Sit and Eat

Stuck in the Middle (With You)

I preached this sermon (or one much like it) at St. Lydia's on Sunday, April 28, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 24:45-53; you can read the text here.  

 

 

In her new book, Stuck in the MIddle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders, 

author Jennifer Boylan gives an account of parenting her two boys

while she is in the midst of a significant transition. 

 

Born Jim Boylan, 

she was “a father for ten years, 

a mother for eight, 

and for a time in between, 

neither, or both,” 

something in the middle. 

 

“The parental version,” as she puts it, 

“of the schnoodle, or the cockapoo.”

 

Boylan gives an account of being fundamentally in the middle of things, 

as she negotiates her own gender transition 

and the shifting landscape of her relationships with her sons and wife. 

 

Her sons’ biggest question in all of this 

(they seem to take the changes their father is undergoing 

with surprising calm and aplomb)

is, 

“What should we call you?”

 

After some discussion, 

the family decides on “Maddy.”

Part Mom, part Dad. 

It’s a name I like, 

because rather then sounding like two words smushed together, 

“Maddy” sounds a little bit like a whole new name. 

An affectionate nickname that slips easily off the tongue

and implies individuality rather than hybrid. 

 

*

 

Generally speaking, 

human beings do not like it much in the middle. 

We tend to dichotomize. 

We want things to be one thing or the other.

We don’t like it when something refuses to be easily categorized. 

We organize our world into polarized sides or put things in carefully labeled bins. 

For whatever reason, gender and sexuality 

seem to be an area where we do this with vigor.  

Despite research that both gender and sexual orientation exist on a spectrum, not a binary, 

our culture continues to brandish our categories like weapons:

boy or girl,

gay or straight. 

You only have two choices. 

Pick one. 

 

 

It turns out that Jesus is very often Stuck in the Middle, too. 

Jesus is a living, breathing, walking paradox. 

He’s two things at the same time. 

He is both human and divine. 

Fully, human, fully divine, as they say:

an impossibility that makes our eyes cross if we think about it too long. 

In the days after the resurrection, 

appearing to the disciples and then vanishing suddenly, 

he seems to be neither dead or alive. 

He’s not a ghost -- you can touch him and see his wounds, 

but he also has this tendency to suddenly disappear into thin air 

and reappear out of nowhere. 

It’s sort of like he’s post-alive. 

He’s so not-dead he’s more than alive. 

Or something. 

Whatever it is that he is, 

it’s in the middle. 

 

In fact, Jesus in Stuck in the Middle 

between heaven and earth. 

Commentator N. T. Wright writes, 

“[Jesus’] transformed body is the beginning of God’s new creation 

in which heaven and earth will come together in a new way. 

Jesus’ risen body is the beginning of a heavenly reality

which is fully at home on, and in, 

this physical world, 

and the beginning of a transformed physical world 

which is fully at home in God’s sphere.”*

 

So Jesus, 

in this time after his resurrection 

is the place where heaven and earth overlap. 

The place where God’s realm and our realm touch. 

He’s in the middle,

and the thing is

that because we are Christ’s body, 

we get to live there too. 

Stuck right in the middle between heaven and earth. 

 

*

 

If you’ve spent a lot of time in the middle, 

maybe, 

just maybe, 

it’s good practice 

for being a Christian. 

Maybe it’s good practice 

for living in this in-between place 

with Christ. 

 

I am the door, 

Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John. 

The final verses of this Gospel 

help us just what that imagery might mean -- 

where the door comes from and where it might lead. 

Life in the body of Christ 

is an entrance to the world of God. 

A threshold 

that we won’t cross completely 

until we go to be with God too. 

 

*

 

I believe in anything 

that complicates the categories that we so often are asked to live within. 

Every time someone asks we “what kind of people” 

come to St. Lydia’s 

I begin to try and tell them, 

and then think of all of you. 

You all defy categories.  

 

In fact everyone defies the categories 

the world so eagerly creates. 

 

Do not misunderstand me -- 

our identities are a crucial part of understanding 

who we are and how the world has percieved and treated us -- 

we have all be extolled or dismissed 

based on the indicators of identity. 

Some of us have felt the weight of systemic racism, classism, sexism, homophobia. 

But when these indicators come to define us, 

we have been reduced to something much less than who we are. 

 

 

This is one of the reasons I’ve been so excited 

about the Season of Listening at St. Lydia’s -- 

this time we’ve been taking the last few months 

getting trained to listen to people around us. 

I’ve been excited to begin to hear those stories 

of how each of us -- 

folks in this community 

and folks in the neighborhood --

defies those little boxes we’re asked to check 

every time we fill out a form. 

About how we’re all a lot more complicated 

than being one thing or another. 

About we’ve all had experiences, 

of being Stuck in the Middle. 

Some of us have found that right there, 

in the middle,

right there with us,

is Jesus. 

 

*

 

Growing up as a kid, 

I was a musician. 

I was a girl who played the trombone 

and I played it well. 

Because I was a musician, 

I got to feel proud -- 

of being artistic, 

talented, 

creative. 

 

But then God turned things around on me, 

and I ended up at Divinity School. 

When people asked me who I was, 

I didn’t know what to say. 

I was no longer a musician, not really. 

I didn’t know what I was heading for, either. 

I wasn’t going to be a pastor, or at least I didn’t think I was.

I was Stuck in the Middle, 

without a identity to be proud of 

or a label to fall back on. 

And I didn’t feel like I was much of anything at all. 

I didn’t know who I was. 

I had to let go of that image of myself,

that label I was hanging onto,

in order to find out. 

 

*

 

In this last chapter of Luke, 

the word, open

is used three times. 

Three times in relationship to the experience 

of meeting the risen Christ. 

On the road, he meets the disciples and opens their eyes, 

then opens the scriptures to them. 

And among the disciples he opens their minds. 

 

The experience of the resurrection is about opening, not closing. 

And you will also notice that it is not about knowing. 

There is a difference between being opened 

and being sure. 

There is a difference between being opened 

and understanding. 

There is a difference between being opened 

and getting it exactly right. 

 

So often we strive for the wrong thing.  

We’re trying so hard to decide who we are, 

we miss being opened to God. 

 

If you are Stuck in the Middle, 

do not be afraid. 

For you are inhabiting a sacred place. 

A threshold of in-between. 

 

If you are Stuck in the Middle, 

do not be afraid.

For you are standing with Jesus. 

Right there in the middle. 

 

 

 

 

*Acts for Everyone, N. T. Wright

Waiting Room

I preached this sermon at the Easter Vigil at St. Lydia's on Saturday, March 30, 2013.  The text is Luke 24:1-12; you can read it here. 

 

 

A few summers ago I worked as a chaplain in a hospital. 

 

One night I was there late, on call, 

and I got a phone call from one of the units 

that a man’s wife had died. 

And so I went up, not sure what to expect. 

 

A nurse caught me on my way in the door to the waiting room 

and pulled me aside to tell me the situation. 

 

The man was younger, in his late forties. 

His wife had been in surgery. 

Everything had looked good, 

she was recovering and talking to him, cracking jokes. 

And then everything wasn’t good.  

She took a turn for the worse, and then she died. 

It was not expected. 

 

I spent more than two hours 

with that man in the waiting room that night. 

I stayed with him as he inhabited this strange, uncanny place 

that exists in the wake of cataclysmic news. 

It was as if his mind was in two different places at the same time:

one was his old life, 

the one when his wife was having surgery, 

but was going to be better soon. 

The other was this...new place. 

This place where she was dead. 

 

And I could see him shifting back and forth. 

He’d carefully recount the story of the surgery, 

what all the doctors had said and when,

and then begin to weep, his head in his hands. 

And then he’d shift suddenly into telling me about his wife, 

all in the present tense. 

Stories about who she was and what she had liked. 

I asked how they had met and he told me the story 

the same way I’m sure he told it at dinner parties 

and we laughed

as if everything was fine.

And then something would pass over his face, 

like a cloud casting a shadow,

and he’d remember that she was gone. 

Again. 

 

 

We talked past midnight, until everyone was gone 

and only the security guards and the night nurses paced quietly by on their rounds. 

It was as if he wanted to stay in the waiting room. 

Because once he walked out those sliding glass doors

into the hot August night,

he wouldn’t be able to push off this new reality any longer. 

In the waiting room, 

no one knew but him. 

In the waiting room, 

it wasn’t real, not yet. 

 

It wouldn’t end with the sliding glass doors, either. 

Hearing she was gone was one thing, 

but knowing it was another. 

The new reality would descend in pieces. 

Months later he would still roll over in bed and expect to find her there, 

still hear her voice. 

 

Death came all at once to her, 

but for him, it would come bit by bit, 

a piece at time. 

 

 

*

 

This morning I celebrated Easter 

with the little kids who came to the other church where I work to dye Easter Eggs. 

We reenacted the whole story of Holy Week, 

galloping down the hallway as if on donkeys

while parents waved palm branches over our heads, 

sitting around a table in an upper room 

where we ate pieces of pita bread 

and drank dixie cups filled with grape juice, 

sitting quietly in the dark chapel as I told the story of what happened 

on that hill outside Jerusalem.  

And then, we all got on tiptoe 

and snuck down the hall to the darkened sanctuary where we crouched quietly

until two angels (okay -- teenaged girls) popped up in the pulpit and yelled,

“Why do you look for the living among the dead!  He is risen!”

And then the lights came up and music started playing 

and the girls threw fistfuls of rose petals down on the kids from above. 

 

This is the way we usually tell the story of Easter:

the story of what happened that morning at the tomb. 

It’s a little bit like a surprise party, actually.

A brief moment of disorientation followed by a loud 

“Surprise!”

and lots of party hats.  

 

 

But there is more in-between to Easter. 

In fact, the news of Christ’s resurrection 

is just as bit by bit, as piece by piece

as the sudden news of a loved ones’ death. 

We may be told, 

but we also have to see, 

to touch. 

We have to experience it for ourselves. 

Or it isn’t quite real. 

 

*

 

On Friday the women made the spices to anoint Jesus’ body, 

and on the Sabbath they waited and they prayed. 

Now it is Sunday, the sun is not even up, 

and they are here to tend to his body, 

to prepare him for burial 

and when they arrive they find that the stone in front of the tomb

has been rolled away. 

 

And he is gone. 

 

The first witnesses to the resurrection are greeted 

not by presence 

but by absence. 

Not by celebration 

but by emptiness. 

An empty tomb 

filled with a whole lot of nothing.

 

The lights do not come up 

and no one yells, “surprise.”

 

There is fear. 

 

There is the feeling that reality has just split dangerously apart. 

The sense that they are in two places at once. 

Their past lives, 

where Jesus was dead, his body laid in a tomb, 

and this one, where these two men, dressed in shining garments 

keep saying,

“Remember?  Remember what he told you?”

“Remember?”

 

And they do remember 

as if recalling a dream, 

that he had said that this would happen. 

 

A new creation begins to dawn. 

A new world in which everything is turned on its head 

and death has no hold over them. 

But they are still in the waiting room. 

 

It will take more than emptiness and absence. 

It will take presence. 

It will take Christ appearing at their sides. 

Walking with them along the road

then sitting down with them and breaking bread. 

Appearing among them and saying 

“See, look at my hands, look at my feet.”

 

It will take encounter, 

with the living Christ, 

the resurrected God, 

still bearing the wounds of death, 

for that new reality to blossom into something that looks like belief. 

 

And this is faith:

to sit in the waiting room 

in the wake of impossible news

and to wonder just what it is that is dawning. 

 

*

 

Is it possible that faith looks more like grief

than it does like joy?

 

Is it possible that faith is more absence than presence?

 

Is it possible it can take a whole lifetime to piece faith together?

A whole lifetime of thinking that you hear her voice in the next room over?

Of turning in bed to find she isn’t there?

A whole life time of remembering?

Remember what he told you.  Remember. 

 

And still we sing, Alleluia.

And still we say, The Lord is risen indeed.

 

We say it not because we are happy 

but because we are trusting. 

We trust: 

That a new creation is dawning 

and we have somehow caught the hem, 

and God is bringing us, 

joyfully,

into a new morning, 

a new place, 

a new world.  

 

We trust: 

that though there is absence 

there is also presence. 

That every so often, 

Christ does appear. 

Not on a dusty road outside Jerusalem 

but on a crowded sidewalk in the city. 

In the eyes of a stranger whose hand brushes yours 

or in moment of sudden beauty: the way the light slants through the avenues at twilight. 

Here at church as we pass bread from hand to hand,

or through the voice of someone you love who’s far away 

over the telephone. 

 

We trust.

That Christ is among us. 

 

*

 

This is the night. 

The hinge on which creation turns. 

You may feel sometimes that you have one foot in the old world

and one in the new. 

And you are right. 

Just sing Alleluia.

Just sing it and trust 

that God will make it new. 

The World Ends a Little Bit Every Day

I preached this sermon (or one very much like it) at St. Lydia's on Sunday, March 17, as a part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 21:5-33: Jesus speaking about the destruction of the temple.  You can read the text here.  

 

Over the last few weeks,

I have been making my way through an eight part, seventeen and a half hour 

PBS documentary called “New York: A Documentary.”

It was made by Ric Burns, brother of Ken Burns, 

and it documents the modern history of New York City, 

from Henry Hudson landing on the tip of Manhattan. 

 

The first five parts of the series were released in 1999, 

and watching it, 

I was aware of a certain, sweeping, tone. 

It is a grand portrayal of the city, 

with arial shots of glinting buildings 

and shining blue waters, choppy in the breeze. 

There is something naively hopeful 

about the perspective of this documentary. 

Something almost innocent. 

 

And then the camera pulls back for a shot of the Manhattan skyline, 

the two towers of the World Trade Center 

rising up to pierce the sky. 

 

And I realize that the people who are telling this story 

have not yet experienced disaster. 

And it shows.

If the filmmakers were to re-make this documentary today,

I’m sure that its tone would be different. 

I’m sure that the story of the city would be a bit more humble, 

tainted with something that tastes a bit like regret:

the knowledge that we’re not immortal.

Like Icarus, we tried to fly too close to the sun. 

 

*

 

The way we view the past 

is based on how we experience the present. 

The story we told of this city in 1999 

is not the same story we tell in 2001. 

Or in 2013.   

 

The past is mutable, 

our perceptions of it adjusting as our own perspectives change,

as our own stories play out and take shape. 

 

This is true of the stories we tell about our individual pasts, 

and about our collectives pasts,

of our community, of our nation. 

And it’s true of the gospels as well. 

 

The gospel of Luke was written sometime between 75 and 100 ad, 

and just as a documentary we would make now 

would reflect our collective experience of the recent past, 

the gospel of Luke 

reflects the recent past of the writer and his intended audience. 

 

Most significantly: 

the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D., 

perhaps just five years before this gospel was written. 

And it was not just the temple that was destroyed, 

but the entire city of Jerusalem, 

decimated by the Roman Emperor Titus. 

 

The writer of Luke is writing to an audience 

whose lives have been violently altered -- 

who have been scattered from a city now under Roman occupation 

and find themselves a persecuted minority 

in a political landscape that is chaotic and shifting.  

 

The significance of these words from Jesus’ mouth are not lost on anyone 

who would have read Luke’s words in the time they were penned:

When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, 

then know that its desolation has come near. 

Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, 

and those inside the city must leave it, 

and those out in the country must not enter it; 

for these are days of vengeance, 

as a fulfillment of all that is written.

 

Basically, the author is saying, 

Jesus told us it was going to be like this

and truly, it is awful.

But don’t loose heart. 

This is a part of the arc of the story that we must live out. 

 

 

*

 

 

The temple in Jerusalem was something to behold. 

It was a mammoth, hulking structure with twelve grand flights of stairs leading to its entrance. 

The first century historian Josephus wrote that 

“...the entire face was covered in gold,” 

and that 

“...the sun was no sooner up than it radiated so fiery a flash 

that persons straining to look at it 

were compelled to avert their eyes, as from solar rays.”*

 

Jesus stood in the temple that day, just before passover, 

as all the folks from the small towns around the city 

stared at its grandeur and ooohed and ahhhed. 

And he told them, 

It’s all coming down.  

Not one stone will be left upon another.

 

It would be like standing in front of Grand Central Station 

or the Metropolitan Museum

and saying to all the tourists 

one day all of this will be gone.

 

 

Things seem permanent until the day we realize that they’re not. 

Towers made of glass and steel 

are invulnerable until they crumble in dust. 

Our bodies are reliable until they turn against us or fall apart. 

Our jobs are secure until the moment they’re gone;

our relationships are reliable until someone leaves us. 

 

Perhaps you have experienced a moment of sudden knowledge 

of how fragile and uncertain the world around us really is. 

How all of it, 

our warm apartments and good health and steady, rhythmic lives

can evaporate in a moment 

when the ground beneath us suddenly shifts 

and everything changes.

 

In this passage, Jesus is telling us something that feels so backwards, 

and yet is so true:

everything that you see, feel, touch, everything real, 

none of it will last. 

All of it will crumble. 

What’s real is what you can’t see.  

What’s real are my words. 

 

 

*

 

 

Some Christians like to fixate on the end of the world. 

It’s kind of a funny thing to do, because we all know it’s coming. 

Everything comes to an end.  

So why spend so much time trying to figure out when?

The signs that Jesus talks about tell us more about our past than our future. 

 

A hurricane hits New Orleans 

and we find some population to blame 

or call it a sign that the end is coming, 

rather than wondering how we, 

this nation, 

abandoned so many to poverty, 

without assistance or protection. 

 

What’s terrifying is not the signs,

not the symbols and the imagined future they might signify, 

but the present that we’ve all be complicit in allowing to come to pass. 

What’s terrifying is the fact that we’re always so surprised. 

 

Nation will rise against nation,

Jesus says,

and kingdom against kingdom; 

there will be great earthquakes, 

and in various places famines and plagues...

it’s not so much a prediction 

as it is a description. 

 

And one that is all too familiar.  

The end is indeed coming:

the world ends a little bit every day. 

“And beyond the end of time,” 

as one commentator wrote, 

“stands Jesus.”*

He is there waiting. 

We can live our lives in expectation, 

not of the end of the world, 

for we know already that the world is ending, 

but in expectation 

of the one who is coming,

the one who is waiting. 

Heaven and earth will pass away, he tells us.

but my words will not pass away.

 

 

*

 

 

These last few weeks 

I’ve been feeling this strange pull to listen to some of the music 

I was playing and listening to in college. 

A lot of it is classical stuff that I studied and then put away for a while

when I moved away from music as a serious career goal. 

 

This week I took out a bunch of old CDs and finally loaded them up 

on my computer. 

I’ve been immersing myself in the Goldberg Variations 

performed by Glenn Gould 

and Lully’s dance suites. 

I was most tentative to listen once more to Bach’s Cello Suites

recorded by Pablo Casals. 

I used to listen to that recording with my partner

the year I lived in the Netherlands 

as we’d sit and drink tea and I’d feel this strange combination 

of being perfectly at home and, at the same time, 

more homesick then I’d ever been in my life. 

 

It was the Cello Suites that I practiced through all four years of college, 

returning to them again and again 

because they were like a deep, cool well 

and you never reached the bottom. 

 

Listening to them this week, 

I found that they opened up something forgotten in me, 

excavated memories that had lay dormant. 

 

I remember every note. 

Every turn, 

every rise and fall of phrase. 

I can sing them, whistle them, 

and still I am delighted and surprised by Casals’ 

imperfect and soaring performance.  

 

Because of this recording, 

this physical thing, 

which can be lost, found, deleted, 

I can cling to Casals’ performance, 

listen to it again and again. 

 

But even if the whole whole world fades away, 

even if the buildings around me crumble

and not one stone is left upon another, 

I will still have the cello suites, 

because they have been written upon my heart. 

 

That’s what Christ gives us. 

Words that are more than words, but an imprint of love, 

written on our hearts. 

Words that he have given us to take in 

and to try to live out. 

Words that will never leave us, 

even after the city lies in ruins.  

We could not loose them, even if we tried. 

 

Everything is ending. 

All the time, all around us. 

But there, in the distance, beyond the end of time, 

past everything has that has passed away,

Christ is standing, and waiting. 

And he will not be moved.  

 

 

 

*Josephus, The Jewish War, 5:207-208

*R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreters’ Bible

The Mercy of Clementine

I preached this sermon (or one much like it) at St. Lydia's on Sunday, February 24 as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 14:1-24; read it here.   "Clemenine" is a pseudonymn.  

 

 

It’s funny how the people at the bottom of the social ladder 

are almost always the kindest. 

 

I was twelve years old when I moved from Connecticut to a town just outside Seattle

and started going to Middle School in a place where I knew no one. 

My school was small and insular enough 

that the social groups were very clearly formed, 

but large enough that a new kid didn’t really make much of an impression on anyone. 

I slipped in the first day of school, 

unnoticed among all the strongly formed cliques 

that had been firmly in place since third or fourth grade. 

 

I wasn’t introduced as new by my teachers

and so no one really noticed me that first day,

and no one said hello. 

Until lunch, 

when, as I stood in the cafeteria, 

holding my plastic lunch try and wondering just what to do, 

a very merciful, very kind girl named Clementine invited me to sit with her. 

 

The thing is, Clementine wasn’t just merciful and kind. 

She was also distinctly uncool. 

As in, it was painfully obvious 

that the table she invited me to join 

was the table for the kids who were so uncool 

that they were forced to sit with each other 

out of circumstances. 

And, on that first day of school, 

those kids felt bad for me. 

It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning. 

 

I declined Clementine’s offer.

For, while I was desperate for her kindness, 

I wasn’t stupid. 

I knew that sitting with her, at her table, 

would mean sitting at that table for the rest of the year. 

Basically, I knew that I could do better. 

 

Middle Schoolers know, 

perhaps better than anyone else,

how rigidly, tribally structured our society is. 

And they don’t hide it. 

I knew it, Clementine knew it.

And we both knew what it meant when I declined her offer,

opting instead to throw away my lunch and cry in the girls bathroom. 

 

 

The thing is, 

I was a Christian. 

Every week I went to church and heard stories like the one we read tonight.  

Stories about how the lowly are exalted. 

Stories about how the last are first and the first are last. 

Stories about how Jesus ate with sinners and prostitutes:

with those at the bottom of the social ladder. 

In the middle school lunchroom, Jesus sat at the table 

with the freaks and the geeks and the outcasts.  

 

And I wondered if I should to. 

I wondered if it was wrong that I didn’t want to be like them. 

That, while I tried always to be kind, 

I purposely cultivated an unremitting distance between me and the kids at that table. 

To make sure everyone knew that I wasn’t one of them. 

 

I did this because I knew that,

once you’ve taken the lowest seat at the table, 

no one ever asks you to take a higher place. 

Not in Middle School, 

and not in ancient Israel. 

And Jesus knew it too.  

 

Did Jesus really want me to live with the consequences 

of joining Clementine at her table?

Was that what he wanted for me?

It felt so risky. 

I dreaded what it would mean. 

 

 

*

 

 

The story in Jesus’ parable 

about a man who throws a banquet

is not that far removed from the social politics of a Middle School lunch room.

In fact, Pliny the Younger’s first century writings 

tell of banquets in the Ancient Near East

in which there were three different kinds of wine, 

served to different guests, depending on how their social rank. 

It was a culture that was unabashedly hierarchical. 

And this is a story of someone getting snubbed, Middle School style. 

Th man in Jesus’ parable throws a great banquet, 

only to find that, unbeknownst to him, 

overnight he’s become desperately uncool. 

When the time comes for the guests to arrive, 

they snub him, 

giving all kinds of crazy excuses about why they can’t come. 

Basically, it’s the “I’m washing my hair” of ancient Israel. 

 

So the man changes the rules of the game. 

He invites the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind -- 

incidentally, the four “categories” of folks 

who were excluded in ancient Israel from serving as priests -- 

the “untouchables” of the ancient world,

to his banquet, that his house may be filled.

 

The parable is one of unbelievable abundance and generosity, 

offered to those who have consistently been disallowed from receiving it. 

 

 

*

 

 

And it places before us a new kind of table. 

 

A table that, unlike the Middle School lunch room

or the socially stratified banquets 

that Jesus and his friends attended,

belongs first to the outcasts. 

 

Belongs to those who don’t belong.  

 

 

*

 

 

I think that, as Christians, 

there are three kinds of tables 

that we can hope to inhabit. 

 

The first is the table of the world. 

It’s the table that perhaps we’re the most familiar with. 

It’s the Middle School lunch room

where some are low and some are high. 

It’s the feast that Jesus attends 

where some get the good wine and some get the cheap stuff. 

It’s the table where power wins and powerlessness looses. 

It’s the table where wealth buys more than poverty does.

It’s the table where you want to be somebody instead of nobody.  

 

The second table is the table of heaven. 

And that’s the table that we hear about throughout the Bible. 

It’s the feast that has been set in the world yet to come. 

A heavenly feast that never ends

and we are all invited.

The master of the house sends a messenger 

out to every corner of the city, 

compels us to come and eat. 

This is a banquet where everything is upside-down. 

Where beggars and kings share the same cup of wine, 

and thieves and nobleman exchange tall tales. 

It’s a table where we’re all just children of God

and wealth and power and prestige have fallen away 

like the husk from a grain of wheat. 

 

The third table, 

well, 

the third table is this one here, in this room. 

The third table 

is this table 

where we gather, 

and share a meal. 

It’s the table that Christ shared with his friends:

tax collectors and prostitutes and fishermen and women, 

and now, 

with us.  

And it’s as if God has gathered up the fragments 

of that heavenly banquet, 

gathered them up in God’s hands

and reached down, 

and spread them here before us. 

 

This is the table 

where we try. 

 

Where we try to remember who and whose we are. 

 

This is the table 

where we disrupt the rules of the lunch room 

and try sitting all together. 

Me and Clementine and the freaks and the geeks and the nerds and the jocks, 

and that kid who won the spelling bee. 

 

This is the table where we are reminded. 

Reminded of another way. 

An upside-down way of living 

that echoes that table in heaven. 

Reminded that, though the whole world tells us 

that what makes us wonderful 

is our achievements or our success or our beauty or our intelligence, 

actually, what makes us wonderful is simply that God loves us.

That’s it. 

 

Perhaps most importantly, 

this is the table 

where we fail. 

 

Because, though Jesus may have invited us here 

and God may have set the table, 

we are not in heaven yet, 

and we bring with us when we come 

all the heartache and fear and struggle   

of the Middle School lunch room. 

 

We are not in heaven yet, 

and so this is the table where we learn 

that difference 

in class, and culture, and background, and race, and wealth,

is really, really hard. 

 

It is not a table of idealism 

where difference is washed away. 

It’s a table of realism, 

where we live in the midst of difference 

and pray 

that God might break in 

and disorder all of our Middle School lunch room tendencies.  

 

 

*

 

 

The third kind of table 

comes with a question. 

A question that our church, 

and all churches, 

need to keep asking continually -- 

if we are to be any different from a Middle School lunch room. 

And the question is:

Who’s not here?

Who’s not at the table?

 

It’s not a question to inspire guilt. 

It’s not a question to make us all feel bad. 

Remember, this is a table of realism, 

not idealism, 

and the truth is that it takes work, and effort, and care 

to be a community of difference. 

 

It is a question that’s about noticing, 

and remembering. 

That our table, 

this table 

doesn’t quite look like the heavenly table yet. 

And it never will, because we’re not in heaven yet. 

But that question, 

Who’s not here?

will draw us out into the in-between. 

Will invite us to live in that uncomfortable place 

of risk and unknowing, 

that dangerous place of hope and expectation. 

For this meal is indeed a foretaste of what’s to come. 

 

 

Then the master said to the slave, 

Go out into the roads and lanes, 

and compel people to come in, 

so that my house may be filled.

 

Estuary

I actually never preached this sermon at St. Lydia's, but I preached one sort of like it.  On Sunday, February 3, I left my sermon on my dining room table, and discovered, minutes before preaching, that I had no manuscript.  It was a bit of an object lesson, since the sermon itself is abut stepping into places of in-betweeness and of risk.  I think this sermon is pretty good, but the one I preached that night was probably more alive.  

The text is Luke 7:36-50, you can read it here.  

 

*

 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

 

Like many other 10th graders in these United States, 

I read these words from a dusty old anthology 

in my high school English class. 

It's the opening of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, 

and one reads them at the same time one reads all the other Transcendentalists 

like Thoreau and Dickinson. 

I, like many tenth graders before me, 

consumed the words dutifully and apparently without relish.  

They were beautiful words, but they didn’t capture me or move me,

not the way they do now, 

now that I am no longer a tenth grader, my mind abuzz with tenth grade things. 

 

They didn’t capture or move me, 

until my English teacher, Mr. Hansen, 

who was a rare and wonderful character I will have to expound on some other time, 

told us a story. 

 

About ten years ago,

he told us, 

I was reading this poem with my honors English class, 

just like this one. 

And in the middle of a stanza, 

this boy in the back stood up and said, 

“Mr. Hansen, I’ve got to go.”

And he walked out the classroom. 

And he didn’t come back for three months. 

 

It turned out that the 10th grader Mr. Hansen was speaking about 

had been moved by the words of Walt Whitman and Dickinson, 

And like Thoreau so many years before him, 

he felt a call to nature so strong that he could not ignore it. 

He walked out of the classroom and apparently just kept on walking, 

at least according to the story. 

I’m not sure exactly what he did for all that time in the woods, 

but in my imagination, 

he returned to his second period high school english class three months later, 

wearing the same clothes he left in, 

with twigs sticking out of his beard. 

 

That kid in Mr. Hansen’s English class 

had a response to the words of Walt Whitman. 

He had a response so strong

that he was moved to do something just a little bit crazy.  

 

This word, response, is the word that many Christian theologies use 

to describe why we do what we do in Christian life and in Christian worship. 

The prayers we offer, 

the offerings we give,

the way we live our lives

are seen as a response 

to God’s grace. 

God breaks into our lives 

like a rock falling into a still pool, 

and the force of the impact on the water 

creates a series of frenetic ripples.  

The money we offer, the prayers we give, the songs we sing 

are all reverberations of that first, 

disruptive event of God’s love for us. 

 

It’s the same for the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears

and dries them with her hair. 

Like the 10th grader who sat in my classroom ten years before me, 

she has encountered something 

that has moved her to respond. 

And her response is just a little bit crazy. 

 

*

 

She is a woman who never receives a name.  

We remember her for her love

and for the scandal of how she makes that love manifest. 

The attentions she lavishes on Jesus

are too intimate for the public setting in which they take place. 

She is the only woman in a room reserved for men. 

She comes up behind Jesus as he reclines at the table, 

and takes hold of his feet,

a gesture that a woman would only enact with her husband. 

The men avert their eyes, embarrassed, 

not sure where to look in the face of this intimacy. 

And she begins to weep. 

And then she unties her hair, 

and it falls down over Jesus’ feet. 

Everyone is trying to figure out where to look, 

and yet can’t stop looking 

as she transgresses every border, 

every boundary they’ve ever known.  

She is inhabiting the margins. 

 

This is her response 

to the God who has broken into her life. 

This is her outpouring:

love that is neither appropriate nor refined. 

It spills over the edges

and overflows. 

 

*

 

Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; 

hence she has shown great love. 

But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.

 

Is it possible that Jesus’ parable about the two debtors 

encourages us to sin?

The more sinful we are, 

the parable seems to say, 

the greater our experience of God’s forgiveness, 

and the greater our response, 

the greater our love.

 

In the biblical commentaries I read, 

you can almost feel the scholars begin to shuffle their papers around 

and readjust their glasses 

when this question arises. 

 

No, no, they argue, 

It wasn’t the woman’s sinfulness that makes her more able to love than the Pharisees. 

It was her knowledge that she was in need of forgiveness 

that makes her different from them.

They can’t see that they are also sinners, and also in need of forgiveness. 

 

But somehow, I don’t think this story is about knowledge. 

Or self awareness of one’s sinfulness. 

I don’t think it’s about what we know about ourselves

or what we don’t know about ourselves. 

 

I think it’s about experience, 

raw, and unfiltered, 

about response, and about desire. 

I think it’s about that moment 

when you realize that your need 

is as vast and deep as the ocean. 

 

And that your need, 

your need which is so vast, and so deep, 

so frighteningly bleak, 

like an open nerve laid bare, 

is the place where you come face to face with God. 

 

*

 

I am an only child 

who grew up in a family that valued performance and achievement. 

I conscientiously kept my distance from all those things

that divided good kids from bad kids, 

for fear that, 

well, 

if I was a bad kid, then I wouldn’t be good. 

I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I did my homework. 

I was a tiny, blonde Pharisee 

who got straight A’s.  

 

I also rarely took risks. 

I rarely crossed boundaries. 

I rarely made mistakes. 

I was the kid who avoided the boy I had a crush on 

to never risk being rejected, 

the kid who avoided classes I wouldn’t be good in 

to never risk failing them. 

 

I never crashed and burned, 

but the way I was living my life wasn’t very...alive. 

 

*

 

I don’t think Jesus wants us to sin 

so that we might experience grace. 

But if our lives look more like the Pharisees’ 

than the woman’s, 

if our lives are about scrupulously staying 

to one side of the line, 

so that we can continue to believe that we’re “good,”

maybe we’re not really living. 

 

In her chapter, “The Elusive Lure of the Lotus,” 

found in Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist and Mujerista Perspectives, 

Mary (Joy) Philip encourages the church to inhabit the margins, 

and introduces her readers to the idea of the estuary:

the place where the river meets the sea. 

“Estuaries,” she writes, “are borderlands that are continuously graced

by the rivers on one side and lashed at by the sea on the other. 

Purity on one side and brackishness on the other.”

She explains that estuaries are in constant flux, 

creating an entirely new environment where animals who must exist 

in sea water or fresh water cannot survive.  

But, “The productivity of an estuary,” she writes,

“is estimated to be eight times that of agricultural land 

because of the rich organic material that the river brings in.  

The incoming water and the ocean tides

create a chaos in which life becomes a struggle 

because of the constantly changing environmental conditions, 

so estuaries are places where fatality is not rare, 

and yet life thrives here.”

 

Something happens in that in-between place 

when we live in the borders between purity and brackishness 

and inhabit a chaotic but rich environment 

where the risks are high, 

but love is abundant. 

 

Something happens in that transgressive place

where a woman stands on the threshold of a man’s world 

and loosens her hair 

and weeps

so that everyone catches their breath 

and reels in beauty and in fear. 

 

Something happens 

when we stop being careful. 

When we follow God’s unruly call 

to live in places of risk and daring, 

to stop needing so badly to be good 

and simply be:

needy people in need of more love than anyone can offer us, 

anyone except the one who made us.

 

*

 

I don’t think Jesus wants us to sin 

so that we might experience grace. 

But I hear him calling us to wade just a little bit deeper into the water. 

To wade out to the place 

where the river meets the sea. 

To wade out to a place that is so in the middle, 

so marginal, 

that we no longer know who we are:

good or bad, 

saint or sinner. 

 

Only that we have stood at the edge of our need, 

which is so vast, and so deep, 

and come face to face with God. 

 

*

 

We share the sermon at St. Lydia's, and so I invite you to reflect in silence, and if you're moved, to share a story or experience that's been sparked by the text.  

I'm Not Here to be Pure

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 20 as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  Just before the sermon, one of our congregants, Mak, was baptized.  The text is Luke 5:29-39, the story of Levi the tax collector who throws a banquest for Jesus; read it here.  

 

Here’s the strange thing about parties in the Ancient Near East: parties were sort of public events.  If I threw a great banquet, like Levi did, I’d invite all of my friends and associates -- the people who were at my social level, and then, everyone else would come too.  And watch.  

It’s actually a little bit like the weddings that have been depicted lately on Downton Abbey (no spoilers here, promise!).  It’s the lady of the house who’s getting married, and all the other lords and ladies are the ones who get invited, but the whole town comes out for it.  There are decorations in the streets and everybody gathers at the door of the church to see the bride.  All the children wave colored flags, and cheer and shout as they chase her carriage down the road as she and the groom make their get-away.

So that’s kind of the scene that we have here  at Levi’s house.  A banquet with all of his friends, the tax collectors, and everyone in the town is out to see the show.  They are gathered around the walls of the house, listening to the music that’s being played inside, and dancing in the streets.  

Including the Pharisees. 

Except maybe they’re not dancing. 

 

Pharisees get a bad rap in the bible.  They’re kind of the universal bad guys: when they come on stage the music goes all dark and tremolo-y.  The Pharisees were a particular segment of Jewish culture during Jesus’ time, almost like a small political party or a ruling class.  They were powerful, elite, and scrupulously observant of Jewish law.  And many of these laws had to do with food and eating.  One commentator writes, “Law guided the Pharisees in matters pertaining to food and meals, so the Pharisees maintained a separation from others and ate only with those who, like them, observed the laws of purity.”*

The Pharisees were really interested in keeping lots of things separate.  Theirs was a world divided into clean and unclean, and their job was to make sure that they stayed pure.  That’s why it is so astonishing, so scandalous, that Jesus is eating and drinking with these tax collectors.  It means he isn’t interested at all in being pure. 

 

*

 

The flirtation with purity is not a religious tendency displayed only by the Pharisees.  We see it in our own religious tradition: the church around us or perhaps those traditions we were raised in.  The idea that by staying on the straight and narrow, or taking part in certain rituals like confession or prayer, we can keep our hearts clean and pure and free of sin.  The short explanation given of Baptism is often that is “cleanses us of our sin.”  As if we are inherently dirty creatures in need of a good scrubbing. 

 

I think it’s dangerous, this focus on purity, because it leads us to believe that if we are good enough, 

careful enough, 

strict enough, 

or harsh enough, 

we can save ourselves 

through our good behavior. 

 

And that when we stumble or falter, 

we risk losing God’s love. 

 

I think that stumbling and faltering is part of the deal. 

And I think that God’s love is not going anywhere, no matter how badly we tumble. 

 

A second and compelling argument against a religious focus on purity might be that Jesus seems wholly disinterested in it. 

 

The Pharisees look on in shock and chagrin as Jesus, who just yesterday was teaching in the temple, defiles himself eating unclean food in the presence of unclean people. Jesus, if anything, is interested in being impure.  It is not the well who need a physician, but the sick, as he says, and Jesus does not show up to this party with a bottle of Purell in his pocket. 

 

*

 

If baptism washes us into anything, it washes us, 

not into purity, 

but into a mess. 

It washes us into the knowledge

that God will draw us to this pool again and again 

every day for the rest of our lives,

not to be scrubbed clean, 

but to be messily re-born, 

re-made,

reminded

that we belong to God. 

This God who sits down to eat 

at a table with sinners, just like us.  

Not because we’re pure or clean or perfect, 

but simply because we’re loved.

 

 

It is not what what’s being washed out of us that’s important, 

but what we’re being washed into:

a life that’s as wild and free as 

children waving and shouting with abandon 

as they chase the car of the newlyweds down the road, 

as the tin cans clatter. 

 

This is a kind of love that we can’t capture by carefully enacting certain behaviors, 

by fastidiously keeping to one side of the line. 

This love has no limits, no boundaries, no lines. 

And instead of dividing us one from the other, 

defining who we can’t eat with, 

this love sets a table for all.  

 

This week I went to hear a couple of friends’ band play as part of Goldenfest, an annual Balkan music festival that happens here in Brooklyn.  Balkan music covers a few genres of music of Southeastern Europe including Klezmer and Romany.  The music is brass and woodwinds clattering over frantic mixed meters, while complex percussion parts drive the whole thing along.  Together with the musical tradition comes a highly developed tradition of dance: the dancers clasp one another’s hands, held up high, and circle the band. 

 

This is a dance that belongs to everyone. 

Not just the professional or the practiced. 

The steps are complex; the line moves steadily forward as the dancers shift and dip. 

For most of the night I watched them, mesmerized, 

moving my feet in place to see if I could catch the rhythm of the thing. 

And then an old friend on the line saw me, 

turned and held out his hand

and pulled me in. 

It was like falling into the water. 

 

 

The call is as simple as that. 

A hand extended. 

Two words: Follow me.

And we leave everything behind 

and join in the dance. 

It takes us round and round, 

the steps repeating, the rhythm revolving, just out of our grasp.  

We might spend our whole lives attempting to understand it, 

or finally just give ourselves over to the untamed meter 

that we pound out on the floor

as the current pulls us under:

This dance is for everyone. 

This is what it is to be free.  

 

 

We share the sermon at St. Lydia's.  And so I invite you to take a moment in silence, then offer a story or experience that has been sparked by the text 

 

 

 

*R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible 

 

Gulf

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 13, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 4:14-30; you can read it here.  That evening was also the launch of our "Season of Listening," a period of months in which our community will be listening to the stories of the city and our neighborhood by conducting one-on-one interviews with residents.  

 

It’s a bit of a strange decision Jesus makes, 

when you think about it.  

Baptized, 

forty days alone in the desert, 

filled with the Holy Spirit,

he returns and begins teaching in the temples all around the country side, 

and everyone is responding, 

and then he goes...

home.

 

To Nazareth, 

a two-stop-lights-and-a-tumbleweed kind of a place, 

where everybody knows everybody at the corner store,

and everybody remembers Jesus, 

Joseph’s son. 

Perhaps he always seemed a little bit...different 

to the residents of this tiny, no-count town. 

While everybody grew up, and found a job and got married, had some kids,  

Jesus just...didn’t. 

Then he was out in the wilderness for more than a month, 

doing God knows what. 

You can almost hear the gossip among folks stopping to chat on the corner:

I always did have a strange feeling about that kid. 

Remember when he was just 11 or 12, 

the way he stayed behind his parents and sat in the temple

in Jerusalem?

They say he was just sitting there, listening. 

It’s just not normal for a kid that age. 

 

*

 

Scholars are confused by the quick turn in Jesus’ conversation 

with the people of his hometown in the temple. 

But I think that many of us, who've left a place to land in a big, anonymous city like this one 

can probably speak of the unstable chemistry that’s in play 

when returning to the place we left behind. 

 

When I go home for Christmas or a summer visit, 

I invariably run into someone I knew back in high school 

at the grocery store or the Barnes and Noble. 

They have three kids and a husband, and I...don’t. 

I left and they...didn’t.

And no matter how genuinely glad I am to see that person, 

or how glad they might be to see me, 

no matter how warm our initial greeting might by, 

the gulf that exists between us is palpable. 

The very act of leaving seems, in and of itself, 

to be a judgement of their staying. 

Even though that’s not what I want at all.  

 

 

There’s no reason to be surprised 

when Jesus’ reception at the temple, 

at first warm, then proud, 

then a little stunned, 

turns quickly to hostility. 

What he’s saying to these people, 

the people who raised him, is,

It’s bigger than all of this.

 

What God is doing is not just for you, 

not just for this place -- it’s for the whole world.  

 

*

 

Yesterday, 

some of St. Lydia’s Leadership Table members and a few others and me

all went to look at a space that’s for rent a few blocks up on Douglass Street.

I thought it was be a place that we might consider for St. Lydia’s -- 

a place that we could think about moving to, 

as we’re swiftly growing out of our space here at the Zen Center. 

 

At our Community Meeting in November, 

we decided that we would aim to move this coming Fall, 

which means that now, amazingly enough, is the time for us to begin to poke around, 

get a sense of what’s out there,

and see what might be realistic.  

 

We also said that, if the right place came along before the Fall, 

it would make sense to move on it. 

I will let you know right now that we decided not to pursue this particular space on Douglass -- 

but we learned a LOT taking a look at it, 

and I want to share some of that with all of you. 

 

The space on Douglass is a big, unfinished mechanic’s garage. 

Brick, one story,

with a roll down garage door. 

The space is HUGE.

By New York standards, it seemed to go on for eternity. 

And the prospect of fixing up such a space for our use, 

putting in new flooring and bathrooms and lighting 

and getting inspections done and figuring out how to pay for it all

was an overwhelming prospect, at least for me. 

 

Afterward, we stood around outside 

talking about the neighborhood and how rapidly it was changing, 

the  businesses and organizations that were popping up just south of the space, 

Park Slope rising up to the East of us

and the Gowanus Houses poised to the West of us, 

the block where we stood situated in the gulf between them.  

 

Wondering who we were in relationship to both. 

 

Jesus reads from the scroll in the temple. 

He reads from the prophet Isaiah 

and everyone in the room hears those words differently when he reads them, 

hears them as if for the first time. 

 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

Jesus says, 

   because God has anointed me
     to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ 

 

Listen to the powerful words he’s using:

Proclaim 

Release 

Recovery 

Go free, or, Liberate 

 

 

Standing on that block, in the gulf between neighborhoods, 

neighborhoods changing more rapidly than we are probably prepared for, 

a whole lot of questions emerged 

about who we are, 

and what we’re being asked to do. 

 

This is Christ’s church, 

and the Spirit has anointed us 

to proclaim, 

to release, 

to recover, 

to liberate. 

 

And we don’t know just how we’re going to do it. 

But we know that it’s bigger than this. 

Bigger than these four walls and bigger than these seven tables. 

What God is doing is not just for us. 

It’s for the whole world.  

 

That’s a little scary to hear sometimes, 

because “just us” is awfully cosy.  

But “just us” also means just that -- 

“Just us.”

 

 

On top of it all, 

proclaiming 

and releasing 

and recovering 

and liberating 

brings up a lot of scary questions, 

about who’s poor and who’s rich, 

about who has power and who doesn’t, 

about who can liberate and who can be liberated. 

It brings up real, deep questions 

about race and class and gentrification. 

About the difference that exists 

between the world of my block, 

and the world of one block over.  

And sometimes these questions feel a little bit like standing in the grocery store,

just feeling the distance, the gulf, between you and another human, 

and wishing it wasn’t there. 

 

The people in the synagogue were filled with rage 

when they heard what Jesus had to say. 

This stuff is real. 

 

But there’s something else that’s real. 

And that’s God’s deep and abiding presence in all of these questions. 

Throughout the last several stories in the Gospel of Luke, 

there’s been a leitmotif running through all the stories we hear. 

It’s the Holy Spirit. 

It’s the Holy Spirit that moves Simeon to go and see Jesus in the temple, 

the Spirit that inspires his song. 

It’s the Holy Spirit that descends at Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, 

the Holy Spirit that drives him into the wilderness, 

and brings him back to begin this ministry that’s been set before him. 

 

None of it happens without God. 

None of it happens without the movement of God’s Spirit. 

 

These questions, 

the whole lot of them, 

about where we’re going to move 

and how we’re going to grow, 

and what we’re being called to do -- 

how we’re being called 

to proclaim 

and release, 

and recover, 

and liberate, 

and the very tricky, very scary, HOW

of actually doing that, 

of actually reaching across the gulf, 

are questions that we need to sit with 

and wrestle with 

and struggle with. 

 

And in the very midst of our sitting and wrestling and struggling, 

the Spirit will move. 

Most likely in ways that are entirely unexpected. 

 

There’s a rule in theatre improv that, 

whatever your partner gives to you to work with, 

the best thing to do is just to say yes. 

What if we approached each day as a holy improvisation?

A playful, surprising partnership

in which our job is to simply be ready to say yes?

We plan and rehearse and prepare, and we should, 

but all of that rehearsal is really just getting ready to be light on our feet. 

To say yes when that surprising moment comes. 

 

St. Lydia’s, for instance, never set out to have a garden;

but we got one by serendipity, 

when it landed in our laps. 

Or maybe it was grace. 

 

I have a feeling that grace is not done with us quite yet. 

 

*

 

Standing in front of this ginormous garage, 

Contemplating what St. Lydia’s might do 

if we were to take a space like this on, 

a space that could house pretty much anything we wanted it to -- 

an after school program,

a theatre, 

a day program for those without housing, 

a yoga class (or three)

bible study, theology group, 

a chapel, 

Jake’s friend, an architect who had come along to advise us, 

gave us some very good advice. 

He said, You need to learn more about the neighborhood.

About what the needs are here, 

and how you’re going to respond to them.

And someone said, 

We need the Season of Listening.

 

This is a season of listening at St. Lydia’s, 

and a season of discernment.

A time to listen to this city and this neighborhood. 

To learn more about what we are being called to do, 

and maybe even to begin to put some flesh on the bones, 

and think a little bit about how we’re going to do it. 

 

And by “we,” what I really mean is “God.”

Because she’s our parter in all of this. 

We will rehearse and prepare,

and then we will listen, 

all so that, when the moment comes, 

we can be light on our feet. 

All so that, when the moment comes, 

we are something close to ready 

to say yes. 

On Cotton

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 6, 2012, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 2:21-35, the story of Simeon seeing Jesus in the temple.  You can read it here.  

 

Virginia Woolf, in her essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” divides our experience of life into two categories: experiences of “being” and “non-being.”  Each day, she explains, is made up of much more non-being than being.  “A great part of every day,” she writes, “is not lived consciously.”  These are the non-being portions of our lives.  “One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done.  The broken vacuum cleaner, ordering dinner, writing orders to Mabel, washing, cooking dinner.”

It is as if these times of non-being are clouded by a cotton wool, as Woolf describes it, a sort of fuzziness of our activities through which we move, pleasantly enough, but not really...awake. 

Then there are moments of being.  Exceptional moments in which we are aware: of beauty, connection, meaning, all of it alive.  Woolf tells of several moments of being in her experience.  A few led to profound despair and hopelessness, another, to satisfaction.  As a child she saw a flower in a bed near the house and thought, “that is the whole.”  Something was revealed in the most ordinary of places.

 

 

When Simeon encounters the eight day old Jesus in the temple, the cotton wool is cleared away.  It is a moment of being: a penetrating revelation of truth and beauty.  He takes the child in his arms and for a moment the two are like passing ships sailing steadily in opposite directions.  The child sailing into life, the old man sailing out of it. 

It’s funny, when you think about it, that Jospeh and Mary are “amazed” at what Simeon had to say at the temple.  Even now, after everything they’ve seen.  After the angel’s annunciation and this unusual pregnancy, after the birth in a manger and the news that that shepherds brought breathlessly, to share.  After all these astonishing moments of revelation, they are still amazed.  Still taken off guard by Simeon’s words. 

Perhaps it was easier for them to recede behind the cotton wool to live for a bit.  It’s safer there, and more familiar, easier than these sudden outbursts of angelic proclamations.  Every child is a miracle to his mother, but perhaps Mary is wishing that Jesus was just a little bit less of one. 

They are beginning to get a develop a picture, however, of another aspect of these lives of being and non-being in which we live, which Virginia Woolf, an atheist, by the way, will write of so many years later.  In the same essay she writes, “...I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we -- I mean all human beings -- are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of this work of art.”

 

 

A prophet is a person who speaks a truth that no one else can see.  And that’s what Simeon does in the temple.  For a moment he transcends the cotton wool like an plane erupting through a bank of clouds into the pure, unfiltered sunlight on the other side, and he and all those in his presence know that they have, for just a moment, stepped into the truth, into a reality unseen until just this moment. 

Joseph and Mary, the parents of Jesus, this God-child, are beginning to see the pattern behind the cotton.  They’re beginning to see what’s been so clearly revealed to Simeon. 

 

 

I grew up singing this song of Simeon.  Grew up singing it so often that I cannot read this text without that melody I learned as a child floating back to me.  Without feeling the weight of a choral folder in my hands and remembering the particular slant of the light through the windows of my cathedral where I sang these words as the sun went down. 

The Song of Simeon is traditionally a text that is sung at evening prayer, and that is where I sang it.  In the tradition I was raised in there are liturgies for so many times in the day, prayers we say when we rise in the morning and prayers we say at noon. 

The Song of Simeon is the prayer we say before we go to bed, as the sun retreats and leaves us in darkness, and we pray that God will watch over us one more night.  And if I should die before I wake, the old children’s prayer goes.

If each of our days is a life lived in miniature, each nighttime is a death in miniature, and through the texts of evening prayer we face that death.  Through the texts of evening prayer, we remember that, whether it comes on this night, or another night many years away, we have seen Christ, each and every day, in the eyes and hearts and hands of others, and so, like Simeon, we can depart in peace. 

 It is not always clear through the cotton, but whether our days have passed in being or non-being, Christ was there.  And so, like Simeon, we can take our leave of this world, for our eyes have seen God’s salvation, prepared for all the world. 

Kings vs. Shepherds

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, December 30 as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.  The text is Luke 2:8-20 and you can read it here. 

You know, I read this sermon now and wonder if this really is what I think about sin, or about Jesus and his relationship to our sin.  For me, these theological questions are not puzzles to solve but countries to inhabit -- countries where I might reside for a time, but which will never capture or require my full allegiance, because there are so many other lands that are equally strange and captivating, and just as real and just as true. 

 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

As far as the Christmas cards and the manger scenes and the pageants are concerned, Christmas has four major ingredients: a manger; Joseph, Mary, and sweet baby Jesus; some shepherds; and some kings. 

Those are all the folks who were there. 

Those are all the things you need to tell the story. 

But as it turns out, in this case, it’s not a both/and.

It’s an either/or. 

 

The version of Christmas that gets told most often, the one that forms the foundation for most pageants and manger scenes, not to mention “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” is Luke’s version of the story.  Luke is the only one of the four gospel writers who tells the story of Joseph and Mary’s journey to Bethlehem, of the manger, and of the shepherds. 

The magi from the East, meanwhile, appear only in the Gospel of Matthew’s version, and their visit to Jesus take place sometime after he’s born, possibly as many as two years later. 

Matthew’s gospel was written before Luke’s, which means that whoever wrote Luke was reading Matthew, and using it as a basis for his own version of the story.  So when we see differences between Matthew’s version and Luke’s version, we know that the author of Luke is trying to tell us something. 

The author of Luke reads Matthew’s version of the story, in which Jesus is given a royal welcome by wise men bearing gifts fit for a king: gold, frankincense and myrrh, and says, No, no no, that’s not how it happened at all. 

The author of Luke tells us that Jesus was greeted, not by kings, but by shepherds. 

It’s a decision the author makes. 

A choice. 

One that reminds us exactly who it is the author of this Gospel says Jesus is concerned with. 

Not with kings,

but with shepherds. 

As he’ll do throughout the gospel, the author of Luke places God not among the important insiders, but among the forgotten outsiders. 

 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

 

*

 

Everybody loves sheep.

Sheep are wooly, and they’re cute when they’re babies.  

To our modern ear, shepherds are probably pretty cute too.  They look cute in the paintings and on the Christmas cards, with their robes and their staffs. 

But the reality of shepherds for Luke’s audience was a little bit different. 

 

For Luke’s audience, shepherds were thieves.  They were shiftless roamers: men who made their homes out in the fields and slept on the ground.  To watch over their sheep, they stayed up all night, drinking and being generally unseemly.  Most importantly, everyone knew that they grazed their sheep on other people’s land.  And so they were not to be trusted. 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

Matthew’s version, a courtly welcome with costly gifts, is replaced by an angelic announcement delivered to a bunch of rowdy ruffians, dirty from days in the field, unshaven, unshowered, making crude jokes, and just about to take long pull from a bottle in a paper bag. 

 

*

 

Last night I went with a friend to see Central Park Five, Ken Burns’ most recent documentary about the five Harlem teenagers who were convicted of the rape of a white, Upper East Side woman in 1989.  These five children, ages 14 to 17, were held for over 24 hours without food or sleep, outside the supervision of their parents, then told they could go home if only they would “tell a story” about what happened that night. 

And so each of them did tell a story: each of them gave a statement in which they were led to give imagined details about a crime they had neither witnessed or committed. 

The context in which this crime occurred had everything to do with what happened next.  New York in the late 80’s was crime-ridden and violent.  Six murders a day was not out of the ordinary.  The city was bisected by race and class.  The subways were gratified and trash-strewn, and crack had just hit the streets, introducing that fatal trifecta of poverty, cash, and guns. 

Just five years earlier Bernhard Goetz, a white man, had shot four young black men on the two train, wounding three and paralyzing one. 

He was found guilty for criminal possession of a weapon and served six months in jail.

His was not the only race-driven crime in this city, which was bristling with fear and ridden with poverty.  

The five teenagers convicted of the rape of Trisha Meili, or “The Central Park Jogger,” as she was known at the time, were picked up in the park that night hanging out with a group of at least 25 other teenagers and pinned with a crime by a police force desperate for the illusion of control over a city in chaos. 

 

The details of their confessions did not match the details of the crime. 

The timeline of their night in the park did not match the timeline of the crime. 

Their DNA did not match the DNA found on the victim. 

And yet they were found guilty by a jury of their peers 

and each imprisoned for between seven to eleven years. 

Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told the New York Times, “The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here."

 

Logic, reason, and evidence.

None of them were enough to overrule desire:

our collective desire to find a face for our fear. 

 

*

 

As I watched the documentary, 

watched the story advance steadily toward its all-too-predictable conclusion,

I found myself thinking, 

This is sin.  This is our sinfulness.

 

Our collective desire to blame and punish without thought. 

The place where we tip from a crowd to a mob. 

This is sin. 

 

It’s a word I use sparingly at St. Lydia’s, because too many of us have experienced this word being used as a weapon, and it can touch nerves that don’t need to be touched.  But I want to talk about it tonight.   

 

For tonight, it might be helpful to draw a distinction between Sin and sins, 

simply as tool for making some clarifications. 

Some of us were taught in Sunday School that God forgives all our sins.

These sins seem to be things like lying or stealing a pack of cigarettes, 

or maybe saying a bad word to our sister. 

Transgressions, really. 

Things that can be counted and tallied up. 

The solution to sins, we may have been taught, 

was trying harder. 

Trying harder to avoid all those pitfalls, 

negotiating our lives like an obstacle course. 

 

But I would argue that Sin is not something that can be tallied up. 

Neither is it something one can avoid. 

Sin is not one, individual act of thoughtlessness or indiscretion.  

Sin is a state. 

Sin is a condition in which we live, 

and from which we have no escape. 

Not because we are bad people, or not trying hard enough, 

but simply by virtue of the fact that we are human. 

 

Sin is the tragic, collective momentum of fear and hatred from which we convicted  

five innocent children of a crime they did not commit. 

Sin is our dangerous potential to tip from a crowd to a mob. 

Sin is our failure to look at the evidence, 

and turn people into symbols of that which we despise or seek to distance ourselves from. 

Sin is our stubborn, collective refusal to acknowledge that we are, 

in fact, 

sinners. 

 

The difference between sins and Sin is important. 

It’s important because people who live in the condition of Sin, 

which is all of us, 

like to find people who are guilty of a few sins, 

to carry the Sin of us all. 

People who live in the condition of Sin, 

which is all of us, 

would rather find five innocent teenagers to blame for the misery and fear of a city, 

than look at the system we’ve created 

in which some feast while others go hungry. 

In which some are kings while others are shepherds. 

 

It’s easy to slap a pair of handcuffs on a kid for stealing a pack of cigarettes.

Easier to do that than to figure out how we, collectively, 

abandon our youth to poverty and lack of education. 

It’s easy to throw a couple of kids from Harlem in prison for a decade.

Easier than contemplating what we gain 

when we load the burden of our own Sin 

onto their backs to carry. 

 

*

 

Come, Thou long-expected Jesus,

the hymn goes, 

Born to set Thy people free;

From our fear and sin release us; 

Let us find our rest in Thee.

 

God comes and dwells among us in the person of Christ 

not to keep us from stealing cigarettes 

or saying bad words to our sister, 

but to liberate us from the captivity of the condition in which we live: Sin. 

 

We are Christians because we have found, 

that in following this particular path, 

in telling and retelling these particular sacred stories,

we catch a glimpse of a reality created by God’s love, 

which is so complete, 

so overwhelming, 

that, every once in a while, 

our fear slips away 

and allows us, for just a moment, 

to see clearly. 

 

It is this funny, backwards thing,

that God releases us of our Sin 

not by erasing our running tally of flops and failings, 

but by loving us so completely.

Loving us in defiance of our condition of Sinfulness. 

It’s as if we suffer from an illness. 

And the love of God is the cure. 

 

Let me assure you that God’s love for you is complete.

Death was no match for Christ, 

and the condition of Sin is no match for God’s love. 

And that means that you are free. 

 

*

 

You can’t have kings and shepherds at the same time. 

 

The news of Jesus’ birth is given to the shepherds, 

not because they’re sinful and in need of healing, 

but because they, like the Central Park Five, 

are the bearers of the Sin of the world. 

Like Antron, Kevin, Raymond, Corey, and Yusef, 

the shepherds are easy to blame. 

Their small sins are easier to point to than our, collective, 

large one. 

Like Antron, Kevin, Raymond, Corey, and Yusef, 

we can call these shepherds names, 

brand them as depraved or unseemly, 

eye them suspiciously and cross to the other side of the street when we see them. 

All of it is easier than looking at the reality we’ve created around us:

a city divided, graffitied and litter-strewn and dangerous. 

Whether it’s the shepherds or the Central Park Five,

we find a face for our fear.  

 

From our sin and fear release us,

goes the hymn. 

I am struck by the pairing of those words, sin and fear.

And then the possibility captured in the word that follows:

release.

That this child, 

this God-child born in a feeding trough 

on the wrong end of the wrong town, 

this story of God among us, 

who lives among us and takes on our Sin and carries it to the grave and breaks the grave open

releases us from it.  

 

 

And that’s the question I want to talk about tonight. 

In this season of God-among-us, how are you being released from sin and from fear?

Bright Blooms Dark Night

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, December 23, as we tipped from the season of Advent into Christmas.  The text is the story of Jesus' birth, found in Luke 2:1-7.  You can read it here.  Before the sermon, we sang the hymn, "Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming."

 

 

We know the story of Christmas. 

Mary, Joseph. 

A child in a manger. 

An angel, the shepherds. 

 

It has a mysterious hold on us. 

We tell it again and again. 

Through carols we search 

for the mingling of word and melody 

that will unlock its meaning. 

Through pageants we rehearse the story once more:

we stand at the manger 

among halos constructed of tinsel and cardboard, 

amid a herd of wooly, preschooled sheep. 

 

We have told this story a thousand times, 

in a thousand different ways. 

The set is always the same, 

we know the script by heart. 

And yet, 

it continues to pull us back 

to something that is both basic 

and fundamentally true. 

For a moment a door in our hearts slips open 

and we are as still and unguarded as the rose in winter, 

hovering on a cusp, ready to bloom.  

 

*

 

A few years ago, when I was a staff member at a very big, 

progressive Church on the Upper West Side, 

we had the occasion to welcome Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 

who came to preach. 

Archbishop Tutu was the first black South African Bishop 

of Capetown in South Africa. 

He was instrumental in dismantling apartheid 

and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The staff and the leaders at Riverside were all in a tizzy over his arrival. 

We scrambled around, making sure that everything would go perfectly

from the moment he arrived to the moment he left. 

We fussed with lighting, 

replaced all the batteries in the microphones.

We ordered food that we were assured would be to his taste. 

I was coordinating the worship services, 

and I think I made about 36 drafts of the bulletin, 

because we kept learning that more VIP’s were coming 

and I’d have to create some kind of appropriately important speaking role for them

and shuffle around all the seating up in the chancel. 

 

And then he arrived. 

All five foot three of him entered the chapel where the clergy were vesting 

and he was immediately subsumed by all the important guests, 

paraded around and introduced to everyone who was there to greet him. 

You could barely see him at the center of the huddle of clergy who had surrounded him.  

I stood on the outside, near the wall, with a few other staff members, 

and took it all in.  

I had never seen someone who exuded such pure, 

unbridled joy.  

It was no wonder that everyone wanted to be close to him. 

 

And then something kind of amazing happened.  

I saw Bishop Tutu’s eyes break free from all the important people,

that inner circle that had had surrounded him, 

and scan the outside of the room. 

And he saw all of us standing there, 

Ralph who was the head of maintenance, 

and Marlon who worked the sound booth,

and me, 

and he very graciously broke through the ring of VIP’s that ensconced him 

and walked over to us,

and shook all of our hands.  

And learned our names. 

And smiled at us in a way that made you think, 

God must love me, because this man does. 

 

*

 

Mary, Joseph. 

A child in the manger. 

An angel.  The shepherds. 

They are the ingredients of a story 

of a God who, 

just like Bishop Tutu, 

is always looking to the edges. 

Surrounded by a throng of the most important people, 

all elbowing their way in for a word or a handshake,

God quietly slips away 

and finds the custodial staff, hanging back in the corner. 

 

If you’re looking for God, 

you can expect to find her around the edges. 

The inn was filled with important people. 

And so God perferred to be born out back, in a feeding trough. 

 

*

 

Perhaps what keeps us returning to this story, 

drawing us back to tell it once more, 

is not tradition or sentiment, 

but that it makes us feel seen. 

 

The strains of carols,

the words and melody we search for but can’t seem to find, 

the truth revealed as we gaze on the child in the manger, 

is that God is for everyone. 

No matter where you stand in the room, 

God sees you, 

seeks you out where you are, 

knows your name. 

 

It is a truth that is so simple as to seem impossible. 

That love has come to live among us, 

tender and fresh;

a rose that blooms in the silent, unseen hours of the half spent night. 

Amid a frozen landscape, 

love springs up

and catches us unaware. 

We thought that no one would see us here,

standing in the corner. 

But love has found us, despite our best intentions. 

 

This is Christmas. 

To stand quietly, as the door to your heart slips open 

and God enters in, 

a bright, unexpected blossom, 

hovering on the cusp, 

and ready to bloom.

 

*

 

We share the semron at St. Lydia's, and so I invite you to spend time in silence reflecting on two questions:

In your expereince, where is the rose, and what is the night?