Monthly Archives: March 2025

Reckoning with Evil: A Sermon for 3LentC, 2025

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3 Lent

March 23, 2025

We all do it. We see someone’s suffering, perhaps even our own, and wonder, “What did I do to deserve that?” We might ask, “Why is God punishing me?” when diagnosed with cancer, or some other random misfortune befalls us. We might ask ourselves when we see someone in poverty, or unhoused, what decisions they made earlier in life that brought them to this point. It’s human; it’s natural. We want misfortune, suffering to have meaning, and so we look for reasons, or assign blame. Since the first humans began to think reflectively, we have wondered about the origin of evil or suffering, and we have developed intricate explanatory systems—religion not the least of them, to help us negotiate, make sense of, and respond to them.

Such questions bring us to the heart of today’s gospel reading, several enigmatic and perhaps unrelated sayings attributed to Jesus and brought together in this place by Luke. Jesus references two apparently somewhat contemporary events. In the first, Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who had executed some Galileans while they were making sacrifices; or to put in imagery we might understand, people killed while seeking refuge from bombing in a church. The second example might be even stranger. The tower of Siloam falls and kills 18 people who were unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when the tower came down.

Jesus uses these two stories to make a point. He asks his listeners if these people deserved to die, if they were any more sinful than anyone else in Jerusalem. And then he lays down a warning, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

Philosophers distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil is the evil or suffering that comes about through natural disaster—tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like. Moral evil is evil that is a result of human action—the holocaust. These two examples of Jesus encompass both types of evil—a random accident, and a crime perpetrated by someone. In either case, our very human tendency is to assign blame. We want to place suffering in a context that makes sense of it, and that makes it conform to our view of the world.

 Jesus here reminds his listeners that there is plenty of blame to go around. The fact that some people were killed when the tower of Siloam collapsed didn’t mean that they were any more sinful than anyone else in Jerusalem.

But the reading doesn’t end there. After this word of warning, Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree. This story seems to be another version of a story in Mark and Matthew. There Jesus comes to a fig tree, looking for fruit but finds none. In fact, Mark observes, it wasn’t fig season. But Jesus curses the tree, and the next day, as they walk by it again, the disciples notice that it has shriveled up. In Luke’s version, it is a parable in which a landowner comes looking for figs, as he has in the two preceding years. But the fig tree is barren, so the landowner tells the gardener to pull it out. But the gardener objects, suggesting instead that they fertilize it and wait to see what happens the next year.

What are we to make of that? Well, if Luke is really reworking the story from Mark, then we see him turning a message of doom into a message of hope. The message from the death of the Galileans and the victims of the Tower of Siloam was loud and clear: “Repent or perish.” But with the fig tree, another message comes forward: “Let’s nurture the tree and see what happens next year. Perhaps we’ll get a crop of figs then.”

Waiting may be an option when it’s a fig tree, but waiting seems irresponsible when the lives of thousands are at stake. The reading from Exodus offers a different perspective on this dynamic. 

Moses, a Hebrew child  was spared genocide when his mother put him in a reed basket in the Nile.  He was found and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter. As a young adult, he came across an Egyptian whipping a Hebrew slave. Moses killed him and fled Egypt, ending up in the land of Midian, where we encounter him in our story.

And he encounters God. Tending sheep on God’s mountain, Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai, Moses sees a bush that is on fire but is not consumed by the fire. When he goes to investigate, he hears the voice of God speaking to him, revealing Godself to him, calling him to be a messenger and prophet of God. There is much to contemplate here; the theophany itself, the revelation of God’s name, Moses’ call, but for our purposes, what matters is something God says to Moses:

“I have observed the misery of my people;

“I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters;

“Indeed, I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians….”

The God who appears to Moses in a burning bush is a God who hears the cries of the oppressed and suffering, and delivers them from their distress. But, and this is the important thing, while sometimes that deliverance involves miracle or supernatural power; other times, most times, perhaps, that deliverance makes use of flawed and weak individuals and communities. 

In response to God’s statement that Moses will be the means of the Hebrews’ escape from bondage, Moses asks, “Why me? Who am I?” Later he will claim that he lacks a good speaking voice and so God will bring Moses’ brother Aaron alongside as an assistant and spokesperson.

The point is this. We see evil, suffering, oppression, all around us—in the racism of our society and especially our criminal justice system; in the plight of refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers on our borders and throughout the country. We see evil especially in the wars that continue to rage, not just in Ukraine.. We see this suffering. It may turn our stomachs, bring tears to our eyes. The images may open our wallets as we donate to the humanitarian efforts. We may even know people who dropped everything and are now involved directly in helping those who are suffering, people who have opened their hearts, and their homes.

In light of the magnitude of the suffering and oppression, such efforts may seem of little value, a drop in the bucket. But just as God sent Christ into the world, into the middle of humanity’s messy life, full of pain and suffering, God calls us into those places of suffering and oppression; to be present there as God is present; sometimes with selfless acts of heroism. Other times, we are called to fertilize and tend an unproductive fig tree, hoping and waiting that in seasons to come it will bear fruit.

My friends, in these challenging and heartbreaking times, our faith may falter; we may wonder whether God is still at work in the world. We may wonder whether the forces of justice and truth can overcome the hatred, lies, and oppression that surround us. But God hears the cries of the oppressed, just as we do, and God is working to deliver them, through our prayers and our actions. In these dark times, may we pray, and hope, and wait, and work for justice and for peace.

Go Tell that Fox! A Sermon for 2 LentC, 2025

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Apparently, I neglected to post this last week…

March 16, 2025

One late November afternoon a couple of years ago, as the shadows were lengthening, I was taking a walk on the southwest bike path. I looked ahead and saw a man and his son standing still, watching something. I stopped and asked what was going on. The man pointed; there was a fox in someone’s backyard, trying to figure out how to get into a chicken coop. Eventually, the dad took matters into his own hands, possibly because he wanted to shield his young son from seeing the mayhem that could take place.  He climbed down the bank, entered the yard, and chased the fox away. The hens were safe, at least for now.

It’s one of those cultural tropes we all know: foxes and henhouses, common to cartoons, stories, and fables, and even the teachings of Jesus. It’s startling though, to encounter it in real life, even if in the back of our minds, we know that there are lots of foxes around here—I’ve even seen one in front of the church—and there are lots of hens. Yet it’s startling to encounter the image in scripture.

Luke has done something quite interesting with these sayings. In Matthew, they appear much later in the story, when Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem in the last week of his life. Luke places them much earlier. Jesus and his disciples are on the way to Jerusalem, but they won’t get there for quite some time. Herod (Antipas) the Son of Herod the Great has already appeared in Luke’s gospel—he arrested John the Baptist just before Jesus began his public ministry. Although Luke doesn’t mention John’s death in his gospel, it is assumed.

 We’re actually jumping around a bit in our reading of Luke. For the past several weeks, our texts have come from relatively early in the gospel. Last week we read the story of Jesus’ temptation, which takes place just before Jesus begins his public ministry. Today’s reading comes from Luke 13, and it’s important to note that it comes from a lengthy section—chapters 9-19, that Luke places is the context of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. It’s also important to note that Luke has moved one of these sayings, Jesus’ lament for Jerusalem. In Matthew, Jesus says this in the last week of his life, while he is in Jerusalem, and in fact, while he is in the temple.

So, Luke removes these sayings chronologically and temporally from Jerusalem and the cross, but even here, with perhaps months or weeks to go before Calvary, the crucifixion suddenly impinges on Jesus’ activity. Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him that Herod wants to kill him. That in itself may seem surprising. We’re programmed by two thousand years of history to assume Jesus and the Pharisees were opposed to each other but remember both wanted to take Torah seriously, to offer ordinary people ways of being faithful in the world.

Jesus calls Herod Antipas a fox. There’s a double edge to this epithet. We tend to associate foxes with slyness or craftiness, so there’s a sense in which Jesus may be offering Herod a compliment. After all, it takes tact, and wiliness to succeed in an imperial system like Rome. At any moment, the caprice of the ruler may turn on you, and survival requires being very adept at maneuvering. But at the same time, foxes are predators, preying on the weak and vulnerable, taking advantage of every weakness in an opponent, or potential meal.

But even if Herod is a fox, a threat, Jesus seems to be saying that he will go about his work—casting out demons and healing people. He won’t be distracted from his ministry by Herod’s machinations. 

There’s a full range of emotions on display in these few verses. Jesus expresses courage in his refusal to turn away from the threat; he shows his sense of purpose in continuing to go about the business of his daily ministry. He is resolute about his fate, as he reminds them that he is on his way to Jerusalem, and that he knows that like other prophets, he will be killed there. Holy Week and the cross loom very large. The sequence of days is mentioned; and Jesus alludes to the triumphal entry—Palm Sunday. 

 In spite of all that, knowing what is to come; how he’ll be treated not only by the authorities but by the people of Jerusalem, he expresses deep love and concern for the city to which he is travelling. The tenderness with which he speaks, comparing himself to a mother hen protecting her chicks, is a world away from the defiance with which the passage begins. 

There’s something else worth pointing out. Jesus and Herod would have a final confrontation, in Jerusalem, in Holy Week. In an episode unique to Luke’s gospel, it would be Herod who would have Jesus dressed in purple, royal garb. Intended as mockery, the incident lays bare the different kinds of authority wielded by Jesus and Herod. Herod relied on force to maintain power; exploiting the weak, and punishing those, like John the Baptist, that he perceived as threats. On the other hand, Jesus’ power was and is a power based in love and vulnerability, like the care of a mother hen for her chicks; the love of the crucified one.

These alternative models may seem as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. We see Jesus weeping for Jerusalem, here, and again, only in Luke, when he enters Jerusalem in the final days of his life. Luke’s readers would have known all too well what would happen to do Jerusalem; defeated and destroyed, laying in ruins, its riches and bounty carried back to Rome to demonstrate Rome’s power and the fate of those who opposed it. 

We see those alternative models of power and authority on display in our world today, and much closer to home. The power of greed, the lust for domination, the demands for utter fealty fill our media and stoke our fears and nightmares. We see institutions and individuals submitting meekly and without protest, passively watching as victims suffer and rights are trampled. And we feel helpless, impotent.

But Jesus wept for Jerusalem, he lamented that he wished he could gather its residents like a hen gathers her chicks. It’s hardly an act of defiance, or one that would make a difference in the long run. But his example, an example of self-giving, sacrificial love, poured out on the cross, leads to God’s victory over evil and death. It is our hope, our faith that God’s love prevails, and that our own small acts of love, weeping for victims, protecting the vulnerable, bearing witness to Christ, do make a difference. They are signs and acts of love that bind us to and in God’s love, confronting and breaking the powers of evil and death, and building blocks of God’s coming reign.   

“Remember that you are dust” A homily for Ash Wednesday, 2025

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“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I wonder how many times I’ve said those words over the 20 some years of my ministry; certainly more than two thousand. I’ve said them to myself at least once each year. I’ve said them to babies, brought forward by their parents; I’ve said them to utter strangers, like some of you perhaps; people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. I’ve said them to long-time members lying in hospice care, who would die a few days later.

Those words, these ashes are a sign of our mortality, a reminder to us that we are created from the dust of the earth, and that our bodies will return to the earth. 

Those words weigh heavily on my soul when I say them to myself each year, and their weight accumulates on me as I say them to you. I suspect they weigh heavily on you as well, as they challenge all of us to reflect on our mortality, to admit to ourselves who we are—dust and ashes, and that we will once more be dust and ashes, that all of our efforts to the contrary, all of our attempts to hold death at bay will come to nothing.

But contemplation of our nature, our provenance and end, is not an end in itself. We do this ritual, we make this strange gesture, we wear this smudge on our forehead to remind us of who we are and to remind us also of who God is. For it is God who made us out of the dust of the earth. It is God who has given us life and all that we have. Yet like our fear and desperate attempts to ignore our mortality, to fight the finality of death, so too do we often find ourselves running away from or ignoring God. We construct defenses; we try to hide. We put in place of God all manner of idols that we worship and pursue: financial success or security, fame, power; bright, shiny possessions; or the thrill of new experiences.

Cross-shaped ashes on our foreheads, the admonition “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” lay bare the emptiness of all those pursuits. They break down the barriers, strip our defenses, leave us kneeling before God our maker and redeemer. 

Our empty selves, our vain hopes, brought to nothing by those words, leaving us with broken and contrite hearts. It is then that we can encounter God, stripped of our defenses, and open ourselves to deeper relationship with our Creator and Redeemer.

We carry the ashy cross on our foreheads for a few hours, a day if we’re careful. But we’re just as likely to brush it off intentionally as soon as we leave church, or perhaps unintentionally, when it vanishes as we take off our winter hats or caps.

There’s a cross marked on us that is permanent, indelible, that can’t be brushed or washed off. It’s made with the same gestures, my thumb making the sign of the cross on foreheads, but with oil of chrism instead of ashes. And I say something quite different as well.

Instead of, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” the words I say on Ash Wednesday, after baptizing someone, I dip my thumb in oil of chrism, and make the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized, saying while I do it, “You are sealed with the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.

We bear that cross all of our lives, even if it is invisible. It is the mark of our belonging to Christ, the mark of our faith. And just as the cross of ash reminds us of our mortality, the cross marked in oil is a sign of who we truly are and of our ultimate destiny. We are beloved children of God.

We can forget that identity; as the cross is invisible, it can be forgotten under the weight of our sin and our doubts. But it may be that just as our foreheads are marked with ashes, the ash works as an abrasive, removing all of the accretions, so that our baptismal crosses are visible to ourselves and to the world. We are Christ’s own forever.

Of course, the Season of Lent has us think about another cross, the cross that looms ahead at the end of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. It’s a journey on which we are invited to accompany Jesus, to walk with him as his disciples and followers. When Jesus explained to his disciples what it meant to follow him, he said, “If you would be my disciples, take up your cross and follow me.” 

We are carrying crosses today; these smudges of ash on our forehead. We carry that other cross on our forehead as well, the sign that we are Christ’s own forever. Lent encourages us to embrace another cross, the cross of discipleship, growing into our identities as followers of Jesus. As we walk this way of Lent, may we find it a time when we confront our mortality, claim our identity as children of God, and grow more deeply Christ-like as we accompany him.

Let us make dwellings: A Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C, 2025

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            Today is the last Sunday after the Epiphany. This coming week, we observe Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the season of Lent. But today we linger in this season when we reflect on all the ways God reveals God’s glory in the world, and especially in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. Each year on this Sunday, we hear one of the three Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration; Jesus’ eerie, other-worldly encounter with Moses and Elijah, when he was transfigured, transformed, and his face shone with God’s glory.

            Before exploring more deeply Luke’s account of this event, I would like to point out something else from the lectionary. The three lessons we heard today are interconnected; the epistle quite obviously, and problematically, reflecting on Moses’ encounter with God on Mt. Sinai, even as Luke’s story does the same. 

            First of all, Exodus. This puzzling, fascinating story comes from the larger narrative of Israel at Mt. Sinai and the giving of the Law to Moses by God. You may recall that Moses spent forty days on top of the mountain; and when he came down with the two tablets, he discovered the Israelites had made a golden calf and were worshiping it. He threw down the tablets, breaking them, so he had to go back up to plead with God on behalf of the Israelites. Now, he has the second set of tablets and is bringing them down. 

            We’re told that his face shone because of his encounter with God, and sparked fear in the Israelites, which explains why he veiled his face when speaking with them and removed the veil when speaking with God. As an aside, this story, and a mistranslation by Jerome when he was translating the Hebrew into Latin back in the 4th century, accounts for the iconographic depiction of Moses with horns throughout the History of Art, most famously perhaps in Michelangelo’s statue of Moses.

            We see Paul’s interpretation of Moses’ veiling in the reading from 2 Corinthians. There’s a lot to unpack here and in a way it’s unfortunate that we’re given this text in conjunction with the other readings. Let me just say that a cursory reading, or listening of the text, might lead us to some unfortunate, even evil conclusions about the New Testament superseding the Old Testament; or the binary of evil Old Testament and good New Testament; or Christ abolishing Torah—Jewish law. In fact, Paul here as elsewhere is trying to make space for the continued relevance of the covenant with Jews as well as the relevance of Christ for gentiles. I won’t say more about that here.

            The gospel story of the Transfiguration seems to emphasize the continuity of Christ with the traditions of Judaism. The presence of the two paradigmatic prophets: Moses and Elijah, seem to confirm Jesus’ identity as God’s son, and more importantly, to emphasize the unbroken line of teaching and divine promise that ends in Jesus.

            But there’s a lot more that’s going on here. 

            The story is full of imagery that looks back to the Hebrew Bible and forward to the resurrection. For example, the words that Luke uses to describe Jesus’ appearance are the exact same words he will use when describing the appearance of the angels at the empty tomb—the dazzling clothes appears in both places. But the ways in which this story points backwards in the biblical tradition are even more striking. 

It’s not just the presence of Moses and Elijah, which 21st century readers might assume is only the gospel writers’ attempts to add to the drama and spectacle. Moses and Elijah were important figures in Jewish speculation. Both had mysterious deaths—Deuteronomy tells us that when Moses died, God buried him, and no one knows the location of his tomb. In the case of Elijah, he didn’t die at all but was carried off to heaven by chariots of fire. Because of this mystery, Jewish apocalyptic thinking focused attention on the return of both figures. 

But their presence may be accounted for in less dramatic fashion. Moses, the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet were two key figures in the development of scripture and Jewish identity—Luke repeatedly tells us that Jesus is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, so their presence here are a reminder of Jesus’ continuity with the tradition that came before him.

There’s another theme that connects back with earlier tradition and with Moses. Luke tells us that the Moses, Elijah, and Jesus “were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.” It’s an odd turn of phrase in English that takes on surprising significance in the Greek, for the Greek word used is “exodus.” With this, Luke is reaching back to the story of God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the promised land, a journey they were on in today’s reading from Exodus. In doing so, he is laying the foundation for his interpretation of the events of the cross and resurrection—like the Exodus Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection liberates us from our bondage to sin and death.

            But there’s another deep resonance with Jewish tradition in this story, one that’s often overlooked by readers or preachers. If you’ve ever heard a sermon on this text by someone other than me, the preacher has probably focused on Peter’s response; his suggestion that they erect booths or dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. And the preacher would likely go on to say that this is another example of Peter’s impetuousness and his getting things wrong.

            I don’t think that’s the case. In first century Judaism, as today, one of the major feasts of Judaism is the feast of Sukkoth or Tabernacles; which, among other things, commemorates the Israelites’ time in the wilderness, including at Sinai, when they lived in tents; and God was present among them in a tabernacle—where God’s glory was present.

            All of that imagery is present here—the mountain, Moses, God’s glory, even the voice from heaven. Peter’s response may not be one of disbelief, but rather an attempt to make sense of the experience, to place it in categories that he understands and is comfortable with.

            Think about it. When you have an inexplicable experience; when something happens in the world around you or to you, don’t you try to make sense of it, to figure it out, to categorize it? Whether it’s unprecedent events taking place in the world, or a mysterious encounter with a spiritual being, or even a brush with fate, don’t you try to assimilate it to categories that you know, to put it in a box, if you will, to file it away?

            I think that is going on here. Peter and the other disciples’ encounter with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, the dazzling white robes, the glory of God, the voice from heaven, all of that was earth-shattering, mind-blowing. Peter’s desire to build dwellings may be an attempt to make that experience a little more manageable.

            I think it’s something scholars have also long done with this story; to assimilate it to the resurrection; or to write it off. The transfiguration is a mind-blowing story, eluding our grasp, escaping our efforts to analyze it. What we do know is what happens next; Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain and begin making their way to Jerusalem.

            It’s a journey we are also on this Lent, as we turn away from the season of Epiphany and the glory of God’s manifestations in the world, and head toward Calvary and the Cross. That too, is a manifestation of God’s glory, the glory of God’s love for us the glory of God’s victory over evil and death. As we enter the glory of these forty days of Lent, may we be open to God’s voice, speaking to us, and to God’s presence, moving us into deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.