Author Archives: mbj

“Oh yes, you did laugh”

When I chose the readings for this service, I couldn’t resist including the wonderful story of the Lord visiting Abraham and Sarah by the oaks of Mamre.  I don’t think there’s any story in all of Scripture that is so filled with laughter.  Abraham – a hundred years old if he’s a day – is drowsing by the entrance of his tent in the noonday heat when he suddenly sees three men standing nearby.  Abraham doesn’t realize that they are angels representing the Lord himself, but he’s a generous host, so he scrambles to his feet – never mind his creaky back or arthritic knees – and runs to greet them.  Bowing before the strangers, he offers them water to wash their feet, a comfortable spot to rest under the oak trees, and a little something to eat.  Together with Sarah, he sets out to serve his guests a feast.

Then comes the funny bit.  This act of hospitality is met with a promise so patently absurd that Sarah, who is secretly listening at the entrance to the tent, bursts out laughing.  Her husband is 100 years old and she is 90.  They are no spring chickens, either one of them, so how can their pleasant but obviously rather obtuse guests expect the two of them to bear a child?  When in the preceding chapter God made the same promise to Abraham, Abraham found it so funny that he “fell on his face and laughed” [bbllink]Gen. 17:17[/bbllink].  Now it’s Sarah’s turn to enjoy the joke.  Of course, when the Lord asks about it, she denies that she laughed, maybe for fear of causing offense, but the Lord knows the truth, and I can imagine the twinkle in his eye and his wagging finger when he says, “Oh yes, you did laugh” [bbllink]Gen. 18:15[/bbllink].

God’s generosity is unbounded; it’s astonishing; it’s absurd.  For – what do you know? – Sarah does get pregnant.  As we read a few chapters later, her newborn son is named Isaac, which means: “he laughs.”  Sarah explains it this way: “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me” [bbllink]Gen. 21:6[/bbllink].  The laughter of disbelief has become the laughter of joy.

The scene of the three angels feasting under the oak trees of Mamre – a scene that ends with such blessing and delight – inspired the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev to write an icon in 1410 that is often called the Icon of the Trinity.  I’m sure you’ve seen it: three figures with golden halos are seated around a table, bending toward a chalice filled with wine.  Rublev portrays Abraham and Sarah’s meal as prefiguring the Eucharist, that sacred meal in which every Christian encounters the triune God afresh.  As the viewer gazes into the icon from the open space at the table, you gradually come to realize that the table has been set for a fourth person.  It has, in fact, been set for you.  You are the one who makes the scene complete.  You are the one who is invited to share in the life of God, to share the feast, to share the laughter and the joy.

During this retreat we have been considering what resources Christian theology and practice might offer us in the face of the environmental crisis now unfolding in our midst, and my short list of essential Christian resources would have to include the sacrament of Holy Communion.  

It is here at this table that we receive the simple elements of bread and wine and realize with astonishment that these apparently ordinary things – like Nature herself – are actually filled with God. 

It is here at this table that we learn to eat mindfully, to take God’s creatures of bread and wine into our hands with reverence and a grateful heart.

It is here at this table that we share the one loaf and one cup and discover that a bit of bread can be enough and a sip of wine can fill us.  We don’t have to grab for more; we don’t have to be greedy “consumers” who must constantly replenish ourselves with material things in order to reassure ourselves that we matter or that we exist.   At this table we discover that in sharing what we have, our hearts are satisfied at last.  

It is here at this table that God gives God’s self to us and we in turn give ourselves to God.  There is no greater joy than this, no greater source of laughter.  It’s here at this table that our bonds with God in Christ, with each other, and with all Creation are restored and renewed.

What I just said is somewhat controversial, and I’d like to tell a story that I hope Bishop Bud won’t mind my telling.  Back in 2002, at a clergy day, Bishop Bud came up to me and said that the bishops of New England wanted to issue a pastoral letter on the environment.  It would be the first pastoral letter on the environment ever released by the Episcopal Church, and the first to be released by a Province, rather than a single diocese.

“Oh,” I said.  “Wonderful!”
“And,” he added, “we want you to write it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yikes.”

I got to work, and Bud and the other bishops pulled together a group of clergy and lay people to help with the edits.  I wrote a draft that included a line saying that in the Eucharist, Christ restores our connection with God and one another and all Creation, received the approval of the committee, and sent the manuscript to the bishops.  Before long I got back an email from Bud.

Tom Shaw and I really like that line, he told me, but we know how carefully this document is going to be scrutinized and we don’t want it to be challenged on theological grounds.  Could you please leave that line out?

I went back to the committee with the edits that the bishops proposed, and Bud was at the meeting.  What do you think?  I asked everyone.

We can’t leave that line out, the people said.  Christ is the one through all things were made.  In his death and resurrection, he restores all things and heals all things and reconciles all things.  That is what we celebrate in the sacrament of Holy Communion. The line has to stay!

I looked over at Bud and he threw me a grin, and we left the line in.  It is part of the pastoral letter, “To Serve Christ in All Creation,” which the bishops of New England released six years ago.

I tell this story to illustrate how theology is often hammered out — in arguments and give and take.  And, God willing, our theology will continue to expand as our understanding of what Jesus Christ has done for us continues to expand.

I can’t think of a better remedy for the anxiety and dread that so often infect our hearts than to share Eucharist together.  More than one activist for social and environmental justice has turned to the Eucharist as an essential – maybe the essential – source of ongoing strength for the struggles they face. 

That has certainly been true for me.  On the morning of my arrest eight years ago in Washington, DC, I shared Eucharist with a dear friend.  As we ate the bread and drank from the cup, we dedicated the day ahead to God.  A few hours later I was in handcuffs and locked in a police wagon, and over the course of a very long afternoon and into the night was transferred from one jail to another, each one more apparently God-forsaken than the last, as if we were making our own small descent through Dante’s circles of hell.  By nightfall the group had been divided into a row of cells that ran along a corridor, and I found myself locked with fellow priest and environmental activist Sally Bingham in a small, dark space supplied with a dirty toilet and two bare, metal bunks painted olive green and etched with graffiti.  We were anxious and tired, and unsure how long we’d be confined.  Our nerves were frayed.

We hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day, so when a guard appeared with stacks of bologna sandwiches and donuts wrapped in cellophane, along with Styrofoam cups of Kool-Aid, I took notice.  I was hungry, but I don’t eat meat and I can’t eat sugar, so I wasn’t sure what to do. Eventually I accepted a couple of bologna sandwiches, which the guard passed through a slot in the bars of the cell, and I asked for a glass of water.  I peeled off the bologna and gloomily studied the meal before me: bread and water.  Basic jail food, I guess, but it didn’t do much for me. 

Just then a friend called out from an adjoining cell, “Hey, watch out.  The bread’s moldy.”

With growing despair I examined my slice of bread.  I couldn’t see anything green on it, but it was too dark to get a good look.  All in all the bread looked fairly loathsome.  I took a quick bite, figuring that if I gulped it fast, maybe I wouldn’t notice my disgust.  But as the bread touched my tongue, I remembered the Eucharist that I had shared that morning with my friend.  I remembered how Jesus gives himself to us in the bread and the wine.  My disgust vanished, along with my sense of deprivation.  I took a second, slow bite of the bread and ate it with reverence.  I took a sip of water.  To my surprise, I suddenly saw that I had everything I needed.  My anxiety slipped away.  I was filled with gratitude and completely at peace.  I knew that I was free.  It didn’t matter that I was still in jail.  It didn’t matter that I had no idea when I’d get out.  None of that mattered a bit.  I was being fed from within, as if a river of joy was secretly flowing through me.

I looked around my cell in disbelief.  No, I wasn’t hallucinating.  I could see that everything was exactly as it was: the same bleak walls and metal bunk, the same rows of bars.  Nothing had budged.  But everything had changed.  It was as if my outward circumstances had suddenly fallen away, or as if they were filled with some hidden radiance.  Everything material seemed to open beyond itself, to be secretly as spacious as the wild Arctic wilderness.  The powers-that-be thought they had imprisoned me but actually I was free. 

I almost burst out laughing.

God greets an old man and an old woman in a meal, and God’s power and mercy spill out in the birth of a baby.  God greets us in the Eucharist, and like Abraham and Sarah before us, we rejoice at the rebirth of hope.  Abraham laughs, and Sarah laughs, and yes, we laugh, too.  Let your souls be fed today.  We have been invited to a feast.

Following the Star

Dear God, happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.     Amen.

Who are the Wise Men?

Nobody knows. Some scholars say they were Zoroastrian priests from Persia. Others say they were Babylonian astrologers. Still others say they were astronomers or philosophers. Despite the familiar hymn, “We Three Kings,“ the Gospel never tells us that they were kings or that there were three of them — all it says is that “wise men from the east“ [Mt 2:1] brought three gifts for the Christ child. Matthew’s Gospel — the only Gospel in which these travelers appear — also does not mention their names or their homeland. We can only guess whether they travelled from Arabia or Mesopotamia, or from lands even further beyond. It was later Christian tradition that decided that there were three of them and that they were kings, and supplied them with names, physical descriptions, camels, and even the dates of their deaths. Their relics are said to have reached Cologne by the middle of the 12th century!

There is a lot that we don’t know about these travelers, but we do know this: the men are wise. I wonder what makes them wise. What is wisdom, anyway? I wonder if the story of the wise men can give us some clues about wisdom as we embark on our own journey into a new year. Maybe the wise men have a gift to give to us as well as to the Christ child.

Here’s what I see. One sign of wisdom: the men are on the move, on a search. However much they already know — and they are called “wise“ from the very start of the story, for evidently they have already learned a great deal– they want to know more. They know what they know, but they also know that there is much that they don’t know. There are truths that we can learn only when we move beyond our comfort zone, and maybe the quest for truth, the quest for God will always take us beyond ourselves, out of a fixed place — our comfortable homeland — and to a place that is new. Wise men and wise women have the humility to admit that they don’t know everything there is to know, and are open to learning more.

So I see boldness in the wise men: they have the courage to set out to an unknown place, because they are fired with a desire to seek the truth. And I see humility in them, too, for to undertake such a journey they must be willing to ask questions (even directions!), to get lost sometimes, to make mistakes, to not know exactly where they are heading or what they will find when they get there. They have to be open to surprise, and heaven knows, the king they seek will turn out to be unlike any other king that they have ever known. The only way to find him is to keep their eyes on the star and to follow the road to God, wherever it leads.

And where does their journey take them? Right into the center of the City of Jerusalem, right into the very presence of King Herod, that brutal, desperate, fear-filled king who wants to cling to power. Herod recognizes in this newborn baby a threat to his rule, and he sets out to do the baby in. At first he works in secret, with sweet talk and lies: he gathers information about the child under the pretense of wanting to pay homage to him, that is, to bow down to the child in worship. He tries to trick the wise men into showing him where the baby can be found. Later on, when these covert operations fall through, Herod unleashes his brutality: he orders his soldiers to kill every child in or around Bethlehem who is two years old or under, and Mary and Joseph must scoop up the baby Jesus and take flight with him to Egypt.

In the midst of Herod’s rage and fear, what do the wise men do? They keep their eyes on the star. They resume their journey. They get back on the road and follow where the star is guiding them. And when they reach their destination, they are “overwhelmed with joy“ [Mt 2:10]. They enter the house, they see the child with Mary, they kneel in adoration, and they offer their gifts. When dream and intuition tell them that God does not want them to return to Herod, they go home by a different road.

Wisdom — it’s all about wisdom. Stay awake, the wise men seem to tell us. There is evil in this world. The voice of Herod is all around us and within us, speaking words of violence and fear, voices that say: Strike. Destroy. Starve. Kill. Voices that say: the only way to peace is to dominate and obliterate, to silence your enemy and to do everything possible to wipe him out. No, the wise men say. Keep your eyes on the star. Keep your eyes on God and bear witness to love. Follow where love is leading you, even if it takes you right into the heart of the world’s suffering and fear, but keep your eyes on the star. If Herod’s voice of hatred tries to coax you back to him, stay on the path of love, the path of peace. Do not return to Herod, but go home by a different road.

This story comes as a gift to us as we enter a new year and take stock of a world so torn by turbulence and hatred. It has been a terrible week in Gaza, with images of fire and blood, rockets and rubble, the sound of shrieks and the smell of fear. As Israeli warplanes pound Hamas targets in Gaza, as Hamas rockets explode in residential areas of Israel, as Israeli troops and tanks cross the border and begin a ground offensive, how in this turmoil and anguish do we keep our eyes on the star? How do we apply our hearts to wisdom? The tangled roots of today’s conflict in the Middle East wind far back into ancient history and deep into the psyche of Arabs and Jews. Who knows where the conflict first began? It seems to have gone on forever, as if it sprang straight from our mythic ancestors, Cain and Abel. In the long years since, both sides have inflicted great suffering on each other, and both sides have endured great suffering, experiencing their own slaughter of the innocents. Both sides have made mistakes, and members of both sides have been driven by fear and rage to the desperate conviction that only violence and retaliation will keep their children safe.

Can we who watch this horror keep our eyes on the star? Can we find ways to call forth the good that is in both sides, to embrace the wisdom that is in both sides, to help each side to look up and see again the star that is shining above them, and shining still within them? The light that is in us is so much brighter than we know, and for all the darkness that surrounds us — for all the violence and the clamor for revenge that fill the world around, for all the fear and hatred that may fill our own hearts, too — for all the Herods around us and within us that counsel rage or despair — the star of love is still shining. We must keep our eyes on that star.

What can we do?

We can try to stop the killing, try to stop both sides from tearing each other apart, and call for a ceasefire.

We can send aid to Gaza, and in your leaflet there is information about how to send money to the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, which is run by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, and where the suffering and need are great. ¹

We can call for vigorous diplomacy to secure a just and lasting peace with a two-state solution, so that both Israelis and Palestinians can achieve the security that both sides so need and deserve. Your leaflet tells you how to sign the Ecumenical Christian Letter to President-Elect Obama, which urges just that. ²

And we can pray – pray that the light of God will enlighten all hearts, pray that God’s mercy and justice will prevail, pray that the suffering will ease and that all peoples will find their path to peace. Next Wednesday we will begin a five-week series on the Holy Land, and I pray that in our discussions — as in everything else we do, wherever we find ourselves, wherever we go — I pray that we will listen with the open-heartedness and humility of the wise men, who, in their quest for truth, were open to learning what they did not know and who, even in the midst of trouble, always kept their eyes on the star.

Let us pray.

O Jesus, be with us as we travel into the fullness of God, that, following your star, we may not wander in the darkness of this world’s night, but may find in you a home, and, as the wise men did, may come at last to kneel before you, overwhelmed with joy. ³     Amen.

1. Send your donation to American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem (AFEDJ), Box 2040, Orange CA 92859 or visit www.americanfriends-jerusalem.org to donate on-line.

2. For more information and to sign, visit: http://action.cmep.org/t/4030/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=173

3. Adapted from Mozarabic Sacramentary, as cited in Prayers for Every Occasion, ed. Frank Colquhoun, Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1967, p. 42.

Daring to Say Yes

This has been a season of interruption and disruption. First came the most damaging ice storm in decades, felling trees and downing power lines, followed shortly thereafter by a big snowstorm. Just as we finished shoveling out the driveway, along comes today’s storm. Meanwhile, the restoration project is close to completion, and the final throes of the creative process require a certain amount of upheaval: some of the hallways and offices in the Old Rectory have been helter-skelter as we drag furniture hither and yon, find new uses for old spaces, and prepare to move into spaces that are new. Did I mention the financial uncertainty that stirs up so many minds, or the disruptions of accident, illness, or quarrels? Disruptions are all around us, and they are uncomfortable, and they sharpen our longing. O come, O come, electricity! O come, O come, certificate of occupancy! O come, O come, some semblance of order!

But — talk about disruption! Check out this morning’s Gospel. The angel comes to Mary and announces a great disruption in Mary’s life: she will conceive and bear a son; she will name him Jesus — that is, the one who saves. He will be called the Son of the Most High, and his kingdom will have no end. Mary will conceive not by a man but by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, and the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.

We have heard this story so many times that we may not be able to imagine Mary’s shock, or to feel any particular suspense when it comes to awaiting her answer to the angel. We know what Mary will say. She will say yes — she always says yes — because that’s how the story goes! Besides, some theologians claim that Mary had to say yes, that her soul was so pure that the possibility of her saying no was out of the question, that God in fact chose Mary to conceive and give birth to Jesus precisely because in her goodness and purity, she would be incapable of saying no to God. But I will take my place alongside the theologians who say that Mary could very well have said no, just as our answer to God can be no. This seems a good day to talk about our freedom to say no, our freedom to say yes, in the midst of the disruptions of our lives.

I have been watching trailers of a movie that opened around here this weekend, Jim Carrey’s new comedy “Yes Man.” I can’t vouch for the movie or say that it is worth seeing — I haven’t seen it, and so far the reviews are mixed — but I find the premise of the movie quite interesting. It seems that the character played by Jim Carrey is trapped in a life in which he is perpetually saying no. Because he has been hurt in a relationship, he has decided to hunker down and hide out, and to every invitation that comes his way — to every possibility, to every opportunity — his answer is always no. Nope, he’s not going to do it. No, he is not interested, he is not the type, he hasn’t the time, he can’t be bothered, no.

The movie’s turning point comes when he is challenged by some kind of guru to transform his life by saying yes. Jim Carrey’s character makes a covenant to say yes for one year to every request that comes his way, however ridiculous the request may be, and the rest of the movie shows what happens when he unleashes in his life the power of saying yes.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I expect that what makes it funny is not just watching the antics of Jim Carrey as he takes up flying lessons or becomes fluent in Korean or bungee jumps off a bridge, but that he is constrained to say yes, he has to say yes, he now says yes as automatically as he once said no. Theorists of comedy — for instance, Henri Bergson — tell us that one of the things that makes us laugh is watching human beings act as predictably and mechanically as machines. A clown runs across a circus ring and slips on a banana peel. The audience laughs. The clown, unhurt, gets up, brushes himself off, resumes running, heads again toward the banana peel, and — we know what is coming, we know what is going to happen — he slips on it again. We laugh even harder. Clowns and comics revel in showing us that doing the predictable, habitual thing over and over can get pretty funny. So it is funny when Jim Carrey has to say no, and it is funny when he has to say yes.

But of course that is not where freedom lies. Doing the predictable thing over and over again provides good material for comedians, but it is also the stuff of suffering and sorrow. Saying a repetitive, compulsive no can trap us in a constricted little place, but so can saying a repetitive, compulsive yes. I’ve probably told you that I tend to say to yes to too many requests, and years ago as a spiritual discipline I intentionally spent the forty days of Lent doing the very opposite of what Jim Carrey does in the latter part of his “Yes Man” movie: I said no to every request that came my way, for that was my path to freedom, my path to fullness of life. I needed to learn how to give a bold and whole-hearted no if I was ever going to learn how to give a free and whole-hearted yes.

So I like to imagine that Mary felt no compulsion to say no and no compulsion to say yes. I imagine that she listened deeply to the angel from within the freedom of her heart. I imagine that the words of the angel dropped as gently as a pebble into the depths of her pure soul, and that she took what the angel was announcing as an invitation, not a command. What would she say to the angel? How would she reply? Here on the brink of Christmas, on the last Sunday of Advent, we stand on tiptoe to hear what Mary will say.

The angel is waiting beside you, Mary, and we are waiting, too. Mary, dear Mary, how will you answer the angel’s impossible request? The whole world has been waiting for this moment, and not just for a few weeks, not just for a season, but for generations, for centuries, throughout the whole long course of human history. How long humanity has waited, O Lord, how long we have waited for you to come in great power among us to set things right — to find the lost and heal the broken, to bring good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind and to let the oppressed go free, to bring peace to the nations and peace to our restless hearts. O come, O come, Emmanuel! When will you come?

O Mary, dear Mary, what will you say to the angel?

We don’t just want electricity when the lights go out — we want to see the Light of the World [John 8:12].

We don’t just want to finish a building or to make order in our homes — we want God to make a home with us [Mt. 1:23].

We don’t just want to be financially secure — we want to touch the rock of our salvation [1 Cor. 10:4].

We don’t just want physical healing for ourselves or for someone we love

— we want to meet the Savior who brings eternal life [1 John 1:2; 5:20].

O Mary, we stand with you today because we long for our Savior and because we, too, want to be mothers of God. We want God’s presence and power to be born afresh in our ailing world. We want the love of God to shine out from our eyes and to be expressed through our hands. We want our own little words to convey the very Word of God, so that what we say leads us and those around us toward reconciliation, not estrangement, toward love and forgiveness, not toward indifference and hate.

Dear Mary, the angel is bending close to you, waiting for your reply, and the angel is bending close to us, too, waiting for ours. Will we give ourselves in love to this moment — fully and without reserve, holding nothing back? Will we say yes to the Christ that longs to be born in our hearts?

It is a brave thing to open oneself to love in a world that is so full of anxiety and hate.

It is a beautiful thing to make space to listen inwardly for God, when the world around us wants to cram us full of ego-centered projects and ambitions, with the din and distractions of shopping and entertainment.

It is a daring thing to say yes to hope, yes to new life, in the face of the world’s despair.

When it is spoken in freedom, yes is such a powerful word, a word of acceptance and assent. Yes, I will take a chance. Yes, I will seize an opportunity. Yes, I will do the unexpected thing. Yes, I will open my heart to love, even if the cost is great. Yes, I will take the first step, even though I can’t see the end of the path and can’t possibly know where my yes will lead. Yes, I will say yes freely, because only in freedom, can my yes really be yes. There are times when love calls us to say no, but when love calls us to say yes, what will we say?

O Mary, what will you say to the angel? Help us to say yes with you. Help us to give birth to the Christ that longs to be born in this gathered community and in the secret depths of our souls.

I invite us to take a few moments in silence and to listen inwardly, as Mary listened, and — in freedom, if we feel led to do so — to pray in silence the words that Mary spoke: Yes. Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.

The World is One

Jesus is in trouble again. The Pharisees are out to get him, just as they were in the story we heard last week, when they threw him a trick question about paying taxes to Caesar. Later that same day some Sadducees confronted Jesus and tried to trip him up in a debate about the resurrection. When the Sadducees were silenced, the Pharisees gathered in a third attempt to trap Jesus – and that’s the story that we hear today. “One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” [Matthew 22:34-35]

The way that Matthew’s Gospel tells the story, the question is not asked out of a sincere desire to understand what Jesus is thinking or to connect with him as a person – it is posed from a place of challenge and suspicion, from that wary, critical, mistrustful place where we eye the other person and says, “Who does he think he is? Let’s get him.”

Sound familiar? It reminds me of the antagonistic atmosphere of these days before the Presidential election. Some of us have been unnerved by the degree of mockery and flat-out lies that has marked some of the political maneuvering – a method that stands at a polar opposite from what Paul describes as his approach to the people of Thessalonica, to whom, he writes, his appeal “does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery.” [1 Thessalonians 2:3]

Maybe “deceit” and “impure motives” and “trickery” are inevitable at this stage of a hard-fought election, but they are also a pretty good example of the general human temptation – even in the absence of an election – to treat other people not just as worthy opponents but as obstacles and enemies, as essentially different from us and our tribe, as objects either to be used for our own purposes or to be ignored and pushed aside. Ordinary human consciousness usually perceives things as separate: this is not that; this is separate from that; you are not my really my neighbor – fundamentally you are ‘other.’

So I imagine Jesus looking into the crowd of confused and hostile faces, and into my own face, too, and answering from the place deep within himself and deep within each of us where we are connected to God. Speaking clearly and with compassion, Jesus answers, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22: 37-40]

The first verse that Jesus quotes is from Deuteronomy and part of a text called the Sh’ma, which begins “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” [Deuteronomy 6:4-5] This passage is called the Sh’ma – which means Hear or Listen in Hebrew – because that is the passage’s first word, and, as one commentator points out, it is “the basic and essential creed in Judaism, the sentence with which every Jewish service still opens, and the first text which every Jewish child commits to memory.” ¹

The second verse that Jesus quotes is from the passage of Hebrew Scripture that we heard this morning, Leviticus 19:18 – “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus’ summary of the law is a completely orthodox, completely Jewish answer. Rabbis often debated which of the 613 distinct commandments in the Torah were the most important, and whether there was a primary commandment in whose light all the others could be understood. Rabbi Jesus is lifting up the same summary of the law – love of God and love of neighbor -that other rabbis had lifted up before, and it’s worth remembering that Jesus and the leaders of Judaism were arguing from within the same heritage of faith. Where they differed, where the tension between them arose, was in how to interpret that heritage of faith, and in who Jesus was.

For Jews and for Christians, and perhaps for people of every other religion as well, loving God and neighbor are completely interwoven. Unless we love our neighbor, our professed love of God is only pious fluff; unless we love God, our professed love of neighbor turns swiftly into co-dependence, into demanding from our neighbor the unconditional love that ultimately only God can give us.

It seems to me that this is why we come together every Sunday to worship: because we want to bring together all the scattered pieces of our lives and of the world that surrounds us. We want to dive beneath the surface differences that so often divide us, and to touch the living God who embraces everything within us and around us, and in whom everything is held together. Especially in the Eucharist, we discover again the deep unity at the heart of reality, that place where we know that everything is connected and that everything is lit up with love. If we want to help a neighbor, it’s no big deal, it’s not such a special thing, any more than it would be a big deal if with one hand I helped the other hand: they may be separate, but they are part of the same body – or if this finger helped that finger: they may be separate, but they are part of the same hand.

Remembering — and experiencing — our basic unity with God and one another is especially important at a time when so much of the world seems so bitterly divided. As religious people, our task is to hold in mind – to hold in heart – the totality of things, because then our thoughts and actions can spring from a deep root of wisdom.

Last year, during the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue, Jews and Christians and Unitarians and people of other faiths walked across Massachusetts as a way of expressing our shared love for God and God’s Creation. By day we walked, and by night we stopped at various churches and at a Jewish temple for an evening program. One night near the end of the walk, Rabbi Sheila Weinberg led us in a chant written by Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center. ² The chant is based on the Sh’ma, and its purpose is to awaken our awareness that at every boundary, the world is one.

One of the words you will hear as we go along is the word “tzitzit,” which refers to the fringes of a prayer shawl traditionally worn by Jewish men, rather like the fringes you see hanging from the end of this stole.

I invite you to join me in the refrain, which is the first and last word of the opening sentence of the Sh’ma (Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one), four words, two in English and the same two words in Hebrew: Listen, one, Sh’ma, echad. Try it out: Listen, one, Sh’ma, echad.

You sing the refrain like this: ³

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad…..

And while I speak the verses, you keep holding that note, and when you need to breathe, you take a breath and return to the sound…. Mmmm… and if you want to add a little harmony, you can hum another note that sounds nice….and we return to the refrain and chant together:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad…..

OK, here we go…. Mmmm…(Hold that note as I speak…)

And when we come to a doorway between the risky world and our safe homes, when we might believe these are two separate worlds – then we pause at the doorway to remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad…..

And when we come to a doorway in time between our active rising up and our dreamy, sleepy lying down, when we might believe these are two separate worlds – then we pause at that moment to remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad….

And when we look at our hands and experience our eyes, when we might believe these are two separate worlds, the world of observing, watching, and the world of doing, making – then we pause to bind our eyes and hands together, and we remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… e’chad…

And when we come to the gateway of our cities, the boundary of our own cultures and communities, when we might believe these are two separate worlds – the world where everybody speaks my language and the language of those… barbarians out there – then we pause at that gateway to remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad….

And when we look beyond all human life at those beings that do not speak at all – mountains and rivers, ozone and oak trees, beetles and krill – when we might say they live in an utterly separate world beyond us, on which we have no effect at all – then we pause to remember that the poison we feed to earth and air and water feeds us poison, and we remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad….

And when we might assert one thing is certain, inside my skin I know what’s what but everything outside me is mysterious and alien – these are two separate worlds – then we look at the tzitzit on the edges of ourselves, we look at these fuzzy fringes made always of my own cloth and the Universe’s air, we look at these threads of connection that bind us to each other, and we pause at that moment to remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad….

And when we come to that final doorway whose other side no one has ever seen, and we might think that the world of life and the world of death are two utterly separate worlds – then we pause at that doorway to remember to remind ourselves:

Listen… One…Sh’ma… echad….

1. William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 2, revised edition, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975, p. 278.

2. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Sh’ma: At Every Boundary, The World is One, The Shalom Center, http://www.shalomctr.org/node/230. Rabbi Weinberg used the refrain cited in the sermon; Rabbi Waskow’s refrain is entirely in Hebrew.

3. For information on shruti boxes, try http://www.shrutibox.com.

Does God Play by the Rules?

Years ago, when my son Sam was twelve, after he had finished his homework we would sometimes sit down together and play a board game or a game of cards. Our favorite was a rather wild and disconcerting card game called “Fluxx.” It’s the sort of game you learn to play not by reading the rules but by plunging in. It starts with each person being dealt three cards. Then you draw a card and play a card. Simple. The trouble is, the game never stands still. The rules change with every hand. Depending on which cards are played, sometimes you end up holding a whole fistful of cards and sometimes you have to give them all away. Sometimes you must show your cards and sometimes you can hide them. Even the goal of the game keeps changing. Just when you’ve figured out how you’re going to win and are about to trounce your opponent, the goal changes and the game goes off in an entirely new direction. Or just when you think you’ve had it and you’re going to lose, the goal abruptly switches and all of a sudden you’ve won. Sam and I would laugh a lot as we played, but I have to say, the game made me dizzy.

Right now most of us are not just playing a card game called “Fluxx” – we’re living it. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the bailout of A.I.G. and the proposed bailout of the whole system of mortgage financing — well, our country’s entire economic system suddenly looks alarmingly fragile. There is talk that we may be facing the worst financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression. While experts scramble to work out a solution, ordinary Americans worry about the security of their jobs and pensions, about how to cover the cost of college tuition or pay back college loans, how to meet mortgage payments and pay their fuel bills.

Many of us feel may feel rattled and anxious this morning as we consider our nation’s economy and our own family’s financial security. The rollercoaster of economic news this week is a stark reminder that life is like that: a perpetual state of flux, though some periods — like this past week, for example — are more unstable than others.

Today’s Collect goes straight to the heart of the matter, for we need God’s help “not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.” I want you to know that I did not choose today’s Collect — it is the Collect that was assigned for this Sunday, and it’s just what we need to hear.

In a world of impermanence and constant change, what does endure? To what can we hold fast? Like the first group of workers in Matthew’s parable about the laborers in the vineyard, in a time of uncertainty we want life to be orderly and predictable. We want clarity. We want God to play by the rules.

“Tell me what to expect and then deliver the goods. Hire me for a day’s work and give me a day’s pay.”

The landowner says, “Fine.”

A few hours pass, the landowner needs more help in the vineyard, and at 9 o’clock when he sees other people “standing idle in the marketplace,” he offers them work and promises to pay “whatever is right” (Mt 20:3, 4). He does the same thing at noon, at 3 o’clock and 5 o’clock.

So far, so good! But in a move that would astonish both a proponent of free-market capitalism and an advocate of governmental regulation, at the end of the day the employer not only pays the last group first, he gives a full day’s pay to everyone, regardless of whether they’ve worked all day or only one hour.

The workers who were hired early in the morning begin to grumble.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” they say. “You’re not playing by the rules! Those latecomers worked only one hour, and you made them equal to us, who sweat it out all day!”

The generous landowner explains that no one has been cheated. No one has received less than the agreed amount. What the first group of workers finds offensive is not that they have been treated badly but that other people are getting more than they deserve. It’s the same irritation that Jonah felt when God forgave the people of Ninevah: forgiveness and generosity aren’t fair!

And that’s the point of the parable: God’s rules are not our rules. We may think that God will reward us according to how tirelessly we work, or how long we’ve been at it, or how much we do for God. But in a sense none of that matters to God. God loves us whether we deserve it or not. Even if we don’t give God a second thought until we’re on our deathbed and at last admit that we’ve squandered our lives on selfish things, and, like the Prodigal Son, we finally turn in anguish to God to say, “I’m so sorry — please forgive me!” — even then, at the eleventh hour, God gives the latecomer the full measure of God’s love, with nothing held back. As one commentator puts it, “The generosity of God…cuts across our calculations of who deserves what.”¹ In short – God plays by God’s rules.

This morning I am glad to hear the parable of the laborers in the vineyard not because it can tell us how to fix the economy. The Bible is obviously not a manual of political economics. But what we do find in the Bible, and in this Gospel story, is news of God’s economy, news of the kingdom of God, lessons of how to live in the midst of the world’s uncertainty and impermanence and fragility, while holding fast to the things that shall endure.

What endures? The love of God endures — the absurd, abundant, over-the-top, generous love that God offers to everyone. In the kingdom of God, there is no need to hoard or grab, no need to push yourself forward at somebody else’s expense, no need to put yourself first and the devil take the hindmost, because the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and first and last shall have no meaning, for all of us will be drawn into a circle of love that leaves no one out.

We don’t have to earn that love. It is already here right now and is being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit [Romans 5:5]. So if you’re feeling tired this morning, if you’re stressed, if you’re worried and afraid, that’s OK. No matter how many changes you are going through, you are rooted in the love of God that nothing and nobody can take away. Get financial advice if you need to, and do your best to make wise financial decisions for yourself and your family, but rest assured that your value as a human being does not depend on your income or your net worth, on your material possessions or the size of your portfolio.

In a time of turbulence, the only thing to cling to — the only thing that lasts -is the love of God. That’s a rule that God won’t change: God loves you to the core. Jesus gave his life for you, and he gave his Holy Spirit to you, so that you too might walk through this world just as he did: with the conviction that the kingdom of God is at hand and that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Hold fast to that love, for it is God’s gift to you, and you don’t have to do a thing to deserve it. Yes, we need to work to survive, but at our core, we don’t need to work to be loved unconditionally. Our deepest identity is not tied to the stock market, and our deepest security has nothing to do with our financial situation or with the fluctuations or even the collapse of our economy.

When you catch that biblical vision that you are loved, and the next guy is loved, and that God’s love is particularly outstretched to the forgotten and the poor, then you not only walk through life with a deep serenity – you also walk through life with a fire for justice, with a longing to create a society in which no one needs to choose between paying a fuel bill or feeding a child, a society in which economic and political leaders are held accountable for their actions and in which greed, selfishness, and corruption at the expense of others and to the detriment of the common good are simply not tolerated. We are a new creation in Christ, and our ministry is to continually re-fashion our families, communities, nation, and world in light of that God-given vision.

I’d like to put in a good word for our adult ed offerings this fall, all of which are intended to equip us for this ministry and to give us the support we need to keep our eyes on the kingdom of heaven and to hold fast to the things that shall endure.

If you are looking for the “peace that passes understanding” and for a more vital and intimate relationship with God, I hope that you will come to one of the Quiet Days that we hold every month on a Saturday, or to the three-week series on prayer that I will be leading on Wednesday nights in October.

If you are fed up with the contempt and scorn, the lies and innuendo that are filling public conversations as we head toward the Presidential election — if you want to re-commit yourself to speaking in a way that is both truthful and compassionate — if you want to develop some skills in how to communicate in a centered, honest way when you are tempted to fly off the handle and say something you’ll regret to your parent or spouse or child — then I hope you’ll join me in a free class in nonviolent communication led by two guest teachers on a Wednesday night in October, and register for the special 6-week course on Monday nights that we will offer for a small fee.

If you want to learn how to live from a place of abundance and gratitude rather than a place of scarcity and fear, then I hope you’ll register right away for a special Quiet Day on stewardship that will be led in two weeks by the much-respected retreat leader, Charles Lafond.

If you want to dig into the Gospel of Mark and learn what it means to be a disciple of Jesus — if you want to think critically about the relationship between God and politics — if you want to befriend your mortality and to learn the wisdom that can only come from facing death — if you want to participate in the MDG movement to eradicate poverty around the world — then there is something in this program that should appeal to you. Today, after the service, we’ll hold our first Forum of the year, as the Rev. Chris Carlisle speaks about college ministry in Amherst and a new collaboration between UMass and Grace Church.

We may not like to live in a world of flux, but in these uncertain times we give thanks to the God whose love undergirds our lives and whose power radiates through our words and hands as we work together to create a better world.

1. Fred B. Craddock et al., Preaching the New Common Lectionary, Year A: After Pentecost, Abingdon, 1987, p. 200.

From the Way of Caesar to the Way of Christ

I can’t say a word this morning until I thank God for the glories of late summer, this sumptuous season when a person can wander for hours in a country field, savoring blackberries and watching dragonflies and cedar waxwings. Farms in these parts smell like fresh-cut hay, and if we tend a garden, our hands probably smell of basil or the tang of tomato plants. The goldfinches are getting fat on sunflower seeds, and the first maple leaves have begun to turn. It’s a season of harvest and beauty, and the last line of today’s psalm probably says it all: “LORD, I love the house in which you dwell and the place where your glory resides” [Psalm 26:8].

It’s also Labor Day weekend, and this morning we give thanks for the men and women who fought for, and succeeded in giving us, the minimum wage and the forty-hour week, unemployment compensation, health and safety regulations in the workplace, and the right of workers to organize for collective bargaining. We give thanks today for those whose work benefits the community, and we hold in prayer those who have no job, or jobs that do not satisfy.

I also need to mention that for many of us, this has been a week of immersion in the world of politics, as we listened to speech after speech from the Democratic National Convention, and to the commentaries that preceded and followed those speeches. More speeches and commentaries will come our way as the Republican Party begins its national convention tomorrow. The battle for the Presidency has been joined, and as we head toward November, Americans will hear competing arguments about how to make this country prosper and how to keep our country secure; how to close the gap between rich and poor, and to heal the enmity between women and men, between black and white, as well as brown, red, and yellow peoples; how to provide for those who are sick or disabled; how to offer a world-class education to all children, not just the children of privilege; how to stop the drift toward endless war; how to protect the well-being of the planet upon which all human life depends.

For better or worse, we live in a time when it seems to be politically expedient, even politically necessary, for candidates to call themselves Christian, although you have to wonder whether we will be able to maintain our Constitution’s separation of church and state if being a Christian becomes a prerequisite for political office. Still, if some people in this country – in fact, a good many people – consider being a Christian one measure of a political candidate’s readiness for leadership, then let’s go for it – let’s talk about what we should look for in a Christian leader and what values should shape a society that is informed by Christianity.

Maybe there is no better place to begin than with today’s Gospel. This passage from Matthew 16 comes right after the passage we heard last Sunday, in which Peter confessed Jesus as the Messiah. As we heard last week, Jesus and his disciples walked all the way to Caesarea Philippi, a city more than twenty miles north of the Sea of Galilee and named after Caesar Augustus, “the emperor whose regime occupied and dominated Jesus’ people and homeland,”¹ and after Philip, the local ruler of the region. Jesus took his band of friends all the way to a place whose name symbolized the political machine of the Roman Empire, as if Jesus were intentionally walking into the very belly of the beast.

Standing in that urban symbol of his people’s oppression, Jesus asked his friends, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter made his bold reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Among other things, that was a daring political statement to make, for to Peter and the followers of Jesus, the Messiah was expected to come as a conquering warrior, a liberating king who would sweep the Romans out of Palestine by force. It was also politically dangerous to call Jesus “the Son of the living God,” for the Caesars of Rome called themselves “sons of the gods.” It was as if Peter were saying, “The Greek and Roman gods are only idols, and they do not and cannot make the empire legitimate; the true and living God gives Jesus the authority and power to overturn the empire and to set us free.”

Jesus praised Peter for his confession of faith, and named him the rock on which he would build his church. But immediately we come to today’s passage, in which Jesus makes the first of four predictions that he will suffer and die, and rise on the third day. Peter is shocked. He associates the Messiah with victory and glory, not with suffering and death. If Jesus is the liberating king, the revolutionary leader whom God anointed to overthrow the Roman occupation, then, as author Brian McLaren puts it, “the one thing Jesus cannot do is be captured, imprisoned, tortured and killed. No, he must capture, imprison, humiliate, and defeat their oppressors.”²

Peter takes Jesus aside and vehemently rebukes him. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” [Mt 16:22]. What comes next, McLaren calls “one of the most dramatic cases of conceptual whiplash ever recorded in literature anywhere.”³ Jesus turns and says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” Just a moment before, Jesus had blessed Peter and called him a rock; now Peter is a stumbling block, an adversary. Just a moment before, Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven; now he calls Peter an agent of the devil, because Peter is tempting him to take the way of power. Jesus used almost exactly the same words during his temptations in the wilderness, when the devil took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and promised them to Jesus if he would fall down and worship him [Mt 4:10]. “Away with you, Satan!” Jesus cried then, and almost word for word cries again now, as Peter gives voice to the temptation that Jesus is grappling with inside himself and to which he says a resounding No.

Peter was right when he confessed Jesus as the Messiah, the son of the living God. But – as McLaren puts it – “Peter was … wrong about what those terms meant. They didn’t mean a violent and coercive leader who would conquer through domination; they meant a leader who would be victorious through being defeated, who would demonstrate power through vulnerability, and who would establish a kingdom not of violent conquest but of faith, hope, and love.”⁴

Today’s Gospel passage gives us clues about the questions we need to ask our candidates for political office, whether they be from the left, right, or center, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, or anything else.

Do their policies follow the way of Caesar or the way of Christ?

The way of Caesar is the way of ‘power over’, of seeking prosperity through grabbing and hoarding everything we can for ourselves, never mind the cries of the poor or the cries of a groaning Earth.

The way of Caesar is the way of seeking security through violence and military domination, the path of silencing, torturing and wiping out our enemies.

The way of Caesar looks out for “number one” — and no one else.

The way of Caesar believes in what theologian Dominic Crossan calls “peace through victory… peace through the destruction of enemies… peace through domination.”⁵

By contrast, the way of Christ is the way of ‘power with’, the way that values forgiveness and reparation more than revenge — honest dialogue and mutual vulnerability more than manipulation, domination, and control.

The way of Christ builds prosperity by setting the rich free from our addiction to material possessions and by setting the poor free from misery and want.

The way of Christ finds security not in hoarding but in sharing, and seeks peace not through violence but through “justice, generosity, and mutual concern.”⁶

In short, it follows the leadings not of fear but of love.

Maybe it’s worth noting that in December 2006, “retiring United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan rejected domination as a response to terrorism. [He said,] ‘Against such threats as these, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others.’ Instead, in an application of Jesus’ ‘golden rule’ to international relations, he said that each nation increases its own security by safeguarding the security of its neighbors.”⁷

Of course it is not just our nation and its political leaders who must choose every day between the way of Caesar or the way of Christ – we ourselves are called by Jesus to pick up our cross and follow him. Flinging around Jesus’ name and calling ourselves Christian is hardly good enough — Peter himself in today’s passage calls Jesus “Lord” and is soundly chastised by the one who says elsewhere that “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” [Mt 7:21].

That is the grace that we pray for this morning, the grace to follow where Jesus leads us, both as individuals and as a nation — the grace to see through the lies of empire and the temptation to domination, the grace to lay down our lives for each other and for the well-being of the world.

1. Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007, p. 109. These paragraphs on Matthew 16 are based on McLaren’s argument.

2. Ibid. p. 112.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. p. 312.

5. John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire, Harper San Francisco, 2007, Chapter 1, cited by McLaren, p.159.

6. McLaren, op. cit., p. 159.

7. Ibid. p. 316.

Behold what you are. Become what you receive.

The story of Jesus feeding the crowds is told more often than any other story in the four Gospels. Each of the Gospels tells at least one story of Jesus feeding a crowd of thousands, and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew tell the story twice [Mark 6:30-44, 8:1-9; Matthew 14:13-21, 15:32-39; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-13]. You can see how important this story was to the early community, for the story was clearly linked to the Eucharist. We often think of the Eucharist as originating with the Last Supper, but the early Church also put a great deal of emphasis on Jesus eating with his disciples in Galilee, and, after the resurrection, on his returning to eat meals with his friends.¹ In different ways each of these meals anticipates the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Today’s Gospel passage makes the connection very explicit. Jesus asks the disciples to bring him what little food they have — five loaves and two fish — and he orders the crowds to sit down on the grass. Take a look at the next sentence: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds” [Matthew 14:19]. If you had a pencil, you could underline the four familiar words that we always hear at the Eucharist: “take,” “bless,” “break,” and “give.”

This morning’s Gospel gives us a chance to reflect on how we are formed and shaped by the Eucharist. When you and I were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we discovered the deepest truth about ourselves: that we are the Beloved of God. That is our deepest identity: we are God’s Beloved. Yet it takes a lifetime to live into the truth of our Belovedness, to make it incarnate in everything we say and do, so that in the very nitty-gritty details of our lives, from the moment we get up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, we not only remember in some abstract and rather distant way, “I am the Beloved of God,” but more and more fully become the Beloved, become who we really are.

You may have noticed a few months ago that we made a small change in the Eucharist, which is printed in the service leaflet. After the Lord’s Prayer, the celebrant breaks the bread and says: “Behold what you are.” And we reply, “May we become what we receive.” Rob brought these lines back after a visit to the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, and the words can be traced all the way back to St. Augustine, who, sometime in the 4th and 5th centuries, preached a sermon on the Eucharist [Sermon 57, “On the Holy Eucharist”] in which he reflected on “one of the deep truths of Christian faith: through our participation in the sacraments (particularly baptism and Eucharist), we are transformed into the Body of Christ, given for the world.”²

The point is that every time we receive the Eucharist, we are transformed — or should be transformed — a little more fully into the Body of Christ, so that the divine love that made us and that flows through us can become more fully expressed in the world. How are we formed by the Eucharist? One place to look is in those four gestures: “taken,” “blessed,” “broken” and “given.” I am indebted in these remarks to the priest and writer Henri Nouwen, a friend and mentor whose book, Life of the Beloved, is on my very short list of top spiritual books. As Henri says, the words “taken,” “blessed,” “broken,” and “given” summarize the life of a priest, because whenever I come together with members of this community and celebrate the Eucharist, I take bread, bless it, break it, and give it. “These words also summarize [our lives] as [Christians] because, as [Christians, we are] called to become bread for the world: bread that is taken, blessed, broken, and given. Most importantly…they summarize [our] lives as… human beings because in every moment of [our lives] somewhere, somehow the taking, the blessing, the breaking, and the giving are happening.”³

What does it mean to say that we are “taken”? To be “taken” by God is to be chosen, to be precious to God. As Henri puts it, “Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God’s loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by our God who is all ears for us. Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal love.”⁴ Claiming and reclaiming our chosenness is the great spiritual battle of our lives, for in a competitive, power-hungry, manipulative world, it is all too easy to forget that God has taken us, God has chosen us — easy to slide into self-doubt and self-rejection.

Knowing that we have been taken by God, that we have been chosen, is the first thing we need to claim as we behold what we are and become what we receive. The second is to recognize that we are “blessed.” The word “blessing” comes from the Latin word, benedicere, which literally means to speak well of someone, to say good things about someone. We all have a deep need for affirmation, to know that we are valued not just because of something we did or because we have a particular talent, but simply because we are.

Henri tells a wonderful story about the power of blessing in his community.⁵ For the last ten years of his life, this renowned spiritual teacher and best-selling author who had taught at world-class universities lived as a chaplain at the L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto, a community for people who are mentally and physically disabled. Henri describes how one day a handicapped member of the community, Janet, asked him for a blessing. Henri was distracted, and rather automatically traced the sign of the cross on her forehead. Janet protested, “No, I want a real blessing!” Henri realized how unthinkingly he had responded to her request and he promised that at the next prayer service, he would give her a real blessing. After the service was over, when about thirty people were sitting in a circle on the floor, Henri announced, “Janet has asked me for a special blessing.” He didn’t really know what she wanted, but she made it crystal clear: she stood up and walked over to him. He was wearing a long white robe with large sleeves that covered his hands as well and his arms, and when Janet came forward and put her arms around him and put her head against his chest, Henri covered her with his sleeves so that she almost vanished in the folds of her robe.

As they held each other, Henri said “Janet, I want you to know that you are God’s Beloved Daughter. You are precious in God’s eyes. Your beautiful smile, your kindness to the people in your house, and all the good things you do show what a beautiful human being you are. I know you feel a little low these days and that there is some sadness in your heart, but I want you to remember who you are: a very special person, deeply loved by God and all the people who are here with you.”⁶

As he said these words, Janet raised her head and looked at him, and from her broad smile, Henri knew that she had really heard and received the blessing.

After Janet returned to her place, another handicapped woman raised her hand — she, too, wanted a blessing. She stood up and put her face against his chest, and before long many more of the handicapped people took a turn, expressing the same desire to be blessed.

Henri says that, for him, the most touching moment came when one of the assistants, a twenty-four-year-old student raised his hand and said, “And what about me?” When I heard Henri tell this story, he mentioned that this was a big, burly guy with a neck out to here, probably a football player. This fellow came forward and Henri wrapped his arms around him and said, “John, it is so good that you are here. You are God’s Beloved Son. Your presence is a joy for all of us. When things are hard and life is burdensome, always remember that you are loved with an ever-lasting love.”

As Henri spoke these words, John looked at him with tears in his eyes and then he said, “Thank you, thank you very much.”⁷

How hungry we are for blessing! And we are blessed, for God is always speaking a word of blessing in our hearts. When we know ourselves as blessed, we can’t help but speak good things to other people, and about other people, and call forth their beauty and truth. As Henri says, “No one is brought to life through curses, gossip, accusations, or blaming… As the ‘blessed ones,’ we can walk through this world and offer blessings. It doesn’t require much effort. It flows naturally from our hearts.”⁸

We are chosen and blessed. And we are broken, too. Everyone in this room is broken. We all have places of loneliness or fear, places of disappointment, shame, or grief. We all know the pain of broken relationships, and we all face death, which Henri calls “the most radical manifestation of brokenness.”⁹ Accepting and befriending our brokenness is part of the long journey of entrusting our whole selves to the care of God, so that, as St. Paul puts it, we know that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” [Romans 14:8]. And it is important to place our brokenness in the light of God’s blessing, to experience it within the context of God’s love. When something ‘bad’ happens to us, it can be tempting to let that event fuel the fire of our self-rejection, to say to ourselves, “You see? Of course that happened to me. I always thought I was no good. Now I know for sure — the facts of my life prove it.” But when we know ourselves as God’s Beloved, we experience our suffering differently — maybe as a kind of purification, or as a way to enter a deeper communion with a loving God who, in Christ, allowed himself to be broken.

We are chosen, blessed, and broken — to be given. “Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others,” writes Henri. “…Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life… How different would our life be were we truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away! How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it… and that — even then — there will be leftovers!”¹⁰

Do you remember our Gospel story? As Matthew puts it, “All ate and were filled” [Mt 14: 20], and even after those thousands were fed, the leftovers could be piled up in twelve baskets. That is the promise of the Gospel: that as we know ourselves to be taken, blessed, broken, and given, we will become bread for the world. Our lives will feed and bless those around us in more ways than we can ask or imagine.

In our Eucharist this morning, we see “a sign of God’s desire and intent to feed not only us but this whole hungry world.”¹¹

Once again, we behold what we are.

May we become what we receive.

1. Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary: The Word of God for the Church Today, Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press, 1984, p.154.

2. Text written by Society of St. John the Evangelist, sent to me courtesy of Brother James Koester, SSJE. Initially, the celebrant at SSJE invited worshipers to the Table with a longer statement based on St. Augustine: “Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out for you; behold what you are, become what you receive.” This was later shortened and made responsive: “Behold what you are.” “May we become what we receive.”

3. Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, New York, NY: Crossroad, 1992, p. 48.

4. Ibid., p. 58.

5. Ibid., pp. 70-72.

6. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

7. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

8. Ibid, p. 82.

9. Ibid., p. 86.

10. Ibid., p 106. 123.

11. From Prayers of the People, WALK OF WITNESS For the Fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals, for use on July 20 or July 27, 2008.

Comfortable Words

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” [Matthew 11:28]. Before I say one more thing, let’s stop right here and give our minds room to do what they are probably already doing – going straight to Handel’s Messiah. First the alto sings, “He shall feed His flock like a shepherd,” and after a bit the alto steps aside and along comes the soprano, picking up the melody and launching into that exquisite passage, “Come unto Him, all ye that labour, come unto Him, ye that are heavy laden, and He will give you rest.” You’ll be glad to know that I don’t plan to sing it.

That sentence from Matthew is one of a group of sentences from Scripture that are often called the “comfortable words. ” If you grew up with the 1928 Prayer Book, you may remember that after the confession and absolution, the priest would say “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him. ‘Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy-laden, and I will refresh you.’” A contemporary translation of that sentence is also in today’s prayer book,¹ though introduced by a different phrase.

“Come unto me” – why do we call these “comfortable words”? It’s not that Jesus wants us to lounge around in an easy chair, but that he wants to give us strength. That’s what the word “comfortable” originally meant –“strengthening.” The word “comfort” comes from the Latin “cum” (with) and “fort” (strength). The Holy Spirit, the Comforter, sends us God’s strength. “Come to me,” Jesus says to us this morning. “I want to give you strength. I want to give you hope. I want to give you life.”

But many people didn’t listen to Jesus and turned him away, and today’s Gospel begins with Jesus’ cry of frustration as he says to the crowds, “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’” [Mt 11: 16]. It’s as if Jesus were inviting people to play wedding games, and the people said, “No, we don’t feel like being happy,” and as if John the Baptist were inviting them to play funeral games, and the people said, “No, we don’t feel like being sad.”² Human nature can be so perverse! John the Baptist and Jesus were saying in different ways, “Look, here is the doorway to God! Here is the path to life!” but no matter what each of them said, the crowds could find fault, if they wanted to. They could hang back — wary, critical, refusing to be satisfied. When John came, neither eating nor drinking, some people blew him off – “Hey, what’s wrong with him? He must have a demon.” And when Jesus came, eating and drinking, they shrugged him off, too, saying, “Forget that guy — he’s a glutton and a drunkard, and he hangs out with tax collectors and sinners” [c.f. Mt 11:18-19].

Catch us in a certain mood and we don’t want to listen and we just don’t care, and it doesn’t matter what the person is saying, it’s never going to be good enough. The person could be telling us the secret of life and giving us the keys to the heavenly kingdom, and we would stick our fingers in our ears. I don’t want to know this. I don’t want to hear this. My life is fine the way it is. I have my own way of doing things. I already know everything I want to know. I don’t want to change. I want you to leave me alone. Am I the only person in this room that gets like that sometimes? When I go there, I am stubborn and proud and my heart is as hard as a rock. Jesus ran up against plenty of people who pushed him away like that.

What did he do then? Today’s Gospel tells us what he did: he turned to God in prayer. He touched into the love of the divine Father that was always flowing through him. He refreshed himself in that harmonious, mutual indwelling of Father and Son, in which the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love that circulates between them. And out of that deep sense of interior companionship and strength, out of that relationship of love from which he received his identity, Jesus turned again to the people around him and invited them to join him.

“Come to me,” he said, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

It is an invitation that Jesus extended to everyone, for to everyone he met he said, “Come.”

“Come down!” he cried to Zacchaeus, who had climbed high up in that tree. “I want to share a meal with you!” [c.f. Luke 19:1-10].

“Come up!” he said to the woman who had been bent over for eighteen years. “I want to see your face and look into your eyes” [c.f. Luke 13:10-17].

“Come out!” he cried to Lazarus, who was closed away in a tomb. “In me you are alive” [c.f. John 11:38-44].

“Come close!” he murmured to the children as he gathered them into his arms. “It is good to be with you” [c.f. Matthew 19:13-15].

“Come on!” he called to the fishermen. “Follow me! Let’s go” [c.f. Matthew 4:18-19].

If Jesus were to show up this morning, I wonder how he would invite you into his presence. Would he say, “Come down — come down out of your head and into your heart — that is your home; that is where you will meet me”? Or, if you are in a place of self-criticism and low self-esteem, maybe he would say, “Come up. In me you have dignity and worth.” If some part of you is dead, or closed off and locked away, maybe he would say, “Come out! I want to give you life.” If you feel lonely, uncertain, or afraid, maybe he would say, “Come close. I want to be with you.” If you’ve been holding back from jumping into the adventure of giving yourself to God 100%, maybe Jesus would say to you, “Come on. Let’s go.”

I invite us to pause for a moment so that you and I can listen inwardly as Jesus says to each of us, “Come to me. Come.”

………….. [silence] ……………

In leading retreats over the years, I’ve found that when many people try to imagine Jesus loving them and inviting them to come close, they can’t let him in. They worry that Jesus is judging them — that they are not good enough for him, not worthy of his care. If you notice this coming up for you, don’t worry — you’re in good company. So it’s worth noticing that Jesus says very explicitly in this passage that he is “gentle and humble in heart” [Mt 11:29]. He is not judging us or setting any conditions. You don’t have to become perfect before you can receive his love and be welcomed into his presence.

And he comes above all to those who are weary and whose burdens are heavy. What burdens are you carrying? Some of us have financial worries: will we have enough to get by? Some of us are burdened with fears about our health or the health of a loved one. We may be burdened by anger, by the weight of a fight we’ve had with someone, or a painful misunderstanding. We may feel the burden of loss — maybe the loss of a friendship or the loss of a dream or the loss of someone we love who has died. We may feel burdened by responsibility, by a difficult decision that we have to make, or by the effort to be in control, to stay on top of things, to make things go the way we want them to. We may be weighed down by guilt, or by worries about the future — our own future, our country’s future, maybe even the future of the planet. The burden we carry may be something new, or it may be something we’ve been hauling around for so long, we hardly know who we’d be if we let it go.

What burdens are you carrying? Can you drop them for a moment? Can you place them at Jesus’ feet? Can you let them go so completely that not even the tips of your finger are touching them?

Put them down, he is telling us. Let them go. I will give you rest.

It’s really hard to do this — it’s the discipline of detachment and self-emptying, the practice of letting go our obsessions and preoccupations — not just our worries, but even our noblest thoughts, our most cherished personal convictions and political opinions, even the ownership of our own lives. We put it all down when we come into Jesus’ presence, and we rest at last. We rest in that space of encounter, that space of love, holding on to nothing.

And as our souls rest in Jesus’ presence, we are drawn into the divine love that gave birth to the earth and all the stars. We discover that just as there is something for us to let go, there is also something for us to take up. “Take my yoke upon you,” says Jesus, “and learn from me.” A yoke is something that holds two oxen together. Where one goes, the other goes. They pull together in the same direction. When we put on the yoke of Jesus (a yoke that began at our baptism, when we were drawn into the life of the crucified and risen Christ, and marked as Christ’s own forever) — when we consciously and willingly take up the yoke of Christ, then we put ourselves at the service of God’s love. We let God’s unconditional love be our goal, for that is the direction that our souls want to head, and our brother Jesus is beside us as a constant companion to give us comfort and give us strength. We are yoked to a love that will never let us go and that wants to overflow into all our relationships, into all our decisions and actions. Our souls are at rest, because they are at ease. Love is what they were made for, and so the yoke is “easy” and the “burden is light” [Mt 11:30].

Yet there is also a work to be done, the spiritual discipline of staying connected to that love, moment to moment to moment. And that is why we are gathered for the Eucharist this morning: willingly and consciously to join our lives again to the love we find in Jesus, the one who invites us to come to him and to find rest for our souls.

1. Rite 1 Eucharist, BCP, p. 332, and the sacrament of Reconciliation, BCP, p. 449. The ‘comfortable words’ have been part of Anglican worship since the first efforts to produce an English language prayer book back in 1548.

2. The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 2 (Chapters 11-28), revised edition, translated with an introduction and interpretation by William Barclay, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975, p. 9.