Act Like You're Already Dead!

Sermon Preached August 5, 2007
The Church of St. Luke & St. SImon Cyrene, Rochester, New York
Colossians 3:1-11

What a bizarre message Paul has for us this morning: Act like you’re already dead!

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set you minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

A little context might help.

The community of Christians at Colossae had not been founded by Paul, but by one of his associates: Epaphras. Paul was writing to them because they were in a state of some confusion. The bottom line was that some among them were trying to make their new found Christian faith into a religion.

Like all religions, this movement among the Colossians was full of “musts” and “shoulds,” rules that needed to be followed in order to stay right with God. It’s not clear from the letter what all those rules were, but they seem to have been an interesting mix of following Jewish purity laws—ways to stay “clean”—and the insistence on certain particular mystical experiences, the kinds of things characterizing what Christians would later call “Gnosticism.” This thinking included what Paul, in chapter 2, calls “self-abasement,” the notion that who we are is fundamentally evil and our evil bodies need to be disciplined if not outright punished so that we are sure never to feel too good about ourselves in this world.

At the end of chapter two, Paul asks (using the translation of The Message)[1]:

If with Christ you’ve put all that pretentious and infantile religion behind you, why do you let yourselves be bullied by it? “Don’t touch this! Don’t taste that! Don’t go near this!” Do you think things that are here today and gone tomorrow are worth that kind of attention? Such things sound impressive if said in a deep enough voice. They even give the illusion of being pious and humble and ascetic. But they’re just another way of showing off, making yourselves look important.

Now it is very important for us to get that Paul starts from certain assumptions, and they are the same assumptions I spoke about two and three weeks ago when I was trying to prove to you that “the only good religion is a dead religion.”

Paul’s assumption is that Jesus has done something for anyone who has the simplest faith in him. Has done something, not will do something. In the first chapter of Colossians, Paul put it this way (again from The Message, with some slight modification):

We look at Jesus and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at Jesus and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him…So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death…. At one time you all had your backs turned toward God…but now, by giving himself completely on the cross, actually dying for you, Christ brought you over to God’s side and put your lives together, whole and holy in his presence….There is no other Message—just this one. Every creature under heaven gets this same Message. The message is a nutshell is just this: Christ is in you, therefore you can look forward to sharing in God’s glory. It’s that simple.

And, in chapter two, just in case you’re not convinced:

Entering into the fullness of Christ is not something you figure out or achieve. It’s not a matter of being circumcised keeping a long list of laws. No, you’re already in—insiders—not through some secretive initiation rite, but rather through what Christ has already gone through for you…If it’s an initiation rite you’re after, you’ve already gone through it by submitting to baptism. Going under the water was a burial of your old life; coming up out of it was a resurrection, God raising you from the dead as he did Christ.

And here’s my favorite part:

Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. God stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.

The Christian Message, Paul is saying, is that the best way to live life is to act like you’re already dead. Because of our relationship with God that we know in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have the capacity to live life in this world as if we had the complete freedom of the next.

What do we say about someone who has died, especially if their life has been somewhat troubled? We say things like, “They’re at peace. They’re free now.”

Paul’s Good News is that we don’t have to wait until we are actually dead to live in the peace and freedom of the dead. We are already dead in Jesus’ death. And in his resurrection, which is his completely free gift to us, we can walk in freedom.

Now walking in freedom does have consequences for our behavior, but it’s not a list of “musts and shoulds” in order for God to be pleased with us. It is a list of games we do not have to play to convince ourselves, or someone else, or God that we are OK. We can stop playing those games because we are already OK!

So there are two lists of bad behavior in this reading that Paul wants us to avoid:

fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry)….anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language.

These are really two lists of synonyms, so Paul is really emphasizing just two things: the use of sex to try to make us feel better about ourselves and the things we are willing to say about other people in order to make ourselves look and/or feel better. Human nature has not changed much in two thousand years, has it?

I actually think Paul means that all those things were idolatry, not just the one, greed (and here “greed” is not about economics but about the lack of care for the consequences of one’s action to the other). All of these things are worshiping an idol, participating in a kind of religion that you hope will make you feel better, which usually for most of us borders on a kind of addiction. What are addictions, after all, but ways we become obsessed with whatever we are sure make us feel better, take the pain of our lives away?

We still think sex will make us feel better about ourselves and we still think that putting other people down will raise us up. This despite two thousand years of evidence to the contrary! Why do we keep falling into these traps? Because we are convinced that we have to do something to make ourselves right.

And Paul’s whole point is that we don’t. We can give up on sex trying to make us feel better about ourselves and we can give up on trying to make ourselves look better than other people and all the other ways we try to manipulate ourselves or others or God into liking us.

God already likes us. Listen to Eugene Peterson’s translation of the last bit of this morning’s reading:

You’re done with that old life. It’s like a filthy set of ill-fitting clothes you’ve stripped off and put in the fire. Now you’re dressed in a new wardrobe. Every item of your new way of life is custom-made by the Creator, with his own label on it. All the old fashions are now obsolete. Words like Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and irreligious, insider and outsider, slave and free, mean nothing. From now on everyone is defined by Christ, everyone is included in Christ.

The message of Christianity—the freedom of a Christian—is that the kind of equality and love and freedom that most people think is only available to human beings when they are dead, is available to us now, in Jesus’ death.

Why is this message so strange? Why aren’t we more attracted to it? Because it means acting like you’re already dead—and I submit to you that will not attract hordes of people inside here if we hang it as a slogan on the front of the church!

Come in and be dead with us!

It is not an easy thing to give up the life of competition to which we have been bred, constantly seeking ways to better ourselves, gain God and others’ and even our own approval of our lives.

Let it go! Paul says. Let it go, let it go, let it go. You are dead already! Your life is hidden in Christ with God. You are already as OK as you will be for eternity. Live that life, not the one the world wants you to live.

[1] Eugene Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Navpress, 2002).

Worship on the Other Side of Religion

Sermon preached on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene
The Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, July 22, 2007
2 Corinthians 5:14-18; John 20:11-18

Last week I proclaimed what some of you may have thought was a very strange message: “The only good religion is a dead religion.” In doing so, I acknowledged that if I was right, it might call into question just what it is we are doing here, participating it what appears to be a religious ritual. I promised that this week I would answer that question, so here I am, making good on that promise.

If the only good religion is a dead religion, then why do we continue to worship as if we were a religion?

Let me first remind you of my definition of “religion” for my purposes. A “religion” is a system of order which, if followed, assures a person of God’s acceptance.

My contention is that Jesus’ message was that God wanted his human creatures to get beyond religion, to know their acceptance as a gift, not a reward. This was not only the message he proclaimed, but that he also sealed with his death and resurrection. The death of Jesus was, in fact, the death of religion itself, and his resurrection the first fruits of a new order that turned the old order on its head. The resurrection was God’s eternal “yes” to humankind, without regard to human participation in evil or even the outright rejection of God, symbolized in Jesus’ passion and death at human hands.

It is serendipitous this morning that we celebrate the Feast of Mary Magdalene and hear a portion of the resurrection story. It is the resurrection that makes all the difference. If we continue to worship—to participate in ritual—as Christian, we do so after the resurrection. We worship on the other side of religion.

Paul puts it this way: “Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” The death and resurrection of Jesus has made for a new creation, a creation reconciled to God, once for all.

How does this affect our worship, and make it ritual “on the other side of religion?” Primarily, understood rightly, an important aspect of our worship is that we use things of the old order and subvert them. We use the things of religion but turn them on their heads. Here are some examples:

We use terms like “priest” and “sacrifice” that are very much part of traditional religion—systems where certain people set apart as holy offer sacrifices to appease God or the gods.

But we also call everyone “priests,” so our ordained caste of priesthood is simply representative of all the people, all of whom are given, as Paul says this morning, the ministry of reconciliation, which is the ministry that Jesus has already accomplished.

And we use the word “sacrifice” to describe what we do at this Altar, but we call it our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” We do not make a new sacrifice, but make present again the sacrifice that has already been made.

Here’s another example. In the Eucharistic prayer we are currently using we recognize at one point that we continue to fall short of all that God intends for us and say, “Have mercy, Lord, for we are sinners in your sight.” But we do not stop there as if that were the end of our story until we do something to make ourselves right with God. We continue the story of the coming of Jesus among us “to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.” And then, a scant 46 words after we have acknowledged that we are sinners in the sight of God, we proclaim, “By his blood, he reconciled us. By his wounds we are healed.”

All of this (and a lot more) is why we call our worship “Eucharist,” thanksgiving. Our worship, our ritual, is not for the purpose of getting ourselves right with God, but thanking God that God has already made us right. We come together week by week to give thanks to God for the many gifts we have been given, most particularly the gift of Jesus, and the sealing of our acceptance in him.

It is vitally important that we understand that it is our method of worship to use the tools of religion to subvert religion. There’s danger in that, of course, and that is why some sects of Christianity have thrown off as many of these religious trappings as possible. When you use the tools of religion it is easy to forget the subversion part and begin to assume that you are participating in a religion and the purpose of your being here is to appease an angry God.

But it is nothing of the sort. Our purpose here is to give thanks to the God who has time and again chosen us in spite of our failings and our weaknesses and who we are confident will continue to do so no matter what because we “are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”

The great objection to viewing Christianity in this way has always been that it seems to throw morality out the door and leave us with a sort of “anything goes” philosophy toward living. St. Paul himself constantly faced this objection to his teaching. But following the teachings of Jesus, living in the way of his death and resurrection does not mean throwing out morality. It means that one has a different motivation for morality.

In conventional religion the motivation for morality is so that God will love us, accept us, and bless us. But that is not the way taught by Jesus or by Paul. The Jesus’ way is to live a life of thanksgiving that is so grateful for the assurance of “the kingdom of heaven” that we try to build that kingdom on earth. That is how Jesus taught us to pray:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

Jesus did not teach us to pray, “may we do your will on earth so that we can inherit heaven.” He taught us to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” I submit those are two very different motivations for morality.

I will end this morning with the figure of Mary Magdalene herself. Mary should be one of the poster children for Christianity’s meaning the death of religion, of worship and relationship with God in the way of Jesus on the other side of religion. All we know of Mary is her healing and acceptance by Jesus, and her grateful response, providing for him out of her resources, tending to what she thought was his grave when everyone else was either in despair or fear.

Unfortunately the church, giving into the temptation of religion, has needed to emphasize her life before Jesus and exacerbate her supposed “sinfulness” beyond the testimony of the Bible, so that when people hear her name they automatically think “prostitute.” In doing so she is made into a figure upholding conventional religion, who changed her ways to make herself right with God.

Let’s stick to what the Bible tells us. In this sense it is better for us to be literalists! The only thing we know about Mary Magdalene is the only thing we need to know: Jesus accepted her and she was grateful. It was the simple story of her life and it is the simple story of ours. So let us, with her, worship on the other side of religion, celebrating our acceptance which is a pure gift from God and living a life of pure thanksgiving, building that kingdom on earth as in heaven.

© 2007, the Rev. Michael W. Hopkins

The Only Good Religion is a Dead Religion

Sermon for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10C)
Preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, NY
Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10:25-37
This was the Sunday closest to the 190th Anniversary of the Foudning fo St. Luke's Church

One hundred and ninety years ago, a group of men (my apologies to the women in the congregation, but that’s how it was in those days) met and officially began an Episcopal Church in what was then the new village of Rochesterville.

Colonel Nathaniel Rochester was among those men, an Episcopalian himself, although he had determined that his new village needed both a Presbyterian Church and an Episcopal Church, and he saw to the founding of both. To be honest, it was not solely a religious or spiritual decision. In those days the village would need churches in order to attract people and grow and provide for some social order. It was also good politics and good economics to build churches in those days.

Religion then was seen to be good for society. Very few if any people would have doubted the statement that religion—particularly the Christian religion—was the bedrock upon which to build a moral, orderly society, composed of men and women who knew right from wrong.

Of course, our ancestors did not always get “right and wrong” correct. Slavery was still legal in New York State in 1817, although that was the year a law was passed that all slaves in New York had to be freed by July 4, 1827. Nathaniel Rochester himself had owned slaves at one point in his life, and there is no reason to believe that other members of the new parish did not.

Women were excluded from any positions of leadership in the new parish—it would be 140 years before a woman would be elected to the Vestry of the parish. No one thought it was wrong to make anyone in the parish who could not afford the pew rent to sit in the back of the church in pews specially set aside for “paupers” was a “wrong” thing.

We dare not look back too smugly on those days or those people, however, for we are still trying to get “right and wrong” correct. Slavery is long gone, but racism still infects our institution. Women are in leadership in our church but it cannot be said that all vestiges of male privilege are gone from among us. And something about which our founding ancestors could not dream—homophobia—now threatens to tear our beloved Episcopal Church apart. We are still a work in progress where “right and wrong” are concerned.

But the bigger mistake our ancestors made in founding this church and others was about this motivation altogether—that the church should be at the center of upholding an ordered and moral society, perhaps that the church should be at the center of society at all. This, too, we are still working on, because even though it is painfully obvious that the church is not at the center of public life any longer, mostly we still believe it should be and we want desperately for it to be once again.

I wonder how many of you have noticed the quote I have had tagged on to my church e-mail the last few months? It is from a United Methodist bishop named William Willimon.

The most important ecclesial agenda for the twenty-first century is that the church that is pushed to the margins in North American life ought to wake up and see that the margin is a wonderful place to evangelize in the name of an implacably subversive Savior.[1]

It ends up, you see, that the Church really was made for the margins, not for the center, because we follow a marginal Savior with a marginal message.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about what we call the parable of the Good Samaritan, for one, with the prophet Amos playing a supporting role.

A lawyer—someone very much from the center of society in Jesus’ day—has a conversation with Jesus. They agree on a very fundamental thing—the heart of the Jewish law.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.

On this much they agree, but then immediately they start speaking different languages with very, very different assumptions. “But who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked. He seeks a definition, further clarity. His question contains the assumption that the answer will tell him how to order his world. Who am I obliged to love? And the assumption is that there must be those I am not obliged to love, which probably has something to do with their behavior, or, at least, with God’s judgment of them.

Jesus does not answer the question in the language the lawyer expects him to use. Jesus does not speak the language of definition, or order. Jesus speaks the language of story. So, he tells one.

It is a familiar story to us, what we call “the Good Samaritan,” but its familiarity means that we miss its subversiveness and its radicalness.

The “villains” of the story are folks, like the lawyer, from the center of ordered, established life in Jesus’ day. They were also folks who knew who they were called to consider their “neighbor” and who they need not consider at all. To perform their societal obligations they needed to remain ritually clean, which meant avoiding things like blood and certainly dead people. They also, themselves, needed to remain alive. The road they were on was clearly a dangerous one and the thieves who had beaten this man quite possibly to death would clearly not mind finding another victim.

The “hero” of the story is a Samaritan. Samaritans were despised by Jewish society in Jesus’ day. They were heretics, blasphemers, outside the people of God, unclean to associate with. Nothing good could come of a Samaritan; the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan.

In a way, that is just what Jesus gave them in the story—a dead Samaritan, or, at least, a Samaritan who risked his life. The hero of his story is a spiritually dead man who risks his life for the sake of another.

The lawyer is forced to say that it is that one who proved to be a neighbor to the man in the ditch. He had done “right” while those at the center of society had done “wrong.” Jesus had turned his societal convictions and his religion on its head, perhaps giving him pause to consider that, although it was not true that the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan, it was true that the only good religion was a dead one.

What do I mean by “religion?” I mean a system of order that, if followed, makes you right with the divine and teaches you how to behave rightly in this world.

It was Israel’s great struggle to try to turn the relationship with God that had been freely given to them into a religion that they could control. I believe one of Jesus’ great passions, as was the passion of his prophetic ancestors like Amos before him, to call people away from religion and back into grateful relationship with God and one another.

He was not particularly successful. The religious authorities were so frightened by him that they colluded with the secular authorities to have him eliminated. His resurrection should have left his followers to continue his work, and many of them did, so much so that they became known not as people who helped order the world, but as people who turned it upside down.

But, alas, the Church that bears his name too often has succumbed to the temptation of religion and, in doing so, has turned its back on the free gift of relationship that continues to be offered by God.

I hope that you can see that part of what our generation of Christians is trying to do in this place is to offer that free gift—you are loved just because God wants to love you. And we are also trying to learn to live in the world as if that were true, which is precisely what Jesus’ meant when he said, “Go and do likewise.”

If we truly believe that we are loved by the maker of the Universe, as is every neighbor who is given to us by God—especially those whom our gut tells us to despise or fear—then we will be people who continue not to order the world but to turn it upside down.

Thank God our ancestors founded this place and thank God that we have inherited it. Let us follow in their footsteps inasmuch as they were people of faith seeking to spread the Good News of God’s love. But let us be clear about our calling to do so not from the center of power and privilege, but from the margins of need and despair where the message of that love can truly be heard and the center of our world turned on its head, which is the only way it will ever know that God is love, love for all, and that we are called simply to love, love all. Let us risk our lives for this love, and this love alone.

[1] William H. Willimon, “Evangelism in the Twenty-First Century: Mainliners at the Margins,” Journal for Preachers 30:4, Pentecost 2007, p. 4.

The Story Isn't Over--The Body Lives

The Story Isn’t Over—The Body Lives
Sermon for Crpus Christi, 2007
The Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York

Today we celebrate the gift of the Body of Christ—Corpus Christi. We celebrate both things we understand to be Christ’s Body. The Body we are given around the Altar, and the Body we are given to be in the world.

These two things go together for us; they can never be separated: the Body we are given and the Body we are given to be. Either one without the other is just a religion, prone to all those mistakes that religions always make—the mistakes of exclusivity that always end up undermining they very thing they purport to uphold. Together they are the very ongoing life of God among us.

The Body we are given can easily turn into an idol without a clear sense of the transformation of our lives this Body is meant to feed in us. Jesus did not give us his Body in the Sacrament as just another religious exercise.

Bishop Frank Weston said it once, clearly and prophetically. Weston was an Anglo-catholic leader in the early 20th century who became the Bishop of Zanzibar. He was a bit of a grouch in his day; he protested the church’s “modernizing” in words that sound somewhat familiar in our own day of struggles in the Church. But he got what it meant to be the Body of Christ. He proclaimed to the Anglo-catholic Congress of 1923 (excusing the language of the day),

. . . I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you, through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. . . . It is folly, it is madness, to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacrament and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating Him in the bodies and souls of His children. . . . You have your Mass, you have your altars, you have begun to get your tabernacles. Now go out into the highways and hedges, and look for Jesus in the ragged and the naked, in the oppressed and the sweated, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus in them, and, when you have found Him, gird yourself with His towel of fellowship and wash His feet in the person of his brethren.[i]

That is really what the question is about that the children’s version of the Revelation story asked us a few moments ago. Is that the end of the story?

The answer is always and emphatically, “No!” God’s story is never over. It lives on in us as we continue to be the People of God, the Body of Christ, given for the world.

And now we have put together what I think may be the two most important words in the Christian vocabulary: story and body. Not what you might think? But Christianity would be utterly nothing without them.

Christianity is meaningless without the Body of Christ, as it was in history, as it is given to us now at the Altar, and as we become it over time in the world. And Christianity is likewise meaningless if we do not understand that the story of our lives, and the lives of those around us, are part of the ongoing story of God.

We act this out every Sunday—in this sense our worship makes perfect sense for this understanding of Christianity. We tell the story and speak and pray our part in it, and we celebrate the presence of the Body and are sent into the world fed by it to be it. Having done this for the cycle of a week, we come back to the story, primarily because in this world it is so easy to forget the story, and when we forget the story, we lose our capacity either to receive or to be the Body.

This relates in several ways to several things we are doing today:

We celebrate another year of Sunday School, which has, at least in its children’s component become very simply about storytelling in the method you have just experienced. Stories are powerful things, maybe the most powerful things that have the capacity to form us. I think it is true what the popular writer Anne Lamott says, that stories are what can save us.[ii]
We celebrate a turning point in some of our young people’s lives, and, I hope, one of the things we are saying to them is, we need you as part of the Body to help us continue the story and you need the story and the Body to continue to nourish you through life.
We say good bye to Bryan Bedell (our Seminarian) who has been part of our story and been formed into and helped to form this Body, and in the mystery of our coming together and going apart we also welcome Malcolm Merriweather (our new Director of Music) into that same mystery that we live.

And we begin a new time of storytelling among us—about how race and racism has affected our identities—our stories and our bodies.

I want to say a bit more about this last one because it is so important to our life together—for this ongoing process of storytelling and body building that makes us who we are continually transformed by God.

I am personally convinced that storytelling is one of the holiest things we can do with one another, which means it can be one of the most transformative things we can do with one another. Knowing one another’s stories more deeply can only strengthen this Body—and I think this is more true when those stories are across the differences of experience that cause us to stretch and grow—sometimes joyfully, sometimes painfully. We become more the Body of Christ that we are called to be as we tell one another our stories, finding together the moments of grace in them—the signs of God’s presence that we can rarely see all by ourselves.

Our anti-racism dialogue over the next few months is an extraordinary opportunity for Body building in which I hope many of us will participate. We will only be as strong as a community of faith as we know one another’s story and support one another on the journey to being the Body of Christ in and for the world.

So how do we answer the question from the children’s story this morning? Is this the end of the story?

No, the story isn’t over, the Body lives. Let it be here with us, and on the streets.

[i] From the closing of Weston’s speech concluding the Anglo-Catholic Congress of 1923. The speech in its entirety is available at http://anglicanhistory.org/weston/weston2.html.
[ii] Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 150-151.

The Restorer of Streets to Live in: Toward the Renewal of Church & City in Rochester

A Sermon preached on May 5, 2007 at the Celebration of 190 Years of the Episcopal Church in Rochester, New York, with Isaiah 58:6-12 as the primary text.

You shall be called…the restorer of streets to live in.

Now that I have you here, let me be honest: I have an agenda. It seems to have been the prophet Isaiah’s agenda, and, therefore, I trust it was and is God’s agenda.

I want us, the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Rochester to be called, “the restorer of streets to live in.”

I suspect you are all with me, more or less. I am assuming it is not my job this morning to convince you that the streets need restoration. That means my job is to suggest how we might get there.

Let me tell you the short answer first, one word, “Together.” I am convinced that we will either fulfill this calling together or we will not fulfill it at all, which is to say, we will either be the Episcopal Church working together in this city, or we will be a footnote in future history books, and, I might add, rightfully so.

This is a story, really. A story about a city and a story about a church. They are, it is no surprise, roughly parallel.

This city and this church were born together, founded, in part, by the vision of the same man, Nathaniel Rochester. He dreamed of a city and he dreamed of a church, his church, as the spiritual conscience of that city. And so we are here in a city named for him, and in a church he himself helped to build and in which he worshipped.

The city prospered and the church prospered. It was relatively easy for both to do so side by side in those days, days that lasted a good long while, well into the memories of some of our folks who are still around. The city prospered and the church prospered.

Those days are gone. We all know that. They are gone in this city and they are gone in this church. The days of easy prosperity are gone. “The urban world we treasured is no more.”[1]

That last statement is a quote from Old Testament Scholar Walter Brueggemann. He tells us that the admission that this is the truth is the beginning of a new path. God can do a new thing if the people can honestly name and grieve their loss.

There is much to grieve. Since this Diocese was formed in 1931, half of our churches are gone, and more are on the brink. If trends continue, there will only be one of us left in this city by the year 2050.

In the city things are much worse. By my count, at least 130 people have been murdered in this city since my arrival two and a half years ago, easily 75% of them young black men, two of whom I have helped bury. Our schools graduate either 39% or 53%, depending on whose statistics you believe, but it is a sign of the times that we spend more energy arguing over which abysmal number is correct than we do actually fixing the problem.

And our problems, whether church or city, are much deeper than even these dreadful statistics. Something has died. Brueggemann believes it is the death of “communal relations” and “consensus meaning.”[2] Shorthand: what used to hold us together is gone. The way we ordered our world is dead, even though we are still hanging on to it as if it were alive.

But I’m here to tell you that our children are not buying it. The children of our streets are not buying the illusion that our old order is still alive. That order no longer has any moral credibility. It hasn’t for a long time. They may not have graduated from high school, but they know that is the truth.

What is this old order to which we still cling? It is, among other things, the whole notion that you can be whatever you want to be. If you work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead. Anybody can be President of the United States if they put their mind to it.

Now that world was always, I believe, an illusion, but it used to carry a certain credibility, enough to carry our sense of community. It doesn’t anymore. We cannot keep telling our children they can be anything they want to be in a world—in a country—in a city—where the gap between the rich and the poor grows ever wider, beyond even our imaginations.

Our children act out in violence on our streets, the same game that the powerful and the rich play out where those games are played every day. My life is more important than yours, which, ultimately does not matter to me at all. We keep being amazed that our children don’t seem to have any respect for life—even their own much less anyone else’s. They learned that from the lifestyles of powerful among us, lifestyles that most of spend a great deal of time worshipping. And we cannot tell them to just “stop it,” because we have no credibility to do so.

Let us tell the truth, the prophets of ancient Israel said. Let us stop lying about ourselves and let us grieve what we have lost, not what has been done to us but what we have done to ourselves.

This is really depressing, but it is the truth. Brueggemann is devastatingly right when he says,

Nobody believes that poverty or homelessness or crime or any of the other maladies can be answered. And, indeed, they never will be, given the categories of imagination now operative. There are simply no categories of imagination [from the old order] that can mobilize public will.[3]

The answer to what ails us (and this is especially difficult for us “liberals” to hear), both in the city and in the church, is not refined policies or recommendations for what appear to be new programs that are just recycles of the same damn thing we have been trying to restore the old order for more than a generation now. The answer is hope. And the answer is us.

And real hope comes, as Brueggemann says, in poetry from prophets that shatters the old categories that are preventing any newness from being born, daring speech, followed by daring acts that re-imagine the city and the church.

What are the components of this daring and shattering re-imagination of ourselves? They are, ironically, old things, things we thought we knew, but they were not really a part of the old order, although we spent a lot of time and energy convincing ourselves that they were.

The speech that will shatter our illusions and give us tools to re-build and restore are these:

· Mercy. Forgiveness as a way of life, which means giving up all our need to be more powerful than others.

· Neighborliness that seeks the flourishing of those around us regardless of who they are or what they have done or what they have not done or what they look like or where they came from or how they make families.

· Resolve and resilience, passion and discipline, which means (and this may be the hardest part for us) throwing off the feeling of scarcity that actually drives so much of what ails us.

What would this look like in the church, among us, in this church, in this city? It would mean an end to the game of “Episcopal Survivor” that we are currently playing whether we want to believe it or not. We are not hostile or nasty to one another, in fact, being good Episcopalians, we can be downright polite to one another. But the truth is we do not care about each other much at all. We are too busy playing our Survivor game for that.

It means too, that we have lost our nerve to act on behalf of those for whom society cares little if at all. That is harsh, and I know that many of us do care as individuals and each of our congregations is trying to do what it can, but that is part of the problem. If all we do is try to do what we can alone, we will not really do very much at all. If we do not risk our lives, nothing will change. Jesus taught us that, if he taught us nothing else. But we will never have enough courage to risk our lives alone. We need each other if we are to take the kinds of risks that will really make a systemic difference, and, yes, we will need partners far beyond the bounds of our own denomination.

It is a time when we could feel just really awful—about both the church and the city. And we should feel awful. But in this awful moment of failure and loss, new life can be born. The moment of failure and loss, Brueggemann says, is the moment we are also pregnant with hope and new possibility.

And we will be led, I am increasingly convinced by two things. First, our willingness to stop trying to create the old world. This is especially hard for us in the church, because we loved the old world. It was good to us. We built monuments to ourselves—oops, I mean to God. People believed us when we told them things. We called our chief clergy “rectors,” a word that comes from the Latin rex, “king,” because we really thought they had control of life and people looked up to them.

I am increasingly convinced that our structures inherited from the old order are a large part of what is killing us. They are keeping us in the game of Survivor and keeping us from daring, old world shattering and new world creating mission.

And I am also increasingly convinced that the poetry we need that will shatter what continues to bind us will come from, is coming from, the most unlikely of places, the very streets so desperately in need of restoration. Yes, much of the speech that comes from the streets is harsh and degrading and death-dealing, but there is, if you truly listen to it, at its heart, a conviction that the world is not working as we keep trying to make it work, and a new world needs to dawn. And I believe that when that desire and that poetry meet the gospel that is not the old order but the ever new one, the revolution has a chance to come.

I have an agenda, as I said, which I trust and pray has at least a large part to do with God’s agenda—a new heaven and a new earth, a home for God among us, and us unshackled from the old ways of division and scarcity and fear. Together we can restore streets to live in, and together we can rebuild this church of ours. Let us be the ones who say, “No more acceptance of decline and scarcity as a way of life. No more playing the Survivor game. It stops, with the grace of God, with us, if we are willing to stop it together.”

[1] Walter Brueggemann, “The City in Biblical Perspective: Failed and Possible,” in The Word that Redescribes the World: The Bible and Discipleship (Fortress, 2006), p. 83.
[2] Ibid, p. 82.
[3] Ibid., p. 87.

Tell Us Plainly

Sermon peached on the 4th Sundy of Easter, 2007, at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York, with the text John 10:22-30

Tell us plainly.

Was it an unreasonable request? I, for one, do not think so. It was a very human request, wasn’t it? Who among us does not appreciate plain-spoken people, at least most of the time. And even though we Episcopalians pride ourselves on practicing a fairly muddy and messy version of Christianity, I still hear a lot of us saying a lot of the time, to God and to the Church, “tell us plainly.”

One of things with which we have to grapple if we are going to be followers of Jesus is that he was often not a very plain-spoken person. He delighted in answering people’s questions with a somewhat open-ended story and with some other non-answer to the question. Reading the gospels you get the impression that people were always walking away from him muttering to themselves, “What was he talking about?”

This was as true of his disciples as everyone else, so we shouldn’t be surprised if it is true for us. A few chapters after our reading this morning from John’s Gospel, Jesus will be trying to prepare his disciples for his departure.

And you know the way to the place where I am going, he says to them.

It is Thomas, perhaps the most plain-spoken of the disciples, who says, Master, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?

Jesus was frequently an exasperating guy. He still is, to any of us who would like a little more direction than we seem to get from God, or a little more clarity about God’s existence, or goodness, or even our own.

Even this whole notion of our gifts, that the Stewardship Committee is asking us to contemplate this morning, can be a foggy trip down an uncertain pathway. What are your gifts? Some of them may be clear, others may not be. How many of you want to answer that question with, “I’m not really sure?”

So, yes, Jesus, tell us plainly. Who are you? Who are we?

Tell us plainly. There’s nothing really wrong with the request, and I think it is perfectly fine for us to keep making it. But we may need to pay a little attention to just what kind of answer we are expecting.

I think those who were making this request of Jesus in the Gospel this morning had in mind a fairly utilitarian answer. Are you the Messiah or not, was really a way of asking, what are you going to do (for us)? And what should we do in response to what you are going to do?

And this may be just why Jesus makes the people around him, including us, so crazy sometimes. He doesn’t always seem very concerned with “doing.” This is particularly true in John’s Gospel.

He frequently answers a utilitarian question with a relational answer, a “doing” question with a “being” answer.

A perfect example of this is his response to this question this morning. Are you the Messiah or not, tell us plainly.

I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me;

It’s a masterful non-answer because he teases them with the word “works” as if they should have already figured out the utilitarian answer to their utilitarian question, but it’s not the important bit at all. He goes on

But you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.

It’s all about relationship: belonging and knowing and being, or, in another important word in John’s Gospel, abiding. He’s turned their question inside out. I know, he is saying, that you want to know what I am going to do, given your expectations of the Messiah. In fact, you’re so busy expecting that you can’t see that I’m already doing it, only what I’m doing is being, and those who can be with me can see that.

And then he goes on actually to speak very plainly, but, again, not the kind of plainly they wanted.

What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one.

The Father and I are one. Again, it is all about relationship. They want to know what this man thinks God wants him to do, and he’s saying, God and I just are together. “The Father and I are one.” You will never understand what I am doing, if you cannot grasp my being.

And there’s the rub.

In Jesus’ way of doing life, what we do flows from who we are, not the other way around. And we live in a world (and Jesus did too) that wants to work exactly the opposite. Who we are depends on what we do. Being flows from doing in our world. What is the first thing we tend to ask someone when we meet them?

This really is a fundamental part of the good news, the gospel. Who we are is fundamental, of first importance, and is not determined by what we have done, are doing, or will do. Why else do we say at baptism that “you are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever”? What we are saying is, who you are in the eyes of God and of this community of faith will never depend on what you have done. It will always simply, but deeply, be. You are a child of God.

Being a child of God is not our reward in heaven after having lived a good life. It is simply who we are, a given, and any goodness we do flows out of that in gratitude.

This also has everything to do with this whole conversation about gifts and ministry and stewardship. This conversation can be a trap for us, because naming our gifts and how we exercise them can easily become all about our “doing.” And, like in Jesus’ conversation this morning, it is about our doing but in an entirely different way than we expect. We cannot know our gifts, and exercise them properly if we do not first know who we are.

I truly believe this is the biggest stumbling block most of us have in this conversation about our gifts. There are two stumbling blocks, really. The first is that, in the Church, we often use an adjective with the word gifts, “spiritual gifts.” “What are your spiritual gifts?” we ask. As if there were “unspiritual gifts”! There are not some gifts that are spiritual and some gifts that are not, just like there is not part of you that God created and part of you that God did not create. It’s all creation, and it’s all gift. You may have the gift of compassion or you may have the gift of carpentry, it’s all the same, no gift is greater or lesser and certainly more spiritual or not.

The second stumbling block has to do with needing to know who we are before we can talk about what we do. People who are not clear about God’s love for them are usually also unclear about what gifts God has given them for ministry. It’s partly the “worthiness” thing. Someone asks you what your gifts for ministry are and you immediately go to that, “Oh, I am not worthy, I am just a lowly worm trying to be good enough so that on judgment day God won’t be too mad at me and I’ll get into heaven.”

Well, as they say in my world, “Get over yourself, Mary!” God made you and, as they say, God don’t make junk, and God loves you even though he can see right straight through you. Of course you are unworthy; we all are. But God has made us worthy just because he wanted to, and because of that to call yourself unworthy for more than five seconds, to get stuck in your unworthiness, is blasphemy. It is also, ironically, the height of arrogance. Who do you think you are that God cannot love you and give you gifts?

Who you are is God’s child, period. Get a hold of that truth, the most important truth in your life, and your gifts will flow from that. That’s as plain as I can speak.

From Wishful Thinking to Hopeful Acting

Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter: Acts 9:1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

This joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow! (Hymn 192, The Hymnal 1982)

It would be nice if for once the world cooperated with our 50 days of Easter rejoicing. Away with sin and sorrow! Couldn’t we accomplish that for just 50 days?

Not these 50 days, clearly, nor any Easter that has ever been. We may wish to brush sin and sorrow away, but they will not be brushed. So is our joyful Eastertide just wishful thinking?

When we proclaim, as we do in the preface of the Eucharistic prayer during Eastertide, that “by his death he has destroyed death,” are we just wishful thinking?

What does it mean for us to proclaim that death has been destroyed in a world where death is very, very real, and clearly “alive and well”?

Does Easter have any real meaning in the face of a tragedy like Virginia Tech?

There is a sense in which Jesus himself acknowledges the problem. In our first reading this morning, the risen Jesus appears to Saul, who is “breathing threats and murder” against Jesus’ disciples. Jesus identifies himself as the one whom Saul is persecuting. In another telling of the story later in Acts (26:12-18), Paul says Jesus declared to him, “It hurts for you to kick against the goads.”

This is a protest from Jesus risen from the dead, fresh from what we call the destruction of death, but clearly still subject even himself to the effects of sin and sorrow, threats and murder.

Clearly the resurrection did not “destroy death,” or even sin, by simply making it go away, or even by ending its power over human life. So how then can we say this with any honesty? How is death destroyed?

First of all just in the ongoing presence of Jesus. Certainly we do have faith that Jesus himself has destroyed at least his own death. “Death no longer has dominion over him,” as Paul says elsewhere (Romans 6:9). God is alive, and so one of the chaplains at Virginia Tech said this week that the one thing he could say with certainty to members of that community despite what had happened is that, “God is even here.” That alone is good news worth telling.

But it is not enough yet, because there is the further question of, “What about us?”

There are two answers to this question, both of them right and important. They are found in our other two readings this morning.

The first answer is about a vision, a vision of eternity, of what we sometimes call heaven, of all creation gathered around God in praise, “myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands.”

The destruction of death is a vision, a vision of eternity, the fullness of time, when, as the writer of the Revelation says later, “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (21:4).

And so we Christians rightly say that death will ultimately be defeated, and this gives us enough faith to go on, and to give God praise and thanks in this life even in the face of death, for, as we say in our burial service, “even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 499).

But this too is not enough. It is a lot, but it is not enough. For what about this life? For if death is destroyed only in heaven, then is this life only a vale of tears, something to be endured until the great reward in the next life? Some have seemed to say so. But then how can the psalmist say, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning?” Can joy ever truly come in our earthly mornings, we who live in the valley of the shadow of death?

The answer is in the Gospel reading this morning, although it is not as obvious as the vision of heaven in the Book of Revelation.

Most of us are at least somewhat familiar with this encounter between Jesus and Simon Peter. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Three times asked, three times answered. What is going on here?

An obvious answer is that Jesus is reminding Peter of his earlier threefold denial. Clearly this has something to do with it, although I am a bit uncomfortable with the notion that Jesus is somehow getting back at Peter, as if there were at least a subtle vindictiveness in his questioning. Jesus has just come back and forgiven them all, Peter included. Does it make sense that he is now making Peter do some further penance?

What is going on here is related to Peter’s earlier denial but is much more complex than a simple tit for tat, and much more universal. What is going on ultimately is meant for all of us who would be disciples of Jesus, signified in the final statement by Jesus, “Follow me,” a commandment surely not meant for Peter alone.

The complexity is found especially in Greek and isn’t easily translated into English. Let me give it a try, using words other than just “love.”

Jesus asks, “Simon Peter, do you love me more than life itself (agapé)?”

Peter replies, “Lord, you are like a brother to me (phileo)”. Not exactly an answer to the question.

Jesus asks again, “Simon, son of John, will you sacrifice your life for me (agapé)?”

Peter replies, “I swear we are as tight as two people can get (phileo).” Again, not exactly an answer to the question.

Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, are we brothers (phileo)?”

Peter, hurt because Jesus seems to be questioning even what he was willing to say, replies, “Of all people, you know that you are my brother (phileo).”

What Peter does not get in this exchange is that Jesus is not talking about their personal relationship. He is talking about Peter’s life, his ministry. “Feed my sheep.” Jesus is calling Peter to move beyond their personal relationship, even the personal relationship he has with the other disciples. If you love me you will feed my sheep. Even if you would not lay down your life for me last week, you will lay it down for my followers in the future. You will die for them just like I did.

And, as I said, this is not just about Peter. It is about all of us who would follow Jesus. We are called not just to feel good about one another, to have a sense of family, belonging. We are called to lay down our lives for each other and for the world.

And this is the other way in which we can honestly say that death has been destroyed among us. We are called to live, to act, as if death had no power over us, not just in some future heaven, but right now. This, finally, gets us beyond wishful thinking to hopeful acting.

It is not an easy thing, to which this conversation between Jesus and Peter attests. And we resist it, as is also clear here. There is a sense in which Jesus knows Peter will resist this right to the end. “Someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you to a place where you do not wish to go,” Jesus warns him.

Yet that “place” is the whole point of Christianity, the whole point of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the whole point of what we mean when we say that “by his death he has destroyed death.” The point is that if I am truly to follow Jesus, saving my own skin is not a top priority for me.

And when it is not I have finally moved from wishful thinking about death to hopeful acting against it.

That is a very difficult place to be and not all of us are there, and probably none of us is there all the time. But do not be fooled, it is the journey we are on.

It is good for us to be clear about that—about each of these three ways in which we do believe that death has been destroyed.

Jesus is alive. Death could not hold him in its power.

We hold the vision of life beyond death, which ultimately will not be able to hold us in its grip either.

And we are committed to live as if death did not matter, not living for the sake of saving our own skin, but laying down our lives for one another.

Because of these things, even after this week, we can still sing, “this joyful Eastertide,” “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia,” and “by his death he has destroyed death.”

An Easter Sermon: Life in the Mean Time

Isaiah 65:17-25

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth…be glad and rejoice for ever in what I am creating.

In the life of ancient Israel there were people who kept the dream alive. They were the prophets. We heard from one of them this morning, Isaiah. People like Isaiah were prophets not because they could predict the future but because they were called by God to announce it. They were folks called by God to stand in the human present and speak about the divine future.

One of the most important proclamations of the Bible from beginning to end is that our human present is not all that there is. There is a future that belongs to God. It belongs to God just like the beginning belonged to God—In the beginning God…are the first words of the Bible. In the end God… are its last words.

The problem with being human is that we live in between the beginning that is God’s and the end that is God’s. We live “in the meantime,” and the time can, truth to tell, be pretty mean.

I do have to say, “Life is good.” Each one of us has much for which to be thankful, and I do not want to downplay that in the least. But there is other truth that must be spoken.

That truth is about the meantime that is the time that is mean.

The time is “mean” in our church, fighting about who is loving whom, with the constant drumbeat of wars and rumors of wars—enough to drive many of us to consider Buddhism as a reasonable alternative.

The time is “mean” in our city, for which we need no other evidence than the two young people murdered in 2006 and 2007 related to this congregation. Rodnell Hartzog and Joshua Lee were victims of the mean time.

The time is mean in our country when disagreement with those in power leads to the now predictable questioning of one’s patriotism, when countless thousands have died, including 3,271 of our own brave young people, as the result of an orchestrated lie. And 24,314 soldiers wounded, the forgotten ones, not only by us but by the very government they were defending.[1]

The time is mean when only 40% of the kids in our city schools graduate and although most of us are aware of this horrific number, no one is rioting on the streets because they are outraged by it.

The time is mean in our personal lives when despair and hopelessness, cynicism and greed, disease and death seem to rule our lives, including my own. The death of my cousin Jeff at 43 a couple weeks ago was a death in the mean time. So was the death of our friends Rudy McClenney and Dick Comegys and Jean Smith and Margaret Marcus in the last year. And I know of your personal tragedies and trials, too many to number.

Into the mean time of ancient Israel’s life, prophets like Isaiah were called to speak a different word, a word beyond the mean present to a different future. And whether or not that different future could be accepted as really possible, the primary purpose of its announcement was to say, “Do not absolutize the present! Do not freeze in this moment! Do not think this is all there is!”

The resurrection of Jesus announces this same message to us. It was and is a breaking into our mean time by the future that belongs to God where the rules are different and the purposes of God—life and love, faith and hope—are no longer thwarted, where weeping and distress no longer rule the day, and where children, as Isaiah says, are not born for calamity.

But is this all just a dream? Is it indeed so much of a dream that its very impossibility actually makes it a nightmare? Are the prophets—Jesus included—just dreamers whose dreams of new heavens and a new earth only mock the ones we are stuck with? Are we just stuck here in the mean time? Is there a way to get ourselves unstuck?

There is, but I can pretty much guarantee we will not like the answer. Few people ever have. I don’t most of the time.

The prophets of ancient Israel were not popular or honored people. Jesus got himself killed because he would not shut up. But followers of Jesus have always said that it is in his very death that we find this answer, and it is an answer on the same trajectory of the prophets before him.

The answer is, as Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann says, serious disarmament.[2] This answer is only implied in the dream from Isaiah 65—where do we think the sound of weeping and cries of distress come from? It is only made explicit in terms of our animal friends, who will no longer in this dreamed of world have to kill one another for food—the dog and cats in our household have yet, however, to hear this good news. But it is explicit in other versions of this dream. The prophet Micah’s version is the best known:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.[3]

For the dream to be real we must be willing to dismantle our weapons. That includes, yes, our real weapons of killing or even, as we like to think, defense, but, probably more importantly, it includes those other things that keep us living in the mean time. Primarily today I am thinking about these dismantlings:

We must dismantle our weapons of cynicism that assumes the worst from everyone, especially those that are different from us.

We must dismantle our weapons of anxiety and fear that label others as threats until they are proven to be friends, and that seek to provide our own security no matter what the cost to the dignity, much less the livelihood, of others.

We must dismantle our aggression, the root of the violence that is epidemic among us, the aggression that believes that my success depends upon your defeat.

And, perhaps most odd sounding to us, and really terrifying if we are honest, we must dismantle our expectations for more, for luxurious and leisurely living. Such is not the vision of Isaiah’s dream, as it was never the vision of Jesus’ dream. Look at Isaiah’s dream closely—we are promised in the dream only life itself, a home, and food enough. That’s it, but for most of us and our appetites, that is not enough.

The weapons that most of us must beat into plowshares to have any chance at Isaiah’s or Jesus’ dream are just these things: cynicism, anxiety, aggression, and greed. These are the things that keep us from the dream, that keep us in “the meantime,” the times that are mean.

What we are being invited into on this Easter Day, by Jesus who shared our mean time and was himself destroyed by it, but now lives wholly within the dream of God, is to make choices that at least begin to take the “mean” out of the time of our lives. We do not have to wait until the next life to experience the dream of God—that is not the message of the resurrection.

We are created by God free women and men, with our own dignity in our own hands. We have the capacity to choose to live life as if the dream were real. As Brueggemann puts it,

We could be children of war and resentment and fear and anxiety and aggressiveness. We need not, however, live that way. There is another way that God intends among us…[4]

Can we name that way this morning?

It is the way of trust that the world has been made so that there is enough for everyone, and so we can beat our swords of competition into plowshares of generosity.

It is the way of peace that rejects life as just a game of “Survivor” writ large, and so we can beat our spears of aggressiveness into pruning hooks of cooperation.

It is the way of faith in a God who loves us in spite of everything, even our own inevitable death, and so that we can beat our swords of fear into plowshares of hope.

It is the way of grace in a world that values control, and so that we can beat the spears of our rules about who is in and who is out into pruning hooks of hospitality.

The good news of this day is that all the ways we think the world works in this mean time: aggression and greed and despair and cynicism and death have been ultimately defeated by the God of Jesus Christ, and we, ourselves, have been given a share of his spirit so that we too may be dreamers of impossible dreams, and, more importantly, doers of impossible things.

The story we carry from this place today is simple. It goes like this: God, who owns the beginning and who owns the end, has shared our in between, our meantime, and found it just as mean as we do. It ate him, literally, alive. But the dream did not die with him, nor must it die with us. And we must not only wait for this dream, we must, like the prophets before us, announce it and live in it, no matter what the cost. Not only our future, but our present, depends on our doing so.

So announce it church:

We’re not living in the meantime, the time that is mean—we’re already living in the future that belongs to God. Death is the last enemy—our brother Paul is right—but it has already been beaten.

Whether it looks like it or not, Christ is Risen and so, my sisters and brothers are you and I. There is no better news than that in this mean time.


[1] Deaths are as of April 6, 2007; wounded as of February 3, 2007, the last date for which the Pentagon has released figures.
[2] Inscribing the Text: Prayers and Sermons of Walter Brueggemann (Augsburg Fortress, 2004), p. 212. Many of the ideas that follow were inspired by the sermon from which this phrase comes, “A Resurrection Option,” using Micah 4:1-5 as the text.
[3] Micah 4:3.
[4] Ibid., p. 214.

Turning Stones Into Glory

[Sermon for Palm/Passion Sunday, April 1, 2007, with Luke's Passion as the Gospel].

“Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” Jesus answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Why did Jesus have to die?

To save us from our sins, right? That’s how the story goes, isn’t it? Humankind was so screwed up that we could not get right with God. God needs a sacrifice for sin, a bloody sacrifice, but nothing we could offer was enough. So God sent Jesus, his only Son, to be that sacrifice. And because Jesus was perfect, his sacrificed has covered our sins.

Right? Something along those lines is what most of us think this story is about? It’s how everybody talks about it, right?

Actually, not everybody; not the Gospel writer Luke, for instance. These things are not what Luke thinks is going on here at all. There is no sense in this story, if you have just listened to it carefully, that the reason for this death is to provide a bloody atonement for our sins.

Then what is this story about? I take my cue from the first Gospel reading we heard today, way back at the beginning of this Service, the nice part about the palms. You remember don’t you? That funny little line at the end of the story—it’s unique to Luke as he tells about Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem.

The religious leaders clearly think Jesus has gone over the top and they plead with him to get everyone to tone it down. Perhaps they were afraid of stirring up the political authorities. Perhaps they were just a bunch of Episcopalians made nervous by all the shoutin’.

Teacher, make your followers quiet down. If I made them be quiet, he says, then the stones in the road would shout.

And so I submit to you that the purpose of this story, of the cross, of Jesus’ death, is to turn stones into glory.

So I am going to tell you a different way of understanding this story, but first I am going to tell you of the practical consequences of telling it a different way.

There are many of them, but the one that is foremost in my mind and heart today comes out of my own experience in the past two weeks of my Cousin Jeff’s death. Jeff was the second oldest after me of my generation—forty three years old, a wife and three beautiful girls, 16, 13, and 9. He was a good guy: happy, generous, hard-working, faithful, almost always smiling. The line at eight o’clock at night at the visiting hours stretched out the door of the funeral home and down the sidewalk a hundred yards.

Jeff is dead. Died of brain cancer, against which he and his family fought bravely and hopefully right to the end. His wife Jamie, no one could possibly have done anymore, and she looked absolutely beaten.

And none of us knows what to say except what we think we are supposed to say. “He’s in a better place. There must be a reason. God’s will is hard to understand. God called him home.”

And because I am the designated family holy man, people especially feel the need to tell me these things, and I wish I had time to sit them down and explain why I do not think any of those things are true, but my own heart is so broken I can hardly speak. But Lord knows I want to stand in the middle of the room and shout, “Everybody stop. This sucks. This just sucks! And God thinks it does too. Would everybody just let God be broken-hearted along with the rest of us, please? The only thing God wants right now is for the very stones to cry out for the loss of this good man.”

You see, I think there is a direct connection between thinking that God insisted that Jesus had to die in order to be appeased by a bloody sacrifice, and our thinking that when someone we love dies, God must have a reason for inflicting this pain on him or her and us.

Now I will confess that you can find places in the New Testament that seem to back up that way of thinking and talking. But the story you just heard is not one of them, and, frankly, I’m sticking with it.

Luke’s Jesus does not die as an atoning sacrifice. He dies as an innocent victim. “Surely this man was innocent,” the centurion, who was supposed to be standing there like a stone, cries out. That is Luke’s message.

Now don’t get me wrong. Luke is absolutely convinced that Jesus is the Son of God. Go back and read the birth story we hear at Christmas every year. It’s Luke’s, and it’s pretty clear. This man is also divine. He himself is quite reticent about it. He’s humble, like we all should be, but that doesn’t mean Luke doesn’t want us to believe that this man is to be followed as the Son of God.

That is, in fact, his whole point. And we can absolutely trust this man, this Son of God, enough to follow him anywhere, because he himself has gone there—betrayed, humiliated, abandoned, and dead. All those awful places we have to go, he has gone. He is not just our God, he is our companion. Jesus walks with you and me, and not through some lovely garden, but into that funeral parlor and up to that coffin and back out on the street to take up living again even though that awful thing can happen to a good man.

Yet we still want to call it the will of God. “Only that,” as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “assumes a universe in which there are no other powers operating besides the power of God.”[1] And I, like her, do not believe that is true. I do not think Luke did either.

Whether we like it or not, the story of the Bible is the story of God sharing power with us. And the moral of the story is not that we should rely totally on God’s power, completely giving over our will to God, although I know plenty of Christians talk like that. I do not believe God wants us to rely completely on him or certainly not to completely abdicate our will. He gave it to us! The dream of God is partnership with the creation, with you and I, for the good of all. To obey God is to be God’s companion, not his lackey nor his punching bag.

We abuse the power God has given us. That is absolutely part of our story. And that too is what this story of Jesus’ death is about. It is a living parable of our ability to abuse our power in so great a fashion that we murder the ultimately innocent victim to assuage our own fear.

And now I just have to let Barbara Brown Taylor take over,

In this light, Jesus did not die to pay our bills. He died because he would not stop being who he was and who he was, was very upsetting. He turned everything upside down. He allied himself with the wrong people and insulted the right ones. He disobeyed the law. He challenged the authorities, who warned him to stop. The government officials warned him to stop. The religious leaders warned him to stop. And when he would not stop, they had to kill him, because he would not stop being who he was.[2]

So was the cross the defeat of God’s will rather than its realization? Yes, in a sense, if we mean by “God’s will” the punishment for our sins, or even the irrational, “Oh, let’s see, today it’s Jeff’s turn to suffer as part of my divine plan,” approach to God’s will.

But Jesus’ death was the will of God if we look at it this way, again with Barbara Brown Taylor:

One beloved human being chose to bear the consequences of being who he was and died with the same integrity that he lived. Insofar as it was the will of God that he live like that, then God’s will included the possibility [and, perhaps, even probability] of his death [as an innocent victim]—not as something God desired but as something God suffered.

Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God who suffers. It is not all that popular an idea, even among Christians. We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God’s power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them.[3]

It is the power to turn a stone into glory. It is the power not to cause the death of my cousin, but to redeem it and him and you and me, a power whose vindication we will celebrate next week, so you had better come back because God and I are just getting warmed up.

Jesus died to show us the way through death, and on the journey, to show us how to teach stones to shout, "Glory!"

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering (Abingdon Press, 1998), p. 116. The paragraphs that follow are inspired by, and occasionally paraphrase, her as well.
[2] Ibid., p. 117.
[3] Ibid., p. 118.

For Jeff

[My cousin Jeff died on March 20 after a battle with brain cancer. He was 44. In the picture I am on the left and he on the right with our great grandmother].

We were the oldest of our generation and because of that there are so many pictures of us together from days that both of us have long forgotten. In some of them we look almost frightened, no doubt unsure of what all this fuss was, and why Gram was trying to hold us so tightly together on her lap.

Our lives just zipped past one another on occasion as we grew older and we never got to know one another well, but I knew you to be a good man, devoted to your girls and a good and honest businessman. We were connected by this odd yet wonderful Johnson bond, at the same time loose and very, very tight.

So I am immensely sad that you are gone, sad most of all for your girls, and for your parents, who are experiencing that awfulness of having one’s child die before you. I suppose I am sad, too, for myself, and the reality of aging and increasing loss.

I am supposedly in the business of coping with loss, and also of proclaiming its ultimate defeat in that thing we call the resurrection, in which I fervently believe. And yet I cannot pretend to understand, much less accept, a death such as yours, a life not lived to its fullness. I wish God could have figured out another way, and I hope someday to be able to ask him why not.

But by then I will have seen you again, if my faith is right, and you will have told me, if I have not yet figured it out myself, that the question doesn’t really matter. You already know that, and probably wish that we could know it too.

I am reminded of a blessing that friends of mine use on occasion. Something like: Life is short, and we do not have much time to make glad the hearts of those who journey with us, so be swift to love and make haste to be kind… I have never used it myself, but perhaps I will begin, because your life and your death have helped me to come closer to its truth.

I know you struggled courageously over the past years and months, and that no one could have been a stronger advocate than your Jamie, and a more faithful companion than your father. You fought the good fight, and so did they, and we are all the better for it. In that very strange paradox of being human, we are all more fully alive because of the way you struggled with death. I trust that now you have seen God’s face and know the love and life that is outside of death. I long to se it with you some day, and perhaps then we will have the time to sit together and become the friends we should have been.

A Day for Humble Thanks

I slept well last night for ther first time in weeks, having stayed up long enough to be able to read the resolutions from the House of Bishops, who have been meeting this week in Texas. I am enormously grateful for their words: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_84148_ENG_HTM.htm.

The words are remarkably clear and, in my estimation, are a healthy dose of self-differentiation in the midst of a climate of "shoulds" created by the Primates. A shorthand summary of what was said might be, "We desire to be in Communion, but as the body that we are. We know this has caused great anxiety, but the anxiety does not belong to us." This is all very grown up(especially for the church)!

As much as it is tempting, however, this is not a day for crowing, because it is a day of pain for some of our brothers and sisters. Let us still hope that we can stay together, and work for it in a way that sacrifices no one's dignity or their integrity.

I am especially grateful to my bishop, Jack McKelvey, for taking a leadership role. Thank you, Bishop, from the bottom of my heart.

This is the Message

Lent 4C: Joshua 5:9-12; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, NY
The Mayor of Rochester was present.


At the beginning of this Service we lamented the breach of what I would call incivility: the gap between the dignity with which we believe every human being is endowed, and the way we actually treat one another. This gap exists in all aspects of our society. None of us are immune to it.

It takes a fairly violent form, however, on our streets and among our young people. The senseless fights at recent basketball games at the Blue Cross Arena are just an example, and just the tip of the iceberg. They brought into the public eye for a moment what is a daily reality of life for many of our young people.

What to do? Many things, obviously. One thing, though, is that we in the church need to get clearer about our message and find new ways to proclaim it, and not just in our churches. All of us need to become evangelists of this message in our daily lives.

The message of Christianity, by the way, was made for these times. Christianity was born in a violent time, when upholding the dignity of every human being was not a cultural value, quite the opposite. The message of Christianity was profoundly counter-cultural. Why else did so many early Christians die for proclaiming it? Our time is increasingly not unlike that early time. If there ever was a time when the message of Christianity was culturally acceptable it was not at its beginning and it is not now.

I think this reality is something around which most of us have a difficult time wrapping our minds. We still think of going to church as a culturally acceptable thing to do. Some of us may live in circles where that may be true, but overall I do not think it is any longer. And this is especially true if we get clear about what the message of Christianity actually is. Our message is deeply culturally subversive.

So what is the message? Our readings this morning are perfect for answering this question.

Joshua says it, in a word from God,

Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt.[1]

Or, in another translation (NRSV), “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.”

Paul puts it succinctly in a couple of phrases from him this morning:

We don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look (the New Revised Standard says, “from a human point of view”); and

Anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. (NRSV: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”).

Then Paul gives as close to a job description for Christians as you can get:

All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other (NRSV: “and has given us the ministry of reconciliation”).

And then Jesus tells us a story that illustrates just how this all works: “There once was a man who had two sons…”

The younger son stands for all of us in alienation from God and from one another, sometimes quite willfully chosen. “Give me my inheritance right now,” the son says, which is as good as saying, “I want no more part of you.”

Now let’s stop right there. What does the father do? He gives it to him. He gives it to him. How many of you would honor such a request by one of your children?

The story starts with God the giver of something he never by rights should have given us, our freedom. We are children of God, but we can do what we want to do. We have free will. It is our glory, and it is, of course, how we mess up.

This is how Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter) is culturally subversive right from the beginning. We have been given complete free will by God. God will not do anything to restrict our freedom. Again, this is our glory. But it also leads me to believe that the world is all about me, me and my glorious ability to make choices for myself.

That would be fine (and only glorious) if each of us lived on our own planet. We don’t. We are surrounded by other “me’s.” And the difficult task God has put before me is to make choices that benefit not just me, but us, because God does not just love me, but God loves us, and the “us,” by the way, is literally every created thing.

We are wired to be individuals. But God asks us to be a community. That’s really the dilemma of being human. And God’s answer to this dilemma is culturally subversive because the goal of our culture is for the individual to be all he or she can be, to be able to make every choice without consequence, for every individual to be able to act as if there was no one else in the universe.

The younger son in the story lives into this, his own, dream. It was a great ride for a while. There is something to be said for dissolute living! What a joy to be able to waste and not think about the consequences!

But, of course, there is that little thing which gets in the way of us all: reality. Pain. “He began to hurt.” And then he was thrust into his moment of disgrace: slopping pigs. The detail of the pigs is very important to the story. Pigs were unclean animals. Jews had nothing to do with them. The son has fallen into total disgrace; there is not a shred of dignity left.

That brought him to his senses.

Those few words are a statement of the entirety of what God expects from us. The one thing we have to do to heal our relationship with God. We have “to come to our senses.” We have to be honest about who we are and what we need, and that almost always means being able to say to ourselves—and here comes the cultural subversion again—“I cannot make it on my own.”

I submit to you that there is no reward in this world for making that statement. We define success in our culture by its very opposite: the self-made man or woman is our cultural hero. Someone who says, “I cannot make it on my own” has failed the rule of personal toughness, that is the rule of our streets, be they our city streets, or our suburban ones.

The son makes the choice. I cannot make it on my own. And he prepares a speech, hoping to be received back into his father’s household. Notice it is a speech about status. He assumes he can only get back in by taking on a lesser status. “Take me on as a hired hand.”

Then the story gets really good, and really subversive.

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him.

Now, either his father just happened to see him or, he was watching and waiting. I assume it’s the latter. God doesn’t give up on us, any of us. God sits on the porch and pines for our return like a lovesick puppy dog.

And then runs to greet him. Is that the way you got greeted when you had to come home with your tail between your legs? I’m betting not. And to try to imagine this elderly Middle Eastern-dressed patriarch running down the road is helpful. None of this makes sense.

And note the kiss and the embrace come before the apology. God doesn’t need our confession in order to forgive. He just needs our desire. And then the son doesn’t get the whole speech out, he only gets to “I don’t deserve to be called your son.”

Eugene Peterson captures it brilliantly in the Message. “But the father wasn’t listening.”

My son is here—given up for dead and now alive!

Nothing the son could do could change his status. “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” He was already a new creation, long before he was willing to think of himself as one.

This is the message. You are already loved beyond your wildest imagination. You are free, and God will not interfere with that, but if you use your freedom to take so much as one step toward God, you will find yourself dressed for a party, no questions asked.

And this is also how we are to treat one another. This is “the ministry of reconciliation” to which God calls us. To love as the father in this story loves, without condition, prodigally, that is, extravagantly. The dignity of each and every one of you, and your neighbors wherever you live, and your enemies wherever they live, and the thug wanna-bes, and the mentally ill, and those in prison, and everyone on this planet that is thought of as weak or a sinner, is never in question in the eyes of God who wants nothing but to dress us all in the best robe and throw a party just because we are alive.

Now just in case we thought this news was all good and no one could possibly stick up their nose at it, into the story strides the older son, representing the way we want the world to work. You get what you deserve.

“No, son,” the father seems to say, “even you don’t get what you deserve. It is not how I operate.”

That’s the message we are called to proclaim. It’s about love, pure and simple, and, mostly, unconditional. It is not the way the world works, but the world, including our children, will remain lost without it. It makes no sense at all, but the world will only be converted to anything like civility by love, and we in the church are called to dare to be the ones who act that way.

That’s why we ultimately have to say “no” to war as an answer to anything, and we cannot put our trust in more police and more rules to make our streets—or even the Blue Cross Arena—safe again. We must teach people how to love, and we must do that by taking the risk of loving them first. That is how God works and it is how we are called to work.

And we should have no illusions as to how counter cultural and sometimes even dangerous that work is. And how even we will resist it, because even we want the world to work like the older brother wants it to work.

But ultimately it doesn’t. The world works by love. That is what we are about to celebrate at Easter, and it is what the message is that we are called to get clear about and proclaim.

[1] Translation of Eugene Peterson, The Message.