Grace Cathedral

Grace Cathedral

Dear Friends,

When I think about Grace Cathedral and the spirit and support that have kept us strong, I cannot help but be aware that all around us in this beautiful city, things are not the way we want them to be.

Two San Francisco hotels account for 9% of the hotel rooms in the city, the massive Westfield Mall on Market Street, and other owners of downtown businesses are leaving the keys on the counter for the bankers and walking away from billions of dollars of investments. Dozens of familiar businesses are simply abandoning the city as we experience layoffs and shocking rates of vacancies in commercial real estate.

The struggles of those who suffer the most in this city continue to ripple outwards, and we seem to have lost our way when meeting people’s most basic needs for housing, clothing, safety, and respect. When we travel, people ask, “Is it really as bad as they say it is in San Francisco?”

In this country, young people are experiencing a mental health epidemic. Older people struggle with a debilitating crisis of meaning as work becomes increasingly detached from what humanizes us. Many people have simply given up on ever having career employment ever again. Our elders feel abandoned and alone. Suicide and addiction claim ever-increasing numbers of lives.

We despair over the damage we are doing to the planet, ongoing wars overseas, the persistence of prejudice at home, and the state of politics in America.

This is what a spiritual crisis looks like. We have forgotten the mystery of our existence, the miracle of our lives, the beauty surrounding us, the God who always calls us to return.

At Grace Cathedral, when we talk about our vision of a spiritually alive world, we have in mind Jesus’ picture of the Kingdom or Realm of God, a world in which every person feels love and has the chance to do the ministry that each of us was created to do. That is the world that we imagine and that we are working to bring into existence along with other communities in our society.

When we talk about the particular part of this vision that is the cathedral’s responsibility, we refer to our mission which is to reimagine church with courage, joy, and wonder. The modern world desperately needs parts of our tradition, but not all of it. Every generation must decide what God is calling us to pass on.

Right now is a crucial moment for us. People in this wounded city come to us during worship, yoga, sound bath, and many events. People in this damaged world have been finding us online. We touch the lives of thousands of people every month, and we need to learn more about these new friends and how they might experience God’s grace in our community.

In this year of poetry, I have been thinking about a poem from Gwendolyn Brooks’ called “One Needs a Teller at a Time Like This.” 

One wants a Teller in a time like this.

One’s not a man, one’s not a woman grown,

To bear enormous business all alone.

One cannot walk this winding street with pride,

Straight-shouldered, tranquil-eyed,

Knowing one knows for sure the way back home.

One wonders if one has a home.

One is not certain if or why or how.

One wants a Teller now:

Put on your rubbers and you won’t catch cold.

Here’s hell, there’s heaven. Go to Sunday School.

Be patient, time brings all good things – (and cool

Strong balm to calm the burning at the brain?) – 

Behold, Love’s true, and triumphs, and God’s actual.

The world needs to know that God is actual… that God is acting, and that God is so interleaved into our inner life and the outer world that it makes no sense to question the reality of God.

At the end of the summer, we will be re-embarking on a strategic planning process for the cathedral. I pray that you will help us reimagine church and re-state the good news of Jesus as we have received it for this new time.

May God bless and keep you wherever you find yourself as you read these words.

Love,
Malcolm

1. What is faith? This may be the most important question of our time. This week the indictment of our former president reminds us how questions of trust underlie every human relationship and institution.[i]

In 1996 Mary Doria Russell published a science fiction novel called The Sparrow. It imagines a then near future in 2019 when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the Arecibo Observatory discovers sung music coming from near Alpha Centauri. Jesuit priests led by the linguistics scholar Father Emilio Sandoz organize a mission to that world. They travel to Rakhat via newly invented technologies developed from mining asteroids.

With the turn of a page it is suddenly the year 2060. Sandoz seems to be the only survivor and returns to earth. Damaged physically, psychologically and spiritually he tries to answer his superior’s accusations. The reader experiences the story in parallel in two temporal settings both as Sandoz and his friends encounter a whole new form of human-like life, and much later as he explains what went wrong. It is an anthropological pleasure to imagine the language and society of the inhabitants of Rakhat. One almost wants to stop reading there before the inevitable disaster.

Emilio Sandoz grew up surrounded by drug crime in Puerto Rico and first began to be educated by the Jesuits as a teenager. He has always struggled with doubt. As the story unfolds he begins to see the circumstances that brought the team together as more than a coincidence perhaps even a miracle. As he finds his place among the far more social, even herdlike, inhabitants of Rakhat they physically touch him and he discovers a new conviction about God, a kind of ecstasy that fulfills him.

This makes his disappointment so much worse when through his actions everything falls apart and he causes the death of his old friends and new ones. Near the end of the story two priests talk about Sandoz’s struggle with faith. The Father General says, “There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So he breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

“’So God just leaves?’ John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. ‘Abandons creation?’ ‘No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.’ ‘Matthew 10:29… “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ‘But the sparrow still falls.’”[ii]

These are two different pictures of faith. First, as a kind of disposition which is a grateful response to good things in our life. This attitude is nonetheless vulnerable to suffering. And we might wonder whether the good outbalances the pain. Or second, faith can be regarded as the knowledge of a silent watcher, a loving but invisible companion who is with us, but constrained in the help that can be provided.

2. If someone asked us to describe our faith we might say something like that. But today the Gospel offers a very different and surprising kind of answer to the question “what is faith.”

My friend Matt Boulton likes to describe the Christian year as divided in half. There are six months of holidays from Advent through Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Then six months of ordinary time which begins now. He says this rhythm is like inhaling and exhaling or like the tide coming in and going out again. Ordinary, does not mean commonplace, it means ordinal as in part of a series. In this case it means a series of episodes from the Bible that teach us how to live and give us a framework for interpreting our experience.[iii]

The first eight chapters of the Gospel of Matthew describe Jesus’ birth, his later baptism, temptation in the wilderness, the calling of his followers (the fisherman on the sea of Galilee), then his first sermon and stories of healing. In chapter nine Jesus invites the one who seems to be the last of the twelve disciples, a tax collector named Matthew.

Imagine Matthew’s daily life charging taxes on goods going to market. The author of the gospel uses the word tax collector as a synonym for sinner. People hate tax collectors for three reasons. First, taxes were cripplingly high. Second, these taxes were levied by, and used to pay, an occupying army that punished and crucified the local people. Tax collectors collaborate in this oppression. Finally, tax collectors extorted more money than required and did this for the sake of enriching themselves.

Jesus immediately befriends and shares a meal with Matthew and “many tax collectors and sinners” (Mt. 9). I wonder what the other disciples thought about this. Matthew seems to be last one chosen, the twelfth disciple. The pharisees, a group seeking to purify the religion of the time, deride Jesus for the company he keeps. Jesus does not make the argument that these people are not really sinners. Instead he says that like a physician he has come not to heal the healthy but the sick.

The first readers of this story would know about the purity rules in the books of Leviticus and Numbers in the Old Testament. Verses there say that menstruating women should be regarded as unclean and corpses too. Anyone and anything, including furniture like beds or chairs, that a bleeding woman touched would also become unclean, and require a period of isolation and ritual cleansing.[iv]

Jesus in the very act of responding to criticisms of the sinners attracted to him, is interrupted by a leader of the synagogue. This man kneels and begs for him to heal his daughter saying, “lay your hand on her, and she will live” (Mt. 9). As Jesus  goes with all of his disciples following him, a woman approaches to touche his clothes. It’s amazing that there are words spoken in the Bible that we still use today. Haimorreow is our word for hemorrhage and means to bleed. For twelve years this woman has been bleeding. For twelve years she has been unclean, isolated and literally untouchable.

We hear a little of her internal dialogue. She says to herself, “If only I touch his cloak, I will be made well” (Mt. 9). The word for “made well” is sōzō related to the word sōtēr for savior. It does not just mean to be physically healed. It means to save, preserve, heal or rescue.

Imagine the drama of this situation. An unclean woman without permission goes through a crowd surrounding a great and holy teacher, past his disciples, through the law that forbids it, and in effect desecrates him. The disciples must have been stunned and wondered what Jesus would say. Jesus does not rebuke her or criticize her actions. He loves her. He commends her boldness. Not only that but rather than taking credit for his healing power, he emphasizes her role in this miraculous healing. He says, “Take heart daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mt. 9).

When Jesus arrives at the synagogue leader’s house everyone knows that touching a dead body makes you unclean. But Jesus takes the girl by the hand and she gets up. The tax collector, the hemorrhaging woman and the synagogue leader come from entirely different stations of life but they teach us that faith is boldness. It is the conviction that our more daring efforts will be met by a loving God.

During Pride Month it is especially important to linger for a moment here. We also need to recognize the way that Jesus interprets scripture. Jesus is not a prisoner to a simplistic and literalist reading of ancient texts. Jesus uses one text, “I desire mercy not sacrifice” from Hosea 6:6 to interpret other texts, those having to do with sinners, menstruating women and corpses. In our time we need to be more diligent in reading the Bible in ways that nurture and love LGBTQ+ and all people.

So for Matthew faith means more than just gratitude for the goodness of our existence. It refers to more than just a silent but compassionate watcher in our lives. Faith is a boldness in trusting God even when we cannot perfectly understand what is happening.

The theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) writes, “This is Abraham’s faith: Faith which, in hope against hope, steps out beyond human capacity across the chasm which separates God and man, beyond the visibility of the seen and the invisibility of the unseen, beyond subjective and objective possibility… to the place where he is supported only by the Word of God.”[v]

This week I received a letter from a dear friend who has been going through four terrible family tragedies this year. During the last of these tragedies he describes time moving so slowly, and about how his mind became his own worst enemy. He writes about being unable to pray, about screaming a bad word at the top of his lungs when he was home or in the car alone.

He says that because he has faith in God, Jesus, the church he kept coming to this place, to Grace Cathedral even though it brought up a tidal wave of feeling and grief. But over time things got better. He heard a setting of “Ave Maria” sung by a visiting choir. He began stopping by “Our Lady of Flowers” the photographic image of Mary in the South Transept, and for an instant he had a kind of vision in which Mary held his family member on her lap. Then in a sermon he was reminded about a dream that the Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich had. In it she held a hazelnut in her hand which represented everything God had created. She worried about its destruction. But God reassured her saying that he would draw all things to himself. My friend concluded saying, “Mary seems to be my path back to mending my relationship with God.”

What is faith? This may be the most important question of our life. May there always be the faith of gratitude for our existence. May we begin to experience God as the quiet, compassionate witness to our life. But above all, my dear ones, let us be audacious and bold in the places where we are supported only by the Word of God. In the beginning God was everywhere and everything. Lay your hand on her and she will live. Take heart daughter yo


[i] Answers surround us about faith and trustworthiness, in the Senate, newspapers, laboratories and our closest relationships. In his book Faith on Earth Richard R. Niebuhr studies Luke’s question “When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth.” Will human life end when no one can any longer be expected to keep their word? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/world/australia/trump-indictment-world-reactions.html

[ii] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (NY: Villard, 1996) 478.

[iii] Matthew Boulton, “Go: SALT’s Commentary for the Second Sunday after Pentecost,” SALT 5 June 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2023/6/3/go-salts-commentary-on-second-sunday-after-pentecost

[iv] Leviticus 12:1-8; 15:19-30 and Numbers 19:11-13.

[v] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskins (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975) 142.

View the sermon on YouTube.

Jesus says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt. 28).

What am I? What is? Every morning during my first year in seminary, I meditated in the ancient wood-paneled chapel a couple of doors down from my room in Divinity Hall. Only sparsely furnished with pews and a lectern, it looked more like a 19th-century courtroom than a church. That fall, the red maple leaves on the tree outside were my burning bush. Professor Peter Gomes would give the orientation to new students there. He talked about how in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his “Divinity School Address” to the graduating seniors there.

Emerson began by saying, “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers… Night brings no gloom to the heart… Through the transparent darkness, the stars pour their spiritual rays. The man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy… The mystery of our nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward has not yielded one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world in which our senses converse… What am I? What is?”[1]

As a Unitarian minister, among students, family, and friends, Emerson also addressed this question to his former professors. It had only been thirteen years since the formation of the Unitarian Association (1825). These Unitarian leaders, his teachers, had objected to the rigid predestination of New England Congregational churches as overly pessimistic and focused on sin. They argued that believing God had already determined who would be saved would undercut the motivation for people to act morally. Above all, they saw doctrines like the trinity as not rational and sought to modernize the church.

In this environment, Emerson criticized both the emerging church and the old one referring to the “universal decay and now almost death of faith.”[2] Even in 1838, people worried about the church dying. Emerson said that churches were overly preoccupied with miracles (“the word Miracle as pronounced by the Christian churches gives a false impression; it is monster”). He thought churches were too inclined to discount sources of truth outside of the Bible. Christians were so focused on the divinity of Christ that they overlooked the way that all people are images of God. Emerson’s teachers viciously turned on him for this, humiliating him in the press.

Near the end of this address to future ministers, Emerson describes hearing a dry, academic, meaningless sermon. He said that he could not tell whether or not the preacher had actually laughed or wept or loved or lived. Emerson writes, “A snowstorm was falling around us [outside]. The snowstorm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the contrast in looking at him and then out the window into the beautiful meteor of the snow.”[3] Emerson passionately cared about helping people to move more closely to God. This involves understanding who God is.

2. This morning, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, the only day on the church calendar dedicated to a doctrine rather than a person or event. This is not merely an academic matter. This conversation must be practical, having to do with real life. At stake is the very picture of God and determines how we pray, live with each other, and understand ourselves.

So what is the trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Where does this idea come from, and how is it useful? Above all, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church describes the Trinity as a mystery. It can, “neither be known by unaided human reason nor cogently demonstrated by reason after it has been revealed.”[4] Despite this pessimism, we can grow in our knowledge of God through study, conversation, and action. We cannot know God perfectly, but the family of trinitarian metaphors can help us

The word trinity does not appear in the Bible or in early church writings. But the tension between the belief that God is one (from the Old Testament) and the idea that God is especially revealed in Jesus, lies at the very heart of Christianity. We see this balance between monotheism and the uniqueness of Christ in recurring twofold and threefold patterns in the New Testament. It is true of our gospel today in which Jesus, for the only time, talks about baptizing the nations “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28)).[5]

In the Bible, we read of people encountering God directly in the person of Jesus. But we also hear Jesus speak of God as distinct from himself (such as when he prays to God or describes God as the one who sent him). God is both one and twofold. Early followers also had encounters with the Spirit (such as at Pentecost when God’s power descended on the disciples). Jesus talks about an entity separate from himself and God. In John, he calls this the Advocate, a spirit that will guide and challenge us over time. This spirit was present in his baptism.[6]

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are not three different gods, but three aspects of how God is both internally (ad intra) in God’s own self and for the world (ad extra). God is not just up there but in here and everywhere. God is creating, sustaining, and renewing all parts of the conscious and unconscious world. God never stops seeking a deeper relationship with us.

Margaret Miles points out that “From the earliest writings, Christians affirmed that Christ the Redeemer was God not a lower order of being. The earliest surviving sermon after the New Testament began: ‘Brethren, we ought to think of Jesus Christ as of God, as the judge of the living and dead.’ The earliest martyrdom account, that of Polycarp, said, ‘It will be impossible for us to forsake Christ… For him, being the son of God we adore, but the martyrs we cherish.’ The earliest outsider comment on the Christian Church, that of the provincial governor Pliny, described Christians gathering before sunrise ‘singing a hymn to Christ as though to a god.’”[7]

After the scattered twofold and threefold pictures of God in the Bible, the first generation of theologians called the Apostolic Fathers writing in the first century, often refer to Christ as “our God” and use the same threefold pattern of language. They are not yet writing about the Trinity.[8]

This changed in the second century with the Apologists. This group of writers sought to make connections between the Christian worldview and the philosophy and culture of the Greco-Roman world. They tried to show that Christianity was not a form of atheism, and that pagan philosophies could be harmonized with it.[9] Just in the same way that we might make our thought a reality in the world, they talked about logos, logic, rationality, and order that comes from God. They also used the metaphor of a child to show that Jesus is not something separate or alien from God.

Finally, Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220 AD), in the third century, was the first one to use the term “trinity.” He was also the first Western theologian to write primarily in Latin rather than Greek. God consists of different persons but one substance. Tertullian uses metaphors like a plant’s shoot, root, and fruit. He talks about different modes of being in God in the way that we talk about different phases of H2O as it passes from liquid to solid or gas.

Over the centuries, Western theology tended to emphasize the unity of God, and Eastern theology highlighted the distinctions between the three persons. St. Augustine uses various metaphors. He writes that the trinity is the one who loves, the beloved, and the power of love. The Trinity is the memory, intelligence, and will we see in our inner life. Augustine believes that everything created by God preserves this threefold pattern. C.S. Lewis says that God is the one we pray to, the desire for God in our hearts, and the one who accompanies us along the way.

3. Together today, we are part of a conversation that has stretched over centuries in vastly different regions and societies using strikingly different languages, images, and metaphors. This expanding dialogue takes us to regions that none of these original authors could have imagined. Ideas and texts separated by centuries help us to understand who God could be for us.

For three reasons, I love the experience of God as Trinity. First, the trinity reminds us that God is a mystery – not a simple single entity but three unified persons drawn by love, creating an otherwise impossible harmony. Second, the trinity reminds us that who we are, is the series of relationships we have with others. We are not individuals but a chorus of the voices who cared for us. Gratitude, generosity, and giving lie at the heart of all things. Third, God is love. Whoever we are, whatever we have done, God is always reaching out to us and from within us.

I have spent many hours imagining Ralph Waldo Emerson in that chapel which is so holy to me. He desired so deeply that every person should become acquainted with God for themselves. To those graduating seminarians, he says, “Yourself, a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men firsthand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you… but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.”[10] May we also do the same.

What am I? What is? We are wrapped and hidden in the mystery of God. We are relational; each of us contains multitudes.[11] We will never be separated from the one who created us and calls us closer every day, until we will meet, at the end of the age.


[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) 100-1.

[2] Ibid., 108.

[3] Ibid., 109. Robert D. Richardson claims that Barzillai Frost was the preacher to whom Emerson refers in the “Divinity School Address.” We walked past Barzillai Frost’s house (and the house where Thoreau died) on Main Street about a dozen times last week as we stayed in Concord, Massachusetts.
Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 289.

[4] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Cited in Margaret Ruth Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 43.

[5] Twofold patterns are found in Rom. 8:11, 2 Cor. 4:14, Gal. 1:1, Eph. 1:20, 1 Tim. 1:2, 1 Pet. 1:21, 2 John 1:13. Threefold patterns are in Matt. 28:19, 1 Cor. 6:11, 12:4ff, 13:13, Gal. 3:11-14, Heb. 10:29 and 1 Pet.1:2. The Trinitarian Controversy tr. and ed. William G. Rusch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980) 2.

[6] Matthew Boulton, “Relationships Are Who We Are: SALT’s Commentary for Trinity Sunday,” SALT, 30 May 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/6/1/relationships-are-who-we-are-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-trinity-sunday

[7] Margaret Ruth Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 44.

[8] These Apostolic Fathers include Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermas, Polycarp, and Papias, the Letter of Barnabas, the Letter to Diognetus, 2 Clement and the Didache. The Trinitarian Controversy tr. and ed. William G. Rusch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980) 3.

[9] These theologians included Aristides, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch. Ibid., 3-4.

[10] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) 113.

[11] “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

View the sermon on YouTube.

Jesus said, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you” (Jn. 14).

Anthropologists estimate that on average over the last five thousand years, during any hundred year period, in about ninety-six of those years men fought wars somewhere in the world.1 Despite this, across the centuries Peter speaks to us. He whispers in our ear, “do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3).

1. How will we defend our hope in this violent and broken world? A couple of people have asked me why we read Caroline Alexander’s translation of the entire text (15,693 lines) of Homer’s Iliad all day yesterday here at the Cathedral. This epic poem was composed in one of the earliest examples of phonetic Greek some time between 750-700 BC. Homer relied on storytelling traditions about the real Trojan War which scholars estimate was fought in 1250 BC.2

The Iliad does not describe the abduction (or seduction) of Helen which started the war. It does not tell the story of how Greek soldiers gained entrance through the gates hidden inside a giant wooden horse or about how the city was sacked. Instead Homer writes about the events of a roughly two week period in the tenth and final year of the stalemated siege of Troy. It is a war that no one seems to want to fight anymore. Why does the war persist? For three reasons: pride, fate and fury.

Achilles, the greatest warrior, whose mother is Thetis goddess of the sea, refuses to fight after his slave girl Briseïs is taken by his inept, whining commander Agamemnon. Agamemnon justifies his action complaining, “[D]o you intend – while you yourself have a prize – that I should just sit here without one?”3 If these embarrassing comparisons of status could have been avoided the war would easily have been won.

Again later the war seems about to conclude, to be satisfied by a duel between Menelaus and Paris, but in the last second Paris is rescued by the goddess Aphrodite, and the hostilities continue. Homer writes, “So spoke (Zeus) the son of Kronos and woke

the incessant battle, and the gods went down to enter the fighting, with purposes opposed.”4 Fate expressed by the god’s intervention makes the conflict intractable.

Finally, Achilles does not respect his commander and questions the very reasons for fighting. Like the boxer Muhamad Ali in his comment about the Vietcong, Achilles says, “the Trojan spearmen… to me have done nothing.”5 He knows that he will be killed if he goes to war, but gets drawn into battle out of rage when his dear friend Patroclus is killed. Priam the father of his adversary foresees his grandchild being thrown from the walls, his daughters sent into slavery and his own death. He begs his son not to fight, “Come then inside the wall my child… oh take pity on me…”6

Both Achilles and Hector know that they will be killed if they go to battle. They understand that the war is not worth their lives and yet they persist. Wrath is the first word in this ancient epic and it is foolish pride, capricious chance and pure anger that drive the forces of war.

This is remarkable. The book uses the conventions of heroic epic to undermine the very idea that wars should be fought at all. It raises universal questions: is a warrior ever justified in defying his commander? How do wars start and why do they continue even when all the combatants want them to end? Can giving one’s life for country sometimes be a betrayal of one’s family? Is dying gloriously and being remembered worth it?7

Achilles says, “ I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man’s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than dripping honey.”8

After killing his enemy Menelaus observes, “There is satiety in all things, in sleep, and love-making, in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance…” but in war the Trojans cannot be satisfied.9

Why did we gather here through the dark night to study this ancient epic? We read The Iliad yesterday to deepen our connection to each other and to all humans throughout history. Together we studied the human heart. We tried to honestly face the pride, pettiness, accident and anger that prevent us from living at peace with each other in this beautiful world.

2. You may be wondering what this has to do with the way of Jesus. The apostle Paul explains this after he escaped a mob that was trying to kill him in Thessalonica and arrives in Athens. He debates Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, two Greek schools of

thought concerned with how we should live. He meets people who, “would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17). And he gives an accounting of the hope that is within him. Let me briefly explain what these philosophers believed.

Epicurus moved to Athens in 341 BC. Epicureans philosophers believed that the goal of human life is happiness, the avoidance of physical pain and peace of mind.10 They thought that fear of death and punishment are the primary cause of the anxiety that distorts our inner life and gives rise to irrational desires. They believed that we could become happy by changing our habits of thought. To do this they recommended avoiding politics and religion (because they thought that the gods do not care about us). They regarded sex and marriage as unimportant, but friendship as everything.

Stoic philosophy began to develop around the year 300 BC.11 They offered a far more developed picture of God as a physical entity. For them God is eternal reason, the intelligence bringing forth creation, the life force that animates all beings. This God is not like the unpredictable, capricious Greek gods, but orderly, rational and providential.

On the Areopagus, the hill dedicated to Ares the Greek god of war, Paul addresses students of Homer, philosophers and everyone else. He refers to finding an altar with the inscription “To an unknown god,” and promises to tell them about the real God who they do not yet know. He explains that God is not an idol or a physical object in the world. God creates and also sets limits to everything. Our existence, our breath, the space we take up and everything we have comes from God. And yet God is also personal. We have a longing for God, and so we search and perhaps even find God, because God is “not far from each one of us” (Acts 17).

On this Mother’s Day we hear how Jesus mothers his friends even as they gather for the last time. He teaches exactly this, that our relation to God is a personal one. Jesus exclaims I will not leave you orphaned, isolated by yourself. But the paraclete (which means the one who goes beside you), the spirit of truth, will be with you. Jesus says, you will be in me and I will be in you. This presence of God will help us to keep God’s commandments. This is important. We are not rewarded for keeping commandments by God’s intimacy. God’s presence makes it possible for us to be agents of peace.

The genius of Christianity is that it recognizes that pride, competition, fury and pettiness put us in impossible conflict but that God sustains us even through the worst forms of suffering. In fact, the suffering of God helps to make our pain bearable.

3. This week with a group I listened to a friend, who I will call Ben, read his memoirs.12 Ben described going out to the movies in Southern California in the 1970’s with his wife and five year old son, seeing a pay phone with a large phonebook hanging on a chain. On a whim he called the Steins, the family that used to share a duplex with he and his mother back in Philadelphia. Growing up the other family seemed to have everything: a television, a car and a dad who was part of that boy’s life.

There was often conflict between the boys. One day as children, Ben thought that his neighbor had told the teacher about him swearing on the playground. And so later Ben secretly threw away his book bag and did not say anything as the boy’s mother beat him. Years later Ben goes and visits that boy’s parents in Los Angeles with his own wife and son. The mother says she always thought he would grow up to be a murderer. Her own son had joined the army, been sent to Vietnam and become addicted to drugs. He could never really get a career going.

Ben called the now grown up neighbor. The two had a superficial conversation, until the neighbor expressed his surprise that Ben had not apologized for his behavior when they were children. The neighbor hung up and they never spoke again. Ben did not show any remorse about what happened in the past, but he seems to be still carrying this burden for harming his friend. After his story our group of friends talked about why some people succeed and others do not. But the real question is how are we to live with each other and our past.

In The Iliad’s world all we have is our ego and it is in competition with every other ego, and there is nothing to temper our fury. The bickering and unreliable gods of the Epicureans and the nameless impersonal power of the Stoic’s God cannot help. But my friends every person you meet shines with the light of God. Being together each week we are learning to nourish the hope within us. This is the hope that we can seek and find God, that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, that through the turmoil and enmity of this world, God is directing us. God is loving us and mothering us.

“Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is within you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3).


1 “If we took any period of a hundred years in the last five thousand, it has been calculated, we could expect, on average, ninety-four of these years to be occupied with large-scale conflicts in one or more parts of the world.” Paraphrase from Tevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004) 98, by Caroline Alexander, The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War (NY: Penguin Books, 2009) xi.

2 Homer, The Iliad tr. Caroline Alexander (NY:Harper Collins, 2015) xxx.

3 Ibid., 5.

4 Homer, The Iliad tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 405 (Book Twenty, line 30).

5 Caroline Alexander, The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War (NY: Penguin Books, 2009) 20.

6 Homer, The Iliad tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 436.

7 Caroline Alexander, The War that Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War (NY: Penguin Books, 2009) 14-15.

8 Ibid., 378.

9 Homer, The Iliad tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 288. Homer, The Iliad tr. Caroline Alexander (NY:Harper Collins, 2015) 282.

10 Konstan, David, “Epicurus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/epicurus/>.

11 The stoa is the porch were classes met. Durand, Marion, Simon Shogry, and Dirk Baltzly, “Stoicism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/stoicism/>.

12 Tuesday 9 May 2023 at 7:30 p.m.

Dear Friends, 

After a nine-month search process Jared Johnson has agreed to serve as our next Canon Director for Music starting on July 1. Jared will direct all aspects of the cathedral’s music programs and will serve as a member of the cathedral’s chapter. 

Jared will be moving here from Columbia, South Carolina where he has served as canon organist and choirmaster of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral since 2003. He directs the Cathedral Choristers, which features advanced choirs for boys, girls, and young men.  

Jared was the music director for the Royal School of Church Music Carolina Course at Duke in 2019, and he will serve as music director of the Saint Thomas Girl Chorister Course this summer. He has performed organ recitals in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. His recordings appear on the Pro Organo and JAV labels. Jared also helped to establish the Cathedral Music School for underserved students at Trinity. 

  I know that you will appreciate Jared’s musicianship, professionalism and warmth. Earlier this week, he said, “I am thrilled and humbled to be joining the Grace Cathedral community as your next canon director of music. Grace Cathedral is a landmark for excellence in music, and it will be my privilege to build on the good work that so many have done before me. The opportunity to lead such an historic choir in an environment of creativity and welcome is very rare, and I am excited to begin this work. I look forward to being part of the community and working together with you to help advance the work of Grace Cathedral.” 

 Jared is a graduate of Oberlin College, with degrees in English and organ performance. After graduation, he received a Watson Fellowship for conducting in London. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University. Jared and his wife, psychologist Erin Johnson, and third-grade twins, Charlie and Sam, will be moving to San Francisco this summer. 

 I am grateful to the members of the search team, led by Vice Dean Greg Kimura and president of the choir guild, Asheley Linnenbach, to the Choir of Men and Boys and to the cathedral’s entire music department. Their leadership this year has been extraordinary. I am very proud of the quality of music at Grace Cathedral this year and feel especially grateful to Christopher Keady, our interim director and Gabriel Fanelli, our choirmaster who both served so faithfully. This search took place as we prepared for this summer’s ambitious choir tour to Austria – the first choir tour since England in 2016. 

 I am deeply grateful for the warm spirit of the cathedral community as we welcome Jared to Grace Cathedral. 

Love,
Malcolm

The Very Rev. Malcolm Clemens Young
Dean of Grace Cathedral

View the sermon on YouTube.

“Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.. (Lk. 24).

What are you failing to recognize in your life? This week the mother of sixteen year old Ralph Yarl sent him to pick up his twin brothers at their friends’ house. He went to the door at Northeast 115th Street instead of Northeast 115th Terrace. The 84 year old white homeowner Andrew Lester shot him in the head and arm. Maybe he would not have done this if Ralph were white. Ralph had to go to three different homes before someone finally agreed to help, but then, only if he would lie down on the ground with his hands up.1

Twenty year old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed when a car she was driving in mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway.2 Armed to the teeth, Americans keep hearing how dangerous our society is. And then, out of fear, we fail to recognize each other.3

An Australian named Glenn Albrecht coined the word “solastalgia.” It combines the words solace, desolation and nostalgia to describe, “an intense desire” to take care of the places that give us comfort or solace. It also refers to the pain that comes from the destruction of natural places.4 I feel this suffering profoundly as I watch the ongoing death of the forests here in Northern California. According to aerial surveys 36 million California trees died in 2022 (that is three times as many as 2021).5

We yearn for places of wholeness, for relationships with each other that nurture and heal. We long to be recognized for who we are, as children of God. This morning we are going to study one of the most formative stories in the Bible and how a twentieth century poet came to recognize Jesus in her own life.

1. Over the year many people have invited me to prisons, shelters, emergency rooms and hospice unit, into places of absolute despair. This is where Jesus comes to us. In the Book of Luke, Jesus does not first meet the most famous disciples (like Mary Magdalene or Peter). He does not appear at the tomb, the temple, or Herod’s palace. Instead he walks with two of the most ordinary people (Cleopas and Anonymous) to Emmaus a town that is so insignificant archaeologists are not sure where it is.

Jesus speaks with two utterly demoralized people, two disciples who gave up everything to follow someone they loved and then saw that person tortured to death by the state. Their eyes were kept from recognizing him. When he asks what they are talking about, they stop, stand there and look sad. This is the same word (skuthrōpoi) that Matthew uses when he teaches that when you fast do not look dismal, so that people can admire you for fasting.6

These friends are so upset, so wrapped up in their grief that they cannot believe he does know what happened to them. “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there…” (Lk. 24)? The Greek word (paroikeis) means to live alongside but separate from the people who belong in a place. Jesus is a stranger to them because he does not inhabit their world of grief.

The friends tell Jesus all the things that happened. This feels even more tragic because they do not believe. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel…” They mention the women who did not find the body at the tomb. Even though the women describe angels who said Jesus was alive, the friends still could not believe.

Jesus explains scriptures and prophecies. His two friends still impossibly do not recognize him. Finally, Jesus takes bread and breaks it with them and in an instant they really see him. They exclaim in one of my favorite lines in the Bible, “were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road…”

My friend Matt Boulton proposes three reasons that Jesus’ friends do not recognize him. First, cannot see through their tears. Sorrow and despair might must make it impossible for them. Second, perhaps this sadness has caused them to turn in on themselves, to be self-absorbed, like a house with the window shades drawn. Finally, it could be because Jesus is somehow different, so new in resurrected life that they cannot see him.7

The twentieth century theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) regarded this last reason as most compelling. It gave him the chance to write about the difference between Jesus’ earthly life and his resurrected life. So what does Barth think happened when Jesus broke bread with his friends? In that moment Jesus came to them in a form, “in which he could never leave them again… He could never be to them a mere figure of the past… The limitation of the past had burst.”8 Jesus encountered them, “emerging from the past as a figure of the present, alive forevermore…”

This is who Jesus can be for us too, if only we will recognize him. In another book Barth writes that, ”believing is not an obscure and indeterminate feeling. It is a clear hearing,

apperceiving, thinking and then speaking and doing. It is a clear human act… believing… does not control its object.” God does not exist for us; we exist for God. And so Barth calls faith, “an irruption into this reality.” It is the “removing of a barrier” to true seeing.9

2. The poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) has written about the barrier to believing that she experienced. It had to do with despair in the face of suffering. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (1821-1881) book The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan exclaims, “I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself.”10 This kind of hatred of human cruelty and suffering consumed Levertov. In England, her Hasidic father had converted and become an Anglican priest, but Levertov stopped participating in church as a teenager. She migrated to the United States in 1947 and became an anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear activist.

Then in her fifties Levertov began writing a poem called “Agnus Dei” or “Lamb of God.” The poem goes like this, “… sheep are afraid and foolish, and lack / the means of self-protection, having / neither rage nor claws, / venom nor cunning… This pretty creature… / leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment / four legs to land on, the grass / all it knows of the world?”

She goes on, “What terror lies concealed / in strangest words, O Lamb / of God that taketh away / the Sins of the World: an innocence / smelling of ignorance, / born in bloody snowdrifts, / licked by forebearing / dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together? // God then, / encompassing all things, is defenceless? Ominpotence / has been tossed away, / reduced to a wisp of damp wool?”

“… And we / frightened, bored, wanting / only to sleep ‘til catastrophe / has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us, / wanting then / to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony… // is it implied that we / must protect this perversely weak / animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings // suppose there is milk to be found in us? / Must hold in our icy hearts / a shivering God?” “So be it. / Come, rag of pungent / quiverings, /dim star. / Let’s try /if something human still / can shield you, / spark / of remote light.”11

As she struggled with those exact words Levertov found her heart being converted to Jesus. Looking back later she explains, “The experience of writing the poem – the long swim through waters of unknown depth – had also been a conversion process.” She began to see in a new light, that agonizing question about why God does not intervene in suffering.12

Levertov explains that she, “began to see these stumbling blocks as absurd. Why, when the very fact of life itself, of the existence of anything at all is so astounding why… should I withhold my belief in God… until I am able to explain to myself the discrepancy between the suffering of the innocent… and the assertion that God is just and merciful.”13 Writing about the world led Levertov to faith in Christ.

I want to close with the poem Denise Levertov wrote about today’s reading. In this modern world of doubt she seems to be imagining herself in the scene. It is called “The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velázquez).” “She listens, listens, holding / her breath. Surely that voice / is his – the one / who had looked at her, once, across the crowd, / as no one ever had looked? / Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her// Surely those hands were his, / taking the platter of bread from hers just now? / Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well? //” “Surely that face – ? // The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy. / The man whose body disappeared from its tomb. / The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive?” // Those who had brought this stranger home to their table / don’t recognize yet with whom they sit. / But she in the kitchen, absently touching the winejug she’s to take in, / a young Black servant intently listening, // swings round and sees the light around him / and is sure.”14

My thoughts this week keep returning to the old men who shot the young people who appeared at their houses rather than welcoming them. In our fears over the dissolution of our society and the desolation of the living world, what are we failing to recognize?

The limitation of the past has burst. Jesus emerging from the past will be with us forevermore. Jesus will come to us and not in the way we expect so let us be flexible and imaginative. May we pay attention not just with our eyes but with the hearts that are burning within us.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, stay with us… be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen15


1 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/us/ralph-yarl-kansas-city-shooting.html

2 https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/woman-shot-wrong-driveway-upstate-new-york/index.html

3 Friday night I had dinner with my friend Barbro who is in her eighties. She saw the destruction of Europe, the aftermath of the holocaust and the advent of the nuclear age. And yet war in Ukraine, dehumanizing poverty on the streets of San Francisco, American political polarization and our worsening climate crisis makes her despair. You can hear the pain in her voice. Maybe you feel some of this pain too.

4 The word solastalgia combines the words solace, desolation and nostalgia to describe, “an intense desire for the place where one is resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace.” Dorothy Dean, “Climate Grief and the Secular Spirituality of Earth-Mourning,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Spring/Summer 2023, 70.

5 https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/california-tree-death-map/

6 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you they have received their reward” (Mt. 6:16 NRSV).

7 Matthew Boulton, “Breaking Bread: SALT’s Lectionary Commentary for Easter 3,” SALT 17 April 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/4/20/breaking-bread-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-easter-3

8 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 The Doctrine of Creation tr. H. Knight, G.W. Bromiley, J.K.S. Reid, R.H. Fuller (New York; T&T Clark, 1960) 471-3.

9 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2 The Doctrine of the Word of God tr. Harold Knight, G.T. Thomson (New York; T&T Clark, 1960) 506.

10 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov tr. Constance Garnett (NY: Modern Library).

11 Denise Levertov, “Agnus Dei,”
Given that lambs
are infant sheep,
that sheep are afraid and foolish, and lack
the means of self-protection, having
neither rage nor claws,
venom nor cunning,
what then
is this ‘Lamb of God’?

This pretty creature, vigorous
to nuzzle at milky dugs,
woolbearer, bleater,
leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment
four legs to land on, the grass
all it knows of the world?
With whom we would like to play,
whom we’d lead with ribbons, but may not bring
into our houses because
it would spoil the floor with its droppings?

What terror lies concealed
in strangest words, O lamb
of God that taketh away
the Sins of the World: an innocence
smelling of ignorance,
born in bloody snowdrifts,
licked by forebearing
dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together?

God then,
encompassing all things, is
defenceless? Omnipotence
has been tossed away,
reduced to a wisp of damp wool?

And we
frightened, bored,
wanting only to sleep ‘til catastrophe
has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,

we who in shamefaced private hope
had looked to be plucked from fire and given
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,

is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings

suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold in our icy hearts
a shivering God?

So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let’s try if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.”

12 Peggy Rosenthal, “The Conversions of Elizabeth Seton and the Poet Denise Levertov,” Seton Shrine, 21 January 2021. https://setonshrine.org/the-conversions-of-elizabeth-seton-and-the-poet-denise-levertov/

13 Ibid.

14 https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2023/4/17/two-emmaus-poems-denise-levertov-and-natasha-trethewey

15 The 1979 Book of Common Prayer, 124.

View the Sermon on our YouTube.

“Your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3).

When are you most fully alive? My friend Rhonda Magee felt fully alive when she was sixteen years old. The world was opening up, college was around the corner. Life had not been easy but she had reason to hope. Rhonda and a boy named Jake were head over heels in love. Then just before she left town for a summer university course, he told her over the phone, “My father kicked me out of the house.” She asked him why. He said, “You know why… I told you how he is. It’s because of us. He said no son of his is going to be dating a black girl…”[i]

Rhonda felt gripped by pain. She was an A student and about to be chosen as the town’s Teenager of the Year. Yet her race – a category created by others and that she felt did not capture much of who she really was – made her unacceptable to Jake’s parents. They had never met her. And yet they were willing to hurt their own son, and therefore themselves, all to teach him, Rhonda, and anyone else a lesson. They believed in white supremacy so strongly that they were ready to throw their own son out like garbage.

We all have beliefs like this. They diminish us and damage the people around us. The social theorist bell hooks assert that racism in America is a crisis of “lovelessness.” Certainly, the current anti-LGBTQ+ legislation illustrates the terrible lovelessness that has this country in its grip. The poverty in this city does too. But these are just a few of many stories we carry that poison our life, that prevent us from ever being fully alive.

The stories we tell about ourselves as individuals also can harm us. Even as a child, psychologist Brené Brown knew that “People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power.” She realized that “very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming or shutting down.” As a result, “Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other.”[ii]

We feel alive when we come home to ourselves and to God when we can become connected in a new way to our past and to each other. This encounter, the forgiveness we experience in Jesus, lies at the heart of the resurrection. Easter is the chance for a new story to take hold in our life. It is the beginning of a new era when everyone will belong and have the chance to thrive. God’s love dares to include those who do not fit, the ones who the powerful cannot abide.[iii] Through God, we can be free of the hold that fear and death have on us.

No one really knows what happened at dawn that morning before Mary Magdalene and the other Mary felt the earth-shaking. They saw the guards frozen like dead men by fear and watched an angel who looked like lightning come down from heaven and roll back the stone at the tomb. There is no way to make Easter fully understandable.

This does not mean it is illogical. Matt Fitzgerald remembers the Easter when his daughter was in kindergarten, and the church sent each child home with a plastic purple Easter egg. Inside was not chocolate but a little slip of paper. His daughter was learning to read, and so she sounded out the three-word message. “He is… raisins?”  “He is raisins is illogical. He is risen is merely incomprehensible.” When we speak about God we have to “distinguish between things that do not make sense and things we cannot make sense of.”[iv] God cannot be contained, confined, described, or defined. But we can meet God in the person of Jesus on Easter morning.

The Gospels of Mark and Luke mention anointing, but in the Gospel of Matthew, the women come simply “to see” the tomb. The Greek word theōrēsai means to observe, analyze, and discern with the connotation that one is involved and committed. It is related to our words theory, theoretical, and theater, that onstage action helps us to better understand human life.

After meeting the angel, the two women leave the tomb quickly with fear and great joy. Jesus greets them with a word (xairete) that means both hello and rejoice (like the word aloha means hello and love). He says, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Mt. 28). He offers this message of comfort and forgiveness to friends who abandoned him.

In the second century, Irenaeus said that the Glory of God is the human being fully alive. Feeling fully alive often involves an experience of joy. What is joy?

Greek has the word makarios for happiness or blessedness. It is the word repeated frequently in the beatitudes as in, “blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt. 5). The ancient Greeks regarded this kind of happiness as the freedom that rich people might have from normal cares and worries. These are the people who have good fortune, health and money.[v]

On the other hand, the Greek word for joy is xara. It is related to our word Grace. It means to be fulfilled. The perfect version of xara can only be found in God. The Greeks thought that this experience did not surprise us haphazardly. Rather this joy naturally comes with wisdom and virtue. To use more modern language, it is the pleasure that comes with a spiritual connection. We do not lose ourselves in joy – we become more deeply ourselves in it.[vi]

Joy is surprisingly difficult for us. Part of the reason for this is that joy as an emotion requires us to be vulnerable. Last winter, I came across a new expression for a feeling I recognize. It is “foreboding joy.”[vii] It refers to that sense of hesitation we feel when it comes to joy. We don’t want to be too joyful because we are irrationally afraid that this will somehow cause something bad to happen.

Psychologists who study this say that 95 percent of parents interviewed have experienced this with their children. We hold back because we think it will make us hurt less later.

One man in his sixties said, “I used to think that the best way to go through life was to expect the worst. That way, if it happened, you were prepared, and if it didn’t happen, you would be pleasantly surprised. Then I was in a car accident, and my wife was killed. Needless to say, expecting the worst didn’t prepare me at all. And worse, I still grieve for all of those wonderful moments we shared that I didn’t fully enjoy. My commitment to her is to fully enjoy every moment… I just wish she was here, now that I know how to do that.”[viii]

Experiencing joy means being vulnerable in love. So how do we cultivate a propensity for joy in our ordinary lives beyond a willingness to really feel joy and to let others see our weakness? The simple answer is to practice gratitude. Gratitude is not an attitude, it is not a feeling. It is something we do over and over, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. For me, gratitude lies at the heart of my prayer life and what we do here.

Last week I was giving a tour of the archives when I found a sermon Alan Jones preached at Grace Cathedral in 1990. It moved me so deeply that I wanted just to read the entire manuscript to you. Alan refers to a French priest named Jean Sulivan, who describes Western cultures as spiritually impoverished and undeveloped, as unawake and unaware of the miracle right in front of our noses.[ix]

That miracle is the miracle of being. It is the miracle that we are. If you want a miracle, look at yourself. Our life is the love story of God trying to reach us, to help us.

Have you ever wanted to meet a famous person? I always wished that I could spend a day with the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman. He wrote a poem called “Miracles.”

“… As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge / of the water, / Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, / Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, / Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, / Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon… Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars / shining so quiet and bright, / Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; / These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place…”[x] When are you most fully alive? In the face of overwhelming lovelessness, and the pain that causes more pain, there is a new story. Jesus calls us to come home to ourselves and to God. So in gratitude, let us see the world with a new intent. Let us leave behind our foreboding joy and know


[i] Rhonda V. Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (NY: Penguin Random House, 2019) 11-13.

[ii] Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart (NY: Random House, 2021) xx.

[iii] Alan Jones, “Easter Day: Take Time for Paradise,” Grace Cathedral Sermons, 15 April 1990.

[iv] Matt Fitzgerald, “Thunderous Yes: Preaching to the Easter Crowds, “The Christian Century, 10 April 2014. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-03/thunderous-yes?utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dcce86669b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2023-04-03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-dcce86669b-86237307

[v] Ibid., 204ff.

[vi] Ibid., 205.

[vii] Ibid., 215.

[viii] Ibid., 50.

[ix] This paragraph and the next come from: Alan Jones, “Easter Day: Take Time for Paradise,” Grace Cathedral Sermons, 15 April 1990

[x] “Why, who makes much of a miracle? / As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge / of the water, / Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, / Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, / Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, / Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon / Or animals feeding in the fields, / Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, / Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars / shining so quiet and bright, / Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; / These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. // To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, / Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, / Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread / with the same, // To me the sea is a continual miracle, / The fishes that swim – the rocks – the motion of the / waves – the ships with men in them, / What stranger miracles are there?”

Walt Whitman, “Miracles,” Leaves of Grass. https://poets.org/poem/miracles

View the Sermon on our YouTube.

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil asking, ‘Who is this?’” Mt. 21

What is God like? And how will we respond? Give me your hand and we will see. In December 1945, halfway up the Egyptian portion of the Nile River, a farmer named Muhammad ‘Alī al-Sammān made an extraordinary archaeological discovery. Thirty years later he told his story. Not long before he and his brothers avenged their father’s murder, they were digging for soil to fertilize their crops when they found a three foot high red, earthenware jar. Wondering if it contained an evil spirit, at first they hesitated to break it open. Then he had the idea that it might contain gold, so he smashed it with his axe and discovered thirteen papyrus books bound in leather.[1]

At home he dropped the books on a pile of straw by the oven. His mother used much of the papyrus along with the straw to kindle fire. A few weeks later, after killing their father’s enemy ‘Alī worried that the police might search the house, so he left the books with a local priest and they were lost. For years experts tried to collect the manuscripts.

In the end they discovered fifty-two texts at Nag Hammadi. Carbon dating of the papyrus used in the bindings places these Coptic translations sometime between the years 350-400 CE. Some scholars, including my New Testament professor Helmut Koester, believe that these are translations of Greek manuscripts that may be even older than the gospels of the New Testament.

One of the first European scholars to discover the texts was startled to read the following line, “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin Judas Thomas, wrote down.”[2] This is the opening of the first complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas ever discovered. We had fragments of it in Greek but suddenly we had the whole thing along with pages of other sources we had never dreamed of.

My favorite quotes from the Gospel of Thomas describes the kingdom of God as a “state of self-discovery.” That ancient papyrus says, “Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father.” It says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”[3]

For years all we knew about the Gnostic Christians in the first centuries after Jesus’ death came from the orthodox Christians who called them heretics. Now finally, to some degree, we can hear them speak for themselves. I first encountered these ideas at the age of twenty-one when I read Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic Gospels. I am attracted to their thought primarily because Jesus has changed my life and I long to learn more about what people in the first centuries thought of him. I am also sympathetic to the Gnostics’ respect for wisdom. We are often trapped in stories that make us miserable. Great thinkers can lift us into a truth that frees us.

The Greek word gnosis means a kind of knowing by experience that differs from rational or scientific knowing.[4] It also describes an ancient faith, a family of religious convictions that shaped what we believe today. As we enter Holy Week rather than trying to tell the whole story of Jesus’ passion, I want to talk about this spiritual path.

We cannot be a Gnostic in the way that third century people could. But studying these ideas give us a way of talking about our tradition’s value and how we experience God in our own lives. On this Palm Sunday I am going to talk about three central gnostic ideas. But first I need to say a little more about what Gnostics believed.

Gnostic groups differed from each other but mostly they believed in a kind of dualism between the spiritual which they regarded as good and the evil material world. They held that the spiritual human soul is part of the Divine and is imprisoned in physical existence. They believed that the soul could be saved by coming to realize its greatness, its origin in a superior spiritual world. For Gnostics an inferior god or demiurge (sometimes called the god of the Old Testament) made the material world. In their upside down interpretation of the Genesis creation story, the snake was the hero. Many Gnostic Christians (the Docetists) believed that it only seemed as if Jesus suffered, or was mortal.

1. The first idea that I would like to criticize is the Gnostic belief that there are secret teachings for the elite that are not available to everyone else. The Gnostic believed that, in the words of an ancient manuscript, he was, “one out of a thousand, or two out of ten thousand.”[5] This contrasts with Christians who believe that everything we need to know about God and Jesus is public. There is no hierarchy of secret knowledge, or spiritual wisdom. We can all read the Bible and with help, draw our own conclusions.

Christians go further than this. In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians he writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). This may be one of the most difficult ideas for us to assimilate. It is the basis for our democracy. We are all equal before God, and before the law. As humans we naturally form groups and are drawn into conflict based on our identity. For instance, it is very difficult to avoid the culture war tension between liberals and conservatives.

The philosopher Agnes Callard spoke about this recently at Harvard. She pointed out that the science journal Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It’s editors wanted to speak out for science and objective truth. She pointed out that in a world where everything becomes ideological this had the unintended outcome of making some people distrust science as political.

Callard said that people on the left use the same tactics as those on the right. “We bully people without knowing it. Not bullying people is harder than it appears.” Her answer is to take a Socratic approach. We should ask people to explain their position rather than trying to beat them in an argument. She says that Socrates is, “not trying to win. He’s trying to find out.”[6]

2. A second Gnostic belief is that we should focus on overcoming illusion through introspection rather than worrying about sin or morality. The important thing for the Gnostic is a relation with our true self not with our our neighbors. In the second century Irenaeus (130-202 CE) rejected the idea that knowledge is enough to save us. He insisted that participating and growing in Christ is a “practical, daily form of salvation.”[7]

In the third century Clement of Alexandria (150-215) writes that God became human so that humans can become God. Every day we improve. He writes about choosing to live joyously so that, “all our life is a festival; being persuaded that God is everywhere present on all sides we praise him as we till the ground, we sing hymns as we sail the sea, we feel God’s inspiration in all that we do.”[8]

3. Finally, Gnostics taught that the material world is evil. In contrast, Christians believe that God created the world and that it is good. We have a responsibility for nature. We see God through the material world. It gives us opportunities to care for each other.

Over the next seven days we will experience God in the world. We will follow Jesus through the exultant crowds, witness his poignant goodbye at his last meal with friends. We will see his betrayal, abandonment death and finally his triumphant resurrection and reunion with his loved ones.

My friend Matt Boulton says that we cannot take all of this in at once. These events require time and space for us to adequately feel and understand them.[9] Last night I received an email from one of our readers who feels overwhelmed by the passion narrative. My friend writes, “the most powerful moment that stands out for me is Jesus’ response to Judas’ kiss.” Jesus says, “Friend do what you are here to do” with no blame or shame, just a sense of love and grief.

This idea that God is present to us in the material world gives us the hope that we can change some things for the better. In an interview the poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014) said that believing in God gave her courage. “I dared to do anything that was a good thing. I dared to do things distant from what seemed to be in my future. When I was asked to do something good, I often said, yes, I’ll try, yes, I’ll do my best. And part of that is believing, if God loves me, if God made everything from leaves to seals and oak trees, then what is it I can’t do?”[10]

What is God like? And how will we respond? There is no secret religious knowledge or a spiritual elite. Introspection will not bring us as close to God as care for those around us will. The material world matters and the presence of Jesus in this world then and now is a message of hope and salvation. All our life is a festival, so bring forth what is within you as you walk with Jesus.

_________________

I would like to close with these lines from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). “God speaks to each of us as he makes us / then walks with us silently out of the night.//These are the words we dimly hear. // You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing / embody me. //Flare up like flame / and make big shadows I can move in. // Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final. / Don’t let yourself lose me. // Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. // Give me your hand.”[11]


[1] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979) xiff.

[2] “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” The Gospel of Thomas, translated by Thomas O. Lambdin. https://www.marquette.edu/maqom/Gospel%20of%20Thomas%20Lambdin.pdf

[3] And later, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one… then you will enter [the Kingdom].” Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979) 152, 154-5.

[4] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979) xvii.

[5] Ibid., 176.

[6] Clea Simon, “In an era of bitter division, what would Socrates do?” The Harvard Gazette, 27 March 2023. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/in-era-of-bitter-division-what-would-socrates-do/

[7] Margaret Ruth Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 33.

[8] Ibid., 38.

[9] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/3/29/palms-and-passion-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-palmpassion-sunday

[10] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/2/6/maya-angelou-on-being-christian

[11] Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (NY: Riverhead, 2005) 119.

View the Sermon on our YouTube.

“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done” (Jn. 4)!

1. Every day we hear about horrifying violence and misery in Ukraine – trench warfare in freezing rain, missile strikes, civilians tortured and murdered, cities, schools, museums, libraries destroyed, 500 churches and religious sites obliterated.[i] Several hundred thousand people have perished there in just one year.[ii] Lately, trying to understand, I have been reading the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004).

Milosz was about fourteen years old during World War I when the German army invaded Vilnius. He was there with just his mother because his father had been conscripted by the Russians. Later in the Polish-Soviet War in 1919, he and his mother were fired on by troops. Throughout World War II Milosz secretly helped Jewish families to survive. He witnessed Nazi soldiers burning down Warsaw in August 1944.

He writes, “I do not regret those years in Warsaw, which was, I believe, the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe. Had I chosen emigration, my life would certainly have followed a very different course. But my knowledge of the crimes which Europe has witnessed in the twentieth century would be less direct, less concrete than it is.”[iii]

For six years after the war Milosz served as a cultural attaché for the People’s Republic of Poland until his outspoken criticisms of the Soviet leadership made it necessary for him to defect to the West. He ended up having a long career at the University of California, Berkeley. Some faculty colleagues were surprised when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. They did not even know he was a poet. He wrote poetry almost entirely in Polish. Americans could not understand and Polish readers were prevented by censorship from reading it.

He writes as a refugee and an immigrant. “Faithful mother tongue, / I have been serving you. / Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors / so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch / as preserved in my memory…/ You were my native land.” He goes on, “Now, I confess my doubt. / There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life. / For you are a tongue of the debased, / of the unreasonable, hating themselves / even more than they hate other nations, / a tongue of informers, / a tongue of the confused, / ill with their own innocence. //But without you who am I?…”[iv] Milosz persists in this lonely work because he does not want us to forget what happened.

Milosz writes about terrifying destruction and cruelty. “You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime, / And kept a pack of fools around you / To mix good and evil, to blur the line, // Though everyone bowed down before you, / saying virtue and wisdom lit your way… / Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one, but another is born.”[v]

Why would I spend so much time studying this record of human depravity? In part because of Milosz’s deep Christian faith. This belief helps him to see the beauty of the world even in the midst of stark suffering. Let me share his poem “Veni Creator.”

“Come, Holy Spirit, / bending or not bending the grasses, / appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, / at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow / covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. / I am only a man: I need visible signs. / I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. / Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in the church / lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.”

“But I understand that signs must be human, / therefore call one man, anywhere on earth, / not me – after all I have some decency – /and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.”[vi]

2. For Christians that one person who helps us to marvel at God is Jesus. If all we had of the Bible were this one story of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman that would be enough. Jesus talks longer to her than to his friends the disciples, or to his family, or in defending himself before the authorities. She is the first person he reveals himself to, the first one to realize who he is. She is the first person to tell others about Jesus, the first preacher. We follow in her footsteps this morning. In a sign of respect let’s call her Leah.

Recently under pressure from the governor’s office, the Florida Department of education lobbied the College Board to remove certain ideas and methodologies from the Advanced Placement course in African American Studies.[vii] One of the most important concepts that was erased is called intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw first articulated this simple idea in 1989. She points out that race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. intersect and uniquely shape our experience. It means that if you are a wealthy, Black, cisgender middle-aged man the world will look different than if you are a Black trans teenager living on the streets.

Of all the people for Jesus to talk to Leah is a particularly interesting choice. Taking an intersectional approach, Leah is a triple outsider.[viii] First, she is a Samaritan. Samaritans were ostracized, regarded as a mixed race people descended from the Assyrian invaders and the Jews left behind during the Babylonian captivity. The ancient historian Josephus writes about how Jews and Samaritans hated and murdered each other.[ix]

Second, Leah is a woman. Women were not allowed to participate in public life. Every morning faithful male Jews would pray, “thank God I am not a woman.” Women were regarded as dangerous. Religious teachers were not allowed to talk to women in public, not even their own wives. An intersectionality approach shows us that  Samaritan women were regarded as particularly and permanently unclean. Jews did not share drinking vessels with Samaritans because according to the Mishnah tractate, Niddah 4:1, “Samaritan women are deemed menstruants from the cradle.”[x]

Third, Leah is a disgraced woman. The others make their visit to the well in the morning. They chat as they work together. But Leah is not welcome. She is one of the people they talk about and so she has come alone at noon. She has had five husbands and lives with a man who is not her husband.

Leah is used to being avoided. She and Jesus have every reason to stay away from each other. How surprising it must be when Jesus looks at her gently and asks for water. Why is he here? Is he lost? She knows from the way he looks and how he speaks that he is a Jew, and that what he is asking for somehow breaks their rules.

They talk and against all expectations Leah begins to understand the “living water” Jesus offers her. She says, “Sir, give me this water” (Jn. 4). Then the subject abruptly changes and Jesus asks her to get her husband. At this turning point she has a choice. She could say, “I thought we were talking about religion. Why ask such a personal question?” Or she could lie.[xi]

Saying, “I have no husband,” is barely and only literally true. Jesus tells her the rest of the truth about herself. Instead of pulling away, he moves closer to her and all of a sudden it feels overwhelming. She tries to change the subject back to religion and that old debate between Jews and Samaritans. She probably thinks that if Jesus knows about the husbands, he must know pretty much everything else too. She hopes to use this debate to confuse matters, to step back away from him and hide.

But this does not work. When she steps back, he moves toward her. He will not let her simply slip away. Just as she tries to hide herself, he will show her who he really is. She says, “I know the Messiah is coming.” And Jesus says, “I am he.”

This is the first time he has told anyone. It is a moment for complete honesty. The triple outsider and the Messiah encounter each other with no pretenses. All the rules, taboos, prejudices, history fall away forgotten.

Jesus shows Leah who she really is. Beyond all possible human identities, she is a child of God. And this is true today too. The Messiah is the one in whose presence we know who we really are – the good and the bad, the possibilities for the future. The Messiah shows us ourselves by crossing all boundaries, breaking all rules, and speaking to us like someone we have known for our whole life.

When we know we are children of God, we can go back to face people we thought we never could face again. We can say with courage, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.”

3. As a faithful Christian the poet Czeslaw Milsoz understood the way that Jesus gives us the possibility of a new beginning beyond the identities we claim and the ones imposed on us. He writes about this in one of his last poems “Late Ripeness.”

“Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning. / One after another my former lives were departing, / like ships, together with their sorrow. // And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas / assigned to my brush came closer, / ready now to be described better than they were before// I was not separated from people/ grief and pity joined us. / We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King. // For where we came from there is no division / into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.//… I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, / as are all men and women living at the same time, / whether they are aware of it or not.”[xii]

I have learned so much from Jesus, from that long-distant Samaritan woman and from Czeslaw Milosz. There is living water in the most agonizing spot in terrorized Europe. Even when we are isolated by loneliness and surrounded by strangers, we have a visible sign. The statute lifts its hand. We no longer have to be separated from others. God is spirit and we are all children of the King. Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.


[i] “500 churches and religious sites destroyed in Ukraine during the war,” World Council of Churches, 22 February 2023.  https://www.oikoumene.org/news/500-churches-and-religious-sites-destroyed-in-ukraine-during-the-war

[ii] “The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials.” Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics,” The New York Times, 2 February 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ukraine-russia-casualties.html

[iii] Milosz was in Warsaw when it was bombed as part of the German invasion. With colleagues from Polish Radio he escaped. When he learned that his future wife Janina was there, he returned for her. This quote is from Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (1953).

[iv] Czeslaw Milosz, “My Faithful Mother Tongue” (1968) The Collected Poems (NY: Ecco Press, 1988) 216.

[v] “You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime, / And kept a pack of fools around you / To mix good and evil, to blur the line, // Though everyone bowed down before you, / saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, /Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day,// Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one, but another is born./The words are written down, the deed, the date.//And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.” Czeslaw Milosz, “You Who Wronged” (1950), The Collected Poems (NY: Ecco Press, 1988) 106.

[vi] Czeslaw Milosz, “Veni Creator” (1961), The Collected Poems (NY: Ecco Press, 1988) 194.

[vii] “Intersectionality… posits that race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of identity intersect in ways that shape individuals’ experience of the world.” Dana Goldstein, Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis, “Florida officials had repeated contact with College Board over African American Studies,” The New York Times, 9 February 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/us/florida-college-board-african-american-studies.html

[viii] A great deal of my account of this has been influenced by the following. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Identity Confirmation: John 4:5-42,” The Christian Century, 12 February 2008. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-02/identity-confirmation?code=IKeroTclkxra5Bnp5Hgg&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a1a9300470-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2023-03-06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-a1a9300470-86237307

[ix] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews Book XX, Chapter 6. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-20.html

[x] Herman Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple: A Work in Two Editions (NY: T&T Clark, 2005) 164.

[xi] This section and the meeting of the “triple outsider” and the Messiah comes directly from Barbara Brown Taylor, “Identity Confirmation: John 4:5-42,” The Christian Century, 12 February 2008.

[xii] “Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning. / One after another my former lives were departing, / like ships, together with their sorrow. // And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas / assigned to my brush came closer, / ready now to be described better than they were before// I was not separated from people/ grief and pity joined us. / We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King. // For where we came from there is no division / into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.// We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part / of the gift we received for our long journey.// Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago – / a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror / of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel / staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us, / waiting for fulfillment.//I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, / as are all men and women living at the same time, / whether they are aware of it or not.”

Czeslaw “Late Ripeness,” Milosz (tr. Robert Hass and Czeslaw Milosz), Second Space: New Poems by Czeslaw Milosz (NY: Harper Collins, 2004). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49453/late-ripeness

View the Sermon on YouTube

“You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1). 

1. “What are you looking for?” These are the first words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of John. Another way to put this would be to ask, “what is the meaning and purpose of your life.” This question of Jesus echoes the words of the ancient Hebrew philosopher Philo (20 BCE – 50 CE) in his treatise “The Worse Attacks the Better.”i 

Philo’s essay suggests that an authentic self in each of us seeks meaning and may find it in self-mastery, courage, piety, virtue or in other forms of goodness. But to realize truth this self has to overcome forces of illusion, distraction and fear. In short, we have to overcome the demands of our ego to have a meaningful life. 

This naturally leads to another related question. What holds you back from experiencing your life as a child of God? Perhaps you are just too busy. Work demands so much more from us than it did a generation ago in the days before cell phones. Maybe you just cannot believe in a personal God who cares about you especially when you see the enormity of suffering and evil in the world. Perhaps you are afraid of being taken in or that because of what you did, you do not deserve to be God’s child. 

On our Tuesday night Forum I interviewed the Buddhist teacher Timber Hawkeye. He has a little experiment for church audiences. He asks them to raise their hands if they believe in God. Then he asks them to raise their hands if they ever worry. He exclaims how can you both believe in God and worry. In my head I thought it is very easy for me to do both, even at the same time. Sometimes my words and actions clearly show that I am not believing in God very much. 

The question of meaning lies at the heart of a 2022 film called Everything Everywhere All at Once. The first scene introduces us to Evelyn a constantly working Chinese immigrant who lives above her laundromat and is overwhelmed by the demands of her disapproving father’s visit, a complicated relationship with her teenaged daughter Joy and a looming tax audit.ii 

Evelyn has no time for her silly husband Waymond who desperately seeks to get her attention. She has no idea that their relationship is at risk. Then at the IRS offices Evelyn discovers a connection to the multiverse. The multiverse is the fantastical idea that at every decision point in our lives the universe effectively splits in two. For instance, when Evelyn decided to marry Waymond against her father’s wishes, there came into existence a family of worlds in which she did not marry him and one in which she did. 

In this scheme billions of other versions of you exist in the other universes. People in the alpha universe discovered how to switch consciousness with your other selves so that you can briefly make use of their talents in your world. 

An alternate universe version of her husband tells Evelyn that out of all the other Evelyns she is the worst failure. But in the end she realizes the power of overcoming our tendency to judge and criticize so that we can continually repair and cultivate relationships. This is the meaning of our life. 

2. The Gospel of John begins with a hymn about how Christ is present at the very beginning of all things, and that darkness will never overcome this light. It then describes the baptism of Jesus. The next day John tells his friends, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1). The baptizer says he knows this because he saw the spirit remain on him. 

According to this account Jesus does not die as a sacrifice in our place to satisfy God (lambs were not sacrificial animals). Instead the Greek word that we translate as taking away sin is airō. It means to raise, lift up, remove and is the same word John uses for taking away the stone blocking the tomb (Jn. 20), or taking up one’s cross.  

To explain who Jesus is, John does not refer to sacrifices but to the Exodus, when the Israelites were protected from the destructive powers of God by putting lamb’s blood on their doorways. They are saved so that they can be set free. God frees us from chains that prevent us from being with God and each other. 

The word sin (hamartia) is singular not plural. Sin is not primarily about sex or private morality. When we say Jesus takes away sin, we mean that sin is a disease. It keeps us from caring for each other and ultimately finding fulfillment. Sin is prejudice, fear of scarcity, competition for attention, confusing people for enemies, ignoring the needs of others, not seeing the value in our own uniqueness, asserting our identity in ways that put us at odds with others, thinking we are separated from the well-being of others. 

Social theorist bell hooks describes sin as the failure of love. She says, “Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs our decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.”iii 

God made us this way, with this longing. And Jesus believes in love’s promise. He invites Andrew to spend the day with him. Quickly Andrew becomes convinced Jesus is the messiah. Andrew’s brother Simon reaches the same conclusion because Jesus so thoroughly understands him. Philip responds immediately to Jesus’ invitation. Jesus tells Nathanael that he saw him under the fig tree and Nathanael instantly reveres him. 

The point is that Jesus does not present an argument for believing. Instead he offers a question, “what are you looking for?” and an invitation, “come and see.” We can do the same thing. The theologian Karl Barth writes that according to John, “the whole meaning and purpose of the mission of Jesus is to bring joy” (Jn. 16:30ff).iv We too can live in this joy but it requires that we embrace a new way of life. 

3. Karl Barth also writes, “Faith is not obedience, but as obedience is not obedience without faith, faith is not faith without obedience.”v I am going to close with two remarkable stories about Christians who answered the call to come and see. 

Before a huge gathering Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assistant told him that there were credible threats on his life. As part of his speech that night King spoke about his own death, how he wanted no one to respond with violence. Afterwards his friend Ralph Abernathy asked if he was okay, and could not comfort him. King found himself wishing for “an honorable way out without injuring the cause.”vi 

One night he came home late and slipped into bed quietly. The phone rang and an ugly voice said, “if you aren’t out of this town in three days, I’m gonna blow your brains out and blow up your house,” and hung up. King went downstairs brewed a cup of coffee and paced as he thought about all the philosophy and theology he had studied. He considered quitting. Then he sat at the kitchen table and prayed saying, “Lord I’m down here trying to do what’s right… but I’m weak now. I’m afraid. People are looking to me for leadership… [and] I have nothing left.” 

Then with tears in his eyes, he felt a “presence stirring in himself.” An inner voice seemed to speak with quiet assurance saying, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And, lo, I will be with you, even unto the end of the world. It was the voice of Jesus promising to never leave him. His trembling stopped and he felt an inner calm that he had never known before. God stopped being a kind of metaphysical category. King felt God profoundly near to him. 

At Grace Cathedral we have been offering bystander training to equip ourselves to know how to confront injustice and unkindness out in the world. Alma Robinson strongly recommends these sessions. One day after the opera she was near Costco. She was calling an uber and out of the corner of her eye she could see a woman coming toward her. Alma thought she might be trying to ask for money. Since Alma did not have any, at first she tried to avoid her. 

But then Alma remembered her bystander training and the instruction to lean into her discomfort. She approached the woman who asked for her phone. Instead Alma said that she would dial the number and that the woman could talk on the speaker. The woman called her mother in Minnesota. The mother felt desperately relieved to hear from her missing daughter. She asked Alma to get her medical help right away. Alma dialed 911. The ambulance arrived just as her uber got there.  

The next day the woman’s mother called Alma back and told her that her daughter had been suffering from mental illness and had thrown her cell phone into the Bay, that she had been so worried about her child living on the streets but could not do anything about it until Alma had helped. She thanked Alma as a fellow mother. 

What are you looking for? And what stands in the way of experiencing yourself as a child of God? In this universe we are busy, judgmental, preoccupied with failure. We sometimes feel afraid of being taken in, not always sure that we deserve good things. We believe in God and worry at the same time. 

And yet Jesus promises that we can be healed of the disease that separates us from what we should love, that he can free us from the power of sin.  

Perhaps we think too much about the meaning of our life. The meaning of Jesus’ life is to bring joy. He does not give us an argument for believing but an invitation to come and see. 

View the Sermon on YouTube

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt. 4). 

1. Often I start with a question but today I want to finish with one. Sixty years ago President John F. Kennedy, full of confidence in modern science, made two predictions. First, that within a decade a human being would walk on the moon. And second, that science would, “make the remote reaches of the human mind accessible.” At that time few people might have guessed that traveling 239,000 miles through oxygen-less -455 degree Fahrenheit outer space would be far, far easier than discovering psychiatric cures for mental illness.i  

In David Bergner’s book The Mind and the Moon, he shares the story of his younger brother Bob who was diagnosed with bi-polar at age twenty-one, institutionalized and medicated with drugs that had debilitating side-effects. Bergner also follows Caroline a woman from Indiana who started hearing voices as a child and whose drug treatments, starting in elementary school, led to obesity and losing control of her forearms and hands. He introduces us to a civil rights lawyer named David whose severe depression during the Trump administration could not be mitigated by either the drugs his doctor prescribed or the psychedelics he turned to afterwards. 

Bergner points out how little we understand the mind. He writes about the damage that can be caused by a psychological diagnosis (which puts us in a kind of box and separates us from other people) and of many drug treatments which have questionable efficacy. Forty million American adults and millions more children are on psychiatric drugs. In one ten year period the number of children diagnosed with bi-polar increased fortyfold. Thirty to forty percent of our students are treated with psychiatric medication at some point in their college years.ii 

I’m not trying to make a point about how we treat mental illness. I just want to remind us how much we are a mystery to ourselves. Perhaps the saddest part of Bergner’s book for me came when he quoted the prominent neuroscientist Eric Nestler. Nestler said that unquestionably fewer Americans should be on psychotropics for depression and anxiety. He went on, “Exercise. Better sleep. Mindfulness. The belief in something bigger than yourself. Religion if you are religious.” Nestler said, “People with religious beliefs benefit greatly from them.” He wondered if they fostered a, “capacity to bring order and meaning into one’s life.”iii 

And then the sad part. He said that religion was not part of his own life. He tragically explained, “The thing about religion is, I can’t know whether Jesus is the Son of God or whether Allah rose to heaven on a winged horse. Those are not scientifically knowable.”iv This is an insurmountable barrier for him, and many others. Theology has failed our generation when ordinary people think that they have to believe something contrary to science in order to be religious. Christians like us have a lot of work to do in explaining this to the people around us. 

The stakes are high. On Tuesday one of our daughters’ friends took his own life only months before graduating from college.v From his social media posts you would never have realized that there was anything wrong. Did he understand that he is a child of God? There is no way for us to know. 

This morning, the first Sunday in Lent, we have before us central biblical texts: the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness and the Garden of Eden. How do these ancient stories help modern people to understand God? How do we interpret them? What meaning should they have in our life? 

2. For Matthew wilderness is equivocal. On the one hand it has no structure and is void. On the other hand it represents limitless possibility, a context for encountering God.vi In ancient scripture the number forty represents a long time.vii This connects Jesus with other figures who persevered over time. 

My friend Matt Boulton proposes an alternative to the way we usually interpret this story.viii For him it is not about a hero bravely resisting temptations to comfort, security and glory with admirable self-control. It is not about the devil offering something that Jesus deeply desires and Jesus gritting his teeth and responding like someone on a diet knowing that he should not have another plate of cookies. This is not about sacrifice but about trust. 

Similarly the story of Eden’s forbidden fruit is not primarily about sin and disobedience or temptation, but rather about fear, and the failure to trust. Let’s begin by seeing the connection between Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness and Moses.  

After his baptism and the forty days in the wilderness the devil tempts Jesus to turn stones into bread, to throw himself down from the temple in order to show that God would save him and to control all the nations of the world. After each of the devil’s offers Jesus responds with a quote from the story of Moses and the years before he received the Ten Commandments in the Book of Deuteronomy. 

At Grace Cathedral our Sunday school calls the Ten Commandments, “the ten best ways.” Moses teaches the people that the law is not for the purpose of keeping something good away from us. The law provides the order that sustains human life, as he says, “so that you may live and increase.”ix We honor our parents not because we fear God’s punishment, but because we want to live in a society that cares for our elders. 

For forty years, before receiving the law, every morning the people of Israel in the wilderness gathered food from God called Manna. Moses calls this a time of preparation. God cared for them, and provided food in order to humble them so that they would be ready for the law. According to Moses if the Israelites had skipped the forty years in the wilderness and immediately entered the Promised Land, they would mistake the abundance there as the result of their own labor and not as a simple gift from God. Moses teaches that every good gift comes from God. 

It is not that we somehow are good and keep the commandments and then deserve a reward. We live by the grace of God. Commandments are part of that gift. The culminating statement about this comes when Moses says, you are fed with manna, “in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:30). The forty days that the Israelites spent in the wilderness were to teach them that we live entirely by the grace of God. Matt calls this “the hidden fountain in our lives… the font of every blessing we encounter.”x 

Jesus’ first temptation is not so much about his personal hunger, but about whether he will decide to no longer depend on how God has already been feeding him. At first it seems to be about hunger, but what the devil is really saying is, “You do not need God to feed you. Sustain yourself.” And Jesus replies that he lives by God’s word.xi 

Similarly the second temptation is not about security. It is about having the kind of faith that means we do not need to test God. The third temptation is not chiefly about having total economic and political power to save the world from injustice and suffering. It is about not succumbing to the fantasy that a world under our total control would be better than the world God is already giving us. 

I want to say just a word about the Garden of Eden. The serpent’s strategy for betraying Eve and Adam revolves around the contention that God cannot be trusted. First, the serpent says that God would keep food from them, then insisting that God lied in saying that they would die. Finally the serpent talks as if God regarded the couple as rivals and wants to keep them from having their eyes opened and becoming like God. 

The problem is not so much that they disobey an arbitrary commandment about fruit. The serpent has tricked them into seeing God as a jealous rival rather than as the loving source of all the goodness they receive. We too have been fooled into forgetting all that God gives us for the sake of love. 

Let me conclude with one more observation. The devil says, “If you are the Son of God,” “command the stones,” or “throw yourself down.” In English the function of each word is determined by its placement in a sentence. In Greek it is easier to change word order. In this case the devil unconventionally separates son from God (“if son you are the God” “Ei huois ei tou theou”). The only other time this occurs is when the crowds are jeering Jesus during his execution and say, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Mt. 27:40). The devil literally, linguistically, grammatically, separates Jesus from God. 

 3. And that is what is at stake for us. Trust. Connection to God. The devil attacks the very idea that we are children of God and that God is giving us what we need. We live with so many people in such despair. Many think that faith requires believing the unbelievable, and this makes holiness seem as inaccessible to them as, “the remote reaches of the mind.” 

Every day offers us the chance to live as if there is no God, or as if God were our rival. Every day also presents us with the chance to experience our existence as God’s priceless gift. We are a mystery to ourselves. During this limitless season of Lent we will encounter the sustaining grace of God. Let it prepare us for the promised land where we will live more fully out of God’s hidden fountain of love. During this journey how will we show the people around us that they are children of God? 

View the Sermon on YouTube

“And Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid…” (Mt. 17).

Last week in an email my friend Hugh Morgan observed that when it comes to social justice the Old Testament prophets sound strikingly modern to him. He wonders if the Old Testament has a stronger social justice message than the New Testament.1 Today we consider this question.

But first let’s define social justice as equality in wealth, political influence, cultural impact, respect… in opportunities to make a difference, to love and serve others. It involves creating a society in which every person is treated with dignity as a child of God, as bearing God’s image. Jesus calls this the realm of God. Martin Luther King calls it “the beloved community.”

Today we celebrate the Last Sunday of Epiphany. Epiphany means a shining forth. You might call it a realization that utterly transforms us. The culminating story of this season occurs on a mountain top when Jesus’ friends experience a mystical encounter with God.

In a recent conversation the law professor Patricia Williams spoke about two epiphanies that she had had.2 For her whole life she had taken at face value family stories she had heard about her great-great-grandmother. These described her as a lazy person who was constantly fishing, as someone that no one liked. Then when Williams was in her twenties her sister discovered the bill of sale for their great-great-grandmother.

In an instant she realized the truth. At the age of eleven her great-great-grandmother had been sold away from all that she had ever known. Two years later she was pregnant with the child of the dissatisfied thirty-five year old man who had bought her. She was traumatized so alienated from his children, who were taught to look down on her, that the only thing they chose to tell her descendants was that she was unpopular. To get to the truth Patricia Williams had to interpret those two stories together and to have empathy for someone’s suffering. We have to do the same thing in order to understand the Bible.

Getting back to our question, Hugh makes a wise observation about the importance of social justice in the Old Testament. The deceased Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah

(1927-2013) wrote a book called Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. He asks about how religious belief makes large human societies possible. He notes that Israel first appears in Egyptian records in the year 1208 BCE, long before anything written in the Bible.

He points out two notable features about the social world that produced the Old Testament. First, that this it attempts to establish a society not on the role of one man as a divine king (like most Egyptian pharaohs) but rather on a covenant between God and the people. Moses is a prophet not a divine king.

The second thing he notices is that the prophets, for instance, Amos does not just condemn failures of religious ritual but the mistreatment of the weak and poor. Amos criticizes both foreigners and his own people. He writes, “Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes” (Amos 2).3

At this point I feel compelled to tell you more about the Old Testament. It will be a long time before Chat GPT can write an accurate sermon. I am totally astonished by how incorrect search engine results are when it comes to some of the most basic issues in religion. This includes how we determine when these books were written. There was no journalist taking notes in the Garden of Eden or the court of David. The books of the Bible were not written in the order in which the events they record happened, or in the order in which they are presented.

One way to look at it is to see them growing up around the two ideas I just mentioned from the prophet Amos – that there is one God for all people and that God cares how the poor are treated. Scholars believe that the words of the prophet Amos were among the first in the entire Bible. So it is not as if the world was created, Noah built an ark, Abraham met God, God chose the Tribes of Israel, David’s kingdom was established, many other kings reigned and then social justice became important. Social justice, this idea of God’s universality and the dignity of every person, comes first. The other stories are ancient but put together by writers with this conviction in mind.

So the twentieth century rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the prophets, “the most disturbing people who ever lived” and “the [ones] who brought the Bible into being.” They “ceaseless[ly] shatter our indifference.” They interpret our existence from the perspective of God. Heschel writes that the prophets have assimilated their emotional life to that of the Divine so that the prophet, “lives not only his personal life but also the life of God. The prophet hears God’s voice and feels His heart.”4

The Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew with three main types of literature the Torah (instruction or) the law, the Nevi’im or prophets, and the Ketuvim or the writings. The New Testament was written in Greek under Roman occupation and includes totally different genres: gospels, epistles or letters, and John’s apocalyptic conclusion the Book of Revelation.

As Jesus alludes to in the Book of Matthew, the New Testament is built on the foundation of the old – that there is one God for all the nations who cares about human dignity. It has a different feeling because it is composed at a different time, under different social circumstances for a different audience. But for me it is not less focused on social justice. Christians do not worship the Bible, but the person of Jesus. Jesus is how we understand our lives and our connection to God.

We see this in today’s gospel. The story of the Transfiguration is not so much about a private mystical experience, but a meditation on Christ’s passion. It exists to shape our response to Jesus’ death on the cross. Imagine the Book of Matthew. We climb up one side through Jesus’ teaching and healing until we finally hear Jesus describe how his death will be. The disciples cannot take it in. We go down the other side to Jerusalem where Jesus will be killed. And for a reassuring moment we linger at the mountaintop.

Let me briefly tell you three things about the Greek text. Matthew uses the emphatic word idou or “Behold! Look!” three times. First, before the appearance of Moses who represents the law, and Elijah who stands for the prophets. Then again when a shining cloud appears and yet again when God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” (Mt. 17).

Jesus’ friends feel so afraid they fall down like dead people. Jesus tells his friends to rise up and uses the same word he does when he says that the Son of Man will be raised from the dead. Jesus touches them in a reassuring way. The Greek word hapsamenos means to touch, hold or grasp. But it also can be translated as to light or ignite a flame.

What does it mean for social justice, to have at the heart of our religion a man who gives up his life and is executed? It is not just what Jesus says that matters. He gives his life to help make real this idea that God loves every human being, that each life has innate dignity. This includes the truth that death is not the end.

Although Christians often get lost in the belief that faith is about an isolated individual’s personal salvation, there is a deep tradition of meditating on the way Jesus’ death reverses the overwhelming evil all around us. I do not have time for more examples but I would like to mention Basil of Caesarea (330-379).

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus tells the story about a rich man who has so much property that he decides to build a bigger barn to hold it all so that he can “eat, drink and be merry” (Lk. 12). That night the foolish man dies. So the fourth century Basil wrote a sermon about this. He says that what we think we need constantly changes. We are metaphorically building smaller and bigger barns all the time. When we think we need too much we cannot be generous to others.

Basil says, “How can I bring the sufferings of the poverty-stricken to your attention? When they look around inside their hovels… [and] find clothes and furnishings so miserable… worth only a few cents. What then? They turn their gaze to their own children, thinking that perhaps by bringing them to the slave-market they might find some respite from death. Consider now the violent struggle that takes place between the desperation arising from famine and a parent’s fundamental instincts. Starvation on the one side threatens horrible death, while nature resists, convincing the parents rather to die with their children. Time and again they vacillate, but in the end they succumb, driven by want and cruel necessity.”5 The Christian tradition in every generation is filled with appeals like this. They beg us to recognize the full humanity of every person.

Let me tell you the second of Patricia Williams’ two epiphanies. When she was a child there were very few women or Black people who were judges, law professors, law partners, attorney generals, etc. Virtually all law had been written by white men. Because of this there were blind spots, basic failures to understand society that had crucial legal ramifications.6

Professor Williams and other intellectuals invented Critical Race Theory to address this, to help the law work for all people, not just those in power. These debates were largely for people in universities until about ten years ago. In our conversation Professor Williams expressed her surprise when she heard a powerful political consultant talk about how he had made millions of Americans fear and hate this social justice project. He had successfully convinced them to regard Critical Race Theory as divisive and dangerous to white people. He explicitly stated that increasing their anger was a means of getting their votes.7

The great twentieth century Jewish expert in building healthy religious congregations Edwin Friedman frequently repeats this warning. “Expect sabotage.”8 When we are working for good, to change how things are, we will be opposed. Those who care about social justice need to understand that there will be people who actively seek to thwart it.

Patricia Williams is a prophet for me, shattering my indifference. Many here this morning are prophets to me also. Behold. Be ignited. Shine forth. Let the realization of Jesus’ love utterly transform us.


1 Hugh Morgan, 9 February 2023. “In reading Isaiah and the minor prophets, I am struck by how modern they sound, when calling out issues of social justice. Of course, our thinking has been influenced by the enlightenment and all that came after it, so my brain may be predisposed to see these threads in the text. But they are there. You do not see the same strength of views on social justice in the New Testament, certainly little about upsetting the then current order. And I do not think you see similar messages supporting the oppressed in Greek or Roman writings (I have a super limited sense of what these are.) And, you do not see “social justice thought” – a very modern thing – called out, developed, emphasized from the OT texts in the early church, nor through the reformation, not even in the revivals in America and England in the late 1800s. Two questions to ponder 1. Where did the social justice message in the OT come from? 2. Are there strains of this message in church history that I / we are not aware of?”

2 Patricia J. Williams on the Grace Cathedral Forum, 1 February 2023. https://youtu.be/8h-xHY7OIuY . Also see Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 17-19.

3 Robert Bellay, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Quoting Michael Walzer and David Malo on a covenant between the people and God (310f). Amos’ ethical statements (302).

4 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction, Volume One (NY: Harper, 1962) ix-26.

5 “How can I bring the sufferings of the poverty-stricken to your attention? When they look around inside their hovels… [and] find clothes and furnishings so miserable… worth only a few cents. What then? They turn their gaze to their own children, thinking that perhaps by bringing them to the slave-market they might find some respite from death. Consider now the violent struggle that takes place between the desperation arising from famine and a parent’s fundamental instincts. Starvation on the one side threatens horrible death, while nature resists, convincing the parents rather to die with their children. Time and again they vacillate, but in the end they succumb, driven by want and cruel necessity.” Basil of Caesarea, “I Will Tear Down My Barns.” Tr. Paul Shroeder. Cited in Logismoi. http://logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-social-justice-by-st-basil-great.html

6 Professor Patricia J. Williams and I talked about “stand your ground” laws that result in much higher rates of death among Black men, because white people are more likely to be afraid of them.

7 In an online interaction I heard from someone who is monomaniacally focused on the idea that Critical Race Theory must necessarily involve government forced discrimination against white people. He did not have the time to see the Patricia Williams interview. He had already made up his mind.

8 “Sabotage is part and parcel of the systemic process of leadership.” Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (NY: Church Publishing, 2017 revised).