EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

by Catherine Phillips

“God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”

I remember hearing this Gospel lesson as a child and being confused by it – I knew I wasn’t supposed to be like the self-righteous Pharisee but I wasn’t quite sure why God wanted me to be the tax collector either. Yeah, sure, I got the humility part, in theory anyway – but he was still a tax collector, right?

And though at first I dismissed that question as juvenile, maybe it’s not such a bad question after all.

It’s easy to forget to listen to scripture – I mean really listen.  Too often, myself first among us, we think we know what is being said – we think we get the gospel condemnation of self-righteousness, the gospel call to embody humility, the gospel call not to trust in ourselves but to trust in God.  But if we stop and really listen, the text still rubs against us in uncomfortable ways and we see how hard it is to embody what we are called to be – hard precisely, I would suggest, because it is such good news that we can hardly believe it possible.

The text tells us that Jesus is speaking to people who trust in themselves that they are righteous and regard others with contempt.  And though I’m sure we all have someone else whom we think Jesus is talking to here – it might as well be us, really.  We are all from time to time a little too confident in our own righteousness, a little too dismissive of people who don’t hold the same opinions as we do, the same passion for justice, or the same pious commitment to prayer.

And so Jesus tells us about these two people who come to pray in the temple – a Pharisee and a tax collector.  The Pharisee, by all outward measures, sounds like he’s got his act together – he’s fasting, and tithing, and praying – doing all these good things we are supposed to do.  And if we don’t dismiss the Pharisee too quickly as someone else, we may want to protest just a little – I mean come on, isn’t it good at least that the Pharisee isn’t a thief, rogue, adulterer, or a tax collector?  Don’t we get some credit for being somewhat respectable?  For being somewhat good?  Sure he’s a little self-righteous about it all – but isn’t it still good that he isn’t like all those other people?  Doesn’t Jesus want to add a footnote saying – “Of course, I am quite glad that the Pharisee is such a fine, upstanding citizen and pious model of the Jewish life.  That’s just not the point of this particular story.”

I suspect we all like a little credit from time to time for our virtues – real or imagined.  We would like someone to pat us on the back and say:  Good job, for not being like all the other people.  People who are too rich or too poor, too liberal or too conservative, too grumpy or too cheery.  Too lazy or wild or ungrateful or deluded.

And this is what the Pharisee prays:  “God, I thank you that I am not like other people”.  We may not be as brazen most of the time about our self-righteousness but at least from time to time we rub up against someone who makes us say – “God, I thank you that I am not like that person.”

So Jesus then gives us an example of one of those other people – one of those people we would never want to be like who is despised and outcast by society.  And the example in this parable is particularly hard for us to swallow because tax collectors aren’t excluded because of the particularities of cultural preference - for not wearing the right clothes or having the right job or living in the right neighborhood.  They aren’t outcast because of racism or sexism or any other ism.  If that were the example Jesus uses – as he does in any other places - we might be convicted a little but we could also sit comfortably, knowing that Jesus’ affirmation of the tax collector was a righteous one, one in line with our own understandings of righteousness.  But the parable is more challenging than that – tax collectors are outcast for some pretty legitimate reasons.

Tax collectors were Jews who worked on behalf of the Roman Empire, extorting money from their fellow Jews to support an empire bent on oppressing the Jewish people through violent and subtle means.  So it seems somewhat justified that the Jews didn’t like tax collectors, doesn’t it? Everybody had good reasons for thinking tax collectors were eternally condemned.

Here again, I would like a footnote from Jesus – “In retrospect, it was a bad decision to use the tax collector as an example in this parable, I should have gone with someone a little less controversial, a little more virtuous to begin with.”

But Jesus doesn’t give us a footnote – he just gives us this despicable character in a moment of deep agony.  The tax collector is off to the side, isolated, alone, in mourning over the state of his life.  He pounds his breast and cannot even bring himself to look up to the heavens – for how could he of all people hope for mercy?  And yet it is mercy for which he asks.  And it is mercy which he gets.  For after this brief moment of seeing the truth of his own failings and placing them in the light of divine mercy, Jesus tells us that the tax collector goes home justified.

Already?  Really?  Justified?

And even more frustrating, it doesn’t seem to be of primary importance to Jesus whether or not this tax collector also goes home virtuous and pious.  We are not told that the tax collector left his job to become the first century equivalent of an organic farmer or a social justice activist or an evangelist or whatever.  We are not told that he started praying and fasting and tithing or loving his neighbor as himself.  We can certainly hope transformation took place – but Jesus does not seem primarily concerned with telling us about it.

Rather, Jesus seems most concerned about this bare, brief moment of humility.  About the moment when the tax collector realizes his fragility and casts all his hope on God.   Why?  What’s so special about a bare moment of humility?  Well, perhaps it is because Jesus trusts so ultimately in God.  Perhaps Jesus knows the power of humility opens us up to the work of God within us and beyond us.  Perhaps Jesus knows that if we were only humbled, the unique and universal light of God planted in us each would start to shine a little brighter.  If we were only humbled, we could embody the virtue God creates instead of the ones we construct.  Maybe this bare, brief moment of humility is so important to Jesus because he knows it is the primary site of true transformation in God.

Then Jesus tacks on that last little sentence, some variation of which we see throughout the gospels:  “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”  And it is very easy to read those words simply as talking about two different types of people – Pharisees and tax collectors, people who trust in themselves and people who trust in God.  And maybe so.

But Jesus uses the same words on either side of the equation – the exalted are humbled and the humble are exalted. (And though I cannot pronounce Greek – it’s the same base word in Greek as well.)  We may want it to say the arrogant are put in their place and the humble are given every good thing but it doesn’t.  It says those who exalt themselves will be humbled but those who humble themselves will be exalted.  Its almost as if Jesus were talking about the same person, as if he were describing a journey of transformation from self-exaltation to humility to divine exaltation, rather than an either/or, black and white divide between people.  Perhaps the messiness of life and the wording of this phrase points us to the truth that we are all Pharisees and tax collectors rolled up in one.

We are both the ones exalting ourselves in need of humility and the humble who are being exalted by God.  The journey of faith, of life lived in the midst of the Holy One, slowly chips away at all the ways in which we exalt ourselves, at all the illusions we daily create and feed – that we are our own source of worth, success, virtue.  That we can control for every possible eventuality that will arise in our lives.  That our souls, the church, and the world are ours to save.  God slowly chips away at all the moments in which we pray:  God, I thank you that I am not like other people.

The Spirit flows in, through, and around us - sometimes gently, sometimes more forcefully but always for good -  wearing down all our exaltations of our separate selves until we realize the blessed good news that we are just like all the other people – blessed and broken,  made in the image of God – and no matter how much that image may get distorted - always invited to grow into likeness with God.  Just like everyone else, we are fragile, ultimately and wholly dependent upon God for life and growth, virtue and transformation.  And in this moment of humility, we cry out to God:  have mercy on me, a sinner, for it is You, God and You alone who can save me.

And there in that moment of pure and total trust in God, God shows us how we are each and all fearfully and wonderfully made.  There in that space God creates us to be the people who will bring glory to God as we show compassion towards all, temperance in our use of God’s creation, love towards our enemies, a passion for justice and peace.  These virtues are no longer about us, no longer about our superiority to other non-virtuous people.  A life transformed in God is about God – about the beauty and wonder of God’s creation, about the latent joy, peace, life, and flourishing always in our midst as pure gift.  It is through this discovery bringing glory to God that we will be exalted.

All who exalt themselves will be humbled but all who humble themselves will be exalted.  May it be so in each of our lives.  Thanks be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

While you all were, I hope, enjoying fall break this past week, I was at a conference listening to the Rev. Dr. Michael Battle talk about ubuntu. Ubuntu is a word from the Southern African language Bantu. It’s less a specific thing than a way of understanding the world. Ubuntu means that people are known only in relationship to one another, that an individual person is known through the web of connections known as family, tribe, or community. In ubuntu there is no ‘I’ apart from ‘we.’

Which is what Jesus means when he said we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. You and I live in a particularly individualistic society, so we tend to hear that commandment as, “You have to learn to love yourself—with therapy and heavy doses of Oprah—before you can love your neighbor.”

But we’ve got it backwards. Real self-love begins with turning outward, not inward. It begins with knowing Christ accepts us. Not only does he accept us, he loves us exactly as we are—including those deep, dark, secret, inadequate, and wounded places we spend so much time fretting over and covering up. Jesus frees us to get over ourselves! God’s love for us in Jesus Christ sets us free from the narrow confines of self-preoccupation and self-preservation and opens us to God and neighbor.

God’s love turns us toward one another. His love for us is an invitation to live in the world God has made, a world for which God has a dream. A shorthand word for God’s dream for the world is shalom. Shalom means ‘peace’, but shalom-peace is a lot more than just the absence of war. Shalom is a vision of abundance and wholeness, a world of plenty where everyone is invited to the feast, a world where no one is sick or in prison because all sorts of brokeness has been healed, a world where every human being has the capacity to enjoy every good gift God has given. Shalom is a vision of the world where no one person enjoys abundance at another’s expense, a world where all humanity lives together as God’s children, at peace with God and with one another and in right relationship to all of creation.

Loving our neighbor is how we live into shalom. It’s how we become who God created us to be.

Israel, as you remember, was created to be “a light to enlighten the nations,” a sign to the world of God’s power and love, a community living in shalom. The details of the community’s life together before God mattered because God’s big dream for the world gets lived out in small, everyday ways. That’s why the books of Leviticus and Numbers are chock full of instructions for how the Israelites are to worship, and do business with one another, and eat, and marry, and treat their parents and their neighbors, and even their neighbors’ cattle. And one of the central tenents of Israel’s life together was her care and compassion for the least, the lost, and the lonely in her midst. The Israelites were to provide for widows and orphans, give relief to the poor, love all those neighbors who otherwise live on the margins. They were to practice ubuntu, loving their neighbors as themselves.

Only Israel forgot. Israel forgot that to be Israel she had to practice neighborliness not just towards those who owned houses in the same neighborhood, had good jobs, went to the right schools, worshipped in the same place, and had interest-bearing checking accounts, but towards those who had and did none of the above. She forgot she was freed for her life with her neighbors on the edge of society and not just those at the comfortable center. And when she forgot, she abandoned God’s dream for her and for the world. So God sent Israel into exile. The Babylonians ran Israel out of the Promised Land and tore her away from everything God had given her there.

So now what? How could a people defined by their life in the Promised Land still be a people away from the place God sent them? God speaks to His exiled people through His prophet Jeremiah. He writes Israel a letter and says, “Here’s what you do. Build houses, plant gardens, tend them, and eat what they produce. Get married, have children, and then let your children marry and have children of their own. And in all that you do, seek the welfare of the city where I’ve sent you, pray to me on its behalf, because in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

The word translated here as ‘welfare’ is shalom. God’s dream for the world, that his children will love Him and one another, continues, no matter the place, no matter their failures and disobedience and weaknesses, God’s dream for the world continues.

In exile, there’s no question of Israel’s being at the comfortable center any longer. The Israelites are the strangers in a strange land. They are profoundly dislocated and homeless. But therein lies their hope, says God.

Your shalom, Israel, your peace and wholeness and growing into the fullness of the life I’m offering you, will be found in your life with the foreigners in whose land you now find yourselves. Your hope lies in your practice of ubuntu, a practice with which your old life of comfort interfered. You forgot that your lives, your true selves, were inextricably bound up with the lives of all of God’s children. You forgot that as long as one of your neighbors was without a home, none of you could truly be at home. You forgot that as long as any of my children suffered, none of you could be at peace.

But now, here in this strange new place, you again have the chance to become the people you were created to be. Here in exile from the life you dreamed of for yourselves you again have the chance to live the life I dreamed of for you. Here in the chaos of loss and dislocation you again have the chance to find shalom.

Frederick Buechner, in his book Longing for Home, writes:

We are not called to judge, or fix, or save our neighbor. That’s for God, not for us. We are called to love our neighbor, to see them, to serve them, and in so doing, to see and serve Christ. We are called to practice ubuntu, to practice neighborliness, that we and all God’s children might become the fully human people God created us to be.

Love God and love your neighbor as your self. Be freed from fearful self-preoccupation and for life with all of God’s children. Enter the world of pain and find there the possibility of renewal and salvation. In all you do, seek the shalom of the city where God has sent you and pray to God on its behalf, for in its shalom we WILL find our own. Amen.

“Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things. . .”

That’s what we prayed at the beginning of today’s service. Please, Lord, grant us freedom from anxiety about all the things that make us anxious.

You’ve heard it said that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, but fear. Well, if fear is a raging flu that knocks us flat on our backs, then anxiety is a constant low-grade fever—not so bad we can’t get out the door to work or school, but bad enough to sap all our energy. Anxiety makes us want to circle the wagons, keep the children home, and store supplies of water and canned goods in remote mountain caves before all the computers hit “2000” and the world as we know it grinds to a halt.

We seem to live in a particularly anxious time. Although, to tell the truth, the world may always have been an anxious place for the people in it. At least we don’t have to worry about getting trampled by wooly mammoths. And I, for one, am very glad to be a parent in the age of the polio vaccine, car seats, and homework help lines. For a lot of us in the so-called global north, the world is actually a safer place to live than it’s ever been before.

So why are we so anxious? Where does all this anxiety come from?

Stanley Hauerwas tells a story about a conversation he had with a woman who is a member of Second Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, a church with some 7,000 members. Dr. Hauerwas was suggesting that anyone who wants to join Second Baptist Church ought to be required to tell the whole congregation how much they earn: “I make $25, 000 a year and I want to be a member of Second Baptist Church.” “I make $189, 000 a year and I want to be a member of Second Baptist Church.” “I make $60,000 a year and I want to be a member of Second Baptist Church.”

The woman, as you can imagine, was taken aback. “We can’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?” asked Dr. Hauerwas.

“Well, gosh, because that’s private,” the woman answered.

And as Dr. Hauerwas always laments when he tells that story, where are the fundamentalists when you need them? Because, sure enough, right there in Acts, Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead when they don’t fully disclose how much they’d made selling some property. The early church seems not to have thought too much of the distinction between public and private wealth.

Sigmund Freud says one of the ways a society deals with deep-seated anxiety about something is to wall it off and make it a taboo subject, something one just doesn’t talk about in polite society.

When was the last time any of us turned to our neighbor at dinner and said, “Hey, so I have $800 in my checking account and I spent $240 on groceries last week. How about you?”

Our anxiety about money is symptomatic of what Father John Haughey calls ‘mammon illness.’ “You can’t serve God and wealth,” Jesus says, or, as we used to say, God and mammon. Mammon illness comes from trying to do exactly that, trying to serve both God and mammon by keeping our faith lives separate from our material lives.

Pulling those things apart, separating our material selves from our spiritual selves, is a kind of disintegration of the wholeness God calls us to. It’s a way of forgetting that we’re followers of the One who is Word become flesh, a way of forgetting that Jesus is the incarnation of the divine God in human form.

Jesus’ teaching about serving God or mammon comes at the end of one of the most baffling parables in the New Testament, the parable of the Dishonest Manager. And if you thought you were alone in finding it baffling you should know that St. Augustine himself said, “I can’t believe this story came from the lips of our Lord.” I find it comforting to know I’m in such good company.

People have tied themselves up in knots trying to explain how it is Jesus can commend a dishonest person as a good example for us to learn from. And it is strange that a manager who wins friends by reducing their debt to his master is commended by that master for doing so. Maybe the master was a first century Donald Trump type who recognized a shrewd business move when he saw one.

Or maybe the manager’s dishonesty isn’t really the point. Maybe that’s just how he happened to get in the story at all. Maybe this parable is really about bridging the supposed divide between spirit and flesh. Whatever his personal merits, the manager exchanges debt for relationship. He takes goods destined for his master’s private stores and gives them back to his master’s debtors and that, in turn, creates good will for himself. The manager’s practicing what Ched Myers calls sabbath economics. He’s using what would have been private wealth to create social wealth instead.

And so in some small way, however imperfectly and however incompletely, the manager is reintegrating what the world would have us pull apart. Whatever his motivation, he’s moved from squandering his master’s private property to using it to make things better for his master’s debtors as well as himself. Whether he means to or not, he discovers that the source of true riches is putting riches back in circulation.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, maker of all that is, seen and unseen. That being so, is it any wonder that trying to lead our lives as if our goods and our souls had nothing in common makes us deeply anxious?

There is another way.

Reynolds Price tells the story of his mother who on her deathbed bolted upright to say, “Reynolds, I regret only my economies.”

What if instead of being imprisoned by our anxieties, we were emboldened by the freedom and joy God calls us to? What if instead of anxiously squirreling our resources away, we scattered them open-handedly, sharing them with one another in celebration of the abundance of God’s grace? And what if instead of living lives carved up piecemeal, we rejoiced in lives of wholeness and witness to all God has given us?

What then? What a world this would be.

Amen.

We’re having an interesting conversation about the Pledge of Allegiance at my house these days. Apparently my daughters haven’t been joining in the pledge at school and their teachers are getting annoyed. I suspect the girls’ stance on saying the pledge has to do with their not wanting to be told what to say—which, of course, is a thoroughly American stance. I support them for that reason, but also—and more importantly from my point of view—because I want them to be very clear about what they pledge their allegiance to.

Jesus is having a pledge of allegiance conversation with his followers in today’s passage from Luke. Large crowds were following Jesus, Luke tells us. And Jesus stops and turns to them and says, “If you come to me and you don’t hate your father and mother and husband and wife and children and brothers and sisters and even life itself, you can’t be my disciple.”

This passage never shows up in the literature on how to grow your church. There’s a lot of talk in the church growth movement about increasing the numbers of folks in a congregation by making the church ‘user friendly’, places Will Willimon describes as

churches where any fool can walk in off the street and immediately get the point. In the “user friendly church” all of the hymns ought to be readily singable, as easy and memorable as advertising jingles. All concepts in the sermons ought to be understandable, comprehensible, and readily available to anyone, regardless of his score on the SAT.

Churches where making people comfortable is the top priority. And those places tend to grow quite large as evidenced by their humongous parking lots.

Jesus seems not to have gotten the memo on church growth. In fact, the very size of the crowd following him is what prompts him to start talking about the cost of discipleship.

And that’s what he’s talking about when he talks about hating family. He’s not issuing a command to get out there and hate people. He’s talking about allegiances.

“If you want to be my disciple, then your allegiance to me has to come first, before everything else, even before those closest to you, even before your life. Your love for me has to be all in all.”

And Jesus doesn’t pretend this won’t be costly. On the contrary, he says what he says precisely because he wants his followers to understand how much following him WILL cost. Who wants to start building a tower, run out of money, and be embarrassed by the sight of a half-built tower standing in the front yard? Or who goes into battle without considering whether he has what it takes to fight? Consider the costs. “Are you willing to give up everything you have to follow me?”

Now, before you all go racing for your cell phones to call home and tell your parents how much you hate them, that’s not what Jesus intends. Jesus is not asking his followers to cultivate hatred in their homes, but to be ready to decide for HIM if and when the time comes.

On our beach retreat this weekend, we spent some time talking and reading about Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Jonathan was a young seminarian who answered Martin Luther King’s call in 1965 to come join in the march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery. Once Jonathan got to Alabama, he decided he needed to stay longer than the weekend he’d intended to spend.

He became involved in the lives of people he met there. He worked for integration in small, daily, one-step-at-a-time ways, like taking African-American high school students to church with him and putting together a list of resources available to help people whose civil rights work got them in trouble.

On August 13, 1965, Jonathan was one of several people arrested for picketing three stores in Fort Deposit, Alabama. On August 20th they were released from jail. Jonathan and three friends went down the street to a small store to buy drinks for the group while the others tried to find transporation back to Selma.

Jonathan’s group was met at the door by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief argument, the man aimed his shotgun at Ruby Sales, a young black girl in the group. Jonathan pushed Ruby out of the way, got caught between the shotgun and the girl, and was killed instantly by the gun’s blast.

Jonathan did not go to Alabama to get shot. He went to Alabama because he wanted to help Martin Luther King. Once he got there, he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t leave the people he’d met. He couldn’t leave because he loved. Jonathan got shot because his life was transformed by loving Jesus and his neighbors and when the time came, his instinct was to protect Ruby rather than himself. He acted instinctively for the love of another rather than for his own life.

Before he was martyred, Jonathan wrote,

I lost fear . . .  when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.

Worship was Jonathan’s way of pledging allegiance. Praying the daily offices, repeating the prayers over and over, saying the canticles until he knew them by heart, all formed Jonathan to bear the cost of discipleship. He continues,

As . . . I said the daily offices day by day, [I] became more and more aware of the living reality of the invisible “communion of saints”–of the beloved community [at seminary] who were saying the offices too, of the ones gathered around a near-distant throne in heaven–who blend with theirs our faltering songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white men, with all of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfils and “ends” all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably ONE.

Jesus’ words are tough words and maybe some or most of the crowd following him went home. But not all of them. There were at least a few Jonathan’s in the crowd, folks who heard those tough words and who also heard the promise that lies behind them. People who, like Jonathan, longed to give their lives to something bigger than themselves, bigger even than everything they held dear. Something that would bring them deep and sustaining joy even when it cost them everything they had.

May we, like Jonathan, find our longing fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And may we, like him, be strengthened by God’s grace to bear the costs of discipleship with thankfulness and great joy. Amen.

My children will tell you I spend what seems to them to be an inordinate amount of time trying to get them to use good table manners. The talk around our dinner table sometimes feels more like regulation than conversation.

I figure it probably won’t be until my girls have grown up and headed off to college that they begin to realize that etiquette has less to with me than with other people. Or at least I hope they do. I hope they’ll come to understand good manners concern what we do for others rather than what we do for ourselves.

Or, maybe my daughters will arrive on a college campus only to hear a sermon about table manners their first Sunday there. You just never know what the Gospel will serve up . . . .

Today it serves up Jesus’ great lesson on the do’s and don’t’s of table etiquette. What better way to start the semester than with some guidance about what not to do in the Marketplace or the Great Hall?

There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘values.’ It tends to come up a lot during Orientation week. Society has values. Universities hope to instill them. Public leaders invoke them in support of wars.

Only, as my former ethics professor loves to say, “Used cars have values, people don’t!” What people have instead is practices, everyday habits, and manners. What we do says a great deal about who we are. And given that, how we eat can be illuminating.

Hence the table talk Jesus gives at the fancy sabbath dinner he’s attending in today’s Gospel lesson. With all the big issues looming—war, poverty, the failing health care system, racism—you might think table manners would be too trivial to rate a mention in the Bible.

But meals are important in the Old Testament and in the New. The single most common image of heaven in the Bible is a banquet. God led Israel into the Promised Land to “eat its fruits and its good things,” says Jeremiah. And again, God says, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it,” according to the psalmist. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled,” preaches Jesus in his very first sermon.

Just skim through the Gospel of Luke sometime when you’ve got a moment—it seems like Jesus is always about to begin, in the middle of, or just finishing supper at someone’s house. Jesus does some of his best teaching over meals—at weddings, and on sabbaths, and, once, at a picnic for five thousand people out in the middle of nowhere. And then, later, at the Last Supper.

So when Jesus arrives for dinner at the Pharisees’ house, he observes the scene as the guests angle and manuver for the best seats in the house. It’s very Hollywood, or very Washington, depending on your coast. Movers and shakers jostling to be seen in the right place by the right people.

First, he has a word for the guests: “Don’t sit in the best seat. Do you want to risk the embarrasment of being asked to make way for someone more important? Better to take a seat at the table over in the corner by the kitchen door and then won’t it be grand if you’re invited to the head table?”

And while this is an excellent pointer for those who want to avoid public humiliation, it’s also instruction in the practice of humility. The place of honor at the dining table, according to Emily Post, is to the right of the host.

Note the seat to the host’s right, says Jesus, and head the other direction.

And then a word for his host: “Don’t invite your friends or family or those well-to-do neighbors who throw that excellent party every New Year’s where everyone who’s anyone is sure to be invited. Instead, invite the folks from the Community Kitchen, the people panhandling on 9th St., and the folks lined up outside the health clinic on Main St. Then you will be blessed.”

The people seated at God’s banquet are the people who don’t even come close to rating the table at the back by the kitchen door. If you want to sit with Jesus, sit with them. Better yet, go find them and invite them to sit with you, and then have a really nice dinner waiting for them when they arrive. With cloth napkins and real china, if you’ve got them.

Our etiquette often has a lot to do with reciprocity. I give this to you, you give this to me. I invite you to my party, you invite me to yours.

“All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted,” is a different etiquette, one that calls for sitting in the lowest seat with no desire to be invited to the highest and for giving with no expectation of return.

A word of  caution here: giving with no expectation of return includes giving without being thought heroic. Which is more of a temptation than we might realize at first. But think about it: when I hear this parable of Jesus’ I always identify with the host, with the one who has something to share. And what a good person I will be if I use my resources to serve people who don’t have the resources to serve me.

But that’s a form of reciprocity, really. It’s tricky, isn’t it?

It takes real humility to recognize that not only can we have an impact on Durham, as one student wrote in the Chronicle this past week, but that Durham will have an impact on us. It requires recognizing that WE are just as much on the receiving end as we are on the giving end—MORE on the receiving than the giving end, in fact, because we are served BY Christ before we serve Christ.

Which is good news for us. It means we’re on his invite list. And when we arrive at the lowest seat, the one fartherst from the head table, we’re likely to find Jesus sitting there, too, waiting to welcome us into his company.

In a world that worships power and success, it’s hard to step out of the reciprocity trap. And here we are in a university that excels at training people to be successful. So what are we to do?

We’re to mind our manners. Jesus, the host of the heavenly banquet, the bread of heaven, and the cup of salvation, invites us to the feast at his table.

Friends, let’s eat.

There’s a proverb from Haiti that goes like this: “God gives but doesn’t share.”

Which is the flip side of what God says to humanity in the beginning of Creation: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. I have given you every plant and every tree; you shall have them for food.”

God gives and gives abundantly, but God doesn’t do the divvying up. That’s left to us, the humans God created in God’s image. We’re the ones charged with being stewards of Creation. And we are stewards, not owners, something God clarifies later when He says, “[T]he land is MINE. You are my tenants.” (Lev. 25: 23)

The depth of poverty in Haiti, which has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, is evidence that something has gone seriously awry with our stewardship. There’s evidence closer to home, too: this past April brought word that infant mortality is on the rise in Mississippi. It’s on the rise even here in North Carolina. In fact, the United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world. Not surprisingly, the rate varies depending on income level. There’s a direct correlation between poverty and whether a baby will survive infancy.
We live in a world where infants die for want of simple things like clean water, food, shelter, and basic health care. Malnutrition and illness—not to mention war, genocide, and famine—favor the poor. Poverty kills.

As much as I wish I had a quick answer for how to fix all that’s heartbreakingly wrong with the world, I don’t.
Except this: remember the sabbath and keep it holy.

In the beginning, God spoke Creation into being. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. There’s no gap in between God’s speaking and God’s creating—what God says, is. And on the seventh day, the day after God created human beings in God’s image, God rested. “So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that He had done in creation.” (Gen. 2: 3)

The first thing God did with the human beings He’d just created was rest. God rested in God’s good creation and the brand new humans were there to bask in God’s enjoyment. The command to remember the sabbath and keep it holy is a command to remember that moment, to remember that we are the creatures of the Creator who made us and who enjoys us. It’s a command to rest in God, to surrender ourselves to Him.

But the command to remember the sabbath and keep it holy came later, after the Exodus, after God had liberated His chosen people. So the sabbath command also comes as a command stop working and remember that God leads His people into freedom and joy. And God’s people can take time to stop working and remember the sabbath because they’re not slaves anymore. Slaves, after all, can’t take a day off. That’s something only free people can do.

Keeping sabbath is a way of keeping righteous. Righteousness gets a bad rap when it gets mixed up with self-righteousness. But what righteousness really means is living in right relationship with God and with one another. Righteous observance of the sabbath one day a week shapes us to live righteously together the other six days.

Unlike the Israelites Amos rails at, a sabbath-shaped people can’t trample on the needy or bring ruin to the poor of the land. A righteous people can’t spend the sabbath day impatiently waiting for it to end so they can get back to their ‘real’ work. A righteous people can’t be enthralled by profit or by buying and selling things.

A righteous people can’t do or be any of those things because they can’t see themselves as being apart from their neighbors. They can’t see themselves as separate from other human beings. A righteous people can’t see themselves as anything other than fellow children of the God who made them.
There are actually 613 commandments in the Bible, not just ten, and of all 613, the command to remember the sabbath and keep it holy is the one repeated most often. And woe to those who don’t obey: “Everyone who profanes the sabbath shall be put to death: whoever does any work on it shall be cut off from among the people.” (Ex. 31:14)

Ironically, that’s exactly what the Israelites have done—they’ve cut themselves off from the neighbors God intends them to love as their brothers and sisters. They’ve built themselves fine houses to live in while others have nowhere to live. They’ve been drinking fine wine and eating well while others are hungry. They’ve passed laws that protect their privileges at the expense of the poor.

And what’s worse, they’ve profaned the sabbath even as they’ve observed it religiously, praising God in solemn assemblies and giving thanks for all God’s given them. As if their prosperity were a sign of God’s favor rather than of their injustice. As if they were called to be owners rather than stewards of what they’d been given.
And that’s when God sends Amos.
God doesn’t send Amos because God’s changed His mind and now hates what He created. God sends Amos because He LOVES what He created and can’t bear to see some of His people willfully cutting themselves off from Him on the one hand while simultaneously making life miserable for the neediest among them on the other.
Just because God gives but doesn’t share doesn’t mean God won’t do anything about it if WE don’t.

Walter Brueggemann says that sabbath is an antidote to the enormous anxiety we have about the fragility of the world. And what he means by that is that when we rest in God, in obedience to God’s command, we learn to trust in God and to trust in God’s abundance rather than in our limitations. When we learn to see the world with sabbath-shaped vision we can’t help but see that there’s not only enough for us all, but more than enough. And, if it’s truly sabbath-shaped vision, we won’t be able to stand not sharing. We won’t be able to stand knowing that our brothers and sisters are going without when we have anything left to give.

And when the fragility of the world and all the people in it seems too overwhelming, our sabbath-shaped vision will help us see that all God promises to His children will be exactly as He promises.

Even Amos gets to say so:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord . . .
when the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
and all the hills shall flow with it.

I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.

I will plant them upon their land,
and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them,
says the Lord your God.

Amen.

 Last winter in the course of a conversation about sin and forgiveness a particularly astute member of the congregation at the Episcopal Center asked about the confession we make every week in the Eucharist. She asked, “Is that it? I mean, we just confess our sins and that’s it? We get a blank slate?”

 It’s a great question. I don’t mean to put words in her mouth, but I think she was wondering if confession is a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. And the simplest answer is—yes. It is. But that’s not because our confession is so powerful. It’s because in confession we’re turning to God who is always ready and waiting to welcome us. It’s not the strength of our confession that gives us a blank slate but the power of God’s forgiveness. By God’s grace, we are forgiven. It’s already done for us and it’s free.

 But a lot of us are geared to wanting to pull ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps. We have a teensy problem with wanting to be in charge of our own salvation, with wanting to be the saver rather than the saved. I know whereof I speak. I’m an oldest child and a priest—I’m VERY good at being in charge.

 Given that tendency to want to be active participants rather than passive recipients, it’s easy for us to hear the story about the Samaritan as an example of what we’re to do. And it is, but maybe not entirely in the way we usually think it is.

 Take, for example, what we call the reading from Luke’s Gospel. It’s known as the parable of the Good Samaritan. That’s how it’s labeled in my Bible. Just the other day, someone wrote our neighborhood listserv about needing a Good Samaritan to water some plants. We even have Good Samaritan laws to protect people who are trying to help someone in need. Everyone knows the parable of the Good Samaritan.

 Except what if that’s the wrong title? What if this parable should really be known as the parable of the Helpless, Beaten-up Guy?

 You may already know about the trouble between the Samaritans and the Jews.  They were all descended from the ancient Israelites, but somewhere along the way the two groups had a complete falling out. By Jesus’ time, the Jews and the Samaritans wanted absolutely nothing to do with one another.

 So here’s this Jewish man who’s an expert in the law of Torah and he comes to Jesus intending to put him to the test. And he and Jesus have a Q&A about how if he wants to inherit eternal life he has to love God and love his neighbor as himself. But then the lawyer pushes a little further.

 “And who is my neighbor?” he asks.

 To answer his question, Jesus tells the parable of a man travelling along the road who’s beaten and left for dead. And, as we all know, neither the passing priest nor the Levite stops to help one of their own. Instead, a Samaritan—one of those who despises and is despised by Jews—takes care of the man. Which is a wonderfully loving and merciful thing for him to do. He is indeed a good Samaritan.

 But that’s not the answer to the lawyer’s question. Remember his question? He asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And here’s what Jesus asks at the end of the parable: “Which of these three, the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan, was a neighbor to the man who got robbed?”

 And the lawyer, who can’t bring himself to even say ‘Samaritan,’ answers, “The one who showed him mercy.”

 The answer to ‘who is my neighbor whom I should love as myself?’ is the Samaritan, not the man the Samaritan helped. The Samaritan is the neighbor to be loved. So not only is this poor man lying half dead in the road, he has no choice but to accept help from someone he usually shuns AND he has to love him as himself.

 He’s having a very hard day.

 And what about the lawyer? The text says he wants to justify himself which means he’s really looking for affirmation, not education. But when Jesus commands him to “Go and do likewise” he’s commanding him to love those he’d prefer to despise at precisely the moment it’s hardest to do so: when they bring love and comfort in his darkest hour.

 The lawyer’s not having such an easy day, either.

 I think we usually identify with the Samaritan in this parable for the best of reasons: we’re primed to love our neighbor by helping. And please don’t misunderstand me: God does call us to love and serve one another and we do have responsibilty for and obligation to our neighbors, to those who are nigh to us.

 But we’d MUCH rather be the Samaritan in the parable than the man lying helpless in the road. And it’s not just that we don’t want to get beaten up by robbers, it’s that it’s way more comfortable to love our neighbor from a position of strength than from one of weakness.

 In the days immediately following September 11, 2001, my father was asked to speak at the University of Georgia where he teaches. Here’s part of what he had to say:

The last several days have drawn astonishing support from all around the world. ‘We are all Americans now,’ they say. And what brought forth this moving display of solidarity? Not threats or displays of force . . . What has drawn others to us has been our vulnerability, being broken open, exposing our suffering and need for help, a people digging in the rubble to find one another. . . We are taught to discern God’s suffering presence in our and others’ blood and tears, taught to discern His hand in the hands of those who would rescue and comfort us.

 It’s a hard lesson, one that some of us have to be taught over and over. But the truth is we stand before God in weakness, not strength. We can’t save ourselves. We are vulnerable, we are dependent, and we are needy.

 But we are not alone nor are we lost. Jesus, whose Body was broken for us, is always with us in our brokeness. Christ is as near to us as our nearest neighbor. God who is beyond all imagining lives in our midst. And when in our weakness we can resist no longer, God’s grace will find us where we’ve fallen, will bind up our wounds, and will care tenderly for us.

 And when that time comes, may God in His mercy give us the grace to love Him with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; and our neighbor as ourselves.  Amen.

 Last winter in the course of a conversation about sin and forgiveness a particularly astute member of the congregation at the Episcopal Center asked about the confession we make every week in the Eucharist. She asked, “Is that it? I mean, we just confess our sins and that’s it? We get a blank slate?”

 It’s a great question. I don’t mean to put words in her mouth, but I think she was wondering if confession is a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. And the simplest answer is—yes. It is. But that’s not because our confession is so powerful. It’s because in confession we’re turning to God who is always ready and waiting to welcome us. It’s not the strength of our confession that gives us a blank slate but the power of God’s forgiveness. By God’s grace, we are forgiven. It’s already done for us and it’s free.

 But a lot of us are geared to wanting to pull ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps. We have a teensy problem with wanting to be in charge of our own salvation, with wanting to be the saver rather than the saved. I know whereof I speak. I’m an oldest child and a priest—I’m VERY good at being in charge.

 Given that tendency to want to be active participants rather than passive recipients, it’s easy for us to hear the story about the Samaritan as an example of what we’re to do. And it is, but maybe not entirely in the way we usually think it is.

 Take, for example, what we call the reading from Luke’s Gospel. It’s known as the parable of the Good Samaritan. That’s how it’s labeled in my Bible. Just the other day, someone wrote our neighborhood listserv about needing a Good Samaritan to water some plants. We even have Good Samaritan laws to protect people who are trying to help someone in need. Everyone knows the parable of the Good Samaritan.

 Except what if that’s the wrong title? What if this parable should really be known as the parable of the Helpless, Beaten-up Guy?

 You may already know about the trouble between the Samaritans and the Jews.  They were all descended from the ancient Israelites, but somewhere along the way the two groups had a complete falling out. By Jesus’ time, the Jews and the Samaritans wanted absolutely nothing to do with one another.

 So here’s this Jewish man who’s an expert in the law of Torah and he comes to Jesus intending to put him to the test. And he and Jesus have a Q&A about how if he wants to inherit eternal life he has to love God and love his neighbor as himself. But then the lawyer pushes a little further.

 “And who is my neighbor?” he asks.

 To answer his question, Jesus tells the parable of a man travelling along the road who’s beaten and left for dead. And, as we all know, neither the passing priest nor the Levite stops to help one of their own. Instead, a Samaritan—one of those who despises and is despised by Jews—takes care of the man. Which is a wonderfully loving and merciful thing for him to do. He is indeed a good Samaritan.

 But that’s not the answer to the lawyer’s question. Remember his question? He asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And here’s what Jesus asks at the end of the parable: “Which of these three, the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan, was a neighbor to the man who got robbed?”

 And the lawyer, who can’t bring himself to even say ‘Samaritan,’ answers, “The one who showed him mercy.”

 The answer to ‘who is my neighbor whom I should love as myself?’ is the Samaritan, not the man the Samaritan helped. The Samaritan is the neighbor to be loved. So not only is this poor man lying half dead in the road, he has no choice but to accept help from someone he usually shuns AND he has to love him as himself.

 He’s having a very hard day.

 And what about the lawyer? The text says he wants to justify himself which means he’s really looking for affirmation, not education. But when Jesus commands him to “Go and do likewise” he’s commanding him to love those he’d prefer to despise at precisely the moment it’s hardest to do so: when they bring love and comfort in his darkest hour.

 The lawyer’s not having such an easy day, either.

 I think we usually identify with the Samaritan in this parable for the best of reasons: we’re primed to love our neighbor by helping. And please don’t misunderstand me: God does call us to love and serve one another and we do have responsibilty for and obligation to our neighbors, to those who are nigh to us.

 But we’d MUCH rather be the Samaritan in the parable than the man lying helpless in the road. And it’s not just that we don’t want to get beaten up by robbers, it’s that it’s way more comfortable to love our neighbor from a position of strength than from one of weakness.

 In the days immediately following September 11, 2001, my father was asked to speak at the University of Georgia where he teaches. Here’s part of what he had to say:

The last several days have drawn astonishing support from all around the world. ‘We are all Americans now,’ they say. And what brought forth this moving display of solidarity? Not threats or displays of force . . . What has drawn others to us has been our vulnerability, being broken open, exposing our suffering and need for help, a people digging in the rubble to find one another. . . We are taught to discern God’s suffering presence in our and others’ blood and tears, taught to discern His hand in the hands of those who would rescue and comfort us.

 It’s a hard lesson, one that some of us have to be taught over and over. But the truth is we stand before God in weakness, not strength. We can’t save ourselves. We are vulnerable, we are dependent, and we are needy.

 But we are not alone nor are we lost. Jesus, whose Body was broken for us, is always with us in our brokeness. Christ is as near to us as our nearest neighbor. God who is beyond all imagining lives in our midst. And when in our weakness we can resist no longer, God’s grace will find us where we’ve fallen, will bind up our wounds, and will care tenderly for us.

 And when that time comes, may God in His mercy give us the grace to love Him with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; and our neighbor as ourselves.  Amen.

There is a website called “The Still Small Voice” whose self-proclaimed mission is to help readers access the voice of their souls and learn to listen to their inner teacher.

Fortunately, Elijah didn’t have access to the “Still Small Voice” website. If he’d listened to HIS inner teacher he would have heard one thing—“Quit. Quit right now.”

“Still small voice” is how some translations of the Bible render what our translation has as the ‘sound of sheer silence’ and others as ‘a soft murmuring sound.’ I don’t know enough Hebrew to be able to argue for one translation or another, but I do know that in nature, silence can be ominous.

The sounds on summer nights in the north Georgia mountains range from the cry of a screech owl—which sounds like a child being sacrificed and will scare the pants off you—to the chorus of tree frogs that starts up right about bedtime. It’s like trying to fall asleep onstage with the Vienna Philharmonic.

By contrast, silence is what happens when all the water gets sucked out into the ocean right before a tsunami hits. Birds get quiet right before a big earthquake. And if you’ve lived in Durham long enough you know from experience that it gets quiet in the eye of a hurricane. Actually, it’s more of a pause, a pause between the front of the storm and its backside.

The silence Elijah hears is the kind of silence that’s a pause in the midst of a storm.

The front of Elijah’s storm is the turbulent few weeks he’s had. He won the contest between himself and 450 prophets of Baal to see whose god was really God. He followed that up by executing all 450 of the losers which made Queen Jezebel furious because she worshipped Baal and those were her prophets. So Jezebel sends word to Elijah that she’s going to do to him what he’d done to her prophets and Elijah lights out for the wilderness, scared, alone, and without food or drink. He flees hours into the desert, sinks down under a solitary tree, asks to die, and falls asleep, worn out and depressed.

Only God won’t let Elijah be. “Get up, eat, and go,” God’s angel says, and Elijah does. He journeys 40 more days into the wilderness until he comes to Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai, the mountain where Moses met God.

In the pregnant pause that follows the wind and earthquake and fire up on God’s mountain, Elijah finds out what the backside of his storm will bring. Far from letting Elijah resign his commission, God recommissions His prophet: “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.” And God goes on to tell Elijah to anoint a foreign king, and the next Israelite king, and Elisha who will succeed Elijah as prophet. And Elijah goes.

Like Elijah’s, the story of the possessed man Jesus meets in Gerasa is a story of a kind of resurrection from death to life. Elijah’s resurrected from wanting to die to a willingness to live and the Gerasene man is resurrected from howling naked among the tombs to living clothed among his neighbors.

Both stories are inescapably political. Elijah is charged with speaking God’s word to kings. The Gerasene man is possessed by a demon named Legion, which is the Roman word for ‘platoon.’

Luke’s making a not-so-subtle link between Roman occupation and demon possession.

The Gerasene man has his own moment of silence. Sometime between when the possessed pigs leap off the cliff into the Sea of Galilee and when the townspeople come to see for themselves, the Gerasene man finds clothes, gets dressed, and sits quietly at Jesus’ feet. But this silence also turns out to be a pause. In the eye of this storm, the Gerasene man receives a commission, just as Elijah did before him.

Like Elijah, the Gerasene man doesn’t get what he asks for. Elijah doesn’t get to retire, but is sent back into the thick of political intrigue and battle. The Gerasene man doesn’t get to stay by Jesus’ side, but is sent to proclaim what God has done for him to the neighbors who’ve just kicked  Jesus out of town.

Is God not listening?

These are hard stories and they’re meant to be. They’re stories about the clash of God’s kingdom with the forces of darkness and sin and nothingness. Karl Barth writes that

the miracles of Jesus [including his exorcisms] . . . are quite clearly military actions, fulfilled by Jesus in the service of God as . . . manifestations of [God’s] kingdom. . . They are not a neutral force . . . but the omnipotence of mercy—not a quiet and passive mercy, but a mercy which is active, and therefore hostile to [destructive] power on behalf of [humanity].  (Church Dogmatics, IV:2, 232)

Jezebel has something at stake in the worship of Baal, even when Baal is demonstrably powerless. The Gerasenes had something at stake in keeping the Romans happy, even though the Romans were occupiers. Neither Jezebel nor the Gerasenes are going to loosen their grip on the status quo or on whatever power they have without a fight. Resistance is greatest where the stakes are highest.

Meister Eckhart, a 13th-century Christian mystic wrote, “Some people want to recognize God only in some pleasant enlightenment—and then they get pleasure and enlightenment, but not God.”

These are hard stories because there’s so much more at stake than pleasant enlightenment. Love, and joy, and abundance, and freedom are at stake. God’s refusal to give up on God’s people is at stake. Our salvation is  at stake. Pleasant enlightenment comes at very little cost. Salvation comes at the cost of crucifixion.

And that’s just it. These are stories about salvation. They are stories about the voice of God who spoke the world into being and who speaks peace in the midst of storms, hope in the midst of despair, and life in the midst of death. They’re stories about being made whole and about being called by God.

Mostly, these are stories about belonging to God. For the truth is, once you are God’s—once Jesus lays his hands on you—you are God’s forever. And once you are God’s you are free to go wherever He sends you because you are freed from death and freed for life with God.

So, go. Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for us. Amen.

This past Tuesday when I went out for my morning run, I had to detour around some big branches knocked down by the high winds that blew through on Monday night. It got worse on East Campus and Campus Drive where there were whole trees down—tall pines and big oaks lying on their sides, roots yanked up out of the ground and dangling in mid-air, exposed.

Which is not a bad way to describe how things felt in the wake of the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech: knocked over, uprooted, and exposed. It’s been a raw, rough week. Two days after the shootings in Virginia came word that 166 people had been killed in car bombings in Baghdad. That same day, 73 more villagers were killed in the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

The nearness of those who died at Virginia Tech makes those who died in Baghdad and in Darfur seem not so far away. The places are different: the pain is the same. This has been a week to pray for deliverance.

In the psalms ‘enemies’ means those who want to do us harm and also the dark forces that threaten the stability of our lives. ‘Enemies’ includes those who hurt us directly and those who hurt us indirectly by thinking misfortune is a just punishment for some sin. None of the people killed in Blacksburg or Baghdad or Darfur deserved to die.

And so we pray, good Lord, deliver us.



Most of the time, those of us gathered here are protected from terror and random violence. Most of the time, we’re blessed to focus on our work, our friends, our hopes, and dreams, and goals, and desires. We enjoy a sense of normalcy and security. The psalmist felt that way—stable, secure, and confident that as things were, so they would remain. She even goes so far as to hint that not only was God responsible for her happy life, but that she believed God would make her ‘as strong as the mountains,’ impervious to harm.

How devastating, then, to be harmed. The very blessing of ordinary, everyday life can veil life’s fragility. Which makes it all the more painful when something happens to tear back that veil. We get toppled over. We’re left uprooted and exposed in all our naked fragility.

At the vigil out in front of the Chapel on Tuesday, Sam Wells said something about what happens when the veil is torn. He said:

[W]e are given a glimpse through these events into a reality we don’t often perceive. For a moment we see the world as God sees it – full of wonder, beauty, fragile glory and passionate devotion, and yet at the same time cruelly mutilated by violence, horror and terror. We see it that way today. God sees it that way every day. It breaks our hearts. It breaks God’s heart.

We’re vulnerable. We’re vulnerable ourselves and we’re vulnerable to losing those we love. It’s unbearably hard to think about the people who died and about what those who love them must be feeling.



Those of us who come from good Presbyterian stock know how the Westminster Catechism begins. It asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”

There’s this funny little bargaining bit in the psalm: “Look, God, if I die, who’s going to sing Your praises? The dust?” Which is maybe not what we expect from someone who’s just declared that God has hidden God’s face and left her fearfully alone. But here, at last, the psalmist is creeping back on to solid ground. Israel understood that God created God’s people to proclaim God’s goodness to the world. The psalmist is reminding God that her death would defeat God’s purpose, but she’s also confessing the truth of who she is—she is someone God created for relationship with God.

That is a confession of faith in the face of an experience that seems to contradict it. And that is why we say the Creeds and read the psalms and all of Scripture, because we are a people of faith whose faith rests on the faith of the generations who’ve gone before us. We turn to those whose lives and lips have confessed the presence of God in the world even when our experience of the world seems to deny God’s presence.

Ellen Davis writes:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded the church of this unsettling truth when he called Christians a people who are identified by their faith, not by their experience, not even their experience of God. Who could rely on their experience in the nightmare years of the Third Reich, when the situation suggested to faithful Jews and Christians that God had abandoned them? Instead, the remnant, the Confessing Church, was thrown back on biblical faith, whose witness to a faithful, merciful, and powerful God we must trust, if we are to endure through the tides of history. (Getting Involved with God, p. 165)

It may seem there’s not much we can do about violence and killing and death. But there is and we’re doing it right now. In the face of horror and terror we worship God. We proclaim the life, death, and resurrection of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. We sing God’s praises, lifting our voices in doxology. We do for our brothers and sisters who mourn and suffer what they may not be able to do for themselves right now: we bear witness to God’s loving presence in this world. We celebrate life-giving love in the face of terror and resurrection in the face of death.

This is a deeply subversive thing to do. By our very presence here we affirm that violence and suffering are not the final determiners of reality. Resurrection breaks open all human categories and limitations. There are no limits on God’s freedom and creative power. Glory be to God whose love has been, is, and will be the final Word.