Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C54

Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 11:00 p.m. Eucharist

Saturday 24 December 2022 (also preached a L&C at 4:00 p.m.)

Isaiah 9:2-7

Psalm 96

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-20

Imagine your existence as an hourglass, the bottom globe filling with sand until the time appointed for your life has ended. We do not know how much sand the top globe holds, how much time we have left. On this holy night when we do not have to pretend let me ask this. How are you doing? I am not talking about what you have accomplished, whether you met your expectations. I ask about your well-being.

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C53

Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 4:00 p.m. Lessons and Carols

Saturday 24 December 2022 Also preaching at 11 p.m.

Mt. 2:1-1, Jn. 1:1-18

Lk. 2:1-7, Lk. 2:8-20

Isa. 7:10-14, Lk. 1:26-38

Gen. 1:1-5, Isa. 35:1-10

Merry Christmas! When I have to say something difficult or controversial from this pulpit I often look up and draw courage from this stained glass window of the warrior St. Martin. It reminds me of the people at St. Martin’s Church in Davis, California. Growing up as a boy they took me seriously. They taught me about God’s love in words and action. They gave me a chance to help and valued whatever contribution I made.

The Third Sunday in Advent

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Malcolm Clemens Young                                                                        Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C51                                            2 Advent (Year A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist                    Sunday 4 December 2022                                                                      

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

Are There Reasons to Have Hope? An Introduction to the Gospel of Matthew

“Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that… by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15).

1. Let me speak frankly. I see you might be the, “sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from sermons, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store.”

“But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about [sermons]? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of [sermons], where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.”[1]

The twentieth century novelist Italo Calvino (1923-1985) wrote these words about books and I begin here because it is human nature to be wary about hoping too much. We have been disappointed enough in the past to wonder, are there reasons to have hope?

I have been reading several recently published books by authors who do not believe in God. I’m grateful to have this chance to walk with them and to try to see the world from their perspectives. Last week I finished reading Kieran Setiya’s book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. His last chapter describes hope as, “wishful thinking.” He goes on to say, “In the end, it seems, there is no hope: the lights go out.” And later in a slightly more positive vein he says, “We can hope that life has meaning: a slow, unsteady march towards a more just future.”[2]

The other book is William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future about how we might try to prevent the collapse of human culture from threats like nuclear war, engineered pathogens, and runaway Artificial General Intelligence. He points out the massive amount of suffering among human beings and animals. He uses a scale from -100 to +100 to measure the lifetime suffering or happiness of an abstract person and wonders if, because of the total amount of suffering, life is even worth living.

By the way the question “does life have meaning,” is not something that we see in ancient writings or even in the medieval or early modern period. The phrase, “the meaning of life” originates only 1834.[3] Before that time it did not occur to ask this question perhaps because most people assumed that we live in a world guided by its creator.

Although these books might seem so different they share a common spirit. First, you may not know what to expect but it will be a human thing. There is no help for us beyond ourselves. Second, they exaggerate the extent to which human beings can comprehend and control the world. Third, they fail to recognize that there are different stories for understanding our place in the universe and that these have a huge influence on our fulfillment. Well-being is in part subjective: we have to decide whether to accept our life as an accident, or to accept it as a gift. Finally, these authors lack a sense that human beings have special dignity or that we might experience God as present with us.

In my Forum conversation with Cornel West the other week he mentioned how much he loved Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book Truth and Method. It’s about the importance of interpretation in human consciousness and begins with a poem from the twentieth century Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). “Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; / but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball / thrown by an eternal partner / with accurate and measured swing / towards you, to your center, in an arch / from the great bridgebuilding of God: / why catching then becomes a power - / not yours, a world’s.”[4]

1. How do we catch the world God is offering to us? This morning I am going to discuss an interpretation of the Book of Matthew by my friend the biblical scholar Herman Waetjen. I am not trying to communicate facts to you or to explain something. I long to open a door so that you might experience the truth of hope, the recognition that at the heart of all reality lies the love of God.

Today is the second Sunday in the church calendar. Over the next twelve months during worship we will be reading through the Gospel of Matthew. Scholars say that 600 of the 1071 verses in it, along with half of its vocabulary come from the Gospel of Mark. An additional 225 verses come from a saying source and other oral traditions.[5] And yet this Gospel is utterly original. Although the first hearers are highly urban people living in the regional capital of Antioch, really Matthew speaks directly to us.

In the year 70 CE a catastrophic event threatened to obliterate the entire religion of the Jews. Roman forces crushed an uprising in Jerusalem destroying God’s earthly residence, the temple, and many of the rituals and traditions that defined the Jewish religion. Without the temple a new way of being religious had to be constructed. Let me tell you about three alternative visions for the faith from that time.

First there was the way of the Pharisees led by Yohanan ben Zakkai (50-80 CE). Legend held that he had been secreted out of Jerusalem during the destruction in a coffin. HE then made an arrangement with Roman authorities to remain subject to them but with limited powers of self-government.

Zakkai asserted that the study of Torah was as sacred as the Temple sacrifices. “He substituted chesed (kindness or love) in place of the demolished temple.”[6] God can be at the center of people’s lives through “a reconciliation that is realizable through deeds of mercy that are fulfilled by observing the law.”[7] Waetjen asserts that the Gospel of Matthew criticizes this vision because it leads to a distinction between righteous (moral) people who are clean and sinful outsiders.

A second solution to this religious crisis comes from apocalyptic literature about the end of the world, especially the Second Book of Baruch. This author writes about the Babylonian destruction of the Jewish Temple in 487 BCE. In his vision an angel descends to the Temple, removes all the holy things and says, “He who guarded the house has left it” (2 Baruch 8:2). The keys are thrown away almost as if it was de-sanctified. According to this view,“in the present the temple has no significance.” But in the future it will be renewed in glory through the power of God. So the people wait for God’s return.

Although Matthew is aware of both these answers to the religious crisis he chooses a third way beyond a division between clean and unclean people, or simply waiting for a new Temple. Matthew writes that Jesus as Son of David comes out of a particular people, with its history, etc., but Jesus is also a new creation which Waetjen translates as the Son of the Human Being.[8]

We see this dual anthropology in the Hebrew bible with its division of soul/self (or nephesh) and flesh (basar). In Greek this is soul/self (psyche) and body (soma). Jesus says, “Do not continue to fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the soul; but rather continue to fear the one who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Mt. 10:28).

In a physical body Jesus is born in Bethlehem as part of the Jewish community where he teaches and heals those who come to him. Jesus also exists also as soul, as the divine breath that gives all creatures life, as the first human being of the new creation, as one who shows God’s love for every person. He teaches that at the heart of all things lies forgiveness and grace. There are no people defined by their righteousness or sinfulness. At the deepest level of our existence we are connected to each other and to God.

The novelist Marilynne Robinson writes about how in modern times some people claim that science shows that there are no non-material things, that we do not have a soul. In contrast she writes about our shared intuition that the soul’s “non-physicality is no proof of its non-existence… [It is] the sacred and sanctifying aspect of human being. It is the self that stands apart from the self. It suffers injuries of a moral kind, when the self it is and is not lies or steals or murders but it is untouched by the accidents that maim the self or kill it.”

She concludes writing, “I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.”[9]

Can we have hope? Does life have meaning? Let me speak frankly. I see you might be the “sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.” But you have a soul. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. At the heart of all reality exists the love of God. The more thankful we are, the more we receive the gift of hope.

My last words come from a poem by Mary Oliver called “The Gift.”

“Be still, my soul, and steadfast. / Earth and heaven both are still watching / though time is draining from the clock / and your walk, that was confident and quick, / has become slow.// So, be slow if you must, but let / the heart still play its true part. / Love still as you once loved, deeply / and without patience. Let God and the world / know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.”[10]

[1] Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller tr. William Weaver (London: Vintage Classics, 1981) 4.

[2] Kieran Setiya, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (NY: Riverhead Books, 2022) 173, 179, 180.

[3] “The meaning of life” first appears in Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus. Ibid., 153.

[4] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (NY: Crossroad, 1992).

[5] Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017) 1-17. See also, https://www.biblememorygoal.com/how-many-chapters-verses-in-the-bible/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesed

[7] Ibid., 2.

[8] Ibid., 7.

[9] Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (NY: Picador, 2015) 8-9.

[10] https://wildandpreciouslife0.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/the-gift-by-mary-oliver/

The Invisible Beauty

“Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Lk. 24).

Forms of beauty exist that we are only dimly aware of. So much happens that we fail to notice. We never experience some of the most beautiful phenomena in nature.

Have you ever been in the Pacific Ocean and seen the sun rise over the continent? The light creates a brilliant golden path over the water that seems to go right to you. Under certain conditions, when you are far out beyond the impact zone, air gets trapped in large exploding waves creating a brilliant, short-lived shower of spray and a rainbow.

When you really know the water, the texture of the ocean surface reveals currents and eddies that help you to find safety. And on a few days in your lifetime the gray of the sky will perfectly match the gray of the water and the rain will fall in such a way that it seems like a million drops of water are frozen midair just above the surface.

Surfing on certain fall days at Ocean Beach the wind blows offshore, the wave doubles up and pitches over your head so that you are encased in smooth walls of emerald green. As the wave collapses behind you spray engulfs you and you are spit out back into the regular world again. I wish so dearly that I could communicate what it feels like to be riding a wave and see a dolphin just below the surface doing the same thing.

Because of grief the disciples fail to see the most beautiful thing of all. They fail to see God in the presence of their friend Jesus. Today I especially understand this feeling. Mike Lawler was one of my dearest friends, the one who helped me to see all of what I just described, the generous soul who taught me to surf. Two days ago I learned that he died. At surprising times I keep finding myself emotionally overwhelmed.

Mike was a six foot five inch, 220 pound contrarian bull and the world was his China shop. He dropped out of college to pioneer surfing on the Northshore of Oahu. He was not shy about confronting over-educated people who were full of hot air. He was a literary roofing contractor. He said, “I used to write sermons when I was shingling roofs, alone with my thoughts and the rhythm of a hatchet whacking nails into cedar shakes.”

We spent hundreds of hours together driving to the beach in his pickup truck. It smelled strongly of wetsuit neoprene, surf wax, and cigar that he later told me he smoked so that his car didn’t smell like marijuana. We talked about creativity, painting, science, Martin Heidegger, Werner Erhard and the sixties. He taught me about the culture, art, physics, meteorology, history, ethics, sociology and technique of surfing. He introduced me to the pleasure of old-fashioned donuts and that is what I crave now after every surf session.

Each All Souls Requiem at Grace Cathedral feels so different, because nothing seems more particular, more specific than the loss of someone we love. And each year that loss feels different.

Today we carry with us the joy of being together after the pandemic but also the weight of so many funerals we have been hosting this fall to honor the many people who died over the last three years. We have had so many more losses as a community I hesitate to even name anyone. Who can imagine life here after Dare’s death last week?

On Wednesday Chris Keady and I talked about the feeling of Mozart’s requiem. Mozart (1756-1791) composed this as he himself was dying and the music conveys a sense of frustration and anger at our limits as human beings. It expresses anxiety about whether we will be forgiven for the damage that we have done. Mozart is not afraid to encourage us to face our sadness. And with the tension and disappointment we also encounter what is beautiful, what we have not yet noticed.

The theologian David Bentley Hart writes that, “what is most mysterious and exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest to hand, and that which is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy… we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing…”

The modern twentieth century French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) spent nine months in a World War II German prisoner of war camp composing “Quartet for the End of Time.” It uses the four musical instruments that were available there (Piano, Cello, Violin, Clarinet). He saw such suffering and had every reason to surrender to cynicism. But instead he was fond of paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) reminding us that, “God dazzles us by an excess of truth.” He writes, “Certain people are annoyed that I believe in God. But I want people to know that God is present in everything, in the concert hall, in the ocean, on a mountain, even on the underground.”

The ancient theologian St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-339) believed that death and evil ultimately cannot hinder us in moving toward God. Hart summarizes his theology writing, “Creation is… a partaking in the inexhaustible goodness of God; and its ceaseless flow of light and shadow, constancy and change… while the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God’s glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite.”

My tough, impermeable, sometimes obnoxious surfing friend Mike Lawler believed this. He was so proud of being a lifelong Episcopalian. The disciples walked many miles without recognizing Jesus and I did the same when I walked with Mike.

A few years ago he wrote a December letter to me from his home in Hawaii about his own death. He said death used to seem so far off “to be no bother.” And then he quotes Joan Didion whom he describes as an Episcopalian (from her book The Year of Magical Thinking).

Didion writes, "We are not idealized wild beings. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we are mourning, for better or worse, ourselves. As we were we are no longer. As we will one day be not at all… as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be."

Mike closes his letter with these words, “My life has been partly molded by having lost a little sister when I was about thirteen. You are afraid to love [because those you] love will die. I wish there was a way to get over the fear… but this is not a conversation for Advent… The ocean was calm and glassy tonight as the spangled sun made you look and love the world. Your sermon touched me as no other. Love, Mike.”

Forms of beauty exist that we are only dimly aware of. We are drawn beyond the world to the source of its beauty.

Job 19:21-27a

Canticle 9

Luke 24:13-35

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive” (Lk. 20).

Haggai 1:15b-2:9

Psalm 149

Luke 20:27-38

What happens after you die? Jesus cares so intensely about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death influences how we live.

As a freshman at Harvard College my old teacher Cornel West hung two pictures on his wall: Malcolm X and Albert Einstein. His roommate James Brown, (not the singer but the man who later became the famous sports journalist) asked him, “I thought you were more of a Martin Luther King type.” Cornel replied, “I am but one doesn’t cancel out the other. I’m loving them both, just the way they both loved us.”1

In his second year The Nation of Islam came to Harvard and black students packed the hall. “Hefty Fruit of Islam guards, the paramilitary wing of the Nation [were] stationed at all the doors.” It had only been six years since Malcolm X’s assassination and when the speaker referred to Malcolm as a dog, Cornel felt startled. The speech went on. When the speaker did it again, Cornel moved to stand up and reply but his friends restrained him.

Finally, the speaker called Malcolm X a dog one more time and Cornel leapt up. He said, “Who gives you the authority to call someone who loved black people so deeply a ‘dog’?” After a brief exchange the speaker said to the 18 year old Cornel. “Young brother, you’ll be lucky to get out of this building alive. And if you do manage to slip out, you’ll be gone in five days.” In his memoir Cornel writes, “from there, it got worse. The crowd went dead silent…” as everyone looked at him. Friends had to negotiate with the guards and then escort him out of the building.

For the next week Cornel went underground going from dorm room to dorm room, too afraid to attend class, hardly sleeping. Finally he went to talk to someone in the Nation. They began by arguing but then Cornel really began to listen, to listen from the heart. For hours they had a wonderful conversation because they gave each other “space to be heard.” His new friend told him he didn’t need to be afraid anymore.

Intense conflict, fear and looming death characterize the atmosphere as Jesus takes up a debate with leaders of the temple. After a long journey to the capitol Jesus arrives in triumph to cheering crowds who wave palm branches. Jesus weeps over the terrible future of Jerusalem. He angrily drives out people who are selling things in the temple. Then he returns there every day to share the good news with the “spellbound” crowds.

Behind the scenes the authorities, “[keep] looking for a way to kill him” (Lk. 19:47). But Jesus’ popularity protects him and so the religious leaders try to discredit his teaching. They want to embarrass him, to get him tangled up in his own words, to provoke him to say something offensive that they might use against him. They have three different debates, the first one about authority, the second on taxes and our story this morning about the resurrection.

Remember, Jesus is only days away from being killed on the cross. The tension and fear among his friends cannot be understated. Jesus wisely avoids the traps that his persecutors set for him. In fact he changes this antagonism into a chance for genuine learning to happen. He is teaching both the people who love him and those who hate him so that some of his enemies even say, “Teacher, you have spoken well” (Lk. 20).

In those days Sadducees were part of the upper class and had an influential role in the temple’s worship.2 They differ from the Pharisees, Jesus and the authors of the Gospels in two main ways. First, they do not believe in resurrection, or any life after we die.

And second, they were convinced that only the first five books of the Bible were authoritative scripture.3 I have known this for thirty years and do not completely understand what it means. I often wonder what did they make of the psalms and prophets, for instance? In any event apparently in those days it was commonly believed that the first five books did not include references to the resurrection in the way that the other biblical books did.

The question they use to entrap Jesus has to do with an ancient cultural practice described in the Book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 25:5-10) called “levirate marriage.” The word levir is Latin for a husband’s brother. The idea is that when a woman’s husband dies, his brother will marry her, they will have children and those children will carry on the deceased person’s name.

So in order to make Jesus stumble in his defense of resurrection, the Sadducees ask what would happen if each of seven brothers married one woman and all died childless. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection? It’s what a friend of mine who is a lawyer

would call a gotcha question. Their goal is to make the idea of resurrection seem absurd and to expose Jesus as a fake.

But Jesus has a brilliant answer. He says in essence. “You mistakenly assume that the cultural conventions of our time will continue to determine our lives in the coming age of resurrection. Unlike today in that time beyond death we will neither marry nor be given in marriage. We will not be able to die anymore.”4

Why does Jesus refer to death here? Greek uses two different words for “to marry” and “to be given in marriage.” In that world of the Bible men marry and women are given in marriage. Jesus looks at the marriage arrangements of his time as a way of dealing with the insecurity that follows death, almost as a kind of insurance policy.

Since in the next world there will be no more death, a widow will no longer need a new husband or a child to provide for her. At that point she will not be someone’s wife, or someone’s property. She will simply be a child of God, a child of the resurrection.

Jesus declares that in the resurrection, we will not have power over other people. No one will have power over us. We will all be free. If this were not enough he even goes on to give the Sadducees a reason for why they might change their mind and experience the liberating influence of the resurrection. He gives them an idea taken from the portion of the Bible that they regard as authoritative.

When Moses experiences God after seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed by flame. God tells him, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6), not “I WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” In that time when Jesus was surrounded by death and the fear of death he says that God is, “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive” (Lk. 20).

And so today we experience again the way of Jesus. He does not hate or attack his enemies. He listens from the heart. He firmly responds to their arguments in the way that my teacher Cornel west did as college sophomore. Jesus wins them over with love so that they say, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”

Jesus also warns us to be careful of expecting God to be limited by our cultural conventions and our intelligence. Even in our moments of greatest imagination, we cannot grasp the beautiful mystery of the holiness that is our deepest desire.

And yet we have these moments of insight. Do you ever feel as if someone you loved but has died is near? Your intuition may be right because, to God “all of them are alive.”

Today we celebrate All Saint’s Day by baptizing fifteen people into the church. They will join this mystical community of people who are liberated from the fear of death and straining to live in love. They will be joining you and me, and all the people of all times and places who are still alive in God.

What happens after you die? Jesus cares so much about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death does not have to constrain how we live and that one day we will be free of the social structures that diminish us. Jesus might ask, “Whose poster would you put up on your dorm room wall? Who would you be willing to stand up for and defend in public even at the risk of your life?”

Let us pray: You know our hearts O God, you see the challenges we face. Help us to listen from the heart and give us a space to be heard. And let us find our hope in the presence of those who have gone before us and in the love of your son Jesus. Amen.

_______________

1 There is so much more to this story and to Professor West’s connections with the Nation of Islam. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (New York: SmileyBooks, 2009) 63, 67-70.

2 I don’t know if it is true but the Wikipedia article claims that the Sadducees name was related to Zadok the High Priest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees

3 Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

4 https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/11/5/whats-resurrection-for-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-second-week-after-pentecost

Dolores Huerta

Civil Rights Activist

October 23, 2022

Grace Cathedral

San Francisco, CA