The Value of Loyalty

One of the most important phrases in the Old Testament is, as our New Revised Standard Version translates it, “steadfast love,” in Hebrew, hesed. That is how God’s love for God’s people is constantly described. This love is not just a feeling, but an act of loyalty to the people of Israel with whom God made an everlasting covenant.

The LORD God’s hesed is not explicitly referred to in today’s reading from Deuteronomy. But when Moses says to the Israelites in today’s reading that they are to “obey the commandments of the LORD your God…by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways and observing his commandments,” he is asking the people of Israel to respond to the LORD’s loyal love with their own active loyalty.

And in today’s Gospel reading Jesus also asks for loyalty. Luke is usually clear when Jesus is giving “insider information” to his followers, or as in today’s reading, “great crowds” along for the ride or looking for a great show. So Jesus’s call for loyalty is out in the open, and at first hearing, harsh. His language about “hating” one’s relatives may have been hyperbole. The books of the New Testament were written in the common Greek that served as an international language in the Roman empire. But Jesus and his fellow Jews spoke Aramaic, similar to but still separate from Hebrew. And biblical scholars today believe that what Jesus actually said in Aramaic was that his followers must “love less,” not “hate” their family.

Whose Banquet?

To set the scene for today’s Gospel, imagine a large U-shaped table with attendees reclining forward, with the host and guest of honor at opposite corners so they don’t have to turn their necks sideways to speak to each other. Perhaps they’re already reclining, but the rest of the guests are jockeying with each other, in increasingly louder tones, for seating within earshot or eyesight of the host and guest of honor. Jesus apparently is still standing around observing the seating competition, but then raises his voice —

— When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

A Saint for the Rest of Us

All of us – lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons – “represent Christ and his Church,” according to our Outline of the Faith. To break it down by syllables, all of us are called to re-present the risen Christ, so that our words and actions point to him. When we celebrate the feasts of individual saints, we celebrate them because they were particularly memorable in re-presenting and pointing to Christ Jesus.

Except that Bartholomew isn’t all that memorable, compared to Peter, Paul, John, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Mary Magdalene among others In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Bartholomew is listed as one of the Twelve Apostles, exclusive company to be sure. But “Bartholomew” just means, “Son of Tolmai,” “Son of…” being a common designation in 1st century Judaism. So by the time those Gospels were written, enough years had apparently passed for this apostle’s name to be unknown.

Peaceful Waters

We can’t say we weren’t warned: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division,” or occupation. Some baptized Christians have failed to see the irony in Jesus’s words and have taken them literally, as license for division by forceful means. But Jesus wasn’t calling for division. Fourteen times in this Gospel, Luke speaks of Jesus as a peace-giver. But as Jesus – by his words and actions – challenges peoples’ presumptions of a God they assume is on their side and in their pocket, then they will cause division by rejecting his peace for all, not just for some.

Those who seek the living God have always been tempted to think they have found God, and having found God, pocket God. So God has had to remind us that they are in nobody’s pocket: “Am I a God near by, says the LORD, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? Says the LORD.” Of course there is no part of God’s creation off limits to its creator. Yet, through the prophet Jeremiah, God begins with a question, “Am I a God near by?” Or have the king and the priests and the approved prophets taken God’s presence for granted, as near by as their dreams? “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed!" In this case, those so-called prophecies were exactly what Sigmund Freud said that most dreams are, wish-fulfillments. Wish-casting isn’t new under the Sun either,

Truth Spoken and Hidden

A common misconception about the biblical prophets is to see them only as fortune tellers. First and foremost, they are called by God to be truth tellers to those who presume themselves to be all powerful. “Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” In the story that had been handed down to Isaiah, those two Canaanite cities were judged by God and destroyed. But now, the prophet speaks to the successors of King David in Jerusalem, and basically says your capital and the kingdom of Judah are no different from Sodom and Gomorrah in their oppression of the powerless, such as orphans and widows.

Today in the Church we have ordained bishops, priests and deacons. We don’t have ordained prophets, though the bishops, priests and deacons are sometimes implored to be “prophetic” in their preaching. Speaking truth to power is sometimes what we all might be called by God to do. But it can come with a price. According to Jewish tradition, Manasseh succeeded his father Hezekiah, the last king mentioned by Isaiah. He was such a terrible king that when Isaiah hid from him in a tree, Manasseh had the tree sawed in half.

Re-presenting Christ

All of us – lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons – “represent Christ and his Church,” according to our Outline of the Faith. To break it down by syllables, all of us are called to re-present the risen Christ, so that our words and actions point to him. When we celebrate the feasts of individual saints, we celebrate them because they were particularly memorable in re-presenting and pointing to Christ Jesus.

James the son of Zebedee didn’t always do a good job of representing Jesus. The nickname that Jesus gave him and his brother of John, “Sons of Thunder,” or in Greek Bonaerges, may not have been entirely complimentary. When Jesus wanted to travel through Samaria on his way to Jerusalem, the Samaritans who hated the Jews as much as the Jews hated them, refused to receive him. Whereupon James and John volunteered to call down fire on them, and Jesus had to rebuke them. And using their mother to gain influence with Jesus is hardly pointing to the same Jesus who replies that he has come to serve, not to demand service or dole out patronage.

Both

Martha and Mary of Bethany are not proxies for the perennial debate about whether the active or contemplative life, hospitality or spirituality, are more important in the Church. These were two sisters who loved each other, who loved Jesus, and whom Jesus loved. Both were faithful disciples of Jesus in their own ways, and both are equally valuable models for how we should faithfully follow Jesus today. At the risk of oversimplification, Mary exemplified listening to the word of God, while Martha exemplified doing the word of God. But you can’t do the word of God if you haven’t listened to it, and if you don’t do the word of God after listening to it then you haven’t heard it.

Both sisters assume roles in this story that would normally have been reserved for males. That it is Martha who “welcomed” Jesus into “her home,” indicates that Martha was the legal owner of the property, presumably a large enough household to entertain Jesus and at least twelve of his apostles, which would also indicate that she owned other land from which income could be generated. A woman could inherit property if there was no father or husband to inherit it. Of course in John’s Gospel, there is a brother, Lazarus, whom Luke doesn’t mention. Perhaps if Lazarus was the youngest, perhaps too young to administer the property, then it might have fallen to Martha to supervise a large household.

My Enemy My Neighbor

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish Biblical Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School, calls Jesus’s interrogator the Malevolent Lawyer.* His malevolence is clear from his first question of Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Do? Inherit? Those two verbs don’t go together. An inheritance is a gift, especially from the giver of eternal life, which the lawyer would have jumped all over Jesus if he’d answered the question. But Jesus responds to this question with another question — You tell me Lawyer. And the lawyer answers correctly, linking together passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Jesus wasn’t unique among Jews in understanding that love of God and love of neighbor are part and parcel of the same Love.

But this Lawyer won’t give up trying to stump the Teacher: “And who is my neighbor?” In her excellent book on Jesus’s parables, Levine writes that the Lawyer’s real question is — Who is not my neighbor? Who can I get away with not showing compassion for? Jesus’s answer, given though the parable is: No one.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Jesus says nothing about what sort of man this is. As Jesus tells his story, we can assume that the man is returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But aside from that, he’s a human being onto whom any identity can be projected. Too often we want to think of ourselves as the Good Samaritan initiating the charity. Jesus wants us to see ourselves in the man who, “fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” So the question in this story is as much who is going to help me as who am I going to help.

Our Armor is Each Other

The peace which Jesus says all the seventy (meaning all of Jesus’s disciples, not just the ordained “elites”) can give is not the civil pleasantry that is said – literally – in passing. It is the peace in which new relationships, thicker than blood or soil – spiritual – are created by a loyalty to Jesus that transcends the more demanding loyalties of this world. And when we share that peace with our new relations, the “accusing” forces of this world fall, perhaps as they scream or flail. But whatever collateral damage they cause on their way down, we still have the peace that Jesus gives, of knowing that we are never alone.

The contrast in today’s Good News from Luke is between peace and accusation. Whatever peace we can give to others as the Seventy could give comes from Jesus. And when we give that peace and it is accepted, then the forces of accusation that prey on our fears and griefs and anguish fall from the sky, like “The Satan” that Jesus saw, whose name means “Accuser.”

Keeping Restoration

As the mission of the Church is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ,” by implication that mission includes keeping the Church in unity with God and each other in Christ. And you can’t restore what you can’t keep.

I believe that my call to ordained ministry was to help spread the unity that I encountered in anglo-catholic churches where I saw people of diverse opinions holding those opinions more lightly when they worshiped God in the beauty of holiness. That was challenged from the moment I entered Virginia Theological Seminary in August 2004. Over my three years, my sponsoring diocese of Virginia was beset by disagreement over the ordination of the openly gay and partnered Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson. In my senior year, about ten parishes voted in mass to leave The Episcopal Church, one of them being my field education site, which made my continued internship there untenable, because I did not consider the question of LGBT people’s rightful place in the Church to be one that should break our communion as “living members” of Christ’s eucharistic body.

Sadly, both parishes that I pastored after my ordination in 2007 contained people of good conscience who couldn’t see that if two committed people are prepared to love each other as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, then their respective genders are not a moral issue. Some left, but others stayed and kept communion with me even though they respectfully disagreed with me. So, my continuing friendship with them continues to persuade me that our church must make a space for their good conscience so that they and I can hold our opinions with open hands, not fists, for the sake of Christian unity.

Living with the Trinity

Theologians speak of the Trinitarian God in two ways: in relation to each other, and in relation to us. Perhaps the best example of the first is St. Monica’s son Augustine describing the Trinitarian God as Lover, Beloved, and the Love that flows between them. But too many metaphors about the relation of the three persons to each other in this one being we call God has usually led to accusations of heresy; either of dissolving the persons into parts or functions of one being, or of creating three beings, all gods.

Some believe that we can only speak of the Trinity in relation to us because it is presumptuous for humans to speculate about a mystery of which we know nothing except what has been revealed to us in Holy Scripture, and what has been revealed to us is what the Trinitarian God has done for us. But still others object that solely focusing on the Trinitarian God in relation to us encourages us to project our own images on to the Trinity, so that we end up worshiping ourselves rather than God.

Repentance and Restoration Start Today

Today is the birthday of the Church, and the 2nd day of birth for Liam Willoughby. Whatever Sunday in the calendar the moveable Feast of Pentecost falls on, that Sunday will always be his 2nd birthday. In the water of Baptism, he will be buried with Christ in his death. By it he will share in his resurrection. Through it he will be reborn by the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit which filled up the hearts and minds of Jesus’s first disciples so much that they had to start telling everyone around them about God’s deeds of power. And in that very public telling, along with some 3,000 baptisms, the Church was born with a mission from God to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism, BCP, p. 855)

“Pentecost,” Greek for “fiftieth,” in this case the fiftieth day after Passover. So, Jerusalem was more crowded than usual with pilgrims from throughout the Roman world there to celebrate the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In addition to those who lived in Jerusalem, many of those pilgrims had probably been there for the Passover and stayed for the fifty days. I suspect that many of them had welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. But then, some were highly perplexed, to say the least, at his ‘dissing the Temple by disrupting the sacrificial system of exchanging Jewish coins for Roman coins to pay for their sacrificial animals. And then, as they saw no apparent change in the political system of Roman occupation, their disappointment boiled into rage, even to the point of joining the chants of, “Away with him, crucify him.”

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father.”

Between this sermon and the reports to come, you’ll have certainly heard enough from the leadership of this parish church by the end of our Annual Meeting. And hopefully we leave space for your questions. So from the circular Gospel reading today, perhaps what we need to hear from Jesus today are the words I just quoted. If I may be so bold, here’s my amplified version:

To “feast” in the church-geek definition, is to celebrate, which makes Ascension Day one of the seven “principal” celebrations, or “feasts” observed in this Episcopal Church. But hasn’t Jesus left us behind? Should we be feasting or fasting, celebrating or mourning? Should the Paschal candle still be burning? And aren’t the Romans still in charge? What good is being more powerful than death if you don’t show it? Isn’t today as good a time as any to restore the kingdom?

Why does The Episcopal Church call this day a feast, a celebration? “Q. What do we mean when we say that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father? A. We mean that Jesus took our human nature into heaven where he now reigns with the Father and intercedes for us.” (Outline of the Faith, p. 850, Book of Common Prayer)

The first words that Pope Leo XIV spoke in his Urbi et Orbi address — to the city and the world — were: “Peace be with you all! These are the first words spoken by the risen Christ…I would like this greeting of peace to resound in your hearts, in your families, among all people, wherever they may be, in every nation and throughout the world. Peace be with you! It is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is disarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally.”

And today, the Christ who is about to be crucified bequeaths peace to his disciples, “Peace I leave to you, my own peace I give you, not as the world gives do I give to you.” He promised peace before his arrest, and at his first resurrection appearance to his disciples, he literally breathes peace on them. But Jesus and Leo understand that what the Church means by peace isn’t usually what the world means by peace. As Leo said, the peace of Christ must somehow disarm its enemies while remaining disarmed. And later in his “Farewell Discourse,” Jesus tells his disciples: “I have told you all this so that you may find peace in me. In the world you will have hardship, but take courage: I have conquered the world.’ The peace of the Lord that we extend to each other will not automatically save us from hardship, pain, harassment, or even death.

Love on the Inside, Love on the Outside

The setup for today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles was tacked on at the end of last week’s reading from Acts — Peter stayed on some time in Joppa, lodging with a tanner called Simon. A tanner made furs and other clothing from animals’ hides. Aside from the odor, it was possible that some of the animals being used Peter might have seen in his vision of a sail being lowered to him with the invitation to eat, which would have been unclean under the Law of Israel, thus Peter’s protest.

Notice that the circumcised believers don’t criticize Peter for baptizing the uncircumcised Cornelius and his household. That Luke refers to “circumcised believers” seems to imply that even in those earliest days, when Christianity was just a Jewish sect, there were already at least some uncircumcised believers. What Peter is specifically criticized for is eating with Gentiles, presumably food that was considered unclean by Jews, perhaps one of the animals Peter saw being lowered to him.

It helps to have two patron saints. Any local church can use all the prayer they can get! So we get to have two patronal feasts on a Sunday, Saint Monica’s on May 4th, and Saint James the Greater on July 25th. At the same time, May 4th this year falls on the 3rd Sunday of Easter. The first three Sundays of Easter always have a Resurrection appearance as their Gospel reading. So, this Sunday at St. Monica and St. James is a blended Sunday, with both collects and half our scriptures (Old Testament and psalm) from St. Monica, and half (Epistle and Gospel) from 3rd Easter. And on this 3rd Sunday of Easter in particular, the common image in the life story of St. Monica and in this particular appearance of the risen Jesus is water and the distance from the security of one’s land.

In The Episcopal Church’s book of saints, Lesser Feasts and Fasts, saints are designated apostles, martyrs, prophets, reformers, bishops, priests, deacons, mystics. Monica is simply designated the Mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, to which I would add the most tenacious and patient mother in all Christendom. She followed her talented son from their home on the North African coast (modern day Algeria) to Italy, and kept at him until, by her patience and prayer, the mentoring of Saint Ambrose the Bishop of Milan, and the groaning Spirit within restless Augustine himself, he was baptized. Monica practiced the same kind of “candid piety” that the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann attributes to Hannah in 1st Samuel. For those tempted to present only their best selves to God, today we have the example of two holy women who held nothing back of their frustrations and their hopes before God.

Thank you all for being here, however many times you have, or have not, been here before.

There is no priority guest list. St. John Chrysostom said something similar on an Easter Sunday some 1,500 years ago:

“If any have toiled from the first hour, let them receive their due reward; If any have come after the third hour, let them with gratitude join in the Feast! And he that arrived after the sixth hour, let them not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss. And if any delayed until the ninth hour, let them not hesitate; but let them come too. And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour, let them not be afraid by reason of his delay. For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to them that comes at the eleventh hour, as well as to them that toiled from the first… You that have kept the fast, and you that have not, rejoice today for the Table is richly laden… Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave.”

In the cycle of nature, this is the season of many colored flowers, warmer temperatures, pollen, allergies, rebirth and new life. And when the Church was evangelizing the land of the Anglo Saxons that was becoming known as England, a monk named Bede wrote that what was known throughout the rest of the Christian world as Pascha — Passover — was being called Easter in England because that’s what the cyclical celebration of Spring had been called in honor of a goddess named Eostre. That wasn’t the first time the Church had taken a pagan festival of nature and grafted something eternal onto it

Tonight I want to give the women their due, whose report of the angelic messengers’ announcement of the Resurrection was dismissed by the men as an “idle tale,” or more bluntly, “nonsense.” In the Orthodox Church, the Second Sunday of Easter is focused on the Myrrh-bearers, of which we know by name: Mary Magdalene, Salome, mother of St. James the Son of Zebedee and one of our patrons, Mary the wife of Clopas and sister of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary the mother of the other Apostle named James, and finally Joanna. They stood with Jesus at the cross; they waited with Jesus’s corpse, and were prepared to keep vigil at Jesus’s tomb. Tonight I especially want to speak of Joanna; mainly because she is mentioned elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel, and she might also be mentioned in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

In chapter 8, Luke identifies her as the wife of Chuza, the household manager of Herod, the same Herod Antipas who the Roman Emperor had installed as Tetrarch of Galilee, who had executed John the Baptist, who had wanted a magic show from Jesus when Pilate sent him to Herod. As part of an arranged marriage, she likely brought a large dowry into her marriage with Chuza. And according to Luke, Joanna, along with Mary of Magdala, Susanna and “many others,” presumably women, financially supported Jesus and his itinerant apostles, from the Greek meaning, “one who is sent.”

There are fundamentally two attitudes attributed to Jesus in the four Gospel narratives of his Passion. Matthew and Mark emphasize Jesus’s sense of abandonment, as in the only words of his that they quote from the Cross — My God, my God, why have you abandoned me. In different ways, Luke and John emphasize Jesus’s serenity. Luke’s Jesus remains calm enough to give mercy and forgiveness to those around him — Forgive them Father, for they don’t know what they’re doing — Today, you will be with me in paradise.