Tag Archives: Bible

Easter Sunday Sermon

Posted on by
Reply

John 20:1-18

Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Amen. 

Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb in the early morning – the other gospels speak of other women coming with her, and of them carrying supplies for Jewish death rituals. She goes to the tomb with expectations based on her experiences in life, formed by her religious beliefs, and rooted in her sense of reality.

She expects to find a cave with a dead body in it, the only earthly remains of her beloved teacher, and I imagine, as millions of women have done for thousands of years, she expected, after an awful weekend, a few quiet moments with her grief. 

That is not what she finds. I wonder if this has happened to you. If your expectations – how ever hopeless they might be – have been upset and disappointed. If you have faced a diagnosis, or gone into a job or even just gotten out of bed in the morning, and the reality that you walked into was nothing at all the way you expected it would be. 

Sometimes our expectations are surpassed – the weather is better than we could have hoped for, and the timings for the party work out like they’re a well-oiled machine. Sometimes our expectations aren’t met, the timings fall short and the presentation drones on, the work is so much harder and less fulfilling than we could have imagined, the house structure has so many more problems and so much more damage than we first estimated. 

And sometimes, our expectations aren’t too small, or too large, but they turn into something that’s not about Goldilocks at all. Our expectations are just on a completely different plane. I believe that’s what’s happened to Mary Magdalene this morning, and I wonder when it might be applicable to us, too. 

Mary Magdalene’s perspective wasn’t just adjusted this first Easter morning, her reality was obliterated and rebuilt. I wonder whether we’re open to having our expectations, our perspective, our very reality, obliterated and rebuilt, too. 

Here in the Gospel of John, we’ve read of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Back in John 11, Lazarus falls ill, and Jesus hears of it – he’s one of Jesus’ best friends, the Gospel says – and rather than going to him right away, Jesus waits a few days. Then, as y’all know, when Jesus arrives at Bethany, Lazarus has been dead 4 days, which, in Judea as in Houston, is a long and hot time for a dead body to be lying around. Jesus raises Lazarus. Though Lazarus then dies again later, we imagine, of old age, there’s a hint, a sort of expectation introduced, that resurrection is something in the realm of God in Jesus’s reality. 

And yet when Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb this Easter morning, and when she finds the tomb empty, it doesn’t say that she wonders if Jesus has raised himself from the dead, like he did with Lazarus. Even though we see from Lazarus that resurrection is the sort of thing that God would do, her mind goes to grave robbers – which seems sort of strange to me, since Jesus was a poor and his followers weren’t wealthy either – there wasn’t any ransom or money to be gained from robbers taking his body. Surely, though, many more grave robbers were walking around in first century Judea than resurrected bodies, so we can imagine how Mary Magdalene would assume this to be the more likely culprit. 

I wonder how we, like Mary Magdalene, get caught up in the assumptions and expectations from our experiences, our beliefs, the roots of our realities. I wonder what things we allow to form our expectations, to dictate our perspectives. Jesus did this resurrection thing once to his friend Lazarus, but there are hundreds of grave robbers. That makes a lot more sense. 

What beliefs do we carry around? What expectations do we have that blind us to God the Gardener standing in front of us? What perspectives are we so married to that God may need to strike us blind in the midday on a road to Damascus? 

How might we miss the resurrection of the Son of God while we are determined to find a rotting corpse to wrap and sprinkle with spices? 

We find throughout Scripture that as God does the sort of thing that God would do – showing up on a mountain and purifying with water and energizing through fire – humans continue to do the sort of thing that humans do. And I must tell you, brothers and sisters, that what we do is get stuck. We are incredibly gifted at forgetting the miracles and ways of God in Jesus, we are unbelievably talented at misunderstanding and taking offense, we are so adept at considering ourselves the wise ones while everyone else must be adrift. These are the stories of Scripture – of God’s unfailing love in the face of our unfailing stumbling. And I don’t think we’ve improved much in the ensuing 2,000 years, whatever the Enlightenment says.

So when Jesus does appear and Mary doesn’t recognize him, she’s acting no different than any of us might. Hanging on to our assumptions, our expectations, that this strange man who has shown up at dawn at her teacher’s tomb has surely taken away the beloved body, the only earthly remains of this leader and friend, and she begs him to give back the broken bits of her beloved that she could cling to them for just a moment longer. That for one more hour, it could be some kind of familiar normal again, despite the death, despite the dark, despite the danger.

And what does Jesus say to her? He calls her by name. He brings to fruition the prophecy he gave of himself earlier in John when he said, “The sheep hear his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out… I am the Good Shepherd.” Jesus calls her name and she immediately recognizes him. Finally, she can have the moment she has been expecting since she awoke in the dark this morning. She can cling to his body, still bruised, but no longer dead. 

Maybe her expectations were a little off, but we’re back on track now. It can be as if the last days were just a bad dream. Maybe we can even get back to the traveling and the preaching and the healing ministries, and just follow our Lord, the Rabbouni, like we did before. It is a wonderful Easter morning, indeed. 

But what does Jesus say to her now? “Do not hold on to me, Mary.” This is not like Lazarus’s resurrection when he is restored to you and life goes back to normal. This resurrection is the central event of all time, this event which you are the first to see and touch is the fulcrum of reality. This morning, Mary, is the embodiment of the truth of the universe. 

We cannot cling to the bruised bits of the past, or the crumbling structures that have come before. We cannot continue in the path of normalcy or expectations or assumptions that have led us to this point. Everything has changed because this God made known in Jesus Christ has by his resurrection to eternal life restored the path of the universe and the course of history and the direction of all creation. 

We come to church each Sunday as a little Easter, because we are people who get so stuck in our expectations and are so formed by the experiences around us and so bogged down by the assumptions that pummel us day in and day out. We need to be reminded this day and every day, and not just Sundays, that God in Jesus through his resurrection obliterated our expectations of what broken relationships mean and how addiction clings and who controls our future and in what we may trust. 

What freedom might you practice if God could really heal your wounds and your relationships? What might you say, and what might you keep quiet about, if God in Jesus breathed life into dead bones? How might you spend your time if God really holds power over death? What if sin were really defeated? 

Here’s the Good News, Brothers and Sisters. It is. Christ is risen. Amen. 

Let Me See Again

Posted on by
Reply

preached at St Francis Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas, 27 October 2024

Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

If God asked you, “what do you want me to do for you?” what would you say? 

I’m struck by what seems to be the immediacy of the blind man’s response – “let me see again.” he says. No waffling around, no mumbling or equivocating, not even an “if you please,” or a “could you possibly.” This man knows exactly what he wants and he isn’t afraid to ask for it. 

Indeed, we see earlier in the passage that when he hears Jesus of Nazareth is walking by, he starts shouting – he’s asking boldly, he’s got no pride, he’s not ashamed of putting himself out there or even begging. When people say, “hey, have some dignity, man,” he just shouts all the louder! 

I wonder what I’d shout about. I don’t have a major disability, I have a home and family and work. Maybe I don’t really need anything from God. I don’t want to burden him, and I’m doing okay on my own. I don’t need to use up his resources, his prayer-bandwidth or whatever. 

But don’t we all need God? For some of us, our physical maladies grate at us like an ill-fitting shoe, or maybe they feel like a millstone around our necks that we carry everywhere. For others of us, our family situation or close relationships strain at us every moment of the day, sapping our energy, feeling like we are walking through a swamp with every step. For still others, we have plenty of energy but our professional lives or other circumstances stoke a fire of frustration that causes us to kick against those goads and spend our energy fighting the thing that exists to keep us in line. 

Is there something in your life that is taking up all your headspace? What is the thing you think about the most? What would it look like to be relieved of that? 

I am struck that what the blind man asks for is something we could all ask for, really: let me see again. What might be blocking your vision? What thing will we not look at that’s actually making us sick? 

This reminds me of another healing story, one from the Old Testament. Way back in Exodus, the people of Israel are wandering around in the desert, and they end up – you guessed it– grumbling, and they are bit by a bunch of snakes for their sins. So now they’re all hobbling around camp, dying of snake bites, and they’re repentant and beg Moses for an antidote to the bites. God tells Moses to put a bronze snake up on a pole in the middle of the camp and that the people need to look at that snake, and then they’ll live. Let me see again. What might we be healed of if we could only see it? What are we suffering under right now that we can’t even see? Or what are we suffering under that we maybe don’t want to see? Is there something we’re refusing to look at, a possibility we don’t want to consider? And here’s the scary thing, friends, what if looking at it, the thing that is killing us, is the way to be healed of it? 

What a bold thing to ask: “let me see again.” Would you dare to pray it? Do you dare to see, again? To see the things you’re missing, or the things you’ve pushed away? Gosh that doesn’t sound good to me. I’m almost preferring blindness now. Do I want to walk through what might be required of me if I can see? 

This past week, I taught the Parable of the Prodigal Son to my 6th graders, and I have to tell you, the 11 year olds really identified with the older son. They resonated deeply with the dutiful one who didn’t get enough accolades. We talked, too, about the way the parable taught us about family, and I tried to lead them to imagine what varying consequences emotional versus physical distance might have in a family – if the younger son went off physically and was blind while he spent all the money, but then his eyes were opened and he came back physically and also had emotional closeness with his father. But what about the older son, I asked them. He had the physical proximity, but did he seem emotionally close? Did it seem he and his father loved one another well? Was the older son blind? Did he want to see? 

The psalm tells us, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, then were we like those who dream,” and the psalmist begs, “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses of the Negev.” As the younger son had his fortunes restored to him when he regained his sight, Scripture promises that we will, too. 

The sticking point is, of course, that the younger son was literally sitting in a pig sty when his eyes were opened. The bump in the straight path to healing is that the Israelites had to look an image of their would-be-assassin in the eye. One might even say that the older son had to swallow his pride and stop keeping score to gain his family back. “Let me see again.” 

But here’s the good news, brothers and sisters. Whatever the pain and difficulty, whatever the destruction or weight you carry, the psalm also tells us that “those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy,” and “those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.” 

Just like the cross, our pain is not, is never, the end of the story. When we can see again, we can face the truth of our situations, and find that God is in the middle of it already. God has already been calling to us, God has already asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” And we might even be inspired, then, to follow him on the way. 

God’s Voice

Posted on by
1

Scripture Readings (1 Samuel 3, John 1:43-51) Epiphany 2, Year A

“You will see greater things than these.” Jesus tells his new disciples Nathanael in our Gospel reading this morning. Nathanael, truth be told, wasn’t expecting to see anything great at all, not least something great from somebody with as dubious an origin as Nazareth. His expectations are low. He doesn’t think he can be surprised by the quality of offering from this Jesus character. It sounds as if Nathanael was not expecting to hear from God. 

And it’s the same in our Old Testament lesson, “The Word of the Lord was rare in those days. Visions were not widespread.” I wonder, do we live in a time in which the Word of the Lord is rare? Do we expect to hear from God?

I wonder if we get confused or mishear God, too. The great prophet Samuel, who ushered in King David –  a man after God’s own heart! – didn’t recognize God’s voice when he called. Samuel’s mentor, the priest Eli, didn’t recognize God’s voice at first, either. They assumed it was just a bump in the night, less than something to be ignored, they assumed it was totally imagined, nothing at all. 

I wonder if we dismiss God’s voice. I wonder if we attribute the stirring of the Holy Spirit to be less than a bump or a coincidence, I wonder if we dismiss the call of God as indigestion or as totally imagined, nothing at all. 

What are we missing out on if we are dismissing God’s voice?

What are we suffering needlessly, because God has given us a way out but we are too focused on our expectations in order to listen to him? 

What difficulty might we avoid, what joy and peace might we have access to, what confidence and strength might we enjoy, if we were attuned to the voice of God?

In our Gospel reading, Nathanael does not immediately recognize God’s voice, either. When Jesus starts to reveal intimate details, Nathanael relents and realizes there might be more going on with this Jesus, that there might indeed be something good to come out of Nazareth. 

Even later in Samuel’s story, when he goes to anoint the future king David, David’s father Jesse thinks that God’s calling of David is so unlikely he doesn’t present this 8th son to Samuel. Can anything good come out of Bethlehem? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What could God be about, calling people from these places, calling these types of people? Is that even God’s voice? Is this voice to be trusted? 

How do we know if a voice is God’s? How can we understand the call of God and follow it? How can we trust? 

One of the things that strikes me in the readings today is that all these people who are hearing from God involve other people in the call. Nobody is hearing God’s voice off by themselves and then acting on it alone. Samuel brings in his mentor, his priest, his father-figure Eli, to ask what to do and what’s going on.

 Is there someone in your life who you look up to, who you have experienced as wise? Maybe they’re somebody to sit with in learning and discerning God’s voice in your life. 

Both of these stories, too, show a sort of testing of spirits in different ways; God calls Samuel several times before he responds, and I wonder if you’ve experienced that, too. How God will put the same opportunity in your path a few times until you accept it. In the Gospel lesson, Nathanael hears about Jesus from Philip, he receives Philip’s testimony, but then he doubts, he famously wonders, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” 

It’s okay to question, to wonder, to doubt. God can handle our uncertainty. God is big enough to receive our questioning, God loves us enough to hold space for our wondering. The important thing in doubt and questioning, though, is sincere inquiry – I sometimes see “doubt” as a shield people use to avoid tough questions or examining their own assumptions. God is big enough to hold our doubts, but it’s disingenuous to just leave him carrying all our baggage. 

God longs for relationship, longs so much to be near to us that he came to be a human in order to be as close to us as possible, to enter our experience, to understand us and love us well, so how might we respond well to that kind of gesture, that sort of call? 

In each of these narratives, we see a sense of community discernment, we see an airing of doubt, and then finally, we see a resolution, a surrender and submission, an openness and an attitude of humble listening on the part of the person called. 

So whether you have a call on your heart today, whether you wonder if you’re hearing strange voices or you believe you have a Word from the Lord, or perhaps you’re straining to hear anything at all, what we can surely all do to prepare us for God’s voice is to adopt open ears and hands and hearts, ready to listen and to humbly receive. 

When I was 16, I went to a summer camp for theology nerds. I’d always been the most zealous for church of my parents’ children, I served on the worship team and in the children’s Sunday School. I loved to read books far beyond my depth when it came to matters of faith and philosophy (I infamously brought Aristotle on a spring break trip to Florida). When I came home from this summer camp, a very small voice suggested I be a pastor. It was a strange voice and a weird thing to say, and those around me dismissed the epiphany, just like Eli when Samuel came to him at first. 

So I wanted to be a religion professor, and that felt much more acceptable to me and to those around me – I wouldn’t actually be traversing that ground of being a woman in a world that had been ruled by men for millenia – though of course academia isn’t that much better! Near the end of my time in college, that voice came again. It reminded me how much joy I’d felt when mentoring young women in my sorority, and how it was the relationships and interactions that fueled me more than reading and regurgitating books. 

I still wasn’t sure about this voice, and thought maybe it meant I should be a college chaplain. That didn’t sound nearly so scary as being some kind of parish priest. But brothers and sisters, I remember the night I laid in my bed, much like Samuel, and the thought was placed in my head, “You will be a priest.” A few weeks after that, a dear mentor of mine wondered aloud to me whether my call was to blow hot air about women in ministry – which was my desired academic focus – or to just go be one. 

God’s call will keep coming, in different times and places and tones and harmonies, until each of us responds. This is true in our individual lives as well as our call as a worshiping community, and as a city, a nation, and a world. 

Openness, brothers and sisters. Being open to God’s voice sounding or looking different than we expected. Allowing our community to help form and inform us about how God is showing up. Allowing ourselves to be challenged and to re-examine our conceptions, which is itself humility. 

So this morning I leave you with the challenge and charge, especially as we celebrate this season of Epiphany, of revelations and of the flooding in of light to our lives: may we be open to the Holy Spirit’s call, may we be open-handed in our response, may God give us courage to humbly submit to his gracious will. 

Amen. 

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” (Mark 1)

Posted on by
Reply

Can you imagine being eager to repent of your sins? Are you one who would have rushed into the wilderness, hopped in your car and high-tailed it to Cameron Parish, if you’d heard that some prophet had showed up there and was baptizing people? 

That sounds nice for other people. Maybe somebody else needs to go unburden themselves, but I’m okay right here. God can change a heart from anywhere, he doesn’t need me to go to Cameron parish or West Texas or Honduras to find salvation and listen to some fire and brimstone preacher. I can repent just fine right here in the quiet of my pew, without any histrionics or wailing or embarrassing outbursts. We have order – we are Episcopalians, for goodness’ sake.

But it’s not really about being Episcopalian or avoiding uncomfortable shows of emotion. It’s about fear, isn’t it? I wonder if we might be afraid of what God requires of us in judgment. 

Last week at the 8:30am service, Fr. Jake preached to open the Advent season, and he relayed a striking image from a C.S. Lewis novel that opened to us the way it might look when Jesus comes to judge and cleanse us. I think it might have looked different than we expected. 

So maybe that’s a good question to ask: what do we expect the exposing and purging of our sins to look like? 

Did any of you see the Anne of Green Gables with Megan Follows from the 1980s? (Who didn’t?!) There’s a scene where she’s a teacher trying to inspire her drama students to really get into playing Mary Queen of Scots, and she throws herself across the stage to cling to the skirts of whoever the other character is, maybe Queen Elizabeth the First, and yells, “Save me, sweet lady!” That’s one of the first images that bursts to my mind about begging for forgiveness. The debasing oneself, the physical and figurative lowering toward the dust. T

And we can easily imagine, too, the way that we might have experienced confession and punishment growing up – a stern voice saying, “well, tell me what you did wrong.” That hot, prickly feeling on your neck and back, maybe even bowing your head in shame and sadness in this expectant silence. Perhaps there were physical consequences too, privileges removed, or pain inflicted to help teach us a lesson.

Our world judges wrong in courtrooms, with testimonies and standing up alone in the truth or in sin. We are not so far removed, only a few hundred years, from pillories and the cutting off of ears or hands. 

Gosh, who would want to invite that kind of awful pain, and to be exacted from the Lord of Lords – the almighty one of ultimate power. What excruciating destruction he could bring to our lives! Surely it’s more than we could even imagine.

Yes, I would be one of those who would demur the invitation to go and be cleansed in the wilderness. I am not eager to have my sins nailed up next to me, or to have a scarlet letter sewn to my shirt, or to serve a sentence in a dank dungeon. Nobody really does, right? 

So I wonder if the exposing and purging of our sins for Jesus’ sake might look different than what we expect. I wonder if Jesus’s redemption and facing of our faults might be surprising in view of what the world teaches us that restitution looks like. 

Consider: back in the garden, when Adam and Eve had disobeyed, God sought them in the cool of the day. He didn’t come immediately the moment he knew they’d sinned. He didn’t stomp over and throw lightning bolts, he didn’t nail them up to a cross literally or figuratively, he didn’t even slap their behinds or waggle his fingers at them. With compassion and regret, he laid out the consequences of their actions; I get the sense that if it had been possible to ignore the price of their actions, he would have, but you see, they’d made a choice to not-trust God, and from that point, God still wanted to protect them as much as he could, and so the consequences provided a sort of boundary line to do what he could to keep them safe while being in the wide world. 

Later, we see in the Gospels how Jesus interacts with those who come to him with humility, knowing their sins. Often these are the people who society reminds of their shortcomings all the day long. But Jesus doesn’t pile on with the cultural expectations of shunning tax collectors and ignoring prostitutes. Those who recognize their imperfections, those who are humble about their sins, those who come to Jesus holding their sins out in front of them, are received how?

Jesus looks with compassion, Jesus takes time to sit with these people. Jesus gently wipes their tears and listens to their burdens and pronounces them forgiven. 

This isn’t the shunning or shaming we might expect. This isn’t the hot anger and lightning bolts that we often assume power will wield. This God revealed in Jesus Christ deals gently with those who recognize their darkness and who seek to heal from evil. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? I wonder whether the people who went out from Judea and all the surrounding countryside and who poured out from Jerusalem were the ones who knew they were already in darkness and already mired in the wilderness of sin. 

I wonder whether these people who sought John the Baptist and his cleansing in the river Jordan recognized that the trip to the wilderness was really not so much geographical as it was spiritual. And that they were, in truth, already there. 

Already in the wilderness. Already lost and parched. Already feeling heavy and burdened by the weight of their lives. Already wandering in guilt and regret. I wonder whether any of this feels familiar to you.

What we find in Scripture, not least in the prophecy from Isaiah this morning, is that this God, unlike rulers in the world or idols of ancient times, uses his great power when he’s doing good, not when he’s meting out consequences. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God of mercy, the prophet Hosea tells us, and when “he comes with might, and his arm rules for him, his reward is with him… he will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms.” This God is abundant in his power for mercy, for gentleness and nourishment, for forgiveness, for light and health and thriving and hope. 

The powers of this world are harsh and dark and full of punishment. The consequences are dire – the wages of sin is death – but the gift of God is eternal life. God’s kingdom, the ruling order that Jesus ushers in through the incarnation, is founded on the power of God’s love, not the power of pain or punishment or shame or evil. So as we approach God’s throne of grace, our confession of sin need not be fearful or defensive. We may rest knowing that the purging of our sins will hurt only in so far as it is hard to extricate ourselves from darkness, and that the love of God is a cleansing, healing salve to our sin-sick souls.