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THE FOOLISHNESS OF LOVE

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Third Sunday of Lent, Year B 3/3/2024

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

THE FOOLISHNESS OF LOVE

God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Today, Paul gives us this riddle to work with. What can it possibly mean? I suppose we could try to paraphrase it in more obviously pious terms: God’s worst moment is better than our best. But that’s pretty prosaic—no to mention insipid—and I don’t see how it could inspire all the excitement in Paul’s voice here. What Paul’s getting at, I think, is that God sometimes operates in ways that look idiotic to us and sometimes chooses a course of action that looks futile to us. God doesn’t do what we expect—sometimes does the exact opposite of it. 

We also read this morning about the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. Here, at least, God looks both powerful and sensible. The event itself abides by the rules of its time: archaeologists have found other ancient documents similar to the one God gives to Moses here. Their purpose was to create a kind of alliance between a powerful partner (a king, perhaps, or a deity) and a weaker one. The superiority of the stronger party is firmly underlined. And clear demands are made on the weaker one. But then you have to wonder. If God wanted an alliance like this with a human community, why choose a shapeless mass of runaway slaves—still looking over their shoulders to see if the Egyptians are about to catch up—plus some assorted riffraff that have fallen in with them because they had nothing better to do. Still, God gives them an alliance, tells them what the rules are and warns them that if they don’t obey they’ll be toast. God is exercising his full powers here, and the people are really intimidated. Indeed, the people wind up saying to Moses, “You speak to us, and we’ll listen; but don’t let God speak to us, or we’ll die.” 

So lay down the law, assign penalties, put it all in writing. Let them know you mean business! Sounds like a smart way to do things by human standards. But, in fact, as the ongoing narrative of the Bible will show, God isn’t really all that serious about the retribution part. The people keep going astray, they may suffer for it for a while, but God is always ready and willing to welcome them back. God never gets to the point of saying, “No, forget it. I’m really and truly over this.” God behaves more like a lover than a tyrant—grieved when the beloved acts badly, but still in love.

Now, Paul himself was a wise and a powerful person. His wisdom was that he really knew the scriptures and what God wants from human beings. He was also powerful—a commanding rhetorician and an up-and-coming member of the religious establishment in Jerusalem. He laid heavy demands on himself. And he even decided to help God out by punishing those weird followers of Jesus who seemed, to him, awfully lax about the rules and who must therefore be making God very angry. What a terrible shock for poor Paul, then, when he had that experience of meeting the risen Jesus as he traveled to Damascus to spread more violent mayhem. Hs world got turned upside down for him, when he discovered that these people were actually doing something in this world that God prized and wanted more of. And—worse yet—God then redeployed Paul to be one of them—indeed, one of their leaders.

Then, in Paul’s years of mission work things got still more awkward. He found that God wasn’t just calling Jews into God’s community, but Gentiles, too. It caused problems and strains in the Christian community; but it also brought new life and strength. Paul had had one shock when God turned out to like those early Jewish followers of Jesus with their casual ways. Now he had a second shock, as he realized that God liked these Gentiles, too. From Paul’s earlier perspective, this must have looked like God was simply going off the rails. But, however slowly, he began to recognize that God’s apparent act of folly was really an act of creating the world anew.

God was doing things that were too foolish, too flaky, too scary, too unhinged for human wisdom. And yet they were turning out to be the beginning of something new and wonderful. 

But, still, something was wrong. Perhaps the wisdom of God was active among us, but where was the power? God in Jesus had put himself at risk and even suffered rejection and execution on the cross—the worst human assault on God imaginable. And yet, God had exacted no revenge, no punishment, not even a little rap on the knuckles of the offenders. Jesus’ followers now found themselves in a similar spot. Some of them got killed. Paul got roughed up a time or two, had to flee for his life on occasion—and would eventually be martyred in Rome. Was God too weak to intervene on behalf of God’s beloved Son and all these other people God loved? Wouldn’t it be a good idea for God to scare some of these persecutors the way he scared the people at Mt. Sinai?

Why does God choose foolishness and powerlessness when violent assertion and retribution might seem perfectly just and reasonable? The answer, of course, is that these things can never accomplish what God really wants, which is love. Paul doesn’t use the word in this reading today, but he celebrates it elsewhere. And we know from 1 Corinthians 13 that he considered it the central and enduring issue for all of human life. God holds back on the thunder and lightning not because we human beings are good, but because God is. God is a lover who only wants to love us—and to offer us the chance to become lovers, too. 

Love is the only power that can achieve what God so deeply wants: God’s communion with us, our communion with God, our communion with one another. But you can’t be tricked into love or frightened into love. God just frees us to love and invites us to love. It may seem weak and foolish, but it can achieve things that nothing else—no other wisdom or power—can do. 

And that love had come looking for Paul, too. Paul encountered the love that comes looking for people who don’t know what they’re missing, people who haven’t even thought about loving and being loved by God. Paul’s own plan was to be so righteous that God couldn’t help but love him; the awful surprise was that it was all too late—he was already loved. 

What seems like foolishness on God’s part is actually wisdom. And what seems like weakness is actually strength. God’s love never gets tired, never gives up, never goes away. Jesus said it, too—in that riddle he told to his detractors in the Temple: “Tear this temple down, and I will raise it again in three days.” Such foolishness! Yes. But still true—even if it comes about in the very unexpected form of his resurrection.

God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. God, it seems, does know what God is doing. 

LOVE IS THE MAIN THING

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

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

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

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

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

Shout with joy to God, all you lands;

lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.

. . . . 

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

the lands and those who dwell therein.

Let the rivers clap their hands,

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

(The Saint Helena Psalter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAN THE RICH BE SAVED?

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A Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
21ST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, OCTOBER 14, 2018
Proper 23B: Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

So, can anyone be saved? Whether we think of ourselves as rich or not—mostly not, I imagine—I suspect, from years of conversations about this text, that most of us were probably a little unsettled by today’s gospel reading. What does Jesus really demand of us? How much is enough? What am I required to do?
You know, we have a long tradition in the church—it goes way back to our ancient Roman forebears in the faith—to read everything in the Bible as if it were a law, a direct moral demand. And the next step beyond that—and this goes back to our almost-as-ancient Irish forebears—is to follow that up with a personal self-examination to calculate how well we’re doing. Well, sometimes that makes sense, but not always. And this story about Jesus and the rich man is actually much more interesting and subtle than that. So instead of jumping directly to guilty conclusions, I want us to take a closer look at the story itself this morning.

I try to picture the situation. And, first off, I notice that Jesus is talking to one particular individual here. This doesn’t start out as a speech to his disciples, much less to the general public. It starts with a particular rich man who is behaving very strangely. First, here he comes running up to Jesus. Very bad form! He’s a man of high status; in antiquity no man of high status ever ran for anything or anybody. (Come to think of it, I don’t suppose you’d see many rich people today making such a spectacle of themselves.) If the rich wanted to talk to someone, they sent for the person—or strolled up calmly, surrounded by their entourage of friends and retainers.
Worse yet, the rich man then kneels before Jesus. Kneeling was the posture of someone in deep distress and need, someone begging for a favor. Very inappropriate for a person of such standing! All his behavior expresses great agitation. And he’s doing it all right in front of a whole crowd of people. The loss of face is astonishing. But he has some question so important to him that he’s prepared to sacrifice all dignity to have Jesus’ answer.

And what, exactly, was the question? That’s a translation problem in its own right. The NRSV starts off this way: “What must I do?” What must I do? That feeds right into our rules fetish, doesn’t it? But it’s not really the best translation of the Greek. The KJV, for example, said “what shall I do?” as if it were a matter of free choice. Closer to the nuance of the Greek here (and the best translation I’ve found) comes from David Bentley Hart: “What may I do. . . .” (The New Testament [Yale UP, 2017]) This isn’t a question about rules; it’s a question about opportunities and choices.
And the goal he aims at? The familiar translation is “to inherit eternal life.” But that is likely to be misleading. It can suggest that he just wants to live for ever or that he’s concerned about going to heaven and escaping hell. But it’s not primarily extent of life that he’s talking about; it’s a kind of life. The Greek phrase has no easy English translation. It signifies a life of peace and joy, a life in communion with God, our neighbors, and our world, a life truly worth living. Sometimes we call it “the life of the Age to Come,” but we also experience it at least occasionally here and now. There are moments when it breaks in on us with beauty and peace and joy, disrupting the everyday failings of this world­—the falsehoods and cruelties that have become common currency in this present age.
Again, David Bentley Hart may offer the best translation, though it’s a bit cryptic: “What may I do to inherit the life of the Age?” “Age” with a capital A; the true and lasting human life in sharp contrast to what we so often have to settle for. Jesus’ rich visitor is asking how he can live a life that will satisfy the deepest possible spiritual longings.
And Jesus’ first response is “You already know the answer: it’s all laid out in the Ten Commandments.” And, yes, leading a decent, humane life already brings us a long step toward “the life of the Age.” But the rich man is looking for something more—because rules are never enough. They can shame us and make us feel guilty, but they don’t empower us. He wants more; he’s looking for a deeper communion with God. He wants a pathway that will take him into the life of the new age, into the presence of God and the kingdom of God. This person, defined by his wealth and public standing, is actually in love with God and the beauty and wonder of human life in this world that God has created, and he wants to live in it now.

And Jesus understands all this—understands what would prompt this unlikely person to run up and kneel before him. He’s come to Jesus because he senses that God and the age to come are alive and present in him and his ministry. And Jesus teases him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” He’s saying, “You sensed God at work here, didn’t you? You sensed the Age to come arriving in my ministry. You’re right. It is indeed here. And the direct way for you to satisfy your longing for God and your longing for the new life, is to offer yourself up completely to it. You are welcome to become one of us, but you’ll have to come stripped of your this-worldly entanglements.”
The rich man is torn. He wants so much to stay, but he’s in a terrible bind. Wealth, in Jesus’ time, wasn’t an individual possession. If you had wealth, it belonged to your household, your extended family. It carried with it responsibilities to them and for them. If Jesus had told him to give the wealth to the rest of the family, he could have done that. (Other people of the time sometimes did that if they wanted to withdraw into a simple, philosophical life.) But Jesus saw that this was not what the rich man wanted. What he wanted was God, the immediacy of God in his life, the love of God, the companionship of God. He wanted to be a St. Francis of Assisi before there was such a person. But, dutiful as he was, those riches and the family to which he and they belonged would always have a hold on him. His passion for God and his duty to his family could not readily coexist with each other.
Peter, who can be relied on to say something awkward, piped up to say, “We’ve left everything.” And they had, but not like what this person would have to doing. They weren’t wealthy to start with. They were working folk. Their families went on working things out in their absence. Peter, it seems, still had a house in Capernaum, where Jesus stayed when they were in town. The disciples could see that what Jesus asked of the rich man would be even harder than what they’d done. And Jesus’ response was, “Yes, virtually impossible. But God has ways.”

And, indeed, even if the rich man could not take that huge step and become a Saint Francis, that doesn’t mean that he was completely shut out of “the life of the Age,” only that his path would be less direct. As Jesus had already told him, being a good human being is the basic thing. And he knew how to do that. He was already doing it. No one is required to give up everything. Most of Jesus’ followers went on living where they were and working at their jobs and thronging to hear him speak and going to him for healing and hope. When he asked so much more of the rich man, it was because he saw in him a passion for God and the life of the Age to Come that could be fully satisfied in no other way.
And why would anyone long, like the rich man, to plunge so deeply into this risky love affair with God? Because there is no greater good, no greater beauty, no greater delight than to be loved by God and brought into that life of grace that God has always wanted for humanity, which we call “the life of the Age to come.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all spiritual garment, no one map for everybody. Each of us finds our own path. Some, like the rich man, want the direct one. Even so, we may not be able to take it up as we would wish. Most of us, like most of Jesus’ followers in every age, will follow more familiar paths, learning slowly to let the radiance of the Age to Come shine through us in this age. If our paths are less dramatic and direct, if we meander a lot and learn slowly, like Peter (thank God for Peter!), it is still the same goal and God has ways—ways to sustain us and draw us onward till we, too, inherit that Age of grace and peace and joy. If the highway to “the life of the Age” is not for you, there are lesser paths as well, paths of faithfulness and generosity and hope in a troubled world. Take those—with God’s blessing.

MATTHEW, 14: FROM MIRACLES TO OPEN CONFLICT (9:1-17)

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We’ve seen how Matthew, in chapter 8, tells stories of Jesus’ miracles in such a way as to emphasize not just how great Jesus’ power was but also the way he transgressed expectations—the expectations of religious leaders among Jesus’ own people, the expectations of Jesus’ disciples (who are left wondering just who he really is), and the expectations of the pagan folk of Gadara, who apparently felt that the cost for exorcising a couple of violent homeless men was much too high.
He’s putting himself in a dangerous position, isn’t he?
It looks that way. And Matthew implies that it was an inevitable consequence of his basic message, the message embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, with its blessings on the merciful, its command to love one’s enemies, its indifference to normal human anxieties. And now chapter 9 continues this series of miracles, leading finally to a radical rupture with the established religious leadership. That little expedition to Gadara on the far shore of the Sea of Galilee was a kind of prologue to more extensive travels that will fill the middle of Matthew’s Gospel. But, for now, Jesus is back in “his own town” (9:1). You get the sense that he’s just stepped out of the boat onto the shore when he sees “some people” carrying a paralyzed man on a cot and he himself initiates the interaction that follows.
And that’s not how I remember the story. I thought he was indoors in the middle of a crowd and they actually had to open a hole in the roof and let the cot down on ropes!
Yes, once again Mark tells a much livelier version of this story (2:1-12), and it’s the one that irresistibly sticks in our minds. But in Matthew’s time as much as in ours, people who retell a story typically have a purpose in mind that necessarily shapes the telling. And Matthew’s purpose, here, is to talk about tensions and conflicts as much as miraculous healings
He seems to be feeding the tensions! Why does Jesus start off by forgiving the man’s sins? He doesn’t even know him. And it’s his faith but that of the people carrying him that catches Jesus’ attention. Where does this sudden focus on sin come from?
People often make an association between sin and sickness. In our time, we’re more to start with sins of diet or stress or (lack of) exercise. In other periods, any sort of sin would do. I wonder if Jesus is saying, in effect, that we always have to deal with the deeper causes as well as the symptoms. Yet, it’s interesting that forgiving the sins doesn’t, in itself, heal the paralysis. Maybe the point, then, is that people require all sorts of healing and we shouldn’t be misled into thinking that the physical healing is the only important kind. Forgiveness is as much an expression of God’s love as bodily healing.
In any case, Matthew has stripped the story down in a way that focuses it squarely on Jesus’ remission of the man’s sins and the outraged reaction of the scribes who are present. The story of the healing that follows is a miracle in its own right, but it also (and this may be even more important) makes it difficult for the authorities to criticize Jesus’ granting of forgiveness.
But their reaction seems perfectly reasonable to them, since only God can truly forgive sins; there is no provision for a human being to do it. He’s violating the religion he shares with them. So how can Jesus call their reaction “evil”?
Matthew may be suggesting that their religious system is more important to them than the good done to the man by hearing a message of forgiveness. Certainly, when Jesus does go on to heal the man’s paralysis, it’s a direct challenge to them, their criticism, and, in effect, their authority. And, to make matters worse, Matthew, for once, also includes the traditional note of amazement at the end of the story—something that’s routine in Mark’s Gospel, but not in Matthew’s: “When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God who had given such authority to human beings.” The point? Jesus has public opinion on his side, which makes the scribes’ position more awkward and also raises the stakes and ultimately precipitates a public rift.
I suppose that hanging out with tax collectors and sinners isn’t going to help, either.
Probably not. In chapter 8, Jesus turned down a scribe who wanted to be part of his inner circle. In this chapter, he summons one Matthew, a tax collector to join that very group. What does Matthew know of Jesus at this point? What sort of disciple would he prove to be? Why does Jesus summon him without warning? These are questions we’ll consider further when we come to the formal listing of the Twelve in chapter 10.
But we can at least say that calling Matthew immediately puts Jesus in touch with a whole group of interested hearers who might never have dared approach him on their own—the tax collectors and sinners that he has dinner with at Matthew’s house. Who were these people? “Sinners” is such a broad term that it could include almost anybody who was less than rigorous in piety. Tax collectors, for their part, were further suspect because of their work. Taxes were collected on a system that rewarded those who collected as much as possible, making them the natural enemies of everyone who had to pay the taxes. But, also, they had a practice of going into people’s houses and poking their noses and hands into all sorts of things. They could easily become unclean in the process and then carry that uncleanness into the houses of other people, such as the Pharisees, who were trying to maintain the highest standards of purity. It’s no wonder the Pharisees reproach Jesus’ disciples about it. They feel they can no longer trust his commitment to purity.
So he tells them to go soak their heads! He’s not trying to avoid conflict, is he?
Not at all. But he’s not just being insulting. He’s setting forth a basic principle. The love of God brings forgiveness to sinners and healing to the sick. It may seem meaningless, then, to the righteous and healthy—or to those who conceive themselves as such. But a suggestion remains hanging in the air that the righteous might be mistaken about themselves. There is a suggestion, too, that the religious leadership has misunderstood the God on whose behalf they claim to act. If they are more concerned about sacrifice (and the purity code that governed access to it) than about mercy, they have God quite wrong. Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 to make it clear that this is no new-fangled notion of his own.
What about fasting? Even the disciples of John the Baptist are upset about the lack of that among Jesus’ disciples.
Since fasting was broadly accepted as a basic expression of piety, it must have seemed bizarre that Jesus and his disciples weren’t practicing it. And Jesus has the effrontery to say that his ministry is a wedding feast, the exact opposite of fasting. His teaching won’t be conventional. It’s a proclamation of “good news,” which changes everything. How strange to read the passage about patches and wineskins here after Jesus’ assertion in the Sermon on the Mount that he wasn’t changing anything at all (5:17-20)! He is changing nothing. And he is changing everything. And neither he nor Matthew intends to give us a detailed explanation of how to work this out, though he does expect that fasting will reappear after he is taken away from his disciples.

Next up: A DECISIVE BREAK WITH THE RIGHTEOUS (13:18-38)

MATTHEW, 11: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT (7:15-29)

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Where does this language about “false prophets” come from? I thought prophets belonged in the Old Testament.
The word “prophet” means someone who claims to be speaking on God’s behalf—in other words, almost any religious leader. Mostly, Jesus’ contemporaries used the word to refer to people who lived hundreds of years before their time, but Jesus is using it here in its more basic sense.
And there was a revival of prophetic claims at the time—especially among Jesus’ own followers, after his death. Sometimes, scoundrels found it pretty easy to impose on innocent Christian congregations by claiming to be prophets. The second-century Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (not himself a Christian) tells an intriguing story about just such a “prophet” in his satire “The Death of Peregrinus.” One might almost feel that Jesus was warning, in advance, against exactly such people.
Prophets made their impression through speech, often with the suggestion that they were in a trance or had been taken over by a spirit that was merely speaking through them. Accordingly, they claimed a degree of authority that was more than human. Jesus says, in effect: “Don’t get swept up in the words; wait to see how your ‘prophet’ lives.”
That means making judgements about people.
Yes, even after we just heard “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged” (7:1). But the judgement is to be based on works of love. Just as we can tell good fruit from bad, we’ll know the true prophet when we see that this person is motivated by God’s love and does works expressive of that love.
Jesus threatens the impostors with hell-fire! Not so very loving, is it?
He gets very angry about abuses done in the name of religion by religious leaders. And it’s clear that he fully expects that such abuses will crop up among his own followers, just as in other religious groups. (Of course, he’s been proven right again and again.) He was also talking about this in chapter 6, where we saw warnings about religious behavior being misused for personal aggrandizement. He sees that no arena of human existence is immune to abuse. That includes religion.
Is he against religion?
No. His teaching is itself religious. It’s about our relationship with the God who is the power behind the creation, the lover of the world, and the Pole Star of our human lives. But he has no illusion that religion is always good in itself. And he’s trying to give us a way to distinguish good from bad in it.
Later Christians have sometimes treated Jesus’ attacks on religion as attacks on one particular religion—Judaism. It’s a nice trick for shifting people’s attention away from our own misdeeds. But it’s nonsense. Jesus never separated himself from Judaism. That separation between Christians and Jews happened only in the generations after Jesus. His strictures apply equally to all religions. In fact, he applies them quite explicitly in this passage to his own followers as well.
The people who say, “Lord, Lord”?
Exactly. And this applies not just to ordinary believers but quite specifically to the elite who have prophesied in Jesus’ name and exorcised and worked miracles. If they haven’t done the will of the Father—haven’t led lives founded on love—he rejects them absolutely: “I never knew you.” We’ll hear a strong echo of this same attack on loveless piety near the end of Matthew’s Gospel in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (25:31-46).
He’s getting quite peremptory here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Everything seems to be either/or, doesn’t it? He didn’t seem so angry at the beginning of the sermon.
Yes. He says, in effect, that either we hang on to what is really central or our lives will fall apart like the house built on sand. The point, though, isn’t that we have to reach perfection immediately. Jesus’ inner circle of disciples certainly didn’t, as Matthew will point out again and again. In practice, human beings are seldom if ever completely good or evil. We are a mix of wisdom and folly—a constantly shifting mix. But the question remains: Where do our central commitments lie? Where is the foundation?
Remember, too, that God sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous (5:43-48). God continues to love us, even when we misstep. But Jesus wants us to understand that the foundation for a wise, centered, enduring human existence is here in these teachings, waiting for us to explore and learn and practice more and more deeply with our lives.
I can see why “the crowds were astounded.”
Yes. These three chapters that make up the Sermon on the Mount still astound. And the attentive reader never gets to the end of finding new insight into them. Each return to the text is apt to open up something we hadn’t noticed or understood before.
Was this really so different from what other religious authorities were teaching?
There is much in the teaching of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries that agrees with the Sermon on the Mount. The difference isn’t primarily one of content, but one of focus and certainty. Matthew’s phrasing here is key; “he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” The scribes, like the clergy of other religions, taught on the basis of an existing religious consensus, which existed in written form in the scriptures of Israel and also orally in the form of opinions offered by a long series of esteemed leaders. The scribes would have been less likely to say “I tell you” than to say “The Torah tells you.” That can tip over all too easily into the creation of an inflexible system that demands obedience and is willing to skimp on less sharply defined values such as love.
Jesus speaks like a prophet himself, claiming direct access to God. He was even wiling, back at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, to contrast what he said with what “was said to the men of old.” No wonder he was willing to make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic prophets! Unlike the false prophets, he is transparent to the gospel of love. The fruits of this tree are good. And they are on display for all to see. In fact, we’ll be seeing more of them in the next two chapters of Matthew.
So that’s the Sermon on the Mount? It’s very dense, and it doesn’t exactly leave you with three clear points or an agenda for concrete action.
You could say it even resists being reduced to a few clear points. Oh, the Golden Rule is clear enough. But putting it into action requires a lifelong process of learning how to love one another, of understanding the peculiar circumstances in which each of us lives, and choosing the loving course in those circumstances. We don’t find a simple set of rules either here or elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew.
Still, we will come back again and again to the themes that these chapters have raised for us, and it is worth the time we’ve taken to look at them closely as part of trying to understand this gospel. Next, Matthew will turn to showing us how Jesus behaved toward the larger public. Here are the “fruits” that authenticate his prophesy.

Next up: TROUBLESOME MIRACLES

MATTHEW, 10: THE NARROW GATE (7:1-14)

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Aren’t we getting another sudden leap from one subject to another here?
Yes, it’s a big jump from not worrying to not judging. There’s no obvious continuity with the latter half of chapter 6. But if we look just a bit further back, we’ll find one. “Do not judge so that you may not be judged” is very reminiscent of “If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (6:15).
Even so, how can Christians live up to these commands? There are occasions when judgments have to be made. Sometimes other people’s thinking really is screwed up. Sometimes their actions really are bad.
Part of the point, I suppose, is that word “other.” We all like to think of ourselves as free of the faults we condemn in others, when in fact we are often guilty of the same things or, if not the exact same, at least equally screwy ones.
If we take these sayings with excruciating literalism, Christians would have to refuse almost any public office, especially juridical ones. But quite apart from that kind of literalism, we all spend a sizable chunk of our ordinary time judging one another and questioning one another’s sanity. It’s worse than ever in American culture right now, but it’s hardly new in our world—just more exaggerated.
Given the overall context of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to be aiming here at broader issues. He’s doing what he does all through the Sermon on the Mount—trying to change our basic perspective on life and religion. We’re all familiar with the tendency of the religious, both on the right and on the left, to become judgmental—not just willing but eager to pass judgment and ready to do so in perfect confidence that they’re right. After all, God told them so. Jesus is saying, “No, God did no such thing.”
So, should we get rid of religion?
It might be worth a try if it had any chance of success, but there is plenty of evidence to show it doesn’t. Generally, if you drop one religion, something else will show up pretty quickly to replace it. And the religions of consumerism or free marketism or ethnic purity or Marxism have proven at least as deadly as Christianity or Islam or Judaism or any of the other traditional offerings. We human beings can work up the enthusiasm for judgment in all areas of life and we can always find something in our current ideology to justify it. To date, fascism and soviet Marxism seem to hold the world championship for sheer bloodiness.
In other words, this is a universal problem of the human spirit?
Yes. It’s part of the same picture with our eagerness to prove our piety in public, our temptation to fudge our bets by worshipping all the available gods of Mammon (just to keep on the safe side, of course), and our propensity to worry ourselves into a stupor. What better companion to these traits than our willingness to jump on the failures, mistakes, and inadequacies of people who don’t see things our way? That gives us a kind of catalogue of what Jesus has covered in the sermon.
Christians are not exempt. There’s ample documentation in the New Testament of people judging one another over issues of leadership, spiritual gifts, circumcision, keeping kosher. And, of course, the people judged their leaders and the leaders their people. Nowhere in Matthew’s Gospel does Jesus accuse Judaism of being specially prone to judgmentalism. Every thing he says on the subject is equally applicable to every human being on earth of any religion or (if that’s really possible) none.
Okay! Okay! But then there’s another leap. Where do these dogs and swine come in? And what are these holy pearls we’re not supposed to throw before them? And how do you recognize them if you’re not allowed to pass judgment?
Hmm! Being a bit difficult, aren’t we? Do I need to have a look in your eye to see if there isn’t a speck there?
Well, no. Actually, I’ve always had the same reaction to vs. 6. But, lately, when I ask myself, “What does Jesus treat as holy here in the Sermon on the Mount?” the answer that keeps coming back is “the intimate relationship of love and trust that God is offering you.” It’s the holy center of true human life. And taking it seriously means that our lives become centered on it.
Jesus has been telling us not to risk this relationship by seeking a reputation for public piety, or by building up this-wordly credits, or by falling into anxiety and the worship of idols or—just now—by setting up as the arbiters of good and evil for everyone around us.
“Do not cast your pearls before swine” is another way of saying “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” The love of God on Tuesdays and the love of shopping or the workers’ paradise or my own wonderful self the rest of the time? No. No effort at compromise will succeed. You will only lose your relationship with God without gaining anything in its place.
But life is more complicated than that. You can’t just go to church and skip the rest of life. There are real dangers and real responsibilities.
Well, Jesus seems to sense the need for an answer to that, as he goes right on with “Ask, and it will be given to you.” But it may not be quite the answer we’d like. What, exactly, will be given to us? Not wealth, not security, no guarantees of long life and easy circumstances. Jesus, after all, had none of these. Rather, it’s the things we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer: that God’s kingdom will be realized to some degree in our lives, that God’s will for peace and justice will be done, at least within the ambit of our lives, that we will find the day to day sustenance that makes life worthwhile, that God’s great gift of forgiveness will spread through the human family, that we will find strength for the tests we cannot evade and freedom from even those evils that we cling to most tightly in our lives. Maybe at some point we’ll even get the bonus of finding that we’ve lost the log in our own eye.
The Golden Rule (7:12) is the guide Jesus offers us for this life. When he says, “This is the Law and the Prophets,” he’s saying, “This is the whole message in a nutshell. Everything else has to be understood in terms of this one criterion.” In another place, he’ll say essentially the same thing about a similar formulation, the twin commandments to love God with our whole selves and to love our neighbors as ourselves (22:35-40).
That sounds awfully loosey-goosey. People use “love” to justify all sorts of mischief and mayhem—more like the road to Hell than the narrow gate to Heaven.
Which is easier, loving other people as we love ourselves or obeying a well-defined set of religious rules? And just think about those punctilious guardians of religion—the inquisitors of past and present—who have managed to persuade themselves that the rules require that they torture you and then claim they’re only doing it because they love you. If they started with love instead of the rules, they would have a much harder time getting to their ghastly conclusions.
And Jesus has already indicated that this business of loving our neighbors also involves forgiving a lot of things, some of them damned close to unforgivable. I suppose that inevitably follows if I hope to be forgiven my own wrong-doings and I’m trying to treat my neighbor as myself.
That’s hard to do.
Yes. as Jesus says, there are broad paths and narrow gates. The path of love has not, typically, been a crowded one. We often get Jesus’ image backwards here, assuming that the narrow gate is for the real sticklers, the people focused on the rules. Actually, no. The word “narrow” here applies to the gate, not the people trying to get through it. Narrow people are likely to have trouble sticking with the the path of love, and they won’t find the narrow gate easy to get through. Maybe they’d rather stick to polishing their reputation for piety. It’s either that or get a radically different perspective on life in this world.

Next up: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT

FACING JUDGEMENT

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A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California on November 19, 2017
Proper 28A: Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 w. Ps. 90:1-8(9-11)12; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

Every year, right before Advent, we hear readings about the Day of the Lord, the End of the World, the Last Judgement. Most Episcopalians don’t really greet these topics with much enthusiasm—and there’s a good reason for that. People who do wax enthusiastic about judgement usually seem to treat it as a threat to other folk. They think they have their feet firmly planted on the safe track to heaven, and they get some enjoyment from shaking the warning finger at everybody else. It is, to put it bluntly, not very Christian.
So. . . the Day of the Lord—there’s our topic for today. And just to make it worse, we also wind up with one of most awkward of gospel readings, the parable of the Talents with its violent and punitive central character. Is Jesus telling us that God is like this? eager to find fault and to throw people into the outer darkness to weep and gnash their teeth? I’ll tell you in advance that the answer is “No.” But first we need to set the stage for this passage.

So lets begin with the easy part: judgement or, to use the term Zephaniah and Paul preferred, the Day of the Lord. It’s an odd phrase with two meanings that, at first, seem diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, the Day of the Lord is a feast day, just as Christians’ sometimes refer to Sunday as “the Lord’s Day.” On the other, it is the time of judgement. One is a celebration of God’s love, the other of God’s justice. And yet, the two things do belong together. It is God’s love that calls forth God’s justice.
The simple truth is that the world is full of evils that cry out for judgement.. We’ve had a rash of multiple killings in the news lately. Hate crimes are up in the US—as witness the Transgender Day of Remembrance that we’re observing today. Jesus told us that the central truth of all human morality is the commandment to love—love both God and our neighbors. Everything else, he said, depends on that. And it gets violated right and left these days, at every level of our American society. And there are other parts of the world even worse off than we. Yes, there is plenty of occasion for judgement. It’s God’s love for this world that makes judgement necessary.
That’s what the prophet Zephaniah was talking about in our reading this morning. “The Day of the Lord is at hand,” he begins. And at first he makes it sound like a feast day: “the Lord has prepared a sacrifice, he has consecrated his guests.” Well, yes, that’s what God wants to do. God loves us. But this God who loves humanity also judges humanity—judges us by the criterion of how well we love. And so the prophet continues:
The great day of the Lord is near,
near and hastening fast;
the sound of the day of the Lord is bitter,
[even] the warrior cries aloud there.
This feast isn’t going to come to a happy conclusion.
And just few decades later, the Chaldeans completely destroyed Jerusalem, which certainly helped imprint Zephaniah’s warnings on people’s minds. That’s how the dominant idea of the “Day of the Lord” went from being a hopeful one to a fearsome occasion of judgement.
Paul’s audience in 1 Thessalonians, also thinks it in terms of judgement. Paul is actually trying to recall them to the message that the Day of the Lord is also an expression of love. It judges only what is unloving in us. And it’s also the vindication of our efforts, however imperfect, to live by love. As we grow in trust for God’s love, we also grow in confidence. We begin to recognize that love as not just a demand, it’s the ultimate truth. In the long run, there is no power that can contend with love, for, as another New Testament writer tells us, “God is love.” We exist only because of that love. And we have chosen to live on the basis of love—not any of the alternatives so readily available in our world, not the basis of trying to grab as much for me and mine as I can and to hell with the rest of the world, not the basis of competitive consumerism, not the basis of hatred for people different from me, not the basis of arrogance and contempt for others, but the basis of love.
It’s not that we’re so perfect that we have nothing to be judged for. Paul would never suggest that! In fact, he always has quite a lot to say about all the stuff his converts have got wrong. But we have opened up to God’s love, we trust that God’s love will never—indeed, can never—betray us. God doesn’t judge us to destroy us, but to save us.

So let’s turn now to the parable of the Talents. A certain slave master with the temper of a Mafia don hands out stacks of money, big stacks of money to three of his slaves. Then he rewards the two wheeler dealers who made more piles of money to stack on top of it and punishes one timid slave who at least didn’t fritter his stack of money away. Wait a minute! Didn’t Jesus, earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, say “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are the meek?” What is he up to here?
Let me, for a start, point out an important element here that we tend to miss: this is a parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, the reign of God. Jesus starts the discourse in chapter 25 off by saying, “The kingdom of heaven will be like this. . . ,” and then gives us three rather alarming parables. The first is the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, which Sophia sagely interpreted for us last week as a warning that the kingdom requires our participation. “Check your oil,” she reminded us. “Stay lit.” Yes, love becomes meaningful only as we respond to it. It’s the only way to become a part of it. God’s love cannot transform us until our love begins to answer it.
Then our passage today begins with the words “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves . . . ” In other words, we’re still on the topic of the kingdom—or more exactly the topic of how the Kingdom of heaven can come into being within us. And this, of course, is exactly what Jesus told us to pray for. We pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” What are we praying for when we use these words? God’s “kingdom” is a metaphor for the kind of life that God lives and also seeks for the world at large. It’s a life characterized by love and justice and peace, by generosity and hope and courage, and by the kind of genuine community in which no one is scorned or pushed aside or treated as unworthy.
This kingdom can’t come on earth without our involvement. It can’t just happen around us. If it could somehow, it wouldn’t do us any good. We’d be totally unprepared for it. In fact, we might not like it much. What good is it to me if all the rest of the world is caught up in love and I’m still a prisoner of my angers, my resentments, my hatreds, my fears? I’d still be trying to live in my old ways in a world where they no longer make any sense at all. Imagine a Hitler in heaven, surrounded by all the people he hates and wants to destroy—and completely unable to do them even the least bit of harm. It may be Heaven for them. It would be Hell for him.
So this is a parable of the kingdom, about entering the kingdom, not a story about God. God isn’t a testy bridegroom who locks foolish virgins out. God isn’t a Mafia don who flips out into a state of rage at timid subordinates. God doesn’t work that way. These parables of the kingdom are about us and our difficulties. What threatens to keep us out of the kingdom that we pray for?

Well, what did keep the third slave out of the kingdom? All three slaves are presumed to have similar abilities. What held him back? It was fear. Fear was the motivation by which he lived his life, and it paralyzed him. He couldn’t even think clearly enough to put the money into a savings account. (“What if there’s a crash? what if the bank goes under? What if the FDIC can’t fulfill its promises? What if . . . . “) So he opts for what seems like the safe thing: bury it in the garden!
Jesus spent so much of his ministry trying to convince us that we don’t have to lead frightened lives. “Do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” (Matt. 6:30-32) Or again, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Matt. 7:7) After all, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (5:45) He wasn’t counseling us to become lazy layabouts, hoping that God would drop peeled grapes in our mouths. He was counseling us to give up fear and anxiety.
You may well be thinking, “There are some things in life we do well to be afraid of.” That’s true—let’s say a falling tree, for example. But Jesus wasn’t talking about fear as a response to immediate danger. He was talking about the kind of fear that can become a guiding principle in our lives. Jesus wants us to jettison it and live out of love instead. And love and fear don’t coexist well with each other. In fact, “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 5:18) The third slave’s fear means always trying to find perfect safety. He has imprisoned himself inside that search. His anxiety can’t help him become a part of the kingdom. It cannot open the gates of the kingdom. And yet, the kingdom is so near to him that if he could only come to a moment of new perspective—could only begin to love instead of fear—he would become a new person and find himself within the gates.

Does God demand justice? Yes. Because God loves this world that God has made and the people in it, including you and me. Yes. Because God is love. Not the sappy kind of love that says to us, “Okay I’ll let you off this time. But don’t do it again.” No, it’s the intense and purposeful and realistic kind of love that says, “You have to get a new grip on your life, you know. Your fear can only destroy you. But love can make you whole. It can bring you into the kingdom.”

DO NOT FEAR

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Preached at Good Shepherd Church, Berkeley

Third Sunday After Pentecost, June 25, 2017

Proper 7A: Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matt. 10:28

Some Sundays our readings are (shall I say?) overstocked with things crying out to be preached on. This is definitely one of those days. But since none of us can probably manage to be here all day, I had to choose just one. And the verse that kept blinking at me in neon was the one I just repeated for you: Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. As if to say: Don’t be too afraid of dying. There are worse things.

But who do you think this person is “who can destroy both soul and body in hell? Is it God? Is it the devil? Both, over the centuries, have been candidates for the position, each with some reason. God is seen as the judge, the devil as the executioner.

And what is all this about hell, anyway? Didn’t that image of the fiery torture chamber down below disappear along with the rest of the three-decker universe after Copernicus upset the whole cosmic applecart five hundred years ago? I’m pretty sure that a good many Episcopalians would say that they don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe in it, either, if you mean the underground place of torment. But I always think, “I do believe in hell.” Or, rather, I don’t exactly believe in hell because I don’t need to. I’ve seen it and I know that it exists. You can read about it in Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and a whole big handful of other countries pretty much every day in the newspaper. You get glimpses of it all around the world and here at home, too. And, for that matter, I suspect that there are very few people who have survived adolescence who haven’t been there themselves—even if just briefly. Yes, hell exists—in the world around us and in the lives of individuals, too. The place with devils and pitchforks is just an icon of it in case you need help finding it on your computer.

But back to my original question: Who is the one “who can destroy both soul and body in hell”? For a long time, from the time of the Black Death onward, Christians have mostly thought of this person as Jesus himself. That’s when depictions of the Last Judgement became popular in Western Christianity. You know the image—perhaps best from Michelangelo’s enormous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, right behind the altar where the worshipper can’t avoid looking at it. And that focus on judgement is one aspect of Medieval religion that the Reformers kept, too. In fact, for some, it became even more central. Christianity, once a religion focused on redemption and hope, became more and more a religion dominated by judgement and fear.

But it doesn’t really work. Jesus does speak here and there about returning in judgement. But you have to do a serious makeover on the Jesus we meet in the Gospels if you want to turn him into that angry figure in Michelangelo’s fresco. It doesn’t really answer the question.

Now, hell is indeed something to be afraid of. We know that already. It’s exactly what disturbs us so in the news nowadays: the anger, the polemics that divide our country—and many others as well; the indifference toward truth; the increasing divide between poor and rich; the ever-increasing numbers of refugees, fleeing from war or from climate change or from tyranny at home. We are living in a world where hell is aggressively active. But it can get worse. Living in it is one thing. But losing our souls to it is another. And that’s what happens when we find ourselves constantly unmoored by it, uncertain, afraid, depressed. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care. I’m not saying we shouldn’t get angry and be active in our resistance. I’m just saying that we are in danger when we lose our sense of rootedness in the love of God and the hope that comes from that.

It’s providential that this text has come up for us on this particular Sunday. This is Pride Month for GLBTQ folk and today is the big celebratory parade across the Bay in San Francisco. Gay Liberation, to use the shorthand term, has deep roots in the past, but the catalytic moment that we commemorate today was an uprising at the Stonewall Bar in New York when some GLBTQ people refused to submit quietly to oppression any more. And the movement was kept going by thousands of other GLBTQ people in all walks of life who decided that they weren’t going to live frightened, divided existences any more.

They were facing up against people who were ready to do them real bodily harm. Some didn’t survive those confrontations. But it was worth doing, because it meant they were reclaiming their souls. Some things, they recognized, are worse than getting killed. Living a life that was, in a way, a constantly improvised fiction meant that they were in danger of losing themselves. Their souls had been hanging in the balance for a long time. They knew how to distinguish those who could kill the body from the one who could destroy both body and soul in hell. And it meant that they weren’t afraid in the way they had been before.

That process still goes on for GLBTQ people. And it’s still not without danger, as events in Orlando reminded us a year or so ago. But people are still recognizing that it is better to keep one’s soul than to give into fear and play it safe and put on a disguise and hide maybe even from yourself.

That same kind of understanding is what kept the early Christian martyrs steady in the face of death. I think of the words of the aged St. Polycarp at his trial in the second century. When the proconsul ordered him to insult Christ, he answered, “For eighty six years I have been his servant and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” His relationship to Christ was part of who he was. The love of Christ had restored his soul. And he would rather keep his soul than rescue his bodily life by sacrificing the relationship that made him who he was.

Martyrdom is an extreme case. But the value of extreme cases is that they help us see what is at stake in our more everyday circumstances. To have a soul means to have a center, a sense of coherence and continuity that tells me who I am. To some extent, each of us is born with that—or at least the beginnings of it. But it has to grow over time, and it grows especially in the context of our relationships with others—family, friends, neighbors, associates at work, people at church, God. We spend our lives forming our souls in dialogue with God and with the people around us. It takes some attention, even if a lot of it happens quite unconsciously. And sometimes it calls for hard decisions. But above all, it calls for keeping faith with all the good that has created and enriched your life and made you who you are.

We trust God, the source of all good, to go on being God, to go on loving us, even when we don’t particularly deserve it, to sustain us in difficult times, to rejoice with us in times of fulfillment and joy—that’s what gives our souls their center. And that in turn, creates hope because, even when the world is going to hell in a hand basket, God is still God and still loving us and standing with us. And this love itself, of course, is the central thing in all of true Christianity. Christianity isn’t primarily about duty. It isn’t primarily about judgement. Its whole message, in fact, can be summed up in a single short sentence: God is love (1 John 4:8, 14). So don’t get distracted. We have to keep our eye on this above all. The whole universe, ourselves included, exists only because God made it in love. And God does us the astonishing, improbable favor of asking for our love in return.

It’s important to re-emphasize all this just now. It’s easy for us to stay in a state of constant alarm, confusion, fright, and anxiety this year. Our president is a genius at keeping us all off balance. The government as a whole exhibits a willingness to oppress the poor and the marginalized such as we have not seen in my lifetime. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. And that means it’s time to return to what gives life to our souls: the love of God and the answering love God awakens in us.

And don’t think that this is some sort of self-serving retreat. It’s not a matter of turning our backs on the world around us—though I do think we could usefully learn to be less easily taken prisoner by each day’s presidential tweets. No, the centered soul doesn’t retreat, but it does need to bat distractions away. And in hard times like these, we can learn the truth of what St. John wrote: “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18) Our fear.

People have learned this in hard circumstances over and over again: martyrs standing before Roman judges, people marching against racial oppression, women breaking the boundaries imposed by misogyny, GLBTQ people coming out of the closet, people today standing up for peace in the face of religious fanaticism and for justice and generosity in the face of a government that’s increasingly a tool of the super-rich. In doing all this, people over the ages have learned the saving of their souls.

And if you can keep your soul, you will find that you can stand up to a great deal of trouble. You can stand up and do your part in hope, not because you’re sure things will turn out the way you would like, but because you know your life will not go to waste, that God is not through working wonders even if they sometimes take longer than we wish.

But what about my original question? Who is “the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell”? I think a part of the answer must be “I am. You are.” We will all die, of course, whether sooner or later. But we have the power to decide whether we shall die with our souls still living. We can kill them—and we are also the ones who, relying on the power of God’s love, can save them.

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.

THE REAL CHALLENGE OF CHRISTIAN FAITH AND LIFE

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Bill Countryman					Los Angeles Clergy Conference
Sermon	May 10, 2017

Readings:  Genesis 12:1-4; Ps. 42; Matthew 5:43-48


	The scripture readings we've just heard underline how difficult it can be to accept God's call to love:  love God and love all our fellow human beings, even our enemies. I don't think I need to do any exegesis. If anything, they're too clear. 
	What I want to say instead, is that this is, after all the basic problem, the basic challenge, and the basic wonder and splendor of all Christian faith and life. To my mind,  no one has ever put a finger on it more precisely than a certain predecessor of ours, a seventeenth-century priest with a gift for poetry named George Herbert. And I want to share with you a couple of his poems this morning and say a few words about them.

	The first is "The Call," which shows up in our hymnal set to a beautiful tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Hymn 487):

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.

We recognize Herbert's starting point—Jesus' words in the Gospel of John:  "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Herbert is inviting Jesus in, and also meditating on what these three terms mean in his life. Perhaps we think of "the Way" as a narrow path of duty and struggle. He seems to think of it as a broad open way where we find space to breathe. Truth in our world has become a bone of contention; he imagines it as a moment of discovery so profound as to leave no room, no desire for strife. And the Life he envisages is not just the physical one we carry inside us, vulnerable to sickness, accident, and death, but a creative power that will ultimately destroy death itself and all its works. The audacity required to invite such powers into your life! But that's what Jesus asks us to do.

	Herbert continues with another triad of invitations, ones we can easily connect with this Eucharist we are about to receive:

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Here comes a light that will illuminate the whole heart and mind—and reveal what? Not our failures, our sins, our unworthiness, but a banquet laid out for us. And unlike our daily meals, it's a banquet that never grows stale, never leaves us sated, weary, longing for a nap. To the contrary, it "mends in length"; it gets better the longer we sit together. It is the true Christian feast of love.

	And then, that strange line:  Such a strength as makes his guest. What can he mean by that? What could ever make us strong enough to sit at the heavenly banquet, in this life and the life of the age to come? The answer, I think, comes clearer in another of Herbert's best-loved poems, also about a banquet (Love-III). It begins, "Love bade me welcome." And then the trouble starts. The thing that hinders us from Love's banquet is our own reluctance to be loved, humbly and simply. We would be happy to be admired for our goodness, our perfection, our moral worth. But simply to be loved because it is Love itself who has made us and seeks us out? Really, it's too much for us:

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

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

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
	Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
	My dear, then I will serve.

A clever ruse that one! It sounds so humble, so virtuous, so deserving almost, when it is really just a last-ditch effort to escape being loved. And the Love that has given us life and breath, and trust and hope, and the gift to be loved and to love, will not grant us this exemption:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
	So I did sit and eat.

	Sooner or later, we must all consent to be loved. And by God's grace this is also how we learn to love God and our sisters and brothers, our neighbors, even—however long it takes—our enemies. For how can we hate all these others whom God loves just as God loves us? 
	And George Herbert summed it all up—the perfect triumph of love—in the final verse of "The Call": 

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joys in love.

	Even so. Come, Lord Jesus!