Christmas, 2022: God chooses us

Lectionary: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14-20

En el nombre del Dios, creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen. 

Tonight (today) we celebrate that Christmas is about God choosing us. God chooses life for us. God chooses joy and peace for us. God chooses redemption and reconciliation for us, and God chooses us to be partners in the reconciliation of the whole world to God. God chooses to be born in us again on Christmas, to dwell in us and renew us, to make us vessels overflowing with God’s own grace, mercy, and love for the world.

As author Marianne Williamson once said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God… We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.” Source. 

That is the real meaning of Christmas – the manifestation of the glorious love of God in the world. Sadly, so much distracts us from that and instead, we get caught up in public and moral outrage over whether or not to use the Greek letter chi (which looks like an X) when writing the word Christmas, or whether to say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. The shaming I see on social media about this is just nuts. And who remembers the Christmas coffee cup debacle a few years ago? The coffee company changed their cup to a solid color which led a pastor to accuse them of hating Jesus.

Focusing on the wrong thing, like buying presents we can’t afford, or moralizing over how others get Christmas wrong, leads us to miss the overwhelming, life-changing, world-changing good news of Christmas – that the glorious love of God is being made manifest in the world.

If it helps, the same thing happened that first Christmas.

According to the Gospel writer, Joseph, who is descended from the house of David, must travel to Bethlehem to register in accordance with a decree from Caesar Augustus. Mary, who is engaged to Joseph, is pregnant and near delivery, so they travel together.

Ordinarily, travelers like Mary and Joseph would have stayed with family or friends who live in the area. But Mary and Joseph can find no place to stay. The Christmas story, which we know so well, says ‘there was no room for them at the inn.’

Mary and Joseph were only offered a rough, dirty place in the part of the house where the animals were kept. The baby would have been placed in a feeding trough to keep him from getting trampled by an animal.

Joy Carroll Wallis, author and priest in the Church of England, suggests that Joseph and Mary were being shunned…their family and friends morally outraged, because Joseph showed up on their doorstep with his pregnant girlfriend and everyone knew it wasn’t his baby.

The Messiah was being born right under their noses, and they missed it because they were busy moralizing. They judged Joseph and Mary to be sinners whom they felt justified in rejecting and excluding, unaware that God had chosen them to be partners in the reconciliation of the world.

The judgment of God, who is the only real moral authority, is salvation in Jesus who is the Christ. By taking on flesh like ours, Jesus links heaven and earth, eternity and time, from ages past to this present moment reconciling us to himself and ensuring that everyone is included in God’s plan of salvation …the clean and the unclean, the Jew and Gentile, the saint and the sinner.

So many "religious" people would rather God offer grace only to those who deserve it. The truth is, none of us deserves it, and yet all of us receive it because that is the nature of the extravagant love of God.

A perfect example is the shepherds in the fields who were the first to hear of the birth of the Savior. In those days shepherds were seen as a group of dirty, low-class nobodies. Yet, God chose them to be the first to hear these tidings of great joy. God chose them to be the first to see the Christ-child. When the shepherds told about what they saw, the grace of God flowed through them so that all who heard them were amazed, and the shepherds themselves could do nothing but praise and glorify God.

Today, God chooses us. We are the believers described in the letter to Titus - people transformed by God’s love and, therefore, zealous for good deeds, remembering of course, that our good deeds are simply the manifestation of God’s grace moving through us into the world.

Tonight (today) we are reminded that Christmas is about God choosing us. God chooses to be born in us again, to dwell in us and renew us, to make us vessels overflowing with God’s own grace, mercy, and love for the world.

God chooses us because that is the nature of the extravagant love of God.

Like Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, we must remember that God will love us, protect us, care for us, and bless us, while providing us with everything we need to do what God asks us to do. All we need to do is choose to trust God.

Merry Christmas! 

Amen.

4 Advent, 2022-A: Reciprocal love

Lectionary: Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25 

En el nombre del Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen. 

I commend to you a non-profit group called StoryCorps whose mission is to build connections between people by sharing real-life stories. Most of the stories are about ordinary people doing ordinary things: a grandmother telling her grandchildren about falling in love with their grandfather; one friend telling another what their friendship means to them.

StoryCorps has produced several books of these stories. One of them is called, “Listening is an Act of Love” and, as they say on their website: “Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts.”

We have a similar mission as Christian churches – to build connections among all people, languages, races, and nations within the shared story of our redemption until the whole world is reconciled to God in Christ. It is true for us too, that listening is an act of love – reciprocal love with God.

We believe that all creation has been spoken into being by Jesus through whom all things were made. He is the Word of God, the reason or plan of God eternally active in creation. At Jesus’ Baptism by John God said, “This is my beloved, listen to him.” (Lk 9:35) Listen to him… Hear and respond to him...

We feel like we do listen to him – or at least we try to. We try to obey Jesus’ command to us to love God, neighbor, and self. We try to obey the rules of our faith as we live our lives in the world. But when God said, “listen to him” at Jesus’ baptism, we weren’t being told to obey Jesus. We were being invited to respond with our “yes” to him, reciprocating his love for us with our love for him.

In today’s Old Testament story, King Ahaz (whose name means, “has held”) demonstrates what happens when we do not reciprocate God’s love. Ahaz is a faithful Jew and holds fast to the Jewish law in Deuteronomy, the one that says, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (6:6) so when God invites him to ask for a sign from God, Ahaz says “no, I can’t.”

God, however, is ready to do a new thing and be known in a new way. God is waiting to save the Jewish people besieged by war, but Ahaz can’t say “yes” to God because he has put his obedience to a rule ahead of God’s offer of comfort. For Ahaz, this encounter is outside his expectations for who God is, what God wants, and how God acts.

Seeing this, the prophet, Isaiah, clears things up, proclaiming that God is already acting to save the people and will give them a sign. Look, Isaiah says, a young woman is pregnant, and by the time her child grows up, the city and the nation of Jerusalem will have been saved from their enemies. This child will be named Immanuel, which means “God with us” because he will be the sign of God’s presence, a reminder of God’s promise of salvation.

The story of Ahaz stands in contrast to the story of Joseph, who in the gospel story today, listens with reciprocal love.

An angel appears to Joseph in a dream saying what angels always say: Don’t be afraid… God is acting in this moment. Your Mary is pregnant and the son within her is from the Holy Spirit. When he is born, you must name him Jesus, actually ‘Jehosua’ in Hebrew – Joshua - which means ‘God saves,’ for he will save his people from their sins.’

Both Matthew and Isaiah proclaim a God who knows what the people need and acts to redeem even before they ask for it. This is how God has always acted.

The prophecy in Isaiah was not about Jesus being born of Mary in Bethlehem. It was about God - who loves us, is always present with us, and is already acting to redeem even before we ask.

In Isaiah, the young woman bore a son who was a sign that God would save the people from their enemies. In Matthew, the young woman bore a son who would save them from their sins.

The story of Joseph’s “yes” to God offers us so much to talk about, but for now, the gift I want to focus on is what it cost Joseph to say “yes” to God.

Nobody around their village would know - or believe - that Mary came up pregnant by the Holy Spirit. They’d have done what folks usually do – put the pieces together in a way that makes sense to them. The obvious conclusion would be that someone besides Joseph got Mary pregnant.

According to the law, Joseph was supposed to have Mary stoned to death for adultery. His inclination, however, was to dissolve their marriage contract and “dismiss her quietly.” That would have spared Mary’s life, but it also would have destined her and her child to a lifetime of poverty, and shame.

When the angel asked Joseph to take the already pregnant Mary as his wife, Joseph knows saying “yes” to God means he will have to sacrifice his righteous reputation and live out his days as the pitiable man with the unfaithful wife.

Joseph could have said to himself, ‘God doesn’t speak to someone like me.’ Or he might have reasoned that God wouldn’t ask him to violate the very laws God gave his people to follow. He could have written off the whole thing as nothing more than a delusion. But he doesn’t.

When he awakens, Joseph gives his “yes” to God because he was righteous. Joseph was in right relationship with God. His conscience was pure, that is, aligned completely with the Word of God given to him.

In our Collect today, we asked God to purify our conscience, to align us completely with the Word of God who dwells in us. The voice of God within us, individually and as a community, leads us forward in the way we are meant to go. It tells us what our divine purpose is and how to live it out.

St. Paul tells us that we have been prepared to do this, having received grace and apostleship from Jesus. We are by definition a gathering of apostles – a people sent on a mission. And what is our mission? To use everything we’ve been given, and risk everything we have, so that God can be made known, and God’s love made manifest in the world in new and unprecedented ways, until all people, languages, races, and nations are “restored to unity with God and one another in Christ.” (BCP, 855).

As we practice our last week of Advent together, I pray that we will listen faithfully and fearlessly to the voice of God within us and respond as Joseph did, with our “yes.” Amen.

2 Advent, 2022-A: Peace in our believing

Lectionary: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12 

En el nombre del Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen. 

As a pastor and a spiritual director, I have the privilege of being invited into deep conversations with people when their faith is being challenged, or they’re experiencing a “dark night” where they feel no sense of the presence of God in their lives. Some are seeking faithfully to discern God’s path for this moment in their lives. Others are just trying to stay connected. 

In all of these conversations, what is foundational is the person’s relationship with God. Who is God to each of these? How do they relate to God and how do they experience God relating to them?

Some of us who grew up in the church learned how to understand and relate to God in certain “acceptable” ways. Others among us either didn’t grow up in the church, or grew up being taught awful, sometimes unfaithful doctrines that continue to affect how we relate to God. Still others have had personal, mystical experiences of God leading to an intimate, convincing relationship with God. Whatever religious doctrines or practices or theology we have, when life is challenging, it’s our belief in and relationship with God that carry us through.

(Photo credit: VM Sherer, "God" by Manuela Rivera Mulvey)

What I’ve noticed is that the challenging moments of our lives often affect our belief in God. I think of medieval mystic Julian of Norwich whose physical challenges led her into an experience of God that completely transformed her believing, and therefore how she related to God, leading her to her famous description of Christ the Mother of Mercy and her equally famous proclamation that “God is not wroth” which she clarifies by saying that wrath is found in humans, but not in God who loves us mercifully, tenderly, and completely.

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul is encouraging the members of the new Christian church in Rome to relate to one another differently: to live in peace and harmony. Jews and Gentiles, Roman occupiers and those they occupied are now members of a new community of faith. The Scriptures, he reminds them, foretold that God’s plan of salvation would be revealed through the Jews, but that it would reach all nations and peoples, and habitual enemies would live together in peace.

This is what we heard described in the reading from Isaiah. The coming of the king will signal the inauguration of a time of profound peace born of right relationship. In this new era, the peace will be so deep, so complete that even natural enemies will share cooperative, peaceful lives.

Looking around then and now, this seems like a dim possibility, but our belief assures us that with God, nothing is impossible. So, Paul exhorts the church in Rome to continue to hope and believe praying this beautiful blessing over them: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Peace in believing…

If we believe that God is just and kind, full of compassion and mercy, that God cares for those who suffer and hears their prayers, that God’s love for us is steadfast and sacrificial, then even when things have gone array, we can have peace in our believing. Even when the world has gone wrong, our belief that God chooses to be in loving, sustaining relationship with us will sustain our hope.

What gets in our way is sin, but that’s one of those words… How do we understand it?

I offer you what German-American theologian Paul Tillich wrote just after WWII came to an end. Tillich describes sin as a three-fold separation: from God, from each other, and from ourselves. This separation, which is caused by the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, distorts all of our relationships. It is only by God’s grace and our willingness to repent that our relationships are restored and we are returned to righteousness, that is, to right relationship. (Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, Whipf and Stock Pub., 1948)

This is the kind of repentance John the Baptist is calling the people to in today’s gospel. John proclaims that the people need to repent so they can receive the grace about to come in the one who would come after him, the one who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit and fire.

And the people were flocking to John to hear his teaching. They wanted what he was offering – a new way of being in relationship with God and each other.

Even the religious authorities were coming, but when they arrive, John doesn’t mince words with them. Why was he so caustic with them? We can’t be sure if the Pharisees and Sadducees came to observe what John was doing in order to prepare an “official response” or if they were, like many others, coming to him drawn by the message of this new way of being. My guess is, it was probably a bit of both.

John’s prophetic teachings used apocalyptic language familiar to the listeners of the day. We have taken them to be punitive, but they really are promising and uplifting. Otherwise, why would so many flock to hear him?

The scariest thing John says in this gospel is probably this: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So let’s look at that more deeply.

The Messiah is coming. The winnowing fork enables him to separate fruit that is ready to be used, from the chaff. Chaff is a natural by-product of the process, and of itself isn’t bad. It just isn’t useful in its present form so it is burned.

The habitual association with hellfire and eternal punishment often clouds our thinking on this, but John says the chaff will be burned in “unquenchable fire.”

As we’ve discussed before, fire is biblical language for the presence of God. Think of the burning bush and of John’s proclamation that Jesus would baptize them with fire. God’s steadfast love and mercy cannot be quenched by us or anything we do. In God, whose mercy endures forever, all who aren’t ready in their present form will be made new by the unrelenting love of God.

We sin. That doesn’t make us bad – just human. Advent calls us to own that and repent, trusting that God loves us and stands ready to restore us to right relationship. When we choose to repent, we may find ourselves “struck by grace,” as Tillich says, “the way St. Paul was on the road to Damascus, knowing deeply the truth that God loves us with an incomprehensible love...”

Repentance opens the way for all of our relationships to be changed, empowered by the grace of God’s unquenchable love. Trusting in the steadfast love of God who is always faithful, we can choose to repent in the way John the Baptist taught and change the way we’re in relationship with God and with one another. 

Then we can live together in peace, and we will have within ourselves peace in our believing. Amen.

23 Pentecost, 2022-C: The new creation

Lectionary: Isaiah 65:17-25, Canticle 9, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19 

En el nombre del Dios, que es Trinidad en unidad. Amen. 

One of the greatest mysteries of our faith – to me – is us. We who are bound up in skin, so marvelously made that the intricacies of our physicality are still being discovered by science… we who are also temples of God’s own Spirit, dwelling places of the Eternal One. We are walking, talking miracles: embodied spirits - form and formlessness, time and timelessness dwelling in our humble, complicated, beloved selves.

Our mortal nature allows us to kiss a loved one, walk on a grassy field, swim in the ocean, and nap under a tree. The Immortal One dwelling in us enables us to know love that transcends time, space, and persons; and to connect to all creation and our Creator in mystical union.

Our Collect today addresses the wholeness of our natures: our mortal selves that hear and see and learn, and our spiritual selves that open to holy Scripture and find it a doorway to hope, and eternity. Most of us know what this feels like – that moment you’re reading something in Scripture you’ve read 100 times before, but suddenly, it breaks you wide open and you are flooded with joy, insight, and truth – the whole thing leaving you breathless and amazed.

This is the moment we recognize how corporeal God’s presence is in us and at the same time, how transcendent we and all creation are in God. Like I said, it’s a mystery.

In our Old Testament reading today, the Prophet Isaiah speaks to this mystery. God is promising a new thing, a new Jerusalem a new place where God’s people will live in joy and the things of the earth that bring sadness or distress will be transformed by the love of God. This transformation will be corporeal, such that “ the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox…” It will also be transcendent: “Before they call, I will answer, while they are yet speaking, I will hear.”

That is the new creation: the symbiotic dance of earth and heaven, God and creation, time and eternity. That is what we sing out in our moments of tranquility and what we cling to in faith when the world is crashing around us.

In the conversation between Jesus and his disciples in the gospel from Luke, we see Jesus guiding his students into this understanding ahead of their own trials. The plot to destroy Jesus is underway and Jesus knows what’s coming – for him and for them. The world is about to crash down around his disciples, so they need to learn how to look beyond the present moment on earth and embrace and ever hold fast to the eternal plan of God. 

So do we.

Has there ever been a time in earth’s history when there weren’t wars and insurrections? Nations rising against nations? Earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, and plagues?

Those aren’t the things to dread, Jesus tells his disciples because, before all of that, the powerful on earth will seize you and throw you in prison. You will be brought before kings and governors who will accuse you on account of me. This isn’t something to dread either, Jesus says, because it will be an opportunity for you to witness to the truth you know, the truth of the new creation prophesied by Isaiah fulfilled now in me.

Let’s pause here for a minute to notice something in this part of the story. Jesus says to his disciples: “So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”

Jesus is promising his disciples that he will give them wisdom and the words they should use after he has been killed - which he also told them was going to happen. Did they wonder how he would do that? Do we? 

Do we remember that we are walking, talking miracles: embodied spirits - form and formlessness, time and timelessness dwelling in our humble, complicated, beloved selves because Jesus’ eternal Spirit lives in our mortal bodies, speaking for us, and acting through us in every moment of our earthly lives?

Corrie ten Boom was a perfect example of this. She was a Christian who put her own life at risk hiding Jews from the Nazis during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Her resistance resulted in her being sent to a concentration camp which she survived but most of her family didn’t. Corrie once said, “I know that the experiences of our lives when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work [God] will give us to do.” (Source)

When we surrender our need to judge, to escape suffering, or even to survive, and choose instead to embrace and ever hold fast to the redeeming love of God, we find life, hope, and true super-hero style strength. I think of saints like Corrie ten Boom, Catherine of Sienna, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – to name just a few.

As Christians, the end of anything is not something we dread or avoid or prepare to survive. It is for us, the revelation of a path to new life. Our reading from Isaiah shows us that God has been bringing new life from death for a very long time.

At the conclusion of this gospel reading, Jesus says, “By your endurance, you will gain your souls." This is often taken to mean that when we suffer, we “earn” our salvation, but that isn’t what Jesus is saying. Jesus never said stuff like that.

Jesus is saying that when we are suffering if we wait in the discomfort, we will awaken to the fact of the presence of God within us. When that happens, we become fully ourselves: human bodies housing the Divine Spirit. Then there is no circumstance, not a pandemic, not even death, that has power over us for we live and breathe in communion with God, according to the will and plan of God.

We can, therefore, let go of our desired outcomes, be undistracted by fear, and choose instead to be awake, aware, and alive in this present moment which is a gift from God. Embracing the hope of eternal life in Christ and holding fast to it no matter what we see or experience in the world is our faithful response.

I close with a poem about hope: 

“Hope is a state of mind not 

 dictated by what appears 

to be, but a promise 

built on faith. 

We look beyond 

fear. And begin to trust 

 what we do not yet see.

We listen 

for though we prepare

and plan

and strive to organize, Love 

will take us in

a new direction, a re-birth

beyond our comprehension. 

 In prayerful surrender

we discover who we are.

By faith we continue

to become

truly ourselves.”                                        Poem and photo: © Valori M. Sherer, 2009. All rights reserved. 

Amen.

All Saints, 2022-C: Bound together in Christ

 Lectionary: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31 

En el nombre del Dios: que es Trinidad en unidad. Amen. 

I love the feast of All Saints because it reminds us that our experience of reality in this world is only part of a larger picture. The larger picture, for Episcopalians, includes heaven and earth and all that is in them: the vast expanse of interstellar space and this fragile earth, our island home… along with angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven (BCP, 370-371) who sing their praises with us each time we gather for Holy Eucharist.

In that larger picture, the will of God is the only reality, and that will is most simply and most accurately described as reconciling love, love that seeks, finds, and joins together all things and all people. We are, therefore, never alone. The saints who were, who are, and who are yet to be are united to us in and by God’s eternal love.

In our earthly lives, we witness and experience a world that often isn’t safe for us and it seems like we need to take care of ourselves even as we profess our belief in God’s redeeming love. The Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ ends up being reduced to a set of beliefs or practices that function more like ecclesiastical fire insurance (you know, staying out of hell) rather than as an invitation to live transformed lives.

When we are baptized, we are baptized first into the death of Christ, and everything we think we know about God, the world, and even ourselves dies there. In Baptism we are reconciled to God in Christ, becoming part of that larger picture of love. We take on the title and the identity of saint: one who shares life in Christ.

We are baptized into new life and we emerge from the baptismal waters already living a new reality. We then spend the rest of our lives sharing the Good News of that truth by living it so that all who know us know that God’s love is the true reality of the world.

In his book, “Proof of Heaven,” neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, M.D., admitted to being a C&E Episcopalian who wasn’t particularly spiritual – until he contracted E.coli and nearly died. Dr. Alexander talked about having a near-death experience in the hospital after which everything he understood about everything was changed. He said he was transformed by a Love he encountered in a place he calls heaven while his earthly body lay in a coma in a hospital bed.

He described his experience of heaven saying: “It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming part of it – without joining with it in some mysterious way (45) … Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else…” (46)

Dr. Alexander goes on to describe other worlds, higher worlds that “aren’t totally apart from us, because all worlds are part of the same overarching divine Reality.” This is reconciliation and it is what the world witnessed for the first time at Jesus' baptism when the heavens opened and the voice of God declared Jesus the beloved Son. It's what we continue to witness today at this and every Baptism.

Our earthly experience that we are separated from God is replaced by the reality of our eternal oneness with God in Christ, and that transforms how we live and the choices we make, which Jesus kindly outlines for us in today’s gospel from Luke.

Speaking to his disciples, Jesus says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” These aren’t declarative statements, they are descriptive. When you begin from your oneness with God, you will love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and bless and pray for those who harm you.

It’s the outcome of the reality of our oneness with God. As Jesus’ disciples in this moment of the Christian narrative, we can expect that the world’s response to us will be much like it was for those first disciples: we will be hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed by those who choose to live as if they are separated from God’s love, power, and mercy. When that happens, Jesus says, “Rejoice,…and leap for joy, for …your reward is great in heaven.”

Episcopalians don’t see this reward as something we collect upon the end of our earthly lives. We understand it to be an eternal reward, eternal – having no beginning and no end. It doesn’t start later, it’s happening now. The reward is that we are able to look beyond the circumstance of any earthly moment and trust the continual working out of God’s plan of redeeming love on earth as it is in heaven.

Our Catechism reminds us that we believe that “the universe is good… the work of a… loving God who
creates, sustains, and directs it. We believe that the world belongs to its creator; and that we are called to enjoy it and care for it in accordance with God's purposes. We believe that all people are worthy of respect and honor because all are created in the image of God…” (BCP, 846) We believe that the communion of saints is the whole family of God, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.

Living this larger, heavenly reality, in the face of a very different earthly reality isn't something we can do on our own. It's something we must do together as the church, the mystical body of Christ on earth.

Today, we have the great joy of baptizing Vincent Johnson into this heavenly reality, and we invite the heavens to open up as we all declare Vincent a saint, a member of the family of God in Christ among the communion of saints on earth.

I invite the family to join me now at the Baptismal font.

21 Pentecost, 2022-C: Surprising redemption

 Lectionary: Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4; Psalm 119:137-144; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; Luke 19:1-10 

As news of the shooting at Central Visual and Performing Arts HS developed this week, a letter written by the shooter, 19-year-old Orlando Harris, was found in his car. In that letter, Orlando said, “I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life.” Source. 

I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life…

We don’t know the circumstances of Orlando Harris’ life or what led him to the moment of violence he unleashed at CVPA. I accept that his note reflects his experience. There is also evidence of his family’s attempts to intervene to protect him and others. In the end, however, he was lost. His experience of being cut off from love led to death.

It’s that way for all of us. Our lives are rooted in our relationship with God, our Creator, and fortified in our relationships with others.

I wish Orlando had known that his cries echo the human experience. In our reading from Habakkuk we hear this desperate prayer: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence” and you will not save?”

I wish Orlando could have known God’s redemption as described by the prophet Habakkuk who moved from desperate isolation to steadfast faith, trusting God to answer his prayer: “I will stand at my watchpost… I will keep watch to see what God will say to me…”

And God told the prophet Habakkuk to wait.

Waiting can be the hardest thing to do when we are in pain or desperate. Holding still in the steadfast belief that God hears and answers our prayers, that God will find and rescue us when we are lost, is hard when God seems absent amid the destruction and violence all around us.

But God isn’t absent. God isn’t ever absent. And God knows better than we do how redemption will happen.

That is what Jesus is teaching us in today’s gospel from Luke. The story of Zacchaeus is a familiar one. It even has a song that sings in our thoughts every time we hear his name: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he. He climbed up in the sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see…”

Do you know it? I remember it from childhood.

The story of Zacchaeus teaches us that God’s redemption will almost always surprise us and that we should be careful about what we think we know about who needs it.

Zacchaeus was a Jewish tax collector who was, by definition, working for the enemy – the Roman occupiers, and getting rich from it. He was, therefore hated by his Jewish community and ostracized by them. In today’s parlance, he was a traitor to his own people and was profiting from it.

So when Jesus came to the wealthy city of Jericho, where Joshua won the battle that gave the Israelites their first home in the Promised Land after their exile, the Jewish people were happy to welcome him. Zacchaeus’ presence would have been an unwelcome part of this happy day.

Most of us grew up hearing that Jesus saved Zacchaeus that day, but the passage tells a different story. Many translations change the verb tense from present to future. Zacchaeus actually says, "Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor – not I will give… If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much – not I will restore, as our translation says.

Some scholars justify this intentional verb tense change by reasoning that if it were present tense, Zacchaeus would sound boastful which Jesus wouldn’t like, or that rich men in the gospels are usually lost, or that if Zacchaeus had been righteous all along it would diminish this as a salvation story.

But that makes no sense to me. The story is a much stronger story in keeping with the overall message of Jesus when it is read in the present tense as it was written.

Zacchaeus was a righteous tax collector, which is admittedly, a difficult concept to fathom. Zacchaeus found a way to survive the horrible reality of Roman occupation and even to profit from it, but he didn’t do that by stealing from his own people.

Even though they hated and ostracized him, Zacchaeus remained steadfast in his right relationship with his Jewish community – and this goes straight to the heart of Jesus’ continual admonition not to judge. The Jewish people in Zacchaeus’ community judged him as sinful – and they were wrong.

So, Jesus demonstrated what God’s redemption looks like – only it wasn’t for Zacchaeus. It was for the “household” (Gk: oikos) present – the Jewish people who were gathered near that sycamore tree. By proclaiming, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham…" Jesus freed them all of the prejudice that separated and divided them, reconciling Zacchaeus back into his Jewish community.

When he said, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost” he was talking about those who put up barriers to relationship, as justified as they thought they were. Zacchaeus was not who was lost. He was already justified by his righteousness. It was the Jewish people gathered. They were the lost ones Jesus came to save, to unbind them from the sin of their judgment and the brokenness it caused their community.

Today as we all heal from the trauma of another school shooting, this one in our hometown, our community, it helps to remember that we too tend to pass judgment and when we do it fractures our community.

What led Orlando Harris, a child of God, to that horrible moment of destruction? We don’t know, but we can and must remember that we are not called to judge, but to reconcile. To do that we must recognize where prejudice is coloring our opinions and fracturing our community, and act to restore right relationship.

As Christians, we are called to the ministry of reconciliation established by Jesus. We do this instinctively when we let ourselves. As news of the shooting unfolded, the videos showed people embracing one another, holding hands, and tenderly touching tear-streaked faces. This is what being the hands and heart of Christ in a broken world looks like.

Let’s close with a prayer by our bishop, The Rt. Rev. Deon Johnson., called, “A prayer for God’s embrace.” 

 Let us pray. 

Surround us O God, surround us, 

Surround us with your loving embrace, when the weight of the world is heavy. 

Surround us with your tender compassion, when the weariness encroaches.

Surround us with your amazing grace, when all seems hopeless and lost.

Surround us with your abiding wisdom, when we are too well pleased with ourselves.

Surround us with your unfenced joy, when the sadness of the world overwhelms.

Surround us O God, with your very self, that we may rest secure in your everlasting arms. 

Amen.

19 Pentecost, Proper 24, 2022-C: Praying into the light of God

Lectionary: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8 

En el nombre del Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen. 

Did you know that the roots of our Anglican-Episcopal tradition are Celtic? It wasn’t until 664, at the Council of Whitby, that the Anglican Church voted to shift from the Celtic tradition of the monks in Iona, to the Roman tradition under Pope Gregory the Great, thereby solving the perplexing problems of how to calculate the date of Easter and how monks should cut their hair.

It’s important to know our history especially as we celebrate Creation Season this year. In the creation-centered Celtic tradition, God is feminine in nature and the institution operates within a relational, monastic structure. In the Roman tradition, God is masculine in nature and the institution operates on a hierarchical, militaristic structure. 

Today we are both and evidence of that can be seen woven into our polity and our practices. How we pray, for example, reflects which tradition has had more influence in our experience.

Do we pray to God who outranks us and whose orders we must follow or be punished? Or do we pray to God whom Julian of Norwich described saying, “our heavenly mother, Jesus, may never suffer us to be lost, for we are his children. And he is almighty, all wisdom, all love…For now he wants us to behave just like a child; for when a child is upset or afraid, it runs straight to its mother with all its might.” (John Skinner, ed., Revelation of Love, Julian of Norwich, 137).  Note: Julian icon written by Anne Davidson. Used with permission.

There are times we need God to be strong, protective, and ready to kick some opponent butt for us. There are other times we need the tender, loving God from whose womb we came and to whose womb we’ll return, as Julian said. Thankfully, we have both. God is all of that and more.

When we pray, it is always in response to God. When we think we need to ask God for help, or strength, or health, it is because God has nudged us to acknowledge our need and come close, trusting God to provide. There are times when our prayers seem to go unheard, and our pain or heartache remains undiminished… justice unobtained. We cry out to God, ‘Do you not care that this is happening? Where are you God? Why don’t you do something?’

When that happens, we remember our belief that God desires the reconciliation of the whole world, including those who cause us pain and heartache, which is why Jesus told us to pray for our enemies and for those who persecute us. They are to be redeemed also and we participate in their redemption by our prayer. What seems like a delay in God’s response to our prayer for justice may actually be the result of God’s continuing efforts to redeem a lost soul or the souls of those involved in the corrupt systems doing the harm.

Luke reminds us to pray always and not lose heart and Jesus’ parable contrasts God with the judges of the world, assuring us that God hears and answers our prayers. “Listen to what the unjust judge says… I will grant justice.” Jesus promises that God responds to our prayer for our sakes, not for God’s own sake, and that God will act quickly to give us justice. Do you believe that? Jesus asks his listeners… Do we?

Prayer is the way we go from knowing about God to knowing God. When we enter into a deeply prayerful relationship with God, we find that God’s desires soon become our desires. Over time, we begin to notice that our will submits more easily and more quickly to God’s will, and we become accustomed to experiencing a oneness with God, one another, and all of creation that is real and true. The things of the world that divide us (power, money, privilege, position) begin to look ridiculous in the context of the Love that connects us and makes us one.

Prayer is a discipline – a strength we build by practice. Setting aside time to pray alone every day and praying in community every week are important habits to foster and they are especially helpful when we find ourselves in crisis, whether it’s a crisis in our lives or a crisis of faith. That’s when our discipline of prayer carries us through, even when we don’t know what we believe anymore. And when we are experiencing the hardest of times, the emptiest of dark nights, the prayers of our community join with the prayers of the company of heaven to uphold us until we emerge victorious again into the light of God.

The way of God and the way of the world hardly ever agree as Jesus’ parable illustrates. That’s why we are wise to heed St. Paul’s advice to be steadfast in believing and guided by Scripture. It’s why we need to remember Luke’s reminder that we should pray always and not lose heart.

But how do we pray always? It seems like an impossible task. I think we are better at this than we might think.

We are praying when we rest quietly in the presence of God, when we read Holy Scripture, pray the Rosary, walk a labyrinth, or contemplate an icon. We pray when we lose ourselves in the magic of a sunset, or when we sing hymns to God. We pray when we joyfully tend to mundane tasks grateful for the gift of life and the ability to work.

When it’s hard to pray, and all we can do is wait in darkness, feeling no real connection to God or anything else, even that is prayer, because it is in the darkness that the transforming light of Christ, promised and delivered to us by Jesus, breaks in most dazzlingly.

I close with a prayer from St. Columba of Iona: 

Be to me, O God, a bright flame before me, a guiding star above me, a smooth path beneath me, and a kindly shepherd behind me, today, tonight, and forever. (St Columba 521-597AD, Iona)  Amen.