A Dangerous God

"Tyrannosaurus!" by Tim Dawson, distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Audio recording

Some years ago, well before the pandemic, I was in Chicago for a weekend, and went to church Sunday morning at St. James’ Cathedral. The service I went to was the one aimed at families, and much of the congregation was made up of small children. That morning, the priest decided it would be a good idea to solicit some of their input for his sermon. Approaching the group of children, he asked them to call out a word that describes what God is like.

“Dangerous!” a little boy cried out excitedly.

“Dangerous,” the priest repeated, flummoxed, clearly not expecting the kids to go in this direction. “Anybody else?” He did manage to get a few adjectives more suitable to the sermon he had planned, about a compassionate, merciful God, one who will never abandon us. I have no quarrel with that message. But surely the ruler of the universe who made the white-hot furnaces that power the stars, the raging oceans and their pitch-black depths, wolves, t-rexes, and cobras, cannot be altogether safe. The answer to a young soul who believes God might be dangerous is not to tell him he’s wrong or wave texts like the one we encounter this morning away. It’s to acknowledge the risk of being a small, flawed mortal trying to be in relationship with infinite and incomprehensible holiness and power.

This is the time of the liturgical year that the readings get weird. That’s probably why I was invited here today. As we reach the end of the year the lectionary forces us to confront our faith’s teaching that all of history will one day culminate in the Day of the Lord, when Jesus Christ will come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead.

The Bible’s apocalyptic texts – Revelation, Zephaniah, Daniel and other prophets, plus not a few of Jesus’s parables – take your pick – generally end with a hopeful vision of God and God’s people dwelling together in peace, what God originally planned for life in Eden. But we don’t get there without tribulation any more than Jesus got to resurrection without suffering the cross and grave.

Episcopalians aren’t really known for being big on the apocalypse. And mostly I think that’s a good thing because, fairly or not, I find the motivations of some of the people who are a bit too into these texts suspect. But their imagery shouldn’t be all that hard for us to conceptualize, really. Modern technology has brought great advances in indoor plumbing and medical treatments that make lives longer, more pleasant, and generally less smelly, than they were not so very long ago. But it has also brought us instant access to suffering on a global scale. Is there any need to dwell on Zephaniah’s image of blood being poured out like dust when the carnage in the Holy Land and Ukraine is only a doomscroll away?

Could these be signs of the end of days? Perhaps, but Christians have been looking for that since the day after Christ’s ascension. The Day of the Lord may indeed come like a thief in the night, but this thief has proved to be most patient, biding his time.

How do we live in this kind of world, with all its suffering? Learning to live in this kind of world is, I think, part of what it takes to prepare for the end to come, should it come in any of our lifetimes.

When Christ comes again in glory, the world will be made anew and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. While we should rest in that trust, God neither expects nor desires us to be idle until the second coming. The message isn’t, “Just let God fix it.” The Gospel we heard this morning begins with the words, “it is as if.” The “it” in question is the Kingdom of God – so this well-known but confounding story is supposed to be telling us what the Kingdom of God is like. The parable of the talents is full of lots of strange little details that make a simple allegorical reading impossible, but one thing we can be sure of is that we are to participate in the upbuilding and growth of the Kingdom of God even as we look expectantly for the Lord’s return.

The economic imagery Jesus uses makes this parable easy to visualize, if not understand, but Zephaniah’s violent prophecy stands counter to any interpretation that would find here an apologetic or justification for profit generation as a virtue in and of itself. Here there is God’s chilling vow to stalk the lanes of Jerusalem after nightfall, lamp in hand, plundering the wealth and razing the homes of those who think God is complacent and distant, and that their silver and gold is all the protection they need from discomfort, accountability, or the paroxysms of history.

Taking the Gospel and Zephaniah together, then, the holy scripture admonishes against seeing productivity itself as a virtue; it is only when it is done for love of God’s perfect Kingdom and all its inhabitants, as we await its full bursting forth, like labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, for the salvation of this imperfect world.

In this business of waiting and working and resting and praying and striving to be about the business of the Kingdom it is not good for us to be alone. Writing an encouraging letter to the discouraged flock in Thessalonica, whose people feared for their fellow believers who had died before Christ’s return, Paul urged the church, which can’t help observing the times and the seasons, he says, to stick together, to build one another up. “As indeed you are doing,” he acknowledges, 1,980 years ago. “As indeed you are doing,” he says to you today.

Last weekend was our annual diocesan convention, and in her keynote address, author Cole Arthur Riley observed that lamentation is a form of hope, because the complaint, “this is not what the world is supposed to be like” rests on a foundation, perhaps a deeply buried one, of a vision of the just and peaceful world God really intends. Apocalyptic texts are like that, too; their power is not in their violence but in their promise of justice for those who never received it in their lifetimes, and a brighter world to come.

We have no shortage of things to lament in these days, but when have we ever? These are troubling, disorienting, even frightening times, but has it ever been otherwise? There’s no promise I or anyone else can make that things won’t get worse from here. But God does promise us that in the fullness of time, they will get better, that things will be made right.

Zephaniah, whose prophecy begins with wrath and distress and anguish brought on by a dangerous God whose holiness simultaneously pulses with the heat of the sun and the cold of the fathomless deep, ends like this:

I will save the lame
    and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
    and renown in all the earth.
At that time I will bring you home,
    at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised
    among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
    before your eyes, says the Lord.

That day will come. Until then, take heart, pray, and wait.

The Kingdom of God is like this: it is as if a people who long for their savior’s return use the gifts God has bestowed on them to do the works of the Kingdom by behaving as if it were already here, even amid the turmoil of history and the struggle of daily life. That looks like some of the things we pray for - giving rest to the weary, pitying the afflicted, shielding the joyous, soothing the suffering, blessing the dying. No matter what trouble may come, know that no work done by your hands and hearts in the service of God and neighbor will ever be wasted, only grafted at the end into the radiance of God’s true and everlasting reign.

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Sermon preached at St. John's Episcopal Church, Crawfordsville, IN

November 19, 2023

Readings: Zeph. 1:7, 12-18; Ps. 90; 1 Thess. 5:1-11; Matt. 25:14-30

Blessed are You

Good morning. I know many of you, but many of your faces are new to me. I’m Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, and I serve on Bishop Jennifer’s staff as canon to the ordinary for administration and evangelism. It’s my honor to be with you here at Nativity today.

Today we as a church are going to try to observe three joyful occasions simultaneously, with each given its due regard. Today we welcome three children, Logan, Micah, and Noah, into the household of God through the waters of baptism. Through baptism we bring them into the unity of the church across space and time, life and death, through the communion of all God’s faithful, which we celebrate in the Feast of All Saints. And it is the day this church has chosen as its first Consecration Sunday, when each of you will prayerfully consider renewal of your commitment to God through your gifts of money in this church.

The contemplation of the mystical communion of saints and the sacrament of baptism may seem to be at odds with the contemplation of our bank accounts. But what is baptism but the very means by which the communion of saints is knit together? And what are saints but those who have faithfully used all of the gifts entrusted to them by God to leave a legacy of holiness, and among those gifts was their money? So, church, I’m confident we can do this.

About the saints – I’m going to talk briefly about three of them – none of them lived in poverty, but each lived more modestly than their means would have allowed, out of an obligation to something greater than themselves. Princess Elizabeth of Hungary (a princess!) used the wealth afforded by her position to distribute alms throughout her realm, and after being widowed at the age of 20, used her money to build a hospital. Nicholas of Myra, better known to us as Santa Claus, delivered three young women from the threat of a life of prostitution by anonymously tossing bags of coins over their garden wall, allowing them to better position themselves on the marriage market. Omobono Tucenghi, who you’ve probably never heard of, responded to a call from God to a lucrative career as a cloth merchant, specifically so that he could give his earnings away.

All these things happened nearly a thousand years – or more – ago, but before we talk any more about them, I want to take you back maybe a decade or so. Then, I was invited to a wedding of two students at the Episcopal Campus Ministry at Indiana University. I didn’t know them at all – in fact I wouldn’t even recognize them if they were in the room today (so if you are here – I’m sorry), let alone remember their names. But I had made the guest list because one member of the couple was Chinese, and they wanted one of the lessons to be read in her native language. The campus chaplain, who had baptized me when I was a senior at IU, remembered that Chinese had been my major.

Now in point of fact by that time my Chinese was so rusty that to say I spoke it would have been a lie – but I could still pronounce it. So I wrote the text out phonetically, and at the appointed time in the service, I stood up and recited the gospel in a language most of the congregation – including me – couldn’t understand.

And yet the meaning of the text, I learned, got through. At the reception guests excitedly told me that they had correctly guessed what I was reading. Because it turns out that in whatever language you read the Beatitudes, the repetitive sentence structure Jesus uses pulses like a drumbeat: 有福了, 有福了, 有福了 – blessed, blessed, blessed.

Of course there’s another text with a repetitive sentence structure I could have been reading. But how many of you had the ten commandments read at your wedding? Right, I didn’t think so.

Still, the ten commandments and the Beatitudes are often mentioned in the same breath. Sometimes the Beatitudes are treated as a kinder, gentler catalog of good behavior. But that perspective both misapprehends the grace chiseled into the tablets at Sinai, and misunderstands what the Beatitudes really are.

Because these are not edicts or commands nor even advice for good living. They are assertions that the downtrodden, the meek, the merciful, the mourning, and the persecuted, whatever their misery or sorrow, are beheld, beloved, and blessed, by God. The people who are treated as of little account by the world are infinitely precious to the world’s creator. Most of us can find ourselves in one of the categories Jesus declares blessed some days, if not every day. And among the inventory of injustices and desolations there are indeed some things to strive for – being pure of heart, being one who makes peace and dispenses mercy.

But if we treat the Beatitudes as an alternative 10 commandments – new and improved, and now there are only eight of them! – then that would mean that Jesus wants us to be persecuted or poor in spirit so we can get to the kingdom of heaven, that he wants us to mourn in pursuit of comfort, that he wants us to be reviled as the price of a great reward in heaven.

Friends, Jesus knows we’re going to experience these things, but he doesn’t want that for us. Part of the gift of the incarnation is that God knows what it’s like to be one of us, not only as an idea, but as an experience, and what Jesus is assuring us in these eight great blessings is that there is no high point and even more - no low point, where we are separated from the love of God. Blessed are you, whoever or wherever you are, for God hates nothing that God has made. The Beatitudes aren’t a thing to do, but a statement of who we are, at our best and our worst, the blessed children of God most high. We can walk through the valley of the shadow of death without fear of evil, for Jesus assures us that for those who believe, the kingdom of God is never far.

Among those who believe are the three saints I mentioned earlier – Elizabeth of Hungary, Nicholas of Myra, and Omobono Tucenghi. It is because of what they did with their money that they are remembered as saints by the church – and one of them became a pop cultural icon. What they did is worthy of admiration and emulation, but more important this morning is the question of why they did what they did.

I suppose one possibility is that they were trying to buy God’s favor. But are these saints blessed because they were generous with their money in pursuit of reward – is holiness saintly when it’s transactional?

“See what love [God] has given us,” John writes in the segment of his first letter that we heard this morning, “that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.” True generosity is born of the understanding that as a child of God you have already been richly blessed, and that blessedness compels you to a response. John goes on to write that, “we will be like God, because we will see God as he is.” And part of being like God, who gives us our bodies, our breath, and eternal hope through the life, death and resurrection of God’s son, is to be inspired by God’s generosity to us.

The biblical guidance for that response, at least as far as finances are concerned, is an offering of 10% of your income. Father Ben spoke about that last week, and he also pointed out that there may be good reasons for you to give a greater or lesser percentage. I won’t belabor that point. But in a little while you will receive your pledge cards, make your prayerful financial commitment for the coming year, and bring that commitment to the altar.

Moments after that, as Micah, Logan, and Noah are about to be baptized, you will be asked, “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” Presuming you all answer, “We will,” you will be faithful to that assent by being examples of what a life committed to following Jesus looks like. If you’re not sure how to approach fulfilling either of these commitments, you could do far worse than to look to the saints. They don’t have to be the three I’ve listed this morning. Think of your own favorites, in fact, better yet, the saints in your life who have shown you what it is to truly follow Jesus – surely these are numbered among the countless throngs gathered in the presence of God around the heavenly throne.

God’s gift to us in the saints is a spiritual ancestry whose bequest to us is a legacy of prayer, service, study, sacrifice, and even miracles. Above all their legacy to us is the faith in Christ they have passed down through 100 generations, a faith that has traversed wars, famines, disasters, golden ages, busts, and booms, even the agony in the Holy Land today, with the steady assurance passing through all time and into eternity, “Blessed are you.”

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Preached at the Episcopal Church of the Nativity, Indianapolis

November 5, 2023

Readings: Rev 7:9-17; Ps. 34:1-10, 22; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Matt.5:1-12

Not the 10 Suggestions

“This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward for what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”(Phil. 3: 13-14) In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Before the diocesan offices moved to Monument Circle a little less than two years ago, the bishop, her predecessors, and staff were housed for some six decades on 42nd Street at the Indiana Interchurch Center, sandwiched between Christian Theological Seminary and the art museum, and across the street from the woods at the north end of Crown Hill Cemetery. 

When I started working there in 2017, I found the building was full of all sorts of curious relics that had accumulated over the years. In the front entryway, which no one actually uses, by the way, there was an enormous peace sign fashioned from green and black marble. Tacked to a bulletin board was a list of nearby restaurants where you could place a to-go order using cutting edge fax technology. And affixed to the supply cabinet where paperclips and ballpoint pens were kept, I found a refrigerator magnet reading “The 10 Commandments,” and below that, in bold italic type, “Not the 10 Suggestions!” complete with an exclamation point so the reader would know the admonition was serious. Below that was a paraphrase of the Exodus passage we heard a few minutes ago, and at the bottom, the name of the magnet’s producer, one Episcopal Church of All Saints in Indianapolis, Indiana.

I have no context for when or why this object was produced, or whose idea it was. I’ve never seen one around here, so I’m guessing it’s nothing that the congregation was particularly attached to nor has left any long-lasting imprint. But it struck me as weird that All Saints would have its name attached to such an item at all, at any time, and maybe it does you, too.

Set aside the scripture for a minute. Think about what the 10 Commandments are in our contemporary culture. When you see efforts to place them in stone monuments on courthouse lawns or in public school hallways, do you think, “Oh, those people are really into the foundational text of Jewish and Christian standards for appropriate behavior?” Or do you experience those efforts as a slightly less colorful version of the manufactured “war on Christmas,” expressions of self-righteous scolding, theocratic ambition, a lurch toward authoritarianism guided by Christian nationalism?

Now to be clear, I don’t think for a second any of that was the motivation of whoever put the sarcastic “not the 10 suggestions” subtitle on that magnet. Probably it was just someone who thought they were being clever. But it’s a real shame, isn’t it, when someone encounters the holy word of God, spoken from the mountain and carved into stone tablets, and finds not a sign of God’s loving kindness towards us, and instead a cudgel in the culture wars.

But the commandments are a sign of God’s loving kindness. You don’t need to look any further than the first one: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” Here God succinctly makes the case for the worthiness of our loyalty. Besides being the ground of all being, God is the guarantor of our freedom. The one who delivered Israel from Egypt loves us too much to let us lapse back into bondage, whether to a political power like pharoah or the antebellum south or any other malign influence that seeks to subjugate our bodies and souls.

So if we want to read and apply the commandments properly, we must read them in the same spirit God spoke them, rooted in the freedom God first desired for Adam and Eve in paradise at the beginning of days.

Can you imagine a world where adherence to the 10 commandments was universal? Think about what it would be like to live in a place where:

 

1. Everyone recognized that the ruler of creation alone is worthy of our ultimate devotion, over and above
2. the false idols produced by corrupted hands and hearts: consumerism, nationalism, white supremacy, unrealistic beauty standards, where
3. the name of God is never used to disguise division and belittlement as holy, where
4. sabbath rest outranks ceaseless striving, where
5. there is peace within families, and where fathers and mothers are worthy of their children’s honor, where
6. there is no murder and no war, where
7. spouses are faithful, where
8. there is no theft and no one needs to steal to survive, where
9. no one lies to the detriment of others or for their own personal gain, and where
10. envy and greed are unknown.

That sounds pretty good, right? A place where you might leave your doors unlocked, answer your phone without there being a scammer on the other end, and just enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as someone somewhere once said.

It is for this reason that the psalmist writes that

The law of the Lord is perfect - it revives the soul (Ps. 19:7), that

The statutes of the Lord are just - they rejoice the heart (Ps. 19:8), that

God’s commandments bring light to the eyes (Ps. 19:8).

The 10 commandments form the scaffolding of a world that is worthy of our hearts’ longing - and we do have to long for that world, because it sure as hell isn’t the world we’re living in.

So what do we do about that?

Well, despair is one option. Not the one I recommend, though.

You could try changing what other people do, which, I mean, go for it?

Or you could try obedience. What would it be like if this whole church tried? I don’t mean to say we’re getting it all wrong - we’re not a pack of murderers and thieves for the most part, I’m pretty sure. I won’t presume to speak for you, but I do confess that I experience envy, that I don’t always enjoy the holy rest that is God’s gift, that I don’t always put God first, that I sometimes succumb to false idols. Am I really the only one?

Now obedience is not a fashionable word, I know. Mother Karen preached on that a year or two ago, and she’s still right. I checked TikTok and #obedience is mostly about dogs. But when it comes down to it, obedience is what happens when listening, trust, and action converge. And provided that you place that trust in one who is worthy of it, say the one who leads us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life, for instance, obedience can be expected to bear good fruit.

The wicked tenants in the parable Jesus tells this morning have a murderous scheme for seizing their landlord’s vineyard that relies on such absurd ignorance of how inheritance laws work that to call it harebrained is an insult to rabbits. Could they really have thought that by murdering two sets of servants and then the landlord’s son, that the landlord would be, like, “ok, I guess they can have the vineyard?” The text of this parable, which Jesus told in the Temple in Jerusalem in the presence of Jewish religious authorities, could be, and indeed has been, used to suggest that God’s favor has been taken from the chosen people of Israel and bestowed upon Christians instead. That reading is wrong and is contrary to a plain reading of the text, where Jesus says that the kingdom of God is for people, whoever those people might be, that produce the fruit of the kingdom. Can one who truly loves, who truly strives to obey the commandments, fail to produce good fruit?

Saying, “it’s the 10 commandments, not the 10 suggestions,” or making refrigerator magnets saying the same, is passive-aggressive and annoying. Unfortunately it’s not incorrect. Commandments and suggestions aren’t the same thing. These really are the basics of what we’ve committed to as followers of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Committing to obedience of God’s law courts the risk of failure, the same as any vow: the promises made in baptism, marriage, ordination. New Year’s resolutions, even. Indeed we will fail, because only God is perfect. But if we stray and return, and stray and return again, we will find a God who is ever ready to forgive us and fortify us to try again - to cleanse us of our secret faults and presumptuous sins, until at length we obtain "the prize of the heavenly call in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:14): “free[dom] to worship [God] without fear, holy and righteous in [God’s] sight, all the days of our life.” (Lk. 1:74-75, para.)

Preached at the Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis - October 8, 2023

Readings: Ex. 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Ps. 19; Phil. 3:4b-14; Matt. 21:33-46

Clorox & Glitter

Near the beginning of each Sunday service in our church is a little prayer that changes week after week, known as the collect. Now that’s a funny sounding word, but it’s spelled like collect, as in you might collect, say, stamps, or Pokemon, baseball cards, or commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint. The objective of these prayers is to collect the prayers of the whole congregation, relate them to the scripture readings of the day, and stuff them into a succinct soundbite with a literary structure “as rigid as a haiku,” as the liturgical scholar Marion Hatchett memorably puts it in his Commentary on the American Prayer Book. In an ideal world, it sets the tone for everything that follows. 

It’s not an ideal world, though, so if I’m honest with you these prayers are often in one ear and out the other for me, and I expect the experience might be the same for you. That’s probably ok since a prayer’s intended audience is God. But it’s still a shame because many of these prayers have an incredible pedigree. Many of them date back 1500 years or more. And if you spend time with them, you’ll find that the insights and disquietude about the human condition in relation to the divine that inspired the anonymous liturgical authors of the age following the collapse of the Roman Empire aren’t that different from our own.

The collect from this morning, however, is not of that vintage. In fact as churchy things go, it’s pretty modern, written in 1898 by the Rev. Dr. William Reed Huntington. Let me read it for you again:

O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A wonderful transfiguration, delivery from disquietude, beholding the King in his beauty. All these things seem worthy of our gratitude, petition, and hope.

But what about the “raiment white and glistening” Huntington describes in the prayer, referring to Jesus’s clothes becoming “dazzling white” in Luke’s Gospel account? This prayer is brief enough that even four words is quite a bit of real estate. Why devote so much of it to a phenomenon that today we can achieve with the humble elements of Clorox and glitter, or if you have a bigger budget, rhinestones and a good dry cleaner?

Focusing on the clothes makes the Transfiguration, the miracle we celebrate today, feel a little bit, I don’t know…cheap?

In 1898, when he wrote this prayer, William Reed Huntington was the rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan, which still stands at 10th and Broadway, and not so long ago celebrated its 200th anniversary. Huntington was a proponent of the social gospel, a movement originating in the late 19th century that looked at the poverty and injustice that are plainly contrary to the will of God and wondered what the Gospel had to say about it. Proclaimers of the social gospel thought about that line in the Lord’s prayer - “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” - and decided that maybe Christians ought to have something to do with making that happen. All Saints is an inheritor of this movement.

Consider life in an industrial city in 1898. Horse manure in the streets and coal smoke in the air. Arnold Manoff, a folklorist documenting life in the city in the subsequent decades, describes one neighborhood this way, “despite its proximity to….[a] tradition of middle class refinement…maybe because it runs downhill…[the place] has gotten a little frayed around the edges and battered at the middle, as if the muddy waters that run down…when it rains have seeped into the cellars and plumbing of the houses so that the people drink muddy water, and maybe that makes them so gray and gloomy.”

If that’s your lived reality, a raiment white and glistening, or - why does it have to be white? - pink and sparkling, green and glittering, or Cher or Dolly Parton or Tina Turner or Barbie shining in the Bob Mackie look of your choice, that’s a sight for sore eyes, real good news that gray gloom isn’t the way it has to be. That joy and beauty don’t solely belong to those who can buy their way out of discomfort, but are the heritage of every child of God. People needed the petition of William Reed Huntington’s prayer. It was still another 15 years before the first bottle of Clorox would hit the market. 

Now, I have a bottle of bleach among my cleaning supplies. I take my shirts in to get dry-cleaned and starched every now and again. The same is probably true for a lot of you. I can appreciate a good outfit, but with easy access to these technologies that would have been a miracle in 1898, let alone in Jesus’s time, shine is maybe less of a sign of salvation for me.

But the muddy waters that run down when it rains, seeping into plumbing and cellars? The literal water that flows through the pipes of our homes may be safe enough to drink, but the figurative waters we figuratively drink and in which we figuratively swim? God help us.

Our own sins? Those who sin against us? The evil done on our behalf? The evil we contend with day after day? Deliver us from this disquietude; Lord, help us.

After Jesus, but before the collects, the creeds, and the Emperor Constantine, was Irenaeus, a priest and bishop of the second-century church. Irenaeus isn’t a household name, but he had a critical role in figuring this whole Christianity enterprise out. His major surviving work has the inviting title of Against Heresies, but it’s a book filled with more love than you’d expect considering the name. No one burns at the stake.

One of Irenaeus’s major concerns is the mutuality in the relationship between God and humans, mediated by the Word made flesh, Jesus. Jesus, he writes, “became the dispenser of…grace for the benefit of [humans], revealing God indeed to [people], but [also] presenting [people] to God.” In his conception of atonement - the means by which humankind and God are reconciled to one another - the Transfiguration is a mediated encounter between the invisible God most high, and the all too mortal Peter and John and James and you and me.

The imagery of the Gospel text - the shining clothes, the disembodied voice from heaven, the clouds. even Moses and Elijah - with enough time and money and smoke machines and holograms and CGI we can do all this. I have friends who attended the recent Beyonce concert in Louisville and between their photos and descriptions vivid enough to call testimony I’d say the technology of the Transfiguration has persuasive contemporary rivals.

The power of our technologies to replicate the described experience of the Transfiguration doesn’t diminish its power any more than the existence of effective HIV therapies, defibrillators, and mental health treatments diminishes Jesus’s healings and exorcisms. Jesus called on his disciples to do the miracles he did and the fact that good science means we don’t need to rely on miracles for our health care as much as we used to is humankind doing its job. (I’ll leave equitable access to health care for another sermon, though)

To the extent any of you are skeptical about the miracle of the Transfiguration because of the power of a global megastar’s ability to deliver an experience that meets the technical specs, consider what the choices are to describe the mountaintop moments of our lives when words fail. Luke is trying to convey an encounter between the disciples and the divine and all he can do to transmit the import of what’s basically a you-had-to-be-there experience is describe the special effects.

Within this, Irenaeus and William Reed Huntington both discern something else. It’s not every year we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration on a Sunday. It’s one of the rare feasts of the church that usually falls on a weekday but takes precedence when it falls on a Sunday. But no matter, right? We hear the story of the Transfiguration annually on the last Sunday of the Epiphany, aka, the Sunday before Lent. Some people call this day “Transfiguration Sunday,” and while I try not to be a very judgmental person I do say those people are wrong.

Because the descent from the mount of the Transfiguration is the beginning of Jesus and the disciples trekking back to Jerusalem. Therefore the homiletic impulse on so-called Transfiguration Sunday is to look at Peter’s proposal, “not knowing what he was saying,” to build dwelling places for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah and point out why you can’t stay on the mountaintop, why you have to go to Jerusalem, the cross, and the grave.

That sermon has its place.

But today actually IS Transfiguration Sunday, an event that occurs only one in seven years. Today, without Lent looming, we can consider there’s another possibility to why the Gospel asserts Peter didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe it wasn’t that Peter didn’t understand the import of the moment vis a vis the inevitable journey to the cross, but that he was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment that he wanted to dwell in it forever.

This is indeed what Irenaeus posits: “For the glory of God is a living [person],” he writes, referring to Jesus, “and the life of a [person] consists in beholding God,” he goes on, referring to Peter, and James, and John, and by extension those of us gathered here.

Some decades after his moment awaking from sleep on the holy mountain to encounter an astonishing vision, Peter describes attending to it as to “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.”

No special effect, no shining garment, no words any gospeller or preacher can write or speak, can take the place of the reality of a celestial hope coursing through arteries and veins to aorta and ventricles, that morning star that is the beauty of God arising in our hearts.

I can’t say what the right image is for you, but I challenge you to ponder a thing so beautiful, so strong, so compelling, that it takes a heart prone to wander and so tangles it up in God’s goodness it can’t be unbound. A vision of the realms of endless days you can’t help but long to purchase mountaintop real estate and stay.

In the moment of the Transfiguration, there was no time to stay. There was still Salvation work to do. But the Transfiguration is a revelation not just of Jesus’s authority but of God’s intent for eternity. It is another version of the New Jerusalem - a dwelling place for God amid God’s creation, where the majestic Glory of the Trinity can shine upon us fully, and where we, delivered from disquietude, can behold the beauty of our heavenly King.

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Sermon preached on the Feast of the Transfiguration

August 6, 2023

Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis

Readings: Ex. 34:29-35; Ps. 99; 2 Pet. 1:13-21; Lk. 9:28-36

Image by the author

Harassed and Helpless

Today’s Gospel reading is a long one, but it doesn’t have to be. The lectionary gives us the option to cut it off around the halfway point, right after Jesus says, “You received without payment; give without payment.” In our email exchange planning for this morning’s service, Renee even mentioned that option. But knowing that I would be among such hardy, faithful souls in Greencastle, I rejected it. I knew you would want to hear the whole thing, especially these comforting words: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name.”

It’s not exactly John 3:16, is it?

Now I’m not going to dwell too much on this verse this morning, but I’m also not going to pretend you didn’t hear it. One commentary I consulted described it as “notoriously troublesome.” But I’m not so sure. One of the harder things about being God, I figure, is that when scripture is one of the tools you’re using to communicate your infinite self to the all too finite mortals you love, the words of inspiration you breathe into the minds and fingers and quills and scrolls of scripture’s human authors have to speak to all time, to all sorts and conditions of people. And so as baffling as we might find these words in our historic moment, imagine for a second what they would have meant to those endeavoring to follow Jesus faithfully while living under a twentieth century totalitarian regime that turned families into extensions of the state’s secret police. Or North Korea today. So if this text doesn’t speak to you today, that’s ok –  it isn’t for you. But for Christians under threat, these words that are menacing to us are nothing less than balm for the soul, the Good News that their faithfulness under adversity has not gone unnoticed by our savior.

There’s Good News for us here, too, just in a different verse: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” I won’t presume to speak for you, but “harassed and helpless” stirs up something in me.

Helpless? Well, that depends on the day. But, harassed? Most definitely. Between the daily torrent of spam calls and texts, the need to be hypervigilant about fraud All. The. Time., to say nothing of the poison of our politics, which his so saturated our lives that ordinary choices are less a statement of preference than a taking of sides. I think most of us actually opt out of this vitriol ourselves, but the angry miasma of rage and mendacity is all but impossible to escape. It’s exhausting.

Unlike the crowds Matthew describes as “like sheep without a shepherd,” we do have a shepherd, in Jesus. Amid the changes and chances of this mortal life, against the competing claims for our attention and allegiance, and whatever our anxieties and uncertainties, we can look to Jesus in scripture, prayer, community, and communion, and find a savior who shares in our joy and does not shy away from our sorrows.

But I worry about the rest of the harassed and helpless crowd, those who are not among us or any Christian community this morning. It will not have escaped your notice that Christmas as a cultural and commercial phenomenon is bigger than ever, but Christ’s church, not so much.

This past Tuesday’s episode of Jeopardy created a minor stir when, in response to a fill-in-the-blank question about the Lord’s Prayer – “Our father, who art in heaven, [blank] be thy name,” not one contestant could come up with, “What is hallowed?”

The same day, watching a trashy reality show I’ll allow to remain unnamed for my own protection, I observed a group of young women say, to my surprise, “Let’s pray.” And then they sat down, joined hands, and said something along the lines of, “I wish an attractive man would be the next person to walk through the door.” Setting aside the merits of the item being wished for, wishing and praying are not the same thing, but they didn’t seem to know that.

I’m not sure if Twitter took notice of the reality show moment, but it definitely seized on Jeopardy, with a predictably scolding stew of hot takes about prayer in school and the decline of the church. But scolding is precisely the wrong approach: Jesus saw the harassed and helpless crowds, and had compassion.

Neither the Jeopardy contestants nor the reality show cast fit into the narrative of decline the church has fretted about for decades. These are not people who have fallen away from the church. If you don’t know the universal Christian prayer, or even have a basic sense of what prayer is, then chances are you’ve never been part of a church, let alone fallen away from one.

I worry about these people not so much for their fate in the afterlife, but for their fate in this one. For a life devoid of faith creates a vacuum the powers and principalities are all to eager to fill with consumerism disguised as spirituality, or straight up magical thinking and wishing, lent credibility by stretching it to five syllables, and calling it “manifestation.” It can be argued that these are harmless, and – maybe. But these substitutes are wholly inadequate in communicating the inherent self-worth each individual has as beloved, made in the image of God. And they cannot function as shields in the time of trial. The peace of God found in prayer, and the ancient words of scripture, many of which are written on our hearts, can.

This is exactly the reality Jesus speaks into. Jesus was actually working with fewer resources than we have. He had no church to invite people into – just twelve ordinary guys who’d been following him around for a while, and his own divine self. That’s what he had to offer the harassed and helpless, and it was enough.

Jesus also describes the helpless and harassed crowds as the Lord’s harvest, the fruit of the seeds God has planted. That field is set before us today. And if we are serious about sharing the abundant life we have in Christ at St. Andrew’s, it is necessary not just to show people the way to 520 E. Seminary Street at 10:15. You also need to show them the way, the truth, and the life. You need to show them Jesus.

Commissioning the disciples as apostles, those sent forth to minister in Jesus’s name, Jesus bestows on them his own powers – to cast out evil spirits and cure every disease. Now the power to grant miracles may not belong to us, but we can make room for them, by being a people who reject the dark spirits of this age: addiction, greed, self-righteousness, and despair; by being a people who meet sickness and adversity with compassion; a people whose lives are a beacon to those harassed and helpless that the world tries to tell that they are not enough as they are, that they may know, and that you may know, the Good News for every place and time: that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are invited into nothing less than eternally beloved citizenship in the kingdom of God.

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Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 18, 2023
St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Greencastle, IN
Readings: Ex. 19:2-8a; Ps. 100; Rom. 5:1-8; Matt. 9:35-10:23

Image: "Crowds" by Laura Rush, distributed under a CC BY license.

This Strong Rock

The first seven words of the section of John’s gospel we just heard have some applicability, I expect, to pretty much every place and time since Jesus first spoke them. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says. Reassuring words when there’s always so much to be troubled about. I could give you the whole litany of today’s troubling things, but I’d just be filling time. I trust you all know whatever cares weigh on your heart today.

So hear our Lord’s words again: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Take a moment. Breathe. Be still and know that God is God.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

Did that work? Are your hearts untroubled now? Have your anxieties abated, your sorrows ceased? I mean, mine are nowhere to be found. Who knew it was that easy?

Now, don’t get me wrong. The last thing I’m doing is mocking the words of The Word made flesh. But these two things can both be true: that the words of Christ are filled with wisdom and power, and so long as they are spoken into the same world that saw fit to crucify the son of God, they are more a prophecy of God’s plans, purposes, and longing, than they are a prescription for our pain.

For each one of you, I’m guessing, Jesus’s injunction not to let your hearts be troubled lands differently. As well it should: each of you arrived this morning carrying all the joys, confusions, and burdens of your unique life on this rainy, thundery day. Just so, Jesus also first spoke these words into a unique context. And with all due respect to the Revised Common Lectionary, that context was not, in fact, the fifth Sunday of Easter. It was Maundy Thursday, that darkest and most dramatic of nights, filled with the last supper, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the new commandment - that you love one another as I have loved you, the betrayal by Judas.

And the betrayal of Peter. Indeed the verse that immediately precedes this morning’s text is John 13:37, when Jesus says to Peter, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” And then the very next words are “Do not let your hearts be troubled?” We know for sure that Peter’s heart was not relieved by Jesus’s reassurance, for Luke’s gospel records him “weeping bitterly” when the prophecy comes true. What then, does this mean?

Isolated from its context, this passage can read like a vision of the hereafter. Jesus’s promise that “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” calls to mind a castle in the clouds, or perhaps a heavenly subdivision, if suburbia is more your speed. I won’t deny that that’s a possible reading, but I don’t think it’s the only one.

We actually hear directly from Peter this morning. Our second reading was from his first letter. And it may not be a coincidence that, some years, maybe even decades, after hearing his Lord’s reassurance that “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places,” and, therefore, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Peter reflects on these words in his own message of reassurance to the people he addresses as “the exiles of the dispersion,” presumably early Christians crushed under the Roman fist.

Peter uses the imagery of God’s house, just as Jesus did, but there is no ambiguity here about whether he is talking about a house above or amid God’s beloved on earth. Those who follow Jesus are “built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” And not in some far off heaven, but here, now.

In Christ, Peter writes, God calls us to be the living stones that form the unshakeable foundations, sturdy walls, and shielding roof of the spiritual home of God, with and among God’s creation, with all sorts and conditions of people. And pay attention to this - living stones, so that the structure we form doesn’t crumble like Hadrian’s Wall. Living stones like us do what living things do: move, grow, learn, change, love. Adapting and evolving to make room for each new person who passes through the waters of baptism to take their place in the ever-growing edifice of the everlasting home.

The fact that, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” is Jesus’s immediate follow-up to his prophecy of Peter’s betrayal is tremendous hope for us all. For if Jesus so offers his grace to Peter in advance of the betrayal he knows is coming, how much more must he offer it to us, in all the ways we think we have failed, fall short, worry that we are abnormal or unworthy of love.

But we’re here, today, doing our best to follow Jesus despite all of that. And he is the way, he is the truth, he is the life, and he has gone before us, to prepare a place for us, this place: this strong rock, this castle to keep us safe, where God’s face shines upon God’s servants, where God’s loving-kindness keeps and saves us all.

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Fifth Sunday of Easter

May 7, 2023

Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis, IN

Readings: Acts 7:56-60; Ps. 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Pet 2:2-10; Jn 14:1-14

Image: "Hiking Along Hadrian's Wall" by eight cent, distributed under a CC BY-NC license.