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THE ETERNAL MYSTERY OF CHRISTMAS

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The birth of a child—any child—is a mystery. I don’t mean an intellectual mystery. We know about the biology of it, the physiology of it, the medical aspects of it. It’s a personal mystery—one that goes to the heart of our humanity. A new human being has just joined us. A blend of maternal and paternal inheritances. A fosterling of the mother’s body. A new link in our human community. And that’s something that makes each of us a little different, too. Circumstances permitting (it’s been a problem of late!), relatives and friends will come thronging to see the new baby. If they can’t come, they demand photos. They come because they want to see for themselves—and to worship the mystery. 

I’m not using the word “worship” lightly. Every true mystery draws us to worship. Our meeting with the new infant is replete with hopes and concerns, with thanks and with questions about the future. What will this new human being turn out to be like? What will the baby grow into? What will this new human choose for its own life? We have little to go on. We all inherit much of who we are—but not all. We are all unique, no two of us exactly alike—not even (at least in my own limited experience) identical twins, who tend to grow each into their own persons. And we come to contemplate the new mystery early on. Our own lives, after all, are involved in this new life, whether as parents or relatives or friends or simply members of the community where this child will be growing and maturing. 

The mystery of human life, starting afresh in this new child, draws us to contemplation. We may have the opportunity to help this child flourish, but we can’t dictate who it will become—or even foresee it with any confidence. Mary of Nazareth was not the first person to “ponder all these things in her heart.” She certainly wasn’t the last, either.

And we bring all this worship with us this evening to this festival of the Nativity of Christ. We come with the shepherds to see the baby resting on a pile of hay in the cattle’s feed trough, because so many people have flooded into Bethlehem for the census that there’s nowhere else. And we find him a mystery, like every newborn, like every new human being. Of course, we know more of the story than Mary or Joseph or the shepherds could know: who he is to become and what he will do and what he will suffer. But at this moment, we allow ourselves to be grasped by the mystery of birth. And we worship.

But there’s more, of course. Not every birth gets announced by choirs of angels. Not every birth is announced first to a bunch of shepherds—strangers from the margins, quite literally, of their society, who wind up taking the place of eager relatives and friends and become the first to worship at this makeshift crib. This birth is news not just for the baby’s family and townsfolk, but for the universe, from its loftiest angelic inhabitants to quite ordinary human beings—and to the cows and sheep and goats. Maybe a donkey or two. Probably some birds perched in the rafters. And no doubt a spider or two in the corners. It’s the whole gamut of creation—the creation that God so dearly loves and longs for. 

This new birth is for the world. It’s destined to change the world. It brings us and God face to face with each other in the greatest of all mysteries.

From earliest times, Christians have tried to speak about this—and always we stumble, precisely because it is the greatest of mysteries. Christians took three hundred years producing the formal “definitions” of Christian orthodoxy. But abstract theological statements can’t fully capture such a mystery. They can only point to it. But the shepherds sensed that they were seeing a world-changing event. And, later on, when people met Jesus, they sensed that they were meeting not just a great teacher and healer. They were meeting the love of God, the power of God fully present in a human life, overflowing with love for all that God has made, drawing close to us and drawing us close, too. God has dared to become one of us, to live our life from “inside.” God takes on all the possibilities and all the risks that every human infant contains, and it didn’t all go well. But our human mystery has now become a divine mystery, too. What will God be for us? What will we be for God and one another? The mystery is still unfolding. 

What we worship here is the mystery of humanity and God together in this world, of creature and creator in one. It is the mystery of love, the love that made this world and holds it together still, however strained the bonds sometimes seem to become. 

There’s no understanding it. But that’s not necessary. What’s important is to be present alongside the other creatures—to acknowledge the mystery—to worship. And to catch the hope that this moment brings and hold it close. Even, perhaps, to find ourselves being changed and strengthened and renewed by it.

L. Wm. Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Christmas Eve, 2021

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

WISDOM, HUMAN AND DIVINE

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Readings from Proper 20B: Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

“A capable wife who can find?” This reading we heard from Proverbs is an elegant poem, a beautifully constructed alphabetical acrostic, which is to say that each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew letter, from aleph through tav. But its message doesn’t hold up all that well in our own time. Even worse if we read the King James Version, which runs: “Who can find a virtuous woman?” It’s interesting how quickly the human wisdom of one age can lose its value in another. And this was, indeed, highly esteemed wisdom in its time—so much so that our Hebrew editor copied it out, even though it was a piece of gentilewisdom, while giving full credit to its original authors. 

I say “authors” because there were actually two of them. The chapter we just read from begins this way: “The words of King Lemuel, an oracle that his mother taught him.” Or, perhaps more likely, “The words of King Lemuel of Massa that his mother taught him.” So the real source of this poem is the queen mother of the kingdom of Massa (probably somewhere in northern Arabia), telling her son what kind of wife he needs. 

She’d be a brilliant businesswoman, experienced in real estate, wine production, clothing manufacture, and international trade, a full partner with her husband in running a large and complicated household, an attentive mother to their children, a benefactor of the poor (very important in an era that had no “social service agencies”)—and very well dressed. She’d qualify as an impressive person in any age. And King Lemuel’s mother is telling him, “This is the partner you need.” It’s not a prescription for every woman nor for every spouse of whatever gender. It might work for anothr very wealthy household in the kingdom of Massa, but not for much of anybody else.

The poem reminds us that women have found ways, even in patriarchal cultures, to exercise their talents. But it certainly doesn’t mean that we ought to return to such a culture.Not every word of scripture is some sort of divine directive. Some of it has more to do with the human beings writing the scriptures than with God’s purpose for humanity us, unfolding over long ages. But even if these words don’t offer us much insight into God, we can still admire King Lemuel’s mother. (I give her double credit for being willing to invite a woman who was her equal in to her household!) And we can guess that Lemuel probably followed her advice. Either that, or he kept her poem to remind himself of his own capacity to make serious mistakes.

And why shouldn’t there be room in the scriptures for human wisdom? The scriptures are a joint operation between God and human beings. When God speaks, it’s the human ear and mind that have to catch the message. And we often start off by assuming that it’s just more of the same. It takes time, experience, and a kind of self-critical wisdom to hear something we hadn’t known or thought before. It takes conversion, the kind of change of perspective that shows us ourselves and our world from a different angle. A little human wisdom, especially if it reminds us that we don’t know everything, can be very helpful for that. It can help make room for the wisdom from above.

And we find both in our reading from the Letter of James. James is confronting major dysfunction in some Christian community that knows and respects him. It’s a community that includes rich people and poor people. It seems to be on friendly terms with its non-Christians neighbors. But, in this passage, he’s concerned that there is a lot of ambitious rivalry and tension within the community. “These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” Yes, internal conflicts can produce conflicts in families and churches and other human communities. Human wisdom knows about that. 

But then he goes on in a way that must have startled his readers. “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.” Wow! In a Christian community! Did they really do that? Well, not with their own hands. But James’s choice of words is not a mistake. A few verses further on (just after the passage we heard this morning), he writes this: “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. . . . Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. . . . You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.” (5:1-6) Some rich Christian landowners have been trying to cut their expenses by stiffing their workers. And James says to them, “That’s murder!” He even suggests that it’s equivalent to their having killed “the righteous one,” Jesus himself. 

The language is shocking. But there’s truth in it. We know there’s a history of it in our own country, given the way Christian people of the dominant, white majority have historically dismissed the claims of the native population of this country and of people brought here as slaves and kept in other kinds of bondage long after slavery was abolished and other people who may have seemed just too subversive of the status quo. And that doesn’t even mention all the generations of people who’ve been made to work for starvation wages.. 

Perhaps Christians have excused the situation with pleas of “Well, that’s just how the world works.” Maybe James’s Christian landowners argued that way: “Well, those people will get by okay without that money. They always do. And I can hardly spare it. Just look at my other expenses!” No! Only an evil, self-serving wisdom can argue that way. “The wisdom from above,” James says, is quite different. It is “pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” 

And what is this wisdom from above? For James, it’s all there in what he calls “the royal law”: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (5:8) James found this law in the Torah and saw it living and breathing in Jesus himself. And this morning, we heard in the gospel reading about what this was going to Jesus. Jesus has taken his disciples away from the crowds to teach them, in private, something of immense importance. He’s telling them, “The Son of Humanity is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” This isn’t the first time he’s told them this. But no matter how many times he reiterates it, they can’t figure out what he’s talking about. They’ve already recognized him as the Christ. For them, in their worldly wisdom, that means that he’s going to take over the world and set things right. But when Peter suggested this on another occasion, Jesus turned on him and said, “Get behind me, Satan.” So they’re not about to challenge him again. But they still don’t understand. They’re just trying to ignore it all.

But why does Jesus know that he’s going to die? Because he’s practicing God’s overflowing love that pours out on every soul in the universe. He’s healing people for free, cleansing lepers, rescuing people from demon possession. He’s even raised the dead occasionally. And the people are looking to him for leadership. Jesus knows that the powers that be are not going to stand for this. What would become of their own importance and power if people actually believe this message of love? What would become of religious distinctions: the pious, the clergy, the theologians? What would become of courts and armies and the other functions of government? They’d become an anemic shadow of their former, powerful selves. And those who benefit from them are not just going to stand there and take this!

And when they come for him, what is Jesus going to do? He cannot respond with violence. He exists to embody and proclaim the love of God. He won’t retaliate, no matter what they decide to do to him. He will not and he cannot. It would betray everything he is and does. But the disciples still don’t understand. And, as we saw in the Letter of James, Christians of later generations still struggle to believe in this love of God, to believe that God’s love is so lavish that they can afford to share it with others. The greatest power in the world—the power, indeed, that created the world—is expressed in love. And God’s love will not do harm, even in self-defense. 

Meanwhile, the disciples, having given up trying to understand all this, have shifted to a more interesting topic of conversation: which of them will get to be prime minister in Jesus’ coming kingdom. No doubt they’re being very quiet so that Jesus won’t hear them, but he knows what they’re talking about anyway. He calls them over and says to them a single sentence: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Period. Chew on that one for a while. And he offers them an example that I suspect did little to clear things up for them. He takes a small child in his arms and says, in effect, “The kingdom of God won’t come to the violent or the earnestly pious or the highly educated or the powerful. It won’t force itself on anyone. It will come as a gift—like someone to be loved, someone who calls forth your love, someone who claims no power over you at all except that of love. Because it is by loving that we become rich. And who is this loved and loving one who calls for our love? It is Jesus. It is God. 

And this is the heart of the wisdom from above. It’s all about the boundless love of God for us—even us. But to grasp this wisdom, we must help extend this love to everyone, those like us and those different from us, our friends and also our enemies. Jesus couldn’t respond with force to the people who wanted to kill him because it would have made a lie of his whole life and the good news he proclaimed. He became the least of all and the servant of all. And we Christians have been struggling ever since in the same way the disciples were struggling. How can we possibly believe and live out something so life-giving and so true and yet so scary? 

But when our love grows weak, God’s love remains strong. And God holds out a hand to us and says, “No, you’re not there yet, but we’ll keep trying.”

Preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

17th Sunday after Pentecost, September 19, 2021

BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT

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A sermon by Bill Countryman, preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JUNE 6, 2021

Proper 5B: 1 Samuel 4-11(12-15) 16-20 (11:4-15); Psalm 138; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35

“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” (NRSV)

I doubt that these two verses from Mark (or their parallels in Matthew and Luke) are on anybody’s list of favorite Bible verses. Mostly, we just want to move on past them. “Oh, yes, well . . . and what was it we were talking about?” 

But they do kind of catch in the memory, don’t they? I remember first encountering them at about ten or twelve. I’d been given a copy of the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible when it first came out and read through the whole thing—yes, even the begats. (I was a kid who would read anything that came into my hands, from the backs of cereal boxes to the encyclopedia. And, you know, some of those names were really weird and wonderful.)

But these verses brought me up short. Wow! What was this sin that was so much worse than anything else? How would you go about committing it? What if you were just experimenting? Would that count for keeps? The church I was brought up in was—happily—not big on eternal damnation. It followed Jesus’ example and concentrated on good news, not bad. But I never forgot the words and, for most of my life, had no clear notion what they might meant. 

But, actually, Mark gives us a helpful hint. He adds the words “for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.'” Great crowds have been flocking around Jesus because they heard that he was healing people and casting out demons. There was so much need! So many people who had fallen prey to sicknesses of the body and of the soul, and here was someone who could actually help them! He was also, by the way, teaching about God and (would you believe it?) God’s love for us. 

It’s not surprising that the scribes—prominent religious experts who came all the way from Jerusalem to investigate what this popular teacher was talking about in Galilee—the scribes were skeptical. They didn’t trust him. “Who was his teacher? Who knows what kind of nonsense the man is teaching?” And their first thought was to warn people off. After all, the scribes were the people who knew their religion inside and out; it was their job to keep things on the right track. But how could they break this man’s spell? Ah! tell them that this is all really the devil’s work. Jesus, they said, was cleverly casting out demons to disguise his own pact with Satan. 

And it’s with reference to this that Jesus gives us his warning about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The unforgivable sin is the one that they’ve been committing: they’ve taken something self-evidently good and loving and generous—talk about generous! Jesus and this disciples can hardly find time to eat!—and they’re saying, “No, no, that’s actually evil.” They are turning the moral universe upside down. And probably they’re quite sincere about it. After all, they’re the experts on religion and Jesus is not one of them and therefore not to be trusted. But Jesus says, “No, to call good evil—to call all this healing evil—is the ultimate betrayal.” This, he declares, lies beyond God’s forgiveness.

But this seems so unlike God! All through the Bible, we get stories about the lengths God will go to just to stay in relationship with the people God loves. Our first reading this morning was a great example. The people of Israel, you see, were a tribal confederation. They had no centralized organization. They relied on temporary leaders (the heroes and heroines of the Book of Judges) to guide them through times of peril or oppression. And the great Samuel—prophet, priest, elder statesman—was the go to person of the day. 

So the people go to him—but just to say that they want to be more modern and have a king instead. Samuel is offended. They have a king! God. And they have a perfectly good leader, Samuel. “You don’t need a king,” he says. But, in what is, for us at least, a wonderfully comic moment, they respond, “But everybodyhas one.” 

Samuel flings up his hands in despair and complains to God, who replies, “There, there, Samuel. Don’t take it personally. It’s the way people are. They’re human beings. Let’s give them what they want. Youshould tell them all the reasons why they won’t like it once they get it. But we’ll work with them anyway. We’ll forgive and go on.”

Yes, God was even willing to forgive his own dethronement. In fact, as we know from later stories, God even become rather good friends with some of the interlopers over the centuries that followed: David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiah. God doesn’t just cut people off because they make a god out kingship or natoinalism or any other form of government, out of capitalism or communism or any other economic orthodoxy, out of classicism or modernism or post-modernism or what have you. God just likes people and sticks with us through our various experiments, wise or foolish. 

But here’s Jesus, who always insists on God’s love for us, saying, Well, there is one kind of sinner that “can never have forgiveness.” Hmm, here’s something interesting that I hadn’t really noticed until I started preparing this sermon. Mark’s Jesus actually tweaks the language here a bit. In vs. 28, he says (in my own translation this time to try to capture where the emphases really fall in the Greek), “Amen I tell you that all things will be forgiven the children of humanity—their sins and their blasphemies, however many they commit.” But then he goes on, “But anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, doesn’t haveforgiveness ever.”

You might reasonably expect the two statements to be completely parallel: “these people will be forgiven everything; those people will not be forgiven at all.” And that is how the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke read. But Mark’s Jesus says, “doesn’t have forgiveness for ever.” And I think Mark’s phrasing here is quite deliberate. One who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit has reversed the poles of holy and unholy, of good and evil. How would God go about forgiving that? How does someone come back from a state of total distortion? how recognize it as evil? how come to repentance? how accept God’s forgiveness of the blasphemy? how reach out for it? how take hold of it? how have it? To have forgiveness of this, to accept the love of a God whom you have caricatured as the devil, how can anyone go about such a thing? You would have to be turned inside out. You would have to become a different person. 

The bad news is that there is probably a bit of this sin in everyone—yes, even us. We can’t always tell good from evil clearly in our own lives. And sometimes it’s, well, just too easy to dismiss something as evil when in fact it’s merely unfamiliar or even just inconvenient for us. And it’s far easier just to keep things the way we’re used to than to rejoice in God’s lavish and undeserved goodness—especially when all that goodness seems to be falling on people less deserving than ourselves. We’re challenged by this right now as a nation as we struggle to grasp how our white-dominated history has inflicted great suffering on the other peoples of this country, from its original inhabitants onward, including African-Americans, people of Hispanic origin, people of Asian origins, immigrants in general. For those of us in the white majority, it’s proving to be a great struggle to repent and let God’s goodness run amok. But it isn’t impossible. 

And that means that God’s forgiveness isn’t impossible, either. The problem is just that it can be such a wrenching experience to accept that forgiveness, to take it to ourselves, to have it, as Mark’s Jesus puts it. Still, it can happen. Think of the example of St. Paul, from whose writings we read this morning. His blasphemy was way worse than that of the scribes from Jerusalem. He was violent in his rejection of the good news. Even if didn’t kill anyone himself, he paved the way for their deaths. And yet here he is, this morning, declaring that “we have received the Spirit of faith.” “Everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” 

There you have it. God can forgive even the unforgivable sin, even the sin of Paul. The trick is that to havethat forgiveness, we have to give up something dear to us—identifying everything we don’t like as evil. We have to accept God as the kind of lavish God who will forgive anything and anyone out of love. And then we can, however gingerly, reach out the hand and take hold of the forgiveness proffered to us and have it, and find ourselves being pulled back by God’s love from the dreadful blasphemy of refusing God’s goodness just because it falls on other people as well as us. 

LOVE IS THE MAIN THING

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Sermon preached on the Sixth Sunday of Easter (also Mother’s Day), May 9, 2021

Year B: Acts 10:4-48; Psalm 98; i John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17.

The Bible, from one end to the other, has a lot to say about love, all sorts of love. Love for God is a persistent theme; so is God’s love for us—for this world and for the people in it. So, too, is the theme of human love: the love of parents and children, of brothers and sisters, of lovers for their beloved, the kind of love that holds a human community together—and the kind that can even open the doors of a community tor strangers and sojourners, people with whom we might at first seem to have nothing in common. The Torah gives us the two great commandments of love: Love God with your whole self, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus declared that these two commandments are really the foundation on which all of depends. 

What’s more, our readings this morning all take up this theme of love. Our Psalm weaves an exuberant poetic image of the whole world joining together in unity to celebrate it: 

Shout with joy to God, all you lands;

lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.

. . . . 

Let the sea make a noise and all that is in it,

the lands and those who dwell therein.

Let the rivers clap their hands,

and let the hills ring out with joy before God. . . . 

(The Saint Helena Psalter)

And love is the topic that runs all through the First Letter of John. We heard it vividly expressed last week in the famous passage that culminates in “God is love”—and then goes on to say that to love God we must love our brothers and sisters, too. And this week’s reading carries on this line of thought. “Every one who loves the parent,” it declares, “loves the child.” To love God is to love Jesus and to love those whom Jesus has claimed as siblings—in other words, to love one another. 

Of course, when John goes on to say, “And [God’s} commandments are not burdensome,” we may begin to hesitate. There are a lot of people in the world I have trouble loving, and some of them claim to be Christians just as I do, despite our serious differences. It’s tempting just to hunker in our community of the like-minded and forget about those people. 

But sometimes God “helps” us along with the task of befriending those we’re suspicious of—or maybe the right phrase is more like “gives us a shove.” Our wonderful story from Acts 10 is an example. Peter definitely didn’t want to go visit Cornelius and his family. The man was a Gentile and therefore unclean and an officer in the Roman army and therefore part of the occupying regime. But God pushed Peter into going by sending him a dream that made it graphically clear that God’s premier concern in all things is not purity, but love. What’s more, when Peter finally got back to sleep, God sent that dream again. And again after that! Not once, but three times, just to make sure that Peter got the message. And then God told him to go with the group of people who would come looking for him in the morning, asking no questions. 

And what happened then? Peter starts telling the story of Jesus, and almost immediately the Holy Spirit falls on this Gentile family—and makes her presence known quite inescapably as they begin to speak in tongues and glorify God. Peter, of course, is flummoxed. How can he deny that these people are genuine followers of Jesus? But how can he initiate them into a community that has been all Jewish up to this point? Happily, he doesn’t have to make the decision all by himself because no person of Peter’s importance in an ancient community ever travelled alone; and he has some other Jewish Christian leaders with him. 

If Peter had been preaching to a Jewish group, or even a Samaritan group, he would have had no hesitation. Next step: baptism. But these are Gentiles! Can he do that? So he put the question to his entourage, “Can anyone refuse water for baptizing these people?” As much as to say, “Can you come up with any other solution?” Their silence confirms his intuition in the matter and only then does he proceed to incorporate this new and hitherto alien group into the Christian community. It was a challenge to take that step. I’m not sure he could have brought himself to do it had not the Spirit given such a plain demonstration of the divine will. But perhaps he remembered, too, that he’d been praying for this very thing all his life in the very words of this morning’s Psalm: 

Shout with joy to God, all you lands [not just Israel];

lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.

It was happening! The circle of love was widening, however risky it felt at the time.

In our reading from John’s Gospel, we heard Jesus giving his own particular formulation of the love commandment: 

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. . . .This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

This isn’t an isolated command. It embraces everything Jesus had been teaching, not just in word but in deed It sums up his own generous gift of himself to them and to the entire world and asks them to learn it and carry it on into the future.

For love, even though we human beings have a certain natural bent for it, is also something we have to learn. We learn it from family (how fitting that today happens to be Mother’s Day, when we acknowledge this indebtedness), from friends, from the example of saints, from the generosity of God, from Jesus. And it’s the true business of the church to be one such source of our learning. And when Jesus says “Love one another,” he doesn’t mean “Love only one another.” He means, “Learn love here, practice it here, so that you’ll be able to extend it further and further into the world around you.” Jesus isn’t just setting up a principle. He wants to show us how to grow toward that ideal, how to learn love. 

Admittedly, Jesus also says something pretty scary in this passage: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Wait a minute! Didn’t the letter of John just tell us that this wasn’t going to be burdensome? But Jesus is speaking here, first and foremost, about himself. He wants us to understand that he’s showing the utmost love that is possible for a human being. He’s showing what an amazing thing love can do at its pinnacle. But he doesn’t ask us to begin there. 

Perhaps with time and practice we may grow even to that point. (Many have, over the centuries.) God grant we never have the occasion to test it! But we begin where we are, not where Jesus is. We begin by learning love, and we can do that even in the company of other imperfect, fallible people like ourselves, of other people who are still learning and growing in grace—of mothers and fathers, of sisters and brothers, of friends, of those who love us, of saints we meet or hear about. And as we learn and grow, we find that love in the long run, is not a burden, but a joy. We are enlarged by it. We grow by it. We become new, more generous people. We may even find we have gifts to share that we hadn’t noticed before. Strangely enough, the commandment to love turns out to be a gift—and living by it a joy.

CHRIST IS RISEN

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A sermon preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley, on Easter Day, April 4, 2021

Readings for Year B: Isa. 25:6-9; Ps. 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; Mark 16:1-8

[Peter said:] We are witnesses to all that Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

They ate and drank with him. They were with him, once again, as friends and disciples. It sounds sort of normal, doesn’t it? A bit like what we hope for in our own lives as the current pandemic virus loosens its grip on our world. It sounds almost, well, ordinary—though, of course, it’s also anything but ordinary. This was, after all, “after God raised him on the third days”—three days after they had seen him dead and buried.

Peter’s account of it all sounds clear and confident and well-practiced and free of any confusion, even though he’s talking, in this passage from Acts, to an audience of aliens with whom he was none too comfortable—a Roman centurion and his household. He doesn’t really understand why God has insisted that he go speak to them. But he’s trying to sum up his experience briefly and matter-of-factly. If the Holy Spirit has plans for this odd encounter, then the Spirit will have to take charge of it. Peter doesn’t know what else to do. (And, as you may remember from hearing the full story on other occasions, what the Spirit does is to convert this whole bunch of Gentiles, leaving Peter to struggle with the aftermath!)

But however calm and collected Peter’s story of the Passion and Resurrection sounds, we know that, on that first Easter Day, it was quite different. We read the Easter story from St. Mark’s Gospel today. It may not have seemed quite familiar. We don’t read it very often; usually, we choose the other alternative in the lectionary—the one from John’s Gospel with its wonderful story about Mary Magdalene’s strange and wonderful encounter with the Risen Christ. 

But Mark, too, tells us something very important about the Resurrection. He makes it clear that it was a profoundly unsettling experience for those first witnesses:

[The women] had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, siting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 

This “young man,” sounding suspiciously like an angel, says to them: “Don’t be alarmed! You’re looking for the man who was crucified. He’s not here. He’s been raised. So go tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee.”

And then comes the strangest verse in all of Mark’s Gospel: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Boom! End of story. End of Mark’s Gospel, at least in the oldest version we have of it. They told nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. 

Of course, the fact that Mark can tell us the story suggests that the women did eventually tell somebody. But Mark has chosen to leave us with the first raw shock of Easter, before the rejoicing had had time to set in. It’s there in the other gospels, too. But Mark makes us almost taste it and feel it. “They told nothing to anyone, for they were afraid!” This can’t happen! This couldn’t happen! If this has happened, our world is being turned on its head! 

I don’t mean to take away the joy of Easter here. I just want us to feel a little something of the shock, the disorientation, even the fear. Then, perhaps, we can discern more clearly what the joy of Easter is telling us. The powers of sin and death, even though they are very much alive in our world (as this last year has so strongly reminded us), are not invincible. They have already been crippled by the events of Good Friday and Easter Day. 

And we’ve heard a vision, this morning, of the future that will ultimately replace our world of sin and death. Isaiah had already provided it hundreds of years before:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines. . . .

And he will destroy on this mountain

the shroud that is cast over all peoples, . . .

he will swallow up death forever. 

Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces. . . .

Does the vision of a great al fresco feast—a great picnic in a beautiful place bringing together all sorts of people in peace—seem too trivial to capture the joy of Easter? I hope not. The idea of a world where death doesn’t have the last word—does it seem too fantastic for us to entertain? I hope not. For these are the visions that can inspire us to live more freely and generously here and now. 

And, in the long interim while we wait for these hopes to be fulfilled, we have with us the Risen Jesus—an uncanny figure and yet very real. He is far beyond us; yet, he is here for us. He can come and go through closed doors; and yet, his friends can touch him; they can eat and drink with him. Easter was terribly strange and alarming for those first disciples and, at the same time, strangely familiar and, as they began to get past their initial shock, utterly exhilarating. It turned their whole world on its head, and it also opened up a future they could never have imagined otherwise.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

WRITTEN IN BLOOD

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Readings: 5th Sunday in Lent, Year B: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 119:9-16; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts. . . . 

How is God going to do a thing like that?! How does God write on a human heart? We speak of “knowing something by heart,” but that’s something we do with the mind—by memorization, like a poem or the periodic table, or just by hearing something again and again, like a song. But if I say that something is “written on my heart,” that must mean something more. That would be something that has become indelibly important to me, something that guides me in life, something that has passionate meaning for me, something I could not just leave behind. 

I may forget many of the poems that I once knew by heart—even some of the hymns. But what is written on my heart, even if it should grow faint at times, will not lightly alter or disappear altogether. 

But it sounds like it might be a painful process, doesn’t it? What instrument is God going to write with? A chisel and mallet? (I hope our hearts are not that hard!) A scratchy ink pen? Even a ball point sounds a little threatening. And what does God use for ink? Won’t any pigment imaginable just be washed away by the constant flow of blood?

Sometimes, I suppose, it may be painful. Are there false things written there? Will they have to be scrubbed off somehow to make room for the true? It’s a process that will involve change because it’s not just a matter of ideas or propositions or rules—things that can be known by the mind alone. After God says, “I will write my law on their hearts,” God goes on to describe the results of the writing in this way: “No longer shall they . . . say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me.” The law written on the heart won’t be just knowledge of words. It will be knowledge of a person. We wind up knowing God. 

I used to think that having the law written on one’s heart would mean you would never violate it. But that isn’t what this oracle of Jeremiah is saying. It says that we will all know God, from the least of us to the greatest, “for,” God says, “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” We won’t become instantly perfect, but we will know God as Forgiver, as one who loves us despite our sins, as one who wishes to draw us into an everlasting embrace.

Jesus says, in today’s reading from the Gospel of John, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” To which John adds the explanation: “He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.” The event that prompted all this was seemingly minor. It was the appearance of some “Greeks.” They could be Gentiles or Greek-speaking Jews—we don’t know. But what is clear is that they’re outsiders, not a part of Jesus’ usual audience. In order to get access to the famous man, they have to search out one of his disciples who has a Greek name and probably knows their language. And when they turn up, Jesus understands that his gospel has become, as he wished, a message of love to the whole world.

In response, Jesus speaks about his death. He is approaching it with anguish, yet he accepts it and prays only that God’s name be glorified—a prayer that is answered by the divine voice. Not every one understands the voice. Some think it thundered. Some think it might have been an angel. Perhaps just one or two could hear and understand the words at that time. Most of Jesus’ disciples—yes, including us—are still people who need to have these things explained to us. 

But Jesus wants to change that. When he is lifted up on the cross, he will draw all people to him. He intends to write on our hearts in blood, his own blood. And what does he write?

He writes, “Loved.” 

He writes, “Forgiven.”

He writes, “Embraced by God.”

He writes a whole sentence: “I am with you always.”

Jesus, in his teaching, kept emphasizing that the whole law is summed up in two commandments: Love God with your whole self; love your neighbor as yourself. To know these commandments you don’t need advanced study or graduate degrees. An illiterate person can read them, written on the heart, as easily as a Doctor of Philosophy. 

And Jesus writes this truth on our hearts by giving himself. He goes to the cross because he refuses to diminish or deny the message of love to suit the demands of politics and the pride of rulers. He goes to the cross to challenge our universal human fear of becoming God’s beloved friends. For we do fear it. We fear the breaking down of our defenses, the loss of all those lies we tell ourselves about our own worthiness, the dissolving of our illusion that we are in full charge of our own lives. We fear God because we do not trust God’s goodness.

And so God comes to us, seeking out our hearts and writing a new thing on them. The pen God uses is love. The ink is God’s own lifeblood. The blood with which Jesus writes on our hearts is not just human blood. It has become the blood of God. And the writing will therefore be indelible. 

Even if we ignore the message or forget it for a time or pretend that we can’t read it, it will still be there, waiting to give us new life, new energy, new hope, a new start. And the only thing that God asks in return is that “they will all know me.” Know God as lover and forgiver, as opener of doors, as lasting friend, as unfailing companion, and as giver of the strength to share this love in the longing world around us.

Preached Sunday, March 21, 2021, at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

THE CASTING OUT OF DEMONS

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Preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley on the 4th Sunday After Epiphany, January 31, 2021

Proper B: Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28

Our reading from Deuteronomy this morning reminds us of an unavoidable reality: there is no single final revelation, perfect in every detail, that can embody God for all time. Times change. Circumstances change. Cultures change. We invent new vices. We rediscover old virtues. We face new threats and stumble over new opportunities. Sometimes we grow fearful. Sometimes we become overbold. We need guidance. We need prophets here and now.

The written Scriptures, voices from the past, are our fundamental starting point for learning faith and hope and love. But they’re not the whole package. In every age, people of faith need living voices that can help guide us, can impart what God means to tell us here and now, in the moment where we live. That’s why the Eucharist always has a sermon. It’s a reminder that there has to be a spoken word alongside the written one. 

But Moses is frank about the difficulties. There will be false prophets alongside the true ones. Even those truly called by God may not always have good hearing, or they may garble the message in relaying it. But the false prophets are the real problem. Moses paints a very ugly picture of them. And, indeed, what could be worse than to substitute falsehood for truth?

We know about that. It’s become a hallmark of our time, hasn’t it? Falsehood hardly needs a disguise any more to masquerade as truth. It just caters to the anxieties and prejudices of its hearers and instantly it goes speeding its way around the world. “False prophet” has always been a good business opportunity; you can make money off it. And it’s a good way of getting people’s attention if that’s what you crave. It can help you hide your own demons and the things you hate in yourself. (I remember a series of vicious anti-gay preachers in the recent past who got caught with their pants down in very awkward situations.) And it can also create a sense of belonging for those who take it up and spread it and begin to feel that they’re a select in-group who alone know the real truth.

You don’t have to be religious, either, to be a false prophet. But it can help. The devil’s bargain between white nationalists and white Evangelicals in our time has shown that. Both groups feel themselves on the defensive because they are afraid of losing power over the rest of us. [Cf. the excellent op/ed piece by Thomas Edsall—”‘The Capitol Insurrection Was as Christian Nationalist as It Gets'” in the New York Times for 1/28/2021.] 

I’m not attacking all Evangelicals (or even all white Evangelicals). There are faithful people among them, and they’re not the only denomination, over time, have fallen into false prophecy. Our Episcopal Church treated its own black clergy and people as a kind of second-rank church until fairly recent years. Roman Catholics had their anti-Semitic Father Coughlin in the ’30s. Lutherans and Reformed had their pro-Hitler cadres in Germany. The medieval church persecuted heretics and witches in whirlwinds of panic. Churches have often provided a home for false prophets. But that makes it all the more important to call them out when they appear and to say, “This is not of God. This is in the service of evil.” 

Jesus’ world had its prophets, too. Some were true prophets like John the Baptist, some false ones like the various leaders of armed bands who presented themselves as prophets of liberation but whom others called, perhaps not unjustly, “bandits.” All rather confusing, not unlike our own time. But Jesus, to his followers, was the prophet par excellence, the one Moses foretold. Why did they come to see him in that way? Partly, no doubt, for his teaching. Matthew, whose gospel we read from last year (“Year A” of our three-year lectionary cycle) emphasizes Jesus’ teaching. Mark, whom we’re reading this year, also has the teaching but adds a stronger emphasis on what Jesus did in his ministry.

Our Gospel reading this morning starts off with teaching: Jesus taught like a prophet with a message from God for here and now, not just a reiteration of received doctrine. The people were duly impressed. But there was more: he also demonstrated a prophet’s power for good. Right in the middle of the synagogue service, a man with an unclean spirit disrupted everything by challenging Jesus. Can’t you picture the congregations’s reaction? “Oh no! why did this guy choose a moment like this to raise a ruckus! Just when things were getting really interesting.” But the demon knew it was in danger—just like our demons of white supremacy and cultural Evangelicalism. It said as much: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” And Jesus did exactly that; he cast the spirit out. And it was a grim and ugly scene with convulsions and deep pain, producing a scream. Yet, it freed the man from the madness of falsehood and lies and restored to him the freedom of a fully human life. 

It must have been a stunning thing to witness. No wonder people were impressed. But it was more than just a spectacle. It was a gift of God’s healing power, a miracle of grace. And it was this that testified to Jesus’ standing as a true prophet. We do not serve the true God by harming other people. True prophets—like Jesus, like Francis of Assisi, like Martin Luther King, Jr.—go right on loving even the people who attack them, try to bring them back to their senses, aim at giving them new life. It’s false prophets who bring guns and talk about hanging their enemies. False prophets aggrandize themselves and bring death and destruction for others. Jesus brings new life. 

A “miracle,” in itself, is just something that causes people to marvel. But this was more; this was a life-giving miracle, a miracle of grace. We need more of those in our own times. And they’re happening already. When people feed one another, comfort one another, encourage one another, bring good news, help house others, share prayer with one another, give hope to others, we are experiencing miracles. It isn’t going to be easy. But true prophecy can, in the long run, face down false prophecy. And, like Jesus, we’re in it for the long run.

It’s important in these difficult times not to give up on anybody. We go on doing our best to love our neighbors, even when they’re being unlovable. It’s what Paul was writing about in that passage we heard from 1 Corinthians. It’s a difficult passage, more amenable to being lectured on than preached, and my first thought, as I began thinking about this sermon was, “Skip it!” But there is something important for us here. 

The gist of the situation that Paul was addressing is this: our early Christian forebears (at Corinth and at Rome, too) had some serious conflicts with one another. People were dividing up into two factions. One group—Paul calls them “the weak in conscience” believed in the grace Jesus preached, but they worried a lot about keeping all the rules as they had always known them. The other faction, called “the strong of conscience,” argued that the Gospel of Jesus overrides the old rules. In Corinth, they were saying, “Why worry about eating something that’s been sacrificed to a pagan god? Those gods are nothing. There’s only one God, the God of grace.” 

So the Weak were saying, “You liberals are turning everything on its head!” And the Strong were saying, “You conservatives are just not thinking this thing through clearly.” Or, as Paul puts it in Romans, the Weak are judgmental and the Strong are contemptuous. Sounds a lot like modern conflicts between Red State folk and Blue State folk, doesn’t it? Paul, who identified himself as one of the Strong, was saying to both groups, “Don’t forget that these are your sisters and brothers, your family, the family of grace. Don’t just dismiss one another.”

We face similar challenges in our time. We must not dismiss the people around us, even those who have fallen victim to false prophets. We must witness against false prophecy, we have to declare the true grace of God’s love and forgiveness. But we must remember that those who may have fallen victim to it are still, like us, creatures of God and beloved of God. The miracle we need and hope for now, however far off it must seem, isn’t just that false prophecy be defeated, but that we can and will find one another again on the other side of it.

That may sound unlikely. (But miracles are always surprises, aren’t they?) Maybe it would be easier just to ignore the deluded—give up on them. (That’s what the “strong” were tempted to do, wasn’t it?) We must not fail to call false prophecy out for what it is. Can we also remember to hold out hope for a time when our divisions will be transcended? It may seem an impossible thing. But with God all things are possible. And people, as Jesus showed, can in fact be rescued from unclean spirits by acts of grace and be given new life and hope.

TEMPLE AND TABERNACLE

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Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 15; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

When I was a child, one of the things I looked forward to about visiting my Grandma Countryman was an old contraption called a “stereopticon.” The stereopticon wasn’t one of the prime attractions, the foremost of which was grandma herself, and, at a level not too far down from grandma, her chicken stew with home-made noodles. But the stereopticon was fascinating. If you’ve not seen one, it was like looking through binoculars that had a rod pointing outward from the bottom of them. And there were cards, each with two photographs on it—the same scene, side by side—that you put into a holder on the rod. And you could move the card in and out along the rod. In most positions, all you saw was a blur, but at just the right point, they sprang into three-D. 

Now, why am I thinking about this today? Several reasons. It’s getting close to Christmastide, which can evoke old memories. That’s one thing. And another is the fact that we’re still locked in by Covid-19, which is depriving us of time with friends and family. But our first reading today is also at fault in the matter. It gives us two pictures of the same thing that don’t really match up. 

David wants to build God a house. Nathan the prophet says, “Great idea! God will like that.” Then, next thing you know, he says, “No, not a great idea.” What could be the problem? Why doesn’t this whole story come into focus? We all know that the Temple at Jerusalem was the great focal point for ancient Judaism, right up until its destruction by the Romans in AD 70. How could there have been any question about building it in the first place? David’s son Solomon would do it in the next generation with full divine approval. Why was it okay then, but not in David’s time? 

And how does the Bible go about merging these two diametrically opposed parts of the story? Well, essentially, it doesn’t bother. As so often, the Bible doesn’t offer us a single, simple formula. It just gives us two sides to the question, side by side, like the photos on a stereopticon card. Let’s call the image “The Presence of God.” Where do we go to find God? How does God reside among us? 

We know that God can be present in a place, a temple, a church building. We sheep of the Good Shepherd have had some experience of that. I think we’re all, in varying degrees, missing the sense of God’s presence that we used to find in our beautiful church building, which we’re currently shut out of for the second time in recent memory. There’s a great sense of God’s presence there, partly the work of the architect, Charles Bugbee, and partly the work of a century and more of prayer that has hallowed the place. We understand the value of a temple. 

But as Nathan reminds us, there’s another way of thinking about God’s presence. We can find God trekking around with us and among us. Sometimes we go to God in a special place; other times, we find God coming to us where we are. All through the long years of wandering in the desert, Israel had a tent that moved with them. It was kind of like a temple—same floor plan, roughly—but is wasn’t some place you went to on pilgrimage. It was a reminder that God moved with you.

We sheep of the Good Shepherd know something about this, too, I think. We miss our church, but we’ve also been finding ways that God meets with us in our own worlds and in the community we still share in worshipping together from our homes or in taking counsel together online or in ministering to the broader world through Pan de Cielo and other ways. 

Two pictures of God’s presence. . . And how do we shift them along the stereopticon’s rod in order to get the three-D picture to pop out? It’s one of the ongoing challenges of faithful living. The Bible doesn’t settle it for us. It leaves us to look for the moments in our lives when things fit together and we know we’re in God’s presence.

So—a shrine where we go to find God or God coming to find us in our own lives? If the Bible refuses to come down decisively on either alternative, that may be in part because there’s also a danger in each of them. There’s a danger in temples by themselves. If we think of God as found exclusively in the temple, worshipped there with religious rites, we are apt to forget that God is also at work in the great world. And there’s also a danger in seeking God only in the great world—­the danger that what is available everywhere may seem to be nowhere. Like the air we breathe, we may take the God who is everywhere for granted and forget to watch for the divine presence. Then we’re in danger of lapsing into indifference, imagining that life is just a space to ramble through, with more or less satisfaction, when we could be finding it an encounter with awe and joy and grace. 

And all these reflections bring me to our gospel reading this morning—to Mary and her part in the story. When the prophet Isaiah had his great encounter with God, it happened in the Temple. When God transformed Mary’s life, it happened in her own house, busy, no doubt, with her chores. The standard image of the Annunciation in art genrally shows Mary at her prayers, startled by the appearance of Gabriel. Luke doesn’t say anything like that. Maybe she was praying—but given the nature of an average work day, it seems more likely that she was sweping or doing the dishes or mending a torn tunic. 

The angel says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” And she’s utterly perplexed. She has no idea what this is all about. Her private space, we might say in modern lingo, is being invaded by the Holy without so much as a “Do you mind?” It’s a bit like Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush; God just moved into his life and everything changed. And, in both cases, the results were of enormous significance, world-changing significance.

God doesn’t always walk into people’s lives with such drastic effects. But God does walk into our lives in ways big and small, a nudge to our consciences, a sudden new awareness of need or injustice around us, some recognition that we have gifts to give and could be sharing with others. . . . .

So, Mary’s story starts out as a God-meets-us-in-our-own-world story. But then something unheard-of happens: God proposes to take up residence in Mary’s womb. And Mary herself thus becomes a temple of a new kind. She becomes something impossible: the mother of God, the house of God. Her womb contains the Uncontainable. Pilgrims will come—shepherds and magi—to worship. Yet, she is not an immovable shrine, but a single human being, a woman, still moving about her daily tasks as her child grows inside her. She is God’s dwelling-place in the midst of this daily world of ours. 

This is the great mystery of the Incarnation. And this is a doctrine that I know many modern people find pointless—or, perhaps more precisely, meaningless. Christians of the Fourth Century and later got into big fights with one another over the exact metaphysical language to use in describing it,which can make it seem even stranger. But it wasn’t metaphysics that the earliest Christians were struggling to express when they first began using divine language to speak of Jesus. They were searching for a way to say that when they met Jesus, they sensed that God was meeting them—not just in circumstantial ways, ways in which any of us may become, for a moment, someone else’s point of contact with God. In Jesus God was always, reliably present, seeking us. God resided in Jesus. God risked taking on a human life in Jesus, with all the dangers and uncertainties that that entailed. 

And it was Mary who made this possible. Mary—the Tabernacle, the Tent of the Presence, living and moving among us in all our wilderness wandering. Jesus—the very presence of God, entering into our world as one of us. It didn’t mean that the earliest Christians quit going to the Temple in Jerusalem. They went right on doing that till the Romans destroyed it. They went right on seeking God in the synagogue as long as they were allowed to. They formed their own congregations. Eventually they built splendid buildings for them. They made pilgrimages to places famous for God’s presence. We can’t just do without our shrines. 

But we also know, in a new way, that God is loose in the world in another, ultimately more important form. God encounters us in our daily lives, in folk needing to be fed or clothed or healed, in folk who mirror God for us, in blessings that give us hope, in moments of distress that help us recognize our limitations, in friends who give us new strength, in enemies to be forgiven, in moments of awe and joy and grace.

Mary is the mother of all this for us because God came to her in her own daily life and she said, “Yes.” And that was a “yes” that made the whole world different. God asked for help from an ordinary woman, and she gave it. And as she said in her Magnificat:

[God] has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.

. . . . . . .

[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly.

[God] has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

God is here for all of us—when we gather to reflect and pray, when we are at home or at work or enjoying a long walk or singing or drying dishes or serving the needy or whatever. We’ll be glad to have our temple back again, when that becomes possible. But God is not less near for the temporary loss of it. Mary has planted that truth at the heart of our faith. Jesus has confirmed it. 

Thanks be to God!

Preached at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Berkeley, California on December 20, 2020, the Fourth Sunday of Advent. 

Advent Series

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Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Berkeley is sponsoring an Advent discussion series focused on poems from my poetry collection Run, Shepherds, Run., and you are invited. You can find the zoom link and copies of the selected readings for it in the weekly Good Shepherd newsletter, posted every Saturday on Good Shepherd’s Facebook page.

The class meets at 1:30 pm PST each Sunday of Advent. I would be happy to see you there!

WHAT SORT OF “KING” ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

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One of the few things Americans can broadly agree on right now is that we are going through a crisis of legitimate government. We may be diametrically opposed to one another in how we describe the situation, but we agree that we’re in crisis. It’s a relatively new experience for us. We haven’t had this level of public suspicion and disaffection and anger in my lifetime, even during the Vietnam War. And it creates a new context this year for this feast of Christ the King. 

The whole business of “kingship” is, even in better times, a bit of a stumbling block for Americans—an institution we rejected centuries ago. It may help to think of it simply as “government.” Monarchy was the only form of government in use in the New Testament period in any context larger than a municipality. To tell the truth, our own presidency isn’t all that different from a modern constitutional monarchy, even if the monarch has to submit to an election every four years. And we know well what a difference a good president can make in comparison with a bad one. 

It’s the same reality that the prophet Ezekiel was talking about in our reading this morning. Earlier in the chapter we just read from, God says that the shepherds (meaning the kings—a metaphor used often in antiquity) have abandoned their sheep. “The shepherds have fed themselves,” God says, “and have not fed my sheep.” 

God continues, at the beginning of the part we just read: 

“I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

Does that sound familiar somehow? Yes, God is the Good Shepherd, the one who seeks out the lost sheep, just as Jesus would later say of himself.

And this is what God demands of kings. God wants our government leaders to take care of the weak sheep. There will be fat sheep, at the same time, who want the king to favor only them. There’s a vivid image of them in the paragraph that was omitted from our reading this morning. God says to the fat sheep: 

“Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?”

The true king must not favor these bullies. The true king must take care of the weak.

But, alas! we don’t live in a world where God has taken direct charge. God refuses to do so, in fact, because God is unwilling to deprive us of our freedom, the freedom that Adam and Eve chose in the Garden of Eden, the freedom to experience both good and evil. Sometimes we wish God would interfere with this freedom a bit more—preferably to our benefit, of course. But God loves the wayward, unpredictable creatures we are. And God doesn’t make a habit of saving us from ourselves. 

Instead, God at least tries to inspire us and our leaders. God wants for us leaders of integrity and generosity:

“I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God and my servant David shall be prince among them.”

It’s a beautiful vision! And it happens from time to time, with individual leaders. But the House of David was a mixed bag, like our own presidents. There is no one source or form of leadership in this world that is guaranteed always to do the right thing. 

When we speak of Christ as “king,” then, we don’t ignore the unfinished, imperfect state of the world we live in. Christ is our shepherd now in the same way God was shepherd of Israel in the time of Ezekiel when it was collapsing before the overwhelming power of rival world empires on either side of it. We pray for help—and sometimes receive it in unexpected ways. But there is no magic cure for what ails us, no voice from the clouds, no lightning bolts to put our enemies on notice and set things right again. 

Is God powerless, then? No. God is practicing restraint. God is giving humanity space to come to our senses. But God is still the supreme ruler of the universe. Our reading from Ephesians describes the Risen Christ very much in terms of royal authority and power:

[God] seated [the Christ] at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all.

The Jesus who himself became the weak sheep bullied by the fat ones, who submitted to every expression of human evil directed against himself without seeking to harm any one in return, who kept faith with God and with the power of love, is revealed here as embodying the deepest and most powerful reality of all. And what is that? It’s the power by which God created everything that exists, the power by which God shepherds us still, the power of love. 

And it is this love that will sit in judgement over humanity as we come to the end of our course, individually or collectively. We heard it a few minutes ago in the Parable of Sheep and Goats. This parable comes right at the critical turning point in Matthew’s Gospel! It is the last piece of Jesus’ teaching before his arrest and crucifixion. It always evokes a shudder, with its command to the accursed: “Depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” But set that aside for a moment. I’ll come back to it. 

For the center of the parable is the curious and unexpected nature of the judgement itself. The blessed are those who, touched by ordinary human consideration for others, have given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked, who have visited the sick and those in prison. And, most astonishing of all, they don’t even remember doing it! They don’t think of themselves as particularly good. They just tried to be decent human beings. 

Jesus really seems to be lowering the bar here. Is that really all there is to it? He doesn’t even say, “You were champions at feeding the poor or visiting the sick.” He just says, “You did it. Remember that?”

And the accursed never did it at all. Busy as they were trampling the grass and muddying the water, they didn’t even notice that they were overlooking something. If they’d only known it was Jesus they would certainly have done the right thing by him. After all, he’s a powerful figure, seated “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” They would have been careful to stay on his right side. But, no, off they go to the eternal fire. 

But don’t confuse the metaphor for the thing itself, the fire for what it points to. God doesn’t suddenly turn into a tyrant in the Last Days, doesn’t become a sadist who enjoys the suffering of others. No, the condemned are their own eternal fire. Having abandoned all human generosity, they chose only to magnify and enrich themselves at the expense of others. And they are being left to what they have created for themselves: a life of strife, jealousy, vicious competition, failure and, ultimately, disgust. They have only one another to bully and rob. And it must be a nasty disappointment for them.

Does that mean that the Good Shepherd, gives up on them? I doubt that. I think that God is always waiting and hoping that love can still touch even the most callous person’s heart and reveal its power for good. We can and should pray for those who have fallen into the trap of selfish arrogance. Maybe our prayers will help them toward a different vision of themselves and this world. But we also proclaim the perfect kingship of Christ, paradoxically revealed in Jesus’ gentleness and love, as the true standard of human leadership. It’s a kingship that puts love and generosity toward all in the first place. Embrace it for yourself, by giving what you can to a world in need. And, by the grace of God, it can help us all move forward out of our present crisis. 

Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley

FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING, NOVEMBER 22, 2020

Proper B: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46