Indivisible: Speaking to the Soul for August 27, 2021

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Many years ago, a sweeping history of Australia was published called The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, by Robert Hughes. It told the story of how England shipped convicts to Australia’s harsh terrain in the 18th and 19thcenturies, making it a continent not only wrested from its indigenous people but built by basically convict labor. One could be sent to Australia for seven or even fourteen years for stealing a loaf of bread—just like the “crime” that was the centerpiece of Les Miserables. Those who were deemed to have broken the law were seen as unredeemable.

Some might say everyone who breaks the law is a criminal who deserves to be punished—and even cast out. Those who say things like that, at the same time, we probably all know people who behave unethically while using the law as a cover, and also people who break the law in order to follow what they consider to be the greater dictates of their consciences. Laws are meant to strengthen societal bonds and relationships—not tear them apart.

In our gospel for this coming Sunday, Jesus’s critics are scandalized by the fact that Jesus’s followers do not perform the ritual washing of the hands all the way to the elbows that was the tradition that developed from the Torah over the centuries. Yet, their criticism stems not from concern, or the wish to help someone who does not know better. Instead, their criticism means to cast doubt on the holiness of this holy man and his followers. If they don’t even wash their hands before eating, how good of a teacher must this Jesus be?

And three years ago, when we last read this pericope, most of us viewed handwashing in a much different light than we do now, as deep into COVID19 as we now are. Most of us, before COVID19, gave handwashing a half-hearted effort at best. And now we have all been taught to scrub our hands up to our elbows while singing “Happy Birthday.” Twice.

Jesus reminds us that purity for purity’s sake, stripped of context, becomes an idol on its own. Jewish purity laws were, and in some communities still are, very strict. Sometimes, keeping the law becomes a display of false piety, unmoored from the spirit and purpose of the law at its inception—it wasn’t to make a big show of yourself; it was to demonstrate care for the neighbors and our willingness to be obedient before God. It was about indivisible community, not individualism.

Ultimately, this argument is about authority and tradition. Jesus points out that tradition is all well and good—until it starts interfering with mission. We’ve lost our way when purity is valued over efficacy—when purity is valued over helping people.

We have been given a similar opportunity to demonstrate that lovingkindness and sense of appreciation of the value of our neighbors’ lives. We have the opportunity to live by grace—in humble acknowledgement of the grace we ourselves have received, honestly acknowledging the profligate love that is at the root of such radical acceptance and forbearance. To see no one as unredeemable.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on August 27, 2021.

The Armor of Vulnerability: Sermon for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B)

I used to love to watch war movies with my Dad, especially those John Wayne classics like The Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. We loved The Fighting Seabees, because my Dad WAS a Seabee in World War II. I also loved playing games based on battle: Battleship,Stratego, and Risk.

In all those movies and in all those games, there were a few life lessons scattered in there for anyone, whether destined for the military or not. Think twice about attacking if you are outnumbered. Always try to defend the high ground, not the low ground. An army travels on its stomach. Offense is more costly and risky than defense if you are defending your home turf. Even: Never get a tattoo while drunk.

And of course, I grew up in churches that used war metaphors in their hymns, hymns like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (which, while it is a patriotic song written during the Civil War, was also in the hymnals of most churches we attended when I was little). Then there were other hymns that glorified the topic of blood: “Because He Lives,” “Are You Washed in the Blood?” “Nothing But the Blood” “What Can Wash Away My Sin?”-- all drawing on the image in the Book of Revelations about the faithful being washed in the blood of the Lamb of God, and made white as snow.

So many words in that image right there that can be deeply problematic if not handled carefully. When I was really little, and trying to understand that last song particularly, I also used to wonder how my friends who were people of color felt about being turned white by Jesus—until I was old enough to read the verse and see that it was talking about garments, not skin. But still, the privileging of the color “white” and its association with some people can be very much misused in prejudiced persons’ hands.

And so, the readings this week brought back some memories—memories of being taught a pugnacious faith, a faith in which Christians were deemed to be persecuted by society and under assault by Satan in a place where every business still was forced under law to be closed until noon on Sunday, the Christian day of worship, and in which my sixth grade homeroom teacher in a public school forced each one of us to take a turn leading the class in prayer every morning, and in which the study of the Old Testament was in the Tulsa Public Schools’ English curriculum not once but TWICE between grades 9-12. And the kids we had in school who were NOT Christian—in particular, the Jewish kids and the Buddhist kids who were refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia—were left to understand that America was a Christian nation, and if they wanted to fit in, they needed to get with the program. Which isn’t exactly how Jesus would have put it.

And these verses from Ephesians were often a chosen text in urging Christians to be ready to violently respond in defense of their faith in Jesus. This section is sometimes referred to as “The Armor of God.” The voice used her is a voice of command—the imperative. That is admirably suited for a passage so filled with martial language. Christians are ordered to take up our positions, to pray (repeated three times) and be alert.

Let’s catalogue the military terms that are scattered like buckshot through this brief passage: “armor” (twice), “belt,” “breastplate,” “shield,” “arrows,” “helmet,” “sword.” Then notice the verbs: “stand” (as in military formation) is used four times; “take” is used three times; “put on” is used three times. The New Interpreters’ Study Bible notes that the word translated as “take” in v. 13 is used in military context for preparations before battle. The order in which the Christian puts each item on is the order used when putting on actual armor and at the end one puts on one’s helmet and places his sword in the sheath.

But then let’s remember who the Christians at Ephesus were: a tiny minority group who chose to follow Jesus in a huge port city that made its living on trade and pagan worship, especially dominated by a Temple of the Goddess Artemis—that also served as one of the biggest banks in the Mediterranean-- that was so big it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That is a VERY different context from ours today, even with fewer people attending church. Even now, for some, claiming the title of Christian is a means to social acceptance and upward mobility, a path to belonging rather than to a life of faithful witness.

The pressure was on these early Christians known as the Ephesians from two directions. First, many of them had converted from Judaism, and Jesus was NOT considered to be the messiah by mainstream Judaism. Second, those who were Gentiles had converted from the civic pagan faith, and their abandonment was feared to possibly bring about the wrath of the gods. They were a tiny, ragtag group of people living in a culture that could turn hostile should some calamity descend and should their neighbors need a convenient scapegoat. They were vulnerable in the worst meaning of that word.

Thus, St. Paul has to urge them to keep the faith. But he does NOT do it by urging them to take up arms against their neighbors. Almost every single piece of the armor mentioned in his metaphorical list is defensive, not offensive. He is also clear that this armor is put on for the gospel of PEACE. The world was already a violent enough place. Jesus spent his public ministry urging people to put down their hatreds, their violent tendencies, and instead to love their enemies and pray for them. Even in this week’s gospel, when people are offended by his blunt words, he doesn’t force them to listen or force them to stay—he lets them depart in peace.

It is even more of a stark contrast to see that the thing Paul is urging those Ephesian Christians to defend in such military terms is “the gospel of peace.” Notice that some of the words used here were also used in our psalm: strength, and then the urging to prayer. Further, the belt Paul urges wearing is truth, the breastplate is righteousness, the shield is faith, the helmet is salvation, and the sword is the Spirit, which is equated with the word of God (not in the sense of Jesus or the scriptures, but in the sense of general revelation). In other words, the tools given to us in the fight against evil are gifts from God, and a sign of God’s loving-kindness toward us.

Nowadays, many of us are rightfully uneasy with concepts of religious warfare, tainted as this imagery is with the evils of the crusades, forced conversion as in Spain in the 15thcentury, jihad throughout the ages, and so on. We continuously see Christians at war against even other Christians. Yet at the same time, the world is in need of people willing to put their entire being behind living out the gospel of peace, grace, and mercy, who ARE willing to stand up for and alongside the cause of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized.

We see Muslim attacking Muslim in Afghanistan right now, with the Taliban attempting to use brutal, military force to impose their fundamentalist, rigid understanding of Islam on their neighbors who have thus far not been persuaded by their words and deeds. Their willingness to kill fellow Muslims in the name of a religion whose name means “Surrender” shows that Christianity is not alone in its tendency to misplace the peaceful heart of faith with the fist of war.

It is important, therefore, to treat these texts respectfully and also carefully. As we have seen repeatedly over the last many months, sometimes one has to physically put one’s body on the line in the cause of justice and creating a lasting PEACE within society. Our efforts are not in the cause of force and oppression, but must be in the service of the “peace of God,” which surpasses human understanding. Jesus’s gospel is one of vulnerability in the BEST sense: openness, the willingness to lay down one’s privileges for the service of the weakest members of society. Just as Jesus himself did, again and again. It’s a vulnerability that projects strength, not fear,because it is grounded in love and service to others.

Does Paul say this armor is to be used to attack others? NO. He says the armor of God will make Jesus’s disciples who put it on bold—bold in proclaiming the living, loving faith of Jesus, in word and deed—ESPECIALLY against the forces of anger, violence, and destruction. It calls for us to be made WISE, not murderous. The armor of God is the armor of love in the face of hatred.

In the end, we have to remember that armor is just an empty shell. Armor’s importance lies in protecting the one wearing it. God’s armor is not meant to block out the cries those around us, but to enable us to stand alongside them in solidarity. The armor of God is what we put on every day that we choose to not just be fans of Jesus but to be followers of Jesus. This armor acknowledges our vulnerability and our freedom to choose a way of life that is NOT always easy, that does come with some cost and sacrifice.

We hear that kind of vulnerability in Jesus’s question to his closest disciples as some of the crowd drifts off in our gospel, shocked by his unflinching talk about blood and flesh. “Do you also want to go away?” he asked sadly, yet with understanding and compassion. Jesus’s love is a freeing love; Jesus’s path is a path NO ONE can be forced to walk. At the heart of this love is the great mystery: that Jesus doesn’t just come to save us from hell, but to show us the way of life as we are living it. It is a life lived for each other no matter how distant or different we are from each other.

We are called to fight for love over conquest, and to fight using our hearts and our honesty, not our fists. May we all choose the armor of truth, the armor of righteousness, the armor of love and light—the armor of vulnerability.

Preached at the 10:30 in-person and online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

1 Kings 8:[1, 6, 10-11], 22-30, 41-43
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69

Prayer, day 3126: Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B)

With joy, we come before your altars, O God
and lift our voices in song and praise

for your saving love!
Bread of Life, you offer yourself to us
for the life of the world:
strengthen us in wisdom
to abide in you, and you in us, Blessed Jesus.
There is no place we find ourselves
that you are not our companion and shepherd, Lord:
for God so loved the world
and all of us within it
that we are given your Son in reconciliation and love.
By your grace, redeem us, O Savior,
and unify us to serve the cause of love always.
Merciful God, by the power of the Holy Spirit,
purify us and consecrate us, we humbly pray,
and place the hand of blessing
over all whose hope is in You.


Amen.

No Turning Back: Speaking to the Soul for August 19, 2021

John 6:56-69

It was all good when Jesus was passing around the bread and sardines.

It was fine when Jesus was poking his finger into the eye of the elites, the powerful.

But Jesus’s talk about drinking blood and eating flesh bursts through the earliest taboos in Torah. So now, Jesus’s teachings HAVE proved too hard for some of his followers. They have not signed on for this. To drink blood and to eat flesh is unimaginable. They asked for bread, and Jesus seems to be giving them stones. Worse than stones, actually, they think. Jesus speaks matter-of-factly to them about bewildering mysteries when they were asking for another miraculous sign. “Moses,” they said, “laid out feasts in the wilderness. We want bread just like that.” They wanted manna, which they called the bread of angels, but Jesus instead gives them riddles. And so, many leave.

But a few remain—then and now. “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” The ones who leave and the ones who stay do not yet understand that, better than loaves and crumbs, Jesus is offering himself to them—and to us.

Too often, we fall into the silken trap that undergirds our modern world—the stubborn insistent voice that insists that each person is in control of his or her own destiny. Other people will get there first, and there won’t be enough to go around. We are driven by fear of scarcity, fear of the Other. We scramble after manna and ignore the feast Christ offers us.

Jesus, however, reveals a different standard for defining reality. Jesus comes into the world as part of God’s proclamation “God loves, therefore we are.” God freely sends God’s Son into the world as the Incarnate Word through love.

There it is in John 3:16—“ For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Jesus is the sign and representation, the icon of God’s love for the world, love that feeds and sustains real life, not just existence. The is no turning back from an embrace that pure, that holy.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on August 19, 2021.

The Rebel Jesus: Speaking to the Soul for August 12, 2021

Ephesians 5:15-20

All year round, not just in March around “St. Paddy’s Day,” I am a fan of Irish music, and of course when one talks about Irish music, the Chieftains are often the first to come to mind. In 1991, they put together an album of “Christmas” tunes with a tasty collection of guest artists. While some of these songs were traditional, some were written by more contemporary singer-songwriters. One of the tunes that made it onto the album was one Jackson Browne wrote especially for this occasion: “The Rebel Jesus.”

In this song, the narrator gently criticizes the commercialization of Christmas, and in a way, Christianity itself. At the end of the song, the singer calls himself, “a heathen and a pagan,” but nonetheless he identifies himself to be “on the side of the rebel Jesus.” The “rebel Jesus” who didn’t just urge us to go along with the injustices of the world, or to throw a few sacks of coins into the lap of beggars, but who freed beggars from their marginalization, who dined with outcasts, and who called the powerful down from their thrones (as his own mother predicted).

In our epistle reading this coming Sunday, St. Paul likewise urges Christians to own their counter-cultural heritage, to live fully and counter-culturally according to Jesus’s precepts of peace, justice, and hope in action. Such a commitment leads, without a doubt, to Christians living as, “strangers in a strange land,” whether in the context of 2000 years ago or now.

We in the US especially are often prone to assume a dominant Christian culture. Even people who are not particularly religious absorb a milieu that is nominally Christian. Our exclamations may include “Oh, my God!”—it even made it into Valley Girl-speak in the 1980s. Most people know that a “Judas” is a traitor, even if they never darken the door of a church. And of course, we see politician after politician posturing outside or inside the doors of churches, regardless of the way in which they live their very public lives. Tepid shows of piety for the sake of access to power is practically an American tradition. Probably as many business deals have been concluded at coffee hour at famous churches as have been concluded on the 18th fairway of the local country club.

Still, the reading from Ephesians reminds us that the Christian way of life is countercultural—and what is countercultural is often seen as foolish, at best, rather than wise. Living according to Christian precepts in a non-Christian culture such as that of the first century Mediterranean world made you outcasts—and outcasts quickly sank to the bottom in a culture based on family, tribe, and nation. Are we that much different?

As Christians, even living in a context awash with a mixture between secular and religious life, those of us who resolutely identify as Jesus-followers are STILL called not to conform ourselves to the world, quasi-Christian or not. That is, we as Christians are challenged not to bow to the expectations of a society founded on values that often fly in the face of the radical love and care that Jesus demonstrated time and again in the gospels. The author of the Letter to the Ephesians attempts to build a spirit of urgency, because most first generations of Christians believed Christ’s return to be imminent. But, even two thousand plus years later, we are challenged to embrace the radical ethos of the one who was crucified as a rebel against imperial power, rather than being a prop to it.

The 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by a pronounced loss of faith, hope, and love. Some acknowledge this by moaning about how “evil” these days are, and imagining that they are punishment from God for one perceived societal sin or another. Interestingly, the television preachers who trade in this kind of fear-mongering always pick an alleged “sin” from which they themselves feel safely insulated in their “personal” relationship with Jesus, which also demands nothing of them in terms of living as a person “FOR” others, as Jesus himself was wont to do.

While the days may be evil, they are evil due to our forgetting of the obligations we owe to each other as children of God and fellow pilgrims upon this earth. Yet this world is also a beautiful world, filled with wonder and love and loveliness. For this, Christians are instructed to give thanks to God always.

We are not supposed to stomp around hating this life, but are called to transform it through our action. This has great implications for those who are growing weary of attempts to reform our justice system and confront the systematic oppression built into our relationships often with each other.

Throughout the scriptures, we see a three-fold pattern that emerges for living a life in God: weep; hope; act. As we have discussed previously, much of our society now is directed at distraction and entertainment, which would be fine, except when we then become unable to sit with ourselves and our thoughts and values and examine them to see their effect on us and upon the world around us. Too often, it seems that many of us lack the ability to be empathetic to the suffering of others, especially if the action required to alleviate that suffering might make us uncomfortable or disturb the status quo. Wisdom can lead us to the place where we are able to weigh the costs and benefits of action against our calling to Christian love and radical acceptance and celebration.

We are called as self-identified Christians to be followers not of a corporate, buttoned-down savior. We are called to be followers of “the rebel Jesus”—rebel because he preached liberation to the captives; sight to those who were willfully blind, especially to the suffering of others; and hope to those who were told to suffer in silence rather than challenge the thrones and principalities that profited from human division and misery.

This is how the world is reconciled and redeemed: through the love that overturns powers and assumptions of privilege. It is a love that calls us to open our hands to received God’s good gifts rather than remain with clenched fists and closed hearts.

Lead on, O Rebel Jesus.

This was originally published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on August 12, 2021.

Together in Love: Speaking to the Soul for August 5, 2021

Ephesians 4:25- 5:2

When I was a kid, one of the most frustrating questions I would be asked by some of my more fundamentalist classmates was this one: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” Even as a teenager, I wondered how one’s relationship to Christ could be based on individualism. Over and over, we are reminded in readings, like this excerpt from Paul’ letter to the Ephesians, that Christ dwells in community with us and calls us into community with each other. This reading reminds us that when we hurt others, we not only hurt ourselves, but we do violence to the life we are called to live as Christians in deed, as well as word and affirmation. Of course, that’s the hard part.

People who could isolate fractions of verses to regulate the behavior of others seem to forget passages such as these, which talk about our behavior as more than being an individual matter between us and God, also calling us to transform how we behave with our kindred and neighbors. The first rule of that is to love our neighbors as ourselves. It’s funny how we don’t judge our neighbors as we judge ourselves, either, all too often. When we talk about our individual relationship with God, we may forget about the unity that has repeatedly been emphasized over the last several weeks we have been reading Ephesians.

This reading, subtitled “Rules for the New Life” in my NRSV Bible, includes a list of rules for living as a Christian community. The rules come from the example of life that God has decreed and that Christ himself set before us during his earthly life among us. This is made clear in 5:1-2 “…be imitators of God… and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us….”

This reading from Ephesians is about how we are called to be transformed once we accept Christ into our lives. It is not enough simply to believe in God and believe in Jesus, or even to have a “relationship” with Christ. Rather, we are called to live according to the example that Christ set for us, as hard as that may be.

That transformation starts with walking in love—in kindness, humility, and compassion for each other and this beautiful earth upon which we all depend. Why be kind? The very next sentence provides the answer: because being kind is integral to who God is, and as God’s children, as Christians, imitating God must be central to who WE are, if we are living the resurrection life called for in this passage and in our gospel. It also means paring away things which are damaging to our relationships with other members of the Body of Christ—lying, holding onto anger or grudges, bitterness, or slander—all things that have become all too common and sometimes even admired in our common lives together.

There are some, especially in this continuing pandemic, who are very fond of talking about freedom—especially when they are talking about themselves, without any concern for the fact that freedom is always balanced by responsibility and duty, especially to others, because all political freedom comes by being members of a body politic. Somewhere along the way too many seem to have confused freedom with selfishness. And the problem with selfishness is that is ends up making us LESS free. Hear me out: in freedom lived out in selfishness, everyone else becomes not a neighbor but a competitor and even possibly an enemy, and no one feels free when surrounded by enemies.

Paul insists, “We are members of one another.” True freedom is built upon peace and amity. When those around us care about us, when we work to decrease anxiety and increase feelings of contentment and satisfaction—these are the foundations of true freedom and peace. And the letter to the Ephesians here provides practical advice about building that kind of Beloved Community—one that is centered on the abundant grace, love and hope that we lift up every time we lift up our hearts and offer ourselves around this altar to God. Together in love, imitating Christ as his disciples.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on August 5, 2021.