A Reflection on Orlando

A sermon by the Rev. Jacqueline Cherry

The Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist, San Francisco

June 19, 2016 – Proper 7, YC

Last Sunday morning, my 10-year-old daughter, Firefly, and I went to brunch in the neighborhood. She sensed something was wrong, so in a very understated way, I told her about Orlando. We’d been seated only a few minutes when a gay couple sat down at the table next to ours. Both men were glued to their phones, broadcasting the news as it flashed across the internet. I tried to distract Fly; but I couldn’t keep myself from listening either.

One man proclaimed, “We’re under attack!, a guy armed with assault weapons was arrested on his way to LA Pride! They are coming to get us.”

I could see the wheels turning in Firefly’s head, she said —When you were a kid you worried about a nuclear bomb; when I was born we worried about climate change; but now I have to worry about guns.

“But now I have to worry about guns” was both a question and a statement. My job as a parent is to protect my daughter. Or, if nothing else, provide the illusion that she is being protected. So when she asked if we were safe I said Yes.

And the men next to us echoed Yes. We lied. Last Sunday morning none of us felt safe.

For some, the Pulse massacre brought back terror of the Stonewall Riots. For others, the massacre brought back profound grief of the AIDS epidemic when we watched our gay brothers and lovers die; young and old, in every corner of our lives —the waiter at the Patio - dead; men who stood with us here, in the communion circle - dead; co-workers, classmates, fathers, men we loved, men we didn’t like at all - dead. And friends we didn’t know were dead until we read their names on the quilt. Somehow we managed to choke back the grief and carry on. But it came flooding back with the news of Orlando; the Pulse massacre shocked and brutalized our collective gay spirit.

Over the last week, we have heard nonstop chatter and speculation — the gunman was a terrorist; had pledged his allegiance to Isis; was bullied as a child; was a closeted gay man who had internalized his father’s homophobia; and so on.

With very few facts revealed, this is what we know to be true:
The Pulse massacre was a direct assault on the gay community by an American born shooter. More specifically, a surgical strike on gay Latinos, a brown-skinned subset of Orlando’s larger gay community.

So yes, Firefly, yes Harper Dandridge and Rhys Monroe, yes David, and all you children with two mamas and two daddies; yes you unflinching gay teens celebrating your high school graduation; yes, in this country you need to worry about guns. And you need to worry about homophobia — deep, systemic, insidious homophobia.

We gray-haired lesbians and gay men, we who have lived here in this city-over-the-rainbow for decades, we have done you a disservice. We have worked for gay rights and equality for some 30, 40, some 50 years. We are weary. And I am afraid our post Stonewall, post Silence = Death complacency has nurtured in you a false sense of security, when we wanted nothing more than to believe our protests and parades had made the world safer for you. We failed.

In the wake of the Pulse massacre, I hear the gospel story of the possessed man, living amidst the tombs, in a different light. In the wake of the massacre, the Gerasene demoniac is an outcast gay man, reviled for who he is, shackled and bound by self-loathing and homophobia. Jesus, of course is the same, he goes to the place nobody will go, and heals a man nobody else would dare touch.

Oh, it’s a good story, Jesus exorcising legions of demons that immediately embody a heard of swine, cascade over a cliff and drown in a lake. But I’m convinced that this story would play out differently today. St. Paul reminds us that before Christ, the law was our disciplinarian. And he goes on to assure us that in Christ we are all children of God.

Today there is no need for exorcism. Today Jesus would sweep the ostracized gay man up in his arms, and gather under his wing all of the queer outcasts - the fags and dykes, trans and transitioning, and the bullied gay teen standing on the edge of a chair waiting for the courage to step off. Jesus shepherds them all out of the catacombs, and onto hallowed ground.

My sons and daughters, Jesus says, I give you this holy place. When you are afraid, when enemies mock you and break your bones, when you cry to God, “Why have you forgotten me?” Gather with one another in this sanctuary, sweet with the smell of perfume and sweat, hear the gospel of Whitman, sing your gay anthems and dance.

Here you may kiss your lover. Here you are free to flip your hair like Cher. This is your holy place; this is Pulse, the I Beam, Amelia’s, The Eagle. Come here and know that you, and you, and you, are forever loved, just as you are.

There are rites and liturgies in the gay community, though they might not be recognized as such —

• The Liturgy of Coming Out; 
• The Covenant of Sacred Sex Between Two Women or Two Men;
• A Celebration at the Occasion of the First Gay Parade;

and the one I wrote last night,

Prayers of Thanksgiving for a Gay Bar
Let us thank God for the beauty of this sacred space.
Eternal Creator, lover of all life, the heavens cannot contain you;
inside the walls of this gay bar,
O God, we feel your presence.
For our Community universal of which this building is a symbol,
We thank you, God.
For your presence whenever 2 or 3 have gathered,
We thank you, God.
For this place where we may be still and know that we are loved,
We thank you, God.
For this sanctuary where we are free to two-step and waltz,
We thank you, God.
For dark corners where bodies are worshipped,
We thank you, God.
For the fellowship of daddies and dykes, fairies and femmes,
We thank you, God.
For the balm of refuge from our homo and transphobic world,
We thank you, God.
For blessing our vows and sanctifying our colorful families,
We thank you, God.
Eternal peace be to this gay bar and to all who cross its threshold.
Amen.

For two days after the Pulse massacre I was numb and didn’t cry. On Tuesday I drove through the intersection at 16th and Potrero and passed the same McDonald’s I’ve passed 1000 times. I’ve always hated that place, I curse the cars backed up on 16th Street waiting for the drive through. When I’m stopped at the red light I inevitably recall Michael Moore’s documentary. To my eye, that McDonald’s was nothing more than a health hazard to avoid.

But Tuesday as I drove by, I noticed a new message on the golden sign glowing above the front door. In all capitol letters it read — LOVE HEALS.  ALL OUR HEARTS ARE WITH ORLANDO.

That’s when I lost it. That’s when I pulled over by the post office and cried. That’s when everything felt different, and at the same time I realized the horror that nothing had changed at all. I wept for the young men and women gunned down in their holy place. I cried for our country’s love of guns. I cried for the shooter, and I wondered what demons possessed him.

Then I realized the Gerasene demoniac wasn’t just an outcast gay man; he was also the shooter. Jesus would cross the Galilean Sea, step off of his boat, and ask the armed man his name. And just like the demoniac, Jesus would transform Omar Mateen with his love. Remember this morning’s Epistle, In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. God’s love knows no bounds; there is no religion more radical than Christianity.

In the wake of the Pulse massacre where 50 people were killed by assault weapons that are legal and easily acquired, there are two things I ask you to do: commit to working for stricter gun control laws, and love like you’ve never loved before. Brothers and sisters, our lives depend on it.

Amen.

Gay Pride after Orlando

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Gay Pride Sunday

Luke 9:51-62

The Rev.d Richard Smith, Ph.D.

The Sunday before last, a dashing young man named Edward Sotomayor was shot in the back and killed when he shielded his lover from a bullet. It’s what our greatest teacher calls the highest human act: laying down one’s life for one’s friend.

The story would be powerful and poignant enough, but remember that Edward was a gay man, one of the 49 gay Latinos killed in Orlando, and this adds a layer to the story.

Before that dreadful moment when he would form a human shield around his beloved to protect him from that fatal wound, he had already gone through the long journey that each and every gay person has had to go through simply to say, “I am gay”, what each and every gay person has had to go through to find the one whose lips they could kiss, the long journey every gay person has had to travel to finally look into another’s eyes and say simply, “I love you”.

Before arriving at the point where he would give his life for his beloved, Edward Sotomayor had already been formed by that very long gay journey. His love was a product of that journey. That long, perhaps arduous journey was the crucible that formed his love.

And it is that long and sometimes arduous journey of love that we queers celebrate today.

We know we can’t take our love for granted; it’s been condemned and denied us for centuries by church and state and society at large. There are forces who would deny it to us still.

• You can YouTube what the Christian lieutenant governor of Texas posted on his website the morning of the Orlando shooting: a passage from Galatians: “They shall reap such as they sow.”
• Or the Baptist pastor in Sacramento who ranted that same Sunday morning, when the bodies in Orlando were not yet cold, that the gunman ought to have lined up everyone at that nightclub and shot them all, but having 50 of them dead was better than nothing.

Such hatred accounts for the alarmingly high suicide rate among gay teens, and that a large percentage of homeless youth in San Francisco are gay kids, some of them transgender, who were forced to flee from families that either disowned, abused, even threatened to kill them.

It’s because of such hatred that we have to march defiantly, and dance, and kiss our same-sex partners and friends right out in public -- a lot!

But this day is not just for us queers. This unconquerable desire to love and be loved may play out differently for us queers, but it's fundamental to every human being. It is placed deep inside every one of us by the One who made us. No one can take it away. It will always win.

In 1963, several years before Stonewall, a woman wrote to an attorney at the ACLU:

Dear Sir:
I am writing to you concerning a problem we have.
5 yrs. ago my husband and I were married here in the District of Columbia. We then returned to Va. to live. My husband is White, I am part negro, and part indian.
At the time we did not know there was a law in Va. against mixed marriages.
Therefore we were jailed and tried in a little town of Bowling Green.
We were to leave the state to make our home.
The problem is we are not allowed to visit our families. The judge said that if we enter the state in the next [25] yrs., that we will have to spend 1 yr. in jail.
We know we can’t live there, but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families and friends.
We have 3 children and cannot afford an attorney.
We wrote to the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy], he suggested that we get in touch with you for advice.
Please help us if you can. Hope to hear from you real soon.
Yours truly,
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving

The attorney she wrote that letter to accepted the case. Four years later Mildred Loving, who was Black, and her husband Richard, who was White, made history when their struggle led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that overturned the ban on interracial marriage.

The couple, who shunned the spotlight, made it clear they never set out to be social revolutionaries. It was simple: they loved each other, wanted to marry, and beyond that, as Mrs. Loving said, “It was God’s work.”

In the end, love must trump everything else, but sometimes only after a struggle.

A man in today’s gospel declares his intent to follow Jesus. He speaks without any conditions: “I will follow you wherever you go.”

Wherever? Really?

At that particular moment, as a result of his own struggle to love, Jesus is on his way toward being executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. Has this man’s unbounded zeal taken that into consideration?

Love is a choice we make, a powerful decision, and, yes, it involves a struggle.

This year, the struggle takes on a new facet, as the queer community joins so many others in fighting for an end to gun violence.

The South African theologian, Alan Boesak, said, “When we go before Him, God will ask, "Where are your wounds?" And we will say, "I have no wounds." And God will ask, "But why? Was there nothing worth fighting for?”

In this morning’s gospel, Jesus says to a second man, “Follow me.” It is a call to love, and it demands an immediate and wholehearted response.

But the man does not immediately act on that call. Instead, he allows his duties as a son to take precedence. He decides to go back home and live under the command of his father until his father dies. Then, after he has buried his father -- sometime in the indefinite future -- his calendar will be cleared for following this call to love.

Jesus is blunt here: “Let the dead bury their own dead”. Loyalty to past commitments, even to the cultural scripts about good sonship, should no longer hold him. If he stays in these commitments, his heart will shrivel and he will have missed the whole point of his life, which is to love. He may end up burying his physically dead father, but he himself will have become spiritually dead.

So on it goes, this journey of love that involves hard choices, a struggle, a fight that requires our immediate and wholehearted attention.

The actor and writer of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, recently captured this so powerfully, and let me close with his words:

When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day
...history remembers
We live through times when hate and fear seem stronger
We rise and fall and light from dying embers
Remembrances that hope and love lasts long
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
Cannot be killed or swept aside...
Now fill the world with music love and pride.

The Pool of Bethesda

Sixth Sunday of Easter
John 5:1-9

The Rev'd Dr Richard Smith

The man has sat by that pool at Bethesda for thirty-eight years. Bethesda means “house of mercy” but it has been not so merciful to him.

When the healing angel stirs the waters, he has no way to get into the pool because of all the crowds rushing in ahead of him. After 38 years it’s safe to say he’s gotten used to it, that he could not imagine the future being any different. He’s resigned himself to a diminished life, given up on his own dreams and his own heart. He can no longer even imagine what it would be like to stand up, feel his full weight on his feet, take one step and then another, gain his stride, pick up the pace, maybe even--imagine!--begin to run. No. After 38 long years, such dreams have long since faded.

He lies there, face down in a half inch of life and drowning.

This is not what God intended for him or for any of us, this diminished life, this despair, this resignation.

Along comes Jesus, a prophet who knows that the only God there is the the one who works 24/7 so we can thrive, live abundantly. And Jesus, who is close to the heart of God, sees a very different future, one full of possibility and hope.

So he says to the man, “Do you want to be made well?” He’s trying to reawaken the man’s own deepest desire. “Do you want to be made well?” Over all those years, the man has lost touch with that deep desire, and Jesus now calls him back to it. The vague outline of new possibilities, a new future is beginning to emerge.

At first the man doesn’t get it. He can’t imagine anything other than his own dismal present experience. He doesn’t answer the question; instead, he simply laments his own helplessness before a cruel fate. "There is no one to put me into the pool."

But Jesus brushes his lament aside and simply says, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

Now comes the hard part, the crux of the story, the decisive moment. Will he or won’t he? Will this man give in to those voices of resignation that tell him it’s better to stay put, not take the risk. “You might fall, get hurt, humiliated.” Or will he resist those voices, believe the vision, stand up, pick up the mat, put one foot in front of the other and slowly, perhaps hesitantly at first but then with greater and greater confidence, learn to walk again?

This brief story has a happy ending. John says, “At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.” It’s a triumphant moment of courage and defiance and determination. He breaks through all the resignation and despair that had overtaken him through the years. Now he is a new creation.

This story is echoed down through the ages. People find the spiritual resources to resist the voices that diminish them. Addicts begin the journey of recovery. People after years of abuse regain a sense of their own dignity and beauty. Married couples working through some hard times find each other again.

It happens on other levels. Women break out of the shackles tradition has imposed on them to flourish as individuals and great artists and thinkers and leaders. Gay people burst out of the closet. Elders refuse to simply sit back and watch TV when there’s still so much wrong with the world, so much left to fight for. People of color keep putting one foot in front of the other in that long journey to freedom and equality. Today is International Workers Day and we remember the stories of workers refusing to be exploited, demanding a fair wage and safe working conditions.

Just a few blocks from here, five hunger strikers called the Frisco5 are resisting the loud and powerful voices telling them and their families to simply move on to make room for the one percent, to simply resign themselves to being harassed by the police and and shot down in the street. Despite how dismal things have gotten for so many of us in this City, these strikers have not resigned themselves, have not lost their capacity to dream. They can still imagine a new creation where there’s room for everyone including their families and the elderly and the Alex Nietos, Amilcars, Marios, and Luises.

San Francisco poet Tony Robles talks about the impact the strike has had on him, how it has re-ignited his own imagination and given him a burst of hope.

It took a hunger strike to make me feel alive in a city that feels dead. I'm sorry but I'm new to the snow. I grew up with colors sprouting from my skin and the color of poetry stained on my tongue. It took a hunger strike to fill my belly with feelings of Frisco, songs of Frisco, the Frisco that is soaked in my bones and blood. It took a hunger strike to bring back that down home feeling and black laughter and fire and tears that flow so deep. It took a hunger strike to clear my veins of digital cholesterol. It took a hunger strike to show we can be tender without legal tender. It took a hunger strike to bring back my city on one piece, one corner of city block. It took a hunger strike to see the Frisco I know--again.

Some theologians say there are a couple of ways to break the human spirit. One involves blatantly visiting poverty and violence on people, the other involves seducing them.

The first strategy can be seen in poor countries run by dictators--like Honduras, and Syria--but also in neighborhoods like ours where many families and elders are forced out of their homes, and police imprison and kill people who are black and brown, and sweep unhoused people from the only shelters they have left. Such relentless assaults can over time break people’s spirits and cause them to lose hope.

The second strategy operates by manipulation and seduction. It first afflicts you with anxiety, convincing you there’s something wrong with the way God made you. You’re too old or too young, too skinny or too fat, the wrong color, the wrong gender or sexual orientation. Then it tries to sell you the cure. And somewhere in the desperate effort to assuage that contrived anxiety, somewhere in the frantic pursuit of skin creams that promise to remove those aging wrinkles, spa treatments to calm your nerves and give you the perfect body, the latest technological gadgets, and cars that put you in control, somewhere along this treadmill you lose your way, lose passion and purpose, your zest for life. A consumer society has disconnected you from your own heart and your own deepest desires and dreams.

Both strategies crush the human spirit. The first does it by violence and brute force and economic exploitation, the second by manipulation and seduction. Both deaden our passion for life. Both leave us in despair, depriving us of the ability to imagine that things could be different, that something new could emerge, that we could be whole.

To thrive as God would want us to do, we have first to consciously resist the voices, however powerful and intimidating they can seem at times, in order to give our imaginations room to envision something new and beautiful and powerful.

I believe Mary Oliver may have been thinking of this when she wrote this poem that I will now close with.

The Journey
by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.

"...if you have love for one another"

THE FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

April 24, 2016   Year C

The Rev. Dr. Jack Eastwood

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

Two weeks ago Richard began his sermon on the theme of love in this way: It takes years and years to marry a man, years and years to marry a woman. Sometimes love comes easy, other times it’s damn hard. For most of us mortals, real, genuine love doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a matter of years, a matter of a lifetime. For many of us married folks, no matter how long we’ve been married, we’re always beginners.

I remember this not just because today’s lessons present us with the same theme, the commandment to love one another, but also because those words echoed in me on a deep level where I know that love is hard work, and indeed takes a lifetime.

With that said I want to offer this story. Bruce Larsen, a Presbyterian minister, tells the story of a young woman who joined his congregation in America having moved from Angola in West Africa. Her name was Maria, and Larsen says, "she was always laughing." She sparkled with her faith. Love leapt from her to others. One day she went to a meeting on evangelism that the presbytery was sponsoring. All kinds of pamphlets, mission strategies, campaigns, and statistics were distributed to the participants. Lots of furrowed brows put lots of brain power into figuring out the best way to get the unchurched churched.

At one point, toward the end of the day, someone turned to Maria and asked her what they did in her church in Angola to evangelize the unchurched. Knowing how rapidly Christianity had grown in her country, they were curious to know more of the African "methodology". Maria, slightly intimidated by the spotlight, stood up, and, after a moment's thought, said, "We don't give pamphlets to people or have missions. We just send one or two Christian families to live in a village. And when people see what Christians are like, then they want to be Christians themselves."

For me, this story poses a very important question. What is the special character of Christian love that can be so compelling or so attractive? What does it look like? How does it feel?

When we think about what Jesus said and the context in which he said it in today’s gospel ­ we know that his love for us was a sacrificial kind, and the love that we should have for each other, too, in some sense is also sacrificial. He tells us to lay down our lives for each other. And that is a great challenge. It seems an impossible command! But I'd like to wrestle with that this morning because I wonder if it is, after all, that impossible.

I remember being at an inter­faith conference on civil rights and hearing a rabbi tell this story about the meaning of love. He said, "One day the son of a rabbi came to his father and said, "My father, I love you." "Oh?" the old rabbi said and he said nothing more.

The next day the son came again to his father and he said more loudly, "My father, I love you." "Oh?" he said, and nothing more.

On the third day, the son came again to his father and said in the loudest voice, "I love you". "My son," the old rabbi began, "do you know what hurts me?" "No, I don't", the boy said quietly. "I am too young to know what hurts you." His father replied, "when you know what hurts me, then you will know how to love me."

The night was murky with darkness looming not only in Jesus’ life but also the lives of his disciples. Issues of status and power, envy and resentment, jealousy and fear filled the atmosphere. Chief among these barrier­-creating emotions was betrayal. Jesus was “troubled in spirit” the text says; “one of you will betray me.” They are set to wondering and asking who is this traitor? Here John, unlike the other gospel writers, presents us with an important picture about God and God’s table fellowship. Jesus responds to the question of identity by dipping bread into the dish in the middle of the table and giving it to Judas. Separation from God’s love will never come from God’s side.

The message of inclusion is given eternally, even under the threat of darkness and betrayal. Loving all in washing their feet, including all in table fellowship, Jesus is the beginning of what makes new the commandment of love. Jesus is glorified in his giving himself away. Love is glorified when it is given away. It is the new meaning of what is fair.

Yesterday I heard a mother, her name is Mary, tell her story of her son’s loving. Several weeks ago he went into a coma and was in the hospital. He had tried to commit suicide by hanging. He had struggled too much of his young life with alcohol and drugs. Mary and her family had gathered at the hospital to be with her son at his bedside during his final hours of life support. A nurse came into the room and asked Mary to step outside to speak to someone. Puzzled and distressed at being pulled away, Mary went to the hall. A representative of the organ donor program was waiting outside the room. She had come to inform Mary that her son had registered as an organ donor. Mary respected her son’s wishes. She now lives not only with the loss of her son in the way he died, but in the way he gave himself for others.

And so it is for folks like you and me, who gather around the Lord’s table, living with our Lord’s death in the way he died, and gives himself to us so that we may give ourselves to others. AMEN

“Do you love me?”

John 21:1-19

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

Married couples can testify. People like Leah and Cecil, Jan and Rebecca, Jack and Judy, Darryl and Stoner, Robert and Ann know this: It takes years and years to marry a man, years and years to marry a woman. Sometimes love comes easy, other times it’s damn hard. For most of us mortals, real, genuine love doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a matter of years, a matter of a lifetime. For many of us married folks, no matter how long we’ve been married, we’re always beginners.

Which brings us to the charcoal fire in today’s gospel from John. It’s on a beach, and Jesus is cooking breakfast for his disciples.

There’s only one other time John mentions a charcoal fire. It’s after Jesus’ arrest. That charcoal fire had burned in the courtyard outside where Jesus was being tried and tortured. In front of that fire stood Peter. It was night and it was cold and he was warming himself. It was there, over that fire, that Peter denied ever knowing Jesus, denied him three times.

Fast forward to today’s gospel and this other charcoal fire, the one on the beach. It is no longer dark; the dawn has finally broken. Over this fire stands Jesus cooking breakfast for his disciples.  

After he serves them breakfast, he says to Peter, “Do you love me?" and Peter says he does. Then Jesus asks him the same question a second time and then once again, and each time Peter says he loves him--three times in all, to make up for the other three times.

But watch what’s happening under the surface here.

As he tells this simple and beautiful story, John is using two different Greek words for love. The words are agape and phileo. 

Agape is the kind of love Jesus has for us. It is love to the end. Often it comes with joy, a sense of peace, deep satisfaction, but it can also require great sacrifice, even the laying down of one’s life. Agape.

By contrast, Phileo is more like bromance. It is the affection between good friends who like the camaraderie of hanging out with each other, swapping stories and favorite jokes, sharing common interests, enjoying meals together. Phileo.

When Jesus first asks Peter, “Do you love me?” the word he uses is agape, as if to say, “Peter do you love me with the same love I have for you, to the end?” But Peter, in a rare moment of humility and honesty, responds by using the word phileo, saying to Jesus in effect, “Well, I can’t honestly say I’d lay down my life for you. But you are my friend. I love you with brotherly love.” Peter is dodging the question here.

Jesus then asks a second time, again using agape, and Peter answers again using phileo, as if to say, “You’re my great buddy,” or as some of our neighbors like to say, “You’re my homey.” 

A third time Jesus asks him, “Do you love me?” but this time it is Jesus who uses the word phileo--in other words he comes to Peter’s level and says, in effect, “OK, Peter, then you do at least love me with brotherly love, the love good friends have?”

And this makes Peter sad. He realizes Jesus is on to him and his evasions. So he now becomes more emphatic and says, “Lord, You know everything; You know what kind of a man I am. You know I denied you three times. You know that at this point in my life I can’t honestly say I love you as you love me. But I do love you as a brother and a friend. That much I can say. And for now, that’s the best I can do.”

Jesus then goes on to tell Peter that one day he will grow in love, one day laying down his life as Jesus had done. “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” Almost as if to say, “Peter I do understand that you love me now with only a brotherly love. But the day will come when you will finally be willing to die for me and you will give over your life. Then you will be able to say that you love me with agape love.”

Then Jesus says simply, “Follow me.” And Peter does.

And so the story continues, from that conversation by the fire on the beach to a life lived over many years, one day at a time, each day learning to love a bit more. Sometimes it’s two steps forward and one step back, there are bound to be misunderstandings and struggles. Perhaps among all the joy and satisfactions there will be more denials, temper tantrums, words spoken in haste, moments of cowardice, or moments when Peter’s own ego would get in the way. 

This is how love works for most of us. It’s a journey with lots of ups and downs, with many joys and satisfactions. What is true in a marriage is also true in following Jesus: We don’t learn how to love overnight; it’s a matter of years, a matter of a lifetime.

It’s important that in all the ups and downs--when we don’t see the results we’d like from our hard work, or when tensions arise within the community, or when prayer feels tedious and hard, or when we betray our own deepest values--the important thing is that we not get discouraged but rather stay on the path of love. This is Peter’s story: over the years, each time he fails, he gets up again: a sinner in need of healing, resolved to follow the one who forgave him and who had called him that day on the beach, the one he came to love more and more fully to the end. 

In all the ups and downs, all our failures and disappointments the important thing is to stay on the path. The important and necessary thing is to keep on loving.

Easter 2016: Practicing Resurrection

John 20:1-18

The Rev'd Dr Richard Smith

Today's Easter gospel begins in darkness, at a tomb, a place of death. It ends with the dawn. 

It begins with a woman in tears -- frightened, and grieving, and outraged. It ends in a garden teeming with life and Jesus speaking her name.

But it begins in darkness. 

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a packed courtroom when the medical examiner took the stand. A young man had been brutally shot and killed. The medical examiner had to explain how he was killed. As she spoke, she projected onto a large screen the first of several graphic photos of the young man’s bullet-riddled body. The bullets had pierced his face, his torso, his legs. They had destroyed him.

Seated in the front row were the young man’s mom and dad. At the very first photo, they both gasped.  They had not seen these photos before. His mom, with tears welling up in her eyes, slumped forward, her face in her hands. 

It was too much. They couldn’t bear to watch this. We got up and left the courtroom, went out to the hall to catch our breath. There we sat for the next two hours while inside the courtroom the medical examiner continued with the photos and completed her testimony. 

As we waited in that windowless hallway, the young man’s mom asked me what any mom in such a moment would ask a priest, the question no priest or theologian or guru has ever been able to answer: “Why did God let my son get killed in this way?” 

Last Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week, we remembered of how Jesus once entered Jerusalem on a donkey, bringing with him into that majestic city a crowd of scruffy peasants from backwater Galilee--a motley crew of poor folks and outcasts, the broken people, the ones the world regards as children and madmen and fools. 

And as Luke tells the story, as soon as Jesus caught sight of the city, he wept. I wonder what was going through his mind in that moment. 

I wonder if it was not just for Jerusalem that Jesus wept, but for the whole world. I wonder if he had in mind that young man’s mother in the courthouse hallway, and all the others like her in this crazy world of ours:

• A world where the bodies of young men of color get riddled with police bullets
• Where immigrants and Muslims are vilified, doors slammed in the faces of their terror-stricken and impoverished families
• Where people like us have grieved the loss of good friends and family members over this past year
• Where some of us struggle with our own health, our own natural aging
• And where, as our city changes so quickly around us, we fear we ourselves could be displaced like so many others. 

The tragedy of the human condition, which is to live and struggle in a world where again and again God is not present, at least not in the way we need him. 

And I wonder if Jesus’ tears that first Palm Sunday anticipated the words he himself would soon utter, words of abandonment very similar to those of that mother at the courthouse, words maybe you’ve heard yourself say in one way or another: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”-- a  cry so dark that only two of the four evangelists have the stomach to record it as the last word Jesus spoke while he still had a human mouth to speak with. 

Jesus wept, that young man’s mom and dad wept, we all weep, because even when a person is good, even when that person is Jesus, God makes himself scarce for reasons that no priest or theologian or guru has ever fathomed.

Because for Jesus and for us, Good Friday is inevitable. Given our vulnerability, and our sinfulness as human beings, and the pitiless storm of the world, tragedy is a fact of our lives.

But here’s the thing: If Good Friday is inevitable, then Easter is an unforeseen bolt out of the blue, a surprising and wonderful punchline. Easter is as much a part of our reality as Good Friday. It’s what one writer calls the comedy of grace, not unlike an old Charlie Chaplin movie. “How can Charlie Chaplin in his baggy pants and derby hat foresee that though he is stood up by the girl and clobbered over the head by the policeman and hit in the kisser with a custard pie, he will emerge dapper and gallant to the end, twirling his invincible cane and twitching his invincible mustache?” [Frederick Beuchner, Telling the Truth; The Gospel as Comedy]

It is this unforeseen and surprising punchline we celebrate today. The comedy of grace. In the neck and neck struggle between life and death, life and love and laughter will win. Even when tragedy strikes, as it inevitably will, still, grace will have the final say. 

This good news bursts onto a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few. And who are the few that hear it? 

They are the last people you might expect, because they themselves are the bad jokes and stooges and scarecrows of the world, the tax collectors and whores and misfits. They are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a  miracle to fill the empty place inside them, that it will take a miracle for the world to finally recognize them as brothers and sisters and welcome them home.

The comedy of grace. It’s the miraculous punchline Magdelene stumbles onto when the one she takes to be the gardener turns out to be the one who once exalted in her perfume, who knew the extravagance of her hair, and who now asks her: “Why are you weeping?”

If this morning we still find ourselves in tears, it’s because the story isn’t over yet. We know how the story ends, we know the story has a surprising punchline: The triumph of life and love and laughter. 

We don’t know when or how or what it might look like, but we stake our lives on that punchline.

What began in darkness in the place of death will end with a broken tomb, a garden teeming with life, and a gardener with a smile on his lips as he speaks your name.

So even now, perhaps with tears still in our eyes, we practice resurrection, anticipating the life and the love, the justice, the joy and laughter that we know will have the final say: 

• It’s why we in this parish stand with those young people of color gunned down by violence, and with immigrants, and people who are homeless, and people who need food, and people in Nicaragua who need clean water. We’re just practicing resurrection.
• It’s why we fight the political and economic forces in this city that have driven so many of our neighbors from their homes and threaten to displace us and many others as well. When we do this, we’re just practicing resurrection.
• And it’s why, on this Easter morning, we celebrate with family and friends and great food, bring back the Alleluias, put on an Easter egg hunt for our kids, and the braver among us so proudly don our homemade and slightly tacky Easter bonnets.

Because today and everyday, we’re caught up in this comedy of grace, we remember how the story ends, we know the punchline, and so today we’re just practicing resurrection.

Palm Sunday 2016

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

March 20, 2016

You may remember the powerful scene in the movie Gandhi. The Hindus and the Muslims have been locked in violent combat. To persuade them to stop the fighting, Gandhi begins a fast. Several days go by, the violence continues, he is pale and emaciated. Into his room comes a distraught young Hindu man. He says to Gandhi, “I'm going to Hell! I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall.” Gandhi asks “Why?” The man says “Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my son!” (Raises his hand to show the height of his young son)

Gandhi says, “I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child about the same age and height as your son, a child whose mother and father were killed, and raise him as your own.

“Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.”

It’s a powerful moment that speaks to the difficult choices we must make in a violent world, whether to render and eye for an eye, or to follow a different path. What Gandhi counsels in that film, and what Jesus counsels in Luke’s telling of the Passion are the same: To meet violence head on with love.

Not so easy in the real world. In 2015 there were 53,030 gun violence incidents, including 330 mass shootings. Twelve hundred people were killed by police last year. Our country has killed many innocent civilians through drone strikes alone. Just a few steps from our front door, young men like Richard Sprague, Bennie Martinez, Hector Salvador, and Jose Escobar were violently murdered. Donald Trump continues to exhort violence not only against protesters at his rallies but also against people around the world, hinting at riots should he lose the nomination.

All this violence makes us very sober as we enter into the Passion story this year. We are not disinterested bystanders in this story.

Toward the beginning of the story, in the Mount of Olives, Jesus tells the disciples, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” This is the very  same prayer we make in the Lord’s Prayer: “Save us from the time of trial.” (The King James version has it “Lead us not into temptation.”)
Question: What is “the time of trial” he wants the disciples and us to be saved from? What is the temptation he does not want us to be led into?

Some scripture scholars believe Luke has a very specific kind of trial in mind here. It is a temptation that was very real for the early disciples: the temptation to resort to violence in defending Jesus when he was violently attacked by the Romans. “Pray that when they come for me,” Jesus is telling them, “you will not defend me by resorting to violence.”

To flip this around, Jesus is telling them that if they do not pray, they will be tempted to give in to violence.

When we pray, we are connecting with our own deepest selves, with who we most fully are, creatures made in God’s image with an infinite beauty and dignity. When we pray, we are connecting to our very centers where we are deeply united to God. And when we speak and act out of that space of prayer, our words and actions reflect God’s mercy and compassion and love.

There, in the garden with Jesus, the disciples do not pray. They fall asleep, they become numb to life with all its joy and pain, they lose touch with their deepest selves where God speaks. And so, when they awake and see the aggressive, armed crowd coming toward them led by Judas, when they see all that is headed their way, fear and anger overtake them, and they immediately ask, “Lord, shall we strike with the sword?” And before Jesus can even answer, one of them grabs a sword and lashes out, cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave.

“No more of this!” Jesus replies.

Jesus, who did pray all night in the garden, who entered deeply into his own heart where he is closest to God, this Jesus lives and speaks and acts in accord with his deepest identity. “No more violence,” he tells them. He reaches out to heal the wounded slave, because that’s what Jesus, the man of prayer, does. When he is beaten and falsely accused, he does not strike back or lash out bitterly. When he hangs from the cross, he forgives his executioners. That’s what he does. Because he prays.

And today on Palm Sunday, with all the violence around us, we have to choose how we want to proceed from here--whether to let fear and anger and depression govern our hearts and our actions, or to become, like Jesus, people of prayer.

Our tradition offers many forms of prayer--some with music and dance; some with a candle before an icon or a crucifix; some with the Jesus Prayer whispered in sync with our breath, or rosary beads; some with the Daily Office; some with entering the stories of scripture through the imagination.

But, for us Christians, our most profound prayer is the simple meal we share each week at this table. It’s here that all the movements and mysteries of this week are gathered to a peak, where bread, like the body of Jesus this week, is blessed, broken, and given. It’s here that Jesus says, “This is my body given for you, my blood poured out for you.”

This meal is more than a ritualized re-enactment of a two-thousand-year-old event. When Jesus tells us,  “do this in memory of me,” he’s asking for much more than a ritual. He’s asking us to give our bodies to be broken as he did, our blood to be poured out as his was.

Do you know what you’re saying when you share this meal? When we celebrate this liturgy, each of us is saying to each other and to the world, “This is my body given for you, my blood poured out for you.” You, as a follower of Jesus, are re-committing yourself to do, in your own way, precisely what Jesus has done before you: giving your body to be blessed, broken, and given so that others can live.

This is what we, people of prayer, do once again this Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week.