“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.

Fragility

Luke 13: 1-9

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

February 28, 2016

We human beings are actually quite fragile. This fragility, the thought that our lives can come unraveled very quickly, can make us anxious, and so we go into denial, try to shore up the illusion that we are immune from the tragedies that others face.

We do this in various ways. More toys, more money, more honors and distinctions, more frenzied activity can calm our anxiety, give an illusion of security. For a moment.

And we can find ways to distance ourselves from those people who remind us of our own fragility. Keep immigrants who are fleeing the violence and poverty of their countries from crossing our borders. Keep the frail elderly and the handicapped in institutions, out of sight. Lock up black and brown people in prison and immigration detention centers. Keep the homeless out of our neighborhoods.

Because such people remind us of how fragile our lot as human beings really is. We’d rather not see them or listen to them or have to think about them.

We tell ourselves things like, “I’ll never be homeless. I’m not like those folks in the encampments down on Division Street. I work hard to keep my job and my health. Heck, I’ve even got a college degree. I’m not like them. Their fate will never be mine.” This self-talk calms our anxiety. For a moment. 

At least until we realize that the majority of those same homeless people once had homes like like the rest of us, some have Ph.D.’s, some were once physicians and attorneys, professional people whose lives suddenly whirled out of control through no fault of their own. Suddenly it dawns on us: We’re not as different from them as we thought. It might not be as obvious, but all of our lives, like theirs, are fragile.

It’s hard to accept our own fragility, to remember, as we said on the first day of Lent, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. We’d like to hide from that fact, go into denial.

There's a religious version of this way of thinking, as seen in today's gospel, a way of shielding ourselves from our inherent vulnerability. 

A crowd tells Jesus about an incident of state terror that Pilate, the Roman Governor, had inflicted on a group of Galilean Jews. They had come to the temple to offer sacrifice. These sacrifices involved the killing of animals. Pilate sent in troops and murdered the Galileans, mingling their blood with the blood of the sacrificed animals. 

If the sacrificed animals were part of a ritual for the atonement of sins, the Galileans were murdered as they were repenting. This makes the crowd think that perhaps their sins were so great that it had something to do with their being slaughtered. They must have been the worst of sinners. God would not accept their sacrifice, but through the agency of Pilate sacrificed them instead. In the background of this tragedy lies a God who seeks out and punishes sinners.

It’s a common logic, almost hard-wired into the human mind: Step out of line, and you will be punished. 

This logic is also an attempt of shielding ourselves from tragedy. “This could never happen to me. I’m a good person. God would not punish me like he did them.” This way of thinking distances us from tragedy and our own fragility, from thinking, “That could have been me.”

Jesus resists this talk of a punishing God, this effort to run from our own fragility, but before he does this, he extends it. “What about physical evil, the accidents that happen? You’ve heard about the tower that fell in Jerusalem that killed eighteen people. Was the hand of God in this, the hand of a God who sees sinners and punishes them?”

To this theology of a punishing God, Jesus gives an adamant “No”. He doesn’t elaborate, nor does he try to make a case for why bad things happen to good people. He just seems to say, “Stop that way of thinking right now!”

And then he goes on to say that if they do not repent, they will likewise perish. Suddenly the focus shifts from tragic victims in the external world, to their own fate. And their own fate doesn’t depend on the caprice of Pilate of the poor mortaring of bricklayers. Their fate is in their own hands, in their own hearts. 

They have to repent, change their mind, or they will perish. It’s suddenly no longer a matter of abstract theology, but of personal decision, a choice not to waste “the one wild and precious life” you’ve been blessed with.

Speculating about why bad things happen is a misplaced emphasis, a waste of time. Focus instead, Jesus seems to be saying, on what God is inviting you to do now, how God is calling you to live fully, to do God’s will on earth. Shift your focus. Change your mind. Repent.

But to do this means embracing our own fragility, not fleeing from it. It means no longer shielding ourselves from those “others” who remind us of life’s inherent fragility, the very ones Jesus sought out and loved to hang out with. This is why one theologian refers to Jesus as “the Compassion of God”.

In fact, the whole story of Jesus is about embracing human fragility. The early Christians wrote a song about this, words we’ll hear on Good Friday. Let me slightly paraphrase that ancient song:

His state was divine,
yet he did not cling to his equality with God
but emptied himself
to assume the condition of a slave,
and became [fragile] as we are;
and being as we are,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death,
death on a cross.

For us, who sometimes do everything we can to flee our own fragility and that of others, it’s hard to grasp that we are liberated by someone who became powerless, that we are being strengthened by someone who became fragile and weak, that we find new hope in someone who divested himself of all honors and distinctions, that we find a leader in someone who became a slave, that we receive life from someone who experienced the most horrifying form of death, death on a cross. Hard to grasp that following Jesus means entering into human fragility, not fleeing from it.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, stumbled across this realization one day. He writes:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being human, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.

Lent is a time that we, as followers of Jesus, come, like Jesus, like Merton, to embrace our own fragility and that of others.

These are days to cherish these fragile and precious lives we’ve been given. Precisely because they are fragile, we can’t take them for granted, must cherish every moment -- the food we eat, the people we love, the beauty of the earth, the work we do. 

And this recognition that we will not always be in this life as we are now, leads us to stop sweating the small stuff, leads us back to what really matters. 

Often, when a person is approaching that most fragile moment in their life, the moment of death, they are blessed with a profound clarity about what is most important. As the common wisdom goes, in that final moment no one regrets that they didn’t spend more time at the office. The recognition of our own fragility leads us back to what matters most, the people, the work, the values we cherish most.

And finally, this recognition deepens our compassion. Rather than shielding ourselves from those whose brokenness and fragility is most apparent, we begin to see them as truly our brothers and sisters, kin, let their stories touch us, maybe even become friends. Their fragility may, for the moment, be more apparent than ours, but we’re not as different from them as we’d like to pretend.

Taking the Side of the Victims

Luke 4:14-21

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.

January 24, 2016

Wait! I thought God loved everyone, that Jesus came for everyone! But in today’s gospel, he says he was sent to the poor, the prisoners, the blind and oppressed. Really? What about everybody else -- the rest of us who, relatively speaking, aren’t poor, or in prison, or blind, or oppressed? What about us?

The problem parallels this past year’s arguments over the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Opponents of that movement have insisted that all lives matter, not just black lives. Why the focus on black lives to the exclusion of everyone else?

Of course, that’s not what the movement is saying. Rather, it’s calling out the fact that in our present world and culture, black lives don’t matter, at least not as much as white ones do. When the day comes that black lives really do matter, then we'll be able to truly say that all lives matter.

As one African-American pastor put it: “When you see a house on fire and direct the firefighters to that house, you’re not saying that all the other houses in the neighborhood don’t matter; you’re saying this one especially matters because it’s on fire. Right now,” he says, “our house [the house of African Americans] is on fire.”

Jesus is doing something similar. He has just been baptized by John the Baptist and spent a long retreat in the wilderness. Filled by the power of the Holy Spirit, he’s ready to begin his ministry. He returns to his hometown synagogue for his inaugural address. They hand him the Book of the prophet Isaiah. Out of the tens of thousands of words in that book, he deliberately selects the ones we just heard, focusing his entire new ministry on the poor and the imprisoned, the blind and the oppressed --  the people the world overlooks, doesn’t want, discards.

In other words, Jesus takes the side of the victims. He is like the mother who loves all her children -- of course! -- but runs to defend her younger one when her older one is picking on him. Today, Jesus takes the side of the exploited immigrant worker receiving less than the minimum wage, but also takes the side of his wife if he should return home and abuse her.

Whoever takes advantage of the vulnerable will answer to God for it. To announce the good news of God’s reign today is to say that God comes to offer all of us a new way to live: as brothers and sisters in a new creation. 

As one central American poet put it, “A religion that doesn’t have the courage to speak out for human beings doesn’t have the right to speak out for God.” That is the price of credible ministry today.

And this is the work Jesus today, ministering through the only body he now has, what Paul calls the Body of Christ. And on this day of our annual meeting, Paul reminds us that we are each members of that Body, each with our own unique role. Many years after Paul wrote those words, St. Therese echoed them, and I’ll close with her familiar words:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours.

Yours are the eyes with which he looks with compassion on this world.

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

The Wedding Feast at Cana

The Rev'd Dr Richard Smith

Second Sunday After Epiphany, Year C

January 17, 2016

Speaking as the parent of a teenager, I am so loving this Gospel story, especially the conversation it includes between a young man and his mother. The young man is, of course, Jesus, and he doesn’t know what time it is, but his mother does. He needs to listen to her. As the parent of a teenager, did I tell you how much I love this story?

First though, let me set the context for this passage. The opening words of John’s gospel are “In the beginning...,” the same words that open the Book of Genesis. John is writing a creation story. And in his creation story, the old world of death and tears and oppression are giving way to life and love and light.

“Of his fullness,” John writes of Jesus, “we have all received, grace upon grace.” This story is about that new creation, that grace, breaking loose.

It is the third day of a wedding feast, and the wine has run out. A Jewish wedding lasted seven days. The wine has run out before the wedding has. This isn’t just an embarrassment, it’s a disaster.

Wine isn’t just a social device to make a party work, it’s a sign of the harvest, of God’s abundance, of joy and gladness and hospitality. And so when this young couple and their families run short on wine they run short on blessing.

This is a story is a metaphor about a humanity that is falling apart and in peril. They have no wine. Humans have lost their connection with the source of life and their communion with each other. Without this connection, life cannot continue. This is a story about a looming catastrophe.

And in this catastrophe, Mary turns to her son. She knows he is the one to bring divine abundance into a world where human life is failing -- where people are lacking, falling sick, weeping, going blind, hungry, dying. She knows that Jesus is sent to prevent this world from perishing. John writes: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life. God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him.”

So Mary knows who to come to when the wine runs out, and so she says to her son, “They have no wine.” She expects him to do something about it.

“Woman,” Jesus says to her, and it sounds like an oddly formal way to address his mother, but the word he’s using is the one used for Eve in the earlier creation story in Genesis. Mary, in John’s new creation story, is the new Eve, the mother of the living who cares for her children and who's responsible for their well-being.

“Woman,” he says, “what concern is that to you or me? My hour has not yet come.”

He’s concerned about the timing. He suggests it’s not time for him to provide the wine.

Turns out, he doesn’t know what time it is. But his mother does.

A word about timing. All throughout John’s gospel, timing is everything. And there are two kinds of time that animate his imagination.

One is the kind of time with which we count and track the everyday events of our lives. It is measured in minutes and seconds, hours and days. It is the time we spend standing in lines, or clocking in at work, or waiting at the stoplight. It is mundane, ordinary time and it beats on relentlessly. This kind of time can be, as one writer puts it, “One damn thing after another.”

But there is another kind of time where all that is predictable fades and what emerges in its place is sheer possibility. This is God’s time, and sometimes it pokes through the ordinary canvas and clock of our lives to reveal a glimpse of the divine. This kind of time, God’s time, is meant to shape what we do with our ordinary time.

Tomorrow we remember someone who knew about this second kind of time. He called it “being on the mountaintop” where the glory of God had become clear.

In a speech he gave in Memphis not long before he was assassinated, Dr. King recalled how he had nearly died in 1958 when a deranged woman stabbed him in a Harlem bookstore. He told how how on his flight from Atlanta to Memphis that morning a bomb scare caused the pilot to announce to the passengers that, because Dr. King’s life had been threatened, a special guard had to be brought on board. King continued:

And then I got into Memphis, and some began to say the threats—or talk about the threats—that were out, what would happen to me from some of our white sick brothers. Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now, because I have been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody I would like to live—a long life—longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now; I just want to do God's will....So I'm happy tonight! I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

A second kind of time. Mountain top time when the glory of the Lord is revealed. God’s time that makes sense of the ordinary time we mark on the calendar. It’s what gave Dr. King a profound clarity and purpose about what he had to do, and fired him with courage in the remaining seconds and minutes and days of his life. It revealed what his remaining calendar time was about, what it meant, why it mattered.

At the wedding feast, Jesus says that his hour, his mountain top moment, has not yet come. He isn’t speaking of a time and date on his calendar; he’s talking about the time when God will reveal his glory through his cross, resurrection, and ascension, the time when the veil of the temple will be torn in two and God will be accessible to all, once and for all.

Mary knows better. She knows that this wedding feast is no ordinary moment. Because whenever there is need and Jesus is on the scene, resurrection and abundance are right around the corner, grace upon grace. She knows what time it is better than her son.

And after his comeback to her request, she doesn’t say anything to him, but I see her casting one of those maternal glances -- the kind my mom still gives to me now and then, and like I sometimes give to my own son...

Rather than argue with him, she turns to the servants and tells them simply and clearly, “Do whatever he tells you.” She knows her son will come around. He might protest, but eventually he’ll listen to his mother.

Well, you know the rest of the story. Jesus instructs the servants to fill six large stone basins with water, to draw some of that water, now turned to fine wine, and take it to the steward. The steward assumes that the host has saved the best wine for last.

Suddenly this couple has six huge basins – 180 gallons – of the finest wine, more than enough for the rest of the wedding celebration. No one could now leave this wedding thirsty, because the water of human inadequacy that leaves you empty and unsatisfied has given way to the wine of exhilaration, the old order has given way to a new creation, abundance and blessing and grace have overflowed.

Gerard Manley Hopkins once said that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. In every moment the new creation is lurking, waiting to break forth. Bread and wine can bear Christ’s body and blood. An ordinary hug can convey unbounded love and blessing. The smallest donation of clean socks or rain ponchos can make all the difference for one of the homeless who sleep here on weekday mornings . A smile at just the right time, can shed light into the darkest of places.

There really are no ordinary moments. Maybe it’s 8:45 on a Tuesday morning and all that’s in front of you is a pile of invoices. Or maybe it’s Thursday evening and time to take out the garbage. Or maybe it’s 7:30 Saturday morning and time, finally, to sleep in.

Yet within each of the seconds and minutes and hours of our days, a new creation is waiting to break forth, waiting for us to unleash it. Life and love and laughter -- grace -- is waiting to break loose in our lives and in our world. Can you see it?

These so-called “ordinary” moments of our lives, do we know how pregnant they are? Do we know how to seize them as Mary would have us do, as Martin Luther King did? Do we really know what time it is?

The Baptism of our Lord, and Rhys

The Rev. Jacqueline Cherry

January 10, 2016  Yr C

What a joy it is to welcome those of you who have come to witness the baptism of Rhys Monroe. I realize some of you are here to celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, please know, we are happy to have you here too.

Before Jesus joined the crowd at the river Jordan, John the Baptist was wandering in the desert when he heard the word of God. And he was inspired to travel the region to proclaim a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. From what we can glean from the various gospels, John looked crazed wearing camel’s hair, and with locust legs and honey stuck in his beard.  In my mind he was breathless with a beet-red face from all of the explaining he had to do. Know body knew who this guy was;
the priests and Levites gave him the 3rd degree:

Who are you?  I am not the Messiah.
Are you Elijah? No.
Are you a prophet? No.
Then who, pray tell, are you? And why are you baptizing?

Let’s be honest, God had given John a horrible job - to proclaim the coming of someone more powerful than himself with no details of who, when or where. John was in the dark waiting for the light, a voice crying out in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.

As the people were filled with expectation, all were questioning in their hearts concerning John whether he might be the Messiah.
It might not be so different today - I imagine all of us, just like the people in Luke’s gospel, are looking expectantly for a messiah. In our national political arena we debate whether Donald or Hillary can best save our country. Or we make ourselves indispensable at work believing that a secure job will keep us safe. Or maybe we long for that special someone who will save us from ever being lonely again. .We look with expectation, and we wonder, is that the one? Is he the person I've been waiting for? Could she be the one to whom I dare open my heart?

As the people were filled with expectation,
all were questioning in their hearts could he be the one to save us?

John stayed with the people baptizing them, and answering their questions wisely, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”  While he was speaking, Jesus slipped into the crowd.  Jesus became one with the people. And in the midst of the people Jesus was baptized by John with the people. And the nature of God is revealed.

The heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon
Jesus like a dove. And a voice came from heaven saying,
‘you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.

This is the moment the world changed. This is the moment that God moved from the realm of heaven to earth. This is the moment God meets us where we are. Boundaries are crossed at baptism. Borders disappear.
John baptized Jesus, then God broke through the heavens and claimed him. The grace of baptism is that we don’t have to do or say anything, God has already claimed us whether we believe we deserve it or not. And it’s going to happen to Rhys Monroe in just a few minutes.

But first, there’s something I need to confess: Neil and Lou, Grandparents and Godparents, Fr. Jack and Cromey, and all of you here, I need you to know that when we move through this rite of baptism, through the examination, the covenant and the prayers, while there’s a part of me that loves our age-old rituals, there’s another part of me that will cringe. Because I don’t believe it is necessary for anybody to renounce Satan and the forces of wickedness, evil powers and sinful desires on behalf of Rhys Monroe. We use this language because we always have; it’s dramatic and it makes good liturgy.

I encourage you therefore to think of Satan as a convenient symbol for the foul elements of humanity - greed and rage, envy and deceit; and, to imagine Jesus as representing the honorable human qualities of compassion, patience, kindness, and humility. So really, the Examination and Baptismal Covenant can be reduced to one question that everyone of us in this church should solemnly consider:

Will you fill yourselves up with love and kindness,
leaving no room for hatred and anger?

The one answer to this question is: I will, with God’s help!

The truth is, what may seem like an archaic ritual is astonishingly progressive. While it’s true that this sacrament of Baptism is a covenant between God, the community, and Rhys Monroe, this is the very thing that gays and lesbians have always had to do – establish our own families of choice by creating kinship not defined by genetics or the law. Baptism is the public proclamation and celebration of our adoption into a family that is united by God; a family bound, above all, by love and the promise to love.
This is the day the heavens opened and all that separated humanity from God was destroyed.
This is the day expectation and questioning is replaced with a joyous Epiphany worthy of awe: The Messiah, the one we’ve been waiting for is with us now.
Today is the day we will gather around this baptismal font with Rhys Monroe Cubba-Penick where he will be claimed, marked and sealed as God’s own. Forever, and ever, amen!