Rescuing us

Holy Saturday, April 3, 2010, 

Revised March 30, 2024

If you have ever experienced your faith as being absent, today is your day. 

If you have ever experienced deep emptiness from your soul to your bones, today is your day. 

If you have ever known loss that cannot be filled, today is your day.

If you've ever looked around at the world and see war, violence, greed and corruption, and wonder if things can't get any worse, then this day is for you.

If you have ever discovered, as C.S. Lewis did, that grief feels very much like fear, then this is your day. 

If you have ever gone through the motions because you don't know what else to do, this is your day.

Holy Saturday is a day very easy to jump over. Today is a gorgeous spring day. People are out planting flowers and going to the store to buy for Easter dinner. Easter dresses are being tried on and egg hunts in the parks are happening as we speak. 

The world is busy and alive, and here we are in a darkened church before a bare cross and it feels empty. 

This is the kind of emptiness that any who has grieved the death of a loved one knows. It is like going through the motions at work, and confronting that first thanksgiving or Christmas or birthday knowing that the one we love is dead. 

I will bet that the followers of Jesus had the most somber, depressing Passover meal on record. But if they are at all like a lot of people I know, they will have done it. They will have read the words, and eaten the bitter herbs and the lamb, because...because what else could they do? Even if it was by rote, it was something. Something to anchor. Something to hold on to when there was nothing else. 

Holy Saturday is a day of absence, emptiness and numbness. If you have ever felt this way, this day is for you. 

The thing about Holy Saturday that is special is that it is the last day of the Old Creation. It's just that we don't know that yet. Just as we won't know that we have passed through the darkest moments of our grief until we suddenly find ourselves feeling again. We won't know until we look backwards. 

And here is the dreadful and true part of Holy Saturday. There is nothing we can do about it. All we can do is what I've said: slog through, go through the motions. We steer into the wave and hope that our boat is not swamped as the wave crashes over our heads. But the feast also tells us that as we wait, as we slog through our fear and emptiness, Easter is coming. 

The disciples hiding and fearing for their lives in the locked upper room did not know that yet. We never know it when we are in it. But Easter is coming. 

Our creeds and tradition say this is the time when Christ descended into hell and went among the dead. 

So, what Jesus was doing on Holy Saturday? Was he, like John's Brown body, "a-moldering in the grave," as the old civil war song goes? Was he walking around the tomb waiting for the angels to come and roll away the stone, folding up his burial cloth before stepping out?

My favorite answer is visual. There is an old icon known as "The Harrowing of Hell" that answers the question of just what Jesus was up to on that otherwise ignored middle day? it shows Jesus entering into hell, into the place of the dead, and he is standing on the lids of the graves of Adam and Eve, the first humans, literally representing all of humanity, and is lifting them out of their coffins to bring them with him back to heaven. In some versions of the icon you see broken chains, locks, handcuff, and tools lying about with a person (the devil perhaps? Maybe death itself?) lying bound and gagged below. 

When I see this icon, I am reminded again of what Holy Saturday shows us:  that even in the emptiness, Christ is there. If we go down to Sheol, and walk among the dead, Christ is there. There is no place where we can go to escape God's love. 

But we don't know that now. We will know that tomorrow. In the meantime, this day is for you.

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Here are the Lessons for Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024

God's reign on earth as in heaven

This last Sunday of the Church’s year is often called “the feast of Christ the King” and while that might sound strange, in fact, you pray that Christ will reign in glory all the time, don’t you? Yes, you really do!

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, as a group or on our own, we pray that God’s will and God’s Kingdom will happen on earth as it happens in heaven.

Nice idea. But exactly what would that look like?

Well, I suppose it depends on what your idea of heaven is.

If you think that heaven is like all those cartoons and jokes … filled with puffy clouds, where everyone has a halo, wings, and a harp, after getting through pearly gates and past the heavenly Maître d, then I guess then you either want heaven to be really peaceful and quiet with harp music over the loudspeakers—or maybe you want a place to get away from it all.  And how would that show up on earth? Probably in a kind of religion that says we don’t ever talk about things that are hard: like poverty…or war… or sickness… or ethics…. We'd just speak comfortable things, focusing only on ‘being saved’ or spiritual gifts without ever thinking about the ethical demand that grows out of following Jesus, and the grace and power of the Holy Spirit to live a transformed, compassionate, active life of service and prayer.

If you think that heaven is filled up with people who think and act just like us, then I guess that heaven will look a lot like our Facebook pages, and wouldn’t that be a sad, boring thing? Imagine eternity living itself out in pretty familiar ways, as we do right now. We would only watch what we like, hang out only with people just like us, and with folks that pretty much believe and act the way we think they’re supposed to. I don’t know about you, but I doubt that this what Jesus had in mind when he taught us his prayer, or when he talked about the ones who enter into God's reign in today's Gospel.

And how we view heaven and God’s reign has an impact on our everyday ethics and behavior because if you think heaven is only going to be filled up with people who do right or believe right or think right, then you probably think that life today should be managed and governed only by people who do, believe, and think the right way—however you define that!

The problem with these approaches is that we end up spending a lot of time trying to manage how other people believe, feel, think, and act. We want to make them straighten up and fly right.

Another problem is that this turns our biases, prejudices, and assumptions into different kinds of idols. Because we try to get heaven (and God) to conform to our image not the other way around

But if we really believe what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, then our prayer is that God will act and be present in our lives every day just as God is present and at work in heaven. What will that look like?

Well, let’s ask Jesus—or at least today’s Gospel lesson! — where Jesus asks simply “did you do on earth what God does in heaven?”

We tend to think of God’s final judgment as something big, and cosmic and grand. We think of God sorting out the good from the bad. What I love about this story is that Jesus’ sets it up exactly as how we would expect it—and then turns it upside down!

In today’s Gospel, we see that Christ returns in glory surrounded by angels. And he separates the nations into those who will enter heaven and those destined for eternal punishment.

And what’s the criteria for entrance?

Is it right belief? Nope!

Is it belonging to the right religion or denomination? Nyet!

Is it doing the right ritual at the right time? Uh-uh!

In this passage, the criteria for entrance into Heaven turns out to be simple kindness. How simple? So simple that the people being welcomed—or not—did not even notice that they had the opportunity to act.

When did we feed you? When did we clothe you? When did we care for you? When did we visit you?

Jesus’ answer: when you took care of anyone who was hungry or naked or sick or in prison or alone or in trouble.

The Bible Scholars may laugh me out of the room, but I see this passage in Matthew 25 as a kind of commentary on the Lord's Prayer in Matthew chapter 6. It is an image and description of how God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

One of my all-time favorite movies is “42”, the story of Jackie Robinson (played by the late Chadwick Boseman) and his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first black player in Major League Baseball in the modern era (since Moses Fleetwood Walker played for Cleveland in the 1880’s). Today’s Gospel made me remember a scene in the film when Branch Rickey, the manager of the Dodgers, played by Harrison Ford, gets a call from Herb Pennock the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies in 1947. Pennock wants Rickey to leave Robinson in Brooklyn, saying that if Robinson comes to Philadelphia, the Phillies won’t take the field.

Branch Rickey asks Pennock “You think God likes baseball, Herb?

“What - ?” replied Pennock. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” shouts Rickey into the phone before slamming it down, “someday you're gonna meet God, and when he inquires as to why you didn't take the field against Robinson in Philadelphia, and you answer that it's because he was a Negro, it may not be a sufficient reply!”

At this time of the rolling year, I start following my personal annual tradition of re-reading Charles Dickens’ famous little book A Christmas Carol. I especially like to hear the version acted out as a one-man show by Patrick Stewart (not the TV movie), while I drive.

One of the things that stands out for me every time I read it, either in print or on audio, Dickens idea of hell. Hell is not a place where “goats” and “sheep” (as they are called in Jesus’ story today) are separated into camps but someplace far scarier. Instead of going to fiery pits, A Christmas Carol describes the eternal wailing and gnashing of the condemned, the "goats," if you will, happening right here on earth.

As Marley’s ghost leaves him, warning of the three spirits yet to visit him, a shaken and startled Ebenezer Scrooge looks out the window of his bedroom and sees a world where “the air was filled with phantoms,” all carrying chains, cash boxes, safes, and bags of gold, wailing “mournful dirges.” And they wail because they see poverty and want all around them and wish to intervene for good but have lost forever the power to do so.

Marley’s ghost moans his plight, holding up his own chain that bind him, explaining: “I wear the chain I forged in life.... I made it link by link, and yard by yard….” He says he forged the chain in life and that Scrooge's own spiritual chain was even longer and heavier than his.

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” 

I think about that scene as every day and every week we pray that simple, radical prayer that Jesus taught us and which we learned as children. And in that prayer, we pray that what God wills in heaven will be done on earth.  Unlike Marley’s ghost, we have the power right now to intervene for good.

As you think about the blessings you’ve received, and contemplate how to return those blessings to God through your pledge and giving to this church and elsewhere, as you think about how you might use your time, talent, and treasure for God’s purposes think about the lesson of today’s Gospel. God has given you the tools, the grace, the means, and the power to participate in God's reign, but has left us the choice to take that up in practical ways every day. 

Notice that in Dicken's story, one of the things that changes for Scrooge after his conversion is his relationship to money. Instead of hoarding it and, in a way, fearing it; his wealth becomes his power for good.

How we respond to the people God has given to us will depend largely on how we use our treasure, time, and talent for good. In the story, Scrooge's money becomes, after his conversion, the way that he touches the lives of not only the Cratchits, but his city and community. His transformation is halting at first but grows, as illustrated in how he joins in with the worship of his local church at Christmas, how he repents to the two 'portly gentlemen,' and how he helps the Cratchits, at first in secret and then in a renewed relationship. Dicken’s describes the effect of his spiritual transformation in terms of both his ethics and his generosity, as well as his personality.

For Jesus, the key to the kingdom—what makes God’s kingdom and God’s will happen on earth just as it happens in heaven-- is so simple that we can overlook it…. Or we can just as easily practically and usefully participate in God’s reign by serving the ones described in today’s Gospel: the hungry, the sick, the lonely, the naked, the homeless, the imprisoned. Here is the mark of God’s work being done on earth as in heaven. It is when people act in kindness, have the eyes to see God’s face in the people God gives to us, the ears to hear God's voice in them, and the willingness to be God’s hands, feet, and voice, to those who seek him and cry out for justice and compassion. 

Every day we pray to live and do God’s will, no matter where it takes us; and every day we have the power in our own small ways to do just that.

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Bulletin for Worship for the Last Sunday after Pentecost (aka "Christ the King" or "The Reign of Christ"), November 26, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 26, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 26, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 26, 2023.

God's gifts, God's purposes, Our action

I have a question for you: What the heck is a talent?

We hear the word all the time. In our culture, a talent isn’t money but a skill, perhaps an aptitude that we cultivate, train, and use, like artistic or musical talent, or a person with a talent (or head) for money. But that is not what Jesus is talking about here.

So what is a “talent?” Well, you know those billboards for the lottery… the ones that have the size of the current jackpot in great big numbers. That’s a talent. If you suddenly had in your hand enough money to equal the average annual salary times twenty… that’s a talent.

So imagine if you hit the jackpot. What would you do?

Now the servants in Jesus’ story did not hit the jackpot. They were people that the master had come to trust, and in the story he entrusted them with what amounted to a winning lottery ticket—with one proviso. Make it grow. Make it grow on my behalf, he said. And then give it back.

Imagine if someone gave you a big pile of money and said to you, “I am going away now,” you take this big pile of money and make it grow and when I come back I will collect what you’ve made. What would you do?

The three Servants in Jesus’ story had some things in common. For one thing, the master trusted them all. He believed them to be responsible. And he thought he knew them well enough to give them as much as they could handle, but not too much. So the master must have thought the third servant had some skills, some gifts, some ability—because even though he was given the smallest amount, it was not chump change. He gave the guy twenty years of average daily wage to play with! That would be about a million dollars in today’s money!

So if you were in the position of any of these people in the story, what would you do?

Thinking about that third Servants reminded me of a news story from a few years ago. It came out of California where a person bought a house for himself and his young family. The previous owner was an elderly man who had died, having outlived his wife and whose grown children now lived far away. As the new owner began to renovate his home, he found envelopes full of cash squirreled away in nooks and crannies all over the house. Now wouldn’t that make for an interesting show on HGTV?

Soon these envelopes became a pile and that pile amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The old man didn’t trust the banks. He didn’t invest the money. He kept the cash a secret so no one would steal it.  He hid them for the rainy day that never came. His children said he lived in near poverty his whole while working every day he could.

Now the new homeowners had a dilemma. His lawyers would have told him that all that money was theirs to keep. The contract on the sale of the house said so…all the contents of the house were theirs. But the couple knew that the man did not save all that money to go to some stranger who happened to buy his house. No, instead, they decided to give it back to the man’s children for them to use.

Heartwarming story, but what made this man hide all his money in the first place? What made him keep it a secret from even his children? What made him live as a pauper while riches were only an arm’s reach away?

Fear.  Fear and a kind of backwards faith that says something bad is going to happen and is always just around the corner.

In today’s Gospel, Matthew’s church is trying to figure out how to live in that very long, uncertain time between the resurrection and Jesus’ return. They’ve remembered a teaching of Jesus and applied it to their own church. They remembered Jesus teaching us to never to bury or hide what we have been given. But here they were, only fifty or sixty years into the history of the church and already had developed a disturbing tendency to stand pat and let things work themselves out.

Their memory of Jesus’ story reminded them not to squander the bounty God has showered on his people; and, most of all, to remember that Christ trusts us to carry out his mission…to be Christ’s people, Christ’s representatives in the world!

But being trusted can be scary. We don’t want to disappoint. We don’t want to mess up. We don’t want to lose what we’ve been given. And if that fear takes hold…if that worry about what might happen becomes front and center…if thinking about potential disapproval or judgment takes hold of our hearts…then we become helpless. If we are overwhelmed by worry, we become afraid of risk or what’s around the corner. Gosh! Who can blame the third servant for burying his treasure in the garden and hunkering down?

That is our challenge even today. We have so much that we love in the Church that we want to hang on to. But changes comes so fast that we often don’t know how to sort it out! We have so many responsibilities—there is so much Gospel work to be done! —but find ourselves saying “what if?” We might be tempted to hunker down, hide our gifts, become helpless.

Pope John XXIII, the Pope who convened the Second Vatican Council sixty years ago that set not only the Roman Catholic Church but all Western Churches on the course to meet a changing world, once said this about the Church: he said that we are not the curators of a museum, but we are instead the cultivators of a flourishing garden.

Gardening is hard work and requires planning and preparation and attention, and you have to get your hands dirty.

And one other thing: gardens are for growing, not for burying our treasure.

Jesus’ parable says that the master trusted each servant with an amount in proportion to their abilities. I believe we have all been given what we need and the place to act on those gifts, and that God trusts us to use those gifts faithfully.

But we get scared, which is why we tend to focus on that poor third servant in Matthew’s Gospel and forget about the other two Servants who are complimented for their work and welcomed into the joy of their master. What they receive is not a promotion with a fat paycheck but something much more important. Their faithfulness means that they enjoy a deeper relationship with God.

So what are your gifts? Are they something to be protected and hoarded? Or used for God’s purpose?

If we understand that everything that we’ve have, not just our money, but everything, is a gift from God to be used for God’s purposes, then our whole outlook changes!

The lesson here for the average friend and apprentice of Jesus is this: our money, our stuff, our time, and our abilities, are our power for good! So receive what God has given you with joy, and then use it—even it means some risk—in a way that returns that blessing to God and to God’s people. Don’t stand pat—do something big and audacious and risky and wonderful for God!

We live in an uncertain time. We don’t know how the economy will unfold so we hang on to everything we can. The temptation is to risk nothing and go for safety. And I am not just talking about money here., but how we organize our living. If we organize our living around what we are afraid of, we might hide from other people, and not bring our best selves into our living. In short, we bury what we’ve been given.

The antidote is to live joyfully in the blessings God has given us in Christ Jesus; to use the abilities and resources God has given us to be God’s hands and feet in the world; and to build on the blessings and assets we have to cultivate our lives in service to God and to the world starting right here, right now.

In Christ, we have been a given a gift beyond expectation or imagining. Now, comes the fun part, using what we have for God’s purpose, God’s glory, for the good of God’s people and God’s creation!

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Bulletin for Worship for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, November 19, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, November 19, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 19, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 19, 2023.

Learning to love the wait

I hate to wait. 

None of us likes to wait. Modern culture demands immediacy. Whatever we want, we want it now. I have become so accustomed to immediacy, that I get frustrated when it takes a picture on my phone to materialize in five seconds and not in one. Never mind that I hold in my hand more computing power than was used on the Voyager probe that passed by Jupiter and Saturn on its way to the cosmos. I want what I want when I want it and I want it right now.

I get impatient to get what I want, even though Acme (whoops!) Amazon, not to mention the Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS, all get things right to my doorstep, often the day after (sometimes the same day!) as when I ordered it.

Father Anthony De Mello is a Jesuit priest, psychologist and retreat leader who teaches that the main task of the spiritual life is to wake up. Despite our over-stimulation with electronic devices, addictions to the Internet and social media, and our endless quest for the newest, the best and the most, we tend to make our way through life sleepwalking. Like the person who walks down the sidewalk (or worse while driving down US 19!) while texting on the phone, we go through life somehow unaware of the spiritual dimension of our lives. Like all of the bridesmaids in Jesus’ story in the Gospel of Matthew, we let that part of our life wait. There will be time for that later, we say to ourselves.

Jesus teaches us in the Gospel to both “wake up” and “be ready!”

Since we now know that we can grow our brains to develop new habits and awareness, what will be the spiritual equivalent of filling our lamps with oil and trimming our wicks?

Let’s first address wick trimming, since lamps and candles burn slower when we regularly trim the wick. It is similar with fruit trees – they produce more fruit when we do the work of pruning. Jesus is always extolling the value of doing the upfront work so that we can reap the dividends more easily when the fruit comes in. So trimming and pruning our lives, reducing the amount of distractions, would seem to be the No. 1 lesson for those of us who aspire to be in Christ’s wedding party when he comes. The paradox is that doing less can also help us to awaken to the presence of the Spirit in every breath we take. Doing less can help us to wake up and stay awake for the presence of Christ here and now.

As to filling our lamps with oil, doing less points us in the right direction. For it turns out that another way to encourage and promote neuroplasticity is to do nothing – not just less, but nothing. All religious traditions have some form of mindfulness meditation, centering prayer and contemplation as a religious or spiritual practice. Sadly, it is rarely found in church, where we tend to relentlessly work our way through the liturgy without pause so we can get to the end. And then what? Enjoy “the 8th sacrament”, aka coffee hour? Or go watch the ball game?

Archbishop William Temple said, “The source of humility is the habit of realizing the presence of God.” He encouraged us to develop the open, imaginative, and receptive side our brains and spirituality that looks for God at work, sees and seeks connections, and enjoys the holiness of the present moment. Contemplative prayer or mindfulness meditation helps us to create what some call an empty space within, but which I call an “open” space. A space open for God, open for the holy. This has two immediate benefits.

Another spiritual guide, Orthodox Archbishop Anthony Bloom encourages us to find God right here, right now, in every day life, even in the most mundane routine or seemingly rote activity. encouraging us to find God, who always seeking us, in the here and now, because as he said "if we cannot find God where we are, we will never find God at all."

Through our prayer and meditation and sacramental living, God’s Spirit has a point of entry into our otherwise busy and sleepwalking lives. Once we prepare a place within, however small, however tentative, for  God to dwell within us, we become more aware and awake to the fact that God has been and is always with us. That God is never absent from us. When we begin to see this, we begin to recognize that the work of spiritual growth is, in fact, no work at all.

But wait, (ahem)! There’s more!

Also, as it turns out, letting the brain rest promotes neuroplasticity. And our prayer can help us develop that plasticity. And we enter into and emerge from our prayer or meditation, we are made new, re-wired and more aware of not only who we are but whose we are. 

We discover that God has always been at home in us. The German theologian Meister Eckhart is quoted as saying, “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.”

So what are we waiting for? Are we to spend our time like those bridesmaids, waiting for Christ to come? Or are we to heed our Lord’s final imperative in the story: Keep awake!

The parables that we’ll hear the today and the next two weeks are tricky. Like today’s. And how we tend to treat them as doctrinal treatises or allegories, assigning parts to each character in the story doesn't help. We find ourselves saying "The unwise bridesmaids represent this or that group, the wise ones who were ready represent someone else… maybe our side, our church, our way of being or doing prayer and worship!"

But what if Jesus meant to simply shock us with details such as closing the door on the foolish ones only to deliver the real message: Keep awake! 

One suspects Jesus really did not want us spending hours of Bible study dithering over questions such as “How could Jesus do that? Why would he close the door on anyone?” when we already know the answer is that he closed the door on no one. Not prostitute, not tax collector, not sinner. His door is always open. The disciples to whom this little tale is told knew that and have witnessed it every day. And like them, we ought to be those who recognize that what seems like his coming again is simply the process of our awakening to the very real Good News of Jesus, that he is with us always even to the end of the age. No waiting required! He is here! Forever and always. We might even say forever and in all ways!

What is Jesus calling us to do? He is calling us to wake up and keep awake!

And the best way to be awake to God is to rest in Jesus. The time and effort put into doing less and doing nothing will awaken us to the clever truth buried deep within this tale of lamps and oil and bridesmaids: He is here. His door is open to all at all times of day and night.

But we have a choice, we can use our energy and time and attention -- our oil! -- for other, frivilous things, or we can use that oil-- our energy, time, and attention-- for God's purposes.

When we wake up to this truth all things are being made new – including most importantly ourselves! —all the time, in ways that often surprise us, we discover that God is making us ready for something new and inviting to participate in that re-making. The first step in accepting that invitation? Be awake to the work of God in our lives!

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Bulletin for Worship for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, November 12, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, November 12, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 12, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 12, 2023.

Stumping Jesus or Stumped by Jesus?

If you love game shows, like “Jeopardy” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” or, if you listen to NPR’s “Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!” on the radio, the questions (or answers) are typically cleverly designed to stump the contestants. Part of the fun is seeing how the contestants handle the challenge of the questions. Of course, in the case of game shows, money, prizes, and lovely parting gifts all hang in the balance. One of the things I like to do when I watch these shows, is to see if I can answer the question quicker and better than the contestants.

In today’s story from the Gospel of Matthew, we see the religious leaders of Jesus’ day playing a game of “Who Can Stump the Messiah?” It is played when each contestant takes turns asking Jesus clever, even challenging questions, but instead of vying for prize, they are really designed to trap Jesus into saying things that will get him into trouble. Another name for the game is “Gotcha!”

And sometimes, I like to play along with Jesus, too!

Today, it’s the Pharisees’ turn to ask the question. On previous turns, you’ll remember, the Pharisees quizzed Jesus about whether or not people should pay taxes to Caesar. It was a question designed to make Jesus lose no matter what he said or how fast he hit the buzzer. If he said, “No, do not pay Caesar – rather, save your money for the real king” he would immediately get arrested for advocating revolution against the Roman Empire. If he said, “Yes, pay the taxes,” then he’d lose the respect of the Jewish people. Jesus reframes the question.

Jesus stumped them instead by asking them to fish out a coin with Caesar’s face on it, and he told them to give to Caeser what was his, and to God what was due God. Ding! Jesus won that round!

But not all the questions that we have, especially the ones that we might want to ask Jesus, can be handled with a simple buzzer, and rather than a glitzy prize, we may simply be seeing peace, solace, or to make sense of whatever is happening in our lives.

And many of the questions we have are not asked because we want to stump Jesus, but because we ourselves are truly stumped and flummoxed by what going on in our lives and in the world we live in.

There are certainly people who love to ask unanswerable questions just to sound clever or to make God, the Bible, or the church, or even ordinary faithful folk seem silly. I remember that very old George Carlin routine where he talked about thinking up outrageous question to stump the nuns in his Catholic school like “Can God make a rock so big that he himself can’t lift it?”

Generally, those kinds of questions aren’t designed to enlighten or even to promote dialogue. They are meant to make the questioner feel smug and superior by belittling the other person. They are usually hiding a deeper pain, or are meant to distract us from the real questions that are often left unsaid.

But other questions come deep from within us and speak to something inside longing for peace, for connection, for hope, for purpose. These are the real questions we want to ask Jesus.

I remember a story told by the late Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” It is about a mother who sent her son to the store to buy a loaf of bread at the corner store for lunch. He didn’t come back for hours and hours, and when he finally came home well after lunch, his frantic mother asked the boy where he was. He said “I was helping my friend fix his bike.” But you don’t know how to fix bikes, she replied. I know, said the boy, but I was helping cry about it!

Sometimes the answer to the question is not an answer but simply a loving presence, a listening ear, and a caring heart, given in the moment without strings or expectation of return. And this comes to us from God, often in the form of a caring friend or companion, or in the silence of prayer as we open ourselves up to God even in our most vulnerable moments.

You may be thinking that some of your questions might stump Jesus and still you want to challenge his authority like those of old. Jesus understands your curiosity and is fully prepared to take on all of the earthly challenges that can be thrown at him. Remember that this loving Jesus is ever-present. Jesus hears your questions as well as your cries, your temptations as well as your triumphs and disappointments. There is nothing too challenging for God. God also challenges us.

This is the pattern that Jesus sets for us in the Gospels. He teaches, yes, and he is ready to interact, even go a few rounds with the skeptics he meets on the way. But the main thing that Jesus does is to meet people, exactly at the point of their greatest need. That is why Jesus can hear our questions not as challenges but as the inquiries of search souls looking for guidance, solace, and connection.

It is tempting to think of the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the Gospels as people with a superficial faith who were only trying to preserve their position and status. And there was certainly enough of that going around, but what if they, like the disciples and the others who followed Jesus, they were simply endeavoring to live as faithfully as they knew how and were trying to figure out how Jesus fit into what God was doing? What if they were like so many people whom we meet today… people who want to believe deeply, and yet can’t get past the nagging questions that won’t go away, including, among so many others: How does faith work when we have science and technology? Why is there so much poverty and violence in a world with so much to offer? Does faith matter? Whom does Jesus truly love? Am I worthy of God’s love? And on and on and on.

Jesus was faced with all kind of questions: some heartfelt, some pesky. But at the heart of all Jesus’ interactions, and the heart of all his answers to all those inquiries was the answer we heard today.

Interestingly, Jesus’ answer to question “what is the greatest commandment” was not an answer new to Jesus. He didn't invent it, but every kid who ever learned Torah at their parent’s knee, or who ever went to Synagogue, would have known the answer by heart: the greatest commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. As even our Prayer Book says (in Rite 1), there is no other commandment greater than these.

And that is why God is ready to hear our questions no matter how basic or superficial sounding like whether or not you should pay your taxes or whether or not you can be married to your brother’s widow in the afterlife. Especially from us, Christ’s followers. Because as baptized people, we are not expected to be “Mr. or Ms. Know It All” but we are called to be followers, everyday disciples. We are, as baptized people, Jesus’ friends, students, and apprentices. 

As Jesus' friends and apprentices, we learn more and more, that in asking and living the questions, we are discovering and exploring how to love God with every part of our being everyday, and how to love the people God brings to us as deeply and as humbly as we love God.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, October 29, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, October 29, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 29, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 29, 2023.

Dressing for the Banquet

If you want to understand how we got much of what is in the Bible, think of the party game "Telephone." You know, the one where people sit in a circle, and someone tells a story… whispering it in their neighbor’s ear, who repeats it to their neighbor, and so on around the circle until it comes back to the first person. The fun is hearing how the heart of the original story gets garbled and changed as it moved around the circle.

Knowing that, we can maybe relax a bit after hearing today’s dramatic… and violent!... parable!

Understand that Jesus’ story is here being remembered by Matthew and his church after having been remembered by the people who heard Jesus, and the people who heard people who heard Jesus, and the people who heard the people who heard the people who heard Jesus, and… you get the idea! I suspect that Jesus’ original parable about how God’s covenant is for everyone has, through a first century version of the game Telephone, become something quite (well… how do I say this nicely?) weird!

It might have been easier if we did as some have attempted and just cut out the weird, jarring, far-out, or disturbing parts of the Bible. The problem is that, as strange as this is, it's still Scripture. It may feel like a game of Telephone, but the Holy Spirit is still part of the process. So now what?

I think it is helpful to recall that during the time between Jesus’ teaching and Matthew writing it down, the early church was bogged down in an argument. Even though God has expanded the Covenant to include all kinds of people—varieties of Jews and a myriad of Gentiles are all now members of this new Christian movement, they are beginning to repeat the same mistakes that Jesus tried to fix. The weirdness of this passage partially reflects the pinch these early Christian communities felt. 

Come with me as we walk through this passage.

Imagine that you were lucky enough to get an invitation to the Coronation of King Charles III last spring. You would have received a card that might have read “the Lord Chamberlain has been ‘commanded by the King’ to invite the holder to the Coronation at Westminster Abbey at 11 a.m. on May 6 in the Year of Our Lord 2023,” or something like that. And notice that the King would not have enticed you with the nice buffet afterwards. Would you have said “no?”

Well, that’s exactly what happens in Jesus’ story in Matthew’s Gospel today. The king really wants these people to come, but they could not have cared less!  They are not interested in the food, and they don’t want to dress up. Not only that, some are also so annoyed, so bothered by the invitation that they berate, beat, and sometimes even kill the messengers! This is an outrageously weird story!

Okay, but it’s weird on purpose. Imagine that what we have here is really The History of God’s Salvation…For Dummies!  It was written by and for Matthew’s church a few decades after Jesus may have said something kind of similar. I think that the parable that Jesus originally spoke might have sounded something like this: “God invited people to something great, to be God’s people and a light to the world. Only people didn’t respond as expected. So now God has invited everyone—not just one people or one nation or one group, everyone! —into the reign of God, and the promise of God's reign has been extended to the ones who have accepted the invitation.” Or something like that.

Along the way, someone added on to the original parable the part about the king who killed the party-poopers and destroyed their city. Why? To tickle the ears of Matthew’s church and invite them to think about how Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70 AD, and with it the end of Temple-based Judaism, and also how the Roman city of Pompei, the most cosmopolitan, artsy, and secular city in the Empire, was wiped out when Mount Vesuvius blew its top soon thereafter. To drive home the point that “Shape up and fly right! God is not fooling around!”

But wait! There's more! You know those servants who were sent out to bring in everyone, both the good and the bad? They would remind those Early Christians of what we would call—from the last chapter of Matthew—the Great Commission, where Jesus tells us to “Go into all the world, baptize and teach!” So the Christians in Matthew’s church would have understood that God has sent Jesus Christ, who lived and died and rose again, and empowered the Church to go into all the world.

End of story, right? "They" are out. "We" are in. Hooray for us! Let the party begin!

Not so fast, sports fans! You may have been invited off the street without warning, but are you dressed for the party? The real sour note of this story (for us anyway) is the part about the guest who has been hauled in from the street and then is suddenly thrown into the eternal cosmic dumpster fire. Why? For not having the right party clothes handy! What’s up with that? 

Preachers have been trying to wiggle out of this for generations, with some commentators saying some malarky like "well, hosts kept party garments ready for guests and these jokers just didn't put them on" or some such silliness. [Sigh!] All that does is disguise the fact that this part makes us squirm. They don't want Jesus to sound so, well, mean! And I get it! We love the welcome part of the first part of the story, even with the special effects, but the “where’s your wedding gown?” part…? Not so much!

Well, it is very weird and I think it's meant to be weird-- but for a reason! I suspect Matthew's church heard and understood why it was weird... otherwise they would not have kept the story in their Gospel! The problem is that we are not in on the joke.

Or are we?

When I hear about the wedding garment, I think about a very old tradition that many Christian churches do when someone is baptized -- even today! The candidates (even babies) have their old clothes removed and after they are baptized from head to toe, they put on new clothes. The newly baptized are dressed in a brand-new white party suit!

So, I wonder if the wedding garment in Matthew’s Gospel might not point to this new clean white baptismal garment that would have been well known in the early church? I don’t know. In any event, I think that the Gospel is telling us that we are not party crashers but invited guests!

So, how do we dress for the party?

Today’s Epistle to the Philippians suggests an answer. Paul wrote this letter from prison. And he urges his friends to be reconciled, calling on his companions in Christ to rejoice and to stop worrying. He says, “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” he is not just saying have a positive attitude, he is saying "put on Christ" -- like that baptismal garment! What we choose to wear outside does affect how we are inside, and how we are inside shows up outside. We have a choice. If we choose to be faithful, to come to the party, we also choose how we are, the kind of garment we put on.

Like a teenager trying to find just the right outfit for the big night out, we might find ourselves trying on several new outfits over the course of our lifetime and our life in Christ. Putting on the “wedding garment” is a life-long process. It is a process that includes intentional prayer, intentional stewardship, intentional service, and intentional worship. As Christians grow and mature, as faith becomes more and more woven into our being, we develop new holy habits of sacramental living, reading, and learning scripture, discovering the skills of prayer, and the joy of generosity. As we do this, we find that we have, in fact, put on—and are putting on every day—the wedding garment! Every day, we are more and more dressed for the party!

Thinking about the wedding garment reminds me of a poem by the 17^th Century Anglican priest George Herbert. He wrote this poem just before or just after the King James Bible was first published 400+ years ago. He describes the ritual of a priest putting on his vestments in the quiet of the sacristy before a celebration of Holy Communion. But he is also talking about every Christian who in faith and baptism has not only accepted God’s invitation to new life in Christ but has also chosen day by day to put on the wedding garment. The poem is called “Aaron.”

Aaron

Holiness on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest:
Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest:
Poor priest, thus am I drest.

Only another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,
My alone-only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me ev'n dead,
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new-drest.

So, holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my dear breast,
My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest),
Come people; Aaron's drest.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, October 15, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, October 15, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 15, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 15, 2023.

Choosing to forgive, choosing to live

I know what Jesus says, but the truth is this: there are times when I don’t want to forgive! I want to get even. I want my day in court. My pound of flesh. I want everyone to know I’ve been wronged, and I want the one who hurt me to get what’s coming.

That’s the truth. And I know I am not alone. The problem of course, is what happens when we organize our lives around our injuries— when I start to build my living around all the ways that I have been denied my due, and all the ways I have been injured—then it becomes quickly apparent that my life will bear the fruit of anger, of fear, of resentment. And that’s why Jesus says what he says about forgiveness.

Forgiveness happens when we choose to no longer organize our lives around the things and the people who have hurt us.

What the late Presbyterian pastor and religious writer, Frederick Buechner said of the deadly sin of anger applies to forgiveness as well:

“Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

The kind of anger that Buechner spoke of is grounded in an inability to forgive.

But it is not magic. Forgiveness doesn’t come with the snap of a finger. Forgiveness is a journey and a discipline.

I remember an example of this from 17 years ago, when five Amish schoolgirls were killed and 11 others were wounded by a gunman in Pennsylvania in 2006. What made this stand out from the rash of school shootings that have infected our country, what stood out the Amish community not only comforted the shooter’s wife and children, but they also forgave him. They even took in and cared for the mother of the killer as she struggled with his crime. As astounding as that was, you want to know what was even more astounding.? It was the anger and the revulsion that the Amish received in their community, in the media, and even in pulpits, because they forgave even as they mourned the death of their own innocent children.

A more startling example happened in 1948. Pastor Yang-Won Sohn’s two teenage boys were shot for being Christians by a rioter in Korea. Yang-Won not only forgave the shooter, but arranged his release from prison and adopted him as his own son.

Were these people crazy? How can people forgive such heinous crimes against innocents? It messes with our minds. Yes, Jesus said forgive, but there must be a limit, and these crazy people crossed it.

But Jesus said, forgive not seven times, but 70 times seven. OK, let’s count it up; we must be way beyond that limit now. But if we’re honest, we know when Jesus said “70 times seven” he was using it to mean “always.” Jesus teaches us that there is no limit to forgiveness, either to the number of times we ought to forgive and to the power of forgiveness. 

And then Jesus told a parable about the wicked slave who is forgiven a huge sum by his master, but then goes out and throws a fellow slave in prison for being owed just a fraction. We hear that the wicked slave then gets his just punishment. “Good,” we may say. He surely deserved that! We might forget that he was punished not because he owed money, but because he did not forgive. Jesus is very serious about this forgiveness thing.

The Apostle Paul reminds the Romans about another side of forgiveness. His take on it was about how we treat each other because of our differences. Some eat anything, others are vegetarians; they must not despise each other. Well, that’s easy enough. We can do that.

Some may worship God on one day, some on another; do not despise one or the other. Another easy one – we can do that! To each his own, we say!

But then the Apostle Paul asks, “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” meaning, why do we pass judgment on everybody else? Perhaps because we so often see immense hurt and evil in our world and we want to see justice done. We cannot imagine why people maim and kill innocent people. We cannot understand the sickness of domestic abuse, trafficking of young men and women and children, the horror of genocide. These evils need to be dealt with. They need to be eradicated from the earth and humanity deserves to live in peace and safety. Forgiveness? Was Jesus being naïve when he said “70 times seven?” Probably not. Remember that even as Jesus was being executed he prayed that God would forgive his tormentors and executioners “for they don’t know what they are doing.”

So, how do we start? We might look once again at the Amish. Their ability to forgive came from the center of their theology, which is the Lord’s Prayer. They believe it when they say, “…As we forgive those who trespass against us….” Over and over, Amish leaders tried to explain that to journalists and others who could not believe the parents of the dead little girls could forgive. The Amish in that community made quite clear that forgiveness did not take away the pain of the death of their children. It also did not take away the requirement that the perpetrator be held accountable. They were choosing not to build their lives around hatred for the person who caused that pain.

So forgiveness doesn't say, "Act like it never happened" -- that's amnesia.

And forgiveness doesn't say, "well, nobody could have expected you to do any better" -- that's condescension.

And forgiveness doesn’t mean that there one who injured us is freed from accountability. That’s, well, unhelpful.

Forgiveness puts demonizing the other person out of bounds. When we demonize another person we deny their moral agency, as well as their fitness for being loved. In suggesting that the others are incapable of moral action—by turning them into monster-- we lets them off the hook.

The truth is that when we are hurt and we want to hit back and we want to make the other person suffer, but choose not to—when we make the hard choice to stop organizing our lives around the injury, we are freed from the shackles of living in the past, feed from the fetters of living the injury over and over again, freed from the prison of rehearsing the hate.

You see, forgiveness doesn’t let the other person off the hook. Forgiveness frees us to continue to live faithfully and ethically, because we have chosen to forgive and because we have chosen to no longer organize our lives around life's injuries that have afflicted us either intentionally by other persons, or the disappointments that have inevitably occurred as life has unfolded. 

In a few minutes, just after we recall Jesus’ gift of himself on the cross and just before we break the bread which is also his body that will feed us, his body, we will pray the Lord’s Prayer. And we will all say “as we forgive those who trespass (sin) against us.” As you let that prayer marinate in your heart, think about what the Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said  about forgiveness:

“The simple truth is, we all make mistakes, and we all need forgiveness. There is no magic wand we can wave to go back in time and change what has happened or undo the harm that has been done, but we can do everything in our power to set right what has been made wrong. We can endeavor to make sure the harm never happens again.”

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Bulletin for Worship for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, September 17, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, September 17, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on September 17, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on September 17, 2023.