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Were not our hearts burning? A Sermon for Easter 3A, 2023

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I’ve always been grateful that I’ve worked in occupations that didn’t require a lot of travel. While I enjoy seeing new places and revisiting places I’ve been or lived before, getting there, especially if it requires a plane ride, can be challenging. It’s not just the hassle; it’s being put in close proximity to strangers, who might want to engage me in conversation.

Why? Because inevitably, the question is posed: “What do you do?” Back when I was a college professor, I learned early on never to say “Religion Professor.” It only took one or two awkward conversations, usually in which my conversation partner expounded on some book they were reading, or wanting to debate the existence of God or talk about the spiritual quest they had been pursuing for the last thirty years, to make me answer “European history” in an attempt to quiet them.

It hasn’t gotten any easier since I’ve become a priest. It’s one of the reasons I don’t even carry books—it’s much harder for onlookers to detect what I’m reading when I’m using a kindle.

I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. You’re traveling, all you want is to be left alone with your thoughts or your reading, and your seatmate wants to engage tell you everything about themselves, or learn everything about you.

I’ll never forget the uber driver who was so intent on sharing his knowledge of Gnosticism with me that he got lost taking me to my destination in Cambridge Mass, and I had to give him instructions, even though it had been more than 25 years since I’d driven in the city.

One of the things I love about the gospel stories of the appearances of the Risen Christ is how they bring together moments of utter transcendence and awe with daily life and the mundane. In the story of Thomas which was read last week, we heard about the disciples gathered together, the appearance of Christ, and the disbelief of Thomas. We also heard his great confession: “My Lord and my God!” In another story from the gospel of John, the disciples encounter the risen Christ making breakfast for them after they’ve spent the night fishing on the Sea of Galilee.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, we have these two disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and encountering a stranger as they go. A perfectly ordinary story with an extraordinary conclusion. A perfectly ordinary story, on the one hand, yet on the other, full of mystery and raising many questions.

Two disciples on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. That’s the first mystery: Why and Where? There’s a great deal of uncertainty about the location of Emmaus. There’s no clear village or town in the vicinity of Jerusalem that had that name in the first century—oh, if you visit the Holy Land now, they can show you where tradition says Emmaus was, the house where Cleopas lived, the church built on the site. But all of that comes much later. It’s almost as if these two disciples, one of them unnamed and unknown, the other Cleopas, only mentioned here, were on a journey to nowhere. 

And why were they traveling? Was Emmaus their home? Were they trying to escape Jerusalem? Are they fleeing the city? That’s perhaps a better guess. Although Luke isn’t quite so hard on the disciples as the gospels of Matthew and Mark, the disciples had every reason to be fearful—their leader had been arrested and executed by the Roman authorities. Their movement was in a shambles and they had every right to suspect that the Romans would be coming after them, too. So they may have been trying to get away from Jerusalem and return to obscurity. They may have been fleeing for their lives.

While we can only hypothesize about their fear and assume they were grieving as well, the text does tell us that they were in despair. They tell their unkown companion, “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.” After telling their story and expressing their dashed hopes, they listen as Jesus explains to them again how everything that happened conforms to Hebrew scripture. They are so taken with him that they urge him to join them for dinner. And it’s at dinner that their eyes are opened.

The gospel reads, “When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.” It’s a description that echoes Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper, and earlier, in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. At that moment, their eyes were opened, they recognized their Lord and Savior, and he vanished from their sight. Now everything made sense to them. The explanation of scripture Jesus had given them helped them make the connection—their encounter with the Risen Christ changed their fear into joy and their despair into happiness. Now they remembered, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?”

Whatever plans they had made earlier, whatever reasons they had for leaving Jerusalem to go to Emmaus, didn’t matter any more. They immediately raced back to Jerusalem to see the other disciples and tell them what happened, that Jesus had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

What’s so wonderful about this story is its relationship to our lives as Christians. Like those two disciples, we all have histories, backgrounds with Jesus. Some of us have grown up in the church, heard bible stories since we were children, have never not been connected to the faith. Others of us have had different journeys, have little or no background in the church, have found ourselves drawn to Jesus, drawn to God. Still others have had a little of both, wandering in and out over the years, active in the church, then for whatever reason feeling profoundly alienated from it, or only disinterested. We read, discuss, explore on our own.

But too often, most of the time, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Even for many of us who are committed members of Grace, too often it seems like we’re just going through the motions, coming to church because that’s what we do, are active volunteers because, well, somebody has asked us, and we just can’t say no, or say it often enough. But our involvement doesn’t touch us at our deepest selves. Sometimes, all the things that are going on in the rest of our lives, struggles at work or in our closest relationships, worries about health or financial security, bog us down, dash our hopes, blind us to the presence of Christ, and our spiritual lives, our lives of faith, seem to be like discarded trash on the side of the road, as we wander.

But then something happens. A chance encounter, a gracious word, a meaningful conversation, a sacred meal. Suddenly our eyes are opened, our hearts burn within us, and Jesus Christ is made known to us in the breaking of the bread. We are transformed, and we rush to tell others.

This is a very rich, thought-provoking story. It operates on many levels, inviting us to reflect on our own experience as people of faith, and people seeking faith. It invites us to think about our Eucharistic feast as an encounter with the Risen Christ, and our worship with the liturgy of the word and table, as a self-contained, embodied experience of resurrection. It invites us to imagine our worship and our lives as transformational experiences.

But there’s more. What would have happened if those two disciples had not urged Jesus to stay with them? What would have happened if they had not invited him to dinner? Yes, it was a simple gesture of hospitality, an act of kindness. But it opened their eyes. It changed their lives.

Our worship, our common life, our own individual spiritual journeys are all opportunities to encounter Jesus Christ. But they are opportunities not for us alone. When we invite others to join us, when we invite others into our lives, our stories, and into our worship, we invite them to encounter Jesus Christ. We are inviting them to experience resurrection. We are practicing resurrection. May all of our hearts burn within us, may we know Jesus Christ in the breaking of the bread, and in the fellowship of the table. Amen.

Empty Tomb and Resurrection: A sermon for Easter, 2023

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Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.”

During the lockdown, I began walking with some regularity in Forest Hills Cemetery. It’s not far from our home and in those months when we were especially concerned about social distancing, I joked that most people I encountered there would remain more than six feet away, safely buried underground. Over the years, I’ve watched as people spent time at the graves of their loved ones, grieving, or tending the plantings. I’ve noticed graves that were unattended, the dead who lay beneath them long forgotten. There are graves with many ritual objects on and around them. 

The reality is that for most twenty-first century Americans, whose lives may not be tied to particular places, cemeteries have lost the kind of meanings and associations they held in the past. 

We’ve lost most of the rituals and duties surrounding the deaths of loved ones. Few of us have touched the body of loved one, fewer still prepared a body for burial which was, up until a century and a half ago, something taken for granted, a crucial part of what it meant to care for a family member or loved one. 

We see that concern expressed, the roles played out in the gospel accounts of the resurrection. While it’s often assumed that such tasks were the responsibility of women, in the Gospel of John, it is two men who prepare Jesus’ body for burial. Joseph of Arimathea asked for Jesus’ body, Nicodemus brought 100 pounds of myrrh and aloes, and together they buried Jesus in Joseph’s tomb.

So why did Mary Magdalene come to the tomb that morning? Knowing the other gospel accounts, we might not even think that was a question, for in all of them, we’re told the women brought spices to anoint Jesus’ body for burial. 

Consider it. Mary has come with Jesus to Jerusalem. We don’t know how long she had been following him, whether she had come with him from Galilee or met him along the way. She had heard him teach, amazing the crowds, filling her and the other disciples with hope. She had seen him heal the sick, give sight to the blind, even raise the dead. She had been part of that strange demonstration, waving palms and shouting “Hosanna!” as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, a procession full of royal symbolism.

And then, she had seen it all come crashing down. The betrayal by one their own, the arrest, and finally, the crucifixion. Everything she had hoped for, everything she had believed, crumbled to ashes and dust, her heart empty, overwhelmed by grief and despair.

I wonder whether she came by herself early that morning because she wanted to mourn in the silence and the dark. I wonder whether the feelings that overwhelmed her compelled her to seek solitude, time to be alone with her thoughts, to try to pick up the pieces of her life and figure out what she might do next. She had abandoned her own life, whatever it was, abandoned her family and friends, to follow Jesus, and now, here she was. Alone, with her dashed hopes, her shattered faith, and a meaningless future.

These are feelings we all know well. We have all been on a walk like Mary was that morning two millennia ago. Whether because of a broken relationship, the death of a loved one, a lost job or career, or simply the heavy weight of the world’s violence and suffering, we’ve all been at that spot, a dead-end, where we can’t go back, and where there seems to be no way forward, a spot very much like a tomb or a cemetery.

But the tomb was empty, and in her confusion and worry, she ran to tell the others. Peter, and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, race to see for themselves, they look in, enter, and their curiosity fulfilled, go back home. But Mary stays behind. Instead of reassuring her, allaying her fears, answering her questions, the empty tomb only added to them, raised more questions. 

And then, in an instant, all those questions were answered. In an instant, Mary’s life changed; the world changed. The tomb was not the end of the story; her hopes were not dashed; her faith was not in vain. When Jesus called her by name, she knew her Lord.
         For us though, it may not be so simple. In the last two thousand years, in spite of Christians claiming through all the centuries that Christ has been raised from the dead, that he has conquered evil and the grave, things look very much the same. There is still hatred, and violence, and suffering. We still have doubts and uncertainty. We still mourn the loss of loved ones. We still know the anguish of the painful chasm between the way things are and the way things ought to be. 

But in the midst of our tears and grief, as we cast our eyes on the tomb, Jesus calls us, and if we turn to him, everything changes: sadness into joy, despair into hope, doubt into faith. The tomb is there, but it is empty. Christ is alive! There is no reason to linger there, for he is risen and goes before us.

We come to this place today, carrying the weight of the world and our lives. There are the private disappointments, doubt, despair, the pain inflicted on us by a cruel word; fears for family, for the future. There is all that is going on in the world, war, injustice, a broken political system. There is, yes, pandemic, with a continuing toll both in lives lost and lives changed. But in the midst of that whirlwind of evil and suffering, in the still, center point, there is Christ, calling to us, calling us by name.

Easter changes everything and nothing. Tomorrow will come and with it, all of the problems that were here yesterday and the day before and last week. The scent of the lilies will dissipate; the memories of a full church and with choir and hymns and brass will slowly fade. Life will go on.

But Jesus calls us by our name and he goes out before us, beckoning us to follow him into the future, away from the empty tomb. He calls us into relationship with him. He calls us into new life and into hope. With Mary, may we turn away from the empty tomb and toward the one who calls us by name, who wipes away our tears and embraces us with his love.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Love is its meaning: A Sermon for Good Friday, 2023

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Calvary, Golgotha, the cross. Holy Week has been building toward this moment. The arc of salvation history has bended toward this day. The cross is the center point of history. For medieval Christians it was also the center point of the universe.

Though we know that the cross is not the center of the universe as pre-modern people may have imagined, the cross remains the center point of our religious world and our spiritual lives. And so we come to contemplate on this day, the events so long ago, we say familiar words and familiar prayers, we sing familiar hymns, and we ponder the mystery of a God who became human like us, and becoming human, took on human suffering and pain in all of its extremity. And we wonder, why?

The power of the story lies not only in the words on the page, or the words as read aloud, but in all the images that are evoked in our minds as we hear them. The cinematic adaptations we have seen again and again since our childhoods; the countless images of crucifixion upon which we have gazed, whether in reproductions in books, or in art museums or in churches like our own. Our hymns are also full of such imagery, powerful, emotional. And there are the ways all of these images reverberate across our culture: crosses worn on pendants, crosses on tattoos, crosses burned on lawns. 

The violence of John’s version of the passion jumps out from the page. There is the violence of language—mocking and scorning; the violence of humiliation, flogging and the crown of thorns. There is the violence of the crucifixion itself—execution by torture as it’s been called. The state violence of this form of capital punishment; displayed publicly for all to see and to understand as warning; the constant presence on the outskirts of cities throughout the Roman Empire of these instruments of execution on display and the bodies of victims as well. 

The text conveys other violence, the virulent anti-Judaism that is woven throughout John’s gospel, but especially here where the gospel writer does everything in his power to divert attention and blame away from Rome and onto the Jewish community. So violent, so anti-Jewish, in fact, that many scholars and theologians advocate abandoning John’s passion gospel on this day. The history of anti-semitism and its resurgence in recent years; its presence in contemporary political and cultural discourse leads me to consider alternatives for future years.

Even if we can ignore or set aside the text’s anti-Judaism, the other violence of the text continues to work on us. We may internalize it, transforming it to guilt and shame, or project it onto a vengeful God who demands blood sacrifice. 

But there are other ways of reading this story, other themes that we might emphasize:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten son…

Or the verse we heard in last’s night gospel reading: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” 

Ponder that statement. “He loved them to the end.” It is the same word that lies behind Jesus’ last words on the cross in John’s gospel: “It is finished.” It has been completed. Was that the end to which he loved them, to that final point, to his death? It is the end to which he loves us and the world, a love which brought him to this point, a love that reaches out to us and to the world from his arms outstretched on the cross. 

For all the violence and hatred in the text, there is also, and above all, love. In Jesus’ last conversation with his disciples, he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. The cross is about suffering, yes, but we should never lose sight of what stands behind that suffering, God’s love for us, Christ’s love for us. It is love that brought Christ to us in the incarnation, love that he showed his disciples and those to whom he ministered, and love he shows most profoundly on the cross. 

The violence may repel us. The bloody depictions throughout Christian history may make us avert our gaze, to turn away, to turn inward, but even if we do, we should not let that violence and suffering obscure God’s love.

I’m reminded of the great medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, who lived in turbulent times, including the Black Plague, who herself suffered illness unto death, and on her deathbed had a vision of the crucified Christ on which she reflected for some thirty years. The vision and her interpretations were replete with graphic descriptions of Christ’s body on the cross. She writes:

And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years and after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.”

         Love was his meaning. Love is the meaning of the cross. My prayer for us all today is that we experience that meaning in all of its profundity and power, that love suffuses us, fills us, and draws us closer to Christ. May love be our meaning.

Emptying and the Cross: A Sermon for Palm Sunday, Year A, 2023

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Palm Sunday 2023:

April 2, 2023

What a difference a few days make! What a difference a few minutes make!

We have gone from joy to sadness, from excitement to mourning, from celebration to despair. In the gospel’s timing, it’s a few days. For us, it’s a few minutes. Earlier, we shouted and sang Hosanna!; then, we shouted, “Crucify him!”

The emotional whiplash in those two cries reflects the liturgical compression of this day—Palm or Passion Sunday. We join with the crowds welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem and minutes later join with the mob calling for Christ’s execution and then stand by watching as he suffers and dies. 

The emotions of this day will linger through the week as we reenact Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. On Maundy Thursday, we will remember the last supper he had with his disciples and in imitation of his own actions, and in obedience to his command, we will wash each others’ feet in act of service and love. Then, on Good Friday we will hear another passion gospel, that of John, and recall the brutality of the crucifixion and human complicity in that act. We will linger at the foot of the cross in silence, meditating on Christ’s love and our sin.

There are years when Holy Week comes at me like loaded dump track barreling down the highway, making me stop, overwhelming me with its power and confronting me with my mortality and humanity. But this year seems different. The crescendo of news—war, indictments, elections, natural disasters threaten to drown out and distract from the liturgical solemnity in which we are participating.

And yet there’s something else. Another school shooting this week reminds us of the horrors in our midst, the deep rot in our society and culture. And the politicians who wash their hands and say there’s nothing that can be done remind me more than a little of Pilate who washed his hands in the face of the frenzied mob. 

Our impulse might be to try drive all of that out of our minds, at least for today, or perhaps even for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, to regard all of the world’s ills and suffering to be distractions from what really matters, from our focus on the events of this week. As understandable as such an impulse might be, I think it’s a temptation that we should avoid. As we recall what happened two thousand years ago, what is inscribed in our sacred texts and reenacted in our liturgies, the crucifixion of Christ, his confrontation with the forces of evil in the world, are not matters to be kept apart from our struggles, our lives, and our world, but are deeply embedded in them, and help us to make sense of them.

To help us regain our footing in the midst of the tumult of our lives, the tumult of our world, the tumult of the passion narrative, the words of St. Paul we heard from his letter to the Philippians is a good place to begin. Scholars call it the “Christ hymn.” It has been much debated over the centuries as we wonder whether it was something Paul wrote or whether he borrowed and adapted it from early Christian worship, 

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God 
as something to be exploited, 

but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, 
being born in human likeness. 

And being found in human form,
he humbled himself 
and became obedient to the point of death– 
even death on a cross.

It speaks of Christ emptying himself to become human, humbly and obediently living in such a way to show us God’s love incarnate; living in such a way that he aroused the hatred and enmity of Rome, and died on the cross.

We may want to focus on the cross today and in the days to come, but the important point to remember is that death is not the end of the story, either for us or for Jesus. As Paul argues here, Christ’s obedience, humility, his incarnating of God’s love that ended in the cross was vindicated. The gory, painful, ignominious death transformed into life, a victory over the forces of evil and death.

Jesus’ silence comes to an end on the cross with his final, despairing cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is a cry of despair, doubt, and pain, at a moment when all seems lost, when the reign of God seems farther away than ever before, when the message of love proclaimed and lived by Jesus seems to be refuted completely by the power of the Roman state.

But in that moment we see the power of God; we see God suffering with us in all of our struggles, suffering, and pain, we see God with us, in the struggle for justice and peace, we see God breaking open the gates of hell and conquering evil. 

Many of us struggle; we are disheartened by the world in which live; horrified by attacks on LGBT people, by the resurgence of anti-semitism. We are fearful for the future of human life and our planet, crushed by the weight of injustice, our hearts breaking for the victims of oppression and violence, 

The cross offers no escape from any of this. The cross is a symbol of the reality of our world, the depths of human evil and depravity. But in its horror, in the horrors of our world, the cross also symbolizes the presence of God in all of those places, suffering with us, suffering with victims of injustice, violence, and oppression. 

The cross is a symbol that even when things seem darkest, when it seems that evil has triumphed, the story is not over. God hears the cries of the suffering and the oppressed. Sometimes, we cry with them, sometimes we cry on their behalf. Sometimes, God cries with those who are suffering and in pain. The cross is a symbol of hope, of our hope that ultimately God will prevail. God does prevail. 

Jesus at the Midnight Diner: A sermon for 6 Epiphany C, 2023

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6 Epiphany:

February 12, 2023

Corrie and I have been watching a quirky, endearing Japanese show on Netflix called Midnight Diner. The premise is a bit far-fetched, at least from a Western perspective. It’s set in a diner that is open only from midnight to 7 am. It’s run by world-weary man probably in his late 50s who is called Master by his customers. There’s only one item on the menu: pork miso soup. But he’ll make anything his customers request, as long as he has the ingredients, and sometimes, they bring him ingredients to make a favorite dish

         There’s a recurrent cast of characters: misfits, a gangster, sex workers, a non-binary bar owner, among others. Each episode may focus on one of them, or on new customers who come in and bring their problems with them. As the series progresses, community is created around the stools, and around the food the master cooks. The brokenness of the world and of human lives is on display, but so too are the tentative attempts to heal that brokenness and the relationships that emerge around conversation and good food. The episodes always end with a brief description of the food item that was featured. And some of them are quite surprising: I never knew that potato salad was a thing in Japanese cuisine.

         We know that community is hard to build and easy to break. We’ve all experienced its blessings and felt the pain of the brokenness. We may even have been reminded of that brokenness, the brokenness of our relationships as we listened to today’s gospel reading with its hard words about hate, reconciliation, divorce, and adultery.

         In fact, one of the key themes in Matthew’s gospel is life in community—“where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Elsewhere Jesus expresses his concern for the weakest and most vulnerable—“the least of these” and cautions his followers not to act in such a way or to offer teaching that might cause the little ones, the vulnerable, the weak in faith, to stumble.

Today’s gospel is a continuation of our reading of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Last week’s reading ended with the ominous statement, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Today we are presented with a series of antitheses. Jesus seems to be quoting Torah as he says, “You have heard it said of old…” and then he offers his own interpretation, “But I say to you…” 

These antitheses—you have heard it say of do not murder, but I say to you… show Jesus working with Torah (the Jewish law). There’s a common assumption among Christians, going back centuries, that Jesus put an end to the Jewish law—that the Jewish community of Jesus’ day struggled to live by the hundreds of narrow prescriptions in the law laid down in the Pentateuch, were oppressed by its demands, and sought freedom from it—a freedom preached by Jesus Christ, Paul, and early Christianity.

Well, it’s not quite so simple as that. In fact, that common understanding is wrong on two counts. It’s wrong concerning first-century Judaism, and it’s wrong concerning Jesus. We know from first-century sources as well as from earlier biblical texts that that the Mosaic law was perceived by Jews as a good thing. Our psalm today expresses that idea:

“Happy are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the laws of the Lord.”

Throughout the Psalms, there’s a consistent sense of joy for the law and that continued down through Jesus’ day. There is ongoing development in the understanding of the law in Judaism and by the first century, the Pharisees were seeking to broaden the law’s influence and range. They were applying the Torah to everyone, not just to the priests. While we may think of that as increasing legalization, it was also in a very real sense, a democratization of the law. It applied to everyone. 

In addition, the Pharisees’ sought to provide guidance concerning the law to every aspect of life. What is murder, for example? The Pharisees provided ways for people to understand the connection between every day activity and the central precepts of the law, in order to preserve the law’s integrity. The Pharisees, and the rabbis after them, called this effort “building a wall around Torah.”

Here, in the Sermon on the Mount, we see Jesus doing very much the same thing. “You have heard it said of old, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Like the Pharisees, Jesus is offering instruction to his listeners about how to interpret Torah. He’s answering the questions, What is murder? What is adultery? 

And think about the way we generally approach such questions. Both in the legal arena and in our own personal moral reflections, we’re likely to try to find ways to interpret actions so that they aren’t judged the more serious offense—thus, instead of murder, people are charged with reckless homicide or manslaughter. 

Jesus is doing just the opposite: What is murder? Jesus says, it’s not just the act of killing someone, it’s being angry, or hating, or ridiculing someone. Jesus is intensifying the law, sharpening it, and internalizing it. It’s not just our outward actions that matter, it’s our inward dispositions and inclinations as well. We all know that it is not only acts like murder that fracture community. We have seen in the world around us how hatred and disparaging language breaks down community; how easy it is to go from violent language to violent action, and how violent language is ultimately dehumanizing.

         Jesus is pointing to the deeper significance of the commandments, and the relationships, the communities that lie beneath them. Sure, murder is wrong, but isn’t hate that leads us to deride fellow human beings as “fools” equally problematic? If our relationships with our fellow human beings are broken, is not our relationship with God also broken? If we are called to reconcile ourselves to God, how can we not want to reconcile with fellow humans? To think about reconciliation, being at peace and harmony with our friends, neighbors, coworkers, before coming to the altar, may have us thinking in new ways about justice. 

         Our criminal justice system is organized around punishment. It often continues to punish people long after they have completed their time in prison. Wisconsin is notorious both for the high percentage of African-Americans in the criminal justice system as well as for its broken and punitive pardon and parole system.

         It profoundly reflects our values that we view certain people as less than human, as threats to the social order. We would rather have them spend their lives in prison than explore ways of helping them flourish. We would rather punish them for minor offenses and police their behavior than do the hard work of creating a society in which their lives have value and to which they can contribute their gifts and skills.

         To be honest, it’s easy for us to allow our views on punishment and retribution in larger society affect the way we think about our personal relationships, our relationships in the church, and our relationship with God. When we are in conflict with another person, we may rather want to see them punished or suffer than do the hard work of talking through the conflict, seeking resolution and reconciliation. We may rather see God as the punitive judge who is likely to punish us for our sins, and who we hope will punish those who have wronged us, than as the merciful, loving One who embraces the penitent sinner.

         The vision that Jesus is beginning to describe in these verses is of a beloved and loving community, in which individuals can flourish and where trust underlies all relationships. It is the vision of a community, reconciled to God, that does the work of reconciliation in the world. It is the vision of a community bound together by love, not united by fear of common enemies, or by the power exerted by authority. It is the vision of a community that witnesses to God’s love and mercy, and works to restore all human beings to relationship with each other and God. It is the vision of such a community to which we are called. Drawn to that vision, may we make it our own. 

It’s time to leave our nets and our boats: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, 2023

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Over the years, I have developed a pattern as I begin working on my sermon for Sunday. I try reading Sunday’s texts early in the week—one of my profs recommended reading them already on Sunday afternoon, but I never do that. Then I go back through my files to look at sermons I preached on the text in previous years. There may be a hint of something that I can build on, an idea I didn’t develop, that could be woven into this year’s sermon.

As I am now in my 14th year at Grace, and going on twenty years of preaching regularly, this practice has become something of a journey into my past, and into the recent history of Grace, as well. Just to give you two examples. In 2014, when I preached on this Sunday, I talked about how we opened our doors to the homeless on MLK Day that year when there was no other location for them to go. That experience catapulted me into the center of efforts to create a day shelter in Madison. In fact, a photo from that day showed up in my Facebook memories on Friday.

Three years later, in 2017, it was just after the inauguration of the last president, and the day after the Women’s March, another occasion when we opened our doors for people to gather, rest, and warm up. 

Both of those events, and it’s just a coincidence that they occurred in conjunction with this Sunday’s lectionary readings, are evidence of our efforts to use our space for outreach and to support the community. If you’ve been around here for a while, you know that we have done many other things in this regard—opening our doors during protests, for groups to gather before and after engaging with legislators, for our food pantry, for the homeless shelter, for concerts.

Over the last year, we have engaged in conversations about our witness and mission in the community. These conversations have seemed especially urgent as the shelter’s departure at the beginning of the pandemic not only left a lot of vacant space in our building, it also left a gaping hole in our congregational identity and mission.

All of those conversations are beginning to bear fruit. Over the last few weeks, I have met with a couple of entities that are interested in using our space for their work. You will all hear more about this in the weeks to come, as proposals are presented and more details emerge. 

As we reflect on where we have been as a congregation, where God is calling us in this present moment, it seems especially appropriate that today’s gospel reading points us directly toward the question of call. We often hear a text like this and want to interpret it light of our own lives, to reflect on God’s call of us, and where Jesus might be asking us to follow him.

Let’s delve into the text. First of all, a bit of context might be helpful. We’re dropped into Matthew’s story of Jesus after he was baptized by John, and after his temptation in the wilderness. So today’s gospel reading comes immediately after Jesus has been tempted by Satan. It’s the beginning of his public ministry, and it begins on an ominous note, after John’s arrest.

Matthew tells us that after hearing of John’s arrest, Jesus withdraws, he returns to Galilee, his home country, presumably having been further south, around the Jordan River, where he was baptized, where John was preaching, and where he himself was tempted. 

In essence, Jesus is going back home; but he’s going there because Herod arrested John the Baptist. It’s likely that Jesus felt himself under threat and suspicion because of the action taken against John; after all, the two were associated. 

So one might imagine that Jesus was feeling fearful, concerned about the future, concerned about his future. But he did not hide. He may have gone to Galilee, but in the midst of whatever fear he might have had, he chose at that very moment, in all of the uncertainty, to begin his public ministry. More than that, Jesus emphatically chose to continue John the Baptist’s ministry. Matthew reports as a summary of Jesus’ proclamation: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” 

Let me pause and make two observations because to twenty-first century ears, this language sounds overly pious and a bit old-fashioned. When we hear the word “repent” our minds go to the overt rituals and drama of repentance—feeling shame and guilt over sins and seeking God’s forgiveness, whether we do this individually and privately, or in the context of the sacrament of Confession. Similarly, “kingdom of heaven” sends our minds to pearly gates, angels with harps, and streets paved with gold. Both of those sets of images are misleading.

The word translated here as “repent” is the Greek “metanoiete” which literally means “change your mind.” So it’s not so much feeling remorse for one’s actions and seeking forgiveness, but a complete transformation in one’s point of view; the way one looks at the world, perhaps even, a transformation of who we are at our very core. 

Similarly, while Matthew almost exclusively uses the phrase “kingdom of heaven,” it’s his wording for what in the gospels of Mark and Luke is called the kingdom of God and kingdom should be thought of not as a place, a territory or nation, but a qualitative existence—we could say “reign of God.” We will have a great deal more to say about the reign of God as we work through the Gospel of Matthew this coming year. Especially now, we might even translate it as “empire” and interpret Jesus’ proclamation of the “empire of God” as a direct challenge to Rome. God’s power and justice is present around us and in this very world, confronting and overturning the power and oppression of Rome.

From that brief summary of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, Matthew turns to the story of Jesus calling the first disciples. In its brevity and simplicity, it invites all sorts of questions. Why did Peter and Andrew, James and John, respond in such a way to Jesus’ call? Did they know Jesus? Had they heard about him? Was it something in his demeanor that motivated them? Were they so ground down and dispirited by lives caught up in the grinding poverty and oppression of Roman occupation that they jumped at the opportunity to break free? Or, as many scholars think, were they somewhat successful? If they owned their own boats, they may have had decent livelihoods. In any case, they left what they were doing, they left their families and homes, and followed Jesus. 

We may think it was an individual call, but it was a call in community and to community. Peter and Andrew, James and John, heard the call together, and answered it together, and when they followed Jesus, they were the first members of the community Jesus was calling into existence, a community that includes us and all those throughout the generations who have responded to that call.

We gather here, in this place, on this square, and with those who join us remotely in response to God’s call. In the heart of this city, God is calling us to share the good news of Jesus Christ, to work for justice and peace. 

Last Sunday, we heard Mark Charles speak eloquently about the injustices the people of the United States have inflicted on Native Americans over the centuries; how our most revered heroes and presidents participated in and perpetrated those evils. He called us, not to reconciliation because that word assumes there was a prior state of relationship or community. Instead, he called us to conciliation, to building relationships with indigenous peoples, to become their allies and to build a more just and equitable society.

In Madison, we are hearing a great deal about the need for affordable housing. We are also seeing how efforts to change zoning laws, to make it possible to build more affordable housing, are resisted by some of our most progressive leaders and media, because those efforts threaten neighborhoods and historic districts. We’re all for justice and equity, except when our home values might be threatened, or when people of different ethnicity or socioeconomic status might move next to us.

Jesus is calling us to leave our boats, to leave our complacency and comfort, and follow him into a future and into community that welcomes all and where all might flourish. May we have the courage to follow him into that unknown and possible future.

November 27, 2022

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I’m not one of those people who complains every spring and fall when we have to change our clocks for daylight savings time. Sure, it’s a hassle, and there used to be the stress of wondering whether we’d forget and get to church either an hour early or an hour late—but cell phones have done away with that anxiety. I don’t really care about losing or gaining an hour of sleep, for truth be told, I never sleep well on Saturday nights—I’m always worrying about my sermon and about what’s going to happen on Sunday morning.

Still, there’s something shocking about that first Sunday evening when it gets dark an hour earlier than it did the night before. Whatever the temperature outside, the fact that it grows dark around 5:00 is a reminder that winter is coming, and I feel my body and spirit coming to terms with that fact.

We’re deep into it now in late November. We had a little over 9 hours of daylight yesterday; thankfully it was sunny and warm, so our spirits weren’t oppressed by the dreariness of a cloudy November day. We know it will get darker; that the days are still getting shorter. 

One of the realities of modern life is the extent to which the electric lightbulb has changed our lives and cultures. The inevitability, the ubiquity, the sheer pervasiveness of darkness has been overcome permanently. It takes a power outage to remind us of the human struggle against darkness, the futility of that struggle, and all the ways that darkness limited and continues to limit human life and culture in so many ways.

Light, darkness. In spite of our technology that keeps absolute darkness at bay most of the time, we all know what it’s like when we turn on a flashlight in a dark space and are able to orient ourselves to our environment. We also know what it’s like when the light suddenly goes out and we don’t quite know where we are. This experience, the contrast of light and darkness are definitive aspects of human experience. We may tend to think of them as oppositional and there’s temptation to give them moral qualities—light is good, dark is evil. Certainly, one can see such tendencies in scripture.

Light and darkness is a leitmotif of our season and those that are to follow—Christmas and Epiphany. Think of the opening verses of the Gospel of John that is read on Christmas Day each year: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot comprehend it.”

The collect for the First Sunday of Advent highlights this theme: “give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light…” It is a quotation from the epistle reading, in which Paul urges his readers to pay attention, to wake up from their sleep for the night is far gone, the day is near, by which he means Christ’s coming.  

There’s something about the advent wreath that conveys the tentativeness, the vulnerability of the season, and of our hope. Around us, the world grows darker as the days grow shorter. Around us, the world is dark—literally so in Ukraine where Russian missiles and drones knock out the power grid, forcing millions to shiver in the cold and struggle in darkness. The world is dark, the relentless march of mass shootings across our country. The light of hope seems nearly extinguished. 

But in the midst of that darkness, even as we know more darkness is to come, week by week we light the candles of Advent, and as we do the Advent wreath grows brighter, its witness stronger, even as the darkness of the season deepens. 

The witness of a single candle burning in a space shrouded by dusk or darkness. That is a metaphor of our Advent experience. St. Paul was writing a couple of decades after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. We sense already in this text some of the uncertainty that arose as Christ’s expected return, in majesty as the collect says, was delayed. Stay awake, he admonishes, the night is far gone.

For us, that urgency, that expectation is even more distant. Oh we know all about those Christians who look for signs of Christ’s imminent return; those who interpret every historical event in light of the Book of Revelation or other biblical prophecies. But really, do most of us think that the loudest exponents of Christ’s imminent return believe it, or rather that they are using it to gain power, prestige, and wealth?

Do we believe it? We say we do, every Sunday, when we recite the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Still, the second coming of Christ, is one of those doctrines with which we might struggle, even as we acknowledge, as we see in the gospel reading as well as in the epistle the centrality of that belief to early Christianity and to the teachings of Jesus as well.

It may seem so farfetched that we press it from our minds, leave it to those other Christians to ponder, to reflect on, and to exploit. Our feet are on the ground, we take comfort in the rational world in which we live, and so we push away those beliefs—even if, from time to time, our minds may wander and wonder. 

The images are gripping aren’t they? Two people in the field, one taken, one left. When we hear it, our mind goes to the stories we’ve heard or the movies we’ve seen that claim to depict Jesus’ second coming and the Rapture—a 19th century invention that has gripped the fascination of generations of especially American Christians.  

If not that, then what? I don’t mean to demythologize or downplay the Second Coming. It is, after all, a central concept in Christianity. One way of thinking about it is that it highlights the contrast between what is and what should be. We know all about what is: the violence, the evil and hatred, I won’t recite the litany. We have a sense that things aren’t right and when we hear the words of scripture as the vision described in Isaiah 2, we feel in the marrow of our bones the disconnect between the world we inhabit and the world that God intends: a world of peace and justice, where swords are beat into plowshares.

At its core, the Second Coming is an expression of our hope that God will make all things right, that God will bring justice and peace, an end to suffering. 

And so, in Advent, we light week by week the candles of the advent wreath, expressing our hope that even in the darkness of our world and of our lives, we can discern the light of God’s presence. And as the candles burn, they proclaim our faith that Christ will come and make all things new. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overwhelm it. Amen.

Past, Present, Future: A Sermon for Proper 28C, November 13, 2022

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As I began looking over the lessons for today, I began to experience a powerful sense of disorientation. It was like a movie that was full of flashbacks and flash forwards, leaving the viewer confused and uncertain of what was happening when, and hoping that it would all get resolved in the final reel. 

Let me explain. There’s that wonderful passage from Isaiah 65, in which the prophet describes a vision of a new heaven and a new earth; a new Jerusalem full of joy, where there is no weeping nor untimely death; where the wolf and the lamb feed together, and the lion eats straw like an ox.

The prophet, writing after the return from Babylonian exile in the 5th century BCE, is looking ahead to a messianic future where God has made all things new, right, and just. Contrast that with the gospel reading. Our gospel reading dates from some 600 years later. Luke is writing at the end of the first century, or perhaps even early in the 2nd, is describing the last days of Jesus’ life, after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Jesus and his disciples spent the days of this last week in the temple, where Jesus overturned the tables of moneychangers, taught, and debated with various religious leaders and groups. 

The temple, rebuilt after the Babylonian exile, had been greatly expanded and renovated by Herod the Great, a building project that began decades earlier and was probably still underway when Jesus and his disciples arrived. It was, by all accounts, magnificent. It would have dominated the landscape and pilgrims would have been able to see its marble walls gleaming in the sun from miles away.

But, as the disciples, tourists from the hinterlands of Galilee, looked at it for the first time, exclaimed in awe at its beauty, Jesus predicts its destruction: Not a single stone will be left standing on another. And he was right. In 40 years, around the year 70, the temple would be destroyed by the Roman legions as part of their suppression of the Jewish rebellion. Ultimately, all that would be left was what remains now, the wailing wall, as it’s called, part of a retaining wall that had supported the temple itself.

That wasn’t all that Jesus had to say. He went on, as we heard, to predict a very different future than the peaceful , abundant, and joyous one described in the Isaiah passage: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.”

There is a more helpful message in the midst of the doom and gloom. Jesus urged his followers not to be terrified when they heard of wars and rumors of wars. And though he predicted his followers would suffer persecution, he promised that he would give them strength, courage, and the words they would need to testify to the truth of his message.

Luke was writing decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, decades after the destruction of the temple and the ruthless suppression of the Jewish rebellion that likely forced many of that second or third generation of Christians to flee Jerusalem and the surrounding area. The early expectation that Jesus would return in glory and power to establish God’s reign was slowly giving way to disappointment and bewilderment as Christians began to rethink that belief and develop theological coping mechanisms that would allow their survival into the future. 

So to summarize, there’s an confusing, disorienting relationship to time and to history evident in these passages. This feeling of disorientation may be familiar to us. It’s not just the semi-annual changing of the clocks that requires our bodies to reorient themselves to the cycles of waking and sleep. There are all the ways in which our technology and lifestyles have collapsed traditional categories and experiences. We know what’s happening half-way around the world as it’s happening. Video and social media posts bring the experiences of war, natural disasters, and other events onto our screens and into our lives.

The dislocation and disruption of the last years have also contributed to that disorientation. The pre-pandemic world seems like a mirage,  a fantasy that bears little reality to the lives we live now, the world in which we live, even as we desperately try to recapture that world in so many ways.

And still, in the midst of that disorientation, time marches on. We are nearing the end of the liturgical year. Two weeks from today is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new Christian year. Our readings are preparing us for that season of preparation. Advent is a time when we look ahead to Christ’s coming, both his coming at Christmas and his Second Coming in power and majesty. It’s a time of joy and hope but it is also a time of reflection during which we are called to open our hearts and cultivate the soil of our souls in advance of both of Christ’s comings.

Advent’s imminent arrival reminds us that the world we inhabit, the time that we inhabit, are transformed by the incarnation of Christ, the coming of Christ into the world. As we pass through the liturgical seasons year after year, from Advent and Christmas through Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, we remember, we reenter that story of Christ’s coming, his death and resurrection, making it present to us, making it our present. But simultaneously the time and place of the world around us have their own rhythms and pace, their own presence.

The disruption and disorientation of our scripture readings careen us back and forth across different possible futures: a new heaven and a new earth; wars and rumors of wars. As they disorient us they also offer us orientation, toward Christ—toward the coming of Christ, the moment that transformed and continues to transform all of history. 

We long for permanence. We want stability. The thick stone walls and spire of Grace Church are testimony to the presence of God’s people in this place over the last almost 200 years and many of us work hard to ensure that this place, this congregation, survives and thrives long into the future. Its sturdy structure gives us confidence, assurance, and hope. How often have we, like those around Jesus, praised its beauty?

The future may fill us with fear. We may mourn what we have lost; the past that we remember or half-remember. We may wish the world hadn’t changed, and that the rapid changes taking place would stop. We may worry about our own futures, the futures of our children and grandchildren, the future of the planet.

Christ promises to be with us, to be present with us, to give us, as he says in today’s gospel, word and wisdom to confess our faith in the midst of the world’s suffering. Christ is with us now, present among us. In word and sacrament, the disorientation of the world and of time, are reoriented toward the one who created time and redeems time; the one whose coming we await, and who comes to us now in the Eucharistic feast. Thanks be to God.

Messy Lives, Messy Faith: A sermon for Proper 22C, October 2, 2022

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By the rivers of Babylon

Proper 22C

October 2 2022

Today is our annual blessing of the animals. In a few minutes, I will invite those of you have brought pets with you, or if you have photographs, or ashes of deceased beloved animals, to come forward for a blessing. We’ve done this many different ways over the years at Grace, but always on a date close to the feast of St. Francis of Assisi which is observed on October 3. Some years, we have changed our readings so that instead of the regular Sunday lectionary, we read the lessons and prayers appointed for the Feast of St. Francis. 

It’s a messy day, messy liturgically because we are doing multiple and somewhat contradictory things, messy because we have among us dogs and other animals that disrupt the decorum of the church. But I’m always reminded when dogs are among us that altar rails became a thing to prevent dogs from entering the holy space of the altar. You’ll note that we no longer have an altar rail that can do that.

One of the few pluses of the past few years of pandemic is that the messiness of our lives was on display for all to see, thanks to zoom and other technological things. I’m not sure how many times a meeting, or morning prayer was disrupted by kittens or cats running through the house and across the keyboard. Zoom, especially for those of us who never created backgrounds, provided windows into the messiness of our lives, the cracked ceilings, the bookshelves that are disorganized with papers everywhere.

That messiness, and the relationships powerfully symbolized by the pets among us, here or at home, remind us of something else profound, the ways in which our lives, even our spiritual lives don’t always present themselves publicly the way we would want them to. More deeply, we might recognize ways in which we don’t admit the messiness of our spiritual lives to ourselves—those places, those hidden things that we don’t like to be reminded of, or confess but have a way of revealing themselves to us, and often to others, at inopportune moments.

Last week’s gospel, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, confronted us with the ways in which we fail to live up to the gospel imperative to love and care for others. We have all walked past homeless people, turning our heads away, offering nothing to panhandlers. In today’s readings, we are confronted with something else entirely, but perhaps even more challenging.

The reading from Lamentations, and Psalm 137, reflect the pain and suffering of a defeated people, forced into exile. Both bear witness to the deep distress and spiritual upheaval caused by military defeat and forced removal. We know about this, if only from the images and stories from the war in Ukraine: cities, cultural and historical monuments destroyed, thousands killed, millions forced to flee.

The texts convey the pain. Lamentations, written by someone who witnessed the devastation, saw the ruined buildings, the empty streets, the destroyed temple. The psalm, written by an exile poet, expressing their deep distress, their crisis of faith:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, *
when we remembered you, O Zion.

2 As for our harps, we hung them up *
on the trees in the midst of that land.

3 For those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
and our oppressors called for mirth: *
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

4 How shall we sing the Lord’S song *
upon an alien soil.

These beautiful, tragic words echo across the millennia. They describe not only the experience of the Babylonian exiles but also the experiences of millions of others over that vast expanse of time, forced from their homes by war, famine, natural disaster, and now climate change. 

But that’s not all. The pasalm ends on a very different note, one so violent that I did not include the its last verse in our service bulletin. It speaks of bloody and violent vengeance, calling down God’s wrath on the conquerors. And that too is part of the experience of victims of war and other forms of violence—the desire to get back, to punish. That’s part of the messiness of human life, too.

Still, there’s something important that neither the psalm nor the reading from Lamentations mentions. The experience of defeat and exile was not only about mourning and desire for revenge. It was also about something else. Something radical, transformational happened while the exiles were in Babylon. In the ancient world, if a people were defeated in war, it meant not only the conquerors were more powerful, it also meant that the conquerors gods were more powerful than the defeated people’s gods. Usually, always, the defeated people lost their religion and their culture, being subsumed into the larger more powerful conquering culture.

In the case of the Babylonian exiles, that didn’t happen. They reflected on their experiences and as they reflected, they came to a new understanding of their God and what it meant to be faithful to that God. And when they returned from exile, they brought that new understanding, and newly created scriptural texts back to Jerusalem with them, and in doing so forged a new faith that would carry them, and their Jewish descendants, through the millennia, down to the present.

In the gospel, the disciples ask Jesus, “Increase our faith!” It’s something we all might ask; something we can imagine those people forced from their homes millennia ago, or people forced from their homes today, might ask. Faced with the prospects of having to abandon homes, or with the prospect of rebuilding lives after hurricanes, as people across the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, South Carolina are facing today, feelings of despair, doubt, may seem natural. For us, too, faced with our own struggles, the suffering in the world, we may be overwhelmed by despair, we may feel helpless, powerless. But what little faith we have, the messy faith we have, may be enough. Jesus is there, among the suffering, the victims of violence, war, and natural disaster, Jesus is here with us, in the midst of whatever struggles we are facing. Jesus’ arms pick us up when we fall down; he carries us when we are too weak, he brings us to this table where we feast with him. Thanks be to God.

Fashioned by God, refashioned by Jesus: A Sermon for Proper 18C, September 4, 2022

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I have an old friend who’s a potter. We’ve pretty much known each other all our lives. Grew up in the same town, he was a year older, in my sister’s class and a friend of hers. We went to the same college and after graduation, he went back home and became the potter at the local historic village/ museum set up by a wealthy entrepreneur. I would drop by his studio every time I went home and if there weren’t many people around, I would watch him throwing pots as we would chat, catching up on our lives and other friends and acquaintances. Like all potters, as he is creating his art, occasionally things will go wrong. There’s a fault in the object he has on the wheel and he has to take it all back down, start over. There’s something mesmerizing about watching a potter at work

Somewhere, I’ve got a pitcher of his I bought at a college art fair many years ago. We also have a number of his more recent pieces. Over the course of his career, he has become adept not only at making useful, attractive objects but also at using glazes to create stunning works of art. 

This reading from Jeremiah is one of the most vivid and memorable images in all of scripture. It has also lent itself to reinterpretation and adaptation as the image of the potter and the clay has become a common way of thinking about our individual relationships with God, “You are the potter, I am the clay” goes the old song. 

But before exploring the image, let’s go back and get a bit of background. We’ve actually been reading about the Hebrew prophetic tradition throughout this season after Pentecost. We were introduced to Elijah and Elisha, then Amos, who was the first of the Hebrew prophets to have his words written down and recorded. Now we come to Jeremiah, who was active for around 40 years or more. He began his work in the 620s, during the reign of Josiah, who introduced a number of religious reforms, chief among them an insistence on worship and sacrifice in Jerusalem at the temple (the book of Deuteronomy reflects these concerns). Jeremiah’s prophecies address these same concerns, especially the tendency to worship other gods, the gods of Canaanite religion, Baal and Astarte

Alongside these religious concerns are the political ones. Judah, the southern kingdom is being threatened by Babylon. Eventually it will be conquered, the temple destroyed, and the religious and political elite of Judah carried off into captivity in Babylon. Under threat, the king of Judah wants to make an alliance with Egypt, something Jeremiah opposes and which contributes to his troubles (imprisonment and exile).

Against this context Jeremiah’s visit to the Potter’s House, and the Word of the Lord that comes to him there becomes quite clear. God is the potter, Judah the clay. God chose and called the people of Israel, created the monarchy, and nourished it. But their apostasy and disobedience have angered God, who will destroy them as a potter destroys a misshapen pot on the wheel. Nevertheless, if the people repent and turn away from the worship of false gods, God may restore them and recreate them.

While this may be the context for the original prophetic oracle—Judah’s apostasy and the existential threat to the nation posed by the Babylonian empire, there is significant biblical warrant for reinterpreting it as the Christian tradition has done, to think about our relationship with God as that of a potter and clay.

Indeed, the biblical story of creation lends itself to that interpretation—God created human beings out of the dust of the earth, fashioned the human as a sculptor fashions a sculpture. That sense of intimacy alongside the creative power of God is evidenced in the first verses of Jeremiah—words we heard a couple of weeks ago: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.”

That same intimacy and deep connection between God and us human beings is eloquently described in today’s Psalm:

Lord, you have searched me out and known me; *
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

 My body was not hidden from you, *
while I was being made in secret
and woven in the depths of the earth.

15 Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
all of them were written in your book; *
they were fashioned day by day,
when as yet there was none of them.

This sense of being shaped, created, formed by God may seem a long way away from the hard words Jesus says in today’s gospel reading.

In today’s gospel, Jesus seems to be making statements about family relationships that radically upend our feelings and ideas about traditional family ties. 

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”

What to make of this? On first hearing, Jesus’ language seems offensive, overly harsh. In its context, it may be hyperbolic, exaggeration. Jesus uses such stark language to drive home the point that if one wants to follow Jesus, be his disciple, nothing else should matter as much.

Our tendency when we hear Jesus say things like he says in today’s gospel reading, is to dismiss it. Either he can’t really mean what he says, or it’s so outlandish as to be completely irrelevant to our lives. And if he means it, then maybe I don’t want to sign on to this Jesus stuff, and anyone who does is crazy, which may be a judgment many of us make regarding others who call themselves Christian. 

But to do that is to let ourselves off the hook; to relegate Jesus to some hidden corner of our lives that is largely irrelevant. Jesus’ words challenge us to think about what he hold most dear, what our deepest commitments are, what are priorities and values really are. And Jesus’ words challenge us to reshape our lives in conformity to him, to reshape our relationships, commitments, and priorities.

We live in a messy world. We lead messy lives. We face all kinds of decisions in our lives that seem not to be clear-cut. We face choices at work that might seem the lesser of two evils; we wonder what it might mean to follow Jesus’ call. Whether the decisions are large or small, it’s about trying to be faithful day in, day out. Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow him. These words challenge us to follow him in all of our lives, in everything we do. They challenge us to get our priorities in line. They challenge us to see everything in light of the cross. Everything! All that we do, all of our values, our hopes and fears, the things we love most dearly lie in the shadow of the cross, by the love demonstrated by Christ’s outstretched arms, and by his call to follow him.

An onerous burden indeed. But even as we hear Jesus’ call to us, to take up our cross and follow him, even as we hear his words that we must hate father and mother, brother and sister, if we want to enter God’s reign, we also need to remember that the burden is not wholly on us. God is working in us, on us, as a potter works on clay, fashioning us into the creatures, the human beings, God desires us to become helping us, through the grace given us in Jesus Christ, to be the vessels of God’s love, pouring out that love into the world. Thanks be to God.