They Don't Know: February 4, 2024

 Year B, Epiphany 5                                             Isaiah 40:21-31                                                                                  

            Just last week I was listening to an NPR news quiz show and they mentioned that a recent study revealed that 28% of Americans don’t believe in God.  I was a bit shocked as that seemed high to me.  I realized that while I typically trust NPR, it was a quiz show, and I should look up the PEW study they were referencing.  Fortunately, I learned it was a misrepresentation. It’s not that 28% of Americans don’t believe in God, it’s that 28% don’t identify with a religion.  That includes atheists, agnostics or those who don’t believe anything in particular.  They call them the nones and we in church have been stressing about the rise of the nones for as long as I have been ordained.  However, the interesting thing about the nones is that most of them believe in God or a higher power, they just don’t associate that higher power with a specific faith, nor do they practice a faith.  That’s very different than not believing in God.

            The people who Isaiah was written for believed in God, although it’s not obvious from the first few lines of our reading which begins with “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?”  Keep in mind that this comes in chapter 40.   The prophet has already been speaking for 40 chapters.  When he asks: Have you not heard?---it’s a rhetorical question. The expectation is yes they have heard.  Yes, they do know.  Yes, it has been told to them from the beginning.  Because Isaiah and the prophets before have been telling the Hebrew people for years and years about God.  Since most of Isaiah’s audience has heard at this point, the better question would be: do they still believe and have faith?

            The Book of Isaiah is one of the longest books in the Bible and it covers several decades. Our reading for today comes after the Babylonian exile, which was about 50 years long.  Jerusalem had been destroyed and the people had been exiled to different places. Some were treated ok and assimilated into their new culture.  Others were essentially forced into labor camps. Those who were able to return to Jerusalem were either too young to remember what it was before, or old enough to know what it once was and wise enough to know what would take to rebuild. 

They returned to a devastated city.  Think of the horrifying pictures we have seen of Gaza or parts of the Ukraine.  Imagine this city, Philadelphia in rubble.  That was the homecoming these people were experiencing.   This is who Isaiah was talking to:  People who were tired.  People who were afraid.  People who were feeling hopeless.  It’s easier to have hope when you don’t exactly know what you are up against.  When they were exiled, they could think of their old home and envision a joyful return.  But when they returned to the rubble and the waste, all they could see was their own loss.

            So it’s not that Isaiah was speaking to people who had not heard of the one true God.  Isaiah was trying to remind the people of the character of God--a God who had the power to stretch the heavens out like a tent and make the rulers of the earth as nothing----but also a God who cares deeply for God’s people.  I wonder how compelling the argument of the all powerful God would have been for the people of Israel.   They were a people who had been defeated. The holy temple had been destroyed.  It seems to me that post defeat and post exile would not be the time for a prophet to focus on the power of God. Isaiah tried this at the beginning. I don’t think he could help himself.  However, in my experience, when I am feeling despair and hopelessness, I don’t want someone to lecture me about God’s infinite power.

Fortunately the tone shifts toward the end. It’s not just about the all powerful God who needs to remind others how incredibly powerful he is. It’s the all powerful God who empowers the weak.  Isaiah writes, “He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless…those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

            I am not much of a bird watcher.  I admire people who have the patience and dedication, but that’s never been my thing, but I do love to watch eagles fly.  Because they don’t fly as much as they glide. They harness the power of the wind.   Of course they flap their wings occasionally, but that’s not their primary method.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Isaiah chooses this bird, the eagle that soars on the wind to demonstrate God’s care.  Because the word that is translated to wind in the Hebrew scriptures can also be translated to God’s spirit or breath.  When God gives us the wings of eagles, it’s not the wings that make us powerful or that enable us to fly---it’s  God’s spirit and breath that lifts us, that gives us the ability to soar.

            Compare the eagle to a humming bird. They’re cute little guys, but they work hard and can beat those wings up to 80 times a second.  I think that is the way most of us operate.  God gives us God’s spirit and instead of allowing that spirit it to give us strength and energy, we just beat our wings against it and then we get angry with God when things aren’t as smooth as we would like them to be.

            The first line of our opening collect is, “Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sin, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in Jesus Christ….”  Jesus rarely emphasized the power of God.  For him, it was about worshipping God, but also lifting up the lowly, empowering the powerless, healing the sick and saving the lost.  The church got a little lost for awhile.  There have been times in our history when the church has been corrupt, when it has been much more concerned with kowtowing to the powerful then lifting up the lowly.

And that, I fear, is why we have so many nones in our nation.  It’s not because they don’t care.  It’s because they don’t know (just like what the prophets Isaiah was asking God’s people.) They don’t know the God who wants to lift us on the wings of eagles so that we can soar.  They don’t know the Jesus who heals the sick and dines with the marginalized and the oppressed.  They don’t know the Episcopal Church and its commitment to openness and love.  They don’t know. 

And we the people of the church have become far too shy about our faith.  We don’t want to offend anyone. We certainly don’t want to be associated with those “other Christians.”  And because of all of this, we have missed so many opportunities to empower others with the faith that we have come to know and trust. This is the failure of the Episcopal Church (which I have heard on more than one occasion referred to as Christianity’s best kept secret).  Guess what—we are not supposed to be a secret!!

This is not the time to be shy about our faith.  This is the time to be bold—not so we can grow our church and fill our pews.  No.  Because they don’t know the love of God and people are lonely, depressed, and hopeless.  We might not be able to give them wings, but we can tell them about the spirit that can help lift them up.  They don’t know, but we do and we can tell them. 

A Better Epilogue: January 21, 2024

 Year B, Epiphany 3                                        Jonah 3:1-5,10              

               We all know the story of Jonah and the whale.  It’s in every children’s Bible.  There are songs, movies, shows.  But they usually focus on the whale part, maybe a little before and after, but mostly the whale.  I mean, what’s cooler than a picture of the inside of a whale? Our reading from today comes after the whale…when Jonah finally arrived in Nineveh.

 You see, Jonah had never wanted to go to Nineveh in the first place.  When God called on Jonah the first time he said, “Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it; their wickedness has come up before me.” The beginning of that request doesn’t sound so bad.  God is asking him to visit a great city. 

Yet this was Nineveh, the heart of the Assyrian Empire, the empire that had destroyed Israel and was thus the enemy of God.  It was great because it was big and powerful, which is wonderful when that big and powerful entity is on your side, not so much when they are your mortal enemy. And God’s wasn’t just asking Jonah to do some reconnaissance.  He was asking---no telling Jonah to go and preach against the city telling them how wicked they were. 

            Jonah did what any sensible person would do, he ran the other way.  He ran as far as he could on dry land and then hopped on a boat.  God was not pleased and sent a great storm.  When the sailors on the boat realized that this storm was sent by God, they called upon Jonah who explained to them that he had fled the call of God.  Jonah decided that the only way to save the boat was for the crew to throw him into the sea and they complied. 

However, we know God is persistent---hence the absurdly big fish.  Once he was swallowed by the big fish (or whale depending on what version you are reading), Jonah had three days to think about the situation. He finally prayed to God (you see that is one of the things that had been missing thus far-prayer) and the fish vomited him onto dry land---right next to Nineveh. One can only imagine that this was a traumatizing experience, but things were about to get deicer, because now, he was behind enemy lines.  

            The first line in today’s reading is, “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time….”  This seems like a benign statement. It’s not.  God wasn’t accustomed to being disobeyed by one of his prophets.  Sometimes the prophet would resist, or take awhile to catch up…but to run in the opposite direction of God’s call…that was a new one. Jonah finally realized that he had no choice but to follow the call of God. 

Jonah went and did what God asked.  He walked through the entire city and told them, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" Then a funny thing happened, the people actually believed him.  This was an unusual response to a prophet.  Prophets were often ignored, usually by their own people.  The idea that this superpower would hear eight words from a man they had never seen before (and probably still smelled like fish guts) and pay attention is harder to believe then a grown man being swallowed by a fish and surviving.  The people of Nineveh not only listened, they took action.  They immediately proclaimed a fast and sat in ash, which was the ancient way of repenting.  Even the king removed his robe and all his royal jewels and sat in ash.  (They skipped that part in our reading.)

When God saw that change of heart, God forgave them and didn’t punish them. Do you think Jonah was happy about that?  Did he find any joy in knowing that he had saved a whole city of people with his words? Of course not.  He got mad.  He told God that he was being too merciful.  I mean, look at all that Jonah had to go through and he started on God’s good side.  Yet he was punished more than the people of Nineveh.  He was so mad, he sat down in the hot sun and wished he could die.

God is loving, so he gave him a bush to protect him from the sun.  Jonah was happy about the bush, so God sent a worm to kill the bush and Jonah was sad again.  It all seems rather cruel of God, but he had a point.  He always does.  He said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow…And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people… and also many animals?”

You know the worst part…for me at least?  That’s the last line of the Book of Jonah.  We have no idea how Jonah responded.  Did Jonah realize that God was right or did he stay mad and bitter?  We will never know.  There is no epilogue.  That often happens in the Bible.  We never hear the whole story. In the Gospel of Mark, we hear the calling of 4 of the apostles.  We know that they dropped their nets as soon as they were called and followed Jesus.  They behaved much better than Jonah.  But we also know that that they all had their moments of doubts.  They all did some stupid things. Peter would deny him. They would all abandon him at the cross.  But Jesus forgave them all, which is why I think Jonah did ok in the end as well. 

We won’t know their full stories.  But we know ours and we even have some control in our stories.  While many of might not admit it, we want life to be easy, fair and completely linear.  As Christians, we want to follow Jesus, as long as he is going in about the same direction that we are.  I mean, we will deviate a little, but let’s not go too far off the path Jesus. We each have a life plan and we can’t let God mess with that too much. 

When I have had to make difficult decisions, I prayed that God would give me peace so I knew I was making the right decision.  Yet peace has often evaded me and I have begun to I wonder if the way we know we are following God is not a sense of peace, but a sense of urgency. That is what Jonah had.  That is what the disciples had. And while urgency is not the same thing as anxiety, it’s also not the most comfortable feeling.  Sometimes it means doing something that is harder than we anticipated.

I’ve always identified with Jonah under that bush, being so angry that it didn’t work out the way he expected…even though it worked out exactly how God expected because Jonah finally…finally followed God’s directions.  The problem with Jonah was he thought he knew what God was going to do---what God should do.  The wicked would be punished and he would get to be the righteous servant of God.  But God was merciful and loving to the enemy of Israel and that didn’t fit Jonah’s expectations.

So often, we let our expectations lead us.  We think we know how something should go and we are pretty sure God is with us on this.  When that doesn’t happen, we can get angry and bitter like Jonah. Maybe that happens once and you get over it.  But maybe it happens over and over again and then you are sitting in the sun cursing a bush and the worm that killed it. 

Fortunately we all have our own epilogue.  God is the author, but I like to think that we have some sway in the editing process.  We get to decide whether to stay bitter and angry or progress to a place where a mere bush cannot dictate our happiness, a place where God’s mercy is not just a gift to others, but to us as well.  A place where God calls us not just to warn the enemy, but befriend the enemy.  God’s plan for us---God’s call for us---is rarely predictable or easy, but it’s a call worth following, wherever and to whomever it may lead us.

If you find that you have some bumps in your life, some things that don’t go as expected---instead of cursing those moments, consider those interruptions as God breaking through. Don’t wait for a major calamity to pray to God’s for help and direction.  God is with you through all of it.  We don’t get to write every detail of our story, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t our story. It doesn’t mean we aren’t going to have one fantastic epilogue.

The Word of God was Rare: January 14, 2024

 1 Samuel 3:1-20                                     Year B, Epiphany 2                                                                 

            I am sure we all remember 2020 as an incredibly difficult year.  The country shut down in March due to the COVID epidemic.  Everything was closed including our churches.  Two months later George Floyd was killed and that killing was recorded for all to see.  Most of us were still confined to our homes and it was harder to ignore this death.  I remember doing my best to avoid the video, but when I finally saw it, it was impossible to forget. Soon after, people in Richmond Virginia started protesting and vandalizing confederate monuments.  The church I served was two hours south of Richmond and it was in our news a great deal.  I went to speak to a trusted parishioner and she said, “You know our monument is the only one in Hampton. It’s just a matter of time.”   You see, we had a 16 foot tall confederate monument in our cemetery. It was a generic soldier and dedicated to all the confederate dead. I had spent 7 years talking to people here and there about it, but never talking with the church as a whole.

Before May of 2020 few in the church saw it as a problem because it was in a cemetery.   However, the church was also in the middle of the cemetery and that statue was 20 feet away from the church’s entrance.   I realized that if it was vandalized, it would make the news and I was going to have to defend that monument or acknowledge that I found it offensive but had never bothered talking about it with the people of the church.  So finally…7 years into my time as rector, I told the vestry that we needed to have this conversation.  And God bless them, they agreed.  I would love to tell you that if they had not supported my decision, I would have moved forward with confidence and courage, but I am not sure I would have.  Often our faith pushes us to have difficult conversations.  Often we resist.  What helped me in my last church was other people who were willing to engage in conversations and encouraged me during the process.

            Often when we talk about the story of Samuel and Eli, we talk about the call---the part where God calls and Samuel answers.   But this is also a story about a willingness to state hard truths and hear them as well. It’s about difficult conversations. We love to talk about Samuel hearing the voice of God and running to Eli because he thought it was Eli who was calling him—which makes sense. If you hear a voice calling you at night and there is someone close by, it would be natural to assume that the person next door is calling you, not God.  That said, Samuel lived in the temple and had lived there for almost his entire life. One would think that if anyone was prone to identify the voice of God, it would be someone living in the temple….sleeping right next to the ark of God.  

Yet Samuel was young…no more than 12.  He probably hadn’t heard any stories about people hearing God’s voice out loud. What is fascinating is that his spiritual mentor, a priest and a judge of Israel (someone who should have been especially in tune to the voice of God) wasn’t able to perceive what was happening until Samuel woke him up a third time.   It was only then when Eli realized that it was the Lord calling Samuel and told him exactly how to respond.  I love that it took them both that long because it’s so true to life.  God often has to pester us in order for us to listen.  If it was this hard for two people living in a temple to hear God, it’s no wonder why it’s difficult for the rest of us. 

However it’s really the 2^nd part of the story that interests me the most.  While it was certainly challenging for Samuel to recognize God’s voice, the hardest part for him was relaying the message God gave him.  Once God had Samuel’s attention, he started by saying, “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears it tingle.” In other words, I am about to do something shocking.  God continued by telling Samuel that he would punish the house of Eli.  God explained that he had already warned Eli that his sons were blaspheming and behaving in immoral ways, which meant that he didn’t want them in leadership positions.  Eli’s role as a leader in Israel was over.

            This put Samuel in an incredibly awkward position. He had to tell his mentor, the man who had raised him as a father, that God was going to punish him.  Fortunately Eli was a good and wise servant of God.  He must have had a hunch what God told Samuel.  Because as soon as morning came, Eli asked Samuel (actually, he demanded it) what God had told him.  Eli demanded that Samuel tell him.  While Samuel was afraid to tell Eli, he told him everything.  Can you imagine what a horrible conversation that must have been? “Eli, your sons are horrible people.  You knew that and did nothing except give them a little lecture.  Now God wants to punish you and your whole family.” Yet Eli responded with grace and faith.  He said, “It is the LORD; let him do what seems good to him.”  What an incredibly faithful and humble response.

            Our conversation about the confederate monument ended up taking about 6 months.  It was especially difficult given that we were in the middle of COVID.  Several people left the church as soon as we announced that we were starting a conversation. They didn’t want us to judge the past or those who had lived in the past.   But the vast majority of people stayed and in the end, it made the church stronger in that we proved that we could have hard conversations and come out the other side still loving one another.  In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Paul implores people to “speak the truth in love.”  That is what Samuel did for Eli and that is what we tried to do at my last church. Not everyone received it that way, but that was the intention.

 During the announcements, you will hear from Liz Kimball about a research project that began years ago under your former rector and our social justice and anti-racism committee that focused on Christ’s Church involvement with slavery. Some of you might wonder why we are talking about slavery a hundred and fifty years after the institution officially ended.  Isn’t it best to move forward? I believe that this is part of moving forward.  When Eli sat and listened to all that Samuel had to say about his family—the sins that they had committed and Eli’s own complicity with those sins---he responded with grace and kindness.  He listened to Samuel and acknowledged all that occurred.  In doing so, he not only started the process of repentance, he empowered Samuel in his role as prophet.  It wasn’t merely and ending for Eli, it was a new beginning for Samuel and the people of Israel.

            When we repent and acknowledge the sins of the past, we are not merely admitting failure, we are creating a space to begin again.  In seminary, I took a class in the history of the Episcopal Church.  The professor explained that the Episcopal Church was one of the few denominations that never split during the Civil War.  When they had their General Convention, they simply marked the southern states absent.  Because they never acknowledged the split, it was much easier to come back together after.  At the time, the professor presented this as a smart tactic and I agreed with him. Yet I have come to realize that this hurt the church more than it helped us. 

In many ways, I don’t think the Episcopal Church ever recovered from the divisions because we never talked about what divided us. Often we think that if we don’t discuss the conflict or the hard thing, we move past it and keep everyone happy.  But I don’t believe that actually keeps people happy nor is it what we are called to as Christians.  One of the reasons why Jesus was killed is because he did talk about the difficult things.  In one of Jesus’ more confounding comments, he said that he came not to bring peace, but division.  He didn’t bring division, he exposed division.  But he did so from a place of love and compassion.

            I have faith that Christ Church is a community where we can speak and hear the truth from a place of love and compassion.  I believe that because you have already been doing that, long before I arrived.  We are a church that embraces a revolutionary spirit.  We are a church that was forged in the midst of conflict—a conflict that led to a new nation. Challenging conversations offer us an opportunity to build something great and to do that together. If you are not sure about any of this, that’s ok. My only request is that you talk to God about it.  Try the prayer that Samuel used, “Speak now, your servant is listening.” Then tell me what the voice said, because just as it was thousands of years ago, the word of God is rare…but it’s a lot less rare when we take the time to listen.

The plaque that covered the confederate battle flag

 

The compromise