Bryan Cones Sermon - Pentecost XI

Bryan Cones

Pentecost 11A

Matthew 16:13-20

 

“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven,

and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

 

Binding and loosing—the two sides of the church’s mission

            here in the gospel of Matthew,

            the charge placed on those who profess

Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.

To be a part of the church Jesus calls forth

            is to have a share in that binding and loosing

for the sake of the reign of God.

 

The “binding” part we Christians seem to have down pretty well.

Every subgroup in the Christian movement

has its own special brand of binding:

The Orthodox have the holy synods

and the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

The Roman Catholics have the papacy and a well-defined hierarchy,

            councils, canon law and the catechism.

The churches of the Reformation have their confessions

and books of discipline.

The monastic movements all have their “rules” that bind them.

Anglican churches for centuries had the Book of Common Prayer

            —often a particular version produced in 1662—

and we Episcopalians bind ourselves

through the baptismal covenant, among other things.

 

So binding we get—

the basic meaning of the word “religion” is to bind, after all.

That’s a bit curious to me, since as I read it,

all Jesus actually binds his followers to

            is love of God and love of neighbor,

            which seems rule enough to live by.

 

Loosing, though, Christians seem to do less of.

I sometimes wonder what Christian churches would look like

            if we led with “loosing” rather than “binding,”

            if we saw our vocation as primarily unbinding,

of freeing humankind of everything, save the command to love.

I wonder what church would be like if we saw our job

            as unleashing the creative potential

of everyone and everything around us,

so that love of God and love of neighbor could flourish

in ways we can’t imagine.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about binding and loosing this week

            as the events in Ferguson, Missouri have been unfolding.

So much of what is being said about it seems unhelpful,

            but when I mute all the commentary

I am struck by how much “binding” I see:

the police all strapped together,

            bulletproof vests and shields and helmets and armored cars,

and the protesters, some with their faces bound in masks,

some eventually bound in handcuffs

or restrained by the police.

 

Those visible “bonds” though are the sacraments

            of the real bindings that are holding Ferguson,

            holding all of us,

all that equipment is the visible sign that points to and enacts

            the distrust, the anger, the lack of opportunity,

            the racism and oppression,

all the diabolical forces that continue to hold our society bound

            in injustice, in violence, in sin, in death.

In my more pessimistic moments I fear that,

whatever happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson

            that resulted in Michael’s death,

those two men were already bound so tightly by these forces

            that what happened between them was almost inevitable,

with the consequences falling most heavily, fatally,

on a young man of color,

            as it so often does both there in Missouri and here in Chicago.

 

What would the church, our church, any church, be like

if we took as our primary calling to loose these powerful bindings?

What if each of us, or a few of us together, or all of us,

chose just one of those bindings, just one buckle of it, or one lock,

            and dedicated ourselves to working on it,

            to gnawing at it, to cracking it,

so that humankind and creation might be just a little freer,

            just a little more able to live under grace,

to experience just a little more the love of God and neighbor?

 

Those aren’t easy questions to answer;

            I’m not sure I have answers for myself.

But I am convinced that our faith in Jesus,

            a faith lived as love of God and love of neighbor,

binds us to answer them,

binds us to working on them,

binds us to unbinding, to setting free.

Perhaps the “keys to the kingdom of heaven”

that Jesus has bequeathed to us

have something to with unlocking whatever holds us bound

to the destructive powers that drive the suffering of the world.

 

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons,

loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people,

and respect the dignity of every human being?

It is to those words of our baptismal covenant

that we bind ourselves

Sunday after Sunday, day after day.

It is after all the privilege of those who are baptized

            to partner with God in unleashing

            the love of God and love of neighbor

for the sake of everyone and everything.

And Jesus has given us not only the authority

but also the grace to accomplish this mission.

 

How we enact that grace,

how we perform it,

how we embody it

            in this place, in this church,

is a question left to us to answer.

 

Kristin White Sermon - Pentecost VII

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 27, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

 

           

Two weeks ago, Jesus told the parable of a sower who threw seed all over the place – on the pathway, on rocky ground, among the thorns, and on good soil.

Las week, he talked about weeds sown among the grain, about the sower commanding that both should grow together until the harvest.

Today we hear Jesus invoke a litany of parables as he talks with those who follow him: about mustard seeds and yeast and hidden treasure and a magnificent pearl and a net. All of these are meant to illustrate what the kingdom of heaven is like.

At the end of it all, he asks one of my favorite questions in the Bible: Have you understood all this?

And they answer: Yes.

To which I would like to respond: Really? All those astonishing and confounding illustrations of the kingdom of heaven and what it is like…you understand it all, without hesitation?

It’s an audacious question for Jesus to ask, a more audacious answer for his followers to give.

Scripture teaches us that the disciples are not the most powerful or sophisticated or educated people in first-century Palestine. They are fishermen, tax collectors. They’re everyday, ordinary, common people, going about their everyday, ordinary, common lives…until they’re not. Until Jesus shows up, asks them to follow him. And they do.

And theologians teach us that “a parable is a parable – not a complete systematics.”[1] Jesus does not tell these stories to deliver “a complete theological system or to address ultimate questions once and for all.”[2] Instead, as he offers these parables, Jesus shares a glimpse of the kingdom, helps make visible what has been hidden. Jesus gets involved in people’s lives. And because he is involved, because he knows who they are, he knows something of the substance of their lives.

As he tells these parables, Jesus takes his listeners’ attention off of himself and focuses it on the world in which he and his disciples lived at the time, the world as his followers would have experienced it.[3]

My own life and well-being is not dependent on where I sow the seeds I have, or whether weeds grow up among the crop…but Jesus’ listeners might have. I bake bread only as a very occasional hobby, not as a matter of necessary sustenance for my family…but listeners in Jesus’ audience probably would only have had bread to eat if they, or someone in their household, made it. I haven’t stumbled upon great treasure in a field, or gone looking for tremendously valuable pearls, or had to sort fish of every kind from a net I have cast. Have you?

Since we likely haven’t done these things, it’s harder for us to get a full glance of these parables that would allow us to understand as the disciples did. Since few if any of us are farmers, it’s hard for us to know that a mustard seed – yes, small and insignificant, easily overlooked – grows into something of a weed itself (which then re-casts much of last week’s parable about an enemy having done this, but we’ll have to take these things one at a time). Mustard is actually not something a farmer wants growing in a field, because it takes over, re-seeds itself in sneaky and invasive fashion. It doesn’t grow it nice, straight rows, but instead spreads on the wind and overtakes without warning. So what does it mean, that the kingdom of heaven is like that?

Since few of us depend for nourishment on the bread we bake daily for ourselves and our families, and since even fewer of us probably create our own yeast from spoiled bread as they did in first-century Palestine, it’s unlikely we’re aware that yeast was considered a contaminant. Usually when it’s mentioned in the Bible, yeast is connected to sin, thought of as a pollutant. So what does it mean, that the kingdom of heaven is like that?

As Jesus tells stories about seeds and plants, about baking bread and plowing a field and fishing with nets and then sorting his catch, he is telling his followers in that moment stories about their own lives. And he is tying those stories to the kingdom of heaven.

So, yes, if Jesus had turned to us after that litany of parables, and asked if we understand these illustrations of the profound nature of God, we might have to pause for a moment in translation.

If he were here now, with us, in 21st century Wilmette, Illinois, the parables might involve smartphones and iPads and grocery stores and conference calls. Who knows what those illustrations might be? How entertaining or confounding could it get, to imagine what connections he might draw? How would he take the ordinary substance of our lives to intersect the kingdom of heaven, to give us a glimpse of those things that are now hidden to us? What would make us think, and then nod, and say “Yes,” when he asked us that same audacious question about whether we understand?

The passage concludes with Jesus telling his followers that “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

When we allow ourselves to see a glimpse of what is now hidden that Jesus would reveal to us, potent and subversive and disruptive and defiant of our expectations as it may be, we train ourselves for the kingdom. When we allow ourselves to be captivated by God getting involved in our lives, we train ourselves for the kingdom. When we allow the substance of who we are to be transformed into what we might become, we train ourselves for the kingdom of heaven.

What treasure will you bring forth?

 

 

 

[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2754

[2] ibid

[3] “Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 3. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 284.

 

Kristin White Sermon - Miepje DeVryer Funeral

Kristin White

Miepje DeVryer Memorial Eucharist - July 26, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

 

           

“We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.”

Soon after her doctors diagnosed Miepje with a brain tumor in February, Pieter came to Tom Alm, our organist-choirmaster, and to me, with an idea. St. Augustine’s has been the DeVryers’ faith community for more than 50 years, and music has been important to Pieter and Miepje for the whole of that time and before. Pieter asked Tom and me if we might have a concert. It would, he imagined, be a celebration of ministries at St. Augustine’s, with glorious music from our organ, which the DeVryers helped to restore some years ago, and with offerings from gifted musicians of this parish…who bless us again with their offerings today. And it would be something that Miepje could enjoy while she was still living.

Pieter’s idea quickly took shape, and became reality right here on June 1st. We shared together in beautiful music, a gathering of friends, a beautiful reception afterwards, with champagne.

Pieter wasn’t sure how long Miepje would be able to stay that day, so we sang her favorite hymn first – Hymn 433. It’s a Dutch tune, made popular when it was sung by a touring choir at the turn of the century. It was Miepje’s favorite hymn, so we sang it first that day…and we sang it first today, as well. “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” we sang.

And that’s what we are doing here, today, as we come together in prayer and song and remembrance, nourished by the sacraments. We gather together to give thanks for the life of Miepje DeVryer. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing – on Miepje, on her family, on her friends, on her community.

Miepje lived fully, externally, out in the world. She played tennis until and beyond her diagnosis, she and Pieter exercised at the Fitness Center, she served here as an usher welcoming people to worship, she continued offering services as a psychiatrist until the week before doctors discovered her brain tumor. She lived externally as a person – remembering what was going on in other people’s lives, asking about their families, their work, their well-being, in ways that showed she cared deeply about their response.

The evidence of how Miepje lived can be witnessed in how she died. People encircled Miepje and Pieter in these past weeks, planting flowers on the terrace outside their home, visiting them at the Midwest Care Pavilion where Miepje spent her last days, knitting prayer shawls for her, bringing flowers from their gardens to brighten her room, bringing meals for Pieter.

And now, we gather. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.

---

The first passage of scripture that the family chose for today’s service was the first reading we heard read by Johanna, from the Book of Lamentations. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end,” it begins.

The author’s use of these words is almost ironic. They are written after Jerusalem has been sacked; the Temple where God’s people believe that God dwells in earthly habitation, destroyed; the people who worshiped there, sent into exile in Babylon. Things have gotten worse than people could have imagined. Remember: the book is called Lamentations.

And yet, this is what comes from the author of that text: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end…”. More than some kind of a naïvete, these words insist on God’s provision in the midst of what must seem a hopeless situation.

What is more, the Hebrew word hesed, which we translate here as steadfast love, means something deeper than that. Those of you here who speak different languages will, I trust, understand the notion of a word being lost in translation. The word hesed is based on the Hebrew root, which means a mother’s love for her children.

On this day, as we mourn the loss of a brilliant and generous woman, a mother and a grandmother, there is something defiantly hopeful about invoking those words from Lamentations: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases…”

The day of the concert here at St. Augustine’s, we began with a prayer and then with some words from Pieter. He spoke of his love for the church and he spoke of his love for Miepje, about their shared love of music. He spoke honestly about her illness, and of how they walked this journey together. It was a way for both Pieter and Miepje to welcome us all into the midst of a lovely and painful and honest space in their lives. And the offerings of people’s gifts, so many of you here again today – your gifts: your presence here among us, your beautiful music, the food you brought to share in fellowship on that day – it was a way for us all to echo those words of defiant hope written so far away in time and space: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end…”

---

And so, we gather. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing – on Miepje, may she rest…on this family…on this community of faith. In the midst of this deep sadness, trusting that the words of Lamentations will again be true: that the steadfast love of the Lord will never cease, trusting that God’s mercies will never come to an end.

We gather together, here today, to ask the Lord’s blessing.

Kristin White Sermon - Pentecost VI

Kristin White

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 20, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

   

I don’t know what weeds look like in Chicago. And I don’t know what grows back.

My grandfather was a master gardener in Oregon. He taught me something about planting and picking, about sowing and thinning. And sure, some things are recognizable – a dandelion here looks like a dandelion there. But things grow in Oregon that don’t grow here, or don’t grow as easily – rhododendrons tend not to reach people’s rooftops in Chicago; I haven’t seen blackberries growing at all here. In Oregon, people regard them as an invasive species, a noxious weed; one of my otherwise conscientious and tender-hearted neighbors told me I’d have to resort to a supertoxic combination of Roundup and motor oil to address the blackberries in our yard.

The two years we’ve been here in Wilmette have really been John’s and my first chance to get our hands back into soil we can return to, since leaving our home in Oregon for seminary in 2006. I’m learning, again and still, with this new season. We have planted asparagus and rhubarb, harvested our first tomatoes and zucchini, discovered the rabbits are undaunted by the height of our raised beds – raised not nearly high enough to stop them eating our strawberries and green beans. I have learned that sweet alyssum re-seed themselves…that cosmos, sadly, do not.

And I have learned that, at first flinch, I can’t always tell which is weed and which is flower.

“Let both of them grow together until the harvest,” the sower says in Jesus’ telling of the parable. Let both of them grow together.

The sower doesn’t spend a whole lot of time puzzling over who the enemy is, gone scattering weed among the grain. He doesn’t grow ponderous over the nature of evil in that place, the how and the why. He doesn’t tell the servants to go tear out everything not planted by himself, which might purify the harvest if it didn’t destroy all the growth in the process.

“Wait,” he says. “Let them both grow together until the harvest.”

---

I find myself holding that thought with Jacob’s words from today’s first reading. After sleeping with his head on a rock, after dreaming a vision of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending, he wakes up, and says, “Surely God is in this place, and I did not know it.”

“Surely, God is in this place.”

“Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

It’s interesting, holding up Jacob as an icon of this passage…Jacob, who is himself (as we all are) quite a mixture of grain and weed. He’s cunning, tricking his brother out of his birthright, conspiring with his mother in a scheme to steal the blessing intended for Esau. And he is also faithful, as we hear in his words from today’s lesson – “Surely God is in this place.” Jacob’s God is our God – the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob…and Leah and Rachel. He himself is a testimony to the need for those things that are good and life-giving to grow up among those things that are not-so-good, even potentially destructive, until the harvest. Because they’re all entwined together, in Jacob…in us.

---

Our own patron saint, Augustine, spent a great deal of time and energy addressing this matter. As a Manichean himself, he lived with the dichotomy between good and evil. As a theologian, he contended with the Pelagians, who thought that if they just tried hard enough, they could overcome evil all by themselves. As a priest and bishop, Augustine argued against the Donatists, who taught that a priest ordained by a bishop, who was himself judged insufficiently loyal to the church during persecution, had not really been ordained a priest…which meant that communion celebrated by a priest judged to be not really a priest, had not really been communion.

In the end, Augustine taught consistently with the lesson of this parable. (He was, after all, converted in the midst of a garden – perhaps he knew something of the nature of weed and grain and growth.) Augustine gives us the classic definition of the Church as a mixed body: corpus permixtum. “It is impossible to maintain absolute holiness in the church,”[1] he writes. “Unholy action by a member does not disable the possibility of future holiness.”

“Let both of them grow together until the harvest,” the sower says.

“Surely, God is in this place,” Jacob says.

---

We cannot always tell which is weed and which is grain. And I think there’s something both seductive and unhelpful about spending lots of time and energy pondering who might have done this, and attributing motive accordingly. There’s something both seductive and unhelpful about asking questions of whom God will accept, and why – about whom God will not accept, and why not. Because it seems that as soon as we pose those sorts of questions, we have put ourselves in the role of arbiter, determining “the wideness of the church’s welcome.”[2]

Instead, I wonder if this parable might be calling us to live into a kind of ambiguity that is at the same time both purposeful and wise.[3]

Because here’s the thing – the sower sowed with good seed. And now weeds have been sown alongside. But tearing out the wicked means threatening the growth – so the sower’s job is to wait, living among both grain and weed, until the time comes for harvest. And…and. God is in this place. God is here, whether we know it or not.

Augustine was right on this count, I believe: we are the corpus permixtum, the mixed body. Each one of us is a combination of both weed and grain; “holy and unholy; potentially fruitful, potentially destructive.”[4]

And our lives are filled with choices where there is no clear answer. Some we’ll get right, and some we won’t, and some – well, we just won’t know for a long, long time…if ever.[5]

All we have to do is turn on the news of this past week, read only the first lines of the newspaper, to find the holy and the unholy all mixed together. All we have to do is read about children crossing our borders, our officials confounded as to what they should do…about four boys shot in Palestine while swimming in the ocean…about people falling from the sky when their airplane traveled over warring country…about a girl making s’mores at a sleepover last night in Garfield park, caught and killed by a stray bullet. How can we not cry out that God would be in this place?

I hope that’s part of the reason we’re here on a Sunday morning. Because in the space of this sacred ambiguity, Jesus promises a day when there will be a harvest, when God will sort things out. I hope we’re here today to stand together with one another in the midst of a life that is both really, really amazing and sometimes really, really difficult. I hope we are here to remember again that God is in this place, promises to be in this place, right here with us. I hope we are here together today to listen again for words of forgiveness and reconciliation and absolution and grace and hope and commissioning, before going back out into a world that is at the same time both broken and beautiful.

I don’t know what all of the weeds look like in Chicago. And I don’t know about everything that grows back. But I’m glad and grateful to be tending this garden here, with you. Surely, surely God is in this place.

 

 

[1] “Baptism, Against the Donatists”

[2] Theodore Wardlaw. “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 3. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 263.

[3] Ibid, 263.

[4] Gary Peluso-Verdend. “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 3. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 264.

[5] http://www.davidlose.net/

Debbie Buesing Sermon - Pentecost V

Debbie Buesing

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

July 13, 2014

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

 

And he told them many things in parables, saying, “Listen!”

Our gospel today, and for the next few weeks, centers on parables told by Jesus. So I could start out by saying how a parable is a story from everyday life, used to convey spiritual meaning. Or I could do some textual analysis and talk about how the writer of Matthew’s gospel pulled all the parables together into one long discourse, to make it easy for teaching in the early church. Or I could take the historical approach and tell how some scholars believe these folksy tales allowed Jesus’ radical message to “fly under the radar” of the powers emanating from the big cities of Jerusalem and Rome.

Or.

I could say:

·       I wonder what this is. It’s gold. It might be a parable, because parables are more precious even than gold.

·       It looks like a present. Parables are gifts that were given to you a long time ago, even before you were born. And they belong to you, even if you don’t know what they are.

·       It has a lid so it’s like a closed door. Sometimes parables seem closed to us. You need to keep coming back for them, and one day they will open.

Is that not our experience of parables too? On the surface they seem almost inscrutable. But we are meant to have to mull them over. I picture the crowds on the hillside unpacking their barley loaves afterwards and saying, “What do you suppose he meant by that?”

With our young theologians, we call it “wondering.” I wonder if you would wonder with me for a minute or two. Let’s do some wondering out loud, together:

·       I wonder if the birds were happy when they saw the sower.

·       I wonder what the sower was doing when the little seeds could not get their roots in among the stones.

·       I wonder what the sower was doing when the little seeds were choked by the thorns.

·       I wonder what the sower was doing when the seeds were growing in the good earth.

·       I wonder who the sower might be.

The disciples were wondering, too. In fact, they were so perplexed that Jesus had to take them aside and and spell it all out for them. (There’s actually a middle section of this gospel passage – “grumpy Matthew,” I call it – the lectionary has removed a lot of the “grumpy Matthew” passages – where Jesus tells the disciples, “Look, I really, really need you to get this!”) So Jesus takes them aside and tells them that the seed is the word of God, and the parable is about how people will choose to respond to it … or not. It seems to me that he is preparing them for their commission, for the work they will be given to do, and maybe even managing their expectations. Some of them may get a hundredfold, others just sixty or thirty. And sometimes, at the end of the day, maybe all you did was feed the birds.  But that’s OK. Someone gets fed.

And I am almost certain that, back on that hillside, the guys sitting up in the farmer section were looking at each other and saying, “What is he TALKING about? Nobody plants in the rocks!” Because I’m sure that agribusiness in the first century was just as concerned about operating costs per acre as its modern descendants: the twenty-first century farmer has computerized tractors with on-board GPS systems that actually read the terrain and let down just enough seed. It’s called “optimized seed spacing.” Maximum efficiency. Nothing goes to waste.

But the economics of grace are different. The sower does not look at the field – at us – in terms of cost/benefit analysis. He just keeps flinging the seeds out there. The word – the Word Made Flesh in Jesus – keeps reaching out to us in love and forgiveness and generosity. When I wonder about this parable, that is the image I keep coming back to. Grace is never wasted.

And so, I wonder one more thing. I wonder if the sower is meant to be us. You and me.

In our Baptismal Covenant we promise to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.” That’s sowing seeds, is it not? And yet, I think we fall short in living into that covenant because we let rocks and weeds hold us back. For one thing, there’s fear. Fear of rejection, as Jesus was preparing his disciples for. Even more, fear of appearing naïve or irrelevant in a world overgrown with the thorns of irony and cynicism. And we want results! We need to see evidence that our generosity –  generosity of time, talents and treasure, or even simple generosity of spirit – is yielding fruit.  

We are cautious farmers. And when we play it safe, we aren’t helping to further the spread of God’s kingdom.

So in the spirit of the Great Sower’s unbounded generosity, let us go out and scatter some seeds. Look for the plants coming up from between the rocks. And while you’re at it, let some birds be fed.  Because you can’t waste grace.

 

This homily was inspired by the Godly Play story of the Parable of the Sower and used the gold parable box. Godly Play ©2011 by Jerome W. Berryman.

Bryan Cones Sermon - Pentecost IV

Rev. Bryan Cones

Pentecost 4A

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

 

So far this summer and pretty much until fall,

we'll be reading the stories of the so-called "patriarchs,

         the “founding fathers” of Jewish tradition,

--except that they are really stories of the matriarchs, too—

and sometimes more about the women than the men.

 

Take Rebekah, for example:

her husband Isaac, after nearly being sacrificed by his dad,

doesn't really do anything else other than father his two sons,

Esau and Jacob.

The real protagonist of the story is Rebekah:

She's the one who accepts the servant's invitation

to leave her home and marry Isaac,

and later she will be the one to choose

which of her sons inherits the legacy of Abraham—

by engineering the theft of a father's blessing

for her younger, favored son, Jacob.

Yet to this day it is Do-nothing Isaac's name that we remember.

And why's that?

 

One thing, I think, is the way we tell the story.

Today's first reading is a perfect example.

This whole scene between Abraham's servant

and Rebekah's brother Laban occurred

just a few verses before:

except instead of the servant telling Rebekah's story,

she speaks in her own voice.

How is it that our lectionary,

created by churches that all ordain women,

still produce a Sunday reading in which the heroine

gets only one line of two words?

 

 

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised

when we hear talk of the "god of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob"

instead of "the god of Sarah and Hagar, of Rebekah,

of Leah and Rachael, and of Zilphah and Bilhah,"

without whom there never would have been 12 tribes in Israel.

 

All of this is a long way of saying, simply,

that who gets to speak matters.

It matters who tells the story,

who gets remembered, and who forgotten.

And I think it should matter to us as those who follow Jesus.

I'm guessing that those who were weary and heavy burdened

were not the ones who ever were able to tell their stories.

Nobody listened to them.

Nor has the church necessarily been all that good at it either

--if we had been paying attention

to the stories of our own founding,

it seems pretty unlikely that it would have taken us

more than 1800 years to have women leading us,

as they did in the early Christian movement.

 

Which leads me to wonder:

Whose voices are still unheard in the church?

What stories need to be heard?

And how would we go about hearing them?

Is it young people, whether teenagers or young adults?

Is it older adults? Persons with disabilities?

Are we sharing our stories and voices as honestly

and truthfully as we can? Or do we hold back?

 

The truthful sharing of stories and hearing of voices

seems to me crucial in a Christian community of faith,

maybe even the difference between a dynamic

and outward focused church

and one that's disconnected from the world around it.

I'd even suggest that it's our job as a church

to be both telling our stories and listening to others.

It also sounds like the kind of church that this world needs;

in fact I think that making sure every voice is heard

and every story told

may make us better citizens of this country,

separated in so many ways across so many boundaries:

red and blue states, divisions of wealth and education and class.

What might be different about our politics or our society

if we practiced curiosity about our neighbors and their stories

rather than judged or categorized them

according to their tribe or party: tax collectors and sinners.

 

I don't think for a second that it's an easy task.

I know for myself this week

I have not found myself curious about protestors

chanting “USA” and blocking busses of migrants in California.

I’ve no doubt that my vision for this country and theirs

is quite different,

but I'm not sure that my gut reaction to them

is any more helpful than theirs.

As long as I'm not interested in their stories,

in what drives them to stand in the road

to turn back 120 refugees,

we are probably no closer to bridging

the yawning gaps in our culture and country.

 

Pope Francis recently said

in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict

that the world is dying from a lack of dialogue.

I think he may be on to something there.

And the heart of good dialogue is the willingness

to hear the voices and receive the stories of others,

especially those different from us,

especially those that are chronically unheard.

May it be so here, and in every community of Christian faith.

Kristin White Sermon - Pentecost III

A Sermon Preached

Kristin White

The Third Sunday after Pentecost – June 29, 2014

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church – Wilmette, Illinois

 

“Don’t look stupid.”

That was the statement that a trainer I worked with said functioned as the freshman student creed in their first days of high school. It resonates, doesn’t it, as you think of that first day entering the scary doors of a giant school…of walking into a classroom and trying to find a seat (don’t sit up front because you’ll look too…eager…don’t sit in back because the teacher will think you’re a punk, don’t – for God’s sake, don’t! – sit in somebody else’s place)…trying to figure out the particular vocabulary of the place, what names they assign to what things…or, that great test of all teenage resilience, deciding which table to choose at lunch time in the high school cafeteria.

At one of the high schools where I taught, I led a freshman program that attempted to set those new students more at ease in their early deer-in-headlights days of “don’t look stupid.” Upperclass students served as hosts, welcoming and checking in with freshmen in their first weeks at our school. The new students walked through all their classes and met their teachers before the day when confusion reigned, when everybody else was there. They were introduced to the language we used – the teacher-appropriate words, at least. And they had a place to sit, together with their small groups, in the cafeteria at lunch.

---

It might be hard to imagine, especially for those of us who have been Episcopalian for a long time, or who have been a part of this community for a while; but I wonder how much of that deer-in-headlights thing is true for people walking through these doors for the first time. After all, you can’t look in from the outside and see what’s going on here, so that alone makes it hard to step across the threshold. Where to sit? Well, too far back and you can’t see, but sitting all the way up front means you have nobody to follow with the standing up and the sitting down and the kneeling…and then there’s the bulletin and a hymnal and the prayer book and another hymnal and the sign of the cross (when do we make that, anyway?)…and communion…and talk about a peculiar vocabulary – Episcopalians have that down cold: from narthex to nave to columbarium to undercroft…and where is Puhlman Hall, and what does it mean to go there and is coffee hour a whole hour and will anyone actually talk to me if I do go?

Well, yes. In a word, yes. I’m grateful for the stories people tell me about the ways they have been made to feel welcome here – about one new member who had someone show her the right page in the right hymnal…about another standing in the hallway outside Puhlman Hall when a former warden introduced himself and welcomed him in…about one of our smallest members, Allison Jacobs, shaking hands with another small guest – now member – Jack Curchin, and inviting him to stay for cookies after church.

This is all more than social window-dressing, friends, as I think you instinctively know. It’s more than just doing those things that allow us to call ourselves a friendly church. There’s theology attached.

In today’s gospel, Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

The school where I taught sat a short distance from the State Penitentiary. Many of my students were the children of inmates. Gangs were a way of life. Education was often not. At the time we began our freshman orientation program, we had one of the highest dropout rates in the state. And I wish I could say that this fixed it – it didn’t…but it made a difference. It allowed new students to find themselves within a context that welcomed them. It allowed them to attach themselves to something that was not a gang. And it provided a way for older students to act as hosts and mentors, helped by giving them a chance and an imperative to lead.

Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

What those kids did, practically speaking – yes, was to help new freshmen walk through the very big and intimidating doors of a very old and intimidating building. They helped students figure out where their classes were and gave them a chance to find a place there. They helped new students navigate the anxiety of the high school cafeteria, decided together on a table where their own small group would sit. They taught new students the peculiar vocabulary of that place, helped them learn. Yes. Those were the practical, nuts-and-bolts things those sophomores and juniors and seniors did for their freshmen. But what they meant? “Welcome. Let me help you across this threshold. Welcome. Let me help you find your way. Welcome. Let me help you build your future here. Welcome. I care, and I’m glad you’re here.”

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, Jesus says; And whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

Now, there are clear lines of distinction between a city high school in Salem, Oregon, and an Episcopal Church in Wilmette, Illinois. But one thing holds true – how we welcome people matters. When we invite friends to be here with us, when the ushers open doors as people walk up the steps, when we slide down the pew to help someone find their way through worship, when we greet people authentically and enthusiastically at the Peace, when we ask them to come with us to coffee hour (Yes, people will talk to you…and No, you don’t have to stay for a whole hour) and when we give them a red coffee cup and introduce them to our other friends…with all of that nuts-and-bolts practical stuff, we help people set aside the deer-in-headlights feeling of walking through those beautiful and perhaps intimidating doors of this beautiful old building. And each time you do that, this is what you’re really saying: “Welcome. Let me help you across this threshold. Welcome. Let me help you find your way. Welcome. Let me help you build a life in this new place. Welcome I care, and I’m glad you’re here.”

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me…whoever gives even a cup of cold water (in a clear glass, or preferably a red mug) to one of these…none…will lose their reward.

 

Bryan Cones Sermon - Pentecost II

Bryan Cones

Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

June 22, 2014

Genesis 21:8-21, Matthew 10:24-39

 

I admit that I am having a hard time valuing sparrows:

            Since the beginning of spring they have been eating

            everything we have planted:

lettuce and peas and spinach

everything that grows early.

I swear one bird told all her friends,

            and a whole flock of sparrows

            could be found every morning eating away

until David built a sparrow-proof fortress for the lettuce.

In Jesus’ time, two sparrows were sold for a penny:

I’d pay a lot more than that if God could love those sparrows

            some place else.

Then again, even if those sparrows are worth nothing to me

to God they are valuable all by themselves.

 

This passage is, of course, not so much

about how God values sparrows,

but about how God values people--

more than “many sparrows”--

though in there is a gentle reminder that

we aren’t valued above ALL of them.

Our value to God is wrapped up in the way God treasures

            every created thing.

 

There is in this passage a wonderful affirmation

of all that God has made,

so much so that even the hairs of our heads

that so easily fall out and turn gray

are counted by God.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a more affirming passage than this one,

written to a community under a lot of stress,

with opponents on many sides.

To have Jesus affirm their value to God,

God’s care for them,

when it was not at all obvious that God favored them

was no doubt a source of comfort.

 

Perhaps we too,

in the more fearful and desperate moments of our lives,

perhaps when we have felt worth not even a penny,

have found the same kind of comfort in knowing that

our value to God is beyond measure.

Nothing that can happen to us,

            no illness or accident or disability,

            or failure or sin, or anything at all,

can take from us our God-given value.

 

And then there’s Hagar:

The slave woman offered to Abraham by her mistress

whose sole value was bear an heir.

And when she did as she was instructed,

and bore a son and became valuable,

she found that her value wasn’t secure at all.

All it took was a “legitimate” son to take it all away.

 

To her mistress, maybe to Abraham, maybe to God,

poor Hagar wasn’t worth very many sparrows,

and no one seemed to be counting the hairs

of her now-unnecessary son Ishmael’s head,

though their story does end with God making good

on a promise to Abraham.

 

 

Hagar and her son, Ishmael, have been on my mind this week

 as I have read of the tens of thousands of Hagars and Ishmaels,

wandering through the wildernesses

of Central America and northern Mexico,

struggling to cross into Texas,

only to find that they are not much valued on the other side.

Perhaps we wonder what kind of desperation,

 what fear of violence and hope for something better,

might drive so many to take such a dangerous journey.

 

How many sparrows are those 39,000 families worth to us?

Is anyone but God counting the hairs on the heads

of the 52,000 children who have crossed since October?

Seeing so many children crowded into detention centers

and hearing so many speak so harshly about them

is enough to make one question Jesus’ certainty

 about the way God values each of them.

Their treatment does not at all seem to reflect their God-given value.

 

With eyes of Christian faith, of course,

 we can affirm with Jesus the value of all those migrants:

There can be no doubt for us

that God is not only counting every hair

but also grieving every lost child,

every bereft mother, every separated family.

The God who sees every sparrow fall

is surely seeing Hagar and her children at the border

and in every place where the value

of the people God has made out of love

is not borne out in the way they are treated.

 

 

So what are we to make of the difference

between Jesus’ affirmation of how God treasures us

and the reality that so many are excluded from the care

that their dignity as those valued by God

should guarantee them?

 

There are many ways to respond to that question,

and this week, as I have read over and over again

Jesus’ affirmation of our value in God’s eyes,

 of how we are treasured along with the sparrows,

I have heard not only an affirmation of the value of all created things

 but also an invitation to join in valuing them as God does.

I wonder if Jesus is inviting us to become God’s partners

in seeing every sparrow and counting every hair,

in grieving with God when anything

God has made falls to the ground

or is lost to neglect, or violence, or fear.

 

Perhaps the gap between the way God values all things

and people’s everyday experience of being valued

closes, bit by bit, when all the friends of God,

including we followers of Jesus,

learn to embody ever more in word and action

God’s treasuring of every sparrow, every hair,

every Hagar, every Ishmael, every created thing.