The First Sunday of Advent: A Sermon

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Readings

This morning’s readings set before us a feast, beginning in our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah. King David will have a descendant—we might mentally cue up “Once in royal David’s city” as the sound track—through whom through God will establish, well, righteousness. “A righteous Branch… execute justice and righteousness… Jerusalem… called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

“Righteous” and “righteousness” are today pretty much restricted to religious contexts. That’s a pity, because ‘righteous’ (tsaddiq in Hebrew) is a remarkably useful word. A person who is righteous is a person who does what needs to be done to fulfill the obligations of a relationship.

The Lord, precisely in this sense, is righteous. It doesn’t matter how powerful Israel’s enemies are. It doesn’t matter how deep a pit Israel has dug herself in. The last thing the Lord will say is “Well, you brought this on yourself; what do you expect me to do?” The Lord is righteous. If that means bringing Israel out of Egypt, the Lord will do it. If that means toppling the Babylonian Empire so the exiles can return home, the Lord will do it. If it means taking on human flesh to live as one of us, the Lord will do it. The Lord is righteous.

It’s that confidence in the Lord’s righteousness that animates the psalm. It doesn’t matter what combination external enemies and self-inflicted wounds the psalmist is dealing with: the Lord can sort it out.

The psalm—and there’s more to it than we read a moment ago—does a good job of balancing awareness of being a sinner and being sinned-against. That language is Raymond Fung’s, who served for years as the WCC’s Secretary for Mission and Evangelism. We are both sinners and sinned-against, and as we acknowledge both the Lord’s righteousness is good news.

It’s that confidence in the Lord’s righteousness that animates the Gospel reading. For this reading, however, we need a bit of context. It occurs in the conversation that starts with some touristic oohing and aahing over the temple. “Not one stone—says Jesus—will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” Asked for more information, Jesus responds with a collage of images and instructions that—like most prophecy—intermingle the immediate and the distant future.

Toward the end of this we get “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.” The NRSV sets off ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ in quotation marks since it’s a quote from one of Daniel’s visions. In that vision four monsters, each worse than the last, stake out their turf. That’s Daniel’s take on about 500 years’ worth of empires in that region: four ill-tempered beasts. But God intervenes and vindicates a human figure: “with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom.”

Our future is not bestial but human. The terrorists will not have the last word; the institutionalized terror of the nations will not have the last word. The advertisers with their pictures of happy mindless consumers will not have the last word. Alleluia!

Jesus has been using “Son of Man” as a way of referring to himself; he hears the phrase in Daniel’s vision as pointing to himself, and so uses it later in the week when, now a prisoner, he’s questioned by the council about his identity: “But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God” (22:69), at which point the council either turns leadership of the meeting over to Jesus or sends him off to Pilate for crucifixion.

Scriptures like today’s second reading, together with our creeds and Eucharistic prayers confess that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” Through repetition it can easily go right over our heads, but it’s profoundly good news: our future, the future of this world, is human, not bestial. It’s good and dependable news: this Jesus is righteous, and will continue to do what it takes to make it happen.

Alleluia. Notice, though, Jesus’ warnings toward the end of the text: “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.… Be alert at all times…” Why be on guard/be alert? Mark’s account spells it out: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (13:32). So these elaborate interpretive machines into which we dump Jesus’ collage of images and instructions so that they can spit out a precise timeline? Save your money.

We do know what Jesus’ coming again will mean. It is the definitive triumph of God’s righteousness, God’s willingness and ability to move heaven and earth for our salvation. Our salvation: the people who harvest our crops not themselves suffering from malnutrition, the people who build our homes not themselves living in leaking shacks, all of us offering worship not to the idols that teach us to hate, and rob us of our humanity, but to God alone, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

That’s not a future we can bring about. It is a future to which we can—and must—witness, a witness expressed also in response to Jesus’ words: “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly… Be alert at all times…” To the degree that we believe in this future, dissipation, drunkenness, etc. are not temptations. But, if all we can expect is one more ill-tempered beast after another, then dissipation etc. begin to sound pretty good. Advent is about there being a better future for this world than it deserves, a better future than any of its current trajectories would lead us to expect. Because of that better future, that Jesus-shaped future, it makes perfect sense “to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.”

Someone once asked Bishop Lesslie Newbigin whether he was an optimist or a pessimist on some issue. His answer was “I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” The Lord has acted and will again act in righteousness, remaking heaven and earth. “Be alert at all times?” Sounds like good advice.

Christ the King: A Sermon

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Readings (Track 1)

Today is the Sunday before Advent, now known as the Feast of Christ the King. This feast is a recent addition to the Church Year: in 1925 Pope Pius XI proclaimed it for the last Sunday in October, and the calendar reforms of Vatican II moved it to the last Sunday before Advent. So we’re just following a Roman innovation?

Not entirely. In both the English Book of Common Prayer (1662) and our 1928 edition the texts assigned for the Sunday before Advent were Jeremiah 23.5-8, a prophecy regarding the coming Messiah (King), and John 6.5-14, Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, which ends with the crowd wanting to make Jesus king on the spot. So already our lessons were pointing in the direction of Christ the King. Nudged by the Romans we’re naming an already-existing reality.

But just what are we doing when we celebrate Christ the King? Pope Pius XI is quite clear about his intentions in 1925. The feast will remind Christians and non-Christians alike of Christ’s spiritual and civil authority, and, specifically, check rising anti-clericalism: “The right which the Church has from Christ himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation, that right was denied.” The Pope is probably in part responding to the then current crisis in Mexico, in which President Callas is enforcing the provisions of the 1917 Constitution, which among other things outlawed monastic orders, prohibited religious organizations from owning property, and took away the right to vote from clergy. In this context “Christ the King” is a clear shot across the bow of secular governments —probably Mexico’s in particular. Certainly many Mexican priests, monks and nuns went to their martyrdom with Viva Cristo Rey on their lips. So “Christ the King” is not a bad moment to remember the many Christians who suffer for their confession of Christ the King around the world and in this country.

As a cleric, any effort to combat anti-clericalism sounds like a Good Thing. Nevertheless, there is more than a whiff of Madison Avenue in the Pius’ encyclical: promote Christ, and some of the glory will rub off on the clergy. Just how this fits with Jesus’ “My kingdom is not from this world” isn’t obvious!

So, let’s go back to the texts we heard this morning and wonder what they might want to tell us, whatever we call this Sunday.

Our first reading, David’s oracle, does sound like a self-serving bit of political propaganda: God has made an everlasting covenant with my dynasty. Nevertheless, David gets at least one thing right in the third verse: “One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God…” The king, no less than the most humble commoner, is accountable to justice and the fear of God.

What justice and the fear of God mean comes through more clearly in our psalm: “If your children keep my covenant / and my testimonies that I shall teach them, / their children will sit upon your throne for evermore.” What is required of David’s children above all is obedience. Without that, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” won’t be of much use.

As we begin to see a trajectory in these texts that leads us to Jesus before Pilate in the Gospel, there’s an additional text from the prophet Isaiah that’s important. Speaking to the people the prophet says “Incline your ear, and come to me; / listen, so that you may live. / I will make with you an everlasting covenant, / my steadfast, sure love for David. / See, I made him a witness to the peoples, / a leader and commander for the peoples” (55:3-4). Of all the ways Isaiah could have described David—king, poet, shepherd, etc.—he calls him a witness. And perhaps because he is a witness, he is fit to be leader and commander. Recall that as Israel passed from one pagan empire to another there were periodically times when all that faithful Israelites could do was bear witness, testify to their faith, even when it meant certain martyrdom.

And it is Jesus as witness, as martyr—it is the same word in Greek—that we meet in the lessons from Revelation and John. Jesus Christ “the faithful witness” in the first, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth” in the second.

The psalm promises an eternal throne to David’s children if they keep the covenant and testimonies; Isaiah and the New Testament texts focus this obligation in terms of the obligation to the truth.

The first thing these texts tell us about Christ the King then is that Christ is the King because Christ himself—in the language of the psalm—keeps the covenant and the testimonies. Christ is obedient. He is fit to be our king because he lives as we are called to live.

Second, these texts remind us that Christ the King was and is Christ the witness to the truth. “Honest” and “politician” are not mutually exclusive categories; one might almost say that Jesus died because he held the two together. Jesus and Pilate typify the alternatives: truth as something that can seriously challenge us, or truth post-“spin.”

Third, Christ’s Kingdom is not defended by the sword. Recall Jesus’ words to Pilate: “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting…” These are words we have had trouble hearing. Early in the fifth century St. Augustine used the words from one of Jesus’ parables (“Compel them to come in”) to mobilize the Empire against those whom the bishops identified as heretics. (Muhammad was born into this world about two hundred years latter, and we are still dealing with the fallout.) Only in the middle of the 17th Century did an exhausted Western Christendom relinquish the sword, and reasonable and enlightened men have insured unbroken peace in Europe since then.

What does it mean for us to celebrate this feast? (This is almost a matter of connecting the dots and then sitting down.) As Jesus’ followers, we’re renewing our commitment to keep the covenant and the testimonies. Since we can’t very well keep what we don’t know, in the middle of busy schedules we make time to read the Bible and to talk to God about what we find there. There are lots of different ways we may do that, but twenty centuries of Christian experience is pretty unanimous in identifying this rhythm (read and pray) as the foundation for any sustainable friendship with God.

And, as Jesus’ followers, we’re renewing our commitment to offer our witness to the truth, both when it is easy and when it is hard. Not too long ago it was easy: society assumed that good people were in church on Sunday morning; all we had to do was open the doors. Today it’s not so easy. Nevertheless, it’s a safe bet that each of us rub shoulders with folk—whether friends, neighbors, acquaintances, strangers with whom we strike up a conversation—for whom it’s true that if they’re going to hear that Jesus brings life, it’ll be us through whom they hear it.

Finally, there’s this business of the sword. We’re in literal compliance with Jesus’ words. Even if we talk of evangelistic crusades, we don’t outfit the ushers with brass knuckles. But here strict literalism is not going to help us: our temptation is not the sword, but the tongue, an even more lethal instrument. Confessing Christ as our King, praying daily for Christ’s Kingdom to come, means scrupulous use of that member, whatever the disagreement.

Before the lessons we prayed “Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule.” We prayed that for all the peoples of the earth; we prayed that for us. As God answers our prayer, may we recognize the answer, and respond with joy.

All Saints: A Sermon

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Readings

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints. As with all the major feasts of the Church, it’s worth asking what it is that we’re celebrating. This sermon’s dedicated to that question.

All Saints started as a way of remembering all the martyrs, those whose witness had cost them their lives. Speaking English or Spanish it takes a moment for us to remember that there’s a connection between ‘martyr’ and ‘witness’; in Greek it’s simpler, for our word ‘martyr’ is simply the transliteration of the Greek word for witness.

Some martyrs were easy to remember, and some, like Stephen or James, had the story of their martyrdom recorded in Acts. But other martyrs were less well known, or only locally known, and there was the strong sense that every church should remember all the martyrs. That was part of what it meant to be part of a universal, that is, a catholic Church. And, it didn’t take many persecutions for there to be more martyrs than days of the year, so for that reason too churches began to celebrate a feast of all the saints. This happened around the end of the 4th century, and by the 8th century November 1 had been fixed as the day of the feast in the west.

So, as we have been doing since the 4th century, on All Saints we remember all the martyrs. One does not have to be a martyr to be a saint, but some measure of the courage of a saint does seem to be necessary. I’ll say more about that later.

One doesn’t have to be a martyr to be a saint. So what’s a saint? When we turn to the Bible for an answer, we may be surprised to discover that all Christians are addressed as or called saints (or ‘holy’). Paul’s letters are addressed to “the saints” (2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians) or to those “called to be saints” (Romans, 1 Corinthians). So it’s the identity into which we’re baptized.

I was born a McAlpine, and had that name before I’d done anything. As I grew I heard family stories that also told me what being a McAlpine was about. Being a saint is something like that: it’s an identity we receive before we’ve done anything to deserve it; it’s an identity we grow into.

Our readings at the Sunday Mass come, as you recall, from a three-year lectionary. The other two years the Gospel reading is the Beatitudes, which provides an obvious opportunity for the preacher to talk about what a saint looks like. This year (Year B) we’re given the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Does that story show us what a saint looks like? Yes, and in three ways.

But before that, let me first notice very briefly the first two readings.

Our first reading from Isaiah: to celebrate All Saints is to celebrate the future God has in store for the human race. The steady diet of injustice and violence which we receive on the TV or smartphone—or step out the front door—will not continue indefinitely. Human history will culminate in a feast. This is one dimension of the Mass that we often overlook. Our celebrations here together with “Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven” are part of that feast, signs of its coming in fullness.

The second reading from the Revelation: Isaiah’s vision on steroids. At the same time, as in Isaiah, there is a warning that while the future of human history is secure, our participation in that future is still in play: our decisions matter. While there isn’t time to unpack the final verse [At the Mass the reading was extended to the end of the paragraph in v.8], notice that the first group named are the cowards. Something of the martyr’s courage is necessary, even if the worst thing we face are condescending smiles when we identify ourselves as Jesus’ followers.

But to the raising of Lazarus: how does that tell us what being a saint looks like?

First, notice that Lazarus in the moments before Jesus calls his name doesn’t have many options. He comes out of the tomb because Jesus calls him. And that’s a powerful picture of what being a saint is about. It’s not something we achieve under our own steam. It’s something that depends every moment on God’s power, on Jesus’ voice.

Second, notice that the alternatives are death and life. Being a saint isn’t about some super-elevated way of life. English speakers talk about “holier than thou.” It’s about living as a human being rather than something else. And in today’s culture there are plenty of examples of “something else” on offer. One of the most popular: to be a consumer: to find your pleasure and your worth in what you are buying. In the right economy and with a bit of luck you can be a successful consumer—but that sidetracks you from learning to live as a human being. God wants us to live, and the name for someone fully living is “saint.”

Third, the person in this story who’s most obviously holy, most obviously a saint, is Jesus. And look what that means for the people around him! Lazarus starts the story dead, and ends it alive. Lazarus’ sisters start the story weeping, and end the story beside themselves for joy. Some of the religious leaders end the story even more upset with Jesus than before, more determined to do him in, which reminds us why at least a bit of courage is necessary for this saint business. Jesus is quite clear: to the degree that we allow God to make us into what we are—saints—we will be a source of life to those around us. And in this world that’s very good news.

Here’s the thing. We often come to God with this or that problem, sometimes small, sometimes large. The Feast of All Saints is on the calendar to remind us—warn us, maybe—that this God to whom we come has his own agenda: to transform us into people who will transform this world. We come for an oil change; God wants to give us a Ferrari. Let us not refuse the offer.

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost: A Sermon

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Lessons (Track 1)

So Job finally gets what he’s been asking for: God comes onstage. Not, however, to answer Job’s questions, but to ask Job some questions. Today’s reading gives us Job’s final response, but before moving to that, let’s wonder a bit about God’s response.

“Who is this that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge? (38:2)

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?…
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (38:4-7)

Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a way for the thunderbolt,
to bring rain on a land where no one lives,
on the desert, which is empty of human life, (38:25-26)

Gird up your loins like a man;
I will question you, and you declare to me.
Will you even put me in the wrong?
Will you condemn me that you may be justified? (40:7-8)

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook,
or press down its tongue with a cord?

Its sneezes flash forth light,
and its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.
From its mouth go flaming torches;
sparks of fire leap out.
Out of its nostrils comes smoke,
as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
Its breath kindles coals,
and a flame comes out of its mouth.
In its neck abides strength,
and terror dances before it. (41:1, 18-22)

So what is this? Sheer bluster? Many readers have thought so. But if they’re right, Job’s in the Bible only because generations of readers were remarkably unobservant. Let’s try for something more likely.

This is obviously a Creator delighted with creation. And it is a wild, beautiful, and dangerous world. What is God up to? The book doesn’t answer the question directly; that would violate the logic of story. The story invites us to reflect, to wonder, to draw our tentative conclusions. In that spirit, here are four suggestions.

First, while it is clearly not a world organized around human interests narrowly conceived, it is the sort of world that can nurture what we most value in humanity. Human interests narrowly conceived: recall the lines about the rain. Elsewhere in the Old Testament rain often appears as a paradigmatic divine blessing: predictable rain in response to obedience, drought in response to disobedience. Here God is sending rain “on a land where no one lives, / on the desert, which is empty of human life.” God hunts for prey for the lion, and that prey is sometimes human.

Has this God built fail-safe mechanisms into creation, whether into weather systems, so that hurricanes don’t hit populated areas, or into the human body, so that cancerous cells immediately die, or into the human psyche, so that evil thoughts put us to sleep? Obviously not.

A world that can nurture what we most value in humanity? Traditionally there are four cardinal virtues (fortitude, temperance, justice, prudence) and three Christian virtues (faith, hope, love). What would these virtues –particularly fortitude, faith, hope, love—mean in a defanged world?

Recall Thomas More. Lord Chancellor of England, he refused consent to Henry VIII’s divorce and was beheaded July 6, 1535. Robert Bolt wrote a play based on his life, Man for all seasons. Late in that play More’s been sent to the tower and his daughter Margaret is trying to talk him into saying the few words that would mean his freedom.

Margaret In any State that was half good, you would be raised up high, not here, for what you’ve done already. It’s not your fault the State’s three-quarters bad. Then if you elect to suffer for it, you elect yourself a hero.

More That’s very neat. But look now… If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all… why then perhaps we must stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes.

Margaret (Emotionally) But in reason! Haven’t you done as much as God can reasonably want?

More Well… finally… it isn’t a matter of reason; finally it’s a matter of love.

Coming at this from another direction, in the middle of a discussion of church order, St Paul asks “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” That’s the briefest of glimpses into our future, and a reminder in this context, that God’s problem isn’t to somehow “get us to heaven.” It’s to form sons and daughters who in eternity can be trusted with power and responsibility far beyond our present imagination.

Why this wild, beautiful, and dangerous world? It’s the sort of world that can nurture virtuous individuals. We might also observe that it can nurture virtuous communities. We confess one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the original community. What would our community life look like, or be worth, if we never had to deal with each other’s suffering? This is a remarkably good world for calling forth the love within our communities that faintly mirrors the eternal love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Second, where does the book leave the question of God’s justice, so often raised by Job’s friends and Job himself? It looks as though the retributive justice (everyone gets what they deserve) is at most a stopgap measure in God’s providence. Recall the verses in today’s reading. Job is to intercede for his friends, precisely so that they don’t get what they deserve. Job’s vindication is good news for Job’s community, problematic as it is. And here again Job and Jesus as presented in Hebrews dovetail, with Hebrew’s celebration of Jesus as the one who “always lives to make intercession for [us].” This really needs to inform our politics. There’s a place for retributive justice, but it alone is not going to reknit our badly torn community life.

Third, God as artist. Why this wild, beautiful, and dangerous world? After listening to God’s response to Job, it sounds as much an aesthetic issue as anything else. Recall Annie Dillard’s observation: “the creator loves pizzazz.” That may be part of what’s going on here. Recall the description of Leviathan “Its sneezes flash forth light, / and its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.” God takes more delight in our wild freedom than we do. We ask “What right does God the Artist have to create such a world?” Well, at each Eucharist we recall (glancing at Crucifix) that the Artist did not shield himself from the violence and danger.

Fourth, this wild, beautiful, and dangerous world that God has created, is the world in which God invites Job –and us—to live. And it is this world that Job embraces in today’s reading.

Understanding that embrace is complicated by the challenge of translating v.6. The New Revised Standard Version, which we typically use, offers a sort of worst-case reading: “therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” No wonder we’re tempted to hear the preceding chapters as divine bluster! The CEB offers “Therefore, I relent and find comfort on dust and ashes,” with the note “The verse is capable of several translations…” The best translation is probably something like “Therefore I recant and change my mind concerning dust and ashes” (Ellen F. Davis in the collection of essays in Getting involved with God). Dust and ashes just aren’t an appropriate response to this God, to this world.

The most powerful evidence for Job’s embrace of this world is that he has more children. To bring children into this world! And the names he gives them: Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren-happuch, which, if we translated them, would come out something like Dove, Cinnamon, and Horn of Eye-Shadow. Here’s how Ellen Davis ends her essay:

The two portraits of Father Job that stand at either end of this book mark the true measure of his transformation. Job, this man of integrity who was once so careful, fearful of God and of the possible sins of his children, becomes at the last freewheeling, breaking with custom to honor daughters alongside sons, bestowing inheritances and snappy names. The inspiration and model for this wild style of parenting is, of course, God the Creator. Job learned about it when God spoke out of the whirlwind. And now Job loves with the abandon characteristic of God’s love –revolutionary in seeking our freedom, reveling in the untamed beauty of every child.

Job, Blind Bartimaeus, Thomas More, and pre-eminently Jesus himself, not ashamed to be called our brother, and even now interceding for us: not bad company in this wild, beautiful, and dangerous world. Amen.

Freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence

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The November Atlantic contains William Deresiewicz’ a review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The final paragraph explores the sense of being stuck that has been pulling me towards depression:

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left: us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

The Atlantic, November 2021, p.95

As for “that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence,” that may be that dimension of the freedom of the Gospel of Jesus most relevant to contemporary hearers, myself included. How might our congregations better nurture that freedom?

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost: A Sermon

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Lessons (Track 1)

“Does Job fear God for nothing?” asked the accuser, the satan. (‘satan’ is simply the Hebrew word for ‘accuser’.) (The accuser could with equal justice have asked it about James and John, and we’ll get to that later.) God permitted the accuser to find out, and Job lost nearly everything. That was in the first two chapters.

Since then, Job has been demanding action from God, and Job’s friends –I use the term advisedly—have been demanding that Job confess whatever sins have brought on his suffering. The arguments of Job’s friends don’t change much, aside from becoming increasingly vitriolic. God rules justly; if Job is suffering, he must be justly suffering, and the only puzzle is why Job is being so stubborn. What is unnerving is how often we hear these arguments today, how often we either use them or find ourselves tempted to use them. At least part of each of us, I suspect, wishes that Job’s friends were right: a completely just God insuring that each person received exactly what he or she deserved now. Some people believe in reincarnation, and one of the attractions of reincarnation is that it allows one to believe in a universe that is completely just at every moment: I am receiving precisely the mixture of weal and woe that my previous lives merit.

And even within the Old Testament, there are plenty of passages in the law that promise weal for obedience and woe for disobedience, plenty of passages in the prophets that interpret disasters as God’s punishment, plenty of passages in Proverbs that connect righteousness and prosperity, wickedness and ruin. And only a fool would deny the truth in these. But is this the whole truth? Is it the whole truth for Job? Obviously not, despite Job’s friends’ eloquent arguments.

Job’s complaints and demands for divine action do change through the course of the book. Job’s initial speech sounds like a demand that God retroactively snuff him out of existence: better never to have been born than to experience this. But as Job continues to reflect on his suffering, he recognizes that he is one of many who suffer, and his demand for God’s action correspondingly shifts: too many innocents are getting crushed.

Job is clear throughout that his problem is God: “When disaster brings sudden death, / he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. / The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; / he covers the eyes of its judges— /if it is not he, who then is it?” [9.23-24] And here, despite the rough edges, Job is speaking rightly about God. We try to protect God, buffer God from evil. Does God get joy from the suffering of the innocent? Is that his will? No. But does God continue to give breath and strength to the wicked, to keep the nerve endings working as the torturer does his work? Yes. “If it is not he, who then is it?”

We do not suffer unless God consents to our suffering. The New Testament assumes this, although notice that Paul adds “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

And Job pushes the limits of language, logic, and faith by appealing to God against God. “For I know that my Redeemer lives, / and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; / and after my skin has been thus destroyed, / then in my flesh I shall see God, / whom I shall see on my side, / and my eyes shall behold, / and not another.” [19:25-27]

Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The problem is not Judas, not the Jewish leaders, not Pilate: it’s God. And precisely in knowing that God’s the problem, Jesus appeals…to God. And so may we. So must we.

Well, that brings us up to the beginning of God’s response to Job in today’s lesson. Read it during the week if you can: Job 38-41. God responds to Job’s questions with God’s own questions, pointing Job to the ostrich, the war stallion, Behemoth, Leviathan, and to the challenge of mounting any useful response to the wicked.

What all that comes to we’ll wonder about next week. What I’ve focused on today is, I think, the necessary prequel to all that: Job’s insistence that God is the issue, and that only from God will come Job’s salvation, that, confronted with suffering, what we want is not explanation, but action.

This last point is, by the way, two-edged, as captured in a dialogue between two characters in a cartoon a few years back.
–Sometimes I’d like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine and injustice when he could do something about it.
–What’s stopping you?
–I’m afraid God might ask me the same question.

Our prayers for God’s intervention need to be matched by the interventions that are within our power. So, for example, as you work through your Christmas gift list, look at the Episcopal Relief and Development Christmas Catalogue. For that person who’s hard to buy gifts for or pretty much has what they need, you could give—in their name—a mosquito net, a goat, or even a cow.

Perhaps the next time through our lectionary cycle I’ll be able to give more attention to Hebrews. For the moment, simply notice that Hebrews’ portrait of Jesus looks surprisingly like Job: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.” This Jesus is clearly one with whom we can be honest about our struggles.

So we turn to the Gospel—and yes, I remember that the Packers-Bears game is one of the early games. I don’t think I need to belabor our solidarity with James and John. At least from the pre-school playground all of us have been honing our skills at claiming and defending turf. It may be large, it may be small, but it’s ours and it’s for a Good Cause. And it is so easy to assume that when we are baptized, initiated into the Great Cause, the Kingdom of God, that the business of claiming and defending turf don’t change.

So Jesus has to keep reminding us: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

The other James, Jesus’ brother and author of the letter, got it right: there are two kingdoms: this world, a zero-sum game in which claiming and defending turf is the only game in town, and the Kingdom of God, in which God’s generosity means that I can relax and serve.

But the text doesn’t end there, but with this final curious verse: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

We choose which kingdom we live in, and that’s true. But that’s not the whole truth. Something closer to the whole truth is that we start out enslaved to the kingdom of this world, the habits of claiming and defending turf embedded deep in us. But Jesus gave his life a ransom for many, for James and John, who on the road to Jerusalem still didn’t get it, for the Roman soldiers awaiting him in Jerusalem, for you and for me. Because Jesus has ransomed us we can choose. The gates are open; we can leave the darkness for the light.

Learning to live in the Kingdom of God is something that takes a lifetime, particularly this business of lording it over others verses serving others. And we learn it –if we learn it—in the midst of our conflicts. So think of the people –family members, colleagues, neighbors—with whom you’ve disagreed in the past and will probably disagree in the future. God can use these relationships to teach us stuff we can’t learn any other way. And here Job and Jesus do not have a monopoly on “prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears.”

Does Job serve God for nothing? Do James and John serve God for nothing, for that matter, or serve only when it helps them to claim and defend their turf? Do we? In God’s severe mercy we don’t have to answer that in the abstract, but as we find ourselves in conflict. In the words of the collect: “Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name.”

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: A Sermon

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Readings

Today’s readings introduce a series of readings in the books of Job and Hebrews. In the Gospel readings in Mark, Jesus continues his march towards Jerusalem, accompanied by the apostles who continue to argue over whose name will be in the biggest lights on the marquee. I’ll comment briefly on the first two readings and devote the bulk of the sermon to the Gospel.

Job

The book tells the story of a paradigmatically righteous man who suffers massively and undeservedly. The book doesn’t explain why, although it soundly rejects a number of bad explanations. Instead, the book focuses on more immediate questions: how do we respond to such suffering, either our own or our neighbor’s? What does this suffering say about humanity? About God? (Is God good in any meaningful sense, or just very powerful?) Do we only serve God as long as we perceive it to be profitable? We’ll be in Job most of October; if you read about a chapter or two a day you’ll be able to engage the Sunday readings at a more satisfying level.

Hebrews

Hebrews is one of the least accessible books in the New Testament. It was usually ascribed to Paul, who was almost certainly not its author. It seems to assume that its audience is in danger of abandoning faith in Jesus for some other form of Judaism. In any case, the bulk of the book is devoted to Jesus’ superiority. In the process, it offers perspectives that Christians throughout the centuries have found illuminating and encouraging.

For instance, in the second half of the 20th Century, Christians sought –as they have in every time and place—for ways of speaking of Jesus that resonated with their hearts. One of these: Jesus our Brother. Not: our God, our Lord, our Master –all true enough—but Jesus our Brother. And it was in this prickly epistle that we found the richest resources to develop this image: the one who “is not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters,” the one who shared our flesh and blood. Jesus is our Brother, who can help us when we suffer and are tested, because he suffered and was tested too; one of the few human beings worthy to be Job’s brother.

Hebrews is significantly shorter than Job; reading a chapter every other day or so should keep you current with the Sunday selections.

Matthew

One of the jokes about my people, the Scots, is that if there are three of us, there’ll be four political parties. This could have been said of the Jews of Jesus’ day, as illustrated by today’s reading. Moses permitted divorce; on what grounds could a man seek divorce? The School of Shammai said: only for unchastity; the School of Hillel said: for practically anything, including burning the roast. The Pharisees wanted to know what Jesus thought.

Jesus asks what Moses commanded; they reply citing the provision for a certificate of divorce. Jesus interprets that as a concession to their hardness of heart, and returns to the creation story: “‘the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

That certainly sounds as though Jesus is taking a position to the right of Shammai: there are no grounds on which a man could seek a divorce.

So that’s all we need to say about that? Hardly. Matthew tells the same story as Mark, but in his story Jesus says “whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.” So in Matthew, Rabbi Jesus aligns with Rabbi Shammai. Paul takes up marriage in his first letter to the Corinthians—we read this in the Daily Office in the last couple of weeks—and permits divorce and remarriage in the case of a Christian whose non-Christian spouse wants out.

So how do we respond to the NT as a whole? Over time the Greek-speaking Eastern Church and the Latin-speaking Western Church came to give quite different answers. The Western Church understood Jesus words as transmitted by Mark as canon law: no divorce. Unfortunately, what that often ended up meaning was that if you were well-connected (money helped), you could get an annulment, and if you weren’t, then you could either divorce & remarry or continue to receive Holy Communion, but not both. The Eastern Church read the same texts and concluded that marriages could die, and so divorce and remarriage were permitted as tragic concessions to our continuing hardness of heart. The history of the Western Church has been a history of gradually approaching the Eastern Church’s position; although some parts –most notably the Roman Catholics—continue to prohibit divorce.

Marriages can die. This certainly rings true. But does it really take Jesus’ words as recorded in Mark seriously? Well, yes, for I think what Jesus is doing here is like what he does in the Sermon on the Mount: “if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment;” “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Does this mean we adjust our laws accordingly? No. Jesus is, I think, making two points: we must not fall into the trap of equating obeying the law with goodness, because anyone with half a brain can figure out how to satisfy the law and still do evil. Second, if we tightened up the law to eliminate this problem, most of us would be locked up.

More broadly, the various ways we Christians have read today’s Gospel is a prime example of the danger of taking a single text as the basis for doctrine or church law without attending to the rest of Scripture!

Returning to Paul, while Paul has his opinions—and bless him for acknowledging them to be opinions and not trying to pass them off as Gospel Truth—he’s clear that both the single and married states are vocations, callings in which we can reflect God’s holiness. So, at a marriage, we’re asked “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” And we respond: “We will.” And we’re reminded of this obligation to mutual support as we celebrate marriage anniversaries. Sadly, there are no liturgical affirmations of this obligation to uphold those whose vocation is the single life. (Perhaps the folk thinking about Prayer Book revision could think about that!) But the obligation’s there, the obligation to uphold each other in either state, married or single. Perhaps today’s text can encourage us to take this obligation more seriously, to listen each other more carefully, to live as brothers and sisters in this new family Jesus is shaping, to do better than Job’s friends, who, hovering just offstage, can’t wait to tell Job what he’s done wrong.

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost: A Sermon

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Readings: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22; Psalm 124; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

Help us, Lord, to become masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others. Take our minds and think through them. Take our lips and speak through them. And, take our hearts and set them on fire. For Christ’s sake, Amen.

Masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others: that’s where we’ll end up; it will take some time to get there.

The first reading is the Lectionary’s only selection from the Book of Esther, the story of God’s saving the Jews from Haman’s genocidal attack throughout the Persian Empire through a Jewess named Esther. It’s a gem of a short story, filled with sharp humor, and is the basis for the Jewish feast of Purim, or Lots, which next year [2022] will be celebrated on March 16.

It is also a subversive story. When Cyrus the Persian gave the Jews permission to return home from exile toward the end of the 6th Century bc, Jewish leadership was united in urging, exhorting, guilting the Jews to return. Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: all agree that Good Jews belong on the road back to Jerusalem. Esther is one of the Bad Jews who didn’t make the trip, and whom we encounter in Susa, the Persian capital. Obviously, God will be attending to the Good Jews, and not to Jews like Esther. But when this threat of genocide comes, deliverance comes not from Jerusalem, but from Susa. If there were ever a tale warning us against writing some portion of the Body of Christ off, it’s this one.

“Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” Jesus, one suspects, has been reading Esther.

Our second lesson is the last part of the Epistle of James, in which James speaks to us of patience and the tongue.

Patience.Ambrose Bierce, probably in The Devil’s Dictionary, says “Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” So we exercise patience when we don’t have other options. James’ vision of patience is quite different. The future is assured because Jesus is coming. There will be a rich harvest, so we can settle into the farmer’s patience. And, James reminds us, Jesus is coming as judge, so judging is something we don’t need to do and are positively forbidden to do.

But some people require so much patience! Yes; us –and God is patient with us. If, by the way, we don’t think that God has to exercise extraordinary patience with us, we don’t know ourselves very well, and are either very young or in a very dangerous place spiritually. So, our exercises in patience with others become a matter of exercising the same patience that we know we need from God. And, notice, the last thing we want from God is any hint of condescension. Are we in the company of an obnoxious person? Well, we have an excellent opportunity to mirror the patience we need from God.

The tongue. A couple chapters ago James warned us of its dangers; here, in an unguarded display of hope, he turns to its positive uses. Three points to notice:

  • Echoing Jesus, he warns us against oaths. Our ordinary speech should be trustworthy, so that “I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is quite unnecessary. And have you noticed how often our speech betrays this problem. “Speaking frankly…”: so the rest of the time you aren’t? “Honestly…”; and what was I hearing before? “To be perfectly truthful…”
  • We use the tongue to bring our illnesses before the community and before God. “Are any…sick? They should call for the elders of the church…” Illness is not a private matter; if one of us is sick, all are affected. As we pray for the sick, we’re saying “God, this is our problem, not simply their problem. “The Lord will raise them up.” ‘Raise up’ is used both for healing and for resurrection. We do not know how God will respond to any particular request for healing. We pray for healing both because we can do no other, and because, bringing the sick to Jesus, there is no better place we can bring them.
  • We properly use the tongue to bring back those who wander from the truth. This sounds quite foreign to us, because we’re used to thinking of each person as having a rather large sphere marked “private” and live in a culture that constantly tells us that one person’s truth is not another’s. Ironically, the same society that hungers for community encourages us to act as strangers to each other. I have no interest in bringing in judging through the back door. But not judging is not the same thing as remaining silent. When we see a brother or sister acting self-destructively, we need to risk saying something. If our society can manage “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” we Christians should be able to take the principle a bit further. There are, in other words, things worse than conflict, and one of them is watching someone taking a wrong turn and saying nothing.

Our Gospel comes from that part of Mark that is structured thematically by Jesus’ repeated warnings of the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem. “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands” says Jesus, and Mark follows this warning with stories of the disciples arguing over who’s greatest, trying to silence those who don’t follow them, etc. The human hands into which Jesus is most immediately betrayed are the disciples’!

Jesus follows his rebuke to the disciples regarding their treatment of others with exhortations regarding their treatment of themselves. The ruthlessness they’ve displayed towards others needs to be focused on themselves: If your hand, your foot, your eye, causes you to stumble, cut it off, tear it out.

One of society’s most seductive promises is “you can have it all.” It shows up in songs, as the goal of various self-help schemes. A women’s organization that should know better will even sell you a t-shirt for your daughter: “Girls can have it all.”

Nope. We have to choose, and the higher we aim, the more we have to give up. A relatively innocuous example of a literal enactment of Jesus words was provided by the NFL defensive back Ronnie Lott, who had the tip of his left pinky finger amputated during the offseason so he wouldn’t risk injuring it in the future and miss more football games. Any sort of excellence demands hours of practice and preparation, time that’s simply not available for other things. “OK, so I’ll aim low” –and the price of that is soul-destroying boredom.

More fundamentally, Jesus’ words are about paying attention to the choices we have. Rather than spending our energy on the faults of others; we might spend our energy on the choices we have regarding how we live before God. Here some ruthlessness isn’t a bad thing, being as attentive to our life before God as the new car owner is to the sound of the engine, or the photographer is to the cleanliness of her lenses.

Why? Because the stuff that destroys us and those around us often starts so innocently. There are so many good reasons to complain; it is so natural. But over time we can spend more and more time complaining, until there is no longer a person complaining, just an incessant complaint. Again, the disciples’ “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him…”: well, they don’t have much power and that “someone” is probably safe. But at the end of that line lie all the diabolical instruments of torture of the inquisition.

Bottom line: we have more power, more choices than we imagine. We may not appear center-stage to deliver our people as did Esther. All of us can pray, as did our brother Elijah, and thereby transformed the weather and the politics of Israel. And all of us daily make decisions: how much slack do I cut those around me; how much slack do I cut myself? Those around me: a lot, as God cuts us a lot of slack. Myself: very little, for little decisions add up, for good or ill, and at the last day I hope to be one who seeks, rather than avoids, God’s gaze.

Help us, Lord, to become masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others. Take our minds and think through them. Take our lips and speak through them. And, take our hearts and set them on fire. For Christ’s sake, Amen.

[The prayer that bookends this sermon I learned from Fr. George F. Regas during our time at All Saints in Pasadena, California, who entered into glory on January 3 of this year.]

New wine & old wineskins

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“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins” (Jesus; Mk. 2:22).

This little proverb’s immediate context is a dispute about fasting, and possibly it’s just about that. But it resonates throughout the larger context of Mark’s entire Gospel, inviting us to hear the passion narrative itself as new wine into old wineskins, with the wine and skins both lost (Jesus crucified; the Temple veil ripped open also as a sign of its coming destruction). Pulling the camera back further to take in Paul’s letters: the struggle to keep both the new wine of the Gospel and the old wineskins of its adherents intact (“What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ [1 Cor. 1:12]).

I suspect that an account of how the New Testament tries to keep wine and wineskins intact would be multi-dimensional. It would include the various ways in which Paul speaks of metamorphosis, e.g., “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed (metamorphousthe) by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God– what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). It would include the metaphor of new birth, for Nicodemus certainly grasps the scope of the challenge (Jn 3:4). And, earlier in the Gospels, John the Baptist.

John’s task: to “prepare the way of the Lord” (Mk. 1:3). What I hadn’t realized until I came at John via the wine/wineskins parable is that a crucial part of preparing the way was bridging the gap between popular expectations of God’s promised future and Jesus. The gap doesn’t disappear: even John wonders whether Jesus is the coming one (Matt 11:1-6). And there’s enough of a gap between popular expectations and John that perhaps the bulk of the religious authorities end up on the far shore (Mark 11:27-33). Nevertheless, John’s warnings that the status quo is unsustainable and that more compassion/justice is needed (Luke 3:7-14) can get folk moving in the right direction, even while leaving aside the more contentious questions of whether established notions of justice/righteousness need revision (they do), and whether outsiders will receive God’s mercy (they will). So John, unpalatable in so many ways, is a fundamental expression of God’s mercy or—to switch frames—God’s marketing. From popular expectations to Jesus: no way. From popular expectations to John to Jesus: that happens. “Prepare the way of the Lord” indeed.

Preserve both the new wine and the old wineskins? Borrowing from Billie Holiday, The difficult God’ll do right now; the impossible will take a little while.

The Delicacy of Wisdom

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“But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). That bit from last week’s Daily Office readings surprised me. Far better, I thought (from later in the same letter) “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (13:12). What is Paul thinking?

That got me rereading the first few chapters of the letter. Paul describes two sorts of wisdom, the world’s wisdom, in which it makes perfect sense to crucify Jesus, and God’s wisdom, in which the crucified Jesus is the cornerstone. It’s not an abstract contrast since the conflicts in Corinth are driven by that same world’s wisdom.

So “But we have the mind of Christ” is right at the tipping-point. On the one hand, if this were not true of Paul’s audience they wouldn’t be self-identifying as Christian. They’ve confessed the crucified Jesus as their cornerstone. On the other hand, their continued pursuit of status and power evidenced in their conflicts shows that this “mind of Christ” hasn’t penetrated very deeply. “I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ” (3:1). They’re at the tipping point; which way will they go?

The delicacy of wisdom. What’s playing out in Corinth is like what Jesus described in the parable of the sower. The word (like wisdom) is powerful; the word (like wisdom) is delicate. And most of us are such a surprising mix of soils! Or again, as Solomon and his editors observed, there’s such a fine line between wisdom and folly:

Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself.
Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes. (Prov 26:4-5)

In Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark Watts notices that Mark juxtaposes Jesus’ two-stage healing of the blind man (“I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”) with Peter’s confession (“You are the Messiah”) and suggests that Mark wants us to notice that Peter’s understanding is about as precise as “like trees, walking.”

We confess Jesus as the Messiah. That’s much better than nothing, but as Mark’s story shows, it’s the beginning, not the climax, of our story. Wisdom is like that. We’re (always?) at the tipping point; which way will we go?