Proper 17 – Proverbs 25
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The first lesson this morning is from the book of Proverbs
It’s not a book we read very often in church, and today’s brief and obscure lesson
            doesn’t exactly encourage us to come running for more.
It is chosen to go with the gospel lesson, as Jesus could easily be referring to this proverb when he gives his advice about where to sit at a dinner party.
 
But, like Jesus’ lesson for the Pharisees,
            the wisdom offered in Proverbs goes much deeper.
Proverbs is a book of wisdom for day to day living.  
It is basically a guide book for living a good life.
And the very first lesson, the foundation for the whole framework of Proverbs,
            is this:
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
In every aspect of life – from finances to family, from work to housekeeping to education and citizenship, the starting place is a deep reverence for God.
 
It is hard to see that reverence in today’s brief lesson,
which is part of a larger section of advice for young men who will be serving at court
It’s basically an admonition to remember your place,
            to avoid being humiliated by placing yourself above your station.
Such warnings do not advocate false humility –
            putting ourselves down to seek praise from others.
But perhaps they do warn against pride.
A number of other places in Proverbs warn against pride,
such as the well-known adage from proverbs, ch 16:
            “pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
 
There is so much in the Christian tradition about the sin of pride.
But that doesn’t mean it is wrong to feel good about ourselves,
            or recognize what we do well.
Admonitions against pride do not ask us to despise ourselves or live in shame.
They do not encourage us to let other people take advantage of us or abuse us.
 
But texts such as these do invite us to examine what makes us proud.
To look at the things – the objects, good jobs, important dinner guests,
            our resume of good works or daily workouts at the gym –
            that make us feel okay about our selves and our lives.
To recognize that when we are most arrogant, most forceful in protecting our status,
            is when we are most insecure.
And then they invite us to let go of all those external things,
to locate our sense of self in the appropriate place –
            that is, in relationship to God, from whom life itself is a gift.
 
Pride which is sinful is pride which separates us from God and other people.
It is pride which places our own selves at the center of life,
            which sees other people as a means to an end, or what they can do for us,
            which discounts the suffering of others.
Proverbs reminds us that our pride is in God, and our relationship with God.
God is the source of our goodness and worth.
And Jesus reminds us to see and honor the dignity of all people –
            not for what they are to us, but for who they are as God’s beloved.
 
 
When Richard Rohr talks about mature spirituality, or the second half of life,
            he talks about this quality of giving up the identity we have based on doing       and achieving, on being recognized and valued for our accomplishments.
Then was also give up the need to judge other people,
            to compare them to ourselves and one another,
            and move towards greater kindness and openness in all our relationships.
When our relationship with God is primary, we lose the need to please others, to pretend to be something we are not, to meet unrealistic expectations or demands of others.
We are freed to love ourselves and to authentically love and serve others.
 
 
In an online discussion about these texts, Seminary President David Lose said,
“It is a theme in scripture that humans are inherently insecure,
            constantly seeking our value and worth in the wrong places
            and comparing ourselves to others.
The invitation of Scripture is to imagine God conveying worth and dignity as a gift.
The challenge is that when we seek our worth in other places,
            we close our hearts to the gift God offers.
 
We may or may not be aware of seeking other things to fill that place in us
            that can only be filled by God’s love for us,
but it is my guess that many of us here share that sense of insecurity.
That sense of wondering if we are good enough.
That many of us fall in to the trap of comparing ourselves constantly to others,
            rather than relying on our relationship with God to form our sense of self.
 
 
How do we place our identity in God?
How do we make “fear of the Lord,”
            or reverence for God and God’s gift of life, the foundation of our sense of self?
How do we counteract all the cultural messages that say you have to have certain things to be happy, or do certain things to be productive and valuable, or know certain things to be important?
 
There is no easy answer to that. But a partial answer is to continue to come to worship – to be part of a community that affirms God’s love for all people and tries to live that out in our life together.
Another way is in Bible study and prayer. Find those parts of the Bible that talk about God’s love for us, and read them often. Ask God to open your heart.
 
One thing that has been helpful for me recently is guided meditation, and I’d like to invite you into a simple practice now.
 
 
Sit comfortably, close your eyes if that is comfortable, or focus on one thing – the resurrection window, a candle, a flower, the floor.
 
Take a few deep breaths.
 
I will say a sentence, and you repeat it to yourself.
 
I am a beloved child of God.
 
God created me in God’s own image.
 
No matter what I do or do not do, God loves me.
 
No matter what I have or do not have, God loves me.
 
I am a beloved child of God.
 
May you go from this place with a deep sense of God’s great love for you.
Amen.

21 August 2016
St. Michael’s Church
Pastor Joe Britton
 
Widening the Circle
 
“Ought not this woman be set free from her bondage on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13)
 
 
            Some of you have heard me tell the story that when I was a parish priest in the old Blue-blood parish of St. Paul’s, Dedham, Massachusetts, I used to tease my parishioners there (many of whom could trace their roots to the Mayflower), that had the Pilgrims by some miracle been blown off course and miraculously landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico—not only would they have found a town of European origins already more than a decade old, but they could have gone to mass at their local parish church (not, of course, that they would necessarily have wanted to do that!).

            That fact—that the European settlement of North America really began in the desert Southwest and not in New England—never sat very well with my parishioners, who had a pretty strong investment in the idea that their ancestors were here first.

            Nor did the fact that the original European settlement of North America was made by Spanish Roman Catholics, and not Anglo Puritans.

            Their discomfort reminds me of a question posed by Lee Maracle, a Canadian First Nations author, in her book, Ravensong: “Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?”[*]

            Or, perhaps put another way, where do you begin encouraging someone to widen the circle of their own awareness of imagination, or as the young Hamlet puts it to Horatio, to imagine that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

            We seem to be living in a time when we are all being forced to confront the fact that the world is much more complicated, and much more varied, than we ever imagined.

          As immigrants cross borders near and far; as the web opens every place on earth to our scrutiny and comment; as commerce floods the world with products of every imaginable origin—we are confronted on a daily basis with the challenge to widen the circle of our understanding of different ways of doing things, and our acceptance of different ways of behaving.

          And of course, we have seen the predictable resistance to such radical change erupting in our country in aggressive and sometimes even violent ways throughout this election cycle. We have talked about that here already on previous Sundays, and I don’t want to dwell on that topic again today.
But what I do want to do is think about the kind of change we are confronting in a more spiritual way.
In today’s gospel, we hear of Jesus angering the powers that be by his challenging the accepted norms of social behavior. The story is familiar, because it is repeated so often throughout the gospels: Jesus is constantly pushing the people whom he encounters to widen the circle, to imagine who or what might be included in their way of looking at things that might transform the way they related to other people.
In this case, there is a woman who has been crippled for eighteen years, pitifully bent over and unable even to stand up straight. Jesus has the temerity to heal her on the Sabbath, the day when no work is to be done, at which the leader of the synagogue takes umbrage. Pushing back at the leader’s anger, however, Jesus reminds him that even on the Sabbath, he takes care of the needs of the ox and donkey in his stable. And if for the animals—then why not this poor woman?

          “Widen the circle of your care and concern,” he seems to say, “to include not just the beasts, but also your fellow human being.”
          Now, if you think about it, this widening of the circle of our sense of responsibility and relationship is something that each of us must in the course of our lives, if we are to move from the complete self-centeredness of an infant (for whom life is nothing more than having one’s needs met), to the willingness and ability to reach out sacrificially to meet the needs of others? Our emotional life—if it is healthy and growing—is a constant trajectory along the path of widening the circle of our consciousness, our commitments, our care, and our concern.

          But more than that, God’s way of dealing with us is also continually to be calling us into a wider circle of consciousness and concern. Many of the great stories of the Hebrew scripture revolve around that call to wider vision: Abraham called our of the Land of Ur to become the father of nations; the Israelites called out of slavery in Egypt to become God’s people; the prophets called out of their obscurity to give presence to God’s voice. 
 
          So perhaps that’s why the stories of Jesus also so often revolve around that very issue of widening the circle—it is he who makes mostly clearly known to us what God is encouraging us to be and to become.

          This past week, my wife and I sent our son off to college. Every parent knows the experience of having one’s experience opened to new things by what our children choose to do (sometimes for good, and sometimes not). I, for example, would never have thought of taking up flying as a passion, a vocation, and a career—but that’s what our son has chosen to do. (And as a result, I have learned a lot more about the realities of aviation than I wish I knew!) The challenge of parenting, of course, is to make room for such adventuresome-ness, encouraging it while also guiding it, yet also not choking it off by failing to widen the circle of one’s own appreciation.

          So all this is to say, that at the very core of what it means to be human, there is a need continually to widen the circle of what we know and who we are, as we respond also to the growth of others.But there is a deeper core to this imperative as well, which is that if we are to come to know God in our life, then our mind must be continually expanding to take in the reality of who God is. We are created finitely, yet with the charge of relating to God’s infinite love. We are like small clay vessels, trying to contain the entire sea. Although we can never fully succeed, then, at fully knowing God, nevertheless only a continually expanding heart and mind can adequately respond to the fullness of God’s love.
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           That expansiveness of heart and mind is the invitation given by God the creator in our origins, it is the challenge taught by God the son in his earthly ministry, and it is the encouragement given by God the Holy Spirit in the promptings which life gives us every day toward opening ourselves to the new, the unexpected, the unexplained.

          The anger and resentment toward other people that we see around us, therefore, is not just an economic and political issue, despite what we read in the newspaper. It is also a spiritual issue—a disinclination to grow and mature with the openness of heart and mind to which God calls us.
Lee Maracle asked, “Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?” Well, as Christians, we might begin with the nature of God’s own being, infinitely complex and diverse as it is. And when we have that thought firmly in mind, then we might expand that awareness to the world of God’s own creation, where we should also expect there to be a diversity of languages and peoples and nations that will defy our comprehension—but which will nevertheless require the widening of the circle of our consciousness if we are to respond to it meaningfully.
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          So we are led to the question of who needs to be included next in my own circle of understanding and concern? Is it my child, or spouse? Is it a Muslim neighbor, or colleague? Is it perhaps the immigrants who are hidden among us? Or perhaps, is it even myself?
 
 
© Joseph Britton, 2016


[*] Lee Maracle, Ravensong, quoted in Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 99.

St Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church                     
Feast of St Mary the Virgin                                                             
 
 
A few weeks ago, I got in the car and the radio came on in the middle of an interview with Sister Simone Campbell, a Sister of Social Service, as well as a lawyer, poet,
            and executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice.
 
Sister Simone leads a group called Nuns on the Bus.
She and eight other Catholic sisters were traveling around the country in their bus,             attending both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions,
            in what they called the Mend the Gaps tour. 
The nuns visited 13 states, hosting conversations with ordinary Americans on both sides of the political divide, in an effort to bridge the divide and focus attention on the injustice of income disparity in the U.S.
People who committed working for justice were invited to sign their names on the bus.
 
The interviewer asked Sister Simone about the role of the church in politics, and she said,
 
Pope Francis is really abundantly clear on this. He says, "Meddle in politics. What we need is a healthy engagement," because we bring the values of our faith to politics. And it’s not about a litmus test on policy. It’s about how do we create community, how do we come together and find a way forward together, without the violence, without the hate, without the division, without the racism. We can do it, and faith is a way to nourish the roots of that commitment
 
And I think what Pope Francis is trying to do is to heal our church and to make us engaged in our society. He says what we sorely need is a healthy politics and that we are to be bridges to each other, not walls. And so, that’s what we believe, that’s why we’re doing this Mend the Gap tour, to be a bridge to those who are more often left out.
 
She went on to explain Mend the Gap:
 
Mend the Gap is our commitment to healing the income and wealth disparity in our nation; healing the democracy gap, where people are pushed out of voting, where they can’t vote; healing the healthcare gap; healing the citizenship gap, where our immigrant population are pushed to the margins because we willfully refuse to fix our broken immigration system; and finally, to heal the gap in housing. What we say is, if we want to be a nation that is great, the way both parties want to say it is, we’ve got to engage these gaps. We’ve got to make change. Our hope is, by creating community, then we will see the needs of others and be willing to engage in the hard work of change.
 
 
As I turned to the lessons for this morning, and read again Mary’s beautiful words of praise and hope, I was reminded of the Nuns on the Bus.
In fact, it occurred to me that Mary – far from being the meek and mild, seen but not heard, good little girl we so often sing of and depict in our artwork – would have fit right in with those radical, faithful, hope-filled Sisters.
 
As David Lose says in his commentary on these verses, Mary’s song is a rebel song.
 
She begins with words of praise and gratitude – these are the words used in a song setting by Marty Haugen:
 
            My soul proclaims your greatness O God, and my spirit rejoices in you
            You have set your sight on your servant here, and blessed me all my life through
            Great and mighty are you, O Holy One; strong is your justice, strong your love
            ------
 
Then the tone changes, from her personal sense of blessing,
            to a vision of God’s action in the world.
Her vision is one of justice: of God defeating tyrants and lifting up the lowly.
In a sense, Mary is saying that God has not chosen her because she is something special –
            just the opposite, in fact.
God has made a habit of choosing people like her – ordinary, humble, poor –
            to carry out God’s work in the world.
Elderly wanderers chosen to be parents of a nation.
A stuttering, exiled prince chosen to rescue God’s people from slavery.
A youngest son, a shepherd, chosen to be king.
A preference for the lowly, rather than the mighty,
            has been God’s m.o. from the very beginning.
 
Mary says:
            He has helped his servant Israel,
                        in remembrance of his mercy,
            according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
                        to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’
 
Mary has grown up hearing the stories and Psalms and prophets,
            which speak of God’s faithful covenant-love for Israel,
and she places God’s promise to her and her people in the context of that history and love.
 
David Lose writes,
“Prophets of all stripes have sung the same: that God cares for all people
            but has a special interest in the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable.”
Lose points out that we have often tended to spiritualize this claim.
Those of us who enjoy privilege and a certain amount of wealth and power hear such words and decide he is talking about the poor in spirit; the humble of heart; and that can include us.
 
 
But Lose urges us not to make that move too quickly.
“Let’s imagine,” he says, “what it would be like for those with so very little –
            power, wealth, privilege, hope – to hear Mary the mother of our Lord
            sing this rebel song of justice and hope and to know that they, too, are blessed,         favored, and folded into God’s promise to change the world.”
 
 
As well as being the Feast of St Mary the Virgin, today is also our back-to-school Sunday,
            when we invite all our students and teachers forward for a prayer and a blessing
            in recognition of their hard work and their new beginnings.
It’s a time full of anticipation and hope.
My Facebook feed this week has been full of photos –
            posted by proud parents – of kids heading off to their first day of school.
(I’m especially impressed by those who get first day of high school photos. My teenage son yelled “bye” at the door and was gone before I could get the camera or gush or anything)
 
It’s great for all of us to celebrate our kids, and the kids around us.
As this new year begins, let us also remember children around our city and state who are happy to go back to school because it provides two meals a day for them –
            meals they otherwise don’t have;
            children who struggle at school because of chaos and violence in their homes;
            children who leave school not knowing where they will sleep tonight.
 
We have taken a step, in reaching out to La Luz and MacArthur schools to say,
            “What do you need? How can we help?”
But we can do more – both in direct help, and in advocating for policies that will mend the gaps between haves and have-nots in our state and our country.
 
Let us, with Sister Simone and the Nuns on the Bus, look beyond partisanship and mud-slinging, to work with people of all backgrounds and parties and heal our society.
As Sister Simone said, “We the people have got to be the leaders we’ve been waiting for.
We can do it, and faith is a way to nourish the roots of [our] commitment.”
 
May our faith be strong and our courage great.
Amen.
 
 
 

​31 July 2016
Fr. Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
XI Pentecost
 
Rekindling Hope
 
“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity!” (Eccl. 1)
 
            How interesting, that after two solid weeks of political conventions today’s lectionary should kick up the chapter from Ecclesiastes that declares all of life to be a pointless vanity. Indeed, some translations of our reading put it even more directly: as the New International Version reads, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is utterly meaningless!”
 
            And certainly there is a lot of political rhetoric around these days that seems to take the view that the political process and perhaps even the country are irreparably broken and corrupt, as if to echo our reading from Ecclesiastes. But the problem is that when one takes such an attitude, it creates a kind of downward spiral, for  if that is true, then it really doesn’t make much difference what the outcome of an election is, does it? One candidate is as bad as another, they’re all the same, scoundrels and scumbags every one of them!
 
            But it won’t surprise you if I suggest that the message the writer of Ecclesiastes is trying to make is in fact a bit more subtle point than that—after all, it is in the Bible, the “good book,” so it must have something more to it than raw cynicism, wouldn’t you think?
 
            The gospel might put us on the right track toward finding something more substantive. Jesus tells the parable of a rich man who securely stores away his belongings, thinking that in his well-protected comfort he can eat, drink and be merry. The wall is built, and he plans to hide behind it. But then that very night, death comes and his soul is required of him: and suddenly he discovers the “vanity” of which Ecclesiastes spoke when he has to reckon with the fact that in death his riches can no longer mask his poverty of spirit.
 
            Having told his parable, Jesus points his hearers toward a larger truth: the important thing in life is to be rich toward God, for only those riches endure. And what does that mean? Well, Paul steers us in that direction in the epistle lesson: we are to give up greed, idolatry, evil desires, and so on, and cultivate instead their opposite—generosity, dignity, respect, and so on.
 
            And here I think is the really important point: if you pay close attention to that list, you will hear running through it a message of great hope and optimism about the human spirit, because unless we understand human nature to be capable of such things as generosity and dignity and respect, then it is entirely disingenuous to expect that we should cultivate them. But as people of faith, we do think that human beings are capable of cultivating these virtues, because we understand God to have created us with that very capacity, modeled in God’s own image. We therefore just won’t accept unbridled cynicism as an adequate approach to life—including politics.
 
            It’s in that very vein that the columnist David Brooks, writing in this week’s New York Times, appealed to the “Judeo-Christian aspirations that have always represented America’s highest moral ideals: [aspirations] toward love, charity, humility, goodness, faith, temperance, and gentleness.”[*] Sounding a bit like St. Paul himself, Brooks was pointing us toward an ultimate hope, optimism, and determination that we both can and should aim toward being our finest selves and not our basest. (In this day and age, I think I would have referred to that as the Abrahamic tradition, or maybe even more inclusively, as the spiritual tradition, but that’s another issue.)       
 
            Someone recently asked me, what I think that she could do right now in response to the high state of anxiety in American politics? Well, I wonder if it might be this: could it be that we as Christians are be called to advocate for hope. To resist the sense of pessimism that can so easily creep into human affairs is not easy (we human beings are a messy, disappointing lot after all). Yet whether we are individually Republican or Democrat, perhaps what we most need to be about as followers of Jesus right now is to be a voice for the richness toward God that is given in the potential each one of us has for generosity, dignity, and respect—a potential which our life together in community equally has. Whether in our conversations with one another, in our interactions in the community, or in our emails and Facebook posts and tweets, we people of faith have a natural commitment to raising the bar of public discourse beyond anger to hope, beyond grievances to aspirations, beyond suspicion to justice.
 
            This past week, I had the opportunity to go for the first time to Chaco Canyon, that extraordinary series of pueblo ruins in northwestern New Mexico dating from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. You probably know that cumulatively, these pueblos constituted an extensive and complex culture whose influence stretched for hundreds of miles in all directions. It is remarkable to me that the largest of the ruins, Pueblo Bonito, was for some 600 years the largest man-made structure in North America, until it was superseded in the nineteenth century by the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution.
 
            Now lying in ruins, one could look on these pueblos with the sentiment we heard from Ecclesiastes that all is vanity, for everything ultimately passes away or is overtaken by time. Yet one can also look on that complex of ruins with a great sense of reverence and amazement at the creative accomplishment of a community of people who ventured something great, and achieved it. Of the two, that is perhaps the more profound statement.
 
            Writing in the 3rd century B.C., at a similar time of anxiety and uncertainty to our own, the author of Ecclesiastes was tempted to look on the world and conclude that everything is meaningless, and that our efforts are therefore in the end pointless. But reflecting more carefully upon his subject, by the end of his book he concludes in effect that the meaning of life is what we choose to make it to mean: we can either fall into despair at its vanity, or we can direct it toward those larger purposes toward which God has created us to aspire. In these first decades of the twenty-first century, perhaps we too need to find the confidence in ourselves that we are building a new global world whose parameters already astonish and amaze us—and sometimes frighten us—yet which it is our generation’s challenge and obligation to construct.
 
            In reconvening the Congress in 1862, at the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln turned to the first chapter of Ecclesiastes as we did today. He quoted these words to the assembled group of worried, fearful legislators: “A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever” (Eccl 1:4). With that reference, he meant to encourage his hearers—who surely faced greater challenges and trials than any we have today—by reminding them that in what they would do, they were laying a foundation of freedom and social unity for succeeding generations. They themselves might not live to see it, but their children, and grandchildren would.
 
            Is that not the kind of confident hope and steadfast determination to which we as people of faith are called to bear witness in our country today? As another well-known passage from Ecclesiastes puts it, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” Surely this is a time for rekindling hope. Amen.
 
© Joseph Britton, 2016


[*] “The Democrats Win the Summer,” July 28.

​24 July 2016: St. Mary Magdalene
Fr. Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
 
Everything Has Become New
 
“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’
She turned to him and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’” (John 20)
 
            After a week of high political drama, and with another one yet to come, we may feel that we need some emotional encouragement.
 
            So today we are celebrating the feast of St. Mary Magdalene (technically July 22). Mary is intrinsically someone worth celebrating, because she is one of the most fascinating of all the New Testament figures. But more significant to us today, I think her story has at least two important things to say to us about the politics of our day.
 
            In the first instance, Mary is described by the gospel writers as a very distinctive individual, being mentioned as one of Jesus’ followers more often than almost anyone else. Yet in the popular religious imagination, she gets blended into a composite of at least three separate women: first herself; then Mary of Bethany (the sister of Martha, about whom we heard last week); and finally the repentant woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with oil and then wiped them with her hair. And of course, in that context, it is often assumed that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (even though scripture never even suggests that).
 
            The real Mary was a woman from the town of Magdala, on the coast of the Sea of Galilee, who had suffered from some form of mental or physical ailment that was cured by Jesus when he “cast out seven demons” from her. (These seven demons seem to have morphed in the tradition into seven sins—and hence the suggestive assumptions about her sexual past). In any case, this experience of healing seems to have attached Mary to Jesus in a particularly intense and committed way, for at the time of his crucifixion, when most of the other disciples have abandoned Jesus, she is clearly named as one of the women who stay and watch with him.
 
            Mary is also among those who go to the tomb early on Easter morning, carrying the burial spices to finalize the disposition of his body. But then, depending on which gospel you read, it is Mary who is first told by an angel that he is no longer in the tomb but risen as he said—or, as we heard today in the account from John, she is the one who first sees the risen Jesus himself, mistaking him for the gardener.
 
            One thing is clear: the image that has been conveyed over and over again of Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute in icons, legends, paintings, and poetry—is largely based on a mistaken reading of scripture. It just doesn’t say what people thought. And that leads to the first lesson we might draw from Mary regarding the current political scene: people are prone to believe what they want to, regardless of the facts. This extraordinary power of self-deception, and the indulgence we give ourselves to play with the truth, is a temptation against which we must be constantly vigilant as individuals and as a people, for it leads only to distortion, poor judgment, and prejudice.
 
Mary Magdalene is also the first witness of the resurrection, and this brings us to the second and perhaps more compelling lesson we might draw from Mary. What is most striking in her encounter with Jesus, is that he appoints her as what is in effect an “apostle to the apostles,” an apostolorum apostola: the one who is to bring the news of Jesus’ resurrection to the disciples.
 
            Now, to understand how truly radical that designation is, we have to keep in mind that at that time, Mary as a woman could not have her testimony accepted without verification by a man, simply because of her gender. Yet she is the one appointed by Jesus as the one to bear witness for him. Jesus essentially makes her the first among equals in the disciples—a point that has often been cited in arguing for women’s leadership in the church. And it doesn’t stop there.
 
            There are also multiple accounts in the literature of the early church that Mary became fully associated with the apostolic mission, as for example a story the revolves around an egg (which you see represented in the icon there on the altar). There are several versions, but the story goes more or less like this: because of Mary’s apostolic stature, she is able to gain admission to a banquet given by no less a personage than the Roman Emperor Tiberius. She comes before him, holding an egg, and proclaiming “Christ is risen!” The emperor scoffs at such an outrageous claim, and says that it was no more likely than that the egg she was holding should turn red there in her hand.
 
            Well, sure enough, the egg does turn to a brilliant red color right then and there, and emboldened by such a sign, she preaches the gospel to the whole imperial household. (This is, by the way, the origin of the tradition of dyeing eggs for Easter).
 
            What strikes me about all this is that Mary was clearly a person who by temperament was open to the new. Perhaps it was the experience of having been healed of the seven demons, but she had come to internalize the conviction that life is not static, and that one must be curious and open enough in heart and mind to encounter the unexpected, to welcome it, and to make it one’s own. Think of her encounter with Jesus in the garden on Easter morning—at first, she follows the obvious instinct to think that someone has stolen Jesus’ body away, and so she confronts Jesus (thinking he is a gardener who might be able to explain the disappearance).
 
            But when Jesus calls her by name, she is quickly able to reassess not just who he is, but in a sense to reassess her whole world view: here is Jesus, risen from the dead against every rational expectation, and she readily embraces him as “Rabbouni” (teacher), the one who will lead her into a new creation in which (as Paul puts it in today’s epistle), “everything old has passed away.”
 
            And so, Mary not only accepts the mantle of being the messenger to the apostles, but finds the confidence and determination in herself to appear in the Lord’s name even before the Emperor himself. Mary you might say is a bit of a radical, an activist—or in biblical terms, an apostle!
 
            On this weekend when we are poised between two political conventions, we might take a moment to ask if there is not something to be learned from Mary’s example of being open to, and accepting of, a new order. As we know, much of the current political rhetoric is motivated by the fear of a changing world, in which new races and classes of people assert a claim upon us; in which the world has become interrelated in ways that we have yet fully to understand; and in which the diversity of peoples and cultures is inescapably present not only globally, but in our own neighborhoods.
 
            Like Mary encountering Jesus, we may at first mistake who and what it is that we see around us. But also like Mary, perhaps we need to approach the impinging reality of this emerging new world with a willingness to reassess and respond to it openly and creatively, rather than defensively and aggressively. Surely the winners in the twenty-first century will be those who can transcend the limitations of cultural, intellectual, and economic tribalism—while the losers will be those who hang on to now outmoded chauvinisms, of whatever variety.
 
            You see, if we believe that in the long run, it is God’s ultimate intention to draw all people to God’s own self, we should expect as people of faith that we will be constantly challenged to encounter and engage the new. God is creating—and re-creating—the world even at this moment, and the question is whether we will like Mary at the tomb mistake that change for something it is not, or be willing to recognize it for the transformative revolution that it is. Amen.
 
© Joseph Britton, 2016