Homily: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 26, 2021] St. James, Newport Beach

 

            I want to begin by thanking Cindy for her gracious invitation to be with you this morning. I don’t want to reveal my age, but the last time I was here at St. James, John Ashey was the rector. You have certainly been through a great deal since that time, and I want to thank you for your faithfulness, perseverance and the obvious creative vitality and pastoral leadership evident in the leadership and ministry of Canon Voorhees. Who else would think of using swim noodles for the socially distanced passing of the peace? I’m glad to be here.

            As the bulletin tells you, my last job before I retired in 2016 was to serve as dean of Washington National Cathedral. I had a great time there—what’s not to love about a beautiful gothic building in a dynamic place like Washington, D.C? We put on a lot of programs in my years as dean—working against gun violence, advocating for same sex marriage, voting rights, and environmental activism--but my favorite event was a one-week endeavor each January called “Seeing Deeper”. During that week we would take all the chairs out of the nave and do music, dance, prayer, and other offerings that made use of the entire transcendent empty space and invited people to respond not just mentally but physically. Seeing a big church like that without chairs is a revelation. We think of churches much as we do classrooms—as places where everyone watches and listens passively to a reasoned presentation. Emptying the space out and using it as a place for using not just our heads but our bodies was, as we said in the 1960s, a mind-blowing experience.

            The first year we did it The Washington Post ran a  front page story [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/national-cathedral-opens-worship-space-to-free-classes-and-more-to-boost-profile-coffers/2014/01/14/216f87b4-7d3f-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html] in which I was directly quoted in perhaps not my most PR savvy remark. Michelle Boorstein, the religion editor, came to our opening night, and as we sat there in the empty space watching a large group doing tai chi, she asked me how this all made me feel. Without thinking two seconds, I enthusiastically pointed to the length of the space and said, “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest.” [“National Cathedral opens worship space to free classes and more to boost profile, coffers” The Washington Post, January 14, 2014] 

            Now it wasn’t the most controversial thing I said there, but it wasn’t the best quote to soothe the worries of the staid, traditional lovers of a cathedral who already saw this smart-alecky Southern California import as a dangerous innovator and change agent. Isn’t this the place where they bury the presidents? The idea of rollerblading past Woodrow Wilson’s tomb was too much for some, and you can be sure I (and the bishop, and the cathedral chapter) heard about it.

            “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest.” Was saying this a mistake? Yes, in that it scared some people who thought I would actually do something like that. No, in that it was an authentic expression of the real exuberance I felt when I opened myself up to the transcendence of a big, holy space.

            This experience of saying something at once unwise yet authentic gets to a kind of doubleness we all experience and which Jesus explores in the Gospel for today [Mark 9:38-50]. He says two things that, on their surface, seem to be in direct contradiction with each other. The first one:

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.”

And here’s the second one:

“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

            How do these statements conflict? In the first, Jesus tells us not to be a stumbling block to others or to tolerate aspects of ourselves that make us get in our own way. Not to take us into a big word study here, but the Greek word σκάνδαλον literally means “the movable stick or trigger of a trap”, hence anything that would cause one to stumble or fall. It’s where our English word scandal comes from. Jesus uses σκάνδαλον to denote how we can be two kinds of stumbling blocks. We can be a stumbling block to someone else. We can be a stumbling block to ourselves. We can so offend someone with our words or behavior that they will look askance at the causes we stand for. We can so get in our own way that we make problems for ourselves that wouldn’t exist without our helping them along.

            To use our example of the day: a smart-aleck dean saying “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest” about a sacred space might very well offend someone and turn them off not only the cathedral but the state of modern Christianity in America. The idea of a priest skateboarding anywhere is probably too much for some.

            But then we have Jesus’s second statement:

“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

Again, not to be a dictionary hound, but the Greek word for salt (ἅλας) denotes a mineral that in Jesus’s day was at once a seasoning, a preservative, and a purifier. If salt has lost its “saltness” (KJV) what use is it? The “saltness” of salt is the thing that makes it worthwhile. If salt isn’t salty, then who needs it?

Seen in this light, a cathedral dean saying “I want to skateboard down it—or have a paper airplane contest,” is doing something, well, salty. For every person who wants to preserve each tradition exactly as it is, there is probably another person who finds our whole church enterprise hide-bound, stuffy, and stodgy. Taken under the rubric of “saltness”, a smart-aleck remark can be taken as a breath of fresh air, a refusal to take oneself or one’s cathedral too seriously.

Now the point of this little exercise is not retroactively to justify my remarks. (Yes, I probably shouldn’t have said it, and yes, I’d probably do it again.) It’s to make a point about this doubleness which all of experience in life. How many times in your life have you said something that you thought was funny but turned out to be hurtful? And how many times have you held back from expressing yourself and so failed to bring your needed perspective to the conversation?

When it comes to self-expression, we are caught in a double bind. A lifelong priest friend of mine used to say, “One person’s painful dichotomy is another person’s creative tension.” We need always to consider the feelings of others and to weigh carefully how our words or actions might injure, offend, or actually abuse someone else. And we also need to be true to ourselves by saying and doing the things that arise from our own individuality. We are no good to the world if we are always stepping on each other’s toes. And we are no good to the world if we squelch the particularity of our own gifts and talents out of fear of being misunderstood.         

            One of the most helpful distinctions I have learned over the years is the one between intent and impact. My words or actions may have an impact on you that I do not intend. When I offend you—which I have probably done several times by now—you need to realize that my words or deeds may have an impact on you that I did not intend. And I need to realize that, even if I did not intend to hurt or offend you, I am responsible for the impact of my behavior on your heart or mind.

            Two seemingly contradictory things are true this morning. Jesus calls us to be aware of our own words and actions and the unintended impact they may have on another. He cautions us not to be a stumbling block to ourselves or others when we speak or act. He asks that we take responsibility for our words and actions.

            And at the same time, he admonishes us to stay faithful to the unique “saltness” that is our own particular gift to the world. If you do not bring your own insights and experiences to the conversation at home, at work, or in the public sphere, who will? Your “you-ness” is precious, and it is a sin to hide it like a candle under a bushel out of mere fear of being misunderstood.

            We come now to gather at God’s table, the one place in our life where we are both members one of another and uniquely precious just as we are. As we are fed with what Jesus calls the “bread of life”, let us take that bread both as a sign of our togetherness and as an emblem of our uniqueness. Your sisters and brothers are too precious to hurt or offend. And you are too precious to squelch the things that make you “you”. We need both to honor each other and to cut ourselves some slack. Walking this doubleness tightrope is never easy, but we’re strengthened to do it, because before us there is Jesus, who in his life and ministry, shows us how both to respect others and value ourselves at the same time. Honor each other, and honor yourself. It’s a risky business, more of an art than a science. This creative tension is the thing that makes us human. And this compassionate care for us as humans, in all our wonderful, mixed-up frailty and magnificence, is what God’s love for us is finally all about. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homily: The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 19, 2021] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            Because they both started out as child actors, my father and the late great jazz drummer Buddy Rich were lifelong friends, so I know this story firsthand. When Buddy was dying, he checked in for his final time at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood. As part of the normal intake interview, the nurse asked Buddy Rich if he had any allergies.

            “Yeah,” he said. “Country and Western.”

            I’m very much like Buddy Rich in my musical tastes—I grew up on a steady diet of straight-ahead bebop jazz and then the 1960s LA rock sound. Over the course of my long life I have come to have some appreciation for country music, but it’s been a long, slow process, and much of it I still can’t stand.

            About 20 years ago my son Oliver and I drove part way across the country together, and we did so by way of Tennessee so we could see Graceland and Sun Studios in Memphis and the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ol’ Opry) in Nashville. It was a wonderful trip.

            The night we were in Nashville, another late, great musician, the singer George Jones, was giving a concert at the Ryman, and we decided to go, more to see the auditorium than to hear the music.

            Now I can’t say that George Jones is precisely my cup of tea—he specialized in the kinds of tearjerker ballads (“He stopped loving her today”) that don’t really appeal to me. And he had the annoying habit, in concert, of advertising one of his many products between songs. But he did sing a song that night that has stayed with me all these years, an up-tempo number called “Sinners and Saints”. In deference to your aesthetic sensibilities I will not sing it to you, but I will at least read you the final verse:

            Nobody’s perfect, we’re just flesh and blood

            One foot on the high road, one in the mud

There’s a mighty fine line between right and wrong

Don’t point your finger, don’t matter which side you’re on

            The only thing different in sinners and saints

            One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.        

 

            In case you dozed off for a minute, here it the refrain again:

            The only thing different in sinners and saints

            One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.

            This deathless bit of cornpone theology came into my head as I reflected on the Gospel for today [Mark 9: 30-37]. The “saints” Jones mentions are the sanctimonious types who seem to think their life in the faith community makes them somehow better than those outside it. The song’s “sinners” are the ones who may not be so outwardly pious but who know their need of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. I’ve worked in the church a long time now, and I have to say that, for all his inelegance, George Jones got it right. One of the dangers of spending your life serving Jesus can be the illusion that doing so gives you special status in the universe.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his companions something they cannot possibly process:

“The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” 

As Mark tells us, “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” A doomed Messiah does not fit with their idea of the program. Imagine you have joined the Jesus movement. You go from success to success—from healings to miracles to feeding the 5,000. One day your leader tells you that instead of the triumph you envision he will instead endure humiliation, torture, and death. As the robot on Lost in Space used to say, “That does not compute.”

So instead of engaging Jesus about the prophecy of his coming crucifixion and death, they start fighting about their relative status:

Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 

 

Why can’t Jesus’s companions hear him? I guess if you think you have signed on to a victory story, your biggest concern will be your own place in the hierarchy. If you’re imagining your new corner office in the Jesus tower, the idea of a crucifixion sounds crazy. It turns out Jesus wasn’t running a dress for success program. The healings and feedings were not about playing to big crowds. They were about something else. They were putting into action the wild, indiscriminate love of a God who, in spite of everything perverse we do, is coming to meet us where and as we are. And they were about living a life that puts compassion and justice way ahead of one’s own personal status.

            In order to make this point to his self-aggrandizing friends, Jesus does one more shocking thing:

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

            As one who worked private schools, and I can tell you that we think of children very differently today than they did in Jesus’s day. Children in Roman occupied Jewish Palestine had no status and no rights. They were at the very bottom of the social ladder. So in holding up a child, Jesus is not being sentimental. He is radically inverting the hierarchy of sinners and saints. “If you really want to follow me,” he is saying, “you will throw your arms open to welcome those who have no earthly status.” Today it’s a child. Tomorrow it will be a prostitute, a tax collector, a widow, an orphan. The community Jesus builds is not one based on status. Or, to put that differently, the only status that matters in the Jesus movement is the knowledge that one is accepted, forgiven, loved exactly as one is right here and right now. 

            Back to George Jones, our guest theologian for the morning:

                The only thing different in sinners and saints

                One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.

 

            The church is not an awards show. The church is a motely gathering of wounded, healed, loved, forgiven people who have somehow experienced the transformative, accepting love of God as exemplified in Jesus. To say that we shouldn’t argue over who is greatest is not to say that we don’t have special status. We do: we have the status of a child who is loved, of a sinner who is forgiven, of a sheep who is lost and then found. And we follow one who, in going to the cross, understood that standing with the likes of us sinners was more important than saving his own skin. 

            We tend to think of the death and resurrection of Jesus as a kind of cosmic magic trick. But in the light of today’s story about true greatness and the welcoming of one without any status, the Passion story shows its true colors. You and I follow one who lived out the deep logic of his life, knowing that so doing would bring him into direct conflict with the values of a world that perpetuates itself by honoring power, status, and privilege over the innate worth of every human being. And our job as followers of that one is to strive continually to keep ourselves open to seeing God’s image both in those to whom the world denies status but also in ourselves and those close to us. 

            In Jesus’s day the ones without status were represented by the child he takes in his arms. Today they are the homeless, the oppressed, the immigrant and refugee, and yes, still and always the poor. When we think we are somehow more important than those folks we have another think coming. It’s not that some people are precious and others not. It’s that everyone is precious. Human worth is not derived from one’s status or associations. Human worth is a given. Jesus was able to love and accept everyone openly and expansively because he knew their real value. He saw beyond the markers to something eternally true.

            And it’s that way also for you. The inverse side of thinking you’re more special than others is to think you’re not special at all. But to deny your own value is just as false as exalting it above that of others. As we come now to gather around God’s table, each of us will be fed with what Jesus calls elsewhere the “bread of life”. This bread comes to us as a sign of the extent to which we are loved, accepted, forgiven, and valued for who and what we are, on our own terms right here, right now.

                        The only thing different in sinners and saints

                        One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.

            Like the late Buddy Rich, I’m still allergic to country music. But sometimes we take in what we need to hear from a source that surprises us: a child in Jesus’s arms, a country singer in Nashville. God loves everyone—the people you love, the people you can’t stand. God loves even, and especially, you. It turns out we all get a corner office in the Jesus tower. Not because we’ve earned it, but because we are loved. And being loved is the only status that finally means anything at all. Amen

Homily: Independence Day/The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [July 4, 2021] All Saints Pasadena

            They say confession is good for the soul, so here goes.

            I did not grow up in a churchgoing household. My father and mother had left their respective churches (Roman Catholic and Missouri Synod Lutheran) as teenagers. Like many 1950s parents, they kept me away from church as a child and left it to me to make religious decisions for myself.

            I guess I showed them.

            I didn’t actually enter a church building until I was in college, and even then it was for an anti-Vietnam War teach-in. But I began to be intrigued with what I saw there, so in the spring semester of my freshman year I took a Religious Studies survey course on Christianity.

            Now if you’re an 18-year-old secular humanist kid in a Religious Studies class where all of the other people seem to have grown up going to Sunday School, you start at a disadvantage. The only thing I knew about Jesus in the spring of 1968 was that he had been born in a barn. Moses and all those other guys were strangers, too.

            So how to make up the deficit? I shrink from admitting this now, but hey, I’m on the other side of a long working life in the church, so what the heck? I tried to catch up to my classmates in scripture knowledge by making my way to the college bookstore and buying—you guessed it—the two-volume set of Cliff’s Notes on the Bible.[i]

            Now I wish I could tell you that a couple of nights with this dubious study guide made me the equal of all my freshman Bible whiz classmates, but the sad truth I learned is shared by Cliff’s Notes customers everywhere: those things are useless. They’re written by teachers who work at colleges you would never want to attend, and they tend to consist of mere plot summary and character analysis. And the problem with the Bible in both its testaments is that plot summary isn’t much help. (“Moses leads Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.” “Jesus takes a walk by the lake.”) And analysis of what they always call “key characters” doesn’t get you very far, either. (“Paul: enigmatic tentmaker who travels the Mediterranean.” “Ezekiel: weirdo who sees strange visions in the sky.”) 

            I begin with this embarrassing story because today is Independence Day, and I’m sorry to say, we are currently enduring a lot of crazy talk about America’s relationship with Christianity in general and with the Bible in particular. You may have heard of the publication of the “God Bless the USA Bible”, an edition inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood’s anthem, “God Bless the USA”. In the words of the publisher,

God Bless the U.S.A. Bible

Easy-to-read, large print and slim design, this Bible invites you to explore God’s Word anywhere, any time.  This bible has been designed so that it delivers an easy reading experience in the trusted King James Version translation.  This large print Bible will be perfect to take to church, a bible study, to work, travel, etc.

 

This Bible also features a copy of:

·       Handwritten chorus to “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood

·       The US Constitution

·       The Bill of Rights

·       The Declaration of Independence

·       The Pledge of Allegiance

 

[https://godblesstheusabible.com]

            While they’re at it, I wish the editors this Bible had incorporated the rule book of Major League Baseball, but that’s probably too much to ask. 

The publication of the “God Bless the USA Bible” is yet one more troubling sign of the conflation of a kind of Christianity with exceptionalistic ideas of American destiny. It’s a movement some are coming to call “Christian Nationalism”, and its implications aren’t as harmless as the promoters of this Bible seem to think they are: we regularly see pastors in pulpits now claiming the current president is not legitimate; churches organizing rallies for the Second Amendment, claiming that gun rights are divinely given; pressure on school boards to ban any discussion of systemic racism in American history. So far, all efforts to find evidence of Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss in the scriptures have proved fruitless, but I’m sure Christian Nationalists will continue to look.

            Today is both Sunday and Independence Day, a double holiday for American Christians. It is important for those of us who try both to follow Jesus and love our country to articulate how we might do these two things at the same time without confusing the two.

There are many ways to describe America, but I have always thought of it as more of an idea than as a place or a particular group of people. This American idea is not a particularly religious idea. It is a humanistic vision of the balance of individual liberties and the common good. In the words of Walt Whitman,

For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the genuine union, when we come to a mortal crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the written law, nor, (as is generally supposed,) either self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects -- but the fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power. [Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas”]

 

America, says Whitman, is a “fervid and tremendous IDEA”.  We are a community of human beings with competing interests who have come together and pledged our “lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the idea that a society can foster both individual liberty and the general welfare. There has always been a tension in American life between those who think it’s all about personal freedom and those who emphasize the common good. But the genius of America, the “fervid and tremendous IDEA” in Whitman’s words, is that we have, over time, and until recently, managed to hold these competing values in balance. 

            In the gospel for today, Jesus says to his companions,

 

No person can serve two masters; for they will either hate the one and love the other or, be devoted to the one and despise the other. [Luke 16: 13, altered]

 

            In Luke’s context Jesus is talking about God and wealth. But we could well apply the idea of divided loyalties to the question of religion and patriotism. All authentic religions stand in what I would call a “prophetic tension” with their cultures. The pressure on all of us people of faith is to try to relieve that tension by making a false accommodation of the two—to have the religion serve and bless the state. We Episcopalians, as descendants of the established, official Church of England, are particularly vulnerable to this tendency. And, as one who served a place we paradoxically call the “National Cathedral” I know this problem “up close and personal” as they used to say on Wide World of Sports. The tendency to deify the nation can be almost irresistible. Loving God and loving your country are powerful drives, and we want to surrender to both by mixing them up together into one great indivisible thing. But love each as we do, we cannot ever conflate them. America is a wonderful, liberating idea. But it is not God. And we shouldn’t pretend to find evidence for its exceptionalism in our Bibles.

            What we do find in our Bibles, of course, is all kinds of guidance about the kind of society we can and should be building together. The Hebrew prophets hold Israel to account for the ways in which it has forsaken economic and social justice. Jesus responds to Roman imperialism with a vision of abundant life lived in community and solidarity with others. The Bible is full of incisive commentary on national political life, but it tends to be more critical than most customers of the “God Bless the USA Bible” might expect. The Bible actually points us toward a more visionary, diverse, compassionate, and inclusive vision for our country than Christian Nationalists would like. But it also reminds us, sometimes painfully, of how often we have resisted that vision over the course of our history. A nation that read its Bibles carefully could never have countenanced slavery, Indian genocide, and the oppression of women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans. We have engaged the Bible not to be challenged by it but only to affirm our prejudices. And that’s not reading the Bible at all. 

There are many reasons for all of us to love both God and country, but very few reasons to confuse the two. As Jesus says,

No person can serve two masters; for they will either hate the one and love the other or, be devoted to the one and despise the other. [Luke 16: 13, altered]

 

So: let’s continue to read our Bibles. And let’s continue to study the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The more we do so critically, the more we will see the prophetic tension in which our faith and our nation continue to stand. On this Independence Day, let’s give thanks for what Whitman called the “fervid and tremendous IDEA” of America, of a place that can both respect individual people and support the welfare of the larger community. And let’s give thanks for a Biblical faith that calls us continually to hold that idea and our performance of it to account. We will always stand in this prophetic, creative tension between God and country. But as the teachings of Jesus and the lives of Bible reading Americans like Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, and others have shown us, that’s a creative and vibrant place to stand. Amen.      

---

[i] One on the Old Testament and one on the New. Actually, they were Monarch Notes, but you get the idea.

Homily: Jim Watterson Memorial Service, [May 29, 2021] St. Margaret's, Palm Desert

            Good afternoon. I’m Gary Hall, a retired priest. I first met Jim when I joined the clergy staff of All Saints, Pasadena in 1990.  My wife Kathy and I moved around the country a lot since then, but Jim and I stayed in touch over the years, and I’m grateful to George for asking me to preach and officiate today.     

How can one possibly do justice to Jim Watterson in any speech, let alone a funeral sermon? In all my years of life inside (and outside) the church, I have never known anyone like him. He was the sweetest, most generous man on the planet. He also did not suffer fools gladly. It was something about that combination—the way his fundamental goodness combined with his fierce critical intelligence—that made me love and respect him from the day I first met him at All Saints, Pasadena over 30 years ago.

            Chris and Milinda have already paid tribute to Jim’s many lovable and admirable qualities, and I am sure many more stories will be shared over the course of the day. Jim Watterson was, in many ways, larger than life. He produced lavish events, especially for the myriad charities and causes he believed in. He and George acquired and revived beautiful properties both here and in Mexico. And he had a kind of old world charm which it is impossible to fake. He was successful because he was smart, compassionate, and empathetic. You always felt better about yourself after spending time with Jim Watterson.

            Although I knew Jim for several decades, our friendship revolved more around the church than his other philanthropic and cultural interests. So I don’t have any stories to tell that might rival the anecdotes we’ll hear from others today. But what I do have is a deep gratitude for his friendship and for the way he lived the life of faith—a life of worship and belief, yes, but also a life of generous and compassionate action.

            Whenever I would preach at All Saints, Pasadena, (which, under George Regas and Ed Bacon, was not often) Jim would linger and grab me at the door late and give me a digest of what he had taken away from what I had just said. He loved the life of the church, and he would have been a fabulous preacher himself. (And just imagine the spectacular liturgies he could have produced!) If Jim were here right now, he would want me to get on with it, to give not an after-dinner speech about him but a sermon, to suggest one, two, or three things that God might be up to as we gather to remember and give thanks for Jim’s life. We are all caught somewhere on the emotional spectrum between profound grief at his passing and deep gratitude for his life. Let’s explore for a bit what our scriptures might have to say to this creative tension in which all we find ourselves.     

            Our first reading [Isaiah 25:6-9] gives us an image of our shared hope for the life beyond this one. For some reason, our culture persists in imagining heaven as a misty place above the clouds where everyone seems to fly around playing the harp. That Hollywood image of heaven is at odds with the biblical picture. The prophet Isaiah describes heaven not as a gaseous cloudfest, but as a meal, “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines”.  He does that because in the Jewish and later the Christian scriptures, the meal symbolizes the well-lived and abundant life. Whether it’s the Jewish Passover seder or the Christian Eucharist, people of faith in the Western world have always seen eating, talking, celebrating together as the ultimate image of what it means to be truly and deeply alive.

            The connection between Isaiah’s image of the life after life and the example of Jim Watterson is almost too obvious to say out loud, but being a shameless expert in stating the obvious I’ll go ahead and make it. Jim’s life exemplified the values of conviviality and abundance. He shared both his life and his substance generously with others. Being around Jim in his festive mode was very much like sitting at God’s table as portrayed by Isaiah. If I had to describe it, I might just dare to say that my best hope for heaven is that it might be an event produced and presided over by Jim Watterson.

            Isaiah goes on to tell us that on this mountain God will “swallow up death forever” and “wipe away the tears from all faces”. The Christian hope that animated Jim’s life was a hope grounded in the celebration of the joy and abundance of life. And when you have lived as joyously and generously as Jim has, what becomes most true and enduring about your life is the spirit and the grace with which you lived it. Yes, as Psalm 23 says, we all walk through “the valley of the shadow of death”. And yes, we all shed tears and suffer as we walk through this valley, but what finally matters is that in the midst of it we were able to embrace, celebrate, and love life and each other. It’s not that Jim didn’t have sorrow, pain, and struggles in his life. He did. But he made his way through them by embracing George, his friends, and the world.

            And that picture from the Hebrew scriptures points us toward our final two readings from the Christian New Testament, both of them attributed to John. First, from John’s letter [1 John 3: 1-2]: John tells us that “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Heaven may be a banquet, but John cannot precisely tell us what’s on the menu. Neither he, nor I, nor any preacher, can describe exactly what happens to us when we die. But John does know and believe one thing. He knows and believes that “when [Jesus] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

            The Christian hope goes beyond a simple wish for life after death. The Christian hope has also to do with personal and social transformation now. Over time, living the life of faith, we go to church, we say our prayers, we read the Bible, we engage in works of mercy and justice because we believe that in listening to and watching Jesus over the course of our lives we can indeed become like him. I was once on a panel on spirituality with several speakers, including the writer Diogenes Allen. He summed up his understanding of the life of prayer this way: “We become what we attend to.” What you probably know about Jim Watterson was that he was deeply engaged in his society and the world. What you probably don’t know is that he was even more deeply engaged with Jesus. Over a lifetime of churchgoing, Jim was becoming what he attended to. And the Christian hope in which he lived and died suggests that even now, as he has gone over to the other side, God is showing Jim Jesus as he is so that Jim can finally be who he truly is, too. 

            And that brings us at last to the gospel [John 6: 37-40]. Yes, we believe that heaven is a banquet and not a harp concert. Yes, we believe that in both life and death Jim was and is on the road to being like Jesus and seeing himself as he is. But there is one more thing to say, and the one who says it is not John, is not Jim, not even me. It is Jesus himself who says it. “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

            In celebrating and grieving for Jim Watterson we are in fact giving thanks for the life of an extraordinarily accomplished and lovable man. But we are doing something more. We are remembering and honoring a man whose life was animated by a hopeful faith in God’s future for the entire human community. Christianity is finally not only about you or me. Christianity is not finally about the church. Christianity is about the world—its people, its creatures, its natural processes. Jesus came not to a select group of insiders but to the entire human and natural world. And he promised to raise us all--every single one of us separately and together--to raise us all up on the last day. 

            Jim Watterson gave of his time, energy, and resources to serve the causes he supported not because he was a do-gooder philanthropist. He gave himself to all that charitable work because he understood that God was up to something both in him and in the world beyond him. Jim understood that being a person of faith has implications for the way you live your life. Jim understood that you and I will be saved only to the extent that everyone else is, too.

            I asked your rector for permission to wear the stole designed by the great liturgical designer and priest Vienna Anderson today. George Regas—Jim’s longtime rector in Pasadena and close friend—died not long before Jim did, and George left me this stole. I’m wearing this stole today as a reminder of the gospel that George preached and that Jim gave so much of his life to believing and following, a gospel that sends us out to be agents of love, justice, and healing in our own lives and in the world around us. Jim Watterson’s life was a banquet. He kept his eyes all through that life on Jesus. And then he lived in a generous and expansive way to open that banquet to everyone—the poor, the sick, the lonely, the suffering, the lost, and even the otherwise happy and well to do. Everyone is welcome at God’s banquet. Everyone was welcome at Jim’s.

            Jim Watterson was unique in my experience. I will never have another friend like him. He blessed Kathy and me in so many ways over three decades of friendship. He blessed so many other lives as well. He is gone, and I join you in grieving his loss. But I also join you in giving thanks for this lovely, generous, remarkable, and accomplished man. 

So from his life and witness I take away a renewed hope not only in a love that transcends death, but in the possibilities of the way to live and engage life now. As we move to the Eucharistic meal that was itself so central to Jim’s life and faith, let us come together around God’s table in anticipation of that final heavenly banquet where we, together with Jim and Jesus, can celebrate and embrace God’s love for Jim, for you and for me, and for the world that God and all of us, especially Jim Watterson, loved so fiercely. Amen.

 

Homily: For the Mission of the Church [May 14, 2021] Bloy House

Luke 10:1-9

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the labourer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

 

Our gospel reading for this evening, [Luke 10: 1-9] tells the account of Jesus appointing 70 of his companions and sending “them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” I note with interest that Jesus does not send his companions to go places he does not want to go. He doesn’t say, “You all go to Needles, Barstow, and Trona. I’ll cover Beverly Hills, the Palisades, and Newport Beach.” Like the 12 who preceded them, the 70 are an advance group, helping the towns prepare for the reconciling work of Jesus. 

When we read this passage, we often focus on verse four’s injunction to “carry no purse, no bag, no sandals”.  I’ve probably heard more preachers try to explain that verse away than any other text in scripture, with the possible exception of the one about the camel and the eye of the needle. I even once heard a priest in a wealthy parish use this text to talk about the all-expenses paid sabbatical trip he was about to take to Europe. “Life is a journey,” he said as he happily packed his purse, bag, and sandals for the ocean voyage.

But my missional interest is drawn less to the luggage and accessories question than it is to the things that Jesus tells them to do. He tells them to “cure the sick” and to say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

Maybe it’s because I’m old and now spend much of my life going to doctors’ appointments, but for whatever reason I now find myself increasingly drawn to the synoptic gospel image of Jesus as a healer. Drawn to Christianity first in college, and attracted by our liturgical and intellectual traditions, I began my baptized life in a privileged, educated church culture that exalted Jesus primarily as a teacher, and I have spent most of my working life (I’m sorry to say) trying to explain (or at least say ingenious things about) Jesus’s parables and sayings. But years and years of reading the Daily Office have forced me to engage with the narratives of our first three Gospels, and when I focus at least on their shared Markan narrative it seems clear that the gigantic crowds came out to see Jesus primarily because he was a healer. To my mind, the teachings were analogous to the sermon you have to listen to before you can have the free meal at the Salvation Army shelter. But the main event, the draw, was the healing: casting out demons, cleansing the lepers, restoring sight and ambulation. The reconciliation on offer in Jesus was not abstract or theoretical. It was concrete and personal. People were restored to body, mind, and community. They might have picked up some life tips along the way, but it was the healing that mattered.

And this helps us understand why the only thing Jesus has the 70 say, after they have cured the sick, is “The kingdom of God has come near you.” The reconciliation you see at work in these acts of healing is the same kind of reconciliation at work on all fronts between God and us fragile, vulnerable, usually misguided humans.  In other words: we have gotten lost, and God has come to find us.

The mission of the 70 is the primary mission of you and me and the church itself. We are not here primarily as stewards of an institution. We are here as those who know ourselves to have been lost and now found, to have been sick and now healed, to have been dead and now alive. And our job is not to make and carefully curate a museum of those experiences. Our job is to go out, as those who are sent, to enact this healing and reconciliation in the world. 

We overthink life in the church. I wish I had back every hour I have spent sweating over an institutional “mission statement”.  It isn’t as hard as we make it. “Cure the sick” and say “the kingdom of God has come near you” finally sum up everything we need to say about what God is up to in and through and among us.

As we come to the end of an academic year, many of you will be going out to take up your ministries in the church and in the world. As you enter these new fields of harvest, try to resist as best you can the institution’s pressure for you to become entry-level, mid-level, and then even high-level bureaucrats. The church is not the Jesus museum, and we are not its curators.  The church is not the Jesus business, and we are not its managers. We are, with the seventy, those who have been sent. Our job is not complicated: heal the sick and proclaim the nearness of God’s kingdom. If we can keep our eyes and ears and hearts focused on what Jesus was actually up to, then we too will be Gospel missionaries in the deepest and best senses of the word. Amen.