Groaning (Proper 11, Year A, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith)

We humans groan. It is part of what makes us human. It can be when the evil Dodgers score a home run off of Tim Lincecum. We groan.

There are deeper groanings: We get bad results from the lab tests, we lose a job or a relationship, we fall back into an addiction. There was another fatal shooting yesterday morning one block from this church. In such moments, we groan. How can we not?

Our world groans: 298 people in a Malaysian jet shot down from the sky this week, more people killed in Gaza in a war that seems endless, 52,000 unaccompanied children fleeing Central America, many of them traumatized, arriving at our border. About this last tragedy, even the pope lamented and groaned from his own heart.

How can we not groan in such moments? It is the human thing to do.

There are different understandings of this groaning we do. Pop culture offers a few understandings--we capture these understandings in bumper sticker phrases: “Life sucks” and “[BLEEP] happens”. These are some of the more glib--and not very hopeful--understandings our culture offers us for why we groan.

Paul has another take on our groaning, he uses another metaphor:

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

Did you catch his metaphor, his understanding of what this groaning of ours is all about? “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains…”

Something is being born, a new creation, a fuller and deeper life. And our groanings, from the personal losses we go through to the death of a child in Gaza--all our groanings are in some way part of these labor pains, a necessary and inevitable part of bringing this new creation, this new life to birth. For Paul, when we groan, it doesn’t mean that life sucks. No, it means we are in labor.

Scripture uses other metaphors to make sense of our groaning. You remember the story of when Peter realizes he has just denied Jesus for the third time, a moment of profound betrayal and abject moral failure. In that moment of recognition, he sobs profusely. He groans.

But note that, as he is hunched over in tears, as he groans, a rooster is crowing. That very moment when he recognizes and feels the shame and sadness of his own abject failure is also the dawn of a new day. A rooster is crowing. A new day is being born.

Groaning. It is labor pains; it is the darkest hour of the night giving way to the dawn. For us resurrection people, our groaning is a necessary and inevitable phase in a story that ends in joy. To paraphrase another line from Paul, we do not groan as people who have no hope--which is to say that we do groan--as people who do have hope, like a mother in labor.

Today I have some groaning of my own to do. I spent part of this week in El Paso, Texas where much of the current crisis of the children at the border is being played out. This is a story about what groaning in labor feels like.

Let me start a few days before I went to El Paso, when I learned about Gilberto Ramos, the Guatemalan teenager found dead in the desert just a short distance from the Texas border. Like many teenage boys from the poorer regions of Central America, he had left his mountain village to come to the United States to make money. His mother had epilepsy; he wanted to help pay her medical bills.

When they searched Gilberto’s body, they found inscribed under his belt buckle the phone number of his older brother waiting for him in Chicago. Around his neck they found the rosary his mother had given him when she hugged him goodbye in Guatemala.

This story haunted me because my own son, one year younger than Gilberto, was born not far from him, in the mountains of Guatemala, in a house like his with a dirt floor, no running water, and a corrugated metal roof. It was not hard to imagine that things could have been different, that this could have been my kid.

So when I was invited by the PICO National Network to accompany a national group of Latino clergy to the El Paso detention center, how could I say no?

It is to this detention center, known as Station 1, that record-breaking numbers of captured immigrants, most of them children, are flown from the Rio Grande Valley to be medically examined and have their basic data collected. From there they are bused to various centers to begin deportation proceedings.1

For clergy, the purpose of the visit was to provide any pastoral support we could to these no-doubt exhausted and likely traumatized moms and their kids. We also wanted to get a clearer picture of how communities like ours can prepare to receive folks like them should they arrive at our doorsteps in coming days.

After several weeks of conversation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we finally arrived at the center to some unexpected news: By some coincidence, the families had just been processed and removed from the center. We would not have the chance to visit them after all. Instead, we would be given a public relations tour by congenial officers of a squeaky clean facility devoid of any immigrants, no photos allowed.

The officers showed us cupboards with newly purchased clothing and disposable diapers and toiletries, the garage where the buses arrive with incoming detainees, the tables where immigrants are fingerprinted and photographed and their data collected, the holding cells in which they spend most of their time, the makeshift cots they sleep on, and the medical examining area where doctors regularly visit. We heard about the challenges in moving the recent influx of immigrants through the many bureaucratic hoops within a mandated 72-hour timeframe. (Just since May 2014, this facility alone has processed 2700 immigrant families.)

Would the immigrants have had their own perspective on what they experienced in this center? We may never know.

To escort us on this public relations tour, DHS sent the Rev. David Myers, the Department’s liaison for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships. Myers said he understood our frustration, both with the Immigration system and with our not being able to visit the families. Unfortunately, he could not assure us that the kids and their families would be given a fair chance to receive asylum in this country.

In the conversations prior to our visit, NALEC leaders had suggested to DHS that, instead of visiting the El Paso center, we take the bus north to the newly opened detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. No, they had been told, there would be no families there either, and besides, that center was so new staff wouldn’t be up-to-speed to receive us.

As we later learned from two sources, this was not true. In fact, at the very moment we were getting our PR tour in El Paso, the Artesia center was filled with 400 women and children. And that center had just received a delegation from DHS, including Secretary Jeh Johnson himself who chose his visit there to announce the newly opened facility’s real purpose: “This facility ... represents proof that indeed we will send people back.”

Artesia, a small town with not nearly enough lawyers to help the detainees with their cases, was already becoming the site of what one immigrant rights veteran called “a deportation mill.” It was not just clergy, but also other professionals and the media who were being shut out.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the Department’s lack of transparency. Back home in San Francisco immigrants had told me of family members being virtually “disappeared” in immigration detention centers, sometimes for months. More recently, immigrants have told me about the hilieras, the “ice boxes” that are now getting media attention. In these ice boxes they were held, sometimes for days, in very cold temperatures with their fingers and lips turning blue, their skin cracking from the cold. To date, no independent party has had sufficient access to the detention centers to verify these stories. Some have described it as a blackout.
We left the detention center and headed to Annunciation House. This Catholic refuge for immigrants has made El Paso a welcome alternative to other cities on the front lines of the border crisis.

Because of the lack of facilities for holding families in deportation proceedings, immigration officials recently began releasing them on their own recognizance with a notice to appear at a later date. But then, in cities like Tucson and Phoenix, they reportedly left those families stranded at a local bus station. Indigenous immigrants who could speak neither Spanish nor English were especially lost.2

But in El Paso things turned out differently. At the beginning of the surge, instead of simply dropping newly released families at the bus station, the El Paso Border Patrol wisely asked Annunciation House for help.

Annunciation House now teems with young mothers watching their lively children play games, read, and do art projects. They have good meals and showers and cots in a comfortable and clean temporary shelter.

Annunciation’s director, Ruben Garcia, relayed a few stories he’s heard from the recent guests. He mentioned the sign posted on an elementary school telling the teachers that unless they handed over their annual bonus checks to the local gang, one child would disappear each day. And there was the Honduran mom who told him “In the last 10 days, they’ve killed ten children in my barrio. The youngest was eight years old. How can we live this way?”

Garcia added that, because many families in these dangerous situations have themselves received no direct threats from the gangs, they do not legally qualify for asylum in the U.S. Immigration simply deports them back to the dangerous situations they fled.

At the end of the day, at a spirited worship service at a large Latino church, one of the Evangelical clergy preached about Esther, the Jewish queen willing to risk her own secure position, even her life, to rescue her people. Then, after praying for Gilberto and other victims of this crisis, this preacher paraphrased an ancient Rabbi, posing a question to the gathering: “If not now, when? If not you, who?”

With these words he invited us to keep breathing, keep bearing down, keep pushing, keep groaning as we must. This, too, is part of a new creation being born, a world in which children fleeing for their lives will not be turned away, will find shelter and welcome.

And so today, we, along with these children and their families, we groan.

Sabbath Rest; Proper 9, Year A; July 6, 2014; by the Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

(On Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

This is a great gospel reading for a lazy summer morning in a long weekend. It talks about rest. ”Come to me, all who are labored and heavily burdened,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.”

It’s a special kind of rest he’s inviting us into here. Not simply a matter of extra time off from work, but sabbath rest. This is the rest of the seventh day when God, like a good Jewish carpenter, saw that all was finished, all was good, and he rested. This is the sabbath rest Jesus is inviting us into. It is something we can enjoy now even as it is something we anticipate.

Because creation is a work in progress. As Jesus once said, “My father keeps on working, and so do I.”  Creation is not yet finished, God is still working to bring us and all of creation to completion.

Our spiritual ancestors invited us into a certain rhythm of life: to spend one day each week both enjoying what God has already made and anticipating how it will be when this amazing world is complete, when we are complete:

No more worry or pain or tears
no more hunger or violence
no one left out or homeless.

On the sabbath, we are to enter with our imaginations into how this new world will be, how it will look and feel when it is complete.

We Christians enter this sabbath rest when we gather at this table for the eucharist where everyone has a place, everyone is fed. Here we remind ourselves and the world around us of what the world can be. Here, to use Gandhi’s words, we can be the change we hope to see in the world, the change we anticipate when creation is complete.

This sabbath eucharist s a subversive act, because it overturns the order of things as we know them. It sets our agenda for the rest of the week.

If in the fullness of God’s creation there will be no more violence, no more moms and dad mourning the loss of their kids, then we let the weapons fall from our hands now and work for peace.
If in that new day there will be no more tears or sadness or death, then we wipe the tears from each other’s eyes now.
If in that sabbath rest, no one will go hungry and no one will be left out because of who they are, then we reach out our hands in welcome now.

The future sabbath that we look forward to sets the agenda for how we live now.

But even as it sets our agenda, this sabbath gathering for eucharist also invites us to rest, to chill, lighten up, loosen our jaws, relax our grasps.

For some of us, this invitation into sabbath rest can be a challenge.

Because we are responsible people who know that our decisions about how we spend our time counts. We have to carefully weigh what we do. Simply trusting that everything will come out alright can be an abdication of our responsibility. This is, of course, an obvious truth.

But only a half truth. Life at its deepest level is not only a conscious project but also an unsolicited gift.

The task of healing--both ourselves and those we love--means not simply trying with all our might to employ our best skills and strategies. Healing is first and foremost the work of God, a gift from the Creator, something we open ourselves to receive.
Bringing about a more just society--from immigration reform to an end to the violence and the devastation of the planet--this, too, is not simply a matter of grit and endurance. We can take ourselves and all our noble work so seriously. But a just society is ultimately a gift from God, something God does. As one bishop once wrote:

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

This is the paradox in which we live: struggling with all our might for healing in our lives and in our world, working to build our community, to bring about justice…

...while at the same time chilling, relaxing our grasp, knowing that it is all God’s work. All is grace, all is God’s gift.

Some philosophers call this an existential tension, a paradox at the center of being human. As one theologian writes, We are like dancers who in a single moment must kick the world away from us with an airy grace, and yet, in that very same moment, press it to our hearts. A paradox at the center of our very human lives.

Sabbath rest: something we enjoy even now, something we strive with all our energy to bring about for us and for all people, something we know to be our future, something that is, ultimately, a gift of the Creator.

It’s summer, and I hope in these lazy days we’re all getting a taste now and then of this sabbath rest, time to chill with family and friends, take a hike on the beach, have an extra beer--that is, if you haven’t had two or three already.

Simply allowing life to carry us without worry or strain on our part.

The poet D. H. Lawrence, obviously a cat person, seemed to understand something about this sabbath rest into which Jesus invites us. Let me close with one of his poems:

All that matters is to be at one with the living God
To be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the
mistress
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.
Sleeping on the hearth of the living world,
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of a master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.

Maybe Jesus’ invitation to sabbath rest means learning the lessons of our cats.

Coming out as a disciple, Proper 7 Year A, the Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

It’s Pride month, and the City is aglow with rainbows and glitter and gold lame; all around are festivals of art, film, poetry; there is music, and dancing. It’s a joyful moment, perhaps this year more than most.

Almost forty-six years ago today, Harvey Milk spoke these words at Gay Pride:

Gay brothers and sisters,... You must come out. Come out... to your parents... I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives... come out to your friends... if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors... to your fellow workers... to the people who work where you eat and shop... come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake. For the sake of the youngsters who are becoming scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene.

Then as now, coming out involved risks of being thrown out of your family, your church, fired from your job, abandoned by people you counted as friends. Harvey knew the risks.

Two years after he spoke the words I just quoted, he taped a recorded message to be played in the event of his assassination.

Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, any time, I feel it's important that some people know my thoughts. And so the following are my thoughts, my wishes, and my desires, whatever, and I'd like to pass them on and have them played for the appropriate people.

Among the things he said in that tape were these words so chilling and prophetic:

"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country."

One year later he was shot and killed.

Our own gay movement is not the only one with martyrs like Harvey. Years before, during the civil rights movement, many followers of Dr. King were “disappeared”, disowned by their families, had their legs broken, or were murdered. Nuns, laypeople, priests, and bishops have been similarly treated in Central America.

The experience of Harvey Milk, and Dr. King, and the martyrs of Central America, was also that of Jesus and his first disciples.

From Jesus the early disciples had discovered a profound new truth about themselves: that even though they were often the outcasts and misfits of their day, the untouchables and the impure, they were the beloved daughters and sons of God, with an infinite beauty and dignity that no one could take from them. That they were worth more than many sparrows.

This was a game changer, not something they were used to hearing, especially from religious leaders. A whole new truth they had discovered about themselves, and about every other human being as well; a whole new truth they had to speak, a new identity they had to come out about.

And so they came out as his followers, proclaiming this new, profound truth about themselves and about everyone else.

And there were consequences, sometimes painful ones, sometimes fatal ones. And in today’s gospel Jesus makes no effort to soft sell what those consequences might be.

It’s ironic that the one we call the Prince of Peace should say in today’s gospel “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household.

When Jesus says this, he is simply stating a spiritual fact. When we discover a new truth about ourselves, we feel the urge, the duty, to proclaim it. This isn’t a command that someone else places on us. We feel it in our hearts. We must speak our truth. The new truth we have discovered about ourselves needs to breathe and grow. As the poet Annie Dillard writes: “The joy that isn’t shared dies young.” Not speaking out leaves us only half alive, living but only partly living.

And yet we know that doing so might disturb some people. This can make us afraid. So Jesus says,

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Speaking our word from the heart has consequences. These consequences can make us afraid. And yet, can we afford not to speak? Can we live with the cowardice?

The philosopher Ken Wilber describes the bargain we make when we when we discover a profound truth about ourselves. He writes,

And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout from the heart--perhaps quietly and gently with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakeable public example--but authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty; you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent… Those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain… And this is a terrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity.

I’m grateful that Ken Wilber acknowledges a variety of ways of speaking our truths--sometimes with reluctant tears, other times with angry wisdom, or careful analysis, or public example. Each of us has to find our own way of speaking truth.

Because to seek comfort and safety instead of speaking our word may mean that, in an effort to avoid pain, we miss opportunities to fully live. We run the risk of merely existing and eventually dying without ever really living, without ever really loving.

As Allen Boesak of South Africa says, "We will go before God to be judged, and God will ask us: 'Where are your wounds?' and we will say, 'We have no wounds.' And God will ask, 'But why? Was nothing worth fighting for?'

Forgiving and Retaining, Pentecost Sunday, 2014, the Rev'd Dr. Richard Smith

So there they are, huddled behind locked doors, traumatized, frightened, blaming themselves and blaming each other, without hope after all their dreams had died on the cross two days before. Into their midst Jesus appears and says, of all things, “Peace”.

And after he breathes his very own Spirit into them, he presents them with two options: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

After all they have experienced from the Romans, from the religious leaders, from their own and each other’s betrayals, this is a choice they must now make--whether to forgive sins or to retain them; to hold themselves and others in their sin, or to release themselves and each other from it.

Someone once told me that the root of the Hebrew word for forgiveness means literally “letting go of the jugular”. The image is that you have someone by the throat and are strangling them to death. And when you choose to forgive, you let go, let them live.

The choice is ours to make.

What does a choice like this look like? One of the other well-known stories about Jesus gives us a clue.

You remember that story...The religious leaders have caught a woman in bed with a man who was not her husband. They drag her out of bed, bring her to Jesus, and make her stand there in front of everyone.

As she stands there, they talk about how horrible she is, to the point that she deserves to be tortured and killed: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now, in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.”

Imagine this scene for a moment… 

What must she have been feeling?  Humiliation, terror, shame….

And what were the religious leaders, all of whom happened to be men, what were they thinking? She has broken the commandment, therefore she must be stoned. That’s all of her story they care about. They do not see her as a human being with dignity, deserving their respect. To them, all she is is a terrible sinner, nothing more. All they could see was this one moment of adultery.

But what was her larger story? What might have driven her to risk her life to be with a man in an illicit affair? The gospel doesn’t tell us, we can only guess what her own struggle may have been. 

Like many women of her day, she was probably in a marriage arranged for her by her parents when she was 12 or 13 years old. 

Was her husband someone she loved, or who loved her?

Was her husband abusive?

Did she feel trapped? 

Perhaps this man that she had the affair with was the one person she could talk to.

Maybe he told her she was beautiful. 

Maybe he told her he loved her.

The larger dimensions of her story are lost on the religious leaders. In their version of the story, she is a terrible sinner, and nothing more.

I wonder if she started to believe the story they were telling about her.

I wonder what Jesus saw in those tear-filled eyes. What story would he tell about her.

Anyway, while the religious leaders are ranting, Jesus does something curious. He sits down on the ground and begins writing with his finger in the dirt.

Scripture scholars go back and forth about what he could be doing here, but the theory I like best is that he was doodling.

You know how it is when you’re on the phone with someone who can’t stop talking, and how it can get a little tedious? And so you grab a pen and a corner of the newspaper and you start to draw pictures of cats or airplanes, just to break the tedium of the moment.

Maybe this is what Jesus is doing as the religious leaders go on and on with their rants about this woman. He’s finding them very tedious. Maybe he rolls his eyes a few times. And he doodles.

And finally when they are done ranting, Jesus stands and speaks to them.

Now Jesus was a devout Jew. He knew the law as well as the religious leaders did. He knew that the law was given as a tool to fashion a people of love, to help us live more fully.

But he also saw that, among some of the religious leaders, the law had become distorted, had lost its purpose. The religious leaders used this beautiful gift from God to brutalize people and crush their spirits, to literally torture and kill them.

So Jesus stands up and says “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He turns the tables. “If you honestly believe you can stone this woman without making a travesty of the law God has given us, then be my guest. Who will cast the first stone?” He is taunting them.

Now who is the righteous and who is the sinner? Who bears the greater weight of sin? Is it this woman, or is it those who have taken the law--something very beautiful to help us love and live more fully--and turned it into something brutal and cruel?

Suddenly those who had seen themselves as righteous, those who sought to judge and punish, they are the greater sinners for having distorted the whole purpose of the law, turning it from a means to life into a means to death. 

With these words of Jesus, “...they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him,”

and he rises to his feet to speak to her. 

He says to her, “Woman….” 

In our English translation, this can seem rather cold and formal, but for Jesus it is a word of profound respect. This is the word he uses when he speaks to his mother. “Woman.”

It’s probably been awhile since this woman was addressed with this profoundly respectful word. 

“Woman,” Jesus says, “has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

When he tells her to “Go,” he’s using the same word Moses used when he said to the pharoah “Let my people go!” It is a call to become free from slavery and to start the journey to the promised land. This is more than an encouragement to avoid falling into sin. He’s beckoning her to a life of freedom--freedom not only from sin, but also from the crushing story the religious leaders had woven for her around that sin, a story that perhaps she herself came to believe. 

While you acknowledge the effects of sin and brokenness in your own life, begin, nevertheless, your journey to the promised land. Even as you own the mistakes and failures of the past, write yourself a new story--one that leads to a more abundant life, greater joy, more love. Step into a new future. 

Perhaps we have to do this not only with ourselves but with other people in our lives. Perhaps we need to do this with El Buen Samaritano as our time with them comes to an end. Even as we acknowledge the sin and brokenness in our relationship, we are not bound to that. That’s not the whole story. Perhaps we can write the story of our relationship with that community these past seven years, and write it in a way that leads us all to greater love and fuller lives.

It’s the choice Jesus offers: to hold ourselves and each other in our sin, or to let go of the jugular, free ourselves and each other from an alienated past, and begin a new story, a new future, that leads to life.

I Will not Leave You Orphans

For many people in today’s world, this gospel won’t make sense. Because Jesus, as he himself puts it, is speaking about something the world cannot receive, a truth that is outside the world’s comprehension.

The world sees only with physical eyes, and if you see only with physical eyes--if, as for many folks in the West, you regard as real and true only that which can be scientifically verified in the lab or presented as evidence in a court of law, then, for you, this gospel reading will make no sense.

But if you think it’s possible that poets and musicians and artists and lovers may also have something to say, that shamans and sages and many non-Western peoples down through the centuries may also have a shot at the truth--even though it’s a different kind of truth--then these words of Jesus may speak to you.

His words may teach you something about how to die and about the connections we have with loved ones who have gone before us.

He is speaking these words to his disciples at a very difficult moment. An excruciating death is about to take him from them. They are about to have their hearts and all their dreams broken.

He’s trying to help them make some sense of what will happen to them, what his going away from them really means.  A few verses earlier, he told them “It is better for you that I go.” He wants his death to be a blessing for them and not a curse.

Over the years, I have met people for whom a loved one’s death had been a curse. The dying person said some hurtful things, or did not say the words of forgiveness or reassurance that were so desperately needed. This can leave a deep wound the person left behind must carry for the rest of their lives.

There is a tradition among many Christians to pray for a holy death. The idea is that, in addition to preparing a will, getting finances in order, and delegating power of attorney, some soul-work is also required. Maybe some forgiveness needs to be given to someone, or some words of reassurance need to be said.

It’s an important question for all of us no matter our age: How do we, like Jesus, make our dying a blessing and not a curse to those around us?

To his own loved ones who would feel abandoned, orphaned, and hopelessly devastated by his death, Jesus speaks strong words of reassurance: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.”

He’s going to leave them in one way but remain with them in another way. His death leads not to loss and abandonment, but rather to a deeper way for him to be present.

It’s in his going away that he can fully enter their hearts, get into the marrow of their bones, be with them in a way far more intimate than simple physical presence allows. By his going away, he becomes, as St. Augustine would say many years later, more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.

This is not something we can discern with our physical eyes. It takes spiritual eyes to see this.

Lovers know how this works. True, the marriage vows say “...until death do us part,” but I think many of us suspect that something more is going on in our loves, that our relationships transcend death.

It’s this “something more” that many poets and artists and indigenous peoples know. It’s a conviction of the heart that when a parent or a lover or a spouse or a friend die, they do not go away from us, but rather, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, their spiritual union with us deepens. Barriers that might have stood in the way are overcome. Our intimacy with them becomes deeper than their physical presence could allow.

"I will not leave you orphaned," Jesus tells us. "I am coming to you."

And then he takes this one step further. He says that in his going away from us, in his death, we will know that he is in his Father and we are in him, and he in us.

The image is one of a Creator continuously present in the creatures she has made, at every moment keeping them in existence, breathing life into them.

The Greeks used a simple but beautiful word to describe what's going on here. Perichoresis. Dancing around. God is like three persons caught up in one big joyful dance. Their life and work are bound together. Perichoresis. A joyful dance.

In Jesus, the second person of that Trinity, you and I are brought into the dance, into the relationship. Perichoresis. It says as much about us as it does about Ultimate Reality. It says that your life and mine--seemingly so small and insignificant in the scheme of things, with all our joys and delights, our bodily pleasures and pains, our triumphs and disappointments, our loves and our fears--our lives are precious because they are swept up in something so vast and magnificent.

This is what the mystery of the Trinity is getting at: that, like the One in whose image we are made, we are caught up in a joyful cosmic dance, a dance not for divine persons only, but for us as well. Because of Jesus, all of our lives are now part of this vast and beautiful cosmic dance.

This dance is going on right now, just beyond what our physical eyes can see. Music is playing just beyond what our earthly ears can hear. This is the love and life Jesus wants to leave with his disciples as he says farewell.

As we listen to a gospel passage like this, our consciousness expands a little. It’s time to lace up our dancing shoes.

Jesus the Gate, 4th Sunday of Easter, Year A, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

Twice each month, members of our community join people from other faith communities in Nightwalks. We walk through our neighborhood stopping now and then to pray for an end to the violence that has caused great pain to many moms and families here in the Mission. Before we head out on our walks, we run through a few ground rules about the logistics and about how to remain safe during the course of the walk.

We’re not naive. In a neighborhood like ours, things can happen very quickly. A purse can be snatched, a fight can break out, someone can fall sick and need a hand. Things can happen. So one of the ground rules in our Nightwalks is very realistic: When we stop to pray, we pray with our eyes open.

Today’s gospel passage is part of a larger story in which Jesus has just given sight to a man who had been blind from birth. The man himself and the religious leaders are standing around wondering what had just happened, and Jesus in this passage is trying to help them understand it.

So to get the full impact of these words, let’s refresh our memory about that story of that blind man Jesus has just healed.

In the culture of the time, because of his blindness, he was considered ritually impure, barred from fully participating in the rituals devout Jews would use to be in right relation with God. Only people who were physically impeccable were permitted to serve God's cult. A son of Aaron, for example, a member of the priestly caste, could not officiate at worship if he had a physical impairment.

This ritual impurity carried a moral connotation, a stigma. The logic was that someone must have done something really bad for him to be both blind and excluded from the community in this way. “Master, who sinned,” the disciples had just asked Jesus. “Was it he himself who sinned or his parents that he was born blind?”

So not only is this man blind, but he also carries the shame and disgrace of a moral stigma.

This is a very common logic, and we find it all around us: it's called blaming the victim. If someone is raped, he or she must have done something to provoke it; if black people or Latinos are poor or incarcerated at high rates or disenfranchised, it must be because they are more stupid or lazy or criminal than others; if someone has HIV, it must be a punishment from God for some form of deviant behavior.

So in addition to living with a significant physical impairment, this blind man was stigmatized, shamed and disgraced. His story is one of exclusion, not only from being able to physically see, but also from fully participating in the life of his own people Israel.

In the face of this, Jesus carries out an act of inclusion. First he spits on the earth, and from the clay he makes a paste and anoints the blind man's eyes. Buried in the Greek text here is a Hebrew pun. The Hebrew word for clay is adamah, and in the story of creation in Genesis, adamah is what God used to make "Adam," humankind.

So, in this moment of healing Jesus is finishing creation. The man born blind had palpably not been brought to the fullness of creation, and so Jesus finishes the process by adding the missing clay.

But with that healing of his eyes, the man receives something else. Call it gumption. He begins to stand on his own two feet, to tell his story, even to talk back--especially to those religious leaders who had shamed and stigmatized him and left him without hope. And because he talks back, they of course throw him out of the synagogue, excommunicate him.

Jesus hears that they threw him out, so he goes looking for him, and when he finds him, they talk. In this conversation, the formerly blind comes to see Jesus, not only with his now-healed physical eyes, but also with his heart. He comes to trust him. “Lord, I believe,” he says to Jesus.

Some religious leaders overhear the man say this. They don’t get it, so Jesus tries to talk to them. He reverses their logic. “You who say that you can see, you are the ones who are blind here. This man who you say is steeped in sin, in this situation he is the one without sin. If there is sin in this situation, it lies not with him but with you who excluded and stigmatized and shamed him.”

That’s where today’s gospel about shepherds and thieves and robbers comes in. The shepherd is the symbol for teachers and leaders. The way they relate to people shows whether they are true shepherds or thieves and robbers.

What Jesus is doing here is walking us through a kind of discernment about how to tell good religious leaders from bad ones, shepherds from thieves and robbers.

In John’s words, thieves steal, kill, and destroy. They leave people less than when they found them. The laws and moral codes meant to form us into people who love and live more deeply--these are used as hammers by these thieves and robbers to crush people’s spirits, to shame and exclude them. “Woe to you,” Jesus once said to the Pharisees. “You lay heavy burdens on people’s shoulders but will not move a finger to lift them.”

True shepherds are the opposite. They leave people more than when they found them. They do not have the voice of a stranger. They know the human heart, they call people by name. What they say resonates with the inner world of people. They walk ahead of them, bringing them to pastures where they can find food to nourish them.

Teachers and leaders who are true shepherds are artists who make us more human, more alive, they awaken joy and zest and passion and purpose. “I have come that they may have life,” Jesus says, “and have it abundantly.” Like good mothers, good shepherds lead us to life, life in abundance.

This is good to know. Sometimes people ask “Is religion good or bad?” The fact is, in itself, religion is neutral. It’s like art. There is good art and bad art.

There is bad art that puts down people who are different, shuts down our hearts, makes us frightened of life, stirs up violence, misogyny, homophobia. Think of the novels of Ayn Rand that influenced much of the recent greed on Wall Street and in Washington; the misogynist and homophobic lyrics of many rap songs on the radio. Bad art.

There is good art, too: art that opens your heart, connects you with life, deepens your ability to feel and to love. Think of Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of a flower, or Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, a movie like Babette’s Feast. This is good art.

Art can be good or bad.

Like art, religion can be either good or bad.

The philosopher Hegel said you can recognize bad religion because it alienates you from yourself and from the world.

Bad religion is what the man born blind--living under shame and stigma and without hope--had experienced growing up.

It’s what many LGBT people of my generation also grew up with. We were told that if we followed the promptings of our own hearts and our bodies that we would burn in hell for all eternity. Bad religion. It alienates us from ourselves and from people we love. It is manifest today in an alarmingly high suicide rate among gay teens and elders, and the recent effort to pass a Kill the Gays bill in Uganda. It does not lead to the abundant life that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.

Over the years I’ve heard many Native Americans talk about their experiences in the mission boarding schools where they were not allowed to return home for their native pow wows and rituals, were beaten if they even spoke their own native languages. Bad religion. It alienates people from themselves, their cultures and communities. It does not lead to the abundant life that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.

There is also good religion. Not only does it connect you with God, the source of life, but it also:
Connects you with your own heart, with the lines and curves of your own body, its desires and pleasures as well as its pains;
Good religion connects you with other people, nourishes friendships, gathers communities like this one.
Good religion connects you with the earth, with all it’s species of flora and fauna, increases your sheer delight when you’re on a hike in nature.

Good religion is seen in true shepherds like Gandhi, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Chief Seattle, Harriet Tubman, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Dalai Lama, Oscar Romero--true shepherds who lead people to freedom, to greater justice, to building the beloved community, to realizing life in abundance.

In today’s gospel, Jesus is walking us through a discernment. When we pray, he wants us to keep our eyes open, to pray with discerning hearts. We have to evaluate the religious and spiritual teachings we are hearing--including those that came from Christian teachers.

What criteria do we use as we make this evaluation? In this passage, Jesus uses the metaphor of the gate to the sheepfold. He says that he is that gate. Religious teachers who are trustworthy, shepherds who are good, pass through that gate that is Jesus. Whether they are explicitly Christian or not, their teachings bring us closer to what he has taught us, make us more loving, more compassionate, more hopeful about the future, more joyful in just being ourselves. Those teachings, in other words, lead us to life in abundance. Ultimately, Jesus says, this is how you know if a religious teaching is good.

But if those teachings lead us to a sense of hopelessness, if they cause us to lose our zest and passion for life, our joy in being the wonderful beings God has made us to be, if those teachings to exclude people and close our hearts to their needs, if they cause us to abuse this fragile and exquisite planet, then these teachings are, in Jesus’ words, the work of thieves and robbers. They are not the work of God. They crush us. They do not lead to life in abundance.

As in the day of Jesus, so also in our own day, there are many religious and spiritual teachings swirling around us. As it was for the man who received his sight and for the early disciples, so it is for us: We need discerning hearts; we need to pray with our eyes open.

Significance of a Stranger, Third Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2014, Luke 24:13-35, Cathlena Plummer

God give us clear minds, open spirits, and loving hearts. Amen.

The significance of a stranger, do we ever ponder that? Do either

one of you take the time to make conversation with a person on the

street, or on the BART, or any other place that is not familiar to you?

Today I want to share this story with everyone….

on one sunny, hot, June afternoon in Utah, my Uncle , cousins, and

I were sitting around telling jokes, after cleaning up the church after

having our convocation that particular weekend.

All of a sudden we felt this gush of wind and dirt pick up in front of us

and turned itself into a devil twister and travelled to the paved highway

that runs along the entrance to the mission grounds. What was most

strange about that gust of wind was that we all chose to notice it and

look at it at the same time.

We couldn’t even tell a good joke, or pay attention to a good joke being

told but, right there in that instant we all chose to watch that gust

of wind turn itself into a devil twister. If you don’t know what a devil

twister is…. come talk to me later and I will explain further…

So we followed the devil twister’s path toward the highway and out of

nowhere a man in a white sheet or garment with black combat boots

appeared. His hair was long and dark brown, his skin was very dark,

remember we’re looking at this figure from a distance….we all sort

of looked at each other bewildered, and we all kind of accepted the

presence of this man to match those that we often think of when we

picture Jesus.

Although we were not talking we knew immediately what the other

was thinking….

The person paid us no mind or could not hear us….but he kept walking

finally over the hill and out of view….then finally we came out of our

trance, it really was like a strange trance, for 5 min? 6 min? I’m not

really sure on that. But none of us ever questioned if that could have

been Jesus? For some reason it felt right that whoever that person was

we seemed to all agree that it was Jesus.

That day that hot sunny afternoon, always pops into my head whenever

I hear the phrase, “What if that homeless person was Jesus? Or, what if

that person talking to himself incoherently was Jesus?”

It never fails to enter my thoughts especially living here in the Bay Area

and seeing all these children living on the streets, some with animals,

that they cannot afford to feed, so they beg day after day, they barely

move away from their regular sleeping spots.

The point is …. What if that was Jesus? How would you know what

Jesus looked like? You will know it in your heart, is what I always hear

when I hear myself question it….your heart begins to beat… that is what

I feel every time I see a teenager lying in the street, or sitting with his

beastly friend.

The question is am I willing to talk to him or her? Am I willing to talk to

Jesus in the flesh?

Most of the time the answer is “No, I have to hurry or I’ll miss the next

train.”

 But, when I do have the time the conversation, has always been

meaningful, the person is in dire straits and is just trying to make it to

the next day, you not only learn about the person in front of you, you

also learn that this could easily be yourself if you allowed it.

Now let us ponder the words in the gospel….

The Gospel tells us, the band of Jesus’ followers was now leaderless

and was falling apart, with two of them already on their way home. The

reports that Christ’s tomb was empty did nothing to alter their thinking;

it only confused them. Their entire world had come apart. The two

despondent disciples summed up the situation very neatly, "we had

hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel."

Human hope is a fragile thing, and when it withers it’s difficult to

revive. Hopelessness as a disease of the human spirit is desperately

hard to cure. When you see someone you love and care for overtaken

by illness, which goes on, and on, despair sets in. It almost becomes

impossible to hope for recovery, to be even afraid to hope because of

not being able to cope with another letdown.

The Emmaus Two had erected a wall of hopelessness around them,

and they were trapped in their misery. "We had hoped ..." What they

were saying is "We don’t expect it now, but once we did. We had it, this

thing called hope, but now it’s gone." I wonder if this is something that

we can identify with? Has something or someone come between our

relationship with God? If so, listen to the Emmaus story because the

heart-breaking experience is only its beginning!

As the travellers made their weary way to Emmaus a stranger fell

alongside them. It was going to be one of the most wonderful walks in

history! We know, of course, that it was the risen Jesus, but somehow

they didn’t recognize him. In fact Luke tells us "they were kept from

recognizing him." It wasn’t an accident that they didn’t notice who he

is or that they were too preoccupied to look at him in the eye. No, they

weren’t allowed to recognize Jesus for a purpose. It was so that they

might be in the same position as ourselves some 2,000 years later.

Visual appearances of Jesus ceased at his Ascension. They are not

granted to us. Like the two on the road we have to make do with other

people’s testimony that Jesus has risen from the dead. Like them we

don’t know quite know what to make of it. Did it really happen? What

precisely happened? How could it have happened? We have to make

up our minds as to what we believe.

On that hot sunny June afternoon we chose to believe that it was

Jesus and with that acceptance….. Jesus disappeared over the hill,

because "In his infinite courtesy, Jesus remembered the frailty of over-
strained nerves and bewildered minds and came, not too suddenly

or overwhelming upon them, but in a way which He alone could do,

revealed Himself as the Risen Christ."

This is what Jesus had shown to Cleopas and the other follower on that

day, and they did not recognize him until he broke bread with them.

They saw his hands - they were different from when he had broken

bread at the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and at the Last Supper. They

were the nail-pierced hands of Jesus. In an instant they knew him. And

in an instant, he’s gone.

Why did Jesus have to disappear? Couldn’t he have stayed longer? He

could, but he didn’t because it’s all part of the education of his last 40

days on Earth - how to manage without his bodily presence from now

on; exactly the same as we have to do some 2,000 years on. But he

is with us still by his Spirit; he is with us as we fellowship with him in

worship and, in obedience to his command, as we remember him in

the "breaking of bread" service.

I can imagine Cleopas and his friend standing in amazement; perhaps

embracing in great joy, asking each other, "Were not our hearts burning

within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures

to us?" Their world had come together again. That heart-burning

experience is something that we all need. We need it in a conversion

experience when the Spirit of God makes us realize that we need Jesus

as our Savior and Lord. We need it as we allow the Holy Spirit to apply

the truths of Scripture in our daily walk with Jesus.

Well, where are we in our experience? Are we still heart-breaking

because we need to meet the risen Christ? Perhaps we’re still in a

heart-searching process - if so, let it continue as it will surely lead to the

heart-burning experience we all need.

God deeply longs for each one of us to walk with Him in close

fellowship so He can fulfill His plans for our lives. The Emmaus Two no

doubt had walked this way many times before. Yet this day would be

different, for it was the time for a life-changing encounter with their

Lord. He can draw near to us at any time.

The ways of God aren’t always obvious so we must be open to allow

him to enlighten our understanding, to take us into a new level in our

spiritual experience. Life will never be the same again! Christ is risen

from the dead! Christ is the Savior! Christ is the hope of the world!

Amen