A sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Location, Location, Location - The Search for an Authentic Identity
Location, location, location. It’s a very popular and familiar saying, and I think that as Americans, we may embody this desire and this longing more than anyone in the world. We are a culture that is transient, in the best and the worst sense of the word. We’re either wandering homeless, searching for that physical home, or we’re in a home, but think it would be a better one on that street; on that side of town; maybe in a different town. And at the same time we are looking for that, we are a people that are deeply spiritually unsettled. This culture of ours, not confined to this country, is a modern culture that lacks the kind of rootedness that an ancient people had. It’s always searching for a real, authentic identity that we can proclaim, and more importantly, settle us into knowing who we are.
This reading today from Matthew is something that comes from Mark’s Gospel, and is shared in all of the Gospels. But for Matthew’s community, it had a special resonance. Because the place that Jesus settles—in Capernaum, in Galilee—was a place that they not only knew, but many in Matthew’s community may have, in fact, lived there. This was their location. So when Matthew gives us this prophecy of Isaiah, it really spoke to them. This Isaiahan prophecy is rooted in their long history of suffering, from the first conquest of the Assyrians coming into that very place. They knew that oppression. It was the oppression of their families and ancestors. It was the yoke of the Assyrians, a dominating foreign power, that had claimed their home and displaced them—if not physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I think more importantly for Matthew, he needs to demonstrate to his community what location is about. The temple is gone, and they’re in a deep grief of identity. Matthew understands that prophecy doesn’t predict the future, but it explains the past. So Jesus, Matthew says, intentionally goes to this place, when he hears that John has been arrested. I think that in Jesus’s sense of identity, he knows that he has to continue John’s work. But not just proclaiming the kind of repentance that John preached, but a repentance that finds center in peace and justice and in God, and makes this prophecy an absolute incarnate one.
Today’s Psalm gives us an indication of that very way of thinking.
One thing have I asked of the Lord;
one thing I seek; *
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life;
To behold the fair beauty of the Lord *
and to seek him in his temple.
Matthew’s community could not have prayed that psalm without thinking of this Jesus who now is the living embodiment of that physical temple that no longer stands. It’s a familiar story for Matthew’s community, and they would have gotten the geography. It was familiar, and it was comforting. And yet, at the same time, like Jesus always is, it was disruptive. This place and this location, Jesus tells them, you know well. But then he does something that they wouldn’t have understood at all: he goes and he calls disciples to follow him. They would have been very perplexed at that. In their culture, and in their world, people went and sought out the prophets; people went out and sought those who they were going to follow. Here Jesus reverses that setting completely, and he’s brazen. He goes to them and he says, “Come with me. Go from this location with me and I will enable you to do something radically different. Not just fishing for fish, a livelihood that these people knew; I’ll help you fish for people. I will help you offer to others a sense of location, a home and dwelling in God. How do they respond? And this may be the most disarming for us: they drop the nets. They move out of that side of town; they move out of that identity that is everything they know; everything that’s going to bring them sustenance, and they follow this person that’s just spoken a couple of words to them. And their lives will never be the same. It’s even more disruptive for a Jewish audience hearing that, because they leave dad in the boat. They don’t even take him to shore and say, you’ll be OK without us. How is this Jewish father going to survive without his sons? It’s absolutely disarming to think about this man sitting out there alone in that boat—how did he get out of it? Or did he? There’s the edge of the Good News. It always brings us life, and it always leaves us on the edge of death: spiritually, possibly; emotionally terrified, and maybe even physical death. I think that’s what Paul is talking about. He goes from that Jewish identity into a place where he says, at the end of that reading, “We don’t want to empty the cross of its meaning.” He’s not just talking about resurrected life; he’s talking about the crucified Christ that he never shadows, never hides. We know that those people—Paul and Peter and those first Disciples—followed that Jesus often, if not always, to their own physical death, but to a place where they could find the center of God.
We as a community sit in this place today in all the images of light, in all of that Epiphany glory. And we know from Matthew’s Gospel what the work of incarnation must be. Jesus, Matthew says, tells us that movement is part of God’s plan; that it’s not always a movement to the right side of town, but to the place where you can be, as Jesus will say, I AM. And God is here. When the disciples in John’s gospel ask Jesus where he’s living, you know what he says: Come and see. He’s not talking about a condo in Capernaum, and off they go.
So here we are at St. Mary’s, and there is incarnation all around us; and there’s light all around us. There’s also a lot of darkness around us. But they way in which we’re going to find that light and radiate it is not to perpetuate the anxiety and the fear that in that place or this way of thinking is the only right one. It’s going to be to respond like the disciples do: to drop it all and follow, and find that place in the very heart of God that gives us that I AM feeling and knowledge and experience and identity. It starts right here for us today. Will you find that in those prophets that come to you, in those Christs that come to you and ask you to give it all up? They might not always be the ones you recognize, or the ones you want to see, or the ones you want to follow. But they’re here—right now—in this location, location, location.
Call Stories in Scripture -- Not always dramatic and unmistakable
The theme of the lessons today is all about call. And when we think about a call, our reflex is that it’s something big with a dramatic story around it. But if you look at the call stories in scripture, they run a range of different ways and methods.
If you think about Moses, you get the ultimate kind of dramatic call. Moses is eighty years old; he’s been tending sheep for forty years out in the desert. His attention is drawn to a bush that’s on fire, but not consumed. He turns aside to take a look and hears a voice say, “Take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground”, and then God speaks to him through the burning bush: “I am the God of your fathers Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and I have heard the cry of my people in slavery. Go and tell Pharaoh to let my people go”. Moses argues; God prevails, and we’re off. Pretty darn dramatic. Hard to top that one; in fact, it isn’t topped.
Now if you go much later into the book of Samuel to the call of Samuel, you’ll remember that after he was weaned, his mother took him, according to a promise she had made to God, to the temple to be raised by Eli, the old priest, to be a holy man. When Samuel was a lad, sleeping in the sanctuary to keep an eye on the lamp, he hears a voice, “Samuel, Samuel”. The voice of God was not heard in the land of Israel much in those days. Thinking it was Eli, Samuel goes to him several times, until Eli explains to Samuel what is going on. So the next time Samuel hears the voice, he says, “I hear you, Lord, and I am your servant.” And that story is on launch.
In the book of Esther, God is never mentioned--the only book in the Bible where God is not named. Esther was the Queen; she was Jewish, and it was a secret—even the King did not know. One day her uncle Mordecai came to her. He had been her coach, and helped groom her and arrange for her to become Queen. He says to her, “The King has signed a decree. We know Haman put him up to it, but the King signed the decree that in the very near future, on a certain day, all the Jews are going to be rounded up and put to death. You have to go to the King and stop this”. And Queen Esther says, “I can’t do that. If you break the King’s rules, you face death. The last Queen crossed the King, and we know what happened to her.” And Mordecai says to her, “You think you are going to escape this? You will be found out, and you will be put to death.” And then I imagine Mordecai pausing a moment before he says, “Perhaps it was for just this moment that you were chosen to be the Queen.” This call never mentions God.
In the New Testament, in today’s Gospel, we have the calling of the first Apostles. John the Baptist says, “There is the Messiah.” And two of his followers peel off and start to follow Jesus. One of them, Andrew, goes to get his brother Peter, and he joins them in a rather second-hand method of calling.
In the Acts of the Apostles, in another dramatic type of call, Paul, then known as Saul, is on his way to Damascus armed with arrest warrants to arrest followers of the Way, and take them back to Jerusalem for trial. We know what that means. This very same Saul had arranged the stoning death of St. Stephen, first Deacon and first Martyr. Saul can see the gates of Damascus, but before he arrives he is knocked down by a blinding flash of light. (By the way, he is not on a horse. The artist, Carvaggio, put that in his painting, and that image sticks with us.) After Saul is knocked down and blinded by this flash of light, a voice says, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul asks, “Who are you?” And the answer, “I’m Jesus, and you’re persecuting me. Go into Damascus to the house you were supposed to go to, and you’ll get further instructions.” Paul gets up, still blind, and makes it to the house, stays there, and is baptized. And as he gets up, something like scales fall off his eyes, and he can see. And he is off.
There are all kinds of different ways to be called. One of the fun things for me as Bishop, something that took me a couple of years to figure out, was to ask people as I was getting ready to confirm them, “How did you end up here?” I remember one Sunday morning at Christ’s Church, Martinsville, everyone was in the narthex getting lined up, and someone came to me and said, “Here are two of your confirmands”. They were 30-35 years old, husband and wife, and were in the choir. On the spur of the moment I asked the wife, “How did you end up here?” She said, “We’re newly minted doctors, and are working off our student loan bills by working in an under-served area.” Then she pointed to an older woman in the choir and explained that she was their real estate agent. As they were going around town looking at houses, the agent asked if they were looking for a church. The woman said, “Yes, but it’s got to have a good choir.” The agent said Christ’s Church had the best choir in Martinsville, Virginia.
Another time I was at a church in a more urban setting for a confirmation, and I had the adult confirmands say in a sentence or two why they were there. And this young woman said, “I was kind of lost; I was at loose ends, particularly about faith, and I walked by this church where there is a labyrinth in front of the building. So I walked the labyrinth, and then I went indoors and have been here ever since.”
Different stories – different ways to be called. And it’s true for people’s non-church stuff, too. It’s fun to ask a contractor, or a teacher, or a doctor, “How did you end up doing this?” The stories are sometimes very touching: “I was inspired by a teacher in the fourth grade”; or “I have always imagined myself doing this very thing”. Other people say the job is OK, but what I really love doing is this....
So I bid you this week to open your ears and open your hearts; think about yourself and the calls you’ve had. I invite you to share your story with someone, or ask other people to describe their story to you.
The last word is this: God loves you, each and every one, exactly as you are, without reservation, more than you can ask or begin to imagine.
Amen
Shepherd or King -- Does it Really Matter? A Sermon for the feast of Christ the King
One of my more entertaining church memories comes from a time many years ago when I was a member of a very small congregation. Being few in number, we were engaged in an intergenerational education program during Advent, during which the vicar was leading us through a discussion of the catechism. At one point in a discussion about Jesus something was said that caused a very precocious six year old in the group to exclaim, “Wait, Jesus was Jewish?” “Well, yes,” answered the vicar. “Huh,” gasped an astonished Christopher, “I always thought he was British.” “Spoken like a true Anglican,” replied the vicar.
I trust we are all clear that Bethlehem, the City of David, is not located in Great Britain. Still, Christopher’s confusion is related I sense to a mindset that is fairly pervasive throughout Christendom. We’ve all been taught since we were children that we are created in the image of God, and that Jesus of Nazareth was the human face of God. Indeed, in today’s epistle Paul refers to Jesus as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” So it’s not surprising that as one travels from place to place around the world, images of Jesus tend to resemble the people of a given area, regardless of whether they in turn look at all like someone born in what we know today as the Holy Land. Hence, in the Coptic Churches of North Africa Jesus is often portrayed as black. In Mexico I encountered images of a dark haired, very warm hearted looking man, quite different from those images of what I call the Scandinavian Jesus with which I grew up. You know the image I mean, the fellow with the hazel eyes and the sandy colored hair in a flowing page boy. The bottom line is it often helps people feel closer to Jesus if they imagine that Jesus looked like they do.
In a move that likewise was intended to make Christ more relevant by tying him to something familiar to many people, Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, in response to the rise of secularism, atheism, and communism that followed World War I. Reeling from the devastation and carnage of what has always been known in Europe as the Great War, many Christians were doubting not merely Christ’s authority but very existence, a perspective encouraged by the several non-Christian dictators who came to power around that time. Pius instituted this new feast with several goals in mind. First, he hoped nations would acknowledge anew that the Church actually has not merely the right to exist but also the right to immunity from the state. Moreover, he dared to hope leaders and nations would regain a seemingly lost sense of respect for Christ. Finally, he hoped individual Christians would gain personal strength and courage from the celebration of the feast, being reminded that Christ the King reigns in their hearts, minds, wills, and bodies. Now, as citizens of a country that got its start by rebelling against a king, living at a time when individualism has been embraced to such an extreme that for many the only authority they’re wiling to acknowledge is the individual self, this image of Christ as King doesn’t necessarily work particularly well, for some of the same reasons, actually, that the Scandinavian Jesus doesn’t either.
Becoming a bit too convinced that Jesus looked like us, means by extension that Jesus didn’t look like anyone who is different from us. That makes it awfully easy to slip into the mindset that we’re somehow better than “they” are, whoever they happen to be, which in turn makes it dangerously easy to exclude or put down those who differ from us, because after all, we’re the ones who are really like Jesus. Adding to this the notion of Jesus as king, with all the antiquated and often oppressive baggage that goes along with the concept of human monarchs definitely doesn’t help. Jesus himself addressed this concern, as we read in Mark, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” If we also remember that in John we are told that “when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself,” we have further reason to ask just what we’re doing celebrating the Feast of Christ the King. The beginning of our answer we find in the passages I just quoted to you. Jesus clearly understood the oppressive nature of secular kings, and fled when he sensed the people wanted to make him one. Unlike those worldly rulers, however, his version of being a king was to be a servant, to be not the one for or to whom sacrifices were made, but to be the one who was willing to be sacrificed. It is no accident that the Gospel reading for the Feast of Christ the King is taken from Luke’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion.
The notion of a servant king is exceedingly counterintuitive. The opening line of today’s recessional, “Crown him with may crowns, the lamb upon his throne” is a long way from Richard the Lion-hearted, with or without crowns. Jesus didn’t want to be a king in the traditional sense, though if our Bible translations are accurate, he spoke on more than one occasion of his kingdom. But his wasn’t the sort of kingdom his listeners were used to or over which some of them wanted him to rule. His wasn’t a kingdom with territory and borders, focused on the autonomy of one people or nation at the expense of others, but rather a kingdom that by existing in the hearts of his followers, would transcend worldly distinctions of language, ethnicity, or nationality. Like heaven itself, Jesus’ kingdom wasn’t so much a place as a state of being. So why talk about Jesus as a king in the first place?
Our problem, I think, isn’t as much with kings as it is with words, with images. We communicate primarily with words. We think in words. Words are what allow me to read a book and conjure up images as I go along of the scenes and events described on the page before me. Yes, some of us can paint, or sculpt or take extraordinary photographs, but even then one person observes such a work of art and then describes it to someone else with words. I was privileged many years ago, for example, to see the Mona Lisa. Unable to paint a painting of the Mona Lisa, however, I have to fall back on words to tell someone else how magnificent it is. Still, this all works quite well for us when we’re focused on earthly matters, but not so well when the subject of our conversation is God.
The very act of using words to describe God limits God. It’s a bit like talking about the universe. Now I spent most of my career teaching chemistry, that is, about the behavior of atoms and molecules. I have no problem at all picturing those particles in my minds eye. Invisibly tiny as they are, I can clearly picture their structure as well as their interactions. Going the other direction though, as astronomers do, I have trouble. I’m fine with the place of earth in our solar system, and that our solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy, but then it begins to get away from me. I understand the Milky Way is one of the 100 billion galaxies that have been discovered so far with the Hubble telescope, a number expected to double as telescopic technology improves. Think about that - 200 billion galaxies! Just how big is the universe? Scientists believe it’s 13.8 billion years old, so that would mean the radius has to be at least 13.8 light years wide, except astronomers tell us the universe is expanding so the edges are supposed to be nearly 46 billion light-years away which makes the diameter 91 billion light-years across. Most mind boggling of all, though, and the point of this exhausting scientific digression, is that I believe God created all of it!!! How big, how powerful, how timeless does that make God?
When you think of God in those terms it makes it seem rather petty to become overly concerned with the physical characteristics, the facial features of Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, as the human manifestation of God Jesus was the aspect of God most like us. But we believe that all three persons of the Trinity have existed from the beginning, so the thirty-three years Jesus spent on earth, while a key part, are only a small part of Jesus’ existence. Moreover, focusing too closely on the various roles he played - teacher, healer, son, brother, friend, political activist, makes it harder I fear to focus on who Jesus really was and why he came among us in the first place. We don’t encounter this problem in the Book of Exodus, which though it doesn’t appear first is the oldest book in the Bible. When Moses, desperately trying to get out of leading the Israelites out of Egypt, a job he really did not want, asked Yahweh of the burning bush, so what am I supposed to say if the people ask who sent me, Yahweh replies, “I Am who I Am. Tell them I Am sent you.” That was it, just the simple statement that Moses was being sent by the God who IS. That’s really all we need to know about God. For that matter, it’s all we really need to know about each other. Age, sex, skin color, nation of origin, economic status, profession, family structure, all may be very interesting, but the only thing that should really matter to you about me is that I am here, I am real, I am a beloved child of God, and that is all I really need to know about you as well.
Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, our four week season of preparation for Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of a baby whose name was Jesus, but whose other appellations - among them Emmanuel, Redeemer, Messiah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace, Son of God would fill a church directory. And I haven’t even started on all the ways we have for referring to the other two persons of the trinity. Names. It never occurred to me to ask her, since she died when I was only ten years old, but I suspect my maternal grandmother never intended to be called Mema, but I’m told that’s what my eldest cousin called her, and it stuck. Mema didn’t care. We were her grandchildren and she loved us. God loves the entire human family and I am sure, cares not at all by what name we address the source of our very being. God knows that in order to matter to us God has to be real to us. How each of us nurtures that relationship between ourselves and our triune God is very personal. Perhaps you relate best to Christ the King, while the person sitting next to you may prefer Jesus the Good Shepherd. Shepherd or lamb, servant or king - it really doesn’t matter to God. What does matter is that you know beyond any doubt, that you are loved by the God to whom I prayed at the beginning of this sermon, the God who was, and is, and always shall be. Amen.
