​17 October 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
21 Pentecost
 
Jesus said to his disciples, “You do not know what you are asking.” (Mark 10)
 
            We are living in what some people have called the era of the Great Resignation. Having endured the effects of the pandemic as well as the bitter social divisions that have accompanied it, a lot of people are reassessing their priorities and deciding to resign from their jobs. Reports say that as many as 4.3 million people have already done so — some to seek a new career, some to find a better fit, some to stop working altogether.
            So the Great Resignation is symptomatic of what we might say is also the Great Reassessment — a life-changing re-ordering of priorities with the intention of living out more fully what one truly values.
            Jesus, I think, would encourage us in this undertaking, at least based on today’s gospel. There he challenges his disciples to reassess their own priorities, and to find a wider sense of purpose than what they have been operating with. The motivation for this encouragement, as you heard a moment ago, is that James and John come to him, wanting to be assured that they will sit at his right and left hand in the end times. They are thinking only in terms of prestige, importance, approval, approbation.
            But Jesus tells them they need to turn their sense of priority on its head: it’s not prestige that counts, but self-sacrifice; not importance, but service; not approval, but compassion; not approbation, but faithfulness.
            And I think most of us could agree with those points, at least to some degree.
            But the thing is, when we look back at the pandemic and try to put our finger on exactly what has changed in our own sense of priority, it’s rather hard to do — at least it is for me. How have we changed? Thinking of the Emmaus Gathering conversations we’ve been having here at church, I myself have been trying to put into words exactly how the pandemic has affected me, and all I come up with is a kind of mental numbness.
            Last night I had a dream that I was in a town where I had to get to the train station, but when I finally got there, I didn’t know where I was trying to go. That’s the way life feels right now. Maybe you have those kind of dreams too.
            But then it occurs to me, that maybe the numbness is exactly the point. The pandemic has put a kind of damper on so much: social interaction, the exchange of ideas, enlivening experiences of art, and music, and good food. Maybe the resulting numbness is precisely what we do need to look at.
            I realize that it makes me eager to go deeper. To get beneath the surface anxieties of these tedious days and to get more closely in touch with whatever it is in life that is longer lasting and more profoundly true.
            In the Sunday morning forum I’ve been leading on “Prophets for Our Time,” we’ve been blessed to encounter some religious thinkers of the mid-twentieth century who have helped us to do exactly that.
            Today, we had a look at Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian who had a huge impact on the Civil Rights Movement by helping to provide its theological base in the principles of non-violent resistance. Now, if you’re like me, you’ve not encountered Thurman much (if at all). He was a kind of behind-the-scenes man, something of a religious mystic.
            But he was passionately devoted to the principle that the way to counter any kind of evil or hatred, is the cultivation of an interior strength through a disciplined spiritual life that is deep enough to be able to resist lapsing into anger or resentment oneself, when confronted with evil and persecution.
            After Martin Luther King Jr. was almost killed by a knife attack in 1958, Thurman went to see him in the hospital. Although no record exists of their conversation, in a subsequent letter to King, Thurman wrote to the younger man that he was glad to hear that the civil rights leader was “structuring your life in a way that will deepen its channel.” Evidently, Thurman had told King in the hospital, that if he was to overcome what lay ahead, he would have to go deep.
            And that, I realize, is what has changed for me during the pandemic. Underneath the mental and spiritual numbness brought on by its unexpected longevity and bitterness, I am increasingly eager to go more and more deeply into what is really at stake in life.
            In a brief meditation Thurman wrote on the theme of “Radical Amazement,” he observed that “What is [often] forgotten is the fact that life moves at a deeper level than the objective and the data of our senses. We are most alive when we are brought face to face with the response of the deepest thing in us to the deepest thing in life.”
            That’s what the pandemic has made me yearn for — when (as Thurman continues) “we pass through all the external aspects of our situation and need, [and] the walls of our pretensions are swept away and we are literally catapulted out of the narrow walls that shut us in.  … Spirit is met by Spirit and we are whole again!”
            There is so much in life that holds us captive to the superficial: our preoccupation with things, our attachment to predictability, our longing for security, our fondness for familiarity.
            But if anything good will come out of these on-going months of frustration and isolation, it will be a determination to rethink, to reimagine, to reconstitute our lives: to go to that place where (as Thurman envisioned), “Spirit is met by Spirit and we are whole again.” For that kind of renewal, I know that I am ready. Amen.
             

​3 October 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
St. Francis
 
“May I never boast of anything except the cross of Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 6)
 
            If you ask me, St. Francis gets sold short. The ubiquitous statues of him in gardens, for instance, imply that he is little more than a lover of nature. He was that, but he was also more.
            Or, the blessing of the animals that has become so popular this time of year hints that he is best remembered as a lover of animals. He was that, but he was also more.
            He was, for instance, someone who conscientiously shed any encumbrance that stood between him and following Jesus—whether the obstacle was wealth, or status, or security.
            Yet he was no hermit. He was also someone who devoted himself to the project of rebuilding the church, at a time when it was morally lax and spiritually vacuous.
            And so he was someone who unashamedly challenged the powers that be, preaching a gospel of renewal even to the pope himself. In fact, it was when no one at the papal court would listen to him, that he went into the fields to give his famous sermon to the birds, as a rhetorical sign that if no one else would listen to him, perhaps at least they would.
            Francis was also the founder of a monastic tradition that carries on to this day, some 800 years later, built on the foundation of worldly poverty and spiritual humility.  We here in the Southwest are especially aware of this tradition, as it was Franciscan friars who first brought Christianity to this part of the world.
            Yet in his own lifetime, and in the years shortly thereafter, Francis was best known for his intense personal identification with Jesus—an identification so intense and profound, that it is said that he came to bear the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, in his own flesh. And so today’s New Testament reading has an especially powerful resonance with this dimension of Francis’ life: he boasted of nothing, save the cross of Christ, and “carried the marks of Jesus branded on his own body,” as the reading says.
            All this adds up to the fact that Francis embodied a great paradox: his whole life was a drive toward complete simplicity, yet the commitment and insight that drove him toward that simplicity were themselves multilayered and highly complex.
            And I suspect that it is this paradox that is the real reason for Francis’ enduring popularity as a saint. We are instinctively drawn both to the focus and intensity of his life, yet also identify with the struggles he had in achieving it.
            If you go to the webpage of the Secular Franciscans (that is, people who live a Franciscan way of life but are not part of a monastic community), you’ll notice that simplicity of life is at the heart of their rule. “Remove the meaningless,” the website banner reads, “to return to the meaningful.”
            What strikes me on this particular Feast of St. Francis, is that in these pandemic times, one of the gifts that has been given to us is an opportunity and the encouragement to do exactly that: “Remove the meaningless, to return to the meaningful.” As you know, on Friday the United States passed 700,000 recorded deaths from Covid-19 on Friday; the world has now lost 4.8 million. Confronted with so much death and surrounded by so much tension and animosity, we are being driven back to reclaim what matters most to us, both individually and as a community.
            Some people for instnace are changing, or leaving careers. Some people are reconnecting with family and friends. Some people are reordering their use of time. It’s as if the spirit of Francis is blowing through our lives, encouraging us to declutter, to change, to simplify.
            In a little book called The Post-Quarantine Church, church consultant Thom Rainer writes that of nine key changes facing the church in these times, the most important is simplicity and clarity of purpose. If busyness characterized the pre-pandemic church, focus will characterize successful churches now. “There will be the temptation,” Rainer writes, “to return to the complex church of the past. … Just say no. … Healthy churches in this new era will be focused churches, congregations that do a few things well.”
How appropriate, therefore, that the first of our “Emmaus Gatherings” during this stewardship season is happening today, on the Feast of St. Francis. Designed as a time to take stock of what has happened, and to imagine the future, these conversations give us opportunity to do exactly what Rainer suggests: to become more focused and deliberate about what we do as a church.
The story surrounding today’s gospel texts is a good example of such deeply-grounded simplicity. Soon after his conversion to a life of poverty, Francis took two of his new companions with him into the Church of St. Nicholas in Assisi, seeking to know God’s will for them. First they prayed, and then three times they opened the gospel book at random to read whatever turned up, and the three verses that jumped out at them were these: Give to the poor; Take nothing for yourself; and Take up your cross.
What could be simpler than these three imperatives, and yet what could be more complex and difficult to follow? But that’s the beauty of the Christian life: it is grounded in the simplicity of faith in Jesus, yet amplified by all the deep resonance and fullness of life that each of us brings to it. Following Jesus is no one thing, it is many things—and yet, it is a focused and intentional thing. That’s why it’s best to describe it as a way of life that touches everything we say and do, rather than something we just believe. And that, it seems to me, is what we can most profitably take from Francis’ own example—faith as a way of life, centered in Christ.
The French poet Paul Valéry once asked, “What is there more mysterious than clarity?” In the spirit of Francis, we might today paraphrase that question as, “What is there more complex than simplicity?” Amen.
 

​26 September 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Michaelmas
 
“They stood still, looking sad.” (Luke 24)
 
            This is a Michaelmas like no other. Some things are the same: images of Michael adorn the church, the hymns are about angels and archangels, and the anthem is based on Michael’s war in heaven.
            But much is different, too. Because of the on-going pandemic, only a portion of our community is gathered together. There is no parish-wide brunch. But most of all, what is different is that we come with unusually tired, anxious hearts, uncertain of what is to come.
            For that reason, we have substituted for the usual Michaelmas gospel the story we just heard, of the walk to Emmaus. It’s a gospel we need to hear right now, and because it’s a big and fulsome story, we have let it stand by itself with no other readings.
It is a text that should speak directly to us, in our current circumstances. It opens with two disciples walking rather aimlessly along the road to Emmaus, a village about 7 miles from Jerusalem. (Interestingly, although scripture gives no reason to assume this, depictions of this scene almost invariably show two men. One of them is named in the text, Cleopas, clearly a man–but the other remains nameless, and so one suspects that she was a woman, given the conventions of the time. Just saying.)
            In any case, they—like us—have gone through a collective trauma. In our case, it’s a pandemic and political crisis, perhaps with some family or professional stress thrown in. In their case, it’s the aftermath of the execution of Jesus, the one in whom they had put all their hopes. Their walk is, after all, on Easter afternoon, but before they’ve actually seen Jesus, and they are walking along “discussing” all that has happened, trying to make sense of how the fulfillment of God’s promise, which seemed so near at hand only a few days ago, now seems so defunct.
            And not only that, but they have heard reports that some women visited the tomb early that morning, and found it empty, except for a vision of angels who told them Jesus was alive. (You see, there are angels in the story after all!) But as of yet (at least in Luke’s telling), no one has laid eyes on Jesus.
            Until now. Suddenly, there he is with them, but they are so deep into their sadness and confusion that the do not, and perhaps cannot, recognize him.
            So he begins to quiz them, and they confess they had hoped that the one to redeem Israel had come. They had hoped. And that to me is the key phrase of the whole story. They had hoped, only to have their hopes dashed.
            And isn’t that a lot like where we are ourselves right now? We had hoped, that the advent of a vaccine would hold the virus at bay. We had hoped, that we as a people would pull together to overcome the pandemic. We had hoped, that some degree of political normalcy might be restored after an election. We had hoped, that the worst of racial violence and intolerance was behind us. We had hoped.
            But now we are on our own road to Emmaus, also walking along somewhat aimlessly, trying to make sense of it all.
            But the thing I notice in the disciples’ reaction to Jesus (or rather, in the lack of their response), is that what really holds them back is that their vision of what God has promised is too small. For them, it was only (as they say) “to redeem Israel,” when what God has in mind is to set the whole of humanity back in right relationship with one another and with God.
            And so, Jesus begins to teach them, to open their minds to see the true narrowness of what they expect of God, and conversely, to begin to see the expansiveness of what God offers to us.
            And isn’t that, too, a lot like our own circumstances right now? Our thoughts tend to go toward wishing for nothing more than that things would return to the way they “used to be,” when in fact the way they “used to be” was not all that good—not really. The pre-pandemic world for which we are now so nostalgic was riven by social conflict, by uncontrolled violence, by unsustainable gulfs between rich and poor, by an earth teetering on the brink of disaster—and, if I may say so, by a Christianity in steady decline through the weight of its own conventions. Surely we want something more than that!
            Jesus pushes the disciples to get over that for which they had hoped, and to hope instead for something more. What he is pushing them to see, finally dawns on them when they sit down to supper, and in the breaking of the bread they suddenly find themselves saying, “Wait! This is Jesus here now!” And in that moment, everything is turned on its head. But Jesus draws back out of their sight, and the two disciples rush off to Jerusalem to tell the others. That’s where we left off reading today.
            But if we had continued to read, we would have heard that just at the moment they meet the other disciples, Jesus appears again to all of them, and after addressing their fright, he makes clear what the story has been leading to all along: they are to be witnesses not just to Israel, but to all nations of the gospel of peaceableness that he came to inaugurate. In short, they are to do nothing less than change the world. And in Luke’s telling, that’s the end of the story. Having said that much, Jesus leaves them for good, sending them out to do the work they have been given to do. His commission becomes their hope, and their hope transcends the limited imagination of what they had formerly accepted.
            So what if, on our own walk toward Emmaus, we were to dream new dreams and imagine new possibilities of our life together? Today marks the beginning of the fall stewardship season, and the committee has proposed that we make this season an opportunity to spend time, like the disciples, both taking stock of the trauma we have been through, but also looking forward to the future that we might create in Jesus’ name—among ourselves, and in the world around us.        
            Under the title of “Emmaus Gatherings,” we are inviting you to trace in the weeks ahead the three essential elements of the Emmaus story: a shared meal to draw us together, discussion of what has happened to us, and then imagining a forward-looking vision for the future.
            Obviously, in the short amount of time we will have, we can’t do or say everything. But we can at least adopt a pattern of anticipating what might be, rather than longing for what was.
 
            Which come to think of it, reminds me of a question I raised last week somewhat rhetorically, and promised to address today. If Lucifer (or Satan) is, as the mythology of the book of Revelation has it, a fallen angel—and if we are St. Michael and All Angels Church, then is Lucifer among the angels whom we evoke in our name?
            Well, it you look toward the future with an unbridled hope, as I think the Emmaus story suggests we do, then I don’t see how you can avoid expecting that in the end, all of creation is to be reconciled to God, even those parts that have fallen furthest away. Some regard it a heresy, but I think it a necessary conclusion to believing in a merciful God, to say that (bottom line): none will be lost. Not one of us. All means all. That’s how radical I read God’s promised reign of peaceableness, to be. Amen.

​19 September 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
17 Pentecost
 
“Show by your good life that your works are done
with gentleness born of wisdom.” (James 3:13)
 
            If you were here or listening online a couple of weeks ago, you’ll remember that I said then that we’ll be reading from the epistle of James for several weeks, until we’ve read it all the way through. So here we are today in chapter 3 (out of 5 altogether), and I want to spend some more time, wrestling with this rather obscure book of the Bible.
            I talked last time about the likelihood that James is the earliest text in the entire New Testament, written by someone who had first-hand knowledge of Jesus and who is intent to interpret his teaching to the fledgling community of his followers. This is Christianity before Paul got ahold of it, Christianity before the gospels put their spin on the story, Christianity before creeds and councils, before liturgies and hierarchies. There’s a kind of purity and simplicity to James, which is why I at least have been so attracted to it these past several weeks.
             Today the topic James takes up is wisdom. Now, you probably know that the Bible is full of literature described as the “wisdom tradition.” The book of Proverbs, for example, with its pithy advice about how to live is a type of wisdom; or Ecclesiastes, with its warnings about vanity.
            James is clearly conversant with this tradition, and parts of today’s reading sound like they could have been lifted from it—think of where he writes, “For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.”
            But as I mentioned a moment ago, James is most intent on preserving and interpreting the teachings of Jesus—so the wisdom he is interested in, is the wisdom of Jesus. His text is littered with a variety of closely related words that point us in the direction of what he thinks that wisdom is: words like “gentle,” “peaceable,” “merciful,” “without a trace of partiality …”
            James seems to have caught on to the fact that what Jesus was trying to do, was to articulate a vision he had for humankind that was founded above all else on peaceableness: living without hatred, or anger, or vengefulness, but focused instead upon finding the common ground where human beings can live together in mutual respect, forbearance, and compassion. Jesus called that vision, the “kingdom of heaven.”
            The thing is, even Jesus himself seems to have known it was only a vision, not something that can be realized. Jesus was not, in the end, a social progressive. He was a social realist. He knew that we human beings simply aren’t capable of living fully into the vision he held up for us: we’re too self-interested, too selfish, too self-centered. (Notice the repetition of the word “self.”) That’s why Jesus was always talking with his disciples about how he must be given up to face death—the price he realized would have to be paid for his challenging the centrality of the self that lies at the heart of every one of us as individuals, and also at the heart of our social systems.
            Jesus nevertheless inhabited his vision of human peaceableness so that we might at least catch a glimpse of it, even if it tragically lies always just around the corner. And although he accepted its ultimate price, he nevertheless also knew that there really is no alternative to a vision of peaceableness—not if human beings are to have hope, not if we are to be able to live by faith, not if we are to avoid living purely cynical lives.
            Maybe this is part of the reason James hits home so forcefully right now: the events of the past few months, years—even the last two decades since 9/11—have made us realize that the confidence that twentieth century modernism had in social progress is dead. Our unreflective response to those horrific events 20 years ago revealed that when threatened, we can be no less bloodthirsty, no less inhumane, than our vilest enemy. We are left knowing that human beings are simply too self-interested, and therefore too violent, for there to be real security in any progressivist illusion.
But this, I think, is the wisdom of Jesus: to hold out the possibility of living in peace, even when there is no peace, as the lifeline that gives us reason to hope. Struggling to find a summary of this wisdom, what I came up with this week is this: Jesus’ teaching is that wisdom is the ability to see the possibility of peace in all circumstances (let me repeat that: wisdom is the ability to see the possibility of peace in all circumstances), and to go on striving for it, even when it is elusive, fleeting and tenuous. That is what is at stake in his admonition to love God, love our neighbor, and love our enemy—Jesus’ three-fold prescription for living peaceably.
            The search for such a wisdom was at the heart of the lives of the desert fathers and mothers of the early church. What is striking, is that they grasped that to find such wisdom was in the first instance not about how to live in the world, but how to live with one’s self. If one could learn how to live peaceably with the struggles and temptations that are within, then perhaps one could do so as well with other people. As a result, these desert dwellers were loath to find fault in others, when the true struggle was to come to terms with one’s own.
            So the story is told of a brother who had sinned, and was turned out of the church by the priest. Abba Bessarion got up and followed him out, for he said, “I too am a sinner.”
            Or again, there was a brother at Scetis who had committed a fault. So they called a meeting and invited Abba Moses. He refused to go. The priest sent someone to say to him, “We are all waiting for you.” So Moses got up and set off; and he took a leaky jug and filled it with water and took it with him. The others came out to meet him and said, “Father, what is this?” The old man said to them, “My sins run out behind me and I cannot see them, yet here I am coming to sit in judgment on the mistakes of somebody else.” When they heard this saying, they called off the meeting.[*]
            You see, Jesus teaches a path of peaceableness which in all things seeks to have compassion and mercy on the other, because of the weakness and fault of the self. That’s why James puts Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount front and center in what he writes, for it was there that Jesus so clearly taught, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God.”
The possibility of living that way of life is opened to us in Jesus because he shows us that we no longer have to justify ourselves before God: in Jesus, God’s truth and mercy have already stepped into the breach, and we don’t have to create it. The wisdom that we acquire by faith is to trust, to lean into, to put our weight on that promise. 
            This is the “gentleness born of wisdom” that James encourages in us today. It is a vision of what life might be like, were we to exercise the restraint of judgment and generosity of spirit toward the other which characterizes the kingdom of heaven. But it is also the patience to dwell on this side of the kingdom with life as it is, still far short of the peaceableness which is our truest desire.
For yet again as it is written, some old men came to see Abba Poemen and said to him, “We see some of the brothers falling asleep during divine worship. Should we wake them up?” Abba Poemen replied, “As for me, when I see a brother who is falling asleep during the [prayers], I lay his head on my knees and let him rest.” Amen.


[*] Stories taken from Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (2003).

5 September 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
15 Pentecost
 
You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture,
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (James 2)
 
            We’re not in a good place right now (and I don’t just mean Zozobra, the traditional man of doom and gloom). I mean each of us, and all of us — we’re not in a good place.
            Just in the past week or two, I’ve had conversations with any number of people who have talked about how worn out they are, maybe from caring for vulnerable aged parents, or from trying to keep the children in their classroom safe, or even their own children.
            Others speak of how exhausted they are, by having to make so many daily decisions about how to respond to the pandemic at school, at work, at the grocery store ….
            Still others confess how angry they are, that so many refuse to be part of the struggle.
            Some have spoken of how they’ve given up hope that we as a society will ever be able to respond to something as challenging as climate change, when we can’t even get our act together to face a threat as straightforward as a contagious virus. It is, as Maureen Dowd observed in this morning’s paper, as if nothing can be overcome.
            And all that’s not to mention the shootings in our streets and schools, the end of a futile war, devastating floods, fires, hurricanes … no we’re not in a good place. And my sense is that just below the surface of our consciousness, that fact is eating away at our spirit. I feel it in restless, troubled dreams at night, and in physical and mental weariness by day … maybe you do too.
 
            Cue the Epistle of James. It so happens, that beginning last Sunday, the lectionary has us reading from this rather unknown letter for five straight weeks, until we will have read the whole of it (it’s only five short chapters).
            James is one of those parts of the Bible that is usually overlooked, perhaps under the influence of Martin Luther who dismissed it as a “straw epistle” because its emphasis on good works seems to contradict his emphasis on faith alone.
            It is, of course, attributed to someone named “James,” but who that James is, is uncertain. Traditionally, it was ascribed to James, the brother of Jesus. (Can you imagine that poor fellow having to introduce his older sibling: “I’d like you to meet Jesus, my Lord, my God, and my brother.” Kind of puts some things in a different light, doesn’t it? But that’s an issue for another day.) The author of the epistle might also have been James, the son of Zebedee, or James the son of Alphaeus. Or maybe it was just someone using the name of James.
            But in any case, the thing that is most interesting to me is that it is at least possible, and perhaps even likely, that this epistle is the earliest Christian writing in the New Testament—written even before the gospels or the epistles of Paul. If that is the case, then it gives us a glimpse into a very primitive form of Christianity, when Jesus’ followers were still vividly aware of his personal ministry and teaching, more so than the later theologizing concepts of Paul and the next generations of the church that we have come to know as “Christianity.”
            Now, if James was in fact writing in the first few years after Jesus, then it was not a very settled time. In response to a Jewish rebellion, the weight of the Roman occupation was felt more heavily than ever, resulting in the destruction of the Temple. The Jewish synagogue community itself was divided over what to make of this new Jesus movement rising up in its midst, and repression of Jesus’ followers was becoming the norm. What the future might bring, no one could tell.
            It was, in short, a stressful time rather like our own.
            Now, if you were to sit down and read through the whole of the epistle of James (and I recommend that you do—it won’t take you very long), you might be struck by how often the author makes pretty direct allusion to Jesus’ own words, and especially to the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, that seems to argue for a pretty early date of composition. You can hear it for instance in the passage we read today, in James’ defense of the poor, or his identification of the “royal law” of “Love your neighbor as yourself” as a summation of the Torah.
 
            But what is most striking is that in the tumultuous times in which he was writing, James focuses on giving advice and encouragement to his readers about how to do good. It’s as if he is convinced that the way to connect with the longed-for good, is to do good — or as Rabbi Heschel said, “The way to God is a way of God.”
            So James admonishes us to do such things as to watch our tongue, and to be careful and thoughtful in what we say. He warns against partiality and favoritism—what we might call “privilege.” He urges us to reach out to the poor and the stranger (or again, what we might call “the refugee”). He encourages us to bear our tribulations with patience—not with a passive waiting, but an active anticipation of that good which is not only worth waiting for, but also worth working toward.
            In short, James would have us to “keep on keepin’ on.” Those aren’t his words exactly, but it is a phrase that evokes that persistence and fortitude which James would have us to have. “Keep on keepin’ on” has a rich tradition with strong biblical overtones in other periods of American history which seemed full of tribulation, going back to its first use around 1910 by the Salvation Army, its reiteration in songs by musicians like Len Chandler in the 1960s, and then Curtis Mayfield and Bob Dylan in the ‘70s.
            But perhaps the greatest use of “keep on keepin’ on” was made by Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech he gave on March 22, 1956, during the Montgomery Bus boycott. In the midst of those dark days of the early Civil Rights Movement, King nevertheless had the strength and the vision to say this:
Freedom doesn’t come on a silver platter. With every great movement toward freedom there will inevitably be trials. Somebody will have to have the courage to sacrifice. You don’t get to the Promised Land without going through the Wilderness. You don’t get there without crossing over hills and mountains, but if you keep on keeping on, you can’t help but reach it. We won’t all see it, but it’s coming and it’s because God is for it.
We won’t all see the place for which we long either—a pandemic tamed, human rights defended, bridges built across social divides, the earth shielded from harm— but this too is coming, and it’s coming, because God is for it. And how do we know to hope for that? Well, because we read this morning in the epistle of James about just such a community of hope grounded in doing good. And based on their example, we too can keep on keepin’ on. Amen.

​22 August 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
XIII Pentecost
 
Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6)
 
            Out of 100 senators, and 435 representatives, Barbara Lee of Oakland, California was the only member of congress to vote against the 2001 resolution authorizing the war in Afghanistan. In explaining her vote, she cited what she had heard preached in church: that in moments of high emotion, we must nevertheless have the wisdom to exercise restraint, “lest we become part of the evil that we deplore.” Now in retrospect, both her words and her vote seem quite prophetic.
            Yet for her vote, Congresswoman Lee received volumes of hate mail, and even multiple death threats—so many that she had to be given police protection.
            Her words were echoed a few months later in a little book called Writing in the Dust, in which then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (who had been among those running for their lives in lower Manhattan on September 11), also made the case for restraint in the face of evil. “It requires courage and imagination,” he wrote. “It is essentially the decision not simply to reproduce what’s already been done to you as if it is the only available response.”
            Yet the drumbeat for war drowned out these more sober voices, so into battle we went, and now 20 years, $2 trillion, and tens of thousands of lives later, the promises of freedom and democracy on which the case for war were made lie in tatters.
            The thing is, the misrepresentation of fact and broken promises that were at the center of this war are not isolated events. They are part of what we perceive nowadays to be a crisis of trust—a sense that neither institutions, nor even fellow citizens, can be trusted to live up to their obligations and responsibilities. In another of his books, Tokens of Trust, Williams describes this situation as one in which we are profoundly unhappy and mistrustful—we live with a debilitating suspicion of one another so that to trust itself “feels like risk and folly.”
            When you think about it, the idea of “trust” is rather complex by its very nature. The word has many layers of meaning, from simply having confidence in someone or something, to placing one’s resources into their care, to being entirely reliant or dependent upon someone else. Ironically, though trust is an interior feeling, it is not something we can manufacture for ourselves. It has to be built up from the exterior, where one’s experience over time create a settled confidence that I can rely on something outside of myself.
            That exteriority also means that although trust is something we feel in the present moment, it is actually more properly understood as an orientation toward the future, and though our trust may recognize that the path toward some future good will be difficult, it nevertheless regards it as possible. Trust is, therefore, very closely related to hope. (Or as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, “Trust is the substance of things hoped for” [Heb. 11:1]).
            In today’s gospel, we find that many of Jesus’ followers are losing faith, or trust, in him. They have been following him, expecting to receive some material benefit, but he has resisted that expectation over and over again, saying that what he has to offer is of the spirit and not the flesh. And so, their belief, or trust in him, begins to fade. (And by the way, the Greek word for “believe” here is pisteo, which doesn’t mean to believe in the sense of thinking something to be true, but in the sense of putting one’s trust in it). In any case, the weakening trust of Jesus’ followers is so apparent, that Jesus even feels the need to ask the twelve—his closest companions—whether they too want to leave him.
            It is Peter (of course) who answers for them: Where else can they go? Jesus is offering them “words of eternal life,” and although they don’t yet know quite what that means, the one thing that is clear to them is that the want to put there trust in him.
            You see operating here that experience of externality—something coming from the outside—that is the origin of trust. It is what Jesus has to offer that evokes the disciples’ trust, even if it is only partially grasped. And so there is something more going on here as well: the life that Jesus is offering them, they experience as gift, as something that is being given to them, not just encountered by happenstance.
            And that, I think, really gets us to the heart of what it might mean to say that we too “trust” in Jesus (as we say we do in baptism, where as part of the Baptismal Covenant we affirm that we “put our whole trust in his grace and love”). Jesus comes to us as gift, with a strange truth and generosity and beauty that impinges upon us as a reality outside of ourselves, which although it eludes me, nevertheless compels me—what Williams calls “a place where I can settle, a place where I can stand.”*
            If we were to read on a bit further in John’s gospel from where we stopped today, we would come to Chapter 7, which never shows up in the Sunday lectionary. That’s no wonder, because it’s a rather strange passage which relates a kind of family feud Jesus has with his own brothers, who even themselves do not believe in him. It gives Jesus the opportunity to make clear that he understands himself to be trustworthy not based on his own merits (which is what his brothers seem to be looking for), but because he is speaking the truth of God.
            And the implication of this truth is that the gift which he offers is not just something one receives, but also something into which one must grow. Trust can be premised upon a fixed idea of stability and predictability (think of the corporate name of our bank, “New Mexico Bank and Trust”). But trust in God is anything but static, because as the creator of all things, God is constantly making all things new. Trust becomes dynamic and progressive rather than fixed and conventional.
            Which takes us back to the crisis of trust with which we began. A Christian church is at its core a community of trust. It is a place where we learn to recognize and receive the gift of trust in God that is offered to us in Jesus. That is to say, a church community is by its very nature a place of growth and change. It is, therefore, as we have observed about so many other aspects of the Christian way of life over the last several years, profoundly counter-cultural—and especially so in these times of rigid division and mistrust. Think of what St. Francis taught us to pray, when he said, “Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is discord, peace; where there is despair, hope; [and, we might add] where there is suspicion, let us sow trust.” Amen.
             
 
 


* See Rowan Williams, “In What Do We Trust? Trusting in Faith,” part of a 2020 online lecture series at St. Martin in the Fields, London, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DflEpuRnoNI
 

​Proper 15B (August 15, 2021)
St. Michael and All Angels Church
The Rev. Carolyn W. Metzler+
 
Proverbs 9:1-6; Ps 34:1-8; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
 
Needed: bowl with water, sponge, bow tie, white towel
 
            There are occasional (very occasional) Sundays when I wish I were a Baptist and didn’t have to deal with the assigned texts of the lectionary. This is one Gospel reading that would not often make it into my chosen repertoire of sermons. Are any of you squeamish about all the flesh-eating and blood-drinking language? For four weeks straight we’ve been hammered with it. The number of times Jesus says “I am the Bread of Life” alone tells us this is important. ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? As we will see next week, this claim of Jesus loses him followers, and maybe on one level we can understand why. It’s hard stuff.
            Some churches deal with the squeamishness by spiritualizing it all away. They see Jesus meaning some kind of spiritual union only, symbolized by the bread and wine as body and blood. I grew up in a church like that. We did not call this an altar, but a table. But there is a real problem with this. That’s not what Jesus said. In fact, if you look at the Greek, the original language of this Gospel, it’s even worse than the English! The Greek word for “eat” is closer to “chew energetically, to tear with one’s teeth, to gnaw, to masticate.” Think lions with their prey.  We’re not talking delicate finger sandwiches here, folks. It’s very organic. It challenges our polite Episcopal sensibilities.  But hang out on this limb with me, OK? Let’s see together what the Holy One might be saying in this very difficult text.
            Remember, Christians did not make this up. The language Jesus uses here is the language of sacrifice. People of many faiths had been sacrificing to their gods for thousands of years. The ancient understanding was that people needed to make sacrifices to the gods to feed them, to appease them if things were not going well, to bribe them into giving a fruitful harvest, to atone for their sins - lots of reasons to make sacrifices. So they’d bring a dove if it was just a little sin, or a bull if it was a humdinger sin, and kill it in some ritual way on the altar (not a table) and burn some token part of the animal. The god would somehow join to the offering and it would then be eaten. In eating it, people saw themselves as somehow sharing in the vital life of the god. Sound familiar?
            How the animal was killed was very important also. The ancient Hebrews believed that the life of the animal—the life of all people, in fact, resided in the blood. When the blood left the body, life left the body. They considered it a sin to eat an animal if there was any blood left in it. That is the meaning of kosher. No blood left. All the life is gone. The life is in the blood.
            Jesus was a good Jew and understood all this. It was not a big step, then, from the ancient understanding of sacrifice to what developed as Eucharist. Only there is a big difference: Jesus does not just celebrate the Passover meal. Jesus is the Passover meal. Jesus does not give an offering; Jesus becomes the offering, reconciling all things and becoming the food and drink that brings God’s life to the whole world. And as he became part of Creation itself in the Incarnation, so he also takes bread and wine, part of creation itself, and fills it with his living presence like a water fills a sponge. If you dip a sponge in water, the sponge remains sponge, the water remains water, but they are so united you don’t know where sponge ends and water begins. This is a crude illustration of what we call “Real Presence.” Bread, wine, God, remain what they are, but in their union they are indistinguishable.
            I love that it is something we eat that makes this possible. It’s not something that we turn on and off like a radio, or put on like a coat which can be taken off again. It’s not a color of hair that wears off eventually. It is something we take into the very center of our being and in so doing it becomes part of our very bodies. It is the most intimate way of abiding in Christ. I love that Jesus doesn’t say “Think about me.” He goes waaaaay beyond thinking. Christianity is so embodied, that we consume the fullness of the one we love and serve. We are physically joined to the sacred Presence so we can love and serve God in myriad ways.  This text needs to go hand in hand with Jesus’ words in Matthew 28: “As you did it to the least of these you did it to me.” This is Jesus, bone or our bone, flesh of our flesh, and Jesus in the world around us. Jesus does not sit up in the clouds watching us struggle through life, wishing us well. He says “Oh! Look! There is Jamye! There is John! There is (fill in your own name here)! I will give them myself in the bread and wine to strengthen them and give them courage. I will join myself to their flesh, their blood, my spirit to their spirit and fill them with my love so that they can go and be me in the world!”
            So when Jesus tells us we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to share in his eternal life, he is saying it is not enough to consider him as a theological possibility. Just as Jesus does not stay remote with us, we cannot be remote from Jesus either. He is not an abstraction. Jesus is saying through this difficult language that he wants to be an intimate part of us and wants us to be an intimate part of him so his life lifeblood is our lifeblood. He is the lifeblood that pumps through our heart and courses through our veins. He is the love that is made flesh in us and which we need to make flesh in the world. To do so is to live the very life of Christ, his death and resurrection. In tis week where every newspaper headline shreds my heart, this Gospel is particularly poignant. Our world is shredded by devastation. In this week alone we have been shocked by the UN Climate Report, a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the agony of Afghanistan, and in our own city the shooting of a 14 year old boy by another. To me, this [fraction gesture] is the most important gesture of the Eucharist. What is broken - be it bread or dreams or hope or hearts or bodies or lives - meets the brokenness of God in the bread and in it all we are somehow made whole. There is no distance between us and Jesus. Who can understand it? It is sacred Mystery. Yet the longer we practice it, the more we know it to be true.
            Do you have difficulty with this? You are not alone. The harsh words really put it to us. Do we believe this? On good days, yes. Some days we want to believe it. Some days we want to want to believe it. God understands and meets us where we are at.
            There is a wonderful old story about a sinful man who wanted to woo the woman he loved, and so he donned the mask of a saint. She married him and over the years he kept the mask on, loving her, pretending to be better than he was until one day she learned of the deception and challenge him to take off the mask.With great fear he did so, only to discover that he had actually become the man he wanted to be. Our brothers and sisters in AA understand this. “Fake it til you make it” is sometimes most faithful. We Anglicans have a saying: “Praying shapes believing.” We do not pray according to how we believe. We believe according to how we pray. And so the Eucharist is a prayer which allows has to practice this kind of faith. The longer we live with it, coming back week after week, year after year, practicing this faith as we pray this prayer, we find that it shapes us, molds us, transforms us into the people of faith we have yearned to become. We are not yet the people of faith or love that we will one day be. But, but God’s astonishing grace, we will be.
            In our first lesson, we read that Wisdom has set a table. “She has sent out her servants to call from the highest places in town: ‘You that are simple, turn in here! To those without sense, she says Come! Eat of my bread and drink of my wine! Lay aside immaturity and walk in the way of insight.’”
            During the season of Advent we read of Jesus’s Holy Wisdom. Wisdom calls us who are simple, uncluttered, not sophisticated. I love that Jesus never says “I am the filet mignon of life,” or “I am the Lobster Newburgh of life.”  Just the simplest bread. We don’t need theological degrees to receive this meal; we don’t need high liturgy or fancy vestments or big words. All we need is openness to God’s life coursing through our veins and the willingness to let our faith grow us as we become what we eat.
(Put on bow tie, and towel over my arm)
            Good morning. I am Wisdom and I will be your server today. The specialty of the house is the Body and Blood of Christ, rich with life and pulsing with joy and thanksgiving. All this is prepared in a fine liturgical sauce which you are invited to receive with your whole body, mind, and soul. Come with the eyes of faith wide open and see God at work in your life. Step right this way, please. Ah! Here is a place at the altar just for you.

​1 August 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
X Pentecost
 
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” (John 6)
 
            A lot of people are giving thought these days to what they learned from the pandemic. Listening to what is said, I find that one of the most recurring themes is a determination to get back to the basics: back to what really matters in life, what truly gives joy, what makes for a meaningful life.
            And so, into that mix comes Sam Sifton, the food editor of The New York Times, with a new cookbook called See You on Sunday (Random House, 2019). You know this is no ordinary cookbook from its first words: an epigraph taken from the biblical book of Acts that simply reads, “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:46). He goes on to recount a series of Sunday suppers that he prepared over the years, where people came together not to be entertained, but just to share in the peculiarly satisfying act of sharing a meal around a common table.
            The people who came to his Sunday suppers were an eclectic mix: friends, neighbors, colleagues, singles, families with children. But Sifton concluded over the years that by simply cooking and serving a meal, you can change lives, when you do it with intentionality and care. And it need not be fancy—as the rector of his local Episcopal Church in Brooklyn put it, “Just put some stuff in a pot. Cook it. Then serve that on rice.”
            Well, as you can imagine, as a food editor Sifton suggests doing a bit more than that. But ultimately his point is, as he says, that “People are lonely. They want to be part of something, even when they can’t identity that longing as a need. [So] they show up. Feed them.”
            Jesus seems to have hand the same instinct.
            And when you think about it, it’s amazing how central the idea of food is to the whole of scripture. From the very beginning, when Adam and Eve consume of the wrong kind of food, eating is associated with the key moment in most biblical stories. Passover. Manna and quail given in the desert. The feeding of the five thousand. The last supper. Emmaus. Jesus’ breakfast with the disciples on the beach. And now today, as if to draw all of this to his own presence, we hear Jesus referring to himself as “the bread of life.”
            So why is this? Why is food so central to our human experience of God’s presence, and to our sense of one another?
            Maybe it has something to do with where we started: if you’re talking about basics, food is truly among the most elemental. In fact, there is nothing more basic to human life, or any form of life, than the food that sustains it. Like air, and water, nourishment is primal.
            And perhaps that train of thought accounts for my own increasing sense that in this time when we are intent to return to basics, it would be good for us as a church to reclaim the eucharist as fundamentally a meal, a meal that points us back to the importance of feeding one another that is at the heart of the Christian way of life.
            You know that at each celebration of the eucharist, we repeat the words Jesus himself spoke at the Last Supper: “Do this for the remembrance of me.” But from time to time, here at St. Michael’s we substitute for that phrase, “Whenever you break bread together in my name, I will be at table with you” as a better rendering of Jesus’ intention. I don’t know about you, but I wonder if Jesus had something like Sifton’s Sunday suppers in mind as the way he would feed us, rather than the highly ritualized, abstracted form it has come to take. At any rate, we would do well to remember that what we do here in church always points to the sharing of a meal. “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” Maybe we too need to find a way to share “Sunday supper.”
            And if the primal act of sharing a meal is at the heart of Christian life, then one has to ask the question of how the symbolic power of food can radiate out into other aspects of the life we share? Our parish food pantry, for instance, becomes in this way of thinking not just a good work that provides people with something to eat. More than that, it is an extension of the sharing of bread and wine that we do here at this table. Look for instance at the picture on the cover of today’s bulletin: there you see the food pantry of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, with food set up not in a side building, but in their sanctuary and around the altar. Not just bread and wine at that table, but tomatoes, and oranges, and eggs, and eggplants! “Gifts of God, for the people of God.”
            So here we are today, at a milestone in our community’s life, when for the first time in many years (not just since the pandemic), we are all gathered at one time around the same table (whether online or in person), to experience together our life in common.
            I know a lot is changing as we get used to being back in the church. The pandemic has turned a lot upside down, and the truth is, the way we used to do many things is simply no longer viable. Too much has changed. Our sense of what’s important, what’s most basic to us, has shifted too much for things to go back to the way they were.
            So let me encourage you that now is not the time to try to hold on to what was. For all the trouble it caused, the pandemic has also given us a great gift: being able to reimagine our life together, and to let go of a lot of those externals that fall by the wayside when we focus on what is most important. So rather than asking, “How do I get what I most like or want out of church?”, the question has become, “How do we receive together what God has to give us?”
And what we need, and what God has to give, are often quite different, which I think is what Jesus was trying to teach the people in our gospel lesson. They were looking for bread; he was offering them life. And in that same vein we might ask, how can we too come to share in the fullest spirit of table fellowship with him and with one another that he offers?
For a meal, a shared meal, is where both the physical and spiritual dimensions of food meet. In her book, Take this Bread (Ballantine, 2007), Sara Miles (a parishioner at St. Gregory’s) captures this convergence when she writes, “There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food.” And I would push that idea even a step further, to say that it’s not just in the food, but in the sharing of it around a table where each person has a place, that we are brought closest to God.
After all, in the Christian vision of the end times, it is a heavenly banquet that God has prepared for us. As the prophet Isaiah put it, “The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines … And it will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God” (Is. 25:6, 8). The consummation of all the meals of which we partake in this life, is a fiesta at which God is the host, and we are the guests—and Jesus teaches us that in him we are given a foretaste of that great banquet, even now. Amen.

​25 July 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
IX Pentecost
 
Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” (John 6)
 
            In a remarkable essay in last week’s New York Time Magazine about Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court, Stephen Carter (one of his former clerks) described Marshall as one of our nation’s great story-tellers, in the same tradition as Abraham Lincoln. “He told stories to teach lessons,” Carter writes, “and also like Lincoln, he never told the same story quite the same way twice. The message was what mattered.” Here’s one example, told in Carter’s own words:
It concerns a lawsuit that arose in the 1960s, in which the plaintiff was well known in New York’s federal courts because she filed complaints regularly, the sort that claim the government has installed electrodes in the plaintiff’s brain to steal her ideas for television shows — things like that.
Her lawsuits were always thrown out, her appeals always dismissed without a hearing.
At this time, the chief judge of the circuit was J. Edward Lumbard. One day Lumbard, without a word to anyone else, put the woman’s appeal on the calendar for oral argument. Nobody could figure out what was going on.
On the day set for oral argument, the United States attorney sent along “the Most Junior Junior Assistant” with instructions to say 10 very precise words, and no more.
The clerk called the case. The plaintiff, representing herself, got up to make her argument. She rambled incoherently as the three-judge panel sat impassively.
When her allotted 15 minutes had elapsed, the plaintiff returned to her seat. Judge Lumbard turned to the Most Junior Junior Assistant United States attorney and invited him to respond.
The Most Junior Junior Assistant stepped to the lectern. With great confidence, the young man recited the 10 very precise words he had been instructed to say:
“May it please the court, we rest on our brief.” In the grandiloquent language of the law, the Most Junior Junior Assistant had stated that the appellant’s case was so utterly frivolous, that there was no need for the appellee [the State] to respond.
Lumbard glowered. His voice thundered:
“Are you trying to tell me, young man, that after this woman, in the exercise of her fundamental constitutional right to petition her government for the redress of grievances, has come into this courtroom to argue her case, her own government will not even do her the dignity of a response? Get up here and argue, sir!”
[In the end,] the court dismissed the appeal without comment. But here’s the kicker: The woman never filed another lawsuit. [She had at last been heard.]
And so ends the story. But in reflecting on it, Carter describes its point as being an illustration of what he calls Thurgood Marshall’s “gregarious humanity,” his ability to see past the prejudices that separate us, to appreciate the human core of every person, all in the name of honoring our common human dignity. Judge Lumbard, Marshall would have said, was someone “you could do business with,” because he was a person who never lost sight of either his, nor anyone else’s, fundamental humanity, and so was always trying to find a way to connect.
I think that Jesus also was somebody you could do business with. Why, just look at today’s gospel, the well-known story of the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples look out upon the gathered crowd and see only a hungry, surly lot who have nothing to offer—in the minds of the disciples, they are nothing but a throng of needy people.
But Jesus looks out upon the same crowd, and sees people who are ready to share and even celebrate, if only they are given a model of how to do so. And so he calls up the one boy who has offered his modest store of five loaves and two fish—and by sharing them, Jesus persuades the people to share what they too have heretofore concealed, and lo and behold there is more than enough for all!
Jesus was someone you could do business with, because he never got stuck on the stereotype of those who came to him in need. Look at every one of the miracle stories, and you’ll see that Jesus was someone who saw through to his petitioners’ humanity, and so was able to bring something new out of them that they hadn’t realized was possible. That’s the real miracle!
And isn’t that a lesson that we all especially need right now when we are mutually so imprisoned by the divisive stereotypes that get repeated over and over again of left versus right, black versus white, red versus blue … on and on it goes. If we were to follow the lead of our greatest exemplars of a “gregarious humanity,” we just wouldn’t settle for such unproductive drivel. We would have to bore down to something deeper.
Let me share with you second story that gets at the point of finding our common humanity even more vividly.
In a rap video that has gone viral in Israel, called “Let’s Talk Straight,” two young guys sit on either side of small table in an auto shop. One (Uriya Rosenman) is an Israeli Jew, and the other (Sameh Zakout) a Palestinian Arab. The Jew launches into a verbal harangue against the Arab, venting all of his frustration with what he regards as the self-absorbed violence, laziness, and untrustworthiness of the Palestinians. The Arab man impatiently hears him out. But then he too lets fly with all of his pent up frustration with the Jews—their self-righteous obsession with the Holocaust, their indifference to the suffering of those they displaced, their air of cultural superiority.
Both men truly “talk straight” (as the video’s title suggests). The columnist Roger Cohen, also writing in the New York Times, put it this way: “The two hurl ethnic insults and clichés at each other, tearing away the veneer of civility overlaying the seething resentments between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority. … By shouting each side’s prejudices at each other, at times seemingly on the verge of violence, Mr. Rosenman and Mr. Zakout have produced a work that dares listeners to move past stereotypes and discover their shared humanity.”
And there you have it – we’re back to that common thread. The video ends with the two sharing the simple meal of pita, hummus, and Coca-Cola laid out on the table between them, as if to underscore the point that though we may be scared of one another and controlled by fear, we are (as Mr. Zakout put it), “fundamentally human. Period. We are human beings first.”
Now he, too, is someone you could do business with—they both are.
So if you can stand the almost excruciating tension created in the video, I’d really encourage you to watch it if you haven’t already (“Let’s Talk Straight”—you can find it on YouTube). It’s an incredibly powerful portrait of what simultaneously divides and binds human beings who are caught on opposite sides, yet in the same vortex, of conflict.
And then you might then ask yourself the question, What similar haranguing monologues are hurled in our own situation, by people on opposite sides of the conflicts that entrap us?
And then you might further think, if Jesus was able to look upon that tired, hungry, empty-handed, surly crowd stretched out before him on the mountainside, and see the potential for a feast—how might he look upon us as a people now, and what capacity for generosity might he see in the humanity that lies hidden beneath our relentless discord?
Think about it. A lot depends on the answer. Amen.

 
The Feast of Mary of Magdala
John 20:  11-18
The Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch
 
Today we celebrate the life of Mary of Magdala.  If ever there were a feast day filled with landmines and sand traps for a preacher, this is it.  There are so many images and stories swirling around the Mary of Magdala we meet today weeping outside the empty tomb.  So many takes on her.  So many cherished images.
 
Some say she was that penitent sinner who washed Jesus' feet with her tears; some say she was that woman caught in adultery; some say she was a second Eve.
 
There are those who see her sitting at Jesus' feet while Martha of Bethany busily fusses around the kitchen.
 
Pope Gregory the Great (or not so great if you ask me) saw her as a woman purged of seven sins--the seven mortal sins.  You know the ones.
 
The back story to the ever so popular Robert Lentz icon of Mary Magdalene has her traveling to Rome, meeting with the emperor, failing to convince him of the truth of the resurrection, and then preaching throughout the Mediterranean world.
 
Even in our own day there are multiple and widely divergent claims about Mary of Magdala:
            *A bumper sticker for magdalen.org reads "Celebrating the mysteries of the woman who
            knew the all"
            *Another online group portrays her as Jesus' "co-preacher, spiritual consort, and wife"
            *There's even a comic book series that features her as mother to a powerful line of women warriors
            that continues to our own day.1
 
It's enough to make me want to shout out, "Will the real Mary of Magdala please stand up and tell your story?"
 
But that's not likely to happen.  So here I go-wading into the waters of historical reconstruction with some scriptural validation attached.
 
Mary the Magdalene lived in Magdala, a city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee--a city and a region that had witnessed decades of Roman oppression and cruelty--citizens enslaved, taxes imposed, land seized, families destroyed, and at least once a portion of the city's weak and the elderly killed to make a point.
 
 So when I think of Mary of Magdala, I hear echoes of that old spiritual playing in my head:  "Nobody knows the troubles I've seen.  Nobody knows but you Lord."
 
At some point, Mary the Magdalene encountered Jesus--maybe when he preached from a boat anchored in the Sea of Galilee or maybe when he walked the shores of that sea recruiting disciples.  Somewhere in Galilee, Mary of Magdala, weighed down by the burdens she carried was seen, known, loved, and healed by Jesus of Nazareth.  Maybe not all at once -maybe it took days, weeks, months even for her to come to herself, for her to see herself, to know herself as beloved of God. 
 
Is it any wonder she followed him?  Is it any wonder she provided for him from what she had?  Is it any wonder that she stayed with him at the cross?  Any wonder that she stood weeping outside the empty tomb? 
 
The one who saw her, the one who knew her, the one who loved her,  the one who brought her to life was gone. 
 
No wonder she stood there weeping--inconsolable, waves of sadness convulsing her shoulders, the weight of her loss almost pulling her down into the ground beneath her feet. 
 
All that was holding her in place was gone--Jesus, the other disciples, her work, her very identity--all gone. 
 
Like those disciples on the Emmaus Road she must have said to herself, "I had hoped. I had hoped...."
 
Aren't we, aren't you and I and those who share this planet with us (and even our planet itself) at that point. 
That point of saying, "I had hoped...; we had hoped..."
            *hoped that vaccinations would stem this tide of disease and death
            *hoped that, as our prayerbook puts it, "divisions would cease"
            *hoped that we could keep the ravages of climate change at bay as we worked to change our         habits
            *hoped that the nastiness that has marked so much of public life would ebb
            *hoped that we could return to normal, to life as it had been before.....
 
Mary of Magdala does not remain looking into the abyss of that empty tomb.  She does not stay stuck in her grief.  She hopes against hope.  She turns, she sees that gardener standing there, she interrogates him--"...tell me where you have laid him...."
 
And then she hears him say, "Mary".  He sees her; he knows her; he loves her; he heals her; and he sends her out to do the work she was made to do and in so doing, he blesses her. 
 
You and I and those who share this planet with us have all been through a lot.  We live in challenging times.  We all have our back stories and our baggage.  We all need to be seen, to be known, to be loved, to be healed.  We all need to be blessed. 
 
Blessing.  That's the promise Mary of Magdala's life proclaims.
 
Blessing.  That's the work God calls us to.
 
So let us pray for just one thing--that we learn to bless as we've been blessed.
 
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1Jodie Eichler-Levine, "Imagining Mary Magdalene:  The Discourse of Hidden Wisdom in American Popular Culture", Postscripts, 7, 1 (2011) 1-25