Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields
Oct 16, 2022 |
Persistent Wombats & Widows
| The Rev. Callie Swanlund
Persistent Wombats & Widows
Read the Rev. Callie Swanlund’s sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 24.
Today’s Readings:
Of course the story doesn't end here. After each snooze the wombat always awakes wanting more carrots. Finding that her way has been blocked, she demands attention in other ways: bangs up the trash can, pulls up the flower bed, sneaks into the grocery bag, anything for more carrots, until the night in which the wombat decides that carrots are insufficient. That night the wombat’s diary reads,
“Why would I want carrots when I feel like rolled oats? Demanded rolled oats instead. Humans failed to understand my simple request, chewed up one pair of boots, three cardboard boxes, 11 flower pots, and a garden chair until they got the message. Ate rolled oats, scratched, went to sleep.”
This sweet but annoying creature obtained what it wanted through a variety of methods, not least of which was persistence. Now, persistence is one of those traits that is typically thought of as a really positive thing; to call someone strong or resilient or persistent are all admirable descriptors. They're markers that someone has gone through something difficult or harrowing and has come out the other side. It's a way that we describe victims of abuse, or people with disabilities, or survivors of various forms of oppression. Now this past week has been filled with several national and global observances of persistence. First on Monday we had Indigenous People's Day, the same day was World Mental Health Day. And the very next day was National Coming Out Day. On each of these days our minds might have been drawn toward people who persist again and again. Here at St Martin's we have a special relationship with the Lakota people in South Dakota. For many years we held mission trips and later pilgrimages to the Pine Ridge reservation and to the nearby Black Hills. The Lakota are people who have seen their lands and homes and rights be taken away. They are people who have faced injustice time and time again, and we all know by now the stories of indigenous boarding schools and other atrocities that have impacted many if not all indigenous tribes. For indigenous peoples, preserving their land, language, and livelihood has always been difficult due to our insistence on colonization. Along with Indigenous People's Day, we observed World Mental Health Day, a day to promote access to mental health resources for all around the globe. It's a day in which people who have been challenged by any variety of mental illness are reminded that they're not alone. People who have undiagnosed mental health needs or people who have no support are given a chance to connect with others. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we've seen a sharp increase in those experiencing anxiety and/or depression, and yet even with its prevalence in most of our lives the stigma and discrimination remains.
Finally we had National Coming Out Day, a day in which we celebrated those LGBTQ people who have “come out”, revealing their identity in a way that isn't required of those who fit the gender or sexuality norms. On this day we acknowledged those who have openly shared their identity but also those who have had their identity shared without their consent or those who have not felt safe sharing their identity and so much more many LGBTQ people are still not celebrated or even supported and often lack affirming healthcare, faith communities, and other sources of strength. Of course, each of these groups are more than their stigma or oppression; each contains beauty, flourishing, and vibrancy, but all are subject to internal or external forces that don't want them to survive, let alone thrive. All of these observances mark people who have been required to persist and that's exactly what we encounter in today's Gospel. Today's Gospel is sometimes called “the Parable of the Persistent Widow,” the person who, like the wombat, does not give up but continues going back to the door again and again, seeking justice, seeking more. And it is the judge who doesn't even believe in her cause, but is tired of being pestered; it's this judge who finally gives in. He relents, because she persists.
Now the moral of all of these stories seems to be that the one experiencing the hardship needs to keep going. There's a fable about two frogs who jump into a jug of milk, and both try to swim to the surface, they try to climb the edges of the slippery jar to get out. One can't make it and eventually drowns while the other keeps swimming and keeps swimming and keeps swimming until it's no longer in a jug of milk but sitting atop a jar of newly churned butter.
Yes, this frog persisted, and we celebrate that persistence, but there's something missing here. Must it always be the one who is threatened or challenged or stigmatized who perseveres? There's a whole industry out there teaching us how we can do better, how we can be better. It's called the self-help industry, and it's just that: it's between us and our self. Now I'm not knocking, it I'll be the first to admit that changing the narrative is a powerful tool, that seeking flourishing can help us move beyond languishing, that tools of self-awareness and self-soothing are incredibly important. But, we weren't put on this Earth simply for self-help. We are a people created by God to be in community with one another to help each other.
The other name for this parable aside from “The Persistent Widow” is “The Unjust Judge,” so my question is this: should we continue praising the resilience, praising the persistence of those who are experiencing injustice and hardship, or should we look to the other character in the story? Should we look to the unjust judge and ask how that system can be changed?
If you've been the one who has had to persist, we applaud you and we're here cheering you on, but can we go beyond that? When the wombat wasn't feeling heard she knocked over the trash cans and dug up the flower beds and it got people's attention. When we witness Injustice how might we persist? How might we get loud? How might we speak truth to power?
God favors the downtrodden, the brokenhearted, the oppressed. God sits with the indigenous people who mourn. God sits with the person struggling to get up in the morning or contemplating suicide. God sits with the isolated queer teenager and and God sets bushes ablaze to get our attention. God sends messages, messengers to teach us the way of love. God calls on us to care for friend and stranger.
So may we persist, not just for ourselves, but for the mutual thriving of us all.
Amen.
Today’s Readings:
- Genesis 32:22-31
- Psalm 121
- 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
- Luke 18:1-8
Of course the story doesn't end here. After each snooze the wombat always awakes wanting more carrots. Finding that her way has been blocked, she demands attention in other ways: bangs up the trash can, pulls up the flower bed, sneaks into the grocery bag, anything for more carrots, until the night in which the wombat decides that carrots are insufficient. That night the wombat’s diary reads,
“Why would I want carrots when I feel like rolled oats? Demanded rolled oats instead. Humans failed to understand my simple request, chewed up one pair of boots, three cardboard boxes, 11 flower pots, and a garden chair until they got the message. Ate rolled oats, scratched, went to sleep.”
This sweet but annoying creature obtained what it wanted through a variety of methods, not least of which was persistence. Now, persistence is one of those traits that is typically thought of as a really positive thing; to call someone strong or resilient or persistent are all admirable descriptors. They're markers that someone has gone through something difficult or harrowing and has come out the other side. It's a way that we describe victims of abuse, or people with disabilities, or survivors of various forms of oppression. Now this past week has been filled with several national and global observances of persistence. First on Monday we had Indigenous People's Day, the same day was World Mental Health Day. And the very next day was National Coming Out Day. On each of these days our minds might have been drawn toward people who persist again and again. Here at St Martin's we have a special relationship with the Lakota people in South Dakota. For many years we held mission trips and later pilgrimages to the Pine Ridge reservation and to the nearby Black Hills. The Lakota are people who have seen their lands and homes and rights be taken away. They are people who have faced injustice time and time again, and we all know by now the stories of indigenous boarding schools and other atrocities that have impacted many if not all indigenous tribes. For indigenous peoples, preserving their land, language, and livelihood has always been difficult due to our insistence on colonization. Along with Indigenous People's Day, we observed World Mental Health Day, a day to promote access to mental health resources for all around the globe. It's a day in which people who have been challenged by any variety of mental illness are reminded that they're not alone. People who have undiagnosed mental health needs or people who have no support are given a chance to connect with others. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we've seen a sharp increase in those experiencing anxiety and/or depression, and yet even with its prevalence in most of our lives the stigma and discrimination remains.
Finally we had National Coming Out Day, a day in which we celebrated those LGBTQ people who have “come out”, revealing their identity in a way that isn't required of those who fit the gender or sexuality norms. On this day we acknowledged those who have openly shared their identity but also those who have had their identity shared without their consent or those who have not felt safe sharing their identity and so much more many LGBTQ people are still not celebrated or even supported and often lack affirming healthcare, faith communities, and other sources of strength. Of course, each of these groups are more than their stigma or oppression; each contains beauty, flourishing, and vibrancy, but all are subject to internal or external forces that don't want them to survive, let alone thrive. All of these observances mark people who have been required to persist and that's exactly what we encounter in today's Gospel. Today's Gospel is sometimes called “the Parable of the Persistent Widow,” the person who, like the wombat, does not give up but continues going back to the door again and again, seeking justice, seeking more. And it is the judge who doesn't even believe in her cause, but is tired of being pestered; it's this judge who finally gives in. He relents, because she persists.
Now the moral of all of these stories seems to be that the one experiencing the hardship needs to keep going. There's a fable about two frogs who jump into a jug of milk, and both try to swim to the surface, they try to climb the edges of the slippery jar to get out. One can't make it and eventually drowns while the other keeps swimming and keeps swimming and keeps swimming until it's no longer in a jug of milk but sitting atop a jar of newly churned butter.
Yes, this frog persisted, and we celebrate that persistence, but there's something missing here. Must it always be the one who is threatened or challenged or stigmatized who perseveres? There's a whole industry out there teaching us how we can do better, how we can be better. It's called the self-help industry, and it's just that: it's between us and our self. Now I'm not knocking, it I'll be the first to admit that changing the narrative is a powerful tool, that seeking flourishing can help us move beyond languishing, that tools of self-awareness and self-soothing are incredibly important. But, we weren't put on this Earth simply for self-help. We are a people created by God to be in community with one another to help each other.
The other name for this parable aside from “The Persistent Widow” is “The Unjust Judge,” so my question is this: should we continue praising the resilience, praising the persistence of those who are experiencing injustice and hardship, or should we look to the other character in the story? Should we look to the unjust judge and ask how that system can be changed?
If you've been the one who has had to persist, we applaud you and we're here cheering you on, but can we go beyond that? When the wombat wasn't feeling heard she knocked over the trash cans and dug up the flower beds and it got people's attention. When we witness Injustice how might we persist? How might we get loud? How might we speak truth to power?
God favors the downtrodden, the brokenhearted, the oppressed. God sits with the indigenous people who mourn. God sits with the person struggling to get up in the morning or contemplating suicide. God sits with the isolated queer teenager and and God sets bushes ablaze to get our attention. God sends messages, messengers to teach us the way of love. God calls on us to care for friend and stranger.
So may we persist, not just for ourselves, but for the mutual thriving of us all.
Amen.
Oct 09, 2022 |
Healing is Always God's Will
| The Rev. Callie Swanlund
Healing is Always God's Will
Read the Rev. Callie Swanlund’s sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 23.
Today’s Readings:
I think sometimes we're hesitant like that when we're asking God for something; we don't want to put God in a box or demand something of God. Sometimes we might not even know what it is we're asking for, so we don't make a direct request. But if we look at this morning's gospel, if we dig into it, we see these ten people suffering from a skin disease called leprosy and we know that they were not at all hesitant in their request. In fact they shouted out to Jesus “Have mercy on us, have mercy on us.”
They knew what they needed and they asked God for it. I think we often have a pretty narrow idea of what healing entails and I think in God's universe healing contains so much more than that. One of the most important pieces of healing is that of belonging. My friend Heather Kern Lanier is an author and a parent of a child with a chromosomal deletion. It's a rare syndrome and they call their child a ‘rare girl’, and she has helped me look at the healing miracles in the Gospels in a completely new light. Often we talk about a person having something restored to them: having sight restored to the blind, having hearing restored to the deaf. But the way that she's helped me see these Gospels is that what in fact is restored is that these people are restored to community.
That it's the others around them, who also are healed, who welcome them in because there are so many who feel ostracized and isolated by their condition. In fact these ten people in today's Gospel had a contagious skin disease. No one wanted to be anywhere near them and it seems that they even knew that because it says that they stayed their distance and they shouted out to Jesus. They were on the outskirts, they were not restored community, until Jesus healed them. Restoring them to belonging, restoring them to community: that is a part of all of the healing miracles, is having others around us see the fullness to which God created us. Scholar Francisco Garcia points out that there's a formula in many of these healing miracles. It is that the person is seen, heard, received, and sent. We see that again in today's Gospel Jesus peers at them, sees them from far off, and then He hears their request. He receives them, already children of God, and there's always an element where He sends them, like the man at the end where He says “Go, your faith has made you well.”
It is this type of healing that allows us to live out our baptismal covenant in which we say that we will respect the dignity of every human being.You see, healing is transformative, and it's not just for those who are healed. Healing is transformative for the healer, and healing is transformative to all those who bear witness to the healing.
Healing is never unidirectional; it requires participation. Healing requires something from us. If we look at some of our favorite miracles we start to notice that they all require some participation. They're never just Jesus off on his own doing something, especially something that's not been asked for. In the feeding of the multitudes Jesus doesn't just snap his fingers and there's a feast. Jesus hears that there's a need. His disciples say the people are getting hungry, they're getting restless, and so He sends them out to gather what is there. Those who provide their fish and their loaves of bread are participating in that. Those who pass it around are participating in that. We also have the time when Jesus's disciples are feeling really rough, they're trying to fish all day long, and there's nothing. There's nothing. And Jesus says to them cast your your nut on the other side of the boat, try over there. And what do they do? They try it, they say “I don't know, Jesus, we've been trying all morning and we've yielded nothing but okay, we'll give it a try,” and they pull up so many fish that it strains their net. They are participating in that miracle.
We have the woman who is in need of healing and all she does is touch the hem of Jesus's robe. That's how she seeks her healing, she seeks to be nearer. She seeks to be encompassed in community, she seeks belonging. And Jesus feels that, He says “I felt the power go out from me,” He felt that connection between them.
Now, this participation in one's healing even comes in the times in which Jesus raises one from the dead. When Jesus goes and sees Jairus's daughter this little girl laid out, presumed to be dead, He says “Talitha koum, little girl, get up.” When He sees Lazarus He says “Lazarus, come out” and they do. They get up, they come out, they are part of the healing.
All of this requires us to believe what our friend that one day in Eucharist said, to believe that healing is indeed God's will. Now healing doesn't always come in the form that we are looking for, it doesn't always come in the form that we are expecting. Healing and a cure are not the same thing. It might be in mind, it might be in body, it might be in spirit. But if we believe that healing is belonging, if we believe that we must participate in healing, and if we believe that healing is God's will, we are promised healing in our lives.
May we all seek healing, the kind that opens our hearts more widely; the kind that transcends our expectations; the kind that transforms us and sets us free. Amen.
Today’s Readings:
- 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
- Psalm 111
- 2 Timothy 2:8-15
- Luke 17:11-19
I think sometimes we're hesitant like that when we're asking God for something; we don't want to put God in a box or demand something of God. Sometimes we might not even know what it is we're asking for, so we don't make a direct request. But if we look at this morning's gospel, if we dig into it, we see these ten people suffering from a skin disease called leprosy and we know that they were not at all hesitant in their request. In fact they shouted out to Jesus “Have mercy on us, have mercy on us.”
They knew what they needed and they asked God for it. I think we often have a pretty narrow idea of what healing entails and I think in God's universe healing contains so much more than that. One of the most important pieces of healing is that of belonging. My friend Heather Kern Lanier is an author and a parent of a child with a chromosomal deletion. It's a rare syndrome and they call their child a ‘rare girl’, and she has helped me look at the healing miracles in the Gospels in a completely new light. Often we talk about a person having something restored to them: having sight restored to the blind, having hearing restored to the deaf. But the way that she's helped me see these Gospels is that what in fact is restored is that these people are restored to community.
That it's the others around them, who also are healed, who welcome them in because there are so many who feel ostracized and isolated by their condition. In fact these ten people in today's Gospel had a contagious skin disease. No one wanted to be anywhere near them and it seems that they even knew that because it says that they stayed their distance and they shouted out to Jesus. They were on the outskirts, they were not restored community, until Jesus healed them. Restoring them to belonging, restoring them to community: that is a part of all of the healing miracles, is having others around us see the fullness to which God created us. Scholar Francisco Garcia points out that there's a formula in many of these healing miracles. It is that the person is seen, heard, received, and sent. We see that again in today's Gospel Jesus peers at them, sees them from far off, and then He hears their request. He receives them, already children of God, and there's always an element where He sends them, like the man at the end where He says “Go, your faith has made you well.”
It is this type of healing that allows us to live out our baptismal covenant in which we say that we will respect the dignity of every human being.You see, healing is transformative, and it's not just for those who are healed. Healing is transformative for the healer, and healing is transformative to all those who bear witness to the healing.
Healing is never unidirectional; it requires participation. Healing requires something from us. If we look at some of our favorite miracles we start to notice that they all require some participation. They're never just Jesus off on his own doing something, especially something that's not been asked for. In the feeding of the multitudes Jesus doesn't just snap his fingers and there's a feast. Jesus hears that there's a need. His disciples say the people are getting hungry, they're getting restless, and so He sends them out to gather what is there. Those who provide their fish and their loaves of bread are participating in that. Those who pass it around are participating in that. We also have the time when Jesus's disciples are feeling really rough, they're trying to fish all day long, and there's nothing. There's nothing. And Jesus says to them cast your your nut on the other side of the boat, try over there. And what do they do? They try it, they say “I don't know, Jesus, we've been trying all morning and we've yielded nothing but okay, we'll give it a try,” and they pull up so many fish that it strains their net. They are participating in that miracle.
We have the woman who is in need of healing and all she does is touch the hem of Jesus's robe. That's how she seeks her healing, she seeks to be nearer. She seeks to be encompassed in community, she seeks belonging. And Jesus feels that, He says “I felt the power go out from me,” He felt that connection between them.
Now, this participation in one's healing even comes in the times in which Jesus raises one from the dead. When Jesus goes and sees Jairus's daughter this little girl laid out, presumed to be dead, He says “Talitha koum, little girl, get up.” When He sees Lazarus He says “Lazarus, come out” and they do. They get up, they come out, they are part of the healing.
All of this requires us to believe what our friend that one day in Eucharist said, to believe that healing is indeed God's will. Now healing doesn't always come in the form that we are looking for, it doesn't always come in the form that we are expecting. Healing and a cure are not the same thing. It might be in mind, it might be in body, it might be in spirit. But if we believe that healing is belonging, if we believe that we must participate in healing, and if we believe that healing is God's will, we are promised healing in our lives.
May we all seek healing, the kind that opens our hearts more widely; the kind that transcends our expectations; the kind that transforms us and sets us free. Amen.
Sep 18, 2022 |
Reckless Creativity
|
Reckless Creativity
The Rev. Laura Palmer
September 18, 2022
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to thee O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
Staying on the high road, let’s just say this is a text clergy find “challenging” or “demanding.” At issue is that the Jesus we encounter here is difficult to reconcile with the Jesus most of us think we know and worship. Can he really be lifting up the snake of a manger we meet in this parable?
One of the books clergy rely on for sermon preparation, Feasting on the Word, comes with these warnings:
behavior of the main character.
And one more:
You understand then why it’s easy to race ahead to the bumper sticker endings: “You can’t serve both God and wealth” Tuck that away for Stewardship Sunday which is coming up soon. “No slave can serve two masters.” Bet you’ve heard a dozen sermons on that. Check.
Some suggest that even Luke struggled with this text and added moralistic endings as exit ramps for perplexed preachers.
“I can’t believe that this story came from the lips of our Lord,” Saint Augustine said some 1600 centuries ago.
We talk about Jesus being God incarnate in human form, and then when he acts like one of us, seemingly inconsistent, out of character, maddeningly obtuse, we’re aghast.
Myself included which led me to fantasize: What if deadline pressure forced Luke to turn in a rough draft? Or maybe he forgot the part of the papyrus which made all of this hang together?
But here’s what helped shed light on the mystery of this text: What if Jesus in talking about “dishonesty” was actually doing so tongue-in-cheek? Stay with me here for a moment, because this makes the “dishonest manager” less like a snake and more like Robin Hood.
In the Roman Empire, there were two classes: the very rich and the very, very, poor. The master’s wealth depended on the exploitation of the illiterate peasants.
About to be fired for his ineptitude, the suddenly desperate manager does an about-face. No longer “strong enough to dig” and “too proud to beg” the manager decides to cancel a percentage of the debts the tenants owe to his boss. “I have decided what to do, he says, “so that when I am dismissed as manager people may welcome me into their homes.”
Some scholars suggest all the manager did was cancel the commission he would have earned on the monies due—an act of generosity since like his boss, his wealth was based on exploitation. But regardless of his motivations—his actions had a huge impact on the very poor who may have never before experienced boundless generosity which no doubt felt like grace.
In a stunning reversal of what we were expecting the master praises his manager’s shrewd behavior. He may not know the extent of what his manager did, but he cannot fail to realize that suddenly everyone he exploits to sustain his fortunes-- now holds him in higher regard.
Cancelling his commission is one of the theories about the manager’s behavior. But his motivation may have been pure selfishness. The manager decided he needed more goodwill than the master needed more wealth and did the right thing for the “wrong” reason. But no one liberated from debt or oppression cares much about who turns the key.
As Martin Luther once said, “Our God is the God who can ride the lame horse and carve the rotten wood.”
When a system is rotten to the core—as the Roman Empire was especially when compared to the Kingdom of God-- does it really matter if a lame horse is the one who rides into town?
We don’t know what happened to the manager in the rush of good will he felt from his new friends. Did his perspective shift when he began to stay in their houses or tents and look at life from the bottom up? Did he begin to experience the pure generosity of friendship and love that often flow from those who have the least to give? We have no idea.
We want parables to be teachable moments; “A grassroots lesson connecting the ordinariness of life with the extraordinary nature of God,” writes Helen Montgomery Devoise.
It’s worth nothing that in this gospel, Jesus is dealing with the world as it is. Corrupt, broken, messy. Continues Devoise:
Why would Jesus make an example for godly living so
unsavory? The parable presents as the model for our
faith someone whose life is the complete opposite of
everything Christ ever taught.
We all expect and hope that the sleazy manager will get his due, and it’s just the opposite. There is a reckless creativity, though to his approach and he acts.
Jesus says that “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.”
Debie Thomas in Journey with Jesus, poses this question:
Where and how might we be more shrewd, more clever, more creative, and more single-minded in our vocations as children of light? If the manager in Jesus’s story can hustle so hard for his own survival, how much more might we contend on behalf of a world God loves?
Today Jesus might look at the way the courts were stacked slowly and steadily over the years with politically minded judges more likely to make politics their priority over the Constitution and note that their shrewd manipulation paid off.
Imagine if those shrewd tactics were pursed be what Jesus called “the children of light?” who understood that the Judiciary is not meant to be an arm of the Executive Branch.
Jesus tells this parable to the Pharisees, the prominent religious leaders who were strict adherent to Jewish law and put that above all else. The Pharisees are no fans of Jesus expansive attitude towards divine judgment. Writes Rev. Dr. Alison Boden, whose husband was your last rector:
Jesus has been cooking the books of diving judgment, and the
folks who’ve staked their lives on following the law to the letter
do not appreciate having the rulebook revised. Christ is God’s
steward and he’s busy forgiving debts—canceling indebtedness.
His message to the religious leaders is that God is the eternal
creditor, not themselves. Jesus is canceling debts owed not to
them but to God, and God commends him for it.
Despite Luke’s best efforts to tack on some take home messages, this parable is finished not in the gospel, but in us. We have to decide what would happen in us if we gave this gospel a time share in our hearts? We have start somewhere and this messy parable is, in the end, is a fine place to start. As Debie Thomas points out:
Where there is unburdening, where there is liberation, where there is crazy, radical generosity — there is God. And where God is? Well, that's where we should seek to be as well. Amen
September 18, 2022
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to thee O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
Staying on the high road, let’s just say this is a text clergy find “challenging” or “demanding.” At issue is that the Jesus we encounter here is difficult to reconcile with the Jesus most of us think we know and worship. Can he really be lifting up the snake of a manger we meet in this parable?
One of the books clergy rely on for sermon preparation, Feasting on the Word, comes with these warnings:
- None of the parables of Jesus has baffled interpreters quite like the story
- The parable of the dishonest steward poses significant theology challenges,
behavior of the main character.
And one more:
- It is no exaggeration to say that the parable’s meaning has stumped even the best and most creative interpreters of Scripture.
You understand then why it’s easy to race ahead to the bumper sticker endings: “You can’t serve both God and wealth” Tuck that away for Stewardship Sunday which is coming up soon. “No slave can serve two masters.” Bet you’ve heard a dozen sermons on that. Check.
Some suggest that even Luke struggled with this text and added moralistic endings as exit ramps for perplexed preachers.
“I can’t believe that this story came from the lips of our Lord,” Saint Augustine said some 1600 centuries ago.
We talk about Jesus being God incarnate in human form, and then when he acts like one of us, seemingly inconsistent, out of character, maddeningly obtuse, we’re aghast.
Myself included which led me to fantasize: What if deadline pressure forced Luke to turn in a rough draft? Or maybe he forgot the part of the papyrus which made all of this hang together?
But here’s what helped shed light on the mystery of this text: What if Jesus in talking about “dishonesty” was actually doing so tongue-in-cheek? Stay with me here for a moment, because this makes the “dishonest manager” less like a snake and more like Robin Hood.
In the Roman Empire, there were two classes: the very rich and the very, very, poor. The master’s wealth depended on the exploitation of the illiterate peasants.
About to be fired for his ineptitude, the suddenly desperate manager does an about-face. No longer “strong enough to dig” and “too proud to beg” the manager decides to cancel a percentage of the debts the tenants owe to his boss. “I have decided what to do, he says, “so that when I am dismissed as manager people may welcome me into their homes.”
Some scholars suggest all the manager did was cancel the commission he would have earned on the monies due—an act of generosity since like his boss, his wealth was based on exploitation. But regardless of his motivations—his actions had a huge impact on the very poor who may have never before experienced boundless generosity which no doubt felt like grace.
In a stunning reversal of what we were expecting the master praises his manager’s shrewd behavior. He may not know the extent of what his manager did, but he cannot fail to realize that suddenly everyone he exploits to sustain his fortunes-- now holds him in higher regard.
Cancelling his commission is one of the theories about the manager’s behavior. But his motivation may have been pure selfishness. The manager decided he needed more goodwill than the master needed more wealth and did the right thing for the “wrong” reason. But no one liberated from debt or oppression cares much about who turns the key.
As Martin Luther once said, “Our God is the God who can ride the lame horse and carve the rotten wood.”
When a system is rotten to the core—as the Roman Empire was especially when compared to the Kingdom of God-- does it really matter if a lame horse is the one who rides into town?
We don’t know what happened to the manager in the rush of good will he felt from his new friends. Did his perspective shift when he began to stay in their houses or tents and look at life from the bottom up? Did he begin to experience the pure generosity of friendship and love that often flow from those who have the least to give? We have no idea.
We want parables to be teachable moments; “A grassroots lesson connecting the ordinariness of life with the extraordinary nature of God,” writes Helen Montgomery Devoise.
It’s worth nothing that in this gospel, Jesus is dealing with the world as it is. Corrupt, broken, messy. Continues Devoise:
Why would Jesus make an example for godly living so
unsavory? The parable presents as the model for our
faith someone whose life is the complete opposite of
everything Christ ever taught.
We all expect and hope that the sleazy manager will get his due, and it’s just the opposite. There is a reckless creativity, though to his approach and he acts.
Jesus says that “The children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.”
Debie Thomas in Journey with Jesus, poses this question:
Where and how might we be more shrewd, more clever, more creative, and more single-minded in our vocations as children of light? If the manager in Jesus’s story can hustle so hard for his own survival, how much more might we contend on behalf of a world God loves?
Today Jesus might look at the way the courts were stacked slowly and steadily over the years with politically minded judges more likely to make politics their priority over the Constitution and note that their shrewd manipulation paid off.
Imagine if those shrewd tactics were pursed be what Jesus called “the children of light?” who understood that the Judiciary is not meant to be an arm of the Executive Branch.
Jesus tells this parable to the Pharisees, the prominent religious leaders who were strict adherent to Jewish law and put that above all else. The Pharisees are no fans of Jesus expansive attitude towards divine judgment. Writes Rev. Dr. Alison Boden, whose husband was your last rector:
Jesus has been cooking the books of diving judgment, and the
folks who’ve staked their lives on following the law to the letter
do not appreciate having the rulebook revised. Christ is God’s
steward and he’s busy forgiving debts—canceling indebtedness.
His message to the religious leaders is that God is the eternal
creditor, not themselves. Jesus is canceling debts owed not to
them but to God, and God commends him for it.
Despite Luke’s best efforts to tack on some take home messages, this parable is finished not in the gospel, but in us. We have to decide what would happen in us if we gave this gospel a time share in our hearts? We have start somewhere and this messy parable is, in the end, is a fine place to start. As Debie Thomas points out:
Where there is unburdening, where there is liberation, where there is crazy, radical generosity — there is God. And where God is? Well, that's where we should seek to be as well. Amen
Aug 14, 2022 |
The Refiner's Fire
| The Rev. Laura Palmer
The Refiner's Fire
Read the Rev. Laura Palmer's sermon for the Tenth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 15.
Jeremiah 23:23-29
Psalm 82
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to thee, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
Now, the laugh’s on me because years ago, a priest friend would send me his sermon on Saturday when he was stuck and uninspired. Once my snarky self said, “Sometimes bad texts happen to good preachers.”
The better word would surely have been “challenging” but there are moments when I click on the text for the following Sunday and think, “Where are Mary and Martha when I need them!” Or last Sunday’s Jesus, the one who said “Do not worry, little flock…do not be afraid.”
We skip over the Jesus who talks about bringing fire and swords. The Jesus who talks about hate and division. And thank you very much, but when it comes to hate and division, we excel in doing that all by ourselves as any news cycle will prove.
So my challenge this week is clear. Is it possible to square this Jesus with the one we not only love and worship, but serve?
Let’s jump right into the fire: the one Jesus said he came to earth to bring and wished were already kindled. What happened to the babe in the manager? The Prince of Peace? Who shall reign forever and ever?
But imagine if Jesus were talking about a refining fire? Reverend Shanon Kershner from Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church poses this question (1):
What if this fire of which Jesus speaks is not a fire of destruction,
a fire signaling retribution and punishment?...What if it’s a fire of
purification, a fire of refinement?... As any metalsmith will tell you,
a refining fire burns with such intense heat that once the metal
is plunged into its core, any impurities come to the surface so they
can be scraped away.
Kershner also helped me understand why Jesus wished the fire had already started when she wrote:
I believe the fire Jesus wished had already been kindled was
a refining fire—one that would scrape away everything in us that
keeps God’s very presence from being reflected in our faces,
reflected in our lives.
This, she writes, challenges us to ask:
What obscures God’s presence from being seen in your face; what obscured God’s presence from being seen in the way you live your life? (2)
Questions worth asking every day of our lives. And think about it: had those flames been kindling, Jesus’ three years of ministry might have gone differently. The crowd that cheered him on Palm Sunday as he road into Jerusalem, expecting a triumphant king, might not have jeered him a week later shouting, “Crucify him,” “Crucify him!”
The kingdom of God Jesus offered was, and still is, a disruptive, radical vision of the world and we fool ourselves when we pretend it isn’t, concocting a cozy and comfy Christianity that divides us from ourselves by saying who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy of God’s love and who isn’t.
A few years ago – before the pandemic—I remember a married gay couple here who’ve now since moved out of state. One of the women told me she and her wife felt welcome felt at St. Martin’s right from the beginning.
“You know, we can’t just walk into any church.” Hear those words again. “We can’t just walk into any church.” And these women were privileged, professional, and white, a point I make only to emphasize how hard it is still for our LGBTQ siblings to find a place of belonging in the world. This was heightened for me this week by a survey from the Trevor Project that said 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, more than half of whom were transgender and non-binary.
2,000 years later, maybe kindling is no longer enough; maybe we need to be spreading lighter fluid over the flames of not only our faith, but our culture.
And many of you I am sure would agree with author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor, who said she wished Jesus disturbing words about creating division in families had never been written down or edited out of Luke’s gospel altogether. (3)
Think for a moment about the cost of discipleship which Jesus surely did because the future of God’s kingdom would depend on those who would carry it forward after his death. By the time Luke was written—several decades after the crucifixion—Christians – and their families-- were being persecuted by the Roman Empire:
As Barbara Brown Taylor points out:
If they found one believer in a household they would arrest
everyone, so it really was true that turning toward Jesus meant
turning away from your family, whether you wanted to or not.
once you made following your Jesus your first priority,
everything else fell by the wayside—not because God took it
away from you but because that is how the world works. As
long as the world opposes those who are set to transform,
transformers will pay a high price. (4)
This brings us to Easter Sunday, 1962, and Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a “transformer” who became a saint in the Episcopal Church in 1991.
Daniels, a Harvard undergraduate from New Hampshire grew up as an Episcopalian but had a crisis of faith when his dad—a physician-- died at an early age and his sister was suffering from a chronic illness at the same time.
But in Boston’s Church of the Advent, that Easter Sunday, something was kindled in Daniels; he heard a call to serve God and after graduation, entered the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.
Passionate about civil rights, Daniels went to Alabama in 1965 for the March on Selma. He’d planned to return to seminary, but Alabama changed him and he got permission to spend the rest of the semester there.
Daniels explained: “I had been blinded by what I saw in Alabama (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.” (5) One of his projects was to help integrate a local Episcopal Church.
In the summer of August, 1965, after a series of demonstrations, Daniels and three other civil rights workers, went to a rural store which local residents hated because it served non-whites.
When Ruby Sales—one of Daniels colleagues-- walked toward the store to buy a cold drink, a man with a shotgun took aim. Jonathan Daniels leaped in front of her and the bullet aimed at the 17 year-old black teenager exploded in Daniels’ chest.
Upon learning of Daniels’ murder, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, said that “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.” (6)
The murderer was subsequently acquitted in Alabama by an all-white jury.
Ruby Sales went to college and then graduated from the same Episcopal seminary Daniels attended. The ordination of women was still years away. Ruby Sales became a leading civil rights activist and a public theologian. Today she runs a non-profit in Georgia.
“You have to understand the significance of Jonathan’s witness,” Ruby Sales told the Washington Post on the 50th anniversary of his murder in 2015, “He walked away from the king’s table. He could have had any benefit he wanted because he was young, white, brilliant and male.” (7) Sales said she feared the racist hatred that killed Daniels was still alive and virulent, and that was seven years ago.
Jonathan Daniels chose, and accepted, the cost of discipleship. He dreamed of becoming a priest and was martyred instead, becoming one with “that great cloud of witnesses,” and a saint in our Church.
The word “martyr” is from the Greek word for “witness.”
Jonathan Daniels became a martyr, witnessing to his faith in Jesus with his life and death. The refiner’s fire kindled in him that Easter Sunday was transformative.
What would happen if we fanned those flames in ourselves? Burning through all that keeps us from seeing Jesus reflecting back when we hold a mirror up to our lives?
Let the life of Jonathan Daniels hand you a match and see what you can kindle anew in your life and witness to Christ.
Today is a very good place to start. This Sunday, August 14th, is the Feast Day of Jonathan Daniels. AMEN
1. Kershner, Shannon, “Conflict Avoidant,” Sermon preached at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, August 18th, 2019
2. Ibid.
6. Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Virginia Military Institute, (VMI Class of 1961), Civil Rights Hero,VMI, Retrieved February 1, 2015
7. Ruane, Michael E., “Black Civil Rights Activist Recalls White Ally Who Took A Shotgun Blast for Her,” ˆWashington Post, August 16, 2015
Jeremiah 23:23-29
Psalm 82
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to thee, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
Now, the laugh’s on me because years ago, a priest friend would send me his sermon on Saturday when he was stuck and uninspired. Once my snarky self said, “Sometimes bad texts happen to good preachers.”
The better word would surely have been “challenging” but there are moments when I click on the text for the following Sunday and think, “Where are Mary and Martha when I need them!” Or last Sunday’s Jesus, the one who said “Do not worry, little flock…do not be afraid.”
We skip over the Jesus who talks about bringing fire and swords. The Jesus who talks about hate and division. And thank you very much, but when it comes to hate and division, we excel in doing that all by ourselves as any news cycle will prove.
So my challenge this week is clear. Is it possible to square this Jesus with the one we not only love and worship, but serve?
Let’s jump right into the fire: the one Jesus said he came to earth to bring and wished were already kindled. What happened to the babe in the manager? The Prince of Peace? Who shall reign forever and ever?
But imagine if Jesus were talking about a refining fire? Reverend Shanon Kershner from Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church poses this question (1):
What if this fire of which Jesus speaks is not a fire of destruction,
a fire signaling retribution and punishment?...What if it’s a fire of
purification, a fire of refinement?... As any metalsmith will tell you,
a refining fire burns with such intense heat that once the metal
is plunged into its core, any impurities come to the surface so they
can be scraped away.
Kershner also helped me understand why Jesus wished the fire had already started when she wrote:
I believe the fire Jesus wished had already been kindled was
a refining fire—one that would scrape away everything in us that
keeps God’s very presence from being reflected in our faces,
reflected in our lives.
This, she writes, challenges us to ask:
What obscures God’s presence from being seen in your face; what obscured God’s presence from being seen in the way you live your life? (2)
Questions worth asking every day of our lives. And think about it: had those flames been kindling, Jesus’ three years of ministry might have gone differently. The crowd that cheered him on Palm Sunday as he road into Jerusalem, expecting a triumphant king, might not have jeered him a week later shouting, “Crucify him,” “Crucify him!”
The kingdom of God Jesus offered was, and still is, a disruptive, radical vision of the world and we fool ourselves when we pretend it isn’t, concocting a cozy and comfy Christianity that divides us from ourselves by saying who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy of God’s love and who isn’t.
A few years ago – before the pandemic—I remember a married gay couple here who’ve now since moved out of state. One of the women told me she and her wife felt welcome felt at St. Martin’s right from the beginning.
“You know, we can’t just walk into any church.” Hear those words again. “We can’t just walk into any church.” And these women were privileged, professional, and white, a point I make only to emphasize how hard it is still for our LGBTQ siblings to find a place of belonging in the world. This was heightened for me this week by a survey from the Trevor Project that said 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, more than half of whom were transgender and non-binary.
2,000 years later, maybe kindling is no longer enough; maybe we need to be spreading lighter fluid over the flames of not only our faith, but our culture.
And many of you I am sure would agree with author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor, who said she wished Jesus disturbing words about creating division in families had never been written down or edited out of Luke’s gospel altogether. (3)
Think for a moment about the cost of discipleship which Jesus surely did because the future of God’s kingdom would depend on those who would carry it forward after his death. By the time Luke was written—several decades after the crucifixion—Christians – and their families-- were being persecuted by the Roman Empire:
As Barbara Brown Taylor points out:
If they found one believer in a household they would arrest
everyone, so it really was true that turning toward Jesus meant
turning away from your family, whether you wanted to or not.
once you made following your Jesus your first priority,
everything else fell by the wayside—not because God took it
away from you but because that is how the world works. As
long as the world opposes those who are set to transform,
transformers will pay a high price. (4)
This brings us to Easter Sunday, 1962, and Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a “transformer” who became a saint in the Episcopal Church in 1991.
Daniels, a Harvard undergraduate from New Hampshire grew up as an Episcopalian but had a crisis of faith when his dad—a physician-- died at an early age and his sister was suffering from a chronic illness at the same time.
But in Boston’s Church of the Advent, that Easter Sunday, something was kindled in Daniels; he heard a call to serve God and after graduation, entered the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge.
Passionate about civil rights, Daniels went to Alabama in 1965 for the March on Selma. He’d planned to return to seminary, but Alabama changed him and he got permission to spend the rest of the semester there.
Daniels explained: “I had been blinded by what I saw in Alabama (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.” (5) One of his projects was to help integrate a local Episcopal Church.
In the summer of August, 1965, after a series of demonstrations, Daniels and three other civil rights workers, went to a rural store which local residents hated because it served non-whites.
When Ruby Sales—one of Daniels colleagues-- walked toward the store to buy a cold drink, a man with a shotgun took aim. Jonathan Daniels leaped in front of her and the bullet aimed at the 17 year-old black teenager exploded in Daniels’ chest.
Upon learning of Daniels’ murder, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, said that “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.” (6)
The murderer was subsequently acquitted in Alabama by an all-white jury.
Ruby Sales went to college and then graduated from the same Episcopal seminary Daniels attended. The ordination of women was still years away. Ruby Sales became a leading civil rights activist and a public theologian. Today she runs a non-profit in Georgia.
“You have to understand the significance of Jonathan’s witness,” Ruby Sales told the Washington Post on the 50th anniversary of his murder in 2015, “He walked away from the king’s table. He could have had any benefit he wanted because he was young, white, brilliant and male.” (7) Sales said she feared the racist hatred that killed Daniels was still alive and virulent, and that was seven years ago.
Jonathan Daniels chose, and accepted, the cost of discipleship. He dreamed of becoming a priest and was martyred instead, becoming one with “that great cloud of witnesses,” and a saint in our Church.
The word “martyr” is from the Greek word for “witness.”
Jonathan Daniels became a martyr, witnessing to his faith in Jesus with his life and death. The refiner’s fire kindled in him that Easter Sunday was transformative.
What would happen if we fanned those flames in ourselves? Burning through all that keeps us from seeing Jesus reflecting back when we hold a mirror up to our lives?
Let the life of Jonathan Daniels hand you a match and see what you can kindle anew in your life and witness to Christ.
Today is a very good place to start. This Sunday, August 14th, is the Feast Day of Jonathan Daniels. AMEN
1. Kershner, Shannon, “Conflict Avoidant,” Sermon preached at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, August 18th, 2019
2. Ibid.
3. Taylor, Barbara Brown, “Family Values, Gospel Medicine, pp. 14-15
4. Taylor, Barbara Brown, “High-Priced Discipleship,” Bread of Angels, pp. 48-49
5. Schjonberg, Joan, Episcopal News Service, “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years After His Martyrdom,” August 13th, 20156. Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Virginia Military Institute, (VMI Class of 1961), Civil Rights Hero,VMI, Retrieved February 1, 2015
7. Ruane, Michael E., “Black Civil Rights Activist Recalls White Ally Who Took A Shotgun Blast for Her,” ˆWashington Post, August 16, 2015
Aug 07, 2022 |
A Place Beyond Imagining
| The Rev. Laura Palmer
A Place Beyond Imagining
Read the Rev. Laura Palmer's sermon for the Ninth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 14.
Today's readings are:
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. AMEN.
It’s a very short distance from the third pew over there on the right-- where I always sit-- to this pulpit but I traveled a very, very, long way to arrive at this moment. It’s astonishing to be here. My heart is filled with gratitude and a quiet joy
When gratitude and joy are combined, it’s both powerful and yet also humbling. For me it’s what can happen in embracing an unexpected life. Faith was involved, to be sure, although I wasn’t calling it that per se. I was calling it “trust’ and when I wanted to change my life I began praying my dangerous prayer: “Let thy will be my will,” Sunday after Sunday at the Eucharist.
I trusted in God to lead me which is at the heart of faith when I was reminded of again when I read the exquisite words from Hebrews: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
People mistakenly assume that I’m courageous but I’m not. I’m very curious though and good at walking through doors when they open. And somehow, the next right thing appears on the wings of the Holy Spirit.
I do try to plan—I was going to go to law school and get Black Panthers out of jail—but I went to Vietnam instead with a pediatrician I met hitchhiking illegally on an interstate -- which led to a long career as an author and journalist in television news.
But there came a time when I knew there were no more jobs in TV that appealed to me anymore. I wanted the remaining years of my professional career to be in service to God out of the profound gratitude I had for the life I’d lived. Not that it had been easy. There were crucifixions along the way but somehow, I kept making it to Easter. I had no idea what to hope for, but did, and do, have faith in things unseen.
So I began praying my dangerous prayer at the communion rail – all six words of it with no idea of what was coming next. “Let thy will be my will.”
If someone had asked me -- and no one really did—I’d probably have said I might end up doing non-profit work in New York City where I lived.
The thought of going to graduate school with money I didn’t have for a degree that led nowhere and that I’d end up working in Philadelphia, a city I often flew through on Amtrak en route to DC, was beyond my power of imagining.
I should also add that by the time I graduated from Union Theological Seminary with an M.Div. in Psychiatry and Religion, I was sure I would never be ordained. Full stop. Never. I’d hear other students say things like “I’ve known I’ve had a call on my head since I was four,” and I’d wince. That wasn’t me. Another time someone said “I had a dream in which the Holy Spirit who showed me I’d be leading people to Jesus.” Good for you, I thought. But that’s not me.
And yet God led me to a place beyond imagining, one where the moment I arrived, I knew I belonged. And you, the loving people of St. Martin’s, and your rector, Jarrett Kerbel, and a parish committee, listened and supported me as I quietly began to respond to what I realize now was a persistent whisper from God. It was long, difficult, and took years. The waiting was at times, endless. Start to finish – what began in New York end nine years later here at St. Martin’s when I was ordained on Dec. 13th, 2019. And even when I was ordained, I never imagined preaching here. I was the oncology chaplain at CHOP, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. So once again this morning, I find myself in a place beyond imagining, where gratitude and joy collide.
God’s will for my life was far greater than my own. A way was made out of no way that I could see. It’s like the passage from Genesis this morning when God told Abraham to look at the heavens and imagine his descendants being as infinite as the panoply of stars flung across the navy night sky. Abraham must have been incredulous. He was too old and for starters, his wife, was barren, yet God let him to a place beyond imagining.
And, as author and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor points out,
"For Protestants in particular, his story is key. Abraham did not lift a finger to be saved. All he did was believe God’s promise and that was enough. He was saved by faith alone." (1)
Faith. Trust. The conviction of things not seen. We stare through the glass of our lives so darkly and often for so long it is hard to imagine that there might be anything more.
It can be easy to forget so that faith should be vibrant and alive. It’s not to be confused with theology, as the noted pastor Frederick Buechner points out:
"Faith is different from theology because theology is reasoned, systematic, and orderly, whereas faith is disorderly intermittent and full of surprises…Faith is homesickness, faith is a lump in the throat faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting, waiting." (2)
And we are not patient people. Waiting makes us anxious and often doubt our faith. It can be frustrating and frightening whether we are choosing to change our lives, as I was, or being forced to change the lives we thought we going to live because of life’s traumas that come to us all. Waiting can be a geyser of what Martin Buber aptly describes as “Holy Insecurity.”
"This is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of danger and of risk, of eternal beginning and eternal becoming, of opened spirit and of deep realization, the kingdom of holy insecurity." (3)
St. Martin’s knows something about holy insecurity as you work and pray through the process of “eternal becoming” it certainly can feel risky at the very best, if not dangerous, at times. But this, too, Buber reminds us, is the kingdom of God.
As if aware of how we struggle with “Holy Insecurity.” Jesus, in the sweet tenderness of these words from Luke says this: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
And yet, that means work, struggle, danger and risk. It surely did in my life as God led me to a place beyond imagining. We must prepare. Keep our lamps lit. Even if at times it only feels like a pilot light of faith, of trust, of love. We must remain ready. And that’s a process, not a switch that can be flicked on.
We will get there together, with faith, and with the deep and strong bonds that have been forged from the past to the present in this parish community for over a century. You are not alone, we are not alone, even if it might often feel that way. As the Psalmist today reminds us, “Our soul waits for the Lord, He is our help and our shield” because St. Martin’s does not belong to your priest. It belongs to you, beloved children of God, and above all, to the one in whose name we live, pray, and serve. God is calling us all to a place beyond imagining and one we’ll recognize the moment we arrive. AMEN.
1. Taylor, Barbara Brown, “The Sacramental Sky,” Duke University Chapel, Durham, N.C. February 18th, 2010
2. Buechner, Frederick, “Faith and Fiction,” sermon preached at Montreat Conference Center, North Carolina, 1986
3. Martin Buber, as quoted in Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, Barbara Brown Taylor, Harper Collins, 2019, pg, 81
Today's readings are:
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. AMEN.
It’s a very short distance from the third pew over there on the right-- where I always sit-- to this pulpit but I traveled a very, very, long way to arrive at this moment. It’s astonishing to be here. My heart is filled with gratitude and a quiet joy
When gratitude and joy are combined, it’s both powerful and yet also humbling. For me it’s what can happen in embracing an unexpected life. Faith was involved, to be sure, although I wasn’t calling it that per se. I was calling it “trust’ and when I wanted to change my life I began praying my dangerous prayer: “Let thy will be my will,” Sunday after Sunday at the Eucharist.
I trusted in God to lead me which is at the heart of faith when I was reminded of again when I read the exquisite words from Hebrews: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
People mistakenly assume that I’m courageous but I’m not. I’m very curious though and good at walking through doors when they open. And somehow, the next right thing appears on the wings of the Holy Spirit.
I do try to plan—I was going to go to law school and get Black Panthers out of jail—but I went to Vietnam instead with a pediatrician I met hitchhiking illegally on an interstate -- which led to a long career as an author and journalist in television news.
But there came a time when I knew there were no more jobs in TV that appealed to me anymore. I wanted the remaining years of my professional career to be in service to God out of the profound gratitude I had for the life I’d lived. Not that it had been easy. There were crucifixions along the way but somehow, I kept making it to Easter. I had no idea what to hope for, but did, and do, have faith in things unseen.
So I began praying my dangerous prayer at the communion rail – all six words of it with no idea of what was coming next. “Let thy will be my will.”
If someone had asked me -- and no one really did—I’d probably have said I might end up doing non-profit work in New York City where I lived.
The thought of going to graduate school with money I didn’t have for a degree that led nowhere and that I’d end up working in Philadelphia, a city I often flew through on Amtrak en route to DC, was beyond my power of imagining.
I should also add that by the time I graduated from Union Theological Seminary with an M.Div. in Psychiatry and Religion, I was sure I would never be ordained. Full stop. Never. I’d hear other students say things like “I’ve known I’ve had a call on my head since I was four,” and I’d wince. That wasn’t me. Another time someone said “I had a dream in which the Holy Spirit who showed me I’d be leading people to Jesus.” Good for you, I thought. But that’s not me.
And yet God led me to a place beyond imagining, one where the moment I arrived, I knew I belonged. And you, the loving people of St. Martin’s, and your rector, Jarrett Kerbel, and a parish committee, listened and supported me as I quietly began to respond to what I realize now was a persistent whisper from God. It was long, difficult, and took years. The waiting was at times, endless. Start to finish – what began in New York end nine years later here at St. Martin’s when I was ordained on Dec. 13th, 2019. And even when I was ordained, I never imagined preaching here. I was the oncology chaplain at CHOP, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. So once again this morning, I find myself in a place beyond imagining, where gratitude and joy collide.
God’s will for my life was far greater than my own. A way was made out of no way that I could see. It’s like the passage from Genesis this morning when God told Abraham to look at the heavens and imagine his descendants being as infinite as the panoply of stars flung across the navy night sky. Abraham must have been incredulous. He was too old and for starters, his wife, was barren, yet God let him to a place beyond imagining.
And, as author and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor points out,
"For Protestants in particular, his story is key. Abraham did not lift a finger to be saved. All he did was believe God’s promise and that was enough. He was saved by faith alone." (1)
Faith. Trust. The conviction of things not seen. We stare through the glass of our lives so darkly and often for so long it is hard to imagine that there might be anything more.
It can be easy to forget so that faith should be vibrant and alive. It’s not to be confused with theology, as the noted pastor Frederick Buechner points out:
"Faith is different from theology because theology is reasoned, systematic, and orderly, whereas faith is disorderly intermittent and full of surprises…Faith is homesickness, faith is a lump in the throat faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting, waiting." (2)
And we are not patient people. Waiting makes us anxious and often doubt our faith. It can be frustrating and frightening whether we are choosing to change our lives, as I was, or being forced to change the lives we thought we going to live because of life’s traumas that come to us all. Waiting can be a geyser of what Martin Buber aptly describes as “Holy Insecurity.”
"This is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of danger and of risk, of eternal beginning and eternal becoming, of opened spirit and of deep realization, the kingdom of holy insecurity." (3)
St. Martin’s knows something about holy insecurity as you work and pray through the process of “eternal becoming” it certainly can feel risky at the very best, if not dangerous, at times. But this, too, Buber reminds us, is the kingdom of God.
As if aware of how we struggle with “Holy Insecurity.” Jesus, in the sweet tenderness of these words from Luke says this: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
And yet, that means work, struggle, danger and risk. It surely did in my life as God led me to a place beyond imagining. We must prepare. Keep our lamps lit. Even if at times it only feels like a pilot light of faith, of trust, of love. We must remain ready. And that’s a process, not a switch that can be flicked on.
We will get there together, with faith, and with the deep and strong bonds that have been forged from the past to the present in this parish community for over a century. You are not alone, we are not alone, even if it might often feel that way. As the Psalmist today reminds us, “Our soul waits for the Lord, He is our help and our shield” because St. Martin’s does not belong to your priest. It belongs to you, beloved children of God, and above all, to the one in whose name we live, pray, and serve. God is calling us all to a place beyond imagining and one we’ll recognize the moment we arrive. AMEN.
1. Taylor, Barbara Brown, “The Sacramental Sky,” Duke University Chapel, Durham, N.C. February 18th, 2010
2. Buechner, Frederick, “Faith and Fiction,” sermon preached at Montreat Conference Center, North Carolina, 1986
3. Martin Buber, as quoted in Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, Barbara Brown Taylor, Harper Collins, 2019, pg, 81
Jul 24, 2022 |
Asking Prayers and Thanking Prayers
| Eugenie Dieck
Asking Prayers and Thanking Prayers
Read Guest Preacher Eugenie Dieck's sermon for the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 12.
Today's readings are:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts,
be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.
Amen.
So, I say to you, ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.
For decades, the little children at St Martin’s have been taught to pray through the construct of asking prayers and thanking prayers.
What they “ask for” and “thank for” are wonderfully simple statements.
I remember two awesome prayers…
“Help me to not hit my brother…who bothers me...a lot.”
“Thank you for African elephants because they are big.”
Today’s Gospel speaks to St Martin’s during this interim time. We are heavy with asking. Our asking prayers may seem obvious – to hold together as a parish, to discern who we are, who we could become, and who we might call to lead us. These are prayers of anxiety and risk. And so, at times, we may not be our best selves.
When we are not our best selves, because we are tired and concerned, the experience leads us to more asking prayers. To be brave, to be patient, to be forgiving, to assume the beneficial intent of words and actions.
The challenge with our current experience is its conditional quality.
We do not know what is going on, because we do not know.
We are searching for certainty in an uncertain time.
In a transitionary period, the essential asking prayer is…
“Dear God, help us to be brave and follow where you are leading us.”
We also have thanking prayers.
We thank God for what we had and now miss.
We thank God for our companions along the way.
We thank God for the persistence and resilience of the church,
both our parish, and the greater church.
I love the thanking prayers of children because they are filled with wonder and gratefulness for the magic of the world.
We have wonder and magic happening here at St Martin’s.
We are showing up and showing up together. And showing up in the full vibrancy of life’s joys and sorrows. There have been happy celebrations and sad experiences, many moments of pastoral care, and hard discussions about simple and complex topics.
I thank all of you for showing up, for your willingness to be this parish, for holding St Martin’s in your prayers and in your work.
The example I gave of the children’s asking and thanking prayers showed a disconnect. Asking to not clobber your brother and thanking for elephants, were not associated in this little boy’s experience.
There is a gap between when we ask God and when we thank God.
We ask and then we must wait. That is what we are doing now.
We are waiting.
Right now, at St Martin’s, the waiting -- for an interim and then a new rector -- is uncomfortable.
Yet in that discomfort is a time to be with Jesus, for he did a lot of waiting. Jesus waited to start his ministry…he waited for the apostles to understand…he waited for 40 days in the desert...
We will all have to wait with Jesus a while longer. We will be uncomfortable and the responses we get from God may not be what we asked for. We may be heard in a different way than we intended, we may ask and get an answer that surprises us, we may knock, and an unexpected door is opened.
One aspect of waiting is we do not feel settled. We are neither here nor there, we don’t know what’s happening, we are not sure who is in charge. Let me address those worries — we are in God’s hands, God is in charge, and waiting is what’s happening.
What we can do while we are waiting is to pray. I ask each of us to offer asking prayers and thanking prayers for St. Martin’s –
it is important to do both.
Asking prayers acknowledge wanting and yearning.
Thanking prayers acknowledge gratefulness and rightness.
I will close by reminding us how safe we are in Jesus’s love and the gift of salvation. As weary as we are at this moment, as concerned as we might be, we are secure and protected. Please pray by asking and thanking, knowing Jesus loves us and cares for us as we wait.
Amen.
Today's readings are:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts,
be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.
Amen.
So, I say to you, ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.
For decades, the little children at St Martin’s have been taught to pray through the construct of asking prayers and thanking prayers.
What they “ask for” and “thank for” are wonderfully simple statements.
I remember two awesome prayers…
“Help me to not hit my brother…who bothers me...a lot.”
“Thank you for African elephants because they are big.”
Today’s Gospel speaks to St Martin’s during this interim time. We are heavy with asking. Our asking prayers may seem obvious – to hold together as a parish, to discern who we are, who we could become, and who we might call to lead us. These are prayers of anxiety and risk. And so, at times, we may not be our best selves.
When we are not our best selves, because we are tired and concerned, the experience leads us to more asking prayers. To be brave, to be patient, to be forgiving, to assume the beneficial intent of words and actions.
The challenge with our current experience is its conditional quality.
We do not know what is going on, because we do not know.
We are searching for certainty in an uncertain time.
In a transitionary period, the essential asking prayer is…
“Dear God, help us to be brave and follow where you are leading us.”
We also have thanking prayers.
We thank God for what we had and now miss.
We thank God for our companions along the way.
We thank God for the persistence and resilience of the church,
both our parish, and the greater church.
I love the thanking prayers of children because they are filled with wonder and gratefulness for the magic of the world.
We have wonder and magic happening here at St Martin’s.
We are showing up and showing up together. And showing up in the full vibrancy of life’s joys and sorrows. There have been happy celebrations and sad experiences, many moments of pastoral care, and hard discussions about simple and complex topics.
I thank all of you for showing up, for your willingness to be this parish, for holding St Martin’s in your prayers and in your work.
The example I gave of the children’s asking and thanking prayers showed a disconnect. Asking to not clobber your brother and thanking for elephants, were not associated in this little boy’s experience.
There is a gap between when we ask God and when we thank God.
We ask and then we must wait. That is what we are doing now.
We are waiting.
Right now, at St Martin’s, the waiting -- for an interim and then a new rector -- is uncomfortable.
Yet in that discomfort is a time to be with Jesus, for he did a lot of waiting. Jesus waited to start his ministry…he waited for the apostles to understand…he waited for 40 days in the desert...
We will all have to wait with Jesus a while longer. We will be uncomfortable and the responses we get from God may not be what we asked for. We may be heard in a different way than we intended, we may ask and get an answer that surprises us, we may knock, and an unexpected door is opened.
One aspect of waiting is we do not feel settled. We are neither here nor there, we don’t know what’s happening, we are not sure who is in charge. Let me address those worries — we are in God’s hands, God is in charge, and waiting is what’s happening.
What we can do while we are waiting is to pray. I ask each of us to offer asking prayers and thanking prayers for St. Martin’s –
it is important to do both.
Asking prayers acknowledge wanting and yearning.
Thanking prayers acknowledge gratefulness and rightness.
I will close by reminding us how safe we are in Jesus’s love and the gift of salvation. As weary as we are at this moment, as concerned as we might be, we are secure and protected. Please pray by asking and thanking, knowing Jesus loves us and cares for us as we wait.
Amen.
Jul 17, 2022 |
Sarah, Mary, and Martha: Getting It Done!
| The Rev. James H. Littrell
Sarah, Mary, and Martha: Getting It Done!
Read the Rev. James H. Littrell's sermon for the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 11.
Today's readings are:
The oldish, slightly bumbling, very gay priest arrived at his newest place of ministry--and a lovely spot it was, and is, ticks and all--one bright May day, curious, glad of human company after a pretty long dry spell, uncertain whether his professional chops had held together across the whole endless stretch of pandemic isolation that had pretty much driven him crazy toward the end of it, and, being not sure, a little trepidatious, maybe a tiny bit anxious.
His anxiety, he thought, was rooted in that part of him that people sometimes called “introvert” But he was suspicious, still is suspicious to this day, of diagnostic personality labels. He kind of felt that people had always been more complicated than any diagnostic manual could ever parse. Once he had taken a test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and after it was all over, the test interpreter had called him in and told him he needed to be careful because he was neither one thing nor another. He was, in that way, he was told, like Jesus, and, the interpreter said to him, “you know what happened to Jesus.” In every respect, he as told, he had tested right down the middle of this binary type indicator system: he was both extrovert and introvert; he was a “sensing” person and also an intuitive one; he both thought and felt; and, thank goodness, he was skilled in both judgment and perception. Just like Jesus.
He thought that was all hocus pocus, not too far from the world of astrology to which some of his other otherwise brilliant friends ascribed as a way of framing human experience.
He actually thought his ability to live in and operate across a wide range of human experience was precisely the product of a man who, because he had been gay pretty much since birth, had had to negotiate his way through and live and even to find ways to thrive in a world in which for half his life what he was was literally unspeakable, and when spoken, the names for what he knew he was were so cruel and vicious and accursed that he--and everyone else of his kind who could--became very good at shape shifting and code switching and most of all, fitting in. When you do that for forty years, you learn serious survival and navigational skills, and if you’re paying attention, you learn to deploy those skills in the service of self-preservation and literal survival. And he had.
And so maybe, in that tiny way, perhaps he was a little like Jesus. He often thought that the pre-public-ministry Jesus, knowing what he must have known, suspecting about himself what he must, across those first thirty years of life, have begun to suspect, that that boy growing into maturity must have found himself a great and often mystifying puzzle.
One thing seemed pretty sure: that Jesus didn’t come out--didn’t unleash the full potency of his mature self into the world--until he did. And when he did, he did it massively. And all that he had learned in those hidden, perhaps hiding, years when (as the old priest remembered from his own Sunday School days) he had been growing “in wisdom and stature and favor with G-D and man,”--all that he then deployed into his world and into his particular human community with energy and focus, purpose and kindness, sensitivity and intuition, great feeling and great intelligence, profound judgment and deep perception. Into that community he strode quickly, powerfully, and “extrovert” if ever there was one. Now and then, though, he would turn away, take a boat across a river or into a lake, climb high into a hidden garden, visit trusted friends, and there he would turn inward, meditating, examining himself and his work, praying to his ever changing, often perplexing G-D.
Or so the oldish gay priest thought. Perhaps in that way, the test interpreter had been right: when you grow up an alien, hidden in full view, in your own country, completely different from what you can ever reveal to the world you live in, you do learn serious navigational skills. And you learn trepidation, and anxiety, and not a little fear.
So yes, when you enter a stranger’s house, as the Lord does Abraham and Sarah’s house in today’s story, in whatever guise--today G-D manifests as “three men”--you never know what you’re going to find, how you are going to be received, whether, even, if you will come out of the encounter in one piece.
And, too, when like Jesus, you come into a house of refuge and nourishment, a house you have known for a long time as perhaps a haven of peace and and a place where friends really care for one another, when you come into the house of Mary and Martha, or perhaps of Martha and Mary, you hope to be received with love and have at least a little of what you bring with you paid some attention to--when you do that, you hope for love and joy and companions on your way. But you never quite know until you are fully there, among these fellow humans, fully engaged with them individually and corporately as you can be within the limits of time and energy that are yours--you never really can know what you will find.
But what I (I, he says, emerging from the third person at last!), what I found on the first day and have found ever since is a community that received me with unfeigned joy, unfeignedly thankful as Bill said last week, for my ministry and for whatever gifts I have brought, and with complete open-hearted acceptance of me, as I now am--no judgment, no stigmatizing, nothing of that sort--just with love, and willingness to move together for this little time into wherever we might be called by G-D, to dwell together in sorrow and in joy, and tragedy even, and in hope. And most of all, I have found a determination to wait on G-D’s time, to wait in G-D’s time, to dwell in the shadow of the Almighty for as long as may be needed.
I have found the best kind of hospitality--and that in spite of a set of challenges and setbacks and surprises that might have knocked a lesser community into complete disfunction. And yet you have persevered, in faith and with passion, and most of all, in action.
So now a closing word about the women of the stories we heard today. Because they are stories both rooted in and descriptive of cultures that are unimaginably patriarchal, even by the measure of the religious patriarchy that our nation’s highest court’s majority seems intent on bending its citizens back to--because these stories emerge from and describe a world where patriarchy is the explicit unquestioned norm, the Hebrew and Gospel stories today really do massive injustice to the women in the room.
Sarah has made the home, and she creates the hospitality in which the three men are ensconced. Listen to the words. “Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said: Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it (as though she had no clue how to make bread), and make cakes.” And there is, handily, a servant, Abraham’s version perhaps of St. Martin's giant of a sexton, James Kent, another servant who is frequently, without much thought, directed hither and yon. Then, when the women and the servants have done the work, Abraham sets out the meal and it is he who keeps the men company while they eat. They, full of calf and curds and milk and bread, and also after all being G-D, perhaps recognize a bit more than Abraham, who has done the work to make all this hospitality possible. “Where,” they ask, “is your wife?” “Oh, she’s in the tent,” Abraham says (the reference to being in the tent is not accidental here either: Sarah is covered and hidden). And then G-D, in the guise of one of the men, promises Abraham his reward. Sarah is to get pregnant. She is to bear a son. And as we know, that son will spawn us all. Thank you, Sarah!
Then there are Mary and Martha. Here Jesus, the patriarch, also gets the women wrong. And here, please pay attention. Absent a Martha or three or ten in every household or community or community of G-D’s people--absent Martha, there will be, can be, no functioning household or community. There just cannot be. Never has been. Never will be. Now this is not solely about function, this story, though it certainly is that. It’s also about how easily the women who do the work can be left to it, often unsupported. Sometimes even their sisters turn away for more worthy endeavors--for listening, or massaging feet, or some such. Yet the work goes on.
So I pray you all, do not in these next days and weeks go all Jesus on your
Immeasurably devoted and skilled and effective Martha(s). Understand, too, that your Martha’s are Mary’s too. Martha’s they are though, now, here. They, and in particular your inestimable Rector’s Warden, is keeping this household running. Do not for even one second let her do that work alone. Do not wait to be asked. Do not, when asked for help, say, “Call me when you need me.” You must, absolutely, must be with Barbara Thomson in the great work before you that is mapping and living into St. Martin’s future while keeping all the wheels turning, and the house functioning, and phones answered and the bills paid and the pastoring done, and all the rest. And just as this is not a one priest church, neither is it a one Martha church. I implore you, each as you are able, to step in and step up.
You do that, this old gay priest may leave as he found himself almost as soon as he arrived: full of hope and joy, in the certainty that he and all of us are held as precious children of God in the capacious hands of God’s love.
I have in my life moved into a whole bunch of wonderful ministries. And, necessarily, I have left those same communities, at some point, and moved into the next place. Though sometimes I have been unsure of what or how that next place or thing may be, I am always sure I am--and in this place this morning--we are always holding hands with G-D. Since the very beginning of my ministry, at every juncture, this has been my prayer:
Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me one, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light,
Take my hand, Precious Lord, lead me on.
Farewell, children of G-D! Amen.
Today's readings are:
- Genesis 18:1-10a
Psalm 15
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42
The oldish, slightly bumbling, very gay priest arrived at his newest place of ministry--and a lovely spot it was, and is, ticks and all--one bright May day, curious, glad of human company after a pretty long dry spell, uncertain whether his professional chops had held together across the whole endless stretch of pandemic isolation that had pretty much driven him crazy toward the end of it, and, being not sure, a little trepidatious, maybe a tiny bit anxious.
His anxiety, he thought, was rooted in that part of him that people sometimes called “introvert” But he was suspicious, still is suspicious to this day, of diagnostic personality labels. He kind of felt that people had always been more complicated than any diagnostic manual could ever parse. Once he had taken a test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and after it was all over, the test interpreter had called him in and told him he needed to be careful because he was neither one thing nor another. He was, in that way, he was told, like Jesus, and, the interpreter said to him, “you know what happened to Jesus.” In every respect, he as told, he had tested right down the middle of this binary type indicator system: he was both extrovert and introvert; he was a “sensing” person and also an intuitive one; he both thought and felt; and, thank goodness, he was skilled in both judgment and perception. Just like Jesus.
He thought that was all hocus pocus, not too far from the world of astrology to which some of his other otherwise brilliant friends ascribed as a way of framing human experience.
He actually thought his ability to live in and operate across a wide range of human experience was precisely the product of a man who, because he had been gay pretty much since birth, had had to negotiate his way through and live and even to find ways to thrive in a world in which for half his life what he was was literally unspeakable, and when spoken, the names for what he knew he was were so cruel and vicious and accursed that he--and everyone else of his kind who could--became very good at shape shifting and code switching and most of all, fitting in. When you do that for forty years, you learn serious survival and navigational skills, and if you’re paying attention, you learn to deploy those skills in the service of self-preservation and literal survival. And he had.
And so maybe, in that tiny way, perhaps he was a little like Jesus. He often thought that the pre-public-ministry Jesus, knowing what he must have known, suspecting about himself what he must, across those first thirty years of life, have begun to suspect, that that boy growing into maturity must have found himself a great and often mystifying puzzle.
One thing seemed pretty sure: that Jesus didn’t come out--didn’t unleash the full potency of his mature self into the world--until he did. And when he did, he did it massively. And all that he had learned in those hidden, perhaps hiding, years when (as the old priest remembered from his own Sunday School days) he had been growing “in wisdom and stature and favor with G-D and man,”--all that he then deployed into his world and into his particular human community with energy and focus, purpose and kindness, sensitivity and intuition, great feeling and great intelligence, profound judgment and deep perception. Into that community he strode quickly, powerfully, and “extrovert” if ever there was one. Now and then, though, he would turn away, take a boat across a river or into a lake, climb high into a hidden garden, visit trusted friends, and there he would turn inward, meditating, examining himself and his work, praying to his ever changing, often perplexing G-D.
Or so the oldish gay priest thought. Perhaps in that way, the test interpreter had been right: when you grow up an alien, hidden in full view, in your own country, completely different from what you can ever reveal to the world you live in, you do learn serious navigational skills. And you learn trepidation, and anxiety, and not a little fear.
So yes, when you enter a stranger’s house, as the Lord does Abraham and Sarah’s house in today’s story, in whatever guise--today G-D manifests as “three men”--you never know what you’re going to find, how you are going to be received, whether, even, if you will come out of the encounter in one piece.
And, too, when like Jesus, you come into a house of refuge and nourishment, a house you have known for a long time as perhaps a haven of peace and and a place where friends really care for one another, when you come into the house of Mary and Martha, or perhaps of Martha and Mary, you hope to be received with love and have at least a little of what you bring with you paid some attention to--when you do that, you hope for love and joy and companions on your way. But you never quite know until you are fully there, among these fellow humans, fully engaged with them individually and corporately as you can be within the limits of time and energy that are yours--you never really can know what you will find.
But what I (I, he says, emerging from the third person at last!), what I found on the first day and have found ever since is a community that received me with unfeigned joy, unfeignedly thankful as Bill said last week, for my ministry and for whatever gifts I have brought, and with complete open-hearted acceptance of me, as I now am--no judgment, no stigmatizing, nothing of that sort--just with love, and willingness to move together for this little time into wherever we might be called by G-D, to dwell together in sorrow and in joy, and tragedy even, and in hope. And most of all, I have found a determination to wait on G-D’s time, to wait in G-D’s time, to dwell in the shadow of the Almighty for as long as may be needed.
I have found the best kind of hospitality--and that in spite of a set of challenges and setbacks and surprises that might have knocked a lesser community into complete disfunction. And yet you have persevered, in faith and with passion, and most of all, in action.
So now a closing word about the women of the stories we heard today. Because they are stories both rooted in and descriptive of cultures that are unimaginably patriarchal, even by the measure of the religious patriarchy that our nation’s highest court’s majority seems intent on bending its citizens back to--because these stories emerge from and describe a world where patriarchy is the explicit unquestioned norm, the Hebrew and Gospel stories today really do massive injustice to the women in the room.
Sarah has made the home, and she creates the hospitality in which the three men are ensconced. Listen to the words. “Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah and said: Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it (as though she had no clue how to make bread), and make cakes.” And there is, handily, a servant, Abraham’s version perhaps of St. Martin's giant of a sexton, James Kent, another servant who is frequently, without much thought, directed hither and yon. Then, when the women and the servants have done the work, Abraham sets out the meal and it is he who keeps the men company while they eat. They, full of calf and curds and milk and bread, and also after all being G-D, perhaps recognize a bit more than Abraham, who has done the work to make all this hospitality possible. “Where,” they ask, “is your wife?” “Oh, she’s in the tent,” Abraham says (the reference to being in the tent is not accidental here either: Sarah is covered and hidden). And then G-D, in the guise of one of the men, promises Abraham his reward. Sarah is to get pregnant. She is to bear a son. And as we know, that son will spawn us all. Thank you, Sarah!
Then there are Mary and Martha. Here Jesus, the patriarch, also gets the women wrong. And here, please pay attention. Absent a Martha or three or ten in every household or community or community of G-D’s people--absent Martha, there will be, can be, no functioning household or community. There just cannot be. Never has been. Never will be. Now this is not solely about function, this story, though it certainly is that. It’s also about how easily the women who do the work can be left to it, often unsupported. Sometimes even their sisters turn away for more worthy endeavors--for listening, or massaging feet, or some such. Yet the work goes on.
So I pray you all, do not in these next days and weeks go all Jesus on your
Immeasurably devoted and skilled and effective Martha(s). Understand, too, that your Martha’s are Mary’s too. Martha’s they are though, now, here. They, and in particular your inestimable Rector’s Warden, is keeping this household running. Do not for even one second let her do that work alone. Do not wait to be asked. Do not, when asked for help, say, “Call me when you need me.” You must, absolutely, must be with Barbara Thomson in the great work before you that is mapping and living into St. Martin’s future while keeping all the wheels turning, and the house functioning, and phones answered and the bills paid and the pastoring done, and all the rest. And just as this is not a one priest church, neither is it a one Martha church. I implore you, each as you are able, to step in and step up.
You do that, this old gay priest may leave as he found himself almost as soon as he arrived: full of hope and joy, in the certainty that he and all of us are held as precious children of God in the capacious hands of God’s love.
I have in my life moved into a whole bunch of wonderful ministries. And, necessarily, I have left those same communities, at some point, and moved into the next place. Though sometimes I have been unsure of what or how that next place or thing may be, I am always sure I am--and in this place this morning--we are always holding hands with G-D. Since the very beginning of my ministry, at every juncture, this has been my prayer:
Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me one, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light,
Take my hand, Precious Lord, lead me on.
Farewell, children of G-D! Amen.
Jul 10, 2022 |
Where You Put Your Body
| The Rev. Bill Bixby
Where You Put Your Body
Read the Rev. Bill Bixby's sermon for the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 10.
Today's readings are:
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, on Easter Day here at St. Martin’s, and here [gesturing toward altar and communion rails] at St. Martin’s, having been invited to celebrate Eucharist in LIFT worship with Anne Alexis and with Carol, I was moving with requisite ritual care (equally comprised of reverence for the Table and fear of tripping on my alb), placing the wafer in each upraised palm with a somewhat simpler distribution sentence for the many young ones (and older ones, too): “All of God’s love is in this bread.” Not the first time I have done bits of liturgical customizing—nor the first time that the fierce honesty of children welled up.
One time, a young fellow, seven/eight, declared quite audibly up and down the altar rail: “Mom—that’s not bread!” But, this past, dazzling Easter morn, a supremely confident, polite young brother of St. Martin’s rang out like a bell: “All of God’s love is in this bread. Thank you.” “Thank you.” Uncomplicated. Un-self-conscious. Unreserved. Alight with wonder. Laden with trust.
Anglicans, fittingly, have a phrase for just that kind of moment, that blessing of unalloyed thanks, a phrase permanently stored in me since I was 10 years old in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Orchard Park, New York. I’ll wager it’s in many of you, too:
“And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days…”
Unfeignedly thankful. Pure poetry. Exquisitely Anglican. I am, today, unfeignedly thankful for this place at St. Martin’s, for the inestimable love on which we dine, week by week at this Table; for the inestimable love in this community at St. Martin's, in which I have been deeply nourished in Bible study, and used of God in sacred discernment spaces, and drawn up to ‘mask can’t stop me’ praise in music and song. And in which I have been delighted and refreshed by one winsome missioner priest who has now made it blessedly impossible not to contemplate our boxwoods, here in the garden, and think about…ticks. And about him. With unfeigned thanks, for him, I mean.
In 2010, I was with youth and young adults of Lutheran congregations across the US, joining an exceptional group of young Palestinian Lutheran leaders for three weeks of living together, traveling together, worshiping together, feasting together, asking hard questions together, building gentle friendships and peace together in the Holy Land.
On our third or fourth day, some 30 of us were moving, raggedly, through the Old City of Jerusalem, north from the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, and then east, tracing a stretch of the Via Dolorosa, in fact, bound for an Israeli security tunnel which leads south from the Muslim Quarter to the wide plazas adjacent to the Western Wall.
This location, at the northern mouth of that tunnel, is a crowded, kinda tense area under normal circumstances in Jerusalem, which are…almost never. After a quick briefing by one of our Palestinian adult hosts, the first set forward was a clump of our US youth, who sailed through after quick passport and backpack checks. When our Palestinian friends started through, the demeanor of the armed Israeli guards (most of whom were around the ages of our young people), changed perceptibly. Papers were presented, challenges were issued, words became elevated, postures stiffened. A couple of our Arab Lutheran kin in Christ were asked to step over to a more restricted area for body searches. This went on long enough for some of us (OK, me) to worry, as the line lengthened, and the general vibe got…kinda tense.
Just then, the clump of American youth who had gone through, and were watching and waiting on the far side, in the mouth of the tunnel, called out, “We’re coming back out; we’re with them,” gesturing toward our Palestinian friends. And, facing detectable scorn from a few Israeli guards, and head-scratching from folks behind us in the security queue, they did exactly that; squeezed back thru.
At which, I assumed the classic youth ministry worker stance: sheer amazement. “We’re coming back out; we’re with them!”
A fine Lutheran bishop, our national church’s bishop of Metro New York at the time of 9/11, once said: “When it comes down to it, Christian discipleship is about where you put your body.” Where you put your body. The story of the road-crossing, ditch-daring, urgent- care extending Samaritan is so well known as to, well, scarcely require a preacher.
For church folk, the characters, the plot, the presumed meanings are stuck to our inner flannelboards, and even a woman or man on the street can tell you what a Good Samaritan is, an exemplar of a biblical random act of kindness.
Except for this—Jesus’s story, Luke’s text, is more spare than we might think, in intriguing ways, and more demanding. The only significant identifier of the man who puts his body on the line is Samaritan. No other adjectives. The contrast is inescapable, very sharp: a Jewish priest, then a Levite, cross away, recoiling, shunning. The Samaritan, moved with pity, crosses over, toward. And acts. Extravagantly.
Where you put your body. The full, disclosive power of the parable, lies precisely there: a sudden confrontation, of centuries-old bad neighbors. For Jesus, the crux of the story is the unexpected coming together, in extremis, of two persons who, in that day, in Luke’s understanding, by tradition and social custom, held each other in official contempt.
Here’s a devastating clue, a foreshadowing of this parable: less than a full chapter before, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem—a narrative linchpin of Luke’s gospel account. Jesus is now going all the way, even, we know, to the cross. Jesus is moving through Samaritan territory, in the hill country north of Jerusalem, where the text says, he is “not received,” that is, not extended usual Near Eastern hospitality for travelers, even strangers. And, his disciples—ah, those disciples—are salivating with recently acquired power: “Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven upon them?” Hmmm…
Discipleship is about where you put your body. The parents walked gingerly into our ministry offices, with furrowed brows. Great parents, often supportive of the venturesome activities of our youth group in my third parish north of the city. One parent had even been a youth advisor. The furrowed brow delegation was worried. In just a couple of weeks, youth from our church and young leaders from a Latino/Latina mission in north Philadelphia—a congregation we had been carefullu co-inventing a partner church relationship with for nearly three years—had planned a fantastic retreat. In the city. With…an overnight. In the city.
I could see, I could feel, how conflicted these parents were. And upset A bit sheepish, a bit frightened. They affirmed up and down the ministry being nurtured with Nueva Creacion, they expressed thanks for the ways their own children had been sensitized, had been shaped—my kid sings in Spanish; my kid has a huge friendship with one of the youth there; my daughter went on a date with a young person from the congregation. But, what they were worried about was that overnight in North Philadelphia. Hmmm…
I suggested we meet with the planning team, including the youth co-leaders—one from each parish—about their concerns. So we did, about a week later. The young woman from our congregation, unabashedly, in the presence of her counterpart (also a girl), spoke the ‘where you put your body,’ summons: “the New Creation kids live there, sleep there all the time; we can do that for one night.” And the pure-hearted young Latina leader assured the parents—“we will be safe with Jesus.”
And, inside me, that classic youth ministry worker stance: Utter amazement.
We carried out the full plan, much to the eventual relief, and I trust, the modest faith-stretching, of the furrowed brow delegation.
Where you put your body.
The parable reverberates down to us, today. Jesus artfully and fearlessly narrates a crossing over, a going down, and even raising up, that cancels stereotypes, breaks down barriers, often cemented by religion. And by race. The young people alongside whom I served claimed just a taste of that transformation, of the gospel’s permission to toss out old scripts, prompt breakthrough relationship. For Jesus, in Jesus, God’s mercy moves among despised others, and is not reserved for the folks under one tent, in one enclave, with just one creed, in one political movement. The parable is, in fact, a dramatic take on love of enemy.
Jesus was not crucified because he told stories about astonishing compassion. Jesus was crucified because he told stories of astonishing compassion for the officially hated, he was crucified because he spoke of God’s inbreaking community of mercy beyond tribe and taboo. Jesus was crucified to dethrone every piety and every society organized by enmity, by scapegoating. Then, and now.
And, Jesus puts his body down for just that, crosses the road, pours himself out over us, promising lasting healing, and on the third day, putting us on his back, carries us up, out of death, to new life.
These days, I struggle to appropriate, to live out the thrust of the gospel, of this parable. And, if I may, I sense that I am by no means alone here at St. Martin's. So much viciousness, so much accretion of raw, unchecked power, so much injustice. How shall I, how shall we, then live into God’s inbreaking community, vis-a-vis some enemies, some forces that seem so, well, thoroughly evil?
I take heart from the example of Bishop Desmond Tutu, whose hymn of hate-vanquishing love we sang before the sermon. Your Bishop Tutu, Anglican Communion—the Arch, as he was affectionately known. In the freedom struggle against apartheid, this buoyant, wide-hearted leader was known to sit right down in front of white South African housing demolition squads, as well as to stand up to young township protesters, to insist they set down incendiary devices and weapons. Knowing where and how to put his body on the line, disarmingly, fruitfully, didn’t end with the formal achievement of liberation and the election of Nelson Mandela.
For years then, as chair and moving spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he placed himself, his gifts, his global reputation, his soul, in the very midst of the terrible anguish and terrible multi-layered racial animus, personal and systemic, of that reborn nation. He helped to catalyze and guide a searingly honest, deeply humane process of healing and restoration of public trust. Embracing blacks and whites, victims and perpetrators, oppressed and oppressors. The arc of the Arch’s witness shows one way, one possibility for both tenacious political engagement for just laws and just governing, and a tenacious insistence on Ubuntu, a South African theology of flourishing, all-embracing community, of fundamental human interdependence and the irreducible created dignity of every…every…person. Tutu stood for, and gave his life to bring into being, that truly revolutionary, reconciled, inclusive community, beyond tribe and taboo.
The community toward which Jesus told stories, beckoning us to take part: “Go, and do likewise.”
The community for which Jesus put his body down. For us, for the whole world.
The community for which, we say this morning, even here at this Table—unfeignedly, yes?—“Thank you.” “Thank you.”
Today's readings are:
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, on Easter Day here at St. Martin’s, and here [gesturing toward altar and communion rails] at St. Martin’s, having been invited to celebrate Eucharist in LIFT worship with Anne Alexis and with Carol, I was moving with requisite ritual care (equally comprised of reverence for the Table and fear of tripping on my alb), placing the wafer in each upraised palm with a somewhat simpler distribution sentence for the many young ones (and older ones, too): “All of God’s love is in this bread.” Not the first time I have done bits of liturgical customizing—nor the first time that the fierce honesty of children welled up.
One time, a young fellow, seven/eight, declared quite audibly up and down the altar rail: “Mom—that’s not bread!” But, this past, dazzling Easter morn, a supremely confident, polite young brother of St. Martin’s rang out like a bell: “All of God’s love is in this bread. Thank you.” “Thank you.” Uncomplicated. Un-self-conscious. Unreserved. Alight with wonder. Laden with trust.
Anglicans, fittingly, have a phrase for just that kind of moment, that blessing of unalloyed thanks, a phrase permanently stored in me since I was 10 years old in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Orchard Park, New York. I’ll wager it’s in many of you, too:
“And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days…”
Unfeignedly thankful. Pure poetry. Exquisitely Anglican. I am, today, unfeignedly thankful for this place at St. Martin’s, for the inestimable love on which we dine, week by week at this Table; for the inestimable love in this community at St. Martin's, in which I have been deeply nourished in Bible study, and used of God in sacred discernment spaces, and drawn up to ‘mask can’t stop me’ praise in music and song. And in which I have been delighted and refreshed by one winsome missioner priest who has now made it blessedly impossible not to contemplate our boxwoods, here in the garden, and think about…ticks. And about him. With unfeigned thanks, for him, I mean.
In 2010, I was with youth and young adults of Lutheran congregations across the US, joining an exceptional group of young Palestinian Lutheran leaders for three weeks of living together, traveling together, worshiping together, feasting together, asking hard questions together, building gentle friendships and peace together in the Holy Land.
On our third or fourth day, some 30 of us were moving, raggedly, through the Old City of Jerusalem, north from the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, and then east, tracing a stretch of the Via Dolorosa, in fact, bound for an Israeli security tunnel which leads south from the Muslim Quarter to the wide plazas adjacent to the Western Wall.
This location, at the northern mouth of that tunnel, is a crowded, kinda tense area under normal circumstances in Jerusalem, which are…almost never. After a quick briefing by one of our Palestinian adult hosts, the first set forward was a clump of our US youth, who sailed through after quick passport and backpack checks. When our Palestinian friends started through, the demeanor of the armed Israeli guards (most of whom were around the ages of our young people), changed perceptibly. Papers were presented, challenges were issued, words became elevated, postures stiffened. A couple of our Arab Lutheran kin in Christ were asked to step over to a more restricted area for body searches. This went on long enough for some of us (OK, me) to worry, as the line lengthened, and the general vibe got…kinda tense.
Just then, the clump of American youth who had gone through, and were watching and waiting on the far side, in the mouth of the tunnel, called out, “We’re coming back out; we’re with them,” gesturing toward our Palestinian friends. And, facing detectable scorn from a few Israeli guards, and head-scratching from folks behind us in the security queue, they did exactly that; squeezed back thru.
At which, I assumed the classic youth ministry worker stance: sheer amazement. “We’re coming back out; we’re with them!”
A fine Lutheran bishop, our national church’s bishop of Metro New York at the time of 9/11, once said: “When it comes down to it, Christian discipleship is about where you put your body.” Where you put your body. The story of the road-crossing, ditch-daring, urgent- care extending Samaritan is so well known as to, well, scarcely require a preacher.
For church folk, the characters, the plot, the presumed meanings are stuck to our inner flannelboards, and even a woman or man on the street can tell you what a Good Samaritan is, an exemplar of a biblical random act of kindness.
Except for this—Jesus’s story, Luke’s text, is more spare than we might think, in intriguing ways, and more demanding. The only significant identifier of the man who puts his body on the line is Samaritan. No other adjectives. The contrast is inescapable, very sharp: a Jewish priest, then a Levite, cross away, recoiling, shunning. The Samaritan, moved with pity, crosses over, toward. And acts. Extravagantly.
Where you put your body. The full, disclosive power of the parable, lies precisely there: a sudden confrontation, of centuries-old bad neighbors. For Jesus, the crux of the story is the unexpected coming together, in extremis, of two persons who, in that day, in Luke’s understanding, by tradition and social custom, held each other in official contempt.
Here’s a devastating clue, a foreshadowing of this parable: less than a full chapter before, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem—a narrative linchpin of Luke’s gospel account. Jesus is now going all the way, even, we know, to the cross. Jesus is moving through Samaritan territory, in the hill country north of Jerusalem, where the text says, he is “not received,” that is, not extended usual Near Eastern hospitality for travelers, even strangers. And, his disciples—ah, those disciples—are salivating with recently acquired power: “Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven upon them?” Hmmm…
Discipleship is about where you put your body. The parents walked gingerly into our ministry offices, with furrowed brows. Great parents, often supportive of the venturesome activities of our youth group in my third parish north of the city. One parent had even been a youth advisor. The furrowed brow delegation was worried. In just a couple of weeks, youth from our church and young leaders from a Latino/Latina mission in north Philadelphia—a congregation we had been carefullu co-inventing a partner church relationship with for nearly three years—had planned a fantastic retreat. In the city. With…an overnight. In the city.
I could see, I could feel, how conflicted these parents were. And upset A bit sheepish, a bit frightened. They affirmed up and down the ministry being nurtured with Nueva Creacion, they expressed thanks for the ways their own children had been sensitized, had been shaped—my kid sings in Spanish; my kid has a huge friendship with one of the youth there; my daughter went on a date with a young person from the congregation. But, what they were worried about was that overnight in North Philadelphia. Hmmm…
I suggested we meet with the planning team, including the youth co-leaders—one from each parish—about their concerns. So we did, about a week later. The young woman from our congregation, unabashedly, in the presence of her counterpart (also a girl), spoke the ‘where you put your body,’ summons: “the New Creation kids live there, sleep there all the time; we can do that for one night.” And the pure-hearted young Latina leader assured the parents—“we will be safe with Jesus.”
And, inside me, that classic youth ministry worker stance: Utter amazement.
We carried out the full plan, much to the eventual relief, and I trust, the modest faith-stretching, of the furrowed brow delegation.
Where you put your body.
The parable reverberates down to us, today. Jesus artfully and fearlessly narrates a crossing over, a going down, and even raising up, that cancels stereotypes, breaks down barriers, often cemented by religion. And by race. The young people alongside whom I served claimed just a taste of that transformation, of the gospel’s permission to toss out old scripts, prompt breakthrough relationship. For Jesus, in Jesus, God’s mercy moves among despised others, and is not reserved for the folks under one tent, in one enclave, with just one creed, in one political movement. The parable is, in fact, a dramatic take on love of enemy.
Jesus was not crucified because he told stories about astonishing compassion. Jesus was crucified because he told stories of astonishing compassion for the officially hated, he was crucified because he spoke of God’s inbreaking community of mercy beyond tribe and taboo. Jesus was crucified to dethrone every piety and every society organized by enmity, by scapegoating. Then, and now.
And, Jesus puts his body down for just that, crosses the road, pours himself out over us, promising lasting healing, and on the third day, putting us on his back, carries us up, out of death, to new life.
These days, I struggle to appropriate, to live out the thrust of the gospel, of this parable. And, if I may, I sense that I am by no means alone here at St. Martin's. So much viciousness, so much accretion of raw, unchecked power, so much injustice. How shall I, how shall we, then live into God’s inbreaking community, vis-a-vis some enemies, some forces that seem so, well, thoroughly evil?
I take heart from the example of Bishop Desmond Tutu, whose hymn of hate-vanquishing love we sang before the sermon. Your Bishop Tutu, Anglican Communion—the Arch, as he was affectionately known. In the freedom struggle against apartheid, this buoyant, wide-hearted leader was known to sit right down in front of white South African housing demolition squads, as well as to stand up to young township protesters, to insist they set down incendiary devices and weapons. Knowing where and how to put his body on the line, disarmingly, fruitfully, didn’t end with the formal achievement of liberation and the election of Nelson Mandela.
For years then, as chair and moving spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he placed himself, his gifts, his global reputation, his soul, in the very midst of the terrible anguish and terrible multi-layered racial animus, personal and systemic, of that reborn nation. He helped to catalyze and guide a searingly honest, deeply humane process of healing and restoration of public trust. Embracing blacks and whites, victims and perpetrators, oppressed and oppressors. The arc of the Arch’s witness shows one way, one possibility for both tenacious political engagement for just laws and just governing, and a tenacious insistence on Ubuntu, a South African theology of flourishing, all-embracing community, of fundamental human interdependence and the irreducible created dignity of every…every…person. Tutu stood for, and gave his life to bring into being, that truly revolutionary, reconciled, inclusive community, beyond tribe and taboo.
The community toward which Jesus told stories, beckoning us to take part: “Go, and do likewise.”
The community for which Jesus put his body down. For us, for the whole world.
The community for which, we say this morning, even here at this Table—unfeignedly, yes?—“Thank you.” “Thank you.”
Jun 26, 2022 |
Moving Forward
| Anne Alexis Harra
Moving Forward
Listen in to the sermon from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for The Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 26, 2022.
Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin’s by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Sermon text:
It is a remarkable honor to meditate on the Words of Life with you this morning, which admittedly feels rather heavy. I originally was on the schedule to preach next week – on Wednesday afternoon, Pastor Jim asked if I might switch to this week. Little did I know. Shaping these words to you, my Beloved St. Martin’s, a community in transition and one that is feeling a tremendous weight, is an outstanding gift. I am honored.
A great injustice was done on Friday, the exact type against which Paul warns in the passage from Galatians. The freedoms of powerful people were used as an opportunity for self-indulgence, to abuse the name of religious freedom and to strip away the dignity and bodily autonomy of women.
After the news broke on Friday I found myself in the midst of a crisis of faith. Finding the words to say to myself, let alone to a congregation already shouldering so much, was almost impossible. Around 7:30 last night with tears in my eyes I angrily said to my far-too-patient partner, “I have no words. This pain is too much. I don’t know where God is, and I don’t know what the future will bring.” My sweet Cole said to me, “Preach what’s on your heart. You’ll find the words.”
I feel like I resonate most with the words of the Psalmist this morning, who opened the psalm with a plea to God for protection during turbulence in Israel. The Psalmist reiterates that it is God who is her only good; with God’s presence near her, she will not fall. Let us take those words with us this week to hopefully lighten our burdens.
I fear we are staring down a long road of anguish and factionizing. St. Paul had this same concern for the Church in Galatia, a portion of whose Letter we read this morning. Despite having brought the Good News of God in Christ to Galatia, Paul was concerned about its factionizing. The Galatians were factionizing and dividing amongst themselves over the interpretation of the law. The Judaic faction of Galatia was adamant that Christian converts should practice Mosaic law, even going so far as to demand that these converts receive circumcision. Paul does not mince words when he warns the Galatians not to trade one form of subjugation for another. Subjugation of any body based on former law infringes on everybody’s freedom. It drives us apart, and it pulls us away from God.
This passage from Galatians today reminds us that our freedom does not come from us, but from the Love of God in Christ, the same Christ who willingly set out on a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem to meet his fate on the cross. True religious freedom comes from Christ and begets the Fruits of the Spirit: joy, patience, gentleness, faithfulness. It does not harm another for righteousness’ sake. Instead, we are coming face to face with profoundly gross misinterpretations of religious freedom, the kind which keep us stuck in the past and unable to move forward in our journey towards the Dominion of God.
In the gospel, Luke illustrates a strange encounter with Jesus, but highlights a harsh truth: The freedom that comes from following Christ involves sacrificing what we once thought was best. At the end of the gospel, we hear a peculiar dialogue between Jesus and one potential follower. The man wants to follow Jesus but asks to offer his family farewell, first. Jesus does not hold back: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” These words would have been bizarre to anyone in ancient times because the “plowing norm” involved the person operating the plow looking backwards routinely to ensure that the rows were straight. In his response to the man, Jesus lets us know that constantly looking backwards is not the way to live into the Dominion of God. The old ways must make way for the new.
I stand before you this morning as a young woman, a hopeful future priest, and a child of God who has grave concerns that a few people with an excess of power are distorting the Scriptures, are appropriating Christian images for political gain, and are taking us backwards – away from the Dominion of God. The Dominion of God is one filled with dignity, mercy, justice, compassion, and its goodness knows no bounds. We can achieve this state, but we must look forward in order to do so. We are called to protect the vulnerable. We are called to life in the Spirit. We are called to freedom in Christ. We are called to fulfill the New Commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Moving into the coming days and weeks, I pray that we journey forward with the same bravery and conviction for justice that our Savior demonstrated for us. Despite the agony in my heart, I have hope in the ancient words of the Psalmist: “I have set God always before me; because God is at my right hand I shall not fall. My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body also shall rest in hope. For God will not abandon me to the grave, nor let God’s holy ones see the Pit.”
Friends, God will not let God’s holy ones see the Pit. God dwells among us. God is sustaining us right now and beckoning us forward. In this time of profound pain and confusion, we have an opportunity to set God before us, and heed Christ’s call to move forward into freedom. For freedom in Christ has – and will continue to – set us free. We will stand firm. And we will not again submit to a yoke of slavery. 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
Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin’s by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Sermon text:
It is a remarkable honor to meditate on the Words of Life with you this morning, which admittedly feels rather heavy. I originally was on the schedule to preach next week – on Wednesday afternoon, Pastor Jim asked if I might switch to this week. Little did I know. Shaping these words to you, my Beloved St. Martin’s, a community in transition and one that is feeling a tremendous weight, is an outstanding gift. I am honored.
A great injustice was done on Friday, the exact type against which Paul warns in the passage from Galatians. The freedoms of powerful people were used as an opportunity for self-indulgence, to abuse the name of religious freedom and to strip away the dignity and bodily autonomy of women.
After the news broke on Friday I found myself in the midst of a crisis of faith. Finding the words to say to myself, let alone to a congregation already shouldering so much, was almost impossible. Around 7:30 last night with tears in my eyes I angrily said to my far-too-patient partner, “I have no words. This pain is too much. I don’t know where God is, and I don’t know what the future will bring.” My sweet Cole said to me, “Preach what’s on your heart. You’ll find the words.”
I feel like I resonate most with the words of the Psalmist this morning, who opened the psalm with a plea to God for protection during turbulence in Israel. The Psalmist reiterates that it is God who is her only good; with God’s presence near her, she will not fall. Let us take those words with us this week to hopefully lighten our burdens.
I fear we are staring down a long road of anguish and factionizing. St. Paul had this same concern for the Church in Galatia, a portion of whose Letter we read this morning. Despite having brought the Good News of God in Christ to Galatia, Paul was concerned about its factionizing. The Galatians were factionizing and dividing amongst themselves over the interpretation of the law. The Judaic faction of Galatia was adamant that Christian converts should practice Mosaic law, even going so far as to demand that these converts receive circumcision. Paul does not mince words when he warns the Galatians not to trade one form of subjugation for another. Subjugation of any body based on former law infringes on everybody’s freedom. It drives us apart, and it pulls us away from God.
This passage from Galatians today reminds us that our freedom does not come from us, but from the Love of God in Christ, the same Christ who willingly set out on a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem to meet his fate on the cross. True religious freedom comes from Christ and begets the Fruits of the Spirit: joy, patience, gentleness, faithfulness. It does not harm another for righteousness’ sake. Instead, we are coming face to face with profoundly gross misinterpretations of religious freedom, the kind which keep us stuck in the past and unable to move forward in our journey towards the Dominion of God.
In the gospel, Luke illustrates a strange encounter with Jesus, but highlights a harsh truth: The freedom that comes from following Christ involves sacrificing what we once thought was best. At the end of the gospel, we hear a peculiar dialogue between Jesus and one potential follower. The man wants to follow Jesus but asks to offer his family farewell, first. Jesus does not hold back: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” These words would have been bizarre to anyone in ancient times because the “plowing norm” involved the person operating the plow looking backwards routinely to ensure that the rows were straight. In his response to the man, Jesus lets us know that constantly looking backwards is not the way to live into the Dominion of God. The old ways must make way for the new.
I stand before you this morning as a young woman, a hopeful future priest, and a child of God who has grave concerns that a few people with an excess of power are distorting the Scriptures, are appropriating Christian images for political gain, and are taking us backwards – away from the Dominion of God. The Dominion of God is one filled with dignity, mercy, justice, compassion, and its goodness knows no bounds. We can achieve this state, but we must look forward in order to do so. We are called to protect the vulnerable. We are called to life in the Spirit. We are called to freedom in Christ. We are called to fulfill the New Commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Moving into the coming days and weeks, I pray that we journey forward with the same bravery and conviction for justice that our Savior demonstrated for us. Despite the agony in my heart, I have hope in the ancient words of the Psalmist: “I have set God always before me; because God is at my right hand I shall not fall. My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body also shall rest in hope. For God will not abandon me to the grave, nor let God’s holy ones see the Pit.”
Friends, God will not let God’s holy ones see the Pit. God dwells among us. God is sustaining us right now and beckoning us forward. In this time of profound pain and confusion, we have an opportunity to set God before us, and heed Christ’s call to move forward into freedom. For freedom in Christ has – and will continue to – set us free. We will stand firm. And we will not again submit to a yoke of slavery. 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
Jun 19, 2022 |
Some Glad Morning: A Morning Meditation
| The Rev. James H. Littrell
Some Glad Morning: A Morning Meditation
Read the sermon text from The Rev. James H. Littrell for the Third Sunday After Pentecost, June 19, 2022.
Today's readings are:
Yesterday, I’m sure all here will agree, was one of those days that dawned beautiful and then stayed that way all day long, ‘til dusk gave way to that rarest of Philadelphia phenomena, a clear, cool, breezy summer night that gladdened my heart with thoughts of Vermont days and nights to come, and was so chilly that even my backyard mosquitoes were dissuaded from chowing down on my enticing shin bones while I was out grilling our salmon. So yesterday morning I was up bright and early, determined to do what I had not done since beginning my ministry here with you, which was to get to work on what passes for my garden, too long neglected while for the last month I had endeavored to be a faithful companion and pastor and priest with you in these early days of ministerial transition in which you are all embarked.
And to be sure, I have found that work with you everything an oldish gay priest who just two months ago thought himself thoroughly retired amid pandemic isolation and general gloom could possibly have imagined, and then some: rejuvenating, challenging (mostly in a good way), refreshing, and most of all, affirming of my competence and capacity to take on and carry out so large a work. I’ve come to understand that all these years have not been for naught and that I actually may have learned some things that I can put into useful practice with you.
I thank you all for that, and for all that goes with it: the opportunity to work with a devoted staff, a great Rector’s Warden and Vestry and generally with a laity as centered in Christ’s missional call and in care for one another as I have ever encountered, despite the occasional tick in the boxwood. I find myself every day overflowing with gratitude to God and to this community and to have been called by the One into the other. It’s a good feeling to have.
But I digress. I arose yesterday determined to get to my garden dirt, to move plants from the containers in which they had been languishing for too long into that dirt, to plant the little patch of grape tomatoes that I have made for my neighbors’ two- and four-year old sons for the past couple years as a summer pandemic entertainment, to get more of the hundreds of perennial bulbs I bought in April in a spasm of optimism into my stony soil, to continue to work plants into the clay left when we had our outside drain--all 55 feet of it--replaced back in March, and to pull some of the more pernicious weeds, especially the Bishop’s weed about to go to seed and the clay-loving crab grass from what passes for our front garden patch, a wild place if ever there was. And so I set out after an early breakfast to see what could be done. And for a few hours, I was lost in that sacred work, for so it felt.
I am far from a gardener in the sense in which that word is used around here, but I grew up on farms and cannot remember a summer when my hands weren’t digging in the dirt somewhere and when that digging didn’t feel like it was as much a part of me as my once curly hair or my love of a backwoods river.
So… I am digging and chopping and pulling and lifting and toting, and doing all that while thinking about today and what I might have to say into it once I got here, after having read and mulled and prayed over today’s readings all week--and they are fierce if you pay attention:
“See, it is written before me; I will not keep silent but will repay; I will indeed repay into their laps their iniquities and their ancestors’ iniquities together, says the Almighty…I will measure into their laps full payment for their actions…,” says Isaiah to us today. Some glad morning.
Put that into our Juneteenth pipes and smoke it, why don’t we? Or not. For, as Isaiah also says, “These are smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all day long.” There’s nothing quite like a fire gone wrong and a wrongway wind to bring tears to the eyes.
And if that’s not enough, that great Good Friday psalm speaks to us, God’s fortunate people, this word of caution and direction, beginning with what I think is one of the great prayers of our tradition: “Be not far away, O God; your are my strength, hasten to help me. Save me from the sword, my life from the power of the dog.”
And then, this: “For you do not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty, neither do you hide your face from them; but when they cry, you hear them.”
And then this promise: “The poor shall eat and be satisfied, and those who seek the Holy One shall give God praise, [saying] ‘May your heart live for ever.’”
What incredible audacity is that, to wish that the heart of God should live forever? Well, I think it’s the audacity of the poor, of the wretched of the earth, of those whose only hope, only hope, is in that promise: that when they cry, the great heart of God will circle about and, in sharing their pain, carry them somehow into glory. Some glad morning.
And so we come, and I came yesterday while plugging a gladiola bulb into the clay, to the mysteries of Paul. In my youthful ministry, I loved this text. It seemed to promise that all the barriers that keep us apart would be, or perhaps even now were, broken down, collapsed into the ineffable mystery of God in Christ. In it was the answer to that great Nina Simone anthem of my closeted youth, “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” For surely, here Paul tells us that in Christ’s new dominion there is no longer, as he says, Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. Surely he is saying that all those words and labels and actual things that divide us are brought together in the sovereignty of God. And yet, and yet. What I wondered, and I wonder, what does this last sentence mean: ``If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Does this not suggest that we are brought together in the bosom of Abraham? Are we all Jews, then. And if so, what of the non-Christian Jews? And if so, I asked myself, where does that also leave me, who stands so clearly outside that bosom by virtue of being who I am? If we are all one in Christ, if all our divisions and dividers are obliterated when we, by baptism, clothe ourselves with Christ, what then of all those who stand outside the Abrahamic promise and the clothing--almost always in pictures, the white clothing--in which are clothed the baptized, in which they come to Jesus?
As I plugged another bulb into the clay, I found I had no good answer to that vexation, but what I felt was at least a little alienation from the great apostle Paul and his orthodox certainties. Food for thought, thought I, plugging away. Some glad morning.
And then, tugging at a particularly stubborn snot of crab grass, I arrived at the Gospel. As a kid, I loved this story, for all its passion and activity, for its many demons and its many pigs, for the vivid way in which the man who had demons is described: naked, forsaken by all, living in the tombs, under guard, bound with shackles and chains from which he breaks out, so great are the demons. And for Jesus' conversation with those demons, clothed in the flesh of this poor man, who beg him not to order them to go back into the abyss but rather into a nearby herd of pigs. And he does, and they do, and then into the lake they rush and are drowned! Wow! Now that’s Gospel for sure, at least Gospel for a little boy. And for sure, there is a great deal here to engage even us grown ups, and I invite you to have at it.
But what I discovered in all this meditative garden plugging away were just a few things that I took in to lunch and took down for this sermon: first, the passion of God for the poor and the dispossessed and the different and the alien and the alienated; the impatience of that same God with the rest, with the self-satisfied, with the performative, with the certain.
Second, just a few words and phrases: smoke in the nostrils; repay their iniquities and the iniquities of their ancestors; saved from the power of the dog; slave, free, male, female, wretched, demon, swine, fear, healing; and the closing declaration of the Gospel: tell out how much Jesus has done.
I suppose that on this day, the first in our calendar of Ordinary Time, we must perforce call into this holy time several things: the institutions, past and present and future, which over and over and over again allow American culture to enslave others, even as the long ago Texas announcement of the freedom of those enslaved people is made a national holiday and there is even, as my across the street friend and neighbor pointed out with both disbelief and anger, a Juneteenth ice cream; the icons and emblems of those past and present times and of our ancestors’ stories of those displacements and enslavements displayed still, everywhere and often subtly, including here in this room; what it means for those of us who are white people to sing with such great gusto the Negro national anthem, and in a sense to claim as our own those lyrics written write out of enslavement and into the first Jim Crow regime of our nation; what is the promise of the Almighty God whom we say is Love but whose Love can be fierce as fire--I will repay, says the Almighty; what means the promise of the Almighty that the chief concern of that great Love and the chief end of that Passion are the poor and the dispossessed; what means it that by that Love and through that divine Compassion we are called to walk with the demoniacs and the suffering, even into the abysses in which they live everywhere, not gazing on that suffering from afar, or performing our dismay and then turning back into our ordinary time, but living with the active intention of changing the world toward a fuller approximation of what God’s Love, when understood as a verb, when understood as you and me, can actually do in a broken world; what does it mean never to relent in that ministry and in that work that we can only do together?
So what to do with this hard hard work and this hard hard history. Well, what came to me as I dug away in that dirt and clay yesterday was that maybe the place and way to begin to understand Juneteenth for most of us who are gathered here or listening today is to begin with a detailed interrogation of the spaces right around us, of this space right here. Maybe we need to begin by taking a look at our own garden, by seeing what we see if we look at the details and where they came from and what they say and mean, and then to begin by doing some weeding and some planting. It may be that community engagement, as we like to call our work in the world these days, needs also to engage this glass, these bricks, those icons in the back of the church and their descriptors, and the stories that this beautiful place, the very fabric of it have to tell. And then to act, not alone nor in silos of ministry, but as an entire community, to do the repair that Love requires, and the planting that follows, some glad morning.
Amen.
Today's readings are:
Yesterday, I’m sure all here will agree, was one of those days that dawned beautiful and then stayed that way all day long, ‘til dusk gave way to that rarest of Philadelphia phenomena, a clear, cool, breezy summer night that gladdened my heart with thoughts of Vermont days and nights to come, and was so chilly that even my backyard mosquitoes were dissuaded from chowing down on my enticing shin bones while I was out grilling our salmon. So yesterday morning I was up bright and early, determined to do what I had not done since beginning my ministry here with you, which was to get to work on what passes for my garden, too long neglected while for the last month I had endeavored to be a faithful companion and pastor and priest with you in these early days of ministerial transition in which you are all embarked.
And to be sure, I have found that work with you everything an oldish gay priest who just two months ago thought himself thoroughly retired amid pandemic isolation and general gloom could possibly have imagined, and then some: rejuvenating, challenging (mostly in a good way), refreshing, and most of all, affirming of my competence and capacity to take on and carry out so large a work. I’ve come to understand that all these years have not been for naught and that I actually may have learned some things that I can put into useful practice with you.
I thank you all for that, and for all that goes with it: the opportunity to work with a devoted staff, a great Rector’s Warden and Vestry and generally with a laity as centered in Christ’s missional call and in care for one another as I have ever encountered, despite the occasional tick in the boxwood. I find myself every day overflowing with gratitude to God and to this community and to have been called by the One into the other. It’s a good feeling to have.
But I digress. I arose yesterday determined to get to my garden dirt, to move plants from the containers in which they had been languishing for too long into that dirt, to plant the little patch of grape tomatoes that I have made for my neighbors’ two- and four-year old sons for the past couple years as a summer pandemic entertainment, to get more of the hundreds of perennial bulbs I bought in April in a spasm of optimism into my stony soil, to continue to work plants into the clay left when we had our outside drain--all 55 feet of it--replaced back in March, and to pull some of the more pernicious weeds, especially the Bishop’s weed about to go to seed and the clay-loving crab grass from what passes for our front garden patch, a wild place if ever there was. And so I set out after an early breakfast to see what could be done. And for a few hours, I was lost in that sacred work, for so it felt.
I am far from a gardener in the sense in which that word is used around here, but I grew up on farms and cannot remember a summer when my hands weren’t digging in the dirt somewhere and when that digging didn’t feel like it was as much a part of me as my once curly hair or my love of a backwoods river.
So… I am digging and chopping and pulling and lifting and toting, and doing all that while thinking about today and what I might have to say into it once I got here, after having read and mulled and prayed over today’s readings all week--and they are fierce if you pay attention:
“See, it is written before me; I will not keep silent but will repay; I will indeed repay into their laps their iniquities and their ancestors’ iniquities together, says the Almighty…I will measure into their laps full payment for their actions…,” says Isaiah to us today. Some glad morning.
Put that into our Juneteenth pipes and smoke it, why don’t we? Or not. For, as Isaiah also says, “These are smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all day long.” There’s nothing quite like a fire gone wrong and a wrongway wind to bring tears to the eyes.
And if that’s not enough, that great Good Friday psalm speaks to us, God’s fortunate people, this word of caution and direction, beginning with what I think is one of the great prayers of our tradition: “Be not far away, O God; your are my strength, hasten to help me. Save me from the sword, my life from the power of the dog.”
And then, this: “For you do not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty, neither do you hide your face from them; but when they cry, you hear them.”
And then this promise: “The poor shall eat and be satisfied, and those who seek the Holy One shall give God praise, [saying] ‘May your heart live for ever.’”
What incredible audacity is that, to wish that the heart of God should live forever? Well, I think it’s the audacity of the poor, of the wretched of the earth, of those whose only hope, only hope, is in that promise: that when they cry, the great heart of God will circle about and, in sharing their pain, carry them somehow into glory. Some glad morning.
And so we come, and I came yesterday while plugging a gladiola bulb into the clay, to the mysteries of Paul. In my youthful ministry, I loved this text. It seemed to promise that all the barriers that keep us apart would be, or perhaps even now were, broken down, collapsed into the ineffable mystery of God in Christ. In it was the answer to that great Nina Simone anthem of my closeted youth, “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” For surely, here Paul tells us that in Christ’s new dominion there is no longer, as he says, Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. Surely he is saying that all those words and labels and actual things that divide us are brought together in the sovereignty of God. And yet, and yet. What I wondered, and I wonder, what does this last sentence mean: ``If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Does this not suggest that we are brought together in the bosom of Abraham? Are we all Jews, then. And if so, what of the non-Christian Jews? And if so, I asked myself, where does that also leave me, who stands so clearly outside that bosom by virtue of being who I am? If we are all one in Christ, if all our divisions and dividers are obliterated when we, by baptism, clothe ourselves with Christ, what then of all those who stand outside the Abrahamic promise and the clothing--almost always in pictures, the white clothing--in which are clothed the baptized, in which they come to Jesus?
As I plugged another bulb into the clay, I found I had no good answer to that vexation, but what I felt was at least a little alienation from the great apostle Paul and his orthodox certainties. Food for thought, thought I, plugging away. Some glad morning.
And then, tugging at a particularly stubborn snot of crab grass, I arrived at the Gospel. As a kid, I loved this story, for all its passion and activity, for its many demons and its many pigs, for the vivid way in which the man who had demons is described: naked, forsaken by all, living in the tombs, under guard, bound with shackles and chains from which he breaks out, so great are the demons. And for Jesus' conversation with those demons, clothed in the flesh of this poor man, who beg him not to order them to go back into the abyss but rather into a nearby herd of pigs. And he does, and they do, and then into the lake they rush and are drowned! Wow! Now that’s Gospel for sure, at least Gospel for a little boy. And for sure, there is a great deal here to engage even us grown ups, and I invite you to have at it.
But what I discovered in all this meditative garden plugging away were just a few things that I took in to lunch and took down for this sermon: first, the passion of God for the poor and the dispossessed and the different and the alien and the alienated; the impatience of that same God with the rest, with the self-satisfied, with the performative, with the certain.
Second, just a few words and phrases: smoke in the nostrils; repay their iniquities and the iniquities of their ancestors; saved from the power of the dog; slave, free, male, female, wretched, demon, swine, fear, healing; and the closing declaration of the Gospel: tell out how much Jesus has done.
I suppose that on this day, the first in our calendar of Ordinary Time, we must perforce call into this holy time several things: the institutions, past and present and future, which over and over and over again allow American culture to enslave others, even as the long ago Texas announcement of the freedom of those enslaved people is made a national holiday and there is even, as my across the street friend and neighbor pointed out with both disbelief and anger, a Juneteenth ice cream; the icons and emblems of those past and present times and of our ancestors’ stories of those displacements and enslavements displayed still, everywhere and often subtly, including here in this room; what it means for those of us who are white people to sing with such great gusto the Negro national anthem, and in a sense to claim as our own those lyrics written write out of enslavement and into the first Jim Crow regime of our nation; what is the promise of the Almighty God whom we say is Love but whose Love can be fierce as fire--I will repay, says the Almighty; what means the promise of the Almighty that the chief concern of that great Love and the chief end of that Passion are the poor and the dispossessed; what means it that by that Love and through that divine Compassion we are called to walk with the demoniacs and the suffering, even into the abysses in which they live everywhere, not gazing on that suffering from afar, or performing our dismay and then turning back into our ordinary time, but living with the active intention of changing the world toward a fuller approximation of what God’s Love, when understood as a verb, when understood as you and me, can actually do in a broken world; what does it mean never to relent in that ministry and in that work that we can only do together?
So what to do with this hard hard work and this hard hard history. Well, what came to me as I dug away in that dirt and clay yesterday was that maybe the place and way to begin to understand Juneteenth for most of us who are gathered here or listening today is to begin with a detailed interrogation of the spaces right around us, of this space right here. Maybe we need to begin by taking a look at our own garden, by seeing what we see if we look at the details and where they came from and what they say and mean, and then to begin by doing some weeding and some planting. It may be that community engagement, as we like to call our work in the world these days, needs also to engage this glass, these bricks, those icons in the back of the church and their descriptors, and the stories that this beautiful place, the very fabric of it have to tell. And then to act, not alone nor in silos of ministry, but as an entire community, to do the repair that Love requires, and the planting that follows, some glad morning.
Amen.
Jun 05, 2022 |
Beatitudes for Pride
| The Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson
Beatitudes for Pride
Hear from the Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson preaching for our Pride Evensong service.
Today's readings are:
Psalm 150
Romans 12:9-18
Matthew 5:1-12
From the Gospel of Matthew this evening we have been given the beatitudes from the great Sermon on the Mount. I love the Sermon on the Mount. Everybody loves the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if we aren’t careful, many of us have heard the Sermon so many times that it can almost sound like an abstract checklist to us: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. It can sound like we are hearing a set of policy statements by Jesus, or a set of ideas, or worse yet hearing a politician’s list of talking points.
Sometimes, to escape that deadening familiarity, I like to try to imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to look out at those who were listening to him speak, and what it must have felt like for them to listen to him and meet his eye. Catching the eye of Jesus as he says “Blessed are those who mourn” is just a fundamentally different experience than hearing Jesus’s abstract ideas about mourning or about seeking righteousness.
To be in that group around Jesus listening, with the disciples or with the crowd from which he has just come, is to have, I think, a deep experience of one’s own blessedness. And I have to believe that Jesus spoke these words not to make an impression on his disciples, not to teach someone a lesson, but because he was moved by the grace and the beauty of those people he loved. In their awkwardness and in their folly and in their hunger, he loved them. He spoke from his heart. He didn’t so much explain to them that they were blessed. He blessed them deeply in that moment.
It seems possible to me, too, that Jesus was moved to narrate his own experience here as one who was himself outcast and downtrodden. I think he saw himself in the eyes of the poor and the lowly. He told us that if we were looking for him, that’s where we would find him. So we could think of the beatitudes as a kind of homecoming for Jesus, a moment in which he himself is resting in love, at rest right in the place where he belongs. You are blessed, he says to them, and in that moment he is one with them just as he is one with God. I can almost imagine that this moment of homecoming and belonging gave him a vast sense of patience. His vision of us from high on that mountain is maybe part of what allows him to let us be who we are, let us take our time coming to him. He sees the blessedness we can’t begin yet to express ourselves.
It's a paradox, but probably not an accident, that the ways of being that Jesus describes in this sermon on the mount can be ways of getting cut off from other people. Poverty of spirit, like physical poverty, can make you excluded from systems of justice, isolated in grief, everyone around you speaking evil of you and persecuting you for no reason. Or you are forgotten: too meek to push your way to the front of the line, looking to make peace where all is war and destruction and peace is just a laughable afterthought, dismissed from the beginning as a peacemaker. Trying to practice mercy in a merciless environment. What friends do you have? Jesus recognizes himself I think in this awful isolation. that threatens us at every moment.
There he is, the very love of God incarnate, one day to be executed like a criminal and abandoned by his friends. Jesus knows about isolation and exile, and he knows that there is a particular beauty, a particular healing, in looking into the eyes of the poor and the meek and those who long for justice, and being one with them. Knowing that in his gaze they are one with God, that he is the meeting place between human frailty and divine life.
The awful isolation to which we willingly subject an outsider is just swept away in his loving gaze. The doors open and the walls come tumbling down.
Now that loving gaze that we feel coming from Jesus is also the gaze of the church if we are really being the church. That knowing look of union is the church’s work. It’s one way to describe what the sacraments and the word of God and the life of the church are all doing: they are teaching the world its blessedness in the eyes of God. The church is gazing on all who suffer, on all who are cast out, with the eyes of Jesus, teaching all of us our blessedness, our beauty, our pride.
That’s the work of the church. Sadly, there are at least two things we know about this work of the church, we in the LGBTQ+ community. One: we know that the church is shockingly broken, shockingly unable to show us our beauty. Yes, the Episcopal Church has, after a lengthy controversy, and with some wonderful leadership, come around to a place of witness, and we can be grateful for that and for the good work of other denominations. It feels so good to gather like this.
But it has to be said that as a whole church, as Christians, as the body of Christ throughout the world, as the historical bearers of the word and the sacraments, we are still much more apt to trample on a queer or transgender kid than we are to mirror their great beauty. We still represent a faith that doesn’t want to see itself in that particular form of lowliness. It would be so much easier for the average Christian to imagine that a young transgender person doesn’t exist than to look and see ourselves in them. And a certain number of Christians will go to great lengthas to make it clear that transgender kids need not exist. Christians are still refusing that vision. Or worse, Christians are deliberately and often cynically targeting the queer and trans communities for persecution.
So that’s the first thing we know in our communities: how the Church is broken. The second thing we know is that as queer, non-binary, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, gay, and allied people we are and have long been a powerful force that calls the Church simply to become itself. We are here, we have argued, we are queer, we are fabulous. We are much more than a subgroup or the latest in a long line of “issues” to be faced. We are not a theological dispute.
We are a mirror in which Jesus sees himself reflected. Who needs to be more beautiful than that? Jesus sees himself in our vulnerability, in our growing fear of isolation and persecution. Whenever we are targeted Jesus sees himself. When we mourn, when we thirst for justice. When jobs and relationships and wedding cakes and safe housing and acknowledgement in the classroom and basic human respect are unavailable to us because we are just too queer. In those times—and yes, those times are now—in those times we are bright reflections of the blessed face of Jesus. And if the church wants to know Jesus, the church needs to know us. Never forget it: if the church wants to be the church it must know you.
Of course the sorrow of missing out on that wonderful exchange of blessing doesn’t stop with just us and Jesus. We know that it’s not just us. We know that there are injuries from wealth and poverty and colonialism, harm done by categories of race and ability, forms of brutal discrimination all around and also everywhere within our own communities--intersecting and overlapping and sometimes competing ways that we just refuse to see Jesus where he sees himself. And yes, we know about the violence in our streets and the rot in our government and the constant dread about the future.
But on a day like this, when we can gather in pride and love, when we can hear ourselves described as blessed and we can believe it for a moment, when St. Martin’s throws its doors open and declares that you and I belong here--that’s when we know that we have a powerful gift to share with the church and with the world.
That look of love that Jesus casts on us, knowing that look, is something we have to offer to other Christians. To come here today to celebrate our pride by praising God with prayer and music and community is to start some very good work in the world. We are here together this evening learning how to do the work of the church, how to turn to the world like Jesus does, how to catch the eye of the one who needs to be seen, how to recognize Jesus in that one, and how to say it over and over in a loving exchange:
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
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
Today's readings are:
Psalm 150
Romans 12:9-18
Matthew 5:1-12
From the Gospel of Matthew this evening we have been given the beatitudes from the great Sermon on the Mount. I love the Sermon on the Mount. Everybody loves the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if we aren’t careful, many of us have heard the Sermon so many times that it can almost sound like an abstract checklist to us: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. It can sound like we are hearing a set of policy statements by Jesus, or a set of ideas, or worse yet hearing a politician’s list of talking points.
Sometimes, to escape that deadening familiarity, I like to try to imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to look out at those who were listening to him speak, and what it must have felt like for them to listen to him and meet his eye. Catching the eye of Jesus as he says “Blessed are those who mourn” is just a fundamentally different experience than hearing Jesus’s abstract ideas about mourning or about seeking righteousness.
To be in that group around Jesus listening, with the disciples or with the crowd from which he has just come, is to have, I think, a deep experience of one’s own blessedness. And I have to believe that Jesus spoke these words not to make an impression on his disciples, not to teach someone a lesson, but because he was moved by the grace and the beauty of those people he loved. In their awkwardness and in their folly and in their hunger, he loved them. He spoke from his heart. He didn’t so much explain to them that they were blessed. He blessed them deeply in that moment.
It seems possible to me, too, that Jesus was moved to narrate his own experience here as one who was himself outcast and downtrodden. I think he saw himself in the eyes of the poor and the lowly. He told us that if we were looking for him, that’s where we would find him. So we could think of the beatitudes as a kind of homecoming for Jesus, a moment in which he himself is resting in love, at rest right in the place where he belongs. You are blessed, he says to them, and in that moment he is one with them just as he is one with God. I can almost imagine that this moment of homecoming and belonging gave him a vast sense of patience. His vision of us from high on that mountain is maybe part of what allows him to let us be who we are, let us take our time coming to him. He sees the blessedness we can’t begin yet to express ourselves.
It's a paradox, but probably not an accident, that the ways of being that Jesus describes in this sermon on the mount can be ways of getting cut off from other people. Poverty of spirit, like physical poverty, can make you excluded from systems of justice, isolated in grief, everyone around you speaking evil of you and persecuting you for no reason. Or you are forgotten: too meek to push your way to the front of the line, looking to make peace where all is war and destruction and peace is just a laughable afterthought, dismissed from the beginning as a peacemaker. Trying to practice mercy in a merciless environment. What friends do you have? Jesus recognizes himself I think in this awful isolation. that threatens us at every moment.
There he is, the very love of God incarnate, one day to be executed like a criminal and abandoned by his friends. Jesus knows about isolation and exile, and he knows that there is a particular beauty, a particular healing, in looking into the eyes of the poor and the meek and those who long for justice, and being one with them. Knowing that in his gaze they are one with God, that he is the meeting place between human frailty and divine life.
The awful isolation to which we willingly subject an outsider is just swept away in his loving gaze. The doors open and the walls come tumbling down.
Now that loving gaze that we feel coming from Jesus is also the gaze of the church if we are really being the church. That knowing look of union is the church’s work. It’s one way to describe what the sacraments and the word of God and the life of the church are all doing: they are teaching the world its blessedness in the eyes of God. The church is gazing on all who suffer, on all who are cast out, with the eyes of Jesus, teaching all of us our blessedness, our beauty, our pride.
That’s the work of the church. Sadly, there are at least two things we know about this work of the church, we in the LGBTQ+ community. One: we know that the church is shockingly broken, shockingly unable to show us our beauty. Yes, the Episcopal Church has, after a lengthy controversy, and with some wonderful leadership, come around to a place of witness, and we can be grateful for that and for the good work of other denominations. It feels so good to gather like this.
But it has to be said that as a whole church, as Christians, as the body of Christ throughout the world, as the historical bearers of the word and the sacraments, we are still much more apt to trample on a queer or transgender kid than we are to mirror their great beauty. We still represent a faith that doesn’t want to see itself in that particular form of lowliness. It would be so much easier for the average Christian to imagine that a young transgender person doesn’t exist than to look and see ourselves in them. And a certain number of Christians will go to great lengthas to make it clear that transgender kids need not exist. Christians are still refusing that vision. Or worse, Christians are deliberately and often cynically targeting the queer and trans communities for persecution.
So that’s the first thing we know in our communities: how the Church is broken. The second thing we know is that as queer, non-binary, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, gay, and allied people we are and have long been a powerful force that calls the Church simply to become itself. We are here, we have argued, we are queer, we are fabulous. We are much more than a subgroup or the latest in a long line of “issues” to be faced. We are not a theological dispute.
We are a mirror in which Jesus sees himself reflected. Who needs to be more beautiful than that? Jesus sees himself in our vulnerability, in our growing fear of isolation and persecution. Whenever we are targeted Jesus sees himself. When we mourn, when we thirst for justice. When jobs and relationships and wedding cakes and safe housing and acknowledgement in the classroom and basic human respect are unavailable to us because we are just too queer. In those times—and yes, those times are now—in those times we are bright reflections of the blessed face of Jesus. And if the church wants to know Jesus, the church needs to know us. Never forget it: if the church wants to be the church it must know you.
Of course the sorrow of missing out on that wonderful exchange of blessing doesn’t stop with just us and Jesus. We know that it’s not just us. We know that there are injuries from wealth and poverty and colonialism, harm done by categories of race and ability, forms of brutal discrimination all around and also everywhere within our own communities--intersecting and overlapping and sometimes competing ways that we just refuse to see Jesus where he sees himself. And yes, we know about the violence in our streets and the rot in our government and the constant dread about the future.
But on a day like this, when we can gather in pride and love, when we can hear ourselves described as blessed and we can believe it for a moment, when St. Martin’s throws its doors open and declares that you and I belong here--that’s when we know that we have a powerful gift to share with the church and with the world.
That look of love that Jesus casts on us, knowing that look, is something we have to offer to other Christians. To come here today to celebrate our pride by praising God with prayer and music and community is to start some very good work in the world. We are here together this evening learning how to do the work of the church, how to turn to the world like Jesus does, how to catch the eye of the one who needs to be seen, how to recognize Jesus in that one, and how to say it over and over in a loving exchange:
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you.
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
Jun 05, 2022 |
Ticks in the Boxwoods
| The Rev. James H. Littrell
Ticks in the Boxwoods
Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Day of Pentecost, June 5, 2022.
Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin’s by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Once upon a time, there was an old (ish) retired (sort of) gay (totally) Episcopal priest who arrived, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, at a lovely--idyllic even--Episcopal church sitting in a lovely swath of greenery almost at the apex of the tallest hill in a great and ancient city (ancient by American standards anyway) in a part of the world, relatively temperate and plentifully watered, not too far but far enough from a great ocean, for millennia populated by a great variety of more or less indigenous people, most recently people who called themselves Lenape, and more recently (in human time) settled by a strange group of humans who had crossed that self-same ocean, at some risk to life and limb and, in some cases, fortune. In varying degrees, these new people had left their homes far away in search of, variously, better lives, fuller liberty, greater opportunity and perhaps fortune. Sailing up a great river from the ocean, they eventually landed and began to settle in, made rough homes, dug rough passages from pathways, and then rough streets and roads from these passages, traversed a tributary of the great river, crossed the peninsula created by the two rivers. Therein they made plans for and executed a city of sorts, a city of square parks, interlaced by parallel and perpendicular streets named for lovely green trees. Many of these people were members of a new religious society, a people who styled themselves Friends and who claimed to come in peace, seeking harmony with all God’s holy creation and all God’s creatures. Indeed, right behind me in that window back there, as many of you know, is one notion of the leader of that first settling society. William Penn his name was, and up there he is smoking a pipe of peace with his new Lenape neighbors, a pipe, he and his Society said, was of peace and brotherly love. That, in fact, is what he named the city: Philadelphia.
Like most human aspirations to perfection, the city fairly quickly fell short of its own expressed values. Faith and commerce held hands, and, yes, Indian wrestled, until Friend’s quest for a city based in and living out the loving values it espoused, collapsed under the sheer power of the vast commercial enterprises that inevitably unfolded in the land. So rich was it in abundance and resource that the urge to commerce and the concomitant necessity of ordinance to safeguard the engines of that commerce, and the power necessary to maintain order and law, all combined and simply vanquished the initial impulse to be a city of mutual love, based in the God of love and the love of God.
Time passed. The great city grew and grew and grew. The indigenous people, mutual friends though Friends may have wanted them to be, withered and perished under the onslaught of commerce and trade. There arrived others, too, non-Friends, seizing the handles of burgeoning wealth and opportunity with very little aspiration to brotherly or sisterly love as foundational in their actual lives. Some of the early Friends and then, in greater numbers, the people who arrived a little later, came to the growing city with other dark-hued humans from Africa, humans who were nonetheless numbered and registered right along with sheep and goats and cows and horses as property and as chattel. They too were harnessed, quite literally, to the great engines of commerce.
The city grew yet larger. A great war came with the great king across the ocean who thought the land and commerce and a portion of all its proceeds belonged to him. The war was fought in the name of many things, most often liberty and freedom from foreign oppression. Some said, though, that it was a war mainly about who benefited from the great abundance of the new country and from its growing wealth. The new city and country won the war, but freedom did not come to many, and certainly not to the enslaved humans of the city, who continued to help empower the great civic enterprise for yet quite a long time, even, in one way or another, right up to right now. One of them, or someone’s idea of one of them, a kneeling child, is also pictured in that window behind me, and if you haven’t looked, you perhaps should. I was shown it yesterday, and it quite literally took my breath away. Thank God for the Holy Spirit and its flames of fire!
But back to the city. The city, fueled by a continuing and abundant and growing supply of raw materials and resources arriving from every corner of the known world, continued to grow apace, and a marvelous thing happened: a steam powered engine was invented and before long there arrived in the newly uniting states (though not united until after yet another ferocious war) a thing called a railroad, vast engines and great carrier trolleys ran on steel tracks, enormous and efficient, and the spokes of this vast new thing drove out from every city in the new country into the places around and far beyond them, harvesting ever more of the abundance, and eviscerating almost every single indigenous person who stood in the way of these mighty wheels and the freight they carried.
Philadelphia was no exception. In fact, as many of you may know, the greatest railroad and the largest corporation in the world in its time was born and sustained right here, for almost a century. At the same time, some of those visionary and creative Philadelphians imagined whole new communities linked to the heart of the great city by rail, places where the makers and beneficiaries of commerce could once again have their homes and enjoy their leisure in green and pleasant environs, up in the forested hills and across the rivers’ tributaries, high above but convenient to the business of the now thriving but also very very dirty city. Churches were built in these new communities, indeed purposefully built, because churches, and especially Episcopal churches--and in the case of this particular community--not one but two Episcopal churches--churches were deemed essential in the making and preservation of an ordered and peaceful, green and pleasant and prosperous community. And thus was made the still very green and pleasant community and the church embedded in it, into which the old (ish) priest, sort of retired priest, very gay priest, unexpectedly arrived one day in May in the year 2022, 330 years after William Penn, of the Society of Friends (whom the Episcopalians and others called jeeringly Quakers because of their spirit-filled quaking manner of fervid religious speech while they gathered for worship in their Meeting houses) founded the city of Philadelphia. 330 years later.
The priest was happy, he found, to be called so suddenly out of his pandemic induced retirement (for there had indeed been, indeed still was, a terrible global pandemic, in which millions and millions of humans had and were still dying). He felt relatively safe, being shot full of a new miraculous vaccine and tucked mostly safe behind a good mask, and he was delighted - delighted - to be amongst the people of the community, whom he found to be, in his early days with them, generous of spirit, moderately adventurous, deeply concerned for the fabric and program and spiritual enterprise of their community, and mostly confident in its future.
And so this old priest, who had arrived in this idyllic place quite soon after not one, not two, but three resident priests, all of long standing, had moved on to other callings, one after another, the latest departure having been the senior priest, began to try together to gather themselves up in the bonds of God’s love in these early days. And the old priest and the community of God’s love at St. Martin’s, after a minute or two of mutual sizing one another up, began gingerly and, at least in the priest’s case, tenderly, to try to discern together a path into the future to which they were together called.
And for the old(ish) priest, the enterprise was experienced almost completely as joy, even though in those early days were full of tragedy in the community and in the nation. He was so glad to be again among loving and caring and completely imperfect human beings again. He rejoiced to himself and to his beloved Louis, his companion for lo the last 43 years, who pronounced to the priest that he seemed happy again, which made him, Louis, happy too.
And the newly arrived old(ish) priest, whose name was Jim and who people mostly called Fr. Jim began to have many wonderfully enriching and enlightening conversations, some of them delving deep into his new parishioner’s lives, some hinting at riches yet to come, one conversant even going so far as to thank him for his own imperfections, or, as that person styled them, for his slight bumbling, which they said gave them and the whole community permission to be a little less than perfect too. And that, in this community where so much perfection was often expected and even demanded, and which perhaps too often had little tolerance for the bumble, it seemed, was a little bit of grace. The old(ish) priest, anyway, had long since given up most of his aspirations to perfection and was working hard at just being an honest and helpful and competent priest and pastor as much as he could be in this slightly fraught time. So he thought a little bumbling was fine, and even if it wasn’t fine, it was, as they say, what it was; and he was who he was.
And then there came a day, it was the day before the great Feast of Pentecost: Pentecost, when all the people of God in Christ in all the whole world were to celebrate in thousands of ways and hundreds of tongues, the day long ago when, in a rush as of a violent wind and with tongues as of fire, the Divine Spirit was made manifest and palpable in the human community. The Day of Pentecost, when people of every language and across every single diverse shape and manifestation of humankind, came to know that all things could become new, and ancient hurts dissolved, and resolved, and visions for the future seen and then made real, and dreams dreamed into life, when united in God’s powerful love and filled with God’s mighty Breath, and lit up by the Fire of Christ’s love, when faithful but a little bit bewildered people became drunk on the sheer magnificence of God’s glory, and began to learn again the truth of Jesus’ promised Peace and the urgency of Jesus’ call to do the actual work of Love. And in the doing, to find God’s Peace, the Peace, the Blessed Assurance, that every now and then, abolishes the troubled heart and the fearful soul.
So it was that day, on the eve of Pentecost, when the old (ish) priest sat out there beside the columbarium on a bench surrounded by sage and boxwood for a conversation with another parishioner. And as they delved deeper into the talking, and as they did, the old priest’s companion on the bench, rather suddenly reached toward the priest’s neck, surprising the old man a little, and then asked if he could take something off the priest’s collar. “I think it might be a tick,” he said, and Father Jim said in response, “Definitely! Have at it!” And it was a tick indeed, and then shortly there appeared another on Father’s neck just above the collar, and then another on his sleeve, and then he felt a little creepy crawl up the back of his neck--another tick! And his companion said, “Yep, ticks in the boxwood. Ticks like it in the boxwood.” “Is that so,” said the old priest, rejoicing - rejoicing - that he had yet again learned a new thing, and suggesting they move quickly away from the boxwood, which is what they did.
So this is a parable. In seminary school they teach you that parables have just one main point.
At the risk of insulting your considerable intelligences, let me suggest to you that you think as I did about the history of that boxwood, and of this green and pleasant place, and its ancient boxwood smell, the smell, for me, of old coastal towns in the south, the smell of English gardens, the smell of all that history that brings us to this day, which is in fact Pentecost. And then remember, as all that history, often wondrous and often terrible and frequently painful and, here in this place especially, seeming almost idyllic in its outcomes, all that history unfolds in your minds, to call to mind the ticks that lurk in the boxwood, happily awaiting your company.
Pentecost calls us toward unity of spirit, toward living more fully into God’s compassion, toward being honest and reconciling and forgiving people, toward fuller and more open hearts and lives, and yes, pocketbooks, and most of all, into the activity which is God’s love, not as children unaware, but as fully forming humans, never forgetting that there be ticks in the boxwood, that imperfection is our most perfect state, and that bumbling but fiery Love is the best love of all.
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
Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin’s by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Once upon a time, there was an old (ish) retired (sort of) gay (totally) Episcopal priest who arrived, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, at a lovely--idyllic even--Episcopal church sitting in a lovely swath of greenery almost at the apex of the tallest hill in a great and ancient city (ancient by American standards anyway) in a part of the world, relatively temperate and plentifully watered, not too far but far enough from a great ocean, for millennia populated by a great variety of more or less indigenous people, most recently people who called themselves Lenape, and more recently (in human time) settled by a strange group of humans who had crossed that self-same ocean, at some risk to life and limb and, in some cases, fortune. In varying degrees, these new people had left their homes far away in search of, variously, better lives, fuller liberty, greater opportunity and perhaps fortune. Sailing up a great river from the ocean, they eventually landed and began to settle in, made rough homes, dug rough passages from pathways, and then rough streets and roads from these passages, traversed a tributary of the great river, crossed the peninsula created by the two rivers. Therein they made plans for and executed a city of sorts, a city of square parks, interlaced by parallel and perpendicular streets named for lovely green trees. Many of these people were members of a new religious society, a people who styled themselves Friends and who claimed to come in peace, seeking harmony with all God’s holy creation and all God’s creatures. Indeed, right behind me in that window back there, as many of you know, is one notion of the leader of that first settling society. William Penn his name was, and up there he is smoking a pipe of peace with his new Lenape neighbors, a pipe, he and his Society said, was of peace and brotherly love. That, in fact, is what he named the city: Philadelphia.
Like most human aspirations to perfection, the city fairly quickly fell short of its own expressed values. Faith and commerce held hands, and, yes, Indian wrestled, until Friend’s quest for a city based in and living out the loving values it espoused, collapsed under the sheer power of the vast commercial enterprises that inevitably unfolded in the land. So rich was it in abundance and resource that the urge to commerce and the concomitant necessity of ordinance to safeguard the engines of that commerce, and the power necessary to maintain order and law, all combined and simply vanquished the initial impulse to be a city of mutual love, based in the God of love and the love of God.
Time passed. The great city grew and grew and grew. The indigenous people, mutual friends though Friends may have wanted them to be, withered and perished under the onslaught of commerce and trade. There arrived others, too, non-Friends, seizing the handles of burgeoning wealth and opportunity with very little aspiration to brotherly or sisterly love as foundational in their actual lives. Some of the early Friends and then, in greater numbers, the people who arrived a little later, came to the growing city with other dark-hued humans from Africa, humans who were nonetheless numbered and registered right along with sheep and goats and cows and horses as property and as chattel. They too were harnessed, quite literally, to the great engines of commerce.
The city grew yet larger. A great war came with the great king across the ocean who thought the land and commerce and a portion of all its proceeds belonged to him. The war was fought in the name of many things, most often liberty and freedom from foreign oppression. Some said, though, that it was a war mainly about who benefited from the great abundance of the new country and from its growing wealth. The new city and country won the war, but freedom did not come to many, and certainly not to the enslaved humans of the city, who continued to help empower the great civic enterprise for yet quite a long time, even, in one way or another, right up to right now. One of them, or someone’s idea of one of them, a kneeling child, is also pictured in that window behind me, and if you haven’t looked, you perhaps should. I was shown it yesterday, and it quite literally took my breath away. Thank God for the Holy Spirit and its flames of fire!
But back to the city. The city, fueled by a continuing and abundant and growing supply of raw materials and resources arriving from every corner of the known world, continued to grow apace, and a marvelous thing happened: a steam powered engine was invented and before long there arrived in the newly uniting states (though not united until after yet another ferocious war) a thing called a railroad, vast engines and great carrier trolleys ran on steel tracks, enormous and efficient, and the spokes of this vast new thing drove out from every city in the new country into the places around and far beyond them, harvesting ever more of the abundance, and eviscerating almost every single indigenous person who stood in the way of these mighty wheels and the freight they carried.
Philadelphia was no exception. In fact, as many of you may know, the greatest railroad and the largest corporation in the world in its time was born and sustained right here, for almost a century. At the same time, some of those visionary and creative Philadelphians imagined whole new communities linked to the heart of the great city by rail, places where the makers and beneficiaries of commerce could once again have their homes and enjoy their leisure in green and pleasant environs, up in the forested hills and across the rivers’ tributaries, high above but convenient to the business of the now thriving but also very very dirty city. Churches were built in these new communities, indeed purposefully built, because churches, and especially Episcopal churches--and in the case of this particular community--not one but two Episcopal churches--churches were deemed essential in the making and preservation of an ordered and peaceful, green and pleasant and prosperous community. And thus was made the still very green and pleasant community and the church embedded in it, into which the old (ish) priest, sort of retired priest, very gay priest, unexpectedly arrived one day in May in the year 2022, 330 years after William Penn, of the Society of Friends (whom the Episcopalians and others called jeeringly Quakers because of their spirit-filled quaking manner of fervid religious speech while they gathered for worship in their Meeting houses) founded the city of Philadelphia. 330 years later.
The priest was happy, he found, to be called so suddenly out of his pandemic induced retirement (for there had indeed been, indeed still was, a terrible global pandemic, in which millions and millions of humans had and were still dying). He felt relatively safe, being shot full of a new miraculous vaccine and tucked mostly safe behind a good mask, and he was delighted - delighted - to be amongst the people of the community, whom he found to be, in his early days with them, generous of spirit, moderately adventurous, deeply concerned for the fabric and program and spiritual enterprise of their community, and mostly confident in its future.
And so this old priest, who had arrived in this idyllic place quite soon after not one, not two, but three resident priests, all of long standing, had moved on to other callings, one after another, the latest departure having been the senior priest, began to try together to gather themselves up in the bonds of God’s love in these early days. And the old priest and the community of God’s love at St. Martin’s, after a minute or two of mutual sizing one another up, began gingerly and, at least in the priest’s case, tenderly, to try to discern together a path into the future to which they were together called.
And for the old(ish) priest, the enterprise was experienced almost completely as joy, even though in those early days were full of tragedy in the community and in the nation. He was so glad to be again among loving and caring and completely imperfect human beings again. He rejoiced to himself and to his beloved Louis, his companion for lo the last 43 years, who pronounced to the priest that he seemed happy again, which made him, Louis, happy too.
And the newly arrived old(ish) priest, whose name was Jim and who people mostly called Fr. Jim began to have many wonderfully enriching and enlightening conversations, some of them delving deep into his new parishioner’s lives, some hinting at riches yet to come, one conversant even going so far as to thank him for his own imperfections, or, as that person styled them, for his slight bumbling, which they said gave them and the whole community permission to be a little less than perfect too. And that, in this community where so much perfection was often expected and even demanded, and which perhaps too often had little tolerance for the bumble, it seemed, was a little bit of grace. The old(ish) priest, anyway, had long since given up most of his aspirations to perfection and was working hard at just being an honest and helpful and competent priest and pastor as much as he could be in this slightly fraught time. So he thought a little bumbling was fine, and even if it wasn’t fine, it was, as they say, what it was; and he was who he was.
And then there came a day, it was the day before the great Feast of Pentecost: Pentecost, when all the people of God in Christ in all the whole world were to celebrate in thousands of ways and hundreds of tongues, the day long ago when, in a rush as of a violent wind and with tongues as of fire, the Divine Spirit was made manifest and palpable in the human community. The Day of Pentecost, when people of every language and across every single diverse shape and manifestation of humankind, came to know that all things could become new, and ancient hurts dissolved, and resolved, and visions for the future seen and then made real, and dreams dreamed into life, when united in God’s powerful love and filled with God’s mighty Breath, and lit up by the Fire of Christ’s love, when faithful but a little bit bewildered people became drunk on the sheer magnificence of God’s glory, and began to learn again the truth of Jesus’ promised Peace and the urgency of Jesus’ call to do the actual work of Love. And in the doing, to find God’s Peace, the Peace, the Blessed Assurance, that every now and then, abolishes the troubled heart and the fearful soul.
So it was that day, on the eve of Pentecost, when the old (ish) priest sat out there beside the columbarium on a bench surrounded by sage and boxwood for a conversation with another parishioner. And as they delved deeper into the talking, and as they did, the old priest’s companion on the bench, rather suddenly reached toward the priest’s neck, surprising the old man a little, and then asked if he could take something off the priest’s collar. “I think it might be a tick,” he said, and Father Jim said in response, “Definitely! Have at it!” And it was a tick indeed, and then shortly there appeared another on Father’s neck just above the collar, and then another on his sleeve, and then he felt a little creepy crawl up the back of his neck--another tick! And his companion said, “Yep, ticks in the boxwood. Ticks like it in the boxwood.” “Is that so,” said the old priest, rejoicing - rejoicing - that he had yet again learned a new thing, and suggesting they move quickly away from the boxwood, which is what they did.
So this is a parable. In seminary school they teach you that parables have just one main point.
At the risk of insulting your considerable intelligences, let me suggest to you that you think as I did about the history of that boxwood, and of this green and pleasant place, and its ancient boxwood smell, the smell, for me, of old coastal towns in the south, the smell of English gardens, the smell of all that history that brings us to this day, which is in fact Pentecost. And then remember, as all that history, often wondrous and often terrible and frequently painful and, here in this place especially, seeming almost idyllic in its outcomes, all that history unfolds in your minds, to call to mind the ticks that lurk in the boxwood, happily awaiting your company.
Pentecost calls us toward unity of spirit, toward living more fully into God’s compassion, toward being honest and reconciling and forgiving people, toward fuller and more open hearts and lives, and yes, pocketbooks, and most of all, into the activity which is God’s love, not as children unaware, but as fully forming humans, never forgetting that there be ticks in the boxwood, that imperfection is our most perfect state, and that bumbling but fiery Love is the best love of all.
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
