September 4, Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Rev. Dr. Frank Senn

Proper 18/Lectionary 23/Pentecost 16/Year C

Texts: Philemon; Luke 14:25-33

September 4, 2016

Some of you may remember the spiritual song from the 1960s that had a chorus that went, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” We sang it on college campuses in Spiritual hootenannies and in the folk masses of that era. I actually thought it was kind of a dippy song back then, but it was a response to the words of Jesus, “I give you a new commandment: love one another”---to which he added, “If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:34-35). I liked the Beatles’ song better, “All you need is love, all you need is love, all you need is love, love, love is all you need.” It was an idealistic time for both church and society back in the 60s. Being young, we didn’t realize that love always has to be worked out in difficult situations, often involving interpersonal relationships. Our readings today illustrate those difficult situations in which love is tested.

We heard almost the whole of Paul’s letter to Philemon; it’s the shortest of Paul’s letters, less than a full page. It’s also a personal letter rather than a letter written to churches. There was some debate in the early church about whether it should even be included in the biblical canon. But it was, perhaps because it tells us how love gets worked out between Christians, especially in close personal relationships.

Paul says he has heard good reports about the love that Philemon has been demonstrating. He speaks particularly of Philemon’s love for other Christians, and he describes this love as something that refreshes people’s hearts, something that perks people up and reminds them that life is worth living. And having given him this big pat on the back, Paul sets about spelling out to him what he sees as the next big step that Philemon needs to take in expressing his love to the saints. He has to take Onesimus back into his household and treat him as his brother in Christ.

Who is this Onesimus? The tradition, at least since the time of John Chrysostom (a contemporary of Augustine’s in the Greek Church), has regarded Onesimus as a slave, perhaps a runaway slave. This letter attracted a lot of attention in the U.S. before the Civil War. Both abolitionists and pro-slavery people appealed to it to support their positions. Runaway slaves need to be returned to their masters, said the anti-Abolitionists. See? It’s right here in the Bible. But the Abolitionists pointed out that Paul tells Philemon to receive Onesimus back “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother.”

But what kind of a brother? A brother “both in the flesh and in the Lord.” I was stopped by the phrase brother “in the flesh.” I checked the Greek. Yup, it uses the word sarx. That’s “flesh.” I checked out various translations. The Jerusalem Bible says “blood brother.” Maybe Onesimus wasn’t a slave at all. Maybe he was actually Philemon’s brother.

Allan Dwight Callahan makes this suggestion in his Commentary, Embassy of Onesimus: The Letter of Paul to Philemon. If Onesimus was Philemon’s blood brother, what’s the bit about Philemon receiving him back “no longer as a slave?” Is Paul using the term “slave” figuratively?

Throughout his letters Paul uses the term both literally and figuratively. Maybe he’s using it in both senses here. Perhaps a scenario can be constructed in which Onesimus was indentured to his older brother (perhaps after the death of their parents), chaffed under the relationship, and ran off to Paul, who was in jail at the time (perhaps in Ephesus). Onesimus proved to be very useful to Paul, but now Paul wants to send him back to Philemon---to bring about reconciliation between two brothers “in the flesh” so that their brotherhood “in the Lord” can be restored.

Doesn’t this up the ante for reconciliation? Isn’t it easier to be magnaminous to, say, an employee than to a brother, with whom you may have had a falling out? Paul goes overboard in making his appeal. He even pledges to make good whatever financial losses Philemon might have suffered because Onesimus ran off.

This is one of the most manipulative letters you’ve ever read. I’ll repay you whatever Onesimus owes, writes Paul, although remember that you owe me your life. I won’t command you to take him back, but please get a room ready for me, because I’m coming to visit Colossae as soon as I’m out of jail. Inplication? I’ll know how you responded to my appeal.

Love involves the hard work of reconciliation where relationships have been broken. That’s the kind of love Paul is asking Philemon to work on. Paul is the third party mediator, using whatever persuasive powers he has. Philemon has shown a lot of love to all the saints. Now he must show love to someone in his own household---perhaps a slave, but more likely an estranged brother. That’s more difficult.

So must family members always be loving each other no matter what? Not if you listen to Jesus in today’s Gospel. He tells the large crowd following him---following him on the way to Jerusalem---, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”    

Obviously this is a perplexing saying, because Jesus’s ethic of love makes it unthinkable that Christians should hate anyone, let alone those closest to them. But such hyperbole was a common form of making a point in the culture Jesus lived in. It’s not unknown among us either, especially when you listen to politicians’ speeches. A contrast is exaggerated to its logical extreme to make its implications apparent.

Thus Jesus’s words may simply be taken (as some translations do) as saying “those who come to me cannot be my disciples unless they love me more than they love father and mother, spouse and children, sisters and brothers, and themselves as well.”

But I think there’s a bit more to it than that. The overall context of the passage is about counting the cost of following Jesus. Jesus tells two parables about counting the cost before you begin an undertaking: count the cost of building a tower before you begin construction; count the cost of setting out to wage war before you pick a fight with another country.

I think that context suggests that the verse is not just about who we love most, but about facing the consequences of who we love most.

And so I think Jesus is not just saying “love me more than your family.” He is warning us that if we really live as his disciples, loving him with all our heart by embracing his values, we might be accused by our families of hating them.

When I was teaching in Indonesia, I heard the story of a student who converted to Christianity from Islam. He said he expected to be beaten by his friends, and he was prepared for that. But being beaten by his family members was hard to take. “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” said Jesus. There are contexts in which following Jesus entails suffering, physical and mental suffering.

Sometimes it’s difficult to break away from family ties to follow Jesus. Francis of Assisi felt that he needed to make a dramatic gesture to show how serious he was about following Jesus in a life of poverty. He stood before his merchant father and his father’s affluent friends and stripped off all his clothes, left them in a pile, and walked away naked. “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions,” said Jesus. To part with your possessions can be as difficult for some people as parting company with your family.

To follow Jesus means to accept the values of the kingdom that he preached, and that might set you at odds with family members, your friends, or a society that doesn’t share those values. None of us can give any kind of advance guarantee about how we will cope with the consequences of that commitment, if push comes to shove. But Jesus is making sure that we don’t end up saying we’d been conned into discipleship without being shown the fine print.  

The fact is that real love always involves risks. Real love always lies beyond our comfort zones. But a new community of disciples founded on deep love, on risky undertakings, perhaps even championing socially controversial actions, is truly worth whatever discomfort and disrepute it takes to be part of it.

Jesus has gone that way before us, and as we gather around this table we are reminded that his body was broken and his blood was shed to make possible this new community of disciples.

So we must come to this table in a state of reconciled fellowship. Philemon and Onesimus must come together to the Lord’s table as brothers in the Lord. Hence the greeting of peace before we come to the table. Maybe you’ve got to wander around the church finding the person you need to be reconciled with and share the Lord’s peace with them before you come to the table.

But we are also reminded that on the other side of the deep baptismal waters of disrepute and death, lies the promised land where the new wine of love and mercy and peace is poured out. And with the bread and wine of scandalous love, we are nourished for the risky journey into communion in the ultimate love of God for us, a love we can only desire to return.

Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord. Yes, Lord, you I love with all my heart.

Amen.

Frank C. Senn

July 31, Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 12:13-21

Kristin White

My grandmother’s apron. The hat that looks like a grape, made by a nurse for Grace when she was on the neonatal unit, and the preemie sized clothes that would be too big for her until she was four months old. The quilt John’s mother made for our tenth anniversary; the quilt my mother made – her first ever – to give me for Christmas during seminary. The dress my grandparents brought from their trip to Hawaii in 1973 when I was two years old, what would be their last trip to Hawaii. The green bear named Green Bear that my friend Deborah gave two of, one to each of our girls, when they were two years old. The painting of Mount Hood that hung in John’s grandparents’ living room. The hat my friend Kate knit for me, and then knit again after I lost the first one.

These are things we have treasured and kept, most of them moved from place to place in our lives over the past decades. They are things we’ve found room for, chosen to store instead of giving them away.

Next week one of our members will be entering a higher level of care at the assisted living center where she lives. That means a room for her instead of the apartment she has now, and so comes the necessary sifting through of what to let go of, what to keep. This member has generously offered gifts of her things to the people served by Family Promise who have been homeless and are returning to living independently, so that other people can have enough of what they need. As I have tried to be helpful to her through this process, it caused me to think about the day when John and I will find ourselves needing to make similar choices. You’ve heard the list of some of the things I would hold onto, were I to decide right now. What about you?

---

Today’s gospel is tough.

Somebody in the crowd Jesus is teaching comes before him and asks Jesus to tell the man’s brother to divide the family inheritance. It seems like he believes Jesus to be fair; nothing suggests the man is trying to manipulate, or get more than he should.

Jesus’ first response is to tell the group to beware of all kinds of greed. An earlier translation of this passage uses the word “covetousness.” So to use that more traditional word, Jesus is warning them against “wanting more of what you already have enough of.” Does this man already have what he needs? So what does fairness mean then?

Next, Jesus tells the story of a wealthy farmer. The farmer plants well, has a good season, and brings in a harvest so large it surprises him – so much that he doesn’t have room to contain it all. He builds a bigger barn where he can store all that wheat. And then he prepares to relax and take it easy, his future seemingly assured.

The easy way for a preacher into this passage is to say what you maybe expect a preacher to say: that money is evil, that possessions corrupt. That might work, some of the time, for some of the people, on a Sunday morning in church. But then there’s that business of going back out into the world again.

Money serves a purpose, when it pays for a home that shelters us, and for the medicine we need to be well, and for shoes to put on our kids’ feet, and for the food that sustains us...heck, even for a vacation once in a while. And possessions? Well, I can tell you that I remember my grandmother wearing the apron of hers that I have when I was ten years old and she taught me to bake a pie. And that tiny grape hat - it needed to be so small that the nurse used a lemon as the form so she could get the size right - that hat helped keep our daughter warm before she could maintain her own body temperature. And the painting that now hangs in our living room reminds us at the same time of our family and of the landscape that are in my family’s bones.

So to say that money and possessions don’t matter, or shouldn’t, seems at best irrelevant (something the Church sometimes gets accused of being), or at worst, negligent (something your rector just doesn’t want to be).

Here’ the trouble: the only subject of the conversation in Jesus’ story is the wealthy farmer himself. The only object of the conversation is his own wealth. And the conversation isn’t actually a conversation at all, because the only person this guy is talking to is himself. 

At no point does the wealthy farmer give thanks for the land, for good weather and fertile soil. All that planting and tending and harvesting and tearing down and building and storing had to involve other people, but you wouldn’t know it – because the farmer never mentions them. He shows no generosity toward people who made the harvest possible. He invites no friends or neighbors or family to join in celebrating his good fortune.

Think about some of the other parables Jesus tells: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Widow’s Mite. Each of those stories shows people sharing what they have, as gift. Each story shows the blessing magnified by the sharing of that gift, making it greater than what it had been by itself. Money and things become tools that the people who have them can choose to share, widening a circle in which more people have enough of what they need.

Or, in the case of today’s parable, they can choose not to.

“I will say to my soul, Soul, take your ease – you have ample goods…”

“But God says, ‘Fool, this very night your life is being demanded of you.' ”

Remember: Jesus is teaching before a crowd of his followers. Remember: this is an illustration he offers when a man asks the teacher he trusts to offer a judgment that is fair.

It is not a sin, so far as I know, to make wise business decisions. It is not a sin to be surprised by a remarkable yield, or to build in ways that better meet our needs. It is not a sin, I believe, to hold special things as tangible reminders of joy or hope or even sadness…as tangible reminders of love. Where we get lost is in believing that we are our own ends, that what we have is always and only and ever a result of what we ourselves have done, that stuff is the entire substance of a person’s life, and that we can never, ever have enough.

Because this night, and every night, our lives are being demanded of us. This night, and every night, we have the choice to clench our fists and isolate ourselves, or open our hands and hearts to share. This night, and every night, we have the opportunity to learn again that we cannot store up treasures that will, finally, secure ourselves to heaven. Only God can do that.

And who knows, in the end – maybe I’ll have a grandchild in some distant future who wants to learn how to bake, and who will need an apron to wear. And somebody else might need a quilt to wrap up in on a cold night. Green Bear might travel to college, if in fact green bears do such things. And maybe someone else, one day, will need a watercolor of a big mountain in Oregon. I pray that when those moments come, we will have the generosity to notice and share, so others can have enough of what they need.

July 24, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 11:1-13
Kristin White

A few weeks ago, a good friend and I got together for breakfast. She had taken her only child to college three years ago, and I wanted her advice as John and I prepare to send Grace (whose permission I have, by the way, to bring her into this story today). Mostly, I think, I wanted someone who knows and loves me to bear witness to the conflicted question that it is to live into these months as we prepare our daughter to go out into the world. She’ll return to us, she promises (she PROMISES), but we recognize that she will return differently, more independently…and we know that it’s our job to prepare and to send her – for us to do that, for her to become that.

“So, how are you doing?” my friend asked. I talked about the lists of supplies and classes, the forms, the roommate and suitemates Grace has begun to know, about the ways we’re spending our time together before she goes.

“So, how are you actually doing?” she asked, maybe more pointedly this time.

“Well,” I said, “I feel like it’s my job now to impart ALL KNOWLEDGE before freshman orientation begins on September 7. You know, ALL KNOWLEDGE. ALL THE INFORMATION. IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. And to do it before she goes, so Grace knows ALL THE THINGS that she needs to know. Like remembering to floss her teeth, and asking good questions in class, and to start studying for final exams before the night before her final exams, and getting to know lots of people but still with the studying, and being careful with money, and picking up after herself, and making her bed. Like, what if she goes to college, and I haven’t told her everything she needs to know? Because everything matters – in fact, everything is of EPIC IMPORTANCE right now.”

No pressure, huh?

At first glance, Jesus might look a little like a parent trying to do the same thing with his disciples in the stretch of the gospel of Luke that we’ve been reading in recent weeks. Ever since he set his face toward Jerusalem, Jesus has been preparing his followers and friends for a time when they won’t be with each other in the same way anymore.

Three weeks ago, he told 70 of his followers to go out in pairs – without extra sandals, without a bag, even – to heal and to proclaim the good news. “If people receive you, wish them peace. If they don’t receive you,” he told them, “Knock the dust off your feet and move on.”

Two Sundays ago, the gospel passage had Jesus responding to a test with a story: “Who is my neighbor?” someone from the crowd asked him. Jesus told about the man attacked and left for dead at the side of the road, about the priest and the Levite passing him by, about the unlikely Samaritan who stopped and showed great mercy. “Go,” Jesus commanded the man, Jesus commands us, “and do likewise.”

Last Sunday, we saw two illustrations of what it is to be faithful, in Mary and Martha, through active service and hospitality, through active attention and presence. We heard Jesus’ caution against worry and distraction, calling Martha and calling us to choose the better part, which shall not be taken from us.

So is that it? Is that Jesus IMPARTING ALL KNOWLEDGE???

Today’s gospel finds Jesus praying “in a certain place.” After he has finished, one of the disciples says, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

Jesus teaches the disciples what many of us know as the Lord’s Prayer, or the “Our Father.” Then he tells a series of short and strange parables – about a friend who says he’s all tucked in for the night and won’t get up to help his friend who’s asking outside, at least until the friend annoys him enough that it’s worse to keep ignoring him than to just get up and give the guy what he needs. He shares the question of a parent giving his child a snake instead of a fish, or a scorpion instead of an egg. Embedded in there is a promise: ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened.

Prayer is a tricky thing. How we stand before God as we are and find words to give thanks, to ask, to lament, to praise, to listen…sometimes to rage…it can be pretty daunting. Mostly, what I hear from people when we talk about what it is to pray is what they don’t do: “I don’t pray like my friend who goes to an evangelical church,” or “I don’t have the prayers from the prayer book memorized,” or “I don’t know how to do it right,” or “I don’t know what I’m trying to do when I pray, or why.”

On the face of it, Jesus’ response to the disciple’s request can seem pretty simple: formulaic, even, and contractual: “This is what you say, and this is what you get.” What you say are those familiar words, words in one form or another that many of us know by heart. And what you get, if we take Jesus’ words literally here, is what you ask for.

Except that’s not how it works, like, mostly ever, especially the second part. So, as a priest and pastor, what breaks my heart is when people ask me if they haven’t prayed the words the right way, or if they haven’t prayed faithfully enough, or if it even matters if they do.

What if there’s more to all this than contract and formula? What if there’s something deeper underneath it all…instead of a slightly frenetic teacher trying to IMPART ALL KNOWLEDGE of EPIC IMPORTANCE, what if Jesus is a clear-eyed savior who has set his face toward Jerusalem, who knows that the only thing that will save us, finally, is love?

Rather than seeing the Lord’s Prayer as a formula that has to be said the same way in order to effect a desired outcome, what if we look at what Jesus is really helping us to say in that prayer:

“Our Father, who art in heaven,” we pray – God doesn’t ask to be addressed with some otherworldly title, but with one of affection and intimacy.
“hallowed be thy name,” we pray – You are holy, your name is sacred.
“thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we pray – May the world as it is become the world you have created us to be.
“give us this day, our daily bread,” we pray – Grant us what we need in order to survive, day by day.
“forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” we pray – Help us to find our way back to each other and to you, when we get lost.
“lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” we pray – Save us, God; save us.

The prayer Jesus teaches is a prayer that his disciples then and now can use to stand before God exactly as they are, exactly as we are, to say something real about who we are and who God is, and to ask for what we need.

And that second part? What if we take ourselves out of the “if I/then I” obligatory expectation? Jesus’ examples invite his followers to approach God by asking, seeking, knocking…with expectation and maybe even annoying persistence. These are not things that we do with a detached and impersonal figure. These are things we do with someone who matters to us, somebody who cares about us…who loves us.

Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem – toward the cross and tomb – because of his love for us. What if all this teaching, since the time he set out, is about equipping his followers to share, and heal, and serve, and welcome, and attend, and listen, and discern, and now, to pray…what if this is all preparation? What if he’s doing this for the disciples, and for us, so that they and we can love God and love one another more fully, especially once Jesus is not here in the same way he has been?

Maybe, at the heart of it all, this is less about IMPARTING ALL KNOWLEDGE of EPIC IMPORTANCE, but instead trusting ourselves to the kind of vulnerable love that calls us to ask, to seek, to bang on the door if we have to. Remember: this gospel passage begins with Jesus praying in a certain place. He prays a lot - he prays in many, many "certain places." And when he teaches his friends, Jesus doesn’t say “if you pray,” he says “when.”

So let us pray, friends. Let us find the ways we have to stand before God as exactly the people we really are, and say:

Dear God: you are holy, and your name is sacred;
let the world as it is become the world you have created us to be;
grant us what we need, day by day;
help us to find our way back to each other, and to you, when we get lost;
save us, O God, save us.

…For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

July 10, Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 10:25-37

Kristin White

As Jesus teaches, in this week’s gospel passage, a member of the group trained in the laws of faith stands up – to test Jesus, the scripture says.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the man asks.

Jesus, good teacher that he is, returns the question: “What does the law say?” he asks, “What do you read there?”

The student, a good student himself, has been paying attention. He doesn’t offer all 613 mitzvot found in Hebrew scripture. He doesn’t list the 10 commandments. He answers with the same answer Jesus himself gave earlier when people tried to test him before, the summary of the law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Yeah,” Jesus says. “So go do that.”

“But….technically speaking,” the man asks, “…who is my neighbor?”

It’s a question we might be asking right now with each report of the news.

Jesus responds to the man by telling a story. It’s the same story told in our stained glass window at the back of the church: a man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, when robbers stripped him and beat him and left him for dead. A priest walked by, crossed to the other side of the road, and passed the man without helping – or even, it seems – acknowledging him. A church leader – a Levite – walked by just as the priest had, also passed the man without helping. Then a Samaritan – an outsider, a stranger – came near, saw the man, and was moved to help him. And that Samaritan didn’t just stem the bleeding, but bandaged the man’s wounds and took him to a place where, at the Samaritan’s own expense, he made sure that the injured man would have everything he needed to recover completely.

“Who was the neighbor here?” Jesus asks the one who would test him.

“The one who showed mercy,” the man replies

“Go, and do likewise,” Jesus tells him.

One of the ministries of this parish is of people who go, and do likewise, on a regular basis. Good Samaritans at St. Augustine’s take two-week rotations in which they care for people in practical and meaningful ways – coordinating meals when somebody is sick, or rides to and from the doctor when someone can’t drive. It’s matter-of-fact, and real, and loving, and kind.

Good Samaritans came around a member of this parish after she had had a stroke some months ago. They served as her neighbors: they made sure her family had dinner each night, they helped her children get home safely from school, one member even walked her dog. When we spent time together earlier this week, and she gave me permission to share this piece of her story, this member said, “I knew they had my back. I knew this church cared for me and for my children. I knew you had my back.”

Good Samaritans came around my own family when we came home from my brother-in-law’s funeral in December. I can still see Margaret Duval standing in Puhlman Hall as I was getting ready to leave for the trip, and saying to me, “Okay, I’m bringing you dinner when you get back. Would it be best on Sunday or on Monday?” And when I tried to defer, when I tried to say – oh, we’d be fine, Margaret said again, “Okay, I’m bringing you dinner when you get back. Would it be best on Sunday or on Monday?” What I can tell you is, practically speaking, John and I didn’t have to go to the grocery store that week, and our family was fed. What I can tell you is that those practical acts of kindness showed our family that we were loved, in ways that we will not forget.

A little over a year ago, Samaritans gathered at the rectory with other ministers of care to talk about why they do what they do. What I heard again and again from those who serve in this ministry was that they had received care from other Good Samaritans at St. A’s. Someone had stepped in and been a neighbor to them at a time when they needed it. Someone came near, and saw, and offered what they had to give. And so our Good Samaritans, having received, chose to go and do likewise. I can tell you that’s why John White serves in that ministry.

That effort builds a fabric, it seems to me, a community of people knit together through these practical acts of kindness. There’s a sort of vulnerability in extending help, and a sort of vulnerability in acknowledging that we could use some help, something that changes us, establishes a trust that maybe wasn’t there before.

It’s a trust we need.

And I don’t know what to do about all that we have seen in the news this week, and in recent weeks, and months. I don’t know what the answer is to the present breaking of our communities – to this world as it is, so clearly not what God intends it to be.

I don’t know what to do about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile being shot and killed by police officers in what could otherwise have been peaceful and non-lethal exchanges. And I don’t know what to do about police officers being targeted and shot and killed at what would have been and should have been a peaceful gathering of citizens.

What I can tell you is that, in my own life, my neighbor is one of our closest friends, the father of our godson, a white man who serves as a state police officer in Oregon. What I can tell you is that my neighbor is a priest, my friend and colleague, a black woman with a six-year-old son whom she reminds anxiously and often to keep his hood off his head. He’s six years old.

Fear is all around. And the more we allow it to take hold, the more isolated we become, the more we cross over to the other side of the road, the more we avoid eye contact, the more we consciously or unconsciously forget to show mercy, the more we define those we are not responsible to be neighbors to, the more we vilify, the more that fear is all around.

Those practical ways we have to show mercy and kindness feel small in the face of this beautiful and terrified world right now. And we need them. We need you. We need each other – to come near and to see one another and to show that we care. We need everybody to practice those small kindnesses that together will help us repair a fabric that has been so badly torn.

We need neighbors. So go, and do likewise.

July 3, Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 3, 2016

Deacon Sue Nebel

            I have a question for you.  When you visualize Jesus, what images come to mind?  What do you see?    Jesus as a newborn baby in the manger.  Jesus moving through the events of Holy Week.  Jesus gathered with his disciples for a last meal.  Jesus on the cross.  Jesus in his ministry, on the move.  Healing, teaching, speaking to crowds.  We find these images in religious art: stained-glass windows, paintings, pictures on church walls or bulletin boards. I remember some from posters on the walls of Sunday School rooms of my childhood. As I search through my memory files of images, I can’t find one for this morning’s Gospel lesson.  Jesus speaking to a group of seventy of his followers.  Getting them ready to head out on their own to various towns and villages.  You might remember seeing a picture of that one, but I can’t.

            It is a wonderful image, Jesus and the seventy.  An important moment in Jesus’ ministry.   In the Gospel lesson last Sunday, we heard that Jesus had “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” The beginning of his long, painful journey to the Cross.  Then, right after that, comes today’s passage. Another part of the story.  Jesus may be focused on Jerusalem, but he knows there is work to be done.  More than he can do himself.  So, he gathers a group of people who have joined up with him, seventy of them.  We don’t know anything about them, but I think we can assume that they come from the ragtag bunch of folks who have been drawn to Jesus. Some Scripture experts tell us that many of them were probably women.  We don’t know how Jesus chose them.  We have no indication of a long vetting process.  No interviews, no background checks. Their commitment to Jesus and his teaching seems to be enough.  There is no also elaborate training program.  No handbook or manual.  Instead, Jesus gathers them together and gives a simple set of directions:

·      Travel light

·      Greet those you meet with a message of peace and accept their hospitality.

·      Cure the sick and teach about the kingdom.

·      If you are not welcomed, move on 

That’s it. 

What is left unspoken—it is what I find most striking here—is Jesus’ confidence in the people he is sending forth.  He has taught them what they need to know.  He has given them the basics:

·      the commandments to love God and love one’s neighbor

·       a vision of the kingdom, or the reign of God, where love rules and everyone thrives.

Jesus believes in the ability of these seventy followers i to move beyond the places that they know,  out into a wider, unknown world.  To places that may welcome them and places that may be hostile or indifferent to them.  Jesus’ silent message to the seventy faithful ones who are about to set out?  I believe in you. You can do this.

            Now, let’s fast forward to this time and this place: St. Augustine’s on a Sunday morning in July.  A gathering of probably less than seventy people, but still a good-sized group of followers.  A part of the Body of Christ, joined together by a commitment to Jesus.  A commitment we made in our baptism.  As part of that commitment, we made promises.  One of those promises was to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”  That is what we do when we gather here on Sunday.  We listen to the Word of God.  We pray together in community.  We break bread together and share it.  But this is not a simple social gathering.  We don’t just participate in these things and then walk out the door with some nice memories.  At the end of our gathering together, we are sent. Sent forth into the world with instructions.   Just like those seventy followers in the Gospel lesson.  We are sent out in Jesus’ name.  Shaped by what we have been taught about and by Jesus.  Emboldened by Jesus’ confidence, we are sent out to do the work. To show forth God’s love to the world in our individual ways, in our words and in our actions.  We are sent out into a world that is hurting and so in need of love.   A world that is anxious and fearful, wearied by repeated acts of hatred and violence.  This week it is the victims and their loved ones in Turkey and Bangladesh that weigh on our hearts.  A nation that on this weekend celebrates of Independence Day, but we are painfully aware that not everyone shares in the freedom and justice that we claim to honor. A community that on this holiday weekend worries about the violence of shootings in our streets.   

What can we possibly do in the face of all this?  We can take action.  We can support measures that limit access to guns.  We can work to recognize and eliminate prejudice, inequality, and injustice.  But we are left with the questions: Will anything that I do have an impact? Remember Jesus and those seventy faithful followers. Jesus makes no promises of what impact that they will have.  There is no talk of big or little effort.  Jesus simply tells them to go out and do the work.

            I have been keeping company this week with a woman named Hannah Coulter. She is the central character in a novel whose title is her name: Hannah Coulter.  The author is Wendell Berry.  Hannah is the last years of her life. She is looking back, remembering the events of her life and reflecting on them.   Her language is simple, her insights often profound.  Hannah married in her twenties, in the early years of World War II.  Like so many young men of that time, her husband Virgil Feltner was drafted into the army and sent to the battlefields of Europe. Hannah lived with his parents. Some men returned from the war; others did not. Virgil was one of those who did not return.  Of the time of grief after learning of Virgil’s death, Hannah writes this:

            "A sort of heartbreaking kindness grew then between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.  It grew among us all.  It was a kindness of doing whatever we could think of that might help or comfort one another.  But it was a kindness too of forbearance, of not speaking, of not reminding...Kindness kept us alive."

Hannah goes on to say of kindness, “It made us think of each other.”  She acknowledges that she could think only of herself, but she didn’t. She was keenly, deeply aware of the feelings of those around her.

"We knew, always, more than we said.  One of us lying awake in the night would know that the others were probably lying awake too, but nobody ever said so.  In the daytime, it seemed to me that we were all kept standing upright, balanced ever so delicately by our kind silence. . .Love held us. Kindness held us."

It is this love and this kindness—its words and gestures, it silences—that enable Hannah to move forward into a new part of her life.  Another marriage, a new family, new joys and sorrows.

            When we leave this place on Sunday morning, we often take with us something that has touched us, something that has made an impression.  A story, a phrase, or an image. Maybe a single word.  Something to hold onto. Today, I ask you to take with you the word “kindness”.  Hold onto it.  Make it yours.   Then, be kindness. Do kindness.  It is our work.  It is what we are sent out to do.  

Proper 9; Year C

2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; Luke 10:1-11,16-20

June 19, Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon for the 5. Sunday after Pentecost

June 19, 2016

Deacon Sue Nebel

            It has been a long week.  Seven days, since we first heard the news of the mass shootings in Orlando. Accounts of death and injuries.  The pain of grief and loss.  The stories of the people who died and the ones who survived.   A targeted attack against a specific group, motivated by anger and hate and a fierce desire to lash out and destroy.  The news of the shootings was like a rock dropped into a body of water.  Circles rippling out, growing bigger and bigger.  A nightclub, the city of Orlando, the state of Florida, our whole country, the world.  A wound to the human family. 

When something like this happens to us, something that overwhelms us and is too much to comprehend, we search for something to grab onto.  Something firm, something solid to steady us in the midst of upheaval.  Last Sunday, I heard about the shootings in Orlando after the beach service.  Shocked and saddened, I carried the knowledge of the event deep inside me during the 9:30 service.  As I moved to the back of the church during the closing hymn, I began to anticipate giving the Dismissal. Thinking about the kind of world we would be going out into. The final hymn last Sunday was “God is Love.”  By the time I reached the back of the church, we were on the second verse.   These are the words that we sang:  

                        God is Love: and love enfolds us, all the world in one embrace:

                        with unfailing grasp God holds us, every child of every race.

                        And when human hearts are breaking under sorrow’s iron rod,

                        then we find that self-same aching deep within the heart of God. 

“. . .aching deep within the heart of God.”  That is what struck me. That is what I grabbed and held onto.  By the time I headed home later to turn on the TV and hear the details of the horror in Orlando, that line from the hymn had become a simple phrase: “the aching heart of God.” A sense that the pain that so many people shared was embraced and held in God.  A God whose love is strong enough to bear all that pain. God in us.  God with us. Something to hold onto.

            As the hours of last Sunday wore on and the new week started, the leaders of the Church began to speak out.  In the Episcopal Church we turn to our bishops, the shepherds of the flock and guardians of the faith.  We want and expect them to step forward and offer guidance to us.  And they did.  One after another, our bishops urged us to pray for those harmed by the violence.  To widen the embrace of our love to include people who are targets of judgment and hate because their sexual orientation or gender identity.  To translate our Christian commitment into action.

            As people of faith, we turn not just to the leaders of the Church.  We also turn to our greatest leader and teacher of all: Jesus. To find out what he can teach us in this moment.  In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus has moved out of Galilee, familiar territory for him, to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. To the land of the Gerasenes.  There he meets a man who, the story tells us, has demons.  This man has a strange history.  He wears no clothes and lives among the tombs, rather than in a house. When people have tried to restrain him, he has broken free of the chains and shackles and taken off into the wilds.  Now we need to understand that in Jesus’ time, demons were seen as evil spirits, drawing people away from God.  It is not hard to imagine, given the description of the man’s behavior, that being possessed by demons could be an explanation for some form of mental illness.  In last Sunday’s Gospel lesson, we were told that some of Jesus’ followers were “women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities.” Among them, Mary Magdalene “from whom seven demons had gone out.” 

This man has a lot more than seven demons.  It is hard to tell in this story when the man is speaking and when the demons are talking, but it is clear that Jesus has the upper hand. It is a dramatic story of healing.  Jesus commands the demons to come out of the man. Then, responding to their pleas not to be banished into the abyss, he lets them enter a nearby herd of pigs. The pigs then rush down the bank into the water and drown. There, done with, gone.  When we see the man again, he is sitting at the feet of Jesus.  Restored to wholeness, he is now wearing clothes and is calm. As Jesus prepares to leave, the man begs to be allowed to go with him.  Jesus refuses.  He tells the man to return home and tell people what God has done for him.  He does just that.  Having experienced the power of Jesus, the power of love, the man moves into action.  In the last glimpse we have of him, he is proclaiming what the power of Jesus has done.

Jesus and the Gerasene. A confrontation with demons.  Jesus wins.  Love wins. That is what this story tells us.  Love is stronger than the demons of prejudice and hate, the evil powers in the world that draw us away from God. As we move forward from the tragic events of this past week, what are we to do? The demons that controlled the mind of the shooter in Orland and the damage that his actions inflicted seem overwhelming.   Any action on our part seems so small, so ineffective.  Some of us will join in efforts to control access to guns.  Some will march in Pride parades.  But for most of us, the question is: what can we do each day, in our own lives?.  Last Sunday, a friend of mine, overwhelmed by her grief and feelings of helplessness in the face of evil forces in the world, wrote this:

And then this came to mind: any act of kindness, any act of resistance

            is worth doing. It doesn't matter how small. Small is good. Small is great.

Small multiplied by a few billion acts every single day becomes something big.

What can we do?  Embraced and held in the aching heart of God, grounded in the deep core of love, we can move forward, one step at a time.  With a faith that has been made wider, fiercer by the events of last week, we can o be a force of love in the world.  To stand with those who are hurting.  To reach out in acts of kindness to everyone we meet, whether friend or stranger.  To treat everyone with respect.  To help build something big.  We can do this.  And we will.

Proper 7; Year C

1 Kings19:1-4,8-15; Psalm 42; Luke 8:26-39

June 12, Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 7:36-8:3

Kristin White

June 12, 2016

One of my preaching professors used to say that when a difficult passage of scripture is read in church, you can take a pass on it once in a while. But if, when a difficult texts are read in church, you preach on something else every time, he said, your congregation will know you’re chicken. Your congregation will know, on some level, that you are not willing to talk about difficult things. And if you can’t talk in your preaching about difficult things that happen in scripture, he asked us, how can your people trust that you will be willing to talk about the difficult and important things that happen in life?

It’s a necessary question for a preacher to ask herself.

This week particularly, I wish I had kept in better touch with that preaching professor, because I would like to know what advice he has about preaching, when two of the passages of scripture read aloud in church are difficult texts.

All of that is to say, there are problems that need addressing in the story from the First Book of Kings, about Jezebel and Ahab, about Naboth and the field that is his inheritance. And there are problems that need addressing in the gospel lesson about Jesus and the Pharisee and the woman with the alabaster jar.

As I’m preaching one sermon today, rather than two (my preaching professor would likely have something to say about that as well), I ask your forbearance about the fact that I’m going to take a pass this go-round on Jezebel, in order to take on the Pharisee who encounters an unanticipated guest at his dinner party. 

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“If this man (Jesus) were a prophet,” that Pharisee thinks to himself, “he would have known what kind of a woman this is who is touching him – that she is a sinner. 

The Pharisee has invited Jesus to eat with him. So Jesus goes, and takes his place at the table, and this unnamed woman – who, we’re clear, is a sinner…the writer of this text goes to the trouble of telling us that now a couple of times – she comes to Jesus, crying enough tears that she can wash his feet with them, using her hair to dry his feet afterwards, kissing those now-washed-and-dried feet, and finally anointing him with costly and beautiful oil.

I can only imagine the discomfort of witnessing such a demonstrative and intimate act. It seems like too much, like the kind of thing where people’s eyes widen a little as they notice it taking place, then breaking eye contact, perhaps with a nervous chuckle that says “well, this is surely not what I expected at a Pharisee’s dinner party…”, the studied concentration on a glass of water, or the grapes that guests eat as they recline at the table, or a crack in the floor, or any single thing except for that thing that they can’t not look at, this moment that is unfolding before them. It seems like too much. And it is, for that Pharisee (“Does he even know what kind of a woman this is?” he grumbles to himself. “Is he really even a prophet? Because if he were, he would know…”).

Well.

Exactly what kind of a woman is this?

She is a sinner, we hear twice. We know that her sins are many, even, because Jesus says so when he schools that Pharisee in his judgment.

And let’s be real here. When a woman in the Bible gets called a sinner, that quality tends to be interpreted in a particular kind of way. Like Mary Magdalene, this nameless woman with her alabaster jar is most frequently portrayed in word and image as a prostitute, as a woman of moral failure, and certainly as somebody who shouldn’t be anywhere near a prophet of proper standing at a Pharisee’s dinner party.

In fact, though, this is not what the actual language of the actual text actually says – not about Mary Magdalene, and not about this unnamed woman. In fact, the very same Greek word for sinner that is used to describe this unnamed woman, is also used by the author of very same gospel to describe…the apostle Peter, at the time Jesus calls him to become one of the first disciples.[1]

Now, I hear Peter described as a number of things: impetuous, unthinking, occasionally rude, and even, through his three denials of Jesus, as disloyal. But I can tell you that I have never heard the apostle Peter described as a prostitute.

So exactly what kind of a woman is this woman who has entered the Pharisee’s house?

“What kind of a woman?” indeed. That’s the sort of question that has been blasted across social media in recent days, thanks to a difficult and important text of its own, written by a woman with the courage to expose that question for what it is. “What kind of a woman?” is the sort of question that lays bare the sin that it is, to blame a woman attacked while at the same time protecting her attacker for the sake of his supposed potential. It’s the kind of diminishing question that causes women to blame themselves for wearing the wrong thing or being in the wrong place or having the wrong number of drinks or dancing with the wrong person or saying hello in the wrong way.

“What kind of a woman?” is the sort of question we ask, when we look for something that enables us to hold a person – a person – at arm’s length…like the Pharisee must want to do, when that woman, with her tears, and her hair, and her alabaster jar, shows up and makes people uncomfortable at his party.

“What kind of a woman?” is the sort of question we ask, when we seek to discount a person as something less of a person than a commodity, a consumable…a disturbance.

“Simon,” Jesus asks that Pharisee: “Do you see this woman?”

Do you? Do I?

And what kind of a woman is she?

Well. Here’s what this difficult text actually tells us: She is the kind of woman who bathes a person’s feet after those feet have gotten dirty and tired from a long day of walking. She is the kind of woman who brings oil that is costly and beautiful to anoint a savior. She is the kind of woman who shows great love. She is the kind of woman who has been saved, by faith.

And I don’t know if that Pharisee ever does manage to see the woman with the alabaster jar. But I’d stake my faith on the fact that Jesus does. Just like he sees Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Susanna. Just like he sees a woman who has been attacked after going to a party. Just like he sees you. Just like he sees me.

What kind of a woman is she?

She’s the kind of woman who follows Jesus.

[1] Verlee A. Copeland. “Proper 6, Luke 7:36-8:3, Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 3. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 143,145.

June 5, Third Sunday after Pentecost

1 Kings 17:8-24, Luke 7:11-17

Kristin White

One of my favorite books, a novel written by Zadie Smith called White Teeth, includes the story of an immigrant family in London. The mother and father were born in Bangladesh, which used to be East Pakistan, which used to be India, which used to be Bengal. These parents choose to raise their family in London out of a desire for stable opportunity, theoretically anyway, coming as they do from a place where tragedy happens even more frequently than the battles that cause their country’s name to change so often. They choose London, instead of that land of “random disaster, of flood and cyclone, or hurricane and mudslide…”[1] where in the first 14 years of my own lifetime, Smith writes: “more people died than in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden combined. A million people lost lives they had learned to hold lightly in the first place.”[2]

My own experience is that we are not a people who hold our lives lightly – not our own lives, not the lives of those we hold most dear. Given the accidents of our birth and talents and upbringing, we get to be…here. And we tend to live with certain assumptions about how the world works: that it is benevolent (bad things aren’t supposed to happen), and meaningful (things are supposed to make sense) and that people are worthy (the stuff of our lives is supposed to correlate with some logic to the good or the bad that we do).[3]

And yet.

Who among us has not cried out to God for some kind of a miracle?

Who among us has not railed against God – or wanted to, at least – with the charge that a compassionate God would not make us suffer?

Who among us has not lived in some kind of fury or devastation when we realized those lives we cherish and hold most dear, are lives that we must also learn to hold lightly?

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The first reading and the gospel passage that are today’s lessons are beautiful stories about generosity and hospitality and compassion and care.

In the first, from the first book of Kings, a starving widow hosts Elijah in her home, she feeds the prophet from the little she has left for herself and her son. God rewards her for her generosity, as the little that she has does not run out – she does not starve, her son does not starve, thanks to God’s provision. Later, when her son becomes sick to the point of death, Elijah intercedes with God on their behalf. God restores the son’s life and breath to him.

In the second story, from Luke’s gospel, a widow grieves the death of her only son as his body is carried away. She mourns with the particular grief of a parent who has lost her child. She is particularly vulnerable herself, now, as a widow with no one left to care for her. The passage tells us that Jesus sees her and has compassion for her. Jesus restores the widow’s son to life. Then Jesus gives that only son back to his mother.

These are beautiful stories of generosity and hospitality, of God’s compassion and care. And they are excruciating stories, too. Because not every child’s life is restored, in the same way that these sons’ lives have been.

Who among us has not cried out to God for a miracle?

And what do we do, when the miracle that comes is not the one we have asked for?

Most of the time, for many of us, those deep and fixed understandings about how the world is, tend to work. Education really does make a difference in our own lives and in the community. The vaccines our children receive mean they don’t contract deadly diseases. The plane touches down safely in spite of some turbulence. We see the person walking in our rearview mirror before we back up the car.

Most of the time, it all works. But what about those times when it doesn’t? If we live with the understanding that this world is benevolent and meaningful, if we live with the assumption that the events of our lives correlate to the things we’ve done or left undone, then what happens when the ground shifts and it all goes sideways? What are we to do, when the surgery doesn’t go as the doctor expected, or the cancer is too much, or the addiction is too powerful, or the accident too swift?

Where is Elijah’s intercession then? Where is the Lord’s compassion?

We cry out for miracles when we know our need of God, when we realize that the lives we hold most dear, we must also learn to hold lightly. We cry out for miracles as signs in the hope that God’s compassion will realign things, and make the world right again.[4]

Sometimes it happens. Sometimes, the great miracle we hope for unfolds as we have asked. More often, it doesn’t. And we find ourselves in chaos, in a place we don’t understand.

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about our need to talk to each other. I’ve been thinking about God Sightings, about the actual vocabulary we have, and dare to speak, for what is holy and real in our lives. And I wonder if an important part of what we need in this journey of faith with each other is the chance to talk together about the miracles that surprise us in our everyday lives. Because I believe they are there. And I also believe that they are usually not what we expect, to the point that often we can’t see those miracles on our own.

We need each other, in this journey of faith as people following the way of Christ. We need people we trust who can tell us the truth that they have found, people who will listen to our truth even as we continue to sort it out. And we need words that fit with who we really are – not ornate, churchy language with lots of syllables that only a few people understand…but words that are hopeful and honest and gritty, sometimes, and sad.

Those crowds around Jesus at the time he raises the widow’s son are not immediately thrilled with the miracle that Jesus has done in their midst. First, they are terrified. Then they’re amazed. Finally, they start to talk about it. And only then does word of Jesus’ miracle spreads “throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.”[5]

I wonder about the miracles of our own lives that surprise and even scare us just a little – maybe more than a little. I wonder where God calls us to stand in amazement. And I wonder how we can find language to tell about what we’ve seen. Perhaps the most important part is to hold it all lightly, to look for surprising moments of God’s compassion in ways we never expected, and to begin that holy conversation.

[1] Zadie Smith. White Teeth. London: Random House, 2000. 176.

[2] ibid

[3] M. Jan Holton. “Proper 5, Luke 7:11-17, Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 3. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 118.

[4] Holton, 120.

[5] Luke 7:11