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

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

The Soul of Mary

Mary Windows, Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis

allsaintsindy · The Soul Of Mary

I think this may be the only Gospel reading that comes around on a Sunday that, if I were a betting man, I would wager a pretty big proportion of this congregation has memorized in its entirety. 

There’s no need to feel bad about it if you don’t, by the way; it’s just that by virtue of being in choir and singing some of the countless pieces of music its been set to, or by praying the Liturgy of the Hours or the Daily Office, whether for a lifetime or stints of a few weeks here and there, repeated encounters with these words of Mary, the blessed Mother of Jesus, have caused these verses to be written in our minds, if not on our hearts. For many centuries in the western church, monks, nuns, priests, and ordinary faithful like us, have greeted the sunset with Mary’s inspirational and aspirational invocation of God most high: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior.”

This passage is also known as the Magnificat, after the Latin for “magnify.” In it, Mary, pregnant with Jesus, speaks of herself not only as rejoicing in the Lord, but magnifying the Lord. Making something that isn’t readily visible, visible.

Even though we make a big deal out of Mary here, what with our statue and stained glass window devoted to her and all, devotion to Mary is, in fact, optional. Scripture doesn’t say a great deal about her. But from the earliest days of the church Mary has loomed large in the Christian imagination. A vast and beautiful tradition has arisen in her honor. It’s easy enough to see why. 

In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ is our savior. We know that he through whom we were loved into being will not let us fall in the end. But by choosing to follow Jesus, and the way of the cross, in baptism, we have chosen a difficult road, and we need companions on the way. That company includes one another – those in this church traveling the same path – the great cloud of witnesses in heaven and on earth, and the risen Jesus himself, most especially in the sacrament of his body and blood.

That company also includes Mary, his mother, who in some very literal ways has made Jesus visible to us. It was Mary who bore God the Son safely into his earthly life, responding affirmatively to the angel Gabriel’s call. From her womb she bestowed him with flesh and blood. With her hands she wrapped him in swaddling clothes. At the wedding in Cana, Mary noticed the wine was running out and prompted her son’s first miracle. At the place of the skull she watched him die; at the foot of the cross she held his corpse with the same tenderness with which she cradled him as an infant, away in a manger all those years before.

On the cross we see a God who gives everything for us, who endured death in order to create a safe passage for us on the other side of that door. In Mary, we see the joyful expectation, and the trusting endurance of sorrow, of swords that pierce the soul, that characterize the life of a disciple walking up to that doorstep. And we see the fulfillment of what it is to be Mary, full of grace – one who has so generously received the gifts of God’s love and mercy that she can’t help but emanate that grace as well. 

Mary has been commemorated with so many sculptures and stained glass windows, so many settings of the Magnificat and Ave Maria, rosaries, grave markers, garden statues, grocery store candles, refrigerator magnets – so much merch – that it can obscure that the heart of Mary, which in our prayers in a few moments we will describe as “immaculate,” is more than anything ordinary, like yours, like mine. Mary’s worthiness to bear Jesus came not from being somehow special or unusually holy, but from being faithful.

That is both comforting, and challenging. There’s comfort in knowing that any one of us could be worthy to be chosen by God to be a vessel used to pour God’s grace into the world. Challenge in that being a vessel used to pour God’s grace into the world may well be our call. That it is not just for Mary’s soul, but for ours, too, to magnify the Lord.

I won't call out this person by name, but there is an All Saints parishioner who, most years if not every year, makes a gift of flowers in honor of St. Constance and her Companions, the Martyrs of Memphis, near their feast day. That commemoration falls on September 9, so if past is prologue, we’ll see flowers for them in just a few weeks.

Constance’s name, and the other Martyrs of Memphis, showed up in the bulletin annually a few times before I took notice and thought to look them up. Without any other knowledge, I assumed they were early church martyrs, North African desert mothers martyred in Memphis, Egypt.

But in fact they were martyred in Memphis, Tennessee, less than a century and a half ago. Constance and her sisters were Episcopal nuns, who had come to Memphis in 1873 to found a girls school. By 1878, an epidemic of yellow fever hit the city. Rather than flee as many others did, Constance, Thecla, Ruth, and Francis stayed to treat the sick. 5,000 people died, including them. Constance died on September 9, 1878, with the rest following her within a month.

It’s a moving story, all the more resonant here because of our church’s intimate experience of AIDS. And it’s no surprise that the patron of Constance’s sisterhood was none other than St. Mary. I daresay the souls of Constance, Thecla, Ruth, and Francis magnified the Lord, showing the power of God to turn hearts to love and mercy, to take risks, and to turn hands to tender service of the sick and fearful.

Now Mary herself was not called to martyrdom, and at one time I might have segued out of this story by saying something along the lines of, “we may not be called to such heroics.” But COVID has killed a million people in this country and isn’t done with us yet; metaphorical violence plagues our airways and actual violence plagues our streets, schools, and other places we’re told are supposed to be safe. So who knows what might be demanded of us? We would do well to prepare our souls to make God visible each day in ways small and large, whatever may come.

And to do that, we could do a lot worse than to follow Mary. And there’s no shortage of ways to do that, as we can see just from the objects and windows in this church.

Following Mary’s example can mean looking like an elegant renaissance lady, being single and pregnant on a street corner, reading quietly until interrupted by an angel, being part of a family on the run, cradling a dead son, and being Queen of Heaven, flanked by angels.

Magnifying the Lord, the soul of Mary brings what is blurry into focus, makes the far away close, makes the unseeable seen. Mary’s soul is a pair of glasses turning indistinct text into story; it is a telescope that coaxes distant galaxies our of darkness. 

Magnifying the Lord, Mary’s soul is a lens atop a lighthouse blazing beams of light into the night sky above the roar of waves, warning sailors and wayfarers away from rocks, guiding us into harbor, so we can walk safely on solid ground.

Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray that our souls, like yours, may magnify the Lord, now, and until the hour of our death.

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The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, transferred

August 14, 2022

The Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis

Readings: Is. 61:10-11; Ps. 34; Gal. 4:4-7; Lk. 1:46-55

The Better Part

Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle? Who may abide upon your holy hill?

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our Gospel today contains the familiar story of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, while Martha rattles around the house, distracted by her many tasks. Countless words have been preached on this text, weighing the tension between the relative merits of single-minded focus in the presence of our Lord and the demands of the many tasks that do indeed need to get done.

It’s common to cast Mary as the spiritual one, while Martha is practical. In some churches people embrace their inner Marthas by joining St. Martha’s guilds, which depending on the congregation, focus on tasks as varied as needlework or providing meals after funerals.

I won’t be the first preacher or the last to point out that the dichotomy between Mary and Martha is a false one. We all have our many tasks to attend to: getting bills paid, helping kids with homework, maintaining some semblance of order in our homes. And we are all blessed with at least some moments to spend time with and be strengthened by Jesus Christ, our savior, redeemer, and friend. The trick is to know which kind of moment you’re in at any given time, and respond accordingly.

Last weekend’s moment was the 80^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the peak Martha event that this denomination has to offer. Held every three years, the General Convention is the mechanism by which the whole church makes decisions together. This year, over four days in Baltimore, around a thousand bishops, deacons, priests, and laypeople gathered to consider some 419 pieces of legislative business. 

These included polite but ultimately inconsequential things, such as resolution A169, which expressed “deepest thanks to the City of Baltimore,” but which one must assume went altogether unnoticed by Baltimore's citizenry.

The convention’s business also included the introduction of initiatives to, and, critically, the provision of resources for, The Episcopal Church to confront its past and present when it comes to its intrinsic linkages with colonialism, its complicity in white supremacist systems, and its blemished record on racial justice and equity. We as a church will be looking at everything from examining the church’s history supporting indigenous boarding schools that separated Native American children from their families and cultures, to the implicit assumptions undergirding the language of our liturgies, to establishing “the Episcopal Coalition for Racial Equity and Justice as a voluntary association of…dioceses, parishes, organizations, and individuals dedicated to the work of becoming the Beloved Community,” an effort I anticipate All Saints will want to be part of.

These efforts come not from a desire to wallow in guilt. This is not about beating ourselves up. This is about believing Jesus when he teaches us, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

They come from a conviction that a church that hides from the truth yields to shame.

But a church that tells the whole truth, that acknowledges and repents of its sins, and commits to righting the wrongs it has done, truly follows Jesus Christ "out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life." (BCP 1979, p. 368)

This work is not a distraction from the Christian message. It is an embodiment of it. And there is some urgency to the task.

A few weeks ago, during my lunch hour, I was over in the parish hall working on something or other to do with church finances, when the doorbell rang. I answered, and at the back door were four or five children, and a pair of young adults. They were from a summer day camp happening nearby. The kids were on a mission – a photo scavenger hunt – and one of the items on their list was to take a photo of “unusual light.” One of the camp counselors had the idea to ask if they could come inside the church, reasoning that sunlight streaming through stained glass would probably fit the bill.

I’m delighted to tell you that when we came into the nave, the kids were in awe.

“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen!” a little girl exclaimed.

One of the boys, probably the oldest of the group, I’d guess maybe 10 years old, immediately demanded a tour. He wanted to see everything. So we trooped up to the organ loft, then out to the Michael Chapel garden, where they were able to cross “a peaceful place” off the scavenger hunt checklist, and into the sacristy, where the kids peered through the skylight and determined it constituted “an interesting view of the sky.” Check.

At last they snapped a few photos of the windows in the Mary and Michael chapels and prepared to leave.

“I’d love to visit here on a Sunday,” the boy said to me.

“And we’d love to have you visit,” I said.

“Would I be welcome here?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” I replied.

“No, would I be welcome,” he repeated, as if I wasn’t understanding him, “Are people welcome here who have skin like mine?”

He gestured to his face, to his brown skin, and my heart sank.

“Yes, of course,” I said again, directing his attention again to the windows, to St. Michael the Archangel and the Blessed Mother sharing skin like his.

I’d like to think my answer was convincing, and that he walked away knowing that the beauty of this place belongs to him every bit as much as it belongs to you sitting here this morning.

But what’s the persuasive power of a glimpse of stained glass compared to the crushing weight of the experiences this boy has had to make him think this question necessary of a church, let alone our church? That’s a Holy Spirit sort of question that I don’t have a proper answer to.

The experience of seeing this boy bowled over by beauty, and yet already understanding himself as under threat because of who he is and what he looks like, wondering if we judge him worthy to be here was heartbreaking.

It will not have escaped your attention that our state and our country are going through some stuff right now. The fundamental dignity and right to self-determination of a lot of people, a lot of us, is under threat. Many of us fear for ourselves, our friends, the future our children and grandchildren will inherit.

As citizens we have our responsibility to engage in the political process, but we only have so much control over the “thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers” (Col. 1:16) that govern what happens out there 

Out there, the Adversary prowls like a lion (1 Pet. 5:8, para.), sowing works of discord, division, devaluing the belovedness of every human being, It is not wrong for us and for those who seek us out, maybe you visiting for the first time this morning, to be worried, afraid.

But worry and fear are not where we're going to stay. The world needs us to commit with even greater vigor to living up to who we say we are in here. So that everyone who passes beneath the little plastic sign reading, “Everyone is welcome,” or past the one in which is carved in stone, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” find us to be clear and true not only about who we are, but who God is.

Jesus Christ came that we "might have life, and have it abundantly" (Jn. 10:10). As much as our world might be a factory of despair right now, anyone who comes in here needs to know – you need to know - that God would not have our spirits wilt while our hearts are still beating.

You are made in God’s image, so for you is the gift of God’s beauty. For you is the gift of God’s love For you is the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God. For you. For all of you.

And for you, against "the changes and chances of this mortal life" (BCP 1979, p. 133), against all of your distracting tasks, is a place to choose the better part, which will not be taken from you (Lk 10:42, para.): to rest alongside Mary at the feet of Jesus, and draw strength from "every word that falls from the mouth of God." (Matt. 4:4) 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost - July 17, 2022

Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis

Genesis 18:1-10a, Psalm 15, Colossians 1:15-28, Luke 10:38-42

The Forgiveness of Sins

"Campfire" by Elena Penkova, distributed under a CC BY-NC license.

Third Sunday of Easter - May 1, 2022

Readings: Acts 9:1-6, (7-20); Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19; Psalm 30

Preached at The Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis

allsaintsindy · The Forgiveness of Sins

I believe in the forgiveness of sins.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

I wonder if Peter was happy to see Jesus after the resurrection. Not in the sense that he would’ve preferred Jesus had just stayed in the tomb - of course not - but you know the feeling, the knot in your stomach, when you come face to face for the first time with someone you’ve failed or wronged in some way - maybe been found out for talking behind someone’s back, or caught in a lie, or you didn’t do the thing you said you would - that feeling.

That feeling. How Peter must have been feeling that.

At least when Jesus was dead, Peter knew what to do with himself, more or less.

As awful as Jesus’s death on the cross and the events leading up to it were, once it was all over, Peter and the other disciples, Mary Magdalene, Mary the Blessed Mother, Joseph of Arimathea, started to do the things their culture assigned them to do. Until suddenly they couldn’t, because a miracle had happened. Jesus wasn’t dead, and there was nothing in their life experience, no Jewish or Roman customs they could draw on to tell them what to do.

There was no first century Emily Post to give Peter words for the occasion when the friend he thought was dead showed up alive in a locked room, displayed his wounds, and breathed the spirit into him.

Especially when not so many days prior, he had failed Jesus so completely: asleep while Jesus sweat blood praying in the garden, denying knowledge of him while he stood trial.

How could he even look Jesus in the eye? How could a coward such as Peter possibly still be the rock on which the church would be built?

So Peter, ashamed, went back to doing what he knew how to do, all that time ago on the shores of Galilee, before Jesus recruited him to fish for people. He went fishing, for fish.

And even that he couldn’t do right, spending all night in a boat with six others without a single fish to show for it.

And that’s when Jesus shows up to make them breakfast. The other resurrection encounters recorded in John have a dreamlike, almost ghostly, quality. But this one feels very rooted in this world, evoking for me memories of backpacking trips and Boy Scout camp.  Sitting around a charcoal fire on the lakeshore, Jesus serves them a meal of fish and bread, the same menu as the feeding of the 5,000, except today there are only eight of them.

John doesn’t record what they talked about, but he scarcely needs to. There’s something about breaking bread together. There’s something about gathering around a campfire. It’s a natural, human-scaled, setting for reconciliation.

The exchange that follows breakfast - the healing of the breach between Peter and Jesus, where Jesus gives Peter the chance to replace his nighttime denials with a declaration of love and loyalty in triplicate at daybreak, demonstrates that the import of the miracle of Easter goes far beyond the restoration of breath to a corpse. We celebrate this great season for fifty days no only because Jesus gets to live, but because we get to live, too.

What happens in this moment, the repetition of, “Lord, you know I love you,” and, “Feed my sheep,” is not an erasure of Peter’s failings. Those are and will forever be part of Peter’s story. God tried erasure once, in the great flood in Genesis, and then swore never to do it again.

Rather, just as Christ’s resurrection body bears the scars of the cross, as evidence of the power of life to overcome even the most grievous of wounds: through the forgiveness of Christ Peter’s failures flower into the foundation of this church and every other church that ever has been or ever will be built. Forgiveness in Christ is no mere sentiment, no, “Apology accepted,” but a force of divine nature.

Forgiveness in Christ transforms Peter’s

Cowardice into courage,

Embarrassment into encouragement,

Pain into peace,

   forgiveness in Christ turns his

Heartache into healing,

   and changes him from

Anxious into apostle, from

Sinner into shepherd;

brings him into the fullness of who he is, Peter, Cephas, the rock upon whom Christ has indeed built his church.

Christ’s forgiveness is not an undoing of sin but a refashioning of the sinner into who we were created to be at the beginning: beloved creatures made in the image of our creator.

And if the forgiveness of Christ can restore Peter from betrayal into full stature as a beloved child of God; if the forgiveness of Christ can bring Paul to his knees on the road to Damascus, and turn him from the persecution of the church to proclaiming that “faith, hope, and love abide” - what will his forgiveness do for you, for me, if we dare to let it into the tender places in our hearts where we carry our shame for our sins against God and our neighbor? If Christ has in some way become a stranger to us, we are no stranger to him; he waits only to hear, “Lord, you know I love you.”

Dawn broke one morning on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus said to Peter and the others, “Come, have breakfast.” And in the repair of the breach between redeemer and redeemed, sin and shame were robbed of their power.

Likewise in Easter, the culmination of the story of our salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, we who gather here this morning to be shaped in our faith in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting,” affirm “this…true saying, worthy of all [people] to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” (1 Tim 1:15, 1979 BCP para.) To save us.

In our incarnate and risen Lord, “the dawn from on high  [has broken] upon us, to shine on [us] who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Song of Zechariah, 1979 BCP, para.)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Squeamish About Jesus

Image: Steve Baxter

Click for audio

“When…his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult – who can accept it?’ But Jesus…said to them, ‘Does this offend you?...Do you also wish to go away?’”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I was raised in a vaguely Quaker, but essentially non-religious household. The Eucharist wasn’t a part of my family’s life. Not only were we infrequent attenders at the Raleigh Fr
iends Meeting, but even if we had been, Quakers don’t do sacraments, at least not in the way we think of them. 

So when I first heard about communion when I was probably eight or nine, and the concept that Christians, and particularly Catholics, were consuming the body and blood of this Jesus Christ fellow, I was pretty grossed out.

I have company in my squeamishness. 

Among the various difficulties the early Christians faced, trying to practice their faith in the hostile Roman Empire, was the accusation that they were cannibals.

The accusation had its roots, of course, in the practice of the Eucharist, in which Christians asserted that once consecrated on the altar, bread and wine truly became the body and blood of Christ.

It isn’t altogether clear whether Christianity’s detractors believed that  the words of institution were actually effective at turning ordinary food and drink into actual human flesh, but really, the efficacy of the prayers wasn’t the point. What mattered was that Christians intended to eat Christ’s flesh and blood, whether or not they in fact managed to do it.

Objections to this body and blood stuff didn’t come to an end when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Written in the mid-1500s, The Thirty-Nine Articles, a foundational document of the Church of England that defined Anglican teaching in opposition to both the Roman Catholic church, as well as certain strains of Protestantism that challenged the social order and the supremacy of the state, asserts that transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic teaching that the bread and wine are truly changed in the Eucharist, “is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.”

In 2014, the Association of Raelian Scientists published an ethically dubious study wherein they surreptitiously acquired consecrated hosts from a few different Catholic churches and tested them to see if they contained human DNA. Never mind that the Catholic church doesn’t actually teach this, so it’s no surprise that they didn’t.

This outcome, however, the authors assert, proves the falsehood of Catholic teaching – and is evidence for their point of view, namely that extraterrestrials created all life on earth, and that humanity will be saved when the United Nations gives UFOs special diplomatic status and some brave country builds a UFO embassy that must include a landing pad for a flying saucer, a conference room capable of seating no fewer than 21 people, and a swimming pool. But I digress.

What today’s Gospel shows us is that it wasn’t just ancient and contemporary detractors of Christianity or Elizabethan reformers who get squeamish about what Jesus says about his body and blood. It’s his disciples, too. Is what he says about the connection between eating his flesh and eternal life true? Do they even want it to be?

Not all of them, clearly. John tells us that “many of [them] turned back and no longer went about with him.”

And as for the twelve, Peter swallows hard and says, “To whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” That answer has a sort of, “We don’t know what this means, but we trust you, Jesus” vibe, which come to think of it isn’t a half-bad attitude to have. 

Now before I go any further, I should say a word about what The Episcopal Church officially teaches about all this. Our catechism says that the Eucharist is the sacrament in which “Christ is made present, and in which he unites us to his one offering of himself,” and that “by faith” we receive the Body and Blood of Christ. So something serious is going on, and we believe that Jesus is somehow really involved and present, but we don’t try to put too much definition around what is essentially a mystery. Or as my friend Holli succinctly puts it, Episcopalians don’t believe in transubstantiation, but they don’t not believe in it, either.

The few paragraphs we read this morning more or less wrap up the sixth chapter of John’s gospel. If you read the whole thing you’ll find it to be an extended discourse on bread. And in this time when we’re still only receiving the bread when we take communion, we might as well focus on it.

The chapter starts with an account of the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes for a hungry crowd. The next day members of that crowd follow Jesus across the Sea of Tiberias. Jesus observes that they have followed him because they were hungry people who had eaten their fill the previous day. He advises them not to follow him for the perishable bread that grows stale and molds, but instead to seek the living bread, the bread that endures eternally. Eat the living bread, he tells them, and they will never hunger or thirst again.

And when they ask how to do this, Jesus tells them that he himself is that living bread that has come down from heaven, which leads us to this climactic moment, where Jesus finally says that to inherit eternal life, his followers must feed on his flesh and blood.

And it’s at that point the disciples are like, “Whoa there, Jesus, you’ve gone too far! This is a hard teaching – who can accept it?”

Hearing Jesus in the moment, his followers don’t yet have the context of the Last Supper, let alone the accumulation of millennia of tradition and theological contemplation. It’s no wonder they’re confused, or that some give up and walk away.

A challenge of being a human trying to have a relationship with God, or, I suppose, a challenge of being an omnipotent, infinite, and incomprehensible God in love with your finite and mortal creation, is that it is so hard for us to understand one another. God uses objects and symbols we can comprehend to tell us who God is. Things like bread and wine.

Jesus uses the miracle of multiplying a young boy’s five loaves to feed the crowd by the seashore to communicate something about himself. He, the eternal Son through whom all things were made, is the very source of their mortal life. And then he asks us them – and us – to take a leap of faith, to follow him not to satisfy the hunger of their perishable bodies, but to find in him living bread to satisfy the yearnings of their imperishable spirits to be eternally united with their creator.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood,” Jesus say, “have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” This teaching resists reason, but to those who can accept it, it rewards participation. Within the challenge of this claim is Jesus’s great promise to us. 

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul asks us to “put on the full armor of God,” as protection against all the evil powers of the world that seek to divide us from God and one another. Some commentaries note discomfort with the militaristic tone of this passage, with its shields and swords and bucklers, but I think in these days of violence and rage, whether at Kabul airport or a local schoolboard meeting, and as the pandemic continues to rage, we can appreciate the value of a good defense.

In the sacrament we receive today, Jesus promises to be truly present with us, as protection and shield against all assaults of the enemy, and to be with us always, even to the end of the age.

Preached at St. David's Episcopal Church - Bean Blossom, IN on August 22, 2021 

Readings: 1 Kings 8:1-6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43; Ps. 84; Eph. 6:10-20; Jn. 6: 56-69

Led into temptation

Sermon preached at St. John's, Speedway, March 1, 2020 (Lent 1). With both the annual meeting and the Great Litany happening, I kept things brief. I owe the emphasis on the angels in this text to a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, Jr. at a preaching conference sponsored by the Christian Theological Seminary's Ph.D. program in African-American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric in the summer of 2019. Before hearing his sermon I hadn't paid much attention to this detail.

Readings:

Gen. 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Ps. 32

Rom. 5:12-19

Matt. 4:1-11

Audio version

Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord; shout for joy, all who are true of heart. (Ps. 32:12)

In the name of the Father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Here at St. John’s, you use the contemporary form of the Lord’s Prayer. I approve. My home parish of All Saints does, too. I prefer it to the traditional version, mainly because it forthrightly asks that our “sins” be forgiven, rather than the more elliptical “trespasses.” I like it when we say what we mean.

I also find “save us from the time of trial” to be more compatible with my conception of God than “lead us not into temptation.” Because what kind of God leads us into temptation, right?

Well, that would be our God, apparently - because this morning Matthew tells us that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness in order to be tempted by the devil. God did lead Jesus into temptation - so that turn of phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is born of Christ’s own experience.

Does this make God cruel? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I wonder instead, if, as Jesus’s earthly ministry really kicks off, what we’re seeing is the Holy Trinity figuring this incarnation business out. This may be a test of the limits that being fully human, with all the appetites  and pleasures and exhaustion and inconveniences and relationships that being human entails, places on God the cosmic Son, through whom all things were made. Can God, divine yet subject to human hunger, go the distance in the desert? Can God, divine yet subject to human pain and fear, commit to the way of the cross?

For the devil’s part, he’s got a sophisticated temptation plan, targeting both Jesus’s humanity and divinity. Better yet, he hopes to entrap Jesus in the words of scripture. After forty days in the desert, Satan finds Jesus to be a famished man, and reminds him of God’s provision for Israel in the wilderness.

“You’re the Son of God, right? Why don’t you do that manna trick again?”

Failing there, Satan snatches Jesus away to the top of the temple, and from that dizzying height above Jerusalem, goads Jesus to prove himself, as if being the Son of God is synonymous with being an unusually virtuous daredevil -

“Shoot yourself from a cannon, walk a tightrope over the grand canyon, throw yourself from the temple, Jesus - show me your power to save.”

And failing there again, the devil tries to sell Jesus the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Worship me,” the devil says, “and I’ll give you all these kingdoms, with their power and palaces, jewels and splendor.”

Jesus responds: “Away with you, Satan, I worship the Lord - you, Satan, have nothing to give me, and to you I have nothing to prove.”

And that is when the angels came.

St. John’s, today we stand just within the threshold of Lent, and we are called to a fast, 

or the assumption of some special act of devotion. I won’t ask what yours is -  that’s a matter for you and God.

But what does your fast mean? Your decision to give up chocolate or alcohol, coffee, diet coke, Netflix or shopping may please God - I don’t know - but that’s not the main thing. It’s a practice for a thing yet to come: a time of trial we may not be spared, a temptation into which God may lead us.

In the Lord’s Prayer we ask that we be saved from that time of trial, or not be led into that temptation, as the case may be, and most days I believe God will honor this request. The world has temptations enough to challenge us without God dragging us into more.

And when I think about what it means for one of us to be led into temptation for the greater purposes of God, I think of a college friend of mine who became addicted to methamphetamine and now works to bring other addicts to freedom, a career that carries the risk of relapse. It’s holy work. God leads him daily into temptation.

For Jesus the time in the desert and the temptation of Satan is a dry run for the crucifixion. When the moment comes, in the agony in the garden, despite expressing his desire - “let this cup pass from me,” he is able to say “not my will, but yours be done,” and so face the cross and the grave.

We may not be called to such heroics. But we prepare ourselves during this holy season so that we too can be ready, practiced, when God has need of our discipline.

But don’t forget the angels. As Jesus’s fast in the desert concludes there are angels waiting to revive him. And as his even greater fast - where he empties himself of all life - comes to an end on the third day, within the tomb there is a spark like the first glimmer of the dawn, and an angel appears to roll the stone away and announce to the women the world’s release from the power of death, and the assurance of new life.

Trust that it will be the same for you. Be blessed in your fast. The angels are coming.