Awkward Tools

The dorm I lived in at IU had a weekly newsletter called the Collins Columns, and for a time my friend John and I were its editors. It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember a lot of details, but a few things stand out. For some reason I wrote a travel guide to Mammoth Cave National Park. We also published an advice column called “Ask Dan,” written by this weird dude named…Dan, who let’s just say is not the kind of person you’d normally approach for advice. Sensing this, no one in the dorm actually submitted a question for Dan to respond to, as far as I remember, so John and I manufactured dilemmas for Dan to adjudicate. So as far as I know, no one was harmed by our publication of Dan’s dubious counsel.

But the thing I remember most clearly about the experience is this. John and I produced the Collins Columns in a basement computer lab loaded with early 90s desktop publishing software. I don’t know how many of you have experience with early 90s desktop publishing software, but if you did, you know that it was, to use a technical term, bad. This fact became a recurring joke in our “from the editors” pieces. Apparently that touched a nerve with the professor overseeing the whole enterprise, who sent us an email chiding, “A good carpenter doesn’t blame his tools.”

I responded with all of the maturity my 19 years could summon, which wasn’t much, dismissing her admonition. But decades on, the reproach has actually stuck with me.

I mention this today because among a preacher’s tools is the Bible, and more specifically in our tradition, the lectionary, which takes us through most of the narrative of scripture every three years on a weekly schedule. I’ve known for some time these readings are the tools I’d have at my disposal to preach here on the first Sunday of Lent. And these readings are the perfect tools. Our Genesis reading gives us the story of the fall in Eden. Our Romans reading provides the bookend to that story, it its promise that Jesus’s sacrifice is the antidote to the poison of the serpent’s deceit. And the gospel prepares us to know that we have company in our 40 days’ fast, reminding us of Jesus’s own 40 days in the wilderness.

But for St. Stephen’s, New Harmony, this isn’t an ordinary first Sunday of Lent. You’ve just received the news that your rector will soon be ending her ministry among you. That’s news I received not that long in advance of you, so for a dozen days or so, I’ve been wondering how to apply these tools, ideal for kicking off our penitential journey to the joy of Easter, to this pastoral moment. They are awkward tools, perhaps, but I will not complain about them.

Now, just to be clear, we all know that your rector is not your savior. Jesus outranks Dr. Beth.

Those of you who have been around the church for a while are well acquainted with the tensions the Christian calendar requires us to hold. That even as we enter into this season of introspection and self-denial, the world goes on, all but unaware of what we’re up to. The third Sunday of Lent, for instance, will coincide with Hollywood’s high holy day and its sequined red carpet procession, and I hereby give you permission to go to an Oscars party, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Living liturgically doesn’t mean denying what’s happening around you any more than Lenten abstention means that Christ hasn’t been raised from the dead, that Easter hasn’t already happened.

Or to put this more simply, I invite you to fully observe a Holy Lent, to fully celebrate St. Stephen’s ministry with Dr. Beth, to be fully sad that that joint ministry is reaching its conclusion, and to fully look with hope to St. Stephen’s future. And I invite you to do all of these things simultaneously.

There’s an interesting detail in today’s gospel that surprises me every time I notice it. The flashiest part of the story, of course, is Jesus’s temptation by, and rebuke of, the devil. The story demonstrates that the authority of God in Christ is not found in worldly power. That’s a subject for another sermon, and the lectionary will provide other chances to take a crack at it this season, on Palm Sunday and Good Friday if not before.

But there’s a curious thing within the first few words of the story, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” By the Spirit.

Leading God the Son to an audience with the devil seems like a weird thing for God the Holy Spirit to do. But then the Trinity is infamously mysterious and confounding.

Asking why the Spirit would do this is a worthy question, but more important today is the fact that the Spirit did it. Jesus did not go into the wilderness alone, unencouraged, and unaccompanied. Jesus went with the full backing of the Lord, the giver of life, who has spoken through the prophets, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.

My colleague Canon Kristin White is fond of quoting Esther de Waal, who summarizes the rule of St. Benedict in a simple sentence: “God is not elsewhere.” It puts in a nutshell Benedict’s critique of monks and other faithful who had a sincere longing for God, but were always looking for him over the next horizon, rather than right where their feet were planted.

When Jesus went into the desert, God was not elsewhere. As you go into your Lenten fast, God is not elsewhere. When New Harmony’s founders cleared the wilderness forest and laid out these streets, God was not elsewhere. God was not elsewhere when St. Stephen’s cornerstone was laid. God was not elsewhere when Dr. Beth began her ministry among you, and neither is God elsewhere today, nor will God depart from you in the days to come.

God was not elsewhere when the devil tempted Jesus with all the kingdoms of the earth. God was not elsewhere when Jesus said no. And God was certainly not elsewhere when at the end of his 40 days of fasting and powerful temptations, angels came and waited upon him.

We stand today just a few steps into our annual journey into Lent. It will take us with Jesus to Jerusalem, to the foot of the cross, and beyond, where we too will find angels waiting for us, ready to remind us once again of a love and a life too powerful to be contained by any tomb.

Hold on. Take a breath. God is with you even in the toughest days and most uncertain hours. God’s angels wait for you. You have every tool you need.

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Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, New Harmony, IN

Lent 1 (February 26, 2023)

Readings: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

A Whole Heap of Curses

Considering that we are still some ten days off from the beginning of the penitential season of Lent, this morning’s readings, and especially the Gospel, are…bracing. The few paragraphs of Matthew we heard just now are taken from the first third of the Sermon on the Mount, better known, and certainly better liked, for “Blessed are the peacemakers…[and] the poor in spirit” than Jesus’s commendation of eye gouging and amputation as methods of avoiding sin.

And many people, possibly including some in this room, have experienced Jesus’s words on divorce as a weapon. Marriage and divorce is not the primary topic of my sermon today, but I can’t let Jesus drop a bomb like that and then just pretend y’all didn’t hear it.

So to be crystal clear about what our church’s teaching on divorce is – and you can find this in Title I, Canon 19 of the canons of The Episcopal Church – “When marital unity is imperiled by dissension…it shall be the duty of….the clergy to act first to protect and promote the physical and emotional safety of those involved, and only then, if it be possible…labor that the parties be reconciled.” Prior to remarriage, clergy are to instruct divorced spouses on their continuing duty of “concern for the well-being of the former spouse, and any children of the prior marriage,” a sign that the lifelong spiritual commitment of marriage is not altogether nullified in its legal end. And the legitimacy of children is never to be questioned.

I think the key to unlocking the good news in this text is in verses 23 and 24: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother and sister, and then come and offer your gift.”

These verses are in fact one of the options the Book of Common Prayer suggests for the offertory sentence – you know, the thing the priest says right after the announcement and before the collection plate goes around. If you want to find all the suggested options, they start on page 376 of the Prayer Book.

The one that begins, “Walk in love as Christ loves us,” is most popular in my unscientific experience. This one is long and harder to commit to memory. And besides, it’s kind of a bold move, at the moment a church is prompting and expecting people to give generously, to remind them that they may have a good reason to be doing something else first, instead.

But there’s a higher ethic at work here, namely that a life of faith is not an individual enterprise. It is a life lived in community; we need companions in the way. Moreover, it is insufficient for the life of that community to be characterized by only the most basic principles of civilization, like, for example, the one Jesus brings up first, refraining from murder? I mean, that’s a pretty low bar…I hope.

Jesus demands that his followers go further by refusing to nurture anger, grievances, and grudges, the things that, left to fester, can give rise to greater harms, violence included. Rather, we are to dig into the hard work of repentance and forgiveness, acknowledging our faults and all the ways we hurt each other, and committing once more to living in right relationship with God and our neighbor. Or to put it another way, paraphrasing our Baptismal Covenant, when we fall into sin, with God’s help, we repent and return to the Lord.

Apparently the church in Corinth is having some trouble with this. That congregation is so riven by jealousy and quarrels that Paul feels he is unable to teach them the depths of the Christian faith. Factions have formed pledging allegiance to Apollos or Paul, so disrupting the unity of the church that he has to remind them of the remedial concept that neither he nor Apollos are anything more than servants of the Gospel, laborers in the field. It is God in Christ alone who is the giver of life, and growth, and who is the world’s salvation.

That’s a necessary and important thing for a Christian to understand, but it’s just “milk,” as Paul puts it, a fussy toddler’s prelude to the solid food of the deeper mysteries of the sturdy eternal vine, of which we are but branches. Rivalries and fights, then, are more than things that make life in the Corinthian church unpleasant – I mean, who wants to join a church like that? Worse, they are actual impediments to developing a deeper relationship with God.

Some of you have participated in the College for Congregational Development, an intensive summer course that teaches how congregations of any size, whatever the resources at hand, can be more healthy, vibrant, and sustainable communities, faithful to the unique call God has given them. One of the things we teach there is that conflict, whether in congregations or really just in life, is as natural as breathing. We’re in benign low-level conflicts all the time – things like figuring out what to have for dinner or where to go on vacation, simple problems to be solved.

But who among us hasn’t been involved in more intense conflicts with higher stakes? Ones where our primary objective may shift from solving a problem or resolving a dispute to insistence on being right, or discrediting or destroying an opponent.

Jesus knows that’s going to happen to us, which is why his instruction is not to avoid conflict or sweep it under the rug, but to confront it. To seek the one with whom we are in broken relationship, and to forgive, or ask forgiveness, as the case may be. There are limits to this teaching. Victims of abuse are not obliged to be in relationship with their abusers, for instance. But in general, the practice of vulnerability in admitting wrongdoing, and the practice of mercy in forgiving those who have wronged us, is a core part of the Christian life. And the case may be that might mean literally standing up and walking out of this church service right now, if something weighs that heavily on your heart.

There’s no question that Jesus has harsh words for us today, and I make no effort to sugar coat them. But I encourage you to hear them with a vision for what the world would look like if we took them seriously, if not quite literally. Common life where forgiveness abounds and the truth sets us free, where each individual is known as a whole person and never just someone’s object of pity or desire, where lifelong vows are honored through good times and bad unless and until they are damaged beyond repair, and where sworn statements aren’t necessary because we tell the truth and keep our promises. That’s a world worthy of our longing and our labor.

“See,” Moses says to the Israelites, “I call upon heaven and earth to witness against you that today I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.” The hellfire and severed limbs of today’s Gospel sure look like a whole big heap of curses. But then, crucifixion looks like a curse, too. And on the other side of that curse lies Resurrection, life for Jesus, life for us, if we’ll have it.

Jesus’s harsh warnings remind us that daily before us are the same choices Moses set before Israel. It is the peculiar nature of a fallen world that in the contest between the death-dealing ways of anger, dehumanization, falsehood, and betrayal – and the lifegiving belovedness God intended not only for each of us in creation, but for all of us, together – the temptation toward death is so strong.

But don’t do that, church. Don’t choose that. Choose the way of Jesus. Choose companions for the whole way, across green pastures and through shadowed valleys. Choose love. Choose truth. Choose the path of life.

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Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 12, 2023

Good Samaritan Episcopal Church, Brownsburg, IN

Readings: Deut. 30:15-20, Ps. 119:1-8, 1 Cor. 3:1-9, Matt. 5:21-37

Image: James Stencilowski, distributed under a CC-BY license