God is not calling us here to worship the Episcopal Church, but God is calling the Episcopal Church, an unjust judge if there ever was one . . .

I'm going to put up two sermons -- today's and last week's.

With this series of lessons from Jeremiah, I have been reading Walter Brueggemann. I have been influenced by the way he combines serious exegesis of the text, a profound appreciation for the history of the people of Israel, and zingers for what it means for the Christian church today. They are texts of urgency -- and today, with the Episcopal Church crumbling around our ears, located, as we are in Brockton, on a corner of crumbling lives and drug deals and substandard housing, those texts of urgency scream with the timeliness of today's headlines.

Will we really take these texts seriously enough? Allow them to work in our souls and lives and hearts and minds ENOUGH to make a difference in this community? Will we, the Episcopal Church, be able to get out of the way enough to bring the light of Christ HERE?

Proper 24 C Oct. 21, 2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 31: 27-34

Psalm 119:97-104 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 Luke 18: 1-8

Once, when Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look! Here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

Those words come just a few verses before today’s Gospel story in Luke. Chapters 16, 17 and 18 are full of stories and pithy sayings of Jesus about the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God, Jesus is saying, is not what you expect. Every one of these stories turns the hearers’ expectations upside down. The kingdom of God, Jesus is saying, is here.

I wish this God stuff could be easy. I wish all we needed was a strapping preacher man with a nice wife and seven children, like in 7th Heaven. I wish everything could work out in the end like in Touched by an Angel. I wish, like in The Vicar of Dibley that all we needed was five cranky men on the parish council and the church would be full on Sunday without doing any work. I wish God would just take it easy, would kick back and leave us alone, would be a proper God like all those other gods, who just need a few rote sacrifices to be appeased, a god who is not much interested in how this world works but just wants us worship him, or them, by doing just what we are doing already, nothing too taxing, a god who looks like us so we can be who we are and still be in the image of God. I am afraid, however, that that kind of god is the god God rejected when God got into this covenant business with the human race. Way back, when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and were treated badly by Pharoah, so badly that they cried out to God and God heard them, God rejected being the god of the status quo, the god of the established order, the god of business as usual, the god of why don’t you Israelites just negotiate for a better labor contract and be still. When God heard the cries of the oppressed people of Israel, God jumped in. God waded in the deep water. God began to care about how the people of Israel were treated, and not just about how they were treated, but that they should no longer be slaves, and not just that they should no longer be slaves, but that the whole world – the whole human race – was the object of God’s desire. And that God wants us – even us – to be partners with God in making this whole world become the world God created us to be.

It would be a heck of a lot easier if we didn’t have this covenant with God, if we just had rules to follow. But here God wants this relationship with us, a relationship built on that first promise to deliver the children of Egypt out of slavery. Centuries later, after lots of misbehavior and angry words, God is back at those children of Israel. Their holy city, Jerusalem, had been sacked, they’d been hauled off to Babylon in punishment, and told to put down roots in that foreign place. Now, through the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah, God comes back at them with a restatement of the covenant, a new covenant, a covenant written on the heart. Way back, when God made a covenant with the people, God left safety and security behind. God plunged in to our messy lives.

Jeremiah emphasizes three ways God wants us. First, God wanted the torah here, on the heart. God did not want the rules of the law just to apply to what to do and not to do. God just didn’t want us on the Sabbath; God wanted us every day.

Second, God wanted everyone to have access to God. God was into radical democracy; every one, from least to greatest, oldest to youngest, privileged to destitute, could know God. God wants no experts. God wants you.

Third, every one was forgiven. The past was past, sins were behind us, we would no longer be haunted by what used to be. We would be free to focus on the present, on the future, on the hope for a better world.

Jesus is right in line with this new covenant of Jeremiah. The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed. God is not the judge who has to be begged, appeased, courted – God is not the judge of business as usual, of vested interests, of the way things have always been. In today’s parable, I am afraid that we have to do the hard work. I am afraid that the judge is us. God is the persistent widow, trying to get our attention year after year, battering us, hitting us on the head, never letting up. How long will it take before we, like the judge, relent and let God in? How long before we realize that our job is not to feed the hungry, or to care for the homeless in our substandard basement, with our donated food and our spare time, but to build homes, to build lives, to build a community? That our job at St. Paul’s Table is to put ourselves out of business? To turn our hearts inside out for God, and for the people God loves? God is not calling us here to worship the Episcopal Church, but God is calling the Episcopal Church, an unjust judge if there ever was one, to give of ourselves with our whole hearts, to be the people God created us to be.

The above image of the persistent widow asks, Have we as a nation become the unjust judge to a widowed world? Read more about the global implications of this passage.

Proper 23 C 10/14/2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

Psalm 66 2 Timothy 2:8-15 Luke 17:11-19

When I drive around a city like Brockton, or Syracuse, where I grew up, or Philadelphia, where my children go to college, I experience a profound sense of dislocation. None of these places are like they used to be. Whole industries have just picked up and moved, leaving behind the communities of people – immigrants from somewhere else -- who moved here to work in those industries. My brother, who has had a good, United Auto Workers-guaranteed job with Chrysler Corporation for many years, just moved to Indiana, in order to work the last few years he has to to keep his pension in tact. As we survey the urban, industrial landscape in America, you could describe it all as an experience of exile.

In our Old Testament lesson, we are back in the land of the exiles. Jeremiah is again preaching to the exiles in Babylon, those who have been uprooted by force, by the violence of an invading army, and transported to a foreign land, the place, as we read in last week’s psalm, Psalm 137, where the people could not conceive of finding God. But Jeremiah, the prophet who told these people that their own faithless behavior caused God to send them into exile – this same Jeremiah now comes back at them with a word of hope.

Ok, he says, there you are in that foreign city, that unrecognizable place, where you have been thrown into exile. But that is the very place where God wants you: where God wants you to settle down, to build homes and gardens, to have families and children, to live and prosper. Seek the welfare of that very city where you now live – not the city of your romantic, longed-for or nostalgic past. Seek the welfare of THIS city. Pray that God bless THIS city. For it is in the welfare of THIS city that you will find your welfare.

This is almost TOO-obvious a lesson for us, this tiny congregation in this great big building, feeding 100 hungry people a day, on a blighted corner of neglect, weeds and drug deals. The welfare of this city, of this city block even, is where we find our welfare.

The Hebrew word for welfare is shalom, a word used 397 times in the bible! It is translated into English in many ways, reflecting the complexity of how it is used in Hebrew. Shalom means peace, weal – as in “Commonweal” or “Commonwealth” – it means completeness, to cause to be at peace, to make peace, to be at rest, to be at ease, to be secure, or safe, or to prosper, to be whole, to be perfect, to be victorious. It is at the heart of the word “Jerusalem” – salem. It is the same as the Arabic word, salaam. If we move into Greek, the language of the New Testament, shalom might be understood as what Jesus meant when he said “the kingdom of God:” the time and place when the justice, mercy and love of God prevail.

To work toward that vision of God’s shalom in this place is to work toward nothing we have seen before. We’re not going to rebuild St. Paul’s Church the way it used to be, any more than the rebuilding of Brockton will recreate it the way it used to be, with shoe factories and tidy streets and stay-at-home moms. In the words of the hymn that begins, “O holy city, seen of John,” we beg, “Give us, O God, the strength to build the city that hath stood/too long a dream, whose laws are love, whose crown is servanthood,/and where the sun that shineth is God’s grace for human good.”

When the city of Jerusalem was invaded, and the leaders and people carried off in captivity to Babylon, there were some Jews who stayed behind. They lived in occupied territory, and they really lived there. Meaning they intermarried with the occupiers, and in the eyes of the exiles in Babylon, they were traitors. Since they did not suffer the pains of exile, and “collaborated” with the enemy, they were pariahs. When the Jews came back from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem, they treated these stay-behinds no longer as kinsmen, but as enemies. They were the Samaritans. Even the passing of hundreds of years could not erase this animosity, and as late as the days of Jesus, faithful Jews could barely spit out the name, “Samaritans.” The name was short-hand for everything disreputable, bad and unclean.

What a shocking story then Jesus tells. This is not just a story about how polite people say thank you. This is a story about God’s shalom, God’s wholeness, God’s health. About who is the citizen of God’s commonwealth. The only one truly whole is the one the other nine despised, the one marked by some as unclean forever. The one forever “other” than Jesus’ own people, the people of the covenant, the people who thought they were automatically assured of God’s grace.

The peace of God, then, is, amazingly, caught up in the peace of the other. Our welfare is inextricably tied up with the welfare of complete strangers. Our wholeness is wrapped up in the wholeness of our enemies. Our health is entwined with the health of people we consider “beneath us.” Our future will look nothing like our past, and this is where we plant our garden.