Homily: July 5, 2020 [Independence Day] All Saints, Pasadena

            One summer when I was home from college—I think it was 1970—the city of Burbank organized an event they hoped would bring the community together in a time of national division. It was a football game not so felicitously entitled “The Freaks versus the Pigs”. One side would be made up long haired hippies like me. The other team would be all Burbank policemen.

            Not being in those days much of an athlete but still wishing to do something civic minded beyond the anti-war protest going on up in Berkeley, I agreed to participate. Unfortunately for my side, the freaks and the pigs seem to have been given different memos about the game’s ground rules. We freaks played as if it really was a touch football game. The other side rolled over us like it was Super Bowl Sunday. I spent most of that game getting myself up off of the ground after I had been unceremoniously tackled.

            I begin with this story as a caution to those who think we are in a uniquely polarized American moment. To be sure, our current divisions are real, but to someone with a long memory they are not new. Mask wearers versus anti-maskers, environmentalists versus climate change deniers, immigration advocates versus fans of the border wall—these oppositions may seem new to some, but they feel to me very much like the divisions I remember from my youth over Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, women’s and LGBTQ rights. The issues and the passions, then as now, are pretty much the same.

            If you watch as much cable news as I do, you are familiar with commentators who decry the current state of polarization in our nation. Many of them speak nostalgically of a time of comity and bipartisanship that lasted, say, from the Revolution of 1776 to last Tuesday. But if you read even a little bit of American history you realize how false these rosy notions of American unity are.

            In the years before I came to All Saints in 1990 I studied and taught American literature. What I am going to say now is grossly oversimplifying, but to my way of thinking, two quite different visions of America have always had to contend with each other. The first might be called the individualistic vision, typified by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography and the nineteenth century robber barons: America is the place of opportunity to make it big, and the Constitution gives me rights to do whatever I please. This is the America of Social Darwinism, laissez-faire Capitalism, the survival of the fittest. “Get out of my way, world, I’m coming through.”

            We might call the second, competing idea of America the communitarian vision. It’s the America of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This is the America not of unlimited personal opportunity but of shared, collective solidarity—the America of labor unions, the New Deal, Civil Rights, and the Great Society. The slogan of this America might be, “We’re all in this together.”

            Proponents of the first, individualistic, vision of America like to claim that we were founded by a bunch of rugged individualists who escaped English tyranny by coming to a New World they could exploit to their hearts’ content. But, in fact, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by Puritans who came here for a collective social experiment. They wanted to found a model society built on reformed Christian principles, a new Geneva in the new world. Certainly there were a few entrepreneurial souls who made their way to early New England, but for the most part the first white Americans practiced a collaborative, not a competitive, enterprise.

            Now the point of this little digression is to suggest that the conflicts we experience today have a long prehistory in our culture. Take, for example, the current debate on wearing masks in a pandemic. If you watch the video clips of anti-maskers addressing their city councils, you’ll hear the same litany many times over: America is a free country. It is my right to go around without a mask. Nobody can make me wear one if I don’t want to. Their argument centers entirely on individual rights.

            The pro-maskers make a different claim: we need to wear masks out of a sense of shared responsibility to each other. I wear a mask not only to protect myself but to protect you and so keep the whole community safe.  My individual health depends on the community’s health. I cannot be healthy if you are not healthy. We could switch out the subject from masks to seat belts, motorcycle helmets, or gun control and have the same exact argument. One side claims rights given to the individual. The other claims responsibilities shared for the common good. This argument is as old as America itself, and not something cooked up by Fox News and MSNBC.

            So what does the history of this conflict mean for you and me in the current moment, on Independence Day, 2020?

            Our first Bible reading today gives us some guidance. It comes from the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, and it is one of my two or three favorite passages in all of scripture. It recounts the story of all the biblical figures who lived faithfully yet who died before seeing the fulfillment of their hopes, what the writer calls “the promise”. This promise, in the Hebrew Bible, begins with the call of Abraham and Sarah, and it was not a hope of personal, individual salvation but one of social fulfillment in a land, a home, a society of justice and peace. Those pioneers of faith were exiled pilgrims on a journey toward their true homeland, and they kept going because they were drawn by a vision of the world that might be. The argument of Hebrews builds toward this majestic conclusion:   

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, God has prepared a city for them. [Hebrews 11:8-16]

            “They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.” You and I know something about that. People of faith, and Christians especially, have always been uneasy in any society. To be sure, there have been churches that bless the status quo, but we who follow Jesus remember that his central message was a critique of a political and religious establishment that often confused power with holiness. No human society yet devised, America included, has ever lived up to the renewed world envisioned in the Old and New Testaments. We walk, as our Puritan forbears did, toward the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, the “city on a hill”, but we recognize that no society, not even ours, can ever quite live up to realizing this hope.

To be a Christian and an American means that we will always stand in this peculiar tension between the already and the not yet. The lofty ideals we proclaim—all created equal and endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; and what the Constitution calls “a more perfect union”; none of these have yet come to pass. Nevertheless, as Hebrews says, “we see and greet” these promises, and we persevere in working to make them real. We desire what the writer of this letter calls “a better country, that is, a heavenly one”, the city God has prepared for us and for all who suffer, struggle, and resist oppression in service of the common good.

The two competing visions of America did not begin in 2016 and they will not end in 2020. Alas, they will always be with us. But here, for us Christians, is the uncomfortable but liberating truth: those of us who follow Jesus are necessarily committed to one side of this argument. There are not, for us, two sides to this issue. The communitarian vision of America is our vision. No matter how some may misuse the words of scripture to promote selfishness, aggression, and cruelty, you and I know that the Jesus we love and follow opposed those values and lived with and served those who were the victims of human injustice and oppression. There may be two parties to this civic argument, but there is only one place for a follower of Jesus to stand: committed ever and again to an expansive, inclusive, and empathic vision of America. We are on the side of the maskers, the environmentalists, the labor unions, the economic reformers, the immigrants, the #MeToo women, those who proclaim “Black Lives Matter”. The institutional church has often made the mistake of thinking it exists to serve the powers that be. But followers of Jesus—both within and outside the church—know whom Jesus would be walking with and standing for in the current moment.

No national polity will ever completely realize the ideal we project onto it, not even the United States of America. Because it can only approximate our vision of the common good, no nation state will ever be worthy of our absolute, final allegiance. But we can work to build something approaching the ideal we seek by standing and working for love, justice, compassion, and peace. Our nation can and will approach the vision we pursue only when we, its citizens, personally and collectively commit ourselves to realizing Jesus’s values in the lives of actual human beings. The United States of America, great and flawed as it is, will never quite become the heavenly city of biblical faith, but if you and I strive to make it the “better country” our scripture describes we can come pretty close.

We followers of Jesus will always be restless and dissatisfied in any society, even the United States of America. We know that no earthly system--however well-intentioned—can finally realize its highest aspirations. You and I and all people of faith will always be strangers and foreigners in search of a homeland. Only by our patient faithful striving will we make this nation in the image of that better country, the heavenly one, as we work together to build the city which God is preparing for us all. Amen.

Homily: Bruce Bayne [St. Luke's, San Francisco] January 18, 2019

            I have known Bruce Bayne since I first went to seminary at ETS in Cambridge in 1973. I vividly recall our first meeting.  Bruce came by the apartment of our mutual friends Addison and Jody Hall to say he was going to the market and did they want him to get anything? Addison said yes, he could pick up a box of Quaker All-Natural Cereal with Raisins and Dates.  He showed Bruce the box and began rather tiresomely to insist that Bruce get it right and repeat the name of the cereal back to him several times: “Quaker All-Natural Cereal with Raisins and Dates”.  Bruce rather sardonically agreed and took off. An hour later he was back with a big bag of groceries. He reached into the bag and pulled out a giant box of Count Chocula. “I’m not sure I remembered what you asked for. Is this what you wanted?” he asked. Shortly after Addison’s meltdown, Bruce pulled out not one but two boxes of the Quaker all-natural cereal, and peace was restored. I think I actually ended up with the box of Count Chocula.

            For many years I considered Bruce my best friend. We knew each other through some operatic ups and downs for over 40 years, and life with him was always kind of like the oscillation between Quaker All-Natural Cereal and Count Chocula. He could be incredibly provocative. And he could be unbelievably generous. He could be angry, and he could be gentle. Our mutual friend Harvey Guthrie used to say that one person’s hard dichotomy is another person’s creative tension. Knowing and loving Bruce was often both.

            We’re gathered to remember and give thanks for Bruce’s life and ministry in the context of the Eucharist, the aspect of the church’s life that I know Bruce took most seriously. In a way, all three readings talk about the Eucharist and the community that Eucharist creates over time. They also talk about death and what lies ahead for Bruce, and you, and me. The Isaiah reading [Isaiah 25: 6-9] portrays the final gathering of God with God’s people as a feast:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,

of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain

the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over

all nations;

he will swallow up death forever.

The passage from Revelation [Revelation 21: 2-7] shows the last things as the new Jerusalem where God dwells among us mortals and wipes away tears from our eyes, saying:

It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the

beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from

the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these

things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

And then, of course, we have the familiar gospel passage in which Jesus announces that we all have been provided for [John 14: 1-6]:

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

Believe in God, believe also in me.

            In my Father’s house there are many mansions.

If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for

you?

            Standing as I am in Bruce’s pulpit, I’m not sure how to talk about these scriptures in a manner that is both respectful of our conventional pieties and faithful to Bruce. We use a lot of sentimental language to talk about both the church and death, and Bruce would have none of that. We often compare the church to a family. Bruce’s birth family did not treat him very well, so he did not particularly warm up to that image. We often talk about death as a passing from one realm to the next, but Bruce would scoff when in the presence of Hollywood visions of the afterlife. Bruce believed in community, and he believed in resurrection. So in the time remaining, let me say a word about the church and a word about whatever it is that comes next not only for Bruce but for you and me, too.

            Bruce Bayne spent his life in the church. His father, Stephen Bayne, was probably the last Episcopal bishop to have the kind of superstar career that doesn’t seem available to clergy anymore. In Bishop Bayne’s day, clergy were still culturally prominent the way they no longer are, and he was a larger-than-life public figure. For Bruce to choose to go into the same business as his famous father was, from the beginning, playing a losing game. And yet Bruce persisted. And he persisted, I believe, not because of some unresolved oedipal conflict but because he really believed all this stuff.

            In my second year at EDS, Bruce and I did an independent study with California’s own Henry Shires on the theology of Paul.   I remember two things from that course. One was the way Bruce skillfully derailed Dr. Shires from the assigned reading whenever he came unprepared.  If Dr. Shires asked Bruce a direct question about something he hadn’t read, Bruce would reply with a question of his own: “Dr. Shires, isn’t this just another example of the Gnostic influence on the apostle Paul?” Shires, always a defender of Paul’s orthodoxy, would run to the bookshelf like one of Pavlov’s dogs and we’d be off for an hour of spirited refutation of any Pauline Gnosticism. Case closed. Bruce was safe for another week.

            The other thing I remember, though, is Bruce’s keen interest in Paul’s understanding of the church and his vision of resurrection. For Paul, as for Bruce, the church was not a voluntary association of like-minded people. For Paul, as for Bruce, the church was literally the body of Christ here on earth. It was a sacred thing, an aspect of God’s incarnation. Bruce gave his life to the church because, believing as he did, he could do nothing else.

            In the same way as Paul did, Bruce rejected the idea of death and resurrection as metaphors for the coming of spring and new life. They were radical, eschatological things. We die, and we’re really dead. And then in God’s own time, we rise. Bruce believed and preached resurrection. But he knew what we all have to go through to get there.

            A couple of thoughts about Bruce’s life in the church. First, he was a great pastor. Bruce had a painful childhood, and while the vestiges of that pain made him an often difficult husband, father, or friend, the remembered trauma made him a wonderful pastor. Bruce could feel with and reach out to people who were up against it, especially in sick rooms and on death beds.

Second, Bruce was a great preacher. He was, in fact, a white-hot preacher, refusing ever to sugarcoat his understanding of the Gospel. His preaching was brilliant but dangerous. It was not for your average polite Episcopalian. Bruce was relentlessly theological in everything he did, and he suffered fools, not only ungladly but at all. While this tendency enlivened his preaching it also made his life in the church complicated. He loved it here at St. Luke’s, but he had a bumpy ride on the ecclesiastical road getting here. He didn’t often make great career choices, and the all too human institutionality of the church was always letting him down. He had such a high theology of the body of Christ that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America could never quite live up to it. I used to remind him of the words of Flannery O’Connor: “Sometimes we suffer as much from the church as for it.” Cold comfort, but there it is.

And then there is resurrection. Probably because in our work we both did so many funerals, Bruce and I used to talk about death a lot. For a time I served a church in the Main Line of Philadelphia where, because we had the fashionable society churchyard we did probably three funerals a week, and I began to tire of the endless stream of eulogies that almost always concluded with, “I know he is playing golf or tennis or sailing up there with Jesus in heaven.” Bruce would have none of that. He had a fierce, eschatological faith. More than anyone I have ever known, Bruce Bayne not only preached resurrection; he believed in it. But for resurrection to be real death has to be real. . Before we can say Bruce will rise, we must acknowledge that he has died. Bruce would not have me say that he is somewhere now up there driving Alfa Romeos with Jesus in heaven’s version of Italy. But he would have me say that, when all is said and done, he and we will rise as Jesus did. I do not look for Bruce’s spirit to be wafting around the cosmos. I do look for Bruce to stand with Jesus and you and me at the last day.

Like many clergy, Bruce early on devised his own blessing, one taken from a collect in our Evening Prayer liturgy. Standing behind the altar at the end of the service, he would say:

Tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless
the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous.

And then he would bless all of us. In some sense, this prayer provided the mission statement for Bruce’s ministry. In his life and work, Bruce did “in point of fact” as he was wont to say, “tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous”. He was the real deal both as priest and friend. I am so grateful for the gift in my life of Bruce George Cuthbert Bayne. He was one of the two or three funniest people I have ever known, and I grew up in Hollywood. He was one of the two or three most theologically honest and grounded people I have ever known. And he was a faithful, constant, and generous friend. True, he spent his life in a kind of emotional pain that could not help spilling into the lives of the people he loved. But when all was said and done, he loved those people fiercely, far beyond his capacity to show it. I owe a lot of what I know about love and death and God and friendship to Bruce, and I am profoundly thankful, even in the midst of all that pain, for the inexpressible gift of his life and ministry. And I look forward, in hope, as he did to that feast on God’s mountain, to that mansion in Jesus’s father’s house, to that gathering around God’s throne, where God will wipe away all tears from our eyes—yours, mine, and especially, Bruce’s. Amen.

Homily: The Ordination of Priests [January 11, 2020] St. John's Cathedral, Los Angeles

            I begin this morning with a confession: I feel a certain amount of trepidation stepping into this pulpit to preach at the ordination of priests. My fear does not spring from inexperience: I’ve been a priest myself for almost 43 years, having been ordained at these very diocesan ordinations on January 15, 1977, the day on which Victoria Hatch was ordained as the first woman priest in Los Angeles. And a good part of my ministry was spent in seminaries, so I’ve bloviated on occasions like this plenty of times before.

            What really scares me, though, is comparison to what happened at this event last year. Hartshorn Murphy, a longtime friend and colleague of mine, preached a spectacular sermon, telling spellbinding stories of his own early life in the church and and his long ministry in it, doing so with nary a note or a text before him. The excellence of Murphy’s sermon alone would have been enough to strike fear into any subsequent ordination preacher, but what really intensified the problem was what happened next. It seemed, for a while, that at every diocesan meeting I went to I was forced to watch the video of this sermon. Commission on Ministry: watch Murphy’s video. Standing Committee: watch Murphy’s video. Commission on Parking, Potlucks, and Purificators: watch Murphy’s video. It got to the point that I could only look at it by forcing my eyelids open, kind of like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Luckily, they stopped short of issuing Murphy ordination sermon swag, so I never had to get the mug, the tote bag, or the souvenir key chain. But you get the idea.

            So here I am, not standing boldly on the step but cowering meekly in the pulpit, holding onto my manuscript for dear life. From this relatively safe position, let me begin with a doublesided prediction. On the downside, you will not hear anything this morning remotely as compelling as what you heard a year ago. On the upside, you’ll never be forced to watch the video again. Or buy the keychain, the tote bag, or the mug.

            We’re gathered this morning as a diverse group of people—families, friends, parishioners, diocesan community—to witness and consent to the ordination of eight people to the priesthood. In the church it is customary for us to pause for a moment before we proceed and allow ourselves to reflect on what the scriptures might have to say about what we are doing. We have two Bible readings this morning to consider, and I’d like to say a brief word about each.

            Our first reading is from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it recounts the call of Isaiah to be a prophet [Isaiah 6: 18]. It is a powerful account: Isaiah sees God and the angels hovering above him and is both overwhelmed with a sense of God’s holiness and filled with personal despair.

And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’

 Now although we often read this passage at ordinations, the dramatic experience of God it relates is not shared by most of us in the ordained ministry. Frankly, if one of our eight friends had presented themselves to the Commission on Ministry and announced that they “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple” they would politely have been told to seek professional help. As they say in the ads, “Don’t try this at home”. Yet we regularly read this passage because it gets at something that all of us who have offered ourselves for this work feel. We feel both driven and unworthy to do it.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!‘

This reading from Isaiah reminds us that we who follow Jesus—baptized people and clergy—do so because we really can’t do anything else. And the church sets some of us apart to dress up and perform priestly actions because it knows that we fragile, finite, dependent creatures will somehow advance the common good, often in spite of ourselves. We don’t get ordained because of our professional competence. We get ordained because, in the words of the New English Bible, we “know our need of God”. And if we really know our need of God we can help others find it, express it, and live out a response to it—which, for the time being, will be enough.

So that’s our first reading. The second comes from the Gospel of John [John 10:11-18] and it is also a familiar passage

‘I am the good shepherd. . . . I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

To people both inside and outside the church, all of this talk about shepherds and sheep can be a little confusing. Jesus is the shepherd and we are the sheep. Wait, aren’t we all the same species? When we call clergy shepherds, aren’t we setting up some kind of hierarchical difference between them and their congregants? One of my long-ago seminary professors solved this by changing the analogy. Clergy were not shepherds, he said, but sheepdogs. My own longtime friend and mentor, Harvey Guthrie (who preached at that ordination in 1977) told us all we were about to become “sheep in shepherds’ clothing”. Both of these figures point to the same problem faced by Isaiah: we priests are regular people being asked to do something extraordinary. And the only way to get through it without massively messing up is to remember how regular and sheep-like we really are.

            For our ordination retreat this week, I asked these eight folks to read a short story by Wendell Berry, a story called “A Desirable Woman”. It tells of a young minister and his wife in a rural community, and it describes the beauty and nobility of the priestly calling as few things I’ve ever read. Here are a couple of lines from that story:

[The minister] had the gift of comforting. He carried it with him, not by his will, it seemed, but by the purest gift, the very presence of comfort. And yet even as it was a comfort to others, it could be a bafflement and a burden to him. His calling, and the respect accorded to it, admitted him into the presence of troubles he could not mend.

            Whether we’re parish clergy, school, hospital, or prison chaplains, seminary professors, even bishops and cathedral deans, the truest thing you can say about us priests is that we are regularly “admitted into the presence of troubles” we cannot mend. When I was in seminary, I was so daunted by the prospect of facing those troubles that I tried to prepare by reading everything and trying to store up pastoral responses that would serve in any emergency. It was only after years working in the church that I realized the folly of that kind of proleptic cramming.

What makes it possible for us priests to do any good at all is the simple gift of the way people let us into our lives—to be with them in the troubles we cannot mend. Sometimes those are public troubles like war, peace, and injustice. Usually they are private troubles like illness, death, failure, and loss. And the best we can do with that gift is not get confused about what it means. Our people are neither our lovers, our enemies, nor our followers. They are, as we are, human beings who suffer and love and try to do their best. All they really want is some empathy and compassion along the way.

And so, to Jamie, Brainerd, KC, Sarah, Bill, Jon, Carlos, and Judith: welcome to the burden and bafflement of priestly ministry. Like all of us who have come before you, you have first said, “Woe is me!” and then answered God’s call in Isaiah’s words, “Here I am, send me.” And like all of us you will spend the rest of your lives being invited into the presence of troubles you cannot mend. Your task, in the midst of those troubles, is to witness to the infinite grace and mercy of God by first remembering what a privilege it is to step into other peoples’ lives and allow God to work through you. But remember: Jesus is the good shepherd. You and I are fellow sheep who have now been asked now to dress in shepherds’ clothing. We are regular people asked to do something extraordinary, allowing ourselves to be vessels of the healing, liberation, and blessing which finally belong to God.

As we stood in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday, January 15, 1977, none of the six of us being ordained that day could have imagined the changes that would be coming to the church in our working lifetimes. As you stand here today none of you can predict where your ministries will take you over the next 40 years. Some of you will be prophetic movement leaders, others parish or chaplaincy pastors. Most of what you do will never be captured on video or shared on social media. Yet all of it—the public, the private—will be characterized by what Wendell Berry calls the privilege of being “admitted into troubles you cannot mend”. To the extent that you come to know that about yourselves and those you work with, you will come to see God not only calling you but working in and through you as well. And what way of life can be finally be more fulfilling or noble than that? Amen.

Address: Diocese of Los Angeles, Bishops' Dinner [November 2, 2019] St. John's Cathedral

            Thank you, Canon McCarthy for that somewhat over the top introduction. I want to begin with the self-evident observation that I am not Kelly Brown Douglas. Kelly is a trim, buff African American woman who is also a world class theologian. I am a retired priest who grew up in the Valley. As Kelly’s former colleague at Washington National Cathedral and the person who recruited her to be dean of Episcopal Divinity School at Union, I do from time to time bask in her reflected glory. As her stand-in tonight I will do my best to channel her values if not her brilliance.

            Kelly and I are really good friends. When Bishop Taylor asked me to speak tonight in her stead, Kelly and I had the following text exchange.

Me: They’ve asked me to speak in your place. You owe me.

Kelly: LOL. God is so good. This is your comeuppance!

Me: Please send standard jokes and talking points.

Kelly: All my jokes are about old white guys, so the joke would be on you, LOLOL

            We’re gathered tonight in a cathedral church. The name “cathedral” derives from the Greek word, cathedra, for “bishop’s chair”. A cathedral is a church with a bishop’s chair. Because St. John’s now boasts two bishop’s chairs (one for the suffragan, one for the diocesan) it must be, in the spirit of Animal House, a “double secret” cathedral.

            A cathedral is not only a bishop’s church. It is a church which enacts a bishop’s ministry, and a bishop’s ministry has always been by its nature a public ministry. What I want to say tonight has to do with the nature of the public ministry that I believe all Episcopal congregations, not only cathedrals, share. In doing so I draw on my experience at Washington National Cathedral, an institution created in the early 20^th century to have a dual vocation—a local one as cathedral for the diocese of Washington, a national one as what the founders called a “Westminster Abbey for America”.  Though they seem different, Washington and Los Angeles have many things in common. When I first moved to DC, everyone there was fascinated with my show business background—both my parents worked in movies and television, and I had a brief flirtation with show business before going to seminary. “How are you adjusting to life in Washington after having grown up in Hollywood?” they would ask. “No problem,” I would reply. “They’re both exactly the same culture.” If you doubt that, just remember the phrase, “What have you done for me lately?”

            I was attracted to Washington National Cathedral by the opportunity to explore there the relation of theology and public policy. We live in a highly contentious and polarized moment in America, and I was intrigued with the idea of how the faith community could bring its values to bear in a way that might enable both sides to talk with each other. Having worked for many years at All Saints, Pasadena, I was familiar with the church’s role as an issue advocate. But Washington offered something different, the chance to represent the gospel’s values not as a partisan but as a partner in the places where policy was being made. Early on in my time there I got the chance to talk to Bill Moyers about this idea, and he said something really interesting: “Imagine how different the health care debate would be if the faith community had weighed in early about health care as a human right before it got to the legislative arena.” Don’t get me wrong: there are times when the church needs to take to the streets in defense of gospel values. But might there also be a way for us to be involved with public life in more collaborative ways? I decided that the nexus of theology and public policy would be my focus during my years in the nation’s capital.

            It didn’t start off too well. My wife Kathy will tell you that I harbor some bizarre pet peeves, the strangest of which is a kind of righteous anger provoked every time the Postal Service raises the cost of a stamp by just one cent. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a streak of one cent stamp raises, and (in those days before we all paid bills electronically) year after year I would have to stand in line at the post office and buy a sheet of one cent stamps. Why didn’t they just raise postage a nickel at a time and leave us alone for a few years? This whole thing really rotted my socks. I would come home from my 90 minutes at the post office muttering expletives questioning the parentage and legitimacy of the US government in general and the postal service staff in particular.

            As luck would have it, my first public appearance at Washington National Cathedral was for the unveiling of that year’s Christmas stamp. They set up a press event downstairs in Bethlehem Chapel, and the two speakers were the US Postmaster General (the Honorable Patrick R. Donahoe, you can look him up) and me. As the Postmaster General and I waited in the slype (the cathedral’s vesting room) for the event to begin, I realized that I had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to press my case. It was time to speak truth to power! So after a bit of chitchat, I turned to Mr. Donahoe and said, “I’d like to speak to you, sir, about these one cent postage raises. They’re really inconvenient. Every year I have to go to the post office and wait in line for over an hour. Can’t you raise them less frequently, a few more cents at a time?”

            I wish I had a video of the way the Postmaster General’s face changed. The light suddenly went out in his eyes. You could see from the look on his face that I had gone in his estimation from ecclesiastical dignitary to dangerous weirdo. The conversation suddenly ended when he remembered there was a phone call he needed to make. It was probably to security or his therapist.

            So buttonholing a cabinet member about your goofy pet peeve is probably not the best way to go about having an impact on public policy. And remember what the great Noam Chomsky once said: “You don’t have to speak truth to power, because they know it already. You don’t speak truth to anybody. Join with people and try to find the truth.” After that interchange I had my friend, Brother Roy Parker of OHC do Chomsky’s saying up in calligraphy and hung it on the wall above my desk, and it became my mantra during my years in Washington. The church has its most profound and lasting impact when it talks with and not to people.

            Let’s dispense with the old canard about religion and politics. The church has an absolute right—indeed a duty—to be an active participant in the public square. If you read the scriptures carefully, you’ll see that the Bible’s ethics are overwhelmingly concerned with social, not personal, morality. The prophets chastise Israel for its shared public faithlessness, and they call Israel to a collective righteousness. In our culture, we experience Christianity filtered through American individualism, and so we tend to think that God cares most about our private morality. But it just isn’t so.

            And as if the Bible weren’t enough, we Episcopalians have an additional warrant for public engagement. We are Anglicans, descendants of the Church of England, an established church. Our greatest theologian, Richard Hooker, wrote extensively about the church’s role and responsibility in promoting the common good, or what he called “commonwealth”. As followers of Jesus in this Anglican mode, you and I are, together, custodians of the common good. We are as responsible for our common life as we are for our personal lives. Unlike our evangelical brethren, we are not trying to stay pure until God destroys the hated world. We are trying to convert and transform God’s beloved world into the new heaven and new earth envisioned by Jesus and promised in the book of Revelation.

            A faithful church must be involved in the making of public policy. But too often, the faith community is absent when those decisions are made. The government is there. The private sector is there. The nonprofit sector is there. But we as church are not usually at the table. We find ourselves excluded or we step back because of mistaken ideas about mixing religion and politics. But, like it or not, politics is the way human beings make collective decisions, and as those collective decisions are made we Anglican Christians have a warrant for participating. A new heaven and a new earth will not come about by us meekly staying home, worrying about our private problems.

            Now I want to be clear that church participation in making public policy is not precisely the same thing as issue advocacy, but the line is often blurry and sometimes we have difficulty drawing it. During my time as dean, Washington National Cathedral started to perform same sex weddings when they became legal in both DC and Maryland in 2013. The cathedral organized the first, large-scale response to gun violence after the Newtown shootings in 2012. In collaboration with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse we hosted a conference and began an initiative on environmental theology and justice in 2014. And from my earliest days in Washington we began ongoing work to repair the church’s involvement in systemic racism in the city and diocese of Washington, an effort that led, finally, to the removal of two stained glass windows honoring Confederate generals and displaying the Confederate battle flag.

Washington National Cathedral jumped into social engagement only partially because I was dean and not because we were all left wing Democrats—indeed, most of us weren’t. We worked with the White House, the Congress, and local DC government because of the social dimension of Christian faith and practice. The Episcopal Church approved liturgies for same sex blessings, and weddings where legal, in 2012. Our church has supported gun control since 1976. Environmental theology has become central to our understanding of God and in world since the 1970s. And racial justice is not only a modern value: it lies at the heart of the biblical prophets’ vision of a horizon of universal peace, justice, and salvation.

The point is that being a public church means taking public stands on issues that are important to us for theological reasons. It then means building relationships with people in government, business, the academy, and the media to help us both articulate and broadcast our positions. And then it means doing the hard, unsexy work of showing up, not just in the pulpit, but in city council meetings, school board meetings, congressional hearings, chamber of commerce and service club meetings. The days are over when we can just get up in a pulpit, say something dramatic, and think doing so will make any difference. When I was in seminary in the 1970s, the Monday New York Times still ran a digest of what had been said in Manhattan pulpits on Sunday. Not anymore. If we want to have an impact on the public square, we need to be active both visibly and behind the scenes in public life. And we need to speak with, not to, each other.

And I’m not talking only or even primarily about our leaders doing all this. Our church communities—our dioceses, our congregations, and our diocesan institutions—need to weigh in as well. Congregations through their vestries and bishop’s committees need to let their communities know where they stand. It’s one thing for the rector or vicar to talk about an issue. We clergy shoot our mouths off all the time. It’s altogether another for a congregation as a whole to say where it is on a matter of local importance. Institutions have power, at least reputational power, and when they use it the results can be dramatic. Look for example at the impact Hillsides, whose leader Joe Costa we honor tonight, has had over the years. Hillsides is not only a first-class service provider. It is also a vocal advocate for children and youth across the spectrum of Southern California government and media outlets. Its impact both on lives and on the community has been dramatic and profound.

We expect our bishops to speak to national, state, and wider community issues like immigration and housing and racial justice. But what difference would it make to our common life if congregations—beginning with our cathedral and extending to all the places where Episcopalians gather--spoke to county supervisors, city councils, and school boards about the gospel’s values in the real-life day-to-day decisions they make that impact so many people? As my old friend and personal hero William Sloane Coffin once said to me, “Anyone can preach. Blessed are those who can organize.” He meant it as a compliment.

Although I am honored to be here tonight, I am deeply sorry you did not get to hear directly from Dean Kelly Brown Douglas, a woman who can both preach and organize. In her two years as dean of EDS@UTS, Kelly has both articulated and enacted a vision of theological engagement in the public square. It is a vision deeply rooted in scripture, tradition, and a profound openness to the pain and beauty of the world.  I am proud to be involved in the building and expression of that vision, just as I am proud after a lifetime of serving around the country to be back in the Diocese of Los Angeles, a diocese where the leadership of John, Diane, and Melissa is continuing a long, deep tradition of living out a transformational vision of the gospel in the real world we all inhabit together. Think about any real issue that impacts people in this region—housing, education, immigration, sexual and gender identity, the celebration of a plurality of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities—and our diocese and its institutions are there. And we are there because Anglicanism is devoted not only to personal salvation but to the promotion of the common good. In our common life, the Diocese of Los Angeles is showing the rest of the church how to be the people of God creatively and faithfully in a specific place and time. We are working together to make this place in this moment in the image of the heavenly city toward which we all strive. That is what it means to be the church in the public arena. It’s not only about taking positions. It’s more deeply about building and maintaining the relationships that can turn those positions into reality for real people in the here and now.

            And here is where I get a bit embarrassed when I think about my pet peeves. I wish I had those 20 minutes with the Postmaster General to do over again. Instead of pressing him about a small personal issue, I should have engaged him about the lives and working conditions of letter carriers or the rural customers who depend on the Post Office to stay connected. Real advocacy is less about expressing my opinion than it is about empathizing with those who are up against it. As the great French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil once said, the real question each of us Christians needs to ask another is, “What are you going through?” If we engage each other by repeatedly asking that question and seeking solutions, we cannot help but change the world.

            I guess what it all means is that if we’re going to have an impact on our public life, we have got to approach that life not only with open minds but with open hearts. Yes, we need to build relationships across the governmental-media spectrum, but before we do that we have to listen with what St. Benedict calls “the ear of our hearts” to the pain and joy of the world. Being the church in the public square is not only or even primarily about spouting sound bites on television. It is about standing with and for people and working to make it possible for them to become the people God intends them to be. It is about living and striving for the common good.

Together, you and I are called to be a public church for the five counties we serve. That calling starts here in the cathedral and extends to the farthest flung outposts of the diocese. If we ever begin to forget that calling, we now have these two big honking double secret bishop’s chairs up here to remind us. And remember: every church has, or should have, a chair for the bishop—a chair which reminds us of the apostolic ministry which the bishop symbolizes and to which all of us are called. I am grateful to be part of a diocesan community that gets that. And I’m honored to have the privilege of working together with all of you not only to glimpse that heavenly city on Sundays, but to work and pray to help bring about its realization in our real communities during the rest of the week. We walk, together, toward that vision. Together we can help God make real the hope and grace and blessing for which we all so deeply long.

Homily: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [August 25, 2019] All Saints, Pasadena

            For those of you younger than 80 who don’t know me, I’m Gary Hall. I worked on the staff here from 1990 to 2001, the last five years of George’s time as rector and the first six of Ed’s. Working at All Saints was always, shall we say, an adventure. One day early on in my time here I was at my desk and received a call from the rector’s office. Now in George’s day the rector’s office didn’t call you to say, “Hey, how’s it going?” In George’s time, as in Ed’s, the rector’s office called you either because a) you had messed up, or b) they had a Mission Impossible task for you. The latter was the case this time.

            I was told that an older parishioner named Paul (first names only, please) was at Huntington Hospital and wanted to talk to a priest right now. He had been diagnosed with a virulent form of leukemia, and he had to make the decision today whether or not to start a very harsh form to chemotherapy. I dropped whatever other urgent thing I was doing and sped over to Huntington.

            Now my generation of clergy were trained in what we used to call “non-directive” counseling: that is, we strove to help the patient or client come to his or her own mind, not just take our advice. So I sat there with Paul, who couldn’t make up his mind, trying non-directively to lead him to some kind of decision. It was for both of us, frankly, torture. “So Paul, I hear you saying you don’t know what you want to do.” “That’s right Gary, I can’t make up my mind.” “Undecided, eh?” “That’s right.” It went on like this for a seeming eternity, a kind of mobius strip feedback loop of endless indecision.

            Suddenly, like a bolt from above, George Regas himself entered the hospital room. He put his hand on my shoulder and remained standing.

            “Stay seated, Gary. What’s the matter Paul?”

            “George, I can’t decide whether or not to do chemotherapy. If I don’t take it, I’ll die. If I do, it might kill me.”

            George didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, you’ve got to do it, Paul. Got to do it.”

            “Really, George?”

            “Absolutely. Got to do it. I have to go now. You keep at it Gary. See you back at the office.”

            George said a prayer and left. I sat there with Paul for another 20 minutes trying to process what just happened.

            Paul did do the chemotherapy. He lived another 20 years.

            I decided to change my counseling technique.

            People who were not around in the Regas years may not know that before George was known as a peace and justice leader he had the reputation as a priest with the gift of healing. In fact, I believe it was George’s commitment to healing that drew him into justice issues in the first place. I think about George’s healing-justice combo whenever I read Gospel stories about Jesus. We over-educated Protestants tend to think that Jesus was famous for his parables and sayings, a kind of first century professor in sandals. But when you read the Gospels closely you see that the crowds came out to see him primarily because he was a healer. And it was his work as a healer that brought Jesus increasingly into conflict with the forces that oppress and diminish human beings.

            Today’s Gospel [Luke 13: 10-17] is a case in point. A woman comes to Jesus, in the words of our translation, “bent double, quite incapable of standing up straight”. Luke uses a rare Greek word here, συνκύπτουσα, suggesting that her legs are bowed together and that she is bent over—literally tied up in knots. He calls her over and says, “Woman, you are free of your infirmity.” He lays his hands on her, she stands up straight, and immediately begins thanking God. The story then goes on to focus how the synagogue authorities get all bent out of shape because Jesus dared to heal someone on the sabbath.

Luke is making an analogy here. This woman is tied up in knots the way Israel itself is tied up in knots. She suffers a literal, physical twisting and brokenness in the same way Israel is twisted and broken by hypocrisy. Luke the Gospel writer wants us to see more than one person’s problem here. He wants us to see ourselves. Jesus heals a woman who is tied up in knots. Jesus means to liberate an establishment that is tied up in hypocrisy. That is true for first century Jewish Palestine. It’s doubly true for 21^st century America.

            I guess I’m drawn to the image of the woman doubled over with legs bowed together because these days I feel that way myself. Who do you know right now who isn’t tied up in knots because of the hypocrisy, racism, and vitriol of our current national life? As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg tweeted last week, “The front page of the NYT right now looks like one of those pre-election parodies about what [this current] administration would be like.” And she’s right: there were stories on one single front page about new immigration rules allowing the indefinite detention of families; the NRA turning the president against universal background checks; the president accusing Jewish Democrats of “disloyalty” and then canceling a trip to Denmark because they won’t sell him Greenland. What sentient, breathing person can take in this stuff on a daily basis and not find herself all tied up in knots?

            Luke’s bent over bow-legged woman is twisted because her community is twisted. You and I are all tied up because our country is sick with the sins of racism, xenophobia, and hate. Social sickness has personal consequences. You can’t live in this current moment and not somehow feel how sick and ugly it really is. As Mark Twain said, in parody of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If”, “If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, you are not aware of the situation.”

            Jesus healed this woman because he felt her pain and knew its cause. Jesus comes to heal us, and he does so by making us agents of healing and liberation ourselves.

            In today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible [Jeremiah 1: 4-10] God calls Jeremiah to speak both personally and publicly: “This day I appoint you over nations and territories, to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” I wish there were a national George Regas who could walk into our rooms, put his hand on our shoulders, and tell us that it will all work out. But the truth is that, as the living hands of Jesus on earth, you and I will have to do this healing work ourselves. Like Jeremiah, you and I are appointed to uproot and tear down, to build and to plant. We are sick with the social sins that surround and infect us. But it’s not hopeless. Jesus offers us both personal and social liberation. We have, in the church and in all justice communities, the opportunity to work not only for the healing of the nation but the healing of ourselves. The healing stories of Jesus are a sign of God’s intention for us. This is not first century Bible land. God wants us to take up our bed and walk. God wants us to straighten ourselves and give thanks. God wants us to face into all the destructive, dehumanizing forces that tie us in knots and turn and liberate ourselves and each other. But we can only free ourselves when we acknowledge we’re sick. We can only repent when we have admitted our implication in sin.

            Today marks the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the American continent. Frederick Douglass noted in his Narrative long ago that slavery proved as injurious to the owners as it did to the slaves, turning them into fierce, stone-hearted oppressors. If you are a white person in America and think that slavery has nothing to do with you, you are kidding yourself. You are, like Israel’s religious authorities and the woman they crippled, tied up in moral and intellectual knots. All of us bear the sin and pain of slavery and its consequences. Slavery is the root evil behind all our nation’s sickness. For a modern that could make its peace with slavery, it was a short step to denying the full humanity of women, LGBT folks, all people of color, and poor people. Until we face into, repent, and work to heal racism, we all will feel crazy and sick.

What George knew then and I did not was that our friend Paul didn’t have the luxury of not taking chemotherapy. What I do know now is that you and I don’t have the luxury of falling into political despair. We will heal ourselves and our world by holding on to and making real our shared vision of justice, love, and above all, hope.

Today at noon Episcopal churches across America, including this one, will ring their bells for one minute not only to remember the arrival of enslaved Africans at Port Comfort, Virginia 400 years ago. We’ll ring the bells also to ask forgiveness and to commit ourselves to reconciliation with each other and God. Let’s take that minute as an invitation from Jesus to straighten ourselves, stand up, and be healed. I know, from my own experience here and elsewhere, that doing this work together is actually in itself joyful and will help us all feel both healthy and sane. There is no cheap, easy path to serenity. Only in promoting our community welfare will we find personal wholeness and peace.

            Jesus worked for justice because he was a healer. We can’t say we follow Jesus and continue to benefit from white privilege. America will never be—we will never be—the nation and people we hope to be until we take responsibility for slavery and all of its consequences which even now infect our lives. For our sake, and the sake of our nation, we need a reckoning. We are bent over and tied in knots. Like my friend Paul facing leukemia, we need to take our medicine.

“Oh, you’ve got to do it, Paul. Got to do it.” “Really, George?” Yes really, George. We’ve all just got to do it. Amen.

Homily: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [July 21, 2019] St. Michael’s, Studio City

Gary Hall
St. Michael and All Angels, Studio City
July 21, 2019 [6 Pentecost]


It seems like a lifetime ago now, but for several years I taught American literature first at UCLA (on that side of the hill) and then at Oakwood School (on this side of the hill). I was already ordained before I went to graduate school, and I left parish ministry for a time because I so loved both the subject matter and working with kids on a daily basis. Eventually I went back to full time work in the church, but I have always carried with me the delight of engaging others in discussion over novels and poems.
Mark Twain is probably the most fun American writer to teach. His 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson is one of my favorites, not so much for its story as for the epigrams that begin each chapter. The character David “Puddn’head” Wilson publishes a calendar, each month featuring one of his characteristic sayings. For example:
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
“In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.”
And my favorite, a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s inspirational poem, “If”: “If you can keep your head when those around you are losing theirs, you are not aware of the situation.”
Now Mark Twain was not much of a Bible reader, and that’s a shame, because if he were he might have made up a Pudd’nhead Wilson calendar entry that would help us understand our reaction to challenging scripture passages. Last week we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story from Jesus that tells us that the respectable people leave a man in the road to die. Today’s gospel has Jesus seemingly praising a layabout and chastising a hard worker. If Mark Twain had been in the Bible business, he might have had Pudd’nhead Wilson say something like this: “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.” Not hilarious, I admit. But pretty accurate.
“You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.” Think about it. There’s the parable of the prodigal son, where the loser brother gets the fatted calf and the hardworking brother gets chastised. There’s the teaching about rich people entering the kingdom of God being like camels trying to get through the eyes of needles. Years of preaching on and listening to these stories have effectively put stained glass around them, and we treat them as holy objects too delicate actually to engage. But let’s be honest. Jesus’s stories are often insulting to our basic ideas of fairness and common sense. He does not make these statements to prettify the status quo. He makes them to shake us up. And so, my Pudd’nhead Wilson-esque suggestion for today: “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.”
Today’s gospel [Luke 10: 38-42] gives us a perfect example.  Jesus goes to the house of Martha and Mary. Martha welcomes Jesus. Her sister Mary sits at Jesus’s feet and listens to his teaching. Martha bustles around the house with all the tasks attendant on Near Eastern hospitality. When Martha can no longer stand the inequality, she snaps, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But instead of siding with an aggrieved woman, Jesus admonishes her: "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
Now, admit it. Doesn’t this make you mad? If it doesn’t, shouldn’t it?
I have heard more bad sermons on this gospel reading than perhaps on any other. I’ve even delivered a few myself. We preachers tie ourselves in knots by trying to make Jesus sound more plausible than he does. We make it sound like he isn’t really saying what we patently know to be the case. Usually, the preacher will say something about the difference between the active (Martha) and contemplative (Mary) spiritual life. But that neat distinction never really works. Anyone can tell that things are askew here. Something about Jesus’s response to Martha outrages my innate sense of fairness. Admittedly, Martha’s initial complaint to Jesus is hard to warm up to. Nobody likes a fink. Yet still we see the justice of her cause. Her sister is leaving her to do all the work.
Or is she? Let’s begin with the best case for Martha. She has a guest in her home, and she is performing all the duties attendant on hospitality, a prime virtue in the ancient Near East. Hospitality to travelers was in those days and remains today a moral obligation in many cultures around the world. Martha is not just being a busybody. In making Jesus feel welcome she is doing important work.
And then there is Mary. She is not just lying on the sofa watching Jerry Springer and eating Cheetos. She is “sitting at the Lord’s feet” (παρακαθεσθεῖσα πρὸς τοὺς πόδας) and “listening to what he is saying” (ἤκουεν τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ). These are not just chance descriptors. They are technical terms from the world of both Jewish and classical teaching. Whether in the Temple or the marketplace, you “sit at someone’s feet” as their student. You “listen to what they are saying” because you are in training to do what they do. You are planning to be a rabbi or philosopher yourself. And planning to be a rabbi or philosopher is something women were not supposed to do.
Mary’s conduct outrages her sister only secondarily because it leaves her with all the housework. Martha becomes unsettled and disturbed because her sister Mary has suddenly upended all her culture’s gender distinctions. In the ancient Near East, women and men inhabited different social spheres in the world and different rooms in the household. Mary has crossed the boundary from the kitchen to the living room. She is sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to what he is saying. She is behaving like a man.
Mary’s behavior is indeed startling on its own terms, and Jesus’s praise of it could easily make one mad. Gender roles go deep in a culture. Perhaps that is why so many people my age seem to have difficulty with both transgender and non-binary ways of self-identification. But the gender bending here says more about Jesus and his community than it does about personal identity. The household over which Jesus presides is one that knows no boundaries. The love and justice incarnate in Jesus transcends any arbitrary way we may have of defining ourselves. When you enter the Jesus zone, all previous bets are off. You are free to be who you are, free to pursue your deepest drives and passions, because in Jesus’s world you are accepted and blessed as you are. In sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his words, Mary is acting out of her truest self. And that is not only OK. It is good.
Over the years, I have been fortunate to spend a good deal of time in monasteries. Many years ago I was staying at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, the headquarters of the Order of the Holy Cross, of which I am an Associate. I vividly remember attending a festival service there celebrating the order’s anniversary. The presiding bishop celebrated and the superior, the head brother in the order, preached. Everyone was dressed up in ecclesiastical finery. When the service ended, we all adjourned to a festive lunch. After lunch, I saw the superior—the same head guy who had just preached at the festival service and chatted amiably with church dignitaries—get up from the table, go to the kitchen, put on an apron, and begin busing dishes, scraping and then rinsing our plates.
What I loved about that is that I saw someone I greatly respected inhabiting both Martha and Mary modes in the same moment. With Mary, he had sat at their feet and listened to what they were saying. With Martha he had performed the essential acts of hospitality. Both aspects seemed to coexist authentically within him. He did not fall for a false choice.
In refusing to chastise Mary, Jesus does not denigrate Martha. He understands that the gender and power roles our culture assigns us to be fluid and not fixed. He allows for the possibility that people will find fulfillment in culturally surprising ways. And he creates a community in which it is OK for you and me to try on new and alternative ways of being. The point of this story is neither that we should all give up grunt work and contemplate our navels, nor that we should assault the roles we have learned to inhabit over a lifetime. The point is that, in the presence of Jesus and each other, we can be free both to be who we really are and to follow the logic of God’s promptings in our lives. And that creative freedom allows us both to find peace in self-acceptance and to find courage to change and bless the world.
Pudd’nhead Wilson never got around to writing a Bible calendar, and perhaps that’s just as well. Following Jesus is a lifetime of self-discovery, and the truths we find there don’t always boil down neatly into aphorisms. It may well be that, “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad;” but after that flash of anger might come the realization that there are new ways of doing things, and living into them might just be the start of a new and purposeful life. Amen.