St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

Let us pray: May these words be your words, this message your message, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Are we there yet? How much longer? Will we EVER get there? I’m SO ready to be home already! I imagine you’ve heard these words, or uttered them in exasperation yourself, plenty of times. We want to be there, to arrive. And we especially want to know how long the wait is. Waiting is the worst. Especially when you have no idea how long it will be.

Today’s parable is all about waiting. Here, towards the end of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been talking about the Kingdom, or as I prefer, the KINdom of heaven. That realization of God’s dream for us. The return of Jesus. The grand coming together. The healing, reconciling, saturating power of God’s love realized in our world. Jesus’ disciples and those who are gathering to listen to his teachings, all want to know, how much longer? When will this be, this end of the age, this coming of the Son of Man, this kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven? And so, Jesus answers them with this parable about a wedding feast.

In Jesus’ time, wedding guests would gather at the home of the bride to be entertained while everyone waited for the groom to arrive. When the bridegroom was close, the bridesmaids and the guests would go out to greet him. And with their lamps lit, they would form a procession to the groom’s house for the ceremony and the multiple day feast! The job of the bridesmaids was to greet the groom and light the path to the wedding location. They needed to be ready and alert, their lamps filled with oil, their wicks trimmed.

In this parable, for some unknown reason, the bridegroom is late, very late, and everyone ends up falling asleep, their lamps burning through plenty of oil while they snoozed. Then, suddenly, a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then they got up and trimmed their lamps. But only those who had brought extra oil could refill their lamps. And when they asked the others to share, they replied, ‘No! there won’t be enough for you and for us; go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And so, off they went. But while they were away the bridegroom arrived, and they processed to the wedding banquet, closing the gate and doors behind them. Finally, the other bridesmaids showed up, but were refused at the door. Sorry, the ceremony’s already started, no admittance after the show has begun. Bummer. They are out and the others are in.

Hmm. Now what does all this mean for us, here and now, today. Well, at the end of the parable Jesus tells us: “Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” We don’t know how long we’ll have to wait to see God’s dream for our world come to fruition. These things are beyond us. We can’t possibly figure out when Jesus will return again in glory. But…what we can do, is figure out how to wait expectantly and hopefully. John Buchanan, in his commentary puts it well: “The point is living expectantly. Christian hope rests on trust that the God who created the world will continue to love the world with gentle providence, will continue the process of creation until the project is complete, and will continue to redeem and save the world by coming into it with love and grace in Jesus Christ” (Buchanan, John M., in “Feasting on the Word” Year A, Vol. 4, p. 286).

And so we do our best to wait in hope, reminding ourselves and one another of the character of our good and loving God. Working to place our trust in God’s grace, forgiveness, and compassion. And we do our best to prepare and make the best of the time we have to wait. We do our best to be wise and to bring along extra oil. In this parable, the bridegroom is Jesus and the wedding feast is his coming again in glory at the end of time. The bridesmaids are all of us. And the oil, the oil can be considered our reserves of faith, our experiences growing and learning and coming closer to our loving God. While we do share some of these moments together, they are also very personal as well, our own understanding of the divine throughout our life’s experiences. As such, they can’t be shared in the way that I can’t just simply pass on my faith to you. I can try. And I can certainly tell you all about it. But my faith can’t be your faith, my experiences with the divine your experiences with the divine. You’ll have to go and search out that oil for yourself. And the time for doing that building, that searching, and that growing is now! Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. It might be too late. You might show up after the show’s already started! There are some things with expiration dates, like apologizing to a good friend, or sharing your true feelings with someone you love, or showing up to care for someone who really needs you now. These opportunities can expire. Don’t wait.

Earlier in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus told the crowds: “…Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). We wait expectantly with hope and we light the way for others by sharing God’s love through works of mercy and caring. In this way we light the path, forming the procession with our own lamps shining God’s love through how we live. In this way we not only keep our own oil stock of faith full, but we also work to participate in the in-breaking, creation, and realization of God’s dream. By preparing, sharing, and shining now, we shine God’s light onto the paths of others as we wait in hopeful expectation for the great wedding banquet. Keep awake! Keep your oil stocked up and build up reserves of faith. Shine your light, God’s reflection of love showing through you. And in so doing we will work together to create the KINdom of God here and now. And then, finally, finally, we will be there.

Amen.

Our first reading today comes from the Book of Genesis. It is part of the Joseph saga, which is a short novella within the Book of Genesis that takes up a little more than a quarter of the entire book. It is the longest story in Genesis. You may remember the Joseph story from the musical a few decades ago, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. It is the story of Joseph, the great grandson of Sarah and Abraham, the grandson of Isaac and Rebekah, and the son of Rachel and Jacob. Joseph is by far Jacob’s favorite son. All the parents here know it is a terrible idea to have favorites, and the story of Jacob is a good example of why that is the case. It creates a lot of animosity among the brothers. Jacob makes it clear that Joseph is the favorite in many ways. One is that amazing technicolor dream coat, or sometimes translated as a coat with very long sleeves, or an ornamental robe. It is essentially a fancy outfit that Jacob only gives to one of his sons. There are other ways that Jacob favors Joseph. For instance, Joseph does not have to work as hard as his brothers. He gets to stay near dad while the other boys have to go out into the field to work. The only job we know that Joseph has is to be sent out by his dad to see what the other brothers are up to. He is sort of a tattletale, which also does not endear him to his brothers.

Along with that, Joseph has a really big ego, which might come from being the favorite, but he thinks he is the center of the world. He has dreams in which all of his brothers are bowing down to him, and when he has that dream he goes and tells his brothers all about it. How do you think that goes over? In one version of the dream, the entire family is bowing down to him, and that really upsets the brothers. One day they decide to kill him. At the last minute they change their minds, and Joseph simply gets sold off into slavery. The brothers take that coat of many colors, rip it up, smear it with animal blood and take it to their dad. They tell him your son, Joseph, was killed by a wild animal. This breaks Jacob’s heart.

Joseph goes off to Egypt, and in order to keep this sermon not too long, we will skip some details. But know that Jacob is falsely accused of a crime and he goes to prison. From there, through a whole series of twists and turns, he becomes second in charge of the entire country. The way that happens is that he is really good at interpreting dreams, or as he likes to put it, God interprets the dream, he tells me, and I tell you. When he is in prison he interprets dreams of a couple of Pharoah’s former employees who were in prison. He interprets that one of them is going to be killed, and the other is going to be spared and will return to his position at the palace. This is what comes to pass. Several years later, Pharoah has some dreams that are very much disturbing him, and he asks his advisors what the dreams mean. None of them know, so Pharoah says go and ask all the wise folks around, but none of them can say what the dream is about. Finally, the one guy in the palace who was in prison with Joseph said, I know somebody who might be able to help. They get Joseph, and he correctly interprets the dream: seven years of plenty are coming, followed by seven years of famine. You need to collect everything extra you can during that time of plenty so that you have enough to get through the famine. Pharoah is so impressed by this that he makes Joseph in charge of this task. He put him as second in charge of the entire country in order to do this task, second only to the Pharoah.

It comes to pass there are seven years of plenty, and Joseph starts collecting extra grain. When those years of plenty are over, he starts giving it back to the people. There is so much they can actually give it to people in other countries who are also experiencing the famine. The famine reaches Jacob and Joseph’s brothers, and they hear that in Egypt they will sell you grain. So Jacob sends almost all of his sons. He keeps one back, his 2nd favorite, and sends the others to go buy the grain.

Again, to keep this sermon not too long, I will not go into the more exciting twists and turns that are Joseph’s revenge story. But towards the end of it, Joseph changes his mind and decides to forgive his brothers. His brothers do not recognize him, so he says, I am Joseph who you sold into slavery. How is dad? There is much weeping, and a wonderful moment when they go and get dad and all their families and go to Egypt, living there on great land. All is well. They are very happy, and then Jacob dies.

This is where our story picks up today. Jacob dies, and the brothers are afraid. They are concerned that the only reason that Joseph did not fulfill that revenge fantasy was because of their dad. Now that he is gone, there is nothing to get in the way of Joseph meting out punishment to his brothers. They go to Joseph and beg him to spare them. They say, dad wouldn’t like this—they still bring in dad to protect them—and Joseph says, do not be afraid. What you intended for evil, God intended for good. All is well. It is a beautiful story of reconciliation.

It is also a story of a clash of two different world views or mindsets, imaginations of how this world should operate. One mindset is the one of the brothers, who are afraid. It is a mindset of punishment, revenge, vengeance, an eye for an eye justice. They know they did wrong, they know they should be punished for it, and are afraid of what that punishment is going to look like. That is their view of how things are probably going to go.

The other mindset is the one that Joseph has, which is the imagination of forgiveness, of mercy, of grace, of reconciliation. I think the brothers’ mindset is probably where most of the world is. A lot of the time, most of us feel that same way, too. The feeling bubbles up inside of us expecting punishment or some type of revenge. Joseph’s mindset is the way of God. We hear it in our Psalm today: He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us. This is God’s dream for the world. A dream of grace and mercy, a dream that looks to the future and sees us reconciled to each other and to God.

I don’t think Joseph has always been in the order of forgiveness or reconciliation. I think when he was having his revenge fantasies and creating twists and turns for his brothers, he was in the other order of punishment and vengeance. But somehow he eventually ends up on the side of reconciliation, where God wants us to be.

I think there is a way to read the entire Book of Genesis as a journey to reconciliation. At the end we have this reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers, but before that there was a rupture. This is not the only time ruptures occur in Genesis. Before this, Jacob and Esau had a great rupture and reconciliation. Before that, Abraham and Isaac. I would also argue Abraham and Sarah have a rupture in the binding of Isaac story. I’m not sure there was much reconciliation after that event. In that story, they go up the mountain together, but they do not come down the mountain together. Genesis also has the story of Babel, the story of the flood, the story of the Garden of Eden. There is a lot of rupture and not much reconciliation, except the rainbow in the flood story. It is generally stories of rupture and more rupture before we start getting some reconciliation. The Book of Genesis is the journey of faith to move from that place that is so natural for us, to move to the place of grace and mercy that God desires for this world.

We see Jesus talking about this in the Gospel in the past few weeks, and in all his stories about forgiveness and the need to forgive. We have been hearing Paul talk about it in his Epistle to the Romans. There was a great passage a few weeks ago when he says, do not return evil for evil, but return good for evil, which is like pouring burning coals on their head. It is all about trying to move to that place of grace, of mercy, of forgiveness, that dream that God has for this world.

My friends in Christ, I encourage you to try and walk this journey. When you feel that sense bubbling up inside of you seeking revenge, vengeance, and punishment, try to look towards that Kingdom of God, that Kingdom of grace and mercy. It is not going to be easy. It is not easy, but try and move in that direction. You have heard me say many times that the central message of the Gospel is love. Reconciliation, forgiveness, grace and mercy are all manifestations and embodiments of that very love. Try, try, and try again to walk towards that Kingdom, that dream. Try and walk along the way of love.

AMEN.

In our Gospel today, Jesus is talking with the Disciples about what to do if another member of the church sins against you. The expression, sins against you, is not very clear. Jesus is not being very precise when he says that, and there are all kinds of debates about if this type of sin is relevant here or not. But Jesus is likely using it in a general sense to mean that if someone has wronged you, what do you do about it? Jesus says, first go talk to the person one on one. If that doesn’t work, take a couple of people with you. If that doesn’t work, take it to a bigger circle, and if none of this works, then treat them like a Gentile or a tax collector.

But what does that mean? The standard interpretation is that the Gentiles and tax collectors are outside of the community. So to treat someone like a Gentile or tax collector means to kick somebody out of the community. A Gentile is, by definition, not a part of the group. You have Jews and you have Gentiles, you have us and you have them. Tax collectors were a part of the group, but then they started collaborating with the occupying Roman Empire to oppress the people, so they got kicked out of the group. These are folks that you don’t hang out with, and that you may even shun. There are Christian communities who take this passage from Matthew’s Gospel and use it to engage in practices of excommunication or shunning. After an earlier service, a parishioner came up to me and shared her earlier experience of being publicly excommunicated at her church with a reading of a letter. This is based on a literal understanding of what Matthew is talking about.

My problem with this interpretation is that the world may have been shunning these folks, but Jesus doesn’t. So this interpretation is not in line with what Jesus does with Gentiles and tax collectors. What does Jesus do with these folks? He eats with them. He heals them. He invites them in. He engages with them. He, dare I say, loves them.

What does it mean to treat someone as a Gentile or tax collector if you’re following Jesus and want to do what Jesus does? It doesn’t mean to push somebody away. It means to keep engaging with them in love. Love, that center of the Gospel message: from Incarnation to Death and Resurrection, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son; there is no greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. It is all about love. When Jesus asks what the greatest commandment is, he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two hang all the law and the prophets. But who is my neighbor, the lawyer asks. It doesn’t mean that person, does it? And Jesus said, it sure does. It might even mean a Samaritan. That goes over our heads, because for us it is the Good Samaritan, like the name of a hospital in Corvallis. Samaritans are good people, but that is not how people understood it when they heard this Gospel. A Samaritan was the last person you can imagine as your neighbor. So Jesus says you have to love even those people that you really don’t want to love. If that’s not clear enough, at one point Jesus says you have to love your enemies, too. Love is the center of the Gospel.

This passage that we hear today, this teaching from Jesus, is about how we love. We remain in relationship with people even when we are in conflict with them, and we treat them in love.

It is the same thing in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: owe no one anything except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. This follows directly from last week’s reading when Paul was talking all about love. He said do not return evil for evil, but return good for evil, for it is like heaping burning coals on their head. There is nothing that the bully hates more than someone loving them back. It shakes everything up. So Jesus is teaching us the Gospel message to love.

I know it is not always easy. In fact, it is rather difficult sometimes. We think of love as being that feel good feeling, but love is so much more than that. Love is the very intentional practice of caring about another person, even when there doesn’t seem to be very much to care about. Love is that act of blessing and not cursing that Paul talked about last week. Love is not an easy thing. It is one of the most challenging things to do sometimes. So we might be relieved to think we can treat someone like a Gentile and ignore them. No. We have to keep engaging. You may need to create some boundaries about how you engage to avoid abuse, but that doesn’t mean we give up on trying to love them.

So, my friends, school is starting, which means you get homework, and that is to love. Love your neighbors, love at home, love at work, love out in the community. Love the person that is really easy to love, and love the person that is really hard to love as well. Love just as God loves you.

AMEN.

May this be in the name of our loving, liberating, life-giving God. Amen.

We have quite an interesting story in today’s gospel. It’s certainly NOT the typical picture of Jesus we are used to. First, context is key. Jesus has been talking to the crowds and arguing with the religious elite about ideas of purity, about what makes someone clean and what makes them impure. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” Sadly, in Jesus’ time, as in ours, ideas about pure and impure continue to influence our opinions and judgments of others. This is not the case with our good and loving God. This is a continuing theme for Jesus. Throughout his life and teachings on earth, again and again he breaks apart commonly held ideas of cleanliness, worthiness, and preference. For many people in the first century, purity codes were an enormous part of everyday life. And in our time, society’s never-ending quest for one upmanship, the “we’re better than them,” the idea of “us” and “them” have become engrained into how we define ourselves over and against others. This is not the case with our good and loving God. ALL, ALL, are clean, pure, worthy. ALL are beloved by God, created in the divine image, inherently good and lovable.

It is this idea that Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite women spells out quite vividly for the disciples and the readers of Matthew’s Gospel. Context is key. After this teaching about what comes from our hearts having the real potential to harm others and ourselves, Jesus heads to a borderland. The region of Tyre and Sidon is on the edge of Jewish and Gentile, or pagan territories. Inhabitants of this region were natural enemies of the Israelites. And the women who comes to Jesus is a Canaanite. Canaanites were polytheistic, believing in multiple gods, Jews were monotheistic, believing in the one God, YHWH. AND…she was a woman, a non-Jewish woman, daring to call out to this Jewish man. Talk about taboos and biases!

“Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David: my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

She seems to know who Jesus is. The fact that she is shouting would imply that she keeps her distance. She is a mother and her daughter is not well. She is crying out for mercy because she can’t bear to see her daughter suffer any longer. And what does Jesus do or say? NOTHING. What? This seem QUITE out of character for him, right? The woman is persistent and the disciples urge Jesus to send her away because she keeps shouting. Jesus answers them, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” I imagine it this way, “What do you want me to do? She’s not a Jew. My mission is to gather God’s chosen people, the Israelites.

Next, notice that this woman dares to approach Jesus and even kneels before him, pleading with him for help. Jesus continues his line of thinking, society’s line of thinking, as he goes on to insult her: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Ouch! Especially in Jesus’ time, dogs were not the furry, fun pets that some of us have in our homes and love, no, they were feral, mongrel packs, certainly viewed as worthless, dirty trash. Is Jesus really calling this woman a dog? Is Jesus using derogatory language, a slur, with this child of God? Well, yes, and no. What Jesus is doing is confronting the disciples and others with their own biases, with their own judgments, with the ways they are seeking to limit God’s love and attempt to place conditions on unconditional love.

The Canaanite woman’s response is excellent: “Yes, Lord, (you’re right, that is the way things work in our world), yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Even the lowliest are entitled to the crumbs that those in power don’t want, need, or care about. Touché. She has answered Jesus with a witty retort. Jesus commends her, hears her plea for mercy and heals her daughter. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And Matthew tells us that her daughter was healed instantly. Jesus commends this pagan woman for HER faith! Woah!

In Jesus’ interaction he shows, with her help, that faith, worthiness, and beloved status, are not limited to a specific group, ethnicity, or religion. Jesus shows that with our good and loving God, it is not about purity, it’s about what comes from our hearts, it’s about our divine identity.

At the back of our prayer book, beginning on page 845 is an outline of our faith, commonly called the Catechism. It’s an explanation of our Christian, Episcopal faith laid out in the form of questions and answers.

Human Nature:

Q. What are we by nature?

A. We are part of God's creation, made in the image of God.

Q. What do we learn about God as creator from the revelation to Israel?

A. We learn that there is one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and

unseen.

Q. What does this mean?

A. This means that the universe is good, that it is the work of a single loving God who creates, sustains, and directs it.

Q. What does this mean about human life?

A. It means that all people are worthy of respect and honor, because all are created in the image of God, and all can respond to the love of God.

We are a part of God’s creation declared good, very good, made in the image of a good and loving God. This Creator God made all that is, seen and unseen, and as a result of this, our universe is good, the work of a loving God. And from this it follows that we, humans, all of us, are worthy of respect and honor because we are all created in this good, loving image of God. God is with us, and all around us, and within us. And this is why all of us are capable of responding to the love of God, of receiving God’s love and returning it, of giving thanks to God and sharing God’s love with everyone, from every place, every language and culture, every religion. All are called, all are included, all are loved, as the prophet Isaiah speaks for God: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.” God’s love is coming to gather each and every one of us up into a loving embrace. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Over the past several weeks St. Mary’s has held Quinceañera services here in the church in celebration of girls’ 15th birthdays. A Quinceañera is a tradition with both Mexican and Spanish roots, celebrated throughout Latin America and elsewhere. It marks the passage from girlhood to womanhood, emphasizing the importance of family and community in her life, and her changing responsibilities to them. It has been a real pleasure for me to be a part of these services, especially the Quencieñeras for Edith and Shaila, who have attended our 1:30 service regularly and who participate by bringing up the elements for communion and by occasionally reading a lesson from the pulpit. I look at each girl one last time on the Sunday before her Quinceañera, knowing that the next time I see her she will be transformed. While Quinceañeras are well-known for the party that goes long into the night, at our church service we guide the young woman along on her continuing walk with God. A bible is presented to help her to grow in her faith through the study of holy scriptures and prayer. The girl processes to the icon or statue of Mary for adoration, often with a bouquet of flowers for an offering to Mary. And she makes an offering to God. “I give you thanks, God of my life, for these fifteen years. With all my heart I promise to serve you today and always. Help me to follow your will and strengthen me to proclaim in word and deeds your Kingdom of truth, justice, and love.” These words of praise and intention are akin to a Magnificat.

The age of 15 can be pivotal for girls and boys alike. It was at the age of 15 that Greta Thunberg started spending her Fridays outside the Swedish Parliament to call for stronger action on climate change. That same year she addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference, her voice heard by students around the world.

At South Eugene High School the Earth Guardians, a student-led group, strives to better the environment through civics, activism, and education. They, too, lift their voices to raise awareness of this important concern of climate change in today’s world.

It was during the 2018 General Convention of the Episcopal Church that many of us first heard Abigail Zimmerman, an Episcopalian and then a ninth grader from Waco, Texas. She spoke to a crowd gathered by the Bishops United Against Gun Violence. She spoke about the school walkout she co-led in response to the then very recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. She said, “I know what I am doing makes a difference and so I persevere.” The speech was akin to a Magnificat. We walked away that day calling her the prophet Abigail.

These are just a few examples of young people finding their path to make a difference in the world. Mary, too, was only 14 or 15 years old when the angel Gabriel visited her at her home in Nazareth. In just a few moments Mary changed from a frightened girl, to whom the angel was compelled to say, “Don’t be afraid, Mary”, to a questioning girl, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”, to a committed young woman, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.”

You may be thinking that this would be an appropriate time for Mary to sing her song of praise. I think it would be. She has changed from a girl who played with her siblings and did simple chores around the house, to a young woman who has taken on the mantle of being the mother of God. But that is a huge leap and best accomplished with family and community. And so Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth and stayed with her for about three months. Elizabeth and Mary are two pregnant women of different generations, each confirming the importance of the child they each are to bear. As professor of religious studies Stephen A. Cooper describes them, “both women are pregnant with significance, for between them they bear the messenger (John the Baptist) and the message (Jesus the Christ). Each woman finds support in the other; each woman cares for the other. Some speculate that Mary was present for the birth of John, helping to care for her cousin and for the baby, before returning home.

Elizabeth has been called a prophet, for she became the first to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. As found in Luke’s Gospel, she was filled with the Holy Spirit and “with a loud voice she blurted out, ‘God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child you carry. Why do I have this honor, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’”

And this is when Mary sings.

Mary sings of the blessing she has received from God. “With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior. He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant. Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored because the mighty has done great things for me. Holy is his name.”

Mary sings of the blessing on all of us. “God has shown mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next, who honors him as God. … God has come to the aid of Israel, remembering his mercy, just as he promised to our ancestors, to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.” Rich and poor, powerful and without power, we receive God’s mercy.

Yet we are called to give as well as to receive. Let us remember to give honor to the young people among us, for God often gives them huge tasks. Let us be honorable in all we do, for we know God gives us huge tasks. We, too, like Greta Thunberg and the Earth Guardians, can use our passion, skills, and abundance to help curtail the destruction of God’s creation here on Earth. We, too, like the prophet Abigail, can raise our voices against inhumanity to each other. We, too, like Mary and the Quinceañeras, can sing praise to God for God’s mercy on us, and for the blessed gift to us of Mary, of her dear Son, Jesus Christ, and for our only Mediator and Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This past week I returned from England where I was helping lead our youth pilgrimage. We had a wonderful time. We visited London and Canterbury and York and other small towns nearby. It was a wonderful pilgrimage.

What is a pilgrimage? Scholars who study pilgrimages say the word is hard to define. There are definitions that cover different aspects, but every definition leaves something out. The scholars say pilgrimage is a rather slippery term. But for today’s purposes, let’s define pilgrimage as a physical journey one takes to a place with the goal, the intention of some sort of spiritual deepening, growth in faith, encounter with the divine, seeking God.

That’s what we did. We were seeking God on this pilgrimage, trying to grow our faith. We were seeking God in churches. We visited lots of wonderful churches like Canterbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, York Minster, Bolton Abbey, and the Church of St. Mary and St. Eanswythe. Have you heard of St. Eanswythe? She is an obscure saint that I had not heard of either.

We were also seeking God in nature. We had wonderful times outdoors trying to listen to the heartbeat of Christ in creation. We were also seeking God in each other, so we spent a lot of time in intentional conversation trying to grow in faith, trying to see the presence of God with us. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

On our second day in England, which was two Sundays ago, we wanted to go to church. But we didn’t want to go to one of the famous, touristy kind of church. We had already had Evensong at Westminster, which was wonderful. We knew we were going to have the next Sunday at York Minster, so we wanted to go to a parish church with good, friendly people like St. Mary’s. We found such a place, St. James Piccadilly, and went to church there. As it happened, it was the Sunday closest to the Feast of St. James, so the Church of St. James was celebrating the Feast of St. James, just like St. Mary’s will celebrate the Feast of St. Mary’s next Sunday. We did not expect this, but it was a wonderful treat. They had a special lunch afterwards that they invited us to, and it was delicious.

One of the things we learned during the service is that St. James is understood to be the Patron Saint of Pilgrims. So the whole service was sprinkled with images and language about pilgrimage, which was perfect for us pilgrims on our pilgrimage.

A funny thing happened after that. St. James kept showing up, every day. The next day we went to Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral, and who was in the Gospel but St. James. The next day we were in some small town in southern England and we saw a sign with directions to St. James Hospital. In small ways, St. James kept showing up.

On our second to last full day we were in York. It was late afternoon and we were at the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey. We had about an hour to explore, to reflect, to be quiet. As I was exploring the ruins, I stumbled upon a church next door called St. Olaf’s. It was a little surprising to find a St. Olaf in England since we think of him as associated with Norway, but I went in. The organist was practicing, which was beautiful, and I slipped into the side chapel to pray. As I was praying, I looked up at the altar, and there behind the altar was a lovely stained glass window that had Jesus in the middle. There was a figure next to him with a tablet, which I knew was Moses, and the other figure must have been Elijah. So this was representing the Transfiguration. If it is the Transfiguration, then the three other people depicted were Peter, John, and James, just as we heard in today’s Gospel. St. James showed up again.

As I was sitting there reflecting on this, I thought about James and pilgrimage and the Transfiguration, and had the realization that the story of the Transfiguration is a story of pilgrimage. Jesus took Peter, John, and James on a pilgrimage. It was a physical journey with a spiritual meaning, a spiritual goal in which they encountered the Holy. They encountered God up there on the mountain. They had this glorious moment in which they saw Jesus transfigured before them, bright shining light, the presence of their forebearers in faith, a cloud, a voice “this is my beloved Son”. It was a wonderful mountaintop experience. They were seeking God and they found God up there on this pilgrimage. And they did something which I think is the most human thing possible. They wanted to stay there. They wanted to bask in the glory of that light shining on them. They wanted to dwell in this moment in which everything seemed so clear and made sense to them. They wanted to stay in the holiness of the presence of God.

So they asked, can we build three dwelling places for the three of you so you can stay here and we can all enjoy this? But Jesus won’t let them. Jesus will not let them bask in that moment. Because the point of those mountaintop experiences, the point of the pilgrimage is not to go find a new place to dwell. It is to go and then come home. Most of life is not lived in those mountaintop moments. Most of life is not lived in glorious pilgrimages in England. Life is lived in the valley. Live is lived here, at home. We go on these pilgrimages not to find a new place, but to have an experience or encounter that we bring back with us, to nourish us while we are here. We go up the mountain so that we can find the light and then shine that light in the valley as we keep walking forward in life, in faith. We go so that we can be nourished and then have sustenance that we need when we are here.

On our pilgrimage we tried to tune our senses to recognize God’s presence in that moment, so that when we come back our senses are more attuned to recognize the ways that God is just as present in our day to day life. We don’t go into those moments so that we can stay there. We go to find something so that we can come back and do the work that God has called us to do in this life.

So, my friends, I encourage you to take some time this week to think about those moments you have had in which you have seen the presence of God a little more clearly. Perhaps it happened while you were on a pilgrimage, or perhaps a trip that was not intended to be a pilgrimage but it became one. Perhaps it was when you were at home, maybe you didn’t go anywhere, yet still found God. Try to take some time to think about those moments, not longing to go back there, not hoping or wishing you could always bask in such a moment, but to try and bring those moments forward.

There is a detail in the Gospel that says they didn’t tell anybody about the experience. They kept it to themselves. I think it is because they had to process it for a long time. Our Epistle today comes from Second Peter. At some point, Peter did finally share what happened up there on the mountain. But he needed a long time to think and reflect on it.

This was not the only mountaintop experience Peter had. Just a few weeks later, Jesus took him up another mountain. Peter, John, and James went with Jesus up the Mount of Olives. This time not to see glory in a transfiguration, but to see Jesus suffer in the garden, to see his weeping, his tears, his agony. I can only imagine they took these two experiences on a mountain and spent the rest of their lives thinking about what God was trying to tell them in those two moments.

I encourage you to think about all of those mountaintops or pilgrimages or holy, profound experiences you have had in your life, and think about what it is God is trying to tell you. How God is trying to transform, maybe even transfigure you in your life. How it is that God has provided a light to shine on the path, no matter how dark or rocky it might be. Take the time to reflect on this, and then move forward in faith.

AMEN

By now I think many of you know that my father was an Episcopal priest. What some of you may not know is that I come, courtesy of my mother’s side of the family, from a long line of Methodist ministers. While several of those men served as missionaries in China, the most famous member of the group, my Great Uncle Edward, stayed home in Pennsylvania where he acquired a reputation as a real fire and brimstone preacher while serving as the pastor of a congregation in East Stroudsburg, not far from my family’s hometown of Prospect Park. Evidently at some point in 1896 he became so wound up while delivering a sermon on the evils of alcohol that he called down the wrath of God on the local tavern. The very next day the tavern was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. American to the core, the owner of the tavern sued Uncle Edward. After lengthy litigation Uncle Edward was found not guilty, the lighting strike and ensuing fire being ruled an act of God. And yes, this ruling can be found in court records, so we know the story is more than simply colorful family folklore.

 Now I never knew this person and I don’t know that my mother did either, but I have the sense that had Uncle Edward been the householder in today’s parable, he would not have had the forbearance to leave the weeds there in the midst of his wheat until harvest time. Oh no, he would not have wanted anything to detract from the pristine nature of his crop, so if some of his wheat proved to be collateral damage in the process of removing weeds then so be it. There would have been no weeds in Uncle Edward’s wheat field! However, whether we’re dealing with other people or the facets of our own personalities, life is rarely so clear cut as simply sorting weeds from wheat, no matter how much some people would like to believe it is.

 I believe we’ve all been created with an infinite capacity for goodness. I further believe that most of us really do try to live into that potential, but in spite of our best intentions we make choices from time to time that move us away from being the person God is calling us to be. In his book The Kingdom Within John Sanford describes Satan, the evil one in today’s Gospel, as “the archetype of choice.” “An archetype,” he goes on to explain, “is an inbuilt pattern in the human psyche. Archetypes are common to all of us. To speak of an archetype of choice is to say every human being is confronted by the necessity of moral choice. None of us escapes this spiritual test.” While I don’t necessarily experience life as a never-ending test, there are certainly times when it feels like it is. Without doubt life is an ongoing process of making choices, and far from being consistent in the choices we make, even the most faithful of us sometimes say yes to God, sometimes no. What that comes down to, in the language of today’s parable, is that at any given moment we’re neither a purebred stalk of wheat nor a perfectly formed but unwelcome weed, but rather a spiritual hybrid of the two. Parts of our being seem able to connect really well with God while other facets seem to be in open rebellion against both God and other parts of our inner selves.

Thankfully, unlike the plants in the parable, we are not genetically nor spiritually predisposed to remain a stalk of wheat or an intrusive weed, nor even a static hybrid of the two, throughout our earthly existence. Rather, we’re constantly evolving spiritual beings, sometimes more weed than wheat, sometimes more saint than sinner, but almost never completely one or the other. This parable has much to say to us then, as we struggle to deal with those facets of our being that take hold of us from time to time, drawing us away from God and oftentimes the people who mean the most to us. Rather than trying to eliminate or weed out those parts of ourselves that we deem less worthy, sinful in some people’s terminology, I believe we’re called to struggle with them, in order to ultimately transform them.

 The great irony of my family tree, you see, is that my mother, descendent of that long line of teetotaling Methodist ministers, married into a family of alcoholics. My father’s maternal grandfather was an alcoholic, so my grandmother would not have a drop of alcohol in the house. All three of her sons grew up to be alcoholics. But the thing is, though late in life, my dad did go through treatment and stopped drinking. My mother said the time between when he left the treatment center and when he was diagnosed with cancer was the best part of the second half of her marriage. My sister Kendra was the one who inherited the alcoholism gene in our generation. She celebrated twenty-nine years of sobriety earlier this month. People can change, we can change, if we’re open to the possibility and willing to work with each other in the life long process of becoming our best selves.

 The challenge to changing, of course, is that it usually doesn’t happen overnight and doesn’t necessarily last forever. As anyone knows who has ever struggled to overcome any sort of addiction, be it to alcohol, food, tobacco, or social media, it isn’t a matter of just deciding to stop. That decision has to be made over and over again. That’s the whole basis of the twelve step mantra of one day at a time. Just for today I won’t take a drink. Just for an hour I won’t look at my phone. By their very nature those decisions have to be made again and again, and for many people, it takes the support of others to make those decisions in the first place, and then to stick with them. My father didn’t just decide one day to stop drinking. No, my brother and I, fearing for the well-being of our mother, strategized for months, he in Vermont and I in Oregon, about how we could best carry out an intervention when we would both be in New York for Christmas vacation. While the timing wasn’t as we had planned; circumstances forced us to make the decision to act on the morning of Christmas Eve day, the plan did work, so that on the day after Christmas my brother drove my dad to the treatment center where a place had been reserved for him. Five months later I called home to wish my mother a Happy Mothers’ Day, and at the end of our conversation she told me my dad had something to say to me. He came on and with little preamble stated, “I need you to know that I knew for a long time that I needed help. I’d sit on the side of the bed every morning and pray to God to help me stop drinking, but then lunch time would come, one of the guys would stick his head in my office and ask ‘Ken, are you coming?’ and it would start all over again. When I came downstairs on Christmas morning and looked at your brother and he looked at me, I knew my prayers had been answered through my children.”

 We are God’s hands and heart in this world. I believe one of the reasons humans are meant to live in community is so that we can be there for each other when difficult decisions have to be made, when really challenging, and often frightening, changes are called for. How we help each other will vary from person to person. We each have our own set of gifts after all. The main thing to remember is that while physical growth ends somewhere in our teens or early twenties, spiritual growth is a never ending process. For that reason it’s a great gift that God is the householder of the field in which we grow, and that God is infinitely patient. Rather than ripping us up roots and all, no matter how weedy our lives may become, God gives us our entire lifetime to turn out right. When I think about the potential for change that abides in each of us, I often think of Oskar Schindler. A German entrepreneur who socialized with the Nazi elite, Schlinder saw in the Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto a gold mine of slave labor for his factories. What Schindler didn’t count on was that over time he would become increasingly attached to the Jew he had made foreman of this operation, and through him acquire an empathy he never sought to develop with the workers themselves. Consequently, as the collapse of the Third Reich became immanent and the Germans worked at an ever faster rate to send as many Jews as possible to the gas chambers, Schindler arranged to buy the freedom of all the people on his list of workers. This man who had set out to use people to make money, spent all the money he had to save people. Today the descendants of the people Schindler saved number in the thousands and the body of Oskar Schindler is buried in Israel, where he is honored as a righteous man.

 We Episcopalians don’t talk about evil all that much, but there is evil in the world. It’s easy in retrospect for us to recognize the evil of The Final Solution, though initially Schindler, at heart a righteous man, saw in what the Nazis were doing an easy way to make money. Just as Schindler did in his time, we have a hard time identifying evil in the world in which we live, but it is here. Whether it’s an obsession with acquiring material wealth no matter the cost to other people or the environment, the lust for power for power’s sake, or running roughshod over others out of the fear of losing power we really don’t even have, evil is real. When we were baptized we promised, or someone promised on our behalf, to renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, to renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, and to renounce all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God. Those need to be more than empty promises. They need to define our way of life. Amen.

Happy Easter! It is truly a joy to be with you all today as we gather together to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about something else. We need to talk about Christmas. Christmas? Just bear with me for a moment.

Christmas is the celebration of the Incarnation, that is, when God became human. Incarnation means enfleshment, when God took on flesh, when Divinity came down to be in humanity so fully that God actually became a person. God made us. God made all creation, it was all good. When God made humans, there was something special about them. God placed God’s very image onto people. God wanted this close relationship with us, but we turned away from Him, we strayed, we got far away from God. We neglected, we rejected, we abused that image of God in each other and in ourselves. We, who were made in God’s image, the God who is love, were implanted with that, and did not live up to the expectations that one would expect for a creature made in God’s image.

So God wanted to reconcile us, and God tried all kinds of ways to get us to come back to Him. And finally God said, I will go out there to the people to achieve reconciliation. And that is the Incarnation, God going to us in humanity. But it is not just the birth of Jesus that is the Incarnation. It is just the beginning of it that we celebrate on the Feast of Christmas. The Incarnation is Jesus’s whole life. It is the fact that he was a vulnerable baby nursing at his mother. It was the fact that he was a surly teenager who made his parents worry. It was the fact that he had work to do in this world. It is the fact that he embraced humanity so fully that he enjoyed all the things we enjoy. Jesus liked a good party. That is one of the chief criticisms of him by his opponents. They said he ate too much and drank too much. He was a glutton and a drunkard, they said. To fully enter humanity he enjoyed all that, but he also had to enter into the suffering and the pain, the agony and the disappointment, the loneliness and the abandonment. He went to the cross on Good Friday, which is a profound implication of what it means to become human. For God to enter into humanity, God had to go down unto death. Not just any death, not a calm, peaceful death, but the worst kind of death that was imaginable. In the crucifixion, God would fully enter into the suffering that we experience in this world.

All of the Incarnational stuff from Christmas to Good Friday is the first part of what God is doing to reconcile humanity to God. God is going to humanity in its fullness. This is Part I.

Today is the beginning of Part II, the Resurrection. This is God coming up. This is God saying that death does not get the final word. While God went to humanity, embracing everything we experience, in the Resurrection and on to the Ascension, that human Jesus is now going back up into divinity, and pulling us along with him. Before he died, Jesus, in John’s Gospel, says, I will lift up all people unto me.

These two things, the Incarnation and the Resurrection, are working together to bring us back into full relationship, to be reconciled fully to God, the God who is love. Imagine a wound on a body and the surgeon sutures it by going down and up and down and up to pull the skin back together to heal that wound. That is what God is doing in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. God goes down to pull us up, to bring us back together, to bridge that gap, to allow the wound to heal.

So we celebrate, not just that Jesus Christ is risen, but we celebrate this amazing work of reconciliation that God is trying to achieve in this world through Jesus. We have Part II and Part II.

And there is a Part III. That is the part where we, who by virtue of our baptism died with Christ and we rose with Christ, are invited to engage in that work of reconciliation. To draw close to others, and to love. To embody that original vision and dream that God had when He implanted us with God’s image. To live in a world in which we have healing and unity and reconciliation. It is not easy work. It feels like it is harder work than ever. We are isolated from each other by technology, politics, and culture that pull us apart. But God is inviting us to a different way, a way to pull close to each other, and to love.

When the surgeon stitches up the wound, that is not the end of the project, that is when the healing begins. That is the work that we are engaged in at this time. We have a God who so loves and adores us that God came here in the Incarnation so that no matter how much we strayed, God would find us. No matter how far we went away, God would come to where we were and pull us in, and invite us to be healed and to help heal. In the name of the risen Christ, God invites us to be incarnate, to be resurrected, to help reconcile this world in love.

AMEN.