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St. Martin Had Bad Hair - The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the St. Martin's Day, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28. Today's readings are:
Isaiah 58:6-12
Psalm 15
James 1:22-27
Matthew 25:31-40
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Nov/Martin...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of our patron saint Martin, for all the ways he has formed the soul of this parish and all the ways he has reflected the image of Christ into the world, challenging us ever deeper into the full meaning of your love for this world. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.
Happy St. Martin's Day. What does one say on St. Martin's Day? After all, there's Merry Christmas, all right, Happy Easter, Happy St. Martin's Day, it's all the same. So every year I study up for St. Martin's Day by going deeper into the saint, and this year's big revelation, coming from his biographer, is that St. Martin had bad hair. His biographer goes out of his way actually to call it ugly hair, so bookmark that. We're getting back to it later. In the meantime I want to start in a place of gratitude.
I am so thankful for a series of talks that have been given the last month here in worship by lay leaders in our parish, starting with Al Good about a month ago and then Greg Cowhey did it at the eight o'clock service and Laura Sibson and Barbara Thomson and then Eugenie Dieck capped it off last week. These wonderful reflections on the meaning of St. Martins were a real gift to the community and to me because I could hear in them all the ways that God has gifted this community, and these talks were full of gratitude and they weren't ever boastful, they were never selling anything, they were never flattering us, they were just without ego and pure in their reflection of the goodness that God has given this parish.
And I was grateful and thought, yes this is true, this parish is centered on the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. And this parish is deeply prayerful. This is a praying community that knows the language of prayer both communally and individually and holds each other in prayer, and the world as well. There's a gift of prayerfulness here. And this community is worshipful, this community knows how to gather around the presence of the living Christ in sacrament and word and celebrate that gift of risen life. And this community is so eager to serve in loving care for each other and loving care for this community. This community understands the call to serve in the name of God, and so with gratitude I lift all those things up. We are a gifted community, gifted by God, and we say thanks be to God for it, and I want to say thanks be to God for Martin, our patron, who I truly believe has formed this community to have the character and soul that we have.
If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will be able to tell you the story of St. Martin so beautifully depicted in the window in the back of the church. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will probably do a pretty good job repeating Matthew 25 for you because we hear it at least once a year, and I believe these stories have deeply woven themselves into the character of the community. What's always interesting about a story that becomes well known is we can fall into the risk of it becoming commonplace; a moral platitude. We could take Matthew 25 that we read today and just turn it into a summary, "Jesus said be nice to the poor," when there is so much more revealed in that story; when there are so many more layers of what God is doing with us and for us in that story.
It opened our eyes. Indeed at bible study this week one of our members opened my eyes to something I had never noticed about Matthew 25. I got to enjoy that surprise of God's address which is even in the story, right? People are shocked that they were serving Christ the whole time. And what surprised me, and this was Steve Barr, a member of the parish, he pointed out: "Jarrett, there are three groups of people in this passage. There are three groups of people." And I was kind of fixated on two, because the goats and the sheep get my attention and they're meant to be anxiety producing, right? Am I a sheep? Am I a goat? Am I something in between? So I thought of just two groups in this passage but no, there's three groups in this passage, and one is the group that is already members of God's family. In that last line, "the members of God's family."
Who are the members of God's family? Who forms the third group? They are the thirsty, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. They are already God's people. They are already part of God's family, and now knowing this we see a deeper challenge in the story, the challenge not just to serve but to recognize the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner as part of God's family, as our sisters and brothers in Christ.
They are kin-folk to us. They are our kin and this to me is part of the incredible scandal of this passage in the ancient world and now, because in the ancient world as now we really do walk through life, and I can name myself in this comment, thinking that our family is our primary unit of obligation and believing that our biological natal family is our primary obligation. We shape our resources and our world around that idea and it can become a way to rationalize accumulation beyond what we need, because we always say we're doing it for our families. And it can rationalize misappropriation of resources socially and structurally because we can invest vast sums of money in the education of our children while ignoring to the point of desperation the education of other children.
And underneath that is some notion that they are not part of our family, that we have a different set of obligations to them, and when we read this passage from Jesus we're challenged. We owe to our family what is owed to all families and we are together in the family of God. It's so challenging and stressful to read this passage about sheep and goats. Who is in my family? And Jesus even raises the ante a little bit because it's not just Christians or Jews who've been called together, it's the nations.
There's this notion in this passage that even the nations who haven't the benefit of a covenant with God or Isaiah, who don't know this tradition, they know you take care of the poor. And the implication is if they know this, you should know even more because you have the gospel and you have the covenants and you have the prophets.
So this story is pretty stress-inducing. It's a challenge, and when I feel challenged like that by scripture I know the story is telling me, "you have more conversion to do. Jarrett, you have more conversion of heart, mind, strength and spirit to do, because someday you will love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength but you're not there yet." More conversion. And let's bring St. Martin in again here (and we're about to get to the haircut...I'm almost there.)
We bring St. Martin in again because that cutting of his cloak that we all know so well (he cuts his cloak in half and he gives it to the beggar and the beggar appears to him as Christ) is a story of charity and it is also a story of conversion and it's just the first cut that Martin makes. It is just the first sacrifice that he makes. Everything else for Martin, including his hair, is going away. His toga, his uniform, the rest of his cloak, his horse, his sword, his armor, his social status are all going to be left behind and relinquished as he grows into his vocation in Christ.
Now, Romans were very sartorially inclined. They liked a good robe, they liked a good haircut, they liked to smell nice. Martin did none of those things. And I'm maybe sensitive to this part of the story because I am in a line of military officers in my family. If you know anything about the military you know there's haircuts, and so generations of Kerbel men never had hair that touched their ears, never had hair that touched their neck, never had hair that was over about an inch long, because that's part of military discipline.
And remember that Martin grew up in a military family. His dad was also a Roman soldier, so this cutting off of his hair, and I know this from personal experience, was political, was an assertion of a worldview, was symbolic of more than hair. Believe me, growing up in the 70s where my mom wanted to take me to the hair salon to have a nice long hair thing going, I know that hair is political.
Martin had ugly hair on purpose. Martin wore a goatskin tunic with a rough rope around it and no shoes, no big wide leather Roman belt, because he was setting himself apart for a life of conversion; a lifelong journey into conversion by identifying himself with the family of God, with the members of God's family. On the margin, in the rough, in the vulnerability he would struggle mightily and slowly, spiritually, experience the conversion that allowed God's light to shine through him without obstacle. He gained spiritual transparency through the discipline of a hermit living in isolation and struggle and boredom. He lived in a way that allowed space for his demons to come up. His ego, his malformed imagination, his passions and appetites, all the stuff that great spiritual masters like Anthony of Egypt struggled with in their hermitages, he too struggled.
I want to bring out for us today this part of the story a little more because I think Martin is offering us something we need to know. I think in this age of great social turmoil and unrest and discomfort we need to know about this gift of going inside. We need to know about this gift of spiritual struggle that clarifies the soul and that brings us into transparency with God, not just for ourselves but ultimately for the world. Because this is kind of part of the miracle of St. Martin, he's one of these people who goes off as a hermit and keeps getting dragged back into public life because he was a leader.
But his transformation in the wilderness set him up to be a very different person in the world. His transformation in the wilderness set him up to speak a different language to a really rancorous, troubled world. Remember the time he was living in: the 4th century. What a time of social unrest. We have immigration and invasion, we have political regimes rising and falling. First we have Constantine who makes Orthodox Christianity the religion of the empire, then we have his son who inserts Aryanism in that place, then we have Julian the apostate who takes it back to polytheism. It's a roller coaster. It's lurching. But in that space was Martin who did something remarkable. Coming out of his hermitage he was able to welcome the heretics, advocate for them, bring them back into the fold and preach mercy, all while sharing the good news. He wasn't a persecuting person. At the same time he still reached out to the polytheists and welcomed them into the fold and shared with them the good news with gentleness. He walked across Europe to convert his mother.
Martin gives us this example of a soul that is so soaked in Jesus Christ that he finds the space of peace and compassion and mercy in a world gone rancorous and cantankerous. And so for me I hear Martin calling us not just to brave acts of sacrifice and charity but to brave acts of inner spiritual struggle, so that we continue as a church to become a different sort of people in the world, reflecting and mirroring this great patron saint of ours who shines so brightly with Jesus Christ. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
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By St. Martin-in-the-FieldsSermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the St. Martin's Day, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28. Today's readings are:
Isaiah 58:6-12
Psalm 15
James 1:22-27
Matthew 25:31-40
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Nov/Martin...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of our patron saint Martin, for all the ways he has formed the soul of this parish and all the ways he has reflected the image of Christ into the world, challenging us ever deeper into the full meaning of your love for this world. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.
Happy St. Martin's Day. What does one say on St. Martin's Day? After all, there's Merry Christmas, all right, Happy Easter, Happy St. Martin's Day, it's all the same. So every year I study up for St. Martin's Day by going deeper into the saint, and this year's big revelation, coming from his biographer, is that St. Martin had bad hair. His biographer goes out of his way actually to call it ugly hair, so bookmark that. We're getting back to it later. In the meantime I want to start in a place of gratitude.
I am so thankful for a series of talks that have been given the last month here in worship by lay leaders in our parish, starting with Al Good about a month ago and then Greg Cowhey did it at the eight o'clock service and Laura Sibson and Barbara Thomson and then Eugenie Dieck capped it off last week. These wonderful reflections on the meaning of St. Martins were a real gift to the community and to me because I could hear in them all the ways that God has gifted this community, and these talks were full of gratitude and they weren't ever boastful, they were never selling anything, they were never flattering us, they were just without ego and pure in their reflection of the goodness that God has given this parish.
And I was grateful and thought, yes this is true, this parish is centered on the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. And this parish is deeply prayerful. This is a praying community that knows the language of prayer both communally and individually and holds each other in prayer, and the world as well. There's a gift of prayerfulness here. And this community is worshipful, this community knows how to gather around the presence of the living Christ in sacrament and word and celebrate that gift of risen life. And this community is so eager to serve in loving care for each other and loving care for this community. This community understands the call to serve in the name of God, and so with gratitude I lift all those things up. We are a gifted community, gifted by God, and we say thanks be to God for it, and I want to say thanks be to God for Martin, our patron, who I truly believe has formed this community to have the character and soul that we have.
If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will be able to tell you the story of St. Martin so beautifully depicted in the window in the back of the church. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will probably do a pretty good job repeating Matthew 25 for you because we hear it at least once a year, and I believe these stories have deeply woven themselves into the character of the community. What's always interesting about a story that becomes well known is we can fall into the risk of it becoming commonplace; a moral platitude. We could take Matthew 25 that we read today and just turn it into a summary, "Jesus said be nice to the poor," when there is so much more revealed in that story; when there are so many more layers of what God is doing with us and for us in that story.
It opened our eyes. Indeed at bible study this week one of our members opened my eyes to something I had never noticed about Matthew 25. I got to enjoy that surprise of God's address which is even in the story, right? People are shocked that they were serving Christ the whole time. And what surprised me, and this was Steve Barr, a member of the parish, he pointed out: "Jarrett, there are three groups of people in this passage. There are three groups of people." And I was kind of fixated on two, because the goats and the sheep get my attention and they're meant to be anxiety producing, right? Am I a sheep? Am I a goat? Am I something in between? So I thought of just two groups in this passage but no, there's three groups in this passage, and one is the group that is already members of God's family. In that last line, "the members of God's family."
Who are the members of God's family? Who forms the third group? They are the thirsty, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. They are already God's people. They are already part of God's family, and now knowing this we see a deeper challenge in the story, the challenge not just to serve but to recognize the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner as part of God's family, as our sisters and brothers in Christ.
They are kin-folk to us. They are our kin and this to me is part of the incredible scandal of this passage in the ancient world and now, because in the ancient world as now we really do walk through life, and I can name myself in this comment, thinking that our family is our primary unit of obligation and believing that our biological natal family is our primary obligation. We shape our resources and our world around that idea and it can become a way to rationalize accumulation beyond what we need, because we always say we're doing it for our families. And it can rationalize misappropriation of resources socially and structurally because we can invest vast sums of money in the education of our children while ignoring to the point of desperation the education of other children.
And underneath that is some notion that they are not part of our family, that we have a different set of obligations to them, and when we read this passage from Jesus we're challenged. We owe to our family what is owed to all families and we are together in the family of God. It's so challenging and stressful to read this passage about sheep and goats. Who is in my family? And Jesus even raises the ante a little bit because it's not just Christians or Jews who've been called together, it's the nations.
There's this notion in this passage that even the nations who haven't the benefit of a covenant with God or Isaiah, who don't know this tradition, they know you take care of the poor. And the implication is if they know this, you should know even more because you have the gospel and you have the covenants and you have the prophets.
So this story is pretty stress-inducing. It's a challenge, and when I feel challenged like that by scripture I know the story is telling me, "you have more conversion to do. Jarrett, you have more conversion of heart, mind, strength and spirit to do, because someday you will love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength but you're not there yet." More conversion. And let's bring St. Martin in again here (and we're about to get to the haircut...I'm almost there.)
We bring St. Martin in again because that cutting of his cloak that we all know so well (he cuts his cloak in half and he gives it to the beggar and the beggar appears to him as Christ) is a story of charity and it is also a story of conversion and it's just the first cut that Martin makes. It is just the first sacrifice that he makes. Everything else for Martin, including his hair, is going away. His toga, his uniform, the rest of his cloak, his horse, his sword, his armor, his social status are all going to be left behind and relinquished as he grows into his vocation in Christ.
Now, Romans were very sartorially inclined. They liked a good robe, they liked a good haircut, they liked to smell nice. Martin did none of those things. And I'm maybe sensitive to this part of the story because I am in a line of military officers in my family. If you know anything about the military you know there's haircuts, and so generations of Kerbel men never had hair that touched their ears, never had hair that touched their neck, never had hair that was over about an inch long, because that's part of military discipline.
And remember that Martin grew up in a military family. His dad was also a Roman soldier, so this cutting off of his hair, and I know this from personal experience, was political, was an assertion of a worldview, was symbolic of more than hair. Believe me, growing up in the 70s where my mom wanted to take me to the hair salon to have a nice long hair thing going, I know that hair is political.
Martin had ugly hair on purpose. Martin wore a goatskin tunic with a rough rope around it and no shoes, no big wide leather Roman belt, because he was setting himself apart for a life of conversion; a lifelong journey into conversion by identifying himself with the family of God, with the members of God's family. On the margin, in the rough, in the vulnerability he would struggle mightily and slowly, spiritually, experience the conversion that allowed God's light to shine through him without obstacle. He gained spiritual transparency through the discipline of a hermit living in isolation and struggle and boredom. He lived in a way that allowed space for his demons to come up. His ego, his malformed imagination, his passions and appetites, all the stuff that great spiritual masters like Anthony of Egypt struggled with in their hermitages, he too struggled.
I want to bring out for us today this part of the story a little more because I think Martin is offering us something we need to know. I think in this age of great social turmoil and unrest and discomfort we need to know about this gift of going inside. We need to know about this gift of spiritual struggle that clarifies the soul and that brings us into transparency with God, not just for ourselves but ultimately for the world. Because this is kind of part of the miracle of St. Martin, he's one of these people who goes off as a hermit and keeps getting dragged back into public life because he was a leader.
But his transformation in the wilderness set him up to be a very different person in the world. His transformation in the wilderness set him up to speak a different language to a really rancorous, troubled world. Remember the time he was living in: the 4th century. What a time of social unrest. We have immigration and invasion, we have political regimes rising and falling. First we have Constantine who makes Orthodox Christianity the religion of the empire, then we have his son who inserts Aryanism in that place, then we have Julian the apostate who takes it back to polytheism. It's a roller coaster. It's lurching. But in that space was Martin who did something remarkable. Coming out of his hermitage he was able to welcome the heretics, advocate for them, bring them back into the fold and preach mercy, all while sharing the good news. He wasn't a persecuting person. At the same time he still reached out to the polytheists and welcomed them into the fold and shared with them the good news with gentleness. He walked across Europe to convert his mother.
Martin gives us this example of a soul that is so soaked in Jesus Christ that he finds the space of peace and compassion and mercy in a world gone rancorous and cantankerous. And so for me I hear Martin calling us not just to brave acts of sacrifice and charity but to brave acts of inner spiritual struggle, so that we continue as a church to become a different sort of people in the world, reflecting and mirroring this great patron saint of ours who shines so brightly with Jesus Christ. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org