Homily: The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 11, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

On this tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I’m not exactly sure how to talk about the events of September 11, 2001. Even at this remove, I do not presume to be able to explain or make sense of them. Kathy and I were living in the Philadelphia area in 2001, and I clearly remember the day and the effect the attacks had on our parish community. But I’m not sure, ten years later, that I understand September 11 any better than I did then. Oh, I think I understand the political and social forces that led to the attacks, and I think I have a sense of the various ways Americans and others have processed them. But I don’t think I see September 11, 2001 with any more clarity than I did at the time. Was it the day that everything changed? Not really. Was it the day we lost our innocence? I don’t think so. The easy bromides don’t help any more now than they did then. But I do know that it felt like a wound and still does. And I do know that our tradition has a lot to say about how to deal with wounds. And that is where, as a Christian, it makes sense for me to try to talk about it.

In the Gospel for today, we begin with this interchange:

Peter came up and said to Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother or sister sin against me, and I forgive them? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. [Matthew 18.21]

What we’re offered in the scriptures this morning—and this is the Gospel actually scheduled for today, not something I chose for the occasion—is a parable of forgiveness. The Bible uses numbers—40 days and 40 nights, 40 years, 77 times—without modern scientific precision. When Jesus says “seventy seven times” or in another reading, “seventy times seven”, he does not mean either number literally. He uses 77 as a figure for infinity. We must always forgive.

And then he tells a parable—one of his most outrageous—about forgiveness. A master forgives a debt of 10,000 talents to a slave who then forces repayment of a debt of 100 denarii. In contemporary terms, the disparity between those debts is enormous. The first slave owes the master something like three or four lifetimes’ worth of wages. The second slave owes the first something like the price of a latte at Starbucks. The point of the story is clear: we who have been forgiven a gigantic amount by God need to extend a proportional amount of forgiveness to our fellow beings.

Now I’m not going to say that we should clap Al Qaeda members on the back and say “let bygones be bygones”. But I am going to say that there is something in the process of forgiveness that we need to attend to if we want to make sense of any hard world historical event. Even though we preachers talk a lot about forgiveness, none of us fully understands it. I know in my own life I have experienced the ability to forgive as a gift more than as an act of my own will. When I’ve been able to do it, I’ve experienced the granting of forgiveness as a surprise. The grace to forgive comes to me from outside myself. But I know it starts with an acknowledgment of the injury I’ve suffered.

We live in what one writer [Michael Hrebeniak ] calls the “Amnesiac Market State”. When we experience pain or tragedy, we tend to say, “Let’s put this behind us and move on.” One thing I do know about forgiveness is that you can’t forgive someone for a wound you haven’t fully acknowledged. To the extent that our 10^th anniversary remembrance of September 11, 2001 helps us recall and acknowledge the pain, confusion, and grief we felt on that day and afterwards, then it’s all to the good. To the extent that this anniversary becomes an occasion for boastful posturing or an anniversary we forget tomorrow, then we really haven’t moved very far down the road to healing.

But once we recall and acknowledge that wound, what then? One of the deep life lessons I’ve learned in almost 62 years on the planet is that I can really, finally, only change myself, not someone else. So the question for all of us on this 10^th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is: how do we become the people God is calling us to be? I can’t really do anything to change the heart of an extremist, whether abroad or here. But I can do something about my own heart and my own world. And that, I believe, is what Jesus is getting at when he talks about forgiving 77 (or 70 times 7) times.

A year ago I asked Beth Taylor to join our staff and take on primary responsibility for youth ministry and outreach. The vestry and I felt at the time that the parish needed both to increase its commitment to our own young people and to develop ways to call all of us into deeper relationship with our wider metropolitan community. Beth has done extraordinary work in both areas, but as we think today about moving forward from September 11, it is her work in the outreach area that engages my imagination.

Over the last year, Beth and the Outreach Committee, chaired by vestry member Felix Rogers, have studied Detroit and its challenges, and they have explored the possibility of finding a non-profit organization with whom we could partner and through whom we could channel all our volunteer and philanthropic energy. My vision for this was that we would build a relationship with a real urban neighborhood, get to know the people in that neighborhood, and build a volunteer program through which parishioners here could offer their energies in the areas of education, healthcare, employment, and housing. This would be a concentrated, focused outreach ministry where our parishioners could offer themselves to tutor kids, build houses, offer professional skills, and help stabilize an endangered neighborhood. It would also allow us to get to know women, children, and men who live in a very different context than the one we all inhabit. Such a program would be transformational for them and for us.

After a year of work, Beth, Felix, and the Outreach Committee have proposed a partnership with Focus Hope, a well-known Detroit non-profit with a forty year history offering hunger relief, career training and development, and racial reconciliation. We have been invited to join their Hope Village Initiative in a section of the Oakman Boulevard neighborhood in Detroit which has the newly reopened charter elementary school, Glazer, as a community anchor. Kathy and I have been down to Focus Hope and to Glazer Elementary, we’ve met with the leaders and the school principal there, and I feel that this partnership will offer us a way to make an enormous difference in the health of Detroit both as a city and as the metropolitan area in which we all live. This partnership will allow Christ Church parishioners to offer the wide range of their skills and energies to help improve the lives of real people in a real place. And this partnership will help us all live out what it means to be a Christian in the 21^st century, pledged in the Prayer Book’s words “to seek and serve Christ in all persons, respecting the dignity of every human being.”

I don’t know what else to say about September 11 except this: when the remembrances and the speeches are over, all of us are left with the question, what have we done to make our community more just, more loving, more prosperous, more safe? What have we done to take on and engage the sufferings and struggles of people whose culture and context may differ from us but whose fundamental humanity we share? There is nothing we can do, finally, to stop others from hating us. But we can, together, work to help our city, our community, our society reflect our deepest values and highest aspirations. And that is why I believe God is calling us to this new work with Focus Hope in Detroit.

The same year as the terrorist attacks, 2001, I became rector of the parish in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania—the Church of the Redeemer, a parish similar in size and demographics to this one. When I arrived in Philadelphia in May of that year, I made a pilgrimage to talk to the retired Bishop of Pennsylvania, Robert DeWitt, not coincidentally the third rector of Christ Church Cranbrook, serving here at the parish in the 1950s and in the 1960s as Suffragan Bishop of Michigan. Bob was a hero of mine, and he had been famous for all kinds of great things in the church, especially for getting so many ministries going here that responded to the urban and social crises of those days.

Because Redeemer, Bryn Mawr and Christ Church Cranbrook are so similar, I asked Bob how he managed to get so many outreach projects going in a large suburban parish. He responded, “There are a lot of people in the congregation who care deeply about the things you and I care about. So I would just get up on Sunday and tell people what I’d been thinking about, and then I’d ask them, if they were thinking about it too, to come over to the rectory some night and we’d think through it together.” So this morning, following in Bob DeWitt’s footsteps, I’m telling you what’s on my mind. I hear God calling us to respond to the fear and pain of September 11, 2001 by opening our hearts and hands to real, nearby people in our own metropolitan area. And I’m asking that, if you hear some version of that voice in your own head, that you come and think and talk about it with Felix and Beth and me at the rectory this Wednesday night. Details are in the bulletin. We’ll be open for coffee and talk from 7:30 to 9:00. Let’s think about this together. Let’s go forward from this tenth anniversary of September 11 not in vengeance or in anger but embarked on a process to know and serve and love people whose lives are linked with ours in an infinite myriad of ways.

Christianity is a realistic religion. It understands that both human sin and aggression and human heroism and compassion will always coexist within and among us. Our call as Christians is not to try to change human nature—only God can do that. Our call is to be faithful, generous, and compassionate as we are where we are, with the people God has made us neighbors.

In this morning’s epistle [Romans 14], Paul says this: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.” Paul and Jesus knew what it is to be afraid. And they knew something else: they knew that those they feared would not say the last word about them; they knew the final word would be God’s. Whether we live, whether we die, we are the Lord’s. That great truth puts every other claim in its place. Threatened and vulnerable though we may feel, we are ultimately, finally, safe. As we take in the knowledge of that safety, let us reach out to love and serve those who will only come to know of God’s blessings through the work of our hands and minds and hearts. Amen.

Homily: The Tenth Sunday after Penteocst [August 21, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrook

Despite all that’s happening nationally and internationally, the biggest story on the Episcopal News Service this week concerned an art theft in Los Angeles. Last Sunday night, a Rembrandt drawing was stolen from an art sale at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles. The 1655 pen and ink drawing, called “The Judgment”, is valued at around $250,000. Late Monday night, a priest at St. Nicholas’ Episcopal Church in Encino walked into the church office after a meeting and discovered that the stolen drawing had been placed just inside the office door. [“After Rembrandt heist, mystery thief finds religion”, Los Angeles Times, 8/17/11] I just mention this in case anybody here has any Cezannes or Monets they want to dispose of. Just think of your local Episcopal church as your one-stop shopping place to drop off master artworks. We’ll happily take them off your hands.

I thought about this story all this week as I pondered today’s Gospel, Matthew’s account of the confession of Peter. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” [Matthew 16. 15] Like the unexpected return of a stolen artwork, Peter’s answer is surprising. And like the choice of a church as the place to drop off that drawing, Jesus’s rejoinder to Peter is even more unexpected. “ "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” [Matthew 16.16] How do you and I make sense of this interchange?

We might start with the question: who is Jesus for you? Is he a teacher? A healer? A miracle worker? A lawgiver? Is he the friend of the suffering and the poor? Is he the one who is put to death on the cross and rises on the third day? When each of us looks at Jesus, we see the aspect of his life and ministry that speaks to us most deeply. In Jesus’s own day, people followed him for various reasons. Most saw him as a healer, many as a teacher. Some saw him as a prophet—Elijah or Jeremiah, as the Gospel says. Some saw him as a religious reformer or political figure, one who preached and practiced subversion of both the Temple system and the Roman Empire. When the church got more established, it portrayed him as a lawgiver. In today’s Gospel, however, Peter says only that Jesus is the Messiah.

The Hebrew word “Messiah” is translated in Greek as “Christ”, and they both mean the same thing—a word we would render in English as “anointed”. The anointed one is, simply, the king. Jews in Jesus’s day looked back to the reigns of kings David and Solomon as the high point of Israel’s life as an independent nation. They longed for a Messiah—an anointed one, a king—who would come, re-establish David’s throne, and throw the Roman occupiers out. When Peter claims that Jesus is the Messiah, he’s saying that Jesus is the king, the one who exercises real political and religious authority.

As you know from the rest of the Jesus story, the drama finally turns on this question of Jesus’s Messiahship. Is he the Messiah? And if he is, what kind of Messiah is he? He certainly doesn’t look and act like a worldly political king. No wonder the majority of Jews never accepted him as God’s promised king and continue, to this day, to look for the coming of the real anointed one, the Messiah who will set things right.

Both religious and secular Jews have thought deeply about the hope for the Messiah and what it means. One of them was Alfred Kazin, a prominent 20^th century Jewish intellectual whose journals have recently been published. In a review this month of Alfred Kazin’s Journals [Edward Mendelson, “The Hidden Life of Alfred Kazin”, NYRB 8/18/2011] the scholar Edward Mendelson observes that “to live authentically as a Jew, in Kazin’s eyes, is to serve universal justice.” When Jews look to the coming of the Messiah, what they are really talking about is the future—not only their future but the world’s. For Jews, the moral life, the religious life, is oriented toward what God is doing next. This means that Jewish thought always asks about the future implications of present actions. What kind of world are we making or leaving for our children? For thinkers like Alfred Kazin, “the moral individual looks toward the future.” [Mendelson] As Kazin puts it, “The Christian idea of the future—based on the individual. The Jewish idea: the past, the group.” Both Jews and Christians need to learn from each other. For Kazin, the task for Jews always involves taking the lessons of a painful past and transmuting them into a hopeful expectation of God’s future. For Christians, the task is to think less about our own individual destinies and more about the future of the world.

Thinking about Messiahship in Jewish terms helps us Christians understand what Peter’s confession actually means. In this moment, Peter makes the connection between Jesus’s ministry and the idea of an anointed one. It is an “Aha! moment”, an occasion when Peter glimpses what Jesus and God are up to. Something is going on in the life and ministry of Jesus that points us towards God’s future—the future to which we (both as individuals and as a group) are invited, a future which God wants us to participate in bringing about with Jesus and each other. The goal is to build a future world that looks like the community Jesus has established with his companions here and now—a world of mutuality, compassion, dignity, and respect, a world characterized by the Hebrew word Shalom—peace, reconciliation, justice, love--a world of health and wholeness, creation restored to what God intends it to be.

You and I live in rapidly changing times. The economic turmoil that has been the principal focus of most of the news this summer (and even last week) is one symptom of the many ways we can no longer live by the assumptions that many of us grew up with. In his review of Nicholson Baker’s new novel in last week’s New York Times Book Review [Sam Lipsyte, “Inside Nicholson Baker’s Sexual Utopia”, NY Times Book Review, 8/11/2011], the novelist Sam Lipsyte discusses what he calls “a vanishing consumerist America, where enough cash can protect you from consequences.” Most of us have lived most of our lives in the grip of this vanishing consumerist America, and more often than not we have put our faith in the fond hope that cash can protect us from life’s consequences. As Lipsyte says about Baker’s novel, “The real humor, and sadness, emerges from the impossibility of this fantasyland.”

We are not the first people on earth who thought they could build a society where our affluence could shelter us from all the vicissitudes of life. The Romans of Jesus’s day tried to live in their own version of a consumerist fantasyland, and one central aspect of Jesus’s life and teaching was that there was another, better way to live. Even in a time of diminished resources, Jesus said, people can live abundantly. The Gospel stories of the feeding of the 5,000 are not just Eucharistic miracles—they are parables of the hidden abundance of life lived on God’s terms. There is, really, enough to go around. Citizenship in Jesus’s kingdom means orienting your life away from faith in cash (or power, or success, or beauty, or whatever bad value appeals to your most fearful self) and toward the values around which Jesus’s life and community are organized. If we live our lives for others and not for ourselves, if we point ourselves openly toward God’s future rather than fearfully protecting what we have salvaged from our past, if we think and pray and work for universal justice rather than building walls around what we think of as ours—if we live this way we will find life joyful, abundant, meaningful, and whole. Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah expresses his willingness to commit himself and his life to the joyous, hopeful future Jesus offers and that dawns even when things look most bleak.

In our Old Testament reading this morning, the unnamed Levite woman who gives birth to Moses makes this same kind of faithful commitment to God’s future. If Moses’s mother had simply clutched the baby to herself, she would have lost him to Pharaoh’s guards. Instead, she performs an action of breathtaking trust. She puts the baby in a papyrus basket and places it in the bulrushes, the reeds on the bank of the river. She does so without a guarantee that someone will come and find and raise the infant Moses on her behalf. In taking a creative risk for the future, this unnamed Levite woman ensured the liberation of Israel from bondage in Egypt. She risks, rather than play it safe. She commits herself and her son to God’s future, and the result is the birth of Israel as a people.

In painful, scary times, it is natural for us to look back to a fantasy of a safe past and imagine that all will be well if we can only get back to a time when things were simpler or easier or more coherent. Nostalgia is always dangerous, because as we look back through memory’s selective filter we fail to see the real pains and dangers that lurked in the time we are idealizing. Nostalgia may look harmless, but it’s dangerous personally, it’s foolish politically, and it’s pernicious as a religious posture. Christianity, like Judaism, always points forward. God is doing a new thing, and you are invited to step into and cooperate with God in bringing that new thing to fruition. The past is a beautiful place to remember, but as the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby learned, it’s a terrible place to live. You can never find fulfillment there.

I don’t know why the California art thieves brought the Rembrandt drawing to a church. But here’s what I hope is true. I hope they realized, once they had spirited away the picture, that by stealing it they had committed a fearful, selfish act, literally seeking future fulfillment in an artifact of the past. By bringing that stolen drawing to a church, I hope they had decided instead to commit themselves to the kind of future Jesus offers, to give up holding on to an icon of worth for themselves alone and instead to entrust it to a community seeking to live out God’s love and justice in the here and now.

As each of us navigates the personal, social, and economic traumas of this turbulent summer, I pray we will have grace to do the right thing, to face always with God into the direction of God’s new, abundant future. The past is gone. We cannot go back there, even if we wanted to. God’s promise to you and me is that we will find blessing and peace both today and tomorrow as we walk together hopefully into the future, uncertain though it may look to us today. Even now, God is working that promise out. Commit yourself to what God is doing in your life and the life of the world. As you respond to God’s promise and live into that commitment, God will lead all of us together toward a future that exceeds everything we can ask for or imagine, we and the world will be blessed, and all will finally be well. Amen.

Homily: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost [July 31, 2011] All Saints, Pasadena

When I opened Saints Alive! last month and saw that four senior preachers, George Regas, Leonard Beerman, Scott Richardson and I, were being billed here at All Saints as “The Boys of Summer”, I actually laughed out loud. I’ll bet that only a few of you here this morning remember Don Henley’s 1984 song by that title, and perhaps only Scott, I, and George Regas are old enough to remember where Henley got that phrase: from Roger Kahn’s 1972 baseball memoir, The Boys of Summer, about growing up with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Calling us “the boys of summer” is certainly flattering, but not exactly accurate.

A week ago, my wife Kathy and I returned from a weeklong backpacking trip in the John Muir Wilderness of the Eastern Sierras. Seven nights without news was a real withdrawal for me, and as I got closer to the end of the trail out I actually hallucinated that the first headline I might see could feature the outlines the Debt Ceiling deal arranged by President Obama and Speaker Boehner. You can imagine how surprised I was to see this mid summer government reality show still to be ongoing. Unlike the Real Housewives of New York or Orange County or Jersey Shore, though, this spectacle is entertaining without being amusing. It’s not even unintentionally amusing. It’s actually kind of scary.

I don’t want to get All Saints in any more trouble with the IRS, so I will refrain from sharing my thoughts about the various personalities playing out this strange governmental mixture of Project Runway and The Gong Show. But I will use it as a shameless, preacherly segue into what’s going on in our reading from Genesis this morning. For weeks, we all have been living with both dread and expectation—dread that something terrible will happen if there is no deal, expectation that our two political parties might actually be able to work together to solve a problem. This expectant, dreadful, tension that we’ve lived with for weeks is very much like the trauma that our hero Jacob has lived under his whole life.

If you remember the Jacob story, he is the second son of Isaac and Rebecca. He has an older brother, Esau, with whom he struggled in the womb. In his ongoing tussle with his older brother, Jacob manages over time to trick Esau both out of his birthright and his blessing from their father, Isaac. Jacob is a kind of a wily trickster, and as the second son he manages, through his maneuverings, always to come out on top. But when he and Esau separate, they do so with enmity. Jacob goes his way and Esau his. But Jacob lives his subsequent years always looking over his shoulder, constantly worried about what will happen when the two brothers meet again. He knows he has defrauded Esau, and he has reason to believe that Esau will exact revenge.

In today’s portion of the Jacob story, we hear about Jacob wrestling with God. We only really understand this text when we hear it in the context of Jacob’s anxiety. Jacob wrestles with God on the night before he expects to meet up with his long estranged brother Esau. He knows that tomorrow he will see again, for the first time in years, the brother he has cheated of both birthright and blessing. He has been living for at least a decade under the constant tension of the knowledge that he has bettered himself at someone else’s expense. And he has projected all his fear and guilt onto the coming meeting with someone who has a real reason to wish him ill. It’s in all this dramatic and emotional mix that Jacob spends the night wrestling with God.

In the course of this encounter, God changes Jacob’s name to Israel—the one who struggles with God and prevails. By making that change, God appears to hold Jacob up as an example of what it means to be a person in relationship with God. One of the reasons for the Hebrew Bible’s persistent spiritual relevance for us is that it is brutally honest about what it means to know and follow God. You and I live in a culture that is sentimental about everything, that pictures God as a big, gooey, greeting card illustration, a collage of roses, clouds, puppies, and fudge. As a priest colleague of mine at Christ Church Cranbrook says, in the church we routinely mistake warmth for depth. When we talk about prayer in our culture, we say things like, “Jesus is my best friend.” I went to a retreat once where the leader said, “Imagine walking on the beach with Jesus.”

It’s not exactly wrong to think about Jesus or God as your best friend. It’s incomplete. God may be my best friend, but, as the Jews knew, God is also my adversary. Jacob wrestles with God, and that wrestling gets at the inherent inequality in the terms on which we encounter each other. God has resources that I don’t have. I’m finite and limited. God is, well, God! In today’s story, God strikes Jacob in the hip socket, putting his leg entirely out of joint. In other words, God hits Jacob below the belt. God does not play fair.

The reason it’s important to see God not only as your friend but also as your adversary is that it helps to acknowledge that God sometimes has different priorities than you do. God loves you and cares for you. But we experience the distance between our vision and God’s as pain. God sees the big picture; you and I see things more partially. I want what I want for myself, my friends, my family, my world. What I want and what God intends may not be the same thing. My wants and hopes sometimes come into conflict with God’s plans. Even though God has my best interests at heart, God’s processes may run me over in the short term. So in a real sense, I experience God as someone who is sometimes working against me. When God and I come into conflict, it’s important that I be willing to go to the mat with God.

And that’s where Jacob’s willingness to wrestle with God shows up our polite, sentimental, greeting cards ideas about prayer. I’m not always walking on the beach with Jesus—sometimes I’m playing a game where God holds all the cards, where the deck appears to be stacked, where the odds are clearly in favor of the house. Sentimental piety would say that we should just give up and reconcile ourselves to the way things are—“not my will but thy will”, and so forth. Job’s three pious friends tell him there’s something wrong with his faith. When people pray for things and don’t get them, I’ve heard their pious friends tell them that their faith simply isn’t deep enough. The Bible knows these pious responses to be bogus. Even though the cards are marked, the deck is stacked, the dice are loaded, Jacob still goes into the encounter, ready to play. He wrestles with God. And even though God wounds him illegally, Jacob still will not let him go until he gets the blessing. He not only gets that blessing; he gets a new name and a new identity. He is now the one who has wrestled with God and prevailed. He has seen God face to face, and he’s still walking around to talk about it, albeit with a limp.

I have long felt that Jacob is the Bible’s most accessible and exemplary hero for all of us who live our lives in what W.H. Auden called “the Age of Anxiety”. Just as you and I still don’t know how the Debt Ceiling Standoff will end, Jacob lived his life constantly under the anxious pressure of the contingent and unresolved. Will he get the blessing or not? Will his estranged brother kill him or not? Jacob’s life was not unlike life in contemporary America. He’s like a person on the Los Angeles freeway at rush hour, always wondering whether he will get there in time. His life is one big projected Carmageddon.

As George Regas would say, “I know that man!” And here are two things I now know that I take away from the story and example of Jacob, things that I believe will help us all live joyous, free, abundant lives even under and in the midst of real tension and anxiety.

Thing one: Jacob’s willingness to go to the mat with God gives hope to you and me when we are similarly up against it. Prayer is a dialogical relationship, not a one-way Maoist re-education program. There’s a reason that over half of the Psalms are what we call Laments, complaints to God about the way things are. Real prayer starts where we are, not where we think we ought to be. What God wants from you is not dressed up, falsely cheerful obedience. What God wants from you is the full reality of who you are. And, if you’re like me, who you are is probably most of the time someone with a grievance or a grudge or a loss or a complaint. Thing one tells us this: come to God as you are, where you are, with what you actually have. Do not be afraid to address God from the depths of your anger, outrage, and pain. Be ready to receive some divine blowback. In the tussling you may get wounded in the hip, but like Jacob you will limp away into the sunrise with the blessing and the promise.

That’s thing one. Here’s thing two. Jacob does, in fact, limp away, and it’s into the sunrise. After his encounter with God, Jacob faces a new day. It’s the dawn of the feared meeting with his estranged brother. In his night with God, Jacob has engaged all his own fears and guilts and hopes and longings. God has brought Jacob to some kind of account, and even though Jacob is wounded, he is now newly ready to go forward.

Jacob arises and goes to meet Esau. He makes provision for the safety of his family. And then the brothers meet, and the meeting is, of course, nothing like what Jacob had expected or feared. In the words of Genesis [33.4}, “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” Thing two tells us this: the things we fear are usually the projections of our own inner life, grotesque fantasies not grounded in reality. Jacob had built up an image of his brother’s anger that was nothing more than his own internalized guilt projected outward. When he finally came face to face with the reality of who his brother Esau was, what he found instead of revenge was reconciliation, instead of blows a kiss, instead of anger, tears. And together they could live into a new way of being with each other, forging a new community (again in the words of Auden) based on trust instead of threats. Remember: Carmageddon work out as we all feared it might.

I don’t know what will happen with the debt ceiling drama, but I do know that it is possible for a divided nation to find a new way to live just as a broken family can. Jacob and Esau might be models for us as citizens. Ancient Israel saw itself in Jacob: a people constantly living under tension, engaged in complicated dealing with an inscrutable God, going forward to face adversaries who often turned out to be allies. And so it is for you and me: whatever burden you carry, whatever fear, whatever sorrow or guilt, whatever pain felt by someone else you care about: the way forward is neither to bury your feelings nor to demonize your adversary. The way forward is, as Jacob did, to get real, to face into your anxiety and dread and empathy, and to carry them straight to God as you are who you are where you are. Go forward into the sunrise, even if it means you do it in a newly wounded way. And then be ready for what God will give you as you greet that new day. As it was for Jacob, so it will be for you. “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” Amen.

Homily: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost [July 10, 2011] Christ Church Cranbrrok

When I worked at All Saints Pasadena in the 1990s I was fortunate to have shared some of my time there with a retired priest I admired very much, Larry Carter. Larry had been the longtime rector of St. John’s Church in downtown Los Angeles, and he was one of my heroes. His ministry at St. John’s had been an expansive peace and justice ministry. He was known to be a fearless advocate for minorities and the poor.

My image of Larry was of a fierce prophet. So imagine my surprise, once, in a Bible study when he said that the opening of today’s Gospel was his favorite passage in the New Testament: “Jesus got in a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach.” [Matthew 13.2] Something about that picture of Jesus teaching from a boat while people listened from the shore touched Larry deeply, and because it touched him it touched me. We 21^st century people read the Bible sometimes so fervently in search of big, deep truths that we don’t pause to savor the simple details. Here is Jesus, teaching the crowds by sitting peacefully in a boat that rocks and sways to the gentle movement of the water. You can almost hear the wavelets plashing against the boat as it bobs. Apart from the content of anything Jesus might have to say in his parables, the image itself of him in the boat teaches us something about what it means to live a centered life, grounded and at home in God’s creation. Hold that thought.

Today’s Gospel is the familiar parable of the sower. Whenever I hear this parable I see two images in my mind’s eye: with Larry Carter’s help I see Jesus teaching from the boat; with the aid of my memory of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, The Sower, I see a man striding through the fields, casting seed in every direction. You and I live so much in the modern urban mental world that we have to exercise some imagination to get what sowing and seeds meant to pre-modern people. A seed, after all, is a tiny mysterious miracle. In this compact package lies a hidden something that can not only produce life itself but can do so abundantly. We put these things in the ground and, amazingly, plants and trees and shrubs come up as if by magic. It’s not surprising that Jesus would use the seed as a symbol of God’s creative, mysterious abundance. Something big lies within something small, and the way it works is entirely hidden from our view. According to Jesus, God is like that: miraculous, abundant, mysterious.

Today’s Gospel is very familiar: a sower goes out to sow, and he scatters the seed in every direction. Some seeds fall on the path, and the birds eat them up. Other seeds fall on rocky ground, and they sprout quickly but then die because they have no root. Still other seeds fall among thorns, which grow up and choke them. Only some of the remaining seeds fall on good soil and produce grain, thirty, sixty, a hundred times what was planted. If you have ears to hear, listen!

Right after the parable itself Matthew gives us an explanation of the parable. Many biblical scholars think that the explanation comes from someone other than Jesus, and I tend to agree with them. There is nothing wrong with the explanation, which likens the types of soil to types of recipients of Jesus’s preaching. It’s OK as far as it goes, but there are two things that make me doubt its authenticity: first, Jesus elsewhere refuses to explain his parables. Like the sower in the story, he throws out these weird stories and asks his hearers to grapple with them where and as they are. Why would Jesus suddenly offer us a first century Cliffs Notes? Second, the explanation of the parable is frankly so flat-footed that it closes off a myriad of other meanings. And if I’ve learned one thing after years of hearing the parables of Jesus, it’s that these stories open up and reveal themselves in multiple, almost infinite, ways.

So let’s listen to the story and pretend, for a moment, that we’ve never heard the explanation. A sower goes out to sow, and he scatters the seed in every direction. Some seeds fall on the path, and the birds eat them up. Other seeds fall on rocky ground, and they sprout quickly but then die because they have no root. Still other seeds fall among thorns, which grow up and choke them. Only some of the remaining seeds fall on good soil and produce grain, thirty, sixty, a hundred times what was planted. If you have ears to hear, listen!

I spent a good part of my adult life studying and teaching American literature, especially the Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They too were alive to the power of the seed as an image not only of fertility and abundance but of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Emerson and Thoreau lived and wrote during the nineteenth century, the age of the rise of science, specifically the time of Charles Darwin. They were alert to the complexity of the processes of natural selection at work in the dispersion of seeds. But they lived in an America that was still mostly rural and agricultural. So they saw seeds scientifically, but that awareness did not stop their seeing seeds in a more nuanced way, as part of the farming life of planting, cultivating, and harvesting, and so as metaphors for life and its processes. Emerson said that the seed was “God manifest in the mind,” “of which the Beauty of the world is the flower and Goodness the fruit” [quoted in Thoreau, Faith in a Seed, “Introduction”, p. 16]. Toward the end of his life, Thoreau became preoccupied with the way plants propagate themselves, and he increasingly saw seeds and their dispersal as a powerful metaphor of life, death, and rebirth. As one critic puts it, for Thoreau “Every plant can be born again in every seed. Every day is a day of creation and at the same time a day of rebirth” {Robert D. Richardson, “Introduction”, Faith in a Seed, p.16]. At the end of the “The Dispersion of Seeds”, Thoreau exclaimed, “The very earth itself is a granary and a seminary, so that to some minds its surface is regarded as the cuticle of one great living creature” [Faith in a Seed, p. 151]. The little miraculous package that makes this holistic vision of life possible is, of course, the seed.

You don’t have to have lived before Darwin to see the way seeds work as miraculous. Even a modern scientific observer can have faith in a seed. Jesus knew what he was talking about when he made the seed and its dispersal the subject of today’s parable. Our whole life is bound up in reliance on the tiny packages of mystery. When Jesus talks about seeds, he is relying on the near awe with which his hearers would have regarded them. They tell us a truth about God and God’s processes. If you have ears to hear, listen!

So my question for everyone here this morning goes like this: what, right now, might this story mean for you? What might it mean for you to think of God as someone who is scattering seeds all over the place? What might it mean for you to think of yourself in relation to these seeds? Are you the path, the rocky ground, the thorns, or the good soil? Or might you be all of them at once? What do these seeds represent? How might we let the truth on offer in this story germinate and sprout within us, bringing forth fruit 30, 60, 100 fold?

I won’t, like Matthew, try to give you an authoritative interpretation. But I will tell you how I hear the story this morning. Instead of thinking of the types of soil as types of people, I hear the story asking me to think of the types of soil as aspects of myself, perhaps as periods in my life. There are times when I seem open to what God is up to in the world and ready to respond to and participate with God in God’s creative, redemptive, healing work in the world around me. Those are the good soil times. Then there are times when I am more closed to God’s promptings and resist seeing myself and others as God sees us. Those are the path, the rock, the thorn times. The point of this story has less to do with characterizing different kinds of Christians than it does simply with seeing ourselves as always involved in the process of life, death, and rebirth. There are times when I am alive and open. There are times when I am closed and as good as dead. That cyclical, rhythmic process of life, death, and rebirth goes on all through the course of our lives. And if I’m hearing this story right, that means that the Christian experience is more like a cycle or a process or a journey than it is like having a once-for-all born again moment. Some days I’m good soil. Some days I’m thorny rocky ground. I know myself to be born again almost daily, and that’s because I can be thorny rocky ground almost daily, too. But over time we move with God in the right direction. Over time those seeds do take root, and we become the people God created us to be.

The good news this morning is that God is like the sower as Jesus describes him in today’s parable. God goes out to sow, and God scatters the seed—the miraculous package of mysterious life—God scatters the seed indiscriminately, with almost reckless abundance. God does not select certain types of people who are privileged to “get it”. God does not select certain moments in your life when you are going to “get it”. God knows that you and I will get it for a while, then not get it, then get it again. God does what God does: God sows the seed indiscriminately, abundantly, generously. God is always coming toward us, opening up the possibility for us that God’s love and hope and blessing will take root and blossom and bring forth fruit in our lives.

And that takes me back to the thought I asked you to hold earlier on. The thought was about the opening picture of Jesus, sitting in a boat, teaching his disciples in parables, the image my friend Larry Carter thought the most beautiful picture in the New Testament. Jesus was at home in that boat because he was at home in the world. He lived a centered life, grounded and at home in God’s creation. You can live that life, too. Summer is the time when we have the possibility of slowing down, going to a different rhythm, a time when we can, if only for scattered moments, rest and relax and open ourselves just enough to let some of those divine seeds come into us and do their transforming work in us.

As you go about your life this summer, I invite you to picture Jesus teaching his disciples from the boat. And then I invite you to picture God sowing those seeds in your direction. If Jesus could relax, so can you. Let God’s loving, embracing, accepting purpose wash over you as waves lap against a boat. In so doing, you’ll find yourself becoming open to God’s promise and call to you in ways you maybe hadn’t before. If God’s purpose can take root in rocky ground, it can take root in you. The abundance of God’s blessings will germinate, sprout, blossom, and bear fruit in your life and in the life of the world. Amen.