Born

a Sermon for Christmas Day A
Text: Luke 2:1-20

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a reinvisioning based on those notes.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you gave us the greatest gift of the season: yourself. Be with us as a parent and child, that we might love you and one another so unconditionally. Amen.

Origins
We love origin stories. We love to know where things come from, and what in our past drives us today. Comics shoot up in price when a character’s origin is featured. The most popular episodes of TV shows are the ones that flashback to a poignant moment in a character’s life.

Jesus’s origin story is no different. We love responding to the question of where Jesus came from. What is interesting is that the four canonical gospels give us very different options.

1. Mark has no origin story, beginning with Jesus as an adult.
2. John begins with the creation of the world and speaks about the origin of Jesus’s ministry.
3. Matthew gives the birth story and then speaks of the wisemen and the flight into Egypt.
4. Luke offers the birth story (this time with shepherds) as well as a later trip to Jerusalem for the 12 year-old Jesus and his parents.

Because of this devotion to origin stories, we might give more interest to the beginnings of things, than where they actually go.

The Reason
I’m sure you’ve seen this cliché somewhere or heard someone say it. I saw this week on the sign outside of a real estate office. It says “Jesus is the reason for the season”. Reason for the season? What does Jesus really have to do with Santa Clause and mistletoe and gift giving? This season in which we storm the stores and gobble up ridiculous stuff and then give it to people who don’t need one more thing cluttering their lives: Jesus is the reason for that? Really?

Okay, that may be a bit cheeky, but so is a little rhyme that is supposed to remind us, not of our faith, but of that pastoral image of a little baby born. But this story isn’t supposed to be the beginning—the origin story—but the middle chapter. The story is a story of relationship between GOD and the people, and the introduction of Jesus serves as an important moment in the midst of that relationship.

The Event
So let’s put on our thinking caps for a moment. Let’s all pretend to be world-class theologians and think about this actual event. And ponder what it really means. We might drift a little close to heresy, but what fun would it be if we didn’t?

Let’s think about what the second person of the trinity is doing with these observant Jews that accept GOD’s call for them, to bring the king into this world.

1. GOD chose to give up omnipotence to be human
2. GOD didn’t become an adult, but a small, vulnerable child

GOD accepted the human process, of growing in the womb, coming through the birth canal, and facing the cold, bright, frightening reality of birth. The divine deity accepted complete and total vulnerability and utter dependence on its chosen parents. Part of me believes we don’t have stories of Jesus’s early life in the canonical gospels because we don’t want to envision our GOD as helpless, swaddled, and crying for milk or attention.

And just as profound, GOD chose to be a child to Mary, not just a parent to her.

Our Event
We celebrate this day a GOD who loves us enough to share in our experience.
Who came to us 2000 years ago and still comes to us today.
Who invites us to love each other with familial love.
Who loves the poor and unlovable—and yet still has room to love us.

May GOD’s peace be with you this day and always.

Where's the Fire?

a Sermon for Advent 3A
Text: Matthew 11:2-11

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a reinvisioning based on those notes.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you invite us into waiting and watching. Help us to see in our expectations true joy and new understanding. Amen.

John
Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire, Jesus? You promised me a fire and a cleansing of the world. You said it! So where’s the fire, Jesus?

John speaks from anger, hurt, anxiety, fear—has he wasted all this time? Has his ministry of preparing the way for this Messiah, this liberator and conqueror been in vain? Because…well…look at this guy. Jesus sure wasn’t matching John’s expectations of a liberator and a conqueror. The very word

Messiah=military leader.

And let’s speak plainly here: John is a man of action. He most certainly would do the work of GOD himself—not send his disciples instead. What kind of Messiah is this Jesus, that lets the disciples do the dirty work?

The Baby
In this season of expectation, we have the opposite expectation. Who are we expecting? A fragile baby. An innocent, innocuous baby that can’t threaten us or frighten us or challenge us or transform us. We expect the innocent pastoral image of a baby welcomed into the world by loving parents.

So John expected a powerful conqueror and received a healer.
We expect a healer and forget about the conqueror.

Jesus
After John’s people leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and asks them about John. He asks three times: “What did you go out [into the wilderness] to see?”
A prophet!
And what did you find?
A prophet!

Jesus isn’t just messing with our expectations, he is inviting us to deal with them. Because, once we see something, we are changed by it. He says that what they found was more than a prophet—a way prepared for them to follow. A road is being paved for us.

Advent is a season of waiting and watching, of expecting and seeing.

The opportunity to watch something is the opportunity to process something. To prepare ourselves for that road. It is the opportunity to be changed—and transformed forever.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones, in his Advent devotional, compares Advent to an expectant mother. That this season of waiting and anticipation is also a season of planning and dreaming and hoping; a season of cleaning and building and gathering. We are changed in the waiting.

For many of us that have had the fortune of being part of a child’s birth, it isn’t in the birth where the real transformation occurs, it is in the expectation.

Be Perfect

We celebrated Veteran's Day this week, so we used the readings for the Independence Day liturgy. As you will notice in the homily, the text comes from Matthew (not Luke) and is in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount. I chose to focus on an aspect of the reading, recognizing what we were lifting up in the context of the service.

a Sermon for Proper 28C
Text: Matthew 5:43-48

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you reveal your dreams and desires to us and invite us to take them up and make them real. Please continue to trust in us. Amen.

We know that it can be a pretty tall order to be a Christian sometimes, don’t we? Our gospel this morning is at the end of the first act of the Sermon on the Mount, a sermon in which Jesus lays out the standards pretty thoroughly: Blessed are the poor, for instance. After a few minutes, he talks about how much more he is expecting than the Law: he says that we know the Law tells us not to mess around with someone else, but Jesus argues that if you even think about messing around, you have sinned. And then he says to not only love the people you like, but the people you don’t! Well! And as if it couldn’t get any worse, he says: “Be perfect.”

Are you kidding me Jesus? Be perfect. Man, that’s just ridiculous.

So what does it mean to be perfect? Perfect is, well…perfect. We know it as something impossibly true—the pinnacle of what can be perceived. We know that it is impossible to be perfect.

Our modern understanding goes back well over 2000 years to Plato. Two of the things that drove Plato’s understanding were dualism and perfection. To him, the world was structured in pairs: you’re in or you’re out; good or bad; right or wrong. If you had one, then you must have the other. And he saw humans as representing that dualism. We are made of a body and a soul. The soul is perfect and incorruptible, so our bodies, therefore, are entirely imperfect and completely corruptible. Disgusting flesh to go along with the truly perfect soul within. You can see how this has messed with Christian understanding from the beginning!

We might be tempted, then to see Jesus’s encouragement as suggesting we strive for perfection, since Jesus would understand that being perfect would be impossible. But Jesus doesn’t say “try to be perfect” or “drive toward perfection,” but “be perfect.”

But what does Jesus actually say? “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” Jesus isn’t a Platonist-he sees this as relational. Our perfection is related to GOD’s.

We are made in the image of GOD and we believe that GOD is perfect. For Plato, perfect is an abstraction—separate. To be perfect or to strive to be perfect would be our confronting GOD, elevating ourselves to GOD. We know from Scripture that this practice is wrong. And yet, Jesus seems to be encouraging this.

We ignore the character of the speaker at our own peril, however. Isn’t it Jesus who is preaching? Isn’t it GOD incarnate, come down to earth? Is it not GOD accepting that evil, corrupting, imperfect human flesh? And his words ring powerfully through the imperfect mouth of the human GOD: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.”

For Jesus, being perfect isn’t about some existential notion of who we are physically, but how we act. To be perfect is to act perfectly—and to act perfectly is to act as GOD acts—as Jesus acts among us.

Stanley Hauerwas, in a commentary discussing the Sermon on the Mount, describes it this way:

“Accordingly the sermon is not addressed to individuals but to the community that Jesus begins and portends through the calling of the disciples. The sermon is not a heroic ethic. It is the constitution of a people. You cannot live by the demands of the sermon on your own, but that is the point.” p. 61

Jesus doesn’t tell us to live as perfect copies of one another in happy harmony with Western culture. We are called to be real together and love one another, recruit weirdos to join us, and to love them too. We are called to change the world so that the sons and daughters of these veterans—and all succeeding generations don’t face the horrors of war. We are called to bring the dream of GOD to this very place at this very moment.

It is a bold GOD that shares perfection with its children.




NOTE: This homily was preached from simple notes and represents not only an approximation of what I said, but some of what I intended to say. In other words, it might sound different.

Gotta Have Faith

a Sermon for Proper 22C
Text: Luke 17:5-10

GOD of Hope and Wonder, open our minds to your generosity and love, that we may be transformed by your faith. Amen.

Our gospel contains a word that I don’t like very much: Faith. Funny, right? I don’t dislike the word itself, and I don’t have an unreasonable problem with the concept. It’s just…I don’t think we get it.

When I was younger, I hated the way some would use certain ‘churchy’ words, like faith, belief, and all that because I never felt like I really understood what they were trying to say. One particular time in college, this one woman was going on and on and I counted the number of churchy words she was using and about the time she got to 40 or so, I decided to give up. It’s why I try to push people to express their beliefs (spiritual foundation?) with non-churchy words: because we need to be adept at expressing ourselves, not parroting church words.

We also seem to have the wrong idea about faith, because we want to quantify it. Because if we quantify it, then we can compare each other. We act like we have a gauge that measures our faith: “I’m only a four today; maybe we should go to church so I can raise it to seven or eight.” Or as if we had a faith thermometer: “Hmmm. 98.6; average faith, today!” But really its that we see people using the churchy words and we think they have more faith. Rick Warren must have more faith than I since he talks about it so much! Or we look at people doing stuff that we don’t want to do and we assume it is because they have more faith: Mother Theresa amongst the people with leprosy: I certainly don’t have enough faith to do that.

Mustard Seed Extract
This is where the disciples are at: they ask Jesus to increase their faith. Jesus has given them all of this stuff to worry about and do, so they certainly don’t have enough faith to accomplish it all. And how does Jesus respond? By blowing up this notion. He teaches them this about faith: if you have the smallest speck of faith, you could throw a tree into the sea. In Matthew, it’s move a mountain, but here, it’s a tree. If we think about what the disciples were asking, Jesus’s response doesn’t make sense:

Jesus, we only have X amount of faith, but what you are asking for requires X+Y!

The system they are operating from is this: if you have a little faith, you can get a little action; middle faith—middle action; big faith—big action; but Jesus says if you have the teensiest, weensiest bit of faith, you can do the most amazing miracle: apparently a type of spiritual telekinesis.

He seems to be saying:

“It isn’t about how much, and it certainly isn’t about the quality, either. You’ve got the faith you need.”

GOD and the slaves
Then Jesus seems to shift gears and starts talking about slaves. It goes something like this: Let’s say you are a landowner and your slave comes to you after a long day to see what you want for dinner. Would you invite the slave to sit down? No! Of course not! You’ll send him into the kitchen to make dinner, serve you, clean it up, then he can eat! Do you expect a pat on the back for doing what’s told of you? Now think of it this way: GOD is the landowner and you are the slave. Would you expect any different treatment?

There is something about this that doesn’t compute. I read it over a bunch of times and I couldn’t make sense of it. That doesn’t seem like the picture of GOD that we’ve been working through in Luke. That seems like GOD, the micro-manager.

Jesus begins by saying “Would you say [this]”? As you are—in the world as it is.

How does the story Jesus tells change if we do,
not what we would normally do,
but what he hopes we will do?

Because as I was reading it, I really wanted to say “yes!” I want to be a person that does invite the slave in to sit down. So I re-imagined the story this way.

A different story
The slave comes to you to ask what you want for dinner and you say “sit, please.” And because he is a good slave, he will follow your instructions, though he is confused by your behavior. You notice right away that he is hot and sweaty and that he has been in the field all day, so you offer him a drink. You walk to the kitchen and pour two glasses and place one in front of him and one in front of you. Since he does all of the cooking, you are afraid to offer him anything to eat, but you can make a sandwich, so you go back to the kitchen, make some sandwiches and place one in front of him and one in front of yourself. And then you eat.

While you are sitting there, you ask him a question. You want to get to know him better. And you realize quickly that you don’t really know him all that well. So you keep asking questions and he begins to open up, telling you about his life and his beliefs and his dreams and his hopes for the world and as he is about to take the last bite, you run to the kitchen for some chips because you don’t want the conversation to end, so you open the bag and put it in front of him and he keeps going. And about the time that you are content and happy, he stands up and clears the table. He returns with a pitcher to fill your glass and he says this:

“Thank you. You didn’t have to do that. You are so generous. This meant a lot to me.”

And then you respond by saying “The pleasure was all mine. Let’s do this again soon.”

“OK.”

Doesn’t that feel right? Doesn’t that fit better with what Jesus has just been saying? And just as Jesus changes the characters over here, we can change these characters around. God is that landowner and we are that slave. How does this match the previous chapters of Luke? It was only a chapter ago that Jesus told the three parables of the lost things: the sheep, coin, and son(s). In that, we get a picture of GOD that comes to us in our weakness and out of ridiculous generosity. Does GOD really expect us to meet the minimum requirements to receive generously? Is GOD that obsessed with minimum standards? The GOD that runs out to greet the ungrateful and rebellious younger son and then the ungrateful dutiful one?

In fact, by giving us the question, Jesus invites us into this thinking. “Would you do [this]?” And we say “Yes!”

So what does this have to do with faith? Everything.
Because faith changes us.
Because faith makes everything new.
Faith is found in generosity and hope and love and devotion.

May we be a people of love and generosity and GOD’s transformative grace. And may we be so changed by GOD that we can move mountains and throw trees into the sea.



NOTE: The actual sermon was preached from very simple notes. This is a recreation posted on October 13th.

Risking Cooties

a Sermon for Proper 19C
Text: Luke 15:1-10


GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give and give and give to us. Help replace the jealousy we feel when you give to others with joy. Amen.


I have an irrational fear of garbage. It isn’t really compulsive or that I’m afraid that the garbage itself will do anything to me. It’s just that I’m worried about contamination. When I touch the garbage bag, I feel like my hand is contaminated. I want to clean it and I don't want to touch anything with it. So when I take the garbage out, I prefer to do it one bag at-a-time because then I don’t turn the doorknob with a contaminated hand—I keep one free. I know its irrational.

In many ways, this morning’s gospel lesson deals with that same irrational fear of contamination. Let’s call it what we have been calling that stuff since we were kids: cooties. It’s a fear of cooties. And the pious people are afraid of the cooties. So they obsess about staying clean and pure. This gospel, then, isn’t just about the cooties, but the risk: its about being pure and keeping space and sharing intimacy.

Before the story begins, Jesus was walking. We know the story. He starts out in the north by himself and along the way, he collects 12 stooges: Larry, Moe, and ten Curlys. Then a bunch more stooges start following him that don't get to be counted as official stooges because Jesus wants 12 (to represent the 12 tribes, I suppose). Then people start following him that heard, saw, and met Jesus along the way and want to be a part of what He is doing. But of course, this isn’t only one type of people: Jesus is followed by all sorts: which includes the riffraff. So tax collectors, prostitutes, and other people that always have cooties come along. And of course, he also collects the pious: the Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees. All of these people are following Jesus: thousands following him.

So what happens from the start? Jesus “welcomes” and eats with the sinners. Now, this doesn’t sound so bad to us, but the word translated as “welcome” is more literally “to bring into one’s arms”. So Jesus is hugging and kissing these people…these people with cooties. It isn’t like he’s giving a handshake that can be easily wiped off. He’s getting them all over his arms and his chest and his face. He might even be kissing these people on the mouth, getting the cooties all over the place. And after this, he doesn’t sit with them for a couple of minutes then go take a shower—to clean all of that stuff off of him. He stays there. He lives there where they are. He lives in the dirt and impurity. This is the radical nearness that Jesus was practicing.

Now, the Pharisees, of course, get mad at him. And we know the main reason: because Jesus broke the rules. This is par for the course by now. Jesus is flaunting his rule breaking. But let’s be honest: it isn’t just that, is it? Many today would be horrified by this action, too. Because we want Jesus to remain pure. He can’t have cooties; he can’t be compromised; he must remain purely divine. So I imagine them pleading with Jesus: “let the disciples do that. Don’t get yourself dirty; we need you. Send them.” Jesus must remain untainted.

Jesus responds to this with three parables about lost things: a sheep, coin, and son(s) because he wants to talk about intimacy. Each of these parables is about separation and distance. Each is about our distance from GOD. And yet, in each, GOD comes to the lost. GOD searches for us. And isn’t that what Jesus was doing? He was going to the lost, and sharing intimacy with those that weren’t on the inside, weren’t safe at home or being responsible? He went to them and risked everything to be with them and to share in that space with us.

It seems to me that Jesus is calling on us to go to each other. He answers the question about his own intimacy by talking about GOD. He means for us to go to one another as GOD comes to us. Even though we might not want to or we’re scared or we have pious people telling us not to, we’re to go. I’m reminded of prison ministry programs or ministries amidst the diseased and dying. I’m reminded of inner city ministries and ministries with the rural poor.

Jesus encourages us to think about a dangerous concept: to put ourselves at risk for the gospel. It’s going to hurt. It isn’t going to be easy. But it’s right.

It’s about risking cooties.


NOTE: The actual sermon was preached from very simple notes. This is a recreation posted over a month later on October 13th.

The Gift

a Sermon for Proper 17C
Text: Luke 14:1, 7-14

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you have given us the most amazing gifts: in our world and in baptism. Help us to know and feel the generosity of giving that you dream for us. Amen.

We all know what it is like to give presents. Searching for the perfect gift. For me, I turn the page on the calendar to December 1st and an alarm goes off in my head: time to start looking for Christmas. Sure, 3 ½ weeks isn’t enough time to discover the perfect gift, but getting good gifts is important, too.

What’s a good gift? A gift you know they will like…because they’ve told you. You get the wishlist out and you buy from it. You’re both happy. After a couple of years, you’ll forget what you’ve given and they’ll forget that you gave it to them, but so what? In the giving, you’re both happy. That’s a good gift.

The perfect gift, on the other hand, is something you know they’ll like because you know them well. And chances are, they didn’t know that they even wanted it until you gave it to them. They can determine your love and appreciation for them through the gift. This begins to get at the perfect gift.

'The Gift'
Do you like puzzles? There is one that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida gives us called ‘The Gift’. It goes something like this:

Alex gives a gift to Bob. But as soon as Bob receives it, he receives something else: an encumbrance or a debt. He now, because of protocol, must give a gift to Alex in return. This debt is made worse by the fact that he is required to put as much into giving the return gift as Alex put into giving it: it has to cost the same in both money and effort. He also can’t give the return gift the next day—it has to be given spontaneously, so Bob must search out the day that expresses the same amount of spontaneity.

Let’s say Alex figures this out and decided to save Bob some of this headache, so he chooses to give his gift anonymously, since Scripture seems to encourage that. But that makes it even worse for Bob, since he still gains the debt, but no means of getting rid of it, and has to search for who gave him the gift. At the same time, Alex gets extra self-esteem for having done something really generous.

And what if Alex’s gift is met ungraciously by Bob, wouldn’t that fix the problem? No, because then Alex recognizes his own superiority in selflessly giving this gift—that Bob just isn’t capable of recognizing its value.

Many might think the conversation ends here. Either there is no way to solve it or Derrida is being too cynical in his description of gift-giving. But Derrida doesn’t actually end here. Derrida recognizes the problem, what he calls “the Impossibility”. That we are stuck in an arrangement that truly is unsolvable, so he gives us two important responses:

1. Give the gift anyway and accept that this is the arrangement. Strive to give without expecting anything in return, while knowing that you will. But it is the gift itself—and the circle filled with generosity and reciprocation—that begets a deep connection between people.
2. Trust in our economies. This means that we know that they system works this way, but people don’t. Alex gives a gift out of love and generosity and Bob receives it and feels it and is compelled, not out of duty, but that love and generosity, to give a beautiful gift in return.

In this morning’s gospel, Jesus reveals the very same notion about ‘The Gift’. He says to be generous and give without thinking about what you are going to get in return. Give. That’s what I’m asking you to do. Give.

Then he throws us for a loop, because he tells us what we are going to receive: grace. He says to us: here’s what you’re going to get; but don’t do it for that reason. Do it to do it. Give generously.

Baptism
What this means is symbolized in what we’ll be doing in just a few minutes: we’ll be baptizing this beautiful little girl. She will receive a gift today that comes in three parts. The first part comes from GOD and it is one that we all comprehend: she gets GOD’s grace. That’s the one we all think of first. The other two are gifts that we get to participate in. We give the gift of membership. In just a few minutes, in baptism, she gets to be one of us. She’ll get all of the rights and responsibilities that each of us has as Christians. She is a full member of the club. The third part of the gift, and perhaps the most important is what we all get to do for her. Her parents and godparents will stand up and vow to her and to GOD to raise her well to spiritual maturity. Then all of us will do the same—vowing that we will care for her spiritual well-being.

When Derrida talked about ‘The Gift’, he was speaking about relationship and obligation, but we’re giving this girl a gift she can’t repay. There is no way that she can give us all a gift in return. But in a few years, if we all do our jobs, she’ll be standing up and vowing to help another little girl grow up in the Spirit. Just as many of us have been given that opportunity.

Jesus gave us a gift that we couldn’t hope to repay in the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. We can’t hope to repay that kind of gift.

Dr. King's Gift
We received a gift 47 years ago yesterday in an event known simply as “The March” or “The March on Washington.” And at the end of the march, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most important speeches in the history of the western world; a speech that rocked the world and motivates people half a century later. A speech that is now referred to by its iconic image: “I have a dream”. There’s a lot about the speech that we remember, including the second most recognizable line; in reference to his daughter, he dreams of the day in which she will be judged “not by the color of her skin, but the content of her character.”

But this speech isn’t just a speech. It is a sermon. And we know this because Dr. King quotes the prophets Amos and Isaiah. This one I read to you this morning is from Isaiah:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

At the first level, Dr. King is talking about race. At the second, he’s talking about equality. But where Dr. King, in quoting the prophets, is dwelling is up here, at the third level: the Kingdom of GOD.

The Kingdom isn’t about being color-blind or post-racial; it isn’t simply about getting along well with everybody. It’s about loving and sharing with everybody regardless of what it means.

My last image, and I’m not sure where it came from, goes like this. When somebody asks us for some money, and we want to give it to them, we reach into our pockets, and we hand it over [demonstrating]. When our arm stops moving—when we’ve offered the money over to the other person—is the moment that the money is no longer ours. Even though it hasn’t left our hand yet, it is no longer ours. It’s GOD’s. If the other person takes it or not. What they do or don’t do with it. It isn’t ours. In giving generously, we give up possession and we hand it over.

The Kingdom, baptism, gifts to strangers and to friends and family are all opportunities for our generosity. For us to not only feel good for doing it and to be good in the eyes of others, but to live in the way Jesus instructs us to live. We’re asked to be generous without concern for what we get out of it.

To show generosity in spite of receiving.

Looking for the Law

a Sermon for Proper 16C
Text: Luke 13:10-17

[This is a written-out version of what I preached without notes. It is a pretty accurate recreation of the flow and wording.]


GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give us your Law and we feel the need to blind ourselves with rules. Help us to see the Law and what it truly means for us. Amen.

The story begins back in seminary. I had this professor named Jay that told us a story. It was a story about a new rector taking over in an Anglican church in Ontario, Canada. The names of the people were withheld, so I’m going to give some names to these characters. The previous rector we’ll call Fr. James. We’ll call the new rector Fr. Dan. Neither of these names has any theological meaning or deep importance for this story, they are simply names that came to me, except for Dan. This story isn’t the story of one my classmates (Dan), but I wanted to put him into this story in homage to him.

So, the story begins on Fr. Dan’s first Sunday. He does the service in the normal way. After Communion, he clears the table, comes out in front of the altar, blesses the people, dismisses them, and then processes out into the world. The second Sunday, he does the same thing. The third Sunday goes the same way. Only this time, as he is standing out in the narthex, shaking hands, a kind, older gentleman pats him on the shoulder and says:

“I hate to tell you this…[words which actually mean something else to us] but you are doing it wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Fr. Dan is confused.
“You are forgetting the special bow,” the man says. “C’mere. I’ll show you.” And the two walk back to the sanctuary so that the gentleman could demonstrate. “It goes like this. You do what you do from behind the altar, see? Then you turn to the back wall, and you bow.”

Dan, being a smart priest, tries to make sense of this. There is no cross on the wall, but the consecrated elements are kept off to the side so he asks if the bow is to the elements. “No—the middle of the wall,” the man says.

So Dan goes into the Parish Hall to ask the people at coffee hour about this “special bow” and person after person says “Oh yeah! The bow! You have to do it—I love the bow!” Dan, still completely clueless, decides to call Fr. James first thing, Monday morning to ask him what was going on.

“Fr. James. This is Dan from St. Paul’s. I know we have a lot to talk about, and we’ll do that soon, but I have to ask you about one thing: what is with the special bow?”
“What bow?”
“The special bow,” Dan says. “You would bless the people, turn to the back wall, and bow, and then process out.”
There is silence on the other end for a moment until Dan hears a deep laugh. “Dan, I wasn’t bowing. I was turning off the radiator.”

This old church used steam heat, of course, and there was a radiator right behind the altar. Fr. James would bend over, turn the cap, and turn off the heat to the nave.

Our professor told us this story for two reasons:

1. How quickly actions become liturgy. You do it a couple of times and it becomes “what we do here” and then do it a couple more times and it becomes “what we’ve always done”.
2. How we give importance to actions, regardless of their purpose. There were probably only a couple of people in the church that new what Fr. James was doing, but the rest of the congregation believed that he was doing something important and symbolic. They decided that it was important and each person concocted some deep, theological reason behind this bow. The truth was that Fr. James was just being lazy.

This is what our gospel is about today. But first, let me introduce you to the characters.

Again, these characters don’t have names and I just came up with them because I wanted them to have names.

The first character is Lucy. She is a beautiful, happy woman, who 18 years ago had a spirit come into her body and bend her over. She can’t look up; she can’t look into other people’s eyes. She can look at the floor and the ground. This is her life today.

The second character is Sam. Ignore for a minute what Jesus says about him. Sam is a good guy. He is pious; a rule follower. We would like him. He would no doubt be the president of Rotary and a well-liked member of the community. A good man. But he has one problem: he loves Lucy, but he sees her and thinks that there is nothing he can do. It is what it is.

The third character is a wandering preacher. Let’s call him…Jesus. And he is preaching away, and Lucy catches his eye. He sees her and stops mid-sentence. “This won’t do,” he says to himself and in moments, he puts his hands on her and tells her that today is a new day. All she needs to do is stand up.

And Lucy listens to him…and she stands up…and she praises GOD.

Now Sam sees this and he is irate. He is mad because 1) Jesus broke the rules and 2) he’ll catch the blowback for this. So he yells at Jesus, telling him to “Stop! You’ve broken the rules!” And, we know that if he were a good Episcopalian, there would be a second condemnation: “Lucy! What are you doing shouting in the middle of the service? Who said you could praise GOD in a church?”

And Jesus responds, not with the semantic argument that we think he does: but instead with a simple chastisement of his own: “you are breaking the law by following the rules.”

If we look at what GOD says about the Sabbath, we go back to Exodus and Deuteronomy: the two places Sabbath is described in the Ten Commandments. In Exodus it tells us that we are to keep the Sabbath day (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) holy and we are not to work because GOD created the world in 6 days and on the 7th he rested.

So Sabbath is about rest.

Then in Deuteronomy 5, it says that we are to keep the Sabbath day holy and we are not to work because GOD liberated his people from Egypt and redeemed them.

So Sabbath is about redemption.

Rest and Redemption.

So, in the couple thousand years between Moses’s arrival with the Ten Commandments and the day Jesus walked into that synagogue, good, well intentioned people tried to figure out what GOD meant by having us not work. So they started with the farmers, the slaves, and the livestock (since they were specifically mentioned in the commandment). Then they added the housekeepers and the cooks and the shopkeepers and everybody else until they had created rules making it so everybody had to rest on the Sabbath. Whew! And they felt good about this until some smart aleck in the back asks the room “what about ______?” For us, that would be “what about doctors? Or police? Or firefighters? We have to work on our Sabbath day. So they started adding page after page of exemptions to the hundreds of rules. And Jesus knows these rules and picks out of the myriad choices—a really juicy one—and he throws it out into the middle of the room for everybody to see. It deals with livestock. Now, they aren’t talking about cute, cuddly sheep in the field necessarily. They’re talking about oxen that pull the plow or carts and goats that produce milk.

Now does anyone know the first two changes to your body when you fast? You lose water and muscle mass.

They knew that the livestock wouldn’t die with a fasting day, so this isn’t a life-or-death decision. But they wanted their livestock to be in tip-top shape for Sunday morning. They didn’t want their oxen weak or their goats to be dry and not producing milk. Jesus, mindful of the Law which says that the Sabbath is about rest and redemption looks at this rule and he says to himself “this exemption is about money.”

So he compares this exemption to the state of this woman. The livestock exemption isn’t life-or-death, but about health and vitality. There is no such exemption for the health and vitality of a woman. It is important for us to recognize that this is a woman—that she is imprisoned and in need of redemption. That she is symbolic of all of those people that are locked up, not by GOD’s Law, but by human rules based in prejudice and hatred. That Sam, in supporting the status quo, even telling her to come back tomorrow, is trying to refuse her rest and redemption on the Sabbath. But Jesus won’t wait—he does it the moment he sees her. He says “what better day than the Sabbath to give this woman rest and redemption? You have it, Sam. The people in this room have it. And now she has it.”

We’re given this wonderful example today to show us how we, by trying to be good people, condemn them instead. That we have a whole bunch of rules that we bring into this space with us: the special bows, the types of music we like, the times we stand and the times we kneel. These are all our rules, not GOD’s Law. It isn’t Jesus’s teaching. It isn’t the Kingdom of GOD. It’s our stuff.

Today, we can be mindful of all of our rules that blind us from GOD’s dreams for us. That our Sabbath might be truly about rest and redemption. And that we make time to ask ourselves and one another “who needs rest today? And who needs to be redeemed?”