When is the right time to show mercy?

How do you like your church? Do you like it all bubbly and spontaneous? Or do you like it orderly and predictable? Throughout its long history, the church has been a little bit of both.

The famous mid-20^th century theologian Paul Tillich said that church history can be understood as a movement between charisma and order. He said whenever charisma—the need to stir things up—and order—the need for stability and predictability— meet up, that’s when the Holy Spirit shows up!

And that is what we see in today’s Gospel. The tension— the conflict! —between order and charisma.

To tell you the truth, my heart kind of goes out to the leader of the congregation, who was just trying to maintain order when Jesus healed the woman on the Sabbath in the middle of a worship service.

More than once in my ministry, I have found myself in the position of that local synagogue leader.

Two of my former parishes hosted soup kitchens in small industrial cities, and every now and then one of our soup kitchen guests would show up at Sunday worship, all scruffy and rough from living on the street. It was… well, let’s just say it was challenging. And uncomfortable.

So I kind of get where the leader of the synagogue in today’s Gospel was coming from. I mean, here was this itinerant rabbi from God-knows-where walking in and offering to heal someone without so much as a by-your-leave. The leader hadn’t read ahead to the ends of the Gospel of Luke yet, so what did he know?

But even if he was trying to do the right thing, he was going about it in the wrong way.

Instead of going to Jesus and asking him directly what he was up to, he goes to everyone…well, more accurately every man… in the congregation and complains “Couldn’t she have waited until after the sabbath to be healed?” he asks.  “Couldn’t she have gone someplace else besides the synagogue?”

I mean, the whole thing wasn’t even her idea! The man is mad at Jesus, but he blames the woman! Never mind that she didn’t even ask to be healed in the first place! After 18 years, she was probably pretty used to being stooped over like a bent matchstick. Jesus invited her to come over to him. It was all his idea!

So, the Leader of the Synagogue has committed a trifecta of wrongs: first, he triangulates—instead of talking to the person he’s mad at, he brings in a third party, the congregation; second, he focuses on the wrong person—the woman and not Jesus; and third, he stirs everyone up in the process.  All in all, he brings out the worst in everyone except maybe Jesus and the woman who was healed…and she was apparently too busy praising God to notice all the hoo-rah going on around her!

So let’s cut through the triangulation, the grumbling and the blame-game, and go right to the Leader of the Synagogue and ask him some questions. We can’t do it face-to-face, but let’s pretend. Besides, given what’s going on in the world right now, they are questions worth pondering anyway.

When would be a good time to show mercy? Tomorrow, maybe? After all, today is a day of rest. We don’t want to do work on a day of rest. After all, even God rested on the seventh day, right? But as Jesus said, even the most observant of Jews will lead their animals to the feeding trough, milk their cows, and gather up the hen’s eggs on the Sabbath. Why? Because animals don’t know about the Sabbath and they don’t care. If you don’t believe me, ask any hungry cat or dog at about 5:30 or 6 am. All they know is that it’s time to be fed or walked and they don’t know or care about your customs, calendars or your need to sleep in. And, you know what? feeding, watering and milking your animals on the Sabbath was all allowable in Jewish law. It was the right and sensible thing to do. 

Jesus asks: if it is okay to show mercy to your livestock on the Sabbath, then why can’t we show mercy to a daughter of Abraham on the Sabbath?

Put another way, when is it a good time to show mercy? Now is a good time to show mercy. Right now. That’s when.

And where is the right place to show mercy? Underneath his complaint about the Sabbath, the unhappy man who stirred up the congregation with his grumbling about the place of the healing is saying something like “This is a house of worship, not a clinic, take it outside.” But Jesus’ invitation to the woman and healing her brokenness tells us that if our worship doesn’t drive us to mercy, then we are not really worshipping God at all! If our worship doesn’t call out compassion, then we are not listening. If our rituals only reinforce our fears then we are only huddling against the cold instead of turning ourselves to God.

So… Where is the place to show mercy? Here is the place to show mercy. Right where we are, right now.

Over four hundred years ago, the first slave ship arrived in an English colony, landing in Virginia with a cargo of about twenty slaves purchased either in Africa or in Brazil, after having been brought over from East Africa by Portuguese merchants. This began a trade in human beings that fed not only the plantations of the Southern states, but eventually the mills and cloth factories in the North. The slave trade not only staffed the plantations across the South but made bankers, investors, inventors, ship-builders, and ship owners in the North quite wealthy. Of course, no one can speak for the spiritual lives of anyone other than ourselves, but I suspect that many a devout Christian took part in the buying, selling of these persons, and benefited from their labor.

A few years back, the Bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island, Bishop Nick Knisely, led his diocese in study, prayer, confession, and repentance for their part in the slave trade and the way the Church in Rhode Island benefitted from the mills, shipping, and banking that depended on the slave trade and made some wealthy and employed many others. (Read more here.)

It took over three hundred years for this country to abolish slavery, and it took a war to do it. And in the century and a half since then, we are still sorting out its meaning and repenting from the consequences.

When Bishop Knisely did this, for the most part, he got a lot back-patting atta boys. But there were some—not a few—people whose families got wealthy from that industry, and Universities, hospitals and private schools who all had wings or halls or scholarships named after people who owned those ships and those trading houses and held shares in stocks that once speculated in human flesh. And they weren’t too happy. It was a long time ago, they said. That was then. Why bring it up now? 

Like the leader in the story today, too often we hear people say that now was not time, and church was not the place, to talk about such things. But Jesus’ response now is the same as it was back then: the time for mercy is now. And the place for mercy is here.

Luke’s Gospel tells us that Jesus’ words were so effective that no one dared challenge him again. Sure. If only. That’s only true if you ignore big chunks of the Passion.

People still challenge Jesus right down to today. They still get annoyed and grumble. They still blame the victim and look for scapegoats. Jesus was condemned to death and went to the cross because human beings will look anywhere, anyplace in order to keep what scares them at arm’s length.  And it still happens today.

We hear the same complaints: why here? Why now?

You know why we have these responses, right? Fear! Fear is the opposite of faith. But there are always people who use our fears to build up their power. There are people who only feel big and strong when everyone around them is terrified, or angry, or shouting. Like the Leader in today’s Gospel who stirred up the crowd with his grumbling—and he didn’t even have the internet and Twitter and the media—who build themselves up by bringing out the worst in everyone else.

It’s true. We do live in an uncertain and often dangerous world, and we do everything we can to maintain some order and create some safety, but here we are living smack dab in the place where charisma and order meet! And that is the place where the Holy Spirit is found! And, as Jesus demonstrates over and over again in the Gospel of Luke, we can show mercy where we can. We might not be able to save every victim of disaster, or stop the suffering of this world, but we can reach out with healing to the person right in front of us, the stranger God gives us, or the sick, injured, or lonely person in our midst.

So…. When is the time to show mercy? Now is the time to show mercy!

Where is the place to show mercy? Here is the place to show mercy!

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Scripture for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16, Year C, August 24, 2025

Website for St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Dade City, Florida

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

Here is the bulletin for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, August 24, 2025, St Mary's Episcopal Church, Dade City, Florida.

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.

Pestering Jesus

There is something strange going on in today’s Gospel. Did you notice? Maybe it struck you as odd but you shrugged it off because it doesn’t fit with how we typically read the Bible… but there it is, as plain as day. Did you notice it? In today’s Gospel, Jesus the Rabbi goes to school.

This underscores an aspect of the Gospels that we often overlook: Jesus teaches, yes; and he certainly heals and shows power; but there is something else, Jesus learns and he changes. What was said about Jesus as a child—that he grew in wisdom and knowledge—is still happening for the adult Jesus in his three-year mission: Jesus learns. He grows in wisdom.  

Wisdom is a constant theme of many movies, TV shows, literature, and even graphic novels, although it rarely described as such.

Remember The Matrix? Neo undertakes a journey to discover his role in overthrowing the Matrix starting with his first meeting with the Oracle, a grandmotherly figure peering into an oven baking cookies, in an apartment where the students hang out as if they are doing their homework after school.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force under the tutelage of the ancient Jedi master Yoda, who seems at first to be an eccentric, slightly annoying little creature but turns out to be steeped in ancient wisdom.

The film The Way, director Emilio Estevez cast his father, Martin Sheen, as a man named Tom who walks the Camino de Santiago, “The Way of St. James.” through northern Spain. Along the way he encounters all kinds of people and discovers the difference between the “life we live and the life we choose.”

Recently, the latest iteration of Star Trek has just wound up its three-year story, which was built around an older, wiser, Jean-Luc Picard, imparting hard-earned wisdom to his younger cohorts—and, most of all, the wisdom they impart to him!

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom is the personification of God’s knowledge, God’s creativity and God’s transforming love. Rather than focusing on the power of God that sends plagues to Pharaoh, parts the Red Sea or those other “big” miraculous things, Wisdom is a way of meeting God through other ways of knowing. It is more intuitive, depends on our senses, and comes out of reflection, artistic and musical expression. Wisdom is where heart, emotion, and thinking meet.

So it makes sense that when the earliest Christians looked for ways to describe their encounter with Jesus, it was the Wisdom literature that spoke to them the most. Their experience of Jesus was not just of a person who did powerful things, but their encounter was one that opened their eyes, their hearts, and their minds to the very presence and person of God. In Jesus, they experienced both the knowledge of God and the welcome of God.

This is at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with the foreign woman in today’s Gospel. Jesus and his disciples went into a Gentile region near Galilee when a woman from those parts asked him to heal her daughter. At first, he flat-out ignored her. He wouldn’t even acknowledge the request.

She shouts after Jesus and the disciples. Finally, he turns to her and speaks the conventional wisdom concerning the Messiah. When he says that he was sent only to the Jews – not to Gentiles like her. He even says that “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Did you hear that? He calls her a dog!

Nevertheless, with courage and desperation, she persisted. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Finally, the picture begins to make sense. Jesus commends her faith and affirms her as a beloved child of God. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

I don’t know about you, but this story startles me because it does not fit with my soft, cuddly picture of Jesus, who here acts in an arbitrary, harsh, and unloving manner—until she changes his mind!

For centuries, preachers have struggled to make sense of it—and to explain away Jesus’ apparent bad manners. Some say that the Greek word Jesus used for “dog” really means “puppy.” (Uhm, no. It doesn’t.) Some say that he was critiquing the cultural norms of the day… really? By being rude? Maybe Jesus was using this encounter to test and stretch his disciples’ understanding of God? Hmm… we’ll see.

Here’s an idea. Maybe the Gentile woman taught him! And the early Church remembered the encounter because they too were learning that lesson over and over again themselves! The lesson? That God’s reign is bigger than tradition or culture or “the way we’ve always done things.”

Remember, Jesus grew up in the first century and that he lived his early life only among Palestinian Jews. He spent almost all of his ministry among Jews – the children of Israel. His training was Jewish. His bible was the Hebrew Scriptures. He lived in a social and religious culture that saw Gentiles as “other,” often as unclean, or taboo.

Was Jesus was stuck in such a mindset or was he deliberately pushing the envelope? After all, he did deliberately go to a place where Gentiles lived when he encountered this persistent woman. Did this encounter cause him to re-think commonly accepted views about Gentiles?

Whatever happened between Jesus and the woman, he clearly went from saying “no!” to commending the woman’s faith and answering her prayer. I think Matthew’s Church remembered this encounter precisely because those early Jewish Christians were starting to see their Gentile Christian companions in a new light! In short, in this story, Jesus is showing an early Church the importance of learning something new.

Jesus’ mind might have been changed, but the real news is that the early Church—the Church of Matthew’s Gospel—was changing! They went out from Palestine into the wider world of the Roman Empire; and they were leaving the Synagogues of the Diaspora and going into new communities, and discovering over and over again that Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit, and the grace of God was changing people in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. Over and over again, they were encountering people about whom they would say “…Great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And in that they found healing!

In this transformation we see the challenges and inner struggles faced by every succeeding generation of Christians. Their transforming, God-provoked re-imagining of a long-held, commonly practices mirror and inform the struggles we experience ourselves in a troubled culture during this excruciatingly troublesome year.

Amid our struggles for inclusion, our long history of racial inequality, the ways we understand Jesus, the Gospel, we will meet and encounter people who challenge our long-held, often cherished notions of faith.

Ten days ago, two branches of the Church recognized in their calendars of saints the sacrificial witness of two very different saints on the very same day—August 14. The Roman Catholic Church remembered the witness Saint Maximillian Kolbe and the Episcopal Church remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels.

Maximillian Kolbe was a Franciscan priest in Poland who overcame his early, learned anti-Semitism and after the Nazis invaded his country sheltered Jews fleeting the Holocaust. For this he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1941, when a prisoner escaped, ten other prisoners were rounded up to be executed. Kolbe stepped in and volunteered to die instead of one of the others, and so the Nazis executed him on August 14, 1941. He was canonized in 1982.

Jonathan Daniels was a seminarian who grew up in Keene, New Hampshire and attended the Virginia Military Institute and eventually the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Mass. In 1965, he answered the call to go to the South and help register disenfranchised black citizens to vote. And on August 14^th, he was jailed in Haynesville, AL, along with six other Freedom Riders including a Catholic priest. After six days. August 20^th, sixty years ago today, they were released but while waiting for a ride, they were confronted by a deputy sheriff who aimed his shotgun at a young girl named Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her aside and was killed in the blast. The priest was wounded trying to protect the others. Ruby Sales continues to be an activist for civil rights and justice to this day.

I don’t know if I would ever have the courage of either of these two saints, but their example inspires us to seek faith where it will be found, to speak out against racism, tyranny, and bigotry in all its forms. The story of the Gentile woman challenging Jesus is the story of the Church—of us—being challenged every day to seek the face of Jesus in the faces of the people God gives to us every day, and to remind us of our baptismal promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons whoever and wherever they may be.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 20, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 20, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 20, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on August 20, 2023.

Calling us to be made whole

Nothing really winds me up like buzzwords. People throw around jargon like candy attempting to sound smart without saying very much. Then these words end up in popular usage in places like television, in commercials, and in speeches… and it really gets me going… people saying things without really much meaning. It happens in business, in church, in politics. It makes me want to sigh.

One of the most popular buzzwords today is “disruption.” They tell us that their product, widget, or process is “disrupting the widget industry… and you should go out and buy it.” Well, friends, disruption is not all it’s cracked up to be… and usually when people are saying it they don’t really mean it. They say “disruption,” but they mean “more of the same… all shiny and looking new!” Like a brand-new car body resting on a chassis designed in the 1930’s.

The fact is that real disruption, real innovation, real invention is usually pretty upsetting. That’s why people resist it so much. Not long ago, the idea of flight was reserved for birds, bugs, and balloonists. The funny thing is that after many millennia of invention and innovation, with all the great gadgets we take for granted today, very little has changed about how people are. And I get that... after all, here I am talking to you wearing what's essentially second century business casual, leading an ancient liturgy, while reading from even more ancient texts. 

Humans are very inventive in taking all our new gadgets and fitting them into the ways we’ve always done things.

Change, real change, is hard. It requires a shift in perspective, in habit, in our thinking, and attitude. That’s why it requires not just discipline but grace, vision of what we want to be and the humility to start over… and hearts that listens for God.

Jesus’ first century image for “disruption” was what happens when one tries to put new wine into old wineskins. You know what you get? You end up with a thirsty person standing on a messy floor holding a broken, leaky wine sack. No, he said, if you are going to do something new, it needs to be all new!

God is doing something new, Jesus says, and it will neither look nor feel nor operate the same way as how things have operated before. In todays’ Gospel we have three examples: Jesus calls Matthew the tax-collector to follow him; he heals a woman who has experienced a constant hemorrhage her whole life, and then he raises a dead little girl to life. 

The Gospel puts these three stories together to answer a simple question: what will following the call of God be like? What is God doing in Jesus? 

In Christ, God is bringing healing, wholeness, and reconciliation to all God’s people.

But God does it differently that what we expect.

Our old habits, our old ways of seeing, our notions of good order and how things “have to be” are going to turned upside down. This new wine will not fit in the old containers. The containers can’t take it!

Watch what Jesus is doing and see how he is at once making new wine and creating new wine containers in the lives of the people he meets.

When he walks up to Matthew in his tax-collecting booth, he is meeting a man who was probably pretty well-off and prosperous, but neither well-loved nor respected by anyone. As a Jewish functionary of the hated occupiers from Rome, he gathered the taxes from the locals to pay for their oppression by a foreign empire. His Roman bosses probably pushed him around and he was unloved by his Jewish neighbors. At best, he might hang out with others like himself who made their living on the wrong side of the tracks: thieves, extortionists, prostitutes, and Jews in the employ of Rome, not to mention those people who made their living doing often important but unsavory work that respectable people didn’t talk about.

So when Jesus calls Matthew, he calls one of the most unlikely, least respected persons imaginable to be one of his followers. And he doesn’t even tell him to clean up his act first! Why does he do this? Why does Jesus risk his own good name and the reputation of his fledgling ministry on the likes of this reprobate … this quisling… Matthew? He shows us why in the two healings that follow.

While Jesus is eating and drinking with Matthew, and his no doubt equally notorious friends, word comes that a little girl, the daughter of a respectable leader in the local synagogue, has died. He begs Jesus to lay his hand on his little girl so that she may live. Jesus goes to care for the girl, which leads to the first healing encounter after Matthew’s call.

On the way, a woman who has suffered her whole life from some kind of hemorrhage… most likely a disorder that affected her since puberty... which meant that not only was she ill, but she was excluded from ordinary company, including other women, certainly was never going to marry, and was probably also separated from her family. By the custom of the day, anyone she touched would be ritually unclean and therefore she risked not only condemnation but also fear-driven violence on a daily basis. So when she takes the risky act of touching his cloak as he passes, she is healed. Jesus blesses her and commends her faith saying “your faith has made you well.”

He finally arrives at the official’s house but by then it’s too late. The girl has died, and the mourning rites have begun. He assures them that all is well, but instead of saying “Watch me bring her back to life…,” or “hold my bier,” he says that she is only sleeping. They all laugh... except apparently the desperate parents and family and a few followers who are holding their breath. After all the hub-bub has died away, and the scoffers sent out, he takes her by the hand and gently bids her to wake up. And she lives!

If you want to know why we friends, followers, and apprentices of Jesus care about the poor, the sick, and those society would consider strange, weird, or different—if you want to know why we find ourselves hosting recovering addicts in our buildings who may never walk into our worship spaces, or feed or clothe folks in need through our various ministries, or why we speak of love and compassion when the culture trucks in fear and division, then this is why: it is what Jesus did. 

He comes to us in the midst of our complicated lives and sits, chats, and eats with us. He touches us where we experience the most pain. He comes into our lives and homes and our hearts and brings life. He sees faith in us when others might only see fault and invites us to follow him.

In all three instances in today’s Gospel, people who lived on the fringes, separated by custom, choice, or circumstance from their communities, were reconciled and brought back into the lives of their families, communities, and daily lives in the company of Jesus.

What does it mean that Jesus called a hated tax-collector and quisling to follow him? It is so that he can live, and work and walk with dignity, respect, and wholeness as a person of God in community.

What does it mean to be made whole and healed, no longer living at the edges of society subject to the alternating vagaries of human pity and condemnation? It is to discover that one’s faith makes us whole and returns us to the family of God! 

What does it mean to experience new life? It is like Jesus coming into your home, and against all expectation, taking you by the hand, and inviting you to get up and live.

Following Jesus changes us, taking what we have always thought to be true and normal and expected and turning it upside down, inside out, and giving it new life. Grace, faith, baptism, sacramental living, and Christian community together all give us a new container—a new wine skin! — to live as Christ’s own forever. We are all called, welcomed, healed, and given new life because with Christ, our faith heals, reconciles, and makes us well.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, June 11, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, June 11, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 11, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on June 11, 2023.

Sight lines

There is blindness and then there is blindness. And there is sight and then there is sight.

Today we hear of a man who was born blind…healed by Jesus he gains both sight and vision.

The man born blind did nothing to deserve Jesus’ attention. He did nothing to earn the free gift of Jesus’ healing. But his healing revealed that there is sight…and then there is sight.

This long Gospel lesson is certainly a strange conversation, isn’t it? On the one hand, this encounter where the leaders interrogate the stubborn (and smart-mouthed) man who was healed sounds like a fight, a kind of verbal brawl. On the other hand, it’s a comedy. I swear, all this exchange needs to drive that point home is a laugh track.

So let’s re-cap. One day while Jesus is walking along, he meets a man born blind. Now the disciples are curious.

Jesus heals the man and tells him to go and wash in a pool that was supposed to be a place where the sick could be healed. Jesus makes a paste or a salve of mud and spit and says go wash. And when he does he is healed. And everyone is excited. But not everyone believes it.

The Pharisees and the religious leaders are skeptical. They try to say that he is not the same man, or that he pretended to be blind. And when those explanations fail, in utter frustration, they write-off the healing by saying he was born entirely in sin.

As I said, there is blindness and then there is blindness.

Jesus comes to the man. Good thing for Jesus he did not ask the man how he received his sight, because after the grilling he just came away from he might have hauled off and popped him one.  Instead, Jesus asks the man if he believes in the Son of Man—Jesus.  The man says “show me, and I will believe.” Of course, he is being shown because Jesus is standing right there. And the man does believe.

The most religious and righteous people in the land see Jesus and do not believe. But this man, who was blind now believes.

There is sight, and then there is sight.

Blindness can come from seeing too much. It can come from thinking we know how the world works and ought to work. It can come from thinking we have everything under control. It can come from thinking that we can get God on our side if we are good enough, smart enough, clever enough. Blindness can come from thinking that we have in ourselves everything we need, and that we don’t need anyone else—and that we above the need for spiritual help.  Often, when we think we see the most, this is when we are the most blind.

But sight can come when we can see the least. Have you ever wished you could see around life’s corners? Have you ever believed that what you thought you saw turned into something else? Have you ever been let down by what you thought you saw clearly? Have you ever been blind to the world around you—it’s gifts, it’s beauty, it’s possibility? Have you ever turned a blind eye to the people most in need of care, compassion and a taste of hope?

These are the people that Jesus touches. The ones who knew they had no sight, no hope, no direction, only dependence and fear and limitation and dead ends. These are the people Jesus touches and the one to whom he brings sight.

The man born blind did not just get up and dance around the room. There were skeptics. He did not see clearly. He knew that he had been healed, and he knew that his healing was a gift; but it took him time from his sight to become vision. His vision grew and grew until he saw and recognized Jesus. He knew the change in him came from God through Jesus and then it all clicked.

Vision is like that. The spiritual life starts with a dim awareness of grace.  And if we follow it, that awareness grows and grows. We know that God is doing something. We know that we are being changed. Those around us may not understand it, they may even discount it. But it is real.

There is something else going on here. In the Ancient Near East at the time of Jesus, well before there was a scientific understanding of how the eyes worked, there was the notion that the eyes not only recieved light, but projected it as well. If this were not so, it was reasoned, then why can, after our eyes adjust, see in an otherwise darkened room? Light came in. Light goes out. That's how it was understood. 

So Jesus' act of creation-- using the dirt and spit to make a mud plaster to put on the man's eyes-- allowed him to let be, as well as see light. Jesus "let there be light!." 

This was the message, the prophetic sign, that Jesus' healing was meant to convey. And Jesus doing this on the Sabbath was not simply a rhetorical stick in his opponents eye. No. Jesus did this on the Sabbath as an act of creation, or more precisely re-creation. He is showing us that not only can we receive light, we can be light. 

All the man knew was that he was healed. And the really odd part was that the more he was interrogated, the more his sight grows. And the really, really odd part, was that the people who were apparently the most equipped to see what Jesus was up to were in this instance the most blind to what He was up to. They could not celebrate the healing, because they forgot that the Sabbath was about our need to rest in God's abundant, creative, healing love, not simply have a day off for Church.

And for us, who are baptized into and fed by Christ's body, our sight grows as our awareness of God grows. We find that Christ is there. He was the one who touched us. He is the one making us whole.  He is the one who lifting us out of our blindness and allowing to more and more see the world for the first time—as if through God’s eyes.

There is blindness and then there is blindness. There is the blindness that comes from not being able to see. And there is the blindness that comes from choosing not to see what God has put before us.

And there is sight and then there is sight. There is the sight that comes from resting in our own knowledge, our own power, and our own keen sense of the world as it is. We may think we are being realistic in our skepticism, but we may simply be locking the door on grace. There is another sight, a sight that brings vision. That is beginning to see ourselves and creation as loved, cherished and worthy of being renewed.

There is sight that sees God at work in simple acts of kindness. There is vision to see God at work in the care for the poor, the outcast and the lonely. There is light that comes from encountering the face of Christ in every person that God brings to us.

The world sees Jesus as a long ago figure of history and myth. The realists in the world see our faith as a desperate allegiance to a good man who failed miserably on an executioner’s cross. The skeptics see us people sadly deluded. They can see that for themselves.

But we have been touched by Jesus, and washed in the waters of baptism, and who have seen the Christ in faith, in sacrament, in community, in the faces of our neighbors, have a different vision. We have seen a mere glimpse of what God sees: a people capable of love, of faithfulness, and compassion, and a creation full of wonder and possibility. We don’t claim to see everything, but we know that in Christ, God removes our blindness and gives us hope.

We are blessed and a blessing, we are healed and are healers

I suppose it is all too obvious to say that the world—and the country and communities--we live in need healing. The Church, the gathering of God’s people, has always been a healing community. When we pray for healing, when we do this sacramentally, we lay on hands on people and anoint them with oil. We pray that they will know God’s healing power. We also pray that God will work healing in our hearts, our bodies and our spirits. There are many reasons that this is part and parcel of the Church’s basic ministry.

First, we do this because Jesus did. He touched people. He met people at the point of their deepest need, and he healed them.

Second, in the earliest Christian communities, a major sign of the Spirit’s presence after Jesus’ resurrection was that they were a healing community.

So, what is Christian Healing? Well, for one thing, healing is more than just fixing broken bodies or lifting up broken spirits—although it certainly includes that! Christ’s healing is for a broken world and that starts on the cross and is made known in the resurrection. That means that when we undertake any ministry of healing—laying on of hands, visiting the sick, ministering to the lonely, the jailed, the outcast, feeding the hungry, working for a just world—we are taking part in God’s reign, taking part in God breaking into our world, and witnessing to the Risen Christ. Healing shakes things up!

In today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus describing the blessed ones of God. He describes who they are and what they do. And while there are many ways that God’s blessed ones live, there is no question that God’s blessing is revealed when we reach out to each other and heal.

Listen again to the core of Jesus’ teaching: the beatitudes.  Like Christian healing, the beatitudes are often distorted and misunderstood. Some preachers and writers who want to turn Jesus’ powerful teaching into something like “positive thinking” or self-help. Some try to convert Jesus’ healing into magic—you know, when you try to use the right ritual or phrases to control events or manipulate the world to your preferences. Some preachers will equate "blessing" with worldly wealth. There are some leaders and some preachers who attempt to use Jesus’ teaching to justify everything from the exclusion and expulsion of immigrants, to the  rejection and violence against gay, lesbian and transgender persons, or will use Jesus’ words to justify the persecution of people of other religions. Others want Christians to be silent and submissive and just meekly give into whatever is going on around us or whatever their leader says.

Needless to say, we live in a time, as much as any time in the church’s history, when it is essential that we listen again to the core of Jesus’ teaching.

So, let us begin again.

The beatitudes in Matthew come in three parts.

In the first part, Jesus proclaims blessing to four kinds of people who are suffering: (1) the poor who are without hope; (2) people who mourn; (3) people who are “meek.” The word that we hear as “meek” does not refer to the shy but rather to the downtrodden and oppressed. Finally, there are (4) the people who thirst after righteousness—because they are desperate for justice!

 Let’s be clear here—these are not qualities anyone wants to have. There is absolutely no virtue in being unintentionally poor. Healing though it might be, mourning is a state of broken heartedness that no one wants. No one wants to be downtrodden and disrespected (aka “meek”). People who experience any or all of these know that this is not what God intends for creation!

Notice that these first four beatitudes are beatitudes of reversal. People who are one way will receive a blessing that will take them to some place new. The poor and those without hope will belong to the kingdom. People who mourn will be comforted. People who are downtrodden will inherit the earth. Everyone who is poor, who mourns, who is downtrodden, and everyone who thirsts for righteousness will be satisfied!

How can this be? How can Jesus say that these permanent conditions of humanity will be reversed? This leads us to the next part of the beatitudes.

The next four blessings are directed to people who strive to live in the way God intends: they are the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers.

In Jewish tradition, the heart of the law is mercy. Mercy is much more than a legal thing—letting someone who is guilty go free—mercy is both the act and the life of compassion to those who are in trouble, who are poor, or who are in pain. Jesus says that people who live mercifully will also receive mercy.

Purity of heart is not just good behavior and clean living, it is a heart tuned to God and open to the working of the divine in the everyday. These are people who see God.

People who are peacemakers are people who work for justice—who work to see the poor treated fairly and who speak truth to power on behalf of those who have no voice. People who bring reconciliation to places of division will be called children of God.

What Jesus says in this second part of the beatitudes is that God blesses (and others are blessed by) people who live their lives in tune with God.

So how will the poor be welcomed into God’s reign? Because the merciful will show then in!

And how will the mourning be comforted? Because people tuned to God’s heart will comfort them!

And how will the downtrodden inherit the kingdom? Because people of peace will bring justice to God’s children!

But all this comes with a price: When people begin to live God’s reign, there will be trouble. And when people care for people with compassion and justice and with hearts open to God, there will be trouble. That's because we live in a world that wallows in injustice, that is energized by grievance and anger, that exploits poverty, and thrives on disrespect! And people—even ones who claim the name “Christian”— who are steeped in these will fight back!  They will call us names (like “woke” or “snowflake” and all that), and they will get on their talk radio and cable news shows and rant about how unrealistic—and, oddly, talk about how mean—we are! They will pass laws to tell us what not to teach in schools so that they don’t feel bad about the ugly parts of our history! And that is why in Jesus’ final blessing in the second part is a word of hope mingled with a word of warning: people who do right will be persecuted—this is a part of living in God’s kingdom right now!

That's because the values of a life of blessing are contrary to the values of the culture.

When we take part in the ministry of Christian healing, it is not just about making our bodies better, we are not doing magic and we are not simply being “nice.” We are doing something much, much better: we are introducing and taking part in God’s reign of justice, hope, and peace. When we open ourselves to God’s healing, we place ourselves alongside people who are poor and without hope—we are people in need of mercy, and when we show mercy, we are extending to others what has been freely given to us by a loving God who loved us first!

Mercy happens when we embrace people who grieve and those who give comfort. When we take part in God’s mercy, we are lift up the downtrodden and the meek, offering both justice and a welcome into God’s reign. And when we do this in the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and healing then we are demonstrating God’s mercy in our lives in real tangible ways.

All of us have things in our hearts of which we are not proud. All of us have things that grieve us. All of us, at some time, have struggled to have hope. And all of us, every one of us, are blessed.

We are blessed because God has given us people of blessing, and made us, in the cross and resurrection and through our faith and baptisms, into a people of blessing.

Whether you come forward for healing, or whether you stay and pray for those who do hear again Jesus’ words: Blessed are the poor and those without hope—the kingdom of heaven is here! Blessed are you who mourn—comfort is here! Blessed are you are worn down and trampled upon—you have a home, the earth is yours! All of you who thirst for God’s way—satisfaction is here!

God’s mercy comes through merciful people. Compassion comes through hearts tuned to God.

Justice arrives through people who seek peace. And no matter what happens or what is said about us, we are a people of mercy and hope and comfort and justice.  And so, wounded though we are, we are healers because we are being healed!

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Bulletin for Worship for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany January 29, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Scripture Lessons for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, January 29, 2023.

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

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

Healed, whole, and reconciled

Leprosy in Jesus’ day was no joke. Being a leper was a kind of walking death, considered evil and unclean. Because the condition was not well understood… and all kind of maladies could cause one to be called a leper from psoriasis to skin cancer to various kinds of skin infections, it was impossible to know who was contagious and who was not. They were excluded from every part of community life. They could not live, worship, eat, walk, or talk among “normal” people. They were required to stay away, keeping a safe distance from life’s normal activities and gatherings. 

So, to survive, they scrounged, depending as best they could, on the charity and more typically the trash of others. Lepers of that day not only lost their skin to continuous infection and inflammation and to the lack of basic care but they were also separated from the community. They had nothing, and no hope, yet they could – from forty paces – watch the real world, and real life, happen just outside of their reach.

Once, a band of ten of these lepers met Jesus. Nine were apparently Jews from who knows where, and one was a foreigner. Together they kept on the move, scrounging food, water and makeshift shelter, as best they could. Perhaps they helped one another dress wounds as they limped along from place to place.  The status and situation as lepers made them a kind of community of the sick and the outcast. What they had most in common was their disease, so their other differences did not matter so much.

When the saw Jesus they stood at a distance – as was required by the law – and shouted for mercy.

I’ll bet they made the same cry to every passing rabbi, holy man, and probably to every hustler and snake oil salesman with a reputation for healing whomever came within earshot. If they were lucky, they’d get some food or clean clothes or perhaps money laid down on the road from a distance. Their prayer was simple: “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.” And Jesus granted them mercy, and without conditions or expectation he gave them their lives back. He told them to present themselves to the priests because the priests were the ones who would certify that the lepers were cured and allow them to rejoin the world.

So off they went toward the city and toward the priests. And as they went, their leprosy went away; they were cured! As they walked their old dead, rotting flesh dropped away and they were clean, bright, like new-born babies. Jesus stood there and watched. He put no conditions on his gift, but he just watched and waited.

Imagine their feelings at this moment. They were grateful. They were no doubt thrilled. I imagine them, laughing, relieved, feeling just wonderful! And most of them had someplace to go… assuming the other nine were Jews, they were off to the temple or wherever they could find a priest to pronounce them fit and clean.

Call me an optimist, but I am also sure that they were thanking God that this holy man Jesus had cured them. To them, Jesus was the most wonderful person in the whole world! They could leave the exiled life and re-join the land of the living!

But even if they were thanking God as they ran to rejoin their old lives, they forgot something….

You see of the ten, there was one who had no place to go. The priests who would pronounce the nine clean, would still consider the tenth man unclean, even without his leprosy. This was a time when people kept to their own communities, lived, worked, and functioned with their own kind. And cured or not, he was a Samaritan… the old prejudices and customs would still keep him outside his friend’s community… unclean, unreconciled, now a stranger. He was no longer apart of the same community as his nine equally cured companions.

We tend to look on this story as one about gratitude… and Jesus certainly names that issue, but this is a story about community, and the grace of being apart of a community of people. The tragedy was that the nine, in their gratitude, forgot about the one who was different than them.

No one could imagine advocating to the priest at the temple for the tenth leper and saying, “for all these years, this Samaritan was one of us, but now that he—like us—was healed by Jesus of Nazareth, you cannot welcome him back in?” No one could imagine that God’s grace and healing power, mediated through Jesus, would do more than cure a physical disease… his healing would also knock down the barriers that were in fact much bigger than the disease they were cured from.

That is, no one could imagine it until after Jesus’ cross, death, and resurrection; it would not be until the Holy Spirit filled and baptized a new community, that we could imagine—and experience—that the  nine could have also been reconciled—and equally healed—with the tenth person.

“Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”

The one who came back in the Gospel story, came back to the only place, to the only person, he could possibly go. And in that return, we see that this healing was much bigger that anyone could previously have imagined.

All ten lepers were cured. And all ten stayed cured, as Jesus said, “were not all ten healed?” But there was more going on. Jesus saw past the imposed exile of the tenth man. And when that man went to only place he could go, he received something more. To him Jesus said, “Rise up and go your way, your faith has made you well.” The Greek for “made you well” is a different word, a theological word; it means “being made whole,” or “being made complete.” It also means being saved. Go your way, Jesus told him, your faith has made you not just cured, but whole, and saved.

All ten were healed, all ten were given their lives, but one had an epiphany, where his gratitude turned into awe. For the tenth man, the light bulb went off and he came back…and was made whole! All ten were given their lives back; but only one was given the fullness of life.

For the one who was made whole, the one who came back to Jesus, his gratitude was the gateway to a something bigger: an epiphany that what God is brings to us is wholeness.

We all have had troubles in our lives, and we all have had blessings. It is easy to imagine crying out to God when we are in trouble. It is very easy to imagine that when everything is going well that we don’t. To just get caught up in the blessings and the busyness, we can forget to return to God. The one who returned received all that Jesus had to give—not just blessing, not even just healing, but wholeness and return to life.

Christ touches us, heals us, blesses us. And he waits for us to move from acceptance to gratitude and to awe. And that’s when we are made whole.

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost  at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to the Scripture readings.

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy.