Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields
Dec 12, 2021 |
The Sting of Forgiveness
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Sting of Forgiveness
Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Third Sunday of Advent.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv3_...
Let us pray. Lord Christ, help us to endure the sting of forgiveness, that we may become for you your brain in the world.
Jarrett and I are part of a Zoom-based lectionary bible study for diocesan priests. We’re on it each week and a group of us read the Sunday lections and talk about what we might preach about. So if you wonder where my sermons come from, I get them from other people. Or at least, they can really focus me on what I need to pay attention to in these readings, and so this week, I want to give credit where credit is due.
Because I’ve been thinking a lot about a story that one of the clergy, Robin, told about forgiveness. When her daughter was young, Robin shared, she attended a home daycare that taught the children that when someone apologized to them – as preschoolers are routinely made to do – they were not to say, “it’s ok.” They were encouraged to say “I forgive you.”
Because when someone harms another person it’s not ok, and their apology doesn’t make what they did ok, and sometimes the feelings that you're feeling are still not ok. So if you want to accept their apology, they children were taught, say “I forgive you.” Now, for things like cutting in line or hoarding the best markers, that can be a pretty quick process. For the bigger things we grow into, getting to I forgive you can take a little longer. As they say, little kid little problems, big kids big problems. But that’s a different sermon.
One day, Robin said, she apologized to her daughter for something she did, like you do when you’re a parent, and her three year old said “I forgive you.” That comment startled her. And Robin said it made her a little angry. Who was this preschooler to say if Robin was forgiven or not? Who was she to forgive me?
And here was revealed to Robin the power that is contained in the I of I forgive you. Because it acknowledges that there’s a relationship involved there, and the one who was hurt has some agency in determining what happens next, whether things are really, indeed, ok.
Robin’s story made me realize that I’m like this. Very often when I apologize, I want the person I’m addressing to tell me that what I did didn’t hurt, it wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t my fault, it’s ok. Often that means what I really want is to be released from my feelings of imperfection, to get rid of the gnaw of guilt, rather than really wanting the person I’ve hurt to be healed.
So it stings to hear “I forgive you.” It stings to hear “Yes you hurt me, and I appreciate that you are taking responsibility for it, and I accept that, and I want to stay in relationship with you.” “I forgive you” is a little more truthful than “it’s ok.” It’s judgement without condemnation. Judgement that’s graceful and merciful. And that sting just might prompt me to wonder what the path is to things really being okay.
And now we’re in the territory of the gospel, though at first glance it seems a bit harsh. I think it’s the brood of vipers language that gives it away. That is the tell that this isn’t a healing ritual. Because John has stepped into the waters of the old time prophet, of one called by God to help Israel face the truth of who it is and to get ready for what’s coming next. Because it’s going to demand the full strength of their covenant with God.
John’s baptism didn’t make the impure clean, it didn’t remove sin. It ritually acknowledged that the life had already been cleaned up, that the change had been made, the heart re-turned to God. So unless you've done that work, don’t get in John’s baptism line.
So what then does John’s baptism with water do, and what does Jesus’s baptism with fire do? John’s baptism invites Israel to return to right relationship with God; it proclaims that Israel has repented and is ready for the life that God will initiate through Jesus.
“What are we to do, John, to show that we are ready for your baptism?,” ask the crowd and the tax collectors and the soldiers?
“Stop sinning”, says John. “Stop invoking your privilege, and hoarding resources, and keeping aid back from those who need it. Stop misusing your power, and extorting people.”
“I’m a prophet,” John would have said, “don’t tell me this is the first time you’re hearing this. Stop sinning. Get your covenant with God firmly in place. Because when Jesus comes baptizing, look out.”
“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” John says of Jesus. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
Luke calls that “good news.” Threshings, pitchforks, unquenchable fire – that sounds like judgement to me. And I think this is where we often go in our imagination of what God’s judgement of us is. It sounds like brutal, terrifying condemnation. But what if that threshing, and chaff removal and sifting is actually what an encounter with God’s love looks like? What if that’s the refining process that happens when God says “I forgive you?”
“From our perspective it looks like judgment. From God’s perspective it looks like love.” Jarrett observed in our lectionary group. That is because God tells us the truth about ourselves. Sure it stings. Because truth stings. What if God’s judgement invites us to see ourselves as God sees us, as we truly are. What if that involves freeing the core of us that God rejoices in and delights in? What if on the other side of God’s judgement, we see ourselves as beloved as God saw us from the beginning, and still sees us?
Consider how John the Baptist describes the baptism offered by Jesus. The threshing floor, the winnowing fork, the fire that burns the chaff -- these are all means of removing the extraneous material from that valuable, useful grain. If we are talking about people who have already repented and emerged from John’s baptismal water, then it looks to me like Jesus is processing the grain for its actual use.
This is the process of God’s love in us – removing that which is not love, which is not necessary, which is perhaps not true about us and carefully gathering up and preserving what is true, beloved, essential to us and to God.
You can call this process judgement. You can call it love. To those of us who do not want to let go of any of it, it sounds terrifying. Because I’d rather things be ok, than to admit that I need to be forgiven of all that does not flow from love. I think sometimes I’d rather bring all my sins to God with a little apology for packing so much, coming with so much baggage and just have God say, “it’s ok, it’s fine, come as you are.”
But real reconciliation with God means bringing all the stuff we can’t manage to put down and allowing God to remove it for us. When God says “I forgive you,” I think it means, “I see your sin, I acknowledge that you have done harm to yourself and others and me, and I remove its power over you and your attachment to it, and we are in relationship”. That includes things like our shame, our fear, our perfectionism, our tendency to dominate, our inability to forgive ourselves and be merciful to others. And God calls upon the wind of God’s spirit to drive it away from us and the fire of the spirit to consume it entirely.
In stories of God’s judgement I think we forget what remains, that there is something in us that is also wonderful, beautiful, useful, effective, necessary to the work of God. The grain of wheat in us that is seed and food remains. That is what God’s truthful gaze, God’s fiery love, frees in us. Consider that when you say amen to the communion bread today. You are not just consuming the wheat, you are becoming the wheat. And that act of threshing and winnowing and sifting is the powerful work of our transformation into Christ’s body.
This puts a new shine on the rose candle of Gaudete Sunday, in this third week of Advent, on this day where we are waiting to make special room to rejoice. It is a lovely light in a darkened room. But put your finger in that flame, and it burns. Because it’s fire. “The Lord is near,” says the heat of that flame. “Do not worry about anything, it says. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
And that as Luke says, is indeed good news.
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
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv3_...
Let us pray. Lord Christ, help us to endure the sting of forgiveness, that we may become for you your brain in the world.
Jarrett and I are part of a Zoom-based lectionary bible study for diocesan priests. We’re on it each week and a group of us read the Sunday lections and talk about what we might preach about. So if you wonder where my sermons come from, I get them from other people. Or at least, they can really focus me on what I need to pay attention to in these readings, and so this week, I want to give credit where credit is due.
Because I’ve been thinking a lot about a story that one of the clergy, Robin, told about forgiveness. When her daughter was young, Robin shared, she attended a home daycare that taught the children that when someone apologized to them – as preschoolers are routinely made to do – they were not to say, “it’s ok.” They were encouraged to say “I forgive you.”
Because when someone harms another person it’s not ok, and their apology doesn’t make what they did ok, and sometimes the feelings that you're feeling are still not ok. So if you want to accept their apology, they children were taught, say “I forgive you.” Now, for things like cutting in line or hoarding the best markers, that can be a pretty quick process. For the bigger things we grow into, getting to I forgive you can take a little longer. As they say, little kid little problems, big kids big problems. But that’s a different sermon.
One day, Robin said, she apologized to her daughter for something she did, like you do when you’re a parent, and her three year old said “I forgive you.” That comment startled her. And Robin said it made her a little angry. Who was this preschooler to say if Robin was forgiven or not? Who was she to forgive me?
And here was revealed to Robin the power that is contained in the I of I forgive you. Because it acknowledges that there’s a relationship involved there, and the one who was hurt has some agency in determining what happens next, whether things are really, indeed, ok.
Robin’s story made me realize that I’m like this. Very often when I apologize, I want the person I’m addressing to tell me that what I did didn’t hurt, it wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t my fault, it’s ok. Often that means what I really want is to be released from my feelings of imperfection, to get rid of the gnaw of guilt, rather than really wanting the person I’ve hurt to be healed.
So it stings to hear “I forgive you.” It stings to hear “Yes you hurt me, and I appreciate that you are taking responsibility for it, and I accept that, and I want to stay in relationship with you.” “I forgive you” is a little more truthful than “it’s ok.” It’s judgement without condemnation. Judgement that’s graceful and merciful. And that sting just might prompt me to wonder what the path is to things really being okay.
And now we’re in the territory of the gospel, though at first glance it seems a bit harsh. I think it’s the brood of vipers language that gives it away. That is the tell that this isn’t a healing ritual. Because John has stepped into the waters of the old time prophet, of one called by God to help Israel face the truth of who it is and to get ready for what’s coming next. Because it’s going to demand the full strength of their covenant with God.
John’s baptism didn’t make the impure clean, it didn’t remove sin. It ritually acknowledged that the life had already been cleaned up, that the change had been made, the heart re-turned to God. So unless you've done that work, don’t get in John’s baptism line.
So what then does John’s baptism with water do, and what does Jesus’s baptism with fire do? John’s baptism invites Israel to return to right relationship with God; it proclaims that Israel has repented and is ready for the life that God will initiate through Jesus.
“What are we to do, John, to show that we are ready for your baptism?,” ask the crowd and the tax collectors and the soldiers?
“Stop sinning”, says John. “Stop invoking your privilege, and hoarding resources, and keeping aid back from those who need it. Stop misusing your power, and extorting people.”
“I’m a prophet,” John would have said, “don’t tell me this is the first time you’re hearing this. Stop sinning. Get your covenant with God firmly in place. Because when Jesus comes baptizing, look out.”
“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” John says of Jesus. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
Luke calls that “good news.” Threshings, pitchforks, unquenchable fire – that sounds like judgement to me. And I think this is where we often go in our imagination of what God’s judgement of us is. It sounds like brutal, terrifying condemnation. But what if that threshing, and chaff removal and sifting is actually what an encounter with God’s love looks like? What if that’s the refining process that happens when God says “I forgive you?”
“From our perspective it looks like judgment. From God’s perspective it looks like love.” Jarrett observed in our lectionary group. That is because God tells us the truth about ourselves. Sure it stings. Because truth stings. What if God’s judgement invites us to see ourselves as God sees us, as we truly are. What if that involves freeing the core of us that God rejoices in and delights in? What if on the other side of God’s judgement, we see ourselves as beloved as God saw us from the beginning, and still sees us?
Consider how John the Baptist describes the baptism offered by Jesus. The threshing floor, the winnowing fork, the fire that burns the chaff -- these are all means of removing the extraneous material from that valuable, useful grain. If we are talking about people who have already repented and emerged from John’s baptismal water, then it looks to me like Jesus is processing the grain for its actual use.
This is the process of God’s love in us – removing that which is not love, which is not necessary, which is perhaps not true about us and carefully gathering up and preserving what is true, beloved, essential to us and to God.
You can call this process judgement. You can call it love. To those of us who do not want to let go of any of it, it sounds terrifying. Because I’d rather things be ok, than to admit that I need to be forgiven of all that does not flow from love. I think sometimes I’d rather bring all my sins to God with a little apology for packing so much, coming with so much baggage and just have God say, “it’s ok, it’s fine, come as you are.”
But real reconciliation with God means bringing all the stuff we can’t manage to put down and allowing God to remove it for us. When God says “I forgive you,” I think it means, “I see your sin, I acknowledge that you have done harm to yourself and others and me, and I remove its power over you and your attachment to it, and we are in relationship”. That includes things like our shame, our fear, our perfectionism, our tendency to dominate, our inability to forgive ourselves and be merciful to others. And God calls upon the wind of God’s spirit to drive it away from us and the fire of the spirit to consume it entirely.
In stories of God’s judgement I think we forget what remains, that there is something in us that is also wonderful, beautiful, useful, effective, necessary to the work of God. The grain of wheat in us that is seed and food remains. That is what God’s truthful gaze, God’s fiery love, frees in us. Consider that when you say amen to the communion bread today. You are not just consuming the wheat, you are becoming the wheat. And that act of threshing and winnowing and sifting is the powerful work of our transformation into Christ’s body.
This puts a new shine on the rose candle of Gaudete Sunday, in this third week of Advent, on this day where we are waiting to make special room to rejoice. It is a lovely light in a darkened room. But put your finger in that flame, and it burns. Because it’s fire. “The Lord is near,” says the heat of that flame. “Do not worry about anything, it says. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
And that as Luke says, is indeed good news.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Dec 05, 2021 |
COVID Retreat
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
COVID Retreat
Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Second Sunday of Advent.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
So early on in my quarantine when I was suffering from Covid these last two weeks (I've had a negative test and I'm completely safe) I decided to turn my quarantine and convalescence into a spiritual retreat. Covid is definitely a Wilderness moment. What does one do with that? Well, one turns it into a retreat where I could take the solitute and the isolation and the loneliness and the misery and use it as a refining fire, as it says in Malachi, to put my soul before God and let God do God's work. That's what a retreat is after all. We get rid of all the distractions and routines and buzzings in our head and the attachments in our hearts so that we can simply put ourselves before God and say, "Work this out in me."
It's an act of surrender in some ways. And that turned out to be a very good use of Covid actually. I could simply say, "God, here I am in my struggles and my frustrations and my failures, and my fallings short, my sins and my confusions and my contradictions." I could put it out there without excuse. "And before you are a merciful God, I can do that." It starts with this gratitude, that we know we can approach God in our full contradictions and find a companion and someone to help sort us out.
So I had a quarantine retreat. I was quarantined into the bedroom and bathroom, with no company and dinner and lunch on a tray.
And what came to me as an image was this cheap toy I found once in a science museum. I've always loved the gift shops of science museums and this was a plexiglass box - a rectangle - and it was filled with iron filings, and the kit came with a number of magnets and the fun you had, such as it was, was applying the magnet to the filings. And of course when you apply the magnet to the filings they go from a disorganized mass into a wonderful organized set that follows the magnetic field of the magnet.
So from this jungle you get this wonderful pattern of the iron filings following the magnetic field of the magnet you apply.
This image came to me as a gift, because I realized that left to myself, I’m a pretty chaotic pile of filings. I'm going off in every different direction. I'm going off in contradictory directions at the same time. I cause myself suffering and angst and anxiety and worry. I fall short and I sin. It's that same pile that I bring into God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, and then in God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, my life finds enlightenment, and finds a pattern that is healthy. A pattern that is humble. A pattern that is connected to God most of all. And as we enter into Advent, I want to recommend to you, however you can do it - hopefully without the Covid part - to have some Wilderness time and put your chaotic pile of filings in front of God and let the love of God and the care of God and God's mercy sort them out and help you find your shape again.
Today on the second Sunday of Advent I am very very grateful for the example of Zechariah and Elizabeth and John and Mary and Joseph. These humble, humble people who are so far off to the side of history, the underside of history compared to Tiberius and Pilate and Annas and Caiaphas. All these key names that Luke spreads across the story are all known in the Mediterranean world and then off in this little corner is where the real action is happening. The Empire might spread good news of sorts, but the good news of God is happening in these humble folks, who give us the clues about how to live in the love and the care and the mercy of God that ushers the presence of Christ into the world.
When we look at the Song of Zechariah or the Song of Mary, we look at these humble folk who ushered in our Lord. They were prepared to know God and to welcome God and to receive God because they were immersed in the story of God. We look at the Song of Mary and this incredible Song of Zechariah, and we see people who knew the promises, who held onto the promises of God, who knew that God was a God of liberation, a God of mercy, a God of forgiveness, a God whose tender mercy at the dawn breaks from on high on those who sit in darkness. A God who doesn't forget God's people. A God who is available for us to bring our whole lives to. They were people who lived in the magnetic field of God's grace. And so we immerse ourselves in the worship and the study of the scripture and prayer to be like them: people receptive, people prepared, people ready to see our God return.
We see St. Paul at his most pastoral in the letter to the Philippians where he's just gushing with love for his community, and I so relate to him, because when I read that passage I think of you. I just love being with you in prayer. I just want you to know the completion of grace. He's like a good pastor, wanting his people to be ready for the day of the Lord, the day the Lord returns. Every day is that day. That's the secret. As we live everyday in the day of the Lord, God is always completely present. God is never present in part. God is only ever fully present - we are absent. We are distracted. We are missing what God is doing.
But we are called to this wonderful reckoning where we can be in God's presence fully. Fully, complete, whole, actualized as the people god has called us to be, because we've been prepared. Because like those magnetic fields, we've been aligned with God. And this is our hope, this is our proclamation, this is what we live for in the season is to know that we can live our lives before God, live our lives in the presence of God on that day when God is fully present with us, which is every day in every moment. Thanks be to God.
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
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
So early on in my quarantine when I was suffering from Covid these last two weeks (I've had a negative test and I'm completely safe) I decided to turn my quarantine and convalescence into a spiritual retreat. Covid is definitely a Wilderness moment. What does one do with that? Well, one turns it into a retreat where I could take the solitute and the isolation and the loneliness and the misery and use it as a refining fire, as it says in Malachi, to put my soul before God and let God do God's work. That's what a retreat is after all. We get rid of all the distractions and routines and buzzings in our head and the attachments in our hearts so that we can simply put ourselves before God and say, "Work this out in me."
It's an act of surrender in some ways. And that turned out to be a very good use of Covid actually. I could simply say, "God, here I am in my struggles and my frustrations and my failures, and my fallings short, my sins and my confusions and my contradictions." I could put it out there without excuse. "And before you are a merciful God, I can do that." It starts with this gratitude, that we know we can approach God in our full contradictions and find a companion and someone to help sort us out.
So I had a quarantine retreat. I was quarantined into the bedroom and bathroom, with no company and dinner and lunch on a tray.
And what came to me as an image was this cheap toy I found once in a science museum. I've always loved the gift shops of science museums and this was a plexiglass box - a rectangle - and it was filled with iron filings, and the kit came with a number of magnets and the fun you had, such as it was, was applying the magnet to the filings. And of course when you apply the magnet to the filings they go from a disorganized mass into a wonderful organized set that follows the magnetic field of the magnet.
So from this jungle you get this wonderful pattern of the iron filings following the magnetic field of the magnet you apply.
This image came to me as a gift, because I realized that left to myself, I’m a pretty chaotic pile of filings. I'm going off in every different direction. I'm going off in contradictory directions at the same time. I cause myself suffering and angst and anxiety and worry. I fall short and I sin. It's that same pile that I bring into God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, and then in God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, my life finds enlightenment, and finds a pattern that is healthy. A pattern that is humble. A pattern that is connected to God most of all. And as we enter into Advent, I want to recommend to you, however you can do it - hopefully without the Covid part - to have some Wilderness time and put your chaotic pile of filings in front of God and let the love of God and the care of God and God's mercy sort them out and help you find your shape again.
Today on the second Sunday of Advent I am very very grateful for the example of Zechariah and Elizabeth and John and Mary and Joseph. These humble, humble people who are so far off to the side of history, the underside of history compared to Tiberius and Pilate and Annas and Caiaphas. All these key names that Luke spreads across the story are all known in the Mediterranean world and then off in this little corner is where the real action is happening. The Empire might spread good news of sorts, but the good news of God is happening in these humble folks, who give us the clues about how to live in the love and the care and the mercy of God that ushers the presence of Christ into the world.
When we look at the Song of Zechariah or the Song of Mary, we look at these humble folk who ushered in our Lord. They were prepared to know God and to welcome God and to receive God because they were immersed in the story of God. We look at the Song of Mary and this incredible Song of Zechariah, and we see people who knew the promises, who held onto the promises of God, who knew that God was a God of liberation, a God of mercy, a God of forgiveness, a God whose tender mercy at the dawn breaks from on high on those who sit in darkness. A God who doesn't forget God's people. A God who is available for us to bring our whole lives to. They were people who lived in the magnetic field of God's grace. And so we immerse ourselves in the worship and the study of the scripture and prayer to be like them: people receptive, people prepared, people ready to see our God return.
We see St. Paul at his most pastoral in the letter to the Philippians where he's just gushing with love for his community, and I so relate to him, because when I read that passage I think of you. I just love being with you in prayer. I just want you to know the completion of grace. He's like a good pastor, wanting his people to be ready for the day of the Lord, the day the Lord returns. Every day is that day. That's the secret. As we live everyday in the day of the Lord, God is always completely present. God is never present in part. God is only ever fully present - we are absent. We are distracted. We are missing what God is doing.
But we are called to this wonderful reckoning where we can be in God's presence fully. Fully, complete, whole, actualized as the people god has called us to be, because we've been prepared. Because like those magnetic fields, we've been aligned with God. And this is our hope, this is our proclamation, this is what we live for in the season is to know that we can live our lives before God, live our lives in the presence of God on that day when God is fully present with us, which is every day in every moment. Thanks be to God.
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
Nov 28, 2021 |
Are We There Yet?
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Are We There Yet?
Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the First Sunday of Advent.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CA...
Let us pray.
In our family, we are the relatives that travel home. We have always tended to live several hours away from the family core, and so rather than being the ones that host Thanksgiving or Christmas, we’re the ones that drive - in our case to all the way to Northeastern Ohio. Now, when we lived in Rochester, New York, we made the arduous trek through Erie, PA every December – for which we should get a special family medal. When we lived in Baltimore MD, the six hour trip home could sometimes become 12 hours because of the curse of The Pennsylvania Turnpike.
And as any of you know when you are traveling with young children on such journeys that are long and boring year after year you search for those signs that will help them to know that the journey is nearly over.
Are we there yet?
“No, but look, it's the Sapp Brothers Coffee Pot. That means we’re near Clearfield, we only have an hour to go.” And there it would be rising up out of the mountains of Central Pennsylvania , as a sign that we were almost done with that trip home from Cleveland back to State College where we lived at the time. Now apparently that coffee pot is a landmark from Omaha to Pennsylvania and it will lead you if you follow it to a truck stop. I appreciated it more as a sign that better coffee lay ahead if we were only patient. Regardless, it was a sign of hope on a long car trip home.
Signs are essential to the upkeep of hope – especially in the long journey that we’re on with God. That’s because a big part of the life of faith is waiting – waiting for delivery from exile, waiting for an end to oppression and injustice, waiting for the Messiah to arrive, the Kingdom to Come, waiting for Christ to return. Today’s Scriptures are a good example – they acknowledge that longing of God’s people.
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” promises Jeremiah.
“Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith,” writes Paul to the dear community of the Thessalonians; the first community he founded.
“Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near," Luke’s Gospel quotes Jesus as saying, after he enumerates the various things that will happen before God’s glory is fully revealed.
Advent is a season that relishes waiting – waiting for a coming Christmas that we know has already arrived. Waiting for a second coming of which we know not the time or the place.
To help us through, God sends signs that acknowledge our longing. Burning Bushes and 12 plagues. Oil that does not run out. Transfigurations. The Scriptures also offer us prophetic performances and veiled apocalyptic imagery like we have in today’s Gospel. And people of faith are notorious for misreading them. God’s signs are characteristically inexplicit in their timing, and when made into predictions, they invariably let us down.
There is an art to reading God’s signs.
Now, when my husband Jess and I met in college and began to spend lots of time together, we often found ourselves looking for someplace to eat. We’d leave a class wondering which of the half dozen dining establishments in Kent, Ohio, would we choose that day. Let’s follow the signs, Jess would say. A fallen branch on the sidewalk would suggest we go left. A crumpled piece of notebook paper sent us forward. A shadow pointing a certain way would steer us in another direction. Inevitably we’d end up at Wendy’s.
I would not say that this was God’s will. Divine signs don’t work like that. Now the Apostle Paul, on the other hand, was very good at reading God’s signs. I think he saw them everywhere, especially in the communities of faith that he helped to found. Listen to his delight in the Thessalonian community that he is separated from and longing for:
“How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” he writes to them.
They are the sign that Paul turns to in order to endure the long slog of his work as an apostle. They give him hope as the Body of Christ in action in real time. The Thessalonians are not perfect – he knows that their faith is lacking in places. But that doesn’t limit his joy. They are enough for him, because they speak to the presence of Christ among the faithful, even as they await Jesus’ coming in glory.
Here is the true power of God’s signs; of Christ’s promises. They answer some of our most persistent questions, though not the one we usually find ourselves asking. More often than not, we cry out with the psalmist, “How long O Lord?” And we think what we want is a day and a time. But the questions that God answers are: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK? And to those questions God answers: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” The Kingdom of God is at hand. Redemption is drawing near. God is with us. This is what God’s signs reveal as we journey from the now of God’s will to the not yet of God’s promises.
Because God knows that it hardly helps us to know how much time it will be exactly before our longing ends, when it’s the present moment that feels like an eternity and seems so hard to endure. Often when things are very near their completion, time seems to slow down and stand still. I remember this from when I was in labor with my kids, and in that last week before they were born, everything just stopped and the inevitable seemed like it was never going to happen. Waiting for news – good or bad – can feel like this. Keeping vigil at a death can feel like this.
And then in an instant everything changes, and the end begins.
So we can’t really trust our sense of time, and the impatience we find ourselves in because of it, but we can acknowledge our longing for the fullness of God’s love to be revealed, for the return of Christ in glory, for the new world coming. And at the same time, we can relish the evidence of it along the way.
And very often it is not in the earthquakes or the roaring of the seas that God’s presence is signified, as much as it’s in communities of faith, like Paul’s dear Thessalonians or our faith community here. God’s signs abound here. Quotidian maybe, but astonishing to me all the same – the compassionate listening, the waiting by the bedside, the checking in on one another, the sharing at morning prayer, the ability to forgive or to try something new. These too are God’s signs. They answer the questions: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK?
And in these signs God answers:” I am here. I am with you. And all will be well.” Amen.
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
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CA...
Let us pray.
In our family, we are the relatives that travel home. We have always tended to live several hours away from the family core, and so rather than being the ones that host Thanksgiving or Christmas, we’re the ones that drive - in our case to all the way to Northeastern Ohio. Now, when we lived in Rochester, New York, we made the arduous trek through Erie, PA every December – for which we should get a special family medal. When we lived in Baltimore MD, the six hour trip home could sometimes become 12 hours because of the curse of The Pennsylvania Turnpike.
And as any of you know when you are traveling with young children on such journeys that are long and boring year after year you search for those signs that will help them to know that the journey is nearly over.
Are we there yet?
“No, but look, it's the Sapp Brothers Coffee Pot. That means we’re near Clearfield, we only have an hour to go.” And there it would be rising up out of the mountains of Central Pennsylvania , as a sign that we were almost done with that trip home from Cleveland back to State College where we lived at the time. Now apparently that coffee pot is a landmark from Omaha to Pennsylvania and it will lead you if you follow it to a truck stop. I appreciated it more as a sign that better coffee lay ahead if we were only patient. Regardless, it was a sign of hope on a long car trip home.
Signs are essential to the upkeep of hope – especially in the long journey that we’re on with God. That’s because a big part of the life of faith is waiting – waiting for delivery from exile, waiting for an end to oppression and injustice, waiting for the Messiah to arrive, the Kingdom to Come, waiting for Christ to return. Today’s Scriptures are a good example – they acknowledge that longing of God’s people.
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” promises Jeremiah.
“Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith,” writes Paul to the dear community of the Thessalonians; the first community he founded.
“Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near," Luke’s Gospel quotes Jesus as saying, after he enumerates the various things that will happen before God’s glory is fully revealed.
Advent is a season that relishes waiting – waiting for a coming Christmas that we know has already arrived. Waiting for a second coming of which we know not the time or the place.
To help us through, God sends signs that acknowledge our longing. Burning Bushes and 12 plagues. Oil that does not run out. Transfigurations. The Scriptures also offer us prophetic performances and veiled apocalyptic imagery like we have in today’s Gospel. And people of faith are notorious for misreading them. God’s signs are characteristically inexplicit in their timing, and when made into predictions, they invariably let us down.
There is an art to reading God’s signs.
Now, when my husband Jess and I met in college and began to spend lots of time together, we often found ourselves looking for someplace to eat. We’d leave a class wondering which of the half dozen dining establishments in Kent, Ohio, would we choose that day. Let’s follow the signs, Jess would say. A fallen branch on the sidewalk would suggest we go left. A crumpled piece of notebook paper sent us forward. A shadow pointing a certain way would steer us in another direction. Inevitably we’d end up at Wendy’s.
I would not say that this was God’s will. Divine signs don’t work like that. Now the Apostle Paul, on the other hand, was very good at reading God’s signs. I think he saw them everywhere, especially in the communities of faith that he helped to found. Listen to his delight in the Thessalonian community that he is separated from and longing for:
“How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” he writes to them.
They are the sign that Paul turns to in order to endure the long slog of his work as an apostle. They give him hope as the Body of Christ in action in real time. The Thessalonians are not perfect – he knows that their faith is lacking in places. But that doesn’t limit his joy. They are enough for him, because they speak to the presence of Christ among the faithful, even as they await Jesus’ coming in glory.
Here is the true power of God’s signs; of Christ’s promises. They answer some of our most persistent questions, though not the one we usually find ourselves asking. More often than not, we cry out with the psalmist, “How long O Lord?” And we think what we want is a day and a time. But the questions that God answers are: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK? And to those questions God answers: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” The Kingdom of God is at hand. Redemption is drawing near. God is with us. This is what God’s signs reveal as we journey from the now of God’s will to the not yet of God’s promises.
Because God knows that it hardly helps us to know how much time it will be exactly before our longing ends, when it’s the present moment that feels like an eternity and seems so hard to endure. Often when things are very near their completion, time seems to slow down and stand still. I remember this from when I was in labor with my kids, and in that last week before they were born, everything just stopped and the inevitable seemed like it was never going to happen. Waiting for news – good or bad – can feel like this. Keeping vigil at a death can feel like this.
And then in an instant everything changes, and the end begins.
So we can’t really trust our sense of time, and the impatience we find ourselves in because of it, but we can acknowledge our longing for the fullness of God’s love to be revealed, for the return of Christ in glory, for the new world coming. And at the same time, we can relish the evidence of it along the way.
And very often it is not in the earthquakes or the roaring of the seas that God’s presence is signified, as much as it’s in communities of faith, like Paul’s dear Thessalonians or our faith community here. God’s signs abound here. Quotidian maybe, but astonishing to me all the same – the compassionate listening, the waiting by the bedside, the checking in on one another, the sharing at morning prayer, the ability to forgive or to try something new. These too are God’s signs. They answer the questions: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK?
And in these signs God answers:” I am here. I am with you. And all will be well.” Amen.
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
Nov 21, 2021 |
Intimations of Christ's Kingdom
| The Rev. Carol Duncan
Intimations of Christ's Kingdom
Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Last Sunday After Pentecost, Christ the King Day. Today's readings are:
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaints_B_RCL.html
Intimations of Christ's Kingdom
The Rev. Carol Duncan
The Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 21, 2021
Happy New Year’s Eve of the Church Year! Today is Christ the King, the last Sunday before we go to Advent and Year C in the lectionary. In anticipation, please be seated.
You may be wondering, what is the kingdom that we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday? I expect you all know it is not a political entity or human territory at all. The Letter to the Romans says the kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Gospel of Mark says disciples were given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for us outside, everything comes only in parables. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says the kingdom is Truth. I want to convey the truth and the dream of kingdom using imagination rather than analytical reasoning, because Christ’s kingdom is not actually graspable by logic.
I had a powerful experience of this otherworldly realm in my freshman year in college. This was in 1963, before Hippies, barely beyond Beatniks. I lived in a residence that was a converted manor type house, up a hill away from the main campus. The group of women who lived there that year were inching toward the new age. We wore black tights. We let our hair grow long.
One night in the late fall I was feeling unusually exhilarated after reading from Genesis for my Western Civ course. I needed to do something expressive. I climbed out the second-floor window onto the forbidden fire escape. It was cold, but I had a coat. From where I was no house lights showed. I lay back and gazed up at the darkness. The stars were bright.
Suddenly I was falling upward into those stars. The jolt took my breath away. I heard no words, but I entered a sort of meeting, a great presence. It was a night vision and a conversion. I had dropped into the holy. My imagination was kindled that night in my 19th year, and it glimmers to this day. You all get the benefit of it now.
The kingdom of God is laid out before us today in three marvelous lessons. The vision in Daniel is like a psychedelic panorama of a celestial throne room, a fantasia of rippling color and splendor. To enter this kingdom space, it may help to close your eyes and breathe it in. The throne is fiery flames, and its wheels are burning fire. A stream of fire issues and flows out from the Ancient One’s presence. A thousand thousands serve him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand attending him. You can hear the music if you let your imagination go, as if Tyrone and the choir were giving their ultimate fanfare. This must be a real place because Ezekial saw it too, and maybe also Paul when he visited the third heaven, whether in body or out of body he couldn’t tell. Into this throne room, coming with the clouds of heaven, enters one like a human being. Daniel couldn’t have known, but we know this is Jesus. A human being like us blazes into the everlasting dominion that shall not pass away. Eternity doesn’t pass away because it has no beginning and no end, no boundaries. It inhabits, surrounds, contains and interpenetrates our cosmic time and space. Sometimes on a deep blue-sky fall day, the blazing leaves can give us a feel for it.
In the Revelation passage, we are ushered into that same throne room. Jesus enters it with the clouds of heaven just like in Daniel’s vision. Jesus is now reverently known as the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. And Jesus is the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. In this throne room Jesus has made us to be his kingdom. He knows we can be priests to serve his God and Father. To Jesus in this throne room belong the glory and dominion forever. And in this throne room every eye will see him, no matter what their life has been. All who have pierced Jesus by denying that we have seen him hungry or thirsty or naked or in prison, and seeing, did not attempt to relieve his suffering. We will see him and wail. Then we fall into the divine loving arms of redemption. Yes, this will be. This is happening in God’s time, which is all time. Time which is and was and is to come, without boundary or limits, eternal.
In John’s Gospel we arrive with a bump. You can open your eyes. This is a factual throne room with a factual king, Pilate. Into this throne room Jesus walks escorted by Roman guards clanking their spears. Jesus is on trial for his life. Are you the king of the Judeans, Pilate asks. The damning question is about Kingship, not about nationality. It is about earthly power. Finite power, although Pilate is incapable of grasping his own finitude. Instead of cowering before this earthly king, Jesus the ever empathic one wonders what Pilate is really thinking. Is he asking someone else’s question or his own? If it is his own, Jesus is interested and wants to know more.
But Pilate considers himself superior to a subject people. He says, I’m not a conquered Judean, am I? The authorities of your conquered nation want me to take care of their problem. What makes them think you are so important? Jesus replied that indeed Pilate is correct, his followers are not fighting to keep him from dying. His kingdom is not from this world. Pilate bears down on factual information. Are you a king? Jesus replies that he is in this world only to witness to the greater realm of truth. He gives Pilate a chance to catch a glimpse of Truth - everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. Do you hear me Pilate? Do you hear me World? I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come to me.
We must look now at our own lives and imagine what Jesus will ask us. May we seek the kingdom in this mortal life in which all have access to good schools, nourishing food, secure homes, satisfying work with adequate wages. Where when we come face to face with every other human, we convey dignity and respect as though we have just arisen from our baptismal immersion. And if we are fortunate, in our piece of the kingdom we will have music of the choir’s greatest fanfares to rejoice us.
Happy Christ the King Sunday, the threshold of a new year and an intimation of God’s eternal realm. Amen.
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
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm 93
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaints_B_RCL.html
Intimations of Christ's Kingdom
The Rev. Carol Duncan
The Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 21, 2021
Happy New Year’s Eve of the Church Year! Today is Christ the King, the last Sunday before we go to Advent and Year C in the lectionary. In anticipation, please be seated.
You may be wondering, what is the kingdom that we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday? I expect you all know it is not a political entity or human territory at all. The Letter to the Romans says the kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Gospel of Mark says disciples were given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for us outside, everything comes only in parables. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says the kingdom is Truth. I want to convey the truth and the dream of kingdom using imagination rather than analytical reasoning, because Christ’s kingdom is not actually graspable by logic.
I had a powerful experience of this otherworldly realm in my freshman year in college. This was in 1963, before Hippies, barely beyond Beatniks. I lived in a residence that was a converted manor type house, up a hill away from the main campus. The group of women who lived there that year were inching toward the new age. We wore black tights. We let our hair grow long.
One night in the late fall I was feeling unusually exhilarated after reading from Genesis for my Western Civ course. I needed to do something expressive. I climbed out the second-floor window onto the forbidden fire escape. It was cold, but I had a coat. From where I was no house lights showed. I lay back and gazed up at the darkness. The stars were bright.
Suddenly I was falling upward into those stars. The jolt took my breath away. I heard no words, but I entered a sort of meeting, a great presence. It was a night vision and a conversion. I had dropped into the holy. My imagination was kindled that night in my 19th year, and it glimmers to this day. You all get the benefit of it now.
The kingdom of God is laid out before us today in three marvelous lessons. The vision in Daniel is like a psychedelic panorama of a celestial throne room, a fantasia of rippling color and splendor. To enter this kingdom space, it may help to close your eyes and breathe it in. The throne is fiery flames, and its wheels are burning fire. A stream of fire issues and flows out from the Ancient One’s presence. A thousand thousands serve him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand attending him. You can hear the music if you let your imagination go, as if Tyrone and the choir were giving their ultimate fanfare. This must be a real place because Ezekial saw it too, and maybe also Paul when he visited the third heaven, whether in body or out of body he couldn’t tell. Into this throne room, coming with the clouds of heaven, enters one like a human being. Daniel couldn’t have known, but we know this is Jesus. A human being like us blazes into the everlasting dominion that shall not pass away. Eternity doesn’t pass away because it has no beginning and no end, no boundaries. It inhabits, surrounds, contains and interpenetrates our cosmic time and space. Sometimes on a deep blue-sky fall day, the blazing leaves can give us a feel for it.
In the Revelation passage, we are ushered into that same throne room. Jesus enters it with the clouds of heaven just like in Daniel’s vision. Jesus is now reverently known as the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. And Jesus is the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. In this throne room Jesus has made us to be his kingdom. He knows we can be priests to serve his God and Father. To Jesus in this throne room belong the glory and dominion forever. And in this throne room every eye will see him, no matter what their life has been. All who have pierced Jesus by denying that we have seen him hungry or thirsty or naked or in prison, and seeing, did not attempt to relieve his suffering. We will see him and wail. Then we fall into the divine loving arms of redemption. Yes, this will be. This is happening in God’s time, which is all time. Time which is and was and is to come, without boundary or limits, eternal.
In John’s Gospel we arrive with a bump. You can open your eyes. This is a factual throne room with a factual king, Pilate. Into this throne room Jesus walks escorted by Roman guards clanking their spears. Jesus is on trial for his life. Are you the king of the Judeans, Pilate asks. The damning question is about Kingship, not about nationality. It is about earthly power. Finite power, although Pilate is incapable of grasping his own finitude. Instead of cowering before this earthly king, Jesus the ever empathic one wonders what Pilate is really thinking. Is he asking someone else’s question or his own? If it is his own, Jesus is interested and wants to know more.
But Pilate considers himself superior to a subject people. He says, I’m not a conquered Judean, am I? The authorities of your conquered nation want me to take care of their problem. What makes them think you are so important? Jesus replied that indeed Pilate is correct, his followers are not fighting to keep him from dying. His kingdom is not from this world. Pilate bears down on factual information. Are you a king? Jesus replies that he is in this world only to witness to the greater realm of truth. He gives Pilate a chance to catch a glimpse of Truth - everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. Do you hear me Pilate? Do you hear me World? I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come to me.
We must look now at our own lives and imagine what Jesus will ask us. May we seek the kingdom in this mortal life in which all have access to good schools, nourishing food, secure homes, satisfying work with adequate wages. Where when we come face to face with every other human, we convey dignity and respect as though we have just arisen from our baptismal immersion. And if we are fortunate, in our piece of the kingdom we will have music of the choir’s greatest fanfares to rejoice us.
Happy Christ the King Sunday, the threshold of a new year and an intimation of God’s eternal realm. Amen.
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
Nov 14, 2021 |
St. Martin Had Bad Hair
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
St. Martin Had Bad Hair
Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the St. Martin's Day, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28. Today's readings are:
Isaiah 58:6–12
Psalm 15
James 1:22-27
Matthew 25:31-40
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Nov/Martin...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of our patron saint Martin, for all the ways he has formed the soul of this parish and all the ways he has reflected the image of Christ into the world, challenging us ever deeper into the full meaning of your love for this world. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.
Happy St. Martin's Day. What does one say on St. Martin's Day? After all, there’s Merry Christmas, all right, Happy Easter, Happy St. Martin's Day, it's all the same. So every year I study up for St. Martin's Day by going deeper into the saint, and this year's big revelation, coming from his biographer, is that St. Martin had bad hair. His biographer goes out of his way actually to call it ugly hair, so bookmark that. We're getting back to it later. In the meantime I want to start in a place of gratitude.
I am so thankful for a series of talks that have been given the last month here in worship by lay leaders in our parish, starting with Al Good about a month ago and then Greg Cowhey did it at the eight o'clock service and Laura Sibson and Barbara Thomson and then Eugenie Dieck capped it off last week. These wonderful reflections on the meaning of St. Martins were a real gift to the community and to me because I could hear in them all the ways that God has gifted this community, and these talks were full of gratitude and they weren't ever boastful, they were never selling anything, they were never flattering us, they were just without ego and pure in their reflection of the goodness that God has given this parish.
And I was grateful and thought, yes this is true, this parish is centered on the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. And this parish is deeply prayerful. This is a praying community that knows the language of prayer both communally and individually and holds each other in prayer, and the world as well. There's a gift of prayerfulness here. And this community is worshipful, this community knows how to gather around the presence of the living Christ in sacrament and word and celebrate that gift of risen life. And this community is so eager to serve in loving care for each other and loving care for this community. This community understands the call to serve in the name of God, and so with gratitude I lift all those things up. We are a gifted community, gifted by God, and we say thanks be to God for it, and I want to say thanks be to God for Martin, our patron, who I truly believe has formed this community to have the character and soul that we have.
If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will be able to tell you the story of St. Martin so beautifully depicted in the window in the back of the church. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will probably do a pretty good job repeating Matthew 25 for you because we hear it at least once a year, and I believe these stories have deeply woven themselves into the character of the community. What's always interesting about a story that becomes well known is we can fall into the risk of it becoming commonplace; a moral platitude. We could take Matthew 25 that we read today and just turn it into a summary, “Jesus said be nice to the poor,” when there is so much more revealed in that story; when there are so many more layers of what God is doing with us and for us in that story.
It opened our eyes. Indeed at bible study this week one of our members opened my eyes to something I had never noticed about Matthew 25. I got to enjoy that surprise of God's address which is even in the story, right? People are shocked that they were serving Christ the whole time. And what surprised me, and this was Steve Barr, a member of the parish, he pointed out: “Jarrett, there are three groups of people in this passage. There are three groups of people.” And I was kind of fixated on two, because the goats and the sheep get my attention and they're meant to be anxiety producing, right? Am I a sheep? Am I a goat? Am I something in between? So I thought of just two groups in this passage but no, there's three groups in this passage, and one is the group that is already members of God's family. In that last line, “the members of God's family.”
Who are the members of God's family? Who forms the third group? They are the thirsty, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. They are already God's people. They are already part of God's family, and now knowing this we see a deeper challenge in the story, the challenge not just to serve but to recognize the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner as part of God's family, as our sisters and brothers in Christ.
They are kin-folk to us. They are our kin and this to me is part of the incredible scandal of this passage in the ancient world and now, because in the ancient world as now we really do walk through life, and I can name myself in this comment, thinking that our family is our primary unit of obligation and believing that our biological natal family is our primary obligation. We shape our resources and our world around that idea and it can become a way to rationalize accumulation beyond what we need, because we always say we're doing it for our families. And it can rationalize misappropriation of resources socially and structurally because we can invest vast sums of money in the education of our children while ignoring to the point of desperation the education of other children.
And underneath that is some notion that they are not part of our family, that we have a different set of obligations to them, and when we read this passage from Jesus we're challenged. We owe to our family what is owed to all families and we are together in the family of God. It's so challenging and stressful to read this passage about sheep and goats. Who is in my family? And Jesus even raises the ante a little bit because it's not just Christians or Jews who've been called together, it's the nations.
There’s this notion in this passage that even the nations who haven't the benefit of a covenant with God or Isaiah, who don't know this tradition, they know you take care of the poor. And the implication is if they know this, you should know even more because you have the gospel and you have the covenants and you have the prophets.
So this story is pretty stress-inducing. It's a challenge, and when I feel challenged like that by scripture I know the story is telling me, “you have more conversion to do. Jarrett, you have more conversion of heart, mind, strength and spirit to do, because someday you will love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength but you're not there yet.” More conversion. And let’s bring St. Martin in again here (and we're about to get to the haircut...I'm almost there.)
We bring St. Martin in again because that cutting of his cloak that we all know so well (he cuts his cloak in half and he gives it to the beggar and the beggar appears to him as Christ) is a story of charity and it is also a story of conversion and it's just the first cut that Martin makes. It is just the first sacrifice that he makes. Everything else for Martin, including his hair, is going away. His toga, his uniform, the rest of his cloak, his horse, his sword, his armor, his social status are all going to be left behind and relinquished as he grows into his vocation in Christ.
Now, Romans were very sartorially inclined. They liked a good robe, they liked a good haircut, they liked to smell nice. Martin did none of those things. And I'm maybe sensitive to this part of the story because I am in a line of military officers in my family. If you know anything about the military you know there's haircuts, and so generations of Kerbel men never had hair that touched their ears, never had hair that touched their neck, never had hair that was over about an inch long, because that's part of military discipline.
And remember that Martin grew up in a military family. His dad was also a Roman soldier, so this cutting off of his hair, and I know this from personal experience, was political, was an assertion of a worldview, was symbolic of more than hair. Believe me, growing up in the 70s where my mom wanted to take me to the hair salon to have a nice long hair thing going, I know that hair is political.
Martin had ugly hair on purpose. Martin wore a goatskin tunic with a rough rope around it and no shoes, no big wide leather Roman belt, because he was setting himself apart for a life of conversion; a lifelong journey into conversion by identifying himself with the family of God, with the members of God's family. On the margin, in the rough, in the vulnerability he would struggle mightily and slowly, spiritually, experience the conversion that allowed God's light to shine through him without obstacle. He gained spiritual transparency through the discipline of a hermit living in isolation and struggle and boredom. He lived in a way that allowed space for his demons to come up. His ego, his malformed imagination, his passions and appetites, all the stuff that great spiritual masters like Anthony of Egypt struggled with in their hermitages, he too struggled.
I want to bring out for us today this part of the story a little more because I think Martin is offering us something we need to know. I think in this age of great social turmoil and unrest and discomfort we need to know about this gift of going inside. We need to know about this gift of spiritual struggle that clarifies the soul and that brings us into transparency with God, not just for ourselves but ultimately for the world. Because this is kind of part of the miracle of St. Martin, he’s one of these people who goes off as a hermit and keeps getting dragged back into public life because he was a leader.
But his transformation in the wilderness set him up to be a very different person in the world. His transformation in the wilderness set him up to speak a different language to a really rancorous, troubled world. Remember the time he was living in: the 4th century. What a time of social unrest. We have immigration and invasion, we have political regimes rising and falling. First we have Constantine who makes Orthodox Christianity the religion of the empire, then we have his son who inserts Aryanism in that place, then we have Julian the apostate who takes it back to polytheism. It's a roller coaster. It's lurching. But in that space was Martin who did something remarkable. Coming out of his hermitage he was able to welcome the heretics, advocate for them, bring them back into the fold and preach mercy, all while sharing the good news. He wasn't a persecuting person. At the same time he still reached out to the polytheists and welcomed them into the fold and shared with them the good news with gentleness. He walked across Europe to convert his mother.
Martin gives us this example of a soul that is so soaked in Jesus Christ that he finds the space of peace and compassion and mercy in a world gone rancorous and cantankerous. And so for me I hear Martin calling us not just to brave acts of sacrifice and charity but to brave acts of inner spiritual struggle, so that we continue as a church to become a different sort of people in the world, reflecting and mirroring this great patron saint of ours who shines so brightly with Jesus Christ. Amen.
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
Isaiah 58:6–12
Psalm 15
James 1:22-27
Matthew 25:31-40
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Nov/Martin...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of our patron saint Martin, for all the ways he has formed the soul of this parish and all the ways he has reflected the image of Christ into the world, challenging us ever deeper into the full meaning of your love for this world. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.
Happy St. Martin's Day. What does one say on St. Martin's Day? After all, there’s Merry Christmas, all right, Happy Easter, Happy St. Martin's Day, it's all the same. So every year I study up for St. Martin's Day by going deeper into the saint, and this year's big revelation, coming from his biographer, is that St. Martin had bad hair. His biographer goes out of his way actually to call it ugly hair, so bookmark that. We're getting back to it later. In the meantime I want to start in a place of gratitude.
I am so thankful for a series of talks that have been given the last month here in worship by lay leaders in our parish, starting with Al Good about a month ago and then Greg Cowhey did it at the eight o'clock service and Laura Sibson and Barbara Thomson and then Eugenie Dieck capped it off last week. These wonderful reflections on the meaning of St. Martins were a real gift to the community and to me because I could hear in them all the ways that God has gifted this community, and these talks were full of gratitude and they weren't ever boastful, they were never selling anything, they were never flattering us, they were just without ego and pure in their reflection of the goodness that God has given this parish.
And I was grateful and thought, yes this is true, this parish is centered on the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. And this parish is deeply prayerful. This is a praying community that knows the language of prayer both communally and individually and holds each other in prayer, and the world as well. There's a gift of prayerfulness here. And this community is worshipful, this community knows how to gather around the presence of the living Christ in sacrament and word and celebrate that gift of risen life. And this community is so eager to serve in loving care for each other and loving care for this community. This community understands the call to serve in the name of God, and so with gratitude I lift all those things up. We are a gifted community, gifted by God, and we say thanks be to God for it, and I want to say thanks be to God for Martin, our patron, who I truly believe has formed this community to have the character and soul that we have.
If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will be able to tell you the story of St. Martin so beautifully depicted in the window in the back of the church. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will probably do a pretty good job repeating Matthew 25 for you because we hear it at least once a year, and I believe these stories have deeply woven themselves into the character of the community. What's always interesting about a story that becomes well known is we can fall into the risk of it becoming commonplace; a moral platitude. We could take Matthew 25 that we read today and just turn it into a summary, “Jesus said be nice to the poor,” when there is so much more revealed in that story; when there are so many more layers of what God is doing with us and for us in that story.
It opened our eyes. Indeed at bible study this week one of our members opened my eyes to something I had never noticed about Matthew 25. I got to enjoy that surprise of God's address which is even in the story, right? People are shocked that they were serving Christ the whole time. And what surprised me, and this was Steve Barr, a member of the parish, he pointed out: “Jarrett, there are three groups of people in this passage. There are three groups of people.” And I was kind of fixated on two, because the goats and the sheep get my attention and they're meant to be anxiety producing, right? Am I a sheep? Am I a goat? Am I something in between? So I thought of just two groups in this passage but no, there's three groups in this passage, and one is the group that is already members of God's family. In that last line, “the members of God's family.”
Who are the members of God's family? Who forms the third group? They are the thirsty, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. They are already God's people. They are already part of God's family, and now knowing this we see a deeper challenge in the story, the challenge not just to serve but to recognize the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner as part of God's family, as our sisters and brothers in Christ.
They are kin-folk to us. They are our kin and this to me is part of the incredible scandal of this passage in the ancient world and now, because in the ancient world as now we really do walk through life, and I can name myself in this comment, thinking that our family is our primary unit of obligation and believing that our biological natal family is our primary obligation. We shape our resources and our world around that idea and it can become a way to rationalize accumulation beyond what we need, because we always say we're doing it for our families. And it can rationalize misappropriation of resources socially and structurally because we can invest vast sums of money in the education of our children while ignoring to the point of desperation the education of other children.
And underneath that is some notion that they are not part of our family, that we have a different set of obligations to them, and when we read this passage from Jesus we're challenged. We owe to our family what is owed to all families and we are together in the family of God. It's so challenging and stressful to read this passage about sheep and goats. Who is in my family? And Jesus even raises the ante a little bit because it's not just Christians or Jews who've been called together, it's the nations.
There’s this notion in this passage that even the nations who haven't the benefit of a covenant with God or Isaiah, who don't know this tradition, they know you take care of the poor. And the implication is if they know this, you should know even more because you have the gospel and you have the covenants and you have the prophets.
So this story is pretty stress-inducing. It's a challenge, and when I feel challenged like that by scripture I know the story is telling me, “you have more conversion to do. Jarrett, you have more conversion of heart, mind, strength and spirit to do, because someday you will love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength but you're not there yet.” More conversion. And let’s bring St. Martin in again here (and we're about to get to the haircut...I'm almost there.)
We bring St. Martin in again because that cutting of his cloak that we all know so well (he cuts his cloak in half and he gives it to the beggar and the beggar appears to him as Christ) is a story of charity and it is also a story of conversion and it's just the first cut that Martin makes. It is just the first sacrifice that he makes. Everything else for Martin, including his hair, is going away. His toga, his uniform, the rest of his cloak, his horse, his sword, his armor, his social status are all going to be left behind and relinquished as he grows into his vocation in Christ.
Now, Romans were very sartorially inclined. They liked a good robe, they liked a good haircut, they liked to smell nice. Martin did none of those things. And I'm maybe sensitive to this part of the story because I am in a line of military officers in my family. If you know anything about the military you know there's haircuts, and so generations of Kerbel men never had hair that touched their ears, never had hair that touched their neck, never had hair that was over about an inch long, because that's part of military discipline.
And remember that Martin grew up in a military family. His dad was also a Roman soldier, so this cutting off of his hair, and I know this from personal experience, was political, was an assertion of a worldview, was symbolic of more than hair. Believe me, growing up in the 70s where my mom wanted to take me to the hair salon to have a nice long hair thing going, I know that hair is political.
Martin had ugly hair on purpose. Martin wore a goatskin tunic with a rough rope around it and no shoes, no big wide leather Roman belt, because he was setting himself apart for a life of conversion; a lifelong journey into conversion by identifying himself with the family of God, with the members of God's family. On the margin, in the rough, in the vulnerability he would struggle mightily and slowly, spiritually, experience the conversion that allowed God's light to shine through him without obstacle. He gained spiritual transparency through the discipline of a hermit living in isolation and struggle and boredom. He lived in a way that allowed space for his demons to come up. His ego, his malformed imagination, his passions and appetites, all the stuff that great spiritual masters like Anthony of Egypt struggled with in their hermitages, he too struggled.
I want to bring out for us today this part of the story a little more because I think Martin is offering us something we need to know. I think in this age of great social turmoil and unrest and discomfort we need to know about this gift of going inside. We need to know about this gift of spiritual struggle that clarifies the soul and that brings us into transparency with God, not just for ourselves but ultimately for the world. Because this is kind of part of the miracle of St. Martin, he’s one of these people who goes off as a hermit and keeps getting dragged back into public life because he was a leader.
But his transformation in the wilderness set him up to be a very different person in the world. His transformation in the wilderness set him up to speak a different language to a really rancorous, troubled world. Remember the time he was living in: the 4th century. What a time of social unrest. We have immigration and invasion, we have political regimes rising and falling. First we have Constantine who makes Orthodox Christianity the religion of the empire, then we have his son who inserts Aryanism in that place, then we have Julian the apostate who takes it back to polytheism. It's a roller coaster. It's lurching. But in that space was Martin who did something remarkable. Coming out of his hermitage he was able to welcome the heretics, advocate for them, bring them back into the fold and preach mercy, all while sharing the good news. He wasn't a persecuting person. At the same time he still reached out to the polytheists and welcomed them into the fold and shared with them the good news with gentleness. He walked across Europe to convert his mother.
Martin gives us this example of a soul that is so soaked in Jesus Christ that he finds the space of peace and compassion and mercy in a world gone rancorous and cantankerous. And so for me I hear Martin calling us not just to brave acts of sacrifice and charity but to brave acts of inner spiritual struggle, so that we continue as a church to become a different sort of people in the world, reflecting and mirroring this great patron saint of ours who shines so brightly with Jesus Christ. Amen.
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
Nov 07, 2021 |
Heaven All the Way to Heaven
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Heaven All the Way to Heaven
Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the All Saints Sunday, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27. Today's readings are:
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net:https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...
Heaven All the Way to Heaven
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, November 7 2021
The first things have passed away, Lord God. Help us to walk into the new thing that you are doing, as your saints. Amen.
Happy All Saints Day. It feels strange to have All Saints Day today when last Sunday was the eve of All Saints Day, on Halloween. There was this long stretchy middle because All Saints Day landed on a Monday and it gets moved to the following Sunday so that we can celebrate the feast of the church. So here we are.
As some of you know, last weekend I was away at a funeral in Ohio. My husband’s nephew died suddenly, tragically, at the age of 38. I’d known him since he was 5. The family is still trying to find its footing again, after what feels like an earthquake.
We got back last Sunday night as trick or treaters were making their way down our street. So for me it has felt like the Feast of All Saints all week long, as I’ve walked with the raw questions that fill the space left by a loss like this. So today’s a good day to face them head on.
On All Saints Day we as Church honor all the holy women and men of God who have died, the saints both known and unknown, especially those who led devout lives or were of heroic faith, and whom we count on being with God. Because I was raised a Catholic, I know this crowd pretty well.
When I was a little girl I loved to read the lives of the saints. On library day at St. Hilary School I would rush to the section of the library where they had the easy-reader books on the martyrs. I recall at least one tugging match with another kid over one of those books. Interesting that my behavior was far less than saintly when it came to getting my hands on those stories.
And oh what stories. I still remember the story of the first century martyr, this little boy who smuggled communion bread under his tunic to deliver it to Christians hiding in catacombs only to be discovered by his unbelieving friends and martyred right there on the street. And that resonated with me because that was not unlike the playground at St. Hilary’s School. There were also the gory pictures and the statuary, like St. Sebastian’s Church which was just down the street and they had a statue filled with arrows. And then there were those beautiful stories of the miracles, like the rose petals that fell from the sky at the death of young Therese of Lisieux, the little flower, the child of Jesus.
I’m not sure so much that it was the lives of the saints that really appealed to me as it was the deaths of the saints actually, when I think about it, because images of martyrdom were a very big part of my second-grade imagination of the saints, as were monastic tonsures and the habits of nuns. I can still see very vividly those water-colored portraits with the eyes sort of pointing towards heaven that were in my Picture Book of Saints, circa 1972. Perhaps some of you had one of those. It was yellow.
But All Saints Day isn’t just for the heroes. We roll in on this day as well All Souls Day, the Feast of the faithfully departed. We recall friends and loved ones who have died “in the faith.” Our nephew David will be in today’s necrology.
And this is where the celebration of the Feast of All Saints gets a bit tricker because the faith of our loved ones can be a very private thing, largely hidden from us, while the questions and doubts they had might actually walk with us, just as we walk with our own questions and our own doubts. We do not know what our beloved ones encounter at death, just as we don’t know what our death will bring. And so for me, the Feast of All Saints tends to be more about what I hope for or have faith in rather than what I’m absolutely certain of.
And that makes it a good day for me to be in Church. Because our worship reminds us of all we do know about God’s love as we have experienced it, its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and its welcome, its power to restore dignity and to fill people with life. We cry out to a God who is that love, and we want that love for those who have gone before us.
This is my leap of hope and faith and imagination when it comes to the Feast of All Saints and its questions – I believe that at death God makes the offer of eternal life abundantly clear, and that our choice to enter that life is no longer clouded by our moral failings, or our traumas, or our misunderstandings, or our limited human imagination. All those things are wiped away. But the choice remains, like a new covenant or a renewed vow.
Here’s the unspoken challenge then of the Feast of All Saints: why make the choice now? Why live as though we know what comes next, when we don’t fully, or we can’t really? To answer this question we, as church, turn again to what we know of God’s love as we’ve experienced it: its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and welcome, its power to restore dignity and its ability to fill people with life. We turn to a God who is that love, and we want that love in this life, for this world. And so we commit to living it as best we can, imperfectly, earnestly, in faith.
I think that is what the life of a saint looks like. Saints believe anyway – despite their doubts. They love anyway - despite the evil that tears things apart, that often tears them apart. And they reach for God anyway - despite all the limitations that make it hard to see God clearly. And God reaches back into that life with the will to be found.
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God; and they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away."
This from the author of Revelation, who is paraphrasing the prophets of old.
The story of the Raising of Lazarus that we heard today from John’s Gospel is a story of the passing of those first things. In the Gospel of John it’s the sign that the old way of death is gone. There is no waiting until the end of time when the dead shall be raised, which was a common idea in Israel. The time is now. The way is at hand.
And it’s interesting to me that Jesus stands on the threshold of this new age when death will be no more, and mourning and crying will be no more, when every tear will be wiped away, that Jesus stands on the edge of that new edge and he weeps for Lazarus who has died. I think this was the great consequence of God making the divine home among us – that God would feel what we feel: the loss, the catastrophe, the bewilderment experienced in the sluggish slowness of our time, even as God’s promise is poised to come rushing in in God’s time. God does not dismiss our misery because God knows how the story ends.
Jesus stands in the now and the not yet with Mary and Martha and their mourning friends, and he suffers with them in the loss of their brother. Because it is not really a comfort to say that eternal life is on the way – until it actually arrives. Meanwhile, Jesus lives the long moment of loss with them. He lives it with us. He is living it with my husband’s family in Ohio right now. And there is real comfort in that.
But John’s Gospel doesn’t stay there, it actually pauses there only briefly and then Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb and Lazarus comes forth. Alleluia! My favorite part of the story is when he emerges from the tomb all wrapped up in his burial clothes, and Jesus says to the shocked crowd of witnesses, “unbind him and let him go.”
Because that’s God’s call to us every-day saints - to unbind people from the stinking stuff that clings and inhibits and trips them up, to help them step into the new life that’s right at hand, like beautiful new clothes. Which makes the story sound a bit like Baptism, with its new garment, its cleansing waters and scented oil, its candle to light the way out of the tomb into light. And that’s why All Saints Day is traditionally a day for baptism. Not simply a day to recall those who have died, but to welcome new life as well. It is an Alpha and Omega sort of day.
The promise of the Feast of All Saints is that we need not wait for an old life to end and a new one to begin, even in the chaos of this current time.
It’s Heaven all the way to Heaven, writes Dorothy Day, my hero, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who I’m sure is in Heaven. She was paraphrasing Saint Catherine of Sienna, who reportedly said “All the way to Heaven is Heaven because Jesus is the way.”
And for now, on the Feast of All Saints, I will take their word for it. Amen.
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
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net:https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...
Heaven All the Way to Heaven
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, November 7 2021
The first things have passed away, Lord God. Help us to walk into the new thing that you are doing, as your saints. Amen.
Happy All Saints Day. It feels strange to have All Saints Day today when last Sunday was the eve of All Saints Day, on Halloween. There was this long stretchy middle because All Saints Day landed on a Monday and it gets moved to the following Sunday so that we can celebrate the feast of the church. So here we are.
As some of you know, last weekend I was away at a funeral in Ohio. My husband’s nephew died suddenly, tragically, at the age of 38. I’d known him since he was 5. The family is still trying to find its footing again, after what feels like an earthquake.
We got back last Sunday night as trick or treaters were making their way down our street. So for me it has felt like the Feast of All Saints all week long, as I’ve walked with the raw questions that fill the space left by a loss like this. So today’s a good day to face them head on.
On All Saints Day we as Church honor all the holy women and men of God who have died, the saints both known and unknown, especially those who led devout lives or were of heroic faith, and whom we count on being with God. Because I was raised a Catholic, I know this crowd pretty well.
When I was a little girl I loved to read the lives of the saints. On library day at St. Hilary School I would rush to the section of the library where they had the easy-reader books on the martyrs. I recall at least one tugging match with another kid over one of those books. Interesting that my behavior was far less than saintly when it came to getting my hands on those stories.
And oh what stories. I still remember the story of the first century martyr, this little boy who smuggled communion bread under his tunic to deliver it to Christians hiding in catacombs only to be discovered by his unbelieving friends and martyred right there on the street. And that resonated with me because that was not unlike the playground at St. Hilary’s School. There were also the gory pictures and the statuary, like St. Sebastian’s Church which was just down the street and they had a statue filled with arrows. And then there were those beautiful stories of the miracles, like the rose petals that fell from the sky at the death of young Therese of Lisieux, the little flower, the child of Jesus.
I’m not sure so much that it was the lives of the saints that really appealed to me as it was the deaths of the saints actually, when I think about it, because images of martyrdom were a very big part of my second-grade imagination of the saints, as were monastic tonsures and the habits of nuns. I can still see very vividly those water-colored portraits with the eyes sort of pointing towards heaven that were in my Picture Book of Saints, circa 1972. Perhaps some of you had one of those. It was yellow.
But All Saints Day isn’t just for the heroes. We roll in on this day as well All Souls Day, the Feast of the faithfully departed. We recall friends and loved ones who have died “in the faith.” Our nephew David will be in today’s necrology.
And this is where the celebration of the Feast of All Saints gets a bit tricker because the faith of our loved ones can be a very private thing, largely hidden from us, while the questions and doubts they had might actually walk with us, just as we walk with our own questions and our own doubts. We do not know what our beloved ones encounter at death, just as we don’t know what our death will bring. And so for me, the Feast of All Saints tends to be more about what I hope for or have faith in rather than what I’m absolutely certain of.
And that makes it a good day for me to be in Church. Because our worship reminds us of all we do know about God’s love as we have experienced it, its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and its welcome, its power to restore dignity and to fill people with life. We cry out to a God who is that love, and we want that love for those who have gone before us.
This is my leap of hope and faith and imagination when it comes to the Feast of All Saints and its questions – I believe that at death God makes the offer of eternal life abundantly clear, and that our choice to enter that life is no longer clouded by our moral failings, or our traumas, or our misunderstandings, or our limited human imagination. All those things are wiped away. But the choice remains, like a new covenant or a renewed vow.
Here’s the unspoken challenge then of the Feast of All Saints: why make the choice now? Why live as though we know what comes next, when we don’t fully, or we can’t really? To answer this question we, as church, turn again to what we know of God’s love as we’ve experienced it: its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and welcome, its power to restore dignity and its ability to fill people with life. We turn to a God who is that love, and we want that love in this life, for this world. And so we commit to living it as best we can, imperfectly, earnestly, in faith.
I think that is what the life of a saint looks like. Saints believe anyway – despite their doubts. They love anyway - despite the evil that tears things apart, that often tears them apart. And they reach for God anyway - despite all the limitations that make it hard to see God clearly. And God reaches back into that life with the will to be found.
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God; and they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away."
This from the author of Revelation, who is paraphrasing the prophets of old.
The story of the Raising of Lazarus that we heard today from John’s Gospel is a story of the passing of those first things. In the Gospel of John it’s the sign that the old way of death is gone. There is no waiting until the end of time when the dead shall be raised, which was a common idea in Israel. The time is now. The way is at hand.
And it’s interesting to me that Jesus stands on the threshold of this new age when death will be no more, and mourning and crying will be no more, when every tear will be wiped away, that Jesus stands on the edge of that new edge and he weeps for Lazarus who has died. I think this was the great consequence of God making the divine home among us – that God would feel what we feel: the loss, the catastrophe, the bewilderment experienced in the sluggish slowness of our time, even as God’s promise is poised to come rushing in in God’s time. God does not dismiss our misery because God knows how the story ends.
Jesus stands in the now and the not yet with Mary and Martha and their mourning friends, and he suffers with them in the loss of their brother. Because it is not really a comfort to say that eternal life is on the way – until it actually arrives. Meanwhile, Jesus lives the long moment of loss with them. He lives it with us. He is living it with my husband’s family in Ohio right now. And there is real comfort in that.
But John’s Gospel doesn’t stay there, it actually pauses there only briefly and then Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb and Lazarus comes forth. Alleluia! My favorite part of the story is when he emerges from the tomb all wrapped up in his burial clothes, and Jesus says to the shocked crowd of witnesses, “unbind him and let him go.”
Because that’s God’s call to us every-day saints - to unbind people from the stinking stuff that clings and inhibits and trips them up, to help them step into the new life that’s right at hand, like beautiful new clothes. Which makes the story sound a bit like Baptism, with its new garment, its cleansing waters and scented oil, its candle to light the way out of the tomb into light. And that’s why All Saints Day is traditionally a day for baptism. Not simply a day to recall those who have died, but to welcome new life as well. It is an Alpha and Omega sort of day.
The promise of the Feast of All Saints is that we need not wait for an old life to end and a new one to begin, even in the chaos of this current time.
It’s Heaven all the way to Heaven, writes Dorothy Day, my hero, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who I’m sure is in Heaven. She was paraphrasing Saint Catherine of Sienna, who reportedly said “All the way to Heaven is Heaven because Jesus is the way.”
And for now, on the Feast of All Saints, I will take their word for it. Amen.
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
Oct 31, 2021 |
Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic
| The Rev. Carol Duncan
Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic
Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26. Today's readings are:
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Psalm 119:1-8
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp26_RCL.html
Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic
The Rev. Carol Duncan, Carol Duncan, 2021
Hear, O St. Martin’s: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
On this All Hallows Eve, Halloween, which is also Reformation Sunday, our lessons invite us to consider the core foundational texts of Judeo-Christian values. As your preacher for this awesome day, I will attempt to honor hallows, souls, Reformation and the essence of Judeo-Christian values.
To get started, let me just say the name of Martin Luther, and pay tribute to him as the progenitor of the Reformation. Now, about Halloween, I will say that at the LIFT service at 9:00 was splendid. We blessed the costumes children and adults worn to this service, and the children who wear them in all their spookiness. We prayed that trick-or-treaters’ joy serve as a sign to all who do not know Jesus that Jesus’ Love reigns over all things in heaven and on earth. Now let’s see what we can do about the core Judeo-Christian values.
Seriously, today’s texts are foundational, and we must treat them as Moses advised. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away. These brief texts are our touchstones, our guiding light to keep God at the center of all we do.
Our bit of Mark’s Gospel today is fascinating. You may recall that Jesus often intensely debated with Scribes and Pharisees who were the arbiters of Jewish law. In fact Jesus has just told them the parable of the wicked tenants, and pointing his finger, which sent the Scribes and Pharisees slinking away. Only the crowd wanted to experience Jesus’ healing presence.
But now another Scribe approaches who had heard the bitter interchanges. This scribe was intrigued by how Jesus handled and subdued his opponents. The atypical scribe asked the central question. “Of all the many obligations, which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus must have received those scribe’s words and him like a surprising friend in a dark place. The scribe listened reflectively to Jesus’ words and Jesus told him he was not far from the kingdom of God. In other words a “small s” saint for all hallows.
So what was Jesus’ response to that question, after which no other opponent dared to ask him any questions? As everyone accepted, then and now, Jesus first gave the true heart of all the Law: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
Jesus took this part of his answer almost, almost, straight from Moses’ lips as we heard today in Deuteronomy. Moses summary of the law was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This phrase is the Shema, words that every observant Jew recognizes then and now as the clarion call to faith. The Shema is a symbolic representation of total devotion to the study of Torah. Torah is for Jews what Jesus is for Christians, the ultimate expression of what humans can know about God.
Jesus agreed that the Shema is first, and yet he delivered an even larger truth by adding a single word - “with all your mind”. My favorite Episcopal bumper sticker is “Jesus died to take away your sins, not your mind.” That’s a good one right? I like that one. And thus Jesus obligingly anticipates a key concept of the reformation on Reformation Sunday. We now live by grace, and not works. We now live by grace and faith alone. Fulfilling legal obligations from any faith tradition is not enough to reach the kingdom of God.
Then Jesus changed the question by adding a second greatest commandment. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” His addition still affirms Torah law, but it emphasizes complexity. Jesus’ second greatest law comes from Leviticus, home to the majority of the 613 individual commands contained in Torah.
I have been accustomed to treating those 613 commands as barriers to the full-hearted love of Jesus. I felt confirmed in my skepticism when I discovered that this key commandment is only half the original Leviticus sentence. The whole sentence is “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Even worse, the very next sentence is “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials.” I bet everyone here is condemned by that one.
How did Jesus pick out that half sentence to be the second most important command? Only when I began to study for this sermon did I find out the rest of the story.
The neighbor command is in the middle of Leviticus 19, which deals with the holiness of God as the source and model for all human behavior. It explains how Jews shall do this in practical concrete terms. Holiness is found in neighborliness, specifically regard for the poor. Holiness involves leaving the edges of fields available for gleaning by the poor. No keeping wages back from laborers (no wage theft). No revealing the disabled. It covers refugees, saying “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” And it contains all kinds of practical details. “You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin.” Even if we don’t know what a hin is, we see that details down to the smallest measure are important in the eyes of God and in dealings with our neighbors. You can’t truly love God if you don’t behave with specific concrete acts of love toward your neighbor. All your neighbors.
I now believe that when Jesus picked out that half sentence, he was inferring all the rest of that holiness code of Leviticus. In the same way, when on the cross Jesus mourned “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”, he was inferring all the rest of Psalm 22. That’s the first sentence of Psalm 22 and he meant the whole thing. Jesus contained all scripture within himself, so he didn’t obliterate the practical concrete rulings of Torah, he fulfilled them.
So now I want to determine how in our day we can live whole-hearted, whole-minded love of God and love of neighbor. I think that we find good pointers here at St. Martin’s. For example, our refugee ministry cites that very verse of Leviticus I mentioned earlier. They are finding practical ways to relieve the suffering of Afghan refugees, as they did earlier for Syrian refugees. And I commend Stephen Ministry to you. Stephen ministers spend hours in reflective prayerful listening to care receivers who have suffered a loss or a death in their family or an illness, or some long-term trouble that needs prayer more than treatment. And we have Women Connecting, another form of sacred listening. Nothing huge, just disciplined chosen neighborly service. Likewise with Men for Others. And I think Choir teaches a very detailed disciplined practice of ministry for the whole community. I know my soul is nourished by their trained voices. Also, trainings offered in Becoming Beloved Community provide another way to approach neighborliness. Faithful Jews in Jesus’ time wouldn’t understand what implicit bias is any more than we know what a hin is, but in order to love God and neighbor in our culture, we need to learn about it. Altar Guild is probably the closest to the details of living found in Leviticus. They take such good care back there (in the sacristy). We mostly don’t see its work but the smooth running services ease our hearts into contemplating the holy.
There are many more examples I could name. Hold up your own participation in any ministry to check if it does indeed help you abide by love of God and love of neighbor. I suspect that it does.
So, happy Halloween, happy Reformation Sunday, happy All Souls day, and peace on your path of salvation.
Amen.
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
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Psalm 119:1-8
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp26_RCL.html
Hallows, Souls, Reformation and the Judeo-Christian Ethic
The Rev. Carol Duncan, Carol Duncan, 2021
Hear, O St. Martin’s: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
On this All Hallows Eve, Halloween, which is also Reformation Sunday, our lessons invite us to consider the core foundational texts of Judeo-Christian values. As your preacher for this awesome day, I will attempt to honor hallows, souls, Reformation and the essence of Judeo-Christian values.
To get started, let me just say the name of Martin Luther, and pay tribute to him as the progenitor of the Reformation. Now, about Halloween, I will say that at the LIFT service at 9:00 was splendid. We blessed the costumes children and adults worn to this service, and the children who wear them in all their spookiness. We prayed that trick-or-treaters’ joy serve as a sign to all who do not know Jesus that Jesus’ Love reigns over all things in heaven and on earth. Now let’s see what we can do about the core Judeo-Christian values.
Seriously, today’s texts are foundational, and we must treat them as Moses advised. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away. These brief texts are our touchstones, our guiding light to keep God at the center of all we do.
Our bit of Mark’s Gospel today is fascinating. You may recall that Jesus often intensely debated with Scribes and Pharisees who were the arbiters of Jewish law. In fact Jesus has just told them the parable of the wicked tenants, and pointing his finger, which sent the Scribes and Pharisees slinking away. Only the crowd wanted to experience Jesus’ healing presence.
But now another Scribe approaches who had heard the bitter interchanges. This scribe was intrigued by how Jesus handled and subdued his opponents. The atypical scribe asked the central question. “Of all the many obligations, which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus must have received those scribe’s words and him like a surprising friend in a dark place. The scribe listened reflectively to Jesus’ words and Jesus told him he was not far from the kingdom of God. In other words a “small s” saint for all hallows.
So what was Jesus’ response to that question, after which no other opponent dared to ask him any questions? As everyone accepted, then and now, Jesus first gave the true heart of all the Law: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
Jesus took this part of his answer almost, almost, straight from Moses’ lips as we heard today in Deuteronomy. Moses summary of the law was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This phrase is the Shema, words that every observant Jew recognizes then and now as the clarion call to faith. The Shema is a symbolic representation of total devotion to the study of Torah. Torah is for Jews what Jesus is for Christians, the ultimate expression of what humans can know about God.
Jesus agreed that the Shema is first, and yet he delivered an even larger truth by adding a single word - “with all your mind”. My favorite Episcopal bumper sticker is “Jesus died to take away your sins, not your mind.” That’s a good one right? I like that one. And thus Jesus obligingly anticipates a key concept of the reformation on Reformation Sunday. We now live by grace, and not works. We now live by grace and faith alone. Fulfilling legal obligations from any faith tradition is not enough to reach the kingdom of God.
Then Jesus changed the question by adding a second greatest commandment. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” His addition still affirms Torah law, but it emphasizes complexity. Jesus’ second greatest law comes from Leviticus, home to the majority of the 613 individual commands contained in Torah.
I have been accustomed to treating those 613 commands as barriers to the full-hearted love of Jesus. I felt confirmed in my skepticism when I discovered that this key commandment is only half the original Leviticus sentence. The whole sentence is “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Even worse, the very next sentence is “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials.” I bet everyone here is condemned by that one.
How did Jesus pick out that half sentence to be the second most important command? Only when I began to study for this sermon did I find out the rest of the story.
The neighbor command is in the middle of Leviticus 19, which deals with the holiness of God as the source and model for all human behavior. It explains how Jews shall do this in practical concrete terms. Holiness is found in neighborliness, specifically regard for the poor. Holiness involves leaving the edges of fields available for gleaning by the poor. No keeping wages back from laborers (no wage theft). No revealing the disabled. It covers refugees, saying “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” And it contains all kinds of practical details. “You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin.” Even if we don’t know what a hin is, we see that details down to the smallest measure are important in the eyes of God and in dealings with our neighbors. You can’t truly love God if you don’t behave with specific concrete acts of love toward your neighbor. All your neighbors.
I now believe that when Jesus picked out that half sentence, he was inferring all the rest of that holiness code of Leviticus. In the same way, when on the cross Jesus mourned “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”, he was inferring all the rest of Psalm 22. That’s the first sentence of Psalm 22 and he meant the whole thing. Jesus contained all scripture within himself, so he didn’t obliterate the practical concrete rulings of Torah, he fulfilled them.
So now I want to determine how in our day we can live whole-hearted, whole-minded love of God and love of neighbor. I think that we find good pointers here at St. Martin’s. For example, our refugee ministry cites that very verse of Leviticus I mentioned earlier. They are finding practical ways to relieve the suffering of Afghan refugees, as they did earlier for Syrian refugees. And I commend Stephen Ministry to you. Stephen ministers spend hours in reflective prayerful listening to care receivers who have suffered a loss or a death in their family or an illness, or some long-term trouble that needs prayer more than treatment. And we have Women Connecting, another form of sacred listening. Nothing huge, just disciplined chosen neighborly service. Likewise with Men for Others. And I think Choir teaches a very detailed disciplined practice of ministry for the whole community. I know my soul is nourished by their trained voices. Also, trainings offered in Becoming Beloved Community provide another way to approach neighborliness. Faithful Jews in Jesus’ time wouldn’t understand what implicit bias is any more than we know what a hin is, but in order to love God and neighbor in our culture, we need to learn about it. Altar Guild is probably the closest to the details of living found in Leviticus. They take such good care back there (in the sacristy). We mostly don’t see its work but the smooth running services ease our hearts into contemplating the holy.
There are many more examples I could name. Hold up your own participation in any ministry to check if it does indeed help you abide by love of God and love of neighbor. I suspect that it does.
So, happy Halloween, happy Reformation Sunday, happy All Souls day, and peace on your path of salvation.
Amen.
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
Oct 24, 2021 |
The Little Book of Consolation
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Little Book of Consolation
Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25. Today's readings are:
Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
Let us pray.
The Book of Jeremiah was written for Israel in exile. And much of the prophet Jeremiah’s work is getting Israel to understand how failure to uphold the covenant with God got them into the mess they were in, and how that same covenant would get them out.
A commentary I was reading the other day described the Book of Jeremiah as “a river of accusation, destruction, and weeping,” but for the exile, also “a book of life.” And tucked right in the middle of the Book of Jeremiah is what’s called the Little Book of Consolation. That’s what today’s first reading is, a page of the Little Book of Consolation.
In the middle of the story and the experience of captivity there is this promise, this vision of restoration. Imagine how that impossible, crazy vision would have sounded to someone who had been forced from their home and impressed into servitude elsewhere or scattered in diaspora.
“See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those with labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them. I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.”
The Little Book of Consolation is a description of profound hope. Future generations will make it home one day, much the way that God led Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. But it’s more than saying that everything’s going to go back to the way it was, or that God will help us out like God helped us out before. It provides a glimpse not of Israel’s vision for itself, but of God’s vision, of God’s hope for the covenant relationship in full blossom. To be consoled by these words is to be consoled by a loyalty to God’s agenda. To be in covenant with God is to partner with God in the divine vision.
I think it that this was the vision that Bartimaeus, begging, blind along the road in Jericho was longing for in Mark’s gospel. But how could he know exactly the shape that healing would take when he told Jesus “I want to see again”? He was no man born blind. And there he was in the messy middle, somewhere between I saw once and I see now. And he cried out for consolation “Son of David, have pity on me.” How did he know it was the Son of David, the messiah walking by when people told him that Jesus was near?
Bartimaeus knew because Bartimaeus could see very clearly through his eyes of faith. Some commentators call this story an “acted parable” because with the healing of the man’s blindness, Jesus was acting out a lesson on faith and discipleship that he had been teaching his followers for a few chapters now. In fact Mark begins this long lesson on discipleship, which we’ve been studying for several weeks now, with the healing of another blind man. That man is brought to Jesus, and it takes a couple tries for Jesus to get the healing to take. Then he sends that man home to keep the secret.
It’s not unlike the learning process that the followers of Jesus experience as Jesus tries to get his disciples to see through his eyes, to live into his vision of what discipleship should be. They must love fully, they must walk empty, they must include the lowly, their faith must be child-like, they must be lower than least, they must serve, even lay down their lives. And woven through these lessons is the hardest one of all: that the son of man must be betrayed and suffer and die, and that in order for God’s eternal life to be made manifest, Jesus’ followers must first follow him to that cross.
And throughout these lessons, the disciples strain to see. Their faith is not ready for public display. The faith of the people that Jesus introduces them to along the way far surpasses the faith of his disciples. Over and over again Jesus is reading to them from the Little Book of Consolation and they don’t recognize it. But Bartimaeus, one of the little ones, one of the blind and the lame does. He asks to see again, but Jesus does not restore him to whatever status he had before he lost his sight and was reduced to begging along the hillside. Upon his healing, Bartimaeus becomes a follower of Jesus, and he follows Jesus into the last week of Jesus’ life.
This is what Bartimaeus will see with his new eyes: he will see the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He will see Jesus mystify the crowds and offend the local authorities. He will see Jesus betrayed and tortured and executed. And if he can stand all of that, he will see Jesus risen. His sight is not restored to behold the old things as they were, but to see the new things as they are revealed. And some of that is not pretty to look at.
As a faith community, our own moment, our messy middle, has some small similarity to our scriptures today. The pandemic scattered us. It isolated us. It kept us away, and the return has been slow and hard going and ongoing. It’s not done yet. We are not as we were 18 months ago. Some are arriving with babies in arms, where there were no babies before. Families have appeared under the 9 a.m. worship tent, where there was no tent before. Some people have beards now. Some of us are silver now. It is still difficult to recognize one another under the masks from the nose up. And there are new faces that we are welcoming – faces we have yet to see all of.
It is a thrill to see the seats filled again. It is a heartbreak to know that there are some who will not fill their seats again. And I think all of us are straining to see what will happen next, what will become of us, what is God’s vision for this time.
There is a book of consolation here. There is an acted parable at play in the messy middle that we occupy. It has to do with what God sees in us and what God is making happen in us right now: God’s vision, God’s big picture. And we can’t see it distinctly, but can glimpse it in the longing of our hearts. We can recognize it in the inklings of compassion and mercy that we witness. We can even detect it working at the edges of the ugliness that we are witnessing right now – making visible injustices that have always been there, but that many of us are seeing for the first time or with a new resolve to not look away.
The little book of consolation before us is a story about making a way where there was no way. Our invitation is to live into that way. How will we assist God in helping people negotiate that way and their arrival? Who is on the road with us? How far are we willing to go to find them, to invite them, to tell them of the love of Jesus that we have witnessed? What kind of place are we preparing for them?
The acted parable before us is a lived story about being made to see what God is doing, and to trust in what we can’t see of God’s plan. What are we seeing for the first time as we open our eyes again? Who is crying out for God’s mercy, and who is trying to hush them up? And what are we to do about it?
Sunday after Sunday we are invited to see ourselves in the stories of faith that we hear proclaimed, and the rest of the week we are asked to make those stories visible to the wider world. We are asked to make our lives a page in someone’s little book of consolation. We are asked to allow Jesus to use our vulnerable selves as an acted parable to show others the way to the kingdom. We are asked to be ready when the message comes: Take Heart. Get up. He is calling you!
Amen.
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
Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
Let us pray.
The Book of Jeremiah was written for Israel in exile. And much of the prophet Jeremiah’s work is getting Israel to understand how failure to uphold the covenant with God got them into the mess they were in, and how that same covenant would get them out.
A commentary I was reading the other day described the Book of Jeremiah as “a river of accusation, destruction, and weeping,” but for the exile, also “a book of life.” And tucked right in the middle of the Book of Jeremiah is what’s called the Little Book of Consolation. That’s what today’s first reading is, a page of the Little Book of Consolation.
In the middle of the story and the experience of captivity there is this promise, this vision of restoration. Imagine how that impossible, crazy vision would have sounded to someone who had been forced from their home and impressed into servitude elsewhere or scattered in diaspora.
“See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those with labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them. I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.”
The Little Book of Consolation is a description of profound hope. Future generations will make it home one day, much the way that God led Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. But it’s more than saying that everything’s going to go back to the way it was, or that God will help us out like God helped us out before. It provides a glimpse not of Israel’s vision for itself, but of God’s vision, of God’s hope for the covenant relationship in full blossom. To be consoled by these words is to be consoled by a loyalty to God’s agenda. To be in covenant with God is to partner with God in the divine vision.
I think it that this was the vision that Bartimaeus, begging, blind along the road in Jericho was longing for in Mark’s gospel. But how could he know exactly the shape that healing would take when he told Jesus “I want to see again”? He was no man born blind. And there he was in the messy middle, somewhere between I saw once and I see now. And he cried out for consolation “Son of David, have pity on me.” How did he know it was the Son of David, the messiah walking by when people told him that Jesus was near?
Bartimaeus knew because Bartimaeus could see very clearly through his eyes of faith. Some commentators call this story an “acted parable” because with the healing of the man’s blindness, Jesus was acting out a lesson on faith and discipleship that he had been teaching his followers for a few chapters now. In fact Mark begins this long lesson on discipleship, which we’ve been studying for several weeks now, with the healing of another blind man. That man is brought to Jesus, and it takes a couple tries for Jesus to get the healing to take. Then he sends that man home to keep the secret.
It’s not unlike the learning process that the followers of Jesus experience as Jesus tries to get his disciples to see through his eyes, to live into his vision of what discipleship should be. They must love fully, they must walk empty, they must include the lowly, their faith must be child-like, they must be lower than least, they must serve, even lay down their lives. And woven through these lessons is the hardest one of all: that the son of man must be betrayed and suffer and die, and that in order for God’s eternal life to be made manifest, Jesus’ followers must first follow him to that cross.
And throughout these lessons, the disciples strain to see. Their faith is not ready for public display. The faith of the people that Jesus introduces them to along the way far surpasses the faith of his disciples. Over and over again Jesus is reading to them from the Little Book of Consolation and they don’t recognize it. But Bartimaeus, one of the little ones, one of the blind and the lame does. He asks to see again, but Jesus does not restore him to whatever status he had before he lost his sight and was reduced to begging along the hillside. Upon his healing, Bartimaeus becomes a follower of Jesus, and he follows Jesus into the last week of Jesus’ life.
This is what Bartimaeus will see with his new eyes: he will see the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He will see Jesus mystify the crowds and offend the local authorities. He will see Jesus betrayed and tortured and executed. And if he can stand all of that, he will see Jesus risen. His sight is not restored to behold the old things as they were, but to see the new things as they are revealed. And some of that is not pretty to look at.
As a faith community, our own moment, our messy middle, has some small similarity to our scriptures today. The pandemic scattered us. It isolated us. It kept us away, and the return has been slow and hard going and ongoing. It’s not done yet. We are not as we were 18 months ago. Some are arriving with babies in arms, where there were no babies before. Families have appeared under the 9 a.m. worship tent, where there was no tent before. Some people have beards now. Some of us are silver now. It is still difficult to recognize one another under the masks from the nose up. And there are new faces that we are welcoming – faces we have yet to see all of.
It is a thrill to see the seats filled again. It is a heartbreak to know that there are some who will not fill their seats again. And I think all of us are straining to see what will happen next, what will become of us, what is God’s vision for this time.
There is a book of consolation here. There is an acted parable at play in the messy middle that we occupy. It has to do with what God sees in us and what God is making happen in us right now: God’s vision, God’s big picture. And we can’t see it distinctly, but can glimpse it in the longing of our hearts. We can recognize it in the inklings of compassion and mercy that we witness. We can even detect it working at the edges of the ugliness that we are witnessing right now – making visible injustices that have always been there, but that many of us are seeing for the first time or with a new resolve to not look away.
The little book of consolation before us is a story about making a way where there was no way. Our invitation is to live into that way. How will we assist God in helping people negotiate that way and their arrival? Who is on the road with us? How far are we willing to go to find them, to invite them, to tell them of the love of Jesus that we have witnessed? What kind of place are we preparing for them?
The acted parable before us is a lived story about being made to see what God is doing, and to trust in what we can’t see of God’s plan. What are we seeing for the first time as we open our eyes again? Who is crying out for God’s mercy, and who is trying to hush them up? And what are we to do about it?
Sunday after Sunday we are invited to see ourselves in the stories of faith that we hear proclaimed, and the rest of the week we are asked to make those stories visible to the wider world. We are asked to make our lives a page in someone’s little book of consolation. We are asked to allow Jesus to use our vulnerable selves as an acted parable to show others the way to the kingdom. We are asked to be ready when the message comes: Take Heart. Get up. He is calling you!
Amen.
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
Oct 17, 2021 |
The Corrections
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
The Corrections
Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24. Today's readings are:
Isaiah 53:4-12
Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
The Corrections
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, October 17, 2021
Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that through your son Jesus Christ you've removed all the obstacles that separate us from your love and your redeeming life. Lord God help us to receive that gift and live with our hearts toward you in all we do. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
So I’ve had some feedback that I might be a little hard to hear during my sermon because of the mask in the microphone, so I don't know how you all feel about me doing this a little bit (lowers mask). Is that better? Thank you for taking this risk with me. It's interesting to take the mask off at the beginning of the sermon because that's where I want to begin. This has been my trusty mask for 19 months now and I think I'll feel a little naked when I don't have it. I will feel grateful for it but I probably won't miss it.
It's been a learning experience during Covid. I've never lived through a time in my life where I was part of so much interpersonal policing. Interpersonal policing just between people in the community here at the church, out at the Acme, at the 7-eleven... Never have I been on such high alert constantly and for so long, keeping one eye peeled for the person whose mask was under their nose or under their chin or not there at all and making sure I was really being careful about my six feet of distance. I'm sure I've been scolded in public. You may have been scolded in public for behavior: “put that mask on”, “put it on right”, “stand a little farther away please”. Never before have I lived in this atmosphere of so much mutual correction - let's put it that way - and I really am very curious what it's going to mean for us long term, And not just the masks and the good hygiene, I really appreciate all that mutual correction. For me it's a sign of good community.
There's also another extension of that that's also good, which is we are living through a time of such incredible and rapid change and shifting among social norms. I can't keep up with the language half the time. I just turned 55 and it feels epical for me. I feel old. My staff is so much younger and they speak a different language and it's wonderful and I love it and it's very sensitive and thoughtful, but I'm tripping over myself. I don't know the right words, you know, gender, sexuality, identity, race, these things are evolving rapidly, and when things shift rapidly, it's once again this atmosphere of mutual correction. Mutual policing. And there's a good in that because it grows us if we have trust and love with each other.
It can also be somewhat embarrassing, so this morning using our texts I want to look at how our Lord Jesus Christ practiced what Thomas Aquinas would have referred to as “Fraternal Correction.” You could also call it Sororal Correction. (There you go, see, I'm learning. I’m not that old, you know!) I had some experiences of this at our golf outing on Tuesday, where I played with two older guys and at the end one of them turned to me and said, “you could really benefit from some golf lessons.” He was not wrong. The other said to me, “and maybe invest in some new clubs.” Cocktails started immediately so that was lovely.
Fraternal Correction: the loving practice of helping people with obstacles in their lives. When Thomas Aquinas talked about it as a virtue, as an obligation, as something we owe one another - a good we owe one another, an excellence - he meant it as a way of communities helping each other grow toward their ultimate goal, which is reunion with God. What are the obstacles that you notice in another person's lives and they might notice in your life, to help free up this path towards reunion with God? And how does one do that with love and trust and intentional relationships so the person is moved in a constructive path, because we know that that correction could also be destructive.
Well, we saw Jesus at work in this regard last week with the rich young man, and Barb did a fabulous sermon on that (if you didn't hear it please look it up online). Jesus delivers some really hard correction to this rich young man, but the text begins with this lovely phrase: “Jesus looked upon him and loved him.” Jesus looked upon him and loved him: a wonderful phrase to close your eyes and feel Jesus saying that to you, or feel Jesus looking upon you that way. So Jesus knew that to deliver powerful correction you must love. Surround that person with the secure knowledge that they are loved, that they are of infinite value to you, that you will not let them go.
And then he did deliver the tough love, the harder news where he said, “you have an obstacle in your life and your path back to God, and that obstacle is your great wealth and your attachment to it. Not just an attachment to things, but an attachment of identity: this wealth is who you are, this is how you think you are favored by God. This wealth, this is how you prove your worth, your value, your deserving. So that whole complex of attachment is holding you back on this progress you do yearn for.”
We don't know what happens next but we know that Jesus found the key obstacle and left the person to wrestle it as they may. Even more than that - and I think this is key - because remember that that passage ends with that phrase “nothing is impossible with God.” I think what Jesus does in alerting the rich young man to this obstacle is brings that young man to the place that is impossible for him, and when we go to that place and that obstacle that's impossible for us, we have only one move: surrender. Surrender to God, to let God do the work that we can't do by our own willpower, to let God work in us what we cannot work in ourselves by whatever system or plan or good self-help book we might read. Take the person to that place that's impossible and we can surrender to God's help.
I see another version of that again in our gospel for today with good old James and John, another wonderfully misguided pair of disciples who give hope to all of us. Up they go to Jesus, and it's really funny, in the Gospel of Matthew they send their mother to ask the same question, so you know they're ashamed on some level. But what's going on here? They're misguided. They're still misunderstanding Jesus even though he's told them otherwise twice already. They're misunderstanding that Jesus is going to be a messianic king, he's going to sit on a throne and rule a restored Israel, so they want to be at his right and his left positions of authority. Part of the team. You know, interpreting it generously, they wanted to be helpful. Interpreting it less so they were maybe a little arrogant, climbing, achieving. And they're mistaken.
So how is Jesus going to take this moment that could be very awkward and destructive and turn it into peer-to-peer correction? Jesus does this fascinating thing where they have asked to be with him in his glory and Jesus knows that his glory is going to be a cross. He knows as we know that James and John aren't going to make it to his right and left hand in that glory. We know he'll be flanked by thieves. So Jesus knows and we know that they're asking something that they're not able to do even though they say they are. They're at their impossible point, they're at their limit. And so Jesus subtly refrains the discussion, the dialogue.
Notice how he switches from kingly language to the language of worship, to the language of liturgy, the language of baptism and communion. So he is able in this reframing to tell them that yes, they will be able to join him in the remembrance of his glory, in the community baptized by the Holy Spirit and the community joined in Christ around the eucharistic table, after Jesus does the work that's unique to him; the death and resurrection that takes away all the obstacles and by grace makes us able to do what was formerly impossible for us. So Jesus finds a way to coach them into a future of inclusion that they can't even begin to imagine, and I kind of personally imagine James and John at the gathering of the early church going, “oh yeah, now I get it. Thank you. Thank you for this.”
This is the Jesus we have who reframes and reaches us and finds ways to get past our obstacles like our ambition and our shame and our guilt and our fear by reframing and loving and telling the truth. I for one have been so grateful in my life for all those mentors who told me the truth. I hated it at the time but they helped me grow, and how lucky are we to celebrate with the author of Hebrews that we have this great high priest. We have this great intercessor who is available to us who we can bring our burdens and blockages to and say, “clear a way for us.”
That's what a high priest does. When we're stuck with our obstacles, when we're stuck with our blockages in our impossible places, those parts of our souls, those besetting sins and habitual vices and patterns of behavior that we have worked for decades to overcome and to get ourselves free of and we just cannot, that's when you go to your great high priest and say, “I need help. I need your help to get past what is impossible for me. I need your grace as one who deals gently,” as Hebrews says, “who knows our weakness” as Hebrews says, “who has suffered with us and for us,” as Hebrews says. “I need your great embrace of my humanity to set me free from what plagues me, because that is what you do as my great high priest. With love and truth and reframing and inclusion you work out a salvation for me that is impossible by my own hands.” And so we celebrate and are grateful. Amen.
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
Isaiah 53:4-12
Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
The Corrections
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, October 17, 2021
Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that through your son Jesus Christ you've removed all the obstacles that separate us from your love and your redeeming life. Lord God help us to receive that gift and live with our hearts toward you in all we do. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
So I’ve had some feedback that I might be a little hard to hear during my sermon because of the mask in the microphone, so I don't know how you all feel about me doing this a little bit (lowers mask). Is that better? Thank you for taking this risk with me. It's interesting to take the mask off at the beginning of the sermon because that's where I want to begin. This has been my trusty mask for 19 months now and I think I'll feel a little naked when I don't have it. I will feel grateful for it but I probably won't miss it.
It's been a learning experience during Covid. I've never lived through a time in my life where I was part of so much interpersonal policing. Interpersonal policing just between people in the community here at the church, out at the Acme, at the 7-eleven... Never have I been on such high alert constantly and for so long, keeping one eye peeled for the person whose mask was under their nose or under their chin or not there at all and making sure I was really being careful about my six feet of distance. I'm sure I've been scolded in public. You may have been scolded in public for behavior: “put that mask on”, “put it on right”, “stand a little farther away please”. Never before have I lived in this atmosphere of so much mutual correction - let's put it that way - and I really am very curious what it's going to mean for us long term, And not just the masks and the good hygiene, I really appreciate all that mutual correction. For me it's a sign of good community.
There's also another extension of that that's also good, which is we are living through a time of such incredible and rapid change and shifting among social norms. I can't keep up with the language half the time. I just turned 55 and it feels epical for me. I feel old. My staff is so much younger and they speak a different language and it's wonderful and I love it and it's very sensitive and thoughtful, but I'm tripping over myself. I don't know the right words, you know, gender, sexuality, identity, race, these things are evolving rapidly, and when things shift rapidly, it's once again this atmosphere of mutual correction. Mutual policing. And there's a good in that because it grows us if we have trust and love with each other.
It can also be somewhat embarrassing, so this morning using our texts I want to look at how our Lord Jesus Christ practiced what Thomas Aquinas would have referred to as “Fraternal Correction.” You could also call it Sororal Correction. (There you go, see, I'm learning. I’m not that old, you know!) I had some experiences of this at our golf outing on Tuesday, where I played with two older guys and at the end one of them turned to me and said, “you could really benefit from some golf lessons.” He was not wrong. The other said to me, “and maybe invest in some new clubs.” Cocktails started immediately so that was lovely.
Fraternal Correction: the loving practice of helping people with obstacles in their lives. When Thomas Aquinas talked about it as a virtue, as an obligation, as something we owe one another - a good we owe one another, an excellence - he meant it as a way of communities helping each other grow toward their ultimate goal, which is reunion with God. What are the obstacles that you notice in another person's lives and they might notice in your life, to help free up this path towards reunion with God? And how does one do that with love and trust and intentional relationships so the person is moved in a constructive path, because we know that that correction could also be destructive.
Well, we saw Jesus at work in this regard last week with the rich young man, and Barb did a fabulous sermon on that (if you didn't hear it please look it up online). Jesus delivers some really hard correction to this rich young man, but the text begins with this lovely phrase: “Jesus looked upon him and loved him.” Jesus looked upon him and loved him: a wonderful phrase to close your eyes and feel Jesus saying that to you, or feel Jesus looking upon you that way. So Jesus knew that to deliver powerful correction you must love. Surround that person with the secure knowledge that they are loved, that they are of infinite value to you, that you will not let them go.
And then he did deliver the tough love, the harder news where he said, “you have an obstacle in your life and your path back to God, and that obstacle is your great wealth and your attachment to it. Not just an attachment to things, but an attachment of identity: this wealth is who you are, this is how you think you are favored by God. This wealth, this is how you prove your worth, your value, your deserving. So that whole complex of attachment is holding you back on this progress you do yearn for.”
We don't know what happens next but we know that Jesus found the key obstacle and left the person to wrestle it as they may. Even more than that - and I think this is key - because remember that that passage ends with that phrase “nothing is impossible with God.” I think what Jesus does in alerting the rich young man to this obstacle is brings that young man to the place that is impossible for him, and when we go to that place and that obstacle that's impossible for us, we have only one move: surrender. Surrender to God, to let God do the work that we can't do by our own willpower, to let God work in us what we cannot work in ourselves by whatever system or plan or good self-help book we might read. Take the person to that place that's impossible and we can surrender to God's help.
I see another version of that again in our gospel for today with good old James and John, another wonderfully misguided pair of disciples who give hope to all of us. Up they go to Jesus, and it's really funny, in the Gospel of Matthew they send their mother to ask the same question, so you know they're ashamed on some level. But what's going on here? They're misguided. They're still misunderstanding Jesus even though he's told them otherwise twice already. They're misunderstanding that Jesus is going to be a messianic king, he's going to sit on a throne and rule a restored Israel, so they want to be at his right and his left positions of authority. Part of the team. You know, interpreting it generously, they wanted to be helpful. Interpreting it less so they were maybe a little arrogant, climbing, achieving. And they're mistaken.
So how is Jesus going to take this moment that could be very awkward and destructive and turn it into peer-to-peer correction? Jesus does this fascinating thing where they have asked to be with him in his glory and Jesus knows that his glory is going to be a cross. He knows as we know that James and John aren't going to make it to his right and left hand in that glory. We know he'll be flanked by thieves. So Jesus knows and we know that they're asking something that they're not able to do even though they say they are. They're at their impossible point, they're at their limit. And so Jesus subtly refrains the discussion, the dialogue.
Notice how he switches from kingly language to the language of worship, to the language of liturgy, the language of baptism and communion. So he is able in this reframing to tell them that yes, they will be able to join him in the remembrance of his glory, in the community baptized by the Holy Spirit and the community joined in Christ around the eucharistic table, after Jesus does the work that's unique to him; the death and resurrection that takes away all the obstacles and by grace makes us able to do what was formerly impossible for us. So Jesus finds a way to coach them into a future of inclusion that they can't even begin to imagine, and I kind of personally imagine James and John at the gathering of the early church going, “oh yeah, now I get it. Thank you. Thank you for this.”
This is the Jesus we have who reframes and reaches us and finds ways to get past our obstacles like our ambition and our shame and our guilt and our fear by reframing and loving and telling the truth. I for one have been so grateful in my life for all those mentors who told me the truth. I hated it at the time but they helped me grow, and how lucky are we to celebrate with the author of Hebrews that we have this great high priest. We have this great intercessor who is available to us who we can bring our burdens and blockages to and say, “clear a way for us.”
That's what a high priest does. When we're stuck with our obstacles, when we're stuck with our blockages in our impossible places, those parts of our souls, those besetting sins and habitual vices and patterns of behavior that we have worked for decades to overcome and to get ourselves free of and we just cannot, that's when you go to your great high priest and say, “I need help. I need your help to get past what is impossible for me. I need your grace as one who deals gently,” as Hebrews says, “who knows our weakness” as Hebrews says, “who has suffered with us and for us,” as Hebrews says. “I need your great embrace of my humanity to set me free from what plagues me, because that is what you do as my great high priest. With love and truth and reframing and inclusion you work out a salvation for me that is impossible by my own hands.” And so we celebrate and are grateful. Amen.
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
Oct 10, 2021 |
The Grace to be Last
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Grace to be Last
Sermon by the Rev. Barbara Ballenger on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23. Today's readings are:
Amos 5:6-7,10-15
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
The Grace To Be Last
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, October 10, 2021
Let us Pray.
Lord God it is impossible on our own. It is possible with you. Help us to tell the difference. Amen.
(Sung) So low can’t get under it, so high can’t get over it, so wide can’t get around it, gotta get through that door.
I’ve done a good deal of church-based work trips in my day. You know the kind where you move the lawns of the elderly or fix the houses that have been destroyed in disasters. How many of you have been on that kind of a work trip, maybe many times? And how many of you when you’ve been on those work trips have heard somebody, maybe a fellow helper somewhere along the way, say, “that trip made me realize how much I truly have. I’m so grateful for what I have as a result of that trip.” Does that sound familiar? I’ve heard it every time, every single time. And sometimes it’s me that’s saying it or thinking it. The shorthand, or maybe the paraphrase of that sentence, is “There for the Grace of God go I.”
And that’s not to say that that feeling of gratitude isn’t real or that that thanksgiving isn’t an actual prayer, it’s just to say that those things might not be blessings. They might not be rewards. This is the harsh truth that our young man learns today in the Gospel of Mark. It’s a harsh truth for all of us who can identify with that young man – who have wealth and privilege and opportunity. In short, it’s the harsh truth of all who are formed to be first.
The rest of this sermon is directed at those of us who have been formed to be first, as this young man was. If you do not find yourself in that category, you are still free to listen in.
Now this young man was not a bad person. He’s not the villain of the story. He’s actually kind of sweet, although maybe a little naïve. He’s devout. He is keeping those commandments and that is no small thing. He is righteous. His heart is in the right place. He knows that inheriting everlasting life, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, is a good thing to want. If we were describing him today, we might say he was a good person who believed in God and wanted to go to Heaven. But he didn’t take it for granted. He threw himself at the feet of Jesus, and asked this teacher who seemed to know a lot about it, if there was anything else he should do in order to be assured that he would be guaranteed God’s favor forever, eternal life.
I don’t think he quite realized who he was talking to. I don’t think he quite realized what he was asking. Because he was working under the assumptions that he had been formed in about what it means to be good in the eyes of God. Good fortune and wealth was a sign that you were doing things right by God. He had checked the boxes and he had the evidence. And that’s not a habit that is limited to First Century Christianity.
Still, for some reason this man wanted more assurance. I wonder if what Jesus had been teaching about the Kingdom of God had made this man feel just a little uneasy about his assumptions? The idea that God is King, and there being a future time when God would reign over all, was part of Israel’s understanding. That’s not new. The promise that the righteous would inherit God’s life was not new. But Jesus seemed to tell the story in a different way, as though the Kingdom of God was something that was unfolding right under people’s feet, as though it was something you had to seek, as though the way in might be different than what this man had assumed - as though maybe anybody could get in.
And so there he is kneeling in the dirt in front of Jesus, and Jesus looks at him, and he loves him. I’ve got to wonder if that divine gaze, that doubled-edged sword of love, wasn’t Jesus’ predominant answer to the man’s question. Before you do, you must be. You must be loved by God. You must let God love you. But the love of God is not passive. It behaves just like the Word of God that we heard about in that passage from Hebrews today. Indeed I think they are one and same:
“Living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before God no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare in the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”
When Jesus is done looking at that man with love, Jesus knows exactly what this man is holding on to and exactly what he lacks. And he lacks nothing, meaning he lacks emptiness. He lacks spaciousness, room for the kingdom to enter in. What he has is keeping him from what God has for him. I wonder if this isn’t Mark’s kind of wonky version of the beatitudes. You know, “blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn.” Mark doesn’t have that list of the Blessed the way Matthew does, and Luke, in those gospels. But I think there are those ingredients there. This young man see himself as richly blessed. He has many possessions. He uses the phrase, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is like saying, “what must I do to have the Kingdom of God? And who in those lists of the Blessed, who gets the Kingdom of God?” In the Gospel of Luke it’s the poor who receive the Kingdom of God, and in the Gospel of Mathew it’s is the poor in spirit who receive the Kingdom of God. In the Beatitudes the rich aren’t listed as being blessed. The first aren’t mentioned either.
So this passage from Mark should make us squirm right along with the rich young man – if we have many possessions, or if we are used to being among the first. Now a good test of whether you fit in this category is to just imagine Jesus talking to you in this way. Jesus looks at you with love and says “you lack one thing. Take everything you have and sell it and give your money to the poor and follow me.” Now just pay attention right now to the anxiety level you might be feeling at this moment. That’s the indicator. “That can’t be the requirement, can it, to get into the Kingdom of God?”
If we were poor, we wouldn’t have it to give away. If we were poor in spirit we wouldn’t blink if it were demanded of us. Jesus is working a real reversal here on this man’s assumptions, and our assumptions, about what everlasting life entails, and what it means to be blessed, and what God’s love for us might cost us.
I think for faithful people who have been formed to be among the first, eternal life feels sort of like what comes after a long and prosperous life. It’s our reward. Another possession to look forward to. Sort of like retirement. But here Jesus makes a very cutting point that that is not what it’s about. It’s not the possessions that get in the way. It’s not the wealth. It’s the love of it. It’s the hold it has. It’s the way that wealth forms a habit of being first.
The one thing the young man lacks, and that I know I lack – is the will to put that down, and to follow Jesus empty into the Kingdom of God. This man of privilege can’t buy his way in, he can’t enter on his own merit or his own righteousness, he can’t use his blessings to pry open the door. With God all things are possible, because that’s who lets us into the Kingdom. I don’t think the man realized he was kneeling right at the doorway of eternal life, right at the entrance of the Kingdom of God. “Why do you call me good”, asks Jesus, “if you don’t really know who and what I am?”
Over and over the message of the scriptures is that the righteous practices, the faithful acts, the following of the commandments are all activities that are meant to express the covenant of love with God, they are meant to shape our hearts into ones that deeply love God and neighbor more than ourselves. And if they don’t do that, they won’t help us enter the kingdom of God. And the offer of eternal life with such a God will shock us and disturb us and send us sad away.
But I don’t think the man’s sadness is the end of the story. I think we assume that this man rejected Jesus’ offer, and we assume that he didn’t make into the Kingdom. But I think because his heart so was troubled, and because Jesus’ word was working in him like a two-edged sword, I want to believe that he gave some thought to what it would take to give up all those things. I think it would have been very hard for him. But not impossible. And that’s my hope for us.
What must we do to inherit eternal life? We must die. We must die to an old way and start living into a new one, because right now the world we’ve made under the old way is not working. And somehow, those of us that have been formed to be first have got to figure out how to step to the back of the line. I see this in our racial repair work, in our economic justice work, in our work in transforming oppressive systems – those of us who have been formed to be first have long dominated the conversation on what the solutions should be, without really seeing ourselves as part of the problem. This Gospel says we’ve got to set that down. We’ve got to give that up. And frankly, I’m not sure how we do that. I’m not sure how we do that exactly in a system that has been so profoundly and thoroughly stacked to our advantage.
The reversal of power, privilege and resources required to truly right all that has been wronged over so long a time seems impossible. My prayer lately has sounded a bit like, “Well then who can be saved?” And I find myself clinging to Jesus’ answer. “For mortals like you Barb, it is impossible. But not for God.” Which puts us in the realm not of miracles, but of grace. That God-given, spirit driven power to do God’s will when all indications are that it’s not gonna work, that’s what we should be praying for. That’s what we should be asking for: the grace to be last.
That may be the one thing we lack – a firm grip on God’s grace. But we’re going to have to empty our hands in order to pick it up. And we’re going to have to clear a space if we’re going to have someone to keep it. In the end it may be the only possession we need, as we take our place at the back of the line that is following Jesus into the Kingdom of God.
(Sung) So low can’t get under it, so high can’t get over it, so wide can’t get around it, gotta get through that door.
Amen.
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
Amos 5:6-7,10-15
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
The Grace To Be Last
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, October 10, 2021
Let us Pray.
Lord God it is impossible on our own. It is possible with you. Help us to tell the difference. Amen.
(Sung) So low can’t get under it, so high can’t get over it, so wide can’t get around it, gotta get through that door.
I’ve done a good deal of church-based work trips in my day. You know the kind where you move the lawns of the elderly or fix the houses that have been destroyed in disasters. How many of you have been on that kind of a work trip, maybe many times? And how many of you when you’ve been on those work trips have heard somebody, maybe a fellow helper somewhere along the way, say, “that trip made me realize how much I truly have. I’m so grateful for what I have as a result of that trip.” Does that sound familiar? I’ve heard it every time, every single time. And sometimes it’s me that’s saying it or thinking it. The shorthand, or maybe the paraphrase of that sentence, is “There for the Grace of God go I.”
And that’s not to say that that feeling of gratitude isn’t real or that that thanksgiving isn’t an actual prayer, it’s just to say that those things might not be blessings. They might not be rewards. This is the harsh truth that our young man learns today in the Gospel of Mark. It’s a harsh truth for all of us who can identify with that young man – who have wealth and privilege and opportunity. In short, it’s the harsh truth of all who are formed to be first.
The rest of this sermon is directed at those of us who have been formed to be first, as this young man was. If you do not find yourself in that category, you are still free to listen in.
Now this young man was not a bad person. He’s not the villain of the story. He’s actually kind of sweet, although maybe a little naïve. He’s devout. He is keeping those commandments and that is no small thing. He is righteous. His heart is in the right place. He knows that inheriting everlasting life, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, is a good thing to want. If we were describing him today, we might say he was a good person who believed in God and wanted to go to Heaven. But he didn’t take it for granted. He threw himself at the feet of Jesus, and asked this teacher who seemed to know a lot about it, if there was anything else he should do in order to be assured that he would be guaranteed God’s favor forever, eternal life.
I don’t think he quite realized who he was talking to. I don’t think he quite realized what he was asking. Because he was working under the assumptions that he had been formed in about what it means to be good in the eyes of God. Good fortune and wealth was a sign that you were doing things right by God. He had checked the boxes and he had the evidence. And that’s not a habit that is limited to First Century Christianity.
Still, for some reason this man wanted more assurance. I wonder if what Jesus had been teaching about the Kingdom of God had made this man feel just a little uneasy about his assumptions? The idea that God is King, and there being a future time when God would reign over all, was part of Israel’s understanding. That’s not new. The promise that the righteous would inherit God’s life was not new. But Jesus seemed to tell the story in a different way, as though the Kingdom of God was something that was unfolding right under people’s feet, as though it was something you had to seek, as though the way in might be different than what this man had assumed - as though maybe anybody could get in.
And so there he is kneeling in the dirt in front of Jesus, and Jesus looks at him, and he loves him. I’ve got to wonder if that divine gaze, that doubled-edged sword of love, wasn’t Jesus’ predominant answer to the man’s question. Before you do, you must be. You must be loved by God. You must let God love you. But the love of God is not passive. It behaves just like the Word of God that we heard about in that passage from Hebrews today. Indeed I think they are one and same:
“Living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before God no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare in the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”
When Jesus is done looking at that man with love, Jesus knows exactly what this man is holding on to and exactly what he lacks. And he lacks nothing, meaning he lacks emptiness. He lacks spaciousness, room for the kingdom to enter in. What he has is keeping him from what God has for him. I wonder if this isn’t Mark’s kind of wonky version of the beatitudes. You know, “blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn.” Mark doesn’t have that list of the Blessed the way Matthew does, and Luke, in those gospels. But I think there are those ingredients there. This young man see himself as richly blessed. He has many possessions. He uses the phrase, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is like saying, “what must I do to have the Kingdom of God? And who in those lists of the Blessed, who gets the Kingdom of God?” In the Gospel of Luke it’s the poor who receive the Kingdom of God, and in the Gospel of Mathew it’s is the poor in spirit who receive the Kingdom of God. In the Beatitudes the rich aren’t listed as being blessed. The first aren’t mentioned either.
So this passage from Mark should make us squirm right along with the rich young man – if we have many possessions, or if we are used to being among the first. Now a good test of whether you fit in this category is to just imagine Jesus talking to you in this way. Jesus looks at you with love and says “you lack one thing. Take everything you have and sell it and give your money to the poor and follow me.” Now just pay attention right now to the anxiety level you might be feeling at this moment. That’s the indicator. “That can’t be the requirement, can it, to get into the Kingdom of God?”
If we were poor, we wouldn’t have it to give away. If we were poor in spirit we wouldn’t blink if it were demanded of us. Jesus is working a real reversal here on this man’s assumptions, and our assumptions, about what everlasting life entails, and what it means to be blessed, and what God’s love for us might cost us.
I think for faithful people who have been formed to be among the first, eternal life feels sort of like what comes after a long and prosperous life. It’s our reward. Another possession to look forward to. Sort of like retirement. But here Jesus makes a very cutting point that that is not what it’s about. It’s not the possessions that get in the way. It’s not the wealth. It’s the love of it. It’s the hold it has. It’s the way that wealth forms a habit of being first.
The one thing the young man lacks, and that I know I lack – is the will to put that down, and to follow Jesus empty into the Kingdom of God. This man of privilege can’t buy his way in, he can’t enter on his own merit or his own righteousness, he can’t use his blessings to pry open the door. With God all things are possible, because that’s who lets us into the Kingdom. I don’t think the man realized he was kneeling right at the doorway of eternal life, right at the entrance of the Kingdom of God. “Why do you call me good”, asks Jesus, “if you don’t really know who and what I am?”
Over and over the message of the scriptures is that the righteous practices, the faithful acts, the following of the commandments are all activities that are meant to express the covenant of love with God, they are meant to shape our hearts into ones that deeply love God and neighbor more than ourselves. And if they don’t do that, they won’t help us enter the kingdom of God. And the offer of eternal life with such a God will shock us and disturb us and send us sad away.
But I don’t think the man’s sadness is the end of the story. I think we assume that this man rejected Jesus’ offer, and we assume that he didn’t make into the Kingdom. But I think because his heart so was troubled, and because Jesus’ word was working in him like a two-edged sword, I want to believe that he gave some thought to what it would take to give up all those things. I think it would have been very hard for him. But not impossible. And that’s my hope for us.
What must we do to inherit eternal life? We must die. We must die to an old way and start living into a new one, because right now the world we’ve made under the old way is not working. And somehow, those of us that have been formed to be first have got to figure out how to step to the back of the line. I see this in our racial repair work, in our economic justice work, in our work in transforming oppressive systems – those of us who have been formed to be first have long dominated the conversation on what the solutions should be, without really seeing ourselves as part of the problem. This Gospel says we’ve got to set that down. We’ve got to give that up. And frankly, I’m not sure how we do that. I’m not sure how we do that exactly in a system that has been so profoundly and thoroughly stacked to our advantage.
The reversal of power, privilege and resources required to truly right all that has been wronged over so long a time seems impossible. My prayer lately has sounded a bit like, “Well then who can be saved?” And I find myself clinging to Jesus’ answer. “For mortals like you Barb, it is impossible. But not for God.” Which puts us in the realm not of miracles, but of grace. That God-given, spirit driven power to do God’s will when all indications are that it’s not gonna work, that’s what we should be praying for. That’s what we should be asking for: the grace to be last.
That may be the one thing we lack – a firm grip on God’s grace. But we’re going to have to empty our hands in order to pick it up. And we’re going to have to clear a space if we’re going to have someone to keep it. In the end it may be the only possession we need, as we take our place at the back of the line that is following Jesus into the Kingdom of God.
(Sung) So low can’t get under it, so high can’t get over it, so wide can’t get around it, gotta get through that door.
Amen.
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
Oct 03, 2021 |
It's Not Good That We Should Read Alone
| The Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson
It's Not Good That We Should Read Alone
Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson for October Evensong on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22. Today's readings are:
Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
It’s Not Good That We Should Read Alone
The Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson, October 3, 2021
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
Please be seated.
In my freshman year of college I was randomly assigned to share a dorm room with three other guys and one of them, I’ll be honest, when I first met him I wasn't sure whether he and I would get along. I'll call him Jesse to protect his privacy even though his real name was Jack. When I first met Jesse it was clear to me that he and I had different interests. Jesse wore a lot of black clothes, the music he preferred was the type where people screamed a lot, and worst of all he was kind of ambivalent towards my Xbox. I mean, how can you trust someone who doesn't like to play Xbox, am I right?
So as the weeks went on it turned out that I was right in part, it was true Jesse and I did not spend, you know, a lot of our free time together, but he and I did share something very important in common. We liked our dorm room to be clean. Not spotless necessarily, you know, but livable. In this Jesse and I were unlikely allies because as it turns out our other two roommates were not human beings but filthy trash monsters.
The trash monsters' names were Nick and Brian and I'm not going to protect their privacy. You see, Brian would throw his dirty clothes everywhere when he was done with them and he didn't do laundry until midterms. And Nick would leave his dirty dishes in my bed because that was where he ate all of his meals because he said it had the best view of the TV. After a few weeks of this thankfully Jesse had an idea. It was called building a fire.
Once per week at some point while the trash monsters were away Jesse and I would walk around the room and take everything that we considered to be out of place and put it in a big pile in the entryway and it was understood that our roommates would then have 24 hours to clean up the pile before we burned it. Was this extreme? Absolutely. Were we serious? You know, probably not, but it did kind of work. Things did improve although not really enough and after that first semester, Jesse and I we ditched the trash monsters and we got a different room together, and so even though Jesse never played Xbox with me and I never went in for the screamo music he ended up being the best roommate that I ever had.
Okay so why am I telling you this story? Because my sermon this evening is about unlikely allies and the perspectives that they can bring. You see, I think churches are a bit like freshman college dorm rooms. Often they smell a bit funny and we don't always get to choose who is there even, so we do need to learn to live together and we need to learn how to solve problems together. Some of our roommates do and say things that can make our shared space unlivable while others can do just the opposite, and it's not always the roommates that you expect.
Two of the texts that we read this evening, Genesis 2 and Mark 10, are texts that maybe many of you have heard before in addition to them being read regularly in kind of the church calendar. Portions of them show up in various liturgies, especially wedding liturgies. For centuries they've been used to form a kind of theological framework for understanding love and partnership especially in the home.
However, many of us probably also know that some of our roommates in the church have used these texts in profoundly oppressive ways, especially the story of the Garden of Eden that we find in Genesis 2 and 3. That's my focus for this evening. This text has been used to prescribe restrictive normative notions of gender and sexuality which have resulted in systematic inequality and violence, especially towards women and queer people, and as a result, for many people both in and outside of the church, these stories are sources of trauma, not of hope. Thankfully in the church we have other roommates as well and they know how to build a fire.
I teach at the seminary in Mount Airy about a mile away from here on Germantown Avenue and I offer most of the Old Testament classes there. This is the part of the Bible that was written before Jesus came along and one of the skills that I teach my students (most of them are preparing for ministry), is how to separate out what the Bible says from what people say the Bible says. One of the ways we do this is we read texts together. We read them in class, they read them at home and then they post about it in our class forum. They also read or listen to the interpretations of scholars and other ministers who have unique perspectives on scripture, and in cultivating these different readings of scripture not only do we notice the things we've missed, we also become more aware of our own particularities and intersecting identities.
Now, I teach the Hebrew language too and ancient Near Eastern cultural facts and that sort of thing, but the most important skill that we practice in my classes is learning to read scripture together within the Body of Christ. And it is here where we hear the Holy Spirit speaking to us of liberation and hope and love in the Bible.
So let me give you just a few examples from our genesis reading this this evening. Okay, so you may have heard that this is a story about how women are to blame for sinning and wrecking God's perfect creation for the rest of us, but when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might see that both the man and the woman are present during that whole exchange with the snake, it's just that the woman does all of the talking while the man is silent. You see, whenever that snake speaks he addresses them in the second person plural form - that is, he's saying “y’all” (but you know, like, in Hebrew), so I believe that whatever the nature of that disobedience is with the fruits and the Tree, whatever its consequences, both the man and the woman are equally responsible.
For centuries the predominantly male interpreters of the Bible have been all too ready to believe the man at his word when he tells God in chapter 3, “Hey, she made me do it. It's not my fault.” But thankfully not everybody who reads the Bible is a man. You may have heard that this story teaches that women must submit to their husbands but when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might see that this is not how God intended to create the world.
Now it's true that there is a verse in chapter three where God says to the woman, “Your husband shall rule over you.” That's in there, but what too many fail to acknowledge is that this speech from God happens after the snake and the tree and the fruits and all that stuff, thus God is not prescribing the way things ought to be, God is describing the tragic consequences of what has resulted from that first sin. Women submitting to men was not an order that God imposed on creation, it's a sign that things are going wrong.
Now, that may seem like a kind of minor rhetorical distinction but consider this: in the same speech God also tells the man that the ground itself is now cursed and that it will be difficult and back-breaking work to farm food. So does that mean it's wrong to, I don't know, buy a tractor? Is it going against the very nature of Creation to spread a little weed killer or to find some other way to ameliorate this curse that is on the ground? Just because gender inequality was a consequence of sin, that does not mean we have to live our lives maintaining it, thankfully. Thankfully not everybody who reads the Bible is willing to believe that God baked gender inequality into creation.
You may have heard that because this story depicts a man and a woman in a committed sexual relationship that it thereby forbids any other kind of sexual contact between human beings. But when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might see that God's imperative to those first human beings is to create and raise children, and that is not at all the same thing as a prohibition against other expressions of love and generosity and commitments, including those that develop between same-sex partners.
The fact is, the very first problem, before the tree, the very first problem that we see in the Garden of Eden is that the very first human being is lonely. That's what's in our reading this evening. The very first verse, this is what God says: “It is not good that man should be alone.” Companionship and partnership is what God creates in this story and it's what God intends for all of us, however and with whomever we might find it. Thankfully not everybody who reads the Bible has such a narrow understanding of human relationships.
Let's do one more. You may have heard that this story teaches that every human being is naturally one of two genders but when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might notice that God originally created just one person, and within that single person are the substances that will eventually become the first man and woman. The first human being is called Adam, which is the Hebrew word for mortal. It's also the root of the name that we use today, Adam. The word Adam is actually a pun because God forms Adam from the adama - that is, from the ground. As one Bible scholar puts it, God takes some of the ground and creates a groundling. The words man and woman -that is, ish and isha in Hebrew - do not even appear in the narrative until there are two people split apart from that original mortal Adam.
What could it possibly mean to be male or female when you are literally the only member of your species? What does it mean that the very first human being that God created was sexually ambiguous? Thankfully there are people in the Body of Christ asking these important questions because I'll be honest, as interesting and as necessary as they are, I would have never thought of them. And I'm a Bible scholar right?
So let me close with one more thought. There's this idea out there that I sometimes encounter in progressive, inclusive churches that the Bible and especially the Old Testament, is not really on our side. “Yeah there are some nice bits here and there but overall the Bible is old, it's outdated and it's non-essential for a kind of modern, you know, progressive Christian faith.” I think when folks say this most of the time I think they mean well. They might be thinking of passages like the Garden of Eden and how some branches of the church have used this text to control and to injure and to violate, but when we bracket off the Bible so uncritically I don't think we realize that we are making the same mistake that those other Christian branches are making. Neither of us is reading scripture with the church.
Today, we're reading it only with the church of the past. It's just that some of us like those past interpretations and some of us reject them, but both perspectives are impoverished, both are short-sighted and both are exclusive. Reading scripture together is one of the most important ways that we as the Body of Christ hear what God is speaking to us today, and in those settings the voice of the Holy Spirit comes as much from the people around us as it does from our own individual readings or hearings of the text. It is not good that we should read alone. Therefore let us cling to the Body of Christ, our community of interpreters, and become one flesh. Amen.
Access a recording of this and other sermons at StMartinEC.org/podcasts/sermons/
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Oct 03, 2021 |
It's Complicated
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
It's Complicated
Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22. Today's readings are:
Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
It’s Complicated
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, October 3, 2021
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Creator God, we give you humble thanks and we express our amazement that you are mindful of us and that you care for each of us. Such extraordinary love points only to your greatness. Lord God keep us in your grace so that we may grow into your love and learn to live in that space just below the angels. In Christ’s Name we pray. Amen.
So my mother always describes “that day” as the worst day of her life. “That day” was the day that my mother's mother moved back in with my mother's father and took her home. My mother had been enjoying life with just her mother. I understand why, because her mother, whose actual name I don't know, was always called by the grandchildren “Other Mama” and that's her name as far as I’m concerned. Other Mama, one of the most nurturing, kind, generous, loving people I've ever met, was taking care of my mom as a solo child in a small bungalow in Amarillo, Texas while Other Mama taught school, and mom enjoyed the undivided attention of her mother. But then she got taken back to her dad.
Now her dad, known to me as Daddy D (known to people more locally as Dr. D. Foster) was a legend in the small town in the Texas Panhandle called Hale Center. He was the town doctor. The one town doctor. Every baby that was born, he delivered. Every bone that broke, he set. Every surgery, he did it. Everyone passing on, he walked them through. He did house calls. He got paid in chickens by broke farmers. He was a legendary small town country god. Now, this public appearance was in contradiction with his domestic life because at home he was retired, he was cruel, he was a drinker, a smoker, and a serial philanderer in a Southern Baptist town.
My grandmother, Other Mama, stood six foot two in flat shoes. She could look Daddy D right in the eyes, but Daddy D had the gift of making her feel small and making her feel bad about herself and he made it a miserable house to live in. So that was the worst day of my mom's life, and even when I was a young child and we visited that little ranch house in Hale Center, Texas, I could feel my beloved grandmother's misery - the heaviness of her hurt on her broad shoulders - vividly, as I worked with her in the kitchen to make breakfast or dinner.
So this is all a way to say that I have some problems with our gospel today, and I'm going to trouble this story a little bit, and it's going to trouble me, and we're going to get someplace with it, and it's going to be complicated so I ask to bear with me. It's really my observation (and I think it's a valid one) that the Episcopal Church has come to a place today where we are able to embrace divorce in a way that Jesus did not.
We can see that when a marriage covenant breaks down so severely that against all efforts, it can't be recovered, we can see that the loving response may be the end of that marriage bond in divorce, that that might be the right loving care of everyone concerned. And so pastorally we wrap couples up in care as they make that journey. We don't judge them, we assist them. This is where we are pastorally today in relationship to divorce. We can see that it demands respect. We can see that it is often a blessing that displays God's liberating and life-giving love in a way that perhaps Jesus could not see according to this passage.
Now, this passage has been worked with by a lot of people and I spent a lot of time evolving arguments this week, and I can teach an adult forum about an hour long on all the ways to worm around what this passage says. There's a whole school that tries to make Jesus a first century feminist who somehow was making men and women equal in this story even though under Roman law they were already such.
I don't really buy all these work-arounds. I think we have to face it head on. Jesus is approached with the question of the legality of divorce and with the Mosaic law he does not contest it, he just says it's given to you for your wholeness and heart. Then he changes the frame in a very Rabbinical argument move and says well that's the Mosaic covenant about the covenant of Creation, and according to Jesus and the covenant of Creation, we’re meant for lifelong marriage or bonding together. And then he goes into the adultery discussion in private with the disciples where yes, men and women are treated equally, but the results aren't so good because if you remarry you’re an adulterer.
So this leads us to the very uncomfortable passage, and as someone once said (the great preacher David Gloss) a woman who had been divorced, well, every time she heard this passage she felt like a garbage can had been dumped on her at church. She came all ready to be renewed and revived and to worship and here comes this gospel like a bunch of garbage to make her feel ashamed and bad about herself. That's why I feel like we have to depart from it to some degree, and be the pastors who recognize that divorce demands respect and blessing and care and may be the right way to go for someone's flourishing and for the health of the whole family.
Now, saying that, -and this is where it gets a little more complicated - I also want to, as I respect divorce, also celebrate life in a union. Now, I trust that this congregation can do complex things in your hearts and your minds so stick with it. While we respect that some marriages are better ended, we still can alongside that celebrate God's intention that we have companionship in the long term, and that's the whole move that Jesus makes back to the Genesis story. The only time in the Genesis story that God says something is not good, it's not good that the first human is alone. So that's how profoundly God believes that we need companionship. We need someone to express that delight and love in us, that is part and parcel of God's delight and love with us.
And another bit of trouble I'm going to throw out in this passage is that that same Genesis passage has been used oppressively to exclude gay and lesbian and transgender people from the benefits of married life and lifelong companionship blessed by the church. Once again I think we’re in a new place in the Episcopal Church where those unions are as blessed as heterosexual unions. Whether it's male and male, female and female, or female and male we can see God's love in these relationships and celebrate them and wish them the same flourishing over time.
Really, indeed when I sit down and do premarital counseling of any couple whatsoever I always move from the assumption that they are heading towards lifelong union. I don't do premarital counseling with an escape clause. You know, saying “these values are from God but you can bail out anytime” is not what I teach. I try to hold out to them the promise of this long-term commitment of time.
These people in their 20s being married right now - actuarially, they might be married for 60 or 70 years. They've got a really good chance at that, so i say to them “think about how your mind, body and spirit will change in 70 years.” And I don't do that lightly. I'm trying to get them to reflect on this gift of love that they share. Does it have the oomph, does it have the depth to stay devoted, stay adoring, stay committed through all of those ups and downs, the for better, the for worse, the richer, the poorer, the sickness, the health? Are your wedding vows very realistic? Do you have the gift of love that's going to see you through that journey? Because for me this whole “to death do us part” thing is not a legal trap, which is how it's sometimes used, that you’ve got to stick together no matter how miserable and bitter you are, how hateful and hurtful a marriage is, you’ve got to stick together til death do you part. That’s the legal reading. For me, the spiritual reading is, do you have the love in your relationship to contemplate on your happiest day the worst thing you can imagine?
Can you imagine losing your beloved, and having the love to go through that horrible experience. That's taking a spiritual sounding. That's looking at the spiritual promise of love, not the legalism of marriage. And marriages can and do do that. They can do that so beautifully. They can express the faithfulness of God for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for sickness and health till death do us part, and be that gift of a loving presence that we all are so yearning for.
My greatest example of this has been my own parents. They always taught me and my sisters “Jarrett, Dallas, Kelly: marriage is hard work. You’ve got to work at everything.” And boy they did, and they’ve been married 60 years and I celebrate that. At the present time my mom is drifting away with dementia and she's staying in a nursing home room and my dad is staying in their old apartment, but every day my dad at 7:30 am is in her room, and he is in her room until 7:30 p.m. He is supervising her care. He is holding elaborate conversations that are pretty much one-sided. He is showing her pictures of their life together. He is planning the music that she loves. He's defending her against bad medical care. He is loving her in the worst time. This could be the final and the worst time, but this is the time that she's being loved so faithfully, so generously, so sacrificially, that all I can see is God's presence.
So let us hold out that love as a promising gift that God offers us in so many states of life: through friendship, through companionship, through partnership, through community, and yes, through marriage as well. That is how deeply we are loved and I fundamentally believe that God believes that we deserve that level of love and need that level of love to flower into the human beings God created us to be. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Sep 26, 2021 |
Stay Salty
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Stay Salty
Sermon by the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21. Today's readings are:
Psalm 19:7-14
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp21_RCL.html
Stay Salty
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, September 26, 2021
Let us Pray.
When my kids, who are in their 20s, are annoyed with something or disappointed or are feeling a little bitter they say they are feeling salty. If they know there’s something that’s upsetting me they say, “Mom, you’re a little salty today aren’t you?”
I’m a little salty. It’s a pretty good word to use with today’s Gospel, which will ultimately bring us around to the topic of salt. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Everybody is a little salty in today’s Gospel. They’re also a little salty in the book of Numbers, but in today’s gospel, Jarrett was calling it “Harsh Mark”. I think we’ll call it “Salty Mark.”
For Jesus it started last Sunday on that walk to Capernaum with his followers, and Jesus had to listen to his 12 right-hand men arguing over which of them would be first in the Kingdom of God – as though he can’t hear them, as though he can’t hear everything. And when he asks them about it, they go all silent, like disciples do. And that makes Jesus a little salty.
So as you might remember from last Sunday, he gathered the 12 together in the house where they were staying and said, “if you want to be first, you must be last of all and servant of all.”
Then He placed a child among them and said “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me… whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
He introduced the child not because they are particularly insightful or humble, but because in the socio-familial relationships of the Roman empire, children were dead last. If they were born with deformities they could be left out to die by exposure. So if you’re going to serve the least ones, like this child in Jesus arms, you’ve got to be willing to be less than least.
This week, that child is still in Jesus’ lap and the 12 Apostles are still struggling with what Jesus is telling them.
You know, so much has been made about the 12 apostles, about how they were the church’s first leaders, the representatives of the 12 tribes of Israel, the predecessors of bishops and priests. I just wonder if Jesus wanted 12 handy examples of what not to do to get into the kingdom of God. “You’ll do. Let’s have John today, it’s John’s turn.”
So today John steps up. ”Hey speaking of doing things in your name, Jesus, there was this guy casting out demons in your name, but he wasn’t following us, so we tried to stop him.” That was John. I wonder if he was feeling a little salty about the competition coming from outside the group.
It’s as though John is saying, “well if I can’t cut out the least ones, who can I cut out? How about him?”
If Jesus wasn’t salty before, he is now. And he not so gently turns the apostles’ attention away from the finger pointing they were sighting down and to the three pointing back at them. They need a lesson on how to be “least of all, and servant of all.”
“You want to know what to cut out? I’ll tell you what to cut out”, says Jesus.
“If you are looking to be first in line by excluding, judging or because you’re jealous of what they’ve got, cut it out.”
“If you are causing someone who is struggling with their faith to stumble and fall because of what you say or do around them, cut it out.”
“And if you have things in your life that are causing you to put yourself in solidarity with anyone or anything other than God, cut them out.”
Then Jesus goes on this big exaggerated litany of all the body parts they should be willing to lose, if they are causing his followers to sin. And at first I thought he was going back to the lesson he taught in Mark 7, where he told his followers that evil doesn’t come from the outside, but from the inside with things like greed, wickedness, deceit, arrogance, and foolishness. That would apply pretty well here. So of course your eye and your hand and your foot aren’t making you sin, but the much deeper agendas are.
But then I remembered that this particular list that Jesus refers to with a good measure of hyperbole had a particular meaning in Jesus’ day. These were the ways that prisoners of conquest were maimed by Rome so they wouldn’t escape their servitude. So prisoners were sometimes blinded and then given manual labor to do that they could never find their way free of. Or their hands or feet were cut off so they couldn’t run away. And that’s how Rome built its great empire. That’s one of the things that came to mind when people talked about the blind and the lame.
So Jesus may also be saying to the arrogant 12 – “how willing are you really to be the kind of servant that God has called you to be? Are you willing to sacrifice your body to keep yourself bound to your service to me? Because that’s what it means to be first in the kingdom.” Like I said – Jesus is salty.
But it’s important that his followers, especially those chosen to spread the gospel, get this right. Because as soon as church membership and discipleship becomes a contest, as soon as some are considered more important than others by their proximity to Jesus, or their status, or their gifts or their apparent blessings, then the fragile unity of the Jesus movement will stumble and fall. There is no room for factions or triumphalism in it. It hurt the church then and it harms it now.
So what does that mean for us today, in this assembly? I think it means that if we find ourselves continually pointing to others as the source of blame for our dissatisfaction, we might need to examine who the rest of our fingers are pointing. We might need to look at whether we are the disciples that God requires for God’s work. When we’re feeling like blaming, it might be an invitation to self-reflection.
So we might ask: what do we do that causes others to stumble in their faith, or in their belief? What do we do as members of the Jesus movement that impedes its work, the growth of others? I could turn it around and make it nicer and ask “what do we do to help people to grow?” But sometimes we have to look at what we do that causes people to wilt, to walk away, to visit and not come back, or to wonder if Christians truly believe what we say we do.
So I’ll just talk about me. Here are some things that I have been guilty of in my life as a Christian:
Failing to welcome,failing to include, or appreciate and offer hospitality. Maybe making sure that I have my spot in a new group and being oblivious that others want to come in too.
In times of church strife, stirring up dissension and inhibiting healing by gossiping, by undermining, holding grudges, or carefully tending my personal agendas.
Expressing my disappointment in tones that would make it very difficult to engage with me on the issue at hand because I so fanned the flames around me,
Acting out of my prejudices and privileges before I even know they’re out of the box– of race, class, and age – as soon as my power gets challenged.
I could go on of course. These are the fingers that tend to point back at me. How about for you?
“Whoever is not against us is for us,” Jesus says of the unnamed exorcist that John has in his crosshairs. But the question for John and for us, instead is, how are you “for God.” In what ways are you that servant, that offering to God, that sacrifice that Jesus calls his followers to be?
This is where salt enters the story in a slightly different way than I‘ve been using it.
“For everyone will be salted with fire,” Jesus says. Sacrifices to God in Jesus’ day were purified with salt and with fire. An animal sacrifice, in the experience of Israel, was an act of prayer and worship, and praise, humility and intercession to God. You prepared a sacrifice carefully.
How have we prepared ourselves to be “for God?” How are we fashioning our lives so that they serve God, and God’s love, and God’s will? What are we salting our lives with, so that they build up rather than tear down, so they are fit for the work that God Is doing in the world?
Here I want to give a brief shout out today’s reading from James, who encourages us to salt our lives with prayer. In all things. We are not to just use God as some divine help desk; but rather, to fully season our lives in joy and pain, in illness and soul-sickness and wellness and whole-heartedness with the kind of prayer that fully surrenders to God in our lives. If we see people who have fallen, we are to help them to rise. If we see people who have wandered, we help them to return. That’s what you do when your life is fully seasoned with prayer and relationship with God. Dorothy Day called it making it easier for people to be good. We make it easier for people to be good. We make the church community a place people can come home to; where people can find peace.
“Salt is good,” Jesus reminds his followers. “But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
Be at peace with one another. This is what Jesus was getting at in the first place, even before he set that child on his lap. Be at peace with one another. Jesus implores us to set aside our arguing, and our egos, and our arrogance, and our blame, and walk together in love.
In other words, Jesus might say, “Stay Salty.”
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Sep 19, 2021 |
Struggle and Sacrifice
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Struggle and Sacrifice
Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20. Today's readings are:
Jeremiah 11:18-20
Psalm 54
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, draw near to us as we draw near to you. Lord God, grant us the gift of your saving wisdom once again, so that we may know the gentleness and kindness of your word in our hearts. In Christ’s Name we pray, Amen.
Please be seated.
We have been in a stretch of the Gospel of Mark that’s raw and hard. Two weeks ago we had the Syrophoenician woman and the horrible words Jesus exchanged with her, and her subtle words that cracked open the good news for all gentiles. Last week we had the ferocious exchange between Jesus and Peter. Jesus revealed who he was: the messiah who would suffer, die, and rise, and there was all that rebuking back and forth in the community, which helps us understand why we are scared to ask questions. This week we have this next raw passage where the disciples, the founding generation of our faith, are caught out looking embarrassed, looking and actually missing the point. And I always ask myself when I’m in this raw section of work “what’s going on?”
One thing that’s going on is the cross has been revealed, and when the cross is revealed, the tension goes up. The story becomes unsettling: this is life and death now. The other thing that’s so interesting to me is where’s the editor? You would think that someone would edit this story. What movement leaves in these kinds of stories about the founding generation? You would think there would be an editor with a public relations point of view. There is none, and all the embarrassing stuff stay in. The embarrassing stories stay in. The struggle stays in the story. And we can imagine that in all these decades when the stories were passed around in the budding community of the early church, the subjects of those stories were there. Peter, John and Andrew got to hear these stories about themselves, and their relatives and friends got to hear them. “Oh, there’s Uncle Peter being dense again.” “There goes Cousin Andrew, boy did he get that wrong.” I think in this lies the hint in why these stories are included.
Remember in the beginning of the gospel Jesus is only teaching his disciples. He’s only in a community with his disciples when he teaches. What does that tell you? It tells you that this embarrassing story was passed on by the disciples. They told this story among themselves, and that fact is crucial. That means that these disciples understood finally what Jesus was teaching at some point, because they were able to accept the sacrifice of embarrassment, the sacrifice of a little humility, for the good of the community, who needed to hear these stories. Because the struggle of the early church is the same struggle of our discipleship now. The struggle to understand what is hard to understand. The struggle to enter this way of Jesus that’s hard to understand in the actual practice of our lives. So the disciples gave us a gift in their sacrifice. “Yes, tell these embarrassing stories about me, because it will help the community. It’s going to help the community that’s learning to sacrifice and learning to struggle.”
We continue down that path of struggle and sacrifice, learning how to live this path that Jesus has offered us as the path of life, and we see both points in this gospel. They didn’t ask Jesus after his second revelation of his death and resurrection because they were scared to bring up their ignorance. And then, as if proving that they aren’t getting what Jesus is teaching by arguing on the way about who will be greatest, and who is going to be the top of the heap in the new kingdom, Jesus very gently calls them out and corrects them. He calls them to lives of service first. – “where the first be the last and the last be the first” - and then pushes them even further by picking up a child, and showing the child as a lesson to them about how to be in the community.
See, the disciples are struggling to take an order, fully knowing that that’s the mystery from death to life: that there is a demotion involved here; that we are called to lives out of glory of service; not of status but of dependence. And I want to be clear with this point that for Jesus, service is not servility. Service is not servility, and sacrifice is not self-hatred. These are common misconceptions promoted oftentimes by the church, but service is not servility and sacrifice is not self-hate. Quite the opposite: both are participation in the goodness of Christ. Both are participation in the way of Jesus and they bring out the good in us that is good for others, and the awareness that what’s good for others is what’s good for us. It’s only when we drop our ego-centric notion of ourselves as the center and begin to live for others that we fully understand that what is good is shared; what is good for me is what is good for you. And so in that understanding servility and self-hatred are not part of the story, rather a liberation is part of the story. A liberation into the story of Christ himself, who gives all in service, to reveal the goodness in the love of God for us.
I believe this teaching is utterly crucial to us. The simple act of asking people to sacrifice by putting on a mask, the simple act of asking people to sacrifice to take the vaccine, has proven so challenging to so many people that we are living with Covid long past when perhaps we should have, and many tens of thousands of people have died, because of a deep unwillingness to sacrifice and to serve the other. This is a humbling and sobering moment in our National life where many of us are standing back and saying “what is missing, that we can’t take such simple measures for the common good?”
Just as an aside I want to say that I’m so proud of St. Martin because our community has shown that willingness to make those small sacrifices for the common good, and that inspired me as a Christ-like work by everyone here during the last 18 months, and you need to be given thanks for that. But the larger issue still remains. Why can’t we understand sacrifice? Why have we lost that virtue? And it haunts me even more because more sacrifice is to be required. It is the calling of communities like us to witness and lead and teach that sacrifice, because the world will need more.
When we think about climate change, we can think and hope that technology will bail us out. There’s one scenario where if we have enough Teslas, we can take the superhighways and we’ll all be happy. I would love that to be true. I really hope that’s how it goes. But all indications are to me that we will need some level of sacrifice to save the planet and save humanity, and our communities have a special role to tell that story, because that story that Jesus told about being betrayed, handed over, killed and risen is not just an alternative story. It’s not just another way of thinking. It’s not just a counter-narrative. It is the event that changed reality itself, and set us free to be a different kind of person, to be a different kind of community, that can make startling choices to serve and to sacrifice and to struggle together because we know through faith that we are part of this new world that Christ is creating, and that that world serves the good of all. 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
Sep 12, 2021 |
The Body That Keeps The Score
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
The Body That Keeps The Score
Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19.Today's readings are:
Transcript:
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Gracious God, I turn to you in gratitude and thanksgiving, knowing that when the cords of death entangle us, when grief and sorrow are on us, that you are there, that any forsaken place you will find us, any place of being lost and alone, you have been there. I give you thanks that your grace surrounds such pain with hope in new life. In Christ’s name, Amen.
I feel like with everything Tyrone taught us, I should sing my sermon this morning. Of course, nobody wants that. I want to recommend a book to you all…a book called The Body Keeps Score. It’s a wonderful book that explores how post-traumatic stress gets lodged in our bodies, that all those terrible events of our lives that were painful and raw and hurtful actually persist in us long past when we may have cognitively remembered them, and that they're prone to emerge later in reactions we can't quite understand or depression from trying to keep those feelings at bay. I strongly recommend this book: The Body Keeps Score.
I can give a very quick real-life example of this phenomenon of traumatic stress rearing up when you didn't expect it. Some of you know that in the last two years of high school and the first two years of college my son Tim gave my wife and I a run for our money. Lots of crises. Crisis after crisis concerning his addictions, and they were stressful and hard and difficult times. We’ve had two peaceful years of recovery and we thought we were past it. Then on one very kind of rainy wet day this summer, with the flood warnings in effect and the stream really high, my son set off to fish. Later that day we got a call from my daughter Martha. “Hey, Tim was supposed to pick me up from work. Where is he?” Allison and I went into full alert. (Allison is my wife if you don't know.) We are on both of our cell phones at the same time, texting, calling, calling friends, emailing, pacing up and down our house with our hands on our head, our pulse racing, our breath short, and we're being curt and tense with each other. Luckily he emerged some hours later and was safe and sound. Allison and I took a deep breath and we looked at each other and said “Where did that come from? We must not be over this yet.” We had a good look at how the trauma was still in us, the anxiety and stress just ready to pop at the next occasion that seemed like a crisis from the past.
I tell you this story about how the body keeps score because for me it indicates the level of work Jesus is announcing in the gospel. The level of work Jesus is announcing of the gospel isn't just notional or cognitive, it's on the deepest level of our human experiences, the places where we often times do not want to go. Jesus's Messiahship will not be as expected, will not be full of power and success and parades and palaces and princesses. It won't be the glory of military victory. It will be ignominious defeat on a cross, because Jesus has to go to that place to surround with God's love and compassion and attention. All of the most alienated parts of our humanity, God has to go to those places we wish not to go, to overcome them with the hope of the Resurrection. That's the good news I want to cling to.
It is the good news I cling to daily, but with the 20th anniversary of September 11th being yesterday, I believe it's a good news we need to hear for our own savior, for the sake of those we love, because I am sure some of you and some of the people you love are carrying in their bodies the score of that day, the horror, the fear, the panic, the worry, the anger, the powerlessness, the shame. Some of us had friends in lower Manhattan. Some of us had family there. Some of us had friends in the towers, or acquaintances, or knew people flying that day, knew people in the Pentagon. And if we take a deep breath we can feel those feelings under the surface of that day. Our spiritual work is to wrap that pain in the compassion and love of Christ, who knows all of it, and lives in that place eternally in love and hope and healing.
For me, Jesus is the ultimate body who keeps the score. In this Messiahship he describes in the gospel, he's describing how he has to take on the suffering of humanity - all humanity from day one to the end of time - in his body. All the alienation, the anger, the hostility, the rage, the shame, the rejection, he takes on for us so that he can overcome it with love and hope and new life. And that is what we cling to when we enter these painful spaces. This truth about Jesus is not just an individual truth. It's not just the pastoral need of us who suffer an anniversary or the needs of our families and friends suffering with us. It's also a larger corporate need because Jesus is not just an individual human on the cross, he is corporate humanity in the biggest sense. Plural humanity.
I heard a story that reminded me of this fact, a story of healing a new life that to me is the epitome of what I’m saying. The Diocese of Pennsylvania is involved in a ministry at the Veterans Affairs Hospital here in Philadelphia, and the ministry is a ministry to soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering from what's called moral injury. We know that in warfare we can suffer psychic injury, we can suffer physical injury and now we know we can suffer moral injury. If only I had this language I would have understood my uncles who went to World War 2, Korea and Vietnam. But here at the V.A, we work with soldiers who are working through this pain, this oppressive pain that they carry.
Part of what they do is they present their story to an assembly of friends and fellow veterans and church people and they tell us what happened, and I’ve heard the story of one particular person I’ll call Andy. Andy was a young man at the time of 9/11 and to honor his grandfather who served in World War 2, he joined the military soon after that day, and he was deployed to Iraq. On one of his patrols, his patrol took fire from a building. They hunkered down and called in an air strike and moments later the building was reduced to rubble. His unit moved into the rubble to search and discovered there was no gunman. There were no guns; no gunmen; no ammunition; no weapons. There was a family. Multi-generations of a family now dead. This was Andy’s moral injury, something he could not erase from his conscience. Something that worked against all of his commitments. Something that broke his heart. Something he struggled with mightily to find relief and forgiveness for years after his service.
He told this story to the assembly with great emotion and then the assembled gathered around Andy and recited some words written for the occasion. The group said “Andy, we (Key word: We) are sorry. It is because of our choices that you were put in that impossible situation. It was because of our choices you are morally injured this way, and we take responsibility and beg your forgiveness.” It was a healing moment, a healing moment of corporate responsibility. Joint shared responsibilities finally acknowledging that the shame this man felt was something we all shared and put on. I see the story of our Christ, our messiah, in this story, where the body of Christ finally is taking this pain into itself, not denying it, not ignoring it, not putting it away, but turning into it with love and compassion that leads to life renewed. Connection renewed. Souls saved and restored. This to me is the mission of the body of Christ, formed by Christ when we live out this mission.
I have one final challenging place to go with you all this morning, because there's a bigger picture here. We've looked at compassion to the individual who suffers, we've looked at the community rallying around someone who suffers. We need to look at the global presence of the messiah who suffers. One of the most striking and difficult things for me as we have observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and 20 years of warfare is the death toll.
929,000 people have died in the last 20 years in Afghanistan; in Iraq and Syria and Yemen. That number is almost too big to grasp. Humans notoriously have a hard time relating emotionally to large numbers, but I have to ask myself “How do I live with this death toll as I try to live a life before God? How do I live with this? What do I do with it as I live with my suffering messiah?”
The first thing I can say that causes me some gratitude in the midst of the entangled grief is that thank God, that God can love that many people, because I know I cannot. But I know that God's love treats each one of those people as a child of God, and the vast majority of them were civilians: women and children and non-combatants. This was a slaughter bigger than the American Civil War and I need to know that my suffering messiah can teach my heart, hardened by nationalism, hardened by parochialism, by all the limitations of my place and time.
Our suffering messiah can teach me that God's love extends to all those people; that they are human beings that are infinitely valuable to God, and arriving at that deep inner knowledge, that wisdom, I can only believe that we need to find another way. That living before God we cannot endorse such slaughter. That living unashamed of our association with Jesus, we cannot endorse such massive killing. We must at least sit in the pain and ask ourselves what can be done differently for the sake of the one we follow. Amen.
Gracious God, I turn to you in gratitude and thanksgiving, knowing that when the cords of death entangle us, when grief and sorrow are on us, that you are there, that any forsaken place you will find us, any place of being lost and alone, you have been there. I give you thanks that your grace surrounds such pain with hope in new life. In Christ’s name, Amen.
I feel like with everything Tyrone taught us, I should sing my sermon this morning. Of course, nobody wants that. I want to recommend a book to you all…a book called The Body Keeps Score. It’s a wonderful book that explores how post-traumatic stress gets lodged in our bodies, that all those terrible events of our lives that were painful and raw and hurtful actually persist in us long past when we may have cognitively remembered them, and that they're prone to emerge later in reactions we can't quite understand or depression from trying to keep those feelings at bay. I strongly recommend this book: The Body Keeps Score.
I can give a very quick real-life example of this phenomenon of traumatic stress rearing up when you didn't expect it. Some of you know that in the last two years of high school and the first two years of college my son Tim gave my wife and I a run for our money. Lots of crises. Crisis after crisis concerning his addictions, and they were stressful and hard and difficult times. We’ve had two peaceful years of recovery and we thought we were past it. Then on one very kind of rainy wet day this summer, with the flood warnings in effect and the stream really high, my son set off to fish. Later that day we got a call from my daughter Martha. “Hey, Tim was supposed to pick me up from work. Where is he?” Allison and I went into full alert. (Allison is my wife if you don't know.) We are on both of our cell phones at the same time, texting, calling, calling friends, emailing, pacing up and down our house with our hands on our head, our pulse racing, our breath short, and we're being curt and tense with each other. Luckily he emerged some hours later and was safe and sound. Allison and I took a deep breath and we looked at each other and said “Where did that come from? We must not be over this yet.” We had a good look at how the trauma was still in us, the anxiety and stress just ready to pop at the next occasion that seemed like a crisis from the past.
I tell you this story about how the body keeps score because for me it indicates the level of work Jesus is announcing in the gospel. The level of work Jesus is announcing of the gospel isn't just notional or cognitive, it's on the deepest level of our human experiences, the places where we often times do not want to go. Jesus's Messiahship will not be as expected, will not be full of power and success and parades and palaces and princesses. It won't be the glory of military victory. It will be ignominious defeat on a cross, because Jesus has to go to that place to surround with God's love and compassion and attention. All of the most alienated parts of our humanity, God has to go to those places we wish not to go, to overcome them with the hope of the Resurrection. That's the good news I want to cling to.
It is the good news I cling to daily, but with the 20th anniversary of September 11th being yesterday, I believe it's a good news we need to hear for our own savior, for the sake of those we love, because I am sure some of you and some of the people you love are carrying in their bodies the score of that day, the horror, the fear, the panic, the worry, the anger, the powerlessness, the shame. Some of us had friends in lower Manhattan. Some of us had family there. Some of us had friends in the towers, or acquaintances, or knew people flying that day, knew people in the Pentagon. And if we take a deep breath we can feel those feelings under the surface of that day. Our spiritual work is to wrap that pain in the compassion and love of Christ, who knows all of it, and lives in that place eternally in love and hope and healing.
For me, Jesus is the ultimate body who keeps the score. In this Messiahship he describes in the gospel, he's describing how he has to take on the suffering of humanity - all humanity from day one to the end of time - in his body. All the alienation, the anger, the hostility, the rage, the shame, the rejection, he takes on for us so that he can overcome it with love and hope and new life. And that is what we cling to when we enter these painful spaces. This truth about Jesus is not just an individual truth. It's not just the pastoral need of us who suffer an anniversary or the needs of our families and friends suffering with us. It's also a larger corporate need because Jesus is not just an individual human on the cross, he is corporate humanity in the biggest sense. Plural humanity.
I heard a story that reminded me of this fact, a story of healing a new life that to me is the epitome of what I’m saying. The Diocese of Pennsylvania is involved in a ministry at the Veterans Affairs Hospital here in Philadelphia, and the ministry is a ministry to soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering from what's called moral injury. We know that in warfare we can suffer psychic injury, we can suffer physical injury and now we know we can suffer moral injury. If only I had this language I would have understood my uncles who went to World War 2, Korea and Vietnam. But here at the V.A, we work with soldiers who are working through this pain, this oppressive pain that they carry.
Part of what they do is they present their story to an assembly of friends and fellow veterans and church people and they tell us what happened, and I’ve heard the story of one particular person I’ll call Andy. Andy was a young man at the time of 9/11 and to honor his grandfather who served in World War 2, he joined the military soon after that day, and he was deployed to Iraq. On one of his patrols, his patrol took fire from a building. They hunkered down and called in an air strike and moments later the building was reduced to rubble. His unit moved into the rubble to search and discovered there was no gunman. There were no guns; no gunmen; no ammunition; no weapons. There was a family. Multi-generations of a family now dead. This was Andy’s moral injury, something he could not erase from his conscience. Something that worked against all of his commitments. Something that broke his heart. Something he struggled with mightily to find relief and forgiveness for years after his service.
He told this story to the assembly with great emotion and then the assembled gathered around Andy and recited some words written for the occasion. The group said “Andy, we (Key word: We) are sorry. It is because of our choices that you were put in that impossible situation. It was because of our choices you are morally injured this way, and we take responsibility and beg your forgiveness.” It was a healing moment, a healing moment of corporate responsibility. Joint shared responsibilities finally acknowledging that the shame this man felt was something we all shared and put on. I see the story of our Christ, our messiah, in this story, where the body of Christ finally is taking this pain into itself, not denying it, not ignoring it, not putting it away, but turning into it with love and compassion that leads to life renewed. Connection renewed. Souls saved and restored. This to me is the mission of the body of Christ, formed by Christ when we live out this mission.
I have one final challenging place to go with you all this morning, because there's a bigger picture here. We've looked at compassion to the individual who suffers, we've looked at the community rallying around someone who suffers. We need to look at the global presence of the messiah who suffers. One of the most striking and difficult things for me as we have observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and 20 years of warfare is the death toll.
929,000 people have died in the last 20 years in Afghanistan; in Iraq and Syria and Yemen. That number is almost too big to grasp. Humans notoriously have a hard time relating emotionally to large numbers, but I have to ask myself “How do I live with this death toll as I try to live a life before God? How do I live with this? What do I do with it as I live with my suffering messiah?”
The first thing I can say that causes me some gratitude in the midst of the entangled grief is that thank God, that God can love that many people, because I know I cannot. But I know that God's love treats each one of those people as a child of God, and the vast majority of them were civilians: women and children and non-combatants. This was a slaughter bigger than the American Civil War and I need to know that my suffering messiah can teach my heart, hardened by nationalism, hardened by parochialism, by all the limitations of my place and time.
Our suffering messiah can teach me that God's love extends to all those people; that they are human beings that are infinitely valuable to God, and arriving at that deep inner knowledge, that wisdom, I can only believe that we need to find another way. That living before God we cannot endorse such slaughter. That living unashamed of our association with Jesus, we cannot endorse such massive killing. We must at least sit in the pain and ask ourselves what can be done differently for the sake of the one we follow. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Sep 05, 2021 |
WWJD?
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
WWJD?
Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
Gracious God, we give you thanks for the example of the syrophoenician woman who cracked open the covenant to include all gentiles thereafter. We thank you for her persistence and her faith that in your abundance there was enough for all. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Please be seated.
So, in the early 1990s I was just starting out as a priest as a youth minister. What do you do with a priest in his twenties? Youth Minister. Luckily I loved it and had a lot of fun with it. This is also the time when in youth ministry there was this great outburst of bracelets: friendship bracelets and cross bracelets, and one of the most popular ones with my group was the one that said “WWJD?”
“What Would Jesus Do?”
And I wore one to go along with the group, and it was a lot of fun, but when I read the story of the syrophoenician woman I wanted a second bracelet to put on top of it, and that one would say “DDWJJD.”
“Don’t Do What Jesus Just Did.”
Because here we have in this wonderful Gospel of Mark, a very uncomfortable reading. Very uncomfortable for anyone who loves Jesus to see him acting as crabby and nasty and bigoted as can be. I could apply other words but we’re in church. It's a very upsetting passage. He refers to the syrophoenician woman as a small female dog. We know there's another translation for that in English. That's how shocking this is.
What is going on with this reading and how do we approach it? Well, I approach it in two ways. One, I celebrate the syrophoenician woman. That's my focus. Her wonderful persistence, her wonderful insistence that there was room enough at the table for her and her daughter, to me is the voice of prayer and faith in the story. She's the example of what faith is, and I believe she is the gate opening moment for all gentiles who come into the covenant. She breaks open the covenant by agitating Jesus. She agitates Jesus in the most clever and subtle of ways, which to me feels like she had heard about this feeding of the five thousand, which had happened in chapter six in the Gospel of Mark (we're now in chapter seven) and she took that message to heart, that in the abundance of God's mercy there was room for her to be fed and healed as well.
The second thing I do with the story is I read it from the perspective of the gentile outsider. I read it from the perspective of the gentile outsider, which I am a gentile outsider. And from that perspective it opens up in a different way because Jesus's behavior to me looks like a gentile's fears of how the God of Israel would behave. It feels to me there's a message here to the new gentiles in the church, who are trying to understand how accessible God is, and this story gives them hope.
So for example, it's a very strange story. Jesus goes all the way outside of Israel to Tyre and the first thing he does is goes into a house and tries not to be disturbed. I picture him going in, shutting the door, and seeking privacy. Jesus, as the story goes on, as I said, is crabby, judgmental, aloof, inaccessible, and favoring one group of people over another, showing favoritism, partiality - and these are all the things that the gentile audience feared were true.
But the gentile audience gets the syrophoenician woman who challenges Jesus. Really challenges him and holds him accountable to his true character and nature, and she pushes him to do this other thing that the God of Israel does. This other thing that is characteristic of the God of Israel. Jesus repents.
Jesus repents from drawing his line too harshly, and allows for the healing, and allows ultimately for the extension of the promise of life in God, past the original covenant, with room enough for all. So first let's give thanks to the syrophoenician woman. She persisted and she opened up the covenant that includes us now. I speak as a gentile in that sense.
And what we have after this revelation in the Gospel is its application in the letter of James. Now take a step back, use your imagination. Remember that these letters to early church communities were read out loud to the community. These are not private correspondence. This letter was read out loud to that community. Imagine a gathering of the poor and the rich - the oppressed and the oppressor - who heard the letter of James together.
That is a shocking confrontation. The struggle going on in their midst is named. They are acting like the unredeemed world when they gather in their assembly for worship. When they gather around the table of Christ they're bringing in the practices of the world to this place where they don't apply anymore. The wealthy are being treated with more regard and being allowed to treat the poor with disregard. “Sit at my feet”...the kind of things you can't say at the Lord's table. And James is confronting them with this very difficult but true word, that in the Kingdom of God all the citizens of that kingdom are equal. And this is a shocking word just said right out there in the open, because for those with more status that's going to feel like a demotion, and for people in the unredeemed world with less status that's going to feel like a promotion. So they can meet as equals in Christ.
How does that play out? What is that spiritual struggle like? To sit in that early community and hear those words, depending on what side of the spectrum you're on, it's a wonderful gift of liberation no matter which side of the spectrum you're on.
I know this conundrum firsthand and practically speaking. When I worked in Chicago I did trainings with the Industrial Areas Foundation where we trained leaders from all over Chicagoland (South, North, West, Eastside) to do delegations to meet with elected leaders to advocate on the basis of our faith for certain changes like universal health care, for example, or school funding, and one of our big training agendas was always helping our members not to give away their power. Not to give away their power.
They had been trained over the years that when they met with an elected official they should defer and just be grateful to be in the powerful person's presence. They should be indirect and careful and meek. And I saw it happen over again and over again, and I participated. I'm from a military family - “yes sir,” “ no sir,” “yes ma'am,” “no ma'am.” I can defer with the best of them. And we had to work together on this notion taught in James that we are equals in the citizenship we have in the Kingdom of Christ, and in that dignity we can speak the truth we need to speak to the powerful.
It only took a few times when we got shunted off to the congressional aide who just got out of college, while we watched the pharma executive or the big donor go into the senator's office, for my people to get the message and sit down and say, “We'll wait for the senator, thank you very much.”
This is the strange world of the Gospel where we are called into this equal dignity in Christ and depending on where we find ourselves in the status hierarchies of the world around us, this may induce a journey either of humility and humbling, or a journey of growth and claiming dignity, so we can meet together in that equality of children of God. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
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
Aug 29, 2021 |
The Hazardous Activity of Building Faithful Communities
| The Rev. Carol Duncan
The Hazardous Activity of Building Faithful Communities
Sermon by the Rev. Carol Duncan for the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
Please pray with me, and with that wonderful music.
Holy One, You gave us birth by the word of truth. Help us be doers of the word, and not merely hearers. Help us look at ourselves in the true mirror of your love for us, so that we may be blessed in our doing. Amen. So you all know what to do now, everybody sit down.
In the car, on the way to my family’s summer birthday gathering, I read today’s gospel out loud. It’s a tough interaction with Jesus, and I wanted my daughter Christie’s reaction to it. She is a deeply faithful Quaker with a close but occasionally disputatious relationship with God. They argue a little bit. My 19-year-old grandson was in the back seat helping his mom connect to Google maps on Bluetooth, so his ears were uncharacteristically available. He heard the part about purity rules and said, “You should preach about washing your hands all the time, and probably about wearing your mask too.” Christie wondered how many sermons today would be based on that counseling. This one will not, although it is good advice. This sermon will consider the hazardous activity of building faithful communities among competing viewpoints and note that even Jesus struggled with it.
In today’s gospel, the Pharisees have assembled to hear Jesus. They are checking out the crowds that formed because Jesus fed 5,000 and cured untold numbers. So here are two communities of faith, the traditional teachers on one side and the shepherdless curious crowd on the other, all seeking clarity. We at St. Martin’s typically root for Jesus and the crowd, because we have inherited their dominant status. Today, I want to give the Pharisees’ side a brief listen.
The Pharisees began at the time of the Maccabean revolt in 160 BCE as a renewal movement. They advocated for restoration of the true observance of the law, and they espoused national independence. They believed in the twofold Law, the written and the oral Torah, and they considered the deep study of Torah to be true worship. They refined the purity rules of Leviticus to apply beyond the Temple, they applied to bring it to the people. Pharisees urgently reminded the Israelite community that it had been given different rules from the more powerful surrounding nations. Those laws are what preserved them as a people, and their God they knew as the true creator, ruler and judge of the world. Pharisees, unlike other sects, believed in eternal life and the resurrection of the body. They expected a future age in which God would act decisively to establish his rule of justice on earth. They thus originated elements of faith that Jesus also taught. Pharisees became a primary force that sustained the Jewish faith after Rome destroyed Jerusalem. They evolved into Rabbis and they changed Judaism from concentrating on animal sacrifice in the Temple to a religion centered in the home and the community synagogue. Through them, God is known in a large part of the world.
The two opposing sides face each other with a lot at stake. Pharisees competed with Jesus for social and political control. As Mark tells it, Jesus responded acerbically toward the Pharisees’ standards of cleanliness. Mark piles up examples of pharisaic practices in an exaggerated manner, as you heard, stacking one on top of the other. This Jesus makes me uncomfortable. Could he have been sleep-deprived and not thinking clearly? First, he calls the Pharisees hypocrites, a damning title. Then, he snubs their oral tradition by citing the unimpeachable Isaiah a little bit out of context. Isaiah had condemned Judah’s leaders but ultimately, Isaiah revealed that God promised to restore them. Following this insult, Jesus addressed his own followers with an unfriendly and hostile list of sins, a belittling shortcut to summarize the law. The same law that the Pharisees try so hard to follow, the law that Moses gave in the first lesson. I mean, that’s God’s law.
This is a family argument. Both sides worship and love the same holy God. Family disagreements are always painful to hear and to be part of.
The Pharisees and Jesus both think that their side has the true version of building beloved community. Community is not simple or easy. Especially when you step back to take the God’s eye view. The tendency that Jesus criticizes in the Pharisees and scribes appears in most religious groups. People attempt to hold on to merely human traditions as if they were divinely revealed. At the same time, the very basic virtues of love, reconciliation and the good news that God has come among us as savior get lost. We find it harder to think about the very real challenge posed to us by the gospel. It is easier to follow the familiar than to transform our hearts. This includes outward behaviors and the inner feelings that give rise to the behaviors such as slander, pride, folly.
So here we are at St. Martin’s right in the middle of this story. We too love God and want what is best for our community. We too may be thrown out of our best selves at times. Sleep deprivation gets to us, stress of the pandemic, immersion in different versions of our history, passion for our friends and our way of being. The question is, can we take a step back? What is the God’s eye view of our current situation?
I urge us to consider the way forward at today’s parish meeting, which I hope you will all come to after this service. I hope we can consider the way forward using the tools provided by James in the Epistle. As he says, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger. Welcome with meekness the word that has the power to save our souls. I hope we can each think slowly before we speak our heart.
I pray that we may humbly invoke the God who holds God’s children in our pain, God that mourns alongside all who love and suffer the anguish of being human, the God who became human and experienced the confusing pangs of building God’s beloved community. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Aug 22, 2021 |
What Can I Get You?
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
What Can I Get You?
Sermon by the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
Let us pray. Lord Jesus, who knew what it was to be chosen and not chosen, help us to choose in spirit and in truth. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning. Welcome to church. What kind of god can I get for you?
I mean, there is an endless selection of gods out there. And in today’s world you really can’t be too choosy.
As Joshua tells the people of Israel in today’s first reading, you gotta choose. Even if you think you don’t have to believe in any god at all, that’s the same as choosing.
Because there are so many forces out there that are bigger than we are individually. So many higher powers. So many gods out there -- that if you don’t choose, they’ll still choose you. And you will end up serving them eventually.
So it’s best to be proactive. What kind of god do you want?
We have the standard models – like the god that will make you feel good no matter what – it just requires a higher and higher dosage over time, and there are side effects. There’s the god of the intellect – this one’s mostly in your head. And there’s the one comes with a work ethic – the harder you strive, the more blessings you get.
Mammon, the love of money – always a popular choice. And there’s always Caesar, the god of empire.
There are several new models that come with your internet plan – like the one that allows you to have the followers as long as you never leave the screen, and the one that knows your deepest appetites even before you do.
And then there’s always the God of Israel, AKA the One True God. Though I have to warn you that I have personally heard several complaints about this One lately. I have been told (and I am not being tongue-in-cheek—this is from one of our youth) this God is bossy and mean. And I have also been told that this God is jealous, vengeful, judgmental, misogynist, and angry—and as a result is very hard to market to current audiences. Often mis-labeled The God of the Old Testament, this God does get better reviews in the Christian scriptures, though it must be said that the God of Joshua was also the Father of Jesus. Same same.
So what will it be? What kind of god do you want to covenant with? Which is to say, what kind of god will you ultimately serve with your life choices and your relationships, with your time and your other investments? Because if you look at those things, you may discover that you’ve already made your choice.
This is the question that Joshua asks of his people so many years after they’ve reached the promised land – and it’s a fair one. Joshua, you may recall, took Moses’ place and led Israel out of the wilderness after its long sojourn there. And today’s passage comes at the end of the book of Joshua, whose namesake is at this point over 100 years old.
Now, we have today a rather edited version, so we don’t hear Joshua’s own detailed description of the God that Israel knows, who delivered them from slavery, guided them through the wilderness, won battle after battle for them as they took military control of the land of promise.
But Israel understands that this is all God’s doing on their behalf. Not their doing. Not the work of their former gods or their neighbors’ gods. And given that, Joshua asks his people to be clear, because he know they have issues with fidelity. What god do they want: the God they know or the god they don’t know?
And the people answered: “We want to serve the God who delivered us.”
“Are you sure?” asks Joshua. “Do you know what you are getting into? Do you recall that this is a jealous God? This God will not let you go so easily. This God will ask all of you. This God does not like it if you see other gods on the side. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
And the people insist: this is the God we want. We choose to serve this God.
And so Joshua ultimately sets up a new covenant between God and Israel that day at Shechem, one of several we find in the Hebrew Scriptures.
So it may be that every once in a while we should revisit our commitments, and ask ourselves when we are gathered in assembly before our God, as we are today: have we really chosen this God? I mean, in every liturgy we have the opportunity to do that. We renew our baptismal promises, as we did last week when Gavin was baptized. We repeat those promises in the creed. But do we stop to ask ourselves, “is this god the one I am covenanted to?” What kind of god do we want? Is it the God of Israel, who revealed Godself in Jesus, or some other? Is the god we want, the god we have covenanted ourselves to? And what does it mean for us to serve that god?
I asked myself this question. I thought it was only fair. Here’s what I want:
I want a God who delivers.
And by that I don’t mean a god who shows up at the door with my order half an hour after I’ve made it, still hot and steamy. I want a God who delivers me. I want a God who delivers us, from the life that kills us to the life that sustains us.
When I think of that word, delivery, I think of being brought to the proper destination, to the place that I’d been sent from, to the place I was meant to go. I think of the Amazon trucks that visit my street probably 30 times a day. But I also think of birthing, when a woman delivers her child from its temporary home within her to the one where it will spend the rest of its life. The day my mother delivered me, was the day life as I know it really started. It was also the day her life as a mother really began.
So given that, I want a God who wants me, and who is with me all along the way, in the life that I’ve been delivered to. I want a God who knows who I am, and where I am. I want a God who will miss me if I’m gone, who wants me back, who has my back.
I don’t want a God who stands by and judges and judges and judges and only applauds on those rare instances where I get things completely right. We have people for that. Many of them coach in the Olympics. People make terrible gods. And maybe that’s why the human qualities we always place on God don’t seem to fit very well.
And I do not want a designer bespoke God that is mine alone – like a personal trainer, or coach, or fixer. Because I’m weary, friends, of the isolation that our worship of individualism has fostered. And I long to be knit back into a larger interconnected and appreciative body, one that doesn’t split apart so easily when it is disappointed or disillusioned.
“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” Joshua tells the people of Israel. When I was a kid we had a little plaque on a side table with that phrase on it. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And I grew up in such a house, which is largely responsible for the faith that puts me here today. Though, I think my Catholic mother still believes I chose another God when I became an Episcopalian.
Which is say that we who choose the God of Israel still have many different experiences and understandings of that One, True God – understandings that shift from one book of the Bible to the next, that change over time from ancient to modern, and vary across faith traditions and divisions and distinctions, that develop throughout our own personal journeys from birth to death.
The work of faith is to be able to discern that One True God over time, as our own understanding deepens and changes. It is to acknowledge the shrouding nature of mystery, the limits of our human interpretations.
But the work of faith begins by acknowledging our own need for deliverance. We often have a clearer picture of what we hope to be delivered from than what we might be delivered to.
For Jesus, in today’s Gospel, that delivery destination is very clear. It is the heart of his entire ministry, it is what lies at the end of the way of his cross, and it is what we receive when we consume his flesh and blood, his whole self, in our communion bread – that destination is the very life of God.
Life that delivers and sustains.
Life that connects and reconnects and unifies.
Life that does not end.
That is the life that we have on offer here. Now, what can I get you?
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Aug 15, 2021 |
Nourished by the Bread and Water
| Anne Alexis Harra
Nourished by the Bread and Water
Sermon by Anne Alexis Harra for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 15.
Today's readings are:
Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp15_RCL.html
Transcript:
At this time, I’m going to invite the young and the young at heart up to the front while I fix my mic, so my friends who were in VBS this week, if you want to come and sit, please join me so I’m not alone up here. Otherwise it’s just Anne Alexis preaching in the middle of the altar.
It is so wonderful to see all of you here this morning! Did we have a fantastic week?
[applause from the congregation]
I’m going to thank all of you for a wonderful week at VBS, to the staff, to the volunteers, but probably most importantly, to all of our children who “Came to the Table” this week with us. You have nourished and sustained me and you truly feasted on the living bread that came down from heaven. And to Gavin, thank you for sharing your baptism with us today.
I’m going to tell you a story, I think God likes to hear our stories. I think He does. While I was at my parents’ house last week, I got really bored. Even though they have a puppy, I was still bored. The puppy was biting, I had had enough. And I was digging through my old baby stuff and some of their old photo albums, and I found this ancient artifact.
[Holding up a booklet] Does anyone want to guess what this is? It is a bulletin. It’s very 90s. That’s because this bulletin is from July 13, 1997. THat is the day that I was baptized. Oddly enough, the readings were from Track 2, Year B. We heard them in July, so I got to reflect a little bit. It was pretty cool to see. And it got me thinking about baptism. This leaflet, and this member of Christ’s flock, are officially 24 years, 1 month, and 2 days old. God’s sustaining love for us has lasted more than 24 years, lucky for us, but for me, it’s lasted 24 years, 1 month, and 2 days.
What I love so much about today is that we saw someone welcomed into Christ’s flock. Gavin asked to join Christ’s pasture, and he was baptized. I always get a little weepy at baptisms, always, always, always. I cried today. That’s why I wore waterproof mascara. I get weepy because I am reminded of this unbelievable, crazy, unending love that God has for us. In baptism, we are reminded of the Covenant, or the promise that we make with God. Through Jesus, God’s love was so powerful that noting, nothing, could separate God from us. Isn’t that amazing? If your mom gets mad at you because you broke the vase that she loves so much, God still loves you. Your mom might be mad, your mom might be really mad, but God still loves you. And it all begins with baptism. But then, today, we get to make a connection from baptism to the scriptures. In the Gospel, Jesus makes a really special promise to us: if we feast on him, if we welcome Jesus into our lives, we will never, ever be alone. We will always feel loved, we will always feel connected to God. We will live forever. If we take communion, if we invite Jesus into our lives, if we pray, we will be connected to God forever. Isn’t that so cool? That is Jesus showing us that he really is love. We are welcomed into the Body of Christ through Baptism, which is God’s unbounding love, and then we stay in it through Eucharist, and prayer. And I learned that nobody seems to understand that more than children. They are the heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven, as you may see here [gesturing to altar with cloth that reads ‘let the little children come to me, do not stop them. For it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs’]
On Tuesday, Rev. Carol fantastically told the story of the Feeding of the 5,000. Now, friends, I gave Rev. Carol the challenge of telling this story to three audiences: our 4-5 year olds, our 6-8 year olds, and our 9-11 year olds. And why Carol didn’t just walk away from me right on the spot is actually quite beyond me, but I’m so glad she didn’t. It worked out beautifully in the end. Our youngest bunch took the story to heart. One of the activities with the story was a relay race with cheerios to demonstrate feeding of the 5,000. And now, 4 year olds, being who they are, wanted to have a snack after the story. And frankly, I would too, I like cheerios. So, when they were done, they wanted to have a snack, and Rev. Carol gave them each some cheerios, but instead of feeding themselves first, they began to feed each other. The living bread that came down from heaven was clear with our 4 and 5 year olds. They listened, they participated well, but the Spirit took over.
And you’ll notice on the pulpit behind me, we have a very colorful, not-Pentecostal-green pulpit frontal. Do you friends remember what that was? [speaking to a VBS camper] Pierce, what was it? It was a prayer chain! I like to think this is how God sees our prayers. Colorful, polka dotted, stripey. And this is how God responds to our prayers. God absorbs them, God thinks about them, and God just holds them so close to God’s heart. Can I share with you guys some of the prayers that our children…[the audience responds affirmatively]... Okay!
One of our friends prayed, “I want everyone to know that Black lives matter.” One of our friends prayed, “God, help me to be a better person.” Ane one prayer in big, scratchy preschool handwriting in purple crayon just said, “GOD.” Straightforward, it gets to the point. The context for this activity was in response to John 14:27, Jesus saying to his followers “peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you.” We told our kids that things are a little scary right now with the pandemic, and it’s okay to be afraid. But God’s love and God’s peace are so much stronger than our fears. So our kids wrote down their fears, their love, everything they wanted God to know. And clearly, everything they had learned through the week resonated with them. I don’t know, I think you guys made some important connections to God, and that fills my heart.
Jesus’ love through God’s peace brings up the most pure, deeply rooted needs in all of us. But the thing is, children are honest about these needs. I think we learned that this week. Connecting to God with no reservations, children feast on the bread of heaven and live into their baptisms. There is a reason that we hear Jesus say in three gospels, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom belongs to them.” Jesus offers his love for us unconditionally, with complete grace. The people who most willingly accept this love are children: open, curious, accepting, gentle, and so free with their own love.
Today, we watched Gavin receive the Sacrament of Baptism. Jarrett asked a series of questions, called the Baptismal Covenant. And The Covenant calls on us to be the most faithful versions of ourselves. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbors as yourself?” This is the second to last question in the Covenant. And it’s just a fancy, church-y way of saying, “Will you look for and accept the love of Jesus in everyone no matter what, and love that person no matter what?” And it can be hard to do. You get in a fight with your best friend. Your best friend stole your favorite pencil. That makes me mad. Rev. Barb, she stole my favorite pen, I’m so mad at Barb, where did my pen go? I’m not interested in speaking to Barb for the rest of the day. The thing is, we get so caught up in our own “stuff” that sometimes we look into someone’s eyes and fail to see Jesus looking back at us. This week, though, I have witnessed our most vulnerable population see Jesus in everyone, they did, they saw Christ in everybody and loved everybody. Gavin chose to receive the Sacrament of Baptism, and through the pure love and light of children, they are seeking and serving Christ in all persons.
Jesus is the living bread which came down from heaven. The most nourishing, sustaining meals which connects us to God. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some nourishing meals in my day. My mom’s spaghetti is something to die for. But nothing comes close to Jesus. We must learn from our children, we have to learn from all of you guys (because I think you’re a heck of a lot smarter than I am) if we truly seek to truly feast on this heavenly banquet. But as we say in the Covenant, “I will, with God’s help.” And that’s the beauty in all of it, we are never alone.
Now this is normally where I would drop the, “Amen,” but I know if I do that I’ll lose all of you. So I need to acknowledge all of the people who made this week so great, so bear with me for a moment. Adam, who was filling in for James, our Sexton, has been marvelous. He lugged water, he cleaned up, he filled paper towels, he ran around. To all of our youth guides who shepherded our youth from activity to activity, and it was hot. To all the volunteers who shepherded kids, led activities, or helped in the kitchen, especially to Debby Schaaf who led bread baking, and again, it was hot. To Kelly and Jason Martin, fantastic, fantastic people. To Cathy Glazer, who miraculously ran the kitchen from afar. That was unbelievable. To Rev. Carol Duncan, who filled in for Bible story time, and who made the feeding of the 5,000 happen in 2021. To Tyrone Whiting, who is a fantastic colleague and a great friend, and who made Choir Camp happen and it was just fabulous. To Rev. Jarrett, who hired me and has given me quiet confidence in ministry again. To Barb, who is a living saint, a minister, a mentor. To Gavin who allowed us to share his day with you, thank you. And last but certainly not least, to Elliot, to Emerson, to Pierce, to Anna, to Lucy, to Lily, to Sam, and to every single child who came this week and reminded me that the living bread of heaven is right in front of us. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am so blessed to know you. And now I will say, Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Today's readings are:
Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp15_RCL.html
Transcript:
At this time, I’m going to invite the young and the young at heart up to the front while I fix my mic, so my friends who were in VBS this week, if you want to come and sit, please join me so I’m not alone up here. Otherwise it’s just Anne Alexis preaching in the middle of the altar.
It is so wonderful to see all of you here this morning! Did we have a fantastic week?
[applause from the congregation]
I’m going to thank all of you for a wonderful week at VBS, to the staff, to the volunteers, but probably most importantly, to all of our children who “Came to the Table” this week with us. You have nourished and sustained me and you truly feasted on the living bread that came down from heaven. And to Gavin, thank you for sharing your baptism with us today.
I’m going to tell you a story, I think God likes to hear our stories. I think He does. While I was at my parents’ house last week, I got really bored. Even though they have a puppy, I was still bored. The puppy was biting, I had had enough. And I was digging through my old baby stuff and some of their old photo albums, and I found this ancient artifact.
[Holding up a booklet] Does anyone want to guess what this is? It is a bulletin. It’s very 90s. That’s because this bulletin is from July 13, 1997. THat is the day that I was baptized. Oddly enough, the readings were from Track 2, Year B. We heard them in July, so I got to reflect a little bit. It was pretty cool to see. And it got me thinking about baptism. This leaflet, and this member of Christ’s flock, are officially 24 years, 1 month, and 2 days old. God’s sustaining love for us has lasted more than 24 years, lucky for us, but for me, it’s lasted 24 years, 1 month, and 2 days.
What I love so much about today is that we saw someone welcomed into Christ’s flock. Gavin asked to join Christ’s pasture, and he was baptized. I always get a little weepy at baptisms, always, always, always. I cried today. That’s why I wore waterproof mascara. I get weepy because I am reminded of this unbelievable, crazy, unending love that God has for us. In baptism, we are reminded of the Covenant, or the promise that we make with God. Through Jesus, God’s love was so powerful that noting, nothing, could separate God from us. Isn’t that amazing? If your mom gets mad at you because you broke the vase that she loves so much, God still loves you. Your mom might be mad, your mom might be really mad, but God still loves you. And it all begins with baptism. But then, today, we get to make a connection from baptism to the scriptures. In the Gospel, Jesus makes a really special promise to us: if we feast on him, if we welcome Jesus into our lives, we will never, ever be alone. We will always feel loved, we will always feel connected to God. We will live forever. If we take communion, if we invite Jesus into our lives, if we pray, we will be connected to God forever. Isn’t that so cool? That is Jesus showing us that he really is love. We are welcomed into the Body of Christ through Baptism, which is God’s unbounding love, and then we stay in it through Eucharist, and prayer. And I learned that nobody seems to understand that more than children. They are the heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven, as you may see here [gesturing to altar with cloth that reads ‘let the little children come to me, do not stop them. For it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs’]
On Tuesday, Rev. Carol fantastically told the story of the Feeding of the 5,000. Now, friends, I gave Rev. Carol the challenge of telling this story to three audiences: our 4-5 year olds, our 6-8 year olds, and our 9-11 year olds. And why Carol didn’t just walk away from me right on the spot is actually quite beyond me, but I’m so glad she didn’t. It worked out beautifully in the end. Our youngest bunch took the story to heart. One of the activities with the story was a relay race with cheerios to demonstrate feeding of the 5,000. And now, 4 year olds, being who they are, wanted to have a snack after the story. And frankly, I would too, I like cheerios. So, when they were done, they wanted to have a snack, and Rev. Carol gave them each some cheerios, but instead of feeding themselves first, they began to feed each other. The living bread that came down from heaven was clear with our 4 and 5 year olds. They listened, they participated well, but the Spirit took over.
And you’ll notice on the pulpit behind me, we have a very colorful, not-Pentecostal-green pulpit frontal. Do you friends remember what that was? [speaking to a VBS camper] Pierce, what was it? It was a prayer chain! I like to think this is how God sees our prayers. Colorful, polka dotted, stripey. And this is how God responds to our prayers. God absorbs them, God thinks about them, and God just holds them so close to God’s heart. Can I share with you guys some of the prayers that our children…[the audience responds affirmatively]... Okay!
One of our friends prayed, “I want everyone to know that Black lives matter.” One of our friends prayed, “God, help me to be a better person.” Ane one prayer in big, scratchy preschool handwriting in purple crayon just said, “GOD.” Straightforward, it gets to the point. The context for this activity was in response to John 14:27, Jesus saying to his followers “peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you.” We told our kids that things are a little scary right now with the pandemic, and it’s okay to be afraid. But God’s love and God’s peace are so much stronger than our fears. So our kids wrote down their fears, their love, everything they wanted God to know. And clearly, everything they had learned through the week resonated with them. I don’t know, I think you guys made some important connections to God, and that fills my heart.
Jesus’ love through God’s peace brings up the most pure, deeply rooted needs in all of us. But the thing is, children are honest about these needs. I think we learned that this week. Connecting to God with no reservations, children feast on the bread of heaven and live into their baptisms. There is a reason that we hear Jesus say in three gospels, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom belongs to them.” Jesus offers his love for us unconditionally, with complete grace. The people who most willingly accept this love are children: open, curious, accepting, gentle, and so free with their own love.
Today, we watched Gavin receive the Sacrament of Baptism. Jarrett asked a series of questions, called the Baptismal Covenant. And The Covenant calls on us to be the most faithful versions of ourselves. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbors as yourself?” This is the second to last question in the Covenant. And it’s just a fancy, church-y way of saying, “Will you look for and accept the love of Jesus in everyone no matter what, and love that person no matter what?” And it can be hard to do. You get in a fight with your best friend. Your best friend stole your favorite pencil. That makes me mad. Rev. Barb, she stole my favorite pen, I’m so mad at Barb, where did my pen go? I’m not interested in speaking to Barb for the rest of the day. The thing is, we get so caught up in our own “stuff” that sometimes we look into someone’s eyes and fail to see Jesus looking back at us. This week, though, I have witnessed our most vulnerable population see Jesus in everyone, they did, they saw Christ in everybody and loved everybody. Gavin chose to receive the Sacrament of Baptism, and through the pure love and light of children, they are seeking and serving Christ in all persons.
Jesus is the living bread which came down from heaven. The most nourishing, sustaining meals which connects us to God. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some nourishing meals in my day. My mom’s spaghetti is something to die for. But nothing comes close to Jesus. We must learn from our children, we have to learn from all of you guys (because I think you’re a heck of a lot smarter than I am) if we truly seek to truly feast on this heavenly banquet. But as we say in the Covenant, “I will, with God’s help.” And that’s the beauty in all of it, we are never alone.
Now this is normally where I would drop the, “Amen,” but I know if I do that I’ll lose all of you. So I need to acknowledge all of the people who made this week so great, so bear with me for a moment. Adam, who was filling in for James, our Sexton, has been marvelous. He lugged water, he cleaned up, he filled paper towels, he ran around. To all of our youth guides who shepherded our youth from activity to activity, and it was hot. To all the volunteers who shepherded kids, led activities, or helped in the kitchen, especially to Debby Schaaf who led bread baking, and again, it was hot. To Kelly and Jason Martin, fantastic, fantastic people. To Cathy Glazer, who miraculously ran the kitchen from afar. That was unbelievable. To Rev. Carol Duncan, who filled in for Bible story time, and who made the feeding of the 5,000 happen in 2021. To Tyrone Whiting, who is a fantastic colleague and a great friend, and who made Choir Camp happen and it was just fabulous. To Rev. Jarrett, who hired me and has given me quiet confidence in ministry again. To Barb, who is a living saint, a minister, a mentor. To Gavin who allowed us to share his day with you, thank you. And last but certainly not least, to Elliot, to Emerson, to Pierce, to Anna, to Lucy, to Lily, to Sam, and to every single child who came this week and reminded me that the living bread of heaven is right in front of us. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am so blessed to know you. And now I will say, Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Aug 08, 2021 |
Truth in Love
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Truth in Love
Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14.
Today's readings are:
1 Kings 19:4-8
Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp14_RCL.html
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
Today's readings are:
1 Kings 19:4-8
Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp14_RCL.html
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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
