Missing from the Table (Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C, 2013, Richard Smith)

The gospel passage takes place at the last supper. Judas has just left the meal, has gone out into the night to hand Jesus over, leaving behind him an empty place at table.
In that moment, as Judas sets off to betray him, Jesus gives us these unforgettable words, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
Theologian Frederick Niedner wonders: Having heard those words from the lips of Jesus, did any of the disciples then go out looking for Judas?  Did anyone begin to fear for Judas, miss him, or try to bring him back, to talk him out of his shame, his anger, his life spinning out of control?
Did they recognize that they could not be whole as long as he was missing from their table? As long as Judas remained out there in the night, wandering alone or swinging lifeless from a tree, there would be tears and aching in his community where his place would still be set at the table, but where his absence would still be felt.
This same kind of brokenness is all around us.
The other day in the neighborhood a mother stopped me and asked me to pray with her for her son who is serving a life sentence in prison. With him gone, there is a brokenness in her family, an empty place at the table, and an empty place in their hearts.
There is a brokenness among people of faith, and it's all too apparent in the Islamophobic reactions to the bombings in Boston. We are all children of Abraham, but some Christians cannot imagine sitting at table with a real, live Muslim.
Our own parish has had its own brokenness. There are people who used to join us at this table but, for various reasons, our relationships with them became broken and they are no longer here.
Perhaps in your own families and in your own circles of friends, you, too, know the pain and shame of having places at the table where no one sits any more.
Friendships that were put to death with hasty, angry, bitter words.
We don't know if the disciples did try to find Judas that night. Even if they had would he have returned? Only God knows.
But we have reason to hope because of the promise in today's reading from the Book of Revelations. One day, when the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven decked out like a bride, God will set out a great marriage feast, and there God will wipe away every tear. No more tears, no more pain.
Will Judas be present? We can hope that he will, that he will sit among all the rest of us who have our own stories of brokenness and betrayal.
This is the great vision of the Book of Revelations, the future we are invited to embrace this morning.
And if we choose to embrace this future, then it will shape and govern how we act and think in the present.
If in the world to come, God will wipe away the tears from our eyes, then we wipe the tears from each others eyes now.
If in the world to come, swords will be beaten into plowshares and there will be no more war, then the weapons fall from our hands now.
If in the world to come, everyone will have a place at the table, including those from whom we are now estranged, even those we regard as most repugnant and despicable, then we reach out our hands in friendship and reconciliation now.
The amazing future described in Revelations shapes and governs how we live our lives in this moment.
The banquet is set before us. We look back to remember the night when Jesus gave us a new commandment, but also we look ahead to the day of its fulfillment.
Let us celebrate the joy we have in sitting together as family, reconciled to each other, and living in hope of that day when every tear will be wiped away and every place at the table will be filled.

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C, 2013 (The Rev. Dr. John H. Eastwood)

Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, 
and follow where he leads. AMEN

Our theme today is Jesus, the Good Shepherd; the one who calls us to follow him,  the one who calls us into discernment about our own ministry. And the challenge that the scriptures present to us is one of knowing his voice and hearing his call.  I don’t know about you, but this sort of reminds me of when I was a kid playing with my friends after school in the back yard. Come dinner time, I would hear my mother call me from the back porch telling me to stop playing and come in for dinner, and of course, I wanted to keep playing.  I didn’t have any trouble knowing who was calling; I just didn’t like the message. The gospel raises the first question. Amid all the voices of our culture, can you hear the voice of Jesus? 

The Easter season brings to our attention a variety of images that tantalize our spiritual senses.  An earthquake and an angel descending, rolling back a stone from a tomb... guards fainting in fear... an empty tomb and angelic figures sitting where Jesus was lying... a group of apprehensive disciples locked in a room, visited by the risen Lord... a clear moment of recognition of Jesus in the breaking of the bread... And in today’s readings, the church in Joppa is weeping over the death of a sister named Tabitha, the call for Peter, who comes and prays over here, and Tabitha is raised to life from death and come to belief in Jesus.  All along the way there are voices of doubt, and voices of fear, anguish and grief... but there are also voices of knowing and trusting and believing and incredible joy ...  The images of the Easter Season are  extreme and provocative,  they are because they are about resurrection, and they are also the story of our lives. This is a season of contrasting voices, the events of our lives that compete for our attention.   With such a clamor, sometimes it is hard to hear the shepherd’ voice.

Consider the week just passed.  In one week we have heard voices crying “shame” as gun control legislation was defeated in the Senate, by a vote of 40 to 60,  and we have heard voices of anguish, chaos, and grief crying out in the streets of Boston after bombs explode at a marathon race. Defeat seemed everywhere, and frankly, as I listened and watched, I began to feel depressed and overwhelmed. With other recent incidents of violence, at Sandy Hook Elementary, and other places, one tragedy inevitably calls to mind other events in the past, like one death reminds of other deaths. Of course, there is the pain of ongoing deaths in war. There are times, and this week was one of those times, when I give in to the voices of violence, and I am truly grasping for hope as I shake my head, and long to hear the voice of peace, and the belief that committing violent acts is not the answer.  Finding a way to hear the voice of peace is the answer.

I watched and heard on TV Friday night the voices of jubilation in the streets of Watertown and Boston. To me they were real and understandable, people were safe, at least safer than not, but I couldn’t find much rest there. I wanted some perspective. I did some searching.

I remembered another April, the year was 1968, and the shock and loss of hope that I felt, with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And I began to look further: April is also the month of the shooting of students at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Columbine in 1999, and the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. With those sad echoes of times past, the voices of grief and the voices of politics, lobbying, and the NRA  push away the shepherds voice of love, hope, and peace in April’s Easter Season

We have to listen again to a different wisdom:  
We have to go back to the gardener’s voice that called “Mary” and she knew it was the Lord; 
we have to remember the voice of Jesus when surrounded by the soldiers in the garden, saying to Peter, “Put away your sword”;  
we have to go back to the moment of recognition in the upper room when he breathed on them and said “Peace be with you”; 
we have to remember how he had been known to the disciples in the breaking of bread; 
our wounds are his wounds, and through these wounds, we hear his voice, the voice not of vengeance or violence, but the voice of peace.   

This was Jesus point.  From all the voices of culture that you hear, listen for my voice.  Beyond all the words of commentary, sounds of confusion, and discordant lyrics trying to make sense of things, listen for my voice.  The church to which the Gospel of John was addressed shared in the uncertainty of many voices.  The church has always had to face this problem.  Today’s gospel provides for us a compass to discern the right path for hearing the voice of Christ and doing authentic ministry in his name.  And that can only be done in community.
Someone will say, “I believe I am called to be a priest, or a social worker; another will say “I am called to work for immigration, or for clean water in Guatemala, or to volunteer in the Julian Food Pantry on Saturdays.”  Just like hearing the call to dinner in the midst of playing, you have to learn to hear who is calling you and what is being said. For that, I know the only way is through community. We can’t be Christians alone walking on a sand beach or on a journey through the woods, we need each other, and the food the Shepherd gives, so that we know our calling. 

There is a well-known, unforgettable story about one of our leaders who through community found the call that strengthened him in his ministry. It is about Martin Luther King during the days of the Montgomery bus boycott.  It comes from a time in his life, not unlike our own, when voices of fear, voices of doubt, and voices of despair were competing for his attention.  Violence had been threatened repeatedly against King and his family and he was afraid.  At home one night, about midnight, King heard the phone ring and he answered.  It was another anonymous caller breathing threats of violence against him unless he got out of town.  After the call, King sat at the kitchen table worrying about the threat, about his children, his wife, himself.  Then he prayed, prayed to God admitting that he was losing his courage, and as he prayed, he heard a voice, a voice he knew. It was the voice of Jesus. “Martin Luther,” the voice said, “stand up for righteousness.  Stand up for justice.  Stand up for truth.  And, lo, I will be with you, even unto the end of the world.”  Strengthened by the voice, he knew which path to take and gained courage in his ministry.  “Almost at once,” he remembered, “my fears began to go.  My uncertainty disappeared.”

Easter is not just an empty tomb, but a victory over the voices of darkness, and a presence, a person, a voice that calls us each by name into the light shines eternally.  AMEN

Peter, Do You Love Me? (Third Sunday of Easter, Year C, 2013, Richard Smith)

I don't know if any of you were once Sunday School over-achievers, but if you were, have I got a trivia question for you!

Question: How many charcoal fires are mentioned in the New Testament?
...
Answer: There are two charcoal fires in the New Testament, both mentioned in John's gospel.
The first is mentioned after the arrest of Jesus. It is in the courtyard of the high priest. The night is very cold, and it burns at  the darkest hour just before dawn. Over this fire, Peter warms himself. While he stands there, three people ask him if he is a disciple of Jesus. Three times he denies it. This is the first charcoal fire.
The second charcoal fire is described in today's gospel passage. This fire burns after the disciples, including Peter, have abandoned Jesus and left him to die. It's about them moving out of that failure, and moment of despair and guilt and fear and mutual recrimination into a sense of hope and aliveness and purpose. It's about their meeting the risen Jesus.
Unlike the first charcoal fire, this second fire burns not in the darkest hour of the night but in the morning just after daybreak. A new day is just starting to dawn. Over this fire, Jesus is making breakfast for his disciples.
Remember that for Jesus and his friends, a meal is a very powerful moment, and when people sat down to a meal, they were saying many things, one of which was forgiveness. They were saying that anything that had come between them, no matter how great or how small, had now been set aside. As they sat down to table, they were saying that they were one. This is why Jesus got in so much trouble with the religious leaders of his day when he so recklessly sat down at table with tax collectors and sinners. He was a bit too generous with the forgiveness. (Remember this aspect of a meal, forgiveness, when you come to this table for the Eucharist.)
So, anyway, over this second charcoal fire, Jesus is preparing a meal for his disciples who have just abandoned and betrayed him. Forgiveness is in the making. 
After they have eaten Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me.” And Peter answers three times, “I do love you. Well, at least I sort of love you.”
There are two Greek words at play here. One word is agape, the other is philos. Agape is complete and unconditional love, the kind of love that that God has for us, the kind that is willing to die for the beloved. The other word for love, philos, means the kind of love buddies have for each other, comaraderie. It's what you feel for the people you enjoy hanging out with.
When Jesus asks Peter, do you love me, he is using the word agape. It's as though he is saying, Peter, do you love me with all your heart, to the point where you would even lay down your life for me as I gave mine for you?
And Peter answers with the word philos, as if to say, “Well, Lord, I think you're a really cool guy.”
They're missing each other here.
So Jesus asks a second time, “Do you love me--using agape, would you lay down your life for me.” And Peter answers again with philos: “Yo! You're my good bud.”
Again, it's a miss.
Finally, Jesus asks a third time, and Peter is hurt that he's asked him a third time. And his response, again using philos, amounts to a kind of confession, as if to say, “Lord, you know everything. You know what kind of man I am. You know that I denied you three times. You know that at this moment I can't honestly say that I love you with the kind of love you are asking for. But I do think you are a good friend. That much I can say. So I leave it at that.” Peter knows himself very well by now.
Jesus then goes on to predict Peter's death. He says that the moment will come when Peter will, in fact, lay down his life out of love for Jesus. He would do this not only by feeding the sheep as Jesus commissions him to do in this passage, but also by literal martyrdom. (Tradition says Peter himself was crucified.)
Peter would one day arrive at this stage of radical love, but it would not happen right away. It would not happen until he was an old man. It would be a matter of growth over time.
Some marriage counselors describe the stages that couples go through in a marriage, from the time they first get the hots for each other, through periods of grayness and everyday-ness and the seven-year itch, through a time of despair when they think they have nothing left between them. These counselors say that if they hang in there through those dark moments, if they can talk things through and heal and forgive, they can come to a time of reawakening when they discover again the love that had been there all the time but had gone unseen, like a powerful underground river. Finally, they can reach the final stage, called, very simply, love. It's what we sometimes see in older couples who have done the work over the course of many years together.
The fact is that married love is not something that happens in a flash. It's not a matter of a few months or years. It takes years and years and years to marry a man, years and years to marry a woman. It's a matter of growth. It takes a lifetime. 
It's less like a display of fireworks and more like a pilgrimage. Along the way, there is a lot of fun, great thrills and laughter, as well as tough times you just work your way through, one step at a time. There are some tough moments when Dostoevky's words can sound all too true, that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
It's like this in a relationship with this character we call Jesus. This is what Peter is wrestling with in today's gospel.
He is a pilgrim on the way, and one day, Jesus tells him, he would arrive at the fullness of love, at agape. But it would not happen overnight. it would take a lifetime, it was a journey.
This is the journey you and I are on. As for Peter, so also with us, learning how to love doesn't happen overnight. It is a pilgrimage, and each morning we put on our shoes and take the next steps. 
It is the journey of a lifetime. It is why God put us here.
And it's a journey that God does not want us to make alone. Which is why he gives us fellow pilgrims, gives us each other. Sometimes they carry us, sometimes we carry them, all of us fellow pilgrims, learning together how to love. I love Ram Dass's definition of community: We're just walking each other home.
Let me end by inviting you to do as Peter does in today's gospel: Take a look for a moment at your own relationship with Jesus. Where are you in your own pilgrimage? Maybe it's that magical time of first infatuation, or maybe it's a time of dryness. Maybe it's a time of despair when it feels like there's really nothing or no one there. Or maybe it is daybreak, a time of reawakening and wonderful new beginnings. Where are you today in your relationship with the one who has gathered us, this wild and woolly character we call Jesus? Take a moment, as Peter did, to wrestle with this question. Maybe do as Peter did and, in the quiet of your heart, speak to Jesus, tell him about where you are this morning.

Easter Vigil 2013 (The Rev'd Dr. John H. Eastwood)

We come together tonight to hear the Church’s most important story in this greatest act of worship of the Christian Year. We come to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ from the dead and to share in his presence with us through the holy food of bread and wine.  With the new fire of Easter, blessed and burning, bright atop the paschal candle, we have the light that illumines all darkness of our hearts and minds.  Tonight we join our stories to that story of new life.
As we listened to the prophets, we heard how God’s people have endured through hardship, abandonment, and loss. As we imagine the experience of Jesus’ disciples, we hear that same experience echoing in their story. When we think about our own lives, we may be able to identify those hard times when we felt lost and abandoned, and found ourselves searching for something solid to hold onto, hoping that the hand of God would reach out to us, and to know ourselves coming home to God.  We can see how the story of long ago, the people of the prophets, the people of Jesus, how their story reverberates within us, and our stories can become joined together. 
And tonight there is a new story that begins to unfold, as a child, surrounded by a family’s love, is washed by the waters of baptism, through the dying and rising of Christ, and made a child of God, and has a new spiritual home in the family of Christ.  What began long ago, the story of dying and rising to new life, continues this into this very night.
I am use the word “story” a lot this here because it has great power within it. Stories lead us to new discoveries, important learnings, and spiritual renewal. 
Sharing spiritual autobiographies is a way of witnessing about God in our lives.  It is about telling what has happened to us, and letting the events speak for themselves.  That is what we will be doing as a congregation this Easter season as we gather into small groups in the coming weeks to share our stories with one another. It is a time of discovery and experiencing the strength of renewal.
Keith Miller, a popular Christian writer tells a story about a woman named “Alice” in his book Habitation of Dragons.  They were members of a support group who were committed to one another in order to help deepen their spiritual lives.  As a part of their common bond, the group shared their spiritual autobiographies.  One night Alice told her story - one that Miller says he could never forget.  It went like this:
When I was a tiny little girl, I was put in an orphanage.  I wasn’t very pretty, and no one wanted me.  Still I wanted to be adopted and loved by a family more than anything else.  I thought about it day and night.  But everything I did seemed to go wrong.  I tried too hard to please everybody who came to look at me, and all I did was drive them away.
Then one day the head of the orphanage told me that a family was going to come and take me home with them.  I was so excited I jumped up and down and cried.  The matron reminded me that I was on trial and that it might not be permanent.  But I just knew it would be.  So I went with this family and started school in their town - a very happy little girl.
But one day, a few months later, I skipped home from school and ran in the front door of the big old house we lived in.  No one was home but there was my old battered suitcase with my coat thrown over it.  As I stood there and looked at the suitcase, it slowly dawned on me what it meant ... they didn’t want me, and I hadn’t even suspected.”
At this point Alice paused.  But the group didn’t notice.  They were waiting for her to continue as they imagined her standing in the hallway with the suitcase, and trying not to cry.
Alice cleared her throat, and then said, almost matter-of-factly, 
That happened to me seven times before I was thirteen years old.
Miller and the group, looking at this tall 40 year old woman sitting next to them, silently wept, and one member stood to give her a hug.  But Alice startled them by saying, Don’t be sad for me.  I needed my past.  You see, it brought me to God.
Our past is our story and as we let it unfold with each other we are helped to discover the presence of God in our lives, the presence of the One who is God of the refugee, the God of unfolding grace. 
Easter is about what it means to live in the Spirit.  Easter means that we are neither lost nor abandoned, but loved by God, and have our home in God.  At Easter, we come home to God.  He is our joy, peace, mercy and grace. Please join me in response, proclaiming once again, “Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!”  Let us stand!

May the peace of the Lord be always with you!

Third Sunday in Lent: On Repentance (Rebecca Gordon)

Here we are in the third Sunday in Lent, and we haven’t really talked much about sin or repentance. Traditionally, Lent is a time to reflect on our failings of thought, word, and deed, on the things done and left undone. Lent is a time to think again, as the Latin roots of the word “re-pent” tell us, about our connections with the world, with each other, and with God. It’s a time to experience both regret and hope. Regret for sin and hope for redemption.

Sin and repentance are subjects that liberal Christians are often uncomfortable with, and there are good reasons for that. Some of us are uncomfortable because in our early religious lives we were introduced to a vicious demon of a God, a God who is just waiting for us to fail so that he – and this God is very much a “he” – can cast us into the eternal fires of damnation. I kind of think there’s a little bit of this God in the one Paul says destroyed 23,000 people at once in the desert, just so they might be a good example for the Christian church at Corinth a millennium later.

This is the God who hates so many of us, maybe because we are as Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church would say, fags, or because, as I used to believe, we are women, or poor, or weak, or because we have failed to find the right amount of unswerving belief in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. A God who hates creation – imperfect as it may be – is a hard God for me to love. A hard God to cry out to, as we did in today’s psalm:

“O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”

Why would I eagerly seek Someone who is only waiting to throw me into the pit? What a blessed relief it is to be able to come to a place like St. John’s, to worship a God who, far from hating me, loves me like a daughter. And yet, and yet…

I think another reason that the idea of sin and repentance is hard for many Episcopalians is that we don’t really believe that as individuals most of us are really all that bad, are truly deserving of eternal damnation. Oh sure, we all do unskillful things, as Buddhists say. We tell the occasional lie, maybe to prevent a friend or partner from being hurt or, more likely, from getting mad at us. We snap at people we love. We put off things that would be better done today. Often we wish we were braver, or kinder, or had more self-discipline. But we’re not evil. Are we?

All this talk of sin and repentance makes us nervous and maybe even a little embarrassed. My partner Jan grew up in the pre-1979 Episcopal church, with the old prayer book that was published in 1928. Most Sundays her congregation at Trinity Church in Buffalo, New York said Morning Prayer, which always began with Confession. Here is part of what they used to say:

“ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.”

We are “miserable offenders… and there is no health in us.” Not the best message for church growth, is it? Not quite the right note to appeal to the spiritual but not religious moving in all around St. John’s, is it? Who wants to come to church to be told they’re bad? And yet, and yet… there are times when I know that I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart, and they have not led me where I truly want to go. And I need somewhere to turn, someone to help me turn my heart where it truly wishes to rest – in God. I need a church that loves me in all my fallible humanity, that does not ignore my failings, but helps recognize and redeem them. I need a place where I can lay the burden of those failings down, place them in stronger hands than my own.

One of the joys of preaching in the Episcopal church is that the preacher doesn’t get to – or have to – decide what texts to talk about. Today the lectionary has served up a slightly odd bunch of readings. We’ve got: the well-known story of Moses and the burning bush; one of the lovely hunger-and-thirst-for-God psalms; Paul’s meditations on why bad things happen to bad people; and an oddly unfinished story about a fig tree.

Oh, and a collect. The collects are another gift of the Episcopal church. They’re a set of prayers for all kinds of occasions, many dating back to the 16^th century. You can find them in that little red book under the chair in front of you – the Book of Common Prayer. (Don’t look now.) Here’s the collect that opened today’s service:

“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”

I think we can find a key to today’s readings in this collect. It is, after all, Lent, and we are being invited to repent. “Almighty God, you know we have no power to help ourselves.”

We have no power to defend our bodies and souls from the assaults of the world. Oh we may think we do. We might pride ourselves on eating right, exercising faithfully, giving up a car to ride a bike to work, as I’ve done. And then, boom! You thing you're doing everything right and you still end up with a herniated disc. (You’ll be glad to know that mine keeps me from being able to stand up all that long, so there’s a natural limit to the length of this sermon!) “We have no power to help ourselves.”

And just as we have no power to protect ourselves from our own ultimate mortality, alone we have no power to protect ourselves “from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”
Sometimes we find ourselves helpless before the devices and desires of our own hearts. Sometimes there is no health in us.

That's pretty harsh. Most of the time most of us have a fair amount of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. We’re not perfect, but we’re not all that bad. I think we can find an example of what the words of the confession mean, if we are willing to repent – to rethink – today’s reading from the Book of Exodus. In this much-loved passage, God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and commands him to free his people from slavery in Egypt.

In a few weeks I’ll be sitting down with other Jews to celebrate the Passover. We’ll remember and retell the story of how we were slaves in Egypt, and how God, through Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, brought us out of slavery into freedom, out of living death into life. We’ll remind ourselves that none of us are free until all of us are free. We’ll repeat what are probably the oldest words in the Hebrew scriptures, a celebration of death and destruction, the poem known as the song of Miriam: “Sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted! The horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea.”

This story of the freeing of the Israelites is one foundation of a way of thinking about our faith called liberation theology. It’s a way of understanding God as the One who stands with the oppressed, who in the person of Jesus knows what it is to be tortured and murdered by the world’s powers, who works in history for justice. The book of Exodus is a central text for liberation theology. This understanding goes back to slavery times in this country. It’s no accident that Harriet Tubman, who led African slaves to freedom, was known by the code name “Moses.” Similarly, people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have taken this story of liberation as their own, as a sign and promise of God’s liberating action.

But there’s another way to read this story, a way to re-think it. Let’s listen again. Here is what God says to Moses: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”

Wonderful news, if you’re an Israelite. Not so great if you’re a Canaanite, a Hittite, or an Amorite. The American Indian theologian Robert Allan Warrior wrote about this side of the story some years ago, in an essay called “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians.”

Speaking about a people who have been freed from horrible oppression, Warrior said, “Once the victims have been delivered, they seek a new dream, a new goal, usually a place of safety away from the oppressors, a place that can be defended against future subjugation. Israel's new dream became the land of Canaan. And Yahweh was still with them: Yahweh promised to go before the people and give them Canaan, with its flowing milk and honey.” Thus, says Warrior, “Yahweh the deliverer became Yahweh the conqueror.”

“The obvious characters in the story for Native Americans to identify with,” he continues, “are the Canaanites, the people who already lived in the promised land.” Warrior invites us to re-pent, to think again about the story of the Exodus. And when we see the great saga of liberation from another viewpoint, it becomes a story of cruelty and extermination. We remember God’s orders to eliminate completely the peoples they meet in the conquest of Canaan. Here, from the Book of Joshua for example, is the story of what happened to a city called Ai:

“Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai.… So Joshua burned Ai[b] and made it a permanent heap of ruins, a desolate place to this day. He impaled the body of the king of Ai on a pole and left it there until evening.”

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells us that the sins of the Israelites included grumbling about their leaders, sexual immorality, and idolatry. I think it’s the last one that’s the real sin. It is idolatry when we turn the God of liberation into an idol who cares only for people like us, a God who will fulfill the devices and desires of our hearts, even at the expense of the hearts of those who are different from us, who promises us milk and honey in return for slaughter.

Indeed, I sometimes think all histories of human liberation contain their own crushings and cruelties, their unbearable pain as well as unbearable joy: think of collaborators tortured and murdered; of the collateral damage of armed struggle against dictators; of the women raped and murdered, crops destroyed, fields sown with salt. This month we will observe the tenth anniversary of the U.S war in Iraq. Whatever the intentions of the architects of that war, many young soldiers went there believing in a mission of liberation. And indeed, a vicious dictator was deposed – at the cost of more than a hundred thousand lives, of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and the “ethnic cleansing” of entire cities.

I don’t think these evils are accidental byproducts of otherwise glorious events. I think they are built into human reality. I think that is what we mean when we say, “There is no health in us.” It’s a recognition of the collective evil that we, as a species, as peoples, are capable of. It’s a recognition of our ability to turn the God of liberation into an idol that treats one nation, one people as if they were divine. I think this is what we see if we are willing to rethink the Exodus from the point of view of the Canaanites.

We see this ill health today in the ravages of an economic system that makes a few people very rich by impoverishing the majority. Most of us are helplessly complicit in this system. We don’t want other people to suffer; we’re just trying to live our lives. The workers at CitiBank didn’t set out to make Gloria suffer when they tried to foreclose on her house. They were just living their lives, doing their jobs, trying be responsible for themselves and their own families. We are implicated, tied up, intimately involved in the reality that life feeds on life, that even without being all that bad, we can cause a great deal of harm.

Which brings us to the unfinished parable of the fig tree. Jesus tells us about a man whose unproductive fig tree is taking up space in his garden. Three years, and it’s borne no fruit. There is no health in it. Maybe he should dig it up. Or maybe it’s worth spreading a little manure around it, and giving it another chance. Did the tree bear figs the next year? We’re left wondering. We never find out the end of the story.

I think that's because the story isn’t over. We are all imperfect fig trees invited to flourish and bear fruit. But we can’t do it alone. We need the nourishment of connection with God and with the body of Christ, which we recognize in each other. With our companions, the ones with whom we share bread. That’s why, week after week, I return to this table for solace and strength. I lay all my imperfections down before God and my neighbors. I repent, re-think, and am reconfirmed through the sharing of bread and wine, as part of the body of Christ in the world, as God’s beloved daughter. We are all invited to do the same! Amen.

Palm Sunday 2013 (Deacon Jackie Cherry)

The Passion Gospel we just heard is so, so very, long, chances are it knocked the Epistle right out of your short-term memory. On Good Friday, we will spend time meditating on Jesus’ body when we hear again the account of his arrest, trial and torture. This morning, I want to look back at our oft-neglected Epistle reading. Here, St. Paul gives us insight into the mind of Christ. But more importantly, he is asking us to develop the Christ-mind. He says,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death --

even death on a cross.

Jesus had prepared for his journey to Jerusalem, the journey we enacted this morning. The events in Jerusalem and throughout Holy Week were not unexpected, at least not for Jesus. He spent his public life emptying himself and humbling himself. He had no desire for self-glorification. In the mind of Christ, serving and building up others, trumps self-preservation.

It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the concept of becoming obedient to the point of death though. I don’t believe this means that Jesus was obedient to a God who wanted him to die. But I do believe Jesus was obedient to humanity. His total surrender to becoming fully human included succumbing to a human death.

The time will come when every one of us will be asked to be obedient to death.

Until that time, we must decide how to live – self-preservation or self-emptying; we can spend our energy saving ourselves or serving others.

My dad was the picture of health. In fact he had no medical history, until he was 80 years old when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He never talked about death. He talked about treatment.

Over a span of 18 months he tried surgery, radiation, drug A, drug B, drug C,

a combo of A and B, B and C, and when nothing worked, he started all over again with drug A. But by then the cancer had spread to his lungs and lymph nodes. The base of his tongue – the primary site of the tumor – was so huge that he couldn’t eat, talking and swallowing caused excruciating pain. The doctor sheepishly told my dad that his anemic, malnourished body couldn’t handle another assault by chemo, and referred him to hospice.

After the treatment stopped, about three weeks before he died, my mom and dad and I were sitting at the dining room table, when my dad abruptly said,

When I expire I want you to let Bernice, (the standard poodle that you may have seen hanging around the church), smell my body. I want Bernice to see me,

and to smell me before they take me away, so she doesn’t wait for me by the door.

This was the first time my dad talked about dying.

The last two days of his life were spent in the San Diego Hospice; my mom and I, and Bernice, stayed with him. A few minutes after dad died, I called Bernice over. Immediately but gently she jumped onto his bed and rested herself on his skeletal chest. They were heart–to–heart. Bernice sniffed his neck, and face, and forehead. She was so focused and careful I thought I was watching a movie in slow motion. Then, like a mother dog with her newborn pups, Bernice started to lick. She licked and licked his chest and face until she had tended to every bit of his exposed skin. This was nothing less than an anointment before burial. As I watched, I fell in love with a part of my dad I had never known. A man who loved his dog so completely that he was willing to acknowledge the unmentionable – his own death – in order to protect her.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. The Christ-mind is within our reach. On Palm Sunday, we aren’t just remembering the humility and self-emptying death of Jesus. We witness today the Christ-mind, the self-emptying that is possible for all of God’s children, each one of us, to grow into.

I’d like you to look at St. Paul’s words carefully. I mean really, right now, look at your bulletin and find the Epistle reading. It is tempting to fast-forward through this reading to Therefore, God highly exalted him, and interpret this to mean if we humble ourselves, then we will be exalted. But listen to it this way:

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death --

even death on a cross. Period. Full stop. Silence. No heartbeat, no breath.

No light, just a big old boulder sealing the tomb.

In his commentary on St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, Fred Craddock explains, “The grave of Christ was a cave, not a tunnel. Christ acted on our behalf without view of gain. That is exactly what God has exalted and vindicated: self-denying service for others to the point of death with no claim of return, no eye upon a reward.”¹

To read today’s Epistle without including the dark space of death is as tempting as jumping from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. I urge you to slow down. Please don’t make the jump. At the forum after the service, Fr. Richard will talk about the importance of the space between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Today begins the long journey through Holy Week to the cross – a journey that includes rough roads, blind intersections, and falling rock. The yellow warning signs, covered in graffiti, faded and warped by the sun, are largely passed by. But slow down and look closely; in the right light you can still decipher the words: Taking Short Cut May Turn Heart To Stone.

Amen.

1 Fred Craddock, Philippians, Interpretation series (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 42; qtd. in David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds., Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2, 175.

Easter Sunday 2013 (Fr. Richard)

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Today's story of Jesus' resurrection is central to who we are, and it explains so much of what we do. You remember what happens before this moment.

• How Jesus associates himself with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners
• How he takes on the religious leaders: "Hypocrites!" he calls them, "whited sepulchers! You lay heavy burdens on people's shoulders but will not move a finger to lift them."
• How he challenges the economic system, overturning the tables of money changers in the temple, declaring woe to the rich if they remain unmoved by the poor at the city gates.

Did he know what he was up against when he said and did all those things?
Because then, in what seemed like the end, he becomes an executed criminal on a cross, bruised and broken, with a fat lip and a swollen eye, barely able to lift his head.
Did he know what he was up against?

Years ago, after a Sunday liturgy, a young woman came running up to me on the church steps. She had recently become a widow long before her time. Her eyes were red, and she obviously had not slept. She asked, “Why didn't someone tell me that one day my marriage would end, either in death or in divorce?”
Did that young widow know what she was up against when she chose to love the man who became her husband?

For that matter, do any of us know what we are up against when we choose to love another person?
After investing ourselves in the ones we love--slogging through all the inevitable misunderstandings and fear and anger, working to enrich their lives, wanting to protect them from harm--ultimately we fail. Death takes everything away.
And so a question arises. Is it worth it?
Is it worth all the energy we invest in our relationships with loved ones? Is it worth the effort to love?

When love moves into the public forum, we call it justice. Do we know what we are up against when we work for justice?
I think of our own parish and our own work for justice.

• This past Lent, we collected enough money to dig a well in a remote village in Nicaragua so the people there can have clean and safe water for their families.
• In the last few weeks we've wept with families in our neighborhood who are torn apart by unjust immigration laws, and we stood with them to demand a change.
• We've marched for marriage equality and the simple right to live and love and raise our kids openly in the light of day.
• And we've handed out fresh vegetables and bread to hungry people every Saturday morning here in this space.

We've wanted our lives, both as individuals and as a parish, to matter. We have tried to make a difference.
Do we know what we are up against when we invest ourselves in  these struggles for justice?

Let's not be naïve. We have powerful forces to contend with: heavily financed lobbyists; an entire culture of greed that measures us by how much we make, the color of our skin, who we choose to love. And then there's the never ending refrain: “It's always been this way, the poor getting poorer and the rich richer. That's just how it is. Why not face the facts?”
Who are we to play David before such Goliaths? Do we even stand a chance of winning? Do we know what we are up against?

When we decide to love someone, or to follow the path of justice, we're taking a big risk. We may find at the end of the day that we had it all wrong--that instead of looking out for others, we should have spent our precious time acquiring more toys; ; making a name for ourselves; climbing the corporate ladder, or the social ladder, or the economic ladder, or one of the many other ladders.
When we decide to love and to pursue justice, we're swimming against the current. Is the sacrifice really worth it?

We Christians think that love and justice are worth the risk. Why? Because of the ancient story we remember today; that the one who gave himself fully to love--and paid for it dearly with his life--has been raised from death, has been vindicated by none other than the Creator of heaven and earth, and is with us now, full of more joy, more life than when he walked the earth 2000 years ago.
Our impulse to love and to work for justice is backed up by no one less than God. That's what the story of Jesus' resurrection means.

Death and tears and sadness will not have the final say. Love and laughter and joy will win. This is the guarantee God gives us in raising Jesus from death. And therefore, no act of love is ever wasted, and in the end, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is worth it to love, worth it to pursue justice, despite the costs. The risk is worth taking.

Our spiritual ancestors believed this--from Mary, the mother of Jesus, to John the Evangelist; from Francis of Assisi to Martin Luther King to Harriet Tubman to Oscar Romero. And like them we in our best moments are crazy enough to believe it, too. In fact, in our baptismal vows, we stake our lives on it.

And so, fellow gamblers, fellow risk takers: We, too, now join the ancient chorus:
     Alleluia! Christ is risen!
     The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Yes. And may we live out this truth of our brother Jesus with confidence, risking everything as he did for love and for justice among all God's children on this amazing and beautiful earth.