Breakfast at the Resurrection: Sermon for Easter 3C

Simon Peter’s head was swirling with thoughts, and his heart was churning with emotion. He felt the weight of guilt pressing down on him since the last time he has seen his Lord, on the night of his betrayal. He needed to get away. So he decided to say he was going fishing overnight—and of course, half of the other apostles immediately jumped in, demanding to come too.

It was torture. All he wanted was to be left alone with his failures—but instead he spent all night listening to the chatter of his fellow-apostles, who didn’t seem to notice he wasn’t his usual, impulsive self.

All he could think of was the red glow of that coal fire, and the reflection of that glow in the faces all around him as he had denied again and again that he knew Jesus. And then the rooster had crowed, and his heart had sunk like a stone, and he had run away.

He would never forgive himself.

Jesus had made a terrible mistake in claiming that he, Simon Peter, could be the head of the group, the leader of the apostles. He couldn’t continue Jesus’s work in proclaiming the good news of Jesus! He couldn’t even stand up for what he believed standing on a side street with a bunch of strangers.

Dawn came and, on top of having to endure PEOPLE all night long in that little boat, they hadn’t caught a damn’ thing. It was hot, and it was still, and the beer had run out a long time ago. It was the perfect combination of conditions for someone determined to be miserable, and it almost gave Simon Peter a grim, black sense of satisfaction.

Then, just about dawn, some guy on the shore had started calling out advice—and if there’s one thing a fisherman can’t stand, it’s some yahoo giving advice from the comfort of shore. “Cast your net on the right side,” the stranger had called. Oh, sure, THAT must be the problem.

But they hauled the nets up, sorted and rolled them, and then cast them on the right side of the boat. For a moment, the nets just sunk out of view into the gloom. And then, when they started to haul it up, the resistance caused the boat suddenly to tilt to one side. As soon as they had shifted their weight to right it, John had yelled out that the guy on shore was Jesus. He sounded so sure that Simon Peter squinted hard at the stranger—and he recognized the slope of those shoulders.

Simon Peter’s heart leapt to his throat, and he did the only thing he could think of—he made himself presentable and jumped over the side. It seemed like it took just seconds to reach the shore. Dripping, he took the hand Jesus offered as he flopped through the rushes, but then dropped it like it was hot. He saw that coal fire, burning merrily, and remembered.

He had no right to expect anything other than condemnation. He had denied his Savior three times to save his own neck, and he deserved nothing more than to be cast out.

Instead, he got breakfast. Breakfast, and forgiveness. There between the white-hot memory of two fires, and three denials.

On that ordinary day, Jesus makes sure the spiritual wounds of Peter are tended to, and placed on the way to healing.

One of the things that is most striking is the ordinariness surrounding Jesus’s encounters with his followers after his resurrection in the gospel of John.

Jesus appears so ordinary that no one recognizes him at first. Mary Magdalene thinks he’s the gardener just outside his empty tomb. The other apostles have to see the wounds on his body to recognize him—and some even demand it as we heard last week. And now, here he just shows up on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, another name for the Sea of Galilee and starts yelling out fishing advice.

And, once again, it is in a simple meal that Jesus communicates so much. Jesus himself has provided the fire, some fish, and the bread—and invites them to contribute too, just as we do to this day in the Eucharist. As the apostles struggle to get the boat to shore dragging their bulging net, some of them remember that time along that same shore that Jesus had fed a multitude with just a few fish and a couple of simple loaves of bread.

So often, we expect to see Jesus surrounded by the miraculous. That expectation fools us, though, and makes us forget this most important fact that Jesus himself alluded to time and again in his teaching: Jesus is almost always found where we least expect him, because he is most present to us as one of us. The stranger offering us advice we don’t want to hear. The hungry elderly man choosing food over medical care. The homeless person seeking shelter and community who feels she’s been cast away by anyone she has ever loved. The refugees fleeing the only home they’ve ever wanted for the probably unfriendly shores of a foreign land where they may never be accepted.

It is in the ordinary that the true miracle of Christ’s love plays itself out for us in each moment, whether of joy or sorrow. We too often live between the fires of our past failures and our current temptation to take the easy way still. Yet we have all been called, like Peter, to proclaim our discipleship—and all of us have had times where we have failed. But not a word of blame is spoken by Jesus to Simon Peter, or to us. Just a simple question: Do you love me? And then Jesus feeds us, body and soul.

Each time Jesus asks, one of Simon Peter’s three denials is blotted out. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks again and again, even though he already knows the answer.

And many of us are bearing burdens of guilt and shame. Many of us, like Peter, allow our failures to haunt us. Sometimes, the hardest person to forgive is yourself. Sometimes, it’s so overwhelming that we go the other way-- we even deny we have done anything wrong, we refuse to acknowledge how we have taken others and our relationships for granted, in order to avoid admitting we have anything for which we need forgiveness. But, unless we are narcissists, we know better. And it eats inside us.

Jesus doesn’t come to Peter there on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias and demand that Peter beg for forgiveness. Instead, Jesus offers him breakfast. Breakfast, and the reassurance that Peter is still beloved, that Jesus still believes in him enough to turn over the care and feeding of his followers to Peter.

And here we are. Two thousand years later, and Jesus calls to us from the shore too, telling us to have faith and put down our nets, just as the rest of society claims that we are in a hopelessly secular time. We stay silent with the good news of Christ—and allow others to seize the microphone, claiming that God is all about retribution and fear and might making right. Our silence can be deadly.

In our gospel, those nets have been empty all night—and they remind me of the way many of us feel, on a personal level, that our nets are empty after these last years of stress and worry. How many times have we put our nets down in the last few years, and hauled them up empty, and had to persevere anyway? The dashed hopes, the lack of an obvious end point has been mentally, spiritually, and physically exhausting.

And that experience of the empty nets can apply to our religious life as well. We may feel that our nets are empty spiritually. And for those of us who pay attention to such matters, the decline of the role of faith in so many people’s lives is also a cause for worry. I think of the continued tales of gloom and doom that many proclaim as the number of people who profess faith in God and who attend religious services continues to shrink in North America and in Europe. Empty nets, empty pews.

Yet—a time of empty nets is also a time of opportunity, as Jesus reminds us. If our nets are empty, perhaps it’s because we are putting them down in the wrong place both for ourselves and in our spiritual lives. The fact is that there are plenty of fish there. Among those who think that Christianity is all about power and might and judging others. Among those who have been hurt by the Church’s tendency toward being an institution rather than a way of life devoted to serving God and each other, and in doing so, finding ourselves. Sometimes, even when we feel the most bereft, we realize that we have drifted away. God hasn’t. God is always there, calling to us from the shore. Urging us to remember whose we are. And urging us to cast down our nets that all can know the warmth of God’s love for them—love we all so desperately need.

We cast down our nets for ourselves and for others, not by fear or threats of a wrathful God, but through the lives WE live as people of resurrection, as people of hope, out in a world that is STARVED for that message. We speak up over the din of division, self-centeredness, and hatred, and let the love and light of Jesus shine out of us by the life Jesus offers us—and offers all—there on the shores of the sea. Jesus offers love, compassion, forgiveness, and nourishment. 

That scene is a reminder to all of us to put our nets down where the need is the greatest. And be willing to joyfully take part in the work of discipleship-- the reason why we're here in the first place, really. We're reminded of that at the end of our gospel, because the reading ends with two simple words: “Follow me.” Simple, but not easy, as Peter and the apostles and as you and me all know.

“Do you love me?” Jesus asks us right now. Yes? Then let down your nets, and gather all you can. Draw the world to Jesus in your words and actions, and in your love most of all. Don’t worry about being overwhelmed, or about the net breaking. The net of faith is strong enough to hold everyone. Don’t worry about your own failures and shortcomings and doubts—know that you are beloved of Jesus, beloved, and worthy, and called to living a resurrected life. 

Preached at the 505 on April 30, and at the 8:00 and 10:30 am Eucharists on May 1, 2022 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

Readings:

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

Psalm 30

Revelation 5:11-14

John 21:1-19

Speaking to the Soul: Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost

There is a viral video that is making the rounds right now. A young woman decides to tell a story to her dog, named Zeus. But this story uses all of his favorite words, including “park,” good boy,” “handsome boy” “I love you,” and, the big one, “snacks.” Apparently at the sound of the first favorite word, her dog gets very excited and attentive.

But as the story goes along—and it’s not a long story—the dog realizes that these words are not promises, but instead are, from his perspective, a cruel joke. You can see the dog sitting there, thinking, “Park? We’re going to the park? Wait-- why are we not going to the park?” 

“Good boy? WHO’S the good boy? I am the only good boy! Who is this other good boy, because it can’t be me; she’s not petting me. Why does she keep sitting there and talking and not following through on her promises?”

With each new favorite word woven into the story of her imaginary trip to the park saying “I love you” to some unknown “handsome boy” and munching on “snacks,” the dog gets a stunned, shocked look on its face. The words lack any follow-through, and the dog realizes he’s been had. He finally stalks off in disgust as his owner keeps prattling on, and snickering at his response. As she ends the story with lots of uses of the word “snacks,” the lowest blow of them all, the dog has had too much, and starts barking—which in his language obviously means, as a toddler I once knew would say when she was disgusted with someone, “Shut up, you crazy lady. You’re drunk.”

In our story from Acts today, through a gift of the Holy Spirit, Jews from all over the Mediterranean and Middle East, gathered for an important Jewish festival in Jerusalem, suddenly hear the gospel of Jesus proclaimed in their own languages. Even though the people talking obviously are not native to their homelands and languages. These complete strangers, natives of dozens of lands in which Jews had been scattered during their many exiles, hear about a story of incredible power, filled with wondrous words, words of promise. And just like poor Zeus, when some of them hear this amazing gospel, itself filled with wonders too great to keep in, some of the listeners react in disbelief and suspect, despite the early hour of the morning, that those who are speaking to them in a frenzy of joy, are drunk.

In the reading from Acts 2:1-21, we are reminded of the power of words in the response of the disciples after the power of the Holy Spirit comes over them, giving them the gift of language. In a blink they are outside, in the streets, doing exactly what the disciples were told to do in our gospel reading—they are out in the world, testifying to the power of God as revealed in Christ to the people they encounter there. It’s probably the most excitement you and I have ever heard coming out of a church meeting.

In a kind of reverse of the curse of the Tower of Babel, now these disciples, many of them simple country folk, have just learned to speak other people’s language. I think that’s an important point for us too in the Church today: we are called to speak to people in their own languages first, rather than expect them to immediately understand the language of Christianity.

But the disciples’ first new language came as a challenge even earlier, for them as well as us. As soon as those early disciples answered Jesus’s call to follow him, they had to learn the language of Jesus—a strange language, then and now, awash in a grammar of grace rather than a grammar of vengeance.

This language, this grammar of grace, was filled with strange ideas, in which the greatest is the least, the least is the greatest, in which forgiveness and grace are more important than being right or self-righteous. Even after Jesus’s life on Earth was done, we can see that the disciples were still trying to make sense of that language. And we are too. We ourselves as Christians 2000 years later also continually work at acquiring that same language-- and it’s still just as alien and difficult for us as it was for them. The power of the Holy Spirit is here to help us continue learning Jesus’s counter-cultural grammar of grace and reconciliation.

The Holy Spirit, Triptych by Filippo Rossi

The Spirit hovered over the waters at creation, and God spoke goodness into the world. The Spirit breathed the Church to life at Pentecost, and blew those disciples out into the streets with the explosive power of love and truth to proclaim the good news to those who most needed to hear it—and in their own languages. The Spirit hovers over us even now, hoping to reinforce the goodness in our hearts. The Spirit is always trying to speak to the soul, using a language that we understood instinctively in childhood, but often have allowed to slip away as our hearts sometimes harden and we become more “worldly-wise.” That’s why the language of love that God imprinted on us at creation, during Jesus’s ministry and again at our baptism, often seems like a foreign tongue. It’s hard for us to trust in words like “grace,” “mercy,” and “forgiveness” for ourselves as being real, much less for us to speak and live them out to others.

As we were discussing these readings in Bible study this week, we reflected with a sense of wonder what it would be like to have those around us really understand what we are saying. Too much that we say gets lost along the way from one person’s mouth to another person’s ear. And the more people become different from us, the worse that lack of understanding often becomes. And yet here are these followers of Jesus, seized by the Spirit, pouring out into the streets and speaking and being understood by people who come from vastly different cultures from those of the disciples.

But that’s exactly what we are called to do as the Church. We are called to speak to the soul of each precious person we encounter, and hear the echoed whisper of that goodness and love vibrating from them—especially when it’s hard for us to do so, when we allow our differences, our fears, or our suspicions to divide us rather than strengthen us. Words do matter when we are speaking to the soul, and the word is Love.

As I talked about last week, story is one of the most powerful forces in the world—and story is bound up in language—language that can hold nothing back, or language that can attempt to limit access to the good news. And we have to give up the idea that we can domesticate Jesus for our own purposes, or that we should hold the Holy Spirit at arms’ length because we fear being seized by love and sent out into those streets just like those disciples all those years ago.

Language is powerful—just as the wind that is often a symbol for the Spirit is powerful. Language can help span divides, soothe grief,-- and spark conflagrations too. Especially when language is used to divide, to wound, to taunt, or to assault the very basis of the truth, as we have experienced these last few years.

We are called, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, just like those disciples, to the proclamation of the power of love.

Willie James Jennings, in his commentary on the Book of Acts, call this moment, “The beginning of the miracle of Pentecost, the revolution of the intimate. This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God, and we are yet to comprehend the extent to which God acts and is acting to break us open. Indeed it will be a community created by the spirit precisely in the breaking open.”(1) The gospel launches a revolution of the intimate, because in speaking of the love of God, we are called to be vulnerable and unguarded in sharing the story of God’s unifying love in a world that only profits by division and turning us against each other in competition or downright hatred.

The story we hear today is the story of the first great promotion of the gospel of Jesus since his execution and resurrection. These last 50 days, they had been an insular little community, locked behind doors, afraid even though the assurance that Jesus most often gave were assurances to not be afraid and instead be at peace. He said those two things—don’t be afraid and peace be with you—so that the disciples would be able to share in Jesus’s work, and he offers us the Spirit to help us now. 

Sharing in Jesus’s work of redemption, reconciliation, healing, and salvation in the here and now is, after all, the entire point of being a follower of Jesus. It’s not just to hoard away the gospel or cut off people from its promises. Our work, just like those disciples, is to go out and speak the good news to all we meet in language that they understand. It’s to let the Spirit lead us without fear.

Let’s face it—we are very much like those disciples locked away in that upper room. We too have been locked away out of fear for a very long time—it seems like forever—as this pandemic has come in waves and surges at us. Yet take a step away from this most recent scenario, and you could say that the institutional church is very much in the same spot.

Too often, we in the big-C Church sit back and wait for seekers to come to us, ignoring the fact that most of those who have turned their backs on religion have heard its practitioners using language that scapegoats others, or that emphasizes selfishness over mission in the world. Too often some who claim the name of Christ try to lock away the gospel. They talk more about who is not allowed in, about who is NOT allowed to be treated as full members of the Body of Christ. They even talk about withholding communion from people. They talk in the language of control and power, rather than in the language of good news about Jesus.

But on this birthday of the Church, we are being asked to take seriously our call to allow the Holy Spirit, as our companion in the Way of Jesus, into our hearts and then send us out into the streets.

To go out into the streets seek out those different from us. We are called to share our story—the story of how Jesus has changed your life and mine through his love, his healing, his transformative welcome of all. We are called not just to use beautiful words, like that poor dog heard from the lips of his owner, but to follow through with fulfilling the promises those words offer. Because the best words always are tied to actions.

We are called to meet people where they are, and speak the truth of love, especially in the face of hatred, paranoid division, and falsehood. We are called to care for the vulnerable—even the vulnerable ones we do not know. We are called to talk about mercy and grace, remembering the mercy and grace we ourselves know have received repeatedly, from God and others. Full stop.

If we talk about forgiveness, and we must, we ourselves must model forgiveness and mercy, bringing it to life in a world too given over to anger, suspicion, and nurturing grievances until they swell and explode like road kill in the summer sun.

If we talk about salvation, and we must, we have to model the kingdom values of Jesus—the grace that doesn’t keep score, but instead gives freely and generously to everyone, whether the world would count them as among the “deserving” or not. We must not look for the least we can do, but the best we can give.

If we talk about love, and we must, we must embody love. This is especially important in this time of division and hate, and in this time when too many openly scorn any idea that we have obligations to each other to act in ways that protect each other, even at our own inconvenience or sacrifice. The church, of all places, should be a place of concern for those we encounter, a place that strives to protect the weakest and most vulnerable, a place where we maintain our parishes not as locked rooms but as launching points to go out and proclaim the gospel in a language all will understand, however long that take.

We may not be perfect at it. We ourselves are still learning Jesus’s language of love, community, and reconciliation today. But it is the language that alone can unify creation as God intended from the beginning. It is the language of salvation, but not salvation for selfish ends. Rather, this language calls all disciples, them as well as us, to find the vocabulary for helping to repair the world and our relationships within it, with each other and ultimately, with God. This idea of responsibility of faithful people to repair the world is what our Jewish brothers and sisters call tikkun olam—the repair of the world.

In a world that focuses on the temporary, we are called to speak of the eternal. In a world that focuses on transaction in all relationships, we are called to transformation and embrace. As disciples, we are called to embrace rather than shun the power of the Holy Spirit, and speak to the soul. Let us dedicate ourselves, this Pentecost Day, to speaking—and embodying-- the miracle of love.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on the Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2021.

Readings:

• Ezekiel 37:1-14
• Psalm 104:25-35, 37
• Acts 2:1-21
• John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Citations:

1) Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible), p. 27.

Skipping Stones: Sermon for Easter 5B

We all knew that 2020 was a tough year for entertainment. Movie theatres were shuttered; Broadway dimmed its lights. Sports were hit especially hard: Major League Baseball and the NFL played abbreviated seasons and still saw outbreaks among the players, and the NHL operated under bubbles in Canada. Thanks to the pandemic, the NBA’s season from start to finish covered 355 days. But for rock-skipping, one sport’s loss was another sport’s gain, and the Mackinac Island Championships last year were even featured on ESPN.

Yes, there are rock-skipping championships for grownups, and one of the quirkiest is on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron. Each year there is a tournament where grown men with nicknames like “Hard-Luck”, “Mountain-man,” and yes, unimaginatively, “Skip,” bend themselves double to send six rocks dancing across the waves in search of glory, a trophy, and 48 pounds of Mackinac Island fudge, which is considered a year’s supply in someone’s bizarre accounting. 

From the first "plink" to the "pittypat" of a smoothly spun stone launched at an optimal 20 degree angle at its release, a team of judges, with their tongues firmly in their cheeks and away from that fudge, count each distinct contact of stone and wave. Competitors still upright after hurling their stone stand squinting, praying to avoid a “gerplunk” in which the stone drops into the water like a, yes, rock; or an “agnew,” in which the stone hits a bystander, a judge or, worst of all, a real person wondering what the heck these weirdos are doing. 

At the very least, rock skipping seems to provide the answer to the question from Monty Python of whether witches float, and someone asks what also floats? Suggested answer? Bread, apples, and very small rocks. And ducks.

As for myself, I am, when it comes to rock-skipping, a purist. I believe in rock skipping for the simple joy of it, unsullied by the taint of competition. Rock skipping brings back a combination of childhood nostalgia and sensory memory: the feel of of finding your likely stones on rocky banks, inhaling the tangy scent of muddy lake water, and hearing Grandpa yelling at us dang kids to stop scaring the fish away.

Yet I have found the purest test of stone skipping was on still water, especially a pond on a still summer’s day, with skill and arm strength alone propelling that rock forward. Sometimes, the best part was after the stone had sunk beneath the surface in silence. Then, we could count the overlapping rings where rock and water had met. On days like that, we would reverently wait as the rings moved ever outward, their edges growing finer and thinner, until the surface of the water was once again smooth and undisturbed. We’d often let out a little sigh as the surface became glassy like a mirror rather than blurry and rippled once more. And then after a few moments, one of us would start the process of finding and launching a well-shaped stone all over again, just so we could admire that throw and the chain of beautiful rings linked and then wisped away like smoke. In my life skipping stones has been more of a contemplative practice.

Sometimes, then and now, I would think about how skipping stones can be a metaphor for life. The interplay of stones and water violates all illusions of predictability: here’s a heavy thing that just for a little while levitates and dances over the most yielding of surfaces. Sometimes we are the rocks, uprooted from where we’ve been hanging out by something beyond our control, suddenly spun and flung out and plunged into an environment we’ve never considered and didn’t ask for. Other times, we’re the placid body of water, minding our own business until some fool comes along and starts trying to disturb the calm surface we’ve so carefully cultivated.

As I grew older, I realized that there have been many people who have skipped across the surface of my life—random encounters with strangers in which, for some reason, eyes meet and notice is taken, and some small kindness is offered, some pleasant conversation is exchanged, some finding of common ground is recognized. Maybe it lasts only a few minutes. But we walk away reminded of the divine spark that rests within each of us and flares to life when we truly see each other and honor each other rather than hoping we avoid eye contact, when we recognize our commonalities rather than our differences or indifferences.

In our reading from Acts today, we hear the story of just such an encounter, as the Holy Spirit skips like a stone across the surface of the lives of Philip and an exotic stranger, leading them to plunge into a small body of water in an act of discovery, joy, and faith.

I imagine that that water alongside that road 2000 years ago was just as smooth and undisturbed as the sun reached its zenith. Most people had the sense to travel in the cool of the morning. And for the last several weeks, things had been in a turmoil in Israel, as if boulders had been tossed into the Sea of Galilee, all because of the work and the execution of a strange Galileean rabbi. His life and his death had created a lot of waves. The authorities were hoping that now that he and his little band were properly cowed, the tumult could cease and, at least on the surface, things could calm down once more.

They thought they had put an end to him and his so-called “good news,” which was nothing but a bunch or tricks and rabble rousing—at least from the leaders’ perspectives.

They did not count on the Holy Spirit. People often don’t. But here the Holy Spirit reaches down and plucks Philip out of what he has been doing, out evangelizing among the Samaritans, even though they were outsiders. Instead, the Holy Spirit sends an angel to tell him to go stand by that wilderness road leading from Jerusalem, even if the heat of the day made that sound crazy.

And instead of an empty road, along comes an ornate chariot, and in that chariot is an astonishing, arresting sight: a court official from Ethiopia, practically the ends of the known world, treasurer for the Queen herself, reading aloud from the writings of the prophet Isaiah. His dark black skin, his voice, and his smooth face implied that he was a eunuch and a foreigner—the ultimate outsider. Yet here were the words of the prophet Isaiah coming from his lips! His sumptuous clothing, carriage, and the fact that he was in possession of a scroll of a prophet indicated his wealth, sophistication, and power. His status as a eunuch made him non-binary in a world that insisted on either/or for everything, and made him not quite male in a world in which only males mattered.

But the Holy Spirit cares for none of these things, then or now. The next thing Philip knows, he has called out to the stranger, skimmed across that road and is clambering alongside the eunuch, first explaining the passage he was reading, and then the good news, or gospel, of Jesus. The passage from Isaiah becomes a stepping stone and a skipping stone at the same time, drawing together seeker and disciple despite all barriers. The gospel of Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophetic promises that all nations, and people of all whom humans might exclude through physical or national prejudices, would be drawn to God, and it is through Jesus that that happens.

Who knows how long Philip spoke? But no matter what, the eunuch heard, and believed. It was at that moment that the gospel of Christ, once confined among mostly the poor of Galilee and Jerusalem, suddenly spun across the surface of that Ethiopian’s life and began to expand from disbelief to certainty. The gospel spins out to the edge of the world, carried to someone as different from those early church member as he can be, in every single way.

“Here is water!” the Ethiopian exclaims. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Was it a demand? Or was it a plea, expecting rejection? Either way, Philip had no defense. He had no objection that seemed to stand any more, although others might point to his counterpart’s exotic status, his foreignness, his mutilated body, any number of things. But we do not hear any resistance from Philip. It’s shocking, after all, this profligate power of love that breaks down any and all barriers. It was one thing to preach the good news to the Samaritans—at least they were distant kin and neighbors of the people of Israel. But this man was an “other” and a stranger and outsider in every possible way.

Too often, we tend to avoid encounters with those around us, much less the forming of real relationship. We are too prone to hold ourselves aloof from those different from us—maybe through contempt, maybe through suspicion, maybe through fear of being vulnerable. All of those things could have prevented this encounter between these two very different people—but God broke through. And so without hesitation, this unlikely pair enters the water beside the road—and as they emerge, both are changed by the encounter with each other, which is also an encounter with God. Where these two men might have approached each other with hesitancy if not outright disdain, they instead become kindred in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, each praising and testifying to God in the aftermath, each flourishing as branches of Christ the true vine brought together by the love God has for all humanity.

Even this early in the Book of Acts, we see the gospel’s reach expanding and spreading like those interlocking ripples on the surface of the water—and Paul, Apostle and champion of the Gentiles, hasn’t even been converted yet—that’s the very next story. This story sets the stage for Paul’s mission, as the Church finds its way to being insular or inclusive—a question that hangs over every Christian parish to this day: Do we sit back and wait for people to come to us, or do we go out and let the love of God break down all barriers and divisions?

Here we see the interlocking rings fanning out from the gospel as it dances improbably like a skipping stone. The disciples at first confined their preaching to fellow inhabitants of Israel, then to co-religionists living all around the Mediterranean. Then the ripples grew wider, and entered into Samaria, and now into the court of the ruling family of Ethiopia. God has been made visible in the most unlikely of places by the unlikely meeting of these two very different people, and neither one of them emerges from that water unchanged. For the Ethiopian, there is a new understanding of God, who sends Jesus to us despite the cost to show us the way of living that brings not just existence, but LIFE. For Philip, further proof that God shows no partiality and the gospel will break free and take root beyond any barriers humans might try to use to control it or limit it. But the Holy Spirit is asking us to skip across our resistance, our hesitancy, and be willing to spread let the gospel by our love, and let that love radiate out from us like ripples on water.

Love cannot be caged. The Holy Spirit will carry the gospel where she will through the discipleship of you and me, and those until it breaks loose of all barriers our prejudices and fears may try to erect around it. As today’s epistle so insistently reminds us, twenty-nine times over, the basis of true worship of God is rooted in love. Love as action. Love that does not exclude but calls all things and all beings to share in the joy of eternal life rooted in the now. Not in limiting the good news only to certain times or certain people, but in encountering each other with joy, empowered by the good news of Jesus, so that we recognize the bonds of love that are meant to link us all together. Like a stone skimming across the surface of the water, the gospel touches down where it will, and the effects of that good news ripple ever outward with no signs of abating.

Can we likewise welcome the Spirit’s dance over the still waters of our lives, stirring up joy and faith, come what may? Can we welcome the stirring up of our hearts’ waters for the sake of a world that desperately needs the good news of a God whose love binds us all together? The Ethiopian’s question hangs over us as well: What is to prevent us from embracing our baptism, from embracing the gospel and being transformed? Isn’t that transformation the meaning and essence of Easter and resurrection itself?

Love calls us forward and calls us to dance over the waves. Despite all barriers we might like to erect and despite all resistance we may have to being vulnerable to the promise of God’s love for us all. We have nothing to lose but our fear.


Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 online and limited in person service of Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO on May 2, 2021.

Readings:

Acts 8:26-40

Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21

John 15:1-8

Citations:

1. Details about the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping Championship can be found here: https://stoneskipping.com.

2. For more on the physics of skipping stones, go here: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.2631

What Are You Looking For? Sermon for 2nd Sunday after Epiphany

In 1987, the Irish rock band U2 released its iconic album “The Joshua Tree.” One of the greatest hits from that album was the song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” This song came at a time when most rock fans were beginning to forget that three of U2’s members identified as Christian, and that their first hit on MTV was a song called Gloria, which was not about a girl but instead contained the words “Gloria in te Domine”—in English, “Glory to You, Lord.” I enjoyed watching my friends in college unknowingly singing praises to God as they sang along.

The lyrics to “I Still Haven’t Found What I am Looking For” describe the seeking and the searching that so many of us have felt, not just in young adulthood, but throughout our lives: 

I have climbed the highest mountains 
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you Only to be with you
I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for 

The song then describes the search for pleasure and connection. But it is in the last verse that the band makes explicit the spiritual nature of their searching: 

I believe in the Kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one 
But yes, I'm still running
You broke the bonds and you loosened chains 
Carried the cross of my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven't found 
What I'm looking for…(1)

The frank confessional tone of the last verses emphasize that this is a song about faith, about searching for transcendence in a world all too mired in immediate gratification. The song recounts a catalogue of experiences that should have thrilled and delighted, but instead have nonetheless been ephemeral, unsatisfying, leaving the seeker empty because they do not point to anything greater than the isolated response to a series of isolated experiences that only provide temporary distraction.

But isn’t this a plaintive cry that comes from the depths of so many people today, both from those who admit to some sort of engagement with faith, and those who lack a faith community of any kind? We are filled with an insatiable hunger for meaning, for connection, for purpose, for peace, for contentment in a world that keeps us constantly on the edge of dissatisfaction, where we are constantly told to want more even as our possessions often are tarnished in our appreciation before we’ve even thrown away the packaging?

The members of U2 were surprised when, shortly after the album’s release, a choir in New York reworked it into a gospel anthem. But to my mind that makes perfect sense: the greatest hymns have always dealt honestly with emotions. “It is Well With My Soul” was written by a man who lost his wife and daughters in a shipwreck. “Amazing Grace” was written by a man who had been involved in the transatlantic slave trade before becoming an Anglican clergyman. “How Great Thou Art,” was written after a powerful storm subsided to tranquility as the writer, Carl Boberg, pondered Psalm 8 while walking. 

Just being able to admit “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” is the first step to acknowledging the longing that lies within us.

It is that sense of longing that caused those two disciples of John to go trailing after Jesus on that dusty road—too unsure or overwhelmed to go up to Jesus directly, they simply lurk behind him, not even knowing what they were hoping to find. “What are you looking for?” I think Jesus’ question to those seekers trailing along behind him is one that we ourselves can ponder, and also ask others when it comes to matters of faith. What is it we are looking for? Jesus is reminding us that the path to enlightenment starts from the acknowledgement of longing, the acknowledgement that we are all seekers, trying to fill a hole within our hearts and souls with something.

We live in an age of substitution. We crave nourishment, but we fill ourselves to the brim with junk food, where even Bread Co. mostly serves up prepackaged foods and actually became the subject of a national petition when they removed their French Onion soup from the menu. We crave excitement, even as we numb ourselves with technology, and the top movie honored by Academy Award nominations is a psychological thriller about a comic book villain many of us wouldn’t want to spend five seconds with, much less two hours in the dark with strangers.

What is it we are actually looking for? The question resonates today as much as it did 2000 years ago. Jesus asks those two seekers that question out of love and compassion. Because just as much as those disciples think that here might be what they are looking for, Jesus has been searching for them, and for each one of us. And I am convinced that that’s another vitally important message to take from this gospel passage. Jesus’s interactions with his disciples constantly portrays him as seeking them out, engaging with people even when they disagree with him, not just sitting back and waiting for people to come to him, but going to where the people are, in their everyday lives.

Our gospel passage also assures us that Jesus welcomes us with our questions, our hesitations, our refusal to believe that something good might also be true. Look at how he responds to those two seekers in our story. They’re afraid to admit to their seeking—so they blurt out the first thing that pops into their heads. "What are you looking for?" Is NOT answered by "Where are you staying?"          

Yet Jesus understands. His response is “Come and see.” And he's not talking about his lodgings. Instead, Jesus invites them to come and see for themselves who he is. And by the end of the day, they themselves are convinced. 

“Come and see” could be seen as a kind of shorthand for the entire Epiphany season. It’s an invitation to move from bewailing that we haven’t found what we are looking for, to taking concrete action to find that meaning that has been missing in our lives. In this season of Epiphany, we hear story after story of how Jesus’s identity was revealed to successive people, Jew and Gentile alike, and in doing so, reveals who God is, helping to bridge the chasm that prevents ordinary humanity from beginning to perceive the essence of God’s nature.

It’s too easy to get caught up in cynicism, across the years and centuries especially. And that’s why we can look at our gospel not just as a story about then, but about NOW.

Too many people are only comfortable with reducing Jesus to merely a historical figure, an ancient wisdom teacher who taught an ethical system based on the golden rule. I suppose that’s better than those who imagine that Jesus is a vengeful referee who hates all the same people we do and can’t wait to chuck them into a hell of unquenchable fire. But not much better. Too many people, self-avowed Christians included, fail to see Jesus anywhere today. But we proclaim Jesus, risen and living in the world today, still guiding us in the way of God, and bridging the divide between humanity and divinity.

What if we took seriously the idea of the ongoing incarnation of God in human vesture that we sing about in our hymns? Because the Church is called to be the embodiment of that same precious body, that same Anointed One, that the disciples encountered. Likewise, the Church is called to equip each and every one of its members to not just embody the healing, reconciling love and wisdom of Jesus, but to see that divine spark in everyone, friend or stranger alike.

As we heard the story of Jesus’s baptism last Sunday, many of us probably reflected upon our own anointing by water and the Spirit in the sacrament of baptism. With that in mind, the call today to “Come and see” to those who do not know God becomes a charge upon faithful people everywhere through the power their baptism to be the living embodiment of Jesus in the world today.

In the early Church, “come and see” was a scandal in the milieu of mystery cults that promised the attainment of secret knowledge to the detriment of those around them. The scandal of the gospel was its universalism two millennia ago—and that same universalism remains a scandal today to those who want to erect walls and stiles and barricades between the seeking and the Savior. Embracing that universal call to “come and see” is the essence of Christian life and discipleship, even if we are faltering and imperfect in our attempt. 

“Come and see” is not a command for the world to come to us—and that’s not how our peripatetic teacher and Savior, Jesus from no-account Nazareth, operated, either. “Come and see” calls us ourselves to be swept up in the unbounded vista of God’s saving love, for only in embracing the mystery of God’s love can we truly dare to share with others the wonders of grace and truth.

“Come and see” is a charge upon us to go meet people where they are-- the poor, the suffering, the overlooked, the downcast, the oppressed, the scorned, the broken and broken-hearted— to love them for who they are whether the calculus of the world judges them worthy or not, and be the healing we long to see in the world. It is standing alongside the despised and the fallen and nonetheless seeing the spark of God’s love in the other as much as we long to believe it resides within us, knowing full well our own failures. It is a call for us to embody the reconciliation, grace, and mercy that Jesus himself embodied—and in embodying those spiritual gifts, Jesus proves that it is possible for us to embody them as well.

Look around you: the world is our mission field. So many people still haven’t found what they are looking for. What if each and every one of us was willing to respond as Jesus did—with love, love in action where there is isolation? With healing and reconciliation, where there has been pain and anger? With invitation and drawing the circle ever wider, where there has only been rejection and heartache? With a personal, heartfelt invitation to “come and see?”

“Come and see” is a call that will only resonate when it springs from the joy abundant we feel at knowing we are Beloved of God, and rather than try to hoard that knowledge to ourselves, to share it with those the world despises so that they too, can join us in rejoicing and renewal. It is a call to a path that never claims that the ends justify the means, but holds that the path itself is holy—and calls us from being mere fans to being actual disciples.

When we live into the relationships that Jesus calls us to embrace with both God and with all creation, we are transformed. We make room within our hearts for the inner light and wisdom of the folly of the gospel of Jesus, one that denies that there must be winners and losers as much of the world’s systems demand. It is embracing the paradox and the gift of God coming into time as a helpless infant, and of the greatest becoming the least, all for love beyond all of our own fearful limitations. It is that embodiment to which the incarnation calls us today. “Come and see” reminds us that the only way love grows is by sharing it with other by not seeking to exclude those different from us but by drawing the circle ever wider until all are drawn within the enclosure of God’s mercy. It is a reminder that God’s love is not a transaction, but a gift and a grace beyond our ken. 

What are you looking for? Let us each be the way for the world to come and see.

Amen.

Readings:
Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 40:1-12
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42


Citations:
(1) "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," by Adam Clayton, Dave Evans, Larry Mullen, Paul David Hewson, and Victor Reina, from 1987's album The Joshua Tree.

Preached at the 505 on January 18 and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on January 19, 2020 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Going Joyfully into the Fields- Sermon for Proper 9, 4th Sunday after Pentecost

As I wrote in my priest’s reflection for July 4, the lectionary of the Episcopal Church treats Independence Day as a Holy Day in the Church’s calendar, and the gospel appointed for July 4 is Matthew 5:43-48, which implores those who follow Christ to emulate him, even to the point of loving our enemies and praying for them as much as we do for our neighbors. I spoke about how this dream for our country reflects back upon our baptismal covenant.

In our gospel today, we don’t hear about enemies and neighbors, but about wolves and lambs. We learn that it’s easy to be loving among lambs. To bear God’s love among wolves may be harder, but it is also what we are called to do to show that the kingdom of God is drawing near.

One common thread that ties the reading we heard tonight together is healing, and overcoming divisions and boundaries, just as that reading from Matthew implored us. Naaman may be a great general, but he is also afflicted by a stigmatizing disease. It is through a nobody—a captured servant girl from Israel—that he learns of a possible cure. No matter what, though, at the time we are talking about, however, the disease will progress, for it was incurable in those days—barring, of course, a miracle.

In those times, illness was isolating—and among certain people, such as Jews, touching someone or something unclean could make yourself outcast and unclean. Naaman is a man of power and influence, and he has probably tried everything he can think of already. How else to explain his listening to the advice of someone who normally would not attract his attention—as well as someone who is herself war spoils, and thus perhaps not be of the most kindly disposition toward Naaman. But for whatever reason, the unknown Israelite woman offers her master the possibility of help.

Even though we just met Elisha last week, here he is already a prophet of great renown. The King of Israel, when he receives Naaman, thinks he is being set up, and apparently has no knowledge of Elisha’s abilities in healing. Elisha, however, being a prophet, knows of the letter and reassures the king of Israel that this can be done. Elisha himself does not even meet Naaman, but sends a messenger to tell him what to do. This is seen by Naaman as a snub—he has travelled all this way, and this petty holy man won’t even meet him face to face? Naaman is also told to wash in some ridiculous little stream? He is outraged, but his servants with him point out that the cure before him is easy, so why not try it? Naaman is persuaded, and indeed, he is cured so that there is no sign he was ever a leper, if his skin becomes that of a “young boy.”

So, in a subtle way, Israel’s superiority—at least when it comes to her God and God’s prophets, is being asserted. Naaman may be able to conquer the Israelites, but they have something that he can never capture—a God who heals. All Naaman has to do is exhibit enough faith to complete the task set before him. Symbolically washing in Israel’s largest river is being willing to submit to Israel’s God. God’s gift to Naaman helps show that Israel’s God is great indeed, and, once again, a Gentile receives healing from the Israelite God, just as we have seen for the last several weeks.

It is also interesting to note that this foreigner is healed by immersing himself in the waters that traditionally are understood to divide Israel from her neighbors. What marks a boundary also mark the rupturing of the social boundaries between Gentile and Jew and between unclean leper and the rest of society. This story also emphasizes the barrier and boundary-defying power of God. God constantly calls us to break through artificial divisions and boundaries—physical, political, social, economic, religious. Far from being a tribal or national god, God’s message and salvific plan is universal.

This is a theme also emphasized in our gospel passage. Last week, Jesus warned his followers that they needed to be ready to sacrifice their old lives if they wanted to follow him. Jesus had just been rejected by a Samaritan village, and then he had told his followers they needed to be willing to lay down their lives for the sake of the gospel, as we talked about last week. Today we see Jesus commissioning the seventy (or seventy-two, depending upon the translation) followers to go out and help proclaim the Good News ahead of him as he has his “face set toward Jerusalem.” The number seventy is meant to portray the universality of the Good News referring back to the 70 nations descended from Noah’s sons after the Flood, listed in Genesis 10 as encompassing all of humanity. 

Just like in the story of Naaman’s healing, it is the nameless people who point the way to what God is doing in the world. The seventy are nameless just as the servants who advise Naaman are nameless. The implication of this is empowering: we don’t have to be spiritual gurus or haloed saints to do the work Jesus calls us to as disciples. Verse 1 makes it clear that Jesus is sending the 70 ahead of him “to places where he himself intended to go.” They are, to use the agricultural metaphor, preparing the field and planting the seed for when Jesus then comes later as “Lord of the harvest.” Because he has set his face toward Jerusalem, there is a sense of urgency—the time to plant the Good News is NOW. Yet just as the seventy returned with joy, so we too must begin and end not in fear, but in joy.

That same sense of urgency should drive us as Christians and as disciples and witnesses today. We live in a time today when church attendance is shrinking. Again and again, we talk about how we want the Church to grow—but gone are the days when we can sit back and wait for people to walk in our doors. 

Too many people see church doors themselves as barriers, not as entrances. We have to understand this-- we live in a time when people have been hurt by churches and self-professed Christians, hurt by being vilified for who they are or what they look like or who they love. We live in a time when clergy sexual abuse all across the spectrum has made people distrust the institutional Church, Catholic, Reformed, or Protestant—and rightly so. There are far too many people who call themselves Christians only as an act of exclusivity, as a justification for their putting down others and for building up those very barriers and boundaries that the power of God calls us to tear down in the name of the Gospel of Love and Peace.

That number 70 is a significant number for today, too. As of 2017, 72% of Episcopal congregations had an average Sunday attendance of 100 or less. This certainly sounds like bad news.

However, that also means we have an opportunity to reset the narrative, to see that the mission field begins right outside the doors of this parish, and out into our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities and our nation and beyond. It means also, however, that just like those seventy, we are called to go to where the people are who haven’t heard the good news.

There seems to be a church on every corner—if you are looking for them. Yet how many times have we heard that people don’t know where churches are—even if they drive by them every day? We have to learn that simply having a sign out front and a cross on the top of the roof isn’t enough. The seekers of today do not come looking for a church based on its marvelous signage. They look for a church that is engaged with the world, that seeks to make a difference in the community around it, that engages in mission that makes life meaningful and purposeful. 

They also need to be shown where the churches are-- that we are not a closed group with arcane rituals shut behind doors, but we are being the visible, living, loving Christ out in the world, meeting people and their needs where they are as Jesus did and does. They need to be specifically invited into our work in the world, and then welcomed and connected to the important visible work we do in the world, as well as our worship. To do that, we need to understand welcoming people differently-- as active, not passively waiting for people to come to us. As Bishop Mary Gray Reeves has noted, “Welcome precedes a sense of either believing or belonging.”

In what ways do we intentionally meet those who do not belong to the church, intentionally meet, get to know them and their stories, and not just invite them into community with us but declare our community with them? How do we attempt to emerge from behind our red doors and walls and become the Church in public spaces, open to encounter all comers?

It can seem daunting. Yet Jesus sent those seventy out not alone, but in pairs. He reminds them to be resilient: if you meet with rejection, shake the dust from your feet and move on—but never give up. As we talked about last week, we are not asked to engage in our life as disciples alone, but as a community. As a team.

Those seventy were accomplishing two main tasks on their journeys: to speak peace (shalom), and to demonstrate the kingdom of God coming near, turning everything upside down as it always does. They were called to demonstrate the kingdom through three activities in particular: they were teaching, they were preaching, and they were healing. And likewise we are called to the same tasks:

First, to speak peace. And not just speak peace, but embody peace and strive for peace and pursue peace, knowing all the while that the foundations of peace are justice and mercy intertwined. 

And then to make visible the coming near of God's kingdom. Our gospel lists three ways the 70 did that. Today, we teach and preach about Jesus to those who do not know him through how we live our lives, through testifying about the wondrous things God has done and is doing in our lives. Some saint famously said: “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” We too can testify with our lives, and then use words as well.

We also must seek to heal the wounds that have been inflicted in people’s lives through a lack of care, empathy, and compassion. To seek to heal those wounds especially that have been inflicted by those who claim to be acting in the name of God. That can be done by something as simple as being present—being fully engaged and willing to listen to those who have been wounded.

God has empowered us—through our love in action, through our spirits and our bodies—to be healing forces in the world today, overcoming all that seeks to divide, to oppress, to wound. The way Jesus embodied God’s love in the world was by how he lived his life teaching, preaching, and healing, sometimes using words.

And how do we as the Church embody God’s love in the world? How do we shine a light on what God is doing in this neighborhood? How do we engage with the people around us so that they want to be a part of not just what we are, but what we are doing?

At our Anglican core, one of the most beautiful things we have going for us is our worship, and worship also is imbued throughout with hospitality and openness—God’s hospitality to us around the altar; our hospitality for each other in the Liturgy of the Word and Table. The point of hospitality is to break down barriers, not enforce them—and theologian Alan Roxburgh makes this point clearly when he says, “The primary way to know what God is up to in our world when the boundary markers seem to have been erased is by entering into the ordinary, everyday life of the neighborhoods and communities where we live.”

Once we do that, then we can invite the world to the table of God, where all boundaries fall, where all are welcome. It is at the table that we share the goodness of creation—bread and wine, offered and taken, blessed broken, and shared. Without any agenda but fellowship, and seeing the divine spark inside of everyone, even if it takes awhile.

The greatest gift Jesus gives us for this holy work, one that pushes back against the constant drumbeat of isolation and loneliness that pervades our society is the calling of us into community; in promising us companions and helpers along the way, in offering healing as much as empowering us to be healers as well.

May we go forth from here ready to live a life of love not just among lambs, but among the wolves, loving each and every person as God loves us, and inviting all to labor alongside us in the vineyard, where the harvest of hope and love is plentiful. This is our Gospel. May we go forth and proclaim it, in the healing name of God.

Amen.