Homily: The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost [November 17, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

            This is a year of anniversaries—in January of the Emancipation Proclamation, last August of the March on Washington, next Friday of the assassination of President Kennedy.  Each of these events both upset and altered our expectations of the established order.  As they happened they appeared to us in one light, in retrospect another. How do we read our past? How do we respond to the present moment?

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’ [Luke 21:5-6]

It is a bit disorienting to gather in this transcendent space on an autumn morning and hear Jesus in today’s Gospel predict the destruction of the temple. We erect buildings like this one because they speak to us of permanence. Beyond that, they represent the good, the just, the holy. In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus seems to be saying that the temple—and here the temple stands for everything we think permanent and hold dear--will be shaken up, torn down, and destroyed. This is probably not what you got out of a warm bed this morning to come out and hear.

How do we read and respond to the present moment? In our Gospel this morning Jesus goes on to make some dire predictions about international events and cosmic calamities:

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. [Luke 21:10]

 

I’ve never been one of those preachers who gets into the pulpit, holds up the good book, and confidently announces that your Bible is more up to date than today’s newspaper.  It is tempting to hear in a passage like this one a prediction of September 11, 2001, or to connect it to unrest in the Middle East, global warming, or the arrival of Lady Gaga and Honey Boo Boo. There is no current calamity, social problem, or celebrity sighting on display here.  Still, Jesus does seem to be saying something about the situation of his followers then and now in the world:

But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. [Luke 21.12]

Things are bad.  They’re going to get worse.  And everybody is going to blame us for the situation.  That about sums up this morning’s Gospel.  Have a nice weekend!

How do we read and respond to the present moment?  What is our situation?  What will become of us? In times of crisis or calamity, people of faith often look to the Bible.  But what, in this era, can the Bible mean for us? Right now in England BBC 2 is running a series called The Story of the Jews featuring the historian Simon Schama.  In a recent interview, here is what Schama said about the Bible’s role in Judaism:

It is a salient characteristic of the endurance of the Jews that when the usual markers and supporters of endurance--namely a territory, an army, the institutions of a state--are completely ripped from them, they invent (beginning with the Bible, much of which was written in the first Babylonian exile) a form of portable narrative.  And a portable narrative does two things:  it actually tells them their own history (part myth, part fable, part accurate); and it also sets down a series of laws and precepts which are specifically about trying to live a Jewish life in a non-Jewish world.  [Simon Schama on Nightwaves, BBC Radio 3, September 13, 2013]

            From Simon Schama’s perspective as a 21^st century Jew, the Bible is a “portable narrative” setting down “laws and precepts” about “trying to live a Jewish life in a non-Jewish world.” They were exiles.  Their portable narrative gave them a sense of home.

            In some sense, we too gather in this cathedral as exiles. Like all Gothic church buildings, this one stands as a monument to a time when Christianity was the official religion of Western culture. When we gather in places like this today it is easy to pretend that we are still at the center of things and to forget that in the postmodern world a multiplicity of faith traditions and narratives live together collectively to shape our shared experience of the holy. As the philosopher Richard Rorty used to say, there is no longer one, unifying “big picture”. You and I live in a moment when we are emerging from the Western cultural consensus that there was a big picture, and that (conveniently for us) it belonged to Christianity.  Now—in spite of what this building wants to say about our pretensions to cultural power and authority—we Christians make our way with other faith traditions in the world. That’s a bit destabilizing, but it’s the truth.  And it’s also good news.  In a funny way it helps us understand our early Jewish and Christian forbears better than we used to.  Because our situation now is almost exactly like theirs.

Early people of faith needed their Bibles as “portable narratives” to tell them how to be faithful in a world in which they were exiles.  Our parents and grandparents did not need that portable narrative in quite the same way because they were comfortably at home in the “big picture” of the Western world. But just as the early Jews and Christians were exiles, so are you and I.  We need our Bibles the way first century Jews and Christians did. When we read the Bible today, it may not be more up to date than our newspaper, but it speaks to us with a power and relevance it may not have had for our immediate predecessors. It is once again our portable narrative, telling us how to be at home in an increasingly alienated world.

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus points forward to a coming time of calamity.  The seemingly invincible temple will be thrown down. Nation will rise against nation.  Rulers will identify people with Gospel values as the problem. That all sounds like pretty bad news, but Jesus does not stop there.  Jesus is blunt and uncompromising as he describes the situation of Christian exiles abroad in the world.  But he is not hopeless or depressed about it.  Listen to how he concludes:

You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls. [Luke 21: 16-19]

 

Not a hair of your head will perish.  By your endurance you will gain your souls. How do we read and respond to the present moment?

Those of us who are drawn out of a warm bed on Sunday morning into a place like this are responding to a powerful divine pull that we cannot easily identify or name. As Emily Dickinson said, “it beckons and it baffles”.  We hear something or feel something not apparent to everyone else.  We respond to something good and beautiful and true at the heart of reality, and we feel called to orient our lives around it. Even though things seem to be going to hell, we find life full of meaning and hope and joy.  We share a symbolic meal together as a way of connecting with each other and the source of all that is good and beautiful and true and hopeful and joyous.  Call us crazy.

As Christians, we may no longer own the master big picture narrative of Western culture, but we do have an important truth to tell.  And here it is: 

Let’s not delude ourselves. Buildings like this one are only temporary.  Nations and peoples will continue to fight each other.  People who stand for justice and compassion will be persecuted.  But it will all, finally, be OK.  Not a hair of your head will perish.  As perilous as our situation may be—whether we face public or personal tragedy—we are finally in the embrace of someone who will not let us go. As we make our way through a difficult and often hostile world, we have our portable narrative, our community, our shared meal to remind us that we are loved and precious, and ultimately secure in that one’s embrace. We and our world will continue to suffer.  But in and through that suffering we will be sustained by someone loving and faithful and good.

In this year of anniversaries, things will continue to be complicated and hard.  I doubt that they will get easier or more simple. How do we read and respond to the present moment? We read and respond to the present moment in the light of our portable narrative. And what that portable narrative tells us is that not a hair of your head will perish, that all will finally be well. That news may not be newer than your newspaper, but it is the deep and abiding truth around which we gather, and for which we proceed in this meal to give thanks.  Amen.

                                                                                                                                               

 

 

Homily: The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost [November 10, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

One of the great books about the effects of war is Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and if you have read it (or seen the film) you will never forget the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran.  Septimus Warren Smith suffers from what they then called “shell shock” and we today call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the course of the novel, Septimus interacts with two physicians—his local Dr. Holmes, who thinks his patient’s disorder is merely a little funk or slight depression, and then a famous London physician, Sir William Bradshaw, who takes PTSD more seriously but only prescribes an extended stay in one of his rest homes.  Neither doctor listens to what Septimus actually says about himself.  He feels that in his military service he has somehow committed a crime or failed to save his comrades during the Great War.  In the evenings, Septimus has what Woolf calls “sudden thunder claps of fear.”  Worse than that, he says that he cannot feel. 

As great as Mrs. Dalloway may be, it is not the last word about veterans and their issues.  So in preparation for Veterans Day weekend, I’ve been reading two books by Washington Post reporter David Finkel:  his classic The Good Soldiers, and this year’s Thank You For Your Service.  The first book followed the Army’s 2-16 Infantry Battalion during the 2007 surge in the Iraq war. The new book shows what became of those soldiers when they came home.  Most veterans return to lead abundant and productive lives, of course, but Finkel’s two books show how the devastation experienced by earlier soldiers like Septimus Warren Smith has become more widespread:  because the medical technology of the 21^st century allows more grievously wounded soldiers to survive, many are living now who died on battlefields in prior wars.  And there are major differences between classic wars and contemporary insurgencies.  Then there were actual battlefields.  Now there are potential improvised explosive devices around every corner and beside every road.

In Thank You For Your Service, David Finkel tells us about Sgt. Adam Schumann, who leaves his third deployment in Iraq on a “mental health evacuation.”  Troubled by many of the same mental terrors that plagued Septimus Warren Smith, Mr. Schumann receives much better care when he comes home.  Still, he is capable of both terrors and rages, and his wife Saskia struggles to cope with her own conflicting feelings:  compassion for her husband and his suffering, anger at how his injuries have taken over both their lives.  As in much of the literature of war and its aftermath, so in this: many of the men and women who come home from our modern wars continue to live the experience over and over again. Their lives become a search for ways to bring the chaos into some kind of control. “Every war has its after-war,” says Finkel, “and so it is with the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have created some 500,000 mentally wounded American veterans.”

 

            Today we observe Veterans Day, a holiday that began with the signing of the Armistice ending World War I on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day was soon established as a holiday dedicated both to honoring the service of American veterans of the Great War and to expressing our commitment to a lasting peace. In 1954, Congress changed the holiday’s name to Veterans Day, and here is what President Eisenhower said in his proclamation of its first observance:

On that day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.

            As we gather this morning to observe this day, let us begin by remembering its original, twin purposes. Veterans Day serves to recognize the service of all America’s veterans.  And it also serves to promote what Eisenhower called “an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

President Eisenhower’s words remind us that we should distinguish Veterans Day from Memorial Day.  That other holiday, which we observe in May, is properly dedicated solely to honoring those who have given their lives in the service of their country.  Obviously, on any day when we honor veterans, those who have died cannot be very far from our minds.  But today is not primarily about the dead.  Veterans Day was established to honor the living.  It asks that we set aside time not only to praise but also to seek the welfare of those who have served the United States in military service.  Over the years, I have noticed that this holiday has experienced what I would call the “Memorial-Day-ization” of Veterans Day. But remember President Eisenhower’s words. Today is about remembering and reconsecrating. Let us save our elegies and eulogies for May and reach out to the survivors in November. Sometimes it is easier to be sentimental about the dead than it is to be attentive to the living.  But our Gospel for today will not let us get off so easily.

Let us not confuse Veterans Day with Memorial Day.  Honoring our dead is one of the traits that make us human, and honoring our war dead is a basic practice of all civilized people.  But often we build monuments to the fallen when we should be caring for the survivors.  It is perhaps more emotionally satisfying to lay a wreath at a tomb than it is to visit a hospital.  But the Jesus we meet in the Gospels always directs our concern and action toward those who suffer and struggle, to those who are with us here and now.

As Jesus says in today’s passage from Luke’s Gospel, our God “is God not of the dead, but of the living.” [Luke 20:38] And later on in that same Gospel, when the women come to the tomb looking for Jesus, they are told, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” [Luke 24:5] Though we care for and honor the dead, we can do nothing for or about them.  They are in God’s hands. The living are another matter.  It is still within our power to do something for and about them. They are in our hands.

Let us not confuse Veterans Day with Memorial Day.  How do we, as Americans, as followers of Jesus, look to the living?  What might we do, as Christians, as Americans, to honor our veterans and to seek their welfare in the here and now?

If we return to President Eisenhower’s vision of the holiday, we can embrace its two purposes:  recognizing sacrifice, promoting peace.  Here is a modest suggestion about each.

Recognizing sacrifice:  there are nearly 22 million veterans alive in America today.  A little over 3 ½ million of them suffer disabilities connected with their service.  While we should see in those numbers reassurance that most veterans lead flourishing, abundant lives, we should be troubled to know that one out of seven homeless people in America is a veteran. On any given night, 107,000 veterans are homeless, and the Veterans Administration estimates that 1.5 million additional veterans are at constant risk of homelessness due to poverty, lack of support networks, and the shrinking supply of affordable housing.

My first modest suggestion:  these people are not numbers, and they matter to us as Americans.  They matter even more to us as people of faith.  It is important that we remember and honor those who serve.  It is vital that we advocate for their welfare. We need to do more as a country, as a church, than politely thank our veterans for their service.  We need to make sure that public policies are in place to treat, educate, support, house, and employ them.

President Eisenhower’s second purpose for this day was to use it to promote peace.  The veterans of the wars in my lifetime served in conflicts about which there was significant public disagreement: Vietnam, Kuwait, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan—each of these wars occasioned major protest in their own day and ongoing disagreement about their purpose even now. We should never confuse supporting a war with supporting our troops.  And we should never forget that, just as serving in even unjust wars is honorable, so is working to end them. We should not use Veterans Day as a whitewash to obscure our ongoing differences about war and peace.  We should use this day as a time to remember and honor the service of the men and women who fought on our behalf and to give thanks that we live in a country that embraces all those contradictions.

The God we know in Jesus “is God not of the dead, but of the living.” That God is also a God of peace, and the men and women who have served our country know perhaps better than the rest of us just how precious peace is.  Let us honor them.  Let us advocate for their welfare.  And as General (and then President) Eisenhower exhorted us, let us, together, do everything we can to promote an enduring peace, so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.  Amen.

 

 

 

Homily: The Installation of Canons [October 31, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

            It is a bit daunting to speak at the installation of cathedral canons on the eve of All Saints Day.  We are, after all, installing these people only as canons.  Their sainthood will have to be decided by a higher authority.  Nevertheless, I quail in the face of a reading, from the Wisdom of Solomon, that speaks of the souls of the righteous in these words:

⁴ For though in the sight of others they were punished,
their hope is full of immortality.
⁵ Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good,
because God tested them and found them worthy of himself;
⁶ like gold in the furnace he tried them,
and like a sacrificial burnt-offering he accepted them.

Anyone who knows Washington National Cathedral well knows that the workload here can be heavy and life can be stressful.  Still, it is hard for me to think of my colleagues as gold for smelting or lambs being led to the slaughter.  In nominating Kim, Gina, Andrew, and Patty to the bishop and chapter, that isn’t precisely what I had in mind.

            One of the drawbacks of having a dean who used to teach Anglican theology and polity is that every once in a while folks around here have to listen to a mini learned disquisition on the finer points of ecclesiology.  (See me afterward for a translation of that sentence into plain English.)  So indulge me for a minute while I talk about canons and what they signify.

            Our English word canon comes from the Greek word kanon, which literally means “reed”.  In the ancient Mediterranean world, Greeks and Romans used reeds for measuring sticks.  So the Greek word kanon came to be applied figuratively as a standard of measurement.  We talk to this day of the “canon of scripture”.  When the Bible was put together, the earliest Christians understood the texts in the Old and New Testaments to be the canon, the measuring stick, by which we would gauge the inspiration and orthodoxy of other texts. 

            Now when cathedral churches developed, the word canon became applied to the clergy who served there.  And the reason that word became the title of cathedral clergy was the same reason it was applied to the texts of Holy Scripture:  just as the books of the Bible were seen as the standard for the measuring of inspired writing, so the clergy of a bishop’s cathedral were held up as the standards, the measuring sticks, for ministerial practice.  In the intervening centuries, the title canon has come to be applied to clergy and now lay people serving on a diocesan or cathedral staff.  And the lexical intention behind that title is this:  it suggests that those people called canon are held up to the church and the world as exemplary.  They are the standards of ministerial excellence.

            Now I say this realizing that my four colleagues might at this moment begin to get swelled heads when I call them exemplary measurements by which the rest of us might take our bearings.  We live in a culture that applies all kinds of standards and metrics from business and academia and even sports to human performance.  Those standards and metrics have their place.  But they are our standards and metrics, not God’s.

            When I say that my four colleagues are exemplary, I do not mean to suggest that they are hyper-competent in worldly terms, though I know for a fact that they are very good at what they do.  Rather, when I call them exemplary I mean that they represent, they exemplify something in the way they do their work and live their lives that can serve as standard for us all.  In the terms of this cathedral and its life, that something is a kind of worldly holiness.  They know a hawk from a handsaw, as Hamlet says.  And they know something else.

            What Kim, Gina, Andrew, and Patty know is expressed a little farther on in that passage from the Wisdom of Solomon:

⁹ Those who trust in [God] will understand truth,
and the faithful will abide with [God] in love,
because grace and mercy are upon [God’s] holy ones,
and [God] watches over [the] elect.

Like all human labor, work in a church can be challenging.  The hours are long, the pay is modest, and ministry is as often as not greeted with resistance as it is with gratitude.  But unlike much of the rest of the working world, those of us who work in the church get to come in here day after day and spend our time carrying out tasks that serve to advance our deepest values.  Most people don’t get to do that. If you stop to think about it, the ability to spend your working life in the service of the Gospel is an enormous privilege, and the people I know for whom ministry is a joy are the ones who have been able to ground themselves in gratitude for that privilege.  They understand that, when all is said and done, they are serving some One who is faithful, loving, and merciful, a God who watches over each one of us and the world.

            As of tonight we have six members of our cathedral staff who are canons of this cathedral:  Kim, Gina, Andrew, and Patty now take their place with Jan and Michael in the leadership of this place and their service as cathedral ministers who set a standard for us all.  That standard reflects not only their worldly competence but something more:  that standard reflects the way they have internalized and so live out what the Wisdom of Solomon calls their continual abiding in God’s love. Tonight’s reading from Revelation [19: 1-10] gives us a picture of the moment to which all our work and prayer and ministry is leading, that day at the end of things when all of us will stand around God’s throne to give thanks that God’s work of love and reconciliation and justice has been finished, and all can cry, “Hallelujah!, Amen!”  That is the day to which all of us move forward together in hope.  And it is in the ongoing service of God’s mission to bring that day about that all of us who serve the church live and work together in hope. 

            And so tonight:  Kim, Gina, Andrew, and Patty. Tonight you take your place as canons of this cathedral along with Jan and Mike.  We look to you now as signs and standards of our own participation in the mighty work that God is doing in and through us all.  My prayer for you and for us this evening, is that you will continue to love and serve God and God’s church in joyous, liberating and transforming ways and so help us all, when everything is finally said and done, to measure up.  Amen.

Homily: installation of Mattew Butterbaugh as Rector of St.Matthew's Kenosha, WI [October 26, 2013]

I want to begin by saying both how pleased I am to be here today and just how old this occasion makes me feel.  Not only did I know your rector when he was a first year seminarian.  I knew your bishop even before he went to seminary.  There are some wonderful blessings inherent in a long career in the ministry, but some days I feel like I'm about 106 years old.

And then there's the anomaly of Matthew Butterbaugh being installed as the 25th rector of St. Matthew's.  I was the seventh rector of Christ Church Cranbrook, the ninth dean of Seabury-Western, and now I'm the tenth dean of Washington National Cathedral.   25 rectors in Kenosha?  You people don't look that mean to me. Since moving to Washington, Kathy and I have come to know and love Mary Garner, the widow of Sanford Garner, a much earlier rector here, and she says you're all lovely people.  But 25 rectors?  Really?  There has to be a story there.

It's probably just as well.  In the Episcopal Church we seem to have a prurience for authority.  The great Ralph Waldo Emerson said that an institution is “the lengthened shadow of one man" [“Self-Reliance”].  True enough, but Emerson was a self-reliant individualistic Transcendentalist.  For us Christians, the church is about community.  Indeed, in today's reading from Romans, Paul describes the church as the body of Christ.  He means that literally.  We are all of us interconnected and part of each other, belonging to something bigger than ourselves.  Yet when we talk about parish churches we seem to confuse the rector with the community itself. And here in Kenosha, it doesn't help that your patron saint and your rector now have the same name.
Listen again to Paul:

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. [Romans 12: 4-5]

As we hear Paul tell us that we are "members one of another", we need to begin our reflection on this new stage in the ministry of St. Matthew's Church with an admission that today is not primarily about the installation of one--admittedly gifted, energetic, and faithful--man. Today is primarily about the ministry of this body in which all of us are members.  If you have any doubts about that, think back on our first reading, from Numbers. We didn't hear the part that comes right before the start of that passage, when Moses complains to God in a tone that makes him sound like a kindergartner in need of a nap.  He's led the people out of Egypt.  They're in the middle of their 40-year sojourn in the desert.  Half of the Israelites want to give up and go back to slavery.  Moses asks Yahweh for help.  And Yahweh takes some of Moses's spirit and puts it on the 70 elders.  The point: leadership in the church is not a solo sport.  It is a team endeavor.  It’s not just individuals who are leaders.  Communities can be leaders, too.

So how can this community, how can all of you, lead and serve in the spirit of Moses and the 70 elders?   I would begin with the simple thought that self-knowledge is the key to everything.  Moses knew himself well enough to see that he needed help.  He was secure enough in his identity to ask for it. In Baptism, you and I have been given both a ministry and an identity.  Knowing who you are, and knowing that who you are is loved by God and good, is the best place to start.  God made each of us unique in God's image.  Each of us brings something precious and unrepeatable to the world. If the church is to be a living incarnation of God's mission, then it needs the fullness of everyone's call--not just the rector's--as it enacts that mission in the world. The church doesn’t just need Matthew Butterbaugh to be a great and interesting guy.  The church needs all of you to be fully who you are so it can be fully who it is in the world.

In today's reading from Romans, Paul reminds us that God’s Spirit lives in and through us in equal but asymmetrical ways. The Spirit at work in the community is given to everyone, but it is apportioned differently:

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. [Romans 12:6-8]

In today’s world, knowing who you are and what you can do is no mean achievement.  We are all bombarded by thousands of daily messages claiming our attention, and we inhabit a society that commodifies everything we do, urging us take things produced by others into ourselves rather than give voice to the intuitions that come from within.  A baptismal vision of the church is radically critical of that consumerist vision of society.  It suggests that who you are, what you think, how you feel, what you know about yourself and God—all those intuitions and perceptions are valuable to the common enterprise.  So as you begin this new phase of your shared ministry at St. Matthew’s with Father Matthew my prayer is that you strive to make this parish a place where people can bring all of who they are—their hopes, their fears, their sorrows, their joys—to God’s table so that they can be offered up and given to the world.  We are all members one of another, and we each have unique and differing gifts.  If St. Matthew’s Church—if any church—has a reason for being, it is to celebrate and share those gifts with each other and the world.  The true sign of your success in living both corporately and from within is that both St. Matthew’s and Kenosha itself will be the better for your having done so.
And then there’s today's Gospel:
After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. [Luke 10: 1-2]

When we hear this Gospel we are usually so overwhelmed with the news that the seventy appointed by Jesus carried no purse, bag, or sandals—“whoa,  not me, Lord, I’m an executive-level Christian!”—that we tend not to hear the first part of the sentence.  Listen to this:  “he sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Did you hear that?  “He sent them on ahead of him.” If I hear this right, the Gospel takes the logic of the Numbers reading and carries it one step further. If you and I are the seventy—and I think we are—then it’s not just the case that we’re helping, as that first seventy did Moses.  Rather, you and I have been sent on ahead of Jesus to every town and place where he intends to go.  Translation:  we’re not just helpers.  We represent, we prepare the way for, Jesus and his vision of new, transformed, risen life. We are, individually and together, the body of Christ.  We are God's enfleshments in the world. That news leads me to two final thoughts and charges I would give to both Matthew and St. Matthew’s as you celebrate your new ministry together.
Charge One: together, you and I together in the church represent Jesus.  That means that God has tied up God’s reputation in us.  It is vital that the church live with integrity and compassion and urgency because when people look at us they see Jesus, and what they think of Jesus will largely be a product of what they think of us.  So the first Gospel charge I hear this afternoon is this:  serve each other and the wider community in such a way that when people look at you they will see Jesus.  Serve them in such a way that the Jesus they see is the Jesus you know and love and want them to know and love, too.
Charge Two:  we all have been sent ahead to prepare the way for Jesus.  Our mission is not about us.  Our mission is about Jesus and his quest to love, embrace, forgive, bless, and transform the world.  You have been given a variety of gifts but the same Spirit.  You are called, together, to use those gifts not for the glorification of this parish or its rector but for the glorification of God.
It is God’s mission you and I and your bishop and your rector are about together, and just as it was not all on Moses shoulders to get it right, so it is not all on yours.  The good news we all celebrate together this afternoon is this: for some reason none of us can fathom, God has chosen the fragile likes of you and me as the instruments for the healing and transformation of the world.  Let us bring all of who we are to that mission.  Let us live it with compassion and integrity.  And let us give thanks that, when all is said and done, God’s life and justice and blessing and hope will prevail.  Amen.

Homily: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost [October 6, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

 

Fifteen years ago this month, Matthew Shepard was killed in Laramie, Wyoming.  Three years ago last month, Tyler Clementi committed suicide in New York City.  Matthew was 21 when he died, Tyler 18. Both young men were gay. We here at the cathedral are taking this weekend both to remember and honor Matthew and Tyler and to commit ourselves to standing with and for LGBT youth.

 In preparation for our conversations both Friday night and this morning, I reread Moises Kaufman’s play, The Laramie Project, an innovative theater piece created and produced by the Tectonic Theater Project as a response to Matthew Shepard’s death. Through a series of conversations with the participants, the play sometimes graphically represents the events of October, 1998. As I reread The Laramie Project I was moved and shocked all over again, but this time I was particularly taken by the remarks of a catholic priest, Father Roger Schmidt, who talks about his participation in a vigil held in Laramie for Matthew.  When he was interviewed about his participation in the vigil, Father Schmidt said this:

And I’m not gonna sit here and say, “I was just this bold guy—no fear.”  I was scared.  I was very vocal in this community when this happened—and I thought, “You know, should we, uh, should we call the bishop and ask him permission to do the vigil?”  And I was like, “Hell, no, I’m not going to do that.”  His permission doesn’t make it correct, you realize that?  And I’m not knocking bishops, but what is correct is correct.  [The Laramie Project, p. 65]

            And then he goes on to say this:

You think violence is what they did to Matthew—they did do violence to Matthew—but you know, every time that you are called [and here he uses a couple of homophobic epithets I’d rather not repeat in the pulpit] . . .Do you realize that is violence.  That is the seed of violence. [p. 66]       

That’s Father Schmidt, a Roman Catholic priest, speaking in 1998, not in the new, open days of Pope Francis but in the old, authoritarian days of John Paul. So think about the courage of those words in their own context. As a person of faith, he responded to a violent hate crime committed against a young man viscerally and from the heart.  He knew what was right, and he did it.

A lot has changed socially and culturally in the last 15 years in America with regard to attitudes toward sexual orientation and gender identity. But still, as far as young people are concerned, the distance between Laramie, Rutgers, and the rest of the country is not as far as we might think.  Every day, all across America, countless unnamed boys and girls suffer indignity, humiliation, bullying, and violence, and they feel that they are in it all alone. And I’m sorry to say that much of the blame belongs to our churches, which give religious cover to the last cultural prejudice that we allow to persist in our society: the stigmatization of a person because of sexual orientation or gender identity.  And that cultural prejudice against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered people persists even in a time when every third television show features a gay protagonist or next-door neighbor.  That prejudice persists because Christian churches continue to promote it.

            Today’s Gospel begins with a very strange request to Jesus by his companions: “Increase our faith!” they demand. Step back from that question and think about it. More faith: isn’t that a weird thing to ask for?

            But as odd as the “increase our faith” question is, Jesus’ reply is even stranger: "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.” [Luke 17: 6]  Have you ever seen a mustard seed?  A mustard seed is really tiny. It makes a poppy seed look like a watermelon.  Jesus responds to his companions by means of a startling comparison.  If you had even an atom of faith you could work miracles. “You don’t need more faith,” he seems to be saying.  “You just need some faith. Right now you don’t seem to have any faith at all.”

Now let’s go back to Father Schmidt’s words and think about them in the context of this faith and mustard seed interchange.  There were other Christian clergy in Laramie who didn’t stand up for Matthew Shepard.  They didn’t want publicly to commit themselves to standing up for a gay young man, and they most likely were Christians of the “Increase our faith!” persuasion.  “I’d stand with Matt if I had more faith.”  In contrast to conflict-avoidant Christianity, Father Schmidt seems to understand what Jesus is talking about this morning. “I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘I was just this bold guy—no fear.’  I was scared.” He didn’t wait until he was fearless to act.  He acted and found that he didn’t have to be ruled by his fear.

I don’t know what I would have done or said in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998 or in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2010, but I hope I would have had the courage of Father Schmidt. I do know what today’s Gospel calls me (and I believe you) to be doing and saying this morning.  It’s tragic that we still live in a nation and in a world where the last socially acceptable prejudice is against LGBT people. It’s tragic that we still live in a nation and a world where LGBT youth are vulnerable because of that prejudice and the way it combines with the other stresses of adolescence and young adulthood.  But it’s more than tragic—in fact it’s shameful--that faith communities, especially Christian ones, continue to be complicit in putting our children at risk and abetting the attitudes that oppress them, thereby encouraging the aggressors who would subject our children to pain, humiliation, and violence.

I’m old enough to remember a time when Christian churches, including our own Episcopal Church, segregated its churches and actively participated in racism.  I’m old enough to remember the ordination of women movement, when many in our church found ingenious theological arguments to deny women leadership roles and so promoted sexism.  In its wisdom, the church came to its senses and labeled both racism and sexism as sinful.  And now we find ourselves at the last barrier—call that barrier homophobia, call it heterosexism.  We must now have the courage to take the final step and call homophobia and heterosexism what they are.  They are sin. Homophobia is a sin.  Heterosexism is a sin. Shaming people for whom they love is a sin. Shaming people because their gender identity doesn’t fit neatly into your sense of what it should be is a sin. Only when all our churches say that clearly and boldly and courageously will our LGBT youth be free to grow up in a culture that totally embraces them fully as they are.

Those of us who gather around this table this morning believe that God has done a new thing in Jesus and is continuing that new thing in us.  God is breaking down categories and barriers between people and creating a new humanity in which all the particularities of how we identify ourselves—racial, ethnic, gender, class—are accepted and blessed as they contribute to the expanding wonder and diversity of a human race created in God’s image.  The new humanity that gathers with Jesus at his table come together as we are, secure in the knowledge that it is good and right to be who we are and to celebrate our identity in its myriad fullness.  It is not only just OK to be gay, straight, bisexual, or transgendered.  It is good to be that way, because that is the way God has made you.  And the Christian community, the world community, needs you to bring the totality of your being—including and maybe especially your sexual and gender identity—to the table.

Young LGBT men and young women will continue to be vulnerable to the sins of homophobia and heterosexism, to the violence of hate and fear until we in the church can say to homosexuals now what it has said to heterosexuals for 2,000 years.  Your sexuality is good. The church not only accepts it.  The church celebrates it and rejoices in it.  God loves you as you are, and the church can do no less.

Only when we find a way fearlessly to speak just that clearly and boldly to LGBT kids, their families, their schools, and their communities, will the world be a safe and nurturing place for the Matthew Shepards and Tyler Clementis of our own day.  We don’t need more faith.  We just need some faith—faith in a God who is bigger and deeper and more loving and compassionate than we are.  It really is OK for you and me to be who we are. Our job, as Christians, is not only to proclaim that Gospel.  Our job is to live it.  And if we are faithful in proclaiming and living it, today’s generation of LGBT youth will thrive and grow and take their places around this table, with Jesus, as we bless, forgive, heal, and love the world.  Amen.