Faith remains: the story of Joseph (Ray Webster's sermon prep for August 7)

First reading: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

Beginning the story of Joseph

This Sunday we read the beginning of the great story of Joseph. The story of Joseph is dramatic and interesting in and of itself, but his story also sets the scene for the stories of Moses and of the Exodus. Joseph’s story tells how the Jewish people ended up living down in Egypt, where they were enslaved. Then we are given the great story of how God acted in history to save the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. This story is remembered in Judaism at Passover. It is the formative story of Judaism. It is remembered and echoed at the heart of the story of Jesus Christ.

Setting the story: the eleven sons of Jacob

Two weeks ago, you will remember that we read the story of Jacob’s marriage to Leah, and then to Rachel. Ethics had not yet developed the concept of having only one wife. Jacob had twelve sons by his two wives and two slave girls. At the time of this story, Joseph was seventeen, and there were ten older brothers. One brother younger than Joseph will later figure in the story, Benjamin. Have you ever heard a youngest child referred to as the “Benjamin” of the family? Joseph and Benjamin were the sons of Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel.

Jealousy and betrayal

Now Israel …

Remember that Jacob was given the name Israel by God --

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age;

It is a beloved detail of the King James translation of the Bible in the 17^th century, that Jacob gave his beloved Joseph a coat of many colors. In this translation it is a more prosaic long robe with sleeves. At any rate, Jacob clearly treated Joseph as a favorite and that made Joseph’s older brothers envious and angry.

Joseph loses everything – except his faith

Most of the brothers decided to kill Joseph and they threw him in a pit. The eldest brother Reuben tried to save Joseph, but the brothers took Joseph out of the pit and sold him to traders, into slavery down in Egypt.

Joseph lost everything – his freedom, family, homeland, language, possessions, and found himself a slave.

The one thing he had was his faith in God.

Second reading: Romans 10:5-15: The word is near you

We are reading from the Letter of Paul to the Romans and come to the great statement:

"The word is near you,

on your lips and in your heart"

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);
One of the great principles of the Reformation was that the Bible be given into the hands of the people, translated into the language of the people. In that extremely practical sense the word is indeed near each one of us. It is intended for each one, not for some special elite, but for every one.

(Ray Webster)

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.

Looking ahead to the Second Sunday in Lent: John 3:1-17

 Our Gospel this coming Sunday (John 3:1-17) is the first of three stories of encounters people had with Jesus. 

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 

Someone who was a leader of the Jewish people, a prominent citizen, a member of the Pharisees who were a source of much of the criticism of Jesus. Interestingly, this would be the description much later of Saul of Tarsus, who became known as St. Paul.

He came to Jesus by night 

Which has the distinct implication that he did not want to be seen coming to Jesus.  

and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." 

Nicodemus makes a nice compliment, leading us to think he had seen and heard Jesus before. Note the emphasis on the word “signs” – “these signs that you do” – which is the word the writer of John uses for the extraordinary actions or miracles Jesus did. Nicodemus compliments Jesus, I think quite sincerely. But Jesus turns the discussion back to Nicodemus, and what he has seen.   


Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, 'You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." 

Jesus places a very great emphasis on the Spirit – the Spirit will also be a theme in his encounter with the woman of Samaria. “Spirit” – the Holy Spirit – is the name for God who is present with us and within us, unseen, like the air we breathe.

We need to be born of water (perhaps a reference to Baptism) and Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us see who Jesus is, what he has done, what his story means to us. The Holy Spirit gives us the love of Jesus to give – to God in prayer and worship, and to others in loving service. The Holy Spirit gives us the strength and wisdom and courage to love, to see how to love.


Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?" Jesus answered him, "Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?


"Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” 

Now Jesus turns to the story of Moses in the Book of Exodus, to a scene where Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. Just so Jesus must be lifted up – and here I think there is a play on the image, for Jesus will be lifted up on the cross, where we will see his love for everyone human being fully and completely given. He will be lifted up in the resurrection from the dead and exalted to glory at the Father’s right hand. There is the double meaning of “lifted up.”  


“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”


Then come the great words Martin Luther called “the gospel in miniature.” If you see someone holding up a sign at Wrigley Field saying “John 3:16” this is what they are referring to!!!

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

God so loved the world, the whole world, all the people in the world, everyone one – that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him – trusts in his love – may have life.

"Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."

 A WORD ABOUT OUR FIRST READING

 

Our first and second readings are tied together in an important way, and I should offer some notes about them as well.

Our first reading is from Genesis 12:1-4a.

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham and his wife Sarah were the first people to believe in God. Abraham’s original name was Abram, and Sarah’s was Sarai. Their new names were a sign of their new faith in God.

God sent Abraham to live in the new land. God promises Abraham and Sarah that a great nation will descend from them. Both the Jewish people. And also everyone who believes in God.   

The Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

A WORD ABOUT THE SECOND READING 

 

Our second reading is from the Letter of Paul to the Romans 4:1-5, 13-17.

In this passage from his Letter to the Romans, Paul takes a verse from the story of Abraham in the Book of Genesis, to be at the center of his theology in this letter.

“Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” As noted above, in the unfolding story of Genesis, Abraham and his wife Sarah are the first people to believe in God. Belief meant acceptance of faith that God truly existed, and it also meant trust in God – trust in God’s mercy and loving kindness. 

 

Paul takes this verse to mean, that Abraham was put right with God not by being perfect, but by his faith in God. Our righteousness is not based on our works, but on our faith – our own trust in God’s mercy and loving kindness. 

 

What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. 

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations") -- in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

This is a very great passage: that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, who Paul goes on to define as those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations").

Pope Pius XI, who died in 1939, is said to have told a group of Belgian pilgrims, We are all Semites – a courageous statement in the face of the anti-Semitism of the late 1930s. That statement is rooted in the words of Paul today. 

(Raymond Webster)

The Bible texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.

Sermon preached on the First Sunday in Advent

First Sunday in Advent, Year A:

Isaiah 2.1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13.11-14; Matthew 24.36-44

It’s hard not to be affected by this time of the year, for good or for ill.  You’ve probably all heard it said around Halloween and All Saints that “the veil is thin,” and I think that same thinness persists throughout Advent. 

At Halloween the idea of the veil being thin suggests that we’re in touch with numinous things: that all around us we perceive the presence of a world beyond us.  But we put away Halloween and All Saints, and set our faces toward Thanksgiving, when “the holidays” truly begin.  Our world is still full of a world beyond us – a world of yesterdays, of recollection and longing and interpretation –  and a world of tomorrows – of dreams and prayers and anticipation.  The veil is still thin here, but not only the veil.  We actually become thinner people, more aware of everything that is happening around us. 

Because when you come so close to numinous things, when all of the scaffolding you move around in falls away, you find yourself living side by side with memories and deep wishes and high hopes.  That also means that you share space with regret and disappointment.  We all walk around with a great sense of anticipation throughout November and December because this season brings to light the most important things: family, friendship, and generosity.  But this season also casts high beams on brokenness, loneliness, and the cruel disparities between people that we see all around.  A thin veil hides very little, least of all what is stirring in our hearts.  The world revealed to us in the light of Advent is a world full of time: of the past and of the future, of waiting and of watching.  As Advent begins, it becomes clear that what the last month has been about, and what will be cast into bold relief from this point forward, is nothing less than our greatest desires.  Advent is about the veil effacing, whispering away, and us seeing clearly things as they really are; and, by extension, feeling acutely the press of everything that we want most.

That sense of intense longing and heightened anticipation is so present in our reading from Romans this morning.  The apostle Paul writes to a group of Christians living in first-century Rome, who are coping with problems common to many of the people Paul knew: Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians are trying to live together in peace, and are trying to learn how to be something new in an old world.  The Roman church does not know what to do about civil authority; it does not know what to do about the Jewish Law; its members, frankly, do not know what to do about one another.  But they have heard about a man named Jesus who was believed to be the Son of God, and who was executed as a criminal, and something about the telling of his story – something about how it sounds to them, how they can imagine it, how they see it manifest in the lives of those who bring it to them – has made them fall in love.  The more they pray, the more they hear Scripture read and expounded upon, the more they come together to bless bread and eat, bless wine and drink, the more they can see: the more light they are given to recognize things for what they truly are.  When they see good, they know it for good; and when they see evil, they know it for evil.  They can’t reject one another because they see in each other the presence of Christ and they know it to be good.  This is hard.  But too, they are increasingly uncomfortable in the city that has been home to them: the arena, the slave markets, the wars, sometimes their own families … and this is devastating.  They are suddenly on foreign territory.  What they want, more than anything, is to know how to make sense of where they have been and of where they are going; to make sense of who they are and of who they want to be.  The Romans want to know how to find some peace.

 And Paul is so inspired.  He sees so clearly and he is so passionate, you can imagine him leaning forward and clasping his hands together as he dictates this letter to his scribe, saying, “wake up!  You know what time it is!  Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone and the day is near!”  Now, if you know that the early Christians thought that Jesus might come again in their own lifetime, it’s easy to hear in his words a message about patience: “Just hang in there – you know what time it is!  It’s almost time for Jesus to come back, to save you by taking you away, and to grant you peace-by-escape.”

But Paul is actually taking a page from Jesus when he encourages the Romans to wake up and live in the daylight.  We have just heard a part of the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about the temple falling down, about his disciples facing persecution, and about his return to earth.  And no matter what we might make of this, Jesus is ultimately fuzzy on the details.  “About the day and the hour, no one knows,” he says of what we call his second coming.  He compares its advent to being alive at the time of Noah.  The point, though, is not that people then were so evil that they couldn’t see that large cumulonimbus cloud about to break open; the point is that nobody could have known about the flood if they wanted to.  It came as a surprise.  Jesus is telling his disciples, “don’t sit around and speculate about what this is going to look like or when it is going to happen.  I have given you a mission and a ministry.  Keep awake, therefore, and go about your business.  Be disciples and not soothsayers.  Quiet yourselves about the future, and put your energy into what it means to walk with me in the present.” 

Paul has his own way of describing that walk: “put on Christ.”  Wear Christ like your clothes, like “armor of light.”  And he, too, is pushing his friends to live now.  To be courageous despite the fact that they are seeing and feeling so much, and to rely on Jesus for their strength.  Jesus spoke about a second coming, another Advent, and Paul would have agreed that such an event could happen at any time, but both of them knew that God’s kingdom was already happening.  What was revealed to the Romans as they grew closer and closer to God, as they put on Christ in prayer, and worship, and in community with one another was that Jesus never left.  That God is here now, and that God’s Spirit cries out in each one of us, louder and louder as the veil gets thinner and thinner.  The more we see the world for what it is, the more we feel the powerful and sometimes disturbing presence of God.  When we long for damaged relationships to be healed, for all people to be loved, to be full, to be safe; when we long for all that lives to share a season of unbroken joy, we feel the pain of seeing too clearly.  We may wish to draw back from what is real, to whisk the veil back across our faces and to snuff out the light.  But when we see, with Paul, how present grace is to us – how salvation, healing, wholeness is poised to break into all the world and overcome what is dark with all that is light – we know that it is grace enough just to see.  And all that we could ever want to see, more and more fully, at this time and all others, is the peace of Christ, all in all. 

Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Nov. 28, 2010 at 8:00am and 11:00am