Year B, Proper 15: Ask What I Should Give You

I feel like I shouldn’t share this sermon out of its congregational context without prefacing it with a few caveats. This was a difficult sermon for me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but it was one that I felt safe enough to preach with St. Mary’s House. There is always a lot beneath the surface of any piece of writing, but this time I don’t think everything made it to the top that needed to.

One thing that I don’t think came across as clearly as I meant it was my critique of the antisemetic influences of the Gospel reading. In my mind, the dramatic thrust of the argument was to take its cues from the five-part bread-of-life/diminishing crowd discourse/motif we’ve been following in the RCL. I tried to communicate this in a plain way, but I think my effort towards simple language here allowed for too much ambiguity in my perspective. This Gospel movement here was supposed to be the second of four cautionary sketches of evangelism gone awry.

I am also reflecting on the ambiguity of my use of the verb “imagine” on the part of the corporate beliver in the final movement. I wanted to tie the end of the sermon in with language that linked to the story about imaginary things in the beginning. Perhaps what is not clear in my effort is my argument that our imaginations are one of the gifts with which we approach the God whom we can never fully understand. By saying that we “imagine our world fully inhabited by Christ” I do not mean to diminish what we imagine as being somehow less real because it comes from our imagination- I mean that we use our imaginations to perceive and discuss that which is essentially beyond many other facilities of understanding. This, in itself, could use some development on my part.

My hope was to preach a sermon that touched on the very real dangers present in Christian evangelism by exposing a particular image of our Eucharist for its potential for harm- and then at the last moment showing that the Church is utterly dependent on this very real, essential image to be healed of all the sin we are responsible for and ultimately grow into the body we are meant to be. Whether I accomplished this is still up for debate.

Preaching with St. Mary's House
Year B, Proper 15
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

"The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the principal high place; Solomon used to offer a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, 'Ask what I should give you.' "

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



Here the bulls, here the rams,
Here the calves, here the sheep
Each halved and set next to a thousand variations of itself
A love gift of carnage made in columns and rows
And then suddenly, the voice of devotion’s aim itself:
“This is all fine and well, my new love,
But ask me what I should give you.”
Solomon sits upright, eyes wide,
Waking in the cold sweat of a dream.

“This girl is telling me that there’s a man
Bigger than the whole world
And more powerful than the whole world
And its just not true
And she won’t leave me alone.”
I look up from the pair of cardstock fairy wings I’m cutting out
To see Hannah, one of my seven-year-old art camp students
Visibly flustered.
“Of course its not true,”
I tell her automatically
“It sounds imaginary to me.”
We have this week, been talking about imaginary things
As seven year olds are wont to do.
Fairies, such as the kind I am making wings for, are imaginary.
Elves are imaginary.
Giants are imaginary past a certain height
But there are also very tall people.
Dinosaurs, while they do not exist any longer
Were in fact at one point real.
Monsters, while not real
Are often imaginary expressions of very real fears and dangers.
My student is still upset
Obviously beyond the tipping point of having her world-view
Screwed with by one of her peers.
“She said that he has hands bigger than the whole world
And that he made us with them.
And its just not true,
Its made up!”
It is then that I look up to see the girl in question, Josie,
Waiting, smiling, hands folded in the wings.
Taking my moment of clarity as an invitation to join
The conversation
Josie swoops in.
“Its just that if you don’t believe in God”
And -at this- she furrows her brow
“You won’t get into Heaven.”
The dissenting seven year old confronts her aggressor:
“Heaven isn’t real.”
And here finally,
Josie looks at her friend as if she’s just realized
That there’s a giant hole in her head
With all the pieces spilling out
And- more alarmingly- that no one else seems to see it
That its up to her to frantically gather them all up
And shove them back inside
Before the very life itself drains from the girl.
“Josie,” I intervene, “Hannah does not like the way you’re
Talking to her, and she’s asked you to stop.
This is something we need to talk about at home.”
And I send them back to their tables.
It is not enough, however, to deter the Evangelist from
Rallying forces.
“Maryanne,” she whispers to another friend,
“Hannah doesn’t believe in God
And I’m worried she’s not getting into Heaven.”
Understanding the cause for alarm
Maryanne quietly sets her work aside
And in a minute I see the two of them
Staring into Hannah’s face-
A second doctor for a second opinion:
She can see the hole too.
“Its just that if you don’t believe in God,
You’re going down there,”
And she points at the tiled floor of the classroom
Which is unobjectingly gathering more paint and chewing gum.
“Josie!” I bark from across the room.
“I asked you to stop!”
For a moment they scatter again
But only a moment and then they start creeping back
Covert- facing away from me.
Hannah’s head is on the table at this point
Arms crossed, ears blocked
So I move in to separate them personally.
As I approach I see that Josie has a small
Rainbow colored triket in her hand,
“Hannah,” she’s saying
Just as I am about to move her away
“If you’ll just say that you believe in God
I’ll give you this eraser.”

Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
You have no life in you.

“Its like you have a kind of cancer,”
the conservative Anglican blogger
Is telling my friend Pamela,
“And we have the cure for it.
Wouldn’t you want us to share the cure with you
If we knew that you were ill?”
The two are having a conversation
In the press box at General Convention
Finally, after the Anglican has spent the better part of the week
Avoiding Pamela
With her Integrity, rainbow-colored press credentials.
Pamela, determined to be friendly,
Determined to enter into dialogue
Had made the first moves,
Only to find her counterpart deeply emotional and afraid.
It was kind of sweet, she would later tell me, over drinks
She really seemed to be concerned for me.

And perhaps she was concerned.
Perhaps she was concerned the way
The first Christians were concerned that some Jews got it
And some Jews didn’t.
Concerned about the way some Jews called them out
Of their private practices for exactly what they looked like:
A cannibal harvest of their own history of leadership
Flesh and blood intermingled and unclean
Talking to a dead man buried in the past
While the present was dangerously neglected.
Concerned that some Jews were walking around
Business as usual
When the world had so clearly changed.
Walking around with holes in their heads.
Perhaps, in some communities
That were a little more removed from the origins of this drama
Communities like the one that first read this Gospel,
There was even a bit of disgust at the thought of sharing
Some common heritage with these people.
A fermented kind of insecurity at not being chosen
And not having the chosen choose to worship
The same vestiges of their own profound
Newly discovered understandings.
Just like in the story:
A miracle happens
Or a little piece of insight makes sense
And here come the Jews again
Crowding in, wanting to be fed.
Always putting up a fight about their own past
And then dropping out one by one
Shouting insults on the way,
“God gave our ancestors bread from heaven already”
or
“Your messiah had a mother and a father just like the rest of us”
And there the true disciples were again
The few, the chosen, the ones who understood,
Just like in the story.
The crowds: dispersed,
Disgusted at a Jesus who would give his own skin and fluids
To the tongues and teeth of his most Beloved
And the Beloved themselves:
not knowing any other way to be fed, remaining.
What better words to hear then
Than ones reminding them that they were on the inside
Of the right circle.
They were the ones who belonged.
What better words to hear a Savior say:
Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood
You have no life in you.

I could not look away this week
As the cable news networks
Honed in on footage from town halls across the country.
I watched as the same clips replayed over and over again
Untill the most radical, outspoken, and strangely informed
Citizens imprinted themselves on the back of my sight
Out-of-chair lunges repeating and multiplying themselves:
Phantom media images
Frozen in moments of extreme emotion.
They looked like zombies there,
Each with their own one line of dissent
Repeating like a mantra
They looked, in the television, possessed.
They can not have life in them, I thought.
And my words as I spoke them in my stupor
Were like a calming kind of poetry
Such a clean and simple way to instantly dehumanize someone.
Because if they did not have life in them
If the unfettered passion on display
Was somehow less than human
Somehow different from the passion in me
That makes coffee in the morning
and faces inquiring seven year olds with fairy wings
If the life I know to be life is not in them
Then I do not have to contend with them.
Then I do not have to contend with the fact that my neighbors
Are being strung up like puppets by the television I watch
And the monied interests I invest in for my own health
As I am strung up there beside them-
Then I do not have to contend with how ridiculous I must look
Holding up a Prop 8 sign
Speaking out of a megaphone
On a street corner downtown.
Do not have to contend with the fact that
My neighbors are afraid of things which I think best for them
Would likely slap my hand away the instant I tried to lift up
Some of the life spilling down from the holes
Which I so clearly believe to be in their heads.

And from here
From such clean, efficient dehumanization
As I am more than willing to participate in
As such perversions of public discourse so readily lend themselves to
From such inclinations of evangelism
That necessarily presume an antidote
To the misfits who so clearly need the life that we have found
From the heart of what most our church takes to be
Our principle, most impassioned Eucharistic image
Countless ways to die are born.
More and more details emerge this week
Of the murderous rampage we unleashed in Iraq
By contracting the Blackwater corporation for private defense.
A corporation which the public learns more and more
To be run by religious zealots
With the clear motive in mind of
Seeking out Iraqi Muslims and killing them.
With the clear motive in mind
Of establishing a Christian world
Made finally alive
By the eradication of all who had no life to begin with.

Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood
You have no life in you.
These are the words we choose again and again
To imagine our world
Fully inhabited by Christ,
God’s Body fully accessible in the very materials
Of our skin, bones and fluids made food
For a world in desperate need of saving touch and sustenance.
We know what it is to have no life
To be struck off balance by the uneasy transactions
of our daily give and take
To need, urgently, food that transcends
Our normal economy of equal exchange
For unimaginable abundance and gift.
And we can recognize that hunger in our neighbor.
And in words that place us in such a radical offering
In words that imagine such a critical traffic of need
In the urgency, in the severity
Of one of our most impassioned Eucharistic images
We are also yoked to consistently realized
Potential for death:
Strangers dying to one another’s humanity
The walls built up between them
By lines of scripture just like these.
Iraqi Muslims
Sought out and gunned down
By the religious zealots imagining a Christian world
without them.
Jews questioning
The Messianic implications
Of a startling new sect in their midst
Villified by the lack of life
We seek to give
No life in you-
No life in you-
No life in you.
In the urgency, in the severity
Of one of our most impassioned Eucharist images
We give ourselves easily
To the tribalism of the world
To another reason to peer up suspiciously
From the bloody feast of our belonging
At what might lie beyond our circle
In the darkness:

Death,
A billion separate sects and tribes
A billion reasons not to see our neighbors
Dying in this world,
And then, finally, beyond that:
God
Staring in alarm at the hole in our head
As all our life falls from us to the floor.
“Ask me what I should give you”
God cries in a thousand tongues
To the church that lies dying in its own murderous rage
Against itself and against a world
That it could never separate from.
“Ask me what I should give you”
God whispers in the ear of Solomon
Behind eyes that have seen enough carnage
On the altars of the Lord.
“Ask me
And I will fill you
With my very life
I will become the very flesh and food and drink you need
To comfort feed and heal you from this poison you have made-
Ask me what I should give you.”
And even as the invitation in our hearing fades
And the life of the church and world go limp for wont of feeding
One another
God holds us anyway:
A fevered body in the night
To be kept awake with stories
Of the time we were as young as Solomon
Eyes widening to imagine
All the asking we are called to do.

Year B, Proper 14: Caught Between Heaven and Earth

Guest Preaching with St. Mark's Raleigh


Year B, Proper 14
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51



The wine tool made it in.
As did the cheese grater,
the citrus juicer,
and
the pastry knife-
Each without a second thought.
But then I came to the spring-form cake pan, and paused.
Will I really need a spring-form cake pan
in seminary?
Will there be time for baking apricot-ricotta coffee cakes
In between Elementary Greek and CPE?
Such are the questions that have plagued me
Over the past several weeks
As I have systematically reduced
The contents of my already small studio apartment
In preparation for a 184 square foot dorm room
At the top of four flights of stairs
In a hopefully renovated 19th Century building
That may or may not have access
To a community kitchen.
Upon further deliberation
I removed the wine tool from the box after all-
But only so I could keep it somewhere
Much more easily accessible.

Many Americans who can afford it
And not infrequently, most who can't
Have a lot of stuff.
In an effort to make a home for ourselves
In this fleeting, frightening world
Most of us have gone about
Staving off our inevitable mortality
By acquiring things.
Stocking up sure and solid possessions meant to serve as
Proof against our much less permanent memories
That we were here.
That photograph of us against a painfully blue sky
Sitting on the mantle
Is proof that there was a time before "stay-cations"
When we actually let ourselves relax
On some stretch of shore
A hundred miles away.
Our grandmothers china
Silently acquiring its cubic foot of dust from the attic
Is proof that there was a time
When this august matriarch of our families heritage
Was as real as two hands setting a table for supper.
Receipts and tax documents shoved into a shoebox
Like some kind of bizarre financial wailing wall
In the nether most regions of our closets
Give us a tangible trail of evidence
Proof that we are who we say we are
And we have purchased what we've said we have.
We acquire a thousand little things such as these
And then set them down about us
In neat piles
as if they
In and of themselves were enough to keep us grounded here.
A thousand small extensions of ourselves
A thousand anchors cast
To keep us tied to this thing we call home
And, history.
And, security,
We build these homes for ourselves out of all we have acquired
We spend our days toiling to build up on this Earth
A little piece of the Heaven we've imagined for ourselves
And then, for the most part, we stay stuck there.
Stuck between these ideas of who we are
Who, I dare say, God wants us to be
And what those ideas look like
working on the ground.

I like to think of myself
As something of a chef
Baking and preparing a good meal
Are how I imagine myself extending hospitality
To those I love.
And to that end I have acquired a lot of things
To help me live that out.
And to that end I packed my kitchen box
Full of every variety of cooking accoutrement that would fit
In preparation for my big move.
But as I lugged this large, awkwardly weighted box
Down the fire escape in the back of my old apartment building
It wedged itself somehow in one of the weird angles
Of the metal stair frame
And I was stuck
Trying to balance the weight of this box
And dislodge it at the same time, mid-air
And before I knew it the cardboard snagged on the metal
And all the contents of my preciously packaged cooking life
Emptied themselves down several flights of the metal stairs
Into the street.

Absalom
Would have fared well
To only be so hung up
On cooking utensils.
But as we find him this morning
Absalom is stuck instead
At the mortal end of an epic struggle
For nothing less
Than possession of his father=s house.
Absalom, by this passage
Has sought to acquire
Nothing less
Than the kingship of Israel.
Absalom is portrayed in the Book of Samuel
As being something of a bit player
In a family cycle of divine retribution
Whose initial cause is utterly beyond him.
It began when King David
Raped Bathsheba and then murdered her husband Uriah
When he could not account for her resulting pregnancy.
This offense was so great against God
That David's prophet Nathan told him it would continue to
Come back to haunt his household.
When Absalom's sister, Tamar, is raped
By their half-brother
It is written as a consequence of
Their father, King David's own shameful behavior
And when Absalom avenges his sister's rape
By killing their half-brother
his resulting exile from Jerusalem
Is the price he pays
For involving himself in an ever widening circle
Of family violence and shame.
Eventually, Absalom and his family are allowed back in the city
But only if they keep their distance from the King-
Absalom is portrayed by scripture, at this point
As a beautiful, vain, narcissistic man,
And the reader cannot be surprised
As vanity is often a symptom of such deep, familial insecurity.
Absalom grows his hair out very long
So long that he cuts it and weighs it each year
His beauty, his hair, kept as a possession
Sure proof against his value in an otherwise
Devalued position in the family's shame.
And the reader cannot be surprised then
When Absalom takes this matter of his
Devalued family position
Into his own hands
When he tries to save himself
By acquiring the very household that holds its power over him.
Absalom waits on the side of the road to Jerusalem each day
He talks to Israelites who are taking their affairs to the King
for judgment
And one by one Absalom wins them over
By speaking in grand terms of the favor he would show them.
Years of this pass by,
and eventually Absalom acquires a massive army
in his favor against his father, the King.
The King learns of his sons new power
And has no choice but to abandon the royal house
With all his family in tow
And Absalom with his army enters it
And marks it finally
As his own.
This battle
We read of today
Is nothing less
Than an epic struggle
Between father and son
For possession of the household
That holds the fate of each
Inexorably tied to their mutual history.
But the battle, we read, doesn't take nearly as much life
As the land does that day.
As Absalom is riding through the forest on the way to battle
He gets caught in the tangled branches of a terebinth tree
And his mule rides on without him.
The Hebrew here literally says that he gets caught by his head
But many translations
Such as the one commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society
Write this to say that Absalom gets caught up by his hair
In the branches of the great tree,
Caught up, that is, by the very extensions of his own vanity
In the world.
And that is where Absalom dies.
Caught between Heaven and Earth.
Feet dangling, ungrounded
Unable to escape his enemies as they circle around him.

Can you see yourself in the picture our lesson paints for us?
Our lives may be fortunately removed from so much violence
Our family disputes may not involve any claims to kingship
Of a great nation
But can you see yourself there anyway
Caught by your big head in the branches of the terebinth tree
Fully responsible for the fight that has led you here
A fight for some claim
on the power that dictates your own life
Fighting the power that has made you, that is beyond you
And caught up in the details that would leave you hanging
Feet dangling, ungrounded
Caught between Heaven and Earth.
Have you been that hungry for the power to save yourself?


Jesus
knows something of our hunger for security
knows something of what we will do to acquire power
for ourselves.
You can see it in the way he always hides his own power.
He brings people back from the dead
Back from the brink of debilitating, isolating illness
And then tells them not to say a word of it
To anyone.
One minute he is dazzling in divine glory
Flanked by Moses and Elijah on a mountain top
And the next he is insisting that his disciples keep what is seen
To themselves
So they can get on with business as usual.
And what happens when the secret is out?
Jesus feeds five thousand on a hillside
Little more than a working lunch, really
To keep the conversation going
But the next thing you know the throngs are pressing in.
They can sense his power
And they want to acquire a piece of it for themselves.
Jesus calls them on it.
You're here because you've had your fill of bread, he tells them
But bread will only make you hungry again
And I am about more than that
I am about bread that will leave you satisfied forever
Bread of God.
They stare at him
There are tears, even, in a few
At the thought of finally finding the one thing
That might keep them full
After too many years spent at empty tables-
But then in the same breath he confounds the whole thing:
I am that bread from Heaven, he says.
It is my own flesh you are hungry for
Take me for your food.
Faces in the crowd that were, for a moment at least, hopeful
Turn sour at this
As the prospects of acquiring, and
Possessing for themselves
Some new secret to life
To security
To the power of abundance
Are suddenly made to sound like a cruel joke.
Some Heaven you come from, they say
Your mother and father live right down the street.
Some stay to argue
But most have lost the will
And simply turn away.


If Jesus has struck a cord here,
it is because he has called out our habits
For storing up a life of safety for ourselves
By linking it to one of our most visceral needs:
The need to be fed.
How else do we better acquire something
How else do we possess it
Than by raw, visceral consumption?
And what else is all that power and security good for
If not for first meeting our basic physical needs.
Jesus knows something
About how much we want to take charge for ourselves
Of the divine power that seems to hold us in its sway
How much we want to acquire for ourselves
that claim Jesus seems to have
On abundance.
"Give us this bread always" the people cry
Give us this power to feed ourselves
To take the matter into our own hands.
The connection of this desire for unending bread
To the manna their ancestors received in the wilderness
Runs deep.
For it was the same impulse in the wilderness
That led some in the camp of Israel
To take the manna that God provided each morning
And store it away.
To gather it up
And set it down about themselves
In neat piles
As if it
In and of itself were enough to keep them grounded and safe.
And those who tried to save that manna
Who just couldn't bare to rely on God to provide
Their daily ration each morning
Woke to find every bit of it they had squirreled away
Infested by worms.
The bread of Heaven will not be possessed.
You have to treat this differently, Jesus says
Because God will confound any effort to be acquired.
The God that can be possessed
The God that can be set up like a trophy on the shelf
Or stored away like a trail of proof
Against our own hard-earned salvation
The God who can be trotted out of our closets
Every time we want to lord our own rightness
Over someone else
Is not God.
And the bread that can be acquired of our own labors
Will only leave us hungry again.
It is the life we are given, rather
That sustains us.We do not approach God
Rather it is God who draws us in, Jesus says.
We in learning to live with God
Learn to take the bread of life as God would give it to us
To open our hands and receive
What is shockingly available in the very flesh before us
As we release any hope we might have had
That we can build up for ourselves
Some fortress of possessions
To keep us safe.

So lets come down
From whatever trees our big heads have been stuck in these days
God is calling us out of whatever towers of treasures we=ve stored up
To taste the living bread that is right before our very eyes
In the very flesh itself.
It is here, present in this room, in the body that we share
And it didn't even take a spring-form cake pan
To make.

Year B, Proper 8: More Than Watchmen for the Morning

Year B, Proper 8
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

Preaching with St. Mary's House
Greensboro, NC

Note: This is, to date, from the height of my love affair with the extended sentence. My paper manuscript, prepared as it is for oration, is marked with breathing notations rather than attention to appropriate punctuation. I don't know if I could preach with this language in many parishes, (your thoughts on this are welcome). But that is why it is specifically written for the people at St. Mary's House, as savy with their use of language as they are with their theology. It will be bittersweet to leave St. Mary's for seminary. Where else do I get to preach for my favorite contemporary theologian and my favorite contemporary poet in the same place?

Also note: The quotations from 1 Samuel are not taken from the linked NRSV version above, but from the JPS Tanakh translation, especially the block quote used- which is from Ch. 20.


“For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

-From the writings of St. Paul to the Corinthians

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


Scripture describes for us the precise moment
When Saul first fully realized
That the heart of his son Jonathan
Was given entirely
To the rival
Of their family’s claim
To the kingship of Israel.
It happened over supper.

Saul and his court were preparing for a festival of the new moon,
And David’s presence would be expected at the King’s table.
David had served in the King’s company
Ever since the Spirit of the Lord had left Saul
To crumble in fits of anxiety and madness
And his courtiers to suggest that the young David
Be called in to soothe the King with his music.
And ever since David’s victory over the great Philistine,
He had soldiered out for the King too
At the head of Israel’s armies.
But his victories there were too great,
The love of the people for David too strong,
And Saul was threatened by him.
And so Saul was determined to kill him.
So David had no intention to be present at the King’s table
For the festival of the new moon.

He had already narrowly escaped one attempt on his life
In his own home:
Aided out his bedroom window by his wife;
Saul’s own daughter, Michal,
Herself given by Saul to David in marriage
That she too might be the end of him.
By her great love for David she was not,
And by her great love David was left free
To wonder whether and how he should defend himself
Against a second attempt on his life
From the King he had pledged his loyalty to
As a servant of God’s anointed, chosen leader
And father in law.
Whether and how he should come to the King’s table
For the festival of the new moon
Where his life was surely in danger.

David, fled to the North from these threats,
Is painted in this part of the narrative as puzzled.
In the midst of this great epic of political posturing,
Self-serving religion and the tribal warfare of land and gods
David is, for a time at least, something of an innocent.
His piety is still wholly undisturbed at this point.
As far as he is concerned, Saul has been anointed by God
To be King of Israel,
he does not question the King’s ordained authority
Even in his madness.
David does not perceive his threat to Saul.
He is troubled and confused by Saul's actions against him.

And in this confusion and flight, he comes to Jonathan.
He is, perhaps, still wearing Jonathan’s clothes when they meet:
The cloak and tunic Jonathan dressed him with
From his own back
On the day he saw David speaking to his father,
The severed head of the Philistine giant
Still gripped clumsily at its mane by David’s hand
Still dripping on the sand:
At the sight of which, scripture tells us,
The soul of Jonathan became bound up with
The soul of David, when he loved him as his own self.
David is, perhaps, still clutching the sword and bow and belt
That Jonathan gave him then
The very outfit of his authority before the armies of Israel
The very dressings of the victories
Which have made Saul insecure.
And dressed thus,
Dressed up like the Prince of Israel should be
A kind of living mirror to Jonathan
Who sees in him beyond the gift of armor
The love of his own soul,
David weeps, bewildered, distressed:

“What is my crime and my guilt against your father,
That he seeks my life?” David asks his princely counterpart.
Jonathan, who had once already defended his beloved’s life
Against the outrage of his father is as confused.
“Heaven forbid! You shall not die.
My father does not do anything, great or small,
Without disclosing it to me;
It cannot be!”
But it is clear that Saul,
Suspecting Jonathan’s love for David,
Has hidden his intent
From his son.
And so to bring Saul’s intentions to the light,
The two devise a plan whereby David will leave his seat vacant
At the King’s table for the festival of the new moon
And Jonathan will gauge the King’s reaction.
On the first evening of the festival
King Saul did notice David’s absence, but thought little of it.
However, when the second evening came
And David was still missing from the King’s table
Saul inquired of his absence,
And when he did, Jonathan lied for him
And said he had been called away to his home.

At this, [Scripture tells us]
“Saul flew into a rage against Jonathan.
‘You son of a perverse, rebellious woman!’ he shouted.
‘I know that you side with the son of Jesse-
To your shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness!
For as long as the son of Jesse lives on earth,
Neither you nor your kingship will be secure.
Now then, have him brought to me,
For he is marked for death.’
But Jonathan spoke up and said to his father,
‘Why should he be put to death?
What has he done?’
At that, Saul threw his spear at him to strike him down;
And Jonathan realized that his father
Was determined to do away with David.
Jonathan rose from the table in a rage.”
Scripture tells us that,
“He ate no food on the second day of the new moon,
Because he was grieved about David,
And because his father had humiliated him.”
While experience tells us that
These familial motions wore so well into our common life
That somewhere
Some two thousand nine hundred ninety five years later
Some young boy likely slammed his bedroom door shut
Against a replica of their rage:
Not dispatched by spears, perhaps,
But every bit as crippling as if it
Had been.

This, then,
is the love that David sings of
As he laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan
In the lection from this morning.
It is strange that we read this part of the story in Church.
Among all the stories from First and Second Samuel
That relate David’s ascent to the throne of Israel
And subsequent rule
This particular episode reveals little of the narrative complexity
That precedes or follows it.
In the fragmented reduction that the Lectionary offers us,
One week David is slaying a giant
And the next he is mourning two characters we have heard
Very little of.
There isn’t even a recognizable theology to this passage:
God is not mentioned in David’s lament,
Death in David’s time,
Meant a complete separation from the world of the living
And thus a complete separation from the living God.
What David does in this dirge
Is honor the love that gave him life.
Jonathan’s love for David saved him in the most literal way
At a cost to Jonathan that was ultimately complete.
Saul was not out of bounds when he warned his son
That his love for David
Would put his own claim to kingship and power in jeopardy.
Jonathan acknowledged this too
When he came to David later at Horesh
And encouraged him in God:
“Do not be afraid:
The hand of my father Saul will never touch you.
You are going to be king over Israel
And I shall be second to you;
And even my father Saul knows this is so.”

I shall be second to you.

Jonathan, because his soul is bound up
In the soul of David,
Because he loves David as his own life
Divests himself easily of the power of his birthright.
Physically,
In the cloak and tunic from his own back
In the weapons of power from his side,
Actively,
In his vulnerable defense of David before his raving father
In his willingness to bear shame from their association
At the family table;
Totally,
As his death in a battle
That David deliberately avoided
Makes the only way forward for David’s monarchy
That this story will allow.
Jonathan
Because he loved David as his own self
Naturally found himself behaving selflessly.

And yet, not simply selfless.
There is a unique quality to the love David sings of
And it has something to do with the longing
Expressed in the psalm which this reading is paired with.
The psalmist, in his longing for God, sings:
I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him;
in his word is my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord,
More than watchmen for the morning
more than the watchmen for the morning.
The longing of the psalmist finds character
With a watchman, weary for the end of his shift
Keeping vigil against the night with dry eyes
That see shapes in the darkness:
Pricking up at its dry rustles
And each snapping twig.
The image of a watchman is employed
Because the psalmist waits expectantly
For God’s deliverance
Which elsewhere comes in the morning.
But more than this,
The morning renders the watchman’s work obsolete.
There is no longer any need for the watchman’s labor
When the town he holds vigil for
Is filled with the light of morning,
All its dark corners illuminated
All its haunting sounds covered by the bustle
Of its awakened people.
The morning fulfills the watchman’s labor
With a largesse that is preternatural to his human limits
And perfectly sensible to expect from the sun itself.
At morning, the lonely watchman changes guard
With the very light of day
And rests soundly for a time because of it.
The love and longing of the watchman for the morning
Is not selfless, it is a self fulfilled
More thoroughly
That he ever could have managed on his own.
And this is the kind of longing which the psalmist has for God
And this is the kind of love which Jonathan showed for David.

A love that envisioned its self, its power, and its future
Fulfilled in the object of its devotion.
Confessed in the midst of therapy
It would be enough to make any psychoanalyst wince,
But in his Biblical context
Jonathan is manifesting with his life
The will of God for a new ruler
An other “him”

(i) And because of this
Jonathan’s character stands in remarkable contrast
Against the rest of the epic work that contains him,
Otherwise populated wholly
By power-hungry egomaniacs:
Priests who irreverently cheat the laity of their earnest sacrifices
Kings who dispense with divine mandate lightly
When it conflicts with their own ease,
Prophets who foam at the mouth when their leaders
And people contradict the callings they profess.

(ii) And because of this
Jonathan’s character
Is placed directly
In that transfer of power
That Hebrew mothers in the Bible like Hannah and Mary
Always seem to be singing of:
The one where the haughty
Are brought down from their high places
And the lowly lifted up.
Not, in this case, through battles or through flight
Not by occupation or miraculous birth
But in relationship that gives wholly of its only resource.

(iii) And because of this
Paul, as he adjures the Corinthians to implicate themselves
In their own effort of selfless giving to their fellows
in Jerusalem,
Can invoke the same quality of love
In the Christ whom he seeks to reveal among them:
“For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ,
That though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor,
so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

And the Corinthians when they read this
Knowing characters like Jonathan
From scripture
Or from their own lives
Of whom this same self-giving was also apparent
Might have understood for a moment
What Paul meant
About a God who would strip himself of power
For no reason other than the fact
That he was in love:
Bound up in the world
As if in God’s own self.

If there is something sacramental to be witnessed
In our relationships,
Something between these men,
In the covenant that joined them,
Which speaks beyond itself of the covenant
That God would forge with us as well
It is here:
It is David singing for the love of Jonathan
Who gave himself for him.
It is us,
Dressed up in the cloak and tunic
Of our God who came among us
Before emptying himself completely,
Leaving us to be a kind of mirror
Of the Prince we thought he should have been,
And will still someday be.

Your glory, O Israel,
Lies slain on your heights;
Your glory, O World
Is poured out.
Let us come then to the King’s table without fear
And feast on the gifts which we are given there
By those who love us as their selves.

Triad Pride Prayer Service, Non-Lectionary

A non-lectionary sermon (!)
(Yes that means I chose these readings myself!
And Yes that means I chose a psalm that is not otherwise in the Lectionary
Because it is "difficult" to preach on!)


Isaiah 49:14-21
Psalm 55

Preaching with Triad Pride, 2009
Greensboro, NC

"Lift up your eyes all around and see;
They all gather,
They come to you."

-From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah

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

In the Summer of 1982 we were terrified.
Many of our friends and lovers were deathly ill
And news reports telling of a new gay cancer
Were confusing and contradictory.
Some in the media talked of GRID
Which stood for Gay related immune deficiency
And the CDC even referred initially to 4-H disease
So named because it seemed to affect
Hemophiliacs, Haitians, Heroin-addicts, and Homosexuals.
In the hospitals, we were confronted with equal amounts
Of fear and confusion, but there
it was also paired with stigma and bigotry.
Our resources were not apparent to us.
But there was a number you could call for support
And this number linked directly
to the home phone of Rodger McFarlane.
That Summer, Rodgers tiny New York apartment became
The hub for a deluge of desperate phone calls
That were then directed to the medical, legal, and counseling
Resources that were so desperately needed.
McFarlane had placed himself in the critical center
Of a gathering, ominous storm.
Earlier that year, he had walked into the headquarters
Of the newly formed Gay Men’s Health Crisis
Which then consisted of a handful of men
One of whom, Larry Kramer, seeing that government and medical
Response to the growing crisis was stalled at best
had issued a rallying cry
For gays to come together to provide a quick retaliation
To the new disease.
McFarlane, who worked as a rehabilitation therapist in the local hospitals
Found himself in a position to lend his expertise of the system
To those whom the system was avoiding.
He also lent his organizational skills-
Finding the appropriate office space for the rag-tag group of young men
And building up the structure of a professional non-profit
And, perhaps most importantly
He lent his home, and phone
To what would ultimately become the Information Hotline of the GMHC
A hotline that to this day
continues to provide counseling and support to persons with HIV/AIDS
McFarlane was later appointed the first paid executive director of the GMHC
As with most gay organizations since the dawn of time,
There were some disagreements about how to run things.

Ultimately, Larry Kramer was too extreem for the group.
His political agenda involved going after the mayor of NYC
And other public and health officials for not responding to AIDS
As the epidemic that it was.
A favorite practice of his became outing public figures who he felt
Avoided assisting the AIDS crisis because they were closeted.
He left the GMHC, calling it politically impotent.
In 1987 he founded ACT-UP, a radical gay activist group
Which promoted grass-roots efforts to raise awareness about
And demand immediate and proper treatment of HIV/AIDS.
In the early history of HIV/AIDS
Rodger McFarlane was the pragmatic counterpoint to Kramer’s rage.
Through steady funding efforts and organized programs
The Gay Men’s Health Crisis became the working model
For community based health-care support for every city in the nation.
Essential resources like the Hotline were joined by the Buddy system
In which people of all genders, gay, lesbian and straight
Volunteered to To give their support and bedside care
To AIDS patients in hospitals and at home
Who had otherwise been entirely abandoned by friends, family members, and lovers.
City after city adopted these necessary and intimate practices of care
To make up for the care which many medical communities were reluctant to provide
To gay people.
As McFarlane himself cared for 100s and 100s of friends dying of AIDS
These practices would become his lasting legacy
Particularly, McFarlanes legacy is documented
in a book called The Complete Bedside Companion
In Which he guides family members and caregivers
Through all the necessary medical, legal, and emotional points
Of a loved one’s approach toward death.
Earlier this month, Roger McFarlane took his own life.
A statement released by his family and friends said that McFarlane
Could no longer continue dealing with heart and back problems
Which followed a broken back in 2002.
He was 54.
In him we have seen one of our greatest heroes, one of our most giving Advocates,
a true cause of the Pride our community gathers to celebrate at events like these.

Rodger McFarlane was and Larry Kramer continues to be
well acquainted with the rage, abandonment, and betrayal
that we read of in Psalm 55.
Though the two men had very different approaches to using that rage
In the world.
"Hear my prayer, O God,
do not hide yourself from my petition.
Listen to me and answer me;
I have no peace, because of my cares.
My heart quakes within me,
and the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling have come over me,
and horror overwhelms me."
Many of the psalms express their fear of the enemy
And plead to God for the safety of escape
or to rain his righteous destruction upon the forces that close in-
But Psalm 55 is heartbreaking in its focus.
"For had it been an adversary who taunted me
then I could have borne it;
or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me,
then I could have hidden from him.
But it was you, a man after my own heart
my companion, my own familiar friend.
We took sweet counsel together
and walked with the throng in the house of God."
This kind of betrayal is familiar to us.
It recalls the childhood friend whom we might have confided in
Only to find them spreading rumors about us the next day at school.
This kind of betrayal recalls the Church of our upbringing
Who formed us in a relationship with the abounding love of God
Only to instruct us later in shame, and degraded worth.
We have been betrayed by Presidents and other politicians
By family members and employers
But this litany pales in comparison to the experiences of those
in the first deathbeds of AIDS.
Beds where many were left to die alone
Abandoned by family members, friends and lovers
Who feared the stigma and contraction of the unknown disease
Betrayed even by their own bodies
Which had promised such sweet assurance of being Beloved
In a hateful world
Only to deliver with poison instead.
The psalmist,
confronted with similar terrors, cries to God to hear his prayer:
“Listen to me, and answer me.”
Kramer issued similar petitions,
In every extremist, galvanizing, media hogging way he could
not to God,
But to those about him: to wake up to the realities of their
Second-class citizenship in the American goverment and medical community.
The psalmist,
confronted with similar terrors, cries to God for escape,
“Oh that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.
I would hasten to escape
from the stormy wind and tempest.”
For many,
McFarland and his army of volunteers
Embodied the presence necessary
Not for escape
But for grounding their experience of death
In real company, and real care that would have otherwise been absent.

It is the Summer of 2009, and we are disappointed, angry, grieved
But much of the terror is gone.
We grieve the passing of Roger
While we celebrate his abounding gift of life to us
We grieve yesterday’s court ruling in California
While we celebrate the victories we’ve claimed in Iowa, Connecticut, Maine
40,000 new cases of HIV/AIDS appear in this country each year
Some of us live with HIV
Or are caring for friends and family with it
But the operative word here is "live"
We live with it.
The early days
When everyone we knew was dead or dying are gone for us.
As is the urgency with which we fought the system for our care.
A lifetime has passed, it seems, since then,
And most of us either feel confident that our people
Are getting the services we need.
Or simply do not possess the language to address and question it
Having missed the universal pervasiveness of its inception in the 80s.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah
We hear of a new day emerging for Zion-
The Holy city of God.
From the darkness of her abandonment.
Zion cries out, “The Lord has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.”
And the Lord to show her otherwise
Directs her gaze beyond herself:
“Lift your eyes all around and see;
they all gather, they come to you.”
And there before abandoned Zion
There before Zion of the solitary deathbed
Before Zion who saw no aid in her darkest hour of trial
Is the vision
Of all her multitude of children
Now grown, now thriving, now full of life.
“Who bore me these?” she gasps
“I was bereaved and barren;
I was exiled and rejected.
Who brought these children up?
I was left all alone, where have they come from?
This land we thought was devastated is now bustling with life.

We, in this room tonight
Are the very same blessing of life
given by God to a formerly barren land.
And as you go to events this weekend
I challenge you to look around yourself
And see in the festive faces of your friends and community
the children which the Lord brings home to Zion.
We, no matter what our age, or gender, or orientation
We are the children AIDS has made.
We are survivors who took benefit
From the medical rights fought for by ACT-UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis
We are among those who took the earliest cues of the movement for chastity
We are among that generation born after AIDS
Who were educated by the public initiatives like Triad Health Project
that taught us to value our own safety in relationship
Our very life
Is the gift of God and years of righteous anger and back breaking work
For justice.
We, in this room tonight,
Are the very same gift of life.
Reared up and remaining from this most desolate time in our history.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah,
God presents this gift of new life to bereaved, abandoned Zion
As if her own children were exquisite jewelry to put on
As if the gift of generations were a wedding garment
To bind up Zions wounds.

And now God is giving us to be the same.
God is blessing us with more life
That we may honor with that life
The struggles which came before us.
How we will show that honor to our forebears
To activist caregivers like Rodger McFarlane
Cannot be given too high a priority in our current agenda.
The fullest expression of gratitude for all we have been given
Can only come as we acknowledge their outrage at injustice
And their immediate response to a need for basic care.

Our current excitement over equal marriage laws
Is very important
Getting many people involved in the work of justice for the 1st time
But it cannot remain an end unto itself
It must be the gateway for more.
We must not forget the continued injustice and need for care
In those places which are beyond our separate units of companionship.
There is still non-discrimination legislation to pursue
Adequate sexual health curriculums to advocate for
And new populations in our own country
Going through the same motions with AIDS that we did two decades ag
Our forebears waged a war on ignorance and death itself
And we must seek out the dying and unknown
if we are to honor that fight that gave us life.
Even as we expend our vast resources on wrestling our right to marry from conservative America
Our kindred around the globe are still wrestling for their lives.
In Iraq, recent feelings of openness led many gay people to
Congregate in public spaces
Only to be slaughtered one after another,
often with their families consent.
In Iran being gay is a crime
Frequently punished by decapitation.
Where boys are lined up, hooded, and hung.
Libiya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Ghana.
What little AIDS leaves alive in our world
Hate and murder are in full force to swallow up.
Our government- or any government- has yet to speak out on
this kind of violence.
Of forebears waged a war on ignorance and death itself
And we must seek the dying and unknown
if we are to honor that fight that gave us life.

In this room,
I am sure there are many veterans of this fight
Even as there are those among us just beginning.
Begin with Psalm 55 if that feels right
Begin with the betrayal and the outrage
Listen closely to it
And see if you can discern where it is coming from.
Begin with this group of people gathered here
With the people you will see tomorrow or the next day
And look at them with the startled eyes
Of a Zion once in ruins,
Who never had expected to see such joy, such life
In such a barren land.
Begin with the booths you are sure to find this weekend
Triad Health Project, Equality NC
Begin with their email listservs and contact your representatives
When they tell you to
Begin with Google,
Look up Southerners On New Ground
Look up Changing Attitudes Nigeria.
Begin wherever you can
And DO whatever you can
To place yourself as the exquisite jewel you are
Upon the body of this people
Who have survived- who have THRIVED.
And May the God of All Justice, Of All Strength, All Comfort, & All Joy
Grant us the power and Spirit that was in Christ
The power that was in Rodger McFarlane
To be present to the unknown and the dying
And to carry them with us to a place of safety and new life.
AMEN!

Year B, Easter 7: Flipping Coins

Year B, Easter 7
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19

"Happy are they whose delight is in the law of the Lord.
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
Bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;
Everything they do shall prosper."

-From Psalm 1, and from the Acts of the Apostles:

"[The disciples] prayed and said, 'Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship.' And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthais."

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

How do we discern the will of God?
How do we know what God wants from us?
What God wants us to do in the world?
We ask ourselves this question frequently
And for good reason.
Every day when Christians pray
Our Father in Heaven
Hallowed be your Name
it comes quickly followed by the words
Your kingdom come
You WILL be done.
Not OUR will, God, but yours.
The idea that we are acting on behalf of,
or at least in tandem with the will of God
weaves itself in and out of our everyday decision making.
Not only at the highest Church level
Where our meetings convene with prayer
And elaborate committee systems are constructed
To ensure some kind of divine consensus
But at the individual level as well.
Who hasn’t stood at the brink of a big decision
A job offer, A new home, A medical choice
Without wishing to know if this is what God wants for us.
Hell, some of us can’t make it through the grocery store
Without wondering if God wouldn’t prefer it
If we purchased the paper products with the highest
post-consumer waste percentages for the sake of
greening God’s good Earth.
Most of us are just lucky if we don’t go so far as to take it upon
ourselves to determine what God wants for others too,
But the risk is there, and real-
Because we Christians consider ourselves
To be veritable experts on discerning the will of God.

In fact, when we gather together we make discerning
the will of God one of our greatest priorities.
In less than two months the national Episcopal Church
will gather for its triennial General Convention
And representatives from all over the country and beyond
Will gather
To try and discern collectively
What God wants for the Episcopal Church.

How do we do it?
How do we know what God wants?
How do we discern the will of God?

Most of us pray
When we have a big decision to make.
We might read scripture
We might consult our friends and advisors
And listen to them carefully for the
right-sounding path to emerge.
But this entirely rational sounding method of discernment
Is occasionally replaced by what we might call more
hasty approaches.
“Give me a sign!” our people have been known to cry
Perhaps when faced with a dining room table full of bills
Unsure of which one will garner our resources first.
And in those moments
Something as chance as the flicker of the light overhead
Might be readily snatched up as the “sign” we needed
To know that the electric will take prirority this month.
We all know the logic.
God obviously wanted me to go shopping today
Because this parking space just happened to appear up front.
God has obviously ordained his blessing on the young man
I met last week, because we both drive the same car
And so on.

Once, when I was fifteen,
I was trying to discern whether or not God had made me gay.
It was starting to become apparent
That there was something about my growing body and mind
That did not fit in with the expectations I had been raised with
And I was terrified.
One afternoon, I closed myself into my room and prayed:
“Dear God,
Please don’t make me gay.
There is so much work I want to do in this world
So many good things that I want to do for you
And if I’m gay, that will just be one more thing
that will get in my way and mess everything up.”
Then, I got out a quarter and said,
“So God, I’m going to flip this coin,
And if its heads, I’ll know that you want me to be gay,
And if its tails, I’ll know that you haven’t made me this way.”

When the coin landed on tails
I decided that God wanted to speak through the best out of three.

While this may seem like an almost endearing way
For an adolescent to determine God’s will for him
Its a little more disconcerting to us modern readers
When essentially the same method of discernment shows up
In our reading from Acts this morning.

This morning we find the disciples
having just returned to Jerusalem from their last earthly
parting with Jesus, who,
After commissioning them to continue his work
in the world, then departed from it by means no less grand
than flight.

The newly minted Apostles have a great amount of work
before them
And first on their agenda is replacing Judas among the twelve.
In other words, the Apostolic Church is not yet days old
And already there are issues of polity and hierarchy to be
dealt with:
Who will be IN the inner circle of leadership
And who will be OUT.
The choice is between Joseph called Barsabbas also known as
Justus; and- Matthais.
(If you ask me, any candidate alternately known by any one
Of three names at any given time
kind of has the cards stacked against him from the outset.)
Both men nominated for the job seem to be equally qualified.
We are told that both were present for each stage of
Christ’s earthly ministry, all the way from
John’s baptism to Christ’s ascension.
So who would it be?
We, the modern readers, are left to wonder
If there wasn’t enough time for panel interviews
Or at least some background reference checks;
Because ultimately, instead,
the Apostles make their choice by praying to God
to make his will known,
and then casting lots: throwing dice.
The first major decision of our infant church
Is here embarrassingly reduced to what we might see
As a matter of chance at least
And a heretical use of divination at the worst.
Incidentally, neither of the two men are heard from again
in the Bible,
Matthais at least is granted his own feast day
in our calender of saints
As for Joseph, called Barsabbas, known as Justus-

I would propose that he be appointed as the patron saint
Of anyone who has ever gotten the short end
Of a Church discernment process.

It would be funnier if there weren’t such a gruesome ring
of truth to it:
For while the mission of these disciples
would lay the groundwork for a global church
And while many and diverse means of discernment
Would be employed in that process
At times, it seems,
When it comes to discerning the will of God. we as a Church
Act with little more finesse and grace
Than a couple of adolescents in an attic
Hovering over a Ouija board.
As a corporate body that claims to carry out the will of God in the world, our discernment of that will has been at times as chance an encounter as rolling dice-
as arbitrary as casting lots.

What else can you call the selective reading of scripture
That has put our Church in a position
Where we claim to embrace the broad reach of Christ’s
welcome to the world
But fall short of consecrating bishops
Or blessing unions that pose a threat to the broader
global culture we are aligned with?
What else but an arbitrary condescension to the ties
we have chosen to maintain.
What else can we call the news that came out this week
Of the Church run schools in Ireland over the past century
Residential schools in which tens of thousands of
Irish children were sexually, physically, and emotionally
abused by priests, nuns and the laity

Where, the report states, “A climate of fear, created by
pervasive, excessive, and ARBITRARY punishment
permeated most of the institutions
where sexual abuse was endemic.”
What else but a Church whose moral alignment in the past
century has been capricious even as it pretends to be
absolute.
There are less extreme examples of course, which in the end
are no less harmful.
There is the level of commitment we as a Western Church
Are willing to make to serve our brothers and sisters
in Africa, in South America, at home.
Any work that falls short of the extreme example of Christs
complete solidarity with the poor
But allows us to give what we feel we are able--
Allows us to maintain the arbitrary balance we’ve determined for ourselves
Between what we are willing to part with
And the degree to which we wish to staunch the swell of
poverty, pollution, war, and other by-products of the
capitalist system that keeps us secure.
What is the line between feeling like we are contributing
As much as we can
between FEELING like we are GROWING as much as we can
And what God really wants of us
What, but a line drawn by chance encounters
along the path of least resistance.

We would like to think better of ourselves.
We would like to think that we are making these decisions
That we are moving forward as a Church and as individuals
By prayerfully considering the will of God.

But the truth is that we are human and deeply flawed-
Even with the Spirit of God surging through us.
And at times we are as fearful as those first disciples must
have been
When their master finally left them to make all the big decisions
alone.
And the truth is that it doesn’t take a popular, virulent atheist
To see that in fumbling through discernment
our Church has been responsible for some of
the most egregious offenses to human dignity our world
has known.

But the amazing thing
The unbelievable thing,
is that God in Christ founded this feeble, flawed, institution of ours,
to be the earthly body of his word and work ANYWAY.
Knowing that the disciples who had followed him in all his
earthly travels were faulty in their own right,
simple fishermen trying their best to grasp at
the mystery shared in Christs presence:
Peter with his doubts
And the rest with their misunderstanding
KNOWING these disciples as human complete with human
faults
Jesus prays ANYWAY in the Gospel we read
To send them into the world as he himself has been sent by God.

Given the flawed and failing nature which the disciples have
demonstrated thus far in the narrative
THIS is a remarkable trust.
“Holy Father” Jesus prays in the Gospel
“protect them in your name that you have given me
so that they may be one, as we are one.”

Every year at Advent and Christmas, we marvel at the mystery
Of the incarnation
The mystery that God would make his presence known
In the vulnerability of human flesh, a child no less.
But the mystery,
the AUDACITY, of God’s incarnation continues here as well
In this prayer of Jesus, in his commissioning of the disciples
In his willing departure from the work which he began.

Some handful of back broken human souls
Who, for all the breadth of their mission to the world
Stood, for a moment at least, around a game of dice
To determine the direction of their next steps.
This is who Christ chose to make his mission to the world incarnate- enshrined yet again in the vulnerable flesh of humanity- us, the Church.

And how then are we, the Church, to choose what is right
To discern the will of God in our work.
How are we to participate in the inbreaking of God’s kingdom
Rather than the theologically sanctioned violence which
is so easy for us to slip complicity into?

With closeness to God, Jesus invites.
May they be one, as we are one, Jesus prays for the disciples
and prays for us.

In this prayer, Jesus does not speak of discernment
But of the closeness with which he experienced God
whom he called Father.
As close as two that in reality are only one.
May they be one as we are one.
As close as Jesus is to God
As close as the tree is to the stream of water which gives it life
In the Psalm we sang this morning
As close as we are called to be to in Christ with God.
In Christ’s incarnation,
God showed God’s own closeness, and oneness
With the suffering of our sin and fallen state
And in inviting the disciples into that very closeness in turn
Christ establishes a second Incarnation just as reckless
as the first:
An incarnation of God’s word and work among the world
At the hands of normal human beings
Infused with the Spirit of God incarnate
Left to discern where that closeness might lead
For better, and as we have seen all to well at times, for worse.

How do we discern the will of God?
I would suggest that we do not discern the will of God
Any better than the tree discerns that its life is in the river it is
planted by.
This tree that we hear of in Psalm One
This tree that we are invited to BE
By planting our own lives close to the streaming wisdom
Of the Torah of God, of the Psalms of God, of the Word of God.
The tree does not discern what quality of water it is
Saturating the ground beneath its roots
The tree does not even choose for itself
What method might be best to bring that water to the world.
The tree is simply fed by the water which sustains it
And GROWS
As it is MADE to do.
Take, eat.
This is what God wants.
To be our food
To be our sustentation.
To be as close to us as water in a tree
Pressing out against our fruit in its due season.
Pressing out in the fullness of our being
In the fullness of Christ’s joy made complete.

Perhaps in the chance encounters we stumble through
In the greatest glory and the darkest pain
In all our strained attempts to hear what God is calling for
As often as our hasty leaps of faith
Perhaps even in lots cast by the disciples in the first days of their mission
We can work to see a radical faith
That not only because, but also in spite of our greatest efforts
God will continue to be revealed.

So here we are: casting lots and calling committees,
busying ourselves with the business of determining
how much of God’s will we are willing to work with

And here too is the Grace of God-
pulsing through our lives, through our words, through our touch
in spite of ourselves,
weaving inbetween our good and bad decisions,
striking out for the new kingdom of God’s redeeming love
all the while.

Year B, Epiphany 4: The God of Human Moments

Year B, Epiphany 4
I Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
I Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

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

Note: If you've never participated in Episcopal worship you have to know that there is a prayer commonly said at the beginning of each celebration of the Eucharist called the Collect for Purity. The prayer goes like this: "Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord, AMEN."


“Lord you have searched me out and known me
You know my sitting down and rising up.”

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

Nathaniel scoffs at the thought of a Nazarene Messiah
The Corinthians are scolded for their
apparently amoral gallivanting
The priest Eli coaches the young Samuel in listening for the Lord
and we. gather for one more week
in the midst of war and burden
to ask that God cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit
that we may perfectly love him
and worthily magnify his Holy name
through Christ.

Anyone who spent pubescent
years in an Episcopal Church
can surely recall the acute sense of horror
that accompanies this weekly recitation
of the Collect for Purity.
“Oh God,”
we’ve heard each Sunday,
“to whom all hearts are open, all desires known
and from whom no secrets are hid,”
And typically at this point
if there are any thirteen-year-olds in the room
their eyes hit the floor,
heavy with the thought of a God
who knows exactly what happened last night,
not to mention what we thought of on our beds
the night before.
Some of us,
confronted with the strains of such divine surveillance
opted out of church life altogether
in exchange for a happily unexamined private one instead,
one complete with guilt-free binge-drinking, swearing, cigarettes
and, in grand Corinthian fashion, other pleasures of the flesh
that we deemed had no business to do with God at all.
Ironically,
when some of us made it back to Church after all that
it usually had something to do
with being so completely known by God
that we couldn’t find any good reason to stay away.
And it is somewhere
in this range of experience
That Psalm 139 comes singing to us.

Our psalmist, this morning,
has reconciled herself
To being completely known by God.
This psalm is one of the biggies,
One of the biblical corner stones
in attributing omniscience
and omnipresence to God
and then wrestling through the implications.

The words we sang this morning have empowered many.
Generations have resisted
literal readings of the Bible meant to diminish them
By finding strength in this particular image of God:
The God who watched in silence as our DNA
clicked like clockwork somewhere in our mother’s womb
somewhere with the stardust and the stones
that we came from.

We have been reassured by these words
That the presence we are so aware of
pressing in. on. us. at all sides
like a well sewn seam pulled tight
IS, in fact,
the God our predators have tried to warn us of.
And we have slept at night because of this understanding.

But there is more to this psalm than what we sang.
There are verses of this psalm
That- for the sake of brevity- our lectionary leaves
on the cutting room floor;
And something of this psalms heart is there with them.

Verses 7 through 12, which we do not read in Church
are more than just a variation
On the theme of an omniscient God,
They are a development into inescapability.
Where can I escape your Spirit? she asks
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb to heaven you are there
If I make my bed in the grave, you are there
If I take the wings of morning
and settle at the furthest limit of the sea, you are there
Even there your hand guides me
Your right had holds me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness conceals me
The day around me like the night
Even darkness is not dark to you, O Lord,
and the night is as bright as any day.

Some psalms wonder at the lack of God’s company.
Psalm 139 marvels that she cannot get away.
There is a strong chorus running through the psalms
That demands to know where God is,
that pleads for God’s presence.
Psalm 10 asks why God stands so far off
to hide in a time of trouble
13 joins in with 83 to ask how long it will last:
Will you hide your face from me forever?
_Why have you forsaken me, inquires 22
from amidst a clutch of dogs teeth.
And 88 goes so far as to plead for salvation, if only
because there will be one less voice to praise God's holy name
Should that voice be lost to death.
“Is your steadfast love declared in the grave”, that psalm asks
“or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?”
Psalm 139 looks up from the other corner of that grave
and simply answers: Yes.

Yes, God is here, she seems to tell us.
This, too, is a Godly moment:
the chill you felt when God's face was hidden
As much as the thrill of victory.
God was here when our legs became like wind
And carried us to victory
just as God was here when we celebrated too much for it
And crushed our front teeth on the pavement.
God witnessed the breathless pause you took
with the ruddy sunrise this morning
Yet not the pause only
But also the red face you got
when you wrestled with the tangled power strip on Tuesday
and finally pulled it out of the wall.
God sat next to you in the car
While you cut through three lanes of traffic,
and when you yelled at your kids
and when you sat on the couch not really watching any program
but just letting your eyes glaze for a bit.
God stood by as you made breakfast
hung the laundry
and fell asleep before remembering
to say goodnight to your spouse.

We can go far with this idea of God’s
inescapable omnipresence,
and in most modern readings of this psalm we do.
And the danger here is how perfectly
we can make this psalm fit
with our creeping Western suspicion of always being watched.
Of being the star of our own personal reality show
That everyone is tuned in to.
Of being the author of books and blogs and sermons
Whose readership and audience is infinitely extended.
Of being guilty, mostly, of personal sins
Such as sex outside of marriage
Or having too strong a fondness
for chocolate cake.

But that would simply be a performance.
Perhaps one elaborately staged
To avoid the more awkward truth
That there is something much more profane,
and frustrating, and inadequate, and vulnerable
In other words,
Something much more whole emerging
In the eyes of our Great Beholder:
Less a life of Godly moments
and more a God of infinitely human ones.

Reconciling ourselves
To being known by this God
Who knows the world so fully
May be disconcerting.
We who have grown accustomed
To keeping dark things hidden in the dark-
the poor silent in their ghettos
and our own skeletons wrapped neatly in our closets-
may be reluctant to show ourselves
In a light so indiscriminately embracing.
We may have to contend with the fact
That this constant companion of ours
Is more deeply world-weary
Than what we might care to invite
into the privacy of our homes.
The longer we let ourselves sit
With the steady, loving, gaze of our Redeemer
The more frequently we may find
That we share the same place there
As the Haitian mother trying to decide which of her children
will eat tonight.
The more frequently we may find
That our fascinating table conversation
Is more or less as valued
as dangerous children's play by cook fires in Guatemala.
The more frequently we may find ourselves
in the company of Palestinians as they retrograde
with each explosion past the meager vestiges of progress
They had managed to claim thus far.
We might even begin to ask
How much we really value God’s presence after all
At least Over things like comfort, safety, health, food
or even spiritual well-being for that matter.
We may find ourselves as frustrated
With the seeming lack of God’s action
In the world
As those psalmists who have wondered at the lack
Of God’s presence altogether.

Near the end of 139- a section also left from our lectionary-
the psalmist rises up with the heart of the matter
& cries:
O that you would kill the wicked, O God
and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me-
those who speak of you maliciously
and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with a perfect hatred;
I count them as my enemies.

By the end of it, 139 is not much different from the other psalms.
Whether aware of God’s pervasive presence or not
The psalmist is still faced with a world
that seems to be at the mercy of the godless
Waiting for God’s intervention.
A waiting made all the more plaintive
Because the psalmist has known
That God is here, witnessing with God’s own self
the devastation we have wrought.
That God must know the pains of this life of flesh
even as we wait,
wading in the thick of it.

Search me, O God, and know my heart
test me and know my thoughts, the Psalm ends
See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, O God,
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, we join.

By the end of it, the psalmist
opens herself to what is truly liberating about
an omnipresent God-
the possibility of being known by an Other
more deeply than she knows her self-
and in that possibility
being open to the unknown direction that might take.
The possibility that the wickedness
she deplores in the world
may be held within her
as much as she is held within
the world her God is watching.
Perhaps it is the best concession one can make
upon discovering ones own belonging
to a world so wholly caught up
In God’s redeeming work.

Eli, after all
cannot train the young Samuel in listening for the Lord
Without risking a message from him
that tells of his own demise.

Nathaniel cannot judge the unlikely origins of the Messiah
Who will save him
Without surrendering that judgment just as quickly
When confronted by a teacher so clearly possessed
with a prevenient understanding of his life.

Paul cannot introduce a liberating theology of God’s grace
To the Corinthians
without the risk of them extending the applications of that Grace
in directions he never dreamed of and could not condone.

And we cannot pray to a God
To Whom All Hearts Are Open
Without the danger of opening Ourselves to All Hearts
An endeavor that pinned our own Christ to the cross;
An impossible task that may very well crush us too.

But that is the Good News of our faith:
That in the crushing there is cleansing
That night is as bright as any day
That in crucifixion the Spirit Thrives.
That the steadfast love of God is declared in the grave
As often as in our victory over it
That wonders will be known in the darkness after all.
May we all love God more perfectly because of it
And worthily magnify her holy Name
through Christ our Lord, Amen.

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.