What Not to Wear

A Sermon on Mark 10:46-52

Last week, my colleague told us about one of his guilty pleasures, and this week, I’m going to tell you about one of mine… reality television. It started innocently enough, when an acquaintance of mine was chosen to compete as a geek on Beauty and the Geek, but now I watch it all, from Top Chef to America's Next Top Model. Normally I think of it as a waste of time with no relevance to anything at all, but this week, I was reading the gospel text and I found myself thinking of the show What Not to Wear. 

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show where people nominate their fashion-blind friends and family for makeovers. They video their friend’s fashion faux pas, and then the hosts, Stacy and Clinton get to go through the subject’s wardrobe, making fun of their clothes and throwing away whatever they want before sending the subject out on a shopping spree to buy clothes that Stacy and Clinton deem more appropriate. In one episode I particularly remember, the woman they were featuring was in her mid-twenties, but she hadn’t changed her style since her early teenage years. She wore lots of little baby-doll t-shirts with slogans on them, and low-riding jeans … but the biggest problem was her “tail.” She had a furry purple tail with a little bell on the end of it, something you might wear if you were dressing as the Cheshire Cat for Halloween, and she safety-pinned it to the back belt loop of her jeans – and she wore it all the time. She thought that without it, she would fade into the background, but once Stacy and Clinton finally persuaded her to part with her tail and teen-aged clothing and start wearing clothing that was more flattering and age-appropriate and less, um, feline, she found that she was taken more seriously. She felt prepared to interview for a real job, a job she certainly wouldn’t have gotten with a tail pinned to her jeans. The thing that had gone wrong in her closet, and the closets of so many other subjects of What Not to Wear, is that her life had changed – she had grown up – but her clothes had stayed the same, and that just wasn’t working for her. 

Now, I don’t mean to glorify What Not to Wear. It’s deeply materialistic, and totally uncritical of our habit of judging people by their appearances; it sends the message that in order to be a valuable person, you need to dress as if you had a lot of money; it buys into and glorifies some of the aspects of our culture that we as Christians are called to reject. But in some ways, that girl and her tail reminds me of blind Bartimaeus. 

Bartimaeus, the text tells us, was a blind beggar in Jericho. Blindness was a lot more common in that time and place than it is in ours – it’s a dry and dusty part of the world, and in the harsh conditions, people’s eyes would become irritated, and then infected, and in a world without antibiotics, their sight would often be permanently lost. So historians suggest that there were many more blind people at Jesus’ time than there are in ours. And in a world without the adaptive technologies that are available to visually impaired people today, there were not many ways for blind people to make a living, so they would often become beggars. 

Bartimaeus was one of these blind beggars, and in our text for today, he is sitting by the road in Jericho when Jesus, his disciples, and a large crowd pass by. He hears that it is Jesus of Nazareth and cries out “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” The surrounding crowd reprimands him for making a scene, but he shouts out until Jesus notices. Jesus tells the people to send Bartimaeus over, and as soon as he is called, Bartimaeus throws off his cloak. Why in the world does he throw off his cloak? That seems like a very odd thing to do, but it turns out that the cloak had a special significance in this time: the beggars of Jesus’ time wore cloaks because they could spread them out on the ground to catch coins that people tossed their way – it was not just their outer garment and their sleeping surface, but also where they collected their money. And so in a very real way, Bartimaeus’ cloak was a marker of the kind of life that he lived, the life of a blind beggar. But when Jesus calls him, Bartimaeus throws off the cloak, stands up, and goes to Jesus. “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks. “Let me see again,” Bartimaeus answers. “Go,” says Jesus, “Your faith has made you well.” And Bartimaeus’s sight is restored, but he doesn’t do what Jesus says.  He doesn’t go.  Instead, he begins to follow Jesus. 

I think that that is why he leaves the cloak behind him; because this is not only a story of healing, it is also a story of discipleship, a story of transformation. When Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, he is giving up the very thing he needs most for the kind of life that he has been living, a possession which is crucial for his life as a beggar. I think that what we see in this moment is Bartimaeus committing to a new life, a life of discipleship. He is ready to follow Jesus on the way, and in the new life he is called to, he isn’t going to be sitting by the road collecting coins.  There will be no time to sit by the road with his cloak spread out in front of him. In a way, he demonstrates more vision than a lot of the other would-be disciples we’ve heard about in the Gospel lessons of the last few weeks – unlike that wealthy young man who was told that he would have to give his money away and went away dejected, Bartimaeus sees that embracing a new life following Jesus means that some things have to change. He sees that the things that have been so necessary to his daily existence are not going to be important in the life he’s being called to. And so throws his cloak off, and he walks away.  He is about to be healed, but before he even regains his vision, he prepares himself for a life of discipleship – a life on the road – a life of following Jesus. 

It’s this kind of wisdom that is so lacking among those people on What Not to Wear. Unlike Bartimaeus, they insist on carrying their “cloaks” around with them – they don’t realize that the clothes that really worked for them before, the clothes that met their old needs, no longer fit into their new lives. Something has changed – they have grown up, they have changed jobs, they are heavier or lighter than they used to be – and unlike Bartimaeus, they have not noticed that the clothes that used to serve them well are now burdens and obstacles. A furry tail might be a fun accessory for a teenager, once in a while – it might communicate that she is quirky and funny and fun. It might help her to feel, in the difficult and judgmental world of high school, that she has something special about her.  It might help her to know that the judgments of the popular kids don’t need to mean anything to her, that she is not trying to please them. Maybe that tail helped that girl to have a sense of self in a time in her life where that was really difficult. But by the time Stacy and Clinton got to her, she was not a teenager any longer, that tail was no longer a cute accessory, and she had convinced herself that without the tail, she was nobody. And as critical as I am of the show’s obsession with external appearance, the tail that that woman wore every day needed to be thrown off, thrown away, left behind, in order for her to embrace her adult life. Like Bartimaeus’s cloak, it may have served a purpose in her past, but things had changed, and now it was no longer necessary, and because she hadn’t left it behind, it was standing in the way. 

Sometimes we have a Bartimaeus moment in our lives: God calls us to something new, and we have the chance to leap up and go, leaving the garments of our old lives behind us. Something has changed, and the things that were essential before are no longer what we want or need. Maybe taking an exciting new job means that we just can’t stay in the old apartment that we loved. Maybe there’s a change in our family – we start a new relationship, or have a child, and the routines and habits that used to structure our lives become inconvenient or impossible. Maybe changing careers or going back to school means having more happiness, but less money, and that calls us to re-examine our lifestyle and live more simply. Do you have a cloak that you might be called to throw off in order to follow a new call in your own life? Does this church? 

The history of our church tells us that we have done it before. In the 1960s, we saw the expense of maintaining a deteriorating building, and we threw off the cloak of our old building, following a call to become a “church without walls.” In the 1980s, we saw that our organizational structure was a giant bureaucracy with a multitude of committees and boards. This structure had worked well when we were a bigger church but it had become a burden for our small congregation of busy New Yorkers. We threw off our old by-laws to create a more streamlined system that would let us focus more on our mission and less on meetings. What cloak might we be called to throw off next? What part of our life as we know it might start to become a burden or a hindrance as we continue to discern God’s call for us in this time? 

Our commitment as Jesus followers leads us, as individuals and a community, to places we never would have expected, and sometimes calls us to leave behind the things that once seemed essential to us. I wonder, once Bartimaeus regained his vision, whether he looked back at his cloak before leaving it behind – I know that I would have – I would have been tempted to go back for it, to insist that I might need it, like that woman who was sure that she needed to keep her furry tail. But the wisdom of Bartimaeus reminds me that sometimes the things that seemed most important are the very things we’re called away from.  Bartimaeus reminds me that sometimes following Jesus means that we can’t take the trappings of our past with us.  And sometimes for us as for Bartimaeus, the story of our healing and the story of our discipleship are one and the same.

Team Grace

“Bless us oh Lord 
These our gifts 
Boutta receive
Bydounty 
Christ our Lord 
Amen.” 

This is the grace my stepson learned when he was four, and it’s the grace he’s been saying ever since. He’s since straightened out the phrase “thy bounty,” corrected some (but not all) of the missing or nonsensical conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns, and accelerated the pace by about three hundred percent. I’m always surprised that our picky eater is so eager to get the prayer over with! 

There’s nothing wrong with a memorized grace. Memorized table graces (often rhyming or sung) can be a nurturing shared ritual, and a wonderful way for children to participate in the family’s spiritual life. Family dinners in my childhood always included a grace from a small book of rhyming table graces with lovely illustrations. Leading the family in grace was a special privilege, and my middle sister learned to read, in large part, from that little pink book of prayers. 

However, as my stepson has grown older, I’ve struggled to help him engage in the meaning of the grace he says. “What does that mean?” I ask, “Why do we say it? What is 'bounty'? And are you sure that it’s supposed to be ‘these our gifts’?” This conversation has actually crossed developmental stages: where my questions once were met with a shrug and an “I don’t know, do I have to eat my vegetables?” they now receive an eyeroll and a “whatever.” 

I’ll admit that I have at least a tiny amount of ego in the game. I’m a minister. My kid should be able to say a grace that makes some degree of theological and grammatical sense, and know what he’s saying. We’ve tried this, and we’ve tried that. We’ve tried talking about table graces, teaching table graces, modeling extemporaneous table graces. And finally we tried something that worked. 

Now we say “team grace.” One of us starts with just a few words, maybe a phrase or a sentence, and then the next person adds a few more. It goes around and around the table until someone decides to say “Amen.” It goes something like this: "Dear God, thank you for this food... and for our time together... bless this meal and our family... and help us to do your will... Amen."  

Miraculously, my stepson loves it. And so do I. I love watching him find a few words to say to God. I love seeing him figure out how a prayer is structured, and what he can add. I love that he doesn’t like to be the one to say “Amen,” and so he’ll add additional petitions rather than end the prayer, thanking God for ice skating, or praying for people at other tables or for people who are in need. We are learning to pray together. And it is grace indeed. 

Bless us, oh Lord, and these your gifts which we are about to receive from your bounty. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

The Christian Wardrobe

A sermon on Colossians 3:12-17

“What should I wear to your church?” That’s a question people ask me all the time when they consider coming to worship with my congregation. I usually make a joke in response: “I’d recommend that you definitely wear clothing,” I reply, “Probably not a swimsuit.” If that doesn’t set them at ease, I tell them that some people wear casual clothes like blue jeans and t-shirts, some wear dresses or suits, and that one particular child often comes in a superhero mask and cape. People are often surprised to hear of a church where you can come as you are; many churches have stricter expectations, written or unwritten. In Israel, I visited churches with posted signs, warning that men or women wearing shorts would be denied entry, and churches where security guards handed out shawls to cover exposed shoulders. In New York, you’re not likely to be asked to leave for dressing too casually in a house of worship, but stares and glares and whispers can make you feel just as unwelcome. Many of us, surely, have endured the embarrassment of showing up somewhere – whether it’s a church service or a party, only to realize that we’re wearing the wrong thing.

So where do contemporary churches get their ideas of what is appropriate clothing for a Sunday worship service? Surely not from Jesus, who spent so much time with poor people who wouldn’t have the means to purchase fine clothing. Jesus, who did not condemn the woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, violating social norms of apparel and proper behavior. Jesus, who told his followers to consider the lilies and not to worry about what they would wear.

There are a few biblical verses that seem to touch on what we should wear, words that encourage women not to wear gold or pearls or braided hairstyles (that is, not to wear clothing that shows off their wealth and social status). There are verses that encourage women to cover their hair in worship, in accordance with the cultural norms of the time. There are verses in the Mosaic legal codes forbidding fabrics made of mixed fibers – no cotton-poly blends! And there are verses that encourage modesty, although the kind of modesty the authors were referring to probably had to do more with humble behavior than with appropriate dress. The opposite of modest, to the writers of the epistles, would more likely be “self-aggrandizing” or “vain,” rather than “scantily clad.”

In fact, there’s not a single word in scripture that dictates what we should wear to church: no “Thou shalt not wear blue jeans to worship,” no “Thou shalt not wear white after Labor Day,” not a single word about Easter bonnets or jackets and ties or close-toed shoes. Those norms, observed by so many worshiping communities, are based in our contemporary culture, not in scripture. So what is in the Christian wardrobe? There is an answer for us today in our reading from Colossians, an epistle written either by Paul himself or by someone emulating Paul and writing in his name, which would have been a common practice in that time. Writing to the newly-formed Christian church in Colossae, he urges them – and all Christians – to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” and to “above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything in perfect harmony.” In the section before today’s reading, the author reminds Christians that they have, in baptism, “stripped off” their old selves, and urges them therefore to rid themselves of all of the vices and harmful and hurtful behaviors that are not fitting for those made new in Christ.

These words come from a very different time, a time when it would have been unimaginable to have overflowing dresser drawers and bedroom closets full of clothes in different colors and styles. Most people would have had very few articles of clothing, perhaps one or two outfits in total. Indeed, Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist urged his listeners, if they had two coats, to give one away to the poor! To strip off anger wrath, malice, and slander, and to put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love, would be a powerful image for those who expected to wear the same garment every day until it gave out. To “clothe oneself” in Christian virtues would mean making a long-term commitment to put these traits on every day, to bear with the places where they might tug or itch, to live in and with them until they became as comfortable and natural as a well-worn pair of blue jeans. When we think of Christian virtues like compassion as garments to put on, we acknowledge that the life of faith may not always come naturally. Compassion, patience, and love are not like brown eyes, a trait which we either have or we don’t. Instead, they are presented as practices that we can “put on,” whether that comes easily or with great difficulty.

I love that our lectionary calendar of readings designates this passage to be read during the Christmas season – the twelve days that follow Christmas, when we reflect on Christ’s incarnation, when we hear stories of his birth and childhood. Much of the world around us celebrates Christmas for the month before Christmas Day (or two months or three months); much of the culture around us has packed up the holly and the ivy, turned off the Christmas carols, and is now getting ready to throw out the eggnog and cookies as we make our New Year’s resolutions and wait to watch the ball drop. But in church, the tree is still up, the Advent wreath is still lit, and the baby Jesus sits in the manger in front of the pulpit; we are still taking some time to reflect on the miracle and the mystery, to sit for a bit longer with this beautiful and paradoxical story of God made flesh.

We hear this passage, urging us to “put on,” like clothing, the virtues of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and love, in the same season that we contemplate the stunning claim that God came to us in human flesh as a baby – the baby of an unwed mother, in a relatively poor family, in an occupied nation. We are urged to put on Christ-likeness because in Christ, God has put on humanity; God has put on vulnerability and mortality. God has put on human emotions and human experiences and human development. In Christmastide, we contemplate the mystery of God putting on humanity, and that through God’s incarnation, God has drawn near to us so that we might draw nearer to God. Christ has put on humanity so that we might, as Paul urges the church in other letters, "put on Christ."

The Good News invites us to be made new, to strip off everything that is not of God and to put on the garments of God’s reign. I wonder whether, perhaps, C.S. Lewis was thinking of passages like this one when he wrote The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – that story of four children entering the land of Narnia through the back of an enchanted wardrobe and meeting there a savior who was familiar in many ways, but had taken on another kind of flesh entirely, a savior who was, as they said, “not a tame lion.” As the Pevensie children make their way to and from Narnia, they go through a wardrobe, clothing themselves in fur coats as they enter the perpetual winter of Narnia. Perhaps C.S. Lewis thought of scriptures like this one when he chose the metaphor of the wardrobe as the passage to another world. It echoes scriptures like this one which invites us to clothe ourselves for the Reign of God rather than the empires of this world.

There’s another reason, too, that I love reflecting on this reading at Christmas-time. Because in our contemporary world, we tend to think of the Christmas story with a sense of warm nostalgia. We see it in a soft-focus, casting everything in a warm golden light. You can see it in the ways we illustrate the Christmas story – my own childhood memories include many Precious Moments nativities, for instance, but I’m sure you can come up with your own images of a clean, peaceful, idyllic manger scene. But the fact is, the Christmas story as it has come to us is the story of a God who comes into a world which is difficult and dreary, sometimes dark and frightening.

Much like the Christmas story itself, this passage from Colossians is one which sounds lovely and rosy, which sounds peaceful and idyllic, but which is actually much more breath-taking and fierce, wild and wonderful. This passage challenges us to do the hard, hard work of building community that reflects the Reign of God in a world where that is not always welcome. It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it is actually asking us to do a hard and counter-cultural thing. We are invited to take off the garments of this world: self-centeredness, competition, materialism, skepticism, apathy, hierarchy, and to put on the garments of the Reign of God: compassion, kindness, humility, patience, love. These are garments that will sometimes attract scorn and judgment; these are garments which are probably not in line with the latest fashion trends. These garments mean seeking peace in a world where violence is the norm. These garments mean seeking transformation in a world more comfortable with the status quo. These garments mean seeing all people as children of God, each uniquely beloved and precious in God’s eyes, in a world that values some people far more than others. The Good News of God’s love is far more than nice people and a nice baby in a nice stable, and the life of faith is far more than nice, polite people in a nice, polite church. The Good News is this: God’s perfect love for us has taken shape in the Word made flesh. Christ has clothed himself in humanity so that we might clothe ourselves in Christ. Or, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since He was what I am and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

The Silence Changed Everything: Zechariah's Story

A sermon on Luke 1:5-25, 57-64

Today’s sermon takes the form of a story. This is not my story, although I will tell it in the first person. It is the story of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, the man whose story opens the Gospel according to Luke. We have heard the gospel narrative, and now I invite you to imagine with me what Zechariah might say if he could tell us his own story of how God changed his life. 

The silence changed everything. Everything. At first I tried to talk, I tried to hum, I tried to rasp, scream, whisper, grunt, whistle, anything I could think of. I lay in bed at night trying everything, my tongue working against my speechless lips, worrying at my teeth, begging in vain for my disobedient vocal chords to comply. Nothing worked – I was completely mute, every attempt to vocalize utterly noiseless. I might as well have been trying to fly. 

It was so frustrating to be silent. I’d always been a big talker anyway. I loved to shoot the breeze on a quiet afternoon, to tell stories around the table, to debate about scripture in the synagogue. To be mute now, after this, was unbearable. I had so much to say! 

It had been a lifetime of waiting for my wife Elizabeth and me. We’d waited for a child, waiting and waiting and waiting until slowly we accepted that it was too late. We’d waited faithfully for the Messiah, suffering year after year under the Roman imperial occupation, enduring the taxation, the centurions and governors and their tyrannical puppet kings, praying for the day when God would save us and free us. And we’d waited for years for my turn to offer incense in the sanctuary. Each group of priests served for a week twice a year, and each day of that week, one of us would be chosen by lots for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to approach the Holy of Holies. I had waited, time after time, for my lot to be drawn. The priests God chose for the task seemed to get younger and younger. Sometimes I wondered if God had forgotten us. But not anymore. The silence changed everything. 

It had seemed like a normal morning as I set off to the Jerusalem temple, joining along the way with the other priests from the order of Abijah. I had pretty much resigned myself by that time, but that day my name was chosen to enter the inner sanctuary and offer the incense. I had entered the chamber prepared to experience the silent, perfect peace of the presence of the Lord. As I lit the incense, there was a rush of wind and a breath-taking, awe-inducing something stood before me, all wings and eyes and sound. I was terrified; my memory is fuzzy, all flashes and snippets. Elizabeth. A son. Name him John. Something about Elijah. Prepare the way of the Lord. 

I knew the story of Sarah and Abraham, but still, like a fool, I objected. We were far too old for a child. “I am Gabriel,” came the reply, “an angel sent by God to tell you good news. But since you didn’t believe these words, you will be silent until these things occur.” And it was gone. The inner sanctuary was silent – and so was I. 

I can only imagine the look on my face as I stumbled out to the puzzled crowd of priests and found my tongue stopped. I stayed in Jerusalem in a silent daze, until the finally the week ended and I made my way home to Elizabeth in the maddening silence. 

So much happened in the silence! Everything with Elizabeth – Liz – changed completely. We’d always gotten along, but it had been different. Liz would laugh at my jokes, listen attentively to my stories, ask insightful questions. I loved that she was a good listener. I was a good talker. But now, I was infuriatingly mute, with the biggest story of my life. I would have written the story down, but Liz couldn’t read it. She’d never learned how; most girls didn’t. I tried to gesture it to her, but what hand signs could possibly communicate this unimaginable being with all the wings and eyes and glory? How can you pantomime “prepare the way of the Lord”? And so we sat in silence, and although the details remained fuzzy, I knew exactly what was happening before Liz realized it, as she started to get queasy, and tired, and more sensitive to smells.

I couldn’t quite remember what the angel had said, but when I would get up at night with a restless Liz, I’d rub her back and remember the stories I’d known all my life. Stories of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Elkanah and Hannah. A barren woman pregnant, I knew, meant God had special plans for my son. Perhaps, I thought, he was the one we had been waiting for. The one who would break the grip of the Roman empire, who would restore Israel to glory, who would be our savior. Where else but the temple could God possibly foretell the birth of the anointed one? To whom but an elderly barren couple, descendants of great houses, could the Messiah be born? Could anyone imagine a more fitting way for God’s salvation to come to the world? My heart blossomed with pride and vindication, after years of the frustration and embarrassment. 

As Liz’s body began to change and she started to realize what was happening, I held her as she wept tears of joy, and laughed in joyful disbelief like Sarah had, so many generations before. I held her as her stories began to bubble forth. I had been embarrassed at her barrenness, pitied by my friends, graciously tolerant of her shortcoming – we had no notion then of the causes, we just all thought that barrenness was God’s curse on certain women, a sign of divine disfavor. I had had no idea what Liz had endured. The years of waiting, the covert glances at her belly, the hushed conversations that stopped when she grew near. The constant references to Sarah and Hannah and their miraculous children. The endless advice, the herbal remedies, the sense of resignation as the weeks and months and years slipped away. The shame she had felt, and the guilt, and the longing. I had never known. Not really. The silence changed everything. 

As Elizabeth’s belly grew, so did my certainty that the child to be born was the One we had been waiting for. I know it sounds foolish now, but put yourself in my position. How many of us have thought we knew when and where and how God’s will would be done? How many of us have imagined that the ways of the Lord were predictable and comprehensible? How many of us have looked for God to appear in the time and place we have designated: here, when we are ready, when we are paying attention, where we have prepared space and time for God. In the church, in the Bible study, in the quiet of our hearts in prayer. I am surely not the first, nor the last, who has looked for God where I expected to find God, in places of honor and glory, but has forgotten to look for God among the lowest and the least. I had forgotten, for a while, but the silence changed everything. 

Six months after that strange day in the temple, Elizabeth waddled home, ushering along her tiny cousin Mary with a small round belly of her own. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She wasn’t married yet, and if Joseph had any sense he wouldn’t marry her now that she was disgraced. I worried that she’d come here to hide from her shame, that she’d want to stay with us permanently. I didn’t want our child, destined for greatness, mixed up with her child by God only knows who. Although I couldn’t give voice to my dismay, I’m sure my face told the whole story. 

In a moment alone, Elizabeth told me, her hushed voice thrumming with joy, how as Mary came up the road, Elizabeth and the child in her womb had recognized the Lord together. Our son had kicked and kicked as if dancing for joy, as both women, normally so reserved, had burst into song. Joseph, through divine intervention or foolish compassion, had not called off the wedding, so Mary would stay until our baby was born, and then make her way home. 

And so for three months I sat with the silence, as we all marveled at the things that were taking place among us. For three months I listened to the two of them talk, sharing stories and hopes and fears, trading notes on kicks and aches and pains. I listened to them talk, and I pondered it all in my heart. I pondered how God was working, silent and unseen, in the darkness of these two wombs, in the lives of these two women, in the heart of one silent man learning to really listen. I pondered the breath-taking divide between the God I had been looking for and the Living God who had showed up in my life, moving in such unexpected ways. I wondered to myself, sometimes, what I had missed by thinking I knew what God would not do, where God would not be. I wondered what I might have seen in my life if I had really taken to heart that nothing is impossible with God. I wondered what I might have heard if I had ever stopped talking and really listened as if God might still be speaking, anywhere and everywhere, in the words of my wife, the silence of the early morning, the still small voice which whispers in our hearts. 

Elizabeth’s time came, and she gave birth to a son, a beautiful son, a son who would prepare the way of the Lord. Eight days after the child was born, Elizabeth chose a name, the right name, the name told to me: John. I knew that there was no way she could have known the name I had heard that day in the temple, and I knew that Elizabeth had heard God in the silence as surely as I had heard God in the rushing wind and strange voice. I heard the joy in Elizabeth’s voice as she spoke our son’s name, and I heard the scorn of our relatives as they dismissed the name and turned to me. They thought I would contradict Elizabeth. But the silence had changed everything. “His name is John,” I wrote. The sensation of warm, pure light radiated from my fallow larynx, tingled up and down my spine, raised goosebumps on my flesh and poured out my eyes as tears. The silence broke into a thousand glittering pieces as a song of praise poured forth from my lips. 

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel 
For God has looked favorably upon God’s people, and has redeemed them. 
Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Flesh-Eating Gospel

Sermon on John 6:51-58

When I read this lesson, I groaned a little bit. And when I went online, I saw that I wasn’t alone. The facebook statuses and blog posts of my clergy friends reflected a shared sentiment: “The bread of life AGAIN?”

The readings we hear each week in church are generally not selected week-by-week by the pastors, but are based on a three-year cycle of readings called the Revised Common Lectionary. Each week has an assigned Gospel reading, an assigned epistle reading, and a couple of different options for Hebrew Scripture readings and Psalms. This year we are in the middle year of the cycle, Year B, and the summer of Year B has a certain reputation among preachers; week after week after week, we hear about bread: the Living Bread, the Bread of Life, the Bread of Heaven, the loaves and fishes.

This Sunday, we once again hear Jesus describing himself as bread. But today’s reading is a little different. Jesus starts out again talking about himself as living bread, but quickly transitions to inviting his listeners to eat his flesh and drink his blood, causing some of my less reverent clergy friends to refer to this week in the summer of bread of life readings as “Zombie-vampire-Jesus week.”

“The bread that I will give for the life of the world… IS MY FLESH.” Zombie vampire Jesus indeed.

Our culture is rather obsessed with zombies and vampires. From Buffy to True Blood to Twilight, George Romero movies to the AMC series “The Walking Dead,” we can’t seem to get enough of these creatures that are human-but-not-quite, feasting on the flesh and blood of the living. So when Jesus seems to invite us to go vampiric on the Son of Man, it feels a little uncomfortable. Our worlds are colliding, as the blessed savior’s words evoke entertainment we think of as scintillating, self-indulgent, and perhaps even irreligious. As I first read this passage, my first instinct was to dismiss the similarities, to try to banish those zombie-vampire overtones from my mind and read it from a purer, more spiritual place.

I’m not alone in that: the great reformer Martin Luther stated emphatically that it surely could not be meant in a literal sense. He goes on to say that the sort of flesh that Jesus invites us to eat is not “the sort of flesh from which red sausages are made,” “not flesh such as purchased in a butcher shop or is devoured by wolves and dogs.” Martin Luther rejects the “fleshiness” of the text, and of course he is right that the text is not a literal invitation to cannibalism.

Another option, which Martin Luther also rejects, is that this passage refers to the sacrament of communion. Many commentators turn toward this option: the bread which we bless and break and declare to one another, “this is the Body of Christ.” The wine which we sip or dip bread into, saying sometimes “the cup of blessing,” but sometimes “the blood of Christ, poured out for you.” Communion is mysterious, and it is sometimes puzzling, and there are different ways of thinking theologically about it, but for those of us who are accustomed to it as an old and familiar ritual, it is not creepy. When we hear this lesson as a foreshadowing of the last supper and the crucifixion, a teaching about communion, it isn’t creepy either.

But what if those creepy resonances between this passage and stories of zombies and vampires are more than coincidence? What if Jesus is intentionally tapping into some of the same deep fascinations and fears, the same taboos and terrors, that horror stories play upon?

After all, it is pretty clear that Jesus’ teaching is disconcerting and upsetting to the listening crowd. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they ask. Even the disciples, a couple of verses after the end of the reading we heard today, tell Jesus he’s on thin ice: “This teaching is difficult,” they say, “Who can accept it?” If we try to reinterpret this teaching so it is not difficult, if we try to find an easy way to hear it so we can accept it without struggle, perhaps we’ve missed the point.

Commentator William Willimon in the Feasting on the Word commentary notes that throughout the passage, Jesus moves from polite words about eating and drinking to ruder words that are more explicitly anatomical, words more aptly translated as “gulp down my flesh,” or “slurp my blood.” Jesus calls attention to the messy reality of eating, the fact that, when we eat, we mash up formerly living things between our teeth, moisten them with our saliva, swallow them into our guts. We can try to dress it up with white tablecloths and pretty plates and proper etiquette; we can chew with our mouths closed and keep our elbows off the table, but eating, at its heart, involves a lot of bodily processes that make many of us a little squeamish when we give them our full attention. When we pay attention to eating, we remember that we are living things, with bodies: muscle and fat, bones and connective tissue, nervous system, skin, nails. Bodies that are different, but not so very different, from the bodies that once made up our hamburgers or pork chops (for those of us who are not vegetarian). Giving our full attention to the processes of eating and drinking calls attention to our own mortality, our own fragility. In this passage, Jesus calls us to give them our full attention nonetheless. Because, as the grand statement at the beginning of John reminds us, in Jesus, the Word was made flesh.

The Word made flesh means that all of the nitty-gritty embarrassing details of having a body have been in-dwelt by divinity. The Word made flesh means that God created every intricate and repulsive detail, from an infant’s tiny curling toes and almost translucent toenails, to dandruff and acne, to aching joints and sore muscles, to the electrical impulses of nervous systems, to liver spots and graying hair. The Word made flesh means that through Jesus Christ, God has dwelt among us in a particular body, experiencing the mundane joys and irritations of physicality. The Word made flesh and dwelt among us, shattering every barrier between that which is physical and that which is spiritual.

In his book Accompany them with Singing, Thomas Long writes about the history and traditions of Christian funerals. Long notes that to the Greco-Roman worldview saw the spiritual and material worlds as completely separate; the prevailing culture surrounding the early church celebrated things related to spirit and intellect and condemned things related to physicality and fleshiness. Early Christians, however, saw an intricate and holy connection between spirit and flesh. Long writes about the ways early Christians puzzled Romans with ideas like the doctrine of the incarnation, and practices like communion, reflecting Christian theology that the spiritual and the physical were not separate spheres, but a unified creation. “The most bizarre of these activities, as far as the Romans were concerned,” Long continues, “was the Christian practice of burying the dead – not just their own dead, but the poor as well.” The early Christians, Long says, gave their time to help bury the poor, a practice their Roman peers found repugnant. They gathered up the bones of martyrs and made relics out of them. They treated dead bodies not as empty shells to be abandoned, but as created things to be disposed of with care. There were other practices, too, stemming from this theology: Diana Butler Bass writes that early Christians were also known for caring for the sick. When an epidemic took hold, she writes, most people who could would flee the city; but Christians stayed and cared for the ailing. They believed that the Word was made flesh; they believed that the resurrection means we need not fear death; they believed that caring for the ignored and despised is a high and holy calling. And they believed that they were nourished and sustained in these acts of service by Christ – whose flesh is true food.

Those beliefs are as counter-cultural today as they were two thousand years ago, although we live in a very different culture than that of the early church. And the call to take seriously the incarnation is as pressing and as counter-cultural today as it was two thousand years ago. Taking seriously the incarnation means working and hoping for justice and peace in the flesh, in the world. Not only spiritual peace in the hearts of the faithful while wars rage and gun violence escalates, but peace in the world. Not only justice by-and-by in the realm of God, but justice now, in this world, for living people: fair pay for a day’s work, access to resources and opportunities, and a government that serves the common good. If Jesus is the Word made flesh, living bread for the life of the world, then God’s call to us, this Body of Christ which we call the church, is to incarnate God’s will. To work and hope and pray for justice and kindness and peace and grace that is tangible; visible; incarnate.

“My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink,” Jesus says. In the creation of human bodies, in the incarnation, the Word made flesh, God enters into all of embodiment. Not just the parts of the human experience that are polite and pretty, not just the parts that are joyful and romantic. The messy parts and the icky parts and the parts that we don’t talk about in polite company.

“My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink,” Jesus says. He invites us to a faith that happens not just in our internal reflections, but with our hands and feet and voices. It is not always sunshine and roses when we visit a friend in the hospital. There are bed pans and hospital johnnys. It is not always easy to sit down and eat with someone we don’t know well. There are awkward silences and moments of conflict. When you embrace someone while they cry, you sometimes end up with snot on your shirt. That is what it means when God invites us to the messy and ugly business, the high and holy calling, of really caring for our neighbors, being part of the Body of Christ, the church, incarnating God’s love for the world.

“My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink,” Jesus says. It sounds creepy, and maybe it is. But it is necessary. Because we who are fed by this living bread have a high and holy calling: to love God and our neighbor; to do justice and love kindness. And in that hard work, we are truly nourished and sustained by Jesus Christ – not always tangibly, but truly. We could not do it if we were merely metaphorically sustained by God. We could not do it if Christ loved us abstractly. We can do it only because we are fed by the Body of Christ – the Body of Christ which we know truly, though not always tangibly, through scripture and prayer and community – nourishing and sustaining each of us. And for that real sustenance, thanks be to God. Amen.

How to Give a Benediction

A Guide for the Perplexed 

I wrote and posted this because I once needed an article like this and couldn’t find one. 

Perhaps you’re in your first call, or doing an internship in a congregation. The hymns are chosen, the liturgy is written, your sermon is ready to go. Just smooth sailing and pastoral presence in front of you, right? Nope. 

The benediction used to take me by surprise every single time I led worship. Unlike most of the liturgy, it can’t be typed in advance, printed out, and read out loud (I do this with many things including my pastoral prayers – it makes worship less spontaneous for me, but a better experience for the congregation.) Unlike the unscripted parts of worship (e.g. announcements), it calls for a certain gravitas, which can be hard to summon up when you’re standing there trying to think of what you were going to say. Frankly, it can be daunting. But fear not! If I can get this figured out, you will be fine. 

First of all: take a deep breath and remember what an incredible gift it is to bless these people and send them out into the world. Wow, right? Let that show on your face. 

Walk out until you are as close as possible while still being visible to everyone. Stand up straight. Stretch your arms out around shoulder level with your palms facing the congregation. Stretch them out farther. Try to accept that this does not make you look silly. Imagine that the power of God is flowing through you – it is. 

Now, say something. I give my benedictions in three sections: 

1. A brief charge. Send them out to do something. It can be as simple as “Go forth to love and serve.” Or it can be a reiteration of the message of the sermon. Or it can connect to the final hymn. Extra style points if you use a little rhetorical flourish. 
2. A blessing. This isn’t something for them to do, it is a prayer for God’s blessing on them. Memorize this one, or say something as brief as “May the love of Christ surround you, today and every day.” 
3. Invoke the trinity (if this is appropriate to your setting) or another way of naming God. I say, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit – one God, Mother of us all. Amen.” Wait to hear “Amen!” 

Lower your arms; don’t look sheepish; don’t think about logistics – you can find your papers later; exit gracefully.

Safety Second

A Sermon on Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Safety second!”

That’s what my friends and I would say to each other in seminary. “Hey, I just got this bike… do you think I’m fine to bicycle through Times Square at rush hour?” “Safety second!” “Wait, how does this grill work again? Am I supposed to use lighter fluid?” “Be careful! Safety second!”

It wasn’t a great joke – we were seminary students, not comedians – but the joke was based on the unstated but implied priority, “God first.” Whenever we heard someone who wasn’t in on the joke say “safety first,” we got a kick out of correcting them. “Safety first!” “No, safety second.” Unveiling the “God first” punch line was especially fun if we were talking to a seminary professor or a field education supervisor.

So imagine my joy when my eight-year-old stepson, staying with his dad and me for the month of July, put on his helmet before a scooter ride and remarked, “Safety first.” I taught him the “safety second” joke, and he had a great time sharing it with everyone from my colleague the senior pastor to his vacation bible camp leaders to strangers on the subway. He had some questions about whether God and safety ever actually conflict with each other – whether it is ever actually necessary to choose between “God first” and “safety second.” My stepson enjoys stories of heroes and martyrs who do actually choose God over safety, but we noticed that in our everyday lives, “God first” and “safety second” usually coexist with little tension.

Our Gospel text for today raises questions of what it means to put God first, even as Jesus, in his encounter with the scribes and Pharisees, puts safety second. Our cycle of readings is taking us, step by step, through the life of Jesus as told in the Gospel according to Mark; the last few weeks included a brief detour into the Gospel of John to hear several lessons about Jesus as Living Bread. This week, we return from the Living Bread to the more mundane type of bread, as we find ourselves with Jesus and the disciples eating a meal in the land of Gennesaret, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And around them are Pharisees and scribes who have come from Jerusalem.

Until I traveled in Israel, I didn’t completely understand the significance of the place names in the Gospels. In particular, traveling in Israel gave me the opportunity to grasp the contrast between the Galilee, where Jesus grew up and began his ministry, and Jerusalem, where he spent his last days and was crucified. The Galilee is a region in the northern part of contemporary Israel, named for its body of water, the Sea of Galilee, which is actually a large-ish lake. To give you a bit of a sense, bicycling around the Sea of Galilee is a popular tourist activity, which takes about a day. To this day, the Galilee is a rural area, with rolling hills and lots of agricultural fields and pastures. Nazareth, the town in the Galilee region where Jesus grew up, is definitely a town, but not a big one, with a couple of bustling streets and a small market.

Jerusalem, by way of contrast, is definitively urban, and was in Jesus’ time as well. The city’s boundaries have expanded since New Testament days, but the center remains similar, a labyrinth of stone streets in a covered market where you could -- and I did -- get lost for hours. As it was in Jesus’ time, it remains a center both of religious observance and of religious and political tension. It is that religious and political tension that will lead to Jesus’ crucifixion, and so when these Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem appear in the bucolic hills of the Galilee, the fact that they have come from Jerusalem is much more than a little geographical tidbit. It is a warning sign that Jesus is starting to get the attention of the religious authorities, and not in a good way.

As soon as these scribes and Pharisees appear on the scene, they have a pointed question, a veiled accusation, for Jesus regarding the disciples, who are eating the meal with unwashed hands. To twenty-first century listeners, people in an age where the existence of germs is widely known, and the sources of germs are widely understood, eating with dirty hands sounds mostly like a safety and hygiene issue. It is a bad idea, but not for the same reasons that the scribes and Pharisees would have considered it unacceptable.

 The Pharisees were members of a religious movement within Judaism, a movement which we honestly don’t know much about. There was a lot of tension between the early Christian tradition and the Pharisees, because both were newish religious movements within Judaism that were open to everyday people, not just the religious elite. The tension between the two movements means that early Christian documents are not considered to be particularly objective, and few other documents mention the Pharisees, so it’s hard to know much about them for sure. The scribes, however, we do know about – they would have been scholarly members of the religious elite. When Jesus attacks them with an accusation of “honoring God with their lips” but not their hearts, he is attacking people who have a lot of power and influence – pretty clearly putting safety second.

For the Pharisees and scribes, failing to wash one’s hands before eating would have been a religious violation: much of Jewish religious practice at the time focused on ritual purity and impurity, and early Christian sources seem to suggest this was a particularly true for the Pharisees. Ritual purity is not about germs and hygiene; it is a different kind of thing entirely – a fact which is illuminated by the verb Mark uses to describe the ritual washing of cups, pots, and kettles: baptizo, to baptize. It is not so much about making things clean of dirt and debris as it is about making things clean in the eyes of God. Observing ritual purity regulations, for the scribes and Pharisees, was a matter of putting God first in one’s daily life and actions; they are scandalized by the disciples’ failure to observe ritual hand-washing practices.

If we don’t pay careful attention, stories like this one can sound like indictments of Judaism and the Jewish tradition, at least as it was practiced at the time. It is easy to hear that tired old theme of Jesus freeing us from the onerous and arbitrary restrictions of the law. But that’s not what this text is saying, or what Jesus is doing. The Gospel accounts make it clear that Jesus knows the law; he quotes the Old Testament with ease, and interprets it with authority. And he knows that there is no religious law or that mandates the washing of hands before meals. That tradition is an old custom by this time, but not part of the Mosaic law. Jesus quotes Isaiah to the scribes and Pharisees, saying that they are, in the words of Isaiah, “teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

The hand-washing tradition is a fine religious observance, I would say also a fine hygienic practice (although ritual washing, like baptism, generally involved a sprinkling of water rather than a good scrub with soap). However, this religious custom that had originated as a way of practicing faith had come to be used as a way of judging, criticizing, and categorizing other people. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus names and rejects many, many religious and social systems that were used to label, demean, and exclude, from ritual washing to temple donations to leprosy. And in many cases, these systems were deeply tied to socioeconomic status: the wealthy and well-born are in, the poor are out.

Our society, too, has a fair number of practices and customs that separate people from one another. We know a few things about labeling and judging. Probably most of us have been on both sides of that coin. From teenage obsession over having the “right” brand of jeans or shoes to the subtle nuances of business attire, our clothing often serves to communicate identity and social status; whether we or not we judge the apparel of others, we are often sized up based on our clothing. The ways we use language, too, whether it’s oral or written, can mark us as younger or older, more or less educated, “from here” or “not from here” in ways that can be used to reinforce racism and xenophobia, sexism, ageism, and class discrimination.

These norms, practices, and customs, from how we speak to what we eat to how we spend our time, sometimes serve to separate “us” from “them,” and to reinforce notions of hierarchy and superiority. This week, more people watched the television show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo than the Republican National Convention. “Honey Boo Boo,” for those not in the know, is a seven-year-old pageant princess from a family that proudly identifies as “red necks.” Their outrageous antics have earned them their own spin-off from the show where they first appeared, Toddlers and Tiaras. The television show has been criticized for the way it portrays this low-income, rural, mostly overweight family; one reviewer notes that the show attempts to make the Thompson family an object of scorn, “something to point and snicker at.” While the audience watches in horror and judgment at the family’s rural Southern culture, others judge the audience for tuning in to such garbage, while some turn up their noses at anyone who even has a television. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of scorn, judgment, and superiority both directed toward and coming from the Republican National Convention.

In the face of all of this, Jesus calls us to a different way, calls us away from judging and labeling, away from hierarchy and arrogance, away from “us” and “them.” Jesus declares that no outward customs – nothing we can see – can “defile,” or make a person less acceptable to God. Instead, he says, “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” Friends, the only human heart we can really know is our own.  Since the only heart we can truly know is our own, we have no choice but to turn from judging the behavior of others to focusing on our own habits of mind or heart. We have no choice but to turn from the superficial differences which separate us to the love of God which unites us and calls us away from scorn and arrogance, and toward repentance and renewal.

That is precisely what we try to do, what we are invited to do, when we come to the communion table. We experience, for a moment, a table where all are welcome and no one is turned away, a table where there is no “us” and no “them.” We experience, for a moment, a meal where rich folks and poor folks and somewhere-in-the-middle folks receive the same bread and the same cup, gifts of love from the same God. We practice a ritual that has been practiced all over the world for centuries, with many kinds of bread and many different words and many different practices, all of which are good and acceptable to God, because all of them come from good intention, all come from the intention to put God first. And we experience the grace of God, who knows the intentions of our hearts, who invites us to cultivate the good and let go of the bad, and who welcomes us back to the table every time.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.