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Sermon for Proper 9A 2014
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
July 6, 2014
I love this reading. I have an image of Jesus throwing up his hands in despair and saying, “I can’t win with you people.
“You’re like whiny children who can’t play nicely together. ‘We wanted to play funeral, but you wouldn’t cry. Then we wanted to play wedding, but you wouldn’t dance.’
“You said John had a demon because he didn’t eat and drink and you call me a drunk and a glutton because I do.
“Really,” I imagine Jesus saying, “there’s no winning with you!”
And then he says, “Ah, but just you wait, because ‘wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’”
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom was often personified as a woman and was seen as God’s presence in the world. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom says that her voice goes out to all humanity proclaiming “Happy are they.” “Happy are those who keep my ways, happy is the one who listens to me, for whoever finds me finds life, but those who miss me hurt themselves.”
Returning to our gospel text, we find that the next five verses are not assigned in the lectionary. These missing verses are a series of woe to you statements, and it’s a shame not to mention them. As April says, “Who doesn’t love a good ‘woe to you?’” There are plenty of “woe to you’s” in the Bible.
“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees!” “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you!” “Woe to you who are rich!” “Woe to you who are well-fed now.” “Woe to you who are complacent in Zion!” “Woe to you destroyer!” “Woe to you betrayer!” I’m sure we all have a few groups of people on whom we’d like to pronounce some “woe.”
For Jesus, it’s a few cities where he has recently performed miracles in hopes of revealing God’s ways and calling people to repentance. It seems that the miracles were welcome, but they didn’t lead the people of those cities to heed Jesus’ words and repent. And so Jesus can’t proclaim “happy are you who keep my ways.” Instead he pronounces “woe” on them.
And then Jesus gets all smug. Since those folks weren’t willing to change, he thanks God for revealing God’s ways not to the “wise and intelligent” but to infants. Infants in Jesus day weren’t just pure and innocent. In a society where only certain adult males mattered, infants were the ultimate symbol of vulnerability. They were disruptive.
So why would Jesus choose to reveal God’s ways only to those who were powerless? I don’t think it was a choice.
In the previous few chapters of Matthew’s gospel, we see that Jesus is doing his best to reveal God to everyone he encounters. He’s raised a dead girl to life, and he’s healed a hemorrhaging woman, two blind men, and someone who was mute. It’s not like he’s hiding. But it seems that his message is only reaching some people – those who are not in power.
Those are the people most likely to need to hear the last three verses of this passage. “Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
In both Jesus’ day and the time that this gospel was written, the Roman Empire was an oppressive force in the lives of Jews. The gospel was written in the very unstable time after the first Jewish rebellion, in which the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple. Jews were suffering under Roman rule, reminded of their place by the very coins they had to use to pay for things, which were stamped “Judea conquered.” “Yoke” and “burden” were words commonly used to describe the Roman Empire’s oppression.
So in a very deliberate way, the author of Matthew’s gospel is using imperial language to fight the Roman Empire. Jesus invites those most burdened under imperial Roman rule to take on a different “yoke,” a different “burden,” if you will. Frank preached about a similar contradiction last week: “a form of slavery that brings freedom and health.”
In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, in a passage parallel to this one, “My sovereignty is gentle,” rather than “my yoke is easy.” Those who are most powerless under the Roman Empire are being asked to voluntarily submit to another sovereign. But this one, we are promised, is a compassionate ruler whose reign benefits others, rather than only one group, one nation, or one individual.
Can you imagine such a thing? I confess, it’s difficult for me, raised as I was with those typically American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency. It’s easy for me to succumb to the notion that the ideal for our society is just what Frank warned about last week: an individualistic freedom unfettered and unrestricted, by any obligations we owe to others.
But on this Independence Day weekend, we are called to live under a compassionate sovereign, in the midst of the American Empire.
It isn’t easy, that’s for sure. The Empire is alive and well there is much woe to proclaim.
Woe to you, Supreme Court! You have gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to make it harder for minorities to vote. You have upheld a ban on affirmative action that will make it harder for minorities to go to college and access other opportunities. Woe to you because in the name of religious freedom, you have stripped away contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act, a provision that primarily benefitted low-income women. And woe to you because your perverted definition of “religious freedom” has already inspired a letter from so-called faith leaders urging the President to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.
I imagine Jesus throwing up his hands, asking, “What am I going to do with you people? You say you value the dignity of every human being, but you ask for the right to discriminate against some, to deny healthcare to others, and to deny education and opportunities to still others.”
And woe to you, policy makers! Tens of thousands of children from Central America, unaccompanied by adults, are seeking refuge and your response, is to debate whether we should enact a policy to send them back to their home countries without even investigating the reasons why they have taken such a drastic step. The Episcopal Church’s Immigration Advocacy Newsletter describes how this crisis came about.
Since 2011, the number of unaccompanied immigrant children making the dangerous passage from Central America to the southern border of the United States has increased more than seven-fold, with arrivals expected to reach 90,000 children this year. The question at the heart of the debate, is why?
These children, many under the age of 12, are fleeing pervasive and inescapable violence in their home countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. These countries are three of the most violent countries on the planet. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, with El Salvador and Guatemala rank fourth and fifth. Within these communities, children, and women are the most vulnerable and are therefore prime targets for violence and exploitation by the organized crime syndicate, gangs, and security forces.
The widely acknowledged tactic of targeting young children for gang recruitment and the lack of security for all civilians has triggered a regional humanitarian crisis years in the making, and has driven tens of thousands of children from their homes.
Woe to us, American people! Are we really so caught up in our false sense of scarcity that we are convinced that helping these children will somehow diminish our collective wealth and prosperity? Woe to us who cannot see how our own complicity in illegal drug trafficking helped cause this crisis!
This is probably the first and only time I will ever wish that we had big projection screens here at Trinity. Because if we did, I would project some pictures for you.
The caption of the first one says, “Some 900 unaccompanied children are being held at a converted warehouse in Nogales, Arizona.”
The photo is of a huge room that looks like a warehouse with a concrete floor, lit by fluorescent lights. A chain link fence creates what looks like a giant cage. Inside the fence, some children lie on what look like kindergarten sleep mats. They are covered with metallic emergency blankets. The kids sleep peacefully. Some other kids sit on long metal benches, angled diagonally inside the giant cage. Around the perimeter of the fence are porta potties, with their vents reaching up and out of the ceiling.
The caption of the next one says, “Female detainees sleep in a holding cell.” (Imagine calling young children “detainees.”)
In this photo two young girls are sleeping on those same kindergarten mats, on their stomachs, heads pillowed in their arms. They are in the corner of a chain link fence cage, with their heads touching the fence. One girl’s left side is against the side of the fence, the other girl’s right side is against a porta potty. They are both wearing blue gym shorts and white tee shirts, like a uniform.
The caption of the last photo says, “Detainees sleep in a holding cell at a US Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas.”
In this photo, the children are in a cinder block cell with a concrete floor. There are a couple of hard benches, formed by extending the cinder block out from the wall and covering it with what looks like a counter top. Here there are no mats. Kids lie directly on the floor, piled together like puppies, under blankets with the Red Cross logo on them. There is a half wall in the corner of the cell, on which sits a roll of toilet paper.
Can it be that Jesus is revealing God’s ways to us through these vulnerable children seeking refuge among us? Is it possible that they will disrupt the American Empire enough to move beyond polemical positions and bring us face to face with our own humanity?
I live in that hope. And Jesus did too. He believed that in the midst of an oppressive Empire, human beings could choose to serve a different kind of ruler. He believed that Wisdom would eventually be proven by her deeds. May that be so for us. Amen.
June 29, 2014, Proper 8, Year A
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
“The Slavery That Frees Us For Others”
Among the most morally despicable human practices is that of slavery. Slavery is a coerced relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another. As such, it is a violation of one of our most precious God-given rights: the right to freely choose our own plans of life for ourselves.
We rightly resist being ‘slaves’ to anyone. We are outraged that hundreds of young girls in Nigeria have been forced into slavery by a fanatical band of zealots. And yet we as a human people have not always condemned slavery and forbidden it as a social practice. While the long arc of history has bent away from slavery, there have been long periods of time in which slavery was sanctioned and approved, often on the basis of arguments drawn from the Bible and the teachings of Christianity. People argued that it was necessary for maintaining a hierarchical social order, it would Christianize the slaves, slaves were sub-human and unprepared for freedom, it was sanctioned in the Bible, Jesus didn’t condemn it, the spiritual or moral freedom of the slave did not require his legal or civil freedom, and so on. Eventually, of course, these defenses were not enough to stave off a civil war that eventually brought slavery to an end over 150 years ago.
But why bring up slavery this morning? Because if we read Paul’s letter to the Romans, his words suggest that he is calling Christians out of one form of slavery and into another. His letter quite explicitly says that we, “having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness." If slavery is as morally odious as I’ve suggested why is Paul extolling a new form of slavery? What’s going on here?
Clearly he is not talking about chattel slavery: the legal possession of someone as a commodity or piece of property, forcefully made subject to the whims and desires of the master.
But being subject or bound to someone else’s will is part of Paul’s understanding of slavery to righteousness or slavery to God. In a deep psychological sense Paul knows that we are all slaves, in a sense, to those values by which we seek to live our lives. What Paul offers is a existentially new form of slavery that both affirms our free will and, contrary to most human wisdom, enables and nurtures our ultimate fulfillment. Paul offers what might seem a living contradiction: a form of slavery that brings freedom and health.
It’s not a question of whether we are enslaved to something but a question of what or to whom we are in bondage and whether we have freely chosen that paradoxical but liberating form of bondage. And he says that our present way of life, which stands in opposition to the way of righteousness, is enslavement to the way of sin. And what is sin? Basically it is the desire of the self to live by itself, and for itself, with no reference to the powers that enable it to be what it is and what it aspires to, and to flourish. It is the self-pride that proceeds on the false assumption that we are our own masters, that we owe nothing to others, that our personal interests are to be pursued without restriction even at the expense of others. When Adam and Eve put their desires ahead of God’s, they committed the first or original sin. It was the placing of the center of value in themselves rather than in God. And by extension the self as its own center of value led to a desire to be radically independent, not interdependent, on all those other persons whom God created to be our equals as brothers and sisters, not our property or our inferiors.
As many scholars have observed, the most common value held in highest esteem by most Americans is the value of freedom from and independence of others: and this means for most people the freedom to be left alone by others so that we don’t depend on them and they don’t depend on us. We desire an individualistic freedom unfettered, unrestricted, by any obligations we owe to others. That is why so many Americans hate and distrust their government: they see it as something alien to themselves even though it provides them with goods that they have not entirely acquired by their own endeavors and then requires them in a bond of mutual obligation to distribute some of those goods to others who often, in their opinion, haven’t earned them and don’t deserve them. In our political process we become, through democratically agreed upon governmental policies, obligated to help others and this obligation we often find to be inimical to our belief that each person should look after him or herself.
We resent having to contribute to the well-being of others because that intrudes upon our desire to be left alone by them. And yet, ironically, this lust for independence is a contemporary form of slavery, namely enslavement to the sin of selfishness, or the belief that no one should have any right to curtail or restrict my freedom to force me into helping them when they have need. And make no mistake about it, it is a form of slavery, even though we think of it as the ultimate form of freedom, to be so tightly wound up in ourselves and our own desires that we can only regard the needs of others as threats to our freedom. The great irony is that like the defense of slavery in an earlier time, some of the strongest voices in defense of individualistic self-centeredness come from allegedly Christian spokespersons. They have taken the true value of freedom, the freedom to choose a way of life that conforms to God’s intention for our flourishing and fulfillment in community with others, and perverted it into the freedom to live apart from others seeking only our own self-interest.
But the secret to the fulfilling Christian life is to freely choose to wed ourselves to the only power that both intends us for flourishing and well-being and in the process reveals to us that such a life is bound up with, encumbered with, deeply fulfilling bonds of relationship with others. There is only one form of slavery, if we want to continue to use that word, that makes any sense at all and that is slavery to a way of life which brings us the most complete and satisfying way of being fully human. The freedom of isolating ourselves from others, of seeking to dis-encumber, dis-embed our lives from those of others will, our faith teaches us, turn out to be in practice the least satisfying, the least complete, the least fulfilling of all ways of life. It will be slavery to everything that destroys the true God-given destiny for each and every person.
If the freedom to be unencumbered, unobligated, independent of others were really true freedom, then think about what such a life might actually look like. Any person who encounters you should first be regarded as a threat to your autonomy and independence: you immediately will want to ask what are they going to request of me? How do they want to entangle me in their lives such that I might become indebted to them? If you do accept their overture of friendship you’ll want to make it conditional on what they can do for you. You’ll at best enter into a tentative and provisional contractual relationship with them which limits their power over you. You’ll define all your relationships in instrumental terms based on the simple question: how can they serve my needs.
The one thing you will not want to happen, to be avoided at all costs, is to fall in love with them or let love be the dominant dimension of your relationship. Why? Because love erases boundaries, it overruns instrumental relationships and puts us in a position of wanting to serve the other person, even be a slave to them, because we care so much about them. So stay away from love like the plague if you desire the splendid isolation of complete freedom from others. Also be sure never to acknowledge how much the contributions of others have made and continue to make your life possible. Ignore the fact that your social security, your Medicare, your highways, your school systems, your national security, your police and fire protection, are provided to you through the contributions of others in the form of taxes and public policies. Believe, against all the counter evidence, that you solely by yourself have made yourself what you are and that you owe nothing to anyone for that. Believe that you provided your own DNA to yourself, and that you nursed and nurtured yourself by yourself growing up. Believe that the social environment in which you grew up was made entirely by you. Believe that parents, teachers, and friends contributed nothing to making you what you are now. Believe, above all, that God didn’t give up his life for you to redeem you from the sin of selfishness and pride. Believe that you have redeemed yourself, that you personally died on a cross for yourself. Believe, if you can, all these things and then proceed to live the most profound lie of all time.
But if you cannot believe all these things, then return to Paul’s wisdom: acknowledge that we are all slaves to something and choose wisely, with God’s grace, to encumber yourself to those things that truly show us how deeply we are entangled in the lives of others. Embrace that entanglement because it is God’s way of showing you that only by committing yourself to the community of other persons can you ever truly lead a life that is ultimately satisfying because it fulfills your innermost, deepest nature and aspirations. Receive the gift of your true self from God and then, recalling the words of Jesus in this morning’s gospel, become truly free and give that cold cup of water to anyone who has need of it and give thanks that you have entered into the only relationship that can give your life absolute meaning: the life of righteous service and slavery to others in God’s name.
Annual Meeting Sermon
God is good-
All the time!
All the time-
God is good!
Here’s the deal. The doctor had you take some tests. Now the test results are back, and the doctor sits you down and tells you that you have five years to live. It’s not an exact number. It could be four, it could be six. But the point is that you apparently don’t have the decades and decades you thought you had.
What do you do now? What, if anything, are you going to do differently starting tomorrow?
This is a challenging question in the abstract, but by all accounts it is even harder in the moment. When we’re under stress, the lizard part of our brain takes the controls and starts punching all the buttons and turning all the knobs. We lose our equilibrium and we’re likely to end up going to one extreme or the other – denial or defeat. If we go to denial, we take no action because we don’t see a problem. The doctor is wrong. Anyway, there’s bound to be a cure by then. If we go to defeat, we take no action because we don’t see any point. My life is over, excuse me while I close my eyes and curl into a ball.
I have some advice for each of us when we face a situation like this. Let me mention here that, although this is a sermon during an Episcopal service, this advice does not relate directly to any of today’s Scripture readings. The best I can do is that there are three pieces of advice and today is Trinity Sunday.
Advice Number One: Assume the Doctor is Correct
By this, I mean that you plan and live your life taking very seriously whatever deadline you’ve been given.
Do you have a will? Is it up to date? Do you have advanced medical directives? Make sure you do.
Are there loose ends in your life? Get them taken care of.
Is there someplace you’ve been meaning to go or something you’ve been meaning to do? Don’t put it off any longer.
Advice Number Two: Do Everything You Reasonably Can to Make the Doctor Wrong
By this I mean see if you can put some more time up on the board. Maybe you can turn that five years into ten years or more.
Take care of yourself. Eat right. Take your medications. Do your research. Talk to other doctors and other patients.
You will notice that there is a tension between advice one and advice two. The doctor is correct and you can make the doctor incorrect. I am asking you to hold two seemingly contradictory things in your head at the same time. You can do this.
Let me remind you that today is Trinity Sunday. One God, Three Persons. In addition to celebrating God today, we also celebrate the church’s God-given ability to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time.
Advice Number Three: Surround Yourself with People You Love
Your family, your friends and neighbors, people you get a kick out of and people you’d like to get to know better. This is something that would be crystal clear to you if the doctor had said you have one month to live. When we’re talking about years, though, it’s something we can lose sight of, and we shouldn’t.
Now, as we consider these three pieces of advice, one thing that you might notice is that these things are good advice whether or not you have five years to live.
We all should be living our lives with urgency. We all should take good care of ourselves and surround ourselves with people we love.
Somehow, when we think we have all the time in the world, we tend to lose focus. We lose sight of what is most important and valuable. And unfortunately, sometimes it takes a rude shock to serve as a wake-up call, reminding us to focus on the things that are important and valuable.
In fact, aside from possible malpractice issues, it would probably be a good thing for doctors to tell all their patients that they have five years to live.
So why am I talking about this? Let me say first of all that it isn’t because I’ve been given a dire prognosis myself.
I’m talking about this partly because we all tend to live in denial of our own mortality, and I believe there is a spiritual value in facing our mortality and planning and living accordingly. But, like many sneaky preachers you’ve heard over the years, I’m also setting this up as a metaphor for something else.
Today is our parish annual meeting. As one of your wardens, I need to report to you on the health of this parish. So we’ve run some tests on the parish, and the test results are back. Are you sitting down?
According to the tests, Trinity Church has five years to live.
The number is not exact. It might be four. It might be six. The issue is not medical but financial. The money that you and I pledge and give to the church each year covers about half of our budget. The rest of the money we need we draw from the parish endowment funds. This actually worked pretty well when the parish had an endowment of six million dollars or more. Our current endowment is about one point two million dollars. We need to either boost our endowment up to where it used to be or else double our pledge income. If our pledge income stays the same and we spend our endowment down to zero, we would probably have to shut the doors.
This is a scary thing to say out loud, and I am hoping that I have prepared you to hear this news in a constructive way. This is threatening information, so beware the lizard brain. We need to steer clear of denial and defeatism.
We are going to avoid those extremes by remembering the advice. What was the advice? Hold on, it’s Trinity Sunday, there were three pieces of advices.
Number One: Assume the Doctor is Correct
We need to take this seriously. What would we do as a church community if we knew absolutely that we only had five more years?
Such a situation does not need to limit or paralyze us. Think of the very first Christians. Many of them believed that their churches only had a few years because they expected Jesus to return and history to end. And they did not curl up in a ball, they went out and changed the world. Now it is our turn.
Here at Trinity Church, we are trying to live our church life with a sense of urgency. We will talk in the meeting about the Mission Discernment Initiative and also about Partners for Sacred Places. These are both efforts to think creatively about what God’s mission for Trinity Church is right now.
Do you have your own thoughts about what is most important for Trinity Church right now? Please let me or Percy know your thoughts.
Advice Number Two: Do Everything You Reasonably Can to Make the Doctor Wrong
I believe that every one of us here can do something to help put some more time on the board for Trinity Church.
Do you give to the church? Do you pledge? Do you tithe? If more of us were tithing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Do you (1) have a will and (2) name Trinity Church in your will? Wills are not just for people who are so rich that they have estates that actually look like estates. Everybody should have a will. If you pledge to the church, it only makes sense to remember the church in your will. You don’t have to leave the church all your assets. Let me even suggest a number: 10% - a tithe of your assets. That would leave 90% of whatever you have to your heirs.
There are plenty of other things each of us can also do to help. Invite a friend to church. Be hospitable to a visitor. Volunteer.
Advice Number Three: Surround Yourself with People You Love
We do a pretty good job of that here, but I think we can do better. With Father Don away on sabbatical, I’m struck by the extent to which he’s been the glue that helps to hold us together, and we need to be more mindful of building our own connections with one another.
Let me mention a few opportunities. In fact, this being Trinity Sunday, let me mention three opportunities:
1. Foyer Groups
Long time parishioners will remember something we did years ago called Foyer Groups. These are groups of 8 or so people who meet every so often for dinner together in someone’s home. Over the course of a year, these people get to know each other in a way beyond what’s possible when we just see one another in church services. Make a resolution right now that when we roll this out, probably next fall, you will all sign up for Foyer Groups.
2. Photo Directory
The church really needs a new photo directory. We have some old photo directories, but they are very out of date. You can tell they’re old because if you look me up, I’m young.
We have some good options for how to do this, but we need a couple of volunteers to help organize the process of getting people signed up and scheduled to get their pictures taken.
Is that something you could help with? Please let me know.
3. Try a New Activity
Every week we list activities that go on here. Try something new. Try drumming or the Bible study. Go to a book group meeting. I’m going to be leading a comedy workshop on Monday evenings in July and August. Come to that. There is no pre-requisite. Our primary goal will be to have some fun together.
When you participate in an activity you learn about whatever the activity is, but you also get to know the other people there in a new way.
So those are some of my thoughts as we approach our parish annual meeting later this morning. I have tried not to sugar-coat things. Hopefully I didn’t go too far and scare everyone. I do believe that God will see us through our challenges in a good way. That doesn’t mean I believe it will be easy. I can imagine a scenario where God does make it easy. You know, the mysterious stranger leaves a winning Powerball ticket in the collection plate. That sort of thing. I would take it.
But it seems much more likely to me that God will see us through our challenges by pushing us as a parish and each of us individually to change and grow in ways that are initially uncomfortable for us but ultimately help us to be better people and a better church.
God is good-
All the time!
All the time-
God is good!
Amen.
Sermon for Easter 6A
Love is the Answer
Acts 17:22-31, John 14:15-21
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
May 25, 2014
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
It's such a common platitude, that it's even a song.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love. All we need is love. What a load of sentimental nonsense! Right?
What is love in the face of 273 Nigerian girls still kidnapped, far from their families, at the mercy of terrorists? What does love mean when 7 families in California are mourning the deaths of their loved ones?
What is love in the face of people dying in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Thailand, Somalia, Bahrain, Mali, and on the streets of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and New York?
If all the world needed was love, there would be no need for Memorial Day, because there would be now wars, no veterans, and no one would die in combat, right?
The world needs more than love, doesn't it?
Surely that’s why Christianity is less and less popular these days, because saying that God is love and that love is the answer to the world’s problems is far too simplistic for our sophisticated 21st century minds. No wonder young people are increasingly saying that they are “spiritual but not religious,” and leaving the church in droves.
But maybe it’s not that the world needs more than love. Perhaps, just maybe, our popular culture has given us a less-than-accurate definition of love.
Last week, we heard these lines from Song of Songs: “Many waters cannot quench love. Neither can the floods drown it. Love is strong as death.” A love that is strong as death is not one that can be represented by greeting cards or Precious Moments figurines or song lyrics, as catchy as they may be.
It is a powerful, transformative love.
The power of that love is so great that when Jesus says “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” it is a statement of fact. It’s not an admonition for us to prove our love for Jesus by keeping his commandments. It is a testament to the power of what it means to love Jesus and to live in that love.
But what are Jesus’ commandments? He didn't come from a mountain with tablets, so how are we to know?
When Jesus was asked what commandments were most important, he gave what is called the summary of the law. We are to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. And on the night that he washed the feet of his disciples, Jesus gave us a new commandment: that we are to love one another as Christ loved us. Our Episcopal catechism teaches us that these are the commandments of Christ.
So Jesus’ commandments all boil down to one thing.
Love.
Because actually, love IS powerful enough to transform ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.
But what I said in the beginning is also true.
The love that we see portrayed around us in greeting cards and Disney movies and romantic comedies is NOT what we need. We need a very different kind of love to engage in the work of transformation.
What does that kind of love look like?
We must begin by confronting the truth that transformative love is not easy. Our human relationships teach us that. Being a sibling, or a parent, or a grandparent, or an aunt, or an uncle, or a child, or a friend, or a spouse, or a partner, is a wonderful thing.
Relationships with other human beings are how we learn what love is all about. But no relationship is without its trials. Those who are closest to us have the greatest capacity to hurt us because our love makes us vulnerable.
We get angry, we hurt, and we are hurt by those who love us the most. If we want to stay in relationship, we have to confront the hurt and pain and anger and find a way through it. When those we love get sick, or die, we grieve and feel we will break into a million pieces.
Real love is difficult, and painful, and messy, and transformative and strong and beautiful. All at once.
I’m seeing this play out in my relationship with my mother. It’s never been an easy one, at least not since I became a teenager. I was always pushing against her ideal of what a woman should be, and I wanted her to be the Mom that I thought I needed. For most of my adult life, I’ve been learning to love her exactly as she is, knowing that she’s doing the best job she can of loving me too.
Last year, my Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and, to paraphrase my friend Lew, “stuff got real.” I had to stop wishing for a Mom that totally “gets” me, that embraces me as a lesbian and a wanna-be priest (two things that are equally incomprehensible to my Mom) and love the Mom I have right this minute, because with every day that passes, I lose a little bit of her.
Jesus also knows that love in human relationships is difficult. We can only imagine his sadness and grief as he prepares to leave these friends that he loves so much. We hear nothing about how he is preparing himself for this trial, but we do hear how he offers them hope and comfort. That hope and comfort extend to us as well.
Jesus assures us that he has not left us as orphans, but has given us an Advocate, a Counselor, the Spirit of Truth living in us. And Paul tells the Athenians God is not unknown, but rather near to each one of us.
When we believe that powerful transforming love dwells in us, we can learn to trust ourselves to act out of that love. And we must know that acting in love will make a difference.
It is all too easy to think that we do not know what to do in the face of the evils and problems of the world. It is all too easy to second guess ourselves, to assume that we do not have “right answers.” But, as I read in an essay this week, “The problem is not that we have so little power. The problem is that we do not use the power that we have. Why do we not honor what we can do?”[i]
If we believe what we hear this morning, that the Spirit of Truth lives in us, that we live and move and have our being in God, that God is not far from each one of us, then how can we deny that we know how to act in love? We need not be paralyzed: we can choose to lead with love.
We may feel that our small efforts at acting in love are wasted. We are not Ghandi, or Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandela, or whomever we may admire.
Our one gift of a coat to someone living outside, our one letter written to a congressperson, our moment of comforting a scared child, our kindness to someone who is usually shunned, those small things will not transform. Or will they?
Remember Jesus’ words?
I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.
Or how about…I was kidnapped and you didn’t forget me, I was sentenced to the electric chair and you were arrested in protest, I was abused by someone in power, and you didn’t let them get away with it, my son was killed by gunfire and you went to the capitol to advocate for stronger gun laws, I was mocked and you came and sat with me, I was grief-stricken and you hugged me…
Stong, transformative love never gives up.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the reason that Jesus tells us to love our enemies is because love has within it a redemptive power, that the redemptive power of love eventually transforms individuals. “Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”[ii]
We must continue acting courageously in love because the realm of God is not yet here. For example, it is tempting to think that we have realized MLK, Jr’s dream. We have an African American president. And yet, we also have Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Davis, and a Supreme Court that gutted Voting Rights Act, and upheld a ban on affirmative action.
We have far to go for people of color, for LGBTQ people, for people living in poverty, for people living with mental illness, for people living in prison.
And what those people need, what we need, what the world needs really is love.
Love is messy and difficult, and powerful and transformative, and because God who is love dwells in us, we are capable of engaging the power of love over and over again to transform ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world. Amen.
[i] Danusha Goska in the book The Impossible Will Take a Little Longer, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-loeb/political-paralysis-from_b_5311305.html
[ii] "Loving Your Enemies," Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 17, 1957, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_loving_your_enemies/
Click here for Fr. Don's sermon from Sunday, May 18, Easter 5.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
4 Easter Year A – Mothers’ Day
May 11, 2014
Acts 2: 42-47 John 10: 1-10
On this Good Shepherd Sunday, I would like us to take a look at how Jesus, the Good Shepherd, guided the earliest Christians of the first century as St. Luke describes it in the Book of Acts.
How does one capture the promise and the drama of a movement? Contemplate for a moment, if you will, the evolution of the American colonies from accidental discovery by European explorers, through protest, then a revolution, and then the complexities of conceiving and then implementing a new form of government unseen and unheard of before that time. On this day when the Episcopal Church honors the memory of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first person of color to serve on the United States Supreme Court, think of the abolition movement to end slavery, the human carnage that was the hallmark of the War Between the States, the political intrigue behind the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution making the institution of slavery unconstitutional. On this Mothers’ Day, we can think about the movement to grant women the right to vote, known as Women’s Suffrage, and the decades and centuries of struggle that entailed. Consider the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – part of the unfinished business of the Civil War – with its marches, church bombings, the brave people of all races who risked and sometimes gave their lives in the struggle for racial justice. All of these movements involved political, social, philosophical and religious influences and, in one form or another, each and every one of them continues to this very day, short of achieving the desired goals. More recently, the movement to gain equal rights for all persons regardless of sexual identity has been at center stage in our church and in our society the world over, and even though it gradually becomes settled law in this country, people still die over the issue in many parts of the world, and Christ’s church remains divided.
All of these movements, and many I have not named, have been the subject of books, movies, poetry, song and journalistic coverage of all kinds. They all had – and continue to have -- spiritual, political, and social underpinnings that have been reported over and over, and yet authors, poets, historians, composers, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers and others have been unable adequately to convey or express the feeling of being part of the development of the movement itself: the solidarity, the reverence, the resolve in the face of threat and danger – the struggle which the actual participants experienced. There simply is no way a third party can adequately convey the profound internal wrestling, , the internal conflicts of leadership – the differences of both of style and substance -- the intense periods of hardship and oppression that were experienced by the leading voices of these struggles. Nor can they adequately convey the deeply exhilarating sense of accomplishment when at least the initial goals of the movement are reached to someone who was not there. Those of us who hear or see these accounts can witness the fruit of the struggle but can never truly experience the process by which the fruit became a reality.
This morning’s passage from the Book of Acts is such an account. The entire book chronicles the events that occur following the death of Jesus Christ as the infant movement gradually evolves; as that initially Jewish movement that would become known as Christianity took its first steps in Jerusalem and Galilee, across Greece and Asia Minor and concluding with the travels of Paul to spread the Good News. But it was anything but a linear process. It wasn’t like one day there is the resurrection and the next day there is an organization known as “the Church.” As The Rev. Susan B. Johnson describes the early Christian movement in her discussion of this passage:
As we move through Acts, what we think of as the Christian church is everything from an offshoot of the parent faith tradition to a radical sect. It is a tentative movement and a street festival, a subversive activity and a public forum, a new current within Judaism and its own distinct and separate religion. This did not happen all at once or through a tidy progression, but through the grace of God, the faith of individuals, and the sometimes very messy expressions of human resolve.
This morning’s passage from the Book of Acts gets to the heart of what it meant to be a part of that fledgling Christian community.
Later in the Book of Acts, St. Luke will describe members of this young community as “People of The Way.” Yes, it was rooted in Jewish faith and practice, and yet as it evolved it reinterpreted, expanded and even re-imagined that tradition in the light of the life of Jesus and the experiences of his followers. Far from being a direct, linear process, it was a work in progress and, like all of the other movements that I have mentioned, continues to evolve even to this day.
There is talk throughout the Christian community today – and in this diocese in particular – about new directions for the church in the 21st century. As I follow the conversations, and as I participate in them, I find myself both energized and a bit frightened. And I ask myself, “Why are these conversations frightening?” When I think about it, it never takes me very long to understand why: It is because deep inside, through the course of my life as a Christian, I have in almost imperceptible but yet powerful ways come to take what I know as “the church” for granted. The Church – with its traditions, it’s honored place in society, its perceived and apparent if not exaggerated authority in the world – this is what I have come to know and at least subconsciously accept as The Church.
And yet St. Luke reminds us in this beautiful and succinct passage from the Book of Acts that we heard this morning that “The Church” is not a static thing, but a movement that was founded as a dynamic outgrowth of Jewish tradition. People who encountered it did so not with a yawn or with complacency but with a sense of awe. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. And what did they witness? The faithful practice of those who believed: Those who had been baptized devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
These were not just empty rituals, performed primarily to meet some expectation that they occur. They were practices that knitted together those early believers both spiritually and in very tangible ways with their fellow believers: All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. They gave with a faith and a gratitude and a commitment that put even our most generous offerings to same. And they didn’t do this only on Sundays: Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple – note that is the Jewish house of worship – they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.
When I reflect on what I fear when I think of change, I am quickly reminded that our American way of life, along with the institutionalized reality of the Christian church throughout the world, have combined to remove all of us from the “awesome” reality that is described in this morning’s passage from the Book of Acts. Gone is that sense of becoming, absent is that awe that comes with the thrill of new discovery. Missing is that sense of newness, of the uncertainty, yes even of vulnerability, that comes from understanding that you are a living member of a work in progress, and not simply a lucky heir to a fortune of church tradition.
Today we celebrate the baptism of Elijah Michael and Gabriel Thomas – can’t get much more biblical than that – as we welcome these two newest members of the church – the Body of Christ in the world. We will, as we always do at baptism, renew our Baptismal covenant, that uniquely Anglican statement of beliefs that also commits us to adopting a certain lifestyle and to being people of The Way. As a part of that renewal, we will commit to the very practices that St. Luke describes in today’s passage from the Book of Acts: Will you continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?
When we say, “I will, with God’s help,” are we going to let God do all the heavy lifting, or will we imagine ourselves as one of that evolving fellowship of which St. Luke wrote? We can perhaps question whether St. Luke was accurately describing practices that actually occurred throughout the entire movement or whether he was perhaps exaggerating a bit in trying to describe the idealized values of some subset of the movement in general. But that should not be our concern. What should really capture our hearts on this day is the renewed understanding that we as individual Christians as well as the church are always in the process of becoming, that we never “arrive” at our destination in this earthly life. The important question for us to be asking ourselves today is: What new momentum, what new leading of the Spirit, what events in the world are leading us to new and awesome understandings of how God is leading us into the Christ-like community? My prayer is that we will continue to grow into a diverse community that is gathered in prayer and worship, that is nurtured with the Word and the breaking of bread, and strengthened to join in the work of reconciliation and restoration of God’s creation. A community of whom it may be said, in the words of our Daily Office: Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to Him from generation to generation in the church, and in Christ Jesus, forever and ever. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Dennis Winkleblack
Sunday, May 4, 2014, Third Sunday of Easter
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
It's late on Easter Sunday. Two followers of Jesus, feeling very lost and defeated at the news of Jesus’ crucifixion, are making their way to a little town called Emmaus. Biblical archaeologists have tried to find Emmaus. Many figure it was around 7 miles or so Northwest of Jerusalem. But no one knows for sure.
It probably doesn’t matter. As Frederick Buechner writes, “Emmaus is the place we go to in order to escape – a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.”
As they're walking, a stranger falls into step with them. The Gospel writer, Luke, says it's Jesus. As the readers of the story, we now know the stranger's identity, but to the disillusioned disciples, he's still a stranger.
Now, exactly why they didn't recognize him immediately, we have no clue. Likely, it’s just the way the mind works: when you know someone is dead, they’re the last person you’d think of meeting on the street. In any case, they didn't recognize Jesus.
As night falls and their home is in sight, the stranger is inclined to continue on the road. Middle Eastern etiquette says no one would presume to be invited into someone else’s home. But the disciples say, "Stay with us." And he does.
Then, in the course of the evening around the table, the darndest thing happened, as if scales had fallen from their eyes: They realize the stranger is Jesus! The men now had more than the rumor of an empty tomb and a missing body. They had their leader back!
It’s long been a matter of debate as to what might have happened around the table to have opened the eyes of Jesus’ depressed followers. Clearly it wasn’t a sermon or even good biblical exegesis for as they were walking, Luke writes, “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”
But they still didn’t get it! Not even with Jesus doing the preaching!
So what, we wonder, could possibly have taken place for them to see that Jesus was Jesus?
Perhaps it might have been the way Jesus gave thanks over the bread. For there in that moment when anything but gratitude was in the air, when the noise from the shattering of dreams was still echoing, Jesus gave thanks to God for the bread they were about to eat.
BIG dreams do die hard, don’t they? Have you ever had a big dream for your life, but then one day had to admit it was dead? That it just wasn’t going to happen? Maybe it was about a job or a career. Or a relationship. Or something very personal? Have you ever had a dream so large that it once drove every minute of your life, but then was no more?
And how did you feel in that awful moment of awareness? Empty, sad, angry, depressed beyond words, despairing.
And what does one typically do in times like those? Give thanks?
In a church I used to serve there was a young man, around 12 years old, who came to our church with his mother. The young man was mentally challenged. The father couldn’t deal with having a less than perfect child and the couple had divorced a few years before. We set up a special class with a special teacher just for him so he could go to Sunday School just like everyone else.
One might wonder if his mother ever said to herself "If only my child had been born ‘normal.’" But apparently she didn’t spend much time thinking such thoughts. She told me her blessings far outweighed her burdens.
I used to watch him and his mother interact. Truly, it was beautiful. The way he would run to greet her after Sunday School. The smiles and the kisses they shared couldn't have been more glorious. No mother was ever more proud than she.
Gratitude. There likely is nothing more subversive in a challenging time than gratitude. In fact, in challenging times, gratitude, being grateful at all for anything, is a sure sign that God is implanted in your soul.
At sundown on Sunday night in a house filled with hopelessness, a stranger says, "Thanks." So, perhaps what enabled the two followers to recognize the one who had taught them to live always in gratitude to God was being reminded in bodily form of that subversive godly gift of gratitude.
Or, maybe what caused them to see the light were his hands. Luke records that the stranger took the bread in his hands and broke it.
Hands reveal so much about us -- gnarled, twisted hands; calloused hands, delicate hands; an open hand, a clenched fist. Hands tell so much of our story.
My mother died about 30 years ago. I remember looking at her hands folded gently across herself in the casket. I remembered one of those hands holding mine walking to my first kindergarten class with Mrs. DeBow. I was scared. I didn't know anyone. She was leaving me. But then she kissed me and left me there to make my way in my new world.
Now I looked at her hands folded across her chest and remembered how those hands had sometimes held on and sometimes let go. And probably did it all about as well as it could be done.
Hands. Hands touch all of life from the sublime to the most unpleasant. There is nothing more earthy, earthly about us than our hands.
And, to be sure, Jesus was nothing if not earthy. His hands touched everything from lepers to those possessed to fish and bread and wine.
The two men, of course, had witnessed Jesus’s hands in action. They had seen what God is like when God is being God: when earthiness is made divine. So, perhaps it was this reminder of Jesus’ divine earthiness that jarred open the disciples’ minds and hearts to the stranger in their midst.
Or, were their eyes opened because there was something about the way Jesus took charge of the supper and served them? Luke is clear. The house may not belong to the stranger, but the supper does. Jesus, the invited guest, becomes the host.
With their leader dead, these men had no center, nothing to give life any real purpose. They were on a road to the proverbial nowhere. They must have been totally confused about God. In any case, whatever life had been like for them before meeting Jesus, it was soon going to be only the same old, same old.
''Get over it and move on with your lives." Isn't that what everyone says or implies when a dream has died, or even when a loved one has died? "Get over it and move on with your lives."
In a world where good people like Jesus get nailed, where children die in a school for no good reason, where fanatics bomb buildings, where anyone with a hand gun can alter the world for scores of people, where senseless wars continue as if no one has learned anything from history ----- sometimes nothing makes any sense at all.
So, might as well get over it and move on with your lives, because there's nothing rational that will take away your hurt and help you make sense of things. Just get over it and move on.
No wonder the followers of Jesus were overcome with despair.
Yet in that room their eyes were opened by something. And it well may have had to do with Jesus serving them like he served them only 3 nights before just moments away from his arrest. Indeed, maybe it was this joining of God and daily bread and serving them that was the tipping point in causing the disciples to recognize the divine, earthy, caring Jesus in their midst.
At this point, in verse 33, Luke's Gospel records a most remarkable thing: "They (the followers) got up and returned to Jerusalem." They didn't even spend the night in Emmaus.
They went back to Jerusalem - the place of pain and perplexity and post-mortems. But, clearly, they went back with a new presence and power and purpose.
Lost and dead and hopeless: this is how only a few hours earlier it had all seemed to the followers of Jesus. It had seemed as if nothing was true except that life was terribly uncertain with a bent for the worst. Now there was a new truth: "There is always hope in God.”
So, would this mean, then, that there would be no more uncertainty? That there would be no more crosses? No more valleys?
You and I know better. The truth of the Resurrection is not that there are no more deaths and tombs, no more sufferings and sadness. I mean, you can't preach that to the folks on the Hospice floor of the hospital. Or, try to convince the parents of the children who died in Sandy Hook that belief in Jesus, going to church, being good means you get special breaks in this cruel world.
No, even people of faith live in good-bad Jerusalem where bad things happen to good people. It was then and is now, even after the Resurrection, a Bad/Good Friday kind of world.
Something, though, also became equally as true for the followers of Jesus on that late Easter afternoon long ago. And what became equally as true as the unpredictable, unfair, often inexplicable world was that the stranger in their midst was God in the flesh. In him, heaven had reached down and embraced earth! And, what was best: this Jesus reality would never die!
And so it is that the Christ still comes to us. Indeed, our religion is nothing if not a physically based, earthly, earthy spirituality. We call it incarnation, God in the flesh once; God in the flesh still.
Curtis Almquist writes: “I suspect for some of us, the people in our past who stood by us are indistinguishable from God: they are what God looked like and sounded like and felt like. Their presence was, to us, an experience of transcendence. They incarnated God, truly.”
At the end of themselves, the two lost souls found an embodied God.
And so it is for us: Whenever we are at the end of ourselves – whenever we are at the end of ourselves – with eyes of faith, Jesus shows up.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Easter Sunday, Year A
April 20, 2014
As many of you know, I am a big fan of several sports and, while I have never been a particularly gifted athlete, I happen to believe that there are a lot of life lessons to be learned from sports and the people who play them. And so it will come as no surprise that I have been particularly inspired by our two University of Connecticut championship basketball teams, but most particularly by the story of the UConn Men’s team.
It was September 2012 in Storrs, Connecticut. Legendary Head Basketball Coach Jim Calhoun had just announced his retirement after leading the team for 26 seasons, including three national NCAA Men’s titles. The future looked bleak. The team was already banned from any tournaments for the coming 2012-2013 season due to poor academic performance of some players. That ban came on the heels of a personal suspension for Calhoun due to a recruiting scandal. Only five players who had seen significant playing time in the previous season were returning. Five of their top players from the previous season had fled – two for the professional NBA and three transferring to other colleges. To make matters worse, realignment of several top collegiate leagues seemed to be leaving UConn in the middle of nowhere.
Given all of the bad news, amidst so much ambiguity, sports commentators everywhere were forecasting doom and gloom for the team’s future. How would it ever return to dreams of glory after falling so far?
I suspect that’s about how Team Jesus must have been feeling on that first Easter morning. The one who had first called them together, the man who had held them together for these several years was gone. Not just gone – he was publicly humiliated, rejected by his own people, and hung to die upon a cross as a common criminal, next to common criminals. Afraid for their own lives and having no idea where to turn, they went into hiding – all but one abandoning him even while he was still alive on the cross. For the past couple of years they had travelled throughout the region, attracting other followers who were also drawn to this man whom they did not quite understand but whose message and life drew them in to want to know more. And now he was dead. And their lives were thrown into utter turmoil – the previous three years with all of its hope and promise seemingly pointless.
That is how that first Easter began. Because, unlike us, they thought that was the end of the story. The Gospels were still to be written, Paul was still Saul and was yet to be smitten, and Jesus’ disciples didn’t have a clue what was going to come next. There was no road map to show them the way, no directions they could follow. No one had ever been there before. So how does the gloom and uncertainty at the beginning of that first Easter day turn into the joy of celebrating Jesus resurrection?
The UConn men’s basketball team overcame the adversity of uncertainty two years ago and in only the second year under the leadership of head coach Kevin Ollie, claimed the NCAA Men’s Basketball national championship alongside their female colleagues. And while I would never be so foolish or misguided as to compare Kevin Ollie or Shabazz Napier to Jesus, I do think there are some lessons we can learn, and some inspiration to be drawn from this team in terms of turning adversity into success, confusion into a sense of purpose, and yes, even death into resurrection.
First of all, BELIEVE. Kevin Ollie calls it “believing in the dark.” Even in the darkest times, he says, even when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you have faith in the basic value of what you are doing and you stick to what you believe to be right. Know what you are looking for and stay with it until you find it.
Second, Don’t give up. When the core of the UConn team was abandoning ship for greener pastures in 2012, there were a few – like the leaders of this year’s team – who believed, who kept the faith and who stayed around. And indeed, they reaped the rewards of new life as this team turned things around. When we look at Team Jesus, recall that on that first Good Friday almost all of the disciples had fled for safety. Only the beloved disciple had the faith and the tenacity to stand by Jesus, along with his mother and a few of the women, to the end. And before his death, one of the last things Jesus did was tell them to care for each other. That’s something that both of our UConn teams are known for.
Third. SOW SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE. Of Kevin Ollie, Senior Tyler Olander said, “He took a job with a team that had nothing to play for last year, but he didn’t look at it that way. He would tell us to plant seeds for the future.” And indeed, that was a metaphor that the UConn coach employed for much of the season, and especially during the tournament: “You don’t give up in the hard times; you sow seeds for the future. . . We’re going back to the Garden, and there’s no better place to sow seeds than in the Garden . . .”
The seeds of our Christian journey were sown at our baptism. We should ask ourselves, “Have we been nurturing them into mature growth?”
Fourth. When you believe, and don’t give up, and you sow seeds for the future, you do not fear the unknown and you can face an uncertain future with confidence. For the Huskies, they found themselves with all of the old securities gone, and they were under a new and untested leader. And yet, they approached the unknown without fear. Coach Ollie spoke of the dark times of uncertainty: “You don’t linger in the dark times or it will destroy you . . . You can settle in the dark times, but you can also stretch in the dark times.” Coach Ollie said of Shabazz Napier, “He has something deep inside of him that he is not afraid to fail.”
In this morning’s Gospel account, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to the tomb on that first Easter and saw that things were not as expected. Indeed, upon their arrival, they experienced an earthquake; next they saw an Angel descending from Heaven who looked like lightning. Then the angel removed the stone from the tomb and sat on top of it as the angel announced that Jesus was no longer there. The angel gave them a message for the disciples. As if that were not enough, on their way they had their own encounter with the risen Jesus, who also told them that he wanted to meet the disciples in Galilee. Mary will then go on to become the first one to preach the Good News as they return to tell the disciples what they have just experienced. They too faced uncertainty with confidence.
To their many fans in Connecticut and around the country, the 2014 UConn Huskies experienced nothing short of a type of symbolic death and unexpected resurrection. Last Sunday, more than 200,000 of those fans came out to a parade here in Hartford to thank them and their female counterparts for their hard work and to see them in person. They captured the hearts and the hopes and the imaginations of so many, establishing in the process a firmer foundation for a more promising future.
If this kind of reaction is possible for the unexpected resurrection of a college basketball program, we can’t even begin to imagine what possibilities lay ahead for Jesus’ followers as they contemplate and wrestle with his own resurrection. The Resurrection upsets all expectations, and the only way to apprehend it is to come and see that things are different. But then again, things are always different than expected with Jesus. For those early followers of Jesus, the resurrection meant, first of all, causing them to experience the loss of the only leader they had known and, secondly, forcing them to continue their journey into an uncertain and changing landscape. They came to the Garden searching for Jesus; but that’s not where they found him.
We have been talking about two gardens – Madison Square Garden and that Garden in which Mary encountered the Angel on that first Easter morning. But there is a third garden – the garden into which we walk on this Easter Sunday 2014. And a question comes to you and me as individual Christians, and it comes to us collectively as the church – as an institution facing uncertain times, seeking to become a community of faithful seekers: “Where are you searching for Jesus?” Perhaps more fundamentally is the question, “What will Jesus look like when we find him in his risen state?” When the women came to find Jesus in the garden, the Angel told them, “He is not here for he has been raised. . . he is going ahead of you to Galilee.” Jesus is still going ahead of us today, inviting us to find him in places we do not expect. As it was for his very first disciples, our challenge today is to always and everywhere be on the lookout for the risen Jesus, to expect the unexpected, and to follow where he leads without fear. AMEN.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Good Friday 2014
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
Time for Death
Tonight, the story ends with "they laid him in the tomb." Tonight, we remember what it is like to feel abandoned by God, and friends, and family, and what it is to abandon those we love. Tonight we remember what it is like to betray and to be betrayed. Tonight we lament, we mourn, and we grieve. Tonight we confront the injustice of a system that still kills its prophets, that still kills goodness.
On Good Friday, we enter into the story of Jesus knowing that he's about to die, knowing that the authorities are coming for him, knowing that they're going to kill him because he's been preaching and teaching concepts that upset the Empire, and threaten those in charge.
We enter in to the story with the disciples. They had been following him for three years. They had come to believe that he was the Messiah, that he could make everything ok, stilling storms, raising the dead, feeding crowds, and healing lepers. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the end was near, the disciples held out hope that some miraculous event would save Jesus.
But it didn't.
Jesus was executed, brutally, in front of all his friends and his mother. This public execution was meant to strike fear in the hearts of all who were following this crazy Rabbi, all who were starting to dream into reality a new kind of Empire based on love, not fear. It was meant to stop that movement in its tracks. No one challenges systems of power the way Jesus did and gets out alive. Jesus died, brutally and publicly on that cross. And that's where the story ends… tonight.
No wonder Good Friday services are never as well attended as Easter. Certainly it is easier to skip over these horrific events and move straight to the resurrection. After all, we are an Easter people. Every Sunday we proclaim, "On the third day he rose again." We already know the end of the story.
And yet… we need Good Friday. We need the time recall that things are not as they should be, that justice seems absent, and that the problems of the world seem unfixable.
Tonight especially we must start by calling out the anti-Jewishness of what we just heard. With the news of Nazi-looking flyers being given out to Jews in Ukraine instructing them to register themselves and all their property with the government or face deportation, tonight we must name the sin of anti-Semitism. The flyers are a hoax that were created to discredit political opponents as anti-Semites. But that doesn't make them any less reminiscent of the Holocaust, or any less terrifying to the Jews who received them.
Based largely on this account of the passion, too many Christians for too many years have blamed all Jews for Jesus' death. Certainly, the author of John's gospel is blaming the Jews of his own day for Jesus' death; he has a political axe to grind. But we know from history that crucifixion was a tool of the Roman Empire, not limited to Jewish authorities. We also know that those who wanted Jesus dead were those in power – some Jewish authorities, some Roman authorities, all who were threatened by Jesus' power-upending message. And we know that Jesus himself was a Jew and his followers were Jews. As scripture scholar Donald Senior has said of the gospel of John, "A Gospel whose one message is a proclamation of love should not be used in such a way that it drips hatred and prejudice into the life blood of the Church." And so on Good Friday especially, we Christians must repent of the harm done to Jews in the name of one of their own who preached love.
In fact, on Good Friday we must take the time to lament so many ways in which power is abused:
the manipulation of our political systems by the wealthy few, and the shaming of the poor that takes the place of the humility of washing each other's feet.
gun violence, and our unwillingness to sheath our weapons and heal our society with sensible laws.
the fear that leads those in power to wash their hands of prophetic troublemakers.
the systems that instill fear in us, that lead us to betray that which we love the most.
And on Good Friday we must take the time to mourn. We grieve our own losses – the death of someone we love, the betrayals and disappointments we have suffered, the pain of watching the people we love suffer.
In the churches I grew up in, we did not observe Good Friday. On Palm Sunday, the preacher would tell us about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey to cheering crowds and waving palm branches. Jesus' passion and death received scant attention.
And then, one week later, we went straight to Easter. Our pastors always told us that Easter was the most glorious celebration for Christians, bigger than Christmas. And I tried to feel that way. I loved singing "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," and I tried to make that feeling into some kind of holy joy, but the message of Easter never really resonated in my soul.
I wanted to believe it was our most important Christian holiday, but my heart wasn't in it. I always ended up feeling guilty because this event that was the heart of our faith held so little meaning for me. It seemed like a fairy tale, or a superhero story.
When I became an Episcopalian, I realized that the soul was missing from Easter for me because I had never experienced Good Friday.
Resurrection means little if we have not felt death's sting.
In an interview about her new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says
I cannot sell out the Christian message, which at its heart says that when the bottom drops out and you’re screaming your guts out at God, there’s more. It says that if you are willing to enter the cloud of unknowing and meet God in the dark—maybe even the dark of a tomb—you might be in for a surprise.
The great hope in the Christian message is not that you will be rescued from the dark but if you are able to trust God all the way into the dark, you may be surprised.
This is the great truth of human life – there is no resurrection without death. And while we may learn to trust that there is more, tonight we cannot see it. Tonight we are in the tomb.
We may be an Easter people, but we cannot get there without making time for death.
“Seven Words”
By Sylvia Sands
The First Word:
The Soldier
I’m a soldier.
So I try not to listen when I hammer in the nails.
I try not to listen to what the condemned man may say.
Otherwise you lose your beauty sleep.
“Father forgive them;
they do not know what they are doing.”
I’ve heard curses and threats and brave defiance,
But never, never, as the hammer swung, concern for me.
At least that’s what it seemed
As I was shocked into meeting his eyes,
The hammer heavy and stilled in my hand
For one dreadful, ice-cold moment.
Through the blood and thorns and nails
His eyes met mine with tenderness.
Suddenly I wanted my mother and my wife
And my gentle daughter
To cradle my head in their laps
And hide me, hide me, from this man’s gaze.
And here I am, throwing dice,
With his words hammering,
Hammering in my head,
Hammering, hammering in my heart,
Like nails of love and forgiveness, and tenderness,
Piercing me, piercing me,
For all eternity.
Here we sit in the first of seven Christian houses of worship that we will visit on this Good Friday, 2014, in the City of Hartford, Connecticut. It may be hard for us to identify with a Roman soldier doing his duty on a hill outside the city limits of Jerusalem just shy of 2000 years ago. It is much easier to objectify him as part of the evil crowd that took part in torturing and killing our Lord.
Some of you, as we have here at Trinity, may have had the opportunity during this week to take part in a dramatic reading of the passion narrative from one of the Gospels. As a member of the congregation, part of that experience is to play the part of the “crowd” or the “chief priests” or “the disciples” in the narrative; along with that comes the opportunity to shout such lines as, “I do not know the man,” or, “We have no king but Caesar” or, the hardest of all, “Crucify him!” . . . Not easy words to repeat. And they are just words. Multiply that uneasy feeling by around, I don’t know, a million, and you begin to understand just perhaps ever so slightly what that soldier may have experienced as he met the gaze of the crucified Jesus.
We, like the soldier, become quite adept at filtering out or ignoring altogether aspects of life that make us uncomfortable – that cause us to lose our beauty rest: Political and social injustices in other parts of the world, economic and educational injustices here at home. This is perhaps preaching to the choir, but when people from the suburbs avoid coming to downtown Hartford, is it really because they are afraid of violence? Or is it perhaps, like the soldier, we are confronted with the reality of part of our community we would rather not experience -- the fruit of our own societal political decisions that keep some well protected and cared for while many are relegated to what is left over. It is more comfortable to avert their gaze and not be drawn in. It is more comfortable not to stare into Jesus’ eyes.
We can avoid to some extent the gaze of our human contemporaries, but as Christians, we can’t avoid the gaze of Jesus. And when we contemplate looking into the eyes of Jesus on this Good Friday, we realize how much like that solder we really are. We, like the soldier, are confronted, perhaps haunted, by the deep, unconditional love of Jesus for each and every one of us, and our own inadequacy to fully accept and own that love. We are reminded by our own consciences of just how far we fall short of God’s plan for us in living up to those values we profess in our baptism. And we are reminded that, with each failure, we, too, are like the soldier, a party to the breaking of the Body of Christ. And yet, he forgives us, and loves us still.
This afternoon I invite you to linger in the gaze of Jesus as we process among our Asylum Hill churches. And if that makes us a little uncomfortable, praise God, that is probably not a bad thing. Amen.
