Lent as a Pilgrimage

Sermon for March 1, 2020, First Sunday in Lent, preached at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Also available with audio at http://www.saint-marys.org/sermons/lent-as-a-pilgrimage

Lessons: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

HYMNS:

150 “Forty Days and Forty Nights” (processional)

141 “Wilt Thou forgive that sin” (offertory)

149 “Eternal Lord of Love, behold your Church (recessional)

Anthem: “Amazing Grace,” we sang the rocking setting by Harold Owen which isn't on the web, so here's John Rutter's version.

Motet: "Adam Lay Ybunden"

Today is the first Sunday in Lent, a season in the church calendar where we are bidden to engage in self-denial, fasting, prayer, repentance, and reading of Scripture — to prepare our minds and hearts to receive the gifts of Holy Week and Easter. One thing we don’t emphasize as much any more, but which historically has been an important part of Lenten piety, is pilgrimage, and especially pilgrimage to the Holy Land where the events of the Gospel took place. 

Nowadays we have planes and buses and cars that make the journey a lot less painful. But pilgrimage in the ancient world was a two or three year undertaking, and nearly always hazardous. Depending on where you started from, you could have to undertake dangerous sea voyages, then walk or ride long distances; you probably experienced several life-threatening illnesses; odds were even you’d get robbed by bandits; there would be language difficulties, and always at least one unpleasant travel companion. You were totally dependent on the locals for food and water, and the locals weren’t always friendly. Pilgrimages were hard, but they were regarded as working miracles in the lives of pilgrims, most importantly the miracle of repentance and forgiveness. 

We speak about Lent in pilgrimage language. In a few minutes, the choir is going to sing Hal Owen’s lively setting of Amazing Grace How Sweet the Sound, where all of life is portrayed as a kind of Lenten journey: “Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come; ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.” For our recessional hymn today we’ll sing, “Eternal Lord of love, behold your church walking once more the pilgrim way of Lent.” 

So on this first Sunday in Lent, I invite you to take a journey of the imagination with me, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. We walk the via dolorosa, the street winding through Jerusalem’s old city with the fourteen Stations of the Cross (like the fourteen stations here in our church). We pause at each station to contemplate the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. We walk this way of sorrow in Lent so that when Easter arrives our hearts will be prepared to hear the good news of His resurrection. 

The last four stations of the cross are located inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which makes it the climax of our pilgrimage. The church has a labyrinthine floor plan, a result of fifteen centuries of destruction and rebuilding and expansion. Going west from the main entrance we come to a huge, domed interior space so large it actually contains another smaller building, which enshrines Jesus’ tomb and the stone rolled away from it.

If we go east instead of west, we wander in a maze-like part of the building. Little chapels are everywhere. Stairs lead up to sacred places on a second story; other stairs descend to chapels deep below the entry level. At the bottom of one set of stairs is the grotto and chapel where Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena is said to have found pieces of the True Cross. Graffiti crosses and words have been carved into the limestone walls and pillars by thousands of anonymous pilgrims over the millennia. 

Back up at the main level, we go up another set of stairs to the Golgotha shrine, where the altar stands above a limestone outcropping that was thought to be the place of Jesus’ crucifixion. As you might expect, the shrine is resplendent with gold, icons, and jewels. But part of the stone of Golgotha has been left bare, and pilgrims line up by their thousands to touch the stone that received the blood of the crucified Christ. If we go back down the stairs and walk underneath the shrine we just visited, we find a small altar, bare and undecorated, set in a niche in the wall. There’s a window just behind the altar looking at the lower reaches of the rock of Golgotha, and with a little imagination we can see a skull. Tradition has it that this is the skull of Adam and this the very place where Adam was buried. That skull-like rock has a rust-colored stain on it, which tradition says is a blood stain from the crucifixion. The architecture presents a theological truth: the blood of Jesus flows down over “the place of the skull” and redeems “the whole of Adam’s race.” That miracle of redemption is strong enough that singers can actually be thankful for Adam’s transgression since that is the reason for Jesus’ entry into our world. Our pilgrimage leads us to gratitude for the best, and even for the worst, of ourselves and our world.

The pilgrim’s journey is indeed a sort of microcosm of the whole Christian life. It’s a road through ordinary space; a dirty, wearisome road, often boring and disappointing, but punctuated all along the way by encounters with the Holy One. The ancients would travel for a couple of days, thirsty and hungry and tired, until they came to the next holy site. The place where Jesus taught the beatitudes, the place where Peter acknowledged Jesus’ divinity, the place where Jesus walked on water. There must be hundreds of these little shrines and holy sites, and many of them can seem like ancient tourist traps … with about that much authenticity. But it doesn’t matter. At these shrines the holy stories are told, keeping our eyes raised towards our destination and refreshing us with little tastes of the joys yet to come. We feel the ashes on our foreheads and realize that we’re all “dead in our trespasses.” Arriving at our destination, we recognize our own faces in the skull of Adam. We sense with wonder the blood of Jesus flowing over us, washing us clean and preparing us to rise again to new and unending life in Him. Then, in the Easter Vigil, while it is still dark, we find ourselves among a great cloud of witnesses standing under the giant dome that covers the place of Jesus’ tomb. We stand expectantly with unlit candles in hand, packed so tightly that we can hardly breathe.

A flame is kindled, begins to be passed from candle to candle. Light begins to fill the room. Then a sound from somewhere, starting small then filling the whole space: Someone is singing, “The Light of Christ!” The candlelight grows brighter and brighter as many thousands of candles are lit. And we return the response in overflowing gratitude to witness the miracle: “Thanks be to God!” And the Bishop announces “The Lord is risen!” to which we respond, “He is risen indeed!”

But that celebration is still 36 days hence. Here we stand just at the beginning of our Lenten pilgrimage. Jerusalem and Holy Week still far away in the mountainous distance. As the poet says, “I lift my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121). The journey won’t be easy, but if we undertake it in faith God will meet us there and bring us to new life. Let’s start on the journey, prayerfully and with repentance and self-denial, full of the hope that we will reach the end in joy. We’ll experience in our own bodies some analog to the suffering and death of Jesus, and then the resurrection of Jesus, a foretaste of the final salvation to which we’re destined.

The Trial of God

The Trial of God: Sermon by Loren D. Crow, Ph.D., given at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon on the tenth of November, 2019.

Lessons:

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



The book of Job is a literary masterpiece. It has inspired plays, movies, novels, music, and plastic arts. Alfred Lord Tennyson called Job “the greatest poem of ancient and modern times.” William Blake did a whole series of engravings on scenes from the book of Job. There are musical settings by the likes of Orlando de Lassus, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Joni Mitchell. H. G. Wells and Elie Wiesel both wrote adaptations of it. Even the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who is not usually known for his love of biblical themes, wrote a novel called Job: A Comedy of Justice.

What gives the book of Job such broad appeal is its stark treatment of two claims that seem on the surface to be irreconcilable with one another: (1) that there is a just God who rules the world and upholds it, and (2) that human beings suffer, often so horribly that even the most heartless person would try to help, and yet God seems to do nothing. The genre of literature that specializes in wrestling with this paradox is called theodicy, and Job is certainly among the finest examples of it anywhere.

The first scene begins with God and Satan making a wager. God is bragging a bit on Job’s excellent character, but Satan argues that the only reason Job is good is because God blesses him for it. It’s true that God has been blessing Job with abundant wealth and happiness, but God thinks Job would still be a good man even if all that dried up. So they make the bet, and the scene shifts to earth. Immediately Job’s fortunes change. His children are all killed, one after another; his wealth evaporates; and he himself is stricken with an agonizing illness. As blow after devastating blow falls, Job remains steadfastly good — the narrator says, “in all this he did not sin with his lips.”

After a while, the scene shifts and Job sits outcast on the trash heap outside of town. Three friends, named Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, come to visit him in his grief. They sit with him in silent mourning for seven days, and then Job speaks. His soliloquy reveals the depth of his suffering. Job wishes he’d never been born, that death would have taken him before life ever started. He longs for the sweet oblivion of death. His friends hear this and realize that Job’s speech calls God’s sovereignty into question. It is God, after all, who decides who shall be born; it is God who decides who shall die, and when. In their view speech like that is blasphemous and must never be allowed.

There follows an extended dialogue between Job and each of his friends, and if you read them (which I urge you to do) you find that each one makes excellent points. There doesn’t seem to be a clear “right side” or “wrong side” in this argument. The drama is trying to grapple with the tension between belief in a God of justice and love and the obvious unfairness of Job’s situation. Job’s friends believe it’s important to salvage God’s sovereignty at the expense of Job’s integrity; Job thinks otherwise. The scholar Norman Habel observes that the failure of Job’s friends is not that they are theologically incorrect, but that they lack compassion.

What people then tended to do, just as they still do today, was to gloss over the dissonance between the two contradictory claims I laid out at the beginning. Most often, what we do is blame the victim, which is what Job’s friends did: Well Job, if you’re suffering, you must have done something to deserve it. To that, Job denies that he has done any wrong. I’m innocent, he says, and I don’t deserve this mistreatment at God’s hands! They retort that no one is truly innocent, especially compared with God; how dare Job claim that he is right and God is wrong! And that’s the beginning of an increasingly acrimonious argument that lasts for much of the rest of the book. It’s a case of three against one; Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar are well educated, prosperous, and smug (hashtag #blessed). They just want to see Job restored to favor and their world no longer problematic. All Job needs to do is repent his sin; surely, God will bring him back to blessing. But Job is having none of it. He knows he doesn’t deserve this, and he refuses to pretend otherwise.

It’s in this dialogue that Job says what we read this morning. He’s got no hope for his own lifetime, so he wants to write his accusation in a scroll, to chisel it into stone, and take his lawsuit to the throne of God. He is confident that if he can just get a hearing before the Divine Judge, he will be vindicated against the spurious accusations of these three “miserable comforters.” The redeemer who Job says is alive is God’s own self. Job’s hope is that God would come, read the written case, and render a judgment that would vindicate Job’s innocence and put the world back in order, not by changing Job’s specific plight but by changing God’s apparent policy, which allows the wicked to flourish while the righteous suffer, and allows those who sit comfortably in their armchairs to blame the worlds ills on the very people who experience those ills most harshly.

It’s a gutsy thing for Job to say, in the face of what everyone around thinks is a mountain of damning evidence, that he is right and God and everyone else are wrong. “Gutsy” probably isn’t even forceful enough. This Job has some hutzpah! But let’s not be too quick to dismiss the arguments of his friends, because what they say isn’t wrong so much as it is self-congratulatory. The reason we shouldn’t write them off too quickly is that we’ll fail to see how their arguments are also our arguments. How often do we hear that homelessness or AIDS or poverty “probably” come from the deficiencies of the people who are experiencing it — they’re using drugs, being sexually promiscuous, taking out loans they can’t repay, and so on? What about the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East? Well, “those people” have always been at war with each other, haven’t they? Lung cancer? Well they should’ve stopped smoking! I’m not saying those arguments don’t have elements of truth to them; they do. But it’s too easy to say these things when you’re not the one involved. And theologically, blaming suffering on human failures alone lets God off the hook too easily. God stands accused. Job helps us face the charges squarely.

If you know the ending of the story, then you remember that God eventually makes an appearance, with blistering majesty and awesome power, and answers Job’s complaint. The answer given by God when he comes on stage is that Job and his friends are too puny, too short-lived, and too lacking in vision to understand the big picture. Which is obviously true, when you consider it. But somehow that answer still fails to satisfy, when the depth of Job’s pain is portrayed with such poetic power. You may also remember that God shockingly tells Job’s friends that they need to ask Job to pray for them. Seems they “have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” Job spoke the truth about God, and his three friends did not! Job does pray for them, their friendship is restored, and the world is put back into order. Finally Job is made even richer, and is given an even better family, than he had at the beginning. His new daughters are particularly beautiful.

And yet, Job’s silence rings out in that parody of happiness at the end of the book, as if to remind us that God’s answer solves the problem like an aspirin cures an open sore. And in fact, the book never really lets God off the hook: Job’s new family at the end of the book is as much a reminder of what he has lost as it is a consolation. The question, Why does the powerful, just, good God allow the world to be so full of sorrow, isn’t resolved at the end of the book, and really it still isn’t resolved today. When the new atheists say they wouldn’t worship any god who would make a world like this one, that stings because there’s truth in it.

There’s a poem that I often quote in this connection, by the Polish-American Jewish poet Aaron Zeitlin:

Praise me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me. 

Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise, says God. 

But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.

If you’re shocked to hear me say such things, if they sound a little irreligious to you, I’m sorry; I really don’t mean to come across as crass or irreverent. And it’s true that this sermon isn’t going to end with a clear-cut application — which I feel is OK since that’s what the book of Job does. But I invite you to consider that the story of innocent suffering is not just Job’s story, it’s Jesus’ story as well, and that story also includes a moment when Jesus says “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The crucifixion story, like the book of Job, does not exonerate God. Quite the opposite! Jesus accepts the judgment and its punishment, and gives His life. He does not blame the world’s pain on the devil or on other people, but embraces it and makes it part of God’s Life. In doing that He shows what Job also knew, that in the very midst of despair and unutterable pain, God is there too. It is not the end. A just, loving God; an unjust, often bitter world that is God’s creation. Two apparently contradictory truths are reconciled at the cross, not by vindicating the one at the expense of the other, but by facing and embracing both. What that means for for me I’m only beginning to understand; what it means for you I can’t pretend to say. But wrestle with the question, and with God, and with the world, and with the truth. That’s where you’ll meet the real God, and that’s how the real God will meet with you.

"Paper" - a Native American reflection on white society

From the cantata "We Have Spoken" by Clyde Thompson, native American poetry set to beautiful music.

Loren Crow, bass soloist

Soundcloud of the performance

Paper

This is the way of white people:
They put great store in writing,
Always there is a paper.

Whenever white people come together there is writing.
When we go to buy some sugar or tea we see the white trader writing.
Even the white doctor, as he sits beside his patient, is writing on a paper, writing on a piece of paper.

The indian needs no writing. Words that are true sink deep into his heart and there remain.
We are puzzled what purpose all this writing serves.

Incarcerated People Are Not Vermin

Sermon for 4 August 2019 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

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

I am part of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon a group of churches cooperating together to seek, among other things, justice in our criminal justice system. As part of this effort I was asked to help put together a “Criminal Justice Sabbath” which would try to raise awareness and gain support at the congregational level. I’ve been involved in various kinds of jail ministry for about seven years, so I’m grateful for this chance to reflect on that experience.

To begin, I want to make sure you noticed the reading from Ecclesiastes. Wow! That right there is what we call a hard truth. If there’s one thing almost all of us want, it’s safety. Freedom from the worry that our life might be gone in an instant (though of course it can). Freedom from realizing, as the writer of Ecclesiastes did, that goodness and wickedness receive little in the way of observable, fair reward and punishment. Oh, we have powerful myths by which we distance ourselves from these realities, such as the myth that we deserve what we have, or the myth that there are dangerous people who will take away what is rightfully ours, or the myth that we have the moral right to take away some people’s freedom if doing so will protect our lives and property.

None of those myths is false from our perspective; they keep the world spinning along pretty much as we’ve always known it. But there’s an underside that we rarely allow ourselves to see which comes from the fact that life and wealth aren’t nearly as stable as our myths tell us. And the human cost of maintaining these illusions is incredibly high. The United States incarcerates more people by far than any other nation. Our life of apparently peaceful serenity comes at a high cost, and the burden of that cost falls disproportionally on the poor. It’s their stories that I want you to hear today, to put a human face on persons whom we persistently think of as monsters or vermin.

These stories are composites, because all of them are people who might be known to you — your neighbor, your fellow parishioner, your college friend. I met a man in jail a few months ago, I’ll call him Bob, who stumbled down the rabbit hole to find his home and cars confiscated by police, his job lost, his wife and children estranged and living in another state, and he himself facing several charges that would take months to sort out while he was kept in county lockup. He didn’t have the money to pay for an ankle bracelet. A year ago he had a good construction job and a family home and a normal relationship with his neighbors. Then things fell apart and, like the Bible’s Job character, he lost everything that mattered to him.

Bob had been a soldier in Afghanistan and had a pretty bad case of PTSD, which translated into heavy alcohol use and a dangerous temper. On the night of his arrest he had been in a bar fight; then he had driven home, still in his agitated state, and was arrested on a DUI. I don’t remember all the charges that were brought against him (there’s never just one charge; always its a bunch of charges, to pressure people into plea bargains), but he was being held at county lockup awaiting trial, which took longer than it should because of the backlog in the courts. Bob’s story has a happy ending of sorts, because his veteran status gave him access to a new alcohol and PTSD treatment program. He has lost everything but his life, but he will at least be able to start over. It’s more than some get.

I met another man, whom I’ll call Darryl. Darryl is a 37-year-old black man who had been in lockups of one kind or another almost all his adult life. His parents had been drug addicts and so he was a ward of the foster care system as far back as he could remember. In his teenage years he started selling drugs and his winsome personality made him pretty successful at it. He didn’t use the drugs himself much; they were a source of income. Darryl keeps trying to “go straight” when he gets out of jail. But do you know how hard it is for someone on probation to get and keep a job? Darryl was in jail this time, not for selling drugs, but for a “parole violation.” His boss had scheduled him to work on the day he was supposed to go meet with his parole officer, and neither the officer nor his boss was willing to change their expectation, so he missed the parole officer meeting in order to keep the job. He was arrested and put in jail, just for seven days, but it was enough to get him fired. His last words to me are haunting: “I’m just so tired,” he said, with tears streaming down his face. “Tired of being in jail, tired of being out of jail, tired of being homeless. I just want to die.”

There was another man — I’ll call him Stephen — whose family had cut off all contact with him because of his erratic behavior. I could see why. In the four or five times I met him Stephen told me no fewer than three separate conspiracy stories that involved occult groups killing infants, powerful people involved in the sex slave industry, the CIA and the Mossad coming after him personally because he had worked for both and knew dangerous secrets of theirs. And there were lots of other names and places that I wasn’t able to see how they fit together or how they connected into any of the main narratives. I’m not a psychologist, but I was able to recognize signs of paranoia thoroughgoing enough that he belonged in a hospital, not a jail. But it took six months before finally he was remanded by the court to the state hospital for treatment.

I’m not telling any women’s stories because our chaplaincy corps has a policy — a wise one, I think — of having women visit women and men visit men. But there are also many women in Lane County Jail, and their stories are not too different from the ones I’ve told.

I’m telling you about these people because I want you to realize that the human beings we lock away in our jails are not animals. We would probably treat them better if they were animals. No, they are our brothers and sons, daughters and spouses and neighbors. I’m also telling you about these people because they are not very different from you and me and the people we love. I’ve known so many who are in jail because of circumstances beyond their control. Those of us who are comparatively wealthy and well educated, who have good networks of people who can help us, would be able to weather problems that the poor are unable to cope with. The English Protestant martyr John Bradford, who was imprisoned and killed in the time of Mary Tudor, said, on seeing a fellow prisoner killed, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.” Once you become aware of how easy it is to get into legal jeopardy, once you realize that your ability to survive depends on your money and social standing, you can’t ever think of those who get caught in the system as less worthy than yourself.

It is the powerful who design and run criminal justice systems everywhere. The wealthy can bend the laws or even break them outright, because they can afford to pay bail and fines and hire the best attorneys. The HBO comedian and commentator John Oliver, in his episode entitled “Municipal Violations” (#31), examines things like traffic tickets, which almost everyone gets and about which no one really feels guilty. Even something as small as a jaywalking ticket can lead the poor into a situation where they’re forced to pay many times what a wealthy person has to pay, and may even have to spend time in jail. People adopt an attitude of moral superiority toward the incarcerated poor, while the reality is that they simply have fewer resources to draw on when they get into trouble.

Criminal justice reform is a political hot topic, and I don’t have enough knowledge to make specific recommendations on the public policy. But there are things we can do right now to improve the lives of people in jail. The main thing is to become involved at some level, and opportunities abound. Become a pen pal. Volunteer as a religious or educational worker. Support with your money and your time programs that help reintegrate convicted persons back into society. Hire them if you can. Get involved politically and work for criminal justice reform. The really crucial thing, though, is for us to change our attitudes about incarcerated persons, to stop thinking of them as vermin and honor their humanity. We owe it to one another, in obedience to our baptismal vows, to seek and serve Christ in them.

Elijah and the Woman of Zarephath

Elijah and the Woman of Zarephath: Sermon for Proper 27, option 2 (11 November 2018) 

Scripture Readings: 1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

The story of Elijah the Tishbite is a great story, but it takes work to get the full value out of it, and in particular you have to read each episode in the context of the larger story. Like so much of the Bible, casual reading of this passage by itself can yield bad fruit, but put the effort in and it will nourish you. The story goes that God was angry with Israel’s king Ahab because he had married a Phoenician princess from the port city of Sidon, named Jezebel. This secures an alliance with Ahab’s northern neighbor, but involved him in the worship of Canaanite gods, which is the Israelite kings’ quintessential fault. The fact that Jezebel comes from Sidon is important to this morning’s little bit of the Elijah story, as we’ll see in a moment.

Before we get into it, it’s worth admitting that there are at least five ways in which this story is difficult for us modern westerners to hear. First, we no longer believe, indeed I’d argue we CAN’T believe, that the gods send rain or snow, or withhold it, in response to human beings. So to begin with, we have to engage in a little voluntary suspension of disbelief in order for the story to work. Second, we find here a God who punishes the whole people of Israel for the sins of the king. As a portrayal of God, this isn’t easy to swallow since it seems to make God arbitrary and unfair. Third, of all the people God could have chosen to take care of Elijah, God chooses a foreigner from Jezebel’s people, a woman without food to give Elijah food, a woman without a name to contrast with the notorious Jezebel. Fourth, it’s not like Elijah is starving — God has been sending ravens to bring him food, using the same language to describe that feeding as the story we’re reading today — which makes the widow’s situation all the more poignant. She barely lives hand to mouth, like birds, but is asked to make provision for Elijah. And fifth, the city gate is a terrible place to gather firewood, even just “two sticks.” The city gate was the public square, where trials and business deals were conducted. Who gathers sticks in such a place? These five things are genuinely odd. Some of them just have to be accepted as part of the story world, but some of them offer real insights into how ancient Israelites would have heard the story. So let’s dig in.

The little town of Zarephath lay between the larger cities of Tyre to the south and Sidon to the north on what is today the coast of Lebanon. Another 25 miles past Sidon and you’re in Beirut. God didn’t send Elijah to the people of Israel, but to a Canaanite woman. Earlier in chapter 17 we’re told that God “commanded” (צִוִּיתִי) the ravens to feed (לכלכל) Elijah. Now ravens are unclean (Lev 11:15), and God not only gives them a command but also requires Elijah to eat bread and meat brought by them, which probably would have made any Israelite squirm. In this morning’s reading we heard that  God had “commanded” (צִוִּיתִי) the woman to feed (לְכַלְכְּלֶךָ) Elijah, the exact same expression. So the unclean birds and the widow of Zarephath stand in the same relation to God and to Elijah.

The woman must accept Elijah’s proposal before she can receive God’s gift. She had been planning to cook for herself and her son, but Elijah calls her to care for himself, who in her eyes was just foreign beggar, first. When she stops living her life of scarcity and begins to share with him, abundance opens up. Her handful of flour doesn’t run out and her little juglet of olive oil doesn’t dry up until the drought is over. The narrator concludes with a “happily ever after” moment showing that everything the prophet promised got delivered. But it doesn’t last. The story goes on with the child becoming sick and dying, with the widow complaining to Elijah, and with Elijah complaining to God and the boy being healed. The first resurrection story in Scripture is not God raising an Israelite but a Canaanite child! The result of this astonishing act of God is that the woman comes to believe what Elijah says is God’s word. So in the larger context, we have a Canaanite woman whose response to Elijah is the correct one, contrasted with Ahab and Jezebel’s incorrect response that tried to shut Elijah up.

Now it’s a real danger in stories like this that particular readings of them can be antisemitic in the worst sense, using Jewish texts against Jews. Nothing could be more remote from Scripture’s intent. Admittedly we see Elijah taking God’s grace to foreigners while keeping the Israelites in drought and it’s so easy to slip from there into a narrative in which Israel is more unfaithful than other people, or somehow deserves bad treatment in the modern world. Such interpretations are unfortunately widespread among some Christians, and there’s a fairly direct pipeline that runs from such interpretations to horrible things like the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last week. We Christians have more to repent and make amends for in that regard than Jews ever did.

Try to imagine reading this story as a Jew in Jesus’ time, a good 700 years or so after this story was written. In Jesus’ day, Tyre and Sidon were part of the Roman province of Syria despite being close to the Galilee. We’re told in Mark’s gospel that Jesus visited Tyre and Sidon at least twice, though that’s not mentioned in the other gospels. Luke actually records Jesus interacting with our story directly. Jesus says “There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah … and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow” (Luke 4:24-26). The saying illustrates how Israel resisted its prophets, necessitating that God should send His prophets elsewhere. I’m sure you can appreciate the antisemitic potential in that. The people of Nazareth, on hearing Jesus say this in the synagogue, tried to lynch Jesus right then and there! If this story could be so offensive when spoken by a fellow Jew, I’m pretty sure it would be deeply offensive from Christians. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that any reading of the Jewish scriptures in which Jews are held up to ridicule or scorn cannot be correct.

Instead, let’s pay attention to what GOD is doing here. God tells Elijah to leave his raven-fed hideaway in Jordan and go to Zarephath, assuring him, “Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you” (1 Kgs 17:9). When God gives people a command, it is always for their good. God commands Elijah twice, and commands the woman once, to the end that both Elijah and she and her son may eat. What seems at first like a hopeless act — a last meal before curling up to die — becomes the very means by which hope comes in. Her obedience to the prophet’s word results in her receiving God’s provision of food as well as, later on, the life of her son. But Jesus’ observation is still apropos: God might have sent Elijah to any number of Israelite widows to save them, but instead sent him to this foreigner to save her. What do we learn about God by observing this? We learn what Israel needed to learn, too, that God is not only the Lord of us and our people, but the Lord of aliens, legal and otherwise, and even the Lord of other nations regardless of whether or not they know it. God loves and cares for the unclean as well as the clean, the sick as well as the whole, the addicted as well as the teetotalers, the Canaanites as well as the Israelites. In the words of Psalm 147 God delights to feed the ravens when they cry out. We can see in the Elijah story the beginnings of the idea that Yahweh, Israel’s God could and did save  other peoples, which would eventually evolve into the idea of Yahweh as the universal God. In the process of Israel’s discovery of God’s Oneness, stories like this one played an important part.

The season after Pentecost is a time when we typically talk about evangelism (though because we’re Episcopalians we may use a different word) and the spread of Christianity throughout the world, and this story weighs in on that matter. We may be tempted to make people convert before we give them help, but in this story it’s precisely the miraculous provision of food that leads to the widow’s conversion. Like all Jews and Gentiles, she is presented with a command from God obedience to which will make her live. That command, which we also receive multiple times in Scripture, is that she care for the stranger living in her vicinity. Even this Phoenician woman can recognize the truth of that command and obey it. Will we?

A Tale of Two Daughters: Sermon for Proper 8

Sermon by Loren Crow, Ph.D., preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 1 July, 2018.

Readings: Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

You may have noticed that Jesus sometimes commands people not to tell others about him, and especially about the miracles that he does. Mark is the gospel that contributes this theme to the tradition. In Mark, when Jesus casts out a demon, he silences the creature before it can spill the beans about His identity. He heals a leper, then commands him not to tell anyone. After Jesus is transfigured in front of some disciples, He commands them not to tell anyone until after the resurrection. Now that strikes most people as odd, because we’re used to thinking of Jesus’ life-work as sort of like a Billy Graham crusade with its goal being to convert as many people as possible. The other gospels say that after Jesus’ resurrection He commands His disciples to spread the Gospel far and wide; but by way of contrast, Mark presents Jesus as keeping his head down, trying to go unnoticed … as he goes about doing all kinds of crazy things which are not exactly designed for stealth. It raises the question: if Mark’s Jesus is so keen to keep a low profile, why is he constantly on the move, healing and casting out demons everywhere he goes?

Scholars over a century ago dubbed this the “Messianic secret” in Mark, and developed two explanations for it, one historical and one theological. Historically, if Jesus was as obviously the Messiah as he is made out to be in the Gospels, then why didn’t most Jews at the time believe it? To that question Mark provides an answer: maybe Jesus commanded His disciples to keep his true identity a secret until after the Resurrection. This explains why Jesus’ following during his lifetime was negligible, but afterwards quickly spread. More important than the historical reason, though, is a theological concern. Mark wants to reveal one of the central mysteries of faith: that the power of Jesus is already at work in the world, secretly, bringing life and healing and salvation. Usually Jesus goes unnoticed, working behind the scenes, underneath perception, almost like it’s a secret. Like a little yeast that works its way into the whole batch of dough and voila, the whole batch is leavened! Or like a farmer who scatters seed in her field and waters it, and then it just grows; it’s a mystery. Actually it shouldn’t be too surprising that Mark’s Jesus stays hidden: He comes to us hidden, too, in sacramental forms of bread and wine and in the persons of our fellow Christians; He comes to us hidden whenever we meet people who seem of no account — the sick and the dying, the poor, the hungry, prisoners. The whole world regards such people as dismissible. Only with eyes opened by God’s Spirit do we begin to be able to see Jesus walking in our midst; only with the ears quickened by the Holy Spirit can we hear and obey Jesus’ voice.

The two “daughters” in Mark’s story constitute the yin and yang of Christian life, the passive and the active reception of Jesus’ presence. Jesus tenderly calls the daughter of Jairos “talitha,” “little girl” or “sweetie.” She’s either dead or so close to it as to fool everyone, so clearly she does nothing to receive Jesus’ gift of new life. Her father, though, humbles himself before Jesus and pleads with him to come and heal his daughter. Oddly, Jesus does not commend the man’s faith. Here's another oddity, Jesus does commend the faith of the woman in the little story that interrupts the narrative flow, inserting between the beginning and end of the Jairos-and-his-daughter story this story about a woman who has battled not only the physical hardships of twelve years’ blood loss but also the religious impurity that a flow of blood produces. As a practical matter, this woman would have been unable to move among other people without causing hardship, and would almost certainly have been shunned as a result. Yet she brazenly steps forward and touches Jesus’ clothes in the belief that doing so would cure her. And she’s right. Jesus immediately senses power go forth from him and uncovers the truth of her action. Then he speaks a word of such grace to her, “Daughter, your faith saved you.” Think of it! Instead of relegating her to the status of just some random person in the crowd, Jesus calls her “daughter,” a close family member, someone important, establishing with one word a whole relationship of care. I imagine them embracing as Jesus tells her to go in peace.

Such a structure where one story is sandwiched inside the beginning and end of another story, is called an inclusio. It’s quite common in Scripture and Mark is an acknowledged master of the form. The key to understanding these inclusios is to look for ways in which the two stories explicate and comment on one another. The inclusio is set up in the first place by the change of location, crossing the sea at the beginning and then returning to His home end of the narrative. The parallel is highlighted by calling both women “daughter.” Jesus is to heal Jairos’ daughter by laying his hands upon her (5:23), and the other unnamed woman reaches out and touches Jesus’ robe. The little girl is twelve years old; the woman has experienced her affliction for twelve years. The young daughter is a passive recipient of mercy because of her father’s pleading and because of Jesus’ grace and power. The woman with the flow of blood actively presses her claim upon Jesus, not because she thinks she has a right but simply because her need is so deep. Both women, the passive and the active, receive what they need exactly as they need it. Both women receive from Jesus a term of endearment. The older woman is called “daughter” to remind us to look at the story of Jairos’s daughter. These two women symbolize the power death has over humanity. Both of them are saved by Jesus from death, literal death and figurative death in the form of debilitating sickness. Jesus invades the world and throws down its powerful evil rulers, who conquers them all with his Truth and his poured out lifeblood. That blood has been shed, that Truth proclaimed, that Kingdom of God is growing up secretly alongside the apparently powerful kingdoms of the world. But sometimes it sure doesn’t feel that way. We’re supposed to be the victors in this crusade, so why does it sometimes feel like we’re losing ground?

“In the midst of life we are in death,” says the Burial Office. All of us are somewhere on the path that our physical bodies are taking through the world, and death lurks we know not when or where, and so we seek the shelter of the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. Come back to the Gospel: both of these daughters were in the midst of death at the beginning and then are delivered from it by the end. In the midst of death, we find that Jesus is our life. When we’re stricken by terrors and wickedness and disease and war, we find that Jesus is our life. When we’re bleeding for twelve years straight and half starved and fully starved of human contact, and we feel like God is off somewhere listening to harp music, we see Jesus and we hear his cry from the cross and we know that he’s right there crucified beside us, showing us how to live. In the mist of death we are in life, if we are in God; but also in the midst of life we are in death, unable to provide life for ourselves, dependent absolutely on God’s bounty. Sometimes we may feel particularly energetic or focused, so we reach out in prayer and touch Jesus’ clothing; sometimes, though, it’s all we can do just to wait because we’ve tried every solution we can think of and now we’ve no choice but to leave ourselves and our world in God’s hands. And then he sends us out into the world to become part of his work. And what does that work look like in actual practice? “your abundance at the present time should supply their needs, so that their abundance may also supply your needs.” Not by converting others at big “crusades,” but by the slow, steady conversion of our minds and our wills to the claims of the Gospel. When others see the Gospel played out authentically in our lives, their own hearts and minds will begin the process of conversion. The secret is out: wherever you encounter goodness and beauty, wherever you witness acts of mercy and healing, whenever you find yourself aware that you have succeeded in being kind, where refugees and families endure uncertainty and hatred, and especially when we gather ourselves together in this place and especially around this altar, in all our brokenness and neediness, Jesus is right here among us doing what he always does, and showing us how to do likewise. Pay attention, and I bet you’ll meet Him soon; keep paying attention and Lord knows what can happen. 

Changing Names: Sermon for Lent 2B, 2018.

Changing Names

Sermon by Loren Crow, Ph.D., preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 25 February, 2018.

Scripture Readings: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

I’d like to begin this sermon with a poem by one of the great theological poets of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot. 

The Naming of Cats, by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

It isn't just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,

Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,

Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—

All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,

Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:

Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—

But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,

A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,

Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,

Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-

Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,

And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover—

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name

I am fascinated by the power of names. Adam gave names to all the animals, and whatever he called a thing, that was its name. Naming is about understanding things, classifying them into groups that have some kind of meaning in our world view, a mystical, almost magical ability that we human beings all have. We would be unable to understand anything at all if not for this power. What a marvelous ability!

But it has a dark side. As fascinated as I am by our astonishing ability to divide the world up and name it, I am disturbed by how often naming has the effect of hiding the truth, shaming heroic efforts, justifying evil, demeaning the beautiful. I once heard it said that the subject of Da Vinci’s famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was a prostitute, a name that carried shame with it like dirty car grease and fouled the speaker’s perception of the painting’s beauty. If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of this kind of naming, the kind that makes you feel worthless and hopeless, you won’t soon forget it. I confess to you now that I am guilty of that kind of naming more times than I can count. Maybe you are, too. Sticks and stones do break bones, but names can injure people’s deeper selves in places untouched by mere physical injury.

But names don’t just have the power to degrade and demean. Their mystic potency is able to summon, as if from nothing, nobility and glory previously unobserved. Before Adam ever named anything, God called every good thing into being by naming it. And God renames people in Scripture often enough that it becomes almost cliché: Hosea’s children get renamed twice, the first time for judgment and the second for reconciliation; Jesus’ disciple Simon becomes Kephas (or its Greek form, Peter). Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, but most often we would be making a serious mistake in reading if we failed to think of those renamings as anything less than world-changing for the characters. Imagine Jacob’s paradigm shift when the angel he’s been wrestling with names him Israel because he’s really been wrestling with God. Think how jarring it must have been for Peter when Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan” — sternly correcting Peter’s mistaken belief in a Messiah who triumphs without suffering. 

We heard another one of those stories this morning in the Old Testament reading, when God renames Abram and his wife Sarai, giving them the names Abraham and Sarah. They are old and childless, and reconciled to their fate. I mean, as St. Paul says, who ever heard of people having children who are so old as to be practically dead themselves?! But God renames the both of them, makes a new covenant with them, and promises that they would become the ancestors of a multitude of nations. Into what seemed like their dying gasps, God spoke a new word that set them on a new path that made what had seemed like the end of their story into their story’s middle. All that with a name.

A name is never exactly the same as the thing to which it points; sometimes it’s lesser, and sometimes it’s greater. This is why, like the cats in Eliot’s poem, there remains a deep ineffability to God’s true Name that we cannot ever know, let alone utter. God lets us use various names of our own making or even ones that God tells us to pray and theologize. But when we use names like “God” and “Jehovah” and “Jesus,” and even “Trinity,” we make a mistake if we think that such words articulate the fullness of God’s Self. They allow us to address God as “Thou,” in Martin Buber’s terminology, but they do not define or limit God’s Being. God’s character is strong enough and transcendent enough that God is unfazed by and resistant to all our attempts to pin it down.

But we do not have the strength of character that God has: we are susceptible to the ways we are named by others. True, humanity, made in the image of that God’s Being and after God’s likeness, is also much more than the names we give and receive. But with the names we give to one another — the labels we use to designate people’s character, the things we highlight and downplay about one another, the aspects of our fellow human beings that we deplore and that we cherish — we shape our experience of them and we contribute to their experience of themselves. For my part, rather than criticizing where there is deficiency, I want to encourage and strengthen where there is goodness. I want to expect and summon the best in myself and others by the names I use. My Lenten meditation, and my earnest desire and prayer, is to work on naming my neighbors and myself in ways that summon beauty and goodness and strength, and that can set us all moving with hope and faith into the new story to which we are called in Christ. That story takes us through Lent and Good Friday, but it brings us into Easter and gives to all of us the shining name “Saints.” That’s the name God gives us, calling us into a new kind of life. When you leave this place, go out and give the name “saints” to those you meet, trusting God to make it true. Amen.

Scripture, God's Weight Room

Scripture, God’s Weight Room

Sermon preached by Loren Crow, Ph.D., at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon, on 19 November 2017, Year A Proper 28

Old Testament: Zeph 1:7, 12–18
Psalm 90:1–12
New Testament 1 Thes 5:1–11
Gospel Matt 25:14–30

We Episcopalians have a different view of Scripture than some of our neighbors do. Some of our neighbors want to use Scripture as a sourcebook for scientific truth. Some want to predict the future with it. Others dismiss Scripture flippantly as little more than an artifact from a barbaric culture. Neither of these will do for us Episcopalians. We receive Scripture as one of the means by which God changes us from earth-bound, deathly creatures into beings capable of being brought into God’s nearer presence. As this morning’s Collect says, God caused all Holy Scripture to be written “for our learning,” and the goal of this learning is “that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life....” For us, reading Scripture is about God bringing us into maturity; it’s like, if you’ll permit me a bit of latitude with the simile, a gymnasium and a weight room for the soul. God has provided this means by which our souls can grow stronger, but it is we who have to work at it: we have to “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them” which gives us the strength to “embrace and hold fast the blessed hope.”

If you look closely at this morning’s readings, you find that each of them, although it appears to be about judgment and doom for evildoers, is really about something else — ready? here it comes! — they’re about trusting in God’s goodness in the midst of judgment. If we can trust that God will do what’s right no matter what, then that trust is the first step in finding ourselves transformed. In the Bible we find that the God who is portrayed there — though he is wild, untamable, unpredictable, unstoppable — is also unutterably good. And so we slowly find ourselves able to trust that same God in our turbulent lives. We don’t ever know the future, and we won’t know it any better by reading Scripture than we will any other way, but we know the One Who holds the future. And by exercising our spiritual muscles in God’s weight room, we become strong enough to “embrace” and “hold fast” the hope that the future God is bring about is far better than we can desire or pray for.

Let’s start with the Gospel. It’s a familiar story. Most of the time we focus on the faithful slaves who, trusting their master’s goodness, invest and double his principal investment. The commendation from his lips rings out, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave.” And we all hope to hear such words from God someday, so that’s natural enough. God has given each of us “talents” that we’re expected to use in the service of the Kingdom, and so this is a natural lesson to draw. But the story is actually much darker than that, contrasting the actions of those good slaves with those of a worthless slave, and I’d like you to notice what the worthless slave says:

I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.

His opinion of his master’s character determines his course of action. The master, he thinks, has unfair expectations. Who knows what this guy would do if a bad investment were made and the money lost; so the slave tries to protect himself by removing the element of chance, hiding the money rather than using it to accomplish things. It’s a failing to which I and most of the people I know are prone: we may tell ourselves, “In God We Trust,” but we hedge our bets in a hundred ways, everything from our armed forces to our insurance policies.

The prophet Zephaniah alleges that this self-protective attitude is idolatrous, trusting in a god who is unmoved by morality. The LORD, they say, “Will not do good, nor will He do harm.” The thing is, I bet if we’re honest most of us will admit that these ancient people of Jerusalem articulate a principle that governs our daily life almost all of the time. If God can be expected to remain aloof, neither helping the good nor hindering the wicked, then we’re going to have to look out for ourselves. We don’t really believe that God helps people, so we live by the principle that God helps those who help themselves. We don’t really believe in God’s judgment, so we have a hell of a time leaving judgment in God’s hands. And in particular, we keep living our lives as if nothing were going to change. We build houses and store up wealth; we plant our vineyards. We stock up on weapons and ammo, we hire police and military and private security contractors. We set apart “rainy day funds.” We buy “life insurance” and “health insurance” and pretend that they will keep us alive and healthy. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we try to store up the manna that we receive daily, but only find that it doesn’t keep.

How would that all change if we really believed in God’s unchanging goodness? How would you change? How would I? How would we, as a church, change our behavior if we really expected God to act, powerfully and inexorably, on the side of good?

Well one possible response might be to just check out, just sit around and wait for God to do something. This is apparently what some in the church at Thessaloniki thought: Since Jesus does all the work of salvation, they figured, and since He was coming back soon to complete His work, they could afford just to bide their time. Like the foolish virgins that we heard about last week, who waited for Jesus’ imminent return but didn’t carry enough oil to provide for even a slight delay. In his letter this week, St. Paul advises Christians to keep themselves watchful even though there’s no way to predict when Jesus will return. They were to keep doing the works of the Kingdom, staying sober and watchful so as not to be caught unawares.

After nearly two thousand years, maintaining this kind of watchful expectation for God is even more difficult than it was in St. Paul’s day. Even maintaining a hopeful attitude about the future is hard when we’re bombarded by news from near and far that makes it feel like the world is unraveling. This is why we need to hear, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Scriptures: to keep alive our hope that, despite all our failings and despite the sorry state of the world, we are being brought by God, sometimes kicking and screaming but inevitably, into the Kingdom where life and not death is the operative principle.

How does reading Scripture do that? Most importantly, it makes our story part of the story of God saving the created world, lets us know that what seems to be a setback in our life is actually a necessary part of the work God is doing, transforming our failure into God’s victory. There is no greater success than to fail and experience how God redeems that failure and turns it into something to be thankful for. But for that to happen, we can’t be like that guy who buries his sack of money in the ground. We have to step out bravely, looking expectantly for what God is doing, and the strength to do that comes from hearing all those stories in Scripture where death is swallowed up in victory. If we read the Bible expecting to encounter there that good God who, even with judgment, comes with healing in His wings, then we will surely meet this God, embrace and hold fast the blessed hope of our salvation.

The Yoga of Christ: Sermon for Proper 9, July 9th 2017

Sermon preached on Sunday, 9 July 2017, at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings for Proper 9: Zechariah 9:9-12; Psalm 145:8-14; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Every religion tells followers to accept a yoke, a discipline that is thought to help transform the adherent into a better self. If you were Hindu, you might engage in regular fasting, or practice body postures, or memorize and recite Hindu Scriptures, or study philosophy, or one a a handful of other disciplines each of which is known as a yoga. The Sanskrit word yoga is actually etymologically related to the English word yoke. A yoke is a piece of wood that harnesses a pair of oxen so that they can work together to pull a wagon or a plow. Both the Sanskrit word yoga and the English word yoke have that literal meaning, but they also have two metaphorical meanings: (1) a discipline to which one submits willingly, and (2) enslavement to a discipline imposed by others. The first of these metaphorical meanings articulates powerfully what a religion means and how it accomplishes the good toward which it aims. When Jesus invites His followers to take on His yoke, he’s asking them voluntarily to adopt the way of life that he embodies: humility and gentleness, and trust in God’s goodness.

Like Hindus, we Christians have several different yogas, different yokes or disciplines, that we think will bring us closer to God. For some of us, prayer and reading of Scripture are spiritual yokes that we do our best to shoulder. Others of us focus on giving alms, or serving the poor and downtrodden, or regular attendance at Mass. Monastics take on the yoke of submission to the chain of authority in their order. If we were Jewish, we might take on the yoke of keeping a kosher home, or studying the Torah and the Rabbis.

But the second metaphorical meaning of a yoke, oppressive enslavement by others to their agenda, is something we all have to deal with. Our culture is obsessed with striving. We’re offered countless programs for self-improvement, everything from weight loss and smoking cessation to improving memory and emotional stability. We’re bombarded with messages about our culture’s ideals and how we fall short of them. We’re taught that constant attention to self-improvement is noble and we’re warned against the dangers of stagnation and acceptance of the status quo. We’re saddened when we notice someone who fails to live up to their potential, by which we mean that they don’t meet our culture’s standards of effort and accomplishment; we think they’re wasting their life and talent.

Our yokes can make us arrogant and intolerant if we’re not careful. If I take on the discipline of sobriety, it’s easy to be judgmental about anyone else who doesn’t. If I express my faith mainly by working for social justice, then I may be tempted to regard as inferior those who seek God in lives of solitude. Christians who are peace activists may be tempted to think the Christianity of the crusaders is in debatable. It’s so easy to praise ourselves by dismissing others’ efforts. But if I’m honest with myself I realize that the challenge of living a Christian life, even by my own standard, is one that I repeatedly fail to meet. There’s just too much that has to be done, and I’m just one person. I get overwhelmed by the vast gulf between the world’s need and my ability to meet that need. Even just for myself, there’s too much work that needs to be done, too much to strive for. If meeting a supposed Christian ideal of life and character is what it means to be a Christian, I’m afraid I’ll never make it.

Of course there are some people who maddeningly manage much of the time to do what they set out to do. Yet I suspect that even they may not feel as successful as they seem to others. Maybe the worst thing about the self-improvement obsessed culture we live in is the fact that it robs from us our ability to relax. There’s always some project on which we should be working — learning a foreign language, training for a marathon, working off those pounds, working on being a better spouse and parent — and if you’re like me you sometimes feel buried under the seemingly inexhaustible supply of things that need to be improved, each one worthwhile and some even essential. There are so many important yokes to bear.

And Christianity teaches us that the main yoke we must bear is a cross. When Jesus invites us to follow Him in bearing our crosses to Calvary, he is bidding us suffer and die with Him, and and promising resurrection. He’s inviting us to yoke ourselves together with Him in His project to save the world. The cross is a yoke that can only be taken in gentleness and humility, because even the slightest impulse of pride causes us to throw that yoke off. It goes something like this: “I shouldn’t have to suffer in that way. I deserve to be treated better than that. It’s beneath my dignity. I’m not going to stand for this kind of treatment.” But to bear the cross-shaped yoke is willingly to submit ourselves to humiliation and pain, again and again, not defending ourselves, not resisting evil, offering the second cheek when the first has been struck. That’s the yoke of Jesus that he calls us to bear.

But riddle me this: How on earth can he call that yoke easy and that burden light? The way of self-denial, of submission to torture and death, the way that feels often enough like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That doesn’t sound easy, so why does he say it is? I think it’s because we don’t have to be successful; we just have to bear up. Success is in God’s hands, not ours; all we have to do is trust that God’s Kingdom is victorious. If we will accept this yoke that leads us through the lowest, most ignoble defeat, then we are assured of success.

That’s why this passage from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans has always held such power for me. I remember even as a teenager deriving a lot of hope from the fact that Saint Paul himself, a man of huge importance, struggled with failure. I identify with his frustration at being unable to make much headway in the project of self-reformation. I’m as caught up as anyone in our general cultural idea that life is all about becoming a better version of oneself, but more often than not I fail at the yogas I attempt to live by, and even when I don’t fail, those yogas don’t accomplish what I hope they’ll accomplish. The thing I want to do is the very thing I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, that’s what I do. I know well enough what I should do, but find myself unable to meet the challenge consistently. Given my inability to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, how is any improvement possible? Paul’s answer resounds, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Because the thing is, when we take on Jesus’ yoke, the partner we’re yoked with is the very Son of God. He is like the powerful ox that pulls the cart inexorably to its true destination. Our contribution, compared to His, is minimal. Yet, if we take on that yoke, He takes our half-hearted, week-kneed, feeble efforts and strengthens them so that they become part of the transcendent story of God’s victory. Success is certain, indeed it’s already accomplished. We can stand up under our yoke and keep walking with Jesus through suffering and death, and right on through resurrection and ascension. He will recreate us as the version of ourselves that we ought to be, and that will be better than a thousand self-help programs. If we trust Him to do that, we will find peace.

The Good News of the Trinity

Sermon preached on Trinity Sunday, June 11 2017, at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see thee in thy one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Trinity Sunday. We worship God in the Holy Trinity every week. But unless you’re a theologian, or at least a wannabe theologian like me, you may not see the point of reflecting much on the nature of this notoriously intractable doctrine of the Church. Of course there are others who have different ideas about the nature of God. To Muslims and Jews our talk of a Trinity sounds a lot like straight polytheism. Dualisms in which there are two equal powers, one good and one evil, are also pretty popular. But Christianity offers a distinctive way of thinking about ultimate reality not found elsewhere: a way that has a lot to teach us if we’ll let ourselves be taught.

This morning’s Collect states that the Trinity is an important doctrine, but doesn’t really say why. Is the Trinity just a point of doctrine that must be accepted and serves only as a kind of litmus test for who’s in and who’s out? Or is there good news there that deserves to be heard afresh? The Trinity is a mystery that tickles the mind, but is it good news? There are lots of mysteries I don’t comprehend, after all — the size of the universe, the power of music to lay my emotions open, the nature of free will — mysteries for which I’m grateful, because they affect me so powerfully and because their power is precisely in their mystery. I hope to show you that there the Holy Trinity is that kind of mystery and to think together with you about what it means.

Here’s something interesting: You’ve probably noticed, that both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed are arranged in three parts, corresponding to the three Persons of the Trinity. What you may not have caught is that all of them, Father, Son, and Spirit, are integral to creation. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth….And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord…begotten of His Father before all worlds…by whom all things were made….I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life.” They are separate persons, but their work is always unified. I think this is why we read Genesis Chapter One the Old Testament lesson for today. Almost no one would argue that the writer of Genesis was thinking of the Trinity in that passage. But pretty much all the early Christian readers of this passage agree that all three persons of the Trinity are actively present in creation. When God says, “Let Us make humanity in Our image,” all the early Christian interpreters agree, this is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit speaking to one another. But before that…let’s back up a bit.

In the beginning, God. Before the heavens and earth came into being. Before the Big Bang. Before there was any matter or energy or time. When there was no here or there, no now or then or yet to be, no times or places or beings or things. For endless eons of undifferentiated time: God. Christian theology teaches us that in this timelessness, God was “eternally coexistent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (By the way, the traditional formulation is male, but we must understand that we’re not talking about maleness or femaleness, we’re talking about Divinity using human relationship as the metaphor. We should always remember the metaphorical character of these names.) The Father is the Begetter and the Source; the Son is the Begotten One; the Holy Spirit is the One Who Proceeds. These Persons are equal but not the same. One image I have for this is a musical trio: none of the parts is the same, and without their differentness there can be no trio. Now the terms “beget” and “proceed” sound a lot like there must have been a time when the Son didn’t exist yet, or a time when the Holy Spirit had not yet proceeded from the Father. But that’s a mistake, which is why the Nicene Creed says explicitly that the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father.” God, the One who lives in eternity and stands outside the universe of created things, this God has always been Three Persons in communion with one another so lovingly, so intimately and so deeply, that they are really one Being.

That communion is so close, that the apostle John could make the straightforward claim that “God is love, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” The thing about love is this: love requires an object. (This reminds me of a joke: Did you hear the one about the guy who loved perfectly? Neither did I. Seems the fellow was foiled by contact with actual people.) There must always be an object of love separate from oneself; it’s what love means. If God is love, then there is a natural threeness that is entailed. The lover, the one beloved, and love itself. The Doctrine of the Trinity, says Saint Augustine, is primarily about understanding that the basic nature of God is LOVE, and secondarily it is about understanding what God has done for us.

The love of God, if it were a little less potent, might have remained fully and beautifully expressed among the Three Persons of the Trinity, as it had been forever. But love is magic: the more you love, the more love you have to give. Love cannot be bottled up even by the infinity of God, but spills out and overflows, and a universe springs into being, a universe with the capacity to participate in the divine love-life. But note the heartache God endures as a result of this creation, which began almost immediately to resist God’s love. No sooner did creation spring forth than love took on a new attribute: self-sacrifice. When love is reciprocated, its selflessness is a joyful, painless thing. But when love goes unanswered the pain of it is incredibly hard to bear. But this God, oh He’s willing to endure the pain for the sake of His creation. So the Begotten One, saves the world by becoming part of it, in the Incarnation, the second great mystery of Christian teaching. He lowered Himself to become human, with everything that means. But through a kind of divine sleight of hand, this doesn’t debase God to being less-than-God; rather it elevates humanity to divine status. Saint Gregory Nazianzen, one of the great trinitarian theologians, says that when Jesus was crucified, raised, and exalted to the right hand of God, that was His humanity that was crucified, raised, and exalted, and our humanity with His. When we cry to God “Abba, Father” we do so in the power of God’s Spirit as children of God, a status to which we are elevated by means of Christ’s work. Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father” not so much because God is our Creator as because we are brought into the divine Sonship.

When we name God as Trinity, this is at least part of what we mean. This is a God who risks relationships even though they lead inevitably to pain and heartache. This is a God who, having created, is not satisfied to leave creation to its own devices, but continually steps in to redeem what would otherwise be lost. This is a God whose purposes cannot be thwarted, whose love is so powerful that even when He empties Himself He’s still too strong for Death! All that’s really good news, but here’s the bit that blows my mind: Because of what the God did in the human Jesus, humanity is brought into the life of the Trinity, where that same Spirit of love transforms us into persons worthy of communion with God. We already have glimpses of that communion even now, in the Eucharistic feast and in our love for one another. Because it is all God’s work, from creation to redemption to exaltation, we can have indomitable hope for ourselves and for one another, and indeed for the whole world. “Look!” says God, “I am making all things new.” This God, whose whole song is Love, simply cannot be stopped until the trio is joined by a whole choir.

Holy God, Holy People — Sermon for 2/19/2017

Sermon for Epiphany 7A, 19 February 2017

Preached at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon

Lessons

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
Psalm 119:33-40
1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
Matthew 5:38-48

Once there was an old farmer who worked a small family holding in northern China. The winters were hard there, and he was barely able to grow enough food for him and his family to eat. But he was content. One day his young son went outside and discovered that an animal had come into his garden and eaten the tops of the turnips. The boy ran inside and said, “Father, the most terrible thing has happened!” But the father just said, “Perhaps.” He went outside and saw that the turnips had indeed been ruined, but then discovered the culprit, a fine horse that was worth more than he could have afforded even by saving for years. He caught the horse and began to be able to plow more ground, and farming became easier. The neighbors noticed the man’s good fortune and told him that he was the luckiest man they knew. “Perhaps,” said the man. One day, when his son got to be a teenager, he was out riding the horse, and fell off and broke his leg. “Oh no!” said the villagers, “What a calamity!” For they knew that the father had come to rely on his son’s help with the chores. But the aging farmer just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Perhaps.” The next day, soldiers came and conscripted all the young boys of the village into the army. Since the farmer’s son had a broken leg, he was excused from duty. The story goes on, as all stories do, and after each episode the father repeated his: Perhaps.

The point of that story, of course, is that you never know where you are in history. The Israelites went down to Egypt thinking that they were being saved from the famine; and so they were, but then they were enslaved and escaped only by means of disaster against the Egyptians. They came and had a marvelous “God moment” at Sinai, with thunder and lightning and God’s booming voice, and received God’s commandments that, by keeping them, they would receive huge blessings. But I want you to notice that not everyone felt like those commandments were a blessing. The divine requirement, “Be holy for I the LORD your God am holy,” meant that some behaviors could not be tolerated, and this clearly placed restrictions on people’s tendency to be selfish. God was giving them land, but they weren’t allowed to use the land however they pleased: they had to harvest the crops in such a way as to deliberately leave some produce for the homeless. They had to be truthful with one another and honest in their dealings, even if it meant putting themselves at a financial disadvantage. In short, they had to be as concerned about the welfare of their neighbor as they were about their own welfare. They had to love their neighbor as they loved themselves.

The thing to get about this is that it’s a corollary of the character of God. Jesus makes the same argument, grounding His moral teaching in his observations about God’s behavior. We’re to do good to people without discriminating between who deserves it and who doesn’t, as he says, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” This principle of what theologians call imitatio dei, “the imitation of God,” underlies all the moral teaching of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. That’s not to say that it’s all necessarily correct for all times and places. Notice that Jesus’ observation about God’s character leads him to a slightly different teaching than the one in Leviticus. Notice that St. Paul, who is still concerned about the holiness of God, now as manifested in His Temple, applies the principle of the Temple’s holiness to the Church at Corinth, beginning a line of reasoning that he’ll work out into many implications in letters to them. The body is God’s temple, and here he means both their individual bodies and the Church as a whole, the Body of Christ. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be destroyed. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be joined to a prostitute. The temple is holy; therefore we mustn’t think of our fellow Christians as more or less important than one another. The temple is holy; therefore we belong not to ourselves but to God. The temple is holy; therefore its priests deserve financial support. The temple is holy, and our body is God’s temple; therefore God lives in us.

Now we could spend quite a long time unpacking the idea of holiness. Whole books have been written on the subject. But what I really want to get across to you is this central fact that the holiness of God and of God’s people requires different responses in different ages, because although God sees the big picture of history we do not. When the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel had to wrestle mightily with the question of “Does this mean that God’s holiness is gone from us? Or is it that God’s holiness will be with us in a new way?” The answer, as we now know, is that God was still among God’s people, but didn’t require a temple to be among them. But then a Second Temple was built by returning exiles, and that temple was important enough that the only time we hear about Jesus being violent it was in defense of that temple’s holiness. When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, the question re-emerged: Is God still among His people? Jews gave the answer that God was still powerfully present with His people in Scripture and in prayer, but some Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah, along with their gentile fellow-believers, reinterpreted the Temple to be composed of partakers in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Today is the only time in the entire three-year lectionary cycle that we read from the book of Leviticus. That’s unfortunate, in my view, because it gives the impression that we get to cherry-pick the passages of Scripture that we like and disregard the others. To me it seems better to read all of Scripture and acknowledge that some of it contains things we can no longer agree with. This is exactly what Jesus does. He reads, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” which appears in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and contains the important principle that our punishment must fit the crime, but then he sets it in light of the higher principle of doing good to good and evil people alike. Why? Because that’s what God does. If that law is subject to reconsideration in light of God’s grace, then surely the other laws we find troublesome on Leviticus and elsewhere can be reconsidered as well. Instead of simply refusing to read them, let’s read them and then ask where the Spirit of God is moving. Because we don’t know where we fit into history. We don’t know how what we see now will turn out. The only thing we can be sure of is the character of this God whose mercies are new every morning and who calls us to imitate Him. As God has forgiven us, so we must forgive those who’ve trespassed against us. As God blesses all creation with abundance, so we must bless those who are in our power to bless. As God has loved us while we were yet sinners, so we must love others regardless of their worthiness. Quit worrying about whether the Church is flourishing or dying; don’t be immobilized by whether there’s the right or the wrong government in power. Even if there are wars and rumors of wars, the end is not yet. Well, maybe it’s the end. Perhaps. Or maybe there’s another chapter yet to be written. What’s needed from us in any case is for us to be holy, to imitate God, to make God’s mercy present in the world he made. Holy, holy holy, LORD God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of God’s Glory. May we be signs and sacraments of God’s holiness. Amen.

The Desert Road

"The Desert Road"

Sermon preached on 11 December 2016 at Saint Mary's Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon

Collect: Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

Scripture Readings:
Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:4-9; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for You, O God.” Amen.

That famous line from Psalm 42 was not one of our readings for this week, but it expresses perfectly the Advent sentiment. Think not so much in terms of Oregon deer, which get plenty of water, but think of deer in the Palestinian badlands, where rain is rare and the only water comes from springs that bring water down from the mountains. All the land around you is parched; such plants as there are, are hardy, thorny things. You can’t really just stay by the springs because that’s where the predators are. So you have your trails on the steep hillsides and you wander them endlessly looking for the next green plant to munch and trying to stay away from the lions and jackals. Most Israelites didn’t live in the desert, of course, but they saw it from where they lived, and it represented for them the realm of chaos, of demonic powers — the realm of death. In contrast to the land made fertile by God’s grace, the desert was ever visible as a part of the world that resisted the divine gift. Nowadays we see desert and wilderness as places, perhaps, where we find God, and Israel has stories about finding God in the desert, too, but mostly the desert is someplace where God is experienced as absent, a place in need of re-creation, that needs to be made fruitful. What the poet who speaks in Psalm 42 does is makes a connection between that physical condition of unfruitfulness to the spiritual condition of feeling God’s absence.

Now I know as well as you do, or anyone does, that God is never actually absent. Yet there are times, aren’t there, when God’s absence seems almost palpable, when the “God-shaped hole in the human heart” feels like more than mere emptiness. At least that’s how it sometimes feels to me. And yet that emptiness is such an ache, such a longing, that it’s like God is present in that very absence and even by means of it. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” goes the saying, as a ravening thirst increases one’s love for cool water. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God.” 

Advent is a time to feel that absence, to relish it as you relish the feeling of hunger when you smell the afternoon feast cooking on Christmas morning. It’s not just a desire to satisfy your hunger with food; there’s something delicious about the hunger itself, which serves as a sign of the feast to come.

This is the kind of feeling we ought to have as we hear Isaiah’s marvelous poem. Remember that to the ancients of the Middle East, desert symbolized the parts of the world that were in rebellion against God’s tireless efforts to make the world live. The desert was where demonic forces, predatory animals, and uncleanness of all kinds endured. If you got sick, and especially if you were infirm in a way that led to ritual uncleanness, such as being lame or blind or had leprosy, then you were of the desert, whether you lived there or not. But in Isaiah’s vision, God makes the desert fertile and lush, and all those symbols of barrenness are cured. The desert blossoms and becomes as fruitful as the greenest regions in Israel. The sight of the blind and the hearing of the deaf is be restored, those who had been unable to speak now can sing, the lame are able not just to walk but to leap for joy. The waterless wastes overflow with vigor. And no predators endanger anybody. And in the midst of this re-created land, this former desert, this place formerly inhabited by the unclean and demonic, there is now a sacred road that leads to Jerusalem and to the temple of God on Mount Zion there. This is imagery of pilgrimage to the temple. The power of God’s new creation, and of the holy road that leads to God’s presence, is so great that even fools can’t miss it, there is no uncleanness on this road because all uncleanness has been healed by God. The highway leads inexorably to the presence of God, and God’s redeemed people travel that way with joy that is so great as to drive away all sorrow and sighing. Doesn’t this vision of Isaiah just make you want to find that road and walk on it, like a thirsty deer who smells the water from afar? Walk with me through Advent; that’s our holy road and it leads to God’s own Self, who was made a human being like us for our salvation.

What I’d like to invite you to see with me is that the healing that’s needed by the desert, and which God promises, is also needed by us. Because there are things that dry us up, that make us forget who we are created to be, things that get control of us and make us who are called to be children of God into slaves. We are, as the Collect says, “sorely hindered by our sins.” I used to think of God as a stern old man who scowled when anyone smiled. That God wanted to prevent us from sinning mainly because he didn’t want us to have any fun. But the longer I live the clearer it becomes to me that that’s wrong-headed. Sins are the things we do that hinder us from living fully, that make us less than fully human, that deaden our physical and spiritual nerves so that we’re unaware of the world’s marvelousness. If you’re like me then you probably don’t have too much trouble thinking of the sins that dry up your soul, things you’ve neglected to do that you should have done; things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have done. Attitudes that cut you off from God and your neighbor. God promises to make the desert bloom again, to save us from our sins, but here we are still in the midst of them. In Advent, hoping and longing for the salvation of God to be born in us and in the world. In this Advent desert I long for God’s healing grace like a deer thirsting for flowing streams.

This the solution of the powerful riddle about how the loving God is also our judge: When God comes to be our judge, He comes to save us. God’s judgment is not a punishment for failure to be saved; it is the means of God’s salvation. That’s because what God is saving us from, is our sins, the attitudes and actions that shrivel up our hearts and make God’s world a desert. God will save us from those sins, because God is recreating everything into a new, green, fertile heaven and earth. I think myself, using Leonard Cohen’s words, that “every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” But even if we utterly refused that salvation, God would save the rest of the world that we insisted on destroying. God’s salvation is inevitable, because life and bounty are God's way.

So what do we do while we live in Advent, in this time of expectation as we await the final victory of God? In modern Israel, the desert is increasingly being made fruitful by irrigation. That is, through a combination of human effort and God’s miraculous gift of life. Our individual lives are like that, too. The main way God frees us from our sins is by helping us to stop sinning. It doesn’t do any good to ask God to free us from our sins if we won’t walk in the freedom we’re given. The desert becomes fruitful when we irrigate it. The holy highway leads to the Jerusalem, but it is our legs that have to carry us on it. Our effort is part of the grace that God gives; it’s not good works versus grace, it’s the grace of good works. And so we remind ourselves annually, in this Advent season, to come back to the Source, to watch and pray for the Lord’s return, to do works of justice and mercy and peace. To eat and drink these signs of the banquet which we shall all eat, cured of our diseases, healed from our infirmities, and saved from our sins. This bread and this wine are the very presence of God breaking into our dried and twisted roots of our souls and beginning to irrigate the parched land. Strengthen the weak knees. Break up your fallow ground. Let streams begin to flow in the desert. 

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so longs my soul for You, O God.”

Pot Calls Kettle Black, Gets Called Back -- Sermon for September 4, 2016

Sermon preached on 4 September 2016 (Proper 19) at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Jeremiah 18:1-11

Psalm 139:1-5,12-17

Philemon 1-21

Luke 14:25-33

Last week we heard that we should not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, because some people, like Abraham our ancestor in faith, have occasionally entertained angels unawares. This week I want to remind you that some of those angels might very well be inside of you being brought out, sometimes painfully, by the Creator who does all things well. 

In our lesson from Jeremiah, God shows the prophet a potter in his shop, making useful things with clay. Perhaps Jeremiah remembered the old Israelite creation story in which the Lord “forms” (it’s the potter word) the man out of dust. In this story, the potter is dissatisfied with the shape his pottery is taking, so he starts over and uses the same clay to make something else. 

Central to the meaning that Jeremiah wants to get across is the idea of turning, of repentance. When the potter finds that what he’s making is ruined, he “turns” or “repents” and makes something different. The call that God issues to the Israelites is a call to repentance, a call for them to turn from their evil ways, and if they will turn then God promises that He will also turn from the course of judgment that He has set. It’s a call to a radical change, and the piece of pottery that will emerge afterwards will be different from the one that might have been possible before it was ruined. Different, but not worse. The skill of this Potter are such that the remade vessel is never second-best, but always simply best.

The Gospel lesson articulates the call to radical change like Jeremiah, but now draws our attention to how difficult and painful it can be. In Luke’s telling, Jesus says to his hearers that anyone who wishes to be His disciple must hate their father and mother, hate their spouse and their children, hate their brothers and sisters, even hate their own life. That’s strong language! Matthew’s version of the same saying (Matt 10:37) makes it a matter of degree: “Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” But here in Luke’s version, it’s more stark and it’s this very starkness, the scandal of it, that makes it powerful. Now I don’t think we should understand that He’s calling His hearers literally to hate their families — after all this is the same Jesus who earlier in Luke commands His followers to love even their enemies, to do good to them even if they don’t appreciate it (Luke 6:27ff). But if we allow Jesus the teacher to say shocking things, and allow ourselves to be shocked by them, then we can see that this is a call to discipleship and a radical one. 

The really important thing, the thing to which Jesus goes on to call us, is carrying the cross and following Him. He doesn’t say here anything about dying on that cross; he talks about carrying it and following Him. What does it mean to carry our cross? I think it means putting ourselves like clay into the hands of the Potter and trusting Him to re-form us into something good. This Potter doesn’t just work the clay into a shape and then let it dry. He keeps working the clay, adding water, re-shaping it, crunching it back into a ball and starting afresh. I don’t want to push that analogy too far — it’s only an analogy, after all — but I do think the point of the story is that we should trust the process and trust the Potter to make us better than we are now. 

Here’s another way to think about it, the Philemon letter. When St. Paul wrote his letter to Philemon and Apphia and the church that met in their house, he used the language of love. They’re a wealthy couple who have a church that meets in their house. They love Paul and are beloved by him. They have refreshed him and met his needs enough times that he’s truly thankful. These are people who are noteworthy for their hospitality, for their active good works. It’s hard to imagine a more laudatory description of them than we get here in this little letter that barely fills a single page.

They were also slave owners. In his letter, Paul calls on Philemon to receive the runaway slave Onesimus back not as a slave but as full fellow-citizen in the Kingdom of God. He could have commanded it, but he wanted them to welcome Onesimus freely. Why didn’t St. Paul, while he had this opportunity, simply declare that slavery was wrong and forbidden by God? Surely he knows that slavery is against the very heart of the God who created all peoples. Why didn’t he say so? I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that it shows to this virtuous Christian couple, and the Church meeting in their house, that God still has a way for them to go, bearing a cross, being smashed and re-formed by the potter.

Philemon and Apphia no doubt thought of themselves, as Paul obviously thought of them, as persons in full receipt of God’s mercy and grace, thoroughly acceptable to God and beloved by Him. They may not have even conceived slavery as the moral evil that we now know it to be. Nowadays it’s impossible to imagine anyone who could, with a clear conscience, be a serious, committed Christian and own slaves. But slavery was a blind spot for them, as it was for many Christians in the United States not that long ago. 

I have absolutely no doubt, none, that we have similar blind spots, aspects of our culture and character that God will re-form, so that in a few hundred years people will say of us, just as we say of the early American Episcopalian slave owners, How could they have thought that was right? What aspects of our culture and character will need that reform? We probably have some ideas, but some things will be surprising, because they’re blind spots. All we can do is trust the divine Potter to re-shape us into the right kind of vessel, and follow Him, enduring the pain of the re-shaping, wherever He leads.

I also have no doubt that if we will commit our whole energy to the following of that painful way, what will emerge in us will be something better even than angels. What the Divine Potter will make us will be something before which even the angels themselves will bow in reverence. It will be the very likeness of the crucified and risen Christ, in us. That, my friends, is a pearl of great price indeed, a glory worth enduring any pain, a hope that subordinates all rival affections. It lies within us already, and we long for it to emerge pure like gold from a furnace. Look for it in yourself; look for it in others; and when you glimpse it be thankful. Amen.