March 27, Easter Day

John 20:1-18

Kristin White

All she has, in that moment, is her grief.

After walking to the tomb in the dark of the early morning, after the shock of seeing the stone rolled away from the place it had been three days before…after the chaos and confusion and the strange – competition? – of the running back and forth…after it all, his body is just not there. The linens lay scattered across the floor. And the other two disciples leave. They go home.

All she has, then, is her grief. There’s nothing else for her to hold onto – not even the sad comfort of ritual; she has no chance to bathe and anoint him, now, to chant the prayers singing him out of this life. Even that familiarity is beyond her grasp, beyond what she can see and touch.

So, absent it all, she stands weeping. What else is there for her to do? When two strangers dressed in white ask her why, she says: “He’s gone. And I don’t know where.”

Then she turns. Which matters – it’s worth paying attention to, this moment. She turns, and finds another person, someone she presumes a stranger; she guesses it’s the gardener, as he repeats the question the first two have asked: “Why are you weeping?”

“Just tell me where he is,” she says. “Tell me where to find him.”

“Mary,” he says.

And she knows. It’s him.

“Mary.”

He knows her name.

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When we baptize people into life in the Christian faith of this Church, we ask six questions:

·      Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

·      Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers?

·      Will you strive for justice and peace among all peoples, and respect the dignity of every human being?

·      Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

·      Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?

·      Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, and respect, sustain, and renew the life of the Earth?

To each of these questions, the person being baptized – or, more often, godparents, who pledge on their behalf – respond with this promise: “I will, with God’s help.”

Each week throughout the season of Lent that leads us to today, we have looked more closely at one of those baptismal questions and promises. In our prayers and our preaching and our conversation and our charge to go out into the world, we have asked together what it looks like to make each promise real in our lives – to say: “I will, with God’s help,” and give that promise substance with our choices and actions, day by day.

We have begun and continued conversations about real things: resisting the collective sin of racism; taking our places as members of this beloved community; asking whom we are serving when we seek and serve Christ; wondering about what dignity really looks like; protecting the work of God’s hands that is this fragile Earth, our island home; sharing God’s good news with a world that starves for the Word that is true and real.

And that’s it. When we ask what is true and real, this is what I can point to; you are who I can point to. Because those questions and promises are more than the ritual of standing with a baby in a white gown at the font. As beautiful as that moment is - and it is beautiful – it is only the beginning. Lived out over the course of a lifetime, those promises say something true and real about who we are as a Christian people. They equip us to face into hard truths: the chaos and confusion and shock and strange competitions that are all too much with us. Even those deep and profound losses, so true and so real that it seems sometimes all we have is our grief, because everything else is beyond our grasp; when it feels like all we can do is stand weeping with Mary.

You know. You know, from the news you see and the news you live.

Baptism is for something. The Church is for something more than itself. Our lives of faith matter, especially in a time when we see things we wish we did not see, and know things we wish we did not know. We need those promises in our lives because they offer us a way to stand against that which would diminish or destroy us, they equip us to steady ourselves, to say: “here, and no further.” We promise to resist evil because there is evil at work in the world. We promise to continue in fellowship because there is too much that would separate us from one another. We promise to seek and serve and safeguard and respect because all we have to do is hear one word – one word – of the daily news, to see that these practices, which make us more fully who we are, are quickly becoming evermore and alarmingly scarce.

So we make our promises, “with God’s help,” because we know enough to know that we can’t do this on our own. And when we do, when we strive, imperfectly, as we will, to live those promises out in our lives, we see our own humanity, and that of the person next to us. When we try, imperfectly, as we will, to live those promises, we catch glimpses of that which is holy within us, and within everybody, everybody, everybody. We do this imperfectly, human as we are, and so we practice, as a people responding to a question with a promise, a people sealed by the Holy Spirit who belong, forever, to the God who knows our name.

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A group of us gathered earlier this week with our bishop, who invited us into a series of meditations. When he spoke about the sacrament of baptism, Bishop Lee said that God takes what is true and makes it real. God takes what is true – that you are God’s own beloved; and makes it real – in tangible ways, in ways we can hold onto, with water and flame and oil; in words said and sung by the voices of the people we love, by the people who know our names.

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“Mary,” he says.

And she knows.

“Mary.”

He knows her name.

She can’t hold onto him, still, because he will be leaving her again, this time to ascend to the Father. But he’s real; she has that to grasp. And she sees him – in a way she might never have imagined, as she walked to the tomb in that sad morning darkness. She sees him – not his body, beaten, and broken, and lifeless, as it had been on Friday afternoon. She sees him on this Sunday morning – risen – God made manifest as her teacher and friend, the one she belongs to, forever. The one who knows her name.

Alleluia.

March 26, Easter Vigil

Genesis 1:1--2:4a; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13; Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21; Baruch 3:9-15, 3:32--4:4

Bryan Cones

Last Sunday we began telling a story: the story about Jesus’ last week or so of life, which we finished up yesterday as he breathed his last. And now with Jesus on this night we are waiting in the darkness for what comes next. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

To mark the time we have started telling our whole story again, from the beginning, in the watery chaos before time began, when it was only God on their own, wondering what might be drawn from the fertile void. And out of a watery nothingness God’s creativity called forth a flourishing something: light and darkness, sun and moon, green growing things, living creeping things, breathing human things. Out of nothing comes something through God’s imagination. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

Another story, this time a natural disaster of epic proportions, a moral disaster that humanity brought upon itself, the story tells us, which threatened to wash away all that God had made. But the Holy One won’t have it, and commissions a life raft to keep creation afloat until the crisis passes. Out of certain destruction comes salvation through God’s faithfulness. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

Another story, perhaps a bit more familiar: an enslaved and oppressed people, no hope of rescue, crushed under the heel of the god-king Pharaoh, a motley crew of Hebrews whose lives did not matter, to Pharaoh anyway. But they did matter to the Holy One, who summons a voice to speak for them, who gives a holy name for them to call, and who marshals creation in a great war against their oppressor. Out of slavery comes liberation through God’s power. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

The story goes on: That people passed through the desert and became a nation, bound by a covenant to the God who set them free. But covenants can be hard to keep, and some who had been oppressed became oppressors themselves, of the widow, the orphan, the alien immigrant. The people turned from the path of Wisdom, though she taught them her ways and called to them again and again in the unheeded voices of the prophets she sent. So finally she came herself, and pitched her tent, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Out of abandonment comes companionship through God’s steadfast love. What do you think is going to happen with Jesus?

And so Wisdom walked among us to show us her way, healing and freeing, teaching and listening, eating and drinking with everybody who came along. And before long she drew the attention of the god-king Caesar, and those who oppressed and enslaved the poor, and turned creation to destruction for their own purposes, who would prefer to keep for themselves what God desires for all.

Which brings us back to where we started, on this night, here in this darkness, waiting to tell the story of what happened with Jesus: out of defeat comes victory, out of death comes life, out of the old creation comes a new one, and the story of Wisdom begins anew in the risen body of Christ.

And so here we are, bearing that story, to a world beset by chaos and violence, on the edge of natural and moral disaster threatening to burn up what God has made, when some lives still don’t matter, the widow and orphan and alien are left abandoned on the border, and Wisdom’s children are still sent to the tombs. What do you think is going to happen with us?

We already know the answer: We are going to live the story we have been telling of what God has been doing all along, of what Christ is now making risen flesh in us, Christ’s body: the divine imagination that draws forth a flourishing something where once there was nothing; the divine faithfulness that shelters and protects what is threatened with destruction, the divine power that goes to battle with anything that enslaves and oppresses God’s people, the divine love that refuses to give up on anyone, the divine Wisdom who teaches and listens, heals and makes whole, who sits to eat and drink with all who have been abandoned, the divine life that disarms death forever.

So let us gather now at the waters where it all began, and begins again and again, to be bathed once more in the story of how God is saving the world. 

March 25, Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-10:42

Deacon Sue Nebel

Good Friday. The second day of the Triduum, the three sacred days leading up to Easter. This day, right in the middle, is the darkest, the most solemn of the three.  We began the Triduum last night in a somewhat festive mood, gathering for an agape meal.  Then we shifted our focus and the mood darkened.  We remembered in words and actions the events of the night before Jesus’ death.  The last meal with his disciples. The footwashing.  His final commandment: to love one another.

Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Triduum, ends in darkness and quiet.  Tomorrow, Holy Saturday, is a day of anticipation and preparation for the evening ahead. The Easter Vigil when the light of Christ dispels the darkness. New life. Hope. Celebration.  But not today, not on Good Friday. Today we gather in sadness, emptiness. The church has been stripped bare.  Today we hear the story of Jesus’ arrest and trial.  His death on a cross. His body placed in a tomb. 

Three days.  Three sets of events.  Three symbols.  Maundy Thursday: the basin and towel of footwashing.  Good Friday: the cross.  Holy Saturday: the empty tomb.  Important, all three of them, but it is the cross that Christian tradition has made central. Walk into a Christian church and you will find a cross, front and center, just as it is here.  We encounter crosses in many forms in our church life.  We carry crosses in procession. We see them in decorations, vestments, service leaflets, and prayer books.  Church logos and flags.  Many people wear crosses as jewelry.  Some simple, some elaborate. 

Today, on Good Friday, we focus on one cross.  The instrument of punishment and death for criminals in the Roman Empire.  Jesus sentenced to die because of his teachings and actions.  Words and actions that were judged to be a threat to those in power.  So, they decided to get rid of him.  In the cruelest, most humiliating kind of death. The cross of Good Friday is not an ornate decorated object. The cross of Good Friday is plain, heavy wood.  Rough, stark.  In a few minutes,  (or Kristin)  will bring that kind of cross forward and we will honor it.  Silently affirming its central place in our hearts and in our lives as Christians.

Good Friday is a day of commemoration, of remembering.  Good Friday invites us into the story of the events surrounding Jesus’ death.  The betrayal by Judas. The scattering of the other disciples.  Jesus questioned by Pilate.  Mocked and scorned by the crowd around him.  The grim details of Jesus’ death.  His body, taken down, wrapped in spices and cloth, and placed in a tomb. 

Good Friday into something else as well.  Good Friday invites us to reflect on what the Cross means to us.  What image of the Cross is most important to us? Which Cross have we taken into ourselves?  To shape who we are and what we do.

·      Is it the Cross of Good Friday?  Jesus’ suffering and death—and the meaning that we give to it.  Jesus as sacrifice.  Jesus dying for us. 

·      Is it the Cross of Jesus’ teaching in Scripture?  Jesus told those who wanted to join him, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” A cross that we choose. The Cross of Discipleship.

·      Our most important cross may be one that we experience in the liturgies of the church.  The Cross of Blessing.  The gestures of the hands of a bishop or priest.  Blessing the bread and wine of the Eucharistic meal.  Blessing the people at the end of a service, reminding them that they are children of God, loved by God.

·      Or perhaps, it is the Cross of Baptism that is most important to us.  The declaration of faith and commitment to Christ.  The final action of the baptismal rite: the anointing with oil and sign of the cross on the forehead.  With the words, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”  A Cross of Identity

Today, as you go out from this liturgy of Good Friday.  I invite you to take one of these images of the cross with you.  Your favorite.  Or perhaps, you might want to take another one. To see how it fits.   Whatever you choose, take it with you.  Carry it with you, as you move through the rest of the day.  Reflect on it.  Find a place for it deep within yourself. Let it work on you.  et it shape you.  Today, tomorrow, and beyond.

March 20, Palm Sunday

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 19:28-40; Luke 22:14--23:56

Bryan Cones

Where is God in all this? That could be a question many of us have been asking since this time last year: violence and destruction in Paris, Istanbul, and Baghdad, which still echoes in the news this week, tragic deaths and unimaginable violence in Chicago, an endless war in Syria whose victims wash up on Europe’s shores, a political campaign marked by anger and frustration, spilling over into a contest of profanity and name-calling, even physical attacks and recrimination. Where is God in all this?

And that’s just in the world out there, without even touching those hard moments of family or personal life: the unexpected and unprepared for deaths, the surprising sickness, the diminishment of just growing older, the betrayal of friends, suffering the mean girls or the bully boys, the feeling of just being alone. Where is God in all this?

What a very good question, one our Christian ancestors were asking themselves as they reflected on the events of the week we are about to begin: Where was God when God’s Son was suffering so? Where was God when the Romans crucified the Chosen One? And where was God when those who followed the Christ suffered rejection and persecution themselves? And here today, on Palm Sunday, we begin to tell once again the stories through which they answered the question: Where is God in all this?

The story actually began last week, with Mary of Bethany’s prophetic anointing of Jesus, her actions signaling where God was in that tender moment, caring for the Son as Jesus prepared to make his final journey. Today we tell more of that story in two parts, beginning with a joyous parade in which the voice of God rises up from those who have been silenced and ignored, so powerful that even those religious authorities couldn’t shut them up, lest God make even the stones sing.

We skip today the part where the crowd invades the Temple, turning over tables in God’s protest of the blasphemy of ripping off the faithful poor as they tried to worship God. That bit of activism is what draws the attention of the Romans, and will end in the story of Jesus’ death we tell today, but not before Jesus shows us where God is: in the forgiveness showered not only upon those with whom he is crucified, but upon those who do the crucifying as well.

That’s not the whole story, of course—don’t forget the middle. On Thursday we tell the story of the night before Jesus died, when God was in the holy meal that is the pledge of God’s love for us, and in the holy act of service that is our pledge of love for all, and in the holy watch through the night with our friend as we wait for Good Friday’s dawn.

On Friday again we tell the story of that fateful day, when the power of evil seemed for a moment to win, as the Just One stood before the unjust, as all his friends, save three, deserted him in his hour of need. Where God was then is sometimes hard to see, though perhaps it was in God’s refusal to destroy what God had so lovingly made, even as it destroyed the Just One.

Which brings us to Saturday, when we gather in the tombs at night, following the faithful women who hoped to anoint the Anointed One, there to discover what God had known all along, that no shadow can overcome the brightness of God, a God who is present through both light and darkness. And so in darkness we tell the whole story again from the beginning of where God has been all along, until we get to the end, which is actually the new beginning, the story of living always where God is, in life that death cannot overcome.

And so we gather today, to tell the story again, starting at the beginning, and staying for the middle, all the way to the end, not just by reading it but by living it: to join the parade of palms and praise today, and to shout with the crowd that wants Jesus dead, to eat with Jesus one last time on Thursday night, and to practice with him the humble service he came to reveal, and to sit up with him in his terror until it becomes too much, to return on Friday before it is too late to accompany Jesus as he dies, to gather at his grave on Saturday night to mourn him, until we are surprised by the new thing God has done on Sunday.

This is Holy Week, when we make present the story we live by, so that we can learn again just how to see where God is in all this, by remembering where God has been and always will be: with us through the same moments of joy, sorrow, service, care, waiting, watching, never failing to be with us to show us the way, never failing to draw new life out of what seems like loss. As we remember this story in word and action this week so may we also discover that God is always wherever we are, whenever we tell this story. 

March 13, Fifth Sunday in Lent

John 12:1-8

Bryan Cones

Imagine yourself for a moment witnessing this act of very public and extravagant affection of this woman toward Jesus just before his death. It is so surprising, even a little shocking, that I can’t help but wonder what really happened and just who this woman was, and what motivated her to do what she did.

Like the account of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan, this story appears in all four gospels, a good sign that something like this really happened, though unlike the story of John and Jesus, the woman’s identity and motivation shifts a bit. In Mark and Matthew, where she anoints Jesus’ head, the story leaves her unnamed, and we know nothing about her. Luke turns her into a woman with a past, a sinner of some sort, and history assumes she was a prostitute, though without any evidence or justification from the story itself.

But here in John, we know exactly who the woman is: Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus, and a good friend of Jesus, so good in fact that when her brother, Lazarus, had died, she let Jesus have it, grilling him about where he had been when Lazarus was sick, and why he hadn’t shown up in time to heal his friend.

In this story, only a short chapter later, the resuscitated Lazarus is back at the family table. And so here again is Mary, this time without a word, covering Jesus’ feet with a shocking extravagance of immensely expensive perfume, and wiping his feet with her own hair. It’s a magnificent act of love and thanksgiving.

Imagine the looks on the faces of the rest of those men at the table, some of whom were offended, if Judas is any indication. Or were they jealous because no one had ever touched them with such care? They judge Mary, it seems, because she didn’t do the proper thing, the expected thing, the righteous thing: giving this extravagance to the poor.

But Mary knew that something else was needed, that this journey to Jerusalem was not going to end well for her friend. In six short days he was going to receive the very opposite treatment: in place of anointing, there will be beatings; in place of perfumed oil, the smell of blood; in place of the softest hair, the hardest of nails.

And so Mary did what only she could do: prepare Jesus’ body for burial, treating his body for a moment with the kindness that only she could offer her friend, Judas and all her other detractors be damned. Her act of kindness is a work of art, a response with her own body to the grace and salvation she had already experienced in Jesus, whose love and power had restored the body of her brother to life.

It is creativity so marvelous that we remember it still every time we tell this story, and I have to wonder if its effect on Jesus was so great, that he imitated Mary’s creativity on the night before he died. Was it Mary’s surprising and creative act of love and service that inspired Jesus to get down on his hands and knees to wash the feet of his friends? Perhaps we have Mary of Bethany to thank for the liturgy we will celebrate a week from Thursday as we wash each other’s feet.

For these weeks of Lent we have been reflecting on the questions of our baptismal covenant, questions that propose how we might respond to the saving work God has done for us in Jesus. We sometimes call them “vows” or “promises,” and today we will consider the one that calls us to care for creation, which for good reason might lead us to discuss climate change or environmental justice for people, such as those in Flint, who suffer the worst effects of pollution.

But seen through the surprising and creative way Mary of Bethany honors “creation” in her creative care of the created body of Jesus, perhaps we might see these questions of baptism less as vows or promises to act in some specific way, more as invitations to creativity like Mary’s. Perhaps they are encouragement to explore the ways we, with Mary, might practice the “art of salvation,” how each of us might take what God has so freely given us in Jesus and make it flesh and blood in our own bodies, as Mary did, in our own surprising and unrepeatable way. God may be inviting us all to get creative with our thanksgiving, to embody salvation in the way only we can do it.

We can’t be Mary of Bethany, of course—but we can be us: knitting a shawl that gathers prayers into soft embrace to shelter the body of one who is sick or grieving; sitting at the bedside of one we love as death carries them into what lies ahead; hauling beds and chairs and tables to transform a parish hall into a bedroom that for a moment feels like home for a family who lacks one; showing up at a community meeting that tries to address just why those families lack a home of their own; sharing one’s reflections on faith and life with friends on a Thursday night in the parish lounge; bearing a loaf of bread to make someone new feel welcome, or picking up bread and delivering it to a feeding ministry so that it won’t get wasted; singing a song of praise to carry the spirits of fellow Christians or anyone else heavenward; planting a scarlet runner bean seed to behold with wonder the power of life at work in God’s creation.

This is the art of salvation: our thanksgiving for what God has already done once for all in Jesus, embodied in countless new ways in us, until at last the mystery of the body of Christ comes to fullness. And if the surprising creativity of Mary of Bethany is any indication, we are still a long way from exhausting the artistic potential of what God is still revealing in those who follow Christ on the Way. 

March 6, Fourth Sunday of Lent

2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Kristin White

Will you proclaim, by word and example, the good news of God in Christ?

When Michael Curry stepped into the pulpit at Washington National Cathedral last All Saints Day to preach his installation sermon as Presiding Bishop, he said, “Jesus came to…transform this world, from the nightmare it often is, to the dream that God intends.” He went on, in that magnificent space, with more bishops than it would be easy to count, and everything and everyone fully adorned, to say that that was not what the day was all about. “The real reason we are here,” Presiding Bishop Curry said, “Is that at the beginning of the service, we renewed our vows of baptism.”

And so I return again to the promise that is our focus this week: Will you proclaim, by word and example, the good news of God in Christ?

What does that mean for you, that promise you made: “We will, with God’s help,” when you were baptized, or, more likely, the promise that was made on your behalf, as you were baptized as an infant or a child? What does it look like in your life, to proclaim God’s good news by both what you say and how you live? Where do you see it made real in the words of scripture, particularly today?

You know the story of today’s gospel, no doubt – the parable Jesus tells in response to the Pharisees’ and scribes’ grumbling about Jesus and sinners and tax collectors: “This guy welcomes them…and eats with them…”

You know – the man, his two sons, one with the audacity to ask for his share of the family inheritance, which he blows off in what the King James Version of the bible calls “riotous living,” then finds himself in trouble, working with pigs who eat better than he does. So he goes home. He goes home, prepared to say all the things you’re supposed to say in a moment as potentially humiliating as that might have been. But when he gets there, it seems like he barely has the chance to get the words out of his mouth before his dad has thrown a robe around his shoulders and put a ring on his fingerand shoes on his feet, ordered the killing of a fat calf and planned a party to get started exactly right now.

His older brother, the one who didn’t ask for his inheritance, who didn’t go off to live riotously, who didn’t go anywhere at all, but stayed put and did the work of a faithful son…he’s not so ready to party. “All that is mine is yours,” says the father. “Your brother was dead and is alive, he was lost and now is found!”

Where is the good news here? And how are we to talk about it?

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In the second letter to the church at Corinth, Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, then there is a new creation…” All of it is from God, who reconciled us to God’s own self through Jesus, who gives us that ministry, entrusts us with the ministry of reconciliation.

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At different times, the story of the Prodigal has landed on me in different ways. Sometimes I’m curious about what exactly was involved in that little brother’s “riotous living.” And sometimes, I understand the older brother’s indignance, older sister that I am (with apologies to my younger sister Becky who is here with us today); more often, that indignance embarrasses me, makes me uncomfortable. And sometimes the word I hear is purely one of thanksgiving for a father prepared to set everything aside and lavish abundant love on the lost child, now found.

Today, I find myself wondering about what comes next. I wonder how this reconciled family – if they are in fact reconciled on this younger son’sreturn – lives differently as a result of that reconciliation. I wonder what the good news looks like in their life. And I wonder, if this parable were to take flesh, how they would share their good news in the days ahead. I wonder how they might proclaim it, even, in what they say and how they live.

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In his installation sermon, Bishop Curry talked about last summer’s General Convention, the wide gathering of the Episcopal Church at which he was elected the first black Presiding Bishop. “I heard a call at that Convention,” he said, “I heard a call for evangelism and a call for reconciliation – to work for evangelism, sharing the good news of Jesus, and to work for racial reconciliation, to cross the divides that separate us.”

The Presiding Bishop went on to tell this story: “In the 1940s, long before desegregation, before Brown v. Board of Education, before Rosa Parks sat on that bus…an African-American couple went to an Episcopal Church. They were the only people of color in the church. They went to worship – the woman had become an Episcopalian, the man was studying to become a Baptist preacher…The service went along, following the order of the 1928 Prayer Book. The woman had told her fiancé beforehand, “When the time comes, I’ll go up for communion, and you can either stay here or you can go up and receive a blessing.” He said, “Well I’ll just sit here and see what happens.” So the time came, and she went forward to kneel at the altar rail, and the priest was giving out the sacrament. And everyone else was not…black…And that was all okay when it was the bread getting passed out, but then the chalice came. And the man looked up and saw there was just one cup, and it had wine in it, too! But the wine wasn’t the issue – it was just one cup. And he watched as the priest took the cup to each person, to the lady just before the African-American woman (remember, this is before desegregation, before Brown v. Board of Education, before Rosa Parks sat down…) and then the fiancé took the cup (“the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, shed for thee, preserve thy body into everlasting life”); and he looked. And then the next person received, and then the next, and the next. And years later, the man would say that he joined the Episcopal Church because he really hadn’t imagined that that could happen in America. He said, ‘Any church where blacks and whites drink out of the same cup knows something about the gospel that I want to be part of.’ 

The Holy Spirit has done evangelism and racial reconciliation in the Episcopal Church before, because that man and woman were the parents of the 27th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.”

My friends, we have good news to share that God has entrusted to us in the person of Jesus. We have the stories of our faith and of our lives to share with people who need to hear them, stories we have our own need to share of those moments when we see glimpses, when our lives have been transformed from the nightmares we sometimes encounter, to the dreams that God intends. 

In the words of Paul’s letter, we are a new creation, entrusted to continue the ministry of reconciliation in thanksgiving for the ways that God has reconciled us.

It’s good news. Good news, indeed. 

How will you live, reconciled, as a new creation? How will you proclaim God’s good news in the person of Jesus by what you say and by how you live?

February 28, Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

Bryan Cones

I know Lent is supposed to be a time for self-examination and all, to look at ourselves and see if we might  take our baptismal covenant a bit more seriously, but seriously, these are the readings that supposed to help us do that? As our second reader Meghan wrote when I sent her the second reading from Paul, “Yoikes!”

Yoikes indeed… We could boil down a paragraph from Paul today to something like: sexual immorality = death; unfaithfulness to Christ = death; complaining = death.

And it’s not just Paul: In probably the goriest passage in Luke’s gospel after the crucifixion, Jesus is commenting on a tragic accident —a tower falling down and killing 18 people— along with a grotesque act of imperial abuse— Pontius Pilate mingling the blood of Galileans he executed with his Roman sacrifices. I wanted to tell the kids to cover their ears while Sue was reading.

Jesus is at pains to point out that the victims of those events hadn’t been more sinful than anyone else, so they didn’t deserve it—but then goes on to say unless his hearers repent, things will be even worse for them! I’m not sure that lovely parable about the fig tree can save it. How’s that for Lenten encouragement?

Even the first reading, with its amazing vision of God in a bush that burns but doesn’t burn up, its revelation of the divine name, and its promise of freedom to an oppressed people, has within it a problem: The land that I AM is going to give to the Chosen People already belongs to someone else, with consequences that extend all the way to the present day in the land where Jesus walked—and not just there, but in many places where Christians have landed and decided that God had promised the land to them, no matter who was already there.

And there’s the rub: These difficult passages aren’t just hard by themselves. They echo still today in the way they are used and interpreted. The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s may have faded from our popular imaginations (though that crisis continues) but those of us who remember it probably remember the ways in which a passage such as the one we heard from Paul today was used to explain why so many gay men had a fatal illness. It was a divine punishment for sexual immorality. That was an interpretation with catastrophic consequences for the faith of many of those gay men and those who cared for them and journeyed with them all the way to death.

And that line about complaining has been used against poor people for a long time—something like they should stop complaining and work harder. When I was a Roman Catholic seminarian in college, I remember my faithful evangelical neighbor explaining to me that in his experience most people who were poor were poor because they made poor choices. I remember first thinking that it was probably a little more complicated than that. Then I thought if I was poor and needed help, I sure wouldn’t want to run into him, but it also struck me that this faithful Bible-focused Christian had evidently missed all those parts in the Bible where blame for poverty falls not on the poor, but on the rich, both for their dereliction of duty in relation to those in need and because their selfishness and injustice are borne by widows and orphans.

These unhelpful approaches to unhelpful passages in the Bible all seem to boil down to something like: People somehow deserve the suffering they are experiencing. In various forms it’s used to make sense of addiction and illness and poverty and war and so on, usually to the detriment of persons actually experiencing them. Maybe sometimes we even turn that interpretation on ourselves: I am suffering because I deserve it, and God is punishing me.

Paul tries to save this a bit by suggesting that God may be using these experiences to test us and help us grow, and won’t give us anything too hard for us to bear. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m terribly interested in being in a relationship with, much less worshiping, a God like that. Life is hard enough without God making it into an object lesson. That’s not the God I experience and know.

What’s that God like? I think a dear friend of mine summed it up best. After years of struggling with what he saw as a mistake in his past and wondering whether God was punishing him or trying to teach him a lesson, he was driving to work one day and had his Eureka moment: God isn’t punishing me, he realized, because God doesn’t punish anybody. And almost immediately it followed: And I shouldn’t punish anybody either. He told me it was like God had unplugged one idea, and plugged in another, and that he almost wrecked his car when he realized what God had done. When he told me that story, I wanted to take off my shoes, because I knew I was standing on holy ground.

Will you seek and serve Christ in every person, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human being? Those two questions from our baptismal covenant are a mouthful, and there are countless ways to live them out. But I wonder if, in light of the these readings, we might start to renew our commitment to them by first repenting of those scriptures and their interpretations that get in the way of loving our neighbor or ourselves, or produce the very opposite of justice and peace because they do not lead to respect for the dignity of every human being.

It seems to me that living out the demands of our baptismal covenant may start with remembering the God who called out to Moses: the God who appeared as an oxymoronic bush that burned but did not burn up, the God whose name is the refusal of name, more like an invitation than an identity. This is a God beyond any human certainty or knowledge, a God who invites silence and wonder before any speech.

And if we want to be a part of this God’s mission of freeing people and honoring human dignity, and partnering in God’s work of justice and peace, that likely begins with remembering that every person we encounter is an image of that ungraspable God, with that same holy fire burning within them.

When we stand facing one another, we stand where Moses stood. “Remove the sandals from your feet,” I AM warns us, “for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”