In Lauren’s
sermon last week, we talked about waiting, and I confess I was at somewhat of a
loss to figure out what more could be said about Advent. And imagine my
whiplash when I looked at the assigned readings for the day and found two very hopeful
ones grouped with “You brood of vipers.” Yeesh.
Then, I
decided to listen to a sermon by the Rev. Traci D. Blackmon. Rev. Blackmon is
an ordained minister in both the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the
United Church of Christ, where she serves as the Associate General Minister of
Justice and Local Church Ministries. She has been a vocal activist and
organizer, particularly through Black Lives Matter and Repairers of the Breach.
The sermon,
delivered in 2018 during an annual UCC conference, was about a passage from the
Book of Joshua, but I found it strangely appropriate for Advent, for the
passage she references details the story of the Israelites finally crossing the
Jordan to enter into the Promised Land.
It is not a
simple task, she explains, because to ancient peoples water often symbolized
chaos and danger. She says, “The image
of God parting the waters of the Red Sea and letting the Israelites cross over
on dry land remains a potent image of God’s power to save. It is an image which
would be fundamental to the Israelites’ developing understanding of their God
because this water, which was usually seen as dangerous, is transformed in that
moment into a gateway of crossing over into a new way of life.”
And here we are again, at the Jordan,
with John demanding first preparation and then entrance in order to be saved.
He chose the Jordan not merely because it was the closest place or the only
place – he chose it specifically to evoke passage from one way of being to
another, and he highlights the seriousness of this endeavour by demanding
repentance.
Rev. Traci continues, “It is always
challenging to move from one place to another; always frightening to let go of
what has been to walk into what will be. Can you imagine what it was like for
the Israelites to stand in their present and look into their future? It’s
difficult; even when you know something good is ahead, it’s still difficult to
leave what has been behind. …But if we just trust God with the first step, we
give God the opportunity, my friends, to blow our minds. Have you ever trusted
God enough to step into the water? I serve a water-walking God.”
She then outlines four instructions
given to the Israelites in the passage, instructions I’m sure John gave to his
candidates, instructions to help us gain a world full of the knowledge of the
Lord, instructions to keep during this season of Advent.
The first is to wait for God.
You’ve
probably noticed that the tendency of our world is to privilege Christmas by
jamming December full of light, colour, sound, smells, taste, and social
obligations. And let me be clear that taking delight in those things during a
dreary time of year is 100% okay! But I know that plenty of people find it
overwhelming as well, and this is why I treasure the season of Advent, which
encourages us to pause and reflect on what is in store of us when God is
finally made incarnate and born through Mary.
Wait for
God.
The second
is to watch for God.
Does this
sound the same as waiting? It’s similar, but not quite the same. It’s not just
about keeping watch like a guard, but about taking the lead from we see. That
could be something as monumental as listening for God’s voice and guidance
before acting or speaking, or it could be something as simple as being playful,
keeping an eye out for God playing hide-and-seek with you in the beauty of the
new-fallen snow, or the delight in gathering with friends, or in the blossoming
of little lights everywhere as people decorate their homes and businesses
against the short days and long nights.
Watch for
God.
The third is
to honour God. John says we must repent, a word with a lot of baggage, but
really it just means to turn around, to choose a new way. The old fridge magnet
says, “Jesus is coming: everyone look busy!” But if we knew that Jesus would be
born into the world tomorrow, and we only had the chance to change one thing
about our own little puzzle piece of the world, what would we change? What
would we change out there and in here?* How would we carve out a little place
of honour for the precious and vulnerable soul to come?
Honour God.
The fourth
is to follow God.
How could we
possibly follow, not only when we know we’re not perfect, but when God actually
comes to us? How do we follow?
Well, we
look at where God chose to enter into the world. Not in halls of gold and
abundance, but in threadbare and splintery simplicity. And we follow Them there
– not to be superheroes, but to enter in with our choicest gifts and say, “This
is the birthplace of the Saviour.”
Follow God.
Finally, Rev.
Traci adds one more of her own, one she says is not explicitly in the text but
that “the text bears out.”
This one is
my favourite one, and honestly, it’s the hardest one.
She says, “You must expect God to show up.”
“You must expect God to show up.”
We’ve got an advantage here, friends.
The Israelites had seen the Red Sea parted. What problem could it be to part
the Jordan?
Like them, we’ve seen greater things
even that God being born among us.
Wait for
God.
Watch for
God.
Honour God.
Follow God.
Expect God to show up.
How will you do these things in this
precious season of river-blue hope?
Here Helminski
reflects on Mary’s conception and birth to Anna and Joachim. Neither of Mary’s
parents are given names in the canonical Scriptures, although they are in some
that didn’t make it into our canon such as the Protoevangelium of James and
Pseudo-Matthew.
Joachim is
described in Pseudo-Matthew as a faithful and generous owner of flocks who
gives away a third of his income to orphans, widows, strangers, and the poor. Anna,
who shares the name of the mother of the prophet Samuel, is a woman of deep
faith. Despite these virtues, they remain barren, a sign of shame in ancient
Jewish culture. Of course, this narrative is regularly overturned in the Jewish
Scriptures by the blessing of children as in the story of Abraham and Sarah and
others, showing that the God of the Israelites cared deeply for those whom
society may have seen as cursed.
Both Joachim
and Anna receive angelic promises that they will bear a child – Joachim while
tending his flocks in the wilderness, and Anna while listening to the sparrows
in her garden. They finally conceive Mary, a girl-child.
Helminski
links Mary to Miriam, sister to Moses, and gives Mary’s parents and cousins a
priestly and prophetic heritage through the line of Aaron. She also details a
bit of the story of Mary’s birth from the Islamic perspective, mentioning accounts
from historians Jafar as-Sadiq (702-765 CE) and Al-Tabari (839-923 CE). Mary’s connection
to Zechariah and Elizabeth, mother of Yahya/John the Baptist, is detailed in
the Qur’an in Surah 19. In Surah 3, Mary’s father, who is named ‘Imrān in the
Qur’anic text, dies before meeting his daughter. Zechariah is given guardianship
over Mary and instructs her in the faith. He is a very different character from
the scoffer portrayed in the Gospel of Luke!
It’s
interesting to contemplate the parallel between these two couples – Anna and
Joachim, and Elizabeth and Zechariah – who deeply long for a child, and Mary, a
yet-to-be-married woman who conceives in one moment, without request. Some labour
to bring God’s will to birth with tears and desperate longing…and to some God
comes suddenly, without warning, inviting them to take part in the dance of Life
and Love. (I remember once asking my friend Seemi if Mary turned/whirled when
she conceived. Seemi replied matter-of-factly, “Of course.”)
I find
myself thinking of the precious pairing of zhikr and sema: both acts
of ecstatic praise, but somewhat different in my personal experiences of them. I
remember chanting, “Hayy, hayy, hayy” at RumiFest 2019 from around
midnight to 2am, our hands rising and falling in exuberant, emphatic motions –
and then, whirling by myself during a 6am lull, the holy silence which had
blossomed in my heart and emptied my head.
It’s not only
formal acts of prayer which are necessary to do God’s will, but the willingness
to become a garden – not merely words and actions of liturgy, sacrament, salah
but a posture of openness.
Last year, a
precious friend, Farah, gifted me a lovely book, one that I had expressed great
interest in: The Way of Mary: Maryam, Beloved of God, a compilation of
theological reflections and poetry from Camille Helminski, a Sufi teacher. I
decided to hold onto it for Advent 2022 as by the time I received it, Advent
2021 had already begun and I had already made my preparations.
I was
thrilled to receive the book and even more thrilled to realize that if I
started it now, in the first week of Advent, and read a section each week, it
would take me right up until the week before Lent began. What an adventure!
Helminski
divides the book into twelve passages, stations, or maqams, calling them
“twelve stars of blessing” and linking each to a moment in Mary’s life.
The entries
that follow are my reflections on what I read. What a gift to sit with Maryam
for the weeks leading up to Jesus’s great journey, remembering all she did to
make Jesus who he was.
This sermon was preached during a service of baptism for a trans man in our community. He is mentioned by name several times here.
All
the way back in 2013, my friend and teacher Omid Safi wrote an article called
“Between Good Friday and Easter: A Muslim Meditation on Christ and
Resurrection” for The American Muslim. As he reflected on the power of
the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, he wrote,
“There
is a beautiful teaching of the Prophet Muhammad where a person came up to him
and said: “O Messenger of God, I love you.” The Prophet said to
him: “Then go put on the battle armor, because surely the next thing to
come will be affliction.” The God that I have faith in is not just the God of
the sunny days, but the God of every day, including the days of suffering, the
days of pain, and the days of loss. I too seek shelter in God in the days of
suffering, having faith in the unseen days to come. Our God is the God of
Good Friday as much as the God of Easter, the God of the lowest valley and
the loftiest mountain, and the God of the spaces in between—where we dwell
most days.”
Today
is a strange confluence of days. We have Christ the King Sunday, also known as
Reign of Christ Sunday or, “The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the
Universe,” if, as the Dude offers, you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
It’s not an ancient feast. Christ the King Sunday was instituted in 1925 by
Pope Pius XI, in response to what he saw as a growing secularism and lack of
faith, but also nationalism and fascism. He instituted it to say, “Christ is
our King, not the King of Italy, not the state, and certainly not this upstart
Mussolini and his thugs.”
Today
is also Transgender Day of Remembrance, a vigil observance begun in 1999 by
Gwendolyn Ann Smith to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a trans woman murdered
in 1998. The vigil commemorates transgender people lost to violence, often by
reading the names of those reported murdered across the world. Today, this observance
is especially important as we mourn the senseless murder and injury of queer
siblings at Club Q in Colorado Springs.
And, it’s the day that our brother KC will be baptized into Christ’s death and
resurrection, a day long awaited and now finally here, a day where we will pray
that he be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious
power, and prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving
thanks to the Father, who has enabled him to share in the inheritance of the
saints in the light.
Today
is a day of new life, when we will celebrate KC going down into the waters of
baptism, waters that represent chaos and death, and coming up born anew. If it
sounds scary, KC, don’t worry – you’ve done it before. You did it the day you
chose to live as fully yourself in the world. As a wise prophet once said, “You
should be baptizing me.” But let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this
way to fulfil all righteousness.
Professor
David B. Levenson in his article “Musings on the Messiah” writes, “One major
function of the Messiah is to bring about God’s justice by defeating all agents
of oppression, human and superhuman[.] However, the focus of [the sacred texts
which discuss the Messiah] is less on the messianic figure than on the
messianic age, the time when God’s justice, rather than Satan or Empire, would
prevail.”
Today
is a day where we look ahead to the restoration of those exiled by hate and
invisibility and dysphoria and murder, where we look ahead to the end of days when
the Anointed One will return to wipe away our tears. We look ahead knowing our
King will come, but we all have a part to play in the healing of the world.
Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not, for how can the messianic age
come without our own healing as a species?
Today
is a day where we are called to choose our King: Jesus, or Caesar; a day where
are called to stand up to wicked shepherds – and woe to the shepherds who
destroy and scatter and slander the beloved sheep of God’s pasture. Woe to
them, and weep for them, for they have chosen incarceration in a prison of hate
and grey ignorance for access to the fleeting and false power that homophobia
and transphobia brings.
Today
is a day of staking our claim as beloved allies of God’s purpose, a day where
in the face of murder and violence we choose life and love; a day where, like
the thief, we cry out when silence needs breaking, cry out as witnesses to the
unjust suffering all around us, and ask to be remembered despite all we have
suffered and all we may have done to hurt.
Even
at the very end, when it seems too late, forgiveness is offered.
Today
is the day when, with KC, we are being called to say, “Jesus, I love you.”
The
next thing to come will be affliction.
But
we have known affliction, friends, and we have and shall overcome.
Did
you know that, on the barren and rocky moonscape of Ireland’s west coast,
plants from both the northern and southern hemisphere grow side by side, as
they do nowhere else on earth?
Did
you know that life probably began around hydrothermal vents spewing forth toxic
chemicals deep in the ocean?
Did
you know that after Friday on the cross came Sunday in the Garden?
Eh,
I figure you heard that one before. But let’s remember it again anyway.
I’ll
close with some words from “Our Precarious Joy,” a poem from nonbinary icon
Alok Vaid-Menon:
“feeling is dangerous because it requires us to dwell in anguish, rather than anesthetize it (as if it never happened).
so many fear joy because they fear losing it.
they hate us because we live here — in this precarious joy — and we have found preciousness, still.
it is far easier to desensitize ourselves to the world. but what about the romance of living? the tundra of grief, of striving, of becoming like every breath is an invitation to another way of being?
what about the dignity of being? i won’t settle for anything less.
i would rather weep than pretend. i would rather be hated than be digestible. i would rather be mirthful than meander around like happiness is some rare ray of light piercing through my window.”
I don’t tend
to preface sermons with content warnings, but I will with this one. I’m gonna
be talking briefly about the events preceding the El Salvadoran Civil War,
which will include some mentions about state-sanctioned violence. If you’re not
in a good place for that, please care for yourself as you need. There’s still
coffee and tea back in the narthex if you want to tune out for a bit.
In 2014, I
went on a trip to El Salvador with the Student Christian Movement, a radical
ecumenical network of Christian youth who engage with social justice through
the lens of faith. We stayed with Jose Innocencio “Chencho” Alas, a former
priest and personal friend of St. Oscar Romero. He taught us about liberation
theology as well as inviting us to help with local reforesting efforts by
planting fruit trees and gardens in impoverished mountain villages. I learned a
lot from him and his cheeky sense of humour, from appreciative inquiry to
radical leftism to how to use a machete.
We visited
many places that had been important to St. Oscar Romero, including the chapel
at Hospital de la Divina Providencia, where he was assassinated, shot by
members of a death squad while he was celebrating Mass on March 24th
1980. That day, he’d given a sermon calling on Salvadoran soldiers to obey
God’s higher order and stop perpetrating violence and oppression on behalf of
the government. Today, his office is a small museum, and many of his personal
effects are behind glass as relics, including the church vestments he was
wearing when he was killed, which are covered in dried blood.
When I saw
them, I was barely a year away from my diaconal ordination, though I didn’t
know it yet, and it hit me: the true meaning of taking up one’s Cross and
following. Friends, I got on my knees.
We have a
strange juxtaposition between today’s Hebrew Bible reading and today’s Gospel.
While Isaiah speaks rhapsodically about the new heavens and the new earth, Luke
details a situation that would have been very familiar Archbishop Romero.
Where Isaiah
has,
“Be glad and
rejoice for ever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress,”
Luke has,
“You will be
betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will
put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not
a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
The Roman
Catholic Church in El Salvador was and is an extremely powerful institution.
Oscar Romero didn’t have a reputation as being particularly progressive before
becoming archbishop. If he had towed the line, as his colleagues in ministry
urged him to do, he might still be alive today. Maybe. Appeasement does not
guarantee freedom or safety. Christians do well to remember that much.
But he
didn’t tow the line.
How could
he, as he looked upon the slain body of his friend, the Jesuit Father Rutilio
Grande, assassinated by Salvadorean security forces? Rutilio had been working
in the liberation theology model, creating self-sustaining “base communities”
among the poor, which was of course threatening to a right-wing government on
the lookout for leftist groups.
Archbishop
Romero later said, “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, ‘If
they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same
path.’”
I’m not
trying to be alarmist – although one should be aware that no one who wakes up
in a functioning democracy expects it to be dissolved, just like no one
who wakes up in a city like Vancouver expects a pandemic to shut down
the whole country.
These things
happen every day, to ordinary people.
Ask my
husband’s parents, who lived for several months in Iran back in the ‘70s, where
women in miniskirts were still a common sight on the streets.
Ask our
friends from Portland, Oregon, who found a fascist warzone had sprung up in
their backyards overnight back in the summer of 2020.
Ask Chencho
Alas, who woke up on November 16th 1989 to find six of his Jesuit
compatriots at the Central American University in San Salvador – plus the
caretaker’s wife and her fourteen-year-old daughter – had been murdered
overnight, and photographs of their slain bodies decorated the walls of the
hallway outside the chapel.
By our
endurance we will gain our souls.
We here in
Vancouver in 2022 are not in the position that Romero was in, or that Luke’s
community was in. But there are many moments where we are called to endure hardship
for the sake of life, love, freedom, peace, and the integration of our souls.
There are moments where we are called to come out, to shut down a bully, to
speak a truth that needs to be spoken, or stand beside someone in support as
they speak theirs.
And if
you’re anything like me, it’s scary as hell.
But if we
don’t, that’s one beautiful seedling that goes un-watered, one perfect spark
that winks out in a cold place, denying warmth to the cold or a warm meal to
the hungry.
It’s a word
I’ve heard Christian people use as a slur, shorthand for a sanctimonious
legalistic person with no sense of mercy, often explicitly set up as an adversary
to so-called Gospel ethics.
It’s one of
those very interesting terms that seems to have crossed the political divide
among Christians. I’ve heard both mainliners and evangelicals use it to refer
to the same sort of person as described above. Heck, I’ve even heard mainliners
use it to describe evangelicals.
As hard as
people try, it’s really not possible in a post-Holocaust world to speak of
Pharisees like this without invoking a long history of anti-Jewish and
anti-Semitic rhetoric. We have a tendency to split the God of our faith into
two: the mean judgmental “Old Testament” God, and the good and kind “Daddy” God
that Jesus talks about – as though Jesus was not Jewish and wasn’t firmly
anchored within his own tradition. This is actually one of the first heresies
recorded in the early church. It’s called Marcionism, after its first proponent
Marcion of Sinope, who believed that the teachings of Jesus were incompatible
with the teachings of the Hebrew Bible, and that indeed the Creator God of the
Hebrew Bible was an entirely different god from the God of Jesus, who had taken
no part in the creation of the world. Marcion was excommunicated from the church
in Rome around the year 144.
If we want
to be in right relationship with the Jewish people, we need to re-evaluate the
way we talk about our roots and our shared Scriptures. That includes coming to
a new understanding of the Pharisees.
Some
scholars have argued that Jesus himself could be described as a Pharisee. There
is a notion (again, low-key anti-Semitic if you think about it) that the
Pharisees were all wealthy educated folks who took delight in ordering poor
people around. But they weren’t. Pharisee wasn’t really a class of people so
much as a lens for looking at Scripture. Pharisees stood in contrast with
Sadducees who were Temple priests insisting on proper protocols for worship,
which heavily privileged Jerusalem and temple sacrifice as crucial for the
following of the Torah. Pharisees, by contrast, insisted that ordinary people
could keep the Law and be faithful Jews whether they had the capability of
accessing Jerusalem and the appropriate resources for sacrifice or not.
You can see
why some would put Jesus into that camp.
It’s likely
that any arguments that occurred between Jesus and the Pharisees were more of
an intra-religious debate which, over the years, were interpreted as Jesus
people fighting with, well, not Jesus-people – especially for the writer of
Luke, who was probably not Jewish and may not have really understood the
heritage of the faith.
Now, on to
the parable.
Amy-Jill
Levine, the Jewish New Testament scholar who deacon Alisdair quoted last week,
has done a lot of work to help re-imagine the figure of the Pharisee.
I’m going to
quote from her at length here. She writes,
“Some
Christian readers dismiss the Pharisee as hypocritical, sanctimonious, and
legalistic, and in turn identify with the tax collector, the appropriately repentant
and humble sinner. However, this reading traps interpreters: to conclude
(following 18.11), “God, I thank you that I am not like this Pharisee,” places
the readers in the very position they condemn. Moreover, this interpretation
overlooks the Pharisee’s numerous supererogatory qualities: tithing, fasting,
giving thanks without asking for something in return.
Other
readers presume that the tax collector stands “far off” (18.13) because other
worshipers ostracize him, believing him to be ritually impure. The parable says
nothing about either ostracism or impurity; to the contrary, to enter the
temple a person must be ritually pure. Even were he ostracized, the cause would
not be impurity but employment: he works for Rome, the occupation government.
Still other
readers perceive the Temple to have become an elitist, xenophobic, misogynist,
fully corrupt “domination system.” Again, the parable thwarts this stereotype,
since it is in the Temple that repentance and reconciliation occur.
Finally,
might we see the Pharisee as helping the tax collector. Just as the sin of one
person impacts the community (hence, e.g., “forgive us our sins” [11.4] rather
than “forgive me my sins”), so the merits of the righteous can benefit the
community (see Gen 18.24-33; hence one view of the cross: the sacrifice of one
can save the many). Perhaps the Jews who first heard this parable understood
the Pharisee’s merit positively to have impacted the tax collector. This would
be the parable’s shock: not only that the agent of Rome is justified but that
the Pharisee’s own good works helped in that justification.”
Can the good
works of one really redeem the bad works of another?
Sometimes,
when I’m deeply frustrated by the hypocrisy, power-hoarding, racism, and
homophobia of this institutional Anglican Church, I think of those within it
who carry out the good work of God quietly, with compassion and perseverance. I
think of you, doing your best to love God and your neighbour in a lonely world
that demands much of us.
I’m going to
sit now and welcome your stories of times where you’ve seen the good overcome
the bad, where the arc of the moral universe has bent toward justice, perhaps
even where your own mind has been changed by the gentleness of others.
This sermon was preached at Holy Cross parish in East Vancouver. Audio is linked at the bottom and you will notice there is an interlude in Japanese which is not included in the text version.Thank you as well to A. Nakao for recording the audio.
Good
morning, Holy Cross parish. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Clare
and I’m pastor to the St. Brigid’s congregation at Christ Church Cathedral.
All right,
let’s do something a little different. Come along with me if you’re willing. If
not, you can just listen, or take a little break if you need to. Do your
shopping list. All are invited, none are compelled.
If you feel
safe to, close your eyes. If you don’t, just soften your gaze. Let yourself
breathe for a minute. Relax, feel yourself sturdy in the pew, breathe deep,
relax any pressure points or pains.
Now, go to a
beautiful place, a place that’s yours, where you’re totally safe. Maybe it’s a
place you loved as a child – a house, a field, a beach, or maybe it’s just the
darkness behind your eyes.
And finally,
think about someone who loves you coming to meet you there. It can be someone
who’s living, or someone who’s no longer on earth. Someone who knows you,
with whom you have a shared vocabulary, who makes you laugh, who holds you when
you cry, someone you don’t need to explain any of your weird quirks to, because
they understand. Someone around whom you don’t have to pretend to be anyone
else.
Let them
slowly materialize in your mind’s eye. How do they look to you? What do you see
on their face as they look at you? Is it a smile? Gentleness? Standing with
arms held out? Seated in a chair with a lap ready for you?
Is it with
invitation?
If yes,
accept the invitation. Go into their arms, climb into their lap, stand close.
If not, just
stand there and contemplate every part of that beloved one.
And let’s
rest in the moment again.
You can come
back to this moment any time you like, but now it’s time to leave. Thank the
one who loves you, and become aware of your breathing. Become aware of the pew
under you, of your limbs. Wiggle your fingers and toes.
You’re back
here, with your friends and with me.
How did that
feel?
This is how
God wants it to be with us.
It might
seem obvious, but I think we forget it often. Mai nichi watashitachiwa
wasurete imasu.
Of course
for some, God might be the only one who makes us feel that level of safety. But
often, even that feels elusive and impossible, because we might think that God,
knowing all of our sins and shortcomings, is more critical than our biggest
critics. In the world we live in, we’re encouraged to believe that when someone
knows our shortcomings, they’re just biding their time until they can use them
against us.
Perhaps when
Jesus tells us we should accept the Kingdom as children, that’s what he meant.
Children are fully aware that they need help. They don’t fuss about it. They
ask quite unselfconsciously for the things they need and want.
And yet
somehow, we grow into adults who become so divorced from what they need that
some die before asking for help, for support, for love.
A child will
say, “Mummy, I want a hug.”
An adult will
wake up one day and wonder how they ever got to be so lonely.
God begs us,
pleads with us, never to lose that “Mummy, I want a hug,” relationship with God.
And yet we
often exchange this relationship, which is loving but also dependent, for the
perceived power that individualism promises.
The
Israelites, newly born as a liberated people and sustained in the wilderness,
built a kingdom, and began to struggle as all kingdoms do. Enslaved anew by
empires, they heard the voices of prophets like Jeremiah speaking God’s word.
God, who has deep respect for this beloved people, says through Jeremiah, “You
wanted to be in right relationship, so I gave you the Torah to show you how it
could and should be. Adults tell each other what they need. Why are you acting
like we didn’t have that conversation?”
I don’t know
about you, but I don’t get really ticked off with people I don’t care about. I
only get ticked off with people I really care about. I do my best to
tell the people I love the truth, because I respect them. Preserving the
relationship is what’s most important, so I put the work in and have faith that
they’ll listen, because they also care about the relationship.
That’s what
God is like with us.
Jesus tells
a parable of a woman who wears down an unjust judge with incessant
self-advocacy. Jesus is not saying this is what God is like, and we should be
like the woman. This woman has enough self-respect to demand justice for
herself from this bored jerk and he relents. But God doesn’t have to be
bullied into giving us what we need, because God loves us.
Often the
Law or Torah is contrasted with the Gospel. One is hard and legalistic and one
is easy and generous. This framing is wrong. It’s harmful to Jesus and Judaism.
Like the 95 calls to action from the TRC, the Torah is God saying, “Do you want
to be in right relationship? Do you really want that, with all your heart and
soul? I’m going to take you at your word. I know you’re always saying you don’t
want to offend me or get it wrong. So here it is. This is exactly what I need
you to do to live in right relationship.”
That’s a
huge gift.
How do we
still get it wrong? The same reason I still snap at the people I love, or run
late, or decide I’d rather sit around than clean my house. We’re frail. God
understands that.
But to say
that we don’t know what God wants from us?
Kanben
shite.
We know what
God wants.
We know God
wants us to be kind and patient and loving.
We know God
wants us to listen more than speak.
We know God
does not want us to treat this planet and its many creatures, our siblings,
with apathy and disdain.
We know God
wants us to share with those less fortunate, and to advocate on behalf of the
oppressed, and, you know, preferably not to oppress other beings in the first
place.
We were
taught that as children.
Why don’t we
do it? We’re human. Okay.
But why do
we pretend that God’s will is inscrutable?
I admit that
sometimes it’s not clear what the right choice is. I’ve had times where I’ve
lost sleep, where I’ve shook my fists at God and said, “How can I do the least
amount of harm in this crappy situation?”
But often,
it really is as easy as just choosing the good.
And if we
can’t, or don’t, which, let’s face it, will be a lot of the time, it’s as easy
as admitting that we know what we have to do, and we just don’t want to.
And that can
just be the prayer. “God, I know what I have to do. But I really don’t want
to.”
Believe me,
God respects the honesty of that prayer.
Again, God
does not have to be bullied and wheedled for justice or love, even when
we screw up. God’s love cannot be bought or earned or stolen.
It’s offered
freely, with total trust, in the same spirit as it was offered to you through
that person you imagined at the beginning of the sermon.
Is that hard
to believe?
Jeremiah
shows us we can rest in that precious love. Remember, when the Israelites broke
that first covenant, God prepared a whole new one.
“I will put
my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their
God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one
another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they
shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin
no more.”
You surely
know that the one who loved you has made you a better person.
A new practice we started some time at St. Brigid’s is called ‘seedchats,’ which are kind of like mini-sermons with space left at the end for the congregation to respond. I wasn’t going to post them because they didn’t feel like “real sermons” but then I realized that was super weird, because they still are, just shorter and often with a question or prompt at the end. So here’s the first one I did. Unfortunately the comments are not included in the text, but the video of the livestream does have them.
I realized that the Thanksgiving passage assigned for today was one we already preached on at the beginning of Lent! I was wracking my brain trying to figure out when I’d preached on this last because I knew it was recent, but it wasn’t Thanksgiving last year, so I was like, “Where did I do this?” And then I found it – Lent 1! Bizarre!
Now when I
preached that sermon, I quoted Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who said, “With the
freedom and privilege offered in the Promised Land come obligations.”
Relationship with God means relationship with those less fortunate. The
Israelites were an agrarian people, a farming people, in the stories of the
Promised Land, so first fruits are not won by ingenuity and hard work. Farmers
know that they can work as hard as possible and still have a bad year. Ancient
farming peoples relied on weather gods – rain, sun, harvest, and hearth deities
who had their own wills and whims.
The biggest
difference is that as Israelite theology shifted over time, their One God
became larger and more inscrutable.
In the words
of Amos:
“The one who
made the Pleiades and Orion,
and turns deep darkness into the morning,
and darkens the day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea,
and pours them out on the surface of the earth,
the Lord is Their name, 9 who makes destruction flash out against the strong,
so that destruction comes upon the fortress.”
In the words
of Deuteronomy:
“When the
Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us,
we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our
oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a
mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with
signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a
land flowing with milk and honey.”
While many
other gods may have acted more capriciously in the old tales, this God was a
God who could not be manipulated by empty ritual. This God demanded that the
people remember who they were: those who were called to a path of caring for
those who dwelt among them as aliens and strangers, those called to remember
their days of eating manna in the wilderness, bread of angels scattered down on
the earth from heaven, those called to remember that they had been liberated
because they were beloved, but sternly told that they should not believe this
set them above other people. Indeed, their status meant that they should extend
this empire-shattering love to all people.
And is this
not also our story?
On this
Thanksgiving Day we are called to remember who we are: those invited into a
resurrection dance not just for Christianity or even humanity but all of
creation, those given the great gift of a beautiful blue and green body held
like a hazelnut in the palm of God’s loving hand, those who are taught that
liberation and compassion are God’s true Law, rather than civility politics or
fear or empire.
Shall we
gather here tonight in thanksgiving? Yes, here and everywhere and at all times.
Shall we
imagine that it is enough to say “Thank you, God, for all our gifts”? By no
means. Gratitude and thanksgiving are meant to be invasive species. They are
meant to overflow our cups – to overflow our tables, to come up to our knees.
What does
this look like?
Every month,
I attend a free online support group for caregivers for people with young-onset
Alzheimer’s disease. It’s only one offering the Alzheimer’s Society of BC has
given to me that has been the most incredible lifeline. I pray that when my
mum’s struggle with the disease is over, I have the strength and endurance to
give back to this incredible organization that brings hope to so many people.
My gratitude already overflows for them and their work.
It’s your
turn. Tell us a story of how thanksgiving has been invasive in your life. Tell
us a story of how you might want it to be invasive. Tell us a story of
witnessing it second-hand.
This Sunday was originally slated to include a baptism at St. Brigid’s, which is why once again we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration in this church calendar year. Unfortunately, the baptism ended up postponed, but it was too late to change the bulletins and readings, so I just rolled with it. It’s a fantastic story; no harm telling it more than once.
I couldn’t
stop watching it: a little video, made by a friend, set to music: “Here comes
the girl! Hello, girl! Welcome.”
The girl in
question was a trans girl, brand new in her journey toward presenting publicly
as female in her daily life. Going through my own gender journey, I’d cleaned
my closet of my more feminine things that didn’t feel like they really belonged
to me anymore, and I thought I could pass some of it on to a trans or nonbinary
person. She was modeling a flowered dress from that stash, doing that thing
that all girls do when they get a new dress: twirling. Our body types are
nothing alike, but I figured her height and proportions would just make the
dress hang a bit differently than it did on me, and I was right. It looked
amazing. She looked amazing. Her smile was so sweet, so shy. “Here comes the
girl! Hello, girl! Welcome.”
She wasn’t
on a mountaintop, but she was transfigured.
In the Book
of Daniel, in response to four great beasts symbolizing four of the great
empires that ran roughshod over Israel, a Holy Ancient One cleanses them with
celestial fire, putting an end to the arrogant, hateful, and meaningless words
of the last, most fearsome beast. And after that, when oppression has been put
to the flame, one like a human being, coming with the clouds of heaven,
approaches the Holy Ancient One, and is given full dominion over all things.
One like a
human being, but clearly not – one who comes robed in cloud and seems
unbothered by the torrents of holy fire that have poured forth from this
Ancient One, and yet looks like us. One whose identity cannot be determined by
the eyes alone. One whose true power is only made fully manifest when
oppression is put to the flame.
One like us.
Jesus goes
to the mountaintop. He takes his closest friends, Peter, James, and John. He
doesn’t trust just anyone with the secret he is about to reveal.
He has
already been about the work of putting systems of oppression to the flame. He
has commissioned fishers, labourers, and a tax collector or two, to go out into
the world with the power to heal, to exorcise, and to proclaim the Kingdom of
God. He has fed five thousand people with the bread of abundance, given without
price or restriction to all who hunger. He has confessed, in an act of radical
honesty, that this kind of advocacy comes with a heavy cost – indeed, it
usually leads to death – and has encouraged others who want to follow to join
him in that work of self-sacrificing love, love totally divorced from any
desire for earthly wealth or gain.
And now, his
true power, his true identity, is ready to be made manifest, at least for a
moment.
On the
mountaintop, in a period of deep prayer, accompanied by his closest friends,
the ones he brought into the bedroom of Jairus’s daughter to witness her
resurrection, he takes on a new form, a true form, a form that leaves nothing
to the imagination. He is out and about.
Moses and
Elijah, prophets who also led slaves to freedom, fed the hungry without price,
and spoke truth to power, are suddenly beside him, placing him firmly,
inescapably, in their legacy – in God’s legacy – of putting oppression to the
flame.
In a bit of
spooky foreshadowing the three companions are weighed down with sleep. In
Chapter 22, they will once again be weighed down with sleep, not on a mountain,
but in a garden. The Sufi mystic Rumi warns us, “If you want everlasting glory…
if you want to burn with love, don’t go back to sleep. You have wasted so many
nights; don’t go back to sleep.”
Here,
though, on the mountaintop, they manage to stay awake, and witness everlasting
glory.
And Peter,
ever enthusiastic, ever clueless, tries to bottle the moment, to curate Jesus’s
secret that the Liberator will come clothed in our own bodies, to make a
monument to it.
And how can
we not want to? When we finally see the truth of what Irenaeus was telling us
when he wrote “The glory of God is a human being, fully alive,” how could we
not want to build a city on that truth?
But this is
always our first mistake: believing we can just pluck wisdom off a branch and
keep it contained to one body, one story, one message. Believing we can encase
God in gold and dance before Them on the mountaintop. Believing that we are
one body, one story, one spirit, apart from everyone and everything else,
alone. We take a moving intricate infinite and try to freeze it into a solitary
static image.
Stay awake,
Peter. This moment is too big for a tent or a tabernacle. This is your beloved,
and he took you up here to tell you something profound. Listen to him. This
moment is manna, heavenly bread. It’s a gift, but you can’t take more than
you’re given. We know this, because a cloud comes down, just like it did for
Moses and the liberated Israel. It’s terrifying, because this Liberator is not
someone that can be manipulated or bullied or shamed, not someone who will
inevitably turn on their flock. This Liberator is outside of the corruptibility
that comes with human power. This Liberator is unlike anything we’ve ever seen
before.
Stay awake,
Peter. Don’t just listen because you’re a student and need to understand. Listen
because the moment is fleeting, and it has to last you a while. You’re staring
into a rising sun now, but a long night is coming. Your beloved is asking you
not to waste that coming night with sleep and despair. He’s trying to tell you,
in this one precious moment, that when the night comes, he wants you waiting at
the window like the woman in the Song of Songs, ever hopeful that the
beloved will bring the sun with him as he crests the treacherous rise of death
like a gazelle.
Stay awake,
Peter, you’ll want to see this.
This is only
the beginning.
Have you
ever seen someone transfigured?
Have you
ever been invited to a lonely place to be told a monumental secret, and
suddenly been struck by awe as the one you thought you knew became something
else entirely – something beautiful and profound and unknowable, and yet so
close to you, and wanting you closer, wanting you to cradle this
incredible secret as though it were an infant star in your hands?
What did you
see? What did you feel? What did you do?
Have you
ever felt transfigured?
Have you
ever made a careful, conscious choice of precious friends, and brought them to
the mountain of your solitude to share this secret, not knowing how they would
react, not knowing if they would recognize the deep work of prayer it took to
bring forth this light of truth, trying to get them to stay awake, trying to
get them to see you, to want to see you, to take immeasurable delight in
the sight of you as you crest the hill of loneliness or burst forth from the
crypt of your secrets?
What did you
see? What did you feel? What did you do?
The great
beasts of our world are on the loose, but so many angels are too. A thousand
thousand are serving the Holy Ancient One in the work of lighting matches to
put oppression to the flame. Ten thousand times ten thousand are bearing
witness, tending fires already kindled.
Will it be
enough?
Who knows?
We’re in the cloud. It’s in God’s hands. We can build monuments and stay on the
mountaintop, or we can listen, and go back out into the world, with hearts like
torches.
The Sufi
teacher Kabir Helminski wrote, “To be a dervish is very easy / Fill with love
until you’re empty.”
One morning I
sat in a church holding onto a precious human soul, and insisting, “God loves
you and does not condemn you to hell for being who She made you to be.”
“But what if
you’re wrong?” they wailed.
It was 2018.
I remember thinking, I thought we were past this.
Instead,
here we were. This beloved child of God was ten years younger than me, and yet,
still, the poison of church-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia had been
drowning their soul.
I’m not
trying to bum you out on this beautiful morning when we’re ready to march and
love and be fabulous.
I’m telling
you this because I needed to know, and we all need to know, in every moment,
that Pride is not just about watching corporate floats and politicians and cops
march by and marveling at how things have changed. It’s not just about having
fun on a beautiful summer day. It’s not just about celebrating this church and
the work it has done to make safe space for people like me – even when I was a
confused bisexual kid in the late ‘90s and all the more as a self-consciously
militant nonbinary kid in the 2020s.
My pronouns
are they/them/theirs, by the way. Like Jesus, very God of very God, I am One
who contains multitudes. Like the Holy Trinity, I am singular they.
A lot of
people get it wrong. I’m not mad. I can tell most of the time it’s an honest
mistake – like if your name is Doris but someone calls you Doreen.
I only get
mad when people do it on purpose – like you would if someone kept calling you
Doreen even after you corrected them many, many times.
Or if they
told you Doris was a name they’d never heard before so they were just going to
call you Doreen because that was easier.
But that’s
not what most people are doing.
My pronouns
are they/them/theirs. Not she/her/hers.
I’m asking
you with an open heart to please not put me in the awkward position of having
to apologize for making your life more complicated with my existence. If you
mess it up, don’t start groveling. Just correct yourself and move on. I will
too! I’m not a monster. I’m a human being. I’ve made many mistakes. I know
you’re going to as well.
I know it’s
especially hard if you’ve known me for a long time and you’re used to using
other pronouns. Hard to course-correct a habit like that. I’ve struggled when long-time
friends have changed their names and pronouns.
Do not
underestimate how much someone will appreciate that you’re trying. When I can
tell someone is trying it’s like a flower blossoming in my chest.
And oh
man…if you introduce yourself with your own pronouns? That’s a whole
bouquet you just planted here.
When you do
that, you are signaling to me that you see me. You are signaling to your kids,
your grandkids, your niblings, your friends, your students, your coworkers,
that you see them, and then, like dear St. Fred, murmuring, “It’s you I like.”
When you do
that, you are saying to that crying kid back in 2018, “I’m not wrong. I love
you. And God loves you too.”
Because
there’s clearly not enough of us saying that to the people who need to hear it.
If there
were, maybe our bishops wouldn’t be fighting over whether to include 2SLGBTQIA+
people in ministry, or whether same-gender marriage is okay.
If there
were, maybe I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time convincing queer kids not
to just give up on living.
If there
were, I would never have had to hear that kid ask me, over and over again, over
a period of years, “What if you’re wrong?”
Let’s say I
am wrong. Let’s say for a moment God is exactly who they say He is – because
obviously that God is a He.
That’s no
God of life. That’s no God that glistens forth in thousands upon millions of
diverse creatures of every gender imaginable, and some unimaginable ones too.
That’s no God that liberates the broken-hearted. That God ties up heavy
burdens, hard to bear, and lays them on the shoulders of others; but is
unwilling to lift a finger to move them. That God is a refuge to no one.
I will not
worship that God. That God is a death-dealer. I’ll go to hell before serving
that God.
I’m speaking
to you from the heart, because I love you.
The Hebrew
Bible text we just read proves that God is not like that.
Now I know today’s
readings are a bit iffy from a Pride Sunday perspective. Hosea can be a bit
much. There’s the passage we heard last week about taking a wife of whoredom –
EEK!
But the part
about God still reaching out to us, even as we abuse and corrupt and destroy
the creatures of God, because God is not like us?
Maybe even…a
little queer?
That’s the
good stuff.
God calls those
who try to imprison Him/Her/Them to account in these passages.
From Chapter
10:
“You have
ploughed wickedness,
you have reaped injustice,
you have eaten the fruit of lies.”
In disowning
your children. In campaigning for conversion therapy. In refusing to provide medical
care and appropriate bathrooms for trans kids. In forbidding kids from
accessing anonymous queer and trans support groups in schools. In supporting
people who sacrifice to the Baals of hate, like Intellectual Dark Web trolls.
In refusing to learn proper pronouns and new names because “it’s too hard” or
“it’s not proper grammar.”
It’s way
harder to ask someone to start using a new name, or the right pronouns. I think
the scariest thing I’ve ever done is asking my husband to start using
they/them. I’ve known him for twenty years. I know he’s a good guy. I knew he
would promise to try, and that’s just what he did.
It was still
scary.
And by the
way, Shakespeare used singular they.
But even if
it was, is proper grammar really more important to you than our relationship? I
mean if it is, okay. But don’t expect me to hang out with you.
Despite all
of that, God calls us back. Despite all of the times that I’ve been
hateful, God has called me back. Where I sowed rage, God sowed love and
compassion.
Hosea’s
anger is borne out from his response to idolatry. Idolatry is a sin because it
puts something else in the place of God. For Hosea, writing in a particular
place at a particular time, that was Baal, a different god.
But maybe
for us, it’s homophobia. Transphobia. Misogyny. Transmisogyny. Maybe it’s
thinking that God can’t be queer or trans. Maybe it’s thinking that God always
chooses male pronouns. (Oh man, watch yourself, family, because if you think I
get crabby when I get misgendered).
And maybe idolatry
is based in fear. Maybe when people see someone like me, they see everything
that they were told was off-limits to them, and some of them resent me for not
playing by those rules. Maybe they see someone who feels free enough to be
themselves. I mean I’ll confess that what actually happened was that I figured
out I’m terrible at being someone other than myself, so I gave up.
But, in that
spirit of fear, some folks look at God and think, “God couldn’t possibly
approve of this, because if They did, I was lied to. If it was okay all along
to be fully me, why have I been spilling my heartblood all this time trying to be
someone else?”
Well, I’m
done being afraid. I’m done making myself small to support people in lies of
self-loathing.
I’m done
with that God.
And you
should be too.
You know
what happened to that kid crying in the church in 2018? After they decided to
try being themselves, I watched them become more and more compassionate and
brave and accepting of others.
To my
beautiful rainbow siblings, keep being you.
To those
allied with us, stand with us. Keep being you.
To those who
might be a little afraid, a little uncomfortable?