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.

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.