May 31, 2020 - Pentecost

Lectionary Readings

Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten us with thy celestial fire. Amen.

            The Holy Spirit, in most Christian traditions, is by far the most neglected person of the Triune God. We pray to the Father often and understand that it is from God’s gracious hand that all blessings flow. Rightfully so, Jesus stands at the center of our faith. And that leaves the Holy Spirit. Part of this neglect is because we can sort of get our minds around God the Father – we even have a helpful metaphor built into it: a loving parent. And Jesus walked this earth and we have earthly stories to help us in knowing him. But who is the Spirit? Do we really mean that part of God is something like a ghost? And the ways that the Spirit shows up in Scripture aren’t always clear – water, wind, breath, and fire. These are inanimate and amorphous things. So who is the Holy Spirit?

December 23, 2018 - Advent 4C

Lectionary Readings

God our redeemer, who prepared the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the mother of your Son: grant that, as she looked for his coming as our savior, so we may be ready to greet him when he comes again as our judge ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “White Christmas” – we’ve heard these songs dozens of times over the past weeks. But there is one song that we haven’t heard this season, and, no, I’m not speaking of “Dominic the Christmas Donkey,” which is a fun song. The song to put on our lips and carry with us in our hearts is Mary’s song which we heard this morning.

November 4, 2018 - Proper 26B

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God – who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.

            “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” What a world this would be if our actions were more aligned with those words. The reason why I preach about love so much is that the Beatles were right, “love is all you need.” Being rooted in the knowledge that God loves us, if we respond to that love with our whole being then we’d see more what we pray for each week – thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. But because of Sin, we aren’t the best at remembering that we are loved or showing love to others. And so love must remain at the center of the Church’s preaching. Once we get love right, then I’m happy to entertain a discussion about what the next priority ought to be. But until then, love remains at the center.

August 14, 2016 - Proper 15C

Lectionary Readings

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

            Have things ever not gone as you had planned? You prepared and practiced for the interview and wore your best outfit, but you didn’t get the job. You planned the perfect surprise party and had wonderful decorations ready, and then the rain came and washed it all away. You had been trying for years to get pregnant and it seemed like a miracle when the test was positive, and then there was a miscarriage. You kept the feuding family members apart and were ready to change the topic if it got heated, and still everyone will remember that family dinner because of the fight. You did everything you knew to do to teach your child about responsibility and making good decisions, and yet they ended up in jail. You tried every treatment and prayed every prayer, and your loved one still died. You studied hard and did every extracurricular activity you could manage, and you still got a rejection letter from your dream college. You loved your spouse and poured all of yourself into the relationship, but the marriage didn’t last. You prepared the soil, watered the seeds, pulled the weeds, but there just wasn’t any fruit on the vine. Sometimes, no matter how deeply your heart is invested in something, no matter how righteous your motives, no matter how hard you’ve worked, no matter how often you’ve prayed, things just don’t go as planned.

April 10, 2016 - Easter 3C

Lectionary Readings

In the name of the Risen Lord. Amen.

            The Book of Common Prayer, drawing from Scripture, states that the mission of the Church is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” In other words, the mission of the Church is reconciliation. Reconciliation is what the Easter season is all about – reconciling the dead to eternal life; reconciling sin to forgiveness; reconciling those who denied Jesus to the grace of the Holy Spirit. Reconciliation is about restoring things which have gone astray, about setting things rights. So you might say that doing the work of reconciliation is to do the work of justice, and that is what our readings today are all about.

February 18, 2015 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God, who creates, redeems, and sustains. Amen.

       “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” What is the purpose of Lent? Though the Judean prophet Isaiah was not writing about the Christian season of Lent, for thousands of years the faithful have asked the question – what would God have us to do?

February 23, 2014 - Epiphany 7A

Lectionary Readings

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

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy…Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I was just hoping to make it through the day without thinking uncharitable thoughts towards others, but holiness and perfection? That’s a tall task. One of the aspects of Leviticus, and any of the Law-giving statements, that is often overlooked is their context. In this handful of verses from Leviticus, we find the refrain “I am the Lord your God” five times. What is easy to miss is that these passages about Law aren’t simply a “do” and “don’t” list. As I’ve said before, the Bible is not a book of directions, but instead is a book that provides direction. And most of these rules, if that’s how we read them, are fairly self-apparent: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal. Any godless society that is interested in having order could come up with a similar list of rules.

January 19, 2014 - Epiphany 2A

Lectionary Readings

Almighty God, by the hand of Moses your servant you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last: Grant that your Church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, and may secure for all your children the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

            I know the 1 Corinthians passage today isn’t the most fascinating Scripture reading that we have, but we can learn a lot by reading the beginning of a letter. And you can tell a lot from a letter by its mechanics. For example, how do you sign the letter? Is it a formal “sincerely” or a warm “with love?” And how do you address the letter- “my dearest so and so” or do you use all the proper titles? Just looking at the signature and address line, you’ll learn something. So as we consider the beginning of 1 Corinthians, let’s pay attention to the mechanics of the letter.

What is Charity?

This graphic is making the rounds on Facebook today. Quite interesting. The question is asking what sort of action is called for when we speak of "helping the poor." Is it directly helping a person in poverty through an act of charity (donation, serving at a food shelter, etc.)? Or is it in working to reform and re-envision our culture to be one where the plight of the poor is addressed?

July 14, 2013 - Proper 10C

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

These are the hardest sermons to preach. All you have to do is utter the phrase “Good Samaritan” and even those with a passing knowledge of the Bible will know what you’re talking about. We have “Good Samaritan” laws that try to promote helping those in need. Even the series finale of the hit show Seinfeld was based on these sorts of laws. So how is a preacher to preach on such a well known text? As Jesus told it, this story was subversive and shocking, but in our culture is has become genteel. Most people hear this passage and assume that the moral of the story is “be nice to strangers,” which it is not. Some preachers will approach the text by examining the question “who is my neighbor,” urging their congregation to respond with compassion to everyone they meet. And that too, is missing the point.

This is an extremely rich parable, and it refuses to be summed up in one pithy little statement. In fact, referring to this passage as the “Good Samaritan” is misleading. We’d do better to call it “The Parable of the Man in the Ditch,” or “The Unlikely Neighbor.” But even those statements don’t capture the full grandeur and all of the subtle lessons that Jesus has put into his masterful telling of the parable. So let’s walk through this passage and see what exactly we are being told to “go and do.”

As the text begins, a lawyer arises to test Jesus and set a trap for him. Lawyer really is a bad translation, this man was a religious scholar, someone who studied the laws of Judaism. So don’t read this passage as an indictment against attorneys, this man had a religious motivation in his approaching Jesus. He came to test Jesus, to try to undermine his teachings. Maybe he wanted to see, if perhaps, the rumors might be true, if there was a chance that he might be really be a prophet, or even more, the messiah.

But his motives were not so pure, as the way the dialogue unfolds, we see that he is just waiting to pounce on Jesus if he fumbles the question. We see this most clearly in the question- “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The question itself is a trap because it doesn’t make any sense. The easy answer is that there is nothing you can do to inherit anything. By definition, inheritances are free gifts, you cannot do anything to earn them. He has asked Jesus an impossible question.

When do we do the same? When is it that doubt causes us to test God? How many times do we pray “God, if you really want me to do this, give me a sign.” And in doing so, we’re just waiting for a chance to get out of if it. When do we ask those impossible questions? When do we make those deals with God that are setting us up for failure, you know the sort- “O God, if you’ll just do this one thing for me, then I’ll do this grand and wonderful thing for you.” But as we’ll see, our traps of insecurity and fear don’t pull God into them.

So Jesus, rather brilliantly, answers his question with a question, not falling for the trap. He asks “what is written in the law? What do you read there?” Any Jewish legal scholar knew the answer- love God and love neighbor. As the passage from Deuteronomy this morning proclaims so beautifully- “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” This isn’t rocket science. The word of God isn’t something hidden from us, it isn’t something that we struggle to understand. It isn’t something that we have to go and search for. It is as near as our mouth and heart. This is one of the most important blessings with which God blesses Israel: the nearness of God and God’s word. So this religious scholar had no choice but to answer the question in this way- love God and love neighbor. And when he responds in that way,
Jesus tells him that he has answered correctly. But the man can’t leave well-enough alone.

The text says that he wants to justify himself. The word “justify” might also be translated as “vindicate” or “make oneself right.” The spring on the trap didn’t work, so he’s grasping at straws now. Parables are meant to draw us in, to invite us to participate in the story. So now is a good time to consider how we fit into the story thus far. If someone asked you- “what is written in the Bible?”, how might you respond? Have you read enough of the Bible to answer that question? Have you meditated on God’s word to have a response? How near is it to your heart and your mouth?

And when is it that we seek to justify ourselves, when we would do better to just keep quiet? When the argument is over, and our traps have failed, why do we keep grasping for straws? This parable is an invitation, both to consider how near to us God is, and to discern the motives for our actions- are they in keeping with God’s word, or are we just trying to justify ourselves?

So Jesus then begins to tell the parable. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. This was not an unheard of happening. Thieves could easy hide and jump on travelers who were not well-protected. They stripped him, beat him, taking all of his possessions, and left him there to die. And I wonder where we still have Jericho roads in our world. What are those pathways that still exist that are full of danger? What are the institutions that still exist that beat people up?

The past several weeks have been historic ones for the Supreme Court. The case that got most of the attention was the ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. And while that is something to celebrate, let us remember that it is just one step in the step towards liberty and justice for all. But there was another case decided that I’m afraid will set up many new Jericho roads. The Court recently struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for discrimination and racism to find a new home in the voting booth. The Court said that the nation has changed in the past 50 years and such a law is no longer needed. I wonder if the security personal on that Jericho road were removed because there hadn’t been any muggings recently. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in dissent- “[This] is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

There are many Jericho roads, where those who are forced to travel them are just waiting to be mugged and beaten. You can find these roads in North Carolina if you’re unemployed, as our legislature has decided to strip benefits. You can find these roads in the housing projects, where the road from poverty to prosperity is full of robbers just waiting to knock people down. You can find these roads in our jails, which are disproportionally full of minorities. You can find these roads in our education system in North Carolina, where we rank 46^th in the nation in dollars spent per student and are continuing to cut funding to public schools. You can find these roads in Raleigh, where Medicaid expansions are being rejected in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy. You can find these roads among migrant workers and our immigration system. You can find these Jericho roads everywhere.

And along comes a priest, coming from Jerusalem and returning home to Jericho. Priests had shifts at the Temple in Jerusalem, and this priest had likely just finished his few weeks of service in the Temple. Some people try to give this priest a free-pass and the quote laws from the Torah about ritual purity, suggesting that the priest would have been making himself unclean by touching the beaten man, thereby making himself unfit for his duty to God. And that would be a great argument, if it worked.

But it doesn’t. For one, the text clearly says that the priest was heading down from Jerusalem, which is a city on a hill. If he was going down, he was finishing up his priestly duties and would have had plenty of time to go through the purification rituals before his name came up on the Temple rota again. Furthermore, those rules only applied to touching a dead body, and the priest doesn’t even walk over to see if the man was still alive. He doesn’t attempt to get help, instead, he can’t be bothered with this. So he crosses over to the other side and goes on his merry way.

Perhaps the priest thought that if anyone asked about it, he could use those purity laws as his excuse. Or perhaps he could say that he was so focused on where he was going that he didn’t even notice the man. What are our excuses? What excuses do we use to keep the dirty, poor, and needy at an arm’s length? When do we look the other way and pretend that we didn’t see injustice?

This priest’s error was in confusing holiness with Godliness. He thought that he had excuses for avoiding this inconvenience- his duty was to remain holy so that he could do his ministry. But he forgets that before anything else, he is called to Godliness, to loving God with all of his heart, soul, and mind, and to love his neighbor as himself. Let us not make the same mistake.

Next down the road comes the Levite. Levites were a group of people that assisted the priests in the Temple. And this Levite was also coming down from Jerusalem, signaling the end of his shift in the Temple. And what I’d like to point out is that he did the same thing that the priest did. Now priests led the worship and rituals in the Temple, and the Levites assisted. And what is so abhorrent about this part of the parable is that the Levite did the same thing as the priest. He knew that the priest, who lived just down the street from him in Jericho, had left the Temple a few minutes before he did. So he knew that the priest must have passed by this wretched man and not done anything. And he did the same thing- nothing.

You’re probably familiar with the psychological phenomenon known as the “bystander effect,” that says that the more people who see someone in need, the less likely anyone is to act. Momentum can be hard to break. It is difficult to go against the grain, to be the voice of dissent when injustice is happening. This incident is an extra damnation against the priest, who set the example for this Levite. And we would do well to consider what examples we are setting. What does the way we live teach our children and grandchildren? How do our actions, as people who claim to be Christians, reflect on Christ? What example do we set for those around us?

But the Levite bears some of the blame as well. And his inaction begs us to consider those moments when we just go with the crowd. The Levite didn’t have the courage to be different. He couldn’t find the strength to do what he knew was right, but would have made him vulnerable. After all, the wounded man could have been a trap. Perhaps the robbers were waiting for someone to approach the man and then attack them as well. But the riskiness of doing the right thing does not make it any less the right thing to do. Let the example of the Levite be a wake-up call to act when action is called for and to speak when a voice needs to be raised.

I really wish that we could have read this gospel passage in its original Greek this morning, because the words jump off the page in the next section. These first two encounters use the exact same sentence structure. But as Luke tells Jesus’ parable, this next section is jarringly different.

This next sentence begins with the word “Samaritan.” And I wish there was a way for me to make your gut churn when you heard that word, as it would have for Jesus’ audience. The conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans was intense, to say the least. It was grounded in a theological dispute, but became an ethnic hatred. The feeling this injured man, a Jew, would have felt when a Samaritan approached him would be the same as if in 1950s Alabama a black man approached a white woman, or if a Palestinian approached a Jew today in the Middle East, or if a Sunni came upon a Shia, or Nazi soldier approached a Jew in 1930s Germany. To say there was tension is an understatement.

And this part of the parable is often overlooked. The beaten man had to accept help from the Samaritan. Even in his half-dead state, he could have let ethic hatred drive him to tell the Samaritan to leave him alone. And it begs the question, would we accept help from anyone? Is there a group of people for which you’d rather die than admit that they saved you? Being helped by someone, especially someone you don’t like can be a challenge. Booker T. Washington was once asked how much he charged for a speaking fee, and he said “$50, unless you host me, then $150.” Putting ourselves at the mercy of others takes a lot of trust and vulnerability. Receiving hospitality, especially for those of us who like to appear as if we’ve got it all put together, can be just as hard as giving hospitality. So let this injured man be a lesson to us, that we accept the grace of God, regardless of what vehicle it uses to get to us.

Do you wonder why the Samaritan stopped to help the man? And not just stop, but he tended to the man, he poured expensive oil and wine on him. He put him on his own animal and guided him to an inn, and paid for his stay. Why did the Samaritan lavish compassion and mercy on him?

Again, the differences in the Greek text make it so clear. In the first two encounters, the text says “a certain priest/Levite was going down that road, and seeing him, passed him by on the other side.” But when the Samaritan enters the parable, the text reads “a Samaritan was journeying and seeing him, had compassion.” What I want to point out is the difference between going down that road, and journeying. The priest and the Levite were going down from Jerusalem, they had a destination in mind. They were on a mission, and they weren’t willing to be distracted. They were so focused on what they thought they should be doing and where they thought they should be going, that they couldn’t make any room in their life for compassion. But the Samaritan was not “going down,” he was “journeying.”

It’s really a question of how you go about life. Is your life a closed system, or open to new possibilities? Do you keep your head down to avoid distractions, or do you take in the sights? What happens when someone threatens to throw a wrench into your plans- do you get frustrated, or do you see it as a new opportunity for grace?

As the parable concludes, Jesus asks the question “which of these was a neighbor?” And this is a rather ironic and intentional reversal of how the parable started. The religious scholar came to Jesus and asked, “who is my neighbor?” And Jesus concludes by asking “who was the neighbor?”

And in that subtle shift, Jesus is communicating the point of this parable. The neighbor goes from being the object of the sentence, to the subject. And point of the parable isn’t to figure out who we’re supposed to be nice to, to discern who our neighbor is. That’s easy, everyone is our neighbor. The tough part of this parable is in figuring how it is that we can be a neighbor to everyone that we encounter. Jesus concludes by saying “go and do likewise,” or in other words- be a neighbor. And that is the point of this parable.

As you can see, this parable isn’t quite as simple as being about the “Good Samaritan” who teaches us to be nice to everyone. Jesus tells this parable to challenge us and reverse the way we see neighborly hospitality. We are invited to consider how it is that we try to trap God in our uncertainly. We are urged to explore the Jericho roads in our own time, that we might make them safer to travel. Our excuses are nothing that should prevent us from doing the work of Godliness. Though it can be difficult to break precedent and be that voice calling out in the wilderness, it is our calling as Christians. We might consider how we can be more open to receiving hospitality from others, and be willing to cross racial, economic, and ideological boundaries to offer help to those in need. And we are invited to enjoy the journey of life, so that we might be able to see what lies around us instead of just going through the motions. It’s a very rich parable, but if all you remember are three words from this sermon, remember these three- “go and do.”

June 16, 2013 - Proper 6C

Lectionary Text (Track 1)

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

            So often the Old Testament presents us with the most illustrious and captivating stories in all of the Bible, and today’s reading from 1 Kings is no exception. It would make a great opera, as it has all the needed tragic and dramatic elements. It tells the story of the king of Israel, Ahab, and his wife, a princess from Phoenicia who follows other gods, Jezebel, and their plot against the Israelite Naboth. It is an old story, but one full of wisdom for us today. It should be rather obvious after hearing this reading that one of the major themes deals with justice.

And to put us in the right frame of mind, I’d like to begin with a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu- “I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say ‘Now is this political or social?’ He said ‘I feed you.’ Because the Gospel to a hungry person is bread.” I begin with this quote because, at times, this might sound like a political sermon. At times, I will say thing that sound like they’ve been taken from a Republican stump speech. At other places, you might hear me as Democratic speech writer. And other times, I just might sound plain crazy. But I want to make it clear: I am simply preaching the text as it was read this morning, pointing toward the Gospel truths.

As Americans, we’re obsessed with the law and justice, and our reading from 1 Kings is very much concerned with law and justice. Supreme Court cases get major media attention, we have several shows about law and order, and courtroom drama is now its own television genre. And in particular, the Constitution has become our focal point. We look to it to discover what is right and what is wrong. But anyone willing to give our country an honest look will soon realize that the Constitution does not lead to justice. We have billion dollar mud-slinging contests to decide who will win the White House every four years, and perhaps the most important job that any president has is appointing Supreme Court justices. And not even for one moment does anyone seriously think that any president will appoint impartial judges to the court; but instead they stack the court with like-minded people. As the prophet Habakkuk notes, “the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted.” And he might as well be talking to modern day America. One has to wonder if what we have is actually a justice system, or rather a punishment and revenge system.

One of the themes that we’ll run into in 1 Kings is the problem of idolatry. And we have made the Constitution an idol. But compared the Word of God, the Constitution is just a piece of paper with ink smeared on it. The justice of our courts is nothing compared to the justice of God. King Ahab of Israel forgot that. He didn’t have our Constitution, but he had his own vision of how a nation should be run. He turned from the Covenant with God, making idols out of everything. And we have begun to do the same. So let this story about Ahab and Naboth be a reminder to us that we keep our focus on God’s law and not laws that we create to suit our own desires and needs.

As we enter the text, it begins with a simple business proposition- “Give me your vineyard, so that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near my house; I will give you a better vineyard for it; or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its value in money.” Ahab is committing the sin of coveting. He wants what is not his. And if this doesn’t speak to our human nature of being selfish and materialistic, then I don’t know what does. Here we have the king of Israel, with more land than he could ever need, with two palaces, with armies and servants, and yet he still isn’t satisfied. He still wants more. He isn’t content with what he has.

And how often do we fall into that pattern? We all do it, so there’s no sense denying it. As St. Augustine said, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in thee.” But we put our hearts in other places. We have other priorities that end up higher on the list than God. We have soccer tournaments that keep us from church, we have budgets that focus more on our own standard of living than the standard of living of those homeless people that live in our communities, we put our faith in political leaders who are just as corrupt as Ahab and Jezebel. We live in a culture of planned obsolescence, always wanting the next best thing. We have all committed the sin of Ahab.

Ahab shows us the dangers of desire; the evils that can come through coveting. You perhaps have seen in the news over the past few weeks the unfolding saga of the young girl in need of a lung transplant and the action of her parents to move her to the top of the transplant list. Now I’m all for a parent doing everything in their power to help their child, nothing wrong with that. But where sin enters the picture is when it devolves into coveting in the way that Ahab did. The problem comes when we focus on our own needs and desires above and against the needs and desires of others. In all of the media coverage, I have yet to hear about what happens to those who get “leap-frogged” on the transplant list; as those parents who have enough money to hire lawyers and create a media-storm seem to get whatever they want, while not considering how their actions might affect others. We often say “you have to follow your heart and be true to yourself.” And the danger in this is that we make desire our ethical standard. We must consider where our desires leads us.

Ahab didn’t consider what taking the land of Naboth might do to him. Ahab commits the sin of saying “I want,” and that is where the whole debacle begins. When we covet, we lose ourselves. Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than in the character of the same name in the novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab. The captain becomes obsessed with catching the white whale, and is willing to sacrifice is ship, the lives of his crew, and his own live in chasing what he covets. It consumes his entire life, and he exclaims “to the last, I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.” When we covet as Ahab, both the captain and the king, did, we lose our relationship with ourselves and with others.

So after this proposition is made, Naboth responds to the king, “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” Ancient laws in Israel prohibited the selling or trading of land, as the land was seen as a gift from God to the family. Even when the law was ignored and land transactions did happen, every 50 years, when the Jubilee year came, the land would revert to the original owner. Naboth was not willing to forget who he was. Ahab was after something that he could not have, and Naboth respected God’s law, even though Naboth stood to gain a lot of money or an even better homestead.

There is an interesting point in Ahab’s speech- he says that he wants to turn Naboth’s land into a vegetable garden. It seems innocent on the surface, but there is a deeper meaning. The other time in the Bible where a vegetable garden is referenced is in Deuteronomy 11:10, where God says “For the land that you are about to enter to occupy is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden.” Ahab intends to take the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and turn it into a new Egypt, a place of slavery, a place of oppression, a place without God’s justice. And so Naboth refuses to allow this atrocity to happen.

Ahab returns home and sulks. He is so overrun by jealousy and covetousness that he has made himself sick to the point where he can’t even eat. Jezebel enters the story, and seeks to console her husband. She says “Do you now govern Israel? Get up, eat some food, and be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.” For the first time in the story, we see the wisdom of that old phrase on display- “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

What I find to be perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole story is that Ahab doesn’t say anything in response to Jezebel. He does not ask, “how are you going to do that?” He doesn’t say “you can talk to Naboth about it, but be mindful of God’s justice.” Instead, he just sits there, complicit in the evil that he knows is about to be done. At the end of the passage, justice comes down on Ahab, reminding us that we are responsible for the actions of those under us. If you’d like a modern example of how this works, I suggest you ask President Obama about it. When we turn a blind eye or abdicate responsibility, the entire house of cards will fall and it will come crashing down on us.

We should also consider how we are like Ahab at this point in the narrative. What are we complicit in? When do we look the other way when it benefits us? There is a great alternative form of the Confession, that, in part, prays “We repent of the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And it’s a great line- the evil done on our behalf. For the most part, if we have a comfortable life, it is the direct result of someone living an uncomfortable life.

I’d like to draw your attention to the growing movement in Raleigh known as Moral Mondays. It is a group of faithful people gathering to peacefully protest against the disgusting legislation being presented before our State legislature. The issue is that the North Carolina General Assembly is considering bills that will remove Medicaid and unemployment benefits from many; that would add a consumption tax that will adversely impact the poor, who will face increased prices on basic goods; and that will force college students to return to their often distant homes to vote, seeking to control election outcomes. In short, the Biblical teachings and imperatives to protect the poor, respect the stranger, care for widows and children, and love our neighbors are being ignored, much in the same way that Ahab and Jezebel ignored God’s justice in favor of their own desires and power.

Do we really think that $4 gasoline, out of season vegetables in every grocery store, and $10 jeans have no repercussions? There is a price to be paid for convenience, but we’re not the one’s paying it. Naboth is. And far too often, we are like Ahab, turning a blind eye so that we can get what we want. The saying is “out of sight, out of mind,” but nothing is out of God’s sight.

And so Jezebel begins scheming, and commits several evils in the process. This is the ultimate nightmare as far as Biblical crimes go. In this one story, Jezebel orchestrates and compounds the sins of Adam, Cain, and David. First, she creates a national crisis by proclaiming a fast. This decree would be as if the president instituted martial law as a means of preventing voters from going to the polls; it is an extreme abuse of power that would have caused panic. It was a way for Jezebel to control the situation and not give Naboth a chance. The fast would have been declared as a way of making amends to God. It was a way of saying, “there is a sinner in our midst, so we need to fast and find them, lest God’s judgment come down on us all.” It’s a rather heinous act to appeal to God’s justice as a way of perverting that same justice. And I can’t help but think of the infatuation that Fox News has had with Benghazi over the past 6 months as a modern day parallel of having an inquisition and crisis for political gain. In both cases, it is a distraction so that people don’t pay attention to the other issues that are going on. And Jezebel is setting Naboth up for doom by creating the conspiracy of someone having angered God.

She then lies and bears false witness, both in concocting the story, but also in signing decrees in Ahab’s name. Naboth’s initial response was “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” Jezebel likely committed the same crime that every news outlet commits on a daily basis- she probably just misquoted Naboth. It is quite likely that she reports Naboth to have said “The Lord forbid that I not give you my ancestral inheritance.” And in doing so, Naboth was swearing an oath before God, and then breaking it by not giving the land to Ahab. And so the trumped up charges of “cursing God and the king” begin to stick. Words are powerful, they can be used to build up or tear down. And Jezebel’s twisting of words urges us to consider how we use them.

Jezebel’s plan is working perfectly, and Naboth ends up being stoned to death for blasphemy against God. This is perhaps one of the greatest crimes that we can ever commit: the killing of an innocent. As I mentioned before, we have an imperfect criminal justice system. We are not God. And so why we insist on utilizing the death penalty is beyond me. This story clearly shows that the death penalty can be improperly applied. Naboth was put to death, following the exact laws of the land- there were two witnesses that corroborated the crime. And as we’ve seen, DNA results have cleared those wrongly convicted, the death penalty is unfairly applied to minorities, and it doesn’t really bring about any sort of justice, but instead focuses on vengeance.

And now that the land owner has been killed for violating God’s law, the king can rightfully take the land instead of it staying with the family, who now has a cursed name. This is the last of the evils that Ahab and Jezebel do. The prophet Elijah comes to Ahab and asks “Have you killed, and also taken possession?” The end of the plot has finally been realized, Ahab has the land. It is a story about the ultimate abuse of power.

You’ll recall the story of King Midas, the king who turned everything he touched to gold, which wasn’t so bad until he touched his daughter and turned her into a statue. Power weakens those who are eager enough to exploit it. King Ahab will live to experience this truth, as Elijah tells him “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood…Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, I will bring disaster on you.” There is an old hymn that sings “this is my Father’s world, oh let me never forget / that though the wrong seems oft so strong / God is the ruler yet.” It is a truth that Ahab would come to learn, and we would do well to remember that lesson.

So what do we do in response to a story like this? How do we live faithfully when justice is so often perverted? We forgive. Justice unravels when we lose sight of who we are in relation to God. Once justice is broken, it is awfully hard to restore. Somehow, we must break the downward spiral of justice and injustice, the cycle of retribution, the vendettas of vindictiveness. And forgiveness is the one thing that can do this.

To some of us, forgiveness in the face of the evils of Ahab and Jezebel might seem naïve or soft.  We worry that we’re not doing anything to stop these evils from happening again. And we end up pushing forgiveness aside, because we think it gets in the way of justice. So we charge into the situation with our own vision of what justice should look like, and the pursuit of justice becomes an idol for us, and before long, we can’t remember if we’re Naboth or Ahab.

We must remember that justice belongs to God. Though the sins we commit are horizontal, going from person to person, there is also a vertical element to our sin. We sin against God just as much as we do others when we violate divine justice.

To be clear, forgiveness isn’t the last thing that Christians are to say in the face of injustice; but it is to be the first thing. We say, “you can harm me, but you can’t take away my allegiance to Christ. You can be cruel to me, but you can’t make me become like you. You can hate me, but I can forgive you.” Forgiveness is God’s justice; it is the way to make things right and restore order. Of course, repentance and restitution have to be part of the equation, but without forgiveness, the cycles will never be broken.

As the former dean of Duke Chapel, Samuel Wells, writes, “why do we forgive? Because Jesus in his cross and resurrection has released the most powerful energy in the universe and we want to be a part of it. Why do we forgive? Because Jesus is dying for us to forgive.” And he goes on to say that forgiveness is the Christian word for justice. When Christ came earth and entered the vineyard, he didn’t come as an Ahab to claim authority and bring about revenge; he came as Naboth, a man who was killed on false charges. And the way that Jesus sought justice wasn’t in condemning the wrong, but it was in saying “Father, forgive them.”

It’s a rich story about justice and forgiveness. We see the problems created by the sins of idolatry, the dangers of desire, and the evil scheming to get whatever we want, regardless of the cost to others. This ancient story gives us a good opportunity to consider justice in our own lives and nation. Where do we sit by and let justice be perverted? Are we able to recognize those moments when we are Ahab or Jezebel and need to be forgiven?

If only we could be a people who were known for forgiveness instead of being obsessed with the law and our own idea of justice. Perhaps when modern day Elijahs confront us, we will repent of our sin. Perhaps then we could be less like Jezebel and Ahab. Perhaps then the Kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven.

Letter to Our Senators

After being urged by Bishop Curry to become more informed about Immigration Reform legislation and write our Senators, I have done so and urge you all to do the same. You can watch Bishop Curry's message here. After doing so, you can then write Senator Hagan and Senator Burr. I will also share the letter that I sent to them both, which briefly outlines why I believe that this legislation is good for our nation, good for Christians who seek justice and compassion, and good for the furthering of God's Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. If any or all of my letter would be helpful to you in writing our Senators, please feel free to copy it.

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Senator,

I write to you, as a constituent of North Carolina and a person of faith who very much believes in the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. I ask you to vote in favor of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, commonly known as the “Gang of 8 Bill,” that will be coming before the Senate in the coming weeks.

Our current immigration policies are not good or just, and they are outdated. It is clear that some sort of reform needs to happen.

What motivates me to write you is the fact that roughly 83% of undocumented immigrants are Christians; they are my brothers and sisters in Christ, and so this is a family matter to those of us in the Church. I am reminded of the plethora of witnesses from the Bible that suggest mercy and justice be shown towards the immigrant.

We would do well to remember that we are all immigrants who have come here from somewhere else (Exodus 22:21- You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.). And both Hebrews 13:2 (Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it) and Matthew 35:40 (Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me) remind us that as we treat our neighbors, so we treat God. And because the Lord is our God, we are to act so that “when an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:35-35).

A pathway to citizenship is a pathway to hope. We are all citizens of God’s Kingdom, and we pray, and are called, to work to make God’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. This legislation at least moves us in that direction. No one bill will solve the problem forever or be perfect. But this bill is a start. Please, don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.

As the prophet Micah wrote, our task is to “do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”This is about justice that will roll down like waters (Amos 5:24), not Republican, Democrat, or Independent agendas. I hope that when the time comes for a vote, you vote with the people whom you were elected to represent in mind; and more importantly, I hope your vote is a vote for justice and compassion towards the “least of these.”

Thank you for your service as a representative of the people.

Blessings,

The Rev. Robert Black

March 3, 2013 - Lent 3C

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

How is your Lent going? Lent is a good time for us to take a good look in the mirror and consider how we are doing. It is a time to journey into our souls and passions. And any part of healthy introspection will lead us to consider sin, both the sins we commit and the sins that have been committed against us. Our focus this morning will be forgiveness.

Before considering the Gospel which addresses forgiveness, the backdrop of Exodus is a helpful one. What we see in this particular passage is that God indeed hears our cries for redemption.

God longs for reconciliation and redemption for all of Creation. There is a divine yearning to respond to the cries of injustice and inhumanity. And, with all of my being, I believe and trust that just as God heard the cries of the Hebrew people, God also hears our pleas for reconciliation and justice. But justice and redemption do not exist in a vacuum, they come through the process of forgiveness.

As we all know, forgiveness is a two way street. Recall that Jesus, when he teaches his disciples to pray, doesn’t include much at all, but does include the line “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” First we’ll consider what it means to forgive, and then what it means to be forgiven.

When we forgive someone, there is an embedded moral judgment. You do not need to forgive the things that you can condone, those things don’t need our forgiveness. What needs to be forgiven are those actions which we cannot condone. Before we can begin to forgive someone, we must recognize that we have been wronged, that we have been sinned against. And so we must consider what sin is.

A good way to define sin is “that which strains relationships.” It was the Anglican priest John Donne who famously noted that “no man is an island.” We are creatures of relationship. And, invariably, we will strain and stress those relationships. Each time we make a decision, we are affecting someone else, and sometimes we are a bit short-sighted or selfish in our actions, and that is where sin exists.

When we begin the journey of forgiving those who have sinned against us, there must be some recognition and naming of that strained relationship. But it is important to remember that though we might recognize the sin, it is not our task to judge the sin, nor is it our place to dictate what justice look like. Judgment and justice belong to God.

When Jesus is speaking about forgiveness in today’s reading, he wonders “Those eighteen who were killed
when the tower of Siloam fell on them- do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No.” Jesus makes it clear that there is no cause and effect relationship between sin and divine punishment. But too often we suppose that there is. Someone recently told me the story of a mother in another church being confronted by a parishioner who told her that her 5 year old son’s cancer was due to their sins as parents. And as repulsive as that sounds, that sort of thinking is commonplace in our culture.

We see someone in prison and we assume that they’ve done something to deserve to be there, that their sin has lead to this punishment. And while sometimes that is the case, our overcrowded prison system is indicative of a culture that fails too many people. I recently heard a presentation about the Augustine Literacy program that operates out of the Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill. They remarked that several states base their long term prison system planning on the literacy rates of second graders. Is it really their fault for ending up in prison when our educational system has failed them? Sin is not about cause and effect, but it’s far too easy to think that it is. So let us remember in our work of forgiving, we are called to recognize sin, not judge it.

The second part of forgiving is that forgiveness requires forbearance. This is where the letting go comes in. We’re not very good at this part of it; we often make bad situations worse. In arguments, it is far too common to break confidences or bring up the past. Forbearing must be a part of forgiving. We all know that the concept of an eye for an eye is self defeating.

An angel came to a someone one day and told them that they could be granted any wish in the world, the only caveat is that their worst enemy would receive double. So at first they thought about asking for a bag of gold, but they changed their mind when they realized that their enemy would be getting two. Then they thought about asking for a farm, full of livestock and crops to live on. But they couldn’t stand the prospect of their enemy having a farm that was twice as large. And so the angel pushes them and says, “I need an answer; what is your wish?” And they think about it some more and say, “I wish to be blind, in one eye.”

If we seek vengeance and avoid forbearance, we will do irreparable harm to ourselves. If we do not let go of the sin, it will consume us. Now, we’ve all heard the phrase, “forgive and forget,” and let me make clear that is terrible theology. Nowhere in all of the Bible does God ever call the people to forget anything. In fact, one of the refrains of the Old Testament is “remember.” A better way to forgive would be to “remember and forgive.” When we forget, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, and acting as if the wound never happened won’t lead to healing. For forgiveness to come, we must let go of the sin so that it does not grasp all of our life.

In forgiveness, there must also be empathy with the wrongdoer. Empathy, not sympathy. But trying to understand the sin is important. There are very few people that do evil for the sake of doing evil. Many of the sins that we do are done invisibly. None of us want children in third-world countries to be enslaved in sweatshops, but sometimes our clothing choices lead to that. It wasn’t an intentional sin. And many times, when we are wronged, the person wasn’t out to get us, they were just consumed with their own agendas that led to their sinful and selfish behavior. Perhaps they acted out of anger because someone else had wronged them. It’s a vicious cycle, and in forgiving, we must break the cycle and try to understand one another.

And finally, in forgiving someone else, we have to desire a new relationship. The theological word for this is “metanoia,” which literally means to change your mind. We go in a new direction. Without this step, inertia will control our relationship and we will not be able to live in forgiveness, but will be stuck in the past. And this is important to remember: the relationship is new, not the same one in which the sin strained. If we try to simply to return to the way things were, the sin will return, but forgiveness is about a new relationship. There are some sins that are so grievous that though there can be forgiveness, the relationship will never be what it used to be. Often we see this in sins of adultery- forgiveness is possible, but intimacy may never be again.

So those four elements are required to forgive- a recognition of sin without judgment, forbearance, empathy, and the desire for a new relationship. And that is only half of the equation of forgiveness; in addition to forgiving, we are also called to seek forgiveness from ourselves, from others, and from God. In the thought of the Old Testament, there was a process to being forgiven, and it started with the recognition of our own sin.

Admitting sin is something that we all struggle with. I think of people like Lance Armstrong, Bill Clinton, and Tiger Woods, all people who instead of admitting their sins, chose to hide them and only made their situations worse. I am a sinner. You are a sinner. It is time for us to stop pretending that we have nothing to hide. Our Church, our nation, and our world need more courageous people who are willing to admit their wrongs and seek reconciliation instead of self-preservation.

We also need to take caution that we don’t confuse excuse making with the admission of sin. If we think we have a good excuse for something, then why should we ask for forgiveness? But too often when we come to God, we are asking God to accept our excuses instead of our regrets. It is not easy to take ownership of our sins, but it is the first step in being forgiven.

And I should also point out that, for the most part, sin doesn’t fall entirely on us. We live amidst sin. Sin is a reality of living in this world, so we don’t need beat ourselves up over it. Self-loathing is not the path to forgiveness. But we do need to recognize that we participate in sin. As Jesus suggests in the Gospel, our fate will be sealed if we do not seek forgiveness. And Lent is a great time to do this soul searching. Part of being healed by God is in our willingness to show our wounded places to God and each other.

Hebrew thought suggests that remorse is the second step in being forgiven. Another word for this might be “compassion,” which is derived from the root meaning to “suffer with.” To be forgiven, there has to be an acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that we have caused others. Before St. Paul converted to Christianity, he was an oppressor of the early followers of Jesus and one day he was traveling on the road to Damascus when the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. His name at the time was Saul, and Jesus asks him “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” In this encounter, we see that Jesus identifies with those being oppressed and persecuted.

When we sin against our neighbor, we sin against God. When we grieve the heart of a loved one through sin, we grieve the heart of God. When we tell ourselves that we’re stupid, or ugly, or worthless, we are rejecting the God in whose image we are made. Our sins are not isolated. Now I’m saying this not to make you feel worse about sin, but as a way of encouraging compassion and remorse in seeking forgiveness.

Next, we must desist from the sin. This is where repentance comes. The root meaning of repentance is “to turn away.” Whatever the sin is, we put our back to it and we move in a new direction. It is important to remember that forgiveness is not the reward for change, but it is the source and condition of that change. We amend our lives not because we feel sorry, but because we seek forgiveness.

The wisdom of the Old Testament then suggests that restitution is needed in forgiveness. We find this referred to in the Bible in examples such as, if you kill someone’s cow, you need to replace it. We can’t always fix the situation or undo it, but we can seek to make things right. As you might have picked up earlier in this sermon, I’m not a big fan of our criminal justice system. And part of that is because it is not a system built on forgiveness or that works towards reconciliation. Instead, it is a system of vengeance and judgment. But there is an ancient, and new-found, understanding of justice that is emerging known as restorative justice.

Instead of justice being about punishment, justice is about metanoia, and forming a new and healed relationship. Instead of focusing on the offender, this sort of justice focuses on the victim and the community. In January, there was a powerful article written in the New York Times called “Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?” It tells the story of 19 year old Conor McBride who killed his long-time girlfriend, Ann Grosmaire, after an argument. It happened in Florida, so you’d expect him to be on death row. But instead, Ann’s father recalls standing next to her hospital bed, hoping and praying that she’s wake up and hearing a voice in his head saying “forgive him.” He said “no, no way, it’s impossible.” But he kept hearing his daughter’s voice calling to him, “forgive him.” It’s a long and complicated story because the legal system didn’t know what to do with the forgiveness that Ann’s parents wanted to offer Conor. They realized that in forgiving him, they found release for themselves as well. Now Conor is still serving time in jail, because as we all know, forgiveness does not mean release from the consequences of our actions. But this restorative justice has given Conor the prospect of living a life with meaning instead of being a murderer on death row; it gave Ann’s parents the ability to be defined not as the parents of a murdered daughter, but as people of hope. Restitution has been missing from our understanding of being forgiven, but it is the vehicle in which grace enters the picture.

And finally, in being forgiven, we must make a confession. In Israel, this was done though a liturgical act. For us as Christians, it can be done through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or Confession as some call it. What is so powerful about this Sacrament is that forgiveness becomes an actual experience instead of a vague idea. It is often said that sacraments are the outward signs of inward and spiritual grace; sacraments are a way of feeling the presence of God. And I wonder what our lives would look like if we had more experiences of being forgiven. I invite you this Lent to consider the Sacrament of Reconciliation, even if you’re not sure if you’re ready for it, perhaps we can begin a conversation. The Israelites knew that for forgiveness to happen there had to be an act of confession once the sin was recognized, remorse felt, after the sin ceased, and restitutions were made.

Jesus offers us the interesting parable of the fig tree that isn’t producing fruit. Earlier in the gospel, Jesus says that we should “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” The tree didn’t, and was going to be condemned for it. But it is given another chance. Let us remember, God gives us the grace of another season to work towards repentance. But let us also remember that it is not an indefinite period of grace. The tree is expected to produce soon. Now is the time to forgive others. Today is an opportunity to practice forbearance and seek new relationships in forgiving others. This moment is a chance to start down the path of being forgiven. Forgiveness is a powerful instrument of grace and transformation in our lives and for our world. Our Father in heaven- forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Amen.

May 6, 2012 - Easter 5B

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our all our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

            Do you ever get that sneaky suspicion that things aren’t how they should be? That somehow the Kingdom of God isn’t coming on earth as it is in heaven? That somehow we’re disconnected from what is true, what is genuine, what is worthy of connection? Well, I do. Those of you who are participating in the Diocesan-wide book study using Diana Butler Bass’ book Christianity After Religion are likely getting a sense of this disconnection. There are many who are disconnected with the Church because they sense a disconnect between the institution and God. There are others who label themselves as spiritual but not religious, embodying this disconnect in their own self-identity. Religious institutions now have approval ratings around those of Wall Street and major corporations. And because of this trend, many people are disconnecting from the Church. Many complain of the disconnect between politicians and their constituents, as evidenced by Congress’ 14% approval rating. We see this lack of connection manifest in a plethora of lawsuits, a near 50% divorce rate, and in tensions around the world.

As we see in our reading from Acts, there is also a disconnect between religion and our understanding of it. The eunuch in this story represents many of us. We read things in the Bible, or we hear sermons, or we read a book about theology, and we’re left scratching our heads, wondering- “what does this mean?” Philip asks, “do you understand what you are reading?” And the eunuch responds “how can I, unless someone guides me?” Here, we see the importance of connection. We bring others to faith by guiding them. As much as we wish it would, faith does not spread by osmosis; faith is not something you “catch.” Faith, instead, is something we work at, and we’re never done with it.

We have become disconnected from our story, from the story of God that continues to unfold in each generation. Poll after poll reveals that the average Christian American cannot come even close to passing a religious literacy test. Now, that isn’t to say religion is about knowing facts, but if we don’t know the story, then it’s awfully hard to take part in it. There are lots of reasons for this disconnection. We’re busy, we think people who are overly religious are a bit crazy, we’ve learned that religion is something we do in private; whatever the reason, we’ve lost touch with God. Simply put, we are disconnected from God and from each other.

So how do we reconnect? How do we get back in touch with God and with others? The answer is our readings from today. When you read through this portion of the 1^st epistle of John and the 15^th chapter of the Gospel according to John, two words should jump out at you. The first is “abide,” which shows up 14 times in these 23 verses; the other word is “love”, showing up 14 times as well. “Abide” comes from the Greek meno, but it means more than that- it’s more of “exist in” or “dwell in”. And “love” is agape, which is the highest of the all the words for love, representing God’s love for Creation. Jesus uses the parables of the vine and the branches to drive the point home.

The only way that the branches, that is us, survive is by being connected to the vine, that is Jesus. Abide isn’t a very common word. No hotel signs say “abide here tonight,” nor do baseball announcers say “bottom of the 9^th with a runner abiding on second base.” We don’t abide much in our culture. We move from place to place for work, we upgrade appliances all the time, we even change friends rather fluently. Not much abides in our world. Abiding is planting your roots. A preacher I knew once said that if the world is about hanging on, then abiding is about hanging in. When you hang onto to something, it’s often something you should let go of, and something you wouldn’t mind losing. But when you hang in, you are committed to staying the course.

And so Jesus tells his followers to abide in him, to remain forever in him, to be rooted in him. If you’ve ever been to a vineyard, upon looking a vine, it’s easy to tell that the braches would be no where without the vine. When people, churches, communities disconnect from the vine, they wither up and die. When we hang-on to ideas about Jesus, we die; but when we hang in with Jesus, we thrive. As funny as it seems, many Christians have become disconnected with Jesus.

It’s even there in the name, we call ourselves Christians, not disciples of Jesus. Somehow, Christ is easier than Jesus- because Christ is about the savior and the glory. But Jesus was a rebel-rouser, he hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes, he talked about the poor and sought to turn this world upside down. Jesus was crucified, and calls his follows to take up their crosses. Bishop Curry often remarks that when he came to this Diocese and starting using the name “Jesus” in writings and sermons, people talked about this new bishop who “talked about Jesus all the time” like there was something wrong with that. We’ve become afraid of then name of Jesus- what would people think of us if they heard us saying his name?

If we follow Jesus, we think people will hear us say Jaay-suz. Jesus has been kidnapped by the religious right, by those who put words in his mouth. And lest we be counted as one of them, we’ve stopped abiding in him. Instead, we focus on social justice, on outreach, on God without Jesus. We have a disconnect with Jesus. But Jesus makes it very clear, the only way to life, is to abide in him.

And the focus of this abiding is in love. The writers of these texts knew that the one thing that could be trusted was the love of God, and that was the one thing worth emulating. Earlier in this sermon I referred to studies that point to declines in Church attendance and religiosity. But what is interesting is that that these same studies point towards a deep hunger in people’s lives for spirituality. Part of the reason why people are so disillusioned with the Church is that they came to it with such high hopes and dreams. They wanted to find a place where they could abide, a place where the fruit of love thrived.

These readings show that we are supposed to abide in Jesus, and in his love. That is the way we thrive and bear fruit. When I was in Israel, I experienced a profound sense of affirmation of my work as a priest, but more than that, as a Christian. I saw that the world needs more people like Jesus. I was blessed while I was there to meet some very faithful Christian leaders, who strive their best to daily model the love of Jesus. Think about what your family, our church, Greensboro, the United States, the world would look like if every day, people who call themselves Christians tried to live as Jesus did. What if we found a way to put aside our differences and abided in love. What if churches could refocus on abiding in Jesus instead of fighting over him? In fact, the roots of the word “religion” mean to “re-connect.” What if religion was more about reconnecting God to humanity?

What if we were more like Jesus? What if we took the time to help each other carry crosses, what if we washed each other’s feet, what if we reached out to the poor and oppressed, what if we everything we did was done, first and foremost, out of love?

And the beauty of this is that each branch that is connected to the vine is important. Each act of love changes the world. I know that in my life, I am always profoundly moved when someone acts out of a deep sense of love towards me. I am always inspired when I see someone who is clearly abiding in Jesus.

There is a story I once heard about a group of soldiers who were friends in World War II France. One of their colleagues died, and they carried him to a church they saw in the distance, so that he might have a proper burial. The priest greeted them and consoled them, but he told them that according to Catholic law, only Catholics could be buried in the cemetery there. But he agreed to bury their friend just outside the fence of the Catholic cemetery. Several years later, after the war, this group of friends journeyed back to that small country church to pay their respects to their fallen friend. When they arrived, they walked around the perimeter of the fence to find the gravesite. But when they found no tomb marker, they stormed into the church, enraged that the priest had not properly buried their friend as he had promised. The priest explained to them, “before I buried your friend, I scoured all the books of doctrine I could find to see if I could somehow bury him in the cemetery, but I could find no such provision. However, I found no rules against extending the fence after I buried your friend.” This is abiding in God’s love which has no boundaries.

This wonderful story leads me into something that I must say this morning. There is a passage in Luke that happens on Palm Sunday. As Jesus enters Jerusalem, the Pharisees tell Jesus to make his disciples be quiet, as they are causing a scene. Jesus responds by saying “if they were silent, the stones would cry out.” The issue at hand is Amendment 1, and indeed, the cry for justice needs to be heard.

Before I get going on this topic, I realize that this is a sensitive topic, and I realize and respect that we will not agree on every aspect, but that does not mean that we should be silent. I also want to make it clear that I am speaking not about politics, but about abiding in love and justice. I am not telling you how to vote; I do not condemn anyone for voting differently than me, nor do I speak for St. Francis Church or any other institution, but rather I speak as a disciple of Jesus.

I will be voting against Amendment 1 on Tuesday for several reasons. I take this encounter between the Ethiopian eunuch and the deacon Philip very seriously. After having the Scriptures explained, the eunuch sees a body of water and boldly asks “what is to prevent me from being baptized.” He very well knows the answer- a lot. He is black, he is a eunuch, meaning, in the language of Deuteronomy, that he was unclean because he had undergone genital mutilation, and he was a foreigner. But you know how Philip responds? He says “nothing is preventing you from abiding in Jesus or experiencing the love of God” and he baptizes him.

So the same-sex couple comes to sanctify their love before God and get the same legal benefits that any other married couple gets asks “what is to prevent us from being married?” I hope and pray that the answer is not “Amendment 1.” If we’ve learned one thing in the country, it is that legislating discrimination, even for religious reasons is never a good idea. One hundred years ago, women could not vote because of a law. Just 40 years ago in the church, women could not be ordained because of a rule. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost on plantations and in the Civil War because our Constitution said that blacks were only 3/5 of a person. In Nazi Germany, we saw the dangers of saying that the ideal person should look a certain way.

Perhaps though the most compelling reason to vote against this amendment is, to use Jesus’ metaphor- we don’t know where the vine will grow in the future. We are branches, and we are only part of the plant, not the whole thing. Passing this amendment would close the door to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has guided the Church to see things in a new light. The first followers of Jesus wanted to exclude all Gentiles from the Church, and we’ve excluded people from full life on the vine ever since then, on the basis of gender, nationality, race, education, economic class, theological beliefs, and now we’re prepared to do it again based on sexual orientation. And if history is any guide, some generation down the road will apologize for us, will overturn laws, and wonder how it was that we called ourselves Christians and did not abide in God’s love. Love has no qualifications, no boundaries, no fences, no limits, and we do not need to act or legislate it as if it does. The love between people need not be limited; nor should our love of them, or rather our lack thereof, places limits upon them.

There is a major justice issue with this law, as people on both sides of the aisle recognize that this is a poorly written amendment which will have many unintended consequences. Marriage between same-sex couples is already outlawed in North Carolina, which is unfortunate enough. But we do not need to pass a law that would harm children, elderly unmarried couples, and victims of domestic violence by dissolving all relationships other than marriage between one man and one woman. This amendment is more about justice than marriage. In our baptismal vows, we promise to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” This amendment would do a lot of injustice to all kinds of people, and I do not know how I can honor my baptismal vows and support this amendment, because it is not about abiding in Jesus or his love. We do not need to speak for future generations, we do not need to cut off the Holy Spirit from moving in our hearts and minds. We do not need to cut others off from the vine of God’s love. What is to prevent me from abiding in Jesus the true vine? I pray that no one answers, “the close-mindedness of the church,” or “the hypocrisy of those who follow Jesus but don’t share his love.”

This amendment will be decided though not based on justice, not even on the will of the people, but rather by the small handful of people who go out of vote in the primary. This amendment could very well pass if those who wish to stand up for justice do not take the time to stand up at the polls and vote. So I urge us all, as people of faith, as people who stand up for the oppressed, as people who take part in the welfare and governance of our land, to vote, regardless of how you cast your ballot.

It all goes back to abiding. Our world is hungry to have its roots planted in something stable, something true, something life giving and affirming. For a variety of reasons, we’ve become disconnected from the true vine, which is Jesus. Today is a day to reconnect. Today is a day to reach out to those who have been cut off from the vine, to those who have been wounded by the branches, to those who want a connection, but aren’t sure how to graft themselves into the vine. We have the opportunity to change our world with each and every breath that we take. By choosing to abide in Jesus, to be rooted in his love, to follow his pattern, to love like he did, then we will bear much fruit in his name.

Amen.

February 12 - Epiphany 6B

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

            Today we are presented with readings that deal with issues of healing and compassion. So that we’re all on the same page, healing in both our reading from 2 Kings and Mark means “to make clean or pure.” Note that the language here is about ritual purity, not medical healing, nor is it the language of salvation. The other word which we run into is compassion. The word itself doesn’t actually show up in either reading, but it is implied throughout. Compassion is a compound word in Latin, with the com meaning “together” or “with;” and the passio means suffering- so “suffering with.”

            Here at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Greensboro, we have as our core values- simplicity, compassion, and hope. So today it is good for us to consider the value of compassion, reflecting on the way that we can take compassion from a slogan to being a way of life.

            The way I’ve structured this sermon is to take a look at the three people involved with these healings in 2 Kings and Mark. First we’ll consider the healed person, then the agent of the healing, and finally the healer.

            In both of our readings, the presenting issue is leprosy. The deeper issue really isn’t the actual medical diagnosis, perhaps they had Hansen’s Disease, perhaps it was some other skin condition. What mattered is that they were both unclean, they were contaminated. Society viewed them in the same way that we viewed the first HIV/AIDS patients in the 80s. These are people that were kept away from others, they were quarantined, lest they infect others.

We have the benefit of modern science and we now know that leprosy is not very contagious and is transmitted not through touch, but by breathing in the cough or sneeze of an infected person. Furthermore, about 95% of the population is naturally immune to this disease. What plagued Naaman and this man was not leprosy, but it was a cultural stigma. They were deemed to be unacceptable- not for who they were, nor for what they said or did, but they were cast out because of fear. The fear of compassion. People were afraid that if they spent time with these people, that they would literally be suffering with them. And as I mentioned, this fear was misplaced. Had people taken the time to minister to these lepers, they would have seen that they themselves would not have been infected.

And the same is true of those people whom we avoid like the plague. If you minister to the homeless, you don’t lose your house. If you have same-sex marriages in your church, you don’t erode the sanctity of marriage or family values. If you visit someone in prison, you don’t become a felon. If you pray with a Muslim, you don’t become a terrorist. If you’re a Republican, by talking to a Democrat you don’t become a socialist. If you’re a Democrat and you converse with a Republican, you don’t become a ruthless capitalist. If you drive your car through a Hispanic or African-American neighborhood, you don’t have your windows shot out. Maybe we don’t run into lepers on a daily basis, but we sure do treat a lot of people like they have leprosy.

The reason why I’m making this point so that we don’t do what many people do when they read the Bible. They say “I’m so glad that we now understand leprosy and don’t treat people like that” or “this story is 2,000 years old and has nothing to do with me.” Modern day leprosies exist because of prejudice, our own actions of pre-judging people, our insistence that we know what the other side will respond with before we even say anything.

We do treat people like lepers, but sometimes we need to be healed too, and these readings have something important to say to us, who needing healing, as well. The first thing to notice is that healing takes a while. Naaman has to bathe seven times in the river. He even had to go through a process. A modern translation of the story would read a bit differently. Naaman would have started by seeing his primary care physician, and then he went to the local specialists, but they didn’t have an answer. So he had to call his insurance company and go back and forth with them for a while about being allowed to see an out of network specialist at a large university hospital the next state over. But the dean of medicine there decides that he doesn’t have a clue what’s wrong and doesn’t want to deal with it. And eventually he gets healed by some faith healer on the outskirts of town. I know many of you are facing health struggles, and if you aren’t, I’m sure you know someone who is, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a neighbor. As a priest, I’ve gotten to know my way around Greensboro nursing homes, Cone and Long hospitals, even Baptist in Winston; there is a lot of hurt in our lives Don’t we all wish it was as simple as a quick healing? But as we see in Naaman’s case, sometimes it takes a while.

And for the man in Mark, it wasn’t any easier. He had likely had leprosy for years, he had likely give up hope. But he heard of a new drug trial, he heard that this man was going throughout the region healing people. Now Jesus wasn’t the first messiah figure to be running around Israel, he had probably heard of other such “faith healers” and had been disappointed by their robust promises. But this man had a lot of trust in God. He didn’t come up to Jesus and greet him the way that most sick people in the Bible did. He didn’t say “have mercy on me, Son of David,” he didn’t even call him Lord. He just said, if you choose, you can make me clean. What faith!

What if Jesus though didn’t cure him? A lot of people have hope and faith that rivals this mans, and yet they die of cancer or other diseases. Mark wasn’t exactly a doctor, he really didn’t know if this man had leprosy or not. Maybe he did, maybe he had some other, more serious skin disease. Again, remember that in the text of these readings, Jesus didn’t technically heal anyone, he just made them clean. And in being made clean, these people were allowed to rejoin society. Maybe this man died 2 weeks later of a more serious ailment. But what Jesus did for him allowed him to live those two weeks fully. Jesus took away the stigma, Jesus made it so that he could rejoin society, so that he could again see his family and friends. And the same is true for us in our dealings with disease and death. Sometimes people recover, sometimes they don’t. But what God offers us is the opportunity to have a good life, and a good death.

We don’t have to be alone in our diseases, we don’t have to face our fears alone. And now I’m talking about more than medical diseases, I’m back to modern day leprosies. If we follow Jesus in showing compassion, in standing up for justice, in seeing the dignity in every human being, then we too can help to make sure that everyone has a good life that ends with a good death.

And one final point on those who are healed. They took part in their healings. The man in Mark answered Jesus by saying “I do choose to be made clean.” Naaman sought the help of others and went through the ritual washing, which seemed ridiculous to him. Isn’t that how healing is? Sometimes we do have to go to strange places and take part in strange rituals. But what is important is that we take the step in doing so. Healing would not have come to either of these people if they had not been resilient.

Next, I’d like to turn to the agent of the healing. Sometimes translators of the Bible get things wrong, and they completely struck out in this Mark reading. Our translation this morning says that Jesus was moved with pity, which really is a nice sentiment and makes for a nice story. But the problem is that scholars agree that the more accurate and historical translation is that Jesus was angered or annoyed. Sure does change the story, doesn’t it?

Why would Jesus be angry with someone asking for help? Have you ever had someone come up to you and ask “I hope I’m not bothering you, but I just need…”  Or about the letters that you get from various charities asking for money? Or how about the church, do you get angry when you hear a stewardship sermon or get that pledge card in the mail?

If you’ll think back to our reading from last Sunday- Jesus did a healing, then went to pray and said “let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” So here’s Jesus, all excited about his mission, energized to go out and preach about the Kingdom of God, and he can’t even take a step towards the next down without being held back. Does that ever happen to you? You get set to do something, and then life happens? If I had a dollar for every daily schedule that I’ve had to readjust because of funerals and hospital visits, well, I couldn’t quite retire, but I’d have a nice stack of cash. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to minister to people, it’s just sometimes I have, in my mind, things that I need to do. It’s when you have dinner reservations to a nice restaurant and a friend calls to say that they really need you to come help with a bout of depression, a lost dog, a sick child. Getting sidetracked isn’t something that most of us enjoy.

This is really where the etymology of compassion really comes into play. Showing compassion is hard because it means to suffer with. When you are interrupted to do the work of compassion, it does drain you. Being compassionate with your time makes you busier and might add to your stress level. Being compassionate with your money means you have less of it. I know it’s basic math, but if you give 5% of your income to charity, then that’s 5% less to go on vacation with or put towards debt. Everyone thinks homeless shelters are good things, but who wants one built next door to their house? Jesus told this man not to tell anyone about the healing. Why? Perhaps because Jesus knew that compassion would cost him some freedom. As his reputation grew and grew, more and more people would sidetrack him. Or maybe he was worried that word would get out that he had touched a leper, and he himself would now been seen as unclean and he’d be unable to do his ministry of preaching. Compassion does cost us- it will cost us time, money, freedom, emotions, and energy.

So why do we bother with showing compassion? Why should be concerned with healing others? After all, shouldn’t we take care of ourselves? Frederick Buechner once said “compassion is the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s shoes. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” Compassion is one of those God given gifts that we have. You know that queasy feeling you get in your gut with you refuse to look at the homeless person on the street, when you refuse to fill out your pledge card, when you don’t make the time to call a friend in need? Some of it stems from guilt, but it’s a part of feeling compassion. It’s you suffering along with them. As long as there is suffering in our world, you too will suffer. It is our task to build the Kingdom of God so that there won’t be any more suffering to suffer with.

And finally, let’s take a look at the healer, that is the source of the healing. I hope that we can all recognize this as God. One of the things we see in these readings is that God’s focus and care isn’t too global to care about our local problems. A lot of people think things such as “God doesn’t care about my problem, my illness, my fear because there are genocides, famines, wars, earthquakes, and dictators in the world. Those are real problems, and God should focus on them.” And that’s half right. God is working in the hearts and minds of people around the world on the “big” issues like war and hunger. But God too cares about your being out of work or your nagging pain in your back. After all, Naaman was a rich and powerful leader, his disease wasn’t a huge hardship for him, Naaman wasn’t even a believer in God until after he was healed. But yet, God has compassion for him, just as God has compassion for all of us.

God is the source of our healing, the strength that allows us to embrace our brokenness and hope for rebirth. But it’s important to remember that healing doesn’t always mean a cure. Good things happen and bad things happen. That’s simply the nature of the world that God created. We have free will, so does nature, so does cancer. It is not that God chooses to heal some people and ignore others, but rather that God loves us and trusts us enough to give us that free will. But when that free will leads to suffering, when it leads to death, when it leads to evil, God is a God of compassion, a God who will suffer with us. As I’ve said before, what God gives us is maximum support, with minimum protection. The glory of the Resurrection only comes after the suffering of the Crucifixion.

We’ve covered a lot today in examining healing and compassion. Healing is a process that requires us to take a part. Healing isn’t always about the cure, sometimes is about being given the grace to live. Those who act as agents of God’s healing find it to be a challenging task, as they are called to suffer with people in showing compassion, but we do this work to make our world whole. We do all of this knowing that true healing comes from our compassionate God, who deeply loves and cares for each and every one of us.

It has been said that if we don’t make a difference by trying, we’ll make a difference by not trying, and the same is true in showing compassion. The way to healing our own hurts, the way to healing our world, is in showing compassion; in taking the time to be with others, to hear about their suffering, and to suffer with them. Remember, our task is not to be healer, that is God’s role in this process. But let us constantly seek ways to bring the grace and compassion of God to those in need of healing.

Let our prayer today be in the words of our Psalm today, verses 11-12, if you’ll allow me this paraphrase- “be with me, O Lord, and show me your compassion. O Lord, be my healer. You can turn my crying into dancing; you can relieve my suffering and clothe me with the joy of redemption.” Amen.