Homily: Cathedral Day [September 28, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

 What is the purpose of a cathedral? In Raymond Carver's well-known 1983 short story "Cathedral" two men--one of them blind--sit in a living room talking when a late-night documentary about cathedrals comes on television. The narrator tries to describe a cathedral to the blind man, but he gradually realizes that, try as he might, he cannot verbally depict the spatial reality of a massive medieval building.  As the narrator explains,

 

I wasn't getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. "They're really big," I said. "They're massive. They're built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone's life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I'm sorry," I said, "but it looks like that's the best I can do for you. I'm just no good at it."

 

As the story progresses, the narrator and the blind man join hands and draw a cathedral together. The narrator puts in windows, arches, flying buttresses, and great doors. When they finish, the blind man runs his fingers across the drawing and appears to understand: "Sure. You got it, bub, I can tell. You didn't think you could. But you can, can't you? You're cooking with gas now."

Carver's story has been widely read and taught, in part, because it represents the way one person touches another and so can make both a human and spiritual connection. Great as it is, though the story “Cathedral” begs an important question: what are cathedrals for?  They mean everything to those of us who love them, but what do they signify for others? As the narrator says, “The truth is, cathedrals don't mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They're something to look at on late-night TV. That's all they are.” Cathedrals belong to the "olden days" when "God was an important part of everyone's life." [Raymond Carver, "Cathedral", in Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories, New York: 1989, pp. 356-375.]        

What are cathedrals for?  Today we celebrate Cathedral Day, the yearly anniversary of the founding of Washington National Cathedral on September 29, 1907. As we gather for this observance, we hear two passages of scripture: the first, in which Solomon prays at the dedication of the Jerusalem temple that when God’s people gather in this place the one to whom they pray will “hear  . . . heed and forgive.“[I Kings 8: 30] The second is Matthew’s account of Jesus cleansing the same temple.  As Jesus famously says,

‘It is written,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer”;
   but you are making it a den of robbers.’ [Matthew 21: 13]

 

            We cannot hear the second story without keeping in mind the first.  King David established Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and his son Solomon built the temple there.  The temple was meant to be the place where Israelites would find reliable access to God.  It was the building in which both as a people and as individuals, Israelites could call on God to hear, heed, and forgive. That’s what Jesus means when he calls it “a house of prayer.”

            But why does Jesus accuse the temple leadership of having turned it into a den of robbers?  Certainly the presence of the money-changers seemed at best hypocritical, but the temple had an even worse scandal at the center of its life than mere commercialism.  When Solomon's father David was dreaming of the temple he declared, “The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.” [2 Samuel 5: 8] Not only had the temple become the living embodiment of a religious system that turned prayer into a financial transaction. Even worse, it had been founded on a principle of segregation, of exclusion. "The blind and the lame shall not come into the house."  Only the able and healthy were welcome.

When we read the story of Jesus cleansing the temple, we are quick to notice the overturning of the money-changers’ tables but slow to hear the following sentence: “The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them.” [Matthew 21: 14] The temple is a house of prayer.  It is the physical embodiment of God’s love and justice.  Jesus cleanses it by making it truly embracing and inclusive.  His first act of outreach is to let in those excluded for centuries. “The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them.”

Which brings us back to the question, “what are cathedrals for?”

The best ways to answer that question lie in the two actions of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel.  Jesus drives out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he lets in the blind and the lame.  A word about each.

The temple money-changers stand for a lot more than mere “commercialism”.  They stand for a whole system of religious purity and privilege that goes against the deep truths of God and the Spirit.  This system of false power and authority is common to every religious tradition, even and especially our own.  Christians and Muslims, as well as Jews, have managed over time to build up systems that often subvert the original intention of the religion they serve.  They have tried to bolster their authority by making claims of an exclusive hold on the truth. Jesus’s public ministry was, in a sense, an extended critique of the temple cult. It should not be lost on any of us that over 2,000 years, Jesus’s followers have built up a religious system almost exactly like the one that he criticized. 

The first point, then, is that a temple, a cathedral, a church is a house of prayer.  It is not the house of prayer. A cathedral is a place where we are invited to be open to God and what God is up to.  It is not the only place where God can be available.  It is a focal point for the holy, but it doesn’t have an exclusive patent on the divine.  Money-changers thrive by convincing you that their system is the only way to get to God. Then and now, that’s a self-serving lie. As Karl Jung said, “bidden or not bidden, God is present”—a statement as true on the street, at home, in the wilderness as it is in here.

And then there’s a second point. “The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them.”  The Israelites of Jesus’s day were neither the first nor the last to become confused about God’s purposes.  As finite, limited beings, you and I set up all kinds of false divisions and hierarchies within the human community.  We separate people into categories and define some as more desirable than others.  In Jesus’s day as now some of those categories were about racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual identity. In Jesus’s day as now, other of those categories were about ability and health.

Jesus consorted with notorious sinners--the lepers, the demon-possessed, the lame and the blind--because he knew what you and I need always to learn: that God’s horizon of love and blessing and acceptance and forgiveness and justice is limitless.  Each of us, all of us, are made in God’s image.  Each of us, all of us, are worth everything to God.  Jesus opened the doors of the temple to the blind and the lame because he knew that he was potentially one of them himself.  Ability and health are differences only of degree, not of kind. For those of us who love this cathedral, God extends a similar invitation to drop our pretensions with one another and get real about our mutual need for healing and grace.

On Cathedral Day 2014, we celebrate the 107-year history of Washington National Cathedral, and we rededicate this place and ourselves to the two missional principles at work in today’s Gospel.  We seek to be a house of prayer. We seek to extend God’s love and blessing and hope to the human community in all its glorious racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and cultural fullness. We are not a purity system doling out religious commodities.  We are a living embodiment of grace and gratitude in a world desperately in need of hope and forgiveness.

Near the end of Raymond Carver’s story, as they have finished drawing the cathedral together, the blind man says to the narrator, “Put some people in there now.  What’s a cathedral without people?”  When the narrator finally pauses to consider what they have achieved, all he can say is, “It’s really something.” Putting some people in there and imagining a cathedral is really something.  Opening these doors to all is what Jesus would have us do. It’s what cathedrals are for.  Amen.

Homily: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 14, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

            Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, “Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.”  [“Nominalist and Realist”]  Emerson was an idealist thinker, but he knew a powerful symbol when he saw one.  Money is what our culture has invented to represent value.  Despite our queasiness in talking of it publicly, money is the perfect figure for things of God and the spirit.  It’s no wonder that Jesus uses money figuratively in so many of his parables.  Money stands for what we hold precious.  As Wallace Stevens, another great Emersonian thinker, said, “Money is a kind of poetry.” [Adagia]

            Now this is not a stewardship sermon, so relax:  I’m not going to hit you up for a contribution.  That will come next month.  But I begin with these thoughts about money this morning because, in the Gospel reading we just heard [Matthew 18: 21-35], Jesus uses money (precious in itself) to stand for something even more precious:  forgiveness.  Aside from the poetic connotations of cash, why might Jesus have used it to represent something ineffable and divine?

            One reason might be the problem of scale.  How do we finite humans conceive of things on God’s terms?  God’s vantage point is so much different than ours.  I think Jesus came up with money as the only way he could represent the vastness of God’s perspective, and the pettiness of ours.

            In the story which Jesus tells this morning, a king forgives an enormous debt: ten thousand talents is equivalent in Jewish Palestine to several lifetimes’ worth of income.  It’s an absurd figure to begin with.  The slave owes the king, say, $10 million, an amount he could never possibly repay.  When the slave asks the king for forgiveness, he is released from his debt.  His life and his future lie open before him.

            The problem of scale next arises in the amount that the slave then tries to extract from a fellow slave.  The second slave owes the first “a hundred denarii”, equivalent at most to a week’s wages.  He also begs for forgiveness, but unlike the king, the first slave is merciless and has the second thrown into prison.

            So there we have it.  The king forgives an enormous debt, the slave enforces a petty one. Hmm?  What spiritual condition might all this talk about money be taken to represent?

            When we talk about human sin, we tend to think of it as an act or series of actions.  But sin is really more of a condition, an orientation, than it is something we do.  I am a sinner, not because I eat meat on Fridays but because I'm caught inside the fiction of my own separate identity. I'm more convinced of my own reality than I am of yours. 

            One of the ways this plays out is in my own awareness of the experience of forgiveness.  I am quick to keep an account sheet of the wounds and insults I have received.  I slower to tote up the injuries I have inflicted.  And I am in a near-constant state of oblivion about the grace and forgiveness that are constantly being extended to me by the world, others, and God.  As the recipient of great gifts, I am a miser when it comes to sharing them.

            It is this sinful, willful, forgetful, stingy selfishness that is on Jesus's mind when he tells this parable of forgiveness.  The first slave has received a gift of invaluable worth.  He has been forgiven an incredible, gigantic amount.  But rather than live his life in thanksgiving for that bounty, he in turn extracts repayment of a pittance from another.

            Translation:  I am the beneficiary of enormous cosmic largesse.  I have been given life, love, an abundance of relationships and gifts, none of which I have earned on my own.  As the recipient of so much generosity, why am I still so reticent to extend it to others?

            Matthew tells us that this is a parable about forgiveness.  But with respect to the author's intentions, it is really about more than that.  It is a parable about our orientation to the universe. In this story, God is obviously the king. He has given and forgiven abundantly.  You and I are the first slave in the story.  We have received grace and forgiveness. In every relationship and interaction we have a choice to make. Will we be mindful of the extent of what we have already been given and forgiven, or will be like the guy born on third base who thought he hit a triple?

            Jesus's story of the unforgiving slave helps orient us in the universe and gives us some direction for living our lives in our families, in our communities, in our world.

            The king was able to forgive the first slave because of his empathy and compassion.  He could feel with the slave in all his guilt and sorrow.  The first slave could not extend similar empathy to the second slave because he was devoid of compassion.  When I come into conflict with others, it is usually because I am more concerned with justifying myself than with understanding the other.  That's true for me as a husband, father, colleague, and friend.  It is also true for me as a citizen. 

            The parable of the unforgiving slave asks that I do two things:  it asks that I find ways to remind myself of the extent to which I am the beneficiary of God's abundance, grace, and forgiveness.  The other night, I heard this quotation from the great Roman orator Cicero:  "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others." To the extent that I can root my orientation toward life in gratitude and not resentment I will be open to what someone else feels, thinks, and believes.  I will begin to care about their pain and grief and fear if not as much as my own, at least more than I do now.

            And here's the second thing this parable asks that I do.  It asks that I try to be just a little bit more like the king than I am usually prone to be.  It asks that I be not only reactively grateful but proactively generous. Christianity is a pragmatic and not an ideological religion.  It cares more about how we behave than about what we think.  The best way that I can follow Jesus is not just to agree with him but to act like him.  Over the course of a lifetime of imitating Jesus, I won't become him, but I will eventually turn into the person that God made me to be.     

            You and I were born on third base.  We didn't hit a triple. As we follow and imitate Jesus and the king he describes in our story we will pull our families, friends, and our neighbors along the base paths, so that all of eventually can reach home.  Amen.

Homily: Cathedral Chapter Evensong [September 11, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

When I was on vacation in Los Angeles last summer I had a minor, but really annoying, traffic accident.  My unasked-for upgraded rental car was a Nissan Xterra, a gigantic SUV type assault vehicle. When attempting to parallel park in front of a store on Pico Boulevard in West L.A., I crushed and obliterated the left front fender of a Porsche Carrera.  The accident really was my fault, but it was my misfortune that the car I damaged was owned by an Iranian attorney from Beverly Hills, who was standing next to the vehicle at the time.

After I extracted myself from the series of screeds that ensued, all that day and the next, I berated myself with the phrase, "If only".  If only I had turned down the Xterra upgrade.  If only I had not tried to parallel park on a busy street.  If only I had actually been able to see the Porsche from my rear view mirror when backing up.

I don't want to suggest that I am comparing my "If only" with Martha's remark to Jesus.  "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Crushing a Carrera is not the same as losing a brother. But the human impulse to look back in remorse is universal.  Who among us has not asked this question after a bad event?  If only I had . . . fill in the blank.  We want to take it back.  We want to return to a lost pre-catastrophe past.

This desire to go back before the "if only" is an expression of nostalgia.  As the New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says, "It’s a kind of nostalgia, not for the past as it was, but for the present that   could have been, if only the past had just been a little bit different." I wouldn't have spent an afternoon being yelled at by an angry lawyer if I hadn't tried to park in front of his car.  Martha would not have had to bury her brother if Jesus had only showed up on time.

One of the mysteries of being human lies in the way we find ourselves caught within the flow of time.  St. Augustine described time as a "concord of past, present, and future—three dreams which, as [he] said, cross in our minds as in the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future." [Frank Kermode, The Sense of and Ending, p. 50 quoting Confessions Book XI]

We live in a concord of three dreams.  When the dream of the present turns sour, we often retreat to a comforting dream of the past. The life of a faith community, like the life of a person, is a concord of dreams, an interweaving of the streams of past, present, and future. Every parish, seminary, or school I have served can tell you the story of its founding, its glory days, its tribulations.  The robust ones have a vision of their future at least as vibrant as their sense of their past.  The dying ones seem caught in the trap of "if only."

In some respects, Washington National Cathedral finds itself in the same spot as Martha and Mary after the death of Lazarus.  We are often tempted to say, with Martha, "If only":  If only the earthquake hadn't happened, if only trends in American religious giving, membership, and attendance weren't going in the wrong direction, if only younger people loved traditional worship as much as we do, if only our average donor weren't 76 years old.  We find ourselves beset with many challenges, most of them economic and demographic.  Our first response, like Martha's, is often to turn from the bad dream of the present to a happier dream of the past.  If only that past had continued, our present would feel different than it does.

Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.' . . . Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ [John 11: 21, 23]

 

When Martha says "if only" to Jesus about Lazarus' death, Jesus replies, "Your brother will rise again."  Martha wants to point Jesus toward correcting the past.  Jesus declines to look back but instead invites her to step into a radiant future.  But not only that, when Jesus invites her into that future he shows her how she can live even now as that future is being brought forward into the present. "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." [John 11:25-26] This invitation to live not a life oriented toward the past but toward a future made present now is a move Jesus makes in much of his teaching.  It's a move that God with us makes every time we gather at God’s table in Eucharist.

The singing of Psalm 96 earlier reminded me of St. Augustine's observation that the best model he could use to represent our experience of how past, present, and future intersect lay in the recitation of a Psalm.  We remember God's activity in the past.  We state our situation in the present.  We ask for God's saving activity to bring us into a new future. Christians look to the past not out of nostalgia but for signs of hope.  We look to the future in expectation, not in dread.  We face both past and future so that we may live abundantly in the present, which is the only dream that finally matters.

We gather tonight as a community in a historic liturgy of Evensong and as a cathedral community perched, as always at the intersection of these dreams of time:  our shared past, our lived present, and God’s future.  And we gather as a cathedral chapter community saying goodbye to one member (Rich Bland) and welcoming into its life and ministry two new members, Michele Hagans and Steve Knapp. As we simultaneously bless and welcome, let us give thanks for the great past of this historic institution.  Let us face into the present with all its mixture of opportunities and challenges.  And let us, like Martha, hear Jesus’s call to go with him into a future which opens before us even now and transcends all that we can ask for or imagine. The time for “if only”s is over.  God’s future breaks in upon us even now.  Amen.

Homily: The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost [August 31, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

Over the course of my working life in the church I have had the privilege of knowing some wonderful people.  One of them was my friend, the late Bishop George Barrett.  George was a great leader on justice issues in the church, and he once told me the story of being interviewed on television.  This was in TV’s early days, when guests were asked to wear lavaliere microphones, the kind you hang around your neck. During a commercial break the sound technician came to adjust his microphone: it was banging up against the large, pectoral cross the bishop wore on his chest. The technician said, “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” George Barrett looked up at him and replied, “It always does.”

The cross always causes interference. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus tells his companions that the journey they are on will end in his death on the cross at the hands of the Roman Empire. Peter cannot abide this.  “God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen to you.” [Matthew 16: 22]  Those who follow Jesus have not reckoned on the reality of the cross as part of the transaction. Jesus knows that his critique of the empire and the religious system that colludes with it will result in his being brought to a political prisoner’s death on the cross. Those who accompany Jesus think that following him will be all about sitting at his feet and copying down his pithy sayings. But Jesus knows that following him means being called into a life at odds with the forces of empire, a conflict that will result for many of his followers in persecution, martyrdom, and death. “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” “It always does.”

            After he rebukes Peter, Jesus says these memorable words:

"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? [Matthew 16: 24b-26]

To be a Christian, to live under the sign of the cross, is to be a perpetual voice for interference. It means that we will always bring the Gospel’s values to bear upon social, ethical, and cultural problems. Because the imperial presumptions with which we are called to interfere are always centered on power, the Gospel critique of those presumptions will always promote the voices and concerns of the powerless. In Jesus’s day and ours, the consequences of that cultural critique will not always be pretty. The cross always causes interference, because in signing on to be followers of Jesus we are signing on to be fellow travelers with him on the way of the cross. And while walking that way with Jesus promises ultimate joy and peace, in the near term it often delivers suffering and loss.

            Jesus’s insistence on the way of the cross as the way of life is, for us first-world privileged Christians, profoundly counter-cultural.  The message our culture sends us is a message of grasping after something: you preserve your life by beating out the other guy. For Jesus and his followers, you preserve your life by what the theologian Sallie McFague calls “cruciform living.”

            The philosopher Aristotle posed life’s basic question: “How, then, shall we live?” Many today ask Aristotle’s question.  They ask it about our wider society. They ask it about their own individual lives.  One of my favorite theological reflections on how to live is Sallie McFague’s book, Life Abundant. Here in part is what she says:

We cannot, in good conscience “love the world”–its snowcapped mountains and panda bears–while at the same time destroying it and allowing our less well-off sisters and brothers to sink into deeper poverty.  Hence, I believe Christian discipleship for twenty-first-century North American Christians means “cruciform living,” an alternative notion of the abundant life, which will involve a philosophy of “enoughness,” limitations on energy use, and sacrifice for the sake of others.  For us privileged Christians a “cross-shaped life” will not be primarily what Christ does for us, but what we can do for others.” [McFague, Life Abundant, p. 14]

 

            A philosophy of “enoughness”, though, is a hard bargain for the likes of you and me. Speaking only for myself, with relation to things I am like a morbidly obese person who no longer know when he is full.  I do not have trustworthy judgment when it comes to knowing how much is enough.  And I’m a person who reads the Bible and goes to church every day!  So if we Christians don’t ever quite know what “enough” is, imagine how hard it is for the others in our culture who have been led to believe that one is satisfied only when one is stuffed.

            When Jesus tells us, this morning, to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him our first response is always to think about sacrifice and martyrdom. But, starting from our place of relative affluence, perhaps the first image of self-denial might lie in what Sallie McFague calls “enoughness.”  Can I live trying to regain a trustworthy sense of what is enough–enough food, enough money, enough energy use, enough houses and cars and the like?  For us first world Christians, taking up the cross begins in a diagnosis of “enough”. Jesus lived an abundant life in the midst of deprivation, and he called others to share that life.  “Cruciform living” means walking in such a generosity of spirit and practice that allows the underlying abundance of God’s creation to shine through us. Denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Jesus begins when we realize we already have enough.

            But following Jesus doesn’t end there. Speaking as a native Californian, I know how easy it is to fall into the self-satisfied smugness of the so-called sustainable lifestyle.  “Hey, I’m driving a hybrid, eating locally-sourced food, and I’m composting. I’m saving the planet!” When you live in beautiful, expensive surroundings it is easy to feel virtuous by paying a little bit more for environmentally-friendly luxuries that poor people can’t afford in the first place.

            Two years ago, Kathy and I moved to Washington from the Detroit area, and if you follow the news you know how many economic and social challenges that city faces today.  Another of my favorite contemporary writers, Rebecca Solnit, has visited Detroit and written thoughtfully about what the change there might mean for all of us in post-industrial America. [Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape.” Harper’s July, 2007] In her writing, Solnit describes both the industrial deterioration of Detroit and the surprising rebirth of local agriculture in the vacant blocks of open land left by the razed and burnt-out buildings.  Here is one of the more provocative things she observes as she watches the painful but inspiring new life which can follow economic devastation:

The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege.   It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place. [Harper’s, July 2007, p. 73]

 

            In other words, if we’re really talking about “cruciform living,” then as a friend of mine observes, “something has to die” before this rebirth can begin.  That something is obviously the exploitive consumerist fantasy in which all of us seem to live and move and have our being.  Detroit is coming to life precisely because it exhibits what Rebecca Solnit calls “the first signs of an unsettling of the very premises of colonial expansion.” [p.73] As she says, we cannot live out the logic of the cross only by “happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege.”  So our walking the way of the cross must point us beyond self-congratulatory abstinence. We walk the way of the cross not only as individuals. We do so as a community. Only as Christians witness, separately and together, to a truly sacrificial, communitarian and abundant way of living can we be truly said to be living a cruciform life.

            Bishop Barrett was right.  The cross will always cause interference.  It will get in the way of our culture’s shallow vision of the abundant life. It will continue to frustrate our fantasies of our own virtue. We will join God in making God’s future as we walk the way of the cross with “those who had [privilege] taken away from them or never had it in the first place.” We will save our lives by losing them in community with those who know what real deprivation looks and feels like.

            May the One who walked to the cross with his companions then walk with us now in our strivings toward “cruciform living.” May that One sustain us to accept that we really do have enough.  May that One bring us all together across the social, racial, and economic boundaries that divide us in common purpose to the end that all God’s creatures may know the true abundance of life lived together in the way of the cross. Amen.

Homily: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [August 24, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” So begins Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”.  As in 1838, so in 2014, “the grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers” [Ralph Waldo Emerson “Divinity School Address”, 1838]. At least around here, the weather of summer, 2014 has been extraordinarily mild. I cannot recall a lovelier time to be alive.

In all other respects than the weather, though, this has been a horrible summer.  The murder of US journalist James Foley by ISIS was only the latest humanitarian disaster:  the Israel-Hamas conflict, resulting in thousands of deaths by non-combatants in Gaza; the ongoing crisis of Central American children at the US-Mexico border; the attacks on Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria.  I have enjoyed the outdoors this summer both for the weather and as an escape from the pain I encounter in the news.

But speaking as an American, the most painful story for me of all this year has been the ongoing situation in Ferguson, Missouri.  It’s a hard story in so many respects. It involves yet another shooting of an unarmed African American by a white person.  It exposed the multiple conflicting ways in which whites and blacks understand and respond to events.  It showed a local government and police force more concerned with justifying themselves than getting at the truth.  And it reminded us all that the hopes of racial justice, articulated 45 years ago in this pulpit by Dr. King, have yet to be fulfilled. 

At the center of the Ferguson tragedy, of course, lies the body of Michael Brown, a young man perched between high school and college, dead of six shots—four to the body, two to the head.  For some reason I don’t understand, my white clergy colleagues have been slower than our sisters and brothers of color to respond to Michael Brown’s death, just as it took us awhile to grasp the implications of Trayvon Martin’s or Emmett Till’s.

But the concerns of Ferguson are the concerns of Northwest Washington.  As William Sloane Coffin, Jr. used to tell his congregation at Yale in the 1960s, “New Haven cannot be a safe haven.” So how do we, as Americans and as Christians, begin not only to understand it but respond to it? Today’s readings give us some help.

 This morning’s Old Testament story turns on a stunning act of civil disobedience. Pharaoh lives in fear of the growing Hebrew population in Egypt and orders that all male Hebrew babies be killed. We are told that two Egyptian midwives—brave women named Shiphrah and Puah— “feared the Lord”, and so they disobeyed Pharaoh’s orders.  They let male Hebrew babies live, and this act of disobedience eventually allowed the baby Moses to escape infanticide and grow up to be one who would lead Israel out of slavery in the Exodus.  [Exodus 1:8-2:10]

It is no accident that African American religious leaders have historically looked to the story of Moses and seen parallels between Egypt and America.  The Exodus story points those of us in the “dominant” culture to an uncomfortable parallel with the Bible’s Egyptians.  We are told that the motivation for Pharaoh’s actions was fear. As Pharaoh says, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land."  Egyptian ruthlessness begins from a sense of vulnerability.  There is an “other” in the land, and if we don’t watch out that “other” will take us over.

In the Bible’s diagnosis, human oppression and cruelty start with fear.  And fear starts in ignorance. As our Exodus story begins, “a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” We fear what we do not know.  And if we have power we find it easier to control and contain what we do not know than to make the effort to understand it.  That was true in the Egypt of 1400 B.C.E.  It was true in the Roman-occupied Jewish Palestine of Jesus’s day.  It was true in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. And it is true in our day, too.

This morning’s Gospel tells the story that we Christians call “the confession of Peter.” When Jesus asks his companions who others say he is, only Peter gets it right: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." [Matthew 16:13-20] Now “Messiah” means “anointed”.  It is the Hebrew word we render in Greek as “Christ”.  Both terms signify kingly authority.  King David was anointed.  So is Jesus. The term has radical political implications, especially in an occupied territory.  The Romans denied the Jews their own royal authority.  The Jews looked for a Messiah, a Christ, an anointed king to bring it back.

When Peter realizes that Jesus is “the Messiah”, the anointed, the Christ, he is recognizing something deep and powerful about God and about us.  Most of us are impressed by shows of strength—royal pomp, a display of weapons—as signs of power and authority.  But Jesus is for us “the Christ”, the Messiah, the anointed one because he is effectively an anti-king.  Jesus is not Caesar, nor does he pretend to be.  What Caesar offers is a grotesque parody of authentic authority.  What Jesus offers is the real deal.  He brings compassion instead of hatred, healing instead of abuse, trust instead of threats.  In this story of Peter’s confession, we see at least one person finally getting it.  Real kings don’t look and act like Caesar.  They look and act like Jesus. What Jesus represents is what the power at the center of the universe really looks like. 

And it’s in response to his dramatic recognition that Jesus makes this surprising gift to Peter.  He says, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” In our context this morning, what Jesus clearly means by “binding and loosing” is the power either to imprison or set free.  When you get it, as Peter did, that Jesus is the Messiah; when you get it that real power lies in love rather than force; when you get it that the other whom you fear is really your brother or sister on this earthly pilgrimage; when you get all that then you, like Peter, have been given the power not only to set others free, but to be set free yourself.

Speaking as a white, American, Christian man this morning I want to say that it is time that we, with Peter, claim the power Jesus gives us to set each other and ourselves free.  “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Jesus here gives us a choice:  we can stay locked in the prison of our own fear, or we can loosen the chains and step towards the marginalized and oppressed people of our nation and the world.  We can move toward the other in riot gear or we can move with open arms. We have a choice, and in giving those keys to Peter, Jesus gives us the power to make it.

We can make that choice first by deciding to stand with the people of Ferguson not only in their grief but in their anger.  We can make that choice next by calling for a true accounting of Michael Brown’s killing and a legal process of justice.  And we can make that choice by moving personally and corporately out of our comfort zones into actual engagement and with people we fear because we do not know.  In empowering Peter to bind and loose, to imprison or to set free, Jesus has given us the power to liberate our brothers, our sisters, and ourselves. 

It is a sad truth that the deaths of poor young people of color--in DC, in Ferguson, in Gaza, at the border-- don't seem to matter to the wider world very much. We no longer have the luxury of refusing to care when unarmed African Americans are killed by fearful whites. Trayvon Martin, shot while George Zimmerman was standing his Florida ground; Eric Garner, killed by a New York police chokehold for selling loose cigarettes; Renisha McBride, shot by a Michigan homeowner when she asked for help; Ezell Ford, a 25-year old mentally-ill man shot by California police; Michael Brown, shot by a Ferguson, Missouri officer for reasons yet to be discovered. Those of us not directly affected by this violence no longer have the luxury of staying safely in our own hidey-holes of ignorance. As Bill Coffin said, “New Haven cannot be a safe haven.” As Martin Luther King said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

There is nothing more important for us American Christians at this moment in history than facing into our own fear and its implications.  We no longer have the luxury of refusing to understand.  Racial justice will only come about as we join with others to demand it.  And when we do that—when we do the work to move with Jesus and with Moses and with Peter out of our fear and into self-knowledge and compassion--then we will loosen all the chains that bind us. And it will truly be, in this refulgent summer, a luxury to draw the breath of life.  Amen.

Michael Brown, Ferguson, and the Faith Community [On Faith August 21, 2014]

Much has been written and said about the disturbances in Ferguson, MO, following the shooting  of Michael Brown, a young African American man, by a police officer on Saturday, August 9.  Some of those statements concern Mr. Brown's activity prior to the shooting.  Others reveal the number of shots (six, two to the head) he received while himself unarmed.

In the days of protest and response, a lot of the discourse has seemed to serve ideology and create a narrative.  We are told that the Michael Brown shooting and the subsequent unrest are about unfinished American racial business, the militarization of policing, the changing demographics of our neighborhoods.

Some of these pronouncements are well-intentioned.  Others (particularly those that seek to justify the shooting) are obviously self-serving.  For those of us who are trying to understand "what Ferguson means" from a faith perspective, almost all of them are useless at best. Every time a young black man is shot in America, a number of voices rise to claim the narrative--witness the long and ongoing argument over Trayvon Martin's shooting.  It's always about something other than what it's really about.

So how do we understand Michael Brown and Ferguson from the point of view of faith?  Speaking as a Christian, I would begin with the premise that any attempt to understand the Michael Brown story must start from respect for him, his body, and his story.  In the baptismal service of the prayer book of my church (the Episcopal Church) we promise to "strive for peace and justice among all people" and to "respect the dignity of every human being." As a Christian, I am bound to start with respect for Michael Brown and the hope that he be given justice. The story is about nothing else than that.

When I first heard the news of Michael Brown's death, I could not help remembering a song written by Oscar Brown, Jr. in 1961 and later made famous by Nina Simone and Diana Ross. Brown's song was written in the middle of the most hopeful and violent moments of the Civil Rights movement, and you can feel the mixture of hope, anger, and fear as the black parent addresses the newborn child:

Brown Baby Brown Baby
As you grow up I want you to drink from the plenty cup
I want you to stand up tall and proud
And I want you to speak up clear and loud
Brown Baby Brown Baby Brown Baby

As years go by I want you to go with your head up high
I want you to live by the justice code
And I want you to walk down freedom's road
You little Brown Baby

Because all faith traditions hold human life (both individually and collectively) sacred, the religious questions raised by Michael Brown's death begin as they must in grief for the cutting off of a young human life by violence, whatever its cause.  When we look at video images of Mr. Brown lying dead in a Ferguson street, it is hard not to think back to Oscar Brown Jr.'s hope that his child would "stand up tall and proud" and "drink from the plenty cup".  Before it is anything else, Michael Brown's death is a human tragedy.
But for people of faith, human tragedies are also social and cosmic tragedies.  We believe that human beings matter not only to each other but to God.  So the injustice and oppression inherent in any American inter-racial killing becomes a theological concern.  For Jews, Muslims, and Christians, God is invested in the health and rightness of human social relations.  The killing of anyone is a human tragedy.  The killing of anyone because of racial, economic, political, or social injustice is a matter of urgent theological concern.  As "Brown Baby"'s hopeful parent sang, "I want you to live by the justice code/And I want you to walk down freedom's road." The betrayal of that hope is an affront to the vision of human freedom and justice to which all our religious traditions aspire.

I serve as Dean of Washington National Cathedral, and because we are both a faith community and a place where religion and public life naturally come together, I addressed our response to Michael Brown's death and the subsequent unrest during last Sunday morning's services.  I said, in part,

“This morning I do want to say, speaking for myself and I believe for the cathedral, that given this nation’s history of racial injustice, the issues and concerns in Ferguson really ought to be at the top of our prayer list and action agenda as a faith community. We here at the cathedral are quick to point people to the Canterbury pulpit and remind them that Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his final Sunday sermon here. We’re quick to appeal to Dr. King’s legacy and to claim a piece of it for ourselves. If we’re really serious about claiming that legacy, it seems to me, we will not only pray for peace in Ferguson, but we’ll also pray for justice. And so, as we go forward as a nation, I add my voice to the many faith leaders who are saying, ‘Yes, we appeal for peace, we appeal for calm, we appeal for healing in Ferguson, but we also appeal for answers’—so that the killing of Michael Brown and its aftermath will not be just forgotten in the next sweep of events, but will call us all into facing continually into God’s invitation to us to break down human boundaries and to ensure that all people find life safe, meaningful and abundant.

“So on behalf of the cathedral and on behalf of all who serve and worship here, I call everyone to prayer and action for not only the people of Ferguson, but for our nation as we continue to live into trying to understand what these events mean, and we pray that justice will be done and that peace will prevail."

For the faith community, Michael Brown's life and death matter.  For the faith community, addressing the social, political, and racial dynamics of his death matter, too.  The "post-racial America" which so many announced still has yet to arrive.  If we are going to live in the America that really exists, we need to face into the racial history that is ours and in which our churches have had such a complicated role.  Michael Brown's killing reminds us, if of nothing else, that the hopes of "Brown Baby" have yet to be realized:

When out of men's heart all hate is hurled
Sweetie you gonna live in a better world
Brown Baby Brown Baby Brown Baby

Our churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples need to be about the work of helping God bring that better world into being.

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The Very Reverend Gary Hall is Dean of Washington National Cathedral.