This sermon, given at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church December 1, 2013 is based on the readings for the First Sunday in year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here.

What a great opportunity for the preacher, to be able to offer these instructions straight from the texts right here at the beginning of the sermon!  Jesus speaks to us from our Gospel reading and says, “Keep awake!”  Paul tells us that this is the time to awaken from our sleep…  So no nodding off during the sermon this morning!

Paul says, “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep” (Romans 13:11).  He wants us to wake up because we are about to begin something remarkable.  It’s the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of a new liturgical year.  We begin our walk through the Gospel of Matthew today.  The crèche is out.  Today we will begin to fill it with animals and shepherds.  We have blue on the altar.  The Advent wreath is out and the first candle is lit.  We are about to begin again.

Once again we will tell the story of a young woman who says “yes.”  We will tell the story of the life to which she gives birth.  And we will tell the story of the light that life brings into the world.  We will tell the story of a child born in a manger, the story of a star leading the Maggi through the desert.  We are about to begin again and Paul tells us that now is the time to awake from our sleep.  Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel to keep awake.  We know that something truly wonderful is about to begin.

And so, just like we do every year in the church, we are going to begin this wonderful adventure, we are going to start this new season… by waiting.

Waiting.  Here we are.  The table is set, the scene is prepared, the stage is ready but we won’t hear the story about that miraculous birth for another month.  We will hear lots of other stories, stories that help us to prepare for the story of Jesus’ birth.  But that moment when the star comes to rest, when the light enters the world, when the moment to which all of history points and from which all of history flows… We are going to have to wait.  Advent is about waiting.  And waiting is an important thing.

Every year about this time people ask me why we can’t sing Christmas Carols during Advent.  I tell them, “Well because it isn’t Christmas yet.  We have wonderful Advent hymns and we will sing those.  But we don’t sing Christmas carols or hymns until the season of Christmas which will begin on Christmas Eve.”  When I say that people often look at me like they are being punished, it’s like I am withholding something from them that should already be theirs.  But there is a real importance, a real value to the waiting that we are about to begin.

While Jesus came some two thousand years ago, and gave us a sense of “already” we are still a church of the “not yet.”  Listen to what the Prophet Isaiah says that we are waiting for:

“For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:3b-4).

We are waiting.  We have been waiting since way before Jesus’ time.  We have been waiting for a long time for the world to be made new according to God’s vision and dream for creation.  We have been waiting for a long time for that reality and that truth to be ushered in and for God’s justice, compassion, and God’s light to reign in all of the world.

That is our experience of life.  That’s what we know.  We are waiting.  So we spend the season of Advent acknowledging that it is so.  Jesus has come once and has ushered in the “already,” but we are still living in the “not yet.”  We are still waiting.

That’s an important thing for us to acknowledge.  It is also important for us to acknowledge how long we have been waiting because this kind of waiting can really grind you down.  When we have been waiting this long our attention can begin to drift, our focus becomes a little fuzzy, we might even begin to fall asleep.  The danger is even greater when we don’t know how much longer we are going to have to wait.

We don’t know how long we will have to wait.  Jesus is pretty clear:

“Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36).

When we have been waiting for something for this long, and we don’t have any idea when it will actually come… there is a real danger that we will begin to settle for the “already” and stop looking towards, hoping for, and working to realize the “not yet.”  That would be a real tragedy.

So in this moment Paul is telling us to wake up, to fix our attention, to sharpen our focus, and, while we are living with the joy of the already, to keep watching, waiting, working, and striving for that which has yet to be realized.

OK.  Big picture, cosmic metaphors…  We are waiting, longing for Jesus to come again and for the whole world to be changed.  Let’s bring it a little closer to home.

There is another waiting and longing that we all experience and which we need to acknowledge this morning.  We are beginning again this morning and we are acknowledging that we are still waiting.  It is also true that some of us here today have experienced this “beginning again” quite a few times…  Year after year Advent arrives, Christmas comes and goes, and we are still waiting; waiting for Christ to be born in us in a way that transforms us and changes our lives.

We may have had a taste.  We may have experienced some of that new birth.  On occasion we may feel that we have made a lot of progress on the journey towards a life in Christ… But we have to acknowledge, and we don’t have to dig very deep to know that this is true… that there is a lot of “not yet” still within us.

Jesus and Paul are both urging us to keep awake because when we have been waiting this long, and we don’t know how much longer we will have to wait there is a danger that our focus will attention will drift, that our focus will become fuzzy, that we might even fall asleep…  And there is the danger that we will turn our attention to other things and focus our sights on other, nearer horizons.

It isn’t easy to wait.  And it is especially difficult to wait alone in the dark with no company other than our selves.   It is not easy to wait, hurting, broken and longing, for something that will make us whole.  When we have been waiting this long there is the danger that we will begin to chase after “not yets;” shadows and fantasies; things that will never make us whole and which, at best, will only distract us from the vigil that we sit.

This is a season when we are particularly susceptible to the temptation to settle for an “already” that will never help us to achieve the “not yet” for which we long.  Black Friday become Black Thursday and stretches into Cyber Monday.   Endless to do lists, thing after thing, task after task, the busyness that we experience this time of year don’t really address the longing.  They don’t give us light and life.  They drag us down and make us forget who we really are so that we end up replacing our Facebook picture with a picture of the Grinch!  The endless shopping and to do lists may in fact be nothing more than a diversion from the acknowledgment that, despite the distance traveled, the time that has passed, the several new beginnings…  we are in fact still waiting.  And if that is the way that we spend Advent, busily avoiding the truth, then when it is all over, when we finally stop shopping, stop doing, when Christmas has come and gone, we are likely to find that we are still… waiting.

We need to spend this season waiting and acknowledging that we are waiting.  We need to hear Paul tell us in the Letter to the Romans:

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22,23).

We need to acknowledge that there is a lot of “not yet,” yet to go.  Only then, when we have come to that realization, can we look back at the “already” and realize the comfort, the support, the light, the life and the warmth that lies there for us in that manger.

It is a difficult and strange place to stand, with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, and to think of the gap between the two as the present in which we live.  So, make sure that you “mind the gap”  this Advent.

That’s where we are… waiting.  It’s not a punishment or a withholding of something that is already ours.  We are waiting intentionally trying to acknowledge and embrace that uncomfortable gap space that we inhabit where we have no choice but to acknowledge our need and our dependence on God alone.  We wait in hope and thanksgiving for the moment when Christ will be born into the world and into us.

Amen.

This sermon was given at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Thanksgiving Day 2013.

It is based on the Old Testament reading for Thanksgiving Day in year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find that reading here.

I think this is a pretty remarkable day.  We gather here on a regular basis to give thanks.  The word “Eucharist” in fact means “thanksgiving.”   So every Sunday and Wednesday, and many other times during the year, we are here giving thanks together.   Today we are joined in this moment of thanksgiving by people all across this country, unified, giving thanks together.   I think that’s pretty remarkable.

There is another thing that we are all doing together today.  We are telling stories.  I am pretty sure that we will all be gathered around tables later in the day today, reliving memories, recounting blessed and wonderful moments we have spent together, telling the stories of the last year, the stories that give us identity and shape who we are.  Many of us will even take turns, making our way around the table, offering something that we are thankful for before we begin to pass the food.

The telling of stories isn’t a remarkable thing for us.  We tell our story every time we gather together in this place.  But the fact that people all over this nation are unified in this opportunity, in this moment of story telling today…  I think that’s  pretty remarkable.

I think that this remarkable moment, this remarkable coincidence of joint thanksgiving and story telling creates a wonderful opportunity for us, for you and me, for the people of God, because we have a pretty remarkable story to tell.

The people of Israel thought that they were going home.  They had sojourned in Egypt, captives, for over four hundred years.  They had escaped from Egypt and the armies of the Pharaoh through the Red Sea and they found themselves in the wilderness on their way to the land that God had promised to them.  Then something happened.  They didn’t arrive right away.  Their route was not “as the crow flies.”  In fact it was a wandering, circuitous mess through the desert.  For forty years  the people of Israel circled around and missed the mark, making wrong turns, getting back on the path over an over again as they tried to find their way home.

Today, as we join them, in the narrative from the book of Deuteronomy, they are on the bank of the river, they are ready to take possession of the land that God has promised them.  The excitement must have been palpable.  Then their leader and their guide, Moses, says “Wait a minute.  I’ve got about thirty four chapters of text to deliver to you before we can enter the promised land.

Moses give them about five chapters of autobiographical history; his history with them, a stiff necked and rebellious people, whom he had wished at times were not his burden to bear.  And then for twenty chapters he reminds them of the law.   He reminds them of the things that God had called them to do and to be.  And then, in chapter twenty six, as he is wrapping up this recitation of the law he describes a ritual that they are to perform in the inner sanctuary once a year; a ritual of thanksgiving where the first fruits of the land are placed before the altar, given to God in thanksgiving for all of the gifts that God had given to them.

I think that it’s important to recognize that the land was a symbol and a sign of their relationship with God, that they were in fact God’s chosen people.  So the first fruit of the land was an especially appropriate gift to be given in thanksgiving.

The ritual that Moses gives to the people of Israel is very specific and clear about the words that are to be said at the moment when the basket of first fruits is given to God before the altar.  There are only three places in all of the Old Testament where the people of Israel are given specific words to say in a formal liturgical setting and moment.  Two of those recitations are given in this morning’s reading.

As the basket is given to the Priest who is in office at the time the people are instructed to say,

“Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us” (Deuteronomy 26:3b).

I know that the promise is true because I ma here.  And I am a member of this family, of this tribe, of this people, whom God has called out for a special vocation: to be a light to the nations.

Then as the basket is placed before the altar they are to say,

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me”  (Deuteronomy 26: 5b-10a).

Moses is afraid, standing there on the edge of the promised land, that the people of Israel will forget the lessons that they have learned as they wandered in the wilderness.  He is afraid that as they move into this land flowing with milk and honey, and the hardships melt away, the people will forget who brought them to this place.  So he is asking them to do a very specific thing to remind themselves of who they are and whose they are.  He is asking them to give thanks and to tell the story.

Biblical scholars refer to this moment in the book of Deuteronomy as a creedal statement.  This is who we are.  This is what we believe.  And it is this story of exile, of liberation, and the story of God’s promises to us being fulfilled by our possession of this land that defines who we are as a people.  Moses knows that the way to remember who we are and whose we are is to give thanks and to tell the story.

I hope that you recognize a pattern in this reading because we are a bout to do the same thing.  We will stand in a few moments and recite the Nicene Creed.  We will say that the promises that God has made to us are true and that we are recipients of those promises.  We will say that we believe that God is.  We will make our offering here at this altar.  And before we share the meal together, before we celebrate, we will tell the story of salvation history.

Listen closely to the Eucharistic Prayer and you will hear the story of God’s work in the world’ form creation through the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.  We will be telling our story as a people in much the same way that the people of Israel were called to tell their story as they gave their offerings to God in thanksgiving for what God had given them.

When I stared out this morning I said I believe we are being presented with a wonderful opportunity today as our family, our tribe, our nation gathers to give thanks and to tell stories.  Now this is something that is particularly difficult for us and I know that it might be challenging…

As we gather around the table later today, and it has been the tradition in my family for a long time to go around the table one at a time and name something that we are thankful for, what would it be like if in addition to naming what we are thankful for we also articulated where God was for us in that moment?  A secular moment, something that people all across this nation are gathering to do today, could become something more for us and for anyone who joins us at our table; an affirmation and a recognition that God is at the center of our lives.  That the things that we have come from God, are gifts from God, and that God is so deeply ingrained in who and what we are that we can’t begin to imagine that God is not there, when we are giving thanks, when we are telling our stories, when we break bread together.

Oh yeah… that wonderful opportunity?  It’s about evangelism, which is not an easy word for Episcopalians to say.   But it is a word that we need to embrace.  And this is a moment of evangelism for us.  This is a moment for us to deepen our faith, to recognize what is at the core of who we are, and to share that with one another in an intimate and familial setting.  Perhaps if we practice this enough in those comfortable moments we will even be able to do it in moments when we are not so sure how it will be received, in moments where it is a little more uncomfortable to share who and what we are.  Perhaps in that moment we will be fulfilling our vocation as heirs of the promises that were made to our forefathers and will be able to become a light to all the nations.

Amen.

This sermon is based on the readings for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22 in year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

Sometimes when I stand up on Sunday morning to read the Gospel I have to work pretty hard to understand or to know how to inflect the words on the page; whether words are spoken in an adjuring way, a pleading way, a comforting way, a convicting way.  That’s why I am so happy that there is this one little piece of punctuation in today’s passage, that exclamation point that allows me to read these words, INCREASE OUR FAITH!  INCREASE OUR FAITH!  The apostles come to Jesus and they say those words, the exclaim them.  They are anxious and they are scared.

How do I know that they are scared?  Well because I read ahead, just a little bit.  Actually I read back.  This is one of those instances where I think that our lectionary doesn’t do us any favors.  They have us starting at the fifth verse of chapter seventeen rather than the first verse which gives us the context for the apostle’s plea when they get to Jesus.  Listen to what he says to them:

‘Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. Be on your guard! If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent”, you must forgive.

Luke 17:1-4

No wonder the apostles are so desperate for help.  No wonder they are so concerned!  They need to live together in community in a specific way, modeling behavior, so that their behavior does not decrease or harm the faith of any of these little ones… They are called to do something that is almost as impossible as having a mulberry tree uprooted and planted in the sea.  They need to be able to forgive.  Not just once.  Over, and over, and over, and over again.  Jesus is calling them to a way of life together in community that seems so foreign to them that when Jesus goes to reassure them he uses this extreme and extraordinary metaphor about a mulberry tree.

Reassure them?  That is exactly what he is doing here.  We have gone back into the text to establish the context for this exchange with the apostles.  Now we need to do a little more work and examine the Greek.

“If you had faith the size of a mustard seed…”  In the Greek there are two ways of understanding this sentence.  One hears this as a reference to something that is not fact, that has not occurred, that is not true.  “If I were you… I am not you.  But if I were, then this is what I would do…”  The other way to hear this sentence is as a statement of fact, something that has already happened, something that is in fact true.  “If you are followers of our Lord Jesus then you are…”  Jesus is saying, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, and you do, you could do the impossible. You could uproot this tree and you could plant it in the sea and it would thrive!”  Jesus is saying, “You have that faith, and it is only the size of a mustard seed, but it is enough!  You can forgive!  Not just once, but over, and over, and over again.  That is all that it takes.  You have enough faith to live in my light and love and to help to bring the Kingdom to realization here and now.”

I imagine that the disciples were pretty desperate when they said to him, “Increase our faith!”  It’s like saying “give us strength, help us through this moment!”  They are not just because Jesus has told them that they have to do the impossible and forgive over and over again.  They are also living in this strange and contradictory world.  Listen to what Habakkuk says to us this morning:

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,

and you will not listen?

Or cry to you “Violence!”

and you will not save?

Why do you make me see wrong-doing

and look at trouble?

Destruction and violence are before me;

strife and contention arise.

So the law becomes slack

and justice never prevails.

The wicked surround the righteous–

therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

Habakkuk 1:2-4

He must have made the mistake of watching the news while he was preparing dinner.  How does he do it;  in a terrible world, a world that seemed intent on depriving Habakkuk of his faith, of making him believe that he was wrong?

The Psalmist is right there with him.  Lord how long will you let the evil doer prosper?  How long will you allow those who exploit others to their own advantage to benefit from their abuse?  Justice is out of whack here!  How long will you let this go on?

The desperation, the panic that the apostles felt when Jesus called them to forgive wasn’t unique to them.  The people of Israel had been feeling that stress and difficulty for a long, long time.

Jesus was calling them to live as a lamp on a lamp stand, a beacon on a hill, a light to the world that would call them to a new life and a new way of being.  That’s why in today’s passage from Luke Jesus is cautioning the Apostles, telling them how important their witness is.  He is cautioning them to live lives that are consonant with God’s vision and dream, God’s Kingdom here and now so that they would be drawing others into that light and into that way of being.  He is telling them that there are lots and lots of things in this world that will point in another direction and pull people in other ways.  “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come…”  But you, you need to be different and to show something new to the world so that things will begin to change.

“Increase our faith!”  The stress that we feel when we hear the command to forgive isn’t any different than the stress that Habakkuk and the Psalmist felt.  It isn’t any different than the stress that the apostles felt when Jesus told them that they had to forgive the same person seven times in a single day.  In fact Luke uses the word “apostles” to tell us that Jesus is speaking, not just to the disciples who were following him, but to all of us who would follow.  It is we who stand before him this day and say, “Help us!  Give us Strength.  We believe, help our unbelief! Increase our faith!”

So where does it come from, that mustard seed of faith?  It is planted deep within us.  Is our God’s gift, it is God’s grace.  It is ours!  That little mustard seed of faith needs to be nurtured.  It needs to be sustained and grown.

Paul in his letter to Timothy here talks about his rejoicing at the faith of the group gathered there together, a faith that was given to them and handed down to them by Lois and by Eunice…  I had a couple of Aunts named Eunice.  I always wondered where that name came from…   Faith that was rekindled and nurtured in community as that early church gathered to give each other strength, to hold one another up, to bear testimony and witness to the things in this world that manifest God’s goodness and light so that even in times of loss, pressure, pain, duress there was always that light shining.  That’s all it takes, that little mustard seed.

So when we begin to think that we don’t have enough, that we are not enough, that nothing that we can do could ever change the way the world is we need to remember that Jesus stand among us this morning and says “Yes you do,” and “Yes you are,” and “Yes you can.  All it takes is that little mustard seed and the nurturing and tending that happens when we come together as the Body of Christ, as a beacon on a hill, as a lamp on a lamp stand, top shine that light into the lives of people who long for what we experience when we experience here together: the light and love of Christ in the body gathered.  Amen.

This sermon is based on the readings for Proper 11 Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

This sermon was preached at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison Wisconsin on July 21, 2013.

The NPR story that is quoted in the sermon can be found here

For the full context and origin of “clutching our purses, locking our doors, or looking suspiciously at poeple in department stores” please refer to the sixth paragraph of President Obama’s remarks about the death of Trayvon Martin available here.

So with whom do you identify in this story?  Are you a Mary kind of girl, someone who receives data and information, impressions about the world around you by sitting still, quietly reflecting and contemplating what is taking place?  Or are you more like Martha, moving constantly, busy, working, receiving and accepting information, interpreting and learning about the world around you as you are in motion?

How do you pray?  Do you have a spot in your house that is set aside for quiet prayer, maybe a special chair, candle that you light, even the same music that plays as you sit and read the daily office?  Or do you pray holding the steering wheel of your car, maybe as you run, maybe even as you wash the dishes?

Historically, classically we hear this reading from Luke’s Gospel as an evaluation of two spiritualties, two ways of being in the world.  And it would seem that Jesus is pointing to one and saying that this is better than the other, passing judgment on the busy ness of Martha and her need to be in motion.  But that’s a little confusing.  Jesus does go up into the mountains alone to pray.  He goes apart from the crowd to pray on a regular basis.  But Jesus is also out there in the streets, preaching, teaching, healing, working with his disciples and he calls us again and again to be servants to all, to be at work in the world working to bring God’s kingdom to fruition.  So how can it be that Jesus is passing judgment on that kind of spirituality, that “busy” way of being?  It doesn’t quite make sense.  It is confusing.  And it’s a little worrisome if, like me, the only way that you can justify sitting long enough to watch a Packer’s game is to fold the laundry or dust the baseboards while you watch the game…  Busy all of the time.

Fortunately, or maybe even predictably, I don’t think that is really the point of this story.  I don’t really think that Jesus is making distinctions about two different ways of being in the world and calling one out as preferable.  But to understand why I think that, to understand what is really happening here we have to back up just a little bit.

Last week we heard the verses that immediately precede the story from Luke that we heard today.  Last week we heard the story of the Good Samaritan.  And in that story a lawyer stands up to test Jesus and in the course of his interrogation he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”  Jesus works through the story of the Good Samaritan to point out that “who is my neighbor” is the wrong question.  Who is my neighbor isn’t even on Jesus’ radar.  What Jesus wants this lawyer to understand is that we are to behave as neighbors to everyone in the world around us.  Who our neighbor is, who our neighbor isn’t doesn’t make sense because everyone is our neighbor and we are called to love them as we love ourselves.

Jesus is turning the social order upside down in this story.  The hero of the story, the person who actually does act like a neighbor is a Samaritan,  is someone from a despised community.  So this story about a Good Samaritan would have been shocking and upsetting to his audience.

As soon as that story ends we hear that “Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home” (Luke 10: 38).  Then something equally shocking happens in this story.  Martha’s sister sits at Jesus’ feet, like a disciple, in the front room, where only the men are allowed to gather, and she listens to what Jesus is saying.  Now that would have been just as shocking to Jesus’ audience as the Samaritan helping the wounded and bleeding man lying in the ditch.

We don’t really know how Martha said those words.  We don’t know what was in her mind.  They were sisters.  Maybe in all their lives they had never quite figured out how to cohabitate, whose job it is to do this, whose job it is to do that, how do we divide up the cores.  Maybe this is an ongoing feud between them and when Martha comes into the front room her words are laden with the baggage of her long struggle with her sister as she asks Jesus to send Mary back to the kitchen.

We do know for sure though, that when Martha walks into that room and says, “Jesus, send her back into the kitchen where she belongs” all of the men in the room said, “Yeah!  Darn straight.  It’s about time!  Get her out of here.  She’s not supposed to be in this room!”  We know that’s how they responded because in the last line of todays Gospel Jess say, “This will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).

Jesus is still on the same theme, he is still working to accomplish the same goal that he had in mind when he started telling the story of the Good Samaritan.  He is turning the social order upside down.  He is asking us to see that we are all neighbors.  And he is working to help us to identify something that is even more insidious than the racial prejudice that was in play when it was a Samaritan that was at the center of the story.  Right now Jesus is talking about bias.

Bias.  It was about a year ago that I heard a story on NPR that I immediately looked up on their web site because I knew that there would come a moment when we would need to hear it together.  In this story they were talking to a sociologist who had written a book about bias and in her book she tells this story:

There was a woman who was washing dishes in her sink when she dropped and broke a crystal bowl.  The glass gashed her hand from the top of her palm to her wrist.  She rushed to the emergency room and the very fist thing that she told the surgeons and doctors who examined her was that she was, “I am a quilter and I don’t want to lose and functionality in my hand.  Please make sure that there are no nerves severed, no tendons cut.”  The Emergency room doctor told her that he was doing a perfectly “competent” job stitching up her hand.  Then a nures who knew the patient walked into the room and said, “Professor Johnson, what are you doing in the emergency room?”  The doctor who was stitching up her hand looked at her and asked, “Are you a professor at Yale?”  The patient answered, “Yes I am.”  Suddenly the room was filled with hand specialists, surgeons, neurologists and other specialists, all of them there to make sure that she retained all of the functionality of her fingers.  Something remarkable had happened because suddenly this person sitting on the stool having her hand stitched up was a person of rank and status in the community.

Bias is an insidious thing.

You know the story about the Samaritan… that seems kind of foreign to us.  Samaritans, people who had intermarried with the people of the land, whose religious practice doesn’t match our own, who worship on the mountain tops instead of in the temples…  that might seem pretty foreign to us.  That’s easy for us to hold at a distance as if it doesn’t have any relevance to or impact on our lives.  But this story is different.  Mary looks like us.  She is a member of our tribe. She is a member of our household.  And yet there is this bias that says where her place is and where it is not.  Where she belongs, and where she may not be.  And so it is this story, I think, that grabs us today.

This story call us to look deep within ourselves and identify those insidious places that don’t rise quite to the level of prejudice or bigotry, but which lurk down there, just a little deeper, at the level of bias.  This passage calls us to look within ourselves and to find those biases and to bring them out into the light so that we don’t find ourselves clutching our purses on the elevator, locking the doors of our cars, or looking suspiciously at people in the department stores. 

We are called to something more.  We are called to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, and with all of our strength.  And we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves (BCP page 351).

Jesus has been working very hard these last two Sundays to help us to understand that our neighbors are everyone that we encounter.

This morning Jesus says that our neighbors place is here, in the room, at his feet, with us and that this, this place, this moment, this right, will not be taken away from them.

Amen.

This sermon is based on the readings for Proper 8 Year C in the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here.

This sermon was preached at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church On September 30, 2013, the day after Bishop Steven Miller ordained the Reverend Dorota Pruski to the Sacred order of Priests, and on the occasion of her first celebration of the Eucharist.

What a wonderful and glorious moment this is.  We have been following this story for such a long time. Clinging to every detail, paying attention to every nuance of this story, waiting and waiting for this moment to come, maybe even thinking that it might never get here.  It’s sort of like reading a great book.  You are reading and the chapter is moving along, you’ve flipped ahead and you know that there are only a few more pages left in this chapter…  but that page that is only half filled with text and has all that white space at the bottom is elusive, it’s still far out there.  The tension builds, things are moving along… “Ok only two pages to the end of the chapter, I know there going to wrap this up somehow.  There’s go to be some sort of conclusion here…”  And then it happens!  You get to the end of the chapter and everything changes.  And then you realize, “wow!  There’s still a lot of this book left!  This story isn’t over yet!”  And so the excitement and the thrill that you’ve had there in that moment as you concluded that chapter and got to all that white space at the end of the page is only heightened because you know the story will go on.

That’s exactly where we are this morning.  We come in here this morning to celebrate the ending of a chapter and the beginning of a new one and it happens with these words,  When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up he set his face to go to Jerusalem”  (Luke  9:51).  Well that is that chapter you thought I was talking about isn’t it?  That is the beginning of a new thing that we are here to celebrate this morning… isn’t it?  It is.  Believe me.  And it is important to take a moment to think about what Luke is doing for us here in this part of his narrative.

Jesus has been ministering in Galilee.  He is at home with his people, gathering his disciples, building his support base, gathering resources, and today, with this chapter and this verse something dramatic changes.  It’s important for us to recognize that for Luke the Gospel all funnels down to that one climactic moment, when there on that Holy Hill Jesus demonstrates to us beyond the shadow of a doubt that God will love us forever.  And the people who are traveling with him are so transformed by that revelation and that moment that the Gospel then explodes form that place and that moment into all the world.  So for Luke, there is this distinct shape to the story that is Gospel.  Everything moves to this one climactic moment in history narrowing down to this one focus and then it expands exponentially, taking off into, and transforming the whole world.  This is the moment when Jesus begins his movement towards Jerusalem.

For the next ten chapters we will hear that Jesus is “on his way,”  “on his way,” “on his way” to Jerusalem.  And so Luke wants to make sure that everything that Jesus says and does is now focused on that moment.  Here we are standing at this moment of transition and Jesus encounters three would be disciples, three people from the crowd who come to him and want to follow him.  I believe that there is some instruction for us in the words that Jesus speaks to them.

The first one come to him and says I will follow you wherever you go.  Jesus points out to him that there is a cost to discipleship.  Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests (Luke 9:58).  They have homes.  They are secure. They know their place.  But to be on the road with me means losing that security, that sense of home and of place.  It means putting those things at risk so that you might find them in me.

Then Jesus says to another person in the crowd, “Follow me” (Luke 9:59).  And the response is, “I will follow you but let me bury my father first.”  Jesus said leave the dead to bury their own dead.  Now I think that we can get into trouble if we take that line too literally.  Clearly, in the rest of the Gospel Jesus’ compassion would instruct us to care for our families, to care for our parents.  What Jesus is trying to so is help this person recognize that he needs to reorient his sense of who his family is and what comes first.  You need to make sure that the way you interact with and relate to your family is building the kingdom of God.  Jesus goes on to say, “As for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God”  (Luke 9:60).  Don’t bury the dead out of a sense of duty, out of a sense of guilt, but care for the people around you the way that I am about to care for you as I walk this path to Jerusalem.  So it’s with a reorientation of our relationships with people, based on this path, that we are called to walk with Jesus.

Another person comes to him from the crowd and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.  But first, let me go and say goodbye to the people in my home.”  Here is the moment where we hear Jesus’ urgency.  You have recognized what is happening here.  You have seen what is changing in the world and so you need to follow now.  You need to follow now.

There is some risk in discipleship.  We risk losing things that we are familiar with and a sense of security.  There is a reorientation of our values and our relationships that comes with discipleship, and there is a sense of urgency to move now.

As this chapter of Luke’s Gospel comes to a close and we look forward to what is to come we find ourselves this morning in a very similar place.  Saint Andrew’s will celebrate its Centennial a year from now.  We will have been in this place for one hundred years.  We are in the process of looking back at where we have been, who we have been, what we have done, and dreaming and visioning for our next century, looking into the future trying to discern who it is that God is calling us to be.  And above all else we need to make sure that as we move in to this new period of our life together we are on the same road that Jesus walks.  We need to make sure that we are on our way to Jerusalem.

So the advice that Jesus gives to the three people for m the crowd who confront him this day he also give to us…  As you look to your future, as you move into your second century, there is some risk.  You may have to let go of some of the things that allow you to feel secure, some of the things that make you feel at home.  You may need to let go of some things and to change.  Jesus also tells us that this will not be easy and we will need to make sure that our relationships with one another and with this place are guided by our relationship with God in Christ Jesus, that they are guided by the love that God reveals to us in the person of Jesus hanging on a cross.  And we are reminded that as we move forward we should do so with a sense of urgency that hastens our feet, that keeps us on the path and that moves us towards the goal with intentionality and with a sense of mission.

There are lots and lots of story lines here this morning and lots and lots of chapters that are coming to and end, lots and lots of chapters that are beginning.  Each and every one of us here today has our own story to write.  But there is one that we  want to hold up and celebrate on this day and it is the one that you thought I was talking about when I started speaking this morning.

I used the words “the Holy Hill” to describe Golgotha, the place outside the walls of the city of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified.  That is code language for some of us sitting in the room today because that’s the language that we use to describe Virginia Theological Seminary, in Alexandria Virginia.  I am not sure that we would say that we were crucified there.  But we made sacrifices.  Dorota moved away from family and friends, from a life in Milwaukee, to a place thirteen, fourteen hours away.  She has face those reorientations of relationships, of filial responsibility, has moved with a sense of urgency to arrive here in our midst today.  And we thank God for people who are in her position of leadership, who have walked the path before us, and who are willing to walk the path with us as we make our way towards Jerusalem.

Dorota and her experience of discipleship will help to form and shape us in the years to come.  And we, you, will help to form and shape her at the same time.  The difficulties that Jesus describes, the difficulties associated with the path of discipleship are real.  And they are formidable.  But we can face them and we can move forward in spite of them because we do it as a community, because we do it together.  And when one of us stumbles there is another to hold us up and to help us to walk.

So today, as we come to the conclusion of a chapter and look forward to the beginning of another, I would like to invite you to imagine that last page of the chapter that we have been on.  There is only a third of the page that is covered with text.  There is a white field at the bottom of that page where something might be added.  As we move into this next chapter of our common life together on the road to Jerusalem I would like to invite you to imagine what story you will add, what words you will write on that page, what images, what pictures, what dreams, what joys, what struggles and what triumphs you will add to the story of our journey together.

Amen.

This sermon is built on the readings for Proper 7 in year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

We are a people shaped and formed by stories: stories that define who we are as individuals, stories of our childhood and our growing up, stories that define who we are as families and communities, stories that define who we are as a people and as a nation.  And a people that are defined by its stories cannot help but revere its greatest storytellers.  People who can shape our lives and out thoughts and our understanding of the world by their use of words and their ability to convey a moment in time, a space, or relationships draw our praise and our esteem.

Luke, the gospeller from whom we heard this morning, is one of our greatest storytellers, a true craftsman.  But some two thousand years after he wrote his stories down, after his community recorded their experiences with Jesus of Nazareth it might be a little difficult for us to appreciate his true craft.  Our culture, our society is so different that we might miss the subtleties of his mastery.  It will be well worth our while to go back and examine his artistry and to see just what it is that Luke is telling us in his story this morning.

Jesus and his disciples are in a boat and they travel across the lake, the deep waters.  Now for the people of Israel chaos lurked beneath the surface of the water, there was the threat of extinction there, the unknown, the unknowable, powers that moved without our understanding…  And so to be out on the deep water was a scary thing.  Luke’s original audience would have appreciated the danger to Jesus and his disciples and their trepidation would have increased when they heard Luke say, “opposite Gallilee.”  Luke is making sure his audiences knows that Jesus and his disciples are traveling into the land of the Gentiles, a place that was unknown and unclean, a place that was hostile and unsafe.  As if that weren’t bad enough our “landing party” reaches the other side  and they find themselves amongst the dead, among the tombs, where a madman, a man possessed, screeches and howls.  This man refuses to wear clothes, he has been repeatedly bound by shackles and has  broken free, bloodied and bruised by his struggles against the chains.  The demoniac swirls across the beach and confronts Jesus and his disciples.  Luke’s audience must have been terrified.  If this were a contemporary movie the sound track would be thrumming.  The walls of our surround sound theater would shaking with the noise and we would be filled with dread as Jesus looks into this man’s eyes and asks him his name.  Then the bombshell drops.  This person is so tormented by the voices screaming within his head that he has lost track of his own identity.  With no name to share the demons speak on his behalf, “’What is your name?’ He said ‘Legion,’ for many demons had entered him.”  Luke’s audience would have been shaking with fear around the table or around the campfire as this story was told.

Having brought us right to the brink Luke now begins to unwind the conflict and pull us back from the edge.  Jesus who has stilled the waves on the lake, who is working to help people to understand who he is, who in this section of Luke’s story is demonstrating his power and authority casts the demons out.  They go into a herd of swine that rushes down the hill, across the field and off the cliff into the lake where they are drowned… still a scary moment, but in the end all has come out well and we can relax.  The man who had been lost among the dead has been set free from the demons that beset him and the demons have been vanquished!

Luke has done a fabulous job of drawing this picture for us, of pulling us into the conflict, of establishing the tension and then resolving it.  He has established Jesus as the Son of the Most High God; even the demons know him by name.  But Luke is not finished with us yet.  It is here in this moment where everything shifts, Luke’s true mastery is revealed, and we see that story that we have just heard is really a set up for what is about to happen.

The swineherd run into the town and they tell people what has happened.  Everyone comes rushing out to see for themselves and they find the man who had been naked, mad, and living among the tombs, clothed, in his right mind, and sitting at Jesus’ feet.  Luke tells us that this was the moment that people became afraid.  I think that is really key for us.  They are not afraid because the swine have run off the cliff into the water.  They aren’t afraid because their way of living has been destroyed or because their meat supply for the coming season is gone.  That’s not why they are afraid.  They are afraid because this person who had been lost, whom they had chained and set guards over, who had been cast out, and who was living apart from them amongst the dead had been restored to them.  They are afraid because they are being confronted by a new and challenging reality.

In the letter to the Galatians we hear Paul say, “there is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The people of that region knew how to manage the reality that they had been living with.  They had a way of keeping themselves safe from people who were mad, who were dangerous, who were “other.”  First they tried to chain him but that didn’t work.  They set guards over him and that didn’t work.  Then his alientation became so great that he removed himself from their presence and was living amongst the dead… For the people of the region, his community, it was a safe and comfortable arrangement that allowed them to ignore him, to shun him, to live as if he didn’t matter.  Jesus has come into their midst and turned their safe and manageable world upside down.  This is the true import of today’s story.

It would be much easier and more comfortable for us to focus on the healing of the demoniac and the casting out of the demons.  That part of the story holds out great hope and promise and it doesn’t call us to behave or to think differently.   But if we have read the scriptures and don’t find ourselves challenged in some way then it is likely that we haven’t heard the whole story.  The demoniac who has been healed says to Jesus, “Please take me away from this place.  Let me be with you.  You have restored me to health, reconciled me to myself, and restored my identity.  Let me come with you where I will be safe, and loved, and secure.”

Jesus says “yes” to this same request over and over again in the Gospels.  He heals people and they ask to follow him and he says, “Sure.  Come along.”  But this time he says, “no.”  He tells the demoniac, now healed, “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.”  Jesus gives him a vocation, he calls him to be an evangelist, but much more than that he calls him to be a manifestation of the new reality in Christ Jesus.  Day after day this person, now restored, will confront the people who had cast him out, who had set him aside.  He will challenge their understanding of the social order, the hierarchy, and the ways in which they had set themselves over and against one another.  This person will live in their midst and force them to confront a new way of being.

There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female; there is no longer black, white Asian, Hispanic; there is no longer gay or straight, there is no longer union or management or even heaven forbid… Republican and Democrat!  There is no distinction that stands in the light of God’s love.

Luke is trying very hard to shock us into a new reality.   Luke’s goal is to have us leave this place this morning, proclaiming how much God has done…  for us.  We come from a variety of backgrounds, a variety of places.  We come into this place with different stories; stories that create and form our personal identities; stories that create the identities of the families from which we hail; stories that create and form us as Christians, as children of God and as people of the Light.

God calls us to leave this place proclaiming that good news and by our lives to demonstrate and make manifest this new reality.  We are all one.  We are all one in God’s sight and we are called to recognize, to live out, to manifest that dream and vision for all of creation; helping to bring it to fruition here and now.  Amen.