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Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany
February 12, 2017
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
We’ve heard a great deal recently about laws, their interpretation, and our obligation to observe them. And yet our readings this morning are among the most confusing and challenging in all of Scripture because they put our understanding of law into question. Recall the words of Moses from Deuteronomy:
“If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.” In other words obey the divine commands and be blessed; disobey them and perish.
Imagine our surprise when, in the gospel of Matthew a rather different tone is struck by Jesus who seems to take an oppositional stance to the laws alluded to in Deuteronomy. Jesus says “you have heard that it was said,” and then adds, “but I say to you”. “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.
And perhaps most startling in light of our contemporary sentiments, Jesus says about divorce: “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
It is certainly clear that whenever we read the words of Jesus: ‘but I say to you’, we know are in the midst of some kind of subversion or at least reinterpretation of previous understandings. At one level of course we find here the basis for the theological proclamation that given the sinfulness of our human nature perfect obedience to the divine law is impossible and cannot be the basis of our salvation.
But I think there is something else going on here beyond the necessity of grace to redeem us from sinfulness. This something else is the invitation to consider the intention of the law and the ways that sometimes open up to us the opportunity to realize the deeper intent of the law in the spaces between, within, and even beyond the technical application of the laws. Laws are essential in any fair and just society. But, as important as they are, they do not exhaust the possibilities for genuine and meaningful human relationships. Jesus refers to someone going to court to settle a matter of legal rights. But instead of settling the dispute in the court, Jesus says “Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.” Jesus seems to be suggesting that if our relationship with our accuser is defined only in legal terms of plaintiff or defendant, then we have lost the possibility of a relationship that ought to be grounded in something deeper than the law: in something touching the more fundamental parts of our being: in love, compassion, forgiveness, sensitivity, empathy, or even a simple awareness that legal restitution cannot overcome the inevitable, unresolvable, and uncontrollable contingencies of life. Not all of human life, from its joys as well as tragedies, can be summed up within the framework of legal commandments.
I was reminded of this recently when I was being interviewed (in a process known as voir dire) for possible inclusion in a jury trial regarding a case of medical malpractice. When I said that my daughter and son-in-law were both physicians I knew I would be excused from service by the plaintiff’s counsel because it could be assumed I would be sympathetic to the doctors against whom the plaintiff had brought her charges. But before they kicked me off the jury one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, noting I had been a professor of religious ethics, asked me whether I had any moral issues with malpractice cases in general. Perhaps not surprising to some of you, I eagerly used the opportunity the lawyer’s question gave me to get into a philosophical and ethical discussion about whether what is called pain and suffering can be compensated for monetarily. I said I had no problem compensating someone for all medical expenses and for wages lost over a lifetime of diminished opportunities because of the injury, but I couldn’t see how money can compensate for subjective pain and suffering since there is no objective correlation between money and pain. It struck me that this is an area of life in which the strict standards of legal justice are not very useful. Even though the law allows payments for pain and suffering, ultimately I don’t think we can put a monetary value on subjective experiences. To do so is to turn our lives into commodities that the market can value by financial measurements. And that is a complete denigration of our lives as spiritual and communal human beings.
This experience of the jury system should remind us that obedience to the law, while indispensable for a just society, doesn’t always get to the heart of what we might be called to do to repair personal relationships and deepen the non-legal bonds that alone can make us more fully human. It’s important to remember, of course, that not all human laws reflect divine law, especially when they repudiate the ties of a common humanity that transcends national borders and ethnicities and which lead to an inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants. When there are such laws or orders that threaten our freedom to welcome the refugee they cannot claim divine sanction and ought to be resisted legally and by peaceful protest. But there are also laws which seem to have a divine sanction behind them and which reflect a deeper understanding of our fullness as human persons. Such a law seems to have been the one sanctioning divorce in the time of Jesus. What Jesus says about divorce is a subversion of that law even though, at first glance, he seems to be establishing a harsh and unforgiving stand on divorce. The law in his time permitted a husband to divorce his wife for almost any reason if she displeased him in some way. To subvert this legal reason for divorce can be seen as Jesus speaking up for the often legally powerless woman in what was, by today’s standards, a thoroughly male patriarchal understanding of marriage. In rejecting the legal recourse to divorce Jesus seems to be calling for a new way of viewing marriage: not as the ownership of a woman by a man, but as a mutual loving and self-sacrificing relationship. Jesus is offering his listeners the opportunity to go beyond the legal definitions of marriage and divorce and to consider the non-legal or extra-legal dimensions of marital relationships. Unfortunately, the Church historically turned this opportunity to go deeper into the nature of marital relationships and instead subjected them to a new form of punitive legality that wounds more than it heals. Forbidding divorce, as some churches do, and punishing it by allowing no new marriage and no acceptance at the Eucharistic meal is simply a perpetuation of a primarily legal or, in church terms, a canonical, definition of what constitutes a human relationship. What Jesus may be suggesting, however, is that if we can look beyond the strictly legal or canonical meaning of divorce and marriage and perhaps see an opening through which we might exercise one more attempt at reconciliation based on empathy or a recovery of the love that was presumably there at the start of the marriage, then possibly, just possibly, the relationship might be restored. But this is a non-legal possibility, it is not required by the law, and in many cases it will not work. At that point, divorce may be the only viable option left that will do justice to the parties and bring some healing to their individual lives after they have ended their legal marriage. This option should never be rejected or made the basis for how divorced people are treated by the Church but it should not be the first and only option tried. Recourse to the law of divorce must be preserved but it should not define the relationship from beginning to end. Human relationships are often messy, complex, and complicated. What Jesus seems to be asking us is to recognize the complexities of human lives and to at least try to find ways to bring the power of love, grace, forgiveness, and mutual understanding into the relationship before abandoning hope entirely for its restoration or accepting its ending with mutual respect and dignity for all involved. Seeing divorce only in legal terms shuts off this call to go beyond what the law offers. We need to think beyond the law to what it ought to serve: the well-being, the mutuality, the love, and the compassion that alone can make us fully human. These things are as true of our secular laws regarding the inclusion of the migrant and the stranger as they are of those with whom our relationships of deepest intimacy are at risk. The law will not redeem us but we, with God’s help, might redeem the law by recapturing its true and essential intention if we keep the deeper meaning of human relationship beyond the law at the forefront of our understanding.
Trinity / St. Monica’s Episcopal Church, Hartford, Connecticut
Year A -- Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany
January 15, 2017
(On this Sunday there were no services held at Trinity Episcopal Church as we joined with our brothers and sisters at St. Monica's Episcopal Church. On February 19, there will be no services at St. Monica's as that community will worship at Trinity at 8 and 10 a.m.)
Isaiah 58: 1-9a, (9b-12) 1 Cor 2: 1-12 Mt 5:13-20
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly Is. 58: 8 Let us pray: Lord, open our understanding by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the Word is proclaimed, we may receive holy wisdom to understand, to embrace and to put into action the many gifts you have bestowed upon us. In Jesus name we pray. AMEN.
GOD IS GOOD. ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. GOD IS GOOD.
And it is indeed good for us to be gathered together this morning – two great congregations with great traditions of serving God and serving our community. And so I want to thank your Pastor Tracy for her friendship and for her interest in collaborating to make this wonderful occasion happen today. Trinity parishioner Mark MacGougan has called this a “home and away” series, and we look forward to welcoming you all to Trinity in two weeks. And all on Super Bowl Sunday. So won’t it be wonderful to go about doing what you need to do during this next week and telling folks that the most exciting thing you did on Sunday was to go to church!
Our Hebrew Bible passage today and the passage from Matthew’s Gospel both speak of “light” as an integral part of our relationship with God. Matthew adds the image of “salt” as part of the Christian life. But to place these images of salt and light in context for this morning, we need to recall last week’s text from Matthew, which was the beatitudes from Jesus’ sermon on the Mount.
Recall that of the four Gospel writers, Matthew is writing particularly to a Jewish audience, emphasizing that Jesus hasn’t come to replace the law but rather Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law, the embodiment of Torah, the guy everyone has been waiting for!
And so in last Sunday’s passage we heard Jesus, in the beatitudes, turn our world on its head. You think happiness is about having lots of stuff? You think happiness is about being self-assured and always winding up on top? Well, NO, Jesus tells us. It may make you FEEL happy, but it doesn’t get you any closer to God. And real happiness, Jesus tells his disciples, comes when everything you expected and wanted turns out to be as empty as worldly stuff always is. It’s only then that you can come face to face with God and sense the Kingdom coming near.
Now that sermon on the Mount was really Jesus’ intervention into an internal argument that was going on amongst the Jews of Jesus’ time. Israel’s land was occupied by the Roman Empire, and in fact, Israel had been a part of gentile empires ever since the Babylonian exile. Sure the people had physically returned to Israel, but it was Roman troops on the ground. Land, city and Temple were all under gentile control. Some wanted to continue an uneasy accommodation with the Romans. Some others – the Zealots –wanted to fight. Still others, realizing the futility of fighting against the Roman empire, decided to kind of circle the wagons and hide, kind of keeping to themselves and observing the study and ritual practice of Torah. Their feeling was if we cannot enjoy political independence, at least we can live in faithful covenantal relationship with God until such time as God reveals that God desires for them to do differently.
So the sermon on the mount served as Jesus’ statement to the zealots – no, we don’t destroy our enemies, we love them and pray for them.
And that brings us to today’s Gospel passage about salt and light. Those first two paragraphs where Jesus is telling us we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world form a transition between the beatitudes and a section that runs for the next couple of chapters of Matthew concerning Christian ethics. Remember now that Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience. What we are hearing today from Matthew is kind of a safeguard to keep the Jews paying attention to this radical message of Jesus WITHOUT them thinking that Jesus is contradicting the teaching of Moses.
So that is what’s happening at the end of the passage – verses 17-19 -- when Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. But just as the Pharisees might be breathing a sigh of relief, Jesus shakes up their world once again.
You see, living in strict covenantal conformity – holding a set of established beliefs and observing a ritual code about certain behavior – is not what Jesus has in mind either. That’s where the “fulfill” part comes in, in verse 20. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
That word “fulfill” turns out to be an important word. It means we actually have to do DO something. Jesus gives us a head start: He tells us You ARE the salt of the earth. That’s one of my favorite lines in the Bible – I love salt. You know, when I was a kid and often hung around stables in the farms of Glastonbury I used to actually envy the horses because they got their own salt block to lick. But what are the characteristics of salt? Well, it brings to life something that might otherwise be bland or tasteless. It actually can enhance the flavor of something it is added to. It also can be used as a preservative, keeping something fresh that might otherwise get old and stale. Salt also makes us thirst for something else besides the salt. And when you cook with salt, the salt the salt loses its own identity and blends with that to which it is added.
Do you get the image? Jesus is saying that we are to bring some salt to our lives and to our relationships with one another. But there is a hitch: We always have to keep it fresh.
Jesus also tells us You are the light of the world. Now we usually think this means that if we have gifts we should use them and not keep them hidden or to ourselves. And to be sure, with parishioners who don’t appreciate the tremendous gifts God has given them I always encourage them to let their light shine. But there is always the danger here, isn’t there, of interpreting this to mean, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!”
I think Jesus is really encouraging his audience here to bring the light of God to what is often a dark and broken world. Light from a flame– which in Jesus time would have been the source of light – draws people to it by the light it spreads and the warmth it provides. Light enables us to see things more clearly. Light is, in fact, composed of many different colors that we can only see through a crystal or in a rainbow. It is a necessary ingredient for vegetation to grow. Jesus metaphor of “light” calls attention to our role as Jesus’ gathered community in the world.
And this is not just true for us as a community of believers as it relates to the outside world. We also need to confront the darkness in our own hearts, our own souls, in order for us to really discover our own light and to let our light shine. We can’t bring the light of Christ to others if we can’t be honest with ourselves and acknowledge the dark and troubled places in our own lives where the light of Christ needs to shine. Author Annie Dillard writes, “You don’t have to sit outside in the dark. But if you want to see find the stars, you have to find the darkness.”
So what are we 21st century Christians to do with this? In this season after Epiphany, Scripture reminds us of all the many and varied ways that the Living God, in the person of Jesus the Christ, was made known to the world at the Messiah, the fulfillment of the Hebrew Torah. How do we, as 21st century Episcopalians, become salt and light for a broken and hurting world?
The danger, of course, is that we can forget that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus sets us the task of running counter to the prevailing culture. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, we can become too self satisfied with what we have already accomplished. We can become too comfortable with the world as it is so long as it works for us, and be comfortable with forgetting about or handing out scraps to those who live on the margins of society. As disciples and apostles of Christ, we need to break out of our comfort zones or else our salt begins to lose its taste and becomes useless in serving God’s mission.
But there is an institutional aspect to this as well, something that on this morning when our two historic congregations are worshipping as one body bears mention. In what Presiding Bishop Curry calls the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement, we have been hard at work over the past several years re-imagining what our church should look like, how it functions, and how it can better be the light of Christ for hurting communities and a hurting nation. For way too long, we have been complacent, content with structures and ideas about mission that may have served us well fifty or sixty years ago but which, like salt that has lost its flavor, have started to lose or have completely lost their effectiveness. What were glory days for some were not so glorious for others, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are being called to a wider vision of Kingdom values and what it means to be followers –disciples and apostles – of Jesus.
We need to recapture the excitement and energy of a movement – something new, something that requires us to dream and to take chances when opportunities arise and we aren’t sure how things will turn out. That was the movement that Jesus started, it was the movement that the apostles joined, and it is the movement to which we are called today.
The lyrics to our anthem this morning say it well. It starts sweetly and gently:
How lovely is thy house, O Lord, what joy we find inside as we in blessed peacefulness abide. How comforting is the music, how comfortable are the pews, as we rest, rest, rest in the Lord. And then suddenly faster, we’ll hear:
WAKE UP, CHURCH, WAKE UP! The Lord is calling you. Wake up, Church, wake up, there is Kingdom work to do; and so arise and shine. Now tell the world your light is come. Wake up, Church, wake up, there’ll be plenty time to rest when life is done.
We can’t hide inside the walls, sitting on the pews. God calls us to go out and we cannot refuse, and so arise and shine. Now tell the world your light is come. Rise, shine, and give God the glory. Wake up, church, wake up.
This can and should be an exciting time for our Hartford area congregations, for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and throughout the world. God has blessed us with wonderful buildings for missionary outreach and for worship that feeds us and nourishes us spiritually so that we may go out to do the work God has given us to do. As Jesus’ followers, we are commanded and enabled by Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to be that salt of the earth that brings new flavor to life, that keeps the Good News of the Gospel fresh, and makes us thirst for justice and righteousness. Jesus invites us and empowers us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to be the light of the world that serves as a beacon to guide us through all that divides us. Lord God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, help us to be that salt of the earth, and that light of the world. AMEN.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, Connecticut
Second Sunday After The Epiphany
Birthday of The Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 2017
Isaiah 49:1-7 Ephesians 6:10-20 John 1:29-42
GOD IS GOOD. ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. GOD IS GOOD.
It is good for us to be here today, together, to celebrate the actual birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Yesterday, in honor of the holiday, our Brotherhood of St. Andrew co-sponsored a Day of Reflection for the men to consider how we can have a positive impact on the church and our communities, make a difference when it comes to the issues of social justice to which Dr. King devoted his life. Even as this nation has seen an expansion of individual rights and advances in civil liberties for many over the past six decades, we are also witnessing an alarming and increasing presence of the so-called "White Supremacist" movement at the center of our national life and politics, a presence that, sadly, threatens to gain strength rather than diminish. And while this phenomenon is generally reported in the public discourse at large, I would like for us today, as we observe the birthday of Dr. King, to reflect, in an age of heightened divisions, on how people of faith, and we as Christians and members of the Episcopal Church, might keep alive and promote that vision of "a beloved community" which was at the heart of Dr. King’s dream
In one of his first published articles Dr. King stated that the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott "is reconciliation . . . redemption, the creation of the beloved community." In 1957, writing in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he described the purpose and goal of that organization as follows: "The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living -- integration." And in his last book he declared: "Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation . . ."
Dr. King’s was a vision of a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice wherein brotherhood would be an actuality in all of social life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith. And he had no delusions that this would be a quick or easy process.
It was on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 17, 1960 when Dr. King made the observation that 11 a.m. on Sunday mornings is the most segregated hour in America. At the time he said it, many parts of The United States were still segregated by law, what is known in legal terms as de jure segregation. But then was then and now is now, and you know what? Even without those laws, 11 a.m. on Sunday morning – now I’m not talking soccer fields and hockey rinks and basketball courts and baseball fields – but I’m talking about in places where Christians are supposed to be on Sundays, Sunday mornings are STILL the most segregated time in America.
A recent study just done in 2015 by LifeWay Research, a Tennessee-based research firm, paints a picture of an American church that hasn’t changed much in half a century:
n Two in three Americans have never regularly attended a place of worship where they were an ethnic minority
n 67 percent say their church has done enough to become more ethnically diverse.
n * 71 percent of evangelicals say their church is diverse enough.
n * Among 1,000 American adults, 82 percent say diversity is good for the country — but not necessarily in their church pews.
n 22 percent have never experienced being a minority at church, but they think it would make them uncomfortable.
n There’s not much urgency about diversity. Half of those surveyed think the churches are “too segregated,” but 44 percent disagree.
n A survey of 1,000 Protestant senior pastors found 43 percent say they speak about racial reconciliation once a year or less.
“People like the idea of diversity. They just don’t like being around different people,” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of Lifeway. “Maybe their sense is that church is the space where they don’t have to worry about issues like this,” he said.
Now, I personally think that poses a problem, because if you don’t like diversity very much, it seems to me you’re probably not going to be all that happy in Heaven either.
In the recent issue of the academic journal Sociological Inquiry, two professors dug deeper into why Sundays remain so segregated.
The article, “Race, Diversity, and Membership Duration in Religious Congregations,’ said that nine out of ten congregations in the U.S. are segregated, where “segregated” was defined as- a single racial group accounting for more than 80 percent of their membership. That is only one in ten congregations are NOT segregated.
Kevin Dougherty , a sociology professor at Baylor University in Texas, and a co-author of the article, says churches haven't kept pace with other institutions. Socially, we’ve become much more integrated in schools, the military and businesses. But in the places where we worship, segregation still seems to be the norm.
Dr. King called this separation one of the great tragedies of the Christian church. And it is one more example of just how far the institutional church has wandered from the Dream of God. The first century Christian church was known for its diversity. Jews, Gentiles, and Greeks mingled alongside women and slaves. Biblical scholars have long maintained that the early church’s diversity was one of the reasons it became so popular. Roman society was characterized by rigid ethnic and class divisions, and the church was a place where people were identified by their faith and not their race or wealth or occupation or station in life.
What can we as Christians do to address what Pastor Jim Wallis has called “America’s Original Sin” – racism? Yesterday at our Brotherhood of St. Andrew event, challenged by several presentations by our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, we entered into “sacred conversations” where we shared our own experiences with issues of race. As a congregation, we have had at least six or more such conversations over the past couple of years. Even in this safe place, it was hard for us to name the sin.
But sin it is. If we consider sin anything that separates us from God and from one another, then racism is indeed a sin. And we as Americans, proud as we are of our constitutional experiment in representative democracy, need to be honest with ourselves that racism IS our Original Sin because, just as traditional church doctrine teaches that Original Sin is with us at birth, so it is built into our system. White America needs to admit that the system hasn’t worked for everybody because it was never designed to work for everybody. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, we find what is known as the Three Fifths Compromise, the compromise that was struck between the northern states and the southern states so that they could all agree on one document. It reads: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
This is actually even worse than it sounds, a kind of compounded interest on the sin of chattel slavery – which, we need to remind ourselves, was endorsed or at least tolerated by many segments of American Christianity as the will of God. Not only were persons of color considered less than fully human – to the extent they were counted at all, it was to give their white owners more power at the ballot box and in the halls of the federal government. By the time the rules gradually began to change, it was too late: Like a cancer that multiplies on itself and eats all the healthy tissue in its path and metastasizes through the entire body, chattel slavery left its ugly imprint on every aspect of our society, our government, and our commerce. It is from that sin of chattel slavery, institutionalized in our founding documents – that our society has yet to recover and for which our non-white brothers and sisters bear a disproportionate burden to this day.
Perhaps this is what the writer of the letter to the Ephesians means when he writes. Put on the whole armor of God… for our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. We are dealing with sin that is so much a part of the fabric of our society that it is difficult if not impossible to find one place to start attacking it. Perhaps this is the sort of demon to which Jesus was referring when the disciples were unable to exorcise a demon on their own. You remember, they come to Jesus and ask, “How come we haven’t been able to get rid of this demon?” And Jesus says: This sort of demon can only be removed with prayer.
As we seek to address the sin of racism and injustice, my brothers and sisters, we here at Trinity Episcopal Church in Hartford are indeed blessed, because we start with at least the beginnings of that Beloved Community of which Dr. King dreamed. Very few if any congregations in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut have the gifts of diversity and vitality that we enjoy. As Dr. King dreamed, we seek to grow together as brothers and sisters in Christ, recognizing that in Jesus we are neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ. When we welcome the stranger, we welcome them not so that they can become more like us, but so that they can become most fully the person God desires for them to become, and that together, we can share and learn from each other’s journeys as we work toward forming a more perfect version of that Beloved Community.
God is the way of Jesus, and the way of Jesus is love. Love is God, translated into the language of life. As we celebrate today what would have been Dr. King’s 88th birthday, let us, as a congregation, commit to take up the charge given by the Prophet Isaiah: I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
With God’s help, and making full use of the unique gifts that God has given us, let us become a light to other congregations even as we open our hearts to one another and come closer to achieving Dr. King’s beloved community in our own congregation. We can never undo the past; but in the love of God in Jesus Christ we can move forward. As Maya Angelou writes in her poem, On the Pulse of Morning,
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
AMEN.
Trinity Episcopal Church
1st Sunday After Epiphany – January 8, 2017
Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord
“Who Is This Messiah and Why Is He Being Baptized?”
Matthew 2:1-12
Now that we are through the Christmas holidays, our Sunday Scripture passages now begin to lead us into what will be our Gospel focus for the rest of this liturgical year, the Good News according to Matthew.”
Matthew’s Gospel is notable in at least two ways. First of all, he is writing to a primarily Jewish audience, and so he roots the story of Jesus deeply in Jewish history and scripture. Time and again we hear in Matthew’s Gospel that what Jesus does or what is done to him is to fulfill something written in the Hebrew scripture. Beginning the Gospel with a rehearsal of Jesus’ genealogy, Matthew paints the picture of a messiah who is the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible. The Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel also establishes a model of messianic leadership based upon service to, and empowerment of, others.
Today we celebrate the Feast of Jesus Baptism as retold by Matthew. But to fully appreciate this story, we have to go back to the Feast we celebrated this past Friday, the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day as many Christian traditions know it.
Remember that the word “epiphany” means “manifestation” or “making known.” During this season after the Epiphany, our Gospel passages will tell of the many and varied ways in which the true identity of this child and later the man Jesus is revealed to the rest of the world.
In the Gospel for Epiphany, Matthew recounts the story of “Wise Men” or astrologers or in the Greek, “magi” who come from the east, following a mysterious star which has arisen and which they have been following. The celestial star that draws the attention of the wise men signals the divine origin of this child, that this miraculous birth as foretold by the angel to Joseph is indeed sent from God. For Matthew and his Jewish audience, this
is an early indication that the messiah, though foretold by the Hebrew scriptures, is to be the messiah to all the world, and not only to those who are followers of Torah.
In Matthew’s Epiphany story we learn something else about this Messiah Jesus. As the wise men arrive in Jerusalem on their journey, King Herod hears about them and his interest is piqued and so he seeks an audience with them. Ever concerned about challenges to his precarious power and authority, he tries to trick the Wise Men into becoming his agents, asking them to return to him once they have found the child under the pretense that he, too, wants to go pay homage to this child. Once they have paid their own homage to Jesus, they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, and they go back to their homeland “by another road.” We see in this part of the story that the life of this Messiah, and those who are his followers, will be one marked by challenges from an establishment – be it government or society in general – that feels threatened by one who preaches and practices righteousness and social justice.
Which brings us to this morning’s recounting of Matthew’s version of the Baptism of Jesus. In a few moments we will renew our own baptismal vows, and at (the 10 a.m. service) we will have an actual baptism. As we recommit ourselves to the promises made by us or on our behalf at our own baptisms, we may wonder why it was that Jesus had to be baptized at all. After all, he was God! He had no need to be saved from sin; he had no need to be “adopted” by God. What could be the need for baptism?
In his version of the baptism of Jesus Matthew gives us some insights into these questions. Matthew tells us that John didn’t want to do this – he felt Jesus should be baptizing him. Jesus’ insistence on being baptized by John relates in an interesting way to what is to follow his baptism, when Jesus is led up to the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. His words to John both maintain Jesus’ authority and at the same time echo Matthew’s concern for righteousness and fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures. And while it was not a part of this morning’s passage, we all know what happens in the wilderness: The devil tries in three different ways to get Jesus to exercise his divine authority to consolidate earthly power. Each time, Jesus refuses.
By submitting to John’s baptism and refusing to submit to the devil’s temptations to consolidate earthly primacy, Jesus sets up a pattern that will define his earthly ministry: He encourages and empowers others – in this case, John – to lead and to be the instruments of God’s work, and declines to appropriate to himself that power. His messianic authority focuses not on drawing power to himself, but on strengthening and empowering, through the Holy Spirit, those who follow him. His is a messiahship of faithful service, not one of control and authority.
And so what does this say about our own baptism? And what does it say about the commitment that will be made by our sister, Anne Rapkin, as today she formally invites Jesus into her heart when she receives the sacrament of Baptism.
Bishop Michael Curry, in his book Crazy Christians, talks a lot about what it means to enter the Christian life:
The dream of God is in part the motive for God’s involvement and God’s mission in the life of the world, from the days of the Bible until now. That dream inspired the Hebrew prophets, who used God’s thunderous, “Thus saith the Lord,” to courageously challenge injustice and mistreatment of the poor. That dream is the reason God came among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who showed us the way to live beyond what often are the nightmares of our own sin-filled human design and into the direction of God’s dream. Over time I began to see that being a Christian is not essentially about joining a church or being a nice person, but about following in the footsteps of Jesus, taking his teachings seriously, letting his Spirit take the lead in our lives, and in so doing helping to change the world from our nightmare into God’s dream.
Bishop Curry identifies a three-fold pattern in the way that Jesus attracts his disciples:
n People come. “Come and see,” he says, “”follow me” (John 1:39; Mark 1:17). Jesus beckons his disciples to him in order to enter into a deepened relationship, through him, with God and with each other in community. That is what baptism is about, a deepened relationship with God and each other in Christ.
n People learn. “They learn not just through his words but also from his actions and even his presence. They learn the good news: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. . . ‘ (Matthew 11:28-30).
n And third, as a result, then they live differently. “They walk in God’s paths. They live God’s ways of love and life. They ‘beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.’ They do not make war anymore, because they have learned God’s ways.
People come. They learn. They live differently. And in so doing, they are transformed and share in God’s transformation of the world.
And so today, as we remember and celebrate the baptism of our Lord, we reflect on the meaning of that baptism – a baptism into which Jesus himself invites us, a baptism to which most of us were committed without knowing what was happening. And that can be a danger. Like the unknowing residents of Downton Abbey – Do you remember that episode when the residents of Downton Abbey were offering public tours in order to raise money to support the operations? Members of the public were lined up out to the main road to get in, and began asking questions about the history of the place, what certain things symbolized, how old things were, etc? And none of the residents knew anything! We Christians who were kind of born into the faith don’t’ always appreciate what we have. Like the Downton Abbey residents who on a daily basis lived amidst a rich history that they neither knew nor understood, it is all-too-easy for us who inherited the Christian faith to take it for granted. We can tend to accept it as a badge of distinction that we did nothing to merit or deserve, that once bestowed requires nothing more from us. We can tend to forget that with the water and the anointing of baptism comes the responsibility of Baptism, the charge to actively participate in making God’s dream of shalom a reality “on earth as it is in heaven” -- a community of peace and justice where all of God’s creation coexists in peace and harmony. It is bringing about what in the Jewish tradition is called tikku’n ola’m – the repair, the rebuilding and the healing of all creation.
Today we welcome as a sister in Christ Anne Rapkin, who now joins her husband Steve as a member of the Body of Christ, the newest member of The Jesus Movement. In the tradition of St. Matthew, she doesn’t enter into this relationship in the sense of turning her back on her Jewish heritage, which she rightfully continues to cherish. Far from turning her back on that heritage, she understands that by embracing Jesus and his followers, in following in his footsteps, in modeling her life on the life and teachings of Jesus, she is expressing and living out that very heritage in a new and vibrant and exciting way.
As we renew our own baptismal vows this day, let us join Anne in committing to do a new thing, to live out our Christian life with a renewed energy and a renewed vision, dedicating ourselves to making that dream of God, that dream of Shalom, our own, in our own day.
GOD IS GOOD. ALL THE TIME. Amen.
Trinity Episcopal Church
Year A – Christmas Day
December 25, 2016
John 1:1-18
“Can I Get A Witness?”
The Prologue to the Gospel According to John, the passage which is the Gospel for Christmas morning, has always been a favorite of mine. Absent are the angels and the shepherds of Luke’s Gospel, and the mystery of the conception and virgin birth found in the Gospel of Matthew. Instead, it goes back to the beginning of everything, revealing the nature of God and of the world that God created.
It had particular power for me on one particular Christmas exactly 20 years ago. It was mid-December 1996. After a snowstorm, I had slipped on some ice, severely injuring my right thigh. I had to wait a few days to see an orthopedist, and by the time an examination revealed what I had done, I had to undergo what amounted to emergency surgery to reconnect a severed quadriceps tendon – the tendon that connects all of the thigh muscles to the knee – before it shrunk too much to reconnect.
I returned home 9 days before Christmas sporting a plaster cast from my hip to my right ankle. Debbie had arranged for a hospital bed and all the other equipment I would need for my 7-week stint in the cast, and I remember that our neighbor brought over decorations for the sides of the hospital bed.
And I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. You see, I had just found out that I would be admitted to be a postulant for ordination to the priesthood, and I had a certain image of what my vocation would look like. Truth to tell, I have realized years later, it was really a caricature of Bing Crosby as the famous Fr. O’Mally in that favorite Christmas movie, The Bells of St. Mary’s. – you know, the easy-going priest who deftly floats from encouraging a sickly nun to breaking up a schoolyard brawl to convincing an elderly tycoon to donate his commercial office building to house the parish school. Come to think of it, some of those things aren't so far from the mark.
All of that sounds a bit romantic but it only fed my feeling sorry for myself. I was expected to make a decent recovery, but what if I didn’t? What if I couldn’t run again? What if I walked with a limp or needed a cane to walk? How would my ministry be the same? It seems silly now, but at the time that's how I was feeling.
And then one night as I was lying awake listening to a Christmas CD from the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, I heard their musical version of the Prologue that we heard this morning. And I burst into tears as the profoundly deep meaning of this passage suddenly came to me in the beautiful simplicity of the song:
A lonely stable stood beneath a lonely star.
A rugged stable embraced God’s almighty heart.
He came into a world that would not understand
His only purpose was to save the fallen soul of man.
Beneath his father’s heaven hope was born one silent night.
Beneath his father’s heaven a baby brought the truth to light.
He came unto his own and they would not believe,
But poor and sinful ones gladly heard Him and believed.
The Word of God made flesh, full of truth and of grace,
The glory of the Father, shining bright upon his face.
Refrain
And I realized that while both secular culture and the church tend to ground the Christmas story in Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus; in the angels and the shepherds and the wise men, it is the opening words of John’s Gospel that bring home what it all means.
And what is that? First and foremost, it is a statement about the nature of the world in which we live as people of faith, the nature of the God who created it, and God’s intentions in creating it. That the very nature of God is light and life. It is not about our dreams, our wishes, our goals; the story is about God and God’s Word, and God’s love for the world God chooses to create.
Second and related to the first is that God chooses to enter the world God created as a vulnerable child who is not universally welcomed into that world. Jesus is described as “light” that is introduced to a darkness that tries, but does not succeed, in overcoming it. It is a reminder that in the midst of the chaos that so often is the world around us; in the midst of an imperfect world that includes war, prejudice, discrimination, illness, injury and doubt, Jesus alone is the light upon which we can depend, the light that signals God’s love for us not in response to human sinfulness, but because it is in the very nature of God to love.
Third and something important for us to remember is that God loves us as we are, as God made us. This morning’s passage doesn’t call us to be Christ – Jesus was already born once and that is enough. What Christmas means for us is to remind us that we called not to be Christ but to be John the Baptist. The true celebration of Christmas calls us to be witnesses to that love and that light which Christ brings into the world – to testify to that light through the things we say and the lives we lead. The ways in which we and the congregations we represent testify to the Light can either spread that light to the world or turn people away from it to embrace the darkness.
The meaning of Christmas is that in the birth of Jesus, heaven comes to earth, the eternal and the earthly are joined, and God becomes one of us. The Christmas story is our story. The birth of Jesus changed the course of history. Whenever people of good will share the Jesus story, we have the power to change the world, sometimes in big ways, sometimes one person at a time. Christmas calls us to be witnesses – not simply to assent to stories and ideas about Jesus, but to live our lives in testimony to His light in ways that demonstrate that this Jesus does make a difference. And so can we.
Beneath His Father’s heaven, a baby brought the truth to light.
Amen.
Trinity Episcopal Church
Service of Hope and Remembrance
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Isaiah 9:2-7; John 1:1-18
During this season of Advent, one of our spiritual tasks is to open ourselves to imagine the Kingdom of God and what it might look like here on earth. I don’t mean waiting for the birth of Jesus. We know that has happened already. We know the story, and we know how it ends. As 21st century Christians, that story has been around for over 2000 years, and we know it so well that popular culture has actually hijacked it to be a season of parties and neutered it of much of its original excitement and meaning.
Theologically – and theoretically – we think of this time as a time of waiting between the “already” birth of Jesus of Nazareth and his “not yet” promised Second Coming. But this explanation doesn’t do much for our souls. A more spiritually profitable Advent discipline is to place ourselves in the shoes of the people to whom Isaiah was writing. A people waiting in hopeful expectation for a time of peace, justice and righteousness, where the yoke of oppression would be no more and the light of God’s presence would shine throughout the world.
And Lord knows the Bible is full of God’s promises for us to anticipate. In Matthew 11:28, Jesus invites us, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
“I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 1:6.
But waiting in “hopeful expectation” is still “waiting.” And Lord knows there is plenty of waiting that goes on in the Bible. Abraham and Sarah waited until way beyond normal child bearing age to have a child, as did Hannah and Elkanah before the birth of Samuel , and as did Mary’s kinswoman Elizabeth and her husband, Zechariah. Moses spent some 40 years waiting for a call, and then spent the next 40 wandering the wilderness leading his people to the Promised Land. Turning to the “Christmas Story,” there must have been many an anxious moment for Mary and Joseph as they awaited the birth of this miraculously-conceived child to be named, Jesus. And we should not assume that these were peaceful moments of waiting: Both Joseph and Mary were prime targets for public shame and ridicule, and one can only imagine the mixture of “hopeful anticipation” and fear and trembling as they awaited this blessed event that they neither asked for nor particularly wanted.
Waiting is not easy for any of us, particularly if we don’t know how the story is going to end. It is one thing to be waiting to see if you are getting the latest I-technology or a new flat screen TV. And I actually DO know adults for whom that is of importance these days.
But what about those of us facing more serious situations, circumstances in our past or in our future that leave us vulnerable, sad, angry, grieving, perhaps hopeless. What about those who are awaiting test results that may dictate the course of their lives in the immediate future? What if we are mourning the loss of a loved one and time doesn’t ease the pain of the loss or provide interest in trying anything new? What if we are in a seemingly hopeless cycle of poverty or drug use or psychological illness from which there seems to be no exit? What if we are trying to recover from a broken relationship and we can’t let go of the “what ifs” and begin to imagine an alternative future? Or in this post-election time, we may be struggling with the reality of recently having savored the assurance of equal rights and protections only now to be experiencing anxiety and new vulnerability in the threats of extremist groups and individuals at the very center of power to take away those hard-won protections. Or on this, the longest night of the year, we may be, like Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus, have no safe or reliable place to live or source of food or income.
No, waiting is not easy when we can’t see into the future and we don’t see easy answers or hear reassurance. And we humans do not have the best track record when it comes to taking matters into our own hands – in fact, we often make matters worse.
And so we gather this evening for this service of Hope and Remembrance, I ask us to focus on the opening words of the Gospel of John as we wait:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. . . .From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
God chose to become one with humankind, and in that act, became one with each of us individually. In the birth of Jesus, God reminds us that “to all who received him, who believed in his name” that we do have the power to be children of God – to be strengthened and to grow, day by day until OUR last day, closer and closer to becoming the people God desires for us to be, living the lives that God desires for us to live, with God’s help.
On this night and throughout the coming Christmastide and beyond, may we hold onto the holy hope as we wait in hopeful expectation of those brighter days when we experience even just a glimmer of God’s light that shines in the darkness, that light that no darkness can overcome. AMEN.
Fourth Sunday in Advent Year A 12-18-16 Trinity Church Hartford
And an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, and said ….”Mary will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Have you ever thought about names in the Bible? They’re fascinating. In much of the Biblical tradition, our heritage form the Bible, names have significance, for they bear meaning, and they identify, and shape, the people who bear them.
We could spend days exploring Biblical names, and their significance, but it’s just too busy a season to do that right now. Rather, by looking at just several names, we can see a neat pattern, that feeds right in to the miracle of Christmas.
In both New and Old Testaments, there are two major name-types.
One name-type consists of names that end in the sound “ —iah” Think of some? Prophets? Isaiah. Jeremiah, Zechariah, Zephaniah, Joshua.
The “—iah” at the end of their names is a shortened form for the full name of God, the name God revealed to Moses in the Book of the Exodus, the name of God which except for that one time, was held too sacred even to say, or write. (“Lord” is what we substitute in English for God’s name that cannot be spoken.)
The first parts of their names say something about the God who cannot be named.
Isaiah: “the Lord gives salvation”
Jeremiah: “the Lord raises up” (to the people of Jerusalem under siege)
Joshua : “the Lord rescues”
Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist: “Remember the Lord” whose Name cannot be spoken
The second major name-type in addition to “—iah” is names that end in “—-el.” Here again, are some familiar to us: Samuel, Nathanael, Daniel , Ezekiel.
The “—-el” at the end of those names is Hebrew for the word for “God”. And like the “—iah” names, these names ending in “—el” also identify and shape the people who bore them.
Daniel: “God is my judge” (think of his standing up to King Nebuchadnezzar)
Samuel: “lent back to God” (by his mother, to whom God had given him in the first place)
Ezekiel : “God will strengthen” (the exiled people)
Nathaniel: “God has given” (mercy)
So, many names in Scripture carry very significant meaning, shaping their bearers’ and hearers’ lives and tying those who carried the names to the God whom they served.
Some modern examples of names linked powerfully to God are
The name of the older son of the family from Syria who moved here last week: Abdulraham (in Arabic), which is “servant of the most merciful God.” And a name in English: Christopher, “one who carries or shows Christ.”
What does all this have to do with the Christmas stories? We’re getting there.
In the Advent-Christmas cycle of Scripture we celebrate two births and two namings. And, have you noticed, in both cases the births are miraculous, and in both cases the name of the child born is given, not by the parents, but directly by God through a messenger angel.
The first birth, which we celebrate in Advent: John the Baptist a son born to a woman so old. Remember, the little kerfuffle at his circumcision when it came to naming the child? His father Zechariah (“Remember the Lord”) had been told by Gabriel — there it is again, the “—el” at the end of Gabriel (God is my strength) — of the coming birth, and Gabriel told Zechariah what his name would be; but Zechariah hadn’t believed a word of it, and was struck speechless by God. So it was that Elizabeth, speaking for the family at the baby’s crcumcision, said, “His name is to be John” (Yohanan). In the “—-iah" tradition) “But no one in your family has been named John.” Zechariah asked for a writing tablet, and wrote, “His name is John!” And he broke into song! The child is John, Yohanan “graced by the Lord.” t was not an unusual name in that day, But did he ever fulfill it in a new way!
The second birth we celebrate in the twelve days of Christmas, a baby born to a woman so young, is of course … Jesus.
Here again, Angels come to the unknowing parents, to bring the word.
We read this morning of an angel coming to Joseph in a dream, to lay out his and Mary’s future, that even though she was pregnant, it was by God and that he was to be her spouse, “and you shall name the child Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
He’s given the same name, by the angel Gabriel, who visited Mary: “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.”
Jesus it is!
Jesus. That’s how his name comes to us in English, but it’s been changed as it’s made its way from the Hebrew-Aramaic, through Greek, and then Latin. The root name is Yeheshua, or in the Old Testament English translations, Joshua, in the “—iah” name tradition. Meaning “the Lord saves, rescues” from evil. Again, like John, not an unusual name in that time.
And did you notice in the birth story we read this morning from Matthew, Jesus is given another, second name? Immanuel, the name foretold in the seventh chapter of bahai from which we read earlier this morning. (Isaiah 7:4) And as “Jesus” comes from the “—iah” tradition, “Immanuel” comes from the “—el” tradition. Meaning “God is with us.”
So, in the birth at Bethlehem, combined in this son so precious to God and to us, two names are given by God — Jesus: the-Lord-saves, and Immanuel: God-with-us.
We live in times when so much of what we have known and value seems ready to be tumbled over, and it seems that the economic, political, ethical, and social patterns and aspirations across the world, which we have worked for and with which we have lived relatively comfortably — taken for granted — are no longer secure in our world; they have lost their dominance in the public life. None of us knows what lies ahead.
Remember, as we think of Mary and Joseph and the babe and stable and shepherds and magi, Jesus Immanuel, God saves, God is with us, was born into the kind of world like ours, in fact his times were much more uncertain, vicious and perilous than ours.
He is the names and the names and him, and the ancient promise has been delivered, for real. His names meant something for the people then, and they mean the same for us now! The good news of God’s gift, the gift of him, as then and as now, is that God is with us now, and that the Lord cares for and saves his people now — and is for the whole world..
So, in this season as you hear the stories, cherish his names given of God by the angels at his birth. Immanuel God is with us. Now. Jesus, given in love for the world, saves in all times and all places. Now,
And always trust the good news. Take him into our hearts. Cherish him in his names. And live in him tied to God so that together we and through us the world know and can believe that the holy child has been born Immanuel —God with us! Jesus — to save us in whatever the world may bring.
To whom be our undying thanks, and praise, now and forever.
April Alford-Harkey
Advent 3 Year A
December 11, 2016
Trinity Episcopal Church Hartford
In the name of the creator, sustainer, redeemer. Amen
In today’s Old Testament reading in Isaiah, we see the continuation of the prediction, or prophesy of what the world will and can look like when the Messiah arrives. The mercy of God is terrifying and simultaneously a place of justice. The created order will be restored, and the weak and vulnerable are made whole when God visits God's people. God’s arrival heals all of God’s creation. The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy, waters will burst open in the wilderness. God’s coming makes all that is weak strong and healthy. Isaiah offers promise for the here and now and a promise for future. In the future, Isaiah asserts that God will act for the people to reverse oppression and deliver them.
In the Gospel reading last week in Matthew we learned about John the Baptist’s ministry. A ministry that prepared a path and the way for the Lord. John the Baptist lived in the mountainous area of Judea, between the city of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He had a simple life and wore a camel hair shirt and ate locust and wild honey. He had strong unshakeable opinions and appeared not to doubt himself. John baptized those who came to him and also called Jesus the beloved of God and that Jesus is the one people had been waiting for. These things are now juxtaposed for John the Baptist in today’s Gospel.
John the Baptist is in prison waiting…little did he know he would later be beheaded. I can’t believe John the Baptist could have imagined himself waiting for rescue, not if Jesus was the Messiah he understood would come to the people. John the Baptist had done all that he was called to do, as a prophet, announcing the arrival of the Messiah. John the Baptist had blind devotion to Jesus. Frustrated and tired John the Baptist asked the disciples to go ask Jesus,” Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John the Baptist must have been confused…If Jesus was the Messiah why was he imprisoned and why wasn’t he being delivered from Herod?
The disciples come back and told John what Jesus’ response was to his question. Which is the blind, were receiving their sight, the deaf could hear, the lame could walk and the lepers were clean. These signs were Jesus’ answer. To say this is not the answer John the Baptist was expecting or looking for might be an understatement. I believe John the Baptist was looking for a more definitive response to the power that Jesus had.
From experience living under the rule of Herod John the Baptist may not have been able to wrap his mind around Jesus not arriving with majesty and grandeur. John the Baptist would have known about vengeance and military might because of Roman rule. How destruction of the enemy was the way to conquer a people and rule them. John the Baptist was looking for something big really… big. A God that made an entrance to be remembered. Then there is Jesus telling him to look at the signs.
But Jesus had come to change the script, to create a new paradigm and rule. A paradigm that looks like nothing anyone has seen before. A reversal that emboldens God’s creation to do good and to find a different way of being in the world. The type of being that heals and empowers others.
How seductive it is to think about a savior who could come into our world and basically beat up the bad guys. And how much we long for a new world, where, like we hear in the Magnificat, the lowly are raised up and the mighty are cast down. We are and have seen some amazing examples of God’s inbreaking during much chaos in the country and there have been hopeful signs that love and justice can be found in the toughest of times.
At the University of Missouri more than 30 football players refused to participate in any games or practices until the then President of the school Tim Wolfe resigned or was terminated. They felt that Wolfe’s responses to a series of racist’s incidents was inadequate. Especially when a swastika was painted on a wall in human excrement.
The fact that strikes by fast-food workers trying to be paid a living wage became so big that it turned into a social justice movement against wealth inequality in our nation.
Gavin Grimm a transgender male who is fighting for his and other peoples’ right to not have to use the bathroom of their biological sex but the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. Gavin has sued the board of education in Gloucester Virginia and the case has now gone to the Supreme Court.
Standing Rock South Dakota, where two of the most volatile issues are being fought against, racism and climate change. The Standing Rock Sioux are protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline which is to run through sacred sites for the tribe. And likely destroy Native burial places. The pipeline could also contaminate the tribe’s only water source. Thousands of people have gone to Standing Rock to protest alongside the Sioux to protect their land. Most recently 2,000 veterans were slated to go. The tribe won a small victory when the Army Corp of Engineers has reversed their once decision to approve the pipeline. A small victory in a larger battle that is still to come.
Brothers and Sisters it’s tempting to look for a mighty savior to take revenge on our “enemies”, but just like when Jesus was doing his ministry, it’s the individual and collective healing and Good News that are needed, not revenge and displays of strength.
O God, you bound us together in a common life. Help us, in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth, to confront one another without hatred or bitterness, and to work together with mutual forbearance and respect; through Jesus Christ or Lord. Amen
December 4, 2016
Second Sunday of Advent
Trinity Church, Hartford
“Different Identities but a Shared Humanity”
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
We are now nearly a month beyond one of the most momentous presidential elections in American history. Many of us are still processing what happened and what it means for our lives going forward regardless of whom we might have voted for. At the core of many of the analyses of the election is the question of identity politics.
I know I have become identified over the years with sermons on the importance of social justice. And that identity is correct, up to a point. It is correct for me and for all who identify with what this morning’s collect calls the prophets God sends to preach repentance. It is correct because what lies ahead of us as a nation will be a continuing and vigilant commitment to the principles of social justice. But an identity that reduces itself only to doing the political work of justice without a deeper grounding in the power of God’s grace, is incomplete. Some of us, in our anger and fear of what the election might portend for many marginalized fellow citizens may find ourselves drawn to the incendiary language of Isaiah, the Psalm, and the words of John the Baptist which we’ve heard in this morning’s lessons. We hear with hope the command of God to the leaders of the nation to rule the people righteously and the poor with justice, and to defend the needy among the people; to rescue the poor and crush the oppressor. We find ourselves resonating strongly to the denunciations of John the Baptist when he excoriates those in power who oppress the poor. We might even celebrate the harshness of John’s prophetic proclamation that even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. Many are even prepared to identify some of those trees by name and party and association with those who have stirred up hate and division within the nation in pursuit of political success.
Some may even be looking desperately for a political redeemer whose winnowing fork is in his hand, and who will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Many would also echo John’s accusation directed against those they feel betrayed the American dream. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
In short, there is plenty of justified prophetic anger available in our biblical and moral heritage to inspire those who are deeply worried that the imperatives of social justice will, in the months to come, be weakened or ignored. We fear for the poor, the undocumented, the refugee, the alien, those with darker skin or different sexual orientations; those who have been marginalized by hate and fear and the rhetoric of exclusion or by the economic inequalities that are shredding the social fabric, a fabric that, no matter who we are, ought to hold us together as a people sharing a common land, a common wealth, and a common good. And that prophetic anger must not be silenced just because it was not satisfied by the results of the election. Continual vigilance against attempts to deny people their rights as fellow human beings is itself an abiding imperative. As the baptismal covenant reminds us, we are committed to persevere in resisting evil. We must be prepared, as Thomas Jefferson said about slavery, to ring the alarm bell in the night to warn us of the impending crisis if justice is not done.
But I said that our identity as Christians is not complete if it is characterized only by prophetic anger and resistance against further injustice and oppression. Our identity as followers of Christ is more than our identity as seekers of justice even as it is inextricably linked to justice if we want to live in community with others. We have an unalterable and unbroken identity as redeemed and renewed persons through the grace of God, an identity that precedes and underwrites our identity as doers of justice. It precedes and transcends all forms of political identity and action. Our true and basic identity is fundamentally characterized by a grounding in the love, mercy, and grace of God which reconciled us to God while we were yet sinners. Because of who God made us to be, we are intimately and together bound with all other human persons no matter how they are socially or politically identified. Our essential identity is inextricably linked to our common humanity which we share with all persons.
We must remember that that bond includes those others with whom we currently are in often radical political disagreement about how we should live our lives together and how justice is best achieved in a fragile and ever-changing society. And one thing this means is that prophetic anger, as justified as it might be, is not a justification for demonizing those with whom we disagree or writing them off because their political identity is not our identity. Some supporters of the winning candidate did, in fact, demonize some supporters of the losing candidate and did so on grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. But returning that demonization with some of their own by characterizing their opponents (primarily undereducated, underemployed, and mostly rural whites) as being irredeemably deplorable racists, does little to help us address the basic problems that we face us a people sharing a common nationality and different social agendas. I myself grew up in a part of the country that those outside it called hillbilly heaven because it was populated by undereducated poor whites. I was mocked for having a West Virginia accent and lacking in the social graces essential to acceptance into polite New England society. While the overt racism that accompanied some of the support for Mr. Trump cannot be denied, neither can the genuine fear many of those associated with that support felt about their exclusion from the economic progress being made by their wealthier and more privileged fellow citizens. We may disagree with the wisdom of their political choice but we cannot deny the fear they felt about being left behind while others appeared to prosper at their expense.
Fear, it turns out, is something both sides have in common. Fear drives much of the recent turmoil in our country. Fear of losing out while others gain: fear of being different; of being ‘other’ than the dominant groups: fear of being disrespected and dispossessed; fear of being discriminated against, marginalized, overlooked, or set aside while others reap the benefits of having a privileged place in society. Many will find different culprits or targets for the fear they feel. But fear crosses the boundary between politically opposed groups: each side has its own set of fears and in many instances they echo each other, even though they use different words and symbols and blame the other side for the fear they feel. Unfortunately there are also those who would stoke and inflame the fears that are felt in order to exploit those fears which they promise to alleviate by finding the right scapegoats.
Fortunately there is hope to be found in this commonality of fear. Our fears can be addressed by a more basic commonality which transcends and replaces fear: grounded in the hope that we share more in common than we don’t share. The ultimate shared good is love, a love which redeems and renews a shared humanity created by a single and all-inclusive fully accepting God of love. Divine love overcomes fear because it takes away or annuls the reasons we falsely believe justify our fear of others. We were not made by God or sustained by God’s love to be identified as opponents in conflict with others or to exploit insignificant differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, refugee or immigration status, wealth or health. Even openly avowed racists and misogynists are still our fellow human beings and by God’s grace we must have, as hard as it is, the audacity to hope that they can be reached at the level of their basic humanity: or so we must believe because with God all things are possible. Sometimes contrary to our most visceral feelings, even virulent racism can be addressed and shown to be without justification if we are willingly enough to try. Unjustified fear of the other feeds racism but we need to acknowledge that fear before we write off the people who are manipulated into holding racist sentiments. We must remember that none of us is defined by a single identity. As columnist David Brooks has put it: each of each is a mansion with many rooms, which can range on multiple occasions and contexts within each of us, from racist to inclusivist, from selfish to altruistic, from greedy and fearful to loving and hopeful. We are more varied in who we are in our particular lives than being defined with a single identity. Treating each other as if we have a single monochrome identity does an injustice to the complexity and often confused mix of identities that comprise each one of us. And that is why we most look beyond our multiple identities to the common identity God has given us in and through our reliance on divine power and grace. Having been given a shared identity in and through God that is more basic than all the superficial differences and identities we carry around in our lives, we are freed and empowered to embrace the instruments of justice within the broad inclusive relationships that comprise our society. We also have the gift of a common sense of what justice is. Justice is love in action. It entails fairness and equality in having all the material and social goods necessary for a meaningful and healthy life. The imperative and the ability to do justice is woven into the very fabric of our being. The fullness of the being God has given us precedes our commitment to justice and the political work necessary to implement justice. It comes before and undergirds politics and will be there at the end when the work of politics is finally done. The fullness of our reconciled and redeemed being has the power to overcome all our fears and enable us to enter into the fears of others and to offer them a way to achieve both justice and inner peace, in the name of God and for the sake of all of us.
Advent 1A 2016 Sermon
Rev. Marie Alford-Harkey
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford Connecticut
Many of you know that I’m the President of the Religious Institute, a non-profit organization that advocates for sexual, gender, and reproductive justice in faith communities and in society.
Because of that work, I was invited to a retreat with other LGBTQ leaders of faith-based organizations the week before Thanksgiving. We were asked to set about the task of using our moral imagination to dream of what is possible for a true moral awakening – an embodied movement for justice.
This was all conceived of before the results of the election were known, of course. It was meant to be a coming together about what was next for the movement for LGBTQ liberation, now that marriage equality is the law of the land and we’ve realized how many folks were left behind by that movement.
But for many of us in the room, every single one of us LGBTQ, the majority of us people of color, the results of the election meant that we were still reeling when we came together. Some of us were fearful. Some of us were angry. Some of us were determined. Some of us were surprised. I think it’s safe to say that none of us was ready to move on to hope at that point – just a week after the election.
I was ready for hard work, and I was trying to get ready for strategizing. I was, as usual, feeling a little out of place. The folks who were at the retreat were giants in the movement – people I admire and respect on many levels. On the plane I spent some time trying to think about what I would say. I tried to get ready to sound smart and to talk about the unique place of my organization in this movement for justice. In short, I was working hard out of my own ego, trying to figure out how to best represent myself and my organization at the retreat.
But this retreat defied the logic of the competitive non-profit world that I inhabit. I should have been ready for that.
We were asked to bring an artifact that symbolizes why we do the work we do. We were going to lay that on an altar at the opening worship of the retreat.
My object requires a quick story. On the Sunday evening before the election, I got a message from a former student (I used to teach high school) that another former student had died. His name was Steven. He was active in our gay-straight alliance and he was a voice for justice for himself and other LGBTQ kids at a time and in a place where it was never easy.
He used to message me every Mother's Day because he knew I had some sadness about not having kids of my own.
Despite the fact that he was always poor and struggling, he gave of himself and whatever he had out of a spirit of abundance. He just assumed that you take care of your friends, and his friends adored him.
My sweet Steven's body was found in a drainage ditch. They think he had a pulmonary embolism. He was 27.
I was devastated, as you can imagine. And so, when I went to look for an object for the altar at this retreat, I went to check my yearbooks because I was thinking of Steven and all my students. I have lots of old yearbooks with lots of mementos tucked in them. I picked up one from 2007, flipped to the back, and there was a piece of notebook paper that Steven had colored with his name in rainbow colors was right there. So that’s what I took to add to the altar. Kids like Steven are a large part of the reason that I do the work that I do.
I should have been ready for something more than a competitive strategy session and trying to position myself and my organization most advantageously, but I wasn’t. I was ready to do and plan and strategize.
But that’s not how it went. We started by creating that altar with all our artifacts and stories on it. And for the rest of the week we were invited into prayer, art, reflection, singing, bible study, quite time, and social time. We were invited to be rather than to do. We were invited to collaborate rather than compete.
We were also challenged. The group was mostly people of color. They pointed out what my wife April had also told me during election season. For people of color, the overt racism that was displayed during the campaign didn’t come as any surprise. It has always been there, right below the surface. So have all the other prejudices that came to light during this difficult season. Systems of oppression have always active in the United States, and they still are. So while we were invited to be, we were also challenged to dream about what a true moral awakening for justice could be like, and how we could make sure that we don’t leave anyone behind.
And this is the heart of Advent 2016 – tension. Is Advent about re-grounding ourselves in reflective spiritual practices? Absolutely. That’s the only way we can dream God’s beautiful commonwealth into being. Is Advent also about waking up, becoming aware of unjust systems, and taking action to dismantle them? Absolutely. That’s the only way we can co-create God’s beautiful commonwealth, which is our mandate as baptized Christians.
Our texts today admonish us to stay awake and to be ready for the unexpected in-breaking of God among us. Scholars believe that the gospel of Matthew was composed in Antioch, in Syria. The audience was “Christian Jews” who were still part of Judaism and were trying to find their place with lots of other Jewish sects in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple. Antioch was the capital of the Roman presence in Syria at the time of the writing of this gospel and it would have had the same economic and political woes as Galilee 50 years earlier when the events that are related were taking place. In both time periods the call for Jesus followers was to resist the imperial systems of domination and subjugation. The same is true in 2016.
The Romans text gives us a way to enact that resistance by reminding us of our baptism. When Paul admonishes us to be “clothed in Christ,” he is referring to an ancient and still-current understanding of baptism as “putting on Christ.”
Today, Luca, Riley, and their families will take on this covenant to be clothed in Christ through baptism. And today we too renew the promises of the baptismal covenant. These are our marching orders as we begin Advent 2016, and as we seek to find a balance between diving deeper into spiritual practices that ground us and acting for justice in the world.
The baptismal covenant reminds us to resist evil, repent, and return to God. It tells us to proclaim the good news of God in Christ by word and example. It calls us to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.
That call to resisting evil is more important than ever this Advent. We must resist systems of empire, power, and domination, like those that the residents of Galilee and Antioch were so familiar with. As Christians we have to find ways to resist the dominant culture of 2016, and what I learned at my retreat is that resistance isn’t about competition, as if there’s not enough justice and love for everyone. Resistance is actually about being connected:
Connected to spiritual practices
Connected to each other
Connected to the earth
Connected to the struggle for justice.
So this Advent, let’s find our deep connection in the midst of an unsettling world. Let’s commit to resisting the systems of domination and oppression that seem to have a death grip on our society. What happens if we Christians live into our baptism? Nothing short of radical transformation.
Let us be bold enough to believe that God’s realm on earth is possible. Amen.
