Sermons from Incarnation, Santa Rosa

Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

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It’s very human to want to escape mortality. To cheat the Reaper and live forever.

Sometimes quite literally. Maybe you’re familiar with the movement called cryonics in which people have their bodies frozen in hopes future technology will be able to bring them back to life one day. On the other end of the timeline, there are some biotech folks in Silicon Valley who are hoping to extend human lifespans to the point of never dying in the first place, at least not from old age. Now as Christians we might say that there’s a difference between endless life and eternal life. A life that’s just chronologically endless, and where you’re continually afraid of dying in an accident, might turn out to be a nightmare instead of a dream.

But most people channel that urge for immortality in more realistic and maybe healthier ways. Leaving a legacy behind: doing something people will remember, something to carry on our names after we’re gone. Or simply being remembered by those who knew and loved us in our lifetimes.

In many cultures having children has been considered a way of living on after death. Sometimes so strongly so that dying childless was considered a calamity. So a custom in ancient Israel, as in many patriarchal societies, held that when a man died childless, his brother would marry his widow and try to have children on the dead man’s behalf, so the family line would continue and the dead man’s identity would live on.

Now in Jesus’ time the Sadducees were a conservative school of Judaism who didn’t believe in an afterlife or resurrection. For the Sadducees this life was all there was: people were made to love and serve God here on earth, and then to sleep in the underworld. So when they hear Jesus preaching about resurrection and eternal life, a group of Sadducees decide to debate him. And notice what Jesus does. Instead of answering on the terms of their example, he explodes the whole scenario. The woman doesn’t have to be one brother’s wife or another. Resurrection isn’t like that at all.

In God’s realm we are set free from death, and the fear of death, forever. We no longer need to matter through our children, or through our spouse. A woman doesn’t need to matter only by being someone’s wife. In the resurrection you will be alive to God as the fully glorious individual you were made to be. Not because you left a legacy or achieved an achievement or made something of yourself. Because you are a child of God, and God is the God of the living.

Now today we are doing something we do every year, which is starting our annual pledge campaign. Today our vestry will be leading us by turning in their pledge cards first, bringing them to the altar at the offertory. Today leaders will be handing out pledge packets. And over the next two weeks—just two weeks, because our campaign was shortened this year by the fires—we are asking everyone at Incarnation to participate in making a financial pledge for 2020.

We ask people to make a pledge rather than just putting something in the plate week by week, partly because it means we can plan ahead and make a budget. But more, because when we make a pledge it’s a tangible way to be intentional about our giving. It’s a way of saying, “This is who I am and who I belong to. My life belongs to God, I am a child of God, the God of the living. And I am committing an intentional portion of the resources God has placed in my care to what God is doing through the church.” The simplest way to do that is to take what you currently give, divide it by your income, and notice what percentage that is. I have a priest friend who uses the phrase, “Know your number.” Maybe it’s 10%, or 6%, or 2%, or half a percent. Wherever it is, that’s a great place to start. And year by year we see if we can stretch toward growing a percent, or half a percent, gradually increasing the proportion of God’s resources we’re investing in this mission on God’s behalf.

This is an important year for Incarnation. For the last five years, since the painful departure of our previous rector, we’ve been running at a deficit of about $130,000. There are reasons why that happened in a time of crisis. But we’re in a new season of ministry together, and it’s time to grow toward financial health. Our vestry has set a 2020 goal to cut that deficit in half. If we can increase our average annual pledge by about $400 this year that will just about reach that goal. Some of us will be able to do that. Some won’t. Some will be able to do more.

So over these next two weeks, please join us in this Faith in Action Campaign. And give, not because you’re trying to prove something or cheat immortality or even leave a legacy to be remembered by. Give because God remembers you, knows you by name, and is giving you eternal life. Give because God is on the move, including right here at Incarnation, and is inviting you to join in.

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

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This past Thursday I was unpacking my car when I found myself drawn into the stories of the saints.

What my car was full of was, essentially, Incarnation’s go-bag. In the midst of the evacuations, several of us packed up sacred items, vestments, chalices, and historic records into our cars for safekeeping. For four days my car was filled to the top with boxes of service registers and parish archives, along with our jeweled brass processional cross, removed from its staff, safely cushioned in Abigail’s car seat.

We packed those items up in a hurry. But on Thursday, during the unloading, I couldn’t help but leaf through some of the old records. And there they were: names and narratives of the great cloud of witnesses whose prayers have soaked into these wooden walls around us for nearly a century and a half.

There were records of baptisms in the old courthouse by the pioneering missionary James Lloyd Breck and of the decision to build this redwood building. There were stories of great conflicts and great successes. There was the newspaper clipping recounting how this very cross was stolen from the church in 1996 and rediscovered by Marti Kennedy ten years later at a rummage sale. There were vestry minutes full of names of saints like Cedric Johnson and Russell Tye and Frances Spater, who entered into glory just this past year.

We who worship in this congregation today are standing on the shoulders of generations who have come before us. That’s true in every congregation, of course, and not just those with a hundred and fifty years of history. Even a brand new church plant is just another budding branch on a vine that stretches back through the centuries.

Today is All Saints’ Sunday, a day when we celebrate what’s sometimes called the Church Triumphant—that portion of the Body of Christ who have already finished their earthly race and who now cheer for us as we run ours, who pray for us and strengthen us, and whose ranks we ourselves will by God’s grace, we trust, one day join.

We are what’s called the Church Militant, that portion of the church that is still fighting the fight and running the race here on earth. And we come to this day this year on the heels of a week that has been full of displacement and disruption and fear. We come hungry, having missed our congregational Eucharist last Sunday, as more than half of us scrambled out of homes, many not knowing whether or not there would be homes to return to. We come back here today with a complicated mix of exhaustion and trauma and gratitude.

Gratitude for the heroic efforts of firefighters and first responders, shelter staff, and volunteers of all kinds. Celebration, that no lives were lost or even anyone seriously injured, and that the scope of destruction was so much less than it could have been or than it looked, on Saturday and Sunday nights, as if it would be. And yet we’re also painfully aware that while fewer people have lost homes and property in this fire, for those who have, the losses are every bit as devastating. We’re aware that lost wages and spoiled food and evacuation expenses have hit many hard, and the poorest the hardest. And we’re aware that our entire community has experienced a collective reactivation of the trauma of 2017, and that for almost everyone there are psychic and spiritual wounds that can go deep even when they’re not obvious on the surface.

One thing that has been so apparent this crazy week is that we need one another. As a church, and as a whole community, we are in this together. And one of the most obvious ways that God has been present through these fires and outages and evacuations has been in the ways the saints have stepped up to be the hands of God for one another.

Last Sunday, after we secured the church, I put our parish database into a Google spreadsheet and began asking parishioners to help me make calls to find out where everyone was, if they had a safe place to stay, if they needed one, or had one to offer someone else. Within short order more than twenty people had stepped up. Logged into the spreadsheet on my computer I could see multiple cells at once being updated by different people at the same time.

Meanwhile I was having phone calls with fellow clergy from our neighboring congregations and from across our diocese as well as the Diocese of California, working together not only to make sure our own people were OK but also to think about how to be of service to our neighbors. Many of you know Kai Harris, who grew up here at Incarnation and is married to Christy Laborda Harris, rector of our neighbor parish St. Stephen’s in Sebastopol. Kai works for a nonprofit that serves low-income people in Sonoma County. Through their contacts they learned of a group of day laborers from near Geyserville who had evacuated to the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, where there was no official evacuation center and a shortage of supplies and services. Christy made a call to our siblings at Good Shepherd, Cloverdale, and the clergy team there headed over to the Fairgrounds with blankets and supplies. At a time when resources were stretched, it was the network of the church that had people on the ground just where they were needed.

Those are just two ways I saw the communion of saints at work this week. I bet you’ve seen others. And I know each of you in some way has been the hands of God for another person this past week. The Church Militant is on the move, as it has been in every age, loving and serving in the name of Jesus. And as we do, the Church Triumphant is cheering us on.

Just like our ancestors in generations past, we are not assured that things will be easy. We are not assured of an easy road. We will endure trials and temptations. We will sometimes be afraid. But their example is set before us, and they join us and pray for us. And Jesus, our Captain, runs alongside us, to guide and strengthen us until at last we cross the finish line and take our place with all the saints in our true eternal home.

Genesis 32:22-31
Psalm 121
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

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“All scripture is inspired by God.”

When I was a teenager I had a number of friends who were conservative Christians with a pretty literalist understanding of the Bible. They would often quote this verse, sometimes using the translation “God-breathed” where the translation we heard today uses “inspired by God.” Now the word in Greek can mean either one. But of course there’s a difference between believing scripture has been inspired by God, or perhaps breathed into by God’s spirit, and believing that it is breathed directly out of the mouth of God. And as a bit of a contrarian, I would sometimes point that out. I would also point out that it’s a circular argument to quote scripture to support your argument about the inerrancy of scripture.

I don’t think we ever settled those debates. But even though I don’t share my friends’ literalist understanding of scripture, I have a lot of admiration for the way they loved scripture. They memorized verses and entire chapters, played games of Bible trivia, recognized the names of obscure characters and places. They marinated their minds in scripture. They loved it, and lived by it.

Episcopalians and other liturgical Christians often pride ourselves on how much scripture we read in church. Three readings every Sunday, and more in the daily services of Morning and Evening Prayer. But we tend not to do as well with personal study of the Bible. Hearing three isolated snippets of scripture out of their wider context each Sunday doesn’t in and of itself help people know and understand the overall story. So there are many devoted Christians who don’t feel they know the Bible well. And who may know that they aren’t fundamentalists, but aren’t quite sure what they do believe about the Bible.

It doesn’t help that reading the Bible can be hard. Often people try to start from the beginning and read straight through. That goes well for a while. Genesis, the first book, is full of powerful stories like the one we heard this morning, about Jacob wrestling with God until he receives a blessing. Adam and Eve, Noah’s ark, Joseph and his technicolor dreamcoat: a lot of us have some familiarity with these Genesis stories even if we’ve never studied scripture as adults. It goes on pretty well into the book of Exodus: ten plagues in Egypt, the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. And then we start getting into the details of the laws Moses receives from God at Sinai, and things get a little … bogged down. And that’s where a lot of attempts to read the Bible stop.

So reading sequentially may not necessarily be the right place to start. Part of the problem is that our culture thinks of the Bible as a book, when it’s not. It’s a library. The word Biblia is plural, “the books,” 66 of them, or more if you count some of those that some denominations include and others don’t.

Now there is an overall narrative across those sixty or seventy books, which we can sum up as Creation; Fall; Israel; Jesus; Church; God’s Future. Creation: God creates a beautiful and beloved world. Fall: sin, evil, and death enter that world. Israel: one particular people in the ancient world comes to know and worship God in a special way. Jesus: God’s own Word becomes a member of that people, lives and dies as one of us, goes freely to a criminal’s death, and conquers death by being raised from the dead. Church: Jesus’ friends and followers spread the good news and share in Jesus’ mission. That’s the time period we live in now. And God’s future is something not fully describable, but something we glimpse in images of a restored creation, a universe at peace, a heavenly banquet, eternal abundant life.

The Bible tells that narrative in many ways, through various kinds of literature. There’s history; legend; poetry; fables; prophetic visions, and much more. So we can’t read the Bible in just one way. What we need is a theology that takes inspiration seriously without getting stuck in literalism.

One traditional Anglican way of describing the scriptures is to say that they are “the Word of God, and contain all things necessary to salvation.” That’s part of a declaration everyone ordained in this church must make. And notice what it says and doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the scriptures are literally inerrant, and it doesn’t say everything in the scriptures is necessary to salvation. It says everything necessary to salvation is in the scriptures. That you don’t need anything else besides what’s in the Bible to know what you need to know about the love of God, the person of Jesus, and the power of the Spirit.

The catechism in the Prayer Book explains a little more about what it means to call scripture the Word of God. It’s on page 853: “Q. Why do we call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God? A. We call them the Word of God because God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible.” We believe not that God dictated these texts, but that the human people who wrote these texts in their own place and time wrote in response to God’s call, and that God worked through them in the writing. And more important still, we believe God speaks to us in these texts today. Even when it’s hard to understand or challenging. Sometimes we have to be like Jacob and wrestle with a passage of scripture until it blesses us. But there is always a blessing to be found.

The Bible is the Word of God, yes. But of course only in a secondary sense. Because the primary Word of God is not a book but a person, Jesus Christ himself, the true Word that God has been speaking since before creation.

I’d like to leave us with a prayer from the first Prayer Book:

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
Psalm 111
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19

“He makes his marvelous works to be remembered, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.” Psalm 111:4

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The Leper’s Thank You

When I was a young girl my mother used to make me write thank you notes whenever I was given a gift. This was one of her “home training” rules (home training rules were designed to ensure that you had good manners). My mother wanted me to understand how important it was to be grateful that someone took the time to find something I would like, buy it, wrap it and give it to me. Thank you notes were to be written and mailed within the week. And, it took time to write those notes because it required thinking about what the gift meant to me and which words would best show my appreciation. I kept up this tradition for many years and I still hear my mother’s voice in my head if I do not send a thank you note when I should.

As I read the lessons for today I noticed how grateful Naaman and the Samaritan leper were when they received their gifts of healing. Each man immediately gave thanks and praised God. When I reflected on what it must have been like for them to finally have hope and be welcomed back into their communities, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to think about what it would have been like for one of them to write a thank you note to God for the gift of healing. I imagined that the Samaritan Leper’s thank you might sound something like this:




Many of us are like the nine lepers who did not think to take the time to stop for a minute to give thanks. A bible study* I reviewed for this week’s lessons posed some interesting questions about why the one leper returned and the others did not. Maybe the nine were eager to get certified by the priests so they could return to their families. Maybe they intended to come back later. We will never know how and why they made the choices that they did. We also do not know why the one returned. Maybe his mother made sure he had good “home training.” We can, however, think about how we might want to respond when we receive gifts of healing from God. With that in mind, I am about to share with you an activity from the bible study.

It was suggested that we imagine that we have been asked to draft a section for the Book of Common Prayer. Turning to page 810 in the BCP we will discover that there are 72 prayers that ask for things and you have to go all the way to page 836 to find 11 prayers of thanksgiving. If we want to practice an attitude of gratitude, if we want to give thanks to God, we might consider writing more prayers of thanksgiving. It would be wonderful if we could write enough prayers of thanksgiving so that they are at least equal to the number of bidding prayers. And if we do not want to wait for the next version of the Book of Common Prayer, we could even self-publish our own Church of the Incarnation Book of Thanksgiving Prayers.

Writing prayers of thanksgiving helps us to practice being grateful. Practicing gratitude helps us to see and understand what God is doing in our lives. An attitude of gratitude reminds us that goodness abounds and that even during great suffering and despair God is present and offering healing, hope and compassion.

I can say this to you as one who has been healed in so many ways by God. Sometimes that healing came when people were praying for me when I had cancer. Sometimes the healing came because people were willing to let God work through them and they gave me a much-needed hug or listened when I needed to talk. Sometimes the healing arrived in a meditation as I listened to lovely recorded voices that reminded me to surrender to God’s love. All I know is that when I needed it most, God always provided the healer and the healing. And for that, I am truly grateful. Thanks Mom, for reminding me to write this note.

*Source: https://lessonplansthatwork.org/2013/06/17/choosin...

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 37:1-10
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

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“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree, Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.”

I’m sure I’m not the only person in this room that has tried this a couple of times. So far without success. I remember hearing this passage as a child, or maybe one of its parallel passages in Matthew and Mark’s gospels where it’s not a tree but a mountain that’s thrown into the sea. And the impression I got was that getting a prayer answered was a matter of believing hard enough. Driving every possible iota of doubt or uncertainty out of one’s mind and holding it that way long enough to get the words out.

It turns out the word we translate “faith,” pistis, doesn’t really primarily mean intellectual belief. It has more to do with trust and faithfulness. It’s less about believing in facts and more about being in faithful relationship with God. So it may be that Jesus isn’t so much suggesting we brainwash ourselves into certainty as that we work on the quality of our faithfulness. Not that if we play mind games we’ll be able to do magic, but that if our hearts and actions come to be aligned with God, nothing will be impossible, even things that seem as impossible as a mulberry tree taking root in the sea.

Now today we are blessing animals and giving thanks for God’s creation, mulberry trees and mountains and seas and all of it, remembering our brother St. Francis, whose feast day was this past Friday. And as we do so we acknowledge that God’s creation is good and beloved, and the human vocation that we were created for includes tending to that creation. And we have to acknowledge also that as a species we are not doing it. In the words of today’s gospel, we are worthless slaves who have not done even what we ought to have done. Today even as we give thanks for these dear domestic animals we are mindful of the species that are becoming extinct because climate change is making their ranges shrink or their food chains disappear. We’re mindful of the trees we are uprooting, not out of faith, but out of greed, as rainforests burn in Brazil and Indonesia, and of the sea levels that threaten to wipe cities and even entire island nations off the map.

Two weeks ago over 7 million people in 180 countries participated in the Global Climate Strike, the largest coordinated mass action on climate change to date. Much damage from climate change has already been done. We here in wildfire country know that as well as anyone. And there are great harms underway that we can no longer prevent. But it is also true that there are even worse harms ahead that we can prevent if the nations of the world act now, in concert, to commit to a path to a carbon-neutral future. It’s young people around the world who are leading the charge; because it is young people who will live through the effects of what today’s adults have created. “Anyone who causes one of these little ones to stumble,” says Jesus, “it would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” And “these little ones” includes not only today’s children but also the animals, and plants, and other forms of life that now depend on us for survival.

The situation is urgent. But it’s not hopeless. There is a lot we can do. As individuals it can feel like our choices don’t matter—but our choices influence the choices of others, and collectively that matters a lot. We can drive less and fly less. We can eat less meat. We can talk about those choices with one another at church and with our friends outside church. And we can advocate for our elected leaders to put this issue front and center, because it’s also true that this issue won’t be solved unless it happens at a government and multi-government scale. So a lot of what we can do has to be working to influence what those with the actual power to decide do. We can do that through how we vote, as well as how we work to influence public opinion. We can show up at events like the climate strike. We can write to our newspapers. We can give money to environmental organizations that pay staff to work full time on this issue.

On this issue, and any other issue, we each have some power. And there are limits to our power. So our work is to do what we can and also to avoid becoming discouraged at the limits of what we can. In that, people of faith have an advantage. Because we believe ultimately the future is in God’s hands. Like the prophet Habakkuk we may rail against the evil we see around us and we may say, “how long will I cry and you will not listen?” And the reply is, “God still has a vision for the appointed time; it will surely come, it will not delay.”

The mystery of our calling is that in some sense, the future doesn’t depend on us. We’re not God. And at the same time, God chooses to work through us, when we’re open to it. So every time we choose to take an action that cares for creation, we are partnering with God, letting ourselves be instruments of God’s peace.

May God increase our faith—which means, our faithfulness. May we be aligned with God’s purposes so fully that nothing is impossible, not even healing this beloved and beautiful world.

Amos 6:1a,4-7
Psalm 146
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31

Alas for those who are at ease in Zion, and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria. Amos 6:1

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Camping

Back in 1972 when we were married, my aunt gave us £30 which we spent on a Vango “Force 10” tent from Blacks of Greenock.[1] I was glad to see that in a photo of one of the Everest expeditions they were using our tent. We spent our days off camping in different parts of Britain; we still have it, though we do not use it often. It protected us from hurricane winds and torrential downpours. On various occasions we hosted friends whose tents leaked, soaking their clothes and sleeping bags.

On a number of occasions I have been backpacking in the Sierra. I enjoy the sensation that I am carrying everything I need on my back far from civilization. Life becomes very simple. There’s nothing to do except hike to our next campsite. At night I hear the sound of the wind in the trees and I look up to see the stars and in August the Perseids (shooting stars). There are no shops to buy things–so there’s no point in having a credit card; and there’s no cell-phone coverage. Up above 10,000 feet the air is thin, the sky is blue, the lake water is clear and stocked with golden trout.

For forty years the Children of Israel camped out in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses. They were nomads with no fixed habitation, looking for pasture for their flocks. They were like the Bedouin tribes of today in the Arabian Peninsular.[2] It was the formative time in their nation’s history. Looking back they realized that it was the time that they felt closest to God. The Hebrew word for “wilderness” is midbar רמִדְבָּ which is derived from the root, דָּבָר which means “word” or “speech”.[3] In the wilderness God spoke to Moses at the burning bush, to Elijah at Horeb and to the Israelites. They could hear because they were not distracted by the trappings of civilization. As pilgrims, they were all equal and no one was superior. God fed them all equally with manna from heaven and water from the rock.[4]

The wilderness is a place of order where all of nature is in a perfect balance of harmony. By contrast cities are places of hurrying, rushing and crime. Some get ahead and take advantage of their position to exploit the poor and vulnerable. There are traffic jams and nowhere to park. Often the air is polluted by ozone or noise or light. Cities can easily be seen as places of chaos.

The prophets reminded the Israelites of their time in the wilderness.[5] They did not need all the trappings of civilization and settled living that they adopted when they reached the Promised Land. But the people rebelled (according to those prophets) and they were blinded by the accoutrements of the surrounding nations. They wanted a king, and a temple made of stone with an altar for sacrifice and hierarchical leadership.

David thought it would be sexy to have a temple in his new capital of Jerusalem. His prophet, Nathan agreed with him,. But in a dream God said, “Not so fast!” God reminded Nathan, “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.”[6]

They didn’t drink wine in the wilderness, not because they were teetotal but because it takes three years for a vine to produce grapes and they were never in one place long enough to grow grapevines. They were people on the move. When they arrived in the Promised Land they found “a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing.”[7] Nevertheless there were radical types who refused to farm the land or live in cities or drink wine, because they regarded those practices as alien, borrowed from the locals. Some were called Rechabites,[8] and another was Samson who was a Nazirite, a wild man who did not cut his hair.[9]

Moses warned the Israelites not to be arrogant and say to themselves, “my power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.” [10]

The prophet Amos was one of those who harked back to the blessed time in the wilderness. He was appalled at the corruption of the Israelites. It was not just that they took advantage of the vulnerable and sold the poor for a pay of shoes. It was their lavish lifestyle. So he prophesied, ” Alas for those who are at ease in Zion, and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria.” They lounged around on beds of ivory, sang idle songs, drank bowls of wine and anointed themselves with the finest oils.[11] “Watch out,” he said,” you’ll be the first ones to be carted off into exile.” And so it happened less than 40 years later.[12]

Luke has much to say about having a right attitude towards wealth and property. Last week among other things we heard the warning of Jesus, “You cannot serve God and Mammon. You’re going to have to choose.” This week we hear the story of Dives and Lazarus. Dives obviously chose to ignore the blessings of the wilderness. He had a lavish lifestyle. Purple clothes were worn by royalty. Purple dye was very expensive. So this was a good way to impress your neighbors.[13] He feasted every day, not just once in a while. He had plenty to eat even when there was a food shortage. No doubt he and his guests drank bowls of wine.

But Dives is not the central character of the story. That’s Lazarus. he lay outside Dives’ house. He was homeless and starving. Life, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote (in Leviathan,1651) was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” No wonder his life expectancy was short. Then comes the reversal (there are number in Luke’s Gospel; this is not a literal description but a fantasy), Lazarus was whisked off by the angels to Abraham’s bosom, not only a place of comfort and feasting, but also a seat of honor. It would have been better if Dives had taken to heart the lessons of the wilderness. Instead he languishes in the flames of Hades, which is where his family will end up.

And we too can learn the lesson of the wilderness. There we will hear the word of God. There will be no ostentatious lifestyle. No claiming, “mine all mine!” No haughtiness in bragging, But as we heard in the epistle, “do good, be rich in good works, and be generous, and ready to share… Thus we will lay up treasure for the future and take hold of life that really is life.”[14]

Proper 19, September 29 2019

[1] It’s still on the market, but its price is now £400
[2] See Johannes Pedersen, Israel: its life and culture (1926). Pedersen was a Danish scholar of the Old Testament.
[3] for midbar see Strong’s concordance #4057; for dabar see Strong’s #1697
[4] Deuteronomy 8.
[5] “The Nomadic Ideal” See Jeremiah 2:2: “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” Also Hosea 13:5, Amos 2:10 etc
[6] 2 Samuel 7:5
[7] Deuteronomy 8:7f
[8] Jeremiah 35
[9] Number 6. Samson is found in Judges 13f. Another was Samuel, 1 Samuel 1:11, 1:22 etc
[10] Deuteronomy 8:17f
[11] You can read all this in the bulletin, Amos 6:1a, 4-7
[12] In 722, Sargon II deported the residents of Samaria to Assyria.
[13] See Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple (1982) about abject poverty in the American South.
[14] 1 Timothy 16:18f (today’s epistle)

Amos 8:4-7
Psalm 113
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

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Wealth

According to the Oxford Dictionary, wealth is defined as, “an abundance of valuable possessions or money.” Its synonyms include affluence, prosperity, riches, substance, and well-being. A person’s understanding of how much wealth they have can be based on a comparison to what someone else has, otherwise known as keeping up with the Joneses. A sense of wealth can also be a measure of what possessions and money represent: status, having “made it,” “living large,” “buying what I want when I want it even if I don’t really need it cause I just want to have it syndrome.”

It is my understanding that most people who have a lot of money or wealth for a long time, “old money folk,” never talk about how much money they have as it is considered ill-mannered. Most of the folks I know, talk about money or wealth regularly because they are still trying to figure out how to get it, when to use it, and on occasion, where to flaunt it.

Our readings today ask us to reflect on this notion of wealth. In Amos the focus is on those whose only concern is how to make money seemingly by any means necessary. Making money the minute the Sabbath is over. Making money even if it ruins the land or hurts needy people. Cheating if necessary to make money. By whatever means necessary, make that money, make that money, make that money. Like a drumbeat it is the driving force of those who will never have enough.

In Timothy, we hear a different definition of wealth. There is a richness to life that comes from praying for others in such a way that all will have dignity and live a peaceable life. Doing what is right and good, as defined by God, is its own reward.

The Gospel offers a third point of consideration. What happens when one receives wealth and wastes it? This troubles me the most because, truth be told, I am guilty of having wasted what I have received. Not all the time, just often enough to realize that I need to continually work to change my ways. Like the manager in the Gospel story, I have not always taken notice of what I have and/or have not used those gifts wisely. Let me give you a couple of examples. Every time I buy too much food and end up throwing it out because it spoiled, salad greens come to mind, I have wasted a gift that could have nourished me. When I order something new to replace something I already have, that works fine by the way, I am wasting resources that might have been better used for something else. Wealth is about abundance. It seems to me that taking the time to think about what I truly need and giving away the rest would be a good thing.

When I was first ordained I served at our mission in Monte Rio. It was a small congregation and in those days we functioned like a family. Everyone knew everyone else and although there were some folks who had plenty of resources, there were others who did not have as much. One summer we decided to have a giveaway. The idea was that everyone would bring to church things they no longer could use or wanted to give away to someone else. We had a few rules. The items had to be in good working order, clean and ready to use. People should only bring items that they would give to a friend. And nothing would be sold. The items were carefully organized and displayed throughout the church. The first hour was reserved for church members to share and then the rest of the day we opened the giveaway to the community. If you needed or wanted it, it was yours. Anything left over at the end of the day would go to the Goodwill or the Salvation Army.

As you might imagine, we had a lot of items to share. One of the items included a huge bag of clean baby clothes. We were about to pack up the items at the end of the day when I woman came by in a car to ask if we had, you guessed it, any thing for babies. It turned out that she worked at a hospital in San Francisco on a unit that served a lot of low-income mothers who had next to nothing for their newborns. We happily gave her that big bag of baby clothes. Of course these days you can do giveaways on the Internet by using sites like Freecycle and Craigslist however, our giveaway is one of my fondest ministry memories because everyone benefited. Folks gave, folks received, and all prospered. On that day, we were all wealthy.

How we define wealth and abundance is important. If one only thinks about money or material possessions as wealth, then we miss all the other forms of abundance in our life. Some of the richest people I have known are people who do not look like they have much. Their wealth came from loving, caring, sharing and believing, believing in a God who would provide them with the wisdom and guidance they needed to thrive. They always had enough, and their needs were always met.

We can serve God by serving one another or we can serve our selves in the pursuit of wealth. We cannot do both. Our choices will always reveal which one we think is the most important.

Exodus 32:7-14
Psalm 51:1-11
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them!

Take a seat, fellow sinners.

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When I was in fourth grade, I lost my cross.

It’s a little silver Celtic cross I wear on a chain around my neck. My parents gave it to me when I was in the first grade. So the three years I’d been wearing it by then pale in comparison to the thirty-three years I’ve been wearing it now. But even then, it had been almost a third of my life.

My friends and I had taken to doing some wrestling at recess, in a wooded area of the schoolyard somewhat screened from interfering adult eyes. And mid-wrestle, I heard the jingle of a snapped chain and felt it slip from around my neck. I cried out, and my friends must have sensed my genuine distress, because the roughhousing stopped and we spent the rest of recess searching the leaf-strewn ground. To no avail.

I was back at my classroom explaining what had happened to my teacher and asking for permission to go back and look a little longer when suddenly I heard the tell-tale jingle one more time. And the chain slipped from inside my sweater where it had gotten lodged, and fell all the way this time and bounced on the carpeted floor. And my teacher and friends rejoiced with me, because what was lost had been found.

There are things that are precious to us far beyond their monetary value. Today Jesus tells us that sinners are like that for God.

We call Jesus the Good Shepherd. But the story of the shepherd he tells today could be called the Parable of the Lousy Shepherd. Imagine the utter lunacy of leaving the ninety-nine alone and unprotected “in the wilderness” to go after one. For Jesus it’s worth it. This shepherd doesn’t stay here inside the flock where things are organized and protected. He goes out to find the lost one, because it’s unimaginable to lose even one, because that one is precious.

Now the stereotype about sheep is that they are dumb. And scientists tell us that’s not exactly true.[1] They have great pattern-recognition and complex social relationships. But they certainly don’t take care of themselves, and they’re prone to getting lost. If you leave them alone, they wander off. They don’t run away because they’re malicious or evil; getting lost is just what sheep do. And as for coins, they’re certainly dumb. They’re inanimate objects. They don’t get lost on purpose. The shepherd doesn’t say to the sheep, “You must have been a lousy sheep or you would never have gotten lost!” The woman doesn’t say to the coin, “If you get lost again, I’m throwing you out with the garbage!”

I’m not saying that we have no agency in the choices we make—although we often have much less than we realize. But I am saying that we have no power to choose not to be sinners, not to need finding, not to need God’s help. And I am saying that the initiative of salvation doesn’t lie with us. Not in the slightest. It’s God’s all the way, the crazy shepherd who goes out after a single sheep, the obsessive woman who tears apart the whole house looking for the lost coin. Sheep and coins don’t find themselves; they don’t make resolutions to get lost no more, or turn over a new leaf. They just sit there lost and helpless until the One who loves them brings them back home.

What does that mean for us? God is not scandalized by sin. God is not surprised by sin. God does not stay far away from sin. Sin is where God comes and finds us, in the darkest places we wander.

There’s a paradox about being here in this gathering today. We know, we are assured, that Jesus will reliably show up here, every time we come together in his name. But the greatest temptation of the church is to become a club of the Ninety-Nine Sheep, those who think they aren’t lost. And to designate someone else as the lost sheep. If we do that, we make two dumb-sheep mistakes. First, we forget that if we’re the ninety-nine and the other person is the lost sheep, then guess where Jesus is? Not in here with us. Out there under a doorway or in a prison or hospital or anywhere else one of his sheep might be lost, alone, and scared.

Second, we forget that when Jesus talks about “ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance,” he’s talking about fictional characters. Ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance don’t exist. There’s nobody here but us lost sheep. And we are set free when we quit trying to convince ourselves and other people that we’re not lost. Jesus doesn’t spend his time in the neatly dusted and vacuumed rooms of your spirit, the parts of yourself you keep respectable and put-together. He’s out in the back alley where you hide your garbage, knocking at the door of the ugliest, most insecure, greedy, lustful, grasping, chambers of your heart—not to condemn, but to redeem and restore.

If you go visit St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, you’ll find a Greek phrase engraved on the altar table in beautiful gilded letters: houtos hamartolous prosdechetai kai sunesthiei autois. It doesn’t mean “Holy, holy, holy” or “Do this in remembrance of me.” It’s a phrase from today’s gospel, meant as an insult to Jesus, that instead is a testament to his love. “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them!” And those words are invisibly written on this table too. This table is for lost sheep, lost coins, and lost souls. The only one not invited is one who thinks they don’t need to be here.

So come, let whoever is hungry take food and whoever is thirsty take drink without price, let the shepherd and the woman call their friends together and throw their parties, let there be rejoicing in heaven, and let the sinners take their places at the heavenly feast.

[1] Harriet Constable, “Sheep are one of the most unfairly stereotyped animals on the planet. Almost everything we believe about them is wrong,” BBC Earth (April 19, 2017), http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170418-sheep-are-not-stupid-and-they-are-not-helpless-either.

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

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It was 1862. It was wartime. But despite the Civil War, the new dome was still in progress on the U.S. Capitol building. The last piece was the great statue of Freedom for the top. It had been shipped from Italy in five sections and temporarily plastered together. But there was a problem. It was time to separate it again for the final casting, and no one knew how to get it apart. The seams were hidden by the plaster. One skilled laborer saved the day. He attached a pulley to the top and pulled up just enough until the seams began to show. The casting could proceed, and the statue stands atop the Capitol to this day.

That man’s name was Philip Reid. He was a black man. And he was a slave. Or rather, he was one of many, many enslaved people who provided the labor for the Capitol Building, most of whose names we don’t know.[1]

It can seem ironic that enslaved people built the Capitol, this symbol of liberty; even the Statue of Freedom on the top. But it’s a symbol of the deep irony built into the history of this country, whose founding documents speak of liberty while enshrining the idea that one person could own another into law.

On August 20, 1619, four hundred years and about two weeks ago, the first European ship, the White Lion, arrived in Virginia carrying kidnapped African people to be sold into slavery. You may have seen the 1619 Project, the special edition of the New York Times Magazine, which tries to put this neglected event back at the center of American history. And it belongs there. We might wish that the story of this country can be told with slavery and racism as a sidebar. But the fact is that slavery existed here for over two hundred years, still longer than the time since it ended. And even after it legally ended, its poisonous legacy of racial injustice continues to this day. The fact is, just like slavery was a central part of the building of the Capitol Building, slavery is a central part of our national story.

Almost two thousand years ago the Apostle Paul wrote a letter to his friend Philemon. It was a personal letter, but one meant to be read in front of the whole church. And it was about slavery. Now ancient Roman slavery was different in some ways from American slavery. It wasn’t based on race. It was easier in some ways for ancient Roman slaves to gain education, social status, and their freedom. But at the heart of both systems was the idea that one human being could be another’s property. In Paul’s place and time that idea was taken for granted. So the letter Paul writes is radical.

There was a slave named Onesimus who had escaped from Philemon’s house. Somehow he made his way to Paul, where he became a Christian. An escaped slave would ordinarily face severe punishment or even death. But Paul writes to Philemon that he should take Onesimus back, not only without punishment, but “no longer as a slave, but as a beloved brother.” Scholars still debate whether Paul is actually telling Philemon to emancipate Onesimus, but I think the letter is fairly clear. For a wealthy person of status to forgive a runaway slave would already have meant significant loss of face in Roman society. To then free him and treat him as a brother would have been unheard of. But Paul says that’s simply what the gospel demands.

In today’s gospel Jesus tells us that following him has a cost. It might cost us money, or status, or possessions, or even loved ones or life itself. I wonder if Philemon realized the cost when he decided to follow Jesus. It cost him more than just the value of one enslaved worker. It cost him his sense of how his world functioned. It cost him his self-understanding as someone with more status. It cost him his ability to take for granted that the difference between him and Onesimus was just how the world worked. It cost him his illusions.

What illusions will following Jesus cost us?

We all have illusions about our society and our place in it. I remember as a child somehow having the belief that this country had never started a war, and never lost a war. I don’t know who taught me that or where I picked it up. I remember the surprise and kind of betrayal I felt as a teenager when I learned that neither of those things was true.

There can be a similar sense of surprise and betrayal for those of us raised on textbooks that gloss over this country’s racial history, and especially those of us like Philemon who happened to be born with some characteristics that gave us some social benefit and who have a vested interest in not thinking too hard about why that’s the case.

Today, for example, the average white household has a net worth ten times the average black household.[2] That’s not because of working harder. Scholars can trace the wealth gap pretty directly from slavery, through Jim Crow laws, segregation, and redlining, up to the present day. That’s one part of the story. And there’s more to our national story about race too: the removal of indigenous people, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the interment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the treatment of Hispanic Americans and immigrants throughout our history, including the detention camps today.[3] This country has been set up, since before it was a country, in ways that favor European settlers and their descendants. It doesn’t have to always be that way. If we hear Paul’s and Jesus’s words today, particularly for those of us who are white, there is a special responsibility—a necessity—to work to make sure it doesn’t stay that way. Facing our history is the first step toward changing our future. If we follow Jesus, it will cost us. But it will set us free.

[1] “Philip Reid and the Statue of Freedom,” Architect of the Capitol, https://www.aoc.gov/philip-reid-and-statue-freedom.

[2] “The median family wealth for white people is $171,000, compared with just $17,600 for black people.” Trymaine Lee, “A Vast Wealth Gap, Driven By Segregation, Redlining, Evictions and Exclusion, Separates Black and White America,” The 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-wealth-gap.html.

[3] Here I draw with thanks from Deacon Pamela Moore’s sermon “Confession and Forgiveness,” delivered at Epiphany Lutheran and Episcopal Church, Marina, CA, August 25, 2019.

Proverbs 25:6-7
Psalm 112
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

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I’m one of those rare people who have never watched an episode of the show Game of Thrones: all I know is context-free cultural references. But over the past eight years it’s been impossible not to hear about things like the Red Wedding, the White Walkers, dragons, armies, and a gripping mix of violence, intrigue, and high fantasy, all centered around the manipulations, alliances, and betrayals involved in jockeying for the right to sit on the Iron Throne.

Palace intrigue, jockeying for position: it’s a formula that seems to work for TV in general. It’s been at the heart of other recent series from The Tudors (set in 16th-century England) to House of Cards (set in modern-day Washington). The record-setting number of hirings and firings in the current presidential administration means we hear a lot about the game of power in real life too. It’s a game with lots of strategies. But false humility is often a good one. It pays to be visible, but not too visible. People in power don’t like to be outshined. You don’t want to overplay your hand. Better to bide your time, kiss up to the boss or king or president, and then bask in their praise when it comes your way.

Now Jesus’ parable about taking the lowest seat at a banquet seems a bit strange, in that it seems to fit right into this pattern. Don’t march right up and sit by the host only to be embarrassed; instead, act humble and then reap the rewards. It seems to have more in common with Game of Thrones than with the upside-down values of God’s kingdom. It’s conventional wisdom, all right. It actually echoes our first reading from Proverbs almost word for word. So there’s not much original that Jesus is saying here. Which probably means that we have to look deeper.

One important thing about this story is the situation in which Jesus tells it. Luke tells us he says this while at a banquet, watching the guests jockey for their seat positions. So this isn’t about abstract theoretical advice. Instead, it’s almost as if Jesus is naming the elephant in the room by describing exactly the behavior he’s seeing. It’s as if, while the guests sidle up to the head table while trying not to look too obvious, Jesus announces to the room, “You know what would work even better?” And then reminds them of this bit of canny folk wisdom from the book of Proverbs. It’s as if, perhaps, Jesus isn’t so much suggesting that false humility is the best way to get ahead, as exposing the absurdity of the entire game.

And now after exposing it, he doubles down by imagining a world beyond those games entirely, where the point isn’t to gain honor and respect in the eyes of others, but to give them away. “When you give a banquet, don’t invite your friends and neighbors who can repay you. When you give a banquet, invite those who are poor, those who can’t repay you.” Put it on God’s tab, Jesus says. You’ll be repaid all right, but not in the world’s currency. Not in job prospects or gossip-column mentions or Twitter likes. Not in this world’s terms, but those of the next.

How do we practice Jesus’ call to live like this, a life not based on status or reciprocation but on totally free, lavish grace?

One way we try, a little bit, here at Incarnation is our Sunday morning Open Table breakfast. Every week, before our 8:00 service, we serve a hot breakfast to all comers. It’s free. It’s good. You can have some, no matter who you are. It’s a small, imperfect, but real and meaningful sign of God’s kingdom. It’s a perfect counterpart to the other breakfast we celebrate each Sunday, the one in this room around this table. That one is a full meal, with plates and silverware and napkins. This one is ritualized, with a morsel and sip for all. Each of these two meals is a a symbol of the great wedding banquet we’re all invited to. And these two meals need each other, in a way. The Open Table breakfast is an invitation for all, offered freely in the name of Jesus. For those who find themselves drawn to Jesus by that invitation, there’s an invitation to join him in another way by sharing his body and blood at this table. But for those who share his body and blood at this table, the very life of Jesus we receive here catapults us back out to love and serve and seek our neighbors, maybe by serving at Open Table, among all the other ways we might find ourselves living out our call to follow Jesus in the world.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” says our second lesson this morning; “for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” It’s a reference to an ancient story of Abraham and Sarah, who showed hospitality to three traveling strangers who turned out to be the angels of the LORD. But it’s also a reference for all of us, because each time we are generous, each time we offer kindness to a stranger, each time we give without thinking about the return, it’s to God that we are giving.

May God teach and train our hearts, day by day, to be soft and generous. May this eucharist fill us with the life of Jesus, and send us into the world to serve. May we live a life beyond status, beyond prestige, where all are welcome because all are guests of the one who gave everything for us.

Isaiah 58:9b-14
Psalm 103:1-8
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

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“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”

That’s one of the Ten Commandments, either #3 or #4 depending on whose numbering system you use. They aren’t actually numbered in either of the two places they appear in Scripture, so Jews, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and other Protestants have all developed slightly different numbering systems.

Those two places are the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. And each one gives a different rationale for this commandment. Exodus says: “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy … for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the seventh day and hallowed it.” So in Exodus the Sabbath is based on God’s own day of rest after the creation. Deuteronomy: “Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy … (for) you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” So in Deuteronomy, the Sabbath is based on liberation: the day of rest is a sign that the people of Israel are no longer slaves who must work seven days a week, but the free people of God.

Today we hear about Jesus performing an act of liberation on the Sabbath. He even seems to suggest that it’s especially appropriate on the Sabbath. His rationale is that if some forms of work, like feeding and watering your animals to sustain life, are appropriate on the Sabbath, then how much more should the life of a child of God be restored to wholeness on this day. Jesus is acting as a rabbi giving an interpretation of the Law, one that differs from the synagogue leader’s interpretation. Often this passage has been misused by Christians to portray all of Judaism as a kind of loveless, rules-driven religion, and to portray the Sabbath as a kind of joyless day where people aren’t allowed to do anything fun. Anyone who’s ever spent Shabbat with an observant Jewish friend knows better. The Sabbath is a day of joy and love, family, prayer, and play. In opposing the synagogue leader Jesus isn’t setting aside Judaism or the Law; he’s stepping into a rich stream of tradition of interpreting the Law on how to honor Shabbat as a day of both rest and liberation.

There’s another misunderstanding Christians have often fallen into about the Sabbath, and that’s to apply the word and the concept to Sunday. Sometimes we hear Sunday called a “Christian Sabbath.” But from the very beginning Christians understood Sunday as something different from the Sabbath. The earliest Christians, who were Jews, kept Sabbath on Saturday—and met together after the Sabbath to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on the first day of the week. It’s certainly appropriate to treat Sunday as a special day, to refrain from work when we’re able, and to do family and church things on Sunday. But we miss the mark when we think of Sunday as a kind of replacement Sabbath, especially when that becomes the same kind of joyless stereotype that was wrong in the first place. From a Christian perspective, Saturday is the Sabbath, the seventh day of creation, a day of rest—one that’s not binding on Christians who are Gentiles, but to be respected nonetheless. Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, sometimes also called the eighth day, as if to say that the resurrection of Jesus bursts out of the boundaries of the calendar to launch a new era of history.

So we gather on the Lord’s Day. And although it’s not the Sabbath, our worship should still carry some of those qualities of both rest and liberation, which aren’t opposites but part of a single unified whole.

Take out a prayer book for a moment, the red book in the pew rack. Turn to page 855. This is part of the Episcopal Church’s catechism, a simple overview of the church’s teaching. If you haven’t seen it before, I recommend it. If you don’t have a prayer book at home, it’s available online.[1] Let’s read just the first two questions and answers on this page:


Sometimes we think of worship on the one hand and mission on the other. We might think of going to church on Sundays to refuel our gas tank, and then going out the rest of the week to practice our mission of doing justice. But in reality it’s much more intermingled than that. We are doing justice right here, right now, as we worship. We are praying for ourselves and our neighbors. We are sharing the peace of Christ with friends and strangers. We are treating one another with courtesy and reverence, sharing the body and blood of Christ together, young and old, rich and poor at the same rail, receiving the same food and drink, all receiving enough, none receiving too much. “The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships,” the catechism says. And it pursues its mission outside these doors too. Worship is part of mission, not separate from it.

And mission is part of worship too. When we share food or drink with someone who’s hungry. When we advocate for housing for everyone who needs it, or for fair treatment of people who come here seeking safety or a better life. When we do the hard work of loving our families and friends and coworkers and neighbors in Jesus’ name—each of those things is also an act of worship, because it gives praise and glory to God.

Today Jesus lifts up a woman who has been bowed down for eighteen years. Today still he is lifting us up too, and enlisting us with him in sharing his mission. Today too we are baptizing David Del Vecchio into that mission: a mission of worship and prayer, of justice and service; a mission that continues until that great Sabbath when our worship and our liberation are complete.

[1] See The Online Book of Common Prayer, https://bcponline.org/Misc/catechism.html.

Jeremiah 23:23-29
Psalm 82
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56

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Fire! Ominous-sounding baptisms! Divisions among families! Threatening signs of social disaster!

Sometimes I fantasize about publishing an expurgated version of the Gospel. You can bet the section we just read wouldn’t be in it! In fact, I think most of us operate on a sort of mentally-expurgated version of the Bible, where the parts that threaten us most–or fit least well with our personal experience–just disappear.

Some of you know that my husband used to be the Protestant Chaplain at Napa State Hospital, a hospital for the criminally insane. I asked him whether he would preach on this passage to his mental patients, and he said, “Absolutely not! They need to hear about peace and love and forgiveness.” I knew he would say that. But I couldn’t help thinking, “Isn’t that what I need to hear, too? Isn’t it what all of us need to hear? Peace and love and forgiveness? Why do we have to deal with these nasty sayings of Jesus? And more to the point, what do I think about Jesus–and my commitment to Jesus–if he really said things like this?”

It may be helpful to imagine the audience Jesus was saying these things to. The first part of what we read was directed at the disciples. Jesus is telling them that he came to bring fire to the earth, and he came to undergo a kind of baptism, and he is anxious to get on with it. It sounds like he is talking with his closest followers about his real ministry, right then and right there. He may not know for certain at this point that his path will lead to the Cross, but he certainly knows by now that it is already leading to conflict with the leaders of his society. And that conflict is going to be big. Jesus sees himself as something quite a bit more than just a catalyst for change. When he describes the coming crisis, he doesn’t use “tame,” civilized images like national conventions and ballot boxes; he talks in cosmic-level pictures: earthquakes and epidemics and firestorms and riots. The crisis is coming, and it’s going to be big.

And the fallout for these followers of his will be cataclysmic, too. That is why he goes on to talk about how he brings not peace but division—and specifically, division within the very most basic system of the society, the family. He demands from his disciples a level of loyalty that could mean turning away from those nearest and dearest to them. And in fact, in the history of Christian discipleship over the centuries, there are hundreds and thousands of stories of people who were faced with precisely this dilemma–do I follow Christ or the rules of my father, or mother, or clan?

Why were the disciples following Jesus right then and there? It seems certain that many of them were hopeful that he would be the one to drive out the Romans and restore Israel to a time of independence and prosperity. A return to the kind of stability they associated with peace. The kind of peace that results from military and economic success. The kind of peace that speaks to the world the news that “our people are the most favored.” You know, that kind of peace. So in declaring “I have come not to bring peace but division,” Jesus is warning his disciples about their blindness to what he is really doing. He is marching toward Jerusalem, and the stakes in the game are rising. The great crisis of his time with them is at hand. Will they stand with him or against him? Will they follow him through this wrenching demonstration of God’s truth? Or will they hang back, retreating to the safety of their families, of old structures, old norms, old alliances? Are these disciples really prepared for the difficulties that will beset them in the future?

Now Jesus turns to the crowd gathered around him. “You are plenty skilled at predicting the weather,” he says. “Why can’t you look at the signs of the times and see what’s coming?” Again, he may simply be directing their attention to the increasing resistance to his own mission, right then and there. Or he may be trying to alert them to the overall direction of events in first century Judaea–the events that will lead, not too far in the future, to the complete crushing of the Jewish nation and the destruction of the Temple. There are a number of places in the Gospel accounts where Jesus predicts the fall of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem. Here he seems to be saying, “It doesn’t take special powers to see into the future to know that the end is near. If you all would just open your eyes, you would see it as plainly as I do.”

So the rather scary message we just heard can be firmly rested in the specific, limited historical world of the New Testament. Jesus’ powerful images of fire and baptism and weather signs, his claim that he came as a force of division rather than to bring peace–these strong words were spoken to real individuals, operating in a very peculiar, a very particular time and space. We breathe a sigh of relief–maybe it’s “their” message, not really “ours”.

The problem is, if we step outside the frame of that biblical picture—if we hold that world at arm’s length and happily sing about how “then was then” and “now is now”–I mean, we’re not first-century Jews and we’re not physically walking along with a known revolutionary–the problem is, if we abandon all that, then we have to let go of the rest of the story, too. The part about being made one with God in the blood of Christ. The part about “God so loved the world.” The part about forgiveness. We would have to abandon the very basis of our Christian hope–the claim that an event that happened two thousand years ago has direct bearing on the meaning of our lives today.

So if we open our hearts and open our minds to listen to what Jesus was saying two thousand years ago–to those people, in that place–what do we hear him say to “these” people, in “this” place?

I hear him calling us to listen with new ears, to learn new languages. Why were the hearers of his own day in such grave danger? Why was Jesus himself such a threat to the authorities, and why would his fledgling church so provoke the people around it? Because Jesus was demanding that the old vessels be smashed, the old terms be abandoned. You people have tried to tie God up in a box, he says. You’ve wrapped God in a tidy package and covered it with bows and stickers and just the right amount of postage and insurance. And then you’ve begun to worship the packaging! God bestows the blessings of peace, and so we look at the peace itself and fall in love with it and make it into a god. God bestows the blessings of the family, and so we look at the family structures and traditions and relationships and we fall in love with them, and we make them into a god. And God bestows freedom on a people, and we cherish the freedom and revel in it, and make it into a god. We worship the peace, and the family, and the freedom, and forget that they are gifts, and work for them as if they were the living forces undergirding our lives.

But only God is God. And those blessings, wondrous as they may be, like freedom and peace and the security of the home, are only blessings, they aren’t God. But God is alive, and God is moving, and God can’t be contained in any language or picture or package of any kind. God isn’t a tame God! God isn’t a palsy-walsy God! The God of Jesus Christ is full of surprises, full of a power we can’t predict or comprehend! Are we ready to swear allegiance to that? Are we ready to walk with Jesus in humble obedience to a God we can’t comprehend, can’t contain, can’t reduce to simple, pretty, human terms?

That seems to me to be something like what Jesus is saying to us, here and now. And after issuing us this challenge, this warning, Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem and demonstrates to us, shows us, lives out for us just how outrageous and unconventional and awesome this God is. With Jesus, we live through the most extreme opposite of those blessings we value so highly. Instead of winning military or social success, Jesus lives out dismal failure. Instead of the security of family, Jesus dies abandoned by his closest friends. Instead of peace, his presence brings on violence. Instead of freedom, Jesus is caught in a web of political and religious tyranny.

And yet…that suffering, that captivity, that abandonment brings the very gifts we long for. This awesome, outrageous God of Jesus wrestles joy and peace and life and hope from the most unlikely human events. God showed us how it worked then, two thousand years ago. But even that mighty story can’t define how God will act tomorrow, or the next day. The God of Jesus Christ isn’t tame! The God of Jesus Christ can’t be contained! Are we ready to walk with Jesus in faithfulness to that awesome God? Are we ready to walk with him into the next, unexpected story of God’s power?

In a few minutes, here, at this altar, Jesus will offer us himself, as nourishment for that walk. Let us receive him in faith, our loving brother, the source of our courage, and the living Word that challenges us to open our ears and eyes and minds to the endless possibility that is our God. Amen.

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 33:12-22
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

+ + +

PREPARATION

“You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Luke 12:40

I thought of calling this piece, “Defensive Living.” I wanted to write about being prepared for such things as drivers who run red lights, or for checking out where the emergency exits are located or even for preserving your teeth by flossing. Jesus spoke about defensive living in his parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids. The wise bridesmaids took enough oil for the lamps, plus some in reserve. The parable concludes with the same exhortation as today’s parable: “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” We need to be prepared for the crisis that is to come (we are all too familiar with devastating fires, earthquakes and El Niño floods). We need to keep our gas tanks filled, our cell phones charged, our bicycle tires inflated. We need to keep our emergency pack handy (ours includes a flash light with spare batteries, a wind up radio, a can opener and a space blanket among other things). But I find “Defensive Living” is already taken as the titles of a couple of books whose message is that you need a handgun to protect yourself.

The message in today’s gospel is “Be prepared.” It is important that one is ready. If you are going to run a marathon you need to train for several months. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth where the Isthmian Games were held (a rival of the games held at Olympia). Athletes need discipline and self-control. They need to run with perseverance, which means having stamina.

Medical students learn a great many things without knowing if they will ever come in useful. When we were in Hong Kong, a pediatrician diagnosed a Wilms Tumor in the young child of some parishioners. He had never seen one before but his training taught him to diagnose it. He sent them immediately to the University of Rochester Medical Center where they treated it.

The metaphor concerns some servants who are waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet. They have no idea when it will happen. It could be in daytime or the middle of the night. The important thing is for the servants to remain alert. This is more than a commonplace story. The situation may be urgent, a matter of life-and-death.

Let me illustrate. André Trocmé was the pastor of the Huguenot church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-east France during World War II. He was posted to this remote village because his pacifist views were not popular with the hierarchy. Even before the war began, he was training his parishioners for the forth-coming crisis, so that when the Jews arrived, escaping from the Nazis, they were ready to provide shelter. They knew that it was their duty to help their neighbors in need. Trocmé preached about the passage in Deuteronomy ordering the setting apart of sanctuary cities where someone who has unintentionally killed another may flee and live. During the war, this village of 3,000 residents saved 5,000 Jews, mostly children. He was aided and abetted by his remarkable wife Magda. One time when the Vichy police came to arrest her husband, she fed them. “It was dinnertime,” she said, “and they were standing in my way, we were all hungry,” None of this would have happened if Trocmé had not trained his parishioners in advance. The two are designated as “Righteous among the Nations,” at Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial.

A second story is closer to home. 20 years ago I attended the Faith-based Coalition for Affordable Housing in Santa Rosa. Members of 17 different denominations attended the city planning board. The land which had been set aside for affordable housing was being used to build high-end properties. For a long time the cost of housing in Sonoma County has been out of sight and there have been few places for low-income people to live. 102 people were there to see that justice was done, a crowd which filled the room. We were led by my friend Rabbi Michael Robinson and his congregant, Stephen Harper. There were a lot of members of the synagogue, Shomrei Torah. I asked Stephen why they were there. He told me that they had been discussing the problem of Affordable Housing and this was their opportunity to stand up and be counted. Most of Friends Meeting were there; they had been holding monthly meetings for the previous 18 months, getting informed and talking about homelessness in our community. We all heard the chairman mutter to his colleague, “I knew that this would happen sooner or later.”

We usher at the Luther Burbank Center. Ushers are the first line of defense for the safety of our guests. Each time we go Betsy or Marcus reminds us what to do in the event of an earthquake: open the doors before the building subsides. We also had training in the event of a shooter entering the building. In order of preference: run or hide or as a last resort fight. These instructions are approved by the Department of Homeland Security. It is crucial that we know what to do in advance.

As Jesus said, “We know neither the day nor the hour.” We need to listen to the prophets when we are “wakened by a solemn warning.” We need to distinguish between false prophets and true prophets. False prophets tell us that everything is going to be fine, fine, fine! But true prophets tells us things that we don’t want to hear, about the coming crises like climate change or the coming financial crash. Whatever the crisis is we need to take action now. Here is the urgency. If we leave it too long it will be too late. So “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.”

Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning give me oil in my lamp, I pray
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning keep me burning till the break of day
Sing hosanna, sing hosanna, sing hosanna to the Servant King

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
Psalm 49:1-11
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

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There are a lot of clichés associated with this gospel passage, about how possessions don’t do us any good after we die. Fairly often we hear people say “You can’t take it with you.” Sometimes people facetiously say, “The one who dies with the most toys wins,” and presumably they don’t mean it literally but as a commentary on how empty that philosophy is. More creatively, there was a country song a few years ago that said, “You’ve never seen a hearse with a trailer hitch.”

Those clichés have value as far as they go. Death is a reality for us and we have to come to terms with that as human beings. Piling up possessions, for those who are able to do it, can be one way of trying to hide from our mortality. Life is short, and we don’t know when it will end, and we need to see our lives in the light of eternity.

And yet today I find myself unable today to find a lot of meaning in those clichés, at the end of a week where our culture’s obsession with violence and oversaturation with weapons has borne fruit in three more mass shootings. The week began with a terror attack in Gilroy. When I went to bed last night I thought it had ended with another at a Walmart in El Paso. When I woke up this morning I learned that even that wasn’t the end of it: late last night another nine people were killed by another gunman outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio.

So today it’s hard for me to be satisfied with a kind of conventional moral lesson from our gospel story today that simply says, be ready for death because it could come at any time. Sure: it could come at any time. But it’s not supposed to come like this. The kind of random, sociopathic hate we see in these acts of terror is something different. A healthy awareness of our mortality is one thing. Living in a society where a Walmart can become a war zone is unacceptable. It’s not the result of the ordinary fragility of existence. It’s the result of human choices. It’s the result of human sin.

What I think this story does have to say to us today is less about mortality and more about isolation. The man in this story seems to think he needs no one but himself and his things. The only person he talks to in the story is himself. He tries to create a universe sufficient to himself. And in the end it’s an empty one. That’s the same kind of isolation that we see so often in young, disaffected men who commit these horrific acts of nihilistic rage. It’s the lie that says that we are separate from one another, that my well-being isn’t bound up with yours.

Today we gather in community, (here at Incarnation, and then later others of us at Armstrong Woods) under the redwood trees, siblings in Christ from Incarnation and St. Andrew’s Mission. It’s a small act and a very unremarkable one. But just by gathering today we are doing something important. We are bearing witness to the fact that we exist most fundamentally not as isolated individuals but as a community. We need one another. As Christians we cannot be the Body of Christ alone. And we proclaim that human beings were not created to be self-sufficient. We are not worlds unto ourselves. We need each other.

I read an article[1] earlier this week about trees: about how trees in a forest, which look like separate organisms, are often actually interconnected at the root level. So deeply interconnected that some forests are less separate organisms than “superorganisms,” like a coral colony, where the distinctions among individuals blur together. The article was a study that found that even leafless stumps are sometimes kept alive by their neighbors, even though they can no longer create their own food by photosynthesis, and no longer contribute any to the rest of the system.

As Christians we believe human beings are something like that. We were created for connection. And we need one another. And that means that if one member of the human family is suffering, is excluded, is mistreated, that mistreatment ripples through the entire root system. It hurts us all. And it means we are called to support one another, to share what we have and care for others.

As Christians we also gather here today in the name of Jesus Christ. And as followers of Jesus one of our core beliefs is that death is not the final word. We believe we are held in the hands of a God who has conquered death, has conquered violence, and who is working even now through Jesus Christ, and through us, to overcome evil and heal the world.

What we do when we gather is unremarkable. But it’s also radical. Today we proclaim that we are members of one another and that our well-being is bound up with the well-being of all of us. That none of us will be fully free until all are free, and as Paul says in Colossians today, Christ is all in all.

________________

[1] “Tree Stumps Can Live On Indefinitely … With A Little Help From Their Friends,” The Economist (July 25, 2019): https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/07/25/tree-stumps-can-live-on-indefinitely. The article’s behind a paywall; for a similar, freely accessible article, see Russell McLendon, “Why Would Trees Keep a Nearby Stump Alive?”, Mother Nature Network (July 29, 2019): https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/blogs/tree-stumps-can-be-kept-alive-nearby-trees.

Genesis 18:20-32
Psalm 138
Colossians 2:6-19
Luke 11:1-13

I tell you, even though he won’t give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will give it to him.

+ + +

This passage has a special resonance for me now that I have a three-and-a-half-year-old who’s a master at the dark arts of negotiation and stalling.

I actually wonder if she’s been reading this passage. “They might not give it to you because they’re your parents, but at least because of your persistence they will give it to you!” This does work sometimes. Some of the things I’ve been asked for in the last several days include: permission to eat a strawberry before washing it. Permission to eat the dessert watermelon before having at least two bites of squash. A real jump rope. Seven different toys from a small toy store in Guerneville. Not to have to take a bath. I’ll let you guess which ones I gave in on.

It’s hard when your kid asks for something and you’re not sure whether to say yes or not. I think every parent likes to make their child happy. Certainly if Abby asked for an egg we would never give her a scorpion. But of course she often asks for things that wouldn’t be good for her; or wouldn’t be good for her right then. Even though she asks with an admirable boldness, there are things we have to say no to that she simply isn’t able to understand.

Scripture tells us that God is in many ways like a parent. The metaphor of God as Father reigned unquestioned for centuries, and in the past few decades it’s come in for some well-merited criticism. Today, more than in many past eras, we’re aware of how our cultures and even our languages tend to privilege male over female. We’re aware that not everyone has a father, and that for those who do, not everyone has a positive experience of their fathers. Fatherhood for some can mean absence, or tyranny, or abuse. We’re aware of the shortcomings of that metaphor, and of the fact that God is also in many ways a Mother, and a Friend, and many other things. As we move toward a healthier understanding of gender and power, we may be able to get back to having “Father” as one very important member of our repertoire of titles for God; a title used by Jesus himself, and not the only title, but a central one.

And if God is like a Father, and for that matter a Mother or any kind of Parent, then presumably there are things we may ask for that God can delight in giving us, right then and there, as I might delight in handing Abby a strawberry (hopefully washed). And then there may be other things we may ask for that aren’t good for us; or wouldn’t be good for us right now. And like a small child, we may be completely unable with our human capacities to comprehend why on earth something we long for so ardently and pray for so fervently might not be good for us, and why God says no.

Jesus teaches his disciples to pray with confidence to a parent who loves them. And he teaches them to pray with boldness and persistence. And yet in this passage he doesn’t actually say we will be given whatever we want. Jesus says “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”—not “give whatever they ask for,” but “give the Holy Spirit.” (In the version of this passage that appears in the Gospel of Matthew, it says he will “give good things” to those who ask him … again, not just anything, but good things.)

There may be times in our lives when we pray and don’t get what we want, yet what we do get is what we most need.

Now I want to be careful here. Because as soon as we acknowledge that sometimes God doesn’t give us what we want because it isn’t good for us, we run into the danger of a kind of simplistic theology that says “Everything happens for a reason.” Many of us when facing some kind of suffering or loss have experienced the pain that can come when a well-intentioned friend says something like, “Well, God must want it this way” or “God never gives you more than you can handle,” as if God is the source of the evil things that happen. Those who are going through a life-threatening illness, or a loved one’s betrayal, or the death of a child, or the horrors of war know that some things are just bad. Not gifts in disguise, not clouds with a silver lining. There is tragedy in this world. Christian faith knows that. We don’t proclaim that evil is an illusion or that everything is a beautiful balance of good and evil. We proclaim that evil exists, and that God is in the process of defeating it. That defeat happened once and for all in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And yet the victory isn’t complete yet, and we still live in a world where we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Last Wednesday morning I was at Anam Cara, our weekly contemplative prayer group. We chanted Psalm 15, which describes a righteous person, and ends, “Whoever does these things shall never be overthrown.” In our discussion afterwards we reflected on what that really means. Lots of righteous people suffer unjustly. We talked about how the psalm might be a kind of wish: “Oh, that those who do these things would never be overthrown!” Or might be taken more in the light of eternity: in God’s ultimate justice and mercy, the righteous may indeed face tragedy but will not be overthrown in the end.

We don’t know why some of our prayers seem to be answered and others not. What we can know is that our prayers are heard by a God who is pure, fierce love. And beyond that, a God who took on the human condition as one of us. A God, the Son of God, who taught his followers to pray boldly for their needs: “Give us our daily bread, forgive us our sins, do not bring us to the time of trial.” Jesus himself prayed to be spared his own trial. And that prayer was heard, although not answered in the way the Son of God himself hoped for in that moment. Jesus went to the cross. The righteous man was overthrown. Until, on the third day, he wasn’t.

May God grant us the gift of boldness and persistence in prayer. And may we know that whatever our prayer is, it is always heard by one who loves us more than we love ourselves, more than we could ever know.

Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

or
Genesis 18:1-10a
Psalm 15
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Psalm 25:1-9
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

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Do you know what a snow-plant is?

I had never seen a snow-plant until I was walking in a grove of sequoias a year or two ago, up at Lake Tahoe, and there they were, two or three of them, poking up from beneath the pine needles, looking like red torpedoes, or fat red asparagus, or some kind of lumpy red mushroom. I stopped in amazement, and crouched low over them, with my hands clasped behind me, to look closely without disturbing them. And someone, it seemed, had taken the trouble to make sure I didn’t disturb them, because around them was drawn a circle in pinecones.

On this hike, nearly every little cluster of snow-plants I saw had a similar circle of pinecones drawn around it. Some of the snow-plants were done for the season, rusty brown and dried out with their seeds sprinkled around them; and some of them were still bright red and fresh. So I was sure that the same person had not drawn all the pinecone circles. And what made me the most sure was that finally I found a group of brilliantly colored, new snow-plants, and I stopped for a minute and enjoyed them, and then I gathered pinecones and drew a circle around them myself.

Later, back at camp, I was reporting my experience to my husband. “Why did you draw the circle?” he asked. “I’m not quite sure,” I answered. “It seemed like the thing to do. It was like when you see something really wonderful, or you see something that looks magic or sacred, you want to draw a circle around it to set it apart, to hold it up, to say, ‘This is special, this is to be noticed, this is to be wondered at.'” And my husband answered, “Seems to me when you draw a circle around something, it means, ‘Keep out.'”

Boundaries. The problem is, they don’t have any absolute meaning in themselves. My husband and I, looking at the same raw data, made two different meanings of it. I saw a frame around a work of art. He saw a fence. A wall. And we were both looking from the vantage point of someone standing outside the circle of pinecones. Might the boundary mean something else from inside the circle?

You know on the west shore of the lake, those magnificent estates that you can barely see into, because they have a huge wall around them? Boundaries, for sure. But what do they mean? If you live in the big house inside, maybe you’re thinking about security, or privacy. All those tourists, you think. All those people like Linda Clader who want to peer into your yard, and catch a glimpse of how you live. If you’re on the outside, driving by, you’re probably thinking about snobbery, or the division of wealth in our society. And you might feel a little envious. Or you might reverse the discrimination, and feel superior because you have to work so hard for what you have.

Boundaries. They aren’t all like a wall or a circle, or the frame around a picture– a line you can see. Boundaries can be produced by sounds, too. A neighbor of mine keeps his dog in the yard with a boundary made by a high-pitched noise. And another friend of mine doesn’t go into a store unless she can hear someone speaking Spanish.

Boundaries. Without them, you can’t play tennis. Without them, you can’t drive a car safely. Without them, you can’t keep a calendar, you can’t run a government, you can’t wage a war. It seems that we humans are programmed, or built, to need edges on things.

Which is why we need to be patient with that lawyer in the story. Like all of us, he was educated to appreciate the usefulness of boundaries. When he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” he was doing nothing more outrageous than anyone does who tries to get a firm grip on the meaning of some rule or other, some boundary or other.

Even more to the point, as a lawyer, he was a professional reader and interpreter of the Book of Deuteronomy.

Now, the book of Deuteronomy has a lot to do with drawing distinctions, with defining what it means to be a member of the people of Israel. But that lawyer, that student of the Law, knew perfectly well that the Law of Moses wasn’t intended to be wielded like a club to bash those who were outside the community, outside the circle. He knew perfectly well that the Law of Moses wasn’t aimed at keeping outsiders outside; it was aimed at teaching the community under the Law to live justly with one another.

The Law drew a circle around this peculiar community of people who saw themselves as subject to their peculiar God; the Law drew a circle, to point up the wonder of that people’s story, and to mark how sacred that story was. But the Law did something else, too: it commanded those peculiar people to look around within that circle, and outside it, and to pay attention to their neighbors who were in need.

The lawyer in the story understood all this. In fact, he and Jesus seem to have agreed right away that the whole of the Law boiled down to love God and love your neighbor. “You have given the right answer,” says Jesus; “Do this, and you will live.”

The problem with the lawyer was that he apparently had no intention of doing anything. Like so many of us, he had gotten trapped into believing that knowing was enough. And again, like so many of us, he had also slid into that very dangerous habit of using his knowledge to draw a little circle around himself so he could feel safe. The circle he had drawn was smaller than that other boundary between us and them. The circle he had drawn protected him even from his own countrymen.

The story Jesus tells him takes aim exactly at those circles, those boundaries that the lawyer has pulled up so close to himself. The story follows a familiar Jewish pattern. A man lies at the side of the road, stripped of everything and beaten to a pulp. A priest passes by, and then a Levite. Both of these characters are professional holy men in the Jewish tradition, but they don’t do what is obviously–to everyone, certainly including the lawyer–they don’t do what is obviously the right thing; they pass by on the other side.

Now we’re following a traditional storytelling pattern, and Jesus’ audience and we all know that the third person is always going to be the good guy. The expected character here would have been the humble Jewish layman, who follows the Law, shows compassion, and somehow saves the day. That’s what the lawyer would have expected. Something like that is what we expect. But it’s not what Jesus gives us.

The “hero” that Jesus brings into the story at this point is the despicable Samaritan. Today, when we call someone a “Good Samaritan,” we are never playing on that aspect of the story. A Samaritan was a heretic, and an outcast, a thoroughly loathsome, barely human character. We all want to identify with the hero in a story, and so when we retell the story of the Good Samaritan, we conveniently forget that the hero is someone we wouldn’t even speak to. Then we go on identifying with the one who showed compassion.

The lawyer in the story doesn’t have that freedom: it’s entirely unthinkable for him, as a devout Jew, to identify with the Samaritan. If the lawyer is going to stay in the story at all, that leaves him only one option: he has to cross over that circle he has drawn for himself, and identify with the guy lying naked, penniless and unconscious in the ditch. He has to see himself as the victim.

Now, there’s plenty of evidence in the scriptures that Jesus was very interested in injustice among his people. And there’s plenty of evidence that possibly the form of injustice he was most interested in was injustice committed in the name of religious purity. And there’s no doubt that as the early Church got going, there was more and more interest in questions about who was out and who was in, and in particular those questions focused on distinctions between Jews and non-Jews in the Christian community. All these interests, all these themes come up in the familiar story of the Good Samaritan.

But I don’t think that those are the real target. Because this story, about crossing the boundary between privileged lawyer and hapless victim, is followed in the Gospel of Luke (next week’s reading, in fact) by another story about crossing boundaries, the famous story of Martha working in the kitchen and Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet. In today’s story, the lawyer who knows it all but won’t do anything is shown to be on the wrong track; next week, it will be the doer who is told that she needs to pay attention to another way.

God knows we need our boundaries. In today’s society, somebody with “good boundaries” is considered a healthy person, and we talk about boundaries when we’re discussing the protection of the less powerful. Boundaries are with us, and they’re good and they’re useful. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is challenging us to look straight at our boundaries, and to consider what spaces or people they might be dividing, and to consider whether those boundaries have been devised to shut gates and doors rather than opening them.

Are they circles meant to frame something wonderful–a flower, a community, an experience–and hold it up so all can see? And if that’s what they’re meant to do, are they succeeding in that without being misinterpreted? Do the fences, the walls that we erect to feel snug and secure from danger keep out love, as well? Do our so-called “professional boundaries” work so well that they prevent our acting with compassion? Whether we see ourselves inside or outside someone else’s circle, can we step across and look at ourselves from that other person’s vantage point? And once we’ve stepped across, can we reach back with an open hand?

God knows we need our boundaries. But God doesn’t seem to. When we talk about God, we hear words like bound-less. Boundless wisdom. Boundless love. And we hear story after story about boundaries broken. Jesus eating with the outcast. A Samaritan presented as the hero of a story. Forgiveness offered to a sinner who hasn’t even asked for it. Our God, coming among us in the flesh, dying for us all.

God knows we need our boundaries. But we gather, now and then, to celebrate the glimpse Jesus Christ has given us of the boundlessness that is the Reign of God. Gathered here, we celebrate our claim that we dwell under that Reign of God, that everyone dwells in that Kingdom. Look hard at those circles, those lines, those walls and doors and gates and fences.What do they protect? Whom do they reject? And how might we Christians be called to open the door or hold out a hand?

Isaiah 66:10-14
Psalm 66:1-8
Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

+ + +

I spent this Fourth of July at a local celebration in the neighborhood Julia grew up in in Palo Alto. It’s a festival we’ve been to many times before, almost exactly the same every year: the neighborhood band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” and sometimes a Queen or U2 song thrown in for variety; floats kids and their parents build out of wagons; dogs and bikes and babies on parade, sack races and three-legged races and a balloon toss; the adorable drill squad of six-year-olds moving their flags in unison, with the only change in the routine from fifty years ago that boys are now on the team too. The first time I went to this celebration I almost couldn’t believe it existed, so perfect in its quintessential Americana-ness. I almost expected to see Harold Hill from The Music Man walk around the corner.

There’s something encouraging about seeing unabashed patriotism in the middle of Palo Alto, where you can’t throw a stick without hitting a Prius. In a time when flag-waving is so often seen as the province of the political right, and when media personalities throw around accusations of treason, there’s something satisfying about seeing a parkful of NPR-listening, farmer’s-market-shopping, arugula-eating Palo Altans singing along lustily to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA and nailing the cymbal-crash moment in the last verse.

Satisfying—and yet also incongruous. Because we know that even as the water-balloon toss and the tug-of-war were going on, people were overcrowded into cages in buildings with the American flag flying outside. Children huddled under Mylar blankets on concrete floors, toddlers taken from their parents and left to be cared for by their fellow detainees who were just kids themselves. People who came to our shores carrying no purse, no bag, and no sandals: and we are the town that has failed to welcome them.

The images that have flooded our screens and newspapers in the past month have made it clear to those of us who are citizens of this nation that appalling things are being done in our name, by our government, under our flag.

And not for the first time, of course. This country has done great things in its history. And it has done some very bad things. There is a narrative of progress and democracy and justice in our national story; and it’s intertwined with a narrative of genocide and racism and violence.

Which brings up the question: how should we as Christians feel about our country?

Much of the Christianity we see in the public discourse says we should wrap ourselves in the flag and treat faith in God and faith in country as almost the same thing. I don’t see any justification for that in scripture. The New Testament says we should pray for our rulers and live peaceably in society, but it’s very clear that our true citizenship is in heaven. The church is a fellowship that transcends all nations and all borders. Not all of us who worship here are citizens of this country, and any Christian congregation where a visitor or guest of another nationality is made to feel less of a member of the Body of Christ for that reason is doing something very wrong.

And yet I do think as a Christian it’s OK to love your country. It’s OK to love it and be proud of it; and it’s OK to love it and be critical of it. It may be that we love it most when we’re being most critical of it. I think as a Christian you can rightly love your country for two reasons.

One is simply because it’s yours: because its sights and sounds and smells are home. Sometimes we love something or someone not because of any objective features but simply because they’re ours. At its best family is supposed to work that way. I think Julia and Abigail are the cleverest, most delightful, most beautiful people in this world. And that’s true, from my perspective, not because I’m ranking them against others in some kind of objective competition but because they’re mine and I love them. We hear that kind of love for Israel and Jerusalem in our reading from Isaiah this morning: “Rejoice with Jerusalem, all you who love her.” All through scripture, including in the wider context of this passage, we see an oscillation between two kinds of love for Israel and for the church. Sometimes Israel is portrayed as benefiting from God’s love at the expense of other nations in an us-vs.-them scenario. But at other times the portrayal is of God’s love for Israel overflowing to benefit all the other nations too, so that Israel becomes a blessing to the whole earth. I think that latter kind of love is more faithful to the overall thrust of scripture. Our love for a home country can easily become idolatrous. It can lead us to an us-vs.-them mentality. But at best it can be something different: it can lead us to want the same good for other places that we naturally want for our own.

The second reason I think as Christians we can rightly love our country—and here I’m talking specifically about this country—is because there are some things about this country to be deeply thankful for. We live in a country and under a government that, for all its faults, is shaped by a constitution that safeguards some basic liberties that many places don’t have. We have the freedom to vote.

We have the freedom to gather here on Sunday mornings, or not to, as we choose. We have the freedom, when we’re outraged by something our government is doing, to make signs and fill the streets and demand change. There are other countries where those things are the case too. But there are a lot of places where they aren’t.

This country is far from perfect. But its own stated values are values of equality, democracy, and human rights. Those are values that are grounded deeply in the gospel, not in the shallow sense in which it’s sometimes trumpeted that this is a “Christian nation,” meaning that Christians should get special privileges, but rather in the deep sense that a government that treats everyone with the same dignity is congruent with a God for whom all are beloved children.

This Fourth of July weekend, pray for this country. Give thanks for what is good. Ask God’s grace to heal what is broken and set right what is unjust. And then do something patriotic. Go out and protest injustice. Go out and serve the poor. Go out and call this country to the values it professes. Go out and make trouble. Go out and make this land a better place, in the name of Jesus.

1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21
Psalm 16
Galatians 5:1,13-25
Luke 9:51-62

+ + +

I don’t know how many times you’ve moved in your life. Some of us here today may have lived in the same place our whole life. Others may move from place to place each night looking for a safe place to sleep. And for others of us it may be in between, moving around every few years or so.

By my count I’ve moved about 14 or 15 times in my life. Growing up, my family moved roughly every three years. So I’ve had a lot of practice with the winnowing process of what to bring along and what not to. And yet all that practice doesn’t make it easy. I once had a Halloween costume with a pirate hat and plastic sword. I only ever wore it one time, but for some reason that hat and sword made it through more than one move. It just kept making it into a box. I might need it someday!

Some of us may be more pack rats than others, but I think all of us have the same need to hold on to the things that make us feel secure. So the Gospel reading for today is challenging. “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Those of us here today who are homeless have a better insight into this passage than anyone else. For Jesus this passage is pretty often literally true. He and his friends go from town to town preaching and looking for people to take them in. He’s just been kicked out by a village of Samaritans, who won’t put him up for the night because Jews and Samaritans don’t get along and he’s on his way to the Jewish capital, Jerusalem. But when he gets to Jerusalem, what waits for him is worse: trial, humiliation, and death on a cross.

Perhaps you’ve seen the movie Romero, which came out in 1989. It’s based on the life of Oscar Romero, archbishop of El Salvador in the late 1970’s. At the opening of the film, Bishop Romero has a nice, cushy place to lay his head. He’s surrounded by well-spoken members of the government who offer him congratulations on his position and ask for private baptisms for their babies. But when Romero begins to realize what the gospel demands of him, he has to abandon that security. He’s a conservative man with a deep life of prayer. And that prayer life leads him to speak out against the government’s repression of poor people. He negotiates with rebels and celebrates Mass in occupied cities. And on the 24th of March, 1980, Bishop Romero was assassinated. For Bishop Romero, learning to follow Jesus meant giving up his prestige, his comfort, and in the end, his life.

Sometimes the things that keep us from walking in Jesus’s footsteps are more subtle. In the reading we heard today from Galatians, Paul calls on us to “be guided by the Spirit.” When we follow Jesus, we’re not led by a system of rules and regulations. As Paul writes, “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” We might prefer having clear laundry lists of what’s right and wrong. But in Christ those are swept away in favor of the rule of love.

Often we get uncomfortable with that way of living. Instead of living in the tension of listening to the Spirit’s guidance, of being open to change and new ideas, we retreat into the neat mental systems we construct to explain reality. You might say we “lay our heads down.” Having things figured out is a soft pillow.

It’s ironic that even as Paul writes about living in freedom and not submitting to the slavery of the law, people through the centuries have used this exact passage as a checklist for who’s going to heaven and who isn’t. “Fornication—check. Drunkenness—check. Idolatry—check. Carousing!” (A lot of Episcopalians I know might be in trouble there. There was a little holy carousing this weekend around Bishop Megan’s consecration.) But Paul’s point isn’t to make a checklist about what behavior gets you saved and what behavior doesn’t. God’s grace doesn’t come from our good behavior. Grace is a free gift of love that leads us to love God and neighbor in return. Holy, transformed lives are the fruit of God’s grace, not a condition for it.

James and John were thinking in terms of conditions and checklists, of who’s in and who’s out. When they got rejected by the Samaritans, they knew who was out. They wanted to torch the village with fire from above. Jesus sets James and John straight—and he does the same to us. We may not be as brash as James and John, but we may well have those moments when we’d like to torch our enemies, if not literally then at least metaphorically. How different it would be if we heard Paul’s words: “Through love become servants to one another.”

In our life as the Church, the Holy Spirit is constantly shaking us up—if we’re able to listen. Through the Spirit’s promptings, the Church has realized that things faithful people had taken for granted for centuries were totally incompatible with the Gospel of Christ. Two centuries ago, people could scarcely envision a world without slavery. Just two generations ago in a large part of the United States people could barely imagine a time when people of different colors could drink from the same spigot. When the Spirit opens people’s eyes, new and exciting things happen. But those things can also be threatening. Changing the way we do things threatens our sense of comfort—that’s part of what it can mean not to have a place to lay our heads.

Yesterday in an amazing ceremony we ordained our dear sister Megan Traquair as our new bishop. It was a beautiful day and one that was completely unexceptional. And just a few years ago it would have been completely radical. It was exactly thirty years ago that our church, the Episcopal Church, ordained its first female bishop. In 1989 that was radical. It was only fifteen years before that in 1974 that we ordained our first female priests. I think I hardly need to say, today, that this Episcopal corner of the Body of Christ is not only hugely enriched by its female clergy. I don’t think we would exist without our female clergy. As a child of the Episcopal Church in the early 80s I grew up with female clergy, thanks be to God. And yet it took us until 1989 to welcome women as bishops. And we’re still learning what it means to welcome the gifts of people who are gay, or lesbian, or transgender. There are those for whom these changes have been hard. And we have to be gracious to one another during change. It’s not always easy to tell whether a change to the status quo is the Holy Spirit or not. But in the meantime, our job is to follow that great commandment to love one another.

The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. In our journey with our Lord, we can be held back by the things we think we need—whether they’re material things, social status, or long-held beliefs. As we learn to walk the way of the Messiah, may we be guided by the Spirit out of all the things that we think make us secure, and into the only real security there is—the challenging joy of walking with God.

Amen.

1 Kings 19:1-4, (5-7), 8-15a
Psalm 42 and 43
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

or
Isaiah 65:1-9
Psalm 22:18-27
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39