Homily: Christmas Day [December 25, 2022] St. Alban's, Westwood

 

            

Kathy and I have just returned from a month in New York City, where I serve each December as priest-in-residence at the House of the Redeemer, a retreat house on the upper east side. As a lifelong museum junkie, I use my spare time there to frequent the many wonderful collections both nearby and farther afield.

            Last week I decided to revisit the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval collection at the far northwestern tip of Manhattan. In seminary days I made frequent trips there from Boston, and I have always found it a haven of peace in an otherwise frenetic city.

            This year I saw again many of my favorite pieces in the collection and rested in the indoor cloisters festooned with blooming paperwhites. But I also noticed something I had not seen before: a fifteenth century Dutch brass lectern in the shape of an eagle. Now because we clergy tend to be know-it-alls, you may think we know more than we do. But, to speak truthfully, I have always wondered why so many church lecterns are shaped like eagles. I have asked many learned people over the years, and no one has been able to tell me. Then I read the lectern’s accompanying placard:

Churches usually had two lecterns: a large one like this for reading the gospels, and a smaller one for reading the epistles. The eagle is the symbol of Saint John the Evangelist . . . Eagles often adorned lecterns because the first words of the Gospel of Saint John are, “In the beginning was the Word”.

 

Case closed! Mystery solved! Another question crossed off my life list. My museum encounter with this gospel bird got me thinking not only about life’s unanswered questions but also about our scripture readings for Christmas Day. They all have to do with words, and words are central to the mystery of God becoming one of us in Jesus.

On Christmas Eve we retell the familiar story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. On Christmas Day the church has always turned its attention away from the manger and toward the larger implications of what we call the Incarnation, literally the “enfleshment” of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The great proclamation of God’s enfleshment in us comes in the opening words of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Today’s earlier readings prepare us for that world- and life-changing announcement.

All of our scriptures today have something to say about words, speech, song, and proclamation. Here is how Isaiah put it:

 

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,

who brings good news,
who announces salvation, 
who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."—Isaiah 52

 

Then even the psalmist gets into the act:

 

Sing to the Lord a new song, *
for he has done marvelous things. —Psalm 98

            

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews gives a more extended meditation on this:

 

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. —Hebrews 1

 

And then, of course, come the familiar yet complicated opening words of John’s Gospel:

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.—John 1

 

Since the very beginning of our encounter with God in Jesus, we Christians have wanted to talk about Christ as what philosophers call a “speech act”. Jesus is not only a person. He is God’s announcement of the unbreakable connection between God and us. Yes, Jesus was a healer, a teacher, a critic of religious and political power, but he was also something bigger and deeper. He was God’s proclamation about the universe and our place in it.

Just as I had questions about why church lecterns are shaped like eagles, so each one of us wonders how we and God might be related. Over the millennia of human existence, people have developed two primary images of the divine. We might call the first image the Creator of the Universe, the source of being, the ultimate ground of all that is. We might call the second image my saving God, the one who actually cares about me. The daring of biblical religion—first Judaism, then Christianity—is to proclaim that these two are one and the same. For us Christians, the Creator of the Universe and my saving God meet in Jesus Christ. The one at the center of creation actually knows, and cares about, you and me.

This is why we listen to the opening words of John’s Gospel every Christmas Day: to remind ourselves that Christmas is about something really big and deep. It’s about God becoming one of us in Jesus. It’s about what we ultimately mean in the scheme of things. If, as we believe, God actually took on human experience, then your life has real meaning—more than might appear on the surface. If God lived and suffered as you and I do, then our joys and sorrows are more important than we might otherwise think. The point of Christmas is that, in this impossible transaction between God and us, something has happened which changed both us and God. We are connected, now, in ways that need to be announced, proclaimed, and sung to the world.

One of the other things I did while in New York was to spend some time at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, the home of the Order of the Holy Cross, of which I am a longtime associate. When you go to a monastery you can enter the routine of its prayer life, and three times a day the brothers ring the bells and pray The Angelus, which allows them, with Mary, to place themselves at God’s disposal. The Angelus consists of three sets of three bells, followed by one set of nine bells each accompanied by prayer.

During the first set of three bells, we pray:

 

The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary,

And she conceived by the Holy Spirit.

 

During the second set of three bells, along with Mary, we pray:

 

Here I am, the servant of the Lord;

Let it be with me according to your word.

 

During the third set of three bells, along with Saint John, we pray

 

The Word became flesh,

And lived among us.

 

Then, during the set of nine bells, we pray together:

 

Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord,

that we who have known the Incarnation

of your son Jesus Christ,

announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary,

may by his + cross and passion

be brought to the glory of his resurrection:

who lives and reigns with you

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and forever. Amen.

 

 

Three days in the monastery reminded me of the monks’ wisdom in praying The Angelus three times a day: it encapsulates what Christmas is all about. The birth of the baby Jesus to Mary and Joseph in the Bethlehem barn announces something big and deep about God, the world, you, and me. “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” God has taken on our life, and we are now taken up into God’s. The birth of Jesus at Christmas inevitably leads us, together, to his resurrection at Easter. We matter. And we now share in the ongoing life and purpose of God in the world.

“Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things.” We all carry around so many unanswered questions, surely about problems larger than lecterns and eagles. Christmas is God’s ultimate answer to all the concerns and the lifting of the burdens we share. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

 

Jesus is born and shall be risen, as we too are and will be. You matter. Everyone matters. All will be well. Merry Christmas! Amen.

Homily: The First Sunday of Advent [November 27, 2022] St. Alban's, Westwood

            Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the day which begins the Christian year. It is a shame that the cultural noise of our American holiday season almost obliterates this beautiful four-week moment. Advent is a time of watching and waiting, a time of hope, of expectation, and self-examination. We have turned it into a frenzy of shopping and partying instead.

            Not that there’s anything wrong with buying gifts or seeing friends. But the way we do it gets in the way of the wonderful if strange rhythm of this season. Taken together, the four weeks of Advent prepare us for the coming of Christ. Later in the season we will focus on the approach of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. Today, at the start, we look way toward the future, toward, in the words of today’s collect, “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead”. Advent on this first Sunday is more about last things than former things. It is about getting ready for the ultimate disposition of our souls.

            When I was in seminary I studied with Krister Stendahl, a great New Testament scholar and future Archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. When discussing today’s gospel passage, Professor Stendahl said that this day, the First Sunday of Advent, has had a curious history. Over the course of the Christian centuries, churches have used every single liturgical color—purple and blue, yes, but also white, green, red and (you guessed it) even black to represent our perception of how we ought to regard the second coming of Jesus. Over time, the church has been both powerful and weak. If Jesus’s return is good news—if we’re oppressed or suffering—we’ll use white or red. If it’s bad news—if we’re the oppressors or the inflictors of suffering—we’ll use black. When in doubt, purple or blue will do.

            Stendahl also said this when asked about the seeming contradiction between God’s judgment and God’s mercy. “God acts. How we respond to it depends on where we are in relation to it. Some of us will experience God’s action as judgment, others as mercy.”

            Those two gems of wisdom from seminary days come to mind in relation to the gospel passage for today [Matthew 24: 36-44]. Jesus tells his disciples about the “coming of the Son of Man”. Everything will proceed as normal, he says. Then “one will be taken and one will be left”. It is easy to see how generations of apocalyptically-minded Christians have portrayed the coming of the Son of Man as a dramatic, cosmic event. It’s also possible to read this saying as a comment on the unpredictability of how each of our lives will end. One way or another, you and I are proceeding toward a final summing up. When we encounter God and Jesus in that moment, some of us will experience that meeting as judgment, others as mercy. Probably, for all of us, a little of both.

            According to Jesus, this is a final exam for which we can do little to prepare. His advice in the mean time? “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

            “Keep awake”. I have watched with some amusement and then growing alarm the recent controversy about the word “woke”. I thought it a bit self-congratulatory for the original users of the term to describe themselves as having awakened from the slumber the rest of us endure. And then I thought it entirely bogus for those who objected to the term “woke” to apply it to all who espoused even modestly progressive views. Nobody, I believe, is truly “woke”. As Henry David Thoreau says in chapter two of Walden, “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

            When Jesus tells us to “keep awake” he is telling us neither to “get woke” nor to hop ourselves up on No-Doz. He is, rather, telling us something about an attitude toward life.  We might also render his words as something like, “Pay attention”. For after all, isn’t paying attention what spirituality is really about? 

            You and I live in a world that is making ever-increasing demands on our attention. American work life has become so invasive as to spill over the bounds of the week and take over what used to be our leisure time. Our devices connect us both to each other and to an endless stream of ads and messages that claim supreme importance. The pervasiveness of these messages makes us behave more reactively than intentionally. They ask that we respond to everything that comes at us without thinking.

            One of the reasons the church has developed the prayer practices it has is simply to hold up for us things to contemplate that we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. When we come together on Sunday, from week to week we hear an array of scripture readings that tell us things we will not get on social media or cable TV. We are asked to listen to those Bible readings because they speak to us truths that can get obscured by the cultural noise which always threatens to overwhelm us. There’s not much room for love, justice, and compassion in our shared cultural pandemonium. We’ll only hear about God’s values if we seek them out.

            I was once on a panel with the late Diogenes Allen, an author who taught the philosophy of religion at Princeton. At the end of the discussion, he told us to remember one thing: “We become what we attend to.” That saying has stuck with me over the years. “We become what we attend to.” If you attend to Tik Tok videos showbiz gossip, they will form your character. If you attend to Jesus, you will over time become like him. I believe that is what Jesus means when he tells us to “keep awake”. In a world dominated by celebrity and power and all kinds of bad values, the way to follow Jesus is to attend to him. Come to church. Read the Bible. Say your prayers. It’s not hard, but it requires the desire to do it.

            Keeping awake, becoming what we attend to: these are what the season of Advent is about. It’s not only, or even particularly, about getting ready for Christmas. Advent is about a stance toward life.  That is what Thoreau meant when he said, “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn . . .”

            My late friend and mentor George Regas used to say that someone who doesn’t feel the joy and pain of the world has “gone to sleep on life”. It is only when I am spiritually asleep that I can drive by the homeless encampments around Los Angeles and feel nothing beyond annoyance. It is only because I have gone to sleep on life that I can ignore the stories of real suffering and injustice in the news and get distracted by the gossip. It is only because I have gone to sleep on life that I can miss real moments of natural beauty or interpersonal connection because I’m distracted by the intrusive claims of my iPhone.

            Thoreau also said, “To be awake is to be alive”.  He might have been channeling Jesus. On this First Sunday of Advent, we hear Jesus calling us to wake up! Step out of the information glut that engulfs you and pay attention to the people and the world around you. Stop listening to pundits and start listening to Jesus, whose teaching will always point you toward a true appreciation of life in all its mystery and wonder. We have all become sleepwalkers. It is time for us to wake up.

            “We become what we attend to.” As we make our way through this beautiful time of year in California, let us approach December 25 not in a slavish frenzy of consumption but in a watchful, hopeful “infinite expectation of the dawn”. God is always coming toward us. Let us prepare for God’s advent by watching, by waiting, by paying attention. If we are faithful and persistent in redirecting our gaze toward Jesus and the life he offers, we will, as Paul says, “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”. 

            Wake up! Jesus is coming toward you. Use this time to prepare yourself to recognize and receive him as he approaches. Amen.

 

Homily: The Twentiy-third Sunday after Pentecost [November 13, 2022] St. Michael and All Angels, Corona Del Mar

            It is a real pleasure to be with you here at St. Michael’s, this morning. I made my first visit here in the fall of 1976, when fresh out of seminary I served as the late Bishop Rusack’s chaplain. I preached here a few times in the 1990s when my good, longtime friend Peter Haynes was your rector, and your church surprisingly was not struck by lightning even once. And Barbara Stewart (who was made a canon of the diocese by Bishop Taylor at our Diocesan Convention this weekend) and I have long been members of a clergy colleague group together. (Barbara, I’ll show you the secret handshake at coffee hour.)  So I have many ongoing connections with this parish, and I appreciate Louise’s invitation to join you today.        

            I, for one, am deeply glad that the midterm elections are (almost!) over. It got to the point in the days before Tuesday that I was afraid to turn on the television. The cable channels were filled with the kind of pointless prognostications that TV anchors usually reserve for the moments just after earthquakes. “Where was it? We don’t know. How big was it? Your guess is as good as mine.” And then there was the barrage of political ads designed both to enrage and confuse you. It was enough to make you want to go live on a desert island.

The days leading up to and following Tuesday’s midterm elections have felt positively apocalyptic, so we should feel right at home in this morning’s gospel reading [Luke 21: 5-19]. Jesus paints a lurid picture there: wars, insurrections, a thrown-down temple, persecutions, and betrayals. To one who lived and worked in Washington D.C. for several years, this sounds like a normal day in Congress.

            We Episcopalians are very near the end of the church year, a calendar based not on solar or lunar models but on the outline of the story of Jesus. The year begins in Advent as we expect the coming of Christ, and it ends with the revelation next Sunday that Jesus, not the principalities and powers of the world, is the one finally in charge. In between those poles we experience Jesus’s birth, his teaching and healing, his entry into Jerusalem, his conflict with the authorities there, his trial, crucifixion, and death, and finally his resurrection, ascension, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. A lot happens in a year with Jesus, and today we are getting ready to ask ourselves what it all means.

            There seem to be two clusters of ideas in today’s gospel: one describing the chaos of the present moment, the other suggesting how Jesus’s followers should interact with the world. I’d like to say a word about each cluster and then to conclude with a thought about stewardship, which I gather is the focus this morning of parish life here at St. Michael’s.

            Listen again to Jesus:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

The great 20^th century theologian Karl Barth once said that preachers should hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. (I wonder what he would have said about Facebook and Twitter.) There are times when the Bible seems hopelessly alien. There are moments when it seems ripped from today’s headlines.

            We live now in a time of dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. It is no wonder that Monday night’s lunar eclipse was hailed by some as an omen about what the next day’s elections would bring: wars and insurrections indeed. The leadup to Tuesday was brutal: horrible negative ads, lawsuits filed contesting votes that hadn’t even happened yet, promises of violence if the election did not go a certain way. We are fortunate that there has been relative calm since Tuesday, but the recounts haven’t started yet.

            Those of us of a certain age have spent most of our lives under a relatively peaceful national and international order. We became conditioned to a long stretch of world peace and bipartisan domestic tranquility. But history and our recent experience teach us that the post-World War II period was a bit of an anomaly. Chaos and contention are more rule than exception. Those who came before and after us have been more conditioned to sustained conflict both at home and abroad. 

            When we listen to Jesus, we should remember that his own time was one of great animosity and tension. Israel was subject to a brutal Roman occupation. And the gospels also witness the internal dissensions within Judaism itself. Jesus was living with, ministering and preaching to, people who were stressed out economically, politically, and even spiritually. They lived, as the King James Bible had it, under the continual threat of “wars and rumors of wars”.

            The first thing we need to hear today is that we should not be misled by our nostalgic wish for a more bipartisan, harmonious time. Sure, it was more peaceful in the 1950s. But that peace was paid for by the silencing and oppression of people who were not white, straight, and male. Relative peace can hide systemic injustice. History is the record of an ongoing struggle between good and evil, justice and oppression, love and hatred. From time to time we may experience a pause in the conflict, but we should not confuse a temporary calm with a lasting peace. 

As much as I dislike the tensions and enmities of the current moment in America and the world, the persistence of the conflict reminds us that people of faith are always asked to engage with the issues of our day. Long as we might to escape into a fantasy of a more civil and harmonious past, Jesus reminds us that there is no safe haven on offer for those who follow him. We will make our way through wars and rumors of wars by remaining faithful to the vision of hope and justice to which Jesus always calls us.

            This first realization cluster suggests a second. Again, in Jesus’s words:  

You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

            Just as the second half of the last century was a time of relative political calm, so the relative security in which we who follow Jesus live, at least in the United States and Europe, can lull us into thinking that it’s easy to be a Christian in a contentious and violent world. Again, history helps us here. The earliest Christians were persecuted by Rome because they refused to accept Caesar as the one with ultimate authority over them. In every subsequent era of world history, the followers of Jesus have found themselves at odds with the values of the prevailing culture in which they live. Our current critique of environmental, racial, and economic violence is another version of Jesus’s critique of the values of ancient Rome and all subsequent authoritarian impulses in world history. If we really get and enact what Jesus is saying about how we ought to live with each other we will always be an irritant to the powers that be. 

            When Jesus tells us, 

so make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict,

 

he is simply telling us not to live through something painful twice. When we worry about something in advance, we experience it both in anticipation and in real time. Once is clearly enough.

            From what I read on your website, today is the day on which St. Michael’s begins its stewardship campaign. I will leave it to others to say in particular why this parish deserves your support. But, given what we’ve heard in the gospel this morning, I would like to leave you with one thought about living in and supporting a Christian community.

            We Episcopalians are fairly worldly as Christians go: we dance, we drink, we even play cards. We are at ease in the habits of the secular world. We do not hand out tracts on the street. We wear our faith lightly.

            Our church’s cultural comfort should not disguise the extent to which we nevertheless hold the world and its values up to the judgment of the gospel. Like Jesus’s earliest followers and Christian witnesses through history, we know deep down that we are not entirely at home in this world. And that is why, even at an unconscious level, we Christians come together and form communities. As much as we love this world, we know we are not entirely of it. We need a place and a community where we can remember and live out who we really are.

            Remembering who we are as Jesus’s followers and living out our true identity in worship, in fellowship, in pastoral care, in service to those who are sick or who suffer—this is why churches exist and this is why you and I who belong to them give them our support. We give to the church not out of guilt but out of gratitude that there is at least one place where we can be who we are and live as God calls us to live.

            The midterms aren’t entirely over, and 2024 is just around the corner. You and I who come together in the church will continue to hear of wars and insurrections. We will continue to come up against the skewed values of the culture we live in. We will continue to be asked to witness to the compassionate values of Jesus. We cannot do that entirely on our own. Jesus promises to be there with us when we come face to face with the forces that would deny him and dehumanize us. He is there with us in the life, worship, and ministry of our parish church. We need our church community more than we know. And it is there for us in ways we can never truly enumerate. That is why St. Michael’s deserves your support. Amen. 

 

 

 

Homily: The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost [October 30, 2022]

 

            For some reason which I fail entirely to understand, every few years I rewatch an old TV series from start to finish. After the presidential inauguration in 2017 I felt compelled to view again The Sopranos in its entirety; something about Tony Soprano and his family helped me understand the newly installed occupants of the White House. And just this year I decided to rewatch all five seasons of Breaking Bad, a series that presented the travails of Walter White, a terminally-ill high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking and distributing methamphetamine as a way to leave his family some money. While I didn’t note any presidential similarities this time, something about the anti-hero’s moral confusion seemed to encapsulate our current national moment.

            Both of those shows became famous because they featured protagonists whom some thought “lovable rogues”, but their surface attractiveness masked deeply flawed interior lives. That these characters could elicit both our admiration and our scorn told us something about the complications of our affections. As I find myself liking Tony Soprano or Walter White in spite of myself, I may need to rethink how I understand my own morality.

            I bring up my complicated response to these two disreputable TV malefactors because they help me understand my feelings about Zacchaeus, the guest star in our gospel for this morning [Luke 19: 1-10]. If you’ve been around the church for a while, you’ll know that Zacchaeus has long been a favorite of Sunday Schools. We routinely make kids sing songs and act out plays about the little guy up there in the branches. He’s a compelling figure: he’s short! He climbs a tree to see Jesus! Surely, we think, someone with whom the kids can identify.

            The problem with the way we use Zacchaeus, though, is that he is actually a lot more like Tony Soprano than he is like the Mayor of Munchkinland. Zacchaeus was short, it is true. But he was also the chief tax collector of Jericho, and you might know that the tax collectors of Jesus’s day were not like today’s IRS bureaucrats. First century Jewish Palestine was occupied by a Roman standing army, and the Romans taxed the population outrageously to feed and house them. Jewish tax collectors were recruited by the Romans to exact these taxes from the already strapped Israelites. As a result, tax collectors were seen more as mob bag men (like Mr. Soprano) than as cuddly little tree climbers. And for Zacchaeus to be the chief tax collector only exaggerated the problems.

            Which is not to say that Zacchaeus doesn’t become a hero. It is to say that he does undergo a transformative journey to get to a good place. You might even say he goes through something like a conversion experience.

            In order to get Zacchaeus to this new good place, both he and Jesus have to take some action. Clearly intrigued by Jesus and what he has heard about him, Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree in order to get a view of this mysterious figure. Just as Zacchaeus moves towards Jesus, so Jesus moves towards him, and says "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today."  

            When Jesus accompanies Zacchaeus to his house, the crowd murmurs, "He has gone to be the guest of . . . a sinner." And they’re right. Zacchaeus is a sinner, if by “sinner” we mean one who publicly defies Jewish law. The people of Jericho are scandalized: they clearly had thought of Jesus as a healer and teacher who would do his good works for respectable people. But here he is accepting the hospitality of the town’s biggest gangster.

            No one is prepared for what happens next. Something about his encounter with Jesus changes Zacchaeus. Luke doesn’t tell us what it was—perhaps just being seen and acknowledged by Jesus, perhaps Jesus’s willingness to risk disgrace by entering his house—this moment with Jesus changes Zacchaeus dramatically, and he blurts out,

"Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." 

            This certainly is a remarkable turnaround. It’s as if Al Capone had suddenly turned into Mackenzie Scott, going from gangster to philanthropist in a zero to sixty turnaround. The biblical standard of generosity is 10%. Nobody gives away 50. And the scriptures call only for one eye for one eye, not four for one. What is going on here?

            In the story of Zacchaeus and his conversion, Luke is telling us something about the nature of repentance. It is clear that this Jesus moment has made Zacchaeus renounce his former life, and he instantly vows to make amends by giving away his ill-gotten gains and paying oversized reparations to those he has injured. This, says Luke, is what true repentance looks like.

In our everyday parlance, we tend to think of repentance as akin to “feeling bad about” something. “Gosh, I repent hurting your feelings, drinking so much last night, investing in Enron.” For you and me today, repentance is regret. But it wasn’t that way for the Jews of Jesus’s day.

The Greek word the gospels use for repentance is μετάνοια, a word which literally means “turning around”, and figuratively suggests “a transformative change of mind”. Μετάνοια means a lot more than what we would call “repentance”. It means entirely changing your thought, and as a result, changing your action. When Zacchaeus repents, he experiences μετάνοια. He doesn’t say, “Gee, I feel bad about my ill-gotten gains.” He says, “I’ll give away half of what I’ve got.” He doesn’t say, “Sorry if I’ve offended you.” He says, “Here is four times what I illegally took from you.” His encounter with Jesus has totally converted and transformed Zacchaeus, and he honors that change not only in language but in action.

What can we learn from this interaction between Jesus and the repentant chief tax collector? Here are two quick thoughts.

First, Zacchaeus’s repentance is one of action, not words. Perhaps it’s the influence of social media, but we 21^st century people seem to think that saying something is the same as doing something. “Of course I work against climate change. I tweeted about it just yesterday!” Not only do we confuse tweets and Facebook posts with doing something; we also spend a lot of our time saying things that we don’t then back up with action. I regularly receive emails from institutions (including universities and churches) that say, in their signature line, “We acknowledge that we occupy unceded Chumash, or other Native American, land.” I have yet to receive an email which adds, “therefore we’re giving it back.” True repentance needs action to be complete.

Thought two is tied up with what Jesus says at the end of our passage: 

Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost."

We tend to think of sin as a personal matter, something we do in private. The nature of Zacchaeus’s sin was public. In his role as chief tax collector he had violated other people and the norms of his community. Over the centuries, the church has asked us to focus on our personal, private actions. But the Bible is more concerned with our social behavior. Zacchaeus may have had impure thoughts or eaten meat on Fridays, but that’s not why he’s a sinner. He’s a sinner because he defrauded and abused people. And in his repentance, his μετάνοια, his complete change of mind and behavior, he is restored through his reparations to his community. “He too is a son of Abraham.” He will remain in Jericho and work it out. His new life will be hard, but it will also be joyous.

Jesus concludes by saying, “For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." This is true not only for Zacchaeus and the people of Jericho. It is true for you and me. Jesus has come to be the guest of us sinners, and the result is that salvation has come to his house. In the same way, Jesus has come to be our guest, and his presence within and among us at first will expose whatever we need to repent. Are our relationships, both personal and social, unjust? Are we behaving in our family or our community in ways that betray our deepest values? If so, we need not to feel bad but to repent, to change, to turn around and live new lives where we are. That’s never very easy to do, but it is the only way to personal and social wholeness.

“For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." Jesus is not only talking about Zacchaeus here he’s talking about you and me. He has come today to be the guest of all us sinners. Our best response, as always, is not to feel bad about our pasts but instead to be open to the forgiven future he offers, and so to change, to turn around, to follow him, and always to give thanks that we have been seen, known, and loved. Amen.

 

 

Homily: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost [October 23, 2022] St. James, Newport Beach

            One of my all-time favorite church jokes goes like this:

            A man of the type we used to call a “captain of industry” goes into an Episcopal church in Manhattan. Struck by the gothic majesty of the building, our powerful industrialist goes to the altar rail and sinks to his knees.

            “Use me, Lord!” he cries. “Hopefully in an executive capacity.”

            This joke always comes to mind when I hear Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, our gospel reading for today [Luke 18: 9-14]. For many years I worked for George Regas, the late, long-time former rector of All Saints, Pasadena, and the industrialist, like the Pharisee, is the kind of person about whom George would often say, “I know that man!” Both of these characters exhibit a presumption of self-importance which I often see in myself. The captain of industry is sure that God wants to use him in upper management. The Pharisee is pleased to let God know that he is not like other people. Neither of these men seems to suffer from a bad self-image.

            In today’s gospel Jesus makes a clear comparison between two characters. We’ve already met the Pharisee. He is joined at prayer by a tax collector, a somewhat disreputable character who simply says, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” Before I unravel the threads of this story, it’s important to understand what it meant to be a Pharisee or a tax collector in the world of Jesus and his companions.

            First, to the Pharisee. The Pharisees were the dominant strain of first century Judaism in Palestine. When presented the opportunity to follow Jesus, they declined. As a result, the New Testament is not exactly objective in the way it presents them:  the gospels almost always depict the Pharisees in cartoonishly evil terms. They are legalistic, self-important villains who skulk around trying to trip up and entrap Jesus. 

            That depiction is not even remotely fair. The Pharisees were simply a group of believers trying as best they could to apply their faith to the dilemmas of everyday life. They had the Jewish law, the torah, as their guide, and they were using it as best they could to answer their spiritual and ethical questions. They were the establishment, and they were doing their best to live their lives in the world with the religion they had. In other words, they were the first century’s Episcopalians. In the words of George Regas, “I know that man!”

            Second, to the tax collector: we shouldn’t think of this character as a contemporary IRS agent. First century Jewish Palestine was occupied by a Roman standing army, and the people there were taxed beyond belief to feed and support those forces. So-called “tax collectors” were distrusted because they were Jews who collaborated with the Roman enemy, acting more like mafia bagmen than government bureaucrats. They were seen as at best gangsters and as at worst traitors.

            We need to see these two men in their first century context, not as 21^st century stereotypes. The Pharisee prays in a conventional way. It was common in the scriptures for praying Jews to remind God of their faithfulness. If you’re not going to make your own case for God, who else will? The Psalms are shot through with the kind of self-congratulatory things the Pharisee says. Similarly, the tax collector in this story resembles the kind of outsider who may live a less than exemplary life but who is nevertheless drawn toward Israel’s God because of the depth of grace and forgiveness evident in the Hebrew scriptures.

            So that’s who these two people are. At the end of the story, Jesus says this about them:

“I tell you, this man [the tax collector] went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

To me, Jesus’s parable turns on the word we translate, “justified”.  Today, we use the word “justified” to suggest something like “proved right”—like when you’re in an argument with your spouse and you say, “see, I was justified” in doing whatever fool thing you’re being called out on. That’s our common use of the word, but it differs a bit from the word Luke uses here.

That word is δεδικαιωμένος, a form of the verb δικαιω, and the sense of that verb is something like “to make right”. It’s a legal term, and one way to understand it would be our English word, “acquitted”. As is often the case in the Bible, Jesus is portraying a legal procedure here. Two men stand before the divine court pleading their cases. The Pharisee argues for his virtue by reciting a list of his moral achievements. The other simply acknowledges himself to be a sinner. They are making their cases. Only one of them, the tax collector, prevails. He has been “made right” with God.

What’s going on here is less about a verdict than it is about a relationship. Both the Pharisee and the tax collector stand before the altar in the temple because they know they are out of right relationship with God, and they are asking to be restored. The Pharisee thinks he can get that by reading God his résumé. The tax collector has no such illusions. He seeks to be restored to right relationship with God by acknowledging his need for mercy and forgiveness.

This story of two different men at prayer is not a story about who is right and who is wrong. It is a story about how we relate to God and each other. The Pharisee thinks that the system and its rules will save him. The tax collector knows that being right with God depends on first acknowledging one’s need. The Pharisee is arrogant because the system has told him that virtue somehow equals accomplishment. The tax collector is humble because he knows, from the outset, that he needs help. That’s why Jesus ends the parable with the saying, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."

The humility Jesus describes here is neither false modesty nor low self-esteem. The humility of Jesus is a humility that begins in an honest assessment of our condition. It’s an acknowledgement that we are God’s creatures and can get into trouble when we forget that. Human systems—philosophies, cultures, even religions—can trick us into thinking that we are totally independent of God and each other. It’s easy to think that when everything is going your way. But sooner or later life teaches us that we are not in control, and in those moments we are thrown back on our need for God and each other. The tax collector knows that now. The Pharisee will know it one way or another pretty soon.

October is the month when Episcopal congregations talk about stewardship, about what you and I give to advance the mission and ministry of the church. Over the course of my working life I’ve heard and given a lot of stewardship sermons, and many of them are what we might this morning call “Pharasaic”: they are a list of programs and accomplishments. They all add up to “Give to the church because it’s so fabulous!”

Jesus’s praise of the tax collector’s humility suggests that there is another reason that you and I give to support the church and what it does. We do so because we want to be “justified”, made right with God and each other. We do so because life teaches us, over the years, that we are not autonomous but dependent. We need God, and we need each other. We need a place like this where we can come together to acknowledge that need and, as best we can, support each other when life hits us upside the head with one of its many two by fours of suffering and loss. We need a place like this so we can witness to the world that, as we acknowledge our own pain and loss, we can respond in generosity and love when we see such suffering in others. 

As we hear this story in stewardship season, let us respond as those who would humble and not exalt ourselves. I am not saying that a generous pledge to St. James will put you in a right relation with God—only God and your own self-examination will do that. But I am saying that giving to support this place is one sign that you see life’s meaning in relation to something larger than yourself—you see it in relation to God and the community which tries in its own way to acknowledge and give thanks to God in its common life and in service to the world around it.

“Use me, Lord! Hopefully in an executive capacity.” “I know that man!” I do know that man, and I’m grateful that over time my life in the church has helped me bit by bit to become less like him. And that is one of the many, many reasons I give to support the church and what it does for me, for my family, for my community, and for the world. I invite you to join me in this generous and joyful work to support what God is up to. Amen.

Homily: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [October 9, 2022] St. Athanasius, Los Angeles

            I don’t like to think of myself as a hostile or passive-aggressive person, but perhaps I am. The older I get, the more annoyed I become when people seem to take basic courtesies for granted. Whether it’s holding a door open for someone or letting a car enter a congested lane of traffic, I am increasingly surprised at how few people pause to offer a word or gesture of thanks. Luckily for them, I have appointed myself the messenger of manners. “You’re welcome!” I often shout, usually in a sickly-sweet, cloying voice. I always feel better, but my sarcasm never seems to make much of a difference.

            This morning’s gospel reading [Luke 17: 11-19] shows Jesus’s response to this kind of social ingratitude, though (luckily for us) without the passive-aggressive hostility or sarcasm. Ten people suffering with leprosy encounter Jesus, and (knowing him to be a healer) they ask that he cure them. When he does so, only one turns back to him and offers thanks. Clearly a bit stunned by their ingratitude, Jesus asks, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

            It is not incidental to the point of this story that the one grateful healed person turns out not to be an Israelite but a Samaritan, an outsider. As in the other Lucan story of the Good Samaritan, the gospel seems to be telling us something about the universal nature of human goodness. It isn’t always the chosen people who do the right thing.

            But the identity of the one grateful person in the story is really a side-issue. The main point, I think, has to do with the whole question of giving thanks as central to our human relation to God. And to get at that—and with apologies to Gerti, your theologically educated warden-- I’d like to offer what I promise will be a brief but pithy little lesson in Hebrew.

            There are two words in Hebrew which may sound alike but which denote a world of theological difference. The first, todah ( תּוֹדָה) means “thanksgiving”. The second, torah ( תּוֹרָה) is more familiar to us. It means “law”. Jews often use torah to describe the first five books of the Bible, but that is because Judaism considers those books to be the law. Though todah and torah may sound similar, they describe two very different attitudes toward God, the holy, and life itself.

            Let’s begin with todah or thanksgiving. In the earliest days of Israel’s life—from the Exodus in around 1400 BC to the Exile in. 587 BC—giving thanks was the primary act of Hebrew worship. The great event of Israel’s common life—the Exodus—was an experience of deliverance from slavery and oppression into freedom. The worshipping life which grew out of that deliverance was one of giving thanks—of making an offering and sharing a meal with God and the community in celebration of and thanksgiving for both the corporate deliverance of the Exodus and whatever personal deliverance (a good harvest, healing, the birth of a child) had occurred in a person’s life. This todah way of relating to God was the primary characteristic of Israel’s life and worship for centuries, right up until the Babylonian exile and captivity of 587. Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah this morning recalls that horribly disruptive period in Israel’s life.

            When the Israelites returned from exile and rebuilt the Jerusalem temple, they made the move from todah(thanksgiving) worship to torah (law) worship. In the book of Nehemiah chapter 8, the priest Ezra reads the torah to the people and they commit to follow its teachings and abide by its rules. In the twenty-year period of the Babylonian exile, a significant shift has occurred: what was previouslyiii a living religion celebrating God’s ongoing presence among us by giving thanks changed to a more static observance, finding God at work most reliably now in the five books of a historic past which we can but remember. This is not to say that Jews did not still give thanks for personal and social blessings. But it is to say that gratitude was subtly replaced by obedience as the primary way one related to God, other people, and the world. Todah had become torah. Thanksgiving turned into law.

            Now this rendering is a bit simplistic, but it helps us understand what Jesus is up to in this morning’s gospel. When Jesus heals the ten, he tells them to “go and show yourselves to the priests”.  In terms of first century Jewish life, this command has the force of torah, of law, and the ten healed persons immediately proceed to follow orders. They’re on their way to the priest to become ritually clean and then to rejoin society. This is all conventional Jewish practice, totally in keeping with post-Exilic ritual standards.

            But one healed person turns back to give thanks. It’s not that he won’t go to the priest and get purified. It’s more that he remembers an earlier aspect of Jewish life that his fellows seem to have forgotten: he remembers that what has happened to him is not so much a cleansing as a deliverance. He has been delivered from the disease of leprosy and set free to live a more abundant life. His response to that deliverance is like that of earlier Israelites. He comes back and gives thanks. He has moved from law to thanksgiving, from torah to todah.

            In making that move, the one healed person encapsulates the entire Jesus experience. Jesus’s critique of first century Palestinian Judaism is a critique any of us might make of any religious system that claims to have a lock on holiness and purity. As an observant Jew himself, Jesus follows and honors torah, the law. But he realizes that the law is there properly not as the object of our worship but as a way into relationship with God, other people, and the world. To Jesus and his companions, just as for the earlier Israelites, the real point of following God is todah, giving thanks. When you put following the law first you can fall into the trap of thinking of yourself as self-sufficient. “Look at me: I’m doing everything right!” When you put giving thanks first, you realize something deeper—you realize that you are the recipient of a divine generosity that gives you not only what you have but even life itself. Following the law tends towards self-righteousness. Giving thanks tends towards compassion.

            In his praise of the one who returned to give thanks, Jesus is leading us not away from the law but to putting law in its proper context of thanksgiving. This teaching suggests two ideas—one social, one theological—which all of us might ponder in the days ahead.

            We are approaching elections at the state, city, and county levels next month. There seem to be two primary types of people in our political life: we might call them the “law-abiders” and the “empaths”. Some candidates argue for tough, legalistic solutions to our social problems. Others argue for compassionate actions that emphasize our solidarity with each other. When looking at these candidates and issues, we might ask ourselves the old evangelical question: WWJVF? Who would Jesus vote for? As Christians we are also citizens, and as citizens we need to be mindful that we’re all in this together. For us, thanksgiving will always take precedence over law.

            That’s the social thought. Here’s the theological one. It won’t have escaped you that “eucharist”, the liturgy we do together this morning, is the Greek word for “thanksgiving”.  As followers of Jesus, we identify ourselves first and foremost as those who give thanks. We come now, together, to gather around God’s table, and we do so not in celebration of our purity but in acknowledgment of our dependence. For our life, our purpose, and our fulfillment we rely not on ourselves but on God and each other. What sets us people of faith apart from our individualistic culture is that we are the people who know and acknowledge our need for each other and God. We are the people who realize, as a mentor of mine once said, that “we’re all on cosmic relief”. That’s why we work for justice and peace. And that’s why, this morning, as we do every Sunday, we now proceed, together in this Eucharist, to give thanks. Amen.

            

            

            

            

Homily: George Regas [May 7, 2022] All Saints, Pasadena

There are at least a dozen great preachers in this room today, and each one of them is now asking themselves the question, “Why is that mook up there doing the sermon instead of me?” I have to say, when Mary showed me George’s detailed plans for this liturgy and I saw my own name after the word “sermon” I was both honored and surprised; in fact I asked myself the same question. "Why me?" But then, casting my eyes to the right, I saw the answer. In parentheses after my name were the words, “ten minutes”.

George Regas never preached for ten minutes in his life, but he knew his colleagues well. He was certain that I, among all his former staff members, was the most likely to follow his instructions. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but where George is concerned, I always do what I’m told.

            George designed everything about this service. He chose the readings, the hymns, and the participants. And if you worked with George on anything, you know how intentionally he did things. So it is no accident that our two Hebrew/Christian scripture readings George chose for today are proclamations. They are announcements not only of God’s vision for the world. They are proclamations of how things actually are. George was first and foremost a preacher. Proclamation was his life’s work.

 

            Our reading from Isaiah 61 is well known to all us progressive religious folk, both on its own terms and as the scroll which Jesus reads aloud when he visits his hometown congregation in Nazareth in the fourth chapter of Luke’s gospel.

 

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
            because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
   to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
   and release to the prisoners; 

            For Isaiah, this passage announces the new, joyous reality of Israel’s life after its return to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile. It is a proclamation of a new, restored world, a transformed community in which justice reigns and wrongs are set right. And when Jesus later chooses to read this passage as the inaugural announcement of his own ministry, Isaiah’s words take on an added resonance. Following Jesus will mean giving oneself over not only to the proclamation of this world. Following Jesus will mean working with others to make this world a reality.

For countless generations of Jews and Christians, Isaiah’s oracle has served as the warrant for prophetic utterance. If you want to see what God is up to, look to Isaiah’s list: bringing good news to the oppressed, binding up the broken-hearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, releasing the prisoners. Established religious communities can fall into the trap of seeing themselves as the custodians of the status quo, defenders of the oppressive systems they are asked to bless. Isaiah and Jesus remind us that God is on the side of those up against it. Critics of us progressive preachers always say that we’re mixing religion and politics. Isaiah’s joyous oracle reminds us that you can’t authentically talk about God without also proclaiming God’s desire for justice.

            When I think of this Isaiah passage in relation to George, the things that he stood for over the course of a lifetime in ministry simply name themselves: civil rights, peace, economic justice, interfaith relations, equity for women and LGBT people in the church and world, healing the sick. Yet when I think more specifically about George, the specific idea of prophecy as “good news” rings clear and true. George was more of a joyous than an angry preacher. One reason you left church feeling exalted following a George Regas sermon was that he always provided not only an analysis of the problem but also an avenue to get together and work with others to address it. George always believed that concerted faithful action could actually change things, and he consistently held out a vision of the hopeful future to which God is calling us. I’ve heard (and delivered) countless prophetic issue sermons in my time, and to my ear they often sound like religious versions of Eyeore complaining about the burrs in his tail. People signed up to hear and follow George Regas because he preached good news. His good news wasn’t always sunny. But it was grounded in a hopeful vision of the just future God holds out to us. And the legacy I take from his life, ministry, and preaching is that we are all called, not to wait on God to free the captives and feed the poor but actively to participate with God in these acts of liberation we proclaim.

            And then there are the Beatitudes (Matthew 5: 1-10). As did Isaiah, so here does Jesus turn our conventional wisdom on its head. The Greek word makarios, which we usually translate “blessed”, more accurately means something like “happy”. Conventional church wisdom is more comfortable talking about the poor, the meek, and the peacemakers as “blessed”. We become a bit more uneasy when we think of them not as pious recipients of our largesse but as the people who, unlike most of us, are actually happy. As the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann once said right here at All Saints, “If you want to see authentic hope, look not to affluent suburbs but to the barrios of Buenos Aires.”

            If Jesus is right—if true happiness exists primarily among the marginalized—what hope is there for the rest of us? How do those of us who are relatively affluent and privileged find a place in this parade? Jesus’s Beatitudes could be seen as a prescription for renouncing the world. It was George’s genius to use them as a way into building solidarity across economic, racial, class, gender, and sexuality boundaries. George spent his life preaching prophetic good news to people whose relative affluence and privilege could easily have inoculated them from having to think about war, injustice, poverty, racism, and oppression. One of his many particular gifts was to accept everyone he came across as they were and, nevertheless, to call them into a deeper understanding and higher commitment in the service of whom Isaiah would proclaim good news and whom Jesus would call happy.

            George never fell into the trap of presuming to “speak truth to power”. Even when George directly addressed and confronted President Nixon, the Pentagon, Pasadena City Hall, or the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, he wasn’t really speaking truth to power. He was speaking truth with power, insisting on staying in relationship with those who resisted his vision, leading them not only by argument but more importantly by empathy and compassion to a new truth which all could embrace and celebrate together.

            It was my good fortune to work with George his last five years here at All Saints, but the trajectory of our relationship started much earlier and lasted long after his retirement. I first got to know George in the 1970s, working with him on issues like the ordination of women and the nuclear arms race. And I stayed connected to George long after he retired. He preached at my installation at the National Cathedral in Washington, and he delighted me when his call for the cathedral to renounce militarism prompted a dozen or so people to get up and leave in the middle of his sermon. I’m sure he would have chased them down and brought them back to talk it through if the decorum of the occasion hadn’t prevented it. 

            Jesus would remind us that abundant living has nothing to do with our privilege and everything to do with our openness to being instruments of God’s love and justice. If you saw George from a distance, you probably only know that he worked hard. If you saw him up close, you also knew that he played hard. George was a great phrase maker, and he often talked about people who had “gone to sleep on life”. George Regas never went to sleep on life, he was always awake to life in the way Isaiah and Jesus were. He knew that living into God’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth called for hard but joyous living. And those of us lucky enough to work with or for him came over time to know that, too.

            Right after George retired in 1995, Bishop Fred Borsch asked him to address the Los Angeles Diocesan Convention. George used that occasion to reflect on four decades of ministry here, in Tennessee, and New York, and he listed the myriad causes he had championed over time. At the end of his address, as he had described what it meant to work with others to proclaim God’s justice, peace, and love, all he finally could say was, “What a privilege. What a privilege.”

            There is so much to be pained and angry about right now: the war in Ukraine, the right wing SCOTUS draft opinion ending Roe versus Wade, assaults on voting rights and LGBT equality to name a few. I wish George were here not only to preach. I wish he were here to organize. But we know where he would stand, and he has left us with an extended interfaith community in which to engage, reflect, and act for the justice which Isaiah, Mohammed, and Jesus demand.

            I said at the outset that George Regas never preached a ten-minute sermon in his life. Apparently, neither have I. But one thing you learned sooner or later working with George is that sometimes it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. 

There will never be another George Regas. But my life and all our lives have been changed forever by loving and being loved by this extraordinary, complex, faithful, loving, and brilliant man. I hope I speak for all the great preachers gathered today by using George’s words to describe what it meant to walk this hard, beautiful road with him. What a privilege, George. What a privilege. Amen.