“Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well” (Mt. 9).

Genesis 12:1-9                                   

Psalm 33:1-12

Rome 4:13-25

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

1. What is faith? This may be the most important question of our time. This week the indictment of our former president reminds us how questions of trust underlie every human relationship and institution. [i]

In 1996 Mary Doria Russell published a science fiction novel called The Sparrow. It imagines a near future in 2019 when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the Arecibo Observatory discovers sung music coming from near Alpha Centauri. Jesuit priests led by the linguistics scholar Father Emilio Sandoz organize a mission to that world. They travel to Rakhat via newly invented technologies developed from mining asteroids.

With the turn of a page it is suddenly the year 2060. Sandoz seems to be the only survivor and returns to earth. Damaged physically, psychologically and spiritually he tries to answer his superior’s accusations. The reader experiences the story in parallel in two temporal settings both as Sandoz and his friends encounter a whole new form of human-like life, and much later as he explains what went wrong. It is an anthropological pleasure to imagine the language and society of the inhabitants of Rakhat. One almost wants to stop reading there before the inevitable disaster.

Emilio Sandoz grew up surrounded by drug crime in Puerto Rico and first began to be educated by the Jesuits as a teenager. He has always struggled with doubt. As the story unfolds he begins to see the circumstances that brought the team together as more than a coincidence. As he finds his place among the far more social, even herdlike, inhabitants of Rakhat they physically touch him and he discovers a new conviction about God, a kind of ecstasy that fulfills him.

This makes his disappointment so much worse when through his actions everything falls apart and he causes the death of his old friends and new ones. Near the end of the story two priests talk about Sandoz’s struggle with faith. The Father General says, “There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So he breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

“’So God just leaves?’ John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. ‘Abandons creation?’ ‘No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.’ ‘Matthew 10:29… “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ‘But the sparrow still falls.’” [ii]

These are two different pictures of faith. First, as a kind of disposition which is a grateful response to good things in our life. This attitude is nonetheless vulnerable to suffering that leaves us wondering whether the good outbalances the pain. Or second, faith can be regarded as the knowledge of a silent watcher, a loving but invisible companion who is with us, but constrained in the help that can be provided.

2. If someone asked us to describe our faith we might say something like that. But today Matthew offers a very different and surprising kind of answer to the question “what is faith.”

My friend Matt Boulton likes to describe the Christian year as divided in half. There are six months of holidays from Advent through Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Then six months of ordinary time which begins now. He says this rhythm is like inhaling and exhaling or like the tide coming in and going out again. Ordinary, does not mean commonplace, it means ordinal as in part of a series. In this case it means a series of episodes from the Bible that teach us how to live and give us a framework for interpreting our experience. [iii]

The first eight chapters of the Gospel of Matthew describe Jesus’ birth, his later baptism, temptation in the wilderness, the calling of his followers (the fisherman on the sea of Galilee), then his first sermon and stories of healing. In chapter nine Jesus invites the one who seems to be the last of the twelve disciples, a tax collector named Matthew.

Imagine Matthew’s daily life charging taxes on goods going to market. The author of the gospel uses the word tax collector as a synonym for sinner. People hate tax collectors for three reasons. First, taxes were cripplingly high. Second, these taxes were levied by, and to pay, an occupying army that punished and crucified the local people. Tax collectors are collaborators in this oppression. Finally, tax collectors extorted more money than required and did this for the sake of enriching themselves.

Jesus immediately befriends and shares a meal with Matthew and “many tax collectors and sinners” (Mt. 9). I wonder what the other disciples thought about this. The pharisees, a group seeking to purify the religion of the time, deride Jesus for the company he keeps. Jesus does not make the argument that these people are not really sinners. Instead he says that like a physician he has come not to heal the healthy but the sick.

The first readers of this story would know about the purity rules in the books of Leviticus and Numbers in the Old Testament. It says that menstruating women were regarded as unclean and corpses were too. Anyone and anything, including furniture like beds or chairs, that a bleeding woman touched would also become unclean. [iv]

Jesus in the very act of responding to criticisms of the sinners attracted to him, is interrupted by a leader of the synagogue. This man kneels before him and begs for him to heal his daughter saying, “lay your hand on her, and she will live” (Mt. 9). As Jesus  goes with all of his disciples following him a woman touches his clothes. It’s amazing that there are words spoken in the Bible that we still use today. Haimorreow is our word for hemorrhage and means to bleed. For twelve years this woman has been bleeding. For twelve years she has been unclean, isolated and literally untouchable.

We hear a little of her internal dialogue. She says to herself, “If only I touch his cloak, I will be made well” (Mt. 9). The word for “made well” is sōzō related to the word sōtēr for savior. It does not just mean to be physically healed. It means to save, preserve, heal or rescue.

Imagine the drama of this situation. An unclean woman goes through a crowd surrounding a great and holy teacher without permission, past his disciples, through the law that forbids it, and in effect desecrates him. The disciples must have been stunned and wondered what Jesus would say. Jesus does not rebuke her or criticize her actions. He loves her. He commends her boldness. Not only that but rather than taking credit for his healing power, he emphasizes her role in this miraculous healing. He says, “Take heart daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mt. 9).

When Jesus arrives at the synagogue leader’s house everyone knows that touching a dead body makes you unclean. But Jesus takes her by the hand and she gets up. The tax collector, the hemorrhaging woman and the synagogue leader come from entirely different stations of life but they teach us that faith is boldness. It is the conviction that our more daring efforts will be met by a loving God.

During Pride Month it is especially important to linger for a moment here. We also need to recognize the way that Jesus interprets scripture. Jesus is not a prisoner to a simplistic and literalist reading of ancient texts. Jesus uses one text, “I desire mercy not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6) to interpret other texts, for instance those having to do with sinners, menstruating women and corpses. In our time we need to be more diligent in reading the Bible in ways that nurture and love LGBTQ+ and all people.

So for Matthew faith means more than just gratitude for the goodness of our existence. It refers to more than just a silent but compassionate watcher in our lives. Faith is a boldness in trusting God even when we cannot perfectly understand what is happening to us.

The theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) writes, “This is Abraham’s faith: Faith which, in hope against hope, steps out beyond human capacity across the chasm which separates God and man, beyond the visibility of the seen and the invisibility of the unseen, beyond subjective and objective possibility… to the place where he is supported only by the Word of God.” [v]

This week I received a letter from a dear friend who has been going through four terrible family tragedies this year. During the last of these tragedies he describes time moving so slowly, that his mind became his own worst enemy. He writes about being unable to pray, about screaming a bad word at the top of his lungs when he was home or in the car alone.

He says that because he has faith in God, Jesus, the church he kept coming to this place, even though it brought up a tidal wave of feeling and grief. But then he heard a setting of “Ave Maria” sung by a visiting choir. He began stopping by “Our Lady of Flowers” the photographic image of Mary, and for instant had a kind of vision in which Mary held his family member on her lap. Then in a sermon he was reminded about a dream that the Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich had. In it she held a hazelnut in her hand which represented everything God had created. She worried about its destruction. But God reassured her saying that he would draw all things to himself. My friend concluded saying, “Mary seems to be my path back to mending my relationship with God.”

What is faith? This may be the most important question of our time. May there always be the faith of gratitude for our existence. May we begin to experience God as the quiet, compassionate witness to our life. But above all, my dear ones, let us be audacious and bold in the places where we are supported only by the Word of God.

In the beginning God was everywhere and everything. Lay your hand on us and we will live. Take heart daughter your faith has made you well.

[i] Answers surround us about faith and trustworthiness, in the Senate, newspapers, laboratories and our closest relationships. In his book Faith on Earth Richard R. Niebuhr studies Luke’s question “When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth.” Will human life end when no one can any longer be expected to keep their word? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/world/australia/trump-indictment-world-reactions.html

[ii] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (NY: Villard, 1996) 478.

[iii] Matthew Boulton, “Go: SALT’s Commentary for the Second Sunday after Pentecost,” SALT 5 June 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2023/6/3/go-salts-commentary-on-second-sunday-after-pentecost

[iv] Leviticus 12:1-8; 15:19-30 and Numbers 19:11-13.

[v] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskins (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975) 142.

Jesus says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt. 28).

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D35

Trinity Sunday (Year A) 8:30 a.m. & 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 4 June 2023

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Chaplain, Cathedral School for Boys

“Your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3).

Acts 10:34-43

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Colossians 3:1-4

Matthew 28:1-10

When are you most fully alive? My friend Rhonda Magee felt fully alive when she was sixteen years old. The world was opening up, college was around the corner. Life had not been easy but she had reason to hope. Rhonda and a boy named Jake were head over heels in love. Then just before she left town for a summer university course, he told her over the phone, “My father kicked me out of the house.” She asked him why. He said, “You know why… I told you how he is. It's because of us. He said no son of his is going to be dating a black girl…” [1]

Rhonda felt gripped by pain. She was an A student and about to be chosen as the town’s Teenager of the Year. Yet her race – a category created by others and that she felt did not capture much of who she really was – made her unacceptable to Jake’s parents. They had never met her. And yet they were willing to hurt their own son, and therefore themselves, all to teach him, Rhonda and anyone else a lesson. They believed in white supremacy so strongly that they were ready to throw their own son out like garbage.

We all have beliefs like this. They diminish us and damage the people around us. The social theorist bell hooks asserts that racism in America is a crisis of “lovelessness.” Certainly the current anti-LGBTQ+ legislation illustrates the terrible lovelessness that has this country in its grip. The poverty in this city does too. But these are just a few of many stories we carry that poison our life, that prevent us from ever being fully alive.

The stories we tell about ourselves as individuals also can harm us. Even as a child the psychologist Brené Brown knew that, “People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power.” She realized that, “very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming or shutting down.” As a result, “Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other.” [2]

We feel alive when we come home to ourselves and to God, when we can become connected in a new way to our past and to each other. This encounter, the forgiveness we experience in Jesus, lies at the heart of the resurrection. Easter is the chance for a new story to take hold in our life. It is the beginning of a new era when everyone will belong and have the chance to thrive. God’s love dares to include those who do not fit, the ones who the powerful cannot abide. [3] Through God we can be free of the hold that fear and death have on us.

No one really knows what happened at dawn that morning before Mary Magdalene and the other Mary felt the earth shaking. They saw the guards frozen like dead men by fear, watched an angel who looked like lightning come down from heaven and roll back the stone at the tomb. There is no way to make Easter fully understandable.

This does not mean it is illogical. Matt Fitzgerald remembers the Easter when his daughter was in kindergarten and the church sent each child home with a plastic purple Easter egg. Inside was not chocolate but a little slip of paper. His daughter was learning to read and so she sounded out the three word message. “He is… raisins?”  “He is raisins is illogical. He is risen is merely incomprehensible.” When we speak about God we have to “distinguish between things that do not make sense and things we cannot make sense of.” [4] God cannot be contained, confined, described or defined. But we can meet God in the person of Jesus on Easter morning.

The Gospels of Mark and Luke mention anointing, but in the Gospel of Matthew the women come simply “to see” the tomb. The Greek word theōrēsai means to observe, analyze, discern with the connotation that one is involved and committed. It is related to our words theory, theoretical and theater, that onstage action which helps us to better understand human life.

After meeting the angel, the two women leave the tomb quickly with fear and great joy. Jesus greets them with a word (xairete) that means both hello and rejoice (like the word aloha means hello and love). He says, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Mt. 28). He offers this message of comfort and forgiveness to friends who abandoned him.

In the second century Irenaeus said that the Glory of God is the human being fully alive. Feeling fully alive often involves an experience of joy. What is joy?

Greek has the word makarios for happiness or blessedness. It is the word repeated frequently in the beatitudes as in, “blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt. 5). The ancient Greeks regarded this kind of happiness as the freedom that rich people might have from normal cares and worries. These are the people who have good fortune, health and money. [5]

On the other hand the Greek word for joy is xara. It is related to our word Grace. It means to be fulfilled. The perfect version of xara can only found in God. The Greeks thought that this experience does not surprise us haphazardly. Rather this joy naturally comes with wisdom and virtue. To use more modern language it is the pleasure that comes with spiritual connection. We do not lose ourselves in joy – we become more deeply ourselves in it. [6]

Joy is surprisingly difficult for us. Part of the reason for this is that joy as an emotion requires us to be vulnerable. Last winter I came across a new expression for a feeling I recognize. It is “foreboding joy.” [7] It refers to that sense of hesitation we feel when it comes to joy. We don’t want to be too joyful because we are irrationally afraid that this will somehow cause something bad to happen.

Psychologists who study this say that 95 percent of parents interviewed have experienced this with their children. We hold back because we think it will make us hurt less later.

One man in his sixties said, “I used to think that the best way to go through life was to expect the worst. That way, if it happened you were prepared, and if it didn’t happen you would be pleasantly surprised. Then I was in a car accident and my wife was killed. Needless to say, expecting the worst didn’t prepare me at all. And worse, I still grieve for all of those wonderful moments we shared and that I didn’t fully enjoy. My commitment to her is to fully enjoy every moment... I just wish she was here, now that I know how to do that.” [8]

Experiencing joy means being vulnerable in love. So how do we cultivate a propensity for joy in our ordinary lives beyond a willingness to really feel joy and to let others see our weakness? The simple answer is to practice gratitude. Gratitude is not an attitude, it is not a feeling. It is something we do over and over, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. For me gratitude lies at the heart of my prayer life and what we do here.

Last week I was giving a tour of the archives when I found a sermon Alan Jones preached at Grace Cathedral in 1990. It moved me so deeply that I wanted just to read the entire manuscript to you. Alan refers to a French priest named Jean Sulivan who describes Western cultures as spiritually impoverished and undeveloped, as unawake and unaware of the miracle right in front of our noses. [9]

That miracle is the miracle of being. It is the miracle that we are. If you want a miracle look at yourself. Our life is the love story of God trying to reach us, to help us.

Have you ever wanted to meet a famous person? I always wished that I could spend a day with the nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman. He wrote a poem called “Miracles.”

“… As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge / of the water, / Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, / Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, / Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, / Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon… Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars / shining so quiet and bright, / Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; / These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place…” [10]

When are you most fully alive? In the face of overwhelming lovelessness, and the pain that causes more pain, there is a new story. Jesus calls us to come home to ourselves and to God. So in gratitude let us see the world with a new intent. Let us leave behind our foreboding joy and know nothing else but miracles. The Lord is risen.

[1] Rhonda V. Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (NY: Penguin Random House, 2019) 11-13.

[2] Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart (NY: Random House, 2021) xx.

[3] Alan Jones, “Easter Day: Take Time for Paradise,” Grace Cathedral Sermons, 15 April 1990.

[4] Matt Fitzgerald, “Thunderous Yes: Preaching to the Easter Crowds, “The Christian Century, 10 April 2014. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-03/thunderous-yes?utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dcce86669b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2023-04-03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-dcce86669b-86237307

[5] Ibid., 204ff.

[6] Ibid., 205.

[7] Ibid., 215.

[8] Ibid., 50.

[9] This paragraph and the next come from: Alan Jones, “Easter Day: Take Time for Paradise,” Grace Cathedral Sermons, 15 April 1990

[10] “Why, who makes much of a miracle? / As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge / of the water, / Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, / Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, / Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, / Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon / Or animals feeding in the fields, / Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, / Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars / shining so quiet and bright, / Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; / These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. // To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, / Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, / Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread / with the same, // To me the sea is a continual miracle, / The fishes that swim – the rocks – the motion of the / waves – the ships with men in them, / What stranger miracles are there?”

Walt Whitman, “Miracles,” Leaves of Grass. https://poets.org/poem/miracles