our souls and you remind us that we are precious to you, honored and loved. By your Holy Spirit help us receive your word to us and let that word open our hearts that we may live in love with you in each day ahead. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

When my mom would take my sisters and I to go see her sister Thala in Clovis, New Mexico, the troops had a certain ritual. We would fly from New Jersey to Amarillo, Texas. My Uncle Bill would pick us up in his big sedan that smelled like the cattle feedlots where he worked. He would immediately drive us to the best barbecue restaurant on Route 40. It was not much to look at but we would zip in get our barbecue and our Dr. Pepper in a tall glass bottle. At that time in New Jersey you could still not get good barbecue or even Dr. Pepper not to mention Mexican food, which is another story. Then we would start the long trip across the panhandle through the small towns and the cotton fields that went on forever until we arrived in Clovis with our Dr. Peppers empty. And all the bottles all went into one of those wonderful old wood soda boxes, with the cokes and the seven ups. We’d rattle them into the case and I found this all utterly fascinating because in New Jersey we could not redeem buzz and I did not understand the whole idea of redemption.

I still don't, but the notion is that the bottle has value. They call it deposit value. It is still an object of value that through a process of redemption can have a new or second life of fruitful use again.

Now for me as a New Jersiate I just thought this was a useless object on the verge of the landfill. This was junk. But in New Mexico this had value because of redemption.

This is actually how I understand redemption.

Redemption is God reminding us that we have value. Redemption is God reminding us that we have value and restoring us to the relationship that gives us that value in the first place, and it is how God loves us into freedom. This redemption story of God's love for us is all over that Isaiah passage which is a glorious, glorious passage. Our deposit value if you will is illustrated by how the passage is book ended by the prophet Isaiah referring to our creation - “you were created o Jacob, you were formed of Israel”. The verbs “creation” and “formed” repeat at the beginning and the end and they are the verbs from the book of Genesis that refer to the creation of the world itself from chaos and the creation of the first human Adam. God formed and created us. We are precious to God as God's creation.

Wrapped up in that creation story is the story of redemption. There is also imagery of Exodus and return from exile. Water, fire, these are images of the people of Israel fleeing from Egypt into the promised land and the story even proposes a whole geopolitical notion of redemption where God has caused the defeat of some nations - the traditional oppressors of Israel - so Israel could be set free once again in the promised land. Our God is a creating God and a redeeming God because God never loses sight of our value even if we do. And then this redeeming story goes even a little heavier because in ancient Israel the redeemer was a family member who had the job of setting you free if you became enslaved due to debt.

So if you became so indebted to someone in your village that that person could literally enslave you, take your freedom, own you, you had a family member whose job it was to redeem you. In other words, ransom you, set you free. Someone whose job it was to remember your value and restore your right relationship, and Israel applied this notion to what God did. God ransoms us at a price and sets us free and this language of redemption is all the way that God says to us how precious we are. How valued we are. How essential we are to what God is doing. Hear that incredibly intimate language Isaiah: “you are precious to me, you are honored by me, I love you.” God loves you.

The “you” is second person singular. “God loves you” was an unprecedented statement in ancient literature, an incredible gift and affirmation of our value to God.

The story is a beautiful background for what happens in Luke where all the same elements are at play. We have the reminders of creation. We have water and the Holy Spirit with Christ in the middle. It's an ancient image of creation. The logos, God the father, the creator, the holy spirit that moved over the waters of creation, all are present reminding us that this is a new creation coming into being right in front of us. John is present telling us about the renewal of the covenant. His baptism was a reminder of the passage of the waters through Exodus into the promised land. It was a covenant renewal ceremony where Israel was remade, reformed - those same verbs again - into the people God intended them to be. And as a renewal it was a redemption. So we see the baptism of Christ himself as a next stage in God's redemptive outreach to us. God will send. God will be our relative. God will be our relative whose sins help someone to redeem us from all that enslaves us. From all the depths and relationships that we've entered into that bind us and draw us away from God. God will pay that price and indicate how valuable we are to God by sending a son. Redemption reminds us of our value.

Redemption restores us to the relationships that give us value, and one of the great gifts of this baptism story and there's so many, is that when God addresses Jesus (and in Luke it's private if you'll notice, it's an intimate address) when he comes up from the water and prays, God says “you are my beloved” and we hear the echoes of Isaiah: “I love you.” But because Jesus has taken on our humanity and because Jesus has started the new creation of our humanity in incarnation and baptism we can hear those words directed to ourselves.

Those words are for Jesus first and foremost but they're also God's words to the humanity he desires to restore. “You are my beloved with whom I am well pleased.” So my prayer for you and for each one of us is to sit in those words today and let those words address you, each one of you, where you are the person addressed.

Hear God's voice to you: “You are my beloved. You are precious to me.”

Let those words open your heart and set you free, and let those words guide you, because all those other voices that invade us about how lousy we are, rotten we are, those aren't from God. The voice of God is “I love you. You are my beloved.”

Amen.

Jan 02, 2022 |

St. Joseph, Pray for Us

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

St. Joseph, Pray for Us

Revisit the Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 2, 2022.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/C...

St. Joseph, Pray for Us
Barbara Ballenger, Jan. 2, 2022

Let us pray. Lord God, you spoke to Joseph in dreams. Speak to us so we may hear and follow.

St. Joseph, the spouse of Mary, has been listed as the patron saint of many things including:

Accountants, barristers, carpenters, dying people. exiles. families. grave diggers. house hunters, immigrants, married people, orphans, pregnant women, social justice, travelers, the Universal Church, and workers.

He is to be invoked if you are doubting or hesitant. And if you want to sell your house you might consider buying a statue of him and burying it in the backyard. I believe my sister did this. Her house did sell, now that I think about it.

For someone whose own back story is a bit vague, a lot has been put on Joseph's saintly plate.

But if it were up to me, if I got to make that list based just what we heard in today’s passage from Matthew’s gospel, I would count Joseph as patron of:

Those who lay down their privilege.
Those in non-traditional families.
Those who obey their dreams.
And maybe all men who listen to directions.

Joseph, who plays a starring role in today’s Gospel, gets a rare moment to shine. In Matthew’s nativity story, Joseph -- rather than Mary -- gets the angelic messages, though he’s asleep for all of them, and he gets no good lines and no songs to sing. Still, today is a great opportunity to reflect on this quiet, obedient soul, who delivers the Christ child. It’s a good day to ask: how are we to follow his example, and for what might we ask his intercession?

The first two chapters of Matthew’s gospel gives us nearly all we know about Joseph.

We learn that:

Joseph’s family was descended from David through Solomon -- Jesus would inherit that distinction.
Joseph is upright and righteous, which means he keeps the Law of Moses faithfully.
And because of that righteousness, he would have divorced Mary when she was found to be with child, had not the angel told him to do otherwise.

That’s because Joseph obeys divine messengers when they speak to him in dreams.

In that regard he bears a resemblance to the Joseph of Genesis, who listened to his own set of dreams, ended up in Egypt and secured safety for his family there, setting the stage for Moses to one day deliver Israel from empire and captivity. Matthew’s nativity story looks a lot like the story of Moses, that seminal story of deliverance for Israel. There is an evil king to flee, magicians give counsel, the death of the innocents, and entry and exit from Egypt. Matthew’s diverse community of Jews and gentiles would get the connection. They would see how it tells the same story of deliverance as Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection does.

But I think that Joseph, the husband of Mary, is more than an allegorical figure. He had no technicolor dream coat, no grand soliloquies, though he brought an earnest resolve to his role.

Joseph delivered.

Not the way a savior does, but the way a midwife does -- protecting, facilitating, accompanying, assisting in the birth. If it were up to me I’d make Joseph the patron saint of midwives rather than house hunters.

One of the things I love best about Joseph is his ability to lay down his power and his privilege -- the rights that mosaic law and social order gave him over his betrothed. He had the ability to have Mary stoned to death for being pregnant with a child not his own, and if not publicly executed, then quietly divorced. He could well have obeyed the law rather than the angel. The law would have protected his dominance, upheld the toxic masculinity that has shaped cultural norms both ancient and modern.

But he chose not to. And that wasn’t disobedience to God’s law. It was a higher level of obedience to it -- an openness to the Word of God that transcended what Joseph understood up to that point. He is much like Mary in that way. They make a very good couple.

This kind of obedience made him socially and culturally vulnerable -- to ridicule, attack, arrest, death. Joseph’s vulnerability in laying down his power, looks much like the vulnerability that God took on in becoming human. The seminary word for that is kenosis: self emptying as an act of love. This was Joseph’s charism, his particular divine gift. He put down the power that society had given him and he picked up the grace that God gave him. This is an essential charism in our time, as well.

To follow the example of Joseph, then, is to practice a form of kenosis, laying down power and picking up grace. It is to obey the call to deliver Jesus into the world, so that Christ may do the work of saving it.

This is humble work, and it’s also whiley work, as we see in today’s Gospel. God subverts evil, slips through the fingers of empire, hides the divine self among vulnerable people, crosses borders and carries out the divine mission according to God’s dream. This is the source of my own hope in these uncertain times, as I consider what will subvert and thwart the powers that plague us.

It helps to tell stories of this ability to be humble and whiley and cooperative in God’s dream, as Joseph was. So another story comes to mind for me, one collected by the brothers Grimm and translated by D.L. Ashliman.

When King Conrad III defeated the Duke of Welf (in the year 1140) and placed Weinsberg under siege, the wives of the besieged castle negotiated a surrender which granted them the right to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders. The king allowed them that much. Leaving everything else aside, each woman took her own husband on her shoulders and carried him out. When the king's people saw what was happening, many of them said that that was not what had been meant and wanted to put a stop to it. But the king laughed and accepted the women's clever trick.

Other versions of the story invite the women to take what is most precious to them, and they leave carrying the village children under their arms and the men upon their backs. You can tell it’s a fairytale because of the happy ending, a king relents and stands by his word, unlike Herod or Pharaoh.

But I think what is most important about these stories -- whether it’s the flight into Egypt or the faithful wives of Weinsberg -- is not whether they happened but whether they are true. And the truth I see is this, the act of setting down privilege and picking up God’s grace yields a humble and whiley strength, which is required for the work of God.

The author of the letter to the Ephesians says it this way:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.

If we would have St Joseph intercede with God for anything on our behalf, perhaps it should be this.

Amen.

Dec 26, 2021 |

A Tribute to Desmond Tutu

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Dec 25, 2021 |

Logos and the Space Telescope

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Dec 24, 2021 |

Strings Attached

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

Dec 24, 2021 |

Wise Words

| Anne Alexis Harra

Dec 19, 2021 |

Mary's Victory Song

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Mary's Victory Song

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent.

Today's readings are:

Micah 5:2-5a
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)
Canticle 15

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv4_...

Mary’s Victory Song

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

The Final Sunday of Advent, December 19, 2021

Please join me in the spirit of prayer.

Gracious God, you inspired Mary to give us your word and the Magnificat. Bless us whichever way our journey is going, whether we are being cast down or raised up, emptied out or filled up, help us know that it is a blessing to arrive with our neighbor in that place called enough.

In Christ's name we pray. Thank you.

My wife and I love every sort of music. If you know my wife Allison Bowden, she can sing large parts of Britten's Ceremony of Carols by heart and she's a big fan of Parliament Funkadelic, so that's how our family rolls. In fact we have a game we play with music which we call “Next line please.” I will sing a line to her and she'll sing it back, like the next line in the song, so an easy one - and you can join in if you want, I will not sing, we will just recite -”Shake it up baby now” (The congregation responds: “Twist and shout.”) “Ain’t no mountain high enough.” (The congregation responds “Ain’t no mountain low enough.”) “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner.” (The congregation responds: “but he knew it wouldn't last.” and so on…)

Now finally, “my soul magnifies the Lord” (The congregation responds: “the spirit rejoices in God, my savior.”

In a world without exclamation points - that is, the ancient world - you repeated things to make your point. If you wanted to explain and exalt and emphasize, you said it twice in a row. So Mary is saying essentially, “rejoice again, I say rejoice in our faithful God.” She is singing a song, a prophecy of exaltation, of joy, of fulfillment and I want to spend time with it this morning. We've had it twice already. We might say, “that's a lot, Jared.” We had it in the psalm position and we had it as part of the Gospel which was optional, but I wanted to do it as many times as we could.

I wanted that because the song of Mary is something I would like us to have by heart and I believe it's also something that's extremely good for our hearts, because in it Mary is teaching us. Mary the apostle, Mary the prophet, Mary the theotokos, the bearer of God's teachings, is telling us how to recognize what our God is doing and who our God is. In fact she is teaching us who our God is by telling us what God does so we can discern the movements of God in our own lives in our own world. She is teaching us that our God is faithful and true and comes through on God 's promises so we can have confidence, we can have hope and we can be humble in our service with our Lord.

Now, the song of Mary is a victory song. She is singing a victory song in a long tradition of woman prophets in Israel. She's in the heritage of Miriam who sings a wonderful victory song after the deliverance at the red sea. She's in the tradition of Deborah from Judges who sings a victory song. She's in the tradition of Hannah who sings a victory song after she is miraculously able to be pregnant, probably the closest to Mary's song. Mary has sung a victory song for what God has already achieved, what God has already accomplished, and it's an odd way she does it.

It involves a special grammar. Now I grew up in the 70s when schools did not believe in grammar. They thought it was oppressive to our cool little souls, so they didn't teach it to us, so I had to do a lot of research this week, but the Magnificat is written in a verb tense that we don't have in English. It’s written in a Greek verb tense called aorist a-o-r-i-s-t. We translate it into past perfect which doesn't quite do the job, but the past perfect is all those verbs in there: “has shown the strength of his arm, has scattered the crowd in the conceit of their hearts.” I like that translation better. “ has cast down the mighty from their thrones, has lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things, has sent the rich away empty.”

In the Greek what all this verbiage means is that this has been accomplished and continues. This has been done, the victory won, and the work continues. God 's work is ongoing and secured by God 's action. That's what makes it a victory song because otherwise we're asking Mary for the footnotes. “When has God done that, when has God done that, when has God done that?” God has done it in the incarnation itself.

In the conception of this child, God has acted decisively to change the history and path of the world. God has acted decisively to reunite God with humanity, to do God 's eternal purpose which was to harmonize humanity with God. This is accomplished in this incarnation and we talk so much about the cross and the resurrection of how God does God 's word but the incarnation is the first stitch. It's the essential beginning of how God makes peace with humanity, how God makes shalom, and I use that word intentionally because it's so much richer than peace. God makes peace with humanity, overcomes our hostility.

I want to pause on that for a minute because this is essential to what the Bible teaches. The history of the Bible is a history of God offering and humanity rejecting, of humanity living in opposition and hostility to God, and we might think to ourselves, “well I’m not hostile to God, I have good intentions, I have a high regard for my own innocence.” But the story we live in is a story of rejection of God 's good authority, the rejection of God 's just and loving authority and when you reject God 's Godliness that is hostility. Ask any parent of a teenager. And it's that hostility, that resistance and reluctance and rejection that we bring to this relationship that God overcomes through God 's power by knitting us together forever in his life through the incarnation. This is the first stitch and that is the glorious good news of this story. I want to underline it in a certain way by a practice I have of every year looking out for where do I see the Magnificat? Where do I see how God has shown the strength of God 's arm, where do I see how God has scattered the powerful in their conceit, how has God cast down the mighty, how has God lifted up the lowly and filled them with good things, how has God sent the rich empty away both in the world and in my self?

Well staying on the theme of music one of my favorite recording artists gave me something that looked like the Magnificat this year. He’s a wonderful singer-songwriter, if you don't know him, named Jason Isbell. He has a great song called 24 frames which I just adore. I will once again resist singing it to you but the lyric is amazing theologically. He says, “you thought God was an architect now you know he’s more like a pipe bomb ready to blow. All you've built was just for show. All gone in 24 frames.”

He is a brilliant songwriter but in the country music world which tries to claim him, he is what we might call a burr in the saddle. He has done amazing work challenging the sexism and racism of the country music establishment. So right now he recently had a seven night residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Now this is the holy temple of country music. A seven night residency with Amanda Shires, his wife, and what did he do? Every night he picked out an African-American country recording artist who was a woman to open for him. He raised up the lowly, but he doesn’t look at it that way. He says each one of these women should be a headline. Each one deserves to be a headliner except for the resistance of racism and country music which we recall was created by segregationist producers who wanted white root’s music to sell opposed to black root’s music.

Using his influence Isbell has facilitated a raising up and he has challenged those in power to be cast down. He goes even farther. A famous country singer Morgan Wallin famously this year was caught on tape using the worst racial slurs you could think of, and this caused rightly a huge scandal and a major pause in his career as it should have. A leader in this was Jason Isbell making sure there were consequences and making sure this was an opportunity for country music to confront its racist history and present, and here's what Jason Isbell said.

He is a wonderful guy. He's been through recovery and he really doesn't suffer fools and he just said, “look, we are not persecuting Morgan Wallin. He is not being harmed. He is still a multi-millionaire. We are taking him off a pedestal and we are bringing him down to the sidewalk where the rest of us live, where the rest of us learn hard lessons and repent and return to the Lord.”

Bring the mighty from their thrones, send the rich away empty, concrete vision of what God is doing as Mary teaches us in the Magnificat, we are invited to join in. We are invited to be a people who facilitate this leveling action of the Magnificat where the rich are sent away empty, the mighty come down from their thrones and the poor are elevated to meet them in this level place called enough.

We are called to be part of that gracious action, that prophetic action and we are called with confidence, with hope and humility that our world desperately needs from us. We are called with confidence because it is accomplished in the coming of Christ. We are called with hope because God is true to God 's promises as Mary tells us. We are called with humility because anything that is done well is only done in God 's power and with God 's help.

Amen.

Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.

Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Dec 12, 2021 |

The Sting of Forgiveness

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

The Sting of Forgiveness

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Third Sunday of Advent.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv3_...

Let us pray. Lord Christ, help us to endure the sting of forgiveness, that we may become for you your brain in the world.

Jarrett and I are part of a Zoom-based lectionary bible study for diocesan priests. We’re on it each week and a group of us read the Sunday lections and talk about what we might preach about. So if you wonder where my sermons come from, I get them from other people. Or at least, they can really focus me on what I need to pay attention to in these readings, and so this week, I want to give credit where credit is due.

Because I’ve been thinking a lot about a story that one of the clergy, Robin, told about forgiveness. When her daughter was young, Robin shared, she attended a home daycare that taught the children that when someone apologized to them – as preschoolers are routinely made to do – they were not to say, “it’s ok.” They were encouraged to say “I forgive you.”

Because when someone harms another person it’s not ok, and their apology doesn’t make what they did ok, and sometimes the feelings that you're feeling are still not ok. So if you want to accept their apology, they children were taught, say “I forgive you.” Now, for things like cutting in line or hoarding the best markers, that can be a pretty quick process. For the bigger things we grow into, getting to I forgive you can take a little longer. As they say, little kid little problems, big kids big problems. But that’s a different sermon.

One day, Robin said, she apologized to her daughter for something she did, like you do when you’re a parent, and her three year old said “I forgive you.” That comment startled her. And Robin said it made her a little angry. Who was this preschooler to say if Robin was forgiven or not? Who was she to forgive me?

And here was revealed to Robin the power that is contained in the I of I forgive you. Because it acknowledges that there’s a relationship involved there, and the one who was hurt has some agency in determining what happens next, whether things are really, indeed, ok.

Robin’s story made me realize that I’m like this. Very often when I apologize, I want the person I’m addressing to tell me that what I did didn’t hurt, it wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t my fault, it’s ok. Often that means what I really want is to be released from my feelings of imperfection, to get rid of the gnaw of guilt, rather than really wanting the person I’ve hurt to be healed.

So it stings to hear “I forgive you.” It stings to hear “Yes you hurt me, and I appreciate that you are taking responsibility for it, and I accept that, and I want to stay in relationship with you.” “I forgive you” is a little more truthful than “it’s ok.” It’s judgement without condemnation. Judgement that’s graceful and merciful. And that sting just might prompt me to wonder what the path is to things really being okay.

And now we’re in the territory of the gospel, though at first glance it seems a bit harsh. I think it’s the brood of vipers language that gives it away. That is the tell that this isn’t a healing ritual. Because John has stepped into the waters of the old time prophet, of one called by God to help Israel face the truth of who it is and to get ready for what’s coming next. Because it’s going to demand the full strength of their covenant with God.

John’s baptism didn’t make the impure clean, it didn’t remove sin. It ritually acknowledged that the life had already been cleaned up, that the change had been made, the heart re-turned to God. So unless you've done that work, don’t get in John’s baptism line.

So what then does John’s baptism with water do, and what does Jesus’s baptism with fire do? John’s baptism invites Israel to return to right relationship with God; it proclaims that Israel has repented and is ready for the life that God will initiate through Jesus.

“What are we to do, John, to show that we are ready for your baptism?,” ask the crowd and the tax collectors and the soldiers?

“Stop sinning”, says John. “Stop invoking your privilege, and hoarding resources, and keeping aid back from those who need it. Stop misusing your power, and extorting people.”

“I’m a prophet,” John would have said, “don’t tell me this is the first time you’re hearing this. Stop sinning. Get your covenant with God firmly in place. Because when Jesus comes baptizing, look out.”

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” John says of Jesus. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Luke calls that “good news.” Threshings, pitchforks, unquenchable fire – that sounds like judgement to me. And I think this is where we often go in our imagination of what God’s judgement of us is. It sounds like brutal, terrifying condemnation. But what if that threshing, and chaff removal and sifting is actually what an encounter with God’s love looks like? What if that’s the refining process that happens when God says “I forgive you?”

“From our perspective it looks like judgment. From God’s perspective it looks like love.” Jarrett observed in our lectionary group. That is because God tells us the truth about ourselves. Sure it stings. Because truth stings. What if God’s judgement invites us to see ourselves as God sees us, as we truly are. What if that involves freeing the core of us that God rejoices in and delights in? What if on the other side of God’s judgement, we see ourselves as beloved as God saw us from the beginning, and still sees us?

Consider how John the Baptist describes the baptism offered by Jesus. The threshing floor, the winnowing fork, the fire that burns the chaff -- these are all means of removing the extraneous material from that valuable, useful grain. If we are talking about people who have already repented and emerged from John’s baptismal water, then it looks to me like Jesus is processing the grain for its actual use.

This is the process of God’s love in us – removing that which is not love, which is not necessary, which is perhaps not true about us and carefully gathering up and preserving what is true, beloved, essential to us and to God.

You can call this process judgement. You can call it love. To those of us who do not want to let go of any of it, it sounds terrifying. Because I’d rather things be ok, than to admit that I need to be forgiven of all that does not flow from love. I think sometimes I’d rather bring all my sins to God with a little apology for packing so much, coming with so much baggage and just have God say, “it’s ok, it’s fine, come as you are.”

But real reconciliation with God means bringing all the stuff we can’t manage to put down and allowing God to remove it for us. When God says “I forgive you,” I think it means, “I see your sin, I acknowledge that you have done harm to yourself and others and me, and I remove its power over you and your attachment to it, and we are in relationship”. That includes things like our shame, our fear, our perfectionism, our tendency to dominate, our inability to forgive ourselves and be merciful to others. And God calls upon the wind of God’s spirit to drive it away from us and the fire of the spirit to consume it entirely.

In stories of God’s judgement I think we forget what remains, that there is something in us that is also wonderful, beautiful, useful, effective, necessary to the work of God. The grain of wheat in us that is seed and food remains. That is what God’s truthful gaze, God’s fiery love, frees in us. Consider that when you say amen to the communion bread today. You are not just consuming the wheat, you are becoming the wheat. And that act of threshing and winnowing and sifting is the powerful work of our transformation into Christ’s body.

This puts a new shine on the rose candle of Gaudete Sunday, in this third week of Advent, on this day where we are waiting to make special room to rejoice. It is a lovely light in a darkened room. But put your finger in that flame, and it burns. Because it’s fire. “The Lord is near,” says the heat of that flame. “Do not worry about anything, it says. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

And that as Luke says, is indeed good news.

Dec 05, 2021 |

COVID Retreat

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

COVID Retreat

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Second Sunday of Advent.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...

Please join me in the spirit of prayer.

So early on in my quarantine when I was suffering from Covid these last two weeks (I've had a negative test and I'm completely safe) I decided to turn my quarantine and convalescence into a spiritual retreat. Covid is definitely a Wilderness moment. What does one do with that? Well, one turns it into a retreat where I could take the solitute and the isolation and the loneliness and the misery and use it as a refining fire, as it says in Malachi, to put my soul before God and let God do God's work. That's what a retreat is after all. We get rid of all the distractions and routines and buzzings in our head and the attachments in our hearts so that we can simply put ourselves before God and say, "Work this out in me."

It's an act of surrender in some ways. And that turned out to be a very good use of Covid actually. I could simply say, "God, here I am in my struggles and my frustrations and my failures, and my fallings short, my sins and my confusions and my contradictions." I could put it out there without excuse. "And before you are a merciful God, I can do that." It starts with this gratitude, that we know we can approach God in our full contradictions and find a companion and someone to help sort us out.

So I had a quarantine retreat. I was quarantined into the bedroom and bathroom, with no company and dinner and lunch on a tray.

And what came to me as an image was this cheap toy I found once in a science museum. I've always loved the gift shops of science museums and this was a plexiglass box - a rectangle - and it was filled with iron filings, and the kit came with a number of magnets and the fun you had, such as it was, was applying the magnet to the filings. And of course when you apply the magnet to the filings they go from a disorganized mass into a wonderful organized set that follows the magnetic field of the magnet.

So from this jungle you get this wonderful pattern of the iron filings following the magnetic field of the magnet you apply.

This image came to me as a gift, because I realized that left to myself, I’m a pretty chaotic pile of filings. I'm going off in every different direction. I'm going off in contradictory directions at the same time. I cause myself suffering and angst and anxiety and worry. I fall short and I sin. It's that same pile that I bring into God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, and then in God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, my life finds enlightenment, and finds a pattern that is healthy. A pattern that is humble. A pattern that is connected to God most of all. And as we enter into Advent, I want to recommend to you, however you can do it - hopefully without the Covid part - to have some Wilderness time and put your chaotic pile of filings in front of God and let the love of God and the care of God and God's mercy sort them out and help you find your shape again.

Today on the second Sunday of Advent I am very very grateful for the example of Zechariah and Elizabeth and John and Mary and Joseph. These humble, humble people who are so far off to the side of history, the underside of history compared to Tiberius and Pilate and Annas and Caiaphas. All these key names that Luke spreads across the story are all known in the Mediterranean world and then off in this little corner is where the real action is happening. The Empire might spread good news of sorts, but the good news of God is happening in these humble folks, who give us the clues about how to live in the love and the care and the mercy of God that ushers the presence of Christ into the world.

When we look at the Song of Zechariah or the Song of Mary, we look at these humble folk who ushered in our Lord. They were prepared to know God and to welcome God and to receive God because they were immersed in the story of God. We look at the Song of Mary and this incredible Song of Zechariah, and we see people who knew the promises, who held onto the promises of God, who knew that God was a God of liberation, a God of mercy, a God of forgiveness, a God whose tender mercy at the dawn breaks from on high on those who sit in darkness. A God who doesn't forget God's people. A God who is available for us to bring our whole lives to. They were people who lived in the magnetic field of God's grace. And so we immerse ourselves in the worship and the study of the scripture and prayer to be like them: people receptive, people prepared, people ready to see our God return.

We see St. Paul at his most pastoral in the letter to the Philippians where he's just gushing with love for his community, and I so relate to him, because when I read that passage I think of you. I just love being with you in prayer. I just want you to know the completion of grace. He's like a good pastor, wanting his people to be ready for the day of the Lord, the day the Lord returns. Every day is that day. That's the secret. As we live everyday in the day of the Lord, God is always completely present. God is never present in part. God is only ever fully present - we are absent. We are distracted. We are missing what God is doing.

But we are called to this wonderful reckoning where we can be in God's presence fully. Fully, complete, whole, actualized as the people god has called us to be, because we've been prepared. Because like those magnetic fields, we've been aligned with God. And this is our hope, this is our proclamation, this is what we live for in the season is to know that we can live our lives before God, live our lives in the presence of God on that day when God is fully present with us, which is every day in every moment. Thanks be to God.

Nov 28, 2021 |

Are We There Yet?

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

Are We There Yet?

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the First Sunday of Advent.

Today's readings are:

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CA...

Let us pray.

In our family, we are the relatives that travel home. We have always tended to live several hours away from the family core, and so rather than being the ones that host Thanksgiving or Christmas, we’re the ones that drive - in our case to all the way to Northeastern Ohio. Now, when we lived in Rochester, New York, we made the arduous trek through Erie, PA every December – for which we should get a special family medal. When we lived in Baltimore MD, the six hour trip home could sometimes become 12 hours because of the curse of The Pennsylvania Turnpike.

And as any of you know when you are traveling with young children on such journeys that are long and boring year after year you search for those signs that will help them to know that the journey is nearly over.

Are we there yet?

“No, but look, it's the Sapp Brothers Coffee Pot. That means we’re near Clearfield, we only have an hour to go.” And there it would be rising up out of the mountains of Central Pennsylvania , as a sign that we were almost done with that trip home from Cleveland back to State College where we lived at the time. Now apparently that coffee pot is a landmark from Omaha to Pennsylvania and it will lead you if you follow it to a truck stop. I appreciated it more as a sign that better coffee lay ahead if we were only patient. Regardless, it was a sign of hope on a long car trip home.

Signs are essential to the upkeep of hope – especially in the long journey that we’re on with God. That’s because a big part of the life of faith is waiting – waiting for delivery from exile, waiting for an end to oppression and injustice, waiting for the Messiah to arrive, the Kingdom to Come, waiting for Christ to return. Today’s Scriptures are a good example – they acknowledge that longing of God’s people.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” promises Jeremiah.

“Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith,” writes Paul to the dear community of the Thessalonians; the first community he founded.

“Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near," Luke’s Gospel quotes Jesus as saying, after he enumerates the various things that will happen before God’s glory is fully revealed.

Advent is a season that relishes waiting – waiting for a coming Christmas that we know has already arrived. Waiting for a second coming of which we know not the time or the place.

To help us through, God sends signs that acknowledge our longing. Burning Bushes and 12 plagues. Oil that does not run out. Transfigurations. The Scriptures also offer us prophetic performances and veiled apocalyptic imagery like we have in today’s Gospel. And people of faith are notorious for misreading them. God’s signs are characteristically inexplicit in their timing, and when made into predictions, they invariably let us down.

There is an art to reading God’s signs.

Now, when my husband Jess and I met in college and began to spend lots of time together, we often found ourselves looking for someplace to eat. We’d leave a class wondering which of the half dozen dining establishments in Kent, Ohio, would we choose that day. Let’s follow the signs, Jess would say. A fallen branch on the sidewalk would suggest we go left. A crumpled piece of notebook paper sent us forward. A shadow pointing a certain way would steer us in another direction. Inevitably we’d end up at Wendy’s.

I would not say that this was God’s will. Divine signs don’t work like that. Now the Apostle Paul, on the other hand, was very good at reading God’s signs. I think he saw them everywhere, especially in the communities of faith that he helped to found. Listen to his delight in the Thessalonian community that he is separated from and longing for:

“How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” he writes to them.

They are the sign that Paul turns to in order to endure the long slog of his work as an apostle. They give him hope as the Body of Christ in action in real time. The Thessalonians are not perfect – he knows that their faith is lacking in places. But that doesn’t limit his joy. They are enough for him, because they speak to the presence of Christ among the faithful, even as they await Jesus’ coming in glory.

Here is the true power of God’s signs; of Christ’s promises. They answer some of our most persistent questions, though not the one we usually find ourselves asking. More often than not, we cry out with the psalmist, “How long O Lord?” And we think what we want is a day and a time. But the questions that God answers are: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK? And to those questions God answers: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” The Kingdom of God is at hand. Redemption is drawing near. God is with us. This is what God’s signs reveal as we journey from the now of God’s will to the not yet of God’s promises.

Because God knows that it hardly helps us to know how much time it will be exactly before our longing ends, when it’s the present moment that feels like an eternity and seems so hard to endure. Often when things are very near their completion, time seems to slow down and stand still. I remember this from when I was in labor with my kids, and in that last week before they were born, everything just stopped and the inevitable seemed like it was never going to happen. Waiting for news – good or bad – can feel like this. Keeping vigil at a death can feel like this.

And then in an instant everything changes, and the end begins.

So we can’t really trust our sense of time, and the impatience we find ourselves in because of it, but we can acknowledge our longing for the fullness of God’s love to be revealed, for the return of Christ in glory, for the new world coming. And at the same time, we can relish the evidence of it along the way.

And very often it is not in the earthquakes or the roaring of the seas that God’s presence is signified, as much as it’s in communities of faith, like Paul’s dear Thessalonians or our faith community here. God’s signs abound here. Quotidian maybe, but astonishing to me all the same – the compassionate listening, the waiting by the bedside, the checking in on one another, the sharing at morning prayer, the ability to forgive or to try something new. These too are God’s signs. They answer the questions: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK?

And in these signs God answers:” I am here. I am with you. And all will be well.” Amen.

Nov 21, 2021 |

Intimations of Christ's Kingdom

| The Rev. Carol Duncan

Intimations of Christ's Kingdom

Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Last Sunday After Pentecost, Christ the King Day. Today's readings are:

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaints_B_RCL.html

Intimations of Christ's Kingdom

The Rev. Carol Duncan

The Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 21, 2021

Happy New Year’s Eve of the Church Year! Today is Christ the King, the last Sunday before we go to Advent and Year C in the lectionary. In anticipation, please be seated.

You may be wondering, what is the kingdom that we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday? I expect you all know it is not a political entity or human territory at all. The Letter to the Romans says the kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Gospel of Mark says disciples were given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for us outside, everything comes only in parables. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says the kingdom is Truth. I want to convey the truth and the dream of kingdom using imagination rather than analytical reasoning, because Christ’s kingdom is not actually graspable by logic.

I had a powerful experience of this otherworldly realm in my freshman year in college. This was in 1963, before Hippies, barely beyond Beatniks. I lived in a residence that was a converted manor type house, up a hill away from the main campus. The group of women who lived there that year were inching toward the new age. We wore black tights. We let our hair grow long.

One night in the late fall I was feeling unusually exhilarated after reading from Genesis for my Western Civ course. I needed to do something expressive. I climbed out the second-floor window onto the forbidden fire escape. It was cold, but I had a coat. From where I was no house lights showed. I lay back and gazed up at the darkness. The stars were bright.

Suddenly I was falling upward into those stars. The jolt took my breath away. I heard no words, but I entered a sort of meeting, a great presence. It was a night vision and a conversion. I had dropped into the holy. My imagination was kindled that night in my 19th year, and it glimmers to this day. You all get the benefit of it now.

The kingdom of God is laid out before us today in three marvelous lessons. The vision in Daniel is like a psychedelic panorama of a celestial throne room, a fantasia of rippling color and splendor. To enter this kingdom space, it may help to close your eyes and breathe it in. The throne is fiery flames, and its wheels are burning fire. A stream of fire issues and flows out from the Ancient One’s presence. A thousand thousands serve him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand attending him. You can hear the music if you let your imagination go, as if Tyrone and the choir were giving their ultimate fanfare. This must be a real place because Ezekial saw it too, and maybe also Paul when he visited the third heaven, whether in body or out of body he couldn’t tell. Into this throne room, coming with the clouds of heaven, enters one like a human being. Daniel couldn’t have known, but we know this is Jesus. A human being like us blazes into the everlasting dominion that shall not pass away. Eternity doesn’t pass away because it has no beginning and no end, no boundaries. It inhabits, surrounds, contains and interpenetrates our cosmic time and space. Sometimes on a deep blue-sky fall day, the blazing leaves can give us a feel for it.

In the Revelation passage, we are ushered into that same throne room. Jesus enters it with the clouds of heaven just like in Daniel’s vision. Jesus is now reverently known as the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. And Jesus is the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. In this throne room Jesus has made us to be his kingdom. He knows we can be priests to serve his God and Father. To Jesus in this throne room belong the glory and dominion forever. And in this throne room every eye will see him, no matter what their life has been. All who have pierced Jesus by denying that we have seen him hungry or thirsty or naked or in prison, and seeing, did not attempt to relieve his suffering. We will see him and wail. Then we fall into the divine loving arms of redemption. Yes, this will be. This is happening in God’s time, which is all time. Time which is and was and is to come, without boundary or limits, eternal.

In John’s Gospel we arrive with a bump. You can open your eyes. This is a factual throne room with a factual king, Pilate. Into this throne room Jesus walks escorted by Roman guards clanking their spears. Jesus is on trial for his life. Are you the king of the Judeans, Pilate asks. The damning question is about Kingship, not about nationality. It is about earthly power. Finite power, although Pilate is incapable of grasping his own finitude. Instead of cowering before this earthly king, Jesus the ever empathic one wonders what Pilate is really thinking. Is he asking someone else’s question or his own? If it is his own, Jesus is interested and wants to know more.

But Pilate considers himself superior to a subject people. He says, I’m not a conquered Judean, am I? The authorities of your conquered nation want me to take care of their problem. What makes them think you are so important? Jesus replied that indeed Pilate is correct, his followers are not fighting to keep him from dying. His kingdom is not from this world. Pilate bears down on factual information. Are you a king? Jesus replies that he is in this world only to witness to the greater realm of truth. He gives Pilate a chance to catch a glimpse of Truth - everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. Do you hear me Pilate? Do you hear me World? I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come to me.

We must look now at our own lives and imagine what Jesus will ask us. May we seek the kingdom in this mortal life in which all have access to good schools, nourishing food, secure homes, satisfying work with adequate wages. Where when we come face to face with every other human, we convey dignity and respect as though we have just arisen from our baptismal immersion. And if we are fortunate, in our piece of the kingdom we will have music of the choir’s greatest fanfares to rejoice us.

Happy Christ the King Sunday, the threshold of a new year and an intimation of God’s eternal realm. Amen.

Nov 14, 2021 |

St. Martin Had Bad Hair

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

St. Martin Had Bad Hair

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the St. Martin's Day, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28. Today's readings are:

Isaiah 58:6–12
Psalm 15
James 1:22-27
Matthew 25:31-40

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Nov/Martin...

Please join me in the spirit of prayer.

Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of our patron saint Martin, for all the ways he has formed the soul of this parish and all the ways he has reflected the image of Christ into the world, challenging us ever deeper into the full meaning of your love for this world. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.

Happy St. Martin's Day. What does one say on St. Martin's Day? After all, there’s Merry Christmas, all right, Happy Easter, Happy St. Martin's Day, it's all the same. So every year I study up for St. Martin's Day by going deeper into the saint, and this year's big revelation, coming from his biographer, is that St. Martin had bad hair. His biographer goes out of his way actually to call it ugly hair, so bookmark that. We're getting back to it later. In the meantime I want to start in a place of gratitude.

I am so thankful for a series of talks that have been given the last month here in worship by lay leaders in our parish, starting with Al Good about a month ago and then Greg Cowhey did it at the eight o'clock service and Laura Sibson and Barbara Thomson and then Eugenie Dieck capped it off last week. These wonderful reflections on the meaning of St. Martins were a real gift to the community and to me because I could hear in them all the ways that God has gifted this community, and these talks were full of gratitude and they weren't ever boastful, they were never selling anything, they were never flattering us, they were just without ego and pure in their reflection of the goodness that God has given this parish.

And I was grateful and thought, yes this is true, this parish is centered on the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. And this parish is deeply prayerful. This is a praying community that knows the language of prayer both communally and individually and holds each other in prayer, and the world as well. There's a gift of prayerfulness here. And this community is worshipful, this community knows how to gather around the presence of the living Christ in sacrament and word and celebrate that gift of risen life. And this community is so eager to serve in loving care for each other and loving care for this community. This community understands the call to serve in the name of God, and so with gratitude I lift all those things up. We are a gifted community, gifted by God, and we say thanks be to God for it, and I want to say thanks be to God for Martin, our patron, who I truly believe has formed this community to have the character and soul that we have.

If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will be able to tell you the story of St. Martin so beautifully depicted in the window in the back of the church. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will probably do a pretty good job repeating Matthew 25 for you because we hear it at least once a year, and I believe these stories have deeply woven themselves into the character of the community. What's always interesting about a story that becomes well known is we can fall into the risk of it becoming commonplace; a moral platitude. We could take Matthew 25 that we read today and just turn it into a summary, “Jesus said be nice to the poor,” when there is so much more revealed in that story; when there are so many more layers of what God is doing with us and for us in that story.

It opened our eyes. Indeed at bible study this week one of our members opened my eyes to something I had never noticed about Matthew 25. I got to enjoy that surprise of God's address which is even in the story, right? People are shocked that they were serving Christ the whole time. And what surprised me, and this was Steve Barr, a member of the parish, he pointed out: “Jarrett, there are three groups of people in this passage. There are three groups of people.” And I was kind of fixated on two, because the goats and the sheep get my attention and they're meant to be anxiety producing, right? Am I a sheep? Am I a goat? Am I something in between? So I thought of just two groups in this passage but no, there's three groups in this passage, and one is the group that is already members of God's family. In that last line, “the members of God's family.”

Who are the members of God's family? Who forms the third group? They are the thirsty, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. They are already God's people. They are already part of God's family, and now knowing this we see a deeper challenge in the story, the challenge not just to serve but to recognize the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner as part of God's family, as our sisters and brothers in Christ.

They are kin-folk to us. They are our kin and this to me is part of the incredible scandal of this passage in the ancient world and now, because in the ancient world as now we really do walk through life, and I can name myself in this comment, thinking that our family is our primary unit of obligation and believing that our biological natal family is our primary obligation. We shape our resources and our world around that idea and it can become a way to rationalize accumulation beyond what we need, because we always say we're doing it for our families. And it can rationalize misappropriation of resources socially and structurally because we can invest vast sums of money in the education of our children while ignoring to the point of desperation the education of other children.

And underneath that is some notion that they are not part of our family, that we have a different set of obligations to them, and when we read this passage from Jesus we're challenged. We owe to our family what is owed to all families and we are together in the family of God. It's so challenging and stressful to read this passage about sheep and goats. Who is in my family? And Jesus even raises the ante a little bit because it's not just Christians or Jews who've been called together, it's the nations.

There’s this notion in this passage that even the nations who haven't the benefit of a covenant with God or Isaiah, who don't know this tradition, they know you take care of the poor. And the implication is if they know this, you should know even more because you have the gospel and you have the covenants and you have the prophets.

So this story is pretty stress-inducing. It's a challenge, and when I feel challenged like that by scripture I know the story is telling me, “you have more conversion to do. Jarrett, you have more conversion of heart, mind, strength and spirit to do, because someday you will love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength but you're not there yet.” More conversion. And let’s bring St. Martin in again here (and we're about to get to the haircut...I'm almost there.)

We bring St. Martin in again because that cutting of his cloak that we all know so well (he cuts his cloak in half and he gives it to the beggar and the beggar appears to him as Christ) is a story of charity and it is also a story of conversion and it's just the first cut that Martin makes. It is just the first sacrifice that he makes. Everything else for Martin, including his hair, is going away. His toga, his uniform, the rest of his cloak, his horse, his sword, his armor, his social status are all going to be left behind and relinquished as he grows into his vocation in Christ.

Now, Romans were very sartorially inclined. They liked a good robe, they liked a good haircut, they liked to smell nice. Martin did none of those things. And I'm maybe sensitive to this part of the story because I am in a line of military officers in my family. If you know anything about the military you know there's haircuts, and so generations of Kerbel men never had hair that touched their ears, never had hair that touched their neck, never had hair that was over about an inch long, because that's part of military discipline.

And remember that Martin grew up in a military family. His dad was also a Roman soldier, so this cutting off of his hair, and I know this from personal experience, was political, was an assertion of a worldview, was symbolic of more than hair. Believe me, growing up in the 70s where my mom wanted to take me to the hair salon to have a nice long hair thing going, I know that hair is political.

Martin had ugly hair on purpose. Martin wore a goatskin tunic with a rough rope around it and no shoes, no big wide leather Roman belt, because he was setting himself apart for a life of conversion; a lifelong journey into conversion by identifying himself with the family of God, with the members of God's family. On the margin, in the rough, in the vulnerability he would struggle mightily and slowly, spiritually, experience the conversion that allowed God's light to shine through him without obstacle. He gained spiritual transparency through the discipline of a hermit living in isolation and struggle and boredom. He lived in a way that allowed space for his demons to come up. His ego, his malformed imagination, his passions and appetites, all the stuff that great spiritual masters like Anthony of Egypt struggled with in their hermitages, he too struggled.

I want to bring out for us today this part of the story a little more because I think Martin is offering us something we need to know. I think in this age of great social turmoil and unrest and discomfort we need to know about this gift of going inside. We need to know about this gift of spiritual struggle that clarifies the soul and that brings us into transparency with God, not just for ourselves but ultimately for the world. Because this is kind of part of the miracle of St. Martin, he’s one of these people who goes off as a hermit and keeps getting dragged back into public life because he was a leader.

But his transformation in the wilderness set him up to be a very different person in the world. His transformation in the wilderness set him up to speak a different language to a really rancorous, troubled world. Remember the time he was living in: the 4th century. What a time of social unrest. We have immigration and invasion, we have political regimes rising and falling. First we have Constantine who makes Orthodox Christianity the religion of the empire, then we have his son who inserts Aryanism in that place, then we have Julian the apostate who takes it back to polytheism. It's a roller coaster. It's lurching. But in that space was Martin who did something remarkable. Coming out of his hermitage he was able to welcome the heretics, advocate for them, bring them back into the fold and preach mercy, all while sharing the good news. He wasn't a persecuting person. At the same time he still reached out to the polytheists and welcomed them into the fold and shared with them the good news with gentleness. He walked across Europe to convert his mother.

Martin gives us this example of a soul that is so soaked in Jesus Christ that he finds the space of peace and compassion and mercy in a world gone rancorous and cantankerous. And so for me I hear Martin calling us not just to brave acts of sacrifice and charity but to brave acts of inner spiritual struggle, so that we continue as a church to become a different sort of people in the world, reflecting and mirroring this great patron saint of ours who shines so brightly with Jesus Christ. Amen.

Nov 07, 2021 |

Heaven All the Way to Heaven

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

Heaven All the Way to Heaven

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the All Saints Sunday, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27. Today's readings are:

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net:https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...
Heaven All the Way to Heaven
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, November 7 2021

The first things have passed away, Lord God. Help us to walk into the new thing that you are doing, as your saints. Amen.

Happy All Saints Day. It feels strange to have All Saints Day today when last Sunday was the eve of All Saints Day, on Halloween. There was this long stretchy middle because All Saints Day landed on a Monday and it gets moved to the following Sunday so that we can celebrate the feast of the church. So here we are.

As some of you know, last weekend I was away at a funeral in Ohio. My husband’s nephew died suddenly, tragically, at the age of 38. I’d known him since he was 5. The family is still trying to find its footing again, after what feels like an earthquake.

We got back last Sunday night as trick or treaters were making their way down our street. So for me it has felt like the Feast of All Saints all week long, as I’ve walked with the raw questions that fill the space left by a loss like this. So today’s a good day to face them head on.

On All Saints Day we as Church honor all the holy women and men of God who have died, the saints both known and unknown, especially those who led devout lives or were of heroic faith, and whom we count on being with God. Because I was raised a Catholic, I know this crowd pretty well.

When I was a little girl I loved to read the lives of the saints. On library day at St. Hilary School I would rush to the section of the library where they had the easy-reader books on the martyrs. I recall at least one tugging match with another kid over one of those books. Interesting that my behavior was far less than saintly when it came to getting my hands on those stories.

And oh what stories. I still remember the story of the first century martyr, this little boy who smuggled communion bread under his tunic to deliver it to Christians hiding in catacombs only to be discovered by his unbelieving friends and martyred right there on the street. And that resonated with me because that was not unlike the playground at St. Hilary’s School. There were also the gory pictures and the statuary, like St. Sebastian’s Church which was just down the street and they had a statue filled with arrows. And then there were those beautiful stories of the miracles, like the rose petals that fell from the sky at the death of young Therese of Lisieux, the little flower, the child of Jesus.

I’m not sure so much that it was the lives of the saints that really appealed to me as it was the deaths of the saints actually, when I think about it, because images of martyrdom were a very big part of my second-grade imagination of the saints, as were monastic tonsures and the habits of nuns. I can still see very vividly those water-colored portraits with the eyes sort of pointing towards heaven that were in my Picture Book of Saints, circa 1972. Perhaps some of you had one of those. It was yellow.

But All Saints Day isn’t just for the heroes. We roll in on this day as well All Souls Day, the Feast of the faithfully departed. We recall friends and loved ones who have died “in the faith.” Our nephew David will be in today’s necrology.

And this is where the celebration of the Feast of All Saints gets a bit tricker because the faith of our loved ones can be a very private thing, largely hidden from us, while the questions and doubts they had might actually walk with us, just as we walk with our own questions and our own doubts. We do not know what our beloved ones encounter at death, just as we don’t know what our death will bring. And so for me, the Feast of All Saints tends to be more about what I hope for or have faith in rather than what I’m absolutely certain of.

And that makes it a good day for me to be in Church. Because our worship reminds us of all we do know about God’s love as we have experienced it, its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and its welcome, its power to restore dignity and to fill people with life. We cry out to a God who is that love, and we want that love for those who have gone before us.

This is my leap of hope and faith and imagination when it comes to the Feast of All Saints and its questions – I believe that at death God makes the offer of eternal life abundantly clear, and that our choice to enter that life is no longer clouded by our moral failings, or our traumas, or our misunderstandings, or our limited human imagination. All those things are wiped away. But the choice remains, like a new covenant or a renewed vow.

Here’s the unspoken challenge then of the Feast of All Saints: why make the choice now? Why live as though we know what comes next, when we don’t fully, or we can’t really? To answer this question we, as church, turn again to what we know of God’s love as we’ve experienced it: its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and welcome, its power to restore dignity and its ability to fill people with life. We turn to a God who is that love, and we want that love in this life, for this world. And so we commit to living it as best we can, imperfectly, earnestly, in faith.

I think that is what the life of a saint looks like. Saints believe anyway – despite their doubts. They love anyway - despite the evil that tears things apart, that often tears them apart. And they reach for God anyway - despite all the limitations that make it hard to see God clearly. And God reaches back into that life with the will to be found.

"See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God; and they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away."

This from the author of Revelation, who is paraphrasing the prophets of old.

The story of the Raising of Lazarus that we heard today from John’s Gospel is a story of the passing of those first things. In the Gospel of John it’s the sign that the old way of death is gone. There is no waiting until the end of time when the dead shall be raised, which was a common idea in Israel. The time is now. The way is at hand.

And it’s interesting to me that Jesus stands on the threshold of this new age when death will be no more, and mourning and crying will be no more, when every tear will be wiped away, that Jesus stands on the edge of that new edge and he weeps for Lazarus who has died. I think this was the great consequence of God making the divine home among us – that God would feel what we feel: the loss, the catastrophe, the bewilderment experienced in the sluggish slowness of our time, even as God’s promise is poised to come rushing in in God’s time. God does not dismiss our misery because God knows how the story ends.

Jesus stands in the now and the not yet with Mary and Martha and their mourning friends, and he suffers with them in the loss of their brother. Because it is not really a comfort to say that eternal life is on the way – until it actually arrives. Meanwhile, Jesus lives the long moment of loss with them. He lives it with us. He is living it with my husband’s family in Ohio right now. And there is real comfort in that.

But John’s Gospel doesn’t stay there, it actually pauses there only briefly and then Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb and Lazarus comes forth. Alleluia! My favorite part of the story is when he emerges from the tomb all wrapped up in his burial clothes, and Jesus says to the shocked crowd of witnesses, “unbind him and let him go.”

Because that’s God’s call to us every-day saints - to unbind people from the stinking stuff that clings and inhibits and trips them up, to help them step into the new life that’s right at hand, like beautiful new clothes. Which makes the story sound a bit like Baptism, with its new garment, its cleansing waters and scented oil, its candle to light the way out of the tomb into light. And that’s why All Saints Day is traditionally a day for baptism. Not simply a day to recall those who have died, but to welcome new life as well. It is an Alpha and Omega sort of day.

The promise of the Feast of All Saints is that we need not wait for an old life to end and a new one to begin, even in the chaos of this current time.

It’s Heaven all the way to Heaven, writes Dorothy Day, my hero, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who I’m sure is in Heaven. She was paraphrasing Saint Catherine of Sienna, who reportedly said “All the way to Heaven is Heaven because Jesus is the way.”

And for now, on the Feast of All Saints, I will take their word for it. Amen.

Oct 31, 2021 |

Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic

| The Rev. Carol Duncan

Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic

Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26. Today's readings are:

Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Psalm 119:1-8
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp26_RCL.html
Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic

The Rev. Carol Duncan, Carol Duncan, 2021

Hear, O St. Martin’s: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

On this All Hallows Eve, Halloween, which is also Reformation Sunday, our lessons invite us to consider the core foundational texts of Judeo-Christian values. As your preacher for this awesome day, I will attempt to honor hallows, souls, Reformation and the essence of Judeo-Christian values.

To get started, let me just say the name of Martin Luther, and pay tribute to him as the progenitor of the Reformation. Now, about Halloween, I will say that at the LIFT service at 9:00 was splendid. We blessed the costumes children and adults worn to this service, and the children who wear them in all their spookiness. We prayed that trick-or-treaters’ joy serve as a sign to all who do not know Jesus that Jesus’ Love reigns over all things in heaven and on earth. Now let’s see what we can do about the core Judeo-Christian values.

Seriously, today’s texts are foundational, and we must treat them as Moses advised. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away. These brief texts are our touchstones, our guiding light to keep God at the center of all we do.

Our bit of Mark’s Gospel today is fascinating. You may recall that Jesus often intensely debated with Scribes and Pharisees who were the arbiters of Jewish law. In fact Jesus has just told them the parable of the wicked tenants, and pointing his finger, which sent the Scribes and Pharisees slinking away. Only the crowd wanted to experience Jesus’ healing presence.

But now another Scribe approaches who had heard the bitter interchanges. This scribe was intrigued by how Jesus handled and subdued his opponents. The atypical scribe asked the central question. “Of all the many obligations, which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus must have received those scribe’s words and him like a surprising friend in a dark place. The scribe listened reflectively to Jesus’ words and Jesus told him he was not far from the kingdom of God. In other words a “small s” saint for all hallows.

So what was Jesus’ response to that question, after which no other opponent dared to ask him any questions? As everyone accepted, then and now, Jesus first gave the true heart of all the Law: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

Jesus took this part of his answer almost, almost, straight from Moses’ lips as we heard today in Deuteronomy. Moses summary of the law was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This phrase is the Shema, words that every observant Jew recognizes then and now as the clarion call to faith. The Shema is a symbolic representation of total devotion to the study of Torah. Torah is for Jews what Jesus is for Christians, the ultimate expression of what humans can know about God.

Jesus agreed that the Shema is first, and yet he delivered an even larger truth by adding a single word - “with all your mind”. My favorite Episcopal bumper sticker is “Jesus died to take away your sins, not your mind.” That’s a good one right? I like that one. And thus Jesus obligingly anticipates a key concept of the reformation on Reformation Sunday. We now live by grace, and not works. We now live by grace and faith alone. Fulfilling legal obligations from any faith tradition is not enough to reach the kingdom of God.

Then Jesus changed the question by adding a second greatest commandment. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” His addition still affirms Torah law, but it emphasizes complexity. Jesus’ second greatest law comes from Leviticus, home to the majority of the 613 individual commands contained in Torah.

I have been accustomed to treating those 613 commands as barriers to the full-hearted love of Jesus. I felt confirmed in my skepticism when I discovered that this key commandment is only half the original Leviticus sentence. The whole sentence is “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Even worse, the very next sentence is “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials.” I bet everyone here is condemned by that one.

How did Jesus pick out that half sentence to be the second most important command? Only when I began to study for this sermon did I find out the rest of the story.

The neighbor command is in the middle of Leviticus 19, which deals with the holiness of God as the source and model for all human behavior. It explains how Jews shall do this in practical concrete terms. Holiness is found in neighborliness, specifically regard for the poor. Holiness involves leaving the edges of fields available for gleaning by the poor. No keeping wages back from laborers (no wage theft). No revealing the disabled. It covers refugees, saying “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” And it contains all kinds of practical details. “You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin.” Even if we don’t know what a hin is, we see that details down to the smallest measure are important in the eyes of God and in dealings with our neighbors. You can’t truly love God if you don’t behave with specific concrete acts of love toward your neighbor. All your neighbors.

I now believe that when Jesus picked out that half sentence, he was inferring all the rest of that holiness code of Leviticus. In the same way, when on the cross Jesus mourned “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”, he was inferring all the rest of Psalm 22. That’s the first sentence of Psalm 22 and he meant the whole thing. Jesus contained all scripture within himself, so he didn’t obliterate the practical concrete rulings of Torah, he fulfilled them.

So now I want to determine how in our day we can live whole-hearted, whole-minded love of God and love of neighbor. I think that we find good pointers here at St. Martin’s. For example, our refugee ministry cites that very verse of Leviticus I mentioned earlier. They are finding practical ways to relieve the suffering of Afghan refugees, as they did earlier for Syrian refugees. And I commend Stephen Ministry to you. Stephen ministers spend hours in reflective prayerful listening to care receivers who have suffered a loss or a death in their family or an illness, or some long-term trouble that needs prayer more than treatment. And we have Women Connecting, another form of sacred listening. Nothing huge, just disciplined chosen neighborly service. Likewise with Men for Others. And I think Choir teaches a very detailed disciplined practice of ministry for the whole community. I know my soul is nourished by their trained voices. Also, trainings offered in Becoming Beloved Community provide another way to approach neighborliness. Faithful Jews in Jesus’ time wouldn’t understand what implicit bias is any more than we know what a hin is, but in order to love God and neighbor in our culture, we need to learn about it. Altar Guild is probably the closest to the details of living found in Leviticus. They take such good care back there (in the sacristy). We mostly don’t see its work but the smooth running services ease our hearts into contemplating the holy.

There are many more examples I could name. Hold up your own participation in any ministry to check if it does indeed help you abide by love of God and love of neighbor. I suspect that it does.

So, happy Halloween, happy Reformation Sunday, happy All Souls day, and peace on your path of salvation.

Amen.

Oct 24, 2021 |

The Little Book of Consolation

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

The Little Book of Consolation

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25. Today's readings are:

Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
Let us pray.

The Book of Jeremiah was written for Israel in exile. And much of the prophet Jeremiah’s work is getting Israel to understand how failure to uphold the covenant with God got them into the mess they were in, and how that same covenant would get them out.

A commentary I was reading the other day described the Book of Jeremiah as “a river of accusation, destruction, and weeping,” but for the exile, also “a book of life.” And tucked right in the middle of the Book of Jeremiah is what’s called the Little Book of Consolation. That’s what today’s first reading is, a page of the Little Book of Consolation.

In the middle of the story and the experience of captivity there is this promise, this vision of restoration. Imagine how that impossible, crazy vision would have sounded to someone who had been forced from their home and impressed into servitude elsewhere or scattered in diaspora.

“See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those with labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them. I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.”

The Little Book of Consolation is a description of profound hope. Future generations will make it home one day, much the way that God led Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. But it’s more than saying that everything’s going to go back to the way it was, or that God will help us out like God helped us out before. It provides a glimpse not of Israel’s vision for itself, but of God’s vision, of God’s hope for the covenant relationship in full blossom. To be consoled by these words is to be consoled by a loyalty to God’s agenda. To be in covenant with God is to partner with God in the divine vision.

I think it that this was the vision that Bartimaeus, begging, blind along the road in Jericho was longing for in Mark’s gospel. But how could he know exactly the shape that healing would take when he told Jesus “I want to see again”? He was no man born blind. And there he was in the messy middle, somewhere between I saw once and I see now. And he cried out for consolation “Son of David, have pity on me.” How did he know it was the Son of David, the messiah walking by when people told him that Jesus was near?

Bartimaeus knew because Bartimaeus could see very clearly through his eyes of faith. Some commentators call this story an “acted parable” because with the healing of the man’s blindness, Jesus was acting out a lesson on faith and discipleship that he had been teaching his followers for a few chapters now. In fact Mark begins this long lesson on discipleship, which we’ve been studying for several weeks now, with the healing of another blind man. That man is brought to Jesus, and it takes a couple tries for Jesus to get the healing to take. Then he sends that man home to keep the secret.

It’s not unlike the learning process that the followers of Jesus experience as Jesus tries to get his disciples to see through his eyes, to live into his vision of what discipleship should be. They must love fully, they must walk empty, they must include the lowly, their faith must be child-like, they must be lower than least, they must serve, even lay down their lives. And woven through these lessons is the hardest one of all: that the son of man must be betrayed and suffer and die, and that in order for God’s eternal life to be made manifest, Jesus’ followers must first follow him to that cross.

And throughout these lessons, the disciples strain to see. Their faith is not ready for public display. The faith of the people that Jesus introduces them to along the way far surpasses the faith of his disciples. Over and over again Jesus is reading to them from the Little Book of Consolation and they don’t recognize it. But Bartimaeus, one of the little ones, one of the blind and the lame does. He asks to see again, but Jesus does not restore him to whatever status he had before he lost his sight and was reduced to begging along the hillside. Upon his healing, Bartimaeus becomes a follower of Jesus, and he follows Jesus into the last week of Jesus’ life.

This is what Bartimaeus will see with his new eyes: he will see the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He will see Jesus mystify the crowds and offend the local authorities. He will see Jesus betrayed and tortured and executed. And if he can stand all of that, he will see Jesus risen. His sight is not restored to behold the old things as they were, but to see the new things as they are revealed. And some of that is not pretty to look at.

As a faith community, our own moment, our messy middle, has some small similarity to our scriptures today. The pandemic scattered us. It isolated us. It kept us away, and the return has been slow and hard going and ongoing. It’s not done yet. We are not as we were 18 months ago. Some are arriving with babies in arms, where there were no babies before. Families have appeared under the 9 a.m. worship tent, where there was no tent before. Some people have beards now. Some of us are silver now. It is still difficult to recognize one another under the masks from the nose up. And there are new faces that we are welcoming – faces we have yet to see all of.

It is a thrill to see the seats filled again. It is a heartbreak to know that there are some who will not fill their seats again. And I think all of us are straining to see what will happen next, what will become of us, what is God’s vision for this time.

There is a book of consolation here. There is an acted parable at play in the messy middle that we occupy. It has to do with what God sees in us and what God is making happen in us right now: God’s vision, God’s big picture. And we can’t see it distinctly, but can glimpse it in the longing of our hearts. We can recognize it in the inklings of compassion and mercy that we witness. We can even detect it working at the edges of the ugliness that we are witnessing right now – making visible injustices that have always been there, but that many of us are seeing for the first time or with a new resolve to not look away.

The little book of consolation before us is a story about making a way where there was no way. Our invitation is to live into that way. How will we assist God in helping people negotiate that way and their arrival? Who is on the road with us? How far are we willing to go to find them, to invite them, to tell them of the love of Jesus that we have witnessed? What kind of place are we preparing for them?

The acted parable before us is a lived story about being made to see what God is doing, and to trust in what we can’t see of God’s plan. What are we seeing for the first time as we open our eyes again? Who is crying out for God’s mercy, and who is trying to hush them up? And what are we to do about it?

Sunday after Sunday we are invited to see ourselves in the stories of faith that we hear proclaimed, and the rest of the week we are asked to make those stories visible to the wider world. We are asked to make our lives a page in someone’s little book of consolation. We are asked to allow Jesus to use our vulnerable selves as an acted parable to show others the way to the kingdom. We are asked to be ready when the message comes: Take Heart. Get up. He is calling you!

Amen.

Oct 17, 2021 |

The Corrections

| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

The Corrections

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24. Today's readings are:

Isaiah 53:4-12
Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...

The Corrections

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, October 17, 2021

Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that through your son Jesus Christ you've removed all the obstacles that separate us from your love and your redeeming life. Lord God help us to receive that gift and live with our hearts toward you in all we do. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

So I’ve had some feedback that I might be a little hard to hear during my sermon because of the mask in the microphone, so I don't know how you all feel about me doing this a little bit (lowers mask). Is that better? Thank you for taking this risk with me. It's interesting to take the mask off at the beginning of the sermon because that's where I want to begin. This has been my trusty mask for 19 months now and I think I'll feel a little naked when I don't have it. I will feel grateful for it but I probably won't miss it.

It's been a learning experience during Covid. I've never lived through a time in my life where I was part of so much interpersonal policing. Interpersonal policing just between people in the community here at the church, out at the Acme, at the 7-eleven... Never have I been on such high alert constantly and for so long, keeping one eye peeled for the person whose mask was under their nose or under their chin or not there at all and making sure I was really being careful about my six feet of distance. I'm sure I've been scolded in public. You may have been scolded in public for behavior: “put that mask on”, “put it on right”, “stand a little farther away please”. Never before have I lived in this atmosphere of so much mutual correction - let's put it that way - and I really am very curious what it's going to mean for us long term, And not just the masks and the good hygiene, I really appreciate all that mutual correction. For me it's a sign of good community.

There's also another extension of that that's also good, which is we are living through a time of such incredible and rapid change and shifting among social norms. I can't keep up with the language half the time. I just turned 55 and it feels epical for me. I feel old. My staff is so much younger and they speak a different language and it's wonderful and I love it and it's very sensitive and thoughtful, but I'm tripping over myself. I don't know the right words, you know, gender, sexuality, identity, race, these things are evolving rapidly, and when things shift rapidly, it's once again this atmosphere of mutual correction. Mutual policing. And there's a good in that because it grows us if we have trust and love with each other.

It can also be somewhat embarrassing, so this morning using our texts I want to look at how our Lord Jesus Christ practiced what Thomas Aquinas would have referred to as “Fraternal Correction.” You could also call it Sororal Correction. (There you go, see, I'm learning. I’m not that old, you know!) I had some experiences of this at our golf outing on Tuesday, where I played with two older guys and at the end one of them turned to me and said, “you could really benefit from some golf lessons.” He was not wrong. The other said to me, “and maybe invest in some new clubs.” Cocktails started immediately so that was lovely.

Fraternal Correction: the loving practice of helping people with obstacles in their lives. When Thomas Aquinas talked about it as a virtue, as an obligation, as something we owe one another - a good we owe one another, an excellence - he meant it as a way of communities helping each other grow toward their ultimate goal, which is reunion with God. What are the obstacles that you notice in another person's lives and they might notice in your life, to help free up this path towards reunion with God? And how does one do that with love and trust and intentional relationships so the person is moved in a constructive path, because we know that that correction could also be destructive.

Well, we saw Jesus at work in this regard last week with the rich young man, and Barb did a fabulous sermon on that (if you didn't hear it please look it up online). Jesus delivers some really hard correction to this rich young man, but the text begins with this lovely phrase: “Jesus looked upon him and loved him.” Jesus looked upon him and loved him: a wonderful phrase to close your eyes and feel Jesus saying that to you, or feel Jesus looking upon you that way. So Jesus knew that to deliver powerful correction you must love. Surround that person with the secure knowledge that they are loved, that they are of infinite value to you, that you will not let them go.

And then he did deliver the tough love, the harder news where he said, “you have an obstacle in your life and your path back to God, and that obstacle is your great wealth and your attachment to it. Not just an attachment to things, but an attachment of identity: this wealth is who you are, this is how you think you are favored by God. This wealth, this is how you prove your worth, your value, your deserving. So that whole complex of attachment is holding you back on this progress you do yearn for.”

We don't know what happens next but we know that Jesus found the key obstacle and left the person to wrestle it as they may. Even more than that - and I think this is key - because remember that that passage ends with that phrase “nothing is impossible with God.” I think what Jesus does in alerting the rich young man to this obstacle is brings that young man to the place that is impossible for him, and when we go to that place and that obstacle that's impossible for us, we have only one move: surrender. Surrender to God, to let God do the work that we can't do by our own willpower, to let God work in us what we cannot work in ourselves by whatever system or plan or good self-help book we might read. Take the person to that place that's impossible and we can surrender to God's help.

I see another version of that again in our gospel for today with good old James and John, another wonderfully misguided pair of disciples who give hope to all of us. Up they go to Jesus, and it's really funny, in the Gospel of Matthew they send their mother to ask the same question, so you know they're ashamed on some level. But what's going on here? They're misguided. They're still misunderstanding Jesus even though he's told them otherwise twice already. They're misunderstanding that Jesus is going to be a messianic king, he's going to sit on a throne and rule a restored Israel, so they want to be at his right and his left positions of authority. Part of the team. You know, interpreting it generously, they wanted to be helpful. Interpreting it less so they were maybe a little arrogant, climbing, achieving. And they're mistaken.

So how is Jesus going to take this moment that could be very awkward and destructive and turn it into peer-to-peer correction? Jesus does this fascinating thing where they have asked to be with him in his glory and Jesus knows that his glory is going to be a cross. He knows as we know that James and John aren't going to make it to his right and left hand in that glory. We know he'll be flanked by thieves. So Jesus knows and we know that they're asking something that they're not able to do even though they say they are. They're at their impossible point, they're at their limit. And so Jesus subtly refrains the discussion, the dialogue.

Notice how he switches from kingly language to the language of worship, to the language of liturgy, the language of baptism and communion. So he is able in this reframing to tell them that yes, they will be able to join him in the remembrance of his glory, in the community baptized by the Holy Spirit and the community joined in Christ around the eucharistic table, after Jesus does the work that's unique to him; the death and resurrection that takes away all the obstacles and by grace makes us able to do what was formerly impossible for us. So Jesus finds a way to coach them into a future of inclusion that they can't even begin to imagine, and I kind of personally imagine James and John at the gathering of the early church going, “oh yeah, now I get it. Thank you. Thank you for this.”

This is the Jesus we have who reframes and reaches us and finds ways to get past our obstacles like our ambition and our shame and our guilt and our fear by reframing and loving and telling the truth. I for one have been so grateful in my life for all those mentors who told me the truth. I hated it at the time but they helped me grow, and how lucky are we to celebrate with the author of Hebrews that we have this great high priest. We have this great intercessor who is available to us who we can bring our burdens and blockages to and say, “clear a way for us.”

That's what a high priest does. When we're stuck with our obstacles, when we're stuck with our blockages in our impossible places, those parts of our souls, those besetting sins and habitual vices and patterns of behavior that we have worked for decades to overcome and to get ourselves free of and we just cannot, that's when you go to your great high priest and say, “I need help. I need your help to get past what is impossible for me. I need your grace as one who deals gently,” as Hebrews says, “who knows our weakness” as Hebrews says, “who has suffered with us and for us,” as Hebrews says. “I need your great embrace of my humanity to set me free from what plagues me, because that is what you do as my great high priest. With love and truth and reframing and inclusion you work out a salvation for me that is impossible by my own hands.” And so we celebrate and are grateful. Amen.

Oct 10, 2021 |

The Grace to be Last

| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger

The Grace to be Last

Sermon by the Rev. Barbara Ballenger on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23. Today's readings are:

Amos 5:6-7,10-15
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...

The Grace To Be Last

The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, October 10, 2021

Let us Pray.

Lord God it is impossible on our own. It is possible with you. Help us to tell the difference. Amen.

(Sung) So low can’t get under it, so high can’t get over it, so wide can’t get around it, gotta get through that door.

I’ve done a good deal of church-based work trips in my day. You know the kind where you move the lawns of the elderly or fix the houses that have been destroyed in disasters. How many of you have been on that kind of a work trip, maybe many times? And how many of you when you’ve been on those work trips have heard somebody, maybe a fellow helper somewhere along the way, say, “that trip made me realize how much I truly have. I’m so grateful for what I have as a result of that trip.” Does that sound familiar? I’ve heard it every time, every single time. And sometimes it’s me that’s saying it or thinking it. The shorthand, or maybe the paraphrase of that sentence, is “There for the Grace of God go I.”

And that’s not to say that that feeling of gratitude isn’t real or that that thanksgiving isn’t an actual prayer, it’s just to say that those things might not be blessings. They might not be rewards. This is the harsh truth that our young man learns today in the Gospel of Mark. It’s a harsh truth for all of us who can identify with that young man – who have wealth and privilege and opportunity. In short, it’s the harsh truth of all who are formed to be first.
The rest of this sermon is directed at those of us who have been formed to be first, as this young man was. If you do not find yourself in that category, you are still free to listen in.

Now this young man was not a bad person. He’s not the villain of the story. He’s actually kind of sweet, although maybe a little naïve. He’s devout. He is keeping those commandments and that is no small thing. He is righteous. His heart is in the right place. He knows that inheriting everlasting life, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, is a good thing to want. If we were describing him today, we might say he was a good person who believed in God and wanted to go to Heaven. But he didn’t take it for granted. He threw himself at the feet of Jesus, and asked this teacher who seemed to know a lot about it, if there was anything else he should do in order to be assured that he would be guaranteed God’s favor forever, eternal life.

I don’t think he quite realized who he was talking to. I don’t think he quite realized what he was asking. Because he was working under the assumptions that he had been formed in about what it means to be good in the eyes of God. Good fortune and wealth was a sign that you were doing things right by God. He had checked the boxes and he had the evidence. And that’s not a habit that is limited to First Century Christianity.

Still, for some reason this man wanted more assurance. I wonder if what Jesus had been teaching about the Kingdom of God had made this man feel just a little uneasy about his assumptions? The idea that God is King, and there being a future time when God would reign over all, was part of Israel’s understanding. That’s not new. The promise that the righteous would inherit God’s life was not new. But Jesus seemed to tell the story in a different way, as though the Kingdom of God was something that was unfolding right under people’s feet, as though it was something you had to seek, as though the way in might be different than what this man had assumed - as though maybe anybody could get in.

And so there he is kneeling in the dirt in front of Jesus, and Jesus looks at him, and he loves him. I’ve got to wonder if that divine gaze, that doubled-edged sword of love, wasn’t Jesus’ predominant answer to the man’s question. Before you do, you must be. You must be loved by God. You must let God love you. But the love of God is not passive. It behaves just like the Word of God that we heard about in that passage from Hebrews today. Indeed I think they are one and same:

“Living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before God no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare in the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

When Jesus is done looking at that man with love, Jesus knows exactly what this man is holding on to and exactly what he lacks. And he lacks nothing, meaning he lacks emptiness. He lacks spaciousness, room for the kingdom to enter in. What he has is keeping him from what God has for him. I wonder if this isn’t Mark’s kind of wonky version of the beatitudes. You know, “blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn.” Mark doesn’t have that list of the Blessed the way Matthew does, and Luke, in those gospels. But I think there are those ingredients there. This young man see himself as richly blessed. He has many possessions. He uses the phrase, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is like saying, “what must I do to have the Kingdom of God? And who in those lists of the Blessed, who gets the Kingdom of God?” In the Gospel of Luke it’s the poor who receive the Kingdom of God, and in the Gospel of Mathew it’s is the poor in spirit who receive the Kingdom of God. In the Beatitudes the rich aren’t listed as being blessed. The first aren’t mentioned either.

So this passage from Mark should make us squirm right along with the rich young man – if we have many possessions, or if we are used to being among the first. Now a good test of whether you fit in this category is to just imagine Jesus talking to you in this way. Jesus looks at you with love and says “you lack one thing. Take everything you have and sell it and give your money to the poor and follow me.” Now just pay attention right now to the anxiety level you might be feeling at this moment. That’s the indicator. “That can’t be the requirement, can it, to get into the Kingdom of God?”

If we were poor, we wouldn’t have it to give away. If we were poor in spirit we wouldn’t blink if it were demanded of us. Jesus is working a real reversal here on this man’s assumptions, and our assumptions, about what everlasting life entails, and what it means to be blessed, and what God’s love for us might cost us.

I think for faithful people who have been formed to be among the first, eternal life feels sort of like what comes after a long and prosperous life. It’s our reward. Another possession to look forward to. Sort of like retirement. But here Jesus makes a very cutting point that that is not what it’s about. It’s not the possessions that get in the way. It’s not the wealth. It’s the love of it. It’s the hold it has. It’s the way that wealth forms a habit of being first.

The one thing the young man lacks, and that I know I lack – is the will to put that down, and to follow Jesus empty into the Kingdom of God. This man of privilege can’t buy his way in, he can’t enter on his own merit or his own righteousness, he can’t use his blessings to pry open the door. With God all things are possible, because that’s who lets us into the Kingdom. I don’t think the man realized he was kneeling right at the doorway of eternal life, right at the entrance of the Kingdom of God. “Why do you call me good”, asks Jesus, “if you don’t really know who and what I am?”

Over and over the message of the scriptures is that the righteous practices, the faithful acts, the following of the commandments are all activities that are meant to express the covenant of love with God, they are meant to shape our hearts into ones that deeply love God and neighbor more than ourselves. And if they don’t do that, they won’t help us enter the kingdom of God. And the offer of eternal life with such a God will shock us and disturb us and send us sad away.

But I don’t think the man’s sadness is the end of the story. I think we assume that this man rejected Jesus’ offer, and we assume that he didn’t make into the Kingdom. But I think because his heart so was troubled, and because Jesus’ word was working in him like a two-edged sword, I want to believe that he gave some thought to what it would take to give up all those things. I think it would have been very hard for him. But not impossible. And that’s my hope for us.

What must we do to inherit eternal life? We must die. We must die to an old way and start living into a new one, because right now the world we’ve made under the old way is not working. And somehow, those of us that have been formed to be first have got to figure out how to step to the back of the line. I see this in our racial repair work, in our economic justice work, in our work in transforming oppressive systems – those of us who have been formed to be first have long dominated the conversation on what the solutions should be, without really seeing ourselves as part of the problem. This Gospel says we’ve got to set that down. We’ve got to give that up. And frankly, I’m not sure how we do that. I’m not sure how we do that exactly in a system that has been so profoundly and thoroughly stacked to our advantage.

The reversal of power, privilege and resources required to truly right all that has been wronged over so long a time seems impossible. My prayer lately has sounded a bit like, “Well then who can be saved?” And I find myself clinging to Jesus’ answer. “For mortals like you Barb, it is impossible. But not for God.” Which puts us in the realm not of miracles, but of grace. That God-given, spirit driven power to do God’s will when all indications are that it’s not gonna work, that’s what we should be praying for. That’s what we should be asking for: the grace to be last.

That may be the one thing we lack – a firm grip on God’s grace. But we’re going to have to empty our hands in order to pick it up. And we’re going to have to clear a space if we’re going to have someone to keep it. In the end it may be the only possession we need, as we take our place at the back of the line that is following Jesus into the Kingdom of God.

(Sung) So low can’t get under it, so high can’t get over it, so wide can’t get around it, gotta get through that door.

Amen.

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Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic

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The Corrections

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