20 Pentecost & Baptism, 2024-B: A guarantee of love

Lectionary: Genesis 2:18-24, Psalm 8; Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

En el nombre de Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador. In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen. 

So many of the conflicts in our world, and in our churches, are about power - who has it, who wants it, and what they do with it. Our own denomination, The Episcopal Church, is a daughter of the Church of England, established when Henry VIII drew a line in the sand for Pope Clement VII clarifying that the British monarch alone had power and control over the church in England and its finances. That church, btw, was Roman Catholic, as was Henry until the day he died.

Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, established the Church in England as the via media, the middle way - a church that could welcome Catholics and Protestants to worship together, as one family. Elizabeth commissioned the greatest literary and theological minds in England to write a Prayer Book that could be used in common by both sides: what we now call our Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth was determined to establish peace in England and to stop the killing of English Protestants by English Catholics and vice versa. Her effort was successful and peace was maintained for nearly 50 years in England during her reign. This is the church from which we, the Episcopal Church in the USA, descend.

We were born over a dispute of power. The Pope said he had it. The King said, Oh no you don’t. I have it. The same can be said of the Great Schism of 1054 when the Eastern and Western Churches split. There was a point at which there were 3 popes - each one excommunicating the others. Excommunications that lasted until 1964. Finally, there is the Protestant Reformation. All of this contributed to our identity as Catholic and Protestant Christians in the Episcopal branch of our family tree.

Conflicts like these may seem rather silly to us now, but only because we have the benefit of a perspective that follows the intervention of God’s mercy and redeeming love.

Power is what our Scripture readings are about today. Power that belongs to God alone who created us, redeemed us, and sustains us.

How we understand God’s power matters, especially on a day we are celebrating the sacrament of Baptism. Let’s begin with the Collect.

In this prayer we call ourselves unworthy because of the sinfulness we know we have and hope to hide - maybe even from ourselves. It’s as if we think we must be sinless to merit God’s love and provision. That makes me sad because as every parent knows, we don’t love and give to our children what they need because they are worthy. They are worthy because they exist. The same is true for us all as children of God.

A focus on worthiness tends to celebrate those with power and judge those without it. Are the billionaires among us rich because they are of more value than the poor? Are their riches a divine reward for their hard work or faithfulness to God? Clearly not. As the saying goes, “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.” (George Monbiot)

God’s power isn’t about the distribution of blessings to some and curses to others. It’s a guarantee of a loving, merciful relationship, in all of the possible circumstances of our lives.

Our relationship to God isn’t as a cowering, fearful creature, but as a beloved child. That’s why Jesus takes a child in his embrace in today’s Gospel and reminds us that it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

As I said two weeks ago, when we are like a child we are open, trusting, and rely on our heavenly parent to know how to take care of what we need and to be ready to do it. When we are like a child, we offer our love freely. We know we’re part of a family and aren’t expected to ‘go it alone.’ We know we don’t know everything and trust that God does. When we are like a child, we trust God to guide us, to keep us safe, and to bring us home, no matter what the earthly path before us looks like.

We are created by a Community of Love, the Trinity, to live in community. As our awareness of our relationship with God grows, we see that community broaden through ever-expanding circles from our families of origin to our friends and faith communities, to our human siblings around the world, to all of God’s creation.

Our communal relationships begin and grow in God. God alone is power. We are not powerless - we just aren’t God.

We also aren’t unworthy. In our Eucharistic Prayer, which you will hear in a few minutes, we give thanks to God, saying: “In (Jesus), you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.

That is exactly what our sacrament of Baptism demonstrates - our death to all in the world that would harm and divide us and our rebirth into life in Christ which unifies us, makes us one, and guarantees that we are never alone.

Today, Henry Mulchek will be Baptized. We will pour water over him and anoint him, symbolizing his full initiation into the Body of Christ, his redemption and release from earthly bondage, and his entry into unity of life in the Holy Spirit - a unity we all share. We affirm that unity by renewing our own Baptismal vows. So, let’s do this. I invite the candidate for Baptism, his parents and godparents, and all the children of the church to come forward to the Baptismal font.

Pentecost 18, 2024-B: Open, expectant, and certain

 Proper 20 Lectionary: Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37 

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

In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.

If God is love and creator of all that is, then who or what in all of creation is not of God? How then, do we understand the ills of the world: pain, sickness, loneliness, hunger, poverty, abuse, oppression, war, betrayal? Are those of God too? The platitude, “everything happens for a reason” is neither helpful nor faithful.

We don’t know why some things happen because we can’t see the plan of God in its fullness. There are times bad things happen - sometimes, but not always - because someone acted outside of the divine plan of love. The consequence of their action has nothing to do with God, at least until God’s redemption has interceded – and we can never see that coming. It almost always happens in a way and at a time we just can’t imagine.

This is what the disciples are struggling to comprehend as Jesus teaches them in our gospel today. The timing of this lesson from Jesus is important. Jesus and the disciples are back in Capernaum, Jesus’s hometown.

Jesus has completed the last of his healing ministry and is now focusing on preparing the disciples for his entry into Jerusalem where he will be betrayed, abused, and ultimately killed. This is the second of three times Jesus tells his disciples about the path that lies ahead of them.

Jesus said, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands – a wrong thing - and they will kill him – a terrible thing - and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” Wait – what? Mark tells us they didn’t understand what Jesus was saying and they were afraid to ask him about it.

Jesus is teaching the disciples to wait in faith and keep themselves open, expectant, and certain of God’s loving plan even when terrible or wrong things start to happen. The last time Jesus taught this lesson, you’ll remember that Peter didn’t want to hear it. ‘No Lord. May that never happen.’ Jesus pushed back at Peter saying, “Get behind me Satan.” ‘Don’t distract me, don’t tempt me away from the path of redeeming love being laid by God.

How can this path be of God? The disciples simply can’t see how Jesus’ betrayal and death can be part of God’s plan of love. This question comes from a worldly point of view.

In our lives, as time unfolds in the earthly realm, the heavenly perspective often eludes us. At the same time, we are steeped in the values of the world and they become ours. Despite our best efforts, we are lured into living as if hierarchy is a given, as if arrogance is really confidence, and selfish schemes are just good business, as if hoarding money and possessions is a greatness to celebrate, along with the power and influence they afford the hoarder.

This is what distracted the disciples as they traveled back to their hometown. They were arguing about who among them was the greatest. Being great from a worldly perspective is a human desire, not a heavenly one, so as Jesus’ earthly story begins to draw toward its conclusion, he teaches the disciples one of the most important lessons he has to give them.

When they settled in for the night, Jesus asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” They were busted and they knew it. But Jesus, as patient and loving as ever, sat down and called the disciples to him. When a rabbi does that, it means class is in session.

‘Do you want to be great?’ Jesus asked. Then he turned all their expectations upside down – again. Jesus had a way of doing this. The greatest, he said, are not first, but last. The greatest must be servant of all.

To demonstrate his point, Jesus took a little child, and holding that child in a loving embrace, he explained that to the world, this child is helpless, powerless, has little to offer, and no clout whatsoever. But to heaven, this child is the face of redemption because: whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not just me but also the one who sent me.

In other words, when we connect with the helpless, the powerless, the weak, the poor, and the excluded, we connect with God. They are the means by which we are made co-creators of love and partners in the continuing work of redemption. And the consequences of our actions echo through time and place, like a pebble that is dropped into still water. As one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Dar Williams, said: “Every time you opt into kindness/ make one connection/ [that] used to divide us/ it echoes all over the world.” (“Echoes” by Dar Williams, My Better Self album)

The symbolism Jesus employed in this demonstration is powerful. A child is open, trusting, and relies on her parent to know how to take care of what she needs and to be ready to do it. A child offers his love freely. He knows he’s part of a family and isn’t expected to ‘go it alone.’ A child knows they don’t know everything and trusts that their adults know a lot more than they do – important things, things necessary for their survival and contentment. So, they trust their adults to guide them, to keep them safe, and bring them home, even when the path before them looks terrible, dangerous, and impossible to pass.

As followers of Christ, you and I are walking on a path of redeeming love that is laid out for us - moment by moment - by God. This path often takes unexpected turns but, we are in the hands of God who always leads us home. We can’t get lost.

A tell-tale sign that we have taken ourselves off the path of love is that conflicts and disputes arise. When that happens, the only faithful response is to “submit to God” as James says in his letter, to draw near to God who will draw near to us and restore our wisdom, our peace, and our feet on the path of love.

Another sign of being off the path of love is anxiety. As we prayed in our Collect, “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love and hold fast to those things that are eternal; and what is eternal and eternally true for us is Jesus, who calls us to serve in his name.

What I love about this gospel story is the way Jesus acted so gently with his disciples who didn’t get it, were afraid to ask about it, and were about to have to deal with it without him. I’m sure he knew how hard it was for his followers to shift from their expectation of Messiah to Jesus’ embodiment of it; from their life-long goal of taking the seat of power to Jesus’ command to be last of all.

It’s hard to shift from the habits of our thinking, especially when the world affirms them so strongly. We won’t always get it right or quickly, but Jesus will stick with us, gently showing us the way to go because he trusts us to go forward as faithfully as we can, moment to moment. He trusts us to be his hands and hearts in the world today, serving and healing in his name. It is our privilege and our responsibility to do so.

I close with the prayer written by the founder of Centering Prayer, Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Let us pray. 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does, in fact, please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

16 Pentecost, 2024-B: Super heroes and she-roes for Jesus

Lectionary: Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

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

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen. 

There are times in our lives when we just need a superhero - someone caring enough to notice our need or the injustice we’ve suffered; someone compassionate enough to choose to help us; and someone brave and strong enough to get it done. The prophet Isaiah speaks to this need describing God as one who will swoop in with vengeance and terrible recompense to rescue us from whatever or whoever threatens us.

I had a superhero like that once - a state prosecutor, named Mike, whose arm muscles literally bulged under his suit jacket. Mike fought fiercely for justice for my daughter and me when we were trying to leave my abusive first husband, and he got it done.

But Isaiah also speaks of God as one who springs up unexpectedly like water in the wilderness, who heals us and soothes us like cool streaming water on hot, thirsty ground. I’ve also had this kind of hero… a she-ro, actually: Mary, the Mother of God. Mary first came to me when I was 4 years old and every time I’ve needed her since. Her presence is always comforting and brings me relief and healing of body and soul.

We who believe can trust that God always knows our circumstances and sends us exactly the heroes and she-roes we need, from earth and heaven, to heal and encourage us, and to get us through. The only catch is that we have to be open to receiving the help, which requires humility.

As I preached last week, humility is a vital Christian virtue. We continually cultivate humility by paying attention to the condition of our hearts, the womb within us where God is conceiving and forming not just new life in us, but also a new way for us to live. This new life motivates us to respond in our world in the ways of God rather than the ways the world has taught us.

In his epistle, James, the brother of Jesus, writes about how this looks. We would live without partiality or favoritism, respecting each person just as they come to us. We would be compassionate, acting on our faith, not just spewing it.

The best illustration of this, however, is in today’s gospel. Having just taught his disciples that evil comes not from without, but from within our hearts, Jesus sets off for Gentile country where he embodies this teaching.

A Syrophoenician woman comes up to Jesus, bows down at his feet, and begs Jesus to heal her daughter. This woman is violating all kinds of cultural boundaries: she’s a Gentile, a woman, and she’s speaking to a man who isn’t her family. She could have been punished severely. That’s how desperate she was.

Which is why Jesus’ response to her is so jarring. “Let the children (of Israel) be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Calling a Gentile a “dog” was a common racial slur at that time. Jesus’ use of it challenges our sanitized version of him.

But this is a story about breaking down boundaries that divide us. In order to break down entrenched barriers we must first notice they exist. Jesus’ startling statement worked like a charm – then and now. Everyone noticed.

The Jewish hearers of Jesus’ slur would have been in full agreement. Syrians are dogs; they don’t deserve what belongs to us. The Syrians listening would have heard the same old, familiar discrimination. It was the way of their world.

That’s why Jesus’ words to this suffering woman, followed by his healing of her daughter, obliterated those entrenched, divisive barriers, and everyone there witnessed this new way of living in the world.

The second healing story breaks down even more barriers. In this story, a deaf man is brought to Jesus. Jesus takes this Gentile man apart from the crowd and performs a Jewish healing ritual on him: laying on of hands and healing prayer, a practice we continue today. Immediately, the man’s ears were opened and his speech was clear.

Mark tells us that those who witnessed this healing were overcome with awe and wonder. Who wouldn’t be?

This man was miraculously healed in his body, but the real barrier Jesus brought down was spiritual. In those days, it was believed that if a person were born deaf it was punishment for sin, probably his parents’ sin. Rather than judging him, Jesus set him free from the sin. In fact, he set his whole family free.

Forgiving sin is something only God can do. So yes, this was an astounding moment! Also astounding was that by this healing, Jesus demonstrated a new way of living in the world - a way where sin is forgiven and healing is real.

In each of these healing stories, Jesus not only meets the ones he heals where they are; he meets the communities that surround them where they are - and heals them too. Jewish people, Syrians, Greeks, and Romans, intensely divided by politics and privilege, are made one in Jesus in these two stories. 

The healing love of God obliterates boundaries.

We’re a community that knows healing. It’s the good news we, at Emmanuel, have to share.

We had to learn together that the means of opening a path of healing is the cultivation and practice of humility. We became each other's heroes and she-roes, sometimes fighting fiercely for justice, other times offering tenderness and soothing care.

This is the new way of living in the world Jesus is teaching in today’s lessons. It’s a way that doesn’t care about how much money, power, or influence you have in the world or in this church,

…a way that welcomes all whom God leads to us, just as they are, showing compassion to anyone who needs it

 … a way where we who witness the healing power of Jesus share the wonder of that with others in our various social circles

…a way that practices forgiveness, where healing is made real for the one who sinned and the one who forgives, reconciling them and their communities into the unity of God’s love.

Three years ago, this was my first Sunday here at Emmanuel. As I preached last week, we’re still who we’ve always been, but when we look back over these last three years, we can see that God has been working in us and a lot has changed.

The healing we’ve been given isn’t just for us - it’s for us to share - and what better day to do that than Homecoming? Our Picnic in the Parish Hall and Ministry Fair offer us the opportunity to enjoy our friendships and commit our gifts to service in the name of Jesus.

Today we acknowledge that we are the super heroes and she-roes God is sending to serve those in need in our church and in our corner of God’s kingdom. We already have all we need to obliterate the barriers that divide us because we have seen and lived the reality of God’s healing love.  Amen.

15 Pentecost, 2024-B: Create in us clean hearts

Note: You can watch this being delivered live at Emmanuel Episcopal Church during our Sunday, 10 am service of Holy Eucharist, live-streamed on our YouTube channel.

Lectionary: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 

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

In the wise words of the under-employed theologian: Calvin, from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Waterson, “You know what’s weird? Day by day, nothing changes, but pretty soon, everything is different.”

Calvin is right in that it feels like we are who we’ve always been, but when we look back we realize God has been working in us and actually a lot has changed. It's always been thus and it’s in community where we see this best.

Our Judeo-Christian history shows us that the movement of the Spirit of God within us has led to an ongoing process of change, and we can infer from our history that this will continue beyond us into the future. An example of this is in today’s gospel from Mark.

The topic is ritual handwashing, but that isn’t the point of this story. The point is: how we respond to the difficulty of honoring what is tradition while allowing for the free movement of the Spirit in the world of the moment.

A word about ritual handwashing. It was not about germs but about humility. We must remember that in this moment of history there was no awareness of germs (that wasn’t until 1500 years later). The Torah requires only priests to do the ritual handwashing, but the tradition developed over time to include everyone (male) to do it.

The amount of water used wouldn’t have been enough to clean their hands as it was meant to cleanse their hearts. It was ritual action; one we have kept and still use as part of our Eucharist. You may notice that the acolyte pours water over my hands before the consecration of our bread and wine of Communion.

As my hands are washed, I offer up a prayer taken from Psalm 51: Lord wash away our iniquities and cleanse us from our sins. Create in us clean hearts, O God, and renew a right spirit within us.”

The word “heart” in Hebrew refers to the womb, the interior of a person where new life is conceived and nourished. This is why when the Pharisees ask Jesus why his disciples don’t wash their hands according to the tradition of the elders Jesus calls them hypocrites and fires back with a quote from their tradition, from Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.”

Then Jesus turns to address the whole crowd and teaches them about the importance of the condition of their hearts. Evil, he says, doesn’t come from outside us but from within us. Evil is that which causes sorrow, pain, division or unfairly causes harder labor/work for the weak, powerless, or oppressed. Remember what Jesus also said, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.”

Evil comes from within and it can be thoughts or actions. Then Jesus names a few: 

• lasciviousness – a thought: disrespecting another using sex as the means 
• fornication – an action: disrespecting another’s or one’s own body usually through sex 
• covetousness – a thought: wanting something that doesn’t belong to you
• theft – an action: taking that thing that doesn’t belong to you
• adultery – an action and a thought: taking or emotionally cleaving to someone who doesn’t belong to you
• murder – an action: taking a life that doesn’t belong to you (since all life belongs to God) 
• slander – an action: making false or damaging statements about someone in order to harm them or their reputation • blasphemy – an action: doing the same thing about God and sacred things 
• pride – a thought: giving ‘self’ priority over other, even over God. Pride is the opposite of humility, which characterized Jesus, his ministry. The cultivation of humility is one of the main purposes of our rituals. And pride leads to…
• folly. A thought or an action: When we think unwisely, we tend to act unwisely. 

 These are the things that defile, Jesus says. We disrespect and violate ourselves, others, and God when we do these things so we must cleanse our hearts when any of these arises in us.

Jesus demonstrated by his life and ministry that while tradition has value, and the elders have wisdom to share, God is at work doing a new thing, because God is working out Their plan of redemption for the whole world: all people, all times, all places. Continually examining the condition of our hearts is important if we are to be faithful participants with God in this.

Our whole tradition, the Christian tradition, is a new thing God worked through Jesus and his followers in that time. It’s no wonder the Jewish leadership resisted the changes.

Change is difficult. What if important traditions are lost?

I’m sure the Pharisees worried about that when Jesus’ disciples dropped the handwashing tradition. Yet, here we are, still ritually washing our hands more than two millennia later.

God is the true keeper of tradition. No leader, no historian, no theologian decides which traditions will live and which must be let go for a time or forever. God decides this because only God knows the full plan of redemption.

As for us, Jesus teaches us to notice the condition of our hearts, the deep interior of our beings, where new life is conceived and nourished by God. When we find the presence of those things that defile within us, we are to repent – to ask God to cleanse our hearts and renew a right spirit within us.

Anglican theologian Evelyn Underhill says: 

“The coming of the Kingdom is perpetual. Again and again, freshness, novelty, power from beyond the world break in by unexpected paths bringing unexpected change. Those who cling to tradition and fear all novelty in God's relation to the world deny the creative activity of the Holy Spirit, and forget that what is now tradition was once innovation; that the real Christian is always a revolutionary, belongs to a new race, and has been given a new name and a new song.”

Beloved ones, as followers of Jesus we intentionally open ourselves to the movement of the Holy Spirit within us, trusting that our loving and merciful God is steadily working out a plan of redemption for the whole world – all people, all times, all places. Our only concern is faithfully participating in that plan as it is revealed to us in this moment of our collective history.

The church is supposed to be a place where the condition of our hearts can be examined safely within a community where love is practiced. When we find that we have gone astray, as individuals or as a community, we are supported in our repentance by a community that continually cultivates humility through our ritual practices. In this way, over time, we are able restore the priority of God’s will for us over our own.

Each time we review our parish history, as we do each year at our Annual Parish Meeting in January, we see how God has worked in us day by day, changing us, forming us, redirecting us. Think of where we were just a few years ago, and where God has led us to now. It feels like we are who we’ve always been, but when we look back we can see that God has been working in us and actually a lot has changed. 

I close with a prayer from another of my favorites, Bishop Steven Charleston, retired bishop of Alaska, and a member of the Choctaw nation: 

 “Give your heart to love today, not to old thoughts of who you were, but to the new idea that your kindness could change another life. Give your mind to hope today, not to the usual list of impossibilities, but to a single faith that goodness is the purpose of history. Give your spirit to peace today, not to the anger of the moment, but to the welcoming road of grace that leads to the home for which you have longed. Give your hands to the work of justice today, not in resignation but in certainty, knowing that what you do will make an enormous difference.” 

 Amen.

12 Pentecost, 2024-B: The gift and power of Communion

Lectionary: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Psalm 34:1-8; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

En el nombre de Diós: creador, redentor, y santificador... In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.  

 Going to church every Sunday was something my Roman Catholic family did – no questions, no options. We sat in the front row on the left. Always. The one in front of the statue of Mary.

My father, who had a bellowing baritone voice, couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but that never stopped him from singing with gusto, searching for the notes as he sang. I was equally embarrassed and awed by that.

My father was a high-strung, volatile, pre-Vatican II Irishman. He grew up in an Irish gang that ran roughshod over his neighborhood in Washington Heights in NYC.

He was a short man with a powerful presence, who owned every room he walked into, including at church. My father rarely showed emotion – unless it was anger. My sisters and I learned quickly that if Dad’s upper lip disappeared, we’d better get out fast (if we could), because his anger was about to blow.

I’ll never forget this one Sunday when I was 5 years old, I witnessed something incredible. During the consecration of the elements, I saw my dad look up at the altar. An unfamiliar look came over his face and I saw that his face practically glowed with what I can only call a mix of peace and joy. He looked like a different person.

I followed his gaze to see what he was looking at. The priest was elevating the bread, then the wine as he prayed the Eucharistic Prayer. I kept looking back and forth from the altar to my Dad’s face, and I knew deep within me that this thing that was happening up there must be really important because it was having this noticeable effect on my father. I watched this happen regularly – not every Sunday, but many of them.

Communion remains the only time I ever saw my father truly humble himself. It’s the only time I ever saw him willingly surrender the strength of his personality to anything. Not even at his AA anniversaries (which I attended as his AA baby). Not even at the deaths or births of family members. Only at Communion.

I invite you to think about and remember the first time you realized that something powerful was happening at Holy Communion and consider sharing those stories – at coffee hour, or in a Formation event. These stories are inspiring and can be transforming.

Admittedly, some people are put off by the language of the Communion prayers: eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood, so it’s important for us to remember that this is the language of ritual. Jesus was a rabbi, who presided over many ritual meals. Orthodox theologian Joseph Martos says ritual meals, “affirm and intensify the bond of unity among the participants.” (Doors to the Sacred, Joseph Martos, 213) That’s what Jesus was doing then and what we do now in remembrance of him,

The letter to the Ephesians affirms this saying, “we are members of one another.” We can be angry, but we must not let that anger cause us to break our communion with one another or with God. When we speak, we are to say only that which will give grace to those who hear us. When we tear down another member or speak ill of them, or when we cling to bitterness and anger, we do damage to that bond of unity God is forming among us.

Martos says that in ritual meals, like the Jewish Passover and our Holy Eucharist, the events we remember “become real and present to the people who share it.” (Martos, 213) As Episcopalians, communion isn’t just a memorial for us as it is for many Protestants. It’s a present reality. Christ is truly present, and we don’t just remember that, we live it, again and again.

When we hear the words, “do this for the remembrance of me” I hope we hear the voice of our Savior inviting us to come back into unity with him. Re-member… Be at one again…

It’s a full-body, full sensory experience for us. We walk our bodies up to the communion rail and stand by someone we may or may not know, someone we may or may not like. We reach out our hands and take the bread and wine of Holy Communion into our mouths.

We taste the bread of communion as it melts on our tongues and that too becomes a signal to our bodies that we are choosing this holy thing to happen within us. We chew the bread and swallow it and its substance literally becomes part of us, part of the cells of our bodies.

The smell of the wine, whether on the bread or in the cup, greets us as the sharp flavor of it stimulates our glands. signaling our saliva. In a very real way, water and wine are mixing within us, echoing the water and wine that flowed from Jesus’ wound on the cross for our sakes, making manifest the union of our bodies to Christ.

When we eat the bread of life and drink the cup of salvation, we are inviting God to enter us, to become one with us, and make us one with God and each other. It’s such a powerful moment, a moment of pure joy as we remember, even for just this moment, that we are beloved and forgiven. It is a moment of deep peace as we remember that by this spiritual food we are renewed, strengthened, and made whole again. When we choose to take Holy Communion, we are intentionally receiving its power to unite us to God and to one another in love.

Our daily lives can drain us. The world can drain us. Our Christian life should drain us. We should be giving out love and prayer and offering words of hope to someone every day. There are so many who need it and we can give it away continually because we believe, we know there is always more ready to fill us up again.

This journey is too much for us unless we are continually nourished and renewed by our spiritual food: the bread and wine of Holy Communion. This journey is too much for us to travel alone, so we must continually affirm our bond of unity to God and one another. This journey is too much for us unless we stop the world, come into the presence of God, and remember that we are beloved, forgiven, and sanctified, that is, we are made holy, unified to Christ in whom we are all made whole.

Remembering that gives us strength to go out to the world, again and again, as living locations of the love of Christ in the world. That is the gift and the power of Holy Communion. Thanks be to God. Amen.

11 Pentecost, 2024-B: Strengthen our belief

Lectionary: Exodus 16:2-4,9-15; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35 

En el nombre de Dios, creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen. In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen. 

My daughter and I moved to south GA from NJ when she was 3 years old. Having left a traumatic situation, my daughter was insecure about her safety – and rightly so. Our lives were threatened in very real ways for 9 years after I left my abusive first husband, her father.

Since I was working full-time, my daughter went to a wonderful 7th Day Adventist day care, where Miss Martha became her person. If I wasn’t around, my daughter felt safe with Miss Martha, which was vital to her healing.

In our culture today, for lots of reasons, many people are in a near-constant state of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze – typical trauma responses to threat. This is especially true for people of color and undocumented people here in the US, and people suffering war or famine around the world.

People need to feel safe and loved. When we do, we can relax. Unless we are able to relax, a continual state of excitement will wear out our hearts, elevate our blood pressure and sugars, and ruin our digestion. We may experience constant anxiety and even lapse into depression. This is trauma response 101.

As people of God, prayer and presence enable us to relax. Prayer and being regularly in the presence of God enable us to shift from our normal state of awareness of the things of earth to a grace-filled consciousness of the heavenly realm.

In our readings from last week and this week, we learn how to make this shift. Jesus says it simply: believe.

In today’s story from Exodus, Moses and his brother Aaron have led the people into the wilderness. They’re hungry and afraid, so they complain, “Why did you lead us out here… to die of hunger?” This isn’t a short-sighted complaint. It’s a real one.

We often picture the exodus of the Israelites in the wilderness as we see it depicted in art - which is interpretive, not historical. There were actually about 650,000 people following Moses and Aaron. That’s more than twice the current population of St. Louis, which is 277,000.

Imagine two men trying to organize the daily feeding of 650,000 people in the desert. It’s an impossibility. This is similar to the impossibility Philip mentioned to Jesus when Jesus told them to feed the 5,000 men, which meant about 20,000 people, in last week’s gospel story. “Six months wages wouldn’t be enough to buy the food we need,” Philip said.

In both stories, we hear they were being tested. Would the disciples be able to shift from their earthly awareness to a heavenly consciousness? Did they believe?

The answer is kind of... Sound familiar? So, God showed them – again – just as God did in Exodus and in story after story in our Testaments, Old and New, that God would take care of them because they were beloved of God.

These stories teach us that our security is found only in God. We may think we can take care of ourselves and do things that will ensure our safety, but all of our efforts guarantee us nothing and what we end up with is no more life-sustaining than fouled manna full of worms.

Last week we heard that after feeding the people, Jesus walked on the water to the disciples who had left on their boat headed for Capernaum. Jesus wasn’t on the boat with them because he had gone off to a mountain by himself.

When the disciples saw Jesus walking toward them on the water, they were terrified. Jesus assured them of their safety, and “immediately,” their boat reached land, that is, their anxiety was calmed.

Today’s gospel picks up this story the next day. The people whom Jesus had fed were looking for him again. They followed the disciples across the sea to Capernaum and there they found Jesus too.

When did you come here, they asked. They knew he didn’t get on the boat with the disciples, so how did he get here? It’s a reasonable question, from an earthly perspective.

Jesus answers, however, from a heavenly perspective. You came looking for me because you want more of that food you had yesterday which satisfied your belly but somehow left you wanting more. Seek the food that satisfies your soul, food that endures for eternity. That food will be given to you by the Son of Man, on whom rests the seal, which means the security, of God.

Their next question seems strange: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” The Greek says it like this: What do we do to bring to pass the works of God?” In other words, how would this covenant work? What’s our part in it?

Jesus’ answer shifts them from earthly awareness to heavenly consciousness. The work of God is this: that you believe in the one whom God has sent.

They’ll consider it, but they need a sign. Moses gave our ancestors manna in the wilderness, they said. What will you do?

Jesus answers them, Moses didn’t give our ancestors manna, God did.” The true bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

We want that bread, they say. I am that bread, Jesus says.

As Sujanna+ reminded us last week, ‘I am’ is the name God calls themself when Moses asks God, what should I tell the people when they ask who sent me, and God says, Tell them I Am sent you.

In today’s gospel, Jesus claims this name and the life-giving power of God saying, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus is the food that gives life to body and soul and endures for eternity and whoever believes in him will never hunger or thirst again.

Here is the ultimate shift from earthly awareness to heavenly consciousness. Jesus, the Messiah of God, didn’t come as a political Messiah to liberate the Jewish people from Roman occupation. Jesus came to liberate the whole world, all people, in every time and place, from the power of sin and death and to give us eternal life; life in the eternal presence of God.

We, who believe, have this life in us because this life is Jesus who dwells in us. What must we do for the works of God to come to pass in our time? We must believe. Do we believe?

When I ask, do we believe, I’m not asking do we assent to, or even acknowledge this truth. That would be nothing more than an earthly awareness. When I ask do we believe, I am asking, do we know and feel in every cell of our being, beyond our comprehension, that God is in us, working through us because we are beloved of God?

The letter to the Ephesians reminds us that we are called to live as Jesus did, humbly, with gentleness and patience, “bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Living like Jesus is servanthood. The quintessential image of this is Jesus with a towel wrapped around his waist, washing the feet of his disciples saying, “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (Jn 13:14-15) This is how it would look if we lived as one body, one spirit in Christ.

We have been uniquely gifted by God to accomplish this in our lifetimes. God gathers us together into the part of the body of Christ we call “our church” to equip us to do the work of ministry. It is in community that our individual gifts come together into a powerful whole that none of us has on our own. This is the synergistic reality of being the church.

We walk together, as a church community, into Christian maturity, a maturity where we can love our enemies, not vilify or kill them; a maturity where we don’t shoot children because their blackness scares us; a maturity that has compassion for, not judgment against, those who are hungry or afraid or strangers among us.

The dream of God lives in us because God lives in us, the church, and ourselves as individual members of it. Trusting that God will provide all we need to do the work They call us to do, we learn and practice together, as a church community, how to represent Christ in the world, gently, humbly, with our metaphorical towels wrapped around our waists.

We practice first in here with one another, then we take it out there, into the world, until the mission of the Church, which is that the whole world is restored to unity with God and each other in Christ, is accomplished. (BCP, 855)

We cannot rely on our own strengths or smarts to do this. We may, at times, feel insecure or afraid, attacked or abandoned. That is why it’s so important to nourish ourselves continually with holy food of Communion, the bread of life and cup of salvation, to strengthen us, body and soul, so that God can work with us, through us, and accomplish all God has promised.

Let us pray: O God, our source and our life, in you alone is our safety and security. Strengthen our belief by your continual presence, that we may faithfully serve others guided by your goodness and mercy, all the days of our lives. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.

8 Pentecost, 2024-B: Our prophetic message to the world

Proper 10 Lectionary: Amos 7:7-15, Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

 

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

I love the prophets in our Scripture! To me they are like artists, painting doorways to the truth. As with other forms of art, it often takes some education to fully appreciate their work.

Amos is known as the prophet of social justice. He was a herdsman and farmer who lived when Israel was divided into two kingdoms: the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel. Amos lived in Judah and God sent him Israel, where Jeroboam was king, to prophesy.

The northern kingdom of Israel then was kind of like Galilee was in our Gospel reading. Today, we might see Hollywood or Washington D.C. similarly. These are places of earthly excesses, even decadence, populated by circles of rich, materialistic cosmopolitans, who believe they earned their own fortunes and, therefore, deserve the enjoyment their fortunes afford them. They show little to no mercy for those in need among them. In fact, they hardly notice them.

It was to people like these that Amos prophesied in Chapter 6: “Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, …who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” (v 4-6)

Amaziah, the priest of the temple, begged Amos to leave Israel and prophesy somewhere else. Stop saying bad things about us, Amaziah said. This is the king’s territory, and we are beloved, favored, and blessed by God. That’s why we have it so good.

Amos responded, yes, you are beloved of God, which is why you, of all people, should know how you are to live in relationship to God and one another. You have gotten lost in the satisfaction that comes from earthly wealth, power, and privilege. You believe that you deserve the blessings you have and that you can kick back and enjoy them. But your power and privilege are an illusion. And when the illusion fails, you’ll realize that you have nothing because you chose to live in the absence of God, which leads only to nothingness.

Amos uses prophetic language to describe this nothingness saying, your wife will be sold into indignity, your kids will have no life in them, you will lose all you hold dear – including your land (which, for the people of Israel, meant their identity). You will even lose the dignity of your life and your death. 

But God, who is steadfast in love and mercy, always responds to human hubris, offering mercy and a way to go. In the vision of the plumb line, God asks Amos, ‘What do you see?’ ‘A plumb line,’ answers Amos. Right, says God. “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.” (v 8-9)

In other words, by the mercy of God, all that the people cling to, all that seems desirable to them but leads to their destruction will be removed. All may seem lost because those things – the luxuries, the power and wealth, the success, and the esteem of others– had seemed so important.

But God, who loves us with steadfast love, knows that these things are to us humans like pills are to an addict. They trick us into believing that we are satisfied and happy even as they are destroying us.

We become so focused on ourselves that we lose sight of those suffering around us – the hungry, unhoused, infirm, and alone. Since we also convince ourselves that we are the source of our success, we conclude that they should earn their own and we don’t need to share with them any part of ours. We even tell ourselves that it’s for their own good that we don’t share – they should learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps – presuming, of course, that they even have boots.

In our gospel story, we see what this kind of self-focus and the attachment to earthly power can do to us. The story of Herod’s murder of John the Baptizer is a difficult story because it includes the worst of human behavior: incest, debauchery, murderous manipulation, misuse of power, and the death of an innocent. We want to cry out – how can those people let this happen? Why doesn’t anyone stop Herodius or Herod from committing this great wrong?

They don’t because they’re so preoccupied trying to amass or keep their own power and the luxurious lives they’ve become accustomed to, that they don’t care about the horror being played out right in front of them. Speaking truth here isn’t worth the risk of losing what they’ve worked to gain for themselves.

Sound familiar? That’s because people are people - in every era of human history.

We, who are followers of Jesus Christ, must go a different way. We are called to walk the way of love, as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry often says, the way of kindness, graciousness, and community.

But detaching from our hubris and self-sufficiency is a lot like detoxing from an addiction – it’s painful at first. The body and mind fight against it. We cling to the false reality we’ve created for ourselves because it is preferable to the truth that is coming into view – the truth that all of those things we thought mattered, the luxuries, power, wealth, and esteem of others, lead us to nothing… leave us as nothing.

It feels like desolation, and, in fact, it is desolation, blessed desolation, the total destruction of a false reality we had made for ourselves. From that place of desolation, we call out to God who is already there waiting to hear and respond to us in mercy and love and to show us what we ought to do, as our Collect says.

We believe that our salvation is in Jesus Christ, the second person in the Trinity of God, who came to live and minister among us, and gave his life for our salvation. Jesus did it and it has been done – once, for all. There is nothing we can or need to do to save ourselves. No amount of obedience or good works can save us. Indeed, they are the fruits of our salvation, not the means to it.

We need to remember that when we do anything good it’s because the grace of God has been lavished upon us, compelling us to do our part in Christ’s continuing work of the redemption of the world. When we do anything good, it’s because the Spirit of God, the viriditas of God, lives in us and touches the world through our grateful hearts and willing hands. When we do anything good, it’s because we have “heard the word of truth,” which is another way to say Jesus. We have believed in him and surrendered ourselves and our lives to him. 

It is through Jesus that we have wisdom to understand what we ought to do and it is by his grace that we can do it. The rules that guide us have to be reinterpreted in each age to make room for a compassionate response to the changes in the world. Jesus did so much of that during his ministry: healing on the Sabbath, touching a bleeding woman to heal her, calming and restoring a demoniac. Jesus showed us how the law is meant to serve humans, not the reverse, through the grace and mercy of God.

Right now, we are witnessing an increase in the passage of laws that criminalize being unhoused and other laws that forbid people from feeding them; laws that forbid giving water to asylum seekers; laws that forbid doctors from providing life-saving surgeries for pregnant women and best practice medical care for trans children.

These are not in keeping with the way of love and we must speak our truth about it, no matter how many modern-day Amaziahs try to make us stop. We have a message to prophesy, a message of the unfathomable, inclusive, compassionate love of God for all people.

And no matter how many Herods of today manipulate their way around what’s right - or even lawful- destroying lives they neither notice nor care about; we won’t stop calling it out as wrong. As Ida B. Wells once said, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” 

We have the light of truth in us. It is the very Spirit of Jesus given to us so that we can continue his reconciling work in the world. So, no matter how impossible or desolate the path to peace and love seems to our earthly minds, we’ll continue to pray for and gratefully receive the grace and power to do what God would have us do. Amen.