Ending Matthew (Ray's commentary on our Nov 20 readings)

TODAY’S GOSPEL (Matthew 25:31-46)

Ending a church year – ending our reading from Matthew

Sunday, November 20 is the end of the church year. A new church year begins on the First Sunday of Advent, the next Sunday, November 27. So on November 20 we end our year long reading from Matthew’s Gospel, and turn in Advent to begin reading from Mark’s Gospel.

The story of the first Palm Sunday is told in Matthew’s Gospel in chapter 21. This fall we have been reading the stories of what Jesus said and did in Jerusalem immediately after the first Palm Sunday. Near the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, the teachings of Jesus in chapters 5 through 7 are so familiar and well-loved they have a popular holy nick-name, “The Sermon on the Mount.” One might call chapters 21-25 in Matthew the sermon in Jerusalem, or the sermon facing the cross.

The story of the cross begins in the next chapter

For in chapter 25 (from which we read on both November 13 and 20) we are on the threshold of the story of the cross of Jesus. That story begins in chapter 26. Bach opens the St. Matthew Passion with the anointing in Bethany, and then the Last Supper and then the arrest.

Christ the King asks us a question

We end our year long reading from Matthew’s Gospel on a high note, a very grand chord is sounded. It is Judgment Day, and Christ in Glory (which is always the glory of his self-giving love) asks us when did we feed the hungry and clothe the naked and give water to the thirsty and visit the sick and the prisoner, and welcome the stranger?  And he makes the great statement that when we do it one of these, we do it to Jesus himself.  

We feed the hungry at our Neighbors in Need dinner on Tuesday, November 15. Christ comes to dinner. Or making a meal for those at Deborah’s Place.

The kids in the parish through through the Heifer Project gave a camel to a family to give milk as well as transportation in a place where other kinds of animals might not survive.

We clothe the naked, bringing clothes to the church to give to Cathedral Shelter or St. Leonard’s – giving families and individuals Christmas gifts through the Cathedral Shelter. 

We help people out of prison through St. Leonard’s Ministries in our diocese.

We welcome the stranger into St. Chrysostom’s.

We visit the sick at Northwestern Hospital – we send the clergy to bring prayer and the Holy Communion. 

A quotation from Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997) often quoted this Gospel. My favorite quotation from Mother Teresa is this:  

In Holy Communion we have Christ under the appearance of bread. In our work we find him under the appearance of flesh and blood. It is the same Christ. ‘I was hungry, I was naked, I was sick, I was homeless.’                                                                                                  Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, 1971, page 74

In the middle ages, Christians loved to make lists of things – the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. These six things – feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, visiting the prisoner, welcoming the stranger – with the addition of giving a decent burial to the dead became known as the Seven Works of Mercy, or the Seven Works or Corporal (physical) Mercy.

Holiness of life is life lived close to Jesus

Holiness of life is life lived close to Jesus, in Holy Communion and in helping others – in loving servant ministry of others. We live close to him in reading his story, in coming to his table to be fed, in times of quiet prayer and in ways we serve through our volunteer work, our work, our giving. Welcoming others into the church.

OUR FIRST READING (Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24) is the prophet’s great vision of God as the shepherd of the people of God. The prophet hears the voice of God saying God will seek the lost. There is also the vision of giving David as king, who be the people’s shepherd and feed them. At the time of Jesus, all Israel was looking for the coming of the new king sent from God, the “anointed one” (in Hebrew the Messiah, in Greek the Christ) the descendant of David. This for us was and is Jesus, born in Bethlehem, the city of David.

IN THE SECOND READING from the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians (1:15-23) Christ is head of the church. 

The parable of the entrepreneurs (Danielle's Nov 13 sermon)

Computer geeks have ruined us.  I mean that seriously.  Bill Gates has ruined us.  Steve Jobs has ruined us.  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has ruined us, and not because we now spend all our free time looking at pictures of our high school friends' children's birthday parties.  All of these insane geniuses have ruined us because our popular perception of them, the stories and legends we've created around them, the amazing scale of their specialized intellects, define for our culture what it means to be entrepreneurial.

Now it's always been the case that societies hold up their best and brightest.  Our tradition has saints, after all -  and if you think it’s hard to emulate them, when you consider our cultural saints, it gets downright overwhelming.  Somebody like Bill Gates started writing code as a little kid and grew a company so big it ran up against anti-trust laws.  Somebody like Jobs so revolutionized the way we process information that many of us can honestly look back two or three years and say that the way we think and act has been transformed by a cell phone.  If that's what it means to be an entrepreneur, then we've got our work cut out for us.  And this matters, because entrepreneurialism - the creativity, adventuresomeness, and fruitfulness that we associate with tech giants and designers and business moguls - is something every person of faith is called to. 

Look at the three people in our parable today.  Just as in the angry story about the wedding banquet that we read earlier this fall, Jesus tells this story to illustrate what the kingdom of God is like.  And here the kingdom of God is like an investor who gives three entrepreneurs some seed money, some creative license, a vague deadline, and maintains high expectations.

You know now how it all cashes out: the first entrepreneur makes it work, just like the investor thought he would - that's why he was given the most capital.  The second does fine, as expected, and is duly rewarded.   The third entrepreneur caves.  He crumbles.  He doesn't have any good ideas, he doesn't have any training, he doesn't have time to do any research and can't think of anything game-changing to do with the seed money, so he defaults to maintaining the status quo and buries his talent - and his head - in the earth.  The investor returns, and after he's oohed and aahed  over the innovative and productive things entrepreneurs one and two have placed in his lap, he’s presented with a dirty bag of money that looks disappointingly familiar.  Entrepreneur three can tell things aren't going well, so words start tripping and falling out of his mouth, "I was afraid, Mr. Investor!  You're a little bit sketchy and everybody thinks you're kind of scary, so I thought if I just didn't risk the money, then we could all be happy - nothing ventured nothing lost, right?" 

Wrong.  Entrepreneur number three misunderstood the creative task he was handed in the same way we are prone to misunderstand it.  He misunderstood what it means to be a faithful entrepreneur.  In an atmosphere like ours of professionalism and expertise, not only can doubt about our fitness for ministry, our resources for ministry, and our God-given gifts run rampant, but we can misidentify what ministry and what gifts actually look like.  We imagine that entrepreneurialism is about producing flawless things.  Without fail.  With great élan.  Fearlessly.  Our popular culture has it that entrepreneurs look like the three "saints" mentioned earlier - the brains, bucks, and bossiness behind Microsoft, Apple, and social networking.  Or we might acknowledge that entrepreneurialism happens on a smaller scale, but with no less astounding, complex things that require specialized intelligence, like that really great Dyson vacuum cleaner that can pivot around corners.  The inventors and investors behind all of these things are entrepreneurial and all of them are smart and imaginative.  But none of them are unique.  Rather, they are working hard at tasks that belong to all people of faith, tasks that are the essence of entrepreneurialism: creative problem-solving, shared risk-taking, and partnership.   

Creative problem-solving begins with a perceived opportunity, challenge, lack - or maybe even with something really good that could be made better.  In the church family, faithful entrepreneurialism could be as simple as this: Scripture has to be read every Sunday.  The communion must be prepared every Sunday.  Children need to be taught every Sunday.  So you enlist yourself in one of those rotations.  Opportunity, challenge, lack ... solution.  There’s more to add here, because there's more at stake than just signing up - that's a first step.  But let’s look at other potentialities in our parish life that call for a spirit of faithful entrepreneurialism.  Ray preached about stewardship last week and mentioned a time in the church when a beloved tutoring program moved to a new location and the parish wanted to continue serving others in our space.  Neighbors in Need was born, with creativity, shared risk, and parntership.

We have another feeding ministry here that has been launched into the entrepreneurial moment.  Over a decade ago a dedicated group of people saw an opportunity in the desire for an outreach program, in the challenge of women struggling with homelessness, and in the needs of a neighborhood agency who serves them.  The creative solution they arrived at was Cooking for Deborah's Place, where members of our church shop for, cook, and deliver a Friday meal once a month to an overnight shelter where local women sleep in safety.  As with any group a community developed around the ministry, and the woman at the center of it, our friend Noma Cave, died a little over one month ago.  In the wake of her death, creative problem-solving, shared risk-taking, and parntership are the name of the game as the people who love this mission come together and explore questions like, "How do we move forward, practically?"  "How do we deepen relationships with our companions in this work, and how do we meet the precious challenge of building new relationships, inviting new people into the ministry in a busy, time-challenged parish?"   There is spirit and energy in this discussion.  There is openness, welcome, and imagination. There is flexibility, as the group thinks about its mission and methods, and generosity as people who have served in the past come forward to help and as others, like the Neighbors in Need crew, lend support and thoughtfulness to their Deborah's Place friends. 

But there’s a still more-important feature of this conversation that magnifies the character of faithful entrepreneurialism: the tools being used to do this are not tools of expertise, professionalism, or insane genius.  They are mystical, but they're not mystifying.  They are the fruits of the Spirit - the gifts of the Holy Spirit that we celebrate in baptism and that flourish in our baptismal ministries.  Deborah's Place is named for the female judge, Deborah, whose story was proclaimed today, not because she was a brilliant strategist, but because she was courageous, decisive, and wise.  And the ministry of Deborah's Place will continue at our church because our church is tenacious, compassionate, relationship-oriented, even sacrificial.  These aren't things you learn in school.  These aren't one-of-kind assets plunked in your cosmic piggy bank before birth that stack your deck ahead or behind of anybody else's.  These are habits of virtue, patterns of a redeemed life that grow as a body grows - our body of Christ in which we discover holiness with one another. 

But all of these fruits, gifts, virtues, and habits are not generic, either.  In each life, some of them are special.  Some of them are talents.  Among us today are people who are remarkably good listeners.  Some of you are remarkably patient.  Some of you are driven to be kind.  Some of you are unfailingly diligent.  Some of you are peace-makers, bridge-builders, consensus-seekers, and some of you are agitators.  You become a lector because you read well, and you join the altar guild because you want to help, but is it really about your voice and how well you clean a chalice, or is it about your deep appreciation and reverence for word and sacrament?  Is it about your sensitivity to holy things?  Have you ever been told that you are hospitable, patient, incisive, perceptive, detail-oriented or good at big-picture thinking? Gentle, assertive, passionate, or dedicated?  Those are your talents.  Those are the things that make us all human, that make us a good creation.  In a eulogy for one of those famous entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs' sister didn't share that her brother was great at algorhythms.  She said, "He loved beauty."  Bill Gates doesn't work for Microsoft anymore ... he was receptive to criticisms of his charitable giving and established a transparent philanthropic foundation.  So he's generous, but maybe his talent is really openness.  And Mark Zuckerburg could use his abilities toward any number of ends, but he says again and again that what he really wants to do is connect people with one another.  So yeah, he's smart, but his smarts make a difference because of his talent: an abiding interest in people.  These are the kind of talents we're all given to some degree or another, and they're the things we're called to draw out of one another. So if nobody has, in fact, told you that you are discerning, or loyal, or curious, then you deserve to be told.  We have to be able to listen to our own lives, but we’re bound to listen to each other's, as well - at the very least because we need every talent in this place to be a whole body, with all its members. 

And the kingdom of God needs it, too.  The kingdom of God is people by faithful entrepreneurs.  It is a community of talent, where self is offered as the creative solution to the opportunities, challenges, and lack we encounter.  It is a community where risk is shared and rewarded and partnerships are built in support and discernment.  And where these things do not take place – where talent is buried and creativity, risk, and relationship founder, there is loss.  We suffer the loss of each others’ talent and we suffer the diminishment of our own.  So our true partner, our foundational relationship, must be with the One creator-problem-solver who risks loving us enough to leave this earth and this family to our care, to leave each one of us to the other’s concern, and who trusts our talents to build a kingdom.  Let us pray.

Almighty God whose loving hand has given us everything.  Grant us grace that we may honor you with our substance and be talented stewards of your kingdom of love.  Through Christ our Lord, Amen.  

Ray's Oct. 23 commentary

The first reading is Deuteronomy 34:1-12

We began reading the story of Moses, back on Sunday, August 21, from the first chapter of the Book of Exodus. Today we come to the end of the story of Moses – to the story of the death of Moses – in the last chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy.

This is the ending of the fifth book of the Bible – the ending of the five books which are the Torah for our Jewish brothers and sisters.

In the timeline or chronology of the first five books of the Bible, the people of Israel have been out in the wilderness for forty years since they were freed from slavery in Egypt.

They are within sight of the promised land, about to enter the promised land.

Moses, who God called to be the leader of the people, who God made use of as God’s instrument to bring the people into freedom, is not going to enter the promised land. That will be for another leader, Joshua.

The people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt, and over the forty years in the wilderness they had been formed as a free people. Not a perfect people. Not a people who didn’t make mistakes. But they had learned the skills needed to survive and be free. They were formed as a people.

So God will form you and me as disciples of Jesus – our primary identity.

Moses laid hands on Joshua, the leader who would bring the people into the promised land. The bishop will ordain Ben Varnum to the transitional diaconate on November 1 here in St. Chrysostom’s. The moment of ordination is when the bishops lays his (or her) hands on the ordinand’s head. This is the ancient custom directly out of the Hebrew Bible.

Joshua is described as full of the spirit of wisdom. So may we all be. I remember that in Thomas Aquinas the first gift of the Holy Spirit is wisdom. This comes from Isaiah 11:2 where wisdom is the first of the list of gifts of the Spirit, the list which became the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The last verses of the first lesson are a wonderful tribute to Moses. For me the most moving phrase is that the Lord knew Moses face to face: Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face is the translation in the King James Version.

When we come before God, God is unseen, as though hidden in the cloud, that great image from these readings from the Hebrew Bible. Yet we know the face of God in Jesus Christ. And a great theme of these readings is the presence of God with us – unseen but with us. Who loves us.

Today’s Gospel reading is from Matthew 22:34-46.

We are coming close to the end of our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. Our last reading will be on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the Last Sunday after Pentecost from Matthew 25, the great passage that when we feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty, or visit the sick or the prisoner, or welcome the stranger, or clothe the naked, we serve Christ himself.

And in chapter 26 we begin the story of the cross of Jesus. Johann Sebastian Bach began the St. Matthew Passion with the first story in chapter 26, the anointing of Jesus. Then comes the Last Supper and the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and then the arrest of Jesus. This is only four chapters away. Three chapters to our final reading from Matthew (in Advent we begin reading from Mark).

In today’s great passage Jesus is asked which commandment is the greatest and Jesus gives the summary of the law, quoting two verses from Deuteronomy. I know by heart the King James translation, found in the Book of Common Prayer, page 324:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments
hang all the Law and the Prophets.

And here is a clear call to us to follow Jesus as his disciples on his way of self-giving love: loving God and loving one another.

God's things (sermon on Matthew 22)

If you got your hands on one of the oldest prayer books, put together in the sixteenth century, you would find a service of baptism with these instructions: “The pastors … should oft admonish the people, that they defer not the baptism of infants any longer than the Sunday, or other holy day, next after the child be born ….” (Gibson, The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI, 242).  In other words, for many, many years in our church when you had a baby you were expected to bring him or her to the font the very next time that the congregation gathered publicly – no more than 6 or 7 days later.  Now there were practical reasons for this in Elizabethan England: infant mortality was such that people were encouraged to baptize their children swiftly.  And also, parish registers, the big books where we still keep track of all of your baptisms, were the primary way of recording any birth in a given town.  But … in the hearts and minds of those people, and in our imaginations as we read those old instructions years and years since, there’s a spiritual reason far surpassing the practical.  It’s put best by a new mother I know who said, “I wish we could go straight from the hospital to the church to baptize my son – I just want to give him back to God.” 

As the parent of a toddler, I now think about that mother’s moving words in an entirely disillusioned way – I would actually like God to do some babysitting for me every day around 5:00 PM.  But what she was trying to express – and I think you all know this and have felt it in some way about some person or thing in your life – was a deep sense of thankfulness.  More than that, though.  What this new parent felt, what somebody newly in love feels, even what somebody who experiences a loss, tragedy, or has to adapt to any kind of “new normal” might feel, is a life-altering sense of gratuity.  That everything we have right now, right this minute, is an astounding, shocking gift.  That we don’t merit anything: we can’t earn the right to be loved just as we don’t deserve to be unloved; we can’t earn the right to do work that suits us just as we don’t deserve to be jobless or without a calling in life; we can’t earn the right to health just as we don’t deserve to be sick or injured.  We can’t earn the right to be alive, and we certainly don’t deserve to have our lives diminished by the powers of sin.  All of this is kind of a mind-bender, I realize, but the point, again, is gratuity.  Grace.  We are creatures surrounded on all sides by beautiful and terrifying gifts that come our way whether we want them or not.  There is nothing we can do to change that; what we can change is whether we know it and what we do about it.  And that’s what Jesus and his opponents are talking about today. 

There’s no friendly conversation between these two parties.  You hear it right there in Matthew’s telling of the story: the legal experts and the teachers who hate the empire get together with this other group of people who have befriended it in order to trap Jesus in the perfect riddle – a riddle we still don’t know what to do with today.  One of them poses the question: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?  If Jesus says ‘no’ he offends the Herodians, the friends of the empire.  If he says ‘yes’ he offends the Pharisees, its critics.  Both groups can make his life miserable.  Being divine and all, Jesus knows what’s going on, so he gives the perfect response to the perfect riddle.  “Show me the money,” he says.  And then he looks to the mark on the coin, the imprint that the money bears.  “That’s Caesar’s face on this coin.  So I guess it’s his.  Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” 

So the takeaway here could be that Jesus is too clever by half.  He effortlessly avoids the trap, making these people look silly in the process.  And in doing so, he gives anyone who wants to dismiss this story the answer that they need: Jesus is dealing shrewdly with troublemakers and is not trying to tell us what to do with our money.  End of story – let’s move on to the next parable. 

 If that’s your take on it you would be sort of right.  Jesus isn’t telling us what to do with our money here … because he’s telling us what to do with our entire lives.  His response to his opponents operates on a couple of levels.  One level is a statement that is smart and gets him out of a bind.   The other level is a challenge that can inspire attraction, repulsion, or curiosity in those who hear it: give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor.  Give to God what belongs to God.  And whose, by the way, are you? 

We could spend an entire morning talking about what it does or doesn’t mean to belong to an empire, or what an empire looks like in our time.  But a more important question for at this moment is do we belong to God, and what does that mean for us?  This is where the knowing and doing enter the picture, because the definite answer is, Yes.  You belong to God.  And there are two ways we can talk about that.  First, you exist.  Everything that lives, everything that has breath is part of God’s ongoing creative process that has never, ever ended.  The seven days of creation aren’t finite – they’re eternal, and we are as fresh and as surprising to God as Adam and Eve when they were brand new.   You are one of God’s things in the same, immediate sort of way that they were.  You belong to God.

Second, some of you were given back to God – when you were too young to take vows or make promises for yourself, the people entrusted with your care acknowledged in a public ceremony who the author of your life really is.  A few of you out there did this on your own – you came to the waters of baptism as an adult and spoke for yourself, publicly, stating, in effect, “I am not my own.”  And what happens to us in baptism?  What do we do to drive that point home?  We name you, we wash you, but we also seal you: we mark you as Christ’s own forever, making a sign on your forehead that represents the permanent, indelible mark on your soul that can never, ever be taken away.  Just as Jesus asked to see the coin, if he were to ask to see you – if you stepped forward and he asked whose mark was on you, he would see his own cross shining back at him.   You belong to God. 

So it’s not up to you to decide that – it’s up to you to know it.  Then it’s up to you to live like it.  And what does that entail?  Again, there are two ways to talk about this.  Knowing that you belong to God and living like it entails both a loosing and a binding.  It is freeing and it is obligating.  Think about all of the things that want to claim us: work is often the first thing that comes to mind.  Right behind work is money, and hunkering over money is empire – not nation states, per se, but the coalescence of all of the forces in the world that seem irresistible, and all-determining, and trap people in ways of life that are unsustainable.  And on a micro-level, each of us has some other Caesar vying for us: unhealthy relationships, addiction, perfectionism, anxiety, or indifference.  Those things are real, and your experience of them is real, but their claim on you is a lie.  It’s an illusion.  You belong to God, with no option for lease or mortgage.  You are marked as Christ’s own.  He sets you free to walk through this world not as a captive, but as a child of God.     

Yet freedom isn’t the same thing as independence.  You belong to God and so you do God’s work, which is to take care of all of these amazing gifts.  Again, it’s as though we never left the garden, and God is showing us this new world, every day, entrusting it to our care.  All of this hit home for me in a big way this past summer, when my son and I visited parishioners high up on the top of a nearby apartment building.  Joshua was supposed to be swimming, but was running laps around the roof, and as I chased him around the corner of the poolhouse for the first time, I stopped dead in my tracks: all around us I could suddenly see the city shooting up toward heaven, so solid; so magic; so crawling with life, stretching out one side as far as a person could see while on the other side this magnificent lake, this primeval body of water that used to cover the very earth beneath our feet right now spread itself out to unseen shores with more cities where more human lives were moving and changing and beginning and ending, and then in the middle of all of it was this one little child, and  I realized, “Oh my God.  None of this is ours.  These buildings, the very work of our hands – none of it belongs to us.  These beaches, these planes, these cars and churches and hospitals.  These trees and fish and people.  All of this is such a gift.  All of this is pure gratuity.  Even this little boy, this little person who consumes my life – even he doesn’t belong to me.  I am just somebody God is using to hold him right now.  It all belongs to God.” 

When you know that you are God’s – when you can really feel it - the only response is to care.  To care for God’s gifts, to steward God’s city, to hold God’s people.  And that is what living like you belong to God entails.  You treat everything that surrounds you – this place, this earth, the people you’ve been given, and your own body – as though you were holding it all lightly, like you hold a newborn baby, tending to it all for God.  Confident but gentle, seeking only the good, recognizing in all else a fellow creature, or a fellow creation, undeniably aware that you and all that you behold are God’s things. 

Let us pray:  O God, whose gifts surround us and whose grace is the very breath in our lungs: open our eyes to the truth about our lives and to the depth of our calling in you so that the good things you have made might be yours and yours alone, for all the world to know.  In God’s holy name we pray, Amen.

Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, Oct. 16, 2011.

Our angry God?

God is not all sweetness and light.  This week’s story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) and the Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22) feature an angry God and an angry king who represents God.  Passages of Scripture that depict God’s “wrath” appear throughout both the Old and New Testaments – and Christians have never had an easy time grappling with them!   

Biblical scholar Gary A. Herion puts the two classic questions around our angry God well:

1. In the “wrath” stories, is God really mad, or are the biblical authors just using figures of speech?
2. If God is really mad, is it a part of God’s personality, “co-equal” to Love, or is it a passing phase?

Here’s a few guidelines to help us puzzle through these issues:

Passion v. Pathos: Passion describes loose, uncontrolled, radiant emotion that we might call “irrational.”  Pathos is emotion directed toward a particular situation, and is related to ethos, which has to do with moral norms.  In Scripture, God’s anger has the character of pathos and is provoked mainly by covenant-breaking: human straying and acts of injustice.  In Exodus, God’s pathos is directed toward Moses when he initially refuses to stand up to the Egyptians, and toward the Egyptians when they persecute the Israelites.  More than any other Ancient Near Eastern deity, the Hebrew God is no capricious, nor is Yahweh inherently wrathful.

Angry Kings: God is often depicted as a king in the Old and New Testaments, not only because the metaphor is apt (God is Lord over Israel), but because metaphors themselves allowed pious Jewish people to avoid using the divine name.  Ancient Near Eastern kings often expressed their “wrath” formally, in writing.  When a king wrote that he was angry, he was being provoked by an external event – something that required him to exercise his power and express his displeasure in a way that offered no apologies.  Wrath was his “royal prerogative.”  Could the same be said for God’s wrath in Scripture? 

Wrath in the New Testament: In Matthew, which we will read in worship until late November, God is never depicted as wrathful.  John the Baptist does, however, mention a “day of wrath.”  This day, ironically, is when God will conquer all wrath.  The adversity that humans experience just by being alive – not because God, in God’s wrath, punishes misdeeds – will be no more. 

New Testament wrath is more at home in Revelation, where, again, it is associated less with God and more with a coming day of judgment and setting-right.  Wrath, therefore, is never some free-floating thing but is occasioned by injustice and broken relationships. 

Bibliography: Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v.6 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 989-998.  

(Danielle Thompson)

A tall order (July 31 sermon)

(The readings for the day were from Genesis 32, where Jacob wrestles with God; Romans 9, where Paul wrestles with his understanding of the church; and Matthew 14 where Jesus feeds the crowds)

A few weeks ago I got an email from a friend, which said, "I'm reading Howard Schultz's book, and it reminds me of the church." Now if you don't recognize his name right away, believe me - you'll be surprised to find out who Howard Schultz is. He's not a minister, or a professor, or a self-help guru. Howard Schultz is the founder and CEO of Starbucks. The coffee company. And he hits the nail on the head when it comes to the problem of the church in our time.

He's not trying to do this, of course. The name "God" doesn't make one appearance in Schultz's book. In no way does he attempt to describe the challenges faced by the body of Christ in the twenty-first century - and why would he? Onward is a business memoir, plain and simple. The weird thing is, Schultz's story of a company brought back from the edge is undeniably religious. And it's something we need to pay attention to not just because it's instructive, but because it calls all of us in the church on the carpet.

Some background information matters here. For one, what was the problem with Starbucks? Well on the surface, it looked like two things: runaway growth and a bad economy. Do you remember when it suddenly seemed like every other building you passed had a little green mermaid plastered to its window? I've actually been in a Starbucks and looked out, across the street directly into another Starbucks. (People joke about that, but it actually happened to me!) No matter how much you love iced green tea or decaf Pike Place, you know intuitively that there's something wrong with that. And three years ago now, right about the time when all of the deep, negative issues that come with that sort of unsustainable growth began to be unbearable for Starbucks, the economy tanked. Everything went into a tailspin, and people stopped buying expensive coffee.

This is when Schultz became the CEO of Starbucks for a second time. And the story he tells of risk and leadership, the way he paints a picture of this moment where Starbucks had to figure something out or that mermaid was sunk, has all of the dramatic, biblical flair of Jacob on the edge of a stream, in all-night hand-to-hand combat with God in human form. You would never guess it from your lectionary insert today, but the reason Jacob sends his family on ahead of him, the reason he's struggling and sleepless, the reason he demands to receive a blessing is that he, too, is in crisis. He’s in immediate, stomach-chewing danger from none other than Esau, the older brother whose inheritance he stole. Jacob ran away from home because Esau wanted to murder him; he's spent years and years at his uncle's place, has a family and some cows and some servants ... but now it’s time to go home. God calls Jacob to return to his kindred with everything he has - only it means crossing paths with Esau. And Esau hasn't done so badly for himself, either. In fact, when Jacob sends a messenger to warn Esau that he's approaching, the message he gets back is this: "Esau is coming. And he has four hundred men with him."

Four hundred armed warriors sort of makes angry shareholders look like another day at the office. And Jacob and Esau's bad economy - the give and take, the market of respect, compassion, and brotherly love that could exist between them - is every bit as uncertain as ours. But it has to change for the story to work. See, in order to be one of these Old Testament patriarchs - in order to be a father of Israel, like Jacob is - you have to live in the land that God promised to Abraham. At this point the story, Jacob can't carry on the family line and be living with his uncle, in a foreign place. He has to go home and claim his inheritance. So, as Ray noted last week, in order to pass faith in God on to untold generations of people through his descendants, Jacob has to get back, regardless of Esau. A whole kind of future depends on it.

But Esau isn't the moment of truth in all of this. The crucial step in Jacob's whole business of saving his family and his future is discovering who he really is. The thing that prepares Jacob to face Esau and prepares him to assume the responsibility of leadership is learning his true identity. Jacob is alone, in the dead of night, afraid of his brother, and God is suddenly there in human form, as though to say, "Don't wrestle with your brother – wrestle with what really matters." And Jacob shows up. Jacob puts up such a fight that God has to stop playing fair and wound him in the thigh in order to break it up. Because he has grappled so hard - because when he was pressed, Jacob pressed back - God gives him a new name, Israel, which means "one who strives with God" or "God strives." So Jacob becomes Israel, and Israel becomes who she will be, a people, including us, whose faith is built on a dynamic, restless, intimate, and ever-evolving relationship with God – with “what really matters.” Jacob limps away, marked not by loss but by the victory of knowing who he really is.

In the end, this was Howard Schultz' victory, too. During sleepless nights and early mornings as he wrestled with our seemingly god-like economy, the thing Schultz kept returning to was identity. In order to get back home, get back where it needed to be, Starbucks needed to know who it actually was. The company had lost its way and forfeited its soul in the pursuit of programs and products and more and more and more, and was in desperate need of what we might call a "come to Jesus" moment. In the book, this is where the real religion begins: the first word Schultz can think of to depict the essence of Starbucks is "love." He follows that up with "respect and dignity. Passion … Compassion, community. Authenticity." He says that if home is the "first place" in a person's life and work is a "second place," then a place like a coffeehouse is a "third place," where people can connect with one another and reconnect with themselves." His new mission statement begins, "To inspire and nurture the human spirit." And finally, Schultz cites an article from the Wall Street Journal written in the midst of 600 store closings, which observed that Starbucks stores are like "secular chapels" where "ritual abounds." The journalist lamented, "I don't go to Starbucks much. I don't go to the Baptist church, either. But I'm glad that we've got one just about everywhere."

Howard Schultz is obviously dramatic. But he's not wrong. Or rather, he's not wrong about the niche that Starbucks is filling, but he is wrong about how they're filling it. Starbucks' coffee is amazing. Starbucks' employees are lovely and are treated fairly. But Starbucks is selling you something, and that something is the idea of love, community, authenticity. Starbucks is banking - quite literally - on the fact that you long for these things, and the problem they faced a few years ago was that they'd forgotten what human beings lack. They were blind to our tender, emotional demands and were supplying something we didn't need. That was the problem with Starbucks.

The problem with the church is that we've forgotten that, too. For decades now the buzz has been declining numbers in all traditions, congregations losing members to death, life transitions, distraction, or disinterest and not replacing them. To this day, every issue of The Christian Century, a magazine that represents mainline Protestantism, or America, which represents a similar group of Roman Catholics, has some article about who's attending, who's not attending, why this is happening, and what we can do to stop it. People worry especially about the next generation of Christians, which is why the National Study of Youth and Religion, a huge project undertaken by scholars within the last few years, was so devastating with its insight that two-thirds of teenagers believe in God and have positive feelings toward church ... but only eight percent of them think that religion has anything to do with their everyday lives. One author, writing on the study, blamed the situation on what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism" - the tendency of many churches to promote being nice, being friendly, and feeling good about yourself above being just, being honest, and working like a dog for the kingdom of heaven. But it can be more than this. It can be feeling trapped in ways of doing things that don't make sense anymore. It can be the pressure of an increasingly complicated world that is outpacing an institution that appears to be about the preservation of tradition only. Or it can be that the church tries to mirror that complicated world too much with too narrow of a focus on growth, too many activities, too much flux, too little silence and peace, so that its true identity, it's core essence, gets lost out there with everything else in a sea of soccer games, office parties, and mocha frappucinos.

One church in our own diocese felt this sense of stagnancy and desperation acutely and decided to explore it. Church of the Holy Spirit, an hour north of here in Lake Forest, took a survey - the same one we did - and uncovered a deep sense of untouched spiritual longing. Their rector responded by coming up with events and programs and classes and activities ... and still, nothing worked. So the church did something risky to pull itself back from the edge. They took another survey, which inventoried not their satisfaction with the parish, but their thoughts about God, their relationship with Jesus, their felt sense of the Holy Spirit, and their life of prayer. It was a hard thing to do. The language of this survey was more evangelical than anything most of us are used to, and it felt too private to many people to answer questions about their interior life of faith. But this is the thing that worked - actually, a better way to say it is that this is the thing that put the church to work. For the last eighteen months groups within Holy Spirit have been studying the Baptismal Covenant and the Bible and their own hearts; they've been trying to pray before meetings and incorporate spiritual practices into their daily routines; they've written spiritual autobiographies and participated in classes called "God sightings" where they try to figure out where and how grace is working in their lives and in the world around them. Not everybody is on board, and not everybody has been totally blown over, but parishioners who've committed themselves to this process report that they are experiencing something they’ve never experienced before.

Church of the Holy Spirit in Lake Forest is not us. The way the challenges of the church in the twenty-first century present themselves to it are different than how they present themselves here. But the overall situation is the same. And whatever we do to meet it now or at any time in our future is likewise the same: we have to discover our true identity. We have to find out who we really are. The good news is that like Holy Spirit, like Jacob, but unlike Starbucks, what we have is the real deal. Real love. Real community. Real relationship. Starbucks has a word for you that changes with each season, each campaign, each shift in the market - God's word for you is always the same: Yes. Starbucks closes - in the dead of night, on holidays, when the weather is bad. God is with you, even when you are searching for God's presence and not finding it ... you are assured that God is there. Starbucks wants to engage you in an economy of exchange, but what God has for you is free: freely given, freely received, free to all. Which is, finally, the last point - Starbucks doesn't have to serve you, but God wants nothing more than to fill your body with food. Jesus saw the crowds, had mercy on them and created substance, created nourishment out of almost nothing at all. We are those crowds, coming to him in need of everything, wondering how there could possibly be something for us here, yet after we eat with him, we’re not only satisfied - we become him. We become his hands and feet and heart and mouth so that the people we are when we are limping away from our encounter with God in this person are people who are changed, equipped, and empowered. People who have tasted and drunken something ... real.

That is who we really are. How we live it and what difference it makes for our life together and for every other life we touch will be our great victory. May God, who has given us the will to do these things give us the grace and power to perform them.

Sermon preached by the Reverend Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, July 31, 2011.

Cited:

Dean, Kenda Creasy. Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenager Is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Schultz, Howard. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing its Soul (New York: Rodale Books, 2011).

Read the Reverend Jay Sidebotham’s story of Church of the Holy Spirit, “Don’t Shoot the Messenger! Or, How We Raised Our Episcopal Spiritual Expectations” at http://makingexcellentdisciples.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/dont-shoot-the-messenger-or-how-we-raised-our-episcopal-spiritual-expectations/.

Sermon prep for July 17: poetic justice?

Commentary by Ray Webster

First reading: Genesis 29:15-28 Jacob marries

These great stories from Genesis tell us the story of the descendants of Abraham – our ancestors in faith, the first people (in the telling of it in Genesis) to believe in God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Today we come to the story of Jacob’s marriage. People are often startled by Jacob’s behavior in Genesis. He tricked his brother Esau out of his birth right, and now Jacob finds himself with a prospective father-in-law who tricks him in turn.

Robert Alter writes:

It has been clearly recognized since late antiquity that the whole story of the switched brides is a meting out of poetic justice to Jacob – the deceiver deceived, deprived by darkness of the sense of sight as his father is by blindness, relying, like his father, on the misleading sense of touch. The Midrash Bereishit Rabba vividly represents the correspondence between the two episodes: “And all that night he cried out to he, ‘Rachel!’ and she answered him. In the morning, ‘and, …look, she was Leah.” He said to her, ‘Why did you deceive me, daughter of a deceiver? Didn’t I call out Rachel in the night, and you answered me?’ She said, ‘There is never a bad barber who doesn’t have disciples. Isn’t this how your father cried out Esau, and you answered him?’”

Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2004, pages 155-156

Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his daughter Leah, and then his daughter Rachel – the one Jacob loved. In the unfolding story in Genesis, Leah is the mother of six of Jacob’s sons: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun. Jacob had two more sons by the slave girl Bilhah: Dan and Naphtali. And then two by another slave girl: Gad and Asher.

Then Rachel would have a son, Joseph, whose story we will read – and then another, the youngest, Benjamin. These were the twelve sons of Jacob who was also called Israel, and the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel.

By the way, I highly recommend Robert Alter’s highly praised translation of and commentary on the first five books of the Bible: The Five Books of Moses, quoted above.

Second reading: Letter of Paul to the Romans 8:26-39

When my home rector as a student, Bishop Wylie, died, many years ago, he left instructions that my old boss in New York, Bishop Rockwell, preach on Romans 8 – this great majestic chapter from the Letter of Paul to the Romans. Part of these words are indeed often read at funerals in the Episcopal Church and they are fitting statements of the central Christian belief in the resurrection in Jesus Christ.

Our passage this week starts with a less familiar verse – much less often read – but of equal importance.

The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

There are times when we do not know what to say to God. Either the situation is too tough. Or sometimes are hearts are too full. The Holy Spirit, who is God dwelling within us, speaks in the silence within, too deep for words, in love.

And then come these great words of Christian faith and hope:

What then are we to say about these things?

These things that happen to us, that happen in this life. What are we to say about death and loss?

If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

And then these great words. In many ways they are the center of my faith:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Jesus put before the crowds another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

The mustard seed is tiny, but a great plant grows out of it. Just so the kingdom of heaven – the sovereignty of God’s love in our lives, and our trust in that love – can be as small, as tiny, as a mustard seed but out of grows something great. Our lives. Our Christian lives. The life of the Christian community.

For the Kingdom (sermon from July 17)

 (The readings for July 17 were from Genesis 28, Psalm 139, Romans 8, and Matthew 13)
 
If you're ever in the South, you'll notice there aren't a lot of really old places.  There are venerable, elegant banks and state buildings, and if you head out of the city you'll find some plantations to tour, but your neighbor isn't going to be living in a home from the early 19th century.  Each town won't have the little clapboard houses of the first settlers like you find in New England or New York state.  And the reason is simple and practical:  there was a war there.  Only 150 years ago, which is a little blip on the cosmic time-line, the American South was a disaster zone.   During the Civil War, towns and downtowns and farms and fields were leveled and burned and changed forever in more ways than a landscape can tell, and in more ways than people can remember.  Today, if you shoot through Atlanta on Interstate-75, you're going to see success: tall buildings, thousands of cars, bridges and apartments that are new and shiny with this unbelievably cheery sun lighting it all up.  But if you were running from Atlanta in 1864, it would have looked just like that scene from Gone with the Wind, where Rhett Butler is racing a horse and wagon through walls of flame as Sherman's army burns everything to the ground.  Atlanta, a real place you can see today, looked like a furnace of fire.

When Jesus talks about wheat and chaff and the furnace of fire today, he's talking about a real place, too.  South of Jerusalem there's valley called Gehenna that captured the imagination of Jesus' friends the way a haunted house captures ours.  The valley was once home to people who worshipped a god called Molech, and by Jesus' time ideas about the horrible things their cult had done were part of popular lore.  People may have burned trash there and Roman soldiers may have practiced cremation there, so evoking Gehenna brought up for everyone images not only of fire, but of ritually unclean and morally abhorrent things.  In the Bible, Gehenna stands for everything that’s opposite to the kingdom of God, and to say a person would end up there meant that the more God's kingdom comes, the more God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, the more painful life will be for those who are opposed to God's will. 

So in the parable today, the one we just read about the wheat and the chaff, we could say that Jesus is being descriptive.  He’s describing how people who are committed to bad things would experience the coming of something good.  Which is easier to hear than if he were being entirely prescriptive about it - we don't want him to be saying here, "Bad people are going to live in a bad place forever and ever" which is our own popular idea about hell.  Because if you believe the latest research, a lot of us here today are uncomfortable with the notion of eternal punishment - either we don't think about it, or we just don't buy it.  A few years ago a huge scholarly study found that while 74% of Americans believe in an afterlife and believe in heaven, only 58% believe in hell (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, June 2008).  And that statistically significant sample of people who believe in heaven without believing in hell looks awfully like us.  Many are Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, Reformed Jews, or members of the United Church of Christ.  Many live in urban areas where they meet lots of different types of people, or they have lots of education or work experience, so they've been exposed to different types of ideas.  The sociologists and theologians who published the study had some thoughts about why hell has dropped off the map for so many people, and it seems to boil down to a couple of things. 

First, the difference between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is often cast in terms of belief or non-belief.  Do you believe in God?  Do you believe Jesus is God?  Good - heaven's up that ladder over there.  No God?  No Jesus?  Sorry.  But people today see that their neighbors and their family members are good and kind and live according to God's will even if they are Buddhist or Muslim or atheist, and they're not willing to consign them to a Judeo-Christian underworld.  The second thing is that the difference between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is often cast in terms of doing good or doing bad.  But we understand that being human is complex.  Institutions and systems and states can lock all kinds of people in bad behaviors; sick families, sick circumstances can create sick individuals; what one group of people thinks is good another thinks is bad; and besides, our religion teaches us to love and to forgive.  Who wants to walk down Michigan Avenue, looking at all those people around you like they're a waving field of grain, and decide "this one's in and this one's out ... she's wheat and he's chaff ... he's going to get punished, and she's going to be with God." 

Here's the thing.  That's what happens when we decide what hell is.  That's what happens when humans do the choosing: we look at all of the people around us and since we can't possibly know about a person's soul, we decide who's good and who's  bad based on things that aren't eternal.  Like the servants in today's parable, we want to get in there and do a weeding even if it means that healthy plants get ripped up in the process.  That's how you get a Holocaust or a Bosnia or a Rwanda.  That's how you get prejudice and apartheid.  But if you know better, if you’re rightfully sensitive to the evil that happens when we start deciding who is saved and who is lost, you end up with the problem of what to do with evil at all.  How do we talk about it?  How do we discern what it is?  How do we teach our children and grandchildren about life in this world?  And if it does make itself known to you -  if, God forbid, something terrible happens to you or someone you love, or to the place where you live, like it did for us almost a decade ago, how do you suddenly make sense in a Christian way of this thing we're afraid to touch with a thirty foot pole?  We don't even like to hear Jesus talk about it.

This is the part where we need God.  Not for clues about what eternal punishment looks like, because God doesn't actually give us a lot of concrete information about any place called hell in the Bible.  God does, however, give us tons of clues about what the kingdom of heaven looks like.  And salvation - making your home with God - depends on being for God's kingdom.  When we look to Jesus, we see that "God's kingdom" means health, sight, abundance, rest, reconciliation, peace, and unselfish love.  But it comes at a cost.  Those things don't just happen - they have to be prayed for and worked for, and there’s plenty in this world that is against them.  You know it when you see it - you know that in God's kingdom children are safe, and you know that people who hurt children are not for the kingdom.  You know that in God's kingdom people are governed wisely, and you know that leaders who abuse their people are not for the kingdom.  You know that in God's kingdom people are judged by their hearts, and you know that those who judge by any other standard are not for the kingdom. 

As people of faith, we believe that God's kingdom is here now, but is also coming.  We pray that one day it will be all-in-all - that every child will be safe, that all communities will know peace, and that all hearts will be united with God and with one another.  And when that happens, the person who's committed to anything else, be it hurting other people, hurting the land, even hurting his or her-self will experience the pain and suffering that comes when there's a radical paradigm shift.  If you were a slaveowner in Atlanta in 1864 and you lost your home, your farm, your laborers and your status as a powerful person when the army rolled in, you would weep and you would gnash your teeth.  And not only you - as St. Paul says in the second reading today, the whole creation would groan along with you, because your paradigm shift, the change you’d be forced to make, would cost everyone.  God wants slaves to be free, but God doesn't want a city to burn.  God might want people to take action against injustice, but God hurts for the young soldier who has to draw his weapon.  

So here's the other part where we need God.  With God, that burning city, that furnace of fire isn't the final word.  It isn't the end of things.  That slaveowner's reckoning, that soldier's memories of war, the conflict inscribed in that very land is only one part of the story.  Because repentance is possible, redemption is promised, and God will never leave us.  Look at this story of Jacob today, who’s fleeing from his brother, who’s afraid and goes to sleep in this insignificant place only to discover that he has found heaven.  That no matter where he is and what happens to him, God will be there, and God will bring him home.  Our whole Bible is this story of forgiveness and reconciliation and hope that everything will be with God.  And just as God promises to bless the world through Jacob, God promises to save the world through Jesus.  It doesn't happen all at once, it may not even happen in the course of a lifetime, and it doesn't happen easily.  But it's the work we're given to do - not saying what's out, but drawing everything in.  And again, as Paul says, to wait with patience and hope for things that we can’t see now, for it will be our salvation and it will be our joy.

Sermon prep for July 17: really? Do we have to go there?

Jesus grasps Adam and Eve's wrists and liberates them from Sheol

Ray and I have committed to preaching about Genesis this summer as a way to provide consistency, and also to explore some really fascinating stories.  But when you get a Gospel reading like the one appointed for July 17, it’s hard to stay focused on Jacob and Esau.  The parable of “the weeds among the wheat” ends with this statement of Jesus in Matthew 13:

Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. ⁴¹The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, ⁴²and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Great.

If you read all of Matthew 13, you’ll find that Jesus’ explanation of his parable (above) comes at his disciples’ request – after he’s already moved on and told a few less “colorful” parables.  They are dying to know what this one means, just as the servants in the parable are dying to rip up the weeds, and just as we are dying to figure out what to do with these uncomfortable words and images.

Nobody really gets what they want here.  The servants are told to wait and let the reapers sort things out.  Jesus’ disciples hear his explanation, but are then treated to another parable that includes fiery furnaces and gnashing teeth.  We’re left with the two hard conclusions, plus a cultural context of our own that doesn’t deal well with either of them: first, sorting out the good from the bad isn’t our problem, just like it wasn’t the servants’; second, God will do the sorting and it ain’t gonna end well for everybody. 

Again, great. 

A lot of the scholarship I read wants to make only these points, that God is in control of this situation and you and I shouldn’t be wandering around worrying about who’s wheat and who’s a weed.  When left to our own devices, we do a pretty bad job at that.  God’s judgments are about hearts – not skin color, social status, sexual orientation, how well one is able to meet a variety of expectations, etc – so there’s comfort in knowing that God is in charge.  I totally agree.

But frankly, that reading of these parables is skewed toward comfort – true, authentic comfort, but comfort none-the-less.  It avoids the part where a sorting actually occurs.  It avoids the part about hell.  And as a Christian and a preacher, I feel called to handle those things … but preferably at arm’s length.  With tongs.  Wearing a hazmat suit.  Is that an option?

So the sermon this week will have to deal with punishment – more specifically, a place of punishment called “hell” in older translations of the Bible.  And we’ll also need to talk about a place of refreshment called “heaven,” which is where Jacob’s ladder reaches up to in the reading from Genesis.  I honestly don’t know how far I’ll get or how deep I’ll be able to go in 10-12 minutes.  But this is a part of our inheritance that we have to engage, and a sermon is one way to do that creatively, honestly, and – this is important – communally. 

(See the posting below for some background on terms used for “hell” in the Bible.)

Sermon preached on The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

Liturgy of the Palms: Matthew 21:1-11; At the Eucharist: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Matthew 27:11-54

If you happened to jog through Lincoln Park earlier in the week, you would have seen something a little out-of-the-ordinary – or out of time, at least.  Canons erupting, men in porkpie hats, women in hoop skirts?  In April, 150 years ago, the American Civil War began, so right behind the Chicago History Museum up here, and all over the country, groups of re-enactors got together to pitch tents, drink chicory coffee, and, most importantly, to stage mock battles.  You might wonder why anybody would do this – why people would spend their free time dressing up in old-fashioned clothing, eating hard-tack, and reliving an unhappy and tragic event, like a battle.  Well, the Tribune reported the words of one re-enactor, who insisted that we, as a country, “have lost sight of what the Civil War was all about … great honor, courage, bravery ….”  He and his friends re-enact because, again, in his words, “[The Civil War is] a part of American history and we have to keep that alive.” 

The re-enactors kind of gave me a jolt this week, not because they were discharging firearms, but because their actions and ours seem to eerily coincide.  More than any other time in the year, Holy Week is when we re-enact, explicitly, the days leading up to Jesus’ death.  And if you want drama, forget Gettysburg – today we’ve got the highs of the liturgy of the palms and the lows of the passion narrative.  We’ve got Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion, and for the next six days we’ll keep replaying all of the things that happened to him in the last week of his life: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and all the way through Thursday when he’ll have one final meal with his friends, and Friday when Jesus will die.  We’ll be there for all it.

We’re in good company, too, with all of this re-enacting.  It’s exactly what Jesus is doing when we see him today, riding into Jerusalem on a little colt.  The tip-off is in the hollers of the crowd as they throw their jackets and some tree branches on the road in front of him.  Hosanna to the Son of David!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!  This is a psalm the people are shouting, and it’s not just any old psalm.  It’s Psalm 118, which is the last part of the Hallel, a group of psalms that Jewish people in Jesus’ time and Jewish people to this day say during major festivals like Passover.  Jesus is actually enacting the story that happens in the psalm: a new king arrives at the temple and is greeted by the people inside with eagerness and desire, because they want to be saved.  Their prayers are answered when the king strides through the temple gate, walking in step with Jesus years later as he ambles into town on the back of a donkey. 

It goes even further than this, though.  Jesus has a reason to be in Jerusalem.  He’s there to confront the powers that oppose him, and to preach God’s kingdom.  But something else happens, right?  Passover.  Jesus is in Jerusalem for Passover, to keep the feast, just as he’s always done.  The Last Supper, the final meal with his friends, the thing that we re-enact on Maundy Thursday, is a Passover meal, with Jesus presiding.  And Passover is the great re-enactment of the defining moment in the history of Israel, the passage from bondage to liberation that lies at the center of who God is for the Jewish people.  Jesus and his friends would have spent the night recalling the story of the Exodus, with this intention, quoted from later Passover texts: “In every generation let each person look on himself as if he came forth from Egypt.  It was not only our ancestors that [God] redeemed, but us as well did he redeem along with them.”  So Jesus falls in line with time as he enters Jerusalem; he falls in line with time as he observes Passover – and the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor notes that he falls in line with time as he and his friends sing at the end of their seder meal.  Because they must have sung the same Hallel, the song Jewish people sing at festivals, the song that the crowd shouted at Jesus as he approached the city gates on Palm Sunday. 

So there are layers and layers of memory going on here, especially when you get to us.  You have the Hallel, and Jesus entering into Jerusalem as the king does in the Psalm, as well as Jesus singing the Hallel at the end of the Passover meal.  And you have the Passover itself, the great festival of remembering that Jesus and his friends were commanded to keep, where Jesus told the story of deliverance from slavery right when he was preparing to deliver us from sin, to be our Passover.  Then you have Jesus’ own command, which you’ve heard before, and which you’re going to hear again in six or seven minutes: “do this for the remembrance of me.”  And so not only during Holy Week, but every week we get wrapped up in this repeating circle of events, this repeating cycle of storytelling, these repetitious actions that we believe make a difference for how we live and how we live with God. 

What kind of a difference, though?  How is our re-enacting anything more than following a command?  Or keeping a family tradition, or acknowledging a precedent?  How is what we do different than what the Civil War re-enactors are doing as they try to raise awareness about American History?  Are we just waving palms around in order to get a feel for what a palm was like in the first century?  Are we just bringing the crucifixion to the front of our minds so we can be mentally prepared for Easter? 

The re-enactors may have more to teach us than we think.  Because if you’ve ever known a Civil War re-enactor, you know that the guy I quoted from the Tribune wasn’t telling the whole truth.  Sure, they want to preserve battlefields and build historical consciousness.  But that’s not why you camp out in costume in a city park.  You camp out in costume because you want to be there.  Meaning, you want to be living in April, 1861, if only for a day.  You want to physically participate in something you otherwise have no access to.  Civil War re-enactors have a Passion for something that didn’t happen to them.  But we have a Passion for something that did happen to us, and that keeps happening to us.  In Jesus, as participants – as sharers – in his body, we passed through the sea; in Jesus we ride into the city while the people who would later kill us sing our praises; we keep the feast of bread and wine where the whole history of God’s creation is prayed out loud, again and again; and in Jesus we suffer, and we die … and then we discover that something else is more powerful than suffering.  Something is more powerful than death.  Just under the surface of everything, just waiting to overtake everything in any given instance is the power of resurrection, the power of new life that is Easter’s answer to Holy Week.  The power of new life that is God’s answer to everything that wants to kill us.  The defining moment in our ongoing history, that we re-enact again and again and again, just by being alive is this: resurrection, resurrection, resurrection – year after year after year, minute after minute, after minute. 

This week, as we re-enact the events leading up to Jesus’ death, as we actively remember the highs and lows of his last week in Jerusalem, we’ll find ourselves falling in line with time in a way we don’t usually experience.  What you’ll be participating in is Jesus’ own life; what you stand to discover is your own life; and the thing that’s yours to claim, is new life: the power of God living in you, now and always.    

Sermon preached by the Reverend Danielle Thompson on Sunday, April 17 at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL at 8:00 AM and 11:00 AM.