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WHO IS JESUS? WHO ARE WE?

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Sunday, August 27, 2023

13th Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 16A: Exodus 1:8-2:10; Psalm 124; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 15:13-20

“Now a new king arose in Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” Maybe he flunked Egyptian History in school. Or maybe he was just looking for a supply of cheap but capable labor to build the new cities he was planning and thus ensure that his glory would be remembered for ever. And he comes up with an excuse for disenfranchising the Israelites that modern populists are still using in our own time: “These people don’t belong here; they’re not a part of us—not real Egyptians, even if they were born here and we’ve been part of our world for years. Their loyalties lie elsewhere and they’ll be a fifth column for whatever Syrian king decides to attack us down here. We need to do something now to make sure they can’t turn against us.”

So the whole Israelite community in Egypt, which had been working alongside the native Egyptians for generations and contributing to the wealth and well-being of Egypt, is turned by royal fiat into slaves—non-persons who live only to bring wealth and glory to their owner. 

These Israelites weren’t the first people to be enslaved in the history of the world, and they certainly weren’t the last. Nor were they above reproach themselves; they, too, held slaves in times in their history. But imagine the horror of their sudden transformation into slaves—the kind of horror experienced by the inhabitants of a conquered city in Greek and Roman times, as they found themselves being sold off to slave merchants, or by people being marched to the coast of Africa and loaded onto slave ships centuries later. 

But the story tells us that God is on the side of the slave. And it’s been, for countless oppressed people since, a beacon of hope—the hope that the evil inflicted on them will not win out in the long run. It was an immensely important sstory for black people in our country over the centuries when enslavement was a thriving institution among us. And it continued to be important after the Civil War, when other forms of oppression took the place of chattel slavery. And we know that our country is still not entirely free of that kind of oppression, directed at people as diverse as American Indians, black, hispanics, and newcomers from other parts of the world. 

In our own time, refugees come here fleeing famine, just as Jacob and his family had done in Egypt. Climate change, coming on top of serious misgovernment in some parts of the world, is causing a human migration that threatens to overwhelm existing boundaries here and elsewhere. Perhaps no country can cope fully with it single-handedly. But it’s become a particular opportunity for populist demagogues. They brand people fleeing starvation as “illegals” (as if they had no human claim on the rest of us) and they spout wild charges that these people are just coming here to commit crimes against the vulnerable and unwary. “We, of course, are the good people; so they must be evil.” The demagogues are worthy successors of the Pharaoh in our reading. 

Paul had something to say to that mentality this morning: “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think.” Good advice, but it’s not likely to get much attention from the Orbans and Modis and Trumps of our world. After all, it calls for a substantial investment of self-examination and humility—things that don’t necessarily contribute to political careers. But Paul’s advice is sound. He’s already suggested that our value is less a matter of our own intrinsic worth, than of the gifts we’re given by the Spirit. And Paul insists that no one person has all the gifts. Like the human body, communities live by relying on the distinct gifts of all their parts. We can certainly testify to that at Good Shepherd. What gifts we’ve been given over this past century and more—right up to the present moment! I find myself feeling great gratitude for each of you and the gifts you share with me in this community. None of us has to be omnicompetent! (Good thing. None of us is!) And yet, together we do amazing things. 

But Pharaoh just wanted to be in total control. And so he concocted that cock and bull story about how the Israelites were different, sinister, a danger to Egypt. American slave-owners of the pre-Civil War era persuaded themselves that slavery was just the natural order of society: the good and capable had to take charge of all those people who weren’t capable of managing their own lives. We all like to think well of ourselves, but thinking more highly of oneself than one ought can be a danger to oneself and to everybody around us. The political tyrants of our world are exhibit A.

Human differences, human boundaries—I suppose they’re inevitable in a finite world. But this morning’s Gospel reading shows us Jesus working to overcome them. The process really started a couple of weeks ago with our reading about the Canaanite woman who came begging Jesus to rid her daughter of the terrible demon that was tormenting her. Our vicar Molly laid it out clearly for us: the woman is a Gentile, indeed Canaanite, descended from of the bitterest of Israel’s hereditary enemies. Jesus is Jewish and is ministering only among Jews. But when he refuses her, she compels him to see that (A) she knows who the God of the Jews is and that (B) this God is generous enough to embrace everybody.

And now, in today’s story, Jesus is going to have a conversation with his disciples about who he really is. Jesus is aware that he’s immensely popular. No doubt he knows perfectly well that some believe he is the Messiah, come to restore the political clout of Israel. If he wanted to take that path, he could have had this conversation in Jewish territory and it would have taken off like wildfire!

Instead, he takes them away from Jewish territory to have the conversation. He first asks them how his ministry is being perceived among the Jewish people: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Jesus refers to himself with this phrase over and over in Matthew’s Gospel. But it’s an odd expression. Later Christians would use it to emphasize that Jesus is truly human as well as divine. But for the people of Jesus’ own time, “Son of Man” wasn’t a recognizable title—nothing like the titles Peter gives him later: “Messiah,” “Son of God.” It clears things up a bit, though, to understand that, in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, “son of man” (or, more exactly, “son of a human”) was just the normal term for “person.” 

The Canaanite woman had given Jesus a recognizable Jewish title: “Son of David.” But here Jesus doesn’t call himself anything special—just a person, a human among other humans. Yes, he will to on to accept Peter’s declaration that he is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” But his fundamental self-identity is an ordinary human being alongside every other ordinary human being. 

Leave it to Pharaoh and his followers, the power-hungry people of every place and time, to think of themselves more highly than they they ought and aim to control the weak—Jesus wants everyone to live and to be free, to be a child of humanity like him. No one can be forced into doing that. Maybe, at times, it will even seem like something of a come-down. “Me? Just an ordinary human being?” But Jesus knows how to invite. That’s all he can do—invite. And that’s what he does—invite the whole world to live with the kind of generosity that he himself practiced. It’s a generosity that makes us all fundamentally equal, that eschews domination, that rejoices in the freeing of the slaves. And Jesus rejoices in every movement we make in that direction, even the smallest, and encourages us to keep going!

GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES, AND THE PERSISTENCE OF HOPE

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

19th Sunday after Pentecost, October 20, 2019

Proper 24C: Jeremiah31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

“I have more understanding than my teachers. . . . 

I am wiser than the elders. . . .”(Ps. 119)

I never hear these words without being transported back to my student days in a very stuffy seminary on the other coast, where such sentiments were firmly discouraged. We all sat in assigned seats in chapel, faculty in the highest row, students, ranked by class, below them. And whenever this Psalm came round in Morning or Evening Prayer, a little chuckle would rise from the lowest rows and be answered by a faint snort from on high.

But the truth is that wisdom and understanding are not the monopoly of any age group. I think, for example, of the young people in our own time who are pressing such issues as the environment and gun violence on their supposedly wiser elders. We may—I hope we do—gain new insight as we age; but sometimes we may lose insights we had caught earlier on. And, in any case, the world keeps changing around us so that the wisdom that fit the 1960s may no longer respond well to the teens of the present century.

I’m not sure what prompted the lectionary to give us this particular Psalm today. But the other readings we’ve heard do a good job of reminding us how our world keeps changing and how new wisdom is demanded of us again and again.

Take, to begin with, the reading from 2 Timothy. As some of you know, there is a good chance that this letter was not actually written by Paul, given that it reflects a situation in the church several decades after Paul’s lifetime. (It wasn’t unusual in antiquity for people to write works under the name of earlier figures as they sought to interpret what they might have said to changed situations.) 

But, as I read this passage, I almost felt as if the author of 2 Timothy was speaking prophetically: 

The time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

Could there be a clearer prediction of the turn that public discourse has taken in the era of the internet and the web? “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear. I don’t care how much scientific evidence you have for them.”

But it was also a pretty good description of early Christianity. Starting off with an astonishing new message about love—the love of God and the love of neighbor—it developed over just a few decades into a welter of sometimes quite bizarre transformations. The center had difficulty holding. The disciple of Paul who wrote this letter was trying to bring people’s attention back to more central things. 

In other words, he was preparing for hard times. He felt a need to rein things back in. Sometimes he may have gone too far. He’s so anxious about people’s thirst for the new and strange and unpredictable that he practically winds up telling people (particularly women) to just sit down and be quiet, which is just another way of losing the focus on love. You can lose the focus on love by turning it weird, but you can also lose it by making it boring, dogmatic, cut-and-dried. 

But what I take from this reading is that we have here one of our early Christian forebears face to face with a world that seemed to flying apart. And our author says to the new generation of leaders, “Don’t give up. Don’t surrender. Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. Convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching.” 

In a world going crazy, we can profit from this admonition. The wisdom of persistence is something we have to take with us into the years to come. 

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that it’s all downhill from here, that the trends of the last four or five years are inalterable. It feels now as if our world is disintegrating. And we may be living with that, one way and another, for some years to come. But there is no such thing as an inalterable track for history, whether you think of it in modern terms as eternal progress or in ancient terms as endless decline. History goes up and down. Bad times give way to good, which give way at some point to bad. 

We also heard the prophet Jeremiah today saying that things will get better. Who? Jeremiah? the tearful prophet? the prophet of bad things followed by worse? the prophet who predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and lived through it personally and saw everything go—the Temple, the kingship, the people’s hopes all shattered.

But today he’s in an oddly hopeful moment:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.

2 Timothy sees chaos on the horizon. Jeremiah, who’s been through chaos and lived to tell about it, sees hope.

It’s not a bad picture of human existence over the long haul. Things may seem to be stable and predictable, but then it turns out that they are threatening to spin out of control. We’re left with the wreckage of a lot of our hopes and dreams and don’t know where to turn, really, but then we may begin to spy some sign of hope. 

But the real question for us isn’t so much “Will it get better or will it get worse?” The only answer to that is “Well, yes.” The real question is how do we live, whichever way it seems to be going? For that we need hope and courage and persistence and the willingness to take some risks and trust the ongoing power of God’s love—love for us and for the world.

And that’s where our gospel reading from Luke comes in. The passage is often referred to as “The Parable of the Unjust Judge.” But that’s wrong. The judge is just a stock figure in this story. Unjust judges were a dime a dozen in Jesus’ time. If you hear some one in the scriptures being praised as having judged justly, that’s high praise; that’s the exception. Admittedly this unjust judge is an extreme example. Many judges were just fudging things because they were afraid of the powerful people in town and didn’t want to cross them. But this one boasts about it: “I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone!” But he’s still a stock figure.

No. This is the Parable of the Persistent Widow. She’s the odd, unsettling figure here. Widows were supposed to be meek and mousy and helpless and not call attention to themselves. But she has figured out that she has power—the power to become an insufferable nuisance! It’s brilliant. But just think what it took. “Persistent” is hardly a strong enough term. She devotes her entire existence for however long it takes to force the judge to deal with her. She becomes completely single-minded and refuses to accept the possibility of defeat, even though she’s clearly sane enough to know that that’s still where it might all end. She lives by persistence—by hope and courage and a willingness to risk, trusting the ongoing power of God’s love.

You can see why she’s such an important figure for us as we wade once again into a time of new turbulence in human history. In fact, I hereby proclaim her the patron saint of all social protest movements. This turbulence is an integral part of human existence, not just some stray aberration that’s come crashing in on us from outer space. This is history. Human existence is always in the middle of a process of growth and decay and disaster and rebuilding. This is the universe we live in. This is the reality through which our ancestors passed during the long, stumbling journey of human evolution. This is still at the core of our history and it will continue to be for ages to come. 

But it isn’t the goal. God’s goal is to plant, not to destroy. Even Jeremiah eventually found the strength to say that. And our experiences of loss and distress are ultimately a part of the longed-for replanting. That’s where we need to place ourselves here and now—for our nation, for the world, for ourselves and our communities. Perhaps each of us has only a small gift of persistence, but together we have a great one. We shall not be discouraged. The love of God is indeed the central power of our world, however much fights against it. The love of neighbor makes human life joyful and powerful. And when we look round at unjust judges and people who want to replace truth with myths and leaders who care only for themselves and a world suffering from our own past mistakes and greed, we will persist. We will make intolerable nuisances of ourselves. Because God is in this with us, however hard it may be to see what God is up to at the moment. God is in it to build up, not to tear down. And that is the wisdom all of us, young and old, truly need.

HOW TO PRAY FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Christians have always prayed for people in authority, particularly the head of state in whatever place they lived. For centuries, that meant the emperor or king or queen or such like. Since the Revolution, American Christians have prayed for the president. Much of the time, that hasn’t seemed like a problem. If you liked the incumbent, it was kind of like cheering. Even if you didn’t, you still wanted God to aid the president in maintaining the peace and stability of the country.
For many Christians (those at least who actually believe what Jesus said about the importance of loving our neighbors and doing good to those in need) this has become more difficult in the case of the current incumbent. Praying for Mr. Trump may almost seem like praying against the well-being of the country. So I offer some thoughts on the topic.
First, remember that praying for someone is not a way of expressing approval. Praying for any one is a way of laying that person in the hands of God for whatever he or she may need, even if you think that what your object of intercession needs is a swift kick in the pants. To be sure, we assume that God knows better than we do; but prayer does allow us to put our two cents’ worth in.
One way to start, then, is to tell God exactly what you think of Mr. Trump and his policies and even give God some hints as to exactly what you would like God to do to him in recompense for, say, his fostering of white supremacist groups. If you feel your imagination is not up to the task, there are many Psalms—97 is a good example—that can provide some suggestions.
Yes, cursing is one form of intercession, and if that’s how you’re feeling just now, feel free to go right ahead. The Psalmist did. Venting can serve a useful purpose—for a while; and, in any case, there’s no point in covering up how you really feel when you pray since God hears the unspoken prayer as well as the spoken anyway.
Of course, if you take Jesus’ teaching seriously, you’ll be feeling at least a little guilty about this. Telling us to love our neighbors set the bar pretty high; telling us to love our enemies made it uncomfortably exacting and very difficult to fudge. We remember that God loves even the worst of human beings, and there are moments when we all find that a great comfort and reassurance. But must we include Donald Trump? Yes, we must, sooner or later. Loving the Donald doesn’t mean you have to like him or think well of him or excuse him; but it does mean desiring his welfare. And since he is, by the cranky machinery of our constitution, President of the United State, the welfare of the whole nation is in some ways, dependent on his.
The welfare I refer to is not simply physical; it is deeply spiritual. This is no less than a prayer for his salvation. How, then, to pray? We might start with something simple, such as “God, please try to keep him from doing anything that will corrupt or destroy the country he is sworn to lead and protect.” We know, of course, that God doesn’t always save human beings from themselves. But it’s still right to pray that prayer—a prayer that the head of state may at least not destroy the state or abandon its best principles.
We can take this prayer deeper. We can pray that Mr. Trump will begin to notice and understand the true dimensions of his presidential responsibility. More than that, we can pray for the awakening of his soul and spirit. His public record thus far suggests that he has been neglecting the life of the spirit. He managed to convince the Evangelical establishment otherwise before the election, but that didn’t take much since they so much wanted to believe it anyway.
What would I most desire for the President? That he come to some recognition of how much he has taken his wealth and success for granted, of how much he owes to other people and to what he might think of, at first, as sheer luck but might come, over time, to recognize as the undeserved grace of God. In other words, I pray for the kind of conversion that would lead him to a new life.
How can such a thing happen? To some of us, the awareness of God’s love is granted even from our early years. For some, like the Apostle Paul, it takes a blinding vision and a voice, a shattering of soul and spirit that may take many years to come to terms with. For some, it comes through physical suffering. I don’t pray that Mr. Trump suffer. But I do pray that God will use whatever God may find useful in pursuit of this goal.
And, since the Scriptures are quite clear that the greatest of God’s weapons is love, I try, in a still faltering way, to offer to God my love for this sorry man for whom I have so little respect, so much suspicion, so little hope. That love, I hasten to add, includes still opposing him at every wrong turn he takes in whatever small way I can. If God’s love does contrive to get through to him, he will understand that.

TRUTH—PERMANENTLY EVICTED?

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Truth really has fallen on hard times. It’s partly her own fault for having settled right in the heart of the city, the middle of all our gang warfare. Her sister Wisdom, an introvert if there ever was one, had the foresight to build her house in a quiet part of town where you can have a real conversation over dinner. But Truth, for better or worse, had to be in the thick of things. And every time another horde comes through, burning and pillaging, they throw her out, then patch up the remains of what was once a handsome mansion, and install their own candidate in her place, all tarted out to look like the real mistress of the house.

There are the Positivists, for example, with their motto of “Anything I can’t see for myself doesn’t exist.” And there are the Fundamentalists whose motto seems to be “Anything we didn’t know a hundred years ago can’t possibly be so.” Assertion, said by some to be Truth’s distant cousin, has served both groups by turns. Truth may be homeless at the moment, but at least she doesn’t have to go through Assertion’s misery—essentially a complete personality transplant depending on which mob has control of her dining room this afternoon. It must be wrenching to go from “knowing” skeptic to “devout” believer and back in the twinkling of an eye.

More recently the post-modern crowd has gotten into the fray and installed a very good robotic simulacrum of Truth in the front hall that tells all callers, “There is no Truth.” This enables them, in effect, to claim Truth for themselves while denying her existence at the same time. A nice trick as long as you can compartmentalize effectively enough.

It’s not just the philosophers and theologians, of course. Other mobs have been getting into the fray. Righteous Regulation is one. Having taken on the responsibility of saving us from global warming and all other ills, they tried to enlist Truth as their hit-person. Failing that, they enlisted a person of the same general size and shape, named Single-Mindedness. But she managed to disappear and they finally employed a former member of an East Bloc secret police force to don her outfit and act in her place. He doesn’t look the part but he’s very effective when he says to some hapless farmer or coal miner, “The climate adjusted future has no room for the likes of you!” The Righteous Regulation gang, meanwhile, has taken to wearing earplugs so as not to hear the cries of outrage.

And, of course, Righteous Regulation’s archenemies, members of the Populism Gang, have seized the obvious opportunity to lead an assault and install their imitation Truth, a largish man in what appears to be a wig, in the house. He seems to have taken on a name beginning with T, but is rumored to be the same persona as the ancient goddess the Greeks called “Demagogia.” It must be uncomfortable for him/her, since by now there’s very little left of the structure. But who cares?. Nobody is paying much attention to Truth now anyway and no one cares whether s/he looks much like the original or not.

It does all seem pretty hopeless. But I find myself thinking often of a quite different take on Truth found in a puzzling line from George Herbert’s poem “The Call”:

Come my Way, my Truth, my Life. . . .

such a Truth as ends all strife. . . .

It’s been a long time since Truth had the power to end any strife, much less all. What did Herbert’s Truth have that our Truths don’t?

She has, above all, an intimate link to Love, as the rest of the poem goes on to show. No wonder she’s disappeared from our gang-dominated environment! The Positivists’ Truth exists only to justify sneering at members of other gangs. The Fundamentalists’ Truth is there solely to pass judgement on dirty mis-believing outsiders. Righteous Regulation only wants clear, certain, and inalterable rules—and freedom from having to deal with the troubles they cause. Populism only wants some sense of being in full control again (as if it had ever been).

The only Truth that has a chance of returning to her house and taking up residence again, of shoring up the walls, refurbishing the dining room, and inviting people in for dinner will be a Truth that honors not only the seen but the unseen, not only faith but science, not only science but the people. Then perhaps we’ll be able to agree with one another that Truth still exists, even though our grasp of her meaning will still, as always, be far from perfect.

The only Truth that can match this description will have to be the Truth also known as Love.

ON BEING PERFECT—JUST LIKE GOD

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Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

As we have listened to the readings from the Sermon on the Mount over the last few Sundays, we’ve kind of gotten used to hearing Jesus make one extraordinary demand on us after another. It’s not enough any more to we refrain from murder; you have to refrain from anger and insult, too. It’s not enough just to refrain from adultery; you have to refrain from feeling sexual desire. And in today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells us to treat people who harm us kindly, to give without stint, and to love our enemies.

Then comes something even worse: Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Oh sure! No problem!

Of all the difficult demands Jesus makes on us, this has to be the worst. We sometimes try to soften it a bit. We note that the Greek word teleios doesn’t mean “perfect” in the sense of “every hair in place.” It means “perfect” in the sense of “complete, fully grown, mature.”

It doesn’t help all that much, does it? No, this is just really difficult. We so much want the Scriptures to give us simple straightforward directives that we might actually have some hope of fulfilling. And then Jesus comes up with this. What’s going on?

Maybe the first thing to say about the deep mysteries of human life—which are also the deep truths about human life—is that they’re never entirely simple. Even talking about them means getting involved in what sound like contradictions. Things like: “You have to stand on your own two feet” vs. “You never outgrow your need of others.” Either one of those maxims, if carried too far, can get you into deep trouble; but they’re both necessary. We live in the midst of these contradictions, one foot on each side of the fault line, and this always feels like an uneasy spot to be in. Jesus does a very good job in the Sermon on the Mount of trying to prevent us from stepping exclusively to one side of the fault line or the other. And he doesn’t do it by making things easy.

We have a tendency to think of growth in virtue—growth in our humanity, to put it another way—in quantitative terms: This week I have done a large handful of good things and a small handful of bad things. My score is probably about 60 percent. I hope. But next week I’ll try to do better. I’ll aim for 62 or 63 percent. I’ll do two good deeds a day instead of just one—or five a week any way. For starters, I won’t express the anger I feel toward my colleague at work and will try to remember his good qualities as well as his bad.

Okay, I’m making fun of this. But it’s almost inevitable, isn’t it? How can I take stock of what sort of human being I’ve been turning into lately without summoning the details into my consciousness? We’re concrete beings, living in space and time. What we do is important. If we could do more good and less harm, that would be a net gain for the world.

But then, along comes Jesus and says to us, “Sorry, 60% isn’t a passing grade any more. Everyone needs to be doing A+ work—plus a little something extra.”

Or not. What Jesus sys about God in this passage today—the God whose perfection we’re supposed to imitate—basically breaks the whole method of accounting. The God he talks about isn’t a meticulous being who does everything exactly right; this God’s perfectionism definitely isn’t of the every-hair-in-place variety. This God is a kind of wild prodigal, scattering gifts everywhere, on the deserving and on the undeserving. What kind of model is that?

And just to make things still more perplexing and uncomfortable, let me throw in another saying from the Sermon on the Mount—one we heard two weeks ago: “I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). Now, the scribes and the Pharisees have gotten a bad press among Christians for the last two thousand years. So you might think, at first, “Well, that should be easy.” No. In Jesus’ time, they were the very people who put the most thought, attention, and energy into leading good disciplined lives. And here’s Jesus telling us that we have to do better than them or we’re not even in the running, as it were.

So what’s going on here? Jesus was trying to get something across to us that can’t be neatly summed up in a few words. There are two sides to it and we have to grasp both of them, even if they don’t seem to agree. One side is that we need the rules that allow us to do our moral accounting and prompt us to acknowledge our failings (and our occasional successes, too, of course). The other side is that it won’t really work. And we know that from experience.

We know that the most seriously, determinedly righteous people can develop strange blindspots and do things that may be deeply harmful. It’s a truism in church life that faithful people can become narrow, exclusive, and punishing. There are whole categories of Christians who have that reputation, even when it’s not in fact always deserved. Think of all those horror stories about harsh nuns wielding their rulers on students in parochial schools in the 1950s. But we also hear stories of gratitude for nuns who taught well and nurtured their students, and you recognize that something significant is going on. Nuns are very good people, but that isn’t always enough. But serious righteousness has an uncanny capacity to slide over into its own opposite. We can easily assemble a good list of examples: the New England Puritans, the Iranian ayatollahs, the Religious Right in the US in our own time. . . .

It’s the same thing with these scribes and Pharisees. They were good people. They had the respect of the public. They were serious about doing the right thing. Yet, they wound up playing a part in the quasi-judicial murder of an innocent man. Yes, the Romans killed Jesus. But it was serious, religious people who set it up.

So what about being perfect as God is perfect? What does Jesus want us to grasp here? It’s much the same as what he says a few lines earlier: “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

The righteousness Jesus is pushing us toward isn’t just the quantitative, additive kind. It’s a righteousness that changes our whole perspective on life. It’s a righteousness that has caught a glimpse of God’s love and wants, more than anything else, to start sharing in that love and offering it to others. This isn’t additive righteousness. This is a righteousness that takes hold of us and transforms us.

Is it any easier? No, it’s probably more difficult. No wonder Jesus told us our righteousness has to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees—not by exceeding it in quantity, in the number of things done according to rule, but by looking beyond my current moral excellence quotient toward the goal of it all, toward a world in which God’s love is shared freely among human beings.

Loving our enemies is never easy. Even praying for those who persecute us doesn’t work very well if we try doing it as a duty. But there are centuries of women and men who have loved and prayed for those least worthy of that love and been transformed by it into beacons of light for the world around them. They are the true saints, the true Christians, the ones who caught what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount.

There are some at Mother Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. They know that forgiving the young man who killed so many of their families and fellow congregants is an awkward, messy, uncomfortable process that may not even do him any good. But they have caught a vision of God’s prodigal, messy righteousness and they’re trying to share in it.

Maybe we can make a start—give it a try in our own, somewhat less daunting situation. We might start with Mr. Trump, so much disliked and feared by people in our congregation—and not without reason. I’m not saying that we should turn all “sweetness and light” and lie about his wrong doings and his falsehoods. And I’m not saying that we quit resisting or trying to make the world a better place. That’s not what those people in Charleston are doing. They’re not surrendering to the evil. In fact, it’s more like they’re refusing to be co-opted by it. They’re refusing to let someone else’s hatred take over their own heart and minds.

Now, you know, forgiveness really starts as an act of prayer. And you don’t want to lie to God in prayer. It just creates a bad connection: God can still hear you (and knows you’re putting on a performance), but you can’t hear God very well.

But I think we could get a helpful start—some guidance in how to do this, from the Book of Common Prayer. I’m thinking of two prayers from the Great Litany.

One runs like this:

That it may please thee so to rule the hearts of thy servants, the President of the United Stats and all others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth,

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

And the other, perhaps even more to the point just now, is this:

That it may please thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,

We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Amen, we say. And Amen.

 

Sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

February 19, 2017

Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A: Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Psalm 119:33-40; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

 

THE REFUGEE’S MORNING PRAYER

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Give ear to my words, O Lord;

consider my meditation.

Hearken to my cry for help, my King and my God,

for I make my prayer to you.

In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice;

early in the morning I make my appeal and watch for you.

For you are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness,

and evil cannot dwell with you.

Braggarts cannot stand in your sight;

you hate all those who work wickedness.

You destroy those who speak lies;

the bloodthirsty and deceitful, O Lord, you abhor.

But as for me, through the greatness of your mercy I will go into your house;

I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you.

Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness,

because those who lie in wait for me;

make your way straight before me.

For there is no truth in their mouth;

there is destruction in their heart;

Their throat is an open grave;

they flatter with their tongue.

Declare them guilty, O God;

let them fall, because of their schemes.

Because of their many transgressions cast them out,

for they have rebelled against you.

But all who take refuge in you will be glad;

they will sing out their joy for ever.

You will shelter them,

so that those who love your Name may exult in you.

For you, O Lord, will bless the righteous;

you will defend them with your favor as with a shield.

Psalm 5, as translated in Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer 1979.

THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY

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Thus far, the principal thing we know about the new president is that he is a very gifted performer. He has successfully kept everyone’s attention on himself, while leaving his opponents off balance. Since he is only just now at the point where he has to do more than hold the center of attention, we are just beginning to have something more concrete to hold hold him accountable for. Much of it appears to be personal vengeance, particularly against his immediate predecessor and any government agency, such as the EPA, which may have offended him in the past.

Mr. Trump’s great goal is still, I think, to keep public attention focused on himself. Even hostile attention is still attention. In fact, it generates renewed enthusiasm on the part of his supporters. After all, the last thing an ardent partisan of either side wants is to have to admit that your critics were right after all and that you have been played for a fool.

Meanwhile, the sound and fury emanating from the liberal side may serve to renew our own sense of solidarity and commitment—a worthwhile beginning to the coming years out of power. But this hardly troubles him at all. In fact, It just enhances his status as the most talked about person on the face of the Earth. Not even the Kardashian family can elbow him out of the spotlight.

Mr. Trump is clearly a genius at manipulating his public. He can evoke adulation where he wishes. He can evoke apoplexy where he likes. Neither is a very sound state of soul, mind, or spirit for people who want to see the US well governed. And apoplexy may even be the less productive of the two. It’s difficult for many of us to do more than utter shrill cries of disbelief that such a person could ever have been elected to a position so critical to the future not only of the US but of the world at large. (See? I’m falling into it myself even as I warn you against it.)

But there’s another aspect to all this that is worthy of reflection and more promising as a guide to further action. Liberals need to rediscover the importance of emotion. It isn’t foreign to our history. President Obama won election largely through evoking hope—the quality of positive expectation in difficult times, a quality compounded of reason and emotion. Reason by itself can’t provide it. It may be good at identifying problems or even thinking up solutions. But, to get us past an impasse we have to find a new source of energy and will that can enable us to bring something good out of the mess we find ourselves in. Hope provides the positive stimulus to let us reach out to one another and work together And hope is never rationally vindicated in advance. It produces its own justification by its deeds.

I have great respect for Hilary Clinton. I voted for her. I believe she would have been an excellent president. For many people, she herself stood as a symbol of hope—the hope that the US was ready to surrender its sexist presuppositions. But she did not manage to become a voice of hope for people facing a different set of challenges in economically distressed and increasingly hopeless parts of the country. I am convinced that she felt compassion for these people, too, but it was not very visible.

Liberals who want to push back against the Trump presidency will have to learn that sound policy is not enough, no matter how rationally convincing. What is necessary is to show people, even those you may not much like, that you have compassion for their troubles, too. And, beyond that, that you have a hope that will enable people to join together to find a way to a better future.

Liberals, please don’t waste too much energy playing Mr. Trump’s game. He is better at it than you are. Play a different game that is not a game at all. Be open about the things that have gone wrong with our world. The globalization of recent years has brought great wealth and prosperity to some people and places, but it has also produced the kind of economic inequality that has pushed many people out onto the streets because they have no place to live or out onto the sea in decrepit boats because they have no way to survive in their own country. Acknowledge it and offer plans to cure it. But also be open and persuasive about your hope that people can join together to make things better. Ideas are likely to remain lifeless until they stir our spirits as well as our minds.

LIVING WITH DEMOCRACY

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Over the last few decades, I’ve found myself thinking that we somehow had regressed as a nation to the turn of the last century and the era of the Robber Barons. With the recent election, it feels more like the 1850s and the nasty politics of the era leading up to the Civil War. I don’t mean that we are on the verge of another violent collision on that scale. I mean that the level of fury and dishonesty has reached levels I thought of as a historical relic, long left behind.

Such periods are a major challenge for democracy, which assumes that public decisions will be argued out on a reasoned basis. In this election, only one side was playing by those rules. The Founders were aware of this possibility. That’s why they built a specifically constitutional democracy. Even the Electoral College, which is making such a mess of the vote this time around was originally a protection to keep populous states from beating up on small ones. One could argue that it has outlived its purpose, since it is making it possible now for states with small populations to gang up on states with larger ones. But be that as it may, we are a constitutional democracy, and there is no politically realistic chance of getting rid of the College in my lifetime.

It’s not just the US where democracy is in trouble. Think Brexit. Think Poland, Turkey, and Hungary. We thought we were above all that. But there is no simple upward trend of enlightenment and decency in history. One could perhaps argue that there has been improvement over the last three centuries, but not without hiccups, surprises, and wild mood swings.

I would like to think that this election is a mere blip that we will soon get past. But there is no guarantee of that. What we can say is, “We’ve been here before, even if not in my lifetime.” This is not the time for despondency, but for renewed and thoughtful determination. And time to ask why so much of our electorate (though not the majority) has given way to sheer recklessness in its choice of Donald Trump. I’m not thinking primarily of the bigots who were attracted to Trump’s open racism and misogyny and xenophobia—as they have been to decades of less explicit exploitation of these attitudes on the part of the Republican Party. I am thinking rather of ordinary people who had given up hope in the political business-as-usual. Some of them voted for Obama the last time around—and for some of the same reasons.

Much of this desperation has to do with specifically local situations. Democrats, I’m afraid, have been too willing to focus narrowly on national issues and politics. In the meantime, Republicans have worked hard to take control of a majority of the states. If Democrats want to change the future of the national government, we will have to get more serious about state governments. Remember that even the least populous state gets a minimum of three electoral votes. Those who live in California or New York cannot afford to be indifferent to the economic well-being or the political health of, say, North and South Dakota. Too often, we have ignored their economic troubles and looked down on what we esteemed their benighted politics.

When I hear friends talking—how seriously is hard to say—about renewing their passports and looking for refuge in some other country, I think, “What other country?” Yes, Canada is a saner place right now than the US, though it may not be eager to add a flood of Yankee refugees. But no human polity is guaranteed immunity to the kinds of disruption we are currently experiencing. Think again of the Brexit. Indeed, I believe that all human beings are equally subject to the doctrine of total depravity—that nasty reality in our hearts that knows how to turn good into evil and which resides as determinedly in the souls of bishops and archbishops, Evangelical leaders and politicians as in those of ordinary folk.

In the US, we have made at least some progress against racism, sexism, homophobia and other kinds of divisive suspicions and hostilities. The present resurgence of these things is a sign of how far they have been brought out into the open and how desperate they are to reclaim their lost influence. This it not the time to give up in disgust and look for some perfect safe place—non-existent in any case. It is time to broaden our vision so that we can see why so many people in the middle of the country, geographically and economically, have lost hope in the political world as we have it. And it is time to recommit to a vision of democracy as embracing all the people. That perfect democracy doesn’t yet exist anywhere. Indeed, I do not believe it will, this side of the Age to Come—which is why we have to keep working to salvage it, restore it, maintain it, extend it.

RUMINATIONS ON THE PRESIDENCY OF DONALD TRUMP

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What will Donald Trump’s presidency be like? Perhaps it seems too soon to ask. The country is still awash with emotion, ranging the full gamut from joy to despair. I was at least half-way expecting the results of the election on the basis of Trump’s improbable victory in the Republican primaries and the meagerness of Clinton’s lead in the late polls. We have learned (or should have learned) from the last few elections not to take such figures seriously.

It’s easy enough to blame the results on bigotry, but I do not think that is the primary issue. Bigotry is a real issue and, by its very nature, a deeply rooted one, but I do not think it was itself the fuse that produced this explosion. The fuse has been lit in plain sight over the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared, particularly in the middle of the country, while despair, anger, and opioid addiction moved in to take their place.

The fact that the counties where Trump fared best were majority white and of limited education does not mean that the voters in those categories are bad people. It just means that they’ve been hit the hardest and may well have had the fewest reserves for coping with the troubles—economically, intellectually, or in terms of skills. We have developed into two nations: one prosperous and well-educated (largely coastal plus select centrally located states); the other struggling and angry (largely South and Midwest).

This is not to deny the element of bigotry. Racism has been active throughout President Obama’s tenure—partly because it was so threatened by his election. Misogyny has played a big role in the election we’ve just had. But the explosive potential of these elements, I believe, has been increased by anger over perceived (and often quite real) loss.

In any case, one begins to wonder what the Trump presidency will actually look like. On the basis of the campaign, I think we can only say that we do not know. It could be a continuation of the campaign, angry and vengeful. Or it could be a continuation of the campaign, driven by whim. Or, as Maureen Dowd speculated recently in The New York Times, there may be some other Trump persona waiting to emerge.

We have no better luck speculating on the Republican Party. It has become increasingly fractious during the Obama years. Now many of its latent disagreements are out in public and could conceivably dig themselves in more deeply. Will the Republicans succeed in ruling in some coherent way? Or will they continue to paralyze the country in their offhand way? I don’t think there is any way to foresee which it may be. The thing I most fear is that any prospect of statesmanlike or stateswomanlike behavior is remote. They are badly out of practice. Indeed, one could almost say that they have stamped such practices out entirely.

The Democrats, in the meantime, must cope with a new recognition of their own deficiencies. How is the party of the educated also to be the party of the alienated and oppressed—all the alienated and oppressed—whites, too; middle-aged men without prospects, too? To them, I would say, “Widen your circle of sympathy and understanding.” What is destroying the middle reaches of the country will wind up destroying all of us if it is not dealt with creatively and fairly.

Someone has said, “This is our Brexit.” I think that is right. It arises out of similar circumstances and with the same intensity of passion and irrationality. And, in both cases, the process has been unleashed and we must now wait to see what form it takes and how we can respond.

WHAT WE DESERVE VS. WHAT WE GET

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You probably don’t need a reminder that this 9/11 was the anniversary of the suicide attack on the World Trade Towers fifteen years ago—the day that put Americans on notice that we’re not miraculously set apart from the rest of the world, that we would be experiencing a share of the violence that has become endemic in other places. In a world that’s increasingly globalized, boundaries become easier to cross, harder to fortify.

We’re still experiencing the consequences of that event in our current election campaigns. One side represents our visceral reaction to it—fury, outrage, indignation; the other our ongoing search for a meaningful, productive response. And all bound up in it are questions of who is worthy and deserving of good and who is evil and deserving of ill.

And the scriptures we heard this morning could almost have been chosen for this exact occasion. They all focus on the slippery issue of justice and grace and they confront it in ways that seem, at first, diametrically opposed.

We began with that argument between God and Moses over the incident of the golden calf (Exodus 32:7-14). God is furious. After all the trouble he has gone to in rescuing Israel from slavery, the people have made a golden image and are saying “These are the gods that led us out of Egypt.” He tells Moses he’s going to wipe them all out and replace them with a new nation made up of Moses’ own descendants.

Moses, to his everlasting honor, declines the offer. Perhaps he is thinking, “There’s no future in this. Human beings are what we are. It will be the same story all over again in another generation or two.” Who knows? What we’re told is that he approaches God in terms of honor—part of the basic value system of his time and place. “If you do this,” he says, “if you destroy these people, your reputation is mud. You’ll never get another nation to call your own.”

(Now before you shake your head over Moses for thinking in such—to us—outdated terms, remember that we are as much creatures of our time and place as he of his. Sometimes, in our determinedly democratic way, we aren’t sure we want to allow God any sort of distinctive power at all.)

But the important thing here is that God relents. Is he persuaded by the argument? Did he set Moses up? We don’t know. We are told only that “The Lord changed his mind.” God, it seems, is capable of both anger and forgiveness. And God is one who works with human beings in our own terms as necessary. This is an extraordinary story of faithful boldness, one that leaves me a bit stunned every time I encounter it.

There is an old way of trivializing stories like this. It goes like so: the God of the New Testament is a loving, generous, forgiving God; the God of the Old Testament was an angry and demanding and punishing God. Not so. The New Testament is by no means free of punishment and the Old Testament has plenty of forgiveness in it. Just remember that Psalm we read together (51:1-11):

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness;

in your great compassion blot out my offenses.

The Psalm appeals to God humbly, but confidently. It knows the God it’s addressing. It trusts. But it also knows that we human beings have faults, sometimes profound faults. It knows that these place barriers between us and God and between us and our neighbors. Grace and forgiveness are necessary parts of our lives, the only things that prevent sheer paralysis. It’s nothing to do with waving sin away, pretending it doesn’t exist. No, no. They’re ways of getting beyond it to something new and life-giving. Sin deserves punishment, yes; but only grace and forgiveness can get beyond it to create new life.

Our third reading was from the First Letter of Paul to Timothy (1:12-17). Actually, there are good reasons to think that Paul didn’t write this letter himself. Probably some thinker in a community Paul had founded was trying to “channel,” as we might now call it, what the apostle would say to the challenges the community was facing fifty years or so later. The effort isn’t always convincing, but in some places, he strikes the pure Pauline tone just right. The passage we heard today was one of those:

“I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, [that’s our author trying to emphasize Paul’s authority; but he goes on] even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. . . . [And why would Jesus do this? He tells us] Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me . . . Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience. . .”

Paul the religious terrorist becomes Paul the apostle. And how confusing so you suppose that was for him? Paul himself tells us that, after his conversion he went off into the hinterlands of Arabia for several years (Gal. 1:17-18). I’ll bet he needed a little while to process all that. How does a persecutor deal with it when the God whose people he was persecuting suddenly confronts him and commissions him to be a missionary of the faith he was just trying to stamp out of existence?

Grace didn’t just dismiss his past. Grace built it into an extraordinary, life-giving future.

And finally we heard from Luke’s Gospel (15:1-10) two of Jesus’ most beloved parables: the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. (There’s the lost sheep right up behind me in the crook of Jesus’ arm.) Notice that both these little stories are drawn from every day life. Nothing exceptional here. Jesus makes that clear in the way he phrases the questions: What man . . . doesn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that’s lost? You know that’s what you’d do. What woman whose lost one of her ten coins doesn’t light a lamp, sweep the house and search for it? Of course! Anybody would do this.

The lost coin gets less attention, but I particularly love it. Here is a woman who’s missing a tenth of what she had to manage her household on for what? a week? a month? Who knows? She is a practical person. She doesn’t panic, but she isn’t going to stand for it. She lights a lamp. Who cares if it’s broad daylight? There are dark corners in every house. She gets our her broom to give every inch of that floor a thorough scouring. Nothing will be missed. If coins could tremble, this escapee would be quaking in its boots.

And so, too, God. Grace, the seeking out of the lost, God’s searching for us in our lostness in the hope of building something new—this isn’t exceptional behavior on God’s part. This is God’s immediate, everyday response to human waywardness.

Yes, God is indeed offended, appalled, even angry at that same waywardness. God, I think we can fairly say, hates cruelty, falsehood, oppression of the weak, arrogance, manipulation of religion for evil purposes, hard-heartedness of every variety. . . . The list is long. We may identify ourselves as great sinners, along with Paul, or as relatively minor ones. However that may be, God is out there every day, trying to retrieve me and my failures and turn them to good use through the workings of God’s grace.

This era we find ourselves living in—the era that turned up in so distressing a form fifteen years ago—calls us to remember all this and to set it at the very center of our consciousness. God is angry with all the harm. And God is searching relentlessly for the strayed sheep, the lost coin. Even the worst of them. And even you and me. Hoping for a way to transform the past wrongs of this world into new life for the future.

So let me leave you with one bit of advice: Watch out for that broom!

Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley, September 11, 2016, 17th Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 19C: Exodus 32:7-14; Psalm 51:1-11; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10)