Grace Cathedral
Grace Cathedral has announced that it is endorsing Proposition 3 (Constitutional right to marriage) and Proposition 6 (Elimination of involuntary servitude for incarcerated persons) on the November 2024 ballot.
Proposition 3 would remove a section of the California Constitution added by Prop. 8 (2008), which states that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. In its place, Proposition 3 would declare that the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right. Although marriage equality has been shielded in California by later court rulings, Prop. 8 is capable of being brought back to life as long it is on the books. Beyond that, Prop. 8 is an affront to same-sex couples and everyone, Grace Cathedral included, who celebrates their marriages and welcomes them and their families into their community. Now is the time to permanently guarantee marriage equality in this state by passing Proposition 3.
Proposition 6 would amend the abolition of slavery clause in the California Constitution to remove a provision that allows involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime. The state prison system relies on this provision to compel inmates to work at whatever task the authorities choose. If Prop. 6 passes, the abolition clause would simply read: “Slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited.” The new language would be added to prohibit prison authorities from disciplining an inmate for declining a work assignment and authorizing them to award credits to inmates who voluntarily accept a work assignment. Grace Cathedral has been calling on the state legislature since 2020 to put this measure on the ballot. Voters in seven other states have amended their constitutions in recent years to eliminate the involuntary servitude exception. Prop. 6 gives California voters an opportunity to join the movement. We are proud to endorse Proposition 6 as well as Proposition 3.
Information about these and other ballot measures is available in the official California Voter Information Guide: https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/. The Guide will be mailed to registered voters in September. Vote-by-mail ballots will be mailed to registered voters on or before October 7, 2024. Grace Cathedral encourages all eligible persons to register and vote.
Statement Endorsing Prop. 3 and Prop. 6
The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean of Grace Cathedral, has issued the following statement to accompany the Cathedral’s endorsement of Proposition 3 and Proposition 6:
“Words matter. Words can be hurtful; they can heal as well. Today there is language in the California Constitution that allows forced labor in state prisons and denies some people the right to marry the person they love. The words are painful just to read, and they harm not only the people they are directed toward but also the moral character of California society. Proposition 3 and Proposition 6 give the voters an opportunity to make amends by removing these words from the state constitution. I want to explain why Grace Cathedral believes it is time to do so. Grace Cathedral is part of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. For this reason, we base our endorsement of Proposition 3 and Proposition 6 position not on merely political considerations but on religious conviction, our church’s ethical teachings, and personal experience.
Grace Cathedral has performed the Rite of Holy Matrimony in the Episcopal Church for same-sex couples ever since it became possible for us to do so in conformity with the laws of this state and the canons of the church. Although I am sure that our worshipping community believes that the right to marry is a civil right, our support for Proposition 3 flows from the conviction that Jesus’ message of radical inclusion and abounding love embraces all relationships. It is a joy for me and Grace Cathedral’s other clergy to celebrate and bless same-sex marriages and witness these couples, their families and children going on to lead happy, secure, and productive lives enriched by their faith and community. I wish everyone could experience what we see and know. Jesus came into the world so that everyone would understand that love is at the center of all creation. Because of this, we invoke his name when people take the extraordinary step of committing their lives to each other in the presence of God. God is the one who created the institution of marriage and gathers the company of friends and family whose love helps to sustain our relationships. Grace supports Prop. 3 because it guarantees that same-sex couples will not be denied the right to marry under the law, and also because it ensures that we can freely and fully exercise our religious right to speak the words that consecrate their marriages in the church.
Regarding Proposition 6, it is important to remember where the words “involuntary servitude” come from. Involuntary servitude is a reduced form of chattel slavery. A person in this status is not legally the property of another, but under the law and through physical force, they are in the same unfree conditions as a slave. Serfdom, peonage, sex trafficking, people with debts to a plantation owner that they can never discharge – this is what involuntary servitude means. Fabricated criminal charges leading to forced labor in prisons and work farms were a tool of the Jim Crow era in our history. Proposition 6 was included in the California Reparations Commission’s legislative recommendations. We teach schoolchildren that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. Are we honest in explaining that an exception to this rule has been made for prisoners? I hope that when Proposition 6 passes, we will be able to share the good news that another step has been taken toward the absolute abolition of slavery. The words of history matter.
The incarcerated people I’ve encountered in my experience want to work; they recognize labor as an activity that dignifies human life. California is already moving away from a punitive model to rehabilitation and community reintegration. Effective January 1, 2024, the California Penal Code declares that the simple fact of incarceration is enough to satisfy the punishment purposes of sentencing. From now on, the stated purpose of an inmate’s period of incarceration is rehabilitation and reentry, not further punishment. In the words of the legislation, “Effective rehabilitation increases public safety and builds stronger communities. In order to achieve these goals, it is essential that incarcerated people are able to live with dignity, are treated humanely, are able to maintain and build strong family and community connections, and have access to varied, high-quality educational and rehabilitative programs.” In the same vein, the Governor signed a bill in July 2024 that provides that if Prop. 6 passes, prisons will be required to develop a voluntary work program for inmates with written rules and regulations for work and programming assignments, including the wages for work performed. It is no longer necessary to keep the language in the state constitution authorizing forced labor in prisons to achieve the goals of the criminal justice system. While passing Prop. 6 will not put the question of what is fair and appropriate compensation to rest, it is another important step in transforming California’s approach to incarceration.
Both Proposition 3 and Proposition 6 require a popular vote because they would amend the California Constitution. We are responsible for taking cruel and unnecessary words out of the Constitution, whether or not we were responsible for them in the first place. Amending the words of the Constitution can be a healing moment. Slavery and involuntary servitude are America’s original sin. Denying same-sex marriage debases the institution of marriage. We have all had the personal experience of feeling entrapped by things we have said or done. We all have regrets about what we have not said or done. Now we can make things right. Prop. 3 safeguards the true meaning of marriage as understood by the Episcopal Church. Prop. 6 puts into effect the church’s teaching that everyone, regardless of present status or condition, has dignity, worth, and the potential to amend their ways.
Words really do matter. California voters have an opportunity to bring the language in the state constitution in line with their values and beliefs. On behalf of Grace Cathedral and our worshipping community, I encourage you to vote yes on Proposition 3 and Proposition 6.
Malcolm Clemens Young
Dean, Grace Cathedral,
San Francisco, CA
Holy God so often we feel cut off from you and one another. Help us find our way to healing and hope, so that we can become new again. Amen.
Strikingly beautiful, Maria had deep dark eyes and long black hair. Superficially she seemed jaded, a kind of rebel. But if you took the time to really know her, she had great intelligence, sensitivity and heart. During my junior year of high school we were close friends. She used to talk about what it felt like getting painfully lost in the shuffle after her parents split up, about her resentful mother being left with almost nothing.
In those days divorce was suddenly becoming far more widespread and our society was not prepared. We did not know how to cope with divorce in a humane and grace-filled way. Divorce deeply affects all of us. Perhaps you have gone through a divorce yourself, or maybe it was your parents, your children, a close friend or work colleague. In our society really poor people, the ones who are barely making it, are far more likely to get divorced than wealthy people.
Being truly part of the human family means understanding how hard it can be to sustain a relationship and how much pain we can suffer when it breaks down. Many of us also have an experience of new life and joy on the other side of this suffering.
What does Jesus offer as we try to understand this feature of the human condition? Many preachers shy away from this complex topic and I worry a little about putting words into Jesus’ mouth and a lot about saying something that inadvertently harms you. But I believe that Jesus offers practical and real good news. But like all communication his words need to be interpreted and this requires difficult work. It is worth it because this teaching will lead us to wholeness and new life.
The context matters. Jesus has been teaching his disciples about becoming “servants of all.”[1] In fact he says that the world completely misunderstands servanthood. In Imperial Rome but also today we tend to think of servants as lower, lesser, outsiders compelled to work for those who are greater than they are. We easily slip into thinking that the great ones are those who coerce and control others. But Jesus turns this idea on its head. He tells his friends that serving others, especially vulnerable people, is the key to a meaningful life. He says that the greatest one will be servant of all.
Some Pharisees come to Jesus. The name Pharisee in Aramaic means “the ones who are set apart.”[2] They care intensely about determining what and who is pure. They are right to fear Jesus because he undermines this whole project. For Jesus there is one human family and no one is impure or left out. The Pharisees ask Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” The narrator calls this question a trap. Whether Jesus says yes or no the Pharisees have a plan to condemn him.
Jesus understands that there is no right answer. He also knows what happened after King Herod and his former sister-in-law each divorced their spouses and married each other. John the Baptist criticized their marriage. And this led to his execution by Herod. Rather than trying to set a policy or law on divorce Jesus changes the question. Rather than asking if it is legal to divorce he asks us to consider what God wants for us.
During those times there were ethical disagreements concerning divorce. Some believed that the only justification for divorce was sexual infidelity. Others thought that a husband should be able to divorce his wife for pretty much any reason. According to the Book of Deuteronomy a man can write a certificate of divorce if his wife, “does not please him” or, “because he finds something objectionable about her” (Deut. 24:1-4).
This biblical passage puts all the power in the hands of the husband. It makes divorce the rule rather than an exception to be employed only after all other courses of action have failed. Most important this law endangers the most vulnerable people in society – women and children who could not own property and who depend for their well-being on the generosity of their husband and father. This actually describes the situation of my friend Maria.
Jesus hates just this kind of human suffering. You can almost hear him raise his voice as he says that the reason for a commandment permitting divorce is our “hardness of heart.” But note this. Jesus does not say Moses was wrong. Jesus does not say that the commandment permitting divorce should cease to be a law. Jesus is not forbidding divorce.
Instead he uses hyperbole to make a point. In our reading a few weeks ago Jesus said that, “if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out” (Mk. 9:47). Just as this is not a call for us to pluck out our eyes, Jesus describing remarriage as a kind of adultery does not mean that no one should ever get divorced. In every way Jesus says we are children of God and our actions have lasting effects on other children of God many of whom are far more vulnerable than we are.
Jesus is the same person who teaches us that the law was made for human beings not human beings for the law. Jesus’ point is not to shame people who have already suffered all the effects of a broken relationship. He is not trying to make people stay in a relationship that is abusive or in one that has clearly died. He is not trying to preserve relationships that continue to do damage to the people who are in them.
Instead Jesus is moving our attention from what the law permits to God’s dream for how our relationships could be. Describing this higher picture of marriage Jesus rejects the Pharisees’ approach which only sees the relationship from the perspective of the divorcing husband. In his words here Jesus treats women and men the same (he talks in equal terms about a man and a woman divorcing a spouse).
Jesus paints a picture of what love can become. He quotes the book of Genesis and talks about people leaving their families in order to be joined together. So often in my own life I think about the deep and miraculous truth that “the two shall become one flesh.” Adding to this Jesus says that, “what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Let that sink in for a bit. Imagine two beings so united in purpose and affection that they become like one single entity. Imagine God as the source of our deepest relationships and actively at work in helping them to thrive.
I understand that marriage is not for everyone. Anyone entering into marriage needs to know that even in the best circumstances it can be hard work. Marriage involves renewing the relationship over and over again. Marriage requires wisdom, communication, perseverance, patience, courage, forgiveness and an openness to what is new and what cannot be controlled. It demands not just a commitment to the other person but to the relationship itself. To be strong a marriage requires a community of support like the one gathered here this morning.
Jesus wants us to know that there is more to life than feeling justified by the law and superior to another person. Jesus wants us to strive for goodness, to find the way that we are called to serve. But there are relationships that have become so broken that no matter how hard we try, they cannot be saved. Jesus speaks about this not because we have broken some rule and deserve to be punished, but because it is God’s nature to be present to help us when we are suffering.[3]
I began by sharing my fear of speaking about divorce with you today. I guess I really did not want to be misunderstood on this point. Jesus does not condemn people for being divorced. Fifty years ago Diane, my mother-in-law and one of the women I most admire, went through a divorce with my father-in-law. Because of this the church she grew up in utterly rejected her. For decades she never felt comfortable in a church and I did not talk to her about it. Some of you might remember that magical midnight Christmas mass ten years ago when she joined us.
Delayed by her flight, Diane hesitantly made her way down the center aisle to her pew. In all those years as family we had never worshiped together. In the middle of my sermon, preaching from this pulpit I immediately recognized her. I almost started crying tears of joy because she had come home – loved by God and by you the people who welcomed her.
Our reading today ends as Jesus’ disciples try to keep children from bothering him. Mark writes that Jesus feels “indignant” about this. He says, “Let the children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” Mark writes, “And [Jesus] took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.”
This week I keep thinking of my high school friend Maria and Jesus taking her into his arms and blessing her. I imagine Jesus holding Diane with that smile from Christmas on her face and blessing her. And in my mind’s eye I see all the people who have suffered the effects of difficult marriages and divorce and he is reaching out to embrace and bless us.
[1] Matt Boulton, “One Flesh: Salt’s Commentary for the Twentieth Week after Pentecost, SALT, 1 October 2024. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/10/3/one-flesh-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twentieth-week-after-pentecost
[2] “The appellation “Pharisee” is probably derived from the Aramaic word perishayya which means “the separated one.” Very likely the addresses of Mark’s story would not know that. But from previous narrative they have already learned that the Pharisees maintain a pollution system that separates the world into two realms of the clean and the unclean.” Herman Waetjen, A Reordering of Power: A Socio-Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989) 165.
[3] Canon Edie Weller writes about this in a sermon. She says, “Jesus was a realist. He knew that there are times when we can’t reach or maintain the kind of relationship that God might dream for us. There are times and circumstances which lead to broken relationships, from which – as hard as we might work at it – we cannot recover. Jesus speaks about this not because the death of a marriage is more sinful or worse in some way than other experiences of human brokenness. Rather he speaks about this because he cares about us. God’s grief in the face of our irreconcilable differences stems not from our having broken the rules or failed a divine test, but from God’s response to our experience of such pain.
Edie B. Weller, “Sermon for Sunday October 7, 2018 Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B (Proper 22), St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington. https://saintmarks.org/staff/the-rev-edie-weller/
Watch the sermon on YouTube today!
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and to forfeit his life?” (Mk. 7).
What does it mean to lose our life in order to save it? For years our friends Kate and Rob seemed to have it all. They were warm, intelligent, wealthy, beautiful and kind. They had good jobs, good friends, lived near Kate’s family and were happy. Kate had always wanted to have children of their own and Rob didn’t. But she agreed to compromise and worked with children at a nearby school.
Then last summer after having been married over twenty years Rob told Kate that he had been reading about polyamory online. He started quoting anthropologists who said that monogamy was unnatural. He said that he had missed out on something and wanted to start sleeping with other women. Kate felt inadequate, humiliated and ashamed. She could not face the prospect of telling anyone about what was happening. The town they lived in was too small for Rob to do this without everyone knowing.
And so leaving his wife behind Rob moved to a city far away. And now a year later they have realized that there is no way for him to come home again. For the sake of his fantasy about unconventionality and freedom he has lost the life he had. Their shared friends, the everyday joys, balance, companionship, happiness and self-respect is all gone. No matter how desperately he might want it back he has lost his life.
What fantasies threaten your life? What ideas of success or perfection are destroying or diminishing you? We might also ask about the fantasies that undermine our common life. In the presidential election debate this week, despite being corrected, Donald Trump falsely stated that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Illinois as if scapegoating poor people would make this nation great.[1]
We all know people who overturn reality for the sake of a fantasy. One might say that Jesus does the opposite. He helps us to cherish reality, to protect it from the dangers of the illusory. His words even today can keep us from losing what matters most.
Like any good student the disciple Peter must have felt pride when Jesus confirmed that he was right in calling him the Christ, the Annointed One (Mk. 8). Peter and the disciples and perhaps we too share a fantasy. We want Jesus to be Christ the King without having to be betrayed, without suffering, without the cross. Along with this we want Jesus to simply elevate us over everyone else so that we can be honored without having accomplished much. We want to save our life without sacrificing anything or prioritizing what is good.[2]
Jesus warns us about gaining the world and losing our life in the process. This morning I want to talk about two ways that Jesus teaches us to cherish reality, to value what really matters, what leads to lasting joy, which John’s Gospel calls “fullness of life.”
1. The first thing that Jesus shows us is that we are spiritual beings with a spiritual life. People lose what is most important when they forget this. People around us forget that they are spiritual beings for different reasons. They might recognize that really believing in God is not just something that happens in our mind but obliges us to change how we live.
Others lose their life because they have put something else in the place of God. It might be money, success, art, creativity, popularity, one’s own uniqueness, or just our habitual ways of acting. Idols are not little statutes. They are the fantasies and desires we put in place of God.
Many people (including my friend Rob) lose their life simply because they cannot imagine that there can be more to existence than they are currently experiencing. They do not see a way for believing in the mystery, for experiencing the holiness of existence. They haven’t encountered a picture of faith that could make sense for them.
There is a Tibetan story about a great king who had four wives.[3] His first wife was the oldest. She loved him very deeply and although she was profoundly loyal, he neglected her. The second wife was thoughtful. She was a great confidante and advisor to him. The third wife was ravishingly beautiful. At the peak of her physical beauty, he worried about her faithfulness. The fourth wife was the youngest. The king treated her like the baby of the family. He always gave her expensive gifts.
As the end of his life approached the king knew he was going to die. He went to the fourth wife and said, “I am going over to the land of death. Will you come with me?” This wife, the youngest, simply replied, “No,” and walked off. He asked the third wife, the beautiful one, if she would accompany him to the land of death. She said, “Of course not. I’m going to marry a new husband.”
The king asked the second wife the same thing. Although she promised to attend his funeral, she refused to go with him. Finally the king came to his first wife, the oldest and most faithful one. He said, “Will you accompany me into the land of death.” The faithful woman replied, “I have always walked with you. I will follow you wherever you go.” The king wished that he had taken better care of her while he lived.
The point of the story is that we all have four wives. The fourth wife, the youngest, is our body. No matter how much attention we give to it, ultimately the disabled rights activists are correct. We are only temporarily abled. We are all on the road to disability and ultimately death. The third wife, the untrustworthy one is our wealth and possessions, which in many cases may be even more unreliable than our body. The second wife, the confidante, represents our friends and family. No matter how much they may love us they can only accompany us so far.
The first wife is our spiritual self. We may neglect this aspect of our life but it is ultimately what matters most. In The Gospel of Mark the word Jesus uses is psyche or soul. Psychology is literally the study of the soul. Jesus says that we can gain the world but lose this soul. We can gain money, health, a good reputation, etc. all at the expense of our spiritual life.
2. A second way that Jesus teaches us to cherish reality is his reminder to act as if God rather than our own ego is a the center of things.
As a teenager I remember reading C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity. In one chapter he asks, “Is Christianity Hard or Easy?”[4] The short answer is that the whole point of all Christianity: the Bible, art, music, clergy, the ancient writings and intricate theologies, the worship, churches like this great cathedral and everything else – the goal of all this is to make us more like Christ. Lewis says that if this doesn’t happen it is all simply a waste.
But being like Christ is a challenge. We want to hold something back, to invite God only into certain parts of our life. It is kind of like the spiritual equivalent of having a secret bank account hidden from your spouse. But God does not want our good intentions or our prayers or our time or our money. God does not insist on a strict moral code. God does not want a clearly defined area of your life.
God wants all of you. And this is both hard and easy. It is hard because it means taking up the cross. It means giving our whole life over to God. But it is easy because we were made for this and no half measure could be enough. We were created to give our life over to something, and if it is not God then it will be something that ultimately will distort and destroy us. We give our life to God and God gives us a new self.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote one of the strangest books in the history of the Christian church. He invented a fictional character Johannes de Silentio and then wrote the entire book from that person’s perspective. Silentio himself does not have faith but he tries to understand it from the outside.
Silentio repeats the question “Who can understand Abraham?” Abraham, the Old Testament prophet who was ready to sacrifice his son at God’s request, is for Silentio the symbol representing all people who believe. Silentio contrasts what he calls the Knight of Infinite Resignation with the Knight of Faith. The Knight of Infinite Resignation is acutely conscious of what he is losing. He reluctantly prepares to sacrifice everything for God but does not really trust God. He seems bowed down and nearly broken by the weight of the infinite.
Silentio contrasts this with the Knight of Infinite Faith. Silentio cannot believe it, “Good Lord… he looks like a tax collector… I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping through. No! he is solid through and through… he belongs entirely to the world… He tends to his work… He goes to church… if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the congregation.”[5]
“In the afternoon he walks to the forest. He takes delight in everything he sees, in the human swarm, in the new buses, in the water of the Sound… he is interested in everything that goes on… and this with the nonchalance of a girl of sixteen… This man has… a sense of security in enjoying [finiteness] as though the finite life were the surest thing of all.”
How do you describe the joy and lightness one feels when you are really in Christ? It is almost impossible to put in words. Today we begin our stewardship season when we make our promise to financially support the Cathedral. It has become one of my favorite times of year. Let me tell you why. Because each week we hear from an ordinary member of the congregation about the good things that God is doing in that person’s life. We see people who do not believe or give grudgingly but with joy. Their celebration is contagious, their faith builds up our own.
What fantasy threatens you? How is Jesus helping you to cherish reality? We have a spiritual life that we discover when we are able to let go of our ego. We have discovered a secret joy in our life together in Christ.
[1] Donald Trump said, “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far — the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.” https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-trump-presidential-debate-transcript/story?id=113560542
[2] The twentieth century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was hanged in a Nazi prison camp not long before the arrival of the allies. In his book The Cost of Discipleship he writes, “cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession… Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ…” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship tr. R. H. Fuller (NY: Macmillan, 1959) 44-5.
[3] From the play by Sarah Ruhl, The Oldest Boy. Also, http://theunboundedspirit.com/the-four-wives-an-inspiring-old-tibetan-story/
[4] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (NY: Macmillan, 1952) 166-70.
[5] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) 49-51.
Congratulations to our 12 choristers who will be vested today as full members of the Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. We always have you in mind when we preach on Thursdays but today’s sermon is especially for you.
I want to talk about a difficult subject. I am not sure that adults are completely honest with children about this. You might even say there is a kind of secret adults keep from children and that is this: it is possible to waste your life.
If you look around your school today pretty much everyone seems okay; your fellow students are mostly being who they are meant to be. But if you check in many years from now you will encounter many disappointments among your friends about how their lives turned out. In the last few years several of my childhood friends have told me that they wondered about where they had gone off track.
So what does it take to succeed? How can you be happy and have your life matter? This is a short sermon and I am going to talk about two aspects of success.
1. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called human beings the political animal. Because we achieve much greater things when we work with others, it is important to develop the skill of getting along with others. And at the heart of this lies an ability to forgive.
Joseph had eleven brothers. He was his father’s favorite. To make matters worse Joseph had dreams. In one the brothers were in the fields binding together bundles of harvested wheat and their bundles bowed down to his. In another Joseph dreamed that the sun and moon (his parents) and eleven stars (his brothers) bowed down to him. This only made his brothers more angry with him (Gen. 37).
So they decided to do something. They decided to kill him and then tell his father that a wild animal had done it. Then Joseph’s brother Judah came up with a better idea. He suggested that they sell their brother as a slave to some traders who were coming along the road. Joseph found himself in Egypt and everything he did met with wild success. The people around him recognized his talents and soon he was the second most powerful person in Egypt (and in the world).
In the midst of a terrible famine Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt to beg for food. At first they did not even recognize him but when they did they became very scared. They had treated their brother so badly and were afraid for what he might do to them. The Bible says that Joseph, “reassured them, speaking kindly to them” (Gen. 50). He said that although they had done a terrible thing, the ultimate outcome would be that all of their families would be saved.
Speaking again to the children here, how you treat your sisters, brothers and parents right now matters. At this stage of your life most of you live with your parents and siblings. But one day you will not all live together and you will have to decide whether or not you are going to be friends. Most adults know many people who are not friends with their siblings or who do not talk with their parents. How you treat each other today will have an effect on what your relationships will be like in the future. In all relationships misunderstandings will arise. Forgiveness is the way we mend relationships.
2. A second essential part of succeeding involves service. In fact, Jesus says that life is about serving others. This realization makes him great, so great that twenty centuries later he continues to radically transform the world, so great that people call him the Son of God. This wisdom is part of the reason why many people, including me, feel his presence every day. Succeding in life requires that we find the right way to serve others.
At our old church we had a boy scout troop and each week during our meeting we would repeat the Scout Oath. “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the scout law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” The purpose of this was to remind us that serving others is simply what human beings do when we are being most human.
Learning to forgive others, finding a way to serve, succeeding in life – these are not practices that you take up after becoming an adult. They are at the heart of what you are doing right now. This is especially true of our Choristers. There are many things that will prepare you for your future, but almost nothing else is as challenging, helpful and rewarding as singing at this very high level.
I encourage you to look up the list of accomplishments of your colleagues the Choirmen. They have won awards, made recordings, composed music, sung with the most prestigious musicians of our time. And yet as choristers you will be on an equal level with them. You will be leaders with them.
All of you singing in this choir will be learning how to be in harmony with each other, how to forgive each other when you inevitably let each other down. You will be serving God and humanity in the most tangible way. Thousands of people will be moved by your work. You will contribute to healing all of us through the beauty of what you create together. The secret is out. Human beings can fail to live into their potential, we can be cut off from the people we are supposed to love, some of us never find a way to help others in the way that we should. But those are not the kind of people you are. I want to conclude by thanking each of you for moving my heart so deeply and helping the many people whose lives will be changed because of your dedicati
Watch the sermon on YouTube today.
“Looking up to heaven [Jesus] and said… “Ephatha,” that is, “Be opened” (Mk. 7).
How can we open ourselves to God?[1] When we go beyond the way others experience us, beyond who we think we are, we will encounter God. Today I am going to offer two pictures of this openness the first from Mark’s story of the Syrophoenician mother and the second from the ancient Book of Proverbs.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got our twenty-three year old Toyota minivan smogchecked and began driving to the peninsula to pick up some used lawn furniture. Not far after 19th Avenue becomes Highway 280 we were moving along at a brisk 70 mile per hour clip. Suddenly we heard an explosive thonk and found ourselves covered in broken glass from our windshield. In the chaos I still didn’t even understand what was happening but Heidi had already switched on the emergency lights. Steadily honking the horn and looking under and around the upright hood, she pulled over to the small shoulder at the center of the freeway.
Disoriented, I looked over my right shoulder as traffic passed us at 80 miles per hour. When I turned my attention back into the car, Heidi had already gotten out the driver side door and was standing on the center divider slamming the hood down, once and again and again. Then I saw her hands move the bent windshield wipers out of the way. She slammed the hood and this time it stayed down. Completely composed she put the car in gear and carefully made her way across four lanes of traffic until we were off the highway driving slowly along surface streets to a car repair shop.
Jesus and the Book of Proverbs teach that faith is not a matter of believing something but the kind of courage, boldness, composure, intelligence and a willingness to face risks in a desperate situation that Heidi exemplified that afternoon.
1. This week I have been haunted by a newspaper article that begins with these words. “No education beyond the sixth grade. No employment in most workplaces and no access to public spaces like parks, gyms and salons. No long-distance travel if unaccompanied by a male relative. No leaving home if not covered from head to toe. And now, the sound of a woman’s voice outside the home has been outlawed in Afghanistan, according to a 114-page manifesto released last month…”[2]
Not to put too fine a point on it but if Heidi and I lived in Afghanistan I might be dead, killed because of my slow reaction to an unfolding disaster. Not only that but we understand so much of the meaning and richness of Jesus’ message because of interactions with women that would not be tolerated under Taliban prohibitions. I have in mind the Samaritan woman Jesus met at a well (Jn. 4:4-26). There were Mary Magdalene, “Johanna… and Susanna, and many others who [according to Lk. 8] provided for [Jesus’ disciples] out of their resources.” Jesus feels such a deep love for his friends Martha and Mary that we can sense it across twenty centuries. Jesus broke down walls in a patriarchal, xenophobic society. And this continues to change the way we interact with each other in our society today.
Jesus always expands the circle of who belongs. This is the Gospel of Mark’s theme. Beginning with the sick, the ignored poor, widows and orphans, people possessed by demons or ritually impure like lepers, foreigners, adherents of other religions even to the ultimate oppressor an imperial centurion who is the first to recognize and say, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mk. 15) – the knowledge and healing of God continues to radiate outwards.
In Mark chapters 5 and 6 Jesus is primarily in Jewish territory. But it is the nature of the healing, freeing work of God that it constantly expands from that Jewish center to include all people without exception.
The place matters. In chapter 7 it is translated as “the region of Tyre.” In fact, “region” is one of the most frequently repeated words in this story. The Greek word for it is horia. It means, “border, coast, domain, limit.” It is linguistically related to our word horizon. Our story begins with Jesus on the edge, seeking rest and solitude in a house. But Mark writes that Jesus, “could not escape notice.” Isn’t that true in our own day too? Wherever you go someone will see Jesus in what you do and how you are.
Without being invited and as an utter stranger and an enemy the woman enters the house. Although Mark uses the most sparse, pared down language in the Bible he uses three ways to describe this woman’s ethnic identity. She lives in the region (the borderlands) of Tyre. She is Hellēnis, that is, part of the Greek religious, cultural and political empire. And she is of the Syrophoenician race.[3]
A few decades after Jesus’ death the Jewish historian Josephus described her people as, “our bitterest enemies” (Ant. 13). Jews working in the countryside of that region would starve to death while the city storehouses that they filled overflowed. They called the Syrophoenician taskmasters dogs. When this woman asks Jesus to save her demon-afflicted daughter, he seems to make reference to this in his reply. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the little dogs.”[4] He seems to be reminding her about the relation between these two peoples, how his nation continues to suffer and badly needs his blessing.
But then this brave woman says, “Sir (kurie or Lord), even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In an instant she brilliantly refers to the nature of his mission, to Jesus’ message that when it comes to God there is enough for everyone. No one needs to be left out. Jesus instantly recognizes this truth and heals her daughter.
It is natural to be curious about what to make of Jesus in this story. On the one hand you might wonder if he speaks about the “children’s food” lightly with affection, a sparkle in his eye and gentle satire. Or is he so tired and sensitive to his people’s mistreatment that he speaks bluntly maybe even harshly to her, and then genuinely and humbly recognizes his error. After decades of reading commentaries about this I know that this question will not soon be resolved.
The point of the story lies elsewhere. Here the faith that Jesus admires is not about believing something, a creed or a doctrine or an abstract idea about God or a religious authority. The faith the woman exemplifies is boldness, the incredible courage to reach out beyond the substantial boundaries of human identity. This is the faith that recognizes our need and reaches out to God for help. You might wonder why we do not always do this.[5]
I think it is because of our fear of not being in control. It is hard to break social taboos and the walls of our identities which contain us. It also comes from our spiritual deafness. We have so many distractions. We are playing so many different stories in our heads that we are never quiet. And as a result we cannot hear the truth about our situation or recognize the way we depend for everything on God.
2. What does being opened look like? You see this openness in people dedicated to prayer. You might also see it in the ancient Book of Proverbs. There are several genres in the Old Testament that resolve into three broad categories. The Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the wisdom literature (Ketuvim).
The Book of Proverbs is part of this wisdom literature and is associated with King Solomon who chose wisdom over a long life, wealth, and revenge (1 Kings 3). The Hebrew word for wisdom here his Khokhmah. It means more than just a mental state but a skill or action for living well in God’s cosmos. Chapters 1-9 include ten speeches from a father to a son about living with virtue and integrity. The majority of the book is dedicated to hundreds of ancient proverbs about family, marriage, sex, friendship, neighbors, money, anger, alcohol, debt. Some of these came from ancient Egypt more than three thousand years ago.[6]
The taliban’s prohibition of public speech reminded me that in the Book of Proverbs Wisdom is personified as a woman preaching in public about the goodness woven into the fabric of the universe. Wisdom teaches that when we act with integrity we are going along with the grain of the universe.
The Book of Proverbs ends with a king (Lemuel) writing about the wisdom he learned from his mother including an acrostic poem describing what a woman who embraces wisdom looks like. “She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue” (31:26). She sounds a lot like Heidi in the driver seat.
How could I summarize what Proverbs teaches? For me the point of it goes far beyond ancient gender roles. Proverbs begins stating simply, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1). This does not mean that we should live in a terror of the God who Jesus describes as like a loving parent to us. It means revering God and recognizing our own place in the world. It is hard for us to realize that we are not God. We cannot simply make up our own definitions of good and evil. We need the wisdom and humility to realize that we are not the center of everything.
It’s hard to explain but the world of Proverbs is about probabilities not promises. If you act with integrity, as an honest and generous person, if you love justice, help others, etc. you are more likely to have a good life. But there are no guarantees (as we see in other examples of the wisdom literature such as the books of Job or Ecclesiastes).
Before concluding let me share a few parables. “The purposes in the mind are like deep water but the intelligent will draw them out” (20:5). “Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it” (15:17). “Better to meet a she-bear robbed of its cubs than to confront a fool immersed in folly” (17:22). “What is desirable in a person is loyalty, and it is better to be poor than a liar” (19:22).
How can we open ourselves to God? When we go beyond who we think we are, beyond the border of how others experience us, beyond our sense that we are the center, we will encounter Jesus’ God of love.
[1] In the sixteenth century Juan Valdes wrote the following in his book The Spiritual Alphabet. “In everything you fear and love, closely observed, you will discover yourself.” Cited in Margaret Ruth Miles, Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (Eugene, OR: 2011) 204.
[2] “No education beyond the sixth grade. No employment in most workplaces and no access to public spaces like parks, gyms and salons. No long-distance travel if unaccompanied by a male relative. No leaving home if not covered from head to toe.”
“And now, the sound of a woman’s voice outside the home has been outlawed in Afghanistan, according to a 114-page manifesto released late last month that codifies all of the Taliban government’s decrees restricting women’s rights.”
“A large majority of the prohibitions have been in place for much of the Taliban’s three years in power, slowly squeezing Afghan women out of public life. But for many women across the country, the release of the document feels like a nail in the coffin for their dreams and aspirations.”
“Some had clung to the hope that the authorities might still reverse the most severe limitations, after Taliban officials suggested that high schools and universities would eventually reopen for women after they were shuttered. For many women, that hope is now dashed.”
Christina Goldbaum and Najim Rahim, “With New Taliban Manifesto, Afghan Women Fear the Worst,” The New York Times 4 September 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/world/asia/women-taliban-prohibitions-afghanistan.html?searchResultPosition=1
[3] 14 Pentecost (9-10-06) 18B. M18.
[4] The word in Greek is the diminutive like little dogs (maybe “doggies” or “puppies”).
[5] Ibid. 3.
[6] See the brief Wikipedia article on “Instruction of Amenemope.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_of_Amenemope
Watch the sermon on YouTube today.
“Once there were three baby owls: Sarah and Percy and Bill. They lived in a hole in the trunk of a tree with their Owl Mother…”[i] These are the first lines in the children’s picture book Owl Babies. One night the three children wake up and find that their mother has gone.
The older two siblings have theories about where their mother went and wavering confidence that she will return. The youngest one Bill just repeats “I want my mommy.” It is a simple story about growing up, about the difficult task of learning to become separate from our parents. Sweet Alexandra loved owls, animals, babies and the experience of childhood itself. This was her favorite story and the basis for her nickname “Owlexandra” or just plain “Owl.”
It is hard to move gracefully from being a child to adulthood. It is hard to leave behind our childhood especially when we are very well adapted to it. It is hard to care for children in this time of transition. It is hard to be a child, or the friend of a child, who is becoming an adult.
Stories help to guide us as we make our way. Alexandra loved stories like Frozen, Wicked, and Hamilton. Her mother is American and her father is from England so they read quite a variety of stories including those of the British author Enid Blyton (1897-1968). In Five on a Treasure Island the first book in the Famous Five series, Julian, Dick and Anne are on their way to spend their first summer away from their parents, at the seashore home of their uncle and aunt, and their cousin Georgina and her dog Timmy.
“The car suddenly topped a hill – and there was the shining blue sea, calm and smooth in the evening sun…” At the house they meet their aunt for the first time (and they “liked the look of her”). She says, “Welcome to Kirrin [Bay]… Hallo, all of you! It’s lovely to see you… There were kisses all round, and then the children went into the house. They liked it. It felt old and rather mysterious somehow, and the furniture was old and very beautiful.”[ii]
These books are filled with secret passageways, hidden treasure, stolen goods, old maps, smugglers, spies, and suspicious strangers. But ultimately bravery, perseverance, kindness and loyalty are always rewarded. In the end everything is perfectly resolved and clear. You know where everyone stands. There is no gray area or ambiguity.
You might say that real life is not like this and you would be right. Each of us is a mixture of good and bad. But we need each other to remind us to feed what is good in us every day so that we grow in kindness.
I love the way Alexandra’s parents talk about her as a “gift from God” and uniquely filled with Christmas magic. In London her older sibling asked Father Christmas (or Santa Claus) for a little sister and ten months later she arrived. Alexandra was an angel in our Christmas pageant right here where I am standing. At the age of three she fell in love with the realistic looking babies in the FAO Schwartz store window. She loved children and animals. The Marin Primary motto is “treasuring childhood” and Alexandra did. She participated in theater, sports like cross country. She made art including a painting based on the work of Keith Haring.
One of the greatest treasures in this Cathedral is a triptych that Keith Haring (1958-1990) finished only weeks before his death from AIDS. It shows a mother holding her baby surrounded by joyful angels.
Alexandra knew that the most important question for a child is not what do you want to be when you grow up. It is who do you want to be; or better how do you want to be. Alexandra was empathetic, a thoughtful caregiver who valued kindness above everything else.
This way of being matches the values of this Cathedral where it is not about who is in or out, who is good or evil, who is saved or damned. The style of faith here is not about condemning other people or other religions. It is not overly preoccupied with the sin which is so evident in the world, the cruelty and unkindness that lead to tragedies like a young person’s death.
Instead we believe that God loves everyone without exception. We hold a faith that arises chiefly out of gratitude, out of an experience of nature’s beauty and the simple pleasure of being kind and helping the people who travel along with us. Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart… Blessed are the peacemakers” and we try to be people who build bridges and look for the best in others. We sing “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” And in the midst of terrible tragedy we remember what a gift our life is.
At the end of the service my friend Luis will sing a poem by the sixteenth century Anglican priest George Herbert. It ends with these words. They are a kind of invitation to God. “Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart: Such a Joy, as none can move: Such a Love, as none can part: Such a Heart, as joys in love.” Love and joy – these are the qualities exemplified by God. They are the possibilities that we realize in our own life.
Jesus does not say much about what happens after we die, about what the poet Mary Oliver calls “that cottage of darkness.” But he does say over and over that God is like a loving parent, an Owl Mother if you will, who always returns, who cares for us as every day of our life as we face the struggles of maturing. And I imagine heaven as like the opening of an Enid Blyton book, the beginning of summer when suddenly we come across “the shining blue sea, calm and smooth in the evening sun,” and we are welcomed with “kisses all round” into an old house and a new adventure. And we will see again our lovely Owl as a kind of angel filled with kindness and the
[i] “Once there were three baby owls: Sarah and Percy and Bill. They lived in a hole in the trunk of a tree with their Owl Mother. The hole had twigs and leaves and owl feathers in it. It was their house.” Martin Waddell, Illustrated by Patrick Benson, Owl Babies (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992).
[ii] Enid Blyton, Five on a Treasure Island Illustrated by Ellen A. Soper (NY: Hatchette Children’s Books, 1997 originally published in 1942), 7-9.
“We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn. 6).
Sometimes we have the sense that what we are living is not our true life. We become aware of this in various ways.1 It might be a sense of longing for something different, or a lingering dissatisfaction with what is. Perhaps we feel false or fake. We may begin to notice it in our own behavior or how we respond to those around us. We might think to ourselves, “Was that me?” “Did I say that?” Our bodies speak to us. During a tense time my back aches and I can suddenly drop ten pounds in a month.
Sometimes we are not really living our own life because of other people’s expectations for us. I think about this a lot as a priest. I especially felt this pressure as a teenager and in my early twenties. LGBTQ+ people have taught me a lot about how much the expectations of society can warp and distort how we live.
In our congregation survey we received a note from a young person who lives in a town with a population of 12,000 on Highway 99 south of Fresno. He writes that in 2016 he was in a church that was pressuring him to vote for Donald Trump, that he found himself suddenly expelled from a leadership class “because I am not straight.” He made his way here even though we are three hours away. He writes that he loves Grace Cathedral because we are, “inclusive and standup [against] social injustice. No church in my town does this and there are 27 churches. Thank you!”2
This week a friend from the congregation wondered aloud if we are living in a simulation like the movie, The Matrix. We talked about God as what is most real. In this youthful, beautiful San Francisco, the poet May Sarton’s (1912-1995) reflections about growing older might be particularly helpful. She writes, “Now I become myself. It’s taken / time, many years and places. / I have been dissolved and shaken, / Worn other people’s faces.”3 Perhaps you have worn another’s face too.
Fear also makes it difficult to live our true life. It is almost impossible to be yourself when you are afraid. That is why poverty, racism and violence cause so much more damage than we expect. Not long after we arrived here our family went on a tour of the Cathedral. We climbed the stairs to the highest reaches above us, with the labyrinth far
below. When I watched my wife Heidi and the children step out onto the catwalk, I felt a yawning pit in my stomach. I felt embarrassed, but knew I had to turn back to a place where I couldn’t see what they were doing. So I missed that part of our day together.
This is a metaphor for what happens with us socially. Fear makes us miss out. When we were in our twenties our house burned down and a very good friend took us in for a few nights. We kept in touch and years later when we were in graduate school together I gave a response to a paper she wrote for a small seminar. She was so angry. She refused to ever meet with me to talk about it. Fear of falling off the catwalk may be an irrational fear, but fear of breaking the relationships that are most important in our life is very reasonable.
This is a special problem for Christians. We have come to see that the truth lies not in asserting our own power but in the way of Jesus. Through Jesus we experience ourselves as God’s children. We try to love God first and our neighbor as ourselves. We do not always have to be right. We feel a new kind of freedom as we rely on God’s forgiveness. We do not have to make everything happen ourselves. We can allow ourselves to rely on God. And when we most need it, often we feel Jesus walking along with us or in the people at places like this.
Others talk as if Christianity is simply an idea in our heads but it is not. Our faith becomes the basis for how we see the world and in turn the decisions that direct us. In the long run faith forms our habits. Faith is an action which leads to what Paul calls “the peace that passes all understanding” (Phil. 4:7).
Many of us experience this all the way down. The story of God, that vision for living our true life, is deeply rooted in our unconscious. And yet in our age Christians have an especially difficult time living what we are. We have learned to put on a secular mask, to in effect hide what we know is true.
When our son was a student at a large public high school he told me that he would almost never talk about religion. He says that people there so fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be a believer that he just didn’t bother to try to explain. He says that so much of what they say about Christianity comes out of a deep ignorance about what it means to walk with Christ. They have so many incorrect assumptions (about a literal reading of the Bible, our opinions about people of other faiths, our position on social issues, etc.) that they just cannot imagine what it would be like to believe in Jesus.
But there is more to this than just ignorance. They are offended not just by what we say but by who we are as Christians.4 I give non-Christians credit. We have done and continue to do a lot to make ourselves misunderstood. But even this does not account for how offended the world is in the face of our message, the good news.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus experiences this offense himself. He talks about people who abide in him, people who are so near to him that it is as if they had eaten his flesh and drunk his blood. He goes on to say that, “the one who eats this bread will live forever” (Jn. 6). He then calls God “the Father” and claims that it is God who draws people to him.
It is hard to know from this short reading exactly which of these disturbing claims offended the people. But John writes, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” I have no idea how to read it, but Jesus seems hurt when he asks, “the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’”
You might have your own theory both about this story and about the offense that Christianity causes some people. I want briefly to describe what three other Christians have thought about offense.
1. My friend Herman Waetjen is Professor Emeritus of biblical studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary. Herman gets right to the point. He says the offense comes from shocking images, from the way that Jesus connects cannibalism to the nation’s founding story of the Passover meal (before the people of God escaped slavery in Egypt).
Herman points out that Jesus is not calling for Israel to become the new overlords, but wants to “terminate all forms of domination.” Instead of sacrificing a lamb Jesus insists that we sacrifice ourselves for the liberation of all people and the whole creation.5
2. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) took the idea of offense very seriously. Kierkegaard mentions two sources for offense. He believes that we cannot know the infinite without giving up our finitude. At the same time it is the nature of human reason to try to go beyond itself, to try to think what cannot be thought. Offense comes from the pain of desiring something that is impossible for us.6
Kierkegaard also suggests that human beings prefer teachers like Socrates who says that the truth is already in us, to teachers like Jesus who is an essential part of the message he conveys. It is not enough for us to simply know what Jesus explains. Because we keep falling back, we depend on a continuing relation with him. This offends our desire for independence, to choose our own way apart from God.7
3. Finally, the theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) points out two different kinds of knowledge. There is what he calls controlling knowledge which depends on objectivity and is the way that a person treats the world as full of things to be used. He writes, “controlling knowledge claims control of every level of reality. [It says that] Life, spirit, personality, community, meanings, values, even one’s ultimate concern, should be treated in terms of detachment, analysis, calculation, technical use.”
For many people today this is the only kind of truth. They are offended by what Tillich calls “receiving knowledge,” the subjective or the emotional experience which “takes the object into itself, into union with the subject.” Much of what we encounter in religion changes the one who is experiencing it, and that is part of its truth.8
Waetjen, Kierkegaard and Tillich each give us a different picture of the offense that Christians experience in talking about Jesus. Maybe at the most basic level people realize that believing in Jesus means that we have to change our life.
The Apostle Paul offended people enough to be called “an ambassador in chains” (Eph. 6). In words that transformed my life as a teenager, he says that faith, kindness to others, the spirit of God all act as defensive armor, as what he calls “the shield of faith.” This armor protect us from being harmed. It allows us to be ourselves, to live the way that our hearts are calling us to live. God will give us what we need. In John Calvin’s words, “nothing which pertains to our safety will ever be wanting.”9
So this week I want to suggest a simple homework assignment. The first part is for each of us to speak to someone, maybe even someone here today, about our experience with offense. The second part is to have at least one moment of boldness when we are not embarrassed of our faith or try to hide it from someone who is important to us.
Our life is too precious, too short, not to fully live.
Let me conclude with an excerpt from a poem by Mary Oliver called “When Death Comes.” “When Death comes / like the hungry bear in autumn… I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: / what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?…” “When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. // When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder / if I have made of my life something particular, and real. // I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, / or full of argument. // I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”10
Are you living what is truly your life?
1 This idea comes from the first chapter of Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2000) 1ff.
2 “Around 2016 I was in a church in my hometown of _____ that was very homophobic and wanted me to vote for trump. I was in leadership teaching classes and I was told I could not because I am not straight when I told everyone at church that I would not vote for trump. I did not know beforehand that this church was like this. It was very traumatic and I made my way to grace again even tho you are three hours away from me. When I am in SF which is normally several times a year I do come to the in person services. I appreciate that you are inclusive and stand up to social injustices. No church in _______ does this. And we have 27 churches lol. Thank you !” Grace Cathedral Community Survey, 7/26/2024.
3 May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself,” in Collected Poems (1930-1993) (NY: Norton, 1993) 162.
4 In 2015, I gave a talk in Silicon Valley on Theology and Artificial Intelligence. Almost everyone there treated me very well, but a few confronted me with a bitterness that is more than just simply ignorance. I could not have generated that anger if I had been speaking about a complicated algorithm or biological phenomena.
5 “In place of the traditional Passover Meal that failed in nurturing liberation and perpetuated only living death, Jesus, with great irony, is offering a new Passover Meal in which its participants sacrifice themselves for the liberation of each other and all their fellow human beings, but always out of their own liberated sovereignty.” Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple: A Work in Two Editions (NY: T & T Clark, 2005) 219, 220.
6 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of Philosophy tr. David Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942) 18-42.
7 Ibid., Chapter II “God as Teacher and Saviour: An Essay of the Imagination,” 17-28.
8 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 97-105.
9 John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion, 1.14.22.
10 Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 10-11.
“[B]e kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4).
“Why is life sacred? Because we experience it within ourselves as something we have neither posited nor willed, as something that passes through us without ourselves as its cause – we can only be and do anything whatsoever because we are carried by it.” The French philosopher Michel Henry (1922-2002) wrote these words in a book about the art of Wassily Kandinsky.1
On the first page of her book Prague Winter Madeleine Albright writes, “I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enogh that I did not see a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.”
“Only I didn’t. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and straightforward than the reality.”2
Life, sacred life, passes through us. Yet this life, like Madeline Albright’s past, is mostly hidden from us. In my experience it becomes clear in Jesus. Jesus is so near and yet most of us, most of the time, do not know who he is.
It is hard to talk about Jesus in this culture when his name has become the basis for a politics of condemnation and exclusion, a symbol expressing fear and hatred. Fellow citizens violently attacked the US Capitol building in his name. But Jesus teaches us that God is love and that through him we might have abundant life. This morning we will address three questions: Why does Jesus matter? What do we learn from Jesus? How will he change us?
1. Why does Jesus matter? Because even if you may not see it right now, life is hard. Let me warn you this part of the sermon hurts. Raymond Carver wrote a short story called “A Small, Good Thing.”3 It begins in a bakery with a mother ordering a cake for her eight
year old son Scotty that will be picked up for his birthday on Monday. Excited, walking to school on Monday, not paying attention, the boy steps into the street without looking and is struck by a car.
At first everything seems somewhat okay. The boy walks home. He has a kind of seizure. It seems like only a mild concussion, but each day the situation looks worse. The parents are utterly preoccupied with their son’s coma when the father receives a phone call about the cake. He doesn’t understand and hangs up. Later in the week as their son’s health plummets they receive phone calls that confuse them. An unidentified voice says, “Have you forgotten Scotty” (75)? Finally, the son dies. It takes two more crank calls with bitter cursing from the parents but finally the mother takes in what has been happening, that the calls are probably coming from the baker.
Realizing this at midnight, the grieving parents with a “deep burning anger… that made [them] feel larger than” themselves, go to confront the baker at his shop. At first he refuses to talk with them or even let them in. At the door to the bakery the parents confront him. As he hits a rolling pin into the palm of his hand it seems like this might even end in violence.
And then it happens. A moment of grace. The mother tells the baker about her son and breaks down, repeating, “it isn’t, isn’t fair.” The baker puts out chairs for the three of them and apologizes saying, “God alone knows how sorry” I am. He goes on, “I’m just a baker… Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten… I’m not an evil man… what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem.”
The baker made them coffee with a carton of cream on the table and a bowl of sugar. He said, “eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” And he served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven the icing still runny.” Although they were tired the baker broke open a “dark loaf” of bread that tasted of molasses and coarse grains. “And they talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.”
You might be thinking. “Those parents are not me. I’m not like the baker.” But we are. This Wednesday one of our families woke up to discover that their beloved teenaged daughter had died in the night. They told me that more than anything she believed in the power of being kind. Why does Jesus matter? Because we get tangled up like the baker and the parents. Because when things go tragically wrong we need help from beyond ourselves.
2. What do we learn from Jesus? We learn that the bread of life is love. We learn to find our way between the simplistic tribalism of a fundamentalist outlook and the debilitating relativizing view that nothing matters.4 From Jesus we learn that love is not abstract.
The poet Wendell Berry quotes Orlando in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Near the end of the play Orlando says, “I can no longer live by thinking.” This is not an anti-intellectual statement. It is his realization that he is ready to marry Rosalind. He is ready for commitment, ready for incarnation. There is a time for thinking. The life of the mind matters. But there comes a point when all of us must say to ourselves, “I can no longer live by thinking.” I need to be committed to a particular him, to a particular her, to a particular them in a particular place and time.5
Alan Jones used to say that the Bible can be damaging or healing, that it “provides an an architecture for our thoughts, that the parables are an antidote to our cycles of jealousy, vengeneance and violence.”6 The Bible shows the deep compassion that Jesus feels for outcasts, strangers, the poor and vulnerable. But more important it shows his love for us.
Pope Pius XII called the twentieth century Reformed Protestant Karl Barth (1886-1968) the greatest theologian since the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). I have a shelf full of Barth’s books. He was asked to summarize all of his theology in one simple sentence. He said, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
In John 6 we hear about Jesus having compassion on the crowds and feeding 5000 people. They wanted to make him king and so, “he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (Jn. 6). When a storm came up, threatening to sink his friends’ boat, he walked on the water out to them. He says, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life… anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.”
3. How will Jesus change us? Through prayer and the sacraments thousands of people have been changed by meeting Jesus here at Grace Cathedral. The preacher Frederick Buechner writes that the expression “becoming a Christian” sounds like an accomplishment like winning an Olympic gold medal or becoming a billionaire.
Buechner says that to him it feels more like “a lucky break” or “a step in the right direction.” Church was not part of his childhood so on the one hand it was unlikely that he would become a person of faith. And yet, “through a series of events from childhood on, I was moved, for the most part without any inkling of it, closer and closer to a feeling for that Mystery out of which the church arose in the first place until, finally, the mystery itself came to have a face for me, and that face was the face of Christ.”7
Some people think a Christian is someone who believes certain things, like Jesus was the son of God, that Mary was a virgin or that all other religions are wrong. Some people think that a Christian is someone who does certain things like going to church or reading the Bible or helping the poor. But Jesus says something different. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (Jn. 14:6). He does not say that one religion or believing a particular thing is the way. We are not required to do anything in particular either. Being a Christian means becoming caught up in God’s dream of justice and love, and in the way of life that leads to harmony and peace.
To the Ephesians Paul writes about what it means to be in Christ. Then we will speak the truth. We will not use language to divide people. We will not give in to rash acts in moments of anger. It means work that brings about goodness. Above all it means forgiving others and being kind to them. In this way we are called into being by other people and by God.
Not long before his death Raymond Carver wrote the poem that his family put on his tombstone. “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”8
Early Friday morning after a hard week I gave my friend’s 17 year old daughter her first surfing lesson. She had never even seen the Pacific Ocean before. Everything was so new, it was like she had only just been born. Although the water felt bitterly cold and the fog never dissipated, we saw lines of awkward pelicans, whales breaching offshore and her favorite, a juvenile seal curiously examining us from only a few feet away.
She needed a picture to show her grandmother. I don’t know why but as I took a photograph of her holding the board with the vast Pacific Ocean in the background, in my mind’s eye, I imagined Jesus standing next to her.
We began by asking Why is life sacred? What is that spirit that carries us through? I have found a small, good thing. Jesus speaks to us, not so often in syllables and words but through the bread we share at this table and in the events of our lives. Over time we begin to recognize that the bread of life is love. However faintly we hear Jesus, he is speaking directly to us. His precious words have the power to make us whole again and ultimately to bring us home.
1 Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky tr. Scott Davidson (NY: Continuum, 2009).
2 I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.
Only I didn’t. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make-choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.
I had been raised a Roman Catholic and upon marriage converted to the Episcopalian faith. I had—I was sure—a Slavic soul. My grandparents had died before I was old enough to remember their faces or call them by name. I had a cousin in Prague; we had recently been in touch and as children had been close, but I no longer knew her well; the Iron Curtain had kept us apart.
From my parents I had received a priceless inheritance: a set of deeply held convictions regarding liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law. I inherited, as well, a love for two countries. The United States had welcomed my family and enabled me to grow up in freedom; I was proud to call myself an American….Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War 1937-1948 with Bill Woodward (NY: HarperCollins, 2012) 1.
3 Raymond Carver, Cathedral (NY: Alfred Knopf, 1983) 59-89.
4 “The Bible… cuts through both crude fundamentalism and the modern relativizing view that nothing matters.” Alan Jones, Grace Cathedral Sermon, 9 September 1989.
5 This is pretty much the same language Alan Jones used to describe Wendell Berry’s article “The Futility of Global Thinking,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1989.
6 Alan Jones, Grace Cathedral Sermon, 9 September 1989
7 “It was a slow obscure process… and the result of it was that I eneded up being so moved by what I felt that I found it inadequate simply to keep it inside myself like a secret but had to do something about it.” Frederick Buechner, “The Face of Christ: February 1,” Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) 30.
8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver
“Dark and cheerless is the morn unaccompanied by thee; joyless is the day’s return till thy mercy’s beams I see, till they inward light impart, glad my eyes and warm my heart.”1
Why practice religion?2 Last week a New York Times journalist asked me a question I frequently hear from my neighbors. “Is religion dying out?” People raising this topic often cite statistics showing a decline in religious participation. Indeed more people went to church in the 1950’s and 1960’s than at any other time in our country’s history. We were a much less diverse country in those days and we were facing the aftermath of the most destructive war in all history. Perhaps there is an ebb and flow when it comes to expressing our spirituality.
I always answer by saying that human beings are spiritual beings and we always will be. We are not going to evolve or grow out of religion. We will never stop asking questions like “where did I come from? How should I dedicate my time and energy? What happens after we die?” We are symbolic creatures who depend on constructing meaning for our social lives and for our individual survival. Despair kills us. The twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) calls humans “Dasein” or “being.” He means we are the being for whom being (that is, our very existence), is a problem.3
Social scientists tell us that religious people are less depressed and lonely (they have more social connections). They are healthier and live longer. They report being happier. Columbia researcher Lisa Miller points out that children who have a positive active relationship to spirituality are 40% less likely to use and abuse substances, 60% less like to be depressed as teenagers and 80% less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex.4
This is probably not the reason to become religious. Religion is not about believing the unbelievable. At heart religions share something in common: the idea that you are not the center. Religions evolved with human beings who long for a connection to God and cannot be satisfied by anything else. I think we could spend a year talking about this but let me share two immediate responses to the question “why practice a religion,” one primarily from the head and the other from the heart.
1. Why religion? Because, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote this in his book Walden in a section about our deep desire to fathom the depths of “opinion and prejudice, and tradition and delusion” so that we might reach the rock solid bottom “which we can call reality.”5 True religion involves opening to reality, becoming aware of the extraordinary mystery both of the world and our inner life.
Ed Yong wrote one of my favorite new books. It is called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around us.6 He begins by asking the reader to imagine an elephant in a room, not a metaphorical “weighty issue” sort of elephant but an actual elephant in a room the size of a high school gymnasium. Now imagine a mouse surrying in with a robin hopping along beside it. An owl sits on a beam and a bat hangs from the ceiling. A rattlesnake slithers on the floor. A spider rests in its web with a mosquito and a bumblebee sitting on a potted sunflower… and a woman named Rebecca who loves animals.
They are all in the same room, but they have entirely different sensory experiences of the same space. Certain animals can see ultraviolet shades that are invisible to us. Mosquitos smell carbon dioxide. Snakes sense infrared radiation coming from warm objects. Ticks detect body heat from thirteen feet away. The robin feels the earth’s magnetic field. Tiny insects make extraordinary sounds that vibrate through plants. When a fish swims it leaves behind a hydrodynamic wake, a “trail of swirling water.” Did you know that harbor seals can detect this with their whiskers and follow a herring from up to about 200 yards away? No one knew this before the year 2001.
There are whole new forms of sensing the world that human beings are only just discovering. We can barely imagine the experience that other creatures are having. I love the word that describes this. It is Umwelt, the German word for environment. But in this case it means the perceptual world of each creature. The ability of our eyes to see details for instance makes us almost entirely unique among all animals other than eagles and vultures. Our Umwelt is predominantly visual one.
My point is that we encounter truth through symbols which lie deep in our subconscious and are shared in our culture. You might call this way of seeing a kind of unavoidable mythological Umwelt. Our Umwelt determines what we think about loyalty, family, economic growth, impurity, justice, identity, childhood, politics, duty, fairness and nationality. This worldview directs us as we try to live a good life.7
Why religion? Because we are unfinished creatures made more complete by God and each other. Religion is a way of studying, interpreting, shaping and ultimately
embodying values. Participating in religion means more consciously opening ourselves to other people. This includes the diverse people in this room but also those who came before us in history who loved God and wrote hymns, prayers and theologies. Together we pray and listen to the promptings of God’s spirit.
During the terrible years of apartheid in South Africa it was dangerous for Desmond Tutu to preach. But this did not stop him. He said “You are love.” “You are the body of Christ that receives the sacraments in order to become more fully the mystical embodiment of love.” God loves us so that we can love another.8
2. Why religion? Because of our longing for God and God’s longing for us. Religion is how we meet God. It is how we receive help from beyond ourselves. In her memoir the historian Elaine Pagels writes about the way her rationalist parents dismissed religion as something only for uneducated people, as unscientific. But this also led them in an extreme way to avoid thinking or talking about suffering and death.
Mark Twain joked, “I know that everyone dies, but I always thought an exception would be made in my case.” This was how they existed and it left them unprepared for life.
Pagels describes having difficulty getting pregnant and then participating in a kind of fertility ritual. Sitting in a candlelit circle a thought entered her mind, “Are you willing to be a channel?” She answered “Yes!” and soon became pregnant. Her son Mark was born with a hole in his heart that had to be repaired by surgery when he was one year old.
The night before the surgery she was startled by an experience that could have been a dream although she felt like she was awake. An inhuman male presence came near threatening to kill her son. She wanted to run but stood her ground. The threatening presence returned twice more. The last time she felt like she could not stand another moment. She spoke the name, “Jesus Christ” and the dangerous being fled and she was no longer afraid.9
Four years later Mark was in Kindergarten when one evening she went into his room to sing him to sleep. Instead he hugged her with his arms around her neck and said, “I’ll love you all my life, and all my death.” The next day at the doctor’s office when they were drawing blood he stiffened and his eyes rolled up. She sensed that the life had left his body, that their connection was breaking. And she lost consciousness.
Suddenly Pagels seemed, “to be in a brilliant place, vividly green with golden light.” Her husband came in and she felt as if she could feel her son’s presence there near the ceiling of the room. The cardiologist came in to say, “I don’t want to get your hopes up,
but your son’s heart stopped and it is beating again.” Pagels had the impression that the boy had heard his parents talking and gone back to his body only to discover it couldn’t sustain his life.
The boy died and Pagels writes, “Strangely, I also sensed that he’d felt a burst of joy and relief to leave his exhausted body. Before that moment, I’d taken for granted what I’d learned, that death was the end, any thought of surviving death only fantasy. Although that may be true, what I experienced that day challenged that assumption. I was astonished, seeming to sense that Mark was all right, wherever he was, and that he was somewhere.”
The tragedy deepened terribly a year later when the one person Pagels’ depended on most, her beloved husband fell to his death in a climbing accident. Her parents did not visit when her son was born, or when he had open-heart surgery or when he died or for her husband’s funeral. They stayed away from suffering. She called it a “pattern of oblivion.”
Elaine Pagels studied ancient gnostic literature written after the Bible was finished. She quotes the Gospel of Thomas which says, “the kingdom of God is within you, and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves then… you will know that you are children of God.”10
Pagels concludes writing, “the kingdom of God is not an actual place… or an event expected in human time. Instead, it’s a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are, and come to know God as the source of our being… The “good news” is not only about Jesus, it’s about every one of us. While we ordinarily identify ourselves by specifying how we differ, in terms of gender, race, ethnicity… recognizing that we are “children of God” requires us to see how we are the same – members… of the same family… [T]he “image of God,” the divine light given in creation, is hidden deep within each one of us, linking our fragile, limited selves to their divine source.”
Why religion? Because in the face of the great mystery of our life we long for reality. We reach beyond our Umwelt to learn from each other. Why religion? Because beyond even the “pattern of oblivion” God meets us here where we receive help from beyond ourselves.
1 Charles Wesley, “Christ, whose glory fills the skies.” Hymn 7.
2 Why religion? If you think that being well-behaved is the most important thing about existence but at the same time feel convinced that God is deeply offended by how you have come up short. Or if you think that the next life is so vastly more important than this one, and that this life is a kind of test for who “gets into heaven,” then the answer to this question may seem obvious. But if you do not believe this, and most do not, and even those who do cannot always be sure – you might wonder whether one should practice a religion at all. Each of us needs to think about this and formulate at least a provisional answer because many of those around us wonder if the good that arises out of religious devotion outweighs the harm done by very vocal religious people.
3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit).
4 Lisa Miller, The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Learning (NY: Picador, 2015). Lisa Miller has been on the Forum at Grace Cathedral twice. https://www.lisamillerphd.com/the-spiritual-child See also, https://youtu.be/KxTmrK_CTys?si=t9GuJJLuHR4p35fJ
5 Henry David Thoreau, The Illustrated Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) 97-8.
6 We only recently discovered that it is not that ticks don’t like the smell of DEET. It just interrupts their ability to sense heat. Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (NY: Random House, 2022) 3-7, 148, 174-5.
7 Christianity and Judaism in particular have an idea called idolatry. It means treating something as if it were God. For thousands of years this has led to condemning the deep human tendency to treat political figures as if they were gods. When we care more about our own comfort, wealth and power than the poor this is a form of idolatry also.
8 Michael Battle, “Preaching Matters: A Sermon that Moved Me,” Kerygma: A Journal for the Episcopal Preaching Foundation, 31 July 2024.
9 Elaine Pagels, Why Religion: A Personal Story (NY: Ecco, 2018) 59-67, 130.
“… Jesus’ name had become known… when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded has been raised”(Mk. 6).
I am standing at the edge, among dry broken reeds on a cliff hundreds of feet above the Pacific Ocean in Northern California. Brutal cold winds out of the Northwest whip the ocean into a frenzied chaos. Far below me olive-coffee colored waves pound the dirty sand. On the beach lie the carcasses of a seal and what looks like her calf.
But I smell only the ocean spray. I hear only the wind and the clanging of a heavily rusted section of chain banging into an old gun emplacement that is crumbling into the sea. I feel the emptiness of the sky and the distance of the horizon.
Then I see it, an osprey with wings extended, suspended in the air, completely stationary in the storm – perfectly still, at perfect peace in the gusting winds. And I think, “this is the image of holiness,” a peace impervious to the gathering storm. This is what it is like when I feel the Holy Spirit under my wings.
Suddenly a black raven materializes out of the black sky and strikes the bird. The osprey finds itself at every point under attack in the vast spaces of the empty sky. There is no safe altitude, nowhere for it to go.
This week in my preparation to be with you today I have been praying about John the Baptist. Usually during the season of Advent he just makes me feel guilty. He insists so strongly that we need to repent as if he knew all my shortcomings. In the Book of Matthew, John says, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance… Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every good tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Mt. 3).
This week instead of hearing him and feeling accused for not taking my faith seriously enough, I have been trying to imagine what it was like to be him. I wonder what it feels like to be inspired into such a spiritual ecstasy that I would leave everything behind and live in the desert. What would it feel like to rely so completely on God, that I would be confident even when I put my life in danger with every word that I spoke?
John is “[t]he voice of one crying in the wilderness; Prepare the way of the Lord” (Mt. 3). John the Baptist is hovering above the cliffs with the Holy Spirit under his wings. John the Baptist knew what it was to be at every point under attack. His body was broken because of his love for the Father.
Today I want to talk about two criticisms of John the Baptist. Modern people might accuse him of fanaticism just as some of the people of his own time for failing to have the faith they believe he should have had.
1. One day after church, a woman who I like very much made the following observation. She said that John’s accusations and threats about the fiery wrath of God, make her deeply uncomfortable. “He is an extremist and a fanatic,” she told me. “He is like all fundamentalists…” I didn’t know what to say. Who is John the Baptist?
Perhaps the first thing to realize about John is that according to the Gospel of Luke he is Jesus’ cousin. His father Zechariah was a temple priest struck dumb by the angel Gabriel. His mother Elizabeth was elderly when John was miraculously conceived.
In Elizabeth’s womb, John jumped in the presence of Jesus’ mother Mary. The two boys were born only six months apart and lived in towns that were within sight of each other. Like Jesus, we know very little about John’s life until he began his public ministry at age 28.
John’s asceticism and spiritual discipline seem to contrast with that of Jesus. We know what he wore and ate because he shocked his contemporaries with his primitive homespun clothes and the way he scavenged for food in the wilderness.
In John’s time there were others who felt called into the wilderness by God. To understand John’s ministry many compare him with the monastic community at Qumran. These monks also denounced the sins they saw in the cities. They also had cleansing rituals that involved being washed in water.
The difference between John and these monks is that while they were exclusive, secretive and withdrawn, John was prophetic, public, missionary and inclusive. Through John, we receive baptism. Jewish circumcision is a ritual which is only for men and is in most cases prohibitively painful for adults and adolescents.
Baptism however is democratic. It is for men and women. In contrast to the washing ceremonies of the monks, baptism is not for priestly purity but so that everyone can participate in the forgiveness of sins. It is fitting that John baptized people in two places, one which was more accessible to Judea and one nearer to Samaria.
The monks fled to the desert to escape society, to separate themselves from it in order that they could be perfect. John brought ordinary sinners out into the desert. He promised that tax collectors and prostitutes and thieves and Roman soldiers and sinners could be saved. Like the Old Testament prophets John warns us to care for the sick and the poor. He gives us hope that even we can be saved.
John the Baptist preaches love for those who suffer and the hope that all things will one day be raised in Christ. He wasn’t trying to overthrow the Roman government. He didn’t advocate the assassination of the provincial governor or subversive actions against the state. Instead he gives us a baptism of forgiveness that even includes official tax collectors and Roman soldiers.
In our time we need to be careful not to become so tolerant that we tolerate injustice and suffering. We have to be careful not to confuse holiness and fanaticism. But critics from the first century faulted John for a completely different reason.
2. Matthew writes, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” For second century Christians these were profoundly unsettling words indeed. Wouldn’t the primary witness to the Holy Spirit’s presence at Jesus’ baptism know that this was the Messiah? The first Christians actually argued that John knew it was the messiah and that he only asked this question for the sake of his disciples. Otherwise, they would have had to confront the possibility that this great prophet’s faith was wavering.
And I believe it was. John preached a gospel of repentance but sometimes this is just as dangerous as preaching subversion. When Herod Antipas, the king of this region of the Roman Empire, heard that John was denouncing him for marrying his brother’s wife, he had the baptizer imprisoned at the fortress of Machaerus, an isolated Hasmonean outpost east of the Dead Sea.
This is where I believe that the soldiers tried to break this great man down. This is where the eagle who soared over the wilderness of Judea was brought crashing down to earth. This is the place where a frightened John needed to hear that his cousin Jesus would soon bring peace.
Here on the outside we don’t think too much about prison life, but in America especially we should. From the early 20th century to the mid-1970’s the US imprisoned 110 people for every 100,000. This figure doubled in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. It doubled again in the 1990’s. In 2001 441 of every 100,000 Americans was in prison. Today 573 of every 100,000 is incarcerated. This compares with 33 in Japan, and 108 in Western Europe.
California alone has more inmates in jails than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. Gulags or Nazi concentration camps aside, the United States has a larger proportion of its population in prison or jail than any other society in history.
So imagine yourself in prison. Not an American prison but in the fortress of Machaerus on the Dead Sea. Imagine knowing that the king’s wife and daughter want your head on a platter, that the only thing which is keeping you alive is the king’s fear of the public’s response to your death. Imagine after feeling the spirit of God’s freedom in the wilderness, that you now find yourself being tortured in a cold and lonely prison.
Jesus could read hearts better than we do faces. He could read thoughts better than we do words. He doesn’t call attention to himself. He does not refer to himself as the Messiah here. Instead he says to the cousin whom he loves the words he knows will comfort him the most.
He says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” To the people who take offense at John’s fragile faith he asks, “what did you go out to the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?” The kings who are sure of themselves are in their palaces. You’ll find the prophets in the wilderness wavering but held up by the Holy Spirit.
In conclusion, of course you are not literally in prison. Sometimes you may even feel as free as an osprey in the silent air. But during those times when the walls of loneliness and despair and powerlessness close in around you, I hope that you will remember our companion John and the promises of his savior.
Let us pray: Loving Father you order all things for our salvation. Uphold us that we may bring hope to those who are poor in spirit and to those who are held captive. Help us never to confuse holiness for fanaticism or a wavering heart for the absence of your love. As we suffer in our own way, never take from us the memory of your children John and Jesus. And when our work here is done bring us into your heavenly kingdom where there is no pain or sorrow. Amen.
________________
Joan Camay and Brownrigg, Who’s Who in the Bible, p. 211ff.
The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Metzger.
William C. Placher, “You Were in Prison…” in the Christian Century, 9/26-10/3/02.
John Donne, Sermon No. 4 (11/22/1629) in The Sermons of John Donne, vol ix, p. 109f.
“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4).
1. Carl Jung (1875-1961) writes, “The most important question anyone can ask is: ‘What myth am I living?’” With a big smile on his face our former dean Alan Jones used to say to me, “you have to know your role in the play!” So what myth are you living? What play is this and what is your character? The therapist Alan Cheuse says, “We’re traveling light but we’re encumbered, like all wanderers, with the ineffable but ever-present baggage of everything that’s come before.”[1]
The early twentieth century anthropologist Bernard Malinowski (1884-1942) studied the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of New Guinea. They inspired his idea of a “charter myth” that provides a foundation for each culture. Malinowski made a distinction between myths and other stories like fairy tales or legends. For him a myth is a story that you see lived out in society. You can tell it is a myth because it affects how people act. It’s meaning is not confined to the story itself but includes its social context. Myths orient us, give our lives meaning, provide identity. They unavoidably show us who we belong to and what we hope for.
In an article on the Kennedy administration James Pierseson writes about the way that Jacqueline Kennedy invented the Camelot myth.[2] One week after President Kennedy’s assassination in an interview with Life Magazine she told a reporter that at bedtime she and her husband often listened to a cast recording of Camelot and in particular the following song. As King Arthur, Richard Burton sings: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”
Jacqueline Kennedy quoted that line and then said, “There will be great presidents again, but there will never be another Camelot.” Newspapers across the country covered this and sixty years later our impression of the time still is shaped by this metaphor. It makes us think of a kind of meritocracy, a circle of intelligent, well-meaning, reasonable, cosmopolitan, justice-seeking cabinet members from Harvard determining the country’s direction. It downplays the US role in invading neighboring Cuba and the escalation of hostilities in Vietnam.
This brings up another aspect of a charter myth. These often advance the agendas of the storytellers, of those who hold power and are invested in the status quo. It has been pointed out that Bronze Age Greek myths justify the institution and power of kings. Today we have a whole family of myths about capitalism, its efficiency and its relation to democracy, about hardworking Horatio Algers and companies like Hewlett Packard being founded in garages.[3] This myth justifies inconceivable levels of inequality and becomes a way to blame poor people for being poor. It justifies the global destruction of our environment and laying nature to waste.
This makes our passage today from The First Book of Samuel even more remarkable. In it the people pressure the prophet Samuel to install their first king who will, “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam. 8). Doesn’t this story seem so apt in our never-ending twilight of a presidential election? God explains to Samuel, the tendency people have to treat their kings as if they were gods. God says, “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.” How remarkable to have a charter myth that undermines kings rather than justifying their power.
2. The Jesus we encounter in the Gospel of Mark stands in just this tradition. The parables of Jesus undermine hierarchies and dissolve the barriers that separate people from each other. Early Saturday morning I awoke from a confusing dream in which a younger friend (Joe Williams) was getting ordained even though he knew it would in some strange way cost him his life. The Book of Mark is like this. It depicts a world of menacing dark forces that undermine the good of creation. These demonic powers overrun our conscious life and dangerously twist our thoughts.
C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity imagines the life of faith as being part of the resistance in occupied Europe waiting for the rightful king to return. And that going to church is like listening in to the secret wireless radio broadcasts from our friends.[4]
Mark wrote his gospel in a society at such a temporal and geographical distance that it might at first seem kind of strange and primitive. Ordinarily, we may not talk about demons. But we know what it means for our inner life to be distorted, possessed or overpowered. Addiction and compulsive behavior touches all of our lives. We have struggled with anger and fear and thoughts that slip out of our control. We know the frustration of falling out of harmony with people we are supposed to love.
Problems with race in America never really get resolved as racism shifts into new and different channels. We see the way that sex is used to degrade people’s humanity. This week a caller to the Cathedral threatened to come here and rip down our Pride Steps. In my whole life I have never seen such a tidal wave of statements by politicians which undermine our legal system. We have demons in our time.
In an overcrowded home Jesus eats bread with friends. There are literal insiders and outsiders. Strangely his family and the authorities are on the outside. In our translation his family (hoi par’ autou), “went out to restrain him” because, “people were saying that, “he [had] gone out of his mind” (existēmi, Mk. 3).[5] The word for restrain is krateō it means to grasp, be strong, take possession of. It is related to our words for rule: democrat, autocrat, etc. The Greek god Kratos was the personification of strength, the brutal and merciless son of Pillas and Styx who bound Prometheus.[6]
Jesus’ moment seems so poignant to me. Have you ever felt discredited and doubted even by your family? But the darkness is rising. City lawyers from Jerusalem escalate the rhetoric. They don’t just say Jesus is normal crazy; he’s extra crazy. They say that the reason he can cast out demons is that he is possessed by Beelzebul, the supreme demon of all.
But Jesus does not let this myth-building stand. In this, the first, parable of the Gospel he changes the metaphor. Jesus says a house and a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. Similarly Satan cannot be divided against himself either. Jesus says, if you are going to rob a strong man, you have to tie him up first. In other words, the world is Satan’s house and Jesus is binding Satan up by healing people, casting out demons and bringing hope for a kinder, more just world.
Jesus says, “people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness.” In the past I have preached about this one verse because it has caused so much pain in history. Søren Kierkegaard’s father worried that he had committed the unforgivable sin.[7] It is up to us to decide if this is a message of forgiveness or the difficulty of forgiveness.
If sin is being caught up personally in this dynamic of participation in the destruction of oneself and others, it is hard for me to believe that God cannot extricate us, even when we cannot imagine how. Similarly I do not believe that Jesus is rejecting his mother and siblings at the end of this gospel reading. Instead Jesus is radically expanding our idea of who can belong so that “[w]hoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
3. So many of the ideas in this sermon come from my friend and neighbor Stephen Pearce. I learn so much from him even in casual interactions. He tells the story of one of his students, a fundamentalist Christian from South Korea. When this man was born he could not breastfeed and the doctors told his parents that he was the third child to be born like this in that hospital and that he probably would not live. Like the story of Hannah and Samuel, his father prayed over him, promising that if he survived the infant’s life would be dedicated to God.[8]
Growing up the boy was aware of this charter myth but it embarrassed him and made him uncomfortable. As he came closer to adulthood he realized that only he could make his father’s sworn oath come true and he resented this too. At this point his parents made him go on an eight-day religious retreat. He did not want to go, hated it once he arrived, and stayed on the periphery not really participating. Then on the last day, the leader asked everyone to turn to the person next to them and give them a blessing.
It turned out that of all the people in the room the young man was standing next to the person who he hated the most. He weakly put his hands on the man’s shoulders, but the man grabbed him in a big bear hug. In that moment a vast silence opened up inside him and he heard God say, “Even those you do not like are worthy of a blessing.” In that moment the myth that guide his life shifted.
In the summer before college I met a young woman in summer orientation. We stayed friends and her sorority sister became my girlfriend. We would go out on double dates with a young man at the fraternity next door. That man turned out to be my lifelong friend Bruce.
We got ordained at the same time and in those early days I consulted him about everything. We joke around a lot. Mostly we keep it pretty light. But yesterday his son Jeremy was ordained a priest right here. And as the bishops and priests laid their hands on him I watched my friend Bruce’s face. I have never seen that expression before. His face was coming alive with the glory of God. My myth started shifting and I began to see how God’s grace passes down through the generations.
Sometimes I share Mark’s picture of a capricious, chaotic, malicious, brutal existence. Sometimes the racism, hatred, anger, sexism, and dishonesty of our times are too much. Sometimes the demons just seem too powerful for me to feel okay as we carry “the ever-present baggage of everything that’s come before.”
But then I realize that Jesus has broken into Satan’s house and restrained him. When it seems like even our family does not understand, Jesus teaches that, “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” And then I remember my part in the play. I am a child of God. I am under the protection of Jesus.
[1] Carl Jung, Alan Cheuse, Branislaw Malinowski, and Camelot are also all part of this essay by my friend: Stephen S. Pearce, “Charter Narratives: An Essay Presented to the Chit Chat Club of San Francisco,” 14 May 2023.
[2] James Pierseson, “How Jackie Kennedy Invented the Camelot Legend after JFK’s Death,” The Daily Beast, 12 November 2013. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-jackie-kennedy-invented-the-camelot-legend-after-jfks-death
[3] “The garage at 367 Addison Avenue became a Silicon Valley icon. Dave and Bill worked there in 1938 and 1939 while living on the property, and it was there that they developed Hewlett-Packard’s first products.” From the company’s website: https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/the-garage/#:~:text=The%20garage%20at%20367%20Addison,developed%20Hewlett%2DPackard’s%20first%20products.
[4] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (NY: Macmillan, 1943) 51.
[5] There are so many translation issues with this pericope. I would love someone to explain in detail why the word bread is left out and why this first reference is translated as family. I have a lot of other questions too.
[6] His siblings were: Nike (Victory), Bia (Force), and Zeleus (Glory).
[7] I wonder if John Calvin participated in the persecution and killing of Michael Servetus because he believed that his heresy constituted an unforgivable sin.
[8] Stephen S. Pearce, “Charter Narratives: An Essay Presented to the Chit Chat Club of San Francisco,” 14 May 2023
“O God, your never-failing providence sets in order all things both in heaven and earth.”
1. Near the end of The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis’ children’s book about the apocalypse, the great Lion stands before a massive closed door which seems to have nothing behind its doorframe. He has just presented a bountiful banquet to a crowd of bickering dwarfs. But they are not able to see or experience it – as they eat the delicious pies, wines and ice creams, they think they are eating old hay, wilted cabbage leaves and putrid water. They complain and fight each other. One says, “the Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
The Lion explains to the children with him that the dwarfs, “will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.” Then the Lion goes to the door and roars so loudly that it could shake the stars. He calls, “Now it is time!” Time! Time! And the door to another world flies open.1
Today I am talking about the sabbath. We will think about what that word means, how ancient Hebrews practiced the sabbath, what questions it raised for them and for us today. But the simple thing I want to express is the idea of the sabbath as a kind of doorway into another world. We walk through the sabbath into a world which constantly changes our experience of this one, a world which helps us to see what is real and what is a distraction and what is an illusion.
The twentieth century theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) calls this “the Strange New World within the Bible.”2 It is ancient but deeply connected to the future. It is familiar in some ways and bizarre in others. It demands that we see what is ordinary in a totally new light. Above all this world helps us, “to reach far beyond ourselves,” for an answer which is “too large for us,” which we are not ready for yet. It brings us into contact with a solution for which we have not struggled or labored enough but which answers our deepest longings.
In that strange world we are with childless Sarah and Abraham as they decide to trust God’s outlandish promise that their descendants will be more numerous than the stars. We are with Moses in exile after he rashly murdered a man. Moses receives a wonderful second chance as God appears to him in a burning busy and announces that he will be
the greatest leader of all time. We are with Samuel at the tabernacle of Shiloh as he learns what it means to hear God speak. We are with prophets like Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, called to speak out in defiance to kings, but who also promise that, “the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory will be seen by thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light.”3
And then we find ourselves in the presence of a gentle person who is not a prophet or doctor or poet or philosopher or hero, and “yet all of these and more.”4 His words alarm the authorities. With compelling power he says “Follow me!” He leaves even the most suspicious people with an irresistible impression of eternal life. In the face of doubt and cynicism Jesus gives us the hope that we too might be healed. You can hear the echo of his great impact today through the people who listen and watch and wait, the ones you see around you now, who share Jesus’ confidence in God’s love.5
Barth writes that the question, “What is in the Bible?” becomes, “What are your looking for?” Who are you? We were made for this question and the sabbath is the way we grow into the answer.
2. What is the sabbath historically? It is the seventh day of the Jewish week. According to the Ten Commandments one should abstain from work on this day.6 Sabbath has two different origin stories. The Book of Exodus (Ex. 20:11) describes it as a way we imitate God who rested after creating the world in six days. The other explanation comes from the Book of Deuteronomy in which sabbath reminds the people that God delivered them out of slavery in Egypt. God has given them a freedom to not work and sabbath ensures that they exercise this freedom.
According to the First Book of Maccabees Gentiles in the century before the birth of Jesus attack faithful Jews who because they are keeping the sabbath refuse to retaliate. They say, “Let us die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly…” (1 Macc. 2). A thousand of them are slaughtered and the leaders resolve to defend themselves in the future.
The Hebrew phrase Pikuach Nefesh means to save a life or soul. It refers to the conviction that saving a life takes precedence over keeping the sabbath. Jesus extends this to healing a man with a damaged hand. You can hear his heartbreak that religious leaders of his time object to healing someone on the sabbath.7 He says, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mk. 3).
What is the sabbath for us as twenty-first century people? In scripture sabbath has two purposes. It is a day set apart for worshiping God. It is also a day for rest and recreation.
It reminds us that our value as human beings is not just about what we produce. Sabbath shows us that we should not treat our work or career as a god. Life is not just about accomplishment, not just about becoming but about being. It is about enjoying the blessings that God longs for us to receive.
Different people may interpret this in various ways but the sabbath reminds me that we have an obligation to go to church, to participate in worship with others. We are not complete as we are. The prayers, readings and hymns expose us to the strange new world of the Bible which transforms how we experience the world and act in it.
3. Let me give three examples of what we might learn as we mature in faith. The novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990) believed that he could communicate theological truths in his fictional stories. He won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer. In it the main character Binx Bolling describes his spiritual quest saying, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”8 On the sabbath, the world of scripture reminds us that we were made to search for God and that abandoning this pilgrimage leaves us empty.
In Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Kiss,” a shy, diminutive and frankly ugly army officer with “spectacles, sloping shoulders and whiskers like a lynx’s” goes to an elegant party.9 The other officers are dancing or playing billiards. Having, “nothing to do” he wanders around the house. On his way back he gets mixed up and finds himself in a dark room. Suddenly he hears, “hurried footsteps and the rustling of a dress [and] a breathless feminine voices whispers, “At last! [It’s you!].” She throws her arms around him and kisses him. Immediately she realizes it is the wrong person and hurries off before he can compose himself.
For the rest of the evening the officer keeps recalling the way she smelled, the feeling of her arms around him and her lips on his cheek. He wonders which of the women at the party it was. Chekhov writes, “an intense groundless joy took possession of him.” For months he keeps going back in his memory to that moment. Much later he returns to that town and sees the mansion from across the water. He realizes that that moment of intimacy was not meant for him, and that he would always be alone. “And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to [him] an unintelligible and aimless jest.”
This reminds me of how we feel when we see someone waving, and then wave back only to realize that they were waving at someone else. There is a deep hurt in many of us who feel like no one will ever love us. No one will say “At last! It’s you!” Some of us may wonder if people would still love us if they really knew what we had done or who we are. When we are in this frame of mind, the strange world of the Bible reminds us that Jesus constantly teaches that God loves us as a father. Jesus shows us that we are not defined by the worse things we have thought and done, that there is always a chance for reconciliation.
When we look at the news of the week, the conviction of a former United States president, the intractable suffering in the Middle East and Ukraine, it can feel like there is no agreed upon foundation for how we treat each other. The historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) writes that there are three basic strategies when things fall apart.10 First is what he calls archaism or nostalgia. I see this in myself when I long for the church of my childhood. This is also the appeal of the slogan Make America Great Again. But we simply cannot go back to the past. Social changes, patterns of migration, changes in business and technology cannot simply be reversed.
Toynbee calls the second strategy for dealing with change, futurism. This is to dismiss the importance of the past and present in order to focus our decisions only on an imagined future. The third strategy is what people do when the first two do not work. It is to opt out or withdraw for the sake of preserving ourselves.
But there is a fourth way. It is more clearly articulated in the Bible than anywhere else. It is a way of living in the present, of living in the presence God or being in Christ. This way folds the past and the future into this moment. The tradition calls this Nunc Eternum or The Eternal now. It is the source of the joy that we see in deeply faithful people. It is a trust in God’s never-failing providence.11
Who are we? What are we looking for? Like the dwarfs of The Last Battle, we have been so afraid of being taken in that we have often chosen cunning over belief. For the span of a moment we can come to see our life as a rich banquet but we inevitably forget. Thank you for being part of this Grace Cathedral sabbath, for celebrating God’s creativity and God’s gift of freedom. Thank you for believing in the search for something more, for listening to God’s voice in the Eternal Now saying, “At last. It’s you.” O Lord shake the stars and open for us that door to the other world. It is time. Time. Time.
1 C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (NY: Harper Collins, 1956) 168-170.
2 Karl Barth, “The Strange New World within the Bible,” The Word of God and the Word of Man, tr. Douglas Horton (NY: Pilgrim Press, 1928) 28-50. https://jochenteuffel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/barth-the-strange-new-world-within-the-bible.pdf
3 “The LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn”(Isa 60:2-3). Also from Handel’s Messiah: https://haventoday.org/blog/handels-messiah-lyrics-verse-references/
4 “Then comes the incomprehensible, incomparable days, when all previous time, history, and experience seem to stand still – like the sun at Gideon – in the presence of a man who was no prophet, no poet, no hero, no thinker, and yet all of these and more! His words cause alarm, for he speaks with authority and not as we ministers. With compelling power he calls to each one: Follow me! Even to the distrustful and antagonistic he gives an irresistible impression of “eternal life.” “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, [31] and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” “Blessed is the womb that bare thee,” cry the people. And the quieter and lonelier he becomes, and the less real “faith” he finds in the world about him, the stronger through his whole being peals one triumphant note: “I am the resurrection and the life! Because I live — ye shall live also!”
And then comes the echo, weak enough, if we compare it with that note of Easter morning-and yet strong, much too strong for our ears, accustomed as they are to the weak, pitiably weak tones of to-day—the echo which this man’s life finds in a little crowd of folk who listen, watch, and wait. Here is the echo of the first courageous missionaries who felt the necessity upon them to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Here is the echo of Paul: “The righteousness of God is revealed! If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. And he which hath begun a good work in you will finish it!” Here is the deep still echo of John: “Life was manifested… We beheld his glory… Now are we the sons of God. … And this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” Karl Barth, “The Strange New World within the Bible,” The Word of God and the Word of Man, tr. Douglas Horton (NY: Pilgrim Press, 1928) 28-50
5 We are with Saul the persecutor of Christians as he becomes transformed into Paul, “carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4).
6 The Book of Leviticus describes it as a time of complete rest for gathering in worship.
7 “He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored” (Mk. 3:5).
8 “Then it is that the idea of the search occurs to me. I become absorbed and for a minute or so forget about the girl.
What is the nature of the search? you ask.
Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.” Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (NY: Ivy Books, 1960) 9.
9 Anton Chekhov, “The Kiss.” https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Kiss.shtml
10 Alan Jones, “Sermon: The Second Sunday after Pentecost,” Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California, 28 May 1989.
11 Today’s collect, that is, the prayer that gathers all of our prayers together and is changed every week which starts out our Sunday services has often puzzled me. It says, “O God, your never-failing providence sets in order all things both in heaven and earth…” I do not think this means that God controls every last detail of our lives using terrible things that happen to us for some greater good. Instead it means that there is a way that God orders everything in creation. We come closer to understanding this through the possibilities opened in the sabbath.