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Buried in Love: A Sermon for Proper 25A, 2023

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October 29, 2023

This has been a year of funerals at Grace. By my count, including those of members both here and offsite, we’ve had twelve, including the one coming up on. That many funerals takes a toll, on volunteers and staff, on the life of the congregation, on our emotional and spiritual well-being. The number of those who have passed, their absence from our pews and from the life of our congregation is a burden we will carry with us. For me and for many of you, it’s not just those we’ve lost this year; it’s all the others who have entered the larger life; people who gave so much of their time, energy, skills, and expertise to Grace; people who meant so much to us.

This past Tuesday, I performed another ritual as part of our love and care for our deceased loved ones. I took a spade, and in the courtyard garden, dug a hole in which we would later inter the ashes of one of our faithfully departed members. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I would say those familiar words a few minutes later, but as I dug, a few steps away, volunteers were welcoming guests to the food pantry, and a few steps further away, people were walking by on the sidewalk, oblivious to what I was doing.

In today’s reading from Deuteronomy, we come to the final scene of Moses’ life. We have heard over the last months, the story of the God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that God would make of them a mighty nation, and that God would give them the land of Canaan as their possession. But those promises have not been realized. Now, at the end of Deuteronomy, the Israelites have still not entered the Promised Land, and their leader, Moses, who had brought them out of bondage in Egypt, would die, like his ancestors, with that dream and promise unfulfilled. 

But in the last scene of his life, God showed him all of that land. It’s particularly poignant to hear that story, and that promise now, in these weeks, as war rages in that very land, some three thousand years later. The effects of that promise endure, weaponized by hatred and the thirst for revenge, countless lives have been lost over the centuries and today.

But there’s the promise and God showing Moses all of that land, and then Moses dies. I would like to draw your attention to another theme in the story and that is the relationship between Moses and God. Here, we are told that God knew Moses face to face. We have seen details of the intimate relationship the two shared. We have seen Moses appeal to God on behalf of the Israelites, we have seen him ask to see God’s glory, and instead to be seen God’s backside from the cleft of a rock, while his face was shielded by God’s hand. We have seen his face transformed by his encounter with God, shining.

Now we see something else, although it is obscured by the translation we use. In the report of Moses’ death, our text reads, “He was buried in a valley in the Land of Moab…” The Hebrew actually reads, “he buried him” that is, God buried him. That tender, intimate act, the image of God taking up a shovel and burying God’s beloved and devoted servant is evidence of the intimacy the two shared. It points to God’s care and concern for God’s people.

It also calls to mind other stories. At the very beginning of the Pentateuch, in Genesis, we are shown God’s tender actions in creating human beings, the man out of the dust of the earth, and the woman from the man’s rib. We also see God’s tenderness, care, and protection of the first humans, when after they sinned, God made clothes for them out of animal skins.

We might be turned off by the intimacy and earthiness of this imagery, of the notion that God might create out of the dust of the earth, that God might take up needle and thread, or that God might bury Moses. Such language might seem overly mythological or anthropomorphic, a far cry from the God of the philosophers or of contemporary theology. 

But such language can offer us comfort and strengthen our faith. To imagine a God so intimately involved in the lives of those God loves, a God whose concern and care extends to the clothes on our back or the disposition of our final remains, a God who knows us face to face, can be a source of strength when we struggle or stumble.

And it also, I think, helps us reflect in a new way on the story from the gospel, in which a lawyer asks Jesus to prioritize the commandments. Jesus’ response is hardly revolutionary.  His words are quotations from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, straight out of Moses’ law. 

It’s worth stressing that Jesus is saying nothing outside of the Jewish tradition. It’s not just only that this understanding of the centrality of love of God and neighbor in the Mosaic law is enshrined in scripture. In Jesus’ own day, it was an idea that was widely shared. A contemporary of his, Rabbi Hillel, is remembered to have said in response to a similar question, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it.”—A reminder, much needed in these days of rampant Anti-Semitism, that Jesus’ teachings were well within the larger framework of 1st century Judaism.

Be that as it may, these words of Jesus continue to challenge us profoundly. We have compartmentalized so much of ourselves, so much of our lives. We place our faith in God in one small sphere of our lives, for Sunday mornings, for example, or for those quiet moments of prayer and meditation. We think of love as an emotion, we talk of falling in or out of love, or we say, we love this or that food, or activity. We are commanded, in Deuteronomy, here in Jesus’ words, to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind—we might say “with all of our selves, with our whole being.” I’m not sure I can even fathom what that might look like for me, what that would be like to love God with all of myself. And then, on top of that, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourself. Is that even possible?

Here’s where I think the earthy, intimate image of God burying Moses might be of help. For in that very human, incredibly intimate action—I bet most of us are turned off by it, by the idea of the transcendent, immortal, invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, being though of performing that very intimate even offensive act, who of us could imagine, in this day and age, actually burying a loved one with our own hands—in that incredibly intimate action, we see a parable of God’s love for us. Imagine God lowering Godself to care for us so intimately. Imagine that love. If God can love us so powerfully and intimately, how can we not love God with the same intensity, with our whole selves, hearts, minds, and souls?

 And if God can love us, how can we not love our selves? That element of this statement is often ignored. We might think that to love ourselves is somehow sinful, inappropriate; yet if you think about it, love of neighbor is predicated on love of self; love of neighbor requires love of self. And when so many people have internalized self-hatred, to open out the possibility that we, too, are worthy of love, well; that’s a gift worth receiving.

And finally, if we love God, and love ourselves as God loves us, how can we not also love our neighbor, who like us, is loved by God? How we live out and incarnate love may take different forms. It may be in the way we at Grace care for members of our community and their loved ones when they pass. It may be through the work of our food pantry and its many volunteers who offer food to those who are food insecure. It may take many other forms as well, by welcoming the stranger; opening our doors for programs like Uptown Sanctuary or Off the Square Club. There may also be new opportunities that we haven’t yet discerned; ways the Holy Spirit may be moving among us to share God’s love, to be God’s love.

Have patience! I’ll pay everything: A Sermon for Proper 19A, 2023

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Some of Jesus’ parables are enigmatic, puzzling. They seem to defy interpretation, like the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, that we will hear next Sunday. Some are familiar, so familiar that their interpretations seem fixed for all time. Some seem to be obvious, stories with a single point that gets hammered home. Then there are parables like the one we heard this morning, a story that we can all connect with but that has some twists and turns that may make us uncomfortable.

On the surface we get it. Though it’s set in an ancient context, in slavery, with a lord or master who demands accounting from his slaves, debt is something we all know about. We’ve heard about the effects of crushing medical debt, incurred through no fault of one’s own, the product of illness, or injury, the random attack of cancer, but caused above all by a medical system that seems designed to draw profits from people at their most vulnerable and weakest. We know about student loan debt, again incurred in the effort to improve one’s lot in life, but thanks to federal policy, and a higher education system more interested in profits than learning, it can become crushing and impossible to pay off, with interest often far exceeding the original amount of the loans. 

So when we encounter a story about debt, and the forgiveness of debt, we think we’re in territory we know. But wait a sec. Let’s consider the numbers. What is a talent (and no, it’s not a God-given ability; in fact, our word talent derives from the Greek word that’s used here). A talent was a unit of measure, of weight. It was about 130 lbs, and in monetary terms, used of silver, and was roughly equal to 15 yrs of an ordinary worker’s wages. So 10,000 talents would be worth 150,000 yrs of work. To put it another way, about equal to 3000 lifetimes. An astronomical sum, isn’t it?

And so the questions start popping up. How could a slave incur so much debt? Well, say for a moment it’s hyperbole. The point is that it is an amount that could never be repaid in one’s lifetime—there, that brings it back down to earth, and to a place we’re familiar with. We have all heard the stories of people saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt; and the only way out from under that debt is to declare bankruptcy.

We get all that. We can even imagine pleading with a debt collecting agency for mercy. We can see our selves down on our knees, begging to be given relief from that staggering debt. And we can imagine also the joy when we hear the response: “Your debt is forgiven.”

But then comes the twist. Having received mercy, his enormous debt forgiven, the slave goes out and encounters another slave who owes him a debt. It’s not as big a debt as the first; only 100 denarii—a denarius being roughly a day’s wages for a laborer. We hear the very same words from the second slave, “Have patience with me and I will pay you everything.” 

But the first slave reacts differently than his master did. Instead of offering mercy, he has the second slave imprisoned. But he gets his comeuppance. The other slaves, having seen all this, probably having heard about what their master had done for him, his sudden good fortune, his freedom from debt; having heard all this, they go back to the master and tell him what happened. He ends up in the same place where he had sent the second slave, in prison being tortured for his lack of mercy. 

One of the challenges of this parable is that it is so easy to allegorize it—to equate the master, the lord with God. But if we do that, we’re left in a very uncomfortable place at the end of the story—with a master, a God, who retracts his mercy, punishes the slave for his actions and his debts. What was it Jesus said in the intro to the parable? To forgive as many as seventy seven times—hardly what the master did, is it?

I think there’s something else going on here. In the Roman empire as in our own day, debt was ubiquitous. It was hard to imagine a world without debt, an economy that didn’t rely on debt. In the end, neither the master, nor the slave could break free of those assumptions, that worldview that saw debt as essential, as all-pervasive.

But in the Jewish tradition, in the Biblical tradition there was an alternative. The Torah imagines a debt-free society; a day of rest when one has no work obligations; a sabbatical year when the land lies fallow; and the year of Jubilee, the 50th year, when all debts are erased, slaves freed, land that was sold returned to its original owner. 

You may be thinking of the Lord’s Prayer—In Matthew, the text reads, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” To be free of debt; to live in a society that is debt-free, what would that even look like?

I was fascinated and saddened this summer as I watched the debate over student loan forgiveness unfold. Countless people spoke of their experiences, attending college without accumulating any debt; or working hard for years to pay it off as they criticized the president’s plan to forgive student loans. It wasn’t fair, they said. They rarely pointed out that when they were in school, the price of tuition was much lower, interest rates on student loans were much lower. They didn’t point out that all of those billions of dollars of payroll protection loans made during COVID were forgiven. Like the first slave, we may rejoice if our debts are forgiven, and we may be reluctant to forgive the debts of others.

The parable leaves us with questions, even though its meaning is quite clear. We should forgive those who owe us, just as God forgives us. But the questions—why does the king not forgive the slave a second time? After all, Jesus has told Peter to forgive not seven but seventy seven times. The parable invites us to think of forgiveness as a calculus—there exists, somewhere a finite number of times, beyond which it is not necessary to forgive. But that’s precisely the wrong way of thinking about things.

To think about forgiveness as a debt suggests that we understand it in terms we comprehend—mathematics or economics, and given all the talk of debt in our culture, we are sorely tempted to go down that route. That’s overlooking something that is crucial in understanding Peter’s question: “How often should I forgive my brother? For that question implies there is relationship between the one forgiving and the one owed. Including that in the equation changes everything. 

We ask God to forgive us and we experience God’s forgiveness, rich, unbounded, unmerited. It is that relationship and that experience that should shape our own forgiveness. That is the point both of Jesus’ answer to Peter and the parable itself.

I have lived long enough and served as a pastor long enough to know that pain and anger from hurt can last a very long time. We process things quite differently; in different ways and at different speeds. Even the same hurt inflicted on two different people can linger in very different ways in those who have been affected. That’s true not only in our personal lives, but also when we think about events like those we commemorate today. Forgiving others may be difficult, even, at times, impossible. Yet our God, who has forgiven us so deeply and so completely, invites us, not only to be forgiven, but to forgive in the same way, richly, unboundedly, and totally. Thanks be to God!

Hiroshima and Transfiguration.: A sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration, 2023

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Feast of the Transfiguration

August 6, 2023

Today is The Feast of the Transfiguration, when the church commemorates the mysterious, ethereal appearance of Elijah and Moses with Jesus. Jesus’ appearance was transformed—hence, transfigured—and appeared “dazzling white” as our gospel reading relates. This is actually the second time this year that we have heard about the Transfiguration. It is also always the gospel reading on the last Sunday before Lent. Today, August 6 is its feast day, and the Book of Common Prayer stipulates that when the 6th falls on a Sunday, it supersedes the customary lectionary readings.

Today is also the 78th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That’s an event that has returned to our cultural consciousness with the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s bio-pic Oppenheimer about the leader of the Manhattan Project, the effort to harness the power of the atom for military use. I’ve not seen the movie yet, although I have read a great deal about it. In case you were wondering, I’ve not seen Barbie, either—In fact, I’ve not stepped inside a movie theatre since the pandemic.

Among the many things written about Oppenheimer, one commonly noted observation is that the film does not go into any detail about the horror unleashed by the bomb, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also left untold is the impact on the local community of the creation of the facilities at Los Alamos—the dispossession of native and Hispanic residents; their employment at the site, and the effects of the radiation on those workers and the local population as a whole; a danger from they which were not given protection, unlike the white scientists and employees.

For people of my age or older, the image of mushroom clouds, the description of the flash of light of detonation, are firmly fixed in our memories. We remember air-raid shelters, the threat of nuclear war, of mutually assured destruction. The awesome, horrible power of an atomic bomb was never far from our thoughts or fears until the gradual thaw of relations between east and west and the end of the Soviet Union, fears that began to rekindle with the invasion of Ukraine last year.

The mushroom cloud, the blinding light of explosion, the invisible radiation that continued to devastate the bodies of survivors for the rest of their lives, seem to confirm the famous quote from the Bhagavad Ghita that Oppenheimer used to make sense of the bomb and his role in it: “Now, we are become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The horrific, literally blinding, brilliance of an atomic bomb explosion offers a dramatic contrast to the brilliance described in today’s gospel reading. If we were able to make a film of the scene, we might be inclined to make use of the special effects and CGI now common in Hollywood, and exploited by Director Christopher Nolan in showing the explosion of the first atomic bomb. And it might lead us to conclude that Peter’s response to this experience, “to make booths or dwellings” for the three heavenly beings, is completely inappropriate and misguided

But in fact, there’s more to it than that. Our reading from Exodus points us to the larger biblical and Jewish context for the Transfiguration. The lectionary is probably intended to have us look for parallels between the Transfiguration of Christ and the changed visage of Moses after his encounters with God on Mt. Sinai. Our translation is strange enough, with the mention of the veil that Moses wore over his face when speaking with the people. In the traditional Vulgate, the dominant Latin translation used throughout the Middle Ages, it reads that Moses’ face was horned; which explains why in so many works of art, most notably Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, he is depicted with horns.

But there’s another, equally significant connection between the story of the Transfiguration and Moses on Mt. Sinai. When Peter says, “Let us make booths, or dwellings…” –the word Peter uses here can also be translated as “Tabernacle” which was the symbol of God’s presence among the Israelites during their time in the wilderness, including Sinai. Tabernacle, booth, dwelling, is also an allusion to the Jewish Festival of Sukkoth, or Tabernacles, which commemorates the Israelites time in the wilderness.

So, rather than not getting the point, as is usually assumed with regard to Peter in this story, and elsewhere in the gospel, it may be that Peter is trying to make sense of this event, and to interpret it in light of his own experience and categories of understanding. A good Jew, encountering Christ’s transfiguration, and encounter with Moses and Elijah on top of a mountain, might readily assume that this was somehow connected with God’s appearance to Moses on Sinai and the traditional ways the Jewish community observed that event.

As we have been reminded so often in recent years, cataclysmic, unexpected, unthinkable events can change everything—Whether it’s the pandemic, insurrection, the reality of global warning that has been predicted and denied for so many years and now confronts us headon. But often those cataclysmic events, even when greeted with the response that “nothing will be the same after this” can lead to denial or escapism. We want things to return to the way they were, we want to pick up our lives right where they were left in abeyance. We want to reinterpret those events, downplay them. We want, like the Israelites responding to Moses’ shining face, to hide it behind a veil, to find ways to ignore or forget it. We want not to be reminded of the horrors, the awesome power, the way such an event changes us and everything around us.

That may be why the disciples told no one anything about what they had seen. They couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t find words to describe it, or their response to it. But they remembered.

Luke’s version of this story offers an additional insight into its meaning for the gospel as a whole and for us. Luke is the only one of the gospels to mention what Jesus, Moses, and Elijah talked about while they were together. We’re told: “they were speaking of his departure”—the word used here for departure is Exodus. It’s another allusion back to Hebrew Scripture but it also points to the deeper theme of Exodus—liberation. 

When they come down from the mountain, Jesus and his disciples will make their way to Jerusalem, to the cross and resurrection. It is a journey, an exodus, of liberation. It is a journey he invites us to join him as his followers and disciples. It is a journey into an uncertain future and into a challenging world. The disciples who experienced Jesus’ transfiguration had that experience to strengthen them, to give them courage and hope along the way. But the other disciples, the ones who didn’t go up the mountain with Jesus, had no such certainty. They accompanied Jesus nonetheless.

 Some of us may, like Peter, James, and John, have had spectacular experiences of spiritual enlightenment or clarity. We may have seen Jesus. But many of the rest of us may never had such high moments. We have no memories of such certainty to fall back on; and some of us, who have had such experiences, may no longer feel their power.

 Even so, Jesus calls us to walk with him on this journey of liberation, this exodus from the world we have inhabited, a world dominated by violence and evil, symbolized by the horror of the atomic bomb;  to a new world, the world of God’s reign, where God’s beauty and glory are made manifest in events like the Transfiguration; a world in which justice, peace, and love prevail. May our journeys liberate us from the bondage of the past, and free us to be the people God calls us to be.

The Parable of the Crazy Sower: A sermon for Proper 10A

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I never knew my grandfather, my dad’s father. He died around a decade before I was born. But growing up I heard lots of stories about him, and my dad and his siblings had the wisdom and foresight in the 1990s to write down their memories of growing up in the twenties and thirties, so my picture of my grandfather was filled out with more detail. 

He was a dairy farmer. He was an experimenter and innovator on the farm, trying new crops, like peanuts one year. One of the stories I heard repeatedly was how he would sort through the corn after the harvest, picking out the best ears and setting them aside as seed for the next year. Then he would take.a few kernels from each of the selected ears, keeping track of which ear they had come from, and try to get them to germinate in the house. If kernels didn’t germinate, he would not use the other kernels from those ears for seed corn. This was long before the widespread availability of hybrid seeds, of course.

In setting aside some of that year’s crop for the next year, he was doing what humans have been doing for thousands of years, since the beginning of agriculture. For most of human existence, preserving seed has been a difficult choice between having enough food to eat until the next harvest, and having enough seed to plant for the next year’s crop. 

Gardeners often do something similar; saving seeds from a favorite variety from one year to the next. It’s why we have heirloom tomatoes after all, varieties that were preserved by gardeners for generations while hybrids took over the marketplace. Those old varieties often have much better flavor or are much better suited for particular cliates.

This may be a useful context for us as we contemplate today’s gospel reading, the familiar Parable of the Sower. I have to confess something to you before I go any further. I did something that I almost never do. I altered today’s gospel reading. Well, I didn’t so much alter it, as shorten it. In the lectionary, the reading includes not only the verses read this morning but also vss. 18-23, which provide an interpretation of the story we heard. I left those verses out because I think they change the way we might hear the story. I’m not saying that interpretation is wrong, just that, as in the case of most stories, there is more than one possible interpretation.

Jesus taught using parables, stories that involved settings and characters often very familiar to his listeners. He used these stories to instruct his listeners about God and especially about the reign or kingdom of God. Often, these stories are so familiar to us that we don’t see how radical and strange they are. In many cases, we fit them into pre-existing categories, or we allegorize them. In this case, as in the interpretation I didn’t include, the sower is God, the seed is God’s word, etc., etc., etc.

But let’s try again. Listen, a sower went out to sow his seed. Some fell on the path, some fell on rocky soil, some fell among thorns. We may not think anything of that—we may have seen yards that have just been seeded where there is grass seed in the street or on the sidewalks. We may have seen farmers who inadvertently corn or soybean seed in a ditch or on a road while planting.

But remember, we’re not talking about industrial agriculture here. We’re talking about subsistence farming, where the seed is precious and may have been preserved while the family went hungry. And what self-respecting gardener would waste their seed or their time by throwing it haphazardly out in the garden?

In other words, the sower doesn’t seem to be behaving as a farmer ought to behave. Think about where he got the seed. Well, it came from the previous year’s crop and it was likely the case that at some point, he had to make a decision between feeding his family with the grain or save it to plant the next year. Given the value of the seeds, he would not be so careless as to allow seed to go to waste by flinging it on rocks, or on a compacted path, or among weeds. 

The sheer profligacy of the sower’s actions only become clear when we interpret it against this backdrop of subsistence farming and the annual reality that there might not be enough grain to feed one’s family or to sow the next year’s crop. Seen this way, the sower’s actions are so out of character, so unpredictable and unnatural that we can begin to tease out the parable’s meaning from those very actions.

 The sower’s behavior is one thing. There’s another odd detail in the story we often overlook—the seed that fell on the good soil produced widely differing results: 100 fold, 60 fold, 3 fold. That sn’t be. Think about Wisconsin cornfields. What should they look like? Absolutely uniform in height. It’s only if the field has drainage problems that we expect variable amounts of grain.

Seen in this light, there is often, perhaps almost always, unexpected and unpredicted details in the parables. Yet, this reality may not bring us any closer to their meaning. Jesus often introduces his parables by saying, “the kingdom of God is like…” So how is the kingdom of God like a sower who acts irrationally and unexpectedly, with such extravagance and profligacy? How is the reign of God like a field that produces widely variable amounts of grain? Or, to put it another way, what does this parable tell us about God, God’s vision for the world and for human community?

Asked in this way, the parable invites us to imagine, to believe in a God who acts in ways completely counter to our values and expectations. We live in a world in which religion, especially Christianity, seems to be imagine a God who reflects our values and expectations. It’s not that God rewards the good and punishes the evil; it’s that God rewards us and those like us and punishes those we unlike us or those we don’t like. But the God of the parables, the God of Jesus Christ, may not behave at all in ways that conform to our expectations and values.

There’s another thing. We expect that our efforts will be rewarded and our evil deeds go punished. Sometimes that means we can be rather smug and presumptive about how God sees us, and that we judge others according to our standards of behavior. 

One of the things about gardening and farming is that it can be humbling. In spite of all of your best efforts, it can all come to naught. We all know this lesson, relearned this summer as we’ve suffered through a drought. As I was riding out the Badger State trail yesterday, I noticed corn fields, right next to each other. In some the corn stood tall and was tasseling; in others, the stalks had barely reached knee-high. 

Just as we want hard work to pay off in our daily life, we want God’s economy of salvation to be fair and to play by the rules, our rules. But the parable of the sower teaches us that the reign of God does not operate by our rules or conform to our expectations.

As hard as that is for us to conceive as we look out at an unjust and suffering world, it is often even more difficult to imagine when we look inside ourselves. We are often apt to hear words of judgment on our selves, our actions, know our own broken and hurting selves, and assume that God rejects us. But that’s not the case either. Whatever we have done in the past, all of the hurt and brokenness we have caused, indeed all of the hurt and brokenness that we experience in our own lives, all of that we can bring to God, and find love and acceptance.

To experience that love is what God’s reign is all about; to know, and love a God whose love towards us is as profligate and expansive as the seed thrown by the sower on good and bad soil, to love that God is what our faith proclaims. That message, God’s expansive love and accepting love, is also our duty to proclaim and share in this broken and hurting world.

Trinitarian Love: A Sermon for Trinity Sunday, 2023

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Today is Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday in the liturgical year when our focus is not on some event in Christ’s life or ministry but on a doctrine of the faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is both central to the Christian faith, and some of such great complexity and mystery that it has confounded and puzzled Christians since the beginning of our faith. Trinity Sunday also brings to a close the long period of the liturgical year that begin last December with the First Sunday of Advent. We have been commemorating the life of Christ—his birth and baptism and then his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Now in the coming months we will focus on his ministry, especially his teaching and healings. 

But alongside the rhythms of the liturgical year, there are other rhythms and sometimes, the life of a congregation takes on its own rhythms and focus. We lost one long-time member earlier this week, and yesterday, we learned of the death of another, beloved member. Many of us have heavy hearts today. Those of us who have been members for some time, will naturally think of all of the others who have gone before; those whose favorite pews are empty, or occupied by newcomers who we have come to know and love. We have said our farewells to so many in these last years; but we have also welcomed many others.

That’s the life cycle of a congregation, the cycle of human life that is lived in community. There are comings and goings; arrivals and departures. Some of those departures are painful, as in the case of deaths; but other departures are painful as well, when someone comes to be alienated, or suffers hurt, or departs because of conflict. 

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with the Doctrine of the Trinity, which seems rather disconnected from anything to do with the life of a congregation, with life in community. In fact, the Trinity is all about relationship. Reflecting on it makes clear, or should that at the heart of God, is relationship—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our lessons point to that mystery in God’s nature; that God reaches out from Godself toward others, toward the world.

That’s precisely what Paul is referring to in the brief passage from his Second Letter to the Corinthians. In 2 Corinthians 13, today’s epistle reading, St. Paul offers us a framework within which to understand our God. I doubt he was doing it self-consciously. It’s a benediction, a blessing, and it comes at the end of a letter in which Paul has bared his soul. He had founded this congregation a few years earlier and had written a letter (I Corinthians) in which he had dealt with a number of issues that divided the community. A few more years passed, and by now, the divisions had deepened. More problematically, a deep rift had emerged between Paul and the Corinthians. Apparently they had called his ministry and his apostolic authority into question. 

Now, in very emotional language, Paul has defended himself and challenged his opponents. Finally, at the end of the letter, he appeals to them to mend the rift: “Agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.” And he concludes, in words that are familiar from our liturgy, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” In other words, in the heat of conflict, when the divisions between Paul and this church that he had founded are at the breaking point, the apostle appeals once again to some central values: the love and peace of God, and the fellowship, communion of the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the Trinity does not just mean that we encounter God in three ways, in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though we do. It does not just tell us how God acts, it also tells us who God is. In this three-ness, in fact, what makes this three-ness so hard for us to understand, is that these three are also one. To put it another way, in the relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is also something fundamental about our faith, that in God, there is fellowship. Quite simply, God is love. And that love expresses itself in the Trinity.

In fact, the great theologian Augustine of Hippo, who wrote a treatise on the Trinity, used love as one of his first analogies as he sought to understand the Trinity. He posed the question, might we understand the Trinity by means of lover, beloved, and the love that binds the two together—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Ultimately, he would reject that image as inadequate to explain the Trinity’s complexity, but it’s a worthwhile starting point.

If we’re struggling to understand the doctrine of the Trinity, or for that matter, any of the doctrines of our faith, it’s worth remembering that to struggle, to question, to doubt, is not a sin but it is inherent in our faith and in our human nature. In the gospel reading, we have Matthew’s version of Jesus’ ascension into heaven. Two weeks ago, we heard Luke’s version of that same event, and it’s worth noting Matthew’s unique emphasis. The thing that jumps out at me is Matthew’s description of the disciples: “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” Even now, after all that has happened, after all they had experienced, some doubted. But consider this: In spite of their doubt, Jesus gave all of them the same commandment: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” And he concluded with a word of promise and comfort, “And lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.” Some disciples may have doubted, but they were still called to share the good news, and given the promise that Jesus would be with them always.

With us, but also apart from us. The doctrine of the Trinity challenges us because on the one hand, we experience God in Christ as a human being, flesh and blood, one of us. We hear that promise of his ongoing presence with us, near us, a source of comfort and strength in difficult times. But at the same time, the Trinity affirms that God is utterly beyond us—something affirmed in the reading from Genesis, which describes God’s creation of the world, speaking it into existence. God’s majestic power and transcendence expressed through the words of an ancient poet and theologian. 

But even here, there is a deep connection and relationship between God and humans: “Let us make human beings in our own image. There is much to explore here, not to least to ponder, as St. Augustine did in the treatise I mentioned earlier, whether we might find in ourselves, in our mind and soul, an image of the Trinity that helps us to understand the trinitarian nature of God. But what I think matters most here, is to understand that because at the very core of God’s nature is relationship—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God’s nature also moves out from God’s self into the world, first creating the world, but then also creating us, to be in relationship with other humans and with God.

In this time when so many in our culture are calling into question the dignity and worth of other human beings—whether because of their race, or gender, or LGBTQ+, or political perspective, it’s crucial that we remember that we are all created in God’s image, that we all have inherently the dignity and worth as beloved creations of God, and that we are called, created to be in relationship, not just with people whose political perspectives we share, or whose race or ethnicity, or gender, or nationality, we are called and created to be in relationship with other humans, just as God created us to be in relationship with God.

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.