(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown for St. Luke’s Day, October 22, 2017, at Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario. Texts: Sirach 38: 1-4, 6-10, 12-14; James 5: 13-16; and Luke 4: 14-21.)
All week I have been thinking about St. Luke. Last Sunday afternoon, we celebrated St. Luke’s Day at the Cathedral with the giving of the Order of Niagara, a sign of devoted Christian service, to parishioners from across the diocese, including our own Stan Bowers. On Wednesday morning, the proper St. Luke’s Day, we had a small celebration of St. Luke at the midweek Eucharist. Wednesday evening, the very small St. Luke’s parish on the North End was disestablished with a last patronal celebration and the building handed back to the diocese, still, we hope, with evangelism and healing in the plans. And this morning we mark St. Luke’s day with a service of anointing and healing. I encourage everyone to come forward who feels a need for healing. Laying on of hands and anointing with a prayer for healing is very biblical, as we heard in our second lesson.
Reflecting on all these events and the life and witness of St. Luke, two intersecting themes – storytelling and healing – come to mind, producing a single theme: being able to tell a good story with real people, but a story that illustrates and leads to healing and new life, whether in this life or the next. That is what St. Luke’s Gospel is about: a good story about real people in real circumstances and a story that leads onward from pain, sickness, intransigence, alienation and indifference, to healing, love, forgiveness, compassion, hope, and new life. And we are invited to let Luke’s story shape our own stories, so that they are equally compelling and helpful to those who hear them.
An argument can perhaps be made that Luke’s Gospel saved Christianity from turning into an abstruse and abstract mystery religion, overly influenced by the Greek gnostic and mystery religions that surrounded it. They certainly shaped John’s Gospel and Epistles and perhaps the book of Revelation, making them sometimes hard to follow. Luke stuck with parables and stories, what we might call “human interest stories” that portrayed Jesus as someone very down-to-earth and engaged with the ordinary life of the people, whether Jew, Samaritan or Gentile, making it clear that Jesus was about practical love and healing, not some abstract concept. We see this in Luke’s detailed narratives of Jesus’ birth, so many stories of healing, and favourite parables such as the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan.
At some point in his life, Luke heard the story of Jesus and was immensely attracted to it. He had the skill and connections to write the story. In writing the story, he made it clear that it was about Jesus and his wonderful healing and loving power, that he was God’s revelation to the world. He told the story in such a way that we are invited into it – into acts of healing, forgiveness, acceptance, care and compassion. We are invited to take Jesus the Healer into our lives and become agents of healing ourselves.
We all have stories of our lives and of our experiences as Christians, or, perhaps, our journeys to Christ. We also often have stories of loss, pain and separation. We read novels and biographies or watch television or films because we like stories and are drawn to them. They may resonate with our own experiences or give us insights we lack. Luke is the prime storyteller and encourages us to tell our stories.
Yet Luke does not tell us much about his own story because he is so taken up in the story of Jesus. We can only assume that the story of Jesus has come to reflect his own experiences as he must have reflected upon his own life as he listened to and wrote down the stories of Jesus. As a doctor, he was a healer, and he must have been deeply drawn to the stories of Jesus the Healer.
Ever so often, I try to write a small memoir as I have had a certain amount of adventures in my life. Yet I have never much succeeded, except in small bits and pieces. We also tell each other our stories. Sometimes those stories are very interesting and sometimes, alas, they are boring.
If we take Luke as our model, perhaps we need to tell our stories in light of Jesus’s story – where, for example, we have experienced tremendous forgiveness (like the Prodigal Son) or where we have been an unlikely healer (like the Good Samaritan) or where we have loved and been loved with the love of Christ, or where we are still broken and need Jesus’ healing power. We may not want to broadcast our stories on the housetops (or we may) but we should all have a story that somehow merges the experiences of our lives – good and ill – into the story of Jesus: his humanity, his perfect love, his death, his resurrection.
These stories all move towards healing and new life, from pain and suffering, to healing and resurrection. So, if we are stuck in a personal story of grief or illness or separation, as Christians we are still part of a divine story that moves through deeper and deeper love, to death and to resurrection.
Thus, as Luke’s Gospel, makes it so clear, we are called to a process of being healed (even if our bodies are moving towards death) and to being healers. In Christ, there is the tradition of “the wounded healer”. Thus, the early church, as we heard in the Epistle of James today, practised the laying on of hands and anointing of the sick, as we shall do today. This early Jewish understanding of health was holistic: health of body, mind, and spirit, so that confession, forgiveness and reconciliation were part of it. Thus, it is not just some sort of appendage to Holy Communion but comes as part of preparation for it. The oil, blessed by the bishop, and the prayers of the whole community are part of the healing action, in addition to the laying on of hands. Taking part in such a service is a commitment to move to full health of body, mind and spirit.
Thus, we are also called to be healers to one another: by listening, by sharing stories of encouragement, by being present in times of sickness and pain, by not judging too quickly, by being confident, even in the face of pain and physical decline. St. Luke was a human being. He must have had times of sickness himself. As a doctor he saw much suffering and did all he could to work for healing. But it was Christ, the great Healer, who attracted him and brought together and made sense of all his efforts for good health. And so it is for us.
There will be times of sickness and decline, both in ourselves and loved ones; there will be times of great grief and sorrow; there will be times of anxiety and anticipated death. Yet, we are still invited to hitch our stories, so to speak, to Jesus’ story, particularly as narrated in Luke Gospel: that despite what our outer bodies look like and experience, we are still on a path to healing and still helping one another along that path. May the Great Healer bring health to us all, through us all. Amen.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario, on Harvest Thanksgiving, October 8, 2017. Texts: Deuteronomy 8: 7-18, Psalm 65, 2 Corinthians 9: 6-15, and Luke 17: 11-19.)
The beauty and promise of our first lesson from Deuteronomy 8, “For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates”, and so forth, needs some further reflection, especially if, on this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, we plan to apply it to Canada as, I am sure, many generations of Canadian preachers have done.
In the original context, the Israelites are returning to their ancestral land after exile in Egypt. Others have occupied this land in their absence and they are given power over them. However, this gift comes with a warning, not to forget God: “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you this day”. And later, “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth’”. Of course, from time to time the returned exiles did forget God; chaos and God’s punishment ensued.
The suggestion of this reading for Canadian Thanksgiving inevitably seems to suggest that the settlement of Canada was a bit like the Israelites coming into the Promised Land since Canada does have the agricultural, mineral and aquatic bounty described in this passage, though too cold for olive and pomegranate trees. However, here we must be careful, lest we put forward a kind of Canadian Christian nationalist theology and forget history.
The settlement of Canada was a colonial enterprise, as with all the great settler nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the Canadian case it was a search for a passage to Asia, a search for valuable furs and other wealth, the search for new agricultural land, development of new markets, a freer political and religious climate and, of course, souls to win for Christ. (One of my great-grandfathers fled conscription in the army of the German Kaiser to settle on a farm in Iowa; many of us have such family stories.)
But, of course, there were already First Nations peoples in North America (as there were aboriginal peoples in Australia and Maori in New Zealand) and the story of defeat and colonization and settler-governments was often not a happy one. At the time, the European expansion was understood as part of God’s divine plan – the so-called Doctrine of Discovery – but now we realize otherwise, especially as settler exploitation of the land and natural resources has been so destructive and unsustainable.
Thus, I believe any celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving is inevitably tinged with an element of penance and sorrow, aware that what we think was given to us was often taken from another who was here first. We need to be aware that the words of Deuteronomy 8 are also directed to Canada’s First Nations peoples, and encourage them to claim their proper rights and land. And, aware that we have been given the privilege of sharing the wealth of the land, we do well to stand with them in solidarity as they seek to enjoy the bounty of their land.
As Christians, this realization should not be too difficult for us. Christian teaching has never encouraged the accumulation of wealth in land or possessions. Indeed, as our second lesson, from 2 Corinthians, points out, we are about giving away – generosity – rather than selfish accumulation. What Paul is calling for is a generous heart: generosity towards those in need, generosity of spirit to all, being a cheerful giver, not giving under duress. He suggests that out of this generosity, more abundance will flow and we need not fear for the future.
Here there is another danger: the risk of seeing Christian giving as a kind of divine bank with a very high guaranteed rate of interest, what we sometimes call “the gospel of prosperity”. Televangelists use this interpretation to encourage people to give beyond their means, with miraculous stories of people becoming wealthy overnight after they have given to the church. The problem with the prosperity gospel is that it is self-interested giving, even selfish giving, focusing on the material wealth that is supposed to come back later. For genuine Christian giving, we do not know precisely what will be the result – perhaps it will be a call to a different lifestyle or a new ministry – but it will be the one God wants and the church will flourish. We give because we are thankful for creation, for our lives, for God’s love to us in Jesus Christ, for the blessings of the church – not because we hope to get a high return on our investment.
Today’s Gospel, the eloquent story of the healed Samaritan leper, a hated outcast, who returns to give thanks after he is healed, while other nine privileged ones do not, reminds us, again, that Christian life is all about thanksgiving. Privilege sometimes blinds us to God’s healing work in us and the need to give thanks. We can be sure that the healed Samaritan leper never forgot what happened to him and was an agent of love, generosity and healing for the rest of his life.
As we know, St. Luke liked human interest stories, so let us dwell a bit more personally on this story. It has always been one of my favourites: the marginal one returning to give thanks. More than once I have found myself literally going back to a person or place where I have felt divine intervention or protection in my life. So, for a moment, think of a person (the leper goes back to a person, Jesus), place or a situation where you have felt Christ’s love in your life and, even if you have not revisited the site, think of it, and say “thank you” to God. . . . Let each of us be like the leper who returned to give thanks in today’s Gospel.
We say “thank you” about God’s healing and love in the past not to be fixated on the past or backward looking but because thanksgiving about the past is the ground for our future. If strangers meet us and find us sour and bitter, lacking the joy of forgiveness and thanksgiving, we are not good representatives of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Putting all this together, we rejoice in the exultant praise of Psalm 65. Even though we and our ancestors have sometimes made of mess of things, even if we have sometimes been begrudging and not cheerful in our giving, even though we have sometimes not returned to give thanks like the faithful leper, we can join in praise of God; with the hope that that praise and thanksgiving will become a permanent part of our lives.
Finally, of course, we come together in the Eucharist or Great Thanksgiving, where we offer all our lives and thanks to God. We say sorry, we promise to do better, we receive God’s grace, and we are sent out as part of the new and thankful creation to do God’s healing work in the world. Thanks be to God!
(A sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario, on the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, September 24, 2017. Texts: Exodus 16: 2-15, Philippians 1: 21-30, and Matthew 20: 1-16.)
The parable of the landowner and the labourers can easily generate outrage. This is not fair! Those who have worked the full day receive only the minimum wage that was promised; while those who started their work much later in the day, even at 5 in the late afternoon when the sun was about to set, receive the same wage. Those who worked the full day complain, for this arrangement is surely not equal pay for equal work. Indeed, we are apt to agree with them and wonder why Jesus told such an apparently unfair parable.
But this story is not about labour relations or equal pay for equal work, at least not initially. We have to come back to that introductory comment of Jesus, “The kingdom of heaven is like….” There is a truth of the kingdom buried in this story of the hard life of day labourers in Jesus’ time.
First, it is important to note that this parable occurs only in Matthew’s Gospel. It has not come from the earlier Gospel of Mark, nor from the early tradition Matthew shares with Luke, so-called “Q”. This is a story that was remembered and cherished by the early community that Matthew was writing for. We know that Matthew’s community was largely Jewish Christian but there were also Gentile Christians.
One common interpretation of the parable is that it speaks to the relation of Jewish and Gentile Christians (especially in Matthew’s community) and that perhaps there were Jewish Christians who were claiming priority in leadership and status because they had known Jesus from the beginning and the Gentile Christians were latecomers. Indeed, they were still walking through the doors, wanting to be baptized.
But God, like the landowner, is wildly generous and Jewish and Gentile Christian are equally and totally accepted in the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God does not respect claims based on how long one has been a Christian or a special affinity to Jesus. All are forgiven, all receive mercy, all are offered generosity.
However, some commentators suggest an earlier concern of Jesus about the leadership of the Twelve. Not long after this passage, James and John, sons of Zebedee, the very earliest of the disciples, ask to be placed at the head of the Kingdom, over against others amongst the Twelve who joined Jesus later. He squarely rebukes them: that length of service or a special link with Jesus is not important; what is important is servanthood. And sometimes those who come later are better servants than those who were there from the beginning.
Thus, a person who is baptized today enters the full Kingdom today, a Kingdom no different than the one we who were baptized as children so many decades ago entered at that time. The Spirit can work through newcomers with the same power, or even more power, than through those who have been around a long time. But, of course, the Spirit can also work through us who have been around a long time, as long as we do not try to quench the Spirit in others.
In a few months, we’ll be electing a new diocesan bishop. There might be a candidate (this story is entirely hypothetical, I do not have anyone in mind) who argues, “I have been a faithful parish priest for thirty years, it is my turn now, I have the years of service”. Today’s Gospel suggests that years of service alone are not a good criterion for leadership, for God’s generosity of Spirit extends equally to those who have arrived later, even much later, and even those who will arrive late tomorrow. And so it is appropriate also to look at candidates who do not have the years of service but have other important gifts, shown in other ministries, even in other dioceses.
Likewise, this parable encourages us if we are in some sense late to the Kingdom. Wasted time no longer matters, God’s full love and mercy is with us. There is still hope for new ministries, new ways of service. Nor, if we have been faithful over many years, is our work discounted in any way.
The parable reminds us of God’s indiscriminate and reckless generosity. If one were a landlord, that is not the way to run the business. Sometimes it seems like that generosity – and I mean much more beyond money – is less and less common. On Friday, I was in Jackson Square and needed to sit down to adjust my shoe. I went to the bench I have often rested at just outside the steps up to the bank. No bench, it has been removed. I went further east, remembering another bench. It too had disappeared. Finally, I went west and found a bench that had not been removed. Why do shopping malls, parks, apartment buildings and airports remove benches? One reason is the suspicion that undesirable people will congregate around them and we really don’t want them. Perhaps we want to keep people moving because we think moving people are shopping people. There is a lack of a generous spirit there. It would be an interesting experiment to put a welcoming bench on our strip of lawn on Forest Avenue to provide rest for those who are walking along and to express our generosity to the neighbourhood. Our bench is now hidden, inaccessible, in the courtyard.
Needless to say, God’s generosity in the parable is the same divine generosity that provided manna in the wilderness to a complaining and sometimes disobedient people, in this morning’s Old Testament lesson.
In the Gospel story, those who have worked the full day and complain about the late comers being treated with generosity, remind one just a bit of the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son. God is simply boundless in forgiveness and generosity. And that generosity is for us as well, as long as we are willing to share it with others, including those who come, so to speak, late.
Today’s Collect begins, ‘Almighty God, you have created the heavens and the earth, and ourselves in your image”. We are created in God’s image of reckless and inclusive generosity. Our temptation, of course, is to pull back, to judge, perhaps taking God’s generosity to us for granted but not very interested in sharing it. Sometimes those who come later have felt the generosity more intensely and respond with greater fervour. We are created in the image of God the generous giver of manna. But if we are only satisfied and complacent, we, though initially the first, may run the risk of being the last: the final warning of today’s Gospel.
Thus, the ongoing renewal in Christ that Paul has been espousing in Romans over the past weeks and in Philippians today is so important. Even the latecomer, maybe especially the latecomer, needs to let the power of Christ – living Christ’s death and resurrection – abound and flourish, especially in relations with others and in participation in God’s mission in the world.
Finally, to go back to the Gospel, it might be tempting to read it only in terms of the internal discipline and relationships within the church. But God’s reckless generosity extends beyond the bounds of the church to the whole world. And, created in God’s image, we are invited into that generous stance with the world – generous even to those very difficult from ourselves, to refugees, to people of other faiths, to those on the margins. The measure we give will be the measure we receive, multiplied by God’s generosity. But if we are stingy and ingrown in our love, growth becomes difficult indeed. Let us be at least a little bit unpredictable and crazy in our generosity, like the landlord; not measuring out every penny for every hour of work given, but generous even to those who are late, or may seem to have nothing to offer us, for in doing so, in a mysterious way, we are helping to facilitate the growth of God’s kingdom of heaven on earth and beyond. And the justice of that Kingdom will eventually reach even the poor day labourer who will now receive a living wage. Let God’s boundless generosity be our generosity.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario, on the 14th Sunday after Pentecost, September 10, 2017. Texts: Exodus 12: 1-14, Romans 13: 8-14, and Matthew 18: 15-20.)
We live in a time when many so-called Christians give Christianity a bad name through racial hatred, violent rage, and incongruous inconsistency. We have only to look at Charlottetown or even the White House. Yet this problem is not exactly new. Almost from the beginning, especially as belief in Jesus of Nazareth as God’s Son and the Messiah moved from the Jewish to the Greek world and beyond, an enormous variety of beliefs and activities ensued, some consistent with Jesus’ teachings, some not.
Already in his epistles, Paul is struggling with this issue, as Jewish Christians try to impose their views on the new Gentile Christians. And the development of the canon of Scripture – keeping some early writings and blessing them to be used for future generations, and rejecting others – was an attempt to address this issue of unacceptable belief and behaviour in the name of Jesus. Likewise, the early development of the episcopate, elders who are guardians of the faith and signs of unity, were an attempt to bring some order to this potential and sometimes actual chaos. And, likewise, early church councils that gave us our creeds.
The early church in Rome was no exception and it likely had bigger problems than small local churches scattered around the Mediterranean. It was the centre of the Empire where all nationalities, all religions and all social classes came together. Trade brought foreigners from afar, with their strange tongues and strange religions. Some became Christians. There were Jewish synagogues, temples of mystery religions, the official cult of the emperor, pagans from the north and new Christian churches reflecting this enormous diversity.
As one of the leaders of this early church in Rome, how does Paul hold them all together? Today’s epistle goes right to the core of Christianity: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” A simple piece of teaching then sums up all the laws: “Love your neighbour as yourself”. Paul teaches with a sense of urgency, for they were troubled times and some were falling away. He counsels the community to turn away from “the flesh” (Greek, sarx, flawed human nature) to “love” (Greek, agape, self-giving love, modelled on God’s love in Jesus Christ). “Owe no one anything but to love one another.”
When I first heard those words many years ago, I felt a sense of liberation: that this was a command to be creative, to find ways to love in difficult situations, giving permission to love difficult people, permission to love in ways that I thought appropriate even though some might judge me. It was a command to listen to people and get to know them and to see how one could be helpful. It certainly was a helpful teaching in relating with people of very different cultures. Within the church the command is mutual so that it also enables one to be comfortable about receiving love. And I am aware that over the years as a Christian, I have received a great deal of love from fellow Christians and still do. Trite as it is, for Christians, love does make the world go ‘round.
But how do we nurture this love? Let me make three brief suggestions.
First, we pray for one another and our neighbours, and even for those who wish us ill. Today we pray for those whose lives have been or are about to be upset by natural disasters – earthquakes in Mexico, hurricanes in the Caribbean and the United States, floods in south Asia, fires in western North America. We pray without judgement on anyone’s political or religious views. But we also pray for understanding of how our human activities might have accentuated or even caused some of these disasters.
Of course, we even pray for our enemies. I wonder how many of us have ISIS and the Taliban or political leaders we do not like on our prayer lists. Ever so often, I reflect on whom I am really not very happy with these days and add them to my prayer list.
As a parish, we are held together by prayer. Ever so often, praying, I work my way through the parish list. We have our parish directories. They can be prayer lists for us, building an unseen chain of love, as I mentioned to the children this morning. To pray for another is to love them. Of course, we do not pray judgmentally: not, “I pray for that stupid jerk who ran the red light and almost hit me.” We do not know what was on that person’s mind that caused him to run the red light. We just pray for him.
Secondly, we cultivate friendship, especially with those different from ourselves but also, and this can be more difficult, with those perhaps a little bit too much like ourselves. Freud wrote of conflicts caused by the “narcissism of small differences” – how can be thrown into anger and hatred by the ways someone like ourselves reminds us of our failings and thus buttresses us in our narrow identities. Cultivating friendship requires the will to do so and an interest in listening. Listening is a skill and sometimes needs developing. (We cannot say, “I have already heard your story, I don’t want to hear it again. Rather, we listen again, more carefully.) We all need someone to listen. We all have the capacity to listen. Listening says to the other person, your story is valuable, I want to know it. We do not listen because we want to gossip afterwards, though that can be a temptation. Our goal is to see others, indeed to see ourselves, as God sees us. God listens endlessly; we are called to listen endlessly, even if the listening makes us cross or confuses us.
Today we have called “Welcome Sunday” both to welcome back parishioners who have been away over the summer and to welcome new parishioners and visitors. We shall gather in a community meal afterwards and all are invited. The tradition of gathering to eat after worship is an ancient one, the “agape feast” of 1 Corinthians which ran into some problem that Paul had to correct. It has been a source of renewal in the church, for example, in early Methodist love feasts. For us, it is a time to share food and listen to one another. I would encourage you to sit with someone you do not know so well and listen to their story.
Finally, sometimes Christians sin and such sin can badly affect the life of the community, as today’s Gospel illustrates: how Matthew’s community understood Jesus’ teaching about resolving unloving or destructive behaviour in the community. I think Jesus’ words here must be read as having gone through the lens of the church discipline of Matthew’s community but that does not blunt the direction of the advice: talk to the person privately, then with a small group, then expulsion or some form of restriction. The church over the years has tended to follow this advice, though sometimes too strictly, sometimes not strict enough. As modern Anglicans, we have recoiled from being too judgmental about people’s personal lives and areas such as smoking and drinking, not wanting to set up rules. Yet, our reluctance to criticize has sometimes made us overly innocent, for example, when we do not believe a priest could abuse children. All our new child protection protocols are necessary and valuable and reflect the direction of today’s Gospel in saying there are some situations that are intolerable to the community.
But we do not want a church that is primarily about judging each other’s behaviour. If that happens, harmless and even good behaviour come to be seen as suspicious. We are called back to the epistle, “Owe no one anything but to love one another” and “Love your neighbour as yourself”. Those commands build up the church and our relations with our neighbourhood and the community.
Finally, who is our neighbour? In this global world of Facebook and Twitter, our neighbour may be thousands of miles away, in any part of the world. But our neighbour is also still those who share our street or apartment building and the stores, restaurants and pubs we frequent. Our neighbour is those we work with professionally or with whom we are in social relationships. The neighbour is our family, those we are most intimate with. But our neighbour is also the stranger, the Welcome Baby mothers and staff, the other groups that use our space, those who come to us for assistance of one kind or another. Indeed, the apartment buildings and hospital that surround us are our neighbour. And in our relations with all, the command is the same: “Love your neighbour as yourself” and “Owe no one anything but to love one another.” How to implement these commands is the challenge.
Before our community “agape meal”, we shall gather at the Eucharist. For us as Christians, it is the meal above all meals, related to the Jewish Passover meal we hear about in the Old Testament reading today, for it unites us with God and one another, strengthening us for the tasks of love we are called to do. Let us come to this sacred meal with hope, bringing the great network of friends that we all have to the altar, including both our accomplishments and failures in love, and, having received Christ’s body and blood, let us return to the world strengthened and encouraged to do the work of Christ’s love in the world. “Owe no one anything but to love one another”. Thanks be to God. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READINGS:
[GENESIS 45:1-15]
[PSALM 133]
[ROMANS 11:1-2A, 29-32]
[MATTHEW 15:10-28]
Today’s Gospel has a lot to say to us. In a simple story it speaks to us of what I believe to be the one of the core principles of Jesus’ manifesto not only for the Jews of Israel but for everyone from then until now and beyond. In such an unpretentious scene Jesus illustrates the deep change he wanted to make in society and in our hearts. Changing how we perceive each other, especially back 2000 years ago, was very important to Jesus -
He was an “agent provocateur” long before Jesus appeared on the Sanhedrin’s radar. He had been quietly but visibly reinterpreting the foundational rules of Jewish society. Jews at the time, lived lives guided by many rules of ritual cleanliness. Who or what was ritually pure involved everything in life, not just food and inanimate objects but men and women of their own community. Then here comes this itinerant teacher, this man who wants to turn all of their guidelines on their ear. He is a rabbi, someone to be listened to for interpretation of those rules and he tells that that it isn’t about what goes into the mouth of a person that defiles them, it is what comes out of their mouth! In other words, their words and how they speak to each other and to strangers is more important that meat and cheese being served on the same plate. Or that is someone is ritually impure because of what they do for a living or are from a family of only certain means – Jesus quietly shows they are still people of value. People that deserve to pray and be listened to by God! People who merited to belong to the community and deserve to be loved.
When Jesus speaks about “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart and this is what defiles it – for out of the heart comes evil intentions.” I thought of Charlottesville.
You see, I used to live in Charlottesville and as the commentators started talking about the tearing down of General Lee – I knew exactly where that was because my toddler daughter Hannah and I used to walk by that statue after our weekly library visits while I enjoyed my independent coffee shop coffee (pre-Starbucks)!. When White Supremacists gathered for a rally recently– I was shocked that they had a permit and permission to parade on the University campus. I was angry when I heard of these people gathering in Charlottesville – but I was not surprised. For all its beauty and architecture, Charlottesville has a history of being a segregated town in Virginia. I know, I have seen it myself. I can remember going into a major chain restaurant (thank goodness, it is now defunct) and being seated in the best seats in the house, up the front by the big windows. From there the view is very clear. All the white patrons sit up the front in the nice seats and all the black patrons are seated in the back beside the kitchen.
It was so obvious that we kept our eyes on it at subsequent visits, to make sure it was an ongoing issue. It was. And one day, as my friend Lizzie, a barrister from England and I were being seated up front, I tapped the arm of the hostess and said, “no, we’d like to sit in the back near the kitchen”. She was incredulous and after confirming with me, she indeed sat us there. The air conditioning didn’t really overcome the heat coming out of the kitchen, so it was much hotter than the seats up front. The servers don’t come around as often; I guess not expecting the tip to be very high. Our food came same as usual but what was different were the looks we got from people. The black patrons sitting with us, smiled huge smiles and understood exactly what we were saying in our quiet way. I don’t know if the white patrons noticed anything, because for them, nothing had changed. However, for us, everything had changed – our perspective had changed. It was the last time we went to that chain for about 25 years. When we revisited Charlottesville, the restaurant had changed hands and there were many black patrons in at the time we dined in the restaurant’s new incarnation.
I was disgusted to follow the tragedy and death of Heather Hyer. Say her name aloud. Say Heather Hyer’s name in the company of those young civil rights workers from the Freedom Summer of 1964. James Earl Chaney from Meridia Mississippi and Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner from New York City were murdered while trying to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote. Heather and all the other martyrs who have fought racism must be remembered. I don’t even know the name of her murderer. But I do know that Heather believed that “if you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention”. Her mother Susan Bro urged the large crowd at Heather’s memorial service, to “find in your heart that small spark of accountability and you will find the courage to speak up.” She went on to say “We don’t all have to die to achieve our goals, we can do it together”. This is what Jesus was teaching, about community. He urged his disciples to look beyond the ideas of ritual cleanliness and the Mosaic Law which spoke of something as “unclean” if it was unfit to use in worship to God. Being “clean” or “unclean” was a designation governing the ritual of corporate or community worship. For example, there were certain animals, like pigs, considered unclean, and therefore not to be used in sacrifices and there were certain actions, like touching a dead body, that made a living person unclean and unable to participate in the worship ceremony. A skin infection could make a person “unclean” and a woman was unclean following childbirth. Jesus followed up on Mosaic Law calling His people to separate themselves from the impurities of the world with the idea of living spiritually pure and seeking to be holy, living a life worthy of our calling. He associated with people far outside his station – people who would be considered forever ritually unclean, like lepers, tax collectors and adulteresses.
You don’t have to think of murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness or slander to have “evil intentions” as they are named here. I’m quite sure the organizers of the rally in Charlottesville weren’t thinking of murdering Heather, but they were thinking of evil intentions such as inflicting fear and intimidation on innocent people. The considered and planned ideas to drive down other people, rather than to lift them up. These are the evil intentions in the heart that Jesus is talking about.
He is also talking to us in our lives today. How do we defile the community? Are there times when what comes from our hearts, is not clean. It is of the intention to drive someone down, when I could be raising someone or some purpose or idea up!
We are blessed when we identify with another person’s woundedness and we raise them up to God. How many times do we wonder how do we lift this person up to God? We pray for them, but what else can we do – we can listen. Just being a person who cares enough to listen to another’s woundedness, is where Jesus enters in. He enters in, when we just recognize that another person is in need, another person needs to be heard and acknowledged. Jesus has a new commandment and it is easy to interpret, unlike the ritual cleansing rules – Jesus just wants us to show love and compassion to everyone we meet. In John 15:12 He lays it out “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” Heather did, and so did James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Henry Schwerner, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, Harry and Harriette Moore, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Jesus said “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another”. As Anglicans we have made our Baptismal Covenant saying “we strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being”. This is the way we chose to interpret Jesus’ command. The challenge of course, is to live out our baptismal promises every day. It is a way of life to give oneself to. Our lives these days are so hurried. Too fast, always on the go until, if you are like our family, eventually you flop down in front of the TV and either vegetate or fall asleep. We need, I believe, to salvage a few minutes every day for introspection. How AM I doing? Was I the person I strive to be today or was I so hurried, I lived without intention today. Did I take the smallest opportunity to lift anyone up? Did I take a moment with Jesus to talk about who I am and who I want to be? See if you can scratch together 5-6 minutes each day, for a little evaluation, summation, inspiration and resurrection.
God bless you on your journey to bring justice and peace to all people and dignity to every human being.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario on the Tenth Sunday of Pentecost, August 13, 2017. Text: Matthew 14: 22-33.)
How many here remember learning to ride a bicycle as a child? Do you remember the trainer wheels? Did you have them or not? I recall that my parents would not allow me to have them. I had to learn to ride without them. I was told that I really would not learn to ride if I grew to depend on them. So I learned without them, and sometimes falling down.
Rethinking this Gospel story, Jesus’ invitation to Peter to join him in walking on the water, reminds me of learning to ride a bicycle. Just as Peter starts to do it right – just as his faith is strong enough to do it, and he tries to walk on the water, he notices the strong waves, becomes frightened and begins to sink into the sea. So the young bicyclist, just beginning to ride on his or her own, suddenly looks down and realizes what is happening and begins to take a tumble. But the parent, perhaps running along side, reaches out and steadies the bicycle, just as Jesus reaches out and strengthens Peter’s faith and saves him. Peter steps out without a rock or reef to step back on to (no “trainer wheels”) but onto the deep itself. And just as the young bicyclist usually does learn to ride the bicycle with practice, Peter, at least metaphorically, learns to “walk on water” in a ministry in often very difficult situations.
To extend the metaphor, we may be Peter, willing to step out in faith, or we may be back in the boat, frightened of what is going on around us, perhaps just being sensible and trying to keep safe. That is not a bad thing. Yet there are also times to try to “walk on water”, so to speak.
I have long been fascinated by the proverb “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. It is one of those proverbs like “charity begins at home” that we may ascribe to the Bible but really isn’t there. It was first used by the English poet, Alexander Pope, in 1711 in his “Essay on Criticism” and has become a part of Anglo-American culture. The phrase is used to urge caution in dealing with complicated and difficult situations. I have said it many times to myself when faced with very difficult pastoral situations. To continue our Coronation Street theme of last week, many a Coronation Street plot revolves around a fool who rushes in where an angel would have feared to tread. Indeed, Peter’s friends in the boat may have regarded him as a fool for trying to join Jesus on the water. Even if the water is very rough, the boat is still safer.
As Christians, we are called to risk, to try to walk on water, so to speak, and perhaps we need to be careful about invoking the expression “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” too much. Indeed, in the 1947 film “The Bishop’s Wife”, the angel Dudley (Cary Grant) turns the expression around, “angels rush in where fools fear to tread”. But even Peter’s “rushing in” to walk with Jesus on the water did not come out of the blue. His decision was based on a developing trusting relationship with Jesus that would continue to develop after this traumatic but liberating experience.
Perhaps the proverb “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is best understood as having two stages. At first, we heed the proverb and do not rush in. But as we study the situation and begin to understand it, as our faith grows, as we practise riding the bicycle, so to speak, we make a move and become involved. We do not permanently huddle frightened in the boat.
The Diocese of Niagara has a special grants program, WOW, “Walk on Water”, for new parish initiatives that seem impossible, like walking on water, but may be quite possible with strong faith and hard work. So far we have not applied for one of these grants; perhaps we are just a bit too huddled in our boat, worrying about the parish’s finances or numbers. But it is a good challenge to us: what would it be for us as a parish to “walk on water” – to venture into the community in a new and imaginative way? As one who lives in the neighborhood, I must say it is a difficult challenge, surrounded as we are by inaccessible high-rise apartment buildings and people of very different cultural backgrounds to whom we look very strange. But the possibility of a WOW grant is a good challenge to us: we would not be able to complain that we cannot afford it. With the news that Arabic has replaced Italian as Hamilton’s second language used in homes, perhaps we should offer Arabic lessons! That is just one idea. With the tragedy that has been unfolding in Virginia, perhaps we can envision a WOW grant that will help prevent the same thing from happening here.
We do not just witness as a parish but also as individual Christians. And in our day-to-day lives these are many opportunities to move beyond the discouraging “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” to trying to “walk on water” and trust our faith in new friendships and relationships, perhaps across religious, cultural or age barriers. That may just mean a friendly smile or word in the elevator, rather than a scowl. Building neighbourliness on a single floor of an apartment building is a challenge but it is worth the try. On a more personal level, perhaps it is time to share more of one’s personal life and needs with a friend, rather than keeping everything secret and secure. In the end, walking on water in faith is more liberating than being huddled in the boat afraid.
As Matthew’s parables in the last few weeks have illustrated, the result of this walking-on-water faith is abundance and quality: abundance of life, even abundance of numbers. (Like many of you, I was struck by the number and variety of mourners at Neil’s funeral on Friday; they were a witness to abundance coming out of Christian love and concern expressed in a community many of us would be uncomfortable with.) So, the invitation is, step out, walk on water a bit, do not be afraid, risk, for even if we fail, Jesus’ hand is there, ready to lift us up. God, give us the strength and courage to step out and risk. Thanks be to God!
(Homily preached at the funeral of Neil Richard Turner (1951-2017) by Bishop Terry Brown at Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario on Friday, August 11, 2017. Texts: Isaiah 61: 1-3, Psalm 23, 2 Corinthians 4: 5-15, John 10: 11-16.)
The themes of this afternoon’s three lessons – justice, vulnerability and care for others – are crucial to the Christian life. Neil, whom we remember today, as we have already heard in Ken’s eulogy, exemplified all of them. The themes flow together, in our lives, as they did in Neil’s.
The promise of Messianic rule in Isaiah is freedom from oppression, healing of the broken hearted, release of the captives, and comfort to those who mourn. Our city especially seems to have many who have hit the bottom, who struggle, who desperately need encouragement, support, prosperity, stability, good housing, and close friends. Day-by-day they come to this church and all our churches and social service institutions for support. Governments and non-government organizations too struggle with poverty and homelessness. Our hospital emergency rooms and jails are places of sad alienation and suffering.
Yet those who struggle in this city are not an object, not an “other”; they are ourselves. That Neil realized as he struggled with those very realities in his own life and reached out to others often in greater difficulty than himself. Thus, he always reached out with a dream of real human justice – a place to sleep, a meal to eat, security in old age, a friendly conversation (albeit often laced with a certain amount of gossip) – and was frustrated with big reports, statistics, committees, bureaucracies and grand promises. Thus, this parish sometimes frustrated him too.
If there is a lesson there, it is that justice must be concrete and not abstract: a reality, not just an ideal. And despite our sociological or psychological theories, real justice, with real people, must be accomplished. And that in seeking justice for others, we are apt to encounter our own vulnerabilities.
Paul’s image of the reign of God as a treasure in vulnerable clay pots is a powerful one. It was the first scriptural image that came to mind as I thought about this homily. When we are young, we may think of our bodies as ever healthy and invincible. But as we age, we realize just how vulnerable we are, to sickness, to depression, to pain, to the deprecations of loneliness, poverty or insecurity. Yet, through the cracks and imperfections of these clay pots, the glory of God shines. One is tempted to reverse Leonard Cohen’s song to, “There are cracks in everything, and that’s how the light gets out”.
With early abuse by one he trusted, with a not very good educational background, with a sexual orientation not very well accepted at the time, with illness and too great a fondness for the pub, Neil was a vulnerable person and he did realize it. We talked about it many times. Yet despite the fragile clay pot of his body, he dreamed, he hoped, he reached out, he loved, he listened, he planned, he ministered. Despite not fulfilling some of his dreams, I experienced his constant encouragement. And many of you here who have known Neil for decades remember, I am sure, a person who reached out in care and compassion despite, and often because of, his many vulnerabilities.
We are reminded that we are all vulnerable but that within those vulnerabilities there are still many opportunities for loving service and seeking of justice. We have the choice of turning in on ourselves and retreating to despair and depression; or we can keep dreaming, keep studying, keep talking, keep connecting. The latter is the Christian way and it was Neil’s as well.
The image of Christ as the Good Shepherd in John 10, which we read as our Gospel, is often read at ordinations and associated with the work of bishops and priests. This over-clericalization of the passage belies the point that first it is God who has the character of Loving Shepherd over all creation, including humanity; that Jesus Christ, humanity taken into God and made divine, is the perfect human manifestation of that divine Good Shepherd, and that in our baptismal ministries we all become Good Shepherds, looking after the best interests of one another. None of us are called to be passive sheep. Nor are church leaders called to lord it over others, let alone the powerless.
Neil certainly had a vocation of shepherd-like caring for others. Whether in his apartment building or on a bench in front of the public library, or in Jackson Square or James Street coffee shops, whether in local pubs (one of them he took me to, I must admit, frightened even me), whether at the cathedral or this parish, whether at the Poverty Roundtable, Mission Services or the Salvation Army, Neil was always available to listen and encourage. He loved people. E.M. Forester’s “Only Connect” might well have been his motto. It is a good motto for ourselves also. “Only Connect”.
Neil dearly hoped to be a priest. It did not happen. Perhaps if he had been born a bit later, or not been so outspoken about his private life, he might have had a better chance. The church did give him opportunities. But prophecy and self-sabotage are not necessarily incompatible and Neil was a strange mixture of both. I tried hard, but I never managed to organize him. There was always another course to be taken. The dreamer dreamt on.
But now Neil will rest and rise where clergy or lay status makes no difference; where wealth or poverty makes no difference; where education or lack of education makes no difference; where gay, bi, tri, straight or trans makes no difference, where whether dreams are accomplished or not makes no difference – as part of the faithful company of heaven gathered around God’s throne, resurrected in God’s glory. We thank God for Neil’s life and witness, we thank God that he is now free of pain and suffering, and we commend him to God, the angels and the saints. Thanks be to God!
