Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost,  November 19, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

1 Samuel 1:4-20
Hebrews 10:11-14,19-25
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Mark 13:1-8

Birth Pangs

“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering,
for he who has promised is faithful.”
Hebrews 10:23

Have you ever read a Bible passage that spoke so directly to you that it went straight to your heart like an arrow?  That’s what happened to me 20 years ago when I first read this morning’s Old Testament story of Hannah and the birth of Samuel – or, as today’s Collect puts it, when I first began to hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest this section of Scripture.  I was 35 years old, newly married, and childless.  I badly wanted a child, but like a good number of women I was struggling with infertility.  During the long bout of medical treatments, I read with great interest the biblical stories of barren women who through the grace of God conceived and bore children late in life – Sarah, for instance, and Rebekah, Rachel, and Elizabeth.  But it was the story of Hannah that most captured my imagination.

Her story may not be familiar to you, since today’s reading is a new passage that we have been given because of our transition to the Revised Common Lectionary, so let’s take a moment to review it.  The first character we meet is Elkanah, who goes every year to worship in Shiloh, the city where the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle are kept.  Elkanah has two wives.  With one wife, Penninah, he has children, but the other wife, Hannah, is infertile.  Elkanah feels a special love for Hannah – he brings her a double portion of the sacrifice.  But the other wife, Penninah, is making Hannah’s life miserable, provoking and irritating her because she can’t bear a child, so that Hannah weeps and will not eat.  Elkanah tries to encourage Hannah, asking “Hannah, why do you weep?  Why do you not eat?… Am I not more to you than ten sons?” [1 Samuel 1:8].

But this doesn’t console her, and one day, “after they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh” [1 Samuel 1:9], Hannah goes to the temple and brings her suffering to God.  Weeping bitterly, she asks God for help and makes a vow: if God will give her a son, she will dedicate him to God’s service as a nazirite.  (Scholars don’t seem to know exactly what a nazirite is, except, as the story tells us, they don’t drink wine and don’t cut their hair.)

The priest, Eli, can see her distress, for she is weeping and moving her lips, but because she is praying in silence he misunderstands what is going on and accuses her of being drunk.  Hannah stands up for herself and tells him that she has been “pouring out [her] soul before the LORD” [1 Samuel 1:15], and Eli tells her to go in peace, assuring her that God will grant her request.

And so Hannah leaves the temple happy.  She believes him.  She believes that God will be faithful to her.  And sure enough, after Hannah and her husband worship one last time and return home, “the LORD remembered her” [1 Samuel 1:19], and before long she does conceive and bear a son, whom she  names Samuel.

When God grants you your heart’s desire, what can you do but sing?  And that’s what Hannah does, praising God in the Song of Hannah that we used this morning in place of a psalm: ‘My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in my God…There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God” (1 Samuel 2: 1a, 2).  She praises the God of justice who has the power to cast down and raise up, the power to break the bows of the mighty and give strength to the feeble.  If the Song of Hannah sounds familiar, that is because it became the template for the Song of Mary, the Magnificat that Mary sings when she is pregnant with Jesus and praises God’s power to overthrow every expectation, to raise up the lowly and bring new life into the world [Luke 146-55; BCP pp. 91-92].

When I read Hannah’s story 20 years ago, I identified very literally with Hannah’s frustrated longing for a child.  I felt that I was sharing in her suffering and sorrow.  Like her, I didn’t feel that anyone, not even my beloved husband, could console me, and that the place to bring my grief was ultimately to God.  Like Hannah, I too made a vow: if God gave me a child, I would entrust that child to God – not that the child would be a nazirite, for I had no idea what a nazirite was – but in the sense that I would try not to cling to the child.  My child’s soul would belong not to me, but to God; the child would be a child of God, even more than he or she would be my own.

You can see why – after several years of infertility work came to nothing, after my husband and I decided to give up any further medical treatment and to relinquish our hope for a biological child – when I suddenly and almost miraculously conceived and bore a child, a son, we decided to name him Samuel. 

Twenty years later I come back to this story with a deep sense of gratefulness for how it carried me through a dark time and pointed me toward hope.  From Hannah I learned something about facing my pain and frustration, and bringing everything to God.  I learned something about persistence and passion, and about entrusting the outcome to God.  I learned about God’s power to bring forth life, though obviously it may not come in the way that we expect.  A Christian friend of mine who went through her own struggle with infertility recently decided to adopt a girl from China, and in gratitude for God’s power to bring new life, she named her daughter Hannah.

Now you may be sitting here thinking, “Well, fine, but this doesn’t relate to me since I have no interest in bearing or raising a child.”  But isn’t it true that in whatever stage of life we are, we sense deep within us a longing to bring forth life?  Psychologist Erik Erikson spoke of a middle-aged person’s drive toward generativity – the desire to encourage and support the younger generation and to pass on what we have learned – just as he spoke of an elderly person’s drive toward wisdom – the desire to look deeply into life, to make peace with one’s place in the big scheme of things.

Artists know the longing to let their creative powers be expressed.  A teacher standing in front of a classroom, wondering how to engage her students; a parent considering what to say to a cantankerous child; a doctor trying to diagnose and treat an illness; a consultant trying to untangle the dynamics of a dysfunctional workplace — each one knows the longing to say or do whatever will move the situation forward and create fresh possibilities so that new life can be born.

We are each like Hannah, standing before God and asking to be a channel for life, a vehicle through which God can tend and bless the world.   And we don’t bring just our personal longings — we also bring to God our longing for a renewal of the earth, a renewal of our human societies.  We ask for life to flow through us, so that through our own hands and words and deeds, new life can come into the world. 

For so many people these are such uncertain and anxious times.  Melting ice caps.  Erratic weather.  The prospect of peak oil and the eventual collapse of a petroleum-based economy.  The news that we have exceeded our planet’s carrying capacity, its ability to replenish the resources that are being used up. No wonder so many of us look to the future with some degree of dread.  Are we heading toward catastrophic climate change and social upheaval?

We want to turn things around.  We want to bring into being something new.  We want to stand up for life, to protect life, to bring new life to birth.  So, like Hannah, we stand before God in our helplessness and need, asking God to come with great power and to make a way where there is no way, to bring new life when maybe all we can see just now is only frustration or despair. 

Hannah didn’t know it, but when she finally brought her personal pain to God, she opened the path for God to change her country’s history. “The story of the birth of Samuel comes at a key turning point in the history of Israel.” (1) Samuel would be the last of the so-called “judges” – inspired leaders of Israel – and would move the nation out of a period of anarchy and chaos [cf. Judges 21:25] into a monarchy.  It was Samuel who anointed the first kings, Saul and then David.  Without Hannah’s persistence and passion, “there would have been no Samuel, and some other way would have had to be found to establish Israel and the monarchy.” (2)

We’re not looking for any monarchy, but many of us are hungering for new ways to organize communities, new ways to shape our economy so that is based on sustainable principles. Hannah’s story – and our Gospel passage, too – challenge us to live into these violent and uncertain times as if they are the inevitable pangs that accompany a birth.  They challenge us to live with the courage and endurance and patience and even the excitement that attend any birth.  That’s what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel reading from Mark: “Do not be alarmed,” he tells us, when we “hear of wars and rumors of wars,” when nations rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there are earthquakes and famines.  “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs” [Mark 13: 7, 8].

God’s Spirit, God’s energy, is calling us to new life, and isn’t it true that even now something new is being born?  We see small signs of a new economic order and of people relating to each other in new ways. We see people supporting small, locally owned businesses and participating in community-supported agriculture.  We see people trying to live more simply, to waste less and to consume only what they need.  Even now, 6 weeks before Christmas, some people have decided to opt out of buying a bunch of stuff that will only end up in the landfill.  Right here at Grace Church we see small groups of people resisting the loneliness and alienation that seem to be part of this post-industrial society and starting up “pastorates,” gathering on occasional evenings in each other’s homes to pray and talk and build real friendships.

Signs like these are very small, but they are signs that something new is being born.  Of course we can always throw up our hands, say it’s too late to stop climate change – that we’re going to have to settle for a future of tribalism and fear, of extreme weather events and millions of refugees. 

But like Hannah, we turn to God in longing and in hope.  We want to bring new life into the world.  We want to create a world that is socially just and environmentally sound.  We want to pass on to our children the life that is here.  We want to be able to say to future generations: “Look! I give you polar bears.  I give you coral reefs.  I give you an intact ice sheet that is the size of a continent.  I give you seasons.  I give you moderate weather.” (3)

Like Hannah we want to say, ‘My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in my God…There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God.”    (1 Samuel 2: 1a, 2)

  


(1) Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, et al., Preaching Through the Christian Year, Year B, Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, p. 467.

(2) Ibid, p. 469.

(3) Eban Goodstein of Green House Network used these images in October, 2006 in a talk at UMass Amherst about his new initiative, Focus the Nation.

 

Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 22, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.  

Isaiah 53:4-12
Hebrews 4:12-16
Psalm 91: 9-16
Mark 10:35-45

So You Want to Be Great?

“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you…”

As you know, a good number of our community is away this weekend at the Bement Camp and Conference Center, exploring what it means to be peacemakers – to live at peace within oneself, in relation to others, and in relation to the natural world.  We who have stayed behind have our own chance to reflect on the way on peace and non-violence as we consider today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark.

To open up this passage, I think it’s useful to see where it is placed in Mark’s Gospel.  If this were a good old-fashioned Protestant church, I’d be asking you to whip out your Bibles.  But since we don’t have a stack of Bibles in the pews, I hope you’ll bear with me as I walk through this myself.  

One thing to notice is that this story of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, coming to Jesus to ask him to seat them at his right hand and at his left, in his glory, is their response to Jesus predicting for the third time that he is going to suffer, die, and rise again.  In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus makes this prediction three times, and each time the same thing happens: the disciples don’t understand, and Jesus teaches them what it means to follow him.

The first prediction is in Chapter 8: “Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi… Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mk 8:27, 31).  But Peter doesn’t understand, and rebukes him, and Jesus turns and says those famous words, “Get behind me, Satan!  For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mk 8:33).  He goes on to teach about discipleship: those who want to follow him must deny themselves and take up their cross; those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake for the sake of the gospel, will save it (Mk 8: 34-35).

Soon after that comes the second prediction of the passion.  In chapter 9, we read, “They went on from there and passed through Galilee… He was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again'” (Mk 9:30-31).  Once again, the disciples don’t understand (“…they did not understand what he was saying,” Mk 9:32) and start arguing with one another about who is the greatest (Mk 9:33-34).  And once again Jesus teaches them about the meaning of discipleship, saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mk 9:35), and then takes up a little child to illustrate his point.

The third prediction of Jesus’ passion takes place in chapter 10, just before today’s Gospel passage.  We read, “They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them… He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him” (Mark 10:32), and then comes the most detailed account yet of the political trial and execution that Jesus will undergo, including his betrayal, trial, torture, execution, “and after three days he will rise again” (Mk 10:34).

Do the disciples understand this time?  Not a chance.  We move straight to James and John asking for positions of privilege and honor, to be seated at Jesus’ right hand and at his left, as if they are planning the administration of the new regime and want to claim the top spots, maybe cabinet member #1 and cabinet member #2. 

Have they been listening to Jesus?  Have they understood a word he has been saying?  Jesus is not making a grab for political power.  His life on earth is going to end not in glory but in shame, not in self-assertion and self-aggrandizement but in self-emptying.  He is not going to march in his troops to take over the city – he is going to be crucified outside its gates.  His glory will come only in heaven, after the resurrection.

James and John aren’t the only disciples who still don’t get it.  When the others hear what James and John were asking, the ten of them get angry (Mk 10:41), and you can’t help wondering whether they are angry because James and John tried to get an unfair head start in snagging the top places of honor, not because they misunderstood Jesus’ mission so completely.

And so, as Jesus did on the two previous occasions, he explains again to all of them what discipleship means.  “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so with you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mk 10:42-43).

When you read any story and the same pattern repeats three times, you have to ask: Why? Why does Mark repeat the pattern in which Jesus predicts that he will suffer, die, and rise again, the disciples misunderstand, and Jesus teaches them about the meaning of discipleship? 

Maybe the answer is that these events are historically true.  Maybe Jesus repeatedly spoke to his disciples of his oncoming suffering and death, and they repeatedly misunderstood or ignored what he was saying.  But maybe the repetition has a deeper meaning.  Like the disciples, we too need time to understand the way of the cross and to learn how to live it out in our lives.  Mark’s Gospel gives us many opportunities to identify with the disciples’ confusion and stubbornness and blindness, and to let Jesus speak to our hearts.

Take James and John, the sons of Zebedee.  They are not strangers to me – they are the voices inside my head that urge me to push myself forward and seize some power, to take what I want and never mind anyone else.  I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the human impulse to self-assertion, but when we forget that we are interconnected with other human beings, when we forget that other people are also made in the image of God and that their needs and hungers are as real and as valid as our own, then a healthy self-assertiveness can morph into a terrible lust for dominance and power.

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, express the impulse that makes us cut someone off in traffic or cut someone off who’s talking to us.  They are the parts of ourselves that want to be totally in charge of what happens, to be in control, to have things go our way and devil take the hindmost.  They are the competitive inner voices that make us jockey for position and elbow everyone else aside.

But their voices don’t echo just inside our own psyche – they can take over the psyche of a whole community or nation.  We hear their voices on the world stage in the groups or countries that seek domination and unjust power, in the voices of threat and armed violence, in the voices that demand, as did James and John, “Do for me whatever I ask of you” (see Mk 10: 35).  In short: do it my way.

For all of us who long to be peacemakers and to be faithful to the way of the cross, I hear in today’s Gospel three calls.  The first is a call to self-restraint.  What would it look like for us as individuals to restrain or contain within ourselves the energies of the sons of Zebedee?  It might look like a willingness to listen rather than to speak, a willingness to set aside our own needs for a time in order to let someone else come forward.  Restraining the sons (and daughters) of Zebedee might look like a willingness not to jump immediately into every situation and try to fix it and change it and get our hands all over it, but rather to wait and watch for a while, to let it be. Sometimes the wisest way to live the Golden Rule — to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – is to turn it inside out and to focus on not doing unto others what you would not have them do unto you.  Refraining from doing harm, refraining from interfering and intervening is sometimes the most loving “action” we can take.

Self-restraint.

I also hear in this passage a call to self-acceptance.  Jesus knows how clueless his disciples can be  — after all, in the space of three chapters they’ve misunderstood him three times!  And he knows how clueless we can be, too.  So it’s good to notice that he doesn’t criticize James and John for their selfish request.  When they come forward and make their demands, he doesn’t heap contempt on them for being arrogant or greedy.  He doesn’t push them away.  Instead he listens to them and patiently teaches them about the ways of the kingdom, in which nobody lords it over anyone else.  And, with their consent, he promises to share his life with them.  They will share the same baptism; they will drink the same cup.  In other words, Jesus invites James and John to stay close beside him and to learn from him until finally they live in union with him.

I think we can work with our inner voices in much the same way.  When we hear that inner clamor for personal power, that willful, anxious urge to dominate and control, maybe we can identify those voices as our inner sons and daughters of Zebedee.  Maybe we can give them a hearing, just as Jesus did, and ask them what they want.  And then we can bring them to Jesus, who loves them utterly and in whose company they can learn to move from power-over to power-with, from seeking fame and glory and success to seeking a way to serve.  Self-acceptance doesn’t mean that we like everything within us, but it does mean that we are honest with ourselves and acknowledge what is so.  And the more we accept ourselves, the less likely we will be to project onto other people the parts of ourselves that we are unwilling to face.

Self-acceptance.

Finally, I hear in this passage a call to self-giving.  If the way to greatness is to serve, then everyone can be great – because everyone can serve.  In the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed, there is room for all and love for all – love even, and especially, for those who are vulnerable, powerless, and insignificant in the eyes of the world.  Because we are baptized into Christ and we drink from his cup, we find ourselves wanting to stand not with the ones who abuse their power, but with the ones who are treated unjustly.  And so it was that a group of us from Grace Church led an interfaith protest this week in front of the Amherst post office, denouncing what amounts to the legalization of torture by our national government.  “Remember those who are in prison,” says the Book of Hebrews, “as though you were in prison with them; [remember] those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured” (Hebrews 13:3-4).

The way of peace making, the way of non-violence, the way of the cross, asks us to practice self-restraint, self-acceptance, and self-giving, and not to count the cost.  Practices such as these are subversive in a society that above all values individualism, materialism, and looking out for Number One.  But they are practices that honor the one who came among us not to be served but to serve, and who gave his life to set us free. 

Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 8, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.  

Genesis 2:18-24
Hebrews 2:9-18
Psalm 8

“What God has joined together, let no one separate”

I had an aha! moment a week or two ago, just as the seasons changed and we began heading into fall.  I was eating supper with my husband on the porch of our home in Northampton, and as we sat there chatting about our day and digging into greens and raw vegetables that I’d picked up at the Food Bank Farm in Hadley, I had a sudden revelation.  It wasn’t a formal meal, so I had put down my fork and picked up a carrot in my fingers, and I was just about to take a bite when it suddenly came to me: this carrot had been planted, grown and harvested just a few miles from my house.  I felt a sudden sense of kinship with that carrot.  We were connected.  We’d lived through the same summer heat and the same summer downpours.  We’d felt the same wind blow across the valley, experienced the same warmth of the sun, the same cool of the clouds.  We were creatures together, this carrot and I: neighbors of a sort, some kind of kin.

I don’t suppose that human beings actually share very much DNA with a carrot, but in that sudden moment of illumination on the porch I realized that this carrot and I were creatures connected to the same soil, growing under the same sun, sprung from the divine Source.  

“Brother Carrot,” I might have called it, before I took a bite.

I know this is a rather fanciful way to start a sermon, but my story has a point: we human beings are on a long journey back to understanding our connections with the Earth.  “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9). That’s the task before us, as I see it: how to find our way back to union with God and all God’s Creation, how to reclaim our partnership not just with our human fellows but also with all living creatures.  I savor every moment of ecological consciousness that is given to me, and to you, because every such moment is a moment of healing. 

All week we’ve been celebrating St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology, whose Feast Day was on Wednesday and whose vision of God’s presence in the biophysical world we will honor again this afternoon at 4 o’clock in a service of blessing the animals.  Heaven knows that in many ways we human beings do not live in right relationship with the land and sea and sky, to say nothing of our relationship with our brothers and sisters who are four-legged, feathered or finned. 

I don’t think I need to belabor the point.  Some of you are fresh from seeing “An Inconvenient Truth,” when on Friday about 85 people packed the Parish Hall to watch the movie.  We are one of 4,000 congregations across the country that showed the film this week, as people of faith take hold of the urgent need to curb global warming. 

Even if you haven’t yet seen the movie, you may know that climate scientists reported at the end of September that the Earth may be close to the warmest it has been in the last million years (1).  At the end of the summer scientists also reported that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much more quickly than they had anticipated, and that in a drastic and unprecedented thaw, this summer an area of Arctic sea ice that normally stays frozen all year briefly opened a channel that was “big enough to allow a ship to sail to the North Pole… Polar bears have drowned and receding Arctic glaciers are uncovering previously unknown islands.” (2) The effects of global warming are being felt not only in far off places but right here in our beloved Pioneer Valley.  Maybe you read the front-page news this week about the new study “projecting that the Northeastern climate will become like that of the deep South by the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are lowered.” (3) 

We all know we’re living in an unsustainable way.  Depending on non-renewable energy and resources is by definition unsustainable.  Consuming more resources than the planet can provide is by definition unsustainable.  Producing a killing level of greenhouse gases is by definition unsustainable.

So what are we to do?  As Christians, one thing we do is dive into Scripture and tradition, looking for wisdom as we struggle to articulate what a religious environmental worldview might look like.  We read familiar texts with a new ecological eye, pressing them to deal with questions that human beings have never faced before. 

Today’s reading from Genesis is a good case in point.  It’s a section of the mythic story of our creation, and the first time I read it through in preparation for this sermon, all I could see was a justification for human alienation from nature.  I interpreted it like this: God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner” (Gen 2:18).  OK, fine, but God apparently creates animals only to relieve human loneliness.  In other words, man is supreme and is created first, and animals exist only to serve his purposes and needs.  God then trots the animals out to the man, who slaps a name on each one – cow, bird, crocodile, whatever – as a way of expressing his dominance and control — there is power in assigning a name.  The animals prove to be inadequate companions for the man, so God decides to create woman. 

The moral?  Well, I decided, this text could be read as a Judeo-Christian rationalization for human dominance and exploitation of the natural world.  Taken alongside Psalm 8, with its lines “You give him mastery over the works of your hands; you put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea” (Ps 8:7-9) – well, I thought, now there’s a mandate for plundering and spoiling the natural world.

But we can’t settle for interpretations like that – they’re not adequate today, if they ever were.  I went back to the Genesis text and considered a different way to read the story.  God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”  OK, I thought. Humanity is built for relationship.  We can’t exist by ourselves or for ourselves alone. God has created us to seek connection. 

Out of the ground God then forms “every animal of the field and every bird of the air”  (Gen 2:19).  You may remember that in an earlier verse Adam himself was formed “from the dust of the ground” (Gen 2:7).  It’s as if the storyteller wants to show that humans and non-human creatures are intrinsically linked, because we spring from the same soil.  We’re made from the same stuff.

Then God brings the animals to the man “to see what he would call them.”  Clearly human beings have a special role in God’s creation, but is it one of domination and exploitation?  Naming a living creature, or discovering the name that it’s already been given, requires care and curiosity, not high-handed authority. From this perspective I imagine Adam contemplating each God-given creature one by one, and taking time to get to know and interact with it before deciding on its name.  How can you know the name of one plant or another, or distinguish one bird from another, until you’ve looked at it closely? 

Last week a naturalist took my husband and me on a walk around our land in Ashfield, teaching us how to identify wild edibles and healing plants.  Unlike many of you, I am clueless when it comes to naming trees and birds and mosses and plants, so I had to work pretty hard.  She had us comparing the edges of leaves, to see if they were wavy or rounded or sharp.  She had us squatting to examine mushrooms, and scraping birch bark to catch the root beer scent, and peering through a magnifying lens to study the patterns of veins on a plant and the spores on the underside of ferns.  She had us look and smell and touch so that we could notice the difference between one plant and another, and perhaps begin to remember its name.  As we walked out of the woods at the end of the afternoon, she remarked, “If you don’t remember the names, never mind: now you know how to look.”

So I like to imagine that Adam’s naming of the creatures had something of the same gentle, inquisitive, appreciative spirit that I saw in her.  I like to think that he knew how to look – that his naming of the animals was a sign of his willingness to abide with them and learn from them.  The best words for anything come only after we’ve experienced it deeply, not before.

And when Adam finally finds his partner, bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, their shared task as human beings is to “to till and keep” (Gen 2:15) the Earth – that is, to exercise a “mastery” or dominion over non-human creatures that is marked by benevolence, not exploitation.  Some theologians define dominion not as domination but as “the mediation of divine blessings to nonhuman creatures.” (4) That’s our vocation, that’s our job – to mediate divine blessings to nonhuman creatures.  Imagine!

In a time of planetary crisis, we need to reclaim an ecological consciousness, to perceive and celebrate the sacredness of all Creation.  You may or may not be drawn to nature mysticism, and I’m sure that some people think it impossibly sentimental or eccentric to imagine speaking, as St. Francis did, of Brother Wolf, Brother Sun, or Sister Moon – to say nothing of feeling any kinship with a carrot!

But I would argue that one of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to one of intimacy with it.  And we don’t have much time- for instance, some experts say that we have about a decade in which to avert – or not – the most catastrophic level of climate change.

The good news is that there are many things we can do right away, as you will see if you come for coffee hour in the Parish Hall and take a look at our little eco-fair.  We hope you’ll stock up on compact fluorescent light bulbs, which save both energy and money, and get off junk mail lists, since junk mail gobbles up the equivalent of 100 million trees every year. (5)

Like many of you, I’m trying to make changes at home.  A few weeks ago I set up a composter in the back yard and I’m figuring out that whole business of when to put in leaves, when to throw in food.  We’ve been driving a hybrid car for a while, we became members of Co-op Power, and soon we’ll set up photovoltaic panels to heat our hot water and produce some electricity. We’re trying to turn off unnecessary lights, and next week we’re getting a home energy audit.

 Personal actions are important, but participating in regional and national initiatives may count for even more.  Here in the Pioneer Valley we have a unique opportunity this month to participate in a public planning process to create a regional Clean Energy Plan.  During the month of October, all citizens of Franklin, Hampden, and Hampshire Counties are invited to join an online conversation that will help us set goals and develop action plans for how to increase our energy efficiencies and how to generate more clean, renewable energy right here in the Valley.  At the eco-fair we’ll have little cards like this one that will show you where to sign on. (6)

I’m also excited about two other initiatives.  Focus the Nation is a project to create a national dialogue about stabilizing the climate that will culminate on January 31, 2008, when teach-ins will be held simultaneously across the country.  Inspired by Earth Day 1970, this event will be held early in the presidential primary season. (7) Focus the Nation could help generate the political will to make our national government freeze carbon emissions and take the lead in curbing global warming.  I’m hoping that Grace Church will want to be a part of this effort.

I’m happy to tell you that Grace Church has already signed on to be a co-sponsor of another event: a global warming walk I’m helping to organize that will head from Northampton to Boston next spring.  The Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue will begin in Northampton on March 16, and end in Boston on March 24, with an interfaith prayer service and rally. (8) You can walk for an hour, a day, or a week.  We’ll sing, we’ll pray, we’ll walk in silence, and we’ll bear witness to our commitment to the God “for whom and through whom all things exist” (Hebrews 2:10) and who connects us one with another and with the whole Creation. 

What God has joined together, let no one separate. 

And when I see you on November 4 at Grace Church’s Hundred-Mile Meal and we share a potluck feast of local foods, I’ll be the person bringing a pot of carrot soup.


(1) “Earth May Be at Warmest Point in One Million Years,” by Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters, September 26, 2006.

(2) “Thaw and Storms Opened Channel to North Pole,” by Francois Murphy, Reuters, September 21, 2006.

(3) “Heading South? Reports: N.E. faces big climate changes,” by Richie Davis, The Recorder, Daily Hampshire Gazette, October 5, 2006, p. 1.

You can visit the Union of Concerned Scientists’ new, interactive website to review findings from the new report by independent scientists and researchers on climate change in the Northeast and to consider how the choices we make today will determine our children’s and grandchildren’s future.

(4) 18th century theologian John Wesley is one example cited by James A. Nash in Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991, p. 103.

(5) New American Dream calculation from Conservatree and U.S. Forest Service statistics.

(6) Sign up at: http://forums.e-democracy.org/pioneer-valley.

(7) For information and to sign up your school, college, church, or business, visit http://focusthenation.org .

(8) For information or to volunteer, contact Mathilda Cantwell, (413) 534-6488, email: walk@religiouswitness.org

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 20, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Proverbs 9:1-6
Ephesians 5:15-20
Psalm 34:9-14
John 6:53-59

Feasting on God

A few weeks ago a reporter from the Daily Hampshire Gazette invited me to be the subject of the newspaper’s weekly column “Hampshire I.D.”  Along with questions such as asking you to describe your funniest memory or your strangest job, the column asks you to name your favorite movie. As you might expect, I felt honor-bound to list An Inconvenient Truth because of its urgent message about global warming, but I also decided to mention a movie that has lingered in my mind since its release almost 20 years ago: Babette’s Feast.  Maybe you remember it.  Based on a short story by Isak Dineson, the film tells the story of a superb French chef who moves to a village on the desolate coast of Denmark and begins an anonymous, humble life as housekeeper and cook for two elderly, pious women.  For a long time Babette cooks nothing more exciting than boiled codfish and ale-bread soup, but one day she wins the French lottery and decides to spend every last franc on creating the most memorable, delectable, mouth-watering feast that anyone has ever consumed, even though her guests – the simple villagers – will have no idea what they are eating. 

Part of the pleasure of the movie comes in watching how the abundance flowing out of the kitchen transforms the rigid, anxious villagers.  As the guests feast at this banquet table of endless bounty, their feuds and quarrels are healed and their sins forgiven.  The wine flows freely, one delectable dish after another is presented and consumed, and gradually the guests’ mutual rancor turns into friendship, and their melancholy into joy.  When the feast is over, the guests walk out into the village square and there, under a starlit sky, they spontaneously join hands in a circle and dance.  Their happiness is complete.

The Hampshire Gazette never asked why I enjoy “Babette’s Feast” so much, but I will tell you: it is a story about the power of the Eucharist, and Babette is a figure of Christ.  Like him, she arrives mysteriously among her community, she takes the humble role of a servant, and then she gives away everything she has to provide a banquet that fills the deepest longings of the human heart. (1) As in the Eucharist, her feast transforms everyone who shares in it. The banquet’s food expresses the overflowing mercy of God, and in the course of this marvelous meal, everybody’s fear, hostility, and shame melt away.  The guests awaken to what we might call a higher consciousness or a deeper level of awareness: they discover that the ordinary things of this world – bread, wine, figs, a platter of meat, and – most wondrous of all – even each other, even themselves – are signs of the presence and mercy of God.  For them, ordinary reality – what we see and smell, what we touch and taste and hear – has become sacramental, all lit up with holiness.  What else can they do after such a meal than walk out under the stars, join hands, and dance?

Babette’s Feast comes to mind, of course, because of today’s Gospel passage from the sixth chapter of John, the last section of Jesus’ discourse on the bread of life.  In the very stark, even shocking, words that we just heard, Jesus invites his friends to share in the Eucharistic feast: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” [John 6:53-54].

This is a very emphatic invitation to the Eucharist, but I have to say that these words may sound repugnant to us – as primitive and brutal as an invitation to cannibalism.  We may flinch when we hear them, for why would anyone want to eat a person’s flesh or to drink his blood?  If it’s any consolation, these words shocked Jesus’ listeners, too, and in the verse immediately following the passage that we heard this morning, many of the disciples reportedly say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” [John 6:60].  Commentators point out that “if the idea of eating a man’s flesh would [be] repugnant to a Jewish audience, the idea of drinking blood would be even more so, because blood as food was forbidden under the Law.” (2)

One obvious thing to say about this passage is that Jesus does not mean the words in a literal sense. “Just as Nicodemus thought of rebirth in a purely physical sense [John 3:4] and as the woman at the well first thought of only natural water [John 4:11],” (3) so we too would be mistaken if we took the reference to Jesus’ flesh literally.  But in acknowledging that, I don’t want in any way to blunt the energy behind Jesus’ words and their insistent vigor and clarity: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” [John 6:56].  In a way that words can never adequately express, Jesus is giving himself to us fully in the Eucharistic bread and wine. 

Maybe Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is something like the image that caught my eye this week as I stood at the checkout lane of Whole Foods.  One of those health-oriented, granola-crunch magazines had a peaceful cover photo of a mother nursing her baby.  Mother and baby were gazing steadily into each other’s eyes, and the baby was cradling its palm against the mother’s cheek.  Clearly the baby was not just taking in physical nourishment from the mother’s body; it was also drinking in her presence and the love that was shining from her eyes and smiling face.  Mother and baby were caught up in a love that embraced them both.

 That may seem an unorthodox, even irreverent image for what is going on at the Eucharist, but I am not the first Christian to have considered it.  Back in the 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria compared God to a nursing mother and wrote of “the Father’s loving breasts” and of “the milk of the Father.”   In the 14th century, the female mystic Julian of Norwich similarly spoke of Jesus as “our true Mother” from whose breasts we drink.  Again, this is metaphorical language for God, who is no more male than female, masculine than feminine.  We grope to put into words the intimacy of our union in Christ with the divine.

I think that some part of us does come to the Eucharist with the helplessness of a baby, knowing that we cannot feed ourselves with the bread of life, and that God alone can nourish our deepest hunger.  This is not to say that the Eucharist infantilizes us, for our task is to grow up in Christ.  Sometimes when we come to the Eucharist, it is our warrior self that needs to be fed, the part of us that takes initiative and takes a stand.  It’s all about growing into our maturity in Christ.  As Paul puts it, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” [1 Corinthians 13:11] – or, as we heard in today’s admonition from the book of Proverbs, “Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight” [Proverbs 9:6].  But maybe it is only in the presence of the unwavering love of God in Christ – as steadfast and tender as a mother’s love – that our basic loneliness and narcissism can finally be healed and that human beings can grow up into the cognitive and spiritual maturity that we must attain if we are to heal our planet.

This week I have been reading again some of the work of Joanna Macy, the Buddhist teacher and deep ecologist who speaks and writes so eloquently about the social and ecological crises of our time.  Macy leads workshops around the world that explore what she calls the Great Turning, the transition from the industrial growth society to a life-giving society, the shift from a path of folly, a path, as she puts it, in which economic success is measured “by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste,” (4) to a path of wisdom, the path that moves us toward living in harmony with the Earth and with each other, and the only way of life that can endure for the future.  The Great Turning – the shift to a socially and environmentally sustainable way of life – is, she says, “the essential adventure of our time.” (5)

So this morning I think of Joanna Macy’s concept of the Great Turning when I hear in Proverbs that Wisdom is inviting us to visit her house and to sit at her table and to walk in the way of insight, not of folly, or when I hear the injunction in the passage from Ephesians, “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time” [Ephesians 5:15]. 

And when it comes to the adventure ahead, I consider the Eucharist our greatest spiritual resource. 

Why? Three reasons.

First, the Eucharist teaches us to live with gratitude – the very word “Eucharist” itself means “thanksgiving.” Gratitude is the wellspring of all religions and one of the shortest paths to intimacy with God.  It is when we are grateful that we are most fully alive, and in the Eucharist we begin to learn, as we heard in today’s second reading, how to “[give] thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” [Ephesians 5:20].

Second, the Eucharist teaches us reverence not only for the consecrated bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, but for the whole creation. Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer, put it this way: “To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation.  When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully and reverently it is a sacrament.  When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily and destructively it is a desecration.” (6) Through the Eucharist, we learn to treat the whole creation with reverence and with restraint.

And third, the Eucharist teaches us to celebrate, to keep our vision alive even in the darkest times, to trust that new life can be born even in the midst of what looks like loss and failure.  “Praise the Lord, rise up rejoicing” – that’s what we will sing before we share Eucharist this morning and celebrate Christ’s victory over death.

A life of gratitude, of reverence, and of celebration – there are worse ways to live, and no better way I can think of to face into the challenges that are set before us.  In the joy of living such a life and of being sustained and fed by the one who comes to us in the bread and the wine, perhaps, like the villagers in Babette’s Feast, we too will find ourselves wanting to take hold of each other’s hands and to go outside and dance under the stars.

 


(1) Drawn from “Babette’s Feast: A Religious Film,” by Wendy M. Wright, Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 1, No. 2, October, 1997, Section #22, posted at http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/BabetteWW.htm

(2) The Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown et al (Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 438.

(3) Ibid, p. 437.

(4) Joanna Macy, “The Shift to a Life-sustaining Civilization,” http://www.joannamacy.net/html/great.html#wheel

(5) Ibid.

(6) Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, quoted by Sean McDonagh, To Care for the Earth: A Call to a New Theology (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1986), p. 130.

Sermon for the Feast Day of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2006 delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, at St. John’s Church, Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Exodus 34:29-35
2 Peter 1:13-21
Psalm 99:5-9
Luke 9:28-36

Transfiguration on the Mountain

It is good to be back in Ashfield and to worship with you again.  This morning we have a wonderful Gospel text to consider, because today is August 6, the Feast Day of the Transfiguration.  You may remember having heard the story of the Transfiguration back in February, because every year we end the season of Epiphany — the season of light — with this very literal high point of Jesus’ ministry and public life.  Because the Feast Day of the Transfiguration, August 6, falls on a Sunday this year, it pre-empts our regular readings and we have a chance to ponder it again.

You know the story: soon after Jesus announced to his disciples his coming Passion and death, he took with him Peter and James and John and went up on a high mountain to pray.  Jesus seems to have lived his life in a rhythm that alternated solitude and service, prayer and compassionate action.  Again and again throughout his ministry, Jesus went away to some solitary place to pray, before plunging back into ministry. 

On the mountain, what began for Jesus as deep prayer grew into an intense religious experience.  “While he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” [Luke 9:29].  To describe this change, Greek manuscripts use a word [“metemorphothe”] that is the source of our English word, “metamorphosis”; Latin manuscripts use a word [“transfiguratus est”] that is the basis of our word, “transfiguration.”

Metamorphosis.  Transfiguration.  Whatever you call it, it’s the same thing: at the top of the mountain, Jesus is swept up in the love that sustains the universe.  What Dante called “the love that moves the sun and other stars” (1) penetrates and embraces Jesus completely.  The God who met Moses on Mount Sinai, the God who met Elijah on Mount Horeb, now meets Jesus so powerfully on Mount Tabor that he is changed, he is transfigured, so that who he really is – in fact, who he has always been – is revealed at last.  The dazzling brightness that emanates from his body is a shining forth of his divinity.  He is the light that shines through him, and even the three sleepy disciples can see it.

What is God saying to us today through this story?  You may be aware that mystics from a variety of religious traditions speak of a vibrant, shimmering energy or light that flows through everything.  In Asia, for instance, the cosmic life force is called chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit, and enlightenment in many Eastern traditions is associated with a flow of energy throughout the human body. (2) Christian mystics likewise speak of the Holy Spirit as a Presence or energy that moves through the body.  We can’t see this Presence, can’t hear it, and can’t touch it with our hands.  But we sense it nearby. It lights up the edges of things, or shines out from within them.  We experience it as light and yet we can’t see it.  This is where the language of paradox and poetry comes in, where mystics speak of a “dazzling darkness” or a “dark radiance,” just as in this passage Luke uses the language of paradox when he describes Jesus’ experience in terms both of “dazzling whiteness” and “glory,” and of a “cloud” that “overshadowed” him.  Something about perceiving that radiant darkness awakens love within us, and awe.

This kind of mystical insight may seem remote from our own experience.  But psychologists tell us that these so-called “unitive” religious experiences are in fact very common, though we often forget them or push them aside.  The poet William Blake has a wonderful line — “We are put on earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”  It takes time and practice to learn to “bear” those beams in both senses of the word: to endure them without running away and also to bring them forth, as a mother bears a child.

You may be familiar with an icon of the Transfiguration that was written years ago by Fra Angelico.  In the icon, Jesus is standing on a mountaintop, his arms outstretched, surrounded by an egg-shaped oval of light.  His face and clothes are shining.  Near him stand several figures, including the two most holy men of Israel: Moses, the lawgiver, who, as we heard in today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, spoke with God as one might speak with a friend and whose face shone with God’s glory, and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets.  The glory is too much to bear.  As the text tells us, the disciples are “terrified” [Luke 9: 34].  In the icon, Peter turns away and throws up his hands; he looks about ready to bolt.  James is half-facing Jesus.  He leans uncertainly on one hand and lifts the other to his face, as if to shield his eyes or to squint through his fingers.  Only John is able to face the radiance directly.  He is on his knees, leaning forward toward Jesus and cupping his hands as if to offer himself completely or as if to drink in the light.  It is a posture of complete attentiveness and trust, a posture of both giving and receiving, and his palms are open in the same gesture we use to receive Holy Communion.

As depicted by Fra Angelico, these three disciples are expressing different movements in our spiritual journey.  They suggest the slow progress we can make as we “learn to bear the beams of love.”  When we sense that God may be drawing close, trying to get our attention, we sometimes leap up and run away, overcome with fear, as Peter does in the icon.  So we dive into one escape or another — we get busy, grab a snack, pour a drink, take another tour of the Internet — anything rather than be still and open ourselves to the Holy.  Another way of avoiding sacred encounter is to try to master or dominate the experience, as Peter seems to do in our Gospel text: in his confusion, he proposes to build three booths, as if he could somehow contain the experience or hold on to it.

But with practice, with patience, with a willingness to return to God whenever we notice that we have strayed, slowly — like James, in the icon, and finally like John  — we grow accustomed to the light and learn to abide in it.  Slowly we are transformed.  We begin to spot the light in others.  We begin to want to say or do whatever might release more light in them and to let it glow a bit more brightly.  Sometimes some light may even leak out of us, too; sometimes we, too, may begin to shine.  And of course that’s the point: not just to gaze at Jesus as he is transfigured, not just to watch him from afar, but to let the divine light penetrate us and to let it change our lives.

On this holy day of Transfiguration, I pray that you and I will commit ourselves afresh to the urgent call to walk up that mountain with Jesus and to open ourselves very consciously to the light of God in Christ.  The choice before us is clear.  On a Sunday morning 61 years ago today, a plane flew high over Hiroshima and released a bomb that produced another kind of blinding flash, another kind of cloud.  The following Wednesday, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  In all, more than 200,000 people were killed.  Since 1945, the Feast Day of the Transfiguration has become charged with new meaning.  August 6 has become for us both a promise and a warning: unless we can find a way, as individuals, as a nation, and as citizens of the world, to abide in the light of God, our future on the planet is bleak.  This August, nuclear weapons are again in the news, as our country negotiates with Iran and as our Administration proposes developing what it calls “reliable replacement warheads.”  This August, we remember the only times that nuclear weapons have been used in war and we say, “Never again.” (3)

And we remember, too, the places around the world where today the skies are lit up by explosions and where people look into each other’s faces not with love but with hatred, rage, or fear.  We remember especially the violence in the Middle East, where just days ago shells fell on Cana, the site of Jesus’ first miracle, and we pray that the light of God will shine again in every human heart.

We remember, too, the unprecedented violence that is being carried out against the Earth itself, the scorching of the planet as our relentless consumption of fossil fuels continues unchecked, and we pray that the light of Christ will give us the will to protect the Creation that God has entrusted to our care.

Today is a good day to hike up mount Tabor and to gaze again at the light of God in Christ — for, as today’s Collect puts it, in beholding his beauty we are “delivered from the disquietude of this world.”  We want to see Jesus, and the Eucharist is our meeting place.  Here in the Eucharist, our human nature meets the divine light and power of God.  Week by week, we offer God our open hands, our bodies, our worries and fears, our very selves, and week by week, God gives God’s self back to us in the bread and the wine, the Body and the Blood.  We may have no clue that we’re being changed.  We may not feel any more holy or peaceful than we did when we walked in the church door.  But in every Eucharist God meets us on the mountaintop.  We offer our selves to God in Christ, and that divine love touches and transforms us just a little bit more.

Sometimes we do sense the radiance, and for that we give thanks.  But we can’t stay on that mountaintop forever, much as we might like to.  Strengthened by the light we’ve seen, we walk with Jesus and the three disciples back down into the darkness where the world calls out for healing and where the cross awaits.  Interestingly enough, that descent down the mountain is part of our transfiguration, too.  The light of Christ can’t grow in us if we hide out from the world but only if we immerse ourselves in it.  Mystical experience is not about flight from the world, but depends on our willingness both to pray and to plunge into life, so that gradually we discover Jesus in every aspect of existence. (4)

“We are put on earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”  In what places in your life do you need those beams of love to shine?  In the silence after the sermon, I invite you to let them in.


(1) William Johnston, “Arise, My Love…”: Mysticism for a New Era, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000, p. 115.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Wording from the Nuclear Reduction/Disarmament Initiative, http://www.nrdi.org/forpeopleoffaith.htm

(4) “The paths we travel on our sacred journey will lead us to the awareness that the whole point of our lives is the healing of the heart’s eye through which we are able to see Jesus in every aspect of our existence.”  — St. Augustine

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, July 2, 2006 delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, at Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Deuteronomy 15:7-11
2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15
Psalm 112
Mark 5:22-24, 35b-43

“Open Your Hand”

I’d like to say a few words about generosity.  It’s a topic that made headlines this week when Warren E. Buffett announced that he would give 31 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the foundation’s effort to find cures for the world’s 20 leading fatal diseases — including a vaccine for HIV/AIDS — and to ensure that every American has a chance at a decent education.  I’ve been trying to imagine what it might be like to have $31 billion – to experience that sense of fullness, wealth, abundance, and plenty – and then to give the money away so that it could go to work in the world to heal the sick and to bring life and hope to the poorest of the poor.  I don’t know what Warren Buffett has been feeling this week but what I want to imagine he’s feeling is joy.  I imagine him sensing a fresh sense of connection with the poor – and actually with the whole human race – for he has stepped beyond the bounds of his own small self, past that tendency to hoard and hold back and look out for Number 1, and has opened his hands to share himself and his possessions with those in need. 

As far as I know it’s unlikely that any of us in this room has had – or ever will have — $31 billion to give away.  But generosity is a powerful energy and it seems increasingly clear to me that one of the best ways to navigate these turbulent times, when so many people are so justifiably anxious about so many things, is to cultivate a spirit of generosity within ourselves, our community, and in our country as a whole.

Generosity is obviously a basic value of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it runs like a thread through three of today’s four readings.  The passage from Deuteronomy is an extended meditation on the importance of giving generously to the poor. “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor.  You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need… Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so… Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.” 

The psalm picks up the theme, declaring that “Light shines in the darkness for the upright; the righteous are merciful and full of compassion.  It is good for them to be generous in lending and to manage their affairs with justice… They have given freely to the poor, and their righteousness stands fast for ever; they will hold up their head with honor” [Psalm 112:4-5, 9]. 

The whole eighth chapter of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians is an appeal to be generous to the church in Jerusalem, and in the excerpt that we heard this morning, Paul praises the churches of Macedonia for their exemplary generosity. “…During a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity.  For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means” [2 Cor 8:2-3].  Paul goes on to say, “I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance” [2 Cor 8:13-14].  And then Paul remembers from the Book of Exodus how God provided just the right amount of manna every day to feed the people in the wilderness, and he adds, “As it is written, ‘The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little'” [2 Cor 8:15].

I’d like to say 3 things about generosity. 

1) True generosity begins with God.  Even if we’ve worked very hard for every penny we own, everything we have – everything that is – is ultimately a gift from God: this breath, this moment in time and whatever moments we have until we die, our capacity to think and feel and remember and hope, the family and friends we’ve been given to love, the whole living breathing planet with its goldfinches and cougars, its foxes and salmon and birch trees – all of it is gift.

The generosity of the Creator flows into the generosity of the Redeemer, who in the act of self-emptying that we call the Incarnation, came down from heaven to become one of us, and gave himself to us on the cross so that we might share in his divine life.  Here is how Paul puts it in today’s reading from 2 Corinthians: “…You know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich [that is, equal to God], yet for your sakes he became poor [that is, human], so that by his poverty you might become rich” [2 Cor 8:9].

God is infinitely generous, and acts of Christian generosity spring from the grateful awareness of how much we’ve been given.  At the same time, remembering the generosity of God can be a wonderful antidote to compulsive giving, the temptation to think that we have to give and give and give without asking for anything in return.  As Henri Nouwen pointed out, “We may think that this is a sign of generosity or even heroism.  But it might be little else than a proud attitude that says: ‘I don’t need help from others. I only want to give.'” (1) Knowing that generosity begins with God gives us grateful hearts and the humility to recognize that yes, we too, need to receive.  Giving without receiving is like breathing out without breathing in.  We won’t last long.

So that’s the first point: true generosity begins with God. 

Here’s the second.  

2) Authentic generosity expresses kinship.  The root of the word “generosity” is the Latin word “genus,” which means “race, kind, or kin.”  To be generous is to make others kin.  This is a very different notion of generosity than what we might call patronage or noblesse oblige, in which a powerful person or group of people deigns to share a little of its abundance with the poor and dispossessed but does not experience, or want to experience, any direct contact with the poor.  Giving in this spirit can actually function as a power play, in which the rich congratulate themselves on their supposed generosity, while the poor remain dependent and disempowered. 

True generosity, it seems to me, expresses kinship.  It recognizes that rich and poor alike are the beloved children of God, equally human and equally worthy of respect.  Human societies tend to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few and to relegate the poor to the margins, but a religious vision of our kinship with one another calls us to a generosity that inspires us to struggle for social and economic justice and not to settle for giving charity and handouts.  And if generosity is all about kinship, maybe in this time of ecological devastation we’re ready to expand our notions of kin to include not just our two-legged relatives but also the four-legged kind, those with fins and those with wings.

Here on the brink the Fourth of July, I want to lift up some of the new social movements that are calling our country back to a vision of mutual generosity and interconnectedness.  I think, for instance, of Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a Christian progressive community in Washington, who just a few days ago launched what he calls “A Covenant for a New America,” whose goal is to overcome poverty with religious commitment and political leadership.

As Jim Wallis puts is, “Poverty is not a family value! …If the gospel that we preach does not ‘bring good news to the poor,’ well then, it is simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ – and it is about time that we said that.” [www.sojo.net]

I think, also, of Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor-publisher of the liberal interfaith magazine Tikkun, who is forming a national interfaith initiative, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, whose goal, among other things, is to create a New Bottom Line for American society. The Old Bottom Line in this country, says The Network of Spiritual Progressives, is materialism and selfishness.  The New Bottom Line that the Network wants to be build is “love, caring, generosity, kindness, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.”  No small vision there!

And here’s my last point:

3) Generosity may be one of the key spiritual practices that can keep us sane and connected with Spirit in a time of turbulence and anxiety.  Generosity has the power to ward off despair.  I remember the response of some of you who came with me on Wednesday – almost 50 of you! – to watch Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Many of us were shaken by the powerful images of melting glaciers and drowning polar bears, of disrupted seasonal cycles and intensifying droughts and storms.  Is it too late to save the precious web of life that our species is so wantonly destroying? As Al Gore pointed out, when it comes to the ecological catastrophe already upon us, it can be easy to move directly from denial to despair.

I wonder if generosity is a practice that can guide our actions and help heal that despair.  Skipping one car trip a week can be an act of generosity.  So can deciding to walk or carpool or to ride a bike.  Buying locally grown food can be an act of generosity, since the average bite of food travels something like a thousand miles – releasing who knows how many pounds of carbon along the way – before it reaches our lips.  Replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents can be an act of generosity, as can reducing the use of our clothes dryer or air conditioner.

I do not know whether our individual and corporate acts of generosity will be enough to stop the most catastrophic effects of climate change, but I do know that when we are generous, we become a living sign of hope.  When despair comes calling, I invite us to go back to point #1: true generosity begins with God.  And so we turn to God and notice the gifts of the moment.  We recall our belovedness to God in Christ and the power of the cross and resurrection.  We let ourselves fill up again with the presence of the Holy Spirit and discover within ourselves an interior abundance and sense of plenty.  What God has given each one of us is much more precious than billions of dollars!

We can also remember point #2: generosity expresses kinship, our connection to each other and to all beings.  We are not alone. 

Our gratefulness to God and our awareness of connection to all beings can help us re-connect with the flow of divine love.  Generosity becomes possible again.  And with every act of generosity, a little more love becomes visible in the world.

I am no easy optimist when it comes to solving climate change or any of the other daunting issues that beset us, but I do put my trust in the creative, redeeming, and sustaining love of God.  In the words of the American poet, W.S. Merwin, “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.”

 


(1) Henri Nouwen, Bread for The Journey (HarperCollins, 1997)

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 21, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas atGrace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Acts 11:19-30
1 John 4:7-21
Psalm 33:1-8, 18-22
John 15:9-17

Free to Give

Let your loving kindness, O Lord, be upon us,
as we have put our trust in you.
-Psalm 33:22

The last part of May is for many of us a season of transition, a time for weddings and graduations.  It’s also a season of transition here at Grace Church as we begin looking ahead to the new fiscal year that begins on July 1.  By now most of you have received the eloquent letter that Doug Adler and Jane Buckloh, co-chairs of the Stewardship Commission, sent out to our parish households, so it probably won’t surprise you to discover that today’s sermon is about stewardship.  I’ve heard my fair share of stewardship sermons over the years, but this is the first time that I’ve actually had to preach one myself, and let me tell you, I arrive at the pulpit this morning with a lot more empathy for the good folks at NPR and even for the poor street performer who must climb up on a chair in front of the crowds and hold out his empty hat.

My sermon’s point is simple and I might as well get it over with and say it straight: I invite you to make a pledge this year – a generous pledge – to Grace Church, a pledge of your time and energy, a pledge of your money and your prayers.  In saying this, I stand before you as a beggar.  I can’t force you to do anything.  I have no power to wield.  I have no threats to thunder down on your heads and no guilt to lay on thick.  All I have is a willingness to stand here and invite your continued participation and support.  I must say, it is a rather vulnerable place to stand.

And maybe that is just as it should be.  The beloved community that Jesus had in mind was not animated by guilt or force or fear.  As we heard in the reading from the First Letter of John, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” [1 John 4:18].  What inspires and sustains Christian communities is love, and love can’t be commanded any more than I can command you to give from your heart.

 Ah, you may say, but what about all the biblical language around “commandment”?  Today’s Gospel reading uses the word five times.  “This is my commandment,” Jesus says to his disciples, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”  “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”  “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” [John 15:12, 14, 17].

 But can love really be “commanded”?  What did Jesus mean?  You know as well as I do that loving feelings can’t be forced, and in any case there is something in our spirit, something in our blood, that resists being told what to do, even if it’s good for us, even if we know it’s the right thing to do.

A story comes to mind that I heard years ago.  A friend of my husband was driving somewhere with his young daughter, and the girl was sitting in the front seat beside her father.  I don’t know what they were talking about or what was going on between them, but for some reason lost to memory the little girl took it into her head not only to unbuckle her seatbelt but actually to stand up in the passenger seat.

“Sit down!” her father said, with some alarm.

The girl refused.

“I’m telling you — sit down!” he cried.

Again the girl ignored him.

“I mean it,” said the father, now quite upset. “Sit down right now.”

The little girl glared at him, slid back down into her seat and buckled her seat belt.  They drove on for some moments in what I imagine was a rather electric silence, and then the girl turned to her father and announced, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I am standing up on the inside.”

No, we don’t like commandments, even if they are issued for our own good.  So if we imagine God as an authoritarian, power-hungry boss “out there” whose business is to order us around and tell us what to do, at the word “command” we are likely to rebel or at least to dig in our heels.  And if we do carry out what we think we’re supposed to do, we may do it with a kind of grim and sullen compliance, while a spirit of resentment secretly lurks in our hearts – sitting down on the outside but standing up on the inside.

I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he commanded his disciples to love. The God that Jesus loved was not some power-hungry magnate “out there” but a Presence that Jesus discovered in his own depths and whom Jesus adored in all things and beyond all things.  I take Jesus’ “commandment” that we abide in his love and that we love one another as a revelation of the deep structure of the universe.  As creatures made in the image of God, we come from love, and at our death we return to love.  During the short span of our lifetime, it is when we are abiding and acting in love that we are most true to who we really are.  I wonder if the commandment to love doesn’t actually express the deepest desire of our heart.

Still, it takes a lifetime – at least – to learn to love well, and it’s easy to get it wrong.  On bad days, we do things that are not a bit loving and we refrain from doing the things that are.  On really bad days, we don’t even care.  No wonder we need to keep returning to prayer, returning to worship and to Christian community, so that we can make ourselves available again to God’s chastening or consoling word, and can continue to grow into who we really are.  When we do at last come home to ourselves, when we re-connect with the God who lives in our depths and in our midst, we discover again the sheer joy of saying the loving word that touches another person’s heart.  We know again the pleasure of giving ourselves in love to the people around us.  We feel again the happiness that comes when we find ways to love other people wisely and well.

So what does this have to do with stewardship?  Making a pledge to share our time and talent and money with this community is a way of giving thanks for the love of God.  It’s a way to praise the God who loved us first. “In this is love,” writes John in his First Letter, “not that we loved God but that [God] loved us and sent [God’s] Son… We love because [God] first loved us” [I John 4:10a, 19].  The initiative in love always belongs to God.  God doesn’t love us because we are smart or talented or virtuous – or even because we’re generous.  OK – truth in advertising: God won’t love you any more or any less depending on the size of your pledge.  God doesn’t love us because we’ve earned or deserve that love.  God doesn’t love us only after we’ve cleaned up our act or sorted out our priorities or generally gotten a handle on our lives. God loves us without a why. 

I think we know what that’s like.  Just think of someone you love – maybe a child or grandchild, or your partner, or your dearest friend.  Why do you love that person?  You might say you love him or her because of this quality or that, or because of something you’ve gone through together, or for any other number of reasons.  But when it comes right down to it, when we love another person, there finally is no “why” – we love the person just because we do.  It’s as simple as that.  We love them because we love them.

That’s something like God’s unmotivated, unconditioned, and sometimes totally unreasonable love for you and for me.  The more we can accept that love, the more deeply we can take it in – the more we will want to share it and to spread it around.  As Doug and Jane put it in their letter, when we give of ourselves to God through the Grace Church community it is because we want to “[complete] the circle of love.” 

So why do I pledge?   I don’t pledge because I have to – no one has to.  Divine love is free. 

I pledge because I want to tell God, “Thank you for your love,” and to love what God loves.  I want to complete the circle.

I pledge because I want to take care of what I love.  I want this building to be full of candlelight and soaring music and I want the lights to turn on and the staff to get paid.

I pledge because I want to support this little fellowship of people that is trying to make God visible to the world.

I pledge because I love the God who comes to us in the healing and transforming power of word and sacrament.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come to the end of a Sunday service and felt myself almost bursting with joy because of the privilege of worshiping God and of sharing in this with you.

I pledge because I want to renew and to deepen my own conversion.

I pledge because of the power of Christ’s promise “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” [John 16:11].  Forget about “giving ’til it hurts.” I want to give until I feel the joy that comes from stepping beyond the worried bounds of my own small self.

Roman Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen put it so well when he wrote, “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. . . A happy life,” he goes on to say, “is a life for others.” (1)

In the end, what we do with our pledges has everything to do with our willingness to respond with love to God’s love.  What we do with our pledges has everything to do with our willingness to trust that in God’s eyes, every act of kindness counts.  I will quote Henri again one last time.  He writes, “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!. . . You and I would dance for joy were we to know truly that we . . . are chosen, blessed, and broken to become the bread that will multiply itself in the giving.” (2)

No, I can’t command you to pledge.  That would be absurd.  But I can invite you to consider what God is leading you to do.  And I can pray that when the Spirit comes among us at Pentecost, together we will lay our gifts at the altar with joyful and grateful hearts. 

 


(1) Henri J. M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992, pp. 106, 109.

(2) Ibid, pp. 123, 124.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 23 2006, (Earth Day/Creation Sunday)  delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Isaiah 26:2-9, 19
Acts 3:12a, 13-15, 17-26
Psalm 111
John 20:19-31

Wounds of Creation,
Wounds of Christ

O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.
-Isaiah 26:19

Every year on the Sunday after Easter we listen to that marvelous and mysterious story we just heard from the Gospel of John, the story of Jesus showing himself to the disciples on the evening of Easter Day and then returning a week later to reassure and convince the disciple we call Doubting Thomas that yes, the Risen Lord is real. 

“Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says to Thomas, showing him the wounds.  “Reach out your hand and put it in my side.  Do not doubt but believe.” And then Thomas finds his faith, saying, “My Lord and my God.”

Today, across the country and around the world we are also celebrating Earth Day – rain or shine.  What happens when we hold Earth Day and our concern for God’s Creation up to the light of this particular Gospel story of the wounded and Risen Christ?  Here on Earth Day 2006, what word of hope or comfort or challenge might God be speaking to us in this Gospel text?   What might the wounds of Christ have to say to us about the wounds of God’s Creation?

And maybe that’s the place to begin: with the wounds of God’s Creation. To me, at least, and maybe to growing numbers of Americans, those wounds have never seemed so clear.  Take, for instance, global climate change.  You know that burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas and oil produces carbon dioxide and other gases that create a blanket around the Earth, making the climate hotter and more unstable.  You also know that what scientists are telling us with increasing alarm is that climate change is not some future event, something that only our distant descendants will deal with.  It is with us.  It is already here.  Maybe you saw the recent issue of Time magazine that proclaimed in big bold letters on the cover, “Be worried.  Be VERY worried.”

Here are some of the items that scientists reported in just the first two weeks of April.

“Dreaded warm air hovers over Antarctica,” reads a headline in The Los Angeles Times. “In the winter sky over Antarctica, scientists have detected a vast cap of steadily warming air, in the first sign that record levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may be trapping heat above the ice sheets of the South Pole” [Friday, March 31, 2006].

On April 1, an Associated Press article is headlined “Caribbean coral in hot water.” “A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters. ‘It’s an unprecedented die-off,’ said [a] National Park Service fisheries biologist [Jeff Miller] … ‘We’re talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by [that] have died in the past three to four months.’  In the same article, another scientist [Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance] called what’s happening to coral worldwide “‘an underwater holocaust.'”

On April 3, ScienceDaily reported “Greenland’s Glaciers Pick Up Pace in Surge Toward Sea.” 

On April 4, BBC News reported “Europe’s Alps could lose three-quarters of their glaciers to climate change during the coming century” [‘Major Melt’ for Alpine Glaciers, by Richard Black, BBC News].

On April 11, scientists reported “Global warming will become a top cause of extinction from the tropical Andes to South Africa with thousands of species of plants and animals likely to be wiped out in coming decades… The scientists said their study broadly backed the findings of a 2004 report in the journal Nature that suggested global warming could commit a quarter of the world’s species to extinction by 2050… ‘It isn’t just polar bears and penguins that we must worry about any more,” said the study’s co-author [Lee Hannah, senior fellow for climate change at Conservation International in the United States].

Are you still with me?  Have you tuned out yet?  It’s hard to listen to even a quick sketch of the devastation that is going on around us without wanting to cover our ears.  It is painful and scary to face this die-off, this crucifixion, and if we don’t have moments of wanting to hide out, then I don’t think we’ve been paying attention.

That’s where the Gospel story comes in.  Just think about those disciples huddled fearfully in that locked up room.  We can say this about them: at least they were no longer in denial.  They had seen the crucifixion; they knew the reality of the violence and the wounds.  They were not about to tell you that Christ’s wounds on the cross were not real, any more than we can pretend that the wounds to God’s Creation are not real.  Like we who face global warming, the disciples had looked death in the face, and they were scared. 

I find it interesting that the text tells us that they locked the doors “for fear of the Jews.” Maybe they were afraid that the Jewish authorities would round them up as accomplices of an executed criminal and that they too would be killed.  We know what that’s like, the impulse to hide because some external force seems out to get us, whether it’s global warming or anything else.  But the irony is that the disciples who hid out “for fear of the Jews” were themselves Jews.  I wonder if it was also themselves that they were afraid of.  I wonder if, in the events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion, they had learned some things about themselves that they never wanted to see – perhaps their own violence, their own impulse to do harm, as when Simon Peter drew his sword during Jesus’ arrest and cut off a man’s ear.  I’m sure the disciples felt guilty as they huddled in that locked room, for they knew they had abandoned the very one they held most dear.  One of them had denied him three times.  Maybe they were whispering fearfully to each other, “What have we done?”

Well, here’s the truth: sometimes it is me who is sitting in that locked room, and maybe sometimes it is you, too: guilty as sin and knowing it.  When it comes to climate change, we North Americans bear more than our fair share of the responsibility, because it is our cars and trucks, our appliances and computers, our airplanes and factories and power plants that are sucking up fossil fuels and churning out 25% of the world’s global warming emissions.  Historically our country is responsible for something like 80% of the extra carbon dioxide that is now circulating in the atmosphere, so when we look at the unraveling of the web of life, when we look at dying coral and melting ice caps, when we look at raging floods in one part of the world and growing deserts in another, we are looking at the consequences – unintended, to be sure, but very real, all the same – of the way of life that gives us such privilege and comfort.  No wonder many of us feel a twinge of guilt when we look at that, and maybe more than a twinge.  It’s a lot to face.  And so we lock ourselves in, paralyzed sometimes by guilt and sometimes by the fearful sense that it’s too late, the deed is done, death has already had the last word.

And then:

“When it was evening of Easter day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you'” [John 20:19].  Can you feel the impact of that moment? The Risen Christ comes to his guilty, worried, frightened friends and says “Peace be with you.”  It is peace that he gives them.  Forgiveness.  Acceptance.  However much they’ve abandoned and denied him, he loves them still.  In fact, in this one short passage Jesus says those words three times, as if the disciples need to soak up that message, to hear it again and again – not only to undo Peter’s three-fold denial but also so that all of them, all of us, will experience that forgiveness deep in our bones.  Maybe that is the beginning of our resurrected life: the moment we hear and take in how much God loves us and how completely we are forgiven.

And then Jesus says “Here.  See my wounded hands and side.”

I wonder what the disciples see as they look at his wounds.   I think they see the harsh reality of violent suffering and death, but now those wounds are radiant – they are lit up with love, as if light were pouring from Jesus’ hands and side.  I wonder what it would be like if we could look at the wounds of Creation in the same way.  I wonder if we could learn to see the wounded Earth as expressing not only the reality of suffering and death, but also as lit up with God’s forgiveness and love.  I wonder what it would be like if, in tending to the wounded body of Creation, we knew that we were also ministering to the wounds of Christ – so that in every act of love for Creation, in every compact fluorescent light bulb that we installed, in every decision we made to walk rather to drive to a car, in every push we made for a national energy policy that promoted renewable energy and tougher fuel standards, we were responding to the deep reassurance and forgiveness of the wounded and yet Risen Christ.

Fear and guilt can take us only so far in motivating our efforts to care for Creation.  It is only the forgiving love of God – that endless, self-sacrificing, hidden outpouring – that can sustain our efforts to become healers of God’s Creation and to share in what today’s Collect calls “the new covenant of reconciliation” [c.f. 2 Corinthians 5:17-20].

For it is not only peace that Jesus gives the disciples.  He gives them a commission.  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” he says, breathing into them the Holy Spirit, the same creative wind and energy that moved across the face of deep at the very beginning of creation.  Jesus not only loves and forgives us – Jesus also wants us to share in the divine life of the Trinity that expresses itself in acts of generosity and compassion.  Like Jesus, we too have been sent here on a mission.  We too have a job to do.

And that, believe it or not, is where we can have some fun, where we can share in the joy of the Risen Christ.  There is nothing more satisfying than living out your deepest values.  Making the switch to more efficient lighting, healing, and cooling can be an act of praising God.  So can supporting renewable energy technologies or becoming a member of a local group such as Co-op Power.  While you drink your cup of coffee after the service, take a look at the display that our Greening the Church group has set up in the Connector of products to “green” your home, from compact fluorescent light bulbs to environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and 100% post-consumer-waste recycled paper.  Find a member of the Vestry and thank him or her for agreeing to make this parish one of the National Council of Church’s Environmental Justice Covenant Congregations – a mouthful of a name meaning that as a parish we’ve made a commitment to care for God’s Creation.

We don’t want to huddle in fear.  We want to embrace the world with the love and peace and exuberance of the Risen Christ.  I am grateful for Doubting Thomas, for he can express our doubt – doubt that we can stop catastrophic climate change, doubt that we can make a difference, doubt that the Risen Christ will be with us, doubt that resurrection is even possible.  Whatever our doubts today, wherever we’re holding back, Jesus invites us to open ourselves to the gift of his forgiveness and his energizing Spirit.  Today at the Eucharist we will stretch out our hands to receive the body and blood of Christ, just as Thomas stretched out his hands to touch Christ’s wounded hands and side.  Like Thomas, we too want to know that the risen Christ is real and alive, and, like Thomas, when we feel Christ’s presence, we too can’t help but rejoice.

Sermon for Good Friday (The Solemn Liturgy of the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ) April 14, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas atGrace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:1-25
Psalm 69:1-23
John 18:1-19:37

Hope in the Cross

“Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for [God] who has promised is faithful.”
-Hebrews 10:23

Not too long ago, at the end of a meeting in the Parker Room, a parishioner and I got to talking about the suffering and anxieties that beset the world.

“There’s so much to worry about!” she said, shaking her head. “Suicide bombers. Terrorism. Global poverty. The carnage in Darfur. The war in Iraq. The possibility that Iran will get nuclear weapons or that our government will nuke Iran. And then,” she added, as if all this weren’t enough, “there is global warming. Peak oil. And avian flu! I mean,” she said – and here she turned and looked at me directly, searching my face – “where do you find hope?”

I looked at her in silence for a moment, considering.

“Well,” I told her, testing every word as I said it, to see if it were true, “in the end I’ve found only one place to put my hope: in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

You and I are here tonight because this is where we place our hope. We are here tonight with all our sorrows and fears, all our guilt and anxiety, everything that torments us, everything that wakes us up worrying in the middle of the night. Tonight we bring everything that is in us, everything that is around us, and here at the cross we put it all down, trusting that Jesus can hold it, Jesus can bear it with us and for us, and that in him and through him we and all Creation will be drawn to new life. We place our hope in the cross of Christ because something momentous happened long ago on that hillside in Golgotha.

It’s a bold claim that we Christians make. Scientists measure the age of the cosmos in billions of years. If I have the figures right – and scientists seem to be making new discoveries about our evolutionary history almost every day – the universe came into existence something like 15 billion years ago. Primitive life forms emerged on this planet maybe 4 billion years ago, the earliest members of the pre-human family showed up around 7 million years ago, and somewhere around 300,000 or 400,000 years ago the first members of our own species, Homo sapiens, began to walk the earth.

Against the backdrop of this enormous expanse of human and cosmic history, Christians dare to say that something pivotal happened over the course of three days early in the first century, something that affected not only human beings but the whole Creation. In a far-off, forgotten province in a dusty corner of the Roman Empire, a man was unjustly condemned, executed, and ignominiously buried – and everything changed. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection exploded into history. (1)

Jesus spent only one week in Jerusalem, his last week, but the story of that week takes up a large portion of the Gospels – a quarter of Luke, a third of Matthew and Mark, and fully half of the Gospel of John. The apostle Paul, who wrote most of the Letters in the New Testament, devotes more space to exploring the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection than he does to examining Jesus’ life and what Jesus taught. For Christians, the cross and resurrection of Christ – what theologians have come to call “the Paschal mystery” – is like the hinge of history, the turning point, the doorway through which we pass to enter new and everlasting life.

We’ve only had about 2,000 years to experience the reverberations of these events, and for all I know, human beings are just beginning to understand and articulate the power of the cross of Christ. So far, all kinds of images have been brought into play. Sometimes, as in tonight’s reading from Isaiah, we speak of the cross in terms of healing, or sometimes, as we heard in the Letter to the Hebrews, the cross is described in terms of sacrifice. Sometimes we speak of the cross as reconciliation, bringing peace to all who are alienated from God, from each other, and from God’s Creation. Sometimes we speak of the cross as ransom, suggesting that it is the payment that sets us free from being kidnapped by the power of evil. Or we use the image of redemption, to say that the cross purchased freedom for a humanity enslaved by sin. Sometimes we describe the cross and resurrection in terms of a decisive victory in the cosmic conflict between good and evil, life and death. (2) “Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle; of the mighty conflict sing” we will proclaim in the ancient words of our closing hymn [#166, Hymnal 1982], and the victory that takes place on the cross affects not only human beings, but the whole Creation: “From that holy body broken, blood and water forth proceed: earth, and stars, and sky, and ocean, by that flood from stain are freed” (3).

Whatever metaphors we use to interpret the cross, it is here at the cross that we find our hope.

It is here at the cross that all our malice and forgetfulness, all our pigheadedness and small-mindedness and hard-heartedness are continually met by the love of God.

It is here at the cross that we receive forgiveness for what may have seemed unforgivable.

It is here at the cross that we see God’s willingness to be vulnerable, God’s willingness to enter into and to share every pain and loss that we suffer, so that there is nothing we can experience that God in Christ does not experience with us.

It is here at the cross that we share our vulnerability with God’s vulnerability, here that we open ourselves to be found by the One who loves us, and suffers with us, and seeks us in and through all things.

It is here at the cross that we are set free from the power of death, and set free as well from the endless, futile attempt to save ourselves and to earn our own salvation.

It is here that we can throw ourselves into the arms of Christ and receive the inspiration and courage to go forward, for it is here that a dying man shows us the undying love of God.

The love that was let loose on the cross has no limits. When we stand at the cross and watch Jesus suffering and dying for us, we are looking into the heart of God. Christ’s suffering love embraces the lost and the forsaken, the embittered and angry — even someone like you, even someone like me, even someone like Zacarias Moussaoui, who told the courtroom this week that he takes delight in the pain of those who lost their loved ones on September 11.

Christ’s suffering love embraces even the darkest and most tormented places of the human spirit, and Christ’s suffering love can inspire acts of forgiveness that startle us with their power. I do not know whether the Harriott family in Dorchester is Christian, but it is Christ’s suffering and forgiving love that I see in five-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott, the little girl in Boston who wept yesterday on the witness stand as she faced the man who shot and paralyzed her two years ago, when she was 3. In a story reported this morning in the lead article of The Boston Globe and picked up this afternoon on the Internet, the little girl looked at the man who fired the bullet that severed her spine and said through her tears, “What you done to me was wrong. But I still forgive him.”

“We’re not victims here,” said the child’s mother. “We’re victors.” (3)

That is what was released on the cross of Christ: a love without bounds, a love without limit.

Tonight we venerate the cross, and we weep, and we marvel.


(1) Grateful acknowledgement is offered to the author – whose identity I do not recall – who used this phrase years ago in an issue of Weavings.

(2) These images are laid out by Rev. Michael L. Lindvall, Senior Pastor of The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, in an unpublished manuscript, cited with permission.

(3) Quoted by Jonathan Saltzman, “I still forgive him,” The Boston Globe, Friday, April 14, 2006, p. 1.

Sermon for Monday in Holy Week, April 10, 2006, delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Grace Church, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Hebrews 11:39-12:3
Psalm 36:5-10
Mark 14:3-9

In Remembrance of Her

I have been reading about the difference between “cold memory” and “hot memory.” (1) Cold memory reduces the past to a collection of facts, bits of more or less random information that have no particular meaning, no particular bearing on our lives.  With cold memory, we look back at the curious things that people used to do, the curious things that people used to believe, and then we get back to what really interests us: what’s going on right now in the present.  With hot memory, we experience a deep connection to the past.  We experience ourselves as participating in a dynamic, unfolding process that flows from the past into the present.  We feel our connection to a community whose stories and insights matter a great deal and have power to change our lives.

During Holy Week you and I are engaging in acts of hot memory.  The stories we ponder this week are “hot” stories – stories that affect us as individuals and as a community, stories that are charged with divine energy and whose meanings we can never exhaust.  These stories take us below the surface of things and into deeper currents of truth.

As Thomas Merton once put it, “If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time; not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!”

Tonight – as we do every year on Monday of Holy Week – we remember the story of a woman who anointed Jesus.  All four Gospels tell some version of this story, and in Mark’s Gospel, an unnamed woman comes to Jesus while he is having supper at Bethany in the house of a man with leprosy who is named Simon.  She takes an alabaster jar of nard – an expensive, aromatic oil from a root native to India – and anoints Jesus by pouring it on his head.  When some of the guests angrily object to the waste and extravagance of her gesture, Jesus rebukes them, saying “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” [Mark 14:9].

As you hold this story in your own hot memory, what meanings does it suggest to you? Some commentators point out that anointing the head of a dinner guest was a familiar gesture of hospitality in ancient times – maybe you remember the line from the 23rd Psalm, “thou anointest my head with oil” [Psalm 23:5].  But the woman’s gesture means much more than this – it has symbolic significance too, for in Old Testament times a prophet would anoint the head of the Jewish king [2 Kings 9:1-13, 1 Samuel 10:1].  Symbolically the woman is anointing Jesus as spiritual king, as Christ, as Messiah – a word that means, literally, “the anointed one.”  Because it is a woman who performs this prophetic act, as feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has pointed out, this is “a politically dangerous story.” (2)  Once again, in the topsy-turvy world of the kingdom of God that springs into being around Jesus, the lowly, the despised, and those without social power – lepers, for instance, and women – are lifted up and drawn into the circle of God’s love, where they find their value, find their power, and find their voice.

So as I hold this story in memory tonight, this unnamed woman who has become a prophet and anointed Jesus as Messiah brings to mind all the women, named and unnamed, who followed Jesus, who listened to and learned from his words, and who welcomed him into their homes.  She brings to mind all the women, named and unnamed, that Jesus healed, all the women that Jesus treated with dignity and respect, all the women who acted as apostles and who exercised significant leadership in the earliest Christian communities.  Our patriarchal tradition often overlooks these women, and how poignant it is, how ironic, that in the very Gospel story in which Jesus declares that what this woman has done will be told the world over in memory of her, the Gospel writer has already forgotten her name.  We can be grateful for the efforts of feminist historians who have worked so hard in recent decades to recover the lost history of women and, in the words of Schüssler Fiorenza, “not only to restore women’s stories to early Church history but also to reclaim Christian history as the history of women and men” (3).

As I hold this story in memory tonight, I also think of the power of one kind gesture.  The world around Jesus that night was full of foreboding.  We live, as Jesus did, in a world that often seems pervaded by anxiety, violence, and uncertainty – what playwright Samuel Beckett called “the dark vast.”  The tension around Jesus was rising to a breaking point.  The civil and religious authorities were looking for a way to arrest him.  And yet, in a quiet room on a dark night in a house somewhere in Bethany, a woman was anointing his head with oil.  I savor that gesture of kindness, and, in this often dark world of ours, I savor every gesture of kindness that we are empowered to express through the power of the crucified and risen Christ.

This woman’s act of devotion will be the last expression of tenderness that Jesus receives before Judas sneaks away to betray him.  How precious that anointing in Bethany must have been to him.  He could see how much the woman loved him, he could see that she recognized him as Messiah, and he could see that she knew that he was going to die: she was anointing the body that would not otherwise be anointed before burial.  In one telling detail, the text says that the woman broke open the jar.  This shows that she was generous in lavishing the jar’s entire contents on Jesus, but it also evokes the occasional practice, in Hellenistic times, of anointing a corpse and then breaking the oil flask and placing it in the coffin. Unlike the other disciples, this unnamed woman understood the way of the cross.  Unlike the other two disciples who feature prominently in Mark’s story of the Passion – Judas, who betrayed Jesus, and Peter, who denied him – this unnamed woman understood the Gospel.  She knew that Jesus was the Messiah and that “for the sake of the joy that was set before him” [Hebrews 12:2] – the joy of redeeming humanity and all creation, the joy of reuniting you and me with our loving Creator – he had to endure the cross.  This unnamed woman represents all of us who have felt blessed and strengthened by Jesus’ presence and who long to offer back some expression of blessing in return.

Tonight, in the deep currents below the surface of the ordinary world, a woman is anointing Jesus. In the period of quiet that follows this homily, I invite you to gaze at this scene.  Perhaps there is something that you too would like to say to Jesus tonight, something that you too would like to give him. 


 1) Jan Assman, quoted by John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and The End of the World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 42.

 2) Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, NY: Crossroad, 1985, p. xiv.

3) Ibid.