One made bread pudding, another, croutons for soup.
One mashed them in milk next day for the baby’s breakfast.
The important thing was, they got to keep the crumbs,
got to bring bread home, swapping hunger for sufficiency,
sharing recipes for remainders;
that their very bodies should remember;
he was all about that.
from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets
A sermon at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, 21 July 2024
I have to admit, I was uncomfortable this morning reciting the line from the Psalm that invokes – or evokes – a phrase that has become a tinderbox in today’s conflicted society. But if David’s realm once extended from the Great Sea to the River (Psalm 89:25), God’s reign is greater. Jesus, Son of David, is not confined by any borders drawn or redrawn on a political map, nor did he confine his healing activities to one side of the Jordan or the other, nor did he despise nor reject the Gentiles, the Syro-Phoenicians, the Canaanites, the Samaritans, the inhabitants of the lands that have been complicated and contested, it seems, since before time lifted them out of the ocean. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2:14)
If only we had Jesus’ compassion for one another.
When his disciples returned from their travels around the region, where he had sent them to heal and to cast out demons and to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom drawn near to them – when his disciples returned full of good and weary joy at all that they had seen and done and wrought, Jesus had compassion on them. He knew what it is to be worn out even by good and faithful and rewarding work. He knew how the Holy Spirit can fill and can wring out a soul, overwhelm one with its power. He told them, come away and rest awhile. For he knew that there would be more, so much more, to follow.
And the crowd saw them going, and because celebrity-spotting is nothing new, they sprinted around the sea to meet them on the other side, so that when they landed, they were not in a quiet place but one of commotion and clamour and a mess of human need. And Jesus had compassion on the crowd, too, and tended to them.
Filling everybody’s needs, he healed, and he fed the thousands that had gathered, and he shielded his disciples from the extra work – he sent them back out on their boat into the night, to be at peace upon the water. He took upon himself the burden of the shepherd, because he had compassion for the sheep.
Even so, even Jesus did not put off forever his need for private prayer, for quiet communion with God. When everyone was fed and healed and put away for the night – we didn’t hear this part this morning, but it’s there, between the lines that we did read – in the night, he went up the mountainside alone, to pray.
No one can keep the well of compassion full without refreshment, without leaning into the providence of our shepherding God, who leads us beside still waters, and in green pastures, who feeds us and anoints us with the oil of gladness and of healing. Even Jesus did not put off for too very long his need to be apart, and to pray.
Provocatively enough, Martin Luther once wrote, “The Kingdom [of heaven] is to be in the midst of your enemies. And [t]he [one] who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ.”[i]
The people who raced around the countryside to cut off Jesus and the disciples’ access to solitude were not their enemies, but they were the enemies of their intentions and desires for solitude, and of their peace in the moment. In order to have compassion upon them took the love of God made manifest in Christ.
Another way of saying this might be that we cannot will ourselves toward compassion for our fellow human, especially when they are at their least convenient, or most demanding, sheepish, or bestial. Yet if we belong to Christ, that is the compassion that is available to us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that, while “human love is directed to the other person for [their] own sake, spiritual love loves [them] for Christ’s sake.”[ii] Bonhoeffer argues that because human love desires to bind itself to the other, or rather to bind the other to oneself, by persuasion or coercion, if fails in the face of the enemy; human love cannot abide rejection, nor resistance. But the love of Christ can overcome all. “Thus this spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of others is wholly dependent upon the truth in Christ”[iii] It’s a kind of letting go and letting Jesus love them.
The most direct path towards the compassion of Christ is prayer. The most essential action of love is prayer. Jesus knew it, practised it, modelled it in the night, on the mountainside; and his compassion was such that it overcame even death.
The compassionate life is tricky enough in the everyday, and my guess is that even the least political among us will find our last nerve twanged by the rhetoric and anxiety and all that will pile onto the social psyche in the coming months. We may be tempted to try to love our enemies into submission. We may be tempted to try to grind out compassion through our clenched teeth. We will not succeed unless we are grounded in the love of Christ, in letting God love those whom we cannot stand, made as they are in the image of God; unless we abandon ourselves to prayer. Unless we abandon ourselves, our preferences and prejudices, and hand the whole lot over to Jesus for healing.
And when we seek Christ, we will find him ready to shepherd us, full of compassion for us, ready to feed us with bread and fill us with stillness and anoint us with healing oil. We have only to reach for him. For he is our peace. (Ephesians 2:14a)
May [the peace] and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all, evermore (2 Corinthians 13:14). Amen.
[i] Quoted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together (Harper & Row, 1954), 17
[ii] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 34
[iii] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 36-7
2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Psalm 89:20-37; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
I heard that they found a cave on the moon.
Even from this twilight I can see craters and cliffs;
I cannot imagine that there would not be a cave,
but this, they said, could become a home
from home, a place to put down roots, conduit
to a new life in the sifting, lifeless soil so far
from the oceans that yearn and fall for its orbit.
Even with our rocket science and subtle scorn,
we are still children of the rock,
cave-dwellers bound by umbilical strata
to the ground out of which we were first formed,
for our heart is restless until we rest in you.
A sermon at the Church of the Epiphany for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2024
I’m curious, so curious why people thought that Jesus had to be someone else. Why they couldn’t allow him to be someone new, someone that God had created specifically to be himself. Why they were afraid to let God do a new thing.
When news of Jesus reached Herod Antipas, he was troubled. He was troubled because people were saying that this was John the baptizer come back to life, or Elijah, or another prophet come back to life; come back to haunt him.
So I’m curious why people, why Herod, thought that Jesus had to be someone else.
I’m afraid, too, that the identification with John the Baptist underscores a nasty point in that story; that his head was not buried with his body. You can imagine the conspiracy theories that transpired: that it was not really John that the disciples claimed and buried; that John had somehow been spirited away, and was now living as Jesus.
The people who were not able to let Jesus be himself might also have been people tied up in grief, bound up by hope, caught up in flights of fantasy and false information. Or people like Herod, mired in guilt.
But that’s why it is so important to set Jesus free to be himself! The patterns we see in the Bible, of hope and sin, greed and guilt, destruction and God’s patient, repetitive redemption, that is always new, always doing the unexpected, merciful thing: these patterns teach us that left to our own imagination, we are lost. With God’s creativity, nothing, no one is beyond new life.
It is a gift to us that God created a world that has discernable patterns, rhythms, predictable days and seasons (although we are not beyond messing with those). We see patterns in history, in relationships, in the fractals of snowflakes. We use them to guide our anticipation, to help us to plan next steps, to choose what to wear when we get up in the morning: sundress or snowsuit? We can learn from the examples of history and experience, positive and negative, what to do and what not to do.
But when we take for granted the patterns that God has created – the seasons, the tides, the swirl of the oceans and all that spins from them – when we forget that our stewardship of the earth means to maintain and to learn and to dance with rather than to mooch off those patterns, then we get into the kind of climate mess we face today.
It is a gift to us that God has created us each in the image of the One, so that we might recognize in one another that spark, that template of the divine that reminds us to love one another. Yet that image, like God, is infinite in its potential and its variety and its expression.
When we reduce people to patterns, stereotypes, when we assume that we know who they are because they’re just the new Elijah, right? Or the new John, or the new Stacy, or the new Hitler – when we forget the intricacy of God’s creation of every soul, fearfully and wonderfully made, then we forget something about God, and about ourselves.
When we treat people as patterns, as immigrants, as Republicans, as white folk, or Black; when we reduce people to patterns, we forget that we, too, are people, who prefer to be known by our own names, as individuals, rather than as the type of someone else. When we reduce people to patterns, violence is done to the image of God. The people injured in Butler County last evening, the people killed, including the perpetrator, had he but remembered it, were made in the image of God. Let’s not do that to one another. Let’s not lose our humanity.
It’s frightening, what happened last night. The attempted assassination of a former president and current candidate for the presidency. It’s frightening because mass shootings are frightening, and all too common in America today. The one in Butler County was not the only one to occur last evening. It’s frightening because it breaks the pattern of our image of ourselves as a nation intent on the peaceful transfer of power. There is a lot to work through here. It’s going to take some time, and some prayer, and some divine providence. But how often have we heard in the word of God, “Do not be afraid”? And St Paul has written elsewhere, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). For God is always able to find a new way, even when we see no way.
There is a lot going on in this morning’s readings. There is dancing, there is despising, there is death, there is adoption, there is the Ark of the Presence of the Living God. In the background, before the ecstatic dancing, there are months when David is afraid to bring the Ark home, and afraid of what new thing God might be doing with it, with him.
Then there’s Herod, and Herodias, and the intrigue of political alliances and family drama. At the end, there is the choice between vengeance, vindication, and integrity. Herod is afraid that if he goes back on his word to give the girl anything – anything – that she asks for, then he will look weak and foolish. But how strong a lesson would it have been for him to stand before his guests and say, “I will give you anything, but I will not become a murderer for you. Choose again.” If he had been willing, not to break his word, but to break it open to the grace of God, the capacity of God to find a new pattern, free from violence and vengeance.
For us, and for the sake of our country, this is not a choice between the bullet and the ballot box. This is a choice between the bullet and our souls. This is a choice between politics and prophetic witness to the power of God’s way of love. Jesus had a choice: call down legions of angels or go to the cross, subvert the power of political violence by defeating death itself. Defeat hatred with the overpowering love of God. Overwhelm vengeance with the suffocating aroma of mercy. Break open the patterns of this world, and let in the kingdom of heaven.
When we forget to let God do a new thing, when we try to fit Jesus into old patterns, our patterns of vengeance and vindication, patterns and pigeon-holes that lead us to violence; when we do that, we forget that the cross broke apart the very structures of life and death; that his incarnation broke the rules of separation between humanity and divinity; we forget that God can make us new, too, if we need it, and we want it, if we will remember it, and have the courage to live it.
There is no part of us, of me, or of you, that God has not created in God’s image. There is no part of us, nor of anyone, so tarnished that God cannot re-create it in God’s image. Even when we cannot see the way forward, that is only because there is no pattern or rule of our imagination that can contain the love of God. Jesus is the proof of it. He was, he is his own Person, and the God of our salvation.
Amen.
Readings include the beheading of John the Baptist (Mark 6:14-29); David dancing before the Ark (verses from 2 Samuel 6:1-19). The news of the day includes the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a campaign rally.
A brief sermon for an outdoor service at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio
I’m always amused, and slightly bemused, by the way in which the evangelists describe Jesus’ visit to his hometown. “He could do no deed of power there,” they say, “ – oh, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.”
It makes you wonder what their expectations were. Laying hands on the sick and healing them sounds pretty powerful to me. No doubt, for the people healed, for their friends and families, it was life-changing. But to the gospel writer, apparently, no big deal.
It makes me wonder about the expectations we have for God, for the presence of Christ among us, for the actions of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
In Nazareth, Jesus encountered a few different reactions to his home visit. There were those who were just astonished and in wonderment at his teaching, his wisdom, his deeds of power. There were those who were offended that someone who should be just like them seemed different, spoke differently, acted strangely, never mind that it was all good, it was not right in their eyes. And then there were the few who humbled themselves to ask him for healing, who accepted him for who he was, without worrying about who he had been, or who he might become. And they were the ones whose lives were changed in that moment, in that encounter, on that visit.
We’ve all been each of them, at one time or another, haven’t we?
The times when we are caught up by the glory, the wonder, the sheer magnitude of God, of God reflected in creation, in the stars or in a sunset; God reflected in the experience of falling in love, of realizing the depths and breadth of being that love opens up to us; of God whispering to us in the night, wisdom that cuts through the noise of the world – we’ve known wonder, haven’t we?
Then there are the times when we wonder what God is doing, and why God is not acting according to our image, why God doesn’t do what we would do to this person, or in this situation; when we question whether God is really everything that God is cracked up to be; when we are offended by God’s mercy, or restraint, or ineffability. Never mind that God is good; we want God to be more like us.
And then there are those blessed moments when our eyes are opened, not dazzled by glory nor dimmed by cynicism, but open and honest, when in all humility we are able to come before God trusting in our Creator’s mercy, and Christ’s grace, and the power of the Holy Spirit to help and to heal us. It was those who trusted Jesus, who trusted in Jesus, who found him ready and powerful to save them.
And then he sent his disciples out to do the same, to offer his grace and his mercy and his healing power to anyone who might need it, to any suffering from sickness of body or spirit or soul, from the torment of disease or demons. It is not necessarily a life free from pain. Paul writes of the thorn in his flesh, the discomfort of being human, of remaining grounded in this frail and friable body. It is a life worth living, knowing the living God, knowing the love of God made manifest in Jesus. And still, Christ sends us to share what we have known, what we have found when we have been truly open to the grace of God.
We have all been there: dazzled by glory and disappointed in God; but it is when we can be humble in seeking out God, and open to God’s reality, Christ’s presence within us and beside us, that we find the grace we need. And that is powerful beyond words.
Amen.
Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice; *
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication. (Psalm 130:1)
When I came home and got back here on Monday, I noticed that some of the t-shirts from our gun violence memorial out front were beginning to fall down. The wind and the weather was taking its toll. It was time to take the whole thing down before it fell down. The question became, what to do with those t-shirts that bore the stories of real people, real flesh and blood suffering. So I brought them into the church, and they are seated among us this morning, because these are members of our community, of this city of Euclid, each of them injured or killed here, one within a block of here, just since last year’s Guns to Gardens event. They are our neighbours.
In each of the healing stories interwoven into today’s Gospels, there is someone who is at their wits end, desperate for healing. The woman has spent everything she had, she has bankrupted herself with medical debt, and nothing is helping. She is getting worse. She has nothing left to lose, she thinks, by trying the power of this miracle man.
Jairus, leader of the synagogue, upstanding citizen throws himself into the dust at the feet of this itinerant preacher, because if he doesn’t do something, and soon, his daughter will die. He is desperate enough to prostrate himself in front of his congregation, in front of those whom he leads, and beg Jesus for help.
In one tight hour, Jesus has the community covered with his grace and mercy, from the highest official to the invisible woman; from the worship leader who makes his annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to one who has not been to the temple in over twelve years.
Of course, it is not Jairus who is sick, but his daughter; still, Jairus is as much in need of Jesus’ healing as anyone, just as the family of the woman made miserable by her affliction need mercy, too. I wonder if that is why Jesus calls her out of the crowd. She is already cured, but he wants the community to see and hear that she is healed, that she, their beloved daughter, is whole, that he affirms her actions and her faith, so that they may begin to heal their relationship with her. So that they may also show her mercy.
As for Jairus, he has risked his reputation on this roving street preacher and miracle-worker. The people outside his home laugh at Jesus and his optimism that the girl’s life can be restored. Jesus does not let Jairus’ faith down; but more, and unasked, he will not allow the girl to become the source of gossip and stories that might harm her reputation: he tells them that she is not dead, only sleeping, because he does not want the stench of death to follow her around the marketplace once she is well.
Jesus understands and demonstrates that healing has not only to do with the body, but with the soul, and with the heart, and with the community.
I don’t know what faith lies in the soul of the Surgeon General, but I noticed this call to action at the close of his advisory on gun violence as a public health crisis, published earlier this week: it will take … the collective commitment of the nation – to turn the tide on the crisis of firearm violence in America.
Experts and miracle workers, first responders and medics, community violence interrupters and kindergarten teachers each have their part to play in preventing and reducing the harm from gun violence; but it will take a change in the heart of our community to bring healing to a wound that has gone toxic. It will require repentance, a hard look at where we are going and the willingness to turn aside to Jesus, to mercy, to compassion. It will require humility, from the foremost leaders to the secret hurting souls. It will require faith, that things can change, that we can change, that we are worthy to be healed.
Are we desperate enough, keen enough, eager enough, yet?
Let’s look for the good news, though. Jesus supports our efforts toward healing, whether they be grand gestures or creeping, shuffling steps through the crowd. Jesus affirms our faith that things can be better, and that he will help make it so. For the sake of Jesus, we are gathered not as individuals wounded by violence, but as a community pulling together to heal one another’s hurts, to pray and to salve with balm the troubled spirit.
This month I have been participating in a blacksmithing marathon, part of the RAWTools 44k, a minute for each of the 44k+ lives lost to gun violence in America in 2023. By myself, I think I’ve put in barely over one thousand minutes; but between the whole community of makers, we’ve achieved well over 44 thousand. A month of minutes dedicated to the victims of gun violence, and committed to bringing healing to a horrible situation.
I wrote to the organizer earlier this week:
No one could do it alone. No one can keep up the heat and the hammer for a month without rest, without breaking. … No one seems to have the answer to this culture of violence, of a weaponized life that can only point toward more death and destruction.
But in community, we can do more. In community, we can create more than can be imagined in one place. In community, the tightness of our time, the tiredness of our arms, the aching of our hearts need not seem small against the Goliath of gun violence. In community, we are each contributing to a whole movement toward peace, one preached by the prophets, beating swords into ploughshares, guns into garden trowels.
My friends, we are the body of Christ. We may be a tiny fingernail on the body of Christ, but we have more healing power in that fingernail than the world has in all of its fine metal and methods. We can make a difference. For the sake of our neighbours, for the sake of ourselves, our homes and our families, as St Paul encourages, it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something– now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means. (2 Corinthians 8:11)
Healing is within our reach, if we stay within the reach of Jesus.
Amen.
A sermon at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio, at the end of Gun Violence Awareness month, on the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B Proper 8
How terrifying
to give birth through these bones
that ache with age, flesh
that bears the scars of the hungry years;
and nearby, Zechariah wrings out words
with his eyes: Breathe. Just breathe. Please
do not cease to breathe.
The birth waters reach their flood;
over them the cries of mother and child
embrace, their voices intertwining
as their bodies separate.
A sermon on Mark 4:35-41 – Jesus stills the storm
Jesus, do you not care that we are perishing?
Many years ago, as I was preparing for ordination, I was assigned to do fieldwork at a church far, far away. This church was going through some stormy times, heavy weather. Hard and hurtful decisions were making waves, and I was close to feeling overwhelmed.
More than overwhelmed, on this particular Sunday morning I was feeling angry, and flailing. I knew that this was no way to approach my duties at the altar, so I stepped into the side chapel, knelt at the rail. I didn’t ask, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” No, my complaint was more personal: “So what, God? Do you want me to go down with the ship?”
And our compassionate, merciful, ever-loving God responded as clearly as I have ever heard them: “It’s not your ship.”
It’s not your ship. I believe that I might have been as astonished as the disciples in the fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee.
An encounter with the living God has a way of staying with a person. I have remembered and reflected on that moment from time to time. The directness of God’s address, humbling and awe-inspiring – I feel as though I recognize it in the no-nonsense approach of Jesus to the storm – Peace! Be still! Knock it off. Then he turns to the disciples and asks them, “What? What were you afraid of?”
It’s as though the storm which has become all-consuming to the disciples, for good reason, knowing the way that storms kick off, as though this storm were a little blip on Jesus’ radar, intent as he was on bringing the kingdom of heaven closer, closer to creation.
And they recognize, in this moment, that there is something way beyond what they thought was happening here. They knew that Jesus was powerful, faithful, a prophet the likes the world had not seen since biblical times. But here was something else: one who had the words to shape creation, to quell the wind and smooth the waters, the one who could speak, “Peace!” and make it happen, as the Word of God spoke light and life into being at the beginning of time.
How hard it is to hold on to that vision of eternity when we are caught up in the immediacy of the storm, sick from the motion of the waves, terrified by the torrent and the sheer noise of the wind. How natural to cry out to God, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” How astonishing to hear Christ reply, “Peace! Be still.”
It shouldn’t be astonishing, if we were of more than a little faith. If we had faith enough in the power of God over creation, over this, God’s world, and every element in it, over these, our lives that are but a breath on the wind of God’s word, “Let there be”; if we had faith enough, we could be the ones speaking peace to those suffering the storms of life all around us. We could be the safe harbour, the becalming, the balm – and I have heard among the saints that you are, for many in your community. We have the words of life, we have the Word of God within us and beside us, before us and beneath us.
When I was very much younger, when I started going to church as a child back in Wales, I used to love looking up at the beamed ceiling that looked so much like the innards of a boat. I could make out the benches where the crew might sit, and where the curve of the prow came together above the altar. It wasn’t for years before I knew that the “nave” of a church is named, like naval, or navy, for its boat-like qualities, for being the ship in which the faithful and the foolish still gather around Jesus, wondering, “Who then is this?” Where we hear him saying, “Peace! Be still!”
It isn’t my ship, but it is our ship, and it is God’s vessel, grace for the world. That church where I heard God speaking in no uncertain terms understood that, and because of it they are not only still afloat, having ridden out the storm, but thriving in the knowledge that they are the vessel of God’s grace, providing safe passage for the good news of Jesus Christ, and a life raft for those still cast adrift, as I thought I was in that Sunday morning chapel, before the altar, before the word that cut through the noise and the chaos.
That is not to say that other storms won’t come – they will. But in the midst of them, remember that the answer to the question, “Jesus, do you not care that we are perishing” is always “Peace! Be still and know that I am with you. Be still and know that there is not a breath of wind that will not return you to me. Be still and know that in the storm and in the quiet, in the flood and in the desert, in the wind and in the whisper, God loves you.”
To speak in parables:
to open the teeth and loose the tongue,
to taste truth beyond the metaphor,
spit out outrageous similes
for God, who is similar to nothing
and almost everything;
to explain them to his friends:
to draw near with a kiss,
the marrow of the message,
to extract from the sea a grain
of salt and let it become upon the tongue
almost everything.
It seem to me that the way to remain
unforgiven is to look forgiveness in the face
and to mistake it for something altogether
other, like a child in a hall of mirrors
who sees distortion as reality and recoils
in horror and inconsolable;
it is not reasonable to reject mercy forever,
not to look for beauty between the seams
of the fairground illusions that obscure
our vision of infinity, the scope
and limit of grace.
____________________________________
As difficult as this passage is to read and reflect upon, I appreciate the translations that lean into the having of forgiveness, as though it is always within our grasp, if only we will see it, reach out for it, recognize it for what it is, instead of rejecting it for what it isn’t. Mark 3:28-30
over the water 