Year B, Advent 4: A House for God

Year B, Advent 4
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:46b-55
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38

Preaching with St. Francis Episcopal Church


David wants to build a house for God.
It seems like the least one could do, right?
God, has, after all,
handpicked David from the midst of a muddy field
Where he was busy tending sheep
And placed him as King over all Israel
so that he might shepherd God’s people instead.
God has delivered David
from the peril of his enemies
God has given David strength,
abundance, and security.
And what kind of gift does one give for all that?
What do you get for the God who has everything?
A house, David thinks, would be appropriate.
David wants to build a house for God.

The story that we read from second Samuel this morning
Comes just after David has been anointed as King over Israel.
Jerusalem has been made the capital
of the newly United Kingdom
And the Philistines have been defeated in their last move
of resistance.
In a wave of riotous celebration
David takes a company of thirty thousand
And marches into the new capital
With the ark of the Lord in procession.
David dances wildly, half-naked, before the Ark
Passing out parcels of meat and figs and bread to his new subjects along the way
and at the end of his parade,
settles into his new cedar-panneled home,
where we find him in the beginning of this mornings lection.

When I read this passage from Samuel,
I imagine that it is night,
and that is is raining.
I imagine David, wild-eyed, and out of breath
worn out from celebration
wet with rain
Storming into his new palace, still singing songs of victory.
But something troubles him.
While he dries by the fire
In the comfort of this grand home
He can see the Ark of the Lord
the very seat of God’s divine presence
outside; protected by little more than a tent,
virtually exposed to the elements.
“See now, I am living in a house of cedar,
but the ark of the Lord stays in a tent.”
He says to the court prophet, Nathan.
Nathan understands his meaning,
what better way to show that God is with this people
Than to display the magnificence of God
in the earthly glories of a beautiful house.

Now, the “house” we are talking about here,
Will eventually be the Temple built by
David’s son, Solomon.
This structure will be the key location
In what we refer to as Temple Judaism,
a biblical Jewish movement in which worship of God
is focused toward the singular location
of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
A truly magnificent architectural achievement
An earthly realization of sacred space.
This is the Temple that was destroyed during the
Babylonian captivity and exile of the Jewish people
Only to be rebuilt and destroyed again by the Romans.
The Temple Jesus caused such a stir in after his triumphal
Entry into Jerusalem
The Temple whose only remaining fragment
Of its Western Wall is still venerated today-
the place where Michael took all of our written prayers
On his trip to Israel.
A house, King David imagines, that will be worthy
Of all the great works God has done for him.

We know a thing or two about building God houses ourselves.
From the time Christians first got the official Roman
seal of approval
We have been offering up elaborate architecture
to the greater glory of God
The Haiga Sophia in present-day Istanbul, for instance
Has a dome perforated by windows -all the way around
And when the sunlight comes pouring through them
It looks as if the dome is floating in heaven itself.
even while grounded here on Earth in its foundations [LOOK!]
or take St. Peter’s in Rome:
a 448 foot high man made cavern whose ceilings
are tiled with such fabulous mosaics
that you cannot help but crane your neck
to look outward and beyond yourself.
We delight in capturing something of divine transcendence
In an actual physical space we can enter.
Colonnades arc up and over
Making stone look as if it could plant roots
And grow toward the sky.
Glass of every color transforms light into a holy dance
Glazing trails across the marbled floors.
Stepping into a well-built church
Can take your breath away
It can hold you in its sacred hush-
Because the best architecture manages to capture
something of the INFINITE
in a finite space.
Even an old country church can have this effect:
Wooden pews creak beneath the weight
Of generations
Steeped in prayers of promise and hymns of praise.
Even the storefront ministry
With its fluorescent lights and folding chairs
Speaks to the urgency of its mission.
And Even if you find greater peace
in a starbucks or a shopping mall
The modern mega-church manages to convey
All this and more as an appropriate dwelling place for the Lord.

WE, are a God-house building people

And David, just as well as us, in our loftiest aspirations
wants to build a house for God.
A mighty, grand, beautiful house,
Maybe even with David’s name emblazoned right across the front of it
In Memoriam
House.
And the only problem
Is that God doesn’t want one.
Or, perhaps, more accurately,
the house God wants, is David himself. [Big Pause]

Before even a single night passes from David’s plan
The word of the Lord comes to Nathan
and is swiftly delivered to his servant David’s door:

“Will you be the one to build me a house?”
God asks.
“Will you be the one to build me a house to live in?
All this time I have traveled up from Egypt
Among my people Israel in a tent and a tabernacle
And have I ever once asked for a House to live in?
No!
What is more, I will make a House of YOU
It is MY saving work that will contain YOU”
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

And in an instant,
as David receives this word of God
for the gift that it is
a new relationship,
A new covenant is born.
A covenant in which God’s people are taken in promise
Not in the same old patterns where
Disobedience is punished with abandonment
And forgetfulness is corrected with wrath
But in a new promise of steadfast, everlasting love
even in the face of the great human failures to come.
In David, God will bear anew
Generations will come
And come, and come
and even in ONE bewildered carpenter
STAND for us
to greet our own Christ-child in his meek estate.
David will give his life to be this Household of God.
David will become many, yoked to God by chords of love.
And even in their exile,
Even in the ruin of the very temple David dreams of,
They will remember this covenant
and fight to know themselves
Not as a people punished
But as keepers of God’s steadfast love.
This Household, not of stone
But of souls will be the one
To bear God’s holy name.

But what of us?
Will we be the ones to build God a house to live in?
This time of year
Reveals our frustrations at such attempts
More than any other.
We are, all of us, in the midst of great efforts
That might have at some point
been well intended for the greater glory of God.
We all take jobs or start projects
We all make big plans
To create some outward show of our love to one another
To our neighbors, to our families, and to God.
We have all, at some point,
Run into the house as wide-eyed and alive as King David
With a great new idea for what we’re sure God wants of us.
And we all know what it is like to have those efforts buried
In the mundane details that life requires
Shot down by the armies of To-Do Lists, cutbacks
Bureaucratic Requirements and Comities
that seem bent on killing dreams.
I intend my own work to be a kind of house for God
Teaching kids from low-income families
Because it seems like what I’m called by God to do
But if you had seen me last week
You would have seen a very disgruntled young man
Trying to cajole a crowd of sneezing, jittery four-year olds
Into a jumbled mess of carols
That looked like a far cry
from the Holiday cheer it was meant to inspire.
Where does it all far apart?
When do our calendars get too full
When do our resources get spread too thin
At what point do the households we intend to build up for God
Start creaking beneath the weight of their own
Hasty assembly?
Somewhere, I think
between the trips to Friendly Center
and the rehearsals and the practices
Somewhere in the diners and the parties
and the correspondence we haven’t tended to
Somewhere in the faculty cutbacks we had to weigh
Somewhere in the pile of papers
that threatens to outgrow the angel ivy on our desks
SOMEWHERE in the places
Where all this becomes so automatic
that we forget what we were building for
It all falls apart.
And then, and only then [Slow down, end]
When we get so tired of it all
maybe then we will be ready
To hear God say “no”
To All the big plans we’ve made-
As he welcomes us instead
into the House he has prepared for us.
And maybe, when we can hear that welcome
It will sound something like the song
Of an unsuspecting virgin mother
Praising the God she has found magnified in her soul.

If we have ears to listen then
We might hear of a new house
Where the proud are scattered in their conceits
And the lowly lifted up-
We might hear of a new house
Where the full are sent away
And the hungry filled with good things
We might hear of a new house
Where our room is right next to Edward’s
who is recovering from a drug-related prison term
and its accompanied repatriation
And also happens to share a place setting with us
At the welcome table down the hall.

If we have ears to listen then
We might hear news that tells us in the midst of a recession even
In the midst of an economic downturn
That threatens to unsettle the lives we’ve made
Good news even here that as long as we have flesh and bones
And a spirit of life within us
We have all the building blocks we need
To be built into mighty towers of dwelling for our God.

We might hear the Good News
That whether we are on the way down
Or already at the bottom waiting for our help to come
We are somewhere in God’s new world.
That even in the midst of our gradual exile
From all the affluence
and security we
thought we had stored up for ourselves-
Even as we watch the temples of our best ambitions
Get disassembled stone by stone
We have a covenant to remember
And bodies and souls to give
To the construction of something new.

David wants to build a house for God,
and so he gives his life.
Mary wants to build a house for God,
and so she gives her soul- in song, and in birth.
And we, eyes drawn toward the Giver of All Gifts
Hearts Full of Thanksgiving
Gather here
In this community
To be a House where God will dwell.

So as we end this Season of Preparation
And await the dawning of our Lord Among Us
Let us open all the shudders
All the windows
All the doors
That the light may come pouring in
And lift us all high beyond
where our necks can crane to see
as if we were floating in Heaven itself
built up and grounded from the Earth.

Year A, Proper 22

Proper 22, Year A
Patronal Feast/Stewardship Kickoff

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Phillipians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

Preaching with St. Francis Episcopal Church


You spend enough time somewhere and you begin to feel like you OWN the place.
Enough time in a favorite cafe or restaurant
leaves us with an expectation
that there will always be a seat for us at OUR table
Or,
maybe its a surge of traffic
that leaves us wondering aloud what so many bad drivers are DOING
on OUR section of bryan boulevard

Enough time, enough familiarity,
and a sense of ownership gradually settles in.
We might not even notice it there at first;
at least
not until its pulled out from under us.
Someone takes our favorite seat at the restaurant
The short cut around Bryan that we always treasured
suddenly becomes common knowledge

Something happens
that sends our sense of ownership crashing to the ground.
One might call this a "reality check"
Kind of like the one the wicked tenants of the vineyard
Are about to get in this mornings parable.

I experienced this kind of reality-check myself recently
When I became the last of my friends to finish my undergraduate degree
And the time finally came
For my two best friends and I
To move out of the house
We had rented together for the past four years
of college.

I call this: The Parable of the Wicked Tenants
of the Bachelor Pad.
The landlord in my story didn’t expect us to produce any crops
Or even come to collect what was due to him
At the end of our term
But I think its fair to say that he expected us
To take care of what belonged to him
While we were tenants there.
Now, like I said,
You spend enough time somewhere
and you begin to feel like you own the place.
You could say that the three of us
Did a lot of living while we leased that house
And we DID care for it
if only in the special way
That only a trio of early twenty something undergrads could.
(Our current Sunday morning audience
prevents me from sharing some of the more colorful details.)
Suffice to say, that OUR reckoning occurred
At the end of our lease
When the time came for our landlord
To show the place to prospective new tenants.
It became VERY apparent VERY quickly
That OUR idea of a happy home
Did not quite match up to the image
That our landlord expected to see upon his return.
We had to make a FEW minor changes
To spruce the place up.
Among many things,
This included ditching the movie theater seats
We had found on the side of the road
That were serving as a lovely perch on our front porch.
But perhaps the thing we were sorriest to see go
Was the giant plywood spray painted bulls eye
That we kept out back.
You see, we had this friend
Who would visit us and crash on our couch all the time
And he just LOVED throwing knives
So we kept this giant, plywood, spray painted bulls eye out back
For him to practice on each time he came to visit.
Our landlord was not amused.
[When he finally sent his only daughter
To review the place before showing
Possibly the only thing we could hold to our credit
Was the fact that we DIDN’T throw her out of the house
In a last ditch attempt to claim heir to something
That never belonged to us in the first place.]
By the time we were finished DIVESTING the house
Of everything that we identified with
It became painfully apparent
That we never really owned the home
We had taken the liberty of so much ownership with.
We were promptly shooed away from the environ
Of so many treasured memories,
And some very nice young women
Were ushered in to take our place.
I am sure that house
SMELLS much nicer these days.

Now, there are some SLIGHT differences between MY story
And the story from this mornings Gospel
(And I’m not just talking about the fact that there WERE NO
1st century Galilean bachelor pads in the parables of Jesus)
The BIGGEST difference, rather, is that
The tenants of this mornings parable weren’t wicked
Because they trashed something that didn’t belong to them
They weren’t wicked
Because didn’t care for the vineyard enough
They were wicked because they cared for it too much.
The tenants of the vineyard
Were GIVEN land to lease
And then their leassor left.
The tenants of the vineyard
Put a season’s worth of hard labor into that land
They spent the first hours of the morning
Checking the temperature of the soil
And the last hours of the day
Fretting over whether the frost would be enough
To kill the crop completely.
The tenants of the vineyard
Spent more than enough time in that place
They spent ALL their time there
And they loved it as their own.
They took ownership of it.
They came to HOLD IT
As their POSSESSION.
So what do we EXPECT them to do
When the servants of their landlord come knocking?

THIS
is not a pretty picture to paint
of the Kingdom of God.
If the Kingdom of God
Is anything like the vineyard in this parable
Then God looks like an absentee landlord
And the Kingdom looks like a place
That EVERYBODY
-servants and tenants alike-
Keeps getting kicked out of.
Its a picture that should set us ill at ease
But it is PRECISELY the image
that Jesus is trying to convey
To the scribes and the chief elders of the Temple.
The scribes and chief elders of the Temple
Who just moments before have asked him:
“By what authority are you doing these things?
Who gave it to you?”
This parable
Is part of an answer to that question
And because it is a question
That we still find ourselves faced with
Two thousand years later
We also ask:
Which part of us, here, now
Is Jesus speaking to in his answer?
Where do WE fit in to this story?

If we were 1st century Christians
Among the original audience for Matthew’s Gospel
We would probably find ourselves identifying most strongly
With those lucky souls about to inherit
The vineyard snatched away from the wicked tenants.
For the early Church
This parable was an allegory
Depicting the failure of the religious leaders of the time
A failure to recognize the word of God
in those prophets sent to instruct them.
In this sense, the tenants of the vineyard
Are the elders, priests, and scribes
While the servants of the landlord are the succession of God’s prophets
And the Son of the landlord is Christ himself
Handed over to others to be killed.
The first Christians heard this story
And the wickedness of the tenants
Was absolutely palpable
And there was a new church that just couldn’t WAIT
for God to kick out the bad guys
So they could get to work and do a much better job.
Now, if this kind of mentality sounds familiar
It might be because we’re in the middle of an election year,
And this is exactly the kind of attitude that most of us adopt
As we’re advocating for our choice of new leaders.
The people in charge have messed it up
They need to be on their way out
And OUR people are the ones who are going to set it right.
This mentality also happens to be very easy
For people my age to adopt.
It seems to US at times
That we have INHERITED a world
That has been duly messed up
By those who came before us:
That we INHERITED a fragile ecology
Ravaged by industrialization
That we INHERITED a failed economy
That rewards greed even as it
Renders assistance to the least among us
All but impossible.
The idealistic YOUNG
Have always identified with the new wave;
Those about to INHERIT a kingdom
That the pervious tenants failed to recognize
As precious to God.
The earliest Christians were ready,
THEY were going to get it right this time.
THEY were the stone the builders rejected
And they were ready to squash the builders
As the brand new cornerstone.

But is this really who WE identify with
In this parable?
If we are honest with ourselves
We may begin to admit that we
Are much more like the first tenants
Than we might care to imagine.
After all, our Church is not one century old
But twenty
And we have had plenty of time to live into our role
As tenants of this Kingdom.
From this end of the story,
We might begin to wonder
About Who
WE’VE thrown out of the vineyard.
We might begin to wonder
Who WE failed to recognize
As a prophet and servant of God.
Was it the woman protesting the war
On the street corner
That we drove past, rolling our eyes?
Was she a prophet?
Was it the man begging for change
That we shrugged off
Before he could get a word in otherwise?
Was it the television pundit
Spewing vitriol about our politics of choice
Before we changed the channel?
Was he a servant of God?
Or what about the men holding hands in the park
That we looked the other way to avoid seeing?
WHO has come knocking at our door
For a piece
Of what we’ve spent our whole lives protecting?
We may wonder WHO has been trying
To force their way into our lives
With a word from God.
We MAY EVEN BEGIN to argue to ourselves
That there’s a REASON
Why prophets get KICKED OUT of the vineyard
In the first place.
They make us uncomfortable,
And their demands are unreasonable,
And they are often extremist to the point of being obnoxious.
“Sure, sure”
We might say to the prophet
“War is wrong,
But how else are we going to pull out of this mess”
Or maybe:
“Yes, yes, I know,
There are people starving-
But what am I supposed to do about it?
What good will changing my own ways do
When no one else will follow suit?”

Prophets make unreasonable demands
They ask for too much
But that is precisely because
The God they serve
Is asking for EVERYTHING.
Everything that we’ve labored so long for
Everything that we’ve conjured by the work of our hands
Even our very selves,
And THAT is simply TOO MUCH
For us to bear.

So one by one
We show them the door.
We kick them out of the vineyard
Lest they ask for more than we are ready to give.

I ask you again:
Who ARE WE in this story?
Are we waiting to inherit a kingdom
Done wrong by those who came before us?
[Pause]
Or have we already locked the door shut
To ensure that NO ONE will take hold
Of what we’ve made?

I tell you:
We, in this place,
here, today
are not called to be EITHER.

We, the members of this Church
are not named
after a TENANT of the vineyard
We are not even named after future TENANTS
About to inherit the Kingdom of God
WE
Are named after one of the very SERVANTS
Who came to knock on the vineyard walls
Demanding what is God’s
For God’s own self:
Francis.
St. Francis who shunned his family’s wealth
To their embarrassment
For his naked stroll through city streets.
Francis whose community of simplicity
Stood in direct contrast to the indulgent wealth
Of the Church in his day.
Francis who spoke the word of God so fervently
That he preached to BIRDS
When the world grew tired of hearing him.
WE bear HIS name.
We bear the name of Francis, God’s servant
And messenger to the harvest time/
We BEAR the name Christian
The name of God’s own Beloved Child sent to claim
God’s Own World
for God’s Own Self.
We have been charged with this difficult work
Of asking for too much
Of answering to a God
Whose love for us is so complete
And is such a foundation for everything that we have made
That it possesses everything we have
And everything that we are
[That it demands everything we have
Everything we are]
More than we can even imagine possessing for ourselves.

When you spend enough time somewhere
You begin to feel like you own the place
And whether we trash it while we’re here
Or become so possessive of it
That we cannot imagine giving it up
To the community God is establishing with us
Doesn’t matter:
What matters is that we are called as servants
Charged with a message
To bring
to the laborers of this Kingdom
to the stewards of this world /
A message we are charged to bring
To our families
To our coworkers
To our politicians
To our institutions
And not least of all
To ourselves.:
That THIS belongs to God.

So the next time you find yourself in the midst of life’s abundance,
The next time you find yourself in the middle of
Life’s Great Harvest
I challenge you to take a chance
and be a prophet;
be a servant for God
With Francis
And with Christ:
find someone nearby, tap them on the shoulder
and remind them that these fruits belong to God/
that God is giving them to us to share together.
Just wait and see how many vineyards
you can get yourself thrown out of
Talking like that.

And when you do finally go
You might as well just leave that giant
plywood, spray painted bulls eye in the back yard

You never know:
The next tenants
Might enjoy
throwing knives
As much
as the old ones did.

Year A, Trinity Sunday: In the Beginning

Trinity Sunday, Year A
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

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

In the beginning
There was a pit
Deep inside each one of their stomachs
Where all the deep darkness
They thought they had lost somewhere on the trail
Had simply gathered
Into a canker of a stone;
Where the stone then turned
As it does upon visiting a new doctor
Or perhaps more accurately
As it does on a first date.
Dread, anticipation, hope
Grand nebulous images of tomorrow
With sure points readied for deflation:

The disciples
in THIS story
had an appointment to keep.

The disciples in this story were not afforded
the luxury of shock
At a half-risen Jesus appearing through walls
In the midst of their supper
Neither did they perceive their beloved companion
As a phantom on the shore
Nor were they brought along into slow recognition
While he kept their company on some long road
To a not-so-important destination.
THESE were disciples whom Jesus had told:
When I rise, you’ll have to come find me again
in Galilee.
THESE were disciples to whom the Mary’s came
With the message of the angel:

The risen Lord will see you now.
He’ll be the one on the Mountain at 3, dressed in white.

Can you hear the collective gulp?

In the beginning
There was terror,
Wild guilt,
Misdirected leaps of faith from entropy
And the spring-loaded cringe of a child ready
for inevitable discipline.

The unique flavor of this Resurrection
Is in the disciples shared journey to see Christ resurrected.
In other stories after Easter Jesus often appears suddenly,
Sometimes to upbraid the disciples for their lack of faith.
Or, Jesus might appear to a few disciples at a time
Leaving them to weave a common portrait gradually
Nodding their heads as they halfway listen to each other;
Making silent corrections in their own minds
For what their friends must be leaving out.
No where else in the Gospels
Is the presence of the disciples so requested by God after Easter
As it is here in Matthew.
The presence
Of disciples who have not been seen in the narrative
Since each of them had abandoned Jesus at the cross.
The imagination can wander on from here
But we will stop at the suggestion
That the road
From Jerusalem to Galilee
Must have been a far different road
From the one to Emmaus.

It is the end of THIS journey
That brings the disciples into worship
And- for some, we are told- into doubt.

I am, of course,
projecting
Some of my own feelings onto the encounter of the disciples.
Namely the feelings that I have
About coming to Church
And listening to the first chapter of Genesis
After two weeks of natural disaster
Months of rampant political violence
And the willful starvation of our world’s poor
By the world’s better off.

In the beginning
when God created the Heavens and the Earth
The Earth was a formless void
And darkness covered the face of the deep
While a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

God said, “Let there be light” and there was light
And God saw that the light was good.

When I hear the words of Genesis, I melt.
My heart opens into a myriad of images:
The buds of trees unfurling a miraculous display of veins
That were somehow bound up in dead wood all along;
Seas teeming with intricately limbed creatures that stunt
my own limited imagination
Babies born and crying
Cells dividing
Stars falling into themselves before their own
annihilating expansion.
Something, appearing out of nothing.
When I hear Genesis,
my heart cannot help but worship
my knees cannot help but bend
And in my worship
There is
deep, deep doubt.

Good for whom? we may rightly ask at this juncture
And what, precisely, do we mean by good anyway.

Last weekend,
as a little more than two hundred of my many-aged peers and I
celebrated the commencement of lives newly informed
by undergraduate careers at Greensboro College,
One of the things that we heard reiterated
by the bevy of speakers prepared for us
was the goodness of this life:
An appeal to remember
to stop and reflect often
on the fact that life is good.

Newly graduated,
Mortarboard still fastened tightly to my head
Speeding down High Point Road
While shouting out the lyrics to the latest Madonna song
With my best friend, Devon, right beside me
I was probably the last person in the world
Who needed to be reminded
Of the goodness of my life
In that moment.

Goodness, as I understood it in these speeches
Is the innate God-given quality of life
That we are to remember in times
When other worldly aims threaten
To deter our perception of it.
Goodness, in this sense, is the FOUNDATION
We may return to at all times
When all else fails.

Surely it must have been what I returned to that day:
Coming home to a table full
of good food and good company:
Three loving and true friends
Two parents in good health and spirits
And one man that I fall more deeply in love with every day
I sat down to ALL THAT
And I SAW that it was good.
And we celebrated its goodness and gave thanks

But the foundation we celebrated on
Seemed much further off than any innate blessing guaranteed
by God.
The foundation seemed to lie in a much more
Hard to reach place than that.
Part of it rested on the shoulders of the Haitian woman
I had heard lamenting on the radio
That her days wages were barely enough
To buy a tin of rice
And that all the rice did anyway
Was scrub out her children’s stomachs like bleach.
The foundation seemed to rest more
On the Kenyan student
Who found herself homeless when the tides turned this year
Against her and her own
And could not protect herself against rape
By those in power.
The foundation seemed to rest more
On the Sichuan woman
Who railed in wild grief against a province
Secure enough to make the shoes on my feet
But not to build hospitals out of anything more
Than cheap steel and concrete that powdered at the touch
All of which crumbled on the sick and young
While the factories stood strong.

The steady numbing global expose of the information age
Does not offer a way around our responsibility
In this shared creation of ours
And Genesis does not offer a way
To know ourselves as originally good
Without first moving over the chaos we are raised from;
It is not history without also
Being the destination.
And the original blessing communicated by Our Creator
Is not a SENTIMENT meant to keep us comfortable
In an entitled happiness
But a rallying cry
And reminder
That this world is being MADE
TO MANIFEST THE CREATIVE PRESENCE OF GOD
and WILL NOT be itself until it does.


What were we supposed to do?
The disciples mumble, shifting their feet,
Resentment building at the assumed responsibility
Of their own failure.
Uproot our lives and move to Myanmar
Only to get shot down by the border?
Set up shop in Zimbabwe and be dead within a matter of days?
Starve ourselves and ship the food to Haiti
While the real problem bloats beyond control
and consumes us too?
Weren’t our prayers enough?
Wasn’t our moment of reverence appropriate?
Didn’t our donations contribute in their own small way?
The cross was bloody and unnecessary
Our lives were at stake
And we did everything but get up there on it ourselves!

The road from Jerusalem to Galilee
The road back to the home where we were first called
From the scene of our own crime and complicity
Is a road traveled with thoughts such as these.

In the beginning
They were the best we could come up with
To keep from falling apart all together
So sure we had been of our own goodness
And then
So suddenly aware
Of the deep darkness
We belonged to.

And then came the Wind
And then came the Light
And we fell to our knees in a mess
Of worship and doubt.

And Christ, Risen from the Grave, for his part
Spoke to neither of these things.

In the new creation rising from this void
Christ speaks instead to authority on earth and in heaven.
And the logic we have hidden behind for so long
The safe rationales that belong to the economies
Of the Earth that we fancy ourselves at having mastered
Wither beneath the compassion and the camaraderie
That we are being remade within.
Christ speaks instead of discipleship to all nations
Discipleship to all peoples
Discipleship in the fashion that he has reared us in
Incarnate and fully present to the ones we are to serve
Sitting the trouble of our world
Down at our own table to break bread.

In the beginning
We were unraveled and exposed
To the wholeness of this end:

As a flawed and willing people
Held within our Maker
Waiting for the making to begin.

Year A, 2nd Easter: The Liturgy of Risen Wounds

Year A, Easter 2
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center


he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and
put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will
not believe."


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


I have some bad news for you.
On the last day, in the General Resurrection,
that glorious becoming
in which we, in all our earthly endeavors
will finally find completion
in the drowning fullness of God:
you might not recognize me at all.

Which is to say,
After the Lamb of God
comes to take away the sins of the world
I'm still confused
as to how much of me
will actually be left over.

I am the hypothetical fool that Paul rebukes
in this week's daily office readings, who asks:
"How are the dead raised?
With what kind of body do they come?"

I might, after all, be so completely full of God
as to be more completely myself
than I never had been before:
my SIN having at long last
withered entirely away,
to reveal the real me.

If, in this glorious becoming,
there were to be any ROOM for disappointment,
I dare say, you might be.
You might be disappointed
that I'm not quite as funny as I used to be.
My small stabs at humor are, after all,
mostly a product of my sin,
of my insistent separateness from God
and the resulting insecurity that at times
procures, albeit, rarely, a small offering
of dry wit.
I'm sure, however, that in our newly exalted state
we won't miss the old, bad jokes so much.

You might, however, be disappointed
that I've stopped baking entirely.
Yes, I'm sad to tell you after all this time
that my chocolate caramel tarts, my pear Roquefort,
and even my lemon curd icing are all products of sin.
All gluttonous misuses of the wealth of creation
while my brothers and sisters starve.
No more baking in the Kingdom,
we won't have to bake.
Everyone will already be provided for
and the price of dessert,
typically meted out with fasts and dire longing
will simply be paid until the endless end of time.
You'll get over it, trust me.

But then, you might be disappointed
that we don't preach and pray together anymore.
You might actually MISS that lingering suspicion
we came to dwell within so often
of whether or not we were ever really ON
to anything about God at all.
Once we are rooted firmly in our places
of the Great Welcome Table
we might not have to talk our way through any of this
any more,
We will simply know
and be glad in the full presence of God.
The consistent, startling inquiry
we have learned in the life of flesh
will die with sin once, and forever.
No more questions asked
All answers found.
You might
if there were any ROOM for disappointment, then,
be disappointed.
A glimmer of melancholy at how life used to be
Before flushing away
to a more satisfying spiritual greatness.

You might, in other words,
not recognize me at all,
or yourself for that matter.

Unless, of course,
today's Gospel has anything to say about it.

This is the day, after all,
when Christ appears to his disciples
bearing the marks of sin
on his risen body.
This is the day, when in John,
alone among the Evangelists
it takes the specific wounds of crucifixion
to signify himself as risen in the flesh
to disciples who exclaim
at this most gruesome display:
"My Lord! and my God!"
This is the day when we are invited
by the love of Christ to wonder:
What does the risen life of flesh look like
When all we have known of how to live in flesh
has been learned here on the ground? [pause]
What does it mean to see, and touch, and know
the wounds we have inflicted on the body of our God
and have our fear of death from wounds subside? [pause]
Can we really hold fast to the conviction of the psalmist
that the God of our faith will not abandon us to the Pit
in an age as grim as our present one? [pause]
And how do we approach these questions in Christian community?
Do we stand around with our arms crossed and wait
for Jesus to come and prove us right to Thomas?
Or will we bear the wounds of our own risen body
instead?

Here, at St. Mary's House, in Episcopal worship,
one way we approach these questions
offered by the mystery of the Gospel
is through our liturgy.
Our liturgy is, in part, what helps us INHABIT the tough
or unbelievable stories
which are so integral to our community of faith,
and on this, the second Sunday after Easter
we are just coming off something like
a liturgical binge session.
Its no wonder most of us stay home on this day.
We're worn out!
We've had a liturgy of Palms to inhabit the triumphal
entry of Jesus into Jerusalem,
a liturgy of foot-washing to re-enact the last supper
and the installation of the Eucharist
(which, in itself, is a liturgy for God's great gift to us),
We've had a liturgy of the cross to recreate the Passion narrative
and the liturgy of the Easter Vigil to symbolize
the resurrection of God's Light
among the darkness of sure death.
To return now to the bread and butter liturgy of Communion
is like having a breakfast of Melba toast
After a week of great feasting.
It is probably best for our digestion,
and yet, the part of me still lurching forward must wonder:

Where is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

We are, after all, more than happy
to pile the World's problems onto the story of the Passion.
It seems natural that we should talk of the
death penalty, and gay bashing,
and the pain of a Mother's loss
on Good Friday
but where are all those stories now?
There are wounds on both sides of Easter:
is it easier to see ourselves in the wounds of the cross
rather than the wounds that have passed through walls
and graves?

Where is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

To find out,
I would like for you to take a moment and imagine
The body of our Church
coming at long last
into the arms of our Beloved Jesus.
This is what we have been waiting for all this time.
The Body of our Church in our collective longing
has been rising through the Centuries
To touch
The Object of our One and Singular Desire:
the Body of our Christ
which has itself
been rising through the Centuries
among us
in the tired hands and faces
which have labored for the Kingdom
on this impossible Earth.
I want you to IMAGINE
for just a moment,
that this is the day when we are reunited.
It is, in fact, not day at all,
but night, for the world itself is at rest.
It is difficult at first to recognize Jesus
in the starlight.

"Is that you?" we ask.
He nods.
"Did all this really happen?" we ask.
He nods.
And still we are not so sure.
We can feel the love between us
and we know it is eternal
But we are unsure if this is the same love
that saved us
through all those years
we thought for sure
we were alone.

Jesus, knowing our hesitation,
takes our hand,
and brings it to his eyes.
We can feel the bags of worry
that have gathered there
from all the nights that we spent sleepless
waiting for our children to come home.
There are tiny canyons in his face
Carved from the river of tears we shed
When our brother died.
There are the ears
we stared at for hours in the bathroom mirror
sure that they protruded too far from our hair
to be beautiful to anyone.
Then he brings our hand to his side,
and there is the sickly familiar shape
of the first legion we found
before the letters H, I and V even had a meaning.
It is right next to the shrapnel
that dug the end of our life
right out from underneath our fifth year
of childhood games in the field.
The ulcer is there
that appeared when our parents decided
that the final weeks of our dissertation
was the best time to tell us how disappointed they were
that we hadn't gotten married yet.
There also is the crick
that ticked through our calf
on the nights we spent 10 hours or more
standing behind the cash register.
The dirt beneath the finger nails,
the cancers that refused to recess
the feet that buckled long before
we ever reached the finish line
even the vanity we feigned each time
a handsome man passed us on the sidewalk
and FROM AMONG this clean cut ruin
in the heartiest of tones
he bids us Peace,
"Peace be with you!"

"My Lord,"
we whisper, in response
"and My God"
And we finally BELIEVE
that all the wounds we retained [SLOWLY!]
in the life of our own flesh
never once held the THREAT
of keeping us from this love.

We spend the whole first night like this
two lovers who, for the last time,
have escaped the bullies of the yard:
together, side by side beneath the stars
Examining each other's wounds,
as they rise and disappear again
like blemishing trout
beneath the clearer stream
of our Resurrected Union.

Where, I ask, is the liturgy for this embrace?
Where is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

Can you imagine how uncomfortable it would make us feel?
Can you imagine how messy it would be?
Can you imagine the squirming
As each intimate detail of our own injury
rose in the unguarded voices of our neighbors?
With what would we symbolize such an encounter?
At whom would we gawk?
Would stories of mere survival alone suffice
Or would those wounds be too healed
to sufficiently represent the ever-open sores
of our dear Savior?
Could we really look on any injured mortal flesh or object
without the fear of DEATH that always LOOMS
when someone mentions their foreclosure
when someone mentions their ill Mother
when someone mentions their disbelief
at being able to face another day?
Or would we shy away
completely
and simply wish
they would get their act together.
Where is the part of our worship
That abolishes this fear of death?
Where is the part of our worship
That gazes upon the marks of horror
this world has made
and returns from such gazing
with a strength of faith
that proclaims:
this too is in the body of our Christ,
risen from the grave!
even here, we were not given up
to Sheol,
we did not, even here,
see the Pit alone!
Where is the part of our worship
Where our applauding God commands:
"MORE LIFE! MORE LIFE! MORE LIFE!"
Even as we, weeping,
look up from our bloodied brierey hands?
Where our laughing God proclaims
"MORE LIFE!"
Even as we, trembling
lock our doors to our own kind?

Where, then, is the liturgy of the risen wounds?

I tell you,
it is here,
in this place,
every week:
in the prayers that we share
and in the peace that we exchange
and in the bodies that we bring
into communion.

IT IS HERE
Every week when we pray together
and we can hear the sins and calamities of our life on Earth
confessed, cataloged and retained
in the memory of our own complicity and helplessness:
Ceaseless War, Environmental Destruction, Reckless Poverty
All a mark and pox upon us
Even as we rise
to be collected
by our God.

IT IS HERE
Every week when we bear
the names of the sick, injured, troubled and dying among us
Even as we greet one another
in the name of our Lord's peace.

IT IS HERE
Every week when we confess ourselves unfinished;
still a mess of flesh
not quite resurrected
not quite knit together with our God
and yet still FROM AMONG such ruin
persisting
in the heartiest of tones
of resistance and resilience
to bid each other
as Christ bids us:
"PEACE!
Peace be with you!"

IT __ IS __ HERE
in this communion
where the recognition comes:
a people risen with our wounds
murmuring in the shock of such belief,
"My Lord,
and my God."

Year A, 1st Lent: Prove Nothing

1st Sunday in Lent, Year A
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

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


"Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down”

IN THE NAME OF GOD WHO CREATES, RESTORES, AND ACCOMPANIES US AT EACH DEPTH WE DARE TO PASS. AMEN.

“If you really are the Son of God, then prove it
Save yourself,”
the thief said, jeering,
suspended in the air from a few feet away
while the crowd below echoed similar taunts in a thousand voices,
“Save us too while you’re at it,” he spat.

And perhaps, at that point,
there, on the cross,
he would have.
Perhaps he would have been done with the whole scene,
the humiliation, the self-sacrifice, the unbearable pain,
perhaps he would have rendered himself completely
from the hard wood of the cross
and disappeared
as he used to be so good at doing in the early days.
Perhaps he WOULD have saved himself
if he had not instead felt the full force of God
his Father in Heaven
fall out from behind him
so completely
if he had not instead,
for at least one moment in his life
forgotten himself:
his identity as Beloved of God
replaced
by what seemed to be nearly all the world
glad for his great suffering.
“My God, my God”
he uttered at last with the psalm,
scripture always dancing from his mouth
for new turns even
in death:
“Why have you forsaken me?”
So much then, for being the Beloved of God.
Christ died alone, forsaken.

Jesus must have had some sense
of how tall an order it would be
to live so deeply into his identity
as Beloved
from the beginning.
First the Great Spirit came
to call his name with love
from the sky over Jordan
and then the Great Spirit
drove him into the wilderness just beside
to starve him of the title completely.

It would have been so much easier
to face the devil
just off the heels of Baptism,
just off the heels of Transfiguration even.
One can imagine Jesus,
radiant in the glory of the Jordan’s river and bright sky
or radiant in the glory of Moses and Elijah
suspended by light and cloud
shouting to the devil, cowering below,
“No! No! Devil, No!
I renounce you Devil!
With all the company of angels
I resist you!
With utmost authority,
I rebuke you!”
But as it was,
the Devil would not confront him
in the hours of his most unquestionable authority
as it was
the Great Spirit of God led him out
into utter silence first.

Our Church has set aside
this holy season of Lent
as a time when we intend to draw ourselves closer to God;
when we strip away those things we can deem
as unnecessary
to seek God in deeper, simpler conversation.
But for Jesus
these were forty days of separation.
To be sure
Jesus set a pattern in his life
of withdrawing from the world
to hear the voice of God,
But these forty days in the wilderness
were a different breed than that.
For these forty days
Jesus was led out
to be tempted by the Devil.
For these forty days
just as he and the world about him
had gained some sense
of his own Belovedness,
Jesus is left not with a constant reminder
of having been awoken to God’s love
but rather, with a vast and empty spaciousness.
A wilderness
in which the voice of God calling for him
is not an all-embracing
all-confounding
persistent presence
but an echo
slipping from each human grasp
into the sand and brush.

“If you really are the Son of God, then prove it,”
the Devil whispers from behind him,
as before him
the whole distance of the Temples height
whips, taunting him, with dry wind.
“Save yourself.”

And at this point,
we must believe,
IF this resistance to the Devil is to be
any resistance worth celebrating at all,
that Jesus felt some doubt by then.
Jesus must have spent enough time apart
from that Great Booming Voice in the Sky
enough time APART
from that great affirmation of Baptism
to wonder if it were true.
To wonder
if he might not NEED another miracle
to tide him over before entering this ministry
another miracle
to assure him of the status he had been gathered into
by God.

Israel had surely needed a miracle or two in the wilderness
to get over such doubts before.
When the second generation of Israelites
to come out of Egypt
had been in the wilderness for forty years
they came into Kadesh
and found no water there to drink.
“This is what you led us out of Egypt for?”
they cried to Moses and to God
“For a dry desolate place?
To die of thirst here in the wilderness!
We would have been better off in bondage
than to have traveled here.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Moses cried back
“Bring water from this bare rock?”
After which
he did,
and the people drank.
The stream of water was named Meribah,
which meant it was the place where God’s people
quarreled with God
and in response
where God showed them God’s holiness
as they had demanded.
This quarreling came to be regarded with shame
because God’s people had not trusted in God’s work
and for their mistrust, they would not see the land
where God was leading them.
This is the quarreling that the author of Deuteronomy
refers to, when it is written,
“You must not test the Lord your God.”
scripture
dancing
always from the mouth of Jesus
for new turns
even in great thirst and hunger,
“It is written:
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Now, one of these things
is much more familiar to us than the other.
At least, one of these things is much more familiar
to me.
If you cannot say that you have spent much time
as of late
quarreling with God,
then I will tell you that I have.
When I look at the Millennium Development Goals
our Church has aligned us with
Its hard for me to get excited and say
“Surely this must be the work of God we are committed to,”
It is far more likely
for me to shake my head
and wonder, “What is the point?
What dent are we going to make?”
When I read the third goal,
‘To Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women’
I cannot help but wonder at how we will ever help empower the women of Iraq
whose status plunges deeper, and deeper into peril
as extremist groups unleashed by an unsettled
and riotous country
strangle any woman caught refusing to wear the veil in public.
When I read the seventh goal,
‘To Ensure Environmental Sustainability’
I cannot help but wonder at how we will ever clean up a world
where those with means purchase their way to a cleaner conscious
more willing to strip mine the forests of Brazil
under the guise of alternative fueling
than to find an alternative means to get wherever it is
we are in such a hurry to go.
When I read the second goal,
‘To Achieve Universal Primary Education for Children’
I cannot help but wonder how we will ever be the ones
to teach the world to teach
when our own schools are filled with rows upon rows of lifeless eyes
hazed over by demands and tests delivered from on high
chipping away piece by piece
systematically, any dignity our children might have had for saving.
If you cannot say that you have spent much time
as of late
quarreling with God,
then I will tell you that I have.
“I’m not sure how willing I am to work for this, God.”
I have said,
preferring, myself
to pour my own efforts into things that might
at least, have a chance at changing
I have quarreled deeply, stubbornly, and selfishly in my heart,
and I know that I am not alone.

Few of us need the devil
to bring us to the temples height
to shout at God to save us from the peril
we’ve jumped into for HIS SAKE
because most of us are more than willing
to go there on our own.
Few of us need the serpent to tell us
that God wants us to be like God’s self
because most of us
if shown the direction of ANYTHING
that would give us more authority
over our own lives and the lives of those around us
are more than willing to say
“Yea, I’ll take some of that.
I’m going to need it
if I’m ever going to get us out of this mess.”

If we are the children of God, then prove it, God!
Give us the power to turn the stones we have been left with into bread
when we have not found enough on our own abundant tables
to share with those who are starving.
If we are the children of God, then prove it, God!
Save us from the perilous heights of greed and reckless autonomy
we have climbed to, and for your sake no less!
To assure ourselves of some safety while engaged in this
impossible work of life.
If we are the children of God, then prove it, God!
Give us charge over the nations, that they might not wreck creation
for the sake of delivering one more amenity to our bedroom doors
while we pamper ourselves away from the exhaustion you caused us
in such tiring days of labor.

Give us just a little miracle to keep us going, God
To keep us believing that this work is worth fighting for.
A little miracle to tide us over and remind us we are loved
in the face of such persistent ugliness.
A child perhaps
who says, “Thank you for helping me learn how to read,”
Or a story in the news even
About the refugee who got away
And is so thankful for her new life
in America.
Anything to keep us believing that we are on God’s side.

And sometimes we’re lucky enough to get it
sometimes the rafters of the Earth
shift
in the birth pains of God’s new Kingdom
Sometimes God strikes the rock for water
and God’s work looks
for a moment at least
enough like something
other than failure
for us to want to keep on going.

But far more often than that
God’s work,
in the wilderness of Jordan,
in the wilderness at Kadesh
in the wilderness just outside of Eden
Gods work
in the wilderness of the lives we have made for ourselves
and in the wilderness of the cross
looks just like
the failure
we are all
so afraid of.
“If you really are the children of God, then prove it,
save yourselves,” the world taunts,
“Because it sure doesn’t look like you can right now.”

To which the whole history of Israel responds:
To which the life of Jesus says:
“I will prove nothing
apart from God.”

“If you really are the Son of God, then
Save yourself,”
the thief said, jeering,
suspended in the air from a few feet away
while the crowd below echoed similar taunts in a thousand voices,

But he could not,
And he would not
be saved
apart from God.
And God’s saving
looked more like failing
than anyone could have ever expected.
Even Jesus
for whom the wilderness should have prepared him
to feel so completely drawn apart
from God,
and yet, did not.

And yet for this
and yet FROM this
we are ourselves
are saved.

Jesus is fully human in Gospel, because he enters fully
into the Belovedness which God extends to him through the Holy Spirit
the Belovedness upon which we so often linger
waiting perhaps, for something more
the Belovedness which proves so hard to hear and feel
in the world where it is delivered.
And because God enters so fully
into that forsaken place of the cross
where we cannot hear God’s cry
for us to live as God’s own
any longer
because it is precisely there where God has tread
so completely
We shall never be alone
even there
again.

In the New Creation of the Cross
we the Body of Christ
face the Devil and the world in common
We travel the long road of Lent
in vast company
as the troubles of this world lead us farther and farther away
from that safe place where we first learned
of our belonging in this Holy Family.
We the Body of Christ
are asked in common if we can stand
to resist the Devil
to resist the calls of this world to ask for
proof of our belovedness
in the midst of our own failing
and we respond in common,
“We will, with God’s help.”
We respond in common
so that those among us
myself included
who doubt the possibility of God’s work
in our weakest moments
might be buoyed up again
by the strength of our communion
to wait not for miracles
but for the miraculous crumbling of the Earth as it has stood
beneath the birth pains of this great Kingdom
The Kingdom where All are Empowered
With safety and with freedom
With good books
With clean water and food
The Kingdom
for the Work of God
which fails and falls so far
to meet us
in the world
before rising up again.

We enter the wilderness of this great work
as one and as many
We have God with us,
We have Christ with us
and by the power of the Holy Spirit who binds us into one
we have each other
to celebrate our Belovedness in God
and travel to the crosses of this life
never to be forsaken there again.