He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. (The full readings for today can be found here.)
Good evening, my friends, good evening. And welcome to the Great Vigil of Easter.
Did you notice that opening line of that very first reading? It’s such a fabulous first line, a cardinal statement: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”
But we might well wonder, Why is the Church giving us that story this evening, as we celebrate the great vigil? What does this have to do with Easter—with the empty tomb? It’s almost as if the Church were trying to tell us something, as if the Church were offering a glimpse into the nature of God through the lens of these readings. I think the Church is trying to give us some insight into God’s professional life, God’s business. You see, I think God is in the business of creating life where there was no life before. And there’s only one reason for that sort of creative impulse, that need to form and shape something new. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So, I want us to imagine the state of mind of the disciples, particularly these women, going to anoint Jesus’ body for his burial. Not only have they witnessed the brutal horror of Jesus’ death, not only have they lost their friend and teacher, but they’ve also seen a dream die. They had dreamed of a life with Jesus, of a life filled with God’s love; they had dreamed of a better world. So they went to the tomb to honor their friend, to honor their loss, to honor the dead.
But they didn’t find any death there, because our God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Our God, as we said earlier, is in the business of new life. Our God is in the business of calling light out of the darkness, of creating new life out of nothing more than His love.
We see that new life happening this evening, right before our eyes. God is on the loose again tonight at St. Christopher By the Sea, doing that God thing. God is about to make a new thing, another Genesis story, in the baptisms of Addison and Wayne. And, while we don’t know yet what paths they will walk down in their lives to come, we know who will always walk with them.
Looking back to the readings tonight, I’m pretty sure that the forces of empire were certain that the story of Jesus was over. In fact, they were certain he was not only dead, but buried. But God, like love, is never static; neither God nor love will be contained. And I want to suggest to you that something more than Jesus escaped from that grave—pure love rolled away the stone, unadulterated love walked out of that tomb, and love told those dear women that he would meet them again in Galilee.
Many of us have tried to keep God in a box. We try to create a spiritual ghetto—over here is where I keep my work life, and over here is where I keep my family stuff, and this box here is where I keep my religion. That box we try to keep God in, well, it’s nothing more than a grave, a tomb. And if today’s Gospel teaches us anything, it teaches us that God will not stay where we put Him. This is our hope; this is why we call ourselves Easter people, my friends. He is not dead; he is risen. Alleluia!
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” (The full readings for this morning can be found here.)
In the name of the living God, who is creating, redeeming, and sustaining us.Good evening, good evening. It’s good to be back with you again.
You know, sometimes, when I look at the readings for a given Sunday, my first thought as a preacher is “There’s just not much there to talk about.” That is definitely not the case with the readings for tonight. Rather, this is like trying to get a drink from a firehose. So, I want to highlight just a few passages from this story of Jesus’ Passion. As we read the Gospel for today, we cannot help but wince as we recall Jesus’ words: “This is my body. This is my blood.”
So, we talked yesterday about the wonderful observation of Jürgen Moltmann, who said that all of our thinking about God, especially our theology of hope, must be accomplished “within earshot of the dying Christ.” Well, tonight we can hear Christ all too clearly. In fact, we may want to plug our ears, but we mustn’t do that, or we’ll miss something very important.
Now, I love my friend John’s gospel. John is a poet, and everything is his Gospel is laden with layers of meaning. In this Gospel, there are no accidents, and there are no coincidences. So, we all remember the fabulous story of Moses on Mt. Horeb when he encounters the burning bush. God tells Moses to take off his sandals because he’s standing on holy ground and tells him that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When Moses asks him his name, God replies, “I am that I am.” We call this the Great I Am, and it implies that everything that has existence, everything that is, exists because of and through God.
Now, let’s see what this poet John does with that idea. When the soldiers and Pharisees come to the Garden of Gethsemane asking for Jesus, he replies, “I am he.” As Jesus hangs on the cross, dying, he says, “I am thirsty.” Now let’s look at how John treats Peter, Jesus’ close friend. You’ll recall that Peter had sworn, “Even though they all fall away, I will not leave you.” And Peter does follow Jesus—right up to the courtyard of the high priest. But when a woman asks Peter if he’s one of Jesus’ disciples he replies, “ I am not.” I am….not. Again, as he tries to warms himself, the crowd asks if Peter was a disciple of Jesus. Peter again says, “I am not.” Peter’s repudiation is actually a denial of his association with God.
I don’t want to judge Peter too harshly. There have certainly been times in my life when I walked away from God, even pushed God away. Sometimes, we all find our fears to be overpowering. This is especially true when confronted with the power of empire, especially an empire as brutal as the Roman empire. You may recall we talked on Maundy Thursday about Jesus and the great commandment: the notion that people would know we follow Jesus by our love.
But a love like that will stick out like a sore thumb in a place like the Roman Empire. Whether it’s Pharoah or Caesar or Vladimir Putin, empire only wants one thing: more—more bricks, more oil, more guns, more land. Empire concerns itself with expansion and self-preservation. Love is concerned, fiercely, with the other.
We see this distinction exposed in the discussion between Pilate and Jesus. Revealing his primary concern with empire, Pilate begins by asking Jesus if he is a king. Jesus doesn’t answer the question, or rather, answers the question with a question of his own. Pilate then asks “What have you done?” And Jesus doesn’t answer this question. Rather, he now goes back to the first question, and says that he is a king in another place. Jesus tells Pilate that he came into the world to testify to the truth. Now, Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?” Later, Pilate asks, “Where are you from?” And Jesus doesn’t answer. In frustration, Pilate then demands, “”Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?” Do you not know that I have the power to hang you up on a tree like a scarecrow?
Does it seem to you that these two men are having a failure to communicate? Although they may be speaking the same language, they don’t share a common vocabulary or a common point of reference. Pilate asks the question, “What is truth?” He doesn’t seem to know and I’m not sure he really cares. In reality, the Truth is standing right in front of him. The Truth is about to be beaten and crucified—because in a world dominated by empire, truth and love will stand out like a sore thumb. Empire doesn’t have any use for truth, but Pilate reveals his real concern. His concern, and his last question, is about power. That is the nature of empire.
Fear and violence are the principal tools, the fundamental weapons of empire. And the Cross was just such a tool. You know, it’s said that for the first century or so, the fish and not the cross, was the primary symbol of Christianity. And I think that’s because no one who had actually seen a crucifixion could bear to see the Cross used in that way, they could not yet imagine it as an avatar of faith. For them, the Cross marked only terror and brutality. Those forces can only be overcome through the strongest force known to humanity. Only love can overcome them.
We see that love demonstrated as Jesus hangs on the Cross, dying. He looks down upon his mother and the beloved disciple, the only ones who remained with him, or the only people who could bear to watch this horror show. And as he’s dying, he says to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” He tells his disciple, “Here is your mother.” It is a moment of unbelievable tenderness, a moment of redefining family as a community of love and loss, an expression of God’s concern for those left behind even in these final moments of agony.
So, what does this story mean for us as Christians in the 21st century, some two thousand years after these events? Well, among other things, I think it means that God intended to share in the entire human experience: pain, hunger, thirst, weddings, joy, glory, sorrow and loss, and even shame and death. God reached into the entire human experience, knew it firsthand, touched it, and made it sacred. It means that there is no part of our lives that God does not understand and will not share with us.
I want to suggest to you that it was not iron nails that fastened Jesus to the Cross. Rather, Jesus was held there by the love of God for all of humanity. In a real sense, the Cross is God’s statement to the world: do your very worst. You can beat me, mock me, scorn me, betray me, deny me, hang me on a tree like a scarecrow, and even kill me. Do your very worst, and I will still love you. And thus, the Cross was changed, transubstantiated, from an instrument of torture and shame into a symbol of hope and love. God’s love overcomes empire, terror, and death. And that’s got to be “good news.”Amen.
In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.’ Luke 18. (The full readings for this morning can be found here.)
In the name of the Living God, who is creating, redeeming, and sustaining us. Well, good morning, good morning. It’s good to be with you again here at St. Michael’s. And many thanks to Brynn and all of you for your generous hospitality.
So, this morning in the lectionary, the Church offers us this story which is sometimes called the parable of the unjust judge. And this passage of the Gospel reminds me of one of my favorite stories about the religious life. Several years ago, there was a young woman who became a nun. And she made her vows and entered the convent. Now the rules of this particular Order required that she be cloistered and keep silence, although every ten years the sisters were allowed to say two words. So, for the first ten years, she was assigned to make the beds. And she changed the sheets, and washed them, and made every bed throughout the monastery. And at the end of that ten years, she went to the Mother Superior and said, “Bed hard.” Well, the next ten years, she was assigned to the kitchen. And she peeled the potatoes and cooked the oatmeal and cleaned every pot in that monastery. And at the end of that ten years, she went to the Mother Superior and told her, “Kitchen hot.”
After ten long years she was next assigned to clean the bathrooms. And she washed every sink and bathtub and scrubbed every toilet they had. And at the end of that ten years, she went to the Mother Superior and said, “I quit.” And the elder nun looked at her and said, “Good. You haven’t done anything but nag me since you got here.” Contrary to that story, and today’s gospel, I don’t think prayer has much to do with nagging God.
And we may be a little confused by this parable, or by many of them. The Hebrew word for parable is mashal, which carries with it connotations of a story, or an allegory, or a riddle. And many of these parables may leave us scratching our heads, including the one this morning, but that’s their function. They’re kind of like a picture frame that is intentionally hung so that it’s not level, so that we’ll have to really think about and puzzle over what’s portrayed. These parables are meant to make us think, to examine, and to turn an idea over in our minds until we come to a deeper understanding of it. And the broader question that I think Luke wants us to look at is how do we think prayer operates, and what does faithful living look like in a fallen world?
So, let’s take a deeper look at this parable and see what it offers us. Jesus begins his story: “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” Oh, I’ve been to that city. And I’m pretty sure that I know that judge. I was a lawyer for a very long time, and on more than one occasion, I ran across that judge who did not fear God nor respect people. And without revealing too much about this judge, I can tell you that the county seat is Beaumont. Now, I should have known there was going to be a problem because in French the name Beaumont means “beautiful mountain.” Have y’all ever been to Jefferson County? Well, it’s not beautiful, and there’s no mountain.
Seriously, if you’ve ever met someone like that—someone who doesn’t fear God and doesn’t respect people—you know how truly frightening a person that is. And I don’t think for a moment, Jesus is trying to tell us that God is like that. The God we worship loved and respected humanity, embraced all sorts of people, prayed regularly, and his blood watered the hill we call Golgotha. I want to circle back to the contrast between God and this unjust judge in just a moment, but first let’s look at one of the other characters in the story.
When we examine the widow in this parable, we remember the biblical direction about taking care of widows because in that world they were fragile and vulnerable. And yet this widow doesn’t seem vulnerable at all. She constantly goes to the unjust judge asking for justice against her opponent. Some translators tell us the better translation is “give me revenge.” And we might re-think our notion of her as fragile when we realize that the judge is actually being worn out by this woman.
So, is Jesus actually telling us that the real secret to a rich prayer life is becoming a bother to God, pestering the Almighty until He just gives in? Somehow, I don’t think that’s the point, especially since Jesus is on the receiving end of so many of our prayers. Now, there are some folks, and a few preachers, who will tell you that if you close your eyes real hard, and give money to the church, and believe just right, God will give you anything you ask for—as if the Almighty were some sort of a cross between a celestial ATM and a divine Santa Claus. We have a name for that sort of theology. We call it “heresy.”
I think Jesus is talking to us about two things. First, he’s telling us not to lose heart. And it’s so easy in this world to lose heart. There are unjust judges everywhere. Our political discourse has been reduced to the snarkiest common denominator. And in our prayer life, help never seems to come as quickly as we’d like, if it comes at all. And if we view prayer as a transaction, we might lose heart all the more quickly. I don’t think our prayer life is like a Vegas slot machine, where if we just keeping putting in enough tokens, we’ll hit the jackpot.
I do think, however, it’s like another bible story, one we didn’t hear today but I’ll bet you know it. I think our prayer life is a lot like the story of Jacob. And you’ll remember that Jacob was trying to come back home, knowing that his brother Esau was furious with him and he’s worried that his brother is coming to kill him. And that night a man comes to Jacob and wrestles with him. And the scripture is unclear about whether Jacob is wrestling with a man, or an angel, or with God himself. The two of them wrestle all night. And although in the struggle Jacob’s hip is thrown out of joint, he tells his opponent, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
Our prayer life is like holding onto God, struggling with God all night, even when we are injured in the struggle. It is a stubborn insistence on a blessing, oftentimes a blessing we do not yet understand. As Saint Paul says, we train ourselves to be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. We will wrestle all night, holding on for that blessing. We will lift up our eyes to the hills, knowing that our help can only come from the Lord. And if we remain obstinate, if we stubbornly cling to God even when our strength is failing, the Son of Man will return to find that we are a faithful people. Amen.
Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” The full readings for this service can be found here.
In the name of our God, the One who creates, redeems and sustains us.
A long time ago, in medieval Europe, they used to have what they called mystery plays. These dramas were often accompanied by a procession or a parade, and would depict scenes or stories from the Bible, particularly from the Gospels. Now, I do something like that in my neighborhood. Anyone who knows me knows that I have two dogs, and they’re not very good dogs at all. In fact, they are terrible dogs. I take them for a long walk at least twice a day, but they are ill-behaved and are committed to that bad behavior. And every now and then, we run across an animal that’s been hit by a car or killed somehow—a squirrel or a cat or a bird.
And my dogs always insist that we stop. They insist that we investigate and consider these incidents very carefully. Now, I’m not sure that they want to bandage up the creature’s wounds, or to carry the poor animal to an innkeeper and pay for its lodging. But I’m always trying to get them to keep walking, to move along, because there’s nothing to see here. I don’t know if that makes me the priest or the Levite in the story, and I’m not sure I like where this analogy is going so let’s get back to the Gospel.
So, Luke begins this fabulous story with a lawyer, a lawyer who wants to test Jesus. And this lawyer asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” I want us to look at the assumption in this question. The assumption is that eternal life is somehow linked to something we do. And I think Jesus’ response will unsettle that assumption. Initially, Jesus answers with a question, and then he answers with a story. Neither directly answers this lawyer’s question, by which I mean Jesus’ response calls us into a discussion that goes beyond a simple answer. It calls us to walk with our rabbi, rather than simply solving a puzzle.
So, this lawyer asks Jesus to give him the secret to eternal life, and I love Jesus’ response. He asks him two very important questions: what is written in scripture; and what do you read there? In other words, Jesus asks him: (1) what is the text; and (2) how do you interpret it? Sometimes, I hear people say that they just want the plain meaning of scripture without any interpretation. We have a theological term for that idea: we call it “poppycock.” Every reading of Scripture requires our interpretation, requires that we bring our understanding filtered through our lives to the work. Our Bible is less like an encyclopedia and more like a chess partner against whom we struggle and sharpen our wits and moral sensibilities. Or, as Bishop Hibbs used to say, biblical fundamentalism is fundamentally unbiblical. Jesus recognizes that principle in his questions to the lawyer.
The lawyer has an answer at the ready; he knows his scriptures. He tells Jesus, “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.” The lawyer answers with a passage from Deuteronomy which is sometimes called the Shema, and a passage from Leviticus. Jesus replies, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” In other words, you already knew the answer. If you want to know what to do, do those things. And anybody would be happy with that answer. Anybody, that is, except a lawyer. So, now he wants to drill down, “But who is my neighbor?”
And Jesus answers this question with a story, a story about a man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. Now, we know that Jericho is the place where God knocks down walls, and Jesus is going to knock a few down himself with this story. We may have lost a bit of the geography here: the story takes place on the long, downhill road between Jerusalem and Jericho, a road also known at the time as the “Bloody Pass” or “The Way of Blood.” The road meanders and the topography provides the perfect environment for an ambush: a paradise for bandits and robbers.
So, I don’t think Jesus’ audience would have been surprised at all about the man being beaten, robbed, and left for dead on that road. Nor would Jesus’ audience have been particularly surprised to hear Jesus tell them that the priest and the Levite both passed the man by, in fact, they walked by “on the other side” of the road. (The laws of ritual purification at the time might actually have recommended this practice to devout Jews.) We aren’t surprised by Jesus’ casting the priests and Levites in the role of the villains: both Jesus and John the Baptist had been doing that for a while.
However, the notion that the Samaritan showed the quality of mercy, the notion of the Samaritan as the hero of the story, would have astonished and befuddled Jesus’ first-century audience. The Samaritans and the Jews had despised each other for hundreds of years at the time Jesus told this story. The Samaritans had desecrated the Temple with human bones. The Jews reciprocated. According to the Mishna (the first major work of Rabbinic Judaism), “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine” (Mishna Shebiith 8:10). So, hearing about a “good Samaritan” would have bewildered Jesus’ audience. It would be the equivalent of a modern parable about the “good Klansman” or a “good member of the Sinaloa cartel,” or the “good fascist.”
The parable reports that the Samaritan came near to the man and was “moved with pity.” The Greek word here implies being moved to compassion at the deepest part of who we are. Thus, most of us assume the good Samaritan in the parable is like Jesus, or God, who loves inclusively with a kind of promiscuous empathy for everyone. But suppose for a moment that it’s actually God in the ditch, and the question is what are we going to do about it? And while the question the lawyer originally asked was about what we have to do for eternal life, suppose the real issue isn’t so much about what we do as it is about the kind of people we’re going to be. Are we going to be the kind of people who notice the suffering in the world around us and are moved by it, or are we going to walk on the other side of the road? I’m wondering who I didn’t notice? Who did I walk to the other side to avoid? Lord, spit on our eyes so that we can see.
In just a little while, we’re going to come up to this altar, and the priest will put a bit of bread into our mouths. And the Church spent a lot of time, and energy, and struggle, trying to figure out how the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus. And I have to tell you, I’m not really that interested in that question. But I am profoundly interested in the question of how you and I become the body of Christ in the world, and I think this parable holds a good part of the key.
This world is so polarized today. We want to fight about guns, about abortion, about race, about money, and about who’s got the moral high ground. Like the Jews and the Samaritans, we have been carrying these grudges along for so very long. And it may turn out that we really are in for the fight of our lives. Suppose, just for a moment, that learning to love our neighbors, learning to care for God’s children recklessly, really is the fight for our lives. It’s a great irony: the fight of our lives is learning how to love. As Bishop Monterroso recently observed, there are thousands and thousands of ways for us love our neighbor. There is only one way to love God; and that’s to love our neighbor. Amen.
“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” (The full readings for today can be found here.)
In the name of the name of the Living God, who is creating, redeeming, and sustaining us.
So, it’s a special day today, and I want to begin by telling you a story, or a couple of stories actually. I don’t know if y’all have noticed this, but whenever I mention that I’m going to tell a story, our clergy have one of three different reactions: sometimes they wince a little bit (the way one might wince sitting in the dentist’s chair as the drill approaches), sometimes, they close their eyes and wish they were someplace else, and sometimes they just bow their heads to pray.
Today is the nineteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord 2022. And it’s an important day in our history, but the story begins a bit before that. Way back on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation. He announced that enslaved people held in the Confederate states were free. Now while that was a fine idea, for many of our enslaved brothers and sisters, it had very little meaning. Pronouncing our fellow countrymen free did not actually change their lives much, especially for those in the southern states. And here lies one of the great contradictions of our nation: we were born out of a yearning for liberty, conceived in language that exalted liberty, and built on the backs of men and women we kept in chains. It was, in short, our country’s original sin. And to proclaim it was over meant very little to the men and women who lived under the yoke of slavery.
Here in Texas, that situation continued for another two and a half years. On June 19, 1865, just a few miles down the road in Galveston, General Gordon Granger finally arrived at the port of Galveston with Union troops. He delivered General Order No. 3 which provided: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.” Many of our African American brothers and sisters would have to wait still longer for their freedom, wait until the harvest was completed.
And I want you to imagine all those years following the Emancipation Proclamation. “They tell me that we’re free, but it don’t seem no different to me at all.” Or maybe, “I have heard rumors of my liberation, but nothing in my life tells me that’s true.” And I have heard those voices in AA meetings, and I have heard those voices as various groups (women, the poor, those subjected to human trafficking, and those suffering from addiction and frightening diseases) struggle for their dignity. And many years ago, that first celebration we call Juneteenth led the people to the Reedy Chapel, which is an AME church in Galveston. Because those people know it was not their enslavers who had liberated them; they knew they had been freed by their God.
And it’s a very old story, that struggle for human dignity and liberation. Our Scripture records Moses going to Pharaoh and telling him that he must set the captives free. It seems that the divine plan, God’s intention for humanity, is intricately tied up with our freedom. And that brings us to the gospel for today.
The gospel story has Jesus wandering far from his home, in the country of the Gerasenes. So, if we look at this story, let’s examine where Jesus is, and what he’s doing. He’s in gentile country, he’s in the tombs (which means ritual impurity), and he’s talking with a demon. He’s in an unclean land, in an unclean place, talking with an unclean spirit. This is the last place a good Jewish boy should be.
That region was also the site of a horrifying event in Jewish history, a terrible war crime. According to the historian Josephus, during the late 60s CE, toward the end of the Jewish revolt, the Roman general Vespasian sent soldiers to retake Gerasa. The Romans killed a thousand young men, imprisoned their families, burned the city, and then attacked villages throughout the region. So, many of those buried in Gerasene tombs had been slaughtered by Roman legions.
As soon as Jesus crosses the Lake of Galilee and steps on shore, he is met by this man who is the victim of demonic possession. The portrait of this man is truly horrifying. He goes about naked and does not live in a home, but rather in the tombs. Luke is telling us that this man is more dead than alive. Mark’s account adds to this man’s torment. He tells us: “He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.” Mark 5:3-5.
So, it is this man, this tortured fragment of a man, who raises one of the most important questions in the Bible: He asks, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” It’s a question most of us should ask, and ask regularly. What exactly is the role of Jesus in our lives? For this man, and I hope for many of us, Jesus has come to set us free. I’m wondering how well we know Jesus as liberator. This man, who is never named in the Gospels came to know Jesus as the man who set him free. And just as the Jewish homeland was occupied by Roman legions, this man was occupied by a legion of forces which robbed him of his full humanity.
When Jesus asks the man to identify the spirits which had taken possession of him, he answers: “Legion,” for many demons had entered him. I don’t know about you, but I have heard the voices of those many demons. You see, the most dangerous message those satanic forces have for us is “This will never change. This will never get better.” I have heard those voices in those who struggle with addiction, and they are legion. We heard those voices as Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and we saw thousands of refugees forced to leave their homes. And they are legion. We heard those voices use scripture, our holy book, to justify the chains on the enslaved people in the American South. And they are legion. We hear those voices every time there is another mass shooting, and we are paralyzed because some of us are committed to the notion that that’s just how things are. And those voices are legion. And we have heard the voices of anger and grievance in our political discourse, and they are legion.
As was the case on that morning in Galveston in 1865, as was the case that morning in the country of the Gerasenes, the divine movement is always a movement of liberation. Let me say that again, the divine movement is always a movement of liberation. We should not confuse this movement as a license to do whatever we want. We know that the movement of liberation is of divine origin when it calls us, not as a charter or privilege for a disordered freedom from all constraint, but rather the liberty to become the people God intended for us to become, the freedom to become fully human. We find the intersection of the divine and the human impulse toward liberation when we hear the call toward becoming more deeply human and restoring our brothers and sisters to the imago dei, the image of God in which they were created.
Jesus understood this was his mission—to release the captives, to let the oppressed go free. But we profoundly misunderstand our faith if we think that we should sit back and applaud this work of Jesus from a distance. Christianity, my brothers and sisters, is not a spectator sport. I’m always amazed when we give the newly baptized a candle. We should give them seat belts and a crash helmet. Because that work of casting out the demonic forces in the world, that work of setting the captives free and restoring men and women to God’s vision for them—that’s our work now. Amen
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. (The full readings for this morning can be found here.)
In the name of the Living God, who is creating, redeeming, and sustaining us.
Well, good morning, everybody, good morning. And welcome as we join together to celebrate the feast day of our patron saint, St. Mark. And I’ve been wondering….no, no, I’ll talk about that later.
So, today, we hear the opening of Mark’s gospel. And our friend Mark’s gospel is unique. There’s no fancy star in the sky, there’s no manger or shepherds, or wise men. There’s no trip into Egypt, or Jesus at the dawn of creation. He begins the story with a baptism. Jesus’ story, for Mark, begins with his baptism. And I wonder, I just wonder, if that doesn’t tell us something about Mark’s community. I think for his community, and maybe for ours, too, the story of who we are begins with our baptism. It is as though Mark sets aside genealogy, history, geography and political context, and tells us: “If you really want to know about a person, learn about their baptism.” Because for Mark and his community, that’s our real beginning. There, we’ll find the real origin of our lives.
We really don’t know all that much about Mark. By the way, I’ve been really trying…no, we’ll talk about that later. We don’t know much about Mark although we think his community may have lived somewhere around Rome. And we believe his community suffered under the early persecutions of the Christian Church.
So, I mentioned today was the feast of St. Mark. It is also the Sunday after Easter, which is sometimes called Low Sunday or if you really want to be arcane, Quasimodo Sunday. If you’ve read much Victor Hugo, you know that the famous hunchback named Quasimodo was left and found at the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the Sunday after Easter. Now some people say it’s called Low Sunday because of the contrast to the High Holy Days of Easter. Some people will tell you that it’s because church attendance is generally low. So you see, I’ve been trying to convince myself…I’ve been working for the last several weeks to convince myself, that’s it’s just a coincidence that today is the day our clergy asked me to preach. But so far, I haven’t had any luck at all.
So, back to this Gospel passage. We think Mark’s community was a fairly small band of persecuted Christians. And certainly, the community of early followers of Jesus would have known hard times. They were occupied by the Roman empire, subjected to a harsh system of domination and taxation; the poor were everywhere, and their religious system was collaborating with these villains. And our patron Mark tells us: Now, hear the word of the Lord. “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you.”
Onto this stage, into this troubled setting, strides this eccentric, bizarre, maybe whimsical character. He is neither charming nor winsome. He rants. He is uncombed and indecorous and unkempt. He’s dressed in camel hair and eats honey and locusts. Now, I don’t care how much honey you cover a plate of locusts with; it still tastes like bugs. And he is amazing. He is amazing mostly because the people come from miles around to hear him preach baptism and the forgiveness of sins.
He seems so irrelevant to the problems people are facing. Their politics were a mess. John preached baptism. Poverty was everywhere. John preached the forgiveness of sins. And the amazing part is that the crowds were drawn to him. I think he’s still out there today, preaching like a madman. Vladimir Putin has ravaged Ukraine and committed terrible war crimes. John is preaching baptism. Look at our troubled economy, look at all this rising inflation. John is preaching the forgiveness of sins. He’s still out there, preaching, as though the solution to our worldly problems lay in the spiritual realm.
And most of us, we don’t really like all that confession of sins part. We are a prideful people, and we cherish our self-esteem. We would much rather mount a good defense, or proclaim our denial, or offer a fine excuse rather make than a simple confession. The truth is, when I look back on my life, I have sinned some, I have sinned again, and I have sinned some more. It’s so hard to announce, as the old Prayer Book used to teach us, “There is no health in us.” We cannot avoid our shame; we cannot ignore it. But we can overcome it and find forgiveness. This is not comfortable, but it is the way to healing.
And there is John, calling to us, crying out in the wilderness, telling us this is the way to God. And that way always seems to lead through our baptism and our willingness to confess our failures—just as we will confess them before we come to this altar for communion.
Now, power is a dangerous thing, and perhaps spiritual authority is the most dangerous of all. It’s a strong temptation, but we can take note of John’s spiritual maturity in his recognition of his role. He knows he’s not the center of the story. It requires a lot to know that you’re the messenger and not the message. He tells the crowd that One “who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” It’s hard to resist the limelight, but John’s humility speaks of the authenticity of his encounter with the divine. This is John’s confession: “I am not worthy. I’m not worthy to stoop down and untie his sandals. I’m not worthy.”
And then Jesus, the one who is worthy, comes to the river Jordan, to be baptized by John. We might wonder, “Why did Jesus need to be baptized?” We believe, and we’ll say so in just a few minutes, in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. So, why did Jesus, who was without sin, need a baptism? I think perhaps this was simply one of the many ways in which Jesus came to share with us in our humanity. He shared with us in the waters of baptism so that we might share with him in that Easter resurrection., And then, Jesus comes out of the water and a voice from the heavens announces that he is God’s beloved child, just as we are the beloved children of the Holy One. And as Jesus comes out of the water, the heavens are torn apart and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends upon him. Here, we have this remarkable collision of holiness, this intersection of the three members of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) at the river Jordan. But it is the Spirit that drives Jesus into the desert, into the wilderness for his time of trial and temptation.
And only after these events, after God’s affirmation of all that he is doing and all that he is, only after he is cajoled and tested in the desert, can Jesus announce to us all that it is time. This is the very time when God’s kingdom has come near. And it’s odd that we return to this story, the beginning of Mark’s gospel, right after we’ve heard the end of the story—Jesus’ passion and resurrection. But perhaps that displacement, that warp and weft of time, may remind us that we are no longer in ordinary, standard time. We are entering into sacred time here.
You see, Mark tells us, very carefully, I believe, that this is only the beginning of the good news. That story is still being written, in your life and mine. We who have been immersed in the water and the Spirit, we who have confessed, repented, and forgiven, we have our own story to tell about the good news of Jesus Christ. Tell that story out, my brothers and sisters, and tell them that the kingdom of God has come near. Amen.
The full readings for this morning can be found here:
But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.
In the name of the Living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Good morning. How’s your Lent going? It’s the fourth Sunday of Lent, so we’re about knee deep in it. And you know, somewhere between the global pandemic, the Russian Invasion, and events in this parish, I think it’s about the lentiest Lent I’ve ever lented. But here we are, and this morning, the Church has offered us this magnificent story. We call this story the prodigal son. That word “prodigal” makes me wonder. It means extravagant, lavish, or sometimes wasteful spending and I promise you we’ll come back to that next week.
It’s one of my favorite stories, a story about how we should treat terrible sinners—you know, people like you and like me. So Jesus tells us this story that captures the essence of not only this season of repentance, but also of the heart of Christianity.
And he begins, “There was a man who had two sons.” Now, I think Jesus’ audience, when they heard this introduction, would have immediately thought, “Uh oh. There’s going to be trouble.” Because these people knew their Scripture, and they would have immediately thought of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Essau, and perhaps of Joseph and his brothers.
You see, I had several brothers, and I understand what kind of trouble younger brothers can be. But in this story, the younger son goes to his father and says: “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” Now, we may miss the import of this request. In that world, at that time, that was in essence the younger son saying, “I wish you were dead” or at least, “You’re taking too long to die.” But the father complies and gives his younger son his inheritance early. So, the younger boy gathers all he has and goes off to a foreign country.
Oh, I know about that foreign country. I’ve spent time there. You see, there was a time in my life when, if you had asked me, I would have told you that I spent all my money on fine clothes, fast cars, good wine, and pretty women. The rest of it, I wasted. These are years when my father referred to me as Count No-Account. So, I’ve been in that foreign country where the younger brother went. And the boy spends everything he has on dissolute living and then trouble comes: a famine strikes the land. You see, there’s one thing about that foreign country: it’s a lot of fun—until it isn’t anymore.
And we know how far this younger son has fallen, because here’s this good Jewish boy in a gentile country feeding the pigs. Feeding the pigs! I mean, that’s no place for a good Jewish kid. And Luke tells us he would gladly have eaten the pig food, but “no one gave him anything.” “No one gave him anything.” That’s the way the world is sometimes, when you’re down on your luck. And it’s hard to find a way out.
But then, Luke tells us, something remarkable happens. The younger brother has what you might call an epiphany, or a moment of grace, or maybe he’s just desperate. But look at what Luke says: “when he came to himself.” Now, that phrase implies more than just a change of mind, it implies that for a while he had been lost to himself, he had wandered away, he had forgotten who he was. And while we may not have run off with daddy’s money, most of us have forgotten who we are at some point. And he decides to go home, even if that means being treated like one of his father’s hired hands.
And now the story gets really good. Luke tells us, “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” That may be my favorite line in all of Scripture. Do you know why the father saw him from a long way off? Because he was looking for him. I suspect he’d been looking for him to come home ever since the boy left. And I take great comfort in that, in the idea of a God who is always anxious for us to come back home. Maybe I find that notion reassuring because…well, I’ve been a long way off myself.
The younger son tells his father, “I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” He confronted his failures, and he recognized that the heavy cost of them. He recognized they might cost him his place in the family, just as our own failures carry a cost. We might add a pause here in the story, as the father weighs his response to the younger son’s words. But the father, in a moment of lavish generosity and forgiveness, tells the servants: Dress this boy up in something fancy and let’s have a party, “let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
And in a real sense, the younger son was dead to his father. He was gone; he was lost. Look at the father’s response: there’s no price to be paid for re-entry into the family; there’s no penance to be done. The father is full of nothing other than joy at his son’s return. Now, we call this parable the prodigal son, and remember that word prodigal means lavish or extravagant. But, I think we could just as easily call it “prodigal father,” because his response of love and forgiveness is just as extravagant as was his son’s spending.
And the family begins to celebrate the boy’s return—well, not everybody in the family joins in the party, the pachanga. The elder son, the good son, who never did a thing to take advantage of his father, can’t even bear to come into the house. Some of us may identify with that older son: he’s responsible; he does what’s expected of him; and he’s very good at keeping score. In fact, he is shacked and bound by his rage.
The older son tells his father: “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” And in the world he lives in, he’s right. He lives in a world of the zero-sum game, where anytime someone gets ahead, you’re falling behind. We call that an economy of scarcity. He cannot even bring himself to recognize his brother. Look at what he says: not my brother has come back, but this son of yours came back.
The problem isn’t that he has a sense of right and wrong. The problem is that he is a prisoner of it, chained to his sense of injustice. He can’t even go into the house. That’s a hard way to live. He reminds me of something we used to say about my family. We said that we suffered from a genetic case of Irish Alzheimer’s—that’s where you forget everything except the grudges.
Let’s contrast his response to that of the father, who tells him: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” Contrast the older son, who says “this son of yours” with the father, who says “this brother of yours.” The father had to celebrate because the joy and forgiveness overflowed from him. The elder son lives in an economy of scarcity; the father lives in something much closer to what we call the economy of grace, or God’s economy. In the economy of grace, love and forgiveness are the currency, the coin of the realm. And that’s the world, the economy, in which the father has chosen to live.
Now, here’s the brilliance of this story, the genius of this tale: we don’t know the end of the story. We don’t know if the older brother accepted his father’s invitation to join in the celebration. We don’t even know if he ever came into the party, into the house. We don’t know if the younger brother really did change his ways, or if he fell back into his old lifestyle. And I think Jesus meant for that story to remain unfinished, because we get to write that ending every single day in our own lives. We can choose to live like the younger brother, the older brother, or the father. We get to write the ending of this wonderful story in the way we live. It’s your story. Make it a good one.
Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
In the name of the living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
In the name of the living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
You know, sometimes I read Mark’s Gospel and I just cringe at the disciples. That’s probably not the right kind of thing for a preacher to say about these men who the Church would later call “saints,” but these guys are the worst. I mean, here Jesus is, trying for the third time in this 9th Chapter of Mark, to tell them—that he will be betrayed, that he will suffer and be killed, that he will come back from the dead. And all they want to do is argue about which one of them is the greatest. These guys are numbskulls, they are narcissistic, self-absorbed mercenary chuckleheads who don’t understand anything about the Gospel or Jesus or the kingdom of God or anything. And what really infuriates me about them, the really exasperating part about them, is that they are so much like me.
And it makes me wonder, what is God trying to tell us as we bicker and argue on the way? What message are we missing as we struggle for success, power, or achievement?
Admittedly, the world teaches us to love these things from a very early age. We have to get the best grades, so we can go to the best colleges, so we can get the best jobs and make the most money. In sports, we are consumed with who’s the best of all time. And we want to know who won the best picture, to stay in the nicest hotels, to drive the best cars. And we want to name among our friends those who are powerful, influential, and important.
I’m reminded that in February of 1964, Muhammad Ali proudly announced to the world, “I am the greatest.” He said, “I am the greatest.” I think I’ll circle back to that idea in a bit.
Things weren’t so different back in Jesus’ time. Sociologists have described 1st Century Palestine as an honor/shame culture. In this sort of culture, you would find honor if a person of great wealth or great importance came to your home or became your associate. On the other hand, you would be shamed if a person of low social standing came to your home for dinner or befriended you.
Now, in that world, children were of no social standing or significance at all. They were completely dependent, and vulnerable in the world around them. And so, Jesus continues to try to teach the disciples when he says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And right after that, he takes a little child into his arms. You see, children didn’t have any social standing at all; they didn’t offer anything of value. Like Jesus, children were completely vulnerable. They had little to offer that the world considers precious. So, Jesus was telling his disciples, all those things that make you a success in the world (drive, ambition, power)—you’re going to have to let that go.
St. James picks up on this idea in the epistle this morning. He says, “where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.” It’s a wonderful notion, and as I look back on my own life, it’s amazing how disorderly and chaotic my own appetite for recognition is. Once you start down that road, it’s hard to find an end. But the gospel tells us something else about that day. While Jesus was trying to explain that he was giving up his life for the life of the world, the disciples couldn’t understand. In fact, Mark says that “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”
James suggests that our selfish ambitions will lead us to chaos. This gospel story today sort of reminds me of the Tower of Babel. Jesus is trying to talk with the disciples about the work of the Cross, and they’re having a completely separate discussion about their ambitions. And even their language has failed the disciples, because they don’t even trust Jesus enough to ask him what he means. Jesus was trying to tell them that there are hard times ahead, and they were afraid.
I’m reminded of something one of my favorite poets, Wendell Berry, once wrote: “Two epidemic illnesses of our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded—are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons. That these two are related (that private loneliness, for instance, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough…. What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language. My impression is that we have seen a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.”
So, I want to circle back to an idea I talked about earlier. I told you that in February of 1964, Muhammad Ali proclaimed “I am the greatest.” He said this as he was preparing to fight Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship. At that time, he had won the Olympic gold medal in boxing and had never lost a professional fight. Ali would defeat Liston and become the heavyweight champion.
But life would knock Ali around a bit. In 1967, as a result of his protest against the Vietnam War and refusal to serve, he was stripped of his title. He could not fight for three years, three of the prime years of his career. He fought again for the heavyweight title in 1971 against Joe Frazier and he lost. He would fight Frazier again in 1974 and regain the title. He would lose the heavyweight championship again in February of 1978 to Leon Spinks. And that year, Ali said something very different from the braggadocio of his youth when he proclaimed himself the greatest. That year, Ali said, “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” Ali had been knocked around by the world, and he kept getting up, but he had come to a deeper understanding. “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
Something very similar would happen with the disciples. They would get knocked around a bit. They would lose their rabbi, their teacher, and their Messianic dreams. Jesus would be hung on a tree like a scarecrow, and they would run away and betray him. They would look deeply into themselves and feel shame at their cowardice. And yet, they kept coming back. They would spread the gospel to Syria and India, to North Africa and Asia Minor, to Persia and Ethiopia, and even to Rome, the heart of the Empire. And Church tradition teaches that these same men, these knuckleheads I spoke of earlier, would each die a martyr’s death. They would become great—great Saints of the Church—but not in any way that they had imagined. They would come to realize that “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
And I think most of us have learned the same lesson. This pandemic has knocked most of us around a bit. Most of us have been knocked around by life, sometimes knocked down. We’ve suffered losses, and we’ve had our hearts broken—maybe the loss of a loved one, a parent or a child, or we’ve seen our dreams dry up and blow away in the wind of disappointment. We wear those scars.
But you know, my father used to tell me, “Anybody who doesn’t have any scars, well, they never found anything worth fighting for.” The question of who’s the greatest, or a life lived listening to the siren song of our own selfish ambitions, that’s not even a fight worth winning. But a life lived struggling against my own ego in service to others, a life lived so that our brothers and sisters might know a better life—as Jesus taught us, that’s a fight worth dying for.
Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.
In the name of the living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Well good evening, good evening. It’s a great pleasure to be with you here at St. Stephen’s, and I want to thank you for your warm hospitality and your rector for the invitation to preach, especially on Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael and all angels.
You know, I love the story of Jacob. I love it for a lot of reasons, including that I’m his namesake and I’m so much like that rascal. I mean, he swindles his brother out of his birthright for a bowl of stew, and then he lies and cheats his way into his father’s blessing. And when he brother figures out what’s happened to him, he does the only thing he can do: he skeedaddles out of there and goes to a foreign land.
And we find these stories time and again. Moses was a murderer with a speech impediment; Rahab was a prostitute; King David was an adulterer and a terrible father; St. Paul was a harsh, judgmental and cruel man who tortured and probably killed the early Christians. And Jacob, well, he’s a certified mess. These men and women were frail and broken and troubled—you know, like you and me.
And yet we call this book that talks about them holy; we call their stories sacred—not because they were such delightful and upright people, but because of the surprising and inconceivable ways that God used them. God takes this weak clay, these broken vessels, and says, “I can do something with that.” He does it in the same way that he looked at the cross, an instrument of shame and torture and humiliation, and said, “I can do something with that.”
So, let’s get back to the story of Jacob. Jacob is on the run from his brother Essau, who intends to kill him. And he’s travelling at night, back to his mother’s homeland. So he’s left his home, and he’s in the wilderness. And there’s no place quite so alone when you’re away from home as a wilderness landscape at night. As Barbara Brown Taylor observed, “Jacob “is on no vision quest: he has simply pushed his luck too far and has left town in a hurry. He is between times and places, in a limbo of his own making.”
Funny things happen in unexpected places. God is born in a cow barn. God speaks from a burning bush. On the road to Damascus, the Church’s greatest enemy becomes its greatest advocate. And here in this wilderness, in this nowhere, this scoundrel Jacob has a dream. Dreams are funny things: they occur outside the boundaries of time and place. But in that “unplace” Jacob the refugee dreams of heaven and earth. And God, the God of his forefather Abraham, comes looking for Jacob in that dream.
Jacob sees the angels, God’s messengers, as they travel up and down that ladder between heaven and earth. This is Jacob’s dream: a constant traffic between this life and the divine life. And in this place of limbo, where Jacob is cutoff from both his past and his future, in this wilderness, it is YHWH who speaks to Jacob.
Scripture tells us., And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” So, the Lord does three things there: the Living God traces his presence back through Jacob’s family tree, promises Jacob the land and God’s blessing, and assures this rascal of the divine presence in his life.
And when he wakes up, Jacob announces one of the most profound statements in the whole of Scripture: “Surely the Lord was in this place— and I did not know it.” It is a remarkable observation, but I think Jacob was only half-right. You see, the point of the story isn’t exactly that God was in Beer-sheba, or Haran, or Bethel, or Jerusalem. All those things are true, but the point of the story is that God was in Jacob, with Jacob. And he didn’t even know it.
Now, if that were true of only Jacob, it would be an interesting biblical fact, but not especially important. But through the incarnation, through God becoming flesh and walking among us, and through our baptism and the bread and wine we take into our lives, God is with us, too. God is in us and with us, and like Jacob, most of the time we don’t even know it.
In the late 1700s, there was a very famous rabbi named Levi Yitzchok, who lived in Berditchev (in the modern country of Ukraine). In trying to interpret this passage of Scripture, he wrote that the ladder represents all of humanity. Our feet are firmly planted on the earth, but we are forever reaching toward heaven, toward the divine. I like that idea. We are called to be instruments of the traffic between heaven and earth; we are called to be the conduit of the divine recreation, heralds of the incarnation, and called to make a pathway for messages to and from the God of Abraham, of Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, and the God of Jacob.
Soon, our brother Wesley will make his vows as a Dominican novice. I can’t speak for him, but one of the startling things that took place as I began to live into those vows was the recognition that God was with me, that God was in this place, and I didn’t even know it.
The full readings for today can be found 
Domini Canes 