EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

All week long I’ve been thinking about the scripture appointed for today and I’ve been thinking about our soon-to-be-graduates. And all week, I’ve been coming back to one thing. Turtles. Loggerhead turtles, to be specific.

My brother spent several summers working as a turtle boy on the barrier islands off the coast of Georgia. A turtle boy’s job is to help protect loggerhead turtles, an endangered species, by safeguarding the eggs they lay on the beaches.

Egg-laying is quite a process for loggerheads: they are massive creatures, several hundred pounds each and not built for speed, at least not on land. The mother turtles haul themselves up onto shore at night, crawl up the beach a few inches at a time, and then use their flippers to scoop out a nest in the sand. It takes hours. If they get distracted before they start digging, they turn around and head back into the ocean and that’s it for that year.

It takes about six weeks for the eggs to hatch and when they do, the little one-inch turtles come out frantically doing the breast stroke. If you hold one in your hand it will swim right off the side.

Baby loggerheads are born looking for the ocean and that outbound trip across the sand seems to be the ticket to their return. The beach itself is somehow imprinted on them as they crawl over it. They won’t come back for twenty-five years or more, but then the females return to the same beach where they hatched. The females find their way back to their beach, lay their eggs, and the cycle begins again.

We don’t actually know how the turtles manage to find their way or how the imprinting works. They don’t have maps or a list of guidelines or rules for how to get where they’re going. Knowing the way is just part of their being. It’s how they are created. Loggerhead turtles come into the world fully equipped to find their way.

Which brings me to our scripture.

Jesus says to Thomas, “I’m going to my Father’s house and there’s a place for you and you know the way to the place where I’m going.” And Thomas answers, “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” And in his response we hear Thomas’ longing to stay with Jesus, to be connected to him, and to be at home with him. Thomas wants to go where Jesus is going. He wants GPS coordinates and a map.

And Jesus answers him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Peter picks up where Thomas left off: “Show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied.” “Here I am,” Jesus answers. “Here is the Father.”

These verses are the beginning of what’s known as Jesus’ farewell discourse. He’s talking to a small, close-knit group of friends some of whom are about to go their separate ways.

I didn’t pick this, honestly, it’s in the lectionary. But I couldn’t have chosen a better passage for the day we celebrate our soon-to-be graduates if I’d tried.  Because in this passage Jesus is talking to the disciples who are soon going to be facing the world on their own, just like our graduates are, and he’s getting them ready.

He’s preparing them for what’s coming next, for the time when they will be navigating without him there to give directions. He’s getting them ready to live in the time in between “Christ is risen” and “Christ will come again”—the time, that is, that we live in. And Jesus doesn’t answer his disciples’ longing to be with him with precise coordinates and a map and a list of rules for finding their way, he simply tells them that he is the way and that in him they have seen the Father. In him they have seen God. Jesus tells his disciples that he is both the way and the destination.

The longing we hear in both Thomas and Peter is a longing to be with God. We are born with that deep longing for God just as surely as loggerheads are born aiming for the ocean. And in the waters of baptism and in the sign of the cross made over us at our baptisms, we are imprinted with everything we need to find our way to God just as those baby turtles are imprinted with their beach. The church, the communion of saints to which we belong, is where that longing for connection to God is both nurtured and satisfied. We can find our way to God because God has given us His Son and one another to be companions on the way.

Valarie, Elizabeth, Graham, Jamie, and Catherine, your graduation will be the culmination of all the good things you’ve done over the last several years, but it will also be the beginning of whatever comes next. Each of you has a pretty good idea of where you’ll be in the next few months or even years, or at least a good idea of where you hope to be. But who knows exactly where any of our paths will lead? As comforting as the idea of a road map for the rest of our lives might be, there isn’t one. Commencement is a celebration of a job well done, but it’s also a setting-off into the great unknown.

You have everything you need for the journey.

You do know the way, but there will be distractions as you go. The world will offer you lots of ways to redirect your longing for God. You will be tempted, as each one of us is, to put a premium on feeling good. You will continue to be assaulted by hundreds of commercial messages every day asking you to believe that your greatest happiness is only one purchase away. You will be invited to have shopping experiences and travel experiences and even worship experiences because ours is a commodity culture and anything can be packaged for the consumer.

Those invitations are invitations to be controlled by your appetites. They will not satisfy your deep longing for God. The invitation to follow Jesus will.

It will be very easy for you, as it is for each one of us gathered here today, to turn away from suffering.

You are amazingly gifted, compassionate, and faithful people. You are not likely to turn away from suffering. But a lot of people expect a lot from you and you expect a lot from yourselves. It will therefore be tempting for you to believe that you are obliged to save the world. You aren’t. That’s been done. I hope that news comes as a relief.

Your call is not to save the world but to stand with those who are suffering and by your love for them to bear witness to the love of Christ who is the salvation of the world. And what will strengthen you to do that is prayer, your ongoing conversation with God. Prayer involves attentive listening as much as it does talking. Most of us are better at talking. Practice listening.

Pay attention to your longing for connection. Jesus Christ didn’t come to one disciple but to a community of disciples. We can’t be the Body of Christ by ourselves. Find a church. Find a community of fellow disciples with whom to worship and go worship week after week after week after week. Getting to know God is the most important thing in your life and it takes practice and it takes community and it takes time. There will come a day when you look around at your fellow parishioners and wonder, “What could a two hour meeting about fixing the church plumbing possibly have to do with God?” Trust me on this one. Don’t give up and don’t go it alone. Find a church.

You do know the way to the Father, just as surely as turtles know their way to the ocean and back. You were born equipped to find your way to God and when you were washed in the waters of baptism, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever, you were imprinted with everything you need for the journey. By the grace of God Almighty, you know the way, and the truth, and the life.

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

(From W.H. Auden, For the Time Being)

Go with God. And don’t forget to write. Amen.

You may have noticed that on Easter Sunday and again today in the place where we’re used to hearing a reading from the Old Testament we instead heard a reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Don’t worry—it wasn’t an oversight. Our lector didn’t begin at the wrong place and we didn’t accidentally skip the Old Testament. We read from Acts on purpose all during Eastertide.

Why? Because this huge thing happened: Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried, and then he was resurrected! He was returned to life. Jesus’ resurrection is at the center of our faith and the book of Acts is all about the earliest response to Jesus’ resurrection. So during Easter, we read from Acts—we immerse ourselves in readings about the immediate response to God’s resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So, given our readings today, given that we’re in Eastertide and while the memory of Good Friday is still fresh, I’ve been wondering: what difference does Jesus’ resurrection make? What I have to offer today is a meditation on that question, one I pray you will all be willing to think and talk about with me.

What difference does Jesus’ resurrection make? First, to state the obvious, if Jesus has been resurrected, that means he’s among the living. If Jesus has conquered death, then he’s with us today.

It’s been a couple thousand years, but we’re still learning how to talk about that. For instance, ‘what would Jesus do?’ is a popular question. It’s a way of asking what Jesus, who was obviously a really good person and great example of how to behave, would have done in a particular situation.

It’s a well-intentioned question, but it’s problematic for a bunch of reasons including that it takes as its starting point that Jesus is dead. If we really have to have a slogan to wear on a band on our wrists, ‘what is Jesus doing?’ would at least take into account his resurrection. So that’s the first difference Jesus’ resurrection makes: it means that he is with us.

Second, Jesus’ resurrection means that we’re forgiven. Think about it—the people to whom the risen Christ appears in John’s Gospel are precisely the ones who abandoned him at his darkest hour. Peter, the rock on whom the Church is built, denied Jesus three times over.

But beyond the disciples, even those who tried, convicted, and crucified Jesus are forgiven. In our reading from Acts today, Peter preaches the first sermon ever. And speaking to the devout Jews who gather around him he says, “[t]his man . . . you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law” (meaning that they handed Jesus over to the Romans for the actual crucifixion). “This man,” preaches Peter, “God raised up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.”

Peter is preaching Jesus’ resurrection to Jesus’ crucifiers. The very first thing that happens after the Holy Spirit fills the apostles is that they go out and share the gospel news that Christ is risen with those who killed him. Their victim returns to them as their salvation. That’s Jesus working to reconcile his enemies to himself, to God. So, another difference Jesus’ resurrection makes: we are forgiven our sins.

Third, Jesus’ resurrection means that we live in hope. “By God’s great mercy God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” we read in 1 Peter.

At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples for the third time, in that lovely scene where they roast fresh-caught fish over the fire and eat breakfast together. And after breakfast Jesus asks Peter, “Simon Peter, do you love me?” three times over, once for each time Peter had denied him. Jesus, crucified after Peter had turned his back on him to save his own skin, waits on Peter’s love. Even more than that, Jesus commissions Peter to feed his sheep, to tend to the Shepherd’s flock.

“The presence of Jesus—still faithful, still calling, inviting his followers to love him—opens out the past in grace,” Rowan Williams writes. “And what Peter may learn is that wherever he may find himself, however he may fall, his life is constantly capable of being opened to God’s creative grace: God’s presence in Jesus will not fail him.” (Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, p. 30)

From failed disciple to feeder of Jesus’ sheep, Peter becomes not only a recipient but a transmitter of hope. Not a disembodied, groundless hope, either, but a hope that comes from understanding that Jesus knows us to our very core, knows our failures and our lacks, and our sins, and not only loves us anyway, but still wants us to love him. That’s a difference Jesus’ resurrection makes: because Jesus returned to us from the dead we live in hope.

Finally, because of Jesus’ resurrection, we live in joy.

We are, all of us, sinners. We mess up. We mean to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, but we get distracted. And sometimes we’re overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of war, and hunger, and sickness, and poverty.

Jesus appears to the disciples who are cowering behind locked doors. On the other side of those doors, nothing’s changed: the people in power still want to kill anyone who threatens that power, rich people still live right beside poor people, some people are out of work, some are hungry, some are sick, some are mourning. And some, like the disciples, are afraid.

And when Jesus appears, the disciples rejoice. All the problems in the world haven’t suddenly disappeared. The only thing that’s changed is that Jesus is with them. Their joy depends only on Jesus’ presence and Jesus is with them, just as he promised he would be.

Nothing can separate us from God. Jesus’ resurrection means God is always with us and because of God’s presence, we live in joy.

This isn’t a comprehensive answer to the question of what difference does Jesus’ resurrection make. It’s more of a launching pad, a place for us to begin. Easter is a time of joy and thanksgiving for God’s saving work in Jesus Christ and a time to dwell on the response Christ’s resurrection calls forth from us. What difference does Jesus’ resurrection make for you? What difference does it make for all of us? What difference for our lives in Durham and Beijing and Belize and Lebanon and McClean and Arlington and Bahama and on a bike ride from one side of the country to the other? How do we live in the light of Jesus’ resurrection day after day after day wherever we are and whatever we’re doing?

Alleluia! Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed. That’s where we’ll begin. Amen.

This past Monday, we waited anxiously to see if panicky financial markets would collapse after the Federal Reserve bailed out the investment bank Bear Stearns last Friday.

On Tuesday, 10,000 people gathered in the Dean Smith Center at the University of North Carolina because Eve Carson, their beloved student body president, was killed two weeks ago.

Wednesday, yesterday, marked the fifth year since we began waging war in Iraq.

And today is Maundy Thursday, the day named after the Latin word, mandatum,  or mandate, from Jesus’ commandment that we love one another.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Given the unremittingly bleak news coming at us from every which way, it might seem naïve to gather as we have tonight to remember—to celebrate—that we are commanded to love.

A youth leader I know once launched a group of teens into an intense conversation about love by offering them a box of doughnuts. He had this wonderful, enthusiastic group of kids and he just knew if he brought in a box of doughnuts someone was bound to say, “I love doughnuts.” So he was ready. And sure enough, someone declared their love for doughnuts.

“Oh really?” he asked. “You love doughnuts?”

And the point he eventually led them to was that we talk about love casually, as if it were something warm and fuzzy and bland, as if it applied equally to doughnuts and people. As if the command to love one another were a cheery moral maxim, a kind of extended play version of ‘Be nice.’

The teens got it. They got that doughnut-love isn’t the real thing, that it doesn’t stand a chance of sustaining us in the midst of war, and death, and anxiety, and grief, or even over the long haul of everyday life.

What will? Because, God knows, it’s been a hard week and from the looks of it, there are more hard weeks to come.

The night Jesus gives his new commandment is the night before he’s going to be crucified. And Jesus knows that. He knows what’s coming. He knows that Judas, with whom he breaks bread, is about to betray him. He knows that Peter is about to deny him three times over. He knows that he is about to be beaten and humiliated and killed and he knows that when he dies his disciples will be as stricken and lost as motherless children.

And knowing that, he washes his disciples’ feet. All of them, even Judas’.

And because we want so badly to know what we’re supposed to do to be good Christians, we tend to get busy with footwashing, rushing off to make some heroic contribution to the world’s well-being. After all, that’s what Jesus said, “I’ve set you an example. Do what I’ve done to you.”

But in our hurry to be good servants, we may skip over the starting line, the most important part, the part that comes before Jesus does anything: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel.”

For Jesus, who he is—Whose he is—comes before what he does.

I know a woman who is certain that each one of us deserves a home. So day after day, week after week, she goes out and talks to the people who live on the streets and in the woods, one person at a time. She asks them how they’re doing and she asks them if they know about the V.A. or about Medicaid. She asks them if they’d like help filling in forms. And on a lot of those days, most of these guys (and it is mostly guys) aren’t interested in hearing what she has to say.

This is not glamorous work. And if it feels heroic the first couple of days, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t 403 days later. In fact, for some of us it might even feel hopeless. But this woman keeps showing up, checking in, asking how folks are doing. And sometimes, it registers. A man who is used to seeing himself as an outsider or a hopeless case, suddenly sees himself the way she sees him, as a neighbor, as someone who’s ready to ‘come in’ as she puts it. And when that happens, she’s there and she’s ready to walk with him.

This is not a person given to grand statements. She is about as no-nonsense and down-to-earth as they come. I’ll sit there talking about building relationships and being present with our neighbors and on and on and when I’m done she’ll ask, “Can you drive Bob to the V.A.?”

And in her groundedness and her persistance, she is a witness to God’s power to sustain hope in the face of hopelessness, to His power to make possible what seems impossible.

I went to my office at the Episcopal Center on Tuesday. The Center was still closed for Spring Break over the weekend and Monday is my sabbath day, so I hadn’t been there since Friday. And when I got there, I discovered that in the three days I’d been away, spring had sprung: the edges of the crumbly brown path that leads around to the front door were outlined in green. Little daffodil shoots had sprung up in tidy, curving rows on either side of the mulch, bright green parabolas tracing a path from the sidewalk on around the corner of the building. It was so beautiful and so surprising, a small miracle, a gift in the midst of a hard day.

Love can be like that, a surprising witness to God’s light in present darkness. No one of us can fix what’s wrong with the world and make all the suffering go away, but we can offer ourselves to our neighbor. We can point beyond ourselves to God by our everyday practices of love. God will sustain us. That’s where we find our hope.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Because we come from God and are going to God, because we are God’s, we are commanded to love. Because Jesus loves us deeply and completely and unconditionally, we are free to love. In the midst of fear, and sorrow, and anxiety, and stress, on the eve of the darkest day in the Christian year, it is given to us to offer a transformative witness to God’s loving presence in this world.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We pray you, gracious God, let it be so. Amen.

The author of John’s Gospel is a master of irony. Throughout the Gospel the wrong people say the right thing, the well-educated can’t grasp the simplest truth even when it’s explained to them, and people who were born with normal vision can’t see while people who were born blind see clearly.

And one of the greatest ironies in today’s passage is that the only two people who are labelled as sinners are the healed blind man and Jesus. The two of them are booted out of a community so certain it has a grip on righteousness that it walls itself in and salvation out.

It’s not because the community doesn’t take salvation seriously, either. On the contrary, the Pharisees, whose job it is to maintain right order, know the rules and they’re trying really hard to figure out which rules apply and how.

“Did he break the sabbath? ‘Cause in that case, he’s a sinner. Is this a sign? It can’t be a sign. There must be some other explanation. Who the heck is this guy anyway? God speaks to Moses, not to strangers. Everyone knows that.”

The beggar answers by stating what he knows. “I don’t know if this man is a sinner. I do know that I was blind and now I see. I don’t know where he’s from, but if he’s not from God, how come I can see?”

And that does it. That’s all it takes. The Pharisees’ certainty that they have the answers blind them to the miracle right in front of them: a blind man, healed on the sabbath, by a man of unknown origins. He’s shown the door and the Pharisees slam it firmly shut behind him.

And the way irony works is that we’re in on the joke. We know just what’s happened and we know on which side of the door true salvation stands. We know the people who slammed the door slammed it because they’re so sure they’re right and the truth is, if we’re completely honest with ourselves, we’re like that sometimes, too.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has a wonderful book called Where God Happens, about the 4th and 5th century desert mothers and fathers. One of the things he appreciates about those desert monastics is their awareness that ‘one of the great temptations of religious living is the urge to intrude between God and other people.’ (p. 15)

That urge to intrude between God and other people doesn’t come from our anxiety about them, but from our anxiety about ourselves. The Pharisees are sure about God because they have the rules down pat—God doesn’t work on the Sabbath, God spoke to Moses and not to anyone else, being born blind means you’re a sinner, as does working on Sunday.

But the problem with that kind of certainty is that it keeps us from seeing what God’s doing when God doesn’t color inside the lines. What happens if God doesn’t play by our rules? What happens if the blind guy sees?

It’s not as if being certain about righteousness has gone out of fashion. Who’s got a lock on the Gospel, the American church or the Nigerian one? Who’s got the answers to what ails our country, John, or Hillary, or Barack? Should parents pick up crying babies or leave them to calm themselves? What’s more important, organic food or locally grown food?

Whatever side of whichever debate we’re on, are we so sure we’re right we can’t see any other possibility? Are we so sure we’re right we’re cutting ourselves off from the very people God commands us to love? Are we so certain of ourselves we can’t see Jesus even when he’s right before our very eyes?

There’s a story about one of the desert fathers, an abbot named Macarius who pays a visit to an old monk. The monk has been counseling others but word’s gotten back to Macarius that the monk’s advice is more judgmental than helpful.

Macarius asks the old man, “How are things going with you?”

“Just great, thanks,” the monk answers.

“So, you’re not struggling with fantasies and temptations?”

“Nope. All is well,” says the monk because everyone knows monks don’t have fantasies and temptations.

Macarius says, “You know, I’ve been living as an ascetic for years now and everyone sings my praises, but between you and me, I am still struggling not to think about girls.”

“Well, now that you mention it,” says the old monk, “me, too.”

“And I’ve been living very simply for a long while, but I still think about how nice it would be to have some new sheets and a few extra blankets.”

“The nights do get cold, don’t they?” agrees the monk.

And Macarius goes on admitting, one by one, all the other fantasies he struggles with, and every time the old monk admits that he struggles, too.

And at last, Macarius asks, “Do you fast?”

“Yeah, I do, but I don’t start until 3:00 in the afternoon,”  the monk admits.

“Well, look,” says Macarius, “go ahead and fast until dinner time, and while you’re at it, read back over the gospel. And if you get distracted by some fantasy in the meantime, don’t look down but up: the Lord will come to your aid.”

And the story doesn’t say so, but my guess is that the old monk became a much more generous listener, not because he was sure of himself and what was right, but because he was freed from having to be so. He didn’t measure up to the standards for perfect monkdom, true, but his salvation depends on God, not on rules. And I just bet knowing that made him a lot less anxious to lower the boom on those who came to him for counsel and advice.

“I came into this world for judgment,” Jesus says, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

Our confidence is in Jesus, not in ourselves. We therefore confess our certainties and all the ways they blind us to God and our neighbor. We are free to confess these things because our failure to see God does not prevent God from loving us.

May living in the light of that knowledge lead us to reach out to others in open humility rather than to wall ourselves off in blind righteousness.  Amen.

Asking someone to do something can be an invitation. It can be a way of saying, “You’re needed here. Come be part of this.”

Which is what I think Jesus is doing when he asks the Samaritan woman for a drink of water. He’s thirsty and he needs water because it’s high noon in the desert, but when he asks this particular woman for a drink he’s asking an outsider to do something for him. He’s a Jew and she’s a Samaritan, and Jews and Samaritans traditionally want nothing to do with one another. But this woman is apparently an outsider even among the Samaritans: women don’t come to the well alone at the hottest part of the day. Hauling water is hard, boring work, so women come together, in a group, early in the morning or late in the evening when it’s cooler and they can keep each other company.

We don’t know exactly why this woman isn’t part of the crowd, although there’s lots of speculation about whether her history with men implies that she’s immoral or abandoned or otherwise tainted. But we don’t know the specifics of why she’s not with her neighbors,  just that she’s not.

It’s a shock when Jesus speaks to her—men aren’t supposed to talk to women who aren’t their relatives. But Jesus not only speaks to her, he asks for something from her. As if to say whether she’s an outsider or an insider  isn’t relevant. As if to say he really does need this woman who’s supposed to be his enemy. As if to say she can be on intimate, human terms with him, just as she is.

She’s startled into talking with him. It’s no wonder that Jesus’ simple request for a drink turns into the longest conversation with anyone Jesus has anywhere in the Gospels. Because Jesus needs her and treats her simply and with dignity—he talks to her the same way he talked to his mother earlier in John’s Gospel (2:4)—even though, as she quickly finds out, he knows exactly who she is and what’s she’s done.

Karl Barth says it’s the job of a missionary to tell people the truth about themselves. And that is what Jesus does for this woman. The truth about her is something more than that she’s a Samaritan who’s had five husbands and now has a man who isn’t her husband. The truth Jesus conveys to her is “You are not an unworthy outcast, you are someone the Messiah asks for a drink of water. You are someone to whom God himself wants to speak. You are someone God seeks.”

And what’s striking about this exchange is its simplicity. Jesus changes water into wine, he feeds thousands of people with just five loaves of bread and two fish, he walks on water, he calls Lazarus back from the dead.

But Jesus also does very simple things. He shares meals with people with whom he’s not supposed to eat, he washes his disciples’ feet, he talks to people with whom he’s not supposed to associate. And he asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. He ministers even from his need, offering up his vulnerability on behalf of someone else. And that—that radically simple insistence on addressing the human dignity and worthiness in every person he meets, that refusal to honor the barriers we erect to keep ourselves safe from people who aren’t like us, that self-giving love of God and his neighbor—that is what gets him killed.

I think when we hear Jesus’ call to take up our cross and follow him we may imagine we’re called to do something daunting and heroic. And sometimes we are, although even then it doesn’t usually start that way. Jonathan Myrick Daniels was killed when he stepped in front of a bullet intended for a young girl, but what got him there was helping his neighbors register to vote. Constance and her companions gave their lives for victims of yellow fever, but what got them there was going about the business of being nurses caring for their patients.

Most often, we’re called to do something radically simple. We’re called to listen to other people, and maybe even to do more listening than talking. We’re called to go meet the people we think of as strangers. We’re called to pull up a milk crate and sit down with the men who live in the parking lot of St. Joseph’s and get to know them because we’re neighbors.

And sometimes we’re not called to do anything at all but to accept what someone else offers us. That, too, is a way of participating in Jesus’ invitation. Jesus came to reconcile the world to God and being part of that reconciliation means recognizing the depth and mutuality of our need.

That may not sound particularly life-changing, but it is. What begins with a simple request transforms the Samaritan woman. Sloughing off her old identity as an outsider she becomes the first evangelist. She runs back to her neighbors calling out, “Come and see!” and what she offers is herself and what her neighbors hear and see in her is so compelling that many of them become believers themselves. They come out to see Jesus and invite him to come back and stay with them a while. And he accepts their invitation and is their guest for a couple of days, and then even “more believed because of his word.”

Remember what we’re asked in our baptismal covenant? “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ? Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”

All of those questions are God’s invitation to be reconciled to God and to one another. Accepting that invitation can be as simple as giving someone a drink of water or accepting a drink of water from someone else. We are all children of God and God created us to be in relationship with Him and with one another.

Jesus’ invitation to the Samaritan woman is his invitation to us, “I need you, just as you are. Come, be part of this.”

Our president once, famously, referred to himself as ‘the decider.’

I’m ‘the explainer.’ I like answers. I like to have answers. It’s taken me a long time to learn that saying, “I don’t know” isn’t a moral failure.

It’s not too hard to figure out that being the decider means being the person in control. But what may not be as obvious is that being the explainer is also about being in control. If we can explain something, we can get a handle on it. We can manage it.

And maybe that is what Peter is doing when he and James and John are up on that mountain with Jesus and suddenly, right before their very eyes, Jesus is all lit up and shining like the sun, transfigured as they’re standing with him—and suddenly Moses and Elijah are there, too, talking with Jesus in his brilliant white clothes.

And what is Peter’s response to this dazzling blaze of glory?  He offers to build three tents to contain it.

It’s a spectacular non-sequitur. Peter has absolutely no idea what he’s witnessing or what to do about it, but he makes an attempt. He wants to have an answer to the unanswerable, to explain the inexplicable, to have some idea of what to do. He’s trying to grasp this astonishing, awesome vision of Jesus in all his glory, to get hold of what’s happening right in front of him, manage it, and bring it under control.

But God can’t be managed. And Peter is not in control.

People are still trying to explain the Transfiguration. They debate when in the course of Jesus’ life it happened. They even argue about which mountain Jesus and his disciples had climbed. Was it Mt. Tabor? That’s where the Church of the Transfiguration now stands. Or was it Mt. Hermon? There’s a ski slope on Mt. Hermon now, the only one in Israel, apparently. I’m not sure if that’s evidence for or against its being the right mountain, but there we have it.

The thing is, we love data. It lets us manage things and be in control. We’re smitten with measurements and analysis and quantifiable evidence. We assess risk, weigh costs and benefits, and rate schools by test scores. We measure inputs and outputs and make policy based on what we learn. We carbon date things to figure out what really happened way back when. We are convinced by data, by the things we’re able to nail down and explain, and that shapes our view of the world.

And if we bring that way of seeing to our reading of Scripture, if we allow our need for management and control to shape how we hear the Word of God, we tend to end up in one of two places: as a fundamentalist who hears the account of Jesus’ transfiguration and says, “Yup, that’s exactly what happened and exactly how it happened because the Bible says so”; or as a rationalist—a fundamentalist’s secret twin—who hears the same account and says, “People’s faces don’t light up like the sun and voices don’t come booming out of clouds, so this is bunk.” Either way, that’s the end of that conversation.

So where does that leave us? What are we to make of the Transfiguration? What happened? Why did it happen? And what is this incredibly strange story doing in our Bible?

I had a really terrific English teacher in high school. Actually, Linda Tucci is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had in any school. She was passionate about poetry, and novels, and plays and she made us memorize line after line of Shakespeare and stanza after stanza of poetry. I don’t think any of us fully understood the passages we were memorizing. For the most part, they were about things that were beyond the realm of our experience. At any rate, I didn’t fully understand them, nor did I particularly like getting quizzed on memory work.

But maybe Ms. Tucci hoped that if we did memorize all those words—all those powerful ideas and emotions we weren’t yet ready to wrap our minds around—they’d stick; they’d stay with us and do their work from the inside out, even if it didn’t happen right away. Maybe she hoped the words we didn’t yet understand would stay with us like the lamp Peter describes, ‘shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.’

Maybe the Transfiguration was something like that. Jesus gave it to Peter and James and John to witness that glorious vision—to have that vision burned onto their retinas and branded into their consciousness. Maybe that dazzling revelation was given to them to live in their hearts until Christ the morning star had risen and they knew that that was what they’d witnessed.

We can’t capture God’s infinite mystery with our finite understanding. We can’t contain God’s glory in manageable tents. But we can hold the witness of Peter and James and John and the whole communion of saints in our hearts and let that witness transform our lives from the inside out.

We are called to engage God’s word, to ponder it, study it, and carry it into the world. But we are also called beyond the limits of our understanding. We are called to live in the immensity of God’s love, to live fearlessly and joyfully, in freedom and abundance, to worship and give thanks, to live and learn and love, to break bread together and together rejoice and sing God’s praises. Until at the last, we, too, will stand before God and behold Him in all His glory.

One of Ms. Tucci’s poems is by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It begins,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

Peter and James and John saw the Transfiguration. Later, after Jesus whose face had shone like the sun, had been nailed to the cross, after his Resurrection, they remembered the vision that had been living in their hearts. Then they could see that God’s glory can no more be contained by sin or brokenness or even death than that glorious vision on the mountaintop could be contained by Peter’s three tents. That even from the cross, even from the grave, God’s grandeur will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

The whole summer before my senior year in college I had a recurring dream in which I kept missing the train. There were lots of variations on how I missed it: I’d show up at the train station just as the train was pulling out; or I’d wake up (in my dream) and realize that I was supposed to already be at the train station; or I’d get to the train station and discover I was a day late. However it happened, I’d arrive and find out the train had left the station.

I’d just come back from living in Paris, otherwise I’m sure I’d have dreamed about missing the boat. But folks travel by train in Europe, so trains it was.

This was not a subtle dream. Even then I knew exactly why I was dreaming about missing the train. I was about to start my senior year, I was going to finish up a little early in January, and I had no idea what was going to happen next.

I was a little anxious about that.

My anxiety didn’t have much to do with how I was going to earn a living. I wasn’t that practical, although, now that I think about it, my parents might have been a little curious about how I planned to pay the rent.

I was anxious because I didn’t know what I was going to do which was really anxiety about who I was going to be.

“What do you do?” is the most frequently asked question at every party I’ve ever been to, right after introductions. Your answer conveys more about you than just where you spend weekdays from 9-5. Our language, our culture, and our history shape expectations about who we are and what we do. So to say we’re a teacher, or a student, or a lawyer, or a janitor, or a stay-at-home parent—let alone a conservative, or a liberal, or a white person, or a black person, or a college graduate, or not a college graduate—to say we’re any of those things is to say we’re a particular kind of person who acts in a particular kind of way. Our identity gets bound up with our work.

We tend to use the words ‘vocation’ and ‘career’ interchangeably, but in Scripture and in Christian tradition ‘vocation’ sticks close to its Latin root, vocare, which means ‘to call.’ Vocation is a call. It comes from outside of us and isn’t something we initiate. Vocation is a gift—our vocation is our call from God.

‘Career’, on the other hand, is derived from the medieval Latin word for ‘race track.’ And since I tend to fall off horses and have zero interest in riding one in a race, it’s hard for me to think of being plunked onto a race track as a gift from God for anyone except jockeys. ‘Career’ is something busy humans do. It’s primarily about human initiative and human effort.

‘Vocation’, on the other hand, begins with God who calls and invites us.

The place where God’s call and our response first meet is in Holy Baptism. In Baptism, we’re sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. We’re received into the household of God and commanded to confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share in his eternal priesthood. We are, in other words, given our identity and our job description. Our vocation begins with our baptism.

Today is the day we celebrate Jesus’ baptism and God shows us what it means to be called by God. Jesus wades into the Jordan to be baptized by John, and as he comes up from the water the heavens open and God’s Spirit like a dove flies down to him and a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

You’ll note that God doesn’t say, “Now you’re my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” God says, “This is my Son.” Jesus’ identity as God’s beloved Son begins before he does anything.

That’s what God says to each of us in our baptism: “You are my child, you are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” See? Those are the words that tell us who we are. Those are the words that set us free from worrying about who we’re going to be. God has claimed us as God’s own and that’s it. All that we have and all that we are is rooted forevermore in God’s love for us. Whatever scripts the world would assign us, whatever identities are supposed to go with categories like ‘banker’, ‘chef’, ‘teacher’, ‘student’, or ‘priest’, God has already given us our true identity. We are God’s children, cherished by God.

The good news is that our baptism sets us free, free from the categories of work, of success or failure, free from the need to derive our identities from something on offer at the Career Counseling Center. Our baptism sets us “free for the unique adventures of vocation in response to the Word who calls us.”

And, God willing, there will be adventures. In our baptismal covenant we agree to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ,” to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves,” and “to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

That’s quite a job description, isn’t it?

What will those adventures look like? I don’t know—it’s up to us to work out the details. I do know that although we have one continuous vocation, we’re likely to find a variety of different ways to respond to that vocation over the course of our lifetimes. We are baptized into the Body of Christ, made members of the community of saints. Each of us is given different gifts to use for the good of the whole Body and each of us may find different ways of using those gifts in different jobs and different places at different times. Our understanding of what God is asking us to do is likely to grow and deepen and change as we learn to live into our baptismal covenant.

But what binds all those professions and jobs together is that we take them up as responses to our vocation—responses to God’s call—rather than than as responses to the scripts and demands society offers and makes of us.

What I didn’t know the summer before my senior year is that it’s not what we do that determines who we are, it’s the other way around. We are God’s children, disciples of His Son Jesus Christ. All else follows from that. This is how the Church of South India puts it in its Covenant Service:

We are no longer our own, but yours. Put us to what you will, set us with whom you will; put us to doing, put us to suffering, let us be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you or brought low for you; let us be full, let us be empty; let us have all things, let us have nothing; we freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

That is the wonderful and wonderfully freeing life to which God calls us.

The Church of South India service continues:

And now, 0 glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are ours and we are yours. So be it. And let the covenant that we have made on earth be ratified in heaven.

So be it. Let our lives, our work, our rest, our waking, and our sleeping, be a proclamation of what we know to be true: God is ours and we are God’s. So be it. Amen and amen.

***I am grateful to Milner Ball for permission to draw on a sermon he preached at Trinity University October 7, 1996 throughout this sermon.

We humans like rules. Rules turn the unruly into the ruled and give us a sense of control.

If you ever need someone to enforce some rules, get a four year old. Four year olds live to enforce rules. They are passionate about it. At the Montessori school where my daughters went to preschool, three, four, and five year olds all shared a classroom and over the years the four year olds were always the self-appointed class police. They were the ones who could be counted on to point out when someone was doing something they shouldn’t. Or not doing something they should, depending. That didn’t necessarily mean they always obeyed the rules, mind you, but they were terrific at reporting everyone else’s violations. Four year olds excel at righteousness.

It’s a demanding job, righteousness, and four year olds aren’t the only ones who think so. Matthew’s Gospel begins with a portrait of someone wrestling with righteousness. Luke tells the story of the announcement of Jesus’ birth from Mary’s point of view, but when Matthew tells the story of the Annunciation he focuses on Joseph.

We don’t get a lot of details about Joseph. He doesn’t have any speaking parts and the last we hear of him is that he’s warned to flee from Egypt in another dream, and he does and he settles his young family in Nazareth in Galilee . . . and then that’s it. We don’t hear any more about him. All we know about Joseph is the one thing Matthew tells us: we know that Joseph is a righteous man.

To be a righteous Jewish man means something very specific. It means to obey the laws of God as set out in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. But right here at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, righteousness is a real stumper for Joseph. Because he’s a righteously God-fearing, law-abiding man he can’t take Mary for his wife when she’s pregnant by someone else, but nor does he want her to be disgraced in public. ‘Being righteous’ and ‘shielding Mary from shame’ seem to be mutually exclusive and Joseph is stuck on the horns of that dilemma.

There are rules for this sort of thing and those rules say that if the woman you’re engaged to turns up pregnant, both she and the man who got her pregnant are to be stoned to death at the town gate. Unless, that is, the woman was attacked by the man, in which case only he should be stoned. Either way, it takes a public hearing to decide whether one or both of them should be put to death. (Deut. 22: 23-27)

Rules are rules for a reason. They help us make sense of the world by giving it some structure and some order. They help make life more predictable and less out-of-control. And rules help us live with one another in peace and harmony—at least some of the time, anyway. Rules protect the life of the community.

Which might be a helpful thing to remember the next time you’re dealing with a bossy four year old.

But rules, even the rules we call ‘law’, have their limits. And Joseph knows about those limits because being a righteous man he knows the stories of God’s presence in human history, the stories told in Scripture. In particular, he knows the stories of his own family which includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David—and also, according to the list at the very beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

The presence of any woman’s name in a biblical list of who begat whom is highly unusual. The presence of these women in the distinguished line that stretches from Abraham down through the House of David to Joseph is downright scandalous: Tamar got pregnant by her father-in-law after his son, her husband, was dead; Rahab was an outsider and a prostitute; Ruth was another outsider, which is a big deal in tribal Israel; and Bathsheba committed adultery with David who killed her husband to keep from being found out.

So it’s not as if Mary’s unexpected pregnancy is the first time there’s been ever been a whiff of scandal in the family.

Tamar and Rahab and Ruth and Bathsheba weren’t stoned to death or disgraced. Far from it—they’re included as honored ancestors in the list of those from whom Jesus Christ is descended.

What happened to the rules?

Matthew’s genealogy is a kind of shorthand. It’s a shorthand list of stories that tell about God’s on-going relationship with Joseph’s family and all of God’s people. And although those stories do include rules for how to live righteously before God, they also point to God’s complete and unrestrained freedom to break any rules, any limits, and any bounds. Those stories tell us that God’s love and God’s mercy are unbounded and cannot and will not be constrained, not even by the rules God Himself handed down.

And that is the context for Matthew’s telling of the Annunciation.

If you’ve ever taken Art History, you know the Annuciation looks something like this:

Mary, a young girl with a golden halo, is sitting with her eyes modestly cast down with the Angel Gabriel kneeling before her, his pure white wings that seem to give off their own light stretching out behind him, telling her the surprising news that she’s going to bear God’s Son.

That’s what the Annunciation looks like in Luke’s Gospel. Here’s how it looks in Matthew’s Gospel:

Joseph, lying in bed, sound asleep, dreaming in the dark.

And this is why there are tons of beautiful paintings of the Annunciation to Mary and not so many of the Annunciation to Joseph.

Joseph must be surprised to learn in his sleep that Mary’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that God’s Son is going to be the newest member of his family—this is startling news—but he must also be relieved. He’s freed from his dilemma. Joseph, the righteous man, wakes up and does exactly as he’s commanded. He takes Mary to be his wife and names her son Jesus.

Righteousness, it turns out, has more to do with attentive obedience to God’s will than it does with following a list of rules. A four year old’s righteousness has to do with trying to control the universe. That’s self-righteouness and four year old’s aren’t the only ones who practice it. Anyone who would reduce the Bible to a rulebook for living has fallen into the same trap.

True righteouness, on the other hand, has to do with surrendering control and being open to God’s radical annunciation. It requires obeying God’s commands while simultaneously listening for new ones. And it requires taking the risk that we may well get it wrong. How will we know that our dream is a message from God and not just wishful thinking?

We won’t, necessarily. Righteousness takes more humility than certainty.

But we haven’t been left to our own devices, any more than Joseph was. We, too, have been given the stories about God and God’s unending care for God’s people, stories that teach us the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. We’ve been given one another and the whole communion of saints to school us in those stories and to teach us to watch for how they’re still unfolding. And we’ve been given the Eucharist which we make week after week knowing that God meets us here where we gather and forms us to hear and respond to His word.

And most especially, we have been given the Son of God, God’s radical newness, who came to us in all humility as a newborn babe, grew to be a four year old, and then to be a man who willingly died for us that all our sins might be forgiven, even when we break the rules, even when we can’t figure out what the rules are. God’s rule, God’s righteousness, is God’s love, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the newborn babe, Jesus Christ.

For that and for all else, thanks be to God. Amen.

The Hope of the Resurrection

by Colin Miller

The church is a city of hope; a society of people who hope for the second coming of a crucified and resurrected Jew. But we usually don’t think of ourselves as people who hope, and so this afternoon I want to explore with you and with St Luke and St Paul why this might be. I want to suggest to you that both these Saints may be telling us that the Christian hope of the final resurrection is the key to avoiding the deception of Satan. So that in the end our lack of hope ends up evincing just how deceived we may be.
And to focus on the hope of the resurrection is particularly fitting at this point in our liturgical year. This time of year, the season after Pentecost, remembers that phase in the history of salvation in which we currently do stand, the age of the church, in which God’s spirit moves forward through us to renew the face of the earth. As we liturgically near the end of this time, our texts have turned to begin to consider the coming judgment, the time of trial and the restoration of all things in Christ. This is reflected in the Collect Sarah prayed:

O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom

This liturgical movement will climax in two weeks on the last Sunday after Pentecost, when we celebrate Christ as King. But we’ve not gotten there yet. We stand in liturgical time the same as we stand in real time: as the church in a world full of deception but eagerly hoping for the final renewal of all things in which time God will be all in all as we worship Christ the King.
Our lack of concern for our future resurrection of course stands in stark contrast to nearly all previous Christian tradition. The Gospel of Matthew is of the opinion that already Isaiah the prophet had spoken of this Jesus in whom the Gentiles would hope (chapter 12). Acts says Paul was on trial precisely for the hope of the resurrection. And this is of course a constant theme in Paul’s own writings: he tell us famously that the three most important things are, as they are commonly rendered, faith, hope, and love. Ignatius of Antioch is adamant throughout his letters that we be of one, common hope of the coming of Jesus. Saint Thomas Aquinas lists this hope among his theological virtues. The Catholic Catechism says that “hope is the desire of the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness.” The short Catechism in our prayer book has an entire section on “Christian Hope” which is defined as “living with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and awaiting the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.”

So what is our problem? Here’s this rich and seemingly endless ancient Christian tradition of the hope of the resurrection, and for us its rarely more than a comforting nicety that we maybe think about on Easter or at funerals. The tradition suggests that most other Christians have been obsessed with this. What make us so different?
Well, I certainly don’t know for sure, and there must be a million different answers, but one answer would be that we don’t really need to hope. Though we would never say as much, our lives imply that we don’t really have anything to hope for. On the whole, people do not need think they really need the church’s hope, because in reality the state and our modern world is the savior. Despite what we may piously claim to our priest, or what, on the other hand, we may cynically mock during a presidential campaign or debate, our lives demonstrate that we largely buy the rhetoric of worldwide salvation through human rights, democracy, free markets, upward mobility, and “development”. Our salvation, in the sense of what is really important to us, comes thence.

Recently moral philosopher Charles Taylor has charted this movement as it developed out of the mideval church and into the modern world. He writes that

In the mediaeval period, it was generally understood that the full demands of Christian life would never be met…in history…but only at the Parousia, at the end of time. There were structural features of our existence here, for instance, the existence of states, and of private property, which were inseparable from our fallen condition…This meant that the two orders in which the Christian lived, the City of God and the earthly city, could never be in tune with each other…. [But beginning with the Reformation in the 16th century, it was] required that one define a way of life open to everyone which would amount to an integral fulfillment [of the Gospel], and this couldn’t help but bring about a definition of the demands of Christian faith closer in line with what is attainable in the world, with what can be realized in history. The distance between the ultimate City of God and [the city of the World] has been reduced….The “Next World” now has a different function, not to complete a path of [deification of the believer already] begun here, but to provide rewards and punishments which fulfill the demands of justice on our actions in history….It became hard for many to answer the question , what is Christian faith about? The salvation of humankind, or the progress wrought by capitalism, technology, and democracy? The two have blended into one.” (A Secular Age, 735-6)

It is no surprise then that when we use the word hope we are usually thinking of some possibility of a better life. We hope for that promotion, to get into that good school, that medicine will save us from death, for recognition from this person, and for physical well being and security, for lack of worry or early retirement. Our modern American world with all its freedoms, comforts and amenities has saved us. Our hope, when we do hope, is on it. But we don’t need the resurrection anymore.

So I’m suggesting that we have been bamboozled. That we are often adrift in a vast sea of lies, and we’re not really sure which way land lies. Or, alternatively, we are sinking in that same sea, and we are not even sure which way is down and which way is up. We are confused about our salvation.

What do we do? We can’t just decide to hope more. Will ourselves into some kind of new state of mind or something easy like that. Its not a matter of having more of some emotion, or being more on the edge of our seat. Rather, we need to be taught by the church’s traditions the proper way to use the word hope. The proper way to hope.

And thankfully our New Testament readings this morning suggest that we are not first people to have had this problem. In the Gospel reading the Sadducees are specifically named as those who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. It was not, of course, that they were good scientific rationalists ahead of their time, but the central reason for this denial was that they only accepted the first five books of the Bible – the Books of Moses - as authoritative and canonical, and there is very little in these books that point to anything like a resurrection. But on a second look, I’m not entirely convinced that these Sadducees are entirely different than we are. Sure, they had their “official” justifications for their lack of hope. But beyond this, they too were quite comfortable. They were the elites of the people, the Roman-backed Jewish leadership, the culturally respectable, the rich. They have a vested interest in the first being first and the last being last.

And indeed this is the score on which Jesus critiques them. The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. Life just goes on as usual – there’s a certain “normalcy” about it. But, Jesus says, those who have part of the resurrection have a completely different way of life – they neither marry nor are given in marriage – and Jesus’s alternative society reveals that the normal, even seemingly natural, way the world works, the way it has always been, is precisely one that does not need and cannot fathom the hope of the resurrection. In other words, living a “normal life” simply being a good citizen, or whatever, is actually to be bamboozled into accepting a salvation that is not from God.

In other words, to recover the hope of the resurrection properly, we need to not just think differently, but to embody a way of life that lets us see the salvation that the world offers as a psudo-salvation, a deception leading us away from the Gospel. And this is precisely what Paul tells the Thessalonians who had been deceived into thinking that the Lord had already come and that they had missed out. The Lord Jesus, he says, has indeed given you a good hope. How to come back to it? Verse 15: Stand. Hold fast to the traditions which you were taught. In other words, live the practices of the church. How? Principally Paul must be thinking of meeting together, not least to share the Eucharist. For when we so do not only do we remember that this meal is the source of our salvation, but also that when eat it we are trained into the proper hope of the resurrection, for whenever we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In other words, to live by the practices of the church is to be trained to see as a false hope the Rulers of this World’s offer of salvation by money, security, prosperity, longer and healthier lives, shelter, independence, invulnerability, civil rights and something called freedom. It takes participation in Christ’s body to remind us of the traditions that the church has always taught: that salvation actually consists not in money but in poverty, not in independence but in dependence, not in authenticating our individuality but in community, not in security but vulnerability, not in being one’s own master but in service, not in claiming our rights but in sacrifice, not in long life but in martyrdom. For only when we live this life of imitation of the crucified Christ do we realize that our only hope is resurrection.
I’m not exactly sure how to begin to do this, but I offer with fear and trembling one practical example: St Joseph’s policy of hospitality to our homeless neighbors. This policy is not just a matter of kindness or political correctness. And woe betide us if we convince ourselves and them that their salvation consists in becoming upwardly mobile, that their hope is in becoming middle class Americans. Rather, their presence is a matter of OUR salvation. Living in communion with them shatters any illusions we might have that God has saved us through our stuff. It shows us little by little how participation in the pseudo salvation the world offers can alienate us from the world God has sent us to save by incorporating it into his church. For it is more than a little awkward to give our poor brethren a blanket and say “see you in the morning”, knowing I am going home to sleep in my warm bed. Imagining these our friends as members with us of Christ’s body permits us neither to send them away to be dealt with by others, nor to turn a blind eye to their want in the face of our relative abundance. We are rather invited to imagine a community of sharing.

So my point has been that the church is an alternative city of hope.
The more that we live our lives in it the more we see that there is plenty of room for the hope of the resurrection, and that we would indeed be hopeless people without it. This will happen not least because as we build the city of God around the eucharist and the poor we will be persecuted for it. But this persecution produces steadfastness, and steadfastness produces character, and character hope. And hope does not put us to shame.
Amen.

Some years back, Ted Turner, the media mogul, founder of  CNN, and former husband of Jane Fonda, was quoted as saying, “Christianity is for losers.”

He has a fair point.

Today is All Saints Sunday, the celebration of the communion of saints to which we belong. It’s a kind of family reunion for the Church and a good time to look over our family tree. Which, as it turns out, is chock full of losers.

Take Channing Moore Williams, for instance. He was sent as a missionary to China and Japan in 1855 and nine years later, baptized his first convert.

One. One convert in nine years. Not a great rate of return for time invested.

Williams is one of the saints on our family tree.

Or there’s Anskar, a bishop who went to spread the Gospel in Denmark and Sweden in the 800’s. He tried to plant the Church in Scandinavia on several different occasions over the course of about thirty-five years, but the kings on whom he relied for support kept getting deposed. He got back from one trip only to discover that many of the Christians in his own diocese had been carried off as slaves by a pagan tribe.

This is what one writer has to say about Anskar: “Anskar was a dud.”  Even the collect we pray on Anskar’s feast day says (and I quote), “he did not see the results of his labors.”

Anskar is one of the saints on our family tree.

Then there’s Constance and her companions, nuns living in Memphis in the late 1800’s. When Memphis was hit with a yellow fever epidemic in August of 1878, Constance and her companions chose to stay rather than flee and save their own lives. Together with the madam of a local brothel, they nursed the sick. Within the month, they were all dead.

Constance and her companions are saints on our family tree.

I could go on: Bridget, who gave away everything she had and then started in on giving away everything her family had, including what they were supposed to eat. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was doing just fine as a chaplain to members of the El Salvadoran military and government—until, that is, he looked out the window and saw the streets full of people demanding justice of that military and that government. Or Harriet Bedell who was invited to visit Seminole Indians on a reservation in southern Florida and was so appalled by their living conditions she moved in.

These are not winners in the eyes of the world. They have none of the marks of successful people: they’re not efficient, they stink at advance planning, and instead of killer instincts, these folks don’t even have instincts for self-preservation. They don’t always get visible results and they aren’t good with money, or at least they’re not good at holding on to it.

We don’t call them losers. Or winners either, for that matter. We call them saints. We look to them for inspiration and example and we proudly claim them as part of our family tree, fellow members of the communion of saints. It’s not just pure contrariness that makes us call them saints, either, because it’s awfully hard to sustain pure contrariness for a couple of millenia. And it’s not their personal saintliness that makes us call them saints because most of them weren’t actually all that saintly. They’re more like St. Augustine who prayed, “God make me chaste, but not yet.”

We call them saints because in their lives we can see God. They are signposts, pointing us to a reality beyond themselves, pointing us to God and God’s kingdom. And actually, it’s their very loserliness that let’s us catch a glimpse of God’s kingdom, a world in which all worldly priorities are reversed. Remember, God blesses the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed on His account. God turns out not to be interested in whether someone’s a winner or a loser.

And right about now, Ted Turner probably isn’t the only one who’s wondering, “Yeah, and so? So God blesses you—you’re still poor, hungry, sad, and hated. This is something we should hope for???”

Which is really a question about what is God’s blessing? What does it mean to be blessed if it doesn’t mean that all the hard things in life suddenly disappear?

Maybe you all have heard of something called the ‘prosperity gospel.’ The Prayer of Jabez came out a few years ago and was on the top of the best seller lists for a good while. Prosperity gospel advocates say that God wants to bless us and bless us abundantly which I believe is absolutely true. They go further and claim that God wants us to be abundantly successful, including financially successful, and this is where we begin to part ways. According to prosperity gospel proponents, material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing. Nice car? God obviously loves you. Big house? God is clearly on your side. Large bank account? You are truly favored!

Only that’s hard to square with what Jesus says. That replaces the Gospel news that Jesus Christ is the salvation of the world with an individualistic religion of success. The so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ is a confusion of what counts in this world with what counts in God’s kingdom. Its advocates have confused asking God to condone their lives with asking God to bless their lives.

God’s blessing has to do with relationship, not with stuff. God’s blessing is about wholeness and reconciles us to God’s self and to our loved ones and  our enemies, both. God’s blessing is about life eternal and being fully alive because we live in Christ and death has no more dominion over us.

And that changes things. God blessed Channing Moore Williams, and that freed Bishop Williams to travel far from home to an utterly foreign land and to work there day and night for nine years before he baptized his first convert. And you know what? That was just fine because the saints of God aren’t motivated by church growth, but by serving their neighbors one at a time, if need be. Blessing is about relationship, not numbers.

God blessed Anskar and although Anskar may never have felt he was making any headway in Scandinavia, that was ok. Anskar knew his job wasn’t to control the outcome, but to continue spreading the Gospel and working for the reconciliation of the world. Blessing is about ceding control to God, not about mastering the universe ourselves.

God blessed Constance and her companions and although I’m sure they didn’t want to die of yellow fever, they were nonetheless free to stay and nurse their neighbors because they loved God. Blessing is about living fearlessly because we know death isn’t the final word.

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If someone hits your cheek, offer them the other one to hit, also, and if someone takes the coat off your back, give them your shirt, too. Give to everyone who begs from you, and if someone steals your stuff, let them keep it.

In the world’s eyes, that might be a job description for losers. In God’s eyes, that’s a job description for a member of the communion of saints.

I wouldn’t stand in the midst of some of the brightest, most interesting, most engaged, and most engaging people I know—and some of their parents—and pray that we will all turn out to be losers. That’s not the point. The point is that, be they winners or losers, the saints of the Church share an extravagant, unquenchable love for God. Their very beings are lit from within because they know God is with them. They are blessed because God blesses them, and they are therefore the freest, most joyful losers—or winners—the world has ever known. And when those saints go marching in, Lord, I pray we will all be in their number. Amen.