Dear Bishop Sumner,

Grace and peace!

I am writing to request the renewal of my license to officiate in the Diocese of Dallas for the coming year. 

Of course it is reasonable that the diocese request a summary of ministry as a part of the renewal process, but of course I am also sheepishly mindful that for me to make too much of my (whole) two and a half months assisting Holy Trinity runs the risk of self-deception and/or wishful thinking. Ha. But the people have been wonderfully welcoming, and it has been a gift to begin building relationships together. Father Keith regularly reminds me that for these first six months, I retain the ability to ask interesting questions of the status quo here, before my total assimilation, and I am glad for the regular invitation to share these questions and observations.

That’s just to say my first work has been listening and prayer, and learning to listen to and join in the prayers of the community of faith. Already we have had the delightfully human opportunity to discover that most of our invisible assumptions of each other don’t hold up to reality, but I have more commonly experienced a deep gratitude, both of a general and deeply local kind. 

Take Linda, for example. Although I do not believe I knew her prior to coming to Holy Trinity, Linda, who organizes the knitting group I frequent on Tuesday mornings, used to attend St. John’s, Dallas, where my family has a long history and my grandfather has been a mainstay for something like sixty-five years now. Just a couple of weeks ago I learned that, beyond that surface connection, back in the day Linda had been the lead designer for the kneeling cushions that adorn the side chapel at St. John’s. When my brothers and I were children, tasked with the thankless work of waiting for Dad to wrap things up elsewhere, we enjoyed the chapel, where we successfully named each cushion after the professional sports team most evoked by the unique combination of color and symbol. 

Far more intimately than most sermons I heard there (which were mostly wonderful), these symbols of faith have been imprinted in my memory for most of my life. I can close my eyes and see the stitches. And now I am given the gift to tell Linda that part of our shared story and name my thanks to God for so knitting together the lives and works of God’s friends. (That’s a small example, but dear to me, and Holy Trinity is full of thousands like it, both because our shared history as well as the many ways God has used Holy Trinity to build up and bless the greater church far beyond HT’s own walls for generations.) It’s like finally meeting the people who have been working on your class’s shared group project for years, and so whose lives are a part of your own, despite your not knowing each other. Which of course for members of the Body of Christ is exactly the case.

At this point, I want to interject that this fullness of communion is very much what I see the diocese encouraging in many and powerful ways, living into the desire to be present as church at once locally, nationally, and internationally. It’s a desire I share and for which I am grateful.

Back at Holy Trinity, I’ve taken my share in the teaching and preaching of the congregation, as well as pastoral care and hospital visits. I manage a good deal of our social media presence and have taken the lead on newcomer ministries (a new work in progress) and certain other aspects of formation for adults, children, and youth. I have been told by some vestry folks that my job is to bring some professional relief to Father Keith, but my experience of Father Keith’s work ethic makes me reluctant to accept that measure for evaluating my effectiveness. Free up some time for Keith, and he will simply find himself some new work for the spread of the Gospel. Sue me. 

In each of these things, my basic approach is to need as much help as I can and not know as much as I can afford not to know. Fortunately, I come by these qualities more or less naturally. 

My wife says these last remarks bother her and are terribly misleading, that my tendency toward self-depreciation drives her nuts. What I mean is something like what Pope John Paul II arrived at when he first became the priest in charge of a parish. Overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all and the task of convening meaningful meetings, he resolved to ask two questions of every gathering he convened: “Who can we ask for help?” and “What light do the scriptures shed on this challenge?” If the mission we share in Christ is reconciliation, needing help keeps us on task, that’s all.

Most recently, I enlisted the aid of a youth at our community-wide trunk or treat; together, we carved a pumpkin that would have roundly defeated the other entrees in its category, had there been any. I say, a win is a win, and at the urging of a staffer I enclose a photograph of myself and Parker with said pumpkin. 

I realize you and I don’t know each other well, so I feel compelled to note that I don’t write any of the above glibly. The examples that have come to mind here are probably my way of naming what my life in the church and these dozen years of ordained ministry have shown me, namely that most of what it means to be the church happens in the spaces between the plans and programs, which is just to say Bonhoeffer was right. “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.” 

I confess I have dreams for this community - like developing a team to keep bees on a portion of the land, and so to make visible a Christian witness with respect to care of the earth - but wonderfully it’s a dream that’s not mine uniquely, but one I am learning we share in community. Happily, it is a dream shared by people determined by the waters of baptism and so committed to trusting God’s love for us to grow in us the love God would have us share with each other. In such a community, maybe there is room for forgiveness, mercy, and bees.

Thank you for affording me a place in the shared ministry of this diocese at Holy Trinity by the Lake. Please know you are in my prayers, even as Rebekah, the kids, and I are grateful for yours. We have a lot of settling still to do and friendships to build, but we are glad, expectant, and grateful that God has called us to sing praises with the People of God in this place. 

Peace,

The Rev. Jonathan Melton

5 Good Links: Climate Change, Rest, Gratitude, and Boogie Woogie Grace

1. Nurya Love Parish on the Way of Love podcast with Presiding Bishop Michael Curry
My friend Nurya Parish, Episcopal priest and director of Plainsong Farm, talks about sabbath and the land on this week's Way of Love podcast. Nurya is a gift and inspiration to the church, and to me! 

2. Wendell Berry's This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems 
While I was listening to the podcast with Nurya, this book came to mind, for those who want to explore the connection between sabbath rest and the land still more deeply.

3. Talking to Kids about Climate Change
Bi-partisan thoughts for a conversation that most parents say they want to be having more than they actually are. With helpful, concrete steps.

4. Scientists Show How Gratitude Literally Alters The Human 

Heart and Molecular Structure Of The Brain

5. Amazing Grace (boogie woogie version)

Theology on Tap REWIND: Bishop Curry & the Eucharist

Outreach, Reaching Out, and When Nouns Find Themselves Looking for Verbs

I love outreach, but when did we 'noun' it? Why isn't the thing 'reaching out'? Why isn't giving beyond the natural boundaries of a people or a place a verb that by its verb-ness assumes the action of its happening and so organically, automatically raises questions of when and how?

Once reaching out becomes outreach, it becomes a noun that lacks a verb. Are we doing outreach? Studying it? Evaluating? This is why nouns birth committees, while verbs are still moving. It's why the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop has sought to reconnect us to the Jesus Movement.

Now, I love the work of outreach. The outreach of the youth groups at my parish is a monthly source of mutual blessing and life. The work of our outreach committee is among the most important work of the parish. My observation here is simply that outreach comes alive as it reaches out, which raises the question of why it would ever be imagined otherwise. And if doesn't need to be imagined otherwise, what language keeps us closest to the heart of things?

I believe this is an exercise in more than semantics. Reaching out communicates a vulnerability that outreach sometimes finds hard to come by. Reaching out gives and asks for help, both. Reaching out is hard to do without relationship. Reaching out implies a reciprocity that outreach relies on other nouns to complete. Reaching out is "a language understanded of the people," where outreach communicates a world of specialization.

But maybe this is much ado about not as much. What do you hope outreach or reaching out (whatever we call them) accomplish in the life of God's people? What verbs in the life of faith struggle to keep their verb-ness and momentum, and what's behind these shifts? What verbs in the life of faith give life to your soul, and where do you find space and support to live them?

Google image search 'outreach.'

Google image search 'reaching out.'

Dad Jokes & Xenophophia (Or 'The Story that Giving Helps Us Remember')

Per usual, this sermon was preached from lessons I did not choose. Here they are. If it's a half-decent sermon, it will make only modest sense without them.

What are you up to today? I’d ask him. Five foot ten and a quarter, Dad would answer. Every. Single. Time. I asked him. He was lying about the quarter inch. But let me ask you, all dad jokes aside, what are you up to today?

Most of the time, we know what we're up to. We know where to be, or where we want to be. We know where to go, or where we want to go. Societal norms direct us. Self-interest, too. If I want this, I’ll go there, if I want that, I’ll go here. Concerns about safety, rational concerns - and irrational ones, also - direct us. Expectations of benefit. Accrual of social capital. The desire for good reputations. When someone remarked to my friend one time the old cliche, “It’s a small world,” my friend answered, “Actually, it’s a rather large world, filled with strange things and wonder. But it’s easy,” he conceded, “to confine oneself to just a familiar cow path or two within the wonder and come to believe that it’s small.” My friend’s popularity at social gatherings and dinner parties is unclear.

But he’s right. 

Everywhere, the invisible calculus. Everywhere, a thousand considerations go into taking this step and not that one. Saying “yes” to one friendship and “no” to another. And as much as we’d like to think we’re up to the task of independently and accurately assessing each step on its own, we develop invisible patterns until without even knowing it we’re walking in only the thinnest slice of the pasture and the possibilities provided us. By the way, that’s what - among other things - therapists are really good for; helping us spot the invisible patterns. Of course, if your therapist shares your blind spots with you, good luck. You may both stay on the same cow path together, and not even know it.

This brief and disputable account of one part of our shared human nature is helpful for spotting the mischief of Jesus in the gospel today. Jesus is traveling through the region between Galilee and Samaria. He’s traveling along the border. The border, which is the edge of a cow path decided by peoples. And the invisible patterns that constitute borders are not the same everywhere, but here - between Jews and Samaritans, in the region between Galilee and Samaria - the invisible pattern is the familiar mutual disdain of people each side is certain they are better than. Think Texas/OU weekend at the fair. Or any group of people your family of origin taught you to count as less than, especially if it wasn’t clear to you when they spoke that they were joking.

The highlight of the story today is of course the healings, but also Jesus’s own astonishment that only one of the ten people Jesus heals of leprosy comes back with a thank you card. Guess what, the one who came back? He came from the wrong people. From the people despised by Jesus’s people. But hey, says Jesus, at least he came back. At least he said thanks. Where are the others? The silence that follows as Jesus’s question hangs in the air is a judgment of ingratitude for the people who thought of themselves as being on the side of the good, even on the side of God. As better than the one who came back. Where are the others? he asks. 

Will Willimon has observed that gratitude is not an emotion that comes easily to people, generally speaking. Life moves fast and there are temples to get to, religious or otherwise. The crisis resolves and it’s back to the rat race. Business as usual. No time to lose. But a friend of mine one time gave me sage advice I cherish. He said you’re never running too late to go to the bathroom. Because what good are you, really, if you show up on time but full of - stuff, or so urgently occupied that you are unable to be present to the people around you? It’s probably the same with gratitude. We’re never too busy or running too late to lift up our hearts, to give voice to our thanks, but sometimes we forget or tell ourselves otherwise. What was the healing for, we wonder, if not to help us get back on the hamster wheel of running ourselves into the ground? 

So we move on. Maybe we find ourselves incentivized to get on with things because the gift we were given and the dependence it reveals wound our pride. Maybe we view God’s help, when it finds us, through the lens of entitlement, as a possession we were owed, even a kind of personal achievement, because we’re, you know, really pretty swell. Self-righteousness kills gratitude, because it claims as its own what is really God’s gift. What we’re talking about is learning to speak truthfully about the world, about our lives.

When you catch a sniff of self-righteousness in yourself, if you’re quick, you can grab a hold of the frayed end of a single, sacred thread. It’s the thread that connects love of God and love of neighbor. They’re on the same thread because God is always giving for the benefit of others, for people like you and me. And for people unlike you and me. “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).”

Love of God and neighbor are on the same thread because it’s hard to be thankful to God for the good gifts of God without becoming generous by extension. Theologian Miroslav Volf writes that the true God gives so we can become joyful givers.” But it’s hard to be thankful to God when I’m pretty sure what I have is because I am better or more deserving than you, whether you’re a Sooner or Samaritan. It’s hard to be thankful and take what was meant to be a continuing blessing for me as well as all those around and beyond me and instead dam the waters around myself, where the waters grow stagnant by my imagined superiority, deserving, and/or self-importance. The same walls that keep me at a lofty and self-satisfied distance from the other side also keep me from seeing the truth about my life. These walls keep me from knowing my life as a gracious gift of the living and generous God. 

So let’s cut to the chase. If you pull that thread tight, the one connecting love of God and love of neighbor, if you pull it tight, all the way, you end up with something truly terrifying. Something like what Dorothy Day, that great saint and founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, realized. She put her realization this way, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” Ugh. Dorothy’s  popularity at social gatherings and dinner parties is similarly unclear.

Why does he do it? Why does Jesus insist on traveling in the land between regions? Along borders. Off familiar cow paths? Can’t we all just stay away and mind our own? But watch this, says Jesus. Follow me. And then, as they do, as we do, Willie James Jennings describes it, "The disciple of Jesus Christ (becomes) a surprise to the world, especially to the cultural and economic worlds where people live in...segregated spaces and sequestered living places…” We become a surprise to the world exactly as we follow the One who goes through the region between Galilee and Samaria.

The thread that connects love of God and love of neighbor is the same thread that connects generosity and gratitude. Nothing so much as generosity - giving and forgiving - reminds us that everything we enjoy is a gift for which we rightly give thanks to God. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.” Nothing so much as generosity - giving and forgiving - reminds us that the good gifts of God are meant for sharing even across borders, for the glory of God and the building up of God’s people. Generosity and gratitude are what humans do when we are, with God’s help, most fully alive. 

So what do you do when someone or something does something beautiful and humbling and you realize you are not yet as alive as you could be? What do you do when someone you have learned to despise - or simply not care about - becomes a sacred window through which you glimpse the abundance of life and, in order to grow closer to God, you find yourself with no choice but to draw close to the infidel? What happens when no one comes back, except for this foreigner?

In the reading from Jeremiah, God gives God’s people the unimaginable instruction to live out their faith in a foreign land. Among the oppressor. As foreigners. They will be the foreigner they have feared and despised. It will feel like the end. But God is evidently okay with this situation in the interim, an interim which will last for most of their lives. Even through they will find themselves involuntarily removed from their cow paths and comfort zones in ways that will test their faith to its limits, even there, God will repeat the blessing and instruction of Eden - “be fruitful and multiply” - and even in a strange land, as strangers, God will be with them.

So, it’s stewardship season, and you'll hear a lot more about that from people other than me in days ahead, but did you know that the practice of tithing, of giving a percentage of one’s income away, finds its roots in Deuteronomy 26, where the people are entering the promised land for the first time in their history not as foreigners?

It’s an instruction that begins "When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess,” in other words, “when you are no longer foreigners, either as your wandering ancestors or as slaves in Egypt, to keep you living and located in the story of God’s deliverance, at the heart of God’s promise and mission in the world, be generous, set aside a portion for the poor and those just traveling through.” It’s the same deliverance at the heart of the Easter Vigil, the exodus Christ completes by his death and resurrection, and so the word is true for us, also: in order to keep you living and located in the story of God’s deliverance, at the heart of God’s promise and mission in the world, to tend the flame of faith with your life, be generous. Give to the ones most unlike you, because they are like you. Remember that you were once them, that you are them, that though you have a place now, remember that you are still pilgrims on a journey, believers in a promise, remember that your true home is in God.

You don’t have to. Do you want to?

It is important for me to give because generosity does not come naturally to me and it is easy to lose sight of my place in the story of God. It is easy to trade the single, sacred thread of Christ’s love for acts of self-deception. But practicing generosity has given me a heart that is grateful for it. In other words, I have come to see that even what I regard as my generosity is really one of God’s gifts. I might have had a much smaller life. I might have declined opportunities to grow in trust of God. I might have continued fearing loss in the many forms it takes, declining border travels and fearing those whom God has made my friends. But, thanks be to God, I am learning to speak truthfully about the world and about my life. Thank God I didn’t wait to feel generous before I tried it. Mostly, thank God I married a woman more generous than me. 

And so I thank God for the gift of generosity. First God’s own, made known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Second, the generosity God gives the church to share, as the living God who makes God’s home in us works in us and through us for the blessing of others, for the restoration of all things in God. And finally, I pray that God will not stop emptying my hands of the things I would otherwise hold onto.

What else do you do, what else do you pray for, when you realize you are both wonderfully loved and yet not as alive as you could be? As alive as you will be.

Amen.

Theology on Tap: Grief, God, & Stephen Colbert

Click here! Our excerpt starts at minute 13:00.

American Idols and How to Resist Them (Learning to Believe that the Treasure is Christ)

Before this sermon was preached, the church read these lessons and prayed this prayer:

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

As of this week, I’ve been a priest in the church for twelve years, the last seven of which I spent on the campus of a public university, at a missionary outpost of the Episcopal Church. Working among heathens, I mean, university students. Bright, young, minds. It was an incredible honor to walk with those students, to get close and see what God is up to with them, what God is showing them. To be a person of faith on campus, as a student, in a living and visible way in 2019, well, it’s something of a miracle, and one the church does well to come alongside, support, and to be interested in.

Of course, that doesn’t mean my only conversations on campus were with people of faith. Far from it. Across seven years I talked to a lot of folks who had either stopped or never started believing. “Fr. Jonathan, I don’t know how to tell you this, but…” 

My mechanic one time told me, talking about his own college-aged son who’d stopped going to church, he said, “I think a little bit of science can hurt a person’s faith, but a lot of science can make it stronger. It’s stopping at a little that presents some challenges.” Same with philosophy, I said. Universities, it turns out, have plenty of a little of both.

So I would find myself from time to time at coffee with a friend self-identifying as agnostic or atheistic and I would remind them, “You know, you atheists and we Christians have an awful lot in common. In fact, atheists have made some tremendous contributions to the Christian faith. No really, you are always reminding us how dangerous a thing it is to worship false gods. You and I both believe it’s a good thing to guard your loyalties from unworthy idols. True, we disagree on the gods we don’t believe in, but just think! In a world that will worship sports teams and Botox amidst all kinds of other things, you and I agree that our worship is worth reserving only for that which is holy and true. Thank you for that witness and reminder.”

The earliest Christians were accused of being atheists. In a marketplace full of gods, pluralist Rome, melting pot of deities, it wasn’t such a big deal to believe in a god, it was a big deal to believe in just one god, to say, as the Jews and Christians did, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God; the Lord is one.” This put Christians a half-step at odds with their culture, and especially with the Roman emperors, who liked to join the game of build-a-god and claim divine status for themselves. They’d print on the coins that got traded across the empire, next to their faces, “Caesar so and so, son of god.”

For Jews and Christians, it was bad enough that they lived in occupied territories ruled by blasphemous politicians claiming to be gods, but to be forced to carry the coins, the little pagan graven images in their pockets, in order to navigate the market and put food on the table added insult to injury. After all, the first Christians took to heart the commandment to “have no other gods before me.”

All of this is background for appreciating the truly shrewd, subversive instruction Paul gives Timothy in the epistle today. “I urge you to pray,” Paul says. I know, it sounds unremarkable, boring. I urge you to pray is just the kind of thing you’d expect a preacher to say. Don’t forget kids, brush your teeth and say your prayers! But in the immortal words of Rafiki, “Look harder…”

“First of all,” Paul writes, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone (so far so good), for kings and all who are in high positions (why not?), so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity (read, pray no one starts a war while we’re asleep). This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For (news to some, the truth is) there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus…”

Did you catch all that there? Pray for the kings. God pities their ignorance and desires that even they would come to know the truth about the world. Forget the coins and absurd inscriptions. Pray for the kings who think they are gods. Maybe nobody told them, but there’s only one God. So I urge you to pray. Pray for the politicians, bless their hearts, who think the cosmos revolves around them. Who think salvation comes from congress. Who believe the end is in their hands. Poor things. Lord, give them the good sense to let us live in peace and quiet. And, Lord, while you’re at it, help us to remember that, no matter how many robocalls from unknown area codes they throw at us in election years, no matter how earnestly they attempt to persuade us otherwise, to make us accomplices to their delusions of grandeur, help us remember that you are God and they are not.

I was sitting across a table at dinner from William Cavanaugh, a political theologian, hero of mine, who - to my shock and astonishment - had just suggested to our dinner party that we should consider unplugging from the news of the day in order to keep our sanity. Turn off your phones! He said. “But Dr. Cavanaugh,” I objected, “There are people who would call that a tremendous exercise in privilege, say it’s irresponsible. Sure, they’ll tell me, straight middle class white guy, you can plug your ears and pretend it’s not happening. No skin off your back. What would you say to that person?” Dr. Cavanaugh nodded. “It’s a fair point. I suppose it depends on how you understand unplugging.” I asked him, “Well, how do you do it?” He said, “I unplug from the media madness by going to church, where my family and I were recently assigned a refugee family, Muslims from Syria, to partner with. Once a week, we play games and take them to Target, so they can get what they need. Only our sons speak a common language, so it’s awkward and clumsy, but…”

“Wait, you unplug by spending time with your church-sponsored Syrian, Muslim refugee family? That’s crazy. Literally no means that when they say they’re unplugging...That’s - a kingdom not of this world.” “Yeah,” he shrugged. “It’s what our church invited us to do.”

Pray for the politicians, bless their hearts. They don’t know what to do with a creativity as defiant as church; one that invites us to be part of an alternative people who agree that our worship is worth reserving only for what is holy and true.

Speaking of things holy and true. I wonder if remembering that only God is God and worthy of our worship isn’t also a helpful key for unlocking the mess of a parable Jesus gives us today. I say mess of a parable because by the end Jesus is piling on explanations like spaghetti noodles on a dinner plate. Of course the final takeaway is “You cannot serve both God and wealth.” And because we Christians appreciate the danger of worshiping false gods, I find Jesus’s highlighting the story as a matter of God v. Wealth (idolatry) helpful. It saved me from my initial assumption stated nowhere in the story is that one of the lead parts, the part of the rich man, is played by God. Unlikely. 

In case you aren’t persuaded by Jesus’s one-liner at the end, consider that the story that follows this story is about a poor man, Lazarus, in heaven and a rich man whose name Jesus fails to mention being licked by flames in hell. So the likelihood is high that God is elsewhere in our story.

Maybe it’s obvious, but it’s still worth appreciating. The confession God is not the rich man is not always easy for us to see or believe all the way. We can tell we are being tempted to believe that the rich man is God when we, from time to time, take wealth to be a sign of God’s favor in our own lives and in the lives of others; when we regard people according to their dollar value or the position we think we stand to gain from them. The temptation is ingrained in us to the point of reflex, simple fact. But then God shows up elsewhere in the story, shouting “Not it!” as we try to pin God down, and just then we discover some of the other gods Christians don’t believe in.

If God is not the rich man, the manager is performing his life for an insidious something other than God, caught up in a system making false promises, extracting moral injuries, in exchange for a status, a position he’s betraying others to keep a hold of. Then the plot unfolds, he loses his job but, much more than that, he loses whatever it was he thought he was getting in exchange. In what will later be commended as our hero’s shrewdness, the manager cuts some deals, gives up what he’s already lost, and resigns himself to life lived with the poor, to life as the poor. Among friends. 

At the point Storyteller Jesus is content to close the book and call that the story’s happy ending. The manager having found eternal homes with the also-rans of society. No wonder they tried to shut him up and run him off. No wonder most folks said “No thanks” and opted for the other, shinier, more compelling, gods instead.

But not Christians. Taking our cue from the atheists, we believe it matters what you worship. We believe in one God, the creeds have taught us to say. And we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Monotheism, believing in just one God, doesn’t come naturally to human beings. That’s why, when a person desires to be baptized, the church says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve got some other gods to put down. Here, let us help you.” 

Cue the prayer book’s baptismal liturgy: Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God? I renounce them. Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? I renounce them. Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God? I renounce them.

And then, after turning to Jesus and professing the faith, the earliest baptizands were stripped of their clothes, lest a false god touch the water, lest the symbols get confused, lest it not be clear that it’s just the one God claiming this life for God. The rest gets stripped away.

Knowing that the world is full of false gods to distract us, the desert fathers of the early church fled to the desert and prayed that God would meet them there. Occasionally, they reported visions. The risen Christ appearing with radiant skin, in beautiful, expensive robes. Seasonal inventory at Nieman Marcus. They’d flee these visions, convinced that they were impostor appearances of the devil, unconvinced that extravagant robes were the uniform of the same crucified and risen Christ who promises God’s kingdom to the poor. Perhaps not coincidentally, the prophets of scripture, like Jeremiah today, are continually looking to Israel’s care for the poor as the lead indicator of Israel’s faithfulness; that is, their belief in just the one God.

Believing in just the one God, being a Christian, doesn’t come naturally. We need God’s help and we need the church, that is, we need practice and practices, we need one another and others, the gift of holy friends. Friends whose friendships make us holier for having been made friends. Friends who will help us live more truthfully than we would have lived without them. Holy friends who will take our hands and pry our fingers loose of the idols when we fall for them. Friends who can be trusted to help open our hearts, help us put down our lies, and make us God’s generous people in the world. 

The Good News is that God has given us help, God’s own self, and plenty of holy friends who believe our worship is worth reserving only for that which is holy and true. Thank God that in Christ Jesus God has given us everything we need to be God’s generous, Spirited people in the world. What a treasure. Christ IS our treasure. What a gift.

 Amen.

No Shirt, No Sins, No Service (On the Contagious Mercy of God)

Here are the readings for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C.

At every Eucharist, like this one, after the announcements, which - I don’t know about you - sometimes feel to me like a Super Bowl halftime, after the smoke clears off the field and the concert is over, the halftime is broken with a single sentence that kicks the game back into motion. It’s the sentence that announces the Offertory. And so the ancients of the faith have cleverly named it the Offertory Sentence. The Offertory Sentence marks the transition from the service of the Word, hearing the scriptures, to the service of the Table, breaking bread together and sharing the cup. “Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” That’s the one I use the most. The prayer book steals it from Ephesians. There are other options, too. One oldie but goodie comes from Psalm 96: “Ascribe to the Lord the honor due his Name; bring offerings and come into his courts.”

Each offertory sentence takes a slightly different approach to signaling the transition, but each one, in its own way, is like a coach’s pep talk in the tunnel, meant to wake us up to the reality of the moment we are fast approaching, when we will soon lift up our hearts, make our sacrifice of praise, and prepare to find ourselves at the table of the Lord.

“I appeal to you, sisters and brothers, by the mercies of God, to present yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” That one is stolen from Romans.

There are others, like the sentence from Romans, that pick up that theme, that ask us to examine ourselves and our souls as we approach the sacred mystery; other sentences, though, encourage us to prepare less through examination of ourselves and our acceptableness, and more by consideration of our God and the truth about all things: “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty. For everything in heaven and on earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom, and you are exalted as head over all.” That’s 1 Chronicles.

Consider your soul. Consider your God. And, truthfully, it’s a mix of both, right? Sitting there in your pew as you contemplate breaking the bonds of inertia to make your way to this table. Consider your soul in the light of this God. The sentences are meant as invitations but, at least as I heard them as a kid, there was always also a warning, if only implied: “Hey you! Listen up. This here is important. You come up these steps, you best have your act put together.”

After all, it was hard for even my twelve year old self to hear any invitation to the table words without also remembering Paul when he writes in 1 Corinthians: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.”

Uh oh.

It’s a dangerous thing to come to this table not knowing better. Un-put-together. I thought. And it is.

But then, in today’s gospel, we read that “all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” And I know they meant it as an insult, but the first time I heard it, I thought two things: The first was, “Well shoot, when was the last time someone could have accused me of eating with people as exciting as that? I should get out more often,” and, two, “Now there’s an Offertory Sentence worthy of this God.”

Backstory. I know I’m supposed to come to this place all good and right and put together. I get that that’s my job, yours too, and I get it - easier said than done - but here’s my real problem. I don’t know about you, but the God who meets us at this table is always messing with and messing up my ideas for what is good and right and proper. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t nearly as polite and nice as I was raised to be. Name-calling the religious leaders. Healing on the days he is told to sit still. Putting the last at the front of the line. Taking off the chains the rest of us had so neatly arranged on the backs of the prisoners. This one time he sees a woman put her last penny in the temple box and he says, “Will you look at that? A religious practice meant to help the community of faith look after widows. Now they’ve gone and used that law to scare this widow into poverty in the name of her God, while they put in some pennies and their brown-nose audience applauds. Clowns. Peter, James, John, let’s get out of here and go find some sinners God can actually do something with.”

This fellow welcomes sinners, and eats with them, they complain. Stays up too late, lamps lit, sweeping the house like a fool looking for coins that got dropped and lost their way. Heads into the world, leaves the friendly confines of home, to chase a sheep so lost it doesn’t even know it is. 

One of the religious leaders pulls me aside and explains so I can understand, “This fellow’s sense of the good, of what is right, what is respectable, does not conform to usual, institutional, and conventional social standards. This fellow sees things differently. This fellow breaks rules, it’s clear to us, religious leaders, that he isn’t very good. And this fellow has the nerve to say that we have got goodness all wrong. This fellow says we’re doing goodness wrong exactly because we’re sure we’ve got it right, because we’ve got it down to abstracted acts made comfortable and predictable, because we’re measuring goodness by the ability of a person to look the part, to show no weakness, to demonstrate no need of God. You understand the problem.”

We sinners know better. Apart from God, even the goodness of a Christian doesn’t amount to much. It’s not just that baptized Christians can’t be good without God, though that’s true, it’s that we’ve given up on pretending to know what good is apart from God’s helping us to see. The world is all so topsy-turvy, upside-down. No wonder it feels like crazy when God comes to set things right. Just when you think you know who to hang out with to get yourself a reputation for righteousness, BAM! New Creation. Christ calls and surprises. The poor find the kingdom and the last get made first. The king makes a throne between thieves, on a cross. How many times have you found yourself thinking, “Well, shoot, you know what, I was wrong. How could I have known that God would show up even there?” 

So about my proposal. A new Offertory Sentence. Liturgical halftime. Imagine, if you will. Any birthdays? Anniversaries. Fine. Before we proceed, uh, just so you know, this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them. No shirt, no sins, no service. Cue the offertory. 

Kierkegaard said that being aware of your sins is the doorway to Christianity because only sinners can begin to see the new possibilities of God, of seeing that more in Christ is possible than the lives we’d imagined before God showed us, the flotsam we’d settled for when we settled for lives we could achieve without God’s meddling and help. This place is for sinners, the ones who know that holiness is not a solo gig, a perpetual performance, pious proof of perfection. Holiness is for the vulnerable and broken. Holiness is for being called together into an adventure God knows we’re not up to, apart from God. Holiness is for life lived with the One who, by his wounds, makes us whole. This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them. 

One of you told me about a preacher at a nearby church. He got up and announced to the congregation gathered that Sunday that he had it on good authority that a good fifty percent of the folks there that day were sinners. He stared and let the silence sit thick over them as they sneaked side eyes at each other. And I thought, well shoot, only fifty? They’re under-performing!

A few weeks ago, another of you stopped by my office to introduce yourself. Brief reprieve from some administrative minutiae. Asked me how I was enjoying the church so far. “It’s wonderful,” I exclaimed. “The people! Everybody has been so unbelievably welcoming, warm, and kind.” “Well, give it time. It’ll change. There’s a reason, after all, we go to church here.” And I thought, I’ll be darned, this church gets church. 

“The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance,” Paul tells Timothy today, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

So. Does that mean Paul was wrong about the danger of the table? That there’s no way to mess it up? Not quite. The danger lies in what Paul calls “not discerning the body.” Not seeing the others. Or, just as bad, seeing the others without seeing how we belong to each other. Judging some in the body to be more or less worthy, until the we of the body becomes us and them. They. A spiritual director one time put it this way, “Comparisons are demonic.” The danger is in presuming to know where and in whom God shows up. The danger is in forgetting that the same forgiveness I come to drink here from the cup is here for you, too, and is every bit as effective. If God says yes to you and yes to me, we are left in this strange space called church, left with the good work, sometimes hard work, of living lives that say yes to each other. 

And wouldn’t you know - there’s an offertory sentence for that! “If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Stolen from Matthew who stole it from Jesus.

It can be easy to think of forgiveness as the wave of the wand that resets the score, something that temporarily gives you a clean slate again, gets you off the hook, so that you can get back to the work of being blameless, trying to outperform the others, of not needing God or God’s help, but Paul writes to Timothy that the mercy God showed to him wasn’t about restoring Paul’s self-image; it was about God’s imagine; it was about making God visible. It was about putting God’s patience on display to encourage the others, that they could trust mercy, too. If God can love someone like Paul, why not me? In other words, God’s strength isn’t just made known in our weakness, in a real sense it depends on it. In other words, the mercy you receive is not your own. Even God’s mercy to you is a gift for the others, waiting to be made known and multiplied in love. 

God’s kindness toward us is the seed of our compassion toward our neighbor, sister, brother, stranger. They will know we are Christians by our love, the old song goes. Not by the earthly love that looks for a reason to justify love’s withdrawal - anyone can do that, that love’s a dime a dozen - but the love that holds on to and remembers that while we sinners Christ died for us. Even then, Christ got up, sought out, sat down at supper with us. This is the love that tells the world about God. 

The love God has made known to us, long before we got things right, God has put that love to work, turning our lives into moons that reflect the light of the sun, making our lives for a witness. God has put that love to work, for wholeness, for sharing, for seeking out, for making right, for making known, for opening others, for continually converting our own hearts, for the redemption of all things.

“So, that’s the reason,” writes Will Willimon in his memoir. “We are put here, located in love, bred for the joy of knowing we, even in our sin and lostness, are owned. Our telos, our baptismally bestowed purpose, is to allow ourselves to be loved, to be lost and found, to say yes (with our lives) to the Yes that God has said to us.” 

Amen.

Offertory Sentence:

Listen up! This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them. Come, let us adore him.