A Charlie Brown Advent (What to do when the World goes Crazy)

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY on the 1st Sunday of Advent:  Luke 21:25-36

“The Doctor is IN,” says the sign at Lucy’s booth in the comic strip Peanuts.  Ever forlorn and confused Charlie Brown confesses to her, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything about life.”  He pleads with her, “Tell me a great truth!”

Lucy asks a question first, “Do you ever wake up at night and want a drink of water?”  “Sure,” comes the reply from Charlie.  Her voice dripping with “wisdom,” Lucy pronounces, “When you’re getting a drink of water in the dark, always rinse out the glass because there might be a bug in it!”

Charlie reflects, “Great truths are even more simple than I thought they were.” 

Perhaps it would be best if we came at this apocalyptic text from Luke with Lucy’s simplicity.  

This First Sunday of Advent is one of the most difficult Sundays for Christians in our tradition.  We are not comfortable with these texts about the second coming and the day of judgment.  They remind us too much of hellfire preaching and street corner signs of doom.

Sort of like Lucy’s curbside psychiatrist’s office, we don’t expect much good news.  Charlie usually comes to her despondent.  He does not understand life.  The pieces don’t come together for him.  Lucy’s message to him is mocking; that’s part of her role in the cartoon.  But she’s on to something, and so is Charlie.  “Maybe Great Truths are more simple than I imagined.”

So is there some simple great truth for us in this end-times rhetoric?

Jesus says some scary stuff:

There will be signs in the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused at the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding at what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

If you listen closely to those words, you can almost hear a description of the coming ecological crisis, but I think Jesus is talking more broadly than that.  He is saying

You will experience the world being turned upside down and inside out, so you do not know which end is up.  What is perfectly normal will not seem normal to you.  You will be anxious and afraid.  Your faith will be shaken to its core.

Does that sound more familiar?  We live on the edge of being out of control.  We live in moments when the pieces of our lives lie at our feet and there does not seem to be any way to put them back together.  Sometimes this happens to us as individuals, sometimes as families, sometimes as communities, even nations.  These are times that are truly confusing or frightening.

So what is Jesus' advice when such times as these come upon us?

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Stand up and lift up your heads.  A simple, great truth.  To understand it more clearly it is important to see what he does not say. He does not say:

• Fall on your knees and hang your head in shame.

• Run for the hills in order to save your life.

• Be afraid, be very afraid.

No, he says, “Stand up and raise your heads.”  Why? “Because your redemption is drawing near.” Again, it is important what he does not say. He does not say:

• Your judgment is drawing near.

• The wrath of God is coming upon you.

• You are going to get what you deserve.

No. He says, “Your redemption is drawing near.”  Redemption.  What does he mean by that?  “Redemption” is one of the words used in the Bible to describe what God fundamentally wants for us and what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection does for us.  There are many words you could insert there:  salvation, rescue, healing, liberation, etc.  The point is that the time of confusion and fear is also the time of redemption, of healing, of liberation.

Christian people learn that when trial or crisis comes, we should look not for signs of ending, but rather for signs of new life because they will surely come.  That does not mean that anger at what has happened, or grief, or any other human emotion is not appropriate for Christians. It is to say that those feelings are never the last word.

I know what it is like to be in the middle of a mess I am sure I cannot get myself out of.  Some kind of defeat or betrayal or wrong choices that seem to spell the end of my life as I know it.  There are days when I cannot follow Jesus’ direction to stand up and raise my head.

But Jesus does not put it all on me when I am so deeply troubled, nor does he put it all on any one of you.  He says, “Stand up and raise your heads.”  The “your” in Greek is plural.  During these times when it feels like the world is coming unglued and there’s no way out—this is the time when we need each other.  When I cannot stand up and raise my head, I need you to do it for me.

So what is Charlie Brown’s simple, great truth here?

When the world is falling apart and you feel like you are falling apart with it, you need not fear the judgment of God, rather, you need to embrace the mercy of God, and we never have to do this alone.  Because the greatest simple Truth is that we are always, always in this together.

All of this is summed up in a subsequent strip of Peanuts.  Charlie Brown discovers this in a subsequent strip.  The first frame is entirely black with just the outline of Lucy, stumbling in the dark.  Perhaps she has stubbed her toe on the bed.  “Curse it all!” she cries.  Next frame, still black, “Blast the blackness . . . Oh, curse, curse, curse.”  Finally in the last frame stands Charlie Brown.  In the midst of the dark, he stands in the glow of a candle.   When all Lucy could do was curse the darkness—and haven’t we all been there?—Charlie Brown knows to light a candle, the kind of thing we are called to do for one another so that we can all get through life when it feels like its ending.

And so I’ll leave you with this Advent question, that will be the topic at Wednesday’s Advent series:  Can it be that in our endings, new beginnings you create?

We Need the Stranger More Than Ever

 Sermon preached on Sunday, November 10, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY:  Ruth 1:18

It’s the Sunday after a consequential election, and I have been thinking ever since then of what it means to love and serve our God, to follow the Way of Jesus, in this time and place?

I’ll try to answer that question first using the story of Ruth and Naomi.  They were faced with a crisis.  All the men had died on them, which means in their day they were in a very precarious situation.  They had no protectors, no providers, no real identity.

Naomi responds with practicality.  The best thing for her foreign daughters-in-law was for them to return to their original families and start over, as Naomi had determined to do for herself.  She knew there was nothing she could do for them.  Orpah, sadly, agrees, but Ruth has a different reaction.  In some of the most beautiful words of Scripture she says

Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

The Bible is full of quietly decisive moments and this is one of them, because Ruth’s decision will alter the course of her life such that she will eventually marry once she returns to Naomi’s homeland of Judah, and from that marriage will be born the grandfather of King David.  Without Ruth’s decision, there would have been no David.

Now you would think that the Bible would make as little of this as possible since Ruth is not a Jew. She is a Moabite, a foreigner, an alien.  But now, the Bible is willing to admit that the stranger is somehow necessary for the community’s ultimate strength.

So what do we learn from this story that helps us in this present moment?

First there is the simple determination to stay together.  In times of crisis, it is easy to let ourselves drift apart and a strong part of the current climate is the need so many of us feel to separate ourselves from one another, to divide ourselves along some perceived ethnicity or culture or earned place in society or our own (not God’s) definition of citizenship.  We must resist that, inspired by those brave and decisive words from Ruth, “Where you go, I will go; your people will be my people and your God my God.”

Related to this comes the second thing to glean from this story.  We need the stranger.  Who among us does not have the blood of a stranger running through our veins?  How we treat the stranger, the alien, will become a defining issue in the days ahead, of that I am certain.

Jesus could not be clearer about this:  the stranger is your neighbor.  The vulnerable, the one in need, for whatever reason, is the one we are called to serve, and not just serve, but to know on a deep level that the one we serve is our equal.

This message was counter-cultural in Jesus’ day, as it is in ours.  We must be prepared to be counter-cultural.

In practical terms what does this mean for us, here at the Redeemer?

At the Diocesan Convention, Bishop Kara asked us to examine some things about ourselves. Some of the questions she asked us to ponder are things like, “How do people around you know what you stand for?  Who is welcome?  How are you prepared to welcome the stranger? How does the stranger know she or he will be welcomed here?”

Those questions are critical ones for churches whose future is uncertain. And now they take on an even important role in an environment where the stranger is suspect, considered dangerous and worth nothing to our continued flourishing as a people.

Again, to try to be as practical as possible, one way this is going to play out for us is in the food pantry.  We, of course, are working on logistical stuff:  getting the rectory ready, arranging for whatever we need to have food available.  But there are some deeper questions for us to ponder.

In my experience ministries like this can develop the sense that “we” are doing something for “them.”  How can we work against this? How can we operate as if “we” is doing something for “us?”

I’ll leave those as opened-ended questions.

What has happened isn’t going to make it any easier for us to be church.  But there is also an opportunity to be clear about who we are, why we think we are here, what we see as our place in the community, and how we provide a welcoming and safe place for those in our communities that are—with very good reason—frightened about what is to come.

Saints By God

 Sermon preached on All Saints' Sunday, November 3, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY:  Isaiah 25:6-9, John 11:32-44

Last week we heard the story from Mark’s Gospel of Blind Bartimaeus, whose persistence got him an audience with Jesus. When Jesus called him, the Gospel writer tells us he leapt up and threw off his cloak.

And I talked about how we have cloaks we must throw off if we are to encounter Jesus and be ready to receive his mercy and grace.  Those cloaks we wear are often, I said, “cloaks of acceptability,” that we think hide our vulnerability or our shame.”

Let’s continue this thought today as we celebrate the Feast of All Saints.

The prophet Isaiah tells us this is an ancient idea, an ancient proclamation of good news.  Isiaah’s vision of the last days are of all people being drawn to a feast on the holy mountain.  There God will destroy the “shroud,” the cloak, that is cast over us all.

What does Isaiah see is this shroud, this cloak.  What does it seek to hide?  It is death itself.  It is the tears that this life brings. It is the disgrace we feel in this life, the shame we carry around for any number of reasons.

There’s an important difference between what the prophet Isaiah sees and what the story of Bartimaeus included.  Bartimaeus threw off his own cloak.  Isaiah sees that, in the end, it will be God who removes that cloak, that shroud. The Lord will take away the disgrace of his people.

The Letter to the Hebrews puts it another way, in two different places. Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters (2:11) and God is not ashamed to be our God (11:16).  In both cases this is not because of anything we have done, but that God has done for us.

I need to say a word about “shame.” These days shame has a bad name.  Some of that is deserved, especially when it is the shame we too easily cast on other people. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

I think it is true we could do without the need to shame other people into acting the way we want them to act, to be the person we want them to be.

But there is a place for feeling shame in any human being’s life. I do feel ashamed when I get something terribly wrong, especially when I hurt another person or creature, whether I intended to do so or not. Having no shame means having no conscience, and that can never be a good thing.

But it’s important that we understand what God’s intention is in regard to our shame.  God does not see it as the last word in our lives.  It is God’s intention to throw it off, to forgive, and to restore.

Now here is how this fits into celebrating All Saints.  Those we call saints are not people who have never done anything to be ashamed of.  We often talk about them as if that were the case.  The saints were those who got it right, who earned their status as examples of how to live a godly life.

Yet if you read their stories this is hardly ever true.  If the saints were those people who got it right, what they got right was their knowledge of God’s abounding love for them regardless of what they had done, for ill or for good.

The saints are the people who know that they could not make themselves saints, they could only seek the love of God, or, rather, to let the love of God seek them, because it is that love and that love alone, that made them right with God, right with one another, right with the world.

I suspect most of the people we have pictured around us today would have protested if someone suggested they were a saint.  They might have gone so far as to be offended that someone should call them that.

I don’t know 98% of the people pictured here, either in icons or in photographs, but I can tell you that every last one of them was wrong in believing they were not a saint.  They were right that they could not make themselves saints, Oh, very right indeed.  But they were wrong in thinking that was how it worked.

The saints of God were and are and always will be the objects of God’s amazing grace, God’s boundless mercy, God’s steadfast, unshakeable, love.

There is nothing we can do to make God love us.  There is, in fact, nothing we can do to make anyone love us. That is one of the great secrets of life.

Love is something we can only receive and let it beget in us the kind of love for God or for one another that expects nothing in return, that we totally, completely give away.

That’s how we participate in God’s project of throwing off the disgrace, wiping away the tears, and destroying the power of death forever.

Jesus called out to Lazarus, “Unbind him and let him go.”  It was the ultimate throwing off the shroud, the cloak.  And our response to God’s love should cause us to be making the same declaration. That is the great of those who have known God’s love, to cry out to another, “Unbind him, unbind her, and let her go.”  Let her, let him, throw off the cloak of acceptability and fall into the arms of the God of love.

"Mercy more than Life:" Keeping the Dream Alive

 Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY on the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9B): Mark 6:1-13.

          In this morning’s Collect of the Day we pray:

 O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Sprit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.

           “And united to one another with pure affection.”

           Now there’s a prayer that, as a nation, we need right now.  The prayer is, of course, aspirational.  It is a dream.  We know we are far from being united to each other in pure affection, or, for that matter, any affection at all.

           We can admit that this has always been so.  America has always been, first of all, a dream.  Ever since these first words were penned:

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

           It is said that Thomas Jefferson penned these words in the room of the boarding house at which he was staying in Philadelphia.  He wasn’t alone. His slave Richard Hemings was with him.

           Those words “all men are created equal” were aspirational. They expressed the dream. Maybe that was not Jefferson’s intent. Maybe he meant a limited definition of “all men.”  Probably that’s true, but I also think he was smart enough to know they were also a dream not yet fulfilled.

           We Americans are at our best as dreamers.  Certainly, Christians are at their best as dreamers, striving to know and share in the dream of God, but also aware that God has yet more dream to be revealed.  That is what the Collect says is “the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

           Our final hymn today knows about the dream, in the third verse

 O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!

           Our villages and cities have never been undimmed by human tears, but that is our dream, as long as we remember it and are constantly asking, “How can we get there?”

           We have a history in this country, and, really, it’s true in most countries, that we are most united when we have a common enemy. Think 9-11-2001.  How much better off we would be if we were most united by a common dream.

           How do we get to that place?  There is a clue in the same him, in the second line:

 O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!

           “And mercy more than life.”  That’s an odd phrase, isn’t it?  To love mercy more than life.  Life is one of our inalienable rights, the Declaration of Independence says, so how can we love something more than life itself?

           Katherine Lee Bates, the writer, knew.  For us all to be free—for all people to be created equal—we each must be willing to give at least a little. We each must be willing to sacrifice a bit of our own life in what she calls mercy, compassion for others.

          The great truth of the American Dream, and the only way to truly fulfill it, is through the generosity of spirit and substance that makes for the common good.

           We heard it last week from St. Paul, put very simply. He was asking for donations to assist those stricken by famine in and around Jerusalem. He said,

 I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of fair balance between your present abundance and their need . . . As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

           Paul was quoting the book of Exodus (16:18), part of the story of the people of God receiving manna, the miraculous bread that kept them alive in the wilderness.  Again, the sentiment is simple: “They gathered as much as each of them needed.”

           That is the spirit of mercy. We usually think of mercy as having to do with forgiveness.  But it is much more than that, because you cannot be merciful if you are not open to another, willing to share life with them at least on a basic level.

           Mercy requires empathy.  And in times of great conflict and division such as what we are in, empathy wanes, even dies.  I see bumper stickers that say “F*#& your feelings.”  In that way of relating to the world, empathy dies, so mercy dies, and any way to the common good dies, and the dream dies.

           One of the things we who are left in the Christian Church must be about these days is keeping mercy, empathy, the common good, the dream, alive.  That is simply what it means to be faithful.  We cannot follow the course of some Christians who not only have bought into the politics of division but believe that it is the only way ordained by God.

           I generally don’t like to say these words quite so bald-faced, but they are wrong. Division is not the way of God.

           You may read today’s Gospel and think otherwise.  Jesus sends out the disciples and instruct them that if they are not welcomed somewhere, if folk refuse to listen to them, then “as you leave, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

           If you think about it, it is a very feeble way of making a protest.  And the protest comes due to two things:  a lack of hospitality and an inability to listen.  Both of those are acts that keep the division alive.

           Sometimes people will not welcome our message and refuse to listen to it. All that we can do is move on to the next one, with sadness and heaviness of heart.

           The bottom-line is this:  God keeps dreaming the world into existence and calling the world to do better, to live with generosity and hospitality toward others, as much as we can, and to love empathy, compassion, and mercy for they are the only way either the dream of America or the dream of God can thrive.

The Problem of the Hidden God

 Sermon preached at The Church of the Redeemer, Addison NY on Sunday, June 23, the 5th Sunday after Pentecost:  Mark 4:35-41.

          The heart of this Gospel story is not the miracle of Jesus ordering the wind and the sea to be at peace. The heart of this story is not the miracle. It is the question,

 Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

 Hey, wake up and do something! We’re going to die!

           Here is a fundamental problem for the believer:  A storm is raging in our lives, and God seems to be asleep.

           It is a problem as old as the Scriptures. There is an interesting passage in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 45.  Isaiah delivers a speech on behalf of God that ends with a very strong statement about God’s presence:

 They pray to you, saying, “God is with you and there is no other; there is no god besides our God.”

 And the very next verse is this statement:

  Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

 And there is our frequent dilemma:  God is real.  God is hidden.

 Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

           The psalms are full of this question.

 Psalm 42:  I will say to the God of my strength, “Why have you forgotten me?

 Psalm 22, the question that Jesus cries from the cross:  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

 And the devastating Psalm 88: But as for me, O Lord, I cry to you for help . . . Lord, why have you rejected me? Why have you hidden your face from me?

           It is true that every psalm that asks God, “why are you sleeping,” resolves in the end to a firm belief in God’s presence. Every psalm, that is, except Psalm 88, whose final words are, “Darkness is my only companion.”

           So, the believer’s dilemma. God is real. God is hidden. God acts sometimes, we are sure of it, and God, like Jesus in the boat, sometimes seems to be asleep.

 Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

           There are three things we can do with this problem.

           One, we can reject God, or reject even the idea of God.  St Teresa of Avila, in the midst of a time of trial, railed against God:  “If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few of them.”  Now this did not cause Teresa to reject God, but her insight is that it does cause many to do so.

           Second, we can go in the opposite direction and deny that God is in any way hidden, asleep, or forgetful. We say very well-meaning things like, “God has a plan and everything happens for a reason.” I know for some of you that is a very real expression of belief and I have no desire to take it away from you.

           But I do think that it can be taken too far, to attribute to God things that are much more the fault of human beings and to deny other people’s experience of God’s absence.

           There is a third way, a kind of middle ground. We can live with the mystery. We can accept that many things in life are beyond our control and beyond the control of God.  I know that sounds like blasphemy. But if human free will is indeed a gift from God, that means that God has given up control of everything.  It is why at the end of the book of Job, after Job questioning God and railing against what seems to be an uncaring attitude, the only answer God can give is,

 Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

           To live with the mystery of life, not as an act of ultimate despair, but as an act of ultimate hope.

           Jesus may seem asleep, but he is in the boat with us, and we are able to call out to him, and if he does not still the storm around us, he can still the storm within us.  This is the message of the 23^rd psalm:

 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me. Your rod and staff they comfort me.

 Or, in the words of our final hymn today, we keep singing,

 When the storms of life are raging, stand by me; in the midst of tribulation, stand by me; in the midst of faults and failures, stand by me; in the midst of persecution, stand by me; when I’m going old and feeble, stand by me.

 The hymn never pretends to speak for God. It does not promise that everything will be all right.  It just offers that stubborn hope in the face of life’s mystery and call on God to stand by us.  Some days that is all we can do. But it is enough.

The Love of Christ Urges Us On

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison on June 16, 2024, the 4th Sunday after Pentecost:  2 Corinthians 5:6-17

For the love of Christ urges us on . . . From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view . . . If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.

 It is an early morning and although 20 or so 7th grade boys are standing together in a clump they are quiet.  It is too early and too cold; their feet are wet from the heavy dew on the grass.

           A boy stands at the edge of the group and shivers.  He’s wearing only gym shorts and a t-shirt, but the shivering comes as much from embarrassment as from the cold.

           The gym teacher barks orders to choose up sides.  He names the two captains.  At first the competition between them is fierce as they pick the best players.  First, second, third round.

           Then the competition shifts and the struggle becomes not to get stuck with the worst players.  The boy stands there through all this knowing his humiliation is upon him once again.  But maybe it won’t be like last week when the teacher had to force the captains to choose between the last few at all.

           A true story, of course.  But also mythic, because it describes our human insecurity:  the fear of standing there in our gym shorts, looking awkward, and not being chosen.

           What does Paul mean when he says that “in Christ” we are “a new creation?”

           Sometimes to answer a question like that it is easier to start with an image of what the opposite is.  This is what being a new creation does not look like. It does not look like the fear of not being chosen, of not belonging.

           For St Paul, being “in Christ” is a very key phrase. He uses it 87 times in his letters.  It is his simple way of describing the unity of Christ and the believer, the unity between Christ and each one of us.  When he says “in Christ” he is saying that the union between Christ and a believer is so deep and so strong that it becomes part of our identity.  I cannot understand who I am other than my relationship with Jesus.

           Which means when it comes to Jesus I always am chosen, I always belong, so much so that life is different, so different Paul uses the metaphor of “a new creation.”

           The boy in that gym class did not know this about himself.  He may have only been 12 years old, but he was experiencing the old creation.  In the old creation he depended on his sense of belonging by how he was treated by others, which seemed to be about a competition that he could not win.  In the old creation he was destined to be forever, not good enough.

           Again, this is not just about an awkward seventh grader, it is about all of us, it is about, to use Paul’s word, “anyone.” Anyone who has ever experienced what it is like to be on the outside with no clear way to the inside.

           The old creation divides the world into winners and losers, defined in such a way that for most people there is no clear path to being a winner. The only chance you have in the old creation is to learn how to act like a winner, often by attaching yourself to a winner, a hero through whom you can get some semblance of belonging.  Or you can play the game of winning by acquisition, summed up by the old, sad bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

           There is only one way to truly belong, to be a new creation independent of the need to be a winner, and that is to be “in Christ,” to know the love of God for you completely unearned or undeserved, no winning anything, required.

           That is what it means to be a new creation.  To know one’s self to be loved in an indissoluble bond with the Creator of the universe, with something outside myself that I do not need to create on my own.

           And to know that love does something to us.  It is found in the phrase “The love of Christ urges us on . . .”

 When it seems like we will never fit in . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 When doubt or grief or despair seem to take hold of us and will not let us go . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 When the world seems so stacked against us, confusing, something we never seem to get right . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 When we are gripped by death itself, which we know will one day have its way with us . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 In spite of everything we cannot control . . . the love of Christ urges us on.

 The love of Christ urges us on into the new creation, where we can let go of the old ways of not belonging into the new ways of being chosen and loved for ever.

           This is the message we need to get clear about not only for our own sakes, but for the sakes of the world around us, the “anyones” out there in need of good news.

           If the church is ever to grow again, this is the message we need to proclaim.  The message is not come and belong to the church, it is come and experience the new creation.  Come and experience the love that never dies, the belonging that no one can take away from you.

Life in a Trinary World

 Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY, on Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024:  John 3:1-17

          It is often said that this Sunday when we celebrate God as Trinity is the
only Sunday that is primarily about a doctrine rather than a story.

           I don’t think that is correct.  My suspicion has always been that the notion of God as Trinity does have something fundamental to say about life in God’s world. “Trinity,” in essence, is how we experience life in its fullness.

           We human beings live in a world that we believe works in dualities—binaries.  Good and evil, male and female, people like us and people not like us, Americans and foreigners, conservative and liberal, the righteous and sinners, straight and gay, black and white, Jew and Gentile, rhubarb lovers and rhubarb haters. You know I could go on and on and on and . . .

           This seems to be how the world works.  It keeps things simple.  But does it really work that way? Is it really that simple?

           I think knowing God as Trinity tells us no. It is not that simple. There is almost always more complexity to life than we care to admit.  And complexity, the Trinity tells us, is actually divine.

           It is, if you think about it, our dualities that are always getting us into trouble.  For example, because we could only imagine there being two kinds of people, we divided the world up by skin color—black and white we call it, when actually skin color is an a continuous spectrum, and there are very few people who are actually colored black or white.

           Those categories became so entrenched that culture grew up around them and soon “black” and “white” became cultural identities. That’s happened with almost all our binaries.  They have become so hard and fast that they are now more about cultural identity than they are about physical or geographic or sexual realities.

           And that’s fine. The way we figure our identities may not change much. On the other hand, they may.  Our younger generations live in a far more fluid world than we baby boomers or even gen x-ers. Some of them are even pushing at perhaps what we thought were our most had and fast binaries:  male and female.

           It turns out they may actually be teaching us about God and the world God has made.  Binary is not the truth in God’s world. Trinary—at least—is the truth.

          So the world God has made is not either/or.  It is not even simply both/and.  It is both/and . . . and something more.

           This has many ramifications but let me say a few words about just one aspect of it.  On my left forearm I have tattooed in Old French, Que scay-je?  It means “What do I know?”

           I learned the importance of this phrase from the man considered to be the father of the personal essay. Michel De Montaigne was a Frenchman in the 16^th century.  He wrote about himself and his experiences in the world. He was a man of deeply held beliefs and opinions.  This might mean he was a colossal bore, but he was and is not.

           He wasn’t a bore because he had the habit of constantly questioning those beliefs and opinions. There was always something more to learn, some new way to be surprised by life.  So in addition to his strongly held views, he lived by the motto: “What do I know?”

           What knowing God as Trinity should mean for us at the very least is that Montaigne was right, there is always something more. Our binaries are convenient and simple but they betray a world that is complex and in that complexity is beauty and joy and hope.

           So often when my own opinions have hardened into something that is easy for me to live with, I am brought up short by something more, and that is God the Holy Trinity at work in me, exposing me to more truth, truth that sets me free from my own capacity to think I understand exactly how things ought to be.

           We see this happening as Jesus speaks with Nicodemus.  You must be born a different way than you have already been more.  There is something more, Jesus says. There is the life of the Spirit, but watch out. When you become companions with the Holy Spirit, you’ll get blown about, many things will not be as you imagined they were, but that is the only way to enter the kingdom of God.

           You enter the kingdom of God not by what you know, but by that something other that come when you are able to see the binaries for what they are—idols.  And let the mystery of God lead you into all truth, truth that is more trinitarian than binary, truth that is something ore than we can imagine on our own.

The Stand By Me God

 Sermon preached on the Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison

           Who or what is the Holy Spirit?

           Jesus’ word for the Spirit was parakletos, “the Paraclete.”  It literally means “one who stands alongside of.”  Over the centuries, Bible translators have used a variety of different words to try to translate parakletos: “Comforter,” “Counselor,” and, what we heard this morning, “Advocate.”

           They’re all good words, but I like to say something like “The Stand By Me God.”  The Holy Spirit is the Stand By Me God, the God who never leaves my side or yours, or ours together.  We are never abandoned. We are never alone.

           This Stand By Me God, Jesus says, is “the Spirit of truth” who will guide us “into all the truth.”  That’s important!  The Stand By Me God is the true God.  It is not as we have feared. God is not the “my way or the highway” God, behave yourselves or suffer the consequences, the angry, judgmental God of our fears.  That is not the true God, the God who is revealed by Jesus.  Jesus reveals the God of Solidarity with us, Emmanuel, meaning God with us, God for us.  This is the truth.

           Which means, Jesus says, the world is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.  He seems to speak in riddles here, but what he means is, I think, quite simple.

           First, he says, the world is wrong about sin.

           The popular conception is that sin is hated by God and righteousness is loved by God, because God is, above all, a God of judgment.  Sinners are in trouble with God and ultimately go to hell in God’s great act of judgment.

           Wrong, Jesus says.  The world is wrong about sin, Jesus says, “because they do not believe in me.”  All along Jesus has been teaching not that God hates sinners, but that God loves them.  Jesus is the embodiment of a God who cannot be separated from humankind, even by its own sin.  If you can conceive of God and me being one, Jesus is saying, than you can conceive of God and sinners being one.

           Which is not to say that Jesus was a sinner, but it is to say that Jesus was fully human, and in him humanity is fully united to God. And if Jesus unites humanity to God, then he unites sinful humanity to God, because there isn’t any other kind of humanity.

           Jesus told a story (John 8:1-11) about a woman who was caught in adultery, a very bad thing, a violation of one of the Ten Commandments.  Her punishment under the Law was death by stoning, and when Jesus came upon her a crowd was getting ready to do just that.  Being a noted teacher, they asked him for his judgment in the case, assuming that he would agree with the Law.  Instead he said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  They all went away and the woman was spared be the Stand By Me God.

           Second, Jesus says, the world is not only wrong about sin. It is also wrong about righteousness.

           The world is wrong about righteousness, he says, “because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer.”  Huh?  What does he mean by that?

           He means, I think, that because he is being eternally united to God, righteousness is now about relationship with him, not about your or my ability to be good.  Does Jesus want us to be good? Of course he does. Is being good a qualification for being in relationship with Jesus? No, it is not.

           A Pharisee named Nicodemus once came to Jesus under the cover of darkness (John 3:1-17).  He was strangely drawn to him even though most of his friends were at best suspicious and at worst outright rejecting of Jesus’ teaching.  Jesus sensed his fear and gave him a challenge: “you must be born from above.”  Which is to say you must have a different way of relating to the world, the way of the Spirit, which blows where it wills.   You must relate to the world through Jesus, who has come, he says, not to condemn the world but to save it.

           Third, Jesus says, the world is wrong about judgment.

           The world is wrong about judgment, he says, “because the ruler of this world has [already] been condemned.”  Judgment has already happened.  Satan, the Accuser of humankind, has already fallen as Jesus has been lifted up and drawn all people to himself as humankind’s not Accuser, but Advocate.

           Among his final words to his disciples, Jesus says, Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  And he says, you are my friends.  We are no longer the accused, we are the advocated for by the Stand By Me God.

           This is all hugely good news.  How sad it is that the world still, by and large, does not know it, certainly does not understand it.  This largely lies on our shoulders. We have not testified to the truth!  We have not sufficiently accepted the Stand By Me God, to allow the truth of this good news to form our words and deeds.  The world sees us as accusers of our fellow women and men, not as advocates.

           The church—you and I—continue to allow the world to be wrong about God, because we keep getting it wrong ourselves.  We keep believing that God is primarily a God of angry judgment, the great Accuser in the sky.  And if we believe that then certainly the world around us isn’t going to argue with us.

           Our challenge is to believe the truth, to live into the truth, that our God is the Stand By Me God.  The “ruler of this world” is already condemned and both sin and righteousness alike are drowned in the overwhelming flood of God’s love.

           The truth is that God loves us.  Period. Full stop. No ifs, ands, ors, buts or maybes.  No fine print.  God is head over heals, puppy dog, ga-ga in love with us.  That is the message. There is no other.  Any other message is a lie, and we ought not to be afraid to call it a lie whenever we hear it.

           God loves you, Jesus says. Lift up that love and the world will be drawn to it.  Proclaim the Stand By Me God so that the world will be proved wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.  Proclaim the Stand By Me God so that the world will know the truth and the truth will set it free.

           Let us be people of the Spirit.  Let us be loved people today. Let us be free people today. Let us give thanks for and lift up the Stand By Me God.