The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost: Out of the Depths

Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD.

LORD, hear my voice.

As a leader of the synagogue, Jairus has prayed this psalm many times. But I’m sure it’s the last thing on his mind as he falls at the feet of Jesus. His thoughts are consumed by the danger to his daughter’s life. Repeatedly, he begs Jesus to come and heal her. My little girl is at the point of death, he says, Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live. The cry of his heart is the same as in the psalm. Jairus is calling to God, out of the depths.

If we’ve lived any length of time, we’ve experienced deep places. Jesus himself knew them in the garden and on the cross, where he suffered and prayed. Deep places can involve a sense of profound separation from God. And yet, they can also open us up to spiritual realities that rarely impinge on our consciousness. Some of my closest experiences with God have been in times of loneliness, fear, guilt, and grief. As Christians, we have a faith that embraces times of sorrow, as well as laughter and light.

The first time the words of the De Profundis touched me was in high school, shortly after a friend’s suicide. But I learned to cry out to God long before I learned the Psalm, when my best friend died when I was five. I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten over either death. Grief isn’t like that. But I have found mercy and healing in God.

Tracey and I prayed from the depths as an ultrasound in her obstetrician’s office shattered our world with news of a fatal birth defect. Years later, with another child, we prayed this way in the intensive care unit over Danny, when we were unsure whether he would live or die. I suppose that’s why many of us find the story of Jairus so moving. We are especially vulnerable when faced with the illness or death of a child.

I know from experience the power of prayer. It is always answered, though not always in ways that make sense to us. We can be bold enough in our prayers to ask for what we want. Jairus asks that Jesus lay hands on his little girl, so that she might live.

Sometimes, though, healing takes unexpected forms—forms other than a cure. Especially in times of death, healing may mean help to pick up the pieces of our lives and put them back together. We do so without ever really being able to fill the hole that’s left behind. With time and grace, grief no longer dominates our every thought and our lives find a new center, but the loss never fully goes away.

Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD.

LORD, hear my voice

The Psalmist is writing in a time of guilt. In the second verse, he notes “If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss, O Lord, who could stand?” His particular prayer from depths is motivated by the consciousness of sin. In God, he finds “forgiveness” and “mercy.” But, like most good poetry and much of the Bible, the Psalm speaks from a particular experience in a way that embraces more than the human author could consciously intend.

Within the Psalm itself, we see a drive toward more general validity. The Psalmist passes from describing his own soul waiting for God to an exhortation to the people of Israel: O Israel, wait for the Lord, for with the LORD there is mercy. With him, there is plenteous redemption, and he shall redeem Israel from all their sins. The Psalm, with its powerful image of the depths, speaks to far more than the experience of sin and forgiveness though. It provides us with assurance, whenever we find ourselves waiting for God.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for him. In his word is my hope. The Word in question is a word of promise. Even in deep places, we can face our future with hope, because God is faithful to God’s promises. Again and again, Scripture testifies to God’s faithfulness. God will not break God’s word, even when we break faith with God. In Eucharistic Prayer D, we pray the following:

When our disobedience took us far from you, you did not abandon us to the power of death. In your mercy you came to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you. Again and again you called us into covenant with you, and through the prophets you taught us to hope for salvation.

Our hope is grounded in the Word of God. And this word takes on a visible, tangible form in Jesus, who is at once God’s embodied offer of mercy and the first fruits of redeemed humanity. In him, we have a merciful Savior.

So much of our lives are lived in hope. We wait for promises we have not yet seen fulfilled. Even Jesus does not take away our need to wait. In his humanity, Jesus shows us how to wait for every good gift from the hand of God. As human beings, we are created to find our fulfillment in God—in that gracious and self-giving mystery who ever exceeds our grasp. We live in sure and certain hope of resurrection.

We trust in the goodness of God. Yet, this side of glory, we seldom see God face to face. Our faith raises as many questions as it answers. And we are plunged again and again into deep places, where we must cry out to God for help.

What little we can see of God, we glimpse most clearly in the face of Jesus. Jesus is God’s face turned towards us in mercy and love. This is one and the same love—the same steadfast love—at the heart of God’s relationship with Israel.

We see this love in church, when Jesus summons us beyond our inward gaze—beyond our greed, hatred, and pride—and into relationships of communion with one another. Perhaps we see it too seldom, even in church. We are always in danger of speaking pious words about brotherhood and sisterhood, without living out the reality. There has never been an era in our history where this was not so. But we do find in church, all the same, an enduring commitment to the well being of our neighbor. We are strengthened for this love by the divine Gift, in whom all other gifts are given.

This is what Jairus discovered, when he prayed to God from the depths. The Lord heard his cry and answered him. Jesus came to his house, took his daughter by the hand, and said to her “Little girl, I say to you arise.”

In the presence of Jesus and the Kingdom he brings, the logic of this world, whose end is death, is turned upside down. Death is no longer the end but the beginning—the gateway to eternal life.

O Israel, wait for the Lord.

For with him there is mercy and plenteous redemption.

The Third Sunday of Easter: Touch Me and See

The sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter is available here at the Episcopal Cafe, an online ministry of the Diocese of Washington.

Easter Sunday: Lay Your Burdens Down

I don’t care what anyone tells you. I don’t care what the hymn says. We do not come to the garden alone.

We come racing with Peter and John, close friends of Jesus, to see the empty tomb. We come with Mary Magdalene, in the middle of the night, trying in vain to care for his body.

We also come with Christians in their billions. Today, they are gathered in Zimbabwe and the West Bank, in Guatemala and Haiti, in a Chinese village, in small town Iowa, in New York City, in the Swiss Alps, and in many other places throughout the world. We are also gathered right here in Athens County. Christians gather in every conceivable type of building: from monasteries to storefront churches, from the little country church to the majestic cathedral, from ancient stone buildings to modern structures of glass and steel. We also gather outside, beyond any four walls built by human hands, to worship the risen Lord at sunrise. We do so in every conceivable way in every conceivable language. In countless tongues, we sing hymns of joy and tell the Easter story.

So, no, my friends, we do not come to the garden alone. We come with many brothers and sisters. We come as a worldwide community, the Body of Christ, the Church.

We come for many different reasons, carrying many different burdens. Some of us are troubled by the burden of sin. Others by the prospect of impending death. Still others come imprisoned by the past and the shackles of memory. We come heavy laden with anger, resentment, and grief. We are fearful and anxious about our future. We worry about finding work or losing a job, perhaps even losing our home. Maybe this has happened to us already. Perhaps we are facing a difficult family situation or life-threatening illness. Perhaps we are bone tired, worn down by hard work and many cares. But, no matter what the reason or burden, no matter how heavy or light, and even if we are among those lucky untroubled few, we come today looking for a word of hope and resurrection joy. We are looking, in a word, for JESUS.

And so, we come. Early in the morning on the first day of the week, we come. We come to the garden tomb with Mary Magdalene. Spices in hand, we come, ready to bury our friend and Lord. We don’t expect much from Jesus. We certainly don’t expect to see him alive. But we have come here in the wee hours of the morning to do what we can.

Mary has spent the night weeping. She must be exhausted. Hours ago, she was already at the end of her rope. Now, she is numb with grief, nearly past the point of caring, in desperate need of sleep. But, when she arrives, there is no body. Insult is added to injury. Even this comfort, however small, is denied her. They have taken his body from her.

And so, she begins to weep. And first the angels, then the mysterious stranger, ask her why. In both cases, Mary’s answer is the same: “They have taken my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” Supposing the stranger to be the gardener, she asks him “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”

But then, the stranger, who is Jesus, calls her by name. “Mary,” he says. And she turns to face him. “Teacher!” she replies. Jesus calls her by name, and she responds. Her turning is more than a simple bodily movement. It is a complete change of life. It is conversion. She is leaving sin and death behind her—to serve the living God. Jesus has appeared to her—ALIVE—so her grief gives way to joy. Having been called and sent, she runs to tell the others: “I have seen the Lord.”

No, we do not come to the garden alone. Our faith is built on the foundation of the apostles. It is built on the testimony of Mary Magdalene, who saw and touched the Lord. It stands upon the testimony of a great cloud of witnesses, throughout the world and throughout the ages, who have encountered the Living One and been changed by him forever. Jesus calls person after person into his Body, the Church. We come to him through his community.

Even those of us who have our doubts—who doesn’t?—can glimpse in broken fragments the meaning of Easter. Every sign and symbol we use, every story we tell, points beyond itself to the Great Mystery. We see it mirrored in the flowers and smiling faces. We hear its echoes in our thunderous hymns of joy. We even taste it and smell it in the bread and wine made holy. We feel it in our bones, in the HOPE this Day gives us—in God’s frightening yet exhilarating offer of freedom. For, on this Day, Christ is risen, breaking the power of death. On this Day, he sets us free from all the powers that enslave us. He calls us and sends us in his Name.

The Christian vision of life is very realistic. “The three sad days have done their worst,” and they cannot be undone. We do not deny sin, suffering, and death. In Christ’s presence, our burdens remain real, but they lose their power over us. Easter does not undo the evil that crushes Jesus; it unveils the saving power of his Cross.

On this Day, God imparts a sure and certain hope the world can’t give. God gives us a knowledge born of love. The whole Day testifies to things unseen—to the victory of God—to the grace and mercy that are now claiming our world, from the bottom on up.

For God chooses the weak and despised of the world, and makes of us a kingdom. God chooses sinners, and makes us beloved children. God chooses the fallen, and makes us stand.

The same stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.

This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

My brothers and sisters, come to Jesus the Living One, who is that very stone, and lay your burdens down. For we have been born anew to a living hope by his resurrection from the dead.

General Convention: Integrity's Witness

Christmas Eve: The Great Light

The People who walked in darkness have seen a Great Light. God has multiplied their joy. For God has broken the yoke of their burden and the rod of their oppressor.

These words from the prophet Isaiah are ones we need to hear. They resound with hope and joy. They are sure words of promise, spoken in memory of God’s mighty deeds and looking forward to God’s vision of a new and restored humanity.

They are echoed in the Prologue of John’s Gospel, where we read the following: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Tonight, beloved, at the end of a long season of preparation and yearning, we celebrate the coming of the Great Light. May he break asunder all that burdens and oppresses us. And may he give us hope to march joyfully into God’s promised future.

The light of Christ comes into the world as it is. When first he came, his country was occupied by Roman legions, and the emperor had imposed a tax on his people. Thus, Mary and Joseph journey by night to be counted for the tax. Once again this year, the Christ child enters a world at war, a world filled with grim and grisly news of every kind. As I sat in my hospital bed this past week watching CNN, I got more than my fill of that kind of news. But, into this world, which we have helped make what it is, God’s Great Light intrudes with the Good News of peace.

Last summer I told you a story, and I promised the congregation I would tell it again at Christmas. It concerns people overcoming the deepest ethnic and religious divisions in our world through a simple act of love. I took it from Chris Hedges, the former New York Times war correspondent, who tells it in his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.

The story concerns the Sorak family, Serbian Christians living in a predominately Muslim area in war torn Bosnia. They had been indifferent to the propaganda of Bosnian Serb leaders like Radovan Karadzic, who argued for “ethnic cleansing.” For the family’s failure to embrace the project of a “greater Serbia,” they were considered traitors by many of their fellow Serbs, who besieged their city during the war. Nonetheless, in the course of the conflict, they lost both their sons, one who died in a car crash and another who was taken away in the middle of the night by Muslim police and “never came back.” The Soraks were caught in the middle, considered enemies by Muslims and also by their fellow Serbs.

Five months after their older son disappeared, in the middle of the siege, his wife gave birth to a baby girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and elderly, were dying in droves. The family was able to give the baby nothing but tea to drink for five days, and she began to fade.

“She was dying,” said the grandmother, “It was breaking our hearts.”

But on the fifth day, just before dawn, a man arrived at the door with half a liter of milk for the child. It was their neighbor, a Muslim farmer, who was keeping his cow in a field to the east of the city, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers. He came back the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims and let the Serb children die. “He never said a word,” the grandmother continued. “He refused our money. He came for four hundred forty-two days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left for Serbia.” Think about that: four hundred forty-two days!

According to Hedges, the couple said they could never forgive those who took their older son from them. “But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Serbs talking about Muslims or even recite their own sufferings, without telling about the farmer and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone. In his act lay an ocean of hope.”

We will perhaps never know what combination of religious belief and simple human decency motivated the Muslim farmer. But I believe he had seen the Great Light. And the inability of his Christian neighbors, the Soraks, to talk about their own sufferings or hear others talk about Muslims without repeating the story of the farmer and his cow, are evidence of a similar conversion in them. Wherever the Great Light of Christ appears, enemies are reconciled, risks are taken for our neighbor, and the power of love puts hatred to flight.

My friends, I believe the simplicity of the Christmas Gospel has the power to change our lives. Each year, we rush with the shepherds to see what God has done. Each year, we hear the angel choirs singing God’s new song. And what do we see? A child, poor and in a manger. He is the Prince of Peace. He is the Son of God, given for us, in frail and mortal flesh.

There is something about the baby Jesus, reaching out to us with all the neediness and hunger of a newborn, that opens our hearts, as nothing else can, to the great and searching light of the Gospel. Christmas is the feast of God’s vulnerability. Tonight, we celebrate God at our mercy in the tiny Christ child. Tonight, we celebrate the marvelous gift of God, given in midnight silence in the bleakest of midwinters.

And we dare not—no, not for a moment—act as if the gift has not been given. In Christ, every child and every human being has become our neighbor, with a direct claim on our love. Tonight, beloved, heaven and earth are joined, and the mercy of God—the wholesome Bread of Angels—is pressed into our hands.

The People who walked in darkness have seen a Great Light. And God has multiplied our joy. For God has broken the yoke of our burden, and the rod of our oppressor.

Thanksgiving Day: Turning Back and Giving Thanks

Why does only one leper return and give thanks to God?

Maybe because he’s a Samaritan and therefore an outsider. God’s mercy comes to him as a surprise. By rights, Jesus shouldn’t have anything to do with him at all.

We are at our most thankful, perhaps, when we are shocked by kindness we don’t expect or deserve. And we are most receptive to the Gospel, when we find ourselves on the outside looking in.

Many of us go through life filled with doubt. We manage to convince ourselves—or allow others to tell us—that we are somehow unworthy of love and acceptance. And there’s a sense in which we’re right. There’s plenty about us that is quite unpleasant—though not always the bits we think.

In moments of self-doubt, we may come to believe we’re not good enough to deserve an honest living, let alone love. If you don’t believe me, watch your colleagues jockey for position in a meeting or at a party. Or look into a mother’s eyes when she can’t feed her kids. We come to believe the lies others tell about us—and to act out the scripts they write for us—rather than trusting the one Word that matters: the Word God spoke, when God created us.

Add to these moments our real crimes against our neighbor—our lack of compassion, our injustice, our false witness, our reckless disregard and calculated neglect for his or her well being—and we see our need for love all the more.

The love we need is never ours by right. Rather, it comes as a gift from another. That’s true enough for the ordinary kinds of love we experience in our friendships and intimate relationships at their best. How much more so for the Love who makes us—and who seeks us out whenever we wander, never counting the cost, until he brings us home.

The other nine lepers are outsiders too. In Israelite society, their particular illness renders them unclean and untouchable. But, when Jesus does reach out to touch and heal them, they forget to give thanks. They don’t treat their cleansing as an occasion for gratitude. The miracles of Jesus often involve the removal of stigma and the restoration of community. By the wideness of his mercy, Jesus brings outsiders into the fold. He creates a community that is open to us all.

Our lack of gratitude cannot nullify the Gift. God still gives it. Though it can be abused or refused, the Gift can’t be ungiven. Even the nine—and, let’s be honest, which of us has never resembled them?—enjoy its benefits. They show their gratitude by living. And for them, at least for now, that’s enough.

The nine are like the millions of our fellow Americans who celebrate today’s holiday with little more than turkey, football, and a family gathering. True, more of us than usual may remember to say a word of thanks at the table. Half-remembered religious customs may be trotted out. A bit more thought may be given to the hungry than at other times of year. And it may all be sincere. But, for most of us, the basic meaning of the day has become thoroughly secular.

I do not presume to judge. Although today can be a day of excess—a day that points us to some of the worst things about ourselves as a people—even its most worldly customs can create community and cultivate gratitude. After all, the meals Jesus ate with all sorts of people were not especially pious affairs, were they?

But, for those of us who believe, today means something more. Thanksgiving calls us to turn back and remember the Gift. And it invites us to bring to mind, if only for a moment, the Giver. Today is a throwback to an earlier time of Sabbath keeping—of regular rest in the mercy of the Seventh Day. It’s also a harvest feast, when we celebrate the abundance of God’s good earth and the human labor that feeds a hungry world.

Today, we give thanks to God for creating us with hearts to love, minds to think, and hands to serve. We give thanks to God for gathering us into a community of brothers and sisters—the first fruits of God’s new world. And we give thanks to God, last and most of all, for giving us a Gift far better than we could ever expect or deserve.

That Gift is Jesus and his grace. May we overflow with gratitude.

The Last Sunday After Pentecost: Christ the King

In a conversation about today’s lessons, one of my fellow priests observed that he used to know someone who was very involved in a soup kitchen up in Akron. Every year on Christ the King, he would wear a t-shirt that read: “Feed the hungry, or go to hell—Matthew 25.”

Like many of us, I agree with the passion behind this statement, if not the theology. Feeding the hungry is a Gospel imperative. Christ will judge us according to how we have treated “the least of these,” his brothers and sisters. When we feed the hungry, we are feeding Christ himself. When we welcome the stranger, we are welcoming Christ himself. Every cup of water offered quenches his thirst. And when we visit prisoners or take care of the sick, we are, in fact, visiting and taking care of him.

Yes, there is stark judgment in this scene. The Son of Man curses the goats at his left hand, whom he sends away into “eternal fire.” Whether or not we believe in hell, we have to reckon with this judgment. For Christ will hold us accountable for how we have responded to him, whenever we’ve found him in need.

I believe God forgives our many lapses of love. In judging us, God looks to Jesus and his work on our behalf. How else could we stand before the judgment seat? As Christian people, we know that, already, in Christ, God has led us “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” But Jesus did not live the life he lived among us, nor did he die for our sins, so that we could stay the same. Jesus came to change our lives. And, according to his own words, he will judge us by what we have done in the body.

Today, I’d like to share a story I’ve shared with some of you before. I can’t read Matthew 25 without thinking about it. The story concerns a pivotal moment in my own conversion. As many of you know, I came to Christ as a young adult and was baptized right before my twenty-third birthday, on the Feast of the Holy Cross. This conversion happened in college. At first, it was intellectual. It was in my sophomore year of college that I first encountered serious thinking by Christians. This began with the assignments for a medieval philosophy course, which in turn led to a close reading of Augustine’s Confessions and to coursework in Reformation history, the Old Testament, and Christian theology. Although I was a philosophy major, I found that many of my teachers had little interest in the questions that kept me up at night: questions about life and death, and the meaning of it all.

But something deeper began to stir in me, when I began to read the Bible. I began to attend church, at first with my roommate, and then more and more often, without him. I became a fixture at the daily service of Morning Prayer at the University’s Memorial Church. Through the Scriptures and through that Christian community, the Spirit began to work in me, changing me from within, so that I desired to give my life to Jesus. The intellectual conversion became a moral one—one that is ongoing and imperfect.

The key moment in the whole process came one morning. It didn’t happen in church but in the city streets. I was walking along Mt. Auburn Street, when I saw a homeless man. It was the late 1980’s and throughout that decade, the homeless population exploded, as mental health centers shut their doors and veterans and others were cast out into the cold. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of them not more than a few blocks from where I lived.

But this man was different, or perhaps I saw him with new eyes. There he stood in a local laundromat, stripped half-naked, washing the only clothes he had. It occurred to me that this poor man was precisely the kind of person with whom Jesus spent most of his time. It also struck me that, according to the clear teaching of the Gospel, this man was Christ himself.

Brothers and sisters, if we want to find Jesus, we must find him in the poor. We must walk with them on the road they walk. We must share their struggles. We must fight at their side and on their behalf. We must do what we can to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit those who are sick or in prison. We must do what we can to create a more just society, in which “all can provide for themselves and their families with dignity.”

One of the things that I love about Good Shepherd. One of the reasons I am still in love with this parish and its people, is our commitment to God’s poor. I see this in our free Wednesday lunch, in our support for the Athens Food Pantry, and in the work of the Good Earth Hunger Mission. As a community, we are feeding Christ. I see this in our Kairos prison ministry and the card playing group at the Nelsonville prison. As a community, we are visiting Christ in prison. I see this in the worship services that we lead at the mental health center and the Lindley Inn assisted living facility. As a community, we are visiting Christ when he is sick, isolated, and lonely.

And we are doing so not only here in Athens County, but around the world through our support of Episcopal Relief and Development and through the work of the Ergoods in training rural health workers in Honduras. Recently, they have sought, through Episcopal Chickens, to provide a sustainable income stream to support this ongoing work. You will see more about that in the December newsletter, and our second Sunday brunch on December 14 will be a fundraiser for this new stage in the ministry. They are also seeking to take another group down to Honduras in the spring. Mission becomes real for us, when we roll up our sleeves and work side by side to advance the Kingdom of God. Mission is valuable, not only because it helps others, but because it changes us. It deepens our relationship with God. When we step outside of ourselves and go into places where we must rely on our faith, we understand what it means to follow in a whole new way.

As a community, we are also welcoming the stranger. We are welcoming Christ and finding him a place to stay when he has no home. Good Works, which runs our local homeless shelter, is reporting that they have turned more people away this year than any other year in their history. They are insisting, quite rightly, that homelessness is not a Good Works problem but a community problem.

As many of you know, our vestry has endorsed a set of goals that include finding legal ways for the homeless to be housed in the City of Athens, in a location with access to essential services. For too long, our only temporary shelter has been grandfathered in, treated as a kind of rooming house, and there is no provision for homeless shelters in the city plan or in the zoning code. We have not sought to dictate to the City how to solve this problem. As people of faith, we are insisting that it must be solved. This work is now entering a new phase. Soon, Bob Gall, Lynn Miller, and I hope to be meeting with the mayor and other city officials to discuss a letter signed by representatives of a dozen or more houses of worship.

One of the most exciting things about this is the broad base of ecumenical support—Roman Catholics, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and mainline Christians, working together to serve Christ in the homeless poor. This advocacy has an interfaith dimension as well. But, for those of us who are Christian, it is our hope to help Christ find a home in our city and a way out of poverty. Our letter to the Mayor and the President of City Council explicitly cites Matthew 25 as one of the reasons why we came together.

My brothers and sisters, I have spoken to you today about curse and judgment. Allow me to close with blessing. According to the Gospel, the king will say to the sheep on his right hand, “Come you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Perhaps the t-shirt should have read: “Feed the poor and find a blessing.” Or “Feed the poor and inherit the kingdom.” Or “Feed the poor and find true life.”

In the Name of Christ the King. Amen.