We hold these truths...

J. Barry Vaughn. St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Birmingham, Alabama. July 4, 2010.

“We hold these truths to be self evident…” They are not the first words of the Declaration of Independence, but they are perhaps the best known. The truths that Jefferson thought to be self evident, of course, were that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Between the 18^th century and the present there has been a great reversal. In 1776 it was “self evident” to virtually everyone that there was a Creator, but the idea that political and civil rights were innate to human nature was a novel idea, far from universal, and even considered dangerous by many. Today most countries at least pay lip service to the idea of human rights, but the idea that there is a Creator is far less “self evident” than it was in Jefferson’s day.

Although “we hold these truths” may be the best known words of the Declaration, it is the words of the final sentence that always move me close to the point of tears: “… for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

“…our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” They were solemn words then, and they are solemn words now. But in 1776 they were more than just words. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Adams, and the rest of the signers committed high treason when they voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence on this day in 1776 and signed it in the days following. Their votes and their signatures made them rebels against the greatest military power of the 18^th century, and there was every reason to expect that they would fail and that Britain would prevail in the war that was certain to come.

But they succeeded and in succeeding they transformed themselves. On July 4, 1776, they were rebels against their rightful sovereign, George III, but when Adams and Franklin signed the Treaty of Paris in 1784 they became patriots, no longer subjects of a crown but citizens of a new republic – the United States of America.

The words “patriot” and “patriotism” are troublesome. They are troublesome for Christians because we have divided loyalties. On the one hand, in his letter to the Romans Paul tells us to be subject to the “governing authorities” because they have been “instituted by God.” On the other hand, the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that we are citizens of a “better country”, a “heavenly” one, a city “whose architect and builder is God.”

One of the reasons that “patriot” and “patriotism” are troublesome is that some confuse the United States and this “heavenly city” of which the Letter to the Hebrews speaks. From the beginning of our history some have believed that America has a divine mission. John Winthrop implied as much in his sermon to the Massachusetts Bay pilgrims in 1630 when he said, “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it like that of New England." For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us.” In the 19^th century the idea that the U.S. had a special, divine mission became the idea of “manifest destiny” and was used to justify some terrible injustices, such as the mass resettlement of Native Americans or sometimes even their massacre. But that is not what Winthrop intended. For him, God’s blessing upon America was conditional. We shall be that “city upon a hill,” he said, if we “delight in each other; make each other's conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together…” But if we do not do those things, Winthrop said, then we will be “a story and a by word” throughout the world.

I think no one understood this better than President Abraham Lincoln. On the eve of his inauguration in 1861 Lincoln referred to the United States as God’s “almost chosen people.” I think the “almost” refers back to Winthrop’s idea that God’s blessing upon America is conditional, and in 1861 no one knew better than Lincoln that one of the conditions was the elimination of slavery.

“Patriot” and “patriotism” may be troublesome, but I believe they are good words, and I consider myself to be a patriot. Patriotism is out of favor with many on the left and with many within the Episcopal Church, in particular, because it can be easily abused. To many, patriotism implies an uncritical support of their country. It implies a kind of idolatry that puts country in place of God. But it need not be so.

I believe that the New Testament advocates a sober and clear-eyed patriotism. In other words, we have an obligation to support our country and its elected officials, even though we know that it is provisional and finite, and that our ultimate loyalty is to the Kingdom of God.

The American experiment is unique, not perfect. One of the things that makes the American experiment unique is our capacity for change, development, and self-criticism. When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he not only meant men, not women, he also meant white men who owned a certain amount of property. But Jefferson’s words took on a life of their own. “Men” became “men and women;” “white” became “black and white;” and “property” became “rich and poor.” And our understanding of those words is still evolving.

At its best, the United States aspires to be a “city upon a hill”, but we are an earthly realm, beautiful but flawed and imperfect. Or in the words that Wellesley College professor Katherine Lee Bates wrote:

America! America!

God mend thine ev'ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

But my patriotism is even better expressed by Abraham Lincoln’s friend, Carl Schurz, a Union general during the Civil War and later a U.S. Senator. Schurz said, “I trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

Babel or Jerusalem?

I have to admit that I think I would have liked Babel. In my mind’s eye I see a combination of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Babel is a city of architectural marvels. It has the tallest sky scrapers, the greatest museums. Its orchestras and musicians play in the finest concert halls. It even has spacious and reverent cathedrals that soar upward, filled with prayer, chant and incense..

The problem with Babel is that it is a destination. Once you have come to Babel, there is no point in going anywhere else. Its people are proud and complacent. They have the finest of everything and not only do they know it, they let everyone else know it, too. To live in Babel is to have arrived.

Jerusalem, on the other hand, is different. Jerusalem is a little shabby. Its buildings are a collection of different styles, different materials. One building may be part gothic, part Romanesque, and then when they ran out of money, they just completed it with plain, unadorned concrete blocks. Jerusalem’s streets are narrow and the streets are not well maintained and you can’t get anywhere without making a dozen turns and asking directions at least five times.

But Jerusalem has a sense of excitement and adventure that Babel lacks, because Jerusalem is not a destination; it is an embarkation point, a launching pad. Jerusalem is where one goes to be equipped for mission.

The most arresting phrase in the story about Babel is “Let us make a name for ourselves.” In the Old Testament in general and in Genesis in particular, to name is to control, to master. God names each part of creation as God creates it: “God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night… God called the dome Sky and the dry land he called Earth…” And above all God named the first human being – Adam.

But the people of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. In other words, they wanted to control themselves, their lives, their own destinies. But this is not an option, and the older we get, the more we understand that we are not the masters of our fate and the captains of our destinies.

Our only choice is to cooperate with God and become a part of God’s story, a part of the city that God is building, or to resist God. Babel was a city that defied God. They not only wanted to make a name for themselves, to be in charge of their lives, they wanted to build a tower that touched heaven. In other words, they wanted to be God’s equals. But that is not an option. God is God and we are not. Babel’s ambition is the essence of sin – to move God out of the center and take God’s place.

What does all this have to do with St. Alban’s? First, note that St. Alban’s is located at the end of a dead end street. That’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because people do not drive by and see us and say, “That looks like a nice church. I think I’ll visit it some Sunday.” It is also unfortunate because of the symbolism. It suggests that St. Alban’s is a little like Babel, that we too, are a destination rather than a launching pad, that we are less like Jerusalem and more Babel.

But sometimes the Spirit breaks through. The Spirit broke through to the disciples on the day of Pentecost. The Spirit came as fire and wind to a bunch of dispirited and disillusioned disciples. Jesus had left them. He had gone away to his Father in heaven. What were they to do? Their Lord and master had gone and the authorities were seeking to do to them what they had done to Jesus. And then in the midst of their pity party, the fire of the Spirit descended upon them.

And that is what is happening to us, I believe. Last Christmas it is EXACTLY what happened, when, in the midst of the Christmas Eve service, George swung the thurible and it hit the altar rail and hot coals flew out all over the carpet. George, you thought that was an accident, but I believe it was the Holy Spirit!

In the great scheme of things, burning a few holes in the carpet was no big deal. But the coals that escaped from the thurible did more than burn holes in the carpet. They began to ignite our imaginations. What if we replaced the carpet? What if we painted the church? What if we made those renovations that we’ve been talking about for years? What if we put in new windows?

And so we have. The carpet is gone. The paint on the walls makes the building look bigger, brighter, and more welcoming. And it is no accident that we now have windows that open outward. They open to let the Spirit in and to let the good news of the gospel out.

The Spirit is also at work among us as we reach out to our sisters and brothers in Haiti and at home. We are becoming known in the diocese as a small church with a big heart for outreach.

It is a lot easier to live in Babel. As I said at the beginning, I think I would have liked Babel. It is a beautiful city and has everything in it to delight the mind and the senses. But there is something missing – a sense of adventure, a purpose.

We are not meant to live in Babel. We are meant to come to Jerusalem so that we may be sent out proclaiming the gospel in every language.”Every language” means not only French and Yoruba and Mandarin. It means the language of the school teacher, the dialect of the accountant, the accents of the insurance agent and the banker. Each of us speaks a different language. Try to find a way to proclaim the gospel in the language that you speak, whether you are a doctor, a lawyer, or an Indian chief. And if you have trouble proclaiming the gospel in your language, ask the Spirit for help. Because when the Spirit gets hold of you and sets your heart on fire, there’s no telling what you will say or where you will end up.

Righteousness and justice are the foundations of God's throne

“The LORD is king; let the earth rejoice; let the multitudes of the isles be glad.”

When we say Psalm 97, the words pass through our brains ever so briefly and then are launched into the air from our tongues, and we do not even pause to think about them. But if we did pause, we might be astonished by them. We might even be somewhat reluctant to say them. For Psalm 97 makes several staggering claims.

The first claim is that the LORD is king. The Psalmist is not making the unexceptional and not especially interesting claim that a Supreme Being rules the universe. This was a claim that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, and other Deists would have been comfortable making. The Deists believed it was self-evident that the world was created by a wise and rational Almighty Lawgiver. But this is not a claim that is as easy for us to make as it was for them.

At the beginning of the 21^st century we have learned that the universe is far more mysterious and far less rational than Jefferson, Franklin, and Locke believed. Darwin taught us that creation took place over millions of years, not seven days, and in some sense is still taking place. According to Darwin the creation of a single species required the extinction of millions of earlier versions of that species that could not compete successfully in the struggle for food and reproduction. Astronomers have taught us that the universe is not a cozy little group of planets and satellites with our sun burning brightly in the center but rather it is a dizzying array of galaxies that exploded from the Big Bang and are speeding off into the void and will one day either slow and cool down to absolute zero or will fall backwards into a mass so dense that light itself will not be able to escape from it. Marx and Freud taught us that we are not even the masters of our own motives and minds but rather are swayed unconsciously by our economic needs and by irrational impulses.

So I am glad that when the Psalmist said “the LORD is king”, he was not saying what the Deists said. Rather, the Psalmist said, “Yahweh is king”, Israel’s very own covenant God was king. And this was an astonishing claim. It was astonishing because Israel was one of the smallest kingdoms in the ancient near east. Israel’s neighbors all had their own gods and goddesses and they generally believed that their own gods exercised their powers within their countries’ borders. The people of the ancient world believed in tribal gods, not cosmic gods. Even the mighty Persians and Egyptians believed that their gods’ powers were confined to the lands that their people ruled.

But this is not the only remarkable thing that the Psalmist said. The Psalmist went on to say that “righteousness and justice are the foundations of Yahweh’s throne”. To get a sense of why this is an amazing claim, think of what the Psalmist might have written. He could have said, Strength and power are the foundation of Yahweh’s throne. He could said that Yahweh’s kingdom is based on domination and force. But instead he said “righteousness and justice are the foundations of Yahweh’s throne.”

It was not an easy claim to make in the ancient world and it is not an easy claim to make today. To the ancient Jews righteousness and justice meant far more than simply adhering to an arbitrary collection of rules. To be righteous and just was to live in harmony with one’s neighbors. A just community was one in which the elderly and orphans were cared for; it was one in which even the stranger from another land was treated with kindness and respect. The righteous person was one who cared not only for her family but also for the neighbor she did not know and who had no claim on her kindness. And the Psalmist makes the startling claim that we are to order our lives in this way because these are the very foundations of the world: “Yahweh is king… righteousness and justice are the foundations of his throne.”

Israel’s God was not a God to approach lightly. Yahweh is a God shrouded in mystery (“clouds and darkness are round about him”); the earth fears the lightning bolts that he hurls from the heavens; and even the mountains “melt like wax” at his presence. Righteousness and justice may be the foundations of his throne but Yahweh “burns up” his enemies.

But Israel is called to rejoice in this fearsome Deity. “Zion hears and his glad and the cities of Judah rejoice” but they are invited to rejoice precisely because Yahweh is a God of righteousness and justice. It is those who are just for whom light springs up and those who are “truehearted” who are joyful and glad.

We need to hear the good news of Psalm 97 because we live in a world which seems to be anything but righteous and just.

Not only have we learned that the physical world is not the orderly Deist universe that Franklin and Jefferson believed in, we have also learned that the moral universe is also chaotic.

The international banking crisis showed us that some bankers were gambling with the money entrusted with them as though they were members of an Elks’ lodge on a junket to Las Vegas.

The oil spewing into the Gulf shows us that the company entrusted with bringing the oil safely to shore and preserving the integrity of the environment lobbied heavily against putting safeguards into place that might have prevented the spill.

The debt crisis in Greece makes it seem as though the government of that country was paying its bills with high interest credit cards and giving no thought to how they would pay back the credit card companies. Now their irresponsibility threatens to shake the already shaky international banking system.

All three of these crises show us a failure to exercise oversight by those charged with the responsibility of regulating and warning.

They also show us our own failings: Our belief that property prices would always go up and never go down; that the stock market would go up for ever; that we could overconsume oil and other limited resources and never have to face the consequences.

We failed to remember that the foundations of Yahweh’s world are righteousness and justice. We forgot that God expects us to exercise wise stewardship of his world, that we are called to be prudent and frugal in using the resources, including financial resources that God has given us. And in many cases we forgot that success and wealth also impose great responsibility, the responsibility to be as righteous and just as Yahweh is – to care for those who have less, who have been pass by and passed over, who are weak and vulnerable.

We have worshiped the false gods of riches and power and (as the Psalmist says) we have been confounded.

It is time for us to turn back to the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah; to turn back to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is time for us to listen and watch for the coming of Israel’s God and to sign and rejoice, to hear and be glad for the coming of this God who judges rightly.

And it is time for us to pray that God will once again establish the world upon righteousness and justice.

The Great Experiment - Easter 2010 (April 4, 2010)

The Great Experiment

J. Barry Vaughn. Easter 2010 (April 3, 2010). St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL.

The great physicist Albert Einstein formulated his theory of relativity by conducting what he called a “thought experiment.” Instead of going to a laboratory and firing up the Bunsen burner or measuring the velocity of electrons, he simply imagined what would happen to two clocks. One would be on a train that could travel at the speed of light and the other would remain stationary. OK, then, that’s about all I know about Einstein and the theory of relativity. But I like the idea of thought experiments, so let’s conduct a theological thought experiment.

Imagine a world without Easter. In the first book of the Narnia chronicles – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis tells us that Narnia is under the spell of an evil and powerful witch who has decreed that it will always be winter and never Christmas. But instead let’s imagine that it is always Lent and never Easter or simply that there is no Easter because, after all, Lent implies an Easter at the end of forty days.

What would such a world look like?

First, the New Testament would be entirely different. If we removed Christmas from the NT, we would lose only 2 or 3 chapters at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. There are no other references to the birth of Jesus. But if we remove Easter, then we lose the ending of all four gospels; we lose most of Paul’s letters because it seems as though almost every other sentence in Paul refers to the resurrection or at least presupposes it; and we lose much of the rest of the NT because on almost every page is an idea, a fact, a concept that makes no sense without the resurrection. The gospels make absolutely no sense without the resurrection. Take the resurrection out of the gospels and what do we have? We have some lovely parables; some pretty exciting miracles (hard to beat that one with the loaves and fishes); some truly impressive moral teaching; and several other very nice things. But Buddhism also has some great parables; Islam tells us of miracles performed by the prophet Muhammad; and every other moral and religious system in the world has a set of moral teachings that is probably 80% identical to the things that Jesus said.

In other words, without the resurrection, without Easter, the question we have to ask about the New Testament, in general, and the Gospels, in particular, is . . . so what? Why pay any special attention to Jesus of Nazareth? He was an inspiring speaker; he showed remarkable compassion; he may even have worked miracles; but he was not significantly different from half a dozen other spiritual, moral, or religious figures.

Second, let’s take Easter or resurrection out of history. If we take the resurrection out of history, then we suddenly lose our bearings. In the west, the resurrection is the great starting point. Our calendars begin with the life of Jesus (as I’ve already implied) not because of his parables or miracles but because he died and rose again. The resurrection of Jesus completely re-oriented life. In the Roman world, Sunday was not a day of rest; it was the first day of the work week, but the resurrection of Jesus transformed a working day into a joyous festival.

Third, take the resurrection out of the equation and there is no satisfactory explanation for the rise of the Christian church. By the end of the first century the Christian faith had spread as far west as the British isles; as far south as Ethiopia; and as far east as India. Why and how did this happen? What energized the followers of Jesus to risk their lives to take their message to the ends of the earth? What was it about the message they proclaimed caught the imaginations of people as diverse as the peoples of Britain, Ethiopia, and India? Well, let’s go back to our thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Paul and the other Christian missionaries of the first century had told their listeners the story of a Jesus who had taught people the story of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son and had healed the sick and even multiplied the loaves and fishes and then had been betrayed and arrested and tried and condemned and executed and then… well, that was pretty much it. What a … well… sad and dull and somewhat tedious little story.

But that is not the story they shared in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and took to the ends of the earth. Instead, they told about the parables and miracles and the suffering and crucifixion but what made the story different and caught the imagination of their hearers was the absolutely staggering ending: Jesus did not stay in the tomb; he rose again on the third day.

Let’s take the thought experiment one step further. What difference would it make if we acted as though the resurrection was real? I ask this question because I’m convinced that most of us think and act as though there was no Easter.

We’re great about giving up martinis and Marlboros for Lent but when Easter has come and gone, it’s pretty much business as usual.

What if instead of thinking of Easter as the end of Lent, we thought of it as the beginning of the most exciting part of the year? What if instead of giving up something for Lent, we took up things for Easter? What if we lived as if Jesus really did rise again on the third day?

Easter makes a difference, the resurrection makes a difference, because it reveals God’s plan for creation. It’s like turning to the back of the book and finding the answers or seeing how the story ends. It tells us that death does not have the last word. It tells us that God longs to gather human life in all its flesh and blood and messiness into the divine life and that there is future for flesh and blood beyond death and decay.

How might the world be different, how might we be different, if we took the resurrection seriously? The resurrection of Jesus is the story of a man unjustly condemned to death who is vindicated by God by being raised to new life. What does that imply for us? It implies that we belong on the side of those who have been unjustly and unfairly treated by political and economic systems – the unemployed, the uninsured, the unjustly imprisoned. The story of the resurrection is the ultimate miracle of healing. All healing is a way of pushing back death. The story of Easter tells us that part of our job as Christians is to bring wholeness to a world of fragmentation and death; to bring hope to the depressed and despondent; to seek out the lonely and unloved.

N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, and former professor of New Testament at Oxford, has wonderful parable about the resurrection of Jesus. Imagine that a wealthy patron of the arts has given a magnificent painting to a church. The congregation is grateful but their church is small and there really isn’t a good place in it for the painting. They try hanging it behind the altar but it’s too tall. They try putting it in the narthex but there isn’t enough light there. They put it in the parish hall but the heat and humidity might damage the painting. Finally, they come to the conclusion that to accommodate the painting they will have to tear down their church and build a new one.

That is what the resurrection implies. We have tried to modify the story of the resurrection to make ourselves comfortable, to accommodate the injustices of our economic and political systems. We have tried to tame the story of Easter to fit our belief in a world in which there are no surprises, no miracles, and in which dead men certainly do not rise again. But the resurrection will not be trimmed or modified.

In the Easter story we have been given a thing both surpassingly beautiful and uncommonly strange, so beautiful and strange that it does not fit into our world. We live in a world of death and decay but Easter speaks to us of a world in which death is destroyed, the world is renewed, and we can be born again to lives full of joy and wonder. But this news sounds too good to be true. We have been disappointed too many times, and as the poet says, we are “half in love with easeful death.”

Our natural reaction is to find ways to take away the beauty and strangeness of Jesus’ resurrection but instead we should ask, “How does this strange and beautiful thing change us and change our world?” That’s when the real work begins. That’s when we start to rebuild ourselves and our world in the image of the resurrection.

The Lord's Prayer 2: Hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...

Hallowed has an old fashioned ring to it. We call Oct. 31 Halloween because it is the eve of All Hallows’ or All Saints’ Day. The saints are the hallowed ones, that is, the holy ones. So, hallowed means holy. Hallowed be thy name means may your name be holy. But that just begs the question, what is holiness?

If hallowed has an old fashioned ring to it, then holy has a somewhat negative connotation. We generally associate holiness with morality. A holy person is surely a person of unimpeachable morals, and generally, we define holiness in negative terms – a holy person is one who doesn’t lie, cheat, steal, carouse, and so on.

However, I think an old gospel song has something to teach us about what it means to be holy. Do you know the old gospel song, “Take time to be holy”?

Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord;

Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word.
Make friends of God’s children, help those who are weak,
Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.

Take time to be holy, be calm in thy soul,
Each thought and each motive beneath His control.
Thus led by His Spirit to fountains of love,
Thou soon shalt be fitted for service above.

What I gather from this old hymn is that holiness is a more positive than negative. It’s about what we do rather than what we do not do. Furthermore, it is not as much about morality as it is about having a close relationship with God.

So back to the Lord’s Prayer. What does it mean, then, to hallow God’s Name or to pray that God’s Name may be hallowed? First, we have to realize that in Judaism to speak of God’s Name is just a more reverent way of speaking of God. The rabbis frequently spoke of Ha Shem, that is, the Name, because to speak of God directly was regarded as irreverent or impertinent. So the prayer is really saying, May God be hallowed or holy.

But surely God is already holy. To pray “hallowed be your Name” seems as redundant as saying May earth be round or May fire be hot. So we have to ask, where and when is God’s Name not hallowed? Then the answer becomes obvious: God’s Name is not hallowed on earth.

On earth we hold many things as holy--success, fame, riches, sexual pleasure—but God is seldom on the list. We take time to watch too much TV, have an extra piece of cheese cake, sleep an extra hour in the morning, but we seldom take time to “speak oft with thy Lord; / Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word./ Make friends of God’s children, / help those who are weak…” and so on.

So to pray Hallowed be thy Name is to pray not that God would change but that we would change, that we would become people who will hallow God’s Name by our words and deeds and that our world would become the kind of place where God’s holiness would be acknowledged.

And that leads directly to the next two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The first phrase of the Lord’s Prayer already teaches us that there is a distance between where we are and where God is. God is in heaven; we are on earth. But the third phrase of the Lord’s Prayer—“your kingdom come”-- teaches us that God longs to collapse that distance, to bring heaven and earth together. But this petition is also one of the most subversive prayers we can pray.

In this petition we are acknowledging that our world is not as it should be. One of Jesus’ most outrageous statements was “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” Righteousness is that state of affairs when the hungry are fed, captives are freed, the widow and the orphan have an honored place, and we would welcome the homeless poor into our own homes.

This prayer is subversive because it exposes that fact that none of earth’s kingdoms is the kingdom of God. It is subversive because it teaches us to look for and long for the day when God will rule. Earthly kingdoms will come to an end and God will rule alone.

This is a subversive prayer because it reminds us that God does not single out any nation for a special blessing. In 1914 German soldiers marched to war with the phrase Gott mit uns (“God with us”) inscribed on their belt buckles.

When I hear “God bless America” or see it on a bumper sticker, I always mentally add “and God bless everyone else, too,” because righteousness is no more at home in America than anywhere else on earth. The poor, the hungry, and the homeless in our midst show us how far we are from God’s kingdom.

While there is much that we can and should do to make this world resemble God’s kingdom, the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that in the end transforming this sad, old world into a place that welcomes its rightful Ruler is not so much our accomplishment as it is God’s gift. We pray, “THY kingdom come”. It is God who comes to us, God who bridges the gap, collapses the great distance between heaven and earth. In the parable of the prodigal son, the dissolute young man wakes up one day and realizes that he is in a “far country” and begins his journey back home. But when he comes within sight of his father, his father rushes out to meet him. And so it is with us. We are in a “far country” but even now the Father is rushing toward us with arms open wide in love.

Finally, we pray “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. In a sense, all three of the petitions we have considered today are saying the same thing. When God’s Name is truly hallowed, and God’s kingdom comes, then God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. But the final petition also touches us in the very center of our being.

We live in a world which exalts individual achievement. The athlete who wins the gold medal in the Olympics gets her picture on a box of Wheaties; the winning team in the World Series is invited to the Oval Office to meet the President; the candidate who fights his way through the primaries, wins his party’s nomination, and has the best sound bites gets to be the President. But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that there is something more important than the single-minded pursuit of success and self-aggrandizement. “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that this petition echoes Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. In contemplating the terrible trial that awaited him, Jesus prayer, “:Not my will but thine be done.”

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” may be the most difficult phrase of the Lord’s Prayer for us to say, because we have no idea what God’s will might be. We can only pray this petition because of the second word of the Lord’s Prayer – Father. Jesus has already assured us that we are praying to a loving Parent, a Parent who wants the best for us. The problem is that although we think we know what’s best for us, the truth is that we do not really know. But God does. To pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to put our trust in the One to whom we pray.

C.S. Lewis said that in the end we can either say to God “Thy will be done” or God can say to us, “Very well, then, THY will be done.” Imagine the consequences of the latter: To prefer our own will to God’s will is to drive down a dark road without headlights, it is to set out into the wilderness without a map. But to say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to trust that God loves us, that God knows the route that will take us safely through the wilderness, and that God has already made a way and prepared a place for us at the end.

“Hallowed be your Name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven…” These three phrases take us from heaven to earth; from the heavenly realm in which God’s will is done, to our world in which anything but God’s will is done, to the assurance that the day is coming when earth will resemble heaven and God will be at home among women and men. So we believe, so we pray, so we act. May it be so. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer 1: Our Father in Heaven

According to Luke, Jesus’ disciples came to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray,” and Jesus replied, “When you pray, say, ‘Father’…” or as Matthew has it, “Pray then this way…” In either case, the Lord’s Prayer is (if you will) the principal text in Jesus’ school of prayer. Even if it were not presented to us as Jesus’ own teaching on how to pray, it would be well worth our time to pay careful attention to this prayer. It has been on the lips and in the hearts of Christians for 2000 years. Throughout that time it has been said innumerable times every day and in every human language. Along with “Now I lay me down to sleep…” and “God is great, God is good…” it is usually the first prayer that we learn as children. The Lord’s Prayer begins and ends in God’s heavenly kingdom: “Our Father in heaven…” and “the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.” But the route it takes away from and back to God’s presence runs through the very heart of human life. So I invite you to join me in sitting with the other disciples at the feet of Jesus to learn what he meant when he said, “Pray then this way, ‘Our Father…’”

Today I want to look at four lessons we learn from the Lord’s Prayer: First, prayer is a skill we need to learn. Secondly, all Christian prayer is corporate. Thirdly, the Lord’s prayer teaches us that God relates to us as a parent to children. And fourthly, that we can never go so far from God that he will be unable to hear our prayer.

“Pray then this way…” implies that we do not know how to pray. How could that be? Isn’t prayer a universal human impulse? Why did the disciples go to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray”? They were Jews, and at the time of Jesus’ birth, the Jewish faith was over a thousand years old. For over a thousand years the Jewish people had raised their hearts and hands to heaven and called upon the Almighty. Even if they had been Greeks or Romans, they would have known how to pray. All of the world’s religions have teachings and traditions about prayer. Doesn’t prayer rise spontaneously from a feeling of gratitude? I think that all of us have a natural desire to offer thanks for the good things that come to us unsought and unasked for – the startling red of a maple in autumn or the stranger who opens a door for us when our arms are loaded with groceries. Prayer seems not only natural but inevitable when disaster strikes – when a newborn’s fever grows higher and higher and nothing seems to bring it down, what parent in the world does not turn to prayer? When the crops fail, or the river overflows its banks, or there hasn’t been a drop of rain in months, is there anyone who does not at least yearn to believe that there is a God who will hear and answer our prayers? And especially at death, don’t we naturally turn to prayer to pray for peace for those who have departed this life?

Prayer appears to be a natural human response to both the good and the bad situations that inevitably accompany human life. And yet, whether we read Matthew or Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus seemed to think he needed to teach his disciples to pray.

Why do we need to know how to pray? The Lord’s Prayer itself is the answer. It is at once both simple enough for a child to learn and understand and also a deep vein of spiritual treasure from which the greatest of saints can mine inexhaustible riches. To be sure, prayer is a natural and universal human impulse and God hears all prayers. However, while our natural impulses are all God’s good gifts, they need to be shaped and trained. It is natural for a child to want to speak, but without hearing her parents talk to her, she will not advance beyond the oooohs and ahhs of infancy. Hunger is a natural impulse, but a child needs to be introduced slowly and gradually to healthy and nutritious food. And so it is with prayer. The spiritual life requires as much training as sports or music. The Lord’s Prayer is a set of exercises from which both the beginner and the advanced student can benefit.

The first word is the first lesson: “Our…” By nature our prayers are selfish and individualistic. We seek to get our own needs met. But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we are not isolated individuals but parts of a greater whole. As with the Nicene creed, so with the Lord’s Prayer, this is a text for the baptized. In the early church, those who were to be baptized at the Easter vigil were taught the Apostles’ creed and the Lord’s prayer either right before or immediately after baptism. Baptism makes us no longer an “I” but a “we” . “We believe…” “Our Father…”

Perhaps the greatest and most destructive mistake of the modern West is individualism. In contrast to human experience from the beginning of time, the women and men of the modern West believe themselves to be captains of their fate and masters of their destiny. But in John Donne’s words, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main....” This is even more true for Christians. Baptism makes us members of the body of Christ and participants in a fellowship that extends throughout time and space. There is no such thing as a solitary Christian, and there is never a Christian who prays alone. And this is the first thing the Lord’s Prayer teaches us. “Our Father…”

The second lesson is about the nature of God. Without a guide us it would be natural to think of God as remote, removed, indifferent, or perhaps even hostile. This seems to have been the belief of the Hellenistic religions. It was assumed as a matter of course that the gods were vindictive and vengeful and so sacrifices were offered to acquire their good will or to avert their anger. One did not have a parent/child relationship with the gods; at best it was more like master/slave. But the Jewish faith taught that God freely bound himself in love to his people in a covenant relationship that could not be destroyed. And Jesus opened the vision of God’s love even more and taught that the relationship that Israel had with God was the relationship that God desires to have with each of us. And this is expressed in the second word of the prayer: “Father”.

Before I go any further I have to acknowledge that “Father” is a problematic word. A few years ago a wit took a jab at our preoccupation with inclusive language:

How shall we sing the praise of Him

Who is no longer He?

Where shall we go to learn

The sex of Deity?

“Father” is problematic for many reasons. First, it implies that God is male or at least masculine. But feminists have taught us that masculine and feminine are cultural constructs. They are categories we impose on each other, but in no sense are they natural or universal. God is beyond our limited concept of what it means to be masculine or feminine. The great Catholic feminist Dorothy Day said that God’s love can be “harsh and dangerous”, but God’s love is also soft and yielding. Love makes God vulnerable. Isn’t that one of the main things we learn from crucifixion? Love took God the Son on a journey from heavenly glory to ignominious death on a cross, from the right of the Father to the right hand of a petty criminal. Harsh and dangerous are categories many of us associate with masculinity, but vulnerability is a quality often associated with the feminine. In a sense, addressing God as Father is a subtle way of undermining our assumptions about both the feminine and the masculine, because we see in God qualities associated with both genders. God is both yielding and resistant, both fierce and tender. We limit ourselves when we define masculine and feminine too narrowly, but God defies our limits and expectations.

However, the great problem of addressing God as Father is that it appears to bless a form of patriarchy. I think the way to deal with this is to acknowledge that it is true. While I believe that the Lord’s Prayer is a universal prayer that Christians always will and always should pray, it is also a product of a different time, place, and culture. The world out of which the Lord’s Prayer came privileged the masculine and could not conceive of God as other than Father. Jesus shared many of the assumptions of that world, but in his acceptance of women as his disciples, in his defiance of the conventions that kept women and men apart, and in his choice of women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection he helped lay the groundwork for the full empowerment of women, even though that took centuries and is not yet fully complete.

I sincerely believe that the day will come when someone will compose a prayer addressing God as Mother, a prayer that will catch our imaginations and move our hearts. Such a prayer will not supplant the Lord’s Prayer but it will balance it. But that day has not come yet. However, when we pray “your kingdom come” I believe we are praying for the day when women and men will share equally in God’s work and when we will perceive that all along God has been as much our Mother as our Father.

The last point I want to make to day is about how we locate God. The Lord’s Prayer addresses God in heaven. The third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer give people almost as much trouble as Father. To many “in heaven” implies that God is far away and not near, that God is out there instead of in here. Heaven is infinitely far away. How, we think, could a God who dwells in heaven be concerned with whether or not we find a job or our spouse’s emotional cruelty or the incessant phone calls from bill collectors? How, we wonder, could the high God of heaven bend his ears to hear not only our voices but even the silent prayers of our hearts? That is precisely the point. By teaching us to pray to our Father in heaven, Jesus is telling us that distance is not a factor with God. No matter where are and no matter where God is, God hears us. As Paul writes in Romans 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”, not even the distance between heaven and earth.

However, there is another message in the third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray to our Father in heaven is an acknowledgement that our world is not yet as it should be and we are not yet as we should be. We are not yet ready to welcome God’s rule. Our world is still a place of injustice and cruelty, of deceit and treachery. The Bible does promise that God will one day come to dwell among us, but that day has not yet come.

The Christian faith teaches us that God is both beyond us and within us, both transcendent and immanent. The Lord’s Prayer expresses the longing that God’s world and our world will one day be identical. But in this present time we must sadly acknowledge that that is not yet the case. While present with us by the power of the Holy Spirit, God does not yet dwell fully in our world.

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we discover that we are not alone, but rather God’s beloved daughters and sons who are invited into a relationship with their heavenly Father and with Christians in all times and all places and that that the deepest desires of our heart are heard in heavenly places. “Pray then this way…”

Two collections of my sermons are on Amazon.com

Thanks to everyone who reads the sermons on my blog. I thought you might like to know that two collections of my sermons are available on Amazon.com. The first is entitled As One Unknown and the second is We Would See Jesus. Each one is $20.

As One Unknown

Table of contents

He comes to us

Introduction 7

Hymn tune: Bluff Park 9

On a day when men were numbered 13

What the wind said to the shepherds 19

In the beginning was the word 25

The toils, the conflicts, the sufferings

In a new light 35

Cleave the wood and I am there 41

Loaf bread and jug wine 49

Strong at the broken places 57

Worthily lamenting our sins 63

All washed up 69

One unknown

The bad news of Easter 77

An idle tale 83

But we had hoped… 91

A tall tale 95

Seeing Jesus again 99

Our own experience

Taking big steps 109

Enemies: A love story 117

Candles against the darkness 123

If the Lord is with us, Why? 129

Under the sign of the question mark 135

Between “Once upon a time”… 141

Nostalgia and remembrance 147

His fellowship

Saints and sinners 155

Has God rejected his people? 161

Outside agitator 169

A more excellent way 175

The Pharisee and the Prostitute 183

Weaving community 189

The impossible possibility 195

We Would See Jesus

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Invocation 11

Waiting for Jesus

Waiting for God 15

Remembering the future 19

Songs of exile 23

Let the skies pour down righteousness 27

New lamps for old 31

The kingdom of love 35

It’s good to be king! 39

Amid tears and great laughter 43

Seeing and hearing Jesus

We would see Jesus 49

Guess who’s coming to dinner? 53

Practice resurrection 57

Keeping secrets 61

The enduring word 65

Words, words, words 69

Named, not numbered 73

The sound of silence 77

The language of heaven 81

God is in the details 85

St. Paul’s Christmas story 87

Hearts and voices heavenward raise 91

Following Jesus

Dancing with God 97

Bread alone? 101

Errand into the wilderness 103

Carry-on baggage 107

Why is this night different? 111

The foolish farmer 115

Taking the plunge 119

Final Jeopardy 123

Mind your manners 127

Dr. King remembered 131

The view from Mt. Nebo 137

Other sermons

What does love taste like? 143

You are what you eat 147

O brave new world 151

Family values 155

The devil made me do it 161

Crossing boundaries 165

Life before and after the comma 169

Very good or very nice?

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good.”

In the aftermath of the magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti recently, we may want to question God’s judgment that the world he created is not only good but very good. Or we may want to question God: How can you create such a world and then declare it to be good?

Part of the problem lies with the word “good.” Being southerners we assume that “good” means “nice,” but that is not what God said.

We want a nice world but instead God gave us a good world. We want a world, a universe, created by Disney, an amusement park world. We want a world with manageable risks, a world in which we can have carefully managed adventures, a world over which God presides as a kind of benevolent, cosmic policeman or nanny. But God gave us a world in which there is real risk and real adventure, a world in which the stakes are high, a world in which our lives and eternal destinies are at risk.

Look around at this good world which God has given us. Think not only of “this fragile earth, our island home” but think cosmically. The universe began with an unimaginable act of violence – the Big Bang. The Big Bang hurled into motion a violent universe. Stars are born, grow old, and die long, protracted deaths, ending as black holes, dense balls of matter whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them.

Life on earth is no less violent. Most species do not survive the long evolutionary climb up from the primordial protein soup. God gave us a dangerous, violent, and beautiful world which is not nice but is good.

So in what sense can this world be said to be good? How can it be good if life for most creatures is “nasty, brutish, and short”?

In Genesis 1 God not only said that the world was good, God also charged us with stewardship of the world. A world that produces earthquakes and hurricanes plainly needs a great deal of stewardship.

Scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne said that God made the world so that the world makes itself, and a world that is always making itself is a dangerous, violent, and unstable place. The Haiti earthquake shows us how true this is. Our task of stewardship is to mitigate what happens when the world makes itself.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction.” We all know intuitively that creation often requires destruction. It took the deaths of thousands of young men in the Civil War to bring an end to American slavery. The price we paid for the fall of the Soviet Union was the creation of a more dangerous and unstable world. The renewal of our inner cities requires the destruction of blocks of slums.

However, our faith, our hope is that destruction yields creation, new life, resurrection. At the very heart of the Christian faith is a powerful symbol of death and destruction – the Cross. But it is a symbol of death that has become the symbol of ultimate hope.

I believe that God’s heart broke when the earthquake struck Haiti. But I also believe that God’s heart had been breaking for Haiti long before the earthquake. God’s heart was broken with Haiti’s poverty, disease, and corrupt government. And I believe that what really breaks God’s heart is our failure to be stewards of creation, our failure to care for and love our sisters and brothers in places such as Haiti.

Where was God, we wonder, when the earthquake struck Haiti or the planes struck the World Trade center or when Katrina hit New Orleans? It’s a fair question and God is a very big God and doesn’t mind our questions, even our angry questions. But the more important question, the question that should really matter to us is Where were we when the earthquake hit Haiti? And where had we been for decades before that when Haiti and its people were suffering?

May our prayer today and always be that our hearts will break when God’s heart breaks, that we will be stewards of this world that is good but not always nice, that we will be there for our sisters and brothers in Haiti and wherever suffering holds sway, and that from every terrible destructive event God will bring creation, new life, and resurrection.

When water becomes wine

Today’s sermon is part 2 of the sermon I started last week. The thread that connects them is water. Life on earth is very wet. Now Dr. Vaughn will give a pop quiz. How much of the earth’s surface is covered with water? (This is the audience participation segment, so don’t be afraid to shout it out!) The answer: about 75%. And how much of the human body is water? About 60%.

Water is easy to define: it’s two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. But what do we mean by “miracle”? Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? A miracle is supernatural intervention in the normal order of things. A miracle is when we pray for rain in the midst of drought and get a downpour. A miracle is when someone with an advanced case of cancer goes into remission and is still healthy years later. How do you define miracle?

Probably all of us have personal stories or stories that have been handed on to us of events that seem miraculous. But I’m equally certain that we have as many or more stories of times when miracles did NOT occur: prayers unanswered… cures that did not happen…

Skeptics can raise many objections to miracles. They rightly point out that the universe is a finely calibrated mechanism. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, no more, no less. I’m told that if water froze just one or two degrees above 32 Fahrenheit or boiled one or two degrees below 212 that life on earth would be impossible. Either earth would be a frozen wasteland or all the water on earth would boil away, and our world would look like Mars or the moon. How can God intervene in this system without creating havoc?

My point is that it’s easy to find arguments against miracles. But we’ve all had moments when the odds have been stacked against us and somehow the miracle occurred: the rain came, the cancer went into remission, the check really was in the mail.

Maybe there is another way to explain miracles that preserves the integrity of the natural world and also allows for divine intervention. Perhaps a miracle is not something that happens OUT there but something that happens IN here, inside us. A miracle is less a change in the world, an intervention in the natural order; a miracle may instead be a change in us. Perhaps the real miracle is when our eyes are open to see God’s hand at work in the world around us.

And that brings me back to Jesus and the wedding feast at the Episcopal Church in Cana. I know they were Episcopalians because they drank all the wine and asked for more! On the face of it, this appears to be a simple story. A wedding party ran out of wine; Jesus took six enormous clay pots of water and turned every drop of it into the finest wine. That’s a miracle by any definition.

But let’s change our perception just a bit. Isn’t water always turning into wine? Wine, like the surface of the earth and our bodies, is mostly water, and water is always becoming wine. It falls to earth as the rain in Napa or Sonoma counties in California or in the Burgundy region of France. The roots of the grape vines draw it up from deep in the earth, and it fills the clusters of grapes. The juice of the grapes is squeezed into vats and aged in barrels. Then it is decanted into bottles, shipped all over the world, and we buy it at Publix or the Pig. Water has become wine again, just as it has for thousands of years.

Is that a miracle? It can be a miracle when God opens our eyes to see it as one.

What I’m going to say next is especially for Ben and Vera whom we’re about to baptize. The rest of you may listen in but this part of my sermon is for our special guests.

Ben and Vera, in a moment I will take water, the very same water that covers much of earth’s surface, the same water that makes up 60% of our bodies, the same water in which Jesus was baptized, the water that becomes wine in the vineyards of California and France, the same water that he turned into wine at Cana, and I will pour a little of this water three times on your heads, and a miracle will take place.

I doubt that there will be any thunder or lightning; you are unlikely to feel or look different, but everything will be changed. In the water of baptism God claims you as his own forever; you became an inheritor of the kingdom of God; you will be numbered among the saints on earth. In baptism God makes a promise never to forsake you. You may forget your baptism; you not only may, you will break your baptismal promises. But God will never forget that you are his beloved son or daughter.

Today you begin a journey, a voyage across life’s sea. There is water all around you and within you. Water is a very good thing. We cannot live without it. But I think we need more than water; I think we also need wine.

There are moments when the water of life becomes wine, when life suddenly becomes intoxicating, when friendship blossoms into romance, when words are no longer enough and we simply must burst into song, when we stand on top of Shades Mountain and watch the colors of dawn or sunset transform it into a magical kingdom.

Ben and Vera, tomorrow is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew a thing or two about miracles. He watched as injustice was turned into justice and suffering was redeemed. He watched as power yielded to love.

Ben and Vera, my prayer for you is that there may be many moments when the water of your life becomes wine, when your eyes are open to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. But I also pray that you will be a part of that transformation, that you will seek out those who are less fortunate – the hungry, the homeless, the sad and weary – and be a part of the transformation of this world into the kingdom of God.

To help you on your baptismal journey, I have several gifts I want to give you on behalf of St. Alban’s.

The first gift is this t shirt. In the early church, newly baptized persons wore white robes to symbolize their new lives in Christ. This t shirt will help remind you of what happened today. On the back it has the word “Christian” surrounded by several synonyms for Christian: saint, child of God, and so on… The second gift I have for you is a small container that I want you to fill with water from the baptismal font and take with you. Baptism is powerful. The story is told of the great German Reformer Martin Luther that once when the devil tempted him, Luther shouted at him, “Be gone, devil; I am baptized!” When temptation comes, remember that you are baptized.

And the third gift is a small cross. The cross may be the ultimate symbol of how God turns water into wine because the cross shows us that God can turn defeat into victory, darkness into light, and death into life eternal.

Welcome to St. Alban’s, Ben and Vera. And bon voyage!

Good advice or good news?

William Inge, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1911 to 1934 said, “The gospel is good news, not good advice… we can find no economic principles in the gospel.” I think Dean Inge was correct and today’s readings give us a great illustration of his observation.

The readings from First Kings, Psalm 146, and Mark all tell us about widows. The widows in First Kings and Mark literally give their entire life’s savings to what they believe to be good causes. Psalm 146 tells us that God sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.”

Let’s update the story of the widows in First Kings and Mark. Imagine that you are a priest and that a woman who is neither quite young any more nor very elderly comes to you for advice. She says, “God has told me to empty my bank account and give it all to Episcopal Relief and Development.”

If you went to one of our Episcopal seminaries, then you had to take Counseling 101 and there you learned the technique of reflective listening, so you try that first, “So, I hear you saying that God has told you to give all your money to Episcopal Relief and Development?” Clever opening, huh? And she says, “Yes, that’s right.”

Then you decide that you need more information. “How much money do you have? What are your sources of income? What are your obligations?” She goes on to say that she is on disability and has a small monthly pension from the company her late husband worked for and has about $3000 in the bank. She pays $400 a month for an apartment that is subsidized for low income persons. And she has a son with medical problems whom she helps financially whenever she can.

Counseling 101 never prepared you for this.

Frankly, if she were my parishioner I would probably begin by telling her that God never tells us to undermine our economic well-being. God certainly never tells us to empty our bank accounts and give it all to Episcopal Relief and Development or Green Springs’ Ministries or even to our parish church. I would tell her that God’s will for us is to be prudent about our financial needs; I would suggest that she talk to someone in the parish who can help her maximize her return on her money and perhaps help her find a better paying job. And I might suggest that she see a good therapist who could help her work through that business about hearing God tell her to give away all she has. After all, we’re Episcopalians and our God doesn’t do things like that.

But then there are those troublesome stories in the Bible. God sends the prophet Elijah to a woman and her child who are only one meal away from starvation and commands her to feed Elijah rather than herself and her child. Elijah reassures her, “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.” Jesus commends another woman for putting “every thing she had to live on” into the Temple treasury.

I have a feeling that Counseling 101 did not prepare me too well for dealing with someone whom God has told to empty their bank account. It certainly did not prepare me to deal with someone who takes Psalm 146 literally.

For the most part, I have put my trust in rulers and children of earth. I have believed and still believe that we live in a world that works pretty well most of the time. I believe that people who work hard and play by the rules will usually experience at least modest success; that our market-driven economy maximizes opportunities for most of us; that our political system provides a stable framework within which people can exercise initiative and reap great economic benefits. Then, a little over a year ago, the international banking system imploded. The pillars of finance, the giants of banking, began to topple. In other words, current events began to resemble the words of Psalm 146.

Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, *
for there is no help in them.

Every year at commencement Harvard University bestows honorary degrees upon a dozen or so men and women for their achievements in scholarship, business, politics and other fields. In 1996 Harvard honored philanthropist Walter Annenberg, the founder of TV Guide. It may only have been a coincidence that Annenberg had just given Harvard $25 million but be that as it may, it was probably more significant that Annenberg at that time held the record for money given to American institutions of higher education. However, immediately after honoring Annenberg, the university marshal said, “Mr. President, we have with us today another philanthropist…” The other philanthropist was Osceola McCarty, a black laundry woman from rural Mississippi who had given her entire life’s savings, some $300,000, to an historically black college to be used as scholarships for its students. Annenberg may have given more dollars to American universities but Osceola McCarty gave everything she had. “She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on…”

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying: It is probably not a good idea to empty your bank account and give it to any cause, however worthy, even St. Alban’s! But sometimes prudence and faithfulness are at odds. Sometimes we are called to make some wildly extravagant gesture, rather than to live our lives within the parameters of prudence. The gospel after all is not good advice, it is good news.

Jesus wept

According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus visited Jerusalem only once as an adult, but John’s gospel tells us that he visited it at least three times. If John is correct, then the story of Lazarus makes a little more sense.

Bethany was a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Martha and Mary lived there with their brother Lazarus. It would have been a logical place for Jesus to stay during his visits to Jerusalem. Probably all of us have friends in large cities who have opened their homes to us when we have come to their towns, thus sparing us the expense and bother of staying in a hotel. Of course, in the time of Jesus there was no such thing as a hotel. To visiting Jerusalem or a similar city one had to have a friend who would open his or her home to you.

We know little about Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Luke’s gospel tells us that when Jesus visited Mary and Martha that Mary sat at his feet but Martha was busy with many things. What little we see of Mary and Martha in today’s gospel readings is consistent with that story.

At any rate, it is clear that the two sisters and their brother were friends of Jesus. So it is surprising that when Jesus hears that Lazarus is gravely ill that he hesitates rather than going at once to Bethany.

This is one of the mysteries of John’s gospel. Jesus has one idea of time; the people around him have another. For Jesus, time seems to go backward and forward; sometimes it speeds up, sometimes it slows down. When his mother tells him that there is no more wine for the wedding feast at Cana, he tells her that his time has not yet come. Present and future become one when he tells the Samaritan woman that the hour is coming and now is when all earthly places of worship will become redundant because God requires only that people worship him in spirit and in truth.

John’s portrait of Jesus also shows the early church struggling to make sense of the idea that Jesus was both fully human and fully one with God. Sometimes John’s Jesus seems to be an almost unearthly figure without human weaknesses and needs. When the disciples bring him food, he says that he does not need it because for him to do the work of God is food enough.

But the Jesus we see in the story of Lazarus is a fully human being.

At the very beginning of John’s gospel he tells us that Jesus is the very LOGOS of God who has taken human form. Logos means word, thought, reason. In other words, in Jesus the distance between God and humanity has collapsed. God’s inmost thoughts have taken on human flesh and dwell in the midst of us. At the beginning of John’s gospel, the author draws back the curtain and lets us in on the secret that others will discover during the course of the gospel as they see Jesus work miracles and finally be raised from the dead.

So if Jesus is the very thought, the very word of God, the word through which God spoke creation into existence, we expect miracles. Changing water into wine, giving sight to the blind, multiplying loaves and fishes – these should not cause any difficult for Jesus. Even raising Lazarus from the dead… But what we do not expect God’s incarnate word to do is to cry. This is the real miracle in today’s story. The raising of Lazarus from death to life is impressive but what moves me is that Jesus weeps, that there are tears at the very heart of God.

Today is All Saints’ Day. The saints, of course, are God’s elite. We know the saints because they are the ones who exhibit heroic sanctity. Like Mother Teresa they give their lives to serving the poorest of the poor; like Albert Schweitzer they spend their lives working in a tiny medical clinic in Africa while writing great books on theology and editing Bach’s organ works (actually, I think Schweitzer overdid it a bit). Like Martin Luther King, Jr. they risk and finally give their lives as they stand up for and speak out for dignity and justice for all.

This is all true as far as it goes, but I believe that the story of Lazarus tells us something else about real sanctity. Real sanctity, real holiness, also weeps. The saint is one who sheds tears over the death of a friend. The saint is one who shares her grief with others, and lets them share their grief with her.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said, “...I am convinced that we should solve many things if we went into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God shold hear us not; but He wold hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.”

Today’s reading from the book of Revelation tells us of a new heaven and a new earth in which death is no more. But it goes on to say that “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” We all long for a world in which death and sickness have disappeared, in which the hungry are fed and the homeless have shelter. I would change only one thing about this new heaven and new earth: Leave room for tears. I believe that real sanctity is to experience the whole range of human feelings from tears to laughter. That is what makes us human, that is what makes us holy. That is what draws us to one another and also draws us toward God.