Let us not consume one another

"Amazing Grace Mural" by 1Flatworld, distributed under a CC BY-ND-NC license.

Sermon preached on the third Sunday after Pentecost (June 30, 2019) at the Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis. Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Ps. 77:1-2; Gal. 5:1, 13-25; Lk. 9:51-62

“The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” (Gal. 5:14-15)

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

Early on in my life as a newly converted Christian, I worshiped with a woman who, whenever “Amazing Grace” came up as one of our hymns. would change one of the words.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” she would sing, “that saved a soul like me.”

“That saved a soul,” rather than, “that saved a wretch.”

She told me she didn’t like the word “wretch” because of what it implied about her worthiness, about her standing with God. I don’t begrudge her that decision, necessarily. God knows certain of our fellow Christians have so emphasized human sinfulness at the expense of our belovedness, and the fact that at the creation God called us good, that when an opportunity comes to surface from the toxicity of such an expression of our faith, that it can do one’s soul good to leave a word like wretch behind.

But as a new Christian, I took the wrong lesson from our conversation. Back then, as now, I relied on the members of the church as a guide to living the Christian life. But I was inexperienced enough that I didn’t understand that what this person was telling me was about what she, as one person, needed to do to protect herself from past harm the church had done. The lesson I learned - or thought I learned - instead, was that in churches that valued the leadership of women, and were at least willing to have the conversation about the standing of gay people before God - my own minimum standards for a church I would join - people weren’t wretches, full stop.

And so all this unpleasant judgment business was just some parasitic narrative that had clung like a barnacle to the super-nice warm and fuzzy “love thy neighbor” heart of the gospel.

When you’re 20 years old in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, amidst the first glimmers of hope in the form of effective HIV treatments that removed a simmering dread, with months yet to come before the revelation of Bill Clinton’s Oval Office affair (and with no small measure of compartmentalization of the Rwandan genocide), it was possible to believe such things, that there was no need for a day of reckoning, that there was no judgment due.

But we do not have the luxury of believing such things today, if we ever did.

Beloved, we are beloved, we are created in God’s image, God did call us good. And in our belovedness, in our goodness, God entrusted the world to our care. How have we done? How have we been our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers? How well have we let the little children come to us?

Others have said better the things I might say about how we as Christians should respond to the stain of our nation’s response to the migrants seeking asylum on our southern border, and most especially our treatment of the children.

On those matters I commend to you Bishop Jennifer’s message  delivered on Friday, and the message from the Bishops of California  delivered yesterday. If you can’t find Bishop Jennifer’s letter in your inbox, chances are you aren’t subscribed to the Diocese’s newsletter, and as the bishop’s canon I am duty-bound to remind you that you can find her message and subscribe to the newsletter at indydio.org.

Also today, at 4:00, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette is hosting “Never Again is Now,” an interfaith gathering to resist the cruelty our country is visiting on toddlers, and to call us back to the values America claims to hold dear. Bishop Jennifer and many people of faith and others of good will will be there, and I likewise commend it to you.

We live in angry, dispiriting times, justifiably so, and who knows if we have seen the worst yet? But we are a people of hope, a people of resurrection, a people who know that when the stone of the tomb eclipses all light from sun, moon, and stars, a yet more powerful spark remains.

There is another side to these times.

But who will we be on it?

From the looks of it, whatever side of the political spectrum we fall on, it appears we will all be like James and John, saying to Jesus, “Hey those Samaritans weren’t so welcoming – is it cool if we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

We don’t traffic in brimstone the same way we used to, but the vitriol and the scorn of our present age burn nearly as hot.

The impulse to destroy our enemies and those who do harm to us and to those we love is perfectly understandable, and scripturally supportable, even, if you look in the right places. But Jesus calls us to a harder thing. I’m not talking about making peace with injustice: that’s appeasement, and we’re all too good at it. I’m talking about making peace with people.

How I wish today’s gospel were longer - like three times longer. Because today and for the next two Sundays, St. Luke gives us an extended lesson on making peace. Today, we have Jesus’s scouts sent ahead to a Samaritan village to find a place for Jesus to stay and teach, and the Samaritans in no uncertain terms reject him. The disciples want to take vengeance, but Jesus rebukes them. We don’t quite know what he says, but next week’s reading gives us a hint.

That’s the sending of the seventy, two by two, into all the places Jesus intended to go as he made his way back to Jerusalem. He instructs them to bring the news that the Kingdom of God has come near, and they are to bestow their peace upon those they meet - only, if they are not received hospitably, they are to move on, yet telling even those who reject them that the Kingdom of God has come near. In a curious aside that is left out of the lectionary text, Jesus says that on the day a town rejects them, “It will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.” Though with no fire from heaven, no brimstone, no pillars of salt, It’s not quite clear what he means: only that it is clear that the judgment of those towns belongs to God, and not to the disciples who would rain down fire.

And then the next week, a lawyer challenges Jesus - seeking to justify himself he asks, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus tells the parable of the man beaten by robbers and left by the side of the road, passed over by a priest and a Levite, only to be rescued by a man of the very Samaritan people who rejected Jesus just some 30 verses earlier. In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus not only reaffirms the expansive notion of neighborliness commanded in Leviticus, but in its placement so soon  after his own rejection by the Samaritans, Jesus affirms that alienation and enmity need not be the end of us.

The development of the Samaritan people in Luke’s Gospel from the rejecting enemy to the literal gold standard of a good neighbor is a mystery in some ways. After all, the Good Samaritan isn’t even a real person, but an imagined possibility. But part of the point of that story is to provoke us to seek the good in those who in actual fact or merely our perception are our enemies today.

But the way of making that shift happen becomes comprehensible if we acknowledge that in the aftermath of our sins against each other - whatever the rightness or wrongness of our past actions and positions - that we have all along been looking through a glass, darkly, and on the basis of our faith’s twin treasures of repentance and forgiveness, we can be reconciled one to another by the grace of God in Christ.

Loving our neighbor means loving the one who is nice to us, the one who has wronged us, the one who reviles us, the one we revile, the one we have wronged - all while upholding the justice, mercy, and righteousness of God. It’s a messy business.

And it’s a messy business we can duck. It’s optional, Paul advises, writing to the Galatians. We do have the option to proceed down the spiral of biting and devouring - just be careful, Paul writes, that in the process of devouring one another you don’t consume one another…as if devour and consume weren’t synonyms.

I have faith that the darkness of the present hour is not our end, but on us is whether the character of the time to come is revenge, blame, and recriminations, biting and consuming, or a yet more excellent way.

It is tempting every day to call for a rain of fire rather than reconciliation to God and to one another in the promised reign of God.

Let us not be led into that temptation.

So, beloved, discipline yourselves, be alert. Your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith. (1 Peter 5:8-9, paraphrase)

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

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What We Have to Say

Sermon preached at St. James Episcopal Church, New Castle, Indiana, on the Seventh Sunday of Easter (June 2, 2019). Readings: Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-26; Psalm 97

Audio Recording

Well good morning, St. James. I’m Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale and I serve on Bishop Jennifer’s staff as Canon to the Ordinary for Administration and Evangelism, and it is my privilege to be with you today.

Part of what makes me passionate about my work is the fact that I came to believe as an adult. And I have spent considerable thought over the years piecing together the work of the Spirit and the work of various people that made my experience possible, and have wondered about what lessons there are there that can help us share the deep joy we find in our faith with others.

I didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. I mean, we were culturally Christian - we celebrated Christmas and Easter, until my brother and I outgrew Easter egg hunts, and then it was just Christmas. But religion was around - my father’s father was a Lutheran minister. My mom grew up in an Irish Catholic family, and her father became a Roman Catholic deacon. There were bibles and books of theology gathering dust on bookshelves in the guest bedroom. And one of my mom’s bibles in particular had lots of color illustrations of things like the Garden of Eden, David and Goliath, various scenes from the life of Jesus. I used to flip through the pictures with some frequency, but never read the book.

Until one summer when I took it to camp and determined that I  would read it, or at least make a start. I made a valiant effort. I got through Genesis and Exodus - lots of good stories there. But then I hit Leviticus. It was only a few chapters before I gave up on that. So I went to the next book, Numbers, and it was, well, lists of numbers, so I figured I’d maybe just flip to the last page of this big book and see how the whole thing turned out. And I found the few paragraphs we read from Revelation this morning: something about the tree of life, and the water of life, and some Greek letters, and for ten or eleven year old me, this made no sense whatsoever, and I set the Bible aside for the next 10 years or so.

Today we arrive at the seventh Sunday of Easter, and while we still have the rest of this week before the Great Fifty Days are over, this is the last time we’ll be celebrating this year’s season of the resurrection, together as a church community.

So two of our readings today are about endings. In Revelation we hear the very last words of scripture, wrapping up a few loose ends, I guess. The tree of life in the New Jerusalem is a mirror of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that kicked off this whole mess in the first place. And the water of life at the end calls to mind the spirit of God moving over the face of the deep in the beginning.

And the Gospel reading today, and all its difficult to follow sentences, what with the “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” business, is the final part of what is known as Jesus’s farewell discourse, his last words to the disciples before he is crucified.

But these endings are also beginnings of a new story, the story we are living now. The Revelation of St. John ends with a promise of Christ’s return, the fulfillment of which we still await.

But more important, I think, Is the part of the Gospel where Jesus starts praying for us, like I mean, really us - you and me, in this room right now, in the Gospel today.

“Jesus prayed for his disciples, and then he said. ‘I ask not only on behalf of these,  but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.’”

Look at what is happening here. The second person of the Trinity, God the Son, is saying a prayer to the first person, God the Father. And the prayer is not just for the disciples but for every generation that comes to believe through the disciples’ word. That’s us, friends. It is an eternal prayer that, as professor Barbara Lundblad puts it, “hangs in the space between earth and heaven, between time past and time present and time yet to come.”(1)

This prayer hovers over us as a hen protects her chicks under her wings. This prayer hovered over our grandparents as it hovers over our children and grandchildren, and nieces and nephews, cousins and friends, and generations we won’t live to see.

Jesus prays this prayer with the purpose “That they all may be one.” In other words he prays that our faith in him will be the thread that binds us through space and time to the disciples, “prophets, apostles, and martyrs...all those...who have looked to [God] in hope [in every generation],” (2) And ultimately to Jesus Christ himself, the one God the Father has loved “since the foundation of the world”.

And the way all this will happen? Jesus prays for those who hear through the disciples’ word. Which means he’s also praying for those who heard through those who heard the disciples’ word, and those who heard those who heard those who heard the disciples’ word, and so on through the present day.

Which means Jesus is praying for someone to hear your word.

So what do you have to say?

Yesterday Rachel Held Evans, one of the great biblical interpreters of our time, was laid to rest. She was a young mother who died unexpectedly after a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic.

As an interpreter of the Bible, though she was incredibly smart, she wasn’t so much a scholar ss an explorer, who sought to understand the Bible’s meaning by experiencing its stories first hand.

In her 2012 book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she examined the various passages of scripture in the Old and New Testaments that attempt to govern how a woman should behave. The book is by turns hilarious and poignant.

At one point, trying to see what it is like to do what Proverbs 31 suggests an ideal wife should do: make “her husband [known] at the city gates,” she stands on the highway at the city limits of her town holding a cardboard sign saying, “Dan is awesome!” What effect this exercise had on her husband’s reputation is unclear.

But also, rRecounting the many horrific stories of exile, abandonment and murder visited by men upon women in the Bible, she and a friend create aservice of remembrance for Hagar, cast out in the wilderness, for Jephthah’s daughter, sacrificed by her father, for an unnamed concubine, who is “thrown into a mob, gang-raped, killed, and dismembered.”(3) They sit with these painful stories, remember these women, and they grieve.

Through this exploration, Rachel Held Evans did not somehow magically make sense of it all, nor did she come to agree with everything scripture seems to say a woman should do. Though she experimented with it, she did not, ultimately, submit unquestioningly to her husband, and she certainly did not stay silent in church.

But what she did do was transform scripture from some book about far off people in a strange culture with sometimes incomprehensible practices into her own story.

And so when we see events like the shooting in Virginia Beach, we know that this, too, is part of God’s story, that God’s people have experienced massacres and wars and sorrow. This doesn’t make it ok. But we can trust that even in tragedy we are held in God’s love.

Which brings me to our reading from Acts. There’s a lot happening here - divination, an exorcism, an earthquake. The miraculous elements of the story are revelations of the power of God, but focus on them too much and you can lose sight of who they’re happening to: a slave girl whose worth in the world is based on how much money the demon that possesses her can make for her owners. A jailer who’s a cog in the machine of a corrupt and oppressive Roman regime, prepared to kill himself  because of the retribution that empire will visit on a man who loses some prisoners to an earthquake - as if he’s supposed to have control over an earthquake.

So this story isn’t so far off from our own world, where we are measured by our ability to accumulate wealth - or to spend it. To most businesses after all, our value isn’t our inherent worth as people, but our ability to be good consumers. And we have great edifices of law and culture to preserve a particular kind of order, and a great many people who are cogs in the machinery of judgment.

And it’s a judgment that says you are less than if you don’t have enough education or you have an addiction, or you’re not pretty, or skinny, or healthy enough. Or you’re ashamed of debt, failings as a parent or spouse, or all the petty sins that mark our daily lives.

The world we live in and the world of the Acts of the Apostles differ in that we have better plumbing, longer lifespans, and smartphones (which may or may not be an improvement). But they are the same in that the powers and principalities of both worlds want us to believe that our fundamental worth is somehow related to how well we can preserve the interests of an empire and keep up appearances.

The work of conversion of hearts is the work of the spirit. So we should take a little pressure off ourselves - making someone believe what we believe isn’t our responsibility.

But we do have a responsibility to share our own stories of faith so that when God acts in someone’s life, God can be recognized because that someone has already heard of the faith passed down from the disciples to us. And we can start doing that by knowing our own story well, and discovering how our own story fits into the great arc of God’s love for the world revealed in scripture and most of all in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Revelation of St. John the Divine is exhilarating and terrifying. The chapters that bring us the the final poetic paragraphs of scripture are filled with fearsome signs and battle, but it is all in the service of clearing away everything the world has gotten wrong about who God is and what the creation is meant to be and strips it back to God’s actual intention: That the people of God may enter God’s holy city by the gates; that the grace of God is the water of life for thirsty and beloved souls.

“And let everyone who hears [this] say, ‘Come.’

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

The one who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon."

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

(1) "John 17:20-26 Commentary" by Barbara Lundblad at WorkingPreacher.org.

(2) Eucharistic Prayer C, 1979 Book of Common Prayer

(3) Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood.

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Why Bother Praising God?

The Death of the Virgin Mary, Chora Church, Istanbul. Image: University of Michigan Library.

O Queen of Heaven, rejoice, for the son you bore has arisen as he promised. Alleluia. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Why are we here today? Why do we bother praising God?

I mean this as a serious question, and actually an urgent one for those of us who believe the church has good news to share, but aren’t quite sure how to share it.

After all, no less a Christian hero than Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, which has brought countless gang members out of the nihilism of street justice into truly hopeful and hope-giving lives, asked in a recent talk in Indianapolis, why we don’t quit doing the things that kind of make God want to go to sleep: namely praise and prayer. Now he might have just been talking about bad liturgy, in which case I’m 100% on board. But he was saying more than that.

Don’t tell God things God already knows, he suggests. God knows God is almighty, that Jesus’s sacrifice was really important and amazing, that the Trinity is a great and majestic mystery. God doesn’t need this information from us. Does singing: “Come my way, my truth, my life,” actually have any influence on whether or how Jesus shows up in our worship, let alone our lives?

Focus on what God really cares about, he says, works of justice and mercy. That’ll keep Jesus alert.

He was tongue in cheek. of course, You don’t give your life away to those the world would just as soon throw away in the way Father Boyle has without a deep spiritual grounding in prayer and worship. He is addressing a balance of priorities in Christian communities and in the whole of the Christian life.

But even in his exaggeration it’s a challenge worth answering – because it’s one I’ve heard from people inside and outside the church alike. If we’re getting something out of being here this morning, we have a duty to give an account of the faith that is in us, so that we can share it with others who may need what we’re getting here too.

There are probably a lot of answers to this question, but there are two that particularly stand out to me right now.

First – we want a relationship with God, right? If we believe that God just dispassionately set the universe in motion and then sort of wandered off, maybe checking in occasionally to see if anything interesting is happening, none of this matters.

But if we actually desire a relationship we need to act like it. On my good days I am an adequate husband. Which means that I recognize that I didn’t just make my vows to Frank and then move on, assuming that he not only remembers exactly what I said that day at the altar nearly six years ago, but also just knows that from day to day my heart remains unchanged.

At a bare minimum, if he, say, hypothetically yesterday, throws a going-away party for a beloved parishioner who is about to move to New Jersey and for the three days prior to the event I was at a monastery and the day of the event I was working in the southern part of the state and arrived home literally five minutes before the party started, the least I can do when someone praises my hospitality is say, “To Frank be the glory.”

I will not presume to know whether Frank particularly appreciates the glory (perhaps he will tell me later), nor whether my declaration gives him any information previously unknown to him, but I do know that my act is part of the constant recalibration of the direction of my heart to maintain my vows against all the distractions the world offers.

And I should not overly dwell on marriage as a metaphor for the relationship with God. The church has done that for centuries with occasionally useful results, but just as often strange and unhelpful implications for gender roles. Our friendships, work relationships, and other family ties are worthy of this kind of attention. And so is God.

The second reason to praise God is to remind ourselves of who we are in that relationship. That includes our ultimate humility, that no matter what, however much we might exercise, or moisturize, or take groundbreaking medications, we will all one day go down to the dust. So we praise God for what we have while we have it. The relationship also includes our ultimate worth. The sisters at Holy Wisdom Monastery outside Madison, Wisconsin use a paraphrased version of the Magnificat, the Blessed Mother’s great hymn of praise, and, not coincidentally, justice and equity. In that paraphrase, the phrase “he has looked with favor on his lowly servant,” is restated: “the Holy Mighty One acclaims my worth.”

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the poor animals on that sheet in Peter’s vision – the four footed animals, the beasts of prey, the reptiles, the birds of the air.

To start, what’s the deal with the sheet?

When I was a kid, when we took our two cats to the vet, we only had one proper pet carrier. So one unlucky cat would go in that, and the other - even more unlucky - cat would be placed in a pillowcase closed up with a knot. That was about as fun to accomplish as you’d think it was.

Fortunately the vet was a short drive away, but let’s just say the cats had trust issues with bedlinens.

So I can’t help wondering about the demeanor of the animals on this sheet.

And as a former vegetarian who retains vegetarian sympathies, the “kill and eat” thing makes me a little uncomfortable

Neither of these are the point of the story, of course, at least not directly. The main point here is about how God’s grace leaps boundaries we set for ourselves, or maybe inaccurately perceive as being set for us by God. And we can either resist or play catch-up as the Holy Spirit races ahead of us.

And so it is appropriate that today, the psalm responds to the expansiveness of God’s grace in unified praise of God by the whole creation. The sun and the moon, men and women, young and old, mountains and hills, sea monsters (my favorite): they all praise God.

And oh, by the way, so do wild beasts and cattle, creeping things and winged birds, all those critters that were on Peter’s sheet.

“Kill and eat.”

You know those barbecue joints where the mascot is a smiling pig with a fork – sometimes even a butcher knife? This feels a bit like that.

It’s spring, which means right now you can walk around in any halfway wild place and hear the great cacophony of creation perpetuating itself, while in constant peril.

Frogs in ponds chirping morning and night. I used to think they were the sounds of invisible creatures that put me to sleep on summer camping trips, but that was just me being impatient – stand still long enough by a patch of reeds and you can tune your eyes to find swarms of male frogs climbing over one another, knocking each other off perches, until they find a female that will have them.

A nesting pair of bluebirds guarding a box, whose song you think is about nothing until you get a little closer, learn that song was a warning that you didn’t heed, and they dive-bomb you.

“But I have vegetarian sympathies!” you want to say, even as you want to point to the actual predators, the big birds of prey, making wide circles far above.

As if the bluebirds care about your vegetarian sympathies when you look like a threat to their eggs. As if those sympathies are any comfort to the cow who bites it on the occasion you want a steak.

And anyway, pity the grubworm the bluebird finds to feed its young.

Do the animals praise God with the intention the psalmist poetically declares?

Probably not, and yet while it is humans who are created in God’s image, all creation bears the imprint of its creator. God looked upon the animals and saw that they were good, and by their very being, they respond, “Yes, we are.”

The relentless chirping of frogs is a song of desperation and reproductive imperative, but it is also a chorus of the name of God, “I AM, and will continue to be.”

And what is the cry of a dive-bombing bluebird but “Get away from my nest, you jerk. I AM and will continue to be.”

So non-human animals -- instinctively, involuntarily -  songs of praise are just kind of what they do, never mind the odds of getting scooped up by a snapping turtle or felled by a hawk.

As for us humans, our ingenuity means that for the most part, we have overcome the Hobbesian Trinity of life as “nasty, brutish, and short,” that is, unless your name appears on our list of those killed by gun violence in this city, or you’re a child victim of yet one more school shooting because responsible adults refuse to take responsibility for our country’s children, or you’re a young mother who suffers the randomness of just going into a hospital with an infection and having a fatal allergic reaction to the antibiotic meant to heal you.

But for most of us, most of the time, things are pretty good. And in that context we can offer God praise for the beauty of the earth, the miracle of our pulse, the fullness of our breath, knowing that at any moment it might be taken away.

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On the Western edge of Istanbul stands an ancient church called Chora, just inside the city walls built by the emperor Constantine. The church is best known for its spectacular 14th century mosaics depicting stories from the life of Jesus and Mary, his mother. The mosaics are incredibly well preserved – due to the four hundred years that the church served as a mosque. Because of the Islamic prohibition of human figures in art, the mosaics were covered in layers of plaster until the church was reborn as a museum in the mid-twentieth century.

The most striking image is a large scale scene of the death of the Blessed Mother. Mary is lying on a bier draped in red and black cloth. At her head stands St. Peter, honoring her body with incense using a three-chained thurible not unlike our own. St. Paul bows at her feet, and the other disciples as well as the women who stood watch with her at the foot of the cross, surround her in awe.

At the center of the image, bathed in an almond-shaped aura of light is Jesus, having descended from heaven, standing next to Mary’s reclining body. He carries an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. This baby is also Mary, whose soul he receives in his arms as she breathes her last.

This image brings up thorny theological questions about whether Mary died a normal death, and waits to be raised at the last day, or received some sort of special treatment in the form of the doctrine of the Assumption, or its cousin, the Dormition.

But such theological arguments are beside the point.

The great mosaic at Chora Church is less a statement on the finer points of theology than a brilliant allegorical take on the descent of heaven to earth, God making a dwelling among humankind in the New Jerusalem, God’s ultimate desire in the Incarnation.

It is a portrait of Jesus Christ the beginning, the Alpha, the one through whom all things were made, including the infancy, childhood, and motherhood of Mary, that bore him into the world in flesh and blood.

And it is a portrait of Jesus Christ the end, the Omega, who at the end of Mary’s earthly pilgrimage receives her as she received him, in swaddling clothes. He removes the sword that pierced her soul, and wipes away all her tears.

We praise God because we have being. We praise God because we finite creatures desire a relationship with the infinite source of that being. We praise God for acclaiming our worth even in our smallness. And we praise God because in the Resurrection, swords are broken and death is destroyed, and that now and at the last, we are held in the arms of Jesus Christ, our beginning and our end.

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

Sermon delivered at the Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis, on the fifth Sunday of Easter (May 19, 2019). Readings: Acts 11:1-18; Ps. 148; Rev. 21:1-6; Jn. 13:31-35.

Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr

Very little is known of the life of Polycarp, the bishop of the early church whose ministry and martyrdom we celebrate today. He lived in Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Greece, and was martyred in or about 156. Like Paul, he wrote a letter to the Philippians, which is perhaps most notable for referring to or quoting multiple Christian texts that ultimately became part of the New Testament. So while Polycarp was not himself a biblical author, he can be regarded as a biblical architect.

We also know that one of Polycarp’s early admirers was St. Irenaeus, best known as the author of “Against Heresies.” Specifically, Irenaeus praises Polycarp for holding the line against the gnostic heresy. Gnosticism has been romanticized in recent years, perhaps most prominently in Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. Gnosticism asserts a complex system of heavenly realms and emanations, and further claims that the spiritual and material worlds are so fundamentally opposed to one another that the incarnation, the idea that Jesus is simultaneously fully divine and fully human, could not be right – that God could not stoop so low as to assume human flesh, let alone die on a cross. At most God might appear to do these things, as if in an elaborate game of pretend.

Now, we do not place our faith in elaborate games of pretend. Paul writes, “I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you but Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” In other words, at the very heart of our faith is our God who took our form, truly suffered, truly bled, and truly died. We have a God who is not fundamentally opposed to our material beings, but a God who so loved the world that he shared our suffering and our fate – and in his resurrection points to our ultimate end.

This is hopeful and amazing news for a despairing and cynical world. And a core vocation of the church is, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, to give “expression [to] the very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed to deeply that we no longer know that they are there.” But, he goes on, “hope is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.” Those facts being such claims as that your net worth and your self worth have something to do with one another, that hard work alone is what it takes not to be poor, that ill health is the just reward for bad choices. Christian hope challenges these facts as falsehoods. When we talk about evangelism in this church, what we mean is being a hopeful people amazed at the gift of God’s love, and being people who share that hope and amazement.

But part of the reason the church often fails its calling to give expression to hope and amazement is that it is distracted by its decline as an institution, and all the challenges, material and spiritual, that come along with that. Which brings us to why you are here today, financial leaders of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. The church must be able to deal with the financial realities of budgets, payroll, and accounting, without being imprisoned by them. Your role, financial leaders of the diocese, is to help the business operations of your local context run so smoothly that your congregation as a whole can be focused on the Gospel. Good administration of a congregation is not the one thing that will drive a church to proclaim good news, but without it, a congregation will necessarily focus inward as it struggles with chaos and crisis. Better that a congregation spend its time struggling with how the Gospel calls them to be a transformed people.

Today you will be hearing about practices that can help your congregational leaders make good decisions by understanding the resources they have at hand. You will learn about practices of transparency so that people who make sacrifices to give to the church know that their gifts are being used faithfully and to the glory of God. You will learn about how you can use online giving technology to allow newcomers to your church to be generous, even if these days they don’t carry cash.

For the rest of the day you will be immersed in business operations, accounting controls, and accounting software features. It may seem at times that we have wandered far from the Gospel. In those moments remember that even among Jesus’s disciples, one was charged with manning the common purse. (Now, that disciple was Judas, so today we are going to ask you to do better.) But the important thing to remember about money is that it can be transformed into anything. Money enables choices. These can be foolish or wise, sinful or holy. My hope for today at that what you learn will help you and your church to use the gifts you have been so generously given to bring the kingdom of God that much nearer to your congregation and your neighbors.

- Sermon delivered to Financial Leadership Workshop in the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis on the Feast of Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr, March 23, 2019. Readings: Ps. 121, 1 Cor. 2:1-5. Walter Brueggemann quotes from The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. 

Love in the Atlas of Space

Image credit: NASA

Sermon preached on the 26th Sunday after Pentecost (November 18, 2018) at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church, Indianapolis.

Readings: 1 Sam. 1:4-20; Ps. 16; Heb. 10:11-25; Mk. 13:1-8

[Audio]

Then Jesus asked, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another. All will be thrown down.”


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


Well good morning, St. Timothy’s! Some of you I know, but many of you I do not. My name is Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, and I serve on Bishop Jennifer’s staff as Canon to the Ordinary for Administration and Evangelism. I’m very thankful to have been invited by your pledge campaign committee to preach here on this, your first Consecration Sunday.


I have to tell you - there’s an unexpected bonus for me being here today. When I received the worship bulletin, I was thrilled to notice that you’re using Eucharistic Prayer C. You guys, this is my favorite, favorite Eucharistic prayer, like favorite enough that I insisted on it at my wedding, and I haven’t gotten around to filing my funeral plans yet but trust me, it’ll be in there too. And as much as I love my home church of All Saints, if I’ve got one gripe about it, it’s that we use this prayer on exactly one Sunday per year - the Sunday after the Ascension. So the fact that I’ll get to pray this prayer with you today is a special treat.


Now, I could give you all manner of complex theological reasons that I love this prayer - and they would all be true - but let’s get straight to the real reason - the phrase, “The vast expanse of interstellar space.” That phrase is why people who don’t like this prayer - and believe me, there are many - call it “the Star Wars prayer.” But for me, this prayer takes me right back to being a kid. After I went through my dinosaur phase and then through my train phase, I entered my astronomy phase, and that night sky loving geek who still lives inside of me perks up a little bit every time I hear these words.


Let me be clear about exactly what kind of astronomer I was. To earn the astronomy merit badge in Boy Scouts, you had to get up in the middle of the night and point a telescope at particular coordinates so you could see the rings of Saturn or whatever. And are you kidding me? That’s too much work.


No, my kind of astronomy was found in my elementary school library, in the National Geographic Atlas of Space, and in those years before the launch of the Hubble telescope, where images from observatories on earth left off, hand-drawn art picked up. In one segment of that book, there were dramatic images of the various kinds of stars, and among these was the red giant. True to its name, a huge, red starr filled the page, and the caption described it as a luminous, but relatively cool star, and about the way in about 5 billion years our own sun will explode into a red giant, causing it to expand into the earth’s orbit and this whole earth and everything about it we know and love will be burned into a lifeless ashen sphere.


That’s heavy stuff for a ten year old.


That’s heavy stuff for us.


I mean, I know that 5 billion years is a long time off, but still, not matter what we do, if the fate of our world is to be swallowed up in the last gasps of a dying star, what is it all for?


The whole thing was distressing news to a ten year old bookworm astronomer. But it wasn’t news to Jesus. “Do you see these great buildings?” he asks his disciples, about the temple, the very center of their faith. Don’t be too impressed. “Not one stone will be left on another; all will be cast down.”


So what’s it all for, we might ask in the face of far off astronomical eventualities.


So what’s it all for, the disciples might ask about the destruction of the Temple, where for centuries the people of Israel had encountered their God.


And what does our Lord say? “Do not be alarmed.”


And what does our Lord say? “Beware that no one leads you astray.”


[Pause]


“What are the only man-made things in heaven?” Goes a Christian riddle. It’s a question about what difference our efforts here on earth mean ultimately mean to God. And the answer is, “The scars on Jesus’s hands.”


Ok, sure, let’s own that. That’s on us. But in a few minutes we’re going to take a moment to confess all of the ways over the last week our failures have wounded God and each other.


Bet let no one lead you astray friends - that’s not the main reason we’re here - wallowing in sin is not what we’re about today. We will receive forgiveness and do yet greater things.


Let no one lead you astray friends: amid all that is passing away, the nails of the cross are not the only fruit we bear.


There’s a passage of scripture whose reading has become so closely associated with weddings that it’s hard for us to hear it any other way.  But let’s pause for a moment in vulnerable uncertainty, to hear of the other heavenly fruit of our hearts.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never dies. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. (1 Cor. 13:1-8)

Love never dies.


“Do you see these great buildings,” Jesus asks, looking at the Temple from the Mount of Olives. “Not one stone will be left here upon another. All will be cast down”


He was right friends. The Temple is long gone, but we are still here.


But it’s not the Temple that is gone, indeed, one day all things will go. But “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow has troubles enough. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” And for those troubles we have the immortal gift of the love of God to bring us through.


You, St. Timothy’s, are well trained in the ways of love.


Last week you celebrated the veterans among you, those who know that the day of passing away is coming, and yet were willing to speed for themselves for the sake of the love of their country, their loved ones, for millions they will never meet.


Yesterday, at Diocesan Convention, I heard your own Donna Adams speak about St. Timothy’s responds to new people desiring a relationship with Jesus, not by a tight-fisted holding on to the way things have always been, but by being a place willing to change so that St. Timothy’s can belong as much to newcomers as to people who have been here a long time, so that you can all discover Jesus together.


In a moment you’ll have another opportunity to act on that love, by renewing your commitment to God and each other through your financial gifts. Now money is not the same thing as love, exactly, but if you look at your bank statements, your credit card receipts, do you not see something about the affections of your hearts?


The commitment you make today is up to you and to God, but the church gives us some tools to think about it.


St. Augustine, the great early church father, writing on the shores of North Africa, describes the concept of rightly ordered love - that is, the idea that you can love more than one thing, but that there is a proper order to love of God, love of family, love of neighbor, and that all genuine love is the result of the primacy of divine love.


And there is the concept of proportional giving - which we know in the 10% tithe that scripture repeatedly identifies as the standard. And if you hear that number today and you’re like whoa, that’s a lot - focus on the concept….it’s not the amount, but the percentage of what has been given to you that you identify as what it means to place God first in your financial life.


The letting go to be generous isn’t easy, but how great its rewards are! A conscious, deliberate letting go of control of our resources, our money, our control, makes room in our hearts for the eternal thing, the thing that will not pass away, to come in and transform us.


Belove, amid so much that is uncertain we are so blessed. In the dust of the fallen temple, in the dust to which we shall return, there is a “new and living way that Christ opens to us, through the curtain” (Heb. 11:20) of the word made flesh, and that is the path of life, the way of love, that hopes all, things, believes all things, the great love, divine, and human, that belongs to all of us, the love that never dies and at the last will bring us to the “fullness of joy” (Ps. 16:11).