“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
This verse in Paul’s letter to the Philippians is loved by many people. It is a favorite to read over and over. In hearing the entire passage today I am seeing it in new ways. I especially identify with the opening words. “My brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for…” As this pandemic year continues, I expect you also can understand Paul’s sentiment. We long to see each other and to be physically together and yet we are not there yet. So how can we do this is, how can we always rejoice? Of course, this year 2020 has brought some times of happiness, the births of new babies, being able to see family and friends even from afar, finding those rolls of toilet paper, getting an economic boost just at the right time, eating favorite foods, learning to use zoom, and so on. There have been happy times even though these are overshadowed by many more times of grief and unhappiness. As we look at this particular scripture I think it might be helpful to make a distinction between happiness and joy. For my purposes today I will define happiness as something that happens to us or for us. While similar, joy is a deeper grounding, a state of being, a place of calm and peace which is always available to us. Joy comes from knowing to whom we belong. While happiness is external brought about by things outside of us, joy is internal. And yes, 2020 has brought much unhappiness and yet the joy found “in the Lord” is unchanged.
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[Christ Jesus], though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. The most important word in this beautiful poem from Philippians 2 is probably not what we think it is. This elegant text, perhaps from an early hymn, lays out for us first the glory and deity of the divine Christ, co-equal, co-eternal with his Father, then how he emptied all that out in becoming human and suffering death on a Cross, and finally his subsequent exaltation as Lord above heaven and earth so that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow. What might be the most important word in this profound passage of the New Testament? Perhaps one of the verbs, describing the great actions God took in becoming human? Emptied, being born, humbled, exalted? Or one of the nouns? God, death, cross, heaven, Lord, glory? All those words are significant, of course -- but I would like to suggest that the real most important word in Philippians 2 might be “Therefore.” [Christ Jesus], though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Therefore. In Christianity, God’s greatest act is to become one of us, to empty out his prerogatives in Christ and meet humanity at our lowest point, to experience vulnerability, pain, and death. Because he did that, the text says, Jesus can be God for everyone. Because he did that, his name is above every name. Because he did that, therefore, he is our God. Jesus is Lord not because he has power, but because he gave it up. Not because he is full, but because he was empty. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name. We are in a time of bitter division in our country, as well as of challenges to our personal emotional health and our own ability to cope. We are concerned about our republic and about our planet. We have lost over 200,000 lives to the virus in the US alone. Not to mention all the personal agonies of one kind or another some of us have passed through this year. In this time, we need Philippians 2. We need to turn to a God who has come into the middle of all this pain, who has entered the human condition and stood with us, uniting himself to us. Not a deity who stands aloof and impassive above it. Not a spiritual force it’s up to us to use to use to fix the world or fix ourselves. We need a God who doesn’t just appeal to our hopes and dreams, but who also understands our anger and despair. This is the God who dies on the Cross for us and rises again. The Anglican theologian and preacher John Stott wrote, “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” We worship Jesus, Philippians 2 tells us, precisely because he gave up his immunity to pain. Out of pure love, he united the human vulnerability he took on to the human vulnerability you and I can’t help having. He came to where we are and embraced us, and – therefore – held in that embrace we are lifted back up along with him into the very being of God. If people know anything about Jonah, it’s that he was swallowed by a whale. Although the Bible actually says a big fish. The book of Jonah is only four chapters long, but there’s a lot more to it than the whale. It’s great: lots of action, and completely hilarious. Our reading this week gave just the ending, but it’s worth reading the whole story, and I hope you will.
Jonah is a prophet, and as prophets do, Jonah gets an assignment from God: go and warn the city of Nineveh that they are in trouble. Well, Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a very powerful nation, known for its war crimes and brutality, a major enemy. Like any patriot, Jonah hates those lousy Ninevites, and besides, they’ll probably string him up the second he walks through the gates. So Jonah has a brainstorm: he’ll run away from God’s assignment. Sure, that sounds like a good idea. So he hops on a ship to Tarshish, which is basically as far as you can go in the opposite direction. It was as if Jonah showed up at the dock and said “Gimme a ticket for wherever is furthest from Nineveh.” But at sea, there is a storm. Jonah confesses that he is running from God and the sailors freak out: “what did you do that for? Are you nuts?” And he says: “look, I’m ruined. Just throw me overboard.” And when they do lo! the sea calms down – as, we might expect, rebellious Jonah sinks to his well-deserved doom. But the Bible doesn’t say what we expect. It says instead, God didn’t let him drown. God sent a huge fish, and it swallowed him whole. I certainly expect Jonah wasn’t in very good shape when he got vomited up three days later, but still this fish saved him from death, and Jonah prays a psalm of gratitude for God’s mercy. And then, we might expect, God says to him, “You’re finished! I’m never trusting you again!” But the Bible doesn’t say what we expect. It says that God gives Jonah a second chance to be obedient and blessed. He speaks to Jonah again: go and warn the city of Nineveh that they are in trouble. So off Jonah goes, but you can tell he still doesn’t like it. The city is of a size that it would have taken about three days to walk across it; well, all Jonah does is come partway in and say one sentence. “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown.” Boy, that’s really going to be helpful to the Ninevites, isn’t it? Don’t put yourself out, Jonah. But God is on the case, so nevertheless the Ninevites get it. In response to this lackluster message, they demonstrate one of the greatest examples of group regret that we find in the Bible. The mayor proclaims a fast. They remove their fancy clothes, they sob in grief, and most important, they change their behavior. And this was the moment where our reading started today: “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” God sends Jonah to warn the Ninevites that the road they are on leads to disaster, but all along God was really just hoping for them to repent. And what does Jonah think of this? He is furious. First off, these guys deserved to be punished; they are an evil regime. Second, Jonah looks like an idiot – he said they’d be destroyed and now they won’t. The Ninevites got it, but Jonah sure didn’t. I mean, listen to the words he speaks in rage: “I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love!” And Jonah does not see this as a good character point. So, we might expect, because Jonah’s so judgmental, God smites him! But the Bible doesn’t say what we expect. No, God just asks gently, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Jonah ignores this overture of love, and sets up camp a little ways away to watch what happens. And the narrative pictures God arranging a comical little object lesson. He has a shade tree grow overnight at Jonah’s camp, to keep his poor judgmental prophet cool. Jonah likes the tree. Thanks, God! The next day God has a parasite attack the tree, and it withers, and poor Jonah gets a sunburn. And what does he do? Becomes furious again. God asks once more , “Is it right for you to be angry?” And what does Jonah say? “You bet it is! You killed my tree!” Jonah is outraged that his personal plant is hurt, but he feels nothing for a whole city of perishing human beings made in God’s image. So does God finally show him who’s boss? No, all he does is ask a question: “You care, Jonah, about this little tree? Shouldn’t I care about Nineveh, these people who are lost, these people I made, even if you don’t like them? Are you angry because I love other people besides you? Should I not be concerned about this great city?” And that question is the last line of the book. “Should I not be concerned about this great city?” The book ends with a question. It’s written that way to force us to ask ourselves for an answer. To ask why we keep being tempted to focus only on what benefits people we like or who look like us. “Should I not be concerned about this great city?” Who or what is your Nineveh? Who can you not stand the idea of God loving every bit as much as he loves us? Who would you likely avoid the invitation to talk to and listen to? Who is your Nineveh, and will you allow God to be concerned about them? “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.”
Since when has love been a debt? Our epistle passage begins with Paul’s advice to not owe anyone anything—which seems fair. It’s not a good habit to rack up IOUs, whether that’s money or favors or time. Nobody wants to always be looking over their shoulder come pay-day, knowing that the creditors are on their way. But then the apostle goes on. “Owe no one anything,” he says, “except in this one area: love.” “You have a continuing debt,” Paul tells us. Don’t forget to pay up. For many of us, that’s news. Digging around in our purse or rifling through our briefcase, we pull out the relational checkbook. Who is it that we’ve borrowed from and not paid back? Our neighbors? Besides a cup of sugar and an occasional tomato, not really. God? What happened to needing nothing but faith? And how does this kind of transaction work? If we miss a payment, do we forfeit . . . something? Will we watch as creditors carry off what once was ours, leaving us with an empty house, an empty garage, and an empty feeling in our stomachs? Paul has spent much of his letter to the Roman church assuring them—and us—that faith in God and faith in God alone is what saves. Nowhere has he hinted that there’s some kind of cosmic loan shark watching the mail for our monthly payment. What does it mean, then, that we are in debt, that we owe love to people we’ve never borrowed from? And that, according to Paul, we should keep ourselves in such a state? The answer lies in what has been done for us. “Jesus paid it all. All to him we owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow.” This fact doesn’t mean that God has given us a free gift and neglected to tell us that we actually have to work for it. What it does mean is that we have been freed by Christ to live like him, freed once and for all to love our neighbors—even the grouchy ones—as Christ loves us: with no holding back. Paul tells us to outdo one another in doing good because Christ died for us. Always be in debt, he says, always owe more love to your neighbor—for this is the way of Christ, the overflowing cup of his love that testifies to God’s mercy in the world. And it really does. Every time we bring water to an enemy, every time we return blessing for cursing, every time we count ourselves less than those around us, God is glorified and the Gospel is proclaimed. We have been redeemed and the debt we owe is really no debt at all but is rather the constant search to worship God by loving our neighbors. Christ has revealed to us what we have been saved from; he has also shown us what we have been saved for: communion with God that will transform everything, right on down to our most mundane relationships. He has done this not so we might earn his regard but so the world might continue to witness his Spirit as we love another. “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.” May we remember this week Paul’s command to us and the power in which we can fulfill it, the power that can “change the leper’s spots and melt the heart of stone.” AMEN. According to the Youtube videos that somehow evade my ad-blocker and the various news articles I reluctantly read, there is one thing on which all political parties and candidates agree: these are dark and dangerous times, and we need a strong leader to deliver us.
The power of this marketing strategy is obvious. We’ve lived through months of pandemic. We’ve watched as protestors fill our streets. And we are currently holding our breath as first wildfires and now hurricanes rip through small towns and large, leaving destruction and grief in their wake. It doesn’t matter if you belong to the political Left or Right: We all know that these are indeed times of deeper darkness than many of us have ever experienced. Which is why we want our political champions to be models of strength, of purpose, of promise—because we can’t tolerate the thought of 2021 being a 2020, part two. Our hopes are built on nothing less . . . than the victory of one of two men. Or so they want us to believe. More than ever before, the presidential nominees want us to see them as our Savior. They want us to believe that they are our only hope. But that is a false assertion, regardless of how poignant it is at this point in time. Because we already have a Savior, a man who, if he was to be represented by a full marketing team and millions of dollars worth of TV commercials would be so exactly the opposite of a strong candidate that no one in their right mind would vote for him—because his entire platform is based on what the world can never understand. Jesus is our Lord, but he is a Lord unlike any other. Just moments after Peter identified Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, “Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things . . . and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And Peter, alarmed at the turn the conversation had taken, grabbed Jesus by the shoulders and said, “this shall never happen to you,” which prompted Jesus’ gut-wrenching reply: “Get behind me, Satan. . . . For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Confused silence greeted his words. Our Messiah was planning to do what? The disciples’ hopes had only just been confirmed. Jesus was the promised one, the Savior of Israel who would bring injustice to an end and re-establish communion with God, not to mention crushing the armies of Rome and freeing the Jewish people from foreign tyranny forever. That he should die was most certainly not on the agenda. And if Jesus thought they would let go of that hope, that they could really trust a leader who was walking toward his death . . . It wasn’t even an option. He must be mistaken. Thousands of years later, we thumb through our Bibles and can feel awfully tempted to judge these men for their sheer obtuseness. But Peter’s reaction and the disciples’ failure to understand Jesus’ words shouldn’t surprise us—because we, like them, are so often blinded by what we can see. The photographs, the news reels, the catastrophic projections, the memories crowd our minds and make the world—in all its fallenness—more apparent and more apparently powerful than the God who has saved us. At times like these, we want power, not sacrifice. Dominance, not submission. We want a leader like Peter and his fellow disciples wanted: a man who will strike down our enemies and accomplish our goals. But what we have is a crucified Messiah. What we have is a God who has chosen—on his own terms—to dwell with us. He doesn’t look polished or important. In fact, his hands are cracked and his robe frayed. He is an unassuming Jewish man who grew up the son of a working-class family; who wandered through deserts and country towns, feeding the hungry and healing the sick, urging those he helped not to tell anyone what he had done. He is a Messiah who will speak with Gentile women, who will bring tax collectors and prostitutes into his fold, who will continue to love and lead his disciples even knowing that they will abandon him in the end. He is the Messiah we need as we walk through life in a world that is fallen. He is the one who will get down in the dirt with us when we trip, the one who will hold us up when we have no strength to stand. He is the life, the true life that we crave, the only life that can lead us into eternal glory—because he lives with us. Jesus’ call to us today is to follow him, a crucified Messiah, a man who will guide us through the lowest of lows and carry us into the highest of highs. “Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. We will not trust the sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. On Christ the solid rock we stand, all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.” AMEN. Paul tells us today in his letter to the Romans chapter 12 that we are to “present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship.” I’d like us to think a little bit about the word sacrifice, both how it’s normally used, and how differently Paul uses it.
A sacrifice is, in common language, something you give up. When you sacrifice something, it is lost to you. We are experiencing sacrifices in all kinds of ways right now because of the pandemic. We have lost getting to go to ball games. We have had to give up coming together to see a friend get married with lots of loved ones. In this season, each of us is sacrificing, giving up things, for the common good all the time. In the same way, in religious contexts, a sacrifice is usually something you give up or even destroy. Once it’s sacrificed, you’ve lost it. Various world religions past and present have structured their lives around sacrifice, the giving up of animals or things in order to please or appease God. This can be something like burning a container of clarified butter, leaving a fruit or vegetable at an altar, killing a goat or cow, or in some ancient cults even human sacrifice. Whatever it looks like, when you sacrifice something, it’s given up, dead, gone. You give it to the deity you believe in, and therefore you don’t have it anymore. It’s a sort of exchange, by which your loss of an animal or a valued possession then merits forgiveness or favor or help from your deity. That’s what sacrifice means in most contexts. But that’s not at all what Paul says today. In this passage from Romans 12, Paul writes, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” So in this kind of sacrifice, you don’t lose what is sacrificed. It is still living. In fact, it becomes better, according to Paul: you become better. You become transformed by a renewed mind, more able to discern the will of God, more equipped with gifts to serve the world. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Why do we Christians get to sacrifice ourselves but still keep ourselves? Why is sacrifice in Christianity so different than sacrifice in other religious traditions? Why a living sacrifice all day long, and not a dead one at a special ritual? Well, because of the previous 11 chapters of Romans. You see, for us, the one true sacrifice has already been made. On the Cross Christ offered himself up for our sake. God offered God to God – by definition there can be no greater gift, no more powerful sacrifice, and in that one action any need for further sacrifices was swept away. Human efforts to do something else to satisfy God become laughably redundant. The whole point of the previous 11 chapters of Romans, of the Mass itself, really of the Christian way of being, is that the sacrifice has been made already, and now our lives, if we say yes, our living is swept up into it. What Christ did on the cross is already ours. What he did as he rose from the tomb is already ours. Every time we come to Mass we are reconnected with that sacrifice, ingesting it, being filled once again with the unique and irreplaceable power of God offering God to God, in case we’ve lost track. That sacrifice has already made us holy and acceptable. There is nothing supplemental that we could add to it, as if there were some further deity out there who needs appeasement or is still keeping a running list of our sins. As Christians we have the opportunity to live in the freedom that was released into the universe when God offered God to God, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. To live in that, and let its finality and enoughness live in you. You will have many temptations not to live that way, not to acknowledge the sacrifice that has already been made on your behalf. Many of us forget, day to day, that there is nobody out there to please or appease because God offering God to God has already accomplished our enoughness. We act as if the full and final sacrifice hasn’t been made. But it has. So I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea. There’s a kindness in his justice which is more than liberty… For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind.” (1982 Hymnal #469)
This familiar hymn expresses what we have seen and learned about Jesus and his love. And then we read today’s gospel story. Jesus’ attitude in this gospel is at the least, unexpected, and perhaps we might even say, shocking. Not that Jesus’ comments aren’t often shocking, at least to the establishment of his time. But his attitude today is not directed to the religious authorities but rather to a distraught Canaanite woman seeking help and healing for her child. His compassion is lacking in this encounter which is what makes it seem out of character to us. And we wonder why. Is Jesus just having a bad day or is there another explanation? The Canaanites were ancient foes of the Israelites. Canaan was the grandson of Noah so the conflict went back to the days of Genesis. And since the time of Abraham, God had promised the Israelites the land of milk and honey—the land, the property, of the Canaanites. There were well-fought battles over this area. The animosity and lack of respect between these two peoples was long standing. By the time Jesus was on earth this was entrenched in both groups and at best they avoided each other. At other times they hurled insults at each other and called the other names, such as dog. All he had was God.
And God, instead of roaring to Elijah’s rescue in the wind or the fire or the earthquake, arrives in the softest of whispers. Up until that point, Elijah had been accustomed to dramatic pyrotechnics, the kind of powerful demonstrations that make you squint and shade your face, eyes watering from the brightness of the light. Only a few days ago in our narrative, Elijah watched as God set a soaking wet ceremonial sacrifice ablaze just to spite the priests of Baal. Before that, Elijah had seen the power of God manifest in the drought he ordained over Israel, a drought that would hold until Israel repented of her idolatry. And then, of course, we have Elijah’s own boldness, inspired by the LORD’s might, that enabled him to challenge a wicked king to his face. But now, after the blaze on Mt. Carmel has fizzled out, and King Ahab’s homicidal queen, Jezebel, is out for Elijah’s blood—now more than ever before, our beleaguered prophet needs a sign, a big one, to assure him that everything will in fact be okay. What he gets, though, is the sound of sheer silence, a few words rather than a thousand fireworks, an anti-climactic revelation when all he wanted was for God to do some additional smiting or perhaps set the royal palace on fire. As a child, I remember singing “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do” right after hearing stories about God’s acts of creation, of Jesus calming the storms, of the Apostles raising the dead in the name of their Lord. Each of us children in the Sunday school classroom were primed and ready to spot the metaphorical lightning strikes, the wonders that would irrefutably prove God to be God. Then, as we got older, the expectations became more subtle. We began asking God for signs—just get rid of the bully. Just make it super clear what I’m supposed to do. Just give me a new job, a new friend, a new passion, and I’ll know you’ll have heard my prayers. Like Elijah, we find ourselves looking to God for a firestorm or an earthquake, but what we end up with is a whisper, the sound of sheer silence, or with nothing more than a hand gripping ours as we flounder in a stormy sea of troubles. It doesn’t seem fair—we’re inviting God to divinely intervene, but all we’re getting is a smile from our neighbor across the street or a crumpled $20 stuffed in a forgotten jacket pocket. These small moments of God’s mercy are easy to miss, easy to explain away. We find ourselves hunting for a big solution when, all along, God has been gently and quietly sowing our path with mercies, guiding our wayward feet through the dark moments of life and toward his light, using whatever comes to hand: a goofy friend, a fuzzy dog, a beautiful sunset. God’s whispers, quiet as they may, are nevertheless words of creation, changing their hearers, who are then empowered to change the world. “Go back to Israel,” the LORD tells his servant, but on the way there you will anoint two kings and call another prophet to help you in your struggle against Israel’s idolatry. You are not alone, Elijah. There are people who will help you, and hidden amongst your enemies are 7,000 Israelites who are still fighting to live righteous lives amidst the decay and injustice of their circumstances. The war hasn’t ended. No conclusive victory has been won. But hope is once more in the air, breathed out from the mouth of God. “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty,” that sometimes he works like a drop of water on the rock, spending years carving a divot in the face of a mountain even when we know he could just snap his fingers and have it done in an instant. His gentleness may not fit our idea of getting things done. If we were in charge . . . we might say. Yet, God’s smallest miracles, his quiet voice, his steady hand, these are our companions on the way. St. Paul tells us that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved—and I do believe that’s true, even when the saving comes and goes as quick as a flash in the dark. We are not alone. God is here to help us. AMEN. Both Isaiah and Matthew today point out how determined God is to feed us, and how powerless we are to help him do it. In Matthew, Jesus feeds 5000 men plus women and children, working with nothing more than one person’s sack lunch. It’s almost funny: the well-meaning helpers in the story scrape together enough to nourish a single individual, and in response Jesus lavishes a banquet on a crowd that could fill the Assembly Hall, and ends up with twelve baskets more food than they can possibly use.
Isaiah is even more insistent on the asymmetrical generosity of God: God cries out “You that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!” Even if you wanted to reimburse God a little something for his trouble, you couldn’t, because the sustenance he gives is free. He already paid the price for it. Come, be fed without money, without price. You can’t possibly afford to buy what God gives. Last week I watched a webinar with two of the Episcopal Church’s great teachers of prayer, Fr. Martin Smith and Mother Sarah Coakley. Fr. Smith was talking about a question he often uses when doing individual spiritual direction or leading retreats, as a way of inviting people into a direct encounter with God. He asks them, “Who is it that God wants to be for you right now?” He has asked all kinds of groups and individuals to turn to God with this question: “Who is it that God wants to be for you right now?” If we have spent time with readings like Isaiah and Matthew this morning, and absorbed them into the way we actually approach life, we will know that God gives grace and nourishment all out of proportion to anything we do or are. God feeds us lavishly, forgives us exorbitantly; we could never reimburse him for his generosity. If we have listened enough to who the Bible tells us God is, that we begin to behave as if it were true, we will know…. God is like that. What Fr. Smith discovered, though, is that even those who were interested enough in God to come to retreats or sign up for spiritual direction didn’t know this. They were often working on the assumption that Christianity was something they had taken responsibility for doing. Why did Fr. Smith say that? Because, he revealed, at the majority of his retreats and events – for Christians, I emphasize – at the majority of his retreats and events where he had asked people to pray with the question, “Who is it that God wants to be for you right now?” they would come back to him and say something like, “I was so grateful for that idea, and I found it really challenging to ask God who he wants me to be for him right now.” Over and over, people turned the question around backwards. Fr. Smith asked them to pray with a question about the love and generosity of God proactively acting on us, and over and over people turned it into a question about what kinds of actions they could do for God. God is crying out, “You that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!” and we are looking at the slightly stale granola bar we have in our backpack, and saying “I can help you out, God. I know you need me!” Do you believe God is like these two passages of Scripture say he is? Do you believe in a God who right now, in response to his infinite knowledge of you, wants to be for you in some way? Who is fundamentally not a taskmaster, not an inspiring ideal you might live up to some day, but a participant in your life who is determined to be for you? Who is looking right now at whatever hunger you have, whatever lack you have – whether it’s boredom or frustration or outrage at injustice or guilt or loss or fear or desire to change – who is looking actively at that and wanting you to allow him into it, out of his infinite love and grace? Do you believe in a God who has so infinitely much to give that every time we really let him do what he wants with us, there will be twelve baskets of leftovers to feed others as well? Because that’s the God who came to us in Christ. That’s the God who told us about himself in Holy Scripture. The god who is a taskmaster or an inspiring ideal is a human invention. So, Who is it that God wants to be for you right now? I invite you, as Fr. Smith invites his retreatants, to pray with that question this week. Not the turned on its head version addressed to the kind of guilt-inducing god we would invent. The Christian version, addressed to the God who has told us over and over how much he loves us. Who is it that God wants to be for you right now? “Steady my footsteps in your word; let no iniquity have dominion over me.”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Steady my footsteps in your word. This directive is one of the gems of psalm 119, in my opinion. There are other familiar poetic phrases from this often neglected psalm which include “your word is a lamp unto my feet”, “let your loving kindness be my comfort, O Lord”, “you are my refuge and shield”, and so on. And yet I will admit a certain internal groaning when I see that this psalm is the appointed one for the day. Or I should say, a portion of this psalm is appointed. Psalm 119 is the longest of the psalms and while it has a unifying theme of the law, God’s word, it is sometimes difficult to see where it is going. We hear “God’s word”, or a synonym for God’s teachings repeated over and over. It has 22 stanzas, each stanza with eight verses. In Hebrew it is an acrostic poem. Each stanza represents a letter of the alphabet and then each verse begins with that same letter. Today’s passage is for the letter Pe (pay) so originally these 8 verses began with Pe words. This structure is lost in the translation to English and so it often seems that the verses have little to no connection. To us as readers now, they can be unrelated phrases strung together. I have chosen to take this as my text this morning for a few reasons which also have what might be considered a “thin connection” but in my mind they are related. I invite you into my reflections. I always find the psalms to be of comfort especially in stressful times and use them in most pastoral situations, as do many clergy. They are a rich source of assurance about God and his love of humankind, as well as acknowledgement of the depth of human emotion, both grief and joy. I encourage you to watch the short teaching videos that our curate Marisa is currently doing on the psalms. Specifically this morning’s verses of psalm 119 talk about the word of God as a source of rejoicing and delight. God’s teachings are a divine and cherished gift, not something to restrict us, but rather to give us structure. The word of God brings light in our darkness. However, we are not left merely to contemplate what God has told us. Rather we are directed to put into action what we are taught. Loving God and loving our neighbor has to be carried out by what we do, not just what we think. This Pe stanza uses the words, footsteps, eyes, heart, mouth, all parts of our bodies, implying action in response to God’s direction. We also learn that following God’s word, seeking to love God, requires God’s help. We cannot “do love” on our own. We are reminded that it is God’s grace which directs us, leads us and supports us. The particular line that stood out to me this morning is “Steady my footsteps in your word” or in another translation, “Order my steps in your word.” There is a song based on this phrase which I first heard while worshiping in a traditional African American church. “Order my steps in your word” is sung over and over, in an easy tune. Then the tune rises and the words are: Lead me guide me every day, Send your anointing Father I pray. And the verse finishes with “Order my steps in your word”. The next verse is “Order my tongue in Your Word” following the same pattern. Other verses include the phrases “guide my feet in your word” and “wash my heart in your word”. The constant plea is to God for His direction and guidance. We don’t just know God’s teachings with our minds; we seek for God to infuse all of our body and all of our action in his precepts. Reading this one line of Psalm 119, remembering this song (and where I first heard it) came at the same time that I heard of one of my personal hero’s death. John Lewis was a Civil Rights Leader, US Representative from Georgia, and a man deeply grounded in God’s word. In thinking of his life along with this song, I realized just how much God had directed his footsteps in multiple marches, memorably in Selma Alabama, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. How God had continually directed his tongue, Baptist preacher that he was, stirring crowds to non-violent action over multiple decades. Steeped in scripture and theology he sought righteousness in the middle of oppression. His feet were guided as he walked with God. John Lewis was a man who loved God and his neighbor, with all his heart and who sought to follow Jesus, God’s embodied word. I believe it was because of his deep faith that he was able to be tenacious and continue to seek justice. John Lewis was a light, reflecting God’s light in a dark world. May he rest in peace and may we strive to follow his example. I invite you to your own musings on the psalms this week and may God “Order our steps in His Word”. Amen. Growing up, we quickly discover that there is both good and bad in the world. That reality may strike us upon seeing a fight spool out on the playground; or it could be that we had a lesson about the animal kingdom in school, a first glimpse at the survival-of-the-fittest; or we could know in our bones, having seen how our parents treat each other since we were small. By the time we’re adults, most of us have come to the conclusion that humans are just devilishly good at hurting one another.
This is our reality, our world in a nutshell—a world where women tuck keys between their fingers to walk to their cars, where the medical professionals treating COVID-19 patients aren’t able to access the protective gear they need, and where poverty and wealth live just blocks away without even crossing paths. We live in a fallen world. We do the best we can. And we long for deliverance. We pray for the suffering to end. But all too often, it doesn’t. All too often we find ourselves in situations we don’t choose, where we feel as powerless as a stalk of wheat overshadowed by a virulent weed. Jesus put before them another parable. The kingdom of heaven, he said, is like a field where a man plants good seed; but while his servants were sleeping, an enemy slipped over the gate and sowed weeds among the wheat. No one guessed that the deed had been done until much too late, when pulling up the weeds would mean pulling up the wheat, too. “Let them grow together until the harvest,” the master decided. “Then and only then will we separate them.” We might imagine the servants raising their eyebrows at this statement; but the decision had been made, and not by them. Given the parable’s uncomfortable implications, it comes as no surprise that Jesus’ disciples are interested in an explanation. “Tell us,” they say, “what you meant by this parable of the weeds in the field.” And he does. The master, Jesus explains, is the Son of Man. The enemy is the devil. The field is the world. And we’re all planted in it, good and bad together, growing up until the harvest arrives. Entrenched as we are in reams of bad news these days, it’s easy for us to relate to the disciples’ confusion and to the servants’ dismay. Did the master really mean to let the weeds and the wheat stay as they are all the way until the harvest? Wouldn’t it have been better to get rid of the weeds at some point, even if it risked some of the crop? Wouldn’t it be nicer if the children of the kingdom could just get a break? But the answer we get, the answer we will always get until Jesus comes again is no. God’s will is for good and evil to grow together in every aspect of our world—which of course leaves us asking the question: why? It’s easy to get tied up in knots trying to figure that out, though that doesn’t prevent many of us from trying. We want answers. We want justice. We want peace. Now. And for good reason. Not one of us here has escaped the experience of good and evil clashing in our lives. Like the psalmist, we cry out, “O God, the arrogant rise up against me; a band of violent men seeks my life; they have not set you before their eyes.” What will happen to us? we ask. What will happen to the wheat when the weed grows taller, leaning over the plant, taking its rain and stealing its sunlight? Will the Lord simply let it die? “But you, O Lord,” the psalmist writes, “are gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and full of kindness and truth. . . . Show me a sign of your favor, so that those who hate me may see it and be ashamed, because you, LORD, have helped me and comforted me.” In the midst of our suffering, in the midst of our struggle to live alongside the evil in the world and to battle the evil in ourselves, we are nevertheless watched over and cared for by Christ, who is merciful and gracious, always ready to “give strength to his servant and save the child of his handmaid.” He has not nor will he ever leave us alone as we live out our lives in this present evil age. Every moment of every day, he walks the fields of the world, tending the wheat and whispering to the weeds, telling all who will hear of the power and mercy of the God who can turn thorns into cypress trees and briers into myrtle. The master said that the weeds and the wheat would remain together, that we who are his children might grow in strength as we exercise our faith in this era between the gardens—and that we might also, by our very presence in the world, give testimony to the One who saves. As we pray for strength, for a sign of God’s favor, the world around us notices and wonders just what it’s seeing. Pain, death, and sin plague everyone, but as the children of God bow their heads at the foot of the cross and seek the way of the LORD, they are witnessing to the children of darkness. “God, show us a sign of your favor,” we pray, “that those who hate us may see it and learn that the LORD reigns and that he is merciful and gracious even to his enemies.” Weed and wheat will be together until the end, according to the will of the Father—but it is so for our sake and for the sake of the lost, that all might come within the reach of his saving embrace. AMEN. God tells us in his Word today how effective his Word is. And if we’re more used to receiving human words than receiving the divine Word, as most of us probably are, we may have trouble believing what God tells us.
In the case of the human word, we all know you can’t trust everything you hear. There’s spin and disinformation. There’s hyperbole on one side and minimizing on the other. There’s also the fact that we humans often say one thing with good intentions, but then find ourselves doing something else. We tell people we are turning over a new leaf on diet or exercise, but then it doesn’t happen. We post memes or news stories online to be seen supporting a cause, but we don’t actually make real changes ourselves. Or maybe we try the popular technique of affirmations: Repeat three times, I am content and at peace -- except, to be honest, we’re actually feeling peevish and agitated. The human word goes out from the human mouth, and very often, what it says is not quite the same as what actually happens. Listen, in contrast, to what God tells us about the divine Word through the prophet Isaiah today: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. When we read a portion of Scripture we always need to look at the whole book for context, and in the context, this is God telling his people they can count on a particular promise he’s made them. The promise is of liberation and restoration to their homeland, from which they’ve been exiled. God speaks their liberation, and it is. They don’t exit their captivity right away, but, what God says, is and it does come to pass. Genesis, the first book in the Bible, depicts the entirety of our universe coming into being by God just speaking it. God said, let there be light, and there was light. God speaks, and it is. This utterly reliable communication that Isaiah is talking about comes to its real fulfillment in Jesus. In Jesus, God speaks his ultimate Word to the universe – we even call Jesus the Word of God. Jesus is God’s communication in person, God in person. So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose. What God says does not return empty but accomplishes that which he purposes. So what is this in-person speech that we can be confident does what it says? What does God say to us in Jesus? Well, God says things that if we receive them into the depths of our being and accept that they are true, will change us completely. He says: you are mine. You are forgiven. You have nothing to fear. I have already changed the world. I have already conquered evil. Death has no power over you once I have claimed you. Sin has no rights over you once you belong to me. All that needs to be done for you to be acceptable and worthy is done. It is finished. And of course that’s the final word of Jesus from the Cross: it is finished. And it is. Listen again to what God tells us through Isaiah: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. God’s purpose cannot be stopped. It can be delayed or pushed away or misrepresented, but it cannot be stopped. This is why we study Scripture, to learn what God says, and thus what is. This is why we read the Bible; to receive the reliable divine Word rather than just our own unreliable human words. There’s nothing wrong with human words and human feelings, of course, but they aren’t what we come to church to receive. We come to church because here we are addressed by a Word that can be ultimately counted on, a Word that does what it says, a Word whose message we were made to receive: You are mine. You are forgiven. You have nothing to fear. I have already changed the world. I have already conquered evil. Death has no power over you once I have claimed you. Sin has no rights over you once you belong to me. All that needs to be done for you to be acceptable and worthy is done. It is finished. Thanks be to God for his glorious Gospel. Grace to you, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am happy to report to you that the contactless communions we have been doing over the past few weeks have been very well received. One person said afterwards that it was like a ray of sunshine had come into their room to have the sacrament again. Another commented how connected they felt to both the altar and the community of Emmanuel to take communion. Our prayer book has a short service that is used for these types of “special” circumstances, including familiar words of the Lord’s Prayer, scripture, confession and absolution. Please contact me if you would like to receive in this way. In hearing today’s gospel I was reminded of a time I was on the receiving end of this sacrament. It happened some years ago when I was taking much longer than expected, to recover from a surgery. I experienced a lot of pain and was unable to be still in the bed. After a week in hospital Bishop Beckwith came to what is now called OSF to anoint me and give me Holy Communion. Bishop Beckwith was trained under the 1928 prayer book rather than the 1979 and so he began the service a little differently. He said, “Hear the word of God to all who truly turn to him.” I paid attention. “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Immediately I became still and calm. I won’t say the pain lessened, but I did not notice it. My limbs quit thrashing. I am easily distracted.
Like a bird or a little kid, I’ll always forget what I’m doing if I see something shiny. And I’m the person who will enter a grocery store with five items on my list and somewhere to be in 20 minutes and end up leaving an hour later with a jar of kimchi, peanut butter cups, preserved lemons, and something called Watermelon Water in addition to 15 other things that I didn't need—only to find when I get home that I forgot to buy eggs. For those of you who don’t live with me, my scatterbrained self might seem sort of harmless and cute. In reality, however, my distractible nature has much less to do with sparkly rocks or a new flavor of ice cream and much more to do with worry—which may be something many of us have in common right now. Whether it’s the pandemic or our 24-hour news cycle or something as simple as the weather, there seems to be a lot more to worry about these days. We go about our lives attending to our tasks when suddenly we realize we’ve been grinding our teeth over a problem we can’t solve or a possibility we can’t prevent. What’s going to happen? What are we going to do? How can this ever be fixed? Around and around the questioning goes until we’re too dizzy to think straight. All too often, it can be a struggle to live in the moment, to accept reality as it is, to trust that our Lord knows what he’s doing and hasn’t left us to fend for ourselves. We look at our world, and we can’t help but wonder if what we can see is stronger than what we can’t. This is a season of life, for me and for many of us, where it can be hard to believe, to feel that we have been brought from death to life. There is so much to worry about, so much present trouble that Paul’s declarations in our epistle passage seem more like whispers, whispers that are very easy to forget. And yet Paul keeps on whispering, telling us that we have been raised to new life in Jesus Christ our Lord—who conquered death and the devil, who is living and actively working for the good of all people, who speaks to us from the Word, who knows our fears and our doubts because he felt them too. Through him we have received the free gift of God that is eternal life, a gift that isn’t simply of the future but one that begins now. Despite the pandemic and the politics, despite even our own worry and doubt, Christ has acted once and for all to free us from the dominion of sin and death. He has freed us from enslavement to anxiety and fear so that we might live for him, a new and gracious Lord who has promised to bring good from even the worst situations. God knows that you and I will continue worrying, that we’ll struggle to live as though a new light has dawned. He knows and he understands and he calls out to us anyway from the Word and in the Sacrament, reminding us that nothing—“neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Our lives may be messy right now. We may fear what is to come. But the Lord is here in the mess, and he is will not leave until every one of his sheep is gathered into his fold. As he says at the end of Matthew’s gospel, “I will be with you always,” he says. “To the end of the age.” AMEN. Some of us are physically back in church this week, in a familiar yet now quite unfamiliar setting. Some of us have chosen to continue in the Emmanuel community by virtual means for the time being. All of us, though, are grounded in the same things: the truth of the Gospel, the reality of God, the gift of belonging to Jesus Christ. We are not grounded in the experience of being together in the church building or the experience of waiting to be together. We are not actually grounded in our own experience at all. Our experience comes and goes. Grounding in God is what’s given us the strength to get through these past months and will give us the strength to get through the months to come.
I was struck recently by a remark by Fr. Andrew McGowan from the Yale Divinity School, that made the same point about this time when we’ve not been inside the church as we’re used to. He said “While our celebration of the Eucharist is the center of our worship, the eucharistic givenness of Jesus is not created by our [gathering] or limited to it. We are created a community by him and our participation in him, not the reverse. We come and go, as our recent experience during the pandemic has underlined so sharply, but he does not; we may not have been in Church, but he has.” Grace to you and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
It has been a long time, my friends, since I have spoken to you in a homily and the first ever that I have spoken in this format. Please know how grateful I am to be with you today sharing my thoughts on the Epistle of the week, the beginning of the fifth Chapter of Romans. I have been told that attention spans are shorter on line so I will ask you to hold onto four words from this passage. The first three are Grace, Peace and Hope. I will save the fourth for a bit later. Grace, Peace and Hope. At the time this letter was written to the church in Rome, Paul was at the height of his ministry. He had traveled throughout Asia and Greece, spreading the gospel and founding many churches. His reputation was well established as a strong believer in Christ and a mature theological thinker. While the Roman church had been started by others, Paul knew of their struggles and successes through communication with their leaders. The main purpose of this letter was to communicate Paul’s understanding of the meaning of Christ’s life and resurrection, and its application. During this time when we daily hear news of new infections, of conflicts about how best to keep others safe, and of deaths, I’ve been just bowled over by the relevance of the Psalms. Our Daily office leaders are praying Morning and Evening Prayer as they normally would, only at home, and the clergy are offering it online, and those offices are grounded in just praying through the Psalter, over and over. Nearly every Monday when I am livestreaming Morning Prayer, there is at least one verse in the Psalms that I appreciate in a way I never have before. A large number of the Psalms, like Psalm 66 today, refer to experiences of plague, isolation, illness, defeat, loneliness, and despair. They model a language for bringing things like that to God and considering them in the light of his loving power. And you know, for all my time as a priest, I’ve had to sort of re-frame these Psalms for people, because apart from exceptions like a tragic event or a national crisis like Sept 11th, most of my parishioners have been more or less protected from this constant vulnerability to death and isolation and defeat that the Psalms just presume all human beings regularly experience. But now we’ve spent several weeks in a situation where we cannot hide from our own vulnerability. We cannot hide from the fact that we need help from one another to stay emotionally healthy, or that human bodies are subject to illness and death. I cannot hide from the fact that I have no control over whether some random person who decides not to respect public health guidelines infects my 87 year old father and sends him to the ICU. And right there is the moment when I need the Psalms. Let’s read from today’s. The text is below, or you can hear our Choirmaster chant it in one of the other videos today: O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Today’s Gospel, which you read in your home rite of Spiritual Communion this morning, tells the story of the risen Jesus making himself known to two dejected disciples as they walked home to Emmaus on the night of Easter. Rumors of the corpse of Jesus having disappeared from the tomb were circulating, and they weren’t sure what to think. But they were sure that the man they had believed to be the Messiah was dead, and that along with him had died their hope that a new creation would come about through his leadership. Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia! This year we can’t all cry out those words together in a full church, but it is nonetheless true, and it is a proclamation that is even more meaningful right now: Death is conquered. Christ is risen.
I watched a webinar a week or two ago in which one of the guests was Dr. Lydia Dougdale, a physician at Columbia University who specializes in treatment of the aged and in medical ethics. She has a book coming out called “The Lost Art of Dying Well,” which responds to the fact that unlike countless previous generations, we Westerners whose lifespans have happened to fall in the past century or so have been uniquely able to skirt the topic of death, and especially to avoid talking about the fact that we ourselves will die. We have forgotten how to receive mortality as an opportunity to ask big questions, how to prepare intentionally for death. And we need to relearn this, because mortality has once again taken center stage, along with its colleagues powerlessness, anger, and fear. Over 20,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the USA so far. There aren’t enough beds, there isn’t enough equipment. We don’t know what will happen -- to our businesses, to our retirement savings, to our plans for 2021, to our vulnerable family members; we don’t know, if the disease claims someone we love, if we will even be able to go to their funeral. And, as Dougdale says, contemporary people like us are not used to thinking about these kinds of things. We don’t easily ask, “Am I ready to die? Am I spending my life in a way that really counts?” But now, the times force us to pose such questions. There are people who treat the Christian proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus, of Easter, as a sort of analgesic, designed to dull the pain of questions like that. A comforting story that helps us feel better and keeps us distracted from suffering. Some of us have probably had people try and use it that way on us, try to rush us out of our crushing grief at the loss of someone especially dear: don’t feel sad, he’s in a better place, just remember she’s with the angels now, you should be happy for her. If we have anything to say (and this year especially) on Easter Sunday with integrity, it had better not sound like any of that. It had better start with the truth that Jesus suffered and died in agony. Like the people in ICUs all over the world, he gasped for breath on the Cross as his lungs filled with fluid. Like the people confined and quarantined, he faced his torment without his friends and colleagues, and in his final hour even without the felt presence of God, whom he said had also forsaken him. He was crushed by shame. He descended into hell. This is what happened to God in Christ. We can’t skip over that. We shouldn’t ever, but especially not this year. Because we need that truth now -- not just to know that ever since then God is with us, completely with us in the sickness and the isolation and the powerlessness and the approach of death. We need so badly to know that God accompanies us there, that he understands completely the experience of isolation and powerlessness and fear. But we also need to know something else. We need to understand that all this is what Jesus was raised from, raised through, raised against, raised to conquer. In his resurrection Jesus does not suddenly waltz onstage like some bespangled assistant we just saw a stage magician cut into three pieces, delightfully whole and cheery at the end of what only seemed an ordeal, waving and accepting applause and saying “See! I’m fine after all! Thanks, ladies and gentlemen!” No. Jesus appears carrying everything he has been through, the wounds to prove it still gaping open. He appears bearing in his now risen and glorified body the entire incalculable weight of sin and death, soaked through with every drop of human fear and despair and hopelessness throughout the ages, his pierced heart full to overflowing with every wailing widow, every abandoned or abused child, every steadily mounting fever, every flatlined heart monitor, every gasp for breath that has ever been. In his risen flesh he is carrying it. Carrying it all, yet radiant. By his death and resurrection Jesus has acknowledged, and taken into himself, and metabolized every atom of evil that has ever corrupted and destroyed the creatures of earth, and returned it as good. Every atom of death that has ever broken a human heart, and returned it as life. Not just more of this life, a few extra years to string out the distractions and the stresses we all used to take so seriously before COVID-19, but everlasting life, God’s own life, a life that is immune to evil. That life starts the moment Easter starts, the moment the tomb is empty, the moment Jesus’ lifeless and destroyed body becomes his risen body. The life of the resurrection has not avoided, not downplayed, but faced and conquered evil, and it invades our world on Easter morning. It comes determined, having raised Jesus, to raise everyone and everything else with him. And it cannot be stopped. Hear me right: the risen life Jesus has won for us today will not keep you from passing through death, or from losing your retirement savings, or from being hospitalized with COVID-19. God does not promise such things. But he does promise that none of that, when you face it anchored in the life of the Risen Christ, can conquer you. None of that can kill you. None of that can ruin you. Because Christ has already conquered, killed, and ruined death, and you belong to him forever. A reading from Ephesians: Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light— for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true... Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
It is intensely painful not to be able to gather for Mass in this space on Sundays. Now there are ways we can pray together on Zoom and Facebook and YouTube, and the Sunday Spiritual Communion devotions being sent out on the parish email list, and the phone calls a team of people are placing to check in with everyone. We need to stay connected, so these are all good. According to C-U Public Health, they’re even an essential service. But it is still intensely painful not to be able to gather for Mass in this space on Sundays. Paul writes to the Ephesians today, Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light. This sacrifice of not meeting is painful, but I know that all of us understand that helping reduce the spread of COVID 19 is, for us right now, part of living as children of light, part of loving our neighbors. And so we are discovering solitude. It has a long history. There have always been people in the Christian tradition whom God called to stay apart, to spend time in the desert. Jesus did it for 40 days and 40 nights, fasting in the wild, which is where we get this season of Lent. The early desert fathers and mothers did it, and hermits still do it today. The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you… so that you will be a blessing.”
This command of God in Genesis 12, our first reading, marks the moment in long-ago history when God starts to create a family for himself, this great nation of children of Abraham. In our second reading from Romans, Paul, over 1000 years later, is still reflecting on that moment -- how did Abraham get access to God’s family? Was it having a special ethnic heritage, or did his behavior reach some threshold that entitled him to be selected? No. It was God’s choice, pure and simple, and Abraham’s yes to that choice, pure and simple. In the Gospel today, Jesus expands on the same principle as he speaks with Nicodemus: The image Jesus uses is that God offers people who have been born in the ordinary way a second, different kind of birth, a birth into God’s kingdom (Jesus doesn’t employ the idea of family much). This kingdom does not depend on your heritage, where you come from, what religion your parents belong to, or whether you are a kind or respectable person. None of that has any effect. The only way to even perceive God’s Kingdom, Jesus says, much less be born into it, is by responding to God in trust. All three readings are getting at the same thing: God makes an offer of incorporation, and if we take God up on it, God will do what he promises. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”
In some situations, it makes sense to cover up embarrassing parts of your life. The cocktail party conversation that begins with a casual “how are you” is probably not the moment to talk about the trouble you’re having making your mortgage payments. It’s the moment for “oh, fine, thanks.” When the guy comes to fix the water heater, there’s no point in telling him the anguish of dealing with your mother’s addiction to painkillers. Just show him the stairs to the basement and leave it be. But there are other situations where covering up something painful or embarrassing is absolutely the wrong thing to do. It defeats the purpose, for example, if you go to the doctor and say “oh, fine, thanks” when in fact you’ve been having uncontrollable tremors in your left leg or steadily worsening blind spots in your right eye. Getting out of your doctor’s office having managed to deceive her or yourself about your problems is not the goal. The goal is to reveal your problems so that they can get healed. |
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