​26 July 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
7 Pentecost
 
 
“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast.” (Matthew 13)
 
 
            I’m the kind of person who makes lists. When I go to the grocery store, I take a list of what I need. At the beginning of the week, I make a list of what needs to be accomplished.
            The thing about lists, is they have a way of expanding. Lists can always have one more thing added — one more task to be done, one more thing to be picked up. Lists have a funny way of growing longer, rather than shorter.
            How interesting, then, that today’s lessons are both in the form of lists. In the first instance, Paul encourages the beleaguered Christians in Rome by assuring them that nothing—nothing!—can separate them from the love of God: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation …” That’s quite a list!
            And then in the second instance, Jesus gives us a list of images for the kingdom of heaven: it’s like a mustard seed, it’s like yeast, it’s like a treasure hidden in a field, it’s like a pearl of great value, or a net thrown into the sea.
            But lists, as we said, have a way of expanding. So I wonder if these two lists we have heard today are not given to us, with the invitation that we expand them in the hearing, with our own additions?
           
            Take Paul’s list of the things that cannot separate us from the love of God. We all have a long list right now of things that seem to separate us not only from one another, but also from a communal awareness of God’s presence—things that we miss every day, giving us an underlying sense of disquiet and isolation.
            On the list that I keep, at least in my head, is that I miss Sunday morning services. I miss meeting people for coffee. I miss dinner parties. I miss the EVs coming forward to take communion to those at home. I miss jet airplanes flying overhead. I miss the opera. I miss Spanish Market. I miss baseball. I miss friends on the Navajo reservation. I miss visiting people in the hospital. I miss teaching classes. I miss singing. I miss music. I miss the children. I miss America, at least the one I knew. I miss all of you.
            Now, in its own way, any one of these things might be added to that list of things that can separate us from God’s love. Not because that love is dependent upon them, but because these things represent the arenas where we find God in one another. So more than anything, I miss finding God in other people.
 
            During these times of pandemic, some people (myself included) have decided to take up reading Boccaccio’s Decameron, that collection of stories from the 14th century plague in Florence, Italy. For me, it was one of those books left unread on my bookshelf from my undergraduate days—and I figured if not now, then when would I read it? The story is set is 1348, when Florence was overcome by an especially horrific outbreak of the black death. Hoping to escape the pestilence, a group of seven young women and three men—ten altogether—decide to leave the city for a villa in the country, where for ten days they dine, dance, sing songs, and tell stories. Each person tells one story every day, for ten days, a hundred stories in all (and hence the book’s name, the Decameron).
            Now, as you may know, the stories have a reputation for being rather risqué: tales of monks and nuns doing rather un-saintly things together, and that sort of thing— not the usual fodder for sermons! And it’s true, at the beginning of the ten days, when the band of refugees is still preoccupied with the death they have escaped, that the stories exhibit a kind of dark humor, as if inspired by the old adage, “Memento mori” (“Remember that you must die”).
            But as the days go by, the stories grow increasingly less frivolous, and the story tellers begin talk about deeper things like human generosity, individual courage, and resilience in the face of fate. Rather than mocking death, the band of refugees comes slowly to realize that what is truly necessary for them to do, is to embrace life. It’s as if “Memento mori” (Remember that you will die) turns to “Memento vivere” (Remember to live).  And so after ten days, having reaffirmed their faith in life, they are ready to return to the city, the place of death.
 
            We are all surrounded right now by many things that cause us to feel separated and isolated, like Boccaccio’s band of storytellers, even from God. And we have a tendency to get stuck there. But we could take inspiration from their exile and return, to remember to live: to let the best part of who we are, shape the response we make to these days that are otherwise so volatile and uncertain.
            What we might find, is that we can then add our own things to Paul’s list of what will not and cannot separate and isolate us, because we have nothing to fear. And to Jesus’ list of things that draw us toward the kingdom, we can also add our own, because in him we have everything to hope.
            Like Boccacio’s “happy band,” maybe we’ll find that we are able to turn the corner from the dark thoughts of the present time, to an embrace of the things that truly matter to us, the things that make life livable: patience, compassion, fortitude, honesty, curiosity, awe, wonder, respect, reticence, silence, peace …
            But there I go again, making another list. Yet it raises the question: what would your list of essential values be? Think on it: such a list is worth creating right now, even writing it down, to let it shape how you choose to live each day. Amen.

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!
 
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
 
Years ago I had a statistics professor who would set our heads spinning by filling a whiteboard with numbers and formulas. When we had finished scribbling furiously, he would say, “We could do it that way, but it would be …” – over the semester we learned to wait for that pause and yell “too hard.” Then he’d show us an easier approach.
 
If I were following his lead this morning, I’d start with the moment in the gospel when Matthew ruins a perfectly good parable by having Jesus offer a simplistic explanation to the disciples. It seems to defeat the whole point of speaking in parables. I’d leap right to the moment when the weeds, the evil doers, are thrown into the furnace of fire, where we’re assured there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. But if, like me, you believe that the story of the resurrection is the story of the redemptive power of God’s love, that would be … – do you remember your line? – too hard.
 
It’s especially too hard right now. In these pandemic days, with the death toll passing 140,000 in our country alone, it feels as though today’s gospel skips the most important part – I want to know what those good and bad seeds do between sowing and harvest – I want to know how they live together in their own short season in the sun.
 
It’s also too hard because these simple divisions of people into good and bad have become toxic, even paralyzing. It’s too easy to convince myself arrogantly that I’m in the “good” camp and become complacent. How many of us have secretly hoped that the next person to get sick will be someone who refused to wear a mask? I know I have. Resisting the temptation to make myself the judge of the “bad seeds” and to dream about the day when they get what they have coming is perhaps my biggest spiritual challenge.
 
So instead, I’m going to talk about the angels. My grandkids came to visit from Albuquerque a week ago (and what a miracle to even be able to say those words right now in Florida!).  The day before I read today’s scriptures, we took them to a nearby zoo for some mask-wearing, physically-distanced ziplining. I watched the three of them each climb 70 feet into the air, ascending ladder after ladder to a series of platforms that stretched high into the sky. At the top, when they were as small as birds, each one clipped a pulley to a line, took a step into thin air, and glided safely to the ground.
 
Then I read about Jacob. He fell asleep with his head on a rock "And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” All night long, the angels came and went. The Book of Genesis doesn’t tell us what the angels were doing, other than going up and down those ladders, but when morning comes, Jacob is moved to exclaim, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ Both halves of that sentence seem important to me right now.
 
I don’t know about you, but I had forgotten all about the angels. I think at some point I relegated them to the easy faith of my childhood. I suspect many of us have memories that involve a flowing white nightgown and a frenzied parent running around pinning wings on our backs. Until I watched my grandkids climb those ladders into the sky, I had completely forgotten that they are real. The Episcopal dictionary describes them as “created spirits” that are sent as messengers of God to human beings. They are “pure spirits” that do not depend on matter for existence. They are “in the divine service” and “sent to serve.”
 
How cool is that?                          
 
If you believe the op-ed writers, things are bad, and they are going to get worse. This week’s headlines included “The next disaster is just a few days away,” and “The great American crack-up is underway” and “For the next six months we’re trapped on a leaking ship…” It’s not an easy time to remember that “the Lord is in this place.”
 
And yet, for one week, in the middle of a pandemic, three children whom I love traveled from New Mexico to Florida to remind me that angels are real. We swam in the ocean, we watched manatees mate from our kayaks, and we balanced on stand-up paddle boards as we scanned the lagoon for dolphins. (Well, they balanced. I fell in.) For one week while I was preparing these words, we gloried in creation and in each other. In Jacob’s dream, Yahweh said, “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go,” and “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised.” I’m struggling to describe what happened, but ever since those three angels reenacted Jacob’s vision in my heart, I’ve been moving through the world buoyed by God’s promise.
 
I was already immersed in angels, so it seemed serendipitous when they appeared in the gospel, too. Our second set of angels this morning shows up in the wheat field. Years ago, as I was trying to come to grips with just how fragile we embodied beings are, a wise woman asked me a powerful question. “Are you in charge?” she said. She saw that I was trying to carry problems on my shoulders that weren’t mine to carry. Her simple question helped me shift my perspective, enabled me to rearrange the items in my backpack so I could keep on climbing.
 
That’s what the angels in today’s gospel do. When the servants ask if they need to take care of pulling the weeds, the master tells them to leave them.“Let them grow together until harvest time,” he tells them, and then the reapers – the angels – will take care of it. In other words, “You’re not in charge.” The fact is, in today’s gospel, the wheat and the weeds have no choice but to stand among each other in that field, roots intertwining, leaves doing their best to reach toward the sun. Waiting together for the angels. I’d be lying if I told you I know what that means.
 
So I’m here today not to congratulate the good seeds or to wag a finger at the bad seeds or to speculate about which I’m most like or how best to live together or even when harvest time might come. I’m here today, in the midst of this global pandemic, to tell you that I believe in angels.
 
I’m not advocating for magical thinking. Pope Francis said, “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.” I’m not advocating that we neglect our responsibility to be outspoken agents of God in this broken world.  I’m just saying that now might be a good time for an assist from some divine spirits sent to serve.
 
I’m praying for angels. I don’t know if they will whisper ideas in the ears of scientists as they seek a vaccine or breathe wisdom into Supreme Court justices as they deliberate or nudge Joe Biden as he chooses a running mate. Maybe they will prop up a tired nurse or swat a virus particle away from someone frail or carry John Lewis in a triumphant parade into paradise. Today’s scriptures remind me that I don’t need to know.
 
I just know I’m sleeping a little better since I remembered the angels.
 

​Earlier this week, I truly recognized a heaviness in my heart. This wasn’t just the kind of tired from not getting enough sleep. It was a spiritual and soulful exhaustion as if it can be felt in the bones. I remember asking, “How am I going to do this?” “This is more than I can manage right now and I don’t know how I’m going to...” and then I stopped, saying aloud, “I don’t have to manage all of this. I am not alone.” So, I pulled out my BCP and I read compline aloud. Following the end of the psalms, I find Matthew 11: 28-30... Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. At the close of Compline, the difference was noticeable. I felt pure consolation and assurance like a child feels in a mother’s embrace.
The image of Christ in today’s gospel is that of the Servant Christ. If one’s burden is heavy — too heavy to bear, the yoke of Jesus is light. He bears it with you. It is here that Jesus invites the weary: "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (11:29-30). At that time, the yoke was a familiar symbol of burden bearing and oppression. Yokes were laid on the necks and shoulders of oxen and also on prisoners of war and slaves. The image of the yoke alone is substantial.
Reflecting on the Servant Christ, there is a relationship between the message in this passage and the ministry of a deacon. The duties of early deacons bore distinct symbols of Christ the Servant. They functioned as models of common Christian service who led, enabled, and encouraged other Christians in charitable deed. Jesus proclaimed his life’s work as service for others. Jesus served the presence of God within humanity by incarnating it in himself and by allowing others to see it in him. Jesus is the deacon of God’s presence.
And what does it mean to take up the yoke of Christ? Accepting the yoke evokes imagery of willing struggle; it can sometimes mean pain and discomfort in the process of relinquishing control. Taking up the yoke of Christ is not easy.
It also means guidance and revelation, and of connection to something greater than ourselves, which serves as a reminder in the midst of pain and discomfort that we are not alone. All of this suggests that something more than simply letting go is required in taking up the yoke of Christ. What Christ seems to point to in Matthew 11 is entry into a covenant relationship. As Episcopalians, we enter into a covenant relationship through the sacraments which our Anglican tradition recognizes as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.” The Holy baptism and the Eucharist are the two great sacraments given by Christ to his people.

Through the sacraments, we are connected to Christ, like a tether, which then connects us to God. And choosing to follow Christ with the life given to us by God, we are connected as Christ’s body: The church. We are all invited to participate in the Servant Christ. This covenant relationship means both mutual participation in the church and in the world. Through baptism, our baptismal covenant reaffirms and renews our commitment to Jesus Christ through service. One who is willing to go where the Spirit is calling; one who, in the image of the Servant Christ, serves those who are heavy-laden, weary, marginalized, burdened in body, mind or spirit.
Being in relationship with God is a bit of a dialectic, as is faith, as is the story of Jesus. For those of you who may not be familiar with dialectics, they suggest that two opposing ideas can both be true at the same time.
Death and resurrection, darkness and light. There are so many dialectics in Christianity. I can experience both pain and joy. I can believe and doubt. And following Jesus can mean I let go of a burden and still experience pain. Taking up Jesus’ yoke does not mean that we are shielded from pain. Pain is part of what it means to be human in this world. Jesus’ crucifixion most poignantly demonstrates the dialectic that grace and suffering can both exist at the same time. I come back to a lovely sentiment written by Cynthia Borgeault that I shared in a past sermon at the beginning of the year. It rings true with even greater relevance now. She writes that suffering is the inevitable outcome of the conditions of this planet, which include hard edges and finite boundaries. She writes that this is not random;
God has created it in precisely this way because it is precisely in these conditions and only in these conditions that certain aspects of love shine forth so luminously—and it is precisely this luminosity which God is trying to reveal, the innermost self-disclosure of the heart of divine love.
Even the ministry of a deacon is dialectical because the ministry of the deacon is transitory. The Deacon works with the Bishop to go where needed to bring the needs of the world to the church and the needs of the church to the world; thus, the time a deacon shares with a community is about 3 years. Which means the ministry of a deacon often requires a balance of building up and letting go all at the same time. The body of Christ is a community of people, who through their relationship with Christ, actually becomes a kind of sacrament. This means that the church is both a community of human believers and an instrument of grace in the world, uniting individuals whether in the walls of a single church community or on the other side of the globe. Faith is the word here. Faithfulness demands action and requires risk.


A burden heavy on my heart for the last several years is my mom’s declining health. I believe I have shared with this community before that my mom has been living with a chronic, terminal cancer that can only be managed with persistent treatment. The treatment stops working about every two years and it is always a very scary time because of the uncertainty of the new treatment’s efficacy. Due to concerns regarding her health right now, and to be present with her at the start of this new treatment, I have made the very difficult decision to leave my New Mexico community to be with my mom and family in North Carolina. This is quite the dialectic. July 19th will by my last day present with the St. Michaels’ community. Though I hold grief and pain in leaving this community, I am also filled with much hope and love knowing that we are bound together in the body of Christ.


The great discipline of faith is to be present in each and every moment, especially the hard ones, trusting that God is present too. Each of us is weary. We carry our individual yokes, and we carry the yokes of our communities across the world in a time of civil unrest, social isolation, illness and dying, and systemic oppression. Yet we also carry the unwavering sacrifice of first responders, healthcare and essential workers, and those on the front lines of this pandemic. We hold those who fight for justice and equality tirelessly across our nation. Oh, God, we are tired and heavy-ladened people. Grant us rest. May we be still in Christ’s gentle presence. Let us take up Christ’s yoke so that Christ may carry ours.
I would like to offer a word, “Yokefellow,” which means being fastened together as companions. No matter where we are, we are fastened together in Christ. As we have learned in this pandemic, despite geographic or physical distance, we continue to remain a community of people called the church; a symbol of grace in the world that reveals and makes true the presence of God.

​28 June 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
IV Pentecost
 
“After these things, God tested Abraham.” (Gen. 22)
 
            So we have before us today what in Hebrew is known as the “Akedah,” or the “binding” of Isaac. Hands down, it is one of the most difficult texts in the whole Bible, and for centuries readers have struggled to make sense of it.
            Why, for instance, does God here decide to put Abraham to the test yet again, when Abraham has proven his faithfulness to God multiple times already? Is it just a game?
            And why does God force Abraham into the impossible situation, of choosing either to obey God, or to sacrifice his own son Isaac (the son through whom he has been promised to become the father of a great nation)? Simply put, God places Abraham in an untenable situation, caught between either violating one of the Torah’s most emphatic prohibitions (to do no murder), or its most emphatic prescription (to love God with one’s whole heart, mind and soul).
            So no matter what he does, Abraham will have to repent of it: there is no good option. Which is what led the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard to posit based on this story that following God’s will implies a suspension of the ethical—but that really leaves us in a kind of existential no-man’s-land doesn’t it? Abraham essentially has to wager that God will forgive him the unforgivable, whatever he decides to do.
            So … could Abraham have refused? Perhaps we, and Abraham, get it all wrong. Could it be that the true test was not whether Abraham would be obedient enough to sacrifice Isaac, but that he would be courageous enough to put himself on the line even before God to protect Isaac. After all, Abraham had already successfully bargained with God over the fate of Sodom, so why give in now? Does Abraham in fact fail the test, so that God has to intervene to prevent the harm that he intends?
            As you would expect, if you do a search online for the Akedah, all sorts of images pop up, from the high art of Rembrandt and Chagall, to the simplistic cartoons of Sunday school Bible studies. At their core, however, they all share in common the inescapable violence of a father with a knife raised against his bound son. It’s not something for the faint hearted—although the cartoon versions try to paper over the violence with some saccharine lesson like “obey God’s will and everything will turn out ok.”
            The problem is, that it doesn’t, not if you pay really close attention to the text.
            Why is it, for example, that up until the climactic moment, it’s always God who speaks to Abraham—and then, just as Abraham is about to strike his son, it’s an angel who bids him not to. Does a third party have to intervene to restrain God’s bloodthirst?
            And why is it, that throughout the story Abraham uses the plural to refer to Isaac and himself when he tells his companions what is going to happen (“we will go ahead to worship, and then we will return”), but in fact when Abraham does return, he reverts to the singular? Was Isaac not with him? In fact, nowhere does the text actually say that Isaac returns with his father. And more than that, in the following chapters of Genesis, nowhere do father and son again have any face-to-face encounter with one another, as if Isaac has run away from his father terrified and estranged. (Wouldn’t you?)
            The midrash commentaries of rabbinical Judaism wrestled repeatedly with these layered complications. One midrash, for example, imagines that it was Satan who put the idea into God’s mind to test Abraham, much like the story of Job. But that begs the question of why is God so easily talked into leading both Abraham and Job into temptation.
            And for that matter, how does Abraham really know that it is God’s voice that he hears, and not Satan’s? Isn’t the voice a bit more like that of the serpent in the garden, than the one that called Abraham into covenant and promised a heritage of good to him?
            Another midrash imagines a jealous Satan trying to bring down Abraham however he can, finally resorting to the most powerful weapon of all: the truth. Satan goes to tell Sarah that her husband intends to sacrifice their son, and she dies of a broken and betrayed heart. (And it is true that in the Bible, her death immediately follows this episode.)
            Yet again, there is another midrash that plays off the first few words that introduce the Akedah: “After these things, God tested Abraham.” After what things? Well, the things we heard about last week, when Abraham treated the slave Hagar and his other son Ishmael so poorly. And so the midrash imagines God’s test as a kind of punishment for Abraham’s favoritism of Isaac over Ishmael (a paternal favoritism that will plague Isaac and his son Jacob as well – like father, like son).
            Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish philosopher of the Holocaust (and himself a survivor of it), once remarked that reading the Akedah is like entering into a dark forest, where one loses all sense of direction. “The more I dive into the text,” he said, “the more I find myself lost in it.” It is simply too full of questions that in the end, are unanswerable.
            And so, Wiesel suggests that perhaps what the text is about, are the questions themselves. Like the problems Wiesel was never truly able to answer in his own work about where God was during the Holocaust, the Akedah also holds up an image of human life as requiring us to live facing questions that either have no answer, or if they do have answers, we do not know what they are.
            We all face questions like that about our life, don’t we? Questions about death and suffering, evil and injustice, unfairness and corruption. Sometimes, the most we can do is to attribute what comes our way to “fate,” those forces that shape the development of our lives in ways that are beyond either our control or understanding.
            And in the midst of having to live with unaswerable questions like that, the most painful of all is the question that comes in our darkest hours: “Where is God?” (the very question that lies at the heart of Wiesel’s lifelong attempt to make sense of the genocide of the Jews).
            Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who was herself murdered at Auschwitz, took it upon herself while she was interned there to respond to the question, “Where is God?”, through the example of her own life. “Someone,” she said, “has to take responsibility for making the idea of God credible.” In her prison diary, published posthumously as An Interrupted Life, she wrote on July 11, 1942, “If God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God. … I don't fool myself about the real state of affairs, and I've even dropped the pretense that I'm out to help others. I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well.”
            Sometimes, there isn’t much more that can be said than that, is there? To “keep on, keepin’ on,” whether our questions are answered or not. To make the idea of God credible at least in one place: the space within ourselves. Amen.