Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 9.

Today's readings are:

Ezekiel 2:1-5

Psalm 123

2 Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13

Readings may be found at https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp9_RCL.html

Transcript:

Please join me in a spirit of prayer.

Oh God, we thank you for that amazing grace that brings us home. We give you thanks that your grace makes us whole, and finds us when we most need to be found. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Good morning! Later in the service we're going to sing the hymn "America the Beautiful." I know, not everyone is comfortable with singing a national hymn in church. I respect that discomfort. I have felt it myself. But this hymn was actually written in an Episcopal church. In fact, the church where Tyrone used to work in Newark, New Jersey, Grace Church Newark. Was it the music director who wrote it?

[Director of Music, Tyrone Whiting]: Correct.

[The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel]: All right, so Tyrone should know this hymn well. And a close look at the words may address some concerns. The whole hymn is a plea for God's grace to be bestowed on our nation, and we know that the grace is God's free gift to us, and it's unearned undeserved, and not something we're entitled to by special exceptional status or achievement. And then in verse 2, we sing this really moving line that I'm not sure everybody knows is in the hymn "America, America."

"God mend thine every flaw." This really sells the hymn to me, "God mend thine every flaw." The hymn is confessional. It contains a confession. It contains an awareness of our own imperfections.

I don't know about you, but I can feel safe and I can feel more comfortable in a world of ideas, or a system that contains the seeds of its own self-correction and repentance, that has confession as part of its method, a tradition that contains the resources for its own accountability and critique. Our scripture, in fact the whole history of Israel leading up to and including Jesus, contains its own system of self-correction, as evidenced in Ezekiel, the Gospel, and Paul this morning, and it's one reason I trust our faith tradition.

To balance out "America the Beautiful" at the end of the service, we're also going to sing one of my favorite hymns from the UCC hymnal, and I thank my wife for this. I'm pointing up. She's alive, don't worry, she's in Maine. That means she's in Maine. Um, this great hymn by Sibelius, "this is my song, O God of all the nations, this is my song, O God of all the nations." And it reminds us of how people everywhere love their country just like we love ours. They love the blue sky of their countries just as much as we love the blue sky like we have today in ours. And that's how I see this day for me. Our love of country is simply an extension of Jesus's command to love all of our neighbors near and far. It's just when we love a country, it's loving our neighbors in the collective or in the aggregate sense. The question of singing a national hymn or not, balancing it with another hymn or not, reveals a telling ambivalence that we struggle with on this day. I know some won't use the language of love in reference to our country.

By these lights, it seems to me our country, as it is and has been, is not seen as worthy of love. Some others are eager to profess love of country, and believe that no nation is worthy of love because it is without spot or blemish. You might think of the phrase, "America, love it or leave it," or some such. Both, however, in my opinion, share a common and dangerous assumption: to be worthy of love, we must be perfect. To be worthy of love, we must be perfect. And for that reason, I think both sides need a dose of Jesus and Saint Paul, and we have just the right dosage in the scripture that happens to fall on this Fourth of July, we have on display in the Gospel a weak, rejected Jesus, and in the Epistle we have Paul reminding us that power is perfected in weakness. Why is a story of failure and weakness and rejection included in a book meant to nurture our trust in Jesus as our Lord and God? Why did the editors leave this in? Because Jesus lives to display God's grace, that is to say God's unconditional love that embraces the flawed and imperfect and the rejected in all of us. Remember what I said about a self-correcting tradition? The Gospel makes sure we are not tempted into a Jesus of power and glory, understood in the world's terms, but subtly reminds us that this is the Jesus of the cross, the Jesus of defeat, the Jesus of rejection and humiliation. He's even humiliated in the story. Notice that his neighbors never mentioned their father. They are noticing he's illegitimate

God is not looking for perfect servants. Rather, God delights in servants who, by doing God's work and telling God's story, in our weakness and despite our weakness, are made able by grace to glorify God through God working in us.

Kierkegaard, to drop a Danish philosopher on you. As you may know, he was a clumsy and lame man, also very grumpy, who was a great fan of the ballet. When he talked about this leap of faith, the ballet was in mind. He was gesturing at something he could not ever hope to achieve on his own with his own abilities in his own merits, but could only do if God's grace worked with his weakness to create a state of gracefulness in him. Believe it or not, I mentioned the Danish philosopher because I had a conversation about him this week with a young man who works at a local climbing gym.This young man is also finishing a Masters in Theology at Villanova. The young climbing instructor talked about how people often achieve a high when they climb the climbing walls. When they're being successful and powerful and graceful and creative, they get this high feeling, an elated, hyper-focused, heightened experience that many call spiritual. We might think of this climbing experience as related to what St. Paul experienced up there in the third heaven.

The young man and I agreed that these were great experiences to have, really fun ones, but also spiritually ambiguous in our achievement and in our sense of powerfulness. We might center on ourselves and center on the experience in itself, and leave no room for relationship, for gratitude, for a community who helped you get to this place, for a sense of blessing from beyond our abilities and our self. The climbing instructor reflected to me that it is when we fall, it's when we falter and reach the limits of our power, that we open ourselves to our need for help from beyond. It is in that relational moment that God's power interacts with our weakness, as Jesus and Paul teach us in the readings today.

We don't have to be perfect to serve God. We don't have to be perfect to serve God and proclaim God's Goodness. God is not waiting for us to get perfect before God loves us. In fact, it's simply the opposite. It's God's love of us as we are that slowly improves us over time and never gives up on us. We don't have to be perfect to be loved by God and by each other.

And we may examine ourselves to ask how that desire for perfection in ourselves and others is an obstacle to our loving. Perhaps a system we use to perfect ourselves, protect ourselves from the vulnerability of loving, our collective life as a nation, does not need to be perfect to be loved. And in fact, in that shared weakness, we may know more clearly how much we need to be redeemed and loved into our better angels. I do believe that acknowledging our flaws and failures in admitting our weakness, "God mend our every flaw," when that comes from a place of love and acceptance, it brings the healing presence of God's grace in tow, and opens us up to the healing we so desperately need and we push away when we constantly come from a place of negativity.

We need to proceed from this love we are given if healing is our goal. Amen.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. 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