March 1, 2020 - Lent 1A

Lectionary Readings

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

            In February, our own Dr. Trevor Eppehimer led a fantastic Sunday school class on The Powers That Be. The premise of the book that inspired the class is that there are real forces in this world that, though invisible, very much impact societies and individuals. Think of getting swept up in something that you’re not very interested in. I know this might make some of you think less of me, but I’m just really not a soccer fan. But when the US team was playing well in the last World Cup, I kind of got swept up in the fever. I watched them play and cheered on the goals. Or think about the Olympics, how many of us ordinarily care about curling? Well, that same thing is true for things like selfishness, or retaliation, or fear. These forces are real and by ignoring their reality we only make ourselves into unwitting slaves to them.

February 26, 2020 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings

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

            Ash Wednesday is a unique day in the Christian year. On every other day of the year, our focus is outward – we focus on caring for those in need, or the environment, or the Church and we focus on glorifying and praising God. Certainly, we praise God in all things, Ash Wednesday included. But today is unique because our focus is not outward, but rather inward. On Ash Wednesday we come face to face with our sinfulness, our mortality, and our neediness. It’s important that we spend one day a year doing this sort of introspection because, for one, it’s honest, but also because such reflection prepares us to receive more fully the grace of God.

April 19, 2019 - Good Friday

Lectionary Readings

Jesus, Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us. Amen.

            It doesn’t always work out this way, but this year our celebration of Good Friday falls on the Jewish Passover. Tonight, Jews around the world will gather with family and friends for a Seder dinner to remember the saving events of God that occurred at the Passover. You’ll recall that when the people were slaves in Egypt, God sent a series of plagues to get Pharaoh to let the people go free. The most severe of these plagues was the killing of all firstborn children in the land. However, to protect the Jewish firstborn, God instructs the people to get a lamb, eat it, and use its blood as a marking on the door post. When the plague of Death sweeps through the land, it will pass over the homes marked with the blood of the lamb. It was this event that led Pharaoh to tell the Hebrews to leave Egypt, and at the Red Sea, God ushered his people into freedom. Since then, Jews have gathered each year to remember the Passover.

April 17, 2019 - Holy Wednesday

Lectionary Readings

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

            When I sat down with these readings to prepare this sermon, what first caught me was what Jesus said, “[The one who will betray me] is the one to whom I give this piece of bread.” Maybe “caught” isn’t the right word, as it was more than that. It was more like that phrase arrested me, implicated me, challenged me. I thought of all the times that I’ve received the gracious piece of bread that Jesus offers, realizing that I am one of his betrayers. Deep and dark thoughts for this Holy Wednesday, I know.

March 6, 2019 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings; Psalm 51

Grace, mercy, and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

            There was an article in The New York Times a few weeks ago that caught my attention. The title is “Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin.” It’s written by a mother who writes, “The notion of sin dominated my girlhood, it was the inflexible yardstick against which I was measured. God was the megaphone bleating in my head: You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad.” She goes on to tell how she slowly wandered away from the church and religion altogether. When she became a mother, she resolved to raise her children differently than she was. She concludes by saying, “I had raised my daughter without sin.”

February 14, 2018 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings; Psalm 51

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

            St. Anselm once wrote, “You have not considered the weight of sin.” Obviously, we were not the audience he had in mind, but the shoe fits. Ash Wednesday is a day on which we, more intently than we usually do, focus on sin. One of the questions that I often get as a priest is “What does it mean to sin?” The question behind the question is often “So, I did this thing, how bad is it?” If we are going to consider sin today, we need to have a working definition to start from.

July 9, 2017 - Proper 9A

Lectionary Readings

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

            “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” For all of his high soaring rhetoric, today Paul puts his finger squarely on the human condition – I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. I don’t know about you all, but when I hear those words, I think “Yeah, been there, done that.”

March 1, 2017 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings

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

            “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Those are the words with which I will impose ashes on your foreheads in just a few moments. That’s an inconvenient truth one if I’ve ever heard one. And yet, outside of Christmas and Easter, Ash Wednesday is typically one of the most well attended days in the Church year. People who don’t regularly come on Sundays come out to have a priest put a cross of ashes on their forehead and remind them that they are dust. How is this Gospel? How is this Good News? Or is it?

Ash Wednesday - February 10, 2016

Lectionary Readings

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

            “Have mercy, Lord, for we are sinners in your sight.” That line comes from Eucharistic Prayer C, which we used over the past several Sundays. It had been a while since I had used Prayer C, and I’ll confess that I was uncomfortable with that line from it. There is a particular brand of Christianity that focuses on sin and buys into the theological concept of “total depravity,” believing that humans are wretched creatures who are overrun with sin. Those ideas though have never resonated with me; in fact, that’s the opposite of what I believe.

August 9, 2015 - Proper 14B

Lectionary Readings

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

            “Christianity is all about salvation,” is a phrase that you’ve probably heard. And it’s true, Christianity is about salvation. Sometimes, though, we use words that are so big and nebulous that they actually have very little meaning- and salvation is one of those words. Salvation from what? What happens if we are not saved? Who does the saving? These are all good and valid questions, but they are questions for another day. Instead, today, the question before us is what are we saved into? That is, what does it mean to be a recipient of salvation?

August 2, 2015 - Proper 13B

Lectionary Readings

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

            You’ll recall a few Sundays ago that I mentioned that the lectionary gives us three strikes against King David. The first was three Sundays ago, when David relocated the Ark of the Covenant for his own political gain. Two weeks ago, David built himself a very fine house of cedar before he thought about building such a house for God. Then last week, when I was on vacation, you all heard the story of David and Bathsheba. I understand that the guest preacher focused on the Gospel last week. So as an introduction to today’s reading from 2 Samuel, let’s quickly review the events of that third strike against David which we heard last Sunday.

July 6, 2014 - Proper 9A

Lectionary Readings

O God, the King eternal, whose light divides the day from the night and turns the shadow of death into the morning: Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep your law, and guide our feet into the way of peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

          In our first reading this morning we heard the wonderful story of the first meeting of Rebekah and Isaac. Isaac needed a wife from his own people, and Abraham had instructed Laban to find a woman with a compassionate heart for his son. He finds the prescribed woman at the well one day, and they lived happily ever after. Except, they didn’t. As the story continues, we learn that Rebekah is unable to conceive a child. And though this was disheartening to the couple, it also put God’s promise into jeopardy. Abraham was promised that his descendents would be as numerous as the stars, and Isaac was the heir. The entire fate of the Hebrew people was dependent upon this marriage between Isaac and Rebekah. As we all know, life is never quite as simple as “happily ever after.” Life, for all of its joys and blessings, is also full of trials and challenges. Most of us can handle good news, but how we respond to the struggles of life will not only say a lot about who we are, but will also dictate how we experience life.

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.

February 17, 2013 - Lent 1C

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.

            When I was in Israel just about a year ago, one of the moments that was most deeply meaningful happened at narrow spot of the Jordan River. This site is known as Qasar El Yahud and it’s a rather still and brown section of the Jordan, but scholars and religious authorities suggest that this is the site where Jesus was baptized. So our group visited that site, after a drive of about an hour through the desert of Israel, and we renewed our baptismal vows there. Behind us was Mount Temptation, the place where today’s reading from Luke took place. The link between baptism and temptation is unmistakable given the geography.

But it was an even more ominous experience. The Jordan is about 20 feet wide at that spot, and on the other side is the country of Jordan. So as I looked across the river, there was a Jordanian soldier with an M16 on patrol. And behind me was an Israeli military installation. As I walked the path down to the river, I passed fencing that had large yellows signs on it, and the signs read “Danger! Mines!”

            My experience there isn’t all that different than what Jesus would have experienced after his Baptism. Just before our reading from Luke begins today, Jesus was baptized and then was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, and in the wilderness he encountered the danger of the Devil. And the Devil will be the topic for this sermon. We’ll explore several things about the Devil. And for the purposes of this sermon, the words “evil,” “sin,” or “Satan” are roughly synonymous with “Devil.”

            The first thing to say about the Devil is that the Devil is real. Now I know that for some of us, that’s a tough pill to swallow. We like to think that the Devil is some part of mythology that we don’t need any more. We say that the Devil was simply a way for the person in olden times to explain bad things. Or sometimes we even frame it in theology and argue that since the Devil is evil, and God created everything, but God wouldn’t create evil, there must not be a Devil. But those thoughts are all wrong.

            We all have experiences of the Devil in our lives. How many of us have said “I don’t know what got into me” or “I don’t know why I did that?” We all have moments of weakness, we are all tempted, and the Baptismal vows that we have made will be tested. This is, of course, is God’s world, but the Devil is a player on the field. To think otherwise is to fall prey to the very nature of evil. In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis writes of a demon coaching another demon on the ways of leading humans to Hell. At one point the teacher demon says “the fact that devils are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in their minds, suggest to them a picture of something in red tights and persuade them that since they cannot believe in that they therefore cannot believe in you.”

            Although there may not be a being named Satan, the idea of the Devil is real. Perhaps not in an ontological sense, but evil exists. Even if we say that evil is simply the privation of the good or is the effect of the divine “no,” evil is a force in our world. The moment we allow ourselves into thinking otherwise, the Devil achieves the first victory.

            The Devil comes to Jesus in personal form because we experience evil in a deeply personal way. Some of the worst evils we know are betrayal and abuse, which happen at the hands of others. Devil is presented as a person because that is real. And by presenting the Devil as a person, Luke makes it clear that though evil can dwell within us, we are not the Devil and the Devil is something much larger than any of us.

            The Devil is reasonable. Notice the things that Jesus is tempted with, nothing too outlandish. Perhaps some other time I’ll preach in more detail on the temptations that the Devil offers Jesus, but essentially, the Devil comes and tempts Jesus with being relevant, powerful, and spectacular. And we are tempted by those things as well. The Devil uses logic in tempting Jesus. The Devil even quotes Scripture, which is a good reminder to us that just because you quote the Bible doesn’t mean that the Devil isn’t at work. You likely won’t easily object to the guiles of the Devil, because the arguments will be reasonable.

            And in a similar line of thought, the Devil is smart, smarter than you. If you got all A’s on your report card, the Devil got all A+’s. If you have a Ph.D, the Devil has two. You can’t outsmart the Devil, and the moment that you think you can, you’ve already fallen into the trap. We all know that our intellect can justify anything that we want it do. We can justify lying, cheating, and stealing. We see it happen all the time. A lot of people in Washington, regardless of political persuasion, will tell you that Bill Clinton is one of the smartest men to ever sit in the Oval Office. And look what his superior intellect of his was able to justify in the way of giving into temptation. The smarter you are, the harder the temptation because the easier it will be for your intellect to justify sin and evil.

            Something that deeply disturbs me is the reprehensible actions started by the Bush administration but made even worse by the Obama administration. I’m referring to the rampant use of assassinations by predator drones. Somehow, we have misused our intellect to justify the indiscriminate killing of enemies, and even worse, American citizens with no due process or judicial review. I am deeply disturbed that the inalienable rights that Americans have are being unilaterally stripped away, that President Obama’s intellect has allowed him to decide that those rights do not apply. We are not a country that kills first and asks questions later, but again, our intellect can justify anything. There’s a reason why God never asks us for our minds, but instead God prefers our hearts.

            Next, we can say that the Devil is subtle. The Devil won’t come asking you to sell the farm, but maybe to just plant a few crops. Or as someone recently told me, if you give the Devil a ride, eventually he’ll ask to drive. The Devil is subtle, sometimes by getting us to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the even worse doing of the wrong things for the right reasons. It has been said that it is better to have vices than a surplus of virtue. When we have too much virtue, we lack a sense of conscience because we think we’re safely on the side of morality.

            One of the ways this subtlety works is that we don’t really think we’re sinners. We had an outside speaker at clergy conference this past fall, and after worshiping with us, he remarked that during the Prayers of the People, when we prayed for the sick, we all named people out loud, and when we thanked God for the blessings of this life, we all shared joys, but when it came time for the silence after “let us confess our sins to God,” you could have heard a pin drop. How many of us really see ourselves as sinners? Don’t you think the world would be a better place if everyone was more like you?

            I’ve noticed that Episcopalians, who are by-and-large, educated and at least middle class, tend to shy away from saying words like Jesus, sin, or cross in public. Talk to a Baptist and they’ll tell you all about how they were a wretched soul until Jesus saved them. I don’t think I’ve ever had that conversation with an Episcopalian. And I think that is, in part, because we’re not so convinced that we’re actually sinners. Sure, we’ll acknowledge that we’re not perfect, but it’s far too easy to fall for the subtle argument that we’re part of the solution, not the problem.

            The truth of the matter is that we’re all sinners, Jesus did die for you in some sense, and apart from God’s grace, you’re doomed to Hell. But the Devil comes to us with the subtlety of thinking that the Confession that we say must be about other people, not us.

            Another way that the Devil uses subtlety is in redefining what is normal. One of the translations of the word “Devil” is “slanderer;” the Devil distorts reality and slanders what God would have as normal. When we start to accept as normal things that are very wrong, the Devil starts to win. Think about driving around Greensboro, on most corners you can find a homeless person. And how many times do we give it a second thought? It has become normal to see a person standing on a corner with a cardboard sign begging for money. There is nothing normal about that. The norm should not be that we have people living in our community that don’t have a roof over their head.

            Did you know that in the entire country, the Greensboro/High Point region ranks 4^th worst in people who report that they don’t have enough money for food? Backpack Beginnings reports that North Carolina is the second worst state in terms of childhood hunger and over half of children enrolled in Guilford Country schools are on free or reduced lunch. If you hear nothing in this sermon, hear this- childhood hunger is not normal and it is not acceptable.

            But the Devil comes and does the work of evil, not always through genocides or mass killings, but in far more devious ways by redefining what is normal for us. By redefining the normal, we accept things that if you asked us about, we’d say we’d never allow to happen. But they happen all around us.

            This is part of what is going on in our reading from Deuteronomy this morning. God is instructing the people what to do when they come out of the wilderness and enter the Promised Land. They are to recount their history, give the first fruits to God, share their food with the hungry and the foreigners, and show gratitude. Gratitude though is not the norm. Theologian Karl Barth once remarked that all sin is basically ingratitude. How often do we take a moment out of the busyness of life to take stock of our blessings and respond with gratitude? Great evil is done by the Devil when we accept an attitude of ingratitude as normal.

            And moving into our next point, that the Devil challenges our identity, it is vital to be thankful. Remember what happened at Jesus’ baptism, the heavens opened up and the voice of God was heard saying “You are my son, the beloved.” And immediately, the Devil challenges Jesus’ identity. Jesus was just called the Son of God, and the Devil comes and says “IF you are the Son of God,” asking him to prove his identity. Part of the reason why Jesus was able to resist the Devil is that Jesus knew who he was and was confident in his identity, and he had gratitude for being the beloved of God.

            It is fitting that the wilderness is the setting for this passage. Alfred North Whitehead said that “religion is what we do with our solitude.” In those moments when we are alone in the wilderness the voices of self-doubt will creep in. But if we can remember, as Jesus did, that we are the beloved of God, we stand a better chance at resisting temptation.

            In the Bible, the wilderness is a special place, it is where God ministers to Hagar in her grief, where God meets Moses and baptizes Jesus, and where the wandering Hebrews become the nation of Israel. And wilderness is not a bad place to be, remember, the Spirit, not the Devil, led Jesus into the wilderness. One desert theologian wrote that “The wilderness, in short, is a place of threat, vulnerability, and danger. Yet it is also a place where we encounter a love we never could have imagined.” The wildernesses of our lives are the times and places where we will find our true identity.

            Our identity is one of the things we hold most dear in our hearts, and rightfully so, so it is no surprise that the Devil comes to attack us there. Using a term from the work of Edwin Friedman, Jesus was self-differentiated. Self-differentiation happens when we are able to define our goals and values apart from surrounding pressures, when you are able to say “I” instead of “we,” when we are able to take responsibility for our own destiny and emotional being while still remaining connected to others. Jesus was able to do this. He didn’t need the approval of the Devil, or the glory of others, to be confident and happy. He wasn’t going to live on someone else’s terms. Jesus knew that his identity was the beloved of God, and so when the Devil came to challenge his identity, he was ready for it. Never forget, you are the beloved of God, and so is everyone you meet. Keep those things in mind and the Devil will have a much harder time testing you.

            And the last thing to say about the Devil is that the he or she is persistent. At the end of the reading, the text says that “the Devil departed from him until a more opportune time.” The Devil doesn’t give up and will come back when your defenses are down and your emotional vulnerability is high. Even if you resist a temptation today, you can be assured that another temptation will be around the corner. There is a reason why Jesus says “for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it.” Perhaps the persistence of the Devil is why when Jesus teaches us to pray, he includes the line “and lead us not into temptation.”

            So the things to say about the Devil this morning are that the Devil is real, personal, reasonable, smart, subtle, challenging our identity, and persistent. As we embark on our Lenten journey, we will be tested. Perhaps you’ve given something up for Lent, chocolate or meat, and that’s good. But it’s fairly easy to give up luxuries, but far worse to give up our soul to the Devil. I don’t know how the Devil will come to you. I don’t know what your wilderness exam will be. Only you know what devils have your number and what bribes they can use to get you. But I know that they’ll be calling you.

            As we enter the wilderness, may it be a holy time, a time of finding our true identity. Come Easter morning, may we be found to have the strength to resist temptation and confidence in our being the beloved of God. And dear Lord, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.

August 12 - Proper 14B

Almighty God, may you guide us to seek the truth- come whence it will, lead where it might, cost what it will. Amen.

            Are you serious? You’ve got to be kidding me! Another Sunday where the Gospel passage is from chapter 6 of John. In fact, we have five Sundays in a row of this whole “bread of life” saga. What do these lectionary composers expect preachers to do with five Sundays in a row of the same passage? How many times do they want us to explain the same thing? Are they testing our patience to see how long before we get bored? It’s ridiculous.

            You might wonder why I’m so angry about this. Well, this is a sermon about the place of anger in our lives and in our faith. And while preaching for five weeks in a row from the same passage in John can be a challenge, I’m not really that upset about it. We all know anger, but we’re not really sure what to do with it. My thesis for this morning is that anger is a forgotten Christian virtue. But it is one of the more misunderstood and dangerous virtues.           

Let’s start by looking at the dark side of anger. Often, anger is seen as a sin. In fact, anger is one of the 7 deadly sins. Sometimes it’s referred to as “wrath,” but that is also an acceptable translation of the words for anger we find in today’s readings. Wrath is a rejection of God’s grace, it is to abandon hope of restoration, it is full of pride and impatience. Anger in the Bible is related to the word for “puff up” or “swell,” so it has to do with an inflated sense of ego.

            And what we do with this sort of anger is even worse. We either hold it in and let it grow into a monster until it finally bursts forth and wreaks havoc, or we let it out too easily and are constantly bickering and snapping at others. Neither is helpful, and neither is virtuous. Anger also causes us to judge others too quickly and we start playing the blame game. This is what we see happening in our reading from John today. Jesus says that he is the bread of life and as our text notes, “they began to complain about him.” They got angry, and they got combative. They say “is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” Essentially, they’re insulting him and saying “where does he get off saying that?” They do evil in their anger- they discredit him, they launch personal attacks, they dishonor the God in him. Sound like any political commercials you’ve seen lately?

            When we get angry, too often we attack. And when this anger spews out in this way, we distort the subject of our anger, dehumanizing them. This is what allows people to justify their acts of violence towards others. When anger allows us to dehumanize and invalidate the grace and love of God in each person, and in all of Creation for that matter, then that anger is indeed a sin. This sort of anger distracts us from seeing people as the beloved children of God.

The other way that anger affects us is by distorting us. Mary Gordon once wrote an essay about anger. She tells the story of hosting a family gathering. She was the only one in the kitchen, doing all the preparing and all the washing of dishes. And you all know how that is, you get angry when you hear everyone laughing and see them sipping their wine without them offering any help. Earlier that day, she promised her mother and children that she would take them the pool to relax after the meal. So once the guests leave, the children and mother get in the car with their bathing suits on. They wait a few seconds and they started leaning on the horn, “beep beep beep”. She flew out the kitchen, and jumped on the hood of the car and started banging on windshield. She screamed “I’m not taking you the pool, I’m never taking you to the pool, and I won’t let you in my house again until the day you die.”

Have you ever feel like that? I’ve never jumped on a car, but I’ve wanted to punch through a windshield before. When she calmed down, one of her children came to her and said “mom, you really scared me.” She asked “what was scary about me?” And the child responded “I was scared because I couldn’t recognize you.” Anger makes us something that we are not. It can destroy us and make us unrecognizable even to our closest loved ones. Anger can define us when left unchecked. But instead, anger should drive us to love the good. So with that in mind, we turn to looking at the virtue of anger.

When anger appears virtuous it grows out of love. When we love someone or something, we are invested in. CS Lewis once wrote that “there is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.” Anger is the proper and healthy response to having your heart wrung and broken. Being angry is natural when you are disappointed in the loss or failure of the object of your love. We hold those whom we love to high standards, we trust them, we believe in them- and so when expectations are not met, we get angry. We get angry that goals are not achieved and purposes are not lived into. Anger is our sign that things didn’t go the way we expected. If we can’t be angry about things that are important to us, we should take a hard look at our devotions and commitments.

This sort of anger is similar to the burn you get on your hand when touching a hot stove. It says to us “danger ahead.” Or you might compare anger to a flashing yellow traffic light, alerting us to be cautious because things aren’t going as planned. William Sloane Coffin famously remarked that “anger is what keeps us from tolerating the intolerable.”

This is a sort of righteous anger, the kind of anger that we find in God, Jesus, and the prophets. We see it in the interactions between God and Moses, Abraham, David, and Job. Anger can very much be a Christian virtue if it is a part of true love. Jesus, in anger, overturns the moneychanger’s tables in the Temple and had many a heated and angry debate with Pharisees. Prophets such as Micah, Jeremiah, and Obadiah are filled with righteous anger at people who pervert justice and abuse the widow and the orphan. Their anger keeps them from tolerating the intolerable, and thereby their anger allows them to call people back to the Kingdom of God.

If we take a closer look at the story from 2 Samuel this morning we can see a great illustration of both anger as a sin and anger as a virtue. I don’t often like to say things such as “if you think your life is bad, just look at this story from the Bible” because sometimes people truly are living in the valley of the shadow of death and things are that bad. You know the saying “it was a flood of Biblical proportions;” well, David’s family is a dysfunctional family of Biblical proportions. So we’ve been reading about David’s affair with Bathsheba and murder of her husband. That’s pretty bad. But then one of David’s daughters is raped by her half-brother, Amnon, who then is killed by his half-brother, Absalom, who was Tamar’s full brother. There’s a nephew, Joab, in the family as well who had bad blood with Absalom, David’s son. Absalom is killed in today’s reading by Joab and then Joab is later killed under Solomon because David ordered it. Like I said, dysfunction on the Biblical scale.

But what I want to point out is how David treats Absalom. Absalom had rebelled against his father, David. He had taken David’s concubines for himself and was wanting to overthrow his father as king. David was full of anger, but that anger did not overcome the love he had for his son. His anger remained virtuous- it signaled to him that there were problems in the family, but he did not resort to revenge. So he says “deal gently with Absalom.” He would not let his anger destroy the relationship or define him. Joab, on the other hand, was full of sinful anger. He disobeys orders, abuses his power, and murders his defenseless cousin. His was an anger of retribution, of taking justice into his own hands, of hatred.

We all experience both kinds of anger from time to time. However, it is our decision to control our anger like David, or to let our anger control us, like Joab. I’m angry. I’m really angry at times. I’m angry about followers of Jesus who in the gun-control debate put the Second Amendment above the peace of Jesus. I try to avoid fast food, but when I eat it, my favorite meal was a spicy chicken sandwich with waffle fries. But now I can’t make that order without getting a side of prejudice- that makes me angry. I’m angry that Christianity has become a cultural assumption in America instead of a decision for sacramental and sacrificial living. I’m angry at politicians who seem to lie constantly and only care about their own agenda instead of the good of people who they represent. But you and I both know that this sort of anger is only going to fester until it destroys me, or those around me when the anger bursts out. So what are we to do with this anger? How do we let anger be a virtue instead of a sin?

Anger tells us that something isn’t right, and imitating Jesus is the way to address that. We heard St. Paul discuss the place of sinful anger and imitation of Christ in his letter to Ephesus this morning. Theologian Richard Niebuhr talks about the “ethic of response.” This is different from people who wear bracelets that say “WWJD?” and ask themselves “what would Jesus do?” That’s a dangerous question because you’re allowed to answer for yourself. I don’t know about you, but I’m not comfortable speaking as if I were Jesus. Instead, the ethic of response is about responding to God’s nature and activity.

So God loves us, therefore we should love others. God created the world, so we should give thanks and protect the earth. God redeems us, so we should accept forgiveness. God is judge, so we should commit ourselves to good instead of evil. As Ephesians 5:2 notes, “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” So our task is not to try to figure out how Jesus would act in a different situations, but instead is to respond to what Jesus has already done. He has already loved us, already showed us that death is not final, already proclaimed the good of the Kingdom of God over and against the kingdoms of greed, power, oppression. Not WWJD?, but instead “how do we keep the ministry that Jesus begun going?”

As a quick aside, I know many of us perhaps have some issue with the line in John that reads “no one can come to me unless the Father draws them.” It sounds very exclusive and unloving. Instead though, Jesus is simply talking about this very point- the ethic of response. We cannot come to God on our own, but only as a response to God’s drawing us in.

St. Paul encourages us to imitate God and be a fragrant offering. That’s wonderful imagery. Be a fragrant offering. Think for a moment about fragrances. Perfume or cologne on the one you love or the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning. To be fragrant is to be a visible and perceptible vehicle of love, of hope, of grace. If we are fragrant, that smell will overpower the sin of anger and allow us to stay on the path of virtue.

Fragrances are also pleasing. I’m pretty sure that you can’t buy any perfume with the name “sewer,” “rotten food,” or “used diaper.” Fragrances should smell like Jesus. And what did Jesus smell like? Well, he was earthy, in the sense that he wasn’t afraid to do some dirty work, but he also smelled like the lilies of the field. His body was anointed with oils and perfumes for death, reminding us that there will be sacrifice in imitating him. But overall, the message of the Gospel is one of liberation, of love, of justice, and that indeed is a sweet smell to our souls.

Good fragrances are also attractive, meaning that they draw us in. If you’re in a crowded room and someone walks in with a nice perfume on, your attention turns to them. In imitating God, we strive to do so in an attractive and constructive way. We don’t need to cram our beliefs down the throats of others. We don’t need to fight over a truth that is not fully knowable on this side of life, but instead we should fight for the Kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven. We don’t need to focus on judgment or other extensions of sinful anger. That isn’t very attractive, and I think that it’s pretty clear that the Church is guilty of being unattractive. There is a reason that so many young adults are staying away from the Church, we’re not really doing much by our actions to appear attractive or genuine.

In imitating God, we are able to better control our anger and let virtue reign instead of wrath. This passage from John about the bread of life offers a final consideration in living with anger. It’s something that we all know- when you’re hungry, you get irritable and angry. Empty stomachs have probably led to many bad decisions throughout history. Skip a meal and you end up cranky. And here I’m shifting to metaphorical meals. Jesus is the bread of life, whoever comes to Jesus will never be hungry and whoever believes in him will never be thirsty. Imitating Jesus will satisfy our needs. Not our needs for a job, not our needs for a new car, not our needs for a cure to our illnesses, but instead our needs for spiritual hunger. And once our soul is filled, then we can attend to our bodily needs. If our souls are hungry, anger will likely lead to sin; but if we are content in our soul, we can use anger as a virtue. Feed on Jesus, he is the true bread come down from heaven that will nourish us.

Though it often gets a bad name, anger is indeed a virtue with a place in the Christian life. Anger can destroy us, or it can save us. Anger is a warning that tells us that something isn’t right, and imitating Jesus is the way to address that. Anger indeed is a virtue, but one which we must be responsible and response-able to. Anger must be kept within the bounds of love and kept on a leash, and anger should make us able to respond to injustice and apathy when we encounter it.

May almighty God grant us the virtue of holy anger that awakens us to evil and keeps us from being consumed by sinful anger. May God gift us with the strength and fortitude to imitate Jesus Christ our Lord in being a fragrant offering, responding to the grace, love, and justice of God. And may we be nourished this and everyday by Jesus, the bread of life. Amen.

January 29, 2012 - Epiphany 4B

Let us pray: Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought us in safety to this new day: Preserve us with your mighty power, that we may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by evil; and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

            This sermon comes with a warning. Often sermons focus on things such as grace, love, and salvation, but today our readings present us with the other side of the coin. This is a sermon about evil, demons, and sin. I had a professor in seminary who had a good friend that worked at the Holocaust museum in Washington. This friend was working on a thesis and spent a lot of time in the Holocaust archives, and they warned my professor- “when you are around so much evil, you must take care that it does not begin to absorb you.” And so I offer you this warning before we begin. Evil is like a solar eclipse, if you stare at it for too long, your vision will never be the same. So today, it is good and fitting to pay attention to evil, because any competent theology must account for it- but don’t spend your Sunday dwelling on it.

            Evil is one of the most misunderstood and unexplored aspects of Christian theology, which I think is exactly how evil likes it. To talk about things such as demons and “unclean spirits,” as our text puts it, seems unscientific and old-fashioned. In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis has a demon say this- “that devils are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination is helpful to us. If any faint suspicion of our existence begins to arise in their minds, suggest a picture of something in red tights and persuade them that since they cannot believe in that, they therefore cannot believe in us.”

            So what is evil you might ask? For the purpose of this sermon, I’m going to tie up evil, sin, Satan, and demons in the same bag. There are shades of difference between them, but we’re really talking about different sides of the same coin. An example of sin is found in our reading from 1 Corinthians. Paul tells people about their interconnectedness and warns them against eating meat, or doing anything, that strains that relationship. The act is the sin, the intent is the evil. Demons are the anthropomorphization of evil.

It’s worth pointing out that our images of hell, evil, and demons are not Biblical, rather what most people think of comes from either Paradise Lost by Milton or Dante’s Divine Comedy. Some have said that evil is the “privation of the good.” Others say that evil is that which is opposed to the will of God. Theologian Karl Barth postulated that evil is nothing, and this is contrary to God because God desires purpose and redemption for all things, so if evil is nothing, evil can never accomplish that. Some will talk about original sin, others will talk about distinctions between light and dark, and yet others will say that evil has to do with free-will. So the question remains, how do we reconcile an all-powerful and all-loving God with the existence of evil?

            I don’t have an answer. But standing on the shoulders of theological giants- I’d say this about evil. Evil exists because love exists. God could have made a world full of evil without love, or full love without the room for evil. But God wanted the most amount of love, and there has to be the possibility for the lack of love, that is where evil creeps in. Evil is not a force that is opposed to the good. Christianity is not Star Wars, there is not a light side and a dark side, there is only the God side. Evil does not exist in any sense of the word, much in the same way that darkness does not exist, but rather is the absence of light. But we can choose to ignore God and live for ourselves, and that is evil. Evil and sin are the straining of the relationships of love to which we are called. And sadly, throughout time, people have chosen to ignore the love of God, and what we would call evil has happened. So what do we do with evil?

            Each of the gospels paints Jesus in a different light. For Matthew, Jesus is the teacher; for Luke, Jesus is the preacher; for John, Jesus is the incarnate love of God. Remember where we are in Mark, our reading today starts at chapter 1, verse 21, so right at the beginning of the gospel. Mark is still introducing Jesus to the audience. So far in Mark Jesus has been baptized by John the Baptist, tempted in the wilderness, and called his disciples. So this incident today is Jesus’ first public appearance, and in telling the story this way, Mark is defining Jesus as exorcist. That’s not a title we often claim for Jesus is it, exorcist? But it’s valid, and Mark invites us to explore that title today. Exorcise literally means to implore out; but it is often used to mean driving out evil or restoring health.

            So as Jesus is beginning his ministry, a man with an unclean spirit approaches him and says “what do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” That’s quite the profession. Not until after the crucifixion does anyway ever make such a bold claim about Jesus. And really, it’s a statement of faith, isn’t it? Somehow, this man knew more about Jesus than the disciples did, perhaps he had heard Jesus say “the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Maybe this man didn’t want to hear the good news or have the Kingdom of God anywhere near him. Maybe he didn’t take kindly to being told that he needed to repent. Maybe he would not accept that fact that he is possessed. And aren’t we all a bit like this man?

            How many of us would say that we are possessed? Can any of us say that something unclean doesn’t live in us? Are we free from jealously, selfishness, addiction, pride, unhealthy lifestyles, racism, homophobia, worry, unforgiving attitudes, sexism, elitism? Do any of us live without sin? Aren’t there issues that we don’t speak out against? Do we live as fully for God as we could? We are all possessed, and we this Jesus to be our exorcist.

            Jesus says to the man “shut up and get out of him!” And the man cried and convulsed and became a new man. Now I know that the text says that the spirit convulsed and came out of him, but there are major problems with reading this text literally, with giving too much reality to demons and evil forces. For one, as I mentioned earlier, we are Christians, not dualists. Secondly, God is the sole source of Creation, not the Devil or Satan. To say that there is a source of evil opposed to God that creates twisted angels is to erroneously take the metaphorical and make it literal. And thirdly, it is to abandon all responsibility. For centuries, demons were the scapegoats for mental illness, addiction, murders, and many other unspeakable crimes. Demons aren’t behind those things, people are. Mental illness is not a curse from God, nor is addiction something over which a person is helpless to control. As Jesus later says, there is nothing outside the body which can defile it, but rather defilement comes from within. Responsibility is a Christian virtue, and to ascribe too much reality and power to demons and unclean spirits is to abdicate that sense of Christian duty. So was there really a demon in that man that day? You can decide for yourself what you think, but I think the greater evil is in ascribing too much power to a force other than God and leaving behind our accountability.

            So Jesus exorcised this man of what was plaguing him. We don’t really know what it was, could have been fear, could have been some old resentment that he held on to, could have been prejudice towards Jews; the point is that Jesus exorcised it out of him, and Jesus can do the same for us. Jesus is the cure for our possessions and the sins which we commit.

            Those gathered there that day were amazed and said “a new teaching, with authority!” Authority means both that Jesus had the ability and right to teach something new, but also that he has the power to do so. Jesus offers the new teaching- that evil is nothing to stop us from pursuing the Kingdom of God. Jesus shows us that we can be saved from the ills that plague us, we can be set free from that which possesses us. But like the man in this story, we have to acknowledge that Jesus has the power to do so. The man calls Jesus the Holy One of God, so you might say that he realizes that Jesus has this authority. So for us to embrace Jesus as exorcist, we must also stand with Jesus, as he alone has the authority.

            We also stand with Jesus to resist evil when we encounter it. Jesus doesn’t ignore the evil that he encounters, which we so often tend to do. It’s easier to not think about the clothes we wear coming from a sweatshop. It’s easier to eat meat when we ignore the fact that unless we buy organic and free-range meat, those animals were very likely abused. It’s easier to invest in companies when we disregard their predatory lending business tactics. You all I’m sure have heard the quote from the pastor in Nazi Germany- “first they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” Evil thrives not because it is a force in this world, but because we allow it to happen. Evil happens when we are silent, evil happens when we look the other way.

            And of course, evil also happens when we ignore Jesus’ words that the Kingdom of God has come near. Sin happens when we live for our own sense of pride and greed instead of thinking about the Kingdom of God. We become the demons of our world when we say things such as “I earned mine, let them earn theirs,” things like “well, it’s not illegal,” phrases such as “I want this and I’m entitled to it.” Another CS Lewis quote- “like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you save your castle only by losing your bishop.” When we negotiate with our morals, when we ignore our ethics, when we focus on our kingdoms instead of God’s, then we do evil.

            Our invitation today is to follow Jesus, our Exorcist, in standing up against evil, both in our own lives and in our world. There is a great story from Greek mythology that advances this point. Sea travelers had to be aware of many dangers as they sailed. One of these dangers was the Sirens who lived near Sicily. They were beautiful creatures, part-bird and part-woman. Sailors would be lured in by their sweet songs and their ships would crash and they would become the victims of the Sirens. In Greek lore, only two people ever evaded them. One was Odysseus, as his crew tied him to the mast and then put wax in their own ears. The other was Jason and the Argonauts on their search for the Golden Fleece. They took along with them, Orpheus, who was a musical hero in Greek mythology. As they passed the island of the Sirens, Orpheus began to sing with the most alluring and beautiful melody that one could ever imagine. Orpheus’ song was so sweet that it made the song of the Sirens sound like discordant chatter. And Jason and his crew sailed safely past the Sirens because they did not desire to go any closer.

            This is how it is in standing with Jesus against evil. The songs of sin and evil are very tempting, as was the song of the Sirens. It can be rather fun to amass wealth, to ignore conscience, and do whatever we want. The results of sin can seem quite fun. Evil indeed knows how to sing a very sweet song. It can be quite hard to drown out the song of evil, because it can be rather loud and is heard is most places. But in our journeys, we have an Orpheus with us in the person of Jesus, a person who sings a different song- a song not of temptation and selfishness, but a song of grace and love. If we listen closely, if we learn the lyrics of the Kingdom of God, we will know that its song is much sweeter and doesn’t cause us to become shipwrecked.

            One last caution- make sure that in resisting evil, you don’t focus on hating evil. The follower of Jesus should love good and hate evil. If you only love good and are indifferent towards evil, then you’re just a sentimentalist. And if you hate evil more than you love the good, then you’re just a good hater, and we have plenty of those already. Let us remember that the key to all of this is the love, the redemption, the grace of the ever-present Kingdom of God. That is how Jesus is our exorcist, he points us towards and strengthens us to live in the Kingdom of God. He shows us that there is a better way than evil, there are greater rewards to be found than those that possess us.

            Evil is a dangerous thing. One the one hand, we don’t want to dismiss its effects, but on the other we shouldn’t ascribe too much power to it. As Mark introduces us to Jesus in the gospel, he introduces Jesus as the exorcist, the vanquisher of evil, the builder of the Kingdom of God. The encounter between Jesus and this man with an unclean spirit is an invitation to be exorcised, a call to hear a new song, a challenge to healthy living, an opportunity stand up with Jesus against evil. With our faith focused on Jesus, with our actions orientated on the Kingdom of God, and with the courage to proclaim the authority of Jesus that makes him the Holy One of God, we too can join the chorus of the saints and angels. The old saying is that no one ever leaves the church humming a sermon, but everyone leaves with a song on their lips. Let our song this day be that sweet song of Jesus the exorcist, whose song calls us to new life and resisting evil.

Amen.