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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readings:

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

Lessons in Prayer: Speaking to the Soul, June 25, 2020

Romans 8:26-39

When my kids were little, we really enjoyed watching Disney movies. No, let me be honest—we still do even now that the kids are grown. Before our kids were born, my husband and I were unashamed to go see Disney and Pixar movies even without a child along with us as cover. One of our favorites, Aladdin, came out two years before we had our first child—and we couldn’t wait to share it with her and her siblings when they were old enough. The genius casting of Robin Williams as the Genie made this film and its lessons about love, friendship, integrity and personal honesty just about perfect (after they fixed some troubling song lyrics).

And yet, as much as we have all at one time, wished for a genie of our own, I remember that as I was growing up and putting away childish things (except a love of animated movies) I noticed that I had a tendency in my prayer to try to make God into a genie. When I would pray each night, I would catch myself reciting a laundry list of wants and wishes. Some of them were exceedingly shallow—“please help me get through this test”--- and others were just as misguided, like praying that there would be less fighting and yelling in my home. God is NOT a genie, or a wish-fulfillment device. The only people each of us can pray to God about changing is—yep, each of us ourselves.

As I was meditating on this Sunday’s readings, I struck by this statement in Paul’s letter to the Romans:

The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Very early in my life, I realized I didn’t know how to “pray as I ought.” Once I stopped the God-as-genie prayers, I prayed rote prayers, like the Lord’s Prayer, but the problem was that it was too easy to skim over the words when they became too familiar, instead of feeling anew the sentiments behind them. I began to study prayer traditions around the world and collect prayers, like this one by St. Augustine for purity which was so funny and yet real:

“Oh Lord, help me to be pure,

but not yet.”

I learned I could pray with beads, or by tying knots, or by focusing on my breath, or by mindful, deliberate movement, like yoga.

A few years ago, I began to write a new prayer almost every day. I even wrote a prayer cycle based on the Lord’s Prayer. I became aware of, in the words of the 17^th century monastic Brother Lawrence, prayer as the “practice of the presence of God,” to begin to try to spend time in conversation with God, “living as if there were none but God and I in the world” and yet of listening rather than talking, and of offering up whatever I was doing to God whenever I could. On the week before I started seminary, when Michael Brown was killed on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, I meditated about “praying with our feet” as we marched in peaceful protest against systemic racism—a kind of prayer that has bloomed again from yet still more violence against people of color in the last few weeks.

I am still no expert in prayer. But here we are Lord, standing in the need of prayer, as the old beloved spiritual goes. As we face rising COVID-19 surges again, and as we face more deaths of people of color in their homes and in the streets, never have we needed to pray “as we ought”—prayer where we listen to God, prayer where we seek God’s wisdom, prayer where we admit our faults and refusals to see injustices, and resolve to set our feet upon a better path. Prayer that doesn’t focus on what we ourselves hope to get but on what we can offer to the world to the glory of God. Prayer that is led by the Holy Spirit, if only we are brave enough to set her free within our hearts and our lives. Prayer that leads us deeper into community with each other, and strengthens us for the holy work with which God blesses us: to love each other in word, and love each other in deed, and love each other even if that means giving way in our own desires so that another may flourish. And so, right now, I pray:

Our Father in heaven,
loving Parent and Creator,
tender Mother,
save us from the time of trial,
for we are prone to wander
and lose our way.

Make us stronger in our faith
and more willing to wrestle with the angel of doubt.
Guide us into living and loving more fully
according to your precepts.
Help us turn aside all vain ambitions
and concentrate fully upon your Word.
Give us courage to make our hearts bigger,
even if that makes them bigger targets,
for love is always the answer.
Help us to persevere
through the difficulties of life,
knowing that You are always with us.
Give us the sight to see hope amid darkness.

O Loving One, hear our prayers
and grant your benediction and grace
to those whose needs we now raise before You.

Amen.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 25, 2020.

Seeds of Generosity: Sermon for Proper 17B

When we first moved to St. Louis, I was perplexed to see commercials on TV all the time for agricultural products—commercials that talked to farmers about “higher yields” and later “roundup resistant strands” and so on. I mean, this was St. Louis, a relatively large city, and yet I saw more commercials for agricultural products than I ever had visiting the rural areas of Oklahoma where some of my relatives actually WERE farmers. Why were we seeing ads for this kind of stuff in the middle of a relatively big city?

After all, I had grown up in a decent-sized city, but it was one where on Saturday you knew not to get out on the main streets before noon, because all the farm folks would be creeping on the roads as they nervously navigated the “terrible traffic of the big city” in their words—which meant anything more than three cars at a stoplight.

To me, St. Louis was a manufacturing hub—a place that was known for beer—we saw plenty of ads for that too—and aircraft and the Ford and Chrysler plants. I mean, sure, there were farm fields in the outstate areas, but it just seemed weird. Then I learned about Monsanto, and Queeny Park, and St. Louis’s connection to agribusiness. It all made sense, but even for years it still made me wonder how many St. Louisans actually paid attention to those ads at all, given how foreign life on a farm was to most suburbanites.

Maybe those ads caught my attention because I knew farmers, and rural people, even growing up in a smaller city like Tulsa. My kin lived in small towns surrounded by fields of soybeans, and winter and summer wheat, and corn. My grandparents at one time were sharecroppers, and my grandmother bore the scars on her hands from picking cotton in the hot sun with a pair of babies strapped to her back, and I had cousins who sill grew cotton and raised cattle.

I knew farmers—their incredible work ethic, rarely taking a day off, their deep connection to the land, and especially their abiding sense of community, which only made sense if you thought about the fact that their neighbors weren’t people who you only saw when you pulled out of your driveway on the way to work, but were often people whom you worked alongside for generations.

The corn is as high as an elephant's eye...

I remember once my Uncle Glenn was driving me through the rural roads in southern Oklahoma when he pointed out a farm field—which looked to my untrained eye like any other field, what did I know? Mr. Abernathy, he said, owned this field, and he grew prize-winning corn. His fields were some of the most productive in a several county area. He constantly produced more bushels of corn per acre than anyone around. And yet, Mr. Abernathy was known far and wide that if someone got into trouble, and ran short of seed corn, he would be happy to give his neighbors some of his prize-winning seed corn. And so, Mr. Abernathy’s farm became kind of an epicenter of a network of farms that all grew amazing corn, even though his was always the best.

Eventually, a reporter came down and found Mr. Abernathy and asked him about his amazing seed-corn, which had been developed painstakingly over generations, and also about his giving away of that same prized seed corn to his neighbors—I mean, that was where the story was, because to give away something that was so valuable was a great human-interest story. “You win competitions at fairs and such year after year,” the reporter marveled. “And yet, you GIVE AWAY that same seed corn. Why?”

“Well, son, I’ll tell you,” Mr. Abernathy drawled. “First of all, it’s the right thing to do, and I like to think that my neighbors would do the same thing for me. But,” he leaned in closer, “here’s the other thing. Don’t you know the wind and the bees pick up the pollen from the neighboring fields and bring it into my own as all of our corn ripens each season? If my superior corn gets pollinated with pollen from inferior corn, eventually, my corn won’t be as good. To grow excellent corn, it’s only smart to help my neighbors grow good corn too. To tell the truth, developing a good strain of corn is only half the job. If I want the best corn, I have to help my neighbors grow good corn, too. My generosity is in my own self interest. We may each have separate farms out here, but in truth we really ARE all connected, and our fates are truly all tied together. Giving away my seed corn, though, isn’t just generous—it’s good for me, too.”

I thought of that story as I was reading this line from the epistle to James: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” This has been a week when generosity and hard work has been on my mind for a number of reasons. In the month I have been with you, I have been amazed at your generous welcome and acceptance of me and my family. I have been blessed with the generous sharing of time, talent, and treasure by so many people as we work together as the community of St. Martin’s to witness to the core value of generosity.

Every time I walk into the nave on Saturday or Sunday and see heaping baskets of produce grown solely to donate to people who might not otherwise have access to fresh produce, I see the generous, creative use of the resources of land, water, and labor that this parish has committed to for the sake of people that most of us will never meet. Every time I hear of you all supporting the Peace Meal, and making sure that the people who gather at St. John's Tower Grove get to take part in the table fellowship and community, I am proud of your generosity.

Yesterday, we had a funeral here for a non-parishioner, and yet so many people in this community, especially Wendy and Denise and the altar guild and the ushers and the facilities crew, pulled together to make sure that St. Martin’s could offer generous and abundant hospitality to the grieving family and friends of a gentleman none of us ever met.

And all of you were involved in being able to give that gift of generosity, because if you didn’t provide the funding for this beautiful building, and for the electricity to cool and light it, to maintain what our bishop has admiringly told me was “the best parking lot in the diocese,” which is no small thing, we would not have been able to help that family in their time of grief.

“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change,” James is saying that generosity is one of the main ways faithful people embody the values of God, as we are called to do. The life of faithfulness is not just about belief, but about ACTION. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves,” James continues. Faith is important—don’t mistake me. But unless faith produces the fruit of transformation of ourselves into people who live by God’s core essential values, it is worthless.

I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons for many of the problems that haunt our modern society isn’t because we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are all separate from each other. I wonder what would happen if the wisdom of Mr. Abernathy wasn’t more widespread. What if we all lived our lives emphasizing the fact that not only are we all interconnected, but that our interconnectedness is a blessing, and that taking care of each other in the end, besides being our calling from God, is in our best interest?

On this Labor Day weekend in which we celebrate the contributions that working men and women throughout the generations have made to our beautiful country, we also confront the fact that it is possible in this beautiful country to work one, two, and even three jobs and still not be able to earn a living wage. We confront the fact that every year, one of the main causes of bankruptcy for working and middle class people is medical bills—where they have had to choose life or health or crushing debt. And I think we as a society can do better than that. We celebrate the labor movement by getting a day off from our labor because they believe their slogan: united we are stronger, divided we are weaker.

As we remember in our Eucharistic prayer each Sunday, God created each one of us in God’s own image. The practical effect of that is to remind us that we are called to embody God’s essential characteristics—it’s how we’re made. Qualities like forgiveness, and mercy. Being slow to anger. Being of great kindness. And not the least of those characteristics is generosity. The qualities and actions being extolled in our epistle and in our gospel today, encourage us to cultivate integrity—a sense of ourselves as individuals, yes, but also as member of a community grounded in love, cooperation, and mutual care. All of James’s advice—be quick to listen, but slow to speak, be slow to anger, putting away habits that hurt our relationships with each other in order to build each other up—is, in the end about integrity and generosity. And our model of integrity and generosity is Christ. 

Yesterday, after the funeral here, I went home before the 505, and I watched recorded video of the eulogies given at the funeral of Sen. John McCain at the National Cathedral by both President Obama and President Bush. President Obama marveled at the generosity that Senator McCain had in asking him—a former political rival, a member of the opposite party, to eulogize him. It made me laugh out loud when President Obama mused that perhaps some of the reasons that Sen. McCain asked himself and Bush 43 to speak at his funeral, even given the fact that they had both sparred with him politically, were that Sen. McCain liked being unpredictable, even contrarian—but also demonstrated Sen. McCain’s generous sense of humor.

President Obama drew a great laugh from the Senator’s widow and son as well as the crowd with this observation: “After all, what better way to get the last laugh than by making George and I say nice things about him to a national audience?” 

Sweets for the sweet.

And when the camera panned to President Bush laughing and nodding with Michelle Obama, they laughed again. Yet, this anecdote is also an example, a gentle, good-humored one, of the integrity the author of James is calling us to embody in the use of our words, and in our actions.

And even though one of my priestly mentors once cautioned me to avoid the word “should,” it’s hard to talk about the ethics of faithful living at times without using it. We should be able to disagree and still respect each other, and even perhaps like each other. We should be able to see the good in others even if they are different from us. Even in death, Senator McCain embodied that kind of integrity. And we know that that integrity came from his own deep faith. A faith we too share. A faith that we are called to emulate, again and again, even when—especially when—it’s hard.

As Jesus reminds us, it’s what comes out of us that defiles us or makes us pure. By cultivating habits of generosity and gratitude, it makes it easier for us to embody the values Christ himself embodied, the values God implanted into us as reflections of God—and it also makes life itself more beautiful, more fulfilling, more just and peaceful and satisfying.

The human heart is a marvel, and also can be a weapon. It’s up to us how to use those hearts we have been given. May we use them to build up each other, in generosity and faith, for it is then that we together will produce abundantly more than we ever thought we could.

Amen.


Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, at 8 and 10:15 am, on September 2, 2018.

Readings:
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Images:
1) Cornfield in Oklahoma, from the Oklahoma Farm Report.
2) Ooooooooooooooooooooooo! klahoma where the wind comes sweeping off the Plaaaaaiiiiinnnn....
3) Meme from Knowing-Jesus.com
4) "Our Community" heart logo from the Santa Clarity Valley Signal
5) Early labor movement etching
6) The Obama, Bush, and Clinton families at John McCain's funeral at the National Cathedral, September 1, 2018.
7) George Bush shares candy with his friend Michelle Obama at the McCain funeral as Laura looks on-- so sweet!

Prayer 2017- The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Almighty God,
who is above and in and through all things,
we gather around your altar and offer our hearts to You,
raising up our prayers and praises,
worshiping You in joyful thanksgiving.

By your love, Holy One,
You chose us before time began:
may we lead our lives
as a witness to your love in the world.
May we bear with each other
in gentleness, patience, and humility,
taking on each others' burdens
and walking alongside each other
as companions in the name of Jesus.

Pour out your blessing upon us as your disciples, O Lord,
and strengthen us in the bonds of love and charity,
we humbly pray.
Make your face to shine on all who seek You,
O Spirit of Truth and Peace,
and rest your hand upon those we now name.

Amen.