Absalom Jones & the Gift of Difference

Sermon preached on Absalom Jones Sunday (the 6th Sunday after the Epiphany) at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene:  Galatians 3:23-28; 5:1

            The first Service of the newly organized St. Thomas’ African Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, was held on July 17, 1794.  Absalom Jones, the leader of the congregation, did not preside at the Service since he was not yet ordained.  The officiant was the Rev. James Abercrombie, an assistant minister at Christ Church, Philadelphia and the preacher was the Rev. Samuel Magaw, rector of St. Paul’s Church, Philadelphia, both white men, of course.

            As the members of the new church  planned for the Service, it may have seemed somewhat insulting to be sent an assistant minister to preside on this auspicious occasion, but the members of St. Thomas’ had not yet heard the sermon, which is to say that they had not yet heard the true nature of the word “insulting.”

            Mr. Magaw preached to the members of St. Thomas’ about their duties, now set before them in this new church.  Here are his words:[1]

The first [duty] is Gratitude to God, for having directed, in his own wise Providence, that you should come from a land of Pagan darkness, to a land of Gospel light…

The next duty is to your earthly benefactors, who planned your emancipation from slavery.

            It must have crossed Absalom Jones’ mind in that moment that no one but himself had “planned” his emancipation from slavery.

            Magaw went on:

Another duty, is compassionate love to your brethren, who are yet in darkness, or bondage, in other parts of the world.

            And here we must give credit to Mr. Magaw for praying at this point in his sermon:

O, mighty God! Thou dost encourage us in this thing. For notwithstanding the confusion of nations, and the corruption and madness of human passions, there is some prospect that the general cause of justice, of freedom, and of peace on earth, will at last prevail!

            These are words that expressed the angel of the better nature of the Episcopal Church at the time.  Unfortunately he did not rest in that good place.  He continued:

Humility is the next duty.  Remember your former condition….when you are tempted to cherish the least pride, in your freedom -- in dress -- in your favorable reception among your fellow-citizens, and even in this stately building; or in any of your civil, as well as religious privileges; then check yourselves, by confessing privately and publicly, that “a slave ready to perish, was my father:” or if all cannot say this; you may unite in expressions still more humbling, and say “a sinner -- a fallen man -- a rebel against God -- an heir of wrath; and, until redeemed, a child of hell, was my father.”

            Do not forget, I hear him saying, your place.  There’s more, but you have undoubtedly heard enough.  Clearly Absalom Jones and his people truly wanted to be Episcopalians!

            The story of persons of African descent in the Episcopal Church is primarily a story of incredible perseverance.  What was that perseverance about?  And what is the gift of that perseverance for us today?

            It is clear that Absalom Jones and the other leaders of St. Thomas’ Church were not entirely enthused by Mr. Magaw’s words. Within a month they published a statement entitled, “The Causes and Motives for establishing St. Thomas’ African Church.”[2] It does not mention the occasion of the church’s first Service, but it clearly is a response to what was heard there.

            It actually is written with great humility.  Included are these words:

…we are now encouraged through the grace and divine assistance of the friends and God opening the hearts of our white friends and brethren, to encourage us to arise out of the dust and shake ourselves, and throw off that servile fear, that the habit of oppression and bondage trained us up in. And in meekness and fear we would desire to walk in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

            The key line is near the end, I think:

…it is needful that we enter into, and forthwith establish some orderly, christian-like government and order of former usage in the Church of Christ; and, being a to avoid all appearance of evil, by self-conceitedness, or an intent to promote or establish any new human device among us. 

            In other words, the folk who established St. Thomas’ African Church sought affiliation with the Episcopal Church because they wanted both to be able to exercise their own dignity and freedom and to do so in fellowship with the historic church, even if that meant they would continue to struggle for equality within that larger structure.

            That is either the very definition of insanity or it is the grace of what St. Paul calls koinonia, a word usually translated as “fellowship” or “communion.”  In other words, Absalom Jones and his people knew the truth of what we heard St. Paul say this morning, that in Christ there

…is no longer slave or free…for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

But they also knew, whether consciously or unconsciously—either way by the grace of the Holy Spirit—that they had that gift to give the larger Church, a gift they fully knew that Church would at best resist and at worst refuse.

            And resistance and refusal is indeed the story of the next two hundred years of Episcopal Church history, yet, again by the grace of God, progress, as the great hymn says, “with a steady beat.”

            I do not think Episcopalians of European descent—of which I, of course, am one—are fully cognizant of their own duty of gratitude to our sisters and brothers of African and Caribbean descent, without whose perseverance this Church of ours would not be the voice for the good news of God in Christ that it is today.  We would not proclaim our duty to uphold and promote the dignity of every human being, the promise of our baptismal covenant that has shaped this church more than anything else in our generation, without the steadfast and tireless witness of African and Caribbean American Episcopalians.

            As one who has brought his own challenge of difference to the church, I am grateful to you, a gratitude that deepens every moment I am privileged to be a part of this community of faith and its history.

            Besides this incredible legacy, what this history of perseverance means for us today is, at least partially, the ongoing witness we make to what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks[3] has called “The Dignity of Difference.”

            The vision of God is indeed, of one humanity, a humanity equally created and beloved and gifted by God.  This is the God to whom St. Paul witnessed in a world where the differences between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free were the very bedrock of society and Christians were thought of as those people who turn the world upside down (which was not meant as a compliment).

            But the vision of God is also the gifted uniqueness of each and every one of us.  The good news is that our unity in Christ does not obliterate our uniqueness in Christ.  Difference remains a gift that in some mysterious way, makes our unity possible—a unity that is not forced upon us, but a unity in which “for freedom Christ has set us free.”

            A couple of sentences from Rabbi Sacks that express a truth that I believe Absalom Jones knew full well and was precisely his motivation—or at least the Holy Spirit’s—in taking the hard road of affiliating himself with the Episcopal Church.  Sacks writes:

We are particular and universal, the same and different, human beings as such, but also members of this family, that community, this history, that heritage. Our particularity is our window on to universality, just as our language is the only way we have of understanding the world we share with speakers of other languages.  Just as a loving parent is pained by sibling rivalry, so God asks us, his children, not to fight or seek to dominate one another. God, author of diversity, is the unifying presence within diversity.[4]

            The gift—and the hard work—of a community such as ours is that each one of us can give the gift of who we uniquely are, and receive that same gift from others, and in this exchange of gifts we find, together, the freedom for which Christ has set us free.

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[1] The entirety of Mr. Magaw’s “discourse” can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h471t.html.

[2] The entirety of this declaration can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h1588t.html.

[3] Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the [British] Commonwealth, a post he has held since 1991.  He is a member of the House of Lords and the other of many books.  Learn more about him at http://www.chiefrabbi.org.

[4] Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Continuum, 2003), p. 56.

Death Cannot Prevent Healing

Sermon preached on the 5th Sunday after the Epiphany, February 5, 2012 at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene:  Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39

Death Cannot Prevent Healing

The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth….[who] gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.

My Grandmother Leah

            As a preacher, I must confess, I am not fond of the stories of Jesus healing the sick.  I tried this week to wrestle with why that is so.

            Certainly it has something to do with the difficulty of interpreting these stories to a 21^st century audience.  There is nothing like a good exorcism story from one of the Gospels (such as we had last week) to underscore what a different world we live in from Jesus and his contemporaries.

            That is not all, however, and it is really just the reason on the surface.  If I dig a little bit I come face to face with my own relationship with illness and, ultimately, death.  It is something that most of us will avoid coming face to face with as much as possible.  And why not? There does not seem to be any possibility for good news there.

            I think the most awful thing for me about sickness and death is their capacity to separate us from, well, ultimately, life.  We all know this from our experience of death, the overwhelming loss of relationship that is almost too much to bear.

            Illness does this to us as well, though.  When I was sick three or so years ago and was on disability for awhile, I felt the physical separation I experienced from this community acutely.  Illness can isolate us from others.  But illness also can divide us from ourselves in a way, as we experience what seems like the betrayal of our bodies or minds.

            And then there is the separation we can feel from society and its sense of well-being, no matter how warped that sense of well-being is.  I remember one of my New Testament teachers in seminary describing how in Jesus’ day, illness was a cultural phenomenon.  Illness almost always resulted in a status of “unclean.”  Illness was a manifestation of weakness and/or guilt.  Sin and illness were inextricably entwined.

            I approached him after class and said that such a way of experiencing and interpreting illness was still alive and well.  “Yes,” he said, “in certain primitive cultures.”  I responded, “You mean like 20^th century Western New York?”

            My great grandmother, Pearl, had a saying, “Growing old is fine unless you weaken.”  Being sick in my family did not bring on a great deal of sympathy.  Still doesn’t.  The assumption, even if unspoken, is that you probably did something wrong. We still use that language, don’t we?  We say, “Something is wrong with my arm.”

            I remember when my great grandfather, Carl, died in 1977.  Grandpa Carl had sliced the fingers of his left hand in the late 1950’s working on a potato harvester.  I remember his son saying as we walked away from the grave, “It is too bad he spent so many years being worthless.”  And I remember when my Grandma Pearl had to leave her home and go into a nursing facility at the age of 96.  There was this sense in the family that she had failed.  And we use that language too, don’t we?  “I saw so-and-so in the hospital. She’s failing.”

            Interestingly enough, the Greek word we translate as “devil,” diabolos, literally means “the divider,” or “the separator.”  Demonic forces are forces that separate us, draw us apart, split us off.  Perhaps the gut-level understanding of illness in Jesus’ day is really not very far from our own.

            That means healing is a bringing together, or, one might say, a making whole.  The trouble we have in the church is when we use the word “healing” that is what we mean.  We do not mean “cure.”  We don’t even mean the lack of illness.  It is entirely possible for someone who is sick, even dying, to be healed in the sense of “made whole.”  I think this is what we mean when we talk about dying “a good death.”  It is to die healed, in a state of wholeness, or something close to it.

            We get hung up on the “miracle” aspect of these healing stories, something I think even Jesus knew was not helpful.  I’m convinced that was part of why he did not want people talking about him.  He knew that a relationship with God based on God’s ability to do miracles was a dead end, so to speak.  Even if miracles happen, they are always a short-term solution.  Jesus may have raised Lazarus from the dead, but Lazarus died again at some point.  In the long run, death trumps miracle every time.

            But death cannot trump wholeness.  Death cannot separate us from God and, therefore, death cannot separate us from one another.  Physically, yes.  Spiritually, no.  In one sense the only miracle that counts for us is the miracle of our baptism, when we are acknowledged as eternal members of the communion of saints, “marked as Christ’s own for ever.”  We are in an indissoluble bond with God.

            In our exuberance at this good news we sometimes are tempted to say too much, as our ancestors have before us.  We want there to be a simple formula. If I am right with God, God will watch over me and guard me.  Take the hymn “Eagle’s wings,” inspired by our passage from Isaiah this morning.  The last verse:

For to the angels he’s given a command

To guard you in all of your ways;

Upon their hands they will bear you up,

Lest you dash your foot against a stone.

            Lovely, but dangerous, I think.  Very tempting. I want it to be true.  But I have plenty of stubbed toes that seem to say otherwise.  And I think it is way too simple to say that they were my fault.  Some of them, yes.  But by no means even most.

            Isaiah actually says it better

The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth….[who] gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.

            It is God who creates, brings together, makes whole, gives power and strength, courage and peace, even when our foot has been dashed against a stone, even when we are well beyond the grasp of miracle.

            So is it OK to pray for a miracle?  Or healing as in a cure?  Of course it is.  I think that’s about as natural as breathing.  But, keep your spiritual wits about you when faced with illness—either your own or another’s.  Wholeness is what is of ultimate importance.  Relationship is what really matters.

            I’ve talked about my grandmother Leah some before. She was Pearl’s daughter, although, unlike her mother, she did not live a long life. She died of colon cancer at the age of 49, when I was 11.  I was her eldest grandchild and we were relatively inseparable.

            The day before she died I was sitting in the hospital lobby while my mother and great grandmother went to see her.  I wasn’t allowed in, of course.  But then my mother appeared, and said, “She wants to see you.”

            Blessedly, this little hospital in Hornell was all on one floor. So my mom took me outside and around to the window into my grandmother’s room. I was startled by her appearance.  It was my first time staring death in the face.

The window was open, just a screen.  I don’t remember saying any words.  There weren’t any words to say, just to be there.  Against the orders of the doctors, my great grandmother had brought one of my grandmother's favorite meals, “peas and potatoes” cooked in hot milk and butter.  She had eaten a goodly portion.

            “I wish you could have some,” she said.  It was something we had shared countless times.  “The screen won't open,” my mother added.  I touched the screen.  My grandmother nodded, and touched the screen back.

            My grandmother died the next morning.  I was devastated but I was not destroyed.  I knew, even without the language of faith, that the relationship I had with her would never die and I knew she knew that too.

            Death visited us and it was terrible, but death could not take the wholeness away.  Death could not prevent healing.

            That is what Isaiah meant, I think, when he said that we would soar with wings like an eagle.

God is Not Finished with Us Yet

Sermon preached on the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene (Annual Meeting of the parish):  Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

            “The Episcopal Church is dying.”

            I have been an active member of the Episcopal Church since 1979 and for almost all that time I have heard this Jonah-like doomsday prediction. It is like Paul delivering the hard message to the Corinthians:  “The present form of this world is passing away.”  Prepare yourself, because it is all coming to an end.  Is that all we can do as a church, is prepare to die?

            I blame no one for making this prediction because the numbers are grim.  When I was born in 1961, the Episcopal Church had 3.6 million members.  I joined a 2.8 million member Church in 1979.  Today, we are members of a 1.9 million member church.  Not good. Not good at all.

            We are not alone, of course. Mainline Protestant Christianity from us to the Southern Baptists is in this same decline, as is the Roman Catholic Church in some parts of the country, including this one.

            The circumstances that brought us to this place are legion. Some of them are our fault. Many of them are not.  Any one answer is too easy, including that those mega-churches are the ones being successful these days. The only thing they have succeeded in doing is soaking up our people.  The fastest growing religious segment of the United States is actually “none of the above,” which means not practicing at all.  The percentage is approaching 40% of the adult population, up from something like 15% in the 1970’s.

            It is important that we know these numbers so that we do not bury our heads in the sand.  We should not pretend that everything is going to be all right.  No one could possibly say that about the mainline church with any honesty.

            Having said that, though, I do not believe the Episcopal Church is dying.  To believe that, I would have to believe that either God has abandoned us or we have abandoned God, and I do not believe either of those things.

            There may be another way of looking at all this, and, therefore, of reacting to it.  Take Paul’s pronouncement that “the present form of this world is passing away.”  That sounds like nothing but bad news.  It sounds like we should hunker down, protect ourselves, and wait for the worst.

            But what if Paul is telling good news, not bad?  What if it is good news that the present form of the world is passing away?  After all, who among us is satisfied with the present form of the world?  Who among us does not wish for the kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven, for which we pray almost every time we pray?

            So what if the decline of the Episcopal Church is good news?  I don’t mean that it is not painful or threatening. But what if it is also good news?

            I said a moment ago that I could believe neither that God had abandoned us nor that we have abandoned God.  So if God is still with us, what is God up to?  That’s the positive question we should be asking.

            I did not come up with this thought on my own.  I came to it in conversation with an Anglican Church of Canada priest named Alan Roxburgh.  It is his belief that churches like ours are not dying, but the way we have practiced being the church is.  He says[1]

We keep looking for ways to turn it around. What program will work? What resource?  What needs in the community do we need to meet in order to get people to come into our church?  The underlying assumption to all these anxious attempts to turn it around is that all we need to do is find a way for people to know how wonderful we are and they will start coming to church again and they will put money in the plate and we will be whole again.

It’s never going to happen.

            This decline, Roxburgh says, is a gift from God.  It is forcing us to stop clinging to an old way of being church in which we could assume that most people agreed with us and that they needed to be part of us to be good Americans, if not simply good people. We either let go of thinking like that or we do die.

            Roxburgh says,

It’s never going to happen. But God never gives up. The Holy Spirit is messing with us, unraveling the church because the Spirit is not done with us yet.  What is happening to us is an invitation by God to become a very different church.  We have [for instance] created clergy whose focus is the church, and who only know how to make the church run reasonably well, talk church talk, and ask church questions.  There’s a point in the Book of Ezekiel where God says to Ezekiel the prophet/priest, “Stop looking for me in the Temple. I’m not stuck there anymore and you need to join me where I am.”[2]

God is out there in the world ahead of us.  This is a gift from God.  How will we learn to live in this new reality that we do not have control of God in our churches, but God is loose in the world and our job is to follow?  And in order to follow, the most important thing we have to give up is our control of who we call “the stranger,” or “the strange,” or “the other.”  In fact, we need to take up the mantle of the stranger and go out into the world and dare to be different.

            “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says, “and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news.”

            In our time this is not the message of the church to the world. It is the message of the world to the church, a message and an invitation from God.

            I am wildly hopeful because of these thoughts.  God is doing something with us.  But, of course, we are free, so we must decide to cooperate.  What does that mean?  Many, many things. I suspect the change we are called to is deep.  It does not mean, I think, that we are called to give up everything, although I may be wrong about that. I am an Episcopalian, so I believe the tradition is a gift to us as well.  But what are we to do, for instance, with buildings built to say to the world, “God is in here, you must come in here to meet him,” when we are really trying to say exactly the opposite thing?

            There is no simple, easy answer, no single program that we can run that will fix us, no person who is smart enough or charismatic enough to turn it around.  There is only us, together.  And I think these things are true:

·         We need to stop wringing our hands and being anxiously reactive to what is happening to us, and claim what is still true:  God is with us and has a purpose for us.  God is not finished with us yet.

·         The Episcopal Church has a lot of baggage and changing it is like turning an aircraft carrier.  But at our heart is a faithfulness and a way of engaging the world that is holy and it is a very fine way of delivering the good news.  I love this tradition and believe with all my heart it is worth passing on.

·         We are perfectly capable of repentance, of change, of re-thinking, we just have to be willing to take risks.  That does not mean throwing common sense to the wind, but it does mean opening ourselves to Gabriel’s message that all things are possible with God.  A for instance—it is a common notion here that there is not much we can do to change this 19^th century building for the betterment of our mission in the 21^st century. And yet, at least three times in the history of this congregation, we have done precisely that.

In short, Jesus is still saying, “Follow me.” We are still being called. There is life in us yet.  We are being changed for the glory of God.  God is not finished with us yet.

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[1] The quotes in this sermon from Alan Roxburgh are from notes taken during his presentation on November 7-9, 2011 at the semi-annual meeting of the Church in Metropolitan Areas.  They are not exact quotes.  Roxburgh’s website is www.roxburghmissionalnet.com.

[2] This takes place in chapters 9, 10 and 11 of Ezekiel.  Ezekiel was a priest before he was called to be a prophet, and was one of the first taken into exile in Babylon in 597 b.c.e.

What to Do When a Samaritan Crashes the Christmas Party

Sermon preached on Christmas Eve 2011 at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Luke 2:1-20

Later on in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus sends out his followers on their first mission on their own (Luke 10). Go out and do what I have been doing: bring the kingdom of God near to the people you meet. We are told little of their adventures, but we are told that they returned with joy.

Jesus is very pleased, as well as any teacher might be. He “rejoiced in the Holy Spirit,” Luke tells us, and at the end of his bubbling over with joy, he says,

Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. I tell you, so many people—prophets and kings among them—wanted to see what you see, and they were not able.

At that moment, Luke says, an expert on the religious law stood up to test him. Maybe he had heard all this rejoicing and wandered over and was confused by what Jesus was talking about. What were his ancestors not able to see that these people could see now?

“Teacher,” he asks, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus knew of his great knowledge of the law, and so he used that and answered his question with a question, one of his favorite things to do. “What is written in the law?” he asks, “How do you interpret it?”

The lawyer gives as his answer what had become pretty standard in Jewish teaching over the past few centuries. He quoted Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength.” And then he quoted Leviticus, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Excellent, Jesus says, do these things in order to have life.

Then lawyer blurts out what may be is his chief question in his interpreting the law. It may be something that he and his colleagues argue about all the time. Luke says he asked because he wanted to “justify himself,” in other words, he wanted Jesus to confirm his thinking on the matter. “So who exactly is my neighbor?” he asks.

This time, instead of another question, the lawyer gets a story.

A man was walking on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he’s attacked by a band of robbers, which would not have been unusual on that road. They take everything he has and beat him within an inch of his life and leave him to die on the side of the road.

Not long after that, a priest happens by, but he pretends he doesn’t see the man and passes by him on the far side of the road. Not long after that, a Levite (sort of like our deacons) does the same.

At this point, the lawyer knows exactly what is going on in the story. He knows why the priest and the Levite passed by. If they stopped and handled the man, who might very well be dead, the law said they would be ritually unclean. That would have made their life very complicated. So it was easy for them to choose not to get involved.

Jesus goes on. Now the next person who came by on the road was a Samaritan.

At this the lawyer’s ears would have shot up like my greyhound’s when he hears something strange. A Samaritan was a foreigner, but not just any foreigner. The Samaritans were ethnically related to the Jews and they followed a form of the Torah, the Law of Moses. They, in fact, thought they followed it the right way and the Jews did not. To make it short, they hated each other as only religious people can.

This Samaritan, however, when he sees the man by the side of the road is moved with compassion. He bandaged the man up, put him on his donkey and took him to a nearby inn. He stayed with the man overnight, and made arrangements the next day with the innkeeper for his continued care. “I’ll check on him when I come back this way,” he says, “and repay you anything he has cost you.”

“Which one of these three people who came upon the beaten man by the road was a neighbor to him?” Jesus asks. There is no other answer, and the lawyer gives it, although he must have practically choked on it. He can’t, however, bring himself to say the word “Samaritan.” “The one who showed mercy,” he says. “Excellent,” Jesus says, “go and do the same.”

Now why have I spent so long telling this story from Jesus’ ministry when I am supposed to be talking about Jesus’ birth? Perhaps I just did not have another Christmas sermon in me? No. It is because you cannot understand the meaning of the Christmas story if you do not know and understand the rest of Jesus’ life.

You see one important reality about reading and understanding the Gospels is that you have to remember that they were written backward. They were not written by some who was following Jesus around taking notes. They were written by people who knew the end of the story, and that profoundly affected how they understood and wrote about the rest of the story, including its beginning.

Now I happen to think that the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” may be the most important question in Luke’s Gospel. It is an urgent question for him. He is writing not for one particular community, he is writing for the known world, the Roman Empire. One of the ways the Empire was changing the world was that people were mixing everywhere. Nobody stayed in their own place anymore. There were Jews in Rome, and Greeks in Palestine, Egyptians here and Carthaginians there.

It was clear to Luke that Christianity was not an ethnic or tribal religion, in fact it was exactly the opposite. So what is the first and foremost question every follower of Jesus has to be clear on? That’s right: Who is my neighbor?

The answer? There are two answers, really, each of them as radical as the other, and they are both found in Luke’s Christmas story.

Answer number one. Question: Who is my neighbor? Answer: God.

Judaism, and our other monotheistic cousin, Islam, have something in common. God is understood to be completely and totally other. That’s why one of the greatest prohibitions in both those religious systems is against making any image of God. You can and should adore God, but do not think you can get anything like close to him.

If anything, Jesus’ principal conflict with his own religious system was that it held God at a distance. “The kingdom of God is at hand,” he said, by which he clearly meant, “God is at hand.” Right in front of your eyes. “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see.”

The whole point of the Christmas story is not that you have to believe every jot and tittle of it as if it were historical fact. God bless you if you do, but that is not the point. The point is to bring us to the place where we not only understand but see that God chooses to be our neighbor.

As John says at the beginning of his Gospel, “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” which is actually a pretty tame translation. It literally says, “The Word became flesh and pitched a tent in our neighborhood.” The Word became flesh and moved in. The occupation of God.

Answer number two. Question: Who is my neighbor? Answer: Absolutely everybody, no exceptions possible at all.

So Jesus is born in obscurity, not in Jerusalem, but in a little town called Bethlehem. Sure, that was where the great King David was born, but nobody in Jesus’ day thought Bethlehem was a particularly important place, and they certainly didn’t call it “the city of David,” as Luke calls it. Jerusalem was the “City of David.” God did not choose to pitch a tent in Jerusalem. That would come later, and the consequences would be…well that’s another story.

And who are the first witnesses of this remarkable birth? Who gets to hear the angels sing? Who receives the amazing news of peace among those whom God favors, as if they were among those kind of people. Shepherds.

We can miss the radical nature of this, because the Bible has many good images of shepherds. “The Lord is my shepherd…,” and all that. The Bible seems to like shepherds very much. But people of Jesus’ day did not like shepherds. They certainly did not think them at all important or honorable or worthy of God’s favor. It was a hard, mean life dealing with the dumbest animals on the face of the planet. Yet they were God’s first neighbors on
earth.

The message is clear from this story to the end as news of the resurrection spreads throughout the world. Love God, the God who is your neighbor. Love one another, and that means absolutely everybody. So the first Christians were thought of as “those people who turn the world upside down,” because they actually thought God was with them, not theoretically, but really, and they created communities that broke every boundary that existed in their world.

“Blessed are the eyes,” Jesus said, “that see what you see.” To see God in the neighborhood, and to see neighbors everywhere. To know you yourself are neighbor.

In Tattoos on the Heart (from which I have quoted several times recently), Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who has worked for many years with Hispanic gang members in Los Angeles, tells about the time 60 Minutes came to interview him. It was 1990. Mike Wallace was the interviewer. Father Greg writes,

Wallace arrived at the poorest parish in Los Angeles in the stretchest of white limousines, stepped out of the car, wearing a flak jacket, covered with pockets….

For all his initial insensitivity, toward the end of the visit, in a moment unrecorded, Wallace did say to me, “Can I admit something? I came here expecting monsters. But that’s not what I found.”

Later, in a recorded moment, we are sitting in a classroom filled with gang members… Wallace points at me and says, “You won’t turn these guys in to the police.” … I say something lame like, “I didn’t take my vows to the LAPD.” But then Wallace turns to a homie and grills him on this, saying over and over, “He won’t turn you in, will he?” And then he asks…, “Why is that? Why do you think he won’t turn you over to the police?” The kid just stares at Mike Wallace, shrugs…and says, “God…I guess.”

Father Greg reflects on his experience,

I was brought up and educated to give assent to certain propositions. God is love, for example. You concede “God loves us,” and yet there is this lurking sense that perhaps you aren’t fully part of the “us.” The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God’s fingertips.

…Then who can explain this next moment, when the utter fullness of God rushes in on you…You see, then, that it has been God’s joy to love you all along.

Father Boyle is able to do the ministry he does because he not only knows that it is God’s joy to love him, but he believes that to be true of absolutely everybody.

God became our neighbor so that we might see and experience this very thing about which the angels sang: Glory to God and peace to those in whom God delights. That’s you and me and absolutely everybody, the ones who God has chosen to be neighbor to.

Tonight all I ask is that you let this story of Jesus’ birth help you answer the question at the heart of everything: Who is my neighbor? Be ready when a Samaritan crashes the Christmas Party.

Four Steps on Our Journey to the Baby

Sermon preached on the 4th Sunday of Advent, December 18, 2011, at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Luke 1:26-38, 46-55 For many years during Advent I have been brushing aside people who say to me things like, “This must be a stressful time of year for you.” “No,” I blithely say, “I’ve done this long enough that there is very little stress anymore.” That is not true this year. This Advent has been chaos and I have been running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off. And guess what? Despite this fact, Advent for me is being a richer and deeper experience than it has for a long time. This year, I could see, in the big picture, what Advent is trying to say to us, what it is trying to do to us. It is about the nature of our relationship with God and how we grow in that relationship. It parallels the themes of the four Sundays. On the First Sunday of Advent we always read one of the apocalyptic sections of the Gospels: Jesus talking in foreboding terms about the future. My favorite story to get us to the place these stories want to take us is an Annie Dillard story. In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie writes about a Christmas Eve when she was a young girl. The family had all gone out to dinner—in itself this was a big deal. Dad and Mom, Annie, and her little sister eating in a restaurant. They got home much later than Annie or her sister were normally up and clearly it was time for bed. There came a knocking on the door, a strange and startling thing all on its own. Soon everyone was calling for Annie, “Look who’s here!” She peaked around the corner and she saw who was there: Santa Claus. “I never—ever—wanted to meet Santa Claus,” she writes. “I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God…Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you’d been bad or good….And I had been bad.” Annie ran upstairs and refused to come down. She refused and refused and refused until the rest of her family—and Santa Claus—gave up. The Santa Claus at her door was Miss White, a neighbor lady. Annie didn’t know that until many years later, of course. She and Miss White were actually friends. Miss White liked to teach Annie things. Six months after the Santa Claus episode, Miss White and Annie were in Miss White’s backyard. Miss White had a magnifying glass and said she wanted to show something to Annie about the sun. Annie writes, “She focused a dab of sunshine on my palm….It burned….I ripped my hand away and ran home crying.” After some reflection, Annie ends her story this way: Miss White, God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love…and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were afraid. Fear is where we often begin in our journey with God. Sometimes we pick up that fear from the Bible text we’re reading. Sometimes other people trying to save us from hell induce that fear. Sometimes it’s just our own fear of the unknown, if nothing else, our fear of death. Mary herself first reacts with fear to the angel Gabriel and his message. Fear is where we often begin. And some of us get stuck there, and some of us just turn away and deny the whole thing because if it is about fear they don’t want to have any part of it. The latter is especially too bad because if they would just take a couple steps forward instead of turning away, they would find that fear is not where the story ends. If we hang in there and walk through our fear, we get to the place of awe and wonder, the place of John the Baptist in the wilderness, where we go on the Second Sunday of Advent ever year. John was reminding Israel, albeit in somewhat harsh terms, that something bigger was going on right under their noses. His command to “repent” was in many ways a plea for his people to open their eyes. Be ready, John was saying, for what I do not fully understand and what you do not and will not fully understand either. To be in awe is to have a keen sense of this mysterious other, another that you know is bigger than yourself. This is such an important step because so many of us suffer from a sense of self, and the world, and even God, that is simply too small. It might seem that those two steps are all that is necessary, but they are not. In one of our favorite hymns, we ask to be “lost in wonder, love and praise.” But we know we cannot stay there. We cannot stay “lost.” We have to be able to move toward this awesome Mystery and even embrace it. So we seek to know the Mystery more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, and that is the Third Sunday of Advent. On that Sunday we read some story about John the Baptist’s relationship with Jesus. The quintessential one we read last year from Matthew, where John sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Seeking deeper relationship with the Mystery means asking questions, sometimes, oftentimes, questions that imply doubt or even disbelief. John had clearly come to doubt whether Jesus was the one for him to ask that question. Then there is that other great seeker from the Gospels, Thomas, whose feast day we celebrate this Wednesday. He was stubborn: “Unless I see him with his wounds, I will not believe.” You don’t have to move from awe and wonder to seeking. Again, you may decide that the Mystery will stay a mystery which means, rationally, that it isn’t real. Seeking and longing with the inherent questions they raise are a place we can stay for a long time. This is primarily because the Mystery does not answer our questions in a direct way. The two words that I think best sum up how the Mystery “answers” questions are “sacrament” and “parable.” In sacraments the Mystery uses things of the earth to be windows to itself. Bread and wine become more than they seem to be. Getting’s one’s questions answered does not mean leaving the awe and wonder behind. And the Mystery incarnate in Jesus rarely answered a question directly. Instead he told open-ended stories, parables. Mary went through this in her encounter with the angel. “How can this be since I am a virgin,” she asks? And Gabriel gives her a classic answer that circles around the question with something like poetry. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you…” Eventually we learn that there is only one answer to all our questions and that answer is love, what we call agapé love, love that manifests itself in the desire to serve, to be compassionate, hospitable and generous. In this love, you, yourself, and your view of others and the world, and even God, become large. They break open. Four stages of spiritual growth: fear, awe and wonder, seeking and questioning, love. Of course they are not really linear. We cycle back through them again and again. And (this is important) we never leave any of them behind. Whenever we arrive at the “love terminal” we are carrying three bags with us: A suitcase full of fear, a garment bag of awe and wonder, and a laptop bag with every question we have ever asked and longing we have ever longed. Mary took all these things from her encounter with the angel, and she travelled with those bags, the same bags with which we travel, to visit her cousin Elizabeth, where she sang her song, a song about the God, the Mystery, that had come to her and, she certainly believed, was coming to the whole world. “You have mercy on those who fear you,” she sang. But she also sang in awe, “You, the Almighty have done great things for me, and holy is your Name.” There is not a question in the song, of course, but she does recall the promise and the longing. “You have remembered your promise of mercy, the promise [you] made to our forebears, to Abraham and his children for ever.” And the song is, of course, dominated by love, but, again, the kind of love that seeks to serve in compassion, hospitality and generosity, that has the consequences justice always has: “You have filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” We are all in different places on this wondrous journey, and it is not unkown for someone to be in more than one place at the same time. Fear, awe and wonder, seeking and questioning, agapé love. Advent is a time to find where we are on that spectrum and bring who we are right now to the manger, where Mary and her baby will receive us as guests along with the shepherds and the magi. And we will find there in the baby a hint of our fear, a great deal of awe and wonder (if we allow it), the allowing of our questioning (Mary will not have forgotten that she, too, questioned), and ultimately the love that enlarges our world and sets us free to love in turn.

The Fire's Center: For Dr. Frank Williams

Sermon preached at the Eucharist in Celebration of the Life and Ministry of Dr. T. Franklin Williams on Saturday, December 10, 2011 at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York:  Deuteronomy 10:12-15, 17-19; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 6:17-23, 27-31.

            I want to begin with a story from the tradition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They were 3^rd century hermits who chose to live in the Egyptian desert.  They were drawn there, some believe, because of the ever-present doctrinal controversies of the 3^rd and 4^th centuries.  Their lives were centered not on doctrinal belief, but on practicing the way of life that Jesus taught.

            Their lives may seem to be a very long way from the life of Franklin Williams, but listen…

            The story is told that Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph seeking counsel.  He said, “Abba, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts: now what more should I do?”

            Abba Joseph stood up and stretched out his arms and hands, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said, “Why not be totally changed into fire?”

            I thought of that story and the desert tradition from which it comes when I read the last lines of the poem Will read a few minutes ago.  The last stanza of the poem was a favorite of Frank’s, oft recited from memory.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.[1]

            When we speak of someone as being “on fire” we generally mean that they are outwardly, demonstrably passionate about something, and perhaps practicing that thing in an extraordinarily excellent way.

            There’s nothing wrong with someone being “on fire” in that way, only it is perilously close to the kind of self-centeredness that repels us rather than attracts us.  Those who are “on fire” can light the way or they can burn us.

            Frank Williams was a remarkable man because he burned with fire in a mostly gentle, mostly compassionate, mostly self-effacing way.  His fire warmed us, lit the way, but rarely, if ever, did it burn us.

            That fire came from three sources I think. It came from his family, to which he was devoted, particularly to Carter.  When I arrived at this parish seven years ago, two couples were introduced to me as if they were only one person:  John and Nicky Harmon, and Frank and Carter Williams.  Frank and Carter.

            I learned over time, of course, that Frank and Carter were very much their own people, with real differences.  Yet the gifts that Carter brought to their relationship, and the gifts that Frank brought to their relationship, were wonderfully complimentary and caused great fruit to be borne by the life and ministry of each another.

            The fire in Frank came also from science, from knowledge.  Dr. T. Franklin Williams was a man of science.  His curiosity about the world and how it works, especially the human body, was…well, it just was.  It was not something Frank did, it was who Frank was. 

            And finally, the fire in Frank came from his faith.  He saw no conflict whatsoever between his science and his faith, not that he did not accept the mystery of the relationship between the two. 

            Frank was a thorough-going Episcopalian. He did not wear his faith on his sleeve.  He had a tremendous, honest respect for other parts of the Christian tradition, and also those from other faith traditions.  But in this setting he found the food that sustained his life, gave him the on-going energy he needed to keep the fire burning.

            At one point in his teaching, Jesus says that we all have to accept the kingdom of God as a little child in order to enter it.[2]  More than anyone else in my life, except perhaps for my own grandfather, Frank helped me understand what it meant to have child-like faith.  Child-like faith is not to be confused with childish faith.  Child-like faith takes in all the knowledge and experience of adulthood, it rarely accepts easy answers and never loses its capacity to ask questions, but it also does not let the wonder and mystery of life be taken away, as happens to so many of us.

            Frank’s faith was not only about wonder as a matter of faith, though, it was also about justice.  Frank’s passionate caring about how people, especially elders, were cared for, came right out of his faith, the faith of the God who “executes justice for the orphan and the widow,” as we heard in the reading from Deuteronomy.  It is also the same thing Paul means when he says to the Colossians, “clothe yourselves with compassion…Bear with one another…”  Justice and compassion are just two parts of a whole.  And in the Gospel reading that Carter chose for today Jesus raises the stakes by teaching us that we must act in these ways not only toward those we love, not only toward those we are kindly disposed to, but toward the difficult, the stranger, and even the enemy.

            All of that, I believe, was fuel for the fire of Frank’s passion and life.  And that passion was born out in deeds, countless deeds that have made Rochester, and the world, a better place. They made Monroe Community Hospital one of the best of its kind in the country. In still too many communities such places are to be avoided like the plague. Not so here, in great measure because of Frank Williams.  He taught a couple generations of doctors and other medical professionals to combine science and compassion in order to care for the whole person, so that you are always doing to others as you would have them do to you.

            I told Carter and Mary, as we were talking the day after Frank died, that the remarkable thing to me about him, that I noticed time and again over the past seven years, was how Frank greeted and spoke with others exactly the same, no matter who they were.

            Frank was a model of one of the promises we Episcopalians make at our baptism, and which we renew at every baptism we celebrate.

I will strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

            Frank, by the grace of God, the love of his family, and the knowledge of his profession, did just that.

            So how could we not be sad today?  We have lost a real light among us, a bearer of the fire, indeed, in the words of the poet, the fire’s center.  He lived a long, full, fruitful life, but we would have loved to have had a few more years.  So we mourn and that is natural, and it is even good.

            But we must not forget.  The fire Frank carried did not belong to him.  He knew that.  He was constantly giving it away, be it in simple words of respectful greeting, or passing on the vital importance of caring for the whole person, or challenging us to be more compassionate and just in our living and to use our God-given minds for the pursuit of knowledge to care for the stranger.

            This fire burns in everyone of us. Frank is not its only source, of course.  He was too impatient actually to be like Jesus in every way.  But God has gifted us with this man and his fire and I think he leaves us with the challenge of Abba Joseph, “Why not become totally fire?”  Or in the question the poet may be asking, “Why not place your heart at the fire’s center?”

            So we mourn, but we are grateful, oh, so grateful, and we are challenged, as Jesus says to us all at the end of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and do likewise.”

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[1] The last lines of Stephen Spender’s poem, “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”

[2] Mark 10:15; Luke 18:17.

The Occupation of God?

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the 3rd Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2011: Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; John 1:6-8, 19-28


This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.


            I wonder if we could think of John’s setting up camp to prophesy and preach and baptize as a kind of first century “Occupy” movement.  “Occupy Bethany,” or “Occupy the Jordan.”

            I see similarities.  John was not out there doing his thing with anyone’s permission or authority. He didn’t seem to care about authority at all, except perhaps for how it was abused.  He certainly was not fond of either the political or religious leadership of his day. He had choice words for both, words that eventually got him murdered by King Herod II, with a little help from Salome and her devious mother.

            His general message was that something was not right about how people were living their lives and he warned that change—repentance, he called it—was absolutely vital for the future of a society that lived up to the ideals of its founders (not to mention God).

            I will confess that I am not as knowledgeable about the Occupy movement as I should be.  This fall has not leant itself to my exploring a new thing.  But I am intrigued by it and generally supportive of it.  Furthermore, I suspect Jesus is too.  The Occupy folks make me wonder, which is always a good thing.  Mostly I wonder what it means to believe passionately that the widening gulf between the rich and the poor in this country and around the world is nearing crisis proportions.[1] Or perhaps we’re already at the crisis point and that’s what the Occupy folks want us to wrap our minds around.

            I also wonder, however, what many of us do with the dilemma we are in.  Many of us, like it or not, have a dependency on Wall Street.  Our 401(k)s or 403(b)s do.  The endowment of this parish, and our diocese, and the Episcopal Church certainly does.  So if we support the Occupy Movement, are we biting the hand that feeds us?  Do we need to find a different way to be fed?  Or does the hand that feeds us simply need some radical reform?[2]  These are all important questions—vitally important, and as people of faith, we ought to be having conversation about them.  Again, I suspect Jesus wants us to do so.

            I also wonder how the church relates to Occupy.  I received the newsletters from a couple of our churches in the diocese recently that had fashioned a graphic that said, “Occupy the pews of your Episcopal Church.”  Clever, but I don’t like it.  At least I don’t like it unless I know those parishes are also having deep conversation about the issues raised by the Occupy Movement.  I checked—they’re not.  It seems to me this is just another example of the church exploiting others for its own benefit.  It’s another reason for a group of people who are largely alienated from the church and highly mistrustful of it to remain so.  It’s not helpful at all.  

            I like some of what Brian McLaren[3] is writing about the Occupy Movement and Christian faith.  In a blog post near the beginning of the movement, he admits that he is kind of uncomfortable with the word “occupy.” It sounds aggressive to him. But he says this in reflection after he spent a day with some Occupiers.

As we walked along, I kept thinking about Jesus' use of the term "kingdom of God." …. Like "occupy," kingdom of God” was a dangerous term for a nonviolent movement. It borrowed the language of the Roman Empire whose pax was maintained by slavery, militarism, public torture, and frequent executions (i.e., crucifixion). It was overtly provocative—bursting out of the private sphere of spirituality into the public world of kings, lords, and laws. It threw down a gauntlet before the powers that be, challenging their legitimacy with a higher authority.

If I had been around, I would have counseled Jesus against using the term.

[Like with the choice of the word “occupy”] I'm glad I wasn't consulted. It's rather obvious now that Jesus knew what he was doing. "The occupation of God has begun" might inspire the same fear and hope among people today as "the Kingdom of God is at hand" inspired in the first century.[4]

            “The occupation of God has begun.” I like that.  And I think the prophet Isaiah would have liked it.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

            That “year of favor” of which Isaiah speaks is the biblical “Year of Jubilee.” Every fifty years Israel was to set things right economically.  All property returned to its ancestral owners, all Israelite slaves freed, slavery being how the poor got used by the rich in those days.

            Jesus was so fond of this message that he used it as his inaugural sermon at the synagogue in his hometown,[5] a story we hear every St. Luke’s Day.

            This good news for the underdogs announced, indeed, the occupation of God.  “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he said about this passage from Isaiah.  Jesus himself was the occupation of God, if you think about it.  Maybe more on that Christmas Eve.

            Whether or not you agree with the tactics of the Occupy Movement, you have to admit as a Christian, that the gross inequality in this country that has ballooned over the last decade has to be addressed.  Do we really believe as followers of Jesus that it is the inherent right for those who are rich to get as rich as they possibly can even if it means that the poor get poorer, the unemployed stay unemployed, and the vast majority of children in this country lose any hope at all of anything approaching the “American dream?”

            A quote from a book of Advent meditations that I am using says it very nicely:

Like it or not, the moral economy of God is not predicated on the necessity of poverty for most and riches for some.[6]

            We need to talk about this, and we need to take action, even if it is not exactly the kind of action of the Occupy Movement.  Or maybe it is.  But I am absolutely confident in this: Jesus wants us to do something.

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[1] In 2009, total US household wealth was held 63.5% by the top 5% of the citizenry (35.6% by the top 1%).  The bottom 80% held 12.8%.  Median net worth in 2007 was $143,600 for white Americans, $9,300 for Black Americans, $9,100 for Hispanic Americans.  Between 1979 and 2009 , the top 5% of Americans saw their real incomes increase 72.7%.  The bottom 20% shrunk 7.4%.

[2] In a 60 Minutes interview on December 11, 2011, President Obama pointed out that, unfortunately, very little that anybody did to cause the 2007-2008 crash was illegal.

[3] www.brianmclaren.net

[4] From a blog, “Why I’m joining the occupation,” http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Joining-the-Occupation-Brian-McLaren-10-20-2011.html

[5] Luke 4:14-21.

[6] Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Let Every Heart Prepare (Morehouse, 1998), p. 29.