Year A, 2nd Advent: Out of the Brood

2nd Sunday of Advent Year A
Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
Greensboro, NC


"The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and te lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them...They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea."


"But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"

IN THE NAME OF GOD, WHO MADE US, SAVES US, AND WILL NOT LEAVE US ALONE. AMEN.

Wolves eat sheep. Lions eat calves. Justice is withheld from the poor and those who need it most. Snakes bite children, and at times, knowledge of the Lord seems as scarce as water in a land where we will scarcely have enough to drink if we keep cleaning the grass of our lawns. THIS is the world we live in.

In my corner of it, one of the more irritating moments occurs each day at 11:55. The children finish their lunch, leaving a linoleum battlefield infused with streaks of green peas in their wake, and make a mad rush for the sink where I sit waiting to receive them: a man, helpless for all their unawareness of it, at the mercy of their apple sauce infested snot-covered slobbering mouths. I despise hand washing: it is simply an unnatural act to commit with a group of ten toddlers. I could handle one, I could even take on three or four at a time, but our State Health Regulations require that the whole gaggle of them wash their hands before and after each meal, before and after each turn at the sand table, after each trip outdoors, before they ever escape to contaminate other parts of the classroom with their germ-infested fingers. The structure and the discipline required to wait patiently at a single sink while a peer labors through the tasks of rinsing, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying, each for the appropriate length of time, is, to say the least, beyond the nature of my children. Benjamin can never seem to fully support his body weight at the sink, and unless I can grasp his torso with one arm while I splash his wandering hands with the free one, he comes away soaked from the midriff down. Celia is determined to take vast wads of paper towels in her hands and reduce them to sopping wet fistfuls which she then plops to the floor in mad delight. Jackson thinks it hilarious to turn the water off just when I get him situated, and Joshua takes his time to marvel at each of the bubbles which have collected on his palm, while his fellows pull, pinch, and push one another to the brink of an irritated oblivion behind him. But perhaps the most amazing gymnastic feat comes from Graham, who manages, each time my attention is diverted by a shoving match that has broken out in the line, to balance himself entirely on the edge of the sink, submerging his whole head beneath the running stream of water to emerge a soaking, grinning, mess, as if from a self-imposed baptism. Armored, as I am, with a merely human sense of good humor about all this, and a collection of hand washing songs that will weary even the most veteran of preschool teachers after their fortieth repetition, I reach a breaking point almost every time. (I have one colleague who greatly enjoys imitating the flat-lipped expression that appears on my face during these moments.) And as much as I would like to think that I am not domesticating my children against their wild and woolly appetites for exploration of the world around them in all its mess, it is this time each day that proves me quite to the contrary.

I just can’t seem to win with these guys, and, I imagine, in my martyred piety, that this must be how John felt when the line got too long at the Jordan. Too long, and too full of people who he knew didn’t care one whit for the repentance he was pushing.

The world, it seems, is out to get us. Matthew trots the Pharisees and Sadducees out to cast their shadow of doubt and unrepentant religiosity over John the Prophet. The Book of Isaiah heralds a Davidic and Zionist King to a people who could probably stand to alleviate themselves of impending Assyrian domination before considering a divinely sanctioned imperialism. Meanwhile, we, the just and dutiful citizens of Greensboro sit at home and shake our heads at the news of the latest schism in our Church, the latest political disgrace in our Nation, the latest scar upon our good Earth, and the latest shooting in the neighborhoods which lie just beyond on own. For us, as for the prophets, there is a particular breed of frustration that comes with having all your ducks in a row, and wondering why the rest of the world hasn’t fallen in line yet. Most of us know the feeling well. After all, we’ve done out part: we fought the good fight, put in the extra hours at work, stood in picket lines against the War. We’ve written to our congressional representatives, voted correctly, replaced most of the incandescent bulbs in our house with fluorescent ones and paused in the Friendly Center traffic to let not one but two vehicles merge into our lane before us. The least the world could do is show up to class on time. The least the world could do is wake up to the absurdity of any black or white solution to our crisis in immigration. But it doesn’t, and it won’t, and at times all our bellowing cries for repentance seem like so much hot air blown out on a bed of snakes. Hope is as common at times as wishing that the world were on our side for once. In the great hymn of hope laid out in Isaiah this morning, the Prophet longs with his people for a time when all the world will fall in line under the justice established by their King. The advent of such a peaceable Kingdom would so transform the world that even the natural order would be changed. But even the aims of such grand ambitions in the world are marked by the desire for some peace on the home front to come out of it. Suspiciously enough, when the natural order IS transcended, its mostly to the benefit of domesticated livestock and small children. No one asked the Lion if HE was interested in changing his diet.

Hope is as common at times, as this: as common as wishing that life were easier.

“I hope tomorrow is better,” we say to the coworker who has been going home to argue with her partner all week long. We are beyond the point of being surprised at how much the struggle has dulled her countenance. There are no new details of her story to share, we simply endure the days that must be lived in the long passages of time between developments. We have long since convinced ourselves that we have done anything we could have: we have given our best advice, we have given our opinions- even and perhaps especially when they weren’t solicited, and at this point, all that we can pair with the constancy of her burden is our own silent presence. “I hope that tomorrow is better” we say, and we know it isn’t enough, and we catch ourselves feeling foolish at even offering it, but it is all that we CAN offer, and she is gracious enough to smile as our words fall to the floor. Hope winnows our own helplessness out of moments such as these. Hope exposes our awkward vulnerability at wishing for something that is just beyond the reach of our control. Yes, it would be easier if our Messiah would appear and give succor to the needy where our own has seemed to fail. And while he’s at it he can take his winnowing fork and pluck out all the grain heads from the burly obnoxious strands of wheat that we’ve been threshing through- but when is that going to happen and what are we supposed to do in the meantime? In that tired space where our own efforts have taken us as far as they can, and we stare out into the blank distance towards that imaginary place where all our striving can been knit together in a world that is striving for the same, we are left only with bare, naked, hope. The kind of hope that makes us feel weak without our neighbor and our God.

Yet once we are there- Isaiah’s vision teaches us- once we have entered into the foolishness of Hope, we might as well go all the way. Hope is as common at times as wishing that life were easier, yes, but its also as grand as imagining a world upside down. If we’re going to be foolish enough to hope against nature, then let us be foolish enough to hope in epic proportions. Let us hope for a world that travels on foot, and farms, and crafts, and sustains itself. Let us hope for a world where teenagers aren’t so self-conscious about the way they look and grow up instead loving their own bodies and the bodies of their peers. Let us hope for a world where gay and lesbian adolescents don’t think twice about falling in love and growing up to mary the man or woman of their dreams. Let us hope for a world where Mothers and Fathers have to work some of the time but mostly get to stay at home and play with their kids. Let us hope for a world where gourmets slop free stew on street corners and jazz bands trill from the shade. Let us hope for a world where Victorian mansions are restored to public use and filled with poets and painters. Let us hope for a world with clean air, clean water, clean earth, and wild woolly animals. Let us hope for a world where greed and anxiety have been put to rest. Let us hope for a world where the shootings have ended. Let us hope for a world where the Mothers of warring nations will no longer look up to see the limbs of their slain children spread across the rubble as the smoke has cleared. Let us hope for a world where every vain thing conceived in our pain against our brethren is shucked away to reveal the sweet goodness of God’s love for us and one another, a people, singing, wanting nothing, hand in hand before our Creator.

There! Do you see how foolish it is? Do you see how impossible? Do you see how uncomfortable it makes us feel, how squeamish and how easy it is to dismiss with the usual logic we have about getting things done in a reasonable manner? The truth is that we will not get the life we hope for and Thank God for That, because if God stopped the world at our own hopes and dreams what a limited world it would be. Rather, It is our hope that will train us in the bigness of God’s vision, in the upside down absurdity of God’s boundless grace for all, exposing the distance left to be traveled until we can recognize one another within it. Our hope will not keep us happy in our own dreams and desires, rather it will break us out and place us into the Mercy of God and God’s people. And it is mercy we will need, for it is our hope for the Kingdom of God that will bring us into a brood of vipers, shaking our fists at the crowd gathered around us in one last fit of rage against the injustice of this world, before surrendering completely with a disheveled, pathetic cry.

At the end of the day, it is our wishing for more that will leave us with less, it is our hope that will break us.

Yet we are not afraid, for if our faith has anything to show our hope at that point, it will be that in that moment, in our brokenness when we face the crowd, we will find that Jesus is there waiting among them. Waiting to step down into the river beside us, to take a piece of what we’re offering.

Wolves eat sheep. Lions eat calves. Justice is withheld from the poor, and those who need it most. Snakes bite children, and at times, knowledge of the Lord seems as scarce as water in a land where we will scarcely have enough to drink if we keep cleaning the grass of our lawns. THIS is the world we live in. It is the world that has shaped us in our pleasure and our pain. It is the world that has forged the hope which will cary us to its end. And, it is the world where God has come to meet us, and will continue to come, time and time and time and time again. I hope, in that case, that tomorrow is better for us all. AMEN.

Year C, Proper 23: Balm for Gilead

Balm for Gilead
by James Joiner
Preaching with St. Mary’s House Episcopal Center
September 23rd, 2007

Year C, Proper 23
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

“No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

-from the Gospel reading this morning, and from Jeremiah:

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the hurt of my poor people I hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”

In the name of God who made us, saved us, and will not leave us alone. AMEN.

A prophet goes to a place, to a high place where he can see, to a place where he can be with God, a place where he can weep, for the prophet goes to be with God, to behold his people as a whole, and beholden as they come to be in his eyes, where they come into the eyes of God as well, they are submerged within a well of tears. What did Jeremiah see? Perhaps, literally, a drought. “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Perhaps, literally, the toil of a whole season driven wastefully into caked and unforgiving ground. No food to eat, nor water to drink, a suffering long past the expectation that salvation might still be coming. What did Jeremiah hear? A people crying out: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?” Where is God in our time of need? Is there in fact, a God? Perhaps not, for surely we, the very people of God, would not be suffering so. Jeremiah hears God turn a shoulder and sigh: “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?” It pains Jeremiah to denounce his people. Yes, of course your God is in you, but you have forgotten. You are “Adulterers, traitors, you bend your tongues like bows; grow strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; you proceed from evil to evil; you do not know God.” And for this there is weeping. For this there is mourning. The very place where God would come to rest is decimated with the suffering of a people who have forgotten. It is a mystery. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

A prophet goes to a place, to a high place where she can see, to a place where she can be with God, to a place where she can weep: for the prophet goes to be with God, to behold her people as a whole, and beholden as they come to be in her eyes, where they come into the eyes of God as well, they are submerged within a well of tears. She is perched atop an overpass, busily delivering souls into their homes along a daily trail of smog She is hunched in a stiff waiting room chair amid bodies that don’t work the way we though they would and anxiety over which part of the paycheck this next bill will pull from. She is on a playground swing in the late afternoon, wishing that her presence were enough to console the boy who is tired, and simply ready to go home, to eat, to sleep, to go to school again. And what does the prophet see? Routines that have become so habitual that the better part of a nation remains asleep to the wars being waged in their own name? Illness that goes untreated because treatment is too expensive? Homes divided over finance, love lost among the schedules that hold us to task, to bear on so many more important things that we’ve created for ourselves. And what does the prophet hear? I ache, cry the people. I hurt. I cannot afford this. I am lonely. I am unhappy. I thought we were the chosen of God- why then do we suffer for no reason? Why then has our life become so mundane as to require a new purchase, the acquisition of expose, a life apart to be a voyeur to, simply to make the next day worth waking up for? Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?

The answer is: yes, of course there is. In the wealthiest of the nations there is balm in abundance, but without human hands to apply it, that which would heal us and soothe our woes lies in perpetual wait. We have enough medication to feed the face of AIDS, enough food spoiling in the dumpsters outside glorified high end groceries to feed the families of the streets, enough tax dollars wasted on our warring appetite to keep the books in our childrens' hands more than just relevant, but a beacon of innovation and a departure for flight. And the physicians? the teachers, the counselors, the mediators and mechanics, the farmers and the soldiers are the best in the world. Why then do my people suffer? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? The answer is the same for us, as it was for Judah and Jerusalem: Because we live apart from God. Because we live for a system that neglects to acknowledge God’s reality.

We live apart from God and suffer- the phrase sends chills down the spine with its familiarity. Isn’t that why New Orleans got Katrina? Isn’t that why the Gays got HIV? Because of sin? Because of separateness from God? So says the conservative Church, and in their claims we have grown accustomed to rejecting that kind of talk outright, to the point, at times, of cringing whenever sin or separation from God is mentioned at all. But if we’re going to listen to the Prophet this morning, we’re going to have to hear it one way or another, preferably in as many different ways as possible until the point finally hits home and means something we can value, something that will change us. How about this way: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' has at one point described God as the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present. There is something which is as present to you as it is to me as it was to the first of us who tread this land and will be to the great grandchildren of tribes and nations whose existence we will never fathom in our finite capacity. In the furthest reaches of our doubt, in the places where Church will never go, this much, at least, must be true. There is something which is as present to you as it is to me as it was to the first of us who tread this land and will be to the great grandchildren of tribes and nations whose existence we will never fathom in our finite capacity. What is it? Or perhaps, more immediately answerable, do we live as if this were the case? Do we live as if the one thing which might be true, that we hold our life in common, is indeed a denominator which will render our differences ornamental in comparison with our fundamentally shared humanity? If this life is as present to each of us as it is to the brothers living beside us, if our claims are truly equal in human sisterhood, then are we as present to one another as we are to ourselves? In our multitude, in the egocentricity that asserts itself as the guiding force of our birth, the answer is necessarily “no”. How could we be? We are so many, we are nearly countless, at least- to the human eye we have at our disposal to sort among the masses. Fortunately, the body of humanity adapts to our confusion. We specialize. The thumb becomes especially good at building houses and the knee at tending sick, while the belly takes care of children when the family is away, and somehow, in its disjointedness, somehow in our human lack of presence to the whole, we are made to fit in. But we forget ourselves. We forget our presence to one another, and in this way, we forget God. Specialization becomes Individualization. We find our way into the profit system, into what is profitable for us and us alone. The knowledge we have accumulated becomes our own private resource for singular success. What’s more, the profit system makes this especially easy to do. I am a teacher, I am a clinician: I’m just the middleman, I keep the books, vote my conscious, that’s it. I go to work in the morning, I do what I can, then go home. The rest will simply have to take care of itself. It is too overwhelming for me to deal with on my own- as if we were ever ‘on our own’! Our individualization becomes our own helplessness. We forget one another, and we forget our own power, and thus we forget God, the one God who is as present to the people sitting outside this building as in. The balm is in gilead, the resources are here- but we the physicians are all too busy gazing at our own scars to reach out and take that balm in our own human hands and apply it to one another. That soothing balm, that mercy, that moment that says here, for just a brief while let us laugh and not care about this world and our sores- let us lift one another up in song high above the furnace into the cool jets of air that will freeze us for a moment as something which can only wholly be ourselves, crystalized as beloved of one another, beloved as God, as whole: no! Instead we go through the system first, the one that promises to keep us comfortable, as long as we are in our own skin. The one that holds us captive in our skills. The one that keeps us from the very humanity of each another. Jerusalem is an adulterer, choosing foreign idols over the God of her covenant. We are just as foolish, abiding by a system that promises to choose for us what is profitable to our individual identity while neglecting the reality that we are present to, and dependent on, so much more than ourselves.

I cast our predicament in this particular light because of how appropriate I think it is that the hero of the Gospel reading this morning is a crook. A man who has failed the system. A man accused of squandering the resources of the profitable. This parable is about as strange and unexpected as they get. Held accountable for the waste of his master’s earthly wealth, the dishonest manager is called to settle his accounts so that he might be cut off, and left out on his own. He has the perfect solution: not wishing to have to actually work, or beg for money, he uses his own disposition for cheating and squandering to heap up some security for himself. He cuts favors out of what doesn’t even belong to him. He decreases the debts debtors owe to his Master, that they might return favor to him, the Manager, when he is left out in the cold. This in itself, makes its own kind of sense- but then, when all is said and done, the Manager’s Master praises him for acting shrewdly, even as his own wealth has been spoiled in the process. I am as confused by this parable as I am by the degree to which I am drawn to it. The simple, and traditional explanation for the story, closest to the one which immediately proceeds it in the text, is that the Manager has acted wisely by using what is at his present disposal to secure his position in the future- a practice which believers should adapt as well. But this explanation neglects much of the strange complexity of the story. The manager is doing more than simply using what is at his disposal, he is cheating, he is using what is at someone else’s disposal for his own gain. It is not even as simple as a Robin Hood Story, where the poor gain at the expense of the wealthy, because we do not know if the debtors are even worthy of being shown this mercy. Certainly, the Dishonest Manager isn’t what we consider worthy of this mercy either, yet he is at the receiving end as well. Perhaps it is the most striking feature of this parable that Mercy is so abundant in it, and for all the wrong reasons. Mercy comes to a cheater through his cheating, and through his cheating, mercy comes to others who may or may not deserve it. The profit system is thwarted and the hierarchy doesn’t seem to mind at all. We cannot even claim Justice in this parable, for the Mercy shown is causeless. And we, the readers, are left to determine: What Good News are we to pull from that?

If I may borrow from the Archbishop one more time, (in honor, of course, of his current visit to the States), I will let myself be reminded in this tale of seemingly causeless Mercy, of his description of the Grace of God as being, “the object of the causeless loving delight of God, being the object of God's love for God through incorporation into the community of God's Spirit.” Causeless loving delight. Love that cannot be justified by our own explanations. Love that forgives us, Love that restores us in its Mercy for no reason we can control or understand. Love as present to you as it is to me as it was to those first among us to tread this land and will be to the great grandchildren of nations whose existence we cannot fathom in our finite capacity. This Grace is the balm we are left to heal from, this is the Grace we are left to seek as our nourishment, each of us the same as the ones who came before us and the ones who will come after. And the Good News we can find today is that despite our vanities and our selfish rationales, despite the systems of wealth which we flounder and flail among, the Mercy of this abundant and causeless love will work its way out to us anyhow- perhaps even because of the flaws and flukes of the human hands which are delivering it. We must be willing to look beyond those systems to which we have grown accustomed to. We must come to expect their failure, and in their failure, in our failure, to be overwhelmed by Mercy all the same. In the birth of something new, the Holy Spirit of God will use us and our devices beyond even our wildest intents. We must be willing to have our expectations unsettled, and our rules defied. God weeps with Jerusalem in her weeping, the balm has broken over Gilead- can you feel it? AMEN.

Year C, Proper 14: Across the Distance

Across the Distance
by James Joiner,
Preaching with St. Mary’s House Episcopal Center, Greensboro NC
August 12th, 2007

Year C, Proper 14
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer- And, let me speak slowly and clearly enough so that everyone can hear what those words and meditations are. AMEN.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

The first sermon I ever heard preached at St. Mary’s House was on All Saints Day, 2004- and it was about Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Martyr of the Civil Rights Movement. When I saw Jonathan’s feast day coming up on the calendar, it made me want to revisit his story and bring it back out for us to listen to, and so I asked Kevin if I could preach on the Sunday before his feast day, which is this Tuesday. Jonathan was a seminarian at ETS when he heard the call in 1965 of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., asking students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama for a march to the state capitol in Montgomery. Jonathan went with other students to Selma, intending to only stay for the weekend, but when he and another friend missed the bus back home, they began to reflect on how touch and go their visit had seemed- so they decided they would stay longer. Jon requested permission to spend the rest of his semester in Selma. On Sundays he would bring small groups of black students to church with him in an effort to integrate the local Episcopal congregation, where their presence was barely tolerated and heavily resented. After exams at ETS, he returned again to Selma where he helped produce a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources to persons in need of assistance.

That Summer he joined in several pickets and protests against local discriminating businesses. He was thrown in jail once. After his release, he and three other friends attempted to enter a local shop, and they were met at the door by a man with a gun, who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, the man aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way, taking the bullet himself. He was killed instantly.

There are, in Jonathan’s life, many inspiring stories, about the way he shaped his life in response to the call he heard, about the work he did to bring about the justice of God’s kingdom on Earth, about the manner in which he laid down his life for another. I sat down with his stories with today's Gospel reading in mind, and found one that seemed particularly resonant, which I would like to share with you now. The following passage is taken from his journal. The episode described was a common one- in which a proposed march would get blocked by rows of policemen:

"After a week-long, rain-soaked vigil, we still stood face to face with the Selma police. I stood, for a change, in the front rank, ankle-deep in an enormous puddle. To my immediate right were high school students, for the most part, and further to the right were a swarm of clergymen. My end of the line surged forward at one point, led by a militant Episcopal priest whose temper (as usual) was at combustion-point. Thus I found myself only inches from a young policeman. The air crackled with tension and open hostility. Emma Jean, a sophomore in the Negro high school, called my name from behind. I reached back for her hand to bring her up to the front rank, but she did not see. Again she asked me to come back. My determination had become infectiously savage, and I insisted that she come forward--I would not retreat! Again I reached for her hand and pulled her forward. The young policeman spoke: "You're dragging her through the puddle. You ought to be ashamed for treating a girl like that." Flushing--I had forgotten the puddle--I snarled something at him about whose-fault-it-really-was, that managed to be both defensive and self-righteous. We matched baleful glances and then both looked away. And then came a moment of shattering internal quiet, in which I felt shame, indeed, and a kind of reluctant love for the young policeman. I apologized to Emma Jean. And then it occurred to me to apologize to him and to thank him. Though he looked away in contempt--I was not altogether sure I blamed him--I had received a blessing I would not forget. Before long the kids were singing, "I love ---." One of my friends asked [the young policeman] for his name. His name was Charlie. When we sang for him, he blushed and then smiled in a truly sacramental mixture of embarrassment and pleasure and shyness. Soon the young policeman looked relaxed, we all lit cigarettes (in a couple of instances, from a common match, and small groups of kids and policemen clustered to joke or talk cautiously about the situation. It was thus a shock later to look across the rank at the clergymen and their opposites, who glared across a still unbroken "Wall" in what appeared to be silent hatred. Had I been freely arranging the order for Evening Prayer that night, I think I might have followed the General Confession directly with the General Thanksgiving--or perhaps the Te Deum. "

In the Gospel today the Kingdom of God is like a Master coming home to find his servants have put all their busy work and rest and lives away just for the sake of greeting him at the door. The Kingdom of God is like a thief in the night that we were unprepared for, unsettling all of the possessions that might stand between us and our reception of it. In Jonathan’s story, the Kingdom of God is like two enemies on a picket line, who for a moment forget their own agendas to be captured by the love of God.

Jesus tells us today that we don’t need to worry- that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, all we have to do is sell our possessions, let go of the things we’ve worked so hard for in this life, and we’ll be ready for it. How willing are we to really do this, especially when we have come to possess so much. Not just cars and clothes and houses and other material wealth, but ideologies, ways of doing things, habits of practice. We have jobs to do, responsibilities to fill, most of them initiated because we feel in our small way that we are fulfilling a part of God’s work with our own. I’m sure that the young police man in Jon’s story felt that way. I am sure that the policeman in Jon’s story could have stuck to his guns and made himself invulnerable- confident that he was there for the right reasons, unwilling to let a small group of students show him love with their song. I’m sure that Jonathan could have stuck to his guns too- could have kept that policeman as the clear enemy in his mind, a subject at whom only fierce righteousness could be directed. But somehow, in a moment on a picket line in the rain in Selma, these two men put their guards down, they stepped outside of their expectations and the responsibilities they had assumed, and they entered into God’s love for both of them with one another: against all odds, against all roles, against all circumstance. But the thing about it is that they were not waiting for that moment- that was not the object of either of their days- they were not servants waiting at the door of their Lord, anticipating with each moment that the Spirit would come knocking. They were more like the house that gets broken into. They had other things on their mind, other agendas planned for the day ahead. The hour was unexpected. But rather than treat that moment like a thief, rather than lock the doors and hold fast against the unexpected, they allowed themselves to be broken into, and there, in that suddenly open place, God rushed in to serve them with his love.

Such a brief, beautiful glimpse of the Kingdom can give us hope, and it can also give us questions about the houses of work and livelihood that we prepare for ourselves now: how willing we are to let the things we’ve come to be so sure of get broken into by the work of God? At what point does our work for God become a possession? At what point do we get so caught up in the work we have designed for ourselves that God’s Grace becomes an interruption to it? An interruption that we are too stubborn to acknowledge? How often do we plow forward with blinders on, unwilling to see the Kingdom of God if it looks different from what we expected, if it doesn’t fit in with what we do. What will it take for us to throw the baggage out the door when the Kingdom comes knocking, what will we have to let go of in order to participate in Grace?

These are not easy questions for us to answer. Imagine, for example, being among the religious minds of Judah when Isaiah comes to tell them: You’ve got it all wrong! your heart is in the wrong place, your ceremony automatic and insincere. You’ve gotten so caught up in your traditions that you have presumed you are honoring God while the real work of God is going on without you. God has come to see your ceremonies, your convocations, and your solemn assemblies as a burden because there is justice to do! Oppressed to be rescued, orphans and widows to defend: that’s where God is- not where you’ve been looking. What would it take for us to hear words like that today if we’ve spent so much of our lives crafting ceremonies, convocations, and solemn assemblies? Are we sure that we would not be too outraged to listen?

Perhaps we don’t have to know what it will take, perhaps we just have to be willing. Whatever our answers now, the good news is that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, and God will have what is God’s good pleasure to have- and that, quite simply, is us. In fact, it is such a sheer delight for God to have us in the fullness of his Grace, in the swell of his complete love, knowing and all-forgiving embrace- that God doesn’t turn away when we’re too busy to take it- when we look at God as if God were interrupting something much more important than all that. And he’s going to keep coming back to give it to us day after day, whether we miss it the time before or not.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

In his life, I think that Jonathan, along with the myriad souls of communion who moved Civil Rights forward in their time, received many promises that were made, even as they died in faith on their journey to a better country. As for us, as for Jonathan, a distance divides us from our brothers and sisters in this world and it is as thin at times as two sides of a picket line. The time will come when we are so full of God’s presence that we won’t know the difference in that distance any longer; and until we can realize that Kingdom in its fullness, we will look over the divide, we will greet those from whom we are separated with unabashed song, and step across from time to time as our unguarded moments will allow. AMEN.


Referenced

Eagles, Charles W. Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Kiefer, James. “Jonathan Daniels.” July 1, 1006, Accessed August 11, 2007, http://satucket.com/lectionary/Jonathan_Daniels.htm

Schneider, William J. ed. The Jon Daniels Story Morehouse, 1992.