Bryan Cones, Pentecost XVIII

Exodus 32:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

I forgot.

Kristin preached last week on those “10 best ways,” the commandments that are the charter of life with the God of Israel. There are only 10 or so of them, but, if the world is any indication, they are fairly easy to forget. Even the people that received them directly from God, so the story goes, forgot them almost immediately. In Moses’ absence they forgot not only the commandments, but who they were: God’s people, slaves delivered from the land of Egypt and made free.

It got so bad that it seems even God forgot: Imagine Moses’s surprise when he found out what his people, whom he brought up from Egypt were doing. My people? I imagine him saying. I was in a whole other country when you came to get me. They all forgot, forgot themselves, forgot God, forgot Moses, forgot each other.

Forgetting is a common problem—it’s in every reading today. Euodia and Syntyche in the second reading, two pillars and leaders in Philippi, evidently had such a hard time getting along that the church had to send a messenger to Paul, in a Roman prison, for his intervention. These two women had forgotten that they were sisters in Christ, partners in the work of the gospel.

Even that odd parable in the gospel of Matthew has some “forgetting” in it: All those original invitees forgot just whose kingdom they were living in, so much so that they killed the king’s messengers. It might be convenient to see this reading as some sort of diatribe against the Jewish authorities, but Matthew wasn't writing to Jews as such; he was writing to Christians, some of whom were already forgetting, going back to their old lives, not living up to the “wedding garment” they had been given. Jesus, like Moses, had been gone for a while, and some of his followers were forgetting him and all those feasts they shared with him.

It’s so easy to forget. And we know that when we start to forget the little things, the big things are sure to follow. It can be easy to forget what life is really about, to forget the best ways to live by. Relationships erode little by little until people “forget” that they are married, or that they are friends, or sisters.

Forgetting can take on a life of its own: I've often wondered if addiction is a kind of forgetting, when something else has so taken over life, that it becomes its own thing, replacing or masking the memory, of the person that’s really there. Perhaps in our own lives we've had moments when we've come to our senses, woken up and wondered: How did I get here? Who am I?

I forgot.

Perhaps in moments of doubt or guilt or shame we've wondered if God has forgotten us as well.

Thank God for Moses. Thank God for Paul. Thank God for all those people who help us remember who we are and who God is. Thank God for the people who stand in the gap and say: This isn't you. Remember yourself, remember who you are called to be. I hope we all have people like that in our lives.

And thank God for those laws, those practices, those best ways that help us remember. As a child one of the nightly rituals in our family was the obligatory “I love you” before going to bed. Often enough, it was preceded by an equally obligatory “I'm sorry,” to mend whichever relationship had suffered that day. Sometimes it felt like we were faking it, and sometimes we were, but we always remembered we were a family, so that we never got so far down the road that we forgot. Perhaps we all have our own home rituals our own ways of remembering who we are.

I’d like to think of this Sunday gathering as one of those ways of remembering. When we touch that blessed water at the door of the church, we remember ourselves as God’s beloved baptized, made one in the new covenant in Christ.

When we greet one another here we remember that we belong to the company of those invited into living the best ways of God, even if sometimes we forget. And even when we do, here’s a whole jumble of Moses and Pauls to help us remember.

When we hear the story of God’s people proclaimed, we remember that it’s our story, too: we are the characters, actors with God in the drama of the world’s salvation.

And when we gather at this table we remember that we are the ones drawn from everywhere to feast at God’s banquet. We are the ones Jesus is talking about. We are the ones gathered and fed to in turn be sent out again, so that the world might itself remember the best way God has made it to be. 

Kristin White Sermon - Bill Gourley Memorial

Kristin White

Bill Gourley Memorial – October 4, 2014

St. Augustine's Episcopal Church

Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,” we hear today, from the first reading, in the Book of Lamentations. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God’s mercies never come to an end.”

Love is exactly what the Gourleys have been showered with, over the past months, and especially in the last weeks of Bill’s life. Athletes he had coached and friends and family and neighbors from down the street and people from very far away came to the Gourleys’ home to tell Bill what he meant to them. And if they couldn’t come in person, they wrote – notes and cards and emails, many of which Carol and Doug shared with me. In them, people talked about what Bill was like as a coach (real, tough, with high expectations that he meant to see fulfilled, and also a great capacity for fun), and as a parent figure (assigning chores to his children’s friends who visited the Gourley house, drawing others closer into the circle, helping them feel like they belonged). There were so many, written by folks who obviously cared so deeply. I found myself walking around with images of them, like snapshots in a wallet, of who Bill was for the people who took such time and care to write.

Steadfast is a word I would use. Bill stuck around, in ways that mattered to the people, in ways that were important. He was steadfast in his love as a husband to Carol for 58 years, as a father and a grandfather, as a coach challenging people to grow into what they were capable of, as a neighbor, as a friend.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.

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People seem to have carried these stories about who Bill was in their lives, like we might carry a favorite picture. And finding out that he was so sick meant that it was time to take that story out, reflect it back to the one who made it possible, as if to say: this is who you are for me; this is who I am, because of you.

“You were the perfect person to come into my life at the perfect time,” one person wrote.

 “I am a better father because of your example,” wrote another friend.

“Now swim,” a nephew recalls his Uncle Bill’s words to him, as Bill pushed him into the deep end of the swimming pool. “And I did,” he wrote.

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And again, I hear those words: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.”

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My own images of Bill over the past two years that I knew him show up in snapshots, too.

I see him here at church in our Parish Hall on a Monday morning, together with the others who count and record and deposit our offerings from Sunday worship. Long after their actual work was done, they would sit and talk, finish drinking the coffee they had made, eating the treats Mary Jane McCluskey brought from Lawrence Dean bakery. I’m pretty sure the problems of the world were solved across the table on those Monday mornings, along with opinions shared, stories told.

I see him two days before this past Christmas at a party, telling me about his thankfully brief trip in and out of the Emergency Room the day before. He was frustrated that he’d had to go in, glad to have been released – honest, practical – and then turning quickly with a smile and a twinkle in his eye to tell a story about something else.

And I see him the very next night, Christmas Eve, here at church. It’s a big night here, Christmas Eve…and we had had some kind of a scheduling mixup that meant my husband John (sorry, honey, liability of being a clergy spouse) was, at that moment, the solo usher for a whole bunch of people coming to worship, helping them in the door, getting a bulletin for the service, finding a seat. Bill and Carol walked in for the late service, and found John serving by himself, and so Bill stayed at the back instead to help. He had been at the hospital two days before. But he wasn’t going to leave John on his own.

I see Bill and Carol getting out of the car the first Sunday back from their yearly trip to Sanibel. He was tan, and rested, relaxed. He said, “You know, I swam every single day. And it was great.”

And I see him just a couple of months ago, in the pews here after another service. He was sitting with Carol, and their neighbor and dear friend Debra Bonamici, teasing them both about their various escapades…and in the midst of the teasing, sharing stories with me about his courtship with Carol so many years ago.

He was practical and honest and opinionated and hopeful and real. And kind. And loving. And I don’t know a better phrase for what all that boils down to, at its essence, than those words from Lamentations: steadfast love.

No one knows that truth of Bill more dearly than Carol, and Bill and Carol’s children, and their grandchildren. Those snapshot stories continue: Bill watching his grandkids at practices and games and meets. Calling each one of them by names of his own creation…and them, in turn, calling themselves by his name.

The promise of God’s steadfast love that we hear in this first passage is that it never ceases, it never goes away. At our very best, that is the kind of love we are able to reflect to one another.

Your snapshots – your stories of who Bill was, and is, for you – they reflect that promise of steadfast love. And they are yours. They are a part of who you are for the rest of your life. They are for you, to be taken out from time to time and shared again and admired, like that favorite picture that reminds you of what is dear and special and good.

A coach of the very best kind to the end of his earthly life and beyond, my guess is, though, that it wouldn’t be good enough for Bill to have you just admire these stories that he helped to make true in your life. I think he would want you to live into what it is they call forth in you. My guess, he might challenge you, too, to find the kind of steadfast love that you are meant to live…and then to do that as fully as you can.

He might challenge you. He might even push you.

And then tell you to swim.

Kristin White Sermon - Pentecost XVI

Kristin White

Pentecost XVI – September 28, 2014

Matthew 21:23-32

In the time leading up to today’s gospel passage, Jesus has been busy. The day before, he entered the Temple, upended the tables where people traded their Roman coins for Temple coins, and then used those Temple coins to purchase doves, which they then offered as sacrifice.

As you can imagine, this kind of thing likely didn’t happen very often. Imagine, first, the mess of it all: the noise of all those coins hitting the ground and the walls and the people; the doves flying away if they could get free, or hurt if they were chained to something that held them as the tables turned. There must have been the whole business of sorting out which Temple coins belonged to whom, and the same with doves…and anybody who has ever seen money fly can guess that there was not an orderly or happy resolution among the merchants or the money traders or their customers.

And imagine, too, the fallout conversations afterwards. Did you hear what happened in the Temple? The rabbi, from Nazareth, the tables, the money, the pigeons. Were you there? Did you see it? What did people do? What happened afterwards? It must have been enough to keep people talking for the rest of the day and into the next.

So that all happened yesterday, in Gospel time. Today, Jesus enters the Temple to teach. The chief priests and the elders approach him (again…you might imagine their posture, their gaze, the urgency of their stride), asking: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”

Jesus has disrupted business as usual in their most sacred space. He created chaos for people likely unaccustomed to it, certainly not expecting such behavior in that location. And they want to know why. There may even be a little bit of that “who exactly do you think you are?” lingering in their words.

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I always thought of the phrase “Question Authority” as belonging on buttons stuck to jean jackets or backpacks, along with lots of other buttons with political statements. I think about it together with protests of the Vietnam War, with leaders in the 1960s trying to bring about peace. So it surprised me not at all that Timothy Leary, that edgy countercultural psychologist, used the phrase often.

It surprised me a great deal, though, to learn that scholars credit Socrates with authoring that phrase. So it turns out the question has been around a whole lot longer than 50 years.

Authority is a tricky business. One who holds the positional authority of a group also holds the power to maintain order, to get things done, to arbitrate and legislate, to control, command, and determine.[1] We can see that in the way those chief priests and elders hold their authority in the Temple; they know how things are supposed to work, and they seem troubled by the disruption. Control and command bleed through their questions of Jesus.

But there’s more than one kind of authority, not only that which is based on position. There is also the authority we give to those we allow to lead us, once they have earned our trust. Jesus is neither a chief priest nor an elder. He holds no authority based on wealth or seminary education or ordination or election or appointment. He does not enjoy the positional authority that would allow for his command and control of a situation.

But he has cured people. He has taught them, and fed them. He has cleansed them from leprosy, raised some from the dead. He has been who he is in their midst. And many – a scary number, I’m guessing, for those in traditional positions of authority – have entrusted him with the authority to lead them.

So when a guy like that, with a following like that, comes into the Temple and turns over the tables, I can see that it makes the traditional authorities nervous.

They ask their question of his authority. Now, there are questions…and there are questions. There are questions seeking understanding, and there are questions seeking to humiliate and discredit. And I wasn’t there 2000-some years ago in the Temple with those elders and chief priests and disciples and Jesus. But, my guess, Jesus did not perceive their question as seeking understanding.

The question he asks in response lays bare the vulnerability of those priests and elders: “Is John’s baptism from heaven or humanity?” I feel a little sorry for them here…because John the Baptist has to be, next to Jesus, the most terrifying person these traditional authority figures have known. They wear long, grand robes; he wears a hair shirt and Birkenstocks (I imagine, anyway, he would, if they had them). They eat carefully, and kosher; he eats wild honey and bugs. They spend their days in select places of the Temple; he lives out in the wild, among all kinds of animals and people. They pray articulate and pious prayers; he shouts: “Repent! For the kingdom of God is at hand!” And people follow him. People are baptized by him. People regard him as a prophet. They have given him the authority to lead them.

So if the chief priests and the elders say that John’s baptism comes from heaven, they have to count themselves among the motley crew of his followers, and, by extension, Jesus. And if they say that his baptism comes from human origin, that crowd of loyal followers might turn on them, eliminate even the pretense of authority they believe is their right.

That crowd of followers may not be wearing buttons with Socrates’ message by way of Timothy Leary on their backpacks, but by their loyalty and their action, they are questioning authority. And they choose to follow that great disrupter John the Baptist, and the one to whom he always points: Jesus; the one who will disrupt – not just the tables in the Temple, but the very way they understand the world works.

It makes perfect sense that the chief priests and the elders are nervous. They should be. If what they ascribe as most important is the authority they hold by virtue of the positions to which they are named or ordained, they should be nervous indeed.

Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus Christ came into the world to protect the status quo. Jesus did not take on human flesh in order to maintain the power structures that kept poor people hungry and sick people isolated. John the Baptist did not carry a bullhorn to cry out “Keep on going the way you’re going, because everything you’re doing is really just fine!” No. Instead, he said, “Repent. Turn around. The kingdom of God is right here.”

Transformation, and the growth and change that come from it are never easy or painless. And these poor chief priests and elders hold up an image for us of what it is to want things to stay as they are. Can you blame them? The tables had worked just fine until now, it seemed to them. Coins were traded. Doves were bought and sold and sacrificed. Did that all really have to get turned upside down?

It’s all messy and confusing and chaotic. And where is the order we crave, and who will restore it in ways that we remember and understand?

We live in a watershed moment right now, a time of change that can either destroy or transform. Somewhere in Africa right now, someone is dying of Ebola. And somewhere in Africa right now, someone else is giving his life to try to save that sick person. Somewhere in Syria last week, another person fell victim to a gang of people with Kalashnikov rifles and a machete and a video camera. And in many places around the world, people come together to stand against such terror, giving their authority instead to acts of humanity and grace.

What I think is true of this time is that the tables have been turned upside down. Whether we’re talking about the steadiness of institutions or structures or ways of being, things will not be as they always have been. Those tables have been disrupted. And now it is our job to question authority as well. And now the question Jesus asks of the elders and the priests might be the question, finally, he asks of us: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin? Which is really: Whom will you follow in this journey? Which is, ultimately: Where do you place your trust?

Jesus’ condemnation of those who question him is not found in their desire to question authority, but their unwillingness to see transformation and refuse to change in the face of it. “For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes (did); and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds…”

Where will we place our trust?

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/authority?s=t