December 15th, 2024: “Without God, we cannot.  Without us, God will not.” by Reverend Jeannie Martz

When I was 17, I got my first traffic ticket.  That was my only ticket for many, many years…but then I moved to Florida and shortly thereafter doubled my total on the long, wide open stretch of Alligator Alley.  Now, like most of us, when I’ve done something wrong I don’t really like getting caught; but even so, I have very different feelings about these two tickets.  The one I got in Florida – well, I was speeding, I got caught, I went to traffic school, and that was that.  End of story.

            But the one when I was 17?  Not my finest hour.  I still cringe when I think about it.  Let me tell you what happened….

            It was a dark and snowy night in February of 1968, and I was driving home from youth group at the First Congregational Church of Wilmette, Illinois – my home church in my hometown.  I was also giving someone else a ride home.  I no longer remember who was getting that ride, but I do remember that because of this act of kindness, there was even a witness to what followed!

            Well, after I’d gone a few blocks from the church, I looked in the rearview mirror and, to my great surprise and even greater confusion, I saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car.

            “That’s strange,” I said to whoever my companion was.  “I wonder why that’s there.  It can’t be for me; I didn’t do anything wrong.”

            And so I continued to drive, obviously not remembering the part in Driver’s Ed about pulling over for an emergency vehicle.  I continued to drive…and drive…and drive, with this police car right behind me, lights whirling like the Fourth of July.  We even went through one of the busiest (and most well-lit) intersections in town, so that lots of people got to see the police car in hot pursuit of a Ford Falcon going 35 miles an hour.

            I kept saying, “Why are they following me?  Why don’t they pass me and get where they’re going?”

            It was only when they turned on the siren that I finally realized that they were where they were going, thank you very much, and that it was in fact me they were after…and so yes, I finally pulled over.

            The officer was very kind.  He said he figured I hadn’t seen him because my convertible’s plastic back window was fogged up.  He officially ticketed me for having made an improper left turn back at the church – which is a total crock, by the way – but I think both of us knew that I was really being ticketed for stupidity!

            So now you know why I cringe.  I was so sure I hadn’t done anything wrong; I was so sure, in fact, that I ended up being hindered by my sureness.  To draw on today’s collect, I was sorely hindered; sorely hindered by my own claim to innocence.  It never even occurred to me to pull over; it never even occurred to me that maybe the police officers wanted to tell me about a broken taillight or something like that.  All I could see was my own belief that I had done nothing wrong.  I was sorely hindered by my pride, and by those self-righteous blinders that only let me see the perspective I chose to see.  I was sorely hindered by my sins.

            “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us….”

            This Third Sunday in Advent is a Sunday with several nicknames and, in the readings, a bit of a lighter spirit – except for that “unquenchable fire” part we just heard!  Today is variously known as Gaudate Sunday because “gaudate” is the Latin translation of the imperative “rejoice” which is part of today’s traditional readings; it’s also called Rose Sunday because we light the pink candle in the Advent wreath today, reflecting that same sense of rejoicing – and, very Anglican, today is also known as Stirrup Sunday because of the opening words of the collect:  “Stir up your power, O Lord….”  Following that, I also have it on good authority that this is also the day that one “stirs up” the Christmas pudding, theoretically adding more whiskey to the mix as it ages.

            All things considered, and with my first traffic ticket to boot, today sounds like a perfect day to talk about…Original Sin.

            Now, the whole concept of Original Sin is distressing and even offensive to many people today, including many Episcopalians.  From the Enlightenment onwards, western Christianity has had an increasingly ambiguous attitude towards sin, and this ambiguity has been made even more complex by the things we now know about human psychology, about the underlying motivations for behaviors, about theories of personality, and so forth.  The idea of Original Sin as something inherited and passed on from one generation to the next without their consent is seen as archaic, and even as unfair in our culture that emphasizes individual action and individual responsibility:  “What’s this ‘we sinned’?” we say.  “I wasn’t there.  I didn’t sin.”

            We don’t generally feel that “one bad apple” taints all of us here in the bushel like the children of Israel did when God through Moses was leading them through the wilderness.  In that day, if one person sinned, it was guilt by association for everyone else:  the whole clan paid the price for that one person’s sin.  Even so, if we say that we don’t believe in the concept or the reality of Original Sin, then I think we need to make sure we know what we’re talking about.  We need to know exactly what it is that we say we don’t believe.

            Even though sin was a late arrival, Genesis tells us that sin got its start in the Garden of Eden.  All of creation, including us, had already come into being and been declared good when sin came along, so the serpent, who was sin’s original vehicle, had his pick of creatures to approach.  More subtle than all the other inhabitants in the Garden, the serpent singled out the woman, and he asked her what God had said about the fruit of the trees in the Garden.  The woman said that according to God, everything was OK to eat except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God had told the man that if they ate of the fruit of that tree, they would die.

            “You’re not going to die,” said the serpent, quietly baiting his hook.  “It’s just the opposite.  One bite of that fruit and your eyes will be opened.  One bite of that fruit, and YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD.

            Well, how cool is that?  Bait just doesn’t get any better!  There might be lots of reasons we’d love to be like God, but the most compelling reason of all is that God is all-powerful – and the siren call of power is just as seductive today as it ever was.

            So the woman believed the serpent, took the bait, took the fruit, and she and the man were hooked – hooked by pride and disobedience; and as they ate, they experienced the first irony of the human condition.  In their attempt to be like God, the man and the woman actually went so far wide of the mark that they ended up about as unlike God as they could possibly be.  Their pride and their disobedience introduced SEPARATION into their, and our, relationship with God; separation, and self-centeredness; and so, doing what we will has become a lot more appealing to us than doing what God wills.

            That’s Original Sin, and my guess is that the overall dynamic sounds pretty familiar to us…but we do still have a problem with that “passed on from generation to generation” part.  When we look at babies, for example, we don’t want to see them as anything but the gifts from God that they are, and so we reject any suggestion that they also participate in Original Sin; and even St. Augustine of Hippo, who did a lot of the definitive work in this area for the western Church, even St. Augustine insisted that each soul is newly made by God…but Original Sin doesn’t contradict that; the theology of Original Sin doesn’t say that babies are evil or bad or not newly made by God.

            What it does say is that simply by being human, simply by being born into this world, babies are separated from God – just like their parents.  It says that babies are self-centered (which they are; that’s how we know what they need), and that babies are concerned with the fulfillment of their own desires – just like their parents.

            The Bible tells us that we were created good and that we ourselves compromised this goodness by deciding that we were the ultimate good.  From this decision, this choice, have come selfishness, hatred, arrogance, infidelity, abuse, and all the other negative behaviors, on the corporate and national levels as well as the personal, all of the behaviors that continue to exalt the one at the expense, or to the detriment, of the other; or of the many; all of the behaviors that we continue to model for those babies who come after us so that they can pass them on to their children too.

            All that is Original Sin, capital O, capital S.  We don’t have a choice about whether or not we inherit Original Sin any more that we have a choice as to who our parents are…but we do have a choice as to how we respond to Original Sin; and in choosing our own response, it helps to see how God responded to it.  Because of Original Sin, we had to say goodbye to Eden.  In spite of Original Sin, God never said goodbye to us.

            It’s easy to track God’s response to our disobedience because God’s response is the whole story of salvation that we find throughout the Bible.  This is a love story, the story of God continually calling us back to God in spite of what we’ve done, in spite of Original Sin.  It’s the story of a righteous God working to guide our behavior so that we too can be righteous; the story of God weeping over us, getting tough with us, but always standing by us with chesed, standing by us with steadfast love.  Ultimately, this is the story of God coming to be with us in the muck and the mire; of God being the one who goes first because we can’t; of God being the one who blazes the trail home to show us the way.  God’s response to our sin is the story of God continuing to invite us into relationship – again, and again, and again.  As St. Augustine has said, “Without God, we cannot.  Without us, God will not.”

            How we respond to the spiritual reality of Original Sin is up to us; and we here as Anglican Christians, as Episcopalians, have chosen to respond positively to God’s love, to God’s invitation into relationship, by receiving baptism for ourselves and for our children, believing God’s promise that in baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection, and that in fact we are marked as Christ’s own forever.  We believe that through the power of the Holy Spirit, baptism heals our separation from God and from each other; that our relationship with all of creation is restored and made new…and so we here choose restoration and new life; but let’s not forget my traffic ticket and my conviction of my own innocence.

            Even baptized, we have freedom of choice every day of our lives, including the freedom to say that we have no sin, the freedom to backslide into arrogance and self-deceit, to backslide into all the “compromises of daily life.”  One author talks about John the Baptizer’s call to repentance today as a call for “a moment of truth, a call to abandon all [the] devices [we use] to maintain [the] illusion of [our] innocence” so that we can “come clean” and “come empty” to receive the gift of God in Christ.

            Abandon all the devices we use to maintain the illusion of our innocence; abandon them so that we can come clean, and come empty to the manger of God’s love; this is the call of Stirrup Sunday.

            “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us….”  Amen.

December 8th, 2024: The Second Sunday of Advent by Reverend Rob Bethancourt

Baruch 5:1-9, Canticle 16, Philippians 1:3-11, Luke 3:1-6

I.    Intro - Two clergy with sign "Turn back before it's too late. The end is near." Guy in redsportscar "Mind your own business, you religious nuts!" Loud splash. Maybe the sign should say "Bridge out"

II.   Body

A.  Background

1.   A lot of ridicule around the theme of repentance

2.   Rightly so. Often presented as: Feel bad about all bad things you've done or you'llgo to hell.

3.   Let's take another look

B.  Gospel - Luke 3:1-6

1.   First, an introduction of John the baptist preaching on repentance

2.   Then Isaiah: this is the voice of one saying "Prepare the way of the Lord"

3.   So evidently preparing the way of the Lord is first and foremost through our ownrepentance

4.   Important to know what repentance is

C.  Repentance

1.   Hebrew: Shuv - turn/choose a new direction (not: Feel bad about yourself)

2.   Greek: Metanoiete - change your mind

3.   New insight this week: Change your focus (unites both Hebrew and Greekunderstanding)

D.  Application

1.   In areas that bring suffering to ourselves, others, and our world, we need tochange our focus

2.   Story of how they train race car drivers to focus on the track ... not the wall

3.   Alignment with God is alignment with love, joy, and peace.

III.  Conclusion

A good question to ask this third week in Advent is:

Where is my current focus hurting my relationship with God?

What is one simple shift in focus that might help this week?

Maybe I am focused on "Ain't it awful." Perhaps a shift could be "What am I genuinely grateful for?"

Maybe I am focused on all the bad things happening in our world. Perhaps a shift could be

"What is one simple act of kindness I could do for another this week?"

December 1st, 2024: The First Sunday of Advent by J.D. Neal

Jeremiah 33:14-16 / Ps. 25:1-10 / 1 Thess. 3:9-13 / Luke 21:25-36

Well friends, today is the first Sunday of Advent, and I’m very sad to not be there in person with all of you to see the church colors change and to light that first Advent candle. As most of you know by now, God always seems to have a dry sense of humor about which gospel passages I get assigned to preach, and today is a double whammy: (1.) today’s gospel is a rough one, and (2.) I’m too sick to actually be there to preach about it! Please say a big thank you to whoever was kind enough to stand up this morning and read this meditation on my behalf.

Starting today, we enter into the season of Advent. The word ‘advent’ means ‘coming’, and it refers to the incarnation — the coming of Christ into the world as a little baby in a manger in 1st Century Palestine. Advent is a season of preparation, where we try to enter into those long, dark centuries before the birth of Jesus when the people of God lived in exile and then under foreign occupation. In these years the people of God were alienated from their home, their temple, and so many of the things that connected them to God and one another; these were years of uncertainty and pain, when it must have seemed that all was lost and when prophecies of restoration and hope must have felt like dimly burning candles in a dark, cold night.

And so it’s no wonder that when Jesus comes onto the scene, he is born into an Israel where the people are desperate for a Savior — where the long years of suffering have taken their toll and the people of God are hoping for a Messiah to come along not just to set things to rights, but to violently overthrow the Roman oppressors and finally make the other nations suffer just like Israel has been suffering. They are hoping for a day when Israel will be lifted up above all the other nations, and when they all will bow down and come to the Temple in Jerusalem as subjects to pay tribute to Israel and Israel's God, as some of the prophets write about.

But this is not the way that Jesus comes into the world to restore it. In fact, our gospel today is the last section of a longer passage where Jesus is predicting that the Temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed and where he tells them what things will be like in the years leading up to that destruction. Of course, Jesus is right, and the temple is actually destroyed about 40 years later in 70AD, but for the disciples and other Jews who hear this, this is impossible news. The temple is the main way that Jews at the time interacted with God; it is where they believed they drew near to God, where God met them. It was THE sign and proof of God’s presence with them. The Messiah was supposed to come into the world to liberate the temple and lift it up to glory, not prophesy about its destruction.

Yet somehow, Jesus says, this time of destruction will be a time when ‘the Son of Man’ is revealed, when God’s glory is made known, and when the disciples are going to “stand up and raise [their] heads, because [their] redemption is drawing near.”

Now, this is a tough passage, and I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand exactly what Jesus is saying here. What I do understand is that when Jesus was born, God’s people were so fixated on their particular understanding of God’s promises, so fixated on the temple and their particular rituals and all of the different things that they looked to for security and strength that when God showed up in the person of Jesus, they misunderstood him entirely. When he threatened the security and stability that they held dear, they entreated the Romans to put him to death.

What I do understand is that sometimes when we are wounded and afraid, we put our trust and security in all sorts of things that we believe will save and protect us — let’s call these things ‘temples’ — and we do all sorts of terrible things to one another instead of facing our fears and handing them over to God. But here’s the thing: God is the only one in whom we can truly rest, in whom there is true healing and security and peace. And sometimes the only way we can be set free and finally give ourselves over to God is when those ‘temples’ that we cling to are taken away and come crashing down around us — when we are forced to see that they were never able to save or protect us all along.

This first Sunday of Advent is traditionally meant to focus on ‘Hope’, so based on everything I’ve written so far, this gospel passage might seem like a bad fit. It’s certainly not warm and fuzzy, and it’s not obviously comforting and hopeful at first glance. But here’s the thing — I think that it says something about what true hope looks like.

As many of you know, my Mom had a heart attack last weekend, she’s in the hospital right now recovering from open heart surgery. My wife, Rachel, has a severe chronic illness, my Dad has cancer, and to top it all off, I have a nasty cold. I’m not having a good week over here. And, often, when someone is going through times like this, it’s tempting to tell them not to worry because ‘everything is going to be alright’ and ‘God’s going to take care of it’ and ‘God has a plan,’ and just to ‘have faith’ — because we don’t like to see people suffering. And in some sense, all of those statements are true, but as I’m sure you know, words like that are cold comfort to someone who is really in darkness, because the truth is that God doesn’t promise that we won’t suffer, that we won’t hurt and grieve and lose many of the things and people that we love.

The ‘hope’ that Christ offers, and that our Gospel this morning offers, is that somehow, even when everything we hold dear seems to be crashing down around us and all things seem dark — somehow, Christ will come. It may be in the kindness of a friend or stranger, in a sudden word from God in prayer or in something we read, or it may be something else entirely, but somehow, even in the depths of our pain, Christ will reveal himself to us and we will discover that all is not lost. The hope of today’s gospel and the hope of Advent is that somehow, someday, despite everything we might lose, darkness and death will not get the last word — all things will, at last, be made well.

This is what we try to remember in this Advent season: that God has come among us — that Christ has been, is now, and will be always with us — and that he often comes to us unexpectedly, when all things seem dark.

This Advent, may we learn to wait in hope for Christ’s coming, and may the Holy Spirit make us the hands and feet of Jesus to those who feel trapped in the dark.

Amen.

November 24th, 2024: Looking for Hope by Reverend Jeannie Martz

I’d like to begin this morning by talking about miracles.

  A few years ago, a community church that I passed every day on my way to my former parish of Trinity, Orange had a banner-type sign out front that read, “Expect a miracle.”  I always had a positive response to that sign, and I took it as a personal reminder to keep my mind and my eyes open to the reality of God constantly at work in the world – and then I encountered another quote, from where I don’t remember; another quote suggesting that a miracle is God’s work in the world intentionally slowed down so that we humans can see it more easily.  I happily embraced both of these thoughts – until I came upon another quote, this time from my own files of “Good Stuff,” quotes and snippets collected from anywhere and everywhere through the years. 

In this particular snippet, its author said, “People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope – and they only get that from people who have struggled, and make the choice to keep going.”  (CtK B 18)

            People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope.  Now this is interesting, because based on what I just said, it’s usually miracles that get all the attention; it’s miracles that get the big press.  Understood as special interventions by God into our physical world or into the lives of individuals or peoples through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, I think we certainly pray for miracles; we pray for the power of God to be manifested in a unique and decisive way in a particular life or a particular situation that’s important to us; but then, as I mentally thumbed through the miracles that are recorded in Scripture, from the parting of the Red Sea and the deliverance of the children of Israel to the provision of manna in the wilderness to the miracles of Jesus’ own ministry:  water into wine at Cana, the multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed the 5,000; all of Jesus’ healing miracles, and even the raising of both Jairus’ daughter and Lazarus from the dead – as I thought about all these, I realized that miracles do have their limitations.

            Now, true – miracles change immediate circumstances and can certainly alter the course of an individual life, as every person healed by Jesus and restored to their family and their community would attest; but miracles don’t change either the ultimate reality, or the ultimate bottom line, of human life.  With only one exception, every single person who was the recipient or the beneficiary of miraculous intervention from God in all of Scripture, sooner or later, they all still died – and Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter each had to die twice.

            Miracles may change the conditions of our humanity, but they don’t change the fact of our humanity.

            The only enduring, ongoing miracle in all of Scripture is the miracle of Jesus himself:  his Incarnation by the Holy Spirit, his Passion and death on the Cross, and his Resurrection to new life -- the miracle that defeated all those other deaths once for all.  The miracle of Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us, is the concrete and eternal expression of God’s love for us and for all creation; and it’s the miracle of Jesus that is the foundation for, and the basis of, all Christian hope.

            As I’ve said before, and I think from this pulpit as well, Christian hope IS NOT wishful thinking pulled out of our hearts and our minds, as we imagine the future we’d like to have.         Christian hope in the present is the confident expectation of our future relationship with God, because it’s an expectation that is based on, and rooted in, the actual events of our past relationship with God.

            One author writes, “Hope, with strength for the future, consists in returning.  [Hope] is retrospective.  The returning is to the fact and foundation of redemption, the established achievement of Christ’s atonement, the ‘one full perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation for the sins of the whole world’ (Cranmer’s phrasing).  Everything else in life that is positive or promised is based on that achievement.”  (LP, Hope, 10)

            This being said, however, confident expectation isn’t always easy for us to maintain.  As I mentioned earlier, people get hope from other people; “people who have struggled, and make the choice to keep going.”

            One of the boldest affirmations of ultimate hope in all of Scripture comes from the voice of someone whose trials, losses, and pain are legendary to this day.  The voice is that of Job, which is surprising, given that when he makes this affirmation, his own situation couldn’t have been worse.

            Through no fault of his own, Job has lost his children, his wealth, his physical health, and his friends; and although he has repeatedly demanded an explanation from God as to the reason for his radical misfortune, he has yet to receive a response.

            Even so, from these depths Job makes a statement that is so powerful, so filled with confident expectation, that it’s included as one of the opening sentences in our Order for Burial in the Book of Common Prayer:  “As for me,” Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.  After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God.  I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.”  (BCP p. 491)

            Even in the midst of all his earthly pain, all his earthly struggles, Job has chosen to keep going, and he has chosen to keep going in relationship with God.

            On this Feast of Christ the King, when we celebrate the culmination of the liturgical year and we look ahead to the time when all things in heaven and earth will be restored and brought together in Christ, on this day all of our readings are about hope, and about fulfillment.  All of our readings support the confident expectation that God’s purposes do continue to be worked out through the events of human history, even when these purposes are opposed by the world’s powers, even when justice seems perverted and the faithful are suffering.  The Book of Daniel, from which today’s first reading is taken, is particularly relevant because Daniel was written to people in pain; people whose lives had been turned upside down by conquest and domination – people who, like us, struggled with violence in their midst; people who struggled with housing insecurity, food insecurity, health issues, and fears for the day to day safety of those they loved.

            A little background:  after the death of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., his very sizeable empire was divided between three of his generals.  One of them, Seleucus, and the Seleucid Dynasty he founded, took control of that part of the Middle East that included Judea; and the Book of Daniel was written two hundred years later, in the second century B.C., at a time when the Jews, especially those in Jerusalem, were being actively persecuted by the ruling Greek Seleucids; persecuted for practicing their faith.  

            Daniel was written to give the people hope in God’s deliverance, but because it was too dangerous to write openly about the author’s understanding of God’s plans for the Seleucids, the book’s storyline was placed in Babylon three centuries earlier, during the time that the

Jewish people were in exile there.  It was presented partly as an extended narrative about Daniel, a Jew who remains faithful to God while a member of the court in Babylon, and partly as an account of Daniel’s visions of God’s coming action.  These visions, as we heard today, are described in the symbolic language of apocalyptic, which is a specific literary style that places the immediate situation of the visionary and of the people themselves who are under threat into the greater framework of world history, and of the world’s imminent transformation. 

(Craddock, 478)            

And while apocalyptic writing doesn’t bring any physical or material relief to its recipients, it does something else:  it places the immediate suffering of its recipients into the greater context of God’s Big Picture; and in doing so, the apocalyptic writer gives the people’s suffering a cosmic dimension as well as cosmic meaning; and it graphically demonstrates to the faithful that in the world things are not always as they seem.  (F, R, Th, 328)

As another author says concerning the apocalyptic promises in the Revelation to John, “…with the Lord God, there is always more:  more transformation to come than the earth has yet seen, more power and authority than claimed by earthly rulers, more dignity for God’s people than earthly rulers recognize.”  There is always more.  (F, R, Th, 326)

A Benedictine abbot once wrote, “Our faith is the answer not so much to the question ‘What must I believe?’ but rather [it is the answer to the question] ‘What dare I hope?’”  (LP, Hope, 14)

“What dare I hope?”  “What is my confident expectation?”  This is a question we not only ask ourselves, but also a question we can ask in faith about Jesus’ mindset, as he stands being interrogated by Pilate in John.

  John’s Gospel, of course, is qualitatively different from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  The last Biblical Gospel to be written, and dating from around the beginning of the second century A.D., the Gospel of John is a mature theological treatise, an extended reflection on the part of his community on the meaning of Jesus as the Christ.

Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus is in complete control as the Risen Lord.  All events take place according to whether or not “his hour” has come, and nothing happens, including both his crucifixion and his death, without his complete consent.  Jesus has come from God, and when the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, he will return to God.

This being said, within the context of John, what does Jesus dare hope? – and again, this isn’t wishful thinking.  Based on his past with the God from whom he has come, what does Jesus confidently expect for the future?

Hold on to that for a moment.

The traditional representation of Christ the King is Jesus on the cross, head up, arms out straight, body erect, vested in a priest’s chasuble and wearing a crown.  

In 1951, the artist Salvadore Dali, in response to what he called a “cosmic dream”, produced a painting that he called “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” because he based its design “on a drawing by the 16th century Spanish friar [and mystic] John of the Cross.”  And I give you one-time sermon permission:  if you have access to your cell phone, go ahead and take it out, keeping it on silent, and go to your browser or search engine.  Type in “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” because I would love for you to see the actual painting as I continue.

As I hope you can see, the painting dramatically depicts Jesus on the cross as seen from above “in a darkened sky floating over a body of water complete with a boat and fishermen”.  Jesus’ upper body is arched forward in an extreme angle as would be consistent with gravity pulling on a torso held back only by nails, but this same angle allows Jesus to look down upon the fishermen as well as upon the cloud-filled, but not necessarily dark, abyss that lies between the fishermen and the cross.

And although Dali paints Jesus on the cross, he omits the nails, he omits blood, he omits the crown of thorns; and because of the angle of Jesus’ head, he also omits any facial expression for Jesus – again, he says, because he was so directed in his dream.  (Wikipedia). 

The power of this painting is unmistakable, because somehow Dali manages to portray not only the mystery of the cross, both “life-giving” and of the abyss, but also the mystery of Christ enthroned upon this cross; the mystery of the crucified Christ as “the one in whom all things [in heaven and in earth] hold together”.  (Christian Century, 10/24/18, Brad Roth, 23)

And this glorified but radically different Christ the King, this Christ without nails, is held on the throne of the cross only by his own love, his own obedience to God, his own will.  The painting’s message and its effect are regal, compassionate, and profound.

To go back to my question about the hope of Jesus, about what Jesus confidently expects for his future, one scholar has said that “The hope of Jesus was based on his

understanding of the character of God.”  (LP, Hope, Robin Scroggs, 13)

As the one who had come from God and was returning to God, Jesus knew God, knew the character of God, intimately.  He knew that he had come from Love and Compassion, that he was returning to Love and Compassion, and that in the Love and Compassion of God as revealed in and through him, all things – us, our lives, our world, all the little pictures that make up the Big Picture – all things will be held together.

People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope – and our hope, our Christian hope, is based on our understanding of God as God was, and is, and ever shall be revealed in Jesus Christ, the king voluntarily enthroned upon the cross of love, for us. We don’t need to expect the miracle.  We already have the miracle.     Amen.   

November 17th, 2024: Doing the Footwork Together by Reverend Judith ('Jude') Lyons

A lot has happened in the month since I was last here.  

So much so, that I have felt drained,

 And I have sometimes felt inadequate to the task of preaching the Good News of the Gospel, to point us toward the New Church New Year that begins in 2 weeks’ time, with the lighting of the first Advent candle, the candle that celebrates Hope.

 

It’s not that I am without Hope – not at all – but a heaviness pervades

And my muscles ache as they work to climb up To where the light is each day.

 

Perhaps you feel something similar –  not because of who you did or didn’t vote for— But because of the fear, aggressive language  and either/or attitudes that surround us. We are a Both/And people  living in an either/or world.

 

But, in the midst of it all, as is always the case— Life goes on with the joys and challenges  of our everyday lives: Friends, family, game night, phone calls, (or text messages), hurt feelings, food, laughter, pets, and love.

 

And also in the mix are larger events that matter. This month contains many celebrations of Indigenous peoples 

There are preparations for Thanksgiving, baptisms, weddings, concerts, and on and on in the vitality of our lives.

A week ago, was the annual Diocesan Convention in Riverside, Where clergy and lay delegates met to do the business of the church AND to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church!!!

 

It was a beacon of light and Hope so needed by us all.

 

On Friday night we watched the documentary about The Philadelphia 11, the first women who were officially ordained as Priests And the brave Bishops who ordained them.

 

I was 27 then, living in Philadelphia, where I watched it unfold on TV as my 18-month old babies played on the floor.

 

Watching the film, I had forgotten the dark, angry, hate-filled abuse they endured 

As these seminary-trained deaconesses pursued Their God-centered call to the priesthood.

 

You can only imagine what they were called  publicly and privately – That they were of Satan, 

They were destroying the nearly 2000 years  of the church,

Jesus was male and only men could be priests 

Women weren’t suited;  didn’t have the right equipment,

Any sacrament these women try to do post-ordination Will be invalid – baptisms, weddings,  And most of all – The Eucharist.

They are an abomination.

All this and much worse – out of the mouths of church people. 

 

 I had also forgotten that the 3 Bishops required to ordain them Had each sacrificed their careers and their reputations to do so And yet they continued to speak out, actively working for years

For the eventual passing vote in the House of Bishops

For the Ordination of women on July 29, 1974.

 

As we watched the film, the clothes and hair were very 1970’s

But the anger and division were very familiar.

 

At Convention, all the women clergy – priests and deacons – wore red— Representing the Holy Spirit.

Clergy shirts and collars, red jacket or sweater, and red stoles.

We all processed in together during the opening hymn of the Eucharist.

 

It was thrilling, ear to ear smiles as we sang – A moment of joy— but also of great humility 

In the deep awareness of those who had come before,

Of the struggles and sacrifices they endured to clear the way for the rest of us.

 

Heading the procession, presiding at the Eucharist, and giving the keynote address was Dr. Rev. Carter Hayward, one of the 11, now in her 80’s.

 

So, here for us was exactly the jolt of Hope we all needed.

Hope drove our flood of feelings for what is good and right and of God---no matter the struggle.

I pray you too have had moments of Hope this week,

The flood of feelings of love, goodness, rightness

In your days and weeks, in your lives

That remind you that there is more – That God’s love is more  than what appears on our news feeds.

 

The Gospel for today resonates  in some unexpected ways with where we find ourselves in this time and place.

 

Jesus who cuts through the surface  to re-orient the disciples

To the stark realties in which they live.

 

Having left the Temple court  where Jesus had been teaching amid tense and dangerous confrontations, Jesus and his disciples walk outside,  along the Temple walls, where an unnamed disciple exclaims –  as a tourist might –

“Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings.”

 

In other circumstances, 

we might accuse Jesus of being a buzz kill,

But here Jesus deliberately reigns in any happy distractions about the size of the Temple.

 

He needs the disciples to stay in the truth, in reality of the precariousness of the world.  He will need them to be fueled by Hope In the middle of devastation, not outside of it, Or in some manufactured positivity. The real Hope is in God –only and always in God— most especially at the hardest, toughest times. “Teacher, what large stone and what large buildings.”  And Jesus says: 

 “not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

 

We know this to be true

Nothing is Permanent

Not the Temple

Or the Twin towers

Or bombed out villages

Or flood ravished towns.      Only God.

 

The disciples grow silent, somber, as they ask Jesus what lies ahead.   There is a collective Gloom.

 

But it is not gloom for Jesus – it is reality which must be faced, where Truth must shine, where courage must reign.

 

In 12-step programs there is this phrase:

Do the footwork and stay out of the results.

That is what Jesus is saying.

Do the footwork, that is where Hope resides and grows.

 

In answering the disciples, Jesus says: 

“Do not be led astray” 

There will be many people, places and things to distract you, And those trying to persuade or fool you.

Keep it simple:

Hold what you know to be true in your heart, mind and actions.

 

Then Jesus says, “Do not be alarmed” 

– which is different from do not be afraid –

Do not be alarmed by the dangers and destruction you see around you – 

War, violence, fire, flood, famine, hatred writ large – That is part of reality, part of the reality in this world. Stay in it.  Stay true.

 

We are so inundated with images  of suffering and discord

That it is hard to stay in it, hard to stay true.

And I confess to needing news breaks;

I switch to watching “The Great British Baking Show”  on Netflix instead.

And that’s good self-care, and a fun thing to do.

But I mustn’t see the world on one channel only.

 

Hope is doing the footwork together, holding each other up

Finding courage in doing what is good and right – with and for others.

 

I realized as I walked in that procession with my red stole How much I missed the courage and joy 

That a regular community of believers gave me.

 

You have that here.  Treasure it.

 

I leave you today with these words inspired by Jesus:

Do not be led astray

Do not be alarmed

Do the footwork together Find the Hope and Love  in as many moments as you can And you will light the way.

 

AMEN.

 

November 3rd, 2024: Reflections on All Saints' and All Souls' Day by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

True confession.

I spent a lot of years as a lay person in the pews – (late vocation).

One thing I was always a bit confused about was the difference between All Saints Day, which we are celebrating today, and All Souls Day.

I finally found a way to remember the difference

All Saints Day – traditionally remembered on November 1st is the celebration of all recognized Saints – the ones the church recognizes as especially holy people.  So think of this day as the day we remember Capital “S” Saints.

All Souls Day – traditionally remembered on November 2nd is the celebration of all the faithful departed, all of those we remember and love who have died but are not necessarily formally recognized by the church.  Think of this as the day we remember small “s” saints.

By the way – you may be wondering why we are celebrating All Saints – traditionally celebrated on November 1st, today, on November 3rd.

All Saints is what we call one of the “moveable” feasts of the church.  We can move it to the closest Sunday, so that more people will get to take part in the celebration.

Because let’s face it – how many people do you think would have showed up on Friday, November 1st at 10am?  Now you understand why we are celebrating on November 3rd!

I want to tell you a sweet story about saints that illustrates what big “S” Saints and little “s” saints have in common.

A Sunday School class took kids into church and showed them the stained-glass windows.  “Those are pictures of the saints.  They are very holy people.”

Later, at the end of the lesson in their classroom, the teacher asked, “Who can tell me what a saint is?”

Danny raised his hand and said, “I know!”  The teacher asked Danny to share with us.  And he replied, “Saints are the people the light shines through.”

You see, all saints, whether they are capital “S” Saints or small “s” saints are people the light shines through.

We know them because we can see the light of Christ in and through them.

And the more we look for that light in people – the more we see it.

So, I’m going to tell you a few brief stories about some saints – some capital “S” Saints and some small “s” saints.

After my ordination I applied for and received approval for a sabbatical in Europe, studying the Saints where they lived:  “Doorways to the Divine – Holy People and Holy Places”

St. Therese of Lisieux

Known as the Little Flower, she is a Capital “S” Saint.  She lived in Northern France from 1873-1897.  Though she died at the age of 25 – she was canonized and made a Saint by the church.

Urged by her Mother Superior, she wrote a book called, The Story of a Soul – an autobiography.

Her spirituality is known as “The Little Way.”

She says that all the small seemingly insignificant actions of love of which we are capable, take on great value because of the motive behind them which is the ceaseless flow of love between us and God.

If we only fear God, she says, we think God needs to be placated by our deeds, which then becomes our motive.

But God is not to be feared, says Therese.  God is merciful love and confidence in that love, means even when we sin, provided we stumble to our feet again and continue our advance toward God, we will be forgiven and God will instantly welcome us home.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

Another capital “S” Saint known as a Man of the Heart.  He lived from 1491-1556 in Bonn Loyola, Spain.

As a young man, he wanted a career as a courtier in the King’s court and as a soldier.

He gambled, he brawled, he fought duels, and he was a womanizer – which is why he fought many duels.

He joined the war between Loyola and Pamplona.  His leg was shattered by a cannonball.

He spent months and months recovering at home and bored to tears, looked for books in the family library on chivalry.  There were only two. 

But there were lots on the lives of the Saints and there was a copy of The Imitation of Christ, a spiritual classic by Thomas à Kempis.

Out of boredom he began to read them and was converted.  He decided he wanted to be a Knight for God.

He travelled to Montserrat outside of Barcelona to give his life to God.

Then he went to a cave retreating to be with God.

He heard God say to him, “Don’t withdraw from the world, take my love out into the world.”

There in Manresa, he wrote Spiritual Exercises, a book of instructions for living a spiritual life.  Even today you can take a 3, 4, 8, or even a 30-day Ignatian retreat based on the book.

Or you can do as I did and buy the book and do the retreat one day at a time at home.

You may remember from last week one practice taken from the Spiritual Exercises: when I mentioned during the gospel that Ignatius encourages us to enter into a gospel story by becoming one of the characters.

To sum up Ignatius’ teaching, it would be: Heart Open to God Heart Open to Others.

Now on to some small “s” saints.

Chris Hooley showed his 11-year-old daughter Kaylee a touching video on YouTube called “Making the Homeless Smile.”  Their motto is: It’s the little things we do that make a big difference in the world.

His daughter was mesmerized by it.  By the way, I highly recommend watching it, it’s wonderful.

With his daughter’s urging, dad and daughter worked together to create a nonprofit charitable organization.  They host street events where they hand out food, water, clothing, and toiletries to the homeless in Phoenix and then they post videos on them on YouTube.

Jackie Waters and her sister Tracy are small “s” saints.  Tracy lived a 21-year battle with a rare form of brain cancer.  But Tracy was an amazing young woman.  She adopted a Superhero presence during her battle which kept her spirits high and showed others how powerful positive thinking can be.

After Tracy died, Jackie, inspired by her sister’s strength, jumped full force into creating “Help Your Hero,” a website that helps children dealing with difficult medical diagnoses to find their inner Superhero and connects parents with important resources to help them as a family.

So let’s be saints that the light shines through, each in our own way.  And let’s take that light out in the world for everyone to see.

And here’s a song to inspire us.  I’m sure a lot of you grew up with this as I did.  It’s #293 in the Hymnal or you can use the handouts I brought.

October 27th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 23: Mark 10:46-52, by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

I believe in miracles.  There is no doubt in my mind that Jesus restored the physical sight of blind Bartimeus in today’s gospel.

Miracles are part of the reason people knew that Jesus was the Messiah.

In Ignatian spirituality we are invited to put ourselves into a gospel story to become one of the characters.

That might be a bit of a challenge for many of us, if we try to become Bartimeus.  It might be hard for us to imagine what being blind would be like.

But there may be a way to connect with Bartimeus.  There may be something in this gospel for those of us who are not physically blind.

We may not be physically blind, but all of us have some spiritual blindness.

And all of us have a choice whether to remain by the roadside crippled by that blindness or whether to cry out to God that we want to see more clearly.

What I’ve learned is that this life journey we are on is way more interesting if we ask to see!

Another thing I’ve learned is that sometimes when God helps us to see something we couldn’t see before, the healing is gradual, sort of like peeling layers of an onion.

Sometimes God takes us back to the same issue over and over again, peeling the onion a layer at a time.

And each time God has us revisit an issue in our lives, we go deeper and deeper into that issue and begin to see more and more clearly.

So if we want to understand where God is trying to heal our spiritual blindness, we need to look for the same issue coming up repeatedly in our lives.

God reveals what God wants to heal.

Look for the same old thing coming up again and again.  Don’t resist it.

Here’s an example from my own life.  Coincidentally it has to do with beggars.

I had a rather jaded view of beggars.  My thought was “Don’t give them money, they might buy drugs or alcohol with it.”  So I didn’t help beggars.

The first layer of the onion began to be peeled off when God began to soften my heart.  Maybe it wasn’t up to me to judge.  Had I checked in with God to see if I was supposed to help this person?

Maybe my job was just to love, not judge and seek God’s guidance.  So occasionally, when I began to get what I call holy nudges from God, I would give beggars a bit of my change.

The second layer was peeled away when children became a part of the picture.

One day a woman came up to me outside TJ Maxx.  She was almost in tears.  She needed school clothes for her kids.  Nudged again, I gave her folding money.

Several weeks after, in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, a man, his wife and two kids were begging, really begging for help.  Following God’s nudge, I gave them money.

The third layer of the onion came off one day when I was seated in a booth next to the window eating a meal at a local Italian restaurant.

I became aware of a homeless man standing outside the window staring at my meal.  I instantly knew he was hungry.

I grabbed a $20 bill and ran outside to give it to him.

Afterwards I got in my car and the thought came to me “You didn’t even ask his name.”

Next time I will, I vowed – the third layer.

Some days later while packing for a week long trip, I looked at all my clothes.  And I thought of all the people around us who shop at Goodwill and can’t afford TJ Maxx.  I vowed to think of their needs before I bought anything else.

And I spent another week of my vacation hauling bags and bags of stuff I wasn’t using to the Goodwill so that someone else could have the joy of owning it.

Layer #4

And then one Sunday after a group of us had gathered at Pollo Loco for lunch, I bumped into a lady in the parking lot, empty coffee cup extended begging for money.

Again, getting a holy nudge, I asked her her name and if she was hungry.  “C’mon let’s get you something to eat,” I said.  I invited her to choose her meal and a beverage, and I paid.  I gave her the buzzer that would let her know her meal was ready, gave her a hug and left.

After I was in the car and down the street the thought came to me “Why didn’t you stay and keep her company while she ate?”

Layer #5

And then God took me to the core of it all.

All of a sudden “I saw.”  I saw what God was leading me to see, what all the layers were about.

And here is what I “saw.”  The more you befriend the person on the roadside, the beggar, the more you will learn to befriend the unlovely parts of yourself.

The more you stop resisting the lives of the beggars in your world, the more you will come to peace with the parts of you that live on the roadside begging.

Ah!  Now I saw what all these encounters with the homeless were about.

I saw the issue with a spiritual depth I hadn’t seen before.

I thought it was about helping the poor and the marginalized.

I thought it was about giving them dignity by knowing their name.

I thought it was about giving the gift of a meal and my company.

I thought it was all about being willing to be a companion to the poor.

And it was all those things!  But it was also about more.

It was about acknowledging the unlovely parts of us.

About not only being aware of that part of ourselves, but extending care to ourselves.

By knowing ourselves (our name) by knowing everything about ourselves.

It’s about spending time with the unlovely parts of ourselves, making friends with that part.

It’s about being able to say, “Yes, this shadow is a part of me.”

I am both shadow and light – accepting rather than resisting that.

The Good News is that by befriending, eating with, giving honor to all of who we are, that part of us will be gradually healed by God.

Just the way Jesus healed the blind beggar.

And so the gospel invites us to take the part of the beggar:

·        To long for something more

·        To beg Jesus to see more

That’s how the onion gets peeled.

And the gospel also invites us to take the part of Jesus:

·        To accept the beggar in ourselves and in the world

·        To never resist the beggar

·        To get to know the beggar

And then we, like the blind beggar, will be healed.

October 20th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 22: Privilege and Leadership, Mark 10:35-45; Isaiah 53; Psalm 91, by Reverend Jude Lyons

Disneyland opened when I was 8.  I was in the third grade, and because the public elementary school was on half days due to, I think, some sort of significant repair or emergency something, my brother and I were enrolled at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic School. And, although it was an adjustment, the best thing was that there were Catholic holidays where all the Catholics went to mass and the very few of us who were non-Catholic didn’t!!  And so, I remember, December 8th. It was the Feast of Mary and the Immaculate Conception.  My classmates all went to mass; my mother, brother, sister and I went to Disneyland. We entered another world. It wasn’t crowded. It was pristine; it was calm; it was beautiful; it was magical; it felt, well, holy.  It was a land of awe and wonder and breath and smiles, and it felt as if time itself had slowed for us all to savor each moment. It seemed to me like a special pass from God.   

Near the end of that year, the Catholic enrollment for St. Paul’s had picked up, and so the non-Catholics….the protestants… were not renewed, which was okay.  I went back to the public school for 4th grade.  What do I remember?  That day at Disneyland. 

Much has changed, at Disneyland, and everywhere else, especially where crowds are a way of life ---- waiting in endless lines, finding a place to park, getting to the discount first, and figuring out how to navigate through too many, too much, too often.  Uncertainty lurks in those crowds – will they run out, will I have to pay extra.  Will the doors close, will I waste the whole day, will my children have a melt down before we get there, will I be at the wrong window, will someone cut in front of me or push me or take the last seat or block the aisle with their suitcase.  And, so it goes.  These are the annoyances of our world, the irritants that actually shape our lives.; And yet we know these are first world problems, not survival problems, not the pushing and shoving that comes when food or water arrives in Gaza, of families fighting to get on the bus or boat away from a war zone.   

We all understand the basic human instinct for survival, for food, shelter, and the protection of our children.   We see the images of desperate people trying to make it through one more day, anyway they can. 

But somehow, in our culture, we have co-opted that basic instinct for survival by cultivating it and using it to appease our inconveniences, our annoyances, to navigate and maneuver through the masses, to find for ourselves, and pay for, the fast pass, the special door, the privileged card, the favored list, the gold card, the sticker for the designated parking lot, the ease and comfort of unique, of special, of privilege. Peddling privilege is a huge money-maker, and most of us fall for it in one way or another.

I have just returned from an 8 day trip to New England, and believe me, if I had been able to utilize special lines for security, or a fast pass for the car (which took hours), or bigger seats, better access to the bathroom, I would have done it in a heartbeat, and I looked longingly at those who sped ahead----so I understand why we enter in to the game of how to get ahead, to leap frog the system, to make better arrangements for ourselves!!   

What I think Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel is not a critique of the desire to secure a place or the desire to get ourselves to the head of the line.  It is not the desire or even the asking that is misplaced.

It is facing what creeps into our hearts that matters. It is the entitlement, the pride, the self -satisfaction with one’s own efforts – in short, it is the lack of awareness of privilege we have managed to obtain, and the lack of gratitude for the ease it brings. 

It is not a condemnation of privilege; it is a condemnation of our insensitivity, our lack of gratitude for what we have and how we, unlike many others, are able to function in the world. Our culture and our human nature rewards us for manipulating the system, in part by making us feel clever, smart, even responsible as we participate in our advantages.  

In this world, there will always be advantages.

As Christians, It is a matter of attitude and perspective and generosity of heart. 

How different would it be if we gave thanks to God every single time we recognize our privilege, even in the smallest ways,  and prayed for those without, for thhose still standing in line.   

We miss the many, many ways we are blessed and we misunderstand the larger purpose. 

And so I feel for James and John, the sons of Zebedee, called the Sons of Thunder.  Their instinct to secure a place for themselves is not very far removed from what we might do too.  But their attitude and their timing stinks – Jesus has for the third time, just told them,

He “will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes.  They will condemn him to death, and will deliver him to the Gentiles.  They will mock him, spit on him, scourge him, and kill him.  On the third day he will rise again.” (Mark 10:33-34).      Well, That’s vivid!! 

 Without any response to that, the Zebedee boys begin their plan to get special seats. Much the way a child says, ‘Promise me you won’t be mad at me’, before they tell what happened, James and John say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”  Clearly, they have been planning this. They have taken Jesus aside. 

Jesus might have said, “Did you hear what I just said?  About what is going to happen?

But he doesn’t. He meets them where they are and asks, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 

It is telling that this sequence in Mark, from chapter 8 through chapter 10, is where Jesus tells his disciples  -- 3 times – what awaits him in Jerusalem,  and the sequence begins and ends with Jesus healing a blind man. Next week you will meet Barnabas.  Jesus asks him the same question he asks James and John: What do you want me to do for you?  Barnabas answers immediately; he desperately wants to see, to understand, to follow.   

 If only the disciples wanted to see, as both blind men do, to see and understand more deeply – but they don’t, and --- as a group, they have devolved into a competitive quarrel over privilege -----and their tempers flare.  

Jesus stops everything and calls his team together and says, ok, circle up.   

He sits them down and says, again, what he has said so often.  The recognized as leaders of this world, privileged and powerful, often wield their power cruelly and lord it over their subjects.  You will not.   “Whoever wants to become great among you, shall be your servant.  Whoever wants to become first among you must be slave of all.”

 Servant leadership is the model of leadership Jesus teaches again and again.  

At our baptism, we were all called to be priests, to serve the needs of the world.  The root of the word ‘priest’ is “bridge”. ;  As priests we are to serve as a bridge between this world and the next, as a light to shine the way into a holy land –maybe something like that first Disneyland was to me --  that operates differently from this one, where one leads with humility and a heart of gratitude, where leadership itself is the privilege, a privilege to put on an apron and get to work. 

There are no shortcuts in our path to follow Jesus.  Jesus knows the road is rocky and hard, and he is clear about that.  There are no special privileges offered – no A tickets, no sure way.  No earned degrees or symbolic vestments, like these, get rewarded with better seats.   

The challenge for us is not to drop out of the TSA Precheck line or stop seeking some comfort or a memorable experience.   The challenge for us is to recognize and give thanks for the gift of that shorter line, that better treatment, to never take for granted even the smallest blessings in our lives and most importantly to pass those blessings on.  James and John took for granted their relationship with Jesus as a ticket to a secure and privileged position.  They didn’t understand that in the Kingdom of God there is no advantage to being in the front row. 

Thank you, Jesus, for your word today to help us understand that true leadership is true service, and that honest awareness of our own privilege can awaken in our hearts an even greater desire to serve God’s people. 

AMEN

October 13th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 21: Mark 10:17-31, by Reverend Jeannie Martz

As we just heard, in today’s Gospel reading Mark tells us that Jesus is setting out on a journey, a journey that we know will ultimately lead to Jerusalem and to the cross.  Suddenly, a man runs up to Jesus and literally stops him in his tracks by flinging himself to his knees in the dust in front of Jesus, begging for an answer that he himself doesn’t have.

            “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?  I can’t figure it out.”  Obey the commandments, Jesus says; you know them as well as I do.  I have, the man says; I’ve done it all, all my life…but it’s not enough; and so Jesus elaborates, calling the man to discipleship in the process.

            The particular language that Mark uses tells us that this question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” is important to the man.  Mark says that Jesus looks at the man and loves him.  Jesus knows that his question is sincere and that the man really, really wants Jesus to give him the answer.

            Instead, Jesus gives him an answer, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor; then come, follow me”, but this answer “shocks” the man; and the word Mark uses here is the Greek equivalent of the word we would use to describe the shock of a sudden death.  The man is speechless because as it turns out, he has many possessions and he’s completely overwhelmed.  He goes away grieving and numb, unable to do as Jesus has directed.

            Now, usually when we look at this passage we talk about the potentially destructive power that our material wealth, our possessions, and the prestige we get from them, can have, especially if we hoard them or misuse them.  We talk about the dangers of seeing ourselves and others – that is, the danger of valuing ourselves, and others – only in terms of what we or they have.  This is the usual avenue of approach here…but it’s not the only one.

            There’s another way to look at this reading, another perspective we can take.  With this reading as the background, we can take a look at what it means to live life out of a question, versus what it means to live out of an answer.

            With all of his possessions, the man who approaches Jesus lives out of a question.  Both the word “question” and the word “quest” have as their root a Latin word that means “search”.  The rich man’s whole life has been a search, a search for meaning; a search for that knowledge, that experience, that possession, that accomplishment that will make him feel complete; but Mark lets us know that his search has been doomed from the start because it’s been strictly an earthly search.

            “Good teacher,” the man says to Jesus; “didaskale agathe”; and maybe he means to show respect, to honor Jesus as a righteous man; but agathe, “good”, this is a word that is generally used only to describe God and God’s inherent goodness; and it’s this use – or misuse – of agathe that Jesus hears, and this is why he corrects the man.  “Why do you call me good?” he asks.  “No one is agathe but God alone,” and it’s worth noting that even though this is supposedly a conversation about eternal life, this is the only overt reference to God that either of them makes.

            Continuing in this same earthly vein, as Jesus goes on to list the commandments, he only mentions the ones that regulate human relationships.  There are four others he doesn’t mention, and these are the ones that concern our relationship with God.  “Teacher,” the man responds, and he avoids the modifier this time – he’s not about to make the same mistake twice – “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”  I’ve followed these commandments all my life, but it’s not enough and I don’t know why….

            Now, it’s important for us to realize that in the eyes of first century Judean society, this man really is a “good” man.  He obeys the Law, and he’s wealthy; and since the very beginning Jews, as well as other ancient peoples -- not to mention today’s Christian adherents of what’s still called the “Prosperity Gospel” -- all of these folks had regarded, and do regard, material wealth as being a visible, tangible sign of God’s favor and blessing.  This is why the disciples are so surprised, and so dismayed, when Jesus says that the wealthy are going to have a tough time getting into the kingdom.  Rich people are already God’s favorites – so if they can’t get in, what hope is there for the rest of us? 

As long-standing as this belief in prosperity is, however, as others have said before, “The Bible is more complicated than that.”

            “I’ve followed all these since my youth…”.  Like Peggy Lee, who I realize some of you have never heard of before, but like Peggy Lee singing “Is that all there is [to the circus, to love, to life]?” the rich man is still hungry, still hollow, still living with a nagging emptiness that both Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal, among others, will wrestle with in later years and later centuries.  To God, the 4th century AD Augustine said, “Thou has created us for thyself, and our hearts are rest-less till we rest in Thee.”

            1300 years later, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and theologian Pascal would write, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?  This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”  (Pensees, VII, 425)

            Having no overt engagement with the God-oriented commandments, not really understanding what he’s looking for, the rich man is rest-less.  Jesus is aware of his unrest and his helplessness and tells him that he “lacks one thing.”  Just as another time he tells Martha of Bethany that “only one thing is needed” and her sister Mary has chosen that “one thing” in sitting and listening to him teach; just as then, Jesus tells this man now what the “one thing” is that he is lacking:  “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

            What you lack, he says to the man, what you’re missing is God; and not just God, but a relationship with God; and not just a relationship, but a particular type of relationship:  a relationship of dependence and discipleship, like Mary of Bethany; a relationship of love and of trust, of fulfillment and completion, like Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal.

            Another twist of language here, and a legal one at that, is that the man asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life.  This is phrased oddly, because according to the Law, the Torah, which the man obviously knows, one’s only heirs are one’s offspring.  Only children can inherit…and what did Jesus say to the disciples in last week’s reading, only two verses before the rich man showed up today?  He said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”  Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like God’s child, as God’s child, will never inherit it.

            You lack one thing, Jesus says to the man:  you must allow yourself to become God’s child, to become God’s heir, trusting in God and depending on God alone.

            Sell all you have; let go of your material security; let go of all those things that you thought would bring you fulfillment, and follow me – because in following me, you follow the One who sent me.  This is the answer to the question you have asked.

            When the man heard Jesus’ words, he was shocked with the shock of a sudden death, the death of who he thought he was; and he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

            This man had based his whole life on the question and on the quest, on the doing and on the having; and he very much wanted Jesus to give him a different answer.  If we also live out of a question, whether it’s the rich man’s question or Peggy Lee’s question or a different question altogether; if we also base our lives on a question, we’ll end up as restless and as unfulfilled as the man in today’s Gospel was…so what if we change our perspective, and we live out of an answer instead?

            What if we base our lives, and the choices and the decisions we make, on the knowledge and on the assurance that as followers of Jesus striving to be faithful, we already have inherited eternal life?

            We haven’t inherited it because we’ve earned it, we haven’t inherited it because our faith or our striving are perfect, we haven’t inherited it because of anything we’re doing.  We have inherited eternal life simply because of grace; simply because God, in God’s mercy and of God’s own choosing, has already given each of us eternal life through our baptism – baptism being the sacrament of our adoption as God’s child, and therefore also our adoption as God’s heir. 

And why does Paul in his writings emphasize so strongly our adoptive relationship with God?   Because according to Roman law, natural born children could be disinherited at the will and the whim of their father.  ADOPTED CHILDREN, HOWEVER, BY LAW COULD NEVER BE DISINHERITED.

            We are in a covenantal, familial, adoptive relationship with God.  We are God’s adopted heirs, and because of that, we are marked as Christ’s own forever.  We are quite literally signed, sealed, and delivered – by God, for God, and to God.  By God’s own choice, we are bound to God in baptism and God is bound to us – and so, with this salvation as our formative reality, we don’t need to worry about not inheriting it; we don’t need to chase it or clutch at it – and we don’t need to try to keep someone else from having it too.  This gift is already ours, and nothing can change this…except our own refusal to acknowledge it and to embrace it.

            An Episcopal priest named Heidi Haverkamp writes, “A few years ago, in crisis, I went to a local Christian spiritual center and was assigned a spiritual director who was an elderly Catholic sister.  She listened to my story, and she told me two simple things.  First, that God is love.  Second, pointing her finger at me with firmness and affection, she said:  ‘Remember, you are poor.’  She explained:  you do not have the resources to save yourself, fix your problems, or change the world – only God does.  Perhaps she saw my temptation to believe in my own ability and responsibility for my life, in no small part because of my many possessions:  great education, successful work life, health insurance, retirement savings, and a house full of stuff.  I am tempted to believe that, based on my own efforts and knowledge, I can achieve – am supposed to achieve – a spiritual life, a godly life, eternal life.”

            Haverkamp goes on, “The rich today include many more of us than in Jesus’ time, used to trusting in our own wits, work, and will to get things done and bend our world to our control.  It is hard for us to find the kingdom of heaven, to enter into it… – as hard as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle….We cannot save ourselves, but God can.  As Jesus makes clear to the young man looking for his extra credit assignment, the way to eternal life is not achievement but want and surrender.  It is to claim the words I am poor.”  (Christian Century, 9/26/18, p. 20)

            If those many, many months of pandemic powerlessness back in 2020 or the more recent devastating hurricanes Helene and Milton in the Southeast, where I used to live and where I still have relatives and friends, have taught us anything, they taught us that WE ARE POOR; that in spite of our material resources or accomplishments in the eyes of the world, none of us has the ability to fix our problems or change the world on our own.  Only God can do this; but God does invite us to share in this work.

            As John writes in his Gospel, “From his fullness,” from the fullness of God in Christ, “have we already received, grace upon grace.”  We are all poor; and because we are poor, we have already received the grace and the promise of the kingdom – and so, as we’ve taught our own children to do, we say “thank you” to the One who has saved us, and we recognize that a life based on the answer is a life that flows out of gratitude, and joy, and love; a life based on the answer is a life that embraces and celebrates the awareness of, and the acceptance of, our own spiritual poverty – which is to say, our complete dependence on God and on God’s grace; our dependence on the God for whom all things are possible.

            Reflecting on Jesus’ final words to the rich man, “Then come, follow me”, Haverkamp writes, “What gets in the way of my following Christ?  This is the rigor I was longing for – not a spiritual drill sergeant, but a person able to see me and tell me the truth:  that whatever possessions I grip most tightly are the junk that is most in my way.  That I am poor; that my only wealth and security is Christ.  That Jesus, in whom all things are possible, is always saying, ‘Now, come, follow me.’”  (Ibid.)

            The rich man and Peggy Lee asked the question, “Are these things I’m clinging to all there is?”  Along with Augustine and Blaise Pascal and Heidi Haverkamp and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we can stand firm in the answer and say with confidence, “No, they’re not all there is.”  The question is not all there is. 

            Our relationship with God is the answer.  Our relationship with each other is the answer.  Faithful and strong, completely dependent upon God, we are poor – but in our dependence lies our wealth and our strength, and with them and with God, our ability to make the difference in the world that we can’t make on our own. 

This dependence and this faith, our reliance on our relationship with God, this is the answer in which lies eternal life.  Amen.

 

October 6th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 20: Mark 10:2-9, by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

Difficult being called to preach on this gospel.

It was a temptation to skip over the first part of the gospel and preach about children.

Oh, I could preach a wonderful sermon about children!

But I won’t.

We don’t grow spiritually by avoiding the difficult things in life.

So we’re going to meet this gospel head on – we’re going to delve right into it.

And we’re going to do it with honesty and integrity.

Set the scene:

a.   Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem and his death

b.   He already has enemies

c.   The Pharisees in particular

d.   They are constantly trying to test him – to catch him in a mistake

e.   This time they come to Jesus asking him to settle a disagreement they are having

·        Pharisees from the school of rabbi Hillel, a Jewish lawyer who founded a rabbinical school in Babylon; his school was liberal, humane, and tolerant

Vs

·        Pharisees from the school of rabbi Shammai, an aristocrat, quite elitist and very nationalistic;  his school was conservative and strict

f.     These two schools had an ongoing disagreement about divorce

g.   Not about whether divorce was allowable, because it was

h.   But on what grounds is it allowable

i.     Deuteronomy 24 said that a man could divorce his wife on the grounds of indecency (note that a woman could not divorce her husband)

j.     But how do we interpret indecency?

·        Shammai said that it meant in the case of adultery

·        Hillel said if a wife displeased her husband, spoke ill of his family, didn’t respect his authority, burnt his toast – he could divorce her

k.   So they challenge Jesus to settle it between them;  the danger was – if he agrees with one side, everyone from the other school would be angry with him

Jesus answers the way a rabbi often answered a question which was posed to him, he answered a question with a question:  What did Moses command you?  And so quoting Moses as their authority, they recite back what scripture says about the law for divorce.

But then Jesus shifts the focus of the conversation.  He makes it primarily about marriage and not divorce.  He shifts the conversation from splitting hairs about loopholes for divorce to God’s dream for humankind.

First, he acknowledges that yes, it is lawful to divorce, but that is only because humans are suffering from hardness of heart.  In Greek, the words mean:  a heart dried up or a parched heart.  According to Jesus, it is because we have parched hearts that there is a need for divorce laws.

Then he moves on to God’s ideal for us – God’s dream for humankind

a.   He begins to quote from Genesis

b.   How God made man and woman as complimentary beings

c.   And that they became one, both physically and spiritually

d.   In essence, together, they become a new being

e.   And nothing can separate them from each other

f.     That is the nature of their oneness

Jesus speaks an absolute truth in this gospel.

a.   When God created man and woman, he intended for them to have a union that was permanent

b.   And though it doesn’t say so in this gospel, we have come to understand that the intention of God is the same for same sex unions

c.   Marriage is meant to last forever

d.   All divorce is a failure to fulfill God’s dream for us

e.   In divorce, we fail one another and we fail God

But the purpose of this gospel is not to arouse guilt.  And it is not to propose a hopelessly high standard, but to give us a vision for what God’s dream of marriage is.

We might say – but I do feel guilty.  I’ve let God down.  I’ve let the community of faith down. I’ve let my partner down because of my divorce.

I wasn’t able to be what I hoped I could be.

I wasn’t able to be what God dreamed for me.

I wasn’t able to create what I promised I would create.

Here is the truth:

a.   All divorce is tragic

b.   But sometimes staying married is more tragic than divorce

c.   Some marriages should end

d.   Sometimes divorce is the lesser of two evils

e.   Is an intact and hopelessly broken marriage any less sinful than a divorce?

f.     There are times when we must acknowledge that we have made a major mistake in the journey of life

g.   We need to face it, own it, admit to our parched hearts, confess it, ask for forgiveness, and move on

h.   That is living in truth

That doesn’t mean we don’t take marriage vows seriously

a.   No, we hold fast to God’s dream for us

b.   And we are even more determined to fulfill that dream

c.   We refuse to buy into the idea of disposable relationships that are so popular in today’s culture

d.   But we also refuse to be legalistic about marriage

e.   God’s dream for us is far more than a rule about never ever getting a divorce

f.     God’s dream for us is unity and oneness and mutuality

g.   And God’s dream above all is about grace

·        A grace that will not turn away from us even if we fail

·        A grace that welcomes us with open arms as though we are powerless children, at times unable to help ourselves

·        A grace that says “Let the little children with broken and dried up hearts come to me.”  Don’t stop them – they need me and I want to bless them

·        The kingdom of heaven belongs to people like these

I have experienced this grace

a.   Marriage falling apart

b.   Tell Bishop

c.   Tell priest who was my boss

d.   You must tell the vestry

e.   Would they ask me to leave?  Decide they couldn’t have a divorced priest?

f.     Broke down

g.   Chair in middle – laid hands

h.   Washed in grace

In that moment I truly understood grace – not at the intellectual level, but at the heart level.

And I knew then that nothing could ever separate me from God’s love.

May we continue on our journeys confident in God’s love, confident in God’s forgiveness, confident in God’s amazing grace.

September 29th, 2024: Embrace the Divine Spirit within You: Reflections on Pentecost 19: Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29; Psalms 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9: 38-50, by J.D. Neal

For about 5 years, I worked as a high school teacher in a great books style, classical education program. This sounds a little hoity-toity, but primarily it means that instead of focusing the classroom around lectures and textbooks, we focused our classes around great books and discussions. Instead of reading textbooks about American History, they would read Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln; instead of reading a textbook or anthology with snippets of English Literature, they would read G.K. Chesterton & T.S. Eliot — straight to the source. Likewise, instead of coming to class to hear me lecture about one of these topics, I would give them an opening question on the book they were supposed to have read that week, and we would spend the whole class discussing the text at hand. My job was to facilitate, to act as a guide and to help the students plumb the depths of whatever book we were discussing — to help them discover that they were able to understand and grapple with the powerful, often di      cult ideas and questions o ered in these books. And the wonderful thing is that they were able; I consistently had better discussions about philosophy and theology with my 14 year old students than with my fellow seminary students in PhD seminars.

The trickiest bit about my job was to help the students themselves discover that they really were able to understand and grapple with this stu        if they did the work, trusted one another, and didn’t give up. And this makes sense, right? I’m sure you can tell that many of the books we would read together are the kind of thing that most of us write o as being out of reach or irrelevant for the average person — stu for ‘those smart people.’ Most of my students didn’t think of themselves as being capable of understanding this stu   when they started our classes. We would get into our rst discussions and they would freeze up after I asked a question, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they had been trained to believe that the teacher was ‘the smart one’ who had all the answers, that their job was just to follow along and receive the special knowledge that I possessed. Especially with rst year students, it would take almost the whole year for the group to really break out of this; as the tutor, I would have to try all sorts of strategies to try to get them to realize that they were capable of doing this work together. One of my favorite strategies was to just go silent and dramatically turn my chair around and put myself in the corner for part of a discussion. The goal here is simple: if the students are unhelpfully relying upon you, looking to the teacher to answer the question instead of using the text, their own minds, and one another, then you remove yourself. You refuse to cooperate, and you stay out until they eventually give up waiting for you to answer the question for them and start to answer it themselves (because it’s either that or they sit in awkward silence for an hour and half) — and (if it works) something magical happens.

They try it. They start to say ‘yes’ to my invitation and begin to do the work together. They vulnerably throw out an idea, they try to puzzle through a confusing passage together, they stumble upon a key idea and start to make sense of it, and they realize that they can do this work, that their minds are made of the same stu   as mine, and that they are just as capable and worthy as I am to discover the goodness, truth, and beauty hidden in those weird old books we would read together.

Now, why did I spend so long talking about this? I’m tempted to just go sit in the corner and make you guys preach the rest of the sermon for me, but that’s not why I bring it up. In the Old Testament reading, we nd Moses feeling overwhelmed and angry, feeling as though God has saddled him alone with the impossible responsibility of taking care of the whole people of Israel. He complains to God about this, and God says, ‘Sure, no problem’ — and ordains 70 ‘elders’ to help Moses lead the people. Two of those ‘elders’ don’t come to the meeting when they are supposed to, and so the spirit of God comes upon wherever they happen to be. Suddenly they are overcome and God’s spirit begins to speak through them out in the middle of the Israelite camp. When Moses’s right-hand man, Joshua, hears about this, he is ‘jealous’ for Moses, he wants to protect Moses’s reputation as ‘The One’ who holds God’s authority, and tells Moses to shut them up. But Moses doesn’t want to, because he is overcome with relief and gratitude because he has remembered that God is the one who leads and provides for his people, and God has given him a whole lot of help when he nally asked for it. Joshua misses the point — Moses doesn’t care about protecting his status and authority, he cares about the presence and power of God being present among his people, and he even looks forward to a day when God would ‘put his spirit on all of God’s people.’

Similarly, when we get to the Gospel, we see the disciples up in arms about the fact that some rogue exorcist is out doing miracles in the name of Jesus, when this person doesn’t follow them. The disciples, like Joshua, are missing the point: they are more concerned with controlling who counts as a ‘legitimate’ disciple of Jesus, with protecting their status and worthiness, than with the fact that the healing work of God is being carried out through this stranger. Remember how Jesus caught them ghting over which one of them was ‘the greatest’ in last week’s gospel? So Jesus reminds them of what he said in last week’s gospel, that the way they are treating this stranger or that little child is the way that they are treating Jesus.

There is a ip side to our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus rebukes the disciples harshly, telling them that it would be better to be drowned or to cut o a limb than to let their pride and desire for status and ‘greatness’ cause them to mistreat or ‘become a stumbling block’ to another person in whom Christ is present, because to do so is to reject Christ himself — because in some mysterious way, Christ is present in each of them.

In other words, the hope of Moses has come true in Christ. God has put his Spirit upon all of his people. And so when we get to our reading from the epistle of James, we are given a picture of a spirit- lled community. A place where all members participate in the life of Christ. Notice that there is no Moses- gure, no special teacher or priest in James’s passage. James assumes that the Spirit lives in every member of the Church community, so he exhorts all of them to praise and pray with one another, to confess to each other, to receive healing through one another’s prayers. He believes that any one of the people he writes to could pray with as much power as Elijah, whose prayers stopped the rains in Israel for 3.5 years! He believes this, because he knows that God has placed his Spirit within each of us and so the whole life of Christ himself is on o er to us — if we can receive it.

The gospel this morning is not just a word to the disciples, it is a word to the ‘little ones’ — to all of us. It reminds us that the life of faith, prayerful connection with God, and the joy and fullness of Christ’s own life are not just for the special, ‘holy people’ over there — for the Moses, the ‘disciples,’ the priests up at the altar, the special saints who are ‘quali ed’ to experience God. We each have di erent gifts and di erent roles to play, sure, but we all are one of those little ones whom Christ stands with. We are all capable of extending Christ’s love and power and healing to each other — just like in the reading from James. And this is good news, especially for St. Matthias, because we don’t have a Moses right now, we don’t have a priest. All we have is one another and the Spirit of God here with us — and that is a gift, because it gives us an opportunity to discover that this is enough. St. Matthias can’t wait around for Church to happen until we nd a priest. We don’t know how long this search process will take, and we don’t need to wait. God has placed his Spirit within you. You are invited to step further into the life and love of Christ here and now, and invited into sharing that life with one another — whether or not there is a priest up there to help you do it. This is what we mean by the ‘priesthood of all believers.’

Each day, Christ holds out his hand to each and every one of us in ways great and small and invites us deeper into his abundant life. But each day, there are things that stand between us and accepting that invitation. Our fears, our shame and feelings of unworthiness, complacency and comfort, the wealth of distractions we are ooded with, even just the layout of our liturgy can mislead us into thinking that the real ‘Christian stu ’ happens up there, with the special ‘holy people’ in special robes rather than down here in each of us. In the somewhat grisly language of today’s gospel, there are parts of our story or our life that might need to be ‘cut o ’ or ‘plucked out’ to allow us to see and grasp the love of God. Just like my old students, we sometimes have a hard time believing that God wants to bring us into the story, that we are capable or worthy of being an instrument of God’s love or a bearer of his peace — and just like my old students, I believe that we have been made capable and worthy and there is much to discover together if we show up and trust. I believe that if we trust James and Jesus today, if we trust that Christ has put his Spirit in us and we do the faithful work of asking for God’s help and listening for his answers, of learning from one another and the Scriptures, of loving those around us and trying to say yes to all the little invitations God sends our way — if we say ‘yes’ then we will discover that we are capable of receiving joy and life that we could not have imagined.

May St. Matthias become a place where we begin to discover this together. Amen.

September 22nd, 2024: Servant Leadership and Working Lovingly Together to Solve the World's Puzzles: Reflections on Pentecost 18: Mark 9: 30-37, by The Reverend Valerie Hart

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight oh God our strength and our redeemer.

 

Jesus and his disciples had just gotten back to their home base in Capernaum. While they were walking, Jesus had been teaching them. He was trying to get them to understand that he was going be betrayed and die. And then after dying he would rise again, but the disciples were pretty of dense and didn't seem to quite get what was going on. Maybe they just weren't listening because they didn't want to hear.

When they got to the house where they were going to, Jesus looked at them and asked, "What were you arguing about?" They didn't like that Jesus had noticed and brought that up because they had been arguing about which one of them was the greatest. It seems a bit like the patriarch of a family bringing together everyone for Thanksgiving. All his sons and  daughters to come together. Then the father says "I have you here today because I met with my doctor last week and I'm going to be going on hospice care tomorrow." Then  the kids start arguing about  which one is the best. Which one does the father like the most. They were worried  about which one did the father think was the best even when the father was dying. Even though the father loved them all, more than they could possibly imagine

Jesus is frustrated by their lack of understanding and that they are still worried about who is the greatest, so he says to them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant to all." The ones to want to be on top are going to need to be ready to be on the bottom.

Then Jesus looks around sees a child and brings this random little child into the center of the disciples. And he says, "See this child, whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me."

This insignificant child, we don't even know its name, we don't know whether they are male or female, but if you are kind to this child you are being kind to Jesus - and to the father in heaven. That means that within this child, this insignificant child, Jesus is present. How can you wonder about who is the greatest.

This gospel reading has gotten me thinking about why are we so concerned with being the best, with being the greatest, with winning? There is something in our culture that is obsessed with who is the best, who is the greatest. Think of the popular shows on TV like America's Got Talent, The Voice, or Dancing with the stars where people compete to learn who is the "Best." We like to watch those to try and figure out who will win. And we imagine ourselves there  - being chosen as the best. We just had the Emmy awards that tell us who are the 'best' actors and actresses. And of course we spent a lot of time this summer, at least I did, watching the Olympics. Caring about who was found to  be the best at some sport I did not even know existed before I turned on the TV. People spend their whole lives preparing for this moment to prove that they are the best in the world.

Why do we always have to feel like we need to be winning? Why do we want to be the best?

 

This summer I was with my grandchildren who range in age  from nine to eleven. I was supposed to entertain them while their parents were busy, and their mother suggested we play board games. The had all the usual games that I had when I was a kid. Candyland, Monopoly, Uno, you know. the basic games. As we started to play I noticed that when one of my grandchildren was winning he started feeling overly  good about himself, saying he knew this game and he had it. Then his luck changed on him and suddenly he was losing. And he didn't like it. He didn't like losing. He wanted to change it . He wanted to cheat. You could see him slowly getting more and more upset until he finally had a meltdown because he was not the best.

The next day when I went to spend some time with them, I did not want to go through that meltdown again. We started to play another game, but he soon started to get upset so I said, "I don't want to do this. Let's do that wonderful 500-piece puzzle you got for your birthday." We found the puzzle and spread out the pieces. We all sat around the table, each trying to fit the pieces together. When someone on one side would say 'look, I got these two together'  everyone would cheer. And then someone else would "say I've got this edge here. Does anyone have red edge piece that might fit." And the others would look to see if they might have that piece. Together, bit by bit, over a couple of days because it was 500 pieces, by bringing the pieces together that chaos began to turn into a beautiful picture. When each one shared their unique pieces, their perspective, and their sense of how to solve the puzzle we where we able to complete it. We worked together to solve the problem. It was fun. And nobody was the greatest, and nobody had a meltdown.

Our society is so focused on up and down, better and less, who's the brightest, who is the fastest, that we are constantly in conflict. We are not able to just enjoy being together. We have a political system now that is all about winning and losing and not about putting the pieces together, bringing all the different perspectives together to find healthy solutions.

Jesus says that the greatest must be the least and be the servants of all.

As long as we are trying to be the best there is a lack of real satisfaction. You may become the best in your class, but then you want to be best in your school. Or you've made it to the top of your group a work, and you got a raise, but you still want to move up. We're always evaluating ourselves, judging ourselves. Are we good enough? Am I the best?

Why do we do that? I'm not sure but I think it has to do with trying to prove that we are worthy. Trying to prove to ourselves, to our parents, to our friends, to our coworkers that we are worthy, that we are of value, by being the best. Or we're afraid. Afraid that if we are not the best, we won't have anything. That there is a pecking order, and we have to be on the top of it or we lose. But Jesus teaches another way. He teaches a way of love. He teaches us that we already are more than enough.


We already are loved. Like that child in the center of the room, we are valued by God. We are so close to God and God's love for us that what someone does for us they do for Christ. That we are that worthy and that much one with Christ that it doesn't matter if we are only a little child. It doesn't matter if we are at the bottom of the pecking order. It doesn't matter if we are rich or we are poor. God loves us. Christ loves of more than we can imagine. We have nothing to prove. Nothing to be afraid of.

Christ says that if you want to be the best, be servant of all. That's what really feels good and gives true satisfaction. This afternoon I'll be going over to my home church, St. Paul's in Tustin. We have something called Sunday Supper where anyone who wants to can come and be given supper. They sit down, we take the food to them, we get drinks for them, we clean up after them. We treat them with love and respect.

There is nothing that is more satisfying than to feed someone who is hungry, to care for someone who is sick, to help someone in need. To welcome the stranger.

And I imagine that's how the people at St Mattias feel when they are doing the Loving Thing. When they are giving food to the hungry. When they are welcoming them and caring for them and smiling at them.

Jesus tells us to stop arguing. Stop competing with each other. Stop trying to be the best, and instead be the least and love and serve. For that is where we will find peace and joy and we will know Christ's presence as we serve him.

September 15th, 2024: Who is He? Reflections on Pentecost 17: Mark 8: 27-38, by The Reverend Valerie Hart

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen

The questions that Jesus asks in this Gospel reading are the most important questions any person wrestles with. The first question is, “Who do people say that I am?”

Any thoughts? Who do people say that Jesus is?

“The savior.” “The son of God.”

“A really good man.” “Our Lord.” “A perfect example.” “The good shepherd.” “The messiah.” “A healer.” “A great teacher.” “Son of man.”

We’ve got lots of words for him. Later in the service we will be saying the Nicene Creed which is the ancient statement of faith that says such things about Jesus as “God from God.” "Light from Light"

Some of those words we’re pretty familiar with. You can probably tell me what a teacher is, because we know teachers. Or a good man, we know about good men.

But what about Messiah? Now that’s the “correct” answer that Peter gave. But the Messiah? What does the word messiah mean? The word we translate as Messiah in Greek is Christos, the anointed one. For the Jewish people of Jesus’ time the Christos, the Messiah was going to be a warrior king like David. He was going to come and lead the Jewish people to once again have control of their land. That would fight Rome so that they would be a free and  great nation. That’s not what Jesus turned out to be. He was a very different kind of messiah. A different kind of savior.

When we listen to all the ways Jesus has been described, we find that most of the time it is kind of complex. It is not easy language. During our lives we’ve heard a lot about who Jesus is. If you went to Sunday School as a child, you heard one thing. In the secular world you might hear something else. Here in church we hear other things. So we have lots and lots of answers to, “Who do people say that I am?”

All of those comments, all the theology, all the books written about who Jesus is, all the creeds can be helpful, but it is the second question that really matters. That’s when Jesus looks at his disciples and says, “Who do you say that I am?”

How do you know who Jesus is? What do you say? Not quoting someone else, not based on what someone else says that Jesus is, but who is Jesus to you? Right now, today, this morning.

I find that when we are on a spiritual journey our understanding of who Jesus is changes over time. Sometimes from day to day. It changes as we study scripture. It changes as we are in discussions with others. It changes as we read meaningful books. But most of all it changes as we have life experiences. As we go through difficult times. As we wrestle with the meaning of life. When we deeply love or deeply hurt. As we discover that through it all, Jesus is somehow there, walking with us.

The most important question of your life is “Who do you say that Jesus is?” Your answer makes all the difference in the world. And only you can answer that question. Some might start with the answer that to you Jesus is a great teacher. That is accepted pretty much around the world. There is almost no one who doesn’t say that he had some wonderful teachings and that he showed a great deal of wisdom. That is one way to approach Jesus, but is not quite consistent with what he said. C. S. Lewis wrote that if you say that Jesus was just a great teacher then you have to assume that he was either a liar or insane because he said that he was much more than that. It is hard to take the wisdom and teachings that we find in the Gospels and separate it from what he said about himself. But often the first way we get to know Jesus is as a great teacher. And that is important.

What about when we say that Jesus is my savior. What does savior mean? How has he saved you? Think about your own personal life. What have you been saved from? What have you been saved for?

How have you experienced, personally experienced Christ's presence in your life?

I've often wrestled with how to describe my relationship with Jesus, and this is what I've come up with. It is personal; it is where I am today. Where I am this morning. It may change, but it is what’s true for me right now.

I would say that who Jesus is to me is that he is my friend. He is my friend who loves me no matter what. He is my friend who values me and holds me precious because he helped to create me. I am of incredible worth to this friend; and he accepts me for who I am. Loves me for who I am. And loves me enough to not let me stay who I am, but encourages me to become more than I think I can be. He is my friend who is always there, whenever I need him. He always cares.

And he is my friend that gave his life for me. And no love is as great as offering your life for another. We don’t have a lot of experiences of what it means for someone to give their life for us. People who have been soldiers, police and the firefighters, like the brave men and women who today are fighting the fires around us, know what it is like to have companions that go into dangerous and difficult situations together. And they know that these companions will offer their lives to protect each other. It is said that when soldiers go into battle once the battle gets intense, they are not concerned with their country, they are not concerned with any grand statements of principle, they fight because of their comrades, the ones they are fighting with. And they want to protect them, and they will risk their lives in order to protect their friends, and they would be willing to die for one another.

Christ died for us. He is my friend that was willing to die for me, and in this passage, he asks for me to be willing to do the same. To pick up my cross and follow him. To be his friend the way he is a friend to me. That might mean giving my life, although being in the United States it is unlikely. But it does mean transforming my life. It challenges me to give up my self-centeredness. It asks me to let go of my sense of ego control. It means changing my priorities, and it affects every decision that I make every day of my life.

 

And so I'll ask you again,

 

Who do you say that Jesus is?

September 1st, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 15: Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23, by The Reverend (‘Mo’) Lyn Crow

Always helpful to look at the big picture when we are reading a gospel story and ask ourselves – what is this really about?

So what is today’s gospel really about?  It’s about legalism VS grace.

Trying to earn God’s approval by performing the requirements of laws VS approval or kindness given to us by God whether or not we deserve it.

So let me ask you this:  Which do you prefer?

-      A neighbor with good habits or a good heart?

-      A friend with good habits or a good heart?

-      A spouse with good habits or a good heart? - A child with good habits or a good heart?

It’s wonderful to have a neighbor who cares for his property, keeps the noise down, brings his trash cans in.

It’s wonderful to have a friend who is considerate, keeps appointments, always sends birthday cards on time.

It’s wonderful to have a spouse who is courteous, gives gracious comments, gets chores done, puts the toilet seat down.

It’s wonderful to have a child who uses good manners, does her homework, keeps his room tidy.

But nothing compares to a neighbor, a friend, a spouse, or a child, with a good heart.

When we are looking only for a person with good behavior, we are really looking at a person’s self-control;  a serial killer can in some settings have amazing self-control.

When we are looking for a person with a good heart – now we are looking at the true quality of a person.

Jesus was always looking beyond a person’s habits to see what was in the heart of a person.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, were concerned with legalism, what was on the outside, what looked proper.  At one point Jesus called them whitewashed tombs.

And here they were attacking the disciples because they weren’t following the correct rituals

-      And by the way this handwashing thing wasn’t about germs

-      The germ theory hadn’t even been thought of

Here’s what it was about:  Exodus 30 and 40.  There you find a law that priests must do a ritual cleansing of their hands before they came to the altar.  Gradually, the Pharisees expanded what the scripture said.  Now everyone was to ritually wash their hands before eating as a way of showing devotion to God.  And it also became a way of distinguishing a devout Jew from his pagan neighbors.  Soon it had very little to do with devotion to God and a whole lot to do with who is in and who is out, who is one of us, and who isn’t.

Humans have a tendency to do that and people in some churches are still doing it:  Baptism in some places isn’t so much about commitment and love of God as it is about who is saved and who isn’t, who is in and who is out.

We in the church have a tendency to be blind to the fact that we often focus on good behavior and all the while exclude, humiliate, and harm others.

Albert Schweitzer said this:

“For centuries Christianity treasured the great commandment of love and mercy as traditional truth without recognizing it as a reason for opposing slavery, witch burning, torture, and all other ancient and medieval forms of inhumanity.”

Even when slavery was finally ended, the church made it very clear who was in and who was out:        

-      All Saints Pasadena

-      St. Barnabas Pasadena for their black servants

Jesus quoted Isaiah and said “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.”

As God’s people we need to be alert – and to catch ourselves when we begin to fall into legalism and use our faith to judge who is in and who is out.

Otherwise, as Frederick Beuchner said:

“We become like a child learning to play the piano.  She holds her hands just as she has been told and memorized the piece perfectly.  She hits all the proper notes, but her heart is not in it, just her fingers are.”

The church and its members need to constantly be asking, “Are our hearts in it?”

-      We need to keep from being whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.

-      To learn that compassion is far more important than getting things right.

I want to tell you a story about a church that I know and love and how they chose compassion and grace over legalism and doing things right.

Tina’s Story

-      When they arrived, she was lying on the patio in front of the church door – dirty, confused, homeless

-      Didn’t try to get her to leave.  Didn’t call police.

-      Greeted her – invited her in

-      She crawled into the sanctuary and laid on the floor

-      No one tried to get her to move

-      Everyone who walked by her greeted her

-      At the peace – people bent down to greet her

-      They discovered her name – for weeks afterward it was almost the same scenario

-      I don’t know how many weeks before she walked in and sat in a pew

-      With the help of some parishioners, she got mental health care, medical care, and an apartment of her own

-      By the end of the year, she was shopping for clothes at Good Will. 

She chose professional looking suits and spike heels.

-      She was definitely one of the best dressed women in the sanctuary

-      And she had become a beloved member of the community

Why do we carve out this time every week to be here?

-      To learn that compassion is far more important than getting things right

-      To learn that being close to the heart of God is infinitely more important than any tradition we may want to cling to

-      To learn to show the world that being a Christian isn’t about getting it right

It’s about the heart – loving our God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and loving our neighbor – yes, every neighbor – as ourselves.

If we do that, then the church can revolutionize the world!  Because that is what the world is dying to know.  There are far too many Christians out there convincing the world that it’s all about getting it right.

We need to get out there and tell the world something radical – it’s about love, that God is not a tyrant but a lover.

So when we leave here today, let’s live like Augustine of Hippo recommended – “Love God and do what you please!”

Because if we love God, truly are nuts about God, what we choose to do will please God.

August 25th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 14: To Whom Shall We Go: John 6:56-69, by The Reverend Hartshorn Murphy

Reading scripture is like going on an archeological dig.  As Christian disciples – students of the Christ – we seek that deepest level, to know the real Jesus, to know what he actually said, and did, and what it meant to those who walked the dusty roads with him.  It is the deepest yearning of our hearts;  this search for the historical Jesus.  And that search must go deeper than the black leatherette King James Bible I grew up with, with Jesus’ words printed in Red.

         The second level, closer to the surface, is that of discerning how the gospel writers shaped stories about Jesus for their times and places.  It is helpful to think of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John not as writers – though obviously they were – but more like editors, who took both written and oral fragments about Jesus and shaped them into narratives.  But they were not reporters.  These are not true biographies or history remembered but rather they are propaganda; proclamation of news that is good.  The word is this:  gospel.  They were writing for particular audiences and those audiences shaped how the stories were written.  Mark’s gospel was written to the Christian community in Rome sometime in the 70’s.  Like St. Paul earlier – the letters preceded the gospels – Mark was writing to Hellenistic Jews.  These were Jews who spoke and read Greek, not Hebrew, and who were open to a new sect of Judaism which was a cultural alternative to Palestinian Orthodoxy.

         Matthew wrote around the year 80 to Jews in Damascus and is the most Jewish of the four gospels.  Luke wrote around the year 90 to Gentile converts in Antioch.

         These three gospels are called “synoptic” gospels. “Syn” think of the word “synonym” meaning same.  And “optic” – to see, vision.  Although there are differences between the three – for example, the birth stories in Luke and Matthew are quite different, though we harmonize them well to pull off children’s Christmas pageants – they are of a different order than John.

         Writing around the year 100 or so, to the cosmopolitan trading center of Ephesus, John was writing to a church that had experienced a break with Judaism.  It is a church which is experiencing a competition with the cult to John the Baptist, with the religious philosophy of Gnosticism and with various “mystery religions.”  In this cultural context, John is writing to theologians and philosophers, arguing, for example, that the beginning of the Jesus story is not in an animals’ feeding trough in a stable/cave near backwater Bethlehem, but was, in fact, before space and time.  Jesus was “logos” – the plan, the agenda – of God, through whom all things came to be.

         Could writing for – at least in part – a gnostic audience, explain why there is no talk of bread/flesh and wine/blood at the Last Supper in John’s gospel but rather we find the humility of foot washing?  In part, the justification for the persecution of Gentile Christians was the suspicion that they sacrificed infants and practiced cannibalism in their hidden rites, as Jesus directed them to do in saying “eat my body” and “drink my blood.”  Could awareness of this audience explain displacing the bread and wine / body and blood talk from the Last Supper and placing it much earlier, at a synagogue in Galilee?  And this teaching is so controversial that it signals an ending of the Galilean ministry and the loss of most of his disciples.

         Today’s gospel reading:  It is the season of Passover.  The reading would have been the Exodus story and about desert manna – the bread-like substance which fell daily from the heavens and sustained the fleeing Hebrew slaves.  Jesus’ sermon – a midrash or an imaginative interpretation of scripture – claimed that he is like bread from heaven – but unlike manna of old, those who partake of him will live.

         What’s going on here?  In Jewish folk tradition, it was believed that when the Messiah came, manna would come again – for the Messiah is a second Moses.  A liberator who would deliver God’s people from their oppression under the Romans.  How powerful was this hope for a people living lives of desperation and chronic hunger.  Droughts and famine, plague and disease would be no more.  Implements of war would be refashioned into tools for an eternal harvest.

         Was Jesus really claiming that he is the fulfillment of these hopes?

         Many of the disciples left Jesus now.  This was not the idle and curious crowd from the feeding of the multitude earlier in chapter six.  These are disciples – men and women who had left hearth and home, farms and fisheries, to learn Jesus’ teaching – but this was all too much.  They left because this talk was just too bizarre.  Torah clearly forbade the consumption of blood.  Genesis 9:4 “You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.”  Had Jesus finally lost his damn mind?

         As many of his Galilean disciples melt away, Jesus turns to the 12 and asks, “Are you going to leave me too?”  I imagine these words asked in a whisper, as if Jesus is afraid of the answer he will receive.  All that Jesus had struggled to build threatens to come crashing down around his shoulders as he awaits their response.  A vulnerable moment that could leave him broken and alone.  (pause)

         Would the 12 break his heart?   (pause)

         Peter – impetuous, passionate and bold – speaks for the 12:  “Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”  When John quotes Jesus’ talk of eternal life, he is not talking about life after death but about new life before death.

         The Greek is literally translated:  “the life of the Age to come.”

         John 5:24 “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.”  Present tense – has, not will have.

         John 17:3 “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  Present tense – this is, not will be.

         It is in dying to our old life that we live.  As Jesus told Nicodemus way back in chapter 3, you must be born from above.

         The invitation is to a life transformed.  As Irenaeus (130-202 CE) said:  “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”   (pause)

         As manna sustained the Hebrew tribes in their journey from slavery to freedom, so Jesus, really present, in the bread and wine of Eucharist, sustains us in our journey from exile and captivity to freedom and new life.  Mary Oliver captures this in her poem, “The Eucharist.”  I’ll conclude with her poem this morning.

“The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church:  The Eucharist”

“Something has happened

to the bread

and the wine. 

They have been blessed. 

What now? 

The body leans forward

to receive the gift

from the priest’s hand,

then the chalice. 

They are something else now

from what they were

before this began. 

I want

to see Jesus,

maybe in the clouds

or on the shore,

just walking,

beautiful man

and clearly

someone else

besides. 

On the hard days

I ask myself

if I ever will.

Also there are times

my body whispers to me

that I have.”                                            

-  Mary Oliver        

August 18th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 13: Wisdom and Trust: John 6:51-58, by The Reverend Judith F. Lyons

Good Morning! 

Last Sunday, my dear friend and mentor, Rev. Hartshorn Murphy,

led us through his reflection on our salvation history,

from the Exodus Story of manna in the wilderness,

to the Passover sacrifice,

to Jesus and what is sometimes called the Lord’s Supper,

or the Mass, or Communion, or the Eucharist.  

 

He explained how differently the Sacrament of bread and wine

is understood and worshipped. 

For our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers,

there is the certainty of transubstantiation;

it is a Sacrament where the bread and the wine are not only made sacred

but become the living body and blood of Jesus. 

 

For many of our more conservative Protestant sisters and brothers,

the bread and the wine are  onlysymbols of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. 

 

For us, as Episcopalians, we hold open a big tent, offering a third way, a middle way.

We believe that during the sacramental prayers over the bread and wine,

something happens, something sacred happens,

where God sanctifies the bread and the wine to be the “holy presence” of Jesus,

given to us as the body and blood of Christ.

God is present in the Mystery of that Sacrament.

 

I remember my confirmation class at age 11, so very long ago,

learning about the Mystery of God in the Sacraments.

We memorized that it was an outward and visible sign

of an inward and invisible grace.

We struggled to understand this “presence” of Jesus that enters the bread and wine,

and we tried to imagine how it is that we abide in him and he in us.

 

We asked the same questions the disciples asked:

how can this be and what does it mean?  

And as we took communion for the first time,

some were sure they felt the “presence”

and some weren’t sure they felt anything.

But because it meant something to those we admired and loved,

and because we so wanted it to mean something to us, we kept at it. 

We were practicing our faith before we understood that we were.

 

What is this “presence” and how does this happen? 

The honest answer is:  we don’t know. 

It is the Mystery of God beyond our knowing, that is forever,

for all time, for everyone, all, ‘believers’ or not.

Glimmers of this ‘presence,’ however, is not beyond our experiencing.

Sometimes when we enter into the mystery of the bread and wine,

it overtakes us; we feel it deeply.

 

Hartshorn shared with us who he brings to the table with him,

that he thinks about his parents, his loved ones,

and his favorite saints on the other side, with Jesus,

and he shares with them the bread and wine.

 

 

Who and What will you bring to the table?

What is in your heart today that needs to be fed by the presence of Jesus?

How might this mystery strengthen you as you continue

The good work of ‘Doing the Loving Thing.?”

 

Two themes emerge in our readings this morning that make vivid our

encounter with the Mystery of Faith:

The Generous offerings of Wisdom and the Surrendering to Trust.

 

In Proverbs 9:1-6 we meet Lady Wisdom

who invites us with enthusiasm and joy to her banquet.

She has built her house, set her table, prepared her food

and sends out her servants to invite everyone to

“come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.”

 

God awaits you. God awaits everyone…. God’s gift is abundance! 

 

And how does Lady Wisdom summon us? 

“You that are simple, turn in here!

                  “To those without sense, come eat of my bread and wine”

                  “lay aside immaturity and live and walk in the way of insight.”

 

There are no requirements, no IQ tests, there are no exceptions; all are invited.

 

How often does God offer us a banquet? 

Even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death…..

God preparest a table before us…..

 

In contemporary language, Wisdom might say,

 Those of you who are skeptical, cynical or judgmental or fearful,

come and see. 

Come to the party. 

 

Those of you who have been hurt or are ashamed or need to be sure,

come and see.

Come to the party.  All are welcome.

 

I have been one of those too skeptical, too reluctant, too much in my head

and too afraid of my heart to come to the party.

I have hidden behind sophistication, education, and peer pressure.

 

I was a cradle Episcopalian.  I went to college in 1964,

in the midst of all that was the sixties,

and I hid my belief in God from my colleagues and friends

who were out to change the world through activism and hard-hitting art. 

I didn’t have the courage or the wisdom to speak up. 

I was a closet believer.

 

Years later, as I tiptoed back to church, I bought myself, at a street fair,

the smallest gold cross there was, and I wore it around my neck.

It was so tiny you probably had to squint to see it,

but that was my first step out and back.

 

So I understand the skeptical and the reluctant,

and I understand a world where caution is not always a bad thing,

but it can become a habit, a wall of resistance,

or you become a dabbler, showing up every once in a while for a few minutes,

missing the best parts of the party—

the food, the laughter, the stories, the truth, the pain, and the love.

 

I think Jesus is trying to say, again and again, I am the party,

I am the food, the laughter, the stories, the truth, the pain, and the love. 

I don’t want you to miss it. I want you to live in abundance,

sharing in the love and joy of now.

 

Today in Ephesians we hear,
Be careful then how you live …..

making the most of the time ……

 

Make the most of the time, to come to the table,

To eat your fill. Receive nourishment and strength

 

 

Well, how are we to do that?

When the world is full of so much pain and despair?

How are we to surrender ourselves to the Mystery of Faith,

Trusting in the power of God

to transform ourselves and the world?

 

Trust is the key.  Trust bridges the gap over what we do not know.

 

Henri Nouwen, prolific and powerful writer

of our relationship to Christ,

Our struggle and suffering with Christ,

And our longing for unity in Christ

Wrote often of two very powerful images of God that sustained him all his life:

The first was the image of the gentle, loving father

in Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son,

so unlike his own father.

 

The second came from his  fascination with the Trapeze artists

he witnessed again and again at a circus in Germany: 

The Flying Rodleighs.

He was transfixed by the free flying and the catching—the sheer beauty of it and the connection between them.   

 

In conversation with them, the flyer said,

“it may seem to the public that I am the star of the trapeze,

but the real star is Joe, my catcher.

The secret is that the flyer does nothing, and the catcher does everything.

When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands

and wait for him to catch me. 

The worst thing a flyer can do is try to catch the catcher;

it could break both our wrists. 

The flyer must trust with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.

 

 

Nouwen was profoundly moved by that image, of God as the catcher,

always in place, always ready, as we fly into the unknown. 

 

I like that image too, of God as the catcher,

but then I wonder about the times I wasn’t caught or didn’t think I was. 

Times of trauma, crisis, terrible grief and loss. 

Those times when I felt more of God’s absence than God’s presence,

or to complete the image, when God’s hands must have slipped because I fell hard;

I wasn’t caught.  I struggled and I suffered. 

 

Only later, as is so true for so many of us,

could I see and understand that there was always a net,

that indeed I was caught and held and strengthened and led slowly to new life. 

I experienced again and again the vastness of God, the utter mystery of God’s love.

And so I have returned to the image of God the catcher, whose net holds us all.

 

We come to the table today with our memories,

our broken lives, our joyous celebrations,

and we humbly offer them to God as God feeds us with God’s presence

to give us strength and courage for the days ahead

to live our lives to the fullest, in abundance. 

 

We revel in this Mystery of faith in a God bigger than religion. 

We share in the bread and wine grateful for the life blood it gives us. 

And we step out in little leaps of faith all the time,

trusting that God the catcher will catch us,

in whatever way God knows we most need.

 

Let us accept Wisdom’s invitation to the party. 

Let us trust that God’s net is firmly in place!

 

 

 

AMEN

 

August 11th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 12: Holy Communion: John 6:35, 41-51, by The Reverend Hartshorn Murphy

Today I’d like to offer a reflection on what is known by various names:  the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Mass, or the Greek word used by the Early Church:  Eucharistia, meaning “thanksgiving.”

          We begin with the foundational story of the Hebrew people:  the Exodus.  Moses, the Liberator is raised up by God to deliver his people out of slavery in Egypt to a land promised;  a land metaphorically envisioned to be flowing with milk and honey.

          But the journey is arduous and long, lasting more than a generation, allowing those with indentured mind sets to die along the way.  But the people grumbled in their hunger, so God sent manna from heaven – a dew like substance which could be made into bread, but sufficient only for a day.  The petition in the Lord’s Prayer is an echo:  “Give us each day our daily bread.”  Manna was strength for the journey through an alien and hostile land.  So that’s the first image:  God providing sustenance to people on the road to freedom.

          Second is sacrifice.  The Latin word is sacrificum, which means:  “to make something holy by offering it to God.”  In ancient Jewish ritual, two goats were offered.  One was the scapegoat (that’s our expression, not theirs).  This goat was laden with the sins of the community and driven into the wilderness to carry away their transgressions.  The second was the blood sacrifice in which the goat was offered as a gift to God, roasted in a holocaust (the word 'holocaust' comes from ancient Greek and means 'burnt offering');  a portion was given back to the worshipper to be consumed.  In this way, the goat came back to you as a meal with God.

          The annual Passover Supper celebrated the Exodus event by the consumption of symbolic foods.  Unleavened bread – Matzo – recalls how the people left hurriedly, with no time for the bread to rise.  Four cups of wine were consumed to commemorate God’s four acts of liberation in Exodus 6:  I will take you out, I will rescue you, I will redeem you, and I will bring you to a new land.

          At the Passover Supper with his disciples on the night before he died, Jesus did something unexpected.  In passing the bread to his friends, he added to the ancient words, “This is my body.”  And then similarly, he took the 3rd cup of wine – the cup which symbolized God’s act of redemption – and said “This is my blood.  Whenever you share it, do it for the ‘anamnesis’ of me.”  Anamnesis is the opposite of amnesia.  In amnesia, you forget who you are, who your people are, and how you understand the world.  Anamnesis means to recall, to reclaim – to come to one’s self again.  It means to find your way back again to wholeness.  To be, in short, set free.

          We today use the word “remember.”  Do this to remember me.  For some of our Protestant brothers and sisters, the Lord’s Supper is but a memorial.  It is to literally remember ceremonially the Last Supper.  But I would urge us to hyphenate.  Re-member.  To be made a member again.

          A gruesome image this:  If you were in a terrible accident and your arm were to be severed from your body and through the miracle of modern medicine, they were able to reattach it;  you could say that your arm was re-membered – made a member of your body again.  In communion, we are re-membered to the body of Christ.

          The stress and strain of daily life with all its microaggressions, distracts us and cumulatively acts to sever our connection to our own selves and to others and the holy communion reconnects us, for which we offer Eucharistia:  Thanksgiving.  In this sense, communion – the same root word as community, right? – is not a noun but a verb.  That community is a mystical one in which you today share this meal, through space and time, with those who have gone before, who have partaken of this sacred meal in their generations:  your mother and father, your grandparents, Francis and Clare, Patrick and Bridget, Mary of Magdala and Mary of Nazareth, saints all, and with Jesus the Christ.  Sit with that for a moment…

          And so all these metaphors obtain.  Communion is strength for this journey through a barren and desert land.  We are but resident aliens in a world not our own.  Pilgrims and strangers do we wander;  fed by the bread of heaven we are sacrificed, that is, made sacred.

          The bread and wine brought to the altar represents our lives and labors for the Kingdom in this broken world.  Each week we build our offering – our occasional fidelity and our pervasive faithlessness – it is blessed and returned to us made whole, renewing us to go forth again into this broken world, and as Samuel Beckett said, to be “ever tried, ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better!”

          Now all this is a mystery, but as is our human nature, the church has tried to nail down the ineffable.  The Roman doctrine of transubstantiation – that the bread and wine become in physical reality the flesh and blood of Jesus.  Or, as mentioned earlier, the extreme Protestant doctrine of memorial, that the Lord’s Supper is only a symbolic re-creation of Jesus’ last dinner.

          And the third option, what we reformed Catholics proclaim, the belief in a “real presence.”  That Christ is present in these substances – not as metaphor or symbol – but in a true and substantial way.  How?  Let mystery suffice.

          Matter matters.  We humans need things we can see and touch and taste and smell to mediate those things which are invisible.  The bread and wine are earthen vessels by which the holy is present to us.

          I’ve said a lot but there’s just a bit more.  At the breaking of the bread, our prayer book has me say “Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us.”  That phrase lifts up one aspect of the Exodus event.  Exhausted with Pharoah’s reluctance to free the people after repeated warnings in the form of plagues, God dispatches the destroying angel to strike dead all the first born, both human and animal, of the Egyptians, all the households not marked with the blood of a Lamb.  These houses were “passed over.”

          The doctrine of sacrificial atonement – that Christ died for our sins to appease a vengeful God who required a blood sacrifice – is thus connected up with the Eucharist.  But scholarship suggests that for the first thousand years of Christian history, holy communion was not understood primarily as a sin forgiveness thing.  That doctrine did not emerge as the sole understanding of Jesus until the time of St. Anselm (1033-1109) and the development of the Just War theory for the Crusades.

          No.  For the first thousand years, as reflected in the frescoes in ancient churches, the holy communion was all about practicing the vision of the Kingdom of God on earth.  A radical vision of social transformation based on love and justice.  A reflection of the primitive church’s baptismal vow to live in Christ  - in which there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female – and today we would add:  no gay or straight, no liberal or conservative, no immigrant or native born – all are one in Christ Jesus, no exceptions.  It is an acting out and a living into God’s dream for human, animal and plant kind;  of Eden’s return at last.  In other words, it’s not just about you;  it’s about us – all of us.

          To symbolize this today, in addition to saying or singing “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” I will add “Though we are many, we are one body” and I invite you to respond: “Because we all share in the one bread.”  [Let’s try it;  (repeat)]

          “Though we are many, we are one body”

          “Because we all share in the one bread”

          Let’s close with John’s vision on the Isle of Patmos.  The Book of Revelation is not about an afterlife or about heaven – or God help us, any Rapture.  It’s a vision in veiled and symbolic and often bizarre images about coming through the persecutions of that time, into the glorious new world struggling to be born, awaiting Christ’s return.  From Revelation 7:

 “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language – standing before the throne and before the Lamb…  and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.  Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst.  The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat… and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

          So let it be!  Amen!

August 4th, 2024: Crowds and the Bread of Life: Exodus 16:2-4,9-15; Psalm 78: 23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35, by The Reverend Judith ("Jude") Lyons

How do you feel about crowds?  

Social scientists say that our relationship to crowds is cultural, determined in large part by the “personal space” in which we grew up.   The technical term for this study is Proxemics.   It examines how population density aPects  behavior, communication and social interaction.  

 When I was growing up in a sleepy West Los Angeles neighborhood – when the population of Los Angeles was less than half of what it is now, there were these kids from New York – back East we called it then – that would come right up to your face to talk, and I was always stepping back.   Later I learned that they meant no harm, it was simply that their personal space was developed from constant crowds  and big families in cramped spaces.

Crowds have been a big part of our cultural life lately.  Political rallies of one sort or another fill stadiums and our screens.  

Crowds stuck at airports when huge storms and a global outage hit at the same time.  

I was in one of those crowds.

And then of course there are sports crowds – most especially The Olympics, where the whole world seems to be gathered together in the pouring rain or the sweltering heat or vicariously from the non-crowd comfort of our living rooms.  

There are the day-to-day crowds of freeways and parking lots and checkout lines and service desks – and then there are the crowds where we went to escape crowds, like the beach, national parks, scenic trails, and on and on.  

 What is your experience with crowds?    

How do you feel in the midst of them?  What crowds from history  do you wish you had been in?

Any crowd where Jesus preached, I would have liked to have been there!

 Crowds can be thrilling in the energy they produce when everyone has their phone light on in raised hands swaying together, singing at a Billy Joel or a Taylor Swift concert. The surge of positive energy can be remembered for a lifetime.  

 Crowds can also be frightening, unstable, unpredictable, filled somehow with a dangerous clashing energy that feels as if life itself is at risk.

 Somewhere in between, crowds can be impersonal and lonely, as you walk among hundreds of individuals and small groups that all have separate lives, all know where they are going, and you are alone surrounded by lots of energies you are not part of.

Today, John’s Gospel is the second of 5  in a series called The Bread of Life Discourse. Last week was the feeding of the 5000, 

a crowd of people, some solo, many in family groups or neighborhood groups, all seeking Jesus because word of his healings had spread.  

 So, why did they come?  

Some desperate for help, healing, change.  

Some to see what’s the big deal about this guy?   

 They were fed.   Free food.   But …How?  

In this crowd, some could see better than others.  Were there arguments about what just happened?

The disciples witnessed it all; 

For all their ‘help’ in trying to manage this crowd, 

they were stopped in their tracks and rendered speechless as the power of God took over, a power beyond their imagining, 

beyond any reason or understanding.

 What the crowd didn’t see was the second part of the Gospel, 

where the disciples head out in the boat without Jesus, get caught in rough waters, and Jesus joins them by walking on the water, and then somehow whisks the boat to Capernaum.  

 If the disciples were speechless before;  they must be dumbstruck now.  

 Our Gospel today again features the Crowd.   John writes ‘the crowd’ as a kind of lump sum and gives it lines to say, as if it were one unified thing.

But of course, they weren’t. 

 This ‘crowd’ tried hard to find Jesus. They saw that the disciples had gone, decided to get “into the boats" and go all the way to Capernaum to find him.  

That’s a lot of boats!  

My guess is that the women, children and elders went home, and groups of men set out to find Jesus.  And it was not a short ride.  

 This crowd is persistent, energetic, driven.  

But when they get there, the question that gets blurted out is beside the point, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”   

‘When’ is not a meaningful question.  

It reflects, instead, the awkward, clumsy, thing we say when we are out of breath or don’t know what to say.  

 Jesus doesn’t answer their question, but answers instead the questions they are afraid to ask:   

Who are you? and how did you feed all those people? 

 Jesus answers that question by saying, in essence, do not pretend that you have come for high purposes.  Yes, you have worked hard to get here, but you’ve come because of all that free food!   

 And, I imagine Jesus smiles, kindly, as he says: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  

For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 

 Without skipping a beat, another blurt: 

What must we do to perform the works of God?  

Again, a poor question-- 

--asked before really listening or hearing.  

It’s not about performing a task or doing a thing.   It is about slowing down, observing, receiving something deeper; it is about seeing and understanding that Jesus was sent by God, that Jesus is the Son of God, that God’s food through Jesus brings eternal life.

 I have some sympathy with the crowd, even though their spokesperson asks stupid questions, 

and most seem to misunderstand again and again who Jesus is and what he is saying.  

 The scene feels to me a little like the press surrounding Jesus and shouting questions at him, looking for quick answers that he refuses to give.  They have forgotten yesterday’s miracles, 

feeding 5000 --old news,  and now they are hungry for a new angle to the story.

 But I also understand that a crowd, even this one, is made up of people, individual people, with real questions, real concerns, real doubts, real longing, with different needs, different styles, and different abilities to perceive and understand what they see and hear. 

Just like you and me. 

 And so Jesus ends this particular segment with something the press can quote, something that seems like an answer:  

“I am the bread of life.  

Whoever comes to me will never be hungry,  whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,”  The press is satisfied for a moment.  

They have the video and they have the quote.

 It seems like an answer, 

but you and I know it is not that simple. 

It asks rather than answers

It asks: what is the bread you most need? 

What will satisfy your hunger and thirst?

 “Give us today our daily bread” we pray.

What is that bread for you today?

Jesus often speaks to and teaches to crowds, but he enters one heart at a time. 

Yours and mine. 

He heals one soul at a time. 

Yours and mine. 

 

You and I know that we will reflect on this bread  and pray about it for most of our lives. 

If I am honest, I know that 

I will struggle with what feels like a demand: believe or else, 

even when I know that “demand”  is not how Jesus does it.   We will sing and feel the beauty  of “I am the bread of life”; 

we will cling to that image and the feeding stories,  and we will feel fed, even when we don’t completely understand how that could be.

 These five Sundays of The Bread of Life discourse are opportunities to reenter the Gospel we have heard time and time again, and to look around with new eyes, hear with new ears, and to step away from the crowd, to slow our crowded lives, 

to allow into our hearts the Bread of Life we need, the very life and breath of God.

 AMEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 28th, 2024: Reflections on The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, 2 Kings 4:42-44, Ps 145: 10-19, Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21 by J. D. Neal

Our readings this morning open with an old story, about a young man named Elisha, living almost 1000 years before the time of Jesus. Elisha was a prophet, a person whose job is to listen and to speak the words of God to the people of God, a job which often entailed miraculous signs that would help reveal something of God to the ones God wanted to speak to. From what I can tell, some prophets, like Elisha, did not work a trade, nor did they accept payment in exchange for miraculous signs or for delivering the words of God to their hearers. Instead, they relied on the generosity of God and God’s people to provide their daily bread, and so our first lesson opens with a man providing Elisha with 20 barley loaves and a sack of grain out of the first-fruits of his harvest. This is a generous gift, enough to feed Elisha for some time, but instead, Elisha commands his servant to share the gift with the hundred-some people gathered around him. You heard the reading, so you know how this goes, the bread (which could never be enough to fill the bellies of over a hundred people) is somehow multiplied — all the people gathered are fed and there is even extra left over. There is something beautiful in this story, and it is certainly a display of God’s power, but what exactly is the point? What are we supposed to glean from this story and from the very similar (but even bigger) story we hear about Jesus feeding thousands in our gospel reading today? Well, if we look around 2 Kings a little bit, we’ll notice a few things. For one, we’ll see that this story about the barley loaves is just one of a series of signs that Elisha performs. In one story, God raises a young boy from the dead through Elisha’s intervention. In another, Elisha saves a widow from destitution by causing her small jar of oil to miraculously multiply into enough oil that she can sell it to pay off her debts and provide for her family. In the passage after our reading, a mighty foreign general named Naaman is healed of leprosy through Elisha’s intervention, learning that God is the true source of power in this world, not the armies or wealth that this general commanded. All these stories display God’s power to heal, to provide, to defy expectations and make a way where there seemed to be no way. This is a theme in the prophets, one that stretches all the way back to the stories of Mosess and the Exodus, where God parts the sea to deliver his people and rains miraculous bread upon them to sustain them in the wilderness. God, the prophets tell us, is the one who provides. Another thing we notice when we look around the context of Elisha’s story, is that he, and many of the Hebrew prophets, lived in a time when the kingdom of Israel was ruled by a series of corrupt kings. According to 2 Kings, Elisha prophesied under the reign of King Jehoram. In this time, the kings of Israel had taken religion into their own hands, building ‘holy places’ all over the kingdom to worship a variety of gods, installing priests who reported to the King and most likely paid tribute to the king from the peoples’ offerings. These kings conquered and enslaved neighboring nations, forcing them to pay tribute and sometimes conscripting them into forced labor, accumulating resources and amassing armies to further their political and military conquests. These kings had long since shed any real reliance upon the God of Israel, trusting instead in gold and ‘chariots’, wealth and power to provide for them — only consulting with prophets of God like Elijah when things went sideways and desperation forced them to remember the God who had delivered them from Egypt long ago, the God who they were always meant to serve and rely upon. And as the kings forgot God and instead turned to greed and violence to provide for their kingdom, so too did they lead the people of God, whom they were meant to shepherd, down this path. With this context in mind, these stories like the one with the barley loaves start to make more sense. Signs like these would show the people of God where the true source of power and provision was — would remind them of what their kings had helped them forget: that they were meant to live differently, to discover and to show the world what it would look like to rely upon God, to trust in his abundance rather than in the strength of men. And so, we start to see, I think, what Jesus has for us in the gospel reading this morning. Jesus spends much of his time in the gospel of John confronting the leaders of Israel, trying to show them that they have been putting their trust in human systems of power and security and have forgotten the love of God. Jesus, like Elisha, does many signs displaying the abundant power of God to heal, to provide, to love without boundary or measure. Jesus too wants to help his followers remember and rely upon God instead of any other source of power or security, and so he miraculously feeds them, demonstrating God’s abundant provision to thousands. But, in today’s gospel, when the people try to take Jesus’ miracle and make him king, he resists, he disappears up the mountain where they cannot find him, refusing their attempt to turn this sign of God’s provision into just another idol. Because here’s the thing, I’ve been speaking a lot about how God is in the business of providing for his people, and that’s all true; God does provide for our needs, often in very concrete and material ways, but God is not a vending machine. And it’s all too easy to turn the gospel of Jesus Christ into some kind of ‘prosperity gospel’, to read stories like this in the Scriptures and then start to believe that as long as you do the right things, or think the right things, or just believe hard enough, everything will go well for you and you will have all of the comfort and security you could want. But that’s not the promise of God’s Kingdom. That’s just treating God the same way the kings of Israel in Elisha’s time treated their gold and idols and armies — as a means to an end, to protecting ourselves and our security. But we follow the risen and crucified Lord, and like I mentioned a couple months ago when I preached on the Good Shepherd passage, God does not promise that we will always have a life free of pain and uncertainty, but that, if we turn towards him, he will always be with us, that we will have what we need, even if it’s not always what we expected or what we would have chosen for ourselves. He invites us into a different kind of kingdom, which offers a different kind of security. Instead of wealth or social standing or any of the other things we seek to secure ourselves in the world, he offers “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” — he offers the security that comes with knowing that at the center of all things, we are fully known and utterly loved by God, and the promise that, if we begin to let go of all of those other things we cling to to protect and provide for ourselves and entrust ourselves and cling to Christ instead, that we will have joy and peace, and that Christ’s love will overflow out of us to bring healing to the world around us. He promises that, somehow, our simple acts of Christ-like love — generosity, patience, kindness to those in need, however we are called to follow — will really have an effect, will really be taken up into his own work of bringing new and abundant life to our world, in ways that we could not ask or imagine. Barley was the poor man’s flour in Israel, it was cheaper to produce and of rougher texture and taste than the finer wheat, often costing half the price. That boy in today’s gospel was likely poor, and giving up his bread and fish to help Jesus feed the crowd was a precious thing, it was an act of real generosity and kindness. In using the humble gift of this boy’s barley loaves and fish to feed these thousands of people, Jesus shows us that not only is God in the business of providing for his people, but that he takes even the smallest, humblest offerings we make and transforms them into instruments of his abundant love and provision. But tomorrow is Monday, and for most of us, as soon as we walk out of these doors, we are plunged back into a world — a kingdom — where we are inundated with a whole bunch of other narratives about how we can find security and comfort and fulfillment, where it is all too easy to forget, to become deaf to the promises of Christ’s kingdom, to trust a job or a 401k or our reputation in our community or a million other things to provide for us. All too easy to become numb to those little holy nudges to love those around us. This is why Paul has to pray for the Ephesians as he does in the epistle reading today: it requires the power of Holy Spirit to make us able to comprehend and remember “the breadth and length and height and depth” of the love of Christ for us, to keep us rooted and grounded in God’s love when there are so many alternatives offered to us. This is why we gather for worship and do this whole liturgy, why we gather, why we read the Scriptures or meet with faithful friends or listen to beautiful music, or read stories or poems that wake us up to the realities of God’s kingdom — why we pray: to remind ourselves that we live in another kingdom, that we are followers of another way, that God is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine”, if we only put our trust in him. So, in the words of Paul: this week, may we remember the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we might be filled with all the fullness of God. Amen

July 21st, 2024: "The Dividing Wall of Hostility", Reflections on The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Jeremiah 23:1-6, Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark 6:30-34, 53-56, by J. D. Neal

On the bookshelf just to the left of my writing desk, there is a small icon — a tiny reproduction of what’s called the San Damiano cross. The San Damiano cross is a crucifix painting. It has a cool place in the story of St. Francis of Assisi and I’d encourage you to go down that rabbit hole on wikipedia later, but that’s not what I want to highlight about it today. In the painting, Christ is depicted with his arms stretched out on the cross, but he is not alone. About his arms and above his head a company of angels is gathered, while beneath his arms and by his legs are a bunch of people: saints and centurions, Jews and Romans, those who followed Jesus and those who put him to death — all of them there at the cross, looking to me like Jesus has just stretched out his arms to gather them all together under his loving embrace.

Our epistle reading today reminds me of this little cross on my bookshelf. In it, Paul describes how the ‘dividing wall of hostility’ between Jews & Gentiles is ‘broken down’ in Christ’s body on the cross — how Christ’s self-giving love on the cross not only removes this wall but gets rid of the significance of ‘Jew’ & ‘Gentile’ distinctions before God all together. Jesus, Paul says, makes them into a ‘new humanity’, joining them all together as one in his Body, his Church. This is a radical thing for Paul to say. At the time of Jesus & the apostles, religious Jews would not even enter a Gentile’s house or share food with them, because they believed it made them ritually unclean. Many of them seem to have believed that Gentiles had no share in God’s promises, and that the only hope for a Gentile was to become Jewish — to undergo circumcision, abandon all Gentile ties, take on Jewish law, and formally become a member of the people of Israel. In their eyes, Gentiles were idolaters, worshippers of false gods, and — perhaps most importantly, as Israel had been under the dominion of Gentile rulers and empires for centuries — Gentiles were ‘the enemy’. The idea that Gentiles could have the same access to God as Jews, let alone the idea of becoming reconciled and united as ‘one Body’ with them, would have seemed insane; impossible; blasphemy. But this reconciliation, this love that breaks down divisions and turns enemies into neighbors is exactly what God in Christ came to give us.

In the gospel reading today, when Jesus gets off the boat and sees the crowd gathered, Mark tells us that ‘he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.’ These people were, in other words, lost without a trustworthy voice to guide them. They felt so in need of the compassion and authority they found in Christ that they rushed all the way around the sea of Galilee on foot, just to beat him to the shore. Thousands flocked from across the whole region just to hear a word of his teaching or to graze the fringe of his garment and be healed. These people, in the words of Jeremiah, had been ‘scattered’ between bad shepherds for a long while. At this time, the people of Israel were divided by religious and political leaders who strove with eachother for influence and power. The Pharisees and Sadducees, the Zealots and Essenes, the Herodians and the Roman occupiers — all of these leaders competed for influence over God’s people, all seeking, in one way or another, to wield the name of God to amass power for their own ideals and ends. All the while, very few of these ‘shepherds’ cared for the well being of their sheep.

Does this feel familiar? We live in a world right now that, to me at least, feels more viscerally ‘scattered’ and divided than it ever has in my lifetime. Genocide and wars rage across the world, inflation and economic changes threaten our sense of security, the ideological gaps between groups and generations seem to be widening. And all the while businesses, political leaders, and even many pastors play on our fears and uncertainties, exploiting all this instability to get us to buy, vote, follow, give ourselves to their cause. I know it is taboo in some spaces to talk even generally about politics at church, but the church is not immune to any of this. All too often do our nation’s leaders wield the name of God in an attempt to get us to believe it is our ‘Christian duty’ to give our money and support to their cause, portraying their political or ideological opponents as enemies of God and God’s people. All too often do political leaders and pastors collapse their faith with their political platform and wield their pulpits to convert their congregations to their political party rather than to Jesus. Our people, our churches are torn apart and scattered between these false ‘shepherds,’ and we are taught, subtly or explicitly, to think of those who disagree with us as our enemies.

We are often exhausted and desperate in the midst of all this turmoil, and just like in the gospel, Jesus comes and looks on us with compassion, offering a different way, the way Paul speaks of in today’s epistle: the way of reconciliation and humble love. Make no mistake, it is the duty of all Christians to do justice and love mercy, to oppose injustice and oppression wherever we encounter it — at work, in our families, on social media, and in the voting booth. But our ideologies and our politics must be ruled by our commitment to the way of Christ — not the other way around. There is only one true shepherd, and if we are to be his sheep, we must be willing to oppose injustice and violence when it affects our enemies as well — to offer compassion even to those whom we cannot stand. Being a part of Christ’s body means being joined to everyone in Christ’s body, even and especially those who we disagree with and think of as our enemies. Jew and Gentile, remember? We all are like sheep without a shepherd, and our wounds and fears and desperation drive us all to seek security somewhere or another. Those who we consider our enemies are just as desperately in need of Christ’s compassion and healing as we are. If we are to be Christians, then we must learn to love as Christ loves. After all, Christ gave himself over to death to draw all people to God, even those who persecuted him and killed him.

In times like these, the Church must not give itself to a false shepherd by pledging its allegiance to a leader or political platform, nor can it remain silent, afraid to engage with the divisive and painful challenges of our times. The way of Christ requires that we seek to honestly address the evils and wounds we inflict on one another, that we call one another to repentance and the renewing of our minds. And it also requires that we follow our one, true shepherd in the way of love, hearing and extending compassion to those with whom we disagree, extending that humility and healing love that Christ gives us — that love which has always been the only thing that can tear down these dividing walls between us. Among all the other figures, that little cross on my bookshelf shows the centurions who cruelly gave Jesus vinegar to drink and stabbed him in the side right there alongside Mary and some of the apostles and saints — all of them, together under the arms of Christ.

May we be the sheep of this good shepherd and cling to his voice in these tumultuous times. May we remember that, in God’s Kingdom, division and despair do not have the last word. And may the Holy Spirit shape each of us into instruments of Christ’s peace, that we might give this world the gift of love that it so desperately needs. Amen.