Jun 16, 2019 |
First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday
| Pamela Moore
First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday
- Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
- Romans 5:1-5
- John 16:12-15
- Psalm 8
- or Canticle 13 (or Canticle 2)
Jun 09, 2019 |
Year C, Day of Pentecost, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, Day of Pentecost, Revised Common Lectionary
Genesis 11:1-9
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, 25-27
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
+ + +
They wanted to make a name for themselves.
They wanted to be somebody. To be big. To be famous.
So they decided to make a big tower.
Of course they did, right? It’s classic. Powerful people build things—particularly powerful men. To show how important you are, build something. A statue, a pyramid, a skyscraper, whatever it is, but make it huge. The bigger the better. Bigger than anybody else’s. That’s how you know you’re important. That’s how other people know you’re important.
There was a real Tower of Babel. It was the ziggurat, the stair-stepped tower at the heart of Babylon. Babylon was the most powerful city of the ancient world, until it wasn’t. The Israelites who told this story didn’t have much love for Babylon, where they’d been held captive for two generations. They reveled in the wordplay of Babylon/Babel/babble, which works in Hebrew about the way it does in English. The Babylonians had a great empire, like so many other empires before and since. They tried to bring the whole world together, which in some ways is a noble goal, except of course that it meant bringing the whole world together under the thumb of Babylon. That’s the thing about a tower. It marks the center of something. And it always has a top. It’s a good symbol for the way human beings tend to try to create unity, which is mostly by building empires. Empires tend to talk about uniting many peoples together—but in practice one group sits at the center. To quote George Orwell, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. A nobleman in Babylon is more so than, say, a peasant woman in the conquered province of Judah. The closer to the center, the higher up the tower you are, the better.
Now the story about the Tower of Babel is clearly based on Babylon. But it’s not just about that one empire. It’s an origin story about all our human efforts to build towers; to make a name for ourselves and create unity based on sameness. The Roman Empire preached peace and prosperity through military might. The British Empire preached progress through the spreading of genteel English civilization to all corners of the world. The Soviet Union preached the brotherhood of all peoples through the dictatorship of the proletariat. All those empires claimed to bring many peoples together in unity. But everyone knew the difference between a Roman slave and Caesar, or between a Punjabi villager and Queen Victoria, or between a pensioner in Kazakhstan and a Kremlin bureaucrat with a big Moscow apartment.
In the Genesis story we see what happens to empires. They fragment. Sooner or later, the myth collapses and the center no longer holds. And what we’re left with is division. We saw it happen in the former Yugoslavia after the Cold War as Croatians, Serbians, and Bosniaks shelled one another after living alongside one another for decades under a dictatorship that preached unity.
And in human terms, that’s the choice we have. A false unity based on empire or fragmentation and division.
That’s where Pentecost comes in.
This is the day when God opened the way of eternal life to every people and nation. This is the day when God undid the curse of Babel.
Two thousand years or so ago, on Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Passover, the followers of Jesus were all together in one place, waiting for whatever would happen next. And then the Spirit moved among them. Tongues of fire appeared, one on each of them. “Tongues,” another pun, because here again just like in English “tongues” can also mean “languages.” And then the real miracle began.
As the disciples began to preach, they spoke not one language but many. Parthians, Medes, Pamphylians and all the rest, heard the good news in their own native tongues. Not in the common languages of the empire they used to communicate with each other, but their own native tongues, the one they learned on their mothers’ laps. Oh, a few heard it in Latin, those visitors from Rome that get mentioned toward the end of that long list. But they’re not first, no more important than anyone else.
And what happened next was just as important. From this moment in the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples begin to go out. They leave the house where they’ve been staying and get out there, as Luke puts it, starting from Jerusalem, out to the rest of Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
At Pentecost God creates a new kind of unity. One without a tower. No one place is at the center. No one group is at the top. As the psalm puts it, “the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole earth.” There’s no center in Babylon or London or Moscow or Rome, no emperor or General Secretary at the top. We have a leader, all right—but Jesus has ascended into heaven and is now to be found wherever we go. Instead of a centripetal unity converging around one favored place or people, God is creating a kind of unity that’s centrifugal. It’s about going out to carry the good news and discovering the Spirit already at work ahead of us in every place, among every people.
That kind of unity was radical two thousand years ago, and it’s radical today. We live in a country that thinks of itself as valuing unity in diversity and the equality of all. Our money itself proclaims “E pluribus unum,” out of many one. And yet it’s also true that in this country some have generally been more equal than others, and you’ve been closer to the center the closer you are to white, the closer you are to Protestant, the closer you are to male and cisgender and heterosexual. Sometimes that center has been reinforced implicitly through unspoken norms. Sometimes it’s been enshrined very explicitly into Jim Crow laws and housing covenants and gerrymandered districts and bathroom bills. Those two visions of this country have been intertwined throughout our history. Sometimes we’ve made real progress toward a fairer and more diverse society. Sometimes we’ve moved backwards. Sometimes that very vision of a nation founded on equality gets used as a smokescreen to perpetuate injustices. But it’s not just the United States. All over our world today there are movements toward greater domination or greater fragmentation or both.
As Christians this should distress us. But it shouldn’t surprise us, and it shouldn’t discourage us. It’s been in our scriptures from the beginning. We can’t manufacture unity on our own. On our own we will always either build bigger towers or degenerate into opposing camps. Only the Spirit of God can bring real unity that neither ignores our differences nor finds in them reasons to hate one another. Only in the Spirit do our differences become things of beauty, precious reflections of the infinite creativity of God.
That Spirit is alive in us today. We received it when we were baptized into Christ, just as today we baptize Fiona, Jazabelle, and Charlie. That Spirit is stirred up in us every time we renew our baptismal covenant as we do today. It stirs us up and flings us out into the world to proclaim the good news in a world without a center, without a tower—a world where Jesus is present in every language, wherever we go.
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, 25-27
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
+ + +
They wanted to make a name for themselves.
They wanted to be somebody. To be big. To be famous.
So they decided to make a big tower.
Of course they did, right? It’s classic. Powerful people build things—particularly powerful men. To show how important you are, build something. A statue, a pyramid, a skyscraper, whatever it is, but make it huge. The bigger the better. Bigger than anybody else’s. That’s how you know you’re important. That’s how other people know you’re important.
There was a real Tower of Babel. It was the ziggurat, the stair-stepped tower at the heart of Babylon. Babylon was the most powerful city of the ancient world, until it wasn’t. The Israelites who told this story didn’t have much love for Babylon, where they’d been held captive for two generations. They reveled in the wordplay of Babylon/Babel/babble, which works in Hebrew about the way it does in English. The Babylonians had a great empire, like so many other empires before and since. They tried to bring the whole world together, which in some ways is a noble goal, except of course that it meant bringing the whole world together under the thumb of Babylon. That’s the thing about a tower. It marks the center of something. And it always has a top. It’s a good symbol for the way human beings tend to try to create unity, which is mostly by building empires. Empires tend to talk about uniting many peoples together—but in practice one group sits at the center. To quote George Orwell, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. A nobleman in Babylon is more so than, say, a peasant woman in the conquered province of Judah. The closer to the center, the higher up the tower you are, the better.
Now the story about the Tower of Babel is clearly based on Babylon. But it’s not just about that one empire. It’s an origin story about all our human efforts to build towers; to make a name for ourselves and create unity based on sameness. The Roman Empire preached peace and prosperity through military might. The British Empire preached progress through the spreading of genteel English civilization to all corners of the world. The Soviet Union preached the brotherhood of all peoples through the dictatorship of the proletariat. All those empires claimed to bring many peoples together in unity. But everyone knew the difference between a Roman slave and Caesar, or between a Punjabi villager and Queen Victoria, or between a pensioner in Kazakhstan and a Kremlin bureaucrat with a big Moscow apartment.
In the Genesis story we see what happens to empires. They fragment. Sooner or later, the myth collapses and the center no longer holds. And what we’re left with is division. We saw it happen in the former Yugoslavia after the Cold War as Croatians, Serbians, and Bosniaks shelled one another after living alongside one another for decades under a dictatorship that preached unity.
And in human terms, that’s the choice we have. A false unity based on empire or fragmentation and division.
That’s where Pentecost comes in.
This is the day when God opened the way of eternal life to every people and nation. This is the day when God undid the curse of Babel.
Two thousand years or so ago, on Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Passover, the followers of Jesus were all together in one place, waiting for whatever would happen next. And then the Spirit moved among them. Tongues of fire appeared, one on each of them. “Tongues,” another pun, because here again just like in English “tongues” can also mean “languages.” And then the real miracle began.
As the disciples began to preach, they spoke not one language but many. Parthians, Medes, Pamphylians and all the rest, heard the good news in their own native tongues. Not in the common languages of the empire they used to communicate with each other, but their own native tongues, the one they learned on their mothers’ laps. Oh, a few heard it in Latin, those visitors from Rome that get mentioned toward the end of that long list. But they’re not first, no more important than anyone else.
And what happened next was just as important. From this moment in the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples begin to go out. They leave the house where they’ve been staying and get out there, as Luke puts it, starting from Jerusalem, out to the rest of Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
At Pentecost God creates a new kind of unity. One without a tower. No one place is at the center. No one group is at the top. As the psalm puts it, “the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole earth.” There’s no center in Babylon or London or Moscow or Rome, no emperor or General Secretary at the top. We have a leader, all right—but Jesus has ascended into heaven and is now to be found wherever we go. Instead of a centripetal unity converging around one favored place or people, God is creating a kind of unity that’s centrifugal. It’s about going out to carry the good news and discovering the Spirit already at work ahead of us in every place, among every people.
That kind of unity was radical two thousand years ago, and it’s radical today. We live in a country that thinks of itself as valuing unity in diversity and the equality of all. Our money itself proclaims “E pluribus unum,” out of many one. And yet it’s also true that in this country some have generally been more equal than others, and you’ve been closer to the center the closer you are to white, the closer you are to Protestant, the closer you are to male and cisgender and heterosexual. Sometimes that center has been reinforced implicitly through unspoken norms. Sometimes it’s been enshrined very explicitly into Jim Crow laws and housing covenants and gerrymandered districts and bathroom bills. Those two visions of this country have been intertwined throughout our history. Sometimes we’ve made real progress toward a fairer and more diverse society. Sometimes we’ve moved backwards. Sometimes that very vision of a nation founded on equality gets used as a smokescreen to perpetuate injustices. But it’s not just the United States. All over our world today there are movements toward greater domination or greater fragmentation or both.
As Christians this should distress us. But it shouldn’t surprise us, and it shouldn’t discourage us. It’s been in our scriptures from the beginning. We can’t manufacture unity on our own. On our own we will always either build bigger towers or degenerate into opposing camps. Only the Spirit of God can bring real unity that neither ignores our differences nor finds in them reasons to hate one another. Only in the Spirit do our differences become things of beauty, precious reflections of the infinite creativity of God.
That Spirit is alive in us today. We received it when we were baptized into Christ, just as today we baptize Fiona, Jazabelle, and Charlie. That Spirit is stirred up in us every time we renew our baptismal covenant as we do today. It stirs us up and flings us out into the world to proclaim the good news in a world without a center, without a tower—a world where Jesus is present in every language, wherever we go.
Jun 02, 2019 |
Year C, 7 Easter, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, 7 Easter, Revised Common Lectionary
Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26
+ + +
Back when I was doing a yearlong residency as a hospital chaplain in Seattle, and then again during the years I was working on a doctorate in Berkeley, I often used to serve as what church lingo calls a “supply priest.” This is a priest who’s available to cover Sunday services when a congregation’s regular clergy aren’t available. It’s sort of like being a substitute teacher, except with vestments on, and with usually a better-behaved clientele.
One of the fun things about doing supply ministry is getting to lead worship in a wide variety of different congregations. Each place has its own congregational culture, and its own ways of doing things: where to stand, when to bow, where things go. I’ve served in congregations with altars up against the wall and altars in the middle of the room, pipe organs and electric guitars, lace vestments and tie-dye vestments. One congregation I supplied in had been part of the charismatic movement and a few people still prayed in tongues during the Prayers of the People.
Doing supply gave me a new appreciation for both the diversity, and also the unity, of the church. Some of the places I’ve visited as a supply priest were congregations I’d love to worship in regularly. Others would never feel like a fit for me in the long run. But each one I benefited from visiting. I’m glad they exist. I’m glad they each contribute their own unique gifts to the Body of Christ.
It’s been said that God values unity, rather than uniformity. We don’t have to all be the same. In fact, God prefers us not to be, because God created us beautifully different. But we do have to love each other.
It goes beyond the Episcopal church, of course, or the Anglican Communion. All those congregations where I supplied were united by a single Prayer Book and by belonging to a single faith tradition, even with all their differences. But there’s also a deeper oneness of all Christians which is real, even though it’s fractured.
I believe this is true: even though we often feel like we have nothing in common, there is a unity among Episcopalians in California, incense-swinging Syrian Orthodox Christians in the Middle East, hand-raising Pentecostals in South America, and even nondenominational prosperity-gospel preachers on TV. That unity isn’t grounded in our theological opinions, because those differ drastically. But there is one thing that all Christians have in common, and that is that we love and follow the person of Jesus.
I don’t want to minimize those differences, which are painful. Yesterday my family and I were at the Pride Festival downtown, enjoying a beautiful day and a beautiful community celebration of unity amid differences: of the remarkable spectrum of gender and sexuality that I believe God has created and loves. And I’m also very aware that many Christians, in fact most Christians around the world, would not be able to celebrate that festival. One thing I do believe is that we will discover our deeper unity by going deeper into our love for Jesus: his work, his message, his person.
The name of Jesus. Paul speaks that name to free the young woman in today’s reading from Acts from demon possession. The jailer confesses that name to be saved. The book of Acts, which we generally hear read in church during Easter Season, is about the good news of Jesus moving through all sectors of society. Paul and Silas are Jews; the girl and the jailer are Greeks. The girl is a slave; the jailer is free. The girl is female; the jailer is male. So this story is a lived demonstration of something Paul writes elsewhere, in his letter to the Galatians: Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, all are made one in Christ Jesus.
Now we are entering the last week of Easter. Three nights ago we celebrated the Ascension, and in this last week of Easter the church waits in anticipation for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. But today’s gospel reading takes us back to the last moments before Easter, when Jesus is praying for his disciples immediately before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. His prayer for them is to be one, as he and the Father are one.
Not to be the same, but to be one.
That prayer extends to the whole church. And it even extends beyond the church, to everyone God has created, who may or may not have come to know and love Jesus by name, but who are made for oneness with God and each other.
That oneness is not always easy.
Who is it hard for you to be one with? Who gets on your nerves?
Whose ideas can you not stand, because they’re just plain wrong?
What shows can’t you stand to watch, or websites to read?
I know some of the answers for me. Maybe you can think of some for you too. The fact is that God doesn’t expect us to agree on everything. But what God does desire for us is to be able to love one another with the same pure, self-giving love Jesus shares with the Father. That doesn’t mean we don’t stick to our convictions and fight for what we value. It does mean that when we fight, we fight fair, and we stay aware of one another as human beings and children of God. Fortunately, we’re not asked to do it on our own. Jesus says in this passage that he’s praying not only for the disciples in the room for him but also for those still to come—for us. And if Jesus prays for something, you can bet it’s going to be fulfilled. So in the end, unity isn’t something we have to manufacture. It’s a gift God has already given us, through the prayers of Jesus, the great high priest. It’s for us to open that gift, and live it out as much as we can in our own lives.
This morning we are celebrating the great sacrament of unity, the holy meal where we share one bread, one cup: Christ in us, we in one another, all of us united in the one Jesus calls “Father.” Then we are going to be sent out into the world to live out that oneness in the middle of a fractured, hurting world. As we do, remember: you do not have to do it alone. Jesus is praying for you.
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26
+ + +
Back when I was doing a yearlong residency as a hospital chaplain in Seattle, and then again during the years I was working on a doctorate in Berkeley, I often used to serve as what church lingo calls a “supply priest.” This is a priest who’s available to cover Sunday services when a congregation’s regular clergy aren’t available. It’s sort of like being a substitute teacher, except with vestments on, and with usually a better-behaved clientele.
One of the fun things about doing supply ministry is getting to lead worship in a wide variety of different congregations. Each place has its own congregational culture, and its own ways of doing things: where to stand, when to bow, where things go. I’ve served in congregations with altars up against the wall and altars in the middle of the room, pipe organs and electric guitars, lace vestments and tie-dye vestments. One congregation I supplied in had been part of the charismatic movement and a few people still prayed in tongues during the Prayers of the People.
Doing supply gave me a new appreciation for both the diversity, and also the unity, of the church. Some of the places I’ve visited as a supply priest were congregations I’d love to worship in regularly. Others would never feel like a fit for me in the long run. But each one I benefited from visiting. I’m glad they exist. I’m glad they each contribute their own unique gifts to the Body of Christ.
It’s been said that God values unity, rather than uniformity. We don’t have to all be the same. In fact, God prefers us not to be, because God created us beautifully different. But we do have to love each other.
It goes beyond the Episcopal church, of course, or the Anglican Communion. All those congregations where I supplied were united by a single Prayer Book and by belonging to a single faith tradition, even with all their differences. But there’s also a deeper oneness of all Christians which is real, even though it’s fractured.
I believe this is true: even though we often feel like we have nothing in common, there is a unity among Episcopalians in California, incense-swinging Syrian Orthodox Christians in the Middle East, hand-raising Pentecostals in South America, and even nondenominational prosperity-gospel preachers on TV. That unity isn’t grounded in our theological opinions, because those differ drastically. But there is one thing that all Christians have in common, and that is that we love and follow the person of Jesus.
I don’t want to minimize those differences, which are painful. Yesterday my family and I were at the Pride Festival downtown, enjoying a beautiful day and a beautiful community celebration of unity amid differences: of the remarkable spectrum of gender and sexuality that I believe God has created and loves. And I’m also very aware that many Christians, in fact most Christians around the world, would not be able to celebrate that festival. One thing I do believe is that we will discover our deeper unity by going deeper into our love for Jesus: his work, his message, his person.
The name of Jesus. Paul speaks that name to free the young woman in today’s reading from Acts from demon possession. The jailer confesses that name to be saved. The book of Acts, which we generally hear read in church during Easter Season, is about the good news of Jesus moving through all sectors of society. Paul and Silas are Jews; the girl and the jailer are Greeks. The girl is a slave; the jailer is free. The girl is female; the jailer is male. So this story is a lived demonstration of something Paul writes elsewhere, in his letter to the Galatians: Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, all are made one in Christ Jesus.
Now we are entering the last week of Easter. Three nights ago we celebrated the Ascension, and in this last week of Easter the church waits in anticipation for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. But today’s gospel reading takes us back to the last moments before Easter, when Jesus is praying for his disciples immediately before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. His prayer for them is to be one, as he and the Father are one.
Not to be the same, but to be one.
That prayer extends to the whole church. And it even extends beyond the church, to everyone God has created, who may or may not have come to know and love Jesus by name, but who are made for oneness with God and each other.
That oneness is not always easy.
Who is it hard for you to be one with? Who gets on your nerves?
Whose ideas can you not stand, because they’re just plain wrong?
What shows can’t you stand to watch, or websites to read?
I know some of the answers for me. Maybe you can think of some for you too. The fact is that God doesn’t expect us to agree on everything. But what God does desire for us is to be able to love one another with the same pure, self-giving love Jesus shares with the Father. That doesn’t mean we don’t stick to our convictions and fight for what we value. It does mean that when we fight, we fight fair, and we stay aware of one another as human beings and children of God. Fortunately, we’re not asked to do it on our own. Jesus says in this passage that he’s praying not only for the disciples in the room for him but also for those still to come—for us. And if Jesus prays for something, you can bet it’s going to be fulfilled. So in the end, unity isn’t something we have to manufacture. It’s a gift God has already given us, through the prayers of Jesus, the great high priest. It’s for us to open that gift, and live it out as much as we can in our own lives.
This morning we are celebrating the great sacrament of unity, the holy meal where we share one bread, one cup: Christ in us, we in one another, all of us united in the one Jesus calls “Father.” Then we are going to be sent out into the world to live out that oneness in the middle of a fractured, hurting world. As we do, remember: you do not have to do it alone. Jesus is praying for you.
May 26, 2019 |
Year C, 6 Easter, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, 6 Easter, Revised Common Lectionary
Acts 16:9-15
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 5:1-9
Psalm 67
+ + +
Last year I met a youngish woman named—well, let’s call her Naomi. Naomi arrived at the church office one afternoon and politely asked for help charging her cell phone. She was in the process of making a long list of phone calls, looking for a place to live.
After years on the waiting list, Naomi had finally received a Section 8 housing voucher. Good news—or so it seemed. Because having a voucher can help you pay the rent … but only if you can find a vacancy with a landlord willing to rent to you in the first place. In California, unlike many other states, it’s legal for landlords to simply refuse to take Section 8 vouchers. But if you don’t use the voucher within a certain period of time, it expires. At the time I met her, Naomi had three weeks to find a place to live, or else be sent to square one to start all over again. There are 26,000 people on Sonoma County’s Section 8 waiting list. There are only 3,000 rental properties known to take Section 8 vouchers. And each year only about 300 of those actually turn over.[1] The odds didn’t look good.
I don’t know what ended up happening for Naomi. I was able to help her by paying for a couple of nights in a motel, and offer her a list of agencies that might give her some more help navigating the process. But you can’t force an opening to appear out of thin air.
Sometimes the system just isn’t enough.
When Jesus came to the pool of Beth-zatha he met a man who had been on the waiting list for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years waiting, much like Naomi, for that one precious and scarce chance. Imagine waiting for the healing mineral waters to bubble and swirl, waiting day in and day out for your chance at healing. Then, one day, suddenly, there it is—but with so many others pushing and jostling to get in, you hardly stand a chance. And then the waters go still and the opportunity closes, and you’re back at square one once more.
So often the systems we set up to try to help people in need are colossally overburdened. In some cases they’re woefully inadequate to begin with. In other cases a spike in needs overwhelms a system that used to function. In any case, there are plenty of pools of Beth-zatha today. Think of our patchwork healthcare system, where all of us at some point find ourselves trying to navigate a complex and confusing bureaucracy at best, and where people without insurance—and even some people with insurance—often choose between taking their medicine and paying their utility bills. Or think of our immigration system, where the waitlist to immigrate legally even for people who qualify can be decades long, and where people who come seeking asylum are routinely detained for two years or more before they receive a hearing.[2]
In today’s gospel we hear of Jesus going up to Jerusalem at the time of a great festival. And when he gets there, he goes, not to the Temple, as least not on this visit. Not to mingle with the celebrating crowds. But to this pool where forgotten people are warehoused. This is where Jesus shows up. And whether it’s an ER waiting room, or an overcrowded homeless shelter, or an immigration detention center, this is where Jesus is showing up today.
How do we show up with Jesus? What can we do when people are suffering and the need seems overwhelming and beyond our control?
It would be nice to respond as Jesus does in this story by offering a miraculous healing: Rise up, take your mat and walk! Now miracles can be prayed for, and they even happen occasionally, but most of us can’t promise them with the kind of confidence Jesus can offer. We can certainly offer tangible help sometimes. Every Sunday morning this church feeds a hot breakfast to folks who are hungry. We give away blankets and clothes. We give groceries away at our food pantry in Monte Rio. We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking this kind of direct assistance will fix the systemic causes behind why people are poor or hungry or sick, but that doesn’t get us off the hook of doing it. Direct human kindness is a basic spiritual practice, and every tangible act of love to another human being is a visible sign of God’s love in the world.
And, of course, direct assistance isn’t enough. As Desmond Tutu is said to have said, “There comes a point where we have to stop just pulling people out of the river. We have to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”[3] When our society’s systems are failing people, there are times when the church can actually work to build better ones. There’s a long and noble tradition of this. Over the centuries the church has often been the first to start hospitals, orphanages, schools, and all sorts of institutions that eventually became an expected part of civil society but had their origins among people of faith. Today too people of faith are organizing to build housing, to start job training programs, to build rehab centers, to step up and fill gaps and create systems that help others get up off their mats and walk.
And then there are times when the need is too great even for our pooled resources as a church, where only collective action at the societal level can really move the needle. No matter how much housing churches build, we’re not going to solve the housing crisis on our own. No matter how much we recycle and cut our carbon footprint, we can’t fight climate change without national governments and international cooperation. And so the church also has a role in advocacy, working together with friends and neighbors of every faith and no faith to use our voices, votes, and dollars to call our society to care for all its members more justly. We have to do it with humility. A passion for justice doesn’t always equate into expertise on exactly what policies will create it. But for Christians the bottom line is always God’s fierce love for all, and in particular for those who are poor, who are sick, or who are suffering.
We work at those three levels, always. Direct, loving service to our neighbors in tangible ways. Building systems and institutions through the church to amplify our ability to care. And lifting up our voices as people of faith in the public square to press our governments and collective institutions in the direction of justice and peace.
And in all of it, we remember that it’s not up to us to make God’s reign happen. God is working, always and everywhere. God’s love is on the move. It’s up to us to watch for it, to see where the Spirit is at work, and then it’s our privilege to join in.
[1] Laura Hagar Rush, “Big Changes Coming to Section 8 Housing Process,” Cloverdale Reveille (May 15, 2019), http://www.sonomawest.com/cloverdale_reveille/news/big-changes-coming-to-section-housing-process/article_c217b636-7754-11e9-98e5-83d95935d892.html.
[2] Zuzana Cepla, “Fact Sheet: U.S. Asylum Process,” National Immigration Forum (January 10, 2019): https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-asylum-process/; Dianne Solis, “Why Don’t Mexicans Just Apply for Citizenship?”, Dallas Morning News (August 28, 2018), https://www.dallasnews.com/news/immigration/2018/08/29/dont-mexicans-just-apply-citizenship.
[3] “Said to have said,” because although this quote is attributed to him in many places on the Internet, I haven’t been able to find a verifiable source.
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 5:1-9
Psalm 67
+ + +
Last year I met a youngish woman named—well, let’s call her Naomi. Naomi arrived at the church office one afternoon and politely asked for help charging her cell phone. She was in the process of making a long list of phone calls, looking for a place to live.
After years on the waiting list, Naomi had finally received a Section 8 housing voucher. Good news—or so it seemed. Because having a voucher can help you pay the rent … but only if you can find a vacancy with a landlord willing to rent to you in the first place. In California, unlike many other states, it’s legal for landlords to simply refuse to take Section 8 vouchers. But if you don’t use the voucher within a certain period of time, it expires. At the time I met her, Naomi had three weeks to find a place to live, or else be sent to square one to start all over again. There are 26,000 people on Sonoma County’s Section 8 waiting list. There are only 3,000 rental properties known to take Section 8 vouchers. And each year only about 300 of those actually turn over.[1] The odds didn’t look good.
I don’t know what ended up happening for Naomi. I was able to help her by paying for a couple of nights in a motel, and offer her a list of agencies that might give her some more help navigating the process. But you can’t force an opening to appear out of thin air.
Sometimes the system just isn’t enough.
When Jesus came to the pool of Beth-zatha he met a man who had been on the waiting list for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years waiting, much like Naomi, for that one precious and scarce chance. Imagine waiting for the healing mineral waters to bubble and swirl, waiting day in and day out for your chance at healing. Then, one day, suddenly, there it is—but with so many others pushing and jostling to get in, you hardly stand a chance. And then the waters go still and the opportunity closes, and you’re back at square one once more.
So often the systems we set up to try to help people in need are colossally overburdened. In some cases they’re woefully inadequate to begin with. In other cases a spike in needs overwhelms a system that used to function. In any case, there are plenty of pools of Beth-zatha today. Think of our patchwork healthcare system, where all of us at some point find ourselves trying to navigate a complex and confusing bureaucracy at best, and where people without insurance—and even some people with insurance—often choose between taking their medicine and paying their utility bills. Or think of our immigration system, where the waitlist to immigrate legally even for people who qualify can be decades long, and where people who come seeking asylum are routinely detained for two years or more before they receive a hearing.[2]
In today’s gospel we hear of Jesus going up to Jerusalem at the time of a great festival. And when he gets there, he goes, not to the Temple, as least not on this visit. Not to mingle with the celebrating crowds. But to this pool where forgotten people are warehoused. This is where Jesus shows up. And whether it’s an ER waiting room, or an overcrowded homeless shelter, or an immigration detention center, this is where Jesus is showing up today.
How do we show up with Jesus? What can we do when people are suffering and the need seems overwhelming and beyond our control?
It would be nice to respond as Jesus does in this story by offering a miraculous healing: Rise up, take your mat and walk! Now miracles can be prayed for, and they even happen occasionally, but most of us can’t promise them with the kind of confidence Jesus can offer. We can certainly offer tangible help sometimes. Every Sunday morning this church feeds a hot breakfast to folks who are hungry. We give away blankets and clothes. We give groceries away at our food pantry in Monte Rio. We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking this kind of direct assistance will fix the systemic causes behind why people are poor or hungry or sick, but that doesn’t get us off the hook of doing it. Direct human kindness is a basic spiritual practice, and every tangible act of love to another human being is a visible sign of God’s love in the world.
And, of course, direct assistance isn’t enough. As Desmond Tutu is said to have said, “There comes a point where we have to stop just pulling people out of the river. We have to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”[3] When our society’s systems are failing people, there are times when the church can actually work to build better ones. There’s a long and noble tradition of this. Over the centuries the church has often been the first to start hospitals, orphanages, schools, and all sorts of institutions that eventually became an expected part of civil society but had their origins among people of faith. Today too people of faith are organizing to build housing, to start job training programs, to build rehab centers, to step up and fill gaps and create systems that help others get up off their mats and walk.
And then there are times when the need is too great even for our pooled resources as a church, where only collective action at the societal level can really move the needle. No matter how much housing churches build, we’re not going to solve the housing crisis on our own. No matter how much we recycle and cut our carbon footprint, we can’t fight climate change without national governments and international cooperation. And so the church also has a role in advocacy, working together with friends and neighbors of every faith and no faith to use our voices, votes, and dollars to call our society to care for all its members more justly. We have to do it with humility. A passion for justice doesn’t always equate into expertise on exactly what policies will create it. But for Christians the bottom line is always God’s fierce love for all, and in particular for those who are poor, who are sick, or who are suffering.
We work at those three levels, always. Direct, loving service to our neighbors in tangible ways. Building systems and institutions through the church to amplify our ability to care. And lifting up our voices as people of faith in the public square to press our governments and collective institutions in the direction of justice and peace.
And in all of it, we remember that it’s not up to us to make God’s reign happen. God is working, always and everywhere. God’s love is on the move. It’s up to us to watch for it, to see where the Spirit is at work, and then it’s our privilege to join in.
[1] Laura Hagar Rush, “Big Changes Coming to Section 8 Housing Process,” Cloverdale Reveille (May 15, 2019), http://www.sonomawest.com/cloverdale_reveille/news/big-changes-coming-to-section-housing-process/article_c217b636-7754-11e9-98e5-83d95935d892.html.
[2] Zuzana Cepla, “Fact Sheet: U.S. Asylum Process,” National Immigration Forum (January 10, 2019): https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-asylum-process/; Dianne Solis, “Why Don’t Mexicans Just Apply for Citizenship?”, Dallas Morning News (August 28, 2018), https://www.dallasnews.com/news/immigration/2018/08/29/dont-mexicans-just-apply-citizenship.
[3] “Said to have said,” because although this quote is attributed to him in many places on the Internet, I haven’t been able to find a verifiable source.
May 12, 2019 |
Year C, 4 Easter, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, 4 Easter, Revised Common Lectionary
Acts 9:36-43
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30
Psalm 23
+ + +
I hear these sheep passages differently since moving to Sonoma County … because I see sheep more often.
I didn’t see sheep too much in Berkeley. As the old radio ad said, Berkeley has cows, grazing up in the East Bay hills, but the only sheep I used to see there were petting-zoo sheep at the Little Farm in Tilden Park.
But here they’re just kind of around more. I saw flock after flock driving down Lakeville Highway toward a meeting in Vallejo last Friday. Last fall we went to the Gravenstein Apple Fair in Sebastopol and my daughter Abby watched a sheep-shearing demonstration, starting with a sheep shaped like a barrel and ending with a skinny buzz-cut sheep and massive, luxuriant piles of wool all over the ground. This is a place where people really raise sheep.
And they do it for various purposes. Wool, certainly. Milk, often. Meat, sometimes, too—we Americans don’t eat nearly as much lamb as folks in Australia or New Zealand, but there’s still a market for it.
One thing we don’t see a lot of sheep raised for today is sacrifice. And that’s a big difference between how we think about sheep today and how people in the Bible would have. People in the Greco-Roman world, and people in ancient Israel, used sheep for wool and milk and meat just like we do. But they also used sheep, and other animals, to worship with. You would take your animal to a shrine or temple, and a priest would help you ritually slaughter it, and offer up some or all of it on a smoking altar, as a gift to the gods, or if you were an Israelite, a gift to the One God. In the Temple in Jerusalem a lamb was sacrificed each morning and each evening as a continual daily offering to God, and each year at Passover each family was to sacrifice its own lamb and eat its portion as part of the festival dinner.
It can be hard for us to imagine just how central sacrifice was to religion in the ancient world—because what was a commonplace of everyday life then is almost completely absent for us today. There are reasons for that. When the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, Jewish worshipers no longer had a place for sacrifice. They began instead to understand their prayers as themselves being a kind of sacrifice, replacing the physical sacrifices from before. Meanwhile Christians had come to understand the death of Jesus as a kind of sacrifice that fulfilled all other sacrifices, so that no more animal sacrifices would ever be needed again. And they too began to speak of their prayers as a kind of sacrifice. We still use that language today when we ask God to accept “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” in the Eucharistic Prayer.
But we need to keep those images of sacrifice in our minds as we hear these scripture readings today. This Fourth Sunday of Easter is often called Good Shepherd Sunday, because the readings for today always feature passages about sheep and shepherds. Psalm 23 is maybe the most famous passage from the Old Testament about God as our shepherd. In John’s gospel we have the basis for our central stained glass window, as Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd. And that’s not unusual in itself. Not only God but also kings and religious leaders in the Old Testament were often described as shepherds, charged with caring for the people.
But our passage from the Revelation to John throws a twist into things—because it gives us a shepherd who is also a Lamb. “The Lamb will be their shepherd,” it says, and echoing Psalm 23, “he will guide them to springs of the water of life.” This Lamb is none other than Jesus, the Good Shepherd who was not content just to take care of the sheep, but who loves the sheep so much that he became one of them.
A chapter earlier in Revelation, a heavenly elder has offered to show John a conquering king who he calls “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” But when John sees this king, it turns out this lion is really a Lamb, as the passage says, “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.”
Pause for a moment and appreciate the paradox of that line. Slaughtered lambs don’t stand—not unless, after being dead, they have been raised up again.
Now everyone knows that lions kill, and lambs are killed. Lions are powerful, lambs are gentle. So for God’s Anointed One to identify as a lamb is something strange and new. The world says that power comes with the blade of a sword or the barrel of a gun. The world says that lions always win. But God says no. The Lamb that was slain stands again. God says that real power is Lamb power.
Our society today may not practice ritual sacrifice, at least not so overtly as those societies of the past. But that hasn’t made us nonviolent. Far from it. Indeed, we continue to sacrifice one another day after day, not in temples, but on streets, and in schools, and in synagogues. Not to gods like Zeus or Apollo, but to gods like racial ideology, or frustrated male rage, or simple economic profit.
The shooting at Chabad of Poway Synagogue was just two weeks ago. Since then not one but two more school shootings have made their way through our headlines, one in North Carolina, one in Colorado. Each time we hear the story again, numbingly familiar at this point. A person full of hate or alienation or both enters, bent on destruction, a predator, a roaring lion.
Lori Gilbert Kaye was trying to shield her rabbi from gunfire when she herself was shot and killed. Riley Howell, a student at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, died after charging the gunman in his classroom, saving the lives of other students. Kendrick Castillo did the same thing at his school in Colorado.
Today as we honor and mourn these brave people, we may well imagine them standing among that great multitude of martyrs, robed in white, with palms of victory in their hands. And we can say with utter certainty that God does not want bloodshed. Not ours; not our friends’; not our enemies’. God stands on the side of the victim. God stands on the side of the innocent. The Lord who is our shepherd is the Lamb who was slain.
It is Eastertime. And we are still rejoicing in the risen Christ, not in a naïve way that says everything is happy and easy now that Christ is risen. The suffering of Jesus is still taking place in the suffering of the world. In the resurrection of Jesus we have seen the first installment of God’s victory, the victory of nonviolent courage, the victory of the Lamb. The fullness of that victory is still to come. There are tears being cried today, and there are tears still left to cry. But at the last day God will wipe them away from every eye.
May the Good Shepherd guide and nurture us. And may we be made bold to live in the way of the Lamb, who was slain, and who now lives and reigns for ever and ever.
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30
Psalm 23
+ + +
I hear these sheep passages differently since moving to Sonoma County … because I see sheep more often.
I didn’t see sheep too much in Berkeley. As the old radio ad said, Berkeley has cows, grazing up in the East Bay hills, but the only sheep I used to see there were petting-zoo sheep at the Little Farm in Tilden Park.
But here they’re just kind of around more. I saw flock after flock driving down Lakeville Highway toward a meeting in Vallejo last Friday. Last fall we went to the Gravenstein Apple Fair in Sebastopol and my daughter Abby watched a sheep-shearing demonstration, starting with a sheep shaped like a barrel and ending with a skinny buzz-cut sheep and massive, luxuriant piles of wool all over the ground. This is a place where people really raise sheep.
And they do it for various purposes. Wool, certainly. Milk, often. Meat, sometimes, too—we Americans don’t eat nearly as much lamb as folks in Australia or New Zealand, but there’s still a market for it.
One thing we don’t see a lot of sheep raised for today is sacrifice. And that’s a big difference between how we think about sheep today and how people in the Bible would have. People in the Greco-Roman world, and people in ancient Israel, used sheep for wool and milk and meat just like we do. But they also used sheep, and other animals, to worship with. You would take your animal to a shrine or temple, and a priest would help you ritually slaughter it, and offer up some or all of it on a smoking altar, as a gift to the gods, or if you were an Israelite, a gift to the One God. In the Temple in Jerusalem a lamb was sacrificed each morning and each evening as a continual daily offering to God, and each year at Passover each family was to sacrifice its own lamb and eat its portion as part of the festival dinner.
It can be hard for us to imagine just how central sacrifice was to religion in the ancient world—because what was a commonplace of everyday life then is almost completely absent for us today. There are reasons for that. When the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, Jewish worshipers no longer had a place for sacrifice. They began instead to understand their prayers as themselves being a kind of sacrifice, replacing the physical sacrifices from before. Meanwhile Christians had come to understand the death of Jesus as a kind of sacrifice that fulfilled all other sacrifices, so that no more animal sacrifices would ever be needed again. And they too began to speak of their prayers as a kind of sacrifice. We still use that language today when we ask God to accept “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” in the Eucharistic Prayer.
But we need to keep those images of sacrifice in our minds as we hear these scripture readings today. This Fourth Sunday of Easter is often called Good Shepherd Sunday, because the readings for today always feature passages about sheep and shepherds. Psalm 23 is maybe the most famous passage from the Old Testament about God as our shepherd. In John’s gospel we have the basis for our central stained glass window, as Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd. And that’s not unusual in itself. Not only God but also kings and religious leaders in the Old Testament were often described as shepherds, charged with caring for the people.
But our passage from the Revelation to John throws a twist into things—because it gives us a shepherd who is also a Lamb. “The Lamb will be their shepherd,” it says, and echoing Psalm 23, “he will guide them to springs of the water of life.” This Lamb is none other than Jesus, the Good Shepherd who was not content just to take care of the sheep, but who loves the sheep so much that he became one of them.
A chapter earlier in Revelation, a heavenly elder has offered to show John a conquering king who he calls “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.” But when John sees this king, it turns out this lion is really a Lamb, as the passage says, “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.”
Pause for a moment and appreciate the paradox of that line. Slaughtered lambs don’t stand—not unless, after being dead, they have been raised up again.
Now everyone knows that lions kill, and lambs are killed. Lions are powerful, lambs are gentle. So for God’s Anointed One to identify as a lamb is something strange and new. The world says that power comes with the blade of a sword or the barrel of a gun. The world says that lions always win. But God says no. The Lamb that was slain stands again. God says that real power is Lamb power.
Our society today may not practice ritual sacrifice, at least not so overtly as those societies of the past. But that hasn’t made us nonviolent. Far from it. Indeed, we continue to sacrifice one another day after day, not in temples, but on streets, and in schools, and in synagogues. Not to gods like Zeus or Apollo, but to gods like racial ideology, or frustrated male rage, or simple economic profit.
The shooting at Chabad of Poway Synagogue was just two weeks ago. Since then not one but two more school shootings have made their way through our headlines, one in North Carolina, one in Colorado. Each time we hear the story again, numbingly familiar at this point. A person full of hate or alienation or both enters, bent on destruction, a predator, a roaring lion.
Lori Gilbert Kaye was trying to shield her rabbi from gunfire when she herself was shot and killed. Riley Howell, a student at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, died after charging the gunman in his classroom, saving the lives of other students. Kendrick Castillo did the same thing at his school in Colorado.
Today as we honor and mourn these brave people, we may well imagine them standing among that great multitude of martyrs, robed in white, with palms of victory in their hands. And we can say with utter certainty that God does not want bloodshed. Not ours; not our friends’; not our enemies’. God stands on the side of the victim. God stands on the side of the innocent. The Lord who is our shepherd is the Lamb who was slain.
It is Eastertime. And we are still rejoicing in the risen Christ, not in a naïve way that says everything is happy and easy now that Christ is risen. The suffering of Jesus is still taking place in the suffering of the world. In the resurrection of Jesus we have seen the first installment of God’s victory, the victory of nonviolent courage, the victory of the Lamb. The fullness of that victory is still to come. There are tears being cried today, and there are tears still left to cry. But at the last day God will wipe them away from every eye.
May the Good Shepherd guide and nurture us. And may we be made bold to live in the way of the Lamb, who was slain, and who now lives and reigns for ever and ever.
May 05, 2019 |
Year C, Easter 3, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, Easter 3, Revised Common Lectionary
Acts 9:1-6
Psalm 30
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19
+ + +
It doesn’t take a whole lot of time on pilgrimage in the Holy Land before you begin to learn to take some of the historic identifications of the holy places with a grain of salt.
It’s not that there aren’t holy sites that archeologists think could actually be historically authentic—like the Church of the Resurrection, as I said two weeks ago at Easter. But when twenty centuries have supplied enough piety, pilgrimage, and potential income, holy sites tend to pop up exponentially. So there are at least two birthplaces of John the Baptist; at least two sites where Jesus and his disciples held the Last Supper; and no less than four contenders for real Biblical town of Emmaus. Those who visit Israel and Palestine looking to find places to venerate the mysteries of the faith … tend to find what they are looking for. Those who go looking to pinpoint THE spot where they happened … are often disappointed.
And so it was back in 2009 when Julia and I arrived at the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter—THE spot on the shores of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus appeared to his disciples, cooked them breakfast, and commissioned Peter to feed his flock. Our group of pilgrims from St. George’s Anglican College in Jerusalem celebrated the Eucharist at an outdoor altar on the grounds, then toured the chapel built over a flat rock, the “Mensa Christi”—the very Table of Christ, where he laid the charcoal fire and spread out the loaves and fishes.
Or, of course, maybe it really happened at that other flat rock over there—or that other beach a mile or two down the shore. Who can say?
Yet as we stood there, looking out at the turquoise water lapping at the rocky shore, I realized just how right this holy place felt. Over twenty centuries of time, cities appear and vanish; buildings, streets, and trees come and go—but the sea today is still the same as it was then. So contemplating the story in that place was easy.
They call the church the Primacy of St. Peter. Now “primacy” is a grand sort of word—and if you’re into celebrating papal authority, perhaps that’s the aspect of the story that works for you. But as I imagine Peter experiencing this encounter with the risen Jesus, it doesn’t sound as though he’s feeling very primatial. Here he is in his soaking clothes, huddling by the charcoal fire as the rest of the disciples make their dry way back to shore in the boat. This is now the third time, the evangelist tells us, that the Lord has shown himself to the disciples. There’s been joy and astonishment as the reality has sunk in that Jesus is actually risen. And yet for Peter, there’s something that remains unaddressed—an awkward, unwelcome memory.
There are only two charcoal fires mentioned in the pages of the New Testament. They are both in John’s Gospel.
One is here. The other is just three chapters back.
We heard about it what feels like a lifetime, but was only just over two weeks, ago: in the Passion Gospel on Good Friday. Peter is huddled around a charcoal fire in the high priest’s courtyard, with the opportunity to remain faithful to Jesus, even to the point of sharing in his suffering and death—and instead he betrays him, taking the easy way out; denying three times that he even knows Jesus, just as the Lord had predicted.
How is it for Peter as he sits here dripping by the fire, one-on-one with the friend he betrayed as he waits for the others to reach the shore? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine the unspoken questions filling his mind?
“Does Jesus even know what happened? Should I bring it up? What’s this charcoal fire doing here, anyway? Is this Jesus’ way of trying to make a point? Oh God, I have to tell him I’m sorry. Wait, that’s stupid. Maybe it isn’t really such a big deal. If only I could stop feeling bad about it.”
There’s a word for the experience of having an unnameable secret, something you can never let anyone know about you. That word is shame. Peter’s shame is the shame most of us know at some point in our lives—the conviction that we have done, or been, something so unworthy that even to acknowledge it would feel like something close to undergoing a death.
And yet death is what Jesus is in the act of triumphing over.
Here by the rocky shores of the lake, he offers his disciples not death, but life. In what must surely be one of the most loving, intimate, ordinary lines in Scripture, he tells them: “Come and have breakfast.” He cooks for them and feeds them the same meal of bread and fish he once fed five thousand people by this same lake, back when he first told the disciples that he himself was the bread of life. And when the ordinary-yet-sacred meal is over, he turns his attention again to Peter and asks him the same question three times: do you love me?
It’s a threefold undoing of a threefold betrayal.
Gently, insistently, Jesus repeats the question until it reaches the core of Peter’s shame. Twice Peter tells Jesus, “Lord, you know that I love you.” After the third time, the story tells us, Peter feels pained and blurts out: “Lord, you know everything!” Indeed, Jesus does know everything—the betrayal, the shame, the love Peter still holds. He sees Peter inside and out, and looks at him with love instead of condemnation. And as Peter’s threefold confession of Jesus overcomes his threefold betrayal, Jesus puts him back in the role of faithful disciple with the old, familiar seaside call: Follow me.
So what about you? And for that matter, what about me? Where are the places of shame in you? Where are the things that paralyze you, that fill you with fear, and that make you a slave to death?
I know in my life—and I imagine it’s the same for you—that the sources of my greatest shame haven’t always been my worst actions or experiences; but usually they have been my most secret. Sometimes the things that trap us in shame are things we have done wrong, like Peter. Sometimes they are things that have been done to us. Sometimes they are our fault; sometimes not. What is always true is that the risen Jesus offers us forgiveness for what we have done wrong and healing for whatever traps us. Just as he does for Peter, he gently but insistently moves to the core of our slavery to death, calls us his faithful disciples, and commissions us to follow him.
Maybe that’s the secret of the “primacy” of Peter. Not that he’s the first among Christians as a ruler of the church; but that he’s the first model for all of us disciples who come along later, of what it truly means to be healed by the risen Christ, and sent to serve in his name.
I don’t know for certain whether this story happened on the site of that Church of the Primacy, or whether the rock in the chapel is really the Table of the Lord. But what is certain is that the risen Jesus continues to come to his disciples. He is here again this very morning to feed us with the bread of life.
It is Easter; our Lenten fast is broken; our sin is forgiven; our shame is healed. This Table of the Lord is about to be set.
Come, and have breakfast.
Psalm 30
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19
+ + +
It doesn’t take a whole lot of time on pilgrimage in the Holy Land before you begin to learn to take some of the historic identifications of the holy places with a grain of salt.
It’s not that there aren’t holy sites that archeologists think could actually be historically authentic—like the Church of the Resurrection, as I said two weeks ago at Easter. But when twenty centuries have supplied enough piety, pilgrimage, and potential income, holy sites tend to pop up exponentially. So there are at least two birthplaces of John the Baptist; at least two sites where Jesus and his disciples held the Last Supper; and no less than four contenders for real Biblical town of Emmaus. Those who visit Israel and Palestine looking to find places to venerate the mysteries of the faith … tend to find what they are looking for. Those who go looking to pinpoint THE spot where they happened … are often disappointed.
And so it was back in 2009 when Julia and I arrived at the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter—THE spot on the shores of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus appeared to his disciples, cooked them breakfast, and commissioned Peter to feed his flock. Our group of pilgrims from St. George’s Anglican College in Jerusalem celebrated the Eucharist at an outdoor altar on the grounds, then toured the chapel built over a flat rock, the “Mensa Christi”—the very Table of Christ, where he laid the charcoal fire and spread out the loaves and fishes.
Or, of course, maybe it really happened at that other flat rock over there—or that other beach a mile or two down the shore. Who can say?
Yet as we stood there, looking out at the turquoise water lapping at the rocky shore, I realized just how right this holy place felt. Over twenty centuries of time, cities appear and vanish; buildings, streets, and trees come and go—but the sea today is still the same as it was then. So contemplating the story in that place was easy.
They call the church the Primacy of St. Peter. Now “primacy” is a grand sort of word—and if you’re into celebrating papal authority, perhaps that’s the aspect of the story that works for you. But as I imagine Peter experiencing this encounter with the risen Jesus, it doesn’t sound as though he’s feeling very primatial. Here he is in his soaking clothes, huddling by the charcoal fire as the rest of the disciples make their dry way back to shore in the boat. This is now the third time, the evangelist tells us, that the Lord has shown himself to the disciples. There’s been joy and astonishment as the reality has sunk in that Jesus is actually risen. And yet for Peter, there’s something that remains unaddressed—an awkward, unwelcome memory.
There are only two charcoal fires mentioned in the pages of the New Testament. They are both in John’s Gospel.
One is here. The other is just three chapters back.
We heard about it what feels like a lifetime, but was only just over two weeks, ago: in the Passion Gospel on Good Friday. Peter is huddled around a charcoal fire in the high priest’s courtyard, with the opportunity to remain faithful to Jesus, even to the point of sharing in his suffering and death—and instead he betrays him, taking the easy way out; denying three times that he even knows Jesus, just as the Lord had predicted.
How is it for Peter as he sits here dripping by the fire, one-on-one with the friend he betrayed as he waits for the others to reach the shore? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine the unspoken questions filling his mind?
“Does Jesus even know what happened? Should I bring it up? What’s this charcoal fire doing here, anyway? Is this Jesus’ way of trying to make a point? Oh God, I have to tell him I’m sorry. Wait, that’s stupid. Maybe it isn’t really such a big deal. If only I could stop feeling bad about it.”
There’s a word for the experience of having an unnameable secret, something you can never let anyone know about you. That word is shame. Peter’s shame is the shame most of us know at some point in our lives—the conviction that we have done, or been, something so unworthy that even to acknowledge it would feel like something close to undergoing a death.
And yet death is what Jesus is in the act of triumphing over.
Here by the rocky shores of the lake, he offers his disciples not death, but life. In what must surely be one of the most loving, intimate, ordinary lines in Scripture, he tells them: “Come and have breakfast.” He cooks for them and feeds them the same meal of bread and fish he once fed five thousand people by this same lake, back when he first told the disciples that he himself was the bread of life. And when the ordinary-yet-sacred meal is over, he turns his attention again to Peter and asks him the same question three times: do you love me?
It’s a threefold undoing of a threefold betrayal.
Gently, insistently, Jesus repeats the question until it reaches the core of Peter’s shame. Twice Peter tells Jesus, “Lord, you know that I love you.” After the third time, the story tells us, Peter feels pained and blurts out: “Lord, you know everything!” Indeed, Jesus does know everything—the betrayal, the shame, the love Peter still holds. He sees Peter inside and out, and looks at him with love instead of condemnation. And as Peter’s threefold confession of Jesus overcomes his threefold betrayal, Jesus puts him back in the role of faithful disciple with the old, familiar seaside call: Follow me.
So what about you? And for that matter, what about me? Where are the places of shame in you? Where are the things that paralyze you, that fill you with fear, and that make you a slave to death?
I know in my life—and I imagine it’s the same for you—that the sources of my greatest shame haven’t always been my worst actions or experiences; but usually they have been my most secret. Sometimes the things that trap us in shame are things we have done wrong, like Peter. Sometimes they are things that have been done to us. Sometimes they are our fault; sometimes not. What is always true is that the risen Jesus offers us forgiveness for what we have done wrong and healing for whatever traps us. Just as he does for Peter, he gently but insistently moves to the core of our slavery to death, calls us his faithful disciples, and commissions us to follow him.
Maybe that’s the secret of the “primacy” of Peter. Not that he’s the first among Christians as a ruler of the church; but that he’s the first model for all of us disciples who come along later, of what it truly means to be healed by the risen Christ, and sent to serve in his name.
I don’t know for certain whether this story happened on the site of that Church of the Primacy, or whether the rock in the chapel is really the Table of the Lord. But what is certain is that the risen Jesus continues to come to his disciples. He is here again this very morning to feed us with the bread of life.
It is Easter; our Lenten fast is broken; our sin is forgiven; our shame is healed. This Table of the Lord is about to be set.
Come, and have breakfast.
Apr 21, 2019 |
Year C, Easter Day, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, Easter Day, Revised Common Lectionary
Isaiah 65:17-25
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Luke 24:1-12
This is the gate of the Lord; whoever God makes righteous may enter.
+ + +
It’s been said that there’s only one monument in the world that was built over an empty tomb.
There are many, many monuments over tombs with bodies inside. New York City has Grant’s Tomb and Arlington National Cemetery, has the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You can go to Red Square in Moscow and see Lenin, his body still eerily preserved, lying in state. The tombs of the ancient pharaohs in Egypt are empty now, mostly, the remains inside fallen victim to grave robbers over the centuries; but they weren’t built to be that way.
So the church in Jerusalem is different. Westerners mostly call it the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which of course is just a fancy word for the church of the holy tomb. In the East it’s simply called the Church of the Resurrection. And at its heart is the little enclosure built over an empty rock tomb. Is it the tomb of Jesus? There’s no way to know for certain. All we know for certain is that the Romans who first built the church around the year 320 believed it was, and that place has been prayed in without interruption ever since, which surely makes it a special place no matter what.
In the end of course whether or not that particular tomb is the tomb, the one we heard about in today’s gospel reading, isn’t the most important thing. Because unlike Grant’s Tomb or Lenin’s Tomb or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, you don’t go there to pay your respects to the body inside. Of course you can pay your respects to Jesus there—but not only there. The only place you can see Lenin is in Moscow. But you never know where you might meet Jesus. Because even though Jesus had a tomb, he didn’t stay there.
The Egyptian pharaohs planned on staying in theirs. They stocked their tombs with everything they thought they might need in the afterlife: gold, jewels, food, musical instruments, and even little statues of slaves to do the manual labor for them, the same old power structures from this life replicated in the next. Jesus’s tomb wasn’t stocked with much at all: a few linen wrappings, which he left behind once he didn’t need them anymore. The women came bringing spices, but he was already gone.
I read a piece commenting on this gospel passage recently that pointed out what a difference it makes that the women step inside the tomb.[1] “When they went in,” Luke tells us, “they did not find the body.” And the women meet the two men in dazzling clothes who tell them that Jesus is risen; and they believe. But later, when Peter comes, he doesn’t go in. He stoops down and looks in from the outside. And he goes home amazed; confused, maybe; hoping against hope, perhaps; but not yet fully on board the resurrection train. And there’s something significant about that difference. Only the women actually go all the way in and stand in the place of gloom and death. These were the same women that had stayed with Jesus at the cross, while Peter lied in his fear and said he didn’t even know him. Now Peter will eventually meet the risen Jesus and come to believe, and go on to be a great preacher of the good news. But here in this moment, it’s the women who hear the good news first, because it’s only they who are willing to face the full reality of suffering and death.
In a similar way, when Jesus came to live as one of us, he didn’t just stoop down and look at the human condition from outside. He came all the way in. This is the Word of God we’re talking about, one with the Father from all eternity, dwelling in light and glory indescribable. But Jesus wasn’t content to stay that way. Rather than holding onto his privilege and power, he let it all go and was born as one of us. Not a particularly rich or powerful one. A traveling preacher and healer, going from town to town in a small province under the occupation of a big empire, talking about God’s love, and putting it into effect through his very presence.
But Jesus came farther in still. He didn’t just come to relieve suffering from the outside. He knew it from the inside, because he tasted it as one of us. The frustration of being misunderstood. The sting of betrayal by a close friend. The fear of death, and not just death, but maybe worse, the fear of pain, and the fear of shame and humiliation.
Jesus knows what it is to be human, and he knows what it is to suffer. In the suffering and uncertainty of our lives, that’s a truth we can hold on to. Jesus didn’t just stoop down from the outside. He came all the way into the tomb with us.
And he doesn’t intend to leave us there.
Maybe you’ve seen Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection of Jesus. They tend to show Jesus practically springing out of Hades, the gates of hell lying shattered at his feet. And they don’t show him alone. Instead they show Jesus reaching down to grasp Adam by the wrist with one hand and Eve with the other, yanking them bodily out of their tombs.
That’s the promise God is offering us today. Jesus Christ, who loves us and gave himself for us, is alive. Not just resuscitated to some more of the same life, but raised to a new and eternal life. And that life isn’t for him alone. He came to share it with us. We can share in the resurrection of Jesus, not only in the next life—although there too, thank God, because that means death is no longer the obliteration of all our hopes and loves but one moment in our journey deeper into the heart of God. But we don’t have to wait till we’re in our own physical graves for Jesus to start yanking us out of Hades. The new life of freedom and joy in Jesus is here for the taking, right now, today.
We baptized two new members into that life last night at the Great Easter Vigil. We renew our connection to that life every time we come to this table to receive the holy food and drink of Christ’s body and blood. And we seek to practice that life here in this community day after day, week after week, as we share our lives and care for the sick and feed the hungry, as we study scripture and sing and serve.
“Open for me the gates of the Lord,” says the psalm we sang earlier. Today we step into the empty tomb with Jesus. We face the reality of all the world’s brokenness and evil headon. And in the face of it all we sing our Alleluias, knowing that the stone is rolled away and the doorway out of that empty tomb is the gate of the Lord, the gateway to a new and risen life.
Alleluia: Christ is risen!
[1] Machrina L. Blasdell, “He is Risen! Easter Day (C) 2013,” https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/sermon/he-risen-easter-day-c-2013.
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Luke 24:1-12
This is the gate of the Lord; whoever God makes righteous may enter.
+ + +
It’s been said that there’s only one monument in the world that was built over an empty tomb.
There are many, many monuments over tombs with bodies inside. New York City has Grant’s Tomb and Arlington National Cemetery, has the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You can go to Red Square in Moscow and see Lenin, his body still eerily preserved, lying in state. The tombs of the ancient pharaohs in Egypt are empty now, mostly, the remains inside fallen victim to grave robbers over the centuries; but they weren’t built to be that way.
So the church in Jerusalem is different. Westerners mostly call it the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which of course is just a fancy word for the church of the holy tomb. In the East it’s simply called the Church of the Resurrection. And at its heart is the little enclosure built over an empty rock tomb. Is it the tomb of Jesus? There’s no way to know for certain. All we know for certain is that the Romans who first built the church around the year 320 believed it was, and that place has been prayed in without interruption ever since, which surely makes it a special place no matter what.
In the end of course whether or not that particular tomb is the tomb, the one we heard about in today’s gospel reading, isn’t the most important thing. Because unlike Grant’s Tomb or Lenin’s Tomb or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, you don’t go there to pay your respects to the body inside. Of course you can pay your respects to Jesus there—but not only there. The only place you can see Lenin is in Moscow. But you never know where you might meet Jesus. Because even though Jesus had a tomb, he didn’t stay there.
The Egyptian pharaohs planned on staying in theirs. They stocked their tombs with everything they thought they might need in the afterlife: gold, jewels, food, musical instruments, and even little statues of slaves to do the manual labor for them, the same old power structures from this life replicated in the next. Jesus’s tomb wasn’t stocked with much at all: a few linen wrappings, which he left behind once he didn’t need them anymore. The women came bringing spices, but he was already gone.
I read a piece commenting on this gospel passage recently that pointed out what a difference it makes that the women step inside the tomb.[1] “When they went in,” Luke tells us, “they did not find the body.” And the women meet the two men in dazzling clothes who tell them that Jesus is risen; and they believe. But later, when Peter comes, he doesn’t go in. He stoops down and looks in from the outside. And he goes home amazed; confused, maybe; hoping against hope, perhaps; but not yet fully on board the resurrection train. And there’s something significant about that difference. Only the women actually go all the way in and stand in the place of gloom and death. These were the same women that had stayed with Jesus at the cross, while Peter lied in his fear and said he didn’t even know him. Now Peter will eventually meet the risen Jesus and come to believe, and go on to be a great preacher of the good news. But here in this moment, it’s the women who hear the good news first, because it’s only they who are willing to face the full reality of suffering and death.
In a similar way, when Jesus came to live as one of us, he didn’t just stoop down and look at the human condition from outside. He came all the way in. This is the Word of God we’re talking about, one with the Father from all eternity, dwelling in light and glory indescribable. But Jesus wasn’t content to stay that way. Rather than holding onto his privilege and power, he let it all go and was born as one of us. Not a particularly rich or powerful one. A traveling preacher and healer, going from town to town in a small province under the occupation of a big empire, talking about God’s love, and putting it into effect through his very presence.
But Jesus came farther in still. He didn’t just come to relieve suffering from the outside. He knew it from the inside, because he tasted it as one of us. The frustration of being misunderstood. The sting of betrayal by a close friend. The fear of death, and not just death, but maybe worse, the fear of pain, and the fear of shame and humiliation.
Jesus knows what it is to be human, and he knows what it is to suffer. In the suffering and uncertainty of our lives, that’s a truth we can hold on to. Jesus didn’t just stoop down from the outside. He came all the way into the tomb with us.
And he doesn’t intend to leave us there.
Maybe you’ve seen Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection of Jesus. They tend to show Jesus practically springing out of Hades, the gates of hell lying shattered at his feet. And they don’t show him alone. Instead they show Jesus reaching down to grasp Adam by the wrist with one hand and Eve with the other, yanking them bodily out of their tombs.
That’s the promise God is offering us today. Jesus Christ, who loves us and gave himself for us, is alive. Not just resuscitated to some more of the same life, but raised to a new and eternal life. And that life isn’t for him alone. He came to share it with us. We can share in the resurrection of Jesus, not only in the next life—although there too, thank God, because that means death is no longer the obliteration of all our hopes and loves but one moment in our journey deeper into the heart of God. But we don’t have to wait till we’re in our own physical graves for Jesus to start yanking us out of Hades. The new life of freedom and joy in Jesus is here for the taking, right now, today.
We baptized two new members into that life last night at the Great Easter Vigil. We renew our connection to that life every time we come to this table to receive the holy food and drink of Christ’s body and blood. And we seek to practice that life here in this community day after day, week after week, as we share our lives and care for the sick and feed the hungry, as we study scripture and sing and serve.
“Open for me the gates of the Lord,” says the psalm we sang earlier. Today we step into the empty tomb with Jesus. We face the reality of all the world’s brokenness and evil headon. And in the face of it all we sing our Alleluias, knowing that the stone is rolled away and the doorway out of that empty tomb is the gate of the Lord, the gateway to a new and risen life.
Alleluia: Christ is risen!
[1] Machrina L. Blasdell, “He is Risen! Easter Day (C) 2013,” https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/sermon/he-risen-easter-day-c-2013.
Apr 19, 2019 |
Good Friday, All Years, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Good Friday, All Years, Revised Common Lectionary
Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
+ + +
Why are we here today?
Are we here to remember the political execution of a small-time failed messiah, a man who got in the way of good government and good religion and ended up crushed between the gears of power?
Or are we here to celebrate the redemption of the world by its creator and Lord?
The fact that we are here to do both is the mystery of the cross.
The story we have just heard is a tragic one. It’s full of betrayal, misunderstanding, false accusations, cynical rulers. It ends with a man nailed up on wooden planks and left by the side of the highway into town to die as an example for those who would challenge the powers that be. The small handful of people who love him are crushed, of course. Yet for the majority of the world, what meaning does all this hold? Not much, really. Life goes on as it always does. Politics and executions are nothing new. It’s a shame, but what can you do?
And yet here you and I are two millennia later, joining with our sister and brother Christians throughout space and time to observe these Holy Three Days. We claim that this Triduum is the key to interpreting all of life. It is the hinge around which history rotates, the moment into which the whole story of life is distilled. This is the time when an instrument of shame and death becomes the means of life and glory.[1] This is the time when the church looks at the cross in the light of the resurrection of Jesus and suddenly sees the meaning that was there all along, a meaning that was invisible before we came to know the resurrection: that in the cross of Jesus, in Jesus’ love in the face of suffering and evil, we see the character of God.
Fifteen years ago Mel Gibson made his famous and controversial movie The Passion of the Christ. It is one of the most violent films of all time, and Gibson’s response to criticism was that he was simply trying to show things as they had really been. But in Gibson’s film, not only is Jesus whipped and crucified, as the gospels actually tell us; he is tossed off bridges and whipped with hooks and cuffed across the face seemingly in every frame. I’m not suggesting that the real Jesus was treated gently or with dignity before his crucifixion, but the level of brutality in this movie was raised so high as to suggest that this particular crucifixion was the most horrific ever to take place.
I don’t believe this is true. Jesus’ death was not exceptional—at least, not in that way. There is a certain stream of Christian piety that tends to suggest that Jesus’s death was somehow worse than any other death in history, that he suffered more, if it is even possible to quantify suffering. That model rests on the idea that Jesus’ suffering is a direct payment for the sins of the world. It’s an accounting model, tit for tat: since Jesus is taking on all the sins of humanity in our place, he must have received the sum total of all that suffering in one fell swoop.
But this is not the kind of God the scriptures show us. The God of Jesus Christ is not the God of torture and violence. God is the lover of mercy and forgiveness. It is not God who killed Jesus. Nor is it the Jews, as some readings of John’s gospel might suggest—the Jewish Christians in the community that produced that gospel would have shrunk back in revulsion from the anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism their text has been used to justify through the centuries as Christians themselves have been all too ready to wield those gears of power and to become perpetrators of the same violence and torture.
The fact is that the crucifixion of Jesus is all too common and all too human a story. Jesus was one of perhaps hundreds of criminals executed that day alone in the Roman Empire and various other empires around the globe. And how many millions over time have suffered pain and death as Jesus did: anonymously; unfairly, but unspectacularly; as far as anyone could tell, pointlessly. There is a terrifying, impersonal randomness to the suffering that characterizes our existence: both the kind we inflict on one another and the kind that seems to happen for no reason at all. The victims of the ongoing wars in Syria and Sudan and Afghanistan; those killed in school shootings or gang murders; those abused by their own loved ones; victims of car accidents, hurricanes, tsunamis; none of these people choose to suffer, and there is no apparent reason why they are the ones who do.
And although not all of us will be victims of such spectacular tragedy, all of us will be touched by some form of suffering that’s unfair and unexpected. It might come in the illness of a loved one, the hopelessness of depression, the gnawing anxiety of poverty, or the loss of a friend. To suffer is to be human—to live in this beloved world which is God’s good creation and yet which is under the bondage of evil, sin, and death.
Where is the good news in all this?
There would be none, except that what we do today does not stand on its own. Today we commemorate the cross and the tomb. But this liturgy does not end tonight. It began yesterday and continues tomorrow, when we will gather in darkness and light to wait for the proclamation that Christ is risen. That resurrection is foregrounded tomorrow—but it is present here today in mystery. What we are doing today is not a passion play. We don’t come to Good Friday each year with recurring amnesia, as if we had to forget about the resurrection in order to celebrate the cross. On the contrary: it’s only in light of the resurrection that there is anything worth celebrating about the cross. As Paul writes to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and . . . we are of all people most to be pitied.”
But Christ has been raised. In the light of that raising we can look back at the cross and find in it what John the evangelist finds: glory. A meaningless waste is now proof that God is present with us: even in bleakest darkness. Jesus, Emmanuel, came as God with us and lived our life firsthand, with all its joy, but also with the futility of suffering, the banality of evil, and the heartbreak of loss. His suffering wasn’t the worst in history in some objective, measurable way, as if suffering were a substance we could count. He didn’t even have to be special in that way. He suffered as one of us. Such is the humility of God.
And not only is Jesus one of us: we are one with Jesus. Today God’s Beloved One pours himself out to death and prays for those who persecute him. Just so, today we who have been baptized into Christ must take up that same vocation. We are about to lift up the solemn prayers for this most solemn of days: and what we are doing in these prayers is what Jesus does from the cross: pouring our selves out to intercede for the life of the whole world. And when we have done that, we will gaze at the cross in love and awe, knowing it to be not only an instrument of shameful death but also the picture of God’s love.
We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you: because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
[1] Collect for Tuesday in Holy Week, Book of Common Prayer, 220.
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42
+ + +
Why are we here today?
Are we here to remember the political execution of a small-time failed messiah, a man who got in the way of good government and good religion and ended up crushed between the gears of power?
Or are we here to celebrate the redemption of the world by its creator and Lord?
The fact that we are here to do both is the mystery of the cross.
The story we have just heard is a tragic one. It’s full of betrayal, misunderstanding, false accusations, cynical rulers. It ends with a man nailed up on wooden planks and left by the side of the highway into town to die as an example for those who would challenge the powers that be. The small handful of people who love him are crushed, of course. Yet for the majority of the world, what meaning does all this hold? Not much, really. Life goes on as it always does. Politics and executions are nothing new. It’s a shame, but what can you do?
And yet here you and I are two millennia later, joining with our sister and brother Christians throughout space and time to observe these Holy Three Days. We claim that this Triduum is the key to interpreting all of life. It is the hinge around which history rotates, the moment into which the whole story of life is distilled. This is the time when an instrument of shame and death becomes the means of life and glory.[1] This is the time when the church looks at the cross in the light of the resurrection of Jesus and suddenly sees the meaning that was there all along, a meaning that was invisible before we came to know the resurrection: that in the cross of Jesus, in Jesus’ love in the face of suffering and evil, we see the character of God.
Fifteen years ago Mel Gibson made his famous and controversial movie The Passion of the Christ. It is one of the most violent films of all time, and Gibson’s response to criticism was that he was simply trying to show things as they had really been. But in Gibson’s film, not only is Jesus whipped and crucified, as the gospels actually tell us; he is tossed off bridges and whipped with hooks and cuffed across the face seemingly in every frame. I’m not suggesting that the real Jesus was treated gently or with dignity before his crucifixion, but the level of brutality in this movie was raised so high as to suggest that this particular crucifixion was the most horrific ever to take place.
I don’t believe this is true. Jesus’ death was not exceptional—at least, not in that way. There is a certain stream of Christian piety that tends to suggest that Jesus’s death was somehow worse than any other death in history, that he suffered more, if it is even possible to quantify suffering. That model rests on the idea that Jesus’ suffering is a direct payment for the sins of the world. It’s an accounting model, tit for tat: since Jesus is taking on all the sins of humanity in our place, he must have received the sum total of all that suffering in one fell swoop.
But this is not the kind of God the scriptures show us. The God of Jesus Christ is not the God of torture and violence. God is the lover of mercy and forgiveness. It is not God who killed Jesus. Nor is it the Jews, as some readings of John’s gospel might suggest—the Jewish Christians in the community that produced that gospel would have shrunk back in revulsion from the anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism their text has been used to justify through the centuries as Christians themselves have been all too ready to wield those gears of power and to become perpetrators of the same violence and torture.
The fact is that the crucifixion of Jesus is all too common and all too human a story. Jesus was one of perhaps hundreds of criminals executed that day alone in the Roman Empire and various other empires around the globe. And how many millions over time have suffered pain and death as Jesus did: anonymously; unfairly, but unspectacularly; as far as anyone could tell, pointlessly. There is a terrifying, impersonal randomness to the suffering that characterizes our existence: both the kind we inflict on one another and the kind that seems to happen for no reason at all. The victims of the ongoing wars in Syria and Sudan and Afghanistan; those killed in school shootings or gang murders; those abused by their own loved ones; victims of car accidents, hurricanes, tsunamis; none of these people choose to suffer, and there is no apparent reason why they are the ones who do.
And although not all of us will be victims of such spectacular tragedy, all of us will be touched by some form of suffering that’s unfair and unexpected. It might come in the illness of a loved one, the hopelessness of depression, the gnawing anxiety of poverty, or the loss of a friend. To suffer is to be human—to live in this beloved world which is God’s good creation and yet which is under the bondage of evil, sin, and death.
Where is the good news in all this?
There would be none, except that what we do today does not stand on its own. Today we commemorate the cross and the tomb. But this liturgy does not end tonight. It began yesterday and continues tomorrow, when we will gather in darkness and light to wait for the proclamation that Christ is risen. That resurrection is foregrounded tomorrow—but it is present here today in mystery. What we are doing today is not a passion play. We don’t come to Good Friday each year with recurring amnesia, as if we had to forget about the resurrection in order to celebrate the cross. On the contrary: it’s only in light of the resurrection that there is anything worth celebrating about the cross. As Paul writes to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and . . . we are of all people most to be pitied.”
But Christ has been raised. In the light of that raising we can look back at the cross and find in it what John the evangelist finds: glory. A meaningless waste is now proof that God is present with us: even in bleakest darkness. Jesus, Emmanuel, came as God with us and lived our life firsthand, with all its joy, but also with the futility of suffering, the banality of evil, and the heartbreak of loss. His suffering wasn’t the worst in history in some objective, measurable way, as if suffering were a substance we could count. He didn’t even have to be special in that way. He suffered as one of us. Such is the humility of God.
And not only is Jesus one of us: we are one with Jesus. Today God’s Beloved One pours himself out to death and prays for those who persecute him. Just so, today we who have been baptized into Christ must take up that same vocation. We are about to lift up the solemn prayers for this most solemn of days: and what we are doing in these prayers is what Jesus does from the cross: pouring our selves out to intercede for the life of the whole world. And when we have done that, we will gaze at the cross in love and awe, knowing it to be not only an instrument of shameful death but also the picture of God’s love.
We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you: because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
[1] Collect for Tuesday in Holy Week, Book of Common Prayer, 220.
Apr 07, 2019 |
Year C, 5 Lent, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, 5 Lent, Revised Common Lectionary
Isaiah 43:16-21
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
Psalm 126
Thus says the LORD: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth.
Do you not perceive it?
+ + +
There’s a saying you hear a lot in the world of interviewing and hiring: past performance is the best indicator of future results. In other words, if you want to know what someone is likely to do if you hire them for a future job, don’t pay attention so much to what they say they’ll do. Pay attention to what they’ve done in the past. Someone who’s shown leadership skills in previous situations is likely to show those skills again. Someone who’s been resourceful, or flaky, or creative, in the past is likely to act those ways in the future.
Now that’s not to say we’re all prisoners of our pasts. People change and grow, thank God. We can all develop new skills and try out new behaviors. But it’s true that most of us do have a certain personality and certain preferences that are pretty stable. Even actors, the people you’d think are the most able to act out a wide variety of personalities, tend to get typecast into roles that suit them. A couple of years ago I read a book by Gretchen Rubin called The Happiness Project. one of the rules the author developed for herself was, “Be Gretchen.” She’d realized she spent a lot of time trying to change herself. She sometimes wanted to be the kind of person who enjoyed going to jazz clubs at midnight—but she really liked staying at home in her PJs. So she learned to give herself permission to be Gretchen, and let someone else be someone else.
Now I don’t want to say that God is limited by our human personality structures. God, being God, is the source of all our various gifts and passions. God can behave in any way God chooses. And yet I think it’s also fair to say that God does in fact have certain recurring patterns of behavior.
Take our Old Testament reading as an example. This passage comes from a time when the people of Israel are in exile in Babylon. And the prophet speaks the words of the LORD: God is about to act. Slavery is over; freedom is at hand. The chosen people are going to be led out across the wilderness, nourished by God with miraculous waters in the desert, and brought out in safety to the Promised Land.
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, says God in this passage. I am about to do a new thing. Do you not perceive it?
Except … this new thing is a lot like the old thing.
In fact, it’s almost an exact repetition of the foundational narrative of Israel, the Exodus, when God brought the chosen people out of slavery, not in Babylon but in Egypt, and let them across the wilderness, nourished them with waters in the desert, and brought them into the Promised Land.
You might say God is playing to type. There’s something about God’s personality that means that bringing the people out of slavery and into freedom is really what God does. In the midst of deepest suffering, when hope seems lost and evil seems to have triumphed, God acts, for liberation. God’s past performance is in fact a pretty good indicator of God’s future behavior. God is always doing something new—and yet, in another sense, God only ever does one thing.
Now it’s only afterwards that it all makes sense: yes, of course. This is God’s way of acting! This is the same God we knew from before, the one who sets us free. This is the new thing that God does over and over, each time fitting into the same pattern, each time unexpected and new. Do you not perceive it?
The story seemed to be completely over for the disciples of Jesus. They hoped he was the one who would bring God’s kingdom on earth and fulfill the hopes of Israel. Instead, he brought down all the power of religion and empire down on his head. We’ve started to feel the gathering clouds already in today’s gospel, in the story of his anointing ahead of time for his burial. And next week we will plunge deeply into the heart of the mystery, into the dark shadows of betrayal and death.
And then in raising Jesus from the dead, God does the most unexpected and mysterious new thing of all. Death is destroyed, violence is defeated. Jesus is risen. This is a new thing—and yet it is in keeping with what God has always done. No one could have predicted it; but in retrospect it makes sense: yes, this is the same God we knew from before! It’s this event, this resurrection—this person—that transforms the disciples’ lives forever. This act of God in raising Jesus keeps reverberating through the centuries, and it will reverberate right down until God’s final victory, when the self-giving love of Jesus is all in all.
It’s slow, and often it’s imperceptible. Evil and death still reign so powerfully, in so many places: in prison cells, in concentration camps, in dictators’ mansions, in our own broken relationships and addictions and petty acts of betrayal. And yet God keeps acting. Even when we least expect it, God does the new old thing again. We hear the strains of We Shall Overcome, and slaves are set free and walls come down and the poor hear good news.
It never happens without people perceiving what God is doing and joining in. And yet it’s never our initiative doing it all on our own. It’s the wild Spirit of God breathing over the world. This is the pattern that is knit into the fabric of creation. Or to say it a better way, this is the personality of the God behind all creation. Because the fullest revelation of God isn’t just a pattern; it’s the human being Jesus. This is the person Paul fell so deeply in love with that all the best and noblest things in his life came to seem like loss, like rubbish, compared to the total delight of knowing Jesus and his resurrection. This is the person Mary fell so deeply in love with that she poured out the priceless perfume, caressing his feet and honoring his person just before he was glorified.
And this is the person we meet whenever two or three of us gather together in his name. We meet him when we read the words of scripture, and we meet him when we celebrate the sacraments. We meet him in the faces of one another, and in the faces of the poor.
We’re about to dive into the very heart of the story. The next time we gather all together as a parish family, it will be to wave palms and celebrate his entry into Jerusalem—and then to hear the story of his humiliation, his suffering and death, and to walk the path toward the empty tomb. Holy Week and Easter are the whole pattern in miniature of God’s love. We do this every year; it’s always the same. And yet it is a new thing each time. Because this is not just a reenactment of things that happened in the past. The same Jesus is alive and present today. The same Holy Spirit is blowing where she wills. The mystery is always the same, but you and I are different, and God is still at work here and now.
Where in your life, I wonder, is God about to do a new thing? Where—even where you would never expect it—might God be about to set you free?
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
Psalm 126
Thus says the LORD: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth.
Do you not perceive it?
+ + +
There’s a saying you hear a lot in the world of interviewing and hiring: past performance is the best indicator of future results. In other words, if you want to know what someone is likely to do if you hire them for a future job, don’t pay attention so much to what they say they’ll do. Pay attention to what they’ve done in the past. Someone who’s shown leadership skills in previous situations is likely to show those skills again. Someone who’s been resourceful, or flaky, or creative, in the past is likely to act those ways in the future.
Now that’s not to say we’re all prisoners of our pasts. People change and grow, thank God. We can all develop new skills and try out new behaviors. But it’s true that most of us do have a certain personality and certain preferences that are pretty stable. Even actors, the people you’d think are the most able to act out a wide variety of personalities, tend to get typecast into roles that suit them. A couple of years ago I read a book by Gretchen Rubin called The Happiness Project. one of the rules the author developed for herself was, “Be Gretchen.” She’d realized she spent a lot of time trying to change herself. She sometimes wanted to be the kind of person who enjoyed going to jazz clubs at midnight—but she really liked staying at home in her PJs. So she learned to give herself permission to be Gretchen, and let someone else be someone else.
Now I don’t want to say that God is limited by our human personality structures. God, being God, is the source of all our various gifts and passions. God can behave in any way God chooses. And yet I think it’s also fair to say that God does in fact have certain recurring patterns of behavior.
Take our Old Testament reading as an example. This passage comes from a time when the people of Israel are in exile in Babylon. And the prophet speaks the words of the LORD: God is about to act. Slavery is over; freedom is at hand. The chosen people are going to be led out across the wilderness, nourished by God with miraculous waters in the desert, and brought out in safety to the Promised Land.
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, says God in this passage. I am about to do a new thing. Do you not perceive it?
Except … this new thing is a lot like the old thing.
In fact, it’s almost an exact repetition of the foundational narrative of Israel, the Exodus, when God brought the chosen people out of slavery, not in Babylon but in Egypt, and let them across the wilderness, nourished them with waters in the desert, and brought them into the Promised Land.
You might say God is playing to type. There’s something about God’s personality that means that bringing the people out of slavery and into freedom is really what God does. In the midst of deepest suffering, when hope seems lost and evil seems to have triumphed, God acts, for liberation. God’s past performance is in fact a pretty good indicator of God’s future behavior. God is always doing something new—and yet, in another sense, God only ever does one thing.
Now it’s only afterwards that it all makes sense: yes, of course. This is God’s way of acting! This is the same God we knew from before, the one who sets us free. This is the new thing that God does over and over, each time fitting into the same pattern, each time unexpected and new. Do you not perceive it?
The story seemed to be completely over for the disciples of Jesus. They hoped he was the one who would bring God’s kingdom on earth and fulfill the hopes of Israel. Instead, he brought down all the power of religion and empire down on his head. We’ve started to feel the gathering clouds already in today’s gospel, in the story of his anointing ahead of time for his burial. And next week we will plunge deeply into the heart of the mystery, into the dark shadows of betrayal and death.
And then in raising Jesus from the dead, God does the most unexpected and mysterious new thing of all. Death is destroyed, violence is defeated. Jesus is risen. This is a new thing—and yet it is in keeping with what God has always done. No one could have predicted it; but in retrospect it makes sense: yes, this is the same God we knew from before! It’s this event, this resurrection—this person—that transforms the disciples’ lives forever. This act of God in raising Jesus keeps reverberating through the centuries, and it will reverberate right down until God’s final victory, when the self-giving love of Jesus is all in all.
It’s slow, and often it’s imperceptible. Evil and death still reign so powerfully, in so many places: in prison cells, in concentration camps, in dictators’ mansions, in our own broken relationships and addictions and petty acts of betrayal. And yet God keeps acting. Even when we least expect it, God does the new old thing again. We hear the strains of We Shall Overcome, and slaves are set free and walls come down and the poor hear good news.
It never happens without people perceiving what God is doing and joining in. And yet it’s never our initiative doing it all on our own. It’s the wild Spirit of God breathing over the world. This is the pattern that is knit into the fabric of creation. Or to say it a better way, this is the personality of the God behind all creation. Because the fullest revelation of God isn’t just a pattern; it’s the human being Jesus. This is the person Paul fell so deeply in love with that all the best and noblest things in his life came to seem like loss, like rubbish, compared to the total delight of knowing Jesus and his resurrection. This is the person Mary fell so deeply in love with that she poured out the priceless perfume, caressing his feet and honoring his person just before he was glorified.
And this is the person we meet whenever two or three of us gather together in his name. We meet him when we read the words of scripture, and we meet him when we celebrate the sacraments. We meet him in the faces of one another, and in the faces of the poor.
We’re about to dive into the very heart of the story. The next time we gather all together as a parish family, it will be to wave palms and celebrate his entry into Jerusalem—and then to hear the story of his humiliation, his suffering and death, and to walk the path toward the empty tomb. Holy Week and Easter are the whole pattern in miniature of God’s love. We do this every year; it’s always the same. And yet it is a new thing each time. Because this is not just a reenactment of things that happened in the past. The same Jesus is alive and present today. The same Holy Spirit is blowing where she wills. The mystery is always the same, but you and I are different, and God is still at work here and now.
Where in your life, I wonder, is God about to do a new thing? Where—even where you would never expect it—might God be about to set you free?
Mar 24, 2019 |
Year C, 3 Lent, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, 3 Lent, Revised Common Lectionary
Exodus 3:1-15
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
+ + +
A little over a week ago we heard a spectacular and repellent example of something human beings are all too prone to doing: the phenomenon of “blaming the victim.”[1] It happened after the horrifying murders of Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand. An Australian senator named Fraser Anning posted a statement saying the attack happened because Muslim people had chosen to immigrate to New Zealand in the first place. Other public officials rightly condemned his remarks, and you may have seen the viral video of a teenager hitting him with an egg a few days later—maybe not the ideal method, but an understandable reaction—and the senator responding by punching the teenager, spiraling from violent words into violent action.
Blaming the victim. It happens all the time. It happens when a woman is assaulted, and people begin asking questions about what she was wearing and whether she should have been more careful. It happens when an unarmed black man is shot and people begin asking questions about whether he was dressed in a hoodie or whether he reached for his wallet too quickly. It happened famously in 2001 after September 11, when the fundamentalist pastors Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson suggested the terrorist attacks were God’s wrath on America for tolerating homosexuality and abortion.
It’s easy to point the finger at Jerry Falwell or Fraser Anning—and yet to some extent blaming the victim is something all of us are tempted to do. Psychologists suggest we have a tendency to want our world to be predictable and controllable.[2] It upsets our sense of order and safety to think that bad things can happen whether or not they’re expected, whether or not they’re deserved.
Now of course there are times when we do contribute to our own misfortune. We make bad choices or take foolish risks. But so much of the time disaster strikes with no rational explanation and no sense of justice. The cancer diagnosis, the freak accident, the sudden act of violence, can come crashing into one person’s life or another with no apparent rhyme or reason. As Rabbi Harold Kushner’s bestseller put it back in the 1980s, there are times when bad things happen to good people. I know how badly I myself want that not to be true. I’d love to live a nice, orderly, predictable life where my family and I are safe and nothing bad happens ever. And so it’s a common cognitive response when something bad happens to someone else to assume that there must have been a reason for it. Maybe they should have been more careful. Surely they must have done something wrong.
Today we heard Jesus reject that kind of victim-blaming. One group of Galileans has been massacred by the Roman governor Pilate; another group in Jerusalem has been killed by a collapsing tower in an apparent freak accident. “Do you think they were worse offenders than anyone else?” says Jesus. “No, I tell you.” And then we have to pay close attention to what Jesus really says next, because the word that gets translated “repent” doesn’t really convey what the English word “repent” suggests. It sounds punitive when Jesus says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” But the Greek word metanoēte doesn’t mean “repent” in the sense of feeling bad about yourself or saying you’re sorry about something. It means “reorient yourself,” “change your way of thinking.” It means a complete change of outlook, a transformation in how we perceive and act in the world.
Part of that transformation means an end to the illusion of blaming the victim. It means giving up the luxury of believing that we can control our lives through our careful planning or good behavior—and that people who suffer must somehow have contributed to their own predicament in some way. It actually means giving up judging other people altogether.
Jesus offers us that transformation of our whole way of thinking. The place where he does it most of all is at the cross. At the cross Jesus himself became an innocent victim. When we look at Christ crucified we see not a criminal who had it coming but God’s beloved one bearing the weight of undeserved evil. And when we see Jesus that way, it starts to train our eyes, our minds, our whole selves to realize that God isn’t a cosmic dispenser of punishment for bad behavior but the never-ending source of life and mercy and compassion. And if we see Jesus that way, that means we start to see others that way too.
Jesus goes on to tell a parable. And if we think God is a cosmic punisher, we might assume God is the landowner in the story, who sees his fig tree not bearing fruit and gives it the punishment it deserves. But that’s not the only way to read this story—and I think there’s another way that makes more sense with what Jesus has just been saying. This landowner is blaming the victim. He thinks the tree must be at fault. It doesn’t occur to him that the tree might be suffering the natural effects of inadequate soil and lack of care. So all he can think of to do is to rip it out. What if God in this story isn’t the landowner, but the gardener? If we read the story with God on the other side, we see a God who stands on the side of the tree and against the punishment of the innocent. We see a patient God, a caring God, who wants to tend to our roots and fertilize our soil.
“Unless you repent,” says Jesus, “the same thing will happen to you as happened to those others who perished.” In other words, unless we break out of the illusion of wanting to be right, wanting others to be wrong, wanting victims to be punished, we’ll be stuck in the same cycle, trying ineffectually to stave off our own suffering by self-righteousness, and then when we finally fail and life happens to us too, having others blame us for our suffering just as we blamed others.
There’s an alternative. It’s the transformation Christ offers us, softening our hearts and fertilizing our souls. If we accept it, our lives won’t be safe, or secure, or predictable. But we’ll see things more clearly. And God may use us to make the world a more compassionate, more loving place.
[1] This sermon is inspired primarily by another fine sermon, preached by my friend and colleague Daniel London at Christ Church, Sausalito, CA, February 28, 2016: https://deforestlondon.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/from-blaming-the-victim-to-subverting-the-system/.
[2] See, for example, Kayleigh Roberts, “The Psychology of Victim-Blaming,” The Atlantic (October 5, 2016): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/the-psychology-of-victim-blaming/502661/.
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
+ + +
A little over a week ago we heard a spectacular and repellent example of something human beings are all too prone to doing: the phenomenon of “blaming the victim.”[1] It happened after the horrifying murders of Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand. An Australian senator named Fraser Anning posted a statement saying the attack happened because Muslim people had chosen to immigrate to New Zealand in the first place. Other public officials rightly condemned his remarks, and you may have seen the viral video of a teenager hitting him with an egg a few days later—maybe not the ideal method, but an understandable reaction—and the senator responding by punching the teenager, spiraling from violent words into violent action.
Blaming the victim. It happens all the time. It happens when a woman is assaulted, and people begin asking questions about what she was wearing and whether she should have been more careful. It happens when an unarmed black man is shot and people begin asking questions about whether he was dressed in a hoodie or whether he reached for his wallet too quickly. It happened famously in 2001 after September 11, when the fundamentalist pastors Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson suggested the terrorist attacks were God’s wrath on America for tolerating homosexuality and abortion.
It’s easy to point the finger at Jerry Falwell or Fraser Anning—and yet to some extent blaming the victim is something all of us are tempted to do. Psychologists suggest we have a tendency to want our world to be predictable and controllable.[2] It upsets our sense of order and safety to think that bad things can happen whether or not they’re expected, whether or not they’re deserved.
Now of course there are times when we do contribute to our own misfortune. We make bad choices or take foolish risks. But so much of the time disaster strikes with no rational explanation and no sense of justice. The cancer diagnosis, the freak accident, the sudden act of violence, can come crashing into one person’s life or another with no apparent rhyme or reason. As Rabbi Harold Kushner’s bestseller put it back in the 1980s, there are times when bad things happen to good people. I know how badly I myself want that not to be true. I’d love to live a nice, orderly, predictable life where my family and I are safe and nothing bad happens ever. And so it’s a common cognitive response when something bad happens to someone else to assume that there must have been a reason for it. Maybe they should have been more careful. Surely they must have done something wrong.
Today we heard Jesus reject that kind of victim-blaming. One group of Galileans has been massacred by the Roman governor Pilate; another group in Jerusalem has been killed by a collapsing tower in an apparent freak accident. “Do you think they were worse offenders than anyone else?” says Jesus. “No, I tell you.” And then we have to pay close attention to what Jesus really says next, because the word that gets translated “repent” doesn’t really convey what the English word “repent” suggests. It sounds punitive when Jesus says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” But the Greek word metanoēte doesn’t mean “repent” in the sense of feeling bad about yourself or saying you’re sorry about something. It means “reorient yourself,” “change your way of thinking.” It means a complete change of outlook, a transformation in how we perceive and act in the world.
Part of that transformation means an end to the illusion of blaming the victim. It means giving up the luxury of believing that we can control our lives through our careful planning or good behavior—and that people who suffer must somehow have contributed to their own predicament in some way. It actually means giving up judging other people altogether.
Jesus offers us that transformation of our whole way of thinking. The place where he does it most of all is at the cross. At the cross Jesus himself became an innocent victim. When we look at Christ crucified we see not a criminal who had it coming but God’s beloved one bearing the weight of undeserved evil. And when we see Jesus that way, it starts to train our eyes, our minds, our whole selves to realize that God isn’t a cosmic dispenser of punishment for bad behavior but the never-ending source of life and mercy and compassion. And if we see Jesus that way, that means we start to see others that way too.
Jesus goes on to tell a parable. And if we think God is a cosmic punisher, we might assume God is the landowner in the story, who sees his fig tree not bearing fruit and gives it the punishment it deserves. But that’s not the only way to read this story—and I think there’s another way that makes more sense with what Jesus has just been saying. This landowner is blaming the victim. He thinks the tree must be at fault. It doesn’t occur to him that the tree might be suffering the natural effects of inadequate soil and lack of care. So all he can think of to do is to rip it out. What if God in this story isn’t the landowner, but the gardener? If we read the story with God on the other side, we see a God who stands on the side of the tree and against the punishment of the innocent. We see a patient God, a caring God, who wants to tend to our roots and fertilize our soil.
“Unless you repent,” says Jesus, “the same thing will happen to you as happened to those others who perished.” In other words, unless we break out of the illusion of wanting to be right, wanting others to be wrong, wanting victims to be punished, we’ll be stuck in the same cycle, trying ineffectually to stave off our own suffering by self-righteousness, and then when we finally fail and life happens to us too, having others blame us for our suffering just as we blamed others.
There’s an alternative. It’s the transformation Christ offers us, softening our hearts and fertilizing our souls. If we accept it, our lives won’t be safe, or secure, or predictable. But we’ll see things more clearly. And God may use us to make the world a more compassionate, more loving place.
[1] This sermon is inspired primarily by another fine sermon, preached by my friend and colleague Daniel London at Christ Church, Sausalito, CA, February 28, 2016: https://deforestlondon.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/from-blaming-the-victim-to-subverting-the-system/.
[2] See, for example, Kayleigh Roberts, “The Psychology of Victim-Blaming,” The Atlantic (October 5, 2016): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/the-psychology-of-victim-blaming/502661/.
Mar 24, 2019 |
Vigil Against Gun Violence
| Stephen Shaver
Vigil Against Gun Violence
Genesis 4:2b, 4b-5, 8-10
Hosea 4:1-3
Luke 23:27-31
Matthew 5:1-9
Words of Outrage: Emma González
+ + +
Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness: Spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace. Amen.
That’s a prayer for peace from our prayer book. And like most of the prayers in our prayer book, it echoes the language of the scriptures. And so of course it doesn’t talk about guns; it talks about swords.
There’s a lot about swords in the Bible. There’s the great passage from Isaiah, inscribed on a wall at the United Nations building: “Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” There’s Jesus telling his followers that his coming would bring not peace but a sword—and then, when they fail to grasp that he’s speaking metaphorically, they try to defend him with swords when he’s being arrested and he says, “Enough! Put away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”
So there’s plenty about swords in the Bible, enough to suggest that God likes it when people put down their weapons. But there’s not a lot about guns, in fact nothing at all, because of course there were no guns two and three thousand years ago when those texts were written. And so in choosing the readings for this service we included plenty of scripture, but we also had to reach outside scripture, to a modern-day prophetic voice from a young person: Emma González, speaking just over a year ago.
Exactly a year ago many of us were gathered, here and elsewhere, to stand up against gun violence in the March for Our Lives. Many people from this congregation were here in Santa Rosa at Old Courthouse Square. I was at the March in Oakland. And in the year since then, too little has changed—a little, but too little. Now gun violence is not limited to the United States, as we saw tragically a little over a week ago in Christchurch, New Zealand. But in New Zealand we are also seeing a society responding, quickly and decisively, by reassessing its own laws and its own relationship with guns, while here in the United States we remain stuck in political gridlock.
We heard Emma González point out that since the time of the Second Amendment the guns have changed but the laws have not. And it’s also true that since the time of the Bible, the weapons have changed but our hearts have not. It’s sometimes said that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And there’s some truth to that as far as it goes. We know the human heart has been capable of violence as far back as humans go. The story of Cain and Abel is about that violence as it first enters the world, and then goes on to spiral down through history in one act of retribution after another. So yes: people kill people. But it’s also true that people kill people with guns. And people with guns are capable of killing in different ways, on a different scale, than ever before.
Scripture doesn’t tell us anything about guns any more than it does about airplanes or germ theory or the Internet. So, just like with those other topics, people of faith have to make decisions in our own time about what’s right, based on principles scripture does give us, and based on the consciences and minds God has given us to follow the Spirit’s leadings in the time we do live in. When God’s children are being slaughtered, we can’t stand idly by. When there’s a chance to protect innocent life, we’re called to act.
This country has more guns per capita, and more guns period, than any other place on earth. It’s not even close. American civilians own more guns than the next 25 countries combined. Yemen, a country in the middle of a brutal civil war, has 52 guns for every hundred people. We have 120. This is the only place in the world with more guns than people. In terms of other countries as wealthy as the United States, the next highest is Canada with 34, and it goes down from there.[1] It’s fair to say this country is addicted to guns. And that addiction has consequences. We have 3.8 gun murders per 100,000 people. Canada has 0.4, Denmark less than 0.2.[2] The human heart is not that different among those countries. The availability of lethal weapons is.
Now there are lots of good reasons why an individual might choose to own a gun. Some of us here tonight own guns. The issue here is not whether a responsible, trained and screened person should be able to buy a gun. The issue is our national addiction to a kind of fantasy of power and domination, expressed in violence. The issue is a culture where Bushmaster rifles, the kind of rifle used in the Sandy Hook shootings, are advertised with the slogan, “Consider your man card reissued.” It’s a sickness of the spirit, an impoverishment of the soul. And it results in a society that is so overmilitarized that we inflict the trauma of active-shooter drills on our children, as if this were a normal thing to have to prepare for; that we tell teachers they should pack heat in the classroom, as if the only possible way we can imagine responding to violence is by unleashing more violence. I don’t want to live in a society that is armed to the teeth. I don’t want my little daughter to grow up in that society.
We’re not going to change the human heart overnight, and we’re not going to cure our society’s addiction to violence overnight. But if our goal is a little more modest, if our goal is saving lives and making people safer, there are some common-sense things we can do, if we as a society have the will—if we have the maturity to put the lives of our children and our loved ones above that fantasy of cartoonish machismo. This church, the Episcopal Church, has gone on record in favor of a lot of those common-sense things. Our General Convention has passed resolutions in favor of requiring universal background checks, permits, and safety training for anyone who purchases a firearm. And in favor of banning military-style assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and devices like bump stocks that essentially convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic ones. Those measures on their own would go a long way. I’m happy to say the White House has actually taken steps to ban bump stocks, and even though on its own that’s just one thing, it shows that when national attention is focused on this issue, things can change.
It’s especially important when people on the right side of the political spectrum work on these issues—because that’s where the political will is that can change things. Some of the best values that the right historically holds dear are responsibility, duty, and honor. There’s a conservative case to be made for expecting people who want to own guns to show the responsibility that comes with the privilege. Our shameful political gridlock is based on partisanship. But this should not be a partisan issue. This is a moral issue.
Because the question is: who are we? In this congregation we believe we are children of God, infinitely precious and beloved in God’s sight, made in God’s own image. Every time a person is wounded or killed with a gun, it is God’s own image that is being assaulted and destroyed.
And so we are called to act. We are called to vote, to tell our politicians that if they want to earn our vote, that they need to support laws that will help save lives. We are called to show up, at marches like the one a year ago today, at events like this, to help build attention and support that affects public opinion over time. We are called to give, to use our resources where we can to promote real learning and advocacy. We are called to write letters to the editor, to talk with friends and neighbors, to do the hard work of winning hearts and minds. And we are called to pray. Prayer is a form of action—not the glib “thoughts and prayers” we so often hear about as a substitute for action, but prayer to a God who hears us, and hurts with us, and uses us to help bring change. We pray tonight in lament for what has happened. We pray for those who have died, for each precious person taken too soon from this earth. We pray for those who grieve. And we pray for a future where we will not have to pray those prayers of lament any more, where there will be no more of these posters, where we will not have to have services like this one.
God’s dream for this world is the Beloved Community, a world where all live in peace and all are fed and all are free of violence and fear. That vision is what gives us hope. We won’t get there by our own efforts alone, and we won’t get there in this life, not all the way. But God can use us, right now, in this life, empowering our efforts, to move this world one notch closer to the Beloved Community. A world that’s a little kinder, a little safer.
Blessed are the peacemakers, says Jesus: for they will be called the children of God. God, make us your children. Make us peacemakers.
[1] Small Arms Survey, 2017.
[2] Nurith Aizenman, “Gun Violence: How the U.S. Compares with Other Countries,” Goats and Soda from NPR (October 6, 2017); https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/06/555861898/gun-violence-how-the-u-s-compares-to-other-countries.
Hosea 4:1-3
Luke 23:27-31
Matthew 5:1-9
Words of Outrage: Emma González
+ + +
Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness: Spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace. Amen.
That’s a prayer for peace from our prayer book. And like most of the prayers in our prayer book, it echoes the language of the scriptures. And so of course it doesn’t talk about guns; it talks about swords.
There’s a lot about swords in the Bible. There’s the great passage from Isaiah, inscribed on a wall at the United Nations building: “Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” There’s Jesus telling his followers that his coming would bring not peace but a sword—and then, when they fail to grasp that he’s speaking metaphorically, they try to defend him with swords when he’s being arrested and he says, “Enough! Put away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”
So there’s plenty about swords in the Bible, enough to suggest that God likes it when people put down their weapons. But there’s not a lot about guns, in fact nothing at all, because of course there were no guns two and three thousand years ago when those texts were written. And so in choosing the readings for this service we included plenty of scripture, but we also had to reach outside scripture, to a modern-day prophetic voice from a young person: Emma González, speaking just over a year ago.
Exactly a year ago many of us were gathered, here and elsewhere, to stand up against gun violence in the March for Our Lives. Many people from this congregation were here in Santa Rosa at Old Courthouse Square. I was at the March in Oakland. And in the year since then, too little has changed—a little, but too little. Now gun violence is not limited to the United States, as we saw tragically a little over a week ago in Christchurch, New Zealand. But in New Zealand we are also seeing a society responding, quickly and decisively, by reassessing its own laws and its own relationship with guns, while here in the United States we remain stuck in political gridlock.
We heard Emma González point out that since the time of the Second Amendment the guns have changed but the laws have not. And it’s also true that since the time of the Bible, the weapons have changed but our hearts have not. It’s sometimes said that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And there’s some truth to that as far as it goes. We know the human heart has been capable of violence as far back as humans go. The story of Cain and Abel is about that violence as it first enters the world, and then goes on to spiral down through history in one act of retribution after another. So yes: people kill people. But it’s also true that people kill people with guns. And people with guns are capable of killing in different ways, on a different scale, than ever before.
Scripture doesn’t tell us anything about guns any more than it does about airplanes or germ theory or the Internet. So, just like with those other topics, people of faith have to make decisions in our own time about what’s right, based on principles scripture does give us, and based on the consciences and minds God has given us to follow the Spirit’s leadings in the time we do live in. When God’s children are being slaughtered, we can’t stand idly by. When there’s a chance to protect innocent life, we’re called to act.
This country has more guns per capita, and more guns period, than any other place on earth. It’s not even close. American civilians own more guns than the next 25 countries combined. Yemen, a country in the middle of a brutal civil war, has 52 guns for every hundred people. We have 120. This is the only place in the world with more guns than people. In terms of other countries as wealthy as the United States, the next highest is Canada with 34, and it goes down from there.[1] It’s fair to say this country is addicted to guns. And that addiction has consequences. We have 3.8 gun murders per 100,000 people. Canada has 0.4, Denmark less than 0.2.[2] The human heart is not that different among those countries. The availability of lethal weapons is.
Now there are lots of good reasons why an individual might choose to own a gun. Some of us here tonight own guns. The issue here is not whether a responsible, trained and screened person should be able to buy a gun. The issue is our national addiction to a kind of fantasy of power and domination, expressed in violence. The issue is a culture where Bushmaster rifles, the kind of rifle used in the Sandy Hook shootings, are advertised with the slogan, “Consider your man card reissued.” It’s a sickness of the spirit, an impoverishment of the soul. And it results in a society that is so overmilitarized that we inflict the trauma of active-shooter drills on our children, as if this were a normal thing to have to prepare for; that we tell teachers they should pack heat in the classroom, as if the only possible way we can imagine responding to violence is by unleashing more violence. I don’t want to live in a society that is armed to the teeth. I don’t want my little daughter to grow up in that society.
We’re not going to change the human heart overnight, and we’re not going to cure our society’s addiction to violence overnight. But if our goal is a little more modest, if our goal is saving lives and making people safer, there are some common-sense things we can do, if we as a society have the will—if we have the maturity to put the lives of our children and our loved ones above that fantasy of cartoonish machismo. This church, the Episcopal Church, has gone on record in favor of a lot of those common-sense things. Our General Convention has passed resolutions in favor of requiring universal background checks, permits, and safety training for anyone who purchases a firearm. And in favor of banning military-style assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and devices like bump stocks that essentially convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic ones. Those measures on their own would go a long way. I’m happy to say the White House has actually taken steps to ban bump stocks, and even though on its own that’s just one thing, it shows that when national attention is focused on this issue, things can change.
It’s especially important when people on the right side of the political spectrum work on these issues—because that’s where the political will is that can change things. Some of the best values that the right historically holds dear are responsibility, duty, and honor. There’s a conservative case to be made for expecting people who want to own guns to show the responsibility that comes with the privilege. Our shameful political gridlock is based on partisanship. But this should not be a partisan issue. This is a moral issue.
Because the question is: who are we? In this congregation we believe we are children of God, infinitely precious and beloved in God’s sight, made in God’s own image. Every time a person is wounded or killed with a gun, it is God’s own image that is being assaulted and destroyed.
And so we are called to act. We are called to vote, to tell our politicians that if they want to earn our vote, that they need to support laws that will help save lives. We are called to show up, at marches like the one a year ago today, at events like this, to help build attention and support that affects public opinion over time. We are called to give, to use our resources where we can to promote real learning and advocacy. We are called to write letters to the editor, to talk with friends and neighbors, to do the hard work of winning hearts and minds. And we are called to pray. Prayer is a form of action—not the glib “thoughts and prayers” we so often hear about as a substitute for action, but prayer to a God who hears us, and hurts with us, and uses us to help bring change. We pray tonight in lament for what has happened. We pray for those who have died, for each precious person taken too soon from this earth. We pray for those who grieve. And we pray for a future where we will not have to pray those prayers of lament any more, where there will be no more of these posters, where we will not have to have services like this one.
God’s dream for this world is the Beloved Community, a world where all live in peace and all are fed and all are free of violence and fear. That vision is what gives us hope. We won’t get there by our own efforts alone, and we won’t get there in this life, not all the way. But God can use us, right now, in this life, empowering our efforts, to move this world one notch closer to the Beloved Community. A world that’s a little kinder, a little safer.
Blessed are the peacemakers, says Jesus: for they will be called the children of God. God, make us your children. Make us peacemakers.
[1] Small Arms Survey, 2017.
[2] Nurith Aizenman, “Gun Violence: How the U.S. Compares with Other Countries,” Goats and Soda from NPR (October 6, 2017); https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/06/555861898/gun-violence-how-the-u-s-compares-to-other-countries.
Mar 10, 2019 |
Year C, 1 Lent, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Year C, 1 Lent, Revised Common Lectionary
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
+ + +
“Lead us not into temptation.”
We pray that line from the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. But what is temptation, really? It’s worth wondering about, not only because today we hear the story of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, but also because I think our culture isn’t quite sure what to do with the notion of temptation.
Think about what typically gets described as “temptation” in our everyday media. Maybe an ice cream sundae, something delicious but unhealthy. Restaurants have desserts with names like “sinful lava cake,” maybe illuminating a puritanical streak in our culture that assumes that if something tastes good then it must be morally wrong to enjoy it. Fellow cat owners will know that there’s even a brand of cat treats called Temptations. And then besides the notion of food as a temptation there’s the notion of sex appeal. Think of the singing group the Temptations, or more recently, the reality show Temptation Island, where couples are surrounded by attractive singles to see whether they’ll stray.
So we hear a lot about food and drink and sex in our culture’s understanding of temptation. We don’t hear that word used as much in conversations about political or economic spheres, or about work or family life. Our media don’t talk as much about some of the kinds of temptations many of us face every day—the temptation to react in anger, the temptation to gossip behind someone’s back, the temptation to avoid taking responsibility for a mistake, the temptation to ignore another person’s need. There’s a lot more to temptation than society tends to focus on.
Now that’s not to say that temptation can’t be about physical desires. Lord knows how many lives have been deeply harmed by addictions to pleasurable things like alcohol, or other substances, or by similar compulsions around sex, or food, or even the rush from things like gambling or video games. The proportion of people whose lives have been touched by addiction is so vast; without a doubt, many of us here in this room face these kinds of struggles every day. If that describes what you’re experiencing in your life, know that God knows you and cares for you and is here for you. There are ways to get help, none of them perfect or necessarily easy, but ways that can work. Talk with me or someone else you trust. And to a lesser extent, all of us can identify with the temptation to overindulge in something that meets a physical desire in the moment but leaves us less healthy in the long run. Jesus’s first temptation is around physical desire, the desire to use his status as the Son of God to meet his own physical needs. “If you’re the Son of God,” says the devil, “command this stone to become bread.” So Jesus knows about physical temptation. But that’s just the first kind. There are two others. In a sermon a while back, I suggested we can think of these three temptations as to do with pleasure—that’s the first one—power, and prestige.
So after pleasure, power is next. The devil tells Jesus he can be king over the whole world if he just falls down and worships him. And power can be tempting indeed. Now power in and of itself is morally neutral. Power isn’t bad. Power means simply the ability to get things done. It’s a lot like money: it can be used for great evil, or for great good. The civil rights movement was the product of thousands and thousands of people organizing to multiply their individual power. Today people organizing for background checks for gun buyers or working to build urgency about global warming are doing the same thing. We kid ourselves if we think that Christians should shy away from power; after all, God is the one we call the source of all “power and might.” But like money, power is something it’s easy to develop a taste for in itself, to enjoy the power rather than the things that can be done with it. We’ve heard a lot in recent weeks and months about both business leaders and political leaders—from both major parties—who seem to take enjoyment in humiliating the people who work under their authority, in reminding others who’s in charge. In a society like ours, power is constantly intertwined with money, education, and other factors like race, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, and so on. And at the same time, all of us have some degree of power. And so the question is, will we use power for others, or will we succumb to the temptation to seek power over others?
Jesus says no to that temptation. His path is a path of power indeed, but it’s the power of love and self-offering, not the power of domination. It’s the power of the cross.
The third temptation I’m calling prestige. And Luke puts this one last, in the climactic position—which is different from the version of this story in Matthew’s gospel, where power comes last. You could argue which order fits better. But there’s something subtle about Luke’s ordering that I think is profound. It suggests that an even more powerful temptation than being able to make other people do what we want might be having other people admire us. The devil invites Jesus essentially to perform a miraculous stunt that will amaze the people and demonstrate his status as the Son of God. And this is the only time in the story where the devil actually takes up Jesus’ own technique and quotes scripture—he quotes directly from the psalm we said/sang earlier today. A good illustration of how taking scripture from one context and applying it literally to another one isn’t always the right way to go—even the devil can do that!
And once again Jesus resists the temptation. He will draw all people to himself, yes. But not through spectacle, and not by trying to be liked. Jesus will indeed win many admirers, but not by pleasing people, but by his sheer integrity as he follows the path of God’s righteousness.
Today Jesus is the model of faithful living as he resists not only the temptations our society knows a lot about, temptations to physical pleasure, but also those higher-level temptations to power over others and the prestige of being admired. In our Lenten journey this year, each of us has the opportunity to reflect on where we face those temptations in our own lives. We won’t be perfect in resisting them. We don’t have to, thank God: Jesus has already done that for us. But through his grace, even here in this imperfect life, it’s possible for God’s Spirit to work in us and make us just that bit more like Jesus, a day at a time.
I can’t think of any better way to end than by repeating the collect we prayed at the start of worship this morning. It’s good enough for a repeat appearance:
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
+ + +
“Lead us not into temptation.”
We pray that line from the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. But what is temptation, really? It’s worth wondering about, not only because today we hear the story of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, but also because I think our culture isn’t quite sure what to do with the notion of temptation.
Think about what typically gets described as “temptation” in our everyday media. Maybe an ice cream sundae, something delicious but unhealthy. Restaurants have desserts with names like “sinful lava cake,” maybe illuminating a puritanical streak in our culture that assumes that if something tastes good then it must be morally wrong to enjoy it. Fellow cat owners will know that there’s even a brand of cat treats called Temptations. And then besides the notion of food as a temptation there’s the notion of sex appeal. Think of the singing group the Temptations, or more recently, the reality show Temptation Island, where couples are surrounded by attractive singles to see whether they’ll stray.
So we hear a lot about food and drink and sex in our culture’s understanding of temptation. We don’t hear that word used as much in conversations about political or economic spheres, or about work or family life. Our media don’t talk as much about some of the kinds of temptations many of us face every day—the temptation to react in anger, the temptation to gossip behind someone’s back, the temptation to avoid taking responsibility for a mistake, the temptation to ignore another person’s need. There’s a lot more to temptation than society tends to focus on.
Now that’s not to say that temptation can’t be about physical desires. Lord knows how many lives have been deeply harmed by addictions to pleasurable things like alcohol, or other substances, or by similar compulsions around sex, or food, or even the rush from things like gambling or video games. The proportion of people whose lives have been touched by addiction is so vast; without a doubt, many of us here in this room face these kinds of struggles every day. If that describes what you’re experiencing in your life, know that God knows you and cares for you and is here for you. There are ways to get help, none of them perfect or necessarily easy, but ways that can work. Talk with me or someone else you trust. And to a lesser extent, all of us can identify with the temptation to overindulge in something that meets a physical desire in the moment but leaves us less healthy in the long run. Jesus’s first temptation is around physical desire, the desire to use his status as the Son of God to meet his own physical needs. “If you’re the Son of God,” says the devil, “command this stone to become bread.” So Jesus knows about physical temptation. But that’s just the first kind. There are two others. In a sermon a while back, I suggested we can think of these three temptations as to do with pleasure—that’s the first one—power, and prestige.
So after pleasure, power is next. The devil tells Jesus he can be king over the whole world if he just falls down and worships him. And power can be tempting indeed. Now power in and of itself is morally neutral. Power isn’t bad. Power means simply the ability to get things done. It’s a lot like money: it can be used for great evil, or for great good. The civil rights movement was the product of thousands and thousands of people organizing to multiply their individual power. Today people organizing for background checks for gun buyers or working to build urgency about global warming are doing the same thing. We kid ourselves if we think that Christians should shy away from power; after all, God is the one we call the source of all “power and might.” But like money, power is something it’s easy to develop a taste for in itself, to enjoy the power rather than the things that can be done with it. We’ve heard a lot in recent weeks and months about both business leaders and political leaders—from both major parties—who seem to take enjoyment in humiliating the people who work under their authority, in reminding others who’s in charge. In a society like ours, power is constantly intertwined with money, education, and other factors like race, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, and so on. And at the same time, all of us have some degree of power. And so the question is, will we use power for others, or will we succumb to the temptation to seek power over others?
Jesus says no to that temptation. His path is a path of power indeed, but it’s the power of love and self-offering, not the power of domination. It’s the power of the cross.
The third temptation I’m calling prestige. And Luke puts this one last, in the climactic position—which is different from the version of this story in Matthew’s gospel, where power comes last. You could argue which order fits better. But there’s something subtle about Luke’s ordering that I think is profound. It suggests that an even more powerful temptation than being able to make other people do what we want might be having other people admire us. The devil invites Jesus essentially to perform a miraculous stunt that will amaze the people and demonstrate his status as the Son of God. And this is the only time in the story where the devil actually takes up Jesus’ own technique and quotes scripture—he quotes directly from the psalm we said/sang earlier today. A good illustration of how taking scripture from one context and applying it literally to another one isn’t always the right way to go—even the devil can do that!
And once again Jesus resists the temptation. He will draw all people to himself, yes. But not through spectacle, and not by trying to be liked. Jesus will indeed win many admirers, but not by pleasing people, but by his sheer integrity as he follows the path of God’s righteousness.
Today Jesus is the model of faithful living as he resists not only the temptations our society knows a lot about, temptations to physical pleasure, but also those higher-level temptations to power over others and the prestige of being admired. In our Lenten journey this year, each of us has the opportunity to reflect on where we face those temptations in our own lives. We won’t be perfect in resisting them. We don’t have to, thank God: Jesus has already done that for us. But through his grace, even here in this imperfect life, it’s possible for God’s Spirit to work in us and make us just that bit more like Jesus, a day at a time.
I can’t think of any better way to end than by repeating the collect we prayed at the start of worship this morning. It’s good enough for a repeat appearance:
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.
Mar 06, 2019 |
Ash Wednesday, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Ash Wednesday, Revised Common Lectionary
Joel 2:1-2,12-17
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Psalm 103:8-14
+ + +
I remember the flecks of ash on my car, that afternoon this past November. The reddish tinge in the sky; the smell of smoke in the air; and those little white flecks of ash all over the car roof and windscreen. Landing everywhere, of course, but visible especially there on that flat surface, against the blue paint. It was from the Camp Fire in Paradise, of course. I’d only seen those little white flecks one time before: a year earlier, when I was still living in the East Bay, and the smoke and the ash were coming from right here in Sonoma County.
It’s said that Lent goes from ashes to fire; it begins here at Ash Wednesday and ends with the new fire of the Easter Vigil. But ashes and fire, these symbols we use during this holy season, are pregnant with added associations here in this community. Given the events of this past week, we might add water to the list—I wonder if we’ll hear those readings about Noah’s flood and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea differently when we come to the Easter Vigil this year. But today our symbol is ash: a symbol of repentance, of lament, of mortality.
Just a few days ago we interred the ashes of our dear sister Natalie Griffith outside in our Memorial Garden. It’s always a profound experience to bury a person’s ashes in the ground. Our columbarium here in the Marian Chapel is a wonderful thing, but when we inter people’s ashes there we’re kept at one remove from the elemental reality as we slide a metal urn gently into its resting place. But in the Memorial Garden we see the ashes as they go back into the earth from which all of us came: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In the ancient world it was common to put ashes on one’s head as a sign of repentance. And that’s what we do today. But following tradition, we don’t just put ashes on our heads in any old way. Instead our foreheads are traced with the sign of the cross—the same sign of the cross each of us receives at our baptism. As you come forward to receive ashes today, let yourself feel that baptismal cross on your forehead, activated afresh.
It’s good that we trace the ashes in that form of a cross. Because what we do today includes repentance, where that’s appropriate, but it isn’t just about repentance. It’s about identifying with Jesus Christ, who became flesh with us. He took on our own earthy, dusty flesh, and in doing so he made it holy. Our bodies are united with his in our baptism, and his life flows through us.
Remember that you are dust. But not just any dust. You are holy dust, molded by a Creator who loved you into being, and who will never give up on you or abandon you. No fire and no flood can get between you and God’s love. Nor even can sin, for there is no sin too great for God’s love to heal. So come forward in faith and trust. Enter into Lent in simplicity and holy, solemn joy.
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Psalm 103:8-14
+ + +
I remember the flecks of ash on my car, that afternoon this past November. The reddish tinge in the sky; the smell of smoke in the air; and those little white flecks of ash all over the car roof and windscreen. Landing everywhere, of course, but visible especially there on that flat surface, against the blue paint. It was from the Camp Fire in Paradise, of course. I’d only seen those little white flecks one time before: a year earlier, when I was still living in the East Bay, and the smoke and the ash were coming from right here in Sonoma County.
It’s said that Lent goes from ashes to fire; it begins here at Ash Wednesday and ends with the new fire of the Easter Vigil. But ashes and fire, these symbols we use during this holy season, are pregnant with added associations here in this community. Given the events of this past week, we might add water to the list—I wonder if we’ll hear those readings about Noah’s flood and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea differently when we come to the Easter Vigil this year. But today our symbol is ash: a symbol of repentance, of lament, of mortality.
Just a few days ago we interred the ashes of our dear sister Natalie Griffith outside in our Memorial Garden. It’s always a profound experience to bury a person’s ashes in the ground. Our columbarium here in the Marian Chapel is a wonderful thing, but when we inter people’s ashes there we’re kept at one remove from the elemental reality as we slide a metal urn gently into its resting place. But in the Memorial Garden we see the ashes as they go back into the earth from which all of us came: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In the ancient world it was common to put ashes on one’s head as a sign of repentance. And that’s what we do today. But following tradition, we don’t just put ashes on our heads in any old way. Instead our foreheads are traced with the sign of the cross—the same sign of the cross each of us receives at our baptism. As you come forward to receive ashes today, let yourself feel that baptismal cross on your forehead, activated afresh.
It’s good that we trace the ashes in that form of a cross. Because what we do today includes repentance, where that’s appropriate, but it isn’t just about repentance. It’s about identifying with Jesus Christ, who became flesh with us. He took on our own earthy, dusty flesh, and in doing so he made it holy. Our bodies are united with his in our baptism, and his life flows through us.
Remember that you are dust. But not just any dust. You are holy dust, molded by a Creator who loved you into being, and who will never give up on you or abandon you. No fire and no flood can get between you and God’s love. Nor even can sin, for there is no sin too great for God’s love to heal. So come forward in faith and trust. Enter into Lent in simplicity and holy, solemn joy.
Mar 03, 2019 |
Last Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Last Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, Revised Common Lectionary
Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36
Proclaim the greatness of the LORD our God,
and worship upon the LORD’s holy hill.
+ + +
Have you ever had a mountaintop experience?
We use the phrase to speak of a spiritual high, a time of clarity, when our connection with God feels direct and our life feels full of meaning.
From Machu Picchu in Peru to Mt. Fuji in Japan to Mt. Olympus in Greece, mountains are places of spiritual power in cultures all around the world. And in the biblical story there are lots of mountains with special significance. Mount Sinai, where Moses spoke face to face with God and received the Ten Commandments. Mount Zion, the hill where Abraham was said to have received the revelation that he was not to sacrifice his son, and which later became the site of the city of Jerusalem and the location of the Temple itself. And of course the unnamed mountain in today’s gospel, the Mountain of the Transfiguration.
We read this story each year from one of the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, or Luke, on the last Sunday before Lent. It’s the culmination of the season after Epiphany, which is all about the revelation of Jesus’ glory in the world. From the star that led the Magi to the Christ child, to the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism, to Jesus’ first miracle at a wedding at Cana, and through the calling of his disciples and his early miracles, the time of Epiphany is like one big coming-out party for, as the hymn says, “God in man made manifest.” So on this last Sunday after Epiphany the manifestation is more spectacular than ever. It’s what you might think of as a classic mountaintop experience: Jesus’ three closest disciples get to witness him shining through with the glory of God. His face shining with radiance, just as Moses’ face did so many centuries before at Mt. Sinai. And Moses himself is here as if to prove the point—along with Elijah, the other greatest prophet from the history of Israel. And finally the very voice of God is heard. Glory, hallelujah, amen!
Now the thing about mountaintop experiences is that they can be habit-forming. Youth ministers and church camp directors know how common it is for people to go away on a retreat or spiritual weekend of some kind and have a life-changing experience, only to end up seeking to repeat the experience over and over, never quite recapturing the incredible feeling of the first time. It’s hard to come down from the mountain. And maybe that’s why Peter makes his strange, awkward suggestion about building dwelling places, as if to say: let’s set up camp here and stay. It seems Jesus pretty much ignores him. And in the very next passage, Jesus and his disciples are back down the mountain, in the thick of real life, with Jesus healing a possessed young child; and just a few verses later, Luke tells us that Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. It’s a transition moment in the gospel story. From this point onward, Jesus is no longer in the coming-out party; he’s on the journey towards Jerusalem and the cross.
But we miss the point of the Transfiguration if we think of it as just a beautiful moment, a kind of escape or respite from the troubles of the world, when Jesus gets to go off and socialize with the greats of the past and the disciples are treated to a vision of loveliness to hopefully sustain them all on the tough journey ahead. Because in fact, there’s the closest possible connection between the Transfiguration and the crucifixion; between the mountain of glory and the hill of Golgotha.
Jesus was crucified, the scriptures tell us, at a place called Golgotha, or Skull Hill. Tradition has it that it was a small rocky outcropping, part of a disused quarry just outside the city walls of Jerusalem to the west, close enough to be seen by people traveling to the western city gates. If you were a Roman government official who wanted to make a cruel point, it was a good place for a public execution. And on this sad, rocky little hill of execution Jesus’ mission of love and liberation took him straight onto a collision course with human power.
What happened there was a sad little scene of casual brutality designed to impress passers-by with the danger of crossing the Roman authorities. It certainly didn’t look particularly glorious. In fact, if you were looking for a revelation of glory, for a mountaintop experience, the crucifixion is about the last place you would look. And yet this was the pivotal moment where, unseen and unknown, God was working through Jesus to conquer evil and defeat death itself.
In one sense the crucifixion and the Transfiguration are about as different as two scenes can get. And yet in another, deeper sense they’re intimately connected. At the Transfiguration we see visibly the glory that’s invisible at Golgotha. In a way, the Transfiguration is like a kind of transparent overlay God gives us to lay over that other scene. Instead of this mountain, that rocky hill. Instead of Moses and Elijah on either side of Jesus, two ordinary thieves. Instead of Jesus stripped naked, Jesus in clothes dazzling with God’s light. These two scenes are a matched pair, and here in the waning moments of Epiphany we get a glimpse of the glory that we can see in the cross only if we have eyes to see past surface appearances, into the truth of God’s plan.
The Transfiguration is an overlay, or a set of goggles, if you will. It trains us to see God’s glory in places where we might not otherwise notice it. At the cross. And in other places, wherever Jesus’ love and liberation are at work. It might be happening right now at a flood evacuation center, or a homeless shelter, or in a hospital room. It might be happening this week at your breakfast table or in your workplace. The more ordinary the place, the better. Because it turns out it doesn’t take a mountaintop to glimpse God’s glory. It just takes the eyes of faith. May the glimpse of beauty we’ve received today train us to see that glory where we least expect it: today, and all through Lent, and beyond.
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36
Proclaim the greatness of the LORD our God,
and worship upon the LORD’s holy hill.
+ + +
Have you ever had a mountaintop experience?
We use the phrase to speak of a spiritual high, a time of clarity, when our connection with God feels direct and our life feels full of meaning.
From Machu Picchu in Peru to Mt. Fuji in Japan to Mt. Olympus in Greece, mountains are places of spiritual power in cultures all around the world. And in the biblical story there are lots of mountains with special significance. Mount Sinai, where Moses spoke face to face with God and received the Ten Commandments. Mount Zion, the hill where Abraham was said to have received the revelation that he was not to sacrifice his son, and which later became the site of the city of Jerusalem and the location of the Temple itself. And of course the unnamed mountain in today’s gospel, the Mountain of the Transfiguration.
We read this story each year from one of the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, or Luke, on the last Sunday before Lent. It’s the culmination of the season after Epiphany, which is all about the revelation of Jesus’ glory in the world. From the star that led the Magi to the Christ child, to the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism, to Jesus’ first miracle at a wedding at Cana, and through the calling of his disciples and his early miracles, the time of Epiphany is like one big coming-out party for, as the hymn says, “God in man made manifest.” So on this last Sunday after Epiphany the manifestation is more spectacular than ever. It’s what you might think of as a classic mountaintop experience: Jesus’ three closest disciples get to witness him shining through with the glory of God. His face shining with radiance, just as Moses’ face did so many centuries before at Mt. Sinai. And Moses himself is here as if to prove the point—along with Elijah, the other greatest prophet from the history of Israel. And finally the very voice of God is heard. Glory, hallelujah, amen!
Now the thing about mountaintop experiences is that they can be habit-forming. Youth ministers and church camp directors know how common it is for people to go away on a retreat or spiritual weekend of some kind and have a life-changing experience, only to end up seeking to repeat the experience over and over, never quite recapturing the incredible feeling of the first time. It’s hard to come down from the mountain. And maybe that’s why Peter makes his strange, awkward suggestion about building dwelling places, as if to say: let’s set up camp here and stay. It seems Jesus pretty much ignores him. And in the very next passage, Jesus and his disciples are back down the mountain, in the thick of real life, with Jesus healing a possessed young child; and just a few verses later, Luke tells us that Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. It’s a transition moment in the gospel story. From this point onward, Jesus is no longer in the coming-out party; he’s on the journey towards Jerusalem and the cross.
But we miss the point of the Transfiguration if we think of it as just a beautiful moment, a kind of escape or respite from the troubles of the world, when Jesus gets to go off and socialize with the greats of the past and the disciples are treated to a vision of loveliness to hopefully sustain them all on the tough journey ahead. Because in fact, there’s the closest possible connection between the Transfiguration and the crucifixion; between the mountain of glory and the hill of Golgotha.
Jesus was crucified, the scriptures tell us, at a place called Golgotha, or Skull Hill. Tradition has it that it was a small rocky outcropping, part of a disused quarry just outside the city walls of Jerusalem to the west, close enough to be seen by people traveling to the western city gates. If you were a Roman government official who wanted to make a cruel point, it was a good place for a public execution. And on this sad, rocky little hill of execution Jesus’ mission of love and liberation took him straight onto a collision course with human power.
What happened there was a sad little scene of casual brutality designed to impress passers-by with the danger of crossing the Roman authorities. It certainly didn’t look particularly glorious. In fact, if you were looking for a revelation of glory, for a mountaintop experience, the crucifixion is about the last place you would look. And yet this was the pivotal moment where, unseen and unknown, God was working through Jesus to conquer evil and defeat death itself.
In one sense the crucifixion and the Transfiguration are about as different as two scenes can get. And yet in another, deeper sense they’re intimately connected. At the Transfiguration we see visibly the glory that’s invisible at Golgotha. In a way, the Transfiguration is like a kind of transparent overlay God gives us to lay over that other scene. Instead of this mountain, that rocky hill. Instead of Moses and Elijah on either side of Jesus, two ordinary thieves. Instead of Jesus stripped naked, Jesus in clothes dazzling with God’s light. These two scenes are a matched pair, and here in the waning moments of Epiphany we get a glimpse of the glory that we can see in the cross only if we have eyes to see past surface appearances, into the truth of God’s plan.
The Transfiguration is an overlay, or a set of goggles, if you will. It trains us to see God’s glory in places where we might not otherwise notice it. At the cross. And in other places, wherever Jesus’ love and liberation are at work. It might be happening right now at a flood evacuation center, or a homeless shelter, or in a hospital room. It might be happening this week at your breakfast table or in your workplace. The more ordinary the place, the better. Because it turns out it doesn’t take a mountaintop to glimpse God’s glory. It just takes the eyes of faith. May the glimpse of beauty we’ve received today train us to see that glory where we least expect it: today, and all through Lent, and beyond.
Feb 10, 2019 |
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, Revised Common Lectionary
| Stephen Shaver
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, Revised Common Lectionary
Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
+ + +
Imagine you’re living in about the year 500, in Syria. You’re a new Christian who’s just received baptism and is coming to communion for the first time, and your bishop teaches you to hold out your hands, receive the bread, and pray this prayer:
“I carry you, living God incarnate in the bread. You have confined yourself in a fiery coal within my fleshly palms. You are holy, God incarnate in my hands in a fiery coal. Lord, make me worthy to taste the food of your body as a taste of your life.”[1]
It’s a striking prayer, isn’t it? That prayer was written by a Syrian bishop of that time named Philoxenus. And it calls the communion bread a “fiery coal.” Actually, lots of Syrian Christian prayers refer to the bread in this way. It’s a direct reference to the passage we heard from Isaiah this morning, where the angel touches Isaiah’s lips with a fiery coal from the heavenly altar, and Isaiah’s sins are blotted out.
At the beginning of the passage, Isaiah has a tremendous vision of God’s holiness, and it produces two emotions: awe, and unworthiness. The two go together: it’s Isaiah’s awe at God’s holiness and beauty that makes him realize he’s unworthy to stand in God’s presence. Peter has exactly the same response to Jesus in our gospel reading today. Jesus’s miraculous command over the fish of the sea fills him with awe as Peter realizes this teacher is full of the presence of God. And Peter’s response is to say: Go away, Lord, for I’m a sinful man! Even our epistle reading today where Paul relates one of the earliest oral traditions about Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection says that Christ died, quote, “for our sins.” So the very first generation of Christians already understood Jesus’ death and resurrection as somehow connected in with sin, and the forgiveness of sins.
Now it’s sometimes said that Episcopalians don’t believe in sin. But all it takes is a look at a prayer book to prove that wrong. Our liturgies are full of language about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. It’s certainly true that Episcopalians tend not to focus primarily on telling people how bad they are. But that doesn’t mean we ignore the reality of sin. Sin is actually one of the best hints at God’s existence. If there’s no God and no real reference point, then right and wrong is basically just a human cultural construction. But for most of us, our spirit cries out against that idea. There really is such a thing as good and evil, right and wrong. And the fact that we realize that all of us sometimes make choices that are wrong is an illustration that there’s a right to strive after. God’s perfection, God’s holiness, God’s goodness are the standard for what the universe should be like. And from Darfur, to Washington, D.C., to our own lives, the universe doesn’t look like that. That’s sin.
It’s been said that sin comes in two kinds, individual and collective, and that evangelical Christians focus more on individual sins while mainline Christians focus more on collective sins. I think there’s truth to that. But the reality is both are real. Some sin is bigger than any one person: the existence of poverty and homelessness. The exploitation of people in developing countries. The human race’s collective participation in climate change. And at the same time, the individual choices we make can be devastating. Substance abuse. Betrayals in relationships. Petty gossip. Bullying. Many of these individual actions resonate down through generations: we act out scripts our parents and parents’ parents created for us, so that addiction or abuse becomes a generational reality, both individual and collective. That’s why I so love the prayer of confession we’ve used on occasion before, and will again today, that names that intersection between individual and corporate sin: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” Isaiah recognizes that intersection when he says, “Woe is me, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips!” The individual, and the collective, both at once.
So sin is real. But like our liturgies, the Bible is preoccupied less with condemning sin than with responding to it. God doesn’t leave us to wallow in guilt or self-flagellation. God is bigger than our guilt. So Isaiah receives the fiery coal, and he’s commissioned to preach God’s message. And the same thing happens with Peter: Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid,” and commissions him as an apostle. God is not interested primarily in telling us what sinners we are. God knows what we are, and who we are. And God wants to delight in us, and to use us to spread the good news of God’s love to others. So God can handle our sin. As one Episcopal priest I know says, in the light of God’s forgiveness, “Your sin is no longer the most interesting thing about you. Sin is a problem God has solved.”[2]
How does God solve it? Plenty of ways. God can forgive our sins in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, any time we turn to God with an open heart. It doesn’t take a special sacrifice or offering or any external sign whatsoever. But we’re human beings of flesh and blood, so material things and actions help. One such action is what I already mentioned, an action we do almost every Sunday in church, unless it’s a particularly joyful feast day: we confess our sins corporately, and receive absolution. When a priest stands before a congregation and assures them that their sins are forgiven, that’s a tangible sign God has provided to seal the reality. So if something is on your heart, if you’re troubled with guilt over something in your life past or present, bring it to the liturgy. Hold it in your heart as you pray that prayer of confession, and know that God hears your prayer, and heals you.
There’s an even more tangible way to receive that assurance of pardon, and that’s through what’s sometimes called individual confession, but the Prayer Book calls the Rite of Reconciliation. Not everyone knows that Episcopalians offer this rite; and no one is required to participate in it. But confessing your sins to a priest who will listen with love and respect, who will keep the confidentiality of that confession private to the grave, and who will then lay hands on you and proclaim that God has put away all your sins, can be an amazingly liberating experience. If there’s something on your conscience that troubles you, I or any priest will be happy to celebrate this rite with you so you can know the freedom of God’s forgiveness specifically and personally.
And of course, there’s the most tangible way of all. It’s through that fiery coal—the holy food that cleanses our lips each week. When you come to this altar in faith and love, God unites you directly with Jesus Christ and all his people in heaven and on earth.
So if your conscience is troubling you—if you have that awareness of sin that’s a sign that you are human—rejoice: because God is here for you. Come to the heavenly altar. Be cleansed. And then, like Isaiah and Peter, let God use you to do great things, and to spread the message of God’s love.
[1]Adapted from Aelred Cody, “An Instruction of Philoxenus of Mabbug on Gestures and Prayer When One Receives Communion in the Hand, with a History of the Manner of Receiving the Eucharistic Bread in the West Syrian Church,” in Rule of Prayer, Rule of Faith: Essays in Honor of Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, ed. Nathan Mitchell and John F. Baldovin (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 62–63.
[2] Gray Temple, The Molten Soul: Dangers and Opportunities in Religious Conversion (New York: Church Publishing, 2000), 158.
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
+ + +
Imagine you’re living in about the year 500, in Syria. You’re a new Christian who’s just received baptism and is coming to communion for the first time, and your bishop teaches you to hold out your hands, receive the bread, and pray this prayer:
“I carry you, living God incarnate in the bread. You have confined yourself in a fiery coal within my fleshly palms. You are holy, God incarnate in my hands in a fiery coal. Lord, make me worthy to taste the food of your body as a taste of your life.”[1]
It’s a striking prayer, isn’t it? That prayer was written by a Syrian bishop of that time named Philoxenus. And it calls the communion bread a “fiery coal.” Actually, lots of Syrian Christian prayers refer to the bread in this way. It’s a direct reference to the passage we heard from Isaiah this morning, where the angel touches Isaiah’s lips with a fiery coal from the heavenly altar, and Isaiah’s sins are blotted out.
At the beginning of the passage, Isaiah has a tremendous vision of God’s holiness, and it produces two emotions: awe, and unworthiness. The two go together: it’s Isaiah’s awe at God’s holiness and beauty that makes him realize he’s unworthy to stand in God’s presence. Peter has exactly the same response to Jesus in our gospel reading today. Jesus’s miraculous command over the fish of the sea fills him with awe as Peter realizes this teacher is full of the presence of God. And Peter’s response is to say: Go away, Lord, for I’m a sinful man! Even our epistle reading today where Paul relates one of the earliest oral traditions about Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection says that Christ died, quote, “for our sins.” So the very first generation of Christians already understood Jesus’ death and resurrection as somehow connected in with sin, and the forgiveness of sins.
Now it’s sometimes said that Episcopalians don’t believe in sin. But all it takes is a look at a prayer book to prove that wrong. Our liturgies are full of language about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. It’s certainly true that Episcopalians tend not to focus primarily on telling people how bad they are. But that doesn’t mean we ignore the reality of sin. Sin is actually one of the best hints at God’s existence. If there’s no God and no real reference point, then right and wrong is basically just a human cultural construction. But for most of us, our spirit cries out against that idea. There really is such a thing as good and evil, right and wrong. And the fact that we realize that all of us sometimes make choices that are wrong is an illustration that there’s a right to strive after. God’s perfection, God’s holiness, God’s goodness are the standard for what the universe should be like. And from Darfur, to Washington, D.C., to our own lives, the universe doesn’t look like that. That’s sin.
It’s been said that sin comes in two kinds, individual and collective, and that evangelical Christians focus more on individual sins while mainline Christians focus more on collective sins. I think there’s truth to that. But the reality is both are real. Some sin is bigger than any one person: the existence of poverty and homelessness. The exploitation of people in developing countries. The human race’s collective participation in climate change. And at the same time, the individual choices we make can be devastating. Substance abuse. Betrayals in relationships. Petty gossip. Bullying. Many of these individual actions resonate down through generations: we act out scripts our parents and parents’ parents created for us, so that addiction or abuse becomes a generational reality, both individual and collective. That’s why I so love the prayer of confession we’ve used on occasion before, and will again today, that names that intersection between individual and corporate sin: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” Isaiah recognizes that intersection when he says, “Woe is me, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips!” The individual, and the collective, both at once.
So sin is real. But like our liturgies, the Bible is preoccupied less with condemning sin than with responding to it. God doesn’t leave us to wallow in guilt or self-flagellation. God is bigger than our guilt. So Isaiah receives the fiery coal, and he’s commissioned to preach God’s message. And the same thing happens with Peter: Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid,” and commissions him as an apostle. God is not interested primarily in telling us what sinners we are. God knows what we are, and who we are. And God wants to delight in us, and to use us to spread the good news of God’s love to others. So God can handle our sin. As one Episcopal priest I know says, in the light of God’s forgiveness, “Your sin is no longer the most interesting thing about you. Sin is a problem God has solved.”[2]
How does God solve it? Plenty of ways. God can forgive our sins in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, any time we turn to God with an open heart. It doesn’t take a special sacrifice or offering or any external sign whatsoever. But we’re human beings of flesh and blood, so material things and actions help. One such action is what I already mentioned, an action we do almost every Sunday in church, unless it’s a particularly joyful feast day: we confess our sins corporately, and receive absolution. When a priest stands before a congregation and assures them that their sins are forgiven, that’s a tangible sign God has provided to seal the reality. So if something is on your heart, if you’re troubled with guilt over something in your life past or present, bring it to the liturgy. Hold it in your heart as you pray that prayer of confession, and know that God hears your prayer, and heals you.
There’s an even more tangible way to receive that assurance of pardon, and that’s through what’s sometimes called individual confession, but the Prayer Book calls the Rite of Reconciliation. Not everyone knows that Episcopalians offer this rite; and no one is required to participate in it. But confessing your sins to a priest who will listen with love and respect, who will keep the confidentiality of that confession private to the grave, and who will then lay hands on you and proclaim that God has put away all your sins, can be an amazingly liberating experience. If there’s something on your conscience that troubles you, I or any priest will be happy to celebrate this rite with you so you can know the freedom of God’s forgiveness specifically and personally.
And of course, there’s the most tangible way of all. It’s through that fiery coal—the holy food that cleanses our lips each week. When you come to this altar in faith and love, God unites you directly with Jesus Christ and all his people in heaven and on earth.
So if your conscience is troubling you—if you have that awareness of sin that’s a sign that you are human—rejoice: because God is here for you. Come to the heavenly altar. Be cleansed. And then, like Isaiah and Peter, let God use you to do great things, and to spread the message of God’s love.
[1]Adapted from Aelred Cody, “An Instruction of Philoxenus of Mabbug on Gestures and Prayer When One Receives Communion in the Hand, with a History of the Manner of Receiving the Eucharistic Bread in the West Syrian Church,” in Rule of Prayer, Rule of Faith: Essays in Honor of Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, ed. Nathan Mitchell and John F. Baldovin (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 62–63.
[2] Gray Temple, The Molten Soul: Dangers and Opportunities in Religious Conversion (New York: Church Publishing, 2000), 158.
