The Momentum of Love-- Sermon for Proper 18C, September 7, 2025

    

There's a sweet little video making the rounds right now. About a month ago, at the halftime for a WNBA game in Las Vegas, the team held a baby crawl race. Ten babies were lined up by their dads on one end of the court on the top of the key, and encouraged to crawl to their moms on the other end of the court. It was NOT a short distance. One little girl really took off, crawling steadily and with great concentration.

Just past midcourt, she suddenly stopped, scooping up one of the stuffed animals that were being slid onto the court as incentives. How could she continue, and keep the toy? In an amazing bit of problem-solving, she then stood up wobbily clutching the stuffie, and took her first little steps for all the world to see. The crowd went wild, and even the other mothers nearby celebrated as she hesitatingly but unfailingly walked into her mama's ecstatic arms.

I think about how determined that baby was--- to stand up on a slick basketball court in her stocking feet, while people all around her were cheering, clapping and screaming, flashes going off all around her-- and then she walked all the rest of the way. She was willing to take those first steps certain of her mom's loving embrace at the end. 

I think she was propelled by the momentum of love. Now she's internet famous, and she has brightened the days of millions of people who have watched the video. This kid is a risk taker, no doubt about it.

Our readings from Philemon and Luke are also about taking risks, and taking our first steps for living out our call to be disciples of Jesus, rather than mere worshipers of him, no matter the cost.

The brief letter to Philemon is notable, because in it, Paul demands, while pretending to ask, that one of his wealthy converts, Philemon, free an enslaved young man who had run away from Philemon and made his way to Paul, imprisoned at the time. Paul not only asks for the freedom of the slave, but asks that Philemon henceforth treat the formerly enslaved young man as a brother. At that time in the Roman world, slaves cost between one year and ten years' worth of the daily wage, a denarii.

Then in our gospel, Jesus, turning his face toward Jerusalem, tries to let the enthusiastic crowd following him know what the risks and costs of discipleship can be. The word "hate" here may be better translated as "turn aside from." This may sound harsh indeed.

The admonition to deny ourselves and take up our cross to follow Jesus is just as scary to us as it was in the time of Jesus’s earthly ministry. The idea that we have to be willing to suffer for our faith seems especially harsh here, too, especially after we have been hearing some harsh words from Jesus the last few weeks.

How can this be good news? It may sound to us at first glance like Jesus is telling us to be willing to throw our lives away—after all, the cross was a symbol of criminality and death. Trust me, to Jesus’s followers, crucifixion was no empty metaphor.

After all, the cross, when Jesus speaks of it in our gospel passage today, was a ROMAN execution method used for those who threatened their death-grip on power. It stood for brutality. It stood for the power of empire to crush and literally squeeze the breath out of those who opposed that power of domination and brutality. How can it be that, in too many people's minds today, they cynically and hypocritically claims that the gold crosses they wear around their necks gives them the power to do the same thing to others?

Theologians from Paul up through today remind us that, after Jesus's execution and resurrection, the cross has been transformed from a symbol of shame to a symbol of the victory of love over death, thanks to Jesus’s willingness to embrace it. That cross has been transformed into a symbol of God’s grace-- and we as Christians must be willing to fight to keep it that way, rather than let it be transformed into a symbol of those who embrace the cruelty and violence of the Roman Empire among us now, just as the Ku Klux Klan attempted to pervert the cross in its campaigns of terror.

And that’s important for us to think about as we try to make sense of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not asking us to embrace death, but instead, to truly embrace a life grounded in God, who loves us no matter what. To be willing to sacrifice, and in sacrificing, to strive to trust in God completely-- which is an aspiration for us all, given the cynical, even cruel world in which we live that makes us mistrustful of almost everyone and their motives. Jesus is asking us to be willing to use our God-given lives for the good of others and for the good of the world. As we begin today to observe the Season of Creation,

Deep in our hearts, many of us have a hard time believing that God’s love is that limitless for us. It is a fact that every love we experience in our lives changes us in some way. Choosing to embrace God’s love for us will change us, too.

Now, change can be a scary thing. It’s scary, because any real change in our lives involves embracing a death of our former selves- letting go of all that is familiar to us, that made us who we have been in the hope that we will become something better.

It’s like when we went to the circus when we were kids. I was always fascinated by the trapeze artists. Sure, there was a net stretched below them. But even with that, I was always amazed by their willingness to let go of the first trapeze, and for several heart-stopping moments to be clinging to nothing at all as they tumbled through the air. There was always a moment when their hands were empty, with nothing but a net far below. But through trust in the laws of physics and their own skills, they have the courage to let go-- and are rewarded with the ability to fly.

Our own lives are often just as risky at times too. We move from one swinging perch to another throughout our lives, as we develop and grow. In between the letting go and the grasping, there are those heart-stopping moments when we are holding on to nothing. But without the momentum of love, without opening our hands, we have no way to grasp the new life-change coming toward us. This is also true of our lives as followers of Jesus. Unless we empty our heads, hands, and our hearts in a similar manner, letting go and emptying ourselves of all that has tied us to the way we have been and the way we were, we cannot take hold of the abundant new life to which we are called through the loving voice of Christ.

Listen. We are given the gift of each day from God. We are given the abundance of the Earth for our flourishing, and for the flourishing of all the living beings who depend upon it. We are given the gift of this parish and its ministries as gifts of God to us and to the world. Caring for each of these things will cost us, but it's a cost worth paying.

Jesus calls us to use each one of those days as much as possible making the most of that life by living our lives for God and for others. It means that the only life worth living is one in which we are willing to be transformed by the power of God’s grace to live for others.

Jesus stretched his arms wide upon that cross as God Incarnate to remind us that God’s arms are themselves stretched wide to encompass the entire world—no exceptions. Jesus stretched his arms wide upon that cross as a fully human person to remind us that we are all capable of loving each other that much, that abundantly. God loves us into being and breathes love into us from the moment of our births, and we are called to try to breathe that love and grace into a world that, through our own human folly and selfishness, is gasping for it. We just have to be willing to take the risk of love, and take that first step onto the path of discipleship, without fear and with an open sacrificial spirit. The momentum of love will propel us forward.

Amen.



Readings:
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

Preached at the 505 on September 6 and the 10:30 Holy Eucharist on September 7, 2025 at St. Martin's Church in Ellisville.

Peace, Love, and Interdependence: Sermon for Proper 9C, July 6, 2025

It's summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, which means it's travel time. School's out, sun's out, and the beach -- at the lake, at the gulf, at the Great Lakes-- beckons for many of our members here at St. Martin's. And even if we are going to someplace new, someplace that isn't our "home away from home," many of us have travel on our mind. This weekend's holiday is no exception to this tendency.

The thing is, I love to travel. I don't love getting ready to travel.

I don't know about you, but for me the challenges of a trip begin before the trip commences, starting with, "What do I bring?" You don't want to bring too much and have to schlep stuff you won't use from hither to yon and back again. On the other hand, you don't want to get caught without something you need and have no way to get it on the road. You want to be ready for emergencies. You don't want to be a pack mule.

This is important even in our modern era, when the actual journey part is usually assisted by plane, train, or automobile. When people traveled mostly on foot, when the journey often took longer than the time at the destination, when there wasn't a motel or hotel or even a yurt available in every town, traveling lightly while having the resources you needed on the road was an even more particular art.

A lot of this worry about what to bring has to do with vulnerability. Lacking something important while on a journey makes one feel vulnerable. Traveling light also means embracing the necessity of depending upon people you don't know. Lacking understanding of a new place and new people makes us feel vulnerable.

The world in which we live tries its best to convince us that vulnerability is a condition to be avoided at all costs. That vulnerability is uncomfortable at best and frightening at its worst, because this world also tries to convince us that there is not enough, that those around us are threats rather than kindred. And travel involves getting outside the comfort zone of all that is familiar and certain. Travel encourages, even requires, vulnerability, even after the packing decisions have been made.

Travel means encountering strangers, and embracing being a stranger yourself. It means encountering strange roads, strange food, strange accents or strange languages, strange customs. The happy traveler is a humble traveler, one who embraces the strangeness and the vulnerability as a chance to grow and learn about others in the encounters that await-- and at the same time learn about themselves. Embracing that kind of being present and open to new experiences teaches us that without vulnerability, honest relationships are impossible, too.

In our gospel portion today, Jesus is still not long into his public ministry, but he has already attracted enough followers that he can choose 70 of the best and brightest and give them a special task. He will send them out ahead of him, two by two, because it's always best to have a wingman. These disciples will be reconnaissance teams, preparing the way, as Jesus himself and his followers travel around the countryside, encountering new people and new places creating a new community.

Now, Jesus is a master at traveling light. He noted in last week's gospel that, although foxes had holes and birds of the air had nests, Jesus as the Son of Man had no place to lay his head. Jesus and his friends and followers share everything they own in a common purse. And it seems like they rarely spend more than a night or two in the same place. Many of us may hear Jesus make that comment about foxes and birds and his relative homelessness, and feel a pang of sadness, or maybe even anxiety. But what if we understood that comment as key to his ministry, and ours-- meeting people where they are, and meeting people as someone just like them? Someone who deliberately meets people humbly, with genuine interest. Someone who embodies one of my favorite sayings about interpersonal relations from Ted Lasso, by way of Walt Whitman: be curious, not judgmental.

Perhaps this can help us make sense of his instructions to his 35 pairs of evangelists to travel lightly. In doing so, disciples travel knowing that they don't just bring good news to the places that they travel-- they also depend upon the kindness and hospitality of those same strangers. Disciples are to come into these new places modestly, humbly-- and in return, when welcomed, exchange peace and blessing with those they encounter. Disciples are to come being curious, not judgmental.

Central to Jesus's gospel is real, loving connection. Jesus may only stay a few days or hours in one place, but the relationships he builds with us are meant to be enduring. To be real. To last a lifetime-- and beyond. Encountering people in all walks of life, but especially those who often get overlooked, those on the margins, encountering them as people who have as much to give to us as we do to them, that is the key to sharing the good news.

Jesus calls his disciples to share peace-- and share it even before they know anything about the house they’ve just entered or the beliefs of those living there. Peace that is more than peace—it’s shalom. It’s well-being, completeness, a greeting, a farewell, and everything in between. Peace, based on justice and mercy, takes a random group of strangers and forms them into community.

We can only share the good news of Jesus, not impose it on others. Not coming in and forcing people to be exposed to snippets of scripture, assuming that we have some thing "they" don't. Instead, the life of peace and justice, which surely we all deserve, means living alongside each other, opening ourselves in vulnerability, in bravery, without resorting to privilege. The heart of the gospel is that the relationship between Redeemer and those needing redemption is rooted in mutuality and interdependence. Like all lasting relationships, the good news of God's love is not rooted in transaction, in profit, in exploitation, but in openness, egalitarianism, and vulnerability.

The list of what they, and we, as disciples are NOT to take in witnessing to the gospel is pretty long. It's meant to remind us of what is really important. It centers our lives as Christians in humility, open-heartedness, and vulnerability. These are not weaknesses. They are gifts in service of discipleship. Gifts at the root of not creating barriers between ourselves and those we meet with protective layers of status, wealth, power, or privilege. 

Once again Jesus is reminding us that the gospel is always counter-cultural, but especially in our time and situation right now. Jesus reminds us today that, in the quest to share the Good News of God's Commonwealth existing right now around us, we are called as followers of Christ to proclaim something better, and make it visible by bringing it to people, to all people, where they are.

That is what we proclaim here in this place, both as a community and a parish, and as individuals. In all our ministries, and all our partnerships, such as with Circle of Concern which we celebrate today, and all our relationships, we are in the business of creating community bound by love, mutual respect, and celebrating the dignity and worth of all. We proclaim the power of the truth of interdependence to make us all stronger, freer, and more connected. There is no independence without interdependence. It is interdependence that makes us great. Our commitment to each other is the great ideal that makes us one people out of many-- not just as a nation, but as the Body of Christ.

Saint Augustine summed up the purpose of life as this. He said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." The greatest asset we have is ourselves, and our wide-open, vulnerable hearts. To see through the eyes of Christ the truth: that when the forces of empire keep trying to come up with new ways to divide and conquer, they are trying to distract us from the incredible power we wield for good when we wield the power of love, the power of relationship across differences, when we wield the power of community. In a world in which loneliness has become an epidemic here in the western world, community-- that starts with the willingness to see each other as beloved children of God no matter who we are or where we are from-- is the real superpower.

You know, that's one of the greatest gifts of travel, after all. To leave all that is familiar, and expand our horizon of the known world beyond our own selfish interests. We then see not only what we all have in common but see the incredible beauty of diversity. How can that kind of epiphany not also change us, and make us fully alive? As the lyrics of our opening hymn reminded us, when we encounter new places and new people humbly, we suddenly see the people around us not as potential threats, or strangers, or competitors for what scarce resources, but as members of our one community-- the community of creation. To see our neighborhood as not defined by boundaries but by sharing what we have in kinship.

As travelers on this earth, as disciples, what Jesus urges us to leave behind in our ministry pales in comparison to what we ARE to share, and share abundantly: peace, followship, true community, healing and reconciliation. Jesus reminds us that the key to witnessing to the Good News of Jesus starts with remembering that that Good News is rooted in community, in relationship, in embracing vulnerability, and most of all in humility. We start by acknowledging that we are not arrogantly leading people from poverty or ignorance and sin from a position of superiority, but meeting people where they are in an interchange of respect and mutuality.

This is our Good News. This is our song. This is our prayer, our dream, our holy shrine. And isn’t this what we see the world around us longing for, right now?

Preached at the Saturday 505 and the Sunday 10:30 Eucharist on the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, July 5-6, 2025.

Readings:

Isaiah 66:10-14

Psalm 66:1-8

Galatians 6:(1-6) 7-16

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Good Enough—Sermon for Epiphany 5C, February 9, 2025

In August 1965, the Beatles were sitting on top of the world. In just over two years since the release of their first album, they had toured the world twice, had met Elvis Presley, their idol. The eldest of the Fab Four was just barely 25 years old. had released five albums, and were feverishly at work on a sixth. As they prepared to record the album in October of 1965, there was pressure on all the band members to come up with new songs—in all their previous albums except for A Hard Day’s Night, they had included covers of other bands’ material as well as original songs.

But John Lennon faced a huge case of writer’s block. He struggled for days to write a song, and that struggle was a part of his own feelings of self-questioning and doubt. He was young, handsome, stylish, wealthy, and famous. And yet he was very troubled. His unstable mother had handed him over to her eldest sister to raise, and then, while he was still a teen, she was killed when a car struck her, leading to a lingering grief throughout his life. He had a young toddler and a troubled marriage due to his own physical and emotional absence. And now he couldn’t write.

He finally laid down after hours of struggling—and within minutes, supposedly the basics for a song came to him nearly whole, and came from the depths of his insecurity and feeling of drift. Unlike most of the previous Beatles songs, and in fact most rock songs at the time. This one did not feature a boy, or a girl, or romance. Instead, Lennon wrote about his own feelings of aimlessness—disguising the autobiographical nature, by writing in the third person. And the song “Nowhere Man” came into being and was included on the Beatles’ sixth album Rubber Soul, released in December of 1965.

The song starts out with the four Beatles singing in harmony, in 5 chords that descend steadily in pitch, mirroring the descent into introspection:
He’s a real nowhere man
sitting in his nowhere land,
making all his nowhere plans for nobody. (1)

This song was groundbreaking in being able to frame the self-doubt that so many people experience periodically throughout their lives. Haven’t we all, at one time or another wondered if we were “good enough” to accomplish some task or achievement? Even more pointedly, haven’t we all questioned, at one time or another, whether we are “good enough” as human beings at all?

I know that some people are not really blessed with a sense of self-awareness deep enough to realize when they have done wrong—we see that far too often in celebrities and other powerful people behaving badly. We see it in the constant rise and fall of movements throughout the last two centuries that give rise to dictators who promise to give people scapegoats and a sense of superiority to drown out the voice of individual conscience that should be setting off alarms in their heads. But most of us, I would wager, are acutely aware of our own failures, of our own times when we have caved into weaknesses or even joined the herd in doing something dumb or even callous.

That feeling of unworthiness is a universal impulse. We see it today in our readings. The great prophet Isaiah has a vision of the glory of God calling him to bear a message of doom to Isaiah’s people—hardly an assignment that will win Isaiah friends. But he answers the call—by overcoming his feeling of unworthiness.

In our reading from 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul acknowledges the continuing shame he feels for having persecuted the earliest members of the church and therefore Jesus himself, calling himself “the least of the apostles” and indeed unfit to be called an apostle at all. And yet, Paul also recognizes that the grace of God throughout his life has led him to where he is at that moment: a leader and planter of churches all over the Greco-Roman world. If he had just stopped there without then humble bragging about his work ethic, his admission of self-doubt might have been better. But that’s Paul for you.

And then we have Simon. Simon is a simple, hard-working fisherman on the Sea of Genessaret. He encounters the holy man Jesus as he is ashore, washing his nets after a frustrating, futile night of long labor—a night in which he has caught nothing. He probably was questioning his own abilities as a fisherman when Jesus asks Simon to lay aside his nets and row him out a way from shore so that he can actually teach the crowd that is clamoring after Jesus so earnestly they practically have him up to his knees in the water. We don’t hear about the exchange. And so I imagine Simon sitting there in the boat while Jesus talks, frustrated and alone in his thoughts.

Jesus finishes with the crowd, and in the next breath, turns his attention to Simon—telling him to get his nets, and row out into the deep water to try for a catch.

“Now? In the middle of the day?” I imagine Simon wondering. Every fisherman knows that the fish aren’t close enough to the surface to be caught in the heat of the day. But after a token protest, Simon does as he is told—and here we see a miraculous catch of fish, so huge that it threatens to swamp not just Simon’s boat but the boat of his associated James and John as well.

This miraculous abundance changes Simon’s self-doubts about his abilities as a fisherman to the much more crucial self-doubts about whether he is worthy to be in the presence of someone who has the powers of God, for everyone knows that sinners cannot see God and live. In terror, Simon begs for Jesus to get away from him.

Simon KNOWS all his faults. He KNOWS he is not good enough to be so near someone so holy.

And yet, nonetheless, Jesus not only reassures him and comforts him in his terror. But then, even more mind-boggling, Jesus specifically calls Simon to follow him and share in Jesus’s work of teaching, healing, and ministry. To catch people instead of fish.

That metaphor might give us pause—after all, aren’t those fish that are caught slaughtered and eaten? Maybe that’s why you will notice that this is a miraculous catch of fish that gets abandoned once it has served its real purpose. The purpose of this miracle was not to nourish anyone’s bodily hunger or need to make a living. The purpose of the miraculous catch was to awaken a spiritual hunger—to light a flame of hope in a downtrodden, anxious, fearful people living in a downtrodden, anxious, fearful time. A time much like now.

And so Jesus calls those who follow him to share in his ministry. To catch people, but instead of entrapping them like fish, to lift them up out of the depths and offer them the good news of salvation, reconciliation, and hope. And even though Simon has NO qualifications for any of those tasks, nor do his friends James and John, they themselves are “caught up” in the power of the message that Jesus has been offering, and without a backward glance at those bulging nets and swamping boats, they leave it all behind to follow Jesus.

Simon and James and John and all who follow Jesus will still occasionally experience doubts about their abilities to work for change, will doubt their own worthiness. People who follow Jesus regularly have doubts about whether what they do actually matters. And people following Jesus under the crushing oppression of empire have these doubts in quantities sufficient to sink a battleship—because that’s how empires subjugate people. By making them scared. by making them feel powerless. by making them feel small and insignificant. By using force and terror and playing to all the pettiest, cruelest, most callous impulses people usually keep buried down deep. By encouraging exactly the same kind of violence, exploitation, and cruelty that Jesus came to us to call us away from.

We just have to believe enough that we CAN make a difference. And we CAN come to that conclusion—if we remember that we are never walking alone in our constant struggle for true justice, peace, and dignity for all. God meets us where we are—whether on the shore or in a boat or behind a desk or washing dishes—and calls us to follow. Jesus called those first disciples from their nets and led them to a horizon they had never imagined before. Jesus will walk alongside those first disciples—and all the ones who follow after, even now. That’s why, when we are asked to promise to walk in the ways of God at our baptism, the answer isn’t just “I will,” But “I will—with God’s help.”

None of us are expected to live a life of meaning and purpose alone. Even John Lennon realized that he could be a force for good and for change—even if just by writing songs that touch us all, recognized that in his song, when he wrote later in his song:
Nowhere man, don’t worry
Take your time, don’t hurry--
Leave it all—til somebody else lends you a hand. (2)

There’s truism in ministry—God doesn’t call the perfect. God perfects and strengthens the called. Jesus is calling the church right now to push off from the safety of shore, and row out into the deep water. To row out into the deep water, and begin hauling in those who are most vulnerable and targeted for hatred right now. We are being called for this moment just as Simon and John and James and Paul and Isaiah were called for theirs. As we recount during Black History Month, as God called Absalom Jones and Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer in our own recent history.

We have all been called to carry the light of Christ into darkness, and to bring the hope of Christ’s saving help to those struggling in the deepest waters of our time. We are called, but we are called in community known as the Church for exactly that reason.

We are called and equipped for this moment by Jesus himself. Jesus shows us we can walk the path of justice and reconciliation because he first led us and walked that way first.

We just have to believe that we are good enough. Because God promises us that we are.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]

Psalm 138

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Luke 5:1-11

Citations:

1 and 2: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, "Nowhere Man" from the Beatles album Rubber Soul, 1965.

Embodying Mercy, Embodying Justice, Embodying Christ : Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany (and Annual Meeting) January 25, 2025

   

This last year, for comfort, I began rereading a book of essays by the poet Mary Oliver entitled Upstream. Her insights into the creative process are delightful. But within the first thirty pages, I was stopped in my tracks by this sentence:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.(1)

I’ve been turning that small sentence over and over in my head the way your turn a smooth river rock over and over in your hand or in your pocket, tucked away. The more I thought about it, the more the words rang true.

When we were children, the thing we yearned for most was attention from those we admired: our parents, or older cousins, neighbors and as we just saw, from our clergy and the adults in our parish. When we became the big kids, we noticed the little kids wanting the same from us. Hopefully we kindly have obliged as much as we had been obliged when we ourselves were small.

Likewise, when we were small, many of us fastened upon often the most ordinary things that completely fascinated us. Chin propped on hands, watching the orderly dotted line of ants moving in and out of an anthill. Searching through the day for a four-leaf clover, and along the way noticing the variations in the edges, tones, and patterns on all the rejected clover-leaves. Watching the industrious uncoiling of the tongues of what were then common butterflies like sulphurs, Monarchs, or blues as they competed with the bees for the clover or drank from the fallen, exploded sandplums under the trees. Learning how to tamp down your natural reaction when a bee landed on you until you could allow one to crawl across your hand with no fear because you know how not to startle it.

I remember thinking how amazing it was that this bee crawling over my arm would have visited this flower, and I would never have known it were I not here to see and notice it right at that moment—and that all around the world, there were millions of bees contemplating millions of clover flowers that I would never get to see. I became aware of how many hundreds of bees would visit this patch of clover in my backyard every day, whether I was there to observe them or not. Later I was given a piece of wild honeycomb by my Dad’s mother, whom we called One Granny, and saw where the bees’ destination as they flew away from me was. We marveled at how they could help create such sweetness from flowers that weren’t particularly pretty or sweet. I learned that bees made honey, but butterflies did not, nor did they make butter. Weird.

I learned to start paying attention. And certainly that started me on the path of devotion to creation in most of creation’s quadrillions of living creatures (not so fond of cockroaches or grubs or water snakes, all of which gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest). But I learned something else: the path to devotion ran straight through a way-station called amazement. I was young, and therefore brave enough to be openly amazed and filled with wonder. I didn’t care if that amazement could be mocked by others as being naïve—I was lucky enough not to even know that lots of people sought to be above amazement, thinking it made them look knowledgeable and worldly.

As I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as is implied this Sunday, when Jesus reads from Isaiah’s scroll in the synagogue. Those who heard him were amazed. And so the adventure of Christ’s ministry begins.

Today, in our gospel we hear the good news—that’s literally what “gospel” means. We hear Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry, and the framers of the lectionary have chosen for us to hear the very best news of God’s dream for God’s people as they live in community. What we are hearing is the SOCIAL good news—what God imagined for people in order to live their lives together.

Offstage—and because we Episcopalians hear other versions of the start of Jesus’s public ministry—it is hoped we remember that this inspirational start of Jesus’s teaching ministry, which he has been preparing for from infancy and youth in Luke’s full telling—comes after his baptism, which is followed by 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and being tested by the worst impulses of humanity.

First comes the temptation of greed, for gluttony, and taking shortcuts to get what we want rather than coming by it honestly. Then, the greed for power that only comes from selling one’s soul to the devil, as the saying goes. Then doing dangerous, harmful things and then expecting God to swoop in and save us from our recklessness—and of course, if God doesn’t act like Santa Claus, we are led further away from God by believing that God doesn’t exist at all. All of these temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness were also about extolling the individual with no consideration for how one’s action would affect others. In other words, all of these temptations we don’t hear, but that hang there just offstage, are basically from the narcissist’s handbook.

Jesus is tempted to do what he wants for himself—but the tempter forgets that Jesus had already rejected all that when he chose to be born to a brown-skinned teenage mother in an occupied territory. He was born to a family that had to flee for their lives and live as refugees simply because those in power suspected that families like his could upend the framework of oppression, cruelty, and division that kept them in power. In all these temptations, Jesus points out that signs of God’s wonder, love, grace, and mercy are all around us, no magic tricks or putting God to the test required. Being willing to be led by faith and the imaginative spark of God’s love made visible through us as individuals and as St. Martin’s parish.

Our faith and fidelity to the good news of Jesus calls us to celebrate the abiding love, grace, and mercy of our God and share those gifts with the world.

Perceiving the signs of God’s wonder all round us could even be said to start with our ability to see at all, given the complexity of the eye gathering light, the retina focusing that light, the optic nerve conducting that data accurately, and the brain receiving, interpreting, and filtering that data to turn it into something meaningful. This is a metaphor for both physical sight and imaginative sight. It is this sight I call on us to employ in our spiritual journeys and as we meet today to consider our past, celebrate the gifts this parish has and gives, and plan for a future of discipleship.

The life of faith is absolutely centered on developing and strengthening that imaginative sight, that allows everyone from scientists and poets and architects and artists and engineers and leaders and teachers and chefs and doctors and nurses and especially people of faith to see not just what is, not just what can be, but helps them inductively forge a path between where we have been, where we are now and where we could be. It is that life we are called to embody here at St. Martin’s.

It is this willingness to imaginatively engage the gospel in our lives today—the very thing that God used to create all that is-- that is the very gift that God implanted in us that most marks us as being made in God’s own image and likeness. It is this ability to give attention to the beauty potentially all around us that commits people to a life of faith. It is a life that sees God’s call to us not as a burden, but as a gift and honor, providing purpose to live a life that really matters, one that seeks to unite rather than divide. There is beauty in each and every heart and face here, and there is just as much beauty and worth in those outside these doors. And that beauty gives hope to a world that desperately needs it.

And so our readings today invite us to set our imaginations free, metaphorically and literally, for the sake of the world. Psalm 19 starts at the cosmic level of God speaking creation into existence, and creation answering back a resounding song of praise, all the way down to the words we lowly humans speak. Everything in creation is speaking—except for one might think, God. But God speaks THROUGH creation here.

Creation itself attests to the truth and beauty of God’s love for us! The Law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul—as Jesus reads from Isaiah. This is all that is needed for enlightenment- to have God’s judgments, God’s love, and God’s mercy to be revealed to us and in us. We then enact our faithfulness to act on that enlightenment in keeping God’s Law of Love, Grace, and Mercy. Our attention to the prophetic Word is the guide to living a life of worth, rather than depending upon one’s own judgment (presumption). Temptation and sin will capture your heart at times, but God’s loving plan for us laid out in God’s commandments can reset our focus and our commitment to living a life centered in community.

Paul’s brilliant metaphor of unity in Christ by being unified with each other is a call to imaginatively understand the purpose of the gospel of Christ: it wasn’t just to save us after we die. It was to save us from living lives disconnected from anything but our own selfish needs and wants. Paul invites the church in Corinth, which was being divided by the narcissistic culture that surrounded them, by class and wealth considerations. Paul urged his audience to instead understand that everyone is part of Christ’s body and therefore worthy of respect, dignity, and most importantly, LOVE in action. We are more powerful when we care for each other and respect each other than we stand silent in the face of cruelty and dehumanization.

Paul reminds us that everyone in Christ’s body are imaginatively and in reality the only visible bearers and enactors of Christ’s presence and work in the world—and that the world around them was literally starving for that presence, for that making visible of God’s love through how believers in Christ live their lives for the sake of God and for the sake of others. Paul, who had never seen Jesus in real life, nonetheless joined himself to the same Body of Christ through his sudden awareness of Christ’s love reaching out to him even as he persecuted Christians in his earlier life.

And then we conclude with Jesus, fresh out of being tempted, proclaiming how his ministry will be the fulfillment of prophecy. He does this not just by reading from Isaiah’s scroll, but imaginatively engaging with it. Jesus announces that he is here to do five things in our common life together:

1 to bring good news to the poor,
2 to announce freedom to captives,
3 to restore sight to those who cannot see, perception to those immune to wonder,
4 to free people from oppression (which can also be linked to the first task), and
5 to proclaim the year of God’s favor, a Jubilee year, a year of community and rejoicing and giving thanks for the many ways we are cared for by God so that we can care for one another.

Jesus then closes the prophet’s scroll and announces that today those prophetic words have been fulfilled within his audience’s hearing. This is Jesus’s work for the sake of the world. And as Christ’s Body, each of us commit to taking up our own parts in embodying that jubilee message for a world mired in scarcity, suspicion, and, too often, cruelty. As individuals, and as St. Martin’s. We work together to strengthen each other for this holy witness and discipleship.

What would it mean for the Scriptures to be fulfilled in your hearing?

How would that happen?

Would we expect God just to wave a magic wand, and poof! everything would be perfect?

Or would it mean, as witnesses to Christ and the Body of Christ in this place, at a time such as this, for us to perceive our world holistically, the good and the bad, and commit to expanding the good by our conscious participation in it, by truly acting together in fellowship to all creation and all people as true children of God? Would it mean realizing the amazing witness we are and can be even more emphatically by taking seriously the joy and blessing of being God’s children and Christ’s body here at St. Martin’s? We have each of us received God’s love, grace, and mercy. We have promised to give that same love, grace and mercy to others.

We live in a world that runs on dividing those who should declare their common cause with one another and dividing them, often by giving them scapegoats and othering those already marginalized. We live in a world where we are told that all are equal as long as, in George Orwell’s warning words in his book Animal Farm, as long as some are more equal than others. As long as some have more liberty than others. As long as some can oppress others by denying their membership in the human family.

No.

God calls us to proclaim a world where we are ALL sustained by God’s grace, but somehow preaching and urging mercy gets derided as “hateful.” A world in which those who preach God’s grace and who urge us to remember our essential unity; our potential to imagine a better, more faithful world for all through commitment to all, results in death threats.

Which is exactly what happened to Jesus after his glorious proclamation of the kernel of his gospel for the sake of living in a Godly community. Seriously. Look it up. Oppressive empires have always acted thus.

Beloveds, 2025 is the 60th year of this parish’s existence. We are now charged and responsible to prepare a firm foundation for the next 60 years and beyond.

We are called to look with the heart, with the soul, with the imagination, and with gratitude for the blessings God has given, is giving, and will give us in our lives together as Christ’s body. We are called to attention to God and each other—and attention is the beginning of our devotion to God and to each other as the people of God and the people of Christ’s Body known as St. Martin’s through the help and mercy of God that we embody. Our devotion begins with our attention—and our brave witness to God’s love, grace and mercy.

Amen.

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO on January 26, 2025.

Readings:

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

Citations:

1) Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, p. 8.

Known By Our Love: Sermon for Proper 24B, 22nd Sunday After Pentecost

What does it mean to have power? And what is the purpose of having power?

Is it so that you can have everything your own way? Is it to be able to lord it over others, and have people bow and scrape before you? Or is it so that you can do the most good for the greatest number of people you can? What if doing that good costs you something?

This is the dilemma Jesus and his apostles spread before us today.

It’s not like Jesus hasn’t tried to tell his closest followers that being Messiah means exactly the opposite of being the emperor of Rome. He’s described that he will be handed over, and suffer, and die. He will do this for the sake of the world—to destroy the forces of death and violence that we humans have set loose upon this world.

The words are literally sting hanging in the air, and James and John apparently have been nodding absently while cooking up a plot to grab the seats of honor “in glory.” Yet for weeks now, we have been hearing Jesus not just predict his passion and death, but also telling his disciples that those who are on the top will be on the bottom, and that those on the bottom will be on the top. One also wonders if they were thinking that the coming of Jesus’s kingdom is going to be as the result of an actual political coup. For the third time, Jesus tells what awaits them in Jerusalem, and for a third time the disciples miss the entire point.

For those of us who know what’s coming, there’s some irony here: we know who is going to end up on Jesus’s right and left at the end of this road: it leads to Calvary, to Golgotha, and it’s NOT two followers of Jesus, but rather, a thief and a murderer hanging on a cross on Jesus’s right and left. Mark picks up on that irony.

Jesus then asks if they really think they can “drink the cup that I drink”—a reference to a cup of suffering that Jeremiah foretold, the cup that Jesus will pray to be taken from him in Mark 14:36 when he is praying on the night before his betrayal. The “baptism” that Jesus will undergo is likewise one of fire and death and betrayal through which he will pass to resurrection. James and John affirm that they can—perhaps a bit too quickly. Again, it seems that they are not really listening, that they do not really understand Jesus.

And then, as soon as the other disciples hear of what James and John are attempting, they get upset—but not because they have gotten Jesus’s message about service, but because probably they too were dreaming of asking for those positions of power and glory.

Now, don’t think I am using the lucky gift of hindsight to make fun of the disciples or mock them. Instead, I think about how lucky we are to see that the disciples were, really JUST LIKE US.

Jesus has laid out for them three times exactly what risks they are taking following him, and exactly what risks he is taking for himself. Someone who goes around criticizing the power structures of the world ends up very often at the very least unpopular and at the very worst dead—because even people who get abused by those same power structures nonetheless often support them, because they can’t imagine there being any other way being any better, or they think, “Well I may be struggling, but this system at least ensures that I’m not on the absolute bottom, because I HATE those people on the bottom”—fill in the blank with any likely group—the poor, the refugee, people from a different country or race, whatever.

Maybe the disciples DO have a sense of impending danger, even while they seem to not fully understand what Jesus is saying. And it’s a common thing that when we feel endangered, we try to take care of ourselves, first. Let’s be honest, don’t we feel grateful when we’re on a plane and the flight attendant tells us that, in case of emergency, we should put our own masks on first? Yay, that’s what we wanted to hear anyway!

Yet that is exactly the opposite of what Jesus has been urging for these many weeks. When we think there’s not enough to go around, our first reaction unfortunately is not to share what we’ve got but to hoard up resources for ourselves—which further multiplies the suffering if there truly is a shortage of resources. That’s kind of the challenge Jesus put in front of that wealthy man last week. If you’ve got a lot, and those around you have nothing, and you let that stand in the way of truly following me, you need to rethink how exactly it is you follow all of those commandments we just talked about. There’s a reason why, my friends, in our confession we are called to truly consider and turn back from both the things we have done, and the things we have left undone.

So what does it mean to be a Christian? Does it mean committing ourselves to a life of giving up things, of denial, of sacrifice?

Well yes—in a way. Jesus calls us to give up the idea of our own powerlessness to work for change. Jesus calls us to denial of the forces that are built on hatred, of causing others to suffer for our benefit. Jesus calls us to sacrifice, but so that we can be investors in the growth of God’s kingdom and God’s message.

Jesus doesn’t ask for empty words of belief. Jesus asks for us to roll up our sleeves, and commit ourselves to following Jesus as the biggest love of our lives. That doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly in our live of faith—far from it, as Jesus insists again and again. But Jesus called us into community so we would have each other in those hard times. So that we would commit to each other as well as to Jesus in love. And when you love something, you dedicate everything you have to making it thrive. 

Jesus specifically doesn't call us to intimidate, or to use his name as a code word for domination. I thought of that when my spouse came home yesterday from getting groceries, and he told me there was a group of people from a local church in the parking lot there handing out Bibles-- and then he noticed that one of them was wearing a gun on their hip, right out there in the open. Would you take a Bible from that guy, from someone trying to intimidate others? What might someone who has little knowledge of Jesus assume about our Savior when seeing this?

Jesus is trying to explain to us this fact: that as his followers, who share in his baptism and his cup, we both live in the heart of God and in the broken places in the world. We are the church of St. Martin all together here, worshiping and giving thanks, but that we also have to be the church of St. Martin out there, where people need us to show us who God is in the face of poverty, exploitation, fear, and division. We discover who we are called to be in being brave enough to turn the values of the world on its head to reflect the love of God in a world that thirsts for it.

Maybe this leads to disillusionment for many—for that rich man last week, for the apostles this week, for us any time we feel uncomfortable with the living out of that commandment to love God and each other with all we’ve got when at the same time we are afraid what we’ve got isn’t enough for ourselves, which is what the forces of division and acquisitiveness want us to believe. Or we are being told that those around us simply want to take everything from us. We live bombarded by lies like that every day. But as Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor said, “Disillusionment is the loss of illusion—about ourselves, about the world, about God—and while it is almost always painful, it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for truth.”

We will close our worship today with one of my favorite hymns I remember from my childhood. Its simplicity is only outshone by the truth that simplicity bears.

We are ONE in the Spirit, we are ONE in the Lord,
And we pray that ALL UNITY will one day be restored.
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

And then, especially in this vitally important election season, and in this vitally important stewardship season, I know I am grateful for this verse:

We will work with each other, we will work side by side
And we’ll guard each one’s dignity and save each one’s pride
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Love that expresses itself in caring for others, and working to bring that to fruition. In working to create a society that seeks the greatest good for the greatest number of people, that is grounded in unity rather than division and in love rather than hate.

To walk in love together, so that we change the world by that collective effort, and by that love.

To serve the world, rather than to seek power for our own ends. To challenge exploitation or neglect of the weak or the sick or the ignorant or the oppressed.

To challenge the idea that a few people are meant to lord it over the vast majority of others.

To refuse to get comfortable with the idea that some people deserve to suffer based on who they are or what they’ve done or where they’ve come from, and get numb to that very real suffering with the idea that we can’t do anything about it rather than admit we “won’t” do anything about it, no matter how small.

Our challenge is to BE the church in the world, each and every one of us as individuals, in what we say and what we do, and how we live, in serving the many people who need help or protection or community, so that we can make the case that the church IS visible and relevant in the issues facing the world today. That our paradoxical values are exactly what is needed in offering hope where there is despair, a willingness to engage in the questions alongside people rather than pretend we have all the answers, in being willing to love those who are ignored or overlooked or isolated, in willing to serve rather than to be served.

Being Christian is not about power—except for the power of love. It’s not about forcing others to live as we —it’s about living the best life we can live because that in and of itself is a blessing. May we declare ourselves able to share that baptism and that cup.

And they’ll know we are Christians by our love. Love in action, love in the cause we stand for—the redemption of the world through the power of love.

Amen.

Readings:

Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

Preached at St. Martin's Church in Ellisville MO on October 20, 2024.

Image: The Red Vineyard, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Spirits in a Material World, Sermon for Proper 23B

Back in the 1980s, MTV ruled the airwaves. The empowerment of youth was a constant theme, and gender expectations were often turned on their heads: Cyndi Lauper took a song written for a male voice and laughed her way through “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Robert Palmer took a song written for a female voice and stood in a Savile Row suit in front of mini-skirted writhing supermodels pretending to be his backup band claiming innocence as he crooned to a randy date “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On.”

Dire Straits, a group of decidedly unglamorous blues rockers from England, created the theme song for MTV with the song “Money for Nothing,” about a real-life conversation their frontman heard between two deliverymen in an appliance store.

As the workers watched music videos, they resent their existence delivering expensive machinery to yuppies and consider that their career choices might be a dead end. Instead, they moan after the glamorous life of a pop star:

“Look at them yo-yos
That’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on your MTV
Aw, that ain’t working
That’s the way you do it
Money for nothing and your chicks for free.”(1)

And we all laughed (including the programmers at MTV itself, as they put the video into heavy rotation)—because we heard our parents complain exactly the same thing to us every hour that we had MTV going full blast.

And the queen of MTV was Madonna, who, like many female stars of the visual medium, had started out as a dancer until someone plopped a mic in front of her, lacquered her blond hair in crunchy waves, and cut all the hems, sleeves, and necklines off her outfits. Her life was filled with glamour and provocation—especially viewed with alarm by our parents. She wore religious jewelry, and her name brought to mind the mother of Jesus, but she sang about NOT being a virgin. She was a fashion icon, a middling actress, a serial dater, and provocateur. She reinvented herself more often than a Transformer, which back then was a just a silly cartoon out of Japan.

We were a generation raised on sarcasm, visual puns, and irony.

And one of Madonna's most ironic videos that we adored came out in 1985, when she rolled out a new song called “Material Girl.” In the video, instead of wearing the torn dresses and studded leather accessories that previously had been her costume, suddenly here she was gliding down a staircase from a soundstage straight outta Marilyn Monroe’s hit film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

A chorus line of handsome men in Armani tuxes fawningly danced around her as she sang of only dating men who could keep her in the lap of luxury as she is showered in cash, furs, and diamonds. The video was a story within a story, however, because in the reality off the set, she claims to be unimpressed by the expensive gifts of her suitors. The rich guy backing her video figures this out, and instead woos her with wildflowers and drives her off the set in a broken-down truck he buys off a handyman. And off they drive into the soundstage of true love.

The truth is that we DO just wanna have fun after working all day, especially with a sharp dressed man. We DO want exciting dates. And we DO live in a material world.

But the irony is that we also long for meaning, for purpose, and for real community and connection.

This is hardly a new issue. And talking about it without irony is fraught with tension.

We see this in our gospel reading today. Jesus continues, as he has for the last many weeks, toward Jerusalem and his passion and resurrection, and his disciples are struggling to accept the harshness of the fate that is awaiting him. The time Jesus and those disciples lived in was just as much a material world as now—only with lots fewer option. The vast majority of people in Roman-occupied Israel were abjectly poor. Then there were a few wealthy people. Nothing in between. On top of them were the Roman overlords, sucking the country dry of anything of real value.

Most of Jesus’s followers fell into that category of the working poor. Fishermen, handymen, day laborers, most of them. They knew what suffering was. So, the idea of a messiah who would suffer and die seemed hardly reassuring.

In the midst of Jesus repeatedly explaining how this would lead to the kingdom of God, today we have the sudden appearance of a rich man running up and kneeling at Jesus’s feet. The man runs up and kneels before Jesus. He then addresses Jesus with an honorific, one that gets brushed aside. Jesus is not swayed by flattery. What must I DO, the man asks, to inherit eternal life? How, in other words, can I add eternal life to my stack of possessions? Jesus responds by listing things NOT to do—did you notice that? Don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t steal—he even throws “don’t defraud” in there even though that’s not actually from the 10 Commandments.

As Jesus so often does, he draws people into not just recalling the law but drawing out what it means to follow that law in practical terms.

Here we have a call story—but one that fails, at least at the time. The rich man wants “eternal life,” but uses language thinking it is something he can acquire or inherit. In other words, he wants the benefits of discipleship but doesn’t understand the transformative nature of it.

Notice also how many times Mark notes that Jesus looks directly at those in this story. Looks, and looks deeply, really seeing into who they are. But for the first time, in Mark’s gospel, we are told that Jesus not only LOOKS at the man but sees him and loves him.

LOVES him.

You only lack one thing, Jesus says. And that is to follow me. Jesus is telling that man, you are weighed down by your chasing after material wealth. It is standing in the way of committing to being a disciple. And the man, understandably, is shocked at Jesus’s suggestion, and goes away sadly.

This seems like a harsh, even frightening tale if we see ourselves as that wealthy man. Do we really have to give up EVERYTHING to follow Jesus?

But perhaps we can admit there is some truth in the idea that the word “possession” has two meanings. The first is something that we own. But there’s another meaning especially if we are familiar with scripture. Possession can also mean those who are controlled by some powerful force—that kind of possession. And even though we no longer believe in demon possession that kind of possession and that dislocated us from living a well-rounded life certainly is a huge issue even now. If we are totally honest with ourselves, we know that there are times when our possessions and the drive for more of them, possess us and prevents us from committing completely to loving relationships with each other, and with God.

But if ever there was a story for our time, this might be it. Think about the culture of the late 20th century that we grew up in. The drive for acquisition ruled—and yet also was often subtly critiqued, even in popular media. For every “Material Girl,” there was an also a reminder that we were also souls, or “Spirits Living in the Material World.” For every Ferris Bueller resentful that he didn’t get a car for his birthday, there was his friend Cameron Fry who’s emotionally controlling father loved a sports car more than his own son. For every Gordon Gecko tycoon crooning “greed is good,” there were workers fighting against totalitarianism in Poland by proclaiming their solidarity with one another.

Countless preachers in today’s America preach that Jesus is a wish-fulfilment genie: simply say you believe, and you shall be saved. No mention of following Jesus, of emulating Jesus, or sharing in the ongoing work of Jesus for the sake of the world—just say you believe, check off that box, and continue on with your life of chasing after worldly success, fortune, fame, whatever.

This creates a disconnect, making one’s own salvation the point of claiming to be Christian. This acquisitive mindset actually subverts the gospel good news and Jesus makes that clear here: to be able to follow Jesus, we have to let go of the things that stand in the way of our full commitment. That could be wealth, as in the case here. Or it could be anger, resentment, selfishness, or any of a host of other things.

In our gospel passage, the man’s possessions themselves are not the issue. His clinging to them over the call of Jesus to follow him IS the issue. And a little part of him knows it. Because for all the stuff he owns and that owns him, he still KNOWS there is something missing. That is why he approaches Jesus to begin with.

And so, we must ask ourselves: what things stand in the way of our own commitment to really following Jesus? How can we grow deeper into trusting God with all that we have and are? We ARE, after all, spirits living in a material world. And we can use those material things for good and still keep a roof over our heads. We can walk in love with Jesus and support the mission and ministry of Christ in a world that desperately needs him. We can do both.

One of the greatest things I learned in my teaching career is that not everyone is ready for the lesson you have prepared at the same time. Some kids were—but others might require more than one opportunity. And I think that’s another thing we can take away from this story. Nothing says that the man doesn’t come back later, and that he doesn’t come to a healthier balance between his obsessing with possessions and the loving call of Jesus to be able to follow him in action as well as in labels.

So perhaps we can use this uncomfortable story to reflect on all the times Jesus has called us to deeper relationship, but we have drawn back. What things possess us and hamper our deeper relationship with God and with each other? It could be cynicism. It could be fear. It could be our too-busy lives and never allowing ourselves a chance to sit in silence with ourselves, much less with God. It could be, like our friend Job, a string of unimaginable losses that make us wonder if God is punishing us, when we know God doesn’t act that way.

Jesus sees us and looks on us with eyes of love. He sees that we have filled our hands and our hearts with things that do not truly satisfy. May we hear his call to be brave enough to free ourselves from the fears, hesitations, grievances, and, yes, sometimes, stuff that doesn’t truly satisfy. May we release those things from their hold over us, so that we may be free to follow Jesus more fully, starting today.


Amen.


Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO om October 12-13, 2024.

Readings for Proper 23B
Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31


Citations:
1) Mark Knopfler and Sting, "Money for Nothing," from the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms, 1985.

Image: Madonna and dancers from her video for "Material Girl."

Labels and Clubs: Sermon for Proper 21B

I bet we can all remember when we reached certain milestones in our lives. I remember when I was finally tall enough to ride Zingo, the wooden roller coaster at Bell’s Amusement Park in Tulsa. I remember when I was finally old enough to join the Bluebirds. I remember when I won a part in the high school play. I remember when I auditioned for and landed a spot in the Tulsa Youth Symphony. Each of those milestones provided me with a sense of belonging. Each enlarged my sense of identity: grown-up kid, not a baby. Member of a group of girls who shared my own interests in the outdoors and admission into a sisterhood that worked in service to others. A budding performer. All of these were labels I embraced joyfully.

Labels can also be limiting. I remember being told I could not use the computer in my high school classroom or play baseball with my neighborhood pals because I was a girl. I remember being told that I would never go to college because we were a working class family. I remember being told that I was just a dirty little Okie kid one time when I visited California.

Jesus draws our attention to labels in today’s gospel passage. First, John expects praise for shutting down someone who was doing the good work of healing people, but were doing it without the proper credentials, you might say. John claimed these do-gooders were not members of the "Jesus Club." Then Jesus addresses people within the community he is forming who act in ways that negate his call to guide and care for one another—who may be actually leading others astray, and doing that in Jesus’s name. Jesus’s name is in danger of becoming a label, not a way of living and doing good.

Funny how we still see these same questions about labels and identities today. In fact, arguments about identity are some of the most dangerous in our common life together. Labels and affiliations can be used as clubc against one another. But it shouldn't be that way.

The question of doing things in Jesus’s name is an interesting one to the original hearers of this gospel passage. Remember, the original followers of Jesus did NOT use the word “Christian.” When the movement finally got big enough to need an identifier, the term was simply “those who belonged to the Way,” according to Acts 9:2. Acts 11:26 states that the first time disciples of Jesus were called “Christians” was in Antioch in Syria, one of the most ancient churches outside the actual Holy Land.

The deeper meaning about the transition from the first term to the second is subtle, but telling. Notice that the phrase first used starts with the description of belonging—reminding us that Jesus formed a community of believers to help support each other, and to support each other specifically in ministering to the world around them. When the name began to collectively shift to “Christians,” the implication is that Jesus’s followers are now specifically bearing his Name and acting in his name. This placed a heavy responsibility upon them to bear that name with humility and with grace, keeping in mind that a life lives publicly as a Christian, then and now, is in itself a profound testimony about Jesus and his Good News.

The question, therefore, in the first section of the gospel is whether the kind of example Christians are called to set as followers and embodiers of Jesus’s teaching can be found outside the Christian community. Have we ever known people who, while not professing the name of Jesus, or even while professing no faith at all, have nonetheless embodied the kind of lovingkindness and humility that Jesus calls his followers to model? Of course. Think of it: without Mahatma Gandhi, there might have been no Martin Luther King, Jr., whose study of Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule in India informed his own passionate commitment to non-violent protest, what king called the use of “soul force.” It is here that we should note that Gandhi’s first name was not “Mahatma” but Mohandas. Mahatma is an honorific which means “great-souled.”

In our first reading, Queen Esther reveals that she is a Jew-- a label that could have gotten her killed under the scheme of her husband's advisor, Haman. She claims that label and is wmpowered by it.

Reflecting on our gospel story, the disciples are worried about someone doing God's work without having the official label of "follower of Jesus." And yet, haven't many of us known about the opposite, who do evil and hide it under the name of Christ?

I imagine we all have known people who do great harm to Christianity by loudly professing to be Christian yet whose lives reveal a shocking lack of compassion, empathy, loving-kindness and reconciliation. Some of the meanest people I have known in my life, angry, bitter, judgmental, grievance-filled prunes, have professed to be good, upstanding Christian people—and loudly proclaimed it too, all the while treating others, especially vulnerable people, with contempt and carelessness.

There’s a church sign I once saw on a marquee: “I’d rather be with a kind atheist than a hateful Christian.” That hurts that it can be true. Bbutwe'cve all known people like that, haven't we?

I wonder: is it the label that is so important, or is it the action? 

Is it truly even possible to be a Christian and be hateful? 

Can someone call themselves “Christian” if they refuse the inner transformation that accompanies truly giving one’s life over to the love of God as we experience it in the life and example of Jesus, who is God in human flesh? Why would God bother to take on a human life at all if it was not to show us how to live a God-centered life?

For much of the last many millennia, at least in the West since the removal of prohibitions on Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, the title “Christian” has been associated with power and influence. Funny how a once-ragtag group of some of the least influential people in their own backwater region of the Roman Empire suddenly shifted to being powerful and connected.

Even here in America, which was founded during the Enlightenment, and which, thanks to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, officially proclaimed the separation of church and state as a governing principle, persons seeking influence and elected office usually did not do well if they proclaimed themselves to not be Christians. Heck, it took this country until 1960 to elect a Roman Catholic to the presidency, and friends, that WAS an actual point of contention. During the Cold war, since refusal to believe in God was associated with communism, proclaiming oneself a Christian became an unspoken prerequisite to higher office. Churches were places not so much where people were formed as disciples but as places where people were seen, and where they networked and conducted business deals—kind of what the golf course is now for much of corporate America.

In too much of the world, attaching the label of “Christian” to someone or something went from being less about taking on a discipline of service and self-denial, and more about opening up the doors of the corridors of power. And so it has been and so it has remained—until very recently. Christianity, too often, has become a club—and remember that the second meaning of the word club is “a tool to beat someone with.”

I was recently told by a person online that if I didn’t believe that each and every word in the Bible should be interpreted as he did, that “I could not be a Christian.” He was pretty mean about it too. I gently reminded him that, fortunately for both of us, that wasn’t his decision to make. Tra- la- la! You are NOT the decider!

Labels DO matter—and undoubtedly they matter too much. Labels are, after all, a way of stereotyping—and that becomes a way to not see the human being bearing that label. We are now in the midst of one of the most bitter partisan contests in our lifetimes. And we are at a dangerous point in our country where labels have gotten to where they matter more than the belief systems they are supposed to represent. We look for a single letter after a candidate’s name, we talk about whether they are “red” or “blue,” and then we get blinded to what those letter and colors actually stand for. Worse, too many of us have now doubled down so that anyone on the other side is not just someone with whom we disagree, but someone who is immediately assumed to be “the enemy.”

And so what is Jesus saying to us right now? Maybe it’s to look beyond the labels that divide us. Look, there it is: right there: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Wow—what would it be like if we took that line right there to heart?

Jesus reinforces this viewpoint in the last sentence we heard today as well: Be at peace with one another.” Not a fake peace, where we refuse to discuss the things that matter. Not the false peace that avoids engaging with those different from us and closes us off from each other. But a real peace, in which we don’t worry about labels and dividing us one from another, but coming together in good will and open-heartedness, putting down our clubs, and instead working together for the common good. Looking for the way we can build each other up rather than oppress and cast out others.

Especially in the days and weeks and months ahead, may we all try to let our lives testify to the goodness of God, and welcome anyone who truly beings about healing and reconciliation, no matter what labels they do it under. Let’s be for each other, rather than against each other. And even though there are plenty of other things to do each Sunday, let’s recommit, as this new program year begins, to show up for each other, here and throughout the week, and for our own deepening of our faith in Jesus. Putting aside all that we use to divide us or to let ourselves off the hook for doing the work, as James has been reminding us this last month.

No labels. No clubs. Just community.


Amen.

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church on September 28-29, 2024.

Readings:

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
Psalm 124 
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

God's Concerto: Sermon for Easter 6B

This weekend, Bill and I were able to hear Yo-Yo Ma perform live with the St. Louis Symphony. Together, they gave a stirring performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. Bill and I and hundreds of others in the audience sat enthralled as we watched the master cellist bring to life the beauty of this musical composition. Because this was a special, gala performance, Bill and I were not in our usual seats, in the second row right in front of the cello section, which is my favorite spot, as someone who played cello starting in 4th grade, through youth symphony and a college music scholarship myself. Instead we were all the way over on the very edge of the fifth row at the rear of the first violin section.

But no matter. Perhaps this was even a blessing, since if I had been sitting right in front of the great master, I might not have been able to take my eyes off Mr. Ma to perceive the entire experience. There were moments I could even close my eyes and focus on the skillful weaving of sound and silence, of melody and harmony, of soloist and ensemble, of individual sound and combined chords that is music.

We humans seem driven to break things down into their constituent parts. And that is natural—that’s the way we learn how some things happen, and gives us an appreciation for even the smallest of things. And at first, my attention flitted from one sensory detail to another.

From my vantage point, my lack of ability to focus on the great Yo-Yo Ma visually, allowed me to experience a profound truth: the performance of a concerto, or any piece of music, is never about just one thing. Music starts with sounds—and silences. It is timeless yet held together logically in each specific moment. In between those sounds and silences there are sounds that are fortissimo, and sounds that are so soft you miss them. There’s the great master, playing the melody on his cello—and then that melody is handed off or harmonized or even held in opposition by the players of other instruments in the orchestra and the appreciation of the audience. 

Every single person on that stage is vitally important for the piece to flower into its fullest potential beauty—and since this is a world-renowned orchestra, everyone from the concertmaster to the last chair of the second violins to the lowly timpani player who spends 95% of his time counting silently are in their own rights incredible at their instruments and contributors to the whole. All this is held together by the depths of knowledge and the sensitivity of the conductor, who is himself actually being led by the soloist and his interpretation of the piece. Each performer is also a listener, responding to those around them. The production of the piece of music is collaborative, unified, organic, bound within a set duration of rhythm and time yet transcending those limitations to lodge in the imagination of all who receive the gift of that music.

We see the same truth from observing the soloist himself. He holds against his body a hollow wooden box, upon which wires have been fastened and tightened in specific ways. The length of those wires has been expanded by the addition of a stick upon which the strings can be shortened through pressure upon them at specific places along the stick. The great soloist pulls sound from that box through the use of his fingers, a bow made of wood and horsehair made grippy with cured tree sap. But the precise placement of the hands—perfected through thousands of hours of practice, produces nothing without the strength of the arms, the firm planting of the feet and gripping by the knees, yes, as well as the prodigious memory (for he used no sheet music for either his performance nor for his encore), but also, most importantly, with each breath and beat of his heart. 

Yet the training and control of the gift of his body is not enough, for—and this is clear with such a great artist as Yo-Yo Ma—the very beauty of his spirit and soul are just as much engaged in the depth and richness of the music he makes: his humanity, his generosity, his activism in the promotion of understanding between cultures and world peace. This humanitarianism is evident in the choice of this concerto, which itself was created by the composer as a plea for peace after the horrors and aftermath of World War I. Yet even if we are unfamiliar with the context of the particular piece of music being performed, as we attend carefully to the swirl of sound around us we begin to make sense of it, to discern certain phrases or themes that get repeated, and that expand through variation and expansion to form the whole, just as a vine is inseparable from branches, just as the wave is inseparable from the ocean.

What if we applied this organic understanding as appreciators of music as a metaphor for our common life together—our common life together, that itself makes music possible? Then the sounds and the silences produced in those brief moments on Friday night become holy reminders of God’s image in all of us, of the wonders of the human soul and imagination in seeking to create things of beauty like concertos and believing that the sounds and silences in music can actually call us to contemplate our mutual humanity and our place within the web of creation. 

The same hands that drew music from their respective instruments were being employed in the cause of beauty and peace, rather than division or hatred, as is implied in today’s psalm that insists that creation is joined in a concerto of praise and love for and by God. And the magic is, even though music works in partnership with time, even though it has a beginning in time and an ending in time, the beauty and sensation the music produces lingers long after the last note has faded away. All works together for the sake of the whole, and in so doing, becomes far greater than the sum of any of that concerto’s constituent parts.

It is, my friends, the same thing with our lives together in this world. Perhaps you have been sitting here wondering about why this preacher is droning on and on about a classical music performance and engaging in flights of fancy making everything perhaps more complicated than it has to be. Perhaps you have been sitting here during the last few minutes looking at the readings for this Sunday and wondering how many MORE times we can hear the word “love” repeated as often as the notes in a concerto during our readings? I mean what is this-- week three already of hearing the word “love” ricochet throughout the week’s chosen passages? Isn’t this constant harping on this theme indicative of a profound lack of imagination on the part of the lectionary developers and the authors of our scripture passages?

It is at this point I want to urge ourselves to step back a bit from the atomistic dismissal or cheapening by repetition of that word “love.” With our hearts, let us look to the whole, instead. Let us be led to begin to recognize the wonder and glory of the beating heart of the gospel that has been being presented to us by the various passages we have been reading and hearing not just in this season of Easter but throughout the scope of our lives as human beings and disciples and members of the ensemble of creation, if we attend properly. 

These last weeks we have been being presented with the core theme of the ministry of Jesus upon this Earth—a ministry that seeks to reveal to us who God is, and, getting a small glimpse of that, who that then makes us? Jesus became incarnate and lived and worked and healed and especially LOVED in order to get us to lift our eyes from our own narrow perceptions and divisions to instead focus on something as richly profound as the beauty, the glory, the unity of our existence. There is a beautiful theme or melody running through our lives that we are often too fragmented, too distracted, and yes, too afraid to acknowledge unless we do have it repetitively placed before us, over and over again.

That word “love” is a single note in the concerto that has been shot through the universe since God originally sang all that is into being.  Our psalm for today begins with the command, "Sing to the Lord a new song, for god has done marvelous things." Yes we are called to sing just as God sings – God sings this universe, this planet, this human family and all that lives and moves into being with the same lyricism and joy in the creative act that we get a glimpse of in the face of a musician who is a master at their craft. Moving from the parts to the whole of the gospel, and perceiving it organically as we seek to perceive any work of art or music leads us to one theme that rings out repeatedly, handed off and shared in the various genres of scripture—in stories, in analogies, in prophecies, in proverbs and parables, in poems and songs, and in bald-faced statements.

We may think that the end and purpose of religion, of being religious, is to love God. And some people emphasize what they describe as the “loving God” part so that they can somehow de-emphasize the loving each other part. Like that is less-than. Like that can be separated from the melody and theme of our existence as beloved children of God made in God’s image. But God insists that the way we love God best is to love one another.

We may look at the imperative of the gospel, and desperately try to find the limits of the demands God places on us through love. We may want to slice and dice and divide things into parts, or worse, “sides” that are in competition with each other. 

But the life of faith calls us into the truth of the Mobius strip that I used in the children's message a few moments ago. The Mobius strip shows that the two loves we are called to embody-- love of God and love of each other-- is actually ONE love. Trace your finger around a Mobius strip, and you see the two "sides" are all one continuous loop.

There is neither beginning or ending for God’s love for us, and we are called and created to love as God loves. Like a Mobius strip, in the faithful performance of our lives lived in concert with God and each other there really aren’t two sides of existence, the worldly and the spiritual, the sacred and profane, the Godly and the human, that compete with each other. There is just ONE side that flows together infinitely. There is one melody that binds all existence together, and calls us all to play our parts mindfully, intentionally, and collaboratively, understanding that we are all part of the whole, conducted by God.

God IS love, our readings insist again. God is relational. There is no personal love of God without lending your heart, your body, your very essence to The theme, the melody, is this: “love one another.” That commandment is repeated more than any other in scripture. It repeats in those specific words, that boldly and that insistently, fourteen times between the gospel of John and the letters of John. And when we take a step back, we see Jesus insistently MODELLING that commandment in all the spaces and actions in between. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another.

Love one another when they are similar to you. Love one another if they are wildly different from you. Love one another whether you judge them worthy or not. Love one another in words, but love one another in action. Love one another loudly when the world seeks to silence love, and love each other in the silences and the gaps when all that comes at us tries to drown out this thread, this melody that holds all things together. Love one another when it costs you nothing, but love one another even when it means laying down your life for another.

We humans are certainly driven to break things down into their constituent parts. We get too caught up in breaking things down into sides. Once again, this is how we try to make sense of all the data and sensation coming at us. But when we use that breaking down of things from the whole to the part in order to place limits on this foundational obligation in the life of faith we reduce the beauty of God’s love within us into discordant notes and cacophony, rather than the demandingly beautiful coherence and unity of playing our parts within God’s concerto of creation.

Readings:

Acts 10:44-48

Psalm 98

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

Preached at at 505 on May 4, 2024 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on May 5, 2024 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.