It was just before the late service one Sunday morning. One of my parishioners whispered, “Rhonda just had a baby!” And they named the hospital where she was. I said, “Oh my God! I’ll go to be with her right after church.”

I hadn’t known Rhonda was pregnant. She’d been at youth group. She’d been at church. Yes, she’d seemed a little drawn, a little more tired than usual. But she was a teenager. Maybe her studies or her concern for others (because she was that kind of person) had been making a claim on her. She was also one of those who, when pregnant, don’t “show” all that much.

I was to learn she wasn’t unusual in just those ways. It turned out she didn’t know she was pregnant either! You say, particularly those of you who have been pregnant, “how could she not have known???” As a psychiatrist friend explained to me later, it is possible for someone to be so much in denial as not to let in that something they fear is going on.

What I was to experience in that hospital room and the days to follow was the kind of redemption on a gut level recorded in the Gospel you have just heard. There was Rhonda in that hospital bed, holding the baby, tears streaming down her cheeks, shaking, fear on her face, her Mother on one side of the bed, her boyfriend (it turned out not the father of the baby) on the other side, both looking down on her and the baby with love. I’ll never forget the experience of striding across that room propelled by I knew not what, holding her and saying again and again, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” as she said again and again, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

This was a small Iowa town almost forty years ago and there were those who suggested a baptism, if at all, be private and quiet. The “new liturgy,” as it was called then, the one we use for worship, was just coming in. One of the approved times for baptisms is the bishop’s visitation and our bishop was to make his visitation shortly, the first to us in his new episcopate. I said, “We’ll do the baptism as part of the bishop’s visitation.” Gulps all around in some quarters. To their credit, though, few and far between in our congregation.

That was the beginning of that parish being the place in all the surrounding towns where such baptisms were held, where second marriages, usually nuptial high masses with the children as acolytes, were celebrated with all the pomp and circumstance as first marriages, where having some personal lapse just made you like all the rest of us, pretty outspoken our slates weren’t any cleaner than yours.

The Gospel makes clear what a dilemma Joseph faced in a day and in a place even more “traditional” than that Iowa town where Rhonda delivered her baby and where Bruce, her boyfriend, celebrated their marriage in a real blow out at St. Paul’s, not long afterward, very happily. Yes, he struggled, and rose to the occasion. Imagine how terrified Mary must have felt. Tradition tells us she was even younger than Rhonda, probably fourteen or fifteen!

And, of course, she was not from the right side of the tracks. That’s not the side, as we’ve learned, God works from. It’s from where we don’t expect God to work from, and with and through those neither we nor they expect God to work through.

But you know something else this Gospel points up? We don’t really much know how we are going to react in the situations God puts us in, the opportunities God creates for us, until we’re in them. I’d like, I think, to be able to tell you following all the paths we preachers lay out as the right ones to make oneself available to respond well will get you there but I know better. I’m confident they’ll help but I also know far too many stories of lives taken hold of by the scruff of the neck, lives of people not on these paths, radically changed as they responded positively in a manner they would tell you not typical of them, to events. There is a book the title of which is Surprised by God, not an inappropriate title for such experiences.

The Advent message is one of hope and expectation. The reasonable hope that, should we find ourselves in situations similar to Bruce and Rhonda’s, Joseph and Mary’s, we’ll discover ourselves responding in far better ways than we think are in us to respond, and the expectation that, out of such faithful responses will open up life chapters for us as wondrous as theirs.

In due course John the Baptist appeared: he preached in the wilderness of Judea… I guess this shouldn’t surprise us by now. Not in the cities. Not in Mile High Stadium, like Promise Keepers. Not in Madison Square Garden, like Billy Graham. in the wilderness of Judea.

This man John wore a garment made of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. And this shouldn’t surprise us either by now. A wierdo. He probably looked more like a homeless person than the salesperson for the Kingdom he’d been appointed to be.

I suppose it’s eloquent testimony to their openness to his message and their willingness to overcome obstacles to hear it that Jerusalem and the whole Jordan district made their way to him.

The “message,” of course, is the message of Advent: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.”

That can be a pretty scary message, identified as it is in Advent with when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead…

What is it about us, I wonder, that, for most of us, finds us changing our attitudes, changing our life styles, even in anticipation of good things, like the kingdom of heaven, only when they’re “at hand,” only when we’ve received a wake up call.

We don’t gather gifts through the year, as we see something we associate with a potential recipient, and put them away. We scramble as Christmas approaches. This, of course, means for many of us interest charges on our credit cards we’d not have incurred had we purchased through the year.

We don’t begin saving for our children’s educations. We don’t begin planning for our retirements.

I love to travel. I get the books. I buy the maps. And they sit for months until a week or two before we leave, unread, unstudied. Then, when I do pick them up to work in them, I’m overwhelmed. It becomes a blur.

And one we as a worshipping community face: I was thinking of it as I was attempting to answer Sam Cooper, The Republican-Amercan reporter’s, questions. Of what might we be called upon to repent? It’s our dream come true. We remember how we were adding to our numbers before we left. We were able to conduct certain programs there we’ve not been able to conduct here. Parking was better.

Some new elements are added: Taft has maintenance resources we lacked. It has a track record of exquisite care of its existing buildings. Prior to the closing we saw trees beautifully planted and mulched on The Green. It has skilled cleaning crews used to keeping things spotless.

The “branding” as “Woodward Chapel of Taft School” could attract more of the Taft community to participate with us, creating an additional energy. Might the chaplain play a greater role with us.

Such programs as it offers to its community and the wider town and regional community can be expected to bring into the space people who might not have had occasion to enter it before for worship, develop an attraction, and return for worship as well.

Are we ready? I wonder.

I wonder, when Rotas are developed for liturgical tasks and those who have accepted responsibility for the tasks don’t take the trouble a) to shout out should they not have theirs and/or b) should they be unable to serve, just not show up rather than see to it that they have secured a substitute.

I wonder, when the only time we gather as a community is for worship. I don’t know how community can be built that way alone. And without a sense of community where does the energy come from that results in the “we can do it” attitude we need to keep ourselves coming week after week and the confidence required to invite others to be part of perhaps a small, but what those others would sense, is a growing thing? There are people to whom getting in at the ground level appeals. I certainly think being in the new/old space offers the promise of igniting that spark but it will need to be fanned into a flame quickly and I would feel much better about the prospects if we could find a way to be more of a community going in.

So, how do we get to that point? How do we “repent” to take advantage of this “Kingdom” that is at hand?

The Epistle has some suggestions:

may he who helps us when we refuse to give up, help you all be tolerant with each other, following the example of Christ Jesus, so that united in mind and voice, you may give glory to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, of all times, we should be cutting one another slack, in the sense of avoiding criticisizing honest efforts, grateful for what each can do. And…

It can only be to God’s glory, then, for you to treat each other in the same friendly way as Christ treated you It’s a time to pay particular attention to displaying the good feeling we pretty much have toward one another, and to display interest in and concern for what is going on in one another’s lives.

In addition, it ought to be the exception rather than the rule not to linger and chat with one another after the service for a moment or two before we leave. Some kind of fellowship time should be a priority to make that easy to do. Those accepting responsibility for fellowship should never just not appear on their date.

Ways need to be found to involve each and every member in the life and tasks of the community. Christianity is not a spectator sport and, even if it were, our numbers are at present too small to permit sabbaticals from involvement by any one, if this opportunity is to be capitalized upon. Worship is first. Worship is the beginning. But membership in a worshipping community involves more than just attendance at worship.

I’ve saved the best agenda item for last, the fun part: Regular opportunities to socialize with one another need to be identified, planned, executed, and participated in by all, or certainly most, even if it involves moving schedules, if this is important.

So, as Mary’s report of the “judgment” experienced in near death suggested, opportunities not taken advantage of are judged. We have one. The one we’ve been asking for. A form, perhaps, of the Kingdom, potentially. What we do with it will write the story of whether we, as a group “repented” for the “kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” As I told the reporter (At this point I don’t know if that saw print…), I see no reason why this can’t be the beginning of a bright new day. The ability to make it so is here, among you. You do have that ability!

Nyah, nyah, ny yah, yah! Nyah, nyah, ny yah, yah! Loser! Die, yah bum!

As for the leaders, they jeered at him. “He saved others,” they said, “let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen one.”

The soldiers mocked him too, and when they approached to offer him vinegar they said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

Even One of the criminals hanging there abused him. with a “You really lack street cred, Dude, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us “You’re one of us, after all, aren’t you??? Here you are, Mr. Smarty Pants, being crucified just like us, as a common criminal, aren’t you???” as well.

And then there’s the crowd, the “people.” They stayed there watching him. We know about their leaders. At least we know what words Luke put in their leaders’ mouths. But what about them?

Funny. None of the other Gospel accounts mention them. Yet it is they Luke tells us God has looked favorably on and redeemed, as we find in the Benedictus Dominus Deus, the Song of Zechariah, and, in the same canticle, they to whom He sent a messenger to give knowledge of salvation to.

They witness every aspect of his ministry

The listen to his teaching

They praise God for his healing power

The hear his critique of the religious authorities. Again. And again. And again.

They get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple, even after he prophesies its destruction!

A great number of them follow as he is led away to be crucified.

Unlike their leaders, the soldiers, and one of the criminals, Luke does not tell us they mock, abuse, or deride him.

Yet we are left to wonder what their role is. Are they just curious onlookers, like those who create “gapers blocks” in opposing lanes of traffic to accidents on superhighways, mesmerized by the potential grizzly scene but without personal involvement or commitment?

Or are they more like those who “keep vigil” at the bedside of a dying person, to offer love and support, to usher over the threshold between this life and the next?

We don’t know. And Luke doesn’t tell us. What do you think it would have been like for you on that day, in that place?

What Luke does tell us is that one of the criminals “gets it.” I read those words and the words I pronounce as a confessor enter my consciousness…Whatsoever good thou hast done or evil thou hast endured be unto thee for the remission of sin. He’s a sinner. A criminal. Dying for his sins/crimes. And he, of all unlikely people, “gets it!” And he points out the reality to the other criminal…

“Have you no fear of God at all? You got the same sentence as he
did, but in our case we deserved it. But this man has done nothing wrong…

He goes on to display how else he “gets it”: He “gets” that it’s O K, out of one’s penitence, not only to expect but to ask a benefit from the Savior…

“remember me when you come into your kingdom”

And here Luke demonstrates, as he has throughout his gospel, that it is not to the usual suspects we should look for evidence the gospel message has taken root, that ours is a religion that turns conventional expectations upside down: the righteous display their unfaith and the unrighteous become the examples of faith and the companions of the Master.

It’s an incredibly distressing scene, the Crucifixion, for us believers, but what we know because we know what follows is that IT…DIDN’T…MATTER!!! The taunts, the abuse, the sneers…all…didn’t…matter.

And that message extends well beyond the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost. The power of the message, for me, is the message is still here 2000 years later. And the power for me is all that the message has meant, in all the ways it has meant it, over all...those...years.

I find compelling the placement of this event in Luke’s gospel and in our liturgical calendar at the transition point just before the Resurrection narrative in Luke’s gospel and at the transition point in our liturgical calendar before the rebirth signified by Advent’s anticipation and Christmas’s story of the Incarnation. Death and rebirth. Challenge and victory.

I think it is an incredible message of hope and an invitation, like the one criminal, for us gloomy faced Christians, depressed about dying churches (we think!) and the disappearance of the Faith, to join the one criminal in “getting it.”

The very state of the present Church is, likely, on the edge of rebirth in a new form. And those who see it, we’re likely to find, are not the usual suspects. But, like the one criminal, out of our despair we can give ourselves permission to ask to be remember by that same Master, now having come into his kingdom.


Amen.

What a great day that must have been for Jesus, the day he met Zacchaeus! FINALLY! Someone who “gets it.” Appropriately enough, in that city of “the walls come tumblin’ down,” as in “when Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho…”

Those were physical walls. These are spiritual walls. And the story leaves us to question whether, or when, in the crowd’s mind, those walls ever did come tumbling down.

You’re familiar with why, from our discussion last Sunday: Tax collector, rich one at that. “Senior tax collector,” so we know he’s tight with Rome. Very tight! And, if rich, not afraid to squeeze his own people for his own gain.

But something’s caused him to want to know more about this guy, Jesus. To want to know more enough that he’ll take his puny little (probably easily breakable) body into what he has to have known was going to be a crowd hostile to his kind in general, and to him in particular.

That “something” has to have been pretty signifcant because the translation doesn’t really do justice to the full significance of the behavior. The translation uses the future tense: half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay him back four times as much. But, in the original Greek, the verbs are present tense: Half of my possessions I am giving to the poor….I am paying back four times as much… That four times as much is the highest rate known to Jewish law and was the rate imposed in Roman law on convicted thieves.

Zacchaeus is already putting his money where his mouth is. Literally! Count it up and he is pretty much doing what the rich young ruler, in an earlier lesson, couldn’t bring himself to do: go. Sell all thou hast. And give to the poor. Combine the half of his possessions he’s giving to the poor with the four times as much payback of defrauded amounts, and he’s not only significantly impoverished himself; he’s radically altered his lifestyle. Think of what it would mean in your life if you were to give away half your possessions when, for most of us, giving away one tenth, a fifth as much as the tax collector is giving away, is something with which we struggle!

The crowd, full of its self-righteousness, full of its inaccurate self evaluation, in its ignorance mis evaluates Zaccaeus. Because it thinks it knows what kind of person he is. It is going on its history with such persons. Doing that isn’t without risk.

The town in which I began my ministry had one doctor. He had practiced medicine almost 40 years in that town when I arrived. By then he’d delivered probably half my congregation and treated well over that percentage. He was a member of the parish, a supporter, a mentor, and a friend. He knew the people and their stories, and he was an invaluable help to me.

One day we were talking about a program I wanted to institute and some members I thought would be good to help put it together. He wasn’t so sure all the choices were the right ones. He reminded me I was the new kid in town. I remember responding, “Doc, I respect your opinion. Usually it’s on the money. You’ve been here a long time and you know the people. That’s an incredible asset. It’s also an incredible liability. Because it can get in the way of midwifing their change and growth. Recognize that my ignorance can be something of an asset too. It may enable me to believe in them without the baggage of knowledge of their past. They may “live into” what I, in my ignorance, see in them.

I find it fascinating how the gospel writer has Jesus come to Zaccaeus… I mean, the guy’s described as little. Short. So short he has to climb into a tree to see Jesus because he can’t see over the crowd. That removes him from a normal sight line. Mostly, we’re not inclined to look up.

Jesus is in a crowd, being pressed upon from every side. Multiple distractions. Yet, he picks Zaccaeus out of the crowd and despite the distractions. Not only that---he goes to him with an agenda…Zaccaeus, come down. As if he knows him… Hurry, because I must stay at your house today. To what do we attribute this? Omniscience? Gospel writer spin?

Whatever the reason, we find in the encounter the model of Our Lord reaching out to, singling out, those who reach out to him. The lesson for us? If we would have the experience of the disciple, the experience of being on the team of the Master, the “Lloyd George knows my father/Father knows Lloyd George” experience of being “tight” with the Messiah, the odds are far better if we act out the “ask and ye shall receive”injunction, if we do what we know he expects of disciples, as Zaccaeus was doing.

As if we needed yet another example, we find in this gospel, one more time, God’s ways, Jesus’ ways, not being man’s ways. We find Jesus consorting with and using as positive examples not the usual suspects.

Maybe so should we. In this gospel we find an argument for looking more aggressively for faithful behavior in unusual places, in unusual persons. Should we approach with greater humility, greater eagerness, the homeless, the retarded, the alcoholic, the prostitute, the prisoner, the bigot, the deviant, the practitioner of other, even bizarre to us, religions, in our quest for Truth and, not uncritically, mind you, at least what portion of models for discipleship they may offer. And, as we do so, should we keep uppermost in our minds they, too, are son(s) of Abraham; for the Son of Man has come to seek out and save what was lost.

May God add His blessing+ to this reading and exposition of his Holy Word. Amen.

What’s wrong with me? Seems to me as if both the Pharisee and the tax collector should be going home “at rights with God.”

The one part that does makes sense to me, that would justify the tax collector being more at rights with God is I think the Pharisee steps off the bag when he makes the invidious comparison between himself and the tax collector. Key words: “not like,” as in “not like this tax collector.” “I’m better.” It’s not for him (or any of us, for that matter) to make such a judgment, because no one of us has all the facts.

And I think he only maybe steps off the bag then. If he’s looking down his nose at the tax collector, yes, he’s stepped off the bag and that’s not OK. If, instead, his prayer is one of genuine thanksgiving that his life story has not made it necessary he support himself with such employment, something like that, well, where’s the sin in that? (Wouldn’t you like to have me as your confessor!)

The audience for the original parable would have had it’s own difficulties with it but they may have been different than mine. They would have wondered what Jesus was smoking! Tax collectors were despised. They often overcollected, making themselves rich off the backs of their already oppressed co-religionists. They were identified as in league with the Roman oppressors, selling out and betraying of their own people.

But, we are told, the Pharisees were not viewed in nearly as negative a light as that in which the gospels paint them, particularly in Galilee. They were not nearly as influential in Jesus’ day as they may have become by the time the gospels were written, several generations later. In Jesus’ day Pharisees truly were devoted to God’s commandments and sought to discern how best to live and act faithfully in their daily lives.

So, first blush, I think it is entirely possible to praise the prayers of both the Pharisee and the publican. I think it’s a legitimate prayer of thanksgiving to celebrate those occasions upon which one is able successfully to follow one’s rule of life. I know I’m gratelful the more completely I’m able to follow the Associates of Holy Cross Rule and I tell God so in my prayers. If I’m not going to condemn myself, I certainly am not going to condemn the poor Pharisee!

And, I note, I’m in good company: In the Second Epistle to Bishop Timothy we find no less a biblical personage than St. Paul, as he approaches the end of his life, writing, I have fought the good fight to the end: I have run the race to the finish; I have kept the faith; all there is to come now is the crown of righteousness reserved for me, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that Day…

Similarly, when I’ve made a fool of myself, or realize I’ve been guilty of unjustly causing another pain, am cataloguing the “thoughts, words, and deeds, things done and things left undone” in my daily private confession and in my sacramental confessions to my confessor, I think that’s appropriate.

A matter of pastoral interest and concern to me, however, is the demonstrated likelihood we will live up to or down to ours and others’ expectations of us. It’s been found in comparison studies of students that, if you take two groups of equal ability and tell one they’re losers and the other they’re winners, the loser group will perform much more poorly on standardized tests than the winner group.

And we know cultural myths and stereotypes persist despite evidence to the contrary:

We think we’re pretty smart, yet we rank 25th among the nations of the world in educational prowess.

We think wealth can buy happiness. A few weeks ago Mary brought to our attention the place money holds in the value recent graduates place on various attributes of potential jobs. If wealth can buy happiness, why are some of the highest rates of depression and suicide found in the wealthiest countries in the world, ours among them?

We view ourselves as “the land of the free,” yet we have one of the highest incarceration rates of any of the countries in the world.

We regard ourselves as among the most civilized, yet we are one of the few countries that has the death penalty, the other countries that have it being among the world’s most primitive.

And, here, my friends, lies the message of this Gospel: Who we think we are may well not be who the Master thinks we are. What we think we are may not necessarily be what the Master thinks we are. Who we think others are may not be who they are. What we think they are may not be what they are. We must look below the surface, take time, probe when we’re looking for role models and measuring our degree of faithfulness against what we perceive theirs to be.

In addition, this gospel serves as a challenge to our tendency to regard our own self-evaluation of our superiority to be evidence of our righteousness.

One more time the Gospel upends the world’s measures of value!

Scream loud and long enough and you get what you want. The squeaky hinge gets oiled. Mommy, PLEASE!!! Is that what the Gospel you just heard is all about? Let’s see…

We have two characters: A judge in a certain town who had neither fear of God nor respect for man and a widow who kept on coming to him and saying, “I want justice from you against my enemy!”

The parable seems unconcerned about what kind of justice, for what offence. It’s treated as a generic. It’s more concerned that we know she persisted and, eventually, he caved, not because he was concerned about meting out justice, particularly, but because “since she keeps pestering me I must give this widow her just rights, or she will persist in coming and worry me to death.”

I know how this goes: I’ve had clients I’m convinced got jobs, not particularly because they wanted to go back to work, but to get rid of my and their job coaches’ constant calls each week to ask them what they’d done to get a job and to learn how well they’d followed our advice. And these aren’t one-call-and-leave –a-message. They’re calls day after day, if they don’t answer or return them, evenings, weekends, e-mails. BUT, they get jobs faster and better than the rest of the pack, out of work with no one pestering them!

Now this widow had an uphill battle. This was no quiet one-on-one. If you’ve ever been in a busy courthouse you know what it’s like: Lawyers and clients all over the place. People in every available corner, gesticulating, cutting deals, manipulating, noise. All looking very important, the lawyers at least, and many of their clients as well.

Now let’s add a wrinkle. It’s not in a building. It’s at the gate of the city. No such thing as judge’s chambers. The judge is in view. It’s mayhem. Almost like a trading floor in a stock exchange, people are jockeying for position, trying to get close to him, clamoring to get their cases heard first. In front of the judge, who is seated on a dais half buried in cushions, surrounded by various secretaries and other notables. Whispered conversations are being held with the secretaries, fees=bribes are being paid. A secretary, his greed satisfied, would call the case. Who paid most, his case was likely to be heard first.

Widows were both common and vulnerable in the society first exposed to this parable. They were very vulnerable. Lose your husband=lose your livelihood, as the property and possessions reverted to his family and ceased to be available to you. Most widows stuck to their homes, dependent on the charity of family and friends.

This was no ordinary widow. This was a widow with a will and a mouth. A loud mouth. And one far from dumb. The translation of “wear me out” doesn’t do it justice. The literal translation is “to hit under the eye” and it’s a term that comes from the world of boxing. I guess we know about that kind of thing from all the publicity about the real world of wrestling, thanks to the Senate campaign!

The judge is saying, “Her constant public public ranting is giving me a “black eye.” It’s drawing attention to how I conduct my office. I can’t risk that so I’d better shut her up.” He may be corrupt and contemptuous and the system may be flawed but he’s savvy enough to know his continuance in office is dependent upon the appearance, at least, that a fair system is in place and that it works.

Well, this is a parable, a story told to make a point. The point is the need to pray continually and never lose heart. Jesus draws attention to the unjust judge’s statement he is granting the widow justice so she’ll stop badgering him, continuing Now will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him day and night even when he delays to help them? I promise you he will see justice done to them, and done speedily…

So, Jesus is making clear his Father in heaven’s commitment to justice even if, to our eyes, it appears to be delayed. And I suppose we could breathe a sigh of relief that the Almighty will take care of such things and we are off the hook, if it weren’t for the final sentence of the passage: But when the Son of Man comes, (the Second Coming---Judgment Day) will he find any faith on earth?

Now, prayer is a problematic activity and, in our practice, I think there’s a tendency to misunderstand its role. We want, I think, to treat it primarily as our spiritual gift list and God, the hearer, as Santa Claus. Prayer is “answered,” mostly, when we get what we want. It is “not answered” when we don’t get what we want, or we rationalize the experience as we wanted the wrong thing or didn’t pray hard enough. Liturgically, we ask our petitions be granted as may be best for us.

It is always a matter of interest to me how full parish prayer lists are of petitions and how, judging from the content, one would assume there’s no one healthy in most of our parishes. And how much attention we pay to the repose of the souls (Eternal rest---what a God-awful, boring concept!) of the dead as opposed to thanksgiving for their lives and witness and, maybe, what contributions we’re making to our world because of it.

What, with rare exception, I don’t see a lot of is prayer, specific and detailed, for social justice issues. I don’t see nearly balanced air time for thanksgivings and, when I do see any it tends to be for life, health, family (which should be there---don’t get me wrong) than for health care reform, progress with inclusivity and other social justice issues.

This gospel suggests prayer is less about “gimme” than it is about relationship. The widow’s persistence results, in the gospel’s terms itself do you notice?, not in a specific, because none is ever named, but in a generic…”justice.”

My daily prayers are my daily “call home,” much as some children talk with their Mother or Father every day or, when I’m travelling, I call my wife every night to check in. When I remember someone who is ill, serving in the military, or whose anniversary of death the day is, I’m prompted to learn how the ill person is doing, what the “latest” is on the person serving in the military. I celebrate the person gone before, may be reminded of something they taught me or a priority they held.

Prayer, properly conceived, results in behavior. It results in behavioral change.

I delight that we are hearing this gospel during the run up to the fall elections! Because it serves as a reminder both of prayer subject matter and implied behavioral results. When someone says to me, “They’re all bums,” my response is, “That may be but whichever one is elected you and I have to deal with, must, as Christians, deal with them. Make known our views to them. Again, and again, and again, like the widow if needs be, whether they do what we want or not.”

The Church and her people are obligated to be as the importunate widow is to the unscrupulous judge, calling it to its best self, Discipleship requires participation up to one’s eyeballs in the political process, especially in a democracy: voting, in every election, giving money to candidates and causes, tax deductible or not, volunteering, as citizens writing letters, e-mailing, phoning congressional and state office holders, tracking issues that matter to faith.

What we pray, how often we pray, how persistently we pray writes the record the Son of Man finds when he comes. Again.

This morning our worship goes to the dogs! and cats. and who knows what else of God’s creatures who transcend their creaturehood and become our beloved pets.

And why would we do that? Give over worship time and attention to such a thing.

Because of a 13th century rich kid who rebelled against the life plan his parents had for him, to dedicate his life to the poor. The poorest of the poor. Raised in the complexity of affluence, he embraced simplicity. He lived close to the earth, without creature comforts. He loved animals and plants, the sea and the stars, the beauty of the world God has given us. He thought of God as a great artist, best known through God’s creations.

It makes sense when you know his home town. Nancy and I visited it in May of this year. Francis may have come from money but he also came from a small town. It’s small even today. And it’s in the country, high on a hill. Farm country. Animals. Birds.

Another reason to bless (ask God to regard in a special way) our pets is the role many of them play as examples of unconditional love, the kind of love God has for us and that dogs, for one, are said to have for their owners. Our pets are a comfort to us. They are companions to us.

Last week Nancy and I got together with the bishop under whom I served in Iowa and who officiated at our wedding. We’ve been friends for almost 40 years. Walter is now in his 80s and failing physically. (Definitely not mentally!) He and his wife talked about their burial plans. They’ve purchased side by side niches for their remains, niches large enough to contain two urns each. One for them and, with them, in their respective niches, the cremains of one of their dogs! Companions in life. Companions in death!

Later in the week we were at the home of another friend, also in his 80s and also still very much alert. His wife died two years ago. They were very close. There was an addition we’d not met at his home---a large dog his children had gotten for him right after the funeral. Companionship. Unconditional love.

Some years ago, arguably, a cat saved my life. It was behaving strangely. It came into the room and meowed loudly. That, in itself, wasn’t that unusual. What was unusual was it didn’t meow to go out; it left the room and headed up the stairs to the second floor. Fine. We didn’t think a thing of it. It came back and meowed loudly again and went back up the stairs. About the third time it did that, we followed. It led us to the open door to the walk-in attic where we had a large exhaust fan. The fan was very hot. It was smoking and soon would have caught fire, which would have spread through the house. The cat led us right to fan, sat, looked at the fan, then at us, then at the fan. Mission accomplished!

That’s enough of my animal stories. Let’s hear some of yours. Of the role your pets play in your lives, pets present or past. Especially pets we are blessing today but not only them. Any pets are welcome subjects….



Let us pray:

Creator God, you have made us and our pets, and all living things. We thank you for giving us pets who give us joy. As you take care of us, so also we ask that we might be given the grace to care for the pets who trust us to care for them. And we pray for your continued care for the pets who have blessed our lives who are with us no longer but rest in you. In the Name of Christ our Lord.

Amen.

There’s a reason why employers don’t usually tell employees they’re going to fire that they intend to do so: behavior of the type displayed in this morning’s Gospel’s aptly named Parable of the “Crafty” Steward!

But it’s a curious parable, don’t you think?

The termination isn’t based on direct evidence. It’s based on accusation. There was a rich man and he had a steward who…was…denounced…to…him for being wasteful with his property. So who are these accusers? Who’s doing the denouncing? And where is the investigation? None is recorded. Neither is any defense by the steward recorded. We are never told whether he was guilty or innocent of the offense claimed.

So how does it happen that he’s fired? Could it be other experiences the rich man had with the steward included other events that made the denunciations credible to him? Did being wasteful with property over which he was steward seem the kind of thing he would be likely to do? Or was he the victim of a more generalized prejudice? Was it typical of stewards in those days to be casual about their responsibilities?

If so, there must have been something about this situation for Jesus to want to use it in a parable, and the Gospel writer to want to include it in his gospel.

Maybe that “something” lies in the steward’s reaction to the news he’s going to lose his job, how he uses the time before his last day worked. He courts favor from those we might expect to be least likely to grant it, the rich man’s debtors, for which he had served as collection agent. Collection agents, like tax collectors and assessors, tend not to be popular people. So, in a remarkable turn of circumstance, we find this collector of debts morph for purposes of securing future, post-termination hospitality, into a creator of debts by reducing the debtors’ debts to the rich man. Yes: “crafty!”

The parable continues its curious nature in the rich man’s reaction to what the steward does (which he, apparently, finds out about!)---he praises him for his “astuteness”! WHY????? It’s particularly curious that the rich man behaved in this manner in those days and in that part of the world because what the steward was denounced for doing was customarily punished not by termination but by death!

Could it be that this is a device Jesus and the gospel writer use to underscore that these behaviors illustrate “how things are done?” That, though the rich man wasn’t about to retain the steward in his position, he saw in him a “kindred spirit” because his behavior was reminiscent of how the boss got to where he was. To be rich in those days and in that part of the world typically came from exploiting the poor. The only difference was, in this case, the steward had turned the tables and was exploiting the rich man!

Things haven’t changed much, have they? My mind immediately turned to a high school classmate of Nancy’s and mine. When we came to know him he’d already done time in reform school. He was crafty even then. Very bright. An operator.

He subsequently became Director of Information Technology for a Fortune 500 company. It was his responsibility to purchase mainframe computers and other technology. Rather than simply do that, he set up a shell corporation which did the purchasing, from which he purchased for his company, at a significantly marked up price. He was caught. And he was fired.

But not before the expensive cars, the trips to Europe often returning on the Concorde, and the new 4500 square foot home with the four car garage. He was also, of course, charged with a felony. Mysteriously, the charges were dropped, probably because the company was able to recover some of the losses, enough that the legal costs would exceed the recoverable costs. At one point he did do 9 months time when he was caught selling stolen goods but, in general, he’s done quite well and is now living out a comfortable retirement in the Carolinas.

You and I know he’s far from alone. Else, why would such phrases and terms as “commence evasive action,” “plausible deniability,” and “cover-up” have entered the lexicon. A president resigns, is pardoned, and becomes a published author and sought-after lecture tour personality. A governor does jail time and becomes a radio talk show host during drive time. And the children of our society ask their parents, “Tell me again how crime doesn’t pay…”

Jesus suggests it may appear to pay, but it doesn’t satisfy. And a rabbi writes a book that becomes popular, with the self-explanatory title, When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough. Our Master covers this in the second portion of this morning’s Gospel, “The right use of money” portion.

“And so I tell you this: use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when it fails you, they will welcome you into the tents of eternity. The man who can be trusted in little things can be trusted in great; the man who is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in great. If then you cannot be trusted with money, that tainted thing, who will trust you with genuine riches?....

“No servant can be the slave of two masters: he will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You cannot be the slave of both God and of money.”

Different mindsets are involved. Very different mindsets. In the middle of one of the worst ecological disasters this country has experienced we witnessed those closest to the scene screaming, “Drill, baby, drill!” Think of all the times a direction, a good one, is opposed on the grounds pursuing it will result in the loss of jobs.

The reason one cannot serve God and money is that money is a means of valuing. When it and material things’ accumulation is pursued, it becomes the value. The consumer becomes the consumed.

The thing about it is the more of it we have, the more likely most of us are to believe we don’t need God, which means, of course, that that is where we place our values. We become “Me People.” Some of us even say things like, “I don’t need God.” or “God is a crutch.” So we cease to experience God’s grace as we bask in the enjoyment of what we own, what we, our own selves think we’ve achieved all…by…ourselves, without any help: our very own golden calves.

One of the benefits becoming older confers, I’ve discovered, is the confrontation being older provides in our lives and those of our friends of similar age with how quickly, dramatically, and thoroughly our lives can change from being “comfortable” to poverty or from independence to dependence. One stroke, elapsing but a few minutes in time, for example, can do it.

Jim Beaumont, a former colleague’s, story also illustrates how quickly relationships can eclipse the “toys” of our lives in importance: Jim headed the lobbying office in the Illinois state capitol for the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce during my time there, a position he had held, with distinction, for some time. He and his family were vacationing in Hawaii. Jim loved to surf. He was accomplished at it, had been for some time. A wave caught his surfboard wrong and flipped him upside down. He landed on his head. He was immediately paralyzed, permanently, from the neck down. Talk about a life changing event! Luckily Jim’s wife took the vow “in sickness and in health” seriously. But what if she hadn’t…

This Gospel offers us two very different life environments, two very different masters, two very different value systems and two very different models of service, the one centered in money and material things, the other in relationships and spiritual things. Our Christian profession invites us to embrace the second one as offering the more enduring, the more trustworthy, the more grace-filled experience. Accepting the invitation involves a radical choice and, perhaps, no little material sacrifice. And our God grants us the free will to make that choice.

And whether or not we do make that choice, like the road less travelled in Robert Frost’s poem, makes all the difference!

How many of you when you were growing up remember begging your parents to sit in the front seat when you had to go somewhere in the car?

How many when you attend a concert or a play or some event where there is open seating, scramble for the best seats?

So we---at least some of us---know what Jesus is talking about, don’t we? Except, it appears for many of us, in church where the order seems to reverse itself. Sometimes, in some churches, there can be a good reason for that: get too far front and you can find yourself in the “jump seat” when the preacher shifts to interview mode! And the reversal would continue, I imagine, were the “friend, move up higher” invitation to be issued. At least judging from the whispers you hear in congregations all spread out when the worship leaders ask all to move forward and closer together!

That’s the thing about being in relationship with this Jesus…He just won’t let one alone!

He notices things. Imagine! You invite the guy to dinner at your home. You have a nice home. You’re a leader in the congregation. Sure, that he’s the visiting celebrity may have played some small role in the invitation being issued but, still, he didn’t have to eat alone, did he?

And what does he do? He tells this parable, embarrassing the other guests by shining a light on their scrambling for the places of honor. How rude!

Yet, if you’ve ever been one caught out claiming a place higher than where you properly should be (as I have on occasion!), you know how uncomfortable it is as you slither in front of all those eyes to the lower place!

In my other life as a job search coach I apply a version of this. It’s a natural tendency for someone who’s recently lost their job to get on the phone and call the former co-workers and friends, to get the word out, to put them on point: “If you hear of anything, call me.”

I recommend they not do that so they can do a little research project: Wait and see who reaches out to them. I tell them they will likely get some surprises. Those they never expected to call or care, will; others they were sure would be first to call, won’t. It’s amazing how that works out.

When they initiate the contact they usually get some surprises of the not-so-pleasant kind, like taking the best seats and being sent to a lower place. It takes the form of experiencing the person they call appearing uncomfortable talking to them, or avoiding them. Particularly co-workers who may fear if their supervisor knew, some of the negative attitudes that resulted in their caller’s being let go could transfer to them and their employment fortunes might be affected.

So, as we’ve found is typical of Jesus, he’s turning the usual practices of his time on their ear. And in another way of which we may have been unaware. The very setting for this parable constitutes a thumbing-his-nose at the religious class structure.

Now on a sabbath day he had gone for a meal to the house of one of the leading Pharisees; and they watched him closely. You bet they did! Because he may have gone to the house of one of the leading Pharisees all right. You remember how last week we talked about how ready we are these days to catch people out, to catch them making a mis-step. He just did: There were parties, factions, in the synagogues in those days just as there are in churches today. Other synagogue parties, like the Sadducees, for example, considered the Pharisees to be too moderate in their application of the Law. So, by choosing a leader of that sect with which to take a meal, Jesus is associating himself with the group seen to have no standards, a sign he not a truly pious Jew.

Then this rude guest, with mortgaged street cred, now insults his host and, by association, his fellow guests by criticizing the guest list! Then he said to his host, “When you give a lunch or a dinner, do not ask your friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbors, for fear they repay your courtesy by inviting you in return. No; when you have a party invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; that they cannot pay you back means that you are fortunate, because repayment will be made to you when the virtuous rise again.”

Well, there goes the traditional Christmas card list pruning! (“Did they send us a card last year or not?”)

And, of all the surveys we do, I’d like to know how many of the churches who run soup kitchens or distribute clothing, actively encourage those they feed or clothe to worship with them, make them feel welcome, sit with them in the pew. There are probably others but I know of one that definitely does: Epiphany, Washington, DC, which has several hundred at its 8:00 a.m. service each Sunday. And, between services, this growing Episcopal congregation serves and shares breakfast with their fellow 8 o’clockers, most…of…whom…are…homeless!

From this Savior, expect the unexpected. Expect to be made uncomfortable. Also expect to be shown by Him where real comfort is to be found: In the Master’s “friend, move up higher!” which results from the personal growth that results from the behaviors He recommends. I, for one, am far from there yet. This Gospel and delving into it with you makes me sufficiently uncomfortable with my own self that I’m more than ready to spend a moment or two in silent meditation and self-examination in preparation for the General Confession we’ll be sharing in a few moments. Let us be in reflection.

Amen.

You know, when I first read this morning’s Gospel, I came away with not the highest regard for Jesus.

It wasn’t that I had any objection to his healing the woman possessed by the spirit that left her enfeebled but rather that the position of the synagogue official seemed entirely reasonable to me: his objection that Jesus had violated the sabbath by performing this healing. Jews are to do no work on the sabbath. It’s a time for refueling, to have the energy to do the work of the rest of the week.

I fault myself (with no small amount of help from those who love me and those I love) that I do so poorly at letting go, keeping sabbath, during whatever time I “comp” for it because my profession’s definition includes Sunday work.

I mean, the woman had had her affliction for 18 years. Nothing in the lesson tells us Jesus wasn’t going to be around the next day. Why couldn’t it keep for one more day? My mind went to: He did this so he could pull their chains, play a “now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch” game. There’s enough of the iconoclast in me that I could identify with that.

So, my research of the passage convicted me as much as it did the synagogue official. The point Jesus was making was “What I’m doing is keeping the sabbath. Your criticism of it, hiding behind a narrow interpretation of the Law, looking for a way to make me wrong, puts you in the unenviable position of yourself violating the real nature of the sabbath: rest and refueling, yes, but also showing justice and mercy, the spirit of the all encompassing love and healing of God.

He reminds them that even though no work is to be done on the sabbath “Is there one of you who does not untie his ox or his donkey from the manger on the sabbath and take it out for watering?” Yes, the woman has endured her affliction for 18 years and yes it could wait a day, but she’s here now. We see her now. Could I even find her tomorrow? Yes, I could ask her to wait but, with all her pain and suffering, might she not reasonably, overcome with anticipation of relief, not beg for it now? And why shouldn’t she? And why shouldn’t I respond? In this House of God am I to show less compassion than you routinely show to livestock!

And then I thought, “The airwaves are full of us doing exactly the same thing.”
We appear to be ever on the alert to catch a leader in some wrongdoing or in some action we can manipulate to make her or him look bad, unpatriotic, uncaring. It’s all about character assassination, hate mongering and inciting to violence. And we dumbly buy the garbage fed to us.

And it struck me: The difference just 19 people have made. Their act on September 11th, 2001 changed a proud nation that had overcome so much into a paranoid, fault finding, posturing bully. Our political discourse has degenerated from diverse viewpoints seeking to work together toward common solutions to conflict management’s end stage category, the mutually assured destruction of the opponent’s position without regard for the cost to the common good.

Well, I want to take this opportunity to thank the critics of Park 51, the Muslim community center proposed in New York City, for providing me material, and a catalyst for my own, and I hope your, personal growth and understanding of this gospel lesson.

Because the debate around that space is reminiscent of the debate in that synagogue so long ago. As one letter to the editor writer put it, “Let’s be clear: We welcome religious edifices throughout this great nation…But Ground Zero is sacred ground. Leading by example…show how understanding and compassionate Islam can be….Build it (the center) anywhere but there.” (Have the crippled woman come back tomorrow.)

Just as the synagogue official misunderstood the meaning of sabbath and what keeping it meant, so the letter writer and the critics of the Park 51 project miss that it is its erection in…its…planned…space that honors that area and redeems the loss suffered there.

Let me explain: In doing so I am indebted, in part, to Hendrik Herzberg, a Jew’s, article in the August 16 & 23rd issue of The New Yorker, which I commend to you.

For one thing, the space is not at Ground Zero. It’s approximately two full city blocks north. One could not see Ground Zero from it at any point, nor could anyone at Ground Zero see it.

Yes, it will have a prayer room on one floor. Of an eight story building, built as a gift to the community by Muslims, the rest of which will be classrooms, galleries, a restaurant, an auditorium, a memorial to the victims of 9/11, a swimming pool and a gym, open to all, including Christians, Jews, Bhuddists, Hindus, and anybody else. Like, maybe, street kids who, with a safe place for recreation, just might find crime less attractive!

It will help “bring back” its run down neighborhood, utilizing space that has lain vacant for 10 years.

It will be managed by a couple dedicated to interfaith dialogue.

Faisal Abdul Rauf is a Columbia grad. He’s been an imam for close to 30 years. He’s the author of What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America. (Sounds pretty pro-American to me!) He is a vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. He was tapped by (Yes!) the F.B.I. to conduct sensitivity training for F.B.I. agents and police officers.

His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with him. Its work is to promote “cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”

Just as what Jesus did in that synagogue reflected the real meaning of the sabbath, so, I would argue, what is happening in New York City reflects not offense to the events of 9/11 and those harmed by them but honor, and faithful people everywhere should praise the Islamic community showing the foresight and leadership to do what they are doing. Not only that: we should hope and pray this effort will be joined by that of other religious groups perhaps making their unique contribution to that area.

So this is the example part. What’s the catalyst for my personal growth and yours?

Well, for one thing, dealing with this gospel and the thoughts it elicited reminded me of how easy it is to take at face value the impassioned positions espoused by literalists.

I have my own literalist side. I have to be careful of that. To the extent any of us have a literalist side or a tendency to be taken in by the literalist side of others, it reminded me we all have to be careful to try to see all possible interpretations of a situation.

Second, think of the fact the woman Jesus healed would not have been readily visible. She was in a crowd. She is described by the gospel writer as being “bent double and quite unable to stand upright.” Part of the miracle is that Jesus even noticed her. What this says to me is that it is incumbent upon us disciples to look for those on the margins who may need/benefit from our help.

A final catalytic, growth element for which I can thank the critics of Park 51 is its reminder of the tremendous amount of work I have to do and energy I have to expend to gain the skill to engage in dialogue with their kind and lead others to do so. Because my natural inclination to just not engage them, to live and let live is not only unacceptable; it’s dangerous. Or my other, maybe even more predominant inclination, to scream back at them and want to take the hammer to them like to the gopher at Chuck E. Cheese’s. That won’t get it either! Only love, dialogue, really hard work, will change minds.

Friends, this literalist climate that surrounds us is dangerous. Very dangerous. We disciples of the Prince of Peace dare not underestimate it. And, if we love our country and what it has stood for for almost 250 years, it’s all the more reason to take it very seriously and engage in whatever it takes to bring us back to center.

The phone rang. I took the call. I recognized the voice: a former client. Now employed in a job he had described as a good fit, with people he liked, the day I’d congratulated him at least. I hoped he still held that job.

“I don’t need Stan, the outplacement guy,” he said after an exchange of pleasantries.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “I need you to put your priest hat on.”

He’d called, it turned out, because he’d remembered our theological discussions, sandwiched into conversations about how his job search was going, or what progress he was making putting together the information we needed in order to help him.

“I go to church and I believe. I don’t have any trouble with God. Believing in Him is easy. And I don’t have any problem with the Holy Spirit. It’s Jesus. Him being God. All this literal stuff. That you have to believe every word or you’re going to hell. I don’t believe it and it’s driving me nuts. There have to be other approaches. We’ve talked about them. Are there any books?”

I hadn’t even looked up this Sunday’s lessons but the words, “I have not come to bring peace but a sword” came into my mind. And I was being asked to become an accomplice.

For from now on a house of five will be divided: three against two
and two against three; the father divided against the son, son
against father, mother against daughter, daughter against
mother, mother against daughter-in-law, daughter-in-law against
mother-in-law.

My caller is in his late 40’s. He was raised in the mainline United Church of Canada. His wife was raised in an evangelical, biblical literalist Protestant tradition. The church they, their 12 year old son, and her family, all of which live in the area, having moved there to be near them, attend is that kind of church. His family are all back in western Canada. The marriage has been in trouble in the past, I know from our conversations. To them this Jesus may now represent a source of division.

Another call, a couple of days later: From Dr. Mansoor, who spoke to us here on Ash Wednesday: He was calling to ask if we would be co-sponsors of a rally at the Capitol building in Hartford and, “I would really love it, Stan, if you could be there with us.”

A week ago Friday about a dozen individuals from a group called Operation Save America, a right wing, Christian extremist organization staged a protest and verbal assault against the Muslim community who had gathered for Friday prayers (The Islamic community’s version of Sunday worship.) at their mosque in Bridgeport. As children and their parents were leaving the mosque after the service, they called the children murderers through their bullhorns, yelled “islam is a lie” and “Jesus hates Muslims,” among other slurs.

Islamophobic protests have been launched against the construction of mosques in California, Georgia, Wisconsin, Illinois, and elsewhere.

A Christian extremist (I would use the term “terrorist” to describe it and other such groups.) group in Florida is organizing “burn the Q’uran” events each year on September 11th.

This despite the fact a person is not considered a good Muslim unless he loves Jesus, that the Q’uran reveres Jesus and that Mohammed taught God had created all religions so that all people could each find a way to worship Him.

The shameful acts the rally, of which we, in fact, were a co-sponsor, as was our Diocese, condemned reflect the Prince of Peace being used as a sword. But the rally itself was a witness to how He also is a figure around which the faiths can unite because as Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike proclaimed Friday afternoon, we each revere him, though in our different ways.

Total commitment brings division. Because, always, there are others who don’t share that commitment or have commitment in opposition. And we might naively say, “That’s a good reason not to take religion seriously; it gets you in trouble.” And doing so certainly has.

Enough so that a Hartford Seminary professor is writing a book the title of which will be The Crooked Road to Christian Ethics. It will have seven chapters, “each one dedicated to a great bludering injustice that has been committed by Christians in the past, for example, the Crusades, inquisitions (there wasn’t only one!!!), colonialism, slavery, witch hunts, and pogroms.”

Yes, religious zeal has gotten us in trouble. It’s also changed the world for the better. It’s made the impossible possible. As this morning’s lesson from the Epistle to the Hebrews points out: It was by faith they crossed the Red Sea as easily as dry land while the Egyptians, trying to do the same, were drowned.

It was through faith that the walls of Jericho fell down when the people had been around them for seven days…

Is there any need to say any more? There is not time for me to give an account of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, or of David, Samuel and the prophets. These were men who through faith conquered kingdoms, did what is right and earned the promises. They could keep a lion’s mouth shut, put out blazing fires and emerge unscathed from battle. They were weak people who were given strength, to be brave in war and drive back foreign invaders.”

And not just them: We are not British subjects today because a poorly armed, untrained, volunteer army of young (they weren’t very old by modern standards) kids overcame the best trained, best equipped military force in the world at that time, that greatly outnumbered them, because they were willing to be committed.

I see in this morning’s gospel an invitation. An invitation to self-examination. To permit that self-examination this is a sermon in two parts. I’m going to pause it at this point and continue it after the Prayers of the People…..


When in your life has your Christian profession cost you, or brought division? Tell God.

If it hasn’t, why hasn’t it? Tell God.

On which occasions in your life have your values, your commitments resulted in division or estrangement? Were they worthy of God? If so, thank God you had the courage to stick to them. In not, ask God’s forgiveness your commitments were unworthy or that you didn’t have any.

When in your life have your commitments been to reconciliation? Thank God.

Ask God for the discernment and courage to make and keep commitments worthy of discipleship to God’s Son, Our Lord, without regard to any division they may cause. Ask God for the grace to endure the cost of discipleship.

Amen.

“You GO, girl!!!” That’s what Jesus is saying to Mary. And it’s not, I’m sure, what either she or her sister, Martha, expect. It’s not, probably, what we expect. It’s certainly not what my wife expects when we’re having a dinner party and she’s busy in the kitchen and realizes “Are you ever going to get around to taking the drink orders????”

But there’s really more to this Gospel than that and, mostly, at least not in the sermons I’ve heard so far on this passage, we don’t realize it or hear about it. We’re no stranger to the countless occasions in Scripture when Jesus violates the fokways of his time and annoys people by doing so, at least some people, and usually the very people, at least to our modern eyes, whose attitudes and behaviors should be challenged.

Meet Jesus the feminist! Yep! We “get” well enough that Mary…sat down at the Lord’s feet and listened to him speaking. We “get” the logic her sister, doing all the work, she thought (and I’ll come back to this), of extending hospitality would be annoyed. What we miss is that, by doing this, Mary has stepped out of her culture’s prescribed female role and its hostess duties and stepped into the role of disciple, a male role, sitting among the men. We may have missed the significance of this but I’ll bet you the men sitting at Jesus feet didn’t!

And what does the guest of honor do??? He sides with the one not playing by the rules. He not only sides with her; he devalues the traditional “proper” role Martha is playing. How do ya like them apples?

By doing so he calls into question typical values then and typical values now.

He raises for us the question (told you I’d come back to it) “of what does extending hospitality consist?” In the final analysis may it not be more hospitable to give the guest our undivided attention?

I think of a visit I made during my college years to my great aunt Anna, then in her 70’s at least. I’d not seen her in some time but, in deciding to visit, I remembered she was very much her own person, a character, a very spirited woman, my kinda gal.

So I shouldn’t have been all that surprised to see a book of Aristotle’s philosophy on her reading table. I commented on it. She didn’t miss a beat: She said, “Well, you know, Stanley, this body is deteriorating and I can’t do much about it. That doesn’t mean my mind has to; I can do something about that!

A day or so into my stay I noticed, though the pots and pans of cooking had been washed, the dishes hadn’t. Strange. Aunt Anna, even in her 70’s, was a good housekeeper. With the impertinence of youth, I asked. You know she had an answer. It turns out a very good one. An answer very appropriate to this morning’s Gospel. “I have plenty of dishes. Enough dishes for your great uncle Hardy, you and me for your stay. We’ll get along fine. I can do them all after you’ve gone when I’ll have plenty of time. But you won’t be here to enjoy. So let’s use the time we have for that rather than for doing those dishes.”

Martha, Martha…you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part; it is not to be taken from her.” Last week we learned the two sides of that one: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

This week’s lessons are all directed to the basics: The Genesis lesson to the importance of family. Sarah is barren. The disappointment occupies her entire being. Yahweh God causes her to conceive. The Colossians passage identifies Christ as the head of Creation and Paul’s witness the center of his life is to reveal Him to us pagans. That word, in Greek pas/pagan, by the way, translates “other.”

Yet these priorities appear to be foreign to most of us. The choice in this Gospel is between two values: being and doing. I find it interesting the choice of words: Martha who was distracted with all the serving… “distracted” Hmmm.

My favorite late mother-in-law divided the year between her homes in Charlottesville, VA and Deer Isle, “way down East,” in Maine. She would come home from the summer in Maine and go “on vacation” from her summer of tennis every morning, sailing all fair weather afternoons and entertaining or being entertained every evening (at least the ones there wasn’t a show at the Stonington Opera House!).

An oft-quoted saying is “I’m too busy to have a nervous breakdown!” I’m sure you all don’t need me to fill in the blanks of your several respective versions of the overbusyness I’ve just described.

And, believe me, I don’t count myself as immune. Who else you know can sign up for a three day silent retreat at a place he’s loved for almost 50 years, Holy Cross Monastery, get so stir crazy that he turns up home early as if he’s “burst his three days prison!”

Still, that’s no cause not to take seriously the “get your priorities straight” message of these lessons because I’m sure we’ll all agree the signs are all around us what we’re doing is not “working” for us. Think of how laden our calendars are with the things we do only because of one word, “ought,” when, really, few of them carry with them a high price tag were we not to do them. I’m continually amazed at how many dysfunctional relationships, family and other, are maintained out of habit or “what people might think.” “People” be damned! This is about having the Life with a capital “L” our Savior promised us and having it abundantly!

And what better time to contemplate the adjustments we should make to move more toward the Mary, “better part” side and assure it not “be taken from” us than summer. Maybe starting with a picnic, even, getting to know and enjoy fellow Episcopalians over an expanded version of the 8th sacrament.

L’chaim!

Images of a Billy Graham Crusade came into my mind as I read the opening lines of this morning’s Gospel lesson:

After this (Remember last week’s excuses as he called various to follow
Him, or those who saw him on the road impetuously promised to follow
Him anywhere?) the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent
them out ahead of him, in pairs, to all the towns and places he himself
was to visit…

The advance party. Billy Graham followed this model. I’ve been the subject of its attention. The pastors of a community would get communications well in advance. They would be courted by the team. They would be reassured that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had no intention of proselytizing (=sheep stealing), that those who came forward to “give themselves to the Lord” would be referred back to the congregations in the community for follow-up, detailed information provided by the Graham organization.

Scholars debate the number seventy two. Were the Twelve included in that number? Seventy was the more usual number chosen to symbolize “a lot.” Why seventy two? I don’t much care. Leave that to the scholars and God bless them. What matters, I think, is Jesus’ acted-out conviction more than a few were going to be needed.

It also reflects, I believe, his position the work was not to be confined to a select few but was the responsibility of the entire body of believers, even if individuals were to discharge it in a variety of ways.

And he makes clear it is to be total, not segmented. It gets really sticky here. Active as I am in interfaith discussions, in all honesty such scriptures as these force me to take the position no constituency is to be exempt from the effort. Not my Jewish friends, particularly my non-practicing Jewish friends. Similarly, (and it can get really violent here but if we’re going to be “the Bible says” people, for the sake of argument, we really can’t escape it) my Muslim friends, again particularly my non-practicing Muslim friends.

Neither is it appropriate to exempt those one hasn’t approached, assuming they wouldn’t be interested or couldn’t be encouraged to have interest, properly approached.

Now, as is the case with any sales effort, the salesperson qualifies his leads. This doesn’t mean one necessarily starts with these groups. In fact, one may never reach these groups, the harvest being so plentiful of the non-practicing of the general population and the laborers so few. They simply can’t, in theory, be exempted. Not and be faithful to the Gospel message.

We should also note the salesperson/evangelist/believer/disciple is not called upon to cram his religion down the throat of the hapless prospect he encounters. There is an art to this. An art the Jehovah’s witness who sat next to my wife on our train back to Hartford from Washington practiced. He stated his case. He offered his reasons. He listened to her response, she tells me. They talked.

So let me introduce the perhaps somewhat unusual counsel we should be open to receive the Mormon, the Jehovah’s witness, who appears at our door. As long as they stay within the bounds of good taste. We might learn something. Hartford Seminary’s motto is “Celebrating differences. Deepening faith.” The Seminary community has learned that such openness tends less to convert, and more to deepen, the respective faiths of participants.

Ironically, the behaviors of certain of our religious extremists, whose conversation does not involve listening to others’ faith experiences but only judgment and coercion such as we’ve witnessed in many who have left the Episcopal Church and others Christian bodies, make it advisable to deny them houseroom.

It won’t be easy: I am sending out like lambs among wolves. And without comforts: Carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals. The salesperson/
evangelist/believer/disciple is to be dependent on gracious hospitality: Whatever house you go into, let your first words be, “Peace to this house!” And if a man of peace lives there, your peace will go rest on him…Stay in the same house, taking what food and drink they have to offer….Whenever you go into a town where they make you welcome, eat what is set before you. Cure those in it who are sick, and say, “The kingdom of God is very near to you.”

A model is provided for places where things don’t go so well: …whenever you enter a town and they do not make you welcome, go out into the streets and say, “We wipe off the very dust of your town that clings to our feet, and leave it with you.”

And this Gospel points out The Plan works: The seventy-two came back rejoicing, “Lord,” they said, “even the devils submit to us when we use your name.”

It’s not rocket science. Effective sales leaves no stone unturned. Anything that moves is a prospect. Not all may be perceived to be of equal value. That needs to be taken into account as time is allocated. One shouldn’t expect it to be easy. It never is. But success breeds success.

Well, this isn’t only Pentecost VI this year. It’s also our national day, the 4th of July. Independence Day. What, if anything, does this Gospel have to do with the 4th of July holiday? I submit to you, a whole lot!

Our Constitution contains the words Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Those words have been interpreted in various ways over the years. Some may be unaware that it wasn’t until the mid-19th century, for example that tax dollars in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ceased to be used for the support of churches. Ah, but that was a state, not the country!

Let me suggest to you that it’s probably a violation of the Constitutioni for the IRS to deny tax exempt status to a congregation that endorses a political candidate. I don’t know that doing so is particularly wise or even effective, but my point is that provision in the Constitution is designed to prevent government from messing with religion, not religion messing with government. In fact, I would argue it is the responsibility of religion to mess with government, to seek a society reflecting its ideals. However, it must do so using legally provided methods.

Constitutionally, I would argue there is no proper sanction against prayer being offered in public schools. The sanction should apply to any student being forced to pray against his will and such prayer as is offered should be the prayer of any religion if prayer is to be offered at all. And my preference is it shouldn’t be made “one size fits all” not to offend. Christian prayer should name Jesus, for example.

Similarly, for there to be religious displays in public space I don’t think is unconstitutional. It would probably be beneficial in a diverse society. Where the rub comes is if one tradition is favored over others. All (including atheism and Wiccanism) should have a crack at the space.

There are many ways to be Jesus’ advance party. From educational conversations, to making one’s worship space clean, neat, and beautiful, to meeting the needs of the community in which believers are placed, to public displays, to announcements, to political action. It’s a game everyone can play. Yes, it has its challenges and we don’t all find our niche easily but the rewards are great.

As the disciples in this morning’s Gospel learned.

My wife tells the story (several of you have heard me tell it) of sitting in her pew pondering how large a role religion plays in the world’s conflicts, how many have been dispossessed, abused, and killed in the name of one person or another’s so-called religious faith. In the midst of this, she reports, she heard a “voice” say, “None of you have got it right, but that’s all right!”

All these voices. Competing voices. Competing religions. Competing Christian voices declaring their way is the only way to salvation. Congregations, even in the same town or region, circling like vultures to pick up the disaffected or dislocated of their co-religionists’ congregations. As I read the Tower of Babel story in preparation for this Sunday I couldn’t help but think how completely Yahweh God achieved his purpose over the years.

Well, partly. If the goal were to prevent mankind from building such grand structures that it would convince itself it could accomplish everything on its own, without the help or support of its God, it might not appear that goal has been achieved. Not when we look at current events!

I think it interesting, though, when we look at the sweep of history, particularly how this morning’s lessons demonstrate the use of language in God’s plan under, first, the old covenant and, then, the New Covenant brought in by Jesus. In the first instance, Yahweh God uses language to confuse; in the second, God, through the Holy Spirit, uses language to unify.

I find it fascinating that we hear these lessons when we do this year. Liturgically, the Feast of Pentecost is always placed at the threshold between the two halves of the Church Year, the historic half, now coming to a close as we conclude our annual walk through salvation history, and the teaching half, now beginning, in which we applying the meaning and implication of the history through which we’ve walked.

The liturgical positioning is the constant. This year the secular calendar tracks with the Church calendar: Next weekend is Memorial Day Weekend, the traditional beginning of summer, the annual separation which ends the program year in schools and businesses. Summer serves as a time of recreation, of refueling.

It also serves as a time of planning. I tell my jobseeker clients it’s the second best time of the year to look for a job, second only to the period between Thanksgiving and the first of a new year. Why? Because the third biggest hiring month of a year is September, the harvest of the program planning done for the new program year during the summer.

This year’s Pentecost observance happens to fall shortly after the consecration of our new bishop, this diocese’s first non-Connecticut priest. He pointed this out himself during the disernment process. It colors the perspective he brings to the office. He has absolutely no Connecticut experience. He comes as a tabula rasa, a “clean slate.”

But, so appropriate to this Pentecost and any Pentecost’s message, though his Connecticut slate may be clean, his slate itself is not only not clean, it is rich with what is written on it.

Look at his bio: The man grows up in a working class family in Fitchburg, MA, (His father was a welder I believe.) the first of his family to go to college. And the college he goes to is one where someone from such a background is definitely in the minority! Then to Cambridge, MA to seminary, a place also known for its dominant institution of higher learning, Harvard.

You’d think he’d be tainted by all this. Au contraire, upon graduation and ordination, acting out Taft’s motto, “Not to be served but to serve,” he goes and spends the first year plus of his ordained life among the poorest of the poor, in Haiti. But he doesn’t go in, often, the usual way such workers have gone, as a bearer of the wisdom and benificence of the rich, American way of life. No. He goes as a learner, under the direction of its indigenous Haitian bishop, to help, under his direction. And is immersed in the “tongue” of Haiti, a unique dialect of French/Portuguese, in which he becomes fluent!

Ask him what God is to him and what the work of the Church is to him and he will answer, essentially with one word: reconciliation. Peacemaking. Welding the different and competing “tongues” into a unity of mutual respect and eagerness to learn the ways of the “other.” His travels, his teaching, his associations, his entire life for his active ministry, are all global. Multi-cultural. Interreligious.

His remarks at his consecration are brief. He ends them with a statement I’ve heard him repeat on several occasions since: “Now it begins.” The work. The discernment is past. As a therapist friend of mine was fond of saying, “Insight is bull; you finally have to change.” “Now it begins” is another way of saying that.

We stand at the cusp of summer. We’ve anticipated the coming of the Christ child. We’ve celebrated his birth and watched him amaze and astound his elders in the Temple. We’ve learned of his ministry. We’ve watched him cause their outrage by his “speaking truth to power,” the challenge he offered to “the way we’ve always done it.” We’ve watched him pay the price. And claim the victory. And put in place the succession plan.

Which now begins.

Summer offers a unique opportunity. It’s a time when we explore. Many of us are not in our usual surroundings for at least part of the time. Wherever we are, though, there are opportunities to learn, to explore, to hear the Gospel spoken in another “tongue.” That “tongue” may still be English but with a different accent, a different color, a different socioeconomic class. To hear it with the attitude it has something to teach is to participate in “Now it begins.”

The doctor in my Iowa congregation (The town was tiny enough that we were a little Rotary!: We had the doctor, the banker, the digger, the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician and there were just about one of each in the town!) and his wife had reached that point in his career where each year they would take a major trip. Wherever they went they would not miss church. They would bring back the bulletin. And the story. It caught on. A good kind of competition began. Our people started making it a point to get to church, bring back the bulletin, tell the story. Perhaps the doctor’s were among the more exotic. But others were as colorful. And surprising.

Class: I’d like to give you an assignment this morning: Do that. Bring back the bulletins. Be ready to tell the story. In announcement time. You have some storytelling practice. You’ve done wonderfully. This is just another opportunity.

Let’s use our summer, our reflections, our explorations, our experiences of “other tongues” during this special period to inform how our “Now it begins” can, following in the Pentecost tradition change the confusion of our modern Towers of Babel into the unity and reconciliation of that first Pentecost.

Two of this morning’s readings are set in the context of “last things.”

The Second Lesson is a portion of the Epilogue of the Revelation to John, a highly symbolic tract, written for its times, to increase the hope and determination of the Early Church during a period of disturbance and bitter persecution, in some respects not unlike the scary times in which we live.

It was not written by the author of this morning’s Gospel lesson. We’re not certain exactly who the author was. Most think it was written around 95 B.C.E., about sixty years after the Crucifixion, by someone inside the Gospel writer’s circle. It prophesies the certain downfall and destruction of Roman imperial power using symbolism as a code language so it can provide hope to the faithful without attracting the notice of the persecutors.

Just before the appointed passage we find the words of the author I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. When I had heard and seen them all, I knelt at the feet of the angel (messenger) who had shown them to me, to worship him; but he said, “Don’t do that: I am a servant just like you and like your brothers the prophets and like those who treasure what you have written in this book. It is God that you must worship.”

This, too, he said to me, “Do not keep the prophecies in this book a secret, because the Time is close….Happy are those who will have washed their robes clean (the baptized), so that they will have the right to feed on the tree of life and come through the gates into the city.

In verse 16, at the beginning of the Epilogue section of the reading, the speaker changes from the author to Jesus: I, Jesus, have sent my angel to make these revelations to you for the sake of the churches….The one who guarantees these revelations repeats his promise: I shall indeed be with you soon.

Similarly, this morning’s Gospel reading is the final portion of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer, placed in John’s Gospel just before its account of Jesus’ arrest. That prayer serves as his valedictory address to the disciples.


“Last things” tend to be important things. Therapists will tell you that, often, the “business” of a therapy session takes place in the last minutes of the time. Great emphasis is place, both in the Bible and in life, on the “last words” of a dying person. So we can assume that what Jesus says in his High Priestly Prayer reflects what he regards as most important. What is that?

May they all be one.
Father, may they be one in us,

How?

as you are in me and I am in you

Any special reason why we should be one in that manner? Absolutely!

so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.

The credibility of Jesus’ role as Messiah and the evangelistic ability of his followers depend on it!

If the unity represented by being one with one another as God is in Jesus and Jesus is in God is so important to achieve, we need to understand it better. A word that may help is the word “desire,” as in romantic love. Akin to it is the word “yearning,” with the “drawing toward one” it implies. The bond among Christians is expected to approach that kind of strength.

The strength of the bond between separated lovers. The strength that characterizes the bond between a parent and a child. The strength that characterizes the bond between military personnel in a combat unit, whose lives depend on one another, who give up their lives for one another.

Such bonds are forged through shared experiences, often not altogether pleasant shared experiences. We celebrated Mother’s Day last week. In a month we’ll celebrate Father’s Day. Not many parents I know, no matter have grateful they are for their children, would say the experience of parenting is without its surprises and its challenges. And many are the (often quite hilarious, told in the present) stories children will tell about the challenges they offered their parents in their younger years. I remember commenting to my stepson on some stories of that nature I’d heard from his Mom. As usual, Jeff, who has quite a sense of humor, quipped, “Yeah, Stan, and those are the ones they (his parents) knew about!”

This morning’s lesson from the Acts of the Apostles gives us its own “bonding” story: During Paul and Silas’ imprisonment there is an earthquake that shook the prison to its foundations. All the doors flew open and the chains fell from all the prisoners. When the jailer woke and saw the doors wide open he drew his sword and was about to commit suicide, presuming the prisoners had escaped.

But Paul shouted at the top of his voice, “Don’t do yourself any harm; we are all here.”

The jailer called for lights, then rushed in, threw himself trembling at the feet of Paul and Silas, and escorted them out, saying, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They told him to become a believer and he and his household as well would be saved. They preach to him and his family. Even though it was late, the jailer took them to wash their wounds. Then and there he and his family were baptized. Then he took them home, fed them and they celebrated their conversion.

The same as happened with Lydia in last week’s lesson from the Acts: Conversion, baptism, hospitality, evangelism. Hospitality, then evangelism. Experience a powerful event. A bond is created. The person tells their circle. The Faith grows. Which leads to which? Eucharist to Agape, the fellowship meal. Or the fellowship meal to Eucharist? For a congregation, the lunch we shared the Sunday after Easter could be to its life as imporant as, or more important than the Sacrament that preceded. Similarly, those who share in the tutoring effort, or the Jesse Tree. Both are needed: worship times and fellowship/shared task times.

These stories demonstrate how just one stirred believer can influence the faith of a household, a neighborhood, even a region. I think they also illustrate how the very reversals of our existence can contain in them the opportunities to bond. Far more comes from overcoming a tragedy, a rock in the road, than the usual same old/same old, uneventful, no drama experiences of our lives.

We need to pay attention to that, look for the opportunities in them, be open to God coming to us and enabling us to come to others through them. That, as we become one with one another, we become one with Jesus and the God who sent him for us, thereby experiencing the love, here and now, that is the Kingdom.

“Jesus Christ. Superstar. Are you who people say you are?” The root question. All depends on the answer. And not just that. It would be oh so easy if it were just that. Beyond the answer to the question we need the answer to the question that follows from the first question: How can we know and trust the answer you give to that first question, Jesus Christ, Superstar?

The Jews demand---we get the sense not altogether nicely---“If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”

He does tell them plainly, but in a confrontational way:

I have told you, but you do not believe.
The works I do in my Father’s name are my witness;
but you do not believe
because…you…are…no…sheep…of…mine

“Because you are not ‘psychologically available.’ “Because,” to use the common usage of the Hebrew Scriptures, ‘your hearts are hardened.’ You can’t let it in that I am the Christ, the Son of God.”

But others do let it in. Others are psychologically available.

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice;
I know them and they follow me.

And they benefit from knowing and following him, he says:

I give them eternal life;
they will never be lost
and no one will ever steal them from me.

The Lesson from the Acts of the Apostles we just heard records Tabitha/Dorcas benefitting from the disciples’ being “sheep that belong to me.” They, aware one of the Apostles was near when one of their number became ill and died, “one who was such a “sheep that belong to me” that she “never tired of doing good or giving in charity, sent for him. And he brings her back to life.

The lesson from the Revelation to St. John the Evangelist describes the reward of “the sheep that belong to me”:

These are the people who have been through the great persecution,
and because they have washed their robes white again in the blood
of the Lamb, they now stand in front of God’s throne and serve him
day and night in his sanctuary; and the One who sits on the throne
will spread his tent over them.

Revelation is a code book. It was written as a message of hope to the Christian community during the days of Roman persecution. The sacrifices of those for whom it was written were extreme because they insisted on observing their religion when it wasn’t popular to do so.

Today they would probably be the ones not joining in the bullying, the binge drinking in the frat house, the conspicuous consumption, the lifestyle that makes tithing impossible, the busyness that makes doing the work of the church and time for prayer and meditation way down the line in the competition for disposable time. They would probably be the ones standing up for those of other faiths, faiths not as dominant as their own, whose dress codes or religious observances were being forbidden by the government. They would probably be the ones who “couldn’t make” activities because of competing religious obligations. They would be the ones bearing the social cost, the modern version of persecution, for not “fitting in.”

But it won’t matter because: They will never hunger or thirst again; neither the sun nor scorching wind will ever plague them, because the Lamb who is at the throne will be their shepherd and will lead them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.

How do the sheep come to know the Shepherd? How do they come to know his voice? How do they come to serve him?

Experience. Just as Jesus says. They witness the works He and his followers do in the Father’s Name. The same way an infant learns, ideally, from the experience it has with a loving, dependable parent. It forms an “attachment” based on experience.

It’s primal. The British psychologist John Bowlby developed in the 1950’s and ‘60s what has come to be known as Attachment Theory, based on his observation of animal behavior in “families.”

He argued that nature (St. Thomas Aquinas might call it Natural Law) has programmed parents and children to attach to each other (or bond) in order to provide security and protection for the young while they are at vulnerable stages of development. When the child successfully looks to the parent to meet its security and protection needs a “secure attachment” is formed. When the needs are not consistently met an “ambivalent attachment” is formed, and when the needs are not met or met in a negative manner, an “avoidant attachment” is formed.

The Christian “sheep” or disciple or church member forms this secure attachment to the Good Shepherd in this manner, just as he forms secure attachments with his car, his job, his life partner, you name it---by seeing these things, persons or relationships perform dependably. And, like the infant-parent relationship, these other relationships, when undependable or negative, result in ambivalent or avoidant attachments.

These facts make it incumbent upon us:

To maximize our exposure to the experiences that result in the formation of the secure attachment, if we want the rewards described in the lessons. It has been wisely said Christianity is not a spectator religion. We’ve also heard it said, usually negatively, about those probably best assured of forming secure attachments and receiving the rewards that they “live at the church” or that “their whole life is the Church.”

Well, sports fans, that’s exactly what Jesus had in mind! It’s what has made the Black church so vital. It’s what makes many mosques as vital as they often are. It’s what’s contributed to the growth of those churches that are growing. They are the community centers for their people. What activities their people engage in are almost exclusively with other members of their church and through the organizations of their church. Total immersion. It’s been said communities either go forward or backward; those who stay the same are on the way to dying. If one’s religious faith is going to work, one can’t practice it halfway.

We’re not talking here about the hereafter. We’re talking about the “now.”

I once participated in an entity we referred to as the Grief Resources Group. We met before work, at a local hospital. We were clergy, nurses, doctors, social workers, funeral directors, lawyers, anyone who dealt with loss. The idea was to contribute our various experiences and perspectives to one another, form a synergy among our disciplines, the better to serve those with whom we dealt.

We quickly learned physical death was a very small part of what we dealt with. There was divorce, unemployment, amputation, mastectomies and other medical losses, demotions, even aging (which one person has called “relinquishment,” the serial “giving up” of things one used to be able to do). We also quickly learned that the clients we had who practiced---not just professed, as in “Oh, I believe….---but actually practiced their religious faith, handled the rocks in the road of life better, in direct proportion to how much they practiced their religious faith.

We spend considerable sums of money on insurance to protect against medical and physical loss. Whyever would we not invest like money and energy in protecting against spiritual loss???

These facts also make it incumbent upon us to do what we can to assure that those who seek to form their attachments in our fellowship find in us the dependability that fosters secure attachments, rather than the undependability that creates ambivalent attachments or the negative experiences that create avoidant attachments.

May the works we do in the Father’s Name be our witness that we listen to the Good Shepherd’s voice and follow Him.

Amen.

You know, I wonder: I wonder what goes through the minds of pewsitters who hear lessons like we’ve just heard. Because, mostly, they don’t sound like good news.

In the Gospel, we find Jesus responding to the disciples’ complaint Pontius Pilate had desecrated their temple offerings by mingling them with the blood of those he had executed, by telling them if they didn’t repent they would die like those Pilate had executed, or like those the tower at Siloam fell on. Lesson: Look for sympathy and get threatened.

He continues with the Parable of the Fig Tree, whose owner, after it had failed to produce for three years, wanted it cut down. “Why should it be taking up the ground?”

In the Epistle we are treated to a recitation of how their ancestors, delivered from their captivity “failed to please God and their corpses littered the desert.” Through a series of examples the point is made displeasing God is a capital crime.

Only in the Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures does the tone lighten, but the comforts still are dependent on repentance.

I’m keenly aware of how strong the association is, in many, if not most, people’s minds of the Church with judgment. I’m aware of the common knee jerk reaction to seeing a clerical collar being, “Uh, oh. Better ‘watch it’ now…” The Church, to its discredit, has, for much of its history, irresponsibly and unfaithfully used literal interpretations of Scriptures like these to impose its authority and seek to control those seeking to be faithful people.

Moreover, I have great difficulty believing in or following the kind of nasty, punitive God presented, if taken at face value. How dare a deity who created his creatures frail, turn around and beat them up because they act out of the very frailty He created! You can tell me, “Well, He gave you free will. You used it to stray. Now you get the consequences.” I’ll buy consequences. What I have trouble with is the “cruel and unusual punishment” part; the punishment is disproportionate to the crime!

Am I saying I don’t believe The Bible? No. I’m saying it has to be understood as what it is: The best we have. The witness of writers who lacked the advantages of two thousand and more years of discovery and revelation, to apply to human experience. It’s our starting point. And Jesus needed to use the categories particular to the age in which he lived to make his points.

These points take on a much more positive character if we view these Scriptures as metaphor. Lack of discipline. Straying from known, proven paths to success have consequences. Often severe ones. Like death. Or, put another way, failure to live as fully as one might.

A few years after I joined Challenger, Gray & Christmas the annual convention of the trade group whose members are, most commonly, its customer contacts was held in my sales territory. The company always has a booth in the exhibit hall. Those sales executives geographically nearest the convention city staff the booth. The days are long. The Tower of Siloam was to fall on me in Boston’s Hynes Convention Center!

God, in the form of JEC, the company’s President and Founder, was there. That’s an understatement. He was everywhere there! I couldn’t escape him. Each sentence began with, “Why didn’t?” “Why hasn’t?” Every two minutes he would call, “There’s one!” “Go talk to him!” This wasn’t a matter of just standing behind an information table and answering the questions of those who stopped by. It was a matter of intercepting harried attendees with a few minutes between sessions, stepping into aisles like a carnival barker and buttonholing them so they’d pay attention to our booth rather than just pass by.

I absolutely hate that kind of behavior. I am extremely reactive when it’s used on me. I remember others trying to calm JEC down. Even his wife told him he should apologize. She could have saved her breath. He was single minded that booth and all his employees had a job to do and he was going to see to it that they did it..

I remember telling Mrs. Challenger and others who were interceding for me it was all right, that I needed to follow what Jim was calling for. That the pressure was making me, though it was unpleasant, more skilled at doing what was called for in that environment. I had experienced Jim by then as someone who demanded a great deal and was outspoken that he would demand a lot, but cared immensely for his people, was always there for us.

Similarly, I notice how often the players on the UConn women’s basketball team describe their coach that way. Tina Charles who has just set new records on that team came to UConn immature, easily led, a kid. She doesn’t leave that way. She’s asked how she handled all the times her coach benched her, denied her playing time, pushed her and pushed her, and pushed her. She gives all the credit for her success to Geno Auriemma. She talks about how he knew what she needed and demanded she give it. How he punished her when she gave less than he knew she was capable of giving. Then she adds, “But he believed in me. He supported me.”

In game after game I watch the second half more intensely than the first. More often than not that’s when UConn spreads out the lead. Why? Because no team is better conditioned than they. It shows in the second half, as the opponent becomes increasingly exhausted by UConn’s intensity. UConn isn’t feeling it; they’re so used to going that long at that pace. In fact, their coach says they look forward to the games because they’re so much easier than practice!

Everybody hates Dis, military boot camp Drill Instructors. Ask them why all that abuse and their answer is simple. “I’m trying to save their lives in combat.” After these same recruits have seen combat they will say they’re alive because of their Dis.

But it’s really more than the grinding through under relentless taskmasters. The Good News is in the result. That’s why one puts up with it. That’s why I can say thank you to Jim Challenger, the UConn women can say thank you to Geno Auriemma and recruits, their families and loved ones and their nation can say thank you to drill instructors. It’s the exhilaration that comes from being all one can be. That’s where the “life” lies.

That’s why we come to the water all you who are thirsty
though (we) have no money, (how we are able to) come
(Why we are able to) Buy corn without money, and eat
and, at no cost, wine and milk
Why we listen to Him
so that our souls may live and our hearts soar.

These passages take on an entirely different character viewed as the message of a life force we struggle to get our limited minds around warning us succumbing to spiritual flabbiness of the easy fix and immediate pleasure brings a kind of death. That life force’s goal for us is more: That we will welcome the sometimes rigorous correction that enables us to have life and it more abundantly.

All religions are based on a handful of theological questions. Basic ones are
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?

In this morning’s Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures we hear an answer to the “Who am I?” question: My father was a wandering Aramaean. He went down into Egypt to find refuge there, few in numbers; but there he became a nation, great, mighty, and strong. The Egyptians ill treated us, they gave us no peace and inflicted harsh slavery on us. But we called on Yahweh the God of our fathers. Yahweh heard our voice and saw our misery, our toil and our oppression; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. He brought us here and gave us this land, a land where milk and honey flow.

Story is important. It reminds us who we are. Our sense of who we are is expressed in our behaviors. What’s happened to us in our lives is expressed in our behaviors.

Small wonder story is part of the central act of the Eucharist, the consecration prayer, in a section called the anamnesis which means “remembrance”: For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread…. Story is also an integral part of congregations’ search processes for new clerical leadership. The people are asked to tell stories about the parish, their memories and experience of it as an aid to identify what kind of leadership will be a good “fit” for them.

Story is used to inspire. To be a wandering Aramaean from a small tribe was to be nothing. Scholars think the “wandering Aramaean” referred to is Jacob, who had heard there was grain in Egypt and who had gone there to obtain some during a severe famine, to keep his people from starving. This passage speaks of a God who, when the Egyptians ill-treated him and his tribe, used His power to rescue him. Not only to rescue this “nothing” person and his “nothing” tribe but to bring them to a new and wonderful land.

We Americans have been taught a similar story. The Puritan flight from England to escape religious oppression, the hardships endured in the New World, followed by a history that has many now believing we are the greatest nation, the most powerful nation in the world.

These are the “mega” stories: the story of nations; what are the “mini” stories? What is your story? What is mine? In the time of reflection the Lenten season affords we might consider the people and events that have formed our story. The geography. The relationships.

My father was a wandering Aramaean. Have you “wandered” in your life? In your job? Are there times when you weren’t sure what you would be when you grew up? Is this one of them? What brought you out of them? In the answer may lie clues to God’s activity in your life. Through events. Through other people. Through your internal resources.

Similarly: have you experienced a time in your life when, metaphorically, the crops failed. Or hope was broken. Or trust failed. When everything that fed you dried up and withered. What brought you through? Again, in the answer may lie clues to God’s activity.

What about the treasured friends? Or relatives. Or others who left their imprints on your life and/or on the life of the community. In each Sunday’s edition of The Hartford Courant there is a feature article entitled Extraordinary Life. It profiles a person who lived in the readership area, who died in the previous few months. Whose are the “Extraordinary Lives” in your story? How are you and that story different because of them?

The Gospel shows us Jesus using his story, in the form of his use of Scripture, to respond to the temptations:

Jesus has been fasting and is hungry. The devil tells him to show
he’s the Son of God by turning a stone into a loaf of bread. Jesus
refuses to show off, quoting Man does not live on bread alone.

The devil takes him to a height and shows him all the kingdoms of
the world, promising him the power and glory of them if Jesus will
but worship him. Jesus quotes the Scripture You must worship
the Lord your God, and serve him alone.” In response.

Finally, the devil takes him up to the parapet of the Temple and
Invites him to demonstrate his faith by throwing himself off it,
himself quoting two Scripture passages, He will put his angels
in charge of you to guard you and They will hold you up on
their hands in case you hurt your foot against a stone. Jesus
trumps what the devil appears to have thought was his ace by
responding You must not put the Lord your God to the test!

How would we use our story? One way might be to make a different kind of confession than the one often associated with Lent. We most commonly think of the meaning of the term “confession” associated with the General Confession we recite as part of the Eucharist. There is another use of that term: the one associated with its use in the name of the holy day The Feast of the Confession of St. Peter. That use refers to a witness or a proclamation. Our reflections might lead us to witness or proclaim the understanding we’ve come to of God’s activity in our lives.

Another way we might use our story is suggested by this morning’s Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures: When you come to the land Yahweh your God is giving you for an inheritance, when you have taken possession of it and are living in it, you must set aside the first fruits of all the produce of the soil raised by you in the land Yahweh is giving you. You must put them in a pannier and go to the place where Yahweh your God chooses to give his name a home. You must go to the priest then in office and say to him, “Today I declare to Yahweh my God that I have come to the land Yahweh swore to our fathers he would give us…Here then I bring the first fruits of the produce of the soil that you, Yahweh, have given me.”

Story, understanding who we are, how we came to be who we are, how God’s activity in our lives has made and is making us who we are draws our attention to using who we are to demonstrate our gratitude by giving back to that same God through our time, our abilities and our material resources, to serve him. Coming to this understanding and using it are what Lent is all about!

“We tried that once, and it didn’t work.”
“How can I, when…”(fill in the impediment)
“I’m really not that good at” (fill in the task someone is being asked to perform)

Jesus had probably had better days than the one Luke records in this morning’s Gospel.

He’s standing by the Lake of Gennesaret. A crowd is pressing around him. He’s preaching and catches sight of two boats close to the bank, their occupants on the shore, washing their nets. “I know how to get a little distance from this crowd,” he thinks. “I’ll have one of these guys put out a little from shore, giving me some breathing room.”

He finishes preaching and now he gets another idea. A different idea: “Put out into deep water,” he says to Simon, whose boat it was, “and pay out your nets for a catch.” Oh, boy! Can’t you just see it? As Simon explains, “Master, we worked hard all night long and caught nothing.” They’re tired. They’ve been up all night. They’re disappointed. When Jesus got (uninvited, we have to believe) into their boat they were probably thinking of getting some rest. They’ve done him a favor. Now this!” Talk about “no good deed goes unpunished!”

But, more gracious than one of us probably would have been, Simon says, “but if you say so, I will pay out the nets.” Maybe that will convince the preacher. The “We tried that once, and it didn’t work” didn’t!

They get a surprise: “when they had done this they netted such a huge number of fish that their nets began to tear, so they signaled to their companions in the other boat to come and help them; when these came, they filled the two boats to the sinking point.”

Are they embarrassed or what? When Simon Peter saw this he fell at the knees of Jesus saying, “Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.” (“I don’t deserve this! I doubted you!”)

Same thing with Isaiah, who saw the Lord Yahweh seated on a high throne; his train filled the sanctuary; above him stood the seraphs, each one with six wings: two to cover its face, two to cover its feet and two for flying.

The foundations of the threshold shook with the voice of the one who cried out, and the Temple was filled with smoke. I said:
“What a wretched state I am in! I am lost,
for I am a man of unclean lips
and I live among a people of unclean lips
and my eyes have looked at the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.”

We all have our excuses, don’t we? Our fears, our insecurities, our feelings of inadequacy or unworthiness. Our laziness. Our cynicism.

I know how many times in my sales career I’ve had to convince myself to call again on companies who have refused to see me, who have told me they never use what I sell or they do use it and are very satisfied with one of my company’s competitors. I also have paid a lot of bills and taken a lot of vacations on the commissions from some of those same companies because, when I tried later, the decisionmaker had changed. Or they’d had a bad experience with the competitor. Or they remembered something I’d said and it had changed their minds.

At some point in their job searches most of my clients tell me there’s “nothing ‘out there.’” No jobs. The economy is bad. They’re too old. They don’t have a college degree. They’re too young. The technology has changed from what they know how to use. There are no jobs in their field in the area where they live and they can’t/won’t move. I also know what happens when they step aside from using the methods jobseekers have always used to find jobs and try the counterintuitive ones we teach them, because I’ve had the perverse satisfaction that comes from congratulating them on the ideal situations they report they’ve teased out from the “out there” where they had claimed nothing was.

If people aren’t interested in the Church any more why does our Centering Prayer group draw the numbers it does, regularly. Why is Compline at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle or at Christ Church, New Haven standing room only in Seattle and in the hundreds already in New Haven. Why, when I visit a hilltop in Taize in France, does my 20 year old host tell me of the thousands who stay in tents and are fed in soup lines for weeks on end in the summer so they can pray there? And, even in April, when I visit and attend candlelight vespers which goes on for hours in a hall filled to overflowing, is no one looking at their watches? And these are young people. And their focus is not judgment and “Jesus saves.” It’s the environment. It’s peacemaking. It’s feeding the hungry.

When we hear “I’m not good at” (fill in the blank of whatever task we are approached to consider performing/responsibility we are asked to consider taking on, do we consider how much farther ahead our experience of the Kingdom here on earth might be were our response to continue, “but I’ll do what I can with this much.” “Can I get help with/be directed to learning more about this part of it I don’t know yet?” Or “I’m better at….and I’ll be happy to take that on.”

This morning’s lessons show us that help is there. It took care of Isaiah’s unclean lips. Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding in his hand a live coal which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. With this he touched my mouth and said:
“See now, this has touched your lips, (I didn’t say the “help” never involves
some discomfort or stretching….)
your sin is taken away,
your iniquity is purged.”
That done
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying:
“Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?”
I answered, “Here I am, send me.”

In the Epistle, St. Paul reminds the Corinthians of the gospel he preached to them is only what I had been taught myself and that, if worthiness were the criteria he’d not have met it. I am the least of the apostles; in fact, since I persecuted the Church of God, I hardly deserve the name apostle, but by God’s grace that is what I am and that grace has not been fruitless.

Now. True Confession time: I told you last week I was dreading Clergy Conference. I waved some of the topics under your noses so you could see why.
Like the disciples, I got some surprises.

What does it take for someone to leave home and family on a months long journey to they know not where, drawn by a star with a pull much as that exerted upon the seas as they ebb and flow? The wise men had heard a “king of the Jews” had been born, yes, but they were not Jews. This was not their king. What made it so necessary for them to do this king homage? What put it into them to experience the star’s pull and then to put themselves at such inconvenience as to let it draw them, first, to Jerusalem, then, following its Temple’s chief priests and scribes, on to Bethlehem? What brought them to their knees before a baby, obviously humbly born???

God only knows. Literally. We don’t. Not for sure. And this is true of all “calls.” They come unbidden. Often they come unwelcome. Similarly, they often come unexpectedly. But the world can be changed by them. Our lives can be changed by them.

The Epiphany story is also referred to as “the manifestation to the Gentiles,” the “other” than the Jews. It is seen to be the evidence that the “good news” was not to be only for the Jewish people but for all people. Including non-Jews, like you and me.

I pondered these questions as I sat in a Congregational meetinghouse last Sunday. I’d not followed a star; unless you count as a star the “light” I’d found in a book that led me to that place, through Sunday’s snowstorm. My journey was measured in hours, not the months that measured the wise men’s journey. The pull of my star was probably not as strong as the pull of theirs but a pull it was. I had to see for myself, if I could, what this place I’d read about was like.

As the preacher explored the themes of the Gospel I’ve just read, the thought came into my mind, “I’m repeating…that…journey!” in another form: A modern pilgrim, responding to little nudges, to see where they lead.

I’d started reading this book as part of the study requirement of a rule of life I follow, partly because I’d heard it talked about mainline Protestant churches that were growing, not declining or closing. I was to find out as I got into it that the words “any more” should be added, because most of those described were on their way to closing before they took new tacks.

Describing the church I was visiting, the author writes, “When Lillian (the previous senior minister) arrived in 1996, the church was divided by conflict and threatened with closure. Only a handful of families remained. The choir was bigger than the congregation. To survive---just to pay the heating bills---the church had been selling off bits of its property for more than twenty years. Not only were these tangible measures of success low, but Redeemer had nearly run out of hope.” Such descriptions are typical of the churches she profiles.

As I read further in the book, I found myself saying again and again, “That’s us! That’s Christ Church. We’re like that!” I read things like:

Do your kids ever have you tearing your hair? Do you wonder if they’ll ever “turn out all right?” Do you ever wonder how you measure up as a parent?

Do your parents not understand you? Do you wonder if they’ll ever “get it”? Do you wonder if you’ll ever be able to please them?

Then this Sunday’s for you! Some call it Holy Family Sunday because of the subject matter. Whatever you want to call it, the lessons don’t fit neatly the “family values” theme:

The hero of the Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures, Samuel, is, arguably, not in what your neighborhood social worker would regard as an ideal situation. He’s in the Temple, yes, and with a holy man, yes. But the holy man is old and, judging by how his kids, Hophni and Phineas turned out, anything but a great success as a parent himself.

These kids are so bad that Yahweh God feels He has to break His promise to their tribe (They were Levites.) that they would be Israel’s priesthood, and install Samuel instead. Talk about corruption: It was customary for worshippers to bring meat sacrifices to the Temple. Eli’s sons made it a practice to help themselves to these sacrifices, intended for Yahweh God alone. As if that weren’t enough, they abused their positions to sleep with the women serving in the Temple, both practices being major abominations.

Some would criticize Hannah and Elkanah, Samuel’s parents. They visit him once a year, when they’re in Jerusalem for the annual pilgrimage anyway, and they bring him a robe. “Thanks, Folks!”

Then there’s the situation described in the Gospel: Mary and Joseph leave Jersualem to go back home. It’s a full day later when they miss the kid. They assumed he was somewhere in the caravan, with the relatives, but it’s not as if they stayed close! So they panic, head back to Jerusalem, find him, and they who, in our society, would be before DCF, accused with child abandonment and neglect, chew him out for not telling them! Does he apologize? No-o-o! He smarts off: “You shoulda known I’d be in my Father’s house…”

On the other hand we can note:

Every time Advent rolls around, and this Gospel is appointed, and it falls to me to read it, I think of Charlie Scott, my college chaplain, my friend, and a dear brother priest. One of his friends nicknamed him “Colussus.” He certainly was that to me: A giant in the formation of my ministry as well as a physically imposing man.

Charlie was Presbyterian minister who, my first year in college, jumped the fence and became an Episcopal priest. He loved the liturgy with the passion of Canterbury, Scripture with the passion of Geneva. He drilled into us that it was not enough just to read a passage of Scripture; we owed a duty to ourselves, our congregations, and our Lord, sufficiently to understand it that our oral interpretation, how we read it, would be consistent with what it meant.

So I think of him when I speak in John the Baptist’s voice the opening words of this morning’s Gospel and place in my mind’s eye this giant of the Faith. To experience John the Baptist was not to experience comfort. He didn’t speak; he bellowed. He was rough, unkempt. His hair would have known no comb, his person no deodorant. His food was locusts and honey.

And his message, oh his message---like a stun gun. No “Peace on Earth, Good will towards men” in this. Rather, Dies irae, the wrath of God. And no escaping: who warned you to fly from the retribution that is coming? But if you are repentant, produce the appropriate fruits, and do not think of telling yourselves, “We have Abraham for our father…” =We’re the Chosen.

This is a pretty cold shower for the crowds who had come out to hear him, attracted by his reputation as a charismatic preacher. He’s preaching to the choir, isn’t he? Because they’d come out, after all, to be baptized, to be washed of their sins in the Jordan River. Why is he treating them like this?

He’s treating them like this because he believes they don’t fully understand the extent of the sin they’ve committed and are continuing to commit. As his directions for what they must do, later in the passage, demonstrate, they need to address systemic sin as well. And they need to address it in the context of their present lives. He addressed three specific audiences:

This morning’s appointed Scriptures constitute a tale of three messengers:

The post-exilic prophet Malachi, addressing a Jewish people asking of Yahweh their God, “So, what have you done for us lately?”

The Apostle Paul, in a rare departure from his crabby, hit ‘em where they aren’t critiques of the behaviors of the early Christian communities, actually giving thanks for and praising the church gathered at Philippi.

And the Evangelist Luke recording the prophetic ministry of St. John the Baptist, almost universally now thought to be the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy, “my messenger to prepare a way for me.”

Our recessional will celebrate him in verse and song:

Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding.
“Christ is nigh,” it seems to say;
“Cast away the works of darkness,
O ye children of the day.”

As is often the case with the lectionary, the portion of Scripture appointed to be read is either preceded or followed by some “good stuff” not included in the reading itself but which is helpful to our understanding of it. The Book of Malachi is one of the Bible’s “little books.” It is believed to have been written after the dedication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 516 BCE, so a little over 500 years before Jesus was born and after the Jews’ deliverance from their exile in Babylon.

So, OK: Yahweh has delivered the Jewish people from their oppressors, yet they’re whining. They’re free, yes, but it didn’t quite follow their script for how it was to roll out…Says Malachi in the verse preceding our appointed lesson:

You weary Yahweh with your talk. You ask, “How do we weary him?”

“Let me tell you,” says Malachi.

When you say, “Any evildoer is good as far as Yahweh is concerned;
Indeed he likes them best”; or when you say, “Where is the God of
justice now?”

It appears it’s not enough for them they’re OK; they want to see their oppressors suffer. In short, they want to substitute their justice for God’s! They apparently have not yet tumbled to the fact God often surprises His people by acting in ways they don’t expect. (As He is about to again---with a Messiah in the form of a helpless baby rather than on a white charger!) It’s an appropriate lection for this “in between” season of Advent, full of reversals: lowly things and people exalted, the mighty brought low.

“You want justice?” Malachi asks. “You’ll get justice all right!” He continues, speaking as Yahweh God,

Look, I am going to send my messenger to prepare a way before
me. And the Lord you are seeking will suddenly enter his Temple;
and the angel of the covenant whom you are longing for, yes, he
is coming, says Yahweh Sabaoth.

But are you ready for this…

Who will be able to resist the day of his coming? Who will remain
standing when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire and
the fuller’s alkali…he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them
like gold and silver, and then they will make the offering to Yahweh
as it should be made…

In other words, “Be careful what you pray for. You may get it!”

Our knee jerk reaction to a passage like this might be, “Uh oh. This doesn’t sound so good. What kind of punitive God is this?” But think about it. Think about those words “refine” and “purify.” They are the words of making better; they are the words of tough love. They are the words of “whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.” The better to prepare them for the challenges they are to face. Like the hated drill sergent the soldier hates but about whom, looking back after surviving combat using what he learned, he claims saved his life!

This is a season much associated with Handel’s Messiah. It contains many of these words from Malachi. Did you know that, after its first presentation, in London in 1741, Handel wrote to a friend, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them. (The audience.) I wished to make them better.” Or that that intent was so important to him, he so saw his oratorio’s function as participating in the reflective/repentant theme of Advent that, even though by 1751 he was blind, until his death he conducted it as an annual benefit for the Foundling Hospital in London, which served mostly widows and orphans of the clergy?

If you think about it, most things for which we hope and wish carry with them a combination of anticipation and apprehension.

Think of the Nativity and think of a pregnancy period: Families are eager for the arrival of the child. A room is prepared. Furniture is secured. Relatives and friends are notified. Some of us want to know if it’s to be a boy or a girl, or even twins! Others want to be surprised. But we also count the fingers and toes. The couple thinks, “We hope he/she is healthy. How will we support him/her? How will it be to change the diapers? The 3 o’clock feeding?”

Before a wedding, with all the excitement, the happiness, still in many places it’s custom for the father of the bride to whisper in her ear, even as the two are about to march down the aisle, or the best man to whisper in the groom’s ear, “You know, you don’t have to do this!” And a common folk comment is that the night before the bride sleeps like a baby and it’s the groom who’s up all night, sweating, thinking about the responsibility he’s about to assume.

As appears to be true of any passage: Getting ready for a vacation. Approaching retirement. As a child leaves for college or their first apartment.

We might consider the uncertainties and ambivalences of our lives as normal process, part of the refinement and purification of a loving God, happening under His control and on His timetable.

The messengers provide us material for anticipation and the reflection that leads to preparation, repentance or both. Pick the concept you find most appealing because they’re pretty much the same, if the reflection is productive.

We can hope and pray the result will be others being able to say of us what the Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians:

I thank my God whenever I think of you; and every time I pray for all
of you, I pray with joy, remembering how you have helped to spread
the Good News from the day you first heard it right up to the present.
I am quite certain that the One who began this good work in you
Will see that it is finished when the Day of Christ Jesus comes.

See, the days are coming---it is Yahweh who speaks---when I am going to fulfill the promise I made to the House of Israel and to the House of Judah:

“In those days and at that time,
I will make a virtuous Branch grow for David,
who shall practice honesty and integrity in the land.
In those days Judah shall be saved
and Israel shall dwell in confidence.
And this is the name the city will be called:
Yahweh-our-integrity.”
The words of the prophet Jeremiah.

We hear these words echoed in English translation in the beginning aria of Handel’s Messiah….

Comfort ye… comfort ye… my people…saith your God
For your warfare…your warfare…is accomplished
And your iniquity is pardoned

Yet these same words are held in tension by this morning’s passage from St. Luke’s Gospel…

“There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars; on earth
nations in agony, bewildered by the clamor of the ocean and
its waves; men dying of fear as they await what menaces
the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. And
then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with
power and great glory.”

They announce well the mood of the Advent Season. It is an “in between” time in the Church’s liturgical calendar, one filled with the hope and joy and anticipation of the coming of the Christ child at Christmas, and the mixed anticipation and apprehension that attend the Second Coming of the Messiah at the end of time, and that Second Coming’s theme of judgment.

I love Advent! It is, perhaps, my favorite season of the entire Church year.

I love its quiet, meditative spirit.
I love its simplicity.
I love the single white candles in the windows of so many homes.
I love its anticipation of a New Order characterized by peace, justice
and integrity.

I dread not the Feast of Christmas but the way we as a society appear to have come to observe the period from when the first Christmas signs appear, which seem to come earlier and earlier each year, until the post-Christmas gift returns and exchanges taper off. I hate many of its characteristics almost as much as I love the Advent season .

I hate its loudness and garishness.
I hate its naked materialism and commercialism.
I hate its exploitation and manipulation.
I hate the relative deprivation it highlights as the have-lesses are
forced to become so very aware of what the have-mores have.
I hate the meanness its pressures bring out in people I encounter.
as I drive the streets and do what shopping I can’t put off until gift
return season is over.
I hate the guilt trips laid on people as gift giving decisions are made.
I hate the exhaustion the season’s expectations inflict on so many and
the lack of consideration shown by so many of the efforts being put
forth by others.
I hate the unkindness and ingratitude demonstrated in so many homes
to relatives and friends, as gifts are opened and someone “didn’t get
what I wanted” or “didn’t get it right!”

And I can’t help but imagine Jesus looking down on this perversion of the celebration of His birth and singing that popular song, “Look what they did to my song, Ma. Look what they did to my song. It was the only thing I could do half right. Look what they did to my song.”

Point/counterpoint. We, you and I, live in that tension during this season every year. We who go to church encounter Advent wreaths, subdued liturgies, ethereal atmospheres in our worship spaces, and we go out from them into the chaos, personal and civic, of the Christmas Season. We live out in our several ways our personal “in between time.”

We celebrate friendships, renew acquaintances, have so many encounters and treats to which we look forward, and our share of dreads. We make and receive our fair share (maybe sometimes more than our fair share!) of Second Coming-like judgment.

How shall we walk this tightrope? We, of course, will make our various choices, our tradeoffs, based on our attitudes and experiences, what backlash we are willing to endure. I don’t suggest the prejudices reflected in my loves and hates stated earlier are congruent with any of yours, necessarily. Nor that you experience this time in the same way I do. But, just in case you do, I want to remind us:

There are choices we can make, the first and most important of which, perhaps, is to remind ourselves, and to internalize the fact, we do have the right to make choices. We don’t have to conform to others’ expectations or demands. May there be consequences of our little acts of political incorrectness? Of course. But they’re likely to be bearable, and short lived. By next season or the one after those with whom we interact will be used to our customs. And, if they work for us, particularly, and others don’t accept us or those choices, perhaps we should be giving some thought to the value of these relationships that don’t let us be ourselves, that don’t let us embrace behaviors that make our religious lives richer.

It is inconsistent with the spirit of Advent to decorate with any more than greens and wreaths until Christmas Eve day afternoon. In my home it’s not permitted and in the homes of many others I know. It’s not Christmas yet; it’s Advent. Single white bulbs in the windows. A family Advent wreath. If we want to decorate the tree, Christmas Eve day and afternoon are the time. And maybe, just maybe, just that is enough, if more will interfere with our Christian observance of the feast.

Perhaps we would find this time more relaxing and we’d be more rested for the feast if we limited our participation in Christmas observances to the period between Christmas and Epiphany. Twelve days.

Hanukkah gift giving is reserved for the children. Maybe our Jewish brothers and sisters have something to teach us.

And Susan Campbell wrote in a recent Hartford Courant column, “For the past few Christmases, we’ve (she and her husband) skipped a gift exchange and either taken one another out to eat, or we go in for a donation to something like Heifer International….It would be so much easier if all the adults who’ve built their funeral pyres to a sufficient height (She figures “I have accumulated more than enough stuff to make a lovely funeral pyre, and so have most of my friends.”) would agree to buy nothing for one another, wouldn’t it?” She continues, “I don’t mean that in a Grinch-y kind of way but there are people out there who actually need things. I’m not one of them and neither are most of my friends. Factor this in, too. A new Harris Interactive poll said that 38 percent of Americans will give to a charity for the holidays---compared with 49 percent last year: That’s in the midst of an economic meltdown, when people most need charity.”

We might remember the gift giving described in Scripture didn’t even take place until Epiphany, with the coming of the Magi and, even then, the only gifts given were to the newborn King.

We might use the quiet, reflective time of Advent to take stock. Advent Sunday is, after all, the Church’s “New Year.” Most of us took a vow to follow the One whose birth we celebrate at Christmas. In our baptisms. In our confirmations. And we’ve renewed that vow at every baptism in the Church we’ve attended. We’ve also vowed at weddings we’ve attended “to support and uphold” the couples. How have we done? How do we intend to do?

Knowing how stressful the outside world is during these weeks, we might try to get more rest, spend more time in quiet, pamper and refuel a little more, so we’re not as cranky as we might otherwise be under the circumstances.

We might consider substituting a plan to contact those on our Christmas card list over the course of the coming year. Individually. Rather than raising our stress level and concentrating the contact cost in a couple month period and being superficial at that, by sending Christmas cards and/or Christmas letters. It might add a new depth to friendship maintenance.

As we make decisions about where and with whom we celebrate the feast we might devote attention to what enables us to enjoy it most, as opposed to what others may “expect.” We don’t “have” to go to anybody’s, especially if to do so is to subject ourselves to dysfunction and pain. When it seems indicated, being with one’s “family of reference,” (friends---which may include certain family members, if they’re also friends…) may be preferred to being with a dysfunctional “family of origin.

A blessed+ “between times” Advent to you and yours, in the peace of God which passes all understanding.

Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, I want to sit up front!” “That’s not fair! I’m older.!”

“No! I should sit in front. I’m shorter! You’re taller. You can see just fine in back!”

No! Me, Mommy! You know I get car sick when I sit in the back…..”

Sound familiar? Get a group of sales executives together and listen to them compare their “numbers.” Or parents or grandparents talk about their kids and who should get the prize, the award. Soccer moms. Little League dads. See the bumper stickers, “My child is an honor student at…..” Or, in parishes across this land that have Christmas pageants, imagine being a fly on the wall as the discussion goes on about whose kid gets to be Mary and whose gets to be Joseph!

Disciples, too, hunh?

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approached him. “Master,”
they said to him, “we want you to do us a favor….Allow us to sit
one at your right hand and the other at your left in your glory.”

So I guess we Anglicans follow in a long tradition…Even though the sees of Canterbury and York are theoretically equal in importance, dividing jurisdiction of England in half, Canterbury responsible for the south and York the north, it is the Archbishop of Canterbury who is primus inter pares (“first among equals”) as titular, or symbolic head of the communion, not the Archbishop of York. Want to know why? Because, tradition has it, when it was decided one would have primacy and the king was deciding who, the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury lept to sit on the king’s right to claim it, edging out the Archbishop of York!

Well, the passage tells us the absolutely predictable happened with this juvenile behavior of the disciples:

When the other ten heard this they began to feel indignant with James
and John…”


Of course they did. Just as siblings do, parents do, clerics do, with this kind of behavior.

The disciples just…don’t…get…it: that the essence of discipleship is not personal glorification but servanthood. As Mark records, Jesus has tried to get it through their thick skulls:

In this morning’s Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures we encounter a desperate and despondent woman: Hannah. Hers is a story to which any woman who has suffered from infertility or had difficulty conceiving will relate. But the pain these women have experienced pales in comparison to that Hannah must have experienced.

Hannah is one of two wives of a man of Ramathaim…whose name was Elkanah. His other wife was named Peninnah. Penninah had children but Hannah had none. Every year this man used to go up from his town to worship and to sacrifice to Yahweh Sabaoth in Shiloh.

One day Elkanah offered sacrifice. He used to give portions to Penninah and to all her sons and daughters; to Hannah, however, he would give only one portion, although he loved her more, since Yahweh had made her barren. Her rival (Elkanah’s other wife) would taunt her to annoy her, because Yahweh had made her barren. And this went on year after year; every time they went up to the temple of Yahweh she used to taunt her. And so Hannah wept and would not eat.

Her barrenness held an importance for Hannah greater than her husband did. Then Elkanah her husband said to her, “Hannah why are you crying and why are you not eating? Why so sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”

Apparently not, because after they had eaten in the hall, Hannah rose and took her stand before Yahweh, while Eli the priest was sitting on his seat by the doorpost of the temple of Yahweh. In the bitterness of her soul she prayed to Yahweh with many tears and made a vow, saying, “Yahweh Sabaoth! If you will take notice of the distress of your servant, and bear me in mind and not forget your servant and give her a man-child, I will give him to Yahweh for the whole of his life…”

This was so important to her that, in effect, while praying for fertility she was bargaining much of the joy of parenting she would have had because, as following scripture records, the child Samuel was turned over to Eli at a very early age and for the rest of his life, as promised. Perhaps easier to understand if we keep in mind that in Hannah’s culture much of a woman’s worth and honor was tied to her ability to give birth to children, and especially male children.

But Hannah kept her focus. She was single minded. And, as we know, Yahweh granted her request. Samuel grew up to be a prophet and judge, one of the most highly regarded ones, who would be the one to anoint both Saul and, later, his son, David, as kings.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews faces a different challenge: Keeping the early Christians in the Faith. As one commentary puts it, In the first century becoming a Christian could involve considerable personal sacrifice. It sometimes meant the severing of family ties, the loss of job opportunities and income, and even arrest, torture, and execution. The Christians to whom Hebrews was written apparently endured “hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated.” It seems that some of the Christians were imprisoned and others were robbed of their possessions. There were many reasons not to become a Christian, and if one did become a Christian, there were many reasons to recant.

Again, keeping the focus is important. Not to do so is to lose the salvation gained through Christ’s atonement on the cross and discipleship. You will need endurance to do God’s will and gain what he has promised….Let us keep firm in the hope we profess, because the one who made the promise is faithful. Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works. Do not stay away from the meetings of the community, as some do, but encourage each other to go…

Similarly, the readers of Mark’s Gospel are urged to keep their focus. This passage, widely interpreted (incorrectly the commentators tell us) as about the end of the world, is more a warning about what happens in times of upheaval when “false prophets” arise, distracting the faithful from the steady course.

The early Christian community was living under Roman rule. By the time Mark’s Gospel was written a number of outrages had occurred, among them:

“But anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great millstone around his neck. And if your hand should cause you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life crippled, than to have two hands and go to hell, into the fire that cannot be put out. And if your foot should cause you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life lame, than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye should cause you to sin, tear it out; it is better for you to enter into the Kingdom of God with one eye, than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell…”

At the very least, this Gospel tells us our responsibilities as disciples extend well beyond managing our own behaviors; they include responsibility for how those behaviors affect the discipleship of others.

Especially the discipleship of “these little ones who have faith,” which I take to have meant, in those days, particularly, the catechumens, those new to the faith, taking their first baby steps of discipleship.

Obviously, the Gospel writer feels strongly about the matter because the punishment is severe: to be thrown into hell “into the fire that cannot be put out.”

This phenomenon---the impact the behavior of an individual or a group has on others, those new to association with it, or considering association with it, is particularly worth examination in a community at the stage of its life ours is, entering a new chapter of our common life.

We’ve been working hard. In less than two years we’ve come from a handful of survivors held together mostly by hope and cherished space, with fond memories, to a growing number attracted by our pluck, our warmth, our energy who, faced with the need to vacate the original space, discovered we had created a new, emerging community that gave us the courage to enter a new situation pretty much whole.

We’ve given of our time, our energy, and our resources to address the challenge of supporting ourselves as we move from the support of the larger church. We’re discovering new things about who we are and what we may become, perhaps at once scary and exciting. We’ve attracted notice, which has inspired a generous donation of seed money to bring us through the fourth quarter.
Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Pentecost XVII (B), Proper 16, 2009
Page Two

We need to use that time well, to get a clearer vision of ourselves, who we are, what our long suits are and what our limitations are, what we have to offer prospective members, what constituencies we’re best suited to serve, and how to make them aware of what we have to offer. Finally, we need to make the offer, seek its acceptance, and integrate these newcomers into our fellowship.

We enter a new phase now, one that moves from marketing to sales, in which follow up becomes important, outside the comfort zone of most of us. A friend who’d spent many years in sales, then in sales management, told me, “I’ve spent my entire career talking to people who didn’t really want to talk to me.”

It may be some of those we approach will want to talk to us. But when the conversation starts to reflect expectation, commitment, a bit less so. It risks losing prospects. But it also may attract the kind of prospect that responds to calls for commitment.

You gardeners know what I mean. For a garden to grow and flourish, pruning is required. Those of you treating illnesses know what I mean. All medications, each designed to heal in its own way, have contraindications, entail risks. Pick up a prescription, read the list, and, with trembling hands, reach for the bottle. Press a physician and you’ll be told, “I wouldn’t have prescribed it if the risks weren’t outweighed by the benefits to you.”

The Gospel talks about a hand, a foot, or an eye causing one to sin. I must admit I came up empty handed with examples of the hand. Though perhaps not so hard. Many of us, perhaps, who are social drinkers and have been at an event where alcohol is available but are with someone with a drinking problem have probably considered whether, in this situation, perhaps we should abstain. Or perhaps considering a dessert when dining with a person who has diabetes.

It’s easy enough to imagine the eye leading to lust or greed, envy or even gluttony. Oh yeah: most of us can associate the eye and the cheesecake all right!

But, for me, as I thought of this sermon, the foot came most to mind and in a particular way---in its association with a body part the Gospel doesn’t mention: the mouth. As in, “open mouth, insert foot!”





Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Pentecost XVII (B), Proper 16, 2009
Page Three

You and I have been treated over these last several weeks to graphic and brutal examples of how the mouth can be used “to bring down…these little ones who have faith.” In the debates over healthcare reform. The incivility. The threats. The verbal terrorism. Dialogue has been difficult to come by. Participants are too busy shouting their viewpoints to be able to hear or even consider an opposing viewpoint or formulate questions that would draw the opposing speaker out, produce at least understanding of the assumptions supporting the position. What we tell ourselves reality is, whether it is correct or incorrect, produces our behavior.

In the healthcare reform legislation debates a significant universe of “little ones” are senior citizens, people on fixed incomes. But similar failures at dialogue can be found in any discussions in which people have strong feelings.

When they happen in churches they drive prospects and members away.

We have said there would be less divorce if the partners to marriages had the attitude, “We’re not going anywhere; let’s find a way to make this work,” rather than, “I can always get a divorce.” Churches would do better were they to embrace the “We’re not going anywhere; let’s find a way to make this work” attitude too. And they’d grow faster.

We will not always agree. That’s normal. Dissent is to be expected. And treasured. It should inspire, however, a particular kind of conversation:

One of the parties states the situation from their perspective. The other listens carefully, not to respond but to understand, then states what they understand the other person to be saying. Assuming they have understood, they now offer their view while the other person listens, to understand. Once both understand the other---And misunderstandings are so common there was a comic strip which featured a series of “He said/She heard”s.---they can think through how they can proceed from there.

Difference is important. It is not to be feared; it is to be embraced. It’s how we grow. It’s how we learn. When someone “loses” and leaves an important balance is lost. We need difference to keep one another honest.

It can be a word, a sentence. I lived many years in the greater Boston area, as many of you know. When I had mentioned an interest in the Boston Symphony concerts, a friend with some familiarity with Symphony Hall where they’re held, commented, “Oh, I’d never go there. Those awful seats!” So I didn’t.

Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Pentecost XVII (B), Proper 21
Page Four

Finally, I did, only a few years before I moved here. I didn’t find those seats awful at all! Symphony Hall is one of the three most acoustically perfect concert halls in the world and the Boston Symphony one of its greatest orchestras. Because of one comment, I’d lost 10 years of pleasure that could have been mine!

We need to think twice as we comment about the internal life of a community of faith, not only with prospects, but with one another. Hope is a fragile thing. So is faith in the future. A phrase I heard often in my childhood, perhaps you heard it in yours, was “Don’t cry before you’re hurt.” It’s wise advice.

How many people when there’s a change in management, a merger, or acquisition, will say, “Uh oh. I’m outta here!” reflecting their belief the result of the change will be worse working conditions, layoffs, you name it. How often do we consider it could be just the reverse. It could be better working conditions, more enlightened management, hiring, raises. Those things won’t go to those who left, who “cried before they were hurt,” rather than once they’d seen it was going to be worse.

I’m inclined to think the Gospel’s reference to hell being the penalty is not to the graphically depicted hell of Hieronymus Bosch paintings or hellfire and damnation preachers. But to lost opportunities, the pain of “what might have been,” not achieved. So, as we conduct ourselves in these very important months of this next chapter in our common life, I hope we’ll keep this Gospel’s message in mind, prepared to prune judiciously when indicated, change when indicated, and careful to remember what may seem little and individual actions to us may cause a “little one” to fall.

“Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

But his face fell at these words and he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth.

Salvation sticker shock: A customer comes interested in salvation. He’s got a high credit score. He’s kept the Commandments. He’s pleasant about it, addressing the credit manager as “Good master.” He’s just making sure he’s dotted all the “I”s and crossed all the “t”s. Why is he not approved, ferevvinsakes??? We sympathize.

Even the disciples were “astounded” at Jesus’ commentary, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” To borrow from computer language, Peter utters his personal OMG: “What about us? We have left everything and followed you?” If a person of “quality”, like this rich, young ruler can’t make it, how can we poor slobs? Are we suckers, or what???

There’s a lot more here than meets the eye and the encounter is much more confrontational than it appears. Let’s take a closer look:

For one thing, though it appears the young man is cozying up by his greeting, he’s really being demanding and Jesus slaps him down.

In those days such a public compliment as “Good master” increased the reputation and, therefore, the honor of the recipient. It was expected the recipient would respond by granting a favor. Not to do so was not to be honorable. The transaction is less a matter of “Tell me what more I need to do to inherit eternal life and I’ll do it/You’re the pro/I know you know the way,” and more “I just honored you/Gimme eternal life!” Jesus knows to be “bought” like this would mortgage his ability to call the man to true righteousness.

So he isn’t having any: “Whaddya mean calling me ‘good.’ (I’m on to you!) No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments…”(He names several.)

Jesus, ever the teacher, uses the encounter to work with two concepts related to wealth as they apply to discipleship.

The first is that there are limited supplies of it so, for some to hog it, harms others. In Jesus’ day it took longer to produce goods and doing so was considerably more labor intensive than it is in ours. Most things---food, drinkable water, the material used to make clothing, land that could be farmed---were in limited supply. Those like the young man, who had a lot, had it at the expense of others.

Well, you know, the legal profession uses a phrase that applies here: nunc pro tunc, “now as then.” When we use limited resources, others suffer too. Some societies are more sensitive to that than others.

I noticed, travelling in Turkey, that the Turks cluster where they live; they don’t build on any land that can be farmed. And Turkey is one of but six countries, we were told, that produces more food than it consumes!

I drive a Prius. I don’t claim moral superiority for that because, I have to admit, ethical issues didn’t influence the choice nearly as much as saving money on gas. Well, maybe SOMEtimes I look down my nose a little at those who drive the trucks that pass for modes of transportation these days…BUT, travelling in France last year in the Prius I was careful to rent so I wouldn’t have to learn new dashboard arrangements, headlight functions and the like, I was brought up short. That Prius was one of the largest cars on the road and several of the French I met wondered why I was so proud of hogging resources by using a car that burned gasoline as opposed to less refined diesel!

We noted they use dual flush toilets to conserve on water. We saw wind farms producing their electricity. And we noticed you don’t get to leave the lights on in your room (We’ve found that to be true in other countries as well.). To activate them you have to put your room key in a receptacle. When you take it out to go out, all the lights go off! And the lights that go off? Lower wattage. Probably flourescent!

Based on this Gospel, I suspect Jesus would find it unconscionable the attitude our political leaders have displayed in the recent past toward international efforts to conserve resources and to reduce pollution. I doubt he’d be much moved by resistance based on preservation of jobs.

More likely, he’d be asking why decisionmakers, particularly Christian ones, aren’t turning their attention and financial resources to the creation of jobs that protect the environment, like the Danes who are making a bundle selling windmills to the French and the people of Prince Edward Island. The latter now derive 5% of their energy from their windfarms, 10% within a few years. And they’re well down the road to developing fuel cells that utilize hydrogen, an element in abundance!

The other concept related to wealth Jesus is addressing is the one that argues it’s a sign of divine favor, like the folk in the C street fraternity house in Washington inhabited by several of our legislators, argue.

Au contraire! It isn’t your possessions, your family, obeying rules, that brings eternal life. It takes God for that. It’s not about the letter of the Law; it’s about the spirit of the Law. Notice: All the commandments Jesus chooses to cite to the rich young ruler have to do with the treatment of one’s neighbor: “You must not kill; You must not commit adultery;You must not steal; You must not bring false witness: You must not defraud;Honor your father and your mother.”

HowEVER…entering God’s Kingdom, he tells them, may mean the loss of everything they thought important before. He refers to leaving “house, brothers, sisters, father, children or land for my sake and for the sake of the gospel” and promises repayment a hundred times over

We in our time have little concept, much as we trumpet “family values”, of how radical an expectation this was. In the ancient near east family was everything. It defined who you were, what you did for a living, how you were regarded. The individualism we practice would have been totally foreign to that culture. So, to abandon family meant leaving the family business shorthanded, losing your identity. It was the epitome of betrayal.

Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. To be a Christian in those days was to join a group of people who were held in low regard.

Well, guess what? Nunc pro tunc. Now as then. There are those who say we live in a post-Christian era. No small number wonder why a person would sacrifice sleeping in on Sunday, invest time and energy in religious activity, or take from funds available for other entertainments to give it away in an offering.

For inner peace maybe? To find in the worship and teaching practical ways to get through the week maybe? To put meaning in one’s life maybe? To gain the satisfaction of making a difference to someone else in his or her struggle maybe?

Because all the chasing after the toys of this world sure doesn’t seem to be getting it. Not as alone and frightened as so many feel. Not with the thirst for a spirituality so many claim. Else why would Bowling Alone or The Purpose Driven Life have sold so many copies.

What must we do to inherit eternal life? How may we experience the Kingdom without having to die first? Not as so many in our society are doing, apparently.

There is a way. Jesus reminds us of that way in this gospel lesson. It focuses on people, not things. It focuses on sharing, not hogging or taking advantage. It focuses on quality, not quantity.

Some 30 years ago on a sunny fall morning I pulled a metal folding chair over to the top of the chancel steps of the parish I had served for 9 ½ years, sat down and, quoting from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken, quietly told that congregation it would be my last Sunday.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I---
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I offered that congregation that morning a theology of vocation, of a call, that I dare say was a departure from the one most of them held. I knew not what was next. It didn’t really matter to me, I told them, because, looking back, my travels had taken me places I could never have imagined they would (They still do!) but wherever they had taken me, it had always turned out all right!

I suggested we are accustomed to thinking of a call as being to the ministry, to something. Why could it not as well move around? Why could it not evolve? Why could it not be through the ministry to something else? perhaps using the experience of ministry to inform the next life chapter.

You see, for the Christian, all is prologue. Life is pilgrimage. We’re on a journey.
This morning’s Scriptures remind us it’s not about the stuff of life. It’s about what’s “between the ears” of life.

King David’s son, perhaps the even greater King Solomon, given the opportunity, doesn’t ask Yahweh God for stuff. He asks for a quality---wisdom---to lead “this great people” Yahweh God has given into his care.

Solomon has built Yahweh God the great Temple in Jerusalem. The Grand Opening has just been held. And this morning’s Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures contains Solomon’s prayer for himself, uttered in that great Temple:

Then ( in the presence of the whole assembly of Israel) Solomon
stood before the altar of Yahweh and, stretching out his hands
toward heaven, said, “Yahweh, God of Israel, not in heaven
above nor on earth beneath is there such a God as you, true
to your covenant and your kindness toward your servants when
they walk wholeheartedly in your way. You have kept the
promise you made to your servant David my father. (That he would
put his son on the throne, to follow him.)…Yet will God really live
with men on the earth? (I guess we’ve learned the answer to that one!) Why the heavens and their own heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built!...Day and night let your eyes watch over this place of which you have said, “My name shall be there.” Listen to the prayer that your servant will offer in this place.

In his pilgrimage, Solomon grew up in an environment full of the relationship of his father David to his God and the promises that God had made to his father, now being acted out. His prayer reflects his awe at experiencing that reality.

St. Paul reminds us, in the passage from Ephesians, that our pilgrimage will involve struggle but that struggle is less one against human enemies as one against the “between the ears” stuff.

For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle,
but against the Sovreignties and the Powers who originate
the darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the
heavens. Like doubt, lack of self-confidence, fear. (Remember
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s counsel to a frightened
nation facing similar problems to the ones we face?---“The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself!”)

Pray all the time, asking for what you need…Forget about the
flowery prose of books of prayer. Just talk with God.

In the this morning’s reading from John’s Gospel Jesus responds to the disciples’ challenge his talking about himself as food is “intolerable language. How could anyone accept it” by saying,

It is the Spirit (the “between the ears stuff”) that gives life,
the flesh (material world=things) has nothing to offer.

So, why are you and I here this morning? This hot, humid summer morning. How did the road of our several pilgrimages bring us here. to Walker Hall? What is our answer to the larger question: Why go to church? Why participate in a Christian community? What’s the “deliverable,” the world wants to know. And we, brothers and sisters in Christ, shall surely have to have an answer if we are to engage in convincing conversation with those outside our doors, to be able to give them, to share with them, what we have found here.

And we do have the answer: It is in our journeys. It is in our stories. Of how we got here. And why we stay here. Our next challenge is to gain the skill to pull the story, the experiences from “between our ears” to come out of our mouths…
our own several versions of what, for our society is the “other road…just as fair…
having perhaps the better claim because” (in our society it is) “grassy” and wants “wear.” And why that “road less travelled by” we’ve taken and are taking is, for us, making “all the difference.” Let’s work together, using our several talents and backgrounds, to meet that challenge!

“I tell you most solemnly,
if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood,
you will not have life in you…”

Food again! Why??? What has gotten into this Savior of ours? Enough already! Why doesn’t he give it a rest? And the Standing Liturgical Commission: What’s wrong with them? This is the third week in a row we get the “bread of life” metaphor. And the Gospel author, John: What is he on about?

I think I can tell you: The repetition is about two, maybe three, things:

The Gospels for last week and this almost make me think I’m watching the Food Channel! All this talk of eating and flesh!

In last week’s Gospel we find Jesus, in effect, telling the crowd that followed him, “You’re not running after me because of wonders I’ve performed that demonstrate who I am---the Son of God…the Savior of the world. You’re running after me because you got fed. To you, it’s not about me and who I am; it’s about your pedestrian desires and your desire to use me!” He tells them to get their minds off transitory, material nutrition and onto eternal, spiritual nutrition.

In this week’s Gospel it’s almost like what happens in a CT scan: the camera angle changes and a slightly different perspective is offered. He’s saying, “Go ahead. Use me. That’s what I’m here for. The issue wasn’t that you shouldn’t have needs. It wasn’t that you shouldn’t seek to get them met. It was the priority you were placing on certain needs over other needs, distracting yourself from the important stuff. You were focussing on wants, not relationships. I’m telling you if you’ll focus on relationships, particularly your relationship with me and the Father who sent me, the wants will take care of themselves!

Of all the gospels, John’s is the most intellectual. It’s less stories and more symbols. “I am the light of the world.” “I am the bread of life.” That kind of thing.

So what this morning’s Gospel is telling us is metaphorical in character. It’s reminding us of a fact: We are what we eat. If you doubt that, turn on your television set. Carbs. Sugars. Junk food. Excess. = Obesity. Fruits and vegetables. Fiber. Exercise. = Buff. Youth. Energy. Health.

My friend Abdullah doesn’t watch the news. He reads the newspaper sparingly. He finds spending too much time on the news interferes with the quality of his prayer life. Abdullah and his wife Osuman are observant Muslims. They stop what they’re doing five times a day and go apart and pray. Their prayers are punctuated with the 99 attributes of God (Allah, to them.), the foremost of which is “Allah, the all merciful.” The other characteristics are all positive. This constant reminder of goodness and grace results in their being gentle, positive, confident people.

Years ago a Presbyterian minister named Norman Vincent Peale tapped into this kind of reality by writing a book titled, The Power of Positive Thinking. Those who read and used it discovered using its precepts changed their lives. In their cases they became what they read (ate) with their eyes---more upbeat, more confident.

Peale was followed by the Simontons, Fort Worth physicians and medical researchers, who published Getting Well Again: A Step-by-Step, Self-Help Guide to Overcoming Cancer for Patients and their Families and by Dr. Kenneth R. Pelletier’s Mind as Healer/Mind as Slayer: A Holistic Approach to Preventing Stress Disorders. Those who read and followed the advice of these books became what they read (ate)---healthy.

Think of the phrase, “I don’t want to go near (fill in the personality, ethnic group, etc.)…It might ‘rub off.’” The reverse is why we hang around Jesus: We want it to “rub off.”

“I am the bread of life.
He who comes to me will never be hungry;
he who believes in me will never thirst.

Spiritually. Metaphorically. But, later, materially. Because, as we become what we eat, we come to possess the inner peace which makes us physically healthier. We move from attitudes of scarcity to attitudes of abundance. Doing so releases us to be more inclined to take the risks that bring results. We start to have the detachment that enables us to think more clearly and make wiser decisions about the practical matters.

“No one can come to me
unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me

That’s how we come to eat the bread of life. We take the leap of faith that the promises are true. We behave “as if.” In little things. Our first metaphorical “bites.” We experience the result. We risk bigger bites.

Example: Close up and personal. We’re here. In Walker Hall. Together.

Our very presence, as we’ve articulated it in various of our meetings, our relationships with one another, feed us.

And they feed others who come by. Shopping. Trying us out. Who find “bread” here they’ve missed elsewhere. And come back. Become part of us, helping us feed others.

I tell you most solemnly,
everybody who believes has eternal life.
“Has.” Not “will have.” Has already.

Anyone who eats this bread will live forever;
And the bread that I shall give
is my flesh, for the life of the world.”

“For…the…life…of…the…world.”

Ours is an incarnational religion. Materialistic. What can be seen and touched. God (spirit) became man (something that could be seen…touched.).

Just as Jesus and our relationship with Him became the bread for us, we, his people, are charged with the task…the opportunity…the gift of becoming that bread for those we touch. We dare not lose sight of that mission. We…our presence…who we are…what we do…are in a very real way eternal life…now, for others on whom it rubs off. That they may, as the Psalmist writes, Taste and see how gracious the Lord is.

“Doom for the shepherds who allow the flock of my pasture to be destroyed and scattered---it is Yahweh who speaks! This, therefore, is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says about the shepherds in charge of my people: You have let my flock be scattered and go wandering and have not taken care of them…I will take care of you for your misdeeds---it is Yahweh who speaks!”

I must admit when, earlier in the week, I first read this portion of the Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures, my mind went immediately to the controversy over human sexuality that has occupied ours and several other denominations over the last several years. Not because the passage has anything to do with sexuality but because it talks about bad shepherds.

Now, we’re none of us strangers to the fact the professional leadership of a congregation can significantly affect its direction, its composition. It’s also wisely said that the clergy called to lead a congregation are a reflection of the personality of that calling congregation. It would be difficult for me to imagine Trinity, Copley Square, Boston calling as rector anyone who wasn’t a great preacher, or St. Luke’s, Evanston, Illinois someone who wasn’t interested in the music and liturgy being the best that could be put together. Or All Saints,
Pasadena someone who wasn’t very liberal on social issues.

However, again and again when I uncover a parish up in arms and over the top in its anger toward, and disaffection with, our denomination and our diocese on the issue of inclusivity, invariably it will be led by a priest whose hobby horse this is. It is usually a particular type: full of himself (oddly enough, though there probably are some, what I don’t find are parishes led by women clergy who foam at the mouth this way!), absolutely convinced he knows exactly what the Bible says and that no one else’s understanding is worth even considering.

We are offered a different model for shepherding and for being the Church in this morning’s lessons.

In Paul’s Letter to the Church at Ephesus he addresses a parallel problem of inclusivity: that of gentile/pagan Christians into Jewish Christian congregations.

He reminds the Ephesians Do not forget, then, that there was a time when you who were pagans physically, termed the Uncircumcised by those who speak of themselves (can’t we just see them puffing their chests out…) as the Circumcision by reason of a physical operation, do not forget I say, that you had no Christ and were excluded from membership of Israel, aliens with no part in the covenants with their Promise. You were immersed in this world, without hope and without God. But now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought very close…

In this morning’s Gospel lesson, Jesus acts out the role of the good shepherd:

First, we find him recognizing the apostles’ exhaustion. Like a good manager, he calls for a “mental health day.”

The apostles (after their missions) rejoined Jesus and told him all they had
done and taught. Then he said to them, “You must come away to some
lonely place all by yourselves and rest for awhile”; for there were so many
coming and going that the apostles had no time even to eat. So they went
off in a boat to a lonely place where they could be by themselves.

It doesn’t work. Even before cell phones and GPS/Onstar, people saw them going, and many could guess where; and from every town they all hurried to the place on foot and reached it before them.

So much for the mental health day. But, although Jesus is weary, this shepherd doesn’t behave as one would expect. He isn’t annoyed. He isn’t irritated these people can’t help themselves from seeking the healing and comfort he/they can give. He isn’t even frustrated and overwhelmed at the enormity of their need.

Instead he took pity on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

The founder and president of the company I worked for must have been aware of this passage because it is reflected in a conversation I had with him early in my time with him and is one I’ve tried to remember in similar situations ever since.

I was having a particularly difficult time getting several people who had been put in our care to guide their job searches after they were fired to do the things we know are more effective than usual job search techniques.

What we teach isn’t the usual way. We don’t prioritize applying for jobs, answering ads. We don’t think your resume is anywhere near the most important element in getting either an interview or a job. Rather it gets you weeded out. Human resources isn’t your friend; it’s your enemy as a job seeker, that kind of thing. Why couldn’t they “get it?”

I expected sympathy. I expected an “answer” to give them for their objections. I got neither. The boss said, very quietly and sort of with the voice of a parent to a slow learning child, “Stan…Come to them in love. They’re the ones who need us most.”

That’s what Jesus does. he took pity on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

We need to pay attention to what is happening here: People are seeking out Jesus and the disciples because they are able to meet their needs. That’s what being the Church means.

What disturbs me most about certain Christian groups is that they see themselves as the “washed,” the righteous. We seek righteousness, yes, but we must be humble that we are, and must accept ourselves as, human beings, less than perfect, who will fall down, then, often with a little help from our friends, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and go on. The Church is not, my friends, a rest home for saints nearly as much as a hospital for sinners!

This has been what may well be regarded by future generations as an historic week in the history of the Church, particularly of the Episcopal Church. The passage of D025 made this week historic. It didn’t get nearly the notice I thought it would. Or hasn’t yet. I am confident it will. D025 nullifies B033, passed at the end of the last General Convention, which declared a moratorium on the consecration of gay bishops even in committed relationships.

As significant as its passage is the vote and its meaning.

While the resolution is polite and signfies the Episcopal Church’s intention to participate as a full constituent member church of the confederation of national churches known as the Anglican Communion, it a) makes clear the Episcopal Church is autonomous (Thank you very much, we’ll make our own decisions what’s permissible and what’s not!) and b) the Anglican Communion is not the only cooperative venture in which it participates.

It makes clear being in a committed same-sex relationship is not a deal breaker to being elected or consecrated a bishop in this church.

While committing to continued financial support of Communion projects, it reminds the Communion “The Episcopal Church contributes a substantial portion of the Inter Anglican budget.” That language is kind: We, in fact, bankroll the Communion. Without our support it would go belly up. Africa and the Southern Cone may have numbers and big mouths; they do not have any money!

Significant is that the Archbishop of Canterbury, after the House of Deputies passed the original resolution by more than a 2-1 margin (It wasn’t even close!), expressed his concern Deputies would take this action and told the bishops, “You can block this (resolution=kill it)…” Apparently, that ill-conceived meddling in our internal affairs did not sit well with the bishops because, with minor amendments, they then concurred, again by a 2-1 margin, again not even close!

In other resolutions one which had our three bishops as co-sponsors asked that individual dioceses be given the latitude to work out their respective positions on blessing civil unions or same-sex marriages in those states that permit them, and responding liturgically to committed same-sex relationships in states that don’t. Another asked that work be done to be presented to the next General Convention to produce appropriate liturgies for the Church to reflect greater inclusiveness around human sexuality.

So, what’s historic about this week is our church’s rediscovery of its spirit as a communion aware adherents can differ mightily on issues of the day and worship in one church (Note the resolutions do not call on any with more conservative views to consider themselves outside the fellowship nor does it require any dioceses to do any of the actions covered; rather, in true Anglican fashion, it permits now a wider range of practice.).

And these actions are consistent with this morning’s scripture lessons:
As people ourselves at various times in our history viewed as being
“beyond the pale,” they position us to include still another group
that we’ve marginalized, just as we previously have come to include
persons of color, women, and other minorities.

They position us as that place where people are invited to come
accepted as who they are, not judged for matters over which
they have no control, indeed celebrated for the diverse perspectives
they bring, to enrich our common life.
Thanks be to God!

What’s it like to be an ambassador of the living God? What does it take?
This morning we find out.

We look at the stories of three biblical figures: the Prophet Ezekiel, the Apostle Paul, and Jesus and the disciples.

The Ezekiel passage tells us the ambassador doesn’t necessarily have a choice---either about serving or about those to whom he is sent:

“Son of man, stand up, I am going to speak to you.” As he said
these words the spirit came into me and made me stand up,
and I heard him speaking to me. He said, “Son of man, I am
sending you to the Israelites, to the rebels who have turned
against me….The sons are defiant and obstinate; I am sending
you to them to say, ‘The Lord Yahweh says this.’ Whether
they listen or not, this set of rebels shall know there is a
prophet among them….”

Notice there are three parts to this appointment as ambassador:

• The formal appointment: I am sending you.
• The message: The formula The Lord Yahweh says this. In those days the use of those words would signal to the people Ezekiel’s credentials, his official status as a prophet.
• That it will be felt at least. this set of rebels shall know there is a prophet among them.

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a large
crowd gathered around him. Then one of the synagogue officials
(read “heavy hitter”) came up, Jairus by name, and seeing him,
fell at his feet and pleaded with him earnestly, saying, “My little
daughter is desperately sick. Do come and lay your hands on
her to make her better and save her life.”

So Jesus heads out but the going isn’t easy…a large crowd followed him; they were pressing all around him. Great! Here he is already tired. He’s just recrossed the Sea of Galilee after the heavy weather getting over in the first place, done some healings there, and recrossed. It’s hot. And he’s got to travel in the middle of a crowd against the deadline of healing a seriously ill, perhaps dying, child of a powerful church leader. Nice!

It gets worse:

Now there was a woman who had suffered from a hemhorrage for
twelve years; after long and painful treatment under various doctors,
she had spent all she had without being any better for it, in fact she
was getting worse. She had heard about Jesus, and she came up
behind him through the crowd and touched his cloak. “If I can touch
even his clothes,” she had told herself, “I shall be well again.” It works!
…the source of the bleeding dried up instantly, and she felt in herself
that she was cured of her complaint.

Fine, but it’s not that simple:

Immediately aware that power had gone out from him, Jesus turned
around in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?”

Halt scene while the disciples tell Jesus, “Hey, dude, it’s a crowd ferrevinssakes. How do we know??? But the woman comes forward and fesses up, all grateful. Jesus won’t take the credit: “My daughter,” he said, “your faith (that touching my garment would get the job done) has restored you to health…”

The delay, however, has consequences: While he was still speaking some people arrived from the house of the synagogue official to say, “Your daughter is dead; why put the Master to any further trouble?” Whoops! Not good poltics---Here Jesus has taken time with this social outcast at the expense of the “quality” people and the daughter has died. There’ll be hell to pay for this!!!

But Jesus is smooth. He overheard this remark of theirs and he said to the official, “Do not be afraid; only (here we go, again…) have faith.” Jesus dumps the crowd, allowing only Peter, James and John to accompany him and Jairus. They get there and it’s the typical grief scene. He wades into it, saying, “Why all this commotion and crying? (Just as he’d confronted the disciples on the boat crossing the Sea of Galilee with “Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith???”) The child is not dead, but asleep.” They’re not having it. But they laughed at him. So, in a fairly cheeky move, if you consider the circumstances, he threw these mourners out and, with the parents and his own companions, went into the place where the child lay. And taking the child by the hand he said to her, “Talitha, kum!” which means “Little girl, I tell you to get up.” The little girl got up at once and began to walk about.

Again, the issue was faith. The parents had faith Jesus could pull it off!

The lesson is clear: What we, looking back, define as miracles come from faith.

You and I may well be in the middle of one in the making. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again---I am often humbled by the faith I see in you in the pews, as over against what I experience sometimes as my own cynicism and doubt. I suggested last week that we are all writing in our blue composition books, like an exam, what our story as a congregation will be. We wrote another chapter last Tuesday night and that chapter participates in the universe one might define as “miracle in the making.” You clearly have been thinking…

Eighteen of you were present, of all ages and all constituencies. As we began, individually, to talk about our thoughts since the June 14th announcement a consensus rapidly began to emerge around the option of pursuing independent status in alternate space, summarized by one of you in the words, “We’re here. (At the meeting.) We’re voting with our feet.” (To be here.) A scant nine days after the announcement:

• Two alternate spaces had been identified and a commitment secured from one, Walker Hall.
• Research was well along (It should be complete by this Tuesday.) on how much in dollars would be required to pay our bills in alternate space, with preliminary estimates we presently are close.

• Several volunteered they already had given thought to what they personally could do to close the gap, some publicly in the meeting, others privately.
• One of our number stepped forward to develop electronic communications to get the word out we’re anything but dead and, to borrow from the late San Francisco City Supervisor, Harvey Milk’s, signature opening, “We’re Christ Church parish and we’re here to recruit you!”
• It was the consensus even scouting out other parishes is premature and a distraction, until or unless it is discovered we can’t build on what we already have.
• A convenor stepped forward to serve as switchboarder, keeping ourselves current with one another, and several immediately volunteered to pick up specific tasks to help her, were she to request/need help with specific tasks.
• It was resolved congregational meetings would continue each Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. for as many Tuesdays as we need, to get ourselves ready for what it will take to continue in new space.
• As one after another of you witnessed to what this fellowship means to you, how far you’ve come from it being about the building, stately as it is, to it being about one another, it became apparent to me in a new way not only that you have what it will take to go on but that you have what it will take to add to your numbers.

June takes me back almost 50 years to the Field House at Middlebury College. It was there I would sit at the long table in the metal folding chair, a pen and a blue composition book in front of me, a box of tissues at my side because, for me, it was hayfever season as well. And I and my instructors would learn what I’d learned. It was final exam time. And across our land in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Nine this late May and June it isn’t all that much different: Students are taking final exams.

How oddly appropriate that at this season of the year we, the people of God in this place, should be taking something of an exam of our own. We probably didn’t pay all that much attention over these months that have gone before. We thought, I dare say, that we were just coming to church. We were singing hymns and saying psalms. We were listening to the Word of God. We were eating and drinking the Body and Blood of His only begotten Son. We were drinking coffee and eating cake and exchanging the news of our respective weeks.

We were doing all those things to be sure. While we were doing those things, as part of doing those things, we either were or were not creating a phenomenon that goes by the name “community.” Or something somewhere in between. And now we are handed a blue book in the form of an announcement by our bishop suffragan that our use of this space must come to an end. A line is drawn in the sand. A date is uttered.

How oddly appropriate that the Scripture appointed for our first public worship after being handed this blue book is that appointed for this day:

A lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures about an adolescent and a bully:
The Philistines mustered their troops for war…One of their
shock-troopers stepped out from the Philistine ranks; his name
was Goliath from Gath; he was six cubits and one span tall.
On his head was a bronze helmet and he wore a breastplate
of scale armor; the breastplate weighed five thousand shekels
of bronze. He had bronze greaves on his legs and a bronze
javelin across his shoulders. The shaft of his spear was like
a weaver’s beam, and the head of his spear weighed six
hundred shekels of iron. A shield bearer walked in front
of him. Pretty impressive, hunh?

He took his stand in front of the ranks of Israel and shouted,
‘Why come out and range yourselves for battle? Am I not a
Philistine and are you not the slaves of Saul? Choose a man
And let him come down to me. If he wins in a fight with me
And kills me, we will be your slaves; but if I beat him and
kill him you