Imagining the Kingdom: Sermon for Proper 12A

Today, I thought it might be fun to start with a little bit of show and tell. In your pews, you will find copies of an illustration on a single sheet of paper. Take a few moments and look at it.

What did you see when you FIRST looked at it? What did you immediately recognize it as?

How many people here saw a duck? How many saw a rabbit?

Who here saw something completely else, like a rock formation or alien spaceship?

Now that I have tipped you off, can you SEE a duck in the picture? Can you SEE a rabbit if you change the focus of your line of sight within the image?

So here’s a mind-blowing question: which is it? Is it a duck, or a rabbit? Or is it both at the same time?

This illustration was used by the early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who himself borrowed it from the field of psychology. He was trying to demonstrate a fundamental issue about the mind and observation—how two people can objectively view the same thing, but come to wildly different conclusions about what that thing is. It has to do with the way we look at things—that we actually first jump to a recognition of the whole of something before we can see its constitutive parts.

Because here’s another fact: we often only see what we are looking for—we have talked about that previously in sermons this year. Jesus knows this. The world wants us to only see scarcity, and division, and soul-crushing competition to the death. It seeks to keep us anxious, empty, feeling unfulfilled and separated from those around us. If that’s all we look for—and we are programmed to see that way—that is all we will see. Unless--- unless we look for the signs that there is something else out there. Unless we use our imaginations, unless we “open the eyes of our hearts” to see the imprint of God all around us, in each other, in images, in nature, in stories or art or poetry. Or through parables.

That’s an important insight to bring to our life of faith. Unless we know what the point of a Christian life is, and can explain that purpose to others, people will have no idea what we are talking about—they won’t recognize the parts of the Christian life unless they can see the whole.

I walk you through this little experiment today because I want you to understand WHY Jesus is telling us all these parables. He is telling us what the kingdom of heaven is LIKE so that we can learn to look for the parts so that we can see the whole revealed right in front of us. He is telling us what the kingdom of heaven is LIKE because it is too big to just recognize all at once, and it is also too small to recognize all at once.

Our gospel reading hits us with six quick parables in rapid succession, all beginning with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” And all of them are meant to explain what the kingdom of heaven, or life under God’s values, would be like.

To be clear, the kingdom of heaven is NOT about what happens when we die. The kingdom of heaven is about what God’s hopes are for how we live our lives. The kingdom of heaven is made up of faithful people who live by-- and love others and all creation by—God’s values. God’s values, as we are reminded by our reading from 1 Kings and our section of Psalm 119, are guided by the wisdom embedded in God’s commandments to us. And in Christianity, we have a model for how to live out those commandments in Jesus. We are called not just to believe in him, but to follow him and act like him—caring for others, seeking to heal and reconcile wherever we go, being lights of love and hope against the darkness of despair. That’s the kingdom of heaven, right here, right now.

Jesus explains to us what the kingdom of heaven is LIKE—back in your days of studying English, you might remember that such comparisons are known as similes. We use this kind of figurative, imaginative language because God is more than whatever our words can say. God is mystery—but mystery that is all around us; mystery that constantly reached out to us in love, seeking our flourishing by living lives of abundance—especially abundant grace, abundant mercy, abundant hope, abundant love.

And here’s the special feature holding all of today’s parables together: Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven starts with small things. Tiny things. Mustard seeds, yeast, and pearls. And those three things, in particular, start with something that is not valued at all. Mustard was a weed. Yeast is considered necessary, but unclean, which is why Jewish households got rid of the leavened bread during Passover. 

And pearls? You may think of them as luminescent and expensive. But do you know how pearls actually start out? They start by being a grain of sand that gets into an oyster and irritates it. The oyster can’t expel the sand, so it begins to coat it with its saliva, which eventually hardens, layer after layer, day after day, until suddenly it’s a pearl. Yep. A pearl is basically an irritating piece of dirt covered by fossilized oyster spit. Seems like an odd thing to value and wear as jewelry—but then again, some of us also like silk, and that starts out coming from a worm’s butt.

You might be laughing, because my illustrations are outrageous—but memorable. I mean, you may never look at a pearl or a duck, or a rabbit, the same way again. Jesus was doing exactly the same thing. His listeners laughed at the idea of a mustard plant turning into a tree, or a woman knead what is the equivalent of 60 pounds of flour and turning it into bread, or a person selling everything he owned for a single pearl.

Jesus’s hearers would probably wonder why any sane person would deliberately sow a weed in his field—it will take the place of valuable crops. Yet here this weed is commended for providing a home to all kinds of birds. In the Bible, trees are often the symbol of how God provides shelter, protection, and nourishment to us. But it goes deeper in our stories today-- what one person considers useless, God considers valuable. Thus, the kingdom of heaven turns earthly calculations of value and worth on their heads. Just as in the Parable of the Sower, something small (it took over 700 seeds to weigh a gram) produces something substantial.

And here’s something we may not know: mustard was considered to be a curative in the ancient world. It was thought to aid digestion and fight the common cold. In our brief parable, mustard growing into such a large bush means that there was far more of it than one person could use, because just like every good thing, too much of a good thing is toxic. Instead, this medicine is meant to be shared.

Take a step back from all these scattered parables to see the whole. Jesus was illustrating this truth: from the smallest things, once we recognize them, we can see hints and flashes of something valuable beyond price: the kingdom of heaven. The Way of Love for us to live and truly flourish and have full and abundant life, right now, even among the weeds.

Listen to that foundational principle again: God seeks our flourishing by calling us to live lives of abundance—especially abundant grace, abundant mercy, abundant hope, abundant love. Is that the message of how the world tells us to live? NO. The world always tells us there is never enough and that the only way to win is by attempting to crush each other and only think of ourselves. That’s why, even though the kingdom of heaven is right now, it is also incumbent upon us to work toward it, to contribute to sharing this good news of God’s love for us.

To have faith, friends, is to imagine what can be. To be faithful people calls us to open our imaginations—our hearts and our minds—to the presence of God in a world that denies God. It’s a world after all, that tells you that a duck is a rabbit—and a Japanese horror-movie rabbit, at that.

Our parables today remind us that even a little is enough. In the Kingdom of Heaven a tiny bit of faith is enough. A tiny bit of understanding is enough. As we look at church attendance decreasing in the West, we are also assured that the Church started small, like a mustard seed, and yet eventually became big enough to even grant non-Jews a place to live, which is one interpretation for the “birds of the air.”

The birds find their refuge in the branches of this new tree, sprung up through God’s goodness, just as we find our refuge within the kingdom of heaven ourselves (Levine, 166). We do nothing to earn this—God’s love and care is there for us through no merit of our own, but simply as a result of God’s abundant grace and mercy. From an ecological standpoint, we could also say that we find our home in this beautiful world that, of all the planets and stars in the universe, is uniquely suited to support our life.

Close your eyes for a moment: what does the kingdom of heaven look like for you? Is there an image, or a sense, or a feeling that hints at God’s loving presence in your life? Now open your eyes. How can you share that image in the world? Because that’s how the kingdom of heaven grows.

One thing is sure. The kingdom of heaven doesn’t just fit one description, simile, or definition.

Poet Denise Levertov, who converted to Roman Catholicism late in life, wrote this poem that is called to mind with our gospel. You can find it in the back of your bulletins. It’s called “On the Parables of the Mustard Seed:”

Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.

No. He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,

was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
               Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.

Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique –
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,

as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom

                                            a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.

The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.

The kingdom of heaven is found in the simplest, most commonplace of things: seeds and trees and homebaked bread, in the joy of discovering something you’ve never expected to find. In looking for the good, and the beauty, and the meaning rather than trying to beat down everyone around us.

So what is the kingdom heaven like to you?

Imagine it. Love it. And then tend to that vision to bring it into being, to provide a home for all.

Amen.

--Preached at the 505 on July 29 and at the 10:30 Eucharist on July 30, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church.

Readings:

1 Kings 3:5-12
Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Worthy Weeds: Speaking to the Soul, July 20, 2023

Sometimes, the worthiness of a weed is in the eye of the beholder. In the lat few years, some farmers, alive to the extreme stress that many pollinating creatures are under, have begun planting the margins of their fields with clover, ox-eye daisies, sorrel—even vetch on the verge! Queen Anne’s lace, which sounds fancy but is actually wild carrot. Taking up valuable farmland! Sixty years ago, this would have been akin to heresy of the hippy-dippiest sort.

But these “weeds” attract pollinators—which in turn, helps the crop to grow, not just in one particular field, but all around. Maybe this is a modern admonition to do as Jesus advises us, to let the weeds grow up among the wheat in Matthew 13:24-30,36-43.

As conditions in our environment get more and more extreme climatologically, weeds are experiencing a rehabilitation of sorts, which makes the parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew’s gospel shine with new possibility. What if this isn’t a story about judgment and flames, but a story of redemption, of allowing time and grace to sort things out where we rush in to condemn?

I remember I was sitting in my car one morning, about ten years ago, reading. In between pages I would watch my daughter's field hockey practice. They played in a desiccated brown field full of crispy grass and weeds—even though every boys’ team was gallivanting on crisply tended fields, the girls were shunted a half mile away, not even on school property, and yet the school claimed equivalency under Title IX. Every time I sat near this field watching these girls practice, I felt a sprout of annoyance break through the drought-fired clay of my heart.

The day before, a man half-heartedly, like a somnambulist, mowed this alleged field, even though the grass had remained in a state of stasis due to the extremely dry conditions of that summer. This field seemed to be in suspended animation, but instead of Sleeping Beauty, it was Sleeping Ugly.

There were tiny oases of green visible here and there across the burnt-ochre and sienna expanse, but those were weeds. It's always that way. When the *stuff* goes down, it's the weeds that thrive. It often seems like that with people, too. I don't know about you, but sometimes that just drives me crazy, especially if I have forgotten the weediness of my own natur, and put on airs that I might be more of a hothouse flower.

As I mused, desultorily, my eyes scanned the thatch patches that prickled, sea-urchin-like, over the ground-- and saw one small, shocking flash of color jump out from the landscape. There was a tiny yelp of purple hanging low among the clumps of fescue and thatch. A fluted flower-- belonging, yes, to some weed.

What could be more unlikely than beauty in such sere surroundings? What could be more stubborn than this small flower determined to bloom just here regardless of its improbability? What else could remind me that even in the most drab and dingy places there is grace and beauty if only we open our eyes?

And suddenly the weed was transformed into a bit of grace, a call for second chances.

In other words, a miracle.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul for July 20, 2023.

Soil, Seeds, and Stories: Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11A)

Words are powerful things. They get inside us and change us. They combine together and create ideas, and those ideas can inspire us to great things, or to terrible things. Words sprout in our hearts and minds like seeds.

Words can also be used to tell stories, and who doesn’t love a good story? BUT—and there is always a but—sometimes people use words in strange and mysterious ways.

So I’m thinking about starting a new self-help group, and I was wondering if any of you all would like to join. Hello, my name is Leslie, and I live with a Dad-jokester. I live with a punning, groan-inducing person whose gift for banter and word-play when we were dating took a dark turn once we had little children, and who has no shame about using his dark gift. And it’s contagious—you live around a Dad Joker long enough, you start collecting Dad Jokes simply as a matter of self-defense, a kind of humor-based version of building up a nuclear arsenal: you never want to use it, but if you don’t have some on hand as a deterrent, you could be attacked at any time.

Anyone else had this experience? Is there anyone out there who can commiserate, and wants to join me in my new club?

The thing I have learned from living with this kind of a jokester is that there is NO topic about which a Dad Joke cannot be told. For instance:

A dad and his kids were walking through the woods, and the littlest kid picked up an acorn.
“Dad! What’s this?” the kid asked.
“A tree.” The Dad answered.
“Really?” the kid asked. And the Dad answered,
“In a nutshell, yes.”

A friend of mine has chickens, and suddenly they weren’t eating the fancy Purina Chicken Chow they had bought. It’s really weird, because I looked at the seed, and it looked flawless. It was, in fact, impeccable.

Last week, I had to drive to Nashville and back in one day because my car had trouble and had to be repaired over several days, and it was finished. On my way back, I was stuck in construction traffic in the middle of a bunch of newly plowed fields, and a plane came in flying low over a field and turned around and flew back overhead. At first I assumed it was dusting crops, but then it looked like the fields were barren, as the plane dropped the stuff it was carrying onto the field next to me, some of it blew back—and it was seed. Aha! I realized I was looking at a reseeding airline.

As we begin chapter 13 of Matthew’s gospel, let us all be grateful that Jesus’s stories were parables instead of puns. No. really. Let us bow our heads. (Mutters) Amen.

Now then let us think about how important stories are. Matthew’s gospel has five main blocks, called discourses. And all these discourses are meant to help Jesus’s listeners understand the point of Jesus’s life on Earth, which is nothing less than helping us find and grow a new community here on earth that lives according to the values of what Matthew calls “the Kingdom of Heaven.” So what is the kingdom of heaven, a phrase used particularly by the author of Matthew? The kingdom of heaven has to do with the reign of God, and in particular, with the transformation that we set out to work toward when we declare ourselves as members of what Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement.”

The kingdom of heaven grows when the Word of God is welcomed, received, nurtured in the hearts of people just like you and me who do the incredible thing of committing to make way for God to rule our lives. Talk about counter-cultural, especially in this day and age of self-help, even sometimes self-worship. At Chapter 13 of Matthew’s gospel, we are entering a new discourse, known as the Parabolic Discourse. In this third of five teaching blocks in the gospel, this chapter stands at the heart of Matthew’s message—and the chapter is filled with 7 parables of the kingdom.

It's funny—there’s one feature parables and puns share. Parables arrest the attention of their hearers due to their twists, their strangeness, their often-enigmatic quality, and sometimes their humor. Parables are stories that use symbols and images to make a point. So the character and the setting are often symbols. 

The first parable in this discourse is this one- the Parable of the Sower. There’s even a pun embedded in the title. The definition of a parable is a comparison or extended metaphor, of course. BUT the etymology of the word “parable” comes from the Greek prefix “para”, which means alongside, and the Greek word root “bole” which means to throw or cast. So the first of the stories in the Parabolic Discourse is a “throwing alongside” of a story of someone throwing seed on all sides. I think that’s awesome, even as it might tread dangerously close to an especially nerdy form of Dad Joke-ism.

So let’s look at this parable: Who is the person sowing or scattering the seeds?
What does the seed stand for?
And there’s different kinds of soil, right?

Specifically, Jesus is talking about the response of the world to his teachings in these parables. Jesus is the original Sower in our first pass through this parable. The different soil stands for the different ways people respond to the teachings of Jesus, especially in Jesus’s lifetime, and in the time just after, in which Matthew’s community is living. And from this parable, we learn that being able to see the truth of a story depends on your setting, but it also depends upon your point-of-view.

Some people have hard hearts, like the dirt on a path packed down by trampling feet—maybe they’re angry or afraid of being disappointed. Maybe they’ve been hurt. They can’t hear the story until they let go of their fear or anger.

Some people get really enthusiastic for a new way of life at first, but when they realize how much work it is, or that some people will dislike them for their new beliefs, they give up and go back to their old story.

Some people like what they hear about what God can do for THEM, but they don’t want to change. They may not like Jesus’s call to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself when that neighbor ends up being someone completely different from them. So eventually they, too, dismiss the story of God.

But in some people, those who have the ability to have an open heart and open mind, those who are willing to believe that love can bring us through anything, even troubles or sadness, and is the greatest treasure of all—they’re willing to write a different kind of story with their lives.

It is only those who open their ears, and their hearts, to be receptive to the story revealed by Jesus who will bear good fruit, but they will bear it abundantly. Those of us who hear the story of God and see our own story within it now have the name for that love that maybe before we didn’t have a name for.

But here are some other implications from this parable. We are not only called to be the good soil, and receive the gospel, and let it drop right there. We are called to be disciples. That means that Jesus calls us to share in the sowing right alongside him. That’s what being members of the Body of Christ really means—not just being good soil for ourselves, but spreaders of the good news of God’s redemption in Jesus for others.

And that means not worrying too much about the way the ground looks in our sharing of the Good News. The Sower sows with abandon—he doesn’t check to see if the conditions are perfect, he just starts scattering seed hither and yon with the confidence that some of it will sprout and eventually bear good fruit. This situation alone is a welcome reminder to all of us to never allow “the perfect” to get in the way of the “good” when it comes to sharing the good news. As a billboard at St. Martin’s used to say about kindness, we should be throwing the good news around “like confetti.” Everywhere we go. Everything we do. We ARE Jesus’s face, heart, and seed-scattering hands in the world.

So yes, one lesson from this parable is to work on the soil in our own hearts, and to work on ourselves so that we are as receptive and fertile as we can possibly be. But the other lesson from this parable is that we ourselves are called to help spread the seed of Jesus’s message of God’s love, redemption and care for us as wide and as far as possible, with abandon. And we can do that as simply and as intentionally as the way we live our lives. As self-professed Christians or not, people know us by our words, by our attitude, by our actions. How we walk through the world is the greatest testament to who Jesus is in this time and in this place. God has given us the very best seed—the seed that promises to sprout and grow and nourish and sustain a billion hearts—if only the seed is scattered broadly enough.

This sharing of the good news is part of what we talked about last week—about “pulling for each other” as one of the most important witnesses we can make as Christians.

So as you go into this week, work the soil of your heart, so that you can fully receive the gospel and bear good fruit—absolutely, and especially before you we worry about the soil quality of others. But then go out into the world, flinging the good news around like confetti—embodying the good news, sharing the good news, so that it may produce abundantly, no matter what soil it first lands on.

Preached at the 505 on July 15, and at the 8 and 10:30 Holy Eucharists at St. Martin's Church in Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 65: (1-8), 9-14
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

Sowing Hope: Speaking to the Soul, July 13, 2023

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-25

In the woods a woodpecker has discovered a pine
filled with insects like a pinata,
and has already worked a pattern of holes
like the brogues on a pair of wingtip shoes, hammering
a spiraling, pointillist tale of his search for sustenance,
his drumroll also warning me
that this tree may not be long for this world.
But still, this is the way of things,
and this is where I go to feel
the peace
and the industry
of wild things.

This is where things grow
mostly despite me
rather than because of me.

To be a gardener or a farmer
is to trade in hope,
to refuse to give up
even when the odds for abundant growth seem long.

Nonetheless here’s growth,
and anticipation,
and hope
in each new sprout from the ground.

Sow in hope; reap in care:
the instruction manual
for farming and ministry.

There is more than simply science
or even art
in how hearts, sometimes scarred from abuse or neglect,
can nonetheless be transformed
into the soil for new growth in love.

Sure, some seed may feed the birds--
but doesn’t God provide there as well?
Plant anyway, yes—
open to receive the gospel in faithfulness,
in response to the promise
that the gospel will bear fruit
even in the clayest soil of the healing human heart.

God famously works in clay, too.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on July 13, 2023.

The Wisdom of Love: Sermon for Proper 9A

I am pretty certain that, if you don’t remember hearing them and studying them before, the readings we just heard may have you a bit mystified. Our gospel itself is puzzling—except maybe for the last bit which at least offers some hope. But if you look closer, our readings today are about two things: the wisdom of God, and the love of God. Scratch that—it’s all actually one thing. God’s wisdom IS God’s love- love which ignores human expectations or limits.

Today’s passage from the prophet Zechariah might ring a bell. It predicts that the Messiah will enter Zion, or Jerusalem, riding on a donkey’s colt—and if you think back to Palm Sunday, that is exactly what Jesus did as he triumphantly entered the city to the waving of palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!” Anyone hearing that in Zachariah’s time would have considered a leader doing such a thing to be incredibly foolish—it’s like someone trying to race in a Formula 1 event while driving a minivan. Great leaders should ride impressive animals—not donkeys.

This detail, though, has an important purpose: the reign of this Messiah will not be based on military strength, one where “might makes right.” Instead, his humility reveals God’s wisdom and values: that prisoners will be set free, and that hopes will be fulfilled rather than lying empty and unfulfilled. This God does not seek dominion but restoration—not overawing people with might, but working to relieve burdens and enabling a culture of shared plenty, of gratitude and rejoicing.

Then there’s the reading from the Song of Solomon, a passage known as “Springtime Rhapsody” a beautiful collection of very frank love poems that most of us hardly ever remember is even IN the Bible. And here’s why it gets skipped over when it comes time for Bible study or preaching: it’s kinda steamy. It’s like Danielle Steele was suddenly invited to turn in a couple of chapters to Holy Writ. Strangely, God is not mentioned anywhere within its verses—instead, we get a conversation between two lovers. This is also unusual because it gives the woman her own voice, and she admits her passion for her beloved—in fact, in a world in which women were often silent, she is the one telling the story. Hers are the opening words in chapter one, imagining the kiss of her sweetheart.

According to our puritanical forebears, this passage isn’t about desire and human passion in all its enthusiasm, bodies bursting to discover each other. Nope. According to our 16th and 17thcentury friends, this passage is about “the Church’s love for Christ” and “Christ’s love for His Church,” with Christ as the bridegroom. This understanding is based upon the idea that the covenant between God and God’s people is similar to the covenant of marriage.

I’m not sure about that. First of all, marriage was much more often NOT about love throughout most of human history than it was about the security of property and inheritance. But there is a second and more obvious problem here: that of faithfulness and passion on the part of the Church.

While I am certain that this passage could be interpreted as Christ’s never-ending, deep, passionate love for the Church, too often the Church seems to fail to return the favor, if you know what I mean. Fallible, distractible, self-deluding, foolish, frightened, wounded humans that we are, too often we are concerned about our own wants, needs, power-madness, and concern about authority to truly love Christ to the depth that we should-- especially if one takes this passage as a guide. But we can do better. We just have to remember that real love puts the Beloved Other ahead of its own selfish satisfaction, and takes delight and finds completion and true bliss in that self-giving love.

Our failure to love stems from a conflict within ourselves- between our worldly concerns versus our spiritual aspirations. What if we were to unite these understanding rather than untie them? For we fail to love each other for the same reason we fail to love God—because we get afraid, because we lose faith in our ability to give of ourselves. Yet the Song of Songs holds out the hope that love CAN be mutual and deep and intimate. Our love for each other can be deep and lasting. Our love for God can fill us completely, and our longing for intimacy is one we need to set free in our relationship with God.

Our failure to love stems from a conflict within ourselves- between our worldly concerns versus our spiritual aspirations. This leads us to our passage in Romans, which then meshes well with our gospel. Paul talks frankly about knowing what he SHOULD do, which is to act lovingly in the world, but being unable to follow through due to his weakness to sin, which leads him to act selfishly.

Paul almost sounds like a member of a twelve-step group here, admitting his powerlessness over his addiction to sin. And that may be a really good analogy to make to describe the power that sin can wield in our lives, especially when we lull ourselves into taking our eyes off the horizon of love that we have to work toward in our lives as children of God. Real love, and true holiness, do not come naturally. Yet there is hope. Paul cries out: “Who will rescue me?” and immediately, he gives the answer: God, through the Incarnate One, our Savior Jesus Christ. He then continues to point out that our intellectual assent to be disciples is often at war with our own weaknesses.

What all our readings are seeking to do is remind us that what is considered wise or clever in the eyes of the world is usually the exact opposite of what God’s wisdom is.

Our gospel passage takes this up especially at the end. And what is absolutely vital is that here. Jesus is speaking, literally, as the Wisdom of God, personified. And there’s an interesting tie to the Song of Solomon here: in the Hebrew scripture, Wisdom was personified as female—possibly because wisdom gets rejected as an authority as much as women did, then, and now.

Jesus is actually paraphrasing a passage from the Book of Ecclesiaticus, known as a wisdom work that appears in some Bibles.

It was allegedly composed about 200-175 BC by a scribe named Ben Sira in Jerusalem, which means Jesus could have known of it. Speaking as Wisdom, a traditionally female character in scripture, we hear Jesus tracing much the same argument as the author of Ecclesiasticus:

51:23 Draw near to me, you who are untaught, and lodge in my school.
51:24 Why do you say you are lacking in these things, and why are your souls very thirsty?
51:25 I opened my mouth and said, Get these things for yourselves without money.
51:26 Put your neck under the yoke, and let your souls receive instruction; it is to be found close by.
51:27 See with your eyes that I have labored little and found myself much rest.

The wisdom that Jesus seeks to give us makes the need for asuffocating load of regulations pointless—those same regulations Jesus’s opponents loved to enforce on others as the self-righteously religious. Jesus’ load is in fact quite light compared with the heavy burdens the scribes and Pharisees place upon others: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”

The wisdom of God does not seek to punish but to enlighten. In place of oppression, it offers love and cooperation. And I believe this speaks of a need in our time as much as in the time of Jesus. Just like now, self-identified “religious folk” were especially good at pointing the finger at others and justifying themselves. They would use the 613 commandments in Torah to denigrate and oppress others, laying burdens upon their backs, while overlooking the parts of the Law that would require themselves to be burdened or to sacrifice what they wanted to do.

And boy, does that resonate for today. How many people do you know who justify lying, cheating, violence, misogyny, or turning a blind eye to the suffering or poverty of others in the name of their own comfort—yet who will scream about how “sinners” who act or love differently than they do deserve being cast out, oppressed, dehumanized, and punished? As if being in a marginalized group isn’t hard enough? And they justify it more often than not in the name of “religion.”

Yet Jesus, speaking as Wisdom herself in our gospel verses, identifies with the oppressed and marginalized. Jesus, speaking as the Wisdom of God, invites all to come unto him, especially those who are weary and feeling burdened by the numerous strictures of the religious leaders.

How is Jesus’s yoke “easy?” First, a yoke is meant to be shared—it works by two creatures sharing the burden and pulling side by side. And rather than lay burdens about hundreds of laws on our backs, Jesus offers to get into the yoke alongside us and help us bear the burdens of being a disciple—a burden that is already lighter because it is based on love, not fear. Christ’s yoke is easy because he takes away the yoke of the Law by making us wise in love and generosity.

That is certainly an easier burden in comparison to the way the religious leaders were apply the law to those around them.

Yet the most important thing to remember is that Jesus refers to a yoke, and not just a harness. And a yoke is meant to be shared. Christ’s yoke is the yoke of Love. And sharing burdens with each other—in the name of love—is all we need, as the Beatles sang. All those great songs of our youth insist the same thing: “Lean On Me,” by Bill Withers. “He Ain’t Heavy—He’s My Brother” by the Hollies. “Climb on a Back That’s Strong,” by Shawn Colvin. “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” by Simon and Garfunkle.

What matters is our care and empathy for each other. As we live in Christian community, we are yoked to Jesus and to each other, and we all pull together. We share each others’ burdens. We literally “pull for each other.” As Jane Siberry wrote in her song “The Life is the Red Wagon:”

The life is the red wagon rolling along
The life is the red wagon simple and strong
…oh, it's no big deal
But when the feet are dragging
you pull for me, and I pull for you,
you pull for me, and I pull for you…

Have you ever experienced the grace of someone pulling for you when you feel that you just can’t go on? Have you ever received a random act of kindness? That’s living life under the Wisdom of God.

We have a lot in common with the cultural landscape of Jesus’s time. Believe it or not. Just think: we have those who seek to divide and conquer, and they are not unashamed of using religion to further their schemes, and to oppress and denigrate marginalized groups by pulling little bits of scripture from here and there to justify their hatefulness and sense of superiority.

We see legal systems being used to oppress people—to take away their ability to be redeemed for injury, to allow a small minority to try to impose their wills on others because they have the ability to buy their way into the system.

Jesus would be the first one to object to this scheme. If your faith causes you to hate and judge and hurt others, you are doing it wrong. As Jesus points out, those “others” were exactly the people he hung out with, ate with, and taught among. Even more than that, those are the ones to whom he encouraged to take up his yoke. So that he could pull alongside them and help carry their burdens. Not condemn them.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus consistently points out that the wisdom of God, and the way it orders our lives, turns worldly wisdom upside down. He is very clear to go even further: the “wisdom” of the world is very often absolutely contrary to the wisdom and ways of God, as he himself exemplifies. Jesus, as the Wisdom of God personified, lives and acts in very specific ways to show US how to live and act.

The way of wisdom, the way of welcome into God’s household, is also the way of mercy, grace, and above all, love. It’s the wisdom that is embodied in our baptismal covenant. This is the wisdom of welcome, beloveds, that we are called to commit to as disciples. Wisdom that doesn’t seek advantage or calculation, but, always and everywhere, serving each other in purity, gentleness, and love.

We worship a God whose wisdom is often seen as foolishness in the eyes of that very same world. A God who tells us to love people the world sees as broken, and love them fully.

May we all be so wise.

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

Readings:

Zechariah 9:9-12
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

After the Fireworks: Speaking to the Soul for July 6, 2023

The moon beams aloft, reclaiming her throne
from the waning of rockets’ red glare; 

Dogs army-crawl, dazed, from under our beds,
still in shock from bombs bursting in air; 

The owl and whip-poor-will renew their song,
vesper hymns lifted God-ward once more, 

That true freedom rings out in sounds of peace--
precious after the echoes of war.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on July 6, 2023.

The Value of Sparrows: Speaking to the Soul, June 22, 2023

 “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?”- Matthew 10:29

The Almighty, and my professor, 
have enticed me to commit 
to thirty minutes of daily unstructured prayer. 
For Episcopalians, this may almost 
sound heretical, but I put away 
my prayerbooks and liturgies, and sit in silence 
at dawn, to discern the tender voice of God 
in whatever guise she assumes 
by this pond 
in the middle 
of this campus 
on this rainy mountaintop, 
clouds above, clouds below. 

At first all you can hear 
are the intrusions crafted by humans: 
the ringing of an unattended telephone, the 
garbage men greeting one another, heavy 
machinery belching diesel fumes aloft, 
revving engines, egad--
and it’s not even six a.m. 

Re-center, the wind murmurs, 
stippling the face of the pond like hammered silver, 
and the poplar leaves flash pale 
as they shrug over in unison, 
hands cupped in gratitude to midwife the coming rain. 

But then, the voice of God hovers 
just behind my ear: 
fish crows chiding “ah ah” just over my shoulder; 
Carolina wrens’ liquid song arrowing from the underbrush 
as Bachman’s sparrow—named after a preacher-- trills; 
a red-winged blackbird’s alarm whistle 
blending perfectly into the sound 
of the garbage truck reversing, 
upending any smug certainty 
of the comparative value of sparrows.

-- Leslie Barnes Scoopmire; this was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 22, 2023.

Image: the pond at which I was praying at Sewanee during my summer school session there.

The Inner Life, the Lover's Heart: Speaking to the Soul June 15, 2023

For the Feast Day of Evelyn Underhill, inspired by her book Concerning the Inner Life

Beloved Creator,
envelop us in love and prayer–
love, humble and homely,
prayer, confident, adoring, and enduring–
that belief be made manifest as reality.

May we see the splendors of faith
through the artist’s eye and lover’s heart:
each praise rooted, grounded and nourished
in a hidden world of prayer, reflecting
the natural loveliness you have set us within.

May the whole of our lives be
a dance of adoration; our restless hearts
centered in You, O Christ, our model and guide,
in awe and wonder at your work within each soul:
love, joy, and peace,
flashing bright blue like a bluebird’s flight
catches the eyes of those around us,
fanning the flame within and upon his breast.
“Prayer is only the body of the bird–
desires are its wings,” so
may we long for you, Lord Christ,
and embrace the mystery of your grace,
that we may serve You and each other
as agents of the Spirit in the world,
clasped tenderly within the love of God.

Amen.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 15, 2023.

Image: bench at Green's View, Sewanee.

Practicing Loving-kindness: Speaking to the Soul, June 8, 2023

In the reading from Genesis this weekend (Genesis 18:1-15), we find Abraham to be an example of hospitality, generosity, and consideration of others. When approached by strangers, Abraham drops what he is doing to welcome them, and to offer rest, refreshment, and nourishment. The rabbinic tradition holds that Abraham’s example of generosity to others flowed out of his unity with God and God’s will.

Jewish midrash — collections of imaginative explanations and extensions of sacred texts—rabbis treat Abraham’s hospitality as even more than the simple welcoming of strangers, and is instead a sign of one of God’s key characteristics: chesed, or “loving-kindness.”

The rabbis teach that this kind of open-hearted embrace of the other, especially if that other is vulnerable, is one of the pillars that supports the world itself. The other pillars are prayer and the study of Torah. Chesed is about cultivating a character of love, mercy, generosity, charity, and service that comes from allowing God to work within us and align ourselves with the divine spark, or breath, that God planted within us from our very beginnings.

As it turns out, Abraham was offering hospitality to God, only he did not realize it. In return, the strangers demonstrated to Abraham that his and Sarah’s needs were seen and would be lovingly, generously addressed by God. When Abraham and Sarah respond to the wondrous predictions of the strangers with disbelief, and even bitter laughter, they are caught short by this question: “Is anything too marvelous for God?”

That same compassion and generosity lies at the root of Jesus’s sending out his disciples to heal and preach to the lost and hurting around them. The twelve received new titles, “apostle,” which means “sent.” They are “sent” to the ordinary people of Israel—for whom Matthew is writing.

Jesus has compassion and empathy for the common people; he sees their needs, like Abraham did as those strangers approached, and is determined to fulfill their needs as shepherd would for those sheep who have no one to watch over them. Jesus compels his disciples to go engage in the same compassion and empathy. To live a grace-filled life, especially because they themselves have received grace, loving kindness, and mercy.

This mercy, grace, and obligation to others that Abraham embodied is referenced in Hebrews 13:1-2: “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Could it be that strangers are angels among us, reminding us that we are stronger when we let loving-kindness rather than anger and woundedness rule our lives? May we be inspired to live a grace-filled life, practicing lovingkindness because we ourselves know we have received grace.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 8, 2023.

The Parable of the Blade of Grass

                  Where the fire enters
a city of small doors, a city
of one blade of grass, a city
where the fire enters, where
the children on their hands
and knees lick the stones
of the street and the mice gather
in the square with the others
to watch the one blade of grass,
where old men whisper
in their hands, a city where the old
women move their skirts against
their thighs to remind themselves
of their own flesh, and what flesh
can do for a city, for a fire,
where a couple not from the city,
not blue-veined, but full of flesh,
watch the town gather around the blade
of grass, watch them offer their eyes,
watch them heap stones around their fire,
this couple not from this city,
not flattened by the heat
or the dust watch the children
crawl to the edge of the blade
of grass and offer their young tongues,
in this city where the fire enters,
the two not of the city walk
to the children, step over their hunched
backs and dirt-stained lips, past the edge
and pluck the flower from the fire,
from this city, in this city where
fire enters through a hush of flesh,
the couple not of the city snap
the blade of grass in two
and place it in each other’s mouth     watch
them eat a fire watch the children grow
legs below the knees     watch the old men
kiss the old women behind the house walls.
Love is when you hear the flood coming.


-- Roger Reeves (1980- ), African American poet and professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago

Likes and Loves: Sermon for Trinity Sunday, year A, 2023

A pilot and a priest have died and are waiting in line outside the gates of Heaven for entry. When they reach the front of the line, St. Peter beckons the pilot forth.

"Who are you, so I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?" he asks.

"I am Steven Armstrong of Houston, Texas." St. Peter consults his list.

"Ah, Captain Armstrong! You were an airline pilot for Southwest Airlines for 32 years. Take these silk robes and this staff of gold; you may enter the Kingdom."

St. Peter then beckons the next person in line forth—the priest. He repeats the same question again: "Who are you, so I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?"

The priest straightens out. "I am the Reverend Denise Ford of Stanford, Connecticut," she replies. "Episcopal priest for the past 32 years."

"Reverend Ford," St. Peter says as he flips through his list. "Pastor of the Trinity Church for the last 12 years, honest, supportive, kind, diligent in study and always willing to help. Ah, yes. Take these wool robes and this wooden staff and enter the Kingdom," St. Peter says. The priest shrugs and accepts them before entering.

Later, she finds St. Peter out fishing by a crystalline stream. "Sir, I'm just curious, but the man who stood in front of me outside the gates of Heaven was just a pilot, but he got silk robes and a gold staff. I preached and spoke the word of the Lord for most of my life, but I received these wool robes and this wooden staff. What gives?”

St. Peter turns to the priest. "Well, Mother, up here, we go by results. While you preached and gave your sermons, people slept.

"While he flew, and especially during landings, people prayed and called out to Jesus unceasingly."


Welcome to Trinity Sunday. It’s a day so dreaded for preaching that the Rev. Shug and I flipped a coin and I lost. I am hoping that I will neither bore you, put you to sleep, nor make you scream in terror over the next few minutes. It’s a pretty low bar, you might think. But Trinity Sunday is a day dedicated to a concept that is so famously difficult to preach about that seminarians are warned that no matter what they do, they might either bore their audience, put them to sleep, or commit heresy. All choices one normally would like to avoid.

So why do it? Even better, why have to do it every single year????

This is a question I also ask myself every year.

We start with understanding that the basic definition of the Trinity is that there are three “persons” within, but one God, and all three persons as equal.

But just putting it into words, which are finite in meaning on their surface means there are many ways we end up limiting God when we try to talk about God. For instance, I made a distinct choice there not to use the pronoun “him” just there, because God is beyond gender. God has no need for gender. Our *language* does, though, but if we constantly default to speaking of God as male, or female, we prioritize certain expectations about how God operates over others.

Some people claim that the Trinity doesn't even show up in the Hebrew scriptures. Untrue. But sometimes subtle. For instance, where was the Trinity in our creation story? You might discern it right there where God referred to "us" making God in "our" image. Some claim that the story in Genesis about three visitors who came to Abraham under the oaks of Mamre were actually the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That's the basis for the painting on the cover of our bulletin at this service, by the way. When Jesus is baptized, the Son goes down into the water, the Father's voice rings out, and the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus like a dove.

But even artists struggle with to depict the Trinity. They often show the Holy Spirit as fire, or a dove. When I was younger I saw a medieval painting that showed one figure with three faces overlapping-- there were four eyes because the faces overlapped and three noses anti was truly the stuff of nightmares. Thank God a pope declared that one a heresy itself. Yuck.

Last night I used two different artistic representations in the bulletin for the 505. The first one depicted God as three male figures. The Holy Spirit was shown as a young African man in the foreground. The Son was depicted as an 8-year-old Middle-eastern boy. And the Father was depicted as an elderly Australian Aboriginal man. It’s a beautiful painting by a Welsh artist who deliberately depicts Biblical images as diverse races.

Then elsewhere in the bulletin I used an icon by Kelly Lattimore that updates the famous 14th century Russian icon of the Trinity as three angels sitting around a table that is on the cover of our bulletin today. Many people today love the original icon because it is actually ambiguous as to whether the characters are male or female—as it should be but is pretty much impossible to do, especially in art. Mr. Lattimore goes one step further and, like the painting I just mentioned, has his figures be recognizably from different continents—one is possibly Latin American, one is Asian, and one is African. He also depicts them as more obviously feminine.

As time has gone on, I have become persuaded that those of us in Lectionary-based churches are challenged each year on the Sunday after Pentecost to address the Trinity because it keeps us humble. It reminds us of the limitations of our ability to express great mysteries, whether in words or image or music. It reminds us that God is a great mystery—the greatest mystery of all—and yet also a mystery that at various times reveals Godself to us in our times of greatest need and greatest wonders and joys.

Language, for instance, contains notions of gender. In French and Spanish and German, nouns can be male, female, or neuter. English makes the neutral option kind of “less-than” and privileges a binary way of thinking about gender--one that is frankly not helpful to reflect the realist of gender expression in all of life. And that limitation has fueled the culture wars over people’s personal pronouns right now. Even though no one is aiming their pronouns, or living their lives, for God’s sake, *at” anyone else.

Especially as we enter Pride Month, that understanding right there might go a long way to cooling down the hatred we have been seeing lately directed at our LGBTQ kindred.

What I find fascinating is that people who resist giving people the dignity of being the final arbiter of who they are also espouse a Christianity that does not see God as Trinity—as three persons but one God, and all three persons as equal. They often privilege Jesus, since he was born a human male, or God, since God was often referred to as “Father.” The Holy Spirit is often waaaaaay too squishy to deal with for these folks, usually. I mean, hey, even artists usually depict the Holy Spirit as a bird or as fire rather than in a figural way. Language-wise, however, the words used 99% of the time for the Holy Spirit in both Greek and Hebrew are female. The words for “breath” and “spirit” are female in those original Biblical languages. So then, we are called to consider that the Trinity, mystery that it is, is also a powerful reminder to us that God is NOT gendered, either.

Further, by extension, we are being shown that God’s image is fully present in ALL people-- regardless of what gender—or no gender-- they claim. Thinking about the Trinity as containing a variety of genders or none at all also has deep implications for how we understand human beings. So NOW we might be getting an idea of why this yearly discussion might be useful, after all, for the world in which we live.

And so, we are stuck with using analogies to describe God. Even “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”—or, if you are old school “Holy Ghost—are imperfect analogies. So we use that formula, but also perhaps consider others, acknowledging all are imperfect. Alternatives include:

There’s “Abba, Christ, Paraclete,” for the Greek-minded.
Source, Word, and Spirit.
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-Giver, from the New Zealand Prayer Book.
Wisdom of God, Love of God, Grace of God, from a common blessing.
Majesty, Word, Spirit.
Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier
The Lover, the Beloved, and Love Overflowing (from St. Augustine)

We struggle as we use a variety of ways to talk about what God is “like.” That’s fine—except analogical thinking is in short supply nowadays. It’s not being encouraged in our schools or in a public sphere. Too many people believe that things have to be black or white, up or down, right or wrong. And it’s okay to think that way—if you are a child. As we get older, though, most of us begin to observe that life doesn’t come at us in two options, just like ice cream doesn’t come in just two flavors. As long as we remember that whatever we think God is “like”—whether that’s a three leaf clover or a raindrop or three heavenly beings seated around a table, that God is still MORE yet, besides. God is like…. And off we go, metaphors and similes coming fast and furious. And yet God is so much more besides.

As I mentioned last week, we returned the Creed to our liturgy last week, after the Great Fifty Day Feast of Easter ended. This was a deliberate choice. The Creed came about to try to describe the Trinity, and how it worked, so it’s good to hear it again with new ears. I hope you do. Because if you DO hear it anew, and actually examine what is in the Creed. You will notice that there are a BUNCH of analogies in it to try to describe the three Persons of the Trinity and yet maintain their full equality: "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being..." Think of that again: to recognize the differences among each person of the Trinity, and yet to honor them as equal. Perhaps practicing this with God would help us practice this with each other.

Wouldn’t that be great?

To recognize that despite all the diversity of the way God touches our lives, that ultimately that diversity is still all part of ONE God. That diversity in unity is a strength. A blessing. A gift for living our own lives with each other.

Just as the Trinity is intimately bound up in each other to ultimately be One, so were we created by God. As we begin Pride month, Trinity Sunday calls us to remember that love is the most powerful force in the universe, and we should always stand for MORE love, not less. Or consider that the Rev. Shug and I are wearing our orange stoles to symbolize our hope to work to end gun violence. If we truly took seriously our invitation into the Trinity’s divine dance of love as children of God, would this madness even be possible?

Sure, some might scoff. Not everybody will do it. But how would it change the world if those of us here and those all around who profess to follow Christ would take the power of that Trinitarian love and mutual support seriously?

What would that be like? Isn’t it worth it to try?

St. Patrick was a missionary to the Irish, and we will hear part of one of his poems to the Trinity in one of our songs today. One of the ways he is depicted in icons is holding a shamrock, which he used to try to explain the Holy Trinity to the Celts in Ireland (which is also a heresy if you stop there, but hey, you have to start somewhere….) He was so good at this that the Celts place the idea of the Trinity at the center of their spirituality. And so perhaps we can learn something from them.

In Celtic Christianity, the concept of the Trinity reminds us that the heart of God is about relationship. It’s not about like—it’s about love. It’s about friendship. It’s about community. It’s about those three persons in the Trinity bound together in love, dancing around each other, taking turns stepping forward or stepping back so that different aspects are revealed about God as is right or necessary. That the heart of God is love, and that we, as God’s children, are drawn into that love. That, if we are made in God’s image, just as the three persons in the Trinity depend upon each other and rely upon each, so too we are called to give up our ridiculous notions of isolation and stubborn pride and realize and even celebrate how much we are made for each other. To love each other. To affirm each other. To see our differences as strengths, not as something that separates us, or worse, calls us to attack each other. 

The Trinity models for us what it is like to love and understand each other at the deepest level. As the great proponent of Celtic spirituality John O’Donohue wrote about the love at the center of the Trinity, and our relationship with that One God:

In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul. This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda: “You are like nobody since I love you.” This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny.

…The Christian concept of God as Trinity is the most sublime articulation of otherness and intimacy, an eternal interflow of friendship. This perspective discloses the beautiful fulfillment of our immortal longing in the words of Jesus, who said, Behold, I call you friends. Jesus, as the son of God, is the first Other in the universe; he is the prism of all difference. He is the secret [soul friend] of every individual. In friendship with him, we enter the tender beauty and affection of the Trinity. In the embrace of this eternal friendship, we dare to be free. (4)

Remembering that we are all beloved of God, all marvelously and wonderfully made by God, made for love in all its true, generous expressions, may we give thanks for being invited into the beautiful mystery of the Trinity, who invites us into the dance of life, or creation, and of celebrating difference and diversity.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on Saturday June 3 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on June 4 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Citations:

1) Holy Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev, ca 1425. 

2) "Christ with Three Faces" image of the Trinity by the Netherlandish school ca 1500. 

3) Kelly Lattimore's icon of the Holy Trinity (used by permission-- all rights reserved). 

4) St. Patrick icon with a shamrock.

5) John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, pp. 14-15, kindle version.

AfterGlow: Speaking to the Soul June 1, 2023

In the beginning there was light. 

As the first flash of light danced at creation,
and the gravid Earth burst into song,
as it was formed,
Elizabeth and Mary danced
and rejoiced, so too
reflecting
the dance of Trinity, mothering and brooding over
all three, all three.

Who are we
that God would invite us into the dance?
Who are we
that our lowliness would be swept aside
by the Mighty One
who nourishes the hungry
and cradles the fallen sparrow?

The heavens are telling
that love–
the shy or tentative or bold assent
to the pull of attraction
in either astrophysics or the mystery of God–
holds all together,
disparate bodies treasured, precious
regardless of difference.

So we look up at the blue skies
looking back down at us like the bluest eye,
and so we look at the smallest ant–
all wonders, wonders all, setting us wondering–
lovingly, tenderly made by God’s very fingers.
Each flares out with the divine afterglow of creation
that burns within each heart,
and sets aglow this star-shaped phlox,
echoing that first flash of love
from when this world
was but a thought.

--This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 1, 2023.

Being Made New: Sermon for Pentecost Sunday, 2023

Descent of the Spirit, Ivanka Demchuk (Ukrainian), 2022. Used by Permission.

Today is a day of creation.

In our readings we just heard, we were taken from the very first beginnings of this precious Earth upon which we all depend, filled with marvels great and small; to Peter’s recounting of God’s love for God’s people throughout history to Easter Sunday to fifty days later, to the Day of Pentecost—and imaginatively, to today.

It’s the birthday of the Church—and we are the ones who have been given the presents. Yet this may be a present that at first glance we are not sure we really like. In the film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris complains that his parents, rather than giving him a car, gave him a computer. Never mind that that gift of a computer allows him to take his “day off” from school—and even erase the evidence from the records at school. Like teenagers everywhere, he equates what he doesn’t have with freedom.

Perhaps that is how many of us feel about our relationship with the Holy Spirit. It’s the part of the Trinity that lots of us most want to hold at arms’-length. Flames of fire popping out over our heads like we’re Bunsen burners? The way she seizes control of people by the hairs of their head and drives them out into the wilderness or into the streets speaking a whole new language? We are post-modern people, and if there is one thing that is true about most of us, it’s that we want to be in charge of our own lives. Mmmm, not sure about all this.

But today is the day we remember that without the Holy Spirit, there would be no Church. There would be no fellowship. There would be no communion. Without the Holy Spirit, all we would know of the life of faith would be in the words in a dusty library of books written by people who thought the world was flat, claimed that there was really only one gender that mattered and that women were at best defective males, and would have reacted to the fact that we can carry access to libraries greater than the library at Alexandria around in our pockets and to our loved ones voices even when they’re thousands of miles away probably with an accusation that we were practicing witchcraft, which never ends well for those accused, my friends. You can look it up.

The Holy Spirit has been there all along, as our psalm today reminds us. And without spoiling next week’s Trinity Sunday sermon too much, our psalm portion today reminds us that the Holy Spirit contains the playful creativity and imagination of God, even if it’s the part that is the hardest to depict without resorting to drawing floating, curly red flames over noggins or pretty white doves, which seems altogether too meek and mild to describe something that also creates mountains just so they can smoke when touched by God’s hand. Maybe the Scots have it right when they at least depict the Holy Spirit as a wild goose, because if you have ever encountered one of those defending its nest while out on a walk, you know what it’s like to meet something that hisses like a viper and charges with the ferocity of Godzilla or Gamera or some other Japanese monster movie character.

So what exactly does the Holy Spirit do within God that helps us?

First, she gives us the courage and the inspiration to put to embody the very best of our natures—the things Jesus came to teach us, the Holy Spirit takes and sets on fire within our souls. All the best of humanity as implanted into us at our creation: our courage to selflessly lay down our lives for others like that our Memorial Day holiday tomorrow also enshrines.

And we need that courage and sense of community. With Jesus’s rising and then ascension we are assured we will never be alone. And with the gift of the Holy Spirit, that promise is brought to fulfilment—even when things seem the bleakest. And so as we meditate upon what it means to welcome the Holy Spirit into our lives, I ask that you take a look at the beautiful icon on the cover of our bulletin. It is by a Ukrainian iconographer named Ivanka Demchuk.

Ms. Demchuk was born in 1990 in Lviv, Ukraine, which is a city on the far western border of Ukraine-- a city that has been batted back and forth between countries since its founding in the 13th century. It has at various times been claimed by Poland, Lithuania, Austria, the Soviet Union, and then, right as Ms. Demchuk was born, the restored nation of Ukraine.

Although technically Russia and Ukraine have been at war since 2014, the invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russia in February, 2022 was a cataclysmic intensification of Russian aggression, resulting in the internal displacement of 8 million Ukrainians within the country, as well as over 8 million more fleeing as refugees into Europe as of May 2023, creating the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Many of those internal refugees are sheltering in Lviv—or pass through it on their way out of the country. It is no exaggeration to wonder how much this long threat has influenced Ms. Demchuk’s icons.

Of this particular piece, Ms. Demchuk explained to me that she had a commission for an icon on the descent of the Holy Spirit right before the Russian invasion. This invasion then led her to consider the similarities between the situation of the disciples in that upper room and the Ukrainian people as their country was being invaded. She writes, “I was thinking all the time how relevant in some meaning the situation is, especially for Ukrainian people who are under occupation of the invaders. Same as the apostles, they were hiding and in anxiety, and hoping- so I was praying for the Holy Spirit to help them to find a peace for their souls and help to endure these difficult times.”(1)

And if we are paying attention, we have seen the people of Ukraine respond with courage, with faith, with determination to resist the evil that seeks to tear them apart. And in our two depictions from John and the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit descends upon the gathered disciples the same way it descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and for the same reason: to empower us for them, and therefore us, for our mission into the world for the sake of the world. Nothing less. To realize our true ministry is not behind locked doors of buildings or hearts but out into the streets of the world.

At Pentecost, through the power of the Spirit, we are reminded that language is power, empowering us to carry the gospel of Christ throughout the farthest reaches of the world as disciples, evangelists, and teachers—as Christians who are the Church.

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.

We are still learning Jesus’s language of reconciliation today. 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.

This language 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.

Three of our readings today—from Acts 2, Psalm 104, and John 20-- hearken back to creation, and remind us that creation is not a one-time event. God did not make heaven and earth so much as God IS MAKING heaven and Earth. With the same breath or Spirit or wind that hovered over creation at the dawn of time, Jesus breathes that same life-giving, empowering, creative Spirit over and into the disciples and sends them en masse out into the streets, where they are then empowered to go and make more disciples of all nations and all peoples. Rather than the end, they begin anew. Our celebration of Pentecost today reminds us to begin anew, too, and draw closer to God so that we may serve God in all our lives.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry makes this connection between Pentecost and creation clear in his book Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus. He says,

“When we draw closer to God, we draw closer to each other, for we are all children of the one God who created us all. And when God draws us closer, the Spirit moves, and we experience the power of Pentecost, that day many Christians over the centuries have regarded as the day when the Church was born. Paul said, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”(2)

That doesn’t mean we have to be perfect. Seriously. Remember those same apostles. They took being NOT perfect to an art form. And thank God for that. That allows us to have hope for ourselves.

The Spirit moves over the world at creation, and the Spirit moves over us seeking to restore and renew creation within us. I want you to listen in a few minutes during the Eucharistic prayer we are going to pray together as Christ’s Church for the world. Listen as we call down the Spirit to move over the bread and wine, and therefore over US, so that WE can be made a new creation before God as we lift our hearts in thanks. Listen as we ask that same Spirit to transform us as God’s children and heirs, to be sent out into the world to continue Christ’s mission to all the world as his Holy Church.

Just as creation is ongoing, the Church is not something tied to a specific time or place or event in history. The Church is not a building. The Church is not a hierarchy. The Church is not a denomination. The Church is not a social club. The Church is the Body of Christ, bound together in bonds tighter than the closest family bonds we may have known. The Church does not exist for its own sake, and that’s a crucial point to make, I think, in this day and age, when institutions can run roughshod over people, and when it seems we are more divided by ever.

As members of the Church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, called to live out the gospel of Christ, we too do not exist for our own sake, or for our own salvation. Instead, we are called into discipleship for the life of the world, to go out into the places that most need the light of Christ, starting with the corners of our own hearts-- and then spreading outward into the entire world.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, the Church is part of the mystical Body of Christ and as such, is given FOR the world as an offering. As each of us remember this day that we are the Church we are called to offer ourselves for the good of others. We are called to build bridges between people who are all so different, and yet united by bearing the image of God that was planted in all of us at creation, no matter what our race, background, social class, or perceived “goodness” or “sinfulness.”


Pentecost reminds us to open ourselves to the power of God in the world right now. Jesus is still creating a new Spirit within us, calling the Church out into the streets to testify to this ongoing creation in the world—and that is you and me, not an institution or a building or just the clergy, but all of us who are baptized by water and the Spirit, as our Baptismal liturgy reminds us. Each and every baptized Christian, whether lay or ordained, is a minister of the gospel of Jesus. Each and every one of us, as Christians, is called to testify to the power of the love of God as revealed in Christ Jesus in the world, by living lives of joy, compassion, wisdom, faith, hope, and healing—all of which qualify as grade-A, bona fide miracles in this day and age of cynicism and greed.

Pentecost, Dame Warburg Welch

In a few moments, we are going to be called to say together the words of the Nicene Creed, which is the description of how the Trinity works and moves within our lives. We haven’t said those words since Easter Day—something that three of you all have asked me about, which earns you a gold star.

I hope you hear those words anew on this Pentecost Day. I hope, no matter how much certain parts of it make you want to cross your fingers behind your backs, you listen especially to the escription of what the Holy Spirit does in our lives there in that last paragraph where she is the star of the show. And then I hope you listen for what the Spirit does as we pray together the Eucharistic prayer—especially as we all collectively call her down into our midst to change ordinary stuff of creation and human hands into the very Body of Christ into our midst, so that we can be formed and sent out, strengthened and encouraged, just like those apostles on that Pentecost Day two millennia ago.

We can be the miracle. Let us go forth by the power of the Spirit. Let us be the Church in and for the world.

Preached at the 505 on May 27 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on May 28, 2023, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church.

Readings:

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:25-35, 37

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Citations:

1) Email exchange wit Ivanka Demchuk, May 24, 2023, on Etsy. Copies of Ms Demchuk's art can be purchased at Modern Icon Art.

Michael B. Curry, Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus, Kindle edition, kindle location 1347-1350.