Sermon for Sunday, November 12, 2017 Holy Comforter RVA 1 Thess 4:13-18 Matt 25:1-13 “Ready”

The email was circulated around Mayo House on a Monday. Its message was cryptic: “Expect a very special guest on Thursday morning.” I read it and promptly forgot it. I should, of course, have noted it on my calendar. My life is inscribed on my calendar. If I cannot find my IPhone, I am lost, because everything goes onto that calendar. But this time, I didn’t write it on the calendar. Perhaps a more pressing problem distracted me, perhaps I had a meeting to go to, perhaps I thought I’d remember this on my own – HAH! – but I made no note of it. Thursday morning came. I had no meetings scheduled either in the office or outside of the office so I dressed casually. Jeans, an open-collared blouse, sneakers. Neat, of course, and not sloppy, but certainly not what I would have chosen to be wearing when, later that day, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby showed up at Mayo House with his family. Our special guest, and I looked like a soccer mom on the way to Costco.

Ah, well, I wasn’t prepared. All my desires to stay on top of the five thousand things on my plate were for naught. All of my obsessive desire for control failed me. It’s my pathology, this need for control, but I suspect I am not alone.

How many of us here are willing to claim the fact that we are control freaks? How many of us make lists? Some of us even add things to our lists simply so we can check them off…hmmm, got up and washed my face: CHECK! We have our schedules, our calendars…I’ve now gotten in the habit of checking my calendar on my phone first thing every morning simply so that I can be sure I don’t inadvertently miss something, and so I’m dressed appropriately. Thank you, Archbishop Welby! So anyway, because I like to be in control, I now check that calendar, just in case.

But for all our desire to be in control, things happen that thwart our desire. Labor starts two months early. You’re asked to participate in a meeting you hadn’t been told about in advance. The doctor isn’t there at the time of your appointment because she is attending to another patient’s emergency. The big contract for your employer isn’t signed so you lose your job.

And then there is the truly heartbreaking stuff, like this: you go to church on Sunday looking forward to hearing God’s Word and a man comes in and kills or wounds many of the parishioners.

Things happen, and it’s out of our control. What’s a follower of Jesus Christ to do?

It certainly doesn’t help when we’ve got a Gospel reading like today’s, where the whole message is about being prepared. The thrust of the text is that we are to be prepared for the second coming of Christ, because in those early days of the church, the belief was that Jesus would be making his return trip pretty darned soon. You get the drift: Jesus is the bridegroom, the church is the bridesmaids, and the church had better be ready.

But here’s the interesting thing about this parable, the thing that might provide comfort to us control freaks who think “how can we possibly be ready for ANYTHING?”

All of the bridesmaids fall asleep waiting. They don’t need to be awake nonstop until the bridegroom shows up. They rest. The smart ones have prepared, but not by putting together a list. They simply have attended to the one thing that is necessary – to have enough lamp oil to light the way when the groom arrives. There is one thing that they need to do – be able to shine a light for the groom – and they’ve prepared for that.

That’s a whole lot more possible than the list with a thousand check boxes on it to cover every single thing that can go awry.

Imagine your list: Cipro antibiotics, a shield that a gunshot couldn’t penetrate, spare batteries for the cellphone, reading material, a down sleeping bag, extra socks, dried meals, first aid supplies…we could go on with the list for hours, couldn’t we? There’s a whole industry built around the possibility of doomsday and the need to be prepared to survive – adherents are called “preppers” and stockpile massive quantities of things in bunkers or storehouses, just in case.

But what is truly necessary? What do we really need to prepare ourselves for  any contingency?

One word: Jesus. One faith: Jesus. One hope: Jesus.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the Epistle today: the message is clear. Stuff will still happen. We cannot prevent it. But we know that when it happens, Jesus is with us. And if the ultimate thing we fear happens – that we are going to die (and believe me, we will all die at some point, no getting around it) – if that happens, who is with us through it and on the other side of it? Jesus.

What does Paul write to the Thessalonians? “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

We cannot prepare for every eventuality, but we are assured that the one thing we most need no matter what happens will always be there: Jesus. He does not abandon us. He promises those who believe in him eternal life. It’s hard to imagine what eternal life will be like, but in my heart I believe that it will be infinitely amazing, infinitely joyous, infinitely filled with love. And it’s my belief in Jesus and in that promise that I try to carry me with me every day, even when I shake my head over the insanity of the world, even when I grieve the loss of 26 people in a church in Texas, half of whom were children and babies shot at point-blank range, even when I pray for a friend whose cancer has returned. I cannot prepare for everything, but I can prepare for the one thing I need and the world needs: Jesus, the savior and the promise.

But if you still want to prepare for any contingency, for a mere $269 dollars, go online. A company called Stealth Angel will provide you with a 72 hour emergency kit for two persons. Pretty fancy, complete with a backpack and a bucket.

Me? I’m relying on Jesus. He’s around for a whole lot longer than 72 hours, and all he asks is our faith and love.

Amen.

Sermon for Sunday, September 3, 2017 Exodus 3:1-15 Holy Ground

They came to the communion rail barefoot. One woman, wrapped in a yellow sari with gold embroidery. A man with gray hair wearing a white kurta – that ubiquitous tunic shirt that men of the Indian subcontinent all wear. Two teenagers with painted toenails, giggling a bit. A young mother juggling her baby on her hip – how do those saris stay wrapped when your baby is trying to wriggle out of your arms? There were others in the congregation, Americans, Canadians, Scots, Brits, a few who had lived in so many places that it was unclear where they would claim as home. Those others hesitated a bit if they were new, wondering if in this church in this place, they too were expected to take off their shoes to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

But the old hands here knew the tradition. These Christians who were a part of the Church of South India, Christians whose tradition said that they were actually evangelized by St. Thomas the Apostle in 52 AD, understood that this school gym where we expats attended our weekly service was holy ground. And so they removed their shoes before coming to the rail, an echo of the story from the Old Testament this morning where God instructs Moses to remove his sandals.

Now when we have heard this story, we have usually concluded that God is commanding Moses not to bring his dirty sandals onto sacred ground. But those of you who have walked on hot dirty ground know that while the sandals you wear may have dirt on them, your feet aren’t exactly gardens of roses either. Sweaty, smelly, dirty, dusty. So maybe it isn’t about the shoes, per se. But what else could it be?

Anybody here ever participate in a foot-washing ceremony on Maundy Thursday? Some of you, yes. Is there anything that can make you feel more shy than showing your feet to a stranger who will actually bathe your feet? Our feet are not really the prettiest part of our body. As I get older, my feet look more and more wretched, and I’m shy about them. Did you know that nail salons do record business on Maundy Thursday with all those who want their feet to look nice for the foot-washing? We are shy about being barefoot, where everyone can see our bunions and hammertoes and that toe where the nail fell off after we ran the marathon, and the rough skin. When our feet are exposed, we feel vulnerable. Part of that vulnerability is the look of them, part of it is the fact that if we step on the wrong thing, they’ll hurt. Any parent who has stepped barefoot on a Lego in the idle of the night can attest to that. Vulnerable, open, showing a part of ourselves that we may not necessarily be comfortable showing. Taking away the pretense that we are in control…because in our hearts we know we are not.

I wonder if what God was doing when he had that conversation with Moses and told him to take his sandals off was to deliberately put him into a place of vulnerability. After all, taking off foot protection in a part of the world where the sand can be 120 degrees and where there are scorpions…that’s a risk, right? Is he willing to engage in a conversation with God while his feet are so vulnerable? Is he willing to engage in a conversation with God while his heart is so vulnerable? Perhaps God wants him to stop wearing a mask of a simple shepherd married to a Midianite woman and live in to who he truly is.

After all, Moses is something of an outlaw. He’s got more than bunions to hide. He had once had a great relationship with Pharaoh – he was a foster child in Pharaoh’s family, remember from last week? – but now he is a runaway and suspect by the Hebrews because he’d grown up in Pharaoh’s household and suspect by the Egyptians because he killed a slave master who had been beating a Hebrew slave. He is someone who is looking over his shoulder, even in Midian, wondering when his complicated past is going to catch up with him.

But it is not his past that catches up with him, it is his future. A future that he hears in the voice from the burning bush, giving him orders that he cannot imagine carrying out. And the only way he can live into the command he is given, to help the Israelites be free from the yoke of Pharaoh, to lead them to a new land, is to shed all the things that he believes protect him.

It’s no surprise that Moses’ response to this command is one we might identify with: “Who, me? The Israelites have no reason to believe me.”

And God gives instructions to this complicated and frightened man. He tells him what the future’s promise is, and it is being Moses’ imagining. He tells him to be vulnerable and brave. And so begins a chapter in the story of God’s people that requires all who are freed from the yoke of Pharaoh to be both vulnerable and brave.

They are to take off the familiar feeling of painful oppression – we sometimes cling to the present existence even if it is painful because at least we know what it is and that which is unknown is scary – and they are to go on a journey. They have no idea it’s going to take 40 years, but they must be vulnerable and brave if they are to be the people of God.

I think of that when I remember those sari-clad women in an Anglican church in the Middle East, where Christianity is not the dominant religion, taking off their shoes to come to the rail. And those feet, some old and cracked, some young with chipped nail polish…so very human, so very vulnerable…and so very brave.

They, like the rest of us in that church, were strangers in another land. None of us knew whether we would be viewed as friends or as aliens there. But in that church on the Persian Gulf, we all were vulnerable. We all were aliens. But we all were on a journey. Perhaps we were working there. Perhaps we were studying there. Perhaps we were teaching there. Members of that church ranged from ambassadors to taxi drivers, from nannies to deans of universities. None of us knew what the future would bring. And yet, we were together in that holy place on holy ground, stripping ourselves of all that we were using to mask our true selves, making our selves vulnerable and brave.

This church is on a journey. It has been wonderful and painful and eye-opening and difficult. Here’s the good news: we’re almost there. We’ve made ourselves vulnerable and brave. Sometimes we’ve shown our best selves. Sometimes, not so much. That’s part of being human, isn’t it? Even Moses messed up every now and again.

So stand on this holy ground. Know that the great I AM stands here with us. Know that Canaan awaits. Keep your shoes off so you remember what vulnerability feels like. Keep your hearts open so you can hear God’s voice, because our hearts are holy ground. Stand on this holy ground, and thank God for it, for all that has gone before and all that is to come.

Take off all pretense that you are in control. God is in control. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Sermon for Sunday, August 13, 2017 Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 “Siblings and Selling Away”

I was an only child. I didn’t understand the tensions between siblings because I had no model for it. It was only when I had a family of my own – 5 kids -  that I saw the continual battle between love and frustration, between giving attention and fostering independence, between not enough time and endless needs, that is sometimes called sibling rivalry.

Because there were five of them, they tended to pair off into battle units. We would call it the pick and poke show. M and B would pick and poke at each other over who would play with the electronic game. C and S would pick and poke at each other over who was the better snowboarder. A would pick and poke at S, and he back, when she wanted him to play with her and he preferred playing with his own friends. They would get attention (negative, but attention is attention) from their father or me in this time-honored way. Sometimes an elder brother would protect or play with his younger sister or brother, but more often it was like “Game of Thrones” with Lite-Brite sneakers on and Nerf weapons instead of capes and armor and war swords.

Sibling rivalry. It’s a bear.

We see sibling rivalry in all its glory in our Old Testament reading today. It’s the story of Joseph, popularized by the musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” a couple of decades ago. In the musical, we see Joseph as the annoying favored brother who seems to get all the goodies from Dad, who interprets dreams in a way that suggests that this is an attention-getting trick, who doesn’t do work, just spouts off all the time. All of this is set to lively pop music, which tends to minimize the harder parts of the text. The brothers’ convenient opportunity to get rid of him by selling him to Midianite traders who took him to Egypt as a slave for example? It’s often played for laughs.

But it wasn’t a laughing matter.

The good news, if there was good news, was that the brothers didn’t kill him. But they sold him away – SOLD HIM – into slavery for 20 silver pieces.

What do we sell, and why?

In Charlottesville yesterday, thousands of people gathered in support of and against the alt-right. Our Bishops were there. Many of our clergy were there, to stand in witness to God’s love.

Those who support a return to white power, to white dominance, to honoring those who fought to keep slaves and who thought those slaves less than human, were there in force. They don’t like people with brown or black skin. They don’t like Jews. They don’t like Muslims. They align with some groups who are arguing for secession of the South –if you don’t believe me, read yesterday’s Times-Dispatch Section A Page 4 – as a whites-only nation. And their beliefs are horrible. We call them neo-Nazis, or worse.

Those who protested against them believe God created us all regardless of color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or country of origin as God’s beloved children. They believe that our diversity gives us strength. They believe that all should be valued, all should be loved, all should have an equal shot in this nation, and equal protections. This church aligns with this view, rather than that of the white supremacists.

So is there anything wrong with that? We’re preaching the Gospel, right?

Of course we are, but here’s where it gets difficult, friends.

Turn to this story of Joseph.

We know Joseph is a show-off jerk. He gets preferential treatment from his father. He has the privilege of prophetic dreams. He regularly makes his brothers furious, because it is just not fair, and he is probably the most annoying sibling on the planet. They want him to disappear, because his very presence rubs their skin and their psyche raw.

Just like tweets from a certain person do to me.

Just like guys who look strikingly like Adolph Hitler in Charlottesville do to us all. And I’ve got to admit that when I read the article about the South seceding to create an all-white or alt-right nation, I said, “let ‘em do it so we don’t have to put up with this nonsense anymore.” I would have been happy to sell them into a separate place where I didn’t have to deal with them anymore, just to get them out of my face.

But siblings are persistent, even annoying ones. God finds a way to thread them back through our stories, the thistles in the flax.

We know Joseph goes through trials and tribulations in Egypt but eventually becomes a powerful person who brings aid to his family and his people. God works through him in a story that ends up heartwarming in the musical. I doubt it was as uncomplicated in reality, but good does come of it.

So am I saying that we should go all “Kumbaya” and hug our local racist as if the belief in racism is just fine, just an alternate truth?

Am I saying that God will sort it out, so we should keep silent about the evil of white supremacist words and actions, which left three people dead yesterday?

No. But neither can we sell our brothers, abhorrent as their beliefs are, into isolation. We work and we speak and we name evil for what it is. And starting today, we pray. 

When we pray today, pray not only for those who live the gospel. Pray not only for those who are persecuted, called “nigger, rag-head, wetback, greaser, Jew-boy, faggot, dyke” but also for those who said those names. Pray not only for those who preach the Gospel of peace but also for those who want to foment war against those who are “other.”

Why? Because who needs God to soften their stiff hearts more than the name-callers, the racists, the bigots, the homophobes? And if we simply sell them off into a silo of tainted wheat, we lose the opportunity to work the yeast of God’s love into them for transformation. The moment that we demonize them, we make them “other” too.

We try to love as God loves. It’ a bear.

There’s a famous picture of a teenaged white girl taunting a black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock 9, who was part of the group trying to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. The white girl, Hazel Bryan, was caught by the camera spewing an epithet at Elizabeth. Over time, Hazel realized what she had done, and in the early 1960’s she called Elizabeth and apologized. She disaffiliated from the church she belonged to that espoused racism. She read about black history and the civil rights movement. She changed. They became friends. Their picture in which they embraced  was taken by the same photographer that took that original iconic and painful shot. They were on Oprah together.

A beautiful story, right? Well, that isn’t the end of the story. The friendship unraveled. Hazel continued to be shunned and demonized from those in the white community who saw her as a race traitor and from those in the African-American community who were still haunted by the 1957 picture. She was made “other” and no one acknowledged how much it cost her. That racism  cost Elizabeth, there is no doubt, and we all own that, to our shame. That it cost Hazel, not so much.

The “othering” thing, it’s a bear.

The author of a recent book about Elizabeth and Hazel wrote “So the famous photograph of 1957 takes on additional meaning: the continuing chasm between the races and the great difficulty, even among people of good will, to pull off real racial reconciliation. But shuttling back and forth between them, I could see that for all their harsh words—over the past decade, they’ve only dug in their heels—they still missed one another. Each, I noticed, teared up at references to the other. Perhaps, when no one is looking—or taking any pictures—they’ll yet come together again. And if they can, maybe, so too, can we.”

But how can we, if we simply make those who walk the wrong path into monsters? If we simply define them as stupid and wrong rather than children of God whose BELIEFS are wrong? If we refuse to engage in the patient and difficult work of reconciliation, if we simply want the warm and fuzzy clickbait of a television advertisement with multiracial children to con us into believing we are now a postracial society?

Transformation is not easy. It’s a bear.

So back to Joseph.

Sibling rivalry was at play in the story of Joseph. He was sold, and somehow even after that he was redeemed and made an agent of God. So too were those who sold him into slavery. In the musical, it was all about the embrace. But I suspect that family dinners at the Jacob house weren’t exactly easy times.

And yet we can imagine there were dinners. And yet we can imagine there was conversation, as strained as it might have been. If we sell away those with whom we disagree, what do we lose? The chance for conversation. The chance for love to convert even the hardest of hearts. The chance for transformation.

So again I say to you, pray for the ones whose beliefs you find most abhorrent, whether that’s an alt-right person in Charlottesville who drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counterdemonstrators or someone who sends out disturbing tweets that seem to absolve an act of domestic terrorism. Pray for Kim Jong-Un, even if he scares the stuffing out of you. Pray for ISIS fighters, who seem irredeemable. Pray for God to transform them, because it seems only God can.

As we heard a couple of weeks ago, it’s easy to pray for the people we like. Time to pray, and pray hard, for those whom we’d prefer to sell away.

Prayer. Sometimes it’s a bear. But it’s a bear we need to wrestle with. It's a starting point for the work that is ahead of us. Selling away is not the answer.

Amen.