EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

Today is All Saints Sunday, the Church’s celebration of the entire communion of saints, those alive now, those who came before us, and those who are yet to come. And a couple of days ago I discovered that the Nasher Museum is a good place to begin to explore what we mean when we say ‘saints.’

I’ve been meaning to get to the El Greco to Velazquez exhibit all fall, but was holding off in the hope that I could go see it with my mother, who is a painter. She was in town for a visit this past week, so off we went.

And among all the paintings, I was particularly struck by a portrait of St. Peter and St. Paul arguing over a text Peter’s holding. Which we can’t read because it’s written in fake Greek. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that the saints look like actual people.

You’ve probably seen some of the classical portraits of saints. They’re usually painted as idealized, serene, and ethereal, usually with one of those golden dinner plate halos hovering behind their heads.

But what’s striking about this portrait is that Peter and Paul look like actual people. Aside from the fact that Paul is a handsome, vigorous-looking young man and Peter is older and looks worse for wear—and I’d have swapped the two—they look like people I run into at Whole Foods.

Which is exactly the point. As Peter Gomes points out on the audio commentary, in the early church, ‘saint’ meant ‘believer’.  It wasn’t until much later that ‘saint’ came to mean a particularly holy miracle-worker. So when we talk about ‘All Saints’, we’re talking about baptized believers, people like you and me, the kind of people you run into everyday.

My friend Cathie went to seminary at General Theological Seminary in New York. And every morning, she’d head out from the dorms where all the students and faculty live to walk her dog, Larry Bob. One semester, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was living at General, too, and every morning as Cathie went out to walk the dog, the Archbishop was heading out for his morning constitutional. He got to be very fond of Larry Bob, so he always stopped to say hello and pet her. (yes, Larry Bob was a ‘her’).

And then, as Cathie tells it, every morning Archbishop Tutu would set off for a walk down the sidewalks of New York, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt—a small, ordinary-looking man—and no one recognized him. There went this great man, one of the saints of the church, ambling off down the street, an ordinary man among ordinary people. It makes you wonder who else we might be walking by, what other saints we’re mingling with all unaware, doesn’t it? 

That is an important thing to know about the saints: they are human, not superhuman.  And what makes them saintly isn’t so much what they do, but who they are. In the Bible, the word ‘saint’ is never singular. The Greek word that’s always used is hagio, and it’s a plural noun. It’s ‘saints’ as in “For all the saints.” There’s no concept in Scripture of an individual saint like a Saint John or Saint Paul or Saint Mary.

‘Saint’ is always ‘saints’ and it always means God’s holy ones. And they are called holy not because they themselves are holy, but because God is holy and they are associated with God. The Latin word for ‘holy’ is ‘sanctus’, from which we get the word ‘sanctified.’ The saints are those who are sanctified by God. What they do derives from who they are, not vice versa.

Celtic Christianity has given us the phrase ‘thin places’ to describe those places in the world that seem particularly holy, places where the veil between this world and the next seems particularly transparent. Saints are like that. They are the embodiment of what we mean by thin places. We look at them and see what it means that we are loved by God. The saints are those in whom the light of Christ shines for us.

In a few minutes we’ll read a litany of saints. And in it, we’ll name some of the saints of the church who are familiar to many of us: Martin Luther King and Florence Nightengale. But we’ll also name some of the saints of the church that only a few or maybe even just one of us knows: a grandparent, a teacher, or a friend. The saints are people we read about in history books, and people we know and love, and people we’ll never hear about. The communion of saints is a communion of all those who believe, and what they have in common isn’t fame, but love for God and love for those around them. Saints are witnesses to God’s love for us in human form.

And what difference does that make? What does it mean that the saints are human and not superhuman, that they are our neighbors, the folks we pass in a crowd? It means that the Gospel is still happening. It means that Christ’s love for us is a present reality, not a past event. Which is an amazing thing, if you think about it. It’s a continuation of the Incarnation—God’s Word made flesh. It means that holiness is something tangible, present, and real.

And what that means is that we aren’t called just to honor saints, but to be saints. Isn’t that crazy? God has picked everyday, ordinary people like you and me to receive the love of Christ and to carry that love out into the world. We are called to be part of the great continuum known as the communion of saints, those who have come before, those who are present now, and those who are yet to come. We are, all of us, united to Christ and all God’s holy people because we have been baptized into Christ’s death and will be joined to him in his resurrection.

Which means we don’t have to go to Haiti to be saints, or sell everything we have and give it to the poor, or even vote one way or the other on Tuesday. What we need to do to be saints is to receive the love of God. And that’s what we’re doing now. That’s what we’ll do when we gather around God’s Table in just a few minutes to receive the bread that really is the bread of heaven and drink the wine that really is the cup of salvation. We’ll be receiving the love of God and when we head back out into the night, we’ll be carrying God’s love with us out into the world.

And that will transform the world. God, in His mercy, has given us the grace and means to let His love shine through us. By God’s grace, everyday life is where holiness happens. By His extraordinary love, ordinary people like you and me are equipped to be saints, the holy people of God. The saints will go marching in, and thanks be to God, we are called to be in their number now and forever. Amen.

This past Sunday there was a story in the New York Times Magazine about a school in Decatur, Georgia, outside Atlanta. The Community School, as it’s known, is a small school for teenage boys with autism. It has a student body of ten and the article begins with a description of those students gathering for Morning Meeting which is how they begin each school day.

The stated agenda for the morning meeting is to go over everyone’s spring schedules. But the real agenda is what it always is: to engage the students in “conversation, [and] debate, [and] negotiation, [and] compromise [all of which are about] the building of relationships.” (NYT Magazine, Oct. 19, 2008, p. 34). So outbursts and interruptions are actually encouraged. The whole point of the school is to help boys whose brains aren’t wired for engaging with other people learn to do so. And anything the boys offer up is an opening.

Teaching these students to engage with other people isn’t just to make them easier to be around. It’s to help their brains. In the middle of the article there’s a fabulous explanation: “Brain development,” it says, “isn’t a solo pursuit but a rich and complex flowering that occurs only in the hothouse of human relationships.” (ibid, p. 35) In other words, we can’t fully become who we’re meant to be by ourselves. Our need for other people is so basic it’s part of how our brains grow.

Now it makes perfect sense that we would be wired for relationship. We’re made in the image of our triune God, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all at the same time. We’re made in the image of God who is in His very Being an active, loving community. One of my favorite words to describe this God is a Greek one: perichoreisis. ‘Peri’ means ‘around’ and ‘choreo‘ means ‘dance’ so perichoreisis means dancing in a circle. It’s the way the ancient church described the loving community at the heart of God’s being.

And this is what’s behind what Jesus tells the Pharisees who gather to test him. When one of them asks, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.” That’s taken from the commandment in Deuteronomy known as the shema, which means, “Hear,” which is how the passage begins, “Hear, O Israel. . . Shema, Israel. . .” That commandment is at the very center of Jewish life and liturgy, so of course it’s the one Jesus picks, but then he keeps going and adds a commandment from another book of the Bible altogether.

“And a second is like it,” he says. “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” That commandment is taken from Leviticus, from a section of the book known as the ‘holiness code’.  And for Israel, ‘holy’ isn’t a description of some impossible ideal, but a description of how Israel is supposed to live. The commands in the holiness code answer the question of how can Israel live as God’s holy people?

The command to love our neighbors as ourselves in Leviticus is the second part of a command about not hating: “Don’t hate your neighbor and don’t hang on to a grudge against her, but love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” And ‘love’ doesn’t mean an emotion here, but a concrete action. To love your neighbor means to reach out to him, to befriend her, to really see the person in front of us. And the distinction between a holy action and just being nice is that part at the end where God says, “I am the Lord.” Loving the neighbor as God intends isn’t just about being neighborly. It’s an act of faith undertaken in obedience to God.

And when Jesus holds these two commandments together, he expands the idea of what it means to love God. The Pharisees to whom he’s speaking love God and they love God’s Law. Their particular gift to the Jewish community was to explore how a community could keep God’s law day in and day out, to understand everyday life as the place where holiness happens-the equivalent of saying that holiness is not confined to what we do in church on Sunday, but is something we carry with us every other day of the week, too.

But, as we humans tend to do, they’ve gone too far in one direction. Keeping the Law has become an end unto itself. Jesus is calling these faithful people to expand their understanding of what it means to be holy from adhering to the last letter of every law to an engaged participation in community and communion. Being holy isn’t about minding your P’s and Q’s, Jesus is saying, but about loving the person right in front of you-that’s what it means to love God.

The Pharisees had gone too far in the direction of legalism. We, on the other hand, have gone too far in the direction of individualism. We tend to hear the command to love our neighbor as ourselves as ‘love your neighbor as you LOVE yourself,” as if to say love for others begins with self-love and self-esteem.

Now, I’m all for self-love and self-esteem. In fact, NOT loving our own selves can be a way of denying that we are loved by God. It can be a way of saying, well, God’s forgiveness and love applies to everyone else, but me, I’m not worthy. Which is a backdoor way of saying that our sinfulness somehow trumps God’s love for us.

Holding on too tightly to a sense that we’re not worthy of God’s love can be a form of pride. So, yes, we are to love ourselves because God loves us. But that’s not what Jesus is getting at here. When Jesus says we’re to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, he means that loving others-being in communion with our neighbors-is how we love God. It’s how we become the people God created us to be. This is literally true. Human development, as the Times article says, isn’t a solo pursuit but a rich and complex flowering that occurs only in the hothouse of human relationships.

And what that means is that love has to have a face. Love that’s only an abstract idea floating somewhere off in the heavens has no meaning for us. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” has a face. God’s love for us has a face, and that is the face of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

And God’s love for us teaches us how to love. We learn to love by being loved-just as the boys at the Community School learn to engage with others because others engage with them.  We learn to love by being loved by our parents, by our family and community, and by our friends. All of that equips us to begin to recognize what it means that we’re loved by God in Christ.

And once we begin to recognize what it means that God loves us, we start to see neighbors everywhere we look. We begin to see all the ways we divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ through race, and religion, and nationality, and gender, and sexuality. All those categories we assign people to keep us from meeting them full on as human beings. They’re ways of walling ourselves off from one another, of defending ourselves from those we label as ‘other.’

But the thing is, we have no self to defend apart from the one that comes into being by the act of loving. There is no God apart from the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dancing together in loving community, and there is no being fully human without loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. There is the law and there are the prophets, but all they have to teach us depends on the two great commandments, the commandments to love.

This is very good news, my friends. Because we are loved we are invited to love. We who are loved deeply, unconditionally, and eternally by God are invited to love God and our neighbor. We are, all of us, invited to join together in God’s loving dance. Amen.

I hope this won’t come as a surprise to you, but I love church. I love coming to church, being with other people who come to church, gathering together to worship, to listen, to sing, to pray, to give thanks, and to be fed and strengthened by God and for God and for one another.

I also love things like canon law and the church constitution and vestry meetings, but I understand those may be an acquired taste.

I love church, and I especially love the Episcopal Church. I’m not actually a cradle Episcopalian: I was confirmed and received as an adult. What got me here was one Sunday I walked into an Episcopal church and I fell in love with the service. I fell in love with the liturgy.

The word “liturgy” comes from the Greek word leitourgia which means, literally, the work of the people. So it’s not something the priest does or something the musicians do or something the people in the pews do but something we all do, together. And, of course, there’s good liturgy and bad liturgy. There’s liturgy that’s dry as dust and some that’s so wild and crazy it completely loses track of what it’s doing. But good liturgy, in all its many variations, is a container. Good liturgy holds us together and gives shape and focus to our worship of God. It’s a structure in which we enact, and proclaim, and participate in the mighty acts of God.

Of course, we don’t live our whole lives in church. We’re not meant to. The very last thing that happens in our liturgy is that we’re sent forth, out into the world to love and serve the Lord. Which is exactly what we’ve been doing here, but it’s a little more free-form out there in the big world. Here we have the Prayer Book to guide our liturgy. But what about out there? What shapes and focuses our lives before God once we go back outside?

One possible answer would be what we just heard in Exodus, the Ten Commandments. That’s what shapes our lives once we leave church. Voilá, question answered, problem solved. We can all go home now and come back next week.

But it’s not that simple. And part of the problem, actually, is that we may a little too familiar with the Ten Commandments. I’ve driven past lots of front yards with a small sign in the shape of two stone tablets stuck in the grass. And I know even without stopping to check that the lines on the tablets are the Ten Commandments. It’s a sign that the person who lives there wants to be right with God, the sign of someone who aims to keep God’s Law.

And the problem isn’t what’s on the sign. The problem is actually what’s missing from the sign. If you stop the car long enough to check it out you’ll see that the first line reads, “I am the Lord your God.” The second line is, “You shall have no other gods before me.”

What’s missing is something essential. God doesn’t say, “I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.” God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” What’s missing from the yard signs is the story of God’s saving act.

And that is a gaping hole. Skipping God’s salvation means taking God’s commandments entirely out of context. Because the Ten Commandments aren’t an abstract moral code or random guidance for how to be a good person. They’re the gift of a loving, liberating God to the people He set free. God gives His commandments to His Chosen People to teach them how they’re to live together as a community with God in their midst.

The psalmist lists praise after praise for God’s commands. “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul . . . The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes.”

It’s hard to catch the full meaning in English, but in Hebrew to say that the law of the Lord is perfect means the law of the Lord has integrity-it has wholeness-and that’s what revives the soul. Because that’s what the Commandments are intended to do: they’re intended to help a community live into God’s wholeness-to live, in other words, in holiness, in sweet harmony and nearness to God.  That’s why the psalmist says they are “[m]ore to be desired than gold . . . sweeter than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.”

The commandments describe who Israel and we really are as the people of God. We’re a people who worship God, resisting the temptation to worship other gods or to make idols to worship instead of God. We’re a people who don’t trivialize the name of God, forgetting it’s holy. We’re a people who don’t make gods of ourselves by thinking that the world depends on our work and not God’s, or by forgetting what we owe to those who brought us into this world. We’re to respect the boundaries of life, and marriage, and honesty, and property because we can’t be holy on our own, but only together as the children of God living in God’s good Creation. We are called to live together in peace.

The Ten Commandments aren’t prescriptions so much as they are descriptions. They aren’t demands so much as they’re accounts of who God freed us to be. By God’s grace we aren’t meant to be merely moral, but holy-the holy people of God.

Which brings me back to church. This all sounds like a pretty tall order, doesn’t it, living as God’s holy people? It sounds like a daunting responsibility. But that’s why God has given us one another and that’s why we come back here week after week, Sunday after Sunday.

The highlight of the Christian year is the Easter Vigil, the night when we pass over from death into life, from Good Friday into Easter. And at the beginning of the vigil, the deacon sings the Exsultet, the song that recounts the story of our salvation, beginning with the exodus and continuing right up through Christ’s resurrection.

It starts on page 286 of the Book of Common Prayer in case you want to check it out later.

This is what’s right in the middle of the Exsultet:

“This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land. This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.”

This is the night, we sing at the Vigil, when we live again the story of God’s saving grace. And that’s what we’re doing now, too. That’s what we’re doing every time we gather to make Eucharist. We gather to hear God’s Word, to confess our sins and be absolved of them, to offer our lives and our selves to God, and to be comforted and strengthened by Christ’s Body and Blood.

And we do this together-there’s no such thing as a Eucharist for one. God doesn’t call us to be holy persons but a holy people. And by God’s grace, that’s who we are when we gather in His name.

It’s not a one shot deal. It’s something we live into our whole lives. In Christ, God has given us everything we need to be His holy people and in each other He’s given us a community in which we learn what that means.

Like I said, I love church. Amen.

I watched a documentary this past week called, What Would Jesus Buy? It tells the story of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. They’re on a mission to get Americans to . . . stop shopping. They want to challenge rampant consumerism right where it happens, so they stage interventions at malls, and Wal Marts, and Starbucks.

There are a lot of very funny scenes of the Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping in action, including one of Reverend Billy exorcising a latte at Starbucks. But there are also a lot of scenes that are deeply sad. A woman during the Christmas shopping rush who says, “I don’t have the money, but it’s for the kids. It’s all for the kids.” Another mother, who doesn’t look like she’s very well-off, listing the things she has in her shopping bags: Nintendo, and Wii, and Tickle-Me-Elmo. A young man on Rodeo Drive who says what he wants for Christmas is a Prada dogtag and a pair of Gucci loafers.

There are scenes of people standing in crowds, pressed up against the entrance to big box stores, waiting for the doors to open and the Christmas shopping season to begin. And those are followed by scenes of what happens once the doors do open: people stumble and fall, and get trampled by the crowd rushing in to buy stuff. It’s like the horrific scenes of people getting trampled on haj, but instead of trying to get to Mecca, these folks are trying to get into Best Buy.

It’s madness.

And it’s not that these people are bad, or stupid, or ridiculous. If anything, what they are is well-trained. They live, like we all do, surrounded by billboards, and ads, and magazines, and stores all of which promise that what they’re offering will make us better-looking, smarter, more distinctive, and popular.

We’re vulnerable to those promises because part of what it is to be human is to yearn. Desire is encoded in our DNA. Longing is part of the human condition.

This economy is built on playing to that longing. It’s driven by manufacturing our desire for stuff, by offering us things to buy that will somehow answer the yearning deep inside us.

That hasn’t worked out so well. It turns out the entire country has been caught in a stampede at a big box store. We’ve been caught with our collective noses smushed up against the glass doors trying to get at the stuff inside as if it were the Holy of Holies.

And into this madness comes Paul.

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, humbling himself and being obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

The yearning that is in us is there because we are created in the image of God. We desire because God desires. God desires us-God loves us so much He sent us His only Son. Only in us, desire gets twisted. St. Augustine said we are created with free will, but that our will gets bent. It gets curved in on itself. And so what is at its source a yearning for God becomes instead a desire for self-fulfillment. We get in our own way of desiring God.

It’s a mess, but it’s not a hopeless mess. It’s not hopeless because God won’t let it be.

Paul is everything the market tells us we should not be. In worldly terms, he has no status, no security, no power, and I’m just guessing here, probably no sex appeal. He’s been flogged, chased from town to town, and tossed in prison. And yet, he’s joyful. His letters are just lit up with joy.

“I thank my God every time I remember you all,” he writes to the Philippians, “constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you . . . . And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more . . . And I will continue to rejoice. . . For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” To live is Christ and to die is only to have more of Christ.

That is the context for how Paul tells the Philippians to live. They are to have the same mind as Jesus did, to follow him in emptying themselves and looking to serve one another rather than grasping at power or status or whatever else it is the world tells us we want.

Which is something the world is very good at doing. The market will tell us how we are to express ourselves. It will tell us how what we buy describes who we are. It will tell us that the way for a mother to show love for her children is to buy them lots of things, more things than she can possibly afford or that they can enjoy, for that matter. And it’s a very successful system, because the stuff we get in the name of self-fulfillment won’t ever fulfill our yearning. So we’ll keep buying more stuff to fill in the emptiness we feel inside.

And the way out isn’t to punish ourselves. When Paul urges us to follow Jesus who emptied himself, he isn’t calling us to self-punishment any more than he’s calling us to follow Jesus as a means to self-fulfillment. It isn’t really even a question of what we’re supposed to do so much as it is a discovery of what God’s already doing.

“. . . for it is God who is at work in you,” Paul says, “enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” The self-emptying Paul means isn’t about following a rigid list of rules for self-improvement, but about responding to God who’s already living and working in us. The self-emptying Paul has in mind is a deepening awareness of God. The practice of loving humility he describes is about making more and more space for the Creator who longs to be with us.

That’s why we’re to love one another and to seek out one another’s best interests rather than our own. It’s not about restricting our wants but about discovering our freedom, discovering it in the joy of serving Christ by serving one another.

The good news is, it’s already happened. The incredibly good news is that Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, is here. God has already given us exactly what we want. Jesus is our heart’s desire. Amen.

Jesus tells a parable: a landowner goes out early one morning to hire some folks to come work in his vineyard. He agrees to pay them the usual daily wage and off they go to work. A little while later, the landowner sees some other folks waiting around, hoping for a job, and he hires them, too, promising to pay ‘whatever’s right’. And so it goes through the day: the landowner keeps going back to the marketplace, finding people there looking for work, and hiring them on, even at 5:00, right before the end of the day.

We know the rest: evening comes and the landowner has all the workers line up and begins to pay them, starting with the folks hired on last, the ones who worked the least. And when the people who’ve been working since dawn see that the people who only worked long enough to pick a couple of grapes are getting a full day’s wage, they get excited.

“Wow, if those latecomers are getting that much, how much are we going to get?”

And the answer, of course, is that they’re paid exactly what they were told they’d be paid: a full day’s wage, a just amount for the amount of work they’ve done.

They’re not happy. And we’re sympathetic. Yes, ok, we understand that the all-day workers weren’t shortchanged, that they got what they had coming to them. But it seems so unfair-compared to the amount of effort they put in, those other folks got so much more. And I’ve read loads of commentaries and articles and even sermons about this passage, and they all get it, too. This is God’s upside down world, they say. God’s justice isn’t like human justice. This is all about God’s grace which He bestows on the least of us as well as on the greatest of us.

And that may be true, but it doesn’t take away the sting. Some of those folks worked the whole day out in the vineyard under a hot sun and some got there right before the sun went down, but they all were paid the same amount. How is that fair? Ok, the folks who didn’t work as hard are just as entitled to God’s grace. That’s good news, but in the sense that yucky tasting medicine is good news-it’s good for us, but it’s a little hard to swallow.

A lot of commentaries on this passage try and make it easier to swallow.  They speculate that the 5:00 workers faced other challenges like maybe they had sick children at home, or they were unemployed because the economy was stacked against them, or they weren’t able-bodied and therefore couldn’t work a whole day.

Whatever. There’s nothing about that in the actual story. Nowhere does it say anything about the lives of the latecomers. Nowhere does it offer any mitigating circumstances that would somehow even things out with the workers who’ve been there since dawn. If we take the story at face value what we get is, these folks got a great deal-the flip side of which is that the folks who worked all day didn’t. This is what the kingdom of heaven is like? Arbitrary? Unfair? How is this good news? It’s outrageous!

And that, actually, may be the point.

Again and again, Jesus tells parables that make no sense-a sower who throws seed all over the place; a merchant who sells absolutely everything he has to buy just one pearl of great price; a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep alone to go find the one sheep who’s gone wandering. Again and again, Jesus tells these stories that just don’t add up in worldly terms, stories with rough edges we can’t smooth away. They’re shocking and that’s why Jesus tells them. He tells these parables to jolt us out of hearing only what we’re listening for, to shock us out of waiting to have our expectations confirmed. These stories conform to God’s logic, not ours, and that hasn’t changed.

Jesus’ parables always take place in the day-to-day world of ordinary people. They’re always about people in their everyday lives, making a living, interacting with their neighbors. And we hear a lot of these parables during the part of our liturgical year known as Ordinary Time. The ‘ordinary’ comes from the word ‘ordinal’ because each of the Sundays is counted-today is the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, for instance. But Ordinary Time also means ‘common’ time, Christian Standard Time as someone once said. And these parables break into Ordinary Time just as Jesus’ incarnation breaks into everyday life.

To our ears, some of Jesus’ parables may have lost their sting. Sowers and pearls and sheep sound bucolic or slightly quaint. That’s not true of this story about the hired laborers. This story is still jarring. It’s still offensive. It has it all, from the exploitation of the poorest workers to not giving each his due. It makes no sense, economically or otherwise.

But Jesus doesn’t tell this parable by way of laying out an economic alternative to capitalism. He’s not looking to make amendments to an existing system or to offer up an economic case study we’re meant to apply. He tells this parable to startle us into seeing something we’ve never seen, to help us name something for which we’ve had no words.

We hear things in the language of rights: a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work; to each his due; the rights of the workers. But Jesus is teaching us a new language, a language of need being met, of payment determined by generosity, not contract, of being loved rather than merely compensated.

That doesn’t mean the folks who worked all day were loved any less than the folks who worked only an hour. That Jesus ate dinner with all kinds of sinners doesn’t mean the faithful people he didn’t eat dinner with were damned. The ninety-nine sheep who weren’t lost aren’t worthless because Jesus does whatever it takes to find the one who is lost. This parable about the vineyard workers isn’t about measuring their relative worth. It doesn’t mean that the ones who worked the least are loved the most. Really, it’s not about them at all, but about God. About God whose criteria for who gets what is God’s love, not our merit. To the extent this parable is about us, it’s about our need rather than our deserts being God’s criteria for giving.

It’s always tempting to believe that God is somehow bound by our sense of what’s fair or what’s just. It’s tempting to believe that those who came to the vineyard early and worked longest should have a greater claim on God’s love and generosity. But Jesus tells us that the last will be first and the first last. That is the truth of what we mean when we say, “God is love.” God’s love stretches far beyond the bounds of our sense of fairness or our inclination to weigh one another’s relative merits and worthiness. God’s grace breaks open the limits we set on God’s love, just as Jesus’ parables break open our limited vision, and Jesus’ existence breaks open our understanding of what it means to be human.

God loves without limits and God gives without limits. And because we are created in God’s image, we are created to live in that limitless love and that limitless generosity. We are created to be as startlingly generous with others as God is with us, to love without measure, because by doing so we’re following Jesus, the last who is first, right into the center of God’s kingdom.

Praise God that this is true. Pray God that we may live into that truth. Amen.

I saw a wonderful movie the other night. I missed it when it was in the theaters and it’s taken me a while to get to it on dvd, but I finally got around to seeing Lars and the Real Girl. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s about a young man who’s isolated and withdrawn and apparently very lonely, even though he lives in the midst of a tight-knit community.

Until one day Lars shows up at the door of his brother and sister-in-law’s house, unexpectedly, and asks if he might introduce them to his new girlfriend. And his brother and sister-in-law are delighted until they discover that Lars’ new ‘girlfriend’ is actually a life-size blow-up doll. Then they’re horrified, but Lars is acting like she’s real and not knowing what else to do, they go along with him.

And it spreads from there. The townspeople are taken aback, and they’re not sure how best to help Lars, but they love him, so they take his new ‘girlfriend’ on Lars’ terms. They welcome her and make a place for her in their community-to such an extent, in fact, that she begins to have a sort of life of her own. Various townsfolk arrive to take her with them to volunteer at the hospital, or to fix her hair, or for a girls’ night out. She goes to a party with Lars, and to church, and even gets a job modeling clothes in a store window.

None of them ever forgets that she’s a blow-up doll but nor do they forget Lars. That she’s not a real person is secondary because he is.

It’s a pity St. Paul didn’t have access to Lars and the Real Girl, but he didn’t, of course, so he had to make do with writing a letter to the Romans. He writes his letter to the church in Rome very early in its life as a church. It’s early enough, in fact, that Christians are still working out what it means to be Christian-which we’re still doing today, of course, but now we have such helpful things as the New Testament and a couple thousand years of church history to help us. This is before the Gospels are written down and there’s obviously not much church history to go by, so these folks are struggling to figure out exactly what it means that they’ve been called to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

Some of them have discovered an enormous freedom in what Paul’s proclaimed to them. “Wow, Jesus died for our sins, so whether we follow a particular set of rules and regulations has nothing to do with whether we’re saved. So, hooray! We’re free!”

Others of them hear the Gospel Paul has preached to them and it sounds really good and really inviting, but they’re still pretty sure they could violate God’s law and mess up their chance at salvation. So, among other things, they refrain from eating what they regard as unholy food.

The first group thinks that’s absurd. For Christians who have been set free, food’s not holy or unholy. It’s just food.

Paul, as it happens, agrees with them about the holiness and food issue. But, really, that’s not what counts in this new thing called church. What really counts is loving your neighbor as yourself and there, Paul says, you Romans are falling short.

“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.”

Paul’s not confused about the reality of the freedom the Roman Christians have discovered, anymore than the townsfolk were confused about Lars’ girlfriend being a doll. One possibility might have been to have Lars committed, but that wouldn’t necessarily have persuaded him that their way was reality and his was delusion. Instead, the townsfolk walk with Lars. They offer him companionship by offering companionship to his friend. By making a place for her, they help him to begin to make a place for himself.

“Walk in love, as Christ loved us” we say at the offertory in the middle of our service. And that’s what Paul’s saying to the Romans. Yes, you are free, forgiven sinners, but if the way you live into that freedom causes offense to your brother or sister, cut it out! You may have every right to do something, but lording that over someone is not walking in love.

I love to have a glass of good wine with dinner. I’m of age and I drink responsibly, so I have every right to enjoy wine with my dinner. But if I am eating with someone who struggles with alcoholism, my right to drink alcohol isn’t relevant. I need to skip the wine. Yes, I’m free to drink whatever I want, but my freedom is less important than my neighbor’s need. My job, says Paul, isn’t to be right, but to love.

Of course, that’s easier with things like wine and dinner than it is with matters of faith and tradition. Take our own church for example: American Anglicans and Nigerian Anglicans believe in the same God. We’re all trying to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. And in the Episcopal Church, our understanding of what that means includes the possibility that a gay man can be a faithful bishop of the church. That’s our reality. For our brothers and sisters in the Nigerian church a gay bishop is simply not a possibilty. That is not reality as they know it. So how do we walk in love with one another?

And what about getting an ardent Republican and an ardent Democrat in an election year to walk in love? What if I disagree with a member of a different party with every fiber of my being? How do I walk in love with that person? Now, there’s a challenge.

And it’s a challenge for which I don’t have an easy answer, but that doesn’t excuse me-or us-from wrestling with it in all humility. It would help if the Bible were a rule book with handy case studies we could apply to sticky situations as they arose. But that’s not what God has given us. What He has given us is Jesus who tells Peter: “How often should you forgive? Seventy-seven times.” An impossible number of times. A limitless number of times. Because forgiveness has no limits and love has no boundaries.

That’s not an easy answer. But it is the right answer and it is true. And, paradoxically enough, the way to live into the boundless freedom and joy God offers us may be to accept boundaries on our neighbors’ behalf.

Towards the end of Lars and the Real Girl, Lars begins to make his way back from his reality to the reality of the people around him. And the way that happens is his life-size doll girlfriend gets sick and begins to die. Now, of course, she can’t really die because she’s not really alive. But that’s not what the townsfolk tell him. What they do is bring flowers and casseroles and jello salads. And when Lars comes downstairs from the sickroom, he finds a group of women sitting in the living room, knitting. They fix him a plate and sit him down and when he asks what they’re doing, they tell him, “We’re sitting with you. That’s what people do when there’s a tragedy.”

That’s what we’re called to do whether there’s a tragedy or not. For as Paul tells the Romans, “The judgment’s not up to you-we’re all going to be judged by God. So worry less about who’s right and who’s wrong and more about what you can do to welcome your neighbor. Because whatever else you may think is true, know this: Jesus Christ has died for you and all that’s left for us to do is to love another as he’s loved us. Walk in love, my brothers and my sisters, walk in love.” Amen.

This has been an interesting week. I feel like the weatherman is my new best friend, given the amount of time I’ve spent hanging on his every word. I’ve been keeping a very close eye on the weather forecast and on the projected path for Tropical Storm, make that Hurricane, no wait Tropical Storm, no, well, almost a hurricane Hanna. Because we always go on a beach retreat at the beginning of the year and how dare Hanna rain on our parade?

One of my favorite things about our beach retreats is hearing everyone’s stories-both the stories of the people I’m just meeting for the first time, and the stories of the people I’ve gotten to know as we’ve travelled together through the semesters. Because here we all are-new students, feeling like strangers in a strange land (even if you’re glad to be here and even if you’re excited about what you’re doing). Returning students, for whom the landscape has shifted-sometimes literally given the rate at which Duke’s building and renovating, but also in terms of who’s here. This is a new place for all of us.

Going to the beach together is a way of beginning to discover who we are as a community. But, not to worry. All is not lost even if we couldn’t get to the beach. Our texts today go a long way towards helping us understand who we are when we come together as this community called church.

From Exodus: we are a community shaped by the story of God’s liberating love;

From Matthew: which means, among other things, that Jesus is in our midst.

First, the story.

Children’s stories usually begin, “Once upon a time . . .”

The children’s story told in our reading from Exodus today begins, “On the tenth day of this month, many years ago, the Lord passed through the land of Egypt and struck down every firstborn. But the Lord spared us.”

That’s what Moses tells the Israelites to tell their children in years to come during the Passover celebration marking the start of their journey out from slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land.

The story begins when God tells Moses and Aaron, “This is what’s going to happen. I’m going to pass through Egypt and I’m going to strike down every firstborn, human and animal alike. And this is what you need to do to prepare.”

And God gives precise, detailed instructions for what the Israelites are to do. On the tenth of the month, get a lamb, a perfect, unblemished year old male. Keep it until the 14^th, then all of you assemble together at twilight and slaughter the lambs at the same time. Then take some of the blood and wipe it on the doorposts and lintels of the house where the lamb will be eaten. Then cook it exactly as I tell you, and don’t leave any leftovers until the next day. If there are any leftovers, burn them. Oh, and when you do eat, eat with your shoes on and eat fast. Get prepared and be ready to go.

Why all the elaborate instructions? Couldn’t they maybe have grilled the lamb, skipped the messy blood part, sat down to dinner, and packed up the leftovers for lunch the next day?

No, they couldn’t, and here’s why. Because this account in Exodus was written down years and years after it happened. And by then the descendants of the people who ate the first Passover meal had been enacting the story of how God brought them out from slavery in Egypt for a long time. Which is exactly what God tells them to do-celebrate this day throughout the generations. Remember, this month is the beginning of months. This is the beginning of your new life as God’s Chosen People.

The Passover tells and passes on the foundational stories and traditions of Judaism to children and newcomers. The rituals of the meal and the words surrounding it “witness to the living God in. . .a way that [lets] a new generation come to [possess] those stories as their own, [helping them] to know God more truly and love God more deeply.”

It has that in common with the rituals and meals of our own tradition.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all testify that Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper during the Passover meal “on the night he was betrayed.” He takes bread and then wine and tells his disciples to eat and drink and to do so “in remembrance of me.” Just as the Israelites were told to observe a ritual Passover meal centered on the story of the Passover, so are the disciples given a ritual meal that embodies the story at the center of our Christian faith, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

And just as the Passover meal makes the Passover story live in new generations of Israelites, the Lord’s Supper ‘re-members’-makes members of-the Body of Christ-the telling, the hearing, the eating, and the drinking of the Lord’s Supper literally makes us who we are. When two or three or more of us gather in Jesus’ name-when we gather, in other words, as church-Jesus tells us that he will be here, too. We will be re-membered, the Body of Christ with Christ.

And why do we do this week after week? Because we are a story-shaped people. We tell these stories and we do these things over and over so that they become our own. We come together every week to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in order to know God more truly and to love God more deeply. The Passover story and the story of the Lord’s Supper are stories about a people called together by God, coming together around a meal, a ritual, and the words surrounding it, and in that gathering, continuing to live the story of God’s People.

We don’t all know each other’s stories yet. Some of us have only just met. But by gathering here today we have begun the story of our life together as the community of God’s people known as the Episcopal Center. And our very gathering is our ongoing witness to the living God, to the presence of Jesus in this community.

We may have lost our weekend at the beach, but we’ll never lose that. Amen.

If you love politics, then welcome to hog heaven. It’s convention season and there’s a feast of politicking going on.

And, if you love politics, then welcome to church. Specifically, welcome to Matthew chapter 16, verses 13-28 in which Jesus and Peter talk some serious politics.

The passage we heard today is actually part two of an account started last week when Peter confesses to Jesus, “You are the Messiah.” And when Peter first says “Messiah” he means something very different than we do now. Peter’s talking politics. For faithful Jews like him, ‘messiah’ was a political term. It meant a descendant of King David’s who would be sent by God to boot out the Romans and rule the tribes of Israel, ushering in a golden messianic age.

And in case we missed the politics of what’s going on, Matthew tells us all this happens in sight of Caesarea Philippi. That’s a city built by King Philip on top of an enormous natural rock formation, a city to which Philip gave his own name and that of the Roman Emperor, thereby currying favor with Caesar while building a giant monument to himself that could be seen for miles and miles around.

The folks charged with designing the stages at the Democratic and Republican conventions would do well to brush up on Matthew’s Gospel. As political backdrops go, this one’s hard to miss.

So there’s Peter, Caesarea Philippi in the background, looking at Jesus, certain that the old politics is on its way out and the new politics is about to begin.

And it is, but not the way Peter expects. Because the first thing Jesus does is switch the backdrop. He points away from kingly Caesarea Philippi to the temple city of Jerusalem which, as it happens, is on the other big rock in Israel. Here’s Peter ready for Jesus to kick King Philip and the Roman Empire out of Israel, and here’s Jesus talking instead about how he’s going to go to Jerusalem and be killed.

This creates some cognitive dissonance for Peter.

“God forbid it, Lord!” he rebukes Jesus. “This must never happen to you!”

But it can and it will because Jesus has a whole new way of doing politics, a way that has nothing to do with domination and everything to do with laying down our lives for our neighbors.

I was listening to some of the convention coverage this past week when I heard an interview with Representative John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia. John Lewis is the last survivor of the people who spoke alongside Dr. Martin Luther King exactly 45 years ago this past Thursday when he gave his “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Lewis was being interviewed on the eve of Barack Obama’s accepting the Democratic nomination to be President, and as he spoke, his voice cracked.

“It’s going to be incredible,” he said. “You know, people died. Some people didn’t make it to the March on Washington. They were beaten. They were tear-gassed. Some were shot and killed. And even after the March on Washington, where there had been so much hope, so much optimism, we had the terrible bombing on a church in Birmingham, where four little girls were killed. I thought I’d cried all my tears,” he said.

And I know about the civil rights movement-I grew up with it. I’ve read about it and studied it and talked to people who were passionately involved in it. I’ve listened to Martin Luther King’s sermons and his speeches and read his letters and if you stick around here long enough, I promise you you’ll hear me talk about Jonathan Myrick Daniels who was martyred in the movement.

But what struck me as I listened to John Lewis, what struck me in a way it never had before, was the presence of those who died, the presence of people who believed so deeply in the God-given dignity of every human life, they were willing to lay down their own lives on those human’s behalf.

“Those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” says Jesus. Those who live as I have lived-for others-even even to the point of dying as I have died-for others-those are my followers. That’s the politics of Jesus, the politics he begins to teach Peter and the other disciples, standing in the shadow of Caesarea Philippi looking toward Jerusalem and the Cross.

The Greek word for bearing witness is martureow from which we get the English word ‘martyr.’ It does not follow, however, that everyone who follows Jesus will be martyred, nor does it follow that only those people who are actually martyred are genuine followers of Jesus.

Losing our life for Jesus’ sake may mean learning to live loosely to privilege and entitlement, or letting go of our need to be right in order to allow someone else to be fully heard and understood, or learning to detach ourselves from worldly markers of success and listening for God’s call instead. Losing our life for Jesus’ sake may mean practicing kenosis, the self-emptying Paul talks about in his letter to the Philippians when he says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves . . . look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

And when I say ‘practicing’ these things, I mean practicing: the doing may precede the feeling by a lot.

But anyone who tells you that the life of Christian discipleship is simple or easy or comfortable isn’t being square with you. I came across a comment from someone who said about this passage from Matthew’s Gospel, “I think Jesus was teasing Peter, the way good friends do who know each other thoroughly. I am coming to believe that these things are probably said with a twinkle in Jesus’ eye, maybe even a smile and a wink.”

I disagree (she says with enormous understatement and self-restraint). Following Jesus takes everything we’ve got, every bit of ourselves, all of our love, and will, and intellect, and hope, and intention, and desire and it won’t always be comfortable, or easy, or even safe. But it will bring us great joy, greater joy than anything else we could ever do.

If you’ve ever seen Representative Lewis, then you’ve seen the scars on his face, scars from the beatings he got for bearing witness. And if you heard his interview, you heard what bearing witness has cost. But you also heard him say he was blessed.

I hope, I pray, that John Lewis lives in the joy that comes from following Jesus. And I hope, I pray, that by God’s grace, we’ll live in that joy, too. Amen.

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.