Grace Cathedral
“Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Lk. 2)
“We stand with one hand on the door looking into another world, / That is this world.” The farmer poet Wendell Berry (1934-) wrote these words about Christmas in a poem called “Remembering that It Happened Once.”[1] Here’s the whole poem.
“Remembering that it happened once, / We cannot turn away the thought, / As we go out, cold, to our barns / Toward the long night’s end, that we / Ourselves are living in the world / It happened in when it first happened, / That we ourselves, opening a stall / (A latch thrown open countless times / Before), might find them breathing there, /”
“Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw, / The mother kneeling over Him, / The husband standing in belief / He scarcely can believe, in light / That lights them from no source we see, / An April morning’s light, the air / Around them joyful as a choir. / We stand with one hand on the door, / Looking into another world / That is this world, the pale daylight / Coming just as before, our chores / To do, the cattle all awake, / Our own white frozen breath hanging / In front of us; and we are here / As we have never been before, / Sighted as not before, our place / Holy, although we knew it not.”[2]
On Christmas Eve we stand between worlds. And for a moment, if we pay attention, we see our place as holy. We do not always experience our life this way. We inhabit a confusing world full of terror and distraction. These days wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Africa cast a long shadow over the human family. Every year we become even more aware that our indifference is endangering the planet itself.
Other forms of sadness threaten to overcome us. Perhaps you have been lying awake at night because you have a child who is in serious trouble. Or perhaps, you have suddenly found yourself alone in the world to face the storms of life without someone to lean on. Or perhaps some kind of addiction holds you in its grip, or you are looking back to brighter years that you know are gone forever and will never come back.[3]
To the shepherds, to all of us tonight the angel announces a sign. A young woman is having a baby called Emmanuel which means God with us. This is the message: we are not alone or abandoned. The sign shows that joy is at the heart of being alive. Because of this baby, the world is being turned upside down. Violence is not at the center of reality, love is.[4]
Seeing the world like this may sound easy, but there is a catch. In order to experience this joy we have to be satisfied with living in a mystery. This does not mean that we have to believe what is unbelievable, that we have to give up critical thinking, or that we are not allowed to have doubts. It’s just that the infinite will not fit into our finite minds. And so our existence is made strange by the kind of creatures we are. We long for the infinite but can never really control or comprehend it.
In the way that a mother gives birth to her child, we become who we are by giving ourselves away. For me this is what makes being a parent such a transcendent experience. Taking care of our children, walking in the oak woodlands, reading stories at sunset after a warm bath, all this made joy an even more central part of my life. Joy is that experience of being called into existence as a kind of creature who is different than God and yet who has a share in the mystery of God. We are made for this delight.[5]
Our friend and Dean Emeritus Alan Jones used to remind us that in Christianity the, “things of God can be handled and held.” In fact, “[T]he things of God can be kissed and caressed.” He talks about how strange it is that Christ enters into history in order to offer us the gift of peace. And that for this reason the true Christ can never assume the shape of violence. The baby and her child are a sign of three great truths. First, the world is a gift. Second the nature of the gift is communion (for all people and the world). Third, this true communion celebrates diversity and difference. Let me say only a little more about each of these.[6]
1. The Gift. Ninety-nine years ago this week the astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of the first galaxy outside our own Milky Way. By 2019 we believed that there were 200 billion galaxies. Now after the New Horizon space probe we think there are 2 trillion galaxies.[7] This is the world we inhabit. This is the generosity of God.
One of my favorite Christmas moments happened years ago, after everyone went home from the midnight service. I turned off the lights and closed up my old church. In the cold, alone on that holy night with the stars, with trillions of worlds stretching across the heavens, I felt God with me, overwhelmed by the miracle that we exist. All of this beauty, everything that is good, is a gift from God.[8]
And this is the peculiarity and the scandal of our faith. It is not chiefly about big ideas or philosophical principles but a God who is particular. At Christmas we celebrate and take delight in the God who can be touched, who can be held as a baby.[9]
At the Christmas pageant this morning we asked children what they wanted to pray for. A boy said, “For the fighting to stop.” Loud applause followed. A girl announced that she wanted her neutered cat to have kittens. Another prayed that a particular candidate would not be elected as president (also to enthusiastic applause). But the most beautiful thing of all was Sinclair our baby Jesus sitting on her father’s lap giving us such joy.
2. Communion. I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s book These Truths, a one volume history of America. American history always fascinated me but there is so much that I missed.[10] She writes about the Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved Americans and what it felt like for them. “In South Carolina the proclamation was read out to the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of former slaves. At its final lines, the soldiers began to sing, quietly at first, and then louder: My country ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!”
She goes on, “American slavery had lasted for centuries. It had stolen the lives of millions and crushed the lives of millions more… It had poisoned a people and a nation. It had turned hearts to stone… The American odyssey had barely begun. From cabins and fields they left. Freed men and women didn’t always head north.”
“They often went south or west, traveling hundreds of miles by foot, on horseback, by stage and by train, searching. They were husbands in search of wives, wives in search of children, mothers and fathers looking for children, children looking for parents, chasing word and rumors about where their loved ones had been sold, sale after sale, across the country. Some of their wanderings lasted years. They sought their own union, a union of their beloved.” This year at Christmas as I’m imagining the joy of those reunions, I’m reminded how we are made for communion.
3. Diversity. Finally let me say a short word about diversity. The two largest religious denominations in America do not permit women to be ordained as leaders of churches. This week Pope Francis gave permission for Roman Catholic priests to give same sex couples blessings in private. He said that these should not in any way look like marriage ceremonies.[11] In our church we have women, trans, gay and lesbian people serving at every level of ordained ministry. We believe that God is present when same sex couples get married here in church. I have experienced such a deep sense of joy at their ordinations and weddings. I wish every person could see it.
We are all different from each other. But this is not a problem. We should not feel threatened by this. We are not competing. There is not one of us that has gotten it all right. Our diversity is part of God’s gift to us. We are one human family.
What happens when we do not receive the world, communion with each other and diversity as a gift? The theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) says that we become incurvatus se, that is curved in on ourself. We refuse to be fully alive. We are cut off from each other and the very sources of what should be our greatest happiness. We become distanced from our true self. This is a kind of hell that we all experience in varying degrees. In this condition we become walled off from joy.
But tonight is holy. It is time to make peace with the mystery and come back home. For many years the famous religion scholar Huston Smith was a member of my grandfather’s congregation in Massachusetts. He said that churches waiting for Christmas are like a child with her face pressed against the window on a cold winter night. Then she runs through the household saying, “Daddy’s home. Daddy’s home.”
Tonight we share this joy in our Christmas carols and in stories whose meaning can never be exhausted. The world is not made of atoms but of stories. Our stories are imperfect ways of expressing an unsayable encounter with the infinite God. Tonight we are here as we never have been before. There is joy at the very heart of being alive. As a mother gives birth to her child let us become who we are by giving our self away.
Because in these 2 trillion galaxies, the things of God can be kissed and caressed. The world is a gift. The nature of that gift is communion. True communion celebrates diversity and difference. We stand with one hand on the door looking into another world…”
[1] I’ve been thinking so much about my friend Alan Jones as he stands at the door between worlds. I’ve been trying to imagine what he would say if he could speak clearly about what this experience is like for him.
[2] Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems (NY: Counterpoint, 2014).
[3] This paragraph comes from a sermon preached by Rev. Theodore Parker Ferris at Trinity Church in Boston on Christmas Day 1960.
[4] “In a confusing world, in a confusing world, it’s no wonder the cry often goes up. Give us a sign, give us a sign, show us what’s what. And the prophet Isaiah says, look, a young woman is having a baby. Emmanuel. God is with us. And the message is, we are not hated or abandoned. The sign a young woman is having a baby tells us that joy is the true mark of being alive. And because of this baby, the world has been turned around. Violence is not at the center of reality, but there’s a catch. To experience this joy of being loved, you have to be content to live within a mystery. I don’t mean by that you have to give up critical thinking or never having doubts. It’s just that the infinite will not fit into finite minds. So this journey of advent reminds us just how very strange Christianity is.”
Alan Jones, “Imagine it’s December 1941.”
[5] “We become who we are by giving ourselves away as a mother gives birth to her baby. So we need a revolution in our thinking so that joy, joy wants more, can be the driving energy of our lives. The joy of being human is to be called into existence as a being other than God. And yet one who shares in the mystery of God. And when we look at Mary and her baby, God’s graciousness is breathtaking. The sheer giftedness of everything. And you won’t see yourself, the world and others are right unless your first reaction is delight. I still have a picture in my mind one Christmas Eve, uh, during the day here when we had a uh, a little baby playing the part of the baby Jesus in the bishop’s pageant. And three elderly women lent over the uh, baby carriage and just were looking at the baby saying, yes, yes, yes. I thought, oh, I’d like people to do that to me.” Ibid.
[6] “And this is the scandal of Christianity. The things of God can be handled and held. The things of God can be kissed and caressed. It is very, very strange. And the strangeness deepens Christ offers in himself a peace that enters history always as a gift that can be received only as a gift the true Christ. The true Christ can never, never assume the shape of violence. The young woman and her baby are a sign of three great truths. The first is then that the world is a gift. And God’s gift to us as a people, as a planet is communion. And thirdly, true communion is the celebration of diversity and difference. So we’re not celebrating generic humanity but human beings in their glorious particularity of Susan and George and Fred and Barbara.” Ibid.
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy
[8] Gratitude lies at the heart of our most memorable encounters with the Holy.
[9] My brother Andrew’s wife Courtney is pregnant with their second child now. I find myself thinking about that little niece all the time. She brings me such joy. When she’s around I want to play with her all the time. When I was about five years old I knew that at one time I had been a cute little boy and remembered all the fuss that teenaged girls would make over me. As I got older, I was aware that the world was less interested in me. When I became even older I realized just how precious a baby can be.
[10] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (NY: W.W. Norton, 2018) 299-300.
[11] Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis Allows Priests to Bless Same-Sex Couples, The New York Times, 19 December 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/world/europe/pope-gay-lesbian-same-sex-blessing.html
Dear Friends,
Many of you may already have heard the news that the Rev Austin K. Rios was elected on Saturday to serve as the ninth bishop of the Diocese of California.
The energy here at the electing convention at Grace Cathedral felt electric. One hundred sixty clergy voters and one hundred and ninety-two lay voters participated in a bicameral body for the election, which chose Rev Rios in the second ballot. Rios then addressed the convention through an online video connection from his church in Rome, Italy. His enthusiasm, even from so many time zones away, felt contagious.
This week, Bishop Marc Andrus told me that the next steps involve a confirmation of our election results by the bishops and standing committees of the churches in the Episcopal Church both here in the United States and abroad. No one expects any controversies, and we should see Austin Rios arriving in California in March.
His ordination as a bishop is scheduled to take place at Grace Cathedral on Saturday, May 4, 2024. Bishop Marc will help to provide him with an orientation to our Diocese and then will retire in July.
For the last five months, we have been working to update the wireless system at the cathedral to accommodate so many voters. We expected each person there to have multiple devices, each trying to connect, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am that all the electronic voting went so well.
Our volunteers and staff were very welcoming and did a fantastic job of making everyone from the Diocese feel at home. I am so grateful to everyone at Grace Cathedral for our ongoing ministry of hospitality. We welcome hundreds of new people to the cathedral every week, and all of us are involved directly or indirectly in this important ministry. It is one of my favorite features of our Cathedral life together.
As we continue to travel through the Advent season together, I am praying that during this dark season, you are seeing the light of Christ shining steadily in our lives.
Love,
Malcolm
The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young
Dean of Grace Cathedral
“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1).
1. ‘A hui hou. Stay awake. Stay awake. In 2004 my best friend was an opera singer named Jennifer Lopez. Jenn is not the famous actor known as J. Lo (although the two were born a year apart). In her early forties doctors diagnosed Jenn with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. She returned to her parent’s house in California to die.
I visited her every Wednesday. The first question she would always ask was, “How is your family?” and the second question would be about a sick person in the congregation or my dissertation. She understood what mattered to me. Jenn was the perfect confidante. I could speak honestly to her about my frustrations with my dissertation advisor or the church leadership without worrying that she might think less of me. Jenn always gave people the benefit of the doubt.[1]
Jenn learned to sing in our church and I can imagine her as a girl first beginning to realize her great talent. On some visits we would watch videotapes of her operas. I loved watching her sweep down the stage in a flowing dress singing so powerfully. Her face in those performances showed so much emotion and sensitivity.
Once I confided to her that sometimes when I watched an opera singer or listened to a musician like a cellist, I almost secretly fell in love with the performer and tried to imagine what their life was like offstage. “Well this is it!” she joked as she gestured to her wheelchair. We spent hours laughing together.
Strangely enough my favorite images of Jenn come from her family photograph albums. Because the colors in those pictures seemed brighter than real life they were particularly appropriate for her spirit. Images from band trips, graduations, summer parties and family gatherings were a wonderful collage expressing her youthfulness, energy and all-around zaniness.
Over time Jenn lost the ability to speak, but because we spent so much time together I could understand her. More than most Jenn loved life and there were times, as it was withdrawn from her, that she despaired. Sometimes I still can hear the moaning sound that at the end of her life was the only way she could express this disappointment. But Jenn never complained, never lost interest.
Above all the two of us loved Jesus. Before she got sick she had begun the process of getting ordained as a priest. If only we could have had a long career together serving God’s people! When I think back to those Wednesdays I realize that we talked a lot about death. But my overwhelming memory is how awake we were – awake to the simplest joys of life and to tragedy. We were awake to the way God’s invisible love surrounds us like a thick blanket on a winter night.
2. The darkness we experienced together is the darkness of Advent. Today we celebrate the first Sunday of the new year. The church calendar could have started with the joy of Easter, or the newness and vulnerability of Christmas, or the fiery energy of Pentecost. But instead we begin in the shadow of war, hatred and sorrow. We begin in darkness: waiting, singing and praying for new light. Yesterday hundreds were killed as war returned to Gaza. We pray for the end of violence in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine. We refuse to turn our eyes away from the suffering.
In America as the secular world prepares for a consumer Christmas, Christians could hardly be more out of step. We are awake, waiting for Christ to come in glory at the end of time. The older I get the more I treasure our Advent hymns. We sing, “Zion hears the watchman singing; her heart with joyful hope is springing, she wakes and hurries through the night…” (Hymn 61).[2]
On this first Sunday of the church year, as we await the advent of Christ, we begin a new story about Jesus. The principle way we know about Jesus is through the four gospels. The word gospel means good news. Because three of the four gospels share so much in common and look so similar we call them the synoptic gospels. Each of our three year cycle of Sunday readings is based on one of them (with the Gospel of John filling out the rest of each year).
Matthew uses five sections (like the Torah or the five books of Moses) to show that Jesus is a new Moses. Luke describes Jesus as the Lord’s royal servant who brings God’s light to the nations of the world. John explains how Jesus reunites us with God in a way that we could never accomplish on our own.
3. Today we are entering the year of Mark. Mark explains how humanity comes to have a new start. He writes about how a new reality called the Kingdom of God comes into history and transforms it. Mark uses a simpler vocabulary and grammar to form powerful, compact sentences. His favorite word in Greek is euthus. It means immediately. It comes up so often that sometimes translators just leave it out.
Mark presents the hearer or reader with a choice about who Jesus is. The only time Mark is really direct about his own position is in the first sentence of the gospel when he writes, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk. 1).
The Gospel of Mark has three sections. The first takes place in Galilee and the last in Jerusalem. The middle section occurs as Jesus travels between the two places. In the first section the world wonders who Jesus is. Mark quotes Malachi (3:1) and Isaiah (40:3) describing Jesus as a kind of messenger from God. At Jesus’ baptism a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved” (Mk. 1). Jesus heals people, casts out their demons and forgives their sins. He tells them about God’s kingdom using stories about a sower casting seeds, and about a tiny mustard seed that grows into a great plant.
In the second section of Mark, Jesus’ friends are struggling to understand who he is. Jesus asks, “but who do you say I am.” Peter boldly calls Jesus the Messiah (Mk. 8). At the time Peter still has in mind a conquering military hero who will overthrow the Roman authorities. Jesus subverts the whole idea of a messiah. He teaches them that the Son of Man did not come to be served but to be serve others. On the mountain two of Jesus’ friends see him talking with Elijah and Moses. From an overshadowing cloud a voice says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him” (Mk. 9).
The final section of Mark shows how Jesus becomes king. A royal procession takes Jesus into Jerusalem where he teaches in the temple. Mark writes, “a large crowd was listening to him with delight” (Mk. 12:37). Later sitting on the Mount of Olives four of his friends ask him when the end will come. Jesus answers with the words we just heard. No one, not the angels nor even the Son of Humanity will know the time. He says literally, “keep on being awake.”[3] Mark uses the word grēgoreō like the name Gregory. It means to be alert or awake, literally woke.
Jesus becomes the Messiah or king by being crucified. A Roman centurion seems to be the only one who understands. He says, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mk. 15). When the women go to the tomb an angelic young man in white tells them that Jesus has been raised. The gospel ends abruptly as they flee, “… for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Mark confronts every person with this question. Who will Jesus be for you? The twentieth century monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) writes, “This is the most complete revolution that has ever been preached: in fact, it is the only true revolution, because all others demand the extermination of somebody else, but this one means the death of the [person] who, for all practical purposes, you have come to think of as your own self.”[4]
4. In this season of Advent we have the chance to prepare a place in ourselves and in the world to receive Christ. There is so much in the Divine plan that we cannot understand, dark places, unmapped territories and worlds to discover. I invite you to encounter Jesus in our present moment. Let me close with a poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes called “Longing.”
“Unsuspecting at first, of course, / you only gradually begin to feel / an urge, a leaning, / slow to become a promise, / a yearning that will become / its own gift, given from beyond. / It grows from a tiny seed, / a grace that is not your doing, / a single cell: / a change of season, / a subtle turning of the heart, / until by some grace you will know. / But now you do not yet, / you are still longing. / But know this, you are Mary, / and Gabriel is near.”[5]
On my very last visit with Jennifer before going out of town, we both knew that we probably would not see each other again in this world. I prayed so hard for a miracle that would instantly make her whole and healthy again. What I discovered was someone who was truly awake – who loved Jesus. That night in a dream her grandmother Margaret, who had died when she was eight years old, kept pulling her hand.
At the end of our visit, I asked if there was anything she wanted to say before I unplugged her laser pointer for the last time. She pointed out the letters for “Mahalo,” or thank you in Hawaiian. I told her ‘a hui hou which means until we meet again. She was so tired and she shut her eyes as I read evening prayer with the Song of Simeon. It goes, “Lord you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised.” I closed my prayerbook, looked into her face and said goodbye. She opened her eyes, smiled back at me and mouthed the words ‘a hui hou.
‘A hui hou. Stay awake. Stay awake. Come Lord Jesus.
[1] We spent those mornings talking about our families, dreams and worries. We talked about the most ordinary things and the profoundest. We talked about politics, art and our love of Jesus. Her commentary on the family and friends in those photographs was priceless. She was smart enough to recognize all of our crazy inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies and frailties, but kind enough to love us even more because of them. Above all Jenn forgave the people around her for the rough edges that make us human. I like to think that she cared for us oddballs more than the normal people.
Mem Jenn Lopez (8-14-04).
[2] Hymn 61, 1980 Hymnal (NY: Church Publishing Company, 1980).
[3] Herman Waetjen, A Reordering of Power: A Socio-Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989) 202.
[4] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961) 144.
[5] Steve Garnaas-Holmes, “Longing.” https://unfoldinglight.net/2023/11/30/longing/
“I pray that… God… may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation… so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…” (Eph. 1).
1. Our life is a journey towards the Holy One. Longing for our true home, we search for God. In his autobiography the twentieth century English monk Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) writes about the 15,000 to 17,000 year old cave paintings discovered in Lescaux France. At the end of long meandering and dangerous underground tunnels through the darkness there are 600 painted and drawn animals in a cavern that is 66 feet wide and 16 feet high.[1]
Scholars believe that these sacred images provided a means for people to enter into communion with the Holy and that the long passageway represented the difficulty of approaching the divine mystery. Through all of human existence people have created calendars and holy places: stone circles, altars, tombs and pyramids.
Human beings have prepared themselves to come into the divine presence by dancing, fasting, praying, and lighting candles. That journey from the mouth of the cave to the dark interior is the passage from the outer world to the inner world. We see it in literature: Aeneas in the underworld, Odysseus coming home, Theseus traveling to the center of the labyrinth.
The Greek philosopher Plato writes that we are like people in a cave looking at shadows on the wall, not knowing the reality they refer to. Our life is like this. We understand God, reality and other people through symbols. When it comes to God we often mistake the symbol for the thing in itself. That is called idolatry. A modern version of this is to think that science can tell us about the meaning of things, that it can answer questions like whether or not we have free will or are in love.
A sense for the mystery transcending the world lies at the heart of all religions. The symbols help us to come into the presence of that holy reality which is our true home. One of the peculiar symbols we have is a feast called The Reign of Christ. We celebrate it today on the last Sunday of the Christian year. People in our church have only had this on the calendar since 1970. I’ve always felt ambivalent about the feast in part because, after the French Revolution, the nineteenth century Roman Catholic church often opposed modernizing trends like the development of democracy in Europe.
Pope Pius XI instituted the feast for Roman Catholics in 1925.[2] In his encyclical written in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution the pope rejected nationalism and secularization.[3] He hoped to remind faithful people that loyalty to Christ the King is more important than national identity. This turns out to be a timely message for us.
Pamela Cooper-White our Forum guest and preacher a few weeks ago has written extensively about the threat of Christian Nationalism to our democracy.[4] She points to the widespread use of Christian symbols during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Far too many people in America consider themselves Christian Nationalists. They support imposing a government that explicitly favors Christians. They believe that the United States was at one time a Christian nation and should be again.
2. Cooper-White vehemently opposes Christian Nationalism I do too. The values Jesus teaches have nothing to do with White nationalism or Christian Nationalism. This is true of our gospel reading today. In the last days before his arrest Jesus privately sits with a group of friends on the Mount of Olives. They ask about the end of time and he shares three parables that are really about what we do now in the present.
In the Parable of the Bridesmaids Jesus teaches us to live joyfully and wisely, one might say “mindfully.” In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus encourages us to be daring and focused on how our life can bear fruit. Finally, today he tells the story of the sheep and the goats, not to frighten us, but to show what a blessing generosity and compassion are.[5]
In the First Letter to the Corinthians Paul writes, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). Jesus makes a similar point. Ultimately, your nationality or religion, what you believe, whether or not you are a Christian, is far less important than being a person dedicated to love, especially loving those Jesus calls “the least of these.”
On Tuesday at the Interfaith breakfast Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi used exactly this story to describe genuine faith. And yet the parable of the sheep and goats has a certain subtlety. For me it cannot be simply boiled down to the transactional idea that only good people will enter God’s kingdom. In Jesus’ story, at the end of the age, all nations are gathered together before the throne. Matthew writes, “The Son of Man… will separate them from one another…” (Mt. 25). To me the Greek word “them” seems to refer to the nations so that the Son of Man judges nations or groups of people rather than individuals.
The people being judged did not have an ulterior motive in their earlier actions. They feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger (xenos), give the naked (gumnos) clothing, take care of the sick and visit prisoners. They do this out of compassion not to gain favor from God. They love people for their own sake and then are surprised to learn that what they did to the least they did to the Son of Man.
Another way to put it is that God made them sheep or goats. It’s not like their good deeds somehow changed what kind of beings they were. Every human being we encounter is an unrecognized Jesus. Every person is God’s beloved child. I do not believe that God destines certain people to eternal suffering. I also know that there have been times that all of us have passed by naked, hungry strangers and that other times we have helped. We are sheep and goats. The point is that our compassion and goodness gives pleasure to God. And there is something in every human being that is divine.
3. What we are talking about is a kingdom not of domination but of servanthood. This is the kind of king we celebrate in Jesus today. Protestant reformers like John Calvin (1509-1564) described Jesus as Prophet, Priest and King.[6] Jesus is a new Moses and stands in the tradition of prophets who remind us to care for the most vulnerable people in our society. Jesus is a priest. A priest is someone like our old friend Ellen Clark-King, who in her words and life shows us how God is present.[7] Finally, Jesus is king – we owe our primary allegiance to God. God is powerful but stoops down to help us.
I want to talk about one example from history. This Tuesday the Episcopal Church will celebrate the Feast of Kamehameha IV (1834-1863) and Emma (1836-1855), the sovereigns of the Kingdom of Hawaii. With fourteen other students they attended the Royal School together as children. As the Crown Prince of Hawaii Kamehameha IV (Alexander Liholiho) traveled through America. People refused to serve him and used racial slurs. He experienced racism here that he had never encountered in England and France. It made him even more wary of growing American influence in the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Emma’s great uncle was King Kamehameha I, the king who united the Hawaiian Islands and her grandfather was his English advisor. Her hanai’d father was an English doctor. After Kamehameha IV became King and married Queen Emma, the royal couple cultivated their connections to Great Britain and invited the Anglican church to come to the Hawaii. This was in part to counter the influence of Congregational missionaries America. The king translated the Book of Common prayer into Hawaiian. They gave the property that became St. Andrew’s Cathedral.
In less than a lifetime foreign diseases had killed off four fifths of the Hawaiian population. The royal couple profoundly cared about the people they served and wanted them to have access to European medicine. One day the queen announced that she would go out with a notebook and solicit funds for a new hospital. The king asked, “What will people think if their Queen goes out begging?” Emma replied, “They will think this is important enough that we will not rest on false pride.” The king replied, “My dear if you are that determined, I will go as your representative.”[8] The two helped create Queen’s the main hospital on Oahu.[9] They also founded ‘Iolani, a school for boys and St. Andrew’s Priory as a school for girls.
The two cared about the ancient Hawaiian ways but they also recognized that the world was changing and that Hawaiians would need to be educated in order to participate in it. Their greatest strength may be the way they humbled themselves for the sake of their people. Perhaps that is what makes a sovereign most like Christ the king.
Late in life the poet Denise Levertov became a Christian. All along she sensed something calling her. This is the poem she wrote when she was younger called “The Secret.”
“Two girls discover / the secret of life/ in a sudden line of /poetry.// I who don’t know the / secret wrote / the line. They /told me// (through a third person) / they had found it / but not what it was / not even // what line it was. No doubt / by now, more than a week / later, they have forgotten / the secret, // the line, the name of / the poem. I love them
for finding what / I can’t find, // and for loving me / for the line I wrote, / and for forgetting it / so that // a thousand times, till death / finds them, they may / discover it again, in other / lines // in other / happenings. And for / wanting to know it, /for // assuming there is
such a secret, yes, / for that / most of all.”[10]
Sometimes it feels like we are in a long meandering tunnel through the darkness. This poem is about those moments when the meaning of our life seems clear, and the knowledge that while this experience will not last, it will be replaced by another. Thank you for listening to this exploration of the Reign of Christ, for remembering the life of Kamehameha and Emma. May our dream be realized of a kingdom not of domination but of servanthood.
Our life is a journey towards the Holy One. Longing for our true home, we search for God. Let us live joyfully, wisely, mindfully, with daring, bearing the fruit of generosity and kindness. Let every person we encounter be for us Christ the king who draws us more deeply into truth.
[1] Bede Griffiths, The Golden String: An Autobiography (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1954 and 1980) 181ff.
[2] The world almost had to stop having kings before the church would institute this feast.
[3] “Feast of Christ the King,” Wikipedia, November 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Christ_the_King
[4] Pamela Cooper-White, The Psychology of Christian Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023).
[5] Matthew Boulton, “The Least of These: SALT’s Commentary for the Reign of Christ the King Sunday,” SALT, 20 November 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/11/16/the-least-of-these-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-reign-of-christ-the-king-sunday
[6] John Calvin, “To Know the Purpose for Which Christ Was Sent by the Father, and What He Conferred Upon Us, We Must Look Above All at Three Things in Him: The Prophetic Office, Kingship, and Priesthood,” Institutes of the Christian Religion tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 494ff.
[7] In seminary we learned the ABC’s, a mnemonic aid to remember what priests do. Priests are empowered to pronounce absolution on those who have sinned, bless people and objects and consecrate bread and wine in communion.
[8] Miriam Rappolt, Queen Emma: A Woman of Vision (Kailua, HI: Press Pacifica, 1991) 71-2.
[9] “Hale Mai O Ke Wahine Alii.” Miriam Rappolt, Queen Emma: A Woman of Vision (Kailua, HI: Press Pacifica, 1991) 74.
[10] Denise Levertov, “The Secret,” O Taste and See: New Poems (New York: New Directions, 1964).
“I sought the Lord, who answered me and delivered me out of all my terror” (Ps. 34).
Inspired by Charles Dicken’s novel David Copperfield, Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. In the book she describes rural poverty, the effects of the opioid crisis and a scene that is so upsetting that both my wife and I independently had to stop reading and look away.
The main character and narrator Demon is born in the aftermath of the collapse of coal-mining as an industry in his Virginia town. He longs to see the ocean but wonders if he will ever get there. His father died before he was even born. Demon’s mom marries an abusive step-father and herself dies of an OxyContin overdose on his 11th birthday.
Demon lives and works (without being paid) with foster children on a tobacco farm. For a brief while he is taken in by the McCobb family with four small children under the age of seven. They too take most of the pay check he earns sorting garbage at a local convenience store.
When their car gets repossessed and they have to move, the family abandons him. He takes to the road with his backpack and his life savings in a peanut butter jar and tries to find a distant grandmother he has never met. It is terrifying to read about a twelve year old hitching rides with strangers.
At a truck stop he tries to escape a prostitute by going into the men’s room. He doesn’t realize it but she follows him in and sees him sitting in the stall. When he comes out she accuses him of stealing her money. The store clerk searches his backpack and gives every cent he has to the woman. The boy runs out into the night with nothing.
Intense misery, injustice and cruelty make us want to look away. Think of the way we sometimes respond to people with horrifying sores who we encounter on the streets here in San Francisco, or the families whose loved ones were murdered or kidnapped by Hamas, or the near total destruction of Gaza. Suffering like this can feel like a threat to our innermost self because we know how vulnerable we are too (becoming a parent exposes us to a radically new vulnerability). When we see too much suffering we cannot look anymore.
Jesus does not get to this point. Jesus sees people for who they really are and loves them. Jesus is not afraid of his own vulnerability. Jesus does not look away. That was true as he went from town to town with his friends in Galilee and today too. This is the most important thing to know in order to understand Jesus’ primary teaching.
In his Gospel, Matthew describes Jesus as the new Moses. Let me give three quick examples. 1. Just as the Pharoah killed male Hebrew infants in the book of Exodus, Herod tried to kill the new king by murdering babies in the Gospel of Matthew. 2. There are five books in the Torah. In Matthew Jesus has five main discourses. 3. Moses receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. In Matthew, Jesus gives the most important sermon of his life on the Mount. Earlier Matthew writes that many in the crowds who have come to the wilderness to see him include people who are, “sick… afflicted with various diseases and pains, people possessed by demons or having epilepsy or afflicted with paralysis, ” and presumably those who help them (Mt. 4:24).1
Jesus says, “blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who thirst and hunger for righteousness.” We call these the beatitudes and it is easy to misunderstand them. The Greek word Jesus repeats is markarios. The dictionary definition for it is, “pertaining to being happy, with the implication of enjoying favorable circumstances.”2 On social media when we see the hashtag “blessed” we expect pretty much the same things the ancient Greeks did. Blessed people are happy, rich, healthy, attractive, strong, popular, often ruthless, sometimes deceptive and aggressive. In the face of this common sense Jesus says, blessed are the poor, those who are mourning, the gentle, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace-makers, the persecuted and reviled.3
Jesus is not telling us to try to become poor in spirit or to make ourselves sad so that we can mourn. Jesus changes what it means to be blessed. Let me take a short grammatical digression. Languages have a category of expression that we call mood. It describes the speaker’s view of an event’s reality – something that is certain, wished for, possible or demanded. The indicative mood makes a statement or asks a question. For instance, “Caroline sings in the choir,” or “Is she the newest member?” The imperative demands that someone do something. For instance, “Sing us a hymn Caroline.”
In this case Jesus uses the indicative. He is describing how his hearers are, not telling them how they should be. In the world of Jesus, God’s blessing always comes first. We do not act a certain way and earn God’s love. God loves us first. This love gives us strength to not ignore our own vulnerability. Jesus does not turn away from the person
who is addicted, or shattered by suffering, or afflicted by nightmarish circumstances. Jesus looks into each person’s heart and says, “You are blessed.”
On Thursday night Augusta, one of the candidates for bishop, mentioned an essay by J.R.R. Tolkien called “On Fairy Stories.”4 The author of The Lord of the Rings analyzes the genre of writing that we call fantasy. Before his generation there were stories like those of Jules Verne that accepted the world as it is and changed one element of it (like in The Time Machine). But Tolkien and his friends gave us something new –whole imagined worlds with entirely different rules than our reality.
One of the defining features of these stories is what Tolkien calls eucatastrophe. A catastrophe is a sudden disastrous event. The Greek prefix eu means good. A eucatastrophe occurs when there seems to be no way out, no reason for hope, then, suddenly something completely good happens. Like the prince’s kiss, the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars or Harry Potter returning to life again for his last battle with evil Voldemort.
For Tolkien in the face of universal defeat, these stories, give us a “sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur.” They give us a taste of joy that presents us with, “a sudden glimpse of… underlying reality or truth. It is not only a consolation but a satisfaction” of the question of whether or not life has meaning.
Tolkien goes on to say that the Gospels, the stories of Jesus, are about a kind of eucatastrophe in history. The story of Jesus changes everything, all human history. This story begins and ends in joy – the joy Mary experienced when she learns she is pregnant with Jesus, to the joyful reunion of friends after Jesus is raised from the dead. It is the story of someone who is not afraid of his vulnerability, who can see every kind of suffering and not turn away. This is Christian joy, the gloria, the good news.
In Kingsolver’s novel the orphan Demon Copperhead longs to be adopted by a loving family. This morning through baptism, God will adopt 15 people into this, “new life of grace.” The courage and openness of Jesus will help them to, “love others in the power of the spirit,” and, “to grow into the fullness of God’s peace and glory.” This experience of Jesus, of the one who does not look away, will lead them to have “inquiring and discerning hearts,” “the courage to will and persevere,” and “the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”5 In this hard world, they will be baptized into joy.
Some people (like Robert Sapolsky) believe that we are accidents, mere biological machines determined in all our decisions by the hard realities of evolution. But Jesus
gives us another way. He shows us how to experience our life as a gift from a God who loves us even when our suffering makes us unrecognizable to anyone else.
Although I rarely surf on Sundays, a week ago just before sunset, I longed to see the ocean. I ended up paddling out at Ocean Beach into some of the best waves of the year. Distant horsetail clouds were darkening with the setting sun. Everything seemed so still along the whole coast from Point Reyes to Pedro Point and Mt. Tamalpais was an image of serenity. The warm offshore breezes formed the waves into perfect tubes and the world felt completely right. That is the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.6
Do not look away. The eucatastrophe is happening. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the pure in heart. Blessed are you, beloved and adopted by God – baptized into joy.
1 “So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, people possessed by demons or having epilepsy or afflicted with paralysis, and he cured them.” The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (RSVUE). https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%204%3A24&version=NRSVUE
2 “Marakarios,” Louw & Nida 25.119.
3 Matthew Boulton, “Blessing Comes First: SALT’s Commentary for All Saint’s Day,” SALT, 30 October 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/10/26/blessing-comes-first-salts-commentary-for-all-saints-day
4 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf
5 Baptism liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer, 299-308.
6 I don’t surf on the sabbath. The waves are best in the morning and I’m always at church then. But last Sunday was an exception. In late afternoon the winds died down and after two full days at the Cathedral I rushed out to Ocean Beach. The surf was pumping. A thousand other people showed up to look at the sunset and formed a crazy traffic jam going through the parking lot. Finally I followed another car past a line of pylons. Throwing on my wetsuit, I grabbed my board. A kind guy on the boardwalk looked right in my eyes and said, “are you late?” “Of course I am the sun is setting in an hour!” The first wave pitched me. But the next ones took me into ecstatic joy. Until I saw the lights of the tow truck right where my car had been in the parking lot.
“Those who trust in [the Lord] will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love…” (Wisdom 3).
At the Bishop’s Ranch for my first clergy retreat I remember the late afternoon heat and that September smell of dust, chaparral and Bay Tree (with a hint of campfire smoke). I knew hardly anyone there as I walked up the Ranch House driveway. The first person to greet me was sixty-eight year old David Forbes. He was fit and trim, wearing a t-shirt and short cut-off jeans. He called me by name. He knew that I had graduated from Cal, that I played rugby there and that we were the national champions.
In those days everyone confused me for Bruce O’Neill and for what seems like years David was the only senior clergy person other than the bishop who actually knew my name. David had grown up in San Francisco. He served here for years as we finished constructing this building’s four walls and as the modern cathedral came into being.
David was involved in building the back half of the Cathedral, installing the human endeavor windows in the clerestory, the East lancet windows and the rose window. He was intimately involved in choosing vestments that we still use, making this granite and redwood altar at the center of the crossing, the governance structures of the cathedral and even the design of our worship services. It was his idea to engrave on our pulpit “In the Beginning” in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
David founded the Cathedral School for Boys (1961) and St. Paul’s School in Oakland (1965), and later the National Association of Episcopal Schools. He helped me a great deal twenty years ago when our church started our own school in the South Bay. When I joined Grace Cathedral, David served as a chaplain to our staff and especially to me. The two of us would have monthly lunches on Polk Street. Sometimes we would drive around town and he would describe his childhood memories of different neighborhoods.
Although David died in April 2022, I think of him nearly every day when I bike past the restaurant where we used to talk. As we celebrate All Souls Day together we remember the people who have died but who seem almost tangibly near to us. David was the most
youthful person in his nineties who you will ever meet. He loved new beginnings. He was always oriented toward the future and cared passionately about the Cathedral.
I want to talk briefly about the message David would share with us. We served together on the board for the Cathedral School for Boys almost to his death. David was active on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion taskforce. For him the purpose of the school is to give students from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance. As a gay man and a passionate advocate for justice David would be alarmed by our national politics. He would insist that Grace Cathedral more eloquently speak out on behalf of the dignity of all LGBTQ+ people.
Today we are not just celebrating All Souls Day, we are also welcoming our three candidates (with their spouses) who will be in the election for a new bishop on December 2. You may be wondering what David would have to say more specifically in this setting. And I would be too if it were not for a surprise gift I received.
A month ago the Postal Service delivered to my office an old weathered manila envelope with David’s handwriting on the outside. David didn’t use notes when he preached, but this folder contained five typewritten manuscripts for sermons preached at Grace Cathedral in the 1950’s. It also included a stole that his daughter said was given to him by his parents at his ordination here at Grace Cathedral.
The first sentence of his sermon on February 2nd 1958 begins with these words. “Churchmen throughout our Diocese will all testify, I believe, that the topic of the moment is the coming election of the Bishop, who… will succeed Bishop Block.”1 The whole sermon is about the 1958 bishop election! Let me share with you three things I especially noticed.
First, the sermon addresses a pervasive sense of worry in the Diocese. Up until that point there had only been four diocesan bishops in the history of the whole diocese. In previous cases the new bishop had for all practical purposes been chosen before the balloting. To make matters worse the newspapers were carrying quotes from different candidates. David uses words like perplexity, confusion, disillusionment, smear, inuendo. And phrases like, “battle royale,” and, “less than Christian tactics.” Reading the sermon made me feel so grateful for the civility and graciousness that I have been experiencing through our process.
Second, the sermon points out just what high expectations we have for bishops. A bishop must have the “purest and noblest motives” and spend much time in prayer. The bishop should have the tongue of Chrysostom to stir people to action. The bishop
should have color and personality to show the relevance and power of the gospel. This person should have breadth of vision to solve vexing problems and be a capable administrator in managing a “financial empire.” David points out that of course the clergy above all want a sympathetic and discerning pastor. In my experience I do not think this has changed. We still want to be seen for who we are and helped when we feel defeated.
Finally, after considering who we are looking for, David asks us to look at ourselves, that is the ones who are doing the looking. He reminds us that we are fallible and sinful people, that we are liable to error and then to persist in it. The church forgives us from sin but cannot completely stop us from sinning. For this reason we have to depend on the Holy Spirit.
“Those who trust in [the Lord] will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love…” (Wisdom 3). On this day when we remember friends and family members who we love and who have died, I pray that their words will come easily to you, if not by postal service as in my case, then through the theater of your memory. I pray that they will feel so tangibly near that you will hear them call you by name.
No one knows for sure what happens when you die. But when I think of seeing David again I always imagine the two of us greeting each other at the Ranch House, walking down the grape arbor to the swimming pool on a warm fall day. There is so much that I would want to share with him. His childlike embrace of new beginnings would make him love what we are doing today. He would want to know all about our candidates for bishop and the upcoming election. He would laugh at how much and how little has changed.
David finishes that sermon from 1958 with these words, “God does have a purpose for this diocese. It is a simple one, although its execution is not so easy. The purpose is to have us grow in zeal and effectiveness, witness powerfully to the love of God for all [people]… Yes, God is with us now and will be with us at Convention… let us ask that He guide us to a knowledge of His will and that he give us the courage to stand for it. May God grant us wisdom and understanding, faithfulness and charity.”
1 David Forbes, “Sermon Preached in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, February 2, 1958 (Prior to the Election of the Bishop Coadjutor).”
“Lord you have been our refuge from one generation to another” (Ps. 90).
1. Where is God hidden? Beth and Jonathan Singer, the senior rabbis at Temple Emmanuel feel like big siblings to me. This is the ninth year we have been friends and I admire them very much. On Thursday for lunch they convened a group of 13 religious leaders (half Jewish and half not Jewish) to talk about the recent violence in the Middle East. They opened the conversation by sharing their deep concern for the people who live in Gaza, and their support for a two state solution to the diplomatic crisis.
They also talked about the terrible pain they are feeling, about friends with family members who are being held hostage in tunnels under the ground. I heard about many funerals, some for young people. Beth said that she hoped that in our meeting together we would really speak from the heart, even if this lead us into uncomfortable places.
All the Jewish leaders spoke, then most of the others except me. Jonathan said, “what do you have to say Malcolm?” Frankly I did not want to say anything. I have never been to the Middle East and did not feel I had much to add. It is difficult to talk about how horrifying and inhumane the terrorist attacks by Hamas are and yet at the same time to recognize that the situation for ordinary people in Gaza seems impossible. I told them that our community is connected to Jewish people and Palestinians too, that every day we pray for peace, that we long for peace.
This seemed to understandably upset one of the other rabbis who I don’t know as well. She said that peace is not enough. After the terrible violence, after the innocent people who have been murdered, something has to be done immediately to make things right. I think all of us felt the tension, the trauma, anger and despair, as she emphatically said that prayers are not enough. We say that here too – when we talk about the epidemic of gun violence in America.
It felt like we had moved far away from the Hebrew prayer of blessing before the meal. God is not just hidden in violence and inhumanity. God can seem hidden to us in our personal pain and fear, and in our humiliation when we have said the wrong thing.
2. God also seems hidden during the last days of Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple. Jesus rides in a palm procession through adoring crowds. He goes directly to the temple. He overturns the tables of the money changers. He heals the blind and the lame. But most of all he teaches. The religious leaders fear his popularity and are afraid to arrest him so instead they plot to trap him in his own words.
God is hidden here. The leaders come in bad faith, not to ask a real question about God. They begin with flattery calling Jesus “teacher” and in their first sentence they use two different versions of the word truth (alētheia in Greek) as they describe Jesus to himself. What we translate in English as being impartial is more literally in Greek, “for you do not see the face of a person.” In other words Jesus treats every person equally as if he did not even know who they were. The philosopher John Rawls uses this idea in his book A Theory of Justice to imagine a society that is fair to everyone with the phrase, “people in the original position”).1
Pointedly the Pharisees who vigorously oppose the Roman occupation have brought with them some Herodians. These are the supporters of King Herod’s son (Herod Antipas) the puppet leader and collaborator with the Roman army. They ask, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not.” If Jesus says it is lawful, the Pharisees and the crowds will hate him. If he says that paying taxes is against God’s law, then the Herodians will charge him with sedition.
Jesus understands that in this moment God is hidden. He recognizes the trap. “Why are you putting me to the test you hypocrites? Show me the coin…” (Mt. 22). The coin, a denarius, would have featured an image (or in Greek an “eikōn”) of the emperor and an inscription which would have read “Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus, Augustus.”2
Interpreters point out that Jesus does not have a coin himself. When the religious leaders produce a coin in the temple, it is a kind of sacrilege. They are violating the first two of the Ten Commandments: 1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, and, 2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. They hand Jesus the symbol of an entire empire built on slave labor and the extraction of unjust taxes.3
In this moment religious leaders collaborating with a brutal empire, attack a loving and righteous man. When God seems so hidden, Jesus helps us to really see who God is. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This does not divide the world into sacred and secular realms. The image on the coin is Caesar’s. But the image, “the eikon” on every single person is God’s. Our whole lives should be given to God.
And they are when we participate in God’s mission, when we oppose cruelty, unfairness and greed, when we give ourselves wholly to love, justice and mercy. This happens when we honor and respect each other, not when we ask cynical questions that entrap others. It happens when we listen with real curiosity and the compassion that leads us to see God present in another person.
3. Every time we fail to recognize the dignity of another, we miss the chance to see God. But there are other ways that God is hidden from us. This week, for the second time on the Forum I will be interviewing the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. What I love so much about him is how hard he is trying to see the inherent dignity in every person and how he helps us to see this holiness too.
Like the Puritan John Calvin (1509-1564), or the Jewish theologian, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Sapolsky believes that there is no free will. Everything that happens was determined by what happened before. For me this is more of a theological/philosophical belief. It certainly cannot be established by scientific reasoning. For Sapolsky this view is liberating because it means we cannot judge anyone for anything they have done (or be judged for that matter).
And yet at the same time he believes that, “the science… ultimately teaches that there is no meaning… There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe…,” that we are “biological machines.”4 Sapolsky believes that there is no rational reason to take care of these biological entities which we call human beings. But every atom in him seems to rebel against this conclusion. He may not put it this way but he longs to inhabit a universe of love.
The theologian Katherine Sonderegger writes about the importance of Moses seeing God. God is hidden from us because as it says in the Hebrew Bible, God is one. God is so utterly singular, so impossible to compare to anything else that God remains hidden. God decides to show us himself, but in his own way, beyond our control. Sonderegger deeply values humility. God is humble and finds us when we are humble too.
We inhabit a world of methodological atheism. It is not acceptable to appeal to God in scientific reasoning. And yet if we think scientific knowing is the only kind of wisdom we miss something of fundamental importance. We become strangers to the One who should be most intimate to us.
Sonderegger writes, “God’s mystery is not marked out by a realm that lies beyond our knowing… beyond the finite limits of our intellect. Rather God is Real in our encounter with Him, and in just this way is exceeding Mystery, superabundant light.”5
The twentieth century monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) addresses God when he writes, “How shall we begin to know who You are if we do not begin ourselves to be something of what You are?” He goes on, “We receive enlightenment only in proportion as we give ourselves more and more completely to God by humble submission and love. We do not first see, then act: we act, then see… And that is why the man who waits to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.”6
Where is God hidden? In the places where we fail to see each other. I’m grateful for my interfaith colleagues. I came away from our meeting filled with joy that we are all struggling to teach the way of love during this time of division. For homework this week seek out someone who disagrees with you – not to change their mind but to see how they are doing and to be with them.
The poet Denise Levertov’s (1923-1997) father was an Anglican priest and at the age of sixty she became a Christian. Let’s close with her poem, “Flickering Mind.”
“Lord, not you, / it is I who am absent. / At first / belief was a joy I kept in secret, / stealing alone / into sacred places: / a quick glance, and away – and back, / circling. / I have long since uttered your name / but now / I elude your presence. / I stop / to think about you, and my mind / at once / darts away, / darts / into the shadows, into gleams that fret / unceasingly over / the river’s purling and passing. / Not for one second / will my self hold still, but wanders / anywhere, / everywhere it can turn. Not you, / it is I am absent.”
“You are the stream, the fish, the light, / the pulsing shadow, / you the unchanging presence in whom all / moves and changes. / How can I focus my flickering, perceive / at the fountain’s heart / the sapphire I know is there?”7
God is not absent and we are not yet fully present. May we listen with curiosity and compassion. May we see the icon of God in every person we encounter. May the humility, truth and surrender of Jesus draw us into the superabundant light of Divinity.
1 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971).
2 Matthew Boulton, “Coin Flip: SALT’s Commentary for the Twenty-First Sunday of Pentecost,” SALT, 16 October 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/10/12/jesus-and-the-2020-election-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twentieth-week-after-pentecost
3 Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury, 2017) 230.
4 Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will (NY: Penguin Press, 2023) 386.
5 Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume One, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015) 42.
6 Thomas Merton cited in, Martha Greene, “Speak Up, God: Exodus 33:12-23,” The Christian Century, 25 September 2002. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2002-09/speak-god?code=CQoPMrN8SZFu5XhV0V0g&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=01731e7e94-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2023-10-16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-31c915c0b7-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
7 Denise Levertov, The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (NY: New Directions, 2013).
“Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3).
1. What Jesus will we believe in? I need to warn you ahead of time that we will struggle with some difficult ideas. Today we will talk about an old pop song, the thought of the Stanford philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) and the enigmatic gospel message in the parable of the tenant farmers.
Fifty-two years ago today, during the Vietnam War, the former Beatle John Lennon released his second solo album Imagine. The title track was the best-selling song of his solo career. He sings, “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man.” Many regarded it as anti-religious (it has the line “imagine… no religion too”).1 But John Lennon insistently objected to this criticism. In fact, he said that someone had given Yoko Ono and him a prayer book and that this inspired him to write the song as a kind of “positive prayer.”
John Lennon said, “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion – not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing – then it can be true.”2 Today as a new war erupts in the Middle East we are talking about how this kind of peace can be true.
What would happen if instead of seeing human flourishing as the result of producing ever more consumer goods, our goal became true peace among all people and creatures of the earth? How would we even do this? The twentieth century French thinker Simone Weil suggests that, “the Gospels are a theory of humankind even before they are a theory of God.”3 This philosophy of humanity has its root in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Let me begin with Richard Compean’s old joke. Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments and the people of Israel ask how it went. Moses says, well the good news is that I got Him down to only ten commandments. The bad news is that adultery is still on the list.
The joke expresses a popular way of understanding the Ten Commandments as if they are a kind of burden, a restriction of our freedom and autonomy, as if God were trying to stop us from having fun. My friend Matt Boulton says that instead these are not arbitrary prohibitions but, “loving limits that guide us toward justice, grace and dignity.”4 Through the law Israel’s relation to God becomes tangible. It makes ethical behavior a kind of calling.
2. The twentieth century Stanford philosophy professor René Girard also regards the Ten Commandments as a central statement about the truth of human life. As complicated beings so much happens in our subconscious and we do not fully understand ourselves. We do not know what we want so we look at what others desire and then imitate them. He calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire.
I was thinking about this at yoga yesterday. I love the beauty of so many different bodies doing the same thing at once. The instructor says, “keeping your right foot back, move your left foot to the top of the mat, put your left hand inside your left ankle, extending your right hand, rotate your trunk toward the right.” Naturally enough we all look at each other to see if we are doing it right.
Girard says our desire is like this. We learn from others. But he points out that desire through imitation frequently leads to violence. Conflict arises from rivalry, from wanting what other people have. In contrast to ancient myths which justify sacrifice and view the world from the standpoint of the crowd, the Bible helps reveal this uncomfortable truth about human nature. It shows us the world from the perspective of the victim. This “concern for the victim becomes the absolute value in all societies molded… by the spread of Christianity.”5
This is where the Ten Commandments come in. According to René Girard these are more than just a guide to living a holy life. They are entirely devoted to one ideal – prohibiting violence against our neighbor. You shall not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness. He says that the tenth commandment (“you shall not covet”) is the most important of all. It is also the most unique. All the other commandments come down to this one. Instead of prohibiting an action, “it forbids a desire.”6 You shall not desire the house of your neighbor, the wife of your neighbor… nor anything else that belongs to him.
Because human beings are naturally inclined to want what another person has, there is an inherent instability in all human groups and families. If left unchecked this rivalry would permanently endanger the survival of all human communities.
Girard points out that this view is in opposition to the one assumed by the social sciences. The social sciences most often regard peace and mental health as normal and conflict as something accidental. Girard believes that conflict is the normal state. And that at every level when a human society struggles with scarcity or tension there is a tendency to resolve this stress by scapegoating individuals and groups. We feel better when we solve our problems by blaming someone else. This is a deep part of who we are as human beings.
Jesus offers us a different possibility. Rather than merely shifting the power so that a different group subjugates the others, God becomes the victim. The kingdom of God strives to create a community in which no one is de-humanized or left out. One notable thing about Jesus is that he does not seem to be in the business of prohibition, of “thou shalt nots.” Instead he cares about offering a model for us to imitate. He promises that we can be like him – in our relation to each other and to God.
Jesus’ teaching and the way he lives focuses on God’s plan to establish a community of love and joy, the kingdom of God, which overturns our ordinary imitated desires for power, prestige and possessions.
3. Huge crowds greet Jesus as he comes to Jerusalem for the last time. Teaching in the Temple, the religious authorities feel threatened by Jesus’ popularity. Because of the crowds they are afraid to directly confront him. As human beings we are hard to reach. When we are confronted by our shortcomings almost all of us have a tendency to make excuses or respond defensively. For this reason Jesus uses the same rhetorical strategy that the priest Nathan did when he confronted King David.
David had had an affair with Beersheba, the wife of one of his soldiers. He then arranged for the man’s death in battle at the front. Later Nathan told David the story of a poor man who only had one little lamb that he loved as a member of his family. A rich man with many flocks took and slaughtered his neighbor’s lamb. Hearing the story the King exclaims that this rich man deserves to die! And Nathan points out, “you are that man.”
Jesus refers to Isaiah 5 in which the house of Israel is a vineyard that God planted but which bears no fruit. In Jesus’ story similarly the owner plants the vineyard, puts in a fence, digs a wine press, builds a tower. A few years later at the time of the first harvest he sends his slaves to collect the rent. They beat one, kill another and stone the last to death. He sends even more slaves with the same result. The New Testament scholar Herman Waetjen regards these as symbolic of the former and latter prophets.7
Then the owner says surely they will respect my son. But they covet his inheritance and in their greed they cast him out of the vineyard and murder him. Uncharacteristically rather than explaining, Jesus asks the religious leaders what they think the vineyard owner will do. And as is the case with Nathan and David, their answer is a judgment on themselves. “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time” (Mt. 21).
The irony is that Jesus tells a story about greed-based violence and the religious leaders hate the story so much that they respond with the same kind of violence. They are the ones that say God will ruthlessly punish his enemies. But in Jesus’ story, God keeps sending more servants until he sends even his son. For the temple leaders either we subjugate our enemies or they do the same to us. But in Jesus’ story God’s longing for us never ceases and always finds a new way to bring peace and reconciliation. Human beings deny, torment and kill God’s child and yet in the end God forgives them.
What Jesus will we believe in? The my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God who only loves our tribe and promises that we will just replace our enemies at the top of the pyramid? Or will we trust in the surprising reversal of the crucified god who dies so that all people might be free and live in peace?
When we look around at the world we should not be surprised by conflict at all levels from the family to nations. It arises out of a desire for what other people have. We should also expect the normal human response which is to try to reduce tension by scapegoating an individual or group. The Bible reveals this truth about the world and helps us to see it from the perspective of a victim.
Jesus offers the promise of another way. By imitating him we become free of the desires that ruin us. We become part of and help to create a community of love and joy. Wherever we go God we bring the freedom of love and share the good news that no one is beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness.
These days I keep thinking of that utterly idealistic song by John Lennon, of him imagining “no possessions” and singing “You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one / I hope someday you will join us / And the world will live as one.” Through God may this become true.
1 John Lennon, Lyrics to “Imagine.” Performed by John Lennon, Ascot Sound Studios, 1971.
2 Matthew Boulton, “The Theologian’s Almanac for the Week of October 8,” SALT, 2 October 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2023/10/2/theologians-almanac-for-week-of-october-8-2023
3 René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning tr. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001) 182.
4 Matthew Boulton, “Amazing Grace: SALT’s Commentary for the Nineteenth Week after Pentecost,” SALT, 2 October 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/9/29/amazing-grace-salts-lectionary-commentary-eighteenth-week-after-pentecost
5 James G. Williams, “Forward,” in René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning tr. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001) xix.
6 René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning tr. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001) 7.
7 Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury, 2017) 224.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus… for it is God who is at work in you” (Phil. 2).
How do you listen to your soul? How can you hear God’s invitation to change your mind? Brené Brown writes about the difference between fitting in and belonging. All of us know what it means to fit in, to try to change essential parts of ourselves so that we will be accepted by others.
Belonging refers to a very different experience. It means learning to “be present with people without sacrificing who we are.”[1] It requires vulnerability and it happens in those rare places where we can really be who we are without pretending. It’s one of our highest ideals at Grace Cathedral. Regardless of where we came from, what we may have done in the past, or whatever we believe now, we belong here.
Last Sunday the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hōkūle’a, arrived at Aquatic Park in San Francisco after a dangerous journey. In the overflowing amphitheater we saw musicians and dancers; we heard prayers and proclamations from Native peoples from across the vast Pacific Ocean. I wish I could express the feeling of joy and celebration that we all shared together.
People describe Nainoa Thompson, the president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society as a Native Hawaiian master navigator but far more importantly he is one of the most significant storytellers of our time. On Tuesday night he talked about the world he was born into. In 1926 the Hawaiian culture and language were outlawed. By the 1970’s there were fewer than one hundred people who could speak Hawaiian fluently and they were mostly advanced in age.
Hawaiians had lost so much – their land, sovereignty, language, religion, culture, music, art and even sports and pastimes. It no longer felt like they belonged in their own homeland. In 1948 the Norwegian writer Thor Heyerdahl published a book called The Kontiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas. For many Hawaiians the book’s unspoken thesis was that Pacific Islanders could never have had the skill to build canoes and navigate them at will through the Pacific, but instead only arrived in Hawaii by luck on giant rafts setting out from South America.
And so in the 1970’s a group of Hawaiians sought out the last remaining navigators (Mau Pialug) and re-learned the practices of their ancestors. They built the Hōkūle’a and in 1976 they successfully traveled to Tahiti. They were utterly surprised when 17,000 people met them on their arrival in Papeete. The mood was ecstatic. The world began to see how they belonged.
But then came the fateful voyage of 1978. Unprotected in a massive storm, stacking waves overturned the canoe. One of the hulls had filled water and the entire crew sat on the remaining upturned hull at midnight getting periodically washed off by waves barely able to hear the next person over because the winds.
The legendary lifeguard Eddie Aikau began to paddle his surfboard for help into the white water of the gale. Nainoa swam over and was the last person ever to speak to him. Later the rest of the crew was miraculously rescued. Back onshore Nainoa witnessed the terrible grief of Eddie’s parents. He heard Eddie’s mother wailing. After all hope was lost he saw Eddie’s father implore everyone to call off the search for his son. For a while fear overtook him and Nainoa lost faith in his calling.
In the most pivotal moment of his life Nainoa’s father came to meet with him. They talked about values, about supporting the community and most of all about the destination – not of a particular voyage, or even of his own life, but of the Hawaiian people. Nainoa had to ask himself if he was ready to be changed.
2. When the religious authorities fault Jesus for befriending tax collectors and prostitutes, he tells the story of a father who independently asks each of his two sons to work in the vineyard. The first says no, but changes his mind later and works. The second says, yes but does not follow through. The strict answer is that neither fully did the will of his father (that would have been to say yes and go). But the one who comes closest is the one who actually does the work. And for Jesus that means the sinners will enter heaven before religious leaders.
We may be familiar with the Greek word metanoia which means changing one’s mind and is frequently translated as repentance. But this is different. The word here is metamelomai. More literally it means to change one’s “cares,” to change what we consider important. It implies a kind of regret or remorse. Jesus says that obvious sinners have this in a way that the religious leaders do not. Understanding how we have fallen short makes us more willing to change our minds.
Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Francis. Living off the riches of his father Francis had a reputation as spoiled but also for putting on great parties. For a while he tried to be a soldier. A serious illnesses in his early twenties made him wonder if he had to change. He dragged his feet, but then began spending time in the ruined church of San Damiano. One day he heard a voice coming from the cross. It said, “Go hence, now, Francis, and build my church, for it is nearly falling down.” He took this instruction literally and within two years had rebuilt three churches that had been falling apart.
Francis cared for impoverished people and became poor himself. He founded a movement of monks. He wrote songs. He attained notoriety for preaching to birds and to human beings. Some say that in the eight centuries since his death no one has more closely approximated the ideal that Jesus teaches.
The twentieth century writer G.K. Chesterton writes that one could never anticipate what Francis would do next. But once Francis did something, all you could say was, “Ah, how like him!” Brother Masseo once approached Francis and asked why the world followed him so ardently, when he didn’t seem especially smart, beautiful or wealthy. A friend of mine thinks it is because that while Francis chose, “a life of intense and prayerful austerity,” unlike many other saints he made being a child of God seem fun.[2] He said, “rejoice always,” both in words and how he lived.[3]
The most famous prayer attributed to Francis is “Oh Lord let me be an instrument of thy will.” Francis lived by emptying himself out so that God could be a continually growing part of his life. Francis told Masseo that God had chosen him precisely because he was the greatest sinner and that this reminded everyone that all good comes only from God.[4] Emptying out his ego Francis saw a world filled with God. All people, all animals and birds, even the sun, moon, water and fire became his family. When we empty ourselves of ego nothing lies outside of the spiritual life.
So today we remember and celebrate this remarkable figure by blessing the animals we love. Over the years I have blessed dogs, cats, turtles, geese, chickens, lizards, gerbils, hamsters, mice, etc. We will also pray for the wild animals around us: the pelicans, coyotes, whales, seals, dolphins, sea lions, salmon, hammer-head sharks, red-tailed hawks, racoons, squirrels, and butterflies too.
It is a wonderful to live in a city dedicated to a person who we remember by trying to be particularly kind to animals, by in our awkward way blessing them and recognizing all the ways that they bless us. In our lifetime an uncountable number of species will be lost forever because of human activity. I have a dream that one day we will truly care for the other creatures and learn to better understand them.
Nainoa says that all storms come in pairs. When the storm hits, take your place at the helm and face into it. Be humble, pay respect, and stay with it. The second storm is the one inside of us. It is the storm of emotions. In that storm when we are tempted by hopelessness we can choose the way of faith. With God’s grace we can decide to be courageous. That is what Nainoa Thompson did.
By the end of the 1960’s after generations of being forced to fit in, a Hawaiian Renaissance in politics, art and culture began to truly unfold. We see many signs of its success. Today there are 22,500 fluent speakers of the Hawaiian language. The Hōkūle’a has been an indispensable part of an extraordinary transformation.
In the beginning I imagine Nainoa may have thought he was just building a canoe, but really what he was doing was building up a culture, a people, a promise that we can all belong. And this has grown into something even more powerful. Today the Hōkūle’a sails to unify all native peoples and to share a message, that human beings will never thrive unless the oceans do too.
How do you listen to your soul? How can you hear God’s invitation to change your mind? Nainoa Thompson and St. Francis were open to being changed by God. They learned to be humble. They dared to imagine a future when all species will be valued and preserved. May each of us conquer our ego and become an instrument of God. May we belong and our life be a blessing to the whole family of God’s creatures.
[1] Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart (NY: Random House, 2021) 159.
[2] I’m referring to Carol Flinders who wrote this in her introduction to Francis. Eknath Easwaran, Love Never Faileth: The Inspiration of Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, Saint Paul, and Mother Theresa (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1984) 16, 13.
[3] A rich nobleman named Bernard of Quintavalle invited Francis over to test him. The rich man fed him, and even set up a bed in his own room to carefully observe him. Francis threw himself on the bed and pretended to sleep until he believed that the nobleman had fallen asleep. Then Francis stayed up all night, praying, crying and saying “My God and my all!”
One night Francis heard a brother cry out in his sleep, “Brothers! I die of hunger.” Francis got everyone up and he gathered them around the table and fed them. He had compassion on people who were stumbling.
Ibid., 23-24.
[4] Ibid., 17, 16.
“For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near” (Rom. 13).
Matthew uses the Greek word for church (“ekklesia”) in only two places. One of them occurs in our gospel reading today. He concludes this passage about Christian community with one of my favorite lines in the Bible. Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18).
To most people in our culture this is not intuitively obvious. Outside the church, people describe faith as a private matter. It is something that happens to you by yourself on a mountaintop in the Sierras or alone on a tropical beach or woodland lake. Jesus tells the disciples that life in Christ happens in community even if it is only a community of two.
Perhaps this is his way of saying we need each other, not just practically, but spiritually also. He knows that we’ll be smarter and stronger together than apart, that only together will we have a chance to accomplish something great. He reminds us that we need each other the way brothers and sisters do. We, as Jesus’ disciples, belong to one family.[1]
Last month our adult children moved back home. It’s been so wonderful to have them with us. It reminds me that families work well they become God’s way of teaching us important lessons, like how to share and cooperate. We learn how to take care of someone else who may need something very different than we do. Family life smooths out the rough edges of our character. We learn that we can’t always have everything our own way. We give up what we want so someone else can have what they want.
Living with others teaches us to negotiate and compromise, to figure out together what’s best for the group. While this is not always pleasant, I believe it is a way that we become more fully human. It can take a long time to learn what your family has to teach you. Fortunately families don’t just teach us how to fight but how to forgive each other too.[2]
But not everyone grew up in families that worked well, because some don’t. These families do not teach forgiveness and cooperation. Often in them rules are more important than people and the first rule is silence about anything that might make waves. They say, “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything.” Some families use this rule to enforce a kind of fake harmony. They use it to mean that if you have a problem with someone, you keep it to yourself, because the illusion of getting along is more important than anything else. This illusion is more important than the truth, more important than your feelings and even more important than you.
It is sad, but many families teach this lesson. Jesus’ point this morning is that the Christian family does not work like this. Jesus says that if your brother sins against you, you have to go back and talk to him. If this doesn’t work, you must keep going to him with others and do everything that you can to be his brother again.
Two things stand out about this advice. First, Jesus puts the burden of reconciliation on the victim, the person who was sinned against. This is not advice that holds in extreme situations, such as ones involving abuse. But for more ordinary interactions with each other Jesus wants us to cultivate an openness to the other person.
Second, he seems less interested in who was right than in getting the family back together again. What seems to matter most to him is that as members of his family we listen to each other. If a family member refuses to listen we do everything we can to keep the doors of communication open. Jesus insists that we do not simply pretend that nothing has happened. He wants us to recognize when someone has left our family, because the only thing worse than losing a sister or brother, is losing that person and yet still having them around.
We all can see the wisdom of this advice. In theory we know we should do this, but in practice we think of a thousand excuses not to. So let’s imagine what it would be like to really follow Jesus this way. So much of my sermon today comes from the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor. I could use material from our life together as an example but I don’t want to embarrass anyone so I have modified Taylor’s story to suit our situation.
Imagine sitting in church every week and getting to know the person next to you. Let’s say his name is Duke and the two of you also share an interest in surfing. One September morning Duke asks to borrow your surfboard. You won’t be using it and it feels good to lend a Christian brother something that gives you both so much joy. The next week the waves are up and you want it back. Duke doesn’t return your calls. Finally you get through to him and he tells you that he lent the surfboard to someone else. That person damaged the board. It’s not just a little ding. He tells you that it was bad luck but your board broke in half.[3]
This doesn’t seem fair to you so you go over and talk to him. You say that because you are friends you’d be willing to pay half the cost of a new board. Duke gets angry and tells you that it wasn’t his fault, that the other guy broke the board and that you should be a better sport about it.
So you go back home and choose two fellow congregants at random and go back. This time Duke is really mad. He accuses you of ganging up on him and embarrassing him in front of others. He yells at you to get off his property before he calls the police.
Imagine sending out an email to everyone at the Cathedral asking them to meet in front of Duke’s house on Saturday afternoon. Since you know he won’t open the door you make signs that say, “Forget the surfboard, Duke” or “Let’s talk.” On Saturday everyone is there and the house is locked up tightly. You see the drapes pull back just a little to one side. You know Duke is watching so you smile and wave for him to come out. Ten minutes later Duke sheepishly comes out of the house and hands you a check for the broken board.
I know what you’re thinking. “I sure am sick of stories about surfing.” Perhaps even more likely you are saying to yourself, “that wouldn’t work.” But my point is how do you know? Have you ever tried something like this? Usually when I feel wronged by someone my strategy differs substantially from what Jesus suggests. The first thing I want to do is to pretend like nothing happened. Forget that old surfboard. Just let it go; don’t be upset. The awkwardness that I feel around Duke is better than a fight. I try to ignore it even though I can’t.
The second strategy is the cold shoulder. You don’t tell the person what is bothering you because that would be impolite, but you show it by treating them as if they weren’t there. It doesn’t occur to you to ask them what happened between the two of you because you assume that you already know.
The third strategy is revenge. Most of us wouldn’t quite call it that because we’re Christians, but it amounts to pretty much the same thing. We have such bad feelings in our heart that we do our best to turn other people against the one who hurt us. We tell jokes at their expense hoping that it will make us feel better.
In C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce he describes hell as a vast abandoned city, a kind of sprawl. The people have intractable conflicts with each other and simply move further away from the center so that they can be on their own. Lewis says that hell keeps growing larger and larger because everyone consistently chooses distance over confrontation.[4]
Jesus instructs us to do the opposite of this, to choose closeness even though it means confrontation. We have a thousand excuses to avoid confrontation. We say, “she’s the one who did something wrong, let her come to me,” or, “it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.” And so things never change.
These excuses are fine if you want to stay alone in your suburban hell, but they are not acceptable for those of us who are called to be in a Christian community. For Christians there is something more important than being right or wrong, and that is being a family together. Our real problem is not the wrong that someone has done to us, but our own desperate desire to defend ourselves at any cost. It is how quickly we will give up on relationships in order to nurture our own wounded pride.
The good news is that we do not have to inhabit an ever-expanding hell by avoiding conflict. Jesus says we can go to people who have hurt us and tell them what is wrong or even better what we think is wrong, because the best way to end a fight is to admit that we might have been wrong. We can ask ourselves if we really know what happened, where we got our information. We can think about our own motives in confronting the other person, whether we are doing it to hurt their feelings or to make peace. We can ask what it is that we are afraid of, whether the relationship is worth it.
Perhaps this last question is the most important one. Once you’ve decided that the relationship is what you want, you’ve taken the first step to realizing that your goal is not to win an argument but to be reconciled. At that point it is time to set the lunch date, make the phone call or write the note that is the first step toward having your brother or sister back. For homework this week, whether you are online or here in person, take this step to seek reconciliation or to build a new relationship.
It is not easy to be part of a family. In many ways it would be so much simpler if we were just a bunch of people here every Sunday each having an individual experience of God in the same church building. But a private relationship with God is not what Jesus intends for us. Our life together, through thick and thin is the primary way that God chooses to be with us, not only to smooth off the rough edges of our characters, but because we need to be loved and cared for by other people. God saves us through each other. How we choose to be reconciled with each other affects how we can be reconciled with God.
This seems like a hard teaching. When someone sins against us, Jesus wants us to be the first one to reach out for reconciliation even when we’ve done nothing wrong, even when we want to fight back, or seek cover.
The theologian Karl Barth writes that, “[The one] who loves is [the one] who has been touched by the freedom of God.”[5] This freedom, this joy is what Jesus wants us to have. So we are called to confront, to persevere and heal, to forgive and seek forgiveness – to throw a party in the center of hell and fill it with such music and laughter, with such love and affection, that all of its residents come in from their distant retreats to see for themselves this joy that we share as a family.[6]
[1] This entire sermon is so heavily indebted to Barbara Brown Taylor. It follows her outline and borrows her ideas and even illustrations. I’ve tried to use my own language but at times I can’t help but borrow even the words she uses to describe this experience. The sermon is Barbara Brown Taylor, “Family Fights” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 83-90.
[2] Since early childhood my brother has always been such a gentle soul. Perhaps most of our fights arose out of my tendency to always tell him what to do. I thought this would help him be better than he was. This may not have been so bad when he was younger, but starting in middle school he simply didn’t want to hear it any more. It has only been as an adult that I finally (but not perfectly) learned to stop doing this.
[3] “Week after week you sit in a pew next to Joe, whom you get to know rather well, so well that one day in early September he asks if he can borrow you lawn mower…” Ibid., 86
[4] “”Was there once a much larger population?” “Not at all… The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbor. Before the week’s over he’s quarreled so badly that he decides to move. Very like he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarreled with their neighbors – and moved. So he settles in. If by any chance the street is full, he goes further. But even if he stays, it makes no odds. He’s sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he’ll move on again. Finally he’ll move right out to the edge of town and build a new house… That’s how the town keeps growing.” C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (NY: Macmillan, 1946) 18-19.
[5] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th Edition tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975) 498.
[6] “When someone crosses us we are called to be the first to reach out, even when we are the ones who have been hurt, even when God knows we have done nothing wrong… That is what we are called to do: to confront and make up, to forgive and seek forgiveness, to heal and be healed – to throw a block party smack in the deserted center of hell and fill the place with such music and laughter, such merriment and mutual affection that all the far-flung residents come creeping in from their distant outposts to see what the fuss, the light, the joy is all about.” Barbara Brown Taylor, “Family Fights” in The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 89-90.
“Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer” (Rom. 12).
1. Where is God to be found? About a hundred years ago, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote these words, “I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all / my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small / and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. // The wondrous game that power plays with Things / is to move in such submission through the world: / groping in roots and growing thick in trunks / and in treeptops like a rising from the dead.”[1]
Yesterday I came across an old journal from October 2000, when our son was one year old. I wrote, “Micah is drinking bathwater now. He downs it like a pot-belly’d Monday night football fan at the local tavern, stands up and then coughs.” I go on to describe finding him under the microwave eating through a plastic bag of russet potatoes (and one eighth of a potato). A page later, he had learned to climb by pushing his chair against the couch and walking along the back of it tightrope style.[2]
It was a pleasure to have these moments brought back to me. God seemed so present in those days of discovery, for me as a new parent, and for Micah as a new human being. James Finley offers a vision for what he calls a “contemplative way of life,” a form of existence that recognizes God as our true center. Contemplation means really looking and paying close attention. Perhaps I had more of a chance to do this when I took care of small children.[3]
Most of what we experience we notice only in passing as we are on our way to something else. But every so often, we find a reason to pause. Something catches our eye. Then suddenly, we find ourselves immersed in a deeper reality. We really encounter what is in front of us: a field of spring Presidio wildflowers, the billions of worlds in the summer night sky, the seemingly infinite calm dark September waters off Point Bonita, the unexpected sound of a cricket in our city, or the joy of children playing.
Although these are absolutely ordinary phenomena, in each case, something has broken us out of the web of worries and judgments that usually dominate our inner lives. These moments of openness almost seem to come before thought. Suddenly we become conscious, in Finley’s words that, “we are the cosmic dance of God.” The fullness of being completely in God surprises us.
We might find ourselves wondering, what do I do now? Often nothing. Our cell phone summons us or a new version of an old worry occurs to us. But when we look back on times like these, we know that they felt like a kind of homecoming, like we belong there. Finley says that, “[W]hen you start understanding your life in light of these moments, you realize this feeling that you’re skimming over the surface of the depths of your own life. It’s all the more unfortunate because God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we are skimming.”[4]
In our disappointment, “[W]e say to ourselves, “I don’t like living this way.””[5] I don’t want to be separated from the place where I most experience God’s love. I want to abide with God always.
2. Moses lived in an untenable political situation. The Pharaoh had ordered his people to murder all male children of the Hebrews. Moses’ parents abandoned him in a basket of reeds. The royal princess found him and raised him as her child. When Moses saw his people being brutalized he murdered a man and had to escape as a refugee. While tending his father-in-law’s sheep, a sight caught Moses’ attention.
An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a bush that was blazing and yet not consumed (Ex. 3). Moses said to himself, ”I must turn aside and look at this great sight” (Ex. 3). God describes a plan of liberation for the Israelites. Moses comically comes up with five excuses for why he thinks God has chosen the wrong person.
God reassures him, “I will be with you.” You will have what you need when you go to Pharoah. This is not enough for Moses. Finally Moses says, what if the Israelites ask your name. And God replies, tell them “I AM has sent me to you” (Ex. 3). Some interpreters suggest this is some kind of humor or a clever way that God avoids the question.
But for me this refers to that experience I described earlier, when our ego drops away and we are united to our creator. It is the gratitude we feel for just being alive and to the one who brought us forth out of nothing. Where is God to be found? In the “I,” the “I AM,” beyond thought, deep within both our self and the world.
3. I spent the first part of the summer, basically in heaven, carefully reading Volume One of Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology.[6] The experience of Moses on Mount Horeb lies at the heart of her understanding of God. She begins with the idea that God is one, God is absolutely unique. Nothing is like God. We cannot think something that is absolutely unique. She writes, “God is concrete, superabundantly particular.”[7]
Sonderegger points out that for this reason, the reality of God, especially for us in modern times, is hidden. She uses the word “omnipresence” to describe God. It does not just mean that God is everywhere but that, most often, we fail to perceive God. She says that nature in a sense hides God. And that in our time atheists help us to more deeply appreciate God’s hiddenness, that “even in indifference and defiance” they in a sense glorify God.[8]
It is not just that modern universities fail to teach about God, their methods have become fully secularized. She calls this “Methodological atheism” and defines it as, “the conviction that God cannot be a reality or dimension in the principled means of knowledge in the modern intellectual world.”[9] Indeed, I would not want my rheumatologist or a Federal Reserve Bank economist appealing to God in their academic papers.
We do not learn about God through the scientific method because God is not a thing. “God is not an object of our thought the way that an apple is… “God does not “stand open” and static in that way to our faculties…” waiting noiselessly to be discovered. “Yet… God will stand open to our knowledge of him as Truth.”[10]
How does this happen you might ask? At this point Sonderegger compares our experience of God with our relationships to each other. Unlike inanimate objects human beings disclose themselves to us. We know that the people we meet have an inner life. They show it to us in their words and actions. Sonderegger writes, ”We must speak or give ourselves away, in gesture or act of kindness or savage cruelty or deep intimacy.”[11] I’m sharing myself with you right now as I talk about what it felt like for me to become a parent.
Sonderegger writes God is lord of our knowledge of him, that in humility and like human beings, God chooses to share himself with us. One of her favorite ideas is that God is compatible with the world and us. This is part of the importance of Moses’ Burning Bush for Sonderegger. God is with us.
We do not experience all of God. But God gives us a hint of transcendence in the way that the bush is burned but not consumed. God draws near and his creatures are not destroyed. God is invisible and mysterious, utterly “other” than us and yet in our midst. We know God in our inner experience.
In Romans, Paul writes, “Beloved never avenge yourself” because revenge separates us from God. When Paul writes extend hospitality to strangers he uses the word philoxeniav which is the love of strangers. The word is related to our word xenophobia or fear of strangers. He asks us to avoid vengeance and love strangers because that is how we often come to see God.
When Jesus says, “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” the word he uses is not life but psuchēn or soul. What is at stake in these burning bush moments is our soul.
3. In all our time together I have never shared a poem that I wrote myself. This is about a walk Micah and I took when he was a one year old. It’s called “Swamp Maples.”
“In the sorrowing rain / Together we walk / Through wet autumn grass / From New England meadows / Into silent woods / And the brooding dark. // With each spongy step / I feel your weight / Shift further over / In the backpack / Until I know / You sleep.// I worry that / The damp mist / Will make you cold. / In the corner of my eye / I see your soft angel / Face under the navy hood. / Your tiny hand touches / My back just beneath the shoulder. / I listen for your breath / And want to wake you / From all death.”
“The fog brings / Everything closer in. / The yellowed ferns and / Ancient bark. / A million / Diamond drops / On the hemlock needles. / Until we leave the grasping roots / Of Pine Hill / For the burning colors of the lowlands. // We step through the swamp / On a thin crimson carpet / Of maple leaves / The gold leaf / ceiling above our heads / Burns with perfect brightness / Through the gray day. / The light illuminating / These trees / Seems to come from inside. // I stop to pray / My boots sinking / In black mud. / Thank you God / For all you have given / Us that we / Never could see before.”[12]
There is only one reason I am speaking to you today. There is only one thing I need to remind you. Seek God. Do not just skim over the surface of the depths of your own life. “Turn aside and look at this great sight.” “I Am” has sent you. So step away from the web of worries and judgments into a deeper reality, into the cosmic dance of God.
Help us find you Lord, “in all things and in all [our] fellow creatures pulsing with your life.”
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Tr. Stephen Mitchell (NY: Modern Library, 1995) 9.
[2] Malcolm Clemens Young, Harvard Journal, 10 October 2000 and 17-18 September 2000.
[3] James Finley, “Waking Up to Life,” The Center for Action and Contemplation, 28 August 2023. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/waking-up-to-life-2023-08-28/
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] On June 30, 2021 Katherine Sonderegger was my guest on the Grace Cathedral Forum. Our conversation can be found at the following link: https://youtu.be/g6v21Z1TkGc?si=SS-9j08Dy3UzAJXi
[7] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume One, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015) 27.
[8] Ibid., 53.
[9] Ibid., 54-5.
[10] Ibid., 75.
[11] Ibid., 76.
[12] Malcolm Clemens Young, Harvard Journal, 16 October 2000.
“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven…” (Mt. 16).
1. Who is Jesus and what are the keys of the kingdom? Yesterday on Market Street a man wearing worn clothes and just socks on his feet walked along pushing people at random as they waited in a security line to enter Ross’ clothing store. Another man crouched in the corner of a bus stop bent over with his head at knee height repeatedly wailing from the heart as a police officer stood five feet away with a loudly barking German shepherd on tight leash. Another man was lying on the ground at Eddy and Mason his hair full of litter.
Drugs and mental illness touch nearly every person you encounter just down the hill from here. Most of the stores have left and the world seems like it is ending. This kind of feeling pervades the beginning of J.T. Alexander’s book I Am Sophia.
His science fiction novel describes a not so distant future as climate change makes the planet uninhabitable. The center of gravity for human culture seems to have shifted into outer space as investors in places like Mars support companies here in the Bay Area doing gene engineering and carbon sequestration.
San Francisco has been renamed Sanef and is one of several independent nations formed after the collapse of America. Like narcotics in our time, many people of the future have become addicted to Stims (this acronym which stands for “Sensory-Targetted Immersive Mindtech”). It is a kind of virtual reality that destroys souls. Horrifying and dehumanizing levels of inequality have become commonplace. Poor people are shunned and called lowcontributors. Sometimes they will have their minds effectively erased by the government.
Nihilistic terrorists frequently kill ordinary people with bombs. There is almost no religion of any kind. People call it metaphysics (or metafiz) and respond to it with a mixture of disdain, suspicion and fear (as many do around us today). In this anti-religious world of the future there is only one remaining Christian church in the universe. It has ten worshipers and a doubting twenty-nine year old bishop named Peter Halabi. That church is in the ruins of Grace Cathedral.
In that future time this very building has holes in the ceiling and the stained glass windows have long been boarded up. But the eleven worship faithfully every Sunday in the Chapel of Nativity. Peter worries that he will have to shepherd the church to extinction. He looks up to that same mural and the image of Mary and says, “I’m not asking… for a big miracle… Just something to let me know [God’s] still up there.”1
Soon a tent appears in front of the Ghiberti Doors. The homeless woman sheltered there enters the church just as Peter is about to read the lesson. She takes the book from him to read and her first words are “I am.” This seems to refer to God’s self-description at the burning bush. It is the way the gospels often describe Jesus. It is the meaning of the letters in the corners of icons. This young woman with a scar on her face walks like a dancer. She calls herself Sophia (a biblical word for the divine feminine) and for most of the book we wonder about her. Is she God, the second coming of Jesus Christ? Or is she sick, unstable and deranged. Or is she just a fraud manipulating the gullible Christians for the sake of her own agenda?
2. This feels like the Gospel of Matthew. When Jesus walks on water and then rescues faltering Peter the disciples say, “what sort of man is this” (Mt. 8:27)? The crowds seem to be wondering the same thing when Jesus asks his friends, “Who do people say the Son of Man is” (Mt. 16)?
Although we have to answer this question in our lives, as readers of this gospel we stand outside the experience of those depicted in Matthew. We see what they do not. The Gospel begins with these words, “An account of the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah…” (Mt. 1:1). As we read we wonder when, and which one of them, will realize who Jesus is.
This exchange between Jesus and Peter happens in Caesarea Philippi, the capital of the Tetrarchy of Philip son of Herod the Great. Herod dedicated the famous Temple there to Rome and to Emperor Augustus, whose statue stood there. He was the first emperor to add to his title: “Divi Filius” or “Son of the Divine.”
Jesus asks his friends who they say he is and Peter says, “You are the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16). Soon we see that Peter does not yet really understand what he is saying. All of us have trouble with this. We think of Jesus as simply a more powerful version of Emperor Augustus when Jesus is really overthrowing that whole way of being.
Jesus shows that the way of domination and self-aggrandizement although it seems stable and powerful on the surface is like sand. In contrast we have the path of Peter with his imperfections, his courage and fear, his insight and foolishness, but above all his
faith. This improbable foundation is the rock upon which our lives can be founded. This is faith which is a kind of pursuit rather than an accomplishment.
Going on Jesus says, “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” (Mt. 16). Through history this sentence has been used to justify the church in those moments when we have been more like the Emperor Augustus than like Jesus, as if some institutional authority in Rome or Canterbury could have power over whether a person can be saved.
This could not be further from the truth. The Biblical scholar Herman Waetjen points out several other ancient examples that clarify what Matthew means. The power of the keys has to do more with things and policies than people. For instance, the historian Josephus writes about Queen Alexandra who ruled the Hasmonean Kingdom from 78-69 BCE. She deputized Pharisees as the administrators of the state and gave them the power, “to loose and to bind.” For Herman this power is about determining what practices are permitted or forbidden.2
We all have a role in this. We all in our way preach the gospel through what we say and how we live. We contribute to the picture of what is acceptable. And we have a responsibility for creating the kind of society which is humane in its care for the people I saw on the streets yesterday.
The puritan theologian John Calvin (1509-1564) writes that the reason for this passage about the keys is that over history it has been dangerous to speak Jesus’ truth and it is important for us to know both that we are doing God’s work and that God stands beside us as we do.3
The twentieth century theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) writes that the thought of God will always disturb the world. Our relations with each other, will never be perfectly clear. We will never adequately understand our situation in the world. That is the reason we need to orient ourselves toward the Eternal, to God. Barth says, “For the vast ambiguity of our life is at once its deepest truth… We know that our thinking of the thought of eternity is never a thing completed in time…”4 Our attention to Jesus, our prayer, is how we avoid being conformed to the world. It is how, instead, we are transformed by the renewing of our minds in Christ (Rom. 12).
About half of I Am Sophia takes place at Grace Cathedral and half on Mars. In the book, Sophia was terribly abused as a child but she found nourishment in the Bible and other Christian books. This made her a kind of theologian. Was Sophia the Christ? I do not
want to spoil the book for you. As he finds himself falling in love with her, Sophia has a great deal to teach the young bishop, and perhaps us also.
She says, “You are the guardian of a great treasure. It is your tradition, and it has an incredible spiritual value, an almost miraculous capacity to change lives for the better. But you misplaced the keys to the treasure chest… when scripture and religion became primarily about trying to determine who was right and who was wrong.”5
Later she gives a kind of invocation, “May your soul have deep roots and strong wings.”6 This means that followers of Jesus need to have a foundation, a stable identity, but we also need room to evolve. Changes in technology and society leave modern people less rooted and more focused on wings. You see this in their emphasis on individual freedom, innovation and progress.
In contrast, many Christians regard the secular world as destructive and offtrack. This leads them to become so backward looking that they are all roots and no wings. The living, loving God of the gospel became to them static and oppressive. What does not evolve dies.
This summer’s survey and our town hall meeting this morning address consider this issue. The idea lies at the heart of our mission statement to “reimagine church with courage, joy and wisdom.” For generations Grace Cathedral has been known for this. But it is up to us if we will continue to have roots and wings.
Near the end of the novel, Sophia says to Peter, “You think strength means being untouched by the suffering we are approaching. You still do not know me…”7 Will San Francisco as we know it die as people self-centeredly and obsessively seek to save themselves? Will the future Grace Cathedral lie in ruins? Will the world know who Jesus is?
At the center of Grace Cathedral is not a statue of the emperor or a belief in domination and self-assertion. At the heart of our being is a living person, the living child of God. He calls us by name and offers the keys to a deeper, more humane and faithful life. Come let us follow Jesus.8
1 J.F. Alexander, I am Sophia: A Novel (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2021) 7.
2 Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury, 2017) 185-7.
3 “It was important for the apostles to have constant and perfect assurance in their preaching, which they were not only to carry out in infinite labors, cares, troubles, and dangers, but at last to seal with their own blood. In order that they might know, I say, that this assurance was not vain or empty, but full of power and strength, it was important for them to be convinced that in such anxiety, difficulty and danger they were doing God’s work; also for them to recognize that God stood beside them while the whole world opposed and attached them; for them, not having Christ, the Author of their doctrine before their eyes on earth, to know that he, in heaven, confirms the truth of the doctrine which he had delivered to them…” John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion ed. John T. McNeill, Tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960) 1213 (4.11.1).
4 “There is – and this is what we mean – a thinking of the thought of grace, of resurrection, of forgiveness, and of eternity. Such thinking is congruous with our affirmation of the full ambiguity of our temporal existence. When once we realize that the final meaning of our temporal existence lies in our questioning as to its meaning, then it is that we think of eternity – in our most utter collapse. For the vast ambiguity of our life is at once its deepest truth. And moreover, when we think this thought, our thinking is renewed; for such rethinking is repentance. We know too that our thinking of the thought of eternity is never a thing completed in time, for it is full of promise. As an act of thinking it dissolves itself; it participates in the pure thought of God, and is there an accepted sacrifice, living, holy, acceptable to God.” Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th Edition tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975) 437.
5 J.F. Alexander, I am Sophia: A Novel (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2021) 60.
6 Ibid., 95.
7 Ibid., 168.
8 Matthew Boulton, “Who do you say that I am…”, SALT, 21 August 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/8/18/who-do-you-say-that-i-am-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twelfth-week-after-pentecost