Two things I have to get off my chest before I get to the sermon:

1.  Being asked to preach at the ordination of a transitional deacon is like being asked to preach at a confirmation.  We do it because we’ve always done it, but we struggle to explain why.  I suspect this invitation wass not so much an honor as a trap.  So I’m not going offer an apologetic for the transitional diaconate:  as of today, Ben will be a deacon.  ‘Nuff said.

2.  For anyone who knows Ben, it seemed logical that a sermon at his deaconing should including some reference to Star Trek, but when I inquired about episodes relevant to the diaconate, he replied, “if I wanted a Star Trek sermon, I would’ve just asked Kyle Rader to do it! (Kyle is Brent House’s Anglican-sympathizing Methodist.) So, no Star Trek – or Stargate Atlantis or Firefly or Battlestar Galactica.

However, in the first episode of the fifth season of the new Dr. Who, we learn that an escaped alien convict known as Prisoner Zero has been hiding for 12 years in the house of one Amelia Pond, unbeknownst to her.  The Doctor (who, for the uninitiated, is a sort of time-traveling, reincarnating trickster-hero, and kind of Jesus-like) has just realized this and they have the following dialogue:

DOCTOR:  How many rooms?

And, indeed, there is a sixth room, untouched and abandoned for 12 years, where the shape-shifting multiform monster has been waiting, biding her time.

This whole episode is full of the theme of seeing and not-seeing, perceiving beneath and beyond the surface, and it occurred to me that the metaphors of vision and seeing are a great frame on which to hang our understanding of orders of ministry.

All Christians are called to see in a special way:  we are called to see Christ in each other, in our neighbor, in our enemy, and in ourselves.  We are called to see the great cloud of witnesses that we celebrate today, to see the presence of the faithful, past and present (and even future), around us, not only in this space, but out in the world, supporting us, cheering us on, depending on us, waiting, with the rest of creation, . . . for the revealing of the children of God.  (They’re here even now . . .)  It is a complete vision, a deep vision, a metaphysical vision.

When we ordain brothers and sisters as deacons, priests, and bishops, one could say that we are setting them aside to focus on and pay attention to a certain kind of vision.  A bishop’s view, it seems to me, is the big picture:  one eye aimed on the past, to “the faith 
of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and those of 
every generation who have looked to God in hope,” and one on the future, discerning how God would have us work “for the reconciliation of the world.”  There’s a third eye, if you will allow the anatomical inaccuracy, looking at the overall wellbeing and mission of the Church as lived out in his or her diocese.

A priest’s vision is generally focused, if you will, on the ground, or on immediate surroundings:  on the life of a particular community, the care of its members, its growth in faith and service, the day to day administration of the sacraments.  There’s some glancing to the past, too, since priests are supposed to pass on the tradition of the Church, and some looking to the future as God’s call is discerned locally.

What’s a deacon’s special vision, then?  I think it’s that vision the Doctor talks about in his conversation with Amy Pond:  peripheral vision.  This is the vision that sees what’s on the edges, what we have chosen not to focus on, the places, as the Doctor says, where we don’t want to look.  The work of the deacon, is, in words we will hear shortly, “to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the 
world.”

Our call as Christians is always to proclaim God’s love and be Christ’s reconciling presence in the world.  But the reality is, as happened very early in the life of the church, we can get so focused on some parts of that work—on the preaching, and the sacraments, and the programs, and the spiritual formation, etc., etc.—that we miss what’s right on the edge of our sight, just in the corner of our eyes.  So we have deacons to bring those things back into focus.

But, as Doctor Who will show, there’s a danger to this vision.  Amy decides to go alone into that newly-discovered room, and the Doctor tells her not to look at Prisoner Zero, only to track it with her peripheral vision, “Don’t try to see it, he says. “If it knows you’ve seen it, it will kill you.”  But Amy simply won’t allow the monster to stay in the corner of her eye.  She turns and looks it directly.  (At which point it does try to kill her, but that’s beside the point.)  Later on, it is exactly that face-to-face encounter with the Prisoner, the memory of what it looks like undisguised, that allows the monster to be defeated and saves the world.

The things that deacons are called to bring to our attention—poverty, disease, abuse, neglect—are unpleasant, painful, embarrassing, troublesome.  We might even feel that to look at those things head-on will kill us.  And we might even be right.  To acknowledge a need in the world and to acknowledge that God might want us to do something about it might mean that we have to change, even to die.  But that’s exactly what the Christian life is about.  The deacon looks the need straight-on and encourages us to do the same, reminding us that this is where Christ is encountered and assuring us that even if we do face death, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation—no, not even scary escaped alien convicts—will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This is the kind of vision that Jesus is using in the Gospel we heard this evening.  The poor, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake don’t look particularly blessed when looked at straight on and they are those who oftentimes we’d rather not look at at all.  Not only do they tell us of what is wrong and painful about the world, but they also remind us that we could easily take their place.  Jesus calls us (and deacons remind us) to turn our heads and look at those in our peripheral vision and, with the vision that all Christians are called to exercise, see the blessing.

There’s a third scene in this episode that is particularly diaconal.  It turns out that there is yet another group of aliens, the Atraxi, who are hunting the escaped Prisoner Zero.  They put a force field around the earth, causing the sun to dim.  At this point every single person on the village green, dozens of them, does what one might expect:  they pull out their phones and begin to take pictures.  (The Doctor responds in exasperation:  “Oh, and here they come, the human race. The end comes, as it was always going to—down a video phone!”)

But the Doctor notices something odd.  Amid all of these people focused on the obvious, there is one man whose camera phone is focused on something completely different:  a man and a dog, who we already know is Prisoner Zero in disguise.  This is Rory, who has been paying attention to his own peripheral vision.  He knows something is terribly wrong but can’t get anyone to listen.  The Doctor asks Rory, “Man and dog.  Why?”  And as Rory explains, the Doctor chimes in, knowing exactly what the problem is.  Rory’s vision has been affirmed and confirmed.

This, too, I think, is a deacon’s work:  to notice other folks’ peripheral visions, to help them understand what they’re seeing, to encourage them to look at the needs of the world straight on, to listen together for God’s call, and to guide or mentor or nudge or network or whatever is appropriate to invite the church to respond.  Deacons are not the only ones who are responsible to attending to the world’s need (just as priests are not to proclaim the gospel or celebrate the sacraments alone, nor are bishops called to guard the faith, administer, or discern alone).  Their special charism is to keep the peripheral vision, as it were, in focus for the Church as a whole.

So, Ben, you’ve been baptized and confirmed.  Now it’s time for the next ontological change.  As happens with these things, you are taking a step away from the freedom of the normal Christian.  Today we set you aside and ask you to keep a special eye on our peripheral vision, to be alert for monsters and the meek, aliens and the merciful, shadows and those who hunger and thirst for anything, including righteousness.  It means that you will have to look those things hard in the face and remember what they look like so that you can point them out to the rest of us.  It’s a strangely myopic vocation, not unlike that of the prophets, who also tended to focus on the things people didn’t want to see.  It takes tenacity and grace, patience and humility, and knowing and loving your community.  You might—and probably will—blink and get it wrong sometimes:  you might see monsters where there are none, or miss injustice looming just there to the left.  This is why, unlike the prophets, you don’t do this work alone.

And you won’t begin alone.  Today you are surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses—and by this local cloud of witnesses, who have already promised to uphold you in your ministry, just as you will promise to hold them accountable to theirs, showing Christ’s people “at all times . . . that in serving the helpless they are serving Christ himself.”

And one more thing:  diagonal stoles are cool.

As I carried my water jar toward the well I saw a man sitting next to it. What was he doing there? There was nothing for it, I needed the water and this was the only time I could draw it. As I came nearer, it became clear to me that he wasn’t from the town. I had never seen him before. So I lowered my eyes and tried to be invisible as I lowered the water jar to the ground.

“Give me a drink.” As soon as he opened his mouth I knew he was a Jew. His very accent was enough to tighten my shoulders. How dare he? Who did he think I was? Who did he think he was? So I asked him, with all the cold politeness I could muster, how it was that he, a Jew and a man, was speaking to me, a Samaritan and a woman?

He replied, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” When he spoke he looked me straight in the eye, not brazenly, not judging me, just looking at me.

I was confused. He was clearly a traveler, but he had no bag, no donkey, much less a bucket. The only water within reach was the old well; there was no stream or fountain where he could get fresh flowing water. Again, the anger began to rise. Who did he think he was? This Jew dares to ask me for water, then boasts that he has better water! My father had always said the Jews were arrogant, that the further they got from the true worship that we Samaritans had maintained, the more arrogant they got.

So I said to him, trying to contain the irritation in my voice: “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our common father Jacob, who gave us this well?”

He paused before he responded. He kept looking at me. I couldn’t remember the last time when someone had looked at me that way. I felt naked, but not ashamed; safe but not quite comfortable. He didn’t take the insult, but simply smiled and said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

My parched throat made me speak before I could even think: “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty,” then remembering the shame that brought me here at this hour, I continued, “or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

The man smiled again. “Go, call your husband and come back.” My heart fell. He was like all the rest after all. As soon as he heard, his eyes would be veiled again, his face would close up like a wall, his gaze would be somewhere over my shoulder. It didn’t matter that my first husband, Ezra, had been trampled by our neighbor’s ox, that the second, Hanan, had died of a wasting disease, that Bilgai had divorced me because I had burned his supper once too often. My fourth husband, Zadok, had run off to join the insurrection against the Romans, and the last divorced me because I had not borne him any children. Adaiah stayed with me when he was in town selling his goods. I knew he had a wife and children in some other town, but he would always leave me a little extra money for food when he left, and some company, some protection on some nights was better than none.

If I ever had to leave my house when others were on the streets, like on market day, the stares and whispers and outright insults followed me until I closed my door behind me again.

But none of that mattered. I looked back at the stranger defiantly and said, “I have no husband.” He didn’t need to know more than that.

The stranger nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “You have had five husbands and the man with you now is not your husband. This is true.”

How could he have known? Even more, how was it that he did not judge me? His eyes still looked at me, open and embracing. My heart leapt. The water was forgotten.

This had to be a man of God! How else would he know these things about me? But he was a Jew, of a people who had abandoned the worship our forefathers had been faithful to on Mount Gerizim!

So I asked him. It was a strange question, but it seemed most urgent at the time. I had to understand who this man was. If he were a true prophet, maybe he could help me to win back God’s favor. God had abandoned me long ago, I was convinced, and I wanted to be able to approach Him once again.

“Woman,” he said firmly, “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . the hour is coming when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him.”

I could hardly believe my ears: “you will worship the Father neither here nor there.” A day was coming when I would worship God unbound by the disgrace I suffered, beyond the hatred that had existed between this Jew’s people and my people for so long. Worship would be not just the right rituals in the right place, but in spirit, not in fear and hiding, but openly and in truth. What was more, the Father was seeking people to worship him, God was seeking me!

I don’t know how much time passed, but before I knew it I was seated at his feet, listening to him and being listened to by him. “I know that Messiah is coming,” I told him, trying to find that common ground between our people, trying to show him that despite being a woman I knew something of our faith. “When he comes, everything will become clear.” The stranger said, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” And I knew that he was telling the truth.

We had both been so engrossed in our conversation that we didn’t even notice when a group of men—evidently his friends—returned from town with food. When we looked up we saw them standing not too far off. There in their eyes was the look that had never appeared in his. They already had decided who I was and judged me unworthy. The shock of it shook me back to reality.

But reality had changed. This man knew me better than anyone, yet he loved me—yes, loved, but not in any way I’d experienced before. He wanted nothing from me but the truth and offered the same in return.

I jumped up, leaving my water jar behind, and ran into town. Right to the main gate of town I ran, where the men gathered to conduct their business, where disputes were mediated, where gossip—rather, news—was shared.

I ran right into the midst of them, ignoring the indignant stares, the pointing fingers. “You must come,” I panted. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” I know it made no sense to them. What had my shameful reputation to do with the Messiah? But my shocking declaration, my seeming lack of shame at being seen in public, and my insistence that they come with me made them follow me back to the well.

When we came back to the stranger and he began to speak to them, I could hear their murmurs when they heard his accent. But before long they too sat down to hear what he had to say. Word spread quickly to the women, who soon crept out of their homes and listened on the edges of the crowd.

He stayed two days, teaching us about the true worship of God and God’s love for us. Even those who’d been skeptical because of my involvement came around to believing him. Just before the stranger left—we found out that his name was Jesus—one of the men of the town turned to me and said, “It is no longer because of what you said that I believe him. I’ve heard him now myself and I know that he is the Savior of the world.” A backhanded complement perhaps, but it was the first time in years that anyone in the town, much less a man, had spoken to me with respect.

I still go to the well every day, but I no longer go at noon. My shame is gone. I can walk with the other women, my head held high. For I have met the Messiah, and he told me everything I had ever done.

How many of you have been in love?  (Don’t raise your hands.  That might be too much information.  Just think about it.)  For those of you who have been in love, I want you to try to remember those first, heady days when time either flew or stood still, when your heart and your mind and your body together yearned just to be with your beloved.  The butterflies in your stomach as you approached the place where your beloved was, or awaited your beloved’s visit.  If being in love isn’t a good memory for you, then remember the longing for a beloved friend or relative, the comfort of his or her presence.  Think of how that felt in your body, the sense of longing in absence and of delight in reuniting, the ways that it changed over time.

This is what the book the Song of Solomon (aka Song of Songs) tries to describe.  How many of you have heard this read in church before – except for maybe a wedding?  How many of you have read this lovely little bit of erotic poetry from the Hebrew Scriptures? It is attributed to King Solomon, but probably written later.  I invite you to go home and read the whole thing.  It’s only about 120 verses long.  Even as love poetry, it might be confusing, since it doesn’t conform to what we have been led to believe is “proper” biblical courtship or eroticism ought to be.  It’s pretty racy, and even the marital status of the couple is not terribly unclear.  Shocking!

There are some things that still make me giggle, given the different cultural contexts, like

Your hair is like a flock of goats,
moving down the slopes of Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes
that have come up from the washing,
all of which bear twins, (4:1b-2)

I’m not sure I’d want my hair to be compared to goats, nor my teeth to sheep.

Then there is the passage for today.  Here the woman describes hearing the voice of her beloved, knowing that he is coming, no, racing toward her.  He stands outside the walls of the house, trying to get in, trying to catch a glimpse of her.  He speaks again:  Arise, my love, my fair one, he says, and come away.  Come outside of the house, he says, and revel in the coming of spring.

In addition to the plain meaning of the text as simple love poetry, there is a long tradition of reading this book as an allegory for the relationship of God with the people of Israel, and later for the relationship of Christ and the Church.  What if we take this tradition seriously and allow this to be an image of God and God’s love for us?  What would it be like to understand God as a lover seeking God’s beloved?

When this sort of imagery is used, that of longing and desire, I have usually heard it used to talk of our longing for God, of our need for God, of the ways that we cannot rest until we rest in God.  All true concepts, all good ideas, well worth meditating on.

But what if we turn that around and take the vignette from today’s text at face value?  What if it’s God who is longing for us?  What if it is God who is racing to find us, running over hills and peeking through the window, calling to each of us, Arise, my love, and come away”?

Take those memories I invited you to recall, those of loving and being loved, that sense of urgency and longing, and imagine yourself as God’s beloved, being pursued by God, like the lover in today’s reading, recognizing the love in the eyes of your beloved.  Imagine it in thought, and emotion, and body.  What do you feel?

This might be a wonderful experience, a reminder of the love that we proclaim each Sunday and in our life together as Church.  But it might be an uncomfortable experience, or a terrifying experience, something you might not want even to think about.  There might be lots of God baggage (or love baggage) and the idea of God seeking you out this way is downright creepy.  You might doubt that this could be true for you, or it used to seem true and now seems far away or abstract.  It might make you feel hopeful or uncomfortable, that maybe God could long for you in such a passionate way.  Or none of the above, or some mix of all of the above.  However your respond, whatever this evokes for you, is fine.

But this is the power of the metaphor.   Even our own mixed responses reflect that we are dealing with something beyond our ability to reckon or grasp, something that we can approach only in metaphors and piece together from thoughts, and feelings, and sensations, colored by our histories and cultures, and limited by our language.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave a presentation several years ago, called “The Body’s Grace.”  It is a wonderful and wise exploration of where spirituality and sexuality meet, and well worth reading.  In it, he says this:

Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted. . . .

The life of the Christian community has as its rationale – if not invariably its practical reality – the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy. [http://www.igreens.org.uk/bodys_grace.htm]

We say all the time that God loves us.  It’s true, but it’s a phrase worn down with use and misuse and abuse.  What does it mean to say the God desires us, in all of the levels that this means, to say that God delights in us, that we give God joy just by our very existence?  Parents and lovers, I think, come closest to understanding best what we try to say about God’s delight, that delight and joy in the mere existence of the one we love.

Williams goes on to say something even more challenging, I think, implying that this understanding of God’s love, delight, and desire for us is not only nice, but necessary:

I cannot make sense of myself without others, cannot speak until I’ve listened, cannot love myself without being the object of love or enjoy myself without being the cause of joy. . . .

To be formed in our humanity by the loving delight of another is an experience whose contours we can identify most clearly and hopefully if we have also learned or are learning about being the object of the causeless loving delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the community of God’s Spirit and the taking-on of the identity of God’s child. [Ibid.]

It is in being loved – by God first and foremost, but also by family, by friends, by a beloved, by the community of faith – that we learn who we are and how to love.  It is by understanding ourselves as desired by God that we can offer that delight back to those around us.  And it is at this point that we can offer back to God what every lover most longs for:  the desire of the beloved.

There was a Muslim poet, a Sufi mystic, in the 13^th century called Rumi. He got it, this mystical connection between romantic, erotic love and the encounter with God.  He wrote thousands of poems, pushing boundaries, blurring lines we tend to draw between the sacred and profane, exalting everyday encounters to the status of mystical epiphany.  In this poem, he echoes the Song of Songs:

From Soul of Rumi, by Coleman Barks [http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/Rumilove.html]

This same idea of peeking in through the window, the sense of longing to be in such intimate contact with that which fills us with our own breath.  We do, indeed proclaim a God who, like the lover in the Song of Songs, or Rumi’s moon, presses up against the window, longing for an encounter with us.  So how do we respond?

Sit back, and breathe.  Experience God’s presence as intimate as your breath entering your body.  Listen for the ways in which God is not only in your mind and heart, but also in your body.  Those places that have the spark of life for you that give you energy and joy and delight in what is around you.  Listen – with your ears, and your eyes and your heart and your gut and your mind.  Watch for glimmers of God in our sacramental life.  One the things that saves us in the Anglican tradition from living entirely in your heads—because we do that, we love our words—is that we have this rich sacramental life that reminds us that we are embodied.    Particularly in the Eucharist, we find places where we are invited to bring our whole bodies to see and hear and taste and smell and touch.  Look, too, through the windows of your neighbor, particularly the ones least likely, because Jesus has taught us that it is there that we also find the Beloved.

Above all, listen, listen:  the Voice is calling, and will always call, for you:  “Arise, my love, my fair one.”  Arise.

Today, we hear Isaiah’s call.  It begins with a magnificent vision of God’s throne, with a robe so immense it fills the temple.  The seraphim aren’t cute cherubs or lovely angels, seraph referred to a fiery serpent.  These basically are six-winged dragons flying around God’s throne.  It is overwhelming and Isaiah reacts with fear and a sense of unworthiness.

But the song of the seraphim is so familiar that it’s easy to lose the holy terror of the scene.  (It’s probably not helpful to suggest that you imagine the seraphim as we sing the Sanctus today?)

Isaiah responds with another oft-used line:  “here I am, send me!”  It’s often used at ordinations, along with the lovely song, Here I Am, Lord.  And at this point, the lectionary gives us the option to end the reading.

Ah, but there’s more, as they say.  Only after Isaiah has volunteered for this vague mission (“Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?”), he gets the details.  He is to go and tell the people of Israel to listen but not to hear, to look but not to see, somehow intentionally to dull their minds for as long as it takes for their cities to be laid waste and the people either dead or in exile.  How can God say, “Make the mind of this people dull, . . . so that they may not . . . turn and be healed”?

Fun.  What are we to make of this disturbing mission?  Isaiah is like the ancient Greek figure of Cassandra, who is given prophetic powers but when she refuses the god Apollo’s love, she is cursed so that no one will believe her.  Is the God of Israel as fickle as the Greek gods?  Is the story of Israel to be as fatalistic and impotent as that of the mortals in Greek mythology?

[I plowed through an article that wrestled with this question, pulling in all sorts of theories of interpretation, including the sociologist Emile Durkheim.  It’s too early in the morning for that, and I think there may be another way to get at this ]

Both the biblical and the ancient Greek prophets are known for telling the future, but white for the Greeks the future is unchangeable no matter what we do, the goal of Biblical prophecy is not simply to predict.  In fact that is perhaps the least important part of the prophets’ message.  The future is presented to the people not as some magic trick or a way to make money on the lottery, but rather as a way calling the people’s attention to the present.  The future is a consequence of the roots laid down in the present, in the actions, attitudes and beliefs of the people right now.  If the people practice injustice, the prophets say, then society will not hold together, those who have power will overstretch themselves and be vulnerable to the powerful of those outside of the nation.  Conversely, if the people hold to their covenant with God and do not follow other gods, if they remember the ethical component of their covenant, then their sense of identity will be maintained, even in exile, and God will be with them.  This means that we have a choice—the future can be changed if we change the present.

I am of the opinion that today one of the closest people we have to prophets are mothers.  They, too, have an ability to tell the future, in a way often most mysterious to their children:  “if you keep rough-housing like that, someone will get hurt”—and bam! It happens! They can see beyond simply human abilities:  “get your hand out of that cookie jar” and she’s not even in the room!

Mothers’ prophecies, like those of the biblical prophets, are based in the present, rooted in watching the patterns and the natural and logical consequences of the choices their children make.

Mothers’ prophecies can also, like those of the biblical prophets, fall on deaf ears.  How many parents have found themselves yelling at their children over and over, repeating yourselves a thousand times, and it’s as if you’re – choose one:  talking to yourself, talking to a brick wall, in a time loop?  How many of you children (both young and grown) have heard that vague parental rumbling in the background, nodded your heads, yet have no memory of what’s been said?

Picture those situations and listen again to the words of Isaiah:

God is highlighting the same dynamic.  When we get used to ignoring God, when we think we’re fine the way we are (playing in our own little worlds, enjoying our own stacks of cookies, provoking our siblings), when we’d rather not get up and do our God-ordained chores (of feeding the poor, caring for the stranger, visiting the prisoner, tending to the sick) – when we do those things for long enough, we stop hearing.  We nod and say, “yes, Mom,” but the meaning fades into the background.

At least until Mom – or God – gets tired of all this.  At this point we have two ways to look at reality and the rest of the reading from Isaiah: the consequence of not paying attention is, by one account, God’s punishment, which means we (and Israel in Isaiah’s day) can attribute our future suffering to God’s wrath, an option I’m not entirely comfortable with (particularly in light of how that gets used against others, e.g. Pat Robertson’s comments about Haiti).  On the other hand, it could be that the cities lying waste, houses without people, the nation in exile, all these things could be a consequence of not being attentive in the first place.  Mom says, over and over, brush your teeth.  If you don’t, the cavities are not Mom’s punishment but a natural consequence.

“Real life” in the big bad grownup world is rarely as simple as not brushing teeth = cavities, but I believe that God’s message through Isaiah points to an important truth.  I couldn’t help but see our current economic situation in the references to houses without people, and to wars and natural disasters in the cities lying waste, and in the realities of environmental destruction in the desolation of the land.

Have we stopped listening to God?  In our comfort, do we sit and play with our own toys, deaf to the cries of the poor next door and around the world?  In our fear, do we plug our ears and sing “la la la,” so that we don’t have to deal with the consequences of our choices to live beyond our means, both individually and collectively.  In our twisted sense of self, do we stare so hard into the bathroom mirror that we can’t hear the truth about either our sin or our loveliness?  In our habit of not listening to God we grow calluses on our eyes, our ears and our hearts.

These are hard questions, perhaps more fitting to the season of Lent, although one of the themes of Epiphany is God’s revelation of truth, particularly in Jesus.  I don’t want to move too quickly from these questions, as uncomfortable as they may be.  I encourage you to take time in prayer, in solitary reflection, and in communal discernment, to be attentive to the ways that we have stopped listening to God (and not in the easy-out ways . . .

But I want to add a final note of encouragement.  Despite Isaiah’s backhanded sign of hope (“the holy seed is its stump”), we do have always, always, always, the redeeming love of God in Christ.  Doing the hard and scary work of recognizing the ways we have covered our eyes, blocked our ears, and dulled our understanding is not so that God can say “I told you so” or punish us.  It is so that we can participate in that abundant life that God longs to share with us.  In today’s gospel, Peter could very well have covered his ears when Jesus asks him to let down the nets again.  Like some request from Mom to take out the garbage yet again (I took it out last week!), it may have seemed unreasonable.  Yet he was able to hear Jesus’ voice, and in responding he got – more work, yes, more suffering, yes, a harder road, yes – but it was all in the context of a sense of God’s abundant love.  And that love is always worth listening for.

Today’s gospel gives us two of three parable Jesus tells in the gospel of John about sheep, the third one being Jesus’ famous words about being the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep..  It is likely that Jesus didn’t tell the stories right in a row like this.  He probably told them on separate occasions and John put them together because of their common theme (kind of like telling stories about great uncle Billy:  “oh and that reminds me of the time when he said this . . . “)

As Jesus told these parables, his listeners would probably have pictured a communal sheep pen in the village to which various flocks would be herded at night.  The shepherds would take turns being gatekeeper (perhaps using their own bodies as the gate while they slept across the opening) and then each shepherd would come and call out his own sheep (through the gate) with a call that the sheep had learned to recognize from him.

In these three parables about sheep, shepherds and pens, Jesus focuses on different parts of the image.  In the first parable, Jesus doesn’t identify himself with any particular part, but rather notes that true shepherds enter by the gate and don’t climb over the wall, while others–thieves and bandits–climb over the wall.  The sheep, he notes, recognize the shepherd’s voice and follow him.  He doesn’t at this point identify himself with the shepherd–he does quite explicitly a bit later–so he seems to be making a point about people other than himself.

The second parable identifies Jesus with the gate to the sheepfold.  If true shepherds enter only by the gate, then their entrance, he says, is through him.  In the first parable, he says that the sheep will not follow a stranger (i.e. the thieves and bandits who have climbed over the wall), but he does say in the second that the thief comes in “only to steal and kill and destroy.”

Some biblical scholars tell us that John is using these parables by Jesus to encourage the church in a very difficult time, a time when different teachings have arisen, a time when the church has been challenged and maligned by the Jewish communities of which they’d originally been a part, a time when things seem quite precarious and dangerous.

Today’s reading is preceding by the amazing story of Jesus healing the man born blind.  In it, the Pharisees are shown to be blind to Jesus’ true identity and blind to the very signs that he is working.  It ends with the lines,

“Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.”

The whole set of sheep and shepherd parables closes with parallel words:

Again the Jews were divided because of these words. Many of them were saying, ‘He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?’ Others were saying, ‘These are not the words of one who has a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’

A bible interpretation tip here:  if a passage has very similar phrases surrounding it–as in this one where we find two parallel references to blindness–one should consider that they are meant to highlight something.

I think John is trying to get us to understand something about us as a community and about the leadership of our communities.  The Pharisees–that is, the authorities–are blind, John tells us, so listen carefully to find out how we should see.

One of the overriding questions for these parables is “how do we know that our leaders and teachers come from God?”  “How do we see them?”  You’ll recognize them, Jesus says, because they will come into the community by the proper way:  through the gate.  They won’t sneak in, they won’t take shortcuts and they know their sheep.

Leadership in the Christian community takes various forms–or at least it should.  There is the obvious leadership of the bishop, as chief pastor, administrator, and bearer of the tradition.  There is that of the priests, essentially deputized by the bishop to teach, preach, offer pastoral care and administer the sacraments.  Those are pretty obvious.  But then there is the leadership of the deacon, who reminds the community and each of its members of their duty to serve the least and most easily forgotten around them.  There is the leadership of those whose lives seamlessly integrate Christ’s love and reconciliation wherever they are–at home, at work, even at church.  There are those whose wisdom helps the community stay on course when fear or confusion or wounds threaten to lead them astray.  There are those whose leadership is in the formation and education of all of the members of the community.  Christian leadership is meant–as we are reminded by Paul’s powerful metaphor of the church as a living body–to be diverse and varied, lay and ordained.

So how do we recognize that leadership as being that which Jesus would have for us?  First, those leaders don’t sneak in.  They don’t manipulate their way to prominence, nor do they hide their light under a bushel basket.  They are true to who they are and who God has called them to be, no more and no less.  Second, they don’t take shortcuts.  This is a hard one.  The work of love and reconciliation is hard, yet it cannot be sidestepped.  True leaders in our community are willing to stay in hard conversations, to hear all of the stories, to allow God to do God’s work in God’s time.  The shortcuts of manipulation and deception (or at least dissimulation), taking advantage of lack of communication, of using fear or other forms of pressure–none of these things are the ways that true shepherds enter a community.

Those first two characteristics find completion in the third:  the true shepherds know their sheep.  Shepherds who tend to use their sheep for wool rather than meat will spend years with their sheep.  The sheep learn to know their shepherd’s voices and the shepherd knows theirs.  Sneaking in will not lead to better knowledge, nor will taking shortcuts.  That comes only with time and entering into the relationships directly and honestly.  (You’ll note that the issue in the story of the healing of the blind man, that the Pharisees don’t know him or recognize him.)

The second parable that Jesus tells gives another key to leadership in our communities of faith.  Jesus is the gate, so the true leaders will enter through him.  But what does this mean?  Those who enter by the gate of Jesus will be like him (tall order, but what we’re all called to follow):  they will seek out and love those who are usually on the margins, they will offer words of encouragement to the struggling and words of challenge to the comfortable, they will serve rather than look to be the boss, they will relate to God with the trust of a child to a parent, they will offer healing and nourishment in surprising and abundant ways, they will seek God’s glory rather than their own.  Now, none of us is Jesus, and we will never fully  live up to those things.  We will see, however, glimpses of that gate in our various shepherds and a desire in them to be more and more like him.

So that’s all very nice and orderly.  I don’t usually write sermons with three point lists:  the three qualities of a godly life, five steps to forgiveness.  But here you are, the three qualities of Christian leadership, or conversely, how not to be a thief and a bandit:  don’t sneak in, don’t take shortcuts, make sure you know the sheep.

But there’s a wrinkle to all of this.  In what we’ve heard, we have a nice, safe sheepfold, walled all around, the one opening guarded by Jesus, kindly shepherds who call our names.  but there’s a catch.  All of this is to prepare the sheep to leave.

If the sheep were to spend all of their time in the pen, there would essentially be no need for shepherds.  The pens are to keep the sheep safe so that they can do something more important:  leave.

Leaving is tricky.  On the one had, the food and water are outside the sheepfold; on the other, most of the dangers are, too.  But this is what shepherds do, they lead their sheep out into a big world full of lovely green grass and sharp-toothed wolves, full of clear running streams and steep cliffs.

As Christians, most of us will not spend our lives inside the sheepfold, if we understand it to be the church.  Nor should we.  We are made to go out into the wide, wild world and face both its joys and its dangers.  The difference is that we have a good Shepherd who leads us, knows us and is willing to give all for us.

All the more reason to pay attention to who your shepherds are and to pay attention to what happens inside the fold.  Jesus implies at first that the sheep will not follow these thieves and bandits because the sheep don’t know their voices.  There is a danger, however.  The thieves enter, he says, to “steal and kill and destroy.”  They do damage inside the sheepfold so that the sheep cannot leave, the sheep cannot go out to find nourishment.

Another mark, then, of a thief and a bandit infiltrating the Christian community is that somehow the members of the community are not permitted or encouraged to leave the fold.  Strange, isn’t it?  But Jesus says, “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. . . . I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  Staying in the sheepfold won’t do it.

“we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed”

So, as is often the case with the epistle reading, we have entered 2 Corinthians in the middle of a conversation—and a pretty intense one at that. Just before this passage, Paul has been making his case against severe critics in Corinth.  In the previous chapter, he uses lots of language about proclaiming the gospel message openly and making reference to the physical frailty of the messengers. His physical body suffers and even carries, he says, “the death of Jesus.”  He leads into today’s reading with this:

7For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, 18because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

Then we heard today:

2For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling— 3if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked. 4For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

Life in this body is hard, Paul says.  He was, like any educated person in the ancient world, influenced by Greek philosophy—which was very distrustful of the body and the material world—and used philosophical categories and vocabulary in make his arguments.  At first, I thought that he had fallen into the distrust of the body and the material world that infused Greek thought, but on reading the following I realized that he is critiquing that very system:

. . . Paul speaks in the language of popular philosophy, from which the following images are drawn: death as a stripping away of the body (5:2-4); the body as a temporary dwelling (5:1, 4); and the body as a burden (5:4). Seneca taps the same tradition that Paul has at his disposal when he describes the Stoic’s attitude toward death:

But this heart is never more divine than when it reflects upon its mortality, and understands that man was born for the purpose of fulfilling his life, and that the body is not a permanent dwelling, but a sort of inn (with a brief sojourn at that) which is to be left behind when one perceives that one is a burden to the host.10

Yet, in spite of the shared metaphors concerning the finitude and difficulty of bodily existence, Paul resists with all his might the notion that for the sake of the soul’s liberation the body is finally to be put away like clippings of hair and fingernails. Notice in 5:4 his abhorrence of the goal of Stoic eschatology, a soul stripped naked. Death, Paul argues, is not the separation of the soul from the body but the further “bodying” of the soul in an eternal house not made with hands. (David Fredrickson, “Pentecost: Paul the Pastor in 2 Corinthians,” Word & World 11/2 (1991), p. 212)

Let’s dig into these metaphors a bit more then.  Why do we wear clothes and live in houses?  Both serve as protection from the elements, yes, but there’s more. Even when the climate allows for it, human beings like to decorate and define their space with clothes and houses.  Our clothing and our houses define us—for better or worse—they tell the world who we are or who we think we are or who we want to be.  They define our space:  here I am and this is where I live.  Letting people into our dwellings (and into our clothes for that matter) is a way of expressing intimacy and trust.

Paul has been celebrating the frailty of his own earthly dwelling, saying that it draws people’s attention not to him but to Jesus, the real power that dwells in him.  But he longs for and trusts that this is just a temporary state.

So all of this talk about clothes and dwellings leads me to make a confession. I watch makeover shows.  First there was “What Not to Wear”.  Then there was “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”  You know, the shows where some slob’s closet is unceremoniously dumped and a whole new wardrobe (and makeup and hair and more) is offered. The process of watching some woman who’s hopelessly caught in the 80’s or a guy who lives in oversized t-shirts and baggy sweats be transformed into someone who looks classy and put together is somehow compelling to me. Now I’m hooked.

What is it about those shows?  These folks certainly are living in pretty shabby earthly tents.  The people around them give testimony to the dwelling (of their clothes) not expressing who they are or sending mixed messages about what they want.  One of the things that the “candidates” often worry about at the beginning is that somehow they will forfeit their identity, lose their uniqueness, get stuffed into someone else’s idea of style and beauty.  They want to be comfortable; they think they look just fine.  Most of the time, however—and I know that these things are heavily edited and if there are failures we probably won’t see them—but most of the time, the person made over will say at the end that he or she feels more comfortable, more beautiful, more fully themselves now that the clothes fit properly and are the right color and style.  The outside now reflects the inside.  The outside now proclaims grace and confidence and fun and maturity and whatever else we long for the world to know about us.

So will there be clothes in heaven?  Or houses?  I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s Paul’s point.  Whatever his physical ailment, he struggled with his body.  Yet he knew it to be an important, even essential part of his witness to Jesus Christ and his transforming power.  The weakness of his body was essential to that witness.  But when the witness was no longer necessary, once that body was left behind, he knew that he would be clothed in something else, something similar but transformed.  He didn’t hate the body; he longed for it to be more, for it to be transformed into its own perfection.  I love that line I read earlier: the soul would be even further “bodied.”

It seems to me that Jesus’ parables reflect the same sense that Paul is expressing, that the visible, the obvious, the physical, the world around us and our very bodies are a sign, but only a pale or ineffectual sign of what is to come. The seed is housed in the earth when it is planted.  The seed itself is a dwelling, an earthly dwelling for the plant that is to come.  And yet the final outcome of that seed is a plant with stalk and leaves that themselves clothe, even more extravagantly the same seed the dwelt in the ground.

The parable of the mustard seed goes even further.  One of the things we don’t often realize with this parable is that it’s a joke.  The mustard bush as we know it is not the “greatest of all shrubs.  Have you ever seen a picture of it?  Birds can’t make their nests in its branches, not the way we know it.  So this tiny mustard seed is dwells in the ground, grows and is reclothed as a bush , a powerful transformation in itself, but then Jesus says that in the Kingdom of God this pathetic little shrub is able to do things we’d never believe.

There’s a still further tie to Paul’s musing on being clothed and unclothed, on dwellings made with hands and not and to Jesus’ riddles about secrets hidden in simple packages.  Today is, for many, the feast of Corpus Christi, a day commemorating the institution of the Holy Eucharist.  The original idea was to be able to celebrate the Sacrament outside of the bittersweet, solemn tone of Holy Week.  It can call up visions of monstrances and way too much incense (is that possible?) and distance between the sacrament and the people, but I found even as we celebrate Eucharist every week, I like the idea of celebrating that gift.

What is that we believe about the Eucharist? (BCP 859)

Q.  What is the outward and visible sign in the Eucharist?

A.  The outward and visible sign in the Eucharist is bread and wine, give and received according to Christ’s command.

Q.  What is the inward and spiritual grace given in the Eucharist?

A.  The inward and spiritual grace in the Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ give to his people, and received by faith.

Q.  What are the benefits which we receive in the Lord’s Supper?

A.  The benefits we receive are the forgiveness of our sins, the strengthening of our union with Christ and one another, and the foretaste of the heavenly banquet which is our nourishment in eternal life.

I love the Eucharist, but really, the bread and the wine certainly don’t look or taste like a banquet.  We eat this bread and share the cup knowing that they are like the mustard seed, hiding a reality beyond what we can even imagine—just as we are to look at each other and within our lumpy bodies and cranky souls see Christ waiting to be revealed.

And so we return to Paul. In the Holy Eucharist, Christ is clothed in bread and wine, and, once eaten, takes up residence, makes a dwelling within his people, even as we long for a dwelling place freed from sin and pain and death.  We already are “a building from God, a house not made with hands.”  Here Christ dwells.  Just as he is clothed in simple bread and wine, so is he clothed in us.  Just as the seed holds possibilities unseen and unimagined, so, too, this community has within it possibilities for reconciliation and justice and love far beyond anything we could manage on our own.

Evangelism: More Questions than Answers. That’s the Point.

Over the past few months, I’ve been having many conversations about faith and spirituality with a Jewish student.  We have talked at length about prayer and spiritual struggles; he has attended Episcopal services and heard me preach; we have reflected on the challenges of inclusive liturgy and language.  At no point do I imagine that this student will convert and become a Christian, but I’m also convinced that what we are engaging in is evangelism.

Evangelism evokes for many images of shouting street preachers and earnest “friends” with tracts, experiences of being judged and condemned, being told you’re going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior (as opposed, of course, to an impersonal Lord and Savior). Some of my students have argued that to try to convince another person to change his or her beliefs is an attempt to impose one’s own worldview on another and is profoundly disrespectful.

On the other hand, in some places the word evangelism has been so watered down that it simply means good parking spots and the newcomers committee at the local parish.  Not something I’d be willing to lay down my life for.

So, the questions seemed unresolved:  what is evangelism and is it appropriate for Christians to evangelize in a pluralistic society?

One of my personal missions is to rescue ill-treated concepts in Christian vocabulary, words like “sin,” “evangelism,” “salvation,” and “east-facing Eucharist” (the last one’s a story for another day).

Evangelism is the sharing of good news.  In Christian parlance, it is the sharing of the good news of Jesus Christ.  What is that good news?  That should be an easy question to pin down.  But it’s not.  There are, at least, two ways of thinking about evangelism:  one based on creed and one based on action.

The credal version, based on the disciples’ and early Church’s experience of Jesus is:  God loves us so much as to become human in Jesus and to be executed as a traitor.   God raised him from death and somehow that life, death, and resurrection redeems us from sin.

The action version is based on the good news that Jesus preached and lived:  offering sight to the blind, liberation for the captives, freedom for the prisoners, dancing for the lame.

Neither of these versions of good news contradicts the other, and people may prefer one to another—and might offer very different visions of what each means in practical terms—but they are both essential pieces of our life and ministry as Christians.

Some understand evangelism as simply inviting people to church, which is limited, but a good starting point.  We invite others to church because it’s where we have found a community where we feel safe and supported and accepted and loved.  Often it’s a place where issues of justice and mercy are actively engaged.  These are the active views of evangelism.  But we need to be able give an account, as Paul says, for the commitments we make and lives we live. There are questions to be asked:  What is to be shared, i.e. who was/is Jesus, who is he for us and why? To what end do we share our faith: conversion, a happier life, a deeper sense of dignity?

In college people are asking deep questions.  They wrestle with the whys and wherefores and why bothers.  The beauty of our time is that people are used to diversity of identity, belief, and practice.  Answers seem less urgent than questions  Christians ought to be able to say why they are Christians, what is it about Jesus that they find compelling, what questions their faith raises and to what needs it responds.  We can talk with clarity and enthusiasm about that which give us life and meaning, why we work for justice, why hospitality is so important.  Sharing humbly and with integrity the good news as we have lived it (including our doubts and struggles) is an invitation to dialogue, a chance to learn from others, and sometimes exactly what an aching heart and weary spirit need to hear.

Note that photos, text and audio of several of these events and activities can be found on the Reflections page of our site.

At Brent House:

• Renewed Mission and Vision statements (near-final drafts, which echo the Diocesan vision, “Form the faithful, grow the church, change the world.”):

Brent House’s Mission is to be a sanctuary for students, a hallowed place for discernment, learning, and spiritual growth, and a facilitator of communities—the academy, the church, and the world.

Brent House’s vision is

• Individuals [who are] mature in their faith
• A richer Academy
• A stronger Church
• A better world

• Two positions were added to the board for members chosen by the students and Brent House residents, providing a direct voice from the students to our governing body.
• The Canterbury Club, our student-led recognized student organization, co-sponsored several of our major and ongoing events.

On Campus:

• The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, physicist and Anglican priest, spoke to an audience of more than 200 people on “The Friendship of Science and Religion,” preceded by a dinner at Brent House.
• Brent House students and the chaplain were involved in the counter-activities in response to the visit of Westboro Baptist (a hate group) to campus in March.
• Brent House and Interfaith Dialogue co-hosted a joyous interfaith Advent/Christmas party, complete with Advent wreath, Christmas pageant (with home-made costumes, of course), a potluck of holiday favorites, tree decorating and caroling!  See pictures here.

With the Diocese and Province:

• Brent House students had leadership roles at both the 2008 and 2009 Diocesan Conventions.
• Two students were confirmed and one received at the Cathedral’s Easter Vigil.  More than 20 people from Hyde Park attended with us.
• Through the energy and leadership of Lee Behnke (member of the board, U of C faculty and St. Chrysostom’s), we knit hats and scarves for refugee families and the homeless.

In the Nation and the World:

• Students from Brent House and Canterbury Northwestern planned and led the provincial student gathering in February.  It was a rousing success, including significant time with Bishop Lee and a jazz mass from the folks at University of Michigan’s Canterbury House.
• Brent House, in cooperation with St. Paul and the Redeemer, was awarded a one-year grant of $12,000 from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship for a special project of Bible study, reflection and worship that seeks to explore and blur the boundaries between sacred and secular.
• Three Brent House students attended Gather, the bi-annual gathering of college students at Estes Park, Colorado.
• Sarah Staudt, a former peer minister, was chosen to be a member of the Committee for Young Adult Ministry, which provides resources for, advocates on behalf of, and promotes ministry relationships to young adults.
• Laura Eberly, now a fourth-year in the College and first-year at SSA, and a former peer minister, was a member of the Anglican delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in March.

And these are only the highlights!

Sermon preached on November 29, 2009, Advent 1 at St. Paul and the Redeemer

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane . . .

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

It’s the end of the world as we know it,

And I feel fine.

- REM, “The End of the World As We Know It.

This is one of my favorite Advent songs.  Really.  I won’t attempt to read all the lyrics here, but I commend them to you.  They are full of random, scattered apocalyptic images and lines like

save yourself, serve yourself.  World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed.  Tell me with the rapture and reverent in the right– right.  You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, flight bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

Sounds a bit to me like what we heard from Jesus this morning:

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory.”

It’s the end of the world as we know it . . .

What is Jesus trying to tell his followers – both then and now – with these frightening, disturbing words and images?

Speech about the future is a tricky thing.  When I say “there will,” or “you will,” or “they will,” I could simply be describing what is likely to happen in the future based on the present.  I could also, however, be making a threat.  I could tell my children, for example, if you don’t brush your teeth, you will get a cavity and need a filling.  I could also tell them, though, if you don’t clean your room, you may not play video games.  The first simply describes the natural consequences of their inaction.  The second describes the consequences imposed by me in response to their inaction.  Both visions of the future are unpleasant, but their moral weight is very different.

What if Jesus was offering this frightening vision of the future as a simple description, based on natural consequences, rather than a threat and a promise as many people often assume?  What if he is trying to prepare the disciples for the inevitable consequences of a world gone wrong rather than letting them in on God’s secret plan of invasion?

I’ve been intrigued by Rene Girard’s theories about the cycles of sacred violence and Jesus’ response to them.  I’m no expert, but one piece of his theory, as I understand it, says that human communities inevitably develop tensions and conflicts, which, if not released in some way, will cause that community to spin apart in chaotic violence.  So one response, found across human cultures, is the establishing of the sacred (which is closely tied to power and control) and structures within the sacred that function as an escape valve for the inevitable tensions.  The violence is expressed against a designated victim, through a sacrifice, and/or via a scapegoat. One Girardian preacher writes this:

Sacrificial violence is a sacred, sanctioned violence that comes into place in order to keep in check the fearsome profane, random violence. A sacrificial crisis, in the Girardian parley, occurs when the effectiveness of the sacrificial institutions is waning such that the sacrificial violence loses its effectiveness in containing profane violence. If a new sacrificial solution does not come into play, then the profane violence grows into apocalyptic violence. Throughout human history we see cycles of being on the verge of such violence and then new sacrificial solutions come into play to again bring relative peace. (Neuchterlein, http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/proper28b.htm)

According to Girard and his followers, Jesus, in his life, ministry, death and resurrection, faced down this cycle of sacred and subverted it, offering an alternative which did not require victims and their sacrifice.

Through this lens, Jesus’ words take on a very different meaning.  The destruction of the temple and the razing of Jerusalem, which he predicts a few verses previously, is not, then, God’s punishment on the Jews for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah, but rather the inevitable result of these human dynamics of power, control, and sacred violence, as played out between the Romans, the rulers of the Jewish people and those who rebelled against both.

There’s another, discomfiting thing that has occurred to me as I’ve reflected on this passage and others like it.  The irony, according to Girardian theory, is that as the roots of sacred violence are exposed and questioned by Jesus and his Gospel, the reality of profane violence, the chaos lying just below the surface, is still there.  In a way, Jesus seems to be saying that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Girard says this:

The theme of the Christian Apocalypse involves human terror, not divine terror: a terror that is all the more likely to triumph to the extent that humanity has done away with the sacred scarecrows humanists thought they were knocking over on their own initiative, while they reproached the Judeo-Christian tradition for striving to keep them upright. So now [according to them] we are liberated. We know that we are by ourselves, with no father in the sky to punish us and interfere with our paltry business. So we must no longer look backward but forward; we must show what man is capable of. The really important apocalyptic writings say nothing except that man is responsible for his history. (Girard, Things Hidden, p. 195)

In Christian communities like this one, we talk a lot about justice, about sharing God’s love, about welcoming all, about challenging structures of oppression, as we should.  It seems so obvious to us that these things ought to be done, and even obvious sometimes exactly what needs to be done, that it can be disconcerting when we face resistance and outright opposition to our work.  Things can seem to get worse before they get better.

I think this is what Jesus is pointing to.  Some of what he’s describing is simply a sinful human world, one in which victims are sacrificed to maintain the structures of power, structures in which we all are complicit.  Some of it may be a warning that the sharing of God’s good news, the working for justice and peace, the working against oppression will not always be received joyfully.  There will be resistance.

And so, Jesus says, “stand up and raise your heads.”  Be confident in the work you do, in the gospel you preach, the God you follow.  This resistance is, in part, itself a sign that your work is being effective.

I was watching one of the Harry Potter movies with my kids the other night.  For those of you who’ve missed Harry Potter, the main narrative thread involves an evil wizard, Voldemort, who had some years earlier wreaked havoc on the wizard world and who has been regaining his strength and is preparing to take over once more.  The trick is that only Harry has actually encountered Voldemort in his progressively stronger forms.  Some believe him; others do not.

In addition to the violence exerted by the overtly evil Voldemort and his followers, there is a dangerous culture of fear that permeates the Ministry of Magic, the official governing body of the wizard world.  For many, particularly those in power, the fear of Voldemort leads them to deny his return and growing power, to deny the very real danger that they all face.  Fear that denies reality becomes rigid, willing to do most anything to protect the illusion of control.  In the novels that blind fear leads eventually to betrayal, even of family members, the scapegoating of those who are different and even torture – for the victim’s own good, of course.

When Jesus says, “stand up and raise your heads,” he is telling us not to be paralyzed by our fear.  We must look with clear eyes around us (and at our own selves) and recognize the depths of evil and violence we confront.  It is real.  We all know it.  The fragile state of our economy and the complex interplay of greed, self-delusion, and not paying attention that got us here, the war zones abroad and a bus ride away, the ways that we can wound and oppress not only the poor and marginalized, but also those who are nearest to us – all of these are part of a web of evil and violence that can seem insurmountable.

Jesus is saying, first, look.  It is the end of the world as we know it.  It’s chaotic and scary and confusing.  Evil is real and seems often to be in control – and if not evil, problems so complex that solutions seem a vain fantasy.  So much seems far beyond our control and we can’t get a handle on what seems to be in our control.

Jesus tells his disciples to hold their heads up and not to fear, in part because fear can blind and paralyze us, causing us, inadvertently, to become like the powers that we challenge. Fear will cloud their vision, making them unable to see the signs, not only of the end of the world but also the signs that redemption is near.

They are not to fear also because they can be confident in the promised coming of God’s kingdom.  But how not to fear?  It’s certainly easier said than done.  “Don’t fear!” can be something like the command to relax, the more we force it, the less it happens.

The REM song I quoted at the beginning has that strange refrain:  the end of the word as we know it (over and over), and I feel fine.  This could be just being fatalistic or apathetic, but maybe it points to another way to live in the year-round Advent that we inhabit.

Jesus is giving us a clue in his parable of the fig tree.  Amid all of the images of war and cosmic turmoil – the end of the world – we have the emerging leaves of the tree – the beginning.  In the midst of real fear, real turmoil, real danger, Jesus tells us to look for signs of life, signs not just in the fig tree, but in all trees, signs that contradict the machinery of war, the shaking of the foundations, the turmoil in the heavens.  These sprouts may be found everywhere: in the changing of an unjust policy, in the rescuing of a child from abuse, in the reconciliation of enemies individual and communal, in the small triumphs over our own sin and weakness.

Stand up, raise your heads, Jesus says, for your redemption not only draws near, but in him, has arrived

Stand up, raise your heads so that you can see the signs of that redemption, small and tender and green.

Stand up, raise your heads, as a witness that the powers of this world cannot control us through fear

Stand up, raise your heads, so that you can see those for whom the turmoil of this world is causing pain and suffering, and respond.

Stand up, raise your heads, as an invitation to do the same for those who live in fear and without hope

Stand up, raise your heads, for it may very well be the end of the world as we know it, but the beginning of a new world is appearing . . . and I feel fine.

Texts:  Luke 9 and 11

I was intrigued to learn that these two texts, which I’ve rarely seen engaged together, are not read in the lectionary cycle.  Congregations who use the lectionary will not be confronted by these two statements in the same year:  one, which is nicely inclusive and universal, and the other, which seems to be of the exclusivist camp.  Even paying attention to the subtle differences between the two doesn’t seem to help.  It’s fabulous that Jesus says to his disciples, that those who are not against them are for them.  This forces the disciples to have a broader, more open view of their ministry.  Not only the properly trained and education, not only those officially sanctioned by official authority, but anyone doing the work is, well, doing the work.

But then Jesus, only two chapters later turns and says, that those who are not with him are against him.  This one makes me uncomfortable.  Soon after telling the disciples that doing the work is doing the work, Jesus then says either you’re on my side or you’re not.

There are some very rich layers in these two texts that would bear more study.  The first saying, for example, is in the context of a discussion about who is great in the Kingdom Jesus proclaims.  The second is in response to questions about the source of Jesus’ power.

I was struck, however, by the fact that both sayings are in the context of discussions about exorcising demons.  I don’t know much about exorcisms.  I’ve never seen the movie.  My diocese – and I’ve asked – does not have a diocesan exorcist, although we are instructed to inform the bishop should we believe an exorcism is warranted.  I don’t think I’ve known any people needing exorcising, although I’m convinced I’ve encountered places and organizations that could use a good casting out.

In the first text, Jesus seems to be saying, hey guys, the demons are being cast out.  Less work for you!  In the second, he seems more concerned about the power by which people understand he casts out demons.  The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the struggle against demons casts light on questions we ask about diversity, particularly religious diversity.

It could be argued, I think, that an important element of nearly all religious traditions is the casting out or guarding against demons, that is the forces of evil or disease.  Christians, of course, battle sin and Satan.  Buddhists seek ways to overcome desire.  Santeros invoke the orishas to protect against curses, hexes and disease.  The law in Judaism sets up a strong sense of ethical expectations and corporate identity, keeping chaos and idolatry at bay.  Even atheists fight off the demons of superstition and dependence on supernatural powers.

In the ancient stories, it is often essential to know a demon’s name in order to cast it out.  It occurs to me that in the various religious traditions, human beings have developed have ways of naming and casting out demons that are unique and to which I would do well to pay attention, because just as my tradition has its gifts, it also has its blind spots.

Christians’ belief in resurrection and reconciliation has been a powerful gift.  But it also has made it difficult to know how to respond to relationships that need to be broken or end, relationships too fraught with abuse, too twisted by changing circumstances and people, built on unstable and unhealthy foundations.  The demon of codependence is a hard one for us Christians to cast out.

The Christian understanding of Christ’s return and the final judgment provides a sense of ethical urgency, but has also makes the demon of environmental destruction difficult for some Christians even to recognize.

It has been difficult for Christians (as it is for any of us) to be aware of, much less name, the blind spots in our tradition wherein demons might dwell.  I would assert that all human religious traditions will have such blind spots that can harbor the demonic (although it’s not my place to name them here).  I believe that one of the gifts of hearing diverse religious voices is that it can help me to see the demons in my own tradition.  It can give me hints of what resources might lie in my own realm that could aid in casting out those demons and give me comfort that, even when I can’t get the name quite right to cast it out, there is likely to be someone whose tradition knows that demon’s name, just like those other exorcists about which the disciples complain.

So that takes care of those who are not against you are for you.  What about Jesus’ more troublesome saying that those not with him are against him? As opposed to the relative nonchalance of the first saying, Jesus seems quite incensed that there are murmurings that he is casting out demons in a demon’s name.  What happened to focusing on doing the work?

Demons are serious business.  If we take evil seriously, then we need to understand that we’re not playing around.  When a teenage girl can be gang-raped with multiple witnesses and no one calls for help, I call that demonic.  Bombs calculated to kill innocents, especially to pursue religious ends, are demonic.  Demons are dangerous, sneaky, masters of disguise.  Casting them out requires spiritual discipline, the wisdom of elders, the energy and daring of the young, a community of support.

I believe that Jesus is telling us in this second saying that while there may be many ways to cast out demons, you need to choose one.   Our religious commitments are like languages, and while one can certainly be multilingual, to communicate one must choose one at a time.  A language requires the discipline of grammar, a certain vocabulary, a community of speech.  If we are to cast out the demons that our particular religious tradition has the gifts to name and banish, we must know our language well enough to name them properly (and to know when what we’ve assumed is a demon may actually be one of God’s own messenger angels).  As a Christian, I can best cast out demons in Jesus’ name, but if I’m going to do that, I had better make sure that I’m hanging out with other people who know Jesus, I need to watch Him at work and take notes, I need to practice on the minor demons I find in myself and in my community.

Last night I was part of a panel in conversation about humanism and atheism and what those forms of belief have to say about the ethical life.  I didn’t talk about demons there, but I did talk about courage.  The religious and ethical life is, in part, about facing down demons.  Every day.  Each tradition has its own form of courage, its own incantations, its own names for those demons.  Each tradition has its blind spots and special demons that dwell there.  Each tradition has its own clarity and its own gifts that the rest of us would do well to understand and appreciate.

Jesus says to me, as one of his followers, if they’re not against you, they’re for you.  Those guys over there may be fighting a demon whose name you don’t know, be glad they’re doing the work.

He also says to me, as one of his followers, if you’re not for me, you’re against me.  Be clear, he says, about what language you’re speaking and what demons you’re battling.  There are others who are depending on you to know their names.