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WHAT BELONGS TO GOD? AND HOW CAN WE KNOW?

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Exodus 13:12-23; Matthew 22:15-22

[Jesus said], “Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

These words have been causing Christians problems pretty much ever since Jesus uttered them. What exactly does belong to the emperor? What exactly does belong to God? And what if the emperor claims something that really belongs to God? It wasn’t long before Christians decided that the emperor did not in fact have the right to be worshipped as a god. And a lot of them suffered mightily for refusing to accede to something that the emperor thought belonged to him. And ever since, preachers and theologians and plain church folk have been debating about where to draw the line. What are we going to do with this? 

The first thing I want to do is point out what you probably picked up anyway. Jesus is making a joke and pinning his interrogators down in a very deft way. Who were these people who were questioning him? Pharisees, who were widely regarded as the most influential authorities on maters of religion, and Herodians, who were supporters of the Jewish royal family. So you have the influential people of both church and state ganging up on Jesus. And they figure they have the perfect question for getting him into trouble. If he says “Pay the emperor’s tax,” he’ll anger all the radicals in the audience. If he says, “No, don’t pay it,” he’ll have the Roman governor on his back pronto.

Jesus asks to see a denarius—no doubt with a wide-eyed look of innocence on his face, as if he’d never seen one before. Then he says, “Well, it’s got somebody’s picture and name on it, doesn’t it? You’d better give it back.” That kind of sounds like an endorsement for paying the tax. But then Jesus opens a whole new dimension to the question when he adds “And give God the things that are God’s.”

And it’s really hard, isn’t it, to sort out where to draw the line? The emperor wants us to pay taxes to support the military. God wants us not to kill. The emperor wants us to embellish his palaces. God wants us to take care of the poor and needy. The emperor wants us to be his partisans. God wants us to love one another–oh, and our neighbors—oh, and even our enemies. But, if it comes right down to it, is there anything in this world that doesn’t belong to God? The earliest Christians refused to burn incense to the emperor. But they prayed for him anyway. Things do get really tangled up here.

And it’s not just that you can’t really make clear lists of what belongs to God and what not or clear rules for telling the difference and making sure that everybody’s doing what’s right. And if others don’t agree with me about the rules, well, they still need to follow them, which is why I need to acquire some political power, which is why I may just be willing to play the emperor’s games. Oops! Why does Jesus make these quizzical statements? They leave us hanging out there in uncertainty so often. 

It’s at this point, that our story today about Moses becomes instructive because it reminds us that it’s not just what belongs to God that’s difficult to get a grip on; it’s God’s own self. Moses so much wanted a bit certainty in his chaotic life. He appealed to God for reassurance that the people of Israel would make it to the Promised Land. He’d been worried about this all through the Exodus: How could he possibly know it would work? (Not that I blame him for his anxiety!) He was looking for assurance from the start, even at the Burning Bush: 

“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” [he asked]. [God] said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” (Ex. 3:11-12)

Not very reassuring, is it? After he’s done the job, then he’ll get the sign.

Of course, Moses’ problem is one we all share. We all learn, sooner of later in life, that there are no guarantees. Our faith, whether it’s in God or the market or Marxism or the weather or Hollywood or ourselves or whatever sort of faith one can have, is never a guarantee. Our faith in God can be a source of strength and insight and direction and hope. But there is no specified quid pro quo—at least not in advance! As Soren Kierkegaard said, all faith starts with a leap into the unknown, however carefully we may disguise it with some array of factoids. Moses had a good piece of evidence in front of him—the bush that was burning, yet not consumed. But was that enough for him to take up this task of leading Israel out of Egypt with confidence? Well, he did it, but he was never completely certain.

And, in today’s reading, he’s looking for another whole level of certainty. He actually wants to know God face to face: “Show me your glory, I pray.” But God answers:

“I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’ . . . but you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live. . . . See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

It’s a stunning passage—stunning because it’s a point at which the deepest spiritual desire touches the mortal limits of human existence, stunning because the immense power of God is arrayed before us, stunning because God actually decides to agree to Moses’ dangerous request, albeit in the one way that won’t kill Moses. 

There’s a parallel between Moses’ request for certainty and his request actually to see God’s glory. The parallel is that God fills both requests, but only, as it were, after the fact. Moses will get his sign for the Exodus only after it’s happened, when Israel has crossed the Red Sea and journeyed into the desert of Sinai. Moses can witness the glory of God, but only after its greatest refulgence has passed. He’s still stuck with faith and all its uncertainties.

And this is indeed the way God works with us, too. God does not overwhelm us with signs at the expense of our own freedom. God does not grant us the face to face knowledge of God that would be so far beyond us that it could only lead to despair. We find God’s revelations so often in the aftermath. We see the rays of God’s glory only as it passes by. In a time of anxiety like the present—anxiety over health, over livelihood, over the state of our nation—this may be a very important thing for us to hear. God doesn’t rescue Israel solo; God does it only with Moses’ voluntary participation. God doesn’t reveal more of God’s presence than a person can stand, but allows us to glimpse God’s footprints around us, God’s fingerprints on the work as God moves onward, God’s back.

We are not the first Christians to find ourselves in troubled times like ours. Indeed, many have suffered worse than we. It was out of the horrors of the Black Death that the Lady Julian of Norwich had revealed to her those famous and astonishing words: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Yes, even if it takes some years in the wilderness first.

Still, couldn’t Jesus at least have given us some idea of how we could recognize what belongs to God? Well, he wasn’t prone to offering definitions. He tended to teach more by indirection, by parables, by puzzles. He wanted to provoke us into a change of mind, surprise us with a new vision of the world. But one of his key themes in Matthew’s Gospel is love—love for God and for our neighbor. He draws his words from the scriptures of Israel and declares that they’re the heart of everything. He even takes it a step further and tells us to love our enemies (5:43-44). Everything that God loves belongs to God. Everyone that God loves belongs to God. We render to God what belongs to God by loving the people God loves, however unlovable some of them may seem to us.

Not an easy task! But it’s why the early Christians kept on praying for the emperor, even when the emperor was intent on killing them. They were somehow seeing their ruler through the eyes of God’s love, God’s desire to seek and save the lost sheep.

But maybe you’d like something more direct, something that sounds more propositional. Well, there’s a passage from 1 John that helps me understand it: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (4:16b) God is love. And everything God made was made for love’s sake. We humans have a seemingly unique capacity to rush off in other directions, to make other things the measure of our existence—things like certainty, glory, wealth, self-aggrandizement, power over others, emperor’s business. But the only true way to know what belongs to God is to look at the world around us with the eyes of God’s love. 

For the ordinary purposes of life, we do owe some things to the emperor. We pay our taxes even if we feel they’re not always well spent, even if we recognize that Nero has gone from being a bit dotty to out and out crazy. But the love we owe to God—and to the world around us and to one another and to our neighbors and even to our enemies—this love takes precedence over everything else. And as we practice it in our troubling times, we, like Moses may grow in courage and understanding and the ability to trace God’s presence among us—and in so doing we will be fulfilling the commandment: Give to God what belongs to God.”

Preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

10/18/2020

WHEN RELIGION GOES BAD, IT NEEDS THIS ANTIDOTE

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You split the hard rocks in the wilderness

and gave drink as from the great deep.

You brought streams out of the cliff,

and the waters gushed out like rivers.

(Ps. 78:15-16, The Saint Helena Psalter)

What a vivid, wonderful description of God’s grace! I can’t think of a more powerful image of new life or deliverance from danger than the sight of running water in the desert—assuming it’s not a flash flood! One of my favorite places in the world is the spot where the Virgin River emerges from its canyon in Zion National Park. All around are masses of dry rock. But there, hanging from the cliffs, are maidenhair ferns and columbines, nourished by seep springs and mists, and the beautiful, cold river flowing through the midst of it. In the middle of the desert, there is life and delight and awe. 

But the people of Israel were deeply fearful when they came to Rephidim and found no water there. They didn’t grow up in the desert, but in the Nile Valley, where there was never any shortage of water or and their gardens had kept them amply fed. Now they wondered how they were going to survive. Moses, an old desert hand, was probably wondering, too. He had no power to solve this problem. All he could do was go to God and complain about the problem and about how the people were tormenting him. It’s God who solves the problem. Indeed, our Psalm, when it says “You split the hard rocks in the wilderness,” is speaking of God, not Moses. 

So this is one of the great miracle stories of the Exodus, one so memorable that people have been coming back to it for millennia to have their spirits refreshed and renewed. What you may not remember is that there’s also another, almost identical story about Moses’ striking the rock and bringing forth water. It’s not as well-known because it takes a distressing turn.

That story, found in the 20th chapter of Numbers, begins the same way with the complaints of the congregation. They say to Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink.”

As before, Moses brings the problem to God, who tells him, once again, to take the miracle-working staff and strike the rock. Let me read the rest of it for you:

So Moses took the staff from before the Lord, as he had commanded him. Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them. These are the waters of Meribah [which means “Quarrel”], where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord, and by which he showed his holiness. (Numbers 20:9-13 NRSV)

Poor Moses! Shut out of the promised land—the goal of this whole long, aggravating, trek through the desert—for what he had just done.

But what went so wrong here? Moses, whose patience was exhausted, effectively took credit himself for the miracle. “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” He even struck the rock twice, when once would have done the job, which makes me think he’s expressing his anger with the people—and maybe with God as well. 

As you may have heard me say on another occasion, Moses was a man with an explosive temper. Like all saints, he was a real human being with real human imperfections. And it’s hard to blame him, given the immense burden of leadership he was carrying. I don’t think God was primarily interested in punishing Moses for this failure; but it was very important that Moses understand what he had done and how deeply important it was.

Moses’ fault was actually one common to many religious people, maybe all of us at one time or another. We can become so closely identified with our experience of God that we find it hard to tell where God stops, as it were, and we are left with just our own over-inflated egos. It leads us to think that what we believe and do has to be right. It gives us license, we think, to impose our views on others. In fact, much of what has brought religion into disrepute for so many people in our time comes from this confusing of ourselves, our communities, our doctrines with God. 

We know about church leaders who thought it more important to maintain the church’s facade of perfect purity than to protect victims of abuse. We also know some who think it more important to grasp political power than to proclaim the good news to the poor and weak. There are always religious people who think that being religious is mainly about how good we are, not about how good God is. 

Jesus was dealing with this same reality in our reading from Matthew’s Gospel this morning. He had a collision with the chief priests and the elders of the people. These were members of the Sanhedrin, the supreme religious authority of Jesus’ time and place and people. Among other things, they had authority over the Temple and whatever happened in it. No wonder they wanted to know what authority Jesus claimed for teaching there. Since he was attracting big crowds, he posed a potential challenge to their own authority at the very heart of the religious community. If a popular preacher tried the same thing in the Vatican or the National Cathedral, you can bet that there would be a committee of dignitaries asking a few questions‚ and maybe a few police ready to evict them.

“By what authority,” they ask, “are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” They want to see his documents. They expect to pass judgement on them. But Jesus responds by putting them in a very awkward spot with a question of his own about John the Baptist: “Did the baptism of John come from heaven or was it of human origin?” In other words, “Where do you think John got his authority?” 

And, as you remember, they can’t answer him. If they say “from God,” he’ll say, “Why didn’t you take him seriously?” If they say “from human authorities,” no one would be fooled—John never claimed any human authority—and the crowd who had taken John so seriously would be very angry.

Now, I have a lot of sympathy for the chief priests and elders in this situation. There were plenty of crazy, dangerous preachers rambling around Judea in Jesus’ time, looking for an audience—as there are in our world, too. There is a place and a purpose for religious officials. I’m one of them. So I guess I would think so. But there’s also a particular danger for them—as for all religious people. We can too easily mistake the status quo for the will of God. For that matter, we can mistake our own authority for the will of God. The chief priests and elders are on the verge of making that mistake. They’ll do it, in fact, before the week is out, when they haul Jesus before the Roman governor with a trumped up charge of sowing civil disobedience. 

They’re in an awkward position. But Jesus offers them another way to judge the situation in his Parable of the Two Sons. Both sons behave badly in this parable. The first son refuses to go work in the vineyard. This point blank refusal could only be seen as a rejection of the father’s authority—not acceptable behavior in that society. The other son, by contrast, made the appropriate response: “I go, sir.” He just didn’t do it. That was probably a more acceptable way of refusing to do the work, but it didn’t change the facts.

And, yet, when Jesus asks the question “Which of the two did the will of his father?” there’s only one possible answer. And the son who kept up appearances isn’t the one who wins the prize; the one who did the wrong thing and repented turns out to be the good son after all. Jesus sums his point up in withering terms: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

How embarrassing! How impossible to believe! We’ve been good faithful people all along. Why should those worthless folk, those tax collectors and prostitutes, be more pleasing to God than we? If we are the custodians of all that is sacred, then surely God is pleased with us. Those people have done nothing to deserve such favor. We had better defend true religion against such outrageous ideas!

But, of course the problem is to distinguish what we’re really preserving. Is it really the will of God? Or is it an orthodoxy that has come to seem self-evidently true and beyond question? Is it even our own power as leaders of a community? 

Even Moses, driven to distraction by the burdens of his task could confuse the boundaries, could act as if it was he and his own magic wand that brought the water, not the grace of God. Even the great leaders of ancient Israel could make the mistake of thinking that they had everything sewn up and under control, that they could be sure who was in God’s favor and who was not. Christian leaders have made the same mistakes in our history—and still today. 

Now it feels very odd to be preaching all this to the people of Good Shepherd. Many of us, in fact, have felt the sting of exclusion or oppression by other religious people, and we are united here partly by the common bond of that experience. Do I really think we’re guilty of Moses’ sin? No. I just think we need to understand this dynamic and recognize that we’re not immune to it. I could tell stories, but this isn’t the time or place.

But the Gospel, happily, also points us toward the antidote. John the Baptist came preaching God’s grace and mercy: Come one, come all! Jesus came preaching God’s love, a love God is happy to pour out on all sinners, including ourselves. All God really wants in return is our love—for God, for one another, for our neighbors, for this world of which we are all a part. That message is what Jesus claims for his authority. And there’s no church or synagogue that will ever have anything better to offer than that.

A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

17th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, SEPTEMBER 27, 2020

Proper 21A: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

NO PLASTER SAINTS

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Sermon preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley

12th Sunday after Pentecost, August 30, 2020

Proper 17A: Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

There are no plaster saints in the Bible. That’s what particularly strikes me in reading today’s stories about Moses and Peter—Moses the great leader and law-giver for Israel, Peter the leader of the Twelve Apostles. They’re great saints. I’m not questioning that. But they’re not plaster saints—not the perfect, unblemished image of some devoted, unperturbed, holy human being, who works wonders and triumphs over every obstacle without turning a hair. 

Plaster saints are very different from real human beings. They’re people who never made bad mistakes or failed in their love of God or neighbor, people without sin or at least without any sins worth calling attention to, perfect beings. Don’t sound very human, do they? But we have a fascination for them. So much so that we often prefer the plaster image to the real person.

For example, we rarely talk about the faults of the great saints, only about their virtues. But they all had their faults. Of course, they did. They were human like us. I think I first realized it years ago when I was reading some of the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux. I was deeply impressed by how movingly he wrote about love. And it was kind of astonishing to realize that this was the same person who had nothing but contempt for old-fashioned monks who didn’t belong to his new up-to-date order, the same person who persecuted my namesake, St. William of York (I have a personal investment in this one!), and the same person who preached the Second Crusade and recruited warriors for it. All those faults don’t mean he wasn’t a saint. Yes, when he was bad he could be horrid. And yet, in his more graced moments he had insights that can still transform people today. Who knows? Maybe the fact that he wasn’t a very loving person contributed to his understanding of how important love is. Either way, the real Bernard definitely wasn’t a plaster saint.

The Bible seems to be refreshingly immune to the whole business of constructing plaster saints. It tells us about the failings as well as the triumphs of people like Moses and Peter. 

Here’s Peter having his great moment of insight into who Jesus really was—the actual, long-awaited Messiah. (We heard that bit last week.) And now, a few verses further on, he follows it up with an equally great moment of getting everything completely wrong. He goes from “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” last week to “Get behind me, Satan!” in a matter of just a few lines on the page. 

And the amazing thing is that he doesn’t get thrown out for his terrible misunderstanding of Jesus’ purpose and intentions. He gets both an A and an F for that day’s lesson, and they don’t even get averaged to C. Yet, he’s still the same Simon Peter, still part of Jesus’ inner circle, warts and all. No plaster statue can capture the complexity of this. Only the story itself can convey it. 

Simon Peter’s story is pretty familiar to us. He’s the leader of the Twelve and also, at times, the most clueless of them. And that’s part of why we love him and need him. His very presence in the story means that there’s room for us, too. 

And yet, we also tend to shy away from this kind of real-life complexity, from this recognition of the tensions in real human existence. A part of us wants our saints to be perfect. We idealize them. We sweep their failings under the rug—as if any sign of imperfection would invalidate God’s work in their lives. But, in reality, their failures simply magnify the gift of grace that was at work in them. That’s far more impressive than a flawless Peter could ever be. And far more helpful to the likes of us.

Moses’s story may be less familiar. It’s spread over a longer stretch of scripture and not all of it gets read on a Sunday morning in church. But let’s take a look again at what we heard today, the wonderful story about the burning bush. The first thing we heard was “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.”

Excuse me! Last week Moses was an abandoned Israelite baby who’d been adopted into the royal family of Egypt. What is he doing in Midian, married to a bedouin woman, and herding sheep? The answer is that Moses had a serious temper. As he grew up, he had difficulty reconciling his Israelite and Egyptian identities, and that led him to commit murder. Here’s the story:

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. (Ex. 2:11-12)

This didn’t even make him a hero among his own people. It just marked him as a dangerous man. The story goes on:

When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”

Moses knew he had better skip town immediately. He fled to the wilderness.

So this is the man who came to the holy mountain and saw a bush burning without being consumed and went to look at the curiosity. And there the voice of God laid on him the task of bringing Israel out of Egypt, forming them into a nation, and giving them their laws. Oh, sure! He was suppose to go back to Egypt, where he was probably still a wanted man. And then he had to convince his fellow-Hebrews, who thought of him as a semi-Egyptian murderer, to pull up stakes and leave under his leadership. And he had to persuade Pharaoh to let this exodus happen. 

Moses is frightened nearly to death by the whole thing, as any sane person would be. God even has to make a compromise with him to keep him on track. God revealed God’s true name to Moses: I AM WHO I AM. But God recognized that this would just provoke scratching of heads among Moses’ audience. So God also gave him a more familiar name to share with the Hebrews: “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me.”

And Moses does go to Egypt. And there he does the impossible, both with the Hebrew people and with Pharaoh. And Moses leads the people out into the desert and somehow shepherds them through forty years of unfamiliar, nomadic existence. And Moses gets worn out. And Moses gets angry. And Moses sometimes loses his confidence in this vast project and in the God who set him at it. No plaster saint. And all the more remarkable for it. 

Now, I’ve led us through all this this morning for a reason—two reasons, in fact. One is quite personal. There’s is a basic truth about us here, about our own spiritual relation with the divine. God is always trying to teach us new things, give us new strengths, call us into love with God and with our neighbors. Our lives with God are always stretching us. And sometimes our “out” is “Well, I’m no saint.” Yeah. Well, neither were Peter and Moses in the sense that we usually mean. We’re not plaster saints. Neither were they. They were real saints, a complicated mix of virtues and flaws and grace that can do great things. 

So we need to get rid of that plaster image in our minds in order to be in deepening relation to God. Sainthood simply isn’t about perfection. It’s about staying in conversation with God, staying open to learning, staying open to the possibility that we may be invited to do things we would never have thought we could do. When we demand perfection, we destroy true sainthood.

So that’s one reason why I think these stories are important to us. My other reason is a social one. Our human addiction to the notion of perfection is affecting and distorting our collective imagination in this country right now. And it takes two forms. One is the kind of pretend perfectionism that so often makes the lives of saints sound so boring. This is a perfectionism that is determined to ignore the faults of whatever human being it’s canonizing as a saint—or hero or some other sort of first-class being. It just sweeps the human faults under the rug. It’s the perfectionism of willful ignorance—the perfectionism of those who cling to statues of Confederate generals and simply refuse to acknowledge that these men were fundamentally oppressors of the weak. Or the people, many of them Evangelical Christians, who have anointed President Trump as their hero and protector, while sweeping all his manifold wrongdoings under the rug of blasé indifference. They don’t call him a saint (at least not yet), but it’s the same phenomenon at work. It’s plaster sainthood run completely amok. 

But there’s also another kind of perfectionism in our public discourse as well. It sees nothing but faults. Any good in the person is tossed into the dustbin along with them. I’m thinking about the “cancel culture,” so focused on sins that it’s forgotten that sin and grace can co-exist and do co-exist in even the best of human beings. Some images deserve to be smashed. I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest that General Nathan Bedford Forrest contributed anything of value to the common life of our country—only profound harm. But if we pursue this kind of negative perfectionism to its, shall I say “perfect”? conclusion, we will be left with nothing more than cynicism. We need our saints, and there are no saints who are above criticism. 

Saints have to be workers of genuine good. But they don’t have to be perfect; in fact, they never will be. If laying bare the saint’s sins is enough to shatter them and make them worthless and contemptible, there will be no saints any more. I’m not against revealing the sins of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt—the Mount Rushmore club. They’re part of their life-stories. What I find disturbing is the idea that one big sin should cancel all the good a person did. 

If we take that road, what do we lose? Just sticking with Mt. Rushmore, we lose the Declaration of Independence, with its promise so much more far-reaching than Jefferson himself could grasp or admit,. We lose our long tradition of elected presidency that Washington first shaped and then hallowed by stepping down voluntarily from his position of power. We lose the great turning point toward emancipation that Lincoln launched even though he wasn’t yet aware what the fullness of justice would eventually demand. We lose Roosevelt’s passion for the natural world and for economic justice because he also had his particular set of cultural blinders—like everyone else in the history of the world—like us, too, I imagine, though we can’t yet know exactly what they are.

The great thing about saints, then, religious or political, isn’t that they’re perfect. In fact, they’re not and they can’t be. They’re human. The great thing about saints is that somehow they manage to cooperate, however imperfectly, with God’s will for good in our world. Plaster saints are useless. You can’t see their flaws because they’ve all been airbrushed away. But they’re lifeless. But we need the real saints, the Simon Peters, the Moseses, with all their flaws to help lead us forward.

Better to eschew our perfectionism, then, and follow the advice Paul gave us this morning to treat one another with a bit of tolerance and humility: “Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” 

Drop the plaster saints. If they break, all the better. If there is a real saint inside, maybe that will give them a chance to breathe again and give us some guidance and encouragement. We’re all called to be saints. That doesn’t mean that we will quickly or easily be released from our failings and inadequacies. It does mean that we will continue to grow and change and draw yet deeper and deeper into the beauty and delight of God’s love for us and for all the world. 

GOD’S JUDGEMENT AND GOD’S LOVE

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Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, July 19, 2020

Proper 11A: Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

We find ourselves in a kind of limbo these days, with no clear path forward or back. We don’t know when our health will be more secure again. We don’t know how our country will move toward fulfilling its own ideals. We don’t know when we’ll be free to be in the same room with one another. We have some new hopes for our health and for our country. And I’m very grateful for zoom giving us this way to share our worship. But, still, we’re living in a bit of a fog—limbo. 

But our Scriptures today have surprised me once again by speaking pretty directly to our situation, even though they would be difficult to connect directly with one another—as is so often the case in the long green season after Pentecost.

I want to begin with our reading from Matthew—that awkward parable about judgement and punishment. I tend to have an allergic reaction to proclamations about God’s judgement. Too often Christians have used them as something to threaten other people with. The whole idea of a God who is just waiting for a chance to send people to Hell—couldn’t we just skip this passage?

Well, the problem then is that judgement does exist and we know it. We’re just more comfortable with it when the name of God isn’t attached directly to it. At least, I feel free to speak of the judgement that Nature is beginning to inflict on the human race. And I accept Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There can be no question but that humanity stands under judgement for all sorts of reasons: our mistreatment of the earth; our mistreatment of one another; our willingness to worship the market before all other gods; our selfishness; the society we have inherited from a past stained by slavery and morphed into a present where “Black Lives Matter” becomes a revolutionary declaration. And none of us can simply wall ourselves off from these judgements. Innocent or guilty, we’re all inescapably involved, and most of us are at least a bit of each. 

The Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement are the prosecuting attorneys. And we are on trial. And, alas, being relatively innocent won’t get us off the hook. The pandemic doesn’t distinguish between those who deserve punishment and those who don’t. It just lays about with indiscriminate violence. And our American racism still seems to punish more victims than perpetrators. 

And what does Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and Weeds have to say to this confusing situation? It tells us that the ultimate judgement won’t happen immediately. And it offers a reason for it. God’s wheat, Jesus says, is for ever being infiltrated by weeds. The particular weed Jesus referred to, it seems, is something called “darnel.” And it’s particularly tricky to deal with because it’s a relative of wheat, and it looks a lot like wheat right up to harvest time, when the wheat seeds turn golden and the darnel seeds black. (Seed wheat, I understand, still has to have the darnel filtered out of it.) 

And the good news of this parable—yes, it does have good news in it—is that God doesn’t let the eager servants rush out and uproot the weeds at once. God gives us time—enough time to become, by God’s grace, more wheat, less darnel. God gives us time to grow into people who give more than we take, who preserve more than we destroy, who are ready to engage in the restoration of the world and the building up of a new, more just community. 

What is the alternative? Jesus describes it in terms of outer darkness, and fire, and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Only the wailing and gnashing of teeth are literal; the rest is metaphor. What is Hell really like? The closest I can come to imagining it is a confined space where Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their like have to deal eternally with one another. None of them can ever get a conclusive advantage over the others. They all fall victim to one another. And they no longer know how to find a way out. That’s the true outer darkness. We don’t want to go there. We know what our reprieve is for: it’s time for us to become wheat.

But what makes that so difficult for us? Paul in Romans calls it “the flesh” or “the body.” I’ve spent a lot of time in my adult life trying to follow Paul’s argument in Romans. (I even wrote a long discussion of it in a book called Reading Other People’s Mail.) But there’s no time in a sermon to unpack Paul’s complicated rhetoric. So I’m just going to tell you where my study has lead me. 

My guess is that when we heard the phrase “sinful flesh” this morning, we all thought of sex. In modern English, what else could anybody think? What Paul means by “flesh” and “body,” though, is something else. It’s our human finitude. Our limitation by time and place and physical strength and mental acuity and, finally, death. If that’s how we think of our lives, life is going to be a matter of struggle. We’ll do what we feel we have to stay ahead of our neighbors and cushion ourselves against the dangers of the world around us. We all become Hitler, and Stalin, and Mao locked up in that confined space together.

The “sinful flesh” manifests itself in fear, in greed, in jealousy, in all the ways we try to make ourselves “safe.” To live in the Spirit, by contrast, is to recognize that we are loved by God and that this is the most important thing about our lives. Paul isn’t saying that it’s wrong to have a job and earn money and pay the rent and take care of yourself and your family. He’s saying it’s wrong to make that your central value in life. True human life is grounded in hope and generosity, based on God’s love for us and everyone around us.

The Covid-19 crisis gives us a new awareness of this struggle. Some people have decided that they’d rather have a good time or pretend that nothing has changed or insist on their personal mask-free liberty instead of protecting the lives of others. And we’re all reaping the consequences. That’s what Paul means by “sinful flesh.” Others have chosen to live in a way that benefits others as well as ourselves. That’s the life of the Spirit. Most of us—we are human, after all—have probably done at least a little of each. Paul exhorts us to live more and more under the guidance of the Spirit.

And that, as Paul says, means living in hope. Not so much the hope of any one thing in particular—the hope of having a vaccine soon, the hope of being able to gather again as church, the hope of being able to move around freely without the aid of a mask. All things worth hoping for—but not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that we live and will always live in God’s love. That’s a trustworthy hope that can sustain us, whatever else happens.

And I can’t imagine a more hopeful message for our situation just now than the story of Jacob’s experience at Bethel: the heavens wide open, angels coming and going on their earthly rounds, God standing beside Jacob and blessing him and claiming him for God’s own.

Why do I find this so full of hope? Well, just think of who Jacob was at this point in his life. He was born the second of twins, which meant that, according to the rules of his time, his older brother was the real successor. British gentry used to say that every gentleman needed two sons: an heir and a spare. Jacob was the spare. He hated it. He was bright and resourceful. His older brother seemed to him stodgy and conventional and perhaps not too bright. And he longed for some way to reverse the terrible mistake of their birth order. He even weaseled Esau’s birthright out of him in exchange for a bowl of stew, the sort of thing he could so easily have just given him. And now, with his mother as ally, he has stolen Esau’s patriarchal blessing by impersonating him in front of their now-blind father.

In other words, he’s not a model of virtue or generosity. And when we meet him in this morning’s story, he’s also an outcast. He’s in the midst of a long trek from what is now southern Israel to central Syria, where his mother counts on her relatives there to take him in. He’s a shady character, in exile from his family, with few resources, on an impossible mission. 

And God picks him to open the heavens for and to reveal the heavenly ladder, and to give this astonishing blessing to. Why? What I learn from it is that God is in no hurry to judge us, to separate wheat from darnel, to start casting people into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. God is not an eager, punitive judge. God is out here among us looking for friends, not people to punish.

The good news, you see, is never about how good we are. It’s about how good God is. Whatever our inadequacies, our uncertainties, our failures of hope, God’s love still embraces us. We don’t know what our lives will look like next month—or six months from now—or a year. We don’t know what kind of progress toward justice our country will have made. But we do know that we are loved and blessed, no matter what and that God gives us the space and the hope to become people of the Spirit, not victims of our frightened finitude. We are free to join in the movement toward new life.

Yes, judgement is inevitable. But we are still capable of growth and change. And if God could give Jacob the hope of a new life, God can offer it to us, too. And does.

THE GOSPEL IS ONLY FOR SINNERS. OTHERS NEED NOT APPLY

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Bill Countryman, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

A sermon for the second Sunday after Pentecost, June 14, 2020

Proper 6A: Genesis 18:1-15; Psalm 116:1, 10-17; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:8

We all have a lot on our minds nowadays. First off, there’s the pandemic, with all of us wondering when things might get back to something like what we used to think of as “normal.” And what would we actually be willing to risk if things suddenly open up again? And, right now, we’re also in the midst of one of the most sweeping social movements in recent American history, one that we hope will lead to far-reaching social changes. That occupies a big part of our thoughts and concerns, too. 

And, if you have room for anything else, let me just mention that June also happens to be “Pride Month,” which celebrates another sweeping social movement that brought about some astonishing changes in our world—one that Good Shepherd was quite actively involved in. One of the things that sticks in my mind about Gay Liberation was that GLBTQ people found allies. All sorts of people were marching, as is true with regard to the current Black Lives Matter movement. It wasn’t just gay and lesbian people (as we used to say in those less precise times) marching; it was also their straight allies. 

And what happened in that movement was that the majority of Americans found, somewhat to their surprise, that their minds were actually being changed—what, in New Testament Greek, is called metanoia, sometimes translated as “repent.” It’s “repenting” not in the sense of beating one’s breast so much as in the sense of seeing the world in a new light, All those presuppositions about heterosexuals and homosexuals didn’t seem to make sense any more. It began to look like we’re all just human beings in this life together.

If it seems like I’m painting too easy a picture, it’s true. I am. That movement still took a lot of time and sacrifice, and the struggle is far from over, as recent government moves to withdraw protections from transgender people make clear. But it remains true that American society—and others in our world—has gone through a sea change in relation to a group that long suffered grave penalties just for being who we were. And, to come back to the present moment, there is hope in the air that the Black Lives Matter movement is achieving something similar. Yes, it calls for changes in laws and in police attitudes and in the economic inequalities that are driving our society crazy. All those are important. But we also need a sea change in how we see one another on a day to day basis. 

Black Lives Matter is becoming the cry of a nation as well as that of an abused minority. Not everybody is on board, not by a long shot. But there’s an astonishingly broad cross section of people who have been converted, have had their minds changed, have come to see things more clearly than we had before. I learned something from Black colleagues and students over the years about the kind of indignities so often visited on them. But I still didn’t really understand how the seemingly endless series of deaths of Black people in the hands of the police was not just a string of separate incidents, but the ultimate expression of the stubbornly systemic racism in our country. I think I’m getting it now. My mind has certainly been changed. 

So we’re all trying to find our way through the pandemic. Black Lives Matter is in all of our minds now. Gay/Lesbian Liberation was a great turning point for many of us. And we celebrate, even if the times demand that we do it more quietly—no Parades! And both of these movements remind us that the task is not finished yet. We as a nation have a long way to go before we will truly be living up to our professed goal of “liberty and justice for all.”

And—as if all this weren’t enough—it just happens that today on the secular calendar is Flag Day, a day that reminds us of both our ideals and the barriers that stand in the way of realizing them. The American flag is a much contested emblem right now. Waving the flag is often a jingoist thing: we’re so much bigger, stronger, and better than anybody else! And Conservative politicians—sometimes quite extremist ones—like to wrap themselves in it as if it belonged more to them than to the rest of us. And that offends me deeply—because I grew up being assured the flag stood for liberty and justice for all, the founding ideals of our republic, the ideals that keep us moving forward even though we have never yet really attained to them. The flag also stands for a sense of community and a kind of selflessness of service to the community that’s manifest in the people of our armed forces. “Not all of them,” you may be thinking. And you’d be right. But the great majority of them. Jon and I both have some of them in our families. And that’s why the flag is flying beside our front door this morning. 

Our national failure to live up to our ideals doesn’t discredit the ideals. It only discredits us. And it is we ourselves who have to hold the ideals high—the very ideals that sometimes condemn us. Why? Because without them we would be directionless. We’re not going to become perfect. We are human beings. But we truly need to acknowledge our failures and keep moving forward.

Now, you may be wondering when I’m going to get on to today’s sermon. Well, right about now in fact. But I wanted to say all this first, because I think our readings speak quite directly to our sins and to the way forward for us. 

I begin with our reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans: 

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. . . . God proves God’s love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us. 

What is Paul saying here? That God has come to meet us at our absolute worst—even as we formed a lynch mob in response. God came in order to wake us up, in order to give us new minds, in order to send us down a new path. This is what proves God’s love for us. Paul is saying, “God didn’t do this for you because you were so sweet and deserving and honorable and religious.” Indeed, as you’ll remember, it was the religious who led that lynch mob in Jerusalem. Being religious offers a chance of repentance, not a guarantee of our own purity and goodness. The gospel is only offered to sinners, in fact. Others, if there are any, need not apply. 

Paul doesn’t say that all is forgiven and we don’t have to grow and change any more. He says, rather, that since we are reconciled by God’s own love in Christ’s death, we will be saved. It’s not a free pass to the heavenly gates. It means that God will stick with us and badger us until we experience the changes of mind that we need. What God is offering us is transformation, not a free ride. And, ultimately, our hope is to live in God’s love, to rejoice in it, to share it with others.

And, you know, this is what the practice of our faith is about. I like that word “practice.” It says it just right. We who practice Christianity are not perfected experts: we’re practicing in our effort to grow and change and become better conformed to God’s amazing love. But as we grow and change, we also become teachers.

This morning’s gospel reading told us how Jesus, as he preached and proclaimed the good news and healed everywhere, “saw the crowds [and] had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into he harvest.'” And who was it that he sent? His disciples! That group of sincere lunkheads who had such a hard time figuring out what he was trying to tell them. Pretty much like us.

We’re all sheep needing a shepherd these days. But Jesus tells us we are, at the same time, shepherds. Jesus doesn’t send perfected experts out to do the shepherding. He sends out practicing students. 

The message is the same, then,sermo for all of us, sheep and shepherds as we are: Change your mind! The kingdom of heaven has drawn near! Believe the good news! The good news comes to those in need of it. And only when we know something of our need can we recognize the good news for what it is. 

The good news, in other words, is for sinners. Others, if there are any, need not apply. God’s love for us helps us to find a new, deeper, more loving mind. It gives us the power to live into that new mind, to let it reshape us and the world around us. We have a hard time believing that it can happen, but it can. It does.

And the wonderful story we heard from Genesis captures our situation perfectly. God visits Abraham and promises that Sarah, who is long past her child-bearing days, will have a child. Sarah laughs to herself, but she’s overheard—oh, the embarrassment! Of course she denies it: “I didn’t laugh.” And God responds, not in anger but in a teasing mode, “Oh yes, you did laugh.” 

And the surprise was on Sarah. The world can turn out different from what we thought possible. We can’t dictate exactly how it will happen. But it starts with getting a new mind,

We’re living in challenging times. But we live through them by the great gift of God’s love, which comes to us before we deserve it, not after. It gives us a new mind. And we can share it with others, even if we are imperfect ourselves in the love of God. And even if we laugh with Sarah at the possibility of good, we may find ourselves laughing with joy later on when God’s gift becomes clearer. What it takes is a new mind, a mind that embraces the possibility of good, even in dark times, even in times like the present, even times of plague and injustice. And that can give us power to change ourselves and the world around us. 

So remember: The Gospel is for sinners. It comes to bring us a change of mind. Others, if there are any, need not apply. But for those to whom it is given, it can work wonders. 

AND THE JOKE IS ON . . . PRETTY MUCH ALL OF US!

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On Easter Sunday, Molly Haws told us how important jokes are to the Easter season. (If you missed that wonderful sermon, be sure to ask her about Frankenstein the next chance you get.) I think she was right on target. And this isn’t some new-fangled modern idea. It’s very ancient. You may not think of orthodoxy as funny, but it is. 

From earliest days, Christians have been telling the story of how Death and Satan thought they had won. They snared Jesus on the cross and swallowed him whole. But they hadn’t reckoned on God’s sense of humor, and they soon heard God chuckling. They had swallowed the hook along with the bait, and the process of coughing their ill-gotten prize back up was going to be very painful for them. 

Our Eastern Orthodox sisters and brothers—who, by the way, are celebrating Easter Sunday today, since they have a slightly different way of calculating it—know this story. One of their best-loved icons shows Christ at the moment when he has invaded and defeated Death and Hell. He’s taking Adam and Eve up by the hand and pulling them up out of their graves and starting a regular revolution in Satan’s own territory. Now, there’s an Easter joke for you. All of Satan’s best-laid plans thrown suddenly onto the scrap heap!

So the big joke is on Satan. But what about Thomas? Every year, on this Second Sunday of Easter, we read the story of Thomas’s uncertainty. He’s entered the English language as “doubting Thomas” with the implication that he was just stubborn, that he somehow failed a test that his fellow disciples all passed. So the joke was on him, too, wasn’t it? 

Now, let me say up front that I like Thomas a lot. He wasn’t given to flights of enthusiasm. He wouldn’t have been one of these renegade preachers who insist on their congregants all coming to church in the middle of a pandemic. If anything, he was a bit of a pessimist—or “realist,” as we pessimists like to put it. We get a lot of insight into him, a few chapters earlier in the story, when Jesus announces that he’s going to Bethany because his friend Lazarus has died. The disciples remind him that there are people down there who were trying to kill him not so long ago. But Jesus is going anyway. And it’s Thomas who says, “Well, let’s go along. We can at least die with him.” (11:16)

So Thomas isn’t one to leap up and do a jig over what might or might not be good news. He wants some evidence. Maybe he felt that some of his colleagues were (what shall we say?) a bit less hard-headed than they might have been. It’s a simple enough matter for him. We know Jesus died on the cross. We know who buried him and where. Whoever or whatever they saw, therefore, was not Jesus. 

But Jesus appears and gives Thomas what Thomas needed: the evidence not just of Thomas’s eyes, but of his hand, touching the wounds crucifixion had inflicted—still open, it seems, though no longer fatal. And Thomas is stunned into a complete reversal. The unthinkable was true. Joke on Thomas, right?

We often think so: “Well, Thomas, you little skeptic. You won’t believe without a special favor, so now you have it. Now, couldn’t you be more like the other disciples who believed without having to see it for themselves?” Thomas is the doubter, the questioner, the one weak in faith. Isn’t it much better just to believe?

But, then, where are all those good people who just believed? In all the Easter stories in the gospels, you’ll hardly find a single person who recognized the risen Jesus right off the bat. Mary Magdalene, on Easter morning, knew Jesus was dead. Therefore the man standing in front of her was not Jesus—until he said her name. And then she knew! Later that day, Jesus had visited the other disciples. He said “Peace be with you,” and showed them his wounds. And only then, John tells us (20:20) they recognized him. 

Even later on, in the next chapter of John, we find the disciples up in Galilee fishing from Peter’s old boat when Jesus appears on the shore and tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat, where they promptly net an enormous catch. And only then does one of them recognize who it is that’s been standing there on the beach all this time and whispers to Peter, “It’s the Lord!”

Thomas isn’t an exception to the rule at all! He’s just like all his sisters and brothers. He knows the rules of the world, the rules of nature. It can’t be Jesus. Therefore it isn’t Jesus. His world has fallen apart; therefore nothing life-giving can happen now. If the joke is on Thomas and his skepticism, it hits everybody else in the story, too.

So the joke was on Satan and Death and Hell. And the joke was on all the disciples, Thomas included, who had such a hard time accepting what had happened. So who else gets caught? Who else gets taken by surprise? Is anybody exempt? 

In one way, I suppose we are the exempt ones. We know when Easter is coming. We know exactly what it’s all about. It’s about Jesus’ resurrection. We’re no more likely than Mary Magdalene and Thomas and the other disciples to believe such a story if it were happening in our own day. But this was a long time ago. It’s become simply a reality for us. I suspect that each of us understands the story in our own slightly distinct way. If we had to say what exactly we think happened on that Easter morning so long ago, we might be hard pressed to give an account. But we know the story. We celebrate it. We’re enlivened by it. It brings us joy. “Christ is Risen” is a familiar reassertion, not a radical break in our world. So, yes, we believe. But is it too easy? It it really the same challenge that faced Mary and Thomas and the rest?

Well, sooner or later, actually it is. What they had to discover was not just the risen Christ. They had to discover that their own lives and hopes had been given back to them, despite those days of disaster, of being scattered hither and yon, of losing their great love and their great hope, of finding themselves marooned in a hostile world. They hadn’t lost just Jesus, they’d lost their trust in God. Crucifixion turned their world, their lives, upside down. Now, the resurrection suddenly turned them right side up again. And that was what was so hard to imagine, so hard to accept

And the question for me now is whether it can make the same kind of difference in my world, here and now. As a pessimist I’ve been getting a lot of confirmation for my possibly jaundiced worldview lately—a lot of confirmation and from all directions. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a different world ahead.

And yet, blessedly, there are signs of resurrection around me, too—signs of God interfering for good. I see them here at Good Shepherd in people who keep us connected, caring for one another and for our neighbors. I see them in the world around us with governors and mayors taking leadership on behalf of public health—sometimes at real political risk to themselves. I see them in people of all sorts tackling what needs doing—making masks and safety clothing for those on the front lines, forgiving rent for people who are thrown into desperate economic circumstances by loss of income, bringing some cheer to the isolated, caring about each other. 

I still find the pessimistic scenario easier to envisage than the hopeful one, but I am persuaded that Christ really isn’t dead, that the grace of resurrection is at work here and now. I’m convinced that God is at work among us, at work in our world. This won’t resolve all our problems. God doesn’t work that way. But it gives hope and hope gives power and perseverance and even a sense of joy dawning on the horizon. 

When Thomas saw the risen Christ, all he could do was exclaim “My Lord and my God.” God was at work before his very eyes. And I consider myself blessed that God is making God’s presence known to us, too, through one another and through other people in the world around us who are touched by the power of God’s love. And this love is the power that made the world and sustains it still and will never be defeated by gullible villains like Satan and Death and their many followers. 

Thomas and I don’t get any prizes for spiritual quickness. So maybe we rank as comic figures in the great story. But Satan and Death are the real butt of the joke, not us. And if we are still struggling, God loves us enough to provide the evidence we need. 

Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA

Second Sunday of Easter, April 29, 2020

Readings: Acts 2:14a; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

A CALL TO ADVENTURE

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

Second Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2020

Genesis 12:1-4a, Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

We have many ways to think of Lent. It can be a season for bringing more discipline and focus into our lives, a season to renew our attentiveness to God in prayer and meditation, a season for spiritual stimulation through reading, a season for cultivating quiet and centeredness, a season to reflect on our mortality—it does start off with those admonitory ashes! These can all be good ways of practicing Lent. They meet a variety of needs in our spiritual lives. Perhaps each of us has our own preference—a preference that may change at different points in our lives. 

But today’s readings have prompted me to think of Lent in yet another way—as a season of adventuring, of risking a break with our existing assumptions about life in order to see if God has something more to tell us, something more to give us, something more that we hadn’t been aware of yet or, if we were, were perhaps feeling inadequate to.

Begin with Abram. In antiquity, leaving your family was a very chancy business. People in our time and place move pretty freely away from their families. You can stay in touch by electronic means; you can go visit without too much trouble; the laws may even be more or less the same in your new place. In other ages, there was much more risk involved. And, at this point, Abram had nothing more to rely on than a promise. 

When he left Haran, he couldn’t know exactly what problems he might face, what resources he might have to face them with, what enemies he might encounter, what allies he might find. Nor could he know what family of his own he might build, still less what an extraordinary history would attend his many descendants. He started out trusting the God who had promised him a blessing, and he ventured everything on it. And all the rest of the Biblical story, from this point on, of course, depends on Abram’s venture. 

And in the process—through dangerous times and peaceful times, through hard times and prosperous times—Abram came to know the God who called him more and more deeply. He come to understand that God’s call was a sign of love for him, something he could never have expected, much less worked for. He came to see that God had offered him friendship and that God wanted Abram’s friendship, too.

Would God have abandoned Abram if he’d refused to take the risk? I don’t think so. The God I have come to know in my life isn’t short-tempered or huffy or quick to break relationships. God would still have been at Abram’s side. But Abram came to know God in ways that became possible only as he took that initial risk, stepping out into the unknown on the strength of a promise.

It’s not so different with Nicodemus in the story we heard from the Gospel of John. Jesus is inviting him to an adventure—a different kind of adventure, but still an adventure. Nicodemus is a person who ought to know God pretty well. He’s very devout; he’s even a teacher of religion. And he’s a person of high status both religiously and politically. And yet, he recognizes, in Jesus, odd outsider though he is, someone who is closer to God than he is himself. 

Nicodemus isn’t a unique figure. It’s fairly easy for people to be very devout or to know a lot about religion without in fact being very close to God. Religion can become an end in its own right—a way to organize your life, a fascinating subject to dig into and learn more about, perhaps a way to reassure yourself that you are among the chosen, while God really couldn’t much like all those rather careless, indifferent, self-indulgent people around you. 

It’s not that religion is bad in itself. It’s almost the only way we have of thinking and speaking about God. But like everything human, it’s subject to abuse. That’s one reason why so many people are deeply suspicious of religion in our time. They’ve seen the abuse in action. But Jesus doesn’t ask Nicodemus to give up religion. He asks him to pass more deeply into it and through it to communion with God’s own self, to a new awareness of God’s love. Nicodemus has all the right words, but he needs to grasp the poem. He has the right notes, but he still has to grasp the tune. He has the right moves, but he isn’t dancing the dance. He needs to be born anew—or from above (the Greek word in question can mean either thing). He needs to be born of the Spirit. 

That could be a big risk for a community leader who is an expert on his religion and a prominent practitioner of it. It could wind up getting him in a dangerous spot in terms of public opinion. But it could also be like Abram arriving in the Promised Land. “Oh, this is what it’s all about—this trust, this hope, this love, this friendship with God, this new way of being in the world.”

And it seems that Nicodemus took the risk. For we will meet him again later in John’s Gospel. As a member of the Sanhedrin, he will later try to secure a fair trial for Jesus when some of his colleagues are more in the mood for a lynching. After the crucifixion, he will join Joseph of Arimathea, another secret disciple, in burying Jesus (19:39). It seems that he did indeed find something of what Jesus was pointing him toward. His first adventure was in looking deeper into his religion and finding there the love and friendship of God. And the adventure continued as he began to live that love and friendship out in his world, sometimes at real risk to himself.

And Paul is making the same point when he brings us back to the figure of Abraham. What was so distinguished about Abraham? Was it his piety? No. It was his willingness to venture. Abraham didn’t wait till he had made himself worthy of God; he just took the gift of God’s love as it was offered to him and launched out into the world. And that, says Paul, is what we all need. 

It sounds good, doesn’t it? God loves you, has always loved you, will always love you. You don’t have to be perfect. In fact, you can’t make God love you any more than God already does because there isn’t such a thing as more love than God is already pouring out on you. It’s the whole bucketful, dumped right on you. 

It should make us glad, right? Actually, it tends to make us nervous.

Why? Because love like that is pure gift, pure grace. You don’t own it. You can’t take charge of it. You can’t even manipulate it, because God knows you inside and out already—probably better than you know yourself. All this can be a little scary. We may wish we had some claims of our own in the matter, some virtues of our own in the bank that we could leverage for what we want. I think that’s why religious people are always to some degree in danger of shutting ourselves up inside our religion and treating it as something that belongs to us and makes more worthy. That way, we think we can earn God’s love.

But there’s nothing of ultimate importance in this life except the love of God, which invites you to share love with God and with all the others God loves. And it’s the consciousness of that love that enabled Abram and Nicodemus and Paul and any number of other saints since to take risks, to venture out, to do new and wonderful things in their lives. 

Perhaps your call, like Abram’s or Nicodemus’s, is to new places or tasks or spiritual discoveries. But for all of us, always, the call is to accept the reality of this extraordinary, all-embracing love of God for each one of us and to take it as our intimate companion as we step into the future that lies ahead of us.

And our Psalm today gives us the right music for the adventure. Bear it in mind this Lent:

I lift up my eyes to the hills;

from where is my help to come?

My help comes from God,

the maker of heaven and earth.

God will not let your foot be moved;

the One who watches over you will not fall asleep.

. . . . . 

God shall preserve you from all evil,

and is the one who shall keep you safe.

God shall watch over your going out and your coming in,

from this time forth for evermore.

[translation from The Saint Helena Psalter, copyright 2004]

TWO KINDS OF DIVINE POWER

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a sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

First Sunday after Epiphany, January 12, 2020

Year A: Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 29; Acts 10:34-43; Matthew 3:13-17

I’ve always loved Psalm 29—partly for its poetry and partly for its spiritual power. Not every encounter with God is like the one in this poem, but some of them are—like encountering something or someone completely overpowering. It starts in the heavens with angelic beings worshipping God “in the beauty of holiness,” when suddenly we find that we’re in the middle of a violent thunderstorm with flashes of lightning and winds powerful enough to twist oak trees and break giant cedars—so intense that it seems to shake the hills like an earthquake. And then suddenly, with all that in our minds, we find ourselves in the temple where all are crying “Holy.” 

But then what comes of all this power? Is it all simply God’s assertion of divine power? a way of saying, “I can smash you if I feel like it”? No, the Psalm ends with an assurance: “God shall give strength to the people; / God shall give the people the blessing of peace.” 

I suppose it’s one of the basic qualifications of a god to exhibit power. A powerless god is a contradiction in terms. And we certainly do think of God as immensely powerful. Start with the creation. What could demonstrate greater power than the ability to speak a whole universe into being? From our side of the event, that spoken word may sound more like a big bang. But from God’s side it was as simple as uttering a short command: Let there be light! And there was light.

But the thunderstorm is a more ambiguous image. It brings rain and renews the earth, but it can also hurl lightning and shatter great trees and start fires. Does God’s great power really guarantee that we will always be secure? In some ways, it seems almost indifferent as to how it affects us. It is so much beyond us that we may seem like little more than accidental witnesses. 

And if we suppose that this kind of divine power is the only kind, it can lead us into grave spiritual mistakes. Believers begin to suppose that they, too, can and should wield this kind of power. It’s the error that leads to Inquisitions and theocracies of all kinds and to the political entanglements of some contemporary Evangelicals as they try to impose their version of God’s will on the rest of us. (The finger, by the way, doesn’t point only at medieval Roman Catholics and modern Evangelicals. Our Anglican forebears in centuries past knew how to fall into that pit, too. It’s a standing temptation for all devout believers. It requires vigilance and humility to resist it. )Bap

But, stirring as this morning’s Psalm is, it isn’t the only form God’s power takes. We get another view of it in our reading from Isaiah this morning. This is one of a group of poetic oracles scattered through some of the later chapters of Isaiah that are referred to as “The Suffering Servant Songs.” This Suffering Servant is described as having suffered so profoundly that even the great powers of the world, more used to inflicting suffering than to noticing it, stand aghast.

But, for Isaiah, this suffering servant holds a new and unfamiliar kind of power. The servant is gentle and works by humble persistence: “He will not cry or lift up his voice, / or make it heard in the street; / a bruised reed he will not break, / and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; / he will faithfully bring forth justice.” Isaiah never says how this apparently weak and marginal person, so gentle as not to dispatch even the reed that appears to be near death already or stifle whatever small spark of light my survive in a rough world—never says how this person is to become the great agent of justice. Isaiah only says that this is another way God will work. The powerful God “who created the heavens and stretched them out, / who spread out the earth . . . / and gives breath to the people upon it” also knows other ways to work—quiet, humble ways that we would normally not think of as representing any power at all.

And just so, we read this morning of Jesus’ coming to John the Baptist to be baptized by him. John described his baptism as “a washing with water for repentance.” John looked at Jesus and apparently sized him up as someone who didn’t have much to repent of. A person who was interested in domination, in thunderstorm power, might have replied, “Yes, you need it. I’ll baptize you.” Instead, John demurs. Jesus, instead, answers, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” 

That’s a vague response, isn’t it? Puzzling, really. Especially since we often think of “righteousness” as a matter of doing everything according to rule. The word often sounds a bit priggish in our ears. But actually the Greek word also means “justice,” just as in Isaiah. What Jesus is doing is bringing forth justice, as Isaiah proclaimed. He says to John, in effect, “I claim nothing for myself. I am here simply as one human being among others. I don’t expect to be treated differently.”

And it is then, of course, after John has baptized Jesus, that the heavens open and the Spirit descends. It is then that the voice from heaven declares to those present, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” It’s not any thunderstorm act that sets the scene for the divine voice. It’s Jesus’ humility, his refusal to make any claims at all for himself, his own virtue or goodness or authority. 

I’ve known people like that. I understand why John the Baptist could recognize it in Jesus. Sometimes it’s just so obvious you can’t avoid it. One person who stands out for me just now was Louie Crew, the founder of Integrity and the prime mover in helping the Episcopal Church wake up to its gay and lesbian members and incorporate them fully into its life. He brought the whole issue out into the open and even though he suffered a lot of abuse, he wouldn’t let it get dropped again. I met him only once, and I expected my own mental image of a social activist—someone blazing with righteous indignation and skilled in marshaling people to fight for the right. Instead, he was the mildest of people, very modest, almost shy. And I understand he was that way with everybody, including the people who most vehemently disagreed with him—people who were his avowed enemies. He took loving one’s neighbor not just as a duty, but as a way of life. 

That God’s power can also work through us in this way shouldn’t come as a surprise. Think of St. Francis of Assisi or Martin Luther King Jr. Think people as you have known yourself—people in whose presence you realized you were in the presence of grace. You don’t have to be famous or obviously powerful to show forth this power of God. But the world around you will be changed, aided, renewed. 

This kind of power can disarm suspicion and hatred. Our story from Acts shows it in action. To fill in the background: Cornelius the Centurion has asked Peter to come to his house because of a vision he has seen. Peter is deeply reluctant. After all, Cornelius is an officer in the Roman army that occupies Judea. He is a powerful man. He’s a gentile and therefore unclean. If Peter goes to see him, it will be extremely rude to refuse to eat with him. It’s said that Cornelius believes in the Jewish God and is known for his generosity in almsgiving and devoted to prayer. But he’s an outsider. Worse than that, he’s a powerful outsider—thunderstorm powerful. 

But Peter can somehow tell that Cornelius has come to know the humble power of God. And Peter can see it in him and is converted by it. Peter came, worried about being compromised by even entering Cornelius’s house. But he sees God at work in the centurion, and he embraces him as kin. With every moment of this kind, God is at work recreating the world. What could we desire more than to be part of such moments, caught up by the unassuming, generous, power of God​?

Today is the First Sunday after the Epiphany in our Western Christian calendar. We apply the term “epiphany” to the visit of the Magi, another moment in which unassuming gentleness bridged the gap between people so very unlike each other. The magi saw it in the holy family. The holy family saw it in the magi. Both found it in the infant Jesus. 

When Eastern Christians speak of the Epiphany, they mean by it Jesus’ baptism, another instance of the same divine humility. And so, each year, we celebrate Epiphany twice, first in the stable with the Magi, then at the River Jordan with John the Baptist. Keep it in mind. God’s thunderstorm power is overwhelming enough. But the great power of God is this humbler form, by which we and our world are being transformed with grace.

THE ANGEL AND THE SHEPHERDS

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L. WM. COUNTRYMAN

Preached CHRISTMAS 2019 at GOOD SHEPHERD BERKELEY Luke 2:1-14

I want to tell you the real story about the angel and the shepherds. Well, I don’t mean that Luke didn’t get it right in his Gospel. But he didn’t have room for all the details, and details do make a difference, after all.

He was right about the shepherds, of course. They were out in the fields, keeping watch over their sheep. There were rumors of wild dogs in the vicinity, so they had to be on the alert. They were sitting around the remains of a little campfire, which wasn’t doing much good against the nighttime cold out there on the hilltops. A couple of them were half-asleep. One of them was whistling. The others were wishing he would quit. They weren’t expecting any excitement—unless it took the form of that pack of wild dogs.

And then the angel appeared. They could tell it was an angel. For one thing he glowed, which your ordinary nighttime visitor doesn’t do. For another thing, he bobbed a bit and didn’t quite seem to be touching ground. Angels do that. They don’t experience gravity, you see, like us. Their natural tendency to stay in the same place, while the earth spins past them; and if they want to keep up with the earth’s movement long enough to have a conversation with one of us, they have a lot of very rapid calculating to do. So they shouldn’t be criticized if they bob and sway a little. It’s really quite amazing that they can do it at all.

So the angel appeared, looking sort of like so. This was an important gig, after all. The angel knew that. He wanted to get it just right, and he wasn’t quite sure what human beings expected of angels. So he’d done a lot of research in museums. And, being of a somewhat flamboyant turn of mind, he particularly liked the Mannerist painters. So he modeled his appearance on their style. The effect was quite good, really. He’d checked it in the mirror.

He knew he was cutting quite an impressive figure. But, just to make sure, he turned up the wattage a bit, till he was far and away the brightest thing around in the middle of the night; and he said to the shepherds, “Don’t be afraid!”

The shepherds just sat there looking straight ahead, not moving a muscle.

The angel was a little taken aback. He wondered if he’d gotten the language wrong. He did a quick mental check: “Let’s see: Judean hills, first century; yeah, these people have to know Aramaic. What is the problem?”

So he tried again—a little louder. “Don’t be afraid!”

Still no reaction—though one or two of the shepherds did seem to be looking a bit sideways at each other, trying to figure out whether anybody else was seeing what they were seeing or whether, as an alternative, they had just gone completely around the bend. They’d all heard tales about shepherds who’d gone crazy from being out by themselves too much, but they were village shepherds who stayed close to home and sat around the campfire together and it wasn’t supposed to happen to them. Still, you didn’t have glowing figures appearing to you every night telling you not to be afraid. Afraid of what? What had they missed out on that they should be afraid of? It all seemed a little suspicious.

Finally, the oldest of them, Jonathan, a man with a gray beard and not many teeth, worked up his courage and said, “All very easy for you to say! You go around the countryside glowing like that and nobody’s going to mess with you. We’ve got wild dogs here to worry about, ourselves—probably bears and lions, too, for all I know.”

“Oh,” said the angel—a little disappointed. This was a major gig, after all, and he’d been assuming that he’d have a fairly sophisticated audience. But he could deal with this.

“There’s big doings afoot,” he says, “stuff you’ll want to know about. And I’ve been sent to tell you.”

“We don’t need no big doings,” says another shepherd—Deborah, a middle-aged woman who was clearly not used to taking any nonsense off anybody, even if they glowed. “Big doings just mean more taxes and soldiers coming through stealing sheep. But thanks for letting us know. We’ll just stay out here and keep out of sight.”

“No, no!” says the angel. “This is good news. For, lo! [He’d been waiting to say that part; it was his favorite bit.] For, lo! I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be for all the people. For today, a savior, who is the anointed Lord, has been born for you in the city of David. And you’re the first to know! You’ll be the first to go and see the baby.”

“Somebody’s got to stay here and look after the sheep,” says Deborah.

“Looking for some baby in Bethlehem in the middle of the night will be like looking for a lump of coal in a cave,” says Jonathan.

“Excuse me,” said the angel, “could we have just a little enthusiasm here? God is doing something very special tonight, and you’re the first to know. God is drawing closer to you human beings than ever before. This baby makes a difference.”

By this time, the shepherds were feeling a little sorry for the angel, who was clearly doing his best. So one of the younger ones said, “Well, we don’t mean any harm. And I’m sure it’s really a great honor. Can you tell us how to get there?”

“Sure!” said the angel, greatly cheered up. “Go into Bethlehem by the West Gate. Take the second left. Go around behind all those warehouses. Take the third right, past the house with the barking dog. (Don’t worry about the dog; he’s all bark, no bite.) Left down the alleyway. Third door on your right. It’s the barn behind the Starlight Motel. This is how you’ll know you’re there: you’ll find the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in the trough where the animals are fed. ”

The shepherds politely nodded their heads, but none of them made a move as if to get up and go. Finally Deborah says, “What about the sheep?”

It took a minute or so because this wan’t part of the plan, but finally the angel said, “All right, I’ll watch the sheep.”

So the shepherds all got up and picked up their satchels and their sticks. And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and singing the Hallelujah chorus.

(Yes, I know. That isn’t what they were supposed to be singing. Luke got his information from the official program, which had them doing the Gloria in excelsis–the one by Vivaldi, I think. But they hadn’t had all the practice time they wanted and, anyway, they were very fond of Handel’s Messiah.)

So the shepherds went. They followed the angel’s directions, and they found the barn, just as the angel had promised. They knocked quietly, for fear of waking the baby, and a quiet voice invited them in. They opened the door and there was Mary, looking exhausted but happy, and the baby asleep on a pile of straw, and Joseph hovering around trying to be useful. And there were some cows and a couple of donkeys, who made the place warmer. And it was dark—just one little lamp.

And the baby was exactly that—a newborn like any newborn. It didn’t glow. It lay on the straw; it didn’t, you know, levitate just above it. And there were no jewels or other riches. And at first, the shepherds were a little disappointed. After the sound and light show they’d just seen, it seemed, well, a bit anticlimactic. In fact, the baby and his family looked very much like them.

But, you know, they had to think about it all. So this is how God comes close to human beings. The bobbing, glowing angels are just a prelude. The real wonder of the universe is a human life in deep communion with God. If you want to know about God, that’s where you have to look. The baby in Bethlehem is the supreme example, but, at any given moment, the revelation could take place in you, it could take place in me it could take place in those shepherds. It was enough, really, to give a person pause.

So they told Mary what a lovely baby she had and what an unusual announcement they’d gotten about the event, and they went back to their flocks pondering it all. And the angel slipped away into the early dawn.

OUR VISION OF THE FUTURE IS WHAT SHAPES US HERE AND NOW

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

22nd Sunday After Pentecost, November 10, 2019

Proper 27C: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38.

I read recently that in the ancient language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, looking at the past was phrased as looking in front of you; looking at the future was looking behind you. It’s the reverse of our English usage, but it makes a certain sense. You can look at what’s already happened. The future is always something of a mystery to us until the day it turns into the past. 

That doesn’t keep us from imagining the future, of course. Maybe it will be just more of what we already know and experience. Maybe it will be a time of surprises, good or bad. Probably some of each! In any case, our interest in the future isn’t just a matter of idle speculation. What we expect of the future has a lot to say about how we live our lives in the present. A boring future is one thing. A foreboding one another. A future with an element of hope yet another. And a hopeful vision of the future is what all our readings this morning are about.

Sometimes the future vision is quite specific and immediate. Haggai kindly dated his prophecies for us to the year 520 BC. That was just eighteen years after a group of exiled Jews had returned to Jerusalem, with the encouragement of the Persian emperor, to rebuild the city. They’d built homes for themselves, but the centerpiece of that city was still missing: the temple still lay in ruins. It was Paris without Notre Dame, London without Big Ben, Washington D.C. without the Capitol.

But this group of settlers—relatively few in number—were daunted. They couldn’t see how to move ahead until Haggai gave them a picture of new and splendid future. He addressed his prophesy to all of them, particularly to their two leaders, Zerubbabel, a Davidic prince who was governor of what was now the Persian province of Judah, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, who, as chief priest, was the religious authority for the community.

Haggai starts by admitting that the situation is discouraging: “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” He tells the people to take courage. And holds up a promise for the future: 

For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth . . . the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor. . . . 

It sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t inconceivable. What he was predicting was that Jerusalem would once again become a great pilgrimage site. People would come from far and wide to worship there and they would bring their gifts and Jerusalem would become rich once again. And, indeed, with a few brief lapses, Haggai’s prophecy has proven true ever since. It’s still true today, when Jerusalem is a holy place for not one, but three religions.

None of this subsequent history would have been possible, had not those few returned refugees found the courage to embark on a seemingly hopeless task. Haggai’s vision of the future made the present different. It offered them hope. It helped them achieve things they hadn’t thought possible.

In our reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, we get a different picture of how present and future may interconnect. According to Acts of the Apostles, the church at Thessalonica had experienced persecutions almost from the moment of its founding (Acts 17:1-10). Here were people who had embraced a vision of the future that would culminate in “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him.” But now, they’re growing uncertain. Life, for this community, has been difficult. And divergent speculations about the coming of Jesus leave people confused. 

Some people are even saying that “the Day of the Lord is already here.” That must have left people thinking, “Then, you mean this is all there is? This is as good—as holy, as joyous— as it’s going to get?” Would that mean that their faith and hope and endurance were all wasted? Some must have thought so, for Paul takes great pains to sketch out a more complex vision of the future. It doesn’t move in a straight line. The day of the Lord will indeed come, but not before the future first takes a turn in the opposite direction. Things will get worse before they get better. It will get very dark before it gets light. 

For the Thessalonian Christians, then, the immediate future isn’t about some great project, like rebuilding the temple. They don’t have the power to change the world around them. But they do still have a hope and therefore they have the power to maintain the beloved community, the community of trust and hope and love. That’s no small achievement in any era, including our own. It’s about hanging on through thick and thin, maintaining the primacy of love in a society that thinks things like power and wealth are more important. Paul urges them, “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm. . .”

So, we’ve heard Haggai offering a vision of the future that helped people to build in the present. And we’ve had Paul offering up a very steely-eyed vision of a future that still holds hope, but only after an intermediate period of trials and tribulations, and he offers that vision to help people to hold firm by what is good and true. And, finally, our reading from the Gospel of Luke opens up the biggest question of all about the future. What kind of future comes after death?

Now, the Scriptures have no single, simple answer to that question. The scriptures of the Old Testament don’t even have much interest in it. And the scriptures of the New Testament use a variety of images in speaking of it. 

And if I look around the world today, I find no unanimity about it either inside or outside the church. For myself, I’ve never had much trouble with the idea of the resurrection. My whole life seems to have been full of resurrections, small and great, and there’s no obvious reason why that pattern should cease with the death of the body. But I’ve also known devout Christians who don’t believe in the resurrection at all, who feel that one life is quite enough for anyone. And just to complicate matters a bit further, I read this week a short blurb in The Christian Century (11/26/2019) about a long-term British study of atheists and agnostics which reported that “about three-fourths of the atheists and nine out of ten agnostics are open to supernatural phenomena, including astrology, the existence of supernatural beings, and life after death.” So human beings, Christian or not, are basically all over the map about this topic. 

The Sadducees, in our gospel this morning, objected to the idea of resurrection because it could create an anomaly, a situation that the Torah specifically forbids. A man was not allowed to marry his brother’s wife except under the specific condition of the brother’s having died without an heir, in which case, the next brother in line is obliged to do so. In the resurrection, however, the woman could not be the wife of one of the younger brothers, because that would violate the prohibition on marrying the wife of a living brother. But she couldn’t return to being the wife of the eldest brother, because the Torah specifically forbids a man to remarry a former wife who has been married to another man in the interim. 

But Jesus objects that they are imagining the future as simply a continuation of the present. But the future is inevitably different. Jesus doesn’t try to map it out in detail. He simply says that in the age to come people will not die and there is therefore no occasion to produce heirs and no need for marriage. In the age to come, we are no longer described as son of this person or daughter of that person. Each of us is there in our own right. Every person is equally present to God. Every person! God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and they are alive to God. And we, too, will be alive to God in the age to come—this remote future hidden from us in this world.

And if we will be alive to God in the age to come, what does that say about who and what we are here and now? It makes each and every one of us a person of extraordinary importance here and now, a person beloved and strengthened by that love. It places each and every one of us in friendship with God, here, now, and always. 

Paul put it this way in his Epistle to Romans:

We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. (Rom. 14:7-8)

And if our future is a life of communion with God, so is our present. It is a life of trust and hope and love. Our vision of the age to come is what makes us who are now as Christians, as saints, as people who live in the here and now with generosity and courage and joy. Perhaps we may have the opportunity to do great tings, like the returned exiles of Haggai’s day. Perhaps we may encounter times when we can only hunker down and hold firm against the corruptions and temptations of the world around us, like the Thessalonian Christians of Paul’s time. But in every age, we can and will be shaped by this assurance from Jesus: “God is not God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.” Yes, you and I. Yes, now and always.