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.