Tag: bible

Is Ketchup a Smoothie? A Sermon on (Not) Understanding the Holy Trinity

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Service Bulletin:

sermon and liturgy trinity c 2025Download

There are several different kinds of knowledge.

First, there’s book smarts, like knowing that tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable.

Then there’s practical wisdom, like knowing that it’s not a good idea to put tomatoes in a fruit salad.

And then there’s philosophy, like wondering whether that means ketchup is technically a smoothie.

Today, we’re going to be talking about that third kind.

Today, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, conventionally known in the Episcopal Church as “associate rector appreciation Sunday” because this is the week that senior rector’s most often take as their vacation. They would much rather leave the explanation of complicated and abstract concepts to those younger clergy who have more up-to-date seminary training. Since we don’t have an associate rector in our parish, and I failed to accurately calculate the week of my vacation, this enviable task has now fallen to me.

So, instead of building up to a conclusion, I’m going to cut straight to the chase. Here’s the main thing I’m going to say about the mystery of the Trinity:

If you think you understand the mystery of the Trinity, you do not understand the mystery of the Trinity; if you do not understand the mystery of the Trinity, you understand the mystery of the Trinity.

Got it? Good. Amen. Let’s all get out of here before the Methodists get the good lunch tables at the diner.

Of course, the problem is that this little riddle leaves us right back where we started, so we end up going around and around until our heads fall off… and that’s the point of the whole thing.

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is the primary Christian concept of God. According to the historical documents of the Anglican theological tradition, “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor diving the Substance” (The Creed of St. Athanasius, BCP 864). The three Persons of the Godhead are “of one substance, power, and eternity” (Articles of Religion, BCP 867). Don’t worry, I can hear all of you mentally checking out, as we speak.

This is why I started with my main statement: If you think you understand it, you don’t understand it; if you don’t understand it, you understand it. It’s like wondering whether ketchup is a smoothie. The question itself supposed to break your brain, not to break it down, but to break it open and leave you slack-jawed in awestruck wonder at the unknowable mystery of ultimate reality.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly outlined in the Bible. It gradually came together, over the course of several centuries, as the greatest minds of the early Church contemplated their experience of God. Beginning with the monotheism of the Jewish tradition, the earliest followers of Jesus realized that they were, in some way that they couldn’t understand, experiencing the very presence of the God of their ancestors through this individual human being. How was that even possible? They had no idea; they just experienced it to be true. And then, just as mysterious, they continued to experience this Jesus as a living presence in the midst of their community after his death. How was that even possible? They had no idea; they just experienced it to be true. Their knowing had neither the categorical certainty of book smarts nor the effectiveness of practical wisdom. Their knowing was a knowledge of the heart: more like falling in love than solving a math problem. As the philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

After almost three hundred years of contemplation, the bishops of the early Church finally settled on the mystery of the Trinity as their non-answer to a question that, by its very nature, can never be answered. Whenever some innovative theologian claimed to have solved the mystery, the bishops of the Church were quick to stand up and pronounce that answer as a heresy, not because they thought that they had a monopoly on the truth, but because they believed that the main thing is to keep the question open.

If you think you understand the Trinity, you do not understand the Trinity; if you do not understand the Trinity, you understand the Trinity.

I love this central commitment of our faith tradition. We don’t claim to have the answers to ultimate questions. We sit in awestruck wonder before the mystery of reality. This is why I like to say that I couldn’t be a Christian, if I wasn’t also an agnostic.

The ultimate unknowability of the mystery of God affords Christians a certain playfulness, when it comes to expressing that mystery in various ways. The language of our tradition tends to default to language that is very personal, very masculine, and very hierarchical. Most of our prayers use words like “Father” and “Lord” to describe the mystery of God, but the witness of our sacred Scriptures point to a wide array of metaphors for expressing our faith in God.

In addition to the exclusively masculine language of Father, the Bible also describes God as a “Mother” (Isaiah 66:3). In addition to the hierarchical language of Lord, the Bible also describes God as a “Servant” (Luke 22:27). In addition to the numerous personal metaphors for God, the Bible also describes God as a “Mighty Rock” (Psalm 62:7), “Living Water” (John 7:38), “Rushing Wind” (Acts 2:2), and “Consuming Fire” (Hebrews 12:29). As I mentioned in a previous sermon, Jesus even compares himself to a chicken in Matthew 23:37.

Therefore, kindred in Christ, since the Bible itself gives us such a wide array of metaphors for the Divine, and since the bishops of the early Church were so doggedly committed to keeping open the question of God’s unknowable nature, we too ought to remain open to exploring a wide variety of metaphors for God.

God is with us always and in all things. Therefore, let us also look for her, for him, for them, for it, always and in all things. How is God like a cloud or a tree? How is God like a chair or a bookshelf?

Jesus, in his parables, often pointed to agricultural metaphors that were common to the everyday experience of ordinary people, when describing the realm of the divine. For Jesus, the realm of the divine was like a woman baking bread (Matthew 13:33), like crops growing in a field (Mark 4:26-29), like a merchant trading in the marketplace (Matthew 13:45-46), like a small seed growing into a great tree (Matthew 13:31-32). This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.

I want to encourage you today to be playful in the many ways that you imagine God to be present in your life. The language we use about God matters, not because we have to be careful to get it right, but because we cannot get it wrong. Everything is potentially a symbol of God, yet nothing fully encapsulates the mystery. Whenever we try to put God in a box, whether that box is Pope-shaped, Bible-shaped, Church-shaped, man-shaped, or colored white, we commit the sin of idolatry and close ourselves off to the great mystery of the divine.

God is with us always, and in all things, therefore let us keep open the question of what God truly is. Let each of us remain humble in our own conceptions of God and tolerant of the expressions of others. As brothers, sisters, and siblings, let us stand side-by-side, following the example of the Bible and the early Church, and maintain a posture of awestruck wonder before the divine mystery that is beyond our understanding.

The Blessing of Babel

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for the Day of Pentecost

Click here for the biblical readings

There are people in this world who enjoy a good fight, but I am not one of them.

I tend to enjoy conversations more when people with differing opinions can come together on some kind of common ground. As a result, I try to look for that common ground whenever I find myself in a debate with someone. I think that, if we can just identify the core values on which we agree, then we will see that we don’t really disagree, and we can work out the minor details of whatever differences we appear to have.

I imagine that I am a typical midwestern Episcopalian in this respect. We are nice people. We don’t go in for loud fights about rigid dogmas. We like everyone to get along. Our liturgical church tradition allows for a great diversity of theological interpretations. After all, we are descended from the Church of England, the land of good manners, so politeness is in our DNA.

Most of the time, this tendency serves us well. There are times, however, when it doesn’t. When I worked as a chaplain, I once had a patient who was a very bitter and bigoted man. He would rant for hours and use all kinds of ethnic slurs against the groups of people he didn’t like.

In particular, he believed that Hispanic people “would never fully integrate into American society” because they were too different from white people. The funny thing, though, is that this patient didn’t realize that I have one parent from Philadelphia and another from San Juan, Puerto Rico. With my light-colored skin and English last name, he assumed that I was just another white guy like him, but in reality, I am half-Hispanic. Our family integrated so well into “American society” that the dividing line between cultures ran right through the middle of my own body.

I could have said something about this to my patient, but I didn’t. This was partially because healthcare chaplains are trained to avoid controversial topics with patients, but it was also because I simply didn’t feel like dealing with it. By keeping silent, I allowed a part of my identity to be erased in the interest of keeping the peace.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had politely mentioned the truth about my ancestry to my patient. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything at all, but then again, maybe that might have been an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to open up an avenue for growth in this man. I will never know because he passed away before I got to do another visit with him.

There are all kinds of ways that people build walls of protection around themselves. Sometimes, it takes the form of a hostile attitude that pushes other people away. Sometimes, as in my case, it takes the form of polite silence, with a smile and a nod. Sometimes, as in the case of today’s first reading from the book of Genesis, it takes the form of a literal wall around a great city and its mighty tower.

The legend of the Tower of Babel is a cautionary tale about the downside of human progress. The human race, as we read in the text, settled in the land of Shinar and spoke a single language. According to most traditional interpretations, God felt threatened by human progress, so they punished the people by confusing their languages and scattering them across the face of the earth.

I find this interpretation unsettling. Human progress, after all, is largely a good thing. In the last hundred years alone, humanity has cured diseases, ventured into outer space, and reduced extreme poverty to a fraction of where it was in previous generations. On the other hand, we have also continued to pollute the land, water, and air of our planet, constructed nuclear bombs with the power to destroy entire cities, and committed cold-hearted acts of genocide with industrial efficiency, as we did in the Holocaust. Progress, it seems, is a double-edged sword.

In the beginning of the biblical story, when God first created the heavens and the earth, they invited humanity to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). But humanity, it seems, had another idea. They preferred to remain stationary, centralize power, and maintain a homogeneous culture in a walled city. This was the opposite of what God intended for the human race. God had made a huge planet for humanity to explore, with all kinds of diverse life-forms and creatures. God meant for the human race to be explorers, but we settled for being settlers in the place where we were.

This is the real reason why God confused the languages of the people of Shinar at the Tower of Babel: not to punish us, but to push us out of the nest and into the wide world. Diversity of language and culture is not a curse, but a blessing. It calls us out of our comfort zones to become the kind of people we were always meant to be.

Fast-forwarding to this morning’s New Testament lesson, from the Acts of the Apostles, we read about the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus’ disciples and allowed their message to be heard and understood by people of many languages. Some interpretations of this passage have understood this miracle as a reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel. The confusion of languages was resolved by the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Once again, though, I find this interpretation unsettling. It is based on the former assumption that what happened at Babel was an act of punishment. But, if I am correct in thinking of the diversification of languages as a blessing, then what happened at Pentecost is a fulfillment of that original blessing. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the people were able to discern a single message that was being communicated through multiple languages. Underneath the diversity of cultural expressions was a common thread of understanding: One Spirit speaking one message in many different ways. This interpretation of the Tower of Babel and the Day of Pentecost has profound implications for how we practice our faith as Christians today.

We live today in a world that is both more connected and more isolated than ever. Through the miracle of telecommunications, we have the ability to talk to people on the other side of the world in real time. Through the magic of the internet, we have access to a vast supply of information that previous generations couldn’t even dream of. However, our human tendency to gather in homogeneous groups of people who think alike, look alike, pray alike, vote alike, and love alike has led us to seek shelter from the vastness of the universe in echo chambers of people who will only confirm what we think we already know.

Kindred in Christ, I think it is past time for us to reclaim the double blessing of Babel and Pentecost in our own day. The price of remaining isolated in sheltered towers of like-minded individuals is nothing less than the survival of our species itself. As the great American intellectual Benjamin Franklin once said, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”

God is once again calling us to discern the voice of the one Spirit speaking in diverse tongues. What this requires of us is that we listen intently to the voices of our neighbors who speak different languages, practice different religions, vote for different candidates, and love different partners than we do. It requires also that we speak courageously, tolerantly, and lovingly from our own perspectives on these issues.

Let us not hide in fear behind walls of hostility or politeness, when it comes to the questions that matter most, but “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) so that we might discern the voice of the one Spirit who speaks through many languages. Let us place our faith in God, who inspired St. Paul to write:

“There are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

(1 Corinthians 12:4-7)

Beloved kindred, let us not give way to the cynicism of this age that despairs of finding common ground and sets humanity on a common course toward oblivion. Let us instead place our faith in Christ, who came that we “may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Let us take the risk of speaking our truth and listening with love, that we too might hear the voice of the one Spirit who speaks in many ways.

Amen.

A Prayer for Universal Oneness

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for the seventh Sunday of Easter.

Click here for the biblical readings.

Today’s sermon is going to be a little bit different.

Rather than teach you about the spiritual principles that connect to our gospel reading, I am going to guide you into a meditative experience of those principles in action. If all goes well, you won’t have to have anyone explain these truths for you because you will know them yourself, in the very fiber of your being.

First, a little bit of setup:

Today’s gospel reading forms a kind of climax to the gospel according to St. John. The whole book has been building to this point. It begins with a series of poignant hints that Jesus drops about his true identity. The words he says, the things he does, and the people he meets all gesture toward some mysterious truth that will be revealed later on.

In the next section, Jesus starts to speak more openly about what this truth might be. Most people still don’t get it, but enough of them are scratching their heads enough to stick around and find out.

After that, Jesus begins a very confusing speech on the night before he dies. He seems to be talking in circles about metaphysical ideas that make no sense, even to his closest disciples.

Finally, he stops talking to his disciples altogether and speaks only to God, while the disciples listen in on the conversation.

That is the part of the story where our gospel reading picks up today. Jesus is talking to God and the disciples are listening in. What he says seems to go in circles and makes little sense to the rational mind.

In many ways, this is intentional. The story of John’s gospel starts with a wide view of Jesus and the people who knew him, but then gradually zooms in to Jesus and his disciples, Jesus himself, and finally inside the mind of Jesus to his personal relationship with God, like Father and Son.

Jesus’ words in this passage are mysterious and circular. If you feel dizzy when reading them, that’s good! It means you are paying attention. The mind of Jesus is a baffling place.

What we see, inside the mind of Jesus, is the interconnected web of all existence, going back to the beginning of time itself. He prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us,” and then, “the glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”

It’s meant to be confusing stuff. It’s supposed to leave us reaching for the bottle of Advil because we can’t fit the vastness of divine truth inside our tiny human brains. Any God that we could fully comprehend would not be worthy of name “God” and certainly not worthy of our worship.

So, instead of explaining himself to us, Jesus gives us the briefest of glimpses into his mind, so that we can experience the reality of sacred interconnectedness for ourselves.

The concept of sacred interconnectedness is not unique to Christianity or even to the subject of religion. Our neighbors who practice in the Hindu spiritual tradition believe that the Atman, the individual soul, is essentially one with Brahman, the ultimate reality. In the scientific field of quantum physics, subatomic particles are not separate bits of matter, but fluctuations of energy in a common field. What Jesus realized, along with spiritual masters and brilliant scientists of every time and place, is the truth that separateness is an illusion. What lies at heart of reality is an inexplicable and inexpressible unity. This is why he prays to his Father, in today’s gospel, “that they may be one, as we are one.”

The most fundamental spiritual truth of all reality is not that there is a God up in heaven, but that God can be found here and now, in the space between you and me. That is the truth that we get to glimpse in today’s gospel, and that is the truth that I hope you take away from today’s sermon.

If you are willing, I would like to invite you to join me on this journey into awareness of our fundamental oneness. This is a very personal journey that no one must undertake. The reality of it will remain true, whether you choose to join me or not, whether you choose to use the word “God” or not. This will be a journey of facts, not beliefs, so even those who do not identify as Christian can undertake it.

I invite you to begin by closing your eyes or letting them gently drop to a space right in front of you, if that is more comfortable to you…

Pay attention to the rhythm of your breathing. In and out, in and out…

Feel the weight of your body, sitting in the pew or chair where you are…

Notice the feeling of your feet on the floor, your back on the pew, and any other sensations that appear in your body…

If there are any little twitches or pains, just let them be for now…

Notice any thoughts that pop into your mind and then let them go…

Even if your thought is, “This is stupid,” that’s okay. Just let them come and go…

The goal is not to stop your mind from thinking, but to not be attached to these thoughts, as they come and go…

If you have a thought, just notice it and let it go, like a helium balloon floating off into the sky, and then gently return your attention to the rhythm of your breathing…

Recall the sum total of the events of your life that led you to this moment, where you are sitting in a pew…

Maybe you came here out of longstanding tradition or habit, or maybe you came because you are searching for something deeper in your life and are wondering whether this worship service might contain the answer to what you are searching for…

Consider the processes taking place within your own body at the cellular level…

Consider the millions of micro-organisms that exist in your gut and on the surface of your skin…

Consider the fact that there are more bacterial cells in your body than human cells…

Consider the words of the poet Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes”…

Without opening your eyes or looking around, imagine the people around you in this room, all of them your fellow worshippers, on a common human journey to understand who we are, where we came from, and where we are going…

Each person’s journey is as unique as your own; no two are alike…

If you are comfortable with it, expand your awareness to the people who are not in this room…

Their life journeys, like ours, are utterly unique, but they share many of the same hopes, fears, and questions…

Now, if you are comfortable with it, consider the ground beneath the floor of this church…

Consider the many life forms that live there…

Imagine their connection to the trees, roots, and grass of the plants outside…

Think about the bodies of those plants absorbing moisture and nutrients from the soil and light energy from the sun…

Think about the flowers and fruits that grow from those plants…

Consider the animals that feed off those flowers and fruits…

Bees, squirrels, and other creatures…

Think about the carnivorous animals that feed on those animals, distributing the sun’s energy into the never-ending circle of life…

Consider what happens when those animals die, how their bodies return to the earth and fertilize the plants, thus beginning the cycle of life again…

Now, if you are comfortable, remember that all life on earth is carbon-based…

In all the universe, there is only one place where a carbon atom can be made: In the heart of a star…

All the carbon in your body once resided inside a star that went supernova, scattering the elements of life into the universe, where they were gathered again on the surface of this planet, and now take the shape that bears your name. This is why we can say, without exaggeration, that you are literally made of stardust…

Some worry that evolution means we are related to monkeys, but I say, “Don’t worry; evolution means that your ancestors are the stars themselves…”

Feel the truth of this scientific fact deep down in your bones, where it is literally true…

Feel the vast network of stars and galaxies that stretches out beyond the bounds of your imagination, reaching light years to the edge of the observable universe (and perhaps beyond), encompassing all of creation at distances that you could not begin to fathom…

Imagine each of those subatomic particles bursting into existence at the moment of the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago…

There are parts of your body that are as old as the universe itself…

When time itself began, you were there…

When the atoms of your body were formed in the heart of a star, you were there…

When the asteroid fell that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you were there…

The very same air molecules that you are currently breathing in may have also been inhaled by Abraham Lincoln, the Buddha, or Jesus of Nazareth…

As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “We are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality; what affects one directly, affects all indirectly…”

Keeping the cosmic scope of this meditation exercise in mind, I invite you to reconsider the words that Jesus prayed to his Father in today’s gospel:

“[I ask] that they may be one, as we are one.”

Do you get it?

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for the sixth Sunday of Easter

Click here for the biblical readings

It’s always annoying when someone walks into a movie late and asks, “What’d I miss?”

My wife and I share equal blame for this particular crime against convenience. Not wanting to be a burden, one of us will say, on our way to the kitchen, “You don’t have to pause it; this will just take a second!”

Inevitably, the all-important snack retrieval process will take longer than expected and the kitchen-goer will miss some pivotal moment in the plot, leaving the other person with the unenviable task of rewinding the video or explaining what just happened. It would have been easier to just pause it, but we will probably never learn.

Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but that’s exactly what has happened to us in today’s gospel. The editors of the Revised Common Lectionary (i.e. the three-year cycle of biblical readings that our church follows in its Sunday worship) decided to cut out the beginning of the scene that we read this morning. In this scene, Jesus is answering a question posed by one of his disciples, but we never get to hear what the question is!

So, for the sake of clarity, I would like to pause the movie and explain what happened while we were out of the room. (If anyone needs to go to the kitchen for a snack, now would be a good time.)

So, the verses we read this morning come from a section of John’s gospel called “The Farewell Discourse.” It takes place on the night before Jesus dies, just after he washes the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper.

In the Farewell Discourse, Jesus answers three questions from three of his disciples: Thomas, Philip, and Judas. The passage we heard today is from Jesus’ response to the third disciple, Judas. The author of John’s gospel goes out of the way to let us know that this Judas is not the infamous Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, but another disciple of the same name.

Jesus had just finished explaining, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me” (John 14:19). Judas asked in reply, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world” (John 14:22)?

Today’s gospel picks up with Jesus’ response to this question:

“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me” (John 14:23-24).

The context of Judas’ question is important for understanding Jesus’ response.

For centuries, many have wondered: Why do some people seem to “get it” when it comes to matters of faith, and others don’t?

Many potential answers to this question have been suggested. Some say that those who “get it” are those who are able to suspend their faculties of critical thinking and “just believe” without question. I can understand the appeal of this approach for those who aren’t constitutionally inclined toward philosophical discourse, but for those who are, this is a violation of their intellectual integrity. Belief without evidence, for such people, would be like asking any of us to betray our core moral convictions. If faith requires suspension of our moral reasoning, then faith is evil. I can understand why intelligent people of good conscience would reject faith on these grounds.

Others have suggested that the inability of some people to believe in Christ is due to the fact that God chooses some people to be saved and others to be damned. The so-called “elect” are predestined for salvation while the “reprobate” are doomed, no matter what they do, say, or believe. This was the view taken by John Calvin, who inspired the Reformed and Presbyterian traditions of Protestant Christianity. I don’t mean to be too harsh against our brother Calvin (or the Reformed/Presbyterian churches), because they too are our kindred in Christ, but I must protest (pun intended) that such a reliance on the sovereignty of God does violence to the loving character of God, who “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).

The final answer to the objection that some seem to “get it,” when it comes to faith in Christ, while others don’t, comes from the atheists, who say that it is the atheists who fully realize the fact that there is no God, therefore those who believe in God are victims of a mass deception, designed to imprison credulous believers in a jail of their own imagination.

I deeply respect the commitment of said nonbelievers to their intellectual integrity, but I also question whether they have placed too much faith in their lack of faith. True skepticism must become skeptical of itself, if it is to remain true to its core belief in the power of open inquiry. The “maybe not” of the skeptic must also be the “maybe so” of the agnostic, if the principle of free thought is to be maintained.

It should come as no surprise that I reject all three of these explanations, though I can see the individual merits of each. The answer that Jesus gives, in response to Judas’ question in John 14, does little to address the doubts and conclusions of any of these groups.

The answer that Jesus gives is rooted, not in philosophical arguments, but in the principle of love. Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word.” Jesus’ word is his command. What is his command? He answers in chapter 15, verse 12: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Love for one another is his commandment.

What is the result of his commandment? He says so in today’s gospel: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23).

To love our neighbor is to love Christ, and to love Christ is to love God, therefore the only way to love God is by loving one another. The New Testament makes this even more plain later on, when it says, in 1 John 4:20, “those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

Therefore, kindred in Christ, the answer to Judas’ question is not knowledge but love. We may never know, with any certainty, whether the basic tenets of the Christian faith are literally true, but we can prove the efficacy of our faith in the way that we treat each other, our neighbors, and even our enemies. I can’t prove to you the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, but I can hopefully demonstrate, in the way that I live my life, the truth that the meaning of life can be found in loving one another the way that Jesus loves us, without condition or proviso.

I dare to proclaim to you this morning that the meaning of life is love itself, and I have come to experience the ultimate expression of love through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. I pray that my actions toward you will be a testimony to this love, and I pray furthermore, that your actions in this life will be a similar testimony to the living love of the risen Christ, who continues to love this world through you.

There is no proof I can offer of the truth of Christ, except the evidence of a life lived in love. I pray that you and I will be faithful in our living witness to the love of Christ. If I am right, then a life lived in love, in the name of Christ, will be all the proof we need.

Amen.

What is this world coming to?

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter

Click here to read the biblical texts.

Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.

That is a tenet of faith in which I wholeheartedly believe. I believe it because I have lived through it on multiple occasions.

One such occasion occurred when I was about thirty years old and still serving as a pastor in my previous denomination. A local news station in upstate New York, where I lived at the time, wanted to interview me on their morning show because they had heard that I was a clergyman who supported equal marriage rights for couples of the same gender. I gladly did the interview and went home.

Later that night, the hate comments started to appear on the internet. All kinds of people were calling me a “heretic” and a “false prophet.” Some said I should be stripped of my ministry credentials. A rescue mission, where I had been a regular guest preacher for years, called to inform me that I had been banned from speaking in their chapel ever again.

I realized in that moment, as I was hearing so many angry voices shout Bible verses at me, that my understanding of the Bible had shifted dramatically from the perspective I had been raised with. I had come to appreciate the Bible as a collection of voices, reporting on their spiritual experiences, and pointing our way to God, but I no longer “believed in the Bible” as the absolute and infallible authority on historical and doctrinal matters. The people lobbing these hateful comments in my direction believed the Bible to be something fundamentally different from what I believe it to be. Therefore, I could no longer consider myself to be a member of their ideological tribe.

This realization threw me into a mental tailspin. If I no longer believed the Bible to be the literal “word of God,” then what did I believe? Could I still call myself a Christian? Did I even believe in God? Was my faith dying because I had sold out to secular fads, instead of clinging to spiritual truths? These were questions that kept me up at night.

Thankfully, I had a wise spiritual director who guided me through my crisis of faith by listening without judgment and recommending good books like The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. Through my director’s companionship, I came to realize that my faith was not dying, but evolving. I was eventually able to say, “Yes, I am still a Christian, and yes, I believe in God,” even though I now understand both of those things in very different ways than I had before.

That was one of my many breakdowns that later led to a breakthrough. Your personal breakdown might be similar, but then again, it might be very different. I think particularly of my many friends in recovery from addiction who had to “hit rock bottom” before they finally got sober. I think of those who have lost jobs, relationships, or health, through no fault of their own, but simply because life doesn’t always turn out as planned.

In moments like these, it’s very normal and understandable for struggling people to look at life and see only the chaos of disaster and tragedy. Even if the chaos isn’t impacting you personally, it’s easy to simply watch the evening news and wonder, “What is this world coming to?”

I think that’s a great question to ask, so long as we don’t presume the answer before we’ve even finished asking the question: “What is this world coming to?”

Scientists have the beginning of an answer to that question. Many of them have noticed that the universe, over the course of its 13.8 billion year history, seems to be moving in the direction of increased complexity and cooperation. In the beginning, there was only physics. Immediately after the Big Bang, there were lots of elementary particles, which later formed into atoms. Atoms bonded together to form molecules, giving rise to the science of chemistry. On this planet (at least), chemical reactions gave rise to the emergence of biological life in the form of single-celled organisms. Life then evolved to the point of more complex organisms, that had brains. Brains evolved to the point of developing consciousness. Human consciousness developed to the point of organizing itself into small groups. Those small groups organized themselves into large, complex societies with laws, technology, medicine, and artistic expression.

It is, of course, undeniable that the course of history has often been meandering, with many fits, false starts, and backsliding along the way, but if we take a step back to look at the big picture of the universe, we can see objects and organisms organizing themselves into increasingly complex patterns of cooperation. Cosmologist Brian Swimme says, “Four billion years ago, the earth was molten rock; now it sings opera.”

Scientists, by virtue of their profession, do not claim to know for certain whether this evolution of complexity, from atoms to opera, is the result of random chance or intentional design. Their job is just to describe what they see, but humans can’t seem to stop themselves from asking the question. Our brains are neurologically hardwired to search for patterns of cause and effect. When that search for a cause takes us past the limits of pure reason, we naturally begin to engage our imaginations and speak the language of the heart.

About a hundred years ago, there was a paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who studied the evolution of life in great detail. It just so happens that Teilhard was also a Jesuit priest. He undertook his own search for truth with the head of scientist and the heart of a mystic.

When science could not answer Teilhard’s burning questions about life’s origin and destiny, he found himself meditating on Revelation 21:6, which we heard this morning in our second reading, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

It seemed clear to Teilhard that “Alpha,” the first letter in the Greek alphabet, was meant to refer to God as the creator of the cosmos. But what did the text mean by saying that God is also the “Omega,” which is the last letter in the Greek alphabet?

Meditating on this question through the lens of his Catholic faith, Teilhard came to believe that, just as the universal Church comprised members from “every tribe, language, people and nation,” so the entire universe itself was being drawn toward eventual unity in the cosmic Body of Christ.

We naturally ask the question in chaotic times, “What is this world coming to?” For Teilhard, with his scientific mind and mystical heart, the answer was, “Christ.” The Church, in his mind, is only the beginning of the unity that will eventually incorporate the entirety of human society, planet Earth, and even the cosmos itself. This, for Teilhard, is what it means to believe that God is both “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

For us, as people of faith and people of science, it is no small task to trust that the universe is headed in this direction. As we have already noted, there are setbacks and disasters that threaten to overwhelm us with chaos. Moreover, the entire project is so huge that we cannot possibly complete it under our own power.

Today’s reading from the Revelation to St. John paints a picture of the end of history as a beautiful garden city where all things are made new and death is forever swallowed up by life. Our psalm this morning develops that idea even further, envisioning a symphony of praise that incorporates, not only all people, but plants, animals, and cosmic forces as well.

Do we dare to believe in this utopian vision? If so, then how on earth do we get there?

Obviously, the task is too big for us to complete ourselves. We human beings cannot do much to affect the progress of distant stars and galaxies. After all, we even feel helpless to resolve the problems that beset us on this “tiny blue dot” called planet Earth.

So, what can we do and how do we do it? There’s more than one answer to that question, but I think Jesus starts us down the right path when he says in today’s gospel, “Just as I have loved you, you also ought to love one another” (John 13:34).

Obviously, this is a very general statement, even vague, if we leave it undeveloped at the level of pious words and sentimental feelings. But love, as those know who have tried to do it, is always simple but never easy. Love only exists at the level of concrete action. As finite beings, we cannot adequately love the entire universe, but we can make a difference at the local level in the way we treat ourselves, one another, and our fellow creatures on earth. Through our acts of love toward one another, our love for the universe and God takes on flesh and becomes a concrete reality. In short, we love God through our neighbors.

This is the secret to transforming breakdowns into breakthroughs that inch the universe closer to its final destiny of unification in the Body of Christ, as Teilhard understood it.

This love asks much of us. It continually takes us outside of our comfort zones and challenges our previously-held assumptions. We can see the early Christians doing just this in today’s first reading, taken from the Acts of the Apostles. In this passage of Scripture, St. Peter is being called on the carpet by his fellow leaders in the early Church. Up to that point, Christianity had been an entirely Jewish movement. But now, a group of Romans, led by Cornelius the Centurion, had become interested in following the way of Jesus and even began to have mystical visions and other kinds of spiritual experiences. St. Peter saw this happening and decided to go ahead and baptize these non-Jews into the Church, even though that had not first converted to Judaism. It was a controversial decision on St. Peter’s part that almost split the church. After much discussion and debate, the Church decided to extend the boundaries of love to include all people, no matter what their culture or ethnicity of origin. I imagine the council’s eyes going wide with wonder after they heard Peter’s story and said, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). They had realized, in a flash of spiritual insight, that God’s arms are big enough to embrace the whole world.

Kindred in Christ, we live in a world that often seems to be on the brink of tearing itself apart. I don’t want to minimize the pain that comes with the question, “What is this world coming to?” But I do want to encourage you with the faith that trusts that this universe is indeed going somewhere good. In the language of science, it is proceeding toward patterns of ever-increasing complexity and cooperation. In the language of our faith, the whole creation is being drawn to unity in the cosmic Body of Christ. We cannot get there on our own, but each of us can do our part to love one another as Jesus loves us, and so build up a new world from the ashes of the old.

Amen.

Where I Stand Is Where I Fall

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.

Click here to read the biblical texts.

Imagine, if you will, a presidential motorcade coming into town. People line the streets, waving American flags. Secret service agents and police officers surround the limousine on all sides, ready to jump into action if there is a problem.

Now, imagine that, on the other side of town, another kind of parade is happening. In this procession, the leader is riding in a little clown car. People still line the streets, cheering. They are playing Hail to the Chief on kazoos. If we saw this silly demonstration, we could easily understand that it was meant to be a parody of the bigger and more serious motorcade happening elsewhere. This was exactly what was happening on Palm Sunday, as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

In Jerusalem, during the time of Jesus, it was customary for the Roman governor to make a military parade through the city during the week before the holiday of Passover. The Roman province of Judea was known for being a troubled place that frequently experienced violent insurrections. The risk of uprising was especially high during the Passover season, when the Jewish people celebrated their deliverance by God from slavery, tyranny, and genocide in Egypt. Governor Pilate’s annual show of force at that time was intended to nip those thoughts in the bud, before people got any bright ideas about acting on them.

Jesus’ triumphal entry, on the other hand, was a deliberate lampoon of the governor’s bravado. He based his demonstration on the words of the prophet Zechariah from the Hebrew Scriptures:

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).

By comparison, Jesus’ gathering was quite small, filled with the most obnoxious riffraff in town, and was obviously poking fun at the powers-that-be. It’s no wonder then that the authorities were anxious that this little demonstration might attract the wrong kind attention from Pontius Pilate and his soldiers. I can hear fear in their voices as they say, perhaps while glancing nervously over their shoulders, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” Jesus responds, rather poetically, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40). Paraphrasing Jesus’ words, I imagine Jesus shrugging his shoulders and saying, “Yeah, sure… Good luck with that!”

The serious point that Jesus was making with this little demonstration of political theater is that the so-called powers-that-be in this world are not so powerful as they think. They show their strength through competition and violence, but Jesus shows us another way to live.

Our Epistle reading this morning tells us something about how that other way looks. St. Paul tells us that Christ, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:6-7a).

This “emptying” that Paul talks about is the self-giving love that Jesus radiates from every cell of his body. It stands in stark contrast to the competitive systems of domination that tend to rule the world, both in Jesus’ time and ours.

The “way of the world,” as we are socially trained to accept it, is the way of the zero-sum game, where there are winners and losers, us and them, insiders and outsiders. We see it everywhere: in military conflicts, sporting events, political elections, and business deals. We get so accustomed to this way of thinking, it even finds its way into our families, neighborhoods, and churches. But this way of thinking comes with a downside: When left unchecked, it destroys the very communities that it depends on.

Consider, for example, the “Super Chicken” experiment conducted by evolutionary biologist William Muir at Purdue University. Dr. Muir was interested in improving the egg-laying potential of chickens, so he took the top-producing chickens from each coop and put them together in a “super coop,” expecting this coop to out-perform all the others. What he discovered, though, was surprising. The “super coop” did not perform better than the other coops, but worse… much worse, in fact, because the super chickens all killed each other. Dr. Muir did what he did in the name of improving efficiency, but ended up creating an environment full of aggressive and territorial over-achievers.

This doesn’t just happen with chickens, either. Back in the 1990s, there was a very successful company called Enron. This company had a “rank and yank” practice where they would evaluate their employees and fire the bottom 10% of performers each quarter. Like Dr. Muir, they were trying to increase productivity, but created a company culture where competition led to dishonesty. Eventually, the whole company collapsed under the weight of its own cut-throat practices. The Enron company went bankrupt, thousands of people lost their jobs, and the leaders went to jail.

When we make an unholy idol of winning, we end up losing our souls.

When Jesus, the Son of God, came into this world, he didn’t come to win; he came to love. He didn’t come to seize power, but to give his life for others. The paradox is that this is what true power looks like: Not the power to control, but the power to love without limits.

There is a scene in one of my favorite TV shows where the hero is trying to convince his nemesis to join the hero in a worthy cause. The nemesis complains, “But you can’t win!”

And the hero replies:

“Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works—because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right. Because it’s decent. And above all—it’s kind. Maybe there’s no point to any of this at all. But it’s the best I can do. So I’m going to do it. And I will stand here doing it until it kills me. Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall. Stand with me.”

I can’t help but hear Jesus in those words. Not trying to win, but just doing what is right, decent, and kind, standing in love until it kills him, and inviting us to stand with him. That’s who Jesus is; as Christians, that’s who we believe God is.

Christians imagine God, not as an “old man in the sky,” but as a flowing river of love. The mystery of the Trinity envisions the one God as three persons (i.e. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), a community, a network of relationships, bound together in perfect love.

Whenever someone is baptized in the name of the Trinity, we are proclaiming our faith that this person, and every person, is caught up in that never-ending flow of love. The Trinity is why we, as Christians, are happy to say, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4:16). We don’t just attach the adjective “love” to the noun “God,” we go all the way to saying that God is love itself. And love, as we remember from English class, is a verb.

And if love is a verb, and God is love, then God is a verb. God doesn’t just exist; God happens wherever love is happening. If a river were ever to stop flowing, it would cease to be a river and become a lake. In the same way, if God’s love were ever to stop flowing outward in greater and greater circles of community, God would cease to be God.

This is the alternate way of living that Jesus presents to us on Palm Sunday: The way of self-giving love. Jesus does this because that’s who Jesus is, that’s who God is, and that’s who we are called to be.

Jesus didn’t come to win; he came to love. He didn’t ride a war horse; he rode a donkey. He didn’t exploit his power; he emptied himself.

Today, Jesus invites us to stand with him.

So, as we enter Holy Week, let us stand with him, not because we want to beat someone, but because it’s right, because it’s decent, and above all—It’s kind. Maybe it won’t lead to us winning the competitions that the world values so much, but it’s the best that Jesus can do, and he will stand here doing it until it kills him. It’s who Jesus is, and who he is is where he stands, and where he stands is where he falls. We already know from experience that the cut-throat way of the world is doomed to failure, so let us try this other way instead. Let us stand with him in love, through Holy Week and every week, until it kills us. Until that Easter morning when the tomb is opened and even death itself is swallowed up in victory, powerless against the relentless flow of God’s love.

An Impact Beyond the Intent

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Photo credit: Enrique López-Tamayo Biosca, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent.

Click here to read the biblical texts.

Back before my wife Sarah and I had started dating, we were in that awkward stage where we were both noticing each other, but neither one had worked up the courage to make a move, so we just kept dancing around the subject. One night, Sarah invited me to a party at her house, and we ended up talking on the couch long after everyone else had left. It was getting late, Sarah reached forward for her drink on the coffee table, I unconsciously stretched, and she accidentally sat right back into the spot where my arm was. Sarah was like, “That was smooth! Can we talk about this?” On the outside, I played it very cool and calm, but on the inside, I was like: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Anyway… to make a long story short: It went pretty well and we’ve been married for 20 years.

The moral of the story is that our actions sometimes have an impact beyond what we intended them to have. That was certainly the case with St. Mary of Bethany in today’s gospel.

Mary’s anointing of Jesus happens at a very important turning point in the larger story of John’s gospel. Up until this point, Jesus had been dropping hints about his true identity, but from this point forward, he would begin to speak more openly as the story moved toward its climax with his crucifixion and resurrection.

In the chapter just prior to this one, Jesus raised Mary’s brother Lazarus from the dead. This miracle, according to John, was the catalyst that caused the religious leaders to begin plotting to have Jesus killed. As this part of the story begins, Jesus is having dinner at the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. The memory of Lazarus’ death and resurrection was very fresh. Mary would have been deeply moved by the miracle she had just witnessed. Not only had Jesus turned her grief into joy, he had also rescued Mary and Martha from a life of poverty and degradation, which would have absolutely happened to two unmarried women who no longer had a man to speak for them in their patriarchal society. Jesus had saved, not one life, but three lives in his raising of Lazarus from the dead. Mary probably felt that she owed Jesus her life at this point.

As a sign of her gratitude, the text tells us that Mary took “a pound of costly perfume.” The Greek word for “costly perfume” is myrrh, which was used for burial rituals. It is quite likely that Mary had bought this perfume to use for her brother’s funeral, which was no longer necessary, thanks to Jesus. By breaking it open and pouring it on Jesus’ feet, she was expressing her relief and gratitude for what Jesus had done for her and her family.

This, all by itself, would have been a powerful statement, but Jesus gives it an even greater significance that Mary herself could not have known. Jesus says, “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.”

Jesus knew, whether through supernatural clairvoyance or just an insightful hunch, that his own death was impending. Mary’s act of devotion meant more than she could possibly have known. Just as Mary honored Jesus with her gratitude, Jesus honored Mary with the knowledge of what her gesture truly meant to him.

The moral of this story is the same as the one I told about my wife and me: Our actions sometimes have an impact beyond what we intended them to have.

Our individual lives are a part of a larger story. Like ripples in a pond, God’s grace expands the meaning of what we do to cosmic significance. If, as Jesus says, even the hairs on our head are numbered, then surely no small act of goodness or kindness goes unnoticed by the God who made the universe.

My favorite modern example of an action that has a greater impact than its intent is the story of Fr. Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican priest who ministered in South Africa in the early twentieth century. Fr. Huddleston was an outspoken activist against the apartheid policies that discriminated against people of color in South Africa. One of the many racist laws on the books at that time was that, whenever a darker-skinned person passed a lighter-skinned person in the street, the darker-skinned person had to step off the curb into the gutter and lift their hat in deference to the lighter-skinned person. Fr. Huddleston, who was himself a lighter-skinned person, thought this racist law was absolutely ridiculous. So, he made it his regular practice that, whenever he passed a person of color in the street, he would step off the curb and lift his hat in a gesture of respect to this fellow child of God. Technically, this was an act of civil disobedience against South African law, but Fr. Huddleston practiced this as an act of divine obedience to the higher law of God, which says that all people are created equal.

One day, Fr. Huddleston was walking down the street and saw a little boy and his mother coming his way. As was his usual practice, he stepped off the curb and lifted his hat in a gesture of respect as they walked by. The boy and his mother were people of color. The little boy asked his mother, “Mummy, who was that man?” And the mother replied, “Son, that man is an Anglican priest, and furthermore, he is a man of God.”

The little boy, telling this story years later, said, “That was the day that I decided I too wanted to be an Anglican priest, and furthermore, a man of God.” That little boy grew up to be Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who helped President Nelson Mandela dismantle the satanic apartheid system that kept God’s beloved children in chains for so many years. It is possible that Fr. Huddleston might have had no memory of that particular day, in which he acted with the same integrity that inspired his actions every day. Like St. Mary of Bethany, Fr. Huddleston could certainly not have known that his simple act of stepping off a curb would have a ripple effect that would eventually lead to the undoing of the twisted system against which he was protesting.

Kindred in Christ, I invite you today to consider how your own simple acts of compassion and courage may have a similar ripple effect on the world in which we live. One never knows when a word of kindness or a gesture of gratitude may have an impact far bigger than its intent. Many such acts are known to God alone, but rest assured that they are known. Jesus says, in his Sermon on the Mount, “When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:3-4).

Dr. Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

As witnesses of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I want to encourage you this day to speak up whenever one of our siblings in Christ has offered some small word or deed that has impacted your day. It is quite possible that the giver of this gift is unaware of what it meant to you. Be quick to offer thanks to them, and to God for them.

If you are on the receiving end of such recognition, I invite you to listen with ears of your heart, giving thanks to God, who has multiplied the impact of your small gift to mean more than you intended.

Dearly beloved, our lives are not our own and they are not lived alone. It is up to us to enlighten our neighbors with knowledge as they have enlightened us with the love of Christ in their hearts. Who knows whether that grateful acknowledgement might be the very encouragement needed by a weary soul who is secretly despairing of life itself? By adding our small gesture of thanks to the common wealth, we may provide the necessary means by which a life might be saved.

Like St. Mary of Bethany, our actions have an impact far beyond their intent. Let us remember this fact and draw strength from it. May we trust that our lives matter more than we know.

Amen.

The Prodigal Father

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

Sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent.

Click here to read the biblical texts.

In his brief novel, The Great Divorce, Anglican author C.S. Lewis writes about an imaginary bus tour of heaven and hell. One of the many interesting things about this book is how he imagines hell. For Lewis, hell is not a realm of fire and brimstone where the wicked are eternally tortured for their sins on earth. Instead, he depicts hell as a place where people live in huge mansions and get whatever they want, whenever they want it. Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? Well, the catch is that, with so much space and instant gratification available, people don’t need each other, so they just pack up and move farther away whenever anyone upsets them for even the slightest of reasons. This leaves vast tracts of empty cities where no one roams. Instead, everyone has locked themselves inside their own mansions and pace the empty halls alone all day, muttering about their “rights” and complaining that everything bad that has ever happened to them is not their fault. The real kicker is that the gates of this hell aren’t even locked; people can get up and go to heaven any time they want, except that nobody wants to. They would much rather stay stuck in their mansions, totally alone, and utterly convinced of their own self-righteousness. The souls of the damned in The Great Divorce bear a striking resemblance to the elder son in today’s gospel reading. I begin today’s sermon with this story because I too have a tendency to act like the self-righteous elder son in Jesus’ parable.

Here is my honest confession: Earlier this week, someone greatly offended me with something they said.

(PLEASE NOTE: If you are hearing this and wondering whether it was you, I want you to be assured that it was not. It had nothing to do with anyone in this room, this parish, or this town. I won’t tell the whole story here because it’s not important to this sermon. All you need to know is that my feelings were hurt and I was very angry about it).

I spent much of the week stewing in my self-righteous indignation, replaying the conversation over and over in my head, and losing sleep over it.

When I sat down to write this sermon, I read the passage and froze stiff when I got to the part about the elder son. I realized that, after my week of angry pouting, I could not, in good conscience, stand in this pulpit on Sunday morning and preach about the good news of God’s amazing grace without being a complete and total hypocrite (because that’s exactly how I’ve been acting). Like the elder son in Jesus’ parable, I wanted my enemies to be punished for what they had done to me; I wanted the scales of justice to be set right, only to realize, when I was confronted by the words of Jesus in Scripture, that I am, as my mother used to say, “full of bologna.”

“Holding onto resentment,” as the Buddha once said, “is like drinking poison and waiting for someone else to die.” That was me this week.

What struck me so hard is that Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son is not really about the prodigal son. It has more to do with the elder son. Jesus tells this story in response to a group of upstanding and religious citizens who were offended that Jesus was “hanging out with the wrong crowd.” In response to their complaints, Jesus tells three stories. The first and second stories are about a lost sheep and a lost coin, respectively. The third and final story was about a lost son who ran home with his proverbial tail between his legs after going on a bender and waking up face-down in a pigsty.

The part of the story we know best begins with the younger son asking his father for his share of the family inheritance. Normally, this sum of money would only be given out after the father had died, so this request was the equivalent of the younger son saying to his father, “You’re dead to me.” I can only imagine the pain that the father felt in that moment. But, instead of berating his son for saying something so stupid, the father honors the request and divides his wealth between his two sons.

As we know from the story, the younger son squandered his inheritance by partying hard until the money ran out and he fell on hard times. When he finally hit rock bottom, the younger son came to his senses and decided to return home. It’s important to note that this decision was not based on any sense of remorse for his actions, but out of the base desire for self-preservation. The younger son concocted a rehearsed speech, through which he hoped to con his way back into his father’s good graces.

When the younger son gets within sight of his family home, Jesus tells us, in what I think is one of the most comforting passages in the entire Bible, that “while he was still far off,” his father got up and ran to meet him. I love this verse so much. The father did not wait for the son to make it all the way home, but ran to him “while he was still far off.” This verse should be a great comfort for those of us who realize that, even after years of following Jesus, we are still very far away from where we ought to be, spiritually.

The father was not standing on the front porch with arms crossed, tapping his foot and waiting for his son to finally crawl his way up the driveway. No, Jesus says that “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran to him and put his arms around him and kissed him.”

The younger son, probably taken aback by this extravagant display of affection, nevertheless starts into his rehearsed speech, but his father doesn’t let him finish. He interrupts the speech with an enthusiastic call to start a party. This interruption should call into question everything that Christians have come to believe about the proper order of confession and forgiveness. The father does not wait to see if his son is sincere about his change of heart. He does not even let him finish his prepared speech.

(I wonder what it would be like if the priests in our church were to interrupt the congregation’s prayer of confession during the Sunday service and pronounce the absolution before they had even finished!)

The son is already forgiven before he even finishes confessing his sins, so great is his father’s love for him. So great is God’s love for you and me, as well, according to Jesus.

God does not forgive us because we repent; God forgives us before we repent. God’s amazing grace is what gives us the strength to repent and amend our lives in the first place.

So, a celebration ensues at the house. But, as we know, all is not well with the elder son, who had stayed home to work dutifully on his father’s farm. We learn a lot from the elder son’s reaction to the news that his brother had returned home. Unlike the father, the elder son was not happy to see him. We learn even more about the elder son’s misconceptions about who his father is.

He says to his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you.” This is our first clue that something is off about the elder son’s perception of his relationship with his father: he thinks of himself as a slave, not a son. He thinks that his father is only interested in obedience, not love. He sees their relationship as merely transactional, not personal. He assumed, quite wrongly, that their relationship would end if the son was not perfectly submissive to the father’s power. The younger son’s return to a celebration would have completely upended the elder son’s faith in a morally-balanced world.

The next thing the elder son says is, “I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.” Now, this is a very puzzling statement. Earlier in the story, Jesus remarked how the father had “divided his property between [his two sons],” at the younger son’s request. Presumably then, the elder son would have already received his share of the family estate which, according to the inheritance laws of that time, would have been a double-portion of that which was given to his younger brother. So, when the father tells his eldest son, “All that is mine is yours,” he was not just speaking metaphorically or hyperbolically; he meant it literally. The fact that the elder son still sees himself as a slave, who has never received anything from his father, is incontrovertible proof that the elder son has entirely misjudged the character of his father.

In the end, this is not actually a parable about a lost son, but about two lost sons. The younger wandered away and wasted what had been given to him; the elder stayed home and forgot that he had been given anything at all. The elder son, by Jesus’ account, is the one who is in the more spiritually precarious position.

The real story, however, is not about either of the sons, but about the father. The father comes out to meet both of his lost sons where they are, in the midst of their self-made mess. Traditionally, this story has been known as “the parable of the prodigal son.” The word “prodigal” comes from a Latin word meaning “lavish or extravagant.” The most lavish and extravagant thing in this parable, as I see it, is not the younger son’s wastefulness, but his father’s graciousness and love toward both of his sons. For this reason, I would like to suggest that we rename this story, “the parable of the prodigal father.”

Kindred in Christ, the good news of this story is that our Father in heaven, as revealed in his Son Jesus Christ, loves us more than we deserve, more than we expect, and even more than we understand. God’s amazing grace and unconditional love annihilates all of our manufactured misconceptions about who God is and who we are, in relation to God.

The truth is that we are loved and we are forgiven by God. Full stop. No provisos, addenda, or quid pro quo. It is a free gift; we did not earn it, so we cannot lose it. Nothing is required.

The only thing God requests of us, out of love, is that we trust in that love and pass it along to others, through our words and actions. Even this meager request is more for our benefit than God’s.

In a world torn by self-righteous violence, the humble testimony of those who know that they are loved, in spite of our best efforts to prove otherwise, has the power to undo the shackles of our own self-righteousness and liberate us from the hell of our own making.

May each of us trust that we are forever held by this love and do our best to demonstrate it to others, to the end that they too might join us in proclaiming the good news of God’s amazing grace.

The Gardener Who Never Gives Up

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent.

Click here for the biblical readings.

Hi, my name is Barrett and I make poor life choices.

Back in 2013, my family and I moved from upstate New York to western Michigan. We figured it would take a couple of days to pack up our stuff, load the truck, and get on the road. After all, we had made a similar move just a few years earlier, coming from the west coast of Canada to New York.

What we failed to account for, though, is that our previous move involved two broke seminarians in a one-room apartment. Everything we owned fit in the back of a modest U-Haul. Over the course of the intervening years, we had amassed a much larger collection of furniture, books, and kids (with all their accompanying accoutrements). A couple of days and a U-Haul wouldn’t be nearly enough to get the job done this time.

A visitor to my house asked, “Hey, aren’t you moving to Michigan next week?”

“Sure,” I said, “I figure I’ll just throw some stuff in boxes and hit the road.”

My friend very wisely took that opportunity to gently talk some much-needed sense into me, “Listen, you’ve got a lot more stuff in this house than you did when you got here. I don’t think a couple of days is going to be enough time.” Thank God for good friends, because this blessed soul organized a whole cadre of neighbors who descended upon my messy house for the entire week that it took the lot of us to get things packed and cleaned before moving day. In the end, everything came together right on time, but there’s no way it would have if it hadn’t been for the love of these people who rescued me from the mess of my own making. All in all, the stakes were relatively low in this crisis, but I was very grateful for the community that made a safety-net for me, when I needed it.

For other people, the stakes aren’t so low and a safety-net is not always there when they need it. Most of us have made regrettable decisions, of one kind or another, in our lives. Tragedy often strikes when unfortunate circumstances combine with our poor choices to leave us in a real pickle. Some of our unhoused neighbors, for example, could tell us heart-rending tales of woe about how they ended up living on the street, through no fault of their own. Others who have never experienced housing insecurity might be tempted to dismiss such stories as mere excuses. “The poor are poor,” some might say, “because of their own fault. If they had made better choices, they wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Thinking this way is tempting because it provides a false sense of security. Some might think, perhaps unconsciously, that they can protect themselves from disaster by being smart enough, good enough, or careful enough. But the reality is that life is rarely so simple. All of us have known good and hardworking people who nevertheless suffer hardship. The scary fact is that all of us are more vulnerable than we would like to think. Moralizing about the causes of disaster will not protect us when bad things happen to good people, especially since good people are also prone to making mistakes, from time to time.

So then, the real question for us Christians is not, “Why are the poor poor,” but, “What will we do about it?” That is the question that Jesus addresses in today’s gospel.

At the opening of the passage, Jesus talks about two terrible events that had happened in recent memory for his listeners. The first was a violent attack on worshipers at the temple by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. The second was a building collapse in which eighteen people had been killed. Jesus answers the question about blame in a very straightforward manner: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.”

Jesus typically asks more questions than he answers and often responds to questions with figurative stories, but this is one of the few times when he gives a direct and unequivocal answer: Did these people deserve what happened to them? No, they did not.

What he says next, however, almost undermines what he just said. Jesus says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did!” In this moment, Jesus almost sounds like an old-timey southern preacher, screaming through a megaphone while standing on streetcorner soap box. But that’s not what Jesus intends.

It helps to understand that the word “repent” has very little to do with feeling guilt or fear. The Greek word translated as “repent” is “metanoia,” which literally means, “change your mind.” Likewise, the word used for “perish” is not just referring to physical death, which eventually happens to everyone, but spiritual death. The best definition of “perishing,” in the spiritual sense, was given by Dr. Martin Luther King when he said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Jesus’ warning about “perishing” is about this kind of spiritual death that we are in danger of experiencing, if we do not change our way of thinking about the misfortunes that befall our fellow human beings.

What then is the alternative that Jesus recommends we follow? To answer this, we need to look at the parable Jesus tells in the next part of the passage. It’s the story of a fig tree that is not performing as expected. The owner of the field wants to tear up the tree and throw it away to make room for other, more productive plants. But the gardener recommends patience and care instead. He says, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.” He recommends that more attention, not less, be given to the plant. He doesn’t give up, but gets involved. God, according to Jesus, is more like the gardener than the owner of the vineyard.

Jesus presents us with the image of a God who does not give up on us, but is willing to get the divine hands dirty with hard work. The implication is that, if God doesn’t give up on us, then neither should we give up on each other.

What I find most interesting about this parable is the unresolved ending. We, the audience, don’t get to find out how the story ends. Did the owner agree to the gardener’s suggestion? Did the extra effort pay off, in the end? Jesus doesn’t say, so we just don’t know. The open ending of this parable does not leave us with certainty, but with hope. There are no guarantees in this life, but the stance of getting involved, rather than giving up, is the best hope we have for making a future that is better than the status quo we are enduring at this moment. The ending of this parable is Jesus’ way of telling us, “The ball is in your court. What are you going to do?”

When I failed to adequately plan for my big move from New York to Michigan, my friends could have easily shrugged their shoulders and said, “Well, that’s just what happens when you fail to plan ahead!” They could have rightly left me stewing in a mess of my own making. I am so grateful they did not do that. Out of their great love for me, they made my problem their problem and turned a moment of crisis into a moment of grace.

Kindred in Christ, the uncertainties of life and imperfections of human nature mean that we are all in the same boat together. We can choose to give up on each other and say, “It’s every man for himself,” or we can get involved with each other, get our hands dirty, and lean into the hope that we can make a better next year than we had last year.

In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus gives us some practical advice on the kinds of things we can do to show up for each other. The Church has traditionally called them, “The Corporal Works of Mercy.” They are: To feed the hungry, to give water to the thirsty, to shelter the homeless, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned, and to give alms to the poor.

Like the gardener’s suggestions in Jesus’ parable, the Corporal Works of Mercy are not a guaranteed plan of social reform; they are a list of virtues that Christians ought to be practicing, for their own sake. We cannot solve the world’s problems, nor can we protect ourselves from the dangers of calamity and our own stupid mistakes, but we can show up for each other in a spirit of care and concern, willing to get our hands dirty with the kind of work that Jesus Christ calls us to do. By following Jesus, and practicing the virtues he taught us, we bear witness to the loving presence of the God who does not give up on us, who gets involved in helping each of us clean up the messes of our own making, and gives us hope for a better tomorrow than we had yesterday.

Friends, our God does not give up on us, so let us not give up on each other. Let us work together in hope, because it is a hope worth working for. Amen.

The Way We See Things Matters

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon3 Comments

Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany.

Click here for the biblical readings.

The way we see things matters.

For example, when I worked as a hospice chaplain, one could say that I was a highly trained professional, providing expert care for my patients’ spiritual needs. On the other hand, one could also say that I was simply “heaven’s UPS guy,” making special deliveries to the pearly gates. It depends on how you look at it.

The way we see things matters.

One could 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.

One could see the world as a meaningless conglomeration of matter and energy that is ultimately indifferent to the needs and wants of 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.”

(Julian of Norwich, 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.

The way we see things matters.

In today’s gospel, we get to see the beginning of the Christian worldview taking root in the minds of Jesus’ disciples, Saints Peter, James, and John. We read that Jesus takes these three friends up a mountain and there, far away from the bustling crowds, “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). 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. In the Buddhist tradition, Siddartha Gautama is the enlightened sage who reveals the Eight-fold Path. In Christianity, on the other hand, Jesus Christ does not reveal the message, but is the message itself. Christians find God in Jesus and, through Jesus, we find God everywhere else.

This is why Jesus refers so frequently to nature in his parables. When people ask him to tell them about the kingdom of God, he says, “Do you see those crops growing in the field? Do you see that woman baking bread? Do you see that farmer sowing seed?” Jesus invites us to “consider the lilies of the field” and “the birds of the air” as reminders of God’s presence. For Jesus, all of these mundane occurrences are revelations of the divine.

The way we see things matters.

If our worldview is shaped by the class warfare of Marxist communism or the market forces of industrial capitalism, we will see the world as an endless fight for survival. If our worldview is shaped by (so-called) Christian nationalism or (so-called) Islamic terrorism, we will see the world as a battleground over who is right and who is wrong. But when our worldview is shaped by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 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)

What does this vision of the Transfiguration look like, when we live it out on a day-to-day basis?

Earlier this week, one of our parishioners at St. Mark’s came into the office and shared a very meaningful, true story with me. It stands out as a reminder of what life could be like, if we tried to see the world the way Jesus sees it. I share that story now with her permission.

Our parishioner is an elderly lady who had been feeling sick all week. After several days, she finally felt well enough to go to the grocery store for supplies. Upon returning home, she was struggling to unload the groceries from her car in the bitter cold. As it happened, a mailman was driving by at that exact moment. When he saw the lady struggling, he parked his truck, got out, and carried the groceries into the house for her. It was a relatively small gesture of neighborly kindness, but it meant the world to this lady. She thanked him profusely, and was absolutely floored by the next thing he said:

“Well ma’am,” the mailman said, “I just figured that’s what Jesus would do.”

This response blew me away. This is what life could be like, if we saw the world the way Jesus sees it.

Kindred in Christ, the way we see things matters.

I encourage you this week to draw inspiration from the great spiritual masters like Jesus Christ, Thomas Merton, Julian of Norwich, and that mailman from Coldwater, Michigan. I invite you to become followers of Jesus, to see the world the way he sees it, full of divine glory. I invite you to look at your fellow beings on this Earth, not as enemies to be defeated, but as neighbors to be loved.

May this Christlike way of seeing transfigure you from the inside out and lead you out to transfigure this world in the name of the God whose name is Love, and in the name of the Love whose name is God.

Amen.