Homily: St. James [July 21, 2024] St. James, Newport Beach

            Today’s Gospel [Matthew 20: 20-28] and its tale of how the mother of James and John went to Jesus on their behalf, reminds me of the many times, during my years as a school teacher and principal, when a parent would come to me asking a special favor for their child. True, no one ever came to me demanding that their kid sit next to Jesus in his kingdom, but some of those special requests came close: a different, more popular science teacher; looking the other way after an outrageous offence; changing a grade for a better chance at a college admission. Being a parent myself I understood the impulse driving the desire for special treatment. But like all administrators everywhere, I always fell back on the tired bureaucrat’s response: “If I do it for you, I’ll have to do it for everybody.” They never found that any more convincing than I did.

            Luckily for us, Jesus in today’s Gospel is more creative than I was. When the mother of James, the first martyr among the twelve apostles and the patron saint of this parish, makes her exceptionalistic request, Jesus does not fall back on school administrator excuses. Instead, he asks James and his brother John, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” They say they are. But with his surprising reply, Jesus stops them in their tracks:

“You will indeed drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”

            We need a little context here. Our gospel reading lopped off some introductory verses about Jesus deciding now to leave his home up north in Galilee and head straight south for Jerusalem. James, John, and his mother apparently think that the trip to the capital city will be a triumphant procession to glory, and they want to sit at the right and the left of Jesus so they can bask in all the applause. Jesus, however, knows that this journey is about something else: he is bringing his healing work and his message of love and justice to the heart of Israel’s life in what will become a direct confrontation with imperial power. This is not going to look or feel like the Tournament of Roses.

            If you remember last week’s Gospel, we heard the story of Herod’s brutal execution of John the Baptist. In today’s reading from Acts, we hear the account of that same Herod ordering the murder of the apostle James by the sword. It turns out that Jesus was right: James did drink from the same cup as Jesus. When love comes up against power, power’s first response is always to murder love. It happened to Jesus. It happened to James. It has happened to saints and martyrs around the world and down through time. James learned the hard way that following Jesus is not dressing for success. It is standing for something that our power structures will always find threatening and will seek to destroy.

            And that is why Jesus concludes today’s teaching with these words to James and John and their companions:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave.

 

Caesar and Herod operate on the power principle, but it won’t be that way in the community gathered around Jesus. The Son of Man “came not to be served but to serve”. It turns out that our special treatment isn’t special privilege. Our surprising reward is a call to service.

I have thought a lot about this Gospel and the story of James this week. Kathy and I are just returned from two weeks in the Midwest, spending time with family and friends. Because we were busy doing basic vacation things we didn’t have time to follow any of the political news stories that have rolled out over the summer. As I thought a lot about this Gospel and very little about social media or cable news, I began better to understand James, his mother, and myself. As this election year shows, we can all be caught up in the world’s constant struggle for power and prestige. But when we turn from the struggle and toward Jesus, we are drawn to a vision of something real and true. Life is not about the things we usually chase and value. Life is about the kind of love, justice, and compassion which Jesus both preaches and embodies.

It is easy upon hearing this Gospel to beat up on James, John, and their mother. What is harder is to look at them and see ourselves. We often value the reward more than the work that earns it. I remember hearing an interview with the late actress Carrie Fisher. She was talking about going to the gym. The reporter asked her if she liked exercise. “No,” she replied. “I like the feeling of having worked out.” That answer could serve as the motto for much of contemporary life. We want to get the result without having to pay the price of it.

Let’s remember, though, that the story of James the Great did not stop here. We wouldn’t be celebrating this apostle, and you wouldn’t have named your church after him, if he had just been a guy on an ego trip. Though we do not know a lot about his life after this and in the earliest Christian community, we do know that he died as Jesus did at the hands of state violence. He clearly took in the message that we hear Jesus giving to all the twelve:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

 

As Jesus has it, we his followers account to a higher set of standards. One of the things you learn studying church history is the way in which Christianity at its best has managed to be what we call today “countercultural”. Often we bless the culture we inhabit uncritically. But sometimes we rise above that. When he describes the common run of humanity, Jesus here uses the word ἐθνῶν which is variously translated “gentiles”, “nations”, “pagans”.  Our culture values ego and rewards performance. Those gathered with and around Jesus nurture more interior virtues and bask not in his fame but in his presence. And we show that we value those things by living lives of service and, sometimes, real costly sacrifice. Just ask James.

When I look closely at James, John, and their mother I am looking in a mirror. As in Carrie Fisher’s example, I want the reputation of having done the thing rather than the doing of the thing itself. I want to be seen as loving, just, generous, and compassionate and am less interested in doing the actual work that earns the reputation. This doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It just means that I’m human. 

But, luckily for me and I trust also for you, the story doesn’t stop there. God does not simply leave us to the mercy of the problems of human selfishness. For some mysterious reason that I cannot always understand, God has brought you and me into this community that we share with Jesus, with James and John, with all the saints and sinners who have shared this table with us over time, and today, here and now, with each other. Perhaps God’s greatest gift to us is that we are not left to face the dilemmas of being human on our own. We have been placed in and given a community in which to work it all out—a thing called the church which can be as frail and damaged as any human institution, but can also be the vehicle that brings us into deeper self-awareness and compassion. 

Today is the Sunday on which St. James parish celebrates the life and witness of St. James the apostle and martyr. He is your patron saint for a good reason. James followed Jesus faithfully, but it took him a while to get what Jesus was really about. I’ve been doing this priestly church work for almost fifty years, and I’m still trying to get it. All of us, together, have been brought into this gracious space and have been given each other as companions to help us become the people God made us to be. It’s not always easy following Jesus. It’s often a bumpy road, and learning hard truths about yourself in community doesn’t always feel good. But over a lifetime walking this road with Jesus and each other leads us to a new and gracious place we wouldn’t have gotten to simply on our own. Over time—and sometimes against our wishes--God makes over us in the image of Jesus. We too become ones who came not to be served but to serve. 

So come to the table now with Jesus, with James, with each other and give thanks for the God who sees us, knows us, loves us. God’s love calls us into new and blessed life in service of a world which still has things mostly upside down and usually backwards. It is only by following Jesus together that we discover, finally, who we really are. Amen.

 

Homily: The Fourth Sunday in Lent [March 10, 2024] St. James, Newport Beach

            When I retired eight years ago, the only thing I promised myself was that I would never again preach on the Sunday we spring forward to Daylight Saving Time. I didn’t know Cindy then, and I didn’t reckon with her persuasiveness.     

Two of today’s scripture readings feature snakes: Moses lifting up a serpent in the wilderness as a divine cure for snakebite, and Jesus’s comparing his own lifting up on the cross to that earlier exaltation of a snake. Every time I come across a snake in scripture, I’m drawn back to the day, in 1982, when I began my job as vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu. The church is situated on a hillside, across the PCH from Paradise Cove. As I got out of my car I was greeted by the Junior Warden, who was carrying a shovel. He greeted me with a hearty, “Good morning, father!” and then proceeded to decapitate a gigantic rattlesnake that I was just about to step on. 

            I am a snakeophobe. (The Latin term is ophidiophobia.) But over the course of my years in Malibu I made a kind of peace with them. It turned out we had a huge den of rattlers on the hillside above us, but they did a really good job of keeping the rodent population down. And every so often I would see king snakes gliding around, and they were very good at controlling the rattlers. I learned to make my way among them, if not with ease, then at least with confidence and some real gratitude.

We’re gathered this morning on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, a day also called “Refreshment Sunday” in the U.S. and “Mothering Sunday” in the UK. This Sunday marks a kind of pause in the Lenten action. We often read the story of Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand today, and our collect refers to Jesus as the bread which “came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world”. But instead of bread today, our readings give us a couple of snakes. Go figure.

Let’s look at each of our three readings briefly.

The Old Testament reading, from the Book of Numbers [Numbers 21: 4-9], recounts a moment part way in the Israelites’ exodus journey from Egypt toward the promised land. The people are tired and hungry, and they constantly complain. The always unpredictable Old Testament God gets so annoyed that he sends poisonous snakes to bite the people. When they repent, God tells Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole so that those bitten by a snake may look on the bronze one and live.

There’s not a lot to say about this, except to note that the ancient symbol of medicine—the caduceus or staff of Asclepius--still in use today: two snakes coiled around a staff or pole. What it seems to suggest is that the malady we suffer contains within it the cure. The cure for snakebite lies within the bite itself. The remedy for the thing we fear is to look directly into the thing we are afraid of. It sounds a bit New-Agey, but there it is.

But Jesus clearly has something like that in mind when he compares himself, in the Gospel [John 3:14-21] to Moses’s bronze snake in the sky: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The lifting up that Jesus foretells is a crucifixion, not an excursion up into the heavens to bring back divine advice. My friend Andrew McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, describes the notion, current in biblical times, of a sage “as a sort of pedagogue who will share interesting theological tidbits and diverting signs from the upper realm.” 

As McGowan points out, what Jesus says in today’s Gospel differs radically from the conventional pieties about divine figures:

Yet his version of being lifted up also amounts to a critique of the conventional ideas about heavenly beings or revealers ascending and descending calmly and benignly with their stores of divine knowledge.  [“Jesus Lifted Up”, abmgc@substack.com, March 5, 2024]

            And that is why, a few verses later, Jesus can say the oft-quoted saying, familiar to old time Episcopalians from the “comfortable words” of the old prayer book to those of us baseball fans who have to endure it written on signs held up behind home plate. John, 3:15: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This is the kind of exaltation Jesus is talking about, an exaltation in service of divine love and forgiveness. Christianity is not about tidbits of divine wisdom. It is about this life-giving encounter between God and us. God lifts up Jesus as an act of love for us. Our response, in that same spirit of love and forgiveness, is to extend compassion, mercy, and grace to others.

            And this brings us to what is, for me, the most important reading in our service this morning: the passage [Ephesians 2: 1-10] from the Letter to the Ephesians. Now I have to admit that Ephesians is perhaps my favorite book in the Bible. It was probably written not by Paul but by a next generation follower. And it wrestles with the reality of what it means for the early church to be made up of two groups who were absolutely anathema to each other: gentiles and Jews. In today’s passage he engages the implications of living together in radical difference for a real, flesh and blood, human community:

 

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. . . But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. . .  For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

            Now it’s always a bit hard to follow these New Testament arguments; their style can be a bit confusing. But what the writer says here is supremely important for us individuals, as citizens, as church. None of us is here by right. We were brought here by the same divine action that lifted up the serpent in the wilderness and Jesus on the cross. As Jesus says, : “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It is only because of God’s generosity that you and I have any status here at all. Our claim to importance rests not on our own doing but on our being recipients of God’s forgiving, empowering, and liberating love.

            The Letter to the Ephesians goes on to claim in later chapters that the existence of a church made up of Jews and gentiles is in itself a proof of God’s greatness. Who could have imagined such a thing? God has brought two human groups who cannot stand each other and put them together in one shared community. A church made up of Jews and gentiles is as startling as would be a church made up of Israelis and Palestinians, of MAGA Republicans and members of ANTIFA, as Trojans and Bruins. What we need to see through the antique reasoning of Paul or his follower is that all of us, together, are recipients of God’s love and grace. The truest thing about us is that we are forgiven, accepted, and loved. All other claims to status are ultimately false. As my late friend, teacher, and lifelong mentor Harvey Guthrie used to say, “We’re all on cosmic relief.”

            You here at St. James have lived through ecclesiastical controversy and come out on the other side. We all have lived through Super Tuesday and now will endure another eight months of bitter squabble until November’s general election. In this Lenten and prolonged campaign season, perhaps the best thing we followers of Jesus can do is to remember the words from John and Ephesians as we make our ways through the dissension and contention of our shared, civic life. : “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Snakes are slithering all around us, whether we’re in Malibu, Newport Beach, or Washington, D.C. When surrounded by these malign serpents, let’s keep our eyes on the one lifted by Moses and Jesus on the cross. These, and no other nostrums, are the antidotes we need.

            “We’re all on cosmic relief.” If God can make a church out of Jews and gentiles, God can make a society out of left, right, rich, poor. As Lent rolls on into Holy Week and Easter, let us remind ourselves and the world of God’s generosity, our dependence on it, and the divine love that sustains us all. Amen. 

Homily: The First Sunday in Lent [February 18, 2024] All Saints, Pasadena

            I left the All Saints staff 23 years ago, so for the vast majority of you who have no clue as to who I am, let me introduce myself. I’m Gary Hall, and I served here for 11 years, from 1990 to 2001, first with George and then with Ed. I left then and served in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan and Washington. Kathy and I moved back here when I retired in 2016. When I got the job in Washington, Susan Russell described me to a reporter in her pithy way as the “Joe Biden of the Episcopal Church”. Joe Biden was younger then than I am now and went on to greater things. I moved back to the Valley. These days, it’s probably more accurate to describe me as the Ben Matlock of the Episcopal Church. I’m old. I’m grumpy. I’ve lost a couple of steps. But that won’t stop me from telling you what I think.

            I’ve been doing this priestly work for close to 50 years now, and maybe because it’s the beginning of Lent I’ve begun to reflect on what got me into this racket in the first place. I did not grow up in the church. Both my parents left their churches when they moved to Hollywood, so my first experience of church was through my college participation in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements. The 1960s were a complicated time—polarized and contentious as now, but also characterized by an exuberantly hopeful spirit. Many of us did think then that we could make a better world.

            If I could go back now and tell my 20-year-old self the state of things in America and the world today he would be horrified by the resurgence of racism, sexism, and xenophobia long dormant in our culture. Who could have thought then that 21^st century would bring an epic of mass shootings, the repeal of voting rights and the basic rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, and the real possibility of repressive, dictatorial leadership in the United States? The death of Alexei Navalny this week at age 47 in a Russian penal colony makes it hard to look at the current state of affairs with anything like optimism.

            This is kind of a bummer way to start a sermon, but it is the beginning of Lent, which my 1968 self might have described as a 40-day bad trip. Our Gospel this morning [Mark 1: 9-15] does not mince words. It pushes us right out into the flow of the action:

And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. [Mark 1: 12-13]

            For centuries, we Christians have patterned this 40-day period before Easter as a reenactment of Jesus’s 40-days’ temptation in the wilderness. Mark’s version of this story is stark in its outline and sparing in details. 

            We’re not really sure what Jesus did in those 40 days, but for me the important thing about today’s Gospel is what he does when he comes out of them.

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

In Mark’s stark view, Jesus comes on the scene and goes right into the wilderness. He emerges from his desert experience ready to take it to the streets. His message: “The kingdom of God has come near.” Let’s not be Romantic about conditions then or now. Jesus lived, healed, and taught in a time of social and personal suffering and political repression. And yet, as Mitch McConnell might say, he persisted. Looking around him, Jesus could not possibly have been optimistic. But he was hopeful. And there’s a difference.

For some reason right now I’m reading a lot of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate Irish poet who died in 2013. Like Jesus and like us, Heaney lived through a time of violence and struggle, especially the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was once asked if he was optimistic about things. He replied that he was not optimistic, but he was hopeful. As he now famously said,

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for. 

            This tension between optimism and hope is at the core of what this Lent-Easter process is all about. We prepare ourselves for Easter by reminding ourselves of the reality of human sin in all its forms. We Americans tend to think of sin as something personal, but for Christians sin has always had a range of expressions. It is cosmic. It is social. It is institutional. And yes, it is personal, but we cannot easily untangle our individual actions from the larger contexts in which we live and are ensnared. Try as we might to be virtuous, we are enmeshed in sin. If you don’t think so, take a minute and consider the clothes you’re wearing or how you got here this morning. Something or someone was violated in the process. Unless you eat fallen fruit and wear rope belts, none of us has absolutely clean hands.

            So much for optimism. And yet: 

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for. 

            Look as I might want to at the world around me and throw up my hands in despair, the Gospel always brings me around to the example of Jesus, who after his 40-day wilderness experience immediately came forth to proclaim not despair but Good News: “The Kingdom of God has come near.” We do not observe Lent as a time of mindless self-flagellation. It is not a 40-day bad trip. We observe Lent as a time of preparation for Easter. Lent is not about itself. It is about Easter, and Easter is about hope.

            Early on in my time here, George Regas brought Desmond Tutu to All Saints to celebrate the end of apartheid in South Africa. His visit then reminded me of an earlier time when Tutu had been on the Today Show, and he was asked if he was afraid of death.

            “There are things worse than death,” Tutu said.

            The host was incredulous. “What on earth could be worse than death?”

            Tutu replied, “If I got up some morning and said to myself, ‘You know, Desmond, apartheid isn’t so bad.’ Thatwould be worse than death.”

            What Tutu knew is what you and I will come to know during this 40-day Lenten journey together with Jesus through death and the cross to life through resurrection. Alexei Navalny knew what Desmond Tutu knew, and they both knew what Jesus knew and you and I are continually called to learn. Hope is “rooted in the conviction that there is good worth fighting for”. Accommodating ourselves to oppression in all its forms is worse than death.

            When I heard about Navalny’s death early Friday morning, I was shocked and saddened, but I was not surprised. Navalny was a prophet, and as my late friend Harvey Guthrie used to say, prophets show us how things are. The church itself is a prophetic community: at its best, it shows the world how things are, that there is a way to live through generosity, compassion, and respect. The strong men who pretend to power by means of repression and hate will not have the last word. 

            “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand.” As we contemplate the realities of life in 2024, we do so not with optimism but with hope. There is a good worth working for. We see that good in the lives of those who work to resist oppression and violence. We see that good in the one who goes to the cross because there are things worth than death. We see that good in the way we respond to God’s call to work together to build the world that naïve optimists thought would naturally come along with the march of science and reason.

            We face enormous challenges. Evil and oppression will not go away simply because we want them to. Our emergence from Lent at Easter will be meaningless unless it is marked by our renewed commitment to hope, our willingness to give ourselves to the things worth working for. That means: we will put our lives on the line in service of God’s vision of peace, justice, compassion, and love. God’s work in the world is only done through us. We must be God’s agents of liberation and change in a broken world.

            The events of this year—not only our elections, but also the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the assaults on rights, the continuing depredation of the planet—these events can only be addressed by hopeful people ready to take them on. Lent is upon us, but Easter is coming. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. A suffering world needs the witness of those who know that there are things worse than death and a good worth working for. That is why God has given us Jesus and each other. Our task, as his companions, is to take up his struggle with gratitude, with joy, and, yes, with hope. Amen.

Homily: The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [January 28, 2024] St. James, Newport Beach

            I haven’t been near a microphone around here since the events of last November—the Diocesan Convention at which St. James’s parish status was approved, and the following Sunday when the vestry was elected and Cindy was called as your rector—so before I do anything officially preachy I’d like simply to say how happy I was to be part of the process that led to all that and how much I love, admire, and respect you and your rector. Her perseverance and leadership have been extraordinary. If Cindy hadn’t been here, St. James never would not have survived the onslaught it received, and this place would be a Shake Shack right now. Congratulations all around.

In August of 1973 I went east from Los Angeles so I could start seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent the few weeks before the start of school getting to know the other new students wandering around.

One of these was a Nigerian man named Joseph Omonije whom I soon befriended. He was reputed to be a tribal king back in his homeland.  I soon found this rumor not so hard to believe.

            One day after the start of school, I went to the Harvard Coop and bought a fancy binder for a project I was doing.  As I walked back onto the campus, Joseph saw and stopped me.

            “Hey! Where did you get that?”

            “Down in the Square at the Coop.”

            “You go down there now and get me one too!”

            Without even thinking about it, I turned right around and headed back down Brattle Street towards Harvard Square. About halfway there, I stopped and said to myself, “What am I doing? He’s not a king; he’s a student like me. Let him get his own fancy binder.” But not, of course, in those precise words.

            This encounter with Joseph taught me something about authority. Whatever else he had, Joseph Omonije had authority. When he spoke, you had to take him very seriously. Whether he had a claim on you was another matter.

 

            As we hear in today’s Gospel, Jesus had  authority. He preached and taught in a way that was surefooted and authentic. In our Gospel for this morning, we are told that the people at Capernaum “were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” [Mark 1.22]  In the Judaism of Jesus’s day, the supreme religious authority was vested in the Torah, the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible.  The scribes were a class of Bible experts who would study the scriptures, render opinions, and resolve disputes about how to interpret Jewish law.  When the crowd at Capernaum says that Jesus does not teach like the scribes, what they mean is that he does not ground his teaching in a claim of professional expertise or an appeal to someone else.  He teaches as one who knows what he’s doing, with authority.  He knows how to tell you something in a way that you will be sure to take it in. And he tells you truth that he knows personally, not that he heard from someone else. 

            According both to Mark and the crowd, Jesus has “authority”.  The Greek word that we translate “authority” is exousia, and exousia (authority) is always contrasted in the New Testament with another Greek word, dunamis, which means “power”.  In the Gospel stories of Jesus, we are told that he has authority, meaning that he speaks and teaches with an inner sense of the right to do so. In the Bible’s understanding, authority comes from within.  It is an orientation toward what one is doing, a sense that one is entitled and privileged to do it.  Jesus teaches as one with authority, not like the scribes.  He does not talk or sound like someone who has spent his entire life in the library.  He talks about God not with textual evidence and citations but from a living inner experience.

            Jesus teaches with authority, with exousia.  What he does not teach with is that other word, dunamis or power.  Dunamis is the word from which we get the word “dynamite”, and it has less to do with inner confidence than it does with the ability to compel somebody to do something.  If I teach with authority, you listen because I’ve convinced you I know what I’m talking about.  If I teach with power, you listen because I’m holding a stick of dynamite to your head.  Bad teachers teach holding the grade book in one hand, threatening students with their power. In the New Testament, power is a military word, authority a spiritual one.  Caesar acts with dunamis, with power.  Jesus acts with exousia, with authority.

            One of the problems with being a Christian is that we have received this authoritative teaching of Jesus all wrapped up in a system of ecclesiastical power.  It is perhaps only one of the ironies of the Jesus movement that what began as a critique of power (the state power of Caesar, the religious power of the scribes) became, for centuries, embodied in a world-historical power-projecting institution.  When Christianity moved from an outsider movement to the official religion of Western culture, it became hopelessly enmeshed in questions of power.  Look, for example, at the title Cindy now carries as the presiding priest of this parish.  “Rector” comes from the Latin word, rex:  king, ruler, power-wielder. (We’re all delighted she has this title, and in my time I had it too. And we’re delighted that she has the wisdom to understand the true source of her authority. But we should remember that much in the church’s governance is a vestige of the days when we thought of ourselves in worldly terms.)  The Jesus we meet in the scriptures is not interested in power.  He lets Caesar and Herod argue about that.  The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is interested in authority.

            And it is the authority, not the power, of Jesus that causes the crowds to follow him.  In today’s Gospel he casts out a demon.  In other stories he heals people, curing lepers and paralytics and restoring sight to the blind.  Jesus can do these things not because he has a certificate from an institution telling him he can.  He does these things because of his own internal connection to and grounding in a relationship with God.  He does not force or compel people to be well.  He draws them toward wellness because of the depth and quality of his inner life made visible in his outward actions.

            Back in my teaching days I once tried to explain to my students the difference between “moral” and “moralistic”.  What I finally came up with was this:  “moral” people say, “I ought”.  “Moralistic” people say, “thou shalt”.  A truly moral person is concerned with his or her ethical obligation in a particular situation.  A moralistic person wants to tell you what you should do.  It is Christianity’s tragedy that we have often confused the two:  over time, we’ve behaved less as a moral movement and more as a moralistic institution. Jesus taught not as one with moralistic power—the ability to compel other people’s assent—but as one with moral authority. He openly lived the Gospel he proclaimed from within.  He drew other people into the expanding circle of his enfolding love.

            There are, for me, two implications for us in all this.  One has to do with our shared, Christian community stance toward the world.  The other has to do with how we, as individual people appropriate God’s authority in our lives.

            As to the first: as a community, the church is called to be moral, not moralistic.  We are called to exercise authority, exousia, not power, dunamis. If we think we are still a world-historical power-projecting institution, we are kidding ourselves. There is lots of bad news in the decline in church membership and attendance across the globe these days, but hidden in all that loss is at least one gleaming nugget of good news.  We are no longer the official religion of the western world.  Therefore, we are free to live again as the church lived before Constantine.  We can become, again, the Jesus movement, a group of fragile, faithful women, children, and men called into new life in the fellowship of Jesus and his table.  As a body, we are now free from the burden of telling other people what to think.  We can turn to the much more energizing and illuminating task of standing for what we believe:  justice, compassion, inclusivity, love.  

            Freedom from having to live from power is our greatest gift as a people.  As individuals, there is also an implication in the shift from power to authority, and living into it starts with seizing an insight in Thomas Merton’s book New Seeds of Contemplation:

Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 30)

 

            You are who you were created to be. When you speak and act out of your authentic self, you do so with authority. Jesus had it, and so can you. Live your life not with power but with authority, with joy and generosity and compassion and hope.  Resist the impulse to tell other people how to live, what to think, or to go get them fancy binders at the Coop. Live from your authentic self, out of what you know to be true.  If we all did that, we’d be just like Jesus.  And everyone around us would be astounded.  Amen.

 

 

Foreward to "Night Owl Prayers" by Rob Lee [January 4, 2024]

            So much of life happens at night.

            We Christians who have inherited the great traditions of the Protestant Reformation have also internalized some unfortunate habits of thought. The Reformers thought of God as light, and they routinely pictured growing knowledge of God as illumination, being filled with light. In our hymns, sermons, and prayers night and darkness became synonymous with sin and death. Our tradition proposed that the life-giving time for work and purpose was the day.

            In the wider and longer Christian tradition there have been other ways of figuring our encounter with God. For earlier theologians and mystics, God was perhaps most clearly to be found in the dark, in the mystery of human suffering and struggle. One of the constant modes of talking about God has been the apophatic way—describing God negatively by what we cannot say. 

“All I know is a door into the dark.” That is how poet Seamus Heaney begins “The Forge”, a poem overtly about a blacksmith but more deeply about the process of self-discovery and making art. The sparks that fly off the anvil are only visible to us because they emerge from near-total darkness. Like the theologians and mystics who preceded him, Heaney spent a lot of time in the dark and emerged with a compelling vision of life and its possibilities.

Luckily for us, Rob Lee has spent a lot of time there, too. Uniquely for a preacher and writer, Rob’s “night job” has allowed him time to pursue his ministerial and scholarly vocations during the day. But he has been keenly observant during those hours, and the result is the gem-like prayers on offer in this prayerbook for night owls. He has seen life in all its nighttime manifestations, and his empathic imagination has allowed him to enter into the hearts and minds of those who, in the words of my church’s prayer book, “work or watch or weep” at night. The result is a collection of prayers which at once give voice to our own nighttime needs and open us up to what other people are going through as well. These prayers both speak for us and speak for others to us.

I recently had the opportunity to see a museum exhibit which put two contrasting Renaissance paintings in the same room. One pictured a saint receiving divine illumination from the sun. The other showed a philosopher looking intently into the dark. The spiritual life is like that. There is not only one way to encounter the divine. So the Reformers weren’t wrong: God is light. But God is something else, too. Sometimes the light can overwhelm the things we are trying to see. The mystics weren’t wrong, either: God is unknowable, and is often revealed in what we cannot (or would not) take in. 

Of all the thoughtful, prayerful people I know, Rob Lee is uniquely qualified to conceive and write a book like this. His life and ministry have led him into engagement with a range of people many of us in ministry only read and hear about. Rob is at once theologically learned, pastorally sensitive, and committed to an inclusive vision of God’s liberating justice. The prayers on offer here reflect his personal authenticity and active compassion. Using them in the spirit in which they are given will help each of us grow more fully into what Thomas Merton called our “authentic selves”.

“All I know is a door into the dark.” Rob Lee’s prayers are little doorways into the dark of a night where both God and human need are revealed. They are keenly observed, compassionately expressed, and artfully written. This book is a gift from one who lives and works in that time of night of which most of us are unaware. God is up to something at night and up to something in this beautiful book. Receive it as the gift it is, and use it as your own doorway into the ways in which God is working in the nights and days of your life. As we faithfully persevere in praying Rob’s prayers you, I, and the world will be healed.

Homily: The Third Sunday of Advent [December 17, 2023] Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City

I am so grateful to Bob Dannals for extending the invitation to be with you this morning. My name is Gary Hall, and I am a retired priest who can’t seem to stop working. I served in my time parish rector, seminary professor and dean, and finally Dean of Washington National Cathedral. My wife Kathy and I live in my home town of Los Angeles now, and so I deeply appreciate Judi Counts’ yearly invitation to spend December as priest in residence at the House of the Redeemer five blocks north of here on 95th St, a few doors east of Fifth Avenue. If you don’t know the House of the Redeemer, check it out. We offer services at 8 am and 5:30 pm five days a week, and also serve as a retreat house and conference center. The place is a gem, and I’m proud to be associated with it. Please come to one of our services or check us out online.

I had a kind of a shock a few days ago. Upon coming out of a room into a hallway, I saw an open door with a frail looking old man looking back at me. I paused to let him exit his door first, but he didn’t move. It took me a while to realize that I was looking not at another door but at a mirror. The frail old man I saw was, in fact, me.

While I still tend to imagine myself as a hearty thirty-five year-old, it took an encounter with a big mirror to show me how I really am. Mirrors often lie to us, but they can also tell us the truth. Artists and prophets do the same.

One day last week, Kathy and I took the train to New Canaan, Connecticut to visit the architect Philip Johnson’s famous glass house. I had seen pictures of this house for years, but it wasn’t until we were standing in it that I understood the place’s true magic. It’s a small house, built of glass, surrounded by 50 acres of landscape. Like the jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the house organizes and gives shape to the world

around it. The landscape reveals itself to you because of the way the house helps you see it.

This is, of course, how art functions. It teaches us to see. In the same way, this is how biblical prophecy functions. My late friend and lifelong mentor Harvey Guthrie was a priest and Old Testament scholar. In his seminary lectures about prophets, he was careful to disabuse us students of our preconceptions. Conservative Christians think prophets predict the future. Progressive Christians think they “speak truth to power”. In Harvey’s way of thinking, they do neither. Instead, in his words

[One is a] prophet not in the sense that he calls us to reform or exhorts us to pursue a program or predicts what is to be. Israel’s prophets   did not essentially do any of these things. They verbalized what was there in their times. The prophet sees reality and verbalizes it and finds that it can be affirmed—and that that affirmation involves the fulfillment of one’s self.

 

As do mirrors and artworks, prophets tell us how things are. We live in a world of appearances. We look around us and think the world to be stressful and bleak. But the prophet sees beyond appearances. The bleakness is an illusion. Something bigger, deeper, and better is going on. That is what we hear in Isaiah’s words:

 

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 brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

. . .

to comfort all who mourn . . .

 

Later on, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus will use these words to announce his own ministry. He is among us, as Isaiah was, to tell us how things actually are. If we saw truly, we would wear “the oil of gladness instead of mourning”. Things are, and will be, OK.

Now at one level, all this sounds kind of crazy. You could argue that prophets are out of touch with reality—that they’re whistling in the dark, living in a fantasy world. But prophets are not dreamers. They are the clear-eyed souls in every generation who see things as they are. And what they see is the persistence of hope in a world of despair, justice in a time of bad faith, love in a climate of hate. These aren’t just greeting card pieties. They are the deepest most powerful truths of life.

And in the Gospel for today, we see the compelling figure of John the Baptist. He was clearly one impressive person. In the words of last Sunday’s gospel, “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” John would stand out anywhere. Even in Southern California, a man walking around dressed like that and calling people to repent would attract attention. And yet today’s gospel tells us, “He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John the Baptist may have been the last preacher in Christendom to make and understand that distinction.

The good news from John the Baptist this morning is that God is doing something big and beautiful and new. He is telling us that God is up something. The coming of Jesus will change our lives. As Julian of Norwich put it, “All shall be well.” Great. But how do we live into that hopeful wellness in a cynical, contentious age?

The key to our making the gospel hope real lies for me in our psalm this morning, Psalm 126. This is one of my two or three favorite psalms. It comes from the time of Israel’s exile in Babylonian captivity. It was written in a time of utter hopelessness.

1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, *

then were we like those who dream.

2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *

and our tongue with shouts of joy. . . .

6 Those who sowed with tears *

will reap with songs of joy.

7 Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, *

will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

 

Think, as you hear it, about the time line projected by this psalm. The singers of it are speaking in the present moment of Babylonian captivity. And yet they sing exuberantly about God’s liberation. They talk about it not in the future tense (as a wished event) but in the past tense (as a completed event). “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, “they announce, “then were we like those who dream.” They go on to describe mouths filled with laughter and tongues with shouts of joy. The hoped-for fulfillment is proclaimed as an achieved fact. The exiled Israelites will dare to live as if their liberation has already happened. Even though they are imprisoned now, they will choose to live in that captivity as free people. And living as free people will help bring about their ultimate liberation.

         Whenever we say this psalm in our liturgy I find my heart and imagination stirred. What would it mean for me, for you, for all of us to live as if what we most deeply long for were already a reality? Think of all the forces of life that oppress us—from political and social forces beyond our control to our own bad habits to the physical illnesses and inevitable losses we suffer and grieve. What would it mean for our lives if we were to choose to act as if our prayers had been answered, as if God’s promises had already been fulfilled? I don’t mean that in some fairy tale way—I mean it in the way the early Christians meant it when they chose to live not in the oppressive control of Rome but in the freeing light of the resurrection. Caesar was not their king; Jesus was. They lived as citizens of his reign and enacted God’s abundant blessing even in times of privation. They were free even in captivity.

The Advent season is our opportunity to reclaim and orient our lives around the promises at the center of the Gospel. Our hope is one proclaimed in the midst of pain as the place where God’s promises become real.  

These prophetic truths will find their perfect fulfillment at Christmas. But for the next eight days, let us live together in Advent hope. God is up to something good and big and deep for us, for those we love, and for our world. Our calling as Jesus’s companions is to hold on to that hope and make it ours, to live as free people even in moments of darkness and pain. That is a tall order, but we are up to it, because before us there is Jesus, one who lived that way himself. As he comes towards us now, let us keep our eyes on Jesus and learn from him how to live lives of wholeness, blessing, and peace in what is, when we see it truly, a beautiful and generous world.

So when you next step out of a door into the shocking view of yourself in a mirror, remember: Jesus sees you, loves you, knows you, and is coming toward you. All shall be well. Amen.