John 14.23-29
Sixth Sunday of Easter 
Year C
Rev. Paul Hanneman

…my peace I give to you

There are a number of firsts in this moment.  For one, it may be the first time a Baptist preacher delivers the sermon at Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church - Susan Allison-Hatch, who has been around here a long time, can’t remember any.  And certainly it is the first time I have preached here, and it is an honor to be standing here.   Also, it is the first time I’ve worn a tie since we moved here!
 
Evelyn & I help with the Food Pantry on Tuesdays.  She hands out bread, and I’m on watermelon, cabbage, rice, flour… When our Food Pantry friends found out I was preaching today, I heard more Baptist jokes than I had in years (I’d heard most of them before)!  And there were questions. ‘Are we going to have to raise our hands over our heads?’  I told them I was a high church Baptist, and they don’t know what to do with their hands – let alone kneeling.  How long are you going to preach?’ One friend said that at the 12 minute mark she’d stand up and draw a finger across her throat…. I told her that some Baptist preachers hardly get through the introduction in 12 minutes…but she didn’t have to worry, because I’m a recovering Baptist preacher; as Elizabeth Taylor said to all seven of her husbands, ‘I’ll not keep you long…’
 
Let us pray:  O Lord Jesus Christ, be present to us in this hour... save us from the error of merely wishing to admire you instead of being willing to follow you and to come to resemble you.  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Amen.
 
Most of you already know that the Gospel of John is different from the other three.  Matthew quotes Scripture constantly, Mark hurriedly lists miracle after miracle, Luke reels off parables…and John gives us poems.  He knew that a word may be all it takes to set heart on fire or break it open.  He speaks of the Word God spoke to say what God is all about, what humankind is all about, what life is all about.  But it wasn’t a sound that emerged, but a human being; Jesus was his name….  God’s Word Jesus utters poems about himself – I am the bread of life… the door…the Good Shepherd…the Light of the world…  John’s Jesus is majestic, mystical, aloof almost – you can’t imagine him with cilantro stuck in his teeth…John’s Jesus is the One he knew in his heart, the Jesus everyone could know too if they kept their hearts open…
 
“Can you help me? I don’t know what to do.” The New York Times quotes these words spoken by one Ukrainian to another, less than 24 hours into the Russian invasion.  They are words spoken when the world is collapsing around you; the profound disorientation is heartbreakingly understandable. It’s also familiar.
 
We live in troubled times.  “I don’t know what to do” was a constant refrain throughout the pandemic each time it became once again impossible to predict the future.  Nations are embroiled in violent power struggles with no end in sight.  Environmentally we here in New Mexico suffer both a 1200-year drought AND the worst wildfire in history.
 
There’s the political and economic turmoil in our own country – polarization, vilification, hostility… The potential Supreme Court decision jettisoning Roe vs. Wade could pour gasoline on an already inflamed nation.  In Buffalo, white supremacy rears its ugly, violent, racist head again – the “great replacement theory” repackages reactionary ideas and anxieties that have fed nativism, racism and antisemitism in the US and Europe for centuries.  A decade ago when I was working with people who are homeless, the ‘drug of choice’ was crack cocaine.  No more.  Last year, fentanyl, a cheap synthetic opioid, caused more overdose deaths than any other drug – ever.  Along with meth (also synthetic and cheap) fentanyl made 2021 the worst year of overdoses – ever.
 

In a recent article, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that the Tower of Babel is the best metaphor I have for…the  fractured country we now inhabit.  We’re disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.  We’re cut off from one another and from the past…[this has happened not only between Red and Blue America, but within both the left and the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, even families.” (The Atlantic, May 2022)
 
“Can you help me? I don’t know what to do.”  Fight, flight, freeze, [try to] forget…
 
The disciples could have demanded that of Jesus when he sits them down together in an upper room on that last night.  The group of the faithful is now even smaller and more insecure.  The die is cast - Judas has left to do his thing, the powers that be are circling like storm cloud, fear and death are buzzing around them like a swarm of flies.  They had come to believe Jesus is not just any other man but God’s very son, and they had left everything to follow him.  And next he will be…handed over to be killed?  They are facing a dangerous, uncertain future without the One whom they called Master.
 
That feverish night Jesus offers his disciples three things. First, a new commandment.  The original Ten Commandments were given to God’s people in the wilderness, so they would get through an unfamiliar and frightening place.  In effect they state, ‘this is how we make it. This is what we do.’
Jesus’ new commandment is short: love one other.
                 
Then Jesus makes a promise: Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them… 
 
Lastly he gives them a gift: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  Peace has come to mean a time when there aren't any wars - any major wars, at least.  These days, we'd most of us settle for that. But shalom means fullness, having all you need to be wholly and happily yourself.  For Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.
 
A commandment, a promise, a gift – Jesus doesn't try to rationally persuade us or give us a list of to-do’s; He gives a vision of what life is like when you believe God loves you.  “Believe" originally did not mean accepting a set of doctrines (not even a Creed!); the Greek root is "to give one's heart to" – “heart” being the self at the deepest level.  Believing is giving one’s deepest self to Christ, the face of God turned toward us.
 
Love one another… Do you remember Who makes our home with you, with me, with us?  Do you know that peace? 
 
Modern poet Robert Penn Warren writes,
Out of the mist, God’s
Blind hand gropes to find
Your face.  The fingers
Want to memorize your face.  The fingers
Will be wet with the tears of your eyes.  God
Wants only to love you, perhaps.    (“What You Sometimes Feel on your Face at Night”)
 
I once had a t-shirt with three lines on it:

To be is to do - Socrates
To do is to be – Jean-Paul Sartre
Do Be Do Be Do – Frank Sinatra

Who would have ever thought that Frank Sinatra would be the one on target for times such as these?!?  We are trained to be human doings – do, do, do; but we are created as human beings.  When we don’t know what to do, Jesus calls us remember who we are and Whose we are – not do do, but BE do BE do!
 
Imagine a world in which great numbers of people are beginning to discover at heart and soul level that we are God’s beloved, the same as Jesus…that God bends over each of us and whispers, “With you, even in your present unfinished state, with you I am well pleased.”  The Creator of all wants to love us, wants us to love ourselves by caring for one another, by seeing face of Christ in each and every person.   Do Be Do Be Do…
 
I know, I know – we’ve heard love one another all our lives, some of us.  It’s easy to get distracted by life, to sentimentalize “love”, to dismiss the New Commandment as not “practical”, not “fixing” anything.  Yet stop; look and listen.  Years ago JB Phillips wrote Your God is Too Small and opened many eyes.  I want to riff off his title and say, if love one another seems tired and trite, then your love is too small!  Dear friends, Love is the Power that births and gives, the laughter that fills the heavens, the tears that water the earth.  And there is no end to it.  Ever.
 
I don’t think we can ever adequately define or even understand love…and I don’t think we were ever meant to.  Instead, we’re meant to give ourselves to love, to live ourselves into love’s mystery.  My dear teacher James Finley says I’m always trying to sink the taproot of my heart into this one love unfolding itself everywhere, which transcends the darkness of this world - not to be carried off, away from the world, but to radicalize my presence in it.  That’s  how Jesus lived.  If we keep at it, turning again to it, little by little by little we find our way deeper, deeper, and the “doing” becomes obvious.
 
We have it in us to be Christs to each other.  We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with Christ and to forgive with him and to heal with him… even once in a while to grieve with some measure of his grief at another's pain, and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another's joy as if it were our own. We have it in us to speak from our hearts and to bear witness to and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the truth of his Presence within and among us.
 
Do Be Do Be Do Be Do…
 
 
He sings to me when I am sad.
His voice is old, but sweeter than honey.
It comes from farther off than I can see.
It is not the world singing, it is he
That made it, and he makes it once again
As way down here I listen,
Listen, and am sad once more
With so much sweetness,
Sweetness - O, my Lord, how can I bear it?
Yet bear it, says the song, and so I do,
I bear it, all that sweetness, as he has
Forever, says the song he sings to me.
 - Mark Van Doren, from “Psalm 2” in That Shining Place 

​Amen.

​17 April 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Easter Day
 
Jesus said, “Peace be with you.” (John 20)
 
            As we did the Stations of the Cross each day this week here in the church, one word has leaped out at me, over and over again: “bitter.” It’s a very sharp word, hard even to hear said. Like many words, it has multiple layers of meaning. It can refer to the emotion someone feels who has been hurt or wronged. But it can also refer to the nature of something that is done to us, as when the psalmist says, “God has dealt bitterly with me.”
            If ever there was someone who had reason to be bitter, it was Jesus. Judas betrayed him. Peter denied him. The guards crucified him. The people mocked him. His disciples deserted him.
            We just heard the story of Jesus’ first appearance to Mary early on Easter morning, and of her astonishing report to the disciples. But I want to push the story a bit further, to the next scene in John’s gospel, when the disciples are gathered together in a locked room later that same day. It’s not hard to imagine that the air in that room was heavy with their resentment toward one another, tense with fear of what might happen next, and redolent with the disappointment they felt in themselves.
            And then suddenly … there Jesus is. It must have been a truly terrifying moment. What would he say or do, this man who had so much reason to reproach them bitterly for what they had done, and failed to do? And yet … the first words out of his mouth are … “Peace be with you.” Those words are so familiar (we hear them in church every Sunday after all!), it’s hard to register just how shocking they must have been in the tension of that moment. Where the disciples had reason to expect only an angry tirade, they get instead a gentle embrace.
            So what’s going on? Well, whatever else one might say about Jesus, those words signify to us that one thing we cannot do is to change his mind about who we are: beloved creatures of God, endowed with the dignity and likeness of God. So Jesus is going to love and forgive us, whether we’re ready for it or not. And there is good news in that: the good news that we are powerless to make him stop loving us. He will always survive our mistakes and failures, always be there working to remake the relationships we break again and again. It is the freedom Jesus has as God’s chosen one: the freedom to love us without restraint, as God created us to be loved from the beginning.
            But here’s the thing: there is a tendency to take that kind of statement about love and forgiveness, and to universalize it, as if it solves all our problems. “Well, okay, then,” we say: “God loves us, our sins are forgiven, and the world is set right.”
            Except that it isn’t, is it? These dark days of a brutal war, symbolized by that pile of cold stones in front of the altar, painfully remind us that the world is still very much enthralled and held captive by violence, in all of its forms, resurrection or not. I find that even the hymns we sing today sound agonizingly out of sync with the reality of our times: “The strife is o’er, the battle done, the victory of life is won.” Really? Could you easily say those words today in Kyiv? In Mariupol? In Bucha? So what, then, are we to make of Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you”? Are they ultimately powerless? Just wishful thinking?
            Speaking for myself, I have to say that there comes into play here something I have learned from being pastor of this congregation. You have helped to teach me a more restrained—or perhaps the word is, a more modest—way of Christian life, than what I once had. This is a congregation that lives in the world with a very realistic sense of the challenges human life brings, whether it is overcoming prejudice, or caring for the stranger, or wrestling with the pains and griefs of old age. We don’t live by clichés here: we live by the hard work of doing our best to address human suffering and need as we find it.
            And in turn, I think that lesson is very much related to Jesus’ words of peace. We just have to accept that as long as we human beings have anything to do with it, the world is not going to be set right, not even by God. The kingdom of God is not absolute, but partial. Yet that doesn’t mean that as followers of Jesus, we are not empowered to live in hope as peaceably as we can for the sake of the world, even while knowing that we are surrounded by a world that is inherently violent and ultimately indifferent. Jesus calls us to do what we can, even though it is never enough. The only thing worse, would be to do nothing.
Brother Roger was the founder of the Taizé religious community in eastern France during the Second World War, a community that dedicated itself to peace and reconciliation even in the darkest days of that conflict. It was said about him that in his own person he made the possibility of peace seem real, just by the way he carried himself, by the way he spoke, by the way he prayed. Yet one day he himself was violently murdered, right in the community’s chapel, just as evening prayer was beginning.
            But in his own sphere, Brother Roger found a way to live peaceably. Gently. Lovingly. Compassionately. Unassumingly. His example has had ripple effects around the globe.
            On the afternoon before he died, Brother Roger asked one of the other brothers to take a dictation, saying, “Note down these words carefully!” He began, “’I leave you peace; I give you my peace.’ What is this peace that God gives? It is,” he said, “first of all an inner peace, a peace of the heart. This peace enables us to look at the world with hope, even though it is often torn apart by violence and conflicts. This peace from God,” he continued, “also supports us so that we can contribute, quite humbly, to building peace in those places where it is jeopardized.”
The dictation ended with the words, “To the extent that our community creates possibilities in the human family to widen …” And there he left off, too tired to continue. He went to the chapel to pray, and it was there that his life was ended.
            But those last words now read as if they are a great invitation: “To the extent that our community creates possibilities in the human family to widen …” Widen what? The circle? Relationships of communion? The possibility of peace? The dignity of every human person? How we choose to answer that question, is the place where each of us is given the choice, and the ability, to make a difference. What is it of God’s compassion and peace that our life will widen, in the sphere of our own being?
            As I prepare to step aside from pastoring this church, I want to leave you with Brother Roger’s unfinished letter as something to ponder as you move into the future: “To the extent that this community creates possibilities in the human family to widen [dot, dot, dot]” It will be for you to fill in the dots, but knowing the depth of commitment and spiritual integrity of this church, I am confident that you will find creative and inspired ways of completing that, as yet, unfinished letter of peace. For it was Jesus himself, appearing to his disciples on Easter Day, who blessed them with the most unanticipated yet most longed-for words ever spoken: “Peace be with you.” Amen.

​10 April 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Palm Sunday
 
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. (Luke 23)
 
            The night the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, I was up late working on a project when the news flashed across my computer screen. I found myself saying, “So just like that, Europe is at war again! How can that be?”
            After all the horrors of the 20th century, you would think we would have learned. But no, history always has a tendency to repeat itself. Especially where violence is concerned. And so here we are once again.
            Violence, it seems to me, is the real heart of the human predicament. Every other problem flows from it, in one way or another. In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden apple is described as the original fault. But that act pales in comparison with what it unleashes: the murder in the very next generation of Abel by his brother Cain in a fit of filial jealousy. As so it was that violence took root in the human heart.
            But violence is more than just an aggressive act of physical force. At the root of violence is the degradation of the dignity of another human being. Violence can thus be verbal, or psychological, or economic. But one thing that all forms of violence have in common, is that the perpetrator must first dehumanize another human being, before feeling empowered to make an attack upon them. That’s why prejudice and bias and privilege are all so pernicious: at root they are what enables violence.
            And as we’ve just heard in the reading of the Passion, it was just like that for Jesus, too. Before crucifying him, his accusers had to mock him, spit on him, humiliate him, make him something other than they were themselves, before they could do away with him. And so, in the current moment, the Passion of Christ becomes the very emblem of the dehumanizing violence in Ukraine upon which we have all looked with such revulsion this past week. We have seen signs of crucifixion everywhere: I don’t need to evoke the horror of it for you to know what I mean …
            Now, this is a bit of an aside, but it is ironic, that on this day–Palm Sunday–the rubrics of the Prayer Book themselves ask that the recitation of the creed be omitted, without explanation. It is as if the creed’s recitation of rather abstract ideas we are to believe about Jesus (such as his consubstantiality with the Father), just doesn’t hold up to the urgency of our demand to know how we are to live in Jesus, face to face with the reality of human violence. Rather than what to think, we need and want to know what to do. The absence in the creed of such guiding words as compassion, or peace, or justice—or even love—is just too glaring when we are confronted by atrocities such as those we’ve seen in the past week. We need something more.
            Now, they say that all preachers really have only one sermon, and that they simply preach a version of it over and over. I plead guilty. The one sermon I have is that because of our creation in God’s image, every human being is endowed with a dignity that cannot be violated, without also violating God. That’s why in Jesus, God gives us the model of how we are to live peaceably, to make possible the recognition of our mutual dignity. And the simple fact that Jesus teaches this way of peaceableness dictates every aspect of how we are to live, and how we are to treat one another. If you think about it, it’s what lies behind this parish’s longtime commitment to LGBTQ rights. It what lies behind our reception and care for immigrants and refugees. It’s what lies behind our ministries to the hungry, and to those who live without housing. The God-given dignity of each and every human being is a fact that puts each of us on the line daily as people of faith.
            So I’ve got today, and then next Sunday, to restate for a final time this one sermon. 
            But I find that in trying to do so in times as troubled and violent as these, the challenge becomes, where are we to find the will and perseverance to defend human dignity, when we feel so overwhelmed and helpless by what we have seen just this week? How do we not just give up and retreat into ourselves?
            Almost providentially, it seems, we were also given another story this week, beyond the violence of war: the story of an African American woman confirmed to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House at a celebration of her confirmation, Judy Ketanji Brown Jackson observed that for her family, it took one generation to go from enduring segregation to her appointment to the court. But for the country, she noted, it has taken much longer: “It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments.” Recognizing the significance of her achievement, she paraphrased from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” to underscore the implications of her new position: “I do so now while bringing the gifts my ancestors gave. I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
            Her story holds up for us that the only real response we can have to violence such as slavery or segregation or war or abuse or whatever form it takes—is never to give in, or to give up, because to do so, is already to have lost. No, perseverance is the only real option for resistance, however difficult and exhausting it may be. (And incidentally, lest you think that such things no longer exist, you should know that one of our guests in The Landing this week was an escaped slave from Mauritania. Slavery is still very much with us.)
So the lesson we might take from Holy Week is this: God does not give up on us. Seeing in us the divine likeness, God cannot help but love us, and to love us whatever the cost. That is the crux of the crucifixion. And if God does not give up on us, then we can take hope that neither should we give up on one another. That’s what affirming human dignity means: the struggle of forgiving, loving, living with other human beings, just as Jesus did for us.
            At the end of this week, we will of course celebrate Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection. Framed in the terms I have been using here, the resurrection might be described as God’s manner of restoring human dignity, after all the violence and ignominy of the crucifixion. But now I’m starting to get ahead of myself, so let’s just stop there and take this up again next week, and let this be part one of a final repetition of what really is, my one and only sermon. Amen.

​Lent 4                                                                                       March 27, 2022
Luke 15:  11-32                                                                          St. Michael and All Angels Church
 
Making Space
 
In the name of God who, as the psalmist assures us, brings us out into the open place and welcomes us because she believes in us.  Amen.
 
I imagine I’m not the only person in this room who has run away from home.
 
I suspect that I’m not the only one among us who has done so more than once.
 
And I’m willing to bet there are others here who have, like I, stomped off in a fit of childhood pique.
 
I get that younger brother.  And the older one as well.  I’ve walked in their shoes on more than one occasion.  Maybe you have too. 

 
That capacity for identification with those brothers helps explain why this parable is often labeled “The Parable of the Prodigal Son”.  But is that really where this story we just heard takes us and leaves us?
I do hope not for that emphasis on the turn back home, on repentance if you will, deflects, me thinks, from the gems to be found in the parable as a whole.  And it is those gems, scattered throughout this story that are so important to life in our worlds today—life in the communities of family, friends, and faith in which we spend most of our days. 
 
What might our gaze reveal if we focus our attention not on the sons but on the father?  A father who is accessible and approachable.  One who is amenable to a very bold request on the part of his younger son.  The kind of father you know you can count on.  A father whose love for you and hope for your safe return leads him to scan the horizon in hopes that he will see you walking down the road.  A father whose generous compassion just can’t be contained.  And a father who, when faced with his older son’s anger and resentment leaves the party and goes out to plead with that older son to join the celebration thus assuring him of his constant love for his son.  A father who appears, either directly or—in two instances—indirectly in every scene of this long parable.
 
There are those who suggest this parable be called “The Parable of the Prodigal Father.”  Maybe.  But centuries of association of prodigal with profligate makes that title untenable too.  I’ve come to think of this parable and the invitation it extends to we who hear it as “The Parable of a Most Hospitable Father.”
 
Isn’t this what hospitality at its very best looks like?  Welcoming you.  Accepting you as you are in the moment.  Giving you what you need in the moment and giving you space when that is what you need most.  A limitless hospitality grounded in love.  That’s just what that father showed.  To both his sons.
 
You and I, we live in a changing, challenging, and dangerous world.  You know the outlines of that world—the shadow of Covid, open talk of World War III, a nasty form of politics that was on full display in last week’s Judiciary Committee hearings on Katanji Brown Jackson’s appointment to the Supreme Court.  All this at a time when many of us are, in one way or another are experiencing the shrinking of our worlds and feeling a sense of rugs being pulled out from under us.  A time that begs for that kind of hospitality that Father showed both his sons. 
 
A hospitality marked by what one theologian identified as a “faith that awakens trust in the still unrealized possibilities in human beings—in oneself and in other people.”  Think of it—trust, confidence that what you see in others and in yourself is not all you get.  There are those unrealized possibilities floating just beneath the surface of our lives as individuals and communities.  Seeds waiting to be watered.  Possibilities hanging around in hopes of a welcoming environment.  A hospitable climate if you will.
 
I’ve come to view the hospitality this parable invites us to as a hospitality of making space---for people, for ideas, for practices.  For tears and for laughter.  For the parts of us (as individuals and communities) that show us at our Sunday best and for those other parts as well.  For our quirkiness and crankiness and kindness.  A hospitality that senses what we need in the moment and tries its level best to deliver. 
 
I saw that kind of hospitality at work this week in a most tender and poignant way.  Towards the very end of those three brutal days of hearings about Judge Katanji Brown Jackson’s appointment to the Supreme Court—three days of relentless inhospitality, Senator Cory Booker turned to Judge Jackson and said,      
“I’m not going to let anybody steal my joy” and then he continued, “It’s hard for me not to look at
            you and not see my mom, not to see my cousins—one of them who had to come here and sit
            behind you….She had to have your back.  I see my ancestors and yours.”
 
Booker concluded by saying, “But don’t worry my sister.  Don’t worry.  God has got you.  And how do I know? Because you’re here.  And I know what its taken for you to sit in that seat.” 
 
That, that is the world the Parable of a Most Hospitable Father invites us to join—a world of making space for one another and for ourselves as well.  

​13 March 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Lent
 
“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
you have brought us this far along the way.”
 
            I’m taking as my text today words we haven’t yet heard, at least today. They are from the Eucharistic prayer that we will pray in a few moments, which is taken from the Lutheran Book of Worship.
            My reason for doing so is I want to talk about the theme of God Matters, and they are especially appropriate to that, as I hope you’ll see.
            God Matters is the title of a book of essays by the English Dominican theologian, Herbert McCabe. The title is an intentional play on words: it is both about matters pertaining to God (using “matters” as a noun), and it is about why God matters to us in the first place (using “matters” as a verb). In short, his thesis is that the things of God make a difference in human life.
            Now, this is not quite a farewell sermon, but I want to explore that statement in relationship to a question that has been a big one for us here at St. Michael’s over the last several years: Does God matter in politics? And I want to start with my great intellectual mentor, Rabbi Abraham Heschel.
            Now, Heschel is best known for his social activism: marching at Selma to advocate for civil rights; or standing in front of the White House to protest the Vietnam War. But he was a rather unlikely candidate for such a role. Theologically he was quite conservative, emphasizing the importance of God’s self-revelation at a time when a lot of theologians (especially Jewish), would have preferred a more logical, rational account of God.
            In fact, Heschel was sometimes accused by his detractors of adopting a radical political agenda, primarily to catapult himself out of the relative obscurity of a rigorous Jewish theologian. Nothing could be further from the truth.
            For Heschel, his political activism was the inevitable consequence of his theology. He passionately believed in the dignity of every human being, each of us being created not only by the same God, but in that God’s image. To Heschel, a human being is nothing less than a symbol of God, so any act that denigrates another person is a blasphemy against God. The fact of racism, therefore, he found to be spiritually intolerable. Likewise the act of war. And such regard for human dignity is what allows us to say not just that the war against Ukraine is a geopolitical crisis, but a moral calamity.
            In a piece on Heschel in First Things, David Novak writes, Heschel saw racism to be an issue of the denial to a group of Americans the basic dignity that is the right of every human person. Thus Heschel writes: “There is a form of oppression which is more painful and more scathing than physical injury or economic privation. It is public humiliation.” Racism, in other words, was in Heschel’s eyes wrong not because it violated a secular idea such as the equality of all human beings before the law, but because it violated the religious idea of the dignity of all human beings before God.
            Novak tells this story to illustrate the point: In September 1963, about four months before Heschel uttered his condemnation of public humiliation (in his book, The Insecurity of Freedom), I was in Lumberton, North Carolina, as a student-rabbi, leading Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services for the one small synagogue in town. I remember walking to the synagogue early Yom Kippur morning from the rooming house where my wife and I were staying. It had rained heavily the night before, and the gutters in the street were full of mud. Approaching me on the narrow sidewalk from the opposite direction was an old black woman, toothless, dressed in a faded calico dress, a ragged straw hat on her head, and tennis shoes with holes in them on her feet. Her head was bowed. And when she was about twenty feet or so from me, she stepped in the muddy gutter to let me pass.
            “Doesn’t the Torah teach,” Novak asks, “that it was I who should have humbled myself before her age? But to that old black woman, I did not represent the Torah or basic human decency. To her I represented centuries of those who have publicly humiliated her people.”
            Heschel’s call for social justice in the face of racism went beyond the liberal call for a just society. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. (another prophetically minded political activist), Heschel understood that God’s justice could only be found in a more loving, compassionate, inclusive community. Equality is not enough.
            But Heschel goes further. If God’s justice is to be found in such a community, then God is in need of us to help bring it about. Such community does not come into being just by the wave of a cosmic wand, but by the active engagement of real human beings in striving to bring it into being. And this leads Heschel to a really radical idea: for God to be God, God needs us. Citing a rabbinical teaching that we strengthen—empower—God to the extent that we comply with the Divine Will, Heschel goes a step further to say that to the extent that we fail to comply with the Divine Will, we diminish God, so that God is not fully God to us.
            That was the theological source of Heschel’s politics: the political arena is where human beings either work toward enacting and fulfilling God’s vision for the human community, or it is where we block and diminish it. The idea that politics and faith ought to be separate, therefore, was unthinkable—any more than the idea that life and breath can be detached.
Heschel summed all this up with one of his signature aphorisms: “Either God is of supreme importance, or God is of no importance.” That is, if we human beings separate off some part of our life and say that God has no place there, or has nothing to do with it, we are essentially saying that God is of no real importance to us in any aspect of our lives. If God is the creator and ruler of all things, then for God to be God, all things must be a part of God’s rule.
So what has all this to do with our upcoming Eucharistic prayer? Well, the phrase, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears” obviously invokes that hymn of the Civil Rights era, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And it goes on to assert pretty clearly God’s role in every part of human life—with an urgency that no prayer in our own Book of Common Prayer quite does. And by invoking that embeddedness of God in human affairs at the very beginning of the communion prayer, we are asserting that we are living in continuity with the Christ whose presence we are calling into our midst: the Christ who teaches the way and pattern of God’s vision of community. It has been said that Judaism is not a doctrine but a life, a continuation of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Leah, Rebekkah and Rachel. I would like to think that something similar could be said of Christian faith as well: it is a continuation of the life of Jesus, who because God matters, left no part of the lives of his followers untouched—whether personal, spiritual, economic, relational … or political. As Herbert McCabe puts it, “The life of Jesus is nothing other than the life of God projected onto our history, and enacted sacramentally in our history, so that God’s story becomes our story . . .” Every part of it. Amen.   
           

​6 March 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
I Lent
 
Jesus said, “One does not live by bread alone.” (Luke 4)
 
            This past Thursday was the day the church commemorates the lives of John and Charles Wesley, two brothers who sparked a revival in the 18th century Church of England by their zealous preaching, hymn writing, and experience of conversion. In their enthusiasm, they practiced a very methodical pattern of piety, from whence the Methodist movement takes its name.
            How ironic, then, that the day before this commemoration, our parishioner J. F. should bring into the church office a communion cup that has been passed down through her family since the days it was used by John Wesley himself  in the Union Chapel, Bury, Lancashire, England. And there it is, sitting on the altar!
            The wonderful thing about artifacts like that is that they remind us that these saints we read about were real human beings, very much like ourselves. Just as we take communion here today from vessels laid out for the purpose, so did he and his community from that very cup—not another one, but that one!
            And being reminded of just how human John Wesley was is especially helpful in his case for getting a feel for the nature of his religious enthusiasm. He was, to put it bluntly, a mess. He had a couple of humiliatingly awful love affairs, his missionary work in Georgia was a bit of a disaster, he was openly mocked in the streets, and he made several really bad judgment calls (such as deciding to ordain ministers himself for his missionary work) which effectively put an end to his membership in the Church of England. As Rowan Williams puts it, “His life is a record of what many have seen as muddle and silliness, false starts, disastrous misjudgments, and wrong turnings.”
            So how did such a fool as that spark a global movement that today comprises come 40 million people around the world, 7.2 million of them in the United States, making it nearly 5 times as large as our own denomination?
            Perhaps the most obvious clue comes from his last words on his own deathbed: “The best of all,” he said, “is God is with us.” It seems that from the very chaos of his life, he had come to the deep realization that it is not we who finally weave our lives together into a meaningful whole, but God. As Williams says, “He knew he was a fool, that his life was a mess; but he set that to one side, because the imperative he felt was to preach what he could only have learned in his folly—that God is to be trusted.”
            Now, that seems to me like an important point for us here at the beginning of Lent. It is easy to lapse into thinking that this season is all about penitence and abstinence—but viewed through the lens of John Wesley’s life, I think one might reframe that a bit to say that Lent might better be thought of as being about learning to accept and receive the gifts God has to offer. To paraphrase Jesus, just a little bit, “One does not live by ashes alone.” That is to say, however useful fasting and self-denial may be, they should not cause us to lose sight of the fact that God’s underlying intention is to bless us, not to accuse us.
            In my experience, Methodism (the movement founded by the Wesleys), has a particular gift of emphasizing the blessedness that comes from knowing Jesus. The theological word is “sanctification,” but beneath that very big word is a more straight forward meaning: doing good. Methodists talk a lot about the “means of grace,” the ways that God gives to us for learning what it means to do good. At the end of the sermon, we are going to sing a good, sturdy Wesleyan hymn (written in this case written by Charles, one of some 6500 that he wrote!). You’ll notice that for Lent, it’s quite celebratory: the refrain is “Lift up your heart, lift up your voice! Rejoice, again I say, rejoice!”
            But if it is true, as John Wesley said on his deathbed, that we have every reason to trust God, to entrust our lives to God, confident that God will hold them in trust for us so that at the end we will not have lived without purpose and meaning, then those are words worth singing in any season. We can entrust our future to God, knowing that God sees us whole and complete, where we may see ourselves only in fractured and scattered pieces.
            And just this kind of trust, it seems to me, is the deeper meaning behind the story of Jesus’ temptation, about which we read this morning: the devil gives Jesus opportunity to trust in all manner of things other than God, but Jesus returns again and again to the simple truth that “all our hope in God is founded” (as another hymn puts it, this time of German rather than English origin):
 
All my hope on God is founded;
God doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance God guideth,
only good and only true.
God unknown,
God alone
calls my heart to be God’s own.
 
Thanks be to God for John and Charles Wesley: misfits, evangelists, saints, people.
 
Amen.
 
 

​27 February 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Transfiguration
 
“And while Jesus was praying, the appearance of his face changed,
and his clothes became dazzling white.” (Luke 9)
 
            I want to speak today about the uncanny—those moments in life when the mysterious comes to the surface, but in unsettling and peculiar ways.
            Two weeks ago, I let you all know the news that I feel obliged to step down from serving as rector of this church in order to be available to care for my soon to be 100-year old father.
            Then the very next day … I got a call early in the morning that he had fallen and was in the hospital, and that I was urgently needed. That was uncanny.
            It’s also uncanny how often the lectionary kicks up just the right lesson for a particular circumstance. The readings aren’t designed that way—how could they be? But more often than not, there they are. Just what you needed to hear.
            Take today, for instance. If I knew in advance that I wanted to talk about the uncanny, what better gospel reading could there be than the transfiguration, when the disciples are completely overwhelmed by the mysterious change in Jesus’ appearance, leaving them unsettled and nervous. What an uncanny experience that must have been! I think we can all imagine them, on their way back down the mountain, saying hesitantly to one another, “What was that about?” “I dunno. You tell me.” “I dunno.” Only later, after Jesus’ resurrection, would they be able to look back and say, “You know, that uncanny vision we had on the mountain was when it really started to become clear who Jesus was.”
            In my experience, encounters with the uncanny do in fact have a way of revealing what was just below the surface all along, but which we overlook in the usual hurry and busyness of our lives. I think back to the last time I was with my mother before she died. After visiting her at home in Fort Collins, I was about to get in the car to drive back to Albuquerque, and of course was in a bit of a hurry to get on the road.
            But then, something told me that I needed to slow down and take time to say goodbye to her. Not just a goodbye before leaving to go home, but a final farewell. There was no particular evidence at that moment that she would soon die, but somehow I knew that I needed to tell her then that I loved her, and out of the haze of her dementia, she looked clearly at me and told me that she loved me too. Those were the last words we spoke to one another. She died not long afterward.
            What was it that told me to take time for that goodbye? I don’t know for sure, but it was somehow another experience of the uncanny, that realization that breaks through from time to time, that there is a connection and interrelatedness that binds all things together to which we need to pay more thoughtful attention.
            And that’s how the uncanny often presents itself: as a premonition, or a gut instinct, or an intuition. Something outside of us just grabs hold of us and forces us to pay attention.
            I remember that in my confirmation class, someone asked the priest what he thought about these kinds of uncanny moments. “Well,” he said, “it does seem to me that the world is more complex than we realize.” Slightly evasive, perhaps, but also deeply true.
So the uncanny is not quite as specific as the idea of providence—the notion that God directly directs or intervenes in human life. But on the other hand, the uncanny is more intense than the simple idea of coincidence—the assumption that otherwise unrelated things sometimes converge purely by chance. Uncanniness lies somewhere in a middle ground between those two extremes—providence and chance. And I think part of what the spiritual life is intended to do is to train us to recognize it when it’s there—a bit like Moses being drawn up onto Mount Sinai.
            Sigmund Freud wrote about the uncanny, or as he called it, the “unheimlich” (unhomely) in German. What he said about it was that the “Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” I think there’s some truth in that: our sense of the interrelatedness of all things is something we take for granted as a child, but we gradually learn to dissect and compartmentalize life under the pressures of competition and our anxiety for security.
            But perhaps the larger message of today, when our attention it turned toward Jesus’ transfiguration, is a reminder to train our eye to see the connectedness rather than the separation of all things. In the strange vision of Jesus shrouded in light, he is shown to unite in himself both the holiness of God and the ordinariness of humanity. What we might read out of that image is that we too are to be the locus where such opposites meet in a single expression of dignified humanity. The transfiguration might then be said to be a celebration of the uncanny possibility of human wholeness—and we might learn to see even in ourselves the uncanny likeness to God with which we were created. Amen.

​30 January 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
IV Epiphany
 
And Jesus said, “The truth is …” (Luke 4)
 
            The reading from Luke that we’ve just heard is very puzzling, because it’s one of those texts where the mood of a crowd turns on a dime. It reminds me a bit of Palm Sunday, when the crowd meets Jesus coming into Jerusalem with cries of “Hosanna!”, only to turn on him abruptly and shout instead, “Crucify!”
            In this case, the scene is the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown. He has read from Isaiah the prophecy that prisoners shall be set free and the hungry fed, and everybody thinks, “Great! That sounds like a plan.” They all speak well of him, the scripture says, and are amazed at his gracious words.
But suddenly Jesus raises the stakes, by saying that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And what seemed like a nice campaign promise suddenly gets put on the table for real. And where there was broad support only a moment ago, there is suddenly bitter controversy and dissension. (Perhaps that sounds a bit familiar!)
            But how does this sudden reversal come about? To answer that, we have to pay particularly close attention to what Jesus says to the crowd, and how they react.
            First he mocks the crowd a bit, saying for them what they want to say for themselves: “Do here the same signs you did in Capernaum!” (Healings, exorcisms, that kind of thing.) But then he names the elephant in the room: no prophet is ever accepted in his hometown, and here he is in Nazareth. Too well known, perhaps. Too many memories. Too much water under the bridge.
            “But the truth is … “ Jesus continues, signaling that we’re getting to the rub. “The truth is …,” and then he points them to two episodes out of the Hebrew Bible, each involving a prophetic encounters in the lives of an individual (and not a community). This, I think, is the key point.
            In the first instance, he names Elijah’s visit to a widow in Zarephath in a time of famine, when she had nothing left for her and her son to eat. But when she shared what little she had with the prophet (thinking that it would be the end and they would all die), miraculously the meal and oil do not run out.
            Then as a second instance, Jesus points to a more obscure story, this time about a Syrian (not an Israelite) named Naaman who had leprosy. He was told by a Hebrew servant girl that there was a prophet named Elisha (Elijah’s successor) among her people who could heal him, and so he went to him and sure enough is cured.
            In each case—the poor widow and the diseased Syrian—the individual had to step out of the identity given them by the community (pauper or leper), and claim their own freedom by taking responsibility for themselves. It’s the same kind of individual specificity that we heard in the reading from Jeremiah: God was speaking to him, not another, but him. “I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,” says God.
            So back to Luke’s gospel. It records that when the people heard these two stories, “all in the synagogue were filled with rage.” Really? Why on earth should two miracle stories make them so mad?
            Now, you may have your own thoughts about how to answer that question, and if so I’d love to hear them. But my thought is that their irritation comes from the fact that by pointing to these two stories, Jesus is suggesting that the people in the crowd are each individually responsible for themselves—that they’ve got to take ownership of who they are and how they shape relationships with God and other people, like the widow and leper, rather than relying on the stigmatizing community to which they belong.
            My son once had an American history teacher in high school who was very demanding of his students, insisting that they do the assigned reading before class. If they didn’t, he would simply say to them, “Then you get the F. That’s on you!”
            Don’t you hate it when someone says that? “That’s on you.” And yet, you know in the moment that at some level that it is true. We are individually responsible for what we do, and as much as we dislike being called on doing something wrong, the fact remains.
            I think that’s what Jesus is doing here: by pointing to the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the leper—two instances when a prophetic encounter was intensively focused on a single person—he is reminding the crowd that they can’t hide behind their numbers to escape the responsibility that each of them has individually for the content of their life. The quality and content of their relationships are their own responsibility, independent of the crowd.
            In our own day, there are all sorts of places to hide from such responsibility. There is lots of pressure to be part of an angry crowd—whether of the right or of the left—and to place our identity within that outrage.
            But in this episode, Jesus is calling us to take control of our emotions and attitude, and to become participants with him in the original good news shared from Isaiah: the captives shall go free, and the poor shall be filled. To become part, in other words, part of a common spirit of generosity and respect.
            Who in your life is captive to an old resentment or wound, whom you could set free? Who is yearning for the fulfillment of a relation of friendship or kinship, whom you could fill? Jesus’ hearers knew these were the demands of relationship that he was asking of them, but for them it was too much to ask and so for it they sought to hurl him from the brink of a hill.   
            But the fact remains, that the freedom which God grants us to live life as we choose, also entails the responsibility to grant to one another the same dignity we ask for ourselves. Not our anger; not our resentment; not our suspicion; not our defensiveness; not our condescension—but our respect, our generosity, our graciousness, and our commitment to the peaceableness, which it was Jesus’ mission to initiate.
            So Jesus, faced with a crowd bitterly opposed to this message of peace, “passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” Let him not pass through us in our own day, but stay and abide with us. Amen.

​23 January 2022
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Annual Meeting
 
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and sight to the blind, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4)
 
            That everything has changed because of the pandemic has become something of a truism—but if you’re like me, it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what that change is!          
            In regard to the church, my growing sense is that whatever has changed is not just due to the last two years of social upheaval, but that it is all part of a much bigger pattern that was already at work.
            Back in 2009, for instance, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox published a book called The Future of Faith. In it, he argued that Christian history can be divided into three distinct periods.
            The first, which he calls the “Age of Faith,” was the first three centuries or so after Jesus, when the Christian community was focused on living the life that Jesus had taught: welcoming social outcasts, sharing bread and wine together as a sign of fellowship, and embodying God’s reign of peace (shalom). About doctrine, there was a wide variety of opinion; about church organization, there was a pattern of shared equality; and about society, there was a consensus that Christian life was steadfastly in opposition to establishment and empire.
            But around the beginning of the fourth century, all that began to change. When the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the year 312, the church suddenly became overlaid with imperial forms of governance; creeds came into being as a litmus test for belonging; and rather than a pattern of opposition to oppressive empire, the church became its advocate and handmaid.
            This “Age of Belief” (as Cox calls it), lasted for a very long time—some 1,700 years in fact, until the relatively recent emergence of what Cox calls the “Age of the Spirit,” beginning in the late twentieth century. This age is once again claiming Christianity’s roots as a non-hierarchical, non-creedal, counter-cultural movement that is focused more on living a life shaped by what Jesus taught, than insisting on believing things about who Jesus was. At its core, the Age of the Spirit is driven by an ecstatic response to the enlivening presence of God’s Spirit: a Spirit that is personal, unpredictable, and counter-cultural to the deadening weight of late capitalism and mass society. 
            The evidence for this kind of transformation lies in two directions. On one hand, Christianity in the last several decades has been transformed by the rapid rise of Pentecostalism, especially in the global south, so that demographically speaking, the most “typical” Christian nowadays is quickly becoming either African or Latin American, and Pentecostal. On the other hand, traditional Protestant and Roman Catholic churches—the ones (like ours) that are most attached to the ancien regime of hierarchical structure, creedal faith, and social establishment—are in steady decline.
            So what does this emerging “Age of the Spirit” look like in practice? Well, it means that worship is becoming more experiential than performative. It means that the experience of God is immediate and personal, rather than doctrinal. It means that we most readily know God through one another, rather than through an institution. It means that church structures are becoming egalitarian and participatory rather than clerical. It means there are multiple ways we come to God, and multiple ways that God comes to us.
            It’s been easy, in thinking about how the pandemic has changed church, to focus only on superficial things such as the experience of online versus in-person worship. But what I think these times have really revealed, is a deep hunger for personal connection in whatever form with one another and with God, beyond what mere “church attendance” can provide. That’s why even if we could go back to the way things were before Covid, we would still find it unsatisfying: we’ve come to crave something more, something life changing—which is what Cox would say is a sign of the Age of the Spirit.
            Let me give you some concrete examples. Last summer, at my invitation a group of vestry members formed a study group around what we called, “The Future of the Church.” Together we looked at a variety of emerging congregations whose very name indicates that something new is afoot within them.
            Take, for instance, St. Lydia’s Dinner Church, a congregation in Queens, New York whose entire life is based on a single verse of scripture: “Jesus was known to them in the breaking of bread.” Or the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, a Lutheran congregation whose worship is designed and executed by the whole gathering, young and old alike, preaching included. Or the Episcopal-Lutheran Church of the Apostles in Seattle, where the sacred and secular are blurred artistically and musically, “like a canvas waiting to be painted” (and often there is one awaiting exactly that!). Or even here at St. Michael’s, there are innovative small groups that have come into being such as a Sabbath gathering on Saturday evening that lights candles of blessing, breaks bread, meditates over scripture, and shares in prayer. And the transformation of some of our institutional office space into a center of hospitality for immigrants speaks volumes about our shifting priorities.
            All of this might be summed up by saying that the emerging Age of the Spirit emphasizes faith as a way of life, rather than a pattern of belief. It’s about what you do, rather than what you think. “Deeds, not creeds,” as one pastor put it. And here’s the point: St. Michael’s has always seemed to me like a congregation on the cusp of just such a transition, for that instinct for personal spiritual wholeness and social responsibility is already woven deeply into the fabric of who we are. So as we come out of these Covid times, I’m convinced there’s something new and innovative just waiting to be discovered and activated among us!   
              And that’s truly exciting, because it means that we have the opportunity to be part of something of global significance that is transforming the Christian church. As Professor Cox wrote, that something is a new stirring of the Spirit, which is yearning to break free as it did in the earliest days of the church, before it became hostage to empire and hierarchy. And that freedom is what Jesus laid claim to in today’s gospel, “the time of the Lord’s favor,” when he proclaimed that prisoners would go free and sight would be restored to the blind—when our deepest longing would be met with God’s most abundant grace.
For those who have ears, now is also a time of renewed invitation to be part of living afresh into God’s peace, the invitation to peace that was at the core of Jesus’ life and teaching, and the peace which was the final gift he made to the disciples: “Peace I give to you, my own peace I leave with you.” May that peace be both the gift we are prepared to receive and to live, and the gift we are ready to offer. Amen.