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SONNETS FOR MARY (cont.)

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NATIVITY

Heavy with child, by wavering hope sustained, 

you made the trek to Bethlehem—a town

so overwhelmed with strangers it retained

no room for welcome. Birthing, you lay down

in a cave, out of the wind—a roof, some straw,

and Joseph to call the midwife in and stand 

by anxiously. A little fire to thaw

the chill and heat the water. And the hand

of God near hidden in the dark. Your part

to be delivered of the promised child

and hold in your lap the mystery, born not

of the will of flesh or man, but of the wild

desire of God to be held in your caress

and enter human life in helplessness.

SONNETS FOR MARY (cont.)

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VISITATION

The one too young, the other much too old,

the pregnant cousins hoarded up their strength

for the months ahead. Their birthings, though foretold

by saints and angels, echoing down the length

of sacred time, would surely make of each

a stranger in her world—like all who care

less for their day than for its outward reach

into a new-born future. No one would spare

them here. You the gossips’ fodder. She,

Elizabeth, a prodigy dragged onstage

where all the curious of the world could see

the strange enormity of pregnant age.

Each stood in need of courage and of grace—

which flowed between them in their close embrace. 

POEMS FOR LENT

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3/1/2024

SONNETS FOR MARY (cont.)

JOSEPH’S DREAM

You waited while the new life grew in you—

waited to know when Joseph would decide,

as law and custom held to be his due,

how to preserve his name and set you aside.

No point in telling him about the vision,

the angel kneeling, the divine request.

You’d seem to lie or mock. And his decision

had been what you expected but for a guest

unbidden in his dreams, who turned his face

away from norm and name and moved him still

to stand with you in hope and to embrace

God’s wayward grace, God’s earthward-yearning will.

And which of you, without angelic voices,

could have withstood your fear and made such choices?

Poems for Lenten Meditation

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I have been writing poetry over much of my now rather long lifespan, but haven’t published much of it. (The main exception would be my book of conversations with God called Lovesongs and Reproaches.) This Lent, I plan to put some of the others online and invite you to make use of them for Lenten meditation.

2/14


ASH WEDNESDAY 

The cross of ashes drawn above my eyes

I faintly sense as it sheds its fragile dust. 

Yet, the mind has an eye to see it. And if wise,

can claim its own mortality— as it must.

The limits of our breath, the certainty

of death—let the image here impressed set free

the soul from arrogance and selfish strife,

and give us back the wonder of this life. 

But which of us is wise except by fits

and starts? We, soon enough, forget it all,

complain again of stingy gifts

and find new fault with God—until we’re called

back to this altar, here again to learn

that dust we are and to dust we shall return.

2/15/2024

JESUS WITH THE WILD BEASTS

And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan: and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him. Mark 1:12-23

I. How crowded the desert was when you matched wits 

with Satan—the Spirit as impresario

for the Conflict of the Ages, the wild beasts

to cheer you on, angels to come and go,

bringing wet towels to cool you. The fight was pitched

between your innocence and the Devil’s guile—

all eagerness to share some helpful tricks

just to smooth your way—well worth your time!

Would you remember that the choice of tool

must always shape the end, that violence

or bribery can never lure a fool

into the mystery of faithfulness?

And nowhere to be heard a human voice.

Did you fear that Satan would prove to be our choice?

2/16/2024

II. In the desert you made yourself at home with beast

and angel as of old in Eden. There

the lion and gazelle, greatest and least,

made forty days of truce and took a share

in your distress, your struggle to decide

whether the prize was worth the cost: to confront

the powers with their wrongs and then to die

without a fight, the quarry helpless in the hunt.

Angels and beasts could only watch and wait 

and give companionship. When you come back,

your people—those who love you and who hate—

will try to turn you off your chosen track.

The thing you seek for them—what you’ll have won—

they won’t begin to understand until it’s done. 

2/17/2024

A LITANY FOR LENT

For fear by which we justify our hate,

for pride that feeds our foolish arrogance,

for selfishness that sees our world’s sad state

as if it were mere inconvenience,

forgive us, God of all compassion.

For gluttony on mere consumption bent,

for lust that shatters faith with friend and neighbor,

for sloth that renders us indifferent,

for envy that resents another’s favor,

forgive us, God of all compassion.

Teach us, instead, to trust your love, to hold

our neighbor’s life in honor as our own.

Teach us and strengthen us to live by grace

to love and foster what your love has sown.

to live in hope and therefore to be bold

until we come to meet you face to face.

Forgive and renew us, God of all compassion.

2/18/2024

SONNETS ON CREATION 

Genesis 1

. . . the earth was without form and void. . .

Isness could have been nothingness. Or worse,

could have been something so entrained, entrapped,

encrystaled that it could not move—some terse

reduction of all to one, cooped up and strapped

into itself, invulnerable and devoid

of movement—body, mind, or soul. It would

have been stillborn—a lifeless, changeless void,

free of decay, like stone that mimics wood

perhaps but never was a tree. Such cold

perfection as might gratify the eye

of a collector, with no one to be bold

and fault the work as cold and dry.

Isness could have been nothingness, did One not say,

“Let there be light and dark. Let night follow day.”

2/19/2024

Let there be a firmament. . . .

Having made room for change, the One stepped back—

that One to whom all time is Now, all place

is Here, that One who nothing knows of lack,

sensing the whole in even the barest trace—

stepped back so that eternity could play

its raptures out in time, infinity

resolve itself in chords, the rhythms of day

and dusk, of night and dawn, in passing, free

truth into narrative, break the unbroken

Now into past and present and what’s yet 

to come. For only so can life be spoken,

what’s dimly sensed be caught in speech’s net.

And yet eternity holds firm to form the heaven,

the enduring loom on which our saving tales are woven. 

2/20/2024


Let the earth bring forth grass. . . . 

Grass—not at once. Before the grass the earth.

Before the earth the rocks. Then wind and rain 

eroding, age on age, to bring to birth 

fine particles and rush them down amain

into the sea, where they turn into—stone!

For earth, the One needs helpers in the toil,

creative atomies that on their own

can turn the barren sediment to soil.

Then from such beings, vanishingly small,

evolves the whole astounding panoply

of earthly creatures: plant and animal, 

life’s outward branching, leafing, burgeoning tree.

The microbes, made by God, have made the world we see.

A lesser God would work alone from jealousy.

2/20/2024

God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Great lights and lesser ones—we thought we knew

how to tell each from each. We watched the sun

pass north and south, leading the seasons through

the turning year. We watched the waning moon

pause for a moment and then wax again,

pulling the tides behind. Pillars we made

to mark their progress; we began to spin

our ordered web of calendars. And, splayed

across the firmament, the lesser lights

we marshaled into orderly arrays:

a track for sun and moon; for sailors’ nights

markers of south and north; signs for our ways.

And now we know our sun is but a lesser star.

Only the One saw great and lesser as they are. 

2/21/2024

Let the waters bring forth abundantly. . . and God saw that it was good.

We have long thought you made the earth for us,

but we were wrong. Your purpose was delight,

yours and the world’s. The hippopotamus

lives to enjoy the pastures of the night.

Leviathan you made for the sport of it.

The breaching whale has reason enough for life.

The oriole at its nest, the small bushtit

scrambling through branches, the melodious strife

of mockingbirds, the kestrels’ soar and stoop,

the secrecy of owls, the effortless

float of condors, the waddle of a troop 

of ducklings—every piece of it you bless.

Your purpose was delight, yours and the world’s; your grace

to share delight with even an ungrateful race.

2/24/2024

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . . And on the seventh day God . . . rested . . . from all his work which he had made.

The labors of six days combine to form

a world, fashioned of water, air, and earth,

of light and dark, of calm succeeding storm,

a world whose inner fires bring to birth,

new mountain steeps that rain will carry down

to form new plains, while ponderous continents

creep across the globe and seas now drown

and now withdraw, a world whose elements

have sprung to life in vast variety.

And then, the story tells us, you decreed

that labor makes of rest necessity.

What finitude requires you concede.

For us, rest leads to work and work leads back to rest.

For you they are the same thing—love. And that is best.

2/25/2024

EDEN (Genesis 2-3)

God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

This was your pleasure garden, was it not?

You planted it with spreading trees for shade,

divided it with water channels, made

a cooling refuge here when the sun grew hot.

You fashioned open glades of limber grass,

rich pools and marshes, austere rockeries;

and nothing there could ever fail to please

the viewer’s eye and heart and mind. And last

you brought the earthling there, still fresh, new-formed

of clay and breath, and offered him the land

to tend and treasure—left it in his hand

that heart, through hand’s engagement, might be warmed.

In Adam, you hoped to give the earth a friend.

To him you gave a world to love and tend. 

2/26/2024

. . . and took the rib and closed up flesh in its place.

Why not have made two earthlings from the start?

Was it so much more difficult than one?

Already master of the potter’s art,

you could have made many, laid them in the sun,

breathed life into them with a single breath.

Did you not know that a single one, alone,

no friend but you, would find it a kind of death?

Ah no! For how, indeed, could that be known

that had not yet been felt? But you could see

the sorrow that fastened on his soul.

And you lanced the wound of singularity,

making one two to make of two a whole—

each with a heart to turn toward the other,

each one the beloved and the lover.

2/27/2024

. . . the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil

The Tree of Life grew in the garden’s heart,

more flourishing in flower and fruit and leaf

than even the highest mastery of art

can represent. And those who stood beneath

its shade could breathe from it a calm, unspoken

certainty of God. A boundless grace

made one God’s friend, a calm delight was token

of a blessed soul that never left this place.

But we chose otherwise and ate from the Tree

not of stability but Knowledge, not

the perfected life but stumbling search—to see

both good and evil, tangled in their knot.

Thus God may have some lovers who abide

and some who come back wiser to God’s side.

The God who Loves in a Time of Distress

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Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

CHRISTMAS 2023

Year B: Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14 (15-20)

The daily news this year isn’t making it easy to celebrate the Christmas season. Our world is proving dangerous in so many ways—from Putin’s blatant aggression in Ukraine to the bloody conflict in Gaza and Israel to the seemingly endless civil wars of Africa to the broader issues of climate change and the vast numbers of refugees fleeing from all these causes of distress. One feels a bit awkward about being too joyful even on a great festival like this.

And yet the Christmas story has something important to say to us precisely in this difficult moment. It tells us that God is still with us, still loves the world God has made and wants to find of reconciling us with God and with one another. 

The Bethlehem story tells us that God long ago decided to come into the most intimate possible relation with us. God made us, to begin with—and then gave us an extraordinary degree of freedom. And we’ve wandered off in all sorts of directions, some of them horribly destructive. But, even so, God was looking for some way to draw us back, to find a true reconciliation with us. And God decided to do it by becoming one of us, human—fully human—which means, among other things, starting out as a helpless infant. 

Mary and Joseph agreed to cooperate in this project. Did they really understand fully what they were letting themselves in for? Who could?! But now they find themselves are in Bethlehem far from home—forced to make the trek south because of some bureaucratic red tape about a census and lines of descent and so forth. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) And Mary’s time has come and there’s no room in any inn and they’ve been shuffled off into a shed where the innkeepers keep their cow and their donkey and maybe some chickens. And there we find the God who is also a human being, swaddled up and lying in the feed trough. 

Was this really a good idea? Well, God did at least choose the early Roman Empire—a relatively peaceful era in human history. If God had chosen our own times, the child might easily have died in infancy. Still, this newborn will have to face all the challenges common to human life. Why choose this risky course of action?

It isn’t as if God had no alternative. The Bible tells us that God knows how to do the big sound and light show. Just think of Mt. Sinai! And God knows how to strike awe and wonder straight into the individual human heart. Think of Isaiah in the temple, seeing God high and lifted up—and the Seraphim flying overhead and singing Holy Holy Holy.

But God isn’t here this time to impress us or to awe us. God is here for something else. God is here to love us and be loved by us. It starts with Mary and Joseph. The circle grows a little with the visit of the shepherds, who know a thing or two about nurturing newborns from their line of work. It will continue growing through Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood. God-in-Jesus will find some people so drawn to him and his teaching and his work that they give up the lives they’d been living just to be with him. It will lead on to the crisis point when the powers that be attack Jesus and kill him precisely because God’s divine love and goodness and generosity are spilling over and threatening to undermine their own power—political, economic, and religious. And, still, the triumph of God’s love will culminate on Easter when that love proves stronger even than death.

For there is nothing, ultimately, stronger than God’s love. It is the power by which God created all the beauty and wonder and vitality in our world—and in us. And God comes to be one of us in the infant Jesus in order to invite us to accept that love, rejoice in it, respond to it, and share it with the rest of the world.

There’s a wonderful poem by Robert Herrick, a love-song addressed to God, that captures it all perfectly:

TO GOD

Come to me, God; but do not come

To me, as to the general Doom,

In power—nor come thou in that state

When thou thy Laws did promulgate,

Whenas the mountain quak’d for dread,

And sullen clouds bound up its head.

No, lay thy stately terrors by

To talk with me familiarly;

For if thy thunder-claps I hear,

I shall less swoon than die for rear.

Speak thou of love and I’ll reply

By way of epithalamy,

Or sing of mercy, and I’ll suit

To it my viol and my lute:

Thus let thy lips but love distill, 

Then come my God, and hap what will. 

And, yes, that’s exactly what God has done. And it’s what is still giving us life, and strength, and grace, and hope, and the power to love in return.

And so I wish you a Blessed and Joyful Christmas—especially in these troubled times.

THE SEASON OF MYSTERIES

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Preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley

EASTER VII (SUNDAY AFTER THE ASCENSION) 5/21/2023

Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:1-11

Eastertide is full of strange stories. At the beginning, Jesus is clearly dead and buried. Everyone knows it. But then he keeps popping up—always at unexpected moments. And, of course, it’s hard to recognize him. After all, it can’t be Jesus; so it isn’t Jesus. No, it’s the gardener. It’s a wayfarer who just happens to fall in step with us on the road to Emmaus. It’s a stranger on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, telling us to cast our net on the other side of the boat. Or, maybe worst of all, he just turns up in the locked room where we’re hiding out and mourning our losses. 

And, most eerily of all, this is not a spirit, not a ghost, not a phantom. Jesus is fully embodied. He can pass through locked doors, yes; but he can also break bread with them, eat with them, touch and be touched. This is still the real Jesus. It’s a conundrum. It’s an impossibility. And yet, it expresses the reality that the disciples were encountering. All they could say was: Christ has died. And yet, Christ lives.

And today, the last Sunday of Eastertide, we heard another strange story about the risen Jesus. He has a last meeting with his disciples and then ascends into heaven on a cloud. As they stand there gawking, two “men in white robes” (hint! hint!) explain that Jesus has been taken up into heaven and will return in the same way—with the implication that they mean “at the end of all things.” Jesus was joining a very elite group with just two other human beings who had been admitted to the direct presence of God: the patriarch Enoch, who, we are told, “walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him” (Gen. 5:24) and the prophet Elijah who was carried up into the heavens in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2). 

And now Jesus’ followers are left, it seems, on their own, without even the occasional shock of meeting provided by those elusive encounters on the road or the seashore. Jesus, it seemed, was gone for good, back to the divine throne that the Word of God had left years before to become a human, like us, in the womb of Mary. They cannot expect to meet him again in the body.

So now we disciples appear to have been left behind to fill in for him—rather like a summer intern being left to sub for the CEO. We no longer have Jesus with us to take our problems and our questions to. And yet, Jesus isn’t completely absent, either. For Jesus is one with God, “seated at the right hand of the Father,” as the creeds quaintly express it; and God is everywhere—including right here and now. The New Testament suggests some of the many ways in which this presence makes itself felt. Sometimes it’s through one another, for example at the kind of gathering we’re doing here this morning, learning from the scriptures, singing hymns, celebrating the sacrament. At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the risen Jesus tells his disciples to go and teach what they learned from him and adds, “And, remember, I am with you always.” In other places, Jesus tells us that we will find him in the people whom we welcome, the people whom we serve, the people whom we comfort and encourage. Our reading from the First Letter of Peter this morning tells us that we will find him when we share his sufferings for the sake of God’s love. And, next Sunday, Pentecost, we’ll be reminded that the Holy Spirit unites us with him as the very presence of God in and with us.

All these thoughts point us toward a mystery that is actually central to being human, the mystery of death and life, the mystery of presence and absence. We think of them as mutually exclusive: you’re either dead or alive; you’re either present or absent. But in reality these are deeply interwoven with each other. How can Jesus be both mortal and eternal? both absent and present? Well, we have some experience of these things already. Our closest friends and loved ones are often a living presence in our lives, even when not physically with us. Sometimes in fact, it’s the very absence of a friend or a family member that helps us understand the meaning and importance of their presence. As I’ve grown older, I become more and more aware how much my parents are still with me—sometimes, even, in me. The dead live on in our own lives in the same way we shape, for good and ill, the world and the lives of the next generations. It’s no accident that one of the oldest expressions of human religion is the honoring of our ancestors. And, indeed, we claim Jesus as our ancestor in the Spirit.

But the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection takes it a step further. He is not just a figure of the past. He can still surprise us in the present, too. The Evangelist John had another way of talking about it. At the Last Supper, he tells us, Jesus said to them, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (14:19) We ourselves, as we are shaped by Jesus’ life, begin to share in it and even to find Jesus in ourselves and in one another.

Here, and yet absent. Absent, and yet here. Does all this make sense? No. It’s bigger than that. It’s a mystery. It’s very perplexing—very difficult to talk about or even think about. In some ways, I feel as if I can do nothing but stumble through this sermon. But it’s a mystery at the heart of Christian faith. In a way, it’s the continuation of another mystery—the Mystery of the Incarnation. How could God empty God’s own self into a vulnerable human being and become subject to hatred, rejection, suffering, death? It’s possible only because God is love. There is nothing in God inconsistent with love. And therefore God can be present in our sometimes hate-filled, murderous world without losing Godself. God can endure death and live on. God can be rejected and continue to love. Because of love, God can be God’s own self and yet know us and our humanity from the inside out.

And we see the fruit this bears not only in the stories of scripture, but in faithful people of every age—sometimes in ourselves, even. We are subject to death and yet live. We are absent from God and yet deeply connected. We can bring into this imperfect moment in which we live something of the love that made the world in the beginning. Mysteries, after all, are not puzzles to be figured out; they’re a reality to be lived in and through. They’re a glimpse into a reality deeper than the everyday, one that, rather like the reality of quarks, doesn’t submit to simple, logical, everyday rules of language. And they’re is all the more powerful for that. It reminds us that, in some ways, our own lives are stranger and more wonderful than we had ever dared imagine. 

The strange stories of Eastertide are not riddles to be solved. They’re mysteries to grow into. They offer to enrich our lives. They give us hope and new strength. They can even draw us into the overpowering and life-giving reality of God’s love for us and for the whole world.

Christ is risen!

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? EVERYTHING

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, MAY 29, 2022

Year C: Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? EVERYTHING

Our gospel reading this morning is an excerpt from a long prayer that Jesus offers up at the last supper—a prayer full of love and longing and concern for his followers. He knows that, after his death, they will be feeling desolate and abandoned. And he wants them to realize that their connection with him isn’t broken or lost. He speaks about it in two different ways. He talks about it as oneness—oneness with him and with God. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” And he also speaks of it in terms of love. “I made your love known to them,” he prays, “and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

Oneness and love: two ways to talk about the same thing. To be caught up in love is to be caught up in the very life of God. To be caught up in God is to be caught up in love. It’s an ecstatic image showing us what human life can be at its fullest; and it’s also a moral image because it tells us not only who we are, by God’s grace, but what kind of life derives from that. To be one with God means learning how to love ourselves, one another, and our neighbors. 

Jesus really emphasized love in his teachings. He quoted Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And he said that this commandment is second only to the commandment to love God. And, at the last supper, he put it in more personal terms for his disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (15:12) As far as Jesus was concerned, that summed it all up. The other commandments may be useful signposts and reminders, but the real point is “Love one another.” 

And we kind of get that. We sing, “Where there is love and charity, there God is” and “They’ll know we are Christians by our love. And probably we have all experienced some of that love in church communities. I certainly have. And yet, we also know that we Christians have often turned our backs on one another—not to mention the people we think of as “outsiders.” It’s not just a matter of the past—of, say, the Spanish Inquisition. Just now, it’s clear that the Patriarch of Moscow, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, has had a hand in encouraging the hateful and appalling war on Ukraine just in order to maintain and expand his church. Christians haven’t done a perfect job of loving one another—or of loving our other neighbors, either. 

That’s a discouraging realization. But it’s not the end of the story. What it calls our attention to is that we all have a lot of growing to do. And it isn’t, by and large, something a person can manage in a single great sweep. Loving one another, loving our neighbors as ourselves, is a matter of life-long learning— a process that comes about only with missteps and uncertainties and failures along the way. The disciples’ time with Jesus was just the beginning of theirlearning how to love one another. And sometimes the learning curve was pretty steep.

Now, Paul, of course, wasn’t there at the last supper. He came along later, and he wasn’t much of a lover at the start. In fact, he started out as a persecutor of the Christian community before winding up as an advocate of it. But the story we heard from Acts of the Apostles this morning has a lot to teach us about loving one another, even with all our complexities and faults. 

To start with, we can see here that Paul was “no saint,” in the way we commonly use that phrase. He could get angry, like us. He could act out of irritation or frustration, like us. He could also rise above his own imperfections at times, like us.

Here’s how the story goes. Paul and Silas are in the city of Philippi, an important place in the north of Greece. And they’ve received a warm welcome from some local people, led by Lydia, a prosperous businesswoman there. They’ve formed a Christian community. And Paul and Silas worship with them and also continue to roam around the city, meeting people, telling their message to those who want to listen, It’s a quiet kind of work.

But a certain slave girl starts following them around telling people to pay attention to them because they’re messengers of God. Luke tells us that she “had a spirit of divination.” We don’t know exactly what that meant, but she must have been an exceptionally intuitive person. She picked up on things other people didn’t notice. As a result, she knew more about other people than she had any cause to know. People looked at her as a kind of oracle and paid her to tell their fortunes, which made her a financial asset for her owners. Paul, understandably, didn’t want this kind of introduction to the public—a positive recommendation from a demon! But Paul could be short-tempered and quick on the trigger. And, in a fit of exasperation, he casts out the spirit. The woman loses her gift for fortune telling, and her owners lose a lot of income.

This is not Paul at his best. It would be another thing if he had acted out of sympathy for her. But he didn’t. He acted out of exasperation. She may have gained something from it—a greater sense of internal unity within herself without the demon; but she lost her particular “gift.” She went from being a valuable slave to just one more young woman serving the household. It’s hardly surprising that her owners stirred up a mob scene, complete with ethnic insults: “these men are Jews! we’re Romans!” And then the magistrates took a hand in matters—one of their major responsibilities was to prevent public disorder— and they had Paul and Silas flogged and thrown into jail. All quite irregular, since there’s been no trial. But this was the quickest way to halt the riot. 

But Paul and Silas submit and go quietly to jail. Now, don’t get an image of a big building with lots of cells. The Romans used their jails only as holding pens. And they were minimal establishments. No separate cells with locked doors. Just some rings in the wall and some stocks for chaining up prisoners. But Paul and Silas, instead of being humiliated or anxious or angry or self-pitying, rediscover their loving relationship with God and spend the night praying and singing 

Then comes the earthquake—a very odd earthquake in that it leaves the building standing but unlocks all the prisoners’ fetters! The lone jailer has no way to prevent the prisoners from running away and is ready to commit suicide. And then Paul and Silas do something very generous for their jailer. He had probably shown them no kindness, but they claim him as a loved neighbor nonetheless. And he, for his part, recognizes that these are not ordinary people. They have spiritual resources he doesn’t have. And they’re giving him an immense gift just by staying put so that they can stand trial in the morning. 

Paul and Silas treated their jailer with love even when he was their enemy. Their loving behavior toward him created a loving response in him and led him and his family to become fellow members of Christ. “Love your neighbor as yourself” merged into “Love one another.” 

And I particularly like the way the story ends—unfortunately not included in our reading today. It shows that Paul, even though he was making the journey toward love and oneness with God, was still the same old Paul we can find in his letters—proud, short-tempered, determined, maybe a bit disrespectful of authority. Learning to love didn’t mean he suddenly became all soft and cuddly. The magistrates of Philippi sent a message to the jailer, telling him to hustle Paul and Silas quietly out of town. (Their only real concern, after all, was to prevent any more rioting.) But Paul and Silas refused and told the local officials that they’d have to do better than that because they’ve just illegally beaten two Roman citizens. Now, Roman citizenship was a real status thing in Paul’s time because Roman citizens were a tiny minority among the vast masses of Roman subjects. And the magistrates knew that the Roman governor of Macedonia would not look on their maltreatment in a friendly light. The magistrates were well and truly frightened and did as they were told. 

Love of neighbor, love of one another didn’t give Paul a personality transplant; and it won’t do that for us, either. But it enabled him to recognize a moment when he had to put the jailer’s life ahead of his own interests. And crossing that boundary created a new community of love. 

And this is the heart of the whole thing, something that comes out so vividly in our reading from the very end of the Revelation of John. John has been talking about the age to come, the true fulfillment of our life as divinely created human beings and as followers and friends of Jesus. John has described it as a great, beautiful and peaceful city— with a river and trees and a great park at its center. And the book’s last words welcome us all in:

The Spirit and the bride say “Come.”

And let everyone who hears say “Come.” 

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

This is what God has longed to share with us all along. And in it, we shall find our own true lives, liberated by our love of one another—this love that we are learning even now, a step at a time.

TWO PRODIGALS

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

SERMON FOR THE FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT, MARCH 27, 2022

YEAR B: Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Sometimes it seems as if Lent is focused mostly on ourselves. We contemplate our mortality. We own up to some of our failings. We make the extra effort. We try to get more serious, to be better people, to look more deeply into our lives. And today’s gospel certainly hits on those points. But it does something else as well. As so often with Jesus’ parables, it sneaks in a surprise.

We know the story of the Prodigal Son so well—almost too well. It’s about repentance, right? Well, yes. But that’s really not the central point. Let’s think it through together.

We start with a prosperous farmer, a man of property, a figure of great dignity. And he has two children to carry the family on after him. What could be more satisfying? Well, the younger child looks at it a bit differently. If his brother lives long and prospers, he’ll be playing second fiddle for the rest of his life. If his brother should die without children, then he’ll be the sole heir; but that’s a long shot. What he really wants is to be the center of his own world. It’s not so hard to understand. 

So the younger child asks for his share of the inheritance in advance. That will have been a piece of land because that’s how people stored up their investments in those days. And he turns the land into cash and goes off to the big city, where—alas!—he fritters it away on high living. He winds up on the next-to-the-bottom rung of society—not quite a beggar, but not much better off than that. Then—and only then—does he “come to himself,” as Jesus puts it. 

That’s a wonderful turn of phrase, isn’t it? He came to himself. He finally got a true picture of who he was and how he’d been destroying himself, and what he might be able to do about it. The phrasing could have been “He repented.” But instead it says, “He came to himself.” Because that’s what genuine repentance is— not just a matter of listing our failures and saying “Sorry.” I’s a matter of recognizing who we are, deep down—good and bad, wise and foolish, generous and selfish, the whole gamut—and how we’re related to others. And, right now, the prodigal knows that he’s in deep need. He knows that he has no further claim on his family. But he also knows he has no hope at all without going back. So he works out the speech that he’s going to make: “I admit that I have no claim on you and deserve nothing. But could I just be one of your hired hands, please?” 

Then there’s the older sibling. He’s now the sole heir—but the estate isn’t what it was. If his little brother had stayed, they could have worked together, and both would be better off. Instead, the idiot sold off his share of the land and left and went on a world tour. Who knows what’s happened to him? So the poor sap who’s left has to work extra hard and be extra smart in order to keep the family farm afloat. And he’s been doing just that for years. This is an archetypal oldest child, I suppose: competent, decisive, organized, determined, the ultimate good-doobie. He may have some sorrow and distress for the kid; but any sympathy he feels is well-seasoned with irritation and reproach. At times, I think, he probably comes close to hating him.

And then there’s papa. What can we say? He’s a strange figure, isn’t he? Shouldn’t he have tried to argue the younger child out of his crazy notions? Instead, he lets him commit all the mistakes he wants. And when the prodigal reappears—dirty, disheveled, scrawny, half-naked—shouldn’t papa at least stand on his dignity and wait for an explanation? But, instead, he won’t even let the prodigal get his litle speech out; he just grabs him and kisses him and tells the slaves to prepare a feast. What about this prodigal’s terrible behavior? What about judgement? What about some appropriate assessment of the situation? Nope! Not a hint of that. It’s straight to the party. (Hmm! Do we detect at least one similarity here between father and prodigal son? Both seem to like a party, don’t they?)

Then there’s older sibling. You can’t really blame him for his negative reaction. He’s out in the field, when all this happens—busting his butt to keep the farm going. That’s his only purpose in life now. He doesn’t even give himself the pleasure of an occasional dinner with friends. And now he’s supposed to celebrate the return of this good-for-nothing kid, who’s responsible for much of the trouble that older brother is trying to deal with? The good-doobie in me would certainly like a little satisfaction here. At least a little public shaming seems called for. 

But what happens? Papa has thrown everything into confusion. “Get the fatted calf , . . . and let’s eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” The old man is losing it. There’s no reason or justice in this, just stupid, prodigal excess. 

Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? It’s no secret here that this old guy in the parable is a stand-in for God. But what does that mean? Does God like prodigals who’ve come to their senses better than stodgy but faithful good-doobies? Doesn’t this kind of undercut the whole idea of Lent—? We’re trying to be better, more faithful people? Is it fair that mere repentance should get the prodigal this grand welcome? Imagine, if you can, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump “coming to himself”—in some convincing way, I mean, not just as a public relations ploy. Am I ready to give them a big hug, forgive everything, and proceed directly to the party? I don’t think so. It sounds too much like what theologians in my younger years referred to as “cheap grace.” Say you repent, and all is forgiven.

Even our Psalm this morning almost sounds that way: 

Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven.

and whose sin is put away.

. . . . . 

For your hand was heavy upon me day and night

. . . . . . 

Then I acknowledged my sin to you

and did not conceal my guilt.

I said, “I will confess my transgressions to God.”

Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin.

(trans, The Saint Helena Psalter)

There! Account closed. 

No, they’re going to have work harder than that for my forgiveness.

But . . . (You suspected there was gong to be a “but,” didn’t you?) . . . Lent’s focus on us and our effort to become better people, however useful and important it is, isn’t really the main point. We may be the main actors in our own lives, but we’re supporting actors in the big picture. The star is God, And what do we know about God from the gospel? We know that God is fathomless love. Yes, God delights in justice and mercy and faithfulness and all the other virtues. But God is love. That means that God desires us, wants us, longs for us, is distressed when we wander off and get ourselves into trouble or turn ourselves into agents of evil. God, like papa in our parable, loves us so much that God has already forgiven us in advance. That’s why the father in the story didn’t have to wait to hear the prodigal’s little repentant speech. You think that cheap grace seems, well, too cheap? Oh, this is worse. God’s grace isn’t just cheap; it’s free—gratis, another world from the same Latin root as grace. So papa just went out and embraced the prodigal and kissed him. 

That doesn’t mean that repentance is unimportant. “Coming to himself” is what got the prodigal to go back home and so to discover how much he was loved. Lent isn’t just about self-improvement. It isn’t even primarily about self-improvement. It’s about going back to our first love. It’s about recognizing that God still loves us and forgives us, and just wants us to wake up and join the human family again. 

And the prodigal who led a wild life in the big city is only half of God’s problem, of course. He’s go another prodigal on his hands, the older son who’s surrendered himself to his own righteousness as conclusively as the younger son surrendered himself to the wild party-life of the big city. Even doing one’s duty, virtuous though it may be, is no substitute for loving one another. This is why the father goes out to look for the older son, the good-doobie. The father doesn’t want to lose either child. He nearly lost one to the siren songs of pleasure and independence. Now, he’s in danger of losing the other to his sense of self-righteousness. This child is caught up in his own mistake about God—that God only wants to be obeyed. And, good-doobie as he is, he needs repentance, too. He never understood that God wanted him to enjoy life, too. He never figured out that his father wanted not just devoted service, but a sharing of love and delight. It just didn’t sound dutiful enough to him.

So here is the really strange thing about this parable. Both children are prodigals—one prodigal with his property, his independence, his very life; the other with his virtue and self-satisfaction. Both need to turn around and head back home to share in the love that enfolds us all. 

Which one of them do you find in yourself? I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but I hope you’re thinking to yourself, “Both.” Because that, I think, is pretty much the usual human condition. And, truth to tell, neither of them does all that well on its own. What gives us life is neither wealth nor virtue. It’s love. What both children need is exactly what God already offers in inexhaustible abundance. 

All that God wants is for that love to be accepted and shared. There’s the central point of Lent. And the party is just a few weeks away!

THE IMPORTANCE OF BODIES

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PREACHED AT Good Shepherd, Berkeley

SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022

Year C: Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50; Luke 6:27-38

THE IMPORTANCE OF BODIES

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body..

Why is Paul so insistent that the resurrection means having a body? It was clearly an important issue for him, even if he wasn’t really sure how to talk about it. And it’s something the Christian community in Corinth was having trouble with. They agreed that they would have a life after death along with Jesus. But they must have thought of it as a purely spiritual existence, freed from the body. Paul was emphatic that there would have to be a body of some kind. Why? I’ll come back to that question in a bit, but first I want to look at our other readings because I think they hold the key here.

Joseph and his brothers—you probably remember the earlier part of the story. Joseph was an annoying kid, not an easy person for his older brothers to live with. He was his father’s favorite—and he liked flaunting it in front of them. They got revenge by selling him off into slavery in Egypt. But there he showed so much managerial talent that the Pharaoh made him his prime minister and put him in charge of the whole country. Among other things, he was presiding over the biggest feeding program in the world all through a seven-year famine. it was the famine that forced his brothers to trek down to Egypt to buy food for their families. And they didn’t know him in his fancy Egyptian duds. But he knew them. And he decided to see just who they had become in the intervening years. So he gave them a test: he would see whether whether they would repeat what they had done to him by abandoning their youngest brother Benjamin (now their father’s favorite in Joseph’s place). He engineered a false accusation against Benjamin and demanded that he be left behind in an Egyptian jail. It turned out that they had indeed learned something from what they’d done to Joseph. They stood by Benjamin and passed the test. 

Only then did Joseph make himself known to them And it wasn’t just a cheerful, gather-the-old-crowd-around family reunion. Our reading this morning didn’t tell quite all of the story. Let’s step back a few verses to the opening of the scene to get the full emotional impact of it: “Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, [remember that he’s a very powerful man and surrounded by other officials] and he cried out, ‘Send everyone away from me.’ So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.” All the pain and suffering of the story is there in these few verses. Joseph is in tears. His brothers are in terror. 

And that sets the stage for the great thing that Joseph does next. He restores their broken family by forgiving them. It was wrenching, it was risky, it was scary; but it worked. Meeting him brought his brothers face to face with their wrongful deed from years past. Joseph, back then, was all wrapped up in being his father’s favorite. But now Joseph realizes that he needs his whole family. His brothers are entirely at his mercy now. He could exact vengeance. Instead he chooses to forgive them. 

What Joseph chose to do is right in line with what Jesus was saying in this morning’s reading from Luke’s Gospel: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” It’s counterintuitive stuff, isn’t it? This isn’t the first thing I want to do with someone who’s done me harm. And I’ll bet Joseph, during his earlier years as a slave, must have hated them roundly. But he caught hold of the big picture when they stood helpless before him and understood that only forgiveness could save them all—save them from a cycle of endlessly compounding and reinforcing the evil. Forgiveness is the only thing that can actually bring good out of evil. 

Jesus’ words are terribly challenging. They’re not something we can just make up our minds to do. They’re not just chores to be done. You can’t make a to-do list out of them and check them off as you complete them. What they are is a way of building a new reality. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. . . ” These are things we have to grow into, just as Joseph had to. But they will produce a new world.

Now, that would be matter enough for a whole sermon, by itself, but I want to go back to Paul and the body. To start with, notice that the whole Joseph story is very much about bodies—both what his brothers did to him and what he does with his brothers. They threw him in a pit and then sold him into slavery. He threatens them with detention in Egypt. And they are reunited only when a famine forces them all back together—because they had bodies to be fed. If they’d all been spirits, none of this could have happened!

Bur we human beings are weird, hybrid creatures, really—a bit like the mythological sphinx: body of a lion, wings of an eagle, human head. On the one hand, we are spirits that can range across the universe—from the furthest galaxies to the infinitesimally small word of quarks and quantum mechanics, through all the vast stretches of human experience, and emotion. We can howl with laughter over the absurdity of our existence and also weep over its sorrows. There is nowhere our spirits can’t go. 

And we are also creatures of the body, creatures of time and place, bound to other human beings from the moment of birth onward. How many years did Joseph have to turn his brothers’ treatment of him over and over in his mind, trying to resolve it all by himself? He may have been as surprised as they to hear himself forgiving them. But forgive them he did, and that opened the way for a new beginning among them all. It was the reality of their bodies that demanded it.

In Paul’s day, almost everybody believed that there was a life after death. They believed that the spirits of the unburied dead could turn up as ghosts to haunt the living. And once their bodies had been buried, they went to Hades, the land of the dead. People who’d been really bad got punished there. People who’d been really good got to hang out in the Elysian Fields. The rest of us, I guess hung out on the streets. But it was a thin, shadowy existence—not something to look forward to. There was really nothing to do—only an eternity of memories. The author of Ecclesiastes (9:4) summed up the prevailing sentiment when he wrote, “Better a living dog than a dead lion.” 

And Paul was saying, “It isn’t like that! It’s a real life because it’s like Jesus’ resurrection.” In other words, we continue to be embodied human beings, with human relationships. These relationships in which we have sometimes harmed one another can also be the relationships in which we can move, together, toward forgiveness and love and new life. 

Jesus’ words this morning told us the dynamics of this life, here and in the age to come. We know what to expect of that world: a realm of healed and restored relationships. We can even begin to live in it here and now. We can begin to discover it in our lives and help one another to discover it. Stepping back from judgement and condemnation doesn’t come easy. Forgiving and sharing don’t, either. But the promise Jesus concludes with is not an idle one: “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your laps; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” Now and in the age to come!

THE GREAT WEDDING

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Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley, CA

Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 16, 2022

Year C: Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; I Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

The reading we heard this morning from Isaiah has a kind of irresistible beauty and delight. The salvation of Zion, of the human society of this world, comes in the form of a marriage with God, a reunion of God with humanity. After eons of estrangement, uncertainty, suspicion, disappointment, and longing, we at last find our peace with God and with ourselves. 

“You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,

and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. . . . 

and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,

so shall your God rejoice over you.”

It’s such a hope-filled passage. No wonder people long used the new names given here to Zion as personal names—even if they seem old-fashioned now: Hephzibah, “my delight is in her,” and Beulah, “Married.” 

“Your love, O God,” as the psalmist truly says, “reaches to the heavens and your faithfulness to the clouds.” And, for that matter, to the ground under our feet and even into our own well-defended hearts. This good news sometimes seems absurdly far from our current reality. But it’s always there, waiting behind the scenes till we’re ready to notice it and give ourselves to it in whatever way we can. 

It’s no accident that our gospel story this morning takes place at a wedding. John the Evangelist certainly means much more by this story of the wedding at Cana than just a casual narrative. He warns us in advance, when he begins, “On the third day”—nudge! nudge! wink! wink!—just like another important event later on in the story, the resurrection. “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee. . . . ” The wedding . . . the resurrection . . . they’re both part of God’s great reunion with humanity.

Now, John’s Gospel can be difficult to follow. That’s partly because everything in the book seems to point to something beyond itself. John says as much when he tells us that this miracle at Cana “was the first of [Jesus’] signs.” It’s a sign; it’s pointing at something greater than itself.

Let’s see how the story goes then. “The mother of Jesus was there.” She will have had family connections or, at the least, a long-term friendship with this family. And Jesus is invited, too—and not just Jesus, but also his disciples, even though they were essentially strangers to the the family in Cana. The new couple are happy to have the world share in their joy.

But then—the wine gives out! How terribly embarrassing for these people! This wasn’t a world where you could send a groomsman out to pick up another case or two of wine. What they had was what they had. And Mary doesn’t want to see these people she loves shamed. So she says to her son, “They have no wine.” Just a comment, right? Well, Jesus seems to think it was more than just a comment. His response is to say, “Not our problem.” Or, as our translation this morning put it: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?” “Woman,” in English, sounds like a rude way of addressing one’s mother, but it doesn’t feel that way in Greek. It’s really more like “Ma’am” in English(good enough even for the Queen of England, right?) “Ma’am, what business is that of ours?”

And then he goes further, “My hour has not yet come.” That’s odd. Why would he not want to perform a miracle for them? I think he didn’t want to get a reputation for that sort of thing. I mean, would anybody still want to sit patiently and listen to his teaching then? Or would they all just throng up to get their miracles? The other gospels tell us that Jesus did get overwhelmed at times and to escape to the wilderness. And yet, he was wrong to say that his hour hadn’t yet come. John’s told us that this is happening on the third day, Easter, the day of fulfillment! And every day is a third day to some other day! Every day is capable of being part of the eternal reunion of God and humanity. The hour for Jesus to begin reconciling God and humanity is always now!

Is your head spinning yet? Reading John can be like that. But here’s where we are after just four verses of this story: Jesus wasn’t planning to do miracles this early in his ministry. And yet, there was a serious problem here—how to save the honor of these kind people and the joy of the wedding. And what is Jesus in the world for, anyway? To bring about a marriage—the great marriage between humanity and God. Mary knows what’s going through his mind. And she gives him a little extra push when she says to the servants—in his hearing—”Do anything at all that he tells you.” And they must have great respect for her, because they do, even though they must have thought that hauling this vast quantity of water was truly stupid.

And then I think about that poor servant who had to take a sample of the water to the chief steward. Was he dreading a tongue-lashing for playing a stupid joke at a very awkward moment. Or could he detect from the bouquet what he was actually brining. In any case, the steward, clearly a wine expert, as his task demanded, is blown away. “Oh, wow! this is the really good stuff? Why have you been keeping it back all this time?” And the bridegroom doesn’t know what’s going on. The chief steward doesn’t know what’s going on. The guests don’t know what’s going on. All they know is that wine is one of the blessings of God’s creation, and this wine is really good wine. And they rejoice and give thanks.

So Jesus succeeds in performing a miracle and ensuring that the joy of the wedding is not interrupted without anybody knowing about it. Well, the servants know, but they’re servants. Who’s going to believe that wild tale? Easier just to shrug it off as the rediscovery of some misplaced jugs. The disciples probably figured it out, because they’d been shadowing Jesus the whole time. But Jesus can still roam about the countryside without the pressure of immense crowds. 

And all these people had important roles to play, even the ones who had no idea what was going on. Mary’s intervention helped it all happen. When you find your self doubting the importance on intercession, this is the story to come back to. True, God doesn’t need to be told what we need. But God loves to see people joining together in love and caring for one another. It’s exactly what God longs to bring about. It prepares the way for the gift.

The servants were indispensable, too. They were just doing their ordinary work but, without that, it wouldn’t have happened. And they knew what had happened, but not how or why. They just knew God had something to do with it. Who but God created wine in the first place? Who but God could do it again, in an instant, with ordinary water? 

The steward of the feast was the herald who proclaimed the miracle, even though he didn’t know it was a miracle. He praised the quality of the wine and he noticed that it had appeared not at the expected time, but at a totally unexpected one. That, of course, means any time at all. You never know.

And even the guests played an essential part. They must have enjoyed that feast and the wine greatly and been moved by the goodness and generosity of God and of the people who made it possible. They rejoiced and gave thanks—exactly what needed dong.

Thus, in a perfectly ordinary year in Galilee—neither the best of times nor the worst of times—Jesus, at a wedding feast, created a foretaste of the life of the age to come. The salvation of Zion, the salvation of humanity, our salvation comes in the form of a marriage with God, a reunion of God with humanity. After however many eons of estrangement, uncertainty, suspicion, disappointment, and longing, we at last find our peace with God and with ourselves. And it isn’t just one great event at the resurrection in the last days. The third day can be any day. And when it does come to us, our job is to accept the gift of new wine, to share it, to rejoice in it.

“Your love, O God,” as the psalmist says, “reaches to the heavens and your faithfulness to the clouds.” And to us and to all the people God has made and loves so deeply.