Author: J. Barrett Lee

The Way That We See

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Sermon for the Last Sunday of Epiphany, Year B

The text is Mark 9:2-9.

Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn penned the following lyrics in his song, Child of the Wind:

Little round planet in a big universe:
sometimes it looks blessed, sometimes it looks cursed.
Depends on what you look at, obviously,
but even more it depends on the way that you see.

(Bruce Cockburn, Child of the Wind)

The way that we see things matters. Our worldview matters. Some see the world as a battleground between us and them, the haves and the have-nots, the fit and the unfit, or the good guys and the bad guys. What matters, according to this worldview, is ensuring that our side wins and the other side loses.

Some see the world as a meaningless conglomeration of matter and energy that is ultimately indifferent to the needs and wants of individual human beings. What matters, according to this worldview, is imposing our will and our ingenuity onto the chaos and forcing it to satisfy our desires.

The Christian worldview does not see the world in either of these ways. As Christians, we follow the guidance of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who teaches that our Father in heaven “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Later on, Jesus says, “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (6:26) and, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these” (28-29).

Jesus sees the universe as a good place that is constantly being created and cared for by God. According to the creation stories in the book of Genesis, which Jesus grew up reading, God created a wonderfully good universe, formed humankind in the divine image, and placed us in the world in order to help care for this beautiful place. Anyone who has read the account of the life and teachings of Jesus in the gospels knows that Jesus is not blind or indifferent to the complicated realities of conflict and suffering, but he regards all of that as secondary to the central truth of a good God who created a good world and continues to sustain it in love.

The fourteenth century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, was the first woman to write a book in English. While lying sick in bed and near death, Julian describes her own experience of the kind of worldview that Jesus wanted to instill in his followers.

Julian writes that God

“showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought: What can this be? And I was given this general answer: It is everything which is made. I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”

(Showings, IV)

The way that Julian and Jesus see the world is very different from the way that nationalists, terrorists, and other fanatics see the world. For Julian and Jesus, there is no struggle between us and them, no cosmic indifference to suffering, because there is only the God whose name is Love.

In today’s gospel, we get to see the beginning of the Christian worldview taking root in the minds of Jesus’ disciples, Ss. Peter, James, and John. We read that Jesus takes these three friends up a mountain and there, far away from the bustling crowds, “he was transfigured before them” (Mark 9:2). The text of Mark’s gospel only describes the change in his clothes, which “became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them” (3). While this might sound like the beginning of a commercial for laundry detergent, no sales pitch was forthcoming. The gospel writers preserved this story in order to express the way they saw Jesus. For them, Jesus was more than just a good man or a wise teacher; he was full of divine radiance. In later centuries, the bishops of the Church would develop this experience into the doctrine we now know as the divinity of Christ. One of the things that makes Christianity unique among the religions of the world is that we find God in a person. In Judaism and Islam, Moses and Muhammad are respected as prophets who proclaim the divine message, but in Christianity, Jesus Christ is the message itself. Through the story of the Transfiguration, we begin to see God in Jesus and, through Jesus, we begin to see God everywhere else.

Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the mystery of the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, we take grain and grapes that have been shaped into bread and wine. This means that, when our ushers present the elements at the altar, they are symbolically offering to God the fruits of the Earth and the genius of human labor. Every wheat stalk and grapevine, every farm worker and truck driver, every hillside and highway are already present on the church’s altar, even before the prayer of consecration has even begun. The Offertory in our liturgy is, not simply a moment for fundraising, but a giving back to God of everything that God has given to us.

Once the priest has received this offering, she blesses it and offers it back to us as the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ. Then we, the people of the Church, rise and gather around the altar to receive Christ. In that moment, it no longer matters who is rich or poor, male or female, black or white, gay or straight, cis or trans, conservative or liberal, Israeli or Palestinian, Ukrainian or Russian. The only truth that matters, in that moment, is that the Body of Christ I receive into my body is the same Body of Christ that you receive into your Body, therefore “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). This is what I mean when I say: Through the story of the Transfiguration, we begin to see God in Jesus and, through Jesus, we begin to see God everywhere else.

The way that we see things matters. When our worldview is shaped by religious fundamentalism or secular atheism, we will see the world as a battle over who is right. When our worldview is shaped by the class warfare of Marxism or the market forces of capitalism, we will see the world as an endless fight for survival. But when our worldview is shaped by the Gospel, our Transfigured Lord will show us a transfigured world that glows brightly with the radiance of God.

I think about the story of the Transfiguration whenever I am outside in the evening and happen to catch those glorious moments near sunset, when all the trees and buildings seem to be shining with a golden light. I feel like I have to stop and make the sign of the cross because it seems like God is granting us a moment, however brief, when we get to see the world the way God sees it all the time.

I think also of another moment of transfiguration, that took place on a busy streetcorner in Kentucky. It was recorded by a 20th century monk named Thomas Merton.

He writes:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being [human], a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

(Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 156-157)

Friends, the way that we see things matters. I encourage you this week to draw inspiration from Thomas Merton and Julian of Norwich. I invite you to attend deeply to our next celebration of the Eucharist. Above all, I urge you to be followers of Jesus, to see the world as he sees it, full of divine glory. May this Christlike way of seeing transfigure you from the inside out and lead you out to transfigure this world in the name of God, whose name is Love, and in the name of Love, whose name is God.

Amen.

Quiet On The Inside

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Sermon for Epiphany 3 / Religious Life Sunday.

Several years ago, while serving as pastor to a Presbyterian congregation, I did something that I am not proud of. I worked tirelessly, day and night, to be faithful in my calling as a minister. I worked so hard, in fact, that I worked myself right into a hospital bed… not once but twice.

I was driven to work that hard by anxieties that are common among the clergy of small parishes: aging buildings, shrinking budgets, and low attendance. I thought that, if I was really a good pastor, the parking lot would be overflowing, donations would be pouring in, and the church would have to build an extra wing just to accommodate all the new people joining with their families. The fact that these things weren’t happening made me feel afraid that I was failing at my job, failing the people I loved at my church, and most of all failing God.

I compensated for this fear by working as long and as hard I possibly could, beyond what was good for my health, sometimes staying in my office until 2 o’clock in the morning. “If I, as their pastor, just worked harder,” or so I thought, “then the church would be doing better.”

This line of faulty reasoning is not unique to clergy. People who work in every conceivable field, from education, to healthcare, to law, to business, and to government, all of us are subject to the endless social pressure to perform, achieve, and succeed. The market-driven economy of our society operates under the unwritten rule and unspoken assumption that the value of a person’s life depends on that person’s ability to produce and succeed on an economic level. The fact that we even use monetary words like “value” and “worth” to describe human dignity is a sign of how deeply this avaricious mindset has infiltrated into our collective unconscious.

This state of affairs is nothing new. Throughout human history, the temptation has always been there to mistake function for identity when considering the quality of human life. The author of our psalm this morning, Psalm 62, talks about their own experience in noticing the capricious ebb and flow of fortune on the stormy sea of the economy. The psalmist writes, “Those of high degree are but a fleeting breath, even those of low estate cannot be trusted. On the scales they are lighter than a breath, all of them together” (Psalm 62:10-11).

In the very next verse, the psalmist goes on to describe the kinds of moral temptation that arise when we try to measure life with the ruler of economic achievement: “Put no trust in extortion; in robbery take no empty pride; though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it” (12). What we can see here is a person of faith desperately trying to navigate the ship of conscience through the stormy seas of moral dilemmas. 

The good news in this psalm is that the psalmist has discovered a still center and a firm foundation beneath the chaotic waves of life’s surface. The psalmist writes, “[God] alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, so that I shall not be shaken. In God is my safety and my honor; God alone is my strong rock and my refuge” (7-8). We can hear echoes of this psalm in the nineteenth century Mariners’ Hymn by William Whiting, which states:

“Most Holy Spirit, who didst brood upon the chaos dark and rude,
and bid its angry tumult cease, and give, for wild confusion, peace;
O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.”

The Hymnal 1982, #608

The societal anxiety that drives us to mental burnout and moral compromise is founded on the fear that, beneath the chaos of life’s waters, there is nothing but the darkness of an empty void. Psalm 62 urges us to realize that this is a lie. God is present in the stillness beneath the surface; this is why the psalmist commands, “Put your trust in him always, O people” (9).

This is the same point that Jesus makes, in our gospel this morning, when he says, “The kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15). An earlier translation of this verse renders it as, “the kingdom of God is at hand” (KJV, emphasis mine). I invite you now to hold your hand out in front of you and repeat those words out loud. One of the names we frequently apply to Jesus in the Christmas season, “Emmanuel,” literally translates from the Hebrew as, “God is with us.” God is with us; God’s kingdom is at hand, as Jesus himself has said.

The stupefying truth that Jesus is communicating here is that the God we believe in is not some distant entity, but a very present reality. St. Augustine of Hippo picked up this line of thought when he prayed to God, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part” (Confessions 3.6.11). In another place, St. Augustine also prays, “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (Confessions 1.1.1).

Psalm 62 agrees with Augustine in proclaiming, “For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, my hope is in him” (Psalm 62:6). This is a confusing statement, given what we have just said about the nearness of God’s presence. How can one wait for someone who is already present?

Imagine that you were to see me in town one day, standing on a street corner, next to our priest. You walk up and ask me what I’m doing and I reply, “Waiting for the priest to get here.” I would not blame you, in that moment, if you then told me that I needed to get my eyes (or my head) examined. You might tell me, “Turn around, Barrett; she’s right there!”

That kind of turning around is what Jesus means, in Mark 1:15, when he tells his followers to “repent.” Many have come to associate that word with guilt and sorrow for one’s sins, but the Greek term used here, Metanoia, is best translated as, “Change your mind.” Its Hebrew equivalent, Teshuvah, literally means, “Turn around.”

What Jesus is inviting us to do in this gospel is change the way we think about God and realize that, beneath the chaotic waters of life’s surface, God is already present with us in the stillness. As Augustine has already told us, God is more present to us than we are to ourselves. What the psalmist calls us to “wait” for then is not the arrival of God, but the realization that God is already here.

My own realization of this presence came after my second trip to the hospital with stress-related illness. I realized then that, if I was going to survive in life and ministry, I needed to find a more grounded and balanced way of living. The only people I was aware of who knew how to do that were monks.

A quick search on the internet revealed that St. Gregory’s Abbey, an Episcopal Benedictine monastery, was located in the city of Three Rivers, just forty minutes away from my house. I booked a week-long retreat as quickly as I could. During that first week at St. Gregory’s, chanting and meditating with the monks, I learned for the first time what it feels like to be quiet on the inside. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

What I began to learn in the monastery that week is the meaning of the psalmist’s proclamation, “For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, my hope is in him” (Psalm 62:6). By letting myself drop below life’s chaotic surface, I found the presence of God in the stillness. The Benedictine way of spirituality changed the way I pastored my congregation, the way I parent my children, the way I relate to my spouse, and the way I live my life.

I made it my mission to visit the monastery as often as I could and bring its way of life home with me, as much as possible. After several years, I made a permanent commitment to that community, not as a monk but as an oblate. An oblate, for those who may not be familiar with the term, is someone who would be a monk, but is prevented by some kind of lifelong commitment (like marriage). As a husband and father with a full-time job, I am not able to rise at four o’clock every morning and pause to attend church services every three hours, but I am able to keep the spirit of the monastery alive in me by pausing for prayer and silence at the beginning and end of each day. I have found that the guidance of the Rule of St. Benedict is just as helpful for busy parents as it is for monks. Through the monks at St. Gregory’s Abbey, I managed to stay out of the hospital and found the kind of balance I had been looking and longing for.

Today, on the third Sunday of Epiphany, The Episcopal Church encourages its parishes to celebrate Religious Life Sunday. This is a day when we give thanks and pray for the many orders of monks and nuns in The Episcopal Church. St. Gregory’s Abbey, by far the closest, is just about an hour away from here in Three Rivers. There are many other communities, each with their own unique identity and calling: The Order of St. Helena, the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Order of the Holy Cross, and the Community of St. Mary, just to name a few.

What these communities all have in common is their commitment to follow Jesus and live out the words of today’s psalmist: “For God alone my soul in silence waits.”

I encourage you to learn about these communities and remember them in your prayers.

Above all, dear friends, I encourage you today to look beneath the chaos of life’s surface and find there, in the stillness, the living heartbeat of God, who is more present to you than you are to yourself. May your discovery of this presence bring you peace and balance as you continue to navigate the troubled waters of this life.

Amen.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

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Sermon for the fourth week of Advent.

Click here to read the biblical text.

Our gospel on this last Sunday of Advent recounts the well-known tale of the Annunciation, where the archangel Gabriel announces to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she is destined to be the mother of Jesus, God’s Son. Over the past two millennia, this story has been told and retold so many times that it can be hard to comprehend its intended emotional impact. To modern ears, the Annunciation is a sweet and tender introduction to the even sweeter story of the Nativity. But can you imagine how it must have sounded to Ss. Anne and Joaquim, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary?

Biblical scholars estimate that Mary would have been about fifteen years old at the time of the Annunciation, a typical marriage age for young women at that time. As the father of a fifteen-year-old at this time, I can keenly imagine how Anne and Joachim must have felt when they first heard the news of Gabriel’s visit.

Mary: “Mom? Dad?”

Anne and Joaquim: “Yes sweetheart, what is it?”

M: “Umm… I need to tell you something. I’m pregnant and my fiancé Joseph isn’t the father.”

The biblical text doesn’t tell us anything about Anne and Joaquim’s reaction, but I imagine they probably felt angry and terrified at the same time, which is completely understandable. This news would have been the embodiment of their worst nightmares for their daughter. Also, what Mary had to say next probably didn’t help them feel any better. How would you feel if your teenage daughter hit you with this news and followed it up with a crazy-sounding story about angels and prophecies? I imagine them pacing the floor, rubbing their temples, and asking, “How could this happen?! What were you thinking?!”

At this moment, Anne and Joaquim probably felt their stomach dropping and their mind racing. This is the feeling of their sympathetic nervous system kicking into high gear. The amygdala in their brain was, flooding their bodies with adrenaline to initiate the fight or flight response. If you’ve ever had the experience of someone shocking you with big news, you can probably relate to what they were feeling.

Mary herself seems to have been quite confused by what was going on. The gospel text tells us she was “perplexed” and asking, “How can this be?” This too is a completely understandable reaction, given the circumstances. Here was a teenage kid, in way over her head, with almost no life experience to guide her.

The response I find most interesting is the one that comes from the archangel Gabriel. The first words out of his mouth are, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” In modern language, I like to imagine that this is the equivalent of, “Congratulations!” The next thing Gabriel says is, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” And finally, after explaining the situation, Gabriel ends by saying, “For nothing will be impossible with God.”

While the humans in this moment are understandably perplexed and freaking out, the angel is the only one responding from a calm place of acceptance and hopeful possibilities. 

In scientific terms, this is akin to the wonderful human ability for the prefrontal cortex of our brains to override the baser impulses of our fight/flight system. You’ve probably experienced this as well, such as those moments when some reckless driver cuts you off in traffic and you successfully resist the urge to run them off the road. You remember, in that moment, that you are going seventy miles an hour in a thousand pounds of metal. After an instant of panic, your rational faculties kick back in and you remember that going to jail will not remedy the situation. 

This is how God has designed our brains. We can choose how to respond when circumstances arise that are less than ideal. We can fly off the handle or we can take a deep breath. We can descend to the level of our basic instincts or we can appeal to “the better angels of our nature,” as President Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it in his inaugural address of 1861.

The astounding truth of this biblical story, which emerges when we look past two thousand years of pious nostalgia, is that God has chosen to save the world through the unplanned pregnancy of an unwed teenage mother. “For nothing will be impossible with God,” as the angel Gabriel has said.

Whether one is talking about teen pregnancy, gun violence, or any other number of social problems that presently plague our society, a common refrain among religious people is that these things are happening because “we’ve kicked God out of our country.” But, if two millennia of Christian theology are to be believed (and I think they are), then this teen pregnancy is the exact place where God has chosen to be most present to our world. This realization should shape the way we choose to respond to pregnant teenagers and any other persons who find themselves in circumstances that are less than ideal. 

One of the collects at Compline, the nighttime office from The Book of Common Prayer, reads as follows: 

“Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

BCP, p. 133

This prayer is immediately followed by the following prayer for mission: 

“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.”

BCP, p. 134

What I love most about these prayers, which are meant to be said just before retiring at night, is how they insist on the presence of God in the most troubling of times and call upon God’s people to participate in the mission of reconciling heaven and earth by caring for each other.

God is most present, not in sweet moments of peace and plenty, but in hard times of want and woe. God comes to us in our hour of need, often through the hands and hearts of caring people, and grows within us. The Divine Word takes on flesh, using the DNA of our own cells, so that we might be the hands and feet of Christ on this Earth. This is the message of Christmas.

The message of Advent, our season of unexpected pregnancy, is to care well for the Christ that grows within us by caring well for the Christ that grows within those around us.

Wherever we go in this life, we find ourselves as divinely favored people in the midst of unfavorable circumstances. We cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we choose to respond to it. Will we fall prey to the demons of panic and despair? Or will we listen to “the better angels of our nature” and declare, as Gabriel did, that “nothing will be impossible with God”?

I have no doubt that you, during this holiday season, will find yourself in the midst of circumstances that are less than ideal. They may be as major as an unexpected pregnancy, a tragic loss, or a global crisis. On the other hand, they may be as minor as a burnt dinner, a delayed flight, or a traffic jam. Wherever you find yourself this Christmas, I encourage you to listen to “the better angels of your nature” by trusting in God’s presence, caring well for yourselves and each other, and responding to these crises, large or small, with the calm compassion of the archangel Gabriel, saying:

Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you…
Do not be afraid… For nothing will be impossible with God.”

Let It Shine

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

Sermon for Proper 28, Year A.

The text is Matthew 25:14-30.

Our gospel this morning is Jesus’ parable of the talents. It’s a tricky passage because we easily miss several of the subtle cultural cues when we try to read this ancient Middle Eastern document through modern North American eyes. So, instead of beginning this homily with a witty anecdote, I’d like to dive right into the text and retell the story in a more modern setting that gives us a better sense of the emotional vibe that Jesus is going for in this parable.

Imagine with me, if you will, that you are the main character in a gangster movie. I’m talking about movies like The Godfather, Scarface, and The Sopranos. For the younger people here, who probably haven’t seen those movies, I’d like you to imagine the scenes with Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

In this movie, you play the role of a working-class immigrant who sold the family farm in Sicily and began a new life in America. Once here, you fell on hard times and found yourself deep in debt to a local mobster. In order to work off this debt, you are now in the employ of this mafia boss. The problem is that, while you are working off your debt, you have to keep borrowing more money to pay the bills. Therefore, you are stuck in a vicious cycle of never-ending debt that will keep you enslaved to this wealthy mobster for the rest of your life.

Late one evening, you get a call from the boss to meet him in a back alley at midnight. Once you get there, the boss’ limousine pulls up. His consigliere gets out, with a toothpick in his mouth and a fedora pulled down over his eyes.

He opens the back door of the limousine and says, “Get in.”

Obeying, you sit down to find yourself face-to-face with your mafia boss. If you’re imagining the old gangster movies, this guy is the Marlon Brando character; if you’re imagining Star Wars, this guy is Jabba the Hutt. He’s rich, powerful, and very corrupt. If you get on his bad side, he’s the kind of guy who could make you disappear, never to be heard from again. In short: this is not a guy you want to mess around with.

He says to you, “Today’s your lucky day, kid. Some shady deals went bad, so I gotta get outta town and lay low for awhile. I’m leaving you in charge of the business while I’m gone and entrusting you with this.”

He picks up a briefcase and opens it. Inside, the briefcase is filled to the brim with neatly bound stacks of hundred dollar bills. This is more money than you’ve ever seen in your life. It would take you more than twenty years, not including your basic living expenses, to earn this much money.

The boss continues, “I’m holding you personally responsible for every penny in this briefcase. If it’s not here when I get back, I’m gonna send the boys around to bust your kneecaps!”

At this point, you have a difficult decision to make. You can’t refuse the money because the boss has decided you will be responsible for it, whether you want it or not. If you use it to run the boss’ loan shark business, and all goes well, you’ll be able to move up in the organization and might even make enough to someday pay off your debts to the boss. If it doesn’t go well, and you lose the money, you’ll find yourself on the bad side of a very dangerous person. The stakes are extremely high.

As a smart person, you decide you’re not taking any chances with this guy’s money, so you take the briefcase down to the bank, rent a safety deposit box, and leave the briefcase there until the boss gets back. You might not make any money but, by playing it safe, at least you know you won’t lose any either. It seems like the best option, given the circumstances.

I’m retelling the story in this way to create some empathy for the third enslaved person in Jesus’ parable. To the original hearers of this parable, it would have sounded and felt very much like a gangster movie. More than that, they might very well know real-life people to whom this had happened. They would not have blamed the third enslaved person one bit for playing it safe and burying the talent. The stakes were unbelievably high.

The question is this: Why does Jesus tell this story as a symbol for how we are going to build the kind of world we want to live in?

Jesus is being intentionally provocative. To his original listeners, this story would have sounded like the exact opposite of the compassion and justice that Jesus had demonstrated and taught about during his earthly ministry. Why then is he telling this story now? That’s the question his listeners would have been asking.

To answer this question, we need to look at the context in which Jesus originally told this parable.

The parable of the talents appears in the last section of Jesus’ final sermon in Matthew’s gospel. This sermon begins in chapter 23, with Jesus calling out the hypocrisy of religious leaders in his culture. It continues with the second section in chapter 24, where Jesus describes, in very apocalyptic terms, how the old social order (i.e. “the way we’ve always done things”) is no longer sustainable and doomed to eventual failure. In this final section, chapter 25, Jesus tells three parables about how we are going to build a new social order to replace the old failed system. Last week, we read the parable of the bridesmaids, which is about being prepared to welcome the new social reality when it comes. Next week, we will hear the parable of the sheep and the goats, which gets into specifics about what this new community will look like. In this new social reality, which Jesus calls “the kingdom of heaven”, the hungry and thirsty will be fed, the naked will be clothed, and the sick and imprisoned will be cared for. This week, we are reading the parable of the talents, which is about taking risks and making the most of what we’ve been given.

Too often in life, we humans sell ourselves short. We mistake our feelings of insecurity for the truth about who we really are. When we look in the mirror, we see ourselves as weak when, in reality, we are strong. We see ourselves as stupid when, in reality, we are smart. We see ourselves as ugly when, in reality, we are beautiful. Many of us develop these inferiority complexes as coping mechanisms for dealing with fear in an uncertain world.

The problem comes when these psychological programs for safety lead us to degrade ourselves to the point where we reject the treasure we’ve been given in ourselves, instead of using those gifts to build the kind of world we want to live in. Like the frightened character in Jesus’ parable, we bury our talent and comfort ourselves with the belief that we can’t fail if we don’t try. To think like this, according to Jesus, is to have already failed.

As human beings, we cannot refuse the reality of our changing circumstances, nor can we refuse the divine treasure that is in us. If we choose to ignore either of these realities, we will only succeed in excluding ourselves from the new world that God is creating through us.

In 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, there has never before existed a person like you. If we are to believe what Scripture teaches, that each unique person is made in the divine image, then you reflect the glory of God in a way that has never been seen before, and never will be again.

Every aspect of who you are, from your ethnicity to your gender identity, to your sexual orientation, to your disabilities, to your upbringing, to your education, to your skills, to your experiences, even to your traumas and your mistakes, all of these are tools that God has given you for the building of a better world.

Jesus called this better “the kingdom of heaven” and it has nothing to do with the afterlife. (If you don’t believe me, just pay attention later in this liturgy, when we say the Lord’s prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”) The kingdom of heaven is Jesus’ vision of the way this world should be, could be, and will be, in God’s time. It is a world where the power of love overcomes the love of power, where the hungry and thirsty are fed, the naked are clothed, and the sick and imprisoned are cared for.

This kingdom of heaven, Jesus’ vision for the world, is the greatest of all the treasures that God has given us. Some of that treasure has been entrusted to you. What is it? Think about your life, and all the unique things that make you who you are. How might you take those specific gifts and use them for the building up of the kingdom of heaven on earth? That’s your homework assignment for this week.

There’s only one rule: You’re not allowed to say, “Nothing,” or, “I’m nobody special.” The plain fact is that, in all of history, there has never before existed anyone like you. You are the unique product of several billion years of evolutionary success and divine creativity. That’s a fact.

(NOTE: Even if you could somehow prove that you aren’t at all special, that fact alone would make you special, because I’ve never met anyone who isn’t special before.)

Don’t bury your talent; dig it up. I want you to take that treasure within you and use it to make a better world than the one we live in today. I want you to hold it high, for all to see, and I want you to sing with me:

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!

Beholding and Becoming

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

Sermon for the Feast of All Saints

The text is 1 John 3:1-3.

As a dad to a teenager and a pre-teen, I aim to be “firm but fair” when it comes to media consumption. Like many parents, Sarah and I worry about the amount of sex and violence that our kids are watching on TV. An additional concern, which didn’t exist when I was a kid, is the kind of radical misinformation that can come to our kids through social media and the internet. I know we are not alone in this concern.

A number of years ago, I was listening to an interview with a Muslim scholar who had written a book on Islamic extremism. The news reporter asked this scholar if people should be worried that a new mosque was opening in their city. The scholar said, “No. Research has shown that regular attendance at mosque is a moderating factor, when it comes to extremism.” So, the reporter asked, “Where then are these young people getting radicalized by groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda?” And the scholar answered, “On the internet.”

My wife Sarah and I have regular conversations with our kids about internet safety and how to critically evaluate the supposed “information” to which they are being exposed online. Like any good parents, we want our kids to be smart and safe, so they can live healthy and happy lives in this world where mass media is never more than a few clicks away.

This is not just a problem for parents and kids. After the horrifying terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, media companies realized they could boost their ratings (and thereby make money) by keeping people glued to their screens with images that provoke fear and rage. Thus began the era of “doom-scrolling” wherein a person can lose hours of time, clicking on article after article and video after video about how the world will come to an end, if the next election doesn’t go the way they want it to go. Political polarization skyrockets as more citizens become convinced that every vote is a “battle for the soul of this country.”

In the world of dietary health, a common maxim is, “you are what you eat.” By this, nutritionists mean to say that the substances we eat eventually get metabolized into the molecules that make up our bodies, so we had better make sure that the food we eat is healthy and nutritious. I would agree with that statement. And I would add that the substance of our mental diet is just as important as the substance of our physical diet. In the same way that the food we eat becomes part of our bodies, so the information we consume becomes part of our minds.

Have you thought about your mental diet? Companies have realized there is a lot of money to be made by stuffing your brain with the junk food of lust, rage, envy, sloth, vanity, arrogance, and greed. (Did you count them? Those are the Seven Deadly Sins and they are the driving forces of our consumer economy.)

What I’m trying to say in all this is that our mental diet matters, at least as much as our physical diet. The information we feed our brains becomes a part of who we are, so we had better make sure that we are feeding our minds with good information that improves our health, as human beings.

St. John the Evangelist, in our Epistle reading this morning, makes just this point. He writes,

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when [Christ] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

1 John 3:2 NRSV

Let me unpack that verse. When John writes, “we will see [Christ],” he means more than just the physical act of looking at something. The Greek term he uses is opsometha, which means “to attend to” something. This is more than just a passing glance; this is the act of giving our full attention to the presence of Christ in our midst. In older English translations, this word was rendered as “Behold!” or, in other words: “Hey, pay attention! This is important!” That’s what St. John means when he says, “we will see [Christ] as he is.”

This kind of deep and attentive seeing has a profound effect on a person. In the twenty years that Sarah and I have been in a relationship, we have shaped each other dramatically. I am a different man today than I was twenty years ago because I have been in a relationship with her. I imagine she could say the same thing about me. In some ways, that change has been for the better, and in some ways, it’s been for the worse (but that’s just what we promised to do when we got married). Our intimate relationships change us, as human beings, because we spend so much time paying close attention to one another, really seeing each other, in the way that St. John means it. The point that John is making in this text is that the same thing happens in our personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

When we follow Jesus as our Lord and Savior and really behold him “as he is,” we begin to become “like him” in the ways that really matter. When St. John, the traditional author of today’s passage, first met Jesus, Jesus nicknamed him and his brother James, “sons of thunder,” presumably because of their volatile temperament and boisterous nature. We know they were working-class fishermen who vied for privileged positions in (what they thought was) Jesus’ political revolution. By the end of his three-year journey with Jesus, we find gentle John reclining on Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper. Later on, when John wrote his gospel, he only names himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” In summing up Jesus’ ministry, John is the one who records the words of the new commandment,

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

John 13:34 NRSV

Finally, when John wrote the epistle from which we read this morning, gentle John (formerly a “son of thunder”) is able to honestly utter the famous words,

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

1 John 4:16 NRSV

So profound was the transformation of John’s heart, Christian tradition remembers him as “St. John the Beloved.” By the end of his life, this “son of thunder” was not remembered for his violent temper, but for the fact that Jesus loved him.

As our evangelical kindred are fond of saying, Christian spirituality is “more of a relationship than a religion.” The tricky part is the fact that our present relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior is not a flesh-and-blood relationship with a person who can be seen, heard, and felt with our physical senses. We encounter the risen Christ through Scripture, Sacrament, silence, and service.

When we gather for worship each week, we look for a genuine experience of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. At home, on the other six days of the week, I hope you are spending time each day in prayer and the study of Scripture. I hope that you give your time, talent, and treasure for the building up of the kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. Through these spiritual practices, we deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Through that ongoing relationship, we come to resemble Christ more and more, as his light shines through us.

Beloved, we live in a world that tries to tell us who we are by our ability to produce and consume goods in a global economy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ shows us who we really are by revealing our true identity as God’s beloved children. As St. John writes in today’s epistle,

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

Beloved, I exhort you this morning to “see [Jesus Christ] as he is,” so that you too might “be like him.” Pay attention to your mental diet.

  • In addition to your weekly attendance at church and reception of the Sacrament, spend some time each day in prayer and the study of Scripture.
  • Whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
  • Proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
  • Seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.
  • Strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being.

By living out these vows, which we all made at our baptism and renew with every new baptismal candidate, we will deepen our relationship with Christ and be transformed, day by day, into his likeness. May God bless you in this holy work and reveal the Divine Self to you in the depths of your heart.

Nevertheless, She Persisted…

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16, Year A).

The text is Exodus 1:8-2:10.

The phrase that comes to mind when I think about our first reading, from the book of Exodus, is the old adage, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” The five women in this story were certainly not well-behaved (according to the standards of their time) and they most certainly did make history.

To put their contribution into perspective, I’d like to compare them to a more modern example. If Moses is Martin Luther King, then the women in this story, together, are Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King was the face of the Civil Rights Movement, but there would be no movement without Rosa Parks. The same could be said about the women of this story and their relationship to the rest of the book of Exodus.

First, we have Shiphrah and Puah the Hebrew midwives. When the Pharaoh issued his genocidal proclamation, they just looked at each other and said, “Nah. Not today, Satan!” They knew it was dangerous to go directly against an edict of the Pharaoh, so they made up an excuse to get out of it. They were the first to stand up against this oppression because they were the first to be impacted by it. The risk they incurred was the greatest because no one had dared to go against the Pharaoh like this before.

Next, we have Jochebed and Miriam, Moses’ mother and sister. They too did their part to resist the government-mandated murder of children. Jochebed hid Moses from the authorities for as long as she could and, when the jig was up, technically complied by putting the baby into the river, but only after she had constructed a waterproof basket for him. Miriam, meanwhile, stood close by and kept watch so that her little brother wouldn’t become crocodile food. Who knows? Maybe the plan was for Moses to stay in the river while Miriam kept watch, then for Jochebed to come back and get him later? That way, she could tell the Pharaoh that she complied with the order to “throw the baby into the river,” but the river threw him back!

Finally, we have Thermouthis, the daughter of the Pharaoh. Her story is quite interesting, because she had all the advantages of a privileged upbringing that would normally shelter her from the harsh reality of Hebrew suffering. Not only that, she was in the middle of a very personal moment, having come down to the river to bathe. Just imagine what it would be like to be in her place: You’re in the shower one day when the doorbell rings. Nobody would blame you if you just stayed where you were and said, “It’s not a good time; please come back later.” But just imagine, if you didn’t do that, but threw on a towel and answered the door anyway, only to find that someone had left a baby on your doorstep! My goodness!

It says a lot about the kind of person Thermouthis was, that she answered the door and sprang into action. For all we know, she may have already been secretly opposed to her father’s policy of genocide and was just waiting for an opportunity to act on those feelings?

What the brave African women of this story have in common is the fact that they all lived in the middle of an unjust situation that they were powerless to change. Under those circumstances, any or all of them could have thrown up her hands in the name of despair or cynicism. Each one risked terrible consequences by going against the Pharaoh’s proclamation, but nevertheless, she persisted.

In this way, the women of Exodus remind me of the hobbit Frodo Baggins from Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings.

When the wizard Gandalf explains to Frodo the enormity of the task before him, Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

Wise old Gandalf replies, “So do I… and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

That is the question that was set before these five women of Exodus. They were powerless to change their circumstances, but they were not powerless. They could not stop the genocide, but they did plant seeds that led to the end of genocide and enslavement against the Hebrews.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is thought to have said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”

When these women lived, the time was not yet ripe for the liberation of the enslaved Hebrew people. It would be several decades before the baby they saved would stand before the Pharaoh and order him in God’s name, “Let my people go!”

Like Rosa Parks and Mother Teresa after them, the divine calling of these holy women was to do “small things with great love,” and thus set in motion the movement that would put an end to the genocide and bring about the liberation of God’s people.

Of those five women, only Miriam lived long enough to see the result of her efforts. I wonder if Miriam, as she watched the tribes of her people crossing over the Red Sea on dry ground, thought about that day by the river, when Princess Thermouthis picked her baby brother up out of the basket their mother had made. She could not have imagined what would come about as a result of that moment.

There is another story, which happened several thousand years later. It takes place in South Africa, during the reign of the racist Apartheid regime. During that time, there was a law on the books that said people of color had to step off the sidewalk and into the gutter, lifting their hat in respect whenever a white person walked by.

A certain Anglican priest, a white man by the name of Father Trevor Huddleston, hated this law and the rest of the Apartheid system that so brutally degraded God’s people because of the color of their skin. In addition to his many sermons and books against Apartheid, Father Huddleston made it his personal practice to do the exact opposite of what this law required. Whenever he was walking down the street and a person of color was coming the other way, Father Huddleston would step into the gutter and lift his hat in respect.

One day, a young mother and her son were walking down the sidewalk and noticed Father Huddleston coming toward them. Per his usual practice, he stepped aside and lifted his hat as they went by. The little boy, then about five years old, asked his mother, “Mummy, who was that man?”

She replied, “Son, that man is an Anglican priest and furthermore, he is a man of God.”

The little boy would later say, “That was the day I decided that I wanted to be an Anglican priest and furthermore, a man of God.”

That little boy grew up to become Archbishop Desmond Tutu who, along with President Nelson Mandela, would dismantle the Apartheid system and usher South Africa into a new era of equality.

Father Huddleston was not able to end Apartheid by himself, but he was able to do “small things with great love” that made South Africa’s soil ready for the seeds of liberation. In the same way, God used Shiphrah, Puah, Jochebed, Miriam, and Thermouthis to prepare North Africa for the freedom that God intended for the people of Israel.

When we look at our lives in this world today, we can see many things that do not line up with God’s will. We are concerned about gun violence, systemic racism, runaway climate change, erosion of family values, decline in church attendance, and any other number of social issues that are worthy of our attention. All of these are problems that are too big to solve by ourselves or in our lifetimes. As much as we would like to do so, we cannot snap our fingers and make these problems go away. Like the five women of Exodus, we are powerless to change our circumstances, but we are not powerless. We can do “small things with great love,” as Mother Teresa said. We can plant seeds of liberation that may bear fruit in future generations.

Who knows? Maybe the seed you plant today will become the tree that bears fruit for tomorrow. Do not give in to the temptations of despair or cynicism. Do what good you can today and trust God to keep it going in the future. That’s the most that any of us can hope for. In the words of gospel singer Keith Green, “Keep doing your best and pray that it’s blessed; let God take care of the rest.”

Amen.

Walking on Water: A Practical Guide

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

The biblical text for this sermon is Matthew 14:22–33.

Video link below. The sermon starts at 0:24:00.

My favorite activity that my wife and I do with our kids is our regular family prayer ritual. We sing, share our joys and concerns for the day, take a moment of silence, and discuss some short passage of spiritual literature. One night, during this ritual, we were discussing this passage from the gospels, where Jesus and Peter walk on the water together.

My son, then about ten years old, spoke up and said, “Stories like this are why I have a hard time believing in the Bible.”

I sympathized with his skepticism, saying, “Yeah, I can understand that. Jesus walking on the water is something that seems impossible.”

But he surprised me by responding, “Oh, no. That’s not it. Jesus is God, so he can do whatever he wants; it’s Peter walking on the water that I don’t understand!” He explained that Peter is supposed to be a regular person, like any of us, and regular people can’t walk on water.

Admittedly, this threw me for a loop. However, I think my son has raised an interesting point with this observation.

The story of Jesus walking on the water appears in three out of the four gospels in our Bible. Only Luke neglects to mention it. But only Matthew includes the part where Peter gets out of the boat and joins Jesus on the water.

The important point my son raises is this: With a little bit of faith, regular people can do impossible things too.

Peter, by all accounts, is a regular guy. He’s a fisherman on the shore of the Galilean Sea. One day, some itinerant preacher named Jesus borrows his boat to use as a pulpit, all heaven breaks loose, and Peter finds himself swept up in an adventure beyond his wildest imagination. The rest, as they say, is history.

Regular old Peter never expected to find himself in a situation where he would have to do the impossible. Yet, there he was: stuck on a boat in a storm at night, squinting across the water, and trying to figure out whether the spooky figure he saw was a ghost or his best friend who knew how to make a twelve-course meal out of a few loaves and fishes.

In that moment, Peter shouts the only idea that comes to his mind, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” To his great surprise, Peter hears the mysterious figure say, “Come.”

I don’t know whether to credit the following events to his faith or his impulsivity, but Peter gets out of his boat in the middle of a raging storm. He takes a few brave steps toward Jesus, but the wind and waves remind him of the stupidity of what he’s doing. He gets scared and down he goes.

The scenes of which this story reminds me are the old roadrunner-and-coyote cartoons where the coyote chases the roadrunner off the cliff, but doesn’t begin to fall until the moment when he looks down. The coyote, who never speaks, holds up a sign that says, “Help” and plummets once again to his doom at the bottom of the cliff. Peter is the coyote in this moment.

Thankfully, for Peter’s sake, the roadrunner he’s chasing in this moment is Jesus Christ himself. He cries out, “Lord, save me” and Jesus obliges.

The next words out of Jesus’ mouth sound like a stern rebuke, but I like to imagine him laughing hysterically as he says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Peter may be a knucklehead, after all is said and done, but he’s Jesus’ knucklehead.

What is the message we can take from this week’s gospel reading? On the most practical level, we could say, “Always wear proper safety equipment when participating in dangerous water sports.” Not bad advice, but I think it falls short of the deeper spiritual meaning of this passage.

In life, we often face impossible situations. The metaphorical wind and waves of this world frequently threaten to overwhelm us. When this happens, the most cynical among us are tempted to look at storm itself and conclude, “This is a dog-eat-dog world and you’ve got to get it while the getting is good. It’s eat-or-be-eaten and my only job is to make sure that I’m not the one who’s being eaten.”

People who think this way tend to look for concrete assurances of their security and prosperity. They feel at ease when the stock market is performing well and their preferred political party is winning elections. They get nervous when the opposite is true. When I say this, I’m not picking on any particular group of people because I see people of all ideologies falling into this temptation, from time to time. If I’m perfectly honest, I have to admit that I’m guilty of it myself. Like St. Peter and Wile E. Coyote, I too have paid too much attention to the wind and the waves, held up my little sign that says “Help,” and then fallen into the depths of despair.

This cynical way of looking at the world sees chaos and competition as the fundamental facts of reality. People who think this way are not wrong. Chaos and competition certainly are facts with which we have to contend in this life, but they are not the whole story. The cynics’ reduction of reality to chaos and competition is a naïve point-of-view that fails to account for the fuller picture of the world, as God created it.

Scientists in the field of evolutionary biology are beginning to wake up to the fact that cooperation plays at least as big a role in the development of life as competition. Similarly, they are discovering that the evolution of life as a story of increasing complexity, consciousness, and creativity in the midst of chaos and competition. As people of faith, we have a tremendous opportunity to bear witness to the hand of God at work in the scientific story of the origin and development of life. This, in part, is why I believe it is so important for Christians to be supportively involved in the work of science. Cooperation, complexity, consciousness, and creativity are at least as central to the evolution of life as chaos and competition.

In the heart-language of the Christian tradition, we could say it like this: Jesus is with us in the midst of the wind and waves of this life.

So then, what are we to do? The story of Peter’s failure in today’s gospel makes it clear: Keep your eyes on Jesus.

Now, arguably, this is more difficult for those of us who live two thousand years after the flesh-and-blood Jesus walked this Earth. We don’t get to hear the sound of his laughter or see the sparkle in his eyes when he tells us that God will care for us in the same way that God cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.

Unlike Peter, we cannot keep our eyes on Jesus, in the physical sense.

What we can do is stay engaged with the spiritual practices that have been handed down to us through two millennia of Church history. By coming to church this morning, you have already taken the first step in that direction. By singing the hymns, participating in the liturgy, hearing the Scriptures, and receiving the Sacraments, you are already dedicating an hour of your week to keeping your eyes on Jesus. The question is what to do with the other six days.

I’d like to encourage you to take some time, every day, to dedicate yourself to some spiritual practice. Prayer, meditation, Bible study, and spiritual reading are not just for priests; anyone can do them and everyone should. Here in the Episcopal Church, we have a wonderful tool for this work in the Daily Office of the Book of Common Prayer. If you already say the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, congratulations! You are already well on the way to keeping your eyes on Jesus. If this practice is new to you and you don’t know where to start, then I would recommend beginning with An Order for Compline on page 127 of the prayer book. The directions are clear and uncomplicated, without much flipping around to find psalms and readings. Start by saying the Office of Compline each night at bedtime. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can look at the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, which offer a much more robust diet of liturgy and Scripture. As time goes by, you will find the words of prayer and Scripture melding themselves with your heart and transforming you from the inside out.

If this practice doesn’t appeal to you, or if you want to expand your spiritual practice beyond the Book of Common Prayer, there are any number of spiritual books at your local bookstore; find one that speaks to you and go from there. Watch an instructional YouTube video on contemplative prayer or mindfulness meditation. If you have some time after church today, I will be leading a workshop on how to pray the Anglican Rosary at our adult formation class. All of you are cordially invited to attend.

Friends, kindred in Christ, I encourage you this day to keep your eyes on Jesus as you weather the storms of this life. Stay engaged with the spiritual practices of our Christian tradition. Keep praying, keep reading, keep sharing, keep serving, and above all keep loving and knowing that you are loved. Keep your eyes on Jesus. This is how you will know that Jesus is with you in the storms of this life and we will weather this storm together.

Amen.

The Overview Effect

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A.

The text is John 17:1-11.

Almost fifty-five years ago, something happened to planet Earth that had never happened before. The exact date was Christmas Eve 1968. On that day, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders (crew of the Apollo 8 spacecraft) became the first humans to travel to the moon. Their mission was not to land on the surface, but simply to circle the moon and take pictures. Of all the photos snapped on that trip, one stands out among the others.

At about 3:40pm, Bill Anders was taking scheduled photographs of the lunar surface when he looked up and exclaimed, “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty.”

Commander Borman ordered back, “Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.”

Thankfully for the rest of us, astronaut Anders did not seem particularly keen on following orders that day; he lifted his camera and captured what nature photographers consider to be “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”

Image credit: Earthrise. Taken by Bill Anders on December 24, 1968. Public Domain.

The photo itself was quickly published after Apollo 8’s return to Earth. In it, we can see the gray horizon of the lunar surface and, floating just above it, a tiny blue marble that contains everything we’ve ever known and everyone we’ve ever loved.

Anders’ photo itself left people around the world breathless, but any astronaut would tell you that the photograph does no justice to the experience of actually seeing that sight with your own eyes. Psychologists have interviewed returning astronauts over the past several decades and recorded their personal thoughts and feelings after seeing the Earth from space. They call it “The Overview Effect” and describe it like this:

“The thing that really surprised me was that [the Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.” (Michael Collins, Apollo 11)

“[It’s an] explosion of awareness… [an] overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness… accompanied by an ecstasy… an epiphany.” (Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14)

The Overview Effect is powerful because it is, in scientific terms, what we would call, in theological terms, a mystical experience. According to early 20th century philosopher William James, an experience can be described as “mystical” if it is given (not produced by the observer), transient (not lasting forever), noetic (having some kind of content or message), and ineffable (indescribable). The Overview Effect meets all four of these criteria, even though it is natural, not supernatural, in its essence.

The main thing that astronauts struggle with in the Overview Effect is how impossible it is to describe to people who have not gone to outer space and seen it for themselves. In this morning’s reading from John’s gospel, we hearers encounter a similar difficulty when listening in on Jesus’ high priestly prayer to his Father in heaven.

Jesus speaks this prayer during Holy Week, just after the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, mere hours before he is arrested and crucified by the Roman authorities. Up to this point in John’s gospel, Jesus has dropped various hints about his identity as God’s Son, but now he is speaking plainly about who he is. The only problem is that Jesus is using human words to describe a reality that is inherently beyond human understanding. He might have better luck describing nuclear physics to a Doberman!

So, as we eavesdrop on Jesus’ prayer to the Father, it sounds to us like he is talking in circles: “Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you… I glorified you on Earth… glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed… All mine are yours, and yours are mine… I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.” He goes on and on like this for quite a while. If you listen to the whole thing, you start to get dizzy after a few verses. I don’t blame you.

What Jesus is doing here is putting words to something that is, by its very nature, beyond all words. He is pulling back the curtain of this world so that we can get the briefest glimpse of the reality he lives in on a daily basis. In simpler terms, Jesus is showing us how he sees the world.

It’s not all that different from the way that astronauts saw the Earth from space. Down on the ground, people tend to be consumed by conflicts that seem to be of utmost importance, when seen up close. Up in orbit, an astronaut doesn’t see national borders, skin colors, or religions. The astronaut only sees the big picture of this little planet, suspended in space by a thread. In its obvious smallness and fragility from space, it becomes painfully obvious that all the Earth is one.

Now, Jesus was not an alien who came down from outer space (although I’m sure there are people on the internet who would debate me on that), but he did reach the same conclusion as astronauts through his own spiritual awareness. The path is different, but the destination is the same: “We are one.”

Jesus prays that his followers “may be one,” as Jesus and his Father are one. The oneness of Jesus and his Father was the hot topic of debate during the first several centuries of Church history. Bishops, popes, and priests spilled a lot of ink and spent a lot of time debating what this actually means. At the Council of Nicaea, the debate became so intense that St. Nicholas (yes, THAT St. Nicholas) slapped another priest for disagreeing with him about the nature of Christ. (SIDE NOTE: In my career as a Presbyterian and an Episcopalian, I’ve been in a lot of tense church meetings, but never one so bad that Santa Claus punched a guy.)

Based on this story, it’s safe to say that the oneness of Jesus and his Father was very important to the early Christians. Eventually, the Church came up with the doctrine of the Trinity to describe the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. What we Christians believe, in some way that defies rational explanation, is that Jesus and the Father are one. Christians call Jesus “the Son of God” because of family resemblance. It’s the same as when we look at a baby and say, “She favors her mother!” To see Jesus is to see God. The resemblance is not physical, but spiritual. When Christians say that Jesus is the Son of God, we mean that God is the kind of person that Jesus was.

When Jesus prays, “that they may be one, as we are one”, he is inviting us all into the dynamic mystery of the Holy Trinity. In some way that defies rational explanation, we are joined together in that same divine unity of spirit. All distinctions of race, nationality, gender, language, sexual orientation, politics, and social class disappear. We are all one in Christ. As our patron, St. Paul, famously wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

What the astronauts observed fifty years ago from space, Jesus revealed two thousand years ago in spirit: “We are one.” The discoveries of science and the revelation of the Bible are unanimous, in this respect.

The oneness we all enjoy, as beloved children of God, is the central fact of our existence. Our central task, as Christians, is to celebrate and activate this oneness in our daily lives. When we gather to pray, sing hymns, hear the Scriptures, and celebrate the Eucharist, we are actualizing the fact of unity, as Jesus revealed it in the first century. When we live in this world as Jesus lived, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the outcast, we are embodying the divine truth that astronaut Bill Anders saw when he snapped his famous photo of the Earth from space.

Jesus prayed to his Father that his followers “may be one, as we are one.” When astronaut Bill Anders saw the Earth rising above the lunar horizon, he heard the answer to Jesus’ prayer.

May we, in our lives, become the answer to Jesus’ prayer. May we look past our sad divisions of race, religion, politics, and economics. May we do our level best to tend this garden that God has given us. May we live as beloved children of God in a world that would divide us by any other criteria. May we be one, as Jesus and his Father are one.

May it be so. Amen.

Top image credit: Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola on the International Space Station. Photo by NASA. Public domain.

Divine Validation

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A.

Link to text: Acts 17:22-31

[TW: Discussion of suicide and self-harm.]

Many years ago, I was going through a particularly rough time, psychologically speaking. My self-esteem was at an all-time low, I felt trapped in a situation that I couldn’t see my way out of, and I didn’t think anyone would take me seriously if I spoke up about how miserable I was. Eventually, my mental health deteriorated to the point where I was regularly contemplating suicide.

[Since you can see that I’m still here, I obviously didn’t act in any final way on those self-destructive impulses, and I’m very glad today that I didn’t. If you, or someone you know, is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, I strongly urge you to reach out to someone you can trust: friends, family, clergy, or therapist. If you can’t think of anyone you know, call 988 on your phone. This is the number for the new Suicide & Crisis Lifeline launched last year by the federal government. This Lifeline, the biggest project of its kind, exists to help people get immediate help in a mental health crisis.]

At the height of my own struggle, I finally spoke up during a prayer meeting at my church. I didn’t go into much detail, but simply said I was “going through a hard time.” Honestly, I wasn’t even sure what I was asking for, but thought it might be nice to hear someone say a prayer for me. The pastor leading the service surprised me by telling the group that I am “a very unselfish person.” His brief compliment, in that moment, took my breath away. I didn’t think of myself in that way (frankly, I still don’t), but those kind words gave me something I didn’t realize I needed: Validation.

Validation, in the sense that I’m using the word here, is about the basic human need to know that we matter and we belong. People go about trying to meet this need in all kinds of ways. Some seek validation in their professional or academic accomplishments; others seek it in their money or possessions; some seek it in their family roles or relationship status. The options are nearly limitless.

One place where I see this human need for validation in our world today is in the online world of social media. With every narcissistic selfie, every envious like, every enraged tweet, and every hormonal swipe-right, we are building a digital temple of idols to our ongoing search for validation. We desperately need to know that we matter and we belong, so we look for that assurance in the never-ending data stream of the internet. Like Athens in Paul’s day, social media is a marketplace of ideas. In some ways, the internet has united human beings with the ability to share information faster than anyone else in recorded history. In other ways, its carefully cultivated algorithms have made us more misinformed, divided, depressed, and angry than ever. We come to these platforms seeking the validation of our human dignity, but settle for the cold reassurance that we are right and everyone else is wrong. Each click fills our brains with a momentary rush of dopamine (the “feel-good” chemical in our brains) but leaves our hearts starved for the validation that comes from genuine relationships.

St. Paul the Apostle, in today’s first reading from the book of Acts, seems to recognize this universal human need for validation. The story opens with Paul teaching on Mars Hill in the famous city of Athens. Athens had been home to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many other well-known Greek philosophers. It was the intellectual capital of ancient Europe, much like Harvard or MIT might be today.

By speaking his message in Athens, St. Paul was very intentionally bringing Christian faith into the marketplace of ideas in his time. One of the things I love most about this story is the way that Paul engages in dialogue, as a Christian, with intelligence, respect, and compassion. Paul doesn’t try to defeat his opponents with forceful rhetoric; instead, he offers them validation by affirming their deepest concerns and aspirations.

He says to them, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” From there, he goes on to describe his experience of visiting their city and equates their “altar to an unknown god” with his own faith in the one God of Jewish and Christian tradition. Later on, he even quotes two Greek philosophers directly: Epimenides, who said, “in [God] we live, and move, and have our being,” and Aratus, who said, “we too are [God’s] offspring.” Both Epimenides and Aratus wrote these lines about the Greek deity Zeus, but Paul applies them to his God.

By doing this, Paul demonstrated that he could understand and appreciate the thought of pagan philosophers, even though they didn’t share his beliefs. It would have been so easy for Paul to berate the Athenians with insults about how ignorant and superstitious they were, but he offers them validation instead. He looked deep into their hearts, past their surface-level disagreements, and said to them, in effect, “I see who you are and what you’re trying to do here. You are searching for God, and the God you are searching for is not far away. In fact, God is right here, within us and all around us, just as your own philosopher Epimenides has said: ‘In God we live, and move, and have our being.’”

St. Paul’s method of respectfully and intelligently validating the Athenians is very much in keeping with the core message of the Christian Gospel. As Christians, we believe that Jesus, the Living Word of God, “took on flesh and dwelt among us.” In Christ, God validates humanity by becoming one of us and meeting us right where we are. Jesus came into this world offering validation to lonely, hurting, and sinful people who are, for all their brokenness, still beloved children of God.

This affirmation is not limited to human beings, either. In Christ, God validates the entire universe by incorporating elementary particles from the Big Bang and DNA molecules from life’s evolution into the incarnate flesh of the Divine Son. As that most well-known Bible verse says, “God so loved the cosmos (Greek for “world”) that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). The Christian Gospel is all about God’s validation of who we are, as beloved offspring of the Divine.

Kindred, this message of validation has the power to change our lives. If we believe that God truly validates the dignity of who we are, in our deepest selves, then we can find, in that faith, the strength to give that same validation to ourselves. We can stop abusing ourselves with words like, “I shouldn’t feel that way.” Instead, we can practice radical self-validation by asking ourselves questions like, “Why do I feel this way?”

The difference between those two statements is subtle, but important. First of all, that second statement is a question, which means we are cultivating curiosity about ourselves, instead of passing judgment. The question assumes there is an important message in whatever feelings we feel.

If we’re feeling depressed or anxious, our body may be trying to tell us that we are overwhelmed and need to rest or ask for help. If we’re feeling angry, it might be because our dignity is being attacked, so we need to set up healthy boundaries to protect our sense of self-respect. These are just examples. You’ll have to search your own feelings in a given situation to discern the message those feelings are trying to send you. The point is that, by asking a question instead of passing judgment, we are practicing radical self-acceptance and thereby coming into agreement with God’s validation of who we are, as beloved offspring of the Divine.

The second step of coming into agreement with Divine validation is to extend our radical self-acceptance toward radical acceptance of others. This is exactly what St. Paul does in his validation of the Athenians. Christians today can find, in Paul’s message, a helpful strategy for engaging in intelligent and respectful dialogue with science, philosophy, and other religions. These things are not enemies of faith, but products of the human mind in its God-given quest for truth and meaning.

As Christians, we might not agree with everything said by our neighbors of other faiths, but if we look deep enough, we might find significant points where we do agree, and those points of agreement might lend new insight to our own faith, as well as cultivate goodwill in our relationships with our neighbors. Let us remain open to these new insights, as they come.

In my own aforementioned experience of validation, from all those years ago, I discovered new strength for living. Across the year that followed my interaction with the pastor at that prayer meeting, I started making some necessary changes in my life, with the help of my family. I switched schools to a smaller environment where I felt less overwhelmed, I got myself into counseling and on medication that stabilized my mental health, and I started exploring my spirituality in a deeper way than ever before. Validation gave me the strength to change for the better in ways that self-criticism never could. May the same be true for you as you practice radical acceptance with yourself and with everyone you meet in the validating and unconditional love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Image: Ruins of the Areopagus (Mars Hill) in Athens, Greece. Photo by Daniel Nouri.

The Language of the Heart

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon on John 14:1-14.

Imagine with me, if you will, that you are a kid on a playground. You’re having a fine time running around on a lovely day. Then you decide that you’d like to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair, so you start to make your way over to the swings. Just then, the biggest kid in the neighborhood steps in front of you, blocking your path.

The big kid says, “Just where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m headed to the swings,” you reply.

“Is that so?” he says, “Well, here’s the thing: Those are my swings. If you want to play on them, you’ve got to get through me first. Let’s find out just how tough you are!” And he puts up his fists.

Now, most of us can understand exactly what’s going on in this situation: The big kid is being a bully. As parents, that’s the moment when we would probably step in and say, “Hey now, that’s not nice! These swings belong to everyone, so anyone can play on them. Why don’t you take a step back and let the smaller kids go play on the swings?”

As grownups, we wouldn’t just stand by and let that kind of bullying happen to our kids on a playground. So then, why do we just accept it when certain kinds of Christians do it to other people? In my job, I spend a lot of time on the highway. I regularly see religious billboards with messages trying to convert people to Christianity. A common Bible verse that appears on these billboards is John 14:6, which we just heard in our gospel reading this morning. In this verse, Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Now, I’m not going to speak against this verse itself; it’s part of our sacred scriptures and I love it. What I am going to speak against is the fact that some of our fellow Christians use this Bible verse as a threat. When Christians post these words of Jesus, out of context, on their billboards and church marquees, they are sending the implied message that no one can have a genuine spirituality unless it looks like theirs. That’s a problem. In a country where Christians already make up a majority of the population, that’s bullying.

More than that, it’s a misrepresentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The word “Gospel” means “good news”, and those who post these billboards think they’re just “preaching the good news”, but frankly, I can see nothing “good” about it. The real Jesus didn’t threaten people with hellfire and damnation. The real Jesus fed the hungry and healed the sick. The real Jesus welcomed outcasts and forgave sinners. The real Jesus got himself in trouble for hanging out with the wrong kind of people. The real Jesus is more likely to be found at the Stonewall Inn than the National Cathedral.

[SIDE NOTE: If you don’t know what the Stonewall Inn is, then please watch the award-winning documentary The Stonewall That Didn’t Fall by Cadence Phillips, a parishioner at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in St. Joseph, Michigan. This documentary recently won first place in the state and has been nominated to represent Michigan in the National History Day film competition in Washington, DC. Cadence is currently trying to raise $1,000 for the trip to Washington.
Please consider donating here: https://gl.me/u/6zDcfFX7MQmv
You can watch the film here: https://bit.ly/stonewallstate
Thanks in advance for your support!]

Now that we’ve talked about what Jesus didn’t mean in that verse, let’s talk about what he did mean when he said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

First of all, it’s important for you to know that biblical scholars generally agree that these words were never spoken by the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth. There was a literary convention in the ancient world that feels foreign to our own. It was a common cultural practice, in the ancient Mediterranean, for students of a great teacher to honor their mentor by writing in their mentor’s name. The idea was that they were continuing their teacher’s thought where the teacher left off, so any credit for brilliance would be given to the original mentor and not the student. Outside of the Bible, we can see this happening in the writing of the great philosopher Plato, who wrote most of his Dialogues in the name of his mentor Socrates. There is little debate among modern scholars that most of Plato’s ideas come, not from Socrates, but from Plato himself (even though he writes in the name of Socrates). It is the same with the author of John’s gospel and the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

When John puts these words into Jesus’ mouth, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, he is not committing forgery, but honoring the teacher who changed his life. The author, in this verse, is telling the readers of his gospel what Jesus meant to him.

This is a problem for us readers in the modern world, who value accuracy above all else, but it was not a problem for ancient readers, who understood that biography was more about “who this person was” than “what actually happened”. If we were to describe what the author of John’s gospel was trying to do, in modern terms, we might say that he was “speaking the language of the heart”.

Let me describe what I mean by “language of the heart” by way of analogy. Imagine a married couple, out to dinner on their wedding anniversary. One of them raises a glass to the other and says, “Sweetheart, you are the most wonderful person in the world and I am the luckiest person in the world. There’s no one else for me. I love you with all my heart. Happy anniversary!” Now, we would all agree that this person was speaking from the heart. So, imagine how inappropriate it would be if the waiter were to interrupt the speaker in that moment and say, “Now wait just a minute, Buster! You can’t possibly say that your partner is the most wonderful person in the world because you haven’t met all the people in the world! For all you know, there could be another person out there, more wonderful than your partner, so you shouldn’t say such inaccurate things on your anniversary!”

If you were sitting at a nearby table, you would be perfectly justified in standing up and saying to that waiter, “Hey now, that’s not nice! This person was talking to their partner on their anniversary. You had no right to interrupt them. In fact, you have no right to pass judgment on their relationship at all!”

When it comes to the language of the heart, most of us would agree with the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said, “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”

This is also how it works, when it comes to Christian faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We owe no one an explanation when we say, “Jesus, you are the way, and the truth, and the life.” We are speaking the language of the heart, just like that couple out to dinner on their wedding anniversary. This is what the author of John’s gospel was trying to say when he put those words into Jesus’ mouth. Using the cultural conventions of his time, he was trying to express his love for the man who had changed his life for the better.

In our day, let us also be just as exuberant in our praise of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Let us proclaim to the world the good things he has done for us, not only in our words, but in our deeds. If Jesus is our way, our truth, and our life, then let us strive to become the kind of people that Jesus was. When we see the hungry, let us feed them. When we see the sick or injured, let us heal them. When we meet the outcast and sinners, let us welcome and befriend them. May we, like Jesus, get ourselves in trouble for hanging out with queers and freaks. When the bullies of this world come hunting for us, may they find more of us in Stonewall than they find in cathedrals. That’s how they’ll know we are there because we are following Jesus, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Image credit: Billboards Portrush by Willie Duffin, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons