Jesus invites us to focus on "what can I do?" instead of "why did this happen?"

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 26, 2017 (Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): John 9:1-41

“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The question would have been a natural one in Jesus’ day; it was widely assumed that sin and physical illness were connected in a directly causal relationship: if you were sick or had a disability of any sort, it must have been because you had sinned. If you were born with an illness or disability, either you must have committed some sin while still in the womb, or your misfortune was due to the sins of your parents. So the disciples were trying to figure it out, to determine which category they should place this man in to explain his abnormality, to find someone to blame.

Despite the advances of modern science, we’re not so different in 21st century America from the disciples who sought to explain the condition of this blind man by blaming it on sin. We’re always looking for ways to blame someone for the uncomfortable abnormalities and disabilities we see in others – “That poor child is deformed because her mother used drugs during her pregnancy,” or “If only he’d stop smoking, he wouldn’t have gotten lung cancer,” or “She has AIDS; that must be a punishment for her lifestyle or drug use.” And if we can’t find a reasonable person on whom to pin the blame, we pin it on God. “Why, God? What have I – or my sister or my uncle or my friend – done to deserve this?” we ask, the assumption being that illness and suffering are only inflicted upon those who “deserve” it as punishment for something they have done wrong.

But the interesting thing is that Jesus rejects this assumption that physical illness is an indication of the presence of sin. “Neither this man or his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

But is this really any better? The man’s blindness – and by consequence, the miserable life he would have experienced as a blind person in first-century Palestine, with no real opportunities for making a living open to him besides begging by the side of the road – was created just so Jesus could come along and perform a miracle? Does that mean all our sufferings are created just so God can be glorified through them? Certainly God can be glorified through our sufferings, but does God create them on purpose – does God make us suffer – just to glorify himself? What kind of God would that be?

But several biblical scholars have suggested that that is not necessarily what Jesus meant to say in this passage. Some scholars propose an alternative translation of the Greek text from the one we heard this morning, a translation that goes like this: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” (9:3-4a). In this translation, Jesus does not give an explanation for the man’s blindness, but simply accepts it as a given. Rather than dwelling in the “why” questions, Jesus is concerned with the more practical “what” questions – what can I do for this man now, and how can God’s glory be revealed in his life, regardless of his condition or his past?

In a similar vein, the blind man is not interested in explaining or justifying Jesus’ behavior when he is interrogated by the Pharisees; he is only concerned with testifying to his personal experience of Jesus. “We know this man is a sinner,” the Pharisees say to him, trying to get him to speak ill of Jesus. “I do not know whether he is a sinner,” the formerly blind man replies. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” He offers no other explanations beyond this simple statement.

In the story as we have received it, both the blind man and Jesus are concerned with the here and now – with responding to the facts of the present situation without over-analyzing them. Jesus does not try to explain the reason why this man was born blind to his disciples, and the blind man does not try to justify Jesus’ actions to the Pharisees. Jesus sees a need and responds to it; the blind man receives a gift and testifies to it. The disciples are so caught up with trying to find a reason for the man’s blindness, to find someone to blame for this misfortune, that they miss seeing a real human being in need in front of them. The Pharisees are so caught up in arguments over what is and isn’t lawful according to religious tradition that they miss the miracle that has taken place in front of them.

The Pharisees tend to get a bad rep in the Gospels, since they’re always set as the “bad guys” in the story, in opposition to Jesus. But as this story shows, the disciples don’t always “get it” either. And aren’t we a little more like the disciples and the Pharisees in this story than we’d like to admit?

I sometimes wonder how Jesus would be received if he were to appear in an Episcopal church on any given Sunday morning. Might we not find ourselves to be modern-day Pharisees, more worried about whether Jesus was performing the liturgy correctly than about the miracle of his presence among us?

And don’t we often look around for people and institutions to blame when things go wrong in our lives, rather than accepting the circumstances for what they are and trying to think creatively about how we could contribute to making the works of God be revealed in that situation?

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.”

“I do not know whether he is a sinner,” says the formerly blind man. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

John’s Gospel this morning is inviting us to let go of the urge to explain, to analyze, to justify, and simply open our eyes to the world around us. Where is there a need that you can respond to, regardless of the reasons it exists? Where have you received a gift that you can testify to with gratefulness? Our personal stories about how we have experienced God working in our lives are the most powerful evangelism tools we have. What is the “one thing you do know” about God in your life? I invite you to share your answer to that question with someone in your life this week, and see what happens. Maybe you too have the power to open the eyes of the blind.

Meeting our spiritual needs is just as critical to our survival as meeting our physical needs

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 19, 2017 (Third Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:5-42

Water is essential for all known forms of life. It could even be said that water is the key to life, biologically speaking. So it no surprise that religious symbolism around water is extensive and widespread. We are dependent on water for our very survival, and we are dependent on God to provide us that water.

In our baptismal service, we give thanks to God for this physical, earthly element and recount the ways in which it is part of our religious history:

“We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise.
In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism.
In it we are buried with Christ in his death.
By it we share in his resurrection.
Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.
Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (BCP 306-07)

But this brief summary of significant events in the history of our faith that happened in water, with water, or through water doesn’t include the two we hear about in our readings today. The framers of our Prayer Book could have added a few more lines to that prayer:

“With it you nourished the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Through it your Son Jesus connected with a Samaritan woman, breaking down religious boundaries and bringing her to acknowledge him as the Messiah.”

God not only brought the children of Israel out of Egypt through water – by walking through the parted waters of the Red Sea – he sustained them during those forty years in the wilderness with water, providing them water from the rock in the desert. Despite the people’s quarreling and grumbling and complaining, questioning the purpose of that very liberation God had brought to them, God continues to be faithful and provides them with the basics for life – water from the rock, and food in the form of manna from heaven and quail.

And Jesus was not just baptized in water; he continued to use water as a powerful image in his teaching, including when he spoke to Nicodemus about being born “of water and the spirit” in the passage we heard last week, and when he told the Samaritan woman in our reading today that he had “living water” to give her, water that would never leave her thirsty again.

She doesn’t understand at first that he’s not talking about actual physical water, some kind of magic liquid that could slake her thirst forever, but about a spiritual sustenance that could feed her soul from within, an internal “well” of strength, of support, of love, of comfort, of protection, offered to her through a connection with this man standing before her, this man who “told me everything I have ever done.”

Jesus’s reference to this internal spiritual sustenance as “living water” draws on its vital importance to human existence: it is key to life; without it we die. The same is true of our relationship with God. We must continually seek it – like this woman coming day after day to draw water from the well – or else we perish.

In 21st century America, where clean water is readily available with little to no effort or money expended on our part, many of us have lost touch with just how important the search for and acquisition of water is when one does not have easy access to it. To us, an offer of “living water” that would never leave us thirsty might be a nice but unnecessary additional convenience. It wouldn’t really impact our lives that much, because for us, acquiring water is as simple as turning on a tap only a few steps from where we happen to be at any given moment. For this woman, though, to have access to water that would assuage her thirst forever would be life-changing. It would mean she would not have to keep coming back to this well to draw water and cart it back to her household. She would have time and energy to devote to things other than mere survival. And so we can almost hear the desperation in her voice when she responds, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

It is with that kind of intensity, that kind of passion, that we should seek God as well. Our physical needs are so primary, so essential, that we can get stuck in seeking to fulfill them alone, but fulfilling our spiritual needs is the only way we will find true sustenance, true life, life beyond the physical, biological meaning of the word. Psychologist Abraham Maslow observed that until our basic physiological needs are met, it is nearly impossible for human beings to focus on anything else. Only when we have enough to eat, shelter, and water, can we begin to explore higher level needs like spiritual awakening. But what we often don’t realize is that our hunger, our craving, for those “higher needs,” is just as essential to our survival as the physical needs. Too many of us stop when we have our basic physiological needs met, neglecting to continue up that hierarchy of needs to pursue the rest of the things we need in order to be truly alive, truly fulfilled.

Jesus is telling the woman by the well that she has a deeper need even than the physical thirst that brings her here day after day, and that only when she addresses that need will her real thirst be quenched.

When the disciples come back and meet up with Jesus and encourage him to “eat something,” his response is, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Just like the woman at the well, they don’t get it either, asking one another, “Did you give him some food? I didn’t give him any food. Did you give him some food?” - but again, he’s talking about a deeper hunger than the physiological. The “food” he has is of the same sort as the “living water” – an internal source, connected to a higher spiritual power, that has the ability to truly nourish in a way that literal, physical food cannot do.

Jesus reminds us that we will only assuage our true hunger and thirst when we seek God as desperately as we seek to fulfill our physical needs. “Give me this water,” we should cry out, like the woman at the well, give me the living water of God that will quench my soul.

But since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do that seeking after God if our basic needs for food and shelter are not met, those of us who do have our basic needs met are called to do all in our power to assist others in meeting those basic needs so that they, too, can seek the kind of spiritual sustenance that will truly nourish them, completely, wholly, at every level of their being.

Faith is a two-way relationship, and we can control only our side

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 12, 2017 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

The season of Lent calls us to be intentional about our spiritual lives: to spend time in prayer, in reading the scriptures, and in self-examination and reflection. One could say that Lent calls us to deepen our faith.

Our readings for today convey the message that our faith is what makes us right with God. These passages represent one side of the classic debate between faith and works – is it our faith, our beliefs, that put us into right relationship with God, or is it our works, our actions, the things we do in this world? Our scriptures for today clearly come down on the “faith” side of the question.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul argues that Abraham was justified – made right with God – not by anything he did, but by having faith – by trusting God’s promise to him. In making this argument, Paul is commenting on a passage from Genesis, chapter 15, just a few chapters after our reading from the Hebrew Bible for today. Chapter 15 includes the famous scene where God shows Abraham a vision – that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky – and after that vision, the scripture tells us that “[Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Paul builds his argument for justification by faith on this line from Genesis. He points out that Abraham was considered “righteous” before God officially made the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s righteousness did not come through the law, which was given later, but through his simple trusting in the word he heard from God.

In our Gospel passage, Jesus encounters a prominent leader of Israel named Nicodemus. Nicodemus goes to visit Jesus by night – perhaps because he does not want to be seen associating with this “rabble rouser” in the light of day – but the fact that he goes to him at all shows that he is drawn to him in some way. He acknowledges that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God,” showing that he does not entirely reject Jesus and his teachings. But Jesus doesn’t give Nicodemus any gold stars for acknowledging him as a teacher. Instead, he launches into a statement about the importance of being “born from above” in order to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

Jesus can tell that Nicodemus has not yet “gotten it,” so to speak. Perhaps his concern with observance of the law has gotten in the way of his understanding the deeper spiritual message; we don’t know. But Jesus is not impressed with Nicodemus’s tentative praise of him. The passage concludes with one of the most famous lines in Scripture – John 3:16 – “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.” Again, we are brought back to the importance of faith – everyone who believes in him will have eternal life, just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

So, the call to us is to have faith, to believe. In Christian circles, this idea is often presented as much easier than “earning” our way into salvation by our works: “What great news – we are saved by faith alone! All we have to do is believe!” But as anyone who has ever struggled with serious doubts knows, it is often much easier to do “good works” than it is to believe in what are some pretty incredible statements that the church holds up as true. This is why plenty of people can go out and feed the hungry and advocate for justice but can’t bring themselves to say the Nicene Creed. It is often easier to do something than it is to believe something.

I’m very interested in why it is that certain people find it easy to believe, to have faith, while other people find themselves stuck, unable to move past their doubt and skepticism to surrender to the life of faith. What made Peter, Andrew, James, and John willing to drop everything and follow Jesus when he called their names, while Nicodemus was drawn to Jesus, but not willing to leave everything to follow him? Why are you all here week after week, active in the life of the church, while you may have friends or family members who were raised with the same exposure to the church and the Christian faith, who are not active in church, and perhaps even skeptical about religion in general? If faith is what makes us right with God, how do we get it? What makes it possible for us to have faith?

I used to believe that faith was entirely a choice: God has created us with free will, so we have the freedom to choose faith or to choose unbelief. From this perspective, the burden of action is entirely ours. God has already acted in history, through the resurrection of Jesus; now it is our choice whether we accept or reject that gift of life.

But as my faith developed, I began to question the notion that my faith was entirely my choice. Yes, I did choose to follow Jesus when I was a teenager and have continued to try to follow him, but why was I drawn to pursue a spiritual path at all? I no more chose my natural inclination toward thinking theologically than I chose my affinity for strawberries or for the color purple. Those things were planted in me from the beginning, it seems, part of my personality, something I did nothing to create.

So I began to think that perhaps the ability to have faith at all is a gift from God. One commentator on this passage from John points out that Jesus’s use of the birth metaphor points to the initiative in matters of faith coming from God rather than from us. Just as babies do not choose to be born, so we cannot choose to be “born again” – such an experience is a gift from God that is bestowed on us. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Just as we cannot control the wind, we cannot control how God’s Spirit moves in our lives and in the lives of others.

Looking at it this way allows us to let go of feeling like the burden is all on us – to have faith and to lead others to have faith. A friend who was going through a difficult time once told me that she had to believe that God chooses her, rather than the other way around. “I CANNOT choose faith right now,” she said. “So I have to trust that God chooses me.” From that theological perspective, the burden of action is entirely God’s. If we have faith, it is only because God has created and planted that faith in us.

But that idea is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it runs the risk of falling into fatalism and making a mockery of human choice, making us into puppets stripped of any kind of real freedom.

And so, I’m coming to think that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between those two viewpoints. In true Episcopal fashion, I’m proposing a via media, a "middle way," between two extremes. Rather than asserting that faith is entirely our choice or entirely a gift, I’m proposing that it’s both. Somehow at the same time it’s both a choice we make and a gift from God.

The problem with the other two scenarios is that in both of them, there is only one active party in the equation: either faith is entirely up to us, or faith is entirely up to God. But faith in God is a relationship, and a relationship requires action by both parties. For a life of faith to flourish, both we and God need to act. The key is remembering that we control only our side of the relationship.

We can smile and act friendly toward someone, but that does not guarantee that that person will become our friend. We cannot control how the other person will respond to us. The same is true in our relationship with God. We can pray and come to Eucharist and say all the right words and do all the right things, but that does not guarantee that in our heart of hearts, we will truly believe and feel close to God. We still have to wait for God to show up, for God to act on God’s side of the relationship. Despite what our liturgies sometimes lead us to believe, we cannot MAKE God show up by saying certain magic words or making certain gestures with our hands. God is not a robot or a vending machine. We cannot force God’s action in our lives, and we cannot force ourselves to have faith.

So perhaps what we are called to do during Lent is not to deepen our faith, but to deepen our spiritual practice. What we can control is our actions and choices on our side of the relationship. We can choose to show up wherever it is that we feel most likely to encounter God – in the church, out in nature, in the midst of our family and friends – and wait. This might mean we spend more time in silence, more time listening rather than speaking in our prayer life. But whatever the practices that work best for us, we can do them with a posture of openness – perhaps literally, praying with open hands, open palms, or metaphorically, opening our hearts – so that we become more receptive to God’s presence and action within and around us, so that we are primed and prepped to notice when God does choose to show up.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). In our life of spiritual practice, we are building ourselves a wind turbine, so that when God’s Spirit does blow in our lives, we have the mechanism ready to capture its energy and allow it to fuel us.

This is what spiritual practice is all about – it is quite literally a practice to prepare ourselves to be ready for those moments when we receive a vision, or a strong inner sense of God’s call, or a deep abiding sense of God’s love and comfort – all of which are pure gifts of grace. We cannot make those experiences happen, but we can keep the lines of communication open. And that’s all we are asked to do on the spiritual path – to show up, to be open – and to leave the rest to God.

Shame and fear: two things God never intended for humanity

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 5, 2017 (First Sunday in Lent, Year A) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19

Since the season of Lent invites us to reflect on sin and its consequences, it is appropriate that we begin with the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the first sin, the “original sin,” in the Garden of Eden.

According to the story, humanity’s first sin was disobedience. God said not to do something, Adam and Eve did it, and wham: God expels them from the Garden.

Setting aside any philosophical questions about whether God’s rules were just and worthy of obedience or not, this story attempts to make sense of one of humanity’s fundamental flaws: our inability to accept limits, to acknowledge that “God is God and we are not.” We never seem to be satisfied with what God gives us; we always want more. As a species, we have a tendency to go after precisely the things we know we cannot have. Many a parent will tell you that the quickest way to get a child to do something is to tell them not to do it.

So what are the consequences of this sin? Immediately after their disobedience, after refusing to accept the limits placed on them, Adam and Eve feel shame -- they become aware of their nakedness and cover themselves, something they had previously not felt it necessary to do -- and fear -- they hide when God comes looking for them in the garden. Their relationship with each other and with God is changed because of their disobedience; rather than relationships characterized by trust and comfort and safety, they have become relationships tainted by fear and shame.

If fear and shame only entered Adam and Eve’s consciousness after the Fall, then it’s safe to say that fear and shame were not part of God’s intentions for humanity. Fear and shame are a consequence of sin, and in fact are sinful themselves, in a way, having nothing to do with what our relationship with God is intended to be like. Yet unfortunately, many people associate fear and shame with God. They think of God as a judgmental figure to be feared, someone in front of whom they should feel shame. Perhaps this is because so many churches and other religious communities -- the organizations that represent God to so many people -- use and rely on fear and shame to motivate and control people. Instead of seeing this as a characteristic of humanity’s sinfulness, people come to see it as a representation of how God relates to us.

And so when we enter a season like Lent, a season about repentance, a season that encourages us to look closely at our sin, it can stir up fear and shame for many people. They may feel they are being judged and shamed for their shortcomings in all areas of their lives. But while Lent encourages us to look seriously at our actions and make amends for any harm we have caused to others, it doesn’t invite us to wallow in shame or cower in fear.

Psychologists have written about the distinction between guilt and shame -- guilt is a feeling of remorse over some action we have done that we regret, while shame is a general feeling of unworthiness, a painful feeling about how we appear to others, whether or not we have actually done anything wrong. Guilt is about specific actions, whereas shame is about our sense of identity, our understanding of self [1]. That’s why shame is so destructive and unhealthy. It’s appropriate to feel guilt over something we’ve done that upset or harmed someone, and the season of Lent encourages us to acknowledge the sins of which we are guilty. But it’s not appropriate to feel like we are a horrible, unworthy person because we’ve done something that upset or harmed someone else -- that’s shame, one of the consequences of the Fall, something that God never intended for humanity.

According to psychologists, people who are overrun with shame often have an inability to feel true guilt, because they are so consumed with feeling bad about themselves they don’t have the ability to notice when they have hurt others or to feel remorse about it [2]. Feeling guilt, however, is considered a sign of emotional health. Emotionally healthy people are able to recognize that their actions may have caused pain to someone else, empathize with that person, and feel remorse and make amends [3]. Guilt may be painful, but it is healthy. Shame, on the other hand, is both painful and unhealthy.

And what about fear? Aren’t we supposed to “fear God?” The Bible constantly tells us things like “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10, Psalm 111:10). Doesn’t fear motivate us to behave ethically, fear of punishment if we don’t?

Well, yes, that kind of fear can be a motivator, but the ancient wisdom of the elders in both Jewish and Christian traditions tell us that that kind of fear is an insufficient foundation for true faith, because it relies on an incomplete understanding of God [4]. Yes, God can punish us, God has the ability to punish us, but God is also merciful. The story of the Fall in the Qur’an says that while God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden for disobeying his law, he also provided them guidance for living in the world to which he banished them. In other words -- with the punishment also came mercy. That is a complete picture of God: as the psalmist says, “You were a God who forgave them, yet punished them for their evil deeds” (Psalm 99:8). With sin comes consequences, but we can also rest assured that God is merciful, that God is always working for our good, even when it may seem we are being slammed with a punishment. Because, as Paul points out in our reading from Romans today, God managed to turn even the Fall into a good thing. Yes, he punished Adam and Eve by expelling them from the Garden, but he righted their wrongs -- and all of our wrongs -- by sending Jesus to us as the “new Adam,” a new creation, a picture of humanity restored to God’s original intentions for us and a gateway to accessing that restored humanity ourselves.

When the Bible talks about “fearing God,” it is not talking primarily about being scared, dreading punishment, pleading with God, “please don’t hurt me.” The Hebrew word used in the phrase “the fear of the Lord” is yirat, a word that means awe, reverence, wonder, amazement [5]. If you’ve ever had a theophany, a moment where God’s presence was revealed to you, made known to you in a powerful way, then you will know that that kind of experience can be slightly “scary” in our normal sense of the meaning of that word, but the emotion generated is one that comes from feeling overwhelmed at being connected in a positive way to something larger than ourselves, not one that comes from worrying that that thing larger than us will squash us.

So this Lent, I invite you to focus more on guilt -- acknowledging and admitting when you hurt others -- than on shame -- thinking you are an unworthy person, and to focus more on awe -- marveling at the presence of God and your connection with God -- than fear -- worrying that God will punish you. Don’t allow Lent to be a season of shame and fear. In fact, maybe this year, you could try giving them up for Lent.


[1] Joseph Burgo, “The Difference Between Guilt and Shame,” Psychology Today Blog, 30 May 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shame/201305/the-difference-between-guilt-and-shame Accessed 4 March 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/Summaries/Eikev/Yirah/yirah.html
[5] Tara Sophia Mohr, “Is it Fear or Awe?” http://www.jonathanfields.com/is-it-fear-or-awe/ Accessed 4 March 2017.

An invitation to take stock of individual and corporate sins during Lent

Sermon delivered Wednesday, March 1, 2017 (Ash Wednesday) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Isaiah 58:1-12, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: all the right ritual actions are meaningless if not accompanied by the right intentions. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.

This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers.” And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.

The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.

Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of denying and emptying oneself in order to open oneself more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love one’s neighbor as oneself. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet of Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance.”

The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own hearts and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?

But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Cuthbert’s, as the Diocese of California, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?

But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people. In our current political climate, these communal sins of our culture are on display in a particularly vivid way. This year I am especially aware of “the evil done on our behalf” that our confession of sin refers to – sins we may have not have committed personally, but things our government has done “on our behalf,” in which we are implicated whether we like it or not.

On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our mortality and the fragility of human life. It is a time for examining our actions and behaviors and priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and taking stock of what is really important in the life of faith.

So as you begin Lent this year, take some time to consider: what is really important to you in your life of faith? What spiritual practices do you wish you were doing on a more regular basis? Could you commit to doing at least one of them during Lent? What relationship in your life do you most need to change in order for God’s love to be reflected in and through it? Could you take some steps toward changing that relationship during Lent?

Each of us may have a different Lenten discipline this year, but the underlying theme of our work is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.

The Transfiguration gives us a "spiritual booster" before Lent begins

Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017 (Last Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.

Sermon Text(s): Matthew 17:1-9

“This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5)

Peter, James, and John hear the voice of God speak these words about Jesus as they are gathered on the mountain in today’s Gospel reading.

We heard these exact same words just a few weeks ago, on the first Sunday after the Epiphany, when our Gospel reading was the story of Jesus’s baptism. After John the Baptist baptizes Jesus in the River Jordan, the Holy Spirit descends from heaven in the form of a dove and comes to rest on Jesus’s head, and a voice from heaven says,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)

The season after the Epiphany is bookended by this phrase – “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The season starts and ends with moments where God declares Jesus to be his beloved Son and commands those around him to take notice. These two great revelations from God take place at the beginning of the two significant phases of Jesus’s life. The first event – Jesus’s baptism – occurs at the start of his public teaching ministry, and the second event – the Transfiguration – occurs at the start of his passion, his journey to the cross. We are told to “look, listen up, take notice!” – as he begins to show us how to live and as he begins to show us how to die.

After the story of Jesus’s baptism, we get a series of his teachings in the following weeks. This year, our readings came primarily from the Sermon on the Mount, and we used those readings as starting points to consider how Jesus taught us to live, and how we vow to follow those teachings through the promises we make when we, too, are baptized. Our Baptismal Covenant is our vow to behave in ways that echo the teachings of Jesus: love your neighbor and your enemy, serve God in all people, strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

The Transfiguration marks the starting point of Jesus’s journey toward his death. Shortly before this revelatory moment, Jesus begins to predict his death and speak of it to his disciples, and shortly after shining with a holy light on the mountain, he “sets his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51), where he will be killed. We always hear the story of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent begins because it marks the beginning of Jesus’s journey to the cross, the journey we commemorate during Lent and Holy Week.

It also gives us a preview of the Resurrection: the image of Jesus changed in form but yet still recognizably Jesus, shining with an otherworldly light, being proclaimed God’s beloved son, worshipped above all other revered prophets of old, foreshadows his eventual triumph over death through his Resurrection.

On their way down the mountain afterwards, Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone about what they have just seen until after “the Son of Man is raised from the dead.” The Transfiguration only makes sense in light of the Resurrection, but the Resurrection cannot happen without walking the road to Jerusalem, the road to death. Peter, James, and John, Jesus’s “inner circle,” are given the vision of the Transfiguration as a “spiritual booster” before they head down that difficult road. They may not understand it in the moment, but somewhere in their consciousness, when they find themselves in the midst of despair, they will remember this: the road may be long and dark, but the end result is Jesus standing triumphant, radiant, shining, glorified above all the prophets.

And as we remember these events of so many years ago, we too are given this “spiritual booster” right before Lent, a “foretaste of the feast to come,” a reminder that the doom and gloom of Lent isn’t all there is to the story. As we prepare for Lent, the Transfiguration reminds us that the Resurrection is not far behind. We enter Lent with the image of a shining, glorified Jesus to lead us through the darkness. In the words of the psalmist, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). As we begin Lent this year, let us not forget that God is with us even as we walk through the wilderness. God is with us in our pain and God is able to transform that pain into new life. The road to death is lit by Resurrection light.

The Prodigal Son: The transforming power of love and forgiveness

Sermon delivered Sunday, March 6, 2016 (4th Sunday in Lent, Year C) at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, where I am serving as long-term supply priest. Audio only (not video) available below.

(2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32)



Jesus is at it again in today’s Gospel reading: answering those self-righteous Pharisees with a parable that gets ‘em right in the gut. “So you’re worried about the fact that I’m eating with ‘sinners,’ are you? Well chew on THIS one for a while!” – and out comes the Prodigal Son, a story that has spoken deeply to the human soul throughout the centuries.

At face value, the message of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems simple, and completely appropriate for the season of Lent: The son repents, the father forgives him. Voila! The God-human relationship illustrated. As the son has sinned and left the father, so we have sinned and left God. As the son realizes the error of his ways and returns to his father, so should we repent and return to God in order to be forgiven of our sins.

But wait just a minute. If we look carefully at the story, it’s not actually that simple. Does the son actually repent? The story tells us that the son “came to himself.” But it’s not entirely clear what that means; whether he actually had a change of heart, or whether the “coming to himself” was him having an “ah ha” moment realizing another way he could continue to continue to make sure he was taken care of at his father’s expense. “How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” he thinks. “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’” Is this expression of humility genuine, or is he just trying to figure out a way to get himself back in the door in a place where he assumes he will be unwelcome? It’s not like he becomes successful and wealthy and goes home to share the bounty with his father – as is so often the case with children and their parents (and with human beings and God!), he only turns back to the father when he needs something, when he seeks to gain from reestablishing the relationship.

So, we’ve got the problem of whether the son’s repentance is genuine or not, and then the story gets further complicated when the son returns home. The parable tells us that “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The father runs to him while he was still far off. The son doesn’t even have a chance to make his confession, to grovel before his father and ask for forgiveness, before the father sweeps him into his arms with hugs and kisses. The son hasn’t said a word yet that would indicate that he is repentant, that he is sorry for what he’s done. For all the father knows, the son could be returning home to ask for more money – which, in fact, is sort of what he is doing, since he’s asking for his father to again provide for his needs in the form of food and shelter. But the father still runs toward him and embraces him. He doesn’t stand back, eyeing his son skeptically and asking him a bunch of questions about what he’s done and where he’s been and what has happened to all the money he gave him. He doesn’t lecture him on respect for one’s elders or demand an apology before he extends his hand in peace. His love for his son overtakes any feelings of resentment or being wronged. His love is unconditional, offered without any action required on the part of the son outside of just showing up.

“Now hold on there,” our inner sense of justice cries out. “That’s now how the story’s supposed to go! The sinner is supposed to show sufficient remorse and contrition before forgiveness is granted! God forgives the repentant, but the unrepentant he will burn with unquenchable fire… or something like that, right? I mean, there has to be some consequences for this guy’s actions! How can the father throw a party for this guy after what he’s done? Isn’t that like condoning his actions?”

Conventional religious thinking, in the Judaism of Jesus’s time and in many other religions in various times and contexts, tends to think of God as a just judge, concerned with impartially enforcing the law. In this way of thinking, God is ultimately concerned with “fairness,” with making sure that each person gets what they “deserve.” If they are good, they deserve a reward. If they are bad, they deserve punishment. Our relationship with God becomes some kind of balancing scale where we hope that, at the end, our good deeds outweigh our bad and we get in to heaven by virtue of how the accounting works out in some kind of divine judgment book. The elder son in the parable represents this kind of conventional religious thinking, as do the Pharisees who are so concerned about who Jesus is eating with and spending time with.

But Jesus constantly challenged the notion of God as an impartial calculator, crunching the numbers to determine our fate. Jesus emphasized the image of God as a loving parent, like the father in today’s parable, who is overcome with love for his or her children. That love guides his response to them, that love colors and influences her judgment, that love makes allowances for her children’s shortcomings.

When this kind of love expresses itself, it may not look “fair” to those who are keeping the great accounting sheet of rights and wrongs. It may mean that some people get celebrations and parties and forgiveness and acceptance that they don’t seem to deserve. But Jesus’s message is that God’s love and mercy is not something we can earn by doing or saying or believing the right things. None of us “deserve” God’s love or forgiveness based on our actions, however “good” we might think we have been! God’s acceptance and forgiveness of us is a gift freely given – out of a relationship based in unconditional love, a love that will not leave us if we screw up or disappoint or “squander our inheritance in dissolute living.”

This kind of love is more concerned with transformation than with fairness. This kind of love is willing to break all the rules if it means helping one soul to know they are loved and valued.

Can this kind of love be taken advantage of? Could the forgiven and loved prodigal son, after enjoying the fatted calf at his reunion party, have ripped his father off, stolen his valuables, and pawned them for money? Of course he could have. This kind of love is risky. It makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the possibility of being deeply wronged, or even physically harmed, in certain circumstances. But it also has the power to transform.

The main character of Les Misérables, that great novel by Victor Hugo that has been cinematized numerous times and made into a stage musical, is an example of a kind of “prodigal son” who is transformed by this kind of love.

Jean Valjean is released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. He has become cynical, hardened, and trusts no one. He has nothing to his name and is let out on the streets with no resources and nowhere to turn for help. As he goes door to door begging, he happens to knock on the local bishop’s door. The bishop takes him in and feeds him and gives him a place to stay. That night, Valjean sneaks out in the middle of the night, stealing the silver place settings from the table. When he is caught and the police drag him to the bishop’s door, they tell the bishop that Valjean has told them that the bishop gave him the silver. The bishop surprises everyone, Valjean most of all, when he confirms Valjean’s story. “That is right,” he tells the police. In the poetic wording of the stage play, he responds, “But my friend, you left so early / surely something slipped your mind / You forgot I gave these also / Would you leave the best behind?” – and proceeds to give Valjean the two silver candlesticks from his fireplace mantle.

According to the law, the right and “fair” thing for the bishop to do would have been to press charges, and for Valjean to go back to prison. But the bishop was more concerned with the transformative power of love than the fair application of the law.

The bishop took a risk by following Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5:39-40: “Do not resist an evildoer… if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Valjean could have betrayed his trust once again after this incident, or gone on to do harm to others as well. The bishop had no way of knowing what the outcome would be, but he chose trust over fear. He chose forgiveness over retribution. And it changed a man’s life. This risky act of generosity and forgiveness by the bishop transforms Valjean. His hardened shell falls away and reveals a kind, tender man with a heart of compassion, who goes about doing good for the rest of the story. The bishop responded to Valjean’s behavior not by “giving him what he deserved,” but by giving him a second chance.

As much as Lent gets a bad rep as a depressing season where we are told how bad we are, Lent is actually the season of second chances. It’s the season where we are reminded not just of our sins, but of God’s mercy. The joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son at seeing his son return home is a metaphor for the joy God feels every time we return to him, no matter what we’ve done and no matter what is in our hearts when we do. God welcomes us home not for a stern scolding, but for a great celebration.

And we are called to do the same. If we are truly transformed by the love and forgiveness God has shown to us, we will offer forgiveness as freely as the father in the parable and the bishop in Les Misérables. As Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians, God has “entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. We are ambassadors for Christ.” We are the ones carrying God’s message to the world, the message that God is ready to throw you a party if you would but show up: no questions asked, no explanations needed. Just come, join us, and feast at that banquet prepared before the foundation of the world. If we are doing our job as Christians, it will also be said of us, “Those folks welcome sinners and eat with them!” Amen.

Participating in Resurrection

Sermon delivered Sunday, April 6, 2014 (Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45)

Our readings for today seem to be getting a little ahead of themselves. They’re all about resurrection! God instructs Ezekiel to prophesy to the dry bones to bring them back to life, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and Paul tells us that “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also” (Romans 8:11).

Resurrection, bringing life from death, is everywhere in these readings. With the exception of the psalm, there’s hardly a word anywhere about our Lenten themes of sin and repentance. What’s going on here? If Easter is still two weeks away, why all this talk about resurrection in the middle of Lent?

Perhaps it is because we most need to remember the promise of resurrection during times of repentance. Whenever we stop to take a cold, hard look at the ways we are dead in our sins, we need to simultaneously remember the promise that we can and will be made alive through the Spirit of God working in us. The 40 days of Lent metaphorically recall Jesus’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness, and it is during our own wilderness periods that we are most aware of our need for resurrection. When we come face to face with our shortcomings and our mortality, we are most open to the gift of grace and new life that God offers to us. By anticipating the resurrection two weeks before we make it to Easter, our readings today remind us that God’s offer of new life is available even in the midst of the wilderness.

And these readings also remind us of something about resurrection that we don’t hear as clearly in the Easter passages – they remind us that God invites us to participate in the process of resurrection. In today’s passages, the people are not passive bystanders to God’s miraculous power to bring life from death; they actually join with God in bringing about resurrection.

Ezekiel joins with God in bringing new life to the dry bones by speaking the words God has given him to speak, and the bystanders in the Gospel join with Jesus in restoring Lazarus to life by moving away the stone from the grave and removing Lazarus’s burial clothes. [1] Clearly, the power to bring life from death is entirely God’s, but at least in these stories, God does not do so without involving others in the process. God could have showed Ezekiel a vision of the dry bones coming back to life without any required words or actions on Ezekiel’s part, and God could have moved the stone away from Lazarus’s tomb miraculously, without human involvement, and Lazarus could have walked out already free from his burial shroud. But for whatever reason, God didn’t do it that way. God chose to leave parts of the process for us to do.

It has become somewhat of a catch-phrase in modern theology to talk about people as being “co-creators with God.” This idea proposes that human beings partner with God in the maintenance of the created world and in bringing about God’s purposes in it. In contrast to a view that sees human beings as entirely passive because “God’s in control,” this theology insists that human beings are active partners with God in God’s activity in the world.

Although a common critique of this theology is that it ascribes too much power to humans, coming close to saying human beings are equal to God, the theologian who first coined the term, Phillip Hefner, actually used the phrase “created co-creator.” We are not just co-creators – as if we were fellow gods in the heavenly court – we are created co-creators. We are, in fact, creatures, and the creature is not greater than the creator.

But, because we are created in the image of God who is a creator, we are made to be creators as well. Our creative abilities – in the arts, in science and technology, in problem-solving – are seen as a stamp of the divine nature in us. This theology also emphasizes human freedom, because it says that God does not direct every little action that happens on earth, but gives us the freedom of self-determination. No, God does not need us to do anything, but rather than exert total and utter control over us, God chooses to leave parts of the process for us to do. To the extent that we do those things, we become a partner with God in the great work of the divine redemption of the world. It is an unequal partnership, to be sure, but it is a partnership all the same.

The people in our readings for today are examples of the created co-creator. They are partners – however unequal – with God in making resurrection happen. Ezekiel delivers the words, the bystanders in the Gospel roll away the stone and remove Lazarus’s burial clothes. They remind us that although God is fully capable of bringing about transformation without us, God often asks for our help in doing so. God gives us a role to play. God invites us to participate in the work of resurrection.

The actions that Jesus tells the people to perform in today’s Gospel reading are rather symbolic. His specific instructions to them are, “Take away the stone,” and “Unbind him and let him go.” Although we can assume the people were invited to do these things in a literal sense for very practical reasons, the stories in John’s Gospel always have a deeper symbolic meaning.

Jesus invites us to participate in the work of resurrection by taking away the stones – the obstacles in our lives and in the lives of others that prevent the power of God from reaching us. I’m sure we’ve all known people who have constructed such emotional walls around themselves that they shut out everyone around them, and even shut out God. We might have even done this in our own lives at some point. There is a saying of Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, who relates that God said to him, “O Son of Being! Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee.” We must give love in order to be open to receiving love. If we do not take away the stones from the entrance to our hearts, the power of resurrection can in no way reach us.

Unbinding Lazarus

Jesus also invites us to participate in the work of resurrection by doing the difficult work of unbinding the shroud of death – the painful memories, the negative self-talk, the grudges and resentments – whatever it is that keeps us bound to the ways of sin and death – he invites us to cut loose those cords so that we can experience and appreciate the full power of the liberation given to us in the resurrection. Even though he had been restored to life, Lazarus’s freedom was still restricted until the people unbound him and let him go. Likewise, even if we have received the gift of new life through the resurrection in our baptism, we too can remain bound by our old burial shroud of sin and death, unless we do our part in the resurrection process and work to loosen those bonds.

This partnering with God in the process of resurrection is not easy business. And we can’t do it alone. Just as Lazarus could not untie himself, and certainly could not have moved the stone away from his grave while he was still dead, so we too sometimes must rely on others to help us move the stones and unbind the shrouds in our lives. This is not to say that others can do it all for us, but that we need companions and guides as we do this work. And while others have a part to play in our liberation, we also have a part to play in theirs – in fact, the two are inextricably linked. As we strive to do this difficult work, this spiritual work of opening ourselves to God and others, of rolling away the stones and unbinding the shroud of death, we find that our best guides and companions on the way are those people who know something about rolling away stones and unbinding shrouds – those people who have been there and have found a way through.

So maybe it’s not so out of character to think about resurrection during Lent after all. For it is only when we have experienced resurrection in the midst of our own wilderness that we are able to joyfully claim our role as created co-creators in God’s great work of redemption in the world.

[1] Insight into the participatory nature of the Gospel passage came from Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2011): 101. I must give him credit for the inspiration behind the direction of and theme of this sermon.

Reflections on "Ashes to Go" - an answer to the critics

Our rector, Bob Cowperthwaite, and parishioner
Gerald Hancock offering Ashes to Go
at our first shift from 8:30-9:30 a.m.

Two weeks ago, our church participated in Ashes to Go for the first time. In additional to our regular Ash Wednesday services at 7 a.m., noon, and 7 p.m., we stood out on a street corner near our church and offered ashes and a very abbreviated version of the liturgy to pedestrians from 8:30-11:30 a.m. and from 2:30-5:30 p.m. This street outreach was intended to reach both those who couldn’t get to service today and those who might not have even thought about going to church today if they hadn’t seen us out on the sidewalk. At the end of the day, we had imposed ashes on 106 people outside.

Ashes to Go has become a nation-wide movement. It started with several Episcopal churches in the St. Louis and Chicago areas in 2007 and 2010, and it “went viral” in 2012, with more than 80 churches in 21 states participating. In 2013, it went international, with participants in Canada, the UK, and South Africa, in addition to the U.S. (Statistics from the Ashes to Go website at www.ashestogo.org.)

As Ashes to Go has become more known amongst “church people,” especially amongst professional church people like clergy and church staff, there has been a lot of discussion about it. It has its share of critics, who assert that this “quickie” liturgy cheapens what should be a somber call to repentance. The critics say that people should make time to attend the full-length liturgy on Ash Wednesday, and if they can’t attend church, that shows that their priorities are in the wrong place. They worry about people taking Ash Wednesday too lightly, or going to an Ashes to Go site just to “get their ashes” as some kind of a token or rote ritual rather than out of a true sense of repentance and desire for connection with God.

I must admit that despite the fact that my call to the priesthood emerged out of my involvement with a street church for homeless people in Cambridge, Mass., and the fact that I was naturally drawn to Ashes to Go when I first heard about it because of the "street church" element of it, my training in seminary conditioned me to always take a step back and listen to the other side of the story, to another perspective. The critics'  arguments against Ashes to Go were well-crafted enough that they gave me pause. Maybe this was an inappropriate cheapening of the dignity of the liturgy. Maybe we shouldn't do it.

But after serving two one-hour “shifts” out on the street corner on Ash Wednesday, I can say that not a single person we encountered in those two shifts seemed to be taking this encounter lightly. Some people had driven from the other side of town just to participate in this brief encounter on the sidewalk. They’d seen an article that the local paper had run about the fact that we were going to do this, and they made time in their day, they went out of their way to come to downtown Franklin just to get their ashes. Their schedule may not have allowed them to attend services at the traditional times of noon or later in the evening, but for whatever reason they were able to get away mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and they were so appreciative because otherwise they really would not have gotten to have an Ash Wednesday experience today, however brief our encounter was. Several people even got tears in their eyes as they thanked us, clearly moved that we were taking the time to bring church to them.

There was a depth of gratitude in their voices as they thanked us that echoed the deeply grateful sincerity I’ve heard in people’s voices when I’ve taken communion to people who are in the hospital or homebound. “Thank you so much for doing this!” they say, with a depth of gratitude that goes beyond the cursory “thanks” we give the cashier at the grocery store or a friend or family member who passes us the salt at dinner. This is a different kind of thanks, a thanks born out of touching a place of need and vulnerability, of mediating a brief moment of grace from one human being to another – whether an Ashes to Go recipient or a parishioner recovering at home from surgery.

As I reflected on this, it occurred to me that I can’t imagine any of the critics of the Ashes to Go movement who are within the Episcopal Church saying that we shouldn’t take communion to people at home or in the hospital because it would “cheapen” the experience, that if they can’t get to church on Sunday for the entire celebration of the Eucharist, then their priorities must not be in the right place. We consider Eucharistic visitation to be one of the most sacred and holy things we do as priests. And yet, what we say and do when we take communion to people is a very shortened version of the full Eucharistic liturgy, just as Ashes to Go offers a shortened version of the full Ash Wednesday liturgy.

That’s when I realized that Ashes to Go is basically a series of “pastoral visits” on the street. It’s about offering a shortened version of the regular liturgy to those who can’t be with the rest of the gathered community. And just as we do when we visit people in the hospital, if there are several people present visiting with the patient, they are all invited to join in the communion, so on Ash Wednesday, when two people happened to walk up at the same time, we invited them to all join together with us in the brief liturgy. Even though none of us had ever met before, in that one brief moment, we were a community of faith praying together. “Wherever two of three are gathered,” Jesus said, “I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). Not “wherever there is an officially sanctioned, full-length liturgy approved by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”

Praying with several people who walked up at the same time. "Wherever two or three are gathered..."

So even the Ashes to Go recipients did get an opportunity to join with other Christians in prayer today. Yes, they could have gone home and read through the entire Ash Wednesday liturgy in their prayer books instead, to get the “full experience,” but there’s something about the encounter with another person, that incarnational experience that is really at the heart of our faith, that is sacred and powerful, however brief.

The difference between Ashes to Go and a traditional pastoral visit, of course, is that we are doing it in a public place. It is no small irony that the Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday is the passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warns us to “beware of practicing your piety before others, in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1), and tells us not to “stand and pray… at the street corners, so that we may be seen [by others]” (Matthew 6:5). Um, gulp. The critics of Ashes to Go point out that we appear to be doing exactly what Jesus told us not to do! When I was “plugging” Ashes to Go to one of my classes at church, encouraging lay people to sign up to help out with it, I made a joke about the irony of this passage and what we were going to do. Everyone laughed, but one of the parishioners spoke up in a serious tone and said, “But I don’t think that’s the same thing as what you’re doing. Jesus was talking about being hypocritical. I don’t think that’s what this is. I think this is different.”

I was surprised by her immediate positive view of what we were doing with Ashes to Go and the disconnect for her in associating it with Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. But after my experience on the street and my insight into the ways in which Ashes to Go is a pastoral encounter, it makes me appreciate her insight even more. If we’re doing Ashes to Go primarily “to be seen by others” in a showy kind of way, then yes, we should hear Jesus’s words of rebuke in the Sermon on the Mount for showy displays of piety. But if we’re doing Ashes to Go out of a sincere desire to serve others and to care for them, then perhaps the more appropriate words of Jesus to remember would be the ways he rebuked the religious leaders for being unwilling to break tradition in order to address human need. “What is lawful on the Sabbath, to do good or to do evil?” (Mark 3:4) he said to those who criticized him for healing on the Sabbath. And while I’m not saying that it’s a matter of life and death for people to get their ashes on Ash Wednesday, I do think that we are addressing a very real need and a very real and sincere desire and longing to connect with God and the liturgies of the church, not throwing tradition to the wind or dismissing the gravity and seriousness of that day.

An Ashes to Go recipient jumps for joy after receiving her ashes.

If anything, Ash Wednesday seemed more serious and more sacred to me through the encounter with folks who cared enough to drive all the way across town to participate in even a shortened version of the liturgy, for whom it meant enough to them to seek it outside of the traditional means of delivery. And the number of people we met and engaged with who didn't have a church home, or who had been hurt by the church, but were making this tentative step back toward connecting with the church -- what could possibly be more holy than that? We didn't just slap some ashes on their foreheads in a cursory fashion and say goodbye, we stood there and talked, sometimes for an extended period of time, with them about God, the church, and the community of faith at St. Paul's and what might be waiting for them there if they chose to join us. Isn't that what the church is supposed to be about? Meeting people where they are and inviting them into the faith? What is lawful on Ash Wednesday -- to make it difficult for people to reach the church or to reach out to them?

I hope that the critics of Ashes to Go might be willing to just give it a try one year and see what happens. The great thing about Ashes to Go is that if you do it, you do it on your own terms. Do you think people should recite at least part of Psalm 51 for it to really be Ash Wednesday? Then include that in the brief liturgy you offer to people. Or, decide to do the whole Ash Wednesday service at a non-typical time in a location more convenient to working people in your area. Take ashes to people in the hospital and in nursing homes and do an abbreviated version of the liturgy with them. Whatever you do and however you do it, the intention is to bring the church to people where they are, to represent symbolically the truth that although it is true that we must make the choice to step toward God in faith, God also is already stepping out to meet us wherever we are. I can think of no more sacred and holy task than to serve as a symbol of that for the world.

Lent, corporate repentence, and gun violence

Sermon delivered Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21).

“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.

This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).

The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.

The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.

Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).

The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?

But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?

But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.

If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.

Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.

And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.

On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.

Opening the eyes of the blind

Sermon given at Trinity Episcopal Church, Winchester, Tenn. (my field ed parish), Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year A (John 9:1-41).

“Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The question would have been a natural one in Jesus’ day; it was widely assumed that sin and physical illness were connected in a directly causal relationship: if you were sick or had a disability of any sort, it must have been because you had sinned. If you were born with an illness or disability, either you must have committed some sin while still in the womb, or your misfortune was due to the sins of your parents. So the disciples were trying to figure it out, to determine which category they should place this man in to explain his abnormality, to find someone to blame.

Despite the advances of modern science, we’re not so different in 21st century America from the disciples who sought to explain the condition of this blind man by blaming it on sin. We’re always looking for ways to blame someone for the uncomfortable abnormalities and disabilities we see in others – “That poor child is deformed because her mother used drugs during her pregnancy,” or “If only he’d stop smoking, he wouldn’t have gotten lung cancer,” or “She has AIDS; that must be a punishment for her lifestyle or drug use.” And if we can’t find a reasonable person on whom to pin the blame, we pin it on God. “Why, God? What have I – or my sister or my uncle or my friend – done to deserve this?” we ask, the assumption being that illness and suffering are only inflicted upon those who “deserve” it as punishment for something they have done wrong.

But the interesting thing is that Jesus rejects this assumption that physical illness is an indication of the presence of sin. “Neither this man or his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

But is this really any better? The man’s blindness – and by consequence, the miserable life he would have experienced as a blind person in first-century Palestine, with no real opportunities for making a living open to him besides begging by the side of the road – was created just so Jesus could come along and perform a miracle? Does that mean all our sufferings are created just so God can be glorified through them? Certainly God can be glorified through our sufferings, but does God create them on purpose – does God make us suffer – just to glorify himself? What kind of God would that be?

Luckily, several biblical scholars have suggested that that is not necessarily what Jesus meant to say in this passage. Some scholars propose an alternative translation of the Greek text from the one we heard this morning, a translation that goes like this: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.” (9:3-4a). In this translation, Jesus does not give an explanation for the man’s blindness, but simply accepts it as a given. Rather than dwelling in the “why” questions, Jesus is concerned with the more practical “what” questions – what can I do for this man now, and how can God’s glory be revealed in his life, regardless of his condition or his past?

In a similar vein, the blind man is not interested in explaining or justifying Jesus’ behavior when he is interrogated by the Pharisees; he is only concerned with testifying to his personal experience of Jesus. “We know this man is a sinner,” the Pharisees say to him, trying to get him to speak ill of Jesus. “I do not know whether he is a sinner,” the formerly blind man replies. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” He offers no other explanations beyond this simple statement.

In the story as we have received it, both the blind man and Jesus are concerned with the here and now – with responding to the facts of the present situation without over-analyzing them. Jesus does not try to explain the reason why this man was born blind to his disciples, and the blind man does not try to justify Jesus’ actions to the Pharisees. Jesus sees a need and responds to it; the blind man receives a gift and testifies to it. The disciples are so caught up with trying to find a reason for the man’s blindness, to find someone to blame for this misfortune, that they miss seeing a real human being in need in front of them. The Pharisees are so caught up in arguments over what is and isn’t lawful according to religious tradition that they miss the miracle that has taken place in front of them.

The Pharisees tend to get a bad rep in the Gospels, since they’re always set as the “bad guys” in the story, in opposition to Jesus. But as this story shows, the disciples don’t always “get it” either. And aren’t we a little more like the disciples and the Pharisees in this story than we’d like to admit?

I sometimes wonder how Jesus would be received if he were to appear in an Episcopal church on any given Sunday morning. Might we not find ourselves to be modern-day Pharisees, more worried about whether Jesus was performing the liturgy correctly than about the miracle of his presence among us?

And don’t we often look around for people and institutions to blame when things go wrong in our lives, rather than accepting the circumstances for what they are and trying to think creatively about how we could contribute to making the works of God be revealed in that situation?

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus says, “but in order that the works of God might be revealed in him we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.”

“I do not know whether he is a sinner,” says the formerly blind man. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

John’s Gospel this morning is inviting us to let go of the urge to explain, to analyze, to justify, and simply open our eyes to the world around us. Where is there a need that you can respond to, regardless of the reasons it exists? Where have you received a gift that you can testify to with gratefulness? Our personal stories about how we have experienced God working in our lives are the most powerful evangelism tools we have. What is the “one thing you do know” about God in your life? I invite you to share your answer to that question with someone in your life this week, and see what happens. Maybe you too have the power to open the eyes of the blind.

Anyway

Sermon preached at the Thursday evening community Eucharist at the School of Theology at Sewanee. Text: Jeremiah 7:23-28

"So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call them, but they will not answer you." (Jeremiah 7:27)

Does this sound like a job you'd be willing to sign up for? God tells Jeremiah to proclaim his words to the people of Israel, but tells him ahead of time that the people aren't going to listen to him. Apparently God didn't get the memo about effective ways to motivate your employees. Imagine what a business meeting would be like if the president of a company took this approach: "Well, we've done the research, and all indicators say that the market is going to reject our product," she'd say to her employees. "We basically have a zero chance of making a profit. Now, your job is to devote your life to producing this product."

People aren't usually too willing to go along with a plan they know is going to fail. We might try something that seems unlikely to succeed simply because we never know what the results will be; since we're not omniscient, there is always a chance the statistics and projections are wrong. But coming from God, there is no uncertainty in the claim: "I'm telling you up front, Jeremiah -- these people aren't going to listen to you." Gee thanks, God. I bet Jeremiah could have done without some of that omniscience there.

So what's the point? Why does God call Jeremiah to speak words of warning to the people and call them to repentance if he knows they're not going to listen anyway? Or, to make it a bit more personal, why are we called to proclaim the Gospel when we know many will reject it?

I think the simple answer is, we do it because it's who we are. We do it because we can't not do it. We do it because God calls us to do it.

Working for the kingdom of God is not always a results-oriented kind of endeavor, as much as we would like for it to be. We speak of "sowing seeds" that we may never see sprout as a metaphor that helps us make our peace with the fact that we may not see any visible results or effects of our ministry in the world around us. We "keep on keepin' on," because we believe in faith that those seeds will someday sprout, even if it's not for many, many years… maybe not even until Jesus comes back.

But sometimes, we can feel a little like Jeremiah must have felt when given the instructions he was given in today's reading: like we've been given an impossible task that we know is going to fail, that no matter what we say and how much we say it, the people will just not hear.

Some of us may have felt that way when the Sewanee Chautauquans blog surfaced last spring, with all of its anti-black and anti-gay rhetoric. People who work with those living in poverty and homelessness may feel that way when the same people never quite seem to be able to get their lives together, or when people with whom they've developed long-term relationships betray them. My friends in the interfaith movement and I felt that way when we saw the video released last month of a protest outside a Muslim charity fundraiser event in California, where violently angry women and men shouted insults at the Muslim men, women, and children who arrived for the fundraising dinner.

In situations like these, we may find ourselves asking, "What's the point?" Why am I giving my life to anti-racism training when there continue to be hate crime shootings every year in my neighborhood? Why am I feeding these people when they're only taking advantage of the system? Why have I spent the past ten years in interfaith education and advocacy only to watch a crowd of people waving American flags yelling, "Go home! We don't want you here, you terrorists!" to Muslim children under the age of of ten, whose only existence in this world has been in the context of post-9/11 fear of Muslims?

Perhaps at times like these we can remember the prophet Jeremiah. "So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call them, but they will not answer you." And yet, you are still to speak -- to speak the words of faith and love. You are still to call -- to call the people to repentance and reconciliation with their neighbor -- even when you know they will not listen. You do this for the same reason that a mother would throw herself in front of a train to try to protect her child, even if she knew that that action would kill them both. You do it because it's who you are. You do it because you can't not do it. You do it because God calls you to do it, regardless of the results.

There's a famous set of "paradoxical commandments," often attributed to Mother Teresa, but actually written by Kent Keith, a speaker and advocate of servant leadership, that I think say it best. Keith wrote them while a sophomore in college, and they advocate a stubborn faithfulness to love against all odds that I, for one, think is what the church should be all about. Here are a few of them:

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

I return to these "paradoxical commandments" whenever I feel discouraged about the seeming impossibility of the tasks to which God calls me. Yes, people may continue to be hurtful and angry and bitter and use one another and kill one another -- and they may do those things in the name of God. But we are to continue to preach peace and to speak truth to power and to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God -- anyway.

After all, God loved us "anyway" -- despite our shortcomings, despite our sinfulness, despite our rebellion against the love of God. Contemporary Christian artist Nichole Nordeman captures this in her song, aptly titled "Anyway," in which she compares the Christian life to the process of restoring an old painting:

A gallery of paintings new and paintings old
I guess it's no surprise that I'm no Michaelangelo...

But you called me beautiful
When you saw my shame
And you placed me on the wall
Anyway

"So you shall speak the words of God to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call them, but they will not answer you." Speak anyway.