The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

I Want to Show You Something
Proper 8
Luke 9:51-62

In the large arc of the Gospel story according to Luke, the events in today’s reading come right after Jesus’ transfiguration.  The transfiguration is when Jesus takes Peter, James and John up the mountain and his appearance is transfigured before them.  They come down from the mountain and the story picks up with today’s reading.

The reading seems to include two completely separate stories.  It’s usually printed in two paragraphs.

First, there’s the incident in Samaria.  You may remember that the Jews and Samaritans weren’t the best of friends in Jesus' day.  They were always ready to suspect one another of ill will.  Jesus sends word that he is coming to a village in Samaria.  When the village refuses to receive Jesus, James and John want to punish them by calling down fire from heaven.  Some have questioned whether they actually had the power to do that.  Regardless, Jesus rebuked James and John, and they moved on.

Then in the second part of the reading Jesus is teaching along the road.  He says that for the Son of Man, and presumably his disciples, there is no place to rest.  There is no time to bury the dead.  No time to linger with family.

These stories seem unconnected.  But they share an urgency.  The key is in the first line.  He set his face to go to Jerusalem.  Jesus is focused on the completion of his journey, the fulfillment of his purpose.

An image came to mind of a young child, maybe 4 or 5 years old.  Who wants to show you something.  You’re a parent or an aunt or an older sibling or a good friend.  You’ve all experienced or witnessed this happening.  The child is persistent.  Tugging at your sleeve, grabbing your hand, demanding your attention.  Come on, come ON…  Come with me NOW.  I want to show you something.  I need to show you something.

You might be in the midst of a conversation.  It doesn’t matter.  You might be tired.  Tough.  You might be involved in other things YOU think are important.  Whatever it is, it is not more important than whatever it is the child wants you to see.

It may be the wonder of an earthworm in the garden.  Or a picture the child has drawn or a new lego creation.  Or maybe the child wants you to witness a new accomplishment, like tying shoelaces.

For the child, whatever it is it is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THEIR WORLD.  And the child feels it SHOULD be the most important thing in your world, too.

So Jesus has that same eagerness, that singleness of focus.  There is something he wants the disciples and us to see.  You have to see this.  Come ON.  Now.  Nothing else is as important.  Don’t worry about torching the Samaritans.  There is no time for other conversations.  Jesus keeps tugging.  Come ON.  Come with me.  To Jerusalem.

And, look.  Look at the cross.

Nothing is more important to Jesus.  Nothing should be more important to us.  Look.  Jesus says:  Look at the cross.

It changes the world.  It transforms everything.

In the collect for the Tuesday in Holy Week we pray: O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life…

The cross transforms everything that is messy, nasty, shameful, and sinful in the world into life.  Life in the kingdom of God.  Life shared with God.  The cross transforms all that is shameful and sinful into fullness of life.

The message for us today is:  Don’t get sidetracked on our journey with Jesus.  Don’t let distractions, things that may SEEM important to us, draw our attention away from the cross.  This doesn’t mean we all have to abandon our families.  It does challenge us to examine our priorities.  To name our distractions.  To name the things that distract us from the importance of the cross.

Look, Jesus says.  Look at the cross.  It is the most important thing in the world.

At the cross human being is transformed into glory.

There at the cross is where love wins!  You’ve heard that phrase.  Rob Bell wrote a book with that title.  We’ve seen it a lot post-Orlando, where at least part of its meaning seems to be a proclamation of the resilience of the human spirit and the power of human caring to overcome hate.   

But for us, the cross is about God’s love.  And the power of God’s love for us.  The cross is where God’s love for us wins.  God’s love wins.  Over everything else.

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost - June 19

The Journey from Despair to Hope

Proper 7

Psalms 42 & 43

Psalms 42 and 43 are printed as a single psalm in some early Hebrew manuscripts.  The lectionary assigns us both to read for this Sunday, which is what we did.  (I don’t know why our Scripture inserts present them as an either/or.)  They are definitely united by theme and content.

Psalm 42 is probably familiar to many of you, especially the first verse:

As the deer longs for the water-brooks,  

so longs my soul for you, O God.

It’s a popular psalm.  I think as we hear that opening verse it evokes a sense of peace, a pastoral or bucolic setting.  We picture a deer wandering by a babbling spring.  And we are comforted to think that we will find God in a setting like that, too.

But this psalm is a lament.  A powerful lament.

The image of that first verse is meant to bring to mind a deer braying in anguished thirst over a watercourse that once had held water but is now bone dry.

The psalm begins in despair.  The refrain, which returns several times in psalm 42 (and 43), gives voice to that despair.

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?  

and why are you so disquieted within me?

Despair, this heaviness of soul, is an apt description, at least for me, of this last week.

Like most clergy (at least in this time zone), when I left home for church last week, I didn’t know what had happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in the early morning hours of last Sunday.  I had seen the flash of an early headline online, but that was it.

Over the course of this past week, of course, we have all learned much more about the targeted killing of 49 LGBT folk at the nightclub.  Also over the course of this last week this event has been framed by our larger national political discourse.  And it has been placed within the sad context of our national history of mass killings.  This past week we also remembered the one year anniversary of the targeted killing of African Americans in the midst of Bible study at church in Charleston, SC, last June.

My soul is full of heaviness.  Like the psalmist, I find myself in a place of despair.

Despair.  I often find it interesting to look up the actual meaning of words.  Despair isn’t a thing.  Despair is the absence of hope. Not to be confused, I think, with depression.  Depression comes from within.  Despair comes from outside of us.  Despair is the hope we don’t see when we look out on the world.

I do not presume…  I cannot, speak for the perspectives of the communities that have been targeted by hate.  This week, the LGBT community.  Last year, African Americans.  I do know that these horrible crimes were just magnified examples of the attitudes that affect them—you, every day.  But I am not within those communities, so my lament is my own.

Commentators aren’t sure if the psalmist’s lament of despair in these psalms was the result of some individual crisis, or if the psalmist spoke on behalf of all Israel at a time of exile.

My own lament of despair is a mixture of individual lament, national lament, and Christian lament.

A lament of despair.

• Despair:  seeing no hope in the face of hatred and bigotry raging in our world, so often expressed in violence.
• Despair:  seeing no hope in a political system totally devoid of concern for the common good.
• Despair:  seeing little hope for my own ability to love the shooter or the hater or the bigot, as Christ calls us to do.
• Despair:  at my own lack of vision or courage to be the ally or a force for good in the world, that I would like to be.
• Despair:  hopelessness at our inability in this country to even have sensible conversations about ways forward.
• Despair:  that violence is done in God’s name, by people of many faiths, including ours.
• Despair:  at the church’s often seemingly ineffective struggle to be all that God calls us to be, bringers of God’s peace and justice to the world.

Depending on how you count 80 – 85 of the 150 psalms are laments.  That’s more than half.  Despair and lament are sadly not unique to our time.  And our time is not the worst.  That’s one thing that today’s psalm reminds us of.

But more importantly, today’s psalm reminds us that the root of all lament is the absence of God.  The source of all despair is the perceived absence of God.  No matter what the external circumstances, the root of all despair is the experience of God’s absence.

The psalmist says:  My soul is athirst for God.  God is the answer for despair.  The presence of God brings hope into despair.

The psalmist’s journey is from despair to praise of God.  The psalmist makes that journey within these psalms!  From the lament of the first verse to songs of praise with the harp.  And that journey takes place in worship.  The journey from despair to hope takes place in worship.  The way out of despair is corporate worship.

In his commentary on this psalm, Walter Brueggemann writes (Psalms, Walter Brueggemann, William H. Bellinger, Jr., New Cambridge Bible Commentary): 

The poet yearns to be surrounded by the believing and worshiping community:  to participate in the worship services of the Temple and to celebrate with the people the presence of God in their midst.

God’s presence is made known here.  In the worship of this believing community.

The poetic movement of the parts of this psalm takes the petitioner beyond a private grief to hope found in a worshiping community shaped by YHWH, so the psalm portrays the faithful person at prayer…  Much of the hope the petitioner finds in this psalm is tied to liturgy (the prayers we say together in worship).  It is the liturgy that speaks to the wilderness of divine absence and moves the inner dialogue to God and to the divine presence in the temple (and for us, at this Holy Table).  That worship makes possible the move from the poignant yearning in the psalm’s first line to the hope in its last line.  The hope is in the life-giving presence of God.

From the yearning of despair to hope in the life-giving presence of God.

Today’s reflection from the Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist speaks to the same thing in a different way.  Brother Curtis Almquist writes today:

In the days ahead we will need one another to help us keep our own promises (our baptismal promises) and to receive the promises Christ makes to us to be with us always.  (We need one another to keep us aware of the promise Christ makes to be with us always.)  Without these promises made in the presence of one another, and without Christ’s grace mediated through one another, things could be otherwise in these days ahead.  We need one another.  We belong to one another.

The final verse of hope in Psalm 42 (and 43):

Put your trust in God;
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Put your trust in God.  God is the help of my countenance.  God’s help is our hope.  God with us is our hope.  God’s life-giving presence with us overcomes despair.

Supported by one another, equipped through worship with the presence of God, we have hope and strength.

Hope to be voices of compassion and inclusion.

Hope to act for justice and peace in the world.

Supported by one another and accompanied by the life-giving presence of God, we have hope.  And the power to bring God’s love and presence to a world that desperately needs it.

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - June 12

The Household of God

Proper 6

Collect of the Day

Every Sunday when we worship together early on in the service we pray the collect of the day.  It changes every Sunday, so it doesn’t become familiar like the rest of the service and I think it often slides by without much notice.

That’s too bad because, they are wonderful prayers.  And as a collection, they are a rich expression of our faith, our yearnings, and our prayers as Christians.

Some of them have ancient origins.  English translations taken from medieval Latin mass books.  Some are new.  Like today’s, which was written specifically for this prayer book. 

The phrase that particularly caught my attention in today was the description of the church as the household of God.  The church is the household of God.

It’s not unique to this collect; it appears in other prayers in the prayer book.  It’s an interesting metaphor.  And, although this collect is modern, the portion of the collect that contains this phrase is old.  In the 1928 BCP, the collect for the 5^th Sunday after the Epiphany began:  “O Lord, we beseech thee to keep thy church and household continually in thy true religion.”  That collect comes from a prayer thought to have originated in the 6^th century during the time of Pope Gregory the Great.

God’s household.  A rich image.

Apparently, it’s not an image found anywhere in Scripture.  In the Bible “households” are strictly human.  In the Old Testament, faithful people are certainly called the “people” of God.  God’s house is mentioned, but it means the physical place of worship.  Jesus and others speak of the “children” of God often.

But the image of the church as the “household” of God seems to have arisen within the church’s experience.

To think of the church as the household of God stresses that the church is the people.  A “household” is people, people who live in some sort of close interdependent relationship with one another.

The collect is meant to stress that God is the head of this household.  It is a household, yes, but the focus is on God as head.

So think about what it means for God to fill the traditional roles of the “head of household.”

It is God who provides safety to this household.  Physical and emotional safety from threats.

God supports the members of the household.  In good times and in bad, God is there.  Always there.

God provides the sustenance for the people of this household.  Every time we gather there around the Lord’s table. 

God provides guidance and instruction, not only on running the household, but on how to live faithfully and with growing maturity as Christians.

There’s another quality of households that’s worth noting.  It’s not so much about the head.  But, ideally in households, the members have responsibilities for one another and for maintaining the household.  They take care of one another.  They do their chores.  What are your chores in the household of God?

It’s a wonderful thing to be a part of the household of God and certainly a good thing to pray for.

But, here’s the kicker.  That’s not what we’re praying for in this collect.  In this collect we are not asking to be included in God’s household or that we may receive the benefits of God’s household.

Collects always have a set structure.  The beginning, the opening phrases, the preamble, of a collect always states something that is given.  Something that is already true.  Often some reality or quality about God is proclaimed.

The description of the church as the household of God is in the preamble of this collect.  The church IS the household of God.  That’s a given.  That’s already true.  We ARE members of God’s household.

The intercessory part of the collect comes later:  We pray that, with God’s help, we may proclaim God’s truth with boldness and minister God’s justice with compassion.

That’s what we’re praying FOR in this collect.  That we may fulfill our mission.

And this is a place where the image of the church as God’s household departs from the idea of a human household.  The purpose of a human household is self-contained.  It is to provide the members of the household, the cohabitants, the benefits of being a part of the household.

The purpose of God’s household is not about what it offers to the people who are in God’s household, rather, it’s about what those people offer to others.  We can’t separate the two.  The purpose of the household of God is to expand the walls of the household, to include more and more people within it.

This is a good collect to keep track of.  It reminds us who we are without question.  We are members of God’s household and recipients of all of the wonderful benefits and blessings that come with being a part of God’s household. 

The collect also reminds us that, as members of God’s household, we are called to us to extend those benefits to others without judgment and without qualification.

Proclaim God’s truth with boldness, and minister God’s justice with compassion

The Third Sunday after Pentecost - June 5

Go and Do Likewise

Proper 5

Luke 7:11-17

(And from last week:  Luke 7:1-10)

The Gospel reading from Luke for today follows directly after the passage we heard last week.  Both are healing stories.  We are in “ordinary time” now, the long green season between Pentecost and Advent.  And Jesus is about his “ordinary” business of healing people.

Last week we heard the story of the healing of the centurion’s slave.  This week it is the story usually called the raising of the widow’s son.  The healing, or resuscitation, of the son of the widow of Nain.

Especially as I reflected on these two passages together, something interesting and important struck me.  It’s right there in the titles we give to these two healing stories.  The healing of the centurion’s slave.  The raising of the widow’s son.  Yes, they are healing (or resuscitation) stories, but there is virtually no focus on the person who is given new health or new life.  The focus is on the centurion and the widow.  It’s almost as though the healing, the miracle, is just a prop in another story.

I’m definitely not diminishing Jesus’ healing ministry.  Jesus heals!  And there are plenty of stories in the Gospels where that is the focus, and where Jesus interacts with the person who is being healed.

But in both of these stories, Jesus’ focus and interaction is not primarily with the person being healed.  (In last week’s story, Jesus doesn’t even ever see the slave who is healed!).

Today’s story begins with Jesus’ compassion for the mother.  That’s what sets this story in motion.  He had compassion for her loss at her son’s death.  But also remember she was a widow and this young man was her only son.  Without a man to protect and care for her, in that society she was totally bereft without any hope.  Jesus saw that and had compassion on her.  Notice also that when the young man is restored to life, Jesus’ action is to return him to his mother.  The point of this story is Jesus’ care for the mother.

If you remember last week’s reading, it’s about a Roman centurion.  A Roman centurion sends to Jesus because, as Luke says, a slave whom he “valued highly” was “ill and close to death.”  Remember, this is a Roman, not a Jew.  The whole passage is about the dynamic between the centurion and Jesus.  Jesus never enters the centurion’s house, never even sees the slave…   but heals him from afar.

At least in these two stories, let’s not let the miracle distract us from the message, which lies in Jesus’ interaction with the centurion and the widow.

This is important because we are the Body of Christ.  We are the hands, the voice, the action, of Jesus in the world today.  And we look to Jesus as a model for what we are called to be and do.  These stories are not just about what JESUS DID, they are about what WE SHOULD DO today.  So we look to Jesus’ actions with respect to the centurion and the widow to learn what it means to be the Body of Christ today.

The story about the centurion is interesting.  He is not a Jew.  He is a Gentile, a foreigner, not of the heritage or faith of Jesus.  He was a pagan, not a child of Abraham.  He sent intermediaries to talk to Jesus.  First, he sent Jews to persuade Jesus that, although he did not share their faith, he was a “friend to Jews,” he supported Jews and helped build their synagogue.  Then later he sent friends of his to say that, although he did not feel worthy to have Jesus under his roof, as a man of power, he respected Jesus’ power.  He recognized and respected Jesus’ power and hoped that Jesus would offer that power to help him.  Maybe he felt some yearning to know Jesus as the Son of God.  We don’t know.

The centurion was a foreigner of uncertain faith whom Jesus had never met.  And Jesus helped him.  The centurion was a foreigner of uncertain faith whom Jesus had never met.  And Jesus helped him.  Jesus might say to the Body of Christ today:  Go and do likewise.

Today’s story is a story of Jesus’ “active compassion.”  Notice that no one asks Jesus to help.  Not the widow, no matter how profound her loss or how precarious her social situation.  No one in the crowd.  Jesus recognizes her deep need and acts.  He does what he can to alleviate suffering.  Maybe we, as the Body of Christ today, can’t restore the dead to life on a regular basis, but we have the power to help.  We have the power to save people from death, to respond to needs around us, to ease suffering in our world.  We can act with active compassion.  Do not wait to be asked.   

We can do what Jesus did for the centurion and for the widow. Go and do what Jesus did.  We are the Body of Christ.

The Second Sunday after Pentecost - May 29

Sing to the Lord
Proper 4
Psalm 96

I love the beginning of today’s psalm.  “Sing to the Lord a new song.”  A new song.

I’m going to preach on the psalm today.  Not only do I like that first line, the other readings didn’t really grab me this week.  The Old Testament reading is basically, “my God can whup your god.”  The passage from Galatians speaks to a specific time in history.   The “false gospel” that Paul is railing against is the teaching that Gentile converts to Christianity had to become Jews first.  Not a pressing issue today.  The Gospel is a healing story, but we’re going to have healing stories for quite a few weeks to come, so we can come back to that.  It’s interesting, though, that what Jesus does during “ordinary time,” this long green season between Pentecost and Advent, is heal people.

Another appealing feature of the psalm is that it tells us plainly what to do.  It instructs us what to do as God’s people.  We are to praise God.  This psalm, like many others, is a summons to praise.

The first three verses of the psalm contain six verbs in the imperative tense.  If you remember your high school grammar, the imperative tense is the one with the exclamation point after it.  It expresses a command.  This psalm commands us to:  Sing!  Sing!  Sing!  Bless!  Proclaim!  Declare!

We are to sing, to declare our praise, to God.

We talk so much about praising God in church, have you ever paused to ask, Why?  Why do we praise God?  Does God need our praise?  Surely God doesn’t need our words to build up God’s own self-esteem.  God doesn’t need to be affirmed or coddled or stroked, to be told what a good job he has done.

So if God doesn’t need praise, if praise isn’t offered to benefit God, why are we summoned to praise?  Because praising God benefits us.  We need to offer praise to God.

Think about it…  Praise is always offered in the context of a relationship.  We forget that sometimes by watering down our praise of God into something abstract…  “The Lord’s name be praised…”  True praise is part of a relationship, spoken as direct communication from one person to another.  I praise you.  I praise you, O God.

And when we speak praise to God, we define our place our relationship with God, we reorient ourselves with respect to God.  Praising God orients us into a position of joyful humility.  Not just humility.  Joyful humility.  Celebratory thanksgiving.

Sing to the Lord a new song.  This psalm is the psalmist’s new song.  What is yours?  What is your song of praise?

The psalms of praise follow a typical pattern.  After the summons to praise, they recite the reasons God is worthy of praise.  In this psalm, the psalmist praises God because God is sovereign over all of the created earth and all the nations and maintains it in order.

Other psalms praise God for other reasons.  In Psalm 139, the psalmist writes:  I praise you because I am wonderfully made.

What do you praise God for?  What is your psalm of praise?  I praise you, O God, for…

For me, today:  I praise you, God for the beauty of the earth and the wonder of spring.  Also this weekend, I praise you, O God, for inspiring valor and service in those who have offered and continue to offer their lives to promote and protect freedom.

Remember, praise is voiced directly to God.  It’s you speaking to God.  I praise, you, God!

Giving voice to praise is important, but there are other ways to offer praise to God.  I love the places in the psalms where the sea, the fields, the mountains, trees and all creatures sing praise to God.  They obviously don’t praise God using our language.  Just by being a glorious part of God’s creation, they praise God.

Thinking about praising God also reminded me of a prayer from the Prayer Book, the General Thanksgiving from the Daily Office.  It comes at the end of Daily Morning Prayer and Daily Evening Prayer.

[W]e pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives,
by giving up our selves to your service,
and by walking before you
in holiness and righteousness all our days.

What does it mean for us to praise God “not only with our lips, but in our lives?” 

I think we do that when we fulfill our vocation, whenever we do the work God calls each of us to.  The word “vocation” has unfortunately become associated with a very limited meaning—a “vocation” to monastic life or ordained ministry.  But it just means the work God calls us ALL to do.  Whether that is our life’s work over the grand arc of a lifetime or smaller tasks within an individual day.  I want to encourage you to think of the half-dozen or dozen mini-vocations God calls each of us to every day.

With that in mind, listen to this oft-quoted passage from Frederick Buechner on “vocation” (Wishful Thinking).

It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this.  The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done.  If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b).  On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do.  The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Whenever we fulfill our vocation, we praise God.

Today and always, let us praise God:  With our lips AND with our lives!