Watch a video of this sermon here.

I want to be with family this year. You likely understand this feeling. My father died less than a month ago, and while his death was a holy one — he was full of years, and he died with great dignity and serenity, despite a grave illness — I am grieved by his death; and though the great St. Francis rightly teaches us to greet death as our graceful sibling, and though our faith rightly teaches us that death has lost its sting, it is still … well …

I want to be with family this year.

And so I had a quick reply when my sister Sarah texted me and my younger sister Elizabeth the other day. She wrote, “Anyone interested in an afternoon or evening at my house, in my front closet, going through Daddy and Mother’s correspondence box?” I answered instantly, with two words: “for sure,” except of course I’m still relevant and hip, so I spelled them “f-o s-h-o.” Fo sho, I’ll be there in that front closet, with family, looking through old letters.

Rejoice! We have been set a daunting task. Praise God! Our job is difficult. Alleluia! We face a strong challenge in our life of faith, one that will demand much from us: it will exhaust our intellects; it will wear out our bodies; it will break our hearts. But we are glad about this, because what’s worse than having no purpose, feeling underemployed, lacking direction? Happily, that is not our fate. We are delightfully busy with an immensely important mission.

And even better, we know that we can rely on one another, passing the tasks back and forth, spotting each other, caring for each other. And of course we do everything with the great benefit of God’s power.

Turn.

Turn!

Turn around. Go back. Take yourself off this path. This way lies destruction, even death. This is not the path of life.

Turn from the path of anxiety, the path of depression, the path of despair. On this path, you are likely to throw up your hands in helpless exasperation. On this path, you will read about war, seemingly endless war, and you will start to feel numb. The news will stop informing you for action, and simply dull you into defeatism, into complacency, and finally into quiet collusion with the very forces of dreadful violence that you once found so outrageous. Turn from this path. This is not the path of life.

I love wizards. The wizard archetype, that is: the elderly artisan at the edge of the village, the wise one, the skillful — and usually a bit odd — person who possesses great intelligence, but is also cleverly gentle, strategically kind, consciously tender. Think of the sages from the east, searching Judea for a small child because they looked up at the night sky and understood what they saw. Think of a grandparent who smiles warmly — and knowingly — allowing the smile to travel all the way up to their twinkling eyes. Think of an old woman with her long white hair braided in back, her ancient face alight with youthful wonder; or think of an old man with his long beard sewn with one or two dazzling gems: is he weird? No … Well, a little bit. But he’s also ingenious.

The wizard is wise and gentle, then, but they are also powerful: our fantasy stories vest wizards with magical abilities, and the wizard is so skillful at the magical arts that they have no need for simple charms or pedestrian wands: they can simply raise one hand and silently summon mighty forces to our aid.

Jesus said, “Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.”

Evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn: four watches in the night. We could also be a little old school and call them Vespers and Compline, Matins, Lauds, and Prime: five of the nine monastic times of prayer that carry a religious community through a night and a day. Jesus tells us to stay awake through these wee hours. And then he goes on to meet us in each of them. 

Jesus meets us in the evening: soon after he gives us this warning about keeping awake, in the Good News according to Mark, Jesus gathers in the evening with his disciples, in a private room, and shares a meal with them. Then, as evening yields to night, he leads them to the garden, where he prays fervently, in agony, for the bitter cup to pass from him. And he tells his disciples, once again, to keep awake—but of course they don’t. They doze. Will we? Whatever we do, Jesus meets us in the evening: he meets us in our sundown gatherings, in our homecomings, in our slumbers, in our restlessness, in our private shadows, in our hauntings.

It is often easy, when walking into a room, to notice, or guess, who the most important people are. If a newcomer walks into this room for the first time, who will they believe is most important to us?

They will be badly mistaken, but I suspect they’ll decide it’s the people up here in the altar area who are the most important. Here I stand on this little platform. I am raised above you primarily to make the most of good sight lines, but does this pulpit satisfy an all-too-human desire to put one person above the others? And all the people up front – we get to wear special clothes. We have copes, chasubles, dalmatics, and tunicles in our closets, grand names for grand garments. Priests wear the copes and chasubles, deacons wear the dalmatics, and the first lay Eucharistic minister wears the tunicle. We say that all four orders of ministry are equal – we insist that bishops, priests, deacons, and the laity are equal – but bishops wear shiny, pointy hats and hold splendid croziers. And even though the robe of Holy Baptism – the white alb – is something every baptized Christian can wear, only the up-front people actually wear them. Our fancy outfits belie our claims of equality. It seems as if the most important people are all up here.

But if Jesus of Nazareth walked into this room and looked around, I firmly believe that he would not identify us as the most important people in the room. He might look at the altar party, and speak to us, only after he has greeted nearly everyone else. 

To watch a video of this sermon, click here.

“Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her… One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for she will be found sitting at the gate.”

We have constructed a new light-green gate to the garden at St. Paul’s. It is simple, yet also a little bit grand. It rolls gently but heavily, along a track laid down upon a new slip of concrete. When it arrives in the fully-closed position, it readily submits to a strong padlock. If you like, you could clamber over this gate and get inside, but that would be awkward, and somehow the gate quietly discourages you from doing this. It is elegant but heavy; it is permeable but strong: it is a substantial metal fence. The gate seems to say, without words, “Respect my boundary; yield to the limit I place upon you.”

I invite you to place yourself, in your imagination, at this gate. It is of course just a physical object that functions practically to strengthen security on our campus, but this gate is more than lovely enough to become your metaphorical gate – to aid you in your spiritual contemplations. Imagine yourself at this gate, and as you contemplate this image, let your heart seek Wisdom, the one who sits at the gate. Let your every thought discern her, for she takes up her post at all of the marked boundaries of our lives.

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.