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Lately I’ve taken a deeper interest in bad guys. But then, they’ve always captured my imagination. After all, as many of you well know, I spend a lot of time on the theological topic of remorse, the idea that our life of faith is about all of us getting better. (Maybe it’s my background as a psychotherapist, or my background as a Lutheran: those identities will always be alive in me.) 

For whatever reason, I’m intrigued and inspired by the notion that in our life of faith, we’re supposed to learn things, improve our behaviors, turn from our bad attitudes, repent from our selfish impulses, grow in maturity, stop hurting our neighbors … in short, we’re supposed to get better. And if that means we need to talk about scary or repellent topics – topics like sin – well, it’ll be worth it. Look at the devastation around the world: our faith offers humanity a robust solution in the form of human redemption and restoration.

But I hasten to say that I’m not talking about shame. I’m talking about sin and remorse, about forgiveness and reconciliation. We discard shame as the abusive and damaging emotional hell that it is, and we simply get in touch with our common human need to get better, to improve, and – always with God’s help, always with God’s power – to reveal God’s own image and likeness that shines from our essential identity as ethical human beings.

All of that fascinates me. 

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Have you ever been at a party and wanted to find a quiet corner, in the shadows, where you could collect your thoughts, breathe, and be invisible for a while? (I know that for some of you here, you may have never not wanted to do this while attending a party.) This may be true even at a fun or lovely party: imagine a party that offers good food, pleasant conversation, and a truly relaxing evening with friends; even there, you might want to step away for a while.

I invite you to step out of the party (good or bad) of your busy life, out of the party of noise and chatter around our parish, and (if just for a few moments) out of the dubious “party” of dust and heat and anguish in our troubled world. I invite you to step out of all that, and spend some quiet time with the image on the cover of today’s bulletin. This is a painting of the encounter of Jesus and Nicodemus. It was painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner, in 1899, in Jerusalem.

I have had the experience of being awake in the wee hours in Jerusalem, and even the experience of being on a rooftop deck in the Old City, like the one in Tanner’s painting. Jerusalem has a desert climate where, I discovered, it is not reliably cool and pleasant outside except after sunset, or before dawn. I wonder if, centuries ago, Jerusalem at night felt like it does now: a warm but restive city, asleep but fitful, quiet but restless. Cities throb and bustle and hum, and some cities never entirely shake off that energy, even at four in the morning. Jerusalem is like that. It is lovely, but it feels a little haunted, a little harrowed, and more than a little sad.

Can a city have a guilty conscience?

One evening last November, one of the twelve evenings my father spent in the ICU at Fairview Southdale Hospital, in Minneapolis, I enjoyed a short conversation with the nurse who was coming on shift, and preparing my dad for a quiet night. The nurse was up and down, typing on the computer keyboard, tapping the beeping IV keypads, checking hoses, repositioning my father on the pillows, dashing in and out to get supplies and run other errands.

As he worked I asked him questions about the monitor tracking my dad’s breathing pattern. I apologized for bothering this medical professional in his duties. “Oh, I’m happy to answer your questions,” he said, with a genuine smile. “It’s part of why I’m here.” He pointed to the jagged line tracking my father breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, above the ventilator’s constant, underlying rhythm. The line changed color when it crossed different thresholds.

“You see here?” the nurse said, pointing to the line where it stayed down in the color green. “This is a breath that the machine did all by itself, and Gary rode the vent.” “He ‘rode the vent’?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. “It means he let the machine breathe for him. I’d actually like him to ride the vent a little, tonight,” the nurse continued. “Riding the vent lets him rest, and when he rests, his lungs can heal.” The nurse paused. Then he said, “Of course we don’t want him to ride the vent all night. It’s also good when he tries to breathe on his own. That’s part of healing, too.”

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While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

I think I know why.

When my father died late last November, and in the early-December aftermath, for a while there, it felt like old times. All the adult children of our family patriarch came together, with all our old shoes. By “all our old shoes,” I mean all our old ways of relating, ways of being, ways of being together. I know how to talk to my brother John, for instance, the way I know how it feels to wear an old shoe. I’ve known John from the beginning of my life. If he walks into a room, I’ll say, “Hey,” and we will need no more of an elaborate greeting than that. 

And so it went, last November, and into December, as we said farewell to our dad and laid him to rest alongside our mother. We remembered immediately who we were, who we had always been.

his homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

***

“Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

This is a great question. A quick answer may come to our world-weary minds: lots of things, dear one! Lots of things prevent you from being baptized.

The question is asked by an Ethiopian eunuch, a person who experienced at least two layers of discrimination. First, they were most likely a literal eunuch who underwent a procedure to make permanent – by way of a physical surgical alteration – their status in vocation and society. In Philip’s world of Palestinian Judea, this also means the eunuch, as someone physically altered, would never have Temple privileges.

The Ethiopian eunuch, by virtue of being a eunuch, and because that term could refer to various actual identities and situations, has sometimes been thought of as “the first gay Christian.” In our cultural and political context, it would not be wrong or inaccurate for us to at the very least call them queer, and to note their departure from sexual and gender binaries.

I made it all the way to the seventeenth book in Louise Penny’s mystery series before I burst into tears. I am a person of deep and powerful feelings, but that’s how difficult it is for me to cry. My problem is an ordinary, predictable one: I was socialized as a boy in the upper Midwest by the children of prairie farmers. Boys don’t cry. Farmers don’t cry. Midwesterners definitely don’t cry.

I wish this were not so, if only because, as Rosey Grier sings so memorably in that 1970s musical, Free to Be You and Me, “It’s alright to cry; crying gets the sad out of you.” And in these days of vocational challenges and personal grief, I surely have “sad in me.” But we all do, don’t we? We feel furious sadness as we lament the relentless warfare that ravages Philip’s wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. We lose sleep contemplating climate devastation and our precarious, beleaguered democracy. It’s rough out there, and our gathered community is in profound need of the Good News. It is alright to cry.

So maybe you think I need a new author, someone who doesn’t have to write seventeen books to get me to cry. In fact I do need a new author: I’ve finished Louise Penny’s eighteen published mysteries, and number 19 doesn’t come out until October. But it’s really not her fault that it took her so long to find the sad in me and get it out. She’s good. She’s insightful and funny, and she has a knack for finding and reflecting on deep truths. I recommend her. And her characters cry plenty themselves, and they deeply move me.

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

***

A shepherd.

What’s a shepherd?

Our holy book is full of shepherds. A shepherd is up on the mountainside when a thornbush bursts into flame, but is not consumed. A shepherd is called from his work and, in the presence of all his older brothers, is proclaimed sovereign of the kingdom. Shepherds are working the night shift when the heavens split apart in glory and angels announce a wondrous birth.

Those shepherds may have been teenage girls. The job of shepherd was not glamorous, not an impressive bullet point on a resume. Even now, a livestock worker in, say, Montana, is not exactly killing it in our high-tech economy.

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When the first Christians want to tell us about Jesus, they often reach for the image of shepherd. This, they say, this is Jesus: Jesus is a shepherd. They know about shepherds themselves, living as they do in a pre-industrial agrarian world where city streets are designed for beasts of burden, not automobiles or trains. But they also cherish older stories of the faith, stories already as ancient to them as their stories are ancient to us. And in those older stories, shepherds reliably appear.

Moses is tending sheep when God appears in the flaming thornbush and sends Moses on his vocation to liberate the Israelites. David is tending sheep when Samuel proclaims that he is the new sovereign of the Israelite nation. God comes near to shepherds. And so it’s not surprising to encounter the shepherds of Bethlehem, knocked off their feet by angels. God in Jesus has come near, so… here come the shepherds. Jesus is divine, his followers say, so… he’s a Shepherd.

But none of this shepherd imagery is necessarily going to pull us in, persuade us, move us, change us. What do we know about shepherds? Let’s take a deeper look. John the evangelist can help us with this.

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I have a core memory from my childhood that reveals interesting backstory about my character, my leadership style, my worldview. I have worked on this memory in therapy. I strive (successfully!) to develop beyond it. Here is the memory, reinforced for years when I was a child: I sat in the back of the family van.

Most of you know I’m one of seven children, fifth in the line. We kids would pile into the van every summer for the long, hot drive to visit my mother’s family in Denver. My dad would take the wheel, driving us across the monotonous miles of southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado.

Family legend recalls the hot, dusty afternoon when my father was flooring it (I think understandably) on one of the highways, probably in western Nebraska, and he got pulled over for speeding. As the officer walked alongside the van on his way to my dad, he saw a little-kid face in every single window of our vehicle. (Some accounts of the story uncharitably put snot in every child’s nose. Other versions are kinder to us, but all of the storytellers maintain that each kid stared manically out of their respective window.) The highway-patrol worker, when he finally reached the driver’s-side window, let my dad off with a warning, saying, “I think you’ve got enough problems today.”

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“Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” the spice-bearing women ask, up at dawn, worrying their way to the grave of their friend.

Great question. Who will roll away the stone for us? The stone is immensely heavy. Sure, it’s shaped roughly like a wheel, so it can roll. But you can imagine the difficulty in getting a purchase, getting it to first start rolling. Once it has a little momentum it will move with increasing ease. But that first shove is heavy. Maybe impossible.

But we want the stone to move, because like those women, we want to visit our friend’s grave. And we want to do what one does when visiting a friend’s grave. But maybe the grave is impossibly shut. Maybe the cemetery is closed.

Who will roll away the stone for us?

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When I am awake in the wee hours, I can’t always think clearly. There’s not a lot of blood flowing to my neocortex. We have two dogs with food sensitivities, and a third dog who all too recently was housebroken: if something goes bump in the night, I don’t even have to look. I succumb to the grim conclusion that there’s a mess, somewhere in the house. (Even if there isn’t.)

But even when the dogs are sleeping in heavenly peace, often enough, before first light, I am vulnerable to dreadful thoughts and awful feelings. “I offended somebody yesterday!”, an inner demon will mutter in the shadows of my mind. “I didn’t finish a project!”, whispers another gremlin as it shuffles along another mental corridor. “I was foolish; they think I’m a fool; I am a fool.”

But there are still worse gremlins in my mind, in the pre-dawn hours. The climate-change gremlins tell me the world is ending (though even at noonday their argument is persuasive). A bridge fell down last week? Well of course it did. I try to go to my “happy place” – and of course you just know I have a happy place: I have given and received lots of therapy; I am couch trained, as they say in our psychotherapeutic culture – and sometimes I can just manage to get there.

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

We proclaim a death. We do this every week. Some of us do it more than once a week. We break bread and give everyone in the room a small portion, and everyone eats. We pour wine into a chalice and everyone is invited to drink. And whenever we do this, we proclaim a death.

We break the bread, and as it breaks we cherish the horrible memory of his body broken, hammered to a pole and crossbar, left to hang in such a way that he would slowly suffocate. And we remember his body stripped of clothes, particularly clothes that would identify or dignify him: no colorful garment to signify that he was a rabbi, an educated teacher and leader; no tunic that signaled wealth or social status; no pockets to hold money; no modest underclothes to protect his privacy. 

We break the bread, tear it in half, then quarters, then into little bits. And then we gobble it up, we wolf it down, we consume it. We consume him.

“Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

“Let her alone.” Listen, if you can, to that strong command. “Let her alone.” Jesus says more to his churlish, resentful friends in this paragraph-long speech — he says more by far — than he’ll say in his own defense against his accusers, later on, at the sham trial. He is speaking to his own, to his friends, to his beloveds, to his family. And he is unhappy with them. And they know it. They remember it. This rebuke is recorded more than once: the first Christians cherished this memory. They wanted us to cherish it too.

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Look up, and see. Raise your eyes and look at the cross, at Jesus on that cross. Jesus rises above us, in glory. Lift your head. Feast your eyes.

Even for those of us who struggle to see with our physical eyes, or see only in ways other than physical, we are a visual species. “I see,” you say, as you finally understand a complicated point. “I feel seen,” you say, when you experience another person truly empathizing with you. “Why can’t you see that?!” you shout to your friend, who has failed to understand your good motive, or your sensible solution.

We humans imagine (imagine is a visual word). We see.

When Mark the evangelist tells us their version of the Good News, their portrayal of Jesus the Crucified and Risen One, Mark takes pains to focus on the centurion seeing Jesus hanging dead on the cross, as Jesus does here in this room, in this sculpture rising above us, high enough for all to see. The centurion sees Jesus on the cross, and only then does he grasp the truth that almost no one in Mark’s Gospel has fully comprehended: the centurion says, “Truly this man was God’s Son.” He sees, and in seeing, he understands.

Don’t miss Mark’s point here: we can’t understand Jesus, who he is, why he matters, until we see him giving away his whole life in love, on the cross.

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

***

We just sang a portion of Psalm 19, perhaps one of the most beautiful psalms in our collection of these one hundred and fifty extremely ancient hymns. Psalm 19 sings of the splendor of creation, of the sun joyfully running its course through the sky, of the flaming spheres of the cosmos singing a song without music, proclaiming a message without words.

Then there are a couple of verses that sound beautiful, but maybe strike you as a little ho-hum. Verses eight and nine, which go like this:

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

***

A crucible is a metal container, roughly in the shape of a cup, that you heat to very high temperatures to manipulate chemical compounds. But in history, the word crucible has also referred to a lamp that is placed near a crucifix. Crucible … crucifixion … excruciating. These words are related. I wonder if the objects they describe are also related — the alchemist’s device and the devout Christian’s chapel lamp. Think about it: the alchemist uses the crucible to put chemicals under the pressure of intense heat. Perhaps, by the light that burns near the cross, you can endure the pressure of seeing things you normally would not see, or would not want to see.

In my years as a couples therapist, I studied the work of David Schnarch, who coined a new term, the sexual crucible, to describe what couples need to do if they want to grow and change together, toward the goal of reviving and invigorating their long-term, monogamous relationship. One member of the couple needs to take a calculated and dreadful risk, by telling the other person what they want, or who they are; they need to tell them something honest that the other person needs to hear.

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Let’s do some systematic theology, shall we? I’ll try to keep it interesting, and relevant. It may even be urgently important! Let’s do some theology together. Ready? Okay. Here we go.

If I take a hammer and bear its weight down upon a nail, the nail will comply and descend into a plank of wood. (Or it will slam onto my fingernail and bruise me badly.) Aristotle would call this an example of efficient cause: I employed a hammer to cause the nail to go into another object.

But there are three other classic, Aristotelian types of causes, three other ways one can make something happen, or bring something into being, or change something. There is the efficient cause, which I just described. Then there is the material cause: hammer, nail, wood, and fingernail — these objects are made of metal and trees and human flesh. The material causes the interaction of the four objects, simply by being the “stuff” the four objects are made of.

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The army is assembling on the hillside. The enemy is forming a battle line. They are in lockstep, forming into ranks and files. They brandish dreadful weapons. They are so numerous they cannot be counted. They are not a group or a team or even a crowd: they are a swarm. They are younger than our elder warriors. They are older than our untrained youth. They stand tall. 

Here is how the prophet Joel describes them: Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.

Consider their weapons. One of their most awful weapons is disinformation: the enemy persuades people in our land to believe conspiracy theories, to assume the worst of our leaders, to be cynics. Civil discourse about civil rights can hardly stand up to snide, combative personal attacks. Everyone plays the Gotcha! game, and eventually everyone loses. There are so many lies and distortions floating around, nobody can believe the truth, or even trust a few basic facts.

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I intensely dislike stains on my clothing. When I notice them for the first time, when I’m standing up at a restaurant or walking after lunch, my morale plunges. I groan. A stain on my clothes can ruin my day. In my compulsive hatred of stains, I suffered grim disillusionment when OxyClean came on the market and I discovered that it’s not great for oil stains. And those little Tide stain sticks? No. They don’t work, especially on oil. Oil is my nemesis. In my household, I take command of all laundry activities while Andrew governs the kitchen, and oil is despised in my realm as much as it is essential in his. This is a happy problem, but I intensely dislike stains.

And so I smile when Mark the evangelist tells us that Jesus is dressed in clothes so clean, clothes so spotless, that they dazzle in a way that “no one on earth could bleach them.” No stains! Jesus gleams. He is perfect. Undamaged. Unmarred. Clean and bright and beautiful.

I don’t like weakness. I don’t like failure. I don’t like to feel lost, and forlorn, and sad. I don’t like feeling foolish, looking foolish, acting foolish, being the fool.

So … why, why does the Risen Christ appear most powerfully, most helpfully, most beautifully when I am weak, when I am grieving, when I am failing, when I am the fool?

The risen Christ appeared to me on the worst day of my life, making it simultaneously the best day of my life. On the day when I painfully chose sobriety, I was confronted not only with my own weakness and grief, but with my own wrongdoing. And in that confrontation, I found peace. I found acceptance. I found painful correction. And I found a path to health, a path to strength, a path to usefulness. 

But it has always been like this. I am not alone. I am not unique.