o watch this sermon on video, click here.

I was talking to myself the other day. (I like to talk to myself; I am one of my best listeners.) “Stephen, I think you need to talk to the parish a little,” I said, quietly, in my heart. “I think you need to talk to your folks about two big things that happened this week. These events affect them; they affect our life together here. Fill them in,” I finished, in my little self-talk. “Let them hear from you.” And so I will.

I begin with something difficult that happened to one of us, and I am choosing carefully, and cautiously, to call him by name. I want to respect his personal privacy, and most importantly I do not want to establish a double standard where we discuss some of us by name – usually those of us who lack a particular privilege – while being diplomatically circumspect about others. In this case, the privilege this person lacks is wealth privilege. But the events of recent days compel me to speak with responsible candor. And so will I do that, with exceeding, anxious care.

I would like to share not my own interpretation of today’s first reading, but an interpretation by an Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Chicago by the name of Yehiel Poupko. In 2015 I traveled with an interfaith group to Israel that was co-led by Rabbi Poupko. He is a friend of Christians, yet he is firmly and happily Jewish, and I often turn to him for insights about the Hebrew Scriptures, which we Christians have been opening for only twenty short centuries as part of our Holy Book.

As it happens, the story of the death of Moses appears in autumn on the Jewish lectionary calendar, too, and this year that festival, scheduled for October 7th, was marred badly by the terrorist attack in Israel. Since October 7th, of course, the war in Gaza and Israel has only worsened, and we hold in prayer all innocent life in peril, including citizens of Gaza (most of them children) and the Israeli hostages and their terrified families. As that region continues to suffer the ravages of war and injustice, I invite you to hear a Jewish reflection on the death of Moses, as we join countless people of all faiths who pray to God for peace, and for justice.

“No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

Carl Sagan was a popular 20th-century writer, astronomer, and exobiologist. He cultivated an infectious enthusiasm for popular science, and he encouraged people to ask big questions about the universe, and humanity’s place in the universe. Sagan was the one who persuaded NASA to turn their Voyager 1 space probe around to photograph Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, giving humanity the astonishing image of a “pale blue dot,” our tiny home, aloft and alone in the vast preserve of outer space. Years before that, Sagan led the development of the Golden Record, an artifact placed on board that same Voyager probe (as well as Voyager 2), containing information about us and our planet for potential discovery by extra-terrestrial species, who might one day intercept our wondrous inventions.

In Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he writes, “There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

It is all too easy for us to perceive the absence of God, and even to feel despair about that absence.

It is all too easy for us, looking at ourselves and the world around us through our post-modern, apocalyptic, existential lenses, to see all that has gone wrong, all that is terrible, all that seems to be pitching everyone over the cliff, dooming everyone to a meaningless death. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,” Jesus tells us today. Well, that part is easy enough: we readily perceive the presence and power of all who can fairly be called “emperor,” and we readily perceive the dreadful imperial damage done to humanity and the earth.

But how do we give to God the things that are God’s, when the very idea of “God” can elude our most basic belief? And even if we could manage to allow for the existence of God, it remains hard to perceive God’s power. It is hard for us to find ourselves not only safely tucked into a cleft in the rock, but placed there by God, so that we might glimpse not God’s face, but just the edge, or the back, or the faintest hint of God’s presence. 

One of my favorite saints is Monica, a north-African woman and the mother of Augustine. She’s one of those saints who fades a little into the mist, since she lived so long ago – she died before the fifth century, in 387. But her son wrote vividly about her, in a way uncommon at the time: in our own literary era we are surrounded by countless biographies and memoirs, but Augustine arguably invented the genre of autobiography himself, in his Confessions, and in that work he writes about his mother.

Augustine writes that when Monica was much younger, she was caught drinking more than her share of the community’s wine. (This explains why she is appreciated by many as the patron of alcoholics.) But she went on to lead a life of sobriety and powerful Christian piety, and she sustained a vigorous, collaborative relationship with her son. She was an assertive, determined mother who had found his early life of youthful misadventure gravely disappointing; but later on, as he matured, she passionately supported his vocation as a Christian theologian. 

When I read about Monica, I think I recognize the person behind the icon. She is driven, successfully overcoming her personal demons and building a virtuous life. She watches and follows her son closely, perhaps comically so. But she takes faith – both hers and her son’s – quite seriously. If she does a thing, she does it fully. She wept bitter tears when Augustine, early on, told her he was not Christian but Manichaean. Nevertheless, she persisted, following him to Rome and then Milan, enlisting the help of Bishop Ambrose. And finally, after seventeen years of resistance, Augustine submitted to his mother’s influence, and to Holy Baptism. His grief in the wake of her death helped inspire his great autobiographical and theological work, the Confessions. Augustine had a powerful mother.

I speak to you in the holy Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let me say that another way:

Hi everybody, I’m Stephen, and I’m an alcoholic.

Today I want to celebrate the existence of a powerful, and powerfully good, community. We live in a time of discord, disruption, and distrust; but this community thrives in the face of all that. We live in a time when people feel desperate, lost, and confused; but this community offers them a way forward. We live in a time when the world seems to be falling apart, but this community helps people get their lives together.

Sometimes, in this community, we hear stories of search and rescue. We hear about a person who would go out and literally lift people out of the gutter, put them in his truck, and drive them to a meeting of this community. And we hear about members of the community who invite troubled people to join us, or sign up to serve newcomers, telling them that the community will never, ever give up on them.

“War broke out in heaven.”

Well, I certainly am glad to hear that. It is time. There are many dragons, about and abroad, and we are at war with them.

For this war, we will need powers. Four powers, by my count.

First, we will need to be mighty in battle: perhaps we don’t need to be physically strong (though for some of us, perhaps we do: sometimes fighting evil requires physical stamina). Whatever our health and abilities, all of us will certainly need courage; strength of character; a willful determination to take up the conflict with our dread foe, to endure, and finally to overcome. In all of this, we call upon the Archangel Michael to empower us: we hail him as the strong warrior who slays the great beast, the one who defeats the accuser, the one who wins. 

Jesus offers another parable today, a story that unfolds, sometimes unravels, curls in different directions, upends what we first think it means, provokes and prods us to look at something or someone in a new way. And then look again, in yet another way. 

Today we consider a series of economic transactions: a landowner (or better translated, householder) takes direct action in hiring laborers to harvest his vineyard. Right away this is odd for the first hearers of the parable: it was usually a paid manager – middle management – who did this kind of hiring work. But the householder is not only taking over the hiring job, he’s finding time throughout his presumably busy day to return to the marketplace to hire more workers.

My father is a member of the Silent Generation, born on the high plains of southwest Minnesota in the mid-1930s. So as you might expect, he is an eminently sensible person. But at Christmas as I was growing up, my father allowed himself to be generous and enthusiastic. 

Because they had seven children, my parents proceeded carefully when it came time to purchase Christmas presents. I remember a formula, something like this: one large gift for each child, two more medium-sized gifts, and a few small, stocking-sized treats. In the seventies my parents got into making banners for church, and my father was inspired to create seven banners for Christmas morning, each bearing the name of a child. And so, when it was time for us to thunder down the stairs, we would descend upon seven piles of gifts, each one marked with an identifying banner.

My father’s good holiday spirit flourished within this orderly system. The gifts he and my mother chose were generous, often quite thoughtful. It was all abundant and delightful.

Eight years ago, on a day in June, a shooter slaughtered nine people who gathered for Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, also called Mother Emanuel Church. The violence was racially motivated. It was an act of atrocious evil. The person who did it was clearly damaged, seemingly beyond repair, and though our faith teaches us that every human person can be reached, it is hard to imagine how the humanity of this killer could be recovered and rehabilitated.

During the shooter’s bond hearing, several family members of the victims told the shooter that they forgave him. Now, why would they do this?! What could it even mean, that they forgave him? This was their faith in action, but their choice to forgive may seem almost obscene. The killer was not repentant. The crime was a hate crime, committed by a white supremacist. But they forgave him. In doing so, they echoed Jesus himself on the cross in Luke’s Gospel, where he prays to God, asking God to forgive the executioners. Why?! Why pray this?

Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Yes.

Where two or three are gathered to break bread and give thanks, celebrate a new birth, or observe a rite of passage, Christ is among them. Where two or three are gathered to “tend the sick, soothe the suffering, bless the dying,” Christ is among them.

All true. All good. And often we say the “two or three” phrase when there are just a few of us at a service, or just two or three of us tackling a big project. It’s a way to encourage ourselves that Christ is here, whether we’re a big happy group or a small clutch of die-hards. We’re not wrong about that.

But what Jesus really means is this:

Jesus said, “Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven.”

To bind and to release: these are judgments God empowers us all to make. To bind and to release: these are privileges we all share in God’s sight. To bind and to release: it may sound harsh, even alarming, but we are called to think critically, and to act in ways that say yes to some ideas and no to others; yes to some practices and no to others; yes to some people and no to others. And heaven will follow our lead.

It’s okay if you aren’t feeling it.

It’s okay if you aren’t over it.

It’s okay if there’s no blood going to it, no power, no light, no delight.

It’s okay. Mary can carry all of your sadness, all of your frustration, all of your anguish. Mary can carry all of your grief into the heart of God.

Mary: the name has a few meanings, but one meaning of Mary is “bitterness,” referring to the hard life of the Israelite slave Miriam (Miriam is the Hebrew origin of Mary). And the “bitterness” in Mary’s name perhaps also refers to the burial spice myrrh, a word with which Mary shares a syllable. Miriam was the sister of Moses, and though we hear her triumphant song of liberation at the shore of the Red Sea, she had been a slave—and she remained a woman in a man’s world—so she knew all too well the bitter experiences of life.

To watch this sermon on video, click here and go to minute 24:42.

One day, when I was a young kid in southwest Minnesota, I was down in the basement of our house, and I was playing with fire. I held a piece of paper against the exposed coils of an old-style space heater, the kind where the red coils were easily accessed through a thin wire casing. The edge of the paper glowed with a new fire, and the fire licked around the paper until I successfully blew it out. The whole experience was vivid with sensory details: brightness, heat, curling ash, the acrid yet pleasant fragrance of the flame. 

Then I heard a rustling and turned to my right. There stood my mother, watching me silently. I felt a flood of fear.

She quietly but firmly told me to go upstairs, and I remember sitting in the living room while my parents calmly asked me what I had done, and why. They were reasonable, sensible, appropriate. In fact it’s possible my father wasn’t even there: memory is tricky; if he was there, he was like Aaron, the brother of Moses – immensely important, but quiet. My parents gave me some basic reminders about the dangers of playing with fire.

All was well, but I felt shaken, because in that terrible moment when she confronted me, my mother’s face was not that of a friend, or at least an easy, consoling friend. Her face seemed to shine with fire.

Sometimes people comment on spiritual topics such as the meaning of suffering, the problem of evil, and so on, and I am troubled by what they say. When someone says, “Everything happens for a reason,” I think to myself, “No, everything does not happen ‘for a reason.’ Horrible things happen, but they are not God’s will, or part of God’s great plan. We live in a phenomenal, serendipitous universe in which Almighty God enters from below as the Humble One. God is the uncontrolling Creator who calls to us from the future, inviting us, but not forcing us, to make good moral choices in this unpredictable, heartbreaking, wondrous ethical arena.”

That’s my full rebuttal to the claim that “Everything happens for a reason.” I stand by it, but I concede it’s pretty long-winded. I rarely say such things out loud because most people don’t want me to mansplain systematic theology, and I want to have friends. If I had to fit all of that on a mug or a t-shirt, I might just say, “Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, but God makes good use of everything.”

That’s still a lot to read on a mug or a t-shirt. Ideally we would forget about catchy theological one-liners and talk about these things in healthy conversation.

To watch a video recording of this sermon, click here.

In the opening scenes of the 1994 Coen Brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy, we find ourselves in a spacious boardroom on the top floor of an Art-Deco building in New York. It is 1958, but the furnishings and fashion all seem more at home in the Roaring Twenties. Men in suits are gathered around a gleaming conference table, hearing a financial analyst report on the condition of their company, Hudsucker Industries. His report is rosy. Talking above a stirring soundtrack, the financial analyst says:

“... We’re up 18 percent over last year’s third-quarter gross, and that, needless to say, is a new record. Our competition continues to flag and we continue to take up the slack. Market shares in most divisions are increasing and we have opened seven new regional offices. Our international division is also showing vigorous signs of upward movement for the last six months, and we're looking at some exciting things in R&D. Sub-franchising – don't talk to me about sub-franchising; we're making so much money in sub-franchising it isn't even funny. Our nominees and assigns continue to multiply and expand, extending our influence nationally and abroad. Our owned-and-operateds are performing far beyond our expectations both here and abroad … the Federal Tax Act of 1958 is giving us a swell writeoff … and our last debenture issue was this year’s fastest seller … So, third quarter and year-to-date, we have set a new record in sales, a new record in gross, a new record in pre-tax earnings, a new record in after-tax profits, and our stock has split twice in the past year. In short, we're loaded.”

I sometimes recall this scene when the officers of this parish submit their reports to the vestry. Now, I concede that our treasurer has never (so far!) reported that “we’re loaded.” But sometimes our reports are rosy, in their own way: in recent months, attendance has consistently ticked upward; our finances are in sound (if modest) shape; our capital campaign is going well; we’re restoring and repairing our buildings and grounds; there is a lot to encourage us these days. “St. Paul’s is on the move again!” someone said in a recent email. 

Someone stopped me this morning after one of the masses to tell me how surprised she was to hear in today’s first reading that Rebekah wore a nose ring. “I have never heard this story before!” she said, mostly joking but, I think, a little startled to hear that a matriarch of Rebekah’s stature would … wear a nose ring.

When I heard the story, I confess I noticed the nose ring, too. It’s an unsettling image for me as well, but not because I don’t approve of nose rings. They’re fine, of course! I do not wear one, for the ordinary reasons that I do not want to, and I do not think I could really get away with doing it. Earrings are about as far as I think I can go. (And I further understood this morning that our fellow member of St. Paul’s was being funny, and I’m sure she knows that her own joke was on her.)

In any case, I found the nose ring unsettling, too, because a thought flashed through my mind: Does the nose ring imply that Rebekah is now her husband’s property, to be led around like livestock? Maybe not, but in this story, the nose ring definitely is part of a betrothal rite, an item among the exchange of goods and gifts between two families when a marriage is formalized. It was probably a harmless symbol of Rebekah’s new family’s wealth. 

To watch a video recording of this sermon, click here.

“What have we here?
said the wolf in the children’s story
stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.
Is this small monster one of us?”

This is a line from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. I’ll share the whole poem a bit later, and as you’ve likely already seen, it’s printed in your bulletin.

“What have we here?
said the wolf in the children’s story
stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.
Is this small monster one of us?”

The wolf in the children’s story: perhaps the wolf is that exiled part of our inner selves, that ravenous, heedless, unnerving, dangerous, violent part of our inner selves, sharply critical, occasionally insightful, but rarely merciful. The wolf perceives others as it perceives itself: a “small monster.” The wolf inside me: it wants to kill or destroy; often hungry, it will eat whatever it hunts, it cares not what. Or who. “When I want to do what is good, [the wolf] lies close at hand.”

.הנני

“Hineni.”

That’s the Hebrew word Abraham uses, more than once, in the disturbing story of the Binding of Isaac. God calls Abraham, and Abraham says, “Hineni.” Isaac calls to his father on their three-day walk to Mount Moriah, and Abraham says, “Hineni.”

When the professor took roll in my seminary Hebrew class, she would call each of our names and expect us to reply, “Hineni.”

“Hineni” means “Here I am.” It is spoken again and again in Holy Scripture. Prophets and priests, servants and sovereigns, and in the Christian Testament Mary of Nazareth, say this whenever God speaks to them, calls out to them, summons them.

I wonder, though, if anyone says this word with more vigor and terrible courage than Abraham, who says it only to hear God give him a wretched command, and then says it again when his son calls out to him and asks him a poignant question, an awful question, a heart-wrenching question: “Father … the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”

To watch a video recording of this sermon, click here.

What is most important to you?

What rises above everything else – truly, everything else – as the most important thing or task, practice or creative pursuit, person or being, in your life?

They say addiction is about putting a substance on top as the most important thing. The love of money, the love of novelty, the love of attention: Maybe you put a vice or a guilty pleasure on top as the most important thing. I know I have done that.

What is most important to you?