The process of packing up one’s life in order to move it, to change it, to transform it into something completely different is a process of opening drawers, clearing out closets and neglected corners, reaching for lost treasures underneath the bed.

There are so many things in this house, in this life that I’ve built, that are hidden, out of view, out of the light, collecting dust and existing only as something forgotten.

I don’t like this process. I struggle with it. In order to go through it I have to make myself see things that I would rather not see. I have to fess up to the deeds that I have done.

Regret feels like a Tupperware of memorabilia from a life I hoped I would live, but that never fully came to pass. I lug it around from one dwelling to another and it keeps getting heavier with every new move.

The darkness of hidden things is heavy and oppressive.

What I wouldn’t give for some freedom from that feeling; some lightness in my heart and in this life I’m living.

Lent is a season for examining the nooks and cranny’s, the disorganized junk drawers, the unopened boxes from 7 years ago that are taking up space inside the heart and making it impossible to feel alive in God, in the body, in relationship to the ones we love.

Lent is more than a spring cleaning. It’s more than buying bigger boxes to cram full of old emotional junk.

Lent is picking up those artifacts of the life you thought you’d have, the life you thought you should have, and gently discarding them.

Lent leaves a pile of garbage in the garage that didn’t look like garbage when you bought it, but that turned out to be something undeserving of your love.

And maybe that’s the heartache of this season.

We don’t like to let go of the things we thought would save us; the things we hid out of sight, but never stopped coveting.

We love these things. We love them in darkness. We love the darkness, because in it we can hide the parts of ourselves that we do not want to see; that we don’t want others to see.

When I moved here to Portland in 2013, my life looked very different. I went by a different name – a kind of spiritual pen name that stuck. I though I was well done with God and Jesus and the institution of the Christian Church. I was moving boxes of unsold cd’s, undesired merchandise, into a new garage along with the boxes of promo pictures, old fan letters, and too many journals that I stopped mid-way.

My pursuit of a career in the spotlight had left me wounded and a little breathless, and tired.

Funny thing about standing in the spotlight is that when it shines on your face all you can see is darkness. And sometimes that’s all you can feel, too.

But then, somewhere down on Couch Street near Powells, God interrupted my life and shone a light on the sidewalk, and I saw clearly the suffering of the world. This vision moved me to an act of service, a change of direction, and ultimately, a consent to believe in the God whose Son was sent not to judge world, but to liberate it.

This memory of the light of God’s love is not something I’ve hid away in a box or that I tucked neatly into an album. This memory is alive in my heart. It is a fire burning, casting light, and fueling the ongoing transformation, initiated by God.

If I had none of that unsold merch – none of those journals with chicken scratch lyrics about young love, or bookmarked admissions of guilt, pages of shame – if all of that was thrown in the garbage pile, I would still have this fire. It would still rage in my heart.

The light of God’s love, incarnated in flesh, lives in this body, which is so much more than an overcrowded garage.

I took a carload of garbage bags to the dump and threw them in a pile of everybody’s trash. Bulldozers were needed to push it around. There was so much evidence of lives left behind, dreams let go, and misplaced love, discarded.

And somehow, even after a carload of trash, I still have more stuff to go through. Boxes of nostalgia are also containers for shame, which is among the heaviest of things I keep in long-term storage.

It doesn’t belong here anymore. The judgement, the condemnation – which is not an edict from God, but an experience that entraps me – is that I continue to make a space for it.

I’m so afraid that people will see it, see my shame or my perceived failures, that I would rather keep it than risk it being seen by junkyard scavengers.

But Jesus says, God so loved the world that God sent a Son whose love is so vast and so expansive, whose light shines so brightly that no darkness could overcome it.

And the light of this Son, will soon shine on a cross, where he will embody the suffering of the world, the suffering we bear, and the suffering we cause; to others and to ourselves.

Lent means coming to terms with who we are, in fullness: the parts we show and the parts we don’t. All of those parts belong to God. All of those parts are loved by God.

God shines a light on the fullness of our lives and in that light we can see the idols we’ve made out of ambition, and pride, and vanity, and selfishness, and any number of other trinkets we’ve been hauling around forever. And we can look at them, like the Israelites look on the serpent, the cause of their suffering, and be freed from their hold on us.

The light of God’s love is not condemnation.

It’s freedom.

The good news, my friends, is God’s perpetual invitation to step into the light of God’s love, to be seen fully, to be loved deeply, and to experience the joy that comes from being loved.a

When I look at these readings I see conflict.

I see conflict in the way that the softness and gentleness of Psalm 23, and the encouragement and faithfulness of Philippians 4 clash with the somewhat problematic parable of the Wedding Feast, wherein Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a King who, in short succession, throws a party, destroys a city of people, and casts a guest into the outer darkness for not wearing the right outfit.

There is conflict here.

And I'm also conflicted on a personal level because this is my last Sunday with you. This is the last sermon I'll preach at All Saints, and a part of me would like this last sermon to be soft and gentle like the psalmist, and encouraging of your faithfulness as Paul does to his beloved friends in Philippi. But Jesus, being God, throws a wrench in the wheel and prevents me from making a smooth and simple exit.

This decision––to either contend with the complexity and consternation of Jesus or to cherry-pick Scripture to suit our longing for a simpler life––is one that does not belong solely to the preacher, but to every Christian who considers their faith to be something of consequence.

If church is little more than a social club, than the imperatives which Jesus delivers to his followers––then and now––can be deemphasized and the focus of church can shift to the decorative pastiche of satin runners and patchwork frontals, well-arranged bouquets and perfectly performed rituals of beauty and order.

But Jesus is a troublemaker. I'm not so sure he would have been a good, mid-century Episcopalian.

As the priest in this place, ironically, I'm perhaps the one most subject to the temptation to ignore Jesus––Jesus, the parable giver––in favor of a Jesus-like archetype whose role is, primarily, to sanction our social mores. In other words, I've been wrestling with the temptation to leave out the troubling Jesus and to leave you with a one-note sermon that says, in short, everything will be fine when we can just get back to the building and go back to normal.

But the present moment is a moment of unavoidable conflict. That is my starting point for this sermon, and that is our shared starting point as a society today.

So in response to this conflict, I'm going to take a cue from Jesus and paint you a picture of something that does not yet exist; something that could very well take shape, with enough people's buy in and, of course, with God's help.

Imagine for a moment that All Saints Episcopal Church is not a church with a long history; a church with the memory of generations of parish hall gatherings and sanctuary celebrations. Imagine that you never saw the sight of the flowers lining the front railing at Easter, or the Christmas pageants or any of what's been created in this building before this present moment. Imagine that All Saints wasn't the sum total of all those past things.

Imagine instead that All Saints Episcopal Church was the newest church plant in the Diocese of Oregon. A church plant with a huge leg up. A church plant that inherited from the church that came before it: a building with beautiful landscaping; a thrift store, an industrial kitchen, and a pocket park; classrooms and fine linens and stained glass. A whole bunch of good stuff. Some of it worth holding onto, some of it worth letting go, and some of it essential to throwing the kind of feast where God prepares the table.

Imagine that this church plant was filled with a ragtag group of people––some of means and some dirt poor; some with degrees and some with calluses on their hands; and all of them invested in one thing:

Discerning the work that God is already doing in the world and committing to participate in that work together.

That's it. That's the vision.

This church plant is not hindered by anything because it isn't attached to anything except the commitment to discerning God's call in community together.

It's not attached to the building or the landscaping. It's not attached to the thrift store or to the Pocket Park. It's not attached to the industrial kitchen. It's not attached to the classrooms or the linens or the stained glass. It's not attached to any of it. Especially to the sense that having those things is in any way at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus.

It's a church plant, remember. All those things are extra.

The only thing that's essential in the new All Saints church plant is the commitment to discerning God's call in community together.

What kinds of wonderfully creative things might this church plant do? What would the ministry of the people look like if the people saw everything they inherited in this building as simply a collection of tools to use in the furthering of God's mission of transforming the world through God’s liberating, life-giving, & reconciling love?

Can you imagine?

This vision of an All Saints church plant is just one response that a follower of Jesus might have to the conflicts we see in scripture and in the world today. But I think it’s a good one. And here's why.

In response to the conflicts Jesus sees in his day––the conflicts of a people whose idolatry is disguised as piety––Jesus, time and time again, paints an imaginative vision that helps to shock folks out of their slumber and remind them of who God really is.

The Lord is our shepherd. There is comfort in this truth, but there is also a challenge to the notion that we are perfectly capable of shepherding ourselves, thank you very much.

No, God is our shepherd. Not the priest or the deacon. Not the Vestry or the Committee Chairs. Not even the bishop.

No, God.

And not God the King who punishes. That’s who we’re inclined to be.

The King of this parable is not God. The King is the comfortable Christian whose offers of generosity are conditional and whose concerns about etiquette trump their willingness to be generous hosts.

The parable isn't the blueprint; it's the corrective. It's not showing us how to throw a feast; who to invite, who to throw out. It's showing us the mistakes we make when we govern over what God has given us to steward––like this building––as though it is our kingdom.

The party is not our to host. The party is God's. The One whose abundance sustains our very lives.The One to whom this building and everything in it belongs.

It doesn't belong to us. And it never has.

So "Rejoice!" Paul the church planter says. "Rejoice!" Rejoice because God is God and we are not. Rejoice because Jesus continues to make good trouble. Rejoice because the Holy Spirit is willing and able to convert the heart of even the most stubborn priest and to plant new churches in old buildings.

God is at work right now in the conflict of the present moment. So let us commit the fullness of our lives––our time, treasure and talent––to the holy work of discerning God's call in community together.

Amen.

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

I have a somewhat long list in front of me of things that I, or others I know and love have been dealing with these past weeks and months:

Smoke
Fire
Pandemic
Depression
Anxiety
The election
RBG
John Lewis
Online school
Online work
Furloughs
Hospice
Health problems
Foreclosures
Death

Aside from the loss of John Lewis (may he rest in peace) and RBG, (may her memory be a blessing) these things are not exclusive to 2020, but the year is shaping up to be the greatest hits of the worst.

Last week I preached about sin and the end of days and it’s not even Lent.

The apocalyptic revealing of the truth of the world is an exhausting reality to endure. And to a great degree, that’s what we’re being challenged to do: to endure. Not to wave a wand and make it disappear. We can’t do that.

We’re all, in a very real way, trying to survive this moment. This is not what any of us wanted. This is not what we signed up for.

But it does invite the question: what did we sign up for? What did we sign up for on this Christian journey? What did we sign up for when God came calling and we said “yes” to that call?

What work did we think would be expected of us?

What did we think the wages would be?

God gives us what we need to get through the day, but are we certain that it’s enough?

The disciples want to know where their place will be in Jesus’ kingdom. They’re kind of obsessed with it.

Jesus offers them assurances that if they devote their entire lives to following him, if they give it all up –  their comfort, their status, their traditional roles, their constructed identities – that they will have a hundred fold in the Kingdom of heaven.

What’s a little comfort in exchange for eternal life, right? The catch being, that the last will be first and the first will be last.

That is the gist of this parable: the last will be first and the first will be last. Or in other words, God is going to do it God’s way.

Maybe this was the biggest rub for them and maybe it’s the biggest rub for us.

God does what God wants and we’re not God. God has God’s work, and it’s not ours to do.

I look at this list, and in truth, I don’t know what the rub is for you. I can guess that, if you’re at all present to what’s happening in the world today, that there is a rub. There is something you’re struggling with. There has been for me, and I don’t really have a fully formed, well-articulated message to bring this Sunday about how to make sense of the mess we’re in together.

But what I’ve got is that God has God’s work and we have ours, and we would do well to remember the difference.

A couple years back I wrote a song that has been on my mind this week. It’s got a little more meat on it than this homily of mine, so I thought I’d sing it for you as part of my reflection. I thought it may speak to the meaning of this parable and this experience of the present moment we’re having together.

That’s God’s Job

Ain’t nobody here got they own salvation
Own salvation
We all tied up in the one salvation
One salvation
Everybody here is a child worth saving
Child worth saving
Cause we all tied up in the one salvation
One salvation

God will give you reason
God will give you patience
God will give you wisdom
God will do the saving
Cause that’s God’s job
That’s God’s job
That’s God’s job
That’s God’s job

Ain't nobody here got a perfect record
Perfect record
So lay them stones down, honey, take a second
Take a second
Who among us here wanna claim perfection
Claim perfection
Lay them stones down, honey, take a second
Take a second

God will give you reason
God will give you patience
God will give you wisdom
God will do the saving
Cause that’s God’s job
That’s God’s job
That’s God’s job
That’s God’s job

That’s God’s job. And we have ours.

What if the wages we receive for doing the work that God has given us to do create a new, long list of things to replace the list of 2020’s greatest hits?

What if the wages are the fruits of the spirit?

Love
Joy
Peace
Patience
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Gentleness
and
Temperance

What if God’s job, as revealed in Scripture, to provide us these things, to give our daily bread; is to search us out – each one of us – regardless of whether or not we’ve decided that we, or our neighbor, are worthy to be found?

And maybe these things God provides – reason, wisdom, patience – maybe God provides them just one day at a time.

Maybe, in that way, they’re like sobriety, which folks in recovery know isn’t something you get to carry over from one day to the next. Each day you start again, leaning on God to provide you what you need to make it through that day.

Reason. Wisdom. Patience. Sobriety.

Daily Bread.

Imagine for a moment that the entire Church understood that we’re all in need of that kind of recovery, and that the only one who could make our recovery possible is God.

And imagine that that is a job God is willing and able to do.

Amen.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Repent,” says John the Baptist at the start of this Gospel of Matthew, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

“The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says at the start of the Gospel of Mark. "The kingdom of God is near; repent and believe in the good news.”

The end is near. Heaven is close. Time is fulfilled.

This is the eschatological backdrop for the good news of Jesus Christ, and if we don’t take a moment to unpack what “eschatological backdrop” means, we will miss the urgency behind today’s Gospel reading, in which we are told to forgive not 7 times, but 77.

Eschatology is the “Study of last things,” according to the Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms. It is the study of the end of the world.

There are few things more out of vogue to talk about in liberal Christian circles than the end of the world. (Thank you, Kirk Cameron, and your enterprise.) Sin is one of those things we don't like to talk about very often, and I’m afraid I'm going to bring that up today, too.

Sin and the end of the world. That’s what I’ve got for you today. So please, 77 times over, forgive me.

There are many different subsets of eschatology. There is consistent, and cosmic, and futuristic; there is inaugurated and individual; there is NT and OT (which is also called Hebrew Bible, accurately); there is proleptic, and realized, and symbolic, and teleological. All of the 17 letter words. Different types of Eschatology.

And at the end of the end of all things is the Eschaton which, literally, in Greek means, “The last thing.”

Now at this point, you may be saying, “um...why, Father Matthew David, are you talking about the last thing - today, of all days? Why would you invite us to think about all things coming to an end, now?”

Well, here's why:

There is an urgency to the present moment, and an urgency to eschatology, and I think we need to grab hold of that urgency, as a community, today.

“Don’t waste a good crisis,” it is said, on the internet, that Winston Churchill said during WWII. I don't know if he did; it's what the internet says. But I like the sentiment: don’t squander those feelings of urgency that arise as the sky turns yellow, or orange, or grey from wildfire smoke, and some half-a-million people are displaced under some state evacuation order – 1, 2, 3 – and we all have absolutely no idea what's going to happen tomorrow.

That feeling of urgency that I'm describing is what informs Jesus’ thoughts on everything; but especially here today, for us, on forgiveness.

We must forgive each other because the kingdom of heaven is near.

We must forgive because the wind could turn and we could be at a Level 3 tomorrow and be on the move. Right?

We must forgive like the end is near and our life depends on it.

And maybe it does.

Now, what I'm not saying here is, "Don't sin because the end is near..."  You know, the line of preaching that can lead to the 'damnation talk'. That's not exactly what's happening here.

But sin, that other subject we don’t like to talk about, also has a connection to eschatology; a connection to the end.

Sin is whatever keeps us from getting our heart ready for that very last thing that very last thing that we will all encounter one day. Sin is what gets in the way when what we really need is to get ready for what’s already here.

Sin is the grudge I hold against my neighbor that makes it hard for me to look at them with love and to help them figure out how to be safe when we’re surrounded by wildfire.

Sin, Paul says in Romans, is whether you eat meat or your a vegetarian in the midst of a natural disaster. That's what we're talking about here.

Sin is the stumbling block I’ve laid down – some snarky remark or the selfish action – that we all trip over as we’re getting our Go-bags with the things that we may need for the journey ahead.

If the end is blowing our way in the wind, sin keeps me oblivious to the smoke; distracted and unable to make the best next choice.

Sin is whatever diminishes my capacity to love you and to love God.

Now, hearing this word "sin" over, and over, and over again... Heading me talk about it and then talk about the end of the world This talk of sin and the end of the world... This may not seem very nuanced to you, and may be off putting. Maybe you think about the fire and brimstone preacher from your past who took every opportunity to shake you in your pews and wrongly convict you, or damn you, or shame you, or blame you.

I’m not here to do any of that. That is not what this is about.

This is just your friendly neighborhood priest telling you, as gently as I can, something you already know: that the world is on fire (because it is) and we don’t have time to be bitter with one another. We don't have time to be spiteful toward one another.

If we’re going to make it through this, we have to forgive.

And I say all of this knowing full well how hard it is. I say this knowing how it feels to hold onto a grudge like it’s a set of prayer beads, convincing myself that if I just clutch it tighter it will eventually yield me a blessing.

Peter knew it was hard to forgive, which is why he asked, "How many times do I have to do this?"

“As many times as it takes,” Jesus, in essence, replies, “to forgive your way to the end.”

Forgive with the urgency that the climate crisis demands. And do so even when the skies turn blue. Let go of that sinful grudge against your neighbor even after the rains come back and the green returns and we forget what it feels like to be this close – only miles away from a raging inferno.

Christianity is a path that has an end. We proclaim it. We name it. It is woven into our liturgical language. It is in our sacred stories of scripture. We may not like to talk about it, but Jesus certainly did. And so did Paul. And so did John the Baptist. It is woven into our identities.

And what we say about the end that I hope gives hope in a moment where it feels hard to hold onto....

And I'm going to, as your priest, be the first one to name it: it's a confusing and challenging thing to preach about hope when you might not, yourself, feel a whole lot of it...

but what we proclaim, as Christians, is the hope that at that at the end of the end, where all things end, Jesus is there. The Word. The One who was there before all creation. The One who breathed you into being. The One who loves you something silly. That at the end of it all is this loving Christ.

So, we have no idea when that end will come, just like we have no idea when these fires will subside. But what we can do now is remember who's at the end of all this; who is on the other side of the fire. Who do we proclaim?

I invite you to answer that question in the language of our prayer, and maybe use this time of urgency as a practice run for the eschaton.

Forgive like your very life – like your very salvation – and that of your neighbor, depend on it.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus pledges to be with his followers. I’m not sure if they’re ready for what that means. I’m not sure we are either.

This week, as your priest, and on behalf of this community, I asked 4 neighbors who are currently experiencing poverty and houselessness to pack up their belongings and find a different place to rest.

Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, Jesus tells us, and I watched as they bound up their tents and their plastic bags and loaded them into shopping carts.

The soft grass of our little corner of heaven could not support them any longer. The hard sidewalk near Bi-Mart would have to do.

I feel like you need to know this because I did this, in part, for you. And even though that seems to be what some of you wanted, I can’t shake the feeling that I sinned against God in the process.

Did I break the commandments that Paul reminds us of today in Romans? Did I commit adultery? Did I murder? Did I steal? Did I covet?

No.

But did I love my neighbor as myself? Love does no wrong to a neighbor, St. Paul says. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Did I break the law of love? And did I do it on your behalf? Maybe.

I do know that I totally took the easy way out.

You see, we received an email this past Sunday from a man – a housed neighbor – which expressed his frustration over the presence of tents in his otherwise “family-friendly” neighborhood, and he encouraged All Saints to be “good neighbors” and ask these people to move along.

So, I took the easy way out and explained to these four people sleeping on our lawn that the reason they would need to move their tents was that the neighbors were beginning to complain, and the next thing that they may do is call the police, and I didn’t want them to have to deal with that kind of confrontation.

I framed it as though I was doing them a favor, even while I implicitly told them that they are not our real neighbors: the people with houses are.

Steve, one of the people I displaced, told me as I was driving a load of his things in the back of my car that, “We were sure we would be safe at a church.”

I wanted to say something to make him feel better, but I couldn’t. I’d already taken the easy way out.

By making some disgruntled neighbor the reason Steve wasn’t welcome to rest here on church grounds, I managed to avoid having to explain how it is that some of us at All Saints – a community that takes pride in the work it’s doing on the weekends to offer services to people experiencing poverty and houselessness – some of us simply didn’t want him here.

Maybe there are rational reasons for not wanting Steve or Amanda or Yvonne to rest here on the property. Concerns about drug use. Fear of building damage. Nervousness about what the housed neighbors will think.

But I didn’t go into that with Steve. I just said, “it was a neighbor.”

Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” The easy way out, when it comes to this saying of Jesus, is to spiritualize Jesus as a kind of godly guardian angel who is summoned every time the priest prays at the start of a meeting, and then politely dismissed every time the priest prays at the end of a meeting.

The harder way to hear these words is to consider that when two or three are gathered as Christians – as members of Christ’s body, as members of All Saints – that Jesus is here, among us, in a tent, on the lawn.

The Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us. That’s the actual meaning in Greek. Not dwelt among us. Pitched a tent.

What if Jesus is here among us, not when have scheduled time for him to be at the building, but whenever he is tired, and hungry, and thirsty.

“Do you give away water in your food boxes?” Steve asked me when I saw him midweek in front of New Seasons. “Amanda and I split a bottle of water last night,” he said. It had been in the 90’s that day.

I told him I wasn’t sure, and that I was sorry to tell him that All Saints has put locks on its faucets to keep people from stealing the brass.

You’re telling this to Jesus, I kept thinking.

I remembered the moment when, driving by All Saints a few years ago, I saw that you had decided to erect a metal fence around the green where people had been sleeping in their tents.

The feeling that I felt when I saw All Saints’ gated lawn, and when I asked Steve and his fellows to move along, and when I told him about the locked water faucets, was a hard feeling to name, at first. Was it anger? Was it frustration? Was it shame? Shame comes closest, but shame makes it about me. This feeling was evoked by the situation.

The feeling was sorrow.

I felt sorrow when I first saw the fence. I felt sorrow when I asked them to move. I felt sorrow when I learned about the brass.

Shame is the easy way out, when it comes to this situation. Shame is a luxury of the privileged. Shame redirects the conversation to the discomfort that guilt puts on a person’s conscience, and in doing so keeps their from having to name their complicity; to name their role in perpetuating sin.

Shame also motivates the question, “What can I do to fix this?” That question, like shame, lets us bypass the sorrow that comes from acknowledging the truth.

Shame is a fence we build to keep the truth out.

Shame is isolating. Sorrow is much harder to sustain.

And yet, we are Christians. We profess that God’s sorrow  moved God to step out from God’s heaven to be with us; to sorrow alongside us; to pitch a tent among us.

Sorrow is God’s gift that is given when we look at the truth and do not look away.

In the moment of fully accepting the truth, we step into the sorrow in which God resides.

The fear to be with the sorrow keeps us from being with Jesus. The fear justifies the easy way out.

When I took the easy way out, I did it to avoid my feelings of guilt and to spare the community any shame. But in doing that I also sidestepped the sorrow on your behalf: your sorrow; sorrow in which you are called to meet God.

So, I’m sorry I did that. I’m sorry I tried to spare you from the truth about the world and the truth about this community.

I hope this looses you from your shame and encourages you to be with your sorrow, just as I am attempting to be with mine. You may find, as I have, that Jesus is there, in the sorrow, looking for a place to lay his head.

Love him as you love your neighbor. And love your neighbor as you love him.

Amen.

Today’s Collect, which I prayed at the beginning of service, is an appeal for God’s help to “increase in us true religion.”

So we have to ask: Which religion are we practicing? True religion? The religion with love at its center?

Or the religion of this world? The religion of violence?

This morning, I feel as though I am Peter and Jesus is on the other side of the screen telling me a truth about this world that I don’t want to hear.

What I see on the screen brings me no joy. What I see in the street brings me no joy.

The cell phone video I saw last Sunday night of Rusten Sheskey shooting Jacob Blake at point-blank range––I didn’t want to see that.

The fires blazing and the people raging, and a teenager shooting and killing 2 people and that being justified as keeping the peace––I didn’t want to see that.

I also didn’t want to wake up this morning to see that someone was shot and killed last night in downtown Portland.

I don’t want to see these things because I don’t want that to be the world I live in.

Peter doesn’t want Jesus to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die, and I don’t want it to be true, that Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante who killed those two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin would probably not be in jail if he was a police officer.

Instead he might be put on administrative leave, protected by something called “qualified immunity.”

I don’t want it to be true that Jacob Blake can’t move his legs now, and that he could this time last week, and that now his legs are shackled to his hospital bed, even though his spine was shattered.

I don’t want that to be true.

I also don’t want it to be true that sometimes the response to learning these things is––well, what did he do? I’m sure he deserved it.
But, here we are.

I’m unsatisfied with what is true, and so was Peter.

So maybe Jesus is saying to me, Get behind me, Satan. Don’t tempt me with believing that the truth is not the truth. Peter doesn’t want to hear that Jesus will die on a cross.

Crucifixion means that the state finds it permissible to execute a person in a humiliating, dehumanizing way, in full public view.

They didn’t have cell phones videos in Jesus’ day, but if they did I guarantee you we would have seen him hanging on the cross during the nightly news.

Certainly Peter doesn’t want that for Jesus. Jesus is the good guy.

And good guys are supposed to kill bad guys, right?

That’s what we’re all supposed to want, right?

That’s what goes through the mind of the Jesus follower in the Garden who takes out his sword and cuts off the ear of the Roman guard.

That’s also what goes through the mind of the Roman guard as he hurls the hammer toward the open palm of Mary’s son.

Good guy violence is woven into our collective identity.

We allow for violence in this country. We depend on it. We celebrate it. We enshrine it in monuments and we sing about it in anthems.

If the violence is being done by the hero, the violence is seen as a good.

Or, at the very least, as a necessary evil.

But “necessary evil” is not a Christian doctrine.

The Fall was not a necessary evil. It was a mistake.

The Crucifixion was not a necessary evil. It was an injustice.

God didn’t nail Jesus to the cross. Roman guards did.

And if the Roman guard is always the good guy, then there was nothing wrong about him nailing Jesus to the cross.

If the Jesus follower who takes up a weapon to inflict harm on the guard is also always the good guy, then a violent rebellion is justifiable.

In either case, the violence of the hero is accepted as permissible.

This is a part of the American religion of violence that has captured the hearts and religious imaginations of so many of us.

And I think we are called to think more critically than adherents of the religion of violence would have us do.

We are called to challenge this notion of good guys and bad guys, of permissible good guy violence, and justifiable bad guy executions.

Walter Wink, in his book, Engaging the Powers, rightly asserts that

“The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known.”

Redemptive violence villainizes. It needs a bad guy. For redemptive violence to thrive, we need to look at each other and forget our shared humanity; forget our belovedness by God.

This could not be further from the Way of Jesus, but this is becoming the American way.

Villainization. Demonization. Dehumanization.

Jesus is not the violent hero that Peter––or perhaps you and me––would want him to be. And we can find ourselves a violent hero to worship. They’re a dime a dozen today.

But that is not the Way of Jesus.

The Way of Jesus, Paul reminds us, is a way of love, mutual affection, honor, hospitality, and a duty to show kindness and compassion toward our enemies; so much so that we undermine the idea of being enemies.

We are not called to be a people of crucifixion. We are called to be a people of resurrection.

And the Resurrection, friends, is God’s final judgement on the religion of violence. Because in the Resurrection, God performs the ultimate act of nonviolent resistance.

Salvation was not achieved through violence against God.

Salvation was achieved through God’s love, alone.

Violence can try to triumph over love, but in the end, Christ is risen.

This is the heart of our true religion.

Amen.

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

Wink, W. (1999). Engaging the powers: Discernment and resistance in a world of domination. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Pr.

The following lament was composed by the Rev. Phil Hooper, curate at Trinity Episcopal Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana and author of the blog, By Another Road.

This lamentation will be used this upcoming Saturday during my prayer service at the close of the Greenbelt Festival, COMPLINE REMIXED: COMFORT AND COMMUNITY IN COMPLEX TIMES.

English is posted first, followed by Spanish.

In grief and in undaunted hope, let us cry out to God, the undivided Trinity, saying:

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God, your Church is splintered and sorrowful. We are undone by the virulence of the age into which you have called us. We hunger for the bread only you can give; we long for the solace of an absent embrace. Gather us close, hide us under the shadow of your wings, and strengthen us to be your ministers amidst the uncertainties that lie ahead.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God, our nation is diseased. A pandemic has brought us to our knees, but we have been kneeling before false gods for too long: economic and environmental injustice, systemic racism, the death-dealing myth of white imperialism, the vainglory of unexamined consumption. We need you, the Divine Physician, to heal the wounds we cannot see, so that we might heal the broken bodies and broken systems we can see.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God, the world is so vast, and so small. We are overwhelmed by its complexities, yet we are reminded how tightly our lives are knit together. The old lies of extraction and exploitation have laid waste to our planet and have oppressed our siblings in every land. Lead us out into the wilderness beyond self-satisfaction, beyond denial, beyond plunder, and teach us new ways to live simply, humbly, close to the earth.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God, our communities are being crushed by the yoke of sin: economic inequality, gun violence, racism, xenophobia, disparities in health and education, loneliness, and despair. Our siblings are sleeping in the streets, weeping in the streets, bleeding in the streets, like strangers in their own land. And so many of us choose to look away. Give us, instead, your easy yoke, your light burden: to open the doors, to step out, to speak out, to trust one another, to be taken where we do not wish to go, to the foot of the Cross, to the tomb, where you will meet us, where real life begins.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God, our loved ones are sick and dying, from viruses and from violence. The silence of silenced bodies overwhelms our ears. The IV-drip of memories stings and burns as it works its way through our veins. We are weak and helpless, but don’t allow us to be hopeless. Make your presence known to us, especially when we cannot be present to one another. Heal our ailments and mend our hearts.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God, you have taken so many away. Their names tumble from our lips, a remembrance, an insistence, a plea. We say their names so that they won’t be forgotten, so that we won’t be willing to forget. As we grieve and grasp at the mystery of death, take their names and bind them to yourself; open your everlasting gates and welcome them home.

Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.

God of our Sorrows and our Joy, we lament today so that we might rejoice tomorrow in your promise of justice, of healing, and of never-ending life; for you are the One in whom all things are made new, and it is to you whom we turn in trust, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and for ever.

Amen.

En el dolor y en la esperanza sin temor, clamemos a Dios, la Trinidad indivisa, diciendo:

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios, tu Iglesia está astillada y triste. La virulencia de la época a la que nos has llamado nos deshace. Tenemos hambre del pan que solo tú puedes dar; Anhelamos el consuelo de un abrazo ausente. Acércate, escóndenos bajo la sombra de tus alas y fortalécenos para ser tus ministros en medio de las incertidumbres que nos esperan.

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios, nuestra nación está enferma. Una pandemia nos ha puesto de rodillas, pero hemos estado arrodillados ante dioses falsos durante demasiado tiempo: injusticia económica y ambiental, racismo sistémico, el mito del imperialismo blanco que trata la muerte, la vanagloria del consumo no examinado. Te necesitamos a ti, el Médico Divino, para sanar las heridas del corazón que no podemos ver, para que podamos sanar los cuerpos rotos y los sistemas rotos que podemos ver.

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios, el mundo es tan vasto y tan pequeño. Estamos abrumados por sus complejidades, pero se nos recuerda cuán estrechamente nuestras vidas están unidas. Las viejas mentiras de extracción y explotación han devastado nuestro planeta y han oprimido a nuestros hermanos y hermanas en todas las tierras. Llévanos al desierto más allá de la autosatisfacción, más allá de la negación, más allá del saqueo, y enséñanos nuevas formas de vivir de manera simple, humilde, cerca de la tierra.

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios, nuestras comunidades están siendo aplastadas por el yugo del pecado: enemistad política, desigualdad económica, violencia armada, racismo, xenofobia, disparidades en salud y educación, contaminación, soledad y desesperación. Nuestros hermanos y hermanas están durmiendo en las calles, llorando en las calles, sangrando en las calles, como extraños en su propia tierra. Y muchos de nosotros elegimos mirar hacia otro lado. Danos, en cambio, tu yugo fácil, tu carga ligera: para abrir las puertas, para salir, para hablar, para confiar el uno en el otro, para ser llevados a donde no deseamos ir, al pie de la Cruz, a la tumba, donde nos encontrarás, donde comienza la vida real.

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios, nuestros seres queridos están enfermos y moribundos, por virus y por violencia. El silencio de los cuerpos silenciados abruma nuestros oídos. El goteo intravenoso de recuerdos pica y quema mientras avanza por nuestras venas. Somos débiles e indefensos, pero no nos permitas ser desesperanzados. Haznos saber tu presencia, especialmente cuando no podemos estar presentes el uno al otro. Sana nuestras dolencias y repara nuestros corazones.

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios, te has llevado a tantos. Sus nombres caen de nuestros labios, un recuerdo, una insistencia, una súplica. Decimos sus nombres para que no sean olvidados. Decimos sus nombres para que no seamos el tipo de personas dispuestas a olvidar. Mientras nos afligimos y nos aferramos al misterio de la muerte, tómenos sus nombres y átelos a ti mismo; abre tus puertas eternas y dales la bienvenida a casa.

Santo Dios, Santo Poderoso, Santo Inmortal
Ten piedad de nosotros

Dios de nuestros Dolores y de nuestra Alegría, nos lamentamos hoy para que podamos regocijarnos mañana en tu promesa de justicia, de curación y de vida sin fin; porque tú eres Aquel en quien todas las cosas se hacen nuevas, y es a ti a quien confiamos, por Jesucristo nuestro Señor, quien vive y reina contigo y el Espíritu Santo, un solo Dios, ahora y para siempre.

Amén.

Photo by Tito Texidor III on Unsplash

On Wednesday, a few of us gathered in a Zoom meeting to share our perspectives about the bishop candidates. It was only a few because I made the mistake of setting the privacy feature in such a way that you had to be registered as an “official user” of Zoom before being allowed into the room.

Many trying to get in could not, and instead of entry they encountered a series of extra steps; digital road blocks, if you will.

We all still live in the memory of Zoom rooms being “Zoombombed” by the internet-version of prank callers, and my chosen security measure was intended to help ensure that this wouldn’t happen. But, it ended up keeping people out.

My attempt at protection kept the church from participating in our collective discernment.

Those who hold my office of priest in Christ’s Church, those who a bishop has charged, using the same words that we hear Christ speak in today’s reading when he gives Peter the keys to the kingdom –

...whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven...

– we who hold this office have a unique responsibility to help facilitate discernment among the gathered body of the Church.

My little mistake wasn’t irredeemable. We will try to have this conversation again later in the week. I’m not bringing this up to preach about me, or about priests, or even bishops, though the office of bishop is certainly on everyone‘s minds right now.

I’m sharing this Zoom story because I think this week’s readings are inviting us to reflect on discernment: on how it begins; on what it is; on what it asks of each of us, whatever office we hold in the world or in the Church.

Disciples of Jesus are always in a process of discernment in the Gospel stories.
Once Jesus initiates their discernment, that discernment process is ongoing.

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Now when Jesus came into the district of Portland, Oregon, the city of Roses, the city of protest and tear gas, the city of struggle to claim the narrative around what is justice and who is on the right side of history, he asked his disciples,
“Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say he’s a good teacher, but others a revolutionary, and still others a figure like the Buddha or Gandhi or countless other holy people from human history.”

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

And in that moment, Jesus initiated in the Church in Portland a process of discernment.

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Discernment, in a Christian context like our own, begins with the question, Who do you say that Jesus is?

The Church, built on the back of Peter, echoing the response of Peter, responds and has responded for generations–centuries–with the words, Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And if parroting the words of Scripture were enough to make one a Christian, then discernment would not be necessary. Discipleship would be a process of memorization.

Learn the words. Say the words. Repeat.

In our Anglican tradition, with our prayer book language, the same can be said about liturgy.

If knowing the words of Rite I or Form A or any number of prayer book prayers were enough to make one a Christian, then discernment would not be necessary and discipleship would only ask that we learn the choreography of prayer book Episcopalianism.

But in my own journey as a Christian, I find again and again that not only is discernment an important part of Christian formation, but it is a nonnegotiable, essential feature of Christian identity.

Once Jesus initiates discernment, our discernment process is ongoing.

Discernment is messy the way that human bodies are messy. Discernment is fragile and delicate process the way that human bodies are fragile and made up of these delicate processes. Discernment in the Church is something that requires the participation of all members of Christ’s body.

This was the frustrating part of my Zoom snafu. One wrong step by a Church representative, and folks are left out of the room; left out of discernment.

Discernment begins with our own reflection on Peter’s response to Jesus, and it continues as we seek out understanding about our own vocation, our own role, our own work in the life of the Body of Christ.

In today’s Epistle, we read, “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.”

This is Paul’s vision of the Church: one body in Christ. And we, the members of this body, have to discern what unique gifts we are called to share; what unique responsibilities we are called to uphold for the benefit of one another.

We’re charged to discern what our gifts are and what their function is in the life of the Church. Paul lays out a number of gifts, and I love how they’re written in the Common English Bible translation:

If your gift is prophecy, you should prophesy in proportion to your faith.
If your gift is service, devote yourself to serving.
If your gift is teaching, devote yourself to teaching.
If your gift is encouragement, devote yourself to encouraging.

The one giving should do it with no strings attached.
The leader should lead with passion.
The one showing mercy should be cheerful.

Discernment happens when we seek to understand how God is equipping us, through our unique gifts, for the present moment.

So as a person who has been charged by his bishop, and the bishop before him, tracing back to Peter, who was charged by the one who initiated the discernment of every Christian around the world, in every generation, I charge you to spend time with the question Jesus posed about his identity.

Who do you say that Jesus is?

I charge you to be mindful of the moments when, in your attempts at protecting the sanctity of the faith, you inadvertently keep people from fully participating in the life of the Church.

Who have you left out of room? Who do you intentionally let in?

I charge you to spend time in discernment about your gifts and their function in the Body of Christ.

What has God assigned for you to do?

Because your cheerfulness, your passion, your generosity, your teaching, your service, your prophetic vision, for a truly just world – all of these gifts, and the myriad more that lie dormant in the hearts of Christians still waiting to embrace discernment are gifts intended to nourish the entire body of Christ. And, through the body of Christ, all of God’s creation.

It all begins with discernment.

And our discernment begins with Jesus.

Amen.

Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

Jesus doesn’t make it easy for us.

He tells us, if we’re not offended, we may not be paying attention.

If we’re not offended by the mistreatment, if we are not offended by the dehumanization, if we are not offended by the violation of our covenant with God to maintain justice and do what is right, we may not be paying attention.

This is the backdrop behind what Jesus says in his first words of today’s Gospel:

“It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

Just open up your Bible to the first 9 verses of Matthew Chapter 15, the dialogue which precedes today’s reading, to see just how fed up Jesus is with the hypocrisy of those who quibble over religious custom while, at the same time, tolerating injustice.

“This people honors me with their lips,” quoting Isaiah,

“But their hearts are far from me.”

Jesus has had it with the performative purity of the comfortably religious, whose privileged place in the social order leads them to believe that they are on God’s good side and that the outcasts of society who follow Jesus are not. Jesus is done with the arguments about minor infractions of religious custom with folks who continually dishonor the dignity of other human beings; or those who tolerate that happening.

That is defilement, Jesus tells us. That is corruption.

The corruption Jesus is calling out today is the corruption of the heart.

He is calling out the corruption of the heart of the very people who believe that they are on the right side of God’s law.

If your heart has been corrupted, Jesus teaches, then it doesn’t matter how law abiding you think you are, ‘cause you've have already fallen short of God’s dream of a kingdom of love.

I don’t know about you, but this call out feels personal, and maybe even a little political. With Jesus, it’s hard to tell the difference.
With Jesus – the Jesus we see in Scripture – the personal is political.

Or in other words, if our heart houses something other than love for everything – for everyone – that God has love for, then our relationship to society is broken.

We see how this plays out in the second part of today’s Gospel, which on first listen may seem quite disconnected from the first. But it’s not.

Scene 1, Jesus is teaching about the corruption of the heart.
Scene 2, Jesus acts out the lesson. He shows us what the actions that come from a corrupted heart look like in the real world.

Jesus is on the border.

A Canaanite woman, a person who is not a part of the religious and social group to which Jesus belongs, approaches him in dire need.

And Jesus does something that doesn’t appear compassionate at all. He completely ignores her cry for help. Her daughter is afflicted, but he says nothing.

Then his disciples, in their own lack of compassion, appeal to have here silenced. She keeps yelling, this woman, can you please send her away.

Then, to show us how the actions of a corrupted heart can take the shape of religious exclusion, Jesus says, “She’s not really my problem. I take care of my own.”

But she did not let up. She continued to plead her case.

Lord, help me. Look at me. See me. Recognize my need. Accept me as a full person. Honor my dignity.

And Jesus calls her a dog.

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Can you imagine how dehumanizing it is to be called an animal?

If you’re not offended, you may not be paying attention.

In this moment, Jesus shows us the worst of what can happen when people believe that those who are a part of their group – their gender group, their cultural group, their racial group, their national group – are fully human, while those outside the borders of those groups, are not.

Jesus could not have provided a better teaching on exclusion and discrimination in the name of God than by acting it out as he did in this moment.

But the Canaanite woman provides the real lesson here, when she says to Jesus:

“Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Or in other words, the abundance of God is greater than the unkind actions of a corrupt heart. And what does Jesus say in response?

"Great is your faith."

The gift of healing was given to this woman who insisted that her dignity be recognized because it is recognized by God.

Jesus doesn’t make it easy for us.
There is a comfort that comes from fortifying the walls between us and those who we think are not us.

But Jesus has been making his followers uncomfortable since day 1. It’s kind of his thing.

God calls us to ask,

What is the state of our heart?
Has is been corrupted by the forces in this world who advocate not for love, but for exclusion? Does our heart need to be filled again with God’s abundant love; a love that gathers up the outcast, that cares for the disregarded, that rescues the deported and frees the prisoner?

Behind the offensiveness of Jesus is a call to conversion; and by conversion, I mean: a change of heart.

So, if you find yourself offended by this challenge from Jesus to love outside of your own borders, you’re not alone.

And, you’re probably paying attention.

Amen.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Jesus loves his disciples like a mother who loves – who adores – her children.

I think of this fierce mother love because of how Jesus mothers Peter in our Gospel reading. And I see this happening in three distinct moments:

1. The moment Jesus does the impossible
2. The moment Jesus saves
3. The moment Jesus teaches

Immediately preceding today’s story is the story we heard last week, Jesus feeding the 5,000. A recap, in case you missed it:

Jesus tries to be alone, to pray and, presumably, to grieve the death of his cousin, John the Baptist, but he cannot get time to himself because the crowds of people following him keep pressing in. They are hungry, they are hurting, they are suffering, and they are coming to him with their every need.

Last week we explored the way that these crowds are like crowds of people crying out for justice. And God’s response to those cries, seen in Jesus, is to give the people what they need.

The disciples try to rationalize not giving food to the people, but Jesus has nothing of it. Jesus feeds them because they’re hungry.

Today’s Gospel begins once the meal has ended. Jesus shushes off the disciples so that he can send away the crowds and then Jesus, the tired mother who has been working to get a break – a single moment to rest, and pray, and mourn over her losses, and regroup – this Jesus retreats for some time alone.

I cannot tell you how many mothers I have spoken to in the past several months who have been struggling to be miracle workers for their children, their spouses or partners, their employers and families. Parents of all genders are struggling right now.

And when the disciples, the children of God, are together in the boat that Jesus has put them in, drifting toward the storm, Jesus isn’t anywhere to be found. At least, not until after having his rest.

(Take note, parents. Jesus rests.)

This brings us to the first moment of mothering from Jesus.

Freshly rested from his time alone on the mountain, Jesus is ready to respond to the cries of his children. He goes to them, walking on the water.

Think about that.

Just a few hours before he was feeding the masses and now he is defying physics. That is how committed he is to loving his followers.

And they don’t know that it’s him. They are afraid and they think that the one who has come to save them is actually there to harm them.

This is also true of every one of us who thinks that the God who loves us is actually hellbent on condemning us.

“It is a ghost,” they cry out in fear. But Mother Jesus is calm, and says, “Sweetie, you’re ok. It’s me.”

Or in our translation today, “It is I,” but in other translations it more accurately reads, “I AM”, which is the way that God announces Godself in Exodus 3:14 when God says to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”

Don’t be afraid, because I AM. I am the one who made you and – ultimately – I am the one who saves you.

Peter isn’t totally convinced, and he barters with Jesus the way that children negotiate with their parents: “If it’s you, command me to come to you on the water.”  Or in other words, If you love me, prove it.

And so Jesus does. And Peter shares in that love... until he doesn’t.

This brings us to our second moment of mothering from Jesus,

which I live to think of as Jesus’ Subaru moment.

You see, when I was a kid back in the early 1980’s, my mom used to drive a Subaru. She drove it to her job at the local news network. She drove it to drop me off at my grandma’s house, where I spent most of my time. And she drove it to church each week, with me in the passenger seat and the Sunday morning Beatles marathon on the radio.

We would sing harmony in her Subaru at the top of our lungs.
Love, love me do…You know I love you...

And every so often, somebody driving in front of us would slam on their brakes, and when they did my mom did a thing that I think many moms do: She extended her arm and put out her hand and laid it across my chest, as if to create a barrier between me and whatever harm might be coming my way. Her arm pushed me back into my seat, as if she possessed the strength to shield my body and save my life.

And she did this so fast. I wouldn’t become aware of the braking car in front of us by the sight of it, but by the feeling of my mom’s protective hand. That’s how fast she was. She didn’t hesitate.

And that is how I imagine Jesus saving Peter:

Arm extended. Hand reaching out. Saving his beloved child. And not hesitating. Jesus does not hesitate to save Peter.

God does not hesitate to love God’s children.

Us.

Now we are at our third moment of mothering from Jesus, which is when Jesus teaches Peter.

Jesus looks at Peter’s panic-stricken face, and says, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

I like to think of the first part of this question as a term of endearment. Certainly we could read it as a condemnation, but why? We don’t have to. Imagine “you of little faith” as a nickname a mom might use, like Silly Head or Squishy Face.

Silly Head, why did you doubt?

The question is an invitation, in love, to genuine self-reflection. It’s asked with the same love that compelled Jesus to do the impossible and then reach out his saving arm.

Why did you doubt, my love. I am here. I am here because I love you something fierce.

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"Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved," Paul says. It doesn’t matter who you are or how unique your identity may be.

The God who made you is the God who will save you.

There are many ways to think about God. And today, I invite you to think about God

as a mother who continues to love even when loving seems impossible…

or a mother who saves her children without hesitation…

or a mother who, like the best teachers, is genuinely curious about and invested in the lives of her children.

Because when we look at Mother Jesus, that is the God we see.

Amen.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

What are we going to do with these crowds of people who are airing their grievances, saying

"We are dying out here on these streets. We need to be freed; to be healed. Healing for our bodies, and for the systems which continue to inflict harm on us."

That’s what the crowd is saying in the middle of the night nearby where Jesus is sitting, grieving the loss of John, the prophet at the hands of Herod, the tyrant.

Send these crowds away, the disciples say. Let them take care of their own needs. Grab their own bootstraps. Address their own problems. They aren’t ours to fix. Let them clean up their own messes. If I’m not suffering under the weight of this world, certainly they can make due if they work hard enough; if they just clean up their act.

The disciples approach the Lord in this desolate place...this boarded up city...this nation, torn... and say to him:

Please make this go away.

And Jesus said, No.

They replied, We don’t have enough. We don’t know how to address these issues: poverty, lack of health care, lack of housing, the pandemic of racism, the racism of the pandemic.

We got nothing here to fix this, the followers of Jesus said. Just a little food.

And Jesus said, “Bring them to me.” And then he gave the suffering people what they needed. For free.

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I learned this story as a child. “How did he do it?” I wondered. How did he take these loaves and fish, and feed the 5,000? Was it magic? Or just something only Jesus can do? Evidence that he is God?

Because who else but God could take something that’s not enough and make it enough? Who else but God could stare at the unsolvable problem and solve it? Who else but God could know what to do about hunger and poverty and racism?

But when the followers of Jesus ask him to solve this problem, Jesus does what God has always done: he invites them to give the suffering people what they need. For free.

To an American Christian, the miracle may not so much be about food, but about economics.

Who gives suffering people what they need for free besides Jesus?

We live in a nation–a world–that, at this point, is so privatized that the very thought of giving people what they need for free is, for many of us, unthinkable.

How out of step that makes us with Jesus.

Jesus gave the suffering people what they needed for free. Isaiah says that’s what God does:

“You that have no money,  come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

Who practices that kind of radical generosity but God?

I have seen this community do it. This very sanctuary is used for prayer  and to prepare food boxes, because each day there are more furloughs and evictions. The unemployment benefits may be gone, but people still need to eat.

We do this when we prepare hot meals or sack lunches for our Saturday morning guests who simply cannot do what the disciples–and maybe some of us–would have them do; go somewhere else and buy their own food.

We give freely from what we have, and we do it because God did it first.

God’s grace is free. God’s love is food for the masses that comes without charge. This kind of generosity could only be thought of as “radical” in a country where the poor are bankrupted by hospital bills and insurance costs; a country where corporations overcharge people to live and then profit from their dying.

This is not the way that Jesus responds to the suffering of the world.

Jesus is gracious and merciful, as the Psalmist writes about the Lord God. He is good to all. His compassion is over all he has made. He upholds all who are failing.

Not some. Not the deserving.

All.

He raises them up and he gives them food.

God gives this suffering world the love that it needs for free; not because we’ve earned it, but because that is simply who God is, and who God is calling every human being to be.

So, can we respond to the cries for equity by saying, “Give the people what they need”?

Can we advocate for the poor by saying, “Give the people what they need”?

Can we be honest about our own personal sins and our complicity in the sin of this nation, by saying, “Give the people what they need”?

What do we need? Justice.

What do we need? Healing.

What do we need? Repentance.

When do we need it? Some disciples would say, not now. Maybe some other, less inconvenient time.

But Jesus says, no. Bring them to me.

Then God puts what little we think we have back into into our hands and tells us to give it away, for free, to all who need it.

And by God’s grace, they will all be fed.

Amen.

Improv actors have this rule. It’s the one rule you absolutely have to follow if you’re going to do improv. It’s the only way it works. You follow this rule.

And the rule is: always say yes.
Just say yes to whatever comes.

Did somebody just say you’re their long lost uncle from Kansas? Say yes. Just go with that.

Did someone just pretend to be making dinner on an invisible stove and they knocked over the pot of spaghetti sauce all over the burners? Say yes. Just go with that.

Just say yes to whatever someone throws at you because it’s the only way that this works out.

I did a little bit of improv as a kid, and I found this rule of “say yes” to be quite challenging. Before the “yes” came all kinds of thoughts; all sorts of ways that I could think through ideas of doing it slightly different; questions that I had. Things came up and it got in the way of the flow.

On Thursday morning of this week, just after coffee and toast, an email came in with the subject “At the hospital.” I knew what that meant. We’d been waiting for it. We all had been waiting for it. Andria was at the hospital.

And just like that, everything changed. A new life was on the way. A new addition to the Skornik family, to the world, to this church, All Saints. And a new role for a relatively new priest. That’s what was right in front of me.

And did I say yes?

Absolutely!...For just a little while.

I said yes until something didn’t go quite according to plan. It only took a couple hours for that to happen. And when that happened I said, "No! That wasn’t what I planned. That was not how I designed this in my imagination."

And at that moment the improv was put on pause.

Jesus has been throwing parables at his disciples for weeks now.
Well, in the context of the story it all happened at once but for us it’s been weeks.
Each one of these parables is a different way of thinking about the Kingdom of God.

Seeds scattered. Lots of food metaphors. Today, a mustard seed. Some yeast spread out. A treasure in a field and a pearl, both so precious that they’re worth selling all your possessions for. A net that scoops up all the fish--edible and inedible--and then the careful sorting that follows.

“Do you get what I mean?” Jesus says, after throwing all of these different parables out, one after the next. And what do his disciples say?

“Yes.”

At first read you might, like me, think, Really? Do you really get them? Well that’s great because they seem to go in so many different directions. Such an abundance of meaning that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what you’re saying, Lord.

But maybe it’s not about the exact meaning here; maybe it’s the process. The action of saying “yes.” The improvisational quality of life–this life–that we’ve been given by God, and that God is continually giving to us.

When I was stuck on Thursday in my “no” I got broken out of my stuckness by a photo of a newborn baby. This fresh face, only in the world for mere minutes, but there he was on my screen, looking like heaven.

The Kingdom of heaven is like a stubborn man who gets stuck in his ways of thinking who is then broken out of it by the face of a newborn baby in a text message.

Do you get what I mean?

Jesus is throwing out these images of a Kingdom in which love is abundant, and the world is just, and all things are reconciled to the God who created all things in the same way that God’s Spirit is reaching out in the most ordinary moments of our life–especially the ones in which we’ve fallen into our own stuckness–and God is giving us these options, just throwing them at us, to say “Yes”. Yes to the abundance of life that God wills for us.

And what does that life look like?

Paul lays it out in our reading from Romans. It looks like a life in which God’s love is so inextricably linked to our life, so much a part of our being, our reality, that we couldn’t escape from it if we wanted to; if we tried.

And not only that, but there is nothing in all of existence, says Paul–not death, not life, or anything in between–that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Even our own stuckness; our own proclivity to say “no”; our own capacity to convince ourselves that God’s love is somehow conditional.

Even that can’t separate us from God.

We are already reconciled. We are already forgiven. We are already beloved.

Jesus intervenes with a new parable, a new image of God’s love for us, and Jesus calls us to say “Yes.” Say yes with the abandon of a person who would sell all his possessions and become poor for the beauty of the smallest part of God’s creation. Yes with the giddiness of a priest who would forget God’s grace for an entire morning before being reminded of it by the face of a newborn baby.

I don’t know what Jesus is throwing your way to lift you out of whatever you are stuck in, but I invite you to consider walking the foolish and often unthinkable path of discipleship in which we all say “yes” to the God who made us, who loves us, and from whom we will never be separated.

Amen.

Hi! Welcome to my website. I'm glad you found my little corner of the internet.

Maybe you found your way here through the Church of England's Faith at Home video, which features my song, "Image of Love." I'm grateful to be a part of such a heart-warming series, and I hope that you've found meaningful opportunities to connect with your faith during this season of quarantine.

Or maybe you found my site by way of my e-mail signature, and you're familiar with my work around hybrid ministry and the transition into the digital. I hope that your transition is going smoothly, and I'm glad to have a chance to have worked with you.

If you came here by way of a Google search, welcome.

Things to See Here

My Podcast, Lectio Musica

Hear individual episodes from my 2018 podcast, Lectio Musica. Each episode features a collection of scriptures from the Revised Common Lectionary and an original song written in response to those readings. The project was a short, but fruitful labor love love made possible by the Episcopal Evangelical Society.

Sermons

Read through some of the sermons written during my formative journey from seeker, to student, to postulant, to priest. Some are in English and some are in Spanish.

My Bio

Here you'll find a few more details about me.

Thank you for visiting. Say hello Twitter if you'd like to connect one-on-one, or post a comment below. It would be lovely to hear from you.

God's blessing be with you on this day and remain with you always.

Here's what you need.

FB PAGE OF TRINITY EPISCOPAL CATHEDRAL

Visit this page at 11AM PST (or a few minutes before) on Saturday morning, the 9th of May for the FB Live service.

Follow along (and you better sing them hymns!) by downloading a PDF bulletin to read on your computer or phone:

English Bulletin

Boletín Español

That's it! Share this with whoever might need it. It's a public service and all are invited.

See you at church!

I hadn't anticipated that I'd be ordained in the middle of a pandemic. But then again, God has been surprising me throughout my entire formation process. Why stop now?

If this is your first time to my site, welcome. You may have made your way here through a super fancy ordination announcement from the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon. Or maybe you saw this post on Facebook, Twitter, or some other hub of community.

Regardless of how you got here, I'm glad you made it.

The Purpose of This Post

I'm going to share some important details about my priestly ordination. Get out your calendars & your to do lists. There are ways you can participate.

1) Date, Time, and Live-stream details

My ordination will take place at 11:00AM on May 9th, 2020 (God willing and the people consenting) at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. This is the feast day of Gregory of Nazianzus. It's also my 41st birthday! Put it on your calendar.

The service will be streamed on the Facebook Page of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral (Please "Like" it).

2) Wear red on the 9th

One of the things we let go of when we stop going out to public gatherings is our sense of public performance. We're all a little like drag queens, you know? We each put on clothing to communicate a message and each setting has its different norms.

Red is the color of ordinations. So wear red on ordination day. It may seem like a small thing, but it means a lot.

3) Donations to my Discretionary Fund

An ordination tradition is to donate to the new priest's Discretionary Fund. From this fund I can help people in financial crisis, be that in the form of groceries, bus passes, or assistance with bills.

If you'd like to donate to this important ministry, click here and choose "Ordination Donations for The Rev. Matthew David".

4) Gifts?

This is a question I've been asked about by several family members and friends. If we want to give you an ordination gift, what would you like/need?

To be honest, I feel as though I've already been graced by an excess of generosity leading up to this day. People have donated to my tuition fundraisers, sent me notes of encouragement, and offered gifts for my ordination to the transitional diaconate. My cup, as it were, runneth over.

But I will offer a few suggestions for those who feel a strong need to send a gift.

• Stoles are often a gift for ordinations. You can find some beautiful ones here, here, or here.
• Gift certificates to Almy would be much appreciated. It's a store that sells a wide array of church-related items that I may need.
• A beautiful shop to check out is Creator Mundi. This would be another option if you wanted to find a unique gift that moves you.

But the best gift you could offer me is to put May 9th on your calendar, pick out something red to wear, and keep me and all those in the Diocese of Oregon in your prayers.

You don't become an ordained minister simply because you want to. It's a call affirmed by many people. Please pray for us.

See you on the 9th!