Homily: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [August 13, 2023] St. Stephen's, Santa Clarita

            You won’t be surprised to learn that someone my age now makes regular visits to physical therapy at Henry Mayo PT in Canyon Country. Nothing major—a shoulder injury that makes me contort like Quasimodo when I try to dress myself. But it is an interesting experience in that I now regularly engage with young men and women in their 20s, something I don’t otherwise do on a regular basis.

            Last Tuesday I overheard two of the PT folks talking about their favorite cartoons, and Sponge Bob was the easy winner. They looked over to me and asked what I thought of Sponge Bob. As a man without grandchildren, I had to confess that I am only slightly acquainted with the fellow. But I felt I needed to say something.

            “The cartoons that were part of my upbringing are the great Warner Brothers cartoons—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweetie, and—of course—the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.”

            Instead of affirming nods, all I got back was crickets. They looked at each other, then at me. “We don’t know who those are.”

            I am not exaggerating when I say that Warner Brothers cartoons form the basis of my early moral and philosophical education. There probably isn’t a dilemma in modern life that I don’t somehow relate to one of those characters. So you can easily understand that, when I first read the Gospel for this morning, I thought about the Roadrunner’s longtime nemesis, Wile E Coyote. This is not as blasphemous as it seems.

            If you remember the Road Runner cartoons, that speedy bird was always being pursued by a coyote who ordered any number of products with which to attack him (bombs, guns, catapults, trampolines, anvils) from the Acme company. And the Road Runner would not only elude his grasp. He would also regularly trick the coyote into running off the end of a cliff.

            Now here’s the connection to today. When running off the cliff, Wile E Coyote would continue making forward progress until he suddenly looked down. And after he looked down, he would look straight at us, and he would realize that he was running in thin air. And then he would plummet far below to the desert floor, landing with an almost imperceptible thud.

            In this morning’s Gospel, Peter acts very much as the coyote does:

Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” [Matthew 14: 22-33]

 

Everything is fine until Peter realizes that he’s trying to walk on water. And when he does, he sinks--just as Wile E. Coyote would do.

            I’ll get to Jesus’s response in a moment. But I need also to mention something else this Gospel puts me in mind of, and that is a memorable New Yorker article from 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s called “The Art of Failure”, and it concerns the way performers (athletes, musicians, actors, dancers) fail by overthinking things--what we call “choking”.  In the article, Gladwell makes a helpful distinction between choking and panicking:

Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. –Malcolm Gladwell, “The Art of Failure”, The New Yorker, August 13, 2000]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-art-of-failure#:~:text=Choking%20is%20about%20thinking%20too,Panic%20is%20reversion%20to%20instinct.

 

We choke when we overthink the task ahead of us. We panic when we don’t think at all. A pianist who has learned a Beethoven sonata chokes when she starts to think about every note she needs to play while performing the piece. A swimmer who drowns in three feet of water panics because he doesn’t think simply to stand up.

            When Wile E Coyote looks down, realizes he’s walking on air, and plummets to the desert floor, he is like an athlete or pianist choking. He fails because he overthinks. In the same way, when Peter walks on the water and notices what he’s doing, he begins to sink. Peter fails because he, too, lets his mind sabotage his body.

            It seems to me that today’s Gospel is one which, like Peter and the coyote, we often overthink. The most obvious detail of the story is Jesus ‘s walking on the water. Generations of readers and preachers become focused on this detail and ask themselves, “How did he do it?” We become obsessed with the mechanics of a miracle.

            But for me the heart of this story lies not in the walking on the water but in the reason Jesus does so in the first place. His companions are in a boat far from land and battered by the waves. He walks toward them in order to comfort them. And he says these powerful words: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

            This story isn’t about a magic trick. It’s about God’s response to us when we are in danger or despair. “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Like the disciples in the boat, you and I regularly find ourselves in situations beyond our control. God’s response to us in those moments is the same: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

            Peter’s attempt to duplicate Jesus’s feat of walking on water leads to his rescue by Jesus, and our Gospel story ends with these words:

Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” 

            Peter is an intriguing character, admirable in his enthusiasm, and almost always getting it wrong. His mistake this morning is similar to the problem of a performer choking: he overthinks things, he lets his mind get in the way of his actions. He second-guesses himself. Attempting to act as Jesus did may have been foolish, but it came from a good intention. But he failed because he allowed his intellect to get in the way of his body.

            In the same way, you and I often defeat ourselves before we start. We are driven by an impulse to do something bold or loving or compassionate, and then we begin to think of possible drawbacks and consequences. It’s impossible. We’ve never done it that way. We’ll look like fools. Better safe than sorry.

            The apostle Paul knew what he was talking about when he said to the Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake.” Christianity began as a Jewish movement, and Paul dared to open Christianity to the gentiles, to non-Jews and in the process showed how God’s love has no limits or boundaries. Some saw this as foolish: who wants a religion without entrance requirements? But over time this foolishness became wisdom and is the hallmark of our inclusive, dynamic, expansive faith in a God who loves and accepts us all no matter what.

            For a moment, Peter was willing to act like a fool—to try to walk on water, to do something courageous and unheard of. And then he began to think about it. He second-guessed himself. He allowed his mind to overcome his heart.

            The Jesus you and I encounter in word and sacrament is one who constantly calls out to us as he did to Peter and his friends: “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” With that kind of assurance, we should know we have nothing to fear. And yet we let the doubts creep in. It won’t work. It’s never been done. I’ll look like an idiot.

            Today’s Gospel story serves as a reminder of the two great truths of Christianity. Truth one: we are in the embrace of one who knows us, who loves us, and who is always there for us when things get too big or difficult to bear. “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” And truth two: because of that one’s continual presence, we are empowered to do similar acts of love, justice, and compassion ourselves. This is a story about us—about the permission we have been given to live and act like Jesus. We overthink things and come up with all kinds of reasons why we cannot live generous, open, compassionate lives. Who wants to look like a fool? Better to stay hunkered down in our corners than to reach out our hands in love.

            Countless opportunities to express generosity and kindness present themselves to us every day: at our workplaces, when we’re out and about, even and especially in our households. We let them pass by because we overthink the consequences of doing something out of the ordinary. We constrain ourselves and limit our possibilities.

Today’s Gospel shows us that there is always another way to live. “Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.” This morning, let’s each and all of us for once commit to stepping out in love and not looking down. Who knows how far we’ll get on the water or in the air? Amen.

 

 

Homily: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost [July 30, 2023] St. James, Newport Beach

 

            Every few days or so, my wife Kathy and I look at our horoscopes in the morning paper. We do this mostly for laughs because these days horoscopes have become like fortune cookies. They give anodyne life advice and don’t really say anything surprising. There’s no “You will meet a tall, dark stranger”, or “Be careful of a journey over water.”  More like, “Today is a good day to clean your sock drawer.”

            A few weeks back we were amused, then startled, to read a horoscope for one of us that said something like, “You will have difficulty today with an older relative.” We felt puzzled, then burst out laughing. We have no older relatives. We are each now the oldest person in both of our families.

            That realization was underscored last week at our yearly vacation with Kathy’s family in northern Michigan. When we first started going to this lake cottage in the 1970s, Kathy and I were the young couple on the verge of marriage. Fifty plus years later, we’re now the old-timers.  That’s true in pretty much every area of our lives. I realize now I’m often dealing with folks who never used a stick shift or a rotary phone.

            I begin with thoughts on time and change because I have long been intrigued by what Jesus says at the end of today’s gospel passage:

“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” [Matthew 13: 52]

            This statement comes at the tail end of a string of parables about the kingdom of God, which Jesus compares to a mustard seed, yeast, a treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, and a bounteous catch of fish. Each thing Jesus describes is both precious and, in its way, surprising.  And then he makes this puzzling remark: if you get what I’m saying in these parables, you’re like “the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”. What can this possibly mean?

            Help in answering this question comes in the form of a painting I’d like to look at briefly. (It’s printed on page 8 of  your bulletin along with today’s Gospel.) It’s a 1640 picture by the French artist Nicolas Poussin, “Landscape with Saint John on Patmos”, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Kathy and I lived in the Chicago area for many years when I was dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in nearby Evanston, and the Art Institute is one of our favorite places in that wonderful city. We always spend some time there before heading up to northern Michigan.

This year I was arrested by this painting, one I had never really noticed before. I must have stood and studied it for a half-hour. You may remember that St. John received his Revelation, the final book in the Bible, on the Greek island of Patmos. Poussin’s painting depicts the evangelist at work on his Gospel and Revelation in the midst of a highly symbolic landscape. As the accompanying text explains, 

In this painting, Saint John, one of the four Evangelists who wrote the Gospels of the New Testament, reclines beside his attribute, the eagle. He is here depicted as a powerful old man, presumably after retiring to the Greek island of Patmos to write his gospel and the book of Revelation at the end of his life. To suggest the vanished glory of the ancient world, Poussin carefully constructed an idealized setting for the saint, complete with an obelisk, a temple, and column fragments. Man-made and natural forms were adjusted according to principles of geometry and logic to convey the measured order of the scene. 

[https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5848/landscape-with-saint-john-on-patmos]

Although I found this picture compelling on its own terms when I stood in front of it, Jesus’s statement in today’s Gospel immediately came to mind: 

“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” [Matthew 13: 52]

Surrounded both by the beauty of the natural world and the markers of an older classical culture, Poussin depicts John the evangelist reaching into what is old and bringing about something absolutely new. It seems he can only give voice to his vision of the future by contemplating the artifacts of the past. In its own way this picture gives us both a theological and a personal truth. As Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel, 

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. [Matthew 5: 17-18]

Jesus’s teachings are both new and old. Yes, they are sometimes startling, but they are also continuous with all that has gone before. Just as John the evangelist brings his new revelation out of the matrix of a world now passing away, so Jesus fulfils what has gone before him. Christians have always stressed that we consider the whole Bible, both old and new testaments, to be the word of God. That’s why we have always rejected the idea that the Gospel somehow replaces the Law. We may be saved, finally, by grace, but that doesn’t mean we can weasel out of the Ten Commandments. The new may arise from the old, but it does not replace it.

And I think something much personally deeper is going on here as well. A follower of Jesus is “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”.  Just as Jesus does not reject what has come before him, so you and I need to see that our present arises out of our past. Our American penchant for what we call “reinventing ourselves” ignores the simple truth, often voiced by the great classicist Mary Beard: “The past is all we’ve got.” You are your history. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do something new. It does mean that your life has a logic and a trajectory, and that the present “you” is a product of all that has gone before in your life.

I’m never entirely sure why we want to beat up on our collective or personal pasts in the way we do. Today we smugly assume that we in 2023 are morally better than those who lived in 1823, 1523, or 23 BC. In the same way, we often dwell on our own personal pasts, and flagellate ourselves for things we did then that we naively think we wouldn’t do again today if we only had the chance. In today’s Gospel I hear Jesus telling us, in the language of the street, to “get over ourselves”. Who we are now is pretty much who we were then. The question is not, “how can I reinvent myself?” The question is, how can I take out of my treasure that which is new and that which is old? How can I weave a fabric of my life that makes peace with the past, looks with hope to the future, and lives with purpose and joy in the present?

A longtime priest friend of mine always ends every conversation with the words, “Be gentle with yourself.” He knows from experience. We continually beat ourselves up over the past—things we’ve done, things we should have done, mistakes we’ve made, feelings we’ve hurt. Be gentle with yourself. You think you’re smarter now than you were then, but chances are if you faced the same people or situations today you’d do exactly what you did years ago. The past may not quite be all we’ve got, but it’s a part of us that we cannot simply deny or try to forget. Make your peace with your past. Bring out of your treasure that which is new and that which is old. 

As in almost all sermons, you find the preacher here talking to himself. I’m now in what the novelist Richard Ford calls “the Permanent Period”—“an end to perpetual becoming”[The Lay of the Land, p.54]-- the time in life when you are pretty much who you’re going to be and things are what they are. In his parables this morning, Jesus reminds us of the preciousness of what is on offer to us in his life and teachings: they are like a mustard seed, yeast rising in bread, a treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, a bounteous catch of fish. If we get over ourselves and settle into the way we and the world are, things will really be OK. 

Look to the example of St. John on the island of Patmos. Make use of the gifts of your past to build the future you long for. Be like the householder who brings out of your treasure what is new and what is old. And, above all else, be gentle with yourself. Amen.

Homily: The Fourth Sunday in Lent [March 19, 2023] American Cathedral, Paris

             

            It is a great pleasure to be with you here in the cathedral this morning and to be reunited with my longtime friend and colleague Tim Safford. Tim and I did two tours of duty together—we both worked for the late, great George Regas at All Saints, Pasadena in the 1990s and then, in the following decade, served as rectors in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. My work has brought me into close contact with hundreds of clergy over the years, and you won’t be surprised to hear me say that Tim is at the very top of the list of priests whom I both love and admire. He is the real deal—prophetically visionary, pastorally authentic, passionate about the church and its mission-- and I am so glad he has brought his considerable skills and wisdom to you during this interim (and centennial) period in your common life.

Well, here we are together in Paris, surrounded by political chaos and mountains of trash. The Americans among us should at least feel at home amidst the chaos: everywhere you turn, it looks like January 6. The trash, though not part of anyone’s normal routine, serves as an apt epitome of the perceptual problems featured in today’s scripture readings. One of our Lenten antiphons asks that God “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless;* give me life in your ways.” You might say that having to make our collective and personal ways through all this garbage is very much like navigating all the bad ideas, perverse priorities, and toxic misinformation that wants to claim our attention. At least during these strikes I have an excuse for keeping my eyes squarely focused on trash. How am I to explain my priorities in all my otherwise distracted moments?

             We have two readings this morning, all of them centered on the idea of true perception and the lack of it. Searching for a new king, Samuel naturally looks first to the bigger, older brothers rather than to the young David.  [The Letter to the Ephesians reminds us, “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light-- for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” [Ephesians 5:8] ] In the seemingly endless Gospel reading for today [John 9: 1-41] Jesus heals a man blind from birth, and this miracle provokes a storm of moral and spiritual misperceiving ignorance in the minds and hearts of his detractors. How, these scriptures ask, do we turn our attention from the false to the true? In a world of beautiful distractions, how do we focus on what really matters?

            Today’s Gospel reading (Don’t worry—I’m not going to reread the whole thing!) ends with this interchange between Jesus and the Pharisees:

Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.’ [John 9: 39-41]

 

The very length of this morning’s Gospel makes it hard to take in the story all at once, but essentially it’s John’s highly ironic account of Jesus giving sight to a blind man as that action becomes the occasion of the Pharisees becoming morally and spiritually clueless themselves. The blind man knows his limitations. The Pharisees are blissfully unaware of their own. For John, Jesus is “the light of the world”, and the tragic part of his story centers on the increasing inability of the religious and secular authorities to perceive the truth he represents. The Pharisees and the Romans think they understand everything. But, like Samuel in the David story, they judge with conventional criteria; they do not see as God sees. They are trapped in their own self-congratulatory narrative. They are not open to what God is doing now in the world around them.

I once attended a retreat where the leader announced, as the theme of his addresses, the following proposition: “We become what we attend to.” He wasn’t talking about today’s readings, but what he said seems connected to what we’re thinking about together this morning. “We become what we attend to.” If we attend solely to the junk and glitter and glitz of our 21st century developed-world, then over time that is what we become. As Pope Francis said in an early encyclical, “technological society has succeeded in multiplying occasions of pleasure, yet has found it very difficult to engender joy”. The attractive gadgets that claim our attention keep us addicted and slightly depressed. If we shift our attention to Jesus, we can become both joyous and free.  That is because if we keep our eyes on Jesus, we might just over time become like him. 

When Christian people are baptized, one of the promises we make is that we will “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.” This is essentially a promise to go to church—to hear the Bible stories read, to participate in the Eucharist on some kind of regular basis. We’ve made this a part of our agreement with each other principally because if we are all to become more like Jesus we will need each other’s help to get there. That is what going to church is about: hearing the story of Jesus and then coming together around his table in a way that gently but forcefully reminds us of what really matters. “We become what we attend to.” 

The goal of the Christian life is to become, over time, like Jesus. For us, Jesus represents the authentic good life that the things we falsely gaze at promise but never deliver. Jesus is just and loving and compassionate. He cares about the poor. He is a healer. His table fellowship gathers everyone—even the outcast and the disreputable—into a community of wholeness and blessing and love. Jesus lives an abundant life in the midst of scarcity. He knows who he is, what he needs, and how to live creatively with other people in God’s world. What we want to be, when we’re honest with ourselves, is like him—joyously alive in the life God offers and intends for us all. And the best way to be like Jesus is to direct our attention toward him—as he is revealed in the Word (our scriptures) and in the sacrament (the bread and wine of communion), and in our life together.  Looking at and listening to Jesus are lifelong endeavors.  Over time, they make us into our authentic selves, the people God created us to be. 

The Pharisees in today’s story are blind, not only because they don’t see Jesus. The Pharisees are blind because they don’t see the man Jesus heals. This story is true on many levels, but at least one of them has to do with the paradox that systems which claim to see us don’t, while the One those systems claim to honor actually does. Jesus sees the man born blind because God sees him. The Pharisees—and read here the representatives of any political, religious, or economic system that wears an otherwise friendly face—only see that man’s plight as proof of their own self-righteousness.

            Jesus sees, knows, and loves the man born blind. And God sees, knows, and loves you. Not as you think you need to present yourself, but as you really are—with all your gifts and talents, with all your failings and flaws. Lent—the season we observe now—is our opportunity to examine ourselves in all our complex and challenging fullness. It is a time to know, accept, and love ourselves as Jesus does. It is a time to get ready to take in the wonder of Easter, our great celebration of God’s validation of Jesus, and through Jesus, of us.

Having lived as long as I have in the church and world, I know that you and I will always find it difficult to turn our eyes away from the shallow and pointless, and that we will always need the help of God and each other to center our attention on what is true and valuable in life.  The way we do that is to keep our eyes on the one who came into the world that we all might be open to God and each other in the here and now. 

Jesus healed the man born blind because he both saw and valued him. We turn our attention to Jesus in part because it is Jesus—not the world’s systems of power, prestige, or influence—who sees and values us. The message of Jesus—that you matter, that your life has value, that your story has meaning—this message will always be revolutionary and countercultural. The world’s systems pretend to be the source of all value. Jesus knew otherwise. He knew that the man born blind was worth everything to God, and that you are, too.

As we walk together toward Easter, let us try to stop and simply attend to the one who offers us true and abundant life both here and now. Let us hear that one remind us of the love on offer and the justice for which all of us are called to stand. Like the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, we will always be drawn to false explanations of how the world works. But like the man healed by Jesus, we will, over time, be given grace to become open to the beauty and wonder of ourselves, each other, and the world.  For God’s ongoing gift to us of Jesus, for Jesus’s example of what it means to be human on God’s terms, and for grace to so point our gaze in his direction that we become the one we attend to, let us proceed in this meal together to pray and give thanks. Amen.