Jesus

Proper 16, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / 2 Comments

On a hot August night, a white police officer shot a young unarmed black man in a community just north of a major American city. Rumors spread through the community that the man had died and soon people were out on the streets, protesting and even looting stores.

The city was Harlem. The year, 1943. The young black man was a soldier intervening as the police officer arrested a young woman. The young man did not die, but his shooting tapped into the frustration of the community. 71 years later, the people of Ferguson are experiencing a painfully similar story.

From our reading of Exodus today: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.”

For years the Egyptians and Jews had a good relationship, thanks to Joseph. However, in today’s reading many years have passed and the text tells us that the Pharaoh has forgotten about Joseph.

And what happens when the Pharaoh forgets? He instructs his people to oppress the Jews. He does not remember their story together. He does not remember the power of God that binds them together. Pharaoh forgets and so the Jews suffer.

What happens when we forget our story?

Well, ask Michael Brown. Or Eric Garner. Or John Crawford. Or Ezell Ford. Or Dante Parker. All five are unarmed black men who have been killed by law enforcement in the last month alone. We don’t know exactly what happened between Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, we have not yet heard the full story. But the shooting has tapped into underlying feelings of injustice about how black men are treated by police all over our country and those concerns are certainly backed by data.

The actions of that night in Harlem have repeated themselves over and over and over in this country.

And this week and last we have seen images of police in full military gear pointing loaded weapons at unarmed protestors, assaulting and arresting journalists, even shooting pastors and other peaceful protestors with rubber bullets.

We have been awakened to the face that we have forgotten our story.

We have forgotten that through Jesus, all humanity, whatever our race, have become one in Christ. We have forgotten that every life is sacred and precious.

And in case you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, some of these men were breaking the law! These weren’t all innocent people.” Consider this.

“While black children make up just 18 percent of kids enrolled in [public] preschool programs, they constitute 48 percent of the students suspended more than once.”

Did you get that? Four year old black children make up less than a fifth of public preschoolers but, nearly half of the four year olds suspended more than once are black.

Four year olds. Are they guilty?

Consider this.

The writer Mikki Kendall, a black woman, was so tired of the multiple violent and sexist Twitter comments she received every day, she tried an experiment with some of her friends. They swapped out their profile pictures, so Mikki’s picture became that of a white man. Her white male friends switched their photos with photos of black women. Her Twitter handle was exactly the same, but immediately, the threats and harassment stopped. The same people who insulted her now had thoughtful questions about what she was writing. The same people! And her male friends who switched their pictures? One of them only lasted two hours. He was stunned at the horrifying invective launched at him when people thought he was a black woman.

Consider this, in a 2012 Pew poll, the researchers discovered that 75% of white social networks are 100% white. That means that 3/4th of white people do not spend any social time with a single friend of another race.

There is something wrong with us. I doubt these police officers or pre-school teachers were overtly racist, though clearly the twitter trolls were. The police officers and preschool teachers are probably perfectly nice people. They are probably a lot like us. I think the problem of racism is so deeply ingrained in us that we aren’t even aware of our bias. We shoot unarmed young black men, we suspend young black boys because deep down, we are afraid of them. Call it white privilege, call it systemic racism, whatever it is, we are infected.

I wish I knew exactly what the cure was.

Maybe part of the cure is remembering our history. As I rabidly followed news coming out of Ferguson this week, I realized I know very little about the history of race in Charlottesville. I know about Sally Hemmings of course, but that was about it. In the last couple of days I’ve tried to learn as much as I can, but it is just a beginning.

Did you know that at the beginning of the Civil war there were more free and enslaved black people in Charlottesville than white? Did you know Jefferson thought blacks were incapable of the full range of human emotion? Did you know there was a community of freed blacks called Canada where the South Lawn of UVA now lies? You can even see a memorial there. Did you know that in the 1960s, African American homes and businesses were destroyed in Vinegar Hill as an act of “urban renewal”?  Did you know that Greencroft Club was begun because Jews and blacks were not allowed in Farmington?

Remembering our shared history is only part of the solution. Even if we learn everything there is to know about our community’s racial history, historical knowledge can only get us so far.

History can’t tell us who we are and how we are connected. History tells us how we are broken, but not how we can be healed.

In our Gospel today, standing in a center of Roman power, a town named after Caesar, Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is. Peter gets the answer right—the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.

The God we love came to disrupt the power structures of the world that tell us what we are worth. He is a living God, who loved us so much and was so grieved by our inability to love him and one another, that he was willing to become human.

He became Michael Brown. He became the victim of our sin, so we wouldn’t have to sacrifice each other any more. His sacrifice should have been the last. His sacrifice was enough for us.

And yet, here we are.

There is still hope for us. We can pray that this living God will help us see our sin more clearly. We can pray that this living God will build empathy in our hearts instead of fear. We can offer ourselves to God as agents of change.

Clergy and other Christians in Ferguson have been doing just that. They have walked alongside protestors and police officers these last few weeks, offering empathy, offering love, helping to diffuse conflict, while still calling for justice. The Episcopal Dean of the Cathedral in St. Louis, Michael Kinman, has written eloquently on the connection between the Eucharist and the Christian response to Ferguson, but he has also acted as a physical barrier between police and protesters this week. He articulates and lives his faith.

Christians and other good hearted people, black and white, have worked for peace together in Ferguson: cleaning up the streets, feeding children who were unable to start school. And people of every race, across the country have been raising money for the St. Louis food bank, which was hit very hard with the school delay.

We can join this faithful group and can be part of change in our community and country. But first we must look deep in our hearts, and be willing to confront any fear and ignorance that may lurk there.

May God help us.

Amen.

Proper 9, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

I have fallen down a hole of BBC television programming this summer. My usual shows are over and so I started with Call the Midwife, which is a refreshingly good natured show after six months of Scandal and House of Cards! One of the actresses in that show is a comedienne and writer that has her own half hour sitcom called Miranda. Miranda is hysterical. She is an at least six foot tall woman who is as agile at slapstick as Lucille Ball. Her character owns a joke shop, much to the displeasure of her traditional mother, and has a big crush on the chef next door. One of Miranda’s problems is that every time she gets cornered or nervous she starts to lie. Crazy, elaborate lies that invent dead husbands and children, and fictive jobs that start out in retail and end up in the secret service. In the show, in the middle of one of these elaborate lies she’ll stop and look at the camera with an expression of utter confusion. As if she means to say, “Why am I doing this? How did I end up here?”

She might join the Apostle Paul in crying out, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” This is one of the most relatable passages in all Scripture, right? There is nothing that will get me to bake chocolate chip cookies faster than a vow that I’m going to eat healthier. Why are our brains such contrarians? We read this passage and wander down a road of psychological examination. But is that what Paul intended?

In Romans 5-8, Paul takes on the problem of human sin. He understands sin not only as the bad things we do, but also as a power that Christ has come to defeat. When we read Romans we think of ourselves as human beings as the main subject here, the star of the show who dramatically battle with sin. But to Paul, human beings are almost on the sidelines. We have found it impossible to battle sin alone! We need help! The real battle is between sin and God.

A very attractive and wise New Testament scholar, Beverly Gaventa, who also happens to be my mother-in-law, argues that all these “I” statements in Romans 7 aren’t meant to be Paul’s confession of weakness. She believes he is using the “I” in the same way the Psalmists, did, as a way for each person who read or heard Paul’s letters to the Romans identify with this very specific, but universal human condition. After all, the Romans were not hearing this letter from Paul’s mouth. Phoebe, who delivered the letter to them, read it to them, and as it got passed around from community to community, different voices spoke those plaintive sentences. And more specifically, Paul is describing here how the power of sin even corrupts the laws that are supposed to keep us from sinning! Here he is speaking specifically of the Mosaic law—the commandments God gave the Israelites. He is careful to make clear that it is not the law that is sinful. After all, the law is designed to guide us into holy living. But the power of sin is so pervasive that it can even make our relationship to the law broken.

In Immortal Diamond, the book we have been studying this summer, Richard Rohr writes, 

[Religion] is not doing its job if it only reminds you of your distance, your unworthiness, your sinfulness, your inadequacy before God’s greatness. Whenever religion actually increases the gap, it becomes antireligion instead. I am afraid we have lots of antireligion in all denominations.

Now, as educated and liberated Episcopalians, it’s easy for us to point fingers and say, “Oh yes, I see how this principle has corrupted the Catholic Church, which is rife with abuse and cover ups!” Or we might look over to our fundamentalist brothers and sisters and see how rigid rule following has led to powerfully corrupt leaders and wounded followers. We even take some pleasure when some particularly vitriolic pastor ends up falling in a national scandal. But guess what, friends? We are just as likely to get entangled by sin as anyone else. As I was talking about the ideas in this passage with my husband he asked, “Well, for you Episcopalians, your law would be your liturgy, wouldn’t it? How does sin creep up there?” I literally gasped, you guys.

It never would occur to me that our liturgy could become an avenue for sin. For one thing, it’s kind of boring. I mean, when I think about Episcopalians and sin the first thing that comes to mind is alcohol, not Cranmer. We’ve got a lot of money and a lot of creative ways to break the commandments. If I were to write a novel about sin and Episcopalians, it would take place on a yacht or on the Upper East Side and there would be some private school back story that would lead to an affair or murder that took place after drinking way too much expensive Scotch. But you know what would not appear in this novel? Our liturgy! I mean, even in Call the Midwife, which takes place in an Anglican Convent, our Anglican service music is used for its comfort and beauty, for solace in the midst of poverty and suffering.

For me, our liturgy is a place of comfort and safety. Its timeless words remind us of eternal truths that comfort and challenge us. But is it possible that sin can creep in around the corners of our creed and service music? If we are to believe the Apostle Paul, then yes, it certainly can. Perhaps, as liturgy loving people, where we sin is an unwillingness to let the Holy Spirit change us. Perhaps we sin in fearing the new, in being too wedded to our books, pews and bricks and not open enough to the world around us. I don’t know, frankly, I’m too close to it! I love our liturgy and pews and bricks! But next time I, or one of you, get worked up about some change, or some imperfection in the bulletin or some misplaced note in the choral singing, we’ll have a moment of recognition. Ah, sin got me, too!

Sin is so pervasive to the human condition, that we cannot escape it. Sin will creep in to every relationship we have, whether it is with our liturgy or our law. Sin creeps in under the doors of our offices, inside our cars, gets between us and the people we love. Sin separates us from our own will, our own bodies, our own desires. Sin tries to ruin everything good in our lives. Sin tries to ruin us.

We are baptizing Jackson Rector today. His parents and godparents will renounce three things: Satan, evil, and sin. Now, renouncing Satan isn’t that challenging. I’m pretty sure not many of you have ever participated in a Satanic ritual. And if you are gathering at midnight in the cemetery to call upon the name of the dark lord, QUIT IT RIGHT NOW. Renouncing the evil powers of the world is a little trickier, after all you have to sort out what is evil and what isn’t! Are we allowed to wear clothes made my child labor? Should we drive a car if it is going to destroy the planet? Should we speak out about unethical practices at work if it means we’ll lose our job? And renouncing sin? Oh boy. We’ve just discussed how sin is everywhere and after us and how it is impossible to not sin! What is the point of renouncing something that is impossible to avoid?

There’s one little detail we haven’t mentioned yet. Christ has already won the battle with sin. It may not feel like it, since we still struggle with sin, but in theological terms, the battle is OVER. Christ’s death and resurrection means sin only has power over us in this world, and even in this world sin never affects our identity as saved, loved people. Once we die, or when the kingdom of God comes to pass, whichever comes first, the power of sin falls away like dust. So, when we renounce Satan, evil and sin, we are acknowledging Christ’s victory. We aren’t saying, “Now that Jackson is a Christian, he is never going to screw up!” We’re saying, “Now that Jackson is a Christian, nothing can stand between him and God.” We’ll get to more of that next week in Romans 8, but in the meantime, next time you feel sin creeping around the door, ready to come after you, you can look it in the eye and say, “Sorry buddy, I belong to Christ, you have no power here.” Thanks be to God.

Easter 5, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

A few years ago This American Life producer Nancy Updike’s stepfather was dying. He had hospice care and Ms. Updike was incredibly impressed by the competence of the hospice nurses because she herself felt so helpless and anxious and at loose ends in the face of his death. So, she ended up producing a half hour segment of This American Life that followed hospice nurses at Kaplan Family Hospice House in Massachusetts.

Hospice care workers are a rare breed of human being. So many of us do all we can to fight death, or to ignore death while all day long every day, hospice nurses and doctors help people prepare to die. They face what the rest of us are afraid to face, and they face it with dignity and respect. They become a bridge for patients and their families between this world and the next. They understand the complex physical, emotional and spiritual process of death. At one point on the program a nurse, Patti told the following story:

“Yeah. Or [the patient is] comatose and the loved ones keeps saying, he’s waiting for his brother to get here on Saturday. They’re coming from Florida on Saturday. And I’m, inside, rolling my eyes thinking it’s Tuesday. He’s going to die on Wednesday or Thursday. He’s not going to be here on Saturday for when his brother arrives from Florida. And then the brother arrives at Logan, shows up at the Kaplan House at 12:30, and the patient dies at 1:00. And they say to me, I told you. He just needed Billy to come from Florida. And it’s like, what?”

Patti and other nurses like her know that death is not just physical. Sometimes a patient needs to see someone; sometimes they need a priest to do last rites or to hear a last confession. But even hospice nurses, the closest thing we have to death experts in our culture, can’t know for certain what happens after death. None of us can really, though they sure are marketing the heck out of the movie Heaven is for Real, aren’t they! Scripture does give us some clues about our life after death, but even the New Testament’s messages are muddied. In Paul’s letters he seems to have the understanding that all humans will be raised in a resurrection at the same time. In other parts of the New Testament, heaven is spoken of as a place where we will unite with God.

Even Jesus did not have an easy relationship with death. When his friend Lazarus dies, he weeps. When he faces his own death in the garden of Gethsemane, he prays for release. And so the words we read today from the Gospel of John are not a flippant response to his disciples’ worries, but are rooted in Jesus’ experience of being both human and divine. He knows the grief and fear of death, but he also knows that God has plans for us beyond our deaths. In this passage, his disciples aren’t so worried about their own deaths. They are worried about what they are going to do without Jesus. Our passage is part of a long speech that is called Jesus’ farewell discourse. When I was almost college aged, my dad started peppering me with advice, “Carpe Diem! Don’t pick the sick puppy! Don’t merge with anyone you don’t want to become!” He knew he couldn’t follow me to University of Richmond, but he really wanted me to take the values of our family with me to college. In the same way, Jesus is giving his disciples a framework that they can use after his death, resurrection and ascension. Jesus is reassuring them and giving them marching orders. And while Jesus’ main point is not to describe the afterlife to his disciples, his words do tell us a great deal about God’s plan for human beings after our deaths. Jesus tells the disciples his death is necessary. He has to leave the disciples in order to prepare a place for them. In John, rather than resurrection language, Jesus imagines heaven as a metaphorical place—a place with plenty of room for everyone. And blessed Thomas, ever practical, wants to know how the heck they are going to find that place? If Jesus is gone, does he plan to leave them a map? Detailed instructions? Thomas stands in for us. We want more details! More information! How do we get to heaven? Jesus then reassures Thomas that Thomas has all he needs. Thomas doesn’t need a map, because he is already in relationship with the one who prepares the dwelling places and leads us to the dwelling places.

This verse—I am the way and the truth and the life is often used as exclusionary—If Jesus is the way, then there is no other way, but Jesus isn’t addressing other religions here. Jesus is addressing Thomas’ specific concerns. Thomas doesn’t need anything but Jesus, and even if Jesus leaves, Thomas is going to be okay, because Jesus will be working on Thomas’ behalf. This exchange between Jesus and Thomas is a gift to us.

No matter how many times we ask for a map—when am I going to die? What will it be like? Will I feel pain? Will there be white light? Will I see my family?–we won’t get answers. Those answers are only knowable after our death. What the New Testament does tell us is that God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to live and die for us so we may share in God’s eternal life. And all we need to get there is Jesus, and Jesus has already done the work necessary to get us there. When Jesus reassures his disciples that they will be okay, that he has them covered, we get to eavesdrop and be comforted. As we heard last week, the Gospel of John is also the Gospel in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd, a shepherd who chases after every last one of his sheep, who makes sure everyone is tucked safely into the sheepfold. Jesus’ promise to his disciples is his promise to us—he is the way and the truth and the life for us, too. We are his sheep. We are his disciples. While we may face our own deaths with fear or dread, we can also know that even in the midst of our anxiety, Jesus is preparing a place for each of us. We are safe within the sheepfold of his love. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Easter 3, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

The story of the Road to Emmaus is one of the most touching accounts of the post-Resurrection Jesus that we have.  Two dejected followers of Jesus, devastated by the death of the man they respected, are walking away from Jerusalem, away from the trauma of the Cross.  Alongside them comes a companion who begins to tell them all about the scriptural basis for the Messiah’s life and death.  They insist he comes home with them and as they break bread together their eyes are opened and they realize their companion is none other than the risen Jesus.  You can almost feel the goose bumps rise on your flesh as they realize with whom they have been talking.  The Road to Emmaus story is our story.  Cleopas could as easily be me or (fill in names from congregation) or you.  The journey Cleopas and his traveling companion go on is the journey we go on every Sunday here at church.

We come in, and we too are overwhelmed by the world. We carry with us oil tankers on fire in nearby Lynchburg.  We carry with us horribly botched executions is Oklahoma.  We carry with us all those who lost their lives and homes in the floods this week.  We carry with us 230 kidnapped Nigerian girls.  We carry with us the painful words of rich men, which expose the ugly racism in our country.  We carry with us our own personal losses, failures and disappointments from the week. We carry with us the worries of our friends and families.  We are weighed down.

And yet Jesus comes along side us, even if we are as gloomy as Cleopas.  Just as Jesus shared the word with Cleopas and his friend, we share the word together.  We remember God’s love for his people by reading aloud the words we have been given in Scripture.  We remember God’s faithfulness to Israel, we remember the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.  We share the stories to remind ourselves that the God of the Universe always reaches out to us and asks us to be in loving relationship with him.  We shake off the false realities we hear all week—that our identity should be rooted in how we look or how much money we make or how smart we are—and we are reminded that our identity rests in being beloved creatures of God.  We are no more and no less.

And then like Cleopas, we invite Jesus to stay with us.  We kneel as we confess the ways we have not been faithful to Jesus.  And in our brokenness, we create space for Jesus.  Intimacy cannot exist without honesty.  Just as a friendship is strengthened by moments of vulnerable sharing, our friendship with Jesus blooms when we are most self aware and honest when we are in conversation with him.  We invite Jesus into the homes of our hearts and then suddenly Jesus takes over and invites us to feast with him.

In Cleopas’s home, Jesus took, blessed, broke and gave bread, the same motions he made on Maundy Thursday and the same motions we make here every week.  Breaking bread is something completely ordinary.  Whether it is pouring out the Cheerios to the kids as you get them ready for school or pulling apart an Albemarle Baking Company baguette that you pass around the table for friends, we break bread together daily.  When we make special meal for someone, it is a way we give ourselves, a way we show our love.  In the same way, in feeding his followers, Jesus extends himself toward them in love.

In the Eucharist, of course, we believe we consume the spiritual presence of Jesus–A Jesus who wants to be so close to us that he becomes part of our very bodies.  In his book With Burning Hearts:  A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life Henry Nowen writes,

Jesus is God-for us, God-with-us, God-within-us.  Jesus is God giving himself completely, pouring himself out for us without reserve.  Jesus doesn’t hold back or cling to his own possessions.  He gives all there is to give.  “Eat, drink, this is my body, this is my blood…this is me for you.

It is in this eating and drinking that Cleopas and his friend’s eyes are opened, they recognize Jesus, they recognize that their hearts burn within them from being in the presence of the holy.  And on Sunday mornings, as we gather around the Eucharist table, your heart may burn within you, too.  After all, for a brief moment you are united with the very Jesus who sat at Cleopas’ table.  For a brief moment you are united with everyone in this room as we share the same body and blood.  You remember that you are holy, too.  You remember that the God of the universe chooses to live within you.

At the very moment Cleopas’ eyes are opened, Jesus disappears.

Isn’t that strange?  For three years, Jesus’ followers hung on his every word, but they never really “got it”.  They were in his presence, but did not have full intimacy with him.  And now, the moment his followers understand, he vanishes.  They do not need his physical presence any more.  His spiritual presence is with them, in the communion they shared.  In his absence, they can have deeper intimacy with him than they did three years in his presence.

The same holds true for us.  We do not need the physical Jesus with us, because we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, who enables deep communion with Jesus and the Father.  The spirit descends on this table and transforms our wafers and port into the real, spiritual presence of Christ.  And that presence lives within you, giving you strength and courage to go out into the world.

We don’t get to stay in the safety of this sanctuary.  We are called to go back into the world.  After their encounter with Jesus, Cleopas and his friend run right back to the dangerous world they were fleeing.  They run back to Jerusalem, find their friends, and tell them the incredible news of Jesus’ resurrection.

At the end of every service here, you hear a dismissal.  Sometimes it is “Go in peace to Love and Serve the Lord!”  Sometimes it is “Go forth in the name of Christ!”  Whatever we dismissal we use, the message is the same.  You can’t stay here.  You must go back into the world, with all of its challenges and loss.  But you do not go into the world alone.  You go with the presence of Christ within you.  And Christ will give you the courage and wisdom you need to face the world with grace and love.  You are a now a Christ-bearer.  You have good news to share.  Go, and may Christ be with you.

Amen.

 

This structure of this sermon is heavily indebted to Nowen’s With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life, quoted above.

Lent 3, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

God was doing something new.

Thousands of years before Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, the Samaritans and Jews had fallen out.  The Samaritans are the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Jews are the descendants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  At one time, they had been united with a common Torah and understanding of God, but over the generations, they pulled further and further apart.  The Jewish community added other Scripture, like the Prophets to their canon.  The Samaritans intermixed with the various peoples that conquered them.  The Jews worshiped in Jerusalem.  The Samaritans worshiped at Mt. Gerezim.  Jews went out of their way to avoid Samaria.

But not Jesus.  God was doing something new.

Jesus goes out of his way to walk through Samaria.  And then when his disciples are off trying to find some lunch, Jesus walks right up to a Samaritan.  And not just any Samaritan.  He walks up to a woman.  And Jesus doesn’t walk up to a woman Samaritan at some appropriate place.  Oh no, he goes right up to that Samaritan woman at a well.  Now, that would be like Jesus walking into a restaurant, finding the single lady at the bar, and sidling up right next to her.  If you’re familiar with the book of Genesis, the well is where love happens.  It’s where sparks fly, where marriage proposals are made, where first encounters happen.

But Jesus doesn’t care about convention.  Because God is doing something new.

This poor Samaritan woman gets a bad rap.  When we hear that she’s had five husbands, we think to ourselves, “Oooh, that hussy!”  But Jesus never says that she has sinned, and never offers to forgive her.  For all we know she could have been widowed five times.  Or been left because she was barren.  All we know is that her life has been hard.  Defying all convention, Jesus decides to engage her in a profoundly spiritual question.  He describes himself as someone who can provide living water.  Instead of dismissing him, the Samaritan woman is intrigued and begins a theological conversation with him.

God was doing something new.

The woman starts to suspect that Jesus is something special—maybe a prophet?  But she just doesn’t know how to resolve this fundamental difference between Jews and Samaritans.  She reminds Jesus that his people worship in Jerusalem and her people worship at Mt. Gerezim.  How can this fundamental division be resolved?  Is one place right and one place wrong?  Even if Jesus can provide her living water, what are the long term implications?  The Samaritan woman is very practical.

What happens next is where Jesus blows the Samaritan woman’s mind.  The Samaritan woman will go on to be a legend. In the Orthodox tradition she is called St. Photine—the luminous one—a woman who converted many, many people.  So what does Jesus say to her?  What is so utterly life changing?

Imagine going back in time two hundred years from now.  Imagine sitting down with your great-great-grandparents and explaining to them that in the future, you won’t need to be in the same room with a person to talk with them.  In fact, in the future, you can be anywhere in the world, pick up a plastic box, stare into it, and have a live conversation with someone you love.  Mind blowing right?  No longer are we bound by physical presence.  We can relate to each other wirelessly.

Well, God was doing something new and similar.  Rather than having a certain place be people’s link toward him, rather than making people choose between Jerusalem and Mt. Gerezim, God was going to do something new.  God was going to be liberated from the constraints humans had put on him.  Instead of being worshiped at Jerusalem, God was going to be worshiped in “spirit and in truth”.

The geographic and biological boundaries that had separated Jew from non-Jew were going to be erased.  No longer would God belong to one people or one place. Living water would not just be offered to women like Mary, but women like Photine as well.  Living water will be available to everyone, those who fit in and those who don’t.  Those who have had easy lives and those who have had difficult lives.  Those who have never married and those married five times.  The living water doesn’t just lie still in its cup.  Living water bubbles up, overflows, and blesses all kinds of people.

God was doing something new.  And God is doing something new.

The church is always changing.  We started out as small groups of people meeting in people’s homes in the middle east and now we have congregations large and small scattered all over the world.  You all have seen your own fair share of changes over the last few years.  You have two new priests and half your lay staff has overturned in the last year.  There are kids in church now and the music is a little different and I’m sure Eric and I have different liturgical, preaching and personal styles than you are used to.  That kind of change can be exciting, but it can also be unnerving.  Church is a place where a lot of us feel safe, so when it starts to feel unfamiliar, we feel uneasy.

The larger church is going through changes, too.  In some ways, it feels like we’re at the end of an era.  We are talking about downsizing our national church offices and even possibly moving them out of New York.  The College of Preachers closed, the Alban Institute just announced it was closing, and even the Virginia Seminary Chapel burned down a few years ago.

I’ve seen two reactions to all this national change.  One is to try to put the Episcopal Church in hospice care and mourn what it used to be.  Mourn the loss of our power and social standing. Mourn the loss of our buildings, some of which need to be closed.  Mourn the loss of what felt familiar and comfortable.

However, I’ve also seen people who believe that God is doing something new.  Church is not the center of our culture any more.  Suddenly, rather than being part of the fabric of society, the church exists on the margins of society.  Right where it was two thousand years ago, actually!

God is doing something new, but not something that hasn’t been done before!

In our own diocese, St. Paul’s in Richmond is experimenting with doing things in a new way by hiring a priest, the fabulous Melanie Mullen to be what they call a downtown missioner.  Melanie’s job isn’t to drum up membership or serve the poor from within the walls of St. Paul’s.  Melanie’s job is to be in the community, get to know neighborhood non profits and businesses and individuals and then learn how the people of St. Paul’s can serve them.  Her job is to bring the church into the world.

Like Jesus’ living water, the people of St. Paul’s, Richmond are experimenting with bubbling up and over the line of their property and into the world around them.

We are blessed to worship a God that continually offers us a cup of living water, even in the midst of change.  Where is living water bubbling up in our community?  How is God blessing us? What gifts and energies are we being called to pour over our walls into our community?

May we, like the woman at the well, shine the light of Christ into the world.

Amen.

 

Lent 1, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

When you were a small child throwing a fit did your mother ever point to a well-behaving child and say, “Look how nicely Johnny is behaving?  Why don’t you behave more like Johnny?”  Poor you!  Unfavorably compared to someone who wasn’t even your flesh and blood! You probably carried on with your fit, thoroughly unimpressed with Johnny.  We do this all the time—unfavorably comparing our bosses to other bosses, spouses to other spouses, our selves to other men and women.

We pull Jesus into this, too.  We read the temptation story and think, “Ah, man, I should be better at resisting temptation. Why can’t I just be more like him?”  We read Jesus’ time in the desert as a kind of morality play.

But the temptation story is not one of Jesus’ parables.  It is not a morality play.  The story of Jesus’ temptation is an epic battle between good and evil.  The temptation story is not a sweet PBS Saturday morning cartoon intended to teach our children morals.  The temptation story is The Lord of the Rings, Rocky, Star Wars.

Jesus is on an epic quest to save humanity.  Humanity is enslaved.  Not by each other, but by death and by sin.  No matter what humans have done, they have not been able to get out of the grip of these evil powers.  Death vanquished every human.  And sin wrapped its claws around people, too.  Sin ruined people’s lives, isolating them from each other and from God.  Jesus is going to go into the world and save humanity from both sin and death, but first he has to get ready.

Jesus has been baptized and is about to enter into his public ministry.  But before he makes any speeches, before he meets his first disciple, he needs to get ready.  In any epic battle movie worth its salt, you get a training montage.  Hermione leads the Hogwarts students in drills Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Yoda trains Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.  Mr. Miyagi teaches Danny “wax on, wax off” in the Karate Kid.  All these “heroes “needed time to prepare.

In Jesus’ case, it is the Spirit who leads him into the desert.  The Spirit doesn’t stick around and shadow box with Jesus or make Jesus run laps.  The Spirit disappears and leaves Jesus alone.  For what Jesus needs to get him through his ministry isn’t physical strength, but spiritual strength.  Fighting the powers of sin and death will take every ounce of integrity and steadiness that Jesus has.  After forty days of prayer and fasting, the Devil, also described as the tempter, shows up.  Now the Devil isn’t particularly hostile here, in fact, he’s almost friendly.  After all, the Devil just wants what is good for Jesus, right?  If Jesus is really the Son of God, he should enjoy the perks!

First the Devil tempts Jesus to turn some stones into bread.  After all, Jesus has been fasting for weeks!  And if he is God, he surely has the power to make himself some food.  But Jesus roots down into Scripture and reminds the Devil that the only food he needs for his mission is the word of God.

The Devil gets really tricky with his next temptation—since Jesus used scripture to deny the Devil the first time, the Devil throws Scripture back at Jesus.  He tempts Jesus to leap off a tall building, telling him that Scripture says angels will protect him.  But Jesus resists the temptation to take a foolish risk and again roots himself in Scripture.

Finally, the Devil tries to make a bargain with Jesus.  He offers him power and wealth and land and all Jesus needs to do is worship him.  But again, Jesus finds within himself the discipline and Scripture he needs to resist.  The Devil flees, defeated.

This story gets sin just right, doesn’t it?  Sin isn’t a bully, at first.  Sin sidles up to us and seduces us.  Have you all been following the story Kevin Roose published in New York Magazine?  He has just published a book called Young Money.  He got to know eight young Wall Street brokers, followed them around and explored their world.  On one occasion he snuck into a secret society event and saw all kinds of crazy skits in which the richest men in the world mocked the 99%. At one point he started filming and was thrown out once they realized he was a journalist.  He didn’t get beat up.  The people who kicked him out got extremely friendly and tried to bribe him into not telling the story.  What a great metaphor!  Sin tells us we deserve it, that it won’t really hurt anyone.  Sin lures us in until it has us firmly in its grasp.

Sin is tricky and insidious and offers us things that appear good.  For Jesus to really minister to the people of the world, he had to go through that experience.  He had to know what it was like, how hard it is, to resist temptation.  Jesus had to learn who he was as a savior.  Was he going to use his power to physically strike down evil?  Did he need to become big and strong and throw his authority around?  No, his authority was rooted in total obedience to his Father.  Jesus would show his power by his humility, by compassion, by wisdom.  His power would be rooted in his deep understanding of Scripture in light of his loving relationship with his Father.

Jesus uses that deep knowledge of Scripture and connection to his Father when he recruits his disciples, preaches to his followers, heals the sick, casts out demons—in short, in every part of his ministry.  Jesus takes this experience all the way to the cross.

Jesus’ ultimate battle with sin and death doesn’t involve him sword fighting the Devil or heroically flying a spaceship into the heart of an alien spacecraft.  Jesus’ final battle has him face our sin and rejection and walk right toward us.  Jesus continues to walk towards us until we kill him.  And then he rises and keeps walking toward us.

In the movie Blood Diamond, a father has lost his son, who has been kidnapped and turned into a child soldier.  When he finally finds his child, the child is pointing a gun at the father’s companion.  The father recognizes the boy and starts to speak with him.  He walks toward him, calls the boy by name and tells him about his mother who loves him and the wild dogs who wait for him.  He describes his home, the place where he belongs, all the while walking towards this boy and his raised gun and then the father says,

 I know they made you do bad things. You are not a bad boy.  I am your father, who loves you.  And you will come home with me and be my son again.

The boy drops the gun and the two embrace.

For generations our sin and the power of death kept us separated from our God.  But God knew we were more than our sin.  He knew that sin enslaved us, keeping our true selves locked away.  And so he sent Jesus, who battled for us.  While it appeared for three days that sin and death won, on that third day Jesus rose from the dead and claimed us for his own.  His was the final word, the final victory.  Death and sin are still present, but they no longer hold dominion over us.  They cannot keep us from God.

A mere five days ago, I preached to you about Lenten practices and how they draw us closer to God.  But the really important message for you to hear is this:  Nothing can separate you from the love of God.  Not your worst sin, not the worst sin someone does to you, not the death of a loved one, not your death.  You can start and break 100 Lenten practices and that will not make God love you less or lessen the power of his victory.

God wins the battle, full stop.

Amen.

 

Epiphany 1, Year A, 2014

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Every once in awhile, I wish the Gospels had a really good novelist as an editor.  I want someone to send this manuscript back to its writers and say something like, “Interesting story, but the motivations of Jesus are unclear.  Why does he want to be baptized if he has nothing for which to repent? Why does John resist?  How does Jesus feel when he gets in the water?  Your use of detail is insufficient, please expand.”

The authors of the Gospels are just not interested in giving us all the details.  They are not interested in thoughts, feelings and motivations.  They are telling us a theological story, not a psychological one.

So we’re left with this very brief description of a momentous event.  Jesus’ baptism was so important that each of the four Gospels have an account.  Matthew’s is the longest, and is an expanded version of the baptism in Mark.  The version in Luke is extremely similar to the one in Mark.  And in the gospel of John, we don’t see the baptism take place, but John the Baptist refers to it.

After Jesus is baptized, a dove comes from the heavens, and rests above Jesus’ head.  This dove floating above the waters evokes the Spirit moving above the waters in the Creation story.  God is creating something new.  Some major change is coming.

This supernatural moment is important because by this time in Jewish history, God had pretty much stopped showing up in momentous, visible ways.  When we read the Old Testament, God appears all the time in dreams and visions, even occasionally allowing someone to catch the briefest glimpse of him.  But God had not revealed himself in that way in a long time.  For God to break into our world, to a send a message, however brief, was heart poundingly exciting.

In the three synoptic gospels, the dove is accompanied by a voice from heaven.  In Mark and Luke that voice speaks directly to Jesus, but in Matthew the voice speaks to everyone within earshot.  “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Two thousand years later we hear that statement and we think, “Aw, isn’t that nice.  God’s giving his son a little pep talk!  I bet that made Jesus feel awesome!”  But if we keep in mind that the writers of the Gospels are interested in making a theological statement, we take another look at what God says about Jesus.  That short sentence is extremely loaded.  It evokes Psalm 2, which reads:

I will tell of the decree of the LORD:

He said to me, “You are my son;

today I have begotten you.

The Psalms are associated with David, and the Messiah is supposed to come from David’s line.

The sentence also evokes Isaiah 42:1

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him;

he will bring forth justice to the nations.

In Isaiah, this describes the suffering servant.  Jesus being linked to the suffering servant is really important.  When Jews pictured a Messiah, for the most part they imagined a mighty warrior.  The suffering servant in Isaiah was just a character of his time, not an archetype for a Savior.  But in one little sentence, God begins making the link for people that this Messiah is going to be different.

God’s words also evoke his own words to Abraham.  When he instructs Abraham to bring Isaac on the near fatal walk, he says, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”  We can’t help but hear those instructions when God refers to Jesus as his beloved son.  Where God spared Abraham’s son, God’s son will not be so lucky.

Each of these men, Abraham, David, and Isaiah were critical players in God’s salvation history.  He used each of them to further define his relationship with humanity.  God makes a covenant with Abraham that he and Abraham’s descendents will belong to each other.  They will be God’s people.  He will be their God. God makes a covenant with David, too, that kings of David’s line will be the rightful kings until the Messiah comes..  Isaiah was a prophet who urged the people of Israel to return to keeping their side of the covenants they had made with God.

Each of these men, and the covenants made with or defended by them, is a key part of God’s history with humanity. For God to reference them as he introduces his Son, demonstrates that Jesus is part of the same salvation history.  Jesus is deeply connected to these men who have come before him in faithfulness to God.  But God also distinguishes Jesus by so clearly announcing their relationship.  Jesus is not just another human in relationship with God.  Jesus is God’s flesh and blood.  His son.  Jesus is the same substance of God.  And yet, Jesus chooses to immerse himself in the same baptism as ordinary humans, to identify with us completely.  To immerse himself in our experiences, our sorrows and joys.

Today we’ll celebrate baptisms at the 10:30 and during the Celtic service.  While the voice of God may not break through our roof, and we may not see a dove flying in, we do know that the Holy Spirit will be present.  Baptisms are not merely our culture’s version of a baby naming ritual.  Baptisms are a leap of faith, the beginning of a new stage of life, a response to that Jesus who so confidently accepted his own baptism and role as our savior.

Baptism is a reminder of the Covenant that God makes with us through Jesus.  No longer are we bound by sin and death, but through Jesus we are set free and invited to live new lives.  When we say yes to life with God through Baptism, we are letting go of our old ways of life.  No longer are we bound by our accomplishments, keeping ahead in the rat race.  No longer are we defined by cruel words that have been spoken about us.  No longer are we do we need to surround ourselves with people who do not have our best interests at heart.    No longer do we need people to be impressed by what brand we wear or what car we drive.  Baptism frees us from the need to gird ourselves with earthly things, because now we are joined with Christ.  Now we are bound to love and service; humility and patience.  We have moved from darkness into light.

Today, as we renew our own Baptismal vows, we are invited to remember that the Holy Spirit remains with us, and even if we’ve slipped back into old ways of life, the Spirit still dwells within us, ready to help us walk back towards the light.  God’s covenant with us will not be broken.  God’s beloved Son has made sure of that.

Thanks be to God.

 

Christmas Eve, Year A, 2013

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

No matter my level of Christmas cheer, there is a moment in every Christmas pageant when I am instantly filled with joy.  Whatever the reason, every year, when small children dressed in angel wings run up to the stage and shout to the frightened shepherds:  “Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth!”  a huge smile lights up my face.

The children of course, aren’t actually angels.  They are ordinary children who fight with their brothers and sisters.  Their haloes are crooked.  Their wings get into the eyes of the angels behind them in line.  Some years they push and shove and jockey for position.  They are holy and ordinary in an entirely charming way.

According to the Gospel of Luke, God used angels prominently in the incarnation.  An Angel of the Lord appears to Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father.  The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, to invite her to bear God’s son.  And, of course, The Angel of the Lord and a band of angels appear to shepherds in the fields, announcing the arrival of the Messiah.

Biblical angels don’t belong on earth.  They are not sweet and cute like our pageant angels.  They are huge and winged and shiny.  They belong to another kingdom, where glowing with the Lord’s presence is less terrifying.  Nevertheless, angels broke through whatever space/time barrier separates us from heaven.  They burst into our reality, terrifying the humans that witnessed their majesty.

The host of angels came to us in an unusual way. They did not swoop in to a group of priests, or at the temple, or even to the King. The host of heaven revealed itself to ordinary shepherds. The transcendent broke into the ordinary.

This juxtaposition of divine and ordinary is the heart of the incarnation.

God could have remained in heaven, relating to his creatures via a distance.  Instead he chose to become a creature.  He chose to be limited by gravity and time and flesh.  He traded the infinite for the finite.  He became ordinary.

This collision of the divine and the ordinary can’t help but change what it means to be an ordinary human.

In this Gospel, when Mary first is confronted by the Angel Gabriel she exclaims the Magnificat, a hymn that marvels at how God turns everything upside down. Mary has a deep understanding that in choosing her, an ordinary girl, to bear God into the world, God is changing the rules completely.  He lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry.  The ordinary becomes sacred.  The insignificant become significant.

The angels are not announcing a Jesus who is visiting as a tourist, taking in the curiosities of having skin and feet and limited points of view.  The angels announce that everything has changed, our categories are irrelevant.  The holy is here, born to an ordinary girl.

My husband picked up a nativity scene at Ten Thousand Villages this week that depicts the Holy Family as a Peruvian family riding a bus.  I love it because it captures the heart of Christ’s birth in a modern context.  If the incarnation happened now, Mary would probably be the kind of girl who rode a bus.  She probably wouldn’t be American. She certainly wouldn’t be rich.  Mary would be an ordinary girl.

News Anchor Megyn Kelly grabbed media attention this month when she insisted both Santa and Jesus were white.  This is easy to laugh about, but it shows how people who have power—white Europeans and Americans—through art and media have remade Jesus in our image.  He becomes more Swedish than Middle Eastern.  We subtly imply that holiness has to look like us.  We are fine with Jesus being ordinary, so long as he is our kind of ordinary.

Theologian James Cone has written that “God is whatever color God needs to be in order to let people know that they’re not nobodies, they’re somebodies.”

God came to earth and made nobodies, somebodies.  God came to earth to make the ordinary holy.  God came to earth so that children of every color and nation could be in relationship with him.  God’s incarnation in Jesus makes holy our ordinary experiences, whatever our skin color or our income.

Andrea Elliot of The New York Times has written a series of articles exposing New York City’s homelessness problem, by following one child—a middle school girl named Dasani.  The story is incredibly bleak. Dasani’s parents are terrible money managers, their room in a homeless shelter is shared by mold and rats, no one in the family feels safe.  But the story is also incredibly powerful because by shining the light on Dasani, we get the rare opportunity to get to know a young, poor girl.  The Marys of our world don’t get screen time.  You just don’t write thirty page stories about a girl like that.  But Elliot captures this girl—her drive, her desire to do well in school, her hunger, her exhaustion, the love she has for her family.  Elliot focuses our attention on a single girl, and reminds us that children like Dasani should matter to us.  Children like Dasani matter to God.

Our outreach team works their tails off to provide for families around Christmastime not because it is a sweet thing to do, but because they know that we are the hands and feet of Jesus.  By buying Christmas gifts and packaging up Christmas hams and vegetables we are shaking our fists at the powers in the world that tell us that there are some people who don’t matter.  By walking alongside our neighbors in need we are proclaiming that their lives are holy. When we celebrate Eucharist in a nursing home or a prison, we are proclaiming the power of God’s love for ordinary, even marginalized people. When we travel halfway across the world to make relationships in Nzali, Tanzania, we are celebrating that all humanity is united by one miraculous birth two thousand years ago.

Whoever you are, whatever your circumstances, your life is holy.  You may think you don’t matter.  You may think you are too young or too old, too rich or too poor, too jaded or too tired, but God has chosen to make your life holy.  And your life isn’t just holy that hour a week you spend in church.  Whether you’re washing the dishes, or walking the dog; typing up a report at work or in the middle of a boring meeting; on the phone with a friend or going for a run—your ordinary life is sacred.  Because before those angels burst onto the scene, the God of the Universe quietly became an ordinary human being.  A human being who presumably had chores and a job..  A human being who had sore feet and stomach aches and who cried and laughed.  Jesus was one of a kind and he was just like us.  Jesus was completely divine and completely human.

Jesus was born and he lived his life and he died and he was resurrected for you. And for the woman who cleans your office, the man who delivers your mail, and the women who made the shirt you’re wearing today.  Jesus was also born for people you will never meet, whose lives are so different from yours you cannot comprehend their experiences, as they could not comprehend yours.

It seems unlikely that any of us in this room will have the gift of a visit from an angel to wake us up to the miracle of our humanity.  So really all we have is moments like these—prayers and candlelight and hymns we’ve sung a hundred times.  We gather together to remember who we are, and whose we are.

And this is who we are. We are people who remember a poor girl who was brave enough to let God in.  We gather with her at the manger and marvel that the very God who created the universe now has tiny baby toes.  We tremble as we consider the risk he’s taking.  He takes this risk for no good reason other than his love for us.

And so we become his, completely ordinary, completely holy, completely humbled.

Amen.

 

Advent 3, Year A, 2013

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

John the Baptist came onto the scene in a big way.  He was a bold and unapologetic man.  He wore camel hair and ate weird things like locusts.  His was so charismatic that even though he preached in the wilderness, people traveled miles and miles to hear him.  The message he proclaimed was as bold as he was.

John the Baptist stared people right in the eye and told them to repent. He called them vipers!  He warned people to get their acts in order.  He warned people someone was going to come after him and that person was going to baptize people with the Holy Spirit and with fire!  This man was going to clear out the threshing floor and separate the wheat from the chaff.

This man, of course, was Jesus.

John put himself out there, ignoring social convention, probably losing friends.  Does anyone really want to hang out with a hairy man eating bugs? John took a huge risk, which finally paid off when he met Jesus face to face.

They had a brief meeting in which John baptized Jesus.  Can you imagine John’s excitement?  He is a prophet who gets to actually experience that about which he prophesies!

Unfortunately, soon after he met Jesus, things went downhill for John.

This fierce Jesus about which John told people didn’t materialize.  Well, Jesus materialized, he just didn’t do what John expected him too.  Instead of kicking tail and taking names, Jesus went around healing people.  And John himself got arrested and put in prison.

When in prison, John had lots of time to think.  Maybe he started to get nervous.  Maybe he started doubting his whole ministry.  How ridiculous would you feel if you spent years dressing like a crazy person and baptizing people in the middle of nowhere shouting about this mythical person who is supposed to come restore Israel to its rightful place… and then you start thinking you’ve been scammed?

In any case, he sends a note to Jesus via one of his disciples.  “Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?”  Ouch.

You guys, John the Baptist had a moment of doubt.  John the BAPTIST!  Is there anyone in the bible who sounds more confident and full of faith than John the Baptist?  Every Advent we get at least two weeks on him because he is such a hero of faith.  Yet, even John the Baptist’s faith fails for a moment.

St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand puts on these little videos with their kids.  One of them is an adorable Christmas pageant that takes place in heaven as God makes the decision to send Jesus to earth.  In it this little blond boy wearing glasses dressed like an angel keeps saying, “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting THAT!”

Whoever wrote the script gets the incarnation just right.  John the Baptist was not expecting the Jesus that showed up.  His imagination was too small.  John the Baptist, and many who expected the Messiah, expected someone fierce.  They expected someone powerful.  They expected someone who could overthrow the status quo.  Jesus is fierce and powerful, but in spiritual ways, rather than political ones.  Jesus is not who they expected.

In the Christmas pageant video, the angels keep trying to figure out what God is doing.  When God wants to straighten things out on earth, they assume he’ll send an army of angels.  When they learn he just wants to send one person, they assume he’ll pick someone big and strong.  When they learn he plans to send a helpless infant, they assume he’ll send the baby to a powerful ruler who could protect him.  When they assume he’ll send a normal baby, he tells them instead he’ll be sending the Prince of Heaven, his son.  Every time God corrects their assumptions, the small angel repeats his line, “Brilliant!  They won’t be expecting THAT!”

Jesus rarely meets expectations.  But he certainly exceeds them.  Jesus doesn’t directly answer John the Baptist’s question.  Instead he points to his activities that line up with Scriptural descriptions of what the Messiah will do with his time.  Jesus says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus’ legitimacy doesn’t come from physical, political, or military power.  He doesn’t need to overthrow a government to start bringing about the Kingdom of God.  In Christ’s incarnation, God shows us who he really is and what his interests are.  In the video the child playing God says, “When the Prince is done, nothing will get between them and my love.”

In Jesus, God comes alongside humanity.  God restores people to themselves and to community.  He reverses deafness and blindness and leprosy.  He changes the narrative about wealth and poverty, reassuring the poor that their poverty is not a punishment. He forgives sins. He even restores the dead to life. He wants people to be able to fully participate in life.  He wants people to be able to fully participate in a relationship with God.

The tables are turned even for what it means to be holy. Prophets have always had an exalted position, but Jesus tells his followers that “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.“  He is not denigrating John the Baptist here.  He goes on to talk about how important John the Baptist is.  He’s just saying Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are so going to change the rules that even the least significant person included in the Kingdom of Heaven is going to have an incredibly special place with God.  Because in the Kingdom of Heaven there is no significant or insignificant.  We are all united with God and therefore incredibly important.

At the same time, we are ALL united with God, so none of us are more important than any other.

This is important for us to hear.  We are so driven in this little part of the world. My favorite example of this recently is the controversy over whether to keep class rankings at Western.  There are so many students pushing to do well that you can have excellent grades and not be in the top ten or even 25% of your class!  These same students are encouraged to play school sports and club sports and do mission trips and develop interesting hobbies.  They are expected to do hours of homework every night while also getting plenty of sleep.  It’s all impossible!  And we who parent and grandparent them aren’t much better with our striving to make more money and dress nicely and volunteer with every board that asks us.  We forget that we are enough not because of what we do, but because of how God loves us.

Jesus turns things topsy turvy for us too, you know.  We expect Jesus to be a certain way.  We excpect Jesus to stay out of the way, mostly, except for when we need a little comfort.  We don’t really expect Jesus to show up when we’re making decisions about our kids’ schedules, or about whether or not to take the promotion, or in the middle of a fight with someone we love.

But Jesus is in our lives, too.  In unexpected ways.  All the time. He calls us constantly to join him in the work of making the Kingdom of God a reality.  He calls us to examine our culture critically and decide what parts of it work and what parts need be rejected for us to live holy lives.  Jesus is intrusive in only the way someone who really loves us can be.  And the angels in heaven are quite possibly looking down and chuckling as they say to themselves.  Brilliant!  They weren’t expecting that!”

Proper 27, Year C, 2013

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

What is heaven like?

I get that question a lot, but since I haven’t experienced the afterlife myself, I never have a great answer.

The Bible never speaks extensively about heaven—but there are clues here and there.  Our passage today is one of those hints.

Ironically, the people asking Jesus the question about what happens after the resurrection don’t even really care about his answer.

Some Sadducees come up to Jesus, trying to outwit him.  Sadducees were the Jewish sect that was in charge of keeping up the Temple.  They came from wealthy, respected families.  And they did not believe in the resurrection.

To try to prove how illogical the resurrection is they pose the question about the widow that we heard today.

This poor hypothetical woman!  In the law of the time, if your husband died, it was his brother’s responsibility to marry you.  This was meant to protect the widow, but it also reinforces how women were treated like chattel—passed along from one brother to another.  This poor woman has not been able to bear children, and she goes through all seven brothers.  You can only imagine how much she and her mother in law loathed each other after all this!

The Sadducees want to know:  Who does she belong to in heaven?  Who has the right to be her husband, if she’s been married seven times and has no children?

Jesus’ response set the Sadducees back on their heels.

To the Sadducees, this woman is just hypothetical, an intellectual exercise.  But Jesus has known and loved women in really difficult circumstances.  Remember his loving response to the woman at the well who had been married five times.  To Jesus, women weren’t chattel to be passed along.  A barren woman wasn’t the object of derision or deserving of shame. Women were integral parts of God’s kingdom.

Jesus tells the Sadducees that in heaven, no one is given in marriage.  Each person comes to God on his or her own terms and worships God as a whole person.  In community, yes, but not tied to any individual person.

What good news this is for us!  We are in this rare time and place in history in which we understand that women and men are equally valuable members of society and the church.  We understand that a woman’s value is not based on her ability to produce an heir for a family line.

On the other hand, we in the church can do better!

Church can be a very marriage and family centered place. When I was single in church, people kept trying to set me up.  When I was newly married, parishioners felt perfectly free to ask me when I was going to get pregnant.  We treat single and childless people as if they haven’t quite arrived to adulthood.

And I am not innocent of this!  One of my goals as your priest was to minister to the women I don’t see at my women’s bible study:  women who work during the day, who are busy with other responsibilities, including children.  So, I planned this “Mom’s night out” for next week.  After we had already advertised this, I had a revelation.  There were fabulous women I really wanted to be there who did not have children. I found myself running around individually asking them to join us.  We’ll rebrand it the next time we meet, and please, if you want to join some of the young and middle aged women of St. Paul’s Ivy next week, read your bulletin for more information!

This is just a small example of the way churches treat being married with kids as the default position for adults.  But be reassured, even if your clergy get mixed up about this, Jesus never does.

Nancy Rockwell wrote a gorgeous blog post about this passage this week in which she writes,

… the Christian church has so venerated women as childbearers  that it has been unable to imagine other roles for women,  even though Jesus never praised childbearing or motherhood, and did imagine other roles for women:   Mary has chosen the good portion and it will not be taken away from her, he said, when Mary chose to sit among the disciples and learn, rather than work in the kitchen.  And perhaps most importantly, in this argument with the Sadducees over the barren woman, Jesus opened the gates of heaven to her, saying that in the resurrection, life is not as we know it here on earth, there is no owning or belonging to one another, for in eternity all are children of God.   Thanks to Jesus, the barren woman does what is unthinkable:  she steps into heaven on her own.

Jesus was never interested in anyone’s societal status.  He never asked a tax collector if he was the best tax collector in his company.  He didn’t ask Peter whether where he ranked among local fishermen. He didn’t keep nagging Mary Magdalene about finding a man and settling down already!

Jesus was interested in the hearts of human beings, not any of the outward categories by which we humans judge each other.

In heaven, and now, we are loved by God for who we are in all our individuality.  There is no one way to be a woman.  There is no one way to be a man.

Heaven is a mystery.  But God is not a mystery.  God has revealed himself to us in Jesus and we can trust that Jesus’ compassion for humanity will extend itself into our experiences after we die.  And for those of us who are happily married, who grieve the idea of no longer being married in heaven, we can trust that while the legal bonds of marriage may be dissolved upon our deaths, the bonds of affection between two people, the love between two people remains.   After all, those bonds are part of who we are.

In our community, may we strengthen and widen those bonds of love so that everyone, no matter their life situation, may feel welcomed into our little corner of the Kingdom of God.

Amen.