Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
October 27, 2019
Proper 25, Year C
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
Anusha was one of my high school students many years ago when I was an Episcopal School Chaplain.  She was a second generation Iranian-American as her family had fled a fundamentalist Islamic regime after the fall of the Shah of Iran.  Her family was highly suspicious of all religion, having seen its darkest side swallow their country, and deal harshly with any moderates or dissenters.  Nevertheless, they enrolled her in an Episcopal school because they liked our academic program and inclusive atmosphere.
 
When she came to my first Theology class, she told me she was not religious, certainly did not need a Chaplain, but would do whatever she had to do to make a good grade.  This was my favorite kind of student.  Pretty soon, she was a leader in class discussion, a keen critic of theological inconsistencies, and a regular hanger outer after class.  I remember Anusha being so forthright in her estimation of Christianity’s embrace of weakness, and so suspicious of any purpose or point in Jesus’ death.  All the while, she began to trust me because I affirmed her doubt as honesty and did not try to convert her.  And, over time, she shared some personal struggles with her family’s high expectations and her friendships that were so very high school.  She would always say: “I don’t get you Rev, but I like you ok.”
 
In the Spring semester of that year, Anusha signed up for a school exchange trip to South Africa, mostly, she said, to spend a month somewhere far away from her parents, and to get her community service credits.  Our school partnered with a struggling school in an all black township outside of Johannesburg.  It was an incredibly poor sprawling community, underdeveloped through decades of Apartheid.  The school provided a path out dire poverty through education and job training where unemployment was over 75 percent.  The way they raised money was in forming partnerships like ours, traveling to the US to perform their own traditional songs of faith, telling their personal and inspiring stories of struggle and hope.
It is so Episcopal School for an Iranian American Atheist to go to make friends and forge connections with Christian South African blacks and see what happens.
 
When Anusha returned, she bounded into my office, saying, “I get it Rev.” “Get what” I asked.  And in an incredible outpouring of self, she told me that she had expected to go there and help these poor people become more like us, seeking success and affluence through achievement.  Then she explained that over the course of her visit, she found he counterparts to be so joyful in loving one another and working together, that she left wanting to be more like them.  During the visit, Anusha and her fellow students joined in the singing and storytelling, and in that shared rhythm, found kinship and communion.  What she got was that we are all connected and that when everyone thrives, we all thrive.  What she got was the power of love, pure and simple.   
 
 
When Jesus tells parables of God’s Kingdom, I do not think of large mega churches full of like-minded people that look like a segmented consumer focus group as much as anything.  Rather, I think about my former students in South Africa singing new songs.  I think of them working shoulder to shoulder, building homes with people far less advantaged but much more joyful.  I think of places and opportunities where divisions among people dissipate and community is made.
 
Today’s Gospel comes from the Kingdom parable section of Luke’s storytelling.  It is a parable of obvious tension.  There is the one Pharisee who comes to the Temple to pray.  By all counts, he is a good man.  He follows the rules, fasting twice a week and giving a tenth of his income.  It is hard to deny his commitment.  The Church needs folks like him.  We might even seek to be like him ourselves.  But the judgment of others… not so much.  And then there is the other guy: the tax collector.  He is a traitor to his people and a sell out to the Romans.  He doesn’t even come inside the Temple; rather, he is on the fringe, looking down, and asking God to be merciful to his sorry self.  Jesus uses this example to say that the tax collector is the more honest and humble in seeking God.  We need to remember that it is religious zealots that are trying to bring Jesus down, and this is a cautionary tale of misplaced piety and self-assuredness.  We do not fast or tithe to be better than others, we fast or tithe because it makes us more humble.
 
This is not a conversion story.  The tax collector does not get a new job and forsake his ways.  The Pharisee does not have that “I get it” moment in seeing that he is in need of God’s mercy just like his fellow human, cowering in the shadows.  This is just a portrait of two extremes to drive home to point that all of us fall short and all in need of grace: the unmerited yet abundant and ever present love of God.
 
Like many of you, I followed the celebrations Representative Elijah Cummings’s life and the various tributes made this past week.  As the son of sharecroppers and a tireless worker for dignity and equality under the law, he was the first ever African-American lawmaker to lie in state.  While there were a few bad actors, as humans are wont to be, by and large, it was a time of affirmation for the best of our communal aspirations.  Even bitter political rivals praised Cummings’s integrity and humility.  The reason they came together is because in the end, they knew one another as fellow humans: friends, and colleagues. 
 
We need more mutual affection in this world.  We need more humanity and less dismissive labeling.  None are righteous, none are pure, and all are in need of mercy.  If we seek good news in this fallen world, we saw a glimmer this week and celebrating a life well lived.  This is not a political thing.  This is a Jesus thing.  As our Presiding Bishop says over and over: “The way of Jesus is the Way of Love. And the Way of Love can change the world.”
 
Anusha is still out there, finding her way as a young adult now.  We saw one another at a wedding not long ago and she still struggles with faith like the rest of us.  Together, we laughed and told stories and remembered her flash of kingdom love some years back.  Memories are good for finding our way forward.  As we seek God and a deeper life with God, we do well to find the flashes of goodness breaking in all around us.  Where divisions fall away, friendships deepen, and joy abounds, God’s kingdom is at hand.  Thanks to Anusha, Elijah, and so many others, sometimes, we get it.  Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
October 13, 2019
Proper 23, Year C
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
Self-help is big business these days.  Google it and you will get four billion results in less than one second.  Four billion.  And that is just a listing of articles, books, seminars, programs, quotations, and tips.  Searching the term “self-help industry” and you get another 536 million results in less than a second.
 
Back in the days of the old west, there were salesmen who went from town to town peddling various oils and potions to help with everything from rheumatism to melancholy.  The practical and pragmatic people in of old west learned quickly that these itinerant marketers were mostly frauds and hucksters.  They called them snake oil salesmen, and pretty soon, everyone got wise to the medicine show scams.
 
Apparently, the internet has opened up a whole new frontier and snake oil sales are booming.  By industry calculations, self-help is a 13 billion-dollar self-help market that is completely unfiltered and unregulated, competing for our affection, attention, and purchasing power.  Contrary to their claims, psychological data and qualitative research find more harm than good in so-called self-help as most of it trades on feelings of shame, inadequacy, and quick fixes.  This analysis tells us something about ourselves, and I am not sure it is good news.  This is not to say that being and becoming better, more whole-hearted people is an unworthy pursuit.  This is to say that like the old song goes, we are “looking for love in all the wrong places.”
 
Ten lepers meet Jesus on the road, asking him to ask for help.  They beg Jesus to have mercy on them, but Jesus does much better showing mercy. Jesus heals them.  Then, he tells them to go and show themselves to the priests.  In their day, leprosy and other skin issues were thought to the highly contagious and many were, and only the priest could certify a person with skin diseases to be cured, and therefore, safe to live in the community again. (This is one job I am glad I do not have as priest!)  And as the story goes, only one of the healed lepers came back to Jesus to give thanks.
 
This story is an old chestnut with clear implications about how much God does for us, and how daft and inconsiderate we can be, even in the presence of enormous blessing.  It has some ethnic tension in there too as the only one who came back was a Samaritan and the Samaritans were seen as uncouth and unclean, yet even a Samaritan, of all people, recognized God’s power in Jesus.  All of my googling this week started when I googled the lesson of the ten lepers, searching for a commentary I once read.  Instead of that, guess what I found?  About half of the hits were all about self-help resources pointing to the benefits of having an #attitudeofgratitude: all one word.  That is a thing.  On the one hand, it is a positive thing.  Even snake oil salesmen can appreciate what is true and good and valuable, but as with most things solely self oriented, it focuses only on the individually resulting happiness in gratitude, and leaves out the absolute value of living, playing, and belonging in community.
 
Part of what we come to Church to re-remember is that we are not in this life alone and that real growth lifts up those we love and serve.  When the writer and theologian C. S. Lewis was coming to faith in his later life, he remarked that “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”[1]  In knowing that we are not alone, and that are we are not made whole flying solo, we are open to God working in and through our lives.  There were ten lepers in the gospel story because they shared the difficulty of disease and isolation together.  Rather than wither away alone, they found community, and their best idea of seeking Jesus arose from their common need.  That encounter saved their lives.
 
The problem with #attitudeofgratitude movement is that it is thought apart from action.  And though the slogan is catchy and rhyming, it is only a place to start.  I can have the attitude of being a marathon runner; I can get the right shoes, the best exercise watch, some running magazines, and I can even enter a race.  But the only way to run that marathon is to get out there and pound the pavement, practice, and develop the necessary endurance.  And even if I fail at marathon running, I can get more fit and closer to the goal than sitting around with all the right gear, reading about it, and cultivating a runner’s attitude.  Likewise if we need a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, we need them not just to have an attitude of being expert, we need them to practice what they profess to know.
 
As we begin our stewardship season, we have to begin at the heart of the thing.  It is not hard for all of us to agree that giving to God’s work in the world is a good thing.  We have this physical space, this beautiful setting, and the stuff we use in worship because most among us, and those who have gone before us, have been givers of time and ability and money.  What we do together going forward depends on that giving to continue and grow.  Through I do not know how much people give, or have given in the past, I know how many have done so, and it represents a vast majority us all.  People of Emmanuel have shown more than an attitude of generosity, the people of Emmanuel have put that belief into practice through giving.
 
When Janice and I sit down to make our financial pledge to Emmanuel for 2020, we will do so with prayers of gratitude and prayers for God to stretch our horizons.  We will consider all of our resources and set a percentage of those resources as our stewardship commitment.  Our goal in giving is ten percent.  While we are not able to do that, we are practicing to make it so.   We will donate to other things as we are able.  But what we give for the work of our parish will come first as it is the ground and source of our life in community.  While we have not been here all that long, you all are our people and the Church is our extended family.  Above all, we trust that giving to Emmanuel is wise, worthy, and helping support its work is our part in loving God’s world in a tangible way.
 
There is a great prayer in our prayer book that begins with this phrase: “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.”[2]  That is a good one to keep in front of us as we face a world that promises all kinds of self-actualized foolishness.  We come to Church to grow up together.  We come to Church to touch the mystery that is God.  We come to church to know and feel the abundant love God has for all of us, and all creation.  The best, most appropriate, and most genuine prayer we can say is “Thank you.”  The best, most appropriate, and most genuine thing we can do is practice our thanks.  Amen.


[1] C. S. Lewis The Four Loves, Harcourt, Brace, 1960.

[2] Collect for the Third Sunday in Lent, page 218.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
October 6, 2019
Proper 22, Year C
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
My bizarre sense of humor has deep familial roots.  I will spare you the commentary on by gone generations, but my older brother and I share an odd fascination with the odd, the ironic, and the twisted wherever we find them in life.  As we live 2,865 miles and three time zones apart, the ubiquity of texting has fueled our connective sharing with threads reading more like Monty Python skits than communications between family members.  When people who know him meet me for the first time, they almost always comment that we have the same weird sense of humor.
 
Christmas and Birthday gifting is always a pleasure in our brotherhood.  Mostly, we find random and unique objects from our travels to give: sometimes Elvis themed kitsch, or t-shirts with bizarre college mascots (Like the fighting Okra of Delta State or the Banana Slugs of UC Santa Cruz) or shirts with pithy, if not questionable, slogans.  Some of these gifts are not suitable for public display, so we wear them when vacationing together where nobody else knows us.
 
By far, one of my favorites is a shirt he gave me early in my time as an ordained priest of the Church.  It shows a church full of spotted dogs sitting in the pews and one dog in vestments at the pulpit saying: “… And He said unto them, bad dogs!  No. No.”  Underneath reads the caption: “Hellfire and Dalmatians.”  I wore that one out.
 
I love that shirt because it pokes fun at the all to human tendency to transfer its own short-lived mercy for others to our miscast image of God.  It rolls us back to some bizarre childhood picture of God as angry man with a white beard hurling lightening bolts at hapless sinners.  Or, it harkens back to some am radio preacher whose sole motivational theology is built around shame and blame.  Only when we put dogs in the pews, do we see how silly it all looks and sounds.
 
“Lord, Increase our faith!” The disciples and followers are seeking special righteousness once again in our Gospel telling.  But with the analogy of the tiny mustard see that yields a prolific bush, Jesus sets the straight that they have what they need, they just need to accept, understand, and leverage faith’s power to grow itself.  Faith is not a quantifiable store housed thing that puts one person’s amount ahead of another’s.  That would make one human inherently better than another simply because of a commodity of faith.  In this way, faith is a lived out thing that can and does start with an inkling, a hope, or a promise, growing from there under God’s steam of creation.
 
To drive the point home, Jesus uses the most problematic and troubling example of a slave doing the slave’s duty first because that is what he or she is supposed to do.  There is no translation or spin that can rescue this image for modern ears.  Its use is more than troubling when considering the human tragedy of American slavery and all of its repercussions.  We do well to try and hear it for what it intends to convey rather than explaining it away, or carrying the metaphor beyond the scope of its intent.  Nevertheless, it is there, reminding us that we are not the ones with the power in the grand scheme of things.  For that we look to an abundantly loving God working in and through us.
 
All of this increased faith seeking is so problematic for an American narrative of lifting ourselves up through deliberate intent and ambitious goal setting.  This reality for some is a myth for others because playing fields are not even and inequality of opportunity is more and more prevalent.  This is not to say that good old hard work is not a virtue, but that we must be careful not to fall into the trap of the so-called prosperity gospel where God is always on my side, concerned with my goals, and materially favorable to the most righteous among us.
 
If you are on any form of social media; Facebook, Instagram, or the like, you might come to believe that the world is loaded with righteous people (#blessed) who are happy, successful, beautiful, vacationing constantly.  While we may try to keep our looks into other people’s lives balanced and realistic, we do compare ourselves to those drinking wine on a tropical island in perfect harmony with their perfectly dressed-all-in-white extended family posing for the family photo.  Or we believe the skinny and ageless faces on the covers of those magazines at the checkout are real and unretouched.  It is not a giant leap to translate those images to be reflective of some sort of blessedness or wholeness that we seek and desire.
 
But keeping it real and in perspective, nobody puts out pictures of their D- paper, their kid getting cut from the team, or their last day in a job where they have been downsized and let go.  I continue to fantasize about starting a news feed called “Realgram” where you are only allowed to show the foibles and fumbles of life: unflattering pictures, burnt casseroles, and the grandkid hitting into a double play.  While “Realgram” would crush the illusion of looking ‘just fabulous’ that we seek to cast, it might help us feel a little better and, certainly, more real.
 
What the disciples seek from Jesus today is some secret, some leg up, some way to get ahead.  And when we are honest, we would love some of that secret sauce too.  If only God would sanctify what I want for me, this would show that my faith is increased.  This is a dangerous calculus.  It sets us up to believe that if we do not get what we want, God must not be listening, or worse, God doesn’t care.  This was never the promise.  The Gospel story hinges on the absolute human rejection of love in person, and even at that, God is all about coming back towards us.  Nothing depends on us completely.  Everything depends what happens next.  That is redemption.  As mother Thesea once said: “We can do no great things - only small things with great love.”  The greatness is God’s.
 
We have to be careful in life not to buy the lie that our story is tragic.  Life is hard, then we die. Sin ruins, and death plays for keeps.  This is the setting where fear, shame, and blame thrive and consume hope.  Instead, our story is the Gospel story.  It is all comedy, because in spite of the worst we do to God, God shows up again.  God comes back to us gain and again not with vengeance, but with love.  We do not need more faith.  We need a great and holy sense of the humor and joy in all as God intends.  Thus, I propose a new and more appropriate t-shirt than the one my brother gave me.  It will read: “And he said unto them Good dogs.  Come on home, and I will feed you forever.”  Amen