Abundant Word,
your economy of language
makes wine out of water,
a feast of fish and bread,
breaking nets out of sleepless nights
I come with crumbs,
with unslept eyes,
high on the fumes of the day,
my shredded garment of flesh
clothing a crumpled soul,
and what will I say?
Dare I pray for a miracle,
fall on my knees, bruised with sin,
beg you to multiply mercy until
it spills from my lips
like alleluias?
Updated 3/2/2019
A sermon to celebrate the ordination of Sally Goodall to the Sacred Order of Deac
Luke 22:24-27; 2 Corinthians 4:1-6
It is a privilege to be invited to preach as Sally is ordained to the Sacred Order of Deacons. Although we each grew up on a small island, in small villages next door to one another, it was only here in Ohio that we met, and only through our several calls to ordained ministry within the Episcopal Church that we came to talk in the real and true ways that Jesus opens up for us; and I am grateful.
You sent me your choices of readings and let me into some of the workings of why you were drawn to this, of all gospels, and that, of all epistles, and Jeremiah’s, of all call stories. You sent, too, a commentary from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist on servant ministry, that which is commended and commanded and demonstrated by Jesus in the gospel. Br Jim Woodrum wrote, “He entered into our condition, grew up and lived among us to show that the Way of God was not one of brute force and might, but one of gentle servitude.” “I am among you as one who serves,” Jesus confirms.
And here is the paradox of diaconal ordination: our model for service, while humble, is also glorious. It is not passive, but powerful. It comes in heavy with the threat of crucifixion, and sings with the truth of Resurrection. We aim to serve, yet all the time it is Christ who is still serving us.
To provoke this comment of Jesus about coming to serve, the disciples have been debating who is the greatest. In the Gospel according to Mark, this conversation happens out in the open, on the way down the mountain from the great Transfiguring experience in which the glory of Christ is revealed to Peter, James, and John; and the other disciples become jealous, and angry, as they jostle for position at the right hand of Jesus.
In Luke’s Gospel, as we hear it tonight, it gets worse. The disciples are sitting at the table of the Last Supper when this dispute arises. They are at the table in the upper room, where Jesus has just this minute passed around a cup of wine, telling them to drink it themselves, since he will not drink of it again until the kingdom of God is fulfilled. He has broken bread, divided it among them as though it were his body, his very life, which is about to be betrayed and handed over to those who oppose that kingdom’s fulfillment.
They begin to whisper and gossip amongst themselves, about who the traitor might be, and from there it is but a quick flip to debating which of them is, in fact, the least likely to betray Christ’s mission, who is most loyal, the best disciple. They fight over who is, in fact, the greatest, while Jesus is sitting there right in the midst of them, still holding the cup of wine!
We often think that we are living in the most divided, rude, uncivil, uncompromising times in history. Perhaps there is something reassuring about knowing that Jesus witnessed the same defensive, boastful, and clueless conversations that we now enjoy.
Whether it was on the way down from the mountain, as the implications of Jesus’ unusual messiahship, the intimations of his passion, began to sink in; or here at the table, already breaking into the bread of his body, sharing out the cup; the problem that Jesus’ disciples had was to submit themselves, their egos, their self-image to his mission, his passion, his kingdom, at the expense of their own ambition.
Submission, now as then, is whispered as a dirty word. We prefer to project strength. But in the context of the gospel, the idea of submitting to God, literally to place ourselves under God’s sending authority, under God’s mission; there is nothing more dignified, nothing more humble, nothing more empowering than that.
To place ourselves at the mercy of God (as though there were any other hope for us, and still); to do so with intention, integrity, and a degree of honesty – that might be the pinnacle of human achievement.
By the way, if you choose to read on from our gospel, you will discover that in the next paragraph, ironically, Jesus promises the disciples twelve thrones, twelve kingdoms, sublet from the kingdom of God. Never mind that Jesus has just included Judas, with his hand on the door on his way out to betray him, a throne next to the other eleven in the kingdom of God. Never mind for a moment that astonishing act of forgiveness; back up to the fact that Jesus has in one breath told his disciples to stop seeking power and glory, and in the very next breath, crowned them with it all.
Each of us is promised the challenge and the resolution that Jesus offers his disciples, those gathered around the table with him. We are challenged to submit our agendas, our fears, our defenses, our ambitions to the service of his mission, his love for the world, his undying faithfulness. When we do, we find ourselves anointed and appointed as Christ’s ambassadors for the gospel, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to discover for ourselves and for one another the healing power of love, and the deep rewards of God’s justice working among us, the crowning glories of God’s mercy and grace.
For the bishop, or the priest, or the deacon, the challenge, and the promise, become quite particular. In a few moments, Sally will submit to the Examination prescribed by the prayerbook for those seeking ordination as deacons, “a special ministry of servanthood … to serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, … the lonely … the helpless.”
It is in serving the most vulnerable, the most easily overlooked, ignored, or exploited people that we learn the most about the love of Christ; because it is by the need to listen deeply, by setting aside our own agendas and letting ourselves be led by the pain of others that we find our way to the foot of the cross. It is in the most intractable problems of the world and its children that we find ourselves unable to proclaim our own greatness, nor believe in our own glory. It is here, at the end of hope, that we find ourselves gathered once more with Jesus at the table, with the people whom he most loves, the ones who are broken like bread, scattered like crumbs, poured out like spilt wine.
I think that’s why all of us, priests, bishops, archbishops and all, begin our ordained ministry as deacons, called to stand witness to Christ’s gradual, often painful transformation of the world’s leftovers into God’s feast of life, of fierce resurrection, fit not for kings but for saints.
And so, God tells Jeremiah, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you.” We are engaged to this ministry by God’s mercy; therefore we do not lose heart, Paul writes. William Temple translated the promise,
“We have this ministry” … There is the fact. Why God called us we do not know; but He did, and here we are. Let us not doubt the reality of our vocation. … The source of our confidence is not our characters, our ability, our eloquence, or anything which is really ours; the source of our confidence is that … God still trusts us. *
Still, Christ serves us, “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In the call to discipleship, Jesus serves us, and we can do no other than to fall at his feet and give thanks, and then be sent, not on our way, but on his.
May this way be to you a source of deep and abiding joy, knowing that “it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry;” that God called you into this, and while God will not necessarily get you out of it, She will remain with you, serving you, and serving through you, your gifts, your prayers, your promise, sending you out under Christ’s banner – submittere – to do the glorious work of love.<
Amen.
* William Temple, “Social Witness and Evangelism,” in Religious Experience and other Essays and Addresses (The Lutterworth Press, 1958)
A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C, at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid
“Love your enemies,” Jesus tells us, and we sigh like teenagers whose teacher has just announced a pop quiz, or worse still, a health and relationships lesson. We don’t want to hear this.
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Do good. Who does he think we are – saints?!
And yet he believes us capable of this miracle, to love a world that runs on hate and fear, like oil in its veins. Jesus trusts us to do better, to find an alternative fuel, one that is more life-sustaining, and more soul-friendly.
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you … For [the Most High] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
St Paul wrote in persecuted times,
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good … Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them … Repay no one evil for evil … Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. (Romans 12:9,14,17a,19)
Some of you remember that last Fall, I told you about my friend whose husband, a rabbi, survived the horrific gun violence and terror attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Beth Kissileff wrote movingly this past week about why she hopes that this murderer will not receive the death sentence; because our hope is always in mercy, and the chance for restoration; because only God is capable of true justice; because the best revenge is a life of faithfulness, integrity, unrelenting good.
If we take vengeance off the table, if we take evil for evil, an eye for an eye away, what are we to do with our anger at the evil that is in this world?
Love, says Jesus. Love with a vengeance! Love so hard that you turn evil back on itself, going the extra mile, giving the extra cloak, turning the extra cheek, not in acquiescence to evil, but to demonstrate the better way, the loving way; love that is strong, stronger than death, and more resilient than evil.
Do good, regardless of those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
And we might ask, but how, because we are not saints yet, most of us at least?
The example of Joseph and his brothers is both difficult and instructive. Joseph spent years as a slave and in prison before he ended up in the exalted position in Pharaoh’s house in which his brothers find him. And even Joseph, for all his fine words, struggled to work out how to forgive them, who to love, how to be reconciled and do good to the brothers who cause him so much harm. He wept. He had them arrested. He hid his true identity from them. Only after a lot of soul-searching and back-and-forth (literally, for the brothers) was he able, finally, to face them, to feed them, and to do good to them.
Perhaps this is a good place to point out that while Jesus is uncompromising about the commandment to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, he offers a reprieve to the abused among us, asking only that we pray for those who have abused us. While love heals our hurt, it does not require that we keep our wounds open. Jesus does not expect us to re-enter the cycles of sin and violence which would victimize us. He does not want us to make compromise with evil, but to love ourselves as our neighbour, to drive out evil with the prayers, the answered prayers, of love. Jesus love us, and does good to us, promising resurrection.
Jesus instructs us not to acquiesce to evil, but rather commands us to fill the world with love, with what is good, such that it crowds out all evil intent.
God provide that we are never tested to the extent of my friend Beth; but instead, we can practice on small things. Instead of rising to an argument when someone at home pushes just the right buttons, we can switch the code, responding instead with cool, calm, calculated love. When someone cuts you off in traffic, then needs to change lanes at the traffic light, instead of enjoying the little thrill of petty revenge, we could let them go in ahead of us, smoothing their way, taking the anger of the road down a notch, soothing our own souls and, who knows, maybe infecting some rude road hog with a little grace.
This is not the same, by the way, as letting them go and hoping that they pick up a ticket on the next stretch of highway. God is not a traffic cop waiting to avenge our slights. In fact, the greatest risk that we run in loving our enemies, in filling the world with forgiveness and grace, in leaving our vengeance to God, that Most High God who is kind to the ungrateful and to the wicked – the risk is that our basest desires for vengeance might never be fulfilled. And isn’t that the real reason that we hold on to our own revenge – because we don’t trust God not to be more merciful, more loving, more forgiving than anyone could ever deserve?
Love your enemies, says Jesus. Let God take your anger and turn it into something beyond your imagining – just as Jesus turned the horror, the terror, the death of the cross into the astonishment of the Resurrection. Leave vengeance to God, and see how the Most High will make saints out of us all by showing kindness to the ungrateful and the wicked, after all. For the justice of God is not to repay evil with evil, but to flood the world with good, love poured out on the cross, life irrepressible, the defeat of death and evil intent, overcome by the love of Jesus.
Amen.
Loving, life-giving God,
God of Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth,
God of Miriam, and Your many Marys;
God of our mothers, our wives, our sisters,
where men have preceded, succeeded,
pleaded that they do not need us;
while the world learns to walk
without us, away from us,
You remember us as
the woman who anointed Your anointed one.
Ah, God,
Mother of all gods,
remember your daughter
in the name of Your Son,
loosen her tongue,
bear her spirit above
the waters of creation:
let her utter Your Word.
Image: Le repas chez le pharisien, James Tissot [Public domain], via wikimedia commons
A homily commemorating Frederick Douglass at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio
“The truth will make you free” (John 8:30-32).
So Jesus told his disciples – but often we prefer the safe cages of half-truths, legends, or outright falsehood to the freedom, the burdensome responsibility of free agency and authority to love God before all, and our neighbour, in truth, as ourselves.
A couple of years ago, I attended a conference hosted by the Bishops United Against Gun Violence in Chicago. The title was “Unholy Trinity: Poverty, Racism, and Gun Violence.” It was, as you may imagine, three days filled with powerful, uncomfortable truths set free by bible study, communal worship, shared experience, and by the gospel. Then, the Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas addressed us. That prominent theologian of the Episcopal Church freed her tongue and told the assembly boldly, “You cannot be White and be a Christian.”
Can you imagine how that incendiary package of truth exploded into the silence of her audience – a silence broken only by the sharp intake of a few hundred breaths? You cannot be White and be a Christian in America today. The truth will set you free.
To preach the commemoration of Frederick Douglass is an exercise in humility for a white woman of considerable privilege. To try to bring his words and example to bear upon the way in which we hear the gospel today, without reduction or exploitation or appropriation, is an exercise in repentance. My repentance will not be perfect, so I ask your forgiveness up front. But in the words of Dr Brown Douglas, I remembered what Frederick Douglass had to say, a couple of centuries ago, about slaveholder Christianity. You remember the truth he told, in an Appendix to his first autobiographical Narrative, regarding what he called “the slaveholding religion of this land”:
… between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. …
Shall I not visit for these things? Saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”
Douglass had told in his Narrative the unfortunate tale of the kind Sophia, his mistress when he first was sent to Baltimore city. She was the one who began to teach him to read. She treated him with dignity, and with kindness. But it was not enough for Sophia to be kind. When her husband discovered their lessons, he instructed her that it was wrong and dangerous to teach slaves literacy; it would make one unfit to be a slave: “there would be no keeping him,” he said. Douglass, a child of around eleven or twelve at the time, seized upon his words:
From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. … The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. …. What he most dreaded, that I most desired.”
He was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering – that to treat a slave with the dignity and invest in him the ability to learn and seek and find for himself all truth – that would unfit him to be a slave forever. The truth would set him free; and his master dreaded freedom.
On the other side of the page, Sophia found herself seduced, corrupted, and finally chained to the profitable lies of slaveholding. After her husband’s rebuke, she began to change. Douglass described how
Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. … Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone.
To borrow a turn of phrase from Kelly Brown Douglas, You cannot be a slaveholder and a Christian. The lies that you tell yourself, wise Sophia, in order to justify your position in the world are incompatible with the truth that sets Frederick free: the dignity of a man made in the very image of God, loved and redeemed for freedom by Jesus Christ.
It is not enough, Sophia, to be tender-hearted, kind, and merciful. Unless you actively resist your husband’s decrees; unless you will oppose yourself to the slaveholder’s life that you lead, and pull down its structure, dismantle its scaffold, you cannot call yourself a Christian. Because, as a slaveholder, you will one day curb the truth, and cut wood for the cross, and find that you have whitewashed your prayers as though they do not run with the blood of Frederick and his mother, his sister, his brothers, his ancestors, and his descendants.
The young Frederick Douglass befriended the poor little white boys who ran around his neighbourhood, and turned them into his teachers. Whatever book-learning they had, he bartered for bread from Sophia’s kitchen. And it is clear from his tender tone that he loved them for it. He loved that he was able to make an equal exchange with them, and they accepted him as one of their own brothers, and amongst themselves, they made a true friendship, a community in which they sustained one another. He freed them from hunger; they freed him to read.
Later, boys like these might have been among the mob that attacked him at the shipyard, afraid that his slave labour might undermine their own wages. They could not grow up White and remain Christian. Unless we are on guard against the corrupting influence of slavery, and its bastard offspring, systemic racism, personal prejudice, implicit, inescapable bias, White self-interest, White supremacy; then we who are descended from Sophia and street urchins are subject always to fall into its snares of sin.
The truth shall make you free. When Dr Brown Douglas addressed the Unholy Trinity, after we had recovered their breath, a few in the audience found their voice again. “We hear the truth in what you say, but you can’t say it like that,” they said, trying to tame her truth and settle it softly into the trap they had not even seen themselves setting, the false promise of peace without righteousness, the false prophecies of redemption without repentance, mercy without justice, the mirage of freedom without the breaking of chains.
The truth will make you free, said Jesus. What is truth? asked Pilate (John 18:38). I am the way, and the truth, and the life, said Jesus (John 14:6), and
the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him (Luke 4:18-20)
* A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, a public domain book via Kindle
A homily commemorating Frederick Douglass at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio
“The truth will make you free” (John 8:30-32).
So Jesus told his disciples – but often we prefer the safe cages of half-truths, legends, or outright falsehood to the freedom, the burdensome responsibility of free agency and authority to love God before all, and our neighbour, in truth, as ourselves.
A couple of years ago, I attended a conference hosted by the Bishops United Against Gun Violence in Chicago. The title was “Unholy Trinity: Poverty, Racism, and Gun Violence.” It was, as you may imagine, three days filled with powerful, uncomfortable truths set free by bible study, communal worship, shared experience, and by the gospel. Then, the Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas addressed us. That prominent theologian of the Episcopal Church freed her tongue and told the assembly boldly, “You cannot be White and be a Christian.”
Can you imagine how that incendiary package of truth exploded into the silence of her audience – a silence broken only by the sharp intake of a few hundred breaths? You cannot be White and be a Christian in America today. The truth will set you free.
To preach the commemoration of Frederick Douglass is an exercise in humility for a white woman of considerable privilege. To try to bring his words and example to bear upon the way in which we hear the gospel today, without reduction or exploitation or appropriation, is an exercise in repentance. My repentance will not be perfect, so I ask your forgiveness up front. But in the words of Dr Brown Douglas, I remembered what Frederick Douglass had to say, a couple of centuries ago, about slaveholder Christianity. You remember the truth he told, in an Appendix to his first autobiographical Narrative, regarding what he called “the slaveholding religion of this land”:
… between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. …
Shall I not visit for these things? Saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”
Douglass had told in his Narrative the unfortunate tale of the kind Sophia, his mistress when he first was sent to Baltimore city. She was the one who began to teach him to read. She treated him with dignity, and with kindness. But it was not enough for Sophia to be kind. When her husband discovered their lessons, he instructed her that it was wrong and dangerous to teach slaves literacy; it would make one unfit to be a slave: “there would be no keeping him,” he said. Douglass, a child of around eleven or twelve at the time, seized upon his words:
From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. … The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. …. What he most dreaded, that I most desired.”
He was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering – that to treat a slave with the dignity and invest in him the ability to learn and seek and find for himself all truth – that would unfit him to be a slave forever. The truth would set him free; and his master dreaded freedom.
On the other side of the page, Sophia found herself seduced, corrupted, and finally chained to the profitable lies of slaveholding. After her husband’s rebuke, she began to change. Douglass described how
Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. … Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone.
To borrow a turn of phrase from Kelly Brown Douglas, You cannot be a slaveholder and a Christian. The lies that you tell yourself, wise Sophia, in order to justify your position in the world are incompatible with the truth that sets Frederick free: the dignity of a man made in the very image of God, loved and redeemed for freedom by Jesus Christ.
It is not enough, Sophia, to be tender-hearted, kind, and merciful. Unless you actively resist your husband’s decrees; unless you will oppose yourself to the slaveholder’s life that you lead, and pull down its structure, dismantle its scaffold, you cannot call yourself a Christian. Because, as a slaveholder, you will one day curb the truth, and cut wood for the cross, and find that you have whitewashed your prayers as though they do not run with the blood of Frederick and his mother, his sister, his brothers, his ancestors, and his descendants.
The young Frederick Douglass befriended the poor little white boys who ran around his neighbourhood, and turned them into his teachers. Whatever book-learning they had, he bartered for bread from Sophia’s kitchen. And it is clear from his tender tone that he loved them for it. He loved that he was able to make an equal exchange with them, and they accepted him as one of their own brothers, and amongst themselves, they made a true friendship, a community in which they sustained one another. He freed them from hunger; they freed him to read.
Later, boys like these might have been among the mob that attacked him at the shipyard, afraid that his slave labour might undermine their own wages. They could not grow up White and remain Christian. Unless we are on guard against the corrupting influence of slavery, and its bastard offspring, systemic racism, personal prejudice, implicit, inescapable bias, White self-interest, White supremacy; then we who are descended from Sophia and street urchins are subject always to fall into its snares of sin.
The truth shall make you free. When Dr Brown Douglas addressed the Unholy Trinity, after we had recovered their breath, a few in the audience found their voice again. “We hear the truth in what you say, but you can’t say it like that,” they said, trying to tame her truth and settle it softly into the trap they had not even seen themselves setting, the false promise of peace without righteousness, the false prophecies of redemption without repentance, mercy without justice, the mirage of freedom without the breaking of chains.
The truth will make you free, said Jesus. What is truth? asked Pilate (John 18:38). I am the way, and the truth, and the life, said Jesus (John 14:6), and
the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him (Luke 4:18-20)
* A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, a public domain book via Kindle
A sermon for the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio, in February 2019
According to Luke, Jesus is preaching from a place of even footing. Once again, he embodies the fulfillment of the prophets: the valleys have been raised up, and the mountains brought low, and he stands upon a level plain.
There was a great multitude of people from Lebanon to the north and Jerusalem to the south, several days’ journeys away, who had come to Jesus to hear him, and to be healed by him, because power was pouring out from him. They yearned to touch him, because God’s mercy, the power of God’s love was overflowing from him. He had no political power, no armour, no army, no armory. He didn’t hold the power of the purse, nor even the power of the pen. But the people recognized that Jesus had the power of life, and in his life, they found life, and healing, help, and hope, such as no one else had ever held it out to them before or since.
Jeremiah’s words deal with political realities that have apparently endured for well over two and a half millennia, from centuries before Jesus on the plain, to this day:
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the Lord.
There is no politician, nor priest, nor folk hero who will save us from ourselves; no philosophy, nor manifesto that will guide us through the valley of the shadow of death. There is none, but only God. There is none, but only Jesus.
Jeremiah is not a prophet with a practical plan. He doesn’t offer a three-step solution to the mess in which the kingdom of Judah has found itself, besieged on all sides. He doesn’t offer, to be more specific, an alternative to the political alliances, compromises, and petitions by which Judah is attempting, unsuccessfully, to save herself.
Instead, Jeremiah says, “Until you change your heart. Until you turn your soul. Until you remember God, this will be your lot. Unless you look for an allegiance to God, all you will find is your own sinful mess looking back at you.”
Jesus says it a different way, on the plain:
Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
The false prophets: those court prophets who assured Judah that all would be well, if they would only hold their course, and not turn aside to anything so foolish as humility, repentance, or the kingdom of God, or any of those whims that Jeremiah preached. The court prophets who have always used flattering words and false arguments to beguile the politicians and the people into thinking that their greatest goal was to maintain the status quo: the layers of power and privilege and profit and poverty that sustained the society which favoured the few false prophets preaching to the choir of the king’s court.
I hadn’t intended preaching about our landscape of gun violence this weekend. Even with the anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Valentine’s Day. Even so. But I can’t. I can’t be part of propping up the status quo when this country is crying out for a change of heart.
“The heart,” says Jeremiah, “is devious above all else; it is perverse.”
I read parts of a report this week issued to shareholders by the parent company of gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson. I do not own shares in that company, to be clear; I was reporting a story about investor activism for the Episcopal Café. But I found, in doing so, that this company doesn’t like the term “gun violence.” It sees it as extreme language, designed
to create a perception that the presence of a gun, in itself, somehow creates the conditions for violence.
On Thursday’s anniversary, a statement from the White House extended sympathy to the Parkland families, and all victims of gun violence. Hours later, in a Tweet, “gun violence” was reframed as “school violence.” One can only imagine the conversations that might have taken place in between: calls from those false prophets who maintain that we do not have a gun violence problem, but a personal violence problem, a criminal violence problem, a school, workplace, yoga studio, nightclub, church, synagogue, movie theater violence problem.
The heart is devious above all else, and perverse. We have a major domestic violence problem. We have a perverse and peculiar problem with people seeing violence as their vindication. We have a problematic culture which celebrates vengeance. We need a change of heart.
Introducing our proliferation of guns magnifies that problem and its power. It allows the power of violence to spill over beyond the reach of arms-length relationships, beyond person-to-person contact. It is the opposite of the power pouring out of Jesus, the power to heal and to haul people together. Until we have a change of heart, we will remain trapped in cycles of our own construction, placing our trust in mere mortals and their metal, defending the deeply problematic status quo, at the expense of those who mourn, those who weep, those who are lost.
Jeremiah declined to offer an alternative alliance for Judah to fight its way out of the corner it was in. Instead, he only offered God.
Our answer to the problem of gun violence, while it may well take political engagement and alliances, cannot come from the well of the world. That’s one reason I am not in love with the activist investor model to engage with gun manufacturers: we cannot let mere mortals, false prophets, control the environment in which we do God’s work. We cannot let the landscape dictate our footsteps, when Jesus’ call is nothing less than to raise up the valleys and erase the mountains, and level the plains.
I don’t know that anyone here is satisfied with the status quo; but what are we willing to change in order to disrupt it? Will we push back against false prophets of fear, and demand instead to declare the love of God? Will we, instead of the power of the fortress and the citadel, look for the power pouring out of Jesus, without walls, out on the plain, for all to come and reach and touch? Will we, instead of the might of armies and the inventory of armories, arm ourselves with the love of God, and love for our neighbours, knowing that these, these alone, are the marching orders of the kingdom of God?
It’s a tall order, I know. But consider the vision of God’s kingdom that Jesus offers: a world in which the poor have power; where the bereft are comforted. Where profits are harvested as food for the hungry, with ploughshares beaten out of pistols. Where the name Pulse has not been perverted to echo with death and anger, but resumes its resonance of life, and love. Where Aurora means the halo of light around the moon, giving glory to God with all the heavenly bodies, and we no longer ask, do you mean the one in Colorado, or the one in Illinois? Where the south side of Chicago is simply the sunny side of the street. Where the Tree of Life grows green in the Garden of Eden. A kingdom where the name Parkland conjures up, not the valley of the shadow of death, but a quiet place, green pastures beside still waters.
It is not a situation that will come about by accident. It will always be opposed by false prophets and fear. It is perhaps impossible for mere mortals to construct. But here’s our secret weapon: we are not mere mortals. We are created, and called, and commissioned in the image of God and by the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. By his power, the power of God’s love made manifest, made human, we can do more than we will ever imagine.
Create in me a new heart, O God (Psalm 51:11a)
Wind trills taughtly-anchored telegraph wires.
A stave of birds compose an arpeggio, ready for flight.
Hedges shrug off the gusts and hold the line, but
Something is trying to stir my hibernation.
First, it must melt the ice from my arteries,
before I learn to love the dam,
set up a new rhythm:
Love’s invitation to dance.
I just this minute finished reading Outlandish: An Unlikely Messiah, A Messy Ministry, and the Call to Mobilize by Derek Penwell, which is good timing as the book releases today. (I was privileged to read a copy of the final pre-press draft.)
Penwell (and may I just say, what a great name for an author!) has written a book based on the urgent realization of Jesus’ political reality, a realization sharpened and made more urgent by recent political events surrounding those of us in the United States of America. While that framework is roughed out from the beginning, the body of the book takes its time to establish the case for a political Jesus who is interested in the bodies and spirits of the people living and breathing before him, at least as much as in the state of their eternal souls.
The tone draws rather deliberately on the snark of modern online political (and religious) debate, except when it gets deep into a bit of biblical digging, which the author obviously enjoys. But to continue on the topic of tone, I appreciated the extended argument for the use of sarcasm as a discipleship tool. Skewering broods of vipers, after all, is quite biblical.
While his thesis is present throughout, it’s really in the final couple of chapters that Penwell pulls the reader round to considering in practical terms what it means to read Jesus as a political leader, and resurrection as a definitive judgement on the world order, for one (or a community) that considers themselves a follower of Jesus:
“The vocation of Jesus’ followers after Easter places them squarely in the middle of the political fight to protect the most vulnerable, while holding to account those who’ve dedicated themselves to … themselves, and the pursuit of their own aggrandizement.”
That’s quite a bridge from the empty tomb to the empty rhetoric of too many modern politicians, and the empty pockets, and empty papers, of too many people within their principalities.
There is even a list of practical tips for getting involved with social justice movements and communities. I can see this being useful not only for individual readers, but for churches, especially social justice committees or leadership groups, that might read the book together.
A word about Penwell’s interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, in Chapter 3. In my tradition, when we pray that prayer (which we do only all the time), we ask forgiveness of our trespasses, or of our sins, rarely of our debts. So Penwell’s assertion that when we ask forgiveness of our debts we are literally begging for our freedom from economic oppression (and promising not to inflict it on anyone else); and following that up with the idea that to ask God to deliver us from the time of trial and evil is to ask for freedom from very present oppressive systems of injustice – that definitely gave me pause. Took my breath away a little, to be honest.
Of course, the implication is that if we are asking God to deliver us from systems that we the people have organized around ourselves (or one another, or just those others), then we had better get to work answering our own prayers, with God’s help. And I think that’s the point of the book: to galvanize faithful, Christlike engagement with the powers that be, following in the footsteps of an outlandish messiah.
Outlandish: An Unlikely Messiah, A Messy Ministry, and the Call to Mobilize, by Derek Penwell, is published by Chalice Press.
A sermon for the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany in Year C. The Gospel tells the story of Jesus teaching from a boat because of the crowds, a miraculous catch of fish, and the first few disciples to leave everything, and follow him.
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.
What is the pressing word that the world needs to hear? What is the great need that Jesus can address?
When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
What makes you trust Jesus? How has Jesus addressed your needs?
Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
With whom can you share the Word of God that answers the needs of your neighbours?
Too many people, so many people needed to hear what Jesus had to tell them about the word of God, the stuff of salvation; so he asked for help from a fisherman fresh off the water after a long and fruitless shift. Despite his weariness, his unwashed nets, his aching bones, Simon was willing to accommodate the man; whether out of curiosity, or hope, or need, or common courtesy, the legendary hospitality of their people; or repayment for that time when Jesus healed his mother-in-law.
Simon did what Jesus asked of him, and Jesus, as though in return, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye, said, “Follow me into the deep water and I’ll show you something.” And the catch of fish that they found more than made up for the night of empty nets, and the aching bodies, and the hungry mouths at home, the fear of food insecurity, and the shame of empty-handedness.
And if the story had ended there, it would confirm everything that the prosperity preachers have told us about the way in which God works: do God a favour, and God will work the odds in your favour. Throw in a coin, a seed, a token, and see your fortunes flood. With Jesus, you’ll hit the jackpot.
But the gospel is not a lucky charm, and faith does not work as a vending machine: prayer in, miracle out; and this story does not end with Simon and his friends heading to market and cashing in their fish for a tidy profit, such as they had never thought to see from a night on the Sea of Galilee, and going home rejoicing.
No, when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything, everything, and followed Jesus.
It can’t have been just about the fish. It can’t have been just about the bread. There was something in Jesus himself – his words, his presence, his essence, the Incarnation of God – that made people want to get close to him, to follow him. The fish, to conjure a distasteful image, were just the icing on the cake.
There are a few things I think it’s worth really trying to notice about this story.
One is that the people had such great need of Jesus’ teaching. Remember, what he had been teaching was the message of the prophets, of the day of the Lord, in which the poor receive good news, and the blind see, and the prisoners and the oppressed find liberty. People were starving for that message. They were parched for that hope. They were teeming for that word.
We know a little of how they feel. We know the over-incarceration of our country, the unequal distribution of the consequences of crime based on economic status and most especially on race and colour, the privatization and profiteering off of punishment that traps people in systems that have been likened to modern slavery, that further dehumanize rather than restoring the dignity of us all.
We know the unequal access to healing medicine, and the travesty of maternal and infant mortality that stains our country’s façade as a beacon of civilization and progress. Again, race is a factor. Again, profit too often takes priority over people.
We know the profound need for good news, that sets people seeking after heroes and helpers, so few of whom measure up in the end; so few who prove completely faithful, and fulfilling. We know the disappointment of a people perpetually seeking their own salvation, and coming up short, so we know the need of the people for the message of salvation that Jesus brings: Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand; God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, God willing.
Another thing to notice is that Jesus did not approach Simon out of nowhere. A chapter or so ago, Simon had heard Jesus preaching in the synagogue, perhaps reading again from that scroll of Isaiah, and Simon had invited him to dinner. At the house, Jesus had healed Simon’s mother-in-law, who had a fever. That was a while back; Jesus has been travelling the countryside preaching in more synagogues and healing many more mothers-in-law before he arrives here, at the seaside. But there is a relationship already in progress. Jesus is already known to Simon. Simon is already inclined to trust him.
One more thing that I’d like to draw out of this story is that once Simon Peter started to follow the direction of Jesus, he quickly found himself overwhelmed, out of his depth, and under-resourced to pull up the fish that he found. He had to call in his partners, James and John, to help him. He was afraid, and he could not handle the work alone; he couldn’t even handle a miracle alone. And Jesus didn’t expect him to. When he said, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people,” he might have been pointing to the partners who had gathered around to help out, the community of disciples that was just beginning to become a gleam in Jesus’ eye.
There is a great need among the people to hear the hope that Jesus has called forth. Simon already has reason to trust Jesus, and to heed that hope. Simon needs to call others to help him if he is to follow the path to fulfillment that Jesus has pointed out for him. And once he does, they follow Jesus, too.
Which brings us back to the questions that we asked at the beginning:
What is the word that the world needs to hear? What is the great need that Jesus can address?
What makes you trust Jesus? How has Jesus helped you?
With whom can you share the Word of God, because they need it, and because you need them to help you heed it?
I can’t do my work by myself. If God wants me to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, freedom from the oppression of gun violence, liberty from white supremacy and deep-rooted racism, food for the hungry, my own salvation from depression and anxiety and the troubles that bind me – then the first thing that I am doing to make that happen is to look around to see which other boats are out, and who I can ask for help. Because it’s too much to contemplate alone. But then I have to remember, too, that Jesus is in the boat with me.
Jesus is in the boat with me. He has always been trustworthy. There have been times, plenty of times, when I have felt overwhelmed, underwhelming, in danger of drowning, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Jesus has been there, a whisper away. Sometimes, he drags me to shore. Sometimes, he dances with me in the deep water, waiting with my aching lungs for the tide to ebb. Sometimes, rarely, he flips the whole scene upside down, inside out, and I find myself, a fish out of water, facing a whole new world.
“Don’t be afraid,” says Jesus, “From now on you will be catching people.” Simon, James, and John looked at the great crowd gathered on the sea shore to hear Jesus, to see Jesus, to find Jesus. And they put down their nets, and followed Jesus into the country, into the crowd, who needed more than anything to know the presence of the living God among them.
over the water 
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