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Sermon Blog
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Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 12, Year B July 25, 2021 Cause I try, and I try, and I try, I can’t get no. No, no, no. Satisfaction, the Rolling Stones classic rock tome makes this important observation. The harder we try to find satisfaction, the farther away it seems to be. Such is the paradox of being human. I wonder if Jeff Bezos is satisfied this week. The Amazon billionaire turned rocket man went to space cost him somewhere north of $19 million dollars to spend five weightless minutes. That is $3.8 million per minute, or $63,333 per second for that… “achievement.” When they landed in a Texas desert, Bezos got out of the craft, put on a big ole cowboy hat, and said a few words. While I am sure his flight helped with some research, employed some folks, the adventure burned 902,000 pounds of fuel. The claim is that there was no carbon emissions for the flight, but the production, transportation, and storage of that much liquified natural gas fuel begs that question. I wonder if Richard Branson is satisfied following his Space X flight into a short while before Branson’s. He only got three minutes of weightlessness and has not revealed what it cost, but they are talking reservations for future flights at $250,000 per person. His vehicle is more plane-like rather than a rocket, so that may have some future applications. I don’t know. Satisfaction is different for different people, I guess, and people are free to do what they wish, but the whole thing looks like a race to fill some emptiness of spirit, to make some sort of power statement, or find a new frontier to dominate as they have seemingly conquered the world of commerce and industry already. Satisfaction can be understood as the state of contentment. What does that require? Perhaps the bar need not be so high, so complicated, or so costly? We get a glance into the quest for satisfaction in our lessons for today. King David, the Mac Daddy of the Old Testament, the accomplished statesman, warrior, and empire builder finds himself seeking some other satisfaction. In the painfully detailed Bathsheba incident, he spies another man’s spouse from his roof top perch, while his people are out at war. David exercises his power and might to bring her into his chambers. When she reveals that she is with child, David tries to cover the whole thing up, leading to the calculated murder of Bathsheba’s husband, General Uriah. David’s fall from grace, favor, and fortune is thundering. He hits hard. And from then on, his life, his reign, and his spirit crumbles. The child of that sin dies. His eldest son rebels against him, and is killed in that same rebellion. Israel, the great hope for a holy kingdom falls with him. There was no satisfaction. In absolute contrast, we hear John’s version the feeding of the five thousand story. This is the only story that we find in all four gospels. The details are all remarkably similar. There are hordes of people following Jesus. They want to be healed and helped. They want to accept his invitation to abide in the Kingdom of God, though their understanding of what that is… is a bit vague at first. You know how it goes, it gets late, and folks get hungry. There is a good bit of chaos and complaining. A little boy appears with five loaves and two fish. Jesus tells everyone to sit down, as he takes the loaves, blesses them, breaks them open, and all are fed. And get this: “When all were satisfied, he told his disciples to gather up the leftovers. They filed twelve baskets. There was enough. There was plenty. There was more than they could eat. All were satisfied. They encountered tangible experience and reality of God’s Kingdom, right there and then. Whatever Jesus was connected to, they want in on that. But as the only model they had for leadership was a monarchy of dominance, they sought to take him, by force if necessary, and make him king. As is the way feeble visioned humanity, they got it, but then, they didn’t get it. Jesus slips away and retreats, as this is not the kind of reign he will fulfill. He does not play earthly power games as a way to God. When anyone dominates, someone else is dominated. That did not work out so well for David. Later, Jesus is praised as great David’s greater son. And how. Satisfaction happens when the power of love is ultimate, when all are fed, all are loved, and, all are saved, finally, from our worst power hungry, self-serving, and empty quests for domination. The novelist and critic Samuel Butler observed that “People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, as they are at seeing it practiced.” To which theologian G.K. Chesterton added “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Indeed, it is really hard to see through the lenses our world sets up as filters for what is real and life giving; that is what the Rolling Stones decry as no satisfaction. Saint Paul steers us this way: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. There is one Way to satisfaction. One Truth. One God. One love. It will not come through holding office, making some kind of conquest, banking a few billion dollars, or a finding few minutes of weightlessness in space. Satisfaction comes when God’s abundant love is known, shared, and celebrated. Satisfaction guaranteed. Amen. Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 9, Year B July 4, 2021 In a mere sixty days, it will be time to awaken the nation. We have a ritual for game day. I have a big red G flag that I fly proudly. We prepare special foods. We decorate the house. We wear special clothes. We sing special songs. We chant special chants. In a mere sixty days, it will be time to awaken the “Bulldog Nation.” For the uninitiated, I am speaking the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team. I grew up right by the campus in Athens. My father taught there for thirty-five years. Our family has had season tickets for more than forty years. Ever since I can remember, fall Saturdays have been reserved for game day. Some of you share passions for other teams. To each her own. If I am fortunate enough to be in town, I go to the massive cathedral of SEC football. I go to tailgate party feasts. I go to the “Dawg Walk” when the team processes into at the stadium hours before game time. I get in my pew in time to see the Redcoat Marching band spell out G.E.O.R.G.I.A. on the field while playing Glory, Glory to Old Georgia before the team takes the field. We tend to win, but the National Championship has eluded us since 1980. I went to every home game that season. I can still name the players. For the life of me, it all sounds like an Easter church service. Special clothes, food, hymns, chants and other ritual. More than one doctoral dissertation has been written on college football as modern religion. But we have to remember that these are young men who fumble and drop passes sometimes. Coaches are not perfect. Our devotion to our cause is not ultimate or life giving. Fandom may look religious, but life does not depend on a game. It is important for us remember that. Incidentally, my father played football for Virginia from 1958-1961. They lost all but one of their first year Cavalyearling games in 1958. In 1959 and 1960, they lost twenty straight. In his fourth year they ended a 28 game Cavalier losing streak which was a dubious record at the time. That year they won four of ten games. Thus, the potential and reality of defeat is part of my DNA. If football is religion, it is a bad one. As you all know, today is a game day for America. We celebrate the birth of the American Idea, wearing our team colors, feasting on grilled food, singing patriotic songs, and cheering with parades and fireworks. My devotion to our nation is strong, and the national flag is flying at our home. Many have given much more than I to preserve the best of American ideals. And we owe them deep gratitude. And yet, today is also Sunday, the day on which we remember and celebrate our ultimate devotion. The cross stands above the flag, reminding us that we are but one nation in the Kingdom of God. It is important for us remember that too. Not without coincidence, the lesson from Second Samuel is all about the formation of a nation: Israel. This is not the modern country of Israel’s founding, it is the establishment of an idea, a nation devoted to God and God alone. The narrative is prescient and powerful. David, who will be the greatest leader of that nation, ever, makes a covenant, a promise to lead faithfully with the people, but more importantly to God. In doing so he is a uniter, bringing people of differing religious factions together for good. All is well. Until it is not. David will come to abuse his power. Subsequent leaders will go their own way. Corruption and greed do their worst. Eventually they all fail. The nation fails too. As nations are constructs of human design, they are never perfect, though they may aspire to the best of ideals. In 586 BCE, the Assyrians and Babylonians wipe out Jerusalem and take them into slavery. While they attempt form again after hundreds of years, it never really works to be a nation and practice faith in perfect harmony. When God takes human form in Jesus, the people are under the thumb of an elite religious ruling class and the militaristic empire of Rome. As Jesus challenges the powers that be as greedy, self-centered, and oppressive, he gets run out of his own home town. Unfazed, Jesus goes to other towns and villages, and sends his disciples two by two to go tell the story of God as loving, forgiving, and just for all people. He does not hand out jerseys. They are not going out to conquer a foe. They are to take nothing, and depend on the kindness of those they serve. If that doesn’t work, he tells them, they are to shake it off are to keep on keeping on. And when they do, they bring healing and help to hurting people no matter their nation, religion, or station in life. That is what God does. In this very parish, during World War II, the rector was a known and avowed pacifist. On a Sunday in 1942, The Rev. H Lee Marston processed down the aisle and when he turned to face the congregation, he saw a giant American flag hanging from the middle of balcony where the organ is today. Promptly and with few words, he dismissed the congregation and left the building. He held fast and proclaimed that the parish would worship God and not America. That took courage, and showed deep conviction. While we have an American flag in our sanctuary, it is a symbol, not an idol. We have an Episcopal Church flag here too. It is a symbol, not an idol. There are no adjectives before the word Christian, neither American nor Episcopalian. God does not do boundaries or play favorites. Thomas Jefferson once said “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” He was speaking of slavery which would not be abolished for another 82 years. It is hard to question Jefferson’s patriotism, and yet his words stand as fair warning that striving for a more perfect union does not make us perfect. Perfection is God alone. The American idea is worthy of celebration to be sure, but liberty and justice for all does not happen just because we say it. We have to remember that God calls people, not nations to embody God’s love. Liberty and justice for all happens when people, people like us, awaken to seek and serve God’s power, God’s kingdom, God’s glory. Glory, glory to God first and forever. Amen. Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 8, Year B June 27, 2021 I am forever grateful for a number of phrases we use in the south that speak far beyond the few words they utilize. “Bless your heart.” “She’s just not right.” “He’s a mess.” You can purchase signs, doormats, and dish towels that say: “In our family we do not hide crazy. We parade it on the front porch and give it some sweet tea.” Mostly, such things are said out of love or as a way not to dismiss the human behind questionable behavior. I appreciate these phrases as nuanced theological statements as well, not as excuse for outright cruelty or bigotry, but as acknowledgement that there is little bit of crazy in all of us. Life is messy. Yes, sir, there is a good bit of crazy mess out there these days. As we stumble out of this pandemic, lots and lots of things are opening up again. We can dine indoors at restaurants, go to parties, send kids to camp, and wander around mask free in the grocery store. At the same time, there has been a precipitous rise in gun violence, road rage, and seemingly random assaults in grocery stores, convenience stores, and gas stations. We may be reopening but the new normal includes free floating anxiety, volatility, and misplaced anger. It does not require deep psychological analysis to identify the source of this messed up behavior. We have endured a traumatic event. It may have been more like a slow drip than a sudden impact, but the effects are real and lasting. My friend, Kevin, is a psychiatrist who works with soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Through wartime stresses they have become ever aware of their mortality, deeply suspicious of others, hyper alert, and constantly on guard. His take is that living with a pandemic checks most all of those boxes in the volatile behaviors we are seeing. His patients become his patients because they have come home, just tried really hard to be normal, only to revert to their war-scarred brain unexpectedly. His work is focused on helping them tell their stories, write about what happened to them, and even, with the help of some Nashville song writers, to sing about it. We read from the relatively obscure book of Lamentations today, and this book was written when the Israelites were off in exile, in slavery in Babylon. It is all about trauma and grief. Even as they return to their homeland, they continued to tell their story, the whole story, to ask God the hard questions of why, and to find comfort together, again, in being and belonging together. The ancients knew that story telling was the best way to acknowledge grief, loss, and begin to rebuild their lives. We are not very good at remembering. The recent acrimony about telling the story of American slavery and its racist tentacles is white hot right now. My people participated in some of that regrettable story, and I suspect that some of you share in that truth too. There is confusion among many that telling the whole story is about blame or shame. It is not. Telling the story is about doing what the Israelites did: acknowledging grief, loss, and beginning to seek a better way forward. We are not good at this right now. Like my friend Kevin’s soldiers, it looks like, for all the world, that we are coping with regathering in trying really hard just to be normal again. Instead of whistling past the graveyard of so much loss, we need to remember and tell the story of those who died, and of missing out on vital experiences: funerals, weddings, school years, graduations, family and holiday gatherings. We did not skip eighteen months of living. We spent those months seeing and fearing our fragile mortality, suspicious of who has it and how it spreads, hyper alert to be safe, and constantly on guard. That is exhausting and we need to take a collective deep breath and speak those truths. This is one way church can help. This week’s gospel is a long one, which is completely atypical for Mark’s style of telling the story. He is a just the facts kind of guy, but this packet of stories must have been really important to his listeners for him to go into so much detail. And these stories are really messy. Jesus meets a rabbi, Jairus, whose daughter is deathly ill. As Jairus pleads for his help, we can hear his parental desperation. As he kneels before Jesus, he crosses a line rendering himself unclean according to strict Jewish purity laws. As Jesus heads off to help, he is interrupted as people are pushing in on him. And when the bleeding woman touches him, he, too, is rendered unclean. Instead of running off to take on cleansing ritual before going back to work, Jesus stays present in the chaos. He takes time to hear the woman’s story and tells her that her faith has made her well. By this time, word comes that Jairus’s daughter has died. Nevertheless, Jesus stays with it. He goes to the child, and takes her by the hand. The whole story is a hot mess of boundary crossing: touching an untouchable, touching a woman not your wife, and touching a dead body. He speaks to the dead little girl, telling her to arise, and she does. The text says that people were amazed. What it does not say is that they were appalled, but we find that our later. All of this speaks straight into where we may find ourselves in this time and place. Jesus makes no effort to whitewash pain and suffering. He does not encourage a “just get over” it kind of amnesia. He looks into the deep need to show what God does with grief and loss. God redeems it. God does not deny it or sweep the suffering under the rug. God gets down in the mess with us and helps us arise and be made new. In these instances, Jesus provides a cure. But as we know, all cure is temporary. The woman’s hemorrhage stopped. The little girl lived. Those things happened for a time, but not forever. But what Jesus shows is how healing happens. Healing happens in acknowledging the suffering, feeling the grief, living with the messy reality, and telling the whole story. I love nuanced southern sayings, but I am not a fan of dismissive or trite lines to explain away life’s messiness. “Everything happens for a reason.” “God will never give us anything we can’t handle.” “Thoughts and prayers, hashtag blessed.” Nope, we do not get back to normal and just get over grief. Ever. We can frame it, learn from it, and grow from it, but it is never neat and clean. God can be found in the love that surrounds us, the person who listens, and in the truth telling of loss, but grief does not go away. It becomes part of our story. There is one more detail Mark includes at the end. Instead of carrying Jesus off on their shoulders to celebrate his godly miraculous powers, Jesus turns the attention back to the child. He says “give her something to eat.” Eucharist. Share the feast of life here and now. Take care of her. Take care of each other. Life may be messy, but we gotta eat. And when we do that, we come together, we belong, we take our place at the table, we say our prayers, we tell our stories, and healing happens. Amen. |
AuthorThe Rev. John Thomas is Rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood Archives
October 2024
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