Ash Wednesday 2022

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A couple weeks back in one of our Zoom gatherings at St. Dunstan’s as soon as the conversation turned to Lent someone responded in the chat area “I’m not ready for Lent!” We can, I think, all sympathize. Between Ukraine, COVID 19, inflation and our domestic polarization, it feels like the last thing we need is to switch from green to purple.

So it’s worth remembering that the One who invites us into this Lent is the One who said “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).

And closely aligned with these words, the words from our psalm:

3 He forgives all your sins *
and heals all your infirmities;
4 He redeems your life from the grave *
and crowns you with mercy and loving-kindness;
8 The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, *
slow to anger and of great kindness.

So what, we might ask, is the problem? It’s like, I think, that story of the fellow hiking in the mountains. His foot slips, he goes over the edge, and just manages to grab hold of a root—and looking down is not a good idea. He calls for help and is answered by a celestial voice: “Don’t be afraid. I’ll help you. Let go of the root.” The guy thinks a long moment and then responds “Is anyone else up there?”

That’s the work of Lent. What’s the root or the roots that I’m hanging onto that keep me from receiving more fully God’s mercy and loving-kindness? It might have something to do with the last verses in the Gospel, where I’m storing up treasure, whether—as the text explores past what we read—my use of my resources is mirroring God’s generosity. Whether my eye is stingy or generous is a pretty good clue re what I trust for my security. What are my preferred roots? The work of Lent.

But back to Jesus. The difference between our situation and that of the dangling hiker is that Jesus comes alongside us: “You don’t have to do this alone. We can do it together.” For what is the story that we hear throughout the Church year if not the story of Jesus letting go of all the roots on offer, and inviting us to come along?

Coming Attractions February 27— March 5 (Last Epiphany Year 2)

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The readings are listed in the Book of Common Prayer p.951, and appear on various websites including Forward Movement, Mission St Clare.

Old Testament. The Old Testament readings range widely, usually with some connection to the themes of Ash Wednesday. We might take the closing verse from the first Ezekiel reading as a sort of basso continuo for the whole week: “For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live” (18:32).

Philippians 2:1-4:23. Paul’s “be of the same mind” uses the verb phroneō, characteristically associated with practical reasoning. Fowl paraphrases “by manifesting a common pattern of thinking and acting,” which pattern is seen paradigmatically in Jesus (2:5-11). Quite intentionally, this Jesus-shaped pattern visibly plays out/doesn’t play out/is encouraged to play out in pretty much all the folk who appear in the book: Timothy, Epaphroditus, Paul himself, the dogs, Euodia, Syntyche, us readers.

Fowl thinks this pattern is part of the friendship with God and others into which we’re invited, citing Dorotheos of Gaza: “Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle.… Let us suppose that this circle is the world and that God is the center; the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of [humans]… But at the same time, the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God” (p.214). (While I’ve read Philippians many times, it never occurred to me that Paul might be talking about friendship. Still chewing on that.)

In passing, “though” in “who, though he was in the form of God” (2:6) is inserted by the translators. They might equally justifiably have inserted “because.” The text is about Jesus; it’s equally about God, what it means to be God. (See, particularly, Gorman’s Inhabiting the Cruciform God.)

And, as unbelievable in the 21st century as it was in the 1st, Paul thinks this looking to the interests of others (2:4) is the path to joy.

The jarring juxtapositions of the Roman penal system and joy in the letter might recall Screwtape’s diatribe in C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters:

He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more please. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’” (Letter XXII).

Gospels. The Lectionary offers engaging selections:

  • Sunday: Peter’s confession and Jesus’ first passion prediction (immediately preceding the Transfiguration, which we hear today from the [Eucharistic] Lectionary)
  • Monday-Tuesday: Scenes from the fulfillment of that passion prediction
  • Wednesday: A sort of dummy’s guide to Ash Wednesday
  • Thursday-Saturday: As we enter Lent, Jesus praying for us

Coming Attractions Feb 20-26 (7 Epiphany Year 2)

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The readings are listed in the Book of Common Prayer p.949, and appear on various websites including Forward Movement, Mission St Clare.

Genesis? The Lectionary pauses the Genesis readings until the first week in Lent.

Proverbs 1:20-8:36. Israeltended to view the people’s accumulated wisdom as one of God’s primary media of instruction, the priests and prophets being the other two (Jer 18:18; Ezek 7:26). While Proverbs is ascribed to Solomon (1:1), it likely received its definitive shape in the post-exilic period, when Persian and Hellenistic globalization threatened to make “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” a dated provincial opinion. So Proverbs focuses on the imagination; see the world this way: Dame Wisdom, God’s confidant, patiently and lovingly wooing all to pay patient attention, to trust—it’s by no means obvious—that “the upright will abide in the land, / and the innocent will remain in it; / but the wicked will be cut off from the land, / and the treacherous will be rooted out of it” (2:21-22). It’s an attempt to chart a course that doesn’t end in the ambiguities of Ecclesiastes (“all is vanity”) or the violence of the Maccabees. It ends up laying the groundwork for the Gospel of John’s account of the Word (logos) made flesh (Prov 8:22-31; Jn 1:1-18).

1 John 3:18-5:21. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” Amen.

If we wonder who the author meant by “one another,” scholars (predictably) differ, but, as noted before, “brothers and sisters” looks more likely, “brothers and sisters” in turn denoting those who share the belief described by the author. In NT usage, ‘brother’ and ‘neighbor’ do not appear to be interchangeable, and neither the Gospel of John nor the epistle speak of love of neighbor. What then? Enter Ignatius, who, at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises writes “every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it.” And if the “good interpretation” goes against the grain of the author’s evident intention? That’s the challenge the epistle poses for this reader.

Coming at this from another angle, here’s Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” It is easy to see the speck in the epistle’s eye…

John 11:17-12:26. The raising of Lazarus, the Council’s plotting, the anointing at Bethany, the triumphal entry, the Greeks’ petition: much to wonder about here. For example, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people…” After Lazarus’ raising, why does Caiaphas assume that Jesus is going to stay dead? “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Who and what needs to die? Reading John together with 1 John, and recalling Solzhenitsyn, it looks like all of us—including the Gospel writers—struggle to figure that out.

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany: A Sermon

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Readings

What might the Spirit be saying to us in these readings?

Let’s start with Paul on Jesus’ resurrection from our second reading. “If Christ has not been raised…” What’s at issue here? Paul gives multiple answers to the question; here’s one of them: “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (v. 32). If Christ has not been raised this [our presence in this Mass] requires a special kind of stupid. Another answer implicit in the text: If Christ has not been raised, then this world doesn’t matter. It’s disposable. But Christ raised—that’s God’s strongest statement that this world matters, that this world has a future.

The Gospel describes that future. Jesus’ words are surprising, by many accounts nonsense. No one wants to be poor, hungry, etc., and those who are poor, hungry, etc. are not obviously blessed or happy. So the verb tenses are important: “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” This future is not simply a continuation of the present. And perhaps a better translation than ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’ is ‘fortunate’: as in you’ve got the winning lottery ticket.

But wait! How can Jesus be pronouncing the poor etc. fortunate and the rich etc. unfortunate? How, for that matter, could his mother sing “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, / and lifted up the lowly; / he has filled the hungry with good things, / and sent the rich away empty” (Lk. 1:52-53)? Here we need to pull the camera back, say, to Psalm 82. It’s short; I’ll read it.

1 God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
2 “How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?
3 Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
4 Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
5 They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk around in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
6 I say, “You are gods,
children of the Most High, all of you;
7 nevertheless, you shall die like mortals,
 and fall like any prince.”
8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth;
for all the nations belong to you!

Within Holy Scripture this vision is an uncontested portrait of our world. Our world is usually unjust. While there are exceptions, the wicked, sinners, and scornful of Psalm 1 usually play an outsized role in making and interpreting our laws. The Golden Rule: those with the gold rule. So Jesus, with only some hyperbole, declares the poor, hungry, etc. fortunate and the rich, full, etc. unfortunate, because usually the poor are poor because of injustice and the rich are rich because of injustice.

Within Holy Scripture the benchmark for justice is the law of Moses, that law that this morning’s psalm celebrated. And there it’s clear that justice is both about how wealth is acquired and how wealth is stewarded. Acquired: only one set of weights and measures in the marketplace. Stewarded: “my” wealth is what I hold in trust for the community. Harvests are to be incomplete, so the poor have something to glean. In Deuteronomy all debts are cancelled every seven years. In Leviticus every fifty years there’s a Jubilee in which all return to their original tribal inheritance. Justice means nobody stays poor—or rich—indefinitely. [NB: this vision of justice aligns with the Native American critique of European society in the early dialogues, for which see Graeber & Wengrow The Dawn of Everything.]

Of course other factors influence where wealth or poverty cluster. Proverbs talks a lot about diligence and sloth, wise and foolish decisions. The larger environment plays a role, all those things over which we have no control: droughts, locusts, armies passing through. But when the Bible pulls back for the big picture (like Psalm 82, Mary’s Song, the Beatitudes), injustice is centerstage.

The poor, hungry, etc. of the Beatitudes are fortunate because God will respond to the prayer at Psalm 82’s end: “Rise up, O God, judge the earth; for all the nations belong to you!”

How do we respond to these texts? Before moving to our other readings, three observations. First, between Psalm 82 and the Beatitudes, to the degree that I’m rich, full, etc. it’s sheer folly to assume that that’s simply the result of my virtue. On the personal level, that might be. On the corporate level, no way. So one of our confessions speaks of “the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” We live on stolen land, our consumer goods are cheap because we’re happy to get them from countries that discourage trade unions—or use slave labor. Should we wish to move from confession to amendment of life, there’s plenty to keep us occupied.

Second, the two verses immediately following today’s Gospel reading: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” So understandable as it might be, our response to the Beatitudes is not to take up the sword, to set ourselves up as judges.

Third, the poor, the hungry, etc. need to wait until Jesus’ return? Absolutely not. Jesus’ vision is that his church be the sphere in which his words are experienced to be true. Recall Jesus’ words to Peter: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age– houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions– and in the age to come eternal life” (Mk. 10:29-30). But from the start we’ve tended to downsize that vision, so Jesus’ brother James has to write:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. (2:14-17)

[In other words, we’re used to hearing James’ words as an argument with Paul re the roles of faith and works. Perhaps equally at issue: whether the church incarnates Jesus’ communal vision, or is simply a group of folk each pursuing their individual salvation.] What’s the church for? (What’s faith for?) The Beatitudes can do wonders for our imagination.

Turning to Jeremiah and Psalm 1, we might hear that image of the tree planted by water as a strategy for life in the world as described both by Psalm 82 and by Jesus’ Beatitudes. It’s an unjust world, and God’s addressing that, but it’s not a quick fix. God’s playing a long game, and the image of the tree planted by water urges us to likewise play a long game. That can be hard. The trust on which Jeremiah focuses is the trust that God’s timetable is preferable to ours. (And, parenthetically, like Jeremiah we’re free to repeatedly bend God’s ear about that—as long as we’re willing to listen to how God might respond.)

Did you notice the chorus in today’s readings? Jeremiah: How fortunate/blessed/happy those who trust in the Lord. The Psalm: How fortunate/blessed/happy those who delight in the law of the Lord. Jesus: How fortunate/blessed/happy the poor. Why (bottom line)? God raised Christ from the dead. God has plenty of skin in the game, and, shifting the image, God regularly invites us to share His Body and Blood so that we play that game well.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.” Blessed are we as we continue to examine ourselves and make the choices that position us to together hear Jesus’ words as good news, to together experience Jesus’ words as good news.

Rise up, O God, judge the earth;
for all the nations belong to you!

Our God is responding to that prayer today, and invites us to join in that response today. We’ll let Isaiah take us out:

For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field—all us trees of the field—shall clap their hands. (55:12).

Coming Attractions: Daily Office Readings 6 Epiphany (Year 2)

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The readings are listed in the Book of Common Prayer p.949, and appear on various websites including Forward Movement, Mission St Clare.

Genesis 29:20-35:20. Jacob remains centerstage. The authors/editors obviously like a good story, but since the narrative is cool, not hot (McLuhan), there are plenty of gaps to fill in. For example, Gen 34: do we enjoy the Jacob’s sons’ (underdog) subterfuge, or weep over its violence?

At other points stories are paired: Isaac’s blindness and the switching of sons (Gen 27), Jacob’s blindness (in the dark) and the switching of daughters (Gen 29); what “seeing God” looks like (Gen 32:22ff and Gen 33:1-11).

Throughout we might wonder about that promise to Abram (“I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” 12:3). How is this working out (or not)? What has God gotten Godself into?

1 John 1:1-3:18. There are at least two reading strategies worth trying here. The first is a chosen naïveté: there are plenty of gems in the book; take one (e.g., “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God”) and sit with it for a good stretch.

The second is to wonder about the weird mix of tenderness and venom throughout. Scholars have various ways of trying to understand this (of course). I find Raymond Brown’s analysis convincing: a community that has understood itself in terms of the tradition represented by the Gospel of John has split, and in the book we hear the voice of the faction thatS eventually joined with the churches that were transmitting what became our New Testament. In contrast to the other Gospels, John does not encourage love for outsiders, and in I John we may be hearing those chickens coming home to roost.

John 9:1-11:16. There are different ways we can read situations. In 9:1-3 and 11:4 it looks like Jesus’ way is to ask what God is doing. Is the author focusing on this as a model for us?

Jn 9:39 (“I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”): only then, or something that continues to play out? What of Jesus’ followers who claim to “see”?

“If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly” (10:24). In context that may be doubly ironic. First, because likely as not “I am the good shepherd” is a political declaration (see 2 Sam 5:2; Ps 78:71; Ezek 34:23). Second, because any attempt to slot Jesus into our carefully constructed taxonomies is likely to be counterproductive.

Coming Attractions: Daily Office Readings 5 Epiphany (Year 2)

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The readings are listed in the Book of Common Prayer p.947, and appear on various websites including Forward Movement, Mission St Clare.

Genesis. The action revolves around another pair of brothers, Esau and Jacob (recall Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac!). Jacob, grasping from birth, distrustful (compare God’s generous promise and Jacob’s lawyerly response [28:13-15, 20-22]), and encountering a kindred soul in…Laban. Esau: Moberly provides the most interesting entry point into the cycle of stories I’ve encountered: “For those of us who feel ‘unfavored’ in terms of what we were born with, who wish we were other than what we are, learning to live well with what we are can be one of life’s greatest challenges.… The only questions that are fruitful are not of a backward-looking and rationalizing nature, but rather of a forward-looking and practical nature: ‘What can I/we/you/they do about this? What can I/we/you/they yet hope for?” (The God of the Old Testament) And it takes some time for Esau to sort this out.

Hebrews. This week we reach the end of this remarkable book, which throughout maintains a creative tension between celebrating God’s new and definitive act in Jesus which is simultaneously in the most profound continuity with this God’s prior acts. The long list of the Old Testament faithful (Heb 11): the author’s ground for confidence that “make you complete in everything good so that you may do his will” (v.21) is not whistling in the dark.

John. There are multiple ways we might come at these stories of conflict; here are two. (1) Abraham comes up repeatedly in chapter 8. Since we’ve just finished reading the Abraham stories, how might a closer reading of these stories checked Jesus’ audience’s confident “Abraham is our father”? (What happens if we read 8:1-11 together with the patriarchs’ habit of passing their wives off as their sisters [Gen 12:10ff; 20:1ff; 26:6ff?)

(2) There’s an old story from the early days of the evangelization of Northern Europe. A tribe agreed to baptism, but only on the condition that their sword arms stayed dry. Even among those who “believed” in Jesus (8:31) there were topics Jesus could address, topics that were verboten. We could do worse than use that as a mirror.

Reading the Fine Print

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We celebrate the Presentation of Jesus in the temple today as recorded in Luke 2:22-39. The “righteous and devout” Simeon plays a major role and his prayer (“The Song of Simeon”) enriches our prayers at the end of the day. Less used are his following words to Jesus’ mother: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed– and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The Song serves to end one story (Simeon’s, each of our days), the words to introduce another. Or, we might say, the words serve as the fine print or warning label for the Song.

The Song sounds straightforward; the words warn that it’s anything but. In the Daily Office readings this comes through most clearly in Jesus’ words, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” a truth that—as the argument immediately following shows—destabilizes his followers’ assumptions and identities.

“A sword will pierce your own soul too.” Simeon gets it right, as does Annie Dillard: “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return” (Teaching a stone to talk).

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany: A Sermon

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Readings

What might the Spirit be saying to us in these readings?

Some initial observations:

On the one hand, Paul’s praise and description of the virtue of love. On the other hand, Jeremiah’s commission (“to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant”) and Jesus’ words to the Nazareth congregation. Whatever love is, it’s not about being nice. Whatever love is—well, that’s the focus of this sermon.

Jeremiah’s commission and Jesus with the synagogue congregation: a visual that might accompany these is that scene from early in Genesis: Adam and Eve hiding in the trees and the Lord calling “Where are you?” There, as in Jeremiah’s time, Jesus’ time, our time, the Lord trying for a conversation. That’s love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” in spades. Any other god would have thrown in the towel long ago.

Jeremiah’s commission: specific to Jeremiah, yes, but also representative of the prophetic task. “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” Not hard to imagine Jesus feeling some solidarity with Jeremiah. Again, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant:” not a bad partial description of the prophetic task. If we wonder why four verbs for the destruction and two for the creation, Abba Nestoros (one of the Egyptian desert fathers around the end of the 4th century) noted that “it is twice as hard to drive out vice as to acquire virtue” (so Cassian, cited in Goldingay The Book of Jeremiah).

Anyhow, let’s move to the Gospel. Last Sunday we heard Jesus reading from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And, as we heard this morning “All spoke well of him.”

Ignoring the proverbial “Quit while you’re ahead,” Jesus tries for a conversation. To unpack Isaiah’s words there are any number of Old Testament stories Jesus could have cited that the congregation would have loved: Moses to Pharaoh: “Let my people go!”, Samson killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, the Lord delivering Jerusalem from the Assyrian army in the time of Isaiah. But Jesus chose two stories of prophets aiding Israel’s enemies—and the congregation goes homicidal.

It’s an understandable reaction. The Jews have been under the Gentile heel for centuries, Rome being simply the latest to fill that role. And to think that Isaiah’s God—Israel’s God—cares as much about them as about us, loves them as much as us…

What’s at stake here? On the one hand, our image of God. We might have thought that the Book of Jonah had settled that question (“O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing,” gracious and merciful even with the Assyrians! But it turns out that whether then or now we’re remarkably slow learners.

On the other hand, it doesn’t take theological training to realize that if God loves our enemies, the other shoe’s about to drop, this God expecting us to love these enemies.

“Love your enemies.” That’s the obvious deal breaker in Jesus’ good news, and it gives us plenty to work on. Here I’m thinking not of our actions or our words, which we usually have under control, but of our gut reactions to moments in our daily lives or news stories. “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you:” I’m not even close to these being habitual.

But “love your enemies” is only the tip of a larger iceberg, which offers us the option of coming at the challenge sideways. And for this I’m drawing on Rowan Williams’ description of the eastern monastic perspective in his book Looking East in Winter.

Williams writes: “Our problem…is not that we are embodied spirits, but that we are incompletely embodied spirits – that is, that we are as yet unable to live in this material and mutable world without clinging to our impressions, distorting our impressions, or compulsively marking out our territory. The things of the world – and our human neighbours in the world – appear either as food or as threat to the ego. Unless we become able to receive the truth of what is before us as it stands in relation to God, not to us, we are failing to be embodied in the sense of being properly part of creation: we are caught in an implicit idolatry, the effort to separate ourselves from the order of which we are a part” (p.32).

We might hear this perspective as unpacking Paul: love “does not insist on its own way,” is not trapped in the habit of seeing everything and everybody in terms of how they might threaten or benefit me. Again, this is prior to my speech or action: it’s about what my eyes or ears attend to.

This, is probably why Paul starts his description of love as he does. One can get very far in the church—in any institution for that matter—with the ego comfortably in the driver’s seat, assessing in others the potential for threat or exploitation. And as long as the ego is calling the shots, no room for love.

What do we do about this? Within this perspective, Williams again: “the dual habits of contrition and gratitude keep before us the nature we had almost lost and preserve us from defeat by the passion of lust and anger” (p.25). Contrition: genuine sorrow over my failures; gratitude: joyful recognition of all that I nevertheless continue to receive. Contrition and gratitude, in other words, aid us in living truthfully.

So, back to Jeremiah, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” become ongoing disciplines, part, with God’s help, of living mindfully. Here the focus is usually not on our enemies—no need to start with the hardest cases—but with family members, neighbors, colleagues. Where are my impulses to defend or use clouding my perceptions of them? Those impulses are the ones to pluck up and pull down.

Two final observations. First, Paul’s description of love is part of his advice on how to live together as a congregation that we heard last Sunday. So “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude” is not about some self-standing altruism, but about what’s necessary so that congregational life doesn’t simply mirror our society’s dysfunctional patterns.

More, recall last Sunday’s Psalm 19. The psalm celebrates the life-giving power of the Law. But toward the end it takes an unexpected turn: “Who can tell how often he offends? / cleanse me from my secret faults.” For all the power of the Law—or the Gospel, for that matter—it’s pretty much powerless against my blind spots. So how does God answer this prayer for cleansing? Until preparing last week’s sermon I’d always assumed that God answered through some sort of ethereal surgery. But reading the psalm together with Paul’s description of how Christ’s Body works… If I only listen to folk who think like me, my blind spots stay undisturbed. So God answers the prayer for cleansing by putting me in this Body with Jews, Greeks, men, women, folk all over the spectrums, many of whom I have no inclination to listen to. I can pretty much count on one of them to tell me about my secret faults. So this love that listens turns out to be necessary for my own healing.

Second, Paul’s description of love is a description of God’s behavior. Why does God keep seeking us out, trying for a conversation, sometimes directly, sometimes through another human being? God is love.

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany: A Sermon

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Readings

What might the Spirit be saying to us through today’s readings?

At first glance the first two readings go in opposite directions. The center of Psalm 19 celebrates the Law, the Torah: it revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent, rejoices the heart, gives light to the eyes… But when Ezra reads that Law the people weep.

Our first reading doesn’t explain why they weep, but its setting lets us make a reasonable guess. Ezra and Nehemiah are reconstructing the people’s common life after the disaster of the Babylonian conquest and exile. The temple’s been more or less rebuilt, the city walls restored, and now the Law reproclaimed. Love God; love your neighbor as yourself. Obey and things will go well; disobey and things will go very badly—as just experienced in the Babylonian conquest and exile. Why think that things are going to go any better the second time around? The people seem to have enough self-awareness to ask this question—and weep.

Love God; love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the path that revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent, rejoices the heart, gives light to the eyes… But as the prophets kept pointing out, it’s remarkably easy to stray from that path. Love God: more than I love my script for how I achieve security and status? Love my neighbor, or see my neighbor as a threat to be neutralized or a resource to be exploited? If only this were the challenge only for Ezra and Nehemiah’s audience, and not for every generation of the people of God!

We’ll come back to this. Meanwhile, attending to our other readings, our Gospel reading, like the first reading, gives us another scene of public proclamation, this time Jesus reading Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” It’s not difficult to apply the psalmist’s praise of the Law to this good news: it too “it revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent, etc.” But—caution, spoiler for next week’s reading—it runs into the same problem the Law encountered: the synagogue audience goes homicidal when Jesus declares that this good news is also good news for those neighbors they consider enemies. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we observed last Monday, ran into that same problem.

Love your neighbor as yourself. As Paul’s letters remind us, this is difficult enough to do within the church. The ear, the eye, the hand: they focus on different things; by most measures they have very little in common. But what Paul’s aiming at: that “the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” Ears, eyes, hands, feet: some of us voted for Trump, others for Biden, some of us get our news from Fox, others from MSNBC, some of us are still sorry we’re not using the 1928 prayer book, others can’t wait for a full revision of 1979. And so on. And Paul wants us to get to the point that “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

What’s at stake here? On the macro level, whether the good news embodied in Jesus is true and has the power to transform, or if it finally belongs in the box with the Easter Bunny and Linus’ Great Pumpkin. On the micro level, look at the ending of today’s psalm. “Who can tell how often he offends? / cleanse me from my secret faults.” For all the power of the Law—or the Gospel—it’s powerless against my blind spots. And as long as I listen only to those who think like me those blind spots stay undisturbed. In other words, God typically responds to “cleanse me from my secret faults” not by some ethereal intervention, but through a neighbor I’m too ready to write off. Cue, again, Dr. King.

This challenge of loving God and neighbor, central to both Law and Gospel: what in our readings might give us some encouragement?

Paul’s image of the body is an appeal to our imagination, so let’s stay with that image a bit longer. The ear, eye, hand: each has access to an extremely narrow slice of reality. And in God’s ordering of the body, it all works, even though none of these parts has the “big picture”—including the brain. This ordering depends on a sort of trust, the eyes, ears, etc. sending out nerve impulses without knowing or controlling what will happen to them. And, conversely, bad things happen when this “trust” breaks down. One or more cells may get together, decide “the heck with all this cooperation, let’s just grow”—which is what we call cancer. In short, Paul’s image is designed to nurture a healthy humility: our individual perspectives are necessarily limited, but that need not be an obstacle to God’s work.

More importantly, going back to Ezra and Nehemiah’s Second Temple weeping congregation, it’s going to be better this time around because God comes to us in our brother Jesus saying “Let’s do this together.” Loving God and neighbor involves some serious dying, an ongoing letting go of my impulses to neutralize or exploit. That’s scary. And Jesus is there beside me: “You don’t have to do this alone. Let’s do it together.” That’s one way of thinking about what the Bread and Wine are about: Jesus’ “Let’s do this together.”

Ezra and Nehemiah aren’t in a position to mount a strong argument against the people’s weeping, but they point in the right direction: “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared.” The endgame of all this is the victory banquet Isaiah described:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. (25:6-8)

The Bread and Wine: they’re the first course. So come to the Table, God’s dream for the new world: everyone is welcome, there’s room for everyone, there’s enough for everyone.

The First Sunday after the Epiphany: A Sermon

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Readings

Then as now we’ve never lacked idiots declaring—often with sandwich boards—that the end is near. Perhaps that’s why Luke gives us two long chapters of backstory so that we take this “idiot” John the Baptist seriously.

First there’s Elizabeth’s extraordinary pregnancy when she and Zechariah are “very old” (CEB). Then Mary’s even-more extraordinary pregnancy, being a virgin. John is born to Elizabeth, and his father Zechariah responds with a lengthy prophecy speaking of “a mighty savior” and of being able to serve God “without fear.” Mary, even before Jesus’ birth, sings what we know as the Magnificat:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

After Jesus’ birth the shepherds convey the words of the angel and the angelic military chorus, and Simeon and Anna add their witness in the temple. So, John the Baptist is no ordinary “idiot.”

John’s message is, I think, three-fold: (1) “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” God is coming to set things right. (2) Repent! When God comes it’s prudent not to be obviously part of the problem: stop hoarding, stop extorting! (3) Me, I’m just the warm-up act. It’s all very apocalyptic. The newspapers might have called it the “Apocalypse Now” tour. Things have to be pretty bad for apocalypse to sound like a good idea, and the crowds flocking to John give us a pretty good idea of life in the benevolent claws of the Roman Empire.

And, at the end of today’s Gospel: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In those words of the Divine Voice many hear echoes of three biblical texts:

The new king’s witness in Ps 2: “I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’” (Ps. 2:7).

The Lord’s introduction of the servant in the midst of exile: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa 42:1)

The Lord’s words to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you” (Gen. 22:2).

John is hardly underplaying what’s going on here! And all three of these texts continue to echo in Luke’s Gospel. Psalm 2: Jesus sorting out his messianic role, which is essentially about what it means to live as a human being. Isaiah 42: Jesus assuming the mantle of the servant—and invites his followers to do so as well. What sort of service pleases God? Genesis 22: Jesus continuing on a trajectory over which he has limited control.

There are many things that we might explore in this and the other readings. Since we’ll be doing the renewal of baptismal vows in a few minutes I’ll focus on just two.

First, this salvation that everyone’s been celebrating—Zechariah, Mary, Simeon, Anna, John—doesn’t play out predictably. Luke’s mention of John’s imprisonment brutally yanks John offstage, and signals what Jesus is getting himself into. This is probably not what John had in mind when he proclaimed “every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And Simeon had warned Mary “and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” And the echo of the words to Abraham in the words to Jesus. Fast-forwarding to Paul, who started his career very certain of how God’s salvation was going to play out, being baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection means giving up our illusions of control.

Second, for all that Zechariah, Mary, John, etc. get right, there’s plenty that they don’t get right, plenty of room for ongoing repentance. Zechariah responds with so little faith to Gabriel’s announcement that Gabriel decides it would be better for all concerned if Zechariah would just shut up until John’s birth. The story we heard last week of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple: every parent’s nightmare, but also evidence that Mary and Joseph had no idea who was living under their roof. This pattern continues with the disciples, so that in Luke’s telling they chose the Last Supper to continue their argument about who’s the greatest (22:24-30). They all end up abandoning Jesus. So, when in the renewal of the Baptismal Covenant we say “I will, with God’s help,” Luke would probably want us to remember that “God’s help” includes graciously accepting our repentance. Jesus tells us to accept a brother’s or sister’s repentance even seven times a day (Lk 17:3-4); our firm hope is the God does likewise.

Let us close with the collect for Friday from Morning Prayer: “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.”