The Two Both of Thems

Today's New York Times and Brockton Enterprise contain several stories about religion:

• a Jesuit priest in Chicago is finally arrested after years of "special" relationships with young boys. They were his helpers, doing his laundry, carrying his baggage, sleeping in his bed -- on and on. A lot of this happened even in Evanston, even during the years we lived there, when we knew the Roman Catholic Church not to be full of pedofiles and creeps but honest, faithful people trying to live out the gospel. And oh, yes, sinners, even this sinner, a prominent, learned, well-traveled man, whose reputation or standing or persuasiveness or even his very sin itself allowed people who ought to know better to overlook what he was doing. It is heartbreaking what is done in the church, in the name of the church, under the cover of the respectability of the church.
• further erosions in our own Episcopal Church are revealed, in the story of the vote in Pittsburgh to remove the Diocese into a purer, more scriptural institution. Meeting in Johnstown, PA, best known for the devastating flood in 1889, when a poorly built dam burst. In the words of the National Park Service, "The story of the Johnstown Flood has everything to interest the modern mind: a wealthy resort, an intense storm, an unfortunate failure of a dam, the destruction of a working class city, and an inspiring relief effort." It was the first major disaster relief success led by Clara Barton and the Red Cross. It seems to me that with this vote in Johnstown, the Episcopal Church is heading for a similar disaster with everything to interest the modern mind: a wealthy institution, an intense storm brought about by ferocious conflicts over the interpretation of the Bible, the unfortunate failure of the customs, canons, common prayer and all other institutional bonds of the church to hold us together, all leading to the destruction of our multi-class, multi-interest, multi-form and moderate church. Bishop Duncan smugly explained the vote by diocesan convention to secede: “What we’re trying to do is state clearly in the United States for the authority of Scripture."
• yet on the west coast, some people of faith, whose interpretations of scripture are diametrically opposed, seem to be getting along. Some rabbis and Jewish lay leaders have partnered with Rick Warren, of the massive Saddleback Church, and the Purpose-Driven Life, to learn how to apply the evangelistic techniques of the megachurch movement to Judaism. The Jews involved in these conversations with evangelicals belong to the more moderate "mainstream of American Jewry," the Times reported. Rick Warren's interpretation of scripture leans more toward Bishop Duncan's. "When Mr. Warren conducted his workshop for Synagogue 3000’s leaders in 2005, several participants challenged his view of homosexuality as abnormal and unbiblical. 'Every faith has its own parameters,' Mr. Warren responded, calmly and firmly, in an exchange preserved on a DVD of the session. 'You can’t believe it all.'" Does that mean then, that we can get along? That we can learn from each other? That we can agree to disagree about what God reveals? On the testy subject of conversion -- Christianity's conviction that "Jesus is the only way to God" -- "Mr. Warren told his Jewish listeners, he 'doesn’t believe in coercion' though he 'does believe in persuasion.' That seemed to placate, if not necessarily please, the group."
• meanwhile, today's Brockton Enterprise carried an opinion piece entitled, "Young are negative about Christians." Duh, Tim said when he showed me this piece. The author, David Yount, a former board member at the College of Preachers, reviews the recent Barna Group (more California evangelicals) survey which discovered a widening disconnect between young adults and Christianity, along with Robert Wuthnow's recent book, After the Baby Boomers.

It is a curious and challenging time for the church. Being a priest in the Episcopal Church these days is like living on one of those trampoline-like nets firefighters hold out when someone jumps from a burning building. Only this net is being continually shaken by those who are holding it, and the cast of characters doing the shaking is always changing.

So how does one preach on texts like those presented to us last Sunday, the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, a text which addresses the challenge of dividing who is in God's grace from who is outside of it? What follows is an only middling sermon, yet in its middling-ness reflective of the difficulty of thinking and praying about the text, writing a sermon and then preaching it, all the while being tossed up and down in the air by an increasingly volatile group of handlers, aka, church leaders.

Proper 25 C 10-28-2007 St. Paul’s
Sirach 35:12-17 Psalm 84 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 Luke 18:9-14

The church – I’m talking about the whole church here, this church, the Episcopal Church, this diocese, all churches: the church would be better off if it were full of Pharisees. Full of people who played by the rules, who paid their way, who showed up every day full of feeling and commitment. People who read not only the Bible but all sorts of other theological texts, who subscribed to current journals of religion, who understood both sides of the issues, people who led a disciplined spiritual life, people who were generous with their giving, people who went the whole nine yards.

This is not the church we live in. Pick a church – any church: the rules are too often used as a battering ram, as power to impose one set of norms or values over other people who hold different norms or values. Spiritual practices are used as measures of superiority – look at how much better I am than you are. Our building is bigger, our outreach program is more comprehensive, more people come to hear our preacher, we are more efficient, get a better return on our investments, we avoid pitfalls, shun conflicts and everyone gets along.

That’s nice, I think. I wonder where those churches are.

Today’s gospel passage is often used to set up a false dichotomy between the smug/ picture-perfect religious person, and the humble sinner with the heart of gold. Whom does Jesus love? Why, the sinner, of course. But: WHO is the sinner in this story? Both of them. Whom then does Jesus love? Both of them. [Or “the two both of thems,” as our oldest son used to call his twin brother and sister when they were babies. Once, when he was sitting near one of them in their stroller, a woman complimented the beautiful baby. We have two, he said; do you want one?] Whom does Jesus love? Both of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Both are worthy of Jesus’ love, and both are sinners.

Now a tax collector in first century, Roman-occupied Palestine, was by definition a sinner. He was a Jew who had to collect taxes for the Romans – each person was taxed and the Romans wanted their money. They did not pay the tax collectors, so the tax collectors paid themselves by charging more than the tax; the only way they could make a living was by skimming off the top. Everyone hated them, and treated them with contempt.

But for Jesus, even the folks who do everything right can be sinners as well. Look again at the first line in the passage: “Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” I think that is the key phrase: they trusted in themselves. Yes, we can do everything “right” but that does not make us better and someone else worse. Everything we have is God’s – it is God’s creation and God’s freely given gifts. It is God’s grace, God’s abundance, God’s mercy. Our blessings are not our doings. That’s what the “righteous” man didn’t get, and somehow the tax collector did. He knew he could not possibly earn God’s mercy, and knowing that, Jesus said, he was justified. He got right with God. He lined himself up on God’s wavelength. The other man, for all his good deeds didn’t get the point, that it wasn’t about him and what he did. It was about God.

When the two left the temple, they continued on with their lives: the Pharisee with his good works, the tax collector with his petty thievery. What are we to do?

The lesson is for us. The temptation is to be the Pharisee, to rely on ourselves and our good works. The invitation from Jesus is to cast all that away, to live in the reality of God’s abundant grace, sinners all. How do we open the doors of our hearts to that reality of grace? And if we did, what would the world look like?

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.

Spiritual Dislocation: Loss and Hope

The lessons for Sunday - yesterday - included the last stanzas of Psalm 137, about smashing the heads of our enemies' children on rocks. Yow. That alone is an argument for the selective reading of scripture ... or is it?

Proper 22-C Oct. 7, 2007 St. Paul’s Lamentations 1:1-6
Psalm 137 2 Timothy 1:1-14 Luke 17:5-10

Our opening prayer for today lays it all out there. We ask God for some big things. We ask God to forgive us those things of which are conscience is afraid. Not even in the deepest, most private recesses of our own hearts and minds can we admit these things – our very conscience – that little voice of me conversing in secret with myself – the Jiminy Cricket of our souls – there are things in our lives that we cannot admit even there. It is these things we bring today before God and ask – audaciously – for God’s mercy and forgiveness. And then, when we are flat out there, prostrate before God, Almighty and everlasting, God always more ready to hear than we are to pray, knowing we are unworthy before this abundant and merciful God, nevertheless, we ask for more. We ask God to give us good things which we are not even worthy to receive. We’re pretty bold here, pretty audacious, pretty flat out.

How many of you, before today, have ever read to the end of Psalm 137? Most of that psalm is familiar and beloved, the subject of lyrical songs of longing, speaking of the unassailable virtue of exiles longing for home, exiles cast into some foreign place against their will. And yes, verses 1-6 do speak of that deep human longing for home, for the one and only sacred space where we can meet God. But verses 7-9: why are we reading such words in church? Words that give voice to rage, violence, vengeance, retribution? Words which talk about destroying enemies for all time by destroying even the innocent children of the people we hate?

The Bible is a complicated book. It tells the story of how we humans, at our most deeply and uncontrollably human, meet God, at God’s most deeply and uncomprehendingly divine. All of our humanity seems to be given equal weight. We are good, are we not, when we long for the home that has been taken away from us? And yet we are wicked, are we not, when we scream curses and long for the blood of innocent children? We cannot, if we understand the word “good,” give equal weight to everything we read in the Bible. We also cannot cut out the parts we don’t like.

Our two lessons from the Old Testament today come from the experience of the people of Jerusalem defeated by the Babylonians – Babylon is, you know, today called Iraq. The Jews are defeated, captured and taken into exile. They long for home. They don’t know how they can worship God apart from the Temple, from their accustomed ways of doing things. They are screaming, crying, wailing, tearing out their hair. If we were near them, we would be embarrassed by such display of emotion.

But their very own theological leaders, the prophets, like Isiaiah and Jeremiah and the author of this book of Lamentations, remind them, in no uncertain terms, that the Jews brought this trouble on themselves. They had strayed from God’s commandments, they had lived faithlessly and foolishly, and at God’s own behest the Babylonians had marched in and destroyed all that the Jews held sacred. In no uncertain terms, said the prophets speaking for God, it was time for reform, time to regroup, to get back with God.

It was hard to hear the prophets then, and it is hard now. Think back to that most destructive day in our memories: Sept. 11, 2001. We were feeling the grief, loss, shock, dislocation that the ancient people of Jerusalem felt with the destruction of their city. Many of us in our society gave voice to that same vengeance we read in Psalm 137. Years later, we are still feeling the loss, the dislocation, maybe still the grief and rage. But has the violence helped? Has the vengeance brought back one of the people lost, restored the orderliness or calm of those days gone by?

The feast day of St. Francis of Assisi was last Thursday, October 4. St. Francis was known for his gentleness with animals, and for his awareness of the beauty and goodness of God’s creation, and so we use the example of St. Francis to give thanks for and to bless those creatures of God whom we love and who love us. We remember Francis’ beautiful prayers to “brother sun and sister moon,” and how we know the goodness of God when we are close to God’s creation.

But in light of this morning’s lessons, we should pay heed to another part of Francis; life. Francis lived at the time of the crusades, in the 12th and 13th centuries. Although he had been a soldier as a young man, his deepening engagement with the Gospel, his identification with the humanity of Jesus, and his life of poverty and simplicity, drew him to try to find ways to intervene in the seemingly endless violence of war and conquest. In 1219, Francis joined one of the crusades, to the Islamic town of Damietta, Egypt, near the mouth of the Nile. Determined that that Muslims should hear the Good News of Jesus, he passed through the combat zone, and received permission to speak to the Sultan Malek-el Kamel. The sultan was not converted to Christianity, but he was converted to Francis. Deeply moved by his enthusiasm, dedication and courage, the sultan, when their cordial conversation was over, sent Francis safely back to the Christian camp.

We know how the story ended. The war continued, and still continues, centuries later. The scriptural cries for vengeance ring louder in our ears than do the pleas for peace and mercy. Would not we, if, like the disciples, we encountered Jesus say, not only, “Increase our faith!” but “Give us faith; we don’t know which way to turn.”

Occasionally there are moments, when mustard seeds can move mulberry trees, if not whole mountains. That encounter in 1219, between Francis and the sultan, between faithful Christian and faithful Muslim, is one of those moments. The sultan recognized not only Francis’ enthusiasm, but his courage, and faith, in the words of some anonymous theologian, is reason gone courageous. Faith is reason gone courageous.

No wonder Jesus told the disciples – and us – that all we need is faith as big as one of the tiniest of seeds in God’s creation. That’s all we need to do what God wants us to do, to figure out our way between loss and vengeance, grief and violence.

Walter Brueggmann offered, once again, the insights I needed to make sense of the complicated texts for today. Look at this 10-year-old essay of his, from The Christian Century, "Conversations Among Exiles."

The experience of the exile, such a fundamental, deep story in the scriptures, speaks to the experience of Christians today. With moorings gone, institutions crumbling, very little like it used to be, in our churches, our communities, perhaps even in our families. Brueggemann is eloquent about what this ancient literature of despair, longing and hope can offer us today:

"But when the church is faithful to its own past life with God, it has ways of speaking, knowing and imagining that can successfully address our cultural malaise. When it remembers its ancient miracles, has the courage to speak in its own cadences, and re-engages old seasons of hurt, the church possesses the rhetorical and testimonial antidotes to denial and despair."

The story of St. Francis wove easily into these lessons. I was particularly taken by that story of Francis conversing with the sultan, as an example of how the violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims can be halted, for even the briefest moment. And in those brief moments, we see a glimmer of a more peaceful, negotiated space between people of faith.

LAST week, it was the gospel that challenged us: the story of Lazarus and and the rich man. The challenge is reading that text without sentimentality --

Proper 21 C 9/30/2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
Psalm 91 1 Timothy6:6-19 Luke 16:19-31

I once read that when Albert Schweitzer read this story of Lazarus and the rich man, it was the turning point of his life. He came up with his plan to work in a medical mission in Africa, and became, for all the world, an example of effective compassion.

When you hear something like that, what do you think? That it is inspiring? Or that it is impossible?

Sometimes I think that packing up and going to some far away place to help those who are desperately poor is easier than staying here in Brockton. We serve 100 or more people a DAY in St. Paul’s Table. Across the state, cities like Brockton are home to 30 percent of the Massachusetts residents who live in poverty. In Holyoke – where homeless families from Brockton are sometimes sent because that is the closest affordable housing for them – 51 percent of the people live in poverty – and do you remember New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina? Only 38 percent of those people lived in poverty then. Across America, the richest 1 percent of the people control 19 percent of the national income.

[read the Gateway Cities report, about Brockton, and 10 other former mill cities in Massachusetts.]

Is that “great chasm,” spoken of by Father Abraham, truly fixed between us, between the haves and the have-nots, for all time? Is it, as some people fear, growing?

There is one thing that Jesus does not endorse when he tells this parable: the fallacy the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, and there is nothing to be done for it on this earth. Jesus does NOT believe that the poor must wait until they rest with the angels to receive a reward. Jesus does NOT believe that the rich man is doomed and destined, because of his riches, to sear in Hades. Jesus tells this story because he believes movement is possible, just as we know it is possible for someone – for Jesus – to rise from the dead. You could say that global redistribution of wealth is about as likely to happen as someone rising from the dead – but with God, even that is possible.

These are dramatic passages from the Gospel of Luke in these last weeks of the church year – the weeks before Advent when we get ready to hear the story of God coming to earth. There is an urgency to how Luke frames the Jesus story. These stories should make us uncomfortable. It’s much easier to read these stories about the rich and the poor, about the innocent and the damned, in a way that mystifies the conflict – that takes it out of the real and implies that it is only a metaphor – that it only seems to be talking about real poverty and real wealth. But Jesus spiritualizes it: being rich and being poor is seen, in this gospel, the way God sees it. That rich man can sure beg Father Abraham to warn his wastrel brothers of the judgment to come, but none of them will get any aid or comfort from on high when their time comes.

This Gospel of Luke turns everything upside down. If we were writing this story today, the “rich man” would have a name. A famous name. A rich person’s name. A name that would roll off our tongues like honey. A name that would be frequently heard on “Access Hollywood” or frequently read on the covers of magazines.

But in the Gospel of Luke, the rich person has no name. He’s just “the rich man.” Lazarus has the name. Lazarus, who is poor and sick and hungry and lonely. It’s Lazarus who is the favored one of God, Lazarus who, dare I say it, in his poverty and weakness, carries in the most exemplary fashion the Image of God.

Now, Lazarus does not deserve to be poor. Or maybe he does. Maybe it’s even his own fault that he is poor – a life of bad choices. Maybe he was mean; maybe he was nasty. But it’s Lazarus’ cause that God takes up as God’s own. It’s Lazarus who illustrates what God means by justice.

Have you noticed that no one changes in this story? Yes, Lazarus goes to heaven, and the rich man to hell, but the gulf between the two of them is just as wide as ever. The rich man doesn’t get it, that it’s not about charity, about giving up a little of what his family has to buy his way into God’s favor. The rich man aims low; he asks for mercy, not forgiveness. He won’t get any of it; he won’t understand what God has to offer, Abraham says, even if someone rises from the dead. The rich man asks only for water, not for life.

And that’s something Jesus’ hearers didn’t know that we know. Someone did rise from the dead. Someone did turn all this order of rich and poor, of have and have-not, of privileged and cast out, all upside down.

What that means is we no longer have to play the rich man’s game, keeping some poor forever while others stay rich and isolated. We can live by God’s rules, the way Jesus did, Jesus who could not be bound by poverty and wealth, or even by the rules of death. If St. Paul’s Table is where everybody can eat lunch, well, then this St. Paul’s Table – this Table of the Lord’s Supper – is everybody is fed. This is where mercy and forgiveness flow in an unending store, where we come forward thinking all we’re asking for is a little piece of bread. But when we open our hands we find new life.

SATURDAY! September 29: St. Michael & All Angels

We had a very fine meeting today, getting our heads together about what kind of leaders we need to start this new congregation here in Brockton -- this new congregational LIFE in Brockton.
My role model of the moment is Frances Willard, social gospel organizer extraordinary, whose motto was, "Do Everything." If we are going to bring about new life on Pleasant Street, we DO need to do everything, and do it more or less at the same time. New congregational life, and new social outreach.
How can we fail, as Desmond Tutu used to say, when the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven are on our side?

Here' are two sermons: one about MONEY and one about BLUEBERRIES.

Proper 20 C 9/23/2007 St. Paul’s
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 Psalm 79 1 Timothy 2:1-7 Luke 16:1-13

So, what is your vote on the governor’s casino proposal? Is he the shrewd dishonest manager, commended by the master? The one who hopes to make friends for himself by means of dishonest wealth?

Who knows what is the right side to take on that casino issue, and today’s gospel lesson is similarly hard to understand. One thing is certain, though: the Gospels talk a lot about economics. Jesus cares how we use our money.

One other certain thing about the bible: it’s written from the perspective of the people on the bottom of the heap, people for whom money is a real concern because they do not have much – people for whom freedom, or comfort, or security are real concerns, because their lives are so precarious.

A line from the Jeremiah reading brings to mind a familiar old spiritual: There is a balm in Gilead. Originally sung by slaves, it contains layers of meaning, in code, that the slaves would know and keep from the masters. The song is shrouded in this gloomy passage from Jeremiah, which seems to allow no hope, no room for redemption. The prophet cries that God has abandoned the people to misery. But even the barely literate slaves knew that later on the prophet Jeremiah would seem to be speaking directly to them, with words that sounded to their ears like retribution and triumph. Indeed, balm overflows in Gilead, but their masters will have none of it: In Chapter 22, Jeremiah tells us, ‘The Lord says (about the palace of the king of Judea) “Though you are like Gilead to me, … I will surely make you like a desert, … Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labour”.’ There is a balm in Gilead, for people who really knew their Bible, with healing and wholeness for those who now had none.

Like those spirituals with their layers of meaning, the parables of Jesus often don't make sense to our modern ears. The gospel as we have it today contains stories about Jesus passed down to the community of faith, stories then retold and reshaped by the evangelists. And so, the gospel also tells us something about the experience of people of faith in the first century. Life was not easy for them; they were persecuted by other Jews or the Roman authorities, and they believed that the End was coming literally within their own lifetimes. Consequently, they added to the gospel a sense of urgency, of the immediate coming of Judgment Day: a crisis. Each parable is told within a situation of conflict in the life of Jesus, conflicts with Roman or Jewish authorities or with people who do not believe what he has to say. Jesus' responds to the challenge or conflict with a parable: a story that makes people stop and think.

Here is the setting: The socially unacceptable tax collectors and sinners are gathered around Jesus to hear him teach; the Pharisees and scribes are grumbling about this Jew who lowers himself to be with those people. First he tells the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin (which we read last week), then the story of the Prodigal Son, and then, today's story, the parable of the dishonest steward. As he tells each story, Jesus raises the stakes. The conflict escalates. When Jesus delivers the moral of the story, "You cannot serve God and wealth," Luke tells us, "The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this and they ridiculed him." Jesus knows who his audience is, friendly and hostile, and he uses the hostility as a foil for teaching, as a set-up to show the faithful how to make decisions when the Judgment Day is at hand.

The dishonest manager cuts some corners and satisfies everyone as best he can. He is in a time of crisis; the Day of Judgment is at hand, and he acts decisively (and saves his neck).

Jesus makes the connection between this bold decisiveness (or "creative bookkeeping") and the boldness and imagination that the Kingdom of God requires. If a crooked servant acts with such shrewdness in settling accounts, how much more quick thinking and bold action are required of us when our Judgment Day comes?

This unsettling story presents several "morals" tacked on at the end of it. After the master has commended the dishonest manager we read, "For the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light." Are we to think, therefore, that since we live in this age, before the coming of the kingdom of heaven, that we should be as sleazy as the steward? When in Rome, do as the Romans do?

The next one is quite odd: "Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes." That sounds a lot like buying indulgences, or paying your way into heaven with someone else's money.

The third interpretation talks about honesty, faithfulness and trustworthiness, which are tested by the manager's use of the rich man's resources: the accounts squared up for the master, no matter how unethical the means by which the steward balanced the books.

But finally, the real message of this parable is revealed: no servant can serve two masters; you cannot serve God and money. We are called, through this peculiar story, to choose between God and devotion to profit and gain. We live where we live: in an unscrupulous world, and so the example of the crooked steward who is shrewd and resourceful with his master's goods is appropriate teaching for us as we wrestle with our crises of life and faith, as we come to terms with the daily decisions between right and wrong, as we struggle with how to use God's resources rightly in the service of others and to God's honor and glory.

Proper 19 C 9/16/2007 St. Paul’s
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 Psalm 14 1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10

In Blueberries for Sal, a little girl and her mother, and a little bear cub and her mother, climb a mountain to gather berries. Both mothers are dutiful and systematic berry-gatherers, while both children are easily distracted, would rather sit and chomp than follow mom, and surprisingly find themselves following the other mother. Both mothers are shocked, dumbfounded, to turn around to check on the little muncher and discover a creature not only not her own, but not even her own species. A panicked hunt ensues, both children are found, and each family pair goes relievedly, and peacefully, on their way. Sal’s mother, and the bear’s mother, were both like the shepherd in Jesus’ parable: persistent and diligent in finding the one that was lost. But to me, a bear is not a particularly attractive metaphor for a shepherd. When I see a bear, I would just as soon they were NOT persistent or diligent in finding ME.

When Jesus told these parables, neither the shepherd nor the poor woman were particularly attractive figures to use as protagonists of these stories. Neither were commonly held up as exemplary or virtuous figures. Jews and Romans did not see eye to eye on many things, but they did agree that shepherds were not to be trusted. People who had to make their living as shepherds, or tax-collectors, or donkey-drivers or peddlers, were considered necessary but shady characters. They worked on the margins of society, where breaking the law was almost inevitable. How could you trust a shepherd NOT to graze his sheep in someone else’s pasture?

Yet as Jesus tells it, the shepherd is not only the hero of the story; the shepherd gets to play the part of God. God loves the world the way the shepherd loves all his sheep – you can hear the jaws drop like iron when Jesus tells this one. Of course, the sheep love the shepherd, just as the baby bear loves her mother, but I wouldn’t want to get found by a bear, and I certainly wouldn’t want to get mothered by one. But that is just what Jesus says: God loves us like a shepherd, no matter how scrawny, smelly or disobedient we are, no matter how deep the ditch we have fallen into, the shepherd God will look for us, find us, and bring us home.

The hero of the second parable is an even more shocking character to Jesus’ listeners, for she is a woman – a lowly, ordinary, poor woman – and she represents God. God is a poor woman who has lost one coin out of the ten she has. When she finally founds the lost money, she throws a party for all her friends. The point of the story is not her unwearied search, nor her housekeeping abilities, “but simply and solely the joy of finding what was lost. As the shepherd rejoices over the lamb brought home, and the woman over her recovered [coin], so will God rejoice”[i] when God finds us, too.

God wants us, and God won’t give up. It’s not about being perfect that God wants, or being self-sufficient, or getting out our Global Positioning System. It’s when we’ve got nothing, when we’re last, least, little, lonely and lost, that God comes and finds us.

God has been at this a long time. The passage from the prophet Jeremiah is bleak indeed, a picture of desolation and desertion. The poem is a reverse of creation – every piece of what God had done is undone, the void returns, the birds are silent, the earth is barren, the very creatures created in the image of God – human beings – choose evil over good. God is angry, so angry that God seems ready to throw in the towel on all of us.

It’s a tough world. It’s tough to read the newspapers daily, or watch the reports from Iraq, to hear about yet another indication of global warming, that we have poisoned this very earth with our carelessness and greed. God is angry. If we stayed only in this 4^th chapter of Jeremiah, we might not see any good reason to get up in the morning.

But God, that persistent shepherd, that diligent woman, tries again. A few chapters later in Jeremiah, God is pleading with the people of Israel to leave their evil ways behind and come back to God. By the end of the book, Jeremiah has a vision of a people completely transformed, a people whose lives are so conformed to God that even their hearts are new.

God doesn’t give up on us, doesn’t stop looking. It’s not when we think we have it all together, when we’re powerful and in charge and in control, but when we are lost – really lost – with nothing left to lose – last, least, little, lonely and lost – that God finds us and brings us home.

---

[i] Jeremias, p. 107

Well, ok, a couple weeks behind ...

It's been quite busy, as more energy and interest builds in our St. Paul's Community, our ideas for a day community center for people who have few other places to go during the day. We'll collaborate with local friends, agencies, businesses, churches, to open our parish hall to people in need. Lots to do -- the need is great.
A terrific day on Pleasant Street, today! Tony, from the clothing store, and Fred, from the laundromat, organized dozens of teens and adults to pluck weeks and sweep trash from the sidewalks. They fed everyone with a picnic on our front lawn. Nice, indeed, to participate in a community ritual of hope and reconstruction.
What would Jesus do in such a time and place? No doubt pick up the rake and join in.
There probably was a time when Pleasant Street was always clean and tidy -- when it was Pleasant, indeed -- perhaps even a green and pleasant land. Some people would say, it's just chaos here now, a mess, why bother to clean it up today? "They" will just trash it tomorrow.
What would Jesus do? I don't think he'd give up on Pleasant Street; I think he'd pitch in.

God doesn't give up on us, any of us. Read on ...

Proper 18 C 9-9-2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 18:1-11

Psalm 139 Philemon 1-21 Luke 14: 25-33

When I was growing up, our neighbor was a potter. He was a very fine potter, taught in an art school, and made wonderful sculptures. But in order to pay the bills, to feed a family of four children and to fix up an old farmhouse with a barn for a studio, he had to make these, these blue bowls. He made hundreds of them, and they are lovely. They are smooth, perfect, whole, and the blue glaze he developed himself. I think these blue bowls, as beautiful as they are, became a burden to him. Now that he is retired, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t make blue bowls anymore.

We children were welcome to visit Henry in his studio. Sometimes he would give us clay to play with, or we could look at the racks of pots waiting to be fired in the silo kiln, or watch them be pulled out, finished, put on racks to cool. One day one pot – a small vase – came out not a perfect blue but a mottled brown and green – an unnatural color, really. Henry was ready to throw it out. Wait, I said. Can I have it? It was shaped perfectly; it was only the color that was wrong. Henry looked at his wife. An artist of his skill would of course smash any pots not up to his standards, especially pots that were supposed to be fired in his signature blue glaze, pots that were the livelihood for his family. Henry looked at the pot. His wife looked at me, and then said, “Oh, come on, Hank. Let her have it.” It’s a treasure of mine, I love the mottled color, the bumpy surface. He couldn’t sell it. He would have destroyed it, but it is quite fine and unusual indeed.

The image of the potter, from the prophet Jeremiah, is a familiar one. “You are the potter,” the Christian crooners sing, “I am the clay.” The lesson Jeremiah took from his visit to the potter’s studio was also one of an imperfect creation, a flawed pot in the potter’s hands, which he nonetheless reshaped into something pleasing and beautiful. This flawed pot, for Jeremiah, was the people of Israel, who had wandered from God – who had even done evil. They were so flawed, as Jeremiah saw it, that God had every reason to smash them to the ground. But like the patient potter, God will try again. God will implore the people of Israel to try again. God will even threaten them with destruction. But what God really wants is for them to come back. The prophet Jeremiah might mention a pot like this thrown on a potter’s wheel, but what he is really talking about is, about our relationship with God, and how God yearns for us and has created us as perfectly, as minutely, as carefully, as this potter created this bowl.

It’s a busy world, 2007. How do we find God, this God whom Jeremiah says is looking for us? Is God there among the hundreds of cable TV channels at our disposal? Does God hang among the racks of dresses at Macy’s? Is God a guest at our weekend picnics, or jumping in the waves at the beach? We who come to church every Sunday might think we have it all figured out: God is locked up here, waiting for us. Well, yes, God is here, and we do meet God – in the bread and wine, in the fellowship at coffee hour, with each other, serving lunch at St. Paul’s Table.

Here, God rules. Here is our Sabbath place, the place where we find companionship. As one wise rabbi describes this Sabbath place, "There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control, but to share."[1] It is a place where we can listen to hard lessons, like today’s lesson from Luke, where Jesus tells us to leave our families to follow him – where Jesus tells us to lay a solid foundation to our work – where Jesus advises us not to enter into a war we cannot win. We don’t have the absolute answers to the questions those stories pose, but like the potter we can take those bits of clay and work them into something pleasing, something beautiful, something meaningful, something we can share.

Life is full of tough questions like the ones we read in today’s gospel, and all of us yearn for some time to stop and think and figure things out – we yearn for some people with whom to share our struggles, and we would like a little refreshment and nourishment along the way. We are a tiny group, but we have kind of figured out how to do those things for ourselves, here and in our relationships with each other.

But what about people who have not yet stumbled across our threshold? They are still looking for something meaningful, for community, for refreshment, for something – the word, the gesture, the music – that will change their lives.

How many of you have been to Starbucks?

Starbucks was the idea of one man who visited Italy and realized that coffee houses there were not just for getting coffee.[2] They were, as he said, the “third place” in people’s lives, between work and home, a place where people lingered, where they met other people. He found that these places were attractive, welcoming, inviting. “Everything matters,” Starbucks would say. Here’s your coffee, but here’s also a comfy chair to sit in while you drink it, and here’s today’s paper, and some nice music, and someone across the table you can have a conversation with. Location matters for Starbucks. They are located at the busy places in town, where many people’s paths cross; not isolated but central, easy to find, open.

If the point was just coffee, well, you could go anywhere for coffee, any hole in the wall, any lunch counter, even make it at home, alone. But Starbucks took that lump of clay, that ordinary, kind of misshapen thing, and reformed it into something pleasant -- maybe not as beautiful as this blue bowl, but certainly into something that gives people a respite in their busy lives.

God is the potter; we are the clay. How is God re-forming and re-shaping our lives, re-forming us into disciples and followers of Jesus? Where is your lump of clay, and what might your blue bowl look like? How is God re-forming and re-shaping our life as a community? If we open our doors even more, invite more people in to this place of respite and community, how will it change us? What shape will we be in when God has reformed our clay?

---

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, TheSabbath

[2] "Cafes of community: the Starbucks principle" by Billy Coburn. Strategic Adult Ministries Journal, (Vol 18, No 5, Issue 145). Pages 8-9.

New Look, New Start, New Paint, New Garden

No picture yet, but you MUST come to St. Paul's and see our renovations:
new red door -- not "fire engine" red but a true deep Henry Hobson Richardson-Frank Lloyd Wright red, a red that I think Ralph Adams Cram, the original architect of the building, would like.
Secondly, the interiors of both of our entrances have been painted -- clean, welcoming, cheerful -- Come on in!!
Thirdly, a garden! Well, there has always been a garden outside the chapel door, but today I planted some mums -- lovely fall mums, donated by a faithful donor. Come by, quite nice, indeed!

Here is last week's sermon -- it's about mission and hospitality. And a clean, welcoming entrance, nicely painted and fresh, is a good start. Come and see.

Proper 17 C 9/2/2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81 Hebrews 13:1-8,10-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14

These lessons today are about two things:

Mission is something you give away.

Mission is the work of God.

“Mission” is a buzzword in today’s corporate culture. Businesses follow mission plans and boards write mission statements.

But “mission” as we use it, as God uses it, is not about the bottom line. “Customer satisfaction” is not a mission, nor is “meeting our target goals” nor even “our mission is to get 500 more people in here every Sunday so we can pay our bills.”

No, those things are not part of God’s mission. They do not, as Jeremiah would say, spring from the fountain of living water. Such mission statements are more in the category of the cracked cisterns of our own making. In the words of the old Prayer Book, such things are among ‘the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

When it is not being used as a corporate slogan, “mission” is kind of a dusty word. In some contexts it has a very bad rap indeed. “Mission” is something that went with “empire,” and “missionaries” accompanied invading armies, and built institutions and came to care more about institutional survival than they did about the original impulse which sent them out into the world in the first place.

That original impulse is the mission of God, which, when we first hear it, sends us out into the world with urgency and fire. We are doing God’s work, which is to help bring God and the world closer together.

Which brings us to the point of today’s parable: hospitality.

The parables of Jesus are not wise sayings, or universal declarations. They are stories which always point us back to ourselves and to our relationship with God. When Jesus talks about hospitality, what is he then saying about us, about our relationship with God, about our participation in this mission work of God?

Mission work is hospitality, and it is hospitality given away – absolutely given away to people who can never hope to afford to be able to pay you back. In the economy of the ancient near east, you would receive a dinner invitation as a mark of status: the status of your host would be somehow improved by your accepting her invitation, and your status as a guest would be enhanced, and then you would invite your host back to have dinner at your house, and so it would go: gracious, kind, hospitable – but reciprocal. You ate; you owed. Such patterns served to keep social relationships intact.

But God’s hospitality serves to upset social relationships. You don’t invite the high-status people to dinner; you invite the low-status. Everybody gets a seat at God’s table, and you don’t get any brownie points for the best outfit or the fanciest college degree or the highest paying job. The first guests to be seated are the ones not on the social register – the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, to be exact – the ones who, as a matter of fact, are on God’s A-list for all the best parties. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews might say, you never know when you welcome in that stranger that you have entertained an angel unawares.

Now we certainly do not do this hospitality perfectly. All too often this kind of hospitality is more like charity, with the “have’s” playing the parts of the Ladies Bountiful with the “have-not’s.” No, in God’s mission, around God’s table, with God’s seating chart, everyone is equal. At God’s table, we all eat family style, and when God passes around that big bowl of green beans, yes, the ones who are hungriest get to eat first, but there will be plenty – more than enough – to go around.

Mission – doing God’s work – is not a zero sum game. It doesn’t get used up. There is no bottom line. Just when you think your old Aunt Tilly, so crippled up with arthritis, has just eaten the last slice of roast beef, why the next thing you know, someone else has come in, and Tilly has gotten up and served this newcomer a plate of God’s best prime ribs. At God’s table, everyone is a guest, and everyone a host. It’s a beggar’s banquet with every place fit for a king.

So let’s not get too puffed up here about what we are doing. We are not inventing any wheel with this “new mission” in Brockton. It’s not St. Paul’s Table downstairs; it’s God’s Table, just as this is God’s Table, where we gather each Sunday, each one of us a beggar, starving for the sustenance that only God can provide – each one of us a king, looking out for the weaker ones among us who need a better place in line. This is where we come when our cisterns are empty. This is where the fountains flow with living water. Come. It’s time to eat and drink.

Now, I did not put this poem by George Herbert in the sermon, but it fits. It's a love song to Jesus, from an ordinary person, who recognizes just what a gracious, abundant gift God gives us, each day, each week, even. Come and see.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.

Some sad news ...

A good friend died this week: Barney Farnham. He was a very kind man, a priest, a risk-taker, a gentle soul, who did indeed listen for the voice of the Spirit moving among us. Here is his obituary from the Baltimore Sun, which does not mention his summer duties. He served the parish in Blue Mountain Lake, NY, where we worship every summer, where the congregation gives more than half of its income away to folks who struggle to make a living in the Adirondacks. We never got the chance to have our annual summer evening of dinner and drinks and real conversation. He is missed.

I have also missed a couple weeks of sermons to post!! This is the one from August 19. "God expects a lot from us," I begin. Yes, indeed. When God hands us turmoil -- like moving (!) -- like the death of a beloved friend -- like uncertainty about where we are to go next -- not to mention those things which cause us deep despair, like the global climate change we have created, or the war in Iraq we let happen, or the homeless we let sleep on our city streets ... yes, God expects a lot from us.

Proper 15 C 8/19/2007 St. Paul’s Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80 Hebrews11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56

God, I am afraid, expects a lot from us.

This passage from Isaiah, for example, is an impassioned plea. Isaiah begs the faithless people (us) to get back with God, God the heart-broken and bereft, God the anguished, feeling abandoned. If God’s anger seems over the top, it’s because God’s investment in the people – in us -- has been so high. God expects, well, those same old things. God expects us to hold up our part of the relationship with God, by showing love, hospitality, generosity, service with all our neighbors. That is the seed God has planted in us, God’s garden, and God expects that seed to flourish.

Jesus, I am afraid, also expects a lot from us.

Today’s gospel is a difficult passage for those of us who look to Jesus for a little peace and quiet in our lives. According to this passage, we won’t get it. This is Jesus as the disturber of the peace, the upsetter of the apple cart, the one who will soon overturn the tables of the money changers and all the business-as-usual that represents. Fire, stress, division, clouds rising, wind blowing, scorching heat: when we pray for Jesus to come among us, this is what we will get. When we ask Jesus to come into our lives, we had better be prepared for change.

Ninety years ago the world was in turmoil, and people in the countries which were engaged in bloody and violent war believed that everything they had come to rely on was shattered. Many thoughtful people were shocked that human beings could behave as barbarically as they were doing on the battlefields of Europe. In this all-out war, towns were destroyed, families shattered, whole populations displaced. The painful irony of the First World War is that it came after an era hailed as one of great progress: for society, for science, for peace and prosperity, for Christianity. The spreading empires of the great European Christian powers, as well as the missionary efforts here, across North America, surely meant the world was becoming a better place, with the dawning of a new, harmonious day.

But with the horror of the First World War, those progressive hopes were gone. Rather than Jesus the bland, pious and optimistic, a new understanding of God in the world had to emerge. "The only safe place for the Christian in this life is in the center of the storm, in the midst of the battle, for that is precisely where Jesus is,” wrote German theologian Karl Barth, who lived through the First World War, and whose theology was a life-long reflection on that experience. God meets us, Barth says, where life is the hardest: where violence and anger erupts in families and among friends; where people are suffering and starving; where the demands of the gospel pit even people who love each other against each other. Barth knew that a Jesus depicted as harmonious and sociable could not sustain people wrenched from all their moorings, a people plunged into a social conflict not of their own making: "To defend the poor,” he wrote, “provokes the anger of the rich; to defend the outcast enrages the in-group; to support a fair wage irritates the robber-barons, to call for peace incites others to war."

The urgency we read in the 2000-year-old gospel, or the 80-year-old writings of Karl Barth is the urgency of a world out of balance. The demands of the prophet Isaiah 800 years before the birth of Christ could be written today, as God cries in anguish over young murder victims on the summer streets of Brockton, or over this seemingly unwinnable-by-any-side war in Iraq. Do we read the signs of the times any better than we predict the weather? Not if the people of New Orleans left vulnerable by the governments they thought were protecting them are any measure – or the people of Haiti, having lost every roll of the dice in the global economy, who fear the next hurricane that will wash their poor soil and poor people into the sea. It’s this world that is out of balance, and we know it, and God knows it, and only heaven can help us now.

Jesus may be expecting extraordinary things from us, but Jesus is not expecting us to go it alone. Jesus, Emmanuel, the God-with-us, also takes us up into God, right into the heart of the divine activity. We are not only following Jesus, doing what Jesus would have us do, but when we are doing God’s work of repairing this broken world, it is Christ working through us.

This gospel passage is about what we do when we see the fractures and terror of the world around us, about what we do when things have gone awry. The number of murders here in Brockton is a sign, pointing to deep social and personal problems, to a lack of well-paying and meaningful work, to a lack of decent, affordable places to live, to a surplus of vital young people with time on their hands and death-dealing drugs and guns too easy to find. What Jesus is saying is when we see those things, when our eyes are opened to the signs of the times and we can measure how far off we have come from the people God created us to be, then there is hope. Then the work of change, of healing, of rebuilding can begin.