May 1, Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:10, 22--22:5

Bryan Cones

So how does all this end, in your own imagination? I don’t mean what is death like, or your own “end,” but the whole shebang: How is God going to bring this great drama of creation to a close? What does salvation or resurrection or eternal life or heaven, or whatever it is we are hoping for, look like, or feel like, when it’s finally all said and done?

Maybe we picture a gigantic family reunion around one big table, all the grandmas and aunties, cousins and parents, the friends who are like family, all gathered together. Then there’s the vision of clouds and angels, happily playing harps or leading a big parade through heaven. To tease my partner David just a bit, I wonder if he imagines something like the back country of Glacier National Park, more or less untouched wilderness, with people far enough apart not to get in each other’s way. I don’t know what my own vision is, but I am at least hoping for a big Star Trek-style tour of the universe from beginning to end, and I insist on seeing every dinosaur that ever was. What about you?

The reason I ask is that whoever wrote the book of Revelation—I’m sure that’s everyone’s favorite book—anyway, when that person got done with all the scary stuff, the seven-headed dragon, and the anti-Christ and the Armageddon to end all armageddons, we get this passage today: A vision of how it all ends, or maybe how it begins again. It is a city in a garden, or a city-and-a-garden. That’s odd to me, especially since “city in a garden” is the motto of Chicago, and as much as I love Chicago and the communities that surround it, a vision of the reign of God it ain’t, hardly a picture of the peaceable kingdom, or the justice that assures everyone has what they need, or the charity extended to all, by all, no matter our color or where we come from.

Thing is, today’s great cities are very much like those ancient ones the visionary John knew: earthly cities, brutal and broken. And still John can imagine a city of God’s design: Instead of walls, both seen and unseen, open doors that welcome everyone. Instead of temples separating what is holy from what is not, the whole city is a sanctuary, where God is unconfined, and God’s grace flows freely. Instead of the shadow of narrow alleys or the glare of advertising, God’s glory reveals what is good in both light and darkness. Instead of good food and clean water for some, and lead-laced poison and food deserts for others, one crystal stream quenches every thirst, and the tree of life rises on both its banks, with an abundance of fruit. And from that tree come leaves that heal the nations, and all of those nations are welcome in that city, and all of them bring their glory to God.

Now that’s what I call an eternal city. And it’s a long way from the sad and suffering cities of the earth to that heavenly city-and-a-garden built and planted by God and revealed in Christ. So how do we get there from here?

Well, by following Lydia, of course. Lydia, woman of Thyratira, dealer of purple goods, an unusual woman in her day, perhaps, prosperous apart from any man, a free woman. She was a successful woman of her own earthly city, but when she discovered faith in Christ in the words of Paul, and when she was bathed in the crystal waters of that other city in her baptism, and ate of its fruit, she knew just how to respond: She opened her home and began to practice the hospitality she beheld for a moment in that eternal city, and began to live now as a citizen of that city yet to come.

A few stories back it was Tabitha, who having seen that city in faith, began to make clothes to adorn those in her earthly city who didn’t have anything to wear. And don’t forget Cornelius, whose Gentile faith pushed Peter to reconsider whether those rules about clean and unclean were important enough to deny citizenship in the city to come. They weren’t.

And so the story goes: Christian after Christian who sees the city in faith, is bathed in the water, eats of the feast, then becomes part of God’s restoration crew, sharing freely of the hospitality of God in Christ, living now as citizens of the city-and-a-garden to come, as if it was already here, even though it is obviously not. There’s a list of saints a mile long, most of whose names are long forgotten. Though we all remember some, I’m sure: Miepje and Patsy and Kathie, three men named Bill. We each have our list.

What’s the distance between Chicago’s earthly city in a garden and the city-and-a-garden announced in Revelation? It’s not actually very far at all from here to there. In fact it may be right on top of us now, just waiting for us to start opening the doors. We have our own Lydia to lead us, along with a Barbara, a number of Jameses and Johns, Marthas and Marys, a Jack and an Amy and some Daniels and Claires. And don’t forget Carolyn and Kristin, Tim and Tom—this could go on for a very long time, so I’ll stop, because I wouldn’t be finished until I said all our names, all of us a part of God’s local building restoration and garden crew. And all around us, people lying on mats, waiting to be healed, to be invited into the city that never fades.

And it all starts with us remembering day by day, week by week, that we are always wading in that other city’s crystal waters, always eating of its abundant fruit, sent with leaves for the healing of nations, and that the name of the Holy One is written on our foreheads. At any moment it is within us to reveal the city to which we belong, and invite everybody, everybody, everybody to come along. 

April 3, Second Sunday of Easter

John 20:19-31

Bryan Cones

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? It’s not a question one gets asked too often in an Episcopal Church, nor in the Roman Catholic churches of my youth. But it is one I grew up with in East Tennessee among Southern Baptists, as perhaps some of you also did if you came up among evangelical Christians.

It’s the kind of question that might feel a little uncomfortable; it was the kind of question meant to get at the kind of Christian you were. My Roman Catholic mother told me always to say yes, because I had been baptized as a baby, so she and my dad had taken care of that for me. Our Southern Baptist neighbors didn’t quite agree on that: for them an experience of Jesus came first, then baptism.

Even though that question reflected a difference between my Catholic family and my evangelical neighbors, I never heard their question as an unkind one, though—the people who asked it mainly wanted everyone to experience what they had. I remember a college friend, an evangelical Lutheran, rewording the famous verse John 3:16: “For God so loved Bryan that he sent his only Son…” Surely I was not all that important, I remember thinking. The good Catholic in me always insisted that we are all saved together, as a community, as a body, even as a whole creation.

But it always made me curious: When my evangelical friends spoke of “being saved,” accepting Jesus, just what was that like for them? Intellectual certainty? Having all your questions answered? All doubts removed? I came to understand in their telling of it, which they were always happy to do, that it was above all more like a feeling, a feeling of being loved and protected and embraced, not only safe from some eternal hell, but protected also from ever falling away from God’s love, or falling out of love with God. It was God’s response to their longing for Jesus— not really in their heads at all, even if it was something they thought about.

I was thinking about that same question reading today’s gospel: the story of how Thomas accepted Jesus not only as Savior, but as “my Lord and my God.” What might that have been like for him? We tend to refer to him as “doubting Thomas,” as if he was intellectually unconvinced by what the other disciples told him, and needed proof. But when we listen to this story closely, Thomas never says, “I want to understand” or “Prove it!” He says, “I want to see him, I want to touch him.” He needs a personal encounter with Jesus to believe, not an argument for why he should. Perhaps he felt left out or overlooked or forgotten by Jesus. And he won’t take “no” for an answer.

And guess what? The risen Jesus says “yes”: “Go ahead, touch me!” And Thomas believes. But, to be honest, I don’t think we should call him “doubting Thomas” so much as brave Thomas, bold Thomas, for daring to ask for what really needed to believe, and trusting that Jesus would respond.

Amazingly, that’s what the risen Jesus seems always to be doing in these stories from John’s gospel: Saying “yes” to his friends not in their joy and wonder and awe, but in response to their doubt, uncertainty, even disbelief. As Kristin reminded us on Easter Sunday, it was Mary Magdalene in her deep grief that the Risen One came to, calling her by name so that she could see him through her tears.

The Risen One in today’s story appears among the cowering disciples, passing not only through locked doors, but through their overwhelming fear of sharing his fate. In the story that follows this one about Thomas, the Risen One appears again to the disciples in their forgetfulness, after they’ve thrown up their hands and gone back to fishing. And immediately after, the Risen One has another personal encounter this time with Peter, deeply ashamed of his denial of Jesus, deeply in need of forgiveness.

Mary Magdalene, the Ten, Thomas, Peter—and us as well. All of us invited to encounter the Risen One from wherever we are, joy and wonder and awe and praise and thanksgiving for sure, and also grief and uncertainty and doubt and unworthiness and fear.

I remember my own encounter like that, somewhere around age 17, not at all certain that anyone could love me as I was, and probably not the only one who ever felt that way. And yet on a weekend retreat, I did have an experience of Jesus’ love for me not unlike that of Thomas, when finally what those evangelicals had been talking about made a little more sense to me. It was less an experience of me accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior—my mom was right, I already had— but an experience of being accepted by my Lord and my God, just exactly as I was, in all my uncertainty and fear.

As I have grown into that experience, I have become utterly convinced that the Risen One is always waiting for any of us to be like brave Thomas: to ask with boldness for what we need so that we can believe, in whatever state we are, so our Lord and God can do just what we have asked.

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? Better yet: Have you accepted that your Lord and Savior accepts you, exactly as you are, without question or reservation. Now that is what I call good news worthy of an Easter alleluia. 

March 26, Easter Vigil

Genesis 1:1--2:4a; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13; Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21; Baruch 3:9-15, 3:32--4:4

Bryan Cones

Last Sunday we began telling a story: the story about Jesus’ last week or so of life, which we finished up yesterday as he breathed his last. And now with Jesus on this night we are waiting in the darkness for what comes next. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

To mark the time we have started telling our whole story again, from the beginning, in the watery chaos before time began, when it was only God on their own, wondering what might be drawn from the fertile void. And out of a watery nothingness God’s creativity called forth a flourishing something: light and darkness, sun and moon, green growing things, living creeping things, breathing human things. Out of nothing comes something through God’s imagination. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

Another story, this time a natural disaster of epic proportions, a moral disaster that humanity brought upon itself, the story tells us, which threatened to wash away all that God had made. But the Holy One won’t have it, and commissions a life raft to keep creation afloat until the crisis passes. Out of certain destruction comes salvation through God’s faithfulness. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

Another story, perhaps a bit more familiar: an enslaved and oppressed people, no hope of rescue, crushed under the heel of the god-king Pharaoh, a motley crew of Hebrews whose lives did not matter, to Pharaoh anyway. But they did matter to the Holy One, who summons a voice to speak for them, who gives a holy name for them to call, and who marshals creation in a great war against their oppressor. Out of slavery comes liberation through God’s power. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

The story goes on: That people passed through the desert and became a nation, bound by a covenant to the God who set them free. But covenants can be hard to keep, and some who had been oppressed became oppressors themselves, of the widow, the orphan, the alien immigrant. The people turned from the path of Wisdom, though she taught them her ways and called to them again and again in the unheeded voices of the prophets she sent. So finally she came herself, and pitched her tent, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Out of abandonment comes companionship through God’s steadfast love. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

And so Wisdom walked among us to show us her way, healing and freeing, teaching and listening, eating and drinking with everybody who came along. And before long she drew the attention of the god-king Caesar, and those who oppressed and enslaved the poor, and turned creation to destruction for their own purposes, who would prefer to keep for themselves what God desires for all.

Which brings us back to where we started, on this night, here in this darkness, waiting to tell the story of what happened with Jesus: out of defeat comes victory, out of death comes life, out of the old creation comes a new one, and the story of Wisdom begins anew in the risen body of Christ.

And so here we are, bearing that story, to a world beset by chaos and violence, on the edge of natural and moral disaster threatening to burn up what God has made, when some lives still don’t matter, the widow and orphan and alien are left abandoned on the border, and Wisdom’s children are still sent to the tombs. What do you think is going to happen with us?

We already know the answer: We are going to live the story we have been telling of what God has been doing all along, of what Christ is now making risen flesh in us, Christ’s body: the divine imagination that draws forth a flourishing something where once there was nothing; the divine faithfulness that shelters and protects what is threatened with destruction, the divine power that goes to battle with anything that enslaves and oppresses God’s people, the divine love that refuses to give up on anyone, the divine Wisdom who teaches and listens, heals and makes whole, who sits to eat and drink with all who have been abandoned, the divine life that disarms death forever.

So let us gather now at the waters where it all began, and begins again and again, to be bathed once more in the story of how God is saving the world. 

March 25, Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-10:42

Deacon Sue Nebel

Good Friday. The second day of the Triduum, the three sacred days leading up to Easter. This day, right in the middle, is the darkest, the most solemn of the three.  We began the Triduum last night in a somewhat festive mood, gathering for an agape meal.  Then we shifted our focus and the mood darkened.  We remembered in words and actions the events of the night before Jesus’ death.  The last meal with his disciples. The footwashing.  His final commandment: to love one another.

Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Triduum, ends in darkness and quiet.  Tomorrow, Holy Saturday, is a day of anticipation and preparation for the evening ahead. The Easter Vigil when the light of Christ dispels the darkness. New life. Hope. Celebration.  But not today, not on Good Friday. Today we gather in sadness, emptiness. The church has been stripped bare.  Today we hear the story of Jesus’ arrest and trial.  His death on a cross. His body placed in a tomb. 

Three days.  Three sets of events.  Three symbols.  Maundy Thursday: the basin and towel of footwashing.  Good Friday: the cross.  Holy Saturday: the empty tomb.  Important, all three of them, but it is the cross that Christian tradition has made central. Walk into a Christian church and you will find a cross, front and center, just as it is here.  We encounter crosses in many forms in our church life.  We carry crosses in procession. We see them in decorations, vestments, service leaflets, and prayer books.  Church logos and flags.  Many people wear crosses as jewelry.  Some simple, some elaborate. 

Today, on Good Friday, we focus on one cross.  The instrument of punishment and death for criminals in the Roman Empire.  Jesus sentenced to die because of his teachings and actions.  Words and actions that were judged to be a threat to those in power.  So, they decided to get rid of him.  In the cruelest, most humiliating kind of death. The cross of Good Friday is not an ornate decorated object. The cross of Good Friday is plain, heavy wood.  Rough, stark.  In a few minutes,  (or Kristin)  will bring that kind of cross forward and we will honor it.  Silently affirming its central place in our hearts and in our lives as Christians.

Good Friday is a day of commemoration, of remembering.  Good Friday invites us into the story of the events surrounding Jesus’ death.  The betrayal by Judas. The scattering of the other disciples.  Jesus questioned by Pilate.  Mocked and scorned by the crowd around him.  The grim details of Jesus’ death.  His body, taken down, wrapped in spices and cloth, and placed in a tomb. 

Good Friday into something else as well.  Good Friday invites us to reflect on what the Cross means to us.  What image of the Cross is most important to us? Which Cross have we taken into ourselves?  To shape who we are and what we do.

·      Is it the Cross of Good Friday?  Jesus’ suffering and death—and the meaning that we give to it.  Jesus as sacrifice.  Jesus dying for us. 

·      Is it the Cross of Jesus’ teaching in Scripture?  Jesus told those who wanted to join him, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” A cross that we choose. The Cross of Discipleship.

·      Our most important cross may be one that we experience in the liturgies of the church.  The Cross of Blessing.  The gestures of the hands of a bishop or priest.  Blessing the bread and wine of the Eucharistic meal.  Blessing the people at the end of a service, reminding them that they are children of God, loved by God.

·      Or perhaps, it is the Cross of Baptism that is most important to us.  The declaration of faith and commitment to Christ.  The final action of the baptismal rite: the anointing with oil and sign of the cross on the forehead.  With the words, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”  A Cross of Identity

Today, as you go out from this liturgy of Good Friday.  I invite you to take one of these images of the cross with you.  Your favorite.  Or perhaps, you might want to take another one. To see how it fits.   Whatever you choose, take it with you.  Carry it with you, as you move through the rest of the day.  Reflect on it.  Find a place for it deep within yourself. Let it work on you.  et it shape you.  Today, tomorrow, and beyond.

March 20, Palm Sunday

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 19:28-40; Luke 22:14--23:56

Bryan Cones

Where is God in all this? That could be a question many of us have been asking since this time last year: violence and destruction in Paris, Istanbul, and Baghdad, which still echoes in the news this week, tragic deaths and unimaginable violence in Chicago, an endless war in Syria whose victims wash up on Europe’s shores, a political campaign marked by anger and frustration, spilling over into a contest of profanity and name-calling, even physical attacks and recrimination. Where is God in all this?

And that’s just in the world out there, without even touching those hard moments of family or personal life: the unexpected and unprepared for deaths, the surprising sickness, the diminishment of just growing older, the betrayal of friends, suffering the mean girls or the bully boys, the feeling of just being alone. Where is God in all this?

What a very good question, one our Christian ancestors were asking themselves as they reflected on the events of the week we are about to begin: Where was God when God’s Son was suffering so? Where was God when the Romans crucified the Chosen One? And where was God when those who followed the Christ suffered rejection and persecution themselves? And here today, on Palm Sunday, we begin to tell once again the stories through which they answered the question: Where is God in all this?

The story actually began last week, with Mary of Bethany’s prophetic anointing of Jesus, her actions signaling where God was in that tender moment, caring for the Son as Jesus prepared to make his final journey. Today we tell more of that story in two parts, beginning with a joyous parade in which the voice of God rises up from those who have been silenced and ignored, so powerful that even those religious authorities couldn’t shut them up, lest God make even the stones sing.

We skip today the part where the crowd invades the Temple, turning over tables in God’s protest of the blasphemy of ripping off the faithful poor as they tried to worship God. That bit of activism is what draws the attention of the Romans, and will end in the story of Jesus’ death we tell today, but not before Jesus shows us where God is: in the forgiveness showered not only upon those with whom he is crucified, but upon those who do the crucifying as well.

That’s not the whole story, of course—don’t forget the middle. On Thursday we tell the story of the night before Jesus died, when God was in the holy meal that is the pledge of God’s love for us, and in the holy act of service that is our pledge of love for all, and in the holy watch through the night with our friend as we wait for Good Friday’s dawn.

On Friday again we tell the story of that fateful day, when the power of evil seemed for a moment to win, as the Just One stood before the unjust, as all his friends, save three, deserted him in his hour of need. Where God was then is sometimes hard to see, though perhaps it was in God’s refusal to destroy what God had so lovingly made, even as it destroyed the Just One.

Which brings us to Saturday, when we gather in the tombs at night, following the faithful women who hoped to anoint the Anointed One, there to discover what God had known all along, that no shadow can overcome the brightness of God, a God who is present through both light and darkness. And so in darkness we tell the whole story again from the beginning of where God has been all along, until we get to the end, which is actually the new beginning, the story of living always where God is, in life that death cannot overcome.

And so we gather today, to tell the story again, starting at the beginning, and staying for the middle, all the way to the end, not just by reading it but by living it: to join the parade of palms and praise today, and to shout with the crowd that wants Jesus dead, to eat with Jesus one last time on Thursday night, and to practice with him the humble service he came to reveal, and to sit up with him in his terror until it becomes too much, to return on Friday before it is too late to accompany Jesus as he dies, to gather at his grave on Saturday night to mourn him, until we are surprised by the new thing God has done on Sunday.

This is Holy Week, when we make present the story we live by, so that we can learn again just how to see where God is in all this, by remembering where God has been and always will be: with us through the same moments of joy, sorrow, service, care, waiting, watching, never failing to be with us to show us the way, never failing to draw new life out of what seems like loss. As we remember this story in word and action this week so may we also discover that God is always wherever we are, whenever we tell this story. 

March 13, Fifth Sunday in Lent

John 12:1-8

Bryan Cones

Imagine yourself for a moment witnessing this act of very public and extravagant affection of this woman toward Jesus just before his death. It is so surprising, even a little shocking, that I can’t help but wonder what really happened and just who this woman was, and what motivated her to do what she did.

Like the account of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan, this story appears in all four gospels, a good sign that something like this really happened, though unlike the story of John and Jesus, the woman’s identity and motivation shifts a bit. In Mark and Matthew, where she anoints Jesus’ head, the story leaves her unnamed, and we know nothing about her. Luke turns her into a woman with a past, a sinner of some sort, and history assumes she was a prostitute, though without any evidence or justification from the story itself.

But here in John, we know exactly who the woman is: Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus, and a good friend of Jesus, so good in fact that when her brother, Lazarus, had died, she let Jesus have it, grilling him about where he had been when Lazarus was sick, and why he hadn’t shown up in time to heal his friend.

In this story, only a short chapter later, the resuscitated Lazarus is back at the family table. And so here again is Mary, this time without a word, covering Jesus’ feet with a shocking extravagance of immensely expensive perfume, and wiping his feet with her own hair. It’s a magnificent act of love and thanksgiving.

Imagine the looks on the faces of the rest of those men at the table, some of whom were offended, if Judas is any indication. Or were they jealous because no one had ever touched them with such care? They judge Mary, it seems, because she didn’t do the proper thing, the expected thing, the righteous thing: giving this extravagance to the poor.

But Mary knew that something else was needed, that this journey to Jerusalem was not going to end well for her friend. In six short days he was going to receive the very opposite treatment: in place of anointing, there will be beatings; in place of perfumed oil, the smell of blood; in place of the softest hair, the hardest of nails.

And so Mary did what only she could do: prepare Jesus’ body for burial, treating his body for a moment with the kindness that only she could offer her friend, Judas and all her other detractors be damned. Her act of kindness is a work of art, a response with her own body to the grace and salvation she had already experienced in Jesus, whose love and power had restored the body of her brother to life.

It is creativity so marvelous that we remember it still every time we tell this story, and I have to wonder if its effect on Jesus was so great, that he imitated Mary’s creativity on the night before he died. Was it Mary’s surprising and creative act of love and service that inspired Jesus to get down on his hands and knees to wash the feet of his friends? Perhaps we have Mary of Bethany to thank for the liturgy we will celebrate a week from Thursday as we wash each other’s feet.

For these weeks of Lent we have been reflecting on the questions of our baptismal covenant, questions that propose how we might respond to the saving work God has done for us in Jesus. We sometimes call them “vows” or “promises,” and today we will consider the one that calls us to care for creation, which for good reason might lead us to discuss climate change or environmental justice for people, such as those in Flint, who suffer the worst effects of pollution.

But seen through the surprising and creative way Mary of Bethany honors “creation” in her creative care of the created body of Jesus, perhaps we might see these questions of baptism less as vows or promises to act in some specific way, more as invitations to creativity like Mary’s. Perhaps they are encouragement to explore the ways we, with Mary, might practice the “art of salvation,” how each of us might take what God has so freely given us in Jesus and make it flesh and blood in our own bodies, as Mary did, in our own surprising and unrepeatable way. God may be inviting us all to get creative with our thanksgiving, to embody salvation in the way only we can do it.

We can’t be Mary of Bethany, of course—but we can be us: knitting a shawl that gathers prayers into soft embrace to shelter the body of one who is sick or grieving; sitting at the bedside of one we love as death carries them into what lies ahead; hauling beds and chairs and tables to transform a parish hall into a bedroom that for a moment feels like home for a family who lacks one; showing up at a community meeting that tries to address just why those families lack a home of their own; sharing one’s reflections on faith and life with friends on a Thursday night in the parish lounge; bearing a loaf of bread to make someone new feel welcome, or picking up bread and delivering it to a feeding ministry so that it won’t get wasted; singing a song of praise to carry the spirits of fellow Christians or anyone else heavenward; planting a scarlet runner bean seed to behold with wonder the power of life at work in God’s creation.

This is the art of salvation: our thanksgiving for what God has already done once for all in Jesus, embodied in countless new ways in us, until at last the mystery of the body of Christ comes to fullness. And if the surprising creativity of Mary of Bethany is any indication, we are still a long way from exhausting the artistic potential of what God is still revealing in those who follow Christ on the Way. 

February 28, Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

Bryan Cones

I know Lent is supposed to be a time for self-examination and all, to look at ourselves and see if we might  take our baptismal covenant a bit more seriously, but seriously, these are the readings that supposed to help us do that? As our second reader Meghan wrote when I sent her the second reading from Paul, “Yoikes!”

Yoikes indeed… We could boil down a paragraph from Paul today to something like: sexual immorality = death; unfaithfulness to Christ = death; complaining = death.

And it’s not just Paul: In probably the goriest passage in Luke’s gospel after the crucifixion, Jesus is commenting on a tragic accident —a tower falling down and killing 18 people— along with a grotesque act of imperial abuse— Pontius Pilate mingling the blood of Galileans he executed with his Roman sacrifices. I wanted to tell the kids to cover their ears while Sue was reading.

Jesus is at pains to point out that the victims of those events hadn’t been more sinful than anyone else, so they didn’t deserve it—but then goes on to say unless his hearers repent, things will be even worse for them! I’m not sure that lovely parable about the fig tree can save it. How’s that for Lenten encouragement?

Even the first reading, with its amazing vision of God in a bush that burns but doesn’t burn up, its revelation of the divine name, and its promise of freedom to an oppressed people, has within it a problem: The land that I AM is going to give to the Chosen People already belongs to someone else, with consequences that extend all the way to the present day in the land where Jesus walked—and not just there, but in many places where Christians have landed and decided that God had promised the land to them, no matter who was already there.

And there’s the rub: These difficult passages aren’t just hard by themselves. They echo still today in the way they are used and interpreted. The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s may have faded from our popular imaginations (though that crisis continues) but those of us who remember it probably remember the ways in which a passage such as the one we heard from Paul today was used to explain why so many gay men had a fatal illness. It was a divine punishment for sexual immorality. That was an interpretation with catastrophic consequences for the faith of many of those gay men and those who cared for them and journeyed with them all the way to death.

And that line about complaining has been used against poor people for a long time—something like they should stop complaining and work harder. When I was a Roman Catholic seminarian in college, I remember my faithful evangelical neighbor explaining to me that in his experience most people who were poor were poor because they made poor choices. I remember first thinking that it was probably a little more complicated than that. Then I thought if I was poor and needed help, I sure wouldn’t want to run into him, but it also struck me that this faithful Bible-focused Christian had evidently missed all those parts in the Bible where blame for poverty falls not on the poor, but on the rich, both for their dereliction of duty in relation to those in need and because their selfishness and injustice are borne by widows and orphans.

These unhelpful approaches to unhelpful passages in the Bible all seem to boil down to something like: People somehow deserve the suffering they are experiencing. In various forms it’s used to make sense of addiction and illness and poverty and war and so on, usually to the detriment of persons actually experiencing them. Maybe sometimes we even turn that interpretation on ourselves: I am suffering because I deserve it, and God is punishing me.

Paul tries to save this a bit by suggesting that God may be using these experiences to test us and help us grow, and won’t give us anything too hard for us to bear. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m terribly interested in being in a relationship with, much less worshiping, a God like that. Life is hard enough without God making it into an object lesson. That’s not the God I experience and know.

What’s that God like? I think a dear friend of mine summed it up best. After years of struggling with what he saw as a mistake in his past and wondering whether God was punishing him or trying to teach him a lesson, he was driving to work one day and had his Eureka moment: God isn’t punishing me, he realized, because God doesn’t punish anybody. And almost immediately it followed: And I shouldn’t punish anybody either. He told me it was like God had unplugged one idea, and plugged in another, and that he almost wrecked his car when he realized what God had done. When he told me that story, I wanted to take off my shoes, because I knew I was standing on holy ground.

Will you seek and serve Christ in every person, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human being? Those two questions from our baptismal covenant are a mouthful, and there are countless ways to live them out. But I wonder if, in light of the these readings, we might start to renew our commitment to them by first repenting of those scriptures and their interpretations that get in the way of loving our neighbor or ourselves, or produce the very opposite of justice and peace because they do not lead to respect for the dignity of every human being.

It seems to me that living out the demands of our baptismal covenant may start with remembering the God who called out to Moses: the God who appeared as an oxymoronic bush that burned but did not burn up, the God whose name is the refusal of name, more like an invitation than an identity. This is a God beyond any human certainty or knowledge, a God who invites silence and wonder before any speech.

And if we want to be a part of this God’s mission of freeing people and honoring human dignity, and partnering in God’s work of justice and peace, that likely begins with remembering that every person we encounter is an image of that ungraspable God, with that same holy fire burning within them.

When we stand facing one another, we stand where Moses stood. “Remove the sandals from your feet,” I AM warns us, “for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

February 21, Second Sunday of Lent

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35

Bryan Cones

One of my first culture shocks as a Roman Catholic exploring the Episcopal Church was this thing called “coffee hour”: “Are you coming to coffee hour? Please join us for coffee hour. We will gather for coffee in the parish hall/undercroft, etc., etc.” As a Roman Catholic who took his Sunday Mass obligation pretty seriously, this coffee hour thing seemed a bit overmuch, sometimes even feeling more like an obligation than an invitation. Wasn’t celebrating Eucharist enough? And why couldn’t be it “coffee 20-minutes-or-so”? I mean, really: What does coffee hour have to do with salvation, whether mine or the world’s?

“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread and the prayers?” asks the Baptismal Covenant. The apostles’ “fellowship” is evidently as important as their teaching, along with the breaking of the bread and the prayers. Is coffee hour or its equivalents part of that covenant? And what kind of “fellowship” are we talking about? Because if it is, coffee hour is indeed important for salvation, both ours and the world’s. But that seems to promise a lot in a cup of coffee.

Not that I don’t get the importance of Christian fellowship to address that basic human concern: the desire to be known, to have a community in which we can express and share what is dearest to us or what concerns us most, whatever is at the heart of who we are. Believe it or not, I even hear that need in today’s first reading. If I listen for the deep human need that Abram shares with God, underneath all that covenant stuff and animal sacrifice, it’s the basic unfulfilled desire for a child of one’s own: one to love and cherish, one who will remember that child’s parents, one who will carry on a family legacy. Abram wants that desperately, and the lack of an heir, if you read the whole story, causes a lot of trouble in his marriage and his family. (See the story of Hagar and Ishmael, innocent victims of that marital trouble.)

I can imagine a present-day Abram or Sarai needing a certain kind of fellowship. It’s the kind in which the question, “How are things going for you?” is sincere, no matter what the answer; it’s the kind that has space both for “We’re expecting a baby!” and “Things aren’t going very well at all, and sometimes I feel like it’s never going to get any better. Sometimes I feel like giving up.” That is indeed the kind of fellowship that could contribute to a person’s salvation. Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

Jesus, too, in the gospel today, could use a kind of fellowship. At some point he must have felt like everyone was out to get him, both Herod and Jesus’ religious opponents who suggest Jesus leave town before Herod does him in. Jesus has a response both smart-alecky and tender, but I wonder what it was like for him, not only to feel like somebody, or a lot of them, was out to get him, but also to know that there really were people out to get him!

Nowadays I wonder what that’s like for other people in similar situations, for an African American teenage boy, for example, who might justifiably feel like the world is out to get him, constantly blaming him for problems not of his making, and seeing examples in young men that look something like him—LaQuan McDonald, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown—that suggest a combination of some people and a whole society may indeed be out to get him just because he is a Black male of a certain age. What kind of apostolic fellowship might he need? Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

I understand that last week the Lenten conversation after church turned to racism and its effects on all of us, and there was hunger for more conversation like that. What kind of fellowship makes that conversation possible? Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

For me it’s the kind in which I know I am loved enough that I can risk revealing my ignorance as a White person about what it’s like to be African American or any person of color in a White majority or White dominant society, knowing that inevitably I will also reveal the way racism still operates in me, and how being White brings me so many unearned benefits—just because I look like I do.

I can only guess at the kind of fellowship an African American person might need for that kind of conversation. But in light of what friends and colleagues who are African American have shared with me, I wonder if it might be at least the kind in which it’s OK to express and share the justifiable anger and frustration that comes from having to explain for the umpteenth time how hard it is just to drive while Black in Chicago or on the North Shore, without even mentioning the other forces that make life as an African American difficult in our society, or adding the complexities of being African American and transgender, or African American and a man, or a woman, or gay, or African American and successful, or African American and poor.

Is that the kind of fellowship the covenant is talking about? If it is I’d have to say that it is indeed the kind that might save the world. And if you need a little proof for that, look to the apostolic fellowship of the historically Black churches, which not only have sustained many African Americans through this centuries-long struggle, but also spilled out into streets and up to lunch counters, and marched across bridges in Montgomery, Alabama, finally to win a single step on the long path to justice. Apostolic fellowship can be powerful force to reckon with. Is that the kind the baptismal covenant is talking about?

So what does coffee hour or its equivalent have to do with salvation? It looks like it could have a lot to do with salvation, especially when it bridges the apostles’ teaching, the breaking of the bread and the prayers, which we make present in ritual in here, with our everyday lives of faith in the world out there. It may do that by fostering real, authentic relationships of love and justice and mercy and understanding, of which this world is in desperate need.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread and the prayers? I admit, the “coffee hour” part was a stretch for me, but upon reflection, I can honestly respond wholeheartedly: “I will, with God’s help.”