God’s Currency: Sermon for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, October 22, 2023

Readings, Proper 24A:

Isaiah 45:1-7
Psalm 96:1-9, (10-13) 
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

 

When I was a kid, I collected coins. I collected coins because my dad collected pennies—especially wheat pennies and even the rare Indian head. Every few months, he would sit me down in front of the pickle jar where he’d toss his loose change when it would get full. I would sort all the coins by denomination, and look for dimes that were pure silver. I’d separate out the Canadian coins because Dad told me they were junk—sorry, Canadians. Then I’d go through the pennies and look for any that were either wheat pennies or steel or bronze pennies from 1943 and 1944 during the war. I learned about the obverse and reverse sides of the coins, the mints marks, and other features. And voila! A coin collector was born—a skinny little girl reading coin collector books in the library like the little weirdo I was.

My collection expanded when Dad would take me to the flea market at the Fairgrounds. Dad himself didn’t believe in paying money for coins, but I got a paper route when I was 8 and started mowing lawns and babysitting when I was ten, so he’d let me do it. At first, I just collected US coins—buffalo nickels, Eisenhower dimes, Kennedy half dollars, Liberty dollars, and uncirculated sets.

Then I got to collect coins from foreign countries. My dad worked for American Airlines as a mechanic, and even though we were working class, we could fly for practically nothing as long as we dressed up in case the only open seats were in first class, which of course made all the employees stick out like sore thumbs.

So I first travelled overseas at age 7—my mom took my brother and myself out of school a week early that spring and we travelled first to New York then to Rome, where we spent several days, staying in inexpensive penziones, and then we flew to Amsterdam, once again staying in cheap hostels. We didn’t care. We saw the Vatican with its priceless works of art and ancient buildings. We met interesting, kind people who didn’t mock our homemade haircuts or Okie accents but found our wide-eyed excitement to be with them charming, apparently.

And now, besides the historical and sentimental value of coins, I learned about the exchange rate. This is how much each currency is worth in US dollars, and it changed daily. Since we had very little money, the timing of changing our money before each trip was important—you wanted to have the value of the other country’s currency be as low as possible in relation to a US dollar. When we went to Japan, the exchange rate was 300 yen to the dollar, which was shocking. I think the Italian lira was even worse, which is probably why so many people fling their coins into fountains in Italy. The man whose job it was to collect the coins from Trevi fountain on behalf of an Italian charity invited me into the water (which was normally forbidden) and I got to help him pick them up.

We later went to Japan, where I first saw coins with holes in them, and after high school we bummed our way around the UK and Europe, adding marks and French francs and Swiss francs to my collection. When we travelled to Ireland from the UK, I was harshly reminded of how political money could be when suddenly in the middle of the Irish sea the boat stopped accepting British pounds and only accepted Irish pounds.

All along the way, I collected a full set of the coins of each country, and added them to my collection.

My oldest coin was a tiny bronze Roman coin found in the mud of the Thames that I bought in a riverside stall, a reminder that the Romans had founded Londinium. The Romans enforced the use of their currency throughout their empire. And sometimes, they would design the coins in particular ways to remind the subject peoples of their surrender. Their coins became part of the way to grind their subject people under their heels. And so it was with the coin that stars in this week’s gospel.

See, the Romans demanded that every single inhabitant in their conquered territories pay a tribute every year to Rome—a tribute that would be used to pay the soldiers and officials who oppressed the native people. Only Roman coins could be used, and so local money had to be exchanged for Roman money, which further increased the cost of the tribute, because the money exchangers would always skim a percentage for themselves. The entire process was designed to be at the very least humiliating as well as expensive, because the tribute penny, as it was called, was actually worth an entire day’s wages. And when you are living hand to mouth, giving up a day’s wages means you give up food for you and your children for that day. Plus, you are funding your own oppression. And, if you are Jewish, you are doing it with coins that violate the commandment about having no graven images, since the obverse of these coins usually features the emperor’s head with the claim, in Latin, that he was the “son of god.”

It is here that I remind us that the word “politics” itself is NOT a negative word. Politics becomes negative when leaders move from tending to simply administering the benefits of society to all citizens, to using the operation of government in an unjust way, as a way to make people feel powerless. The gospel is political in the best sense. The crucifixion of Jesus is political in the worst sense. And in between these two political axes but definitely on the negative side is the issue of the use of Roman coins and paying that Roman tax.

So when Jesus’s opponents question him about whether to pay the Roman occupation tax or not, they are still asking him about authority, and they have been doing throughout Matthew’s gospel. But they are asking Jesus a political question. And Jesus responds so snarkily, I just love it. Did you catch that. The Pharisees believe the very coin itself is violation of the commandments, and so Jesus makes them acquire one and hand it over. Brilliant! The Herodians are collaborators with Rome, so they are watching to see if Jesus publicly espouses resistance to the empire so that they can tell their boss, the puppet king Herod, so that he can tell his Roman bosses and get Jesus arrested for rebellion. See? Totally political.

In the translation I first heard as a child for this story, Jesus asks whose image is on the coin. They acknowledge that it is the current emperor’s. But hold that thought of the question of image for a moment.

Jesus’s famous dictum “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's” may have been taken by many to be an indictment of the Roman empire. It was. But more important was the second half of Jesus’s statement: give to God the things that are God’s.

If we think about this statement creating two neatly delineated piles, we are in error. Even that denarius, stamped with the emperor’s face, represented not just the empire, but also the precious energy and time that was expended in earning it. Money is, of itself, neither tainted nor holy, nor are the human systems that money represents. But neither money nor economic systems have ever created the wonder of a single newborn day or created a single life.

So some people ignore the political nature of the situation itself, and take Jesus’s statement completely out of context, forgetting that he is adroitly evading a political trap. Or they focus on the first half of his statement and ignore the second half.

Because here’s the issue: the image of the emperor, and the currency of the emperor, represents more than just metal and denomination. It represents Roman oppression, Roman cruelty, Roman injustice, Roman war, Roman godlessness. That’s the real image of empire imprinted on those coins—scarcity, dehumanization, want. Using people until you use them up.

Pay Caesar in the coin of the realm. But give to God in God’s own currency.

But what is God’s currency? It’s the opposite of Rome’s. God’s currency is grace, reconciliation, peace, justice, community, and love. It is all the blessings and goodness that is woven into creation—and into every gift God gives to God’s children. And God’s currency can be found in the image of God that each and every one of us bears from the time of creation onward—when we seek to live holy, faithful lives, guided by the summary of the law that Jesus repeats and exemplifies over and over: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. ALSO the opposite of the Roman currency of stealing from the masses to fund their gigantic war machine.

We cannot forget that we ourselves belong to God, and that everything we have comes to us from God, given to us out of love by God for not just our survival but for our flourishing. God’s currency is a currency of fearlessness because it is a currency that proclaims the profligate presence and love of God in all of creation. And the exchange rate is ALWAYS in your favor.

Holding a day’s wages in his hand, Jesus reminds us that the abundant, profligate, priceless love of God brought creation into being, and traced its way down to me and you and every living thing, binds us together and calls us into flourishing and well-being. Jesus calls us to remember whose we are, and how we use that knowledge to set the priorities in our lives. If that priority is not love, rooted in abundance and faithfulness, the love that makes us part of something greater than ourselves, all our striving is empty and our lives risk being hollowed out like a drum lying forgotten in a corner.

God’s currency is the foundation of all stewardship. We belong to God, and when we live according to God’s values, we are signs of and testimony to God’s currency in the world. A currency of more value than any dollar, mark, pound, ruble, Euro, or denarius. A currency that never loses value but remains precious and in mint condition the more it is passed around from person to person.

Whatever we give—love, forgiveness, compassion, empathy, justice, mercy, grace-- will be returned a hundred-fold. We may need to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. But let us never fail to render unto God the things that are God’s. Which is—everything that matters.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on October 21, 2023 and at the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on October 22, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

No Dress Code: Sermon Proper 23A October 15, 2023

Ah, another Sunday, another gospel reading that seems to portray God as vindictive and violent, and uses religious differences to back that up.

Another Sunday where we misunderstand parables and their symbolism. So let me start out asking these questions:

Do we believe that God is a slave-owning king willing to slaughter anyone who offends him?
Do we believe that scripture portrays God that way, and do we ourselves experience God in that way?
Do we believe that people are FORCED into the kingdom of heaven, measured, and then found wanting?
To be specific, do we believe God would condemn to eternal hell people who do not wear the right clothes to a party to which they were not initially invited? And if so, should we put that on our website in the section for visitors under “What to expect?”

Once, again, NO. And for those of us who are survivors of the kinds of Christianity that DOES promote ideas like that, let me say this: HELL NO.

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says this about hell:

“I am among the 78% of American Jews who do not believe in hell. On the other hand, I do like the idea. In my less generous moments, I have delightful thoughts of sentencing people there. Then I stopped, both because I realized such thoughts are ungracious and because I do not believe that eternal pain helps any one. To whether there are postmortem punishments in hell, or rewards in heaven, that I do not want to know personally for a very long time: getting through each day on earth is complicated enough.”[1]

And yet, some of us WANT a God who smites sinners and leaves people we don’t like to roast in hell for all eternity. We especially want that when we ourselves feel victimized or powerless. But I wonder— is this a case of making God in our own image, rather than allowing God to remake us in God’s own image?

We know that this parable has been especially misused by a whole lot of people who like to imagine God to be vindictive and violent to justify their own vindictiveness and violence, which is usually tied to a toxic masculinity and patriarchical model of Christian leadership. This has become, in particular, a deeply dangerous political idea.

To be frank: I am persuaded that this parable has been misused historically when it has been about who is thrown out into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. We gloss over the images of abundance and welcome that are embedded in this story, and in the readings we heard before this gospel in our lectionary. And we may be allowing our resistance to real gospel values to suppress the growth of our spiritual understanding.

First of all, we need to stop believing that we can separate our spiritual lives from our daily lives. We modern Christians keep wanting to separate our daily lives from our spiritual lives—to think about the kingdom of God only on Sundays—and not even every Sunday, since our lives are overscheduled and there are other things to do.

But here’s a truth: your spiritual lives ARE your everyday lives. It is how we live outside these walls that truly reveals our spiritual values and our spiritual compass. And so we are being urged here to understand that we are being called to spiritual renewal.

We overlook the fact that the king invites EVERYONE in, and asks only that they put on the clothing of abundance. I wonder if a more fruitful interpretive lens to hold up to this passage is the universal abundance and universal grace we hear in our first three readings.

In our passage from Isaiah, we hear of rich feast prepared by God for those who live in exile and oppression. Hardly the image of a God who seeks our everlasting torment.

Then, there is the 23rd Psalm. Is there any more beloved and precious depiction of God’s determined love, care, and protection in scripture than this beautiful poem?

And then Paul’s closing thoughts to the Christians at Philippi, urging them to not let a disagreement between two of their members to keep them from embodying the “mind of Christ”—specifically describing the mind of Christ and therefore the mind of God, as being true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise.

The three parables that we have heard the last three weeks about Jesus’s authority make it clear that those in power had rejected Jesus’s invitation. This third parable makes it clear that Matthew’s community believes that because the leaders and now Jerusalem itself have rejected God’s message sent to them through numerous prophets and finally God’s own son, as last week’s parable made clear, the invitation is going to be extended to people that powerful people usually wouldn’t associate with and denigrated: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the riffraff, the nobodies, the blind and lame, the people who thought they’d been forgotten. People just like us, just as broken as us, just as in need of grace as us.

When we start trying to exclude people from entering our doors, from sharing in communion with us, from hearing that they are beloved by God, we are behaving EXACTLY as those Jesus is shown here as criticizing.

There is no dress code for God’s kingdom.

When God invites us into the wedding feast, God provides everything that is needed—including the robes. But the robes are not something external. The robes symbolize the inner transformation of living by embodying that same grace and mercy we have received for others.

What if the person who is found without a robe does not symbolize not being the right sort of person by birth or ancestry, but by refusing to be transformed by the banquet? What if that lack of robe is actually a refusal to adopt the mindset of community and gratitude that Jesus makes central to one’s ministry in the world?

Once you’ve come in to the feast, you are expected to put on the garments of love—the same characteristics that Paul lists as necessary to living the faithful life: whatever is true, honorable, just, and pure—and this is about internal purity in the sense of allowing love, not condemnation, to shine out of us.

The Church may bill itself as the representation of God’s banquet—the kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s terminology on earth. That’s beautiful—except for the times when the Church falters in living up to the ideals espoused in the gospel. The fact that we fail as the Church should surprise no one, since the Church is made up of fallible human beings who do not shed their pain, wounds, or sins at the door, but bring them right on in. After all, this community is where the healing can take place. Jesus’s healing of people’s physical ailments throughout scripture was all about restoring people to relationship. And that is necessary work today as much as it was in Jesus’s time.

We as the Church can start to embody the kingdom of heaven rather than mirroring the wounds of our society--IF we are intentional about recognizing that fact, and become very intentional about how we respond to each other and treat each other as we learn this new language of love and life that Jesus’s gospel calls us to. IF we start by constantly examining the way we treat each other here within our communities of faith, and try to change the ways we relate to each other so that we put on those wedding garments.

When we align this parable with the epistle and the gospel, we are led to a reminder that our spiritual life and our daily lives must align within a joyful embodiment of sharing what we have received from God with those around us.

We are led once again to awe at the abundance of God’s mercy and provision in all four of our readings. We are also led to an understanding of the way that God calls us into true community with each other, regardless of our differences. If God can prepare a rich feast for us even while we are inclined to fear and anxiety with our enemies surrounding us, and if God invites EVERYONE to the wedding feast of the kingdom, who are we to harbor hatred, division, or defeatism ESPECIALLY in our spiritual lives OR in our daily lives when we are confronted with the opportunity to toss people out or condemn others?

I have known people throughout my life who were angry, judgmental, and unkind. I have known people who have held others to impossible standards of behavior that they themselves did not meet, but were always searching for some pretext to feel superior to others and to cast others out with curses and condemnation. And all too often, they justified division and cruelty and even aggression in the name of Jesus. And the worst part was, many of these people call themselves “Christian.” And in doing so, they have tarnished the gospel of Christ in the eyes of thousands. We hear actual statements of this from people who have left the church—especially young people—because not only were they not welcomed, but they saw people who claimed to believe in Jesus acting absolutely opposite of Jesus’s example.

What if this parable is meant to remind us that God does not call the perfect, but God asks the called to work toward perfection—and by perfection, I mean those hallmarks of Jesus that actually imitate Jesus: being true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise, as Paul puts it in our epistle.

Grace is grace because it is not only generous, it is unexpected and unearned. Grace goes against everything for which our human-made systems stand. As Rachel Held Evans writes in our book study book, Searching for Sunday:

The church is positively crawling with people who don’t deserve to be here…starting with me. But the table can transform even our enemies into companions. The table reminds us that, as brothers and sisters adopted into God’s family and invited to God’s banquet, we’re stuck with each other; we’re family.[2]

We all are invited to the banquet, and we bring with us our anger, our flaws, our fears. But just as we are accepted as we are, we are also invited to allow the grace of the sacraments and the community to change us and heal us. Putting on the wedding garment means allowing yourself to be transformed by the miracle of community that the wedding feast is, that we are called to truly re-enact every time we worship together. The point is not to just sit and observe and then go back to our business. The point is to be amazed and transformed by the abundance God places before us in every moment—and to take that into our hearts and souls and share that good news with the world.

Come in to the feast—and let the feast change you. Let the feast change our communities by changing us. And by that, we change the world. No dress code required.

Amen.



Preached at the 505 on October 14 and the 8:30 and 10:30 am Holy Eucharists on October 15, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14


Citations:
[1] Amy-Jill Levine, The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings, p. 101, Kindle edition.
[2] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving Leaving, and Finding the Church, p. 152.

From Tenants to Tenets in Action: Sermon for Proper 22A

I have a pet peeve: I hate it when people use the word “tenants” in place of the word “tenets.”

Tenants are people who temporarily rent a place. Tenets are ethical beliefs or guiding principles.

And in the parable we just heard, too often we ourselves get confused not just about who the tenants are, but what tenets we are called to embrace as followers of Jesus. So please hold that thought while I explain.

I am also not fond of today's readings- or perhaps the baggage they bring with them-- either as a Christian, as a historian, or as a preacher. As a Christian the casual violence seemingly endorsed in the story sets alarm bells off in my head and heart.

As a historian, I know that, for centuries, this parable has been used to justify rampant hatred of Jews by the Church in its official teachings and by people who call themselves Christians-- all through misunderstanding who the characters are in this parable, and how the original listeners received this story and why.

Historically, the parable in today’s gospel has been broken down this way: God, despite acting wildly un-God-like, is the vineyard owner. The evil tenants, supposedly, are the Jews, and they are painted as a threat to the greater community and even to God's order in a way that would have made Hitler happy: Trying to get something for nothing, substituting ruthlessness for the obligation to anyone beyond themselves. The servants sent to the tenants who are beaten and killed? Those are the prophets, just like John the Baptist had been executed by the pseudo-Jewish King Herod. And when the vineyard owner's son is killed? And then, the murdered son is Jesus.

This parable, cut free from its context, reinforces the claim that lives on to this day among some Christians that the Jews were the ones who killed Jesus, ignoring the fact that crucifixion was a Roman punishment. It was the way the Empire dealt with rebels and resisters. The gospel writers, of course, dared not name Rome as the culprit. For the people of Israel in the time of Jesus, ROME was the ruthless claimer of each and every vineyard, LITERALLY. That’s how Empires operate: they take what isn’t theirs by threat or by violence, and use what they take for themselves and their murderous machinery. 

In Jesus and Matthew’s time, it was ROME that had unjustly claimed the vineyard, and extracted the produce not for the benefit of the people of God, but for its own greed and power. If Matthew’s community had written that into this parable, though, they would have been exterminated. When we forget that, we lose sight of the implications for us today in asking ourselves who the Roman Empire is for us today, and whether we really, in actual deeds, serve God or that empire.

One of my seminary professors once gave us a very important piece of advice about our interpretation of scriptures like this: if you constantly see yourself and the position of the underdog in every story, you need to stop and ask yourself to stand in the shoes of the other characters in the story, and see how that changes your perspective.

It's human nature, of course, to want to hear of your enemies getting what you think is coming to them. But since we are commanded to love our enemies, if we fail to love them, aren’t we acting just like the “evil” tenants?


The evil tenants, we are to understand, committed the great evil of taking what God had provided to them and using it for their own pleasure and advantage, to feed their own greed at the expense of the people. First and foremost, the tenants are everyone who ignores that they don’t own the vineyard, and thus not free to do what they wanted with its produce. They were only given use of the vineyard while they used its produce to advance God's Kingdom.

It's always tempting to see ourselves and biblical stories as the character that's the underdog. It's tempting because so often in scripture it is the underdog who gets favored: the younger son over the elder son; the second wife over the first; and, especially with Jesus, prostitutes and tax collectors over the religious leadership. But Jesus, himself a Jew, wasn’t criticizing all Jews—he was still in the process of answering the question asked at the start of Matthew chapter 21 three weeks ago—the question of the source of Jesus’s authority to come in to the Temple and start flipping over tables and criticizing those who encouraged those tables to be there in the first place. He was acting as a prophet to call all to honest self-examination and repentance so that they could embrace a new status, not as tenants, but as children of God. ALL of us.

So, if I hated thinking about how to put this parable into context for 20th century Americans at the end of last week, I am especially concerned about how it might be used on this particular day, as we hear of the attacks on civilian targets in Israel yesterday morning by Hamas, which is a proxy for Iran, and then of Israel’s responding rocket attacks into Gaza and the West Bank. And so the historical misuse of this parable by the Church for centuries to justify its ascendancy and claim to having displaced all Jews as God’s chosen people, a hateful philosophy known as supersessionism and triumphalism--must be admitted, and denounced in the strongest terms. Any attempt to kill each other over the vineyard must be denounced today and every day.

We must remember that each generation is called to read these parables in light of their own situation—and thus far, each generation has failed to consider that they themselves might be the tenants willing to do anything to avoid acknowledging that they there are times when they themselves forget that we are ALL tenants.

I say this as I lay alongside this parable not only the terrible genocidal bloodshed going on right now in Israel and Palestine, but also as on Monday, we will hold in tension the remembrance of Columbus Day and the push to reconsider tomorrow instead as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

In the case of our Indigenous kindred, too, the word “tenant” has actual historical meaning. Let me explain: when the conquistadores representing European kings came to these shores, they did not encounter an empty country, but rather a fertile vineyard, if you will, that they saw being occupied by evil tenants. And legally, they referred to Indians as tenants, rather than owners of the land.

What made Natives tenants worthy of being displaced? Two things: first, that those tenants we supposedly “godless,” since they had never been exposed to Christianity. But second, that to the invaders’ eyes, the lands which the indigenous peoples occupied had not been improved and harnessed for economic exploitation. They believed that God’s command to dominate the Earth in the first chapters of Genesis meant that only those who turned wilderness into cropland and mines had a full right to the land. Because, to their eyes, the “Indians” had not improved the land, they believed the Indians had violated God’s will and therefore forfeited their right to it.

That’s right-- they believed that to be Christian, one had to act as the wicked tenants we just condemned. To take fertile land that did not belong to them and use it for their own selfish ends. Talk about ironic. They substituted their own tenets justifying theft, just like those evil tenants did.

Do not think that I am kidding—this is the actual legal justification for the enslavement of native peoples and death of 90% of them within the first fifty years post-contact; the further removal of the surviving native peoples over the next 250 years, for supposedly impeding white settlers’ “progress” with their continued territorial claims; the confining of the survivors of THAT removal effort, one that moved right through this diocese in several cases during the Trail of Tears, onto tiny reservations on the most unproductive lands; and the eventual further fracturing of even those tiny holdings left to them if anything of value was found upon them. 

We see this in what happened to one of Missouri’s own original nations—the Osage—when, after they were removed from Missouri and Kansas, the county-sized reservation they received in exchange in Oklahoma was found in the early 20thcentury to be sitting atop some of the richest petroleum deposits in the world—a story so heinous it is now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and opening later this month.

All of this based upon the same kind of misapplication of notions of God’s justice that occur when we fail to use this parable for anything but a self-examination of our own actions and the way WE fail to understand the values of God’s kingdom that we ourselves are called to embody.

So let’s back up.

Can we start from the understanding that, in imagining the vineyard, we are ALL being reminded that all that we are and all that we have is NOT actually ours, but is a gift from God? We are ALL start with just being tenants on this Earth, and in this life. This understanding is one of the main tenets of scripture. Do we acknowledge God’s ownership of everything in our lives, or do we serve the empires that come along and encourage selfish misuse of the resources God has given us?

Do we instead remember and take seriously what we proclaim every single Sunday—that in every single thing Jesus did and does, Jesus calls us to joyfully take up the offer to be not just tenants, to not be assisters of Empire, but children and heirs of God in God’s vineyard. We are given the opportunity to exchange our tenuous tenancy for the status of God’s children—a matter of choice and not mere accident of birth.

Rather than making us feel vulnerable, however, if we understand God as loving us so fiercely as to only desire our flourishing—the very God Jesus repeatedly described and came to earth to make visible before us in human flesh—that should be a reminder that we are called to abundance—and to care for the flourishing of one another if we truly want to be not just God’s tenants, but God’s children. God’s ways of abundant generosity and grace must become our ways too, if we want to truly inhabit the vineyard rather than murder each other over it. That means we must be good stewards in every aspect of our lives—starting with stewardship in our faith communities, yes, which we have been talking about up her from this pulpit for a month now. But even more importantly, in the care of those around us.

For instance, in ancient Israel it was absolutely forbidden for a landowner to harvest from edge to edge in their fields, leaving nothing behind. Instead, it was an actual law that harvesting should leave behind some of the produce, so that the poor, the widowed, the foreigner, and the destitute could come into the fields after the harvesters and take provision for themselves from what was left deliberately behind. The idea of the super-rich 1% of the landowners taking everything for themselves from resources that belonged to God and therefore to the entire community was considered to be an outrageous violation of God’s call to care for everyone in the community.

Being not just tenants but good stewards and heirs in God’s kingdom means examining how our actions—and especially the actions from the past from which we still benefit today-- affect the most vulnerable and most oppressed among us. To make sure the produce of the vineyard is used for the care and flourishing of EVERYONE. We are meant to produce good fruit by embodying God’s generosity and compassion with one another, rather than attacking and killing off anyone who stands in the way of our insistence that we can do anything we want, even hurting other people directly or indirectly, in the name of our own freedom.

Being not just tenants but good stewards and heirs in God’s kingdom similarly means to take seriously the care and protection of this beautiful and precious planet, the only one we have.

Here is the good news: God gives us all that we need, and more besides. Everything we have comes from God, and comes from God abundantly and without qualification. In giving us everything, God only asks that we follow God’s example in making sure that everyone is cared for, that our resources are dedicated to God in response to God’s own gifts to us. That we live not by what we can hoard and keep for ourselves, but by how we can do good and live blessed lives that celebrate abundance with what we have, and how we care for each other.

We move from being tenants to being children living by God’s kingdom tenets when we decide, through real faith, to align our entire lives upon the cornerstone values of Jesus. We follow that example when we make Jesus the true cornerstone of our lives both inside these walls and how we live outside them—because the point of a cornerstone is to set the orientation for the entire building that symbolizes our lives.

The good news is that Jesus calls us, right now, to turn away from the embrace of division, oppression, and violence that makes up the tenant life, to embrace the tenets of true flourishing: abundant grace, abundant stewardship, abundant mercy that is our true inheritance as beloved children of God, with Jesus as our cornerstone, right here, right now, in our lives and the lives of St. Martin’s. May we make that proclamation of abundance not just a tenet, but a cornerstone on which to build a faithful future.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on October 7 and the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on October 8, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:7-14
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

The Abundant Gift of Freedom: Sermon for the Proper 19A

We are here this weekend celebrating so many things: the start of a new program year, the 58th anniversary—on Tuesday, actually—of our first Eucharist as a parish in 1965—58 years ago, and the start of our annual pledge campaign at a critical juncture in the life of this parish.

Since the start of September, we have met seven times for worship, offered three online services to the world, all due to hundreds of man- and woman- hours in preparation, from more than 15 hours creating and printing all the bulletins, to the efforts of the altar guild, the printing and the publishing of them here and on the website and newsletter that a volunteer curates and maintains to the preparation of the readers and Eucharistic ministers, to the ten-plus hours of programming the broadcast crew provides and then watches over each week, to the preparation and return of our choir and the efforts of our music director. We have excited volunteers offering scores more hours creating the curriculum and teaching our littlest members in church school, and are preparing for the launch of a new adult forum.

We have had staff and volunteers adapting, printing, and preparing the mailings for our annual pledge campaign and getting them to the post office. We held a fellowship gathering out at a local restaurant in our community. We are preparing to enjoy a delicious feast with our brunch later this morning, and preparing for another day of fun and fellowship with the Lunch Bunch, and are in the midst of preparing for our annual pet blessing on October 7 and our Fall Festival on October 21.

But that’s just within our doors. Since the start of September, this parish has kept one family from losing its electricity; has provided one person with the means to get new clothes so that they could work after everything they had was stolen as they moved here; has funded and assisted in cleaning laundry for a dozen households; has provided school children with new backpacks, food, and personal items from our blessing box; and has begun winding down our garden ministry which provides food throughout the Midwestern growing season to hundreds of people. We have visited and cared for members who are ill or housebound.

And that’s just in 16 days—because this day has barely started. In the next few days, we will, God willing, hold a nearly fully subscribed blood drive that will help as many as 144 people in need of blood in the coming weeks throughout the St. Louis region. We will also attempt to help a person struggling to get to work who lacks transportation whom we also helped keep their power on in the spring.

We are preparing to provide the means for people in our community to avoid death by overdose in the midst of a silent plague of opioid addiction in this county that enslaves millions of people and devastates millions more and costs billions of dollars each year. This parish has provided a priest to pray over and share the communion of this parish with the dying last night, and to comfort the living as they begin both their anticipating the grief of the passing of a loved one.

In other words, we have been not just a beacon of Christ’s love, but a beacon of the freedom and abundance that Christ lived and died and rose again among us to embody and to model.

Now imagine if St. Martin’s was not here. The world, my friends, would not just tick on, unnoticing. Instead, there would be an enormous void throughout this area. And in our own lives.

Each one of those ways we help our community around us is an offer of empathy, independence, and most importantly freedom with our joyful, generous accompaniment alongside them. Not out of a sense of superiority but out of a recognition that we are all equally beloved in the sight of God. This parish is a living witness to the actual real, LIBERATING love of God in a world that spends 99% of its time trying to divide, oppress, and impoverish the majority in the service of a few who then benefit with the hoarding of wealth and power.

A world whose modus operandi is TAKING from others rather than giving to others. A system that actually fears the growth of generosity and empathy for fear of people realizing the liberating power and the joyful sense of freedom that God’s love in action in the world offers.

We stand as witness to the power of freedom—real freedom. Not the freedom to oppress, or grab at the expense of others. But the freedom and flourishing that love, compassion, repentance, and forgiveness bring. The freedom that comes from believing that there not only is enough, there is MORE than enough among us.

In our gospel passage today, Jesus is concerned with helping his followers live a life embued with grace, but even more importantly, with freedom.

Peter’s question that opens our gospel reading today should be relatable to most of us. Peter wants to know what the limit is. He wants to know what is the least he can do when someone has wronged him. He wants to know when he is let off the hook if someone continually injures him.

He starts—like most of us—in thinking about times when he has been the injured party. Yet how would the question change if we approached it from the position of the transgressor? “Lord, how many times should my brother, sister, or friend forgive me?”

Do we want the answer then just to be only seven?

I am certain that I could pile up seven offenses against my loved ones in a very short amount of time. When we are on the giving end, we like to limit our obligation. When we are on the receiving end, we want a never-ending stream.

But life together in this parish of St. Martin’s reminds us again and again that the “least we can do” is basically the same as doing nothing, the same as standing by a burning house with a fire hose and refusing to turn it on because we are worried about the water bill.

We are called to embody the grace of compassion, mercy, community, and forgiveness because we ourselves have received it without limit. That’s who God is. God never gives up on us or keeps tally when we fall short in our lives of living the completely loving, completely free way God created us to embody.

We all know apologizing sometimes seems to be harder than forgiveness in our culture. And that is exactly why using today’s gospel for self-reflection is so necessary. Because when we try to avoid apologizing, or when we refuse to forgive, we are chaining ourselves to the past. I ask you to think really hard about the last time you really forgave someone, yes, but also the last time you apologized and were forgiven.

Do you remember the sense of relief you felt in both instances? Do you remember the weight that was released from your shoulders and your heart, and the freedom you felt?

Yes, freedom. Yale professor theologian Miroslav Volf calls forgiveness “… a genuinely free act that “does not merely re-act,” forgiveness breaks the power of the remembered past … and so makes the spiral of vengeance grind to a halt. This is the social import of forgiveness.”[1] And that is true relief, and repair of our fragmented world. That is our path to true freedom. And it starts with loving and caring for each other as though we were a single body.

Because we are. What happens to anyone happens to all of us. That's another reason why forgiveness and repentance are vital Christian practices.

Forgiveness, and true repentance, are part of the gift of freedom Jesus pleads with us to accept. To use our own freedom to set real love in motion throughout our lives and the lives of our communities-- for our own flourishing, and, better, for the flourishing of others.

As we begin our program year and our annual pledge campaign, it is more important than ever that we step out of the paths in our past that have not served us well. The paths that have sought to find “the least we can do.” The paths that have convinced ourselves that this parish of St. Martin’s doesn’t really matter, and does not make a vital difference in the lives of literally hundreds of people each and every week of our 58 year existence. And the next 58 years in the future. And beyond.

We are, instead, called by God to embrace our freedom by seeing the world through the eyes and heart of abundance and grace. Of forgiveness and reconciliation. By pooling together our substantial resources to OWN our agency and our witness to the world that there IS enough. We are called to free ourselves from the fear of scarcity, and embrace the abundant freedom of securing our financial not just survival, but flourishing. For the life of the world. For the lives of our neighbors. For the lives of joy we all want and NEED to live.

And in that proclamation, to embrace the freedom of living in a way that matters, a way that gives purpose to each day because we know we are accomplishing real miracles and making a real difference in the world. And it starts by truly walking the path that the liberating love and forgiveness of God places before us. Starting now.

Amen.




Preached at the 10:30 Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on September 17, 2023.

Readings:
Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35


Citations:
[1] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, Revised and Updated (pp. 121-122). Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition.

Where We Feed Each Other: Sermon for Proper 18A

Long ago, in a poor country far away, a young woman once approached the wise woman of her village with a question: “What are heaven and hell like?”

“Come, let me show you,” replied the wise woman, and the two walked into the forest, until they came to a house. The wise woman opened the door, and there they saw dozens of people all spread out, slumped weakly with their chairs pushed back against the walls, as far from each other as possible. In the center of the single room was a huge round table, about seven feet in diameter, covered with dozens of steaming tureens of delicious-smelling soup.

Yet the people in the house were so malnourished they looked like abandoned dogs. Then the young woman noticed that the only utensils in the room were spoons with handles that were about eight feet long.

There was no way they could use those spoons to feed themselves. Some people had blisters and even wounds on their hands from trying to spoon the hot soup directly into their mouths.

And like mistreated dogs, they were filled with the instinct to lash out. As the two women stepped inside, one fellow seemed to faint for a moment, and fell over onto the shoulder of one of the women seated next to them. With a vicious shove, that neighbor exclaimed “Get off me! Don’t touch me! Don’t I have enough trouble of my own?” and the man, awakened, slowly pulled himself up and slumped back into his seat.

As the young seeker and the wise woman had opened the door and stepped inside, some of the people there began weakly, hoarsely demanding that the two women leave. “Go away!” they cried. “There already isn’t room for any more here! Leave us to suffer in peace!”

The young woman’s eyes brimmed with tears at the sad scene. The old woman let her look a moment longer, then guided her back out the door so that they could talk freely. Once outside, she turned. “That,” said the wise woman, “is hell.” The young woman stifled a sob. “Now let’s journey a bit further,” said the wise woman.

They walked deeper into the forest, and up to another house. The wise woman opened this door, and there again they saw dozens of people all gathered around a huge table piled high covered with enormous steaming tureens of delicious soup. In fact, there were three times as many people in the house. Once again, the only utensils in the room were spoons with handles that were eight feet long. Yet the people here were laughing and joyous. “Come in! Come in!” exclaimed several of them. “Dinner is about to start!”

With some trepidation, the young woman and the wise woman sat down at the chairs pulled close to the table. One of the persons stood to lead the group in saying grace, and together they all thanked whoever had provided the delicious soup—the plants, the bees, the farmers, the harvesters, the chefs, ending with giving thanks for the blessing of those gathered around the table.


After a hearty amen, half the people pulled up to the table took a hold of one of the spoons, and then filled it from one of the tureens. Then, in a staggered rhythm, each spoon-holder reached across the table and fed a person across from them. And then each person who had just been fed picked up their own spoon and fed a person opposite of them. Those who held the spoons chatted merrily with each other while they fed their companions. The young woman and the wise woman, too, were fed until they could eat no more. And yet the tureens never seemed to go empty.

Eventually, the wise woman took the young woman by the hand and said it was time to leave, and they bid their new friends farewell. “Come back anytime!” several of the house’s inhabitants called. “There is always plenty to go around!”

The young woman was stunned. “That was heaven, wasn’t it?” she asked the wise woman, and the wise woman nodded. “I don’t understand!” the young woman cried. “Why was it so different? Both houses had exactly the same tables, the same food, the same spoons!”

“Ah, my child,” said the wise woman. “Hell is where, despite being surrounded by abundance, we isolate and think only about what we lack and don’t see what we DO have. But heaven-- heaven is where we feed each other, where the greatest abundance is love and care for one another.”

I have loved this fable since I read it in a book of folklore when I was a child. And the interesting thing is that versions of the Fable of the Long Spoons shows up in cultures all around the globe: In Jewish midrash, in Chinese fables (where the spoons become chopsticks and the soup becomes rice), in Hindu and Buddhist and Muslim tales. There is obviously universal wisdom embedded in this tale.

In all of our readings, we hear about challenges in relationships with God, and with each other. In our reading from Ezekiel, the prophet is addressing a common, but mistaken, belief, then and now, that people suffer calamities due to their sinfulness. And while it is true that there are often consequences for bad behavior, we also know that sometimes hateful people flourish and innocent people suffer. And it’s human nature to try to figure out a system to it all—to figure out a system, so we can avoid that suffering.

In the case of Ezekiel and his audience, the people of Israel believe that God has punished them for their lack of faith in God by having them be conquered and their leaders carried into exile. Yet the prophet assures them that God does not desire the punishment of anyone. God DOES expect us to examine ourselves, and where we do things that do not serve ourselves or others well, to turn aside from those harmful behaviors and repent—which literally means to choose a new path.

Our psalm portion tells us exactly how to have the perspective to do this: by studying, with humility and gratitude, God’s revelation to us, God’s wisdom offered for us, starting with scripture. Taking that wisdom as our own, and focusing on that revelation as a gift to guide our choices and relationships in all that we do. That’s one of the reasons why Christian education, and regular study and prayer over scripture is so important as a practice, if we really want to flourish and grow as children of God and the best people we can be.

The next reading meant to deepen our wisdom and guide our relationships comes from Paul writing to the beleaguered Church in Rome. His first sentence itself is a wonder: Owe one another nothing…. EXCEPT to love one another. We all know that another word for debt is “obligation.” 

Friends, love is the greatest obligation of them all! And yet it is also the ground of everything good and beautiful and true. We are literally made for love. 

Paul had spent a lifetime even before his conversion studying scripture. And before his encountered with the risen Christ, he had been an aider and abettor of the persecutors of the followers of Jesus. But when the lens of Christ was added to his knowledge of God’s specific commandments, he suddenly saw the universal light of Christ woven into everything and every person, and urges all of us who hear his words to do the same.

But then we come to our gospel. The situation described here seems grim. There is injury within the tiny community of Christ followers to whom the author of Matthew belongs. So Jesus advises a way to address the wrong and seek restitution, reconciliation, and healing.

And I have seen this specific teaching be used to absolutely devastating effect by being misinterpreted in church and our common lives together. And especially right now. I want to ask everyone to concentrate on the fact, that Jesus first urges us to try again and again to confront issues in our relationships openly and lovingly. Repeatedly. To persevere in trying to maintain acknowledgement of where we all fall short in loving God and each other—and remember loving each other is one of the main ways we show the world we love God. 

So being loving and compassionate in our relationships is often the boldest witness we make as to who Jesus, the Son of God, is. And that benefits not just others but ourselves. To remember the lesson of our fable, by feeding each other, we ourselves are fed.

But let us remember, first of all, that the specific issue being addressed here is behavior that directly hurts another. Not our “disapproval” of another person or of ways that they are different from us. This is supposed to address real injury, not looking down on those who don’t look like we do, or dress like we do, or use the same pronouns as we do, or love the same way we do.

Then there is this key statement: if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector.

Oh hey! There’s the chance to start enforcing some codes of exclusion, right? Everybody knows that Gentiles and tax collectors were considered to be enemies of the people, yes? Let’s remember: Gentiles were non-Jews, often soldiers or citizens of the Roman empire or descendants of the Canaanites or Babylonians or Persians, all representatives of the Jewish peoples’ oppression just like in Ezekiel’s time. And tax collectors were those who collected taxes in the name of that regime, economically squeezing revenue out of an already desperately poor people. Yep. All that is true. So does that mean we can cast out and hate and oppress those we consider to be sinful?

And let’s be clear, too often right in what is going on around us right now, that “sinful” label really means “those who don’t live and look and dress and love how we think you should live and look and dress and love.”

But how does this very real tendency we have to bash those different from us line up with Paul’s insistence that Jesus taught us that we should owe each other nothing—except love?

The key is to ask one very important, very much overlooked question: How did Jesus treat tax collectors and Gentiles? Did he urge violence against them, ostracism, excommunication? Did he urge the passage of laws to strip them of their humanity?

Or did he have long conversations with them, teach them, heal their loved ones, praise their astounding faith, sit down to eat with them and even bless them? In fact, does anyone know what the author of Matthew’s gospel was supposed to have had as his occupation before becoming a follower of Christ? Matthew 9:9 and Mark 2:14 state that Matthew, also known as Levi, was sitting in his booth collecting taxes when Jesus walked by and called him to follow him. Matthew himself was a tax collector—and was not just NOT outcast by Jesus, or stoned to death by him, but called to be one of Jesus’s earliest followers.

As we finish up a week that included a secular holiday dedicated to a reminder of how much we all depend upon each other’s common labor, I hope we can see this passage in Matthew’s gospel with clear eyes and a clear heart. How does all of that stuff early in our reading about approaching those who have sinned against us end? With this statement, so important that it is in our prayer book prayers at the end of the morning prayer liturgy: where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’

When ever even a handful of people gather, in the name of Jesus, which means in the example and imitation of Jesus, Jesus is there in the midst of them. When we hold tight to our relationships with each other, rather than looking for ways to cast people out, Jesus is right here in the midst of us. When we tend to our OWN sinfulness and error first, and stop trying to distract ourselves by pointing the finger at others, Jesus is in the midst of us. When we are willing to stop believing that each other is the enemy, and instead start feeding each other, then Jesus is in the midst of us.

And all of us will be fed. Heaven, my beloveds, is where we feed each other.

--Preached at the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church on the 15th Sunday after Pentecost, September 10, 2023.

Readings:

Ezekiel 33:7-11
Psalm 119:33-40
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

Fiercely Compassionate: Sermon for Proper 17A

Have you ever had an enemy?

I know I have had a few people in my life who I have realized did NOT to put it mildly, have my well-being at heart. The worst ones have been relatives, or better, “frenemies”—people who to your face pretend to be your friend, but behind your back undermine you and work against you at any opportunity.

The problem is, how can you avoid granting them power in your life?

What if the first step is refusing to allow them the position of “enemy” to begin with?

I ask this question, because this may be the nub of so much of the division we suffer from in our lives.

And this ends up being something our readings are asking us to consider this weekend.

Last week, in our epistle from Romans 12:1-8, Paul urged us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to God.

This week, in urging us to bend over backwards being kind to those who seek to hurt us, it almost sounds like Paul is now demanding our sanity.

In 205 words in Romans 12:9-21, there is a rapid-fire list of 27 specific commandments about how we are called as followers of Jesus to live in relationship with others. Twenty-seven! And seven of those begin with either “do not” (six times) or “never” (once). All the rest are stated positively, centering around the words “love,” “bless,” and “rejoice.” Under all of this are commands to give: to “contribute to the needs of the saints (fellow church members),” and to give your enemies food and drink if they hunger or thirst. There’s a lot there that absolutely sounds doable, though.

Until we get to that last bit there.

It is obvious that Paul himself understands that the standards of behavior here ARE incredibly demanding. Probably the most difficult is being not only not vengeful, but actually kind and solicitous to your enemies. Perhaps that’s why he includes that little bit that, if you are loving toward your enemies, it will actually “heap burning coals upon their heads.” We used to call it “killing them with kindness.” And that’s a pretty bizarre collection of words, if you stop and look at them. Are we really being kind if we are also “killing them?”

But then that brings up a conundrum: do I gain anything by doing these kindnesses, if that “heaping of burning coals” on their heads is then something I can’t avoid enjoying? I think that Paul is trying to toss us, and our human nature, a bone there. I also think this lines up nicely with our earliest view of Paul back when he was the Pharisee and persecutor Saul, and he held everyone’s coats when they stoned the first martyr of the Church, Stephen, to death in the Book of Acts. Paul definitely loved himself some vengeance.

And of course, Paul assumes that our enemies even HAVE consciences or feel healthy shame, which is a big assumption, then or now. Too many people have made selfishness and contempt their real gods.

This section of the letter to the church in Rome emphatically urges us to live into a paradox as people of faith. We live in a world that we believe is based largely on punishment and negative reinforcement, or motivation out of fear-- but we pray (at least when it comes to ourselves) for a God that uses a different accounting method; listen closely when we pray the Lord’s prayer, and you will see what I mean. Many of us know that we fall short of doing what we ought to do in all our relationships. Most of us believe we could be better children, better parents, better friends, and better Christians. Knowing our faults and failings, we also want to believe in grace for ourselves—but all too often we want to believe in judgment and condemnation for others.

The point is not to heap burning coals upon our enemies but to be kind and loving to them—it’s the kindness and love that should be emphasized. If we’re not careful, enjoying heaping burning coals on the heads of those who have wronged us approaches schadenfreude—a great German word for the phrase “enjoying another’s misfortune.” Satisfying as that may be, it also is antithetical to a real spirit of compassion and forgiveness. Schadenfreude leads us right back to contempt and dehumanization.

Remember the command that began chapter 12 in this letter: to not be “conformed to the spirit of the world” around us, because the spirit of this world—one WE humans have created mind you, and keep reinforcing by our willing participation in it—is one of misery for the vast majority of people. Even to just begin to live by the golden rule would be a radical act of defiance against this cruel calculus. We are, through our baptism and discipleship, called to be better people through Christ who strengthens us, and models for us this kind of self-giving love.

Being a Christian cannot ever be about oppressing anyone—that’s the party the gospel demands we leave. It’s part of making generosity and grace a true part of our lives. Christianity should make loving others the central act—no matter what we think of their behavior, rather than only loving those who conform to our notions of belief. Just like Jesus, we are in the “never give up on others” business.

We live awash with messages of hatred and fear. We live in a time of name-calling and dehumanization of anyone who is different from you.

And I think, at the root of it, is not just a lack but an attack on empathy, which is then an attack on compassion. Think on it. And that’s the first step in defeating this terrible division in our world, which transcends national barriers. Because the minute you think about who is pushing the division, and then ask yourself why, you take the first step toward defeating them.

I love the work of Brene Brown, a teacher and social worker (and Episcopalian!) who works to help people live wildly compassionate, brave lives. I ran across an interview where she discussed the work of Dr. Chris Germer and Dr. Kristin Neff (1). They are psychologists who study compassion, and they name the enemies of compassion, which is a vital step in defeating the forces of division that seek to divide us. Germer and Neff identify two kinds of compassion: soft compassion, and fierce compassion. Both are necessary to effect change not just for ourselves, but for others, especially groups being marginalized.

Soft compassion is gentle, nurturing compassion, and God knows we need lots of that. It’s the kind of compassion that many of us need to practice for ourselves: giving ourselves a break when we fall short or mess up or struggle. It’s acknowledging where we ourselves are hurting and giving ourselves grace, so that we may do the same to others.

Fierce compassion is more active, more filed with agency. And it is this compassion that fomenters of hatred fear the most, because it leads to not just weakly accepting injustice as they “way things are” but urges us to action. Real action. Even if we have to start off slow, like feeding our enemies and giving them something to drink, so that we can realize they aren’t our enemies after all.

But there are many things that stand in the way of us practicing this kind of compassion. They list these as both far enemies and near enemies of fierce compassion. Far enemies are opposite of what we are trying to cultivate, and they include:
Anger and Fear (emotional reactivity, as opposed to attention and mindfulness
Demonizing (Other-ing, as opposed to empathy)
Hostility (versus kindness)

Near enemies are more tricky, however. Near enemies seem harmless, but are meant to roadblock any real change. The near enemies of practicing true compassion include:
Complacency (can’t we all just get along?)
Sameness (the claim that we are all the same—the “all lives matter argument” or “I don’t see color” claim that blocks the acknowledgement of oppression)
Pity (feeling bad for someone in a way that makes you also feel superior) (2)

I would probably add here avoiding shame, like when some leaders claim that truths and facts that might inspire “feeling bad” should be suppressed in school.

I wonder if what Paul is getting at here is the same thing Germer and Neff are talking about. If we refuse to allow ourselves to dehumanize our enemies, and instead refuse to react to them in ways that cedes to them our own power, we free ourselves from the endless cycles of division and vengeances that weakens us all.

I know it sounds hard. To change this cycle of reaction and vengeance requires incredible mindfulness, empathy, and compassion—compassion for both ourselves, and for those around us. But here is a universal truth: hurt people hurt people. Breaking that cycle of hurt is a gift to ourselves beyond price.

Maybe THIS is the cross Jesus is urging us to take up in order to follow him in our gospel. I think we flinch when we hear that commandment from Jesus because we literally associate the cross with death and pain. Of course, that is why crucifixion was invented. But for Christians, the cross means something different. It means emptying ourselves of all our privileges, just like Jesus did, and reacting to those who have hurt us with the grace that we ourselves do not deserve but receive a million times over from Jesus. 

This not only is a gift we give to ourselves, because there is nothing worse than allowing someone who has hurt you to live rent-free in your head and heart. It also denies our enemies their power to hurt us in the ways that matter most—inside our own hearts and spirits.

To be clear: neither Paul nor Jesus are telling us let people abuse us. Instead, we are being given the power to refuse to allow ourselves to be defined by those who attempt to hurt us. Instead of sinking to the level of our opponents, we expose their injustice, and free ourselves from carrying the boulders of hatred they are attempting to place on our backs.

The heaping burning coals upon their heads thing is just a bonus.

We are seeing a lot of hateful acts being perpetrated right now by people who claim to be Christian, and that cruelty and contempt is part of why so many people are turning away from religious belief of any kind, as we discussed last week in the result of the “Jesus in America” survey the Episcopal Church commissioned a year ago.

The cross is not just a symbol of torture—if it were, why would we place them over our hearts or wear them on our clothes or hang them over our altars?

The cross, instead, is a symbol of fierce compassion—the compassion that didn’t just see the injustice and the violence of the world, but met that violence and injustice with love—and with ACTION. The kind of action Martin Luther King Jr called “soul force.” The kind of compassion that refuses to conform itself to the world but actively seeks to change the world to relieve the suffering of others—because when one person suffers, we are ALL diminished. Even if they are so-called “enemies.” That’s why wars happen.

The cross we are being urged to take up is a sign of victory, and a sign of enlightenment on the path of love.

And there’s no time like now to rededicate ourselves to living in the Way of Jesus.

And that doesn’t just involve believing, but doing.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” and your spirit. Let us take up our crosses and learn from Jesus. To take up our cross, we put down the burdens of fear and division that paralyze our souls.

The world will know we are Christian by this fiercely compassionate love. Then we will carry the cross of Jesus with honor.


Amen.



Preached at the 505 on September 2 and the 10:30 Principal Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, Missouri.


Readings:
Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8 
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

Citations:
1) “Interview with Dr. Chris Germer on the Near and Far Enemies of Fierce Compassion, Part 1 and 2,” on Brene Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast, November 2022, found at https://brenebrown.com/podcast/the-near-and-far-enemies-of-fierce-compassion-part-1-of-2/

2) Dr. Chris Germer, “The Near and Far Enemies of Fierce Compassion,” October 22, 2020, at Mindfulness Teacher Training, https://mbsr.website/news/near-and-far-enemies-fierce-compassion

The Holy Silence: Sermon for Proper 14A, August 13, 2023

In the dawn of the mornings when I am first to rise, I let our three dogs out through the front door, and they go galloping off to chivvy the squirrels that stalk the birdfeeders. It’s a luxury and also a danger, since our yards are not fenced, so before opening the door I look to see if any deer, possums, or raccoons are visibly lurking, and rather than leave them alone I walk out with them.

I have learned in the months we have lived here to look up as well as out. More often than not, as they got rocketing into the woods, I will catch a glimpse of one or two barred owls launching themselves huffily from the very tops of the ash trees bordering our driveway. The first time I noticed this was in winter, and their large brown bodies stood out starkly against the pale gray dawn and the descending snow. In fact, I noticed that the hissing sound of snow caressing trees and ground as it fell was much louder than the sound of the owls’ flight. I was amazed that snow, which has sound-dampening qualities of its own, could be louder than the flight of these very large birds.

I later learned that, due to the unique structure of their feathers and wings, certain owls can fly absolutely soundlessly, despite their large size. Scientists speculate that this is a survival feature: given how slow they are, their silent flight can both help them sneak up on their prey, and help them be able to listen as they fly to locate and then track their prey (1).

In the stories we hear today about both Elijah and Jesus, silence plays an often overlooked role. In our story form the first Book of Kings, Elijah is in hiding in the desert, and feeling like God is not doing enough for him. He has obeyed God zealously, as he notes, and it has come at great cost to him. He lived when Ahab was king, a very weak king he was, childish and not too bright. Ahab foreign-born queen, Jezebel, was the real power behind the throne, and she encouraged the worship of Baal, a local storm god. At God’s command, Elijah had engaged in a spiritual contest with all of Jezebel’s Baal prophets. When they could not entice their God to outdo Elijah’s God, Elijah had not only triumphed, but had slaughtered them all. This caused Jezebel to demand Elijah’s head, and off into the wilderness he fled. In anger, he lay down under a shrub and demanded that God take his life.

In response, God led him up to Mount Horeb, we are told, and actually goes before Elijah. What we are NOT told is that Horeb is also known as Mount Sinai. This might help us make more sense of this story, especially compared with what we heard last week. Elijah kills agents of the corrupt Kingdom, flees into the wilderness, and then has an encounter with God. Does that sound like any other prophet we have ever heard of in the Hebrew scriptures? Try this: Moses, though raised in a position of privilege as the adopted son of an Egyptian princess, strikes down and overseer who is beating an Israelite, and then flees into the wilderness, where he encounters God in a burning bush. After freeing the Israelites from slavery, Moses climbs up the same mountain Elijah is on and converses with God in such a transformative way that his skin glowed, as we heard last week. In our story we hear today, we are meant to hear echoes of the relationship that God had with Moses. Undoubtedly, Elijah is meant to make that connection as well.

When things get rough for Elijah, he loses his faith in both God and himself. He loses faith in God because he expects God to be a thunderous, storming, smiting kind of God-- the kind of God that Baal was. Elijah doesn't want the God that we heard about being described in Psalm 85. Instead he wants the God who has described in Psalm 77, which describes God this way.

16 When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid; the very deep trembled. 17 The clouds poured out water; the skies thundered; your arrows flashed on every side. 18 The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lit up the world; the earth trembled and shook. 19 Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen.

But God is greater than a puny storm god. God therefore takes Elijah up on one of the most significant mountains in Israel's history, and actually reveals God's self to him.

So is God in a mighty wind? No.
In an earthquake? No. Once again, puny Baal-like parlor tricks.
God is not even in a fire, not this time.

Instead, God is in what is described in this translation as “a sound of sheer silence.” Other translations describe it as “a small still voice.”

And yet Elijah is not impressed. After having the very presence and glory of God pass him by, when again he is asked why he is there, he simply repeats his complaint about God, implying that God is not supporting him enough.

In our gospel story, Jesus shows us the importance of silence and soft voices in communicating with God. After a day in which he's fed a multitude and healed countless others, all Jesus wants is a little bit of peace and quiet so that he can pray to God. And the only way he can get it is by forcing the disciples into a boat and sending them out on the waves. And in the midst of his quiet prayer time, he becomes aware that the disciples’ boat is in the midst of a storm, and so stops what he is doing and goes out on the waves to save them.

In this description of Jesus walking on the waves, we once again are reminded of those same lines from Psalm 77, this time being enacted by Jesus as the Son of God: “Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen.” Jesus is here revealing himself as more than just a prophet. Unlike Elijah, the disciples are incredibly impressed-- so impressed in fact that you could call it terrified. They call out to him in the midst of the storm and even though he answers still can't believe what they are seeing understandably enough. Then Peter-- impetuous, leap before you look Peter, asks his teacher to allow him to walk on the water too, as proof that it's really Jesus. And so Peter is invited to step out into the waves, walking in the footsteps of the almighty, only to lose faith even quicker than Elijah and begin to sink. Jesus comes to the rescue, returned him to the boat, and stills the storm--the storm that is a symbol, as it often is, for a lack of faith in God., Just as it was a symbol of the worship of Baal in the time of Elijah.

As I think about the challenges facing the capital C church in these times, I wonder if the lectionary isn't trying to lead us into a place where once again we are being challenged to focus our imaginations and our attention so that we may see the presence of God all around us, and be encouraged. We are told that Christianity is in the midst of a storm of disbelief and irrelevance, Especially in the incredibly loud and busy world in which we live, a world where the quiet that allows us to see the wonders all around is deliberately almost impossible to come by.

St. Martin’s continues to struggle against a storm of financial challenges caused by lack of revenue, despite all the wonderful ministries and faithfulness of so many of her people--a problem that has existed for decades but is reaching crisis proportions now. And this couldn't be at a worse time, but also is somewhat unbelievable-- this is a parish that when I arrived here five years ago supposedly only had three years left to exist--and then COVID happened and yet we survived that and even in many ways flourished, even as we experienced terrible losses, including of beloved members of long standing. They loved this parish-- and entrusted it into our care.

Yet there seems to be this constantly swirling storm that assails our ears and our hearts and fails to believe that there is enough-- even more than enough-- to be able to place this parish on a sound financial footing so that we can concentrate on the really important things: seeing, and hearing, and proclaiming the generous and life giving presence of God in our lives and in the world around us. Even further, we are actually called to then embody that belief so that others may see it as well. Like Elijah, rather than believe that we already have the resources to succeed, we are tempted to act like Elijah and crawl under a bush and ask to die. God plays in 10,000 places all around us, and reveals the glory of God's love to us in every moment--if only we quiet the incessant grumbling of our expectations that God do our fighting for us. What if we decided to stop drowning out God’s compassionate love for us, reinforcing our own fears, and instead expect to see God even in the quiet little miracles that surround us every day—and even empower us to be miracles ourselves, as this parish church IS already to so many people?

As scripture repeatedly reminds us, and psychology affirms, our expectations have enormous influence on our ability to discern and experience the presence and activity of God and the world around us. If we expect to see God in the storm, that's the only place we will see god. But if we expect to see God all around, we will have the faith and the courage to do what we need to do to continue in the ministry God has blessed us with.

I wonder if each and everyone of us made an effort to mindfully seek the presence of God in silence for even 15 minutes of a day and silence so that we could hear that small still voice of God in every heart beat how that would change us, both as individuals and as a parish.

One of the gifts of my classes this June at Sewanee was an assignment to spend 30 minutes each day (at least five of the seven days of the week) in unstructured prayer: to simply sit and open my heart and spirit to God. Because my accommodations were in a busy apartment building, I decided to find quiet places around campus, often near water or an overlook. Sometimes I prayed in the morning, some days it was so busy I could only pray at night.

I want to invite you into considering joining me and seeking out the small still voice of God both in our common lives and in our lives as individuals, each and every day.

Be still, and know that God is God.
Be still, and know that God is there in quiet and in stillness.
Be still and look for God's hand at work in our lives-- not in the earthquake, or the wind, or the fire, but in the quiet love and tenderness that surrounds us and upholds us always.

May we seek out the small still voice within the sound of God's loving, precious silence, and then go into the world, charged to truly testify to the amazing presence of God’s love that will be revealed.

Preached at the 505 on August 12 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, Missouri.

Readings:

1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33


Citations:

1) Lesley Evan Ogden, “The Silent Flight of Owls, Explained,” July 28, 2017, at Audubon.com, https://www.audubon.org/news/the-silent-flight-owls-explained