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Wilt Thou forgive that sin? A Sermon for Lent 3B, 2024

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We just sang one of my favorite Lenten hymns: “Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun”—the text is by the seventeenth century poet, and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, John Donne. Donne is not an easy poet to understand, his images are complex, often confusing, and he often uses words that were already archaic in his day, and incomprehensible. He also often invented words. 

Donne was from a Roman Catholic family—his brother died in prison, after having been apprehended for harboring a Jesuit priest. Donne himself converted to the Church of England, probably in part to secure his career. And his call to holy orders came only when other, more lucrative career opportunities were closed off to him. He eventually became the Dean of St. Paul’s and became one of the most famous preachers of his day, a status that is largely inexplicable to contemporary readers of his sermons.

He wrote a great deal of poetry, though little of it was published in his lifetime, and his secular, love poetry is as highly prized as is his religious works like the words we just sang. His most famous poem is probably “Death be not proud” but he is probably even more famous for the words he wrote as he lay in a sickbed and heard the funeral bell tolling: “No man is an island, entire of itself …” A recent biography, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell is a beautiful and insightful introduction to his life and work.

In the hymn we just sang, Donne is exploring the various types of sins he has committed, and asking God whether God’s forgiveness extends to those and to him. He begins with original sin, “that sin where I begun;” then mentions his habitual sins, those he commits, though he knows he should not. He asks about the sins he led others into, and sins he was able to abstain from for a year or two, though he relapsed. And finally, he asks about the sin of fear, or despair, that when he dies, his sins will not be forgiven; but then he asks that God swears by Godself, that Christ will be there, shining, as Christ’s presence shines now, and forgives him. 

It’s a probing self-examination that may make us feel a bit uncomfortable, even in this penitential season of Lent. Though he speaks to our own experiences, we moderns tend not to want to examine ourselves too closely. We are quick to condemn the sins of others, to decry the systemic sins that surround us and in which we are enmeshed, but when we come to our own sins and shortcomings, we may feel a bit uncomfortable being too honest with ourselves or with others.

Perhaps my explication of the text unsettled you in some way. I know that we often don’t pay close attention to the words of the hymns we sing, we may catch a phrase or an idea, but often the words seem less important than the music as a whole, which can move us and bring us into communion with each other and with God.

There was a time, probably before I was ordained, that I often turned to Donne in Lent. He’s one of those authors who speaks to the human condition, our brokenness and sin, but also, as in this hymn, beautifully expresses the power and extent of God’s mercy and grace. When we are turned off by language of sin and repentance, we may forget that such language opens us to the riches of God’s grace and the ways that, through grace, and our repentance, God is working to remake us in God’s image.

Donne is one of those authors I often return to during Lent. There was a time, back before I was ordained, I think, when I spent considerable time with his poetry and other writings during this season. The beauty and power of his language, the clear-eyed way in which he examines himself, encouraged me to deepen my relationship with God, to lay bare my soul before God, and open myself, more widely and deeply to God’s loving grace.

There are other images and texts to which I turn in this season, and one of the most powerful is today’s reading from I Corinthians. My history with this text goes back much further than my relationship with Donne, back to my undergraduate years and the first course I took on Paul. 

Like Donne’s seventeenth-century English and his focus on sin, Paul can be off-putting to twenty-first century sensibilities. His letters bear witness to his difficult personality and the many conflicts in which he was embroiled. Many decry him for his lack of interest in Jesus’ teachings—which are what attract many twenty-first century people. He’s often difficult to read, opaque in his argumentation, and at his worst, or at the worst of his editors and transcribers, a virulent misogynist.

All that aside, Paul offers a compelling vision of God in Christ, and it is here, in these verses, that we see that vision at its clearest and most compelling. He is writing in defense of his ministry and preaching, and he appeals to the cross as testimony and proof of the truth of his teaching:

 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Paul here is alluding to a central paradox of the Christian faith, the paradox of the cross. In this horrific death by torture, a vivid demonstration of Roman power and ruthlessness, we see Jesus crushed and killed. There could be no starker display of his human weakness. Yet for Paul, on the cross we see the power and wisdom of God. 

Elsewhere, in II Corinthians when Paul is talking about his own personal physical weakness and infirmity, he says that in response to his prayer, Christ said to him, “power is made perfect in weakness.” In other words, the cross is a demonstration of Christ’s power, of God’s power. Yet, that power, an allusion to the vindication of Christ through the resurrection, that power never erases the fact of the cross. The cross still stands, Jesus’ suffering remains. 

It’s a message that’s often overlooked and ignored by Christian triumphalism. We internalize and spiritualize the cross to rid it of its revolutionary message. We ignore the pain and suffering of the cross to focus on the joy of resurrection. When Christianity becomes enmeshed in power politics, in empire, nationalism, and white supremacy, the symbol of the cross often becomes a weapon wielded against the weak, the stranger and the alien, unbelievers, adherents of other religions.

One of our great challenges as Christians in this historical moment is to proclaim Christ crucified, folly and stumbling block, or literally, scandal. Our challenge is to see and to proclaim the cross as power made perfect in weakness, not to wield it as a weapon against others. In this day, when much of Christianity seems to have become another means by which people assert their own individual rights in a zero-sum game that results in the infringement of the rights of others, preaching Christ crucified, taking up our crosses, is a truly revolutionary message and way of being in the world.

On the cross, we see God’s weakness and God’s power. On the cross we see God’s love, incarnate, and suffering. On the cross, we see Christ giving himself for us and for the world, forgiving our sins and the sins of the world. On the cross, we see Christ, showing us a new way of being in the world, forgiven, and forgiving, sharing God’s love, bring hope to the hopeless, offering love to a world filled with anger and hate. As we walk the way of the cross this Lent and into Holy Week, may we enter into the love that Christ shares, on the cross and in our hearts, may we experience the forgiveness of our sins, and share God’s forgiving mercy and grace with the world.

Good Lord, Deliver Us: A Sermon for 1LentB, 2024

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February 18, 2024

I love the Great Litany! I know it’s unfamiliar and strange to most of you. We use it only once a year at Grace, on the First Sunday in Lent and I’m guessing some of you, perhaps most of you, didn’t pay close attention to the words as they were chanted by Margaret as she has done every year I’ve been at Grace.

The Great Litany is one of those things that connects us powerfully to the past—to the past of the Anglican tradition, and also to the deeper past of our common humanity. It’s actually the first liturgical text created in English by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, published in 1544 and used throughout the kingdom in the runup to Henry VIII’s military campaigns in Scotland and France. It was then included in the first Book of Common Prayer published in 1549, and republished and altered throughout the centuries.

The version we use has been cleaned up a good bit: there is no mention in the 1979 version of the “detestable enormities of the bishop of Rome” for example. But even our version connects us to the fragility of human life in the pre-modern period; reminders that childbirth was dangerous for both mother and child, that life was hard, short, and subject to the violence of nations and nature.

Twenty years ago, I might have drawn attention to the apparent dissimilarities between the pre-modern world and our own, as science and technology seemed to have protected us from so many of the dangers faced by earlier generations. But now, we are learning how tenuous life on earth and life in community are—we are living through plague and pestilence, earthquakes, fires, drought, and flood, and wars are ravaging.

To be confronted with this ancient text, its roots lie much deeper than 16thcentury England, in fact may feel like someone has poured cold water over our heads, shocking our system, our sensibilities, taking us out of our comfort zone. In that way, the Great Litany is very much like the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. As familiar as that rite may be, to hear, or say “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” strips us bare of all of our defenses, and reminds us profoundly, and utterly, of our humanity and our mortality, and our dependence on God for our lives.

Lent should disrupt us and our lives. Just as the ashes on Ash Wednesday remind us of our humanity, mortality, and the fragility of our existence, so to does the Great Litany remind us of our dependence on God, and the struggles-physical, spiritual, communal that we face day by day. Both of them call us to refocus our lives on the God who created us and on Jesus Christ, through whose death and resurrection we begin to experience our remaking in the image of God.

Each year, our gospel is the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. That’s a little bit of a misleading title, at least for the Gospel of Mark. For in these few verses, we see it all, the transition from baptism, to wilderness, to preaching the reign of God and we’re encouraged to see the connections between these three elements. But even as we do that, we’re probably inclined to overlook the brevity and simplicity of Mark’s version of Jesus in the wilderness, and what he might be trying to teach us.

Here’s Mark’s version: 

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Perhaps the most important thing in Mark’s terse description of these events is the connections between Jesus’ baptism and the wilderness. I have stressed several times already the violent language Mark used in describing the baptism—the heavens were torn apart, ripped apart, and the Holy Spirit came down. Now, we see similar violent language in his description of the Holy Spirit.

What can Mark have meant by telling us that “immediately the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness?” “drove” that’s powerful, almost violent language, and indeed it’s the very same word that Mark uses to describe Jesus’ actions and power when he drives unclean spirits out of possessed people. And we might go further and see a deeper connection—the Holy Spirit entered into Jesus at his baptism, possessed him, we might say. 

There’s something else worth noting. Our translation says Satan “tempted” him, in fact, a better translation would be tested, not tempted. That is to say, rather than be enticed or lured away from his mission, Mark seems to be suggesting that he is being assessed, evaluated—will he be up to the task that is set before him?

All of this takes place in the wilderness, where Jesus was with the wild beasts and the angels ministered to him. That’s all Mark tells us; that’s all he thinks we need to know. We don’t know the content of the “testing” nor do we know Jesus’ mental or spiritual state as he was undergoing it. All we know is that when he returned from the wilderness and his testing, he began his public ministry, proclaiming the good news of the reign of God. 

The wilderness is a rich image, one with a lengthy history in the biblical tradition, going back to the sojourn of the Hebrews in the wilderness. Whatever else the wilderness might have been, it was wild, as Mark’s mention of the “wild beasts” emphasizes. The wilderness is not civilized; it is not a safe place. 

All of us have experienced such wild and dangerous places. All of us have sojourned in the wilderness, whether for forty days or forty years. Some of us may feel ourselves in such a place today. We may be struggling to experience God’s presence in our lives; we may sense that we are beset by wild beasts or other struggles. Our spiritual lives may seem as dry and barren as a desert. We may be lost and discern no way forward.

Certainly, today, this week, we may feel very much like we are in a wilderness, in uncharted territory, beset by dangers. And whether our wilderness is something only we are experiencing—struggles in our families or work, with illness, or doubt, or it is because of larger events in our community, nation or world, it can very much seem like we are lost and alone. 

It’s important to remember that Jesus experienced his period of testing after his baptism, after receiving the powerful affirmation of who he was. He had heard the voice from heaven saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved.” That affirmation went with him into the wilderness, into his period of testing and it went with him when he emerged and began his public ministry.

It is an affirmation we too have heard, that we are God’s beloved children. Like Jesus, we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower us to do God’s work in the world. We might even see ourselves like Jesus, driven into the wilderness, driven by the Holy Spirit into the world, to do that work. 

Lent is a time when we are inclined to focus on internal work—on prayer, reflection, other spiritual disciplines. In the face of the horrible tragedies that we witness, and all of the problems that are swirling around in our culture and news, it often seems both like prayer is all that we can do, and that prayer is much too little, ineffectual. Praying the Great Litany, as powerful as its language is, may seem like little more than play-acting in the face of the world’s problems. But even as we are pleading with God to intervene, to save and protect us, the words of the litany are also working on and in us, as prayer always should. Those powerful and ancient words are shaping us, remaking us, helping us to see ourselves with new eyes and opening our hearts to God’s presence and redemptive work.

Jesus came back from the wilderness having claimed his call, found his voice. He returned from the wilderness and began his public ministry, healing the sick, casting out demons, proclaiming God’s reign. Remembering our baptisms, empowered by the Holy Spirit, may this Lent be not only a time of testing and reflection, but a time when we find our voices and call, and proclaim with renewed hope and courage, the good news of the coming of God’s reign.

Waiting, Serving, Healing: A Sermon for Epiphany 5B, 2024

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February 4, 2024

Last Sunday we sang one of my favorite hymns; the great Charles Wesley, “O for a thousand tongues to sing.” It’s one of the hymns I know practically by heart, one that I’ve sung dozens of times. As familiar as it is, like many hymns, its words can strike differently in different contexts. Take verse 6, for example:

Hear him, ye Deaf; ye voiceless ones,
Your loosen’d Tongues employ;
Ye Blind behold your Saviour’s come,
And leap, ye Lame for Joy. 

On the surface, unremarkable, perhaps but it points to something significant, and challenging in our times. We hear and say a lot about welcoming people, embracing people of different ethnicities and sexualities, of accommodating people with physical or mental challenges but especially in the latter cases—there are often unspoken assumptions that may raise barriers to full acceptance or engagement in the community. We often don’t realize how our hymns, and our scriptures can be such barriers. 

When we come to Jesus’ healing miracles, we may, unconsciously or subconsciously compare them to our own common life—looking to fix or heal other people rather than seeing them as challenging us to grow, and change, and learn. Some of you may recall a sermon a year or so ago in which I referenced the book: My Body is not your prayer request in which the author, Amy Kenny advocates for disability justice in the church.

There are physical barriers that have been constructed, and there are psychological, and even religious barriers that we erect that make full inclusion difficult, if not impossible.

In this little story, in these few verses, Mark has once again packed a world of ideas. First of all, think about the difference in settings between the healing that occurs in today’s story, and the story last week. Last Sunday, a possessed man was rid of an unclean spirit in a public space, in the midst of the synagogue. Today’s story takes place in private, in a home, in domestic space. 

There is a difference as well in the healing and in its aftermath. The unclean spirit, recognizes and identifies Jesus—You are the Holy One of God, but wants nothing to do with Jesus, and we don’t know what happens to him after the exorcism. In a way, the possessed man and Simon’s mother-in-law are in the same situation. They are both debilitated by their maladies, and by definition, they are robbed of whatever status and role they might have had. The possessed man can only disrupt synagogue services, and Simon’s mother-in-law is bed-ridden. Jesus’ act of healing, in both cases, restores them to their roles. 

There’s something else worth noting in Mark’s brief description of the healing. There’s a tenderness, an intimacy in Jesus’ actions. He reaches down to touch her, and “lifts her up”—language evocative of other healing stories in the gospel and of the resurrection.

Cured of her illness, Simon’s mother-in-law served Jesus and the others. But it is interesting. It’s interesting not because it is behavior we might expect of a woman in a traditional culture, or too often, in our own. Our culture, indeed our church continues to be conflicted about such roles. In the context of Mark’s gospel and early Christianity, her serving takes on added significance. For one thing, the term used is the greek word, diakonia, which of course is the word from which our own word, deacon, comes. But there’s more, much more. It’s the same word that appears just a few verses earlier, in Mark’s description of the temptation in the wilderness. V. 13 reads: “He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” The word translated here as “waited” is the same word used in our reading of Peter’s mother-in-law: “she began to serve them.”

 Much later, at the crucifixion, Mark tells us that there were women watching from afar, and Mark writes that these women had followed Jesus and “served him” in Galilee. They were his disciples, and as we shall see, in some ways these women were model disciples, disciples who stayed with him, while the men ran away.

To put it clearly. Jesus’ healing of Simon’s mother-in-law is not just about restoring her to her community and to her role. It is about equipping her to be a disciple. She got up and served them. We might be tempted to see this as her simply returning to the traditional, role of a wife and mother in a patriarchal culture. But for Mark, it’s more than that. She stands as a disciple, one who follows Jesus and ministers to him. She stands as a contrast to the unclean spirit who wanted to have nothing to do with Jesus. She also stands in contrast to those other disciples who came looking for Jesus when he went away for prayer and solitude.

This little gospel reading is challenging in so many ways, not because we have to struggle to make meaning out of it, but because it reflects our own situation, our own relationships with Jesus. Imagine the scene, after these two healings, everyone with a problem comes to Jesus. They’ve heard of his miraculous powers, and they want him to help them. We can imagine the scene. Dozens, hundreds of people waiting in line, pressing at him to get his attention, to feel his healing touch. At the end of it all, Jesus is exhausted, worn out, and he goes away by himself to pray and recover. Mark writes: 

“In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”

It’s a telling moment in Mark’s gospel, a rare occasion when Jesus is off by himself. After all that excitement and work, he needs to be by himself, recover and rejuvenate, to pray, to be with God

But even then he’s not left alone. His disciples come after him. The text says, “they hunted him down.” And what do they do? Do they ask, “How can we help? How can we serve you?” No, they tell him the obvious, that everyone’s looking for you.

Jesus responds enigmatically, saying, we’re not going back. We’re moving on. I’ve got more work to do. “I have to go elsewhere, to other towns, and proclaim the good news there.” Jesus turns his back on Capernaum, he turns his back on whoever back there he might not have healed, or whoever might have come late and missed their chance, and he moves on proclaiming the good news, of the coming of God’s reign.

In a way it’s a fitting end to this story, and brings us back to the beginning of my sermon. For even Jesus couldn’t do it all; he needed time to regroup, time to be with God, to deepen his relationship with God before embarking on a new mission in new territory. None of us can do it by ourselves. To respond to God’s call, to serve those in need require skill, and energy. But it also requires us to make room for others, to enable others to serve and do their part. 

One of the things I’m learning as I enter this stage of my ministry, is to make room for those others, to give others space and opportunity to use their gifts and skills, to follow their passions, to respond to God’s call in ways that are appropriate to their context, their experience, and their abilities. As a congregation, we would do well to hear that message, to follow Jesus, to equip and make room for everyone to serve the body of Christ, to be the body of Christ.

The words from Isaiah call us to remember the importance of bringing those burdens to God, as Jesus brought his to God in prayer. As we think about the upcoming season of Lent; they may inspire us: 

but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

Amen.

A Whale of a Sermon: Epiphany 3B, 2024

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 “Whale Pulpit” Ss. Peter and Paul Church, Duszniki, Poland. Photo by Magdalena Łanuszka, http://en.posztukiwania.pl/2016/05/06/big-fish-in-a-pulpit/

It’s one of those great ironies, and perhaps an indictment of the 3-year lectionary cycle, that the Book of Jonah gets so little love in the Sunday Eucharistic lectionary. I mean, if you ever went to Sunday School as a kid, if you had a story bible, if you know anything about the Old Testament, and even if you don’t, you’ve heard something about Jonah and the whale. It’s a great story, full of drama, big fish, and lots of humor. But we will only hear from it once in the three-year lectionary, this reading of a smattering of verses from chapter 3 (the same chapter comes up as an alternative reading in year A).

I get it; I get the discomfort. I had figured out the problems with a literal, historical reading of Jonah when I was a young boy. Whales can’t ingest humans; people can’t survive for three days in a whale’s belly; a whale couldn’t get from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf to spew Jonah out, and on and on. One commentator remarked that of all the details in the story of Jonah, that he was eaten by a whale is the most plausible. But it’s a great story!

The cultural and theological significance of it go far beyond the story’s detail. Look at that image on the front cover of a pulpit in the shape of a whale. What must it be like to preach from such a thing? It certainly would enhance one’s sense of responsibility, of obligation and authority and it draws attention both the brevity of the sermon Jonah preached (six words in English, five in Hebrew) and the amazing response to that sermon by the people (and cattle) of Nineveh. 

On Friday, I had a conversation with some clergy friends that detoured into talking about preaching and about what we expect our sermons to do. Oddly enough, none of us brought up Jonah’s example as a sermon either to emulate, or to expect that level of response from one’s congregation. 

Well, let’s dig in a bit.

For if there’s anything unlikely, unbelievable, it’s the effect of Jonah’s preaching. The text says that Nineveh was a large city; it was a three-day’s walk from one end to the other, and that when Jonah arrived, he walked a day into it, and there preached his message of doom and destruction. That’s all it took. One lone voice, six simple words in Hebrew. Just this, coming from a foreigner, and the whole city, man and beast, put on sackcloth and ashes, and repented of their wickedness. It could happen, I suppose.

What comes next is equally surprising. Having prophesied doom and destruction, Jonah leaves the city, finds a hill overlooking it, and settles in to watch the carnage. God provides him with a bush that grows up to give Jonah shade from the hot sun, a turn of events that made Jonah quite happy, but the next day, God caused a worm to kill the bush so that it withered and Jonah got sunburnt. He also got angry.

If you were Jonah, how would you respond to this development? One would think he would be pleased with himself, proud of the effects of his preaching. But no. He complains to God, saying that the reason he didn’t want to go in the first place was because he knew this would happen. He knew God was a gracious God, full of mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, ready to relent. In other words, if Jonah was going to prophesy doom and destruction, he wanted to see it happen.

So what should we make of all this? A prophet who doesn’t want to be a prophet, certainly doesn’t want to be a successful prophet and resists his call. On that level, we can understand the story all to well. We can imagine resisting the tug of duty and responsibility, turning away from what we know we ought to do. We can even imagine, most of us, sensing God calling us in a certain direction, calling us to deeper commitment, to a richer spiritual life, and turning away.

That’s all easy to imagine, and in that sense, Jonah represents us, everyman. But there’s more to the story than just Jonah. Besides Jonah and God, there’s another actor, or set of actors in the story, and that is Nineveh itself. Now, Nineveh was the heart of the Assyrian empire, one of the great empires of the ancient near east, and one of the most brutal. It was Assyria that had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century bce. Nineveh was the evil empire. Its power dwarfed all of its neighbors, including the kingdom of Judah. That makes Jonah’s resistance to God’s call all the more understandable, even if that’s not the excuse Jonah gave himself.

In the end, the book of Jonah is not primarily about Jonah. It is about God. It is a story of God’s love, mercy, steadfast love. It is about proclaiming not just God’s displeasure and threatening destruction, it is about knowing who God is, and proclaiming that message of love, mercy, and steadfast love. 

When God rebukes Jonah at the end of the story, God points out that if Jonah was concerned about a bush, how much more should God be concerned about the city of Nineveh with its more than 120,000 inhabitants, and also animals. This is a story about the universalizing of God’s love and mercy. Jonah, and the original readers of this text, were being challenged to expand their notion of God and of God’s love. For all God’s love and concern for the Jewish people in the post-exilic period, the Hebrew Bible and the book of Jonah, bear witness to a growing understanding that God is God of all creation, the God of all humanity and God’s love and mercy extends to all humans, even to one’s enemies.

I wonder how many of us are like Jonah, so hardened in our attitudes, so critical of those with whom we disagree, that what we really want is to see them destroyed by God’s wrath, embarrassment in the media, or humiliating political defeat? We proclaim God’s judgment on our opponents but do we ever consider what might happen if they changed their minds, if they repented of the actions that we regard as sinful, evil, oppressive and unjust? 

Are we like Jonah, who having delivered our prophetic message in the most self-righteous of language and attitude, are now sitting above the city, waiting for its destruction? Or can we imagine that God might accept the repentance and show mercy?

And that’s the message for us as well. Like Jonah, that is what God is calling us to, as individuals and as a congregation. The God who is calling us is not a God of wrath and destruction, no matter how much some Christians in our culture would have us and everyone else believe it. The God who calls us is unimaginable in the extent of the love, mercy, and patience God has. It is that God we have experienced ourselves in the forgiveness of our sins. It is that God we are called to share with a world that knows hate and fear and violence. It is that message, a message we know for ourselves, that we need to bring to those around us. And we need to proclaim it throughout the our community and the world. Wherever there is animosity and hate, whatever enemies we fear, God’s steadfast love and mercy is present even there, even among them. God is reaching out, seeking the lost, extending God’s love to the unloved, the hated, the reviled, whether they live on the other side of the world, or right next door. 

Christmas Rubble: A Sermon for Christmas Eve, 2023

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December 24, 2023

At first glance, at first reflection, all seems as it should be. There’s something so seductive, so reassuring about entering a beautiful space like Grace Church, decorated as it is every year at Christmas time. There’s the garland, the wreaths, the beloved creche in front of the altar with the exquisitely carved magi and entourage in the back of the nave as they’ve begun their journey to Bethlehem. 

It all sounds the same, too, with familiar carols and our lovely choir and musicians. Where have you come from this evening? From holiday tables at restaurants, or festive gatherings with friends and family? Some of us may even be planning on going to other gatherings; others of us will make our ways  home at the end of a long, and exhausting Sunday. 

It’s so similar to so many other Christmases, my fifteenth here at Grace. Some of you have been coming much longer than that and are settling into the beauty and familiarity of rituals and memories that may go back decades. But those memories are also tinged with sadness as we remember those who aren’t here any longer.

But beneath that familiarity and beauty, tucked away in our memories, or perhaps shoved out of our immediate attention by that beauty, are other memories, other images—of those Christmases in 2020 and 2021 when there were no services here because of the pandemic. We’re reminded that the pandemic has not left us, that our return to normalcy takes place while many continue to contract the illness or suffer the effects of long covid.

There may be other images, other emotions that are hard to repress right now. One image that haunts me is a photo shared by the pastor of the Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, Palestine. The Churches in Jerusalem and the West Bank announced recently that there would be no public celebrations, no public displays during Christmas, so this pastor, instead of erecting the usual creche like ours, did something else in his church. He brought in a pile of rubble, and in the middle of it lies the Christ child, wrapped in a keffiyeh, the symbol of Palestinian peoplehood. It speaks directly and eloquently to the humanitarian crisis that we’ve watched over the last nearly two months, an indiscriminate and horrific destruction of a people who have been driven from their homes, oppressed and practically held captive for the last nearly 75 years.

The plight of Christians, and Muslims, in the West Bank receives less attention than that of Gaza, but their lives are also under attack on a daily basis, their existence and presence in their homeland more precarious than ever. In Gaza, our Christian siblings are being killed, their ancient churches bombed to rubble. Of course, it’s not just Christians who are suffering there. The bombs don’t distinguish on the basis of religious commitment. On top of the thousands dead and homeless, now we’re hearing of starvation as aid continues to be blocked. The world watches; our own government is complicit in the atrocities. War continues in Ukraine as well, and even where there is no war, there is famine, hunger, and homelessness, poverty and disease. 

As we celebrate Christmas with carols, happy gatherings, and parties, we know that across the globe, people are suffering. We have learned hard lessons over the last few years. We have learned and re-learned about the fragility of life—how easily and quickly loved ones may be snatched from us by disease. We have learned about the fragility of our political institutions, our national life. We see daily evidence of the fragility of the human global community, and we are growing more aware, even as many deny it, of the fragility of life on this planet. 

So too, do we know the fragility of our faith. It is easy to grow disheartened, for our doubts to spiral into despair. In the presence of all the world’s ills, to lose hope seems not only natural but obvious. We reel from broken relationships, from trauma that continues to haunt us. It may very well be that it took all the courage we have left in us to venture out this evening to this place, in a desperate, unspoken plea for God to speak to us, to heal us and the world.

But the disconnect between our lives and our world and that of first-century Palestine may seem greater than ever. What can an ancient faith, a familiar story say to us in the face of millions suffering and global climate catastrophe? Can the story of Christ’s birth still speak to us? Can the carols we sing, the familiar decorations, the season’s joys, fill our hearts?

 The story Luke tells is not only about the birth of Jesus Christ. He interweaves that story with the story, and the reality of the Roman Empire. And it’s not because Luke was one of those 21st century bros who thinks about the Roman Empire every day, as the recent internet meme would have it. He did think about it every day because it was an all-encompassing, totalizing reality. It insinuated itself into the lives of everyone from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent—and even beyond as its cultural influence extended almost everywhere.

Luke is writing within the Roman Empire, to citizens and inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The subjects of his story belonged to a people who were prone to rebellion, repeated small ones, but larger ones, like the Jewish Revolt of the late 60s ce, which would have been fresh in Luke’s memory, or the one a generation later in the 130s, after which Rome razed Jerusalem, and forbid Jews to live there. 

By placing his story in the context of the Roman Empire, Luke is highlighting the contrast between that reality, and the reality of God’s reign, coming in a very different way, in poverty, humility, and weakness. Not the power of Roman legions, or tanks or military force, but the power of vulnerable and fragile, a baby, swathed in love, bringing love, inviting us to love.

We desperately want certainty, unmistakable signs of God’s power and might, fixing us, fixing the world. Instead, we get this: a baby born in a dusty town in a far-off place and a far-off time. We get stories of angels, shepherds, and magi. We want God to solve our problems, fix our world, to show Godself to us with power and majesty. Instead, we get this: a tiny new life, utterly vulnerable, utterly dependent, the fragility and weakness of an infant. And this, we believe, is God.

This is God: this tiny, utterly dependent and vulnerable baby is God come into the world. This first time, Christ did not come in power and great majesty, but quietly, almost unnoticed, in a remote corner of the Roman Empire, to a young woman who seemed wholly ordinary and unremarkable.

This is God, in Christ, coming to us, in all our fragility, vulnerability, and suffering, coming into our broken lives and broken world. A baby, coming into the rubble of our lives, the rubble of our world, filling it, and us, with grace and hope and love. Thanks be to God. 

The Reign of Christ: A sermon for the last Sunday after Pentecost, 2023

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Christ separating the sheep from the goats, San Apollinaire Nuevo, Ravenna, 6th century

Reign of Christ

November 26, 2023

It’s been nearly forty years since I’ve visited Ravenna, Italy but its churches and their mosaics are still alive in my memory. So too is the awe and wonder that they evoked in me then. In the sixth century ce, Ravenna was the western capital of the Byzantine Empire, and the emperors and their families undertook a vast building project to express their power and faith. The mosaics conflate and combine imperial and religious imagery and while their meaning and significance are much debated among art historians and historians of late antiquity, their power, in the sixth century and today, are not.

You can see that imagery on full display on the the cover illustration of today’s service bulletin. What you cannot see is that in addition to looking like a ruler sitting on a throne, Christ in this mosaic is clad in imperial purple, wearing all the trappings and symbolism of a Roman emperor. 

I chose that image because today is the observance of Christ the King, or the Reign of Christ in contemporary parlance, is a 20th century innovation, this mosaic seems to capture perfectly the lectionary choice of Matthew 25:34-46. Christ, reigning in majesty, separating the sheep from the goats. 

Thinking about this image in the context of the parable may help us to encounter the story with new eyes, for it has become something of a favorite for many of us, a way of thinking about our responsibilities as followers of Jesus and to distinguish our sort of Christianity from that of many others—a focus on doing good rather than believing correctly. That interpretation is both comforting and self-gratulatory, and as always with the parables, I want us to experience its strangeness.

One way to do that is to note its context and the parables that precede it. Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, the talents, the wedding banquet. The parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids concludes with the foolish ones locked out of the banquet hall. The parables of the wedding banquet and the talents end with someone cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. This one ends similarly with the goats banished to eternal punishment.

After the last two Sunday gospel readings, two parables of judgment and warning about the return of Christ, two parables that make us uncomfortable both in their urgency and in the message of judgment they proclaim, the judgment in this parable seems to support all of our prejudices and values.

In today’s reading, we are inclined, thanks to two thousand years of Christian reflection on this story, to see the separation of sheep and goats into good and evil as obvious, a given. Well, not so fast. In the ancient near east, goats were a prized animal. Their milk and meat were staples. They were not seen as evil—a goat was an acceptable sacrifice in Israelite religion. 

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that it was a common practice to keep goats and sheep together in a single flock. The only time the two animals were separated by the shepherd was on cold nights, when goats needed more protection. In short, in this reading as in the two preceding parables, the separation of sheep and goats into good and evil, is rather arbitrary. 

In fact, that’s something of a theme in Matthew’s gospel, that one can’t distinguish good from evil until the time of judgment—remember the parable of the wheat and the weeds, when “the devil” sowed weeds in a field and the farmer said that at the time of harvest, the wheat and the weeds would be separated and the weeds burned. So there’s something typically Matthean about this whole passage, something that Matthew as a gospel writer is especially interested in. It’s probably a result of something I mentioned a couple of Sundays ago, that a central concern for early Christians that Jesus had not yet returned.

I would like to draw your attention to something else in the text. Jesus is describing what the coming of the Son of Man will be like. First, he uses royal imagery. He will come in glory and sit on his heavenly throne. But immediately, that imagery is combined with another image, that of the shepherd. He will separate the people like a shepherd separates his flocks, the sheep from the goats. 

This image may draw us back to the reading from Ezekiel, where another visionary sees God coming like a shepherd, judging between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, rescuing them from wherever they have been scattered, feeding them, binding up the injured. We might find it odd that these two images—the shepherd and the king—are linked together in the biblical tradition. As the reading from Ezekiel makes clear, one reason for that linkage is the tradition that the founder of the Davidic monarchy—King David, was a shepherd. But for Christians, when shepherd imagery is used of Jesus, it is almost always used to emphasize Jesus’ care for us and his intimate love for us. 

Yet here in Ezekiel, the shepherd is a judge who culls his flocks, separating the fat from the lean sheep. So too in the gospel, the Shepherd King is a Judge who divides the sheep from the goats. In the Ezekiel passage the contrast between the care and tender concern the shepherd shows for the lean sheep and the harsh words with which he judges the fat.

The same is true in the gospel. The king judges harshly, unequivocally between the sheep and the goats. Christ appears to us here as a shepherd-king, but there are two other important images of Christ in the gospel. One is the obvious one. When the king says, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me, identifies the presence of Christ in the naked, the prisoner, the hungry, the sick. The third image is less obvious. The text begins with a reference to the Son of Man. In Matthew, when Jesus uses that title of himself, it almost always is in reference to his crucifixion. Christ the King is also the Crucified One and the least of these.

We are called to hold these three images together, we might think of them as three facets of a prism that together refract the light. If we ignore one of them, the other two become less brilliant. Emphasizing one over the other is a common temptation for Christians, but the gospel itself warns against it. We might prefer one image over the other. Some might want to encounter Christ only in the face of the poor and hungry; others only in an image of the Crucifixion. There are even those who can conceive of Christ only as the judge who comes on a cloud of thunder and reigns in majesty. 

Each image taken by itself will lead to a distortion of our faith. Those who focus only on the crucifixion will see Jesus only as the one who offers forgiveness for our sins. Those who focus on Christ in Majesty will think only about the second coming and making sure that they are on his right side. Those who focus only on outreach to others turn the Christian message into a social service agency. 

The judge separates sheep from goats, those who reached out to the needy and those who didn’t. The surprising thing here is that all are surprised. Neither group knew that Christ was present in the naked, the stranger or the prisoner. So for those whom the King welcomed into the kingdom, their actions in reaching out to the needy were not a conscious response to Jesus’ teachings or the result of acting out of duty or in order to gain their salvation. Their actions were an unconscious, unknowing part of who they were as Jesus’ disciples.

The same Christ who will come in Majesty to judge the living and the dead; the same Christ who was crucified for our sins; the Christ in whom we proclaim our faith when we recite the creed, that very Christ is present in all of those people—in the prisoner, the naked, the hungry, the stranger, and the sick. To hold these different images together, to confess Christ crucified, risen, reigning in majesty along with recognizing Christ’s presence in the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry and naked is our task as Christians seeking to follow him.

Happy Saints: A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday, 2023

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Today is All Saints’ Sunday. I love it because of its wide range of meanings and observances. Today, we remember the faithful departed, a commemoration that is connected with November 2, traditionally All Souls’ Day. We also remember all of the saints. The observance of All Saints’ goes back to the early Middle Ages and arose as an occasion on which to recognize all of the saints, mostly martyrs, mostly nameless, who did not have a day reserved for their memory. For us, it’s also an opportunity to think of those anonymous saints, the people in our lives and community that have helped to shape us as followers of Jesus and served as models of faith.

All Saints’ is also one of those days set aside in the liturgical calendar that is especially appropriate for baptism. So, in addition to remembering those who have passed, and acknowledging the pillars of faith that uphold our community now, we are bringing into the body of Christ new members. It’s a visible, and powerful symbol of body of Christ that includes those who have gone before us, and those who will come after us.

But what sort of community is this one to which belong and into which we are bringing Evie? It is a question that we must ask ourselves as we seek to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. It is a question we must ask as we explore God’s call to us in this place, in this moment. And there is perhaps no better place to begin exploring that question than in the words of Jesus we hear in the gospel this morning—the Beatitudes.

Today’s gospel helps us to make sense of the roles others play in our lives, and also about the roles we may play in the lives of others. It takes us back to the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in the Gospel of Matthew. For Matthew, these are the first words that Jesus says publicly. It’s the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, and we commonly call these first verses the beatitudes—the blessings. Blessing or blessed is one of those words we don’t use in regular conversation anymore, except when someone sneezes, or in certain phrases, like the southern “Well, bless your heart!” and even then we use the word without thinking about it much.

The word that’s translated as “blessed” could also be translated “happy” and that translation may help us get at all this means. “Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Get it now?

I didn’t think so. That makes no sense, but that may be what Jesus means by all this. Happy are the poor in spirit; happy are the meek, happy are the merciful, happy are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, happy are the peace makers, happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. We don’t associate any of those things with happiness. For us, happiness is associated with a very different range of ideas, emotions, and states of being. We can’t fathom how the poor in spirit might be happy.

 So we try to do something else with these sayings. We try to make them goals for ourselves—if we become poor in spirit, we will attain the kingdom of heaven, if we become merciful, we will receive mercy. But that’s not what Jesus is saying, either. Rather, those who are already poor in spirit are blessed, those who are merciful are blessed. Jesus is describing people who are already doing or being the things for which they are blessed.

We know the world we live in isn’t like the world that Jesus describes. We know that the meek, the pure in heart, peacemakers, the poor in spirit are not praised or rewarded in our culture. What Jesus is describing is an alternate reality with different values. Jesus is proclaiming, as he does throughout the gospel of Matthew, the reign of God. It’s a world turned upside-down, where the last are first and the first are last, where the meek, not the powerful inherit; where the merciful receive mercy.

There may be no more urgent message in our time than this—that God is not on the side of the powerful, the prideful, the wealthy but rather, on the side of the weak, the humble, the poor. In a time when military force is being used against captive populations; when nations seek to extend their influence by force of might, when those who are victims of state violence and climate change seek better lives in other places and are repelled at borders and treated inhumanely, to express the values of the beatitudes is revolutionary indeed.

And that is what we are called to be and to do as followers of Jesus. That is what we commit to in our baptismal covenant. When I baptize Evie later, I will ask all of you: 

CelebrantWill you proclaim by word and example the Good
News of God in Christ?
PeopleI will, with God’s help.
 
CelebrantWill you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving
your neighbor as yourself?
PeopleI will, with God’s help.
 
CelebrantWill you strive for justice and peace among all
people, and respect the dignity of every human
being?
PeopleI will, with God’s help.

The commitments we make and remake today are signposts on the way to the world Jesus is calling into existence in his teaching and ministry. Our response to his teachings help to bring that world into being, even as all around us the forces of evil, death, and destruction fight mightily against it. That evil may seem more powerful than the words and vision of Jesus. Nevertheless, in the midst of that evil, we, and all the saints bear witness to the greater power of Jesus’ love. May his love and grace give us the strength to embody that love in all that we do.

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.