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."

Walking in Love With Creation: Sermon for the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (transferred)

A long time ago, almost 800 years, there lived a man named Francis. He left behind family and wealth to become a repairer of churches, a deacon, and a friar who organized a new religious order based on humility and poverty in solidarity with the poor.

One day Francis was walking in the woods, traveling from one city to another as he recruited people to join his order. Above his head he heard hundreds of birds in the trees, singing and cheeping and doing all the bird-like things they could, with gusto. He heard in their joyfully noise a message of praise to God. The story goes that he called to the birds, and they flew down from the trees and gathered about his feet, and he began preaching to them:

“My little sisters, many are the bonds which unite us to God. And your duty is to praise Him everywhere and always, because He has let you free to fly wherever you will, and has given you a double and threefold covering and the beautiful plumage you wear.

“Praise Him likewise for the food He provides for you without your working for it, for the songs He has taught you, for your numbers that His blessing has multiplied, for your species which He preserved in the ark of olden times, and for the realm of the air He has reserved for you.

“God sustains you without your having to reap or sow. He gives you fountains and streams to drink from, mountains and hills in which to take refuge, and tall trees in which to build your nests. Although you do not know how to sew or spin, He gives to you and your little ones the clothing you need.

“How the Creator must love you to grant you such favors! So, my sister birds, do not be ungrateful, but continually praise God, who showers blessings upon you.”

It is said that the birds listened attentively, and that when he dismissed them to fly away they formed the shape of the cross in flight. He later joked that animals were more attentive congregations than many human ones he had encountered.

His love for creation as a testimony to the loving provision of God for all of us is something too many of us still have difficulty embracing. We live in a time when our planet is warning us about our lack of care for creation, whether through benign neglect or through outright exploitation of the Earth and her resources. As we look at the historic flooding caused by Hurricane Helene in places that had thought they were safe from climate change, and as we watch the formation of more, even stronger storms in the Gulf of Mexico and all around the world, some of us still view nature as an adversary to be conquered than a gift and revelation of God’s abiding love for us and for all God’s creatures.

This last week (on October 4, actually), it is our tradition to commemorate the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, who is remembered as one who extolled the integrity, the oneness of creation, one who saw all of the universe, from the Sun and the Moon to even the tiniest creatures, as giving praise to the God and Creator of All. Our readings today reflect that spirit of the joyful honoring of creation that Francis taught.

Francis believed that creation revealed the glory and wisdom of God. There are stories of Francis moving earthworms aside so that he wouldn’t step on them, or of him saving a town that was being terrorized by a ravenous wolf by calling the wolf brother and treating it with such tenderness that it laid down at his feet and ravaged the town no more. No animals, from crickets and bees to falcons and pheasants, were too insignificant that Francis couldn’t see God’s generous love to us in the example of each creature.

In our gospel today, Jesus reminds us of the tender care he offers us, urging us to lay aside the striving of he world and lean into our trust in Jesus, whose burdens upon us are insignificant to the fears and anxieties of the world. In our passage from Psalm 121, we hear the voice of God reassuring us that God’s care and love for us never pauses, never ceases. And in our reading from Job, God lists wild animals not known in the ancient world for their wisdom and nonetheless asserts God's providential care. That generous, abundant provision is not just for domestic animals, as we humans sometimes emphasize, but on all creatures, especially wild beasts that roam free Jesus tenderly reminds us about the joy and beauty present in the most common things we tend to overlook in our distracted race through each day. In calling us to trust and awareness of all for which we could be grateful, Jesus calls us to live in each moment joyfully, bathed in God’s love.

Because it is so hard to fully live into each moment, we instead too often fall into the trap of feeling isolated from each other. That false sense of isolation leads to anxiety like Jesus was addressing, and that anxiety fools us into believing we are separate from one another. We see the effects of this belief right now in our city and throughout society. Anxiety and fear and isolation make us forget God’s promise of love and care.

Yet God’s promises to us are written into the very bonds of love that bind us to God, to each other, and to every living thing on the earth. That covenant that God established after the Great Flood was not just with Noah, but with both humans and all creation, plants and birds and all that lives, which, some scientists maintain, includes our very planet itself as a living organism, if one takes a broad enough view. The covenant story we heard from Genesis reminds us that creation is a full partner in our relationship with God, and gives God praise and glory.

Jesus reminds us that God’s love restores and renews us, so long as we center ourselves within each moment enough to feel that shared love. It is there in the joyful songs of birds whose welcome sings the morning into being. It is there in the lowliest, tiniest wildflower growing in a roadside ditch, turning its hopeful face toward the sun.

Instead of worry, Jesus calls us back to mindfulness, an important spiritual practice in many world religions. And not just any mindfulness, but the mindfulness of remembering how fully and thoroughly God loves us and through that love binds us together. Coming back to awareness of our unity with all living things is a wonderful place to start.

We see here in this anecdote that Jesus was a keen observer of the beauty of creation, and that he had spent time savoring the awareness of the birds singing and building their nests, and the sight of wildflowers—what some might call weeds—cloaking the fields and hills in beauty in a myriad of colors, all the hues of the rainbow mentioned in our first reading. Both the rainbow and the raiment of the most humble flower are signs to us of the promise God maintains with us and with all creation to love us and care for us always—not just in the distant past but right now and forever. Every living thing reminds us that God’s wondrous love bears the world into being and sustains it in every moment.

Luckily, we are also reminded of God’s love especially in the love and faithfulness of our companion animals, whose steadfast joy in us models to us the love and devotion we ourselves are made to exhibit toward our God.

At our pet blessing yesterday, those who gathered spoke of beloved canines and cats, fishes and rats—these creatures who show their devotion to us unswervingly. The very presence of all these living creatures in our lives remind us of God’s love. They remind us, also, that we are charged from the very first story in scripture with service to the earth and all the living things upon it and within it. Even the smallest creature has been placed on Earth to support the web of life on this planet, from humans to honeybees, and none is dispensable—not even wasps or mosquitos, who, I have to admit, are not my favorites. But we spoke of the ways that our pets’ devotion reminds us of the unswerving devotion and trust God’s abundant love elicits from us when we contemplate all the things for which we can be grateful in each day we live.

As we begin our stewardship campaign this year, I ask that you consider the way in which God has knit us into this huge community of creation, and consider the generous blessings of the natural world that make our lives possible. But I also ask that you remember how much the amazing community we have formed right here at St. Martin’s also finds ways to testify to God’s abundant love and grace each and every day, and ask each of you to recommit to supporting it

Our companion animals’ devotion exemplifies the devotion we owe God. Their love exemplifies the love we are called to bear for each other, no matter our differences.

St. Francis reminded us that all of creation participates in demonstrating God’s love—the same lesson Jesus taught us today in this gospel passage from Matthew. Each creature is a reminder of God’s blessing to and love for us. It is that holy and limitless love that binds all things together, just as mutual forces of gravity and attraction hold galaxies and stars in their courses as they dance through space. They walk alongside us as we seek to walk in love as Christ loved us, and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.


Amen.

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO on October 5-6, 2024.

 Readings:

Job 39:1-18

Psalm 121

Matthew 11:25-30

Image: "God's Fool," statue of St. Francis in Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery, from Naperville, IL

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

Readings, Proper 24A:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s back up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

Readings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.




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

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


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

Great Expectations: Sermon for Advent 3A

The Christian liturgical calendar has two seasons of preparation: Advent and Lent. In the early Church, Advent was actually longer—from St. Martin’s Day through Christmas Eve, and it was known as “Little Lent.” The lessons in both Advent and Lent are centered around self-examination and repentance. But after two weeks of apocalyptic visions, this third Sunday in Advent brings us something different: Joy.

The great systematic theologian Karl Barth noted, “Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.” It may be simple, but it is not easy without mindfulness. Let’s face it: we are not hard-wired for joy. We are hard-wired in our animal brains for fear, especially the fear of scarcity—and scarcity and gratitude do not coexist with each other. We have to make a conscious effort to reset our expectations in order to get to joy rather than anxiety. We have to reset our lens to look at what we have, and the way those around us enrich our lives rather than see what we don’t have, and see others as competition for scarce resources. Yet we are also made in the image of God, and God’s beloveds. That’s why “don’t be afraid,” is repeated over 365 times in scripture. One for each day of the year.

The readings we hear this Sunday are all about defying expectations. The vision Isaiah gives us this week shows a desert blooming, the weak being strengthened, the disabled made whole, waters gushing forth in the driest of places. It’s the same vision of healing and restoration that Jesus uses to define and describe his ministry in our gospel: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

And where does Jesus get the inspiration of this vision of abundance where there was need? From his own mother, whose Magnificat describes Jesus’s ministry even before his birth in the same way: the lowly, including Mary, lifted up, the proud and conceited humbled, the downtrodden lifted up, the hungry filled. The Magnificat begins and ends with identifying God with mercy. Mary’s vision and Jesus’s vision align, and that’s no accident. It’s a reminder of what the gospel really means and what it tells us about living into God’s generous vision for us.

Joy begets gratitude. Gratitude begets generosity. So why are these three things so hard to find in our own lives and in the culture that surrounds us? Perhaps it has to do with our expectations.

One of my favorite shows in the last couple of years has been Ted Lasso. It’s the story of an American college football coach hired to coach an underachieving English soccer club, even though he knows nothing about the game of soccer—not even the rules about offsides. The fans of the team are rabid and also cynical, having seen defeat snatched out of the jaws of victory too many times. Ted’s greatest feature as a coach is his relentless optimism. He inspires his players to believe in themselves, to have faith in themselves as a team. This sunny outlook clashes with the culture of world-weariness of the team organization and the fan base. When Ted urges the fans to keep the faith and have hope, her gets rebuffed repeatedly with the phrase, “It’s the hope that kills you.”

That’s the thing about low expectations. They become prophecy, because they suck the life out of you.

We can almost hear that same world-weariness in the tone of John the Baptist in our gospel today. Sitting in his prison cell, where he has been placed due to his stirring up the discontent of the masses against the most powerful people of his day, he had been preaching the coming of a fire-wielding, butt kicking Messiah, as we heard in last week’s gospel. He had expected the Messiah to join him in militancy.

Last week we saw John proclaiming the coming of the Lord. So much anticipation was imbedded in that gospel, which is of course so perfect for Advent. When indeed Jesus did appear, Jesus was not exactly what John had been expecting.

Isn’t that so often the case? We dream about something wonderful happening in our lives, and then reality ends up being still so random. Not worse, but different than our expectations. John had been expecting Messiah to be obvious to him. He expected Messiah to establish a certain way of justice that would reorder society the way John thought it should be.

And that’s not what he got. Instead, like Charlie Brown trick-or-treating and only getting rocks, in Matthew 4:12, John was arrested. The prophet rots in jail for seven chapters, and now, in chapter 11, he is forced to send some of his followers to attempt to ascertain whether Jesus is indeed the Messiah.

Sitting in his jail cell, John has doubts. To find the source of his disquiet, simply look at his words of prophecy. He has been foretelling doom, and judgment, and punishment. This is not the Messiah John has been expecting. John was expecting someone who would emphasize repentance more, even though Jesus certainly did plenty of that.
John was expecting vengeance!
John was expecting a leader who would be a strong man.
John was expecting some retribution at broods of vipers!

Many people, even today, especially today, expect to see that kind of God and that kind of leadership operating in the world right now. The problem with having a leader or God who is a “strong man” is that the only way he becomes a “strong man” is by taking away agency from everyone else and gathering all the power to himself and maybe his buddies. When Jesus instead focuses on healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and caring for widows John feels like he has been hoodwinked.

John has not gotten the Messiah he wanted or expected. And yet, here is his cousin, Jesus, and he is NOT some warrior king. He is not about restoring the former glory of Israel by having it rise to new military or political or economic power.

What Jesus IS about is moving among those who have been outcast. This God, we see, emphasizes mercy over retribution, in contrast to the God that many people today still seem to expect—a God of retribution and smiting, a sender of earthquakes and famines to punish millions. This God assures us that we are enough—good enough and strong enough to do an amazing thing: change the world by living as disciples and followers of Jesus.

Jesus reminds us that his ministry will surprise us. And since we are called to follow in his path, it will also lead us in ways we did not expect. It will heal us in ways we may not even think we deserve—but that’s the forces of evil whispering in our ear. “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” Jesus says. Blessed are those who embrace and follow Jesus for who Jesus is, radical enough for the best of us, instead of trying to make Jesus fit their preconceived notions of who Messiah will be.

We too live in a culture of scarcity, a culture that celebrates the lowest common denominator, a culture that is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder with war, climate challenges, and the inability to treat those with whom we disagree not as kindred but as enemies. We are ruled by fear of not being good enough.

We have been convinced that there is not enough, even as this planet just recently welcomed its 8 billionth inhabitant. Take a step back and look at what a scarcity mentality does to us. It has been scientifically proven that living in the fear of scarcity causes us to be unable to care about the future—we cast away planning for tomorrow, even when the investment is small and the reward great when we are in the grip of a scarcity mindset. Scarcity actually bathes our minds in failure, weakening us and immobilizing us, robbing us of any feeling of agency. Scarcity whispers “there’s nothing you can do,” and makes sure that you are robbed of the will to change. Scarcity robs us of having great expectations of ourselves and our power to make a difference.(1)

There is also a scarcity of decency, compassion, and humanity running about among us. We are surrounded by forces of division who gain power by mocking, spitting upon, and demonizing those who are different. We are plunged into feelings of helplessness that leads us to disengage, to believe we have no power to change obvious wrongs, to believe that our voice does not matter. We are told that we are never enough, and that there isn’t enough to go around—and we are often told that by the very people who have hoarded more than they will ever need or be able to use—and they use their excess to keep the rest of us scampering after crumbs and attacking each other.(2)

That was very much the same world Jesus and Mary and John lived in, too. Jesus’s religious opponents controlled people by shame, and the Romans controlled people by brutality and contempt—three byproducts of the scarcity mindset. Yet if you look at how Jesus and Mary define how to conquer the scarcity mindset, they do not propose exchanging one oppressor for another. They describe a vision like Isaiah describes: one in which beauty grows where there was desolation, where there is no longer one group lording it over another, but instead, where all have ENOUGH. And the way we do that is to turn from competing with each other and seeing each other as competitors in a death match of scarcity, and instead see each other as resources.

What if we reset our expectations to quiet the screaming monkey mind drumming between our ears, and instead opened our eyes to see that there is enough? Enough and more to spare! What if we invested in each other—in fulfillment of our baptismal promise to celebrate and give thanks for the potential and worth of every person? We don’t need big flashy miracles. Joining together and making sure each other had enough would be an abundant miracle, in and of itself. And that’s the kind of transformative ministry Jesus practiced among those he encountered. It’s what we are called to do as disciples.

“God is at work in the world, healing the broken paces and inviting us to see it. Live with joy!” both Mary and Jesus urge us. Open your eyes to see the wonders of God all around you, the gifts from God poured abundantly into your life with every breath that you take! The way of faith is the way of joy and gratitude, a life we can only receive once we cast away the soul-killing “certainty” that there will never be enough. It is that certainty that keeps the world at each others’ throats— rather than living by the kingdom values this season of preparation calls us to embrace for our flourishing. It’s there already. Jesus and Mary invite us to embrace abundance, to embrace faithful living, to embrace joy.

This coming week, I invite you to dedicate some time each morning and each evening specifically cultivating a spirit of joy, a spirit of expectation, a spirit of gratitude. I invite you to live in AWE: abundance, wonder, and empowerment. That’s how to live into the joy of great expectations, of gratitude for not only what we have but what we can build with each other.

Preached at the 505 on December 10 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on December 11 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 35:1-10

Psalm 146:4-9

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

Citations:

(1) See this article from the American Psychological Association: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/02/scarcity; 

(2) See Brene Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, 27-29 (kindle edition).

Giving Our All: Sermon for Proper 28C (St. Martin's Day, tr.)

There are a lot of things going on in our lives right now that come together today. First, this is the Sunday closest to the feast day of our patronal saint, Martin of Tours, and so we celebrate that today, giving thanks for his example in our lives, and also having a wonderful feast, literally, in a few minutes after worship concludes, to which you are all invited.

We are also in the midst of Native American Heritage Month, which has been observed in this diocese by daily posts about the history and cultural achievements of the first peoples who lived in the Americas and in Hawai’i.

November 11 is St. Martin’s Day, and also is Veterans’ Day, which originally day of the armistice that ended World War I. Most people do not know that these two commemorations do not just coincide: they were MEANT to coincide. So we also marvel that our patron saint is associated with a day of great thanksgiving, a day in which we recognize the real sacrifice, honor, and obligation of those who serve in the military of this country. And our gospel reminds us of the terrible cost of war and military service that Martin himself knew.

Our patron saint, Martin of Tours, was born to pagan parents from Hungary in the early 4th century of the common era, with a father who was a senior military officer in the Roman imperial guard. As a child, he grew up in Italy, where his father was stationed, and at age ten it is believed he attended a Christian worship service. He did this against his parents’ wishes, and he became a catechumen, or someone undergoing religious instruction to join the Church. Back then, the minimum time for the catechumenate was three years but was often longer.

Then, at 15, Martin was required to join the army as well, and he became a cavalry soldier. It is said that while he was stationed in Gaul, near Amiens, a beggar approached him in the cold and asked for some alms. In response, Martin cut his military cloak in half with his sword. Later that night, Christ appeared to him in a dream, clothed in the half of the cloak he had given the beggar. Martin then determined to be baptized, and he was.

He eventually realized that he felt he could not be a Christian and be a soldier of Rome, and so he requested to be released from his 25-year commitment to the army. This was right before an impending battle, so he was charged with cowardice and thrown into jail. He offered to stand unarmed before the enemy army, holding nothing but a cross, and army officials were ready to take him up on his offer—but the enemy sued to surrender, and so Martin was discharged.

Martin then made his way to Tours in what is now France, where he studied with Hilary of Poitiers, and eventually made his vows as a monastic, but gained a reputation for piety and holiness. He established a monastery there called Marmoutier, where his holiness attracted several hermits who lived in small cells around him.

The people of Tours decided to make Martin their bishop, but he wanted nothing of it. So the story goes that he was tricked into the church to be elected bishop on the excuse that someone needed healing. One popular legend claims that he was so reluctant to be elected that he hid in a barn full of geese, who ratted him out by honking at him. And so the townspeople dragged him out, covered in feathers and probably goose-poop, and finally persuaded him to accept election as bishop. This is why, by the way, it is a tradition to this day in Europe to eat goose on Martinmas. Revenge CAN be, if not sweet, then at least tasty.

Nonetheless, even though bishop, he still lived in Marmountier in his humble cell. He was known for travelling to every parish in his diocese once a year, often on foot. In all things, he was led by a sense of duty, a sense of compassion, and a sense of conscientiousness that gazed outward with humility.

Martin is the patron saint of, among other things, tailors, beggars, soldiers and conscientious objectors, winemakers AND recovering alcoholics, which just goes to show that the people in the Roman curia who decide these things know a multi-tasker when they see one. He is the patron saint of geese, whose migration is usually simultaneous with his feast day, and although he is that patron saint of France, in England his emblem is a goose, and it is said that traditionally, the geese begin their migration south on St. Martin's Day. The newborn baby of Hans and Margaret Luther was baptized on St. Martin’s Day in 1483, and thereafter bore the name of Martin Luther into history. It is said that the trees bloomed on the day he was buried, even though it was November 11; and one term used to describe what some call “Indian summer” days at this time of year in Europe is “St. Martin’s Summer”—one we got to experience for two glorious days last week, including on St. Martin’s Day, before God turned on the cold Friday night.

St. Martin’s feast day is also what is called here in the US as “Veterans’ Day.” Martinmas is also connected to the end of World War I. Martin remained somewhat popular in France even during the French Republic, even if for a while his popularity flagged in France as violent anti-religious sentiment swept across it in the Enlightenment. Until World War I. World War I was a new kind of World War, fully industrialized, and the loss to human life was staggering for that time. Entire villages in England and France lost nearly all of their young men in the fighting.

The horrors of mechanized trench warfare, machine guns, and poison gas left a lasting impression on the survivors. Some villages in England lost every single young man between the ages of 18 and 35 to this war as either wounded or dead.

As the war dragged to a terrible end, the cease fire eventually was declared at 11:11 am on November 11, 1918—St. Martin’s Day—specifically, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The French people had a resurgence of piety regarding the saint, with some believing that his intervention had helped spare France from any more of the horrors of the conflict, which was fought largely on French and Belgian soil in the European theatre. St. Martin’s feast and the celebration of peace and those who sacrifice to defend peace are forever linked. The feast day of the soldier and conscientious objector is also the day that this horrific war came to an end.

Therefore, every time we celebrate St. Martin’s Day, we honor also those who have sacrificed and continue to sacrifice upon the fields of battle, even while we fervently give thanks for peace—real peace that is grounded in abundance for all because we realize the interconnectedness of all. We remember the fast in the midst of the feast.

This is where this morning’s gospel comes in. Interestingly, this pericope contains all of chapter 21 EXCEPT that it omits the first five verses of this chapter:

[Jesus] looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; 2he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.3He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; 4for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’

Think of these two small copper coins as pennies. Jesus sees this, and comments on it. The rich have given from their extra, but the widow has given all that she has to live on. Hers is an act of absolute faith and trust in God, while the rich are giving what they will not miss, what will not affect their real comfort and their bottom line.

The widow understands that she has an obligation to help maintain the Temple. Not only that, she has the FAITH to fulfill that obligation because she has an absolute trust in God. But we make our first mistake when we look at annual giving as only giving to this parish. Our giving to this parish is our giving to God.

The widow gives of what she needs, and does it without fanfare, and without hesitation. In this way she demonstrates great faith and faithfulness. The same faith Martin displayed when he gave up everything to follow Christ.

The anecdote about the widow is important in understanding the verses that we just heard. Where and how we worship God is a matter that we should have at the forefronts of our minds. And for the original audience of Luke, the answer to this question, even as followers of Jesus, had been the Temple. What is NOT spoken of, and what we have to keep at the forefront of our minds, is that Luke’s audience has already witnessed the very calamities and destructions that Jesus speaks of in this day’s gospel. Luke has Jesus speaking of things that happened after Jesus’s own earthly ministry, but within the life of the Lucan community. In 70 CE, the Temple WAS destroyed by the Romans, and not a stone WAS left standing. The beautiful treasures and ornaments that Luke has Jesus’s followers describe in those first words had been gone for years by the time Luke’s gospel was written. The only knowledge some of Luke’s community had for what the Temple had looked like in all its glory was probably memories from their elders, or the accounts of the Jewish historian Josephus

What Luke has Jesus describing had already happened. And I wish I could say that we ourselves have no knowledge of such calamities, as did our patron saint Martin as he experienced in his military career. But we do. Russia is committing the same kind of destruction and calamities in Ukraine right now. The last century alone has witnessed attempted genocides and slaughters of the Armenians by the Turks; the Jews and Gypsies and LGBT people, among others, by the Nazis; Stalin’s starving years; Pol Pot’s fields of blood in Cambodia; the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda; Muslims by Serbs in Bosnia; 300,000 residents of Nanking by the Japanese…. The list goes on.

And this month, we acknowledge and dedicate ourselves to becoming more educated about the violence, dispossession, and often outright murder that was visited on and still continues in some places toward the Indigenous people in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. As we hear Luke’s passage, we think of people who have been persecuted for their faith throughout history, especially our Jewish kindred as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the US and other western nations again. As Martin was when he asked to be released from his military obligations based on his conscience.

So what is the good news? What do we “do” with the first verses of Luke chapter 21? What is its call to us?

First of all, we are reminded that faithfulness and generosity cannot be an afterthought, as the story of the widow, the story of Martin, and the story of Jesus himself illustrates and calls us to imitation.

We are also reminded that even when we encounter wars and calamities and destruction, God is still with us. I think we are reminded that the destruction of the Temple also ended up reminding us that we worship God not in a certain place, but in approaching Jesus and inviting him to live and guide us. In a way, WE are now called to be the Temple to the world as Christ’s body—to be the insistent reminder that God lives among us in creation and is forever making it new, as our Native kindred insist to this day, and as our passage from Isaiah proclaims.

So let us live lives of real sacrifice, real gratitude, real connection with each other and with our God. Let us pray for the wisdom and courage to make this parish stronger and on a more stable footing than ever. Let us honor the sacrifices of those who have gone before us in faithfulness both in our nation’s history and in the history of this parish, and put our empathy into action before the eyes of the world. And in all we do, may we proclaim boldly our commitment to God and each other with gratitude for our blessings, steadfastness in hardship, and see our responsibilities to each other as never a burden, but a joy. May we follow in the example of Martin, and live s life of faithfulness and dedication to God, all our lives.

Preached at the 505 on November 12 and at the 10:30 Eucharist in November 13, 2022, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville,

Readings:

Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9 
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19