Michael Seiler

Tag: Love

  • Alignment

    Just the other day, I went shopping at IKEA, and in the self-serve area, I managed to grab a shopping cart that had one of those wheels that seemed to have a mind of its own. Every time I hit a little seam in the concrete, the cart would dramatically swerve off in the direction of the rut. It ended up being more of a workout than a shopping experience. 

    Now, I suppose that I could have kicked that wheel repeatedly until it fell off, since it was causing my cart to stumble, but in the end, I just kept pulling the cart back into alignment. It was more work, but I was able to keep the cart in one piece that way.

    In the Gospel passage today, we see that John has seen someone casting out a demon in the name of Jesus, and tried to stop him because he did not belong to their little band of disciples. But Jesus tells him that if the person is doing good in the name of Jesus, that he should not stop them, because, “If they are not against us, then they are for us.” In other words, “It doesn’t matter if they are a part of us. If they are not actively opposing us, then they are basically on our team.”

    If the four wheels on my shopping cart were all different people, then I would have said that the only one actively opposed to our mission was the one that kept flopping around, trying to get us to smash into a shelf of glass bowls. But, it’s true that any of the other four wheels could not have cared about where I was trying to go. They weren’t deliberately trying to yank us off course, and so I would never have known where their true allegiances lay, because as far as I was concerned, they were all in alignment.

    What’s interesting in this passage is that Jesus goes from talking about alignment to talking about sin. He goes from talking about the alignment of people to the greater mission of Jesus in this world, to talking about our own alignment with Jesus. If our hand, your foot, your eye, causes you to stumble – that is, to sin – then cut them off and throw them away, because it’s better for you to go about maimed in life, than to set yourself on a course of destruction. Or, to put it into my shopping cart analogy, it is better to pull off the wonky wheel of the shopping cart that is your life, and run around with three wheels than it is to smash your shopping cart into a shelf full of glass. 

    Now, in order to understand that our actions are causing us to stumble, we need a few things. Namely, we need to know what sin is. And to know what sin is, we need knowledge, which comes from reading scripture, and from spending time with others who might teach us. But more than knowledge, what we need is to acknowledge that what we are doing is causing damage to us or to others. That’s called self-awareness. And it might seem like that is an easy thing, but we only ever get self-awareness in two ways: from the Holy Spirit, or from others in community. We might know what sin is, but lack self-awareness that we are embracing it. Remember that saying about a sliver in someone else’s eye, while we ignore the log in our own eye? How are people going to know about the sliver in their eye, unless we tell them? And how are we going to know about the log that is resting in our own eye? Unless we also have the humility to allow others to tell us that, and unless we have the trust built up with others that we give them the permission to point these things out in our lives, then we are just a person with enormous knowledge of the bible, but without the ability to affect much change in our lives, or the lives of others, because we are effectively isolated from each other.

    Well, this is where Jesus’ admonition to acknowledge our sin and take action to change it comes squarely into play with the passage in James today. James was part of the early church in Jerusalem, and here we see how that early community was attempting to live with the reality that each of us can, at times, be a wonky wheel on the shopping cart of life. We cause others to veer off course, to cause themselves and the community damage, and we may not even realize what we are doing.

    “Are any among you suffering? They should pray.” 

    “Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise.”

    “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.”

    “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

    If you look at these things, you see that the consistent thread is prayer. And the second consistency is community. That is, James and his merry band of believers were attempting to break down the isolation that comes from sin and pride. You see, even when we are aware of the sins in our lives, and acknowledge that they are there, we often do not want to share that with people. And so we live in isolation, and we suffer silently and alone. We are ashamed, and we live with guilt, and yet, we still do not want to confess those things to others, out of fear of rejection.

    And it is here, in this space, this type of thinking that we can become that wonky wheel that throws the whole cart out of whack, that causes damage to ourselves and others, and causes us and the whole community to veer off course. Because we carry too much pride, and too much fear to allow others to care for our souls.

    The prayer, the confession, the sharing and singing for joy that James brings up in this passage are all intended to first and foremost bring the community of believers into alignment. They are intended, not to make sure that everyone conforms to a particular set of beliefs, but that we all at least come to the realization that we are moving toward a larger goal. These calls to prayer and confession in James are intended, at the very least, to get us to quit being actively against our own good, and against the greater good of the community of believers. They are intended to at least make sure that we are not against one another – and therefore, for one another: aligned. Aligned with a common goal, which is to point ourselves, and our community toward God. Because it is in God alone that we are truly aligned, and can find our rest and comfort.

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on September 29, 2024.]

  • That Your Joy May Be Complete

    In today’s Gospel, we see once again John’s emphasis on Love: loving our neighbors, loving one another, even to the point that we might lay down our lives for a friend. Jesus says that we are to do this, to love one another so that our joy may be complete! This commandment to love one another: its intention is to bring us joy! There’s several things in this passage that we need to understand, the first of which is that the commandment to love one another is just another way of saying “Love your neighbor.” And, if we remember the story of the Good Samaritan, we realize that our neighbor is everyone who is not us. 

    The second thing about this passage is the definition of the word “complete.” It brings with it the ideas of “maturity,” of “wholeness,” and of the “full realization of some form of potential.” In other words, it doesn’t just mean “finished,” but that something has accomplished the purpose for which God created it.

    So, what God is saying is that our Joy will attain the purpose that God has intended for us, if – and when – we love one another. It’s a very simple commandment, but it is not always easy to implement.

    In the sermon on the mount, Jesus had even told his disciples to “Love their enemies,” and to “Pray for those that persecute you.” Very simple commandments, but once again, not at all easy to implement. Love God, Love your neighbor, Love one another, Love even your enemies. Jesus would not have told us – his disciples – to love our enemies unless he knew that the command to love those who didn’t love us would bring us joy.

    So how do we do this? How do we love our neighbor, when this world increasingly accepts and justifies violence? You will find all sorts of rhetoric that is intended to make us afraid, because fear provokes anger. The rhetoric is intended to inflame our passions, to make us mad – mad enough to do something about it – preferably with sticks and stones, or even with guns and knives.  You see the rhetoric plastered across newspapers, television and, more often, in posts on various social media sites, sometimes going so far as to call for violence or even death to those that hold a different political viewpoint.

    Honestly, this sort of rhetoric is nothing new. We’ve been dealing with it in this world for as long as there has been written history. But as Christians, we need to be able to step back from this sort of rhetoric, and ask ourselves whether what we are being told is intended to make us afraid, and therefore angry, because we know that when we are afraid, and when we are angry, we are unable to love one another.

    Are we able to trust God enough to be able to consider the option that Love might be a better way?

    In your bulletin today, you’ll see a comic. For those that don’t have a bulletin, I’ll describe it right quick. Jesus tells his disciples he’s got to go, and that they should remember what he told them. The disciples reflect, and realize that it’s pretty much, Love God, and Love your Neighbor. Then one of them says, “Well, that seems pretty simple. I don’t see how we can mess th–” And he gets cut off by another disciple who says, “Uh-oh. Here come the theologians.”

    While we might be able to name theologians off the top of our heads, like Augustine, Luther, Cranmer, or Barth, what most of us don’t realize is that each of us engages in theology on a daily basis. We read the Bible, or hear portions of scripture read, and we interpret them through our own lenses – and that makes us theologians. We can either engage in theology that interprets the words of God and asks us to shape our lives to the simple commands to love God and love our neighbor. Or, we can look for loopholes. Good theology calls for us to transform our lives to conform to God’s will, and to Jesus’ teaching to love God and neighbor. Bad theology looks for loopholes, and seeks to justify our behavior, so that we do not need to change anything about ourselves. Bad theology looks for ways where we get to decide who our neighbors are, so that we don’t need to love our enemies, or pray for those who persecute us.

    Love one another, as I have loved you.

    A very, very simple commandment. It’s just not very easy to implement. Because, you know why? We all like to feel morally superior, we all like to win an argument, we all like to retaliate with power and control, rather than love and compassion. We hate the idea of having to apologize, because saying sorry means we have to acknowledge we were wrong. 

    We all love the idea of justice, and people getting what we think they deserve. But given our human nature, we would rather take justice into our own hands for a quick fix, rather than let the hand of God work through the love that God’s disciples share with the world. In case you’re wondering, that’s us – we are the hands of God in this world. 

    The concept of loving our neighbor is a simple one, but actually loving our neighbors is not always easy.

    Some of you may remember this. This story has stuck with me since the very first time I heard it:  In 2006, there was a shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. A man barged into an Amish schoolhouse and shot ten 10 young girls, killing 5 of them. Then he shot himself.

    These Amish people, only one day after having performed the funeral services for their own daughters, attended the funeral service of the man who had killed their children. They all hugged the widow, and then hugged the man’s children. Later on, they raised money to support this man’s family.

    And you can probably guess the reactions to this act of compassion: People were outraged! Many of them accused the Amish of not caring that their own kids died, since they had “Gotten over the tragedy too quickly.” Some people claimed that justice would be allowing the Amish to kill the children of the man that murdered their own – a sentiment that many people agreed to. They pushed violent retribution, rather than love.

    The Amish, however, responded that they were indeed still grieving for their own children, and that they recognized that the family of the shooter had lost a husband and a father, and that that family was grieving too. It was an incredible display of compassion in the midst of their own grief.

    When asked how they could possibly forgive someone who had killed their children and love the family of that same man, the Amish responded: “God has commanded us to love one another. That is what we are doing.” 

    When asked if it was difficult, the answer was, “Of course it is difficult. We grieve for our loss every day, but we have been commanded to forgive sins and to love one another. That is a choice we have to make every single day.”

    The psychologist Erich Fromm, in his book, “The Art of Loving,” said this:

    Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.

    In other words, Feelings come and go, so how can God command us to have feelings of love for our neighbor? The simple answer is that God doesn’t. God commands us to love, which is an active decision to behave a particular way, as evidenced by the Amish in response to the murder of their daughters. They clearly didn’t have feelings of love. Instead, they chose to express love through strength of will.

    The Amish held a belief that they could – and would – see something beautiful even if they loved their neighbor despite the murder of their children. They had internalized the good news that Jesus said we should love our neighbors so that our joy might be complete!

    The Gospel today says, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” We know that the way that Jesus loved us was through a sacrificial death on a cross. The Gospel then goes on to say, that “greater love has no one, than to lay down their life for a friend.” We often like to think of this laying down of our lives as a heroic act – an act of martyrdom when others are facing persecution – and that we would step in and take their place. We like it because of the finality of that decision, the understanding that it is “giving everything” for someone else.

    But more often than not, laying down one’s life for a friend means sacrificial forgiveness, the decision to love, and a willingness to walk away from the rhetoric that pulls our hearts toward hatred and judgment. It’s never an easy task to make the decision to try and understand people and see things from their viewpoint, which is the pathway toward forgiveness and love. It is easy, however, to pass judgment and to refuse to forgive. 

    A hard heart takes very little damage.

    William James, the psychologist, said, “Action seems to follow feeling, but really, actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

    Or, in other words, “Feelings come from action.” Or, “What we do, we come to feel.” If we choose to support rhetoric that calls for violence upon others, then we will be more likely to actually commit violence, because we will begin to feel hatred and live in judgment. If we choose to respond in forgiveness, love, and compassion, then we will be more likely to feel the emotion of love, because feelings follow actions.

    We need to only look to the Amish again to see this. We can see the results that their difficult decision of compassion in the face of evil had on their community.

    In an open letter to the Amish community that offered her comfort during the aftermath of the shooting, the wife of the shooter had this to say: “Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.”

    The letter continued, saying “Please know that our hearts have been broken by all that has happened. We are filled with sorrow for all of our Amish neighbors whom we have loved and continue to love. We know there are many hard days ahead for all the families who lost loved ones, and so we will continue to put our hope and trust in the God of all comfort, as we all seek to rebuild our lives.”1

    Now, all these years later, the family of the shooter, and the families of the victims have not only become friends, but have remained friends, and visit one another regularly, caring for the victims and sharing their faith in the God of Love.

    Through the active decision to engage in sacrificial love – to display compassion – this community was brought to the very maturity of joy that God has promised for those that love one another. 

    The command to love our neighbor is a simple one.

    It’s just not always easy to do.

    But if we choose the path of love, we can stand on God’s promise that our joy will be made complete.

    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20061021080225/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/16/wamish16.xml

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on May 5, 2024.]

  • Children of God

    Several years ago, there were protests in our country that were evidence of the racial tensions that are still prominent in our country. During that time, there was a video shared on Facebook, which you might have seen. The video shows two little boys who see each other from a distance, and start running toward each other, huge smiles on their faces, and their arms spread out in order to give each other a hug. They can’t be more than two years old. And when they finally get to each other, they fall down in a puddle of joy, laughing and giggling.

    It’s a heartwarming little video. It makes us smile, because their happiness at seeing each other is so infectious, so palpable that you can feel it pouring out of the screen while you’re watching it. 

    What I haven’t told you about the video yet, is that one of the boys is white, and the other is black. But, of course, when you’re watching the video, the only thing you think of is how happy they are. We see that they are the best of friends, they are closer than family. There’s just pure joy at seeing each other, and we begin to feel that same joy because it just pours out of them, through the screen, right into our very core. It’s a feeling we all love to feel, and long to feel, and intrinsically, we understand the purity of their joy and love for each other. It really is a beautiful little video.

    Some of you may have already learned this life-lesson, which is to NEVER READ THE COMMENT SECTION on Facebook posts if the post is from someone you don’t know. I, unfortunately, keep returning to the comment section like a vulture to a road-kill party.

    The most heartbreaking comment that I found under this little video was this:

    “Yeah, they’re happy now. But give them 10 to 15 years, and they will learn to fear and hate each other. That’s what this world will teach them. Our society is broken.”

    You might be wondering why I started out with something like this today. After all, our Gospel is about the disciples, afraid, hiding from the authorities that might come to arrest them because of their association with Jesus. But Jesus shows up, shows them his scars, eats with them, and opens up the scriptures for them, so that they might understand everything they need to know about the Messiah.

    Jesus has shared these things with them so that they understand that “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

    “To All Nations.”

    This phrase in the Bible has more meaning than just “other countries.” In fact, it routinely is used in both the Old and New Testament to mean, “people of different races and ethnicities.” In short, you are to preach the gospel to strangers, those you don’t understand, those whom you might fear, those unlike you in many ways.

    The disciples were given the task of proclaiming the Gospel to all the world, to all nations, to everyone, to strangers – no exceptions. And that is what the disciples in that room did, eventually. 

    And thanks to them, you and I stand here today, disciples of that same Jesus. And so, by extension, we are called to proclaim that very same Gospel to all people, of all nations, of all races and ethnicities, to strangers – no exceptions.

    Several years ago, while still in seminary – so actually, quite a lot of years ago – I went to a workshop that proclaimed that it would help you to live life to the fullest, to help you break through those things that were holding you back from being your best you. You know the type, I’m sure you’ve all seen one of these workshops advertised before. Because it had been recommended to me, and out of curiosity, I went.

    At one point, those leading the workshop had the entire crowd do a thought exercise, in which we were told to envision ourselves walking down an empty street, as the day is coming to an end, and the light is beginning to dim. On that street, we see a stranger approaching us, and then we are guided through several questions, like “What are they wearing?” “Where are they looking?” “Where do you think they are going?” “Why do you think they are out this time of night?” You know, all the questions that you would ask yourself if you were walking down a street and came across a stranger. What we discovered is that everyone’s mind came to the conclusion that the other person could not be trusted, and that we had to protect ourselves from the possible evil they might wish to do to us. In short, everyone realized that the image we had created in our minds expressed our deepest fears. 

    And then the instructors asked us to put ourselves into the shoes of the other person. To imagine seeing ourselves through their eyes, and what they might be thinking. It took a while, but slowly people started having an aha moment, because we realized that the stranger was asking the same exact questions, and coming to the same conclusion about us: that we are people who might do evil, and we are people who could not be trusted. To them, we were the construct of their fear.

    We fear what we do not understand. We fear what we do not seek to understand. We fear what we refuse to understand. And we will never be able to love what we fear.

    The question the instructors asked afterward was this: “What would it change if you approached each stranger on the street by trying to understand them and view their life through their eyes and experience, rather than a person to be mistrusted and feared? What would your life look like then? How might your life be shaped for the better?” 

    The lesson learned was straightforward: we need to be able to separate fact from fiction, because most of our fear is learned behavior. Learned through our families, our friends, our neighborhoods, our communities, our cultures.

    That understanding of learned behavior can easily be summed up in the phrase, “Like Father, Like Son,” “Like Mother, Like Daughter,” or “Like parent, like child.”

    Our New Testament reading today begins with the words, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” Through our baptism, we have been made a part of a heavenly family: we have been adopted into the family of God. And, as Children of God, we have now inherited all the benefits that are due to those who look to God as a parent, and Christ as a brother. We are no longer just Americans, or Chinese, Brazilian or Latvian, German or Canadian. We are first, and foremost, citizens of the New Jerusalem, citizens of heaven, the Holy City of God. We are children of a family that transcends time and space, race and ethnicity, boundaries and borders.

    The ideal, of course, is that the phrase, “Like parent, like child” would apply to each of us. That we would look to the example of Christ, and become like our brother, who is one with the Father. That in all of our actions, the humility, the grace, the passion, and, of course, the Love of Jesus would be evident in each of us.

    That is the ideal. 

    That is what we hope for. 

    Mahatma Gandhi, whom I’m sure you’ve all heard about, led a successful campaign for India’s independence from England, by employing non-violent protests as a form of resistance to British rule. He was born into a Hindu family, but at some point found himself reading the Gospels, and he wanted to know more about Jesus, whom he found intriguing. So, one Sunday morning he set out to go to a Christian Church in Calcutta, but was turned away at the door, because, he was told, the church was only open to Whites and Indians born into the High Castes. Since he was of a lower caste, he could not enter, and was sent away. He never pursued Christianity again, and told people that “If it weren’t for Christians, I would be a Christian.”

    “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

    The Church in Calcutta lost an opportunity to share the Good News of Love with a man that later went on to gain freedom for not only his own people, but inspired work among people throughout the world in similar situations. Think of the amazing witness that was lost through Gandhi’s work in the world, only because that church’s learned behaviors caused them to express their fear and pride at allowing a commoner to enter into their community and worship the God of Love with them.

    If Jesus gave his dsiciples the commandment to preach the Good News of repentance and forgiveness to all nations, then by extension, that includes us. So the next question is “How do we do that?” Not all of us are preachers, or writers, or have the opportunity to express our beliefs to people through some form of mass media. 

    St. Francis of Assissi is known for this saying: “Preach the gospel at all times. … And when necessary, use words.”

    When necessary. Use words.

    What St. Francis knew, is that the language of Love is the loudest form of communication that the world has ever seen. From the beginning of written history, we have stories of greed, selfishness, war, hate, anger all growing out of the fear of the unknown. The need to keep ourselves safe, to acquire more, to put ourselves and our own above everyone else has been written into our cultural DNA. To fear the outsider, to be selfish, and to look out for one’s own interests – those things are culturally accepted behaviors. And fear plays itself out in the form of anger and hate.

    But Love, and peace, and understanding – those behaviors are countercultural. Which is why we enjoy videos like the two best friends running toward each other that I mentioned earlier. Those videos remind us of the humanity that we long for, yet overlook for the sake of securing for ourselves those things which make us feel less afraid, make us feel more in control, and feel like we have some power. 

    When we behave like the world expects us to behave, no one ever asks us: What makes you so different? And, How can I find what you have found?

    People ask that question when they see us behaving in a way that expresses the what John was declaring in the New Testament passage:

    “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.”

    What makes us different?

    What makes us different from the culture around us?

    When we find the answer to that question, when the answer to that question takes root in our hearts and minds, that is when we begin to live into the commandment Jesus gave us to share the good news of repentance and forgiveness to all nations.

    And that is when we begin to preach the Gospel without words.

    When we find the answer to that question, that is when we might see a fearful stranger on a dark road not as someone to be feared and hated, but as a potential Child of God, to whom we can run toward with open arms, and fall into a puddle of joy, laughing and giggling.

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on April 14, 2024.]

  • What Are You Looking For?

    Several months ago, I had reason to go looking for my Passport. So I went to the place where I keep it and other important documents and important items. And it wasn’t there! So then I went to the back-up location, expecting to find my passport there. But it wasn’t in that spot either! And I started to get a little worried. So then I went down the line of all the places where I keep things, and as I checked each one of them, and as the passport didn’t show up, I got more and more worried. I started thinking about all the work that I would have to do to renew my passport, and the possible issues I might have to deal with if I really did lose it. I tore up my place looking for it, and spent time trying to remember where I last saw it, the sense of dread picking up as time went on.

    If I had this amount of worry and dread come up for something like a passport, imagine the amount of fear and dread that the disciples would be facing when they realized that Jesus’ body was missing.

    Imagine the questions that must have come through their minds at first with the most obvious one being: Did we come to the right tomb? 

    First they question themselves, and then, in anger, they question others. Mary, no stranger to conspiracy theories, blames the nebulous “they” when asked what she is looking for by the angels at the tomb: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Then she turns around and sees the gardener, and he asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” And she accuses him of stealing the body: “Sir, if you have taken him away, please tell me where so I can take him away.”

    And Jesus has to say, “Mary! Come on, now. It’s me!”

    Isn’t that just typical? When we are in the midst of our grief, when we are in the midst of our own thoughts and priorities, when we are engrossed in our own issues, we tend not to see God, even if God is standing right in front of us.

    Up until she recognized Jesus, all that was on Mary’s mind was what she had lost. And not just her, but what all the disciples had lost.

    Mary, and all the disciples had lost a friend. They had lost someone close to them, someone they could confide in, they could trust. Someone with whom they had spent time eating, playing, laughing, and joking. But now he was gone. And their minds were focused on that loss. 

    Mary and the other disciples had lost a courageous leader. Jesus had fearlessly confronted the representatives of the people, spoken truth against their lies, called out their attempts at oppressing the people. He made sure that they knew that he stood against their misuse of the scripture to manipulate the people and control them – all for their own personal gain and amassing of wealth and power. The disciples’ minds were not only filled with the loss of that leadership, but their minds were filled with fear at what their association with Jesus might mean now that he was no longer there to confront the leaders of the people.

    Mary and the other disciples had lost a miracle worker. They had watched as Jesus had done the unimaginable. He had raised Lazarus from the dead, he had fed 5000 people with just five loaves of bread and two fish, he had turned water into wine at a wedding, healed a man blind from birth, and had walked on water. They had seen Jesus doing the unimaginable, and now they could not imagine a future without him.

    Mary and the other disciples had lost hope, because they expected Jesus to be the Messiah, the mighty one who would free them from the hands of the oppressive Roman regime, and return them to a country that governed itself. They had expected him to be the messiah, the one who would conquer the world with his mighty hand. And instead, he suffered ridicule, torture, and death on a cross. And their minds were filled with that type of despair that comes only when you lose the hope you have clung to for so long.

    All of this is on Mary’s mind when she stands there at an empty tomb. She’s suffered incredible loss. And now this. Jesus’ body is gone.

    It’s no wonder then, that she looked at the gardener and asked him where he took the body. “Tell me where you moved him.” It’s no wonder she looked at the gardener, and didn’t realize who he really was: Jesus. Risen from the dead.

    To go from this sense of loss to the realization that Jesus was alive would have been an incredible shock. And would have required an enormous amount of change in understanding – who was this Jesus really? How could he be alive? What does it mean that he is not still dead? How can this happen? What does all this – his life, his crucifixion, his death – mean to me now?

    The church year is structured for exactly this. So that we might come to know Jesus, and realize what was lost. From his birth as a bouncing human baby boy, to the death on the cross, and the resurrection, we become intimately aware of who Jesus is: human like us, baptized in the river, where a voice from heaven announces his true identity as the son of God, tempted in every way like us in the desert, transfigured on the mountaintop to display his true identity, working miracles among people who were more interested in the results of those miracles than in understanding who he was, betrayed by a close friend, arrested and tried for blasphemy, tortured and nailed to a cross, and finally, dying in agony, carrying the sin of the world upon his shoulders.

    The church year is structured for exactly this. So that we might come to know Jesus, and understand what was lost. And this is why people were often baptized on easter. And also why we renew our baptismal vows on Easter. Because Easter is the day where we realize just what Jesus’ death on the cross meant, and, even more importantly, what his rising to life again means for not just us, but all people, the whole world over. If Jesus’ death on the cross conquered sin and opened up the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary of God’s presence for us, then the resurrection of Christ conquered death and opened up for us an abundant life, a life of courage in the midst of a world that perpetuates cycles of death, rather than cycles of life.

    The church year is structured for exactly this. So that we might come to know Jesus, and feel that sense of loss that the disciples felt. But more importantly, that we might feel the joy that Mary felt when we see the risen Christ standing in front of us, calling our names, and saying, “Come on, now. Don’t you recognize me? It’s Jesus!”

    In many ways, that question of recognition is more than what it seems. It is not just reciting the facts, or making declarations; it is internalizing the truth of who and what Christ is. It is, in fact, the same question that Jesus asked his disciples just before he was transfigured into glory on the mountain: “Who do you say that I am?”

    If the first half of the church year is structured so that we might come to know the person of Jesus, and realize what was lost when he died on that cross, then the rest of the church year is structured around our response to the question: “Who do we say that Jesus is?” so that we might come to truly understand and internalize what it was that Christ has accomplished for us.

    It might have taken the disciples some time to work through their grief of losing a friend, a teacher, a mentor, and leader, but when they finally put all the pieces together they were able to proclaim loudly from every corner of Jerusalem that Jesus was the messiah, the son of the living God, the one who conquered sin through his death on the cross and who conquered death through his rising again.

    They were transformed, given new life, changed from scared and frightened people into bold proclaimers of truth.

    Where they had previously watched Jesus confronting the powers of the world, speaking truth to evil, calling out injustice, and standing up for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, they now looked to Jesus as an example, and continued the work themselves. From denying Jesus three times, to being the rock on which Jesus built his church, Peter was reborn as a new person. From doubting that Jesus had even been resurrected, to evangelizing an entire continent, Thomas was reborn as a new person. From abandoning Christ when the authorities came to arrest him in the garden, to standing before those same leaders, unafraid and with an authority that came from a higher power, these disciples were transformed, they were reborn as new people. People who carried themselves with the confidence that the Almighty stood behind them.

    Where the disciples had previously watched as Jesus had done the unimaginable, they now began to realize that God was working miracles in their midst. Instead of looking for the miracles as a show of mighty power to prove Jesus’ earthly ministry, the disciples now saw these miracles take place because they were showing the power of God’s eternal ministry.

    Where once they thought that their Messiah had died, they now realized that God’s view of salvation was greater than merely Israel, and included the entire world. “For God so Loved the World.” They went from people who had hope that they might be saved, to people who had a hope and a vision that all the world might see – and feel – the presence of a loving God.

    They went from meek and mild, to bold and brave.

    They were reborn, made new, birthed into a fullness of their calling as disciples of Jesus, because they suddenly realized that death in this life is merely a speed-bump on the road to glory. 

    If they need not fear death, then what on earth would they ever need to fear?

    We are not passive listeners of old stories, we too are disciples of Jesus. A Jesus who is alive, and whose power working in us, can do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. A Jesus who looks at us and asks, “Come on, now. Don’t you recognize me?” 

    How much excitement our lives hold depends on how we answer that question.

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on March 31, 2024.]

  • While We Were Still Sinners

    If Lent is the time of year when we try to put ourselves into Jesus’ shoes, in an attempt to understand his suffering, then Holy Week – the week of the Passion – is that week when we realize just how much Jesus suffered – and that no amount of giving up chocolate will ever help us realize the extent of Jesus’ sacrifice.

    But Holy Week is more than just an attempt at understanding Jesus’ suffering.

    Holy Week is the week during which we realize that we are not only the recipients of all the benefits of Christ’s death on the cross, but we are also the accusers, the bystanders who did nothing, the soldiers who revelled in the violence, and the crowd that yelled “Crucify him!”

    It’s easy for us to look past our own sinfulness and blame those who were there at the time calling for his death, and to see ourselves as innocent.

    It’s easy for us to look past our own sinfulness and focus on the resurrection and see only the benefits that Jesus’ death on the cross brings to us.

    It’s easy to look past our own sinfulness and see this week of Jesus’ passion as merely an intellectual exercise in theology and the cycles of the church year.

    It is much less easy for us to admit that the reason Jesus was on the cross in the first place was because we are the ones who yell, “Crucify him!”

    The reason for Holy Week is for us to learn to grapple with the fact that Christ died for me – a sinner – and that each time I seek my own will instead of the will of God, each time I distort my relationship with God, other people, and all creation,1 that I am the one who yells, “Crucify Him!”

    Or worse, I am the soldier who condemns him, who beats him, who holds him down and drives the nail into his hands and into his feet.

    Palm Sunday especially helps us to understand the wild fluctuations of our human nature. One moment we are joyous and proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah, celebrating him as a king, waving palms and laying them down in his path – and the next we are the angry crowd, the betrayers, the accusers, yelling, “Crucify Him!” 

    We see the beauty in what Christ has done, and can do, but we also recognize that what Christ wants of us is not entirely what we want to do. We see the joy of our salvation in the person of Jesus, but we don’t want to hand over the reins to our life just yet, Or maybe not entirely. We see the good that a life of discipleship brings, but still grasp firmly to our own desires, dipping our toes in the river without ever jumping in completely and letting the flow of God’s love take us where we ought to be.

    It is when we come to this understanding of the depth of our ability as humans to focus on our own desires over and against the will of God that we realize just how powerful Jesus’ death on the cross really is. It is when we recognize the depth of our sin and understand just how much our sin can keep us from the loving arms of God that we begin to feel the truth of the meaning of this death on the cross:

    God loves me because while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me.

    The centurion in today’s gospel reading, a soldier who commanded his men to crucify Jesus, who stood by and watched as what was supposed to be just another convicted criminal being put to death for their crimes, this centurion had a moment of true understanding when he saw all that was going on around him, realized that he had a part in it all, and looked up at the broken body of Jesus and said: 

    “Truly, this man was the Son of God!”

    How much our savior loves us. That while we are still sinners, he dies for us.

    1. Book of Common Prayer, Catechism: Sin and Redemption, p. 848
    2. “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8, NRSV

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on March 24, 2024.]

  • For God So Loved

    Lent is the time of the year when we contemplate Jesus’ suffering, where we contemplate our own sin, and where we take on a personal sacrifice in an effort to identify a bit more with Jesus, and what his death on the cross means to us.

    Given all that, we should probably be quite miserable, right?

    Maybe not. 

    You may see the Rose colored stole this morning. Rather than wearing the typical Lenten purple, this Sunday, called “Laetare” Sunday, we wear a Rose colored stole. This Sunday is supposed to give us a moment when we can step back a bit from our Lenten disciplines and live in the joy of our salvation. The Latin word “Laetare” means “Rejoice!” 

    The Gospel this morning gives us the reason for our rejoicing. Today we read the much quoted line in scripture that says, “God so loved the world that he sent his only son that people might not perish, but have everlasting life.” 

    But there is more to the Gospel than just this verse. You see, just before this, Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a ruler of the people, had come to speak with Jesus at night to avoid detection by his cohorts. He was truly interested in hearing what Jesus had to say. And Jesus tells him that the only way to heaven is to be born again, to be born of water and spirit. And each time Nicodemus says, “What? How is this possible?” He doesn’t understand. And then Jesus begins with the passage about how the Son of Man must be lifted up, and all who believe in him will be saved in reference to the passage about how the Israelites complained about God’s provision, and then had to contend with poisonous snakes. Just like people looked to the serpent on Moses’ rod, people must look to Jesus to be saved. Then comes John 3:16. God came to save the world, and if you believe, you will have everlasting life. 

    A good reason to rejoice, right?

    A very good reason to rejoice. 

    Unfortunately for us, several of the following verses have proven to be problematic. You see, in verse 18, the Gospel tells us that those who do not believe are condemned already. That is, if they do not believe, then God has already condemned them. And what that has meant for some people in history, is that if you are not a believer, and if God has condemned you, then do I not have the authority to condemn you as well? If you don’t share my faith, are you not expendable? Are you not inferior? Some of these attitudes were even enshrined in law, justifying the destruction of entire groups of people, simply because they did not believe the same as those who follow the Christian faith.

    And even though we don’t necessarily have the full legal justifications in place for this kind of systematic destruction of peoples, what we find is that this attitude is still ingrained in our  religious culture. By this I mean that rather than justifying the destruction of entire people we deem “unbelievers,” we still look for ways to determine what constitutes a “true believer.” We look for ways to determine who is a real Christian, as opposed to those who are just “playing at religion,” or “worshiping false gods.” Rather than looking at the direction of a person’s heart toward God, rather than seeing how closely their lives emulate God’s love – a sacrificial love that would die on the cross for us – we instead look at how they do things differently than we do.

    And we begin to draw lines in the sand, and build walls to keep people out, because, as we have decided, they do not meet the definition of a “true believer,” and therefore, I should be able to condemn them, just as God apparently has, and treat them despicably.

    “These people don’t look like me,” we say, and we draw a line in the sand, and we build a wall, and then we decide, my religion is safe from those who don’t belong.

    And then Jesus comes along and wipes away the line, and tears down the wall.

    For God so loved the world.

    “These people don’t think like me,” we say, and we draw a line in the sand, and we build a wall, and then we conclude, my religion is safe from these people who lack critical thinking skills and don’t have the proper education.

    And then Jesus comes along and wipes away the line, and tears down the wall.

    For God so loved the world.

    “These people don’t love like I do,” we say, and then we draw a line in the sand, and we build a wall, and we enact laws to make loving another more difficult or even impossible, and then we decide that we have saved the world’s children from these godless heretics.

    And then Jesus comes along and wipes away the line, and tears down the wall.

    For God so loved the world.

    “These people don’t pray like I do,” we say, and then we draw a line in the sand, and we build a wall, and we tell those in our camp to stay away from those idol worshiping, hocus-pocus loving people that say their prayers from a book, and traffic in useless tradition. And then we decide that we have saved the world from their ancient religion and sorcerer’s ways.

    And then Jesus comes along and wipes away the line, and tears down the wall.

    For God so loved the world.

    “These people don’t vote like I do,” we say, and then we draw a line in the sand, and we proof-text scriptures to show how those others are living a lie, and when they don’t come over to our camp, we begin not just to ridicule them or regale them with our impeccable logic for why we are right, but we begin to use physical violence to “convince” them that they need to change.

    And then Jesus comes along and wipes away the line, and tears down the wall.

    For God so loved the world.

    And finally, we get so mad, we turn to Jesus and we say, “Okay. Stop it Jesus! Why are you erasing these lines? How am I supposed to know the true believers from the pretenders?”

    And Jesus just comes up behind us, puts his hands on our shoulders, and turns us around… …so that we can see someone behind us, drawing a line in the sand, and building a wall, in order to keep us out. To them, we are the deplorable ones. To them, we are the pretenders, we are the fake Christians, we are those who do not believe the right way and are therefore worthy of God’s condemnation.

    And then Jesus comes along and wipes away their line, and tears down their wall… and turns to us and smiles.

    For God so loved the world.

    How can we not rejoice when we see the world – and ourselves – through the eyes of God? That the Family of God is far larger than we ever imagined? That the person across from us is just as loved by God as the person in the mirror? 

    St. Augustine says it this way: “God loves each one of us, as if there were only one of us to Love.”

    And if we have been loved in this manner, should we not rejoice and pass on that same love? Rather than focusing on differences, rather than fostering divisions, shouldn’t we focus on our similarities, on those areas where we might live and work in harmony?

    Our Gospel passage continues today, and gives us an insight into how we might accomplish this. John says that those who hate the light do not come to the light, because the light would expose their deeds. How would it expose them? It would expose their deeds as superficial, skin deep, lacking in love. Those who do come to the light have their deeds clearly seen, and their deeds will be seen to be done in God.

    What does all this mean?

    The word “believe” in John does not simply mean agreeing to a set of principles, but a word that implies trust, and a word that implies action based on trust. Action. Based in trust.

    If you were a financial advisor, and I had a million dollars to invest, I might believe you when you tell me that you have the necessary skills to invest and manage that money. But trusting you with my own personal million dollars is another thing entirely; giving you that million to steward for me might be a bit more frightening, and if I don’t trust you enough, then I may not follow through on action – even though I believe that you are capable. 

    Just not capable enough for my money.

    For John, those who believe in God are also those who trust God enough to live by the commandments that Jesus handed down. And those are simple: Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself. 

    Ten chapters later here in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35)

    We are commanded to love one another, and our neighbor as ourselves.

    Even if, or perhaps, especially if, those neighbors live on the other side of a line we have created ourselves. Rather than looking at our differences, we need to look for where others are loving their neighbors, and join them in that work, regardless of whether they look like me, think like me, love like me, pray like me, or vote like me.

    If we can trust God enough to bless the actions within the family of God and allow ourselves to rejoice in our mutual faith, then imagine the rejoicing that will happen when we come to understand ourselves as neighbors even to those who don’t even believe like we do. 

    For God so loved the world.

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on March 10, 2024.]

  • Get Behind Me

    Several years ago, the editor in chief of Christianity Today recounted several conversations that he had had with pastors in his denomination. The pastors told him that when they preached from the Sermon on the Mount – you know, things like “Blessed are the meek,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” or especially, “Turn the other cheek.” When they preached from the Sermon on the Mount, people would come up to them afterwards and say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” But when the pastors would say, “I was literally just quoting the words of Jesus,” the people would not say, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize that.” Instead, they would say something to the effect of, “Okay, but that won’t work anymore. That’s weak.”1

    This is essentially what Peter did with Jesus in today’s Gospel. Peter, and most other people of his time hated the Roman oppressors in their land, and they were expecting a messiah that would come in with a mighty fist and power unseen before, and wipe out the enemies of Israel.

    But then Jesus starts talking about how the Son of Man must suffer and die for the sake of all humanity, and Peter begins to rebuke him, essentially saying, “That’s not going to work, Jesus. That’s weak.”

    And we see how well that worked out for Peter.

    “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

    Get behind me Satan! When we hear that we may immediately think that what Jesus is saying is, “Get outta here!” “Scram!” or “Buzz off!” But that’s not what Jesus is saying to Peter at all. He is reminding Peter to align himself in the proper order, to literally get behind Jesus. You see, Peter had an agenda, and he wanted to make sure that Jesus did what Peter wanted. In other words, he wanted Jesus to stand behind him, to follow him, and not the other way around. 

    Last week we heard about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. And in Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus is tempted by the devil, he says, “Away with you Satan!” He doesn’t tell the devil to get behind him like he tells Peter, he simply tells Satan to go, to leave him. And Satan leaves him.

    There’s an interesting lesson that we can learn from these two interactions between Jesus and Satan, and Jesus and Peter.

    When Jesus rebukes Satan and commands him to leave, Satan leaves. He does as Christ says. Christ is superior to Satan and his minions, and they obey him, even though they don’t want to. I won’t unpack that any more, as I imagine you realize the implications of that for your own life.

    Secondly, when Jesus rebukes Peter, he is making us aware that we can do the work of evil in this world, simply by trying to push through our own agendas. That is, we know what God’s agenda is for humanity, and when we impose our own wills over and against the will of God, we can be seen as acting for – or at the very least – allowing evil to manifest in the world.

    If we look in the Book of Common Prayer, in the Catechism, we are told that “the mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” And, that the Church pursues its mission as it “promotes justice, peace, and love.” And finally, that the ministers of the church, which include everyone, not just those curious ordained folk, but everyone, is to “carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.”

    Reconciliation. That is a word we often hear only in Lent, when we are reminded that the Episcopal Church does in fact have the Rite of Reconciliation, which most people know of as Confession.

    This work of reconciliation is what happens when Jesus turns to Peter and says, “Get behind me Satan!” He convicts Peter of Peter’s wrong motivations, but then offers him the reconciling gesture that Peter might subordinate himself to Christ, and get behind him, or follow him. Or, to put it more bluntly: You have made an error Peter, but you are still my disciple. Get behind me, and follow me, and follow my teachings.

    Reconciliation, however, encompasses more than just a personal forgiveness of sins and a reconciliation of ourselves to God. The work of Reconciliation that the church is called to, and we ourselves are called to, is to reconcile not just the world to God, but to reconcile ourselves to each other; to promote peace; to promote love; and to promote justice.

    When we fail to do those things, when we allow our own agendas to take over our thoughts, our minds, and our actions; when we allow our own agendas to supersede the work of Christ in this world; when we allow our own agendas to creep up and push out the reconciling work of the Church; when our own agenda causes us apathy and indifference to war, to bigotry and to injustice simply because it doesn’t affect us personally – that is when we find ourselves allowing the work of evil in this world. Or worse, by simply aligning ourselves with those who promote war, bigotry and injustice, even if we don’t say or do anything ourselves, we may find ourselves actively working for those terrible evils in this world. And then, we might just hear Jesus saying the same words to us as he did to Peter: “Get behind me Satan!”

    The Good News is that it never just ends there. Just like Peter did, we too can get behind Jesus. We can accept the offer of reconciliation from Christ, and align ourselves with God’s mission in this world, and follow the teachings of Christ even when we find them more difficult than doing our own thing. 

    And that is when things will really get exciting.

    We know from our reading of Scripture that Peter did a few more things that were rather impulsive, and contrary to Jesus’ work – things like cutting off a man’s ear, or denying that he even knew Jesus – but in the end, Peter was known as one of the leaders of the Church. 

    This was what Jesus was talking about after having corrected Peter. He tells all his disciples that if they want to be his disciples, they must take up their crosses and follow Him. We must deny ourselves, and lose our lives. Not literally, mind you. Specifically, we must lose those things that work against God’s mission in this world; a mission that we are all called to; a mission of striving for peace, of striving for justice, of sharing God’s love, so that together we continue Christ’s work of reconciling the world to God.

    Our agendas need to be placed on the cross and sacrificed for the greater good of God’s redeeming work in this world. When we lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel, that is when we find it, Jesus says. What will it profit us if we follow our own agendas and “gain the whole world,” as he says; that is, what good is it if we are powerful enough to run the world, but forfeit our lives by thinking of the things of man, rather than the things of heaven?

    One of the best known saints in our canon was a wealthy young playboy who stood to inherit his father’s immense wealth. He spent his youth living an irresponsible life, caring only for his own desires. At the time, joining the military was considered “glamorous,” and so he joined up. But after spending a year as a prisoner of war, he had a profound change of heart, a conversion. He renounced his former life of extravagance after seeing how the poor in his city lived, and then dedicated his life to helping the sick, the homeless, and to rebuilding churches in and around his hometown.

    Here was a young man who had, by all accounts, all the trappings of this world, from riches, power, prestige, and the freedom to search for pleasure and meaning by whatever means he fancied. But instead of continuing to live for himself, he surrendered everything, took a vow of poverty, and dedicated himself to the work of God. 

    Some might say he lost his life for the sake of the Gospel. He willingly surrendered his position of power and wealth for poverty and weakness.

    Some of you may have already realized that I am talking about St. Francis of Assisi. And you may know that through his work he founded a religious order that has changed the world with its focus on serving the poor and the marginalized.

    Imagine if he had never surrendered those things to God, and instead had sought to preserve his lifestyle at all costs? He would have remained just a blip in the history of Assisi, another playboy going about the business of pursuing his own pleasure, constantly trying to find out who he was meant to be, but never finding out God’s true purpose for his life.

    For St. Francis, Jesus telling him to “Get behind me” meant that he had to give up his wealth and power. But for each of us, the idea of “Get behind me” means something entirely different, and it is something that only we can know for ourselves. It does not have to mean giving up wealth, or prestige, as it did for Francis. It can mean something entirely different to you than it did to Francis, or your neighbor in the pew next to you.But I can tell you, that when we hand over those things that we still want to control for ourselves, when we hand over the reins to God and make God’s agenda our own agenda, that is when we begin to flourish and thrive, when we begin to grow into the joy of God’s ultimate plan for our lives. We may not become saints like Peter and Francis, but we will be living in joy and purpose when God says, “Get behind me,” and we say, “Sure thing, Lord.”

    1. The New Republic, August 10, 2023

    [This sermon was delivered at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Wickenburg, AZ on February 25, 2024.]

  • Two Lies and a Truth

    Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

    John 7:53-8:11

    Benjamin Disraeli, the former prime minister of England, once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

    If statistics tell us anything, it is that almost everyone lies. And almost everyone tells damned lies. This particular passage of scripture presents us with numerous examples of the various forms of lies, from fabrications, to lies of omission, to lies of broken promises. Any time you speak of betrayal, you are really speaking about the existence of a lie. And what is a lie, but a seed of deception born in a heart of desperation and the desire to claim a worthiness that comes from external affirmation, rather than the knowledge that we are all made in the image of God.

    If we look to the book of Susanna, we can find a story of deception, of lies and betrayal, all built on the desires of two lecherous old men. They tried to force a young woman into sleeping with them by threatening to stain her character – by claiming she slept with another, younger man other than her husband. Susanna considered their threat, and knew that it would mean her death to sleep with these old men, as well as death to be accused of it. But nevertheless, she chose to fall into their trap, rather than sin in the sight of the Lord.1 So, the old men followed through on their threat, and, because they were elders in the community, their lie was viewed as the truth. Susanna was brought to trial for her alleged infidelity, but she appealed to God2, and God, through a young man named Daniel, ripped off the veil of their lies and brought these two old men to their own shame. All because they wanted to control and manipulate another person for their own pleasure, using their position of respect within the community to do so.

    These men didn’t realize that if you are going to fabricate a lie, you need to tell twenty more to maintain that lie. Eventually, the truth will out you.

    Susanna. A woman, accused of infidelity, but saved by God’s truth.

    The reading above, tells an almost opposite story. One of a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. Here we have the lie of a broken promise – the promise of fidelity – coupled with lies of omission and lies of fabrication, most likely, to maintain the secrecy of this activity over time. Think of the broken trust between her and her husband, and the broken trust between her and her children, brothers, sisters, family members. With that level of deceit it might stand to reason that her husband and some of her family wanted her dead too – for the hurt and anger she caused them. Those in her immediate circle would feel the betrayal, and feel the anger her behavior had caused them.

    But what of the others? What of the scribes? What of the Pharisees? Is their own deception any better? Any worse? Or even, any different from this woman’s?

    What of the scribes and Pharisees? We see Jesus teaching in the temple courts. The Pharisees arrive with this woman and state a truth: “Our laws state that she should be put to death,” but they tell this truth in an effort to cover up their own deception: that their intent was to entrap Jesus, so that they could accuse him of teaching contrary to their laws. Their lie needed to sound plausible, if only to cover up that they could find no fault in Jesus, and instead feared the loss of power and prestige that his teaching might cause them.

    Instead of responding to their question, Jesus begins to write in the dirt, and finally says, “Let anyone of you here who is without sin, throw the first stone at her.” And then he keeps writing.

    Slowly, one by one, from the oldest first to the younger, all begin to walk away.

    And so, a woman caught in adultery is also saved by God’s truth. By God’s truth ripping away the lies these scribes and Pharisees held so dear.

    The lie they told themselves that maintaining power and prestige at all costs was the most important thing. The lie they told themselves that their own sins were not as wicked or destructive as this woman’s betrayal of her marriage vows. The lie they told themselves that their estimation of their own righteousness meant that God valued their lives more than hers. Or, more importantly, the lie they told themselves that God hated the woman’s sin more than God hated theirs.

    Every lie is a betrayal. And the lies we tell ourselves are the greatest betrayal of all, because they deny the image of the divine within us.

    In his book, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote:

    Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

    God is the very essence of love, and when we live our lives without funneling that love to the world, then we betray the image of God in both ourselves, and in others. When we live our lives without love, we begin to live in the lie that there are rankings of sin, and gradations of righteousness, and levels of purity that define our worth in the eyes of God.

    We should always create laws to hold people accountable for actions harmful to the freedom and autonomy of others, but when we cease to love, then we are more likely to create laws that would merely seek to control others for the sake of our own desires and illusions of power. We become more likely to create laws that deny some people their very existence, based not on wrong actions, but rather, on wrong being. Rather than seeking to love and understand them, we instead dare to question the very existence of the image of God within them.

    And from that question, it is an incredibly small step to creating laws based on ever increasing levels of hate, and with ever increasing punishments, up to the point where we may claim it is legal to stone to death those very people whom God has created, simply for being different.

    Until one day, we find ourselves on the receiving end of that thorny spear of self-righteousness, and find ourselves facing a mob of angry, stone wielding lovers of God, simply because we no longer find ourselves among the acceptable.

    Warm and fuzzy stuff, isn’t it? 

    But it really is. It really is.

    God came to the aid of Susannah by allowing the young man Daniel to expose the truth from the lies. Jesus came to the aid of this woman caught in the act of adultery, and offered her no condemnation, instead exposing the lies of self-righteousness within those who would condemn her.

    We may yet betray God, by believing the lies we tell ourselves, and failing to love. We may yet betray God. And God can come to our aid too, exposing the lies we tell ourselves and which lead us away from God’s mercy and love. Like Susanna, we need only appeal to God, remembering that the truth, as painful as it might be, will always set us truly free.

    Just like the woman caught in the act of adultery, there will be no condemnation, merely God’s request to sin no more. To sin no more means that we must refocus our minds on the truth that God is Love, and that the spark of the Divine rests within everyone we meet. If we can focus on this, then we will see the other as a child of God, made in God’s own image, and we will seek to understand, and seek to grow in love.

    And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

    Philippians 1:9-11
    1. Susanna, vs. 22-23
    2. Susanna, vs. 35

  • Kingdoms

    If you were to ask any random person on the street about a prayer that they could recite from memory, the Lord’s Prayer would make the top five. It seems that this is a prayer that everyone, whether they attend church now, or only as a child, has committed to memory. And as is often the case when we have committed words and phrases to rote memory, we often quit reflecting on their meanings and purpose.

    The disciples asked Jesus to show them how to pray, and Jesus gave them a short and simple prayer, the elements of which are intended to focus our relationship with God, and with each other. 

    Hallowed be your name

    The word hallow isn’t often used in English language anymore, but it is the best word to translate the Greek word, which means to “make holy,” “to set apart,” “to consecrate.” In other words, we are to set God apart as holy, to venerate, respect, and stand in awe of God. And when we say that we wish for God’s name to be holy, what we mean is not just the words we use to describe God – a person’s name encompasses more than just the letters and pronunciation – it is the very essence of who they are. To hallow God’s name means to set God apart as one is worthy of our praise, our love, and our respect.

    And what is the opposite of “hallowing,” of “setting apart” and “making holy?” We might think that the opposite would be to slander God’s name, to draw up stories where God did not live up to the reputation, or where God had failed to live up to our expectations. But even in that case, we still acknowledge that God is separate and different – we just don’t like what God has done – but God’s distinction from us, from humanity, is never a question.

    The opposite of “hallowing,” the opposite of making holy, is to make mundane, to make ordinary, to make commonplace. To see God not as something to be venerated, praised, and glorified, but to see God as something akin to a Magic 8 Ball, an oracle that can be consulted from time to time, and whose advice is no better than rolling dice or consulting the advice column in a newspaper. It would be, in essence, making the name of God – the very essence of God’s being – no more important than our own thoughts and feelings, an afterthought to our own understanding.

    And if God is not Holy, and if God is nothing more than something mundane, then we would have made God’s name – God’s very essence – no more powerful than our own. Or, to be more blunt, we would have considered ourselves equal to God. And when we have succeeded in making God mundane, then we risk making God a tool in our hands that can be wielded to accomplish our own desires and goals.

    If God is not holy and venerated in our lives, then the question is, who, or what is?

    Your kingdom come

    Without a king, there can be no kingdom. And before the world turned to various other forms of government, the world was ruled by kings, and the King’s will was the rule of the land. The king’s will was law. What the king wanted, the king got.  So, while it is not present in Luke’s Gospel, the common phrase of “Your will be done” is implied by praying for God’s kingdom to come to earth. 

    The trouble with humans, with all of us, however, is that we often would rather that our will is the law of the land. Just ask any toddler.  We are a people who value self-determination and who value self-reliance. Just imagine what can happen when we have quit hallowing God’s name, and instead made God nothing more than a tool to accomplish our own desires.

    Just recently, I was speaking with a coworker about recent events in this country. And as we spoke, my coworker became more and more angry with me because I kept insisting that if we wanted to see real change, that we as Christians had to push for an unbridled love of our neighbor, rather than forcing people to live under the laws we might consider to be the will of God. My coworker insisted that it was clear that the laws of this land should follow God’s moral code, as adherence to God’s moral law was the best way to run any country, with strict penalties for not living up to God’s law. 

    And then I had to ask, “But then who interprets and decides what God’s will is? Is it only the people in power that can interpret God’s will?”

    History has shown us that there has never been a time when people claiming to know God’s will has ever produced good results. For example, take John Calvin, one of the protestant reformers of the 1500s. Persecuted for challenging the church, he fled to Geneva Switzerland where he became one of the leaders in what was soon called “The City of God.” In Geneva, the moral law and civil law soon became one and the same, a man named Michael Servetus was deemed a heretic, and burned at the stake. 

    People who had at one point been persecuted by the Catholic Church for heresy now killed this man for the same crime. Even the reformers behaved like those they had tried to reform. People who had violence committed against them quickly turned to violence of their own once they held the reins of power.

    Or, perhaps looming even larger in history, consider the Third Reich. In Germany before WWII, there were Protestant Christians who actively supported the Nazi regime, calling themselves “storm troopers for Jesus Christ.” These were the type of people who believed that Jesus had selected them to bring about his kingdom on earth through violence or power or the rule of law. And, the Nazi Party took advantage of this type of thought and encouraged protestant churches in this belief to such a degree that the German Christian movement eventually released a statement that said: 

    “the eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind. It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler … This law speaks to us from the history of our people … It is loyalty to this law which demands of us the battle for honor and freedom … One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!”

    Those that claimed to follow a crucified God, now looked to use Jesus Name to justify the violence and murder of others while they shaped the world to their own desire. It was an evil that had the support of religion to grant it divine legitimacy.

    It has never worked well when people use God’s name to push their own will through a political agenda. History is full of examples, from the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, from the Ayatollahs of Iran to the Clerics of Afghanistan. In each case, God was nothing more than a tool, a sword brandished in support of the will of those wielding it.

    There can be no kingdom without a king. And if God is not king of our lives, our hearts, and our minds, then the question remains: who, or what is?

    Give us our daily bread

    While the word we use is “bread,” the word is used to indicate everything that we might need to survive. This phrase is a plea for provision, for what we need to live our lives, to survive and be taken care of. 

    It is not a plea for what we want, because we often confuse what we need with what we want, as evidenced by the immortal words of Janis Joplin: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.”

    What we need is not always what we want. And what we want, is not always what we need. Praying for God to provide us with our daily bread is an acknowledgement of our complete reliance upon God. If we look further in the passage, the words of Jesus following the prayer speak about how a parent treats a child, or how someone treats a neighbor. How much more will God provide for God’s beloved than people like us providing for those we love?

    There is a book which he recounts the stories of the Desert Fathers, mystics and monks who lived in the desert during the 3rd century. In one story, we hear of a disciple and his mentor:

    Abba Doulos, the disciple of Abba Bessarion, said: When we were walking along the sea one day, I was thirsty, so I said to Abba Bessarion, Abba, I am very thirsty. Then the old man prayed, and said to me, Drink from the sea. The water was sweet when I drank it. And I poured it into a flask, so that I would not be thirsty later. Seeing this, the old man asked me, Why are you doing that? I answered, Excuse me, but it’s so that I won’t be thirsty later on. Then the old man said, God is here, and God is everywhere.

    God is here, and God is everywhere is a statement of ruthless trust in a God who is to be revered, whose name should be hallowed, and who provides. And while I would like to say that I am like Abba Bessarion, it is often more true that I am like the disciple, who would rather put water into a flask for future use because I have not yet entirely come to live within the idea that the God whose name is hallowed will provide all that I need. It is not a bad thing to prepare for the future, but when we trust in our own preparations rather than God’s provision, that is when we step into murky waters. Do we trust God, or do we trust ourselves more? And if we trust ourselves more, then the question remains: who, or what, is king of our lives?

    Forgive us our sins – as we forgive those who sin against us

    Martin Luther King, Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Change takes time, but change will come. He, much like others of his time, were committed to peaceful means to bring about the hope that they wished to see. Despite the violence he and others faced, they continued to forgive those who had wronged them, and continued to love those who persecuted them. 

    They could have chosen the path of violence, as some others during that time chose to do, but instead they chose to continue peacefully, putting trust in God’s great arc of justice. It was through this continued choice to remain peaceful in the face of violence that other people began to see the evil, and to see the need for change, slow though that change was in coming.

    Forgiveness is the most radical form of trust in a God that provides. Because if God can provide for us in all things, then God can certainly provide for us in the face of evil, and provide for us despite that evil. And if we are unable to forgive, then the question remains: who is really king of our lives?

    First person plural, not singular

    Finally, with all of what we have discussed today, the most important thing to remember is that the prayer is not about “My Father in heaven,” or “Give me my daily bread,” but instead, it is all about the first person plural: Our. Us. We. 

    Human nature is to harm those who harm us, to seek out for ourselves as much as we can, to prepare our own little kingdom, and to name ourselves masters of our own domain.

    But we are not masters of our own domain, we are a community of believers, and a community will not grow without forgiveness, and a community cannot forgive unless it expects God to provide, and we cannot expect God to provide unless God is the king of our lives, and that happens when we consecrate and hallow God’s name.

    Our father in heaven, hallowed by your name, your kingdom come.

    Amen.

    [This sermon was delivered at The Episcopal Church of St. Matthew in Tucson, AZ on July 24, 2022.]

  • Duct Tape and Dwelling Spaces

    Several years ago, I was part of an intentional community of young men who served the church called the Brother’s House. My position, as the oldest, was as the head brother, and the three others living with me were all aged 19 – 21. I was in my early thirties. You can imagine that living in the same house together with these young men didn’t always go as I would have hoped. Sometimes, I had prepared food, only to find that at the moment that I wanted to eat this food I was looking forward to, someone had beat me to it. Or I would vacuum the floors, only to have someone track mud into the house. Or one of them would fail to pay rent, and we would find ourselves without services. Not the best arrangement, but certainly an opportunity to grow my ability to forgive.

    Every time we live with others in community, we open ourselves up to growth – opportunities to expand as people, as spiritual beings; we learn to live together as a beloved community with those on the same journey toward God.

    As we read in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers that if they keep his commandments, he and the father would come and dwell with them. In a sense, God becomes our housemate, and the house in question is our soul, our mind, our heart. God wants to live in community with us, and make a home with and within us.

    For those of you who know that you’ve lived with anyone else, you know that the best relationships are ones in which there is no deception, no lies, no lasting secrets. We get an idea of what it means to live with God in the reading from Revelation today. In the place where God dwells, the streets and homes are illuminated with the light of God. There is no darkness at all. To expand our metaphor of a home, if God dwells with us, our souls themselves become illuminated, and darkness and falsehood are cast out. 

    These readings are a foreshadowing for what we – and the lectionary – celebrate in two weeks: Pentecost. The arrival of the Holy Spirit to guide us, to illuminate our paths, and to move us into a state where falsehoods and lies can not find any shadows in which to lurk.

    It is a slow process. Changes developed through a life together.

    God will never push, but God will prompt. God will not demand, but God will suggest. God will not nag, but God will remind. God will seek to shine light on anything that we might wish to keep secret, so that we might draw ever closer to a relationship with the Divine.

    Imagine, then, a home, filled with rooms, and God has come to dwell with you. As you show God around the house, you point out the beautiful view from the balcony, overlooking the mountains across the valley from where you are. You show God all the beautifully decorated rooms and let God know that you are pleased to share your home.

    And things go well. You wake up in the morning and spend time on the balcony, drinking your coffee and having deep and meaningful conversations with God. And you feel God’s love and closeness, as though you alone are God’s most beloved.

    Until one day, God says, “What’s behind this door here? You’ve never shown me what’s in this room.” And you respond, “You don’t need to see that room. Come, let’s go to the balcony and talk a bit. I’ve got a new bottle of wine I’d like us to try out.”

    But God persists, and eventually you open up the room, pull back the curtains and reveal a room covered in cobwebs, filled to the ceiling with old boxes of junk of things you know you need to get rid of but somehow cannot bring yourself to let go of. But God brings the light to it, helps you throw out what needs throwing out, and with other items, God dusts them off, and helps you use them to decorate other parts of the house.

    And this happens over and over again, with different rooms, as God shakes out those things we would rather keep hidden, and renews those things we may have forgotten.

    This is transformation. This is growth. This is a refining of our lives so that we more closely reflect the image of God as the light of God’s love permeates our hearts and minds.

    Imagine, however, one day, walking through the living room, and, turning, you see God sitting on the balcony with someone else. And God is laughing and joking, and talking with the other person just as God does with you. 

    So you confront God, asking, “How can you love this other person and spend time with them when they are clearly not keeping your commandments? They are not worthy of your love.”

    And rather than answer you, God takes you to one more room, and opens the door. And in this room, God pulls open the curtains and reveals duct tape on the floor, separating the room in two. “Okay,” you say, “But that’s just because my brother will make a mess of things if I don’t set some boundaries. He is not like me.” And God leads us out of the room, showing us the duct tape lines that divide the hallway, the living room couch, right over the top of the kitchen table, all the supposedly shared spaces of the house, and we protest all the way, saying that we need these dividing lines, because God’s love simply cannot be for those that don’t keep his commandments, right?

    We enjoy seeing our own lives transformed by God’s love, as we slowly shape our lives to reflect the will of God in this world. We are fond of seeing our lives change as we slowly transform into “good people.” And somehow, we always seem to think that those commandments that we keep are the only ones that make us worthy of God’s love.

    We, as a people, like to be curators of the commandments that we believe will please God. We have lists of rules, and catalogs of morality, and we like to be the ones to enforce it all  too. Because, isn’t that what makes a person worthy of God’s love? Isn’t keeping God’s commandments the prerequisite for God making his home in and with us?

    We forget, however, that others are being transformed through the light of God’s love just as we are. And we forget that our understanding of God may be out of sync with theirs. What has been revealed to them may not yet have been revealed to us. And the opposite is also true: what has been revealed to us may not have yet been revealed to them. 

    God dwells with them, just as God does with us; God loves them, just as God loves us; God forgives them, just as God forgives us. 

    There can never be a beloved community – a community that includes all God’s children regardless of any differences that might keep us apart – there can be no peace, no living together in harmony, unless there is forgiveness and understanding.

    This is not easy, and it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In my own life I have people that I still think are evil. Who have wronged me, done much to disparage me and cause me harm. And yet, I know that if they are actively trying to love God, then God will dwell with them, just as God dwells with me when I seek to love God.

    At some point, the light of God’s love will shine deeply enough into my own heart that I will find the strength to forgive them, understand them, and reconcile. But today is not that day. Not yet.

    It is also never easy when in this world we are confronted by war, genocide, violence and hatred. When we see people being murdered for the crime of being different. When we see people pushing for laws that make life more difficult for others simply to suit their own morality; when we see hatred showered upon some people in the name of a loving God; when we see people cast aside and deemed unworthy, simply because of who they are. 

    It is never easy to respond to those hateful actions with love, when we would rather respond in kind. We see so much of this world that still needs to be transformed by God’s love, and it seems so overwhelming. What can be done? How can the world be changed when there is still so much desire for power and control – and the ensuing hatred that springs from it?

    But we are not called to change the world.

    At least, not all at once.

    We may get caught up in the idea of what makes a person worthy of God’s love, pulling out those lists and catalogs again, and running down the checklist to determine someone’s qualifications for becoming God’s beloved.

    But God doesn’t care about any of that. God doesn’t care about the commandments and rules we come up with. Because the commandments that please God are only two:

    Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, mind and soul.

    Love your neighbor as yourself.

    There can never be a beloved community – a community that includes all God’s children regardless of any self-imposed differences to keep ourselves apart – there can be no peace, no living together in harmony, unless there is forgiveness and understanding.

    God makes a home with us, so that God’s love will transform us. And God transforms us so that we might transform the world – slow and difficult as it may be.

    We are called to throw open windows and allow God’s light of love to shine in the dark places. We are called to rip up the duct tape that divides our living spaces between those worthy of God’s love and those deemed to not live up to all the requirements. We are called to stand in the face of hatred and power armed with nothing more than God’s love. 

    We are called to allow ourselves to be transformed by God, so that through God’s love working in us, we can transform the world.

    And if we continue with this path, then slowly, ever so slowly, we may see the world transformed into one that resembles the heavenly city of God. A world in which there is no darkness at all.

    [This sermon was delivered at The Episcopal Church of St. Matthew in Tucson, AZ on May 22, 2022.]