What do we return to God by giving it to the Emperor?

What is our obligation to the state, to the political sphere of American engagement?

This question resonates, especially as the impulses of autocracy and empire stress-test our American liberal democracy in ways unimagined just a generation ago.

And in what ways is our obligation to the civic town square, to our pluralist society, also an obligation to God?

We believe everything belongs to God. This truth quietly underscores Jesus' answer to the trap set for him by the civic and religious leaders when they ask him whether it's lawful to pay taxes to the emperor.

This morning's reading from Matthew’s gospel puts us in earshot of Jesus' masterful reply, which he offers with a visual aid: a Roman denarius produced by his examiners. A close inspection clearly shows the emperor's head, stamped on the coin in sharp patrician profile, together with a title calling him divine.

"Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's," says Jesus, "and to God the things that are God's.” It's a pithy response that brooks no argument. It cleverly addresses Jesus' interrogators' insincere question about the lawfulness of the Roman tax without offending Rome or any would-be revolutionaries in Jesus' retinue.

I suspect many of you, like me, grew up with an interpretation of this teaching that looks no further than the neat "church and state" binary on its surface.

Good Christians are expected to pay their taxes to the God-ordained government without complaining, while also, certainly, tithing in church and giving back to God, whose special favor, by the way, rests with the nation.

Jesus was often pragmatic. His answer safeguarded him and his followers from being turned over to the Roman authorities before it was time. But I don’t think he's opposed to the idea of Christians paying their fair share of taxes to sustain what we might call, borrowing from St. Augustine, “The Earthly City.”

What's intriguing in Jesus' answer is that it goes much deeper than prudent tax advice. In fact, it isn't really advice at all. In outmaneuvering the authorities, Jesus gives us agency. We must discern what we owe the emperor, and of course, what we owe God.

God and the emperor aren't equal creditors, even if our republic draws a hard line between church and state. While most Americans rightly value this constitutional distinction for the sake of religious liberty, as Christians, we must go a step further. By virtue of our baptism, we understand all that we are and all that we have according to our identity of belonging to Jesus Christ.

So again, what do we return to God by giving it to the emperor?

It's a rich time to ponder these things. We're in stewardship season with In-Gathering Sunday only a week away. All of us – parishioners and staff – have been discerning our monetary pledges supporting God's work at the cathedral for the coming year.

It's not quite tax season, but it is election season. For those of us privileged to vote in this country, how will we steward our political franchise come November 3rd?

Voting our faith-formed values is one way we give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's. The emperor may or may not like it, but he’s earned our vote. Christians everywhere are called to vote, give, speak, and act^[1] according to their conscience as faithful followers of Jesus.

Faithfulness must guide our discernment about what we owe and to whom. We are called to be faithful.

The most interesting invitation to Christian faithfulness in the civic square I've heard lately comes from an atheist. Jonathan Rauch, an author, journalist, and fellow at the Brookings Institute, styles himself as a gay, culturally Jewish atheist.

I was at the Episcopal Parish Network Conference in March, where I heard Rauch give the keynote address in conversation with Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe.^[2]

In brief, Rauch believes that Christianity is a necessary load-bearing wall in a functioning Western liberal democracy—specifically the United States. He believes the Mainline Protestant tradition maintained this load-bearing wall for centuries, but it has crumbled, losing its supportive strength.

The vacuum left by the shrinking size and diminishing political influence of Mainline denominations like the Episcopal Church has been filled by hyper-evangelical Christian nationalist cult factions drunk with power.

As theologian Carlyle Marney has said, "In cases where the Church has ceased to be in tension with Caesar, one of two things has happened. One, either Caesar has been converted, or, two, the Church has so watered down the Gospel of Jesus that it has lost the capacity to speak truth to power."^[3]

Bishop Rowe pushed back on Rauch just a little bit during the keynote to remind us all that the Episcopal Church has a history of watering down the gospel to retain considerable class power. While there’s never been an established church in the United States, there has –and I do think this is changing – been an establishment church. That’s us. Our DC cathedral is called the National Cathedral, after all – it’s the place of state funerals for American presidents, whether or not they were Episcopalian.

Today, this is almost a charming carryover of a much more polite (if watered down) era of church power and influence. The opportunity today is very different. Both Rauch and Bishop Rowe believe that, as a church, we are called to cast a fresh, engaging, authentic vision of Christianity for a broken and hurting world.

With our words, actions, and resources, we need to break through the noise with a Christian promise for the world rooted in love and flourishing, offering pathways to peace and reconciliation, and – here’s our baptismal identity again – championing the dignity of every human being.

We can't do this by trying to out-scream the loudest screamer in the room. We have to bear steadfast witness to a counter-cultural way of being, much as the church did two thousand years ago.

Rauch is utterly convinced that the Episcopal Church has enough riches in our deep well of theological treasure to promote an attractive, exciting, even winsome picture of core Christian teachings. All we have to do is figure out how to do this, and we begin to rebuild a more civil civic society.

This isn’t a new idea, to be sure, but it’s always worth a fresh and faithful try, guided by the Spirit, and she can work with anything. Rauch's invitation stands out because he offers his own distillation – as an avowed atheist – of Christianity's foundational religious teachings.

Here’s how this man articulates three core Christian teachings that he firmly believes – without believing in God – can not only shift the narrative but shift the world.

The first is, "Do not be afraid." Fear is the ultimate enemy of divisive politics and polarization between friends, families, neighbors, and nations. I think Rauch is right to highlight what God offers us here. We have nothing to fear, not ultimately—and not even presently. This doesn't mean we don’t feel fear, but it's a powerful grace to remember that God is always with us, especially when we're afraid.

The second core teaching is: imitate Jesus. The gospels show us that Jesus was a radical egalitarian. We can do no better than to follow him and be guided by him in our engagement with others.

Third, forgive each other. What more needs to be said?

God’s promise, "Do not be afraid," offers us a sure footing from which to ask again: What do we give back to God by giving it to the emperor?

Where, how, and with what gifts are we called to brave the civic square for our faith? What do we owe our country that we also owe our God?

I believe we owe the emperor our courage in speaking up and acting out to resist the narrative of Christian empire. We have an obligation to deny any more oxygen to the destructive fire of dangerous and counterfeit Christianity that has wed itself to much of American conservative political power.

I believe we give back to God and speak truth to power when we not only resist but reframe the dominant Christian narrative in this country. We give back to God when we offer a positive, life-giving, connecting, astonishing vision of the Christian faith. One that is grounded in scripture and tradition. One that is as true, ancient, and enduring as Christianity itself.

Jesus has given us freedom of interpretation with his instruction on paying taxes. What we determine belongs to the emperor and what we choose to give back to God is open to our earnest and prayerful discernment as individual and corporate members of Christ’s Body.

Faithfully, and untrammeled by fear, let's begin.

About five years ago, one of my seminary classmates was on retreat at the Jesuit Retreat House in Los Altos, California, and he sent me a photo that shocked and disturbed me. It was a photo of a man sleeping on a bench in front of the retreat house. My heart was moved with compassion for this man. I was grateful that he found a safe place to rest. His head and most of his body were covered with a blanket and only his bare feet were visible. I zoomed in on the photo to discover that this was not a real person. It was a sculpture and as I looked more closely at the feet^[2], I noticed the man’s wounds. They bore the signs of crucifixion. This was Jesus. The risen and glorified Christ depicted as a homeless man sleeping on a bench outside.

Jesus the Homeless^[1] is a bronze sculpture by Timothy Schmalz that first appeared in 2013 at Regis College, a Jesuit institution that is part of the University of Toronto. Schmalz offered it to Cathedrals in Toronto and New York City, but they declined for various reasons. Many find the image too disturbing and controversial for their affluent Christian communities. But other communities were attracted to its shock value. Reproductions of Jesus the Homeless can be found all over the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceana today. The sculpture gained worldwide recognition when St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Bay Village, Ohio installed the sculpture in their very affluent neighborhood. Within 20 minutes of the installation of the sculpture, someone called the police to report a homeless person sleeping on a bench. The news reporting of the incident highlighted American privilege, our indifference toward the issue of homelessness, and our contempt for the unhoused.

We have quite a shocking and disturbing parable from Jesus in the Gospel today. It’s quite a bizarre story. Like most of Jesus’ parables it not only invites us to see things in a new way, it detonates us from our complacency. As New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine argues, the parables of Jesus are intended to “afflict the comfortable.”^[3] Jesus is trying to show us things we don’t want to see. What if we were to use “discomfort” as the interpretive lens for understanding today’s parable?

Let’s recap this crazy story. It’s a brutal horror story, steeped in violence and murder. The king is a nasty person. He decides to throw a wedding banquet for his son. Already, it is a story of affluence and privilege. I imagine that only the aristocracy are invited. They receive an invitation to the banquet and do the unthinkable. They refuse. In the ancient world, no one would refuse a royal summons. So, the king sends messengers to deliver a more enticing message. “Everything has been prepared for you! The oxen and fatted calves are ready for the table. It will be a lavish feast and quite a party!” But this group of aristocrats dismisses the invitation for a second time and kill the messengers. They don’t just say “no,” they respond with violence and murder. The king is enraged. He sends “his troops, destroys those murderers, and burns their city.” So, he uses his military to attack his own people, and he burns his own city to the ground. What an unpredictable, evil, and unhinged ruler he is. Despite all this death and destruction, he proceeds with the lavish banquet. He sends his slaves into the streets of the city he just destroyed to invite “everyone” to the wedding banquet. I don’t know about you, but if my home and everything I owned were just destroyed and I was climbing out of the rubble, I might not be in the mood for a lavish royal dinner party. The homeless people who survived the destruction of their city are gathered up and brought to the wedding hall against their will. Of course they’re not dressed properly! They only have tattered rags of devastation covering their bodies. We are told that the man without the proper wedding robe is thrown “into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

What is going on here and what will disturb us enough to find the truth that Jesus is shocking us into?

This past Tuesday I led the parish Bible Study. I studied commentaries from five different scripture scholars who wrote about this passage. Each one urged against a traditional allegorical interpretation. I think we like simple allegories to make sense of this outrageous story. Remember, an allegory uses symbolic figures and actions to communicate a theological truth. The traditional allegorical interpretation is this. The king in the parable is God, the son is Jesus, the wedding feast is the heavenly banquet, the rejected and murdered slaves are the Old Testament prophets, and the aristocratic invitees who refuse to attend the wedding are God’s “chosen people,” the Jewish people. The last-minute guests who are gathered up from the streets are us -- the gentiles. This interpretation doesn’t challenge me a bit. It puts me in a place of privilege. It suggests that we are the ones who got it right. We correctly responded to God’s invitation. The Jews did not. We Christians got it right; the Jews got it wrong. To me, this is a horrible and sinful interpretation. Are we to really believe that God is this violent and unjust king? Interpretations like this contributed to the bloody history of the church’s abusive relationship with the Jewish people who are our spiritual ancestors. It is clearly anti-Semitic. Furthermore, it suggests that those who do not accept the invitation should die while we who say “yes” to the violent and murderous king should end up feasting in his safe and cozy palace while the world burns around us. How many times in history have we seen this scenario?

What is the truth that Jesus is shocking us into? Where is God found in this parable? How can this mirror the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus suggests?

I believe that the kingdom of heaven is found in the rejection of the king and the terror that comes with his abuse of power. God is the one who refuses the invitation of the evil despot. God rejects the king and all he stands for. For to accept the invitation to the wedding banquet is to participate in violence, murder, and abuse. What if Jesus is not the bridegroom, but the one without the proper wedding garment?^[4] Jesus is the homeless man who was gathered up from the ashes of a burned-out city, who chooses the outer darkness to the complicity of a lavish, unjust banquet. For this is where God is found. The God of Jesus Christ is found in the outer darkness. Jesus is found in the darkness of Gethsemani, on the cross of Calvary, and in the lonely grave.

I’m sorry that this has been such a heavy sermon. Here is the Good News. God is found in the darkness of human life. God has visited every experience of human darkness – even suffering and death. If you have ever experienced darkness in your life, God is there. If you or anyone you love has ever suffered, God is there. God doesn’t just deign to visit you in your suffering–God is already there. We believe in a God who prefers a place of darkness to the lavish banquet table. The God of Jesus Christ dwells outside the banquet hall, in the darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Oh, God can be your king, but he reigns from a cross, not from throne. Jesus is not the bridegroom at a lavish banquet. He’s the unrobed guest. Jesus is the homeless man on a bench outside. He’s the improperly dressed dissenter who has been escorted into the darkness, bound and broken for the sake of love. May you find him there.

This was Peter’s worst nightmare. It wasn’t long ago, in narrative time anyway, that the fear of confrontation and imprisonment (or worse) made Peter deny Jesus three times, be absent at the cross, and then hide until Easter. Yet here he is, just months later post-Pentecost in today’s reading from Acts, boldly proclaiming a faith in Jesus that could and one day would get him killed. He’ll keep externally processing and saying too much because he’s Peter, but he won’t be that trapped by fear ever again. We’ll continue tracking his story for the next several weeks as part of the trial revised common lectionary we’re using this fall. My question, though, as we think about what it means to boldly proclaim: what changed for him? Or more to the point, where might we get that freedom from fear in our own lives?

Fear is all over our other readings this morning – both fear of the Lord as reverence or awe and the more familiar, destructive fears we face every day. God, for one, seems to have no problem using fear as a motivator in Exodus. At least, that’s how Moses interprets the pyrotechnics surrounding the rollout of the Ten Commandments. Apparently, the people at the base of Mount Sinai didn’t get the memo from our psalmist today about the heavens declaring the glory of God and the firmament showing God’s handiwork. The people are not awed by the artistry of it all, by the thunder and lightning and smoke; they’re just terrified. It happens. Moses assumes that’s part of God’s point. I mean, without the threat of punishment or the prospect of overwhelming force curbing our worst impulses, what is there to keep us in line?

Perhaps there’s another option besides God scaring us into submission. Perhaps our fears say more about us than they do about God. We don’t necessarily need to take Moses’ interpretation here as our own – although I do think he’s trying to leave room for the power of awe to shape us too. In spelling out what loving God and loving neighbor look like (which is what the Ten Commandments are all about), God is up to something besides saying No – something far more creative and life-giving. Think about it. God did not free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt just to enslave them again to fear. Fears of rejection or failure or scarcity – whatever it is that keeps us up at night – those fears might keep us narrowly focused on the tasks in front of us, but they do not motivate us to surpass expectations or to create anything stunning or new. Terror doesn’t generally inspire greatness – and yes, we are created in God’s image, so greatness can still be our goal.

If the vastness and beauty of the heavens are the clue to God’s character that Psalm 19 says they are, then we don’t need to settle for avoiding sin and completing most tasks on time with supervision. Our Creator made us for more than that. Seen from this perspective, the law starts to look less like a prison and more like how our psalm describes it. Remembering that God is God and that we are not, taking our rest, honoring our closest relationships, telling the truth and being content with what we have – these practices are meant to revive the soul and rejoice the heart and give light to the eyes. They’re meant to free us from fear, not enslave us to it.

One wishes the religious leaders in today’s Gospel could have seen that. We don’t have time to dig deeply into this passage, but one brief note: We are not beholden to their interpretation of Jesus’ parable either – their assumption that the only valid response to violence is more violence. We’re told straight out that they’re afraid, and that fear clouds their judgment. Jesus reminds them here that God finds value in those they reject, and if they can’t share the fruits of the kingdom, then Jesus will give the keys to someone who can.

Which brings us back to Peter – and the story we started with. What happened to him between Holy Week and Pentecost? What gave him the courage to boldly proclaim? Well, he had the worst night of his life. That’s what happened. He failed. He failed Jesus and himself spectacularly, and Jesus called him back into service and told him to feed his sheep anyway. He gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven anyway. Peter found out that we can really get it wrong before we get it right and that it’s never too late to start again. What’s more, in the resurrected Jesus, he learned that we don’t need to be afraid of death anymore either. He encountered the perfect love that casts out fear, the love that takes what others have rejected and makes it the cornerstone – the foundation for something beautiful. And as for us, well – when we don’t need to be afraid of rejection or failure or death, what’s to stop us from being made whole? What’s to stop us from greatness? Amen.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard told of an encounter between a Native Alaskan and a missionary priest who is seeking to share the story of our religious tradition with this man from the hinterlands of northern exposure, albeit with a slant toward saving his soul. After hearing the priest unfurl the good news, and weighing his own response to it, the Native Alaskan asked: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell when I die?” The priest answers in all seriousness: “No, not if you did not know.” To which the Native Alaskan responds, “then why did you tell me!”

Sometimes the whimsical story is perfect for stirring the crucible of deep wisdom. Our best authors intuitively know that.

The Acts of the Apostles is one of my favorite books of the Bible—beautifully moving, playfully whimsical at times, and, if we are honest, profoundly problematic. We hear a snippet this morning that holds this full range. A man, lame since birth, is miraculously healed, and immediately goes walking and leaping and praising God. What an image! Who is not moved by such unrestrained joy in the face of long held constraint of suffering!

We see Peter and John leaning into their newly expanded roles as evangelists for Jesus Christ, who has left the post-Pentecost apostles to continue his earthly ministry in their own right.

This Book of Acts is their sequel to the gospels, recounting the deeds of this motley band of upstarts. Their courageous witness emboldens them to be mediators of their first miracles, but they also remain humble that they are not the power behind such events; God is. If they had just stopped there…

When they blame their Jewish siblings for killing Jesus, they deliver a message that has been used by Christians for centuries to bludgeon Jews, proverbially and literally. It should cause us to squirm uncomfortably in our seats. We can do better.

The other disconcerting religious trap playing out here is that the man, lame from birth, was so born as punishment for his or his parents’ sinfulness, a divinely ordained quid pro quo promulgated by God as retributive recompense for their shortcomings. Such a tit-for-tat calculus leaves little room for a compassionate God who comes to dwell with us, or for a Christ willing to be crucified for all, and it surely complicates our understanding of disability. I’m hard-pressed to ever say a newborn baby deserves anything but the warm embrace of love, and we would do well to not use our religious imprimatur to suggest otherwise.

Three decades ago, Nancy Eisland turned this traditional theology on its head in her seminal book, The Disabled God, and in doing so, reframes disability through the lens of liberation precisely because the resurrected Jesus reveals himself as the Christ who makes post-resurrection appearances with all his bodily wounds in full reveal, bringing an impaired, scarred body into his glorified state—affirming non-conventional “physicalities” rather than erasing them. The Body is richer for the diversity of expressions.

In the Eucharist, we are invited to meet and commune with this “disabled God,” crucified and risen, who inspires us to imagine new paths to inclusion, wholeness and justice.

But to do this, we must deconstruct at least three traditionally-held theologies:

• First, the “Sin/Punishment” model (i.e., disability is a direct punishment for sin).
• Secondly, Eisland declares morally bankrupt the “Charity/Pity” model—the notion that disabled folks exist primarily to inspire able-bodied souls to practice charity or compassion.
• And third, she denounces what she calls the Super-crip/Miracle model—namely, that for persons with disabilities to meet societal muster, they must either have a miracle moment which comes as divine reward for their faith, or they must exhibit superhuman feats despite their disabilities, prompting others (you and me) to simply marvel. Our marveling is what creates value. I hope you see the folly in that.

Her use of the term “super-crip” is intentionally disturbing, meant to cajole us from our places of able-bodied comfort. All three models orient to othering and exclusion, a toxin potently at work in our world even today. Again, we can do better.

The antidote to exclusion is embrace, the sort that Jesus Christ offers by outstretching his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, so that everyone might come within the saving reach of his embrace, and invites us to do the same.^[1]

You should know that a year ago the Vestry adopted a long-range accessibility improvement plan, building on our commitments in recent years to guide us in improving ways we, as a church community, can welcome and embrace, rather than ignore and exclude.^[2] We don’t do it perfectly, and it will take time, but more important than any one structural fix is a mindset that invites us to be evangelists of good news for all.

Today is the launch of our annual stewardship appeal, which bears the theme “Boldly Proclaim” this year. This is the season when everyone who counts Saint Mark’s as a spiritual place of connection is invited to make your commitment of financial support for the mission and ministry of this place in the coming year. I know talk of money may cause some to squirm in their seats. Some like to call it the annual beg-a-thon. I think that misses the point though.

Yes, we set an operating budget informed by the commitments we receive in the annual appeal, but I am not asking you to give to fund a budget. I am asking you something much more profoundly important in life. To share what Annie Dillard called your “unrestrained hallelujah.” Or to join the healed man in walking and leaping and praising God. You could say this is our sequel to the sequel. We have a story to write, here and now, not just read an ancient one. Indeed, we are called to Boldly Proclaim it, and we do so with all that we have and all that we are. A shared story, forged in community which strives to center itself on that holy embrace for all.

Again, Annie Dillard wisdom, at once whimsical and sublimely to the point:

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage…—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”

This is our moment, friends. We don’t get a pass due to our foibles or our fears any more than those first disciples did when the post-Pentecost Jesus gave them his charge in their day. Giving is one way of engaging God, with gratitude and joyful, making money a little less a god in our lives.

I choose to give in community, this cathedral community in particular, because I believe the story being written here is one of unrestrained hallelujah, a holy enterprise in which I get to participate. I hope you will, too.

No one here but us chickens.

REPENT and REPAIR. These words are part of a theme for this Sunday at St. Mark’s. I hope you will take a few moments to visit the Affordable Housing Project Visual Storyboards in the Compline corner of our nave today. They recount the story of racially motivated restrictive covenants in our neighborhood that were designed to keep black families out. St. Mark’s parish purchased this land just as these covenants were being written into property deeds. As far as we know, our deeds never contained this language, but our faith community remained silent while this was going on. Furthermore, we are reconciling with the fact that we were a predominantly white church that chose to build in a whites-only neighborhood. We harmed our neighborhood and our black siblings by participating in this systematic process of exclusion. Today, our thirst for justice and accountability has demanded that we repent of the evil we have done as we seek to repair it. Repent and repair. It’s what justice requires and the Gospel demands of folks like us who claim to be followers of Jesus.

Our Gospel today doesn’t address racial justice directly, but it says a lot about fairness. What we learn is that our deep-seated sense of fairness is not God’s fairness. For our sense of fairness is rooted in scarcity while God’s fairness is found in abundance and generosity.

I have one sibling, my brother, Jack, who is three and half years younger than me. When we were kids, we fought like crazy. I remember us both being in the back seat of our family car as we were arguing about the proper distribution of hard candy from a bag that my mom gave to pacify us. As our bickering escalated, my mother intervened from the front seat with a directive. I’m sure that she offered a reasonable and fair solution, but my brother whined, “It’s not FAIR!” My mother had had enough. She pulled the car over, got into the back seat, sitting between us, and said, “Listen you two. Life isn’t fair. You’re being selfish and stingy. I gave you the candy. I’m still waiting to hear ‘thank you!’” She was right. Our sense of fairness was informed by scarcity. We completely ignored her generosity. It took me many more years to learn through the school of hard knocks that life really isn’t fair.

This scarcity-based sense of fairness is what Jesus is confronting in our Gospel today. You heard the story. The vineyard workers who arrived late and worked for one hour got paid the same amount and those who worked from dawn. Doesn’t that offend your sense of fairness? I hope it does. It’s supposed to.

After all, we know what fairness is, and we know how it’s supposed to play out. Equal pay for equal work is fair. Equal pay for unequal work is not fair. Rewarding hard work and ambition is fair. Excusing sloth and sloppiness is not fair.

But God, if the landowner in the parable represents God, is not fair. At least, not according to our deeply held beliefs about fairness. God, it turns out, does not believe that the front of the line is the best place to be. God isn’t interested, in showing favor to the best, the biggest, and the brightest -- the workers with the most elite educations, those with astonishing professional achievements, and the most impressive zip codes.

In fact, the landowner in Jesus’s story doesn’t judge his workers by their hours at all. He doesn't seem to care about why some workers are able to start at dawn and others come later. Perhaps the late starters aren’t as literate, educated, or skilled as their competitors. Perhaps they have learning challenges, or a tough home life, or children to care for at home. Perhaps they’re refugees, or don’t own cars, or don’t speak the language, or can’t get green cards. Perhaps they struggle with chronic depression or anxiety. Perhaps employers refuse to hire them because they’re gay, or trans, or disabled, or black, or female.

Whatever the case may be, the landowner doesn’t ask them to explain or defend themselves. All he cares about is that every last person in the marketplace finds a spot in his vineyard – the early bird and the latecomer, the able-bodied and the infirm, the young and the old, the popular and the forgotten. When the workday is over, what concerns the landowner is not who deserves what. All he cares about is that every worker ends the day with the dignity and security of a living wage. The capacity to go home and feed a family. Sufficient security and peace of mind to sleep well. A reliable sense of accomplishment, belonging, and dignity. It’s an image of the Reign of God.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” asks God.

I must tell you. I really struggle with this. You see, I’m a recovering type-A personality. I’m an Enneagram 3, the Achiever and Performer. My sense of worth and value are wrapped up in being the first in line at dawn and completing the best possible work at the end of the day. AND, I expect to be recognized for it! But Jesus is inviting me to place myself at the end of the line. Things look different from that perspective. Jesus has invited me to join the workers who got more than they expected – the ones who received twelve times the pay they knew they deserved. I’m invited to be ecstatic, stunned, thrilled, and grateful with those at the end of the line. Their experience of payday was one of utter blessing. I was just expecting to get what was owed to me.

If I keep myself at the front of the line I experience a host of difficult emotions – envy, bitterness, anger, and dissatisfaction. I’m too resentful to join in the celebration of those at the end of the line. I miss out. I don’t take satisfaction in my hours of good work. I don’t delight in the fruit of the vineyard. I don’t relax into my time off, enjoying the wages I have been given. Instead, I waste my off-hours harboring resentment and anger.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” God asks.

Maybe, if God’s generosity offends me, it’s because I don’t have eyes to see where I stand in the line of God’s grace and kindness. Where would you rather stand? At the front of the line, where bitterness and judgment consume you? Or at the back, where surprise and joy reign supreme?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the landowner insists on paying his workers in reverse order, thereby making sure that the first workers see what the last receive. He wants them to experience what radical generosity looks like. He wants them to relinquish their anger and join the party. He wants them to use their plenty to build longer tables, not higher walls.

Could it be any more obvious that we – all of us, every single one of us – are wholly dependent on each other for our survival and well-being? That the future of Creation itself depends on human beings recognizing our fundamental interconnectedness, and acting in concert for the good of all? What’s fair for me isn’t good enough if it leaves you in the darkness to die. The vineyards of this world thrive only when everyone has a place of dignity and purpose within them. The time for selfish and stingy notions of fairness is over.

Are we willing to see this yet? Are we willing to live it?

“Listen. Life isn’t fair. You’re being selfish and stingy. I gave you the candy. I’m still waiting to hear ‘thank you!’” You know, she’s still waiting. Let’s make this right. Thank you, mom, and thank you, God!

Forty years ago, the sage bard Wendell Berry wrote these words:

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”^[1]

Integral to life’s most important work is learning our narratives of meaning. Did someone tell you about the day you were born, or the day you were adopted, in such a way that it became your story, not just theirs? Intimately yours, down in the depths of your being?

We encourage godparents of infants preparing for baptism here that it is incumbent on them to tell their godchild the story of the baptism day, so that they will know it in their bones.

We need such narratives to make sense of this existence, this life, this journey, so that when we lose our way, as we inevitably will, we may still have guideposts to help us orient.

Communities need these narratives, too. This story from Exodus is one of our bedrock narratives. At the Easter Vigil, we always hear the Creation story from Genesis and this story from Exodus. The rest of God’s salvation history unfurls from those two foundational stories, and we are invited to make them intimately ours here and now.

The story of the Exodus is not for the faint of heart. Angels going before and behind God’s people, kicking up dust storms and throwing pillars of fire to keep Pharaoh’s bloodthirsty army at bay. But the people knew they were there, on their tail and closing fast, as they came to the seashore. Cutoff, nowhere to escape, you can imagine panic, the sort that awakens you from a nightmare, with heart racing, sweat on the brow.

But this is God’s story, too. The stories that lend most meaning intertwine our story with God’s story.

The Hebrew word for Red Sea is a play on words, a paradox really. It’s the Reed Sea, full of rushy marshes oozing into the deep waters, but with the tweak of a tittle, the word can also mean the Sea of the End. The end of the old—slavery in Egypt, oppression, stifled existence, violence, and the beginning of something new—new, but as yet not fully known, a threshold between what was and what will be, and God figures prominently in it.

Moses channels that divine power and leads the people in admirably pastoral fashion. Fiercely encouraging. Resolutely the leader, smiting the water with his two-by-four, as the old Negro Spiritual tells it.

Moses stood on the Red Sea shore.

Smote that water with a 2x4.

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.

The waters part but then come crashing back in with tsunami-scale power against their pursuers. The people are delivered into the desert of unknowing, to wander forty years, a straight-line distance of some 200 miles, from here to Portland, but life doesn’t usually follow straight-line narratives, does it?!

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

At points, the people of the Exodus will wish for a return to the fleshpots of familiar suffering rather than remain in this desert of unknowing, this crucible of mystery and meaning-making. They will be treated to manna and meat falling from the sky, and they will resent even those miracles at times. We may want to scoff or guffaw at their seemingly ridiculous fickleness.

But remember, this is our story, and we should hear it, not as an ancient tale of anachronistic entertainment, but as the story that gets down into our bones and breathes its sinewy life into our mortal coils on the real journey here and now.

Can we see the journey across the sea and into the desert as the long-winding way to meaning and true identity? Can we hold our spiritual ancestors’ foolishness and fears as portals into our own meandered inanity and our newly rediscovered belovedness? Sooner or later, we must make the choice to leave behind the familiar haunts of a shackled existence and step into the mysterious unknown where we find ourselves and God in fresh, liberating and life-giving ways.

Again, Wendell Berry:

“the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”^[2]

The people who came up off the dry seabed and wandered into the desert were never going to make it “home” without seeing that God was with them every inch of the way. It is a scriptural promise we seem to have to learn over and over again. This is the spiritual journey.

This radical story of ours is dripping with truth presenting as irony and allegory and, most of all, mystery. Mystery leaves a feathered edge to the thresholds of wisdom; mystery holds the space for dark tones to demure full clarity, and in doing so, invites us into those depths of divine possibility, with engaged heart and mind and soul and strength. It is there, in the depths of our being, that we often discover God anew.

Here on this day that we traditionally know as Homecoming Sunday, it is good to be together. Today we are reminded once more that this sacred space and the work we do arising from here are structured on such bedrock narratives that intertwine our meandering stories with God’s story.

This is a place where a community—you and I, and those who have gone before and those not yet known to us—gather so that God might lead us through the parted waters that demarcate what was from what may yet be. That is at once exciting and intrepid, as a story with deep meaning should be.

Will we trust God enough to embrace this journey, together, and newly rediscover our belovedness, stepping inch by inch into a newfound freedom to be who we were truly created to be, and see the hand of God at work in our lives?

This is our story, friends. This is our journey.

As Berry said, it is the real journey, “very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

Welcome home.

Mirrors aren’t always flattering. Ask anyone who’s ever been in a fitting room. They capture sides of us we don’t want to see. The good news, though, is that they’re not completely accurate. The lighting, the shape of the glass, the smudges on the surface – all of these can distort the image and make us look either better or worse than we actually are. We’re also typically not the best ones to judge what we see in a mirror; we often find what we expect to find. If we expect to find beauty, we’re likely to find it there somewhere. If we expect ugliness, we’ll likely find it there too. So, here’s my question: Can we train ourselves to look for beauty, and what might happen in ourselves, and in our world, if we succeed?

I’ve been pondering this in light of our Scriptures today. It’s said that the Bible doesn’t just reflect God to us; it reflects us to ourselves. And sometimes, what we see in that mirror is not pretty. Consider today’s psalm. We can put it in context, remind ourselves that it was likely written during the Babylonian exile over 2500 years ago – when the writer and their audience were so thoroughly defeated that they didn’t have swords to wield. Their king, their temple, and their self-respect were gone. The God of the Passover who delivered their ancestors from slavery had long ago left the building, or so they feared. It seemed ridiculous to claim that God “takes pleasure in the people and adorns the poor with victory.” Claiming joy in our Maker under these circumstances, reminding ourselves that we are still made in God’s image, and finding beauty there regardless - these can be deeply faithful acts well worth singing out loud.

From there though, we can admit that the psalm goes off the rails. Boasts from our War Department notwithstanding, how can the praises of God legitimately be in our throat while a sword is in our hand wreaking vengeance? My colleague Adam aptly reminded us last Sunday that vengeance is not and never will be our job. Claiming God’s prerogative as judge does neither God nor us any favors. It so distorts the image of God within us that no one can be seen clearly – certainly not God. So, while the second half of the psalm does not reflect God to us, it does reflect us to ourselves. Our thirst for vengeance when we’ve been injured and our propensity to justify it in God’s name - that is part of who we are. And until we can see this ugliness for what it is, we’re likely to keep doing wrong to our neighbors, near and far. There has to be a better way.

There is. Paul names it in our reading from Romans. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” That feels liberating, at least at first. At last, we’re given a lens, a filter, by which to screen everything else we read in the Bible – a standard we can actually live by. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

The law of love - it seems so simple, until we try putting it into practice. I know I don’t always feel love for all my neighbors, whom Jesus clearly describes in the parable of the Good Samaritan as anyone in need (Gentiles and tax collectors included.) And after taking a good, hard look in the mirror, love is not necessarily what I feel for myself either. Thank God, love is not fundamentally a feeling; otherwise, the effort to force our feelings into such a narrow box would consume all our energy and leave us paradoxically self-focused, when the point of love is to cast our vision outward. Love means wanting and working for another’s good, even when we’re not sure what that might be. It means seeking and serving Christ in all people, including ourselves, whether we see the image of God reflected back to us or not.

I wonder how we might put this law of love into practice. I wonder if we could start by looking for beauty. This tracks with how a seminary professor of mine once described love as “taking delight in the concrete particularity of the other.” If every last one of us is created in God’s image, then beauty is part of how we’re made. It gets distorted, of course, by choices we make and by choices made for us; it gets obscured by circumstances we never would have chosen. We might need to look with more patience, more gentleness than we’re used to in our born-to-be-a-critic culture. Our faith tells us that there is still God-given beauty there to be found. Some say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if that’s true – that no one else gets to define beauty for us and that we can shape what we see – then so be it. That’s good news too.

All this to say, if all we see in our mirrors is ugliness, then we need better mirrors. Maybe we can be better mirrors for each other by letting love color what we see and what we reflect in return. And then maybe we can step back from our mirrors and get back to working for each other’s good. Why else are we here? In the Name of the One who gives us the lens of love and expects us to use it, Amen.

“Vengeance is mine…,” says the Lord.”

Oh.

Ok…

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.”

Wowzer.

Is that, is that the gospel? Does that sound like good news to you?

I suppose it comes down to who or what you think might be facing the business end of God’s vengeance  – and whatever God’s vengeance may be.

“I will repay,” says the Lord. “Leave room for the wrath of God.”

Paul is referencing Deuteronomy and God’s promise to vindicate God’s People from all that would seek to destroy Israel. Now in Romans Chapter 12, he’s borrowing this language to address the Church in Rome.

How did the early church hear this? How do we hear it today?

On one level, Paul makes it clear that without exception God wants Christians to keep our noses out of the judgment business. It’s clearly spelled out: this is God’s domain.

If only the church had a better track record with respecting this non-negotiable distinction. Even so, there’s something unsettling about all this talk of wrath and vengeance in the middle of what otherwise sounds like a saintly operator’s manual for Christian living. A mentor of mine would have called this – and please forgive my crassness here – a turd in the punchbowl.

One of these things is not like the other in the refreshment Paul is serving up for us here.

If, as Christians we’re meant to repay our hungry enemies with food and our thirsty enemies with drink, and if we are called to live peaceably and harmoniously, and never act without first giving thought to what is noble in the sight of everyone, what do we do with our resentments, our anger, our natural desire for revenge, our human impulse to repay vengeance with vengeance?

Here’s one problem with Paul’s unfortunate party punch. At a surface level, it looks like we have to practice a pretty robust piety while God acts on instincts we can well understand. Why are Christians denied all the cathartic impulses that scratch our evolutionary itch for survival of the fittest?

Well, because, at a deeper level, of course, this base, animalistic behavior is antithetical to our Christian vocation, and we know that. Sometimes it’s hard, but we know that.

And it gives us another punch problem to reckon with – if wrath and vengeance as payback is inconsistent with following the Way of Jesus, how are we to reconcile with the notion that God gets away with vengeance, cruelty, and violence?

Of course, we must concede that we don’t understand the workings of God – and we don’t. We’re told that what may seem to us like base behavior on God’s part may just be God acting at a higher level of purpose beyond our ken.

And that may be. But there’s still something inadequate about this as an end to the argument. A God who suffers as Jesus did on the cross, is not a God who inflicts suffering. If we can’t trust these fundamental attributes of God’s nature, whose image and likeness all humans bear, we are lost.

And yet the faith into which the gospel invites us is a faith of finding, belonging, and homecoming. The gospel is trustworthy beyond our imagining, especially unto its capacity to transform the meaning of our suffering into newness of life.

I’m struck by spiritual movements within some Christian circles that reject any concept of a retributive God because it smacks of dualism. It fails to transcend the limits by either/or thinking, and it seeks to go beyond notions of vengeance and retribution – surely these are baser instincts in the spiritual evolution of humans.

Perhaps. And where retributive justice can soften and grow into restorative justice in non-dual Christian philosophy, it has much good to teach us.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t a place or a call or a time for God to set things right, to repair what’s broken, to hold to account that which must be held to account.

The oppression we see in the world today – in our own nation – surely, there must be a rebalancing of great injustices – there must be hope for change, even now.

As Christians we join Mary in professing a new day where the mighty are pulled down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. There are binaries – healthy binaries – in the gospel, as we can see.

But, there are those in our tradition, too, who would take dualistic certainty too far, to where they seem to build their faith on a sharp justice binary of salvation and damnation. At the end of the day, it’s pearly gates or lake of fire. The giving of God’s mercy, they say, will one day be over.

Perhaps extremes in all directions actually fail to leave room for God’s vengeance, whatever that may be.

The vengeance of God is not the vengeance of humankind. This is where we begin to discern that Paul’s punchbowl and its contents, if I haven’t stretched the analogy too far – is not what it initially seems to be. There is a consistent logic, a patterning, a sanity to the Way of Jesus.

On this we must and can depend. It is in every way and always at cross purposes with the world of empire and domination, but it can be trusted, relied on, and recognized for the real hope that it brings to the oh-so-hurting and broken world as we know it.

“I will repay,” says the Lord. “Leave room for the wrath of God.”

Now it begins to make sense. I don’t know about you, but I see much in this world that only God can repay. What if leaving room for God’s wrath is a kind of surrender of our wrath into the care of God’s wrath? This isn’t to let it go, but to use it, paired with a bigger cause, a larger concern, a community of faith.

This might be part of what it means to carry our cross, to borrow that complicated concept from our gospel reading. I know you’ve heard it preached from this pulpit before, but never, and I mean never, does the phrase “carry your cross” subject anyone to the violence, cruelty, or manipulation of someone else’s idea of what your burden should look and feel like.

In a way, we carry our cross to leave room for God’s just wrath. And we carry our cross to join with other Christians in the call to walk in the way of the cross together. The cross is never carried in isolation – not even Jesus carried his cross alone. And whatever our burdens may be, they are borne by the cross and not on our backs, our insecurities, our fears.

We carry the cross of Christ as members of the Body of Christ to bring good news to the world.

Somehow, some way, part of that good news is our command to leave room for God’s vengeance.

Perhaps the best way to square the circle is to go back and read Romans 12 itself. Paul is contextualizing the hard stuff. He seems to be saying, leave all that, the impossible, to God. Here’s what we’re to do:

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.

Overcome evil with good.

What can at first glance seem like a moral list — a high code of ethics that you don’t have to be Christian to abide by, becomes our Christian duty when we adopt it as our guide to participate in God’s justice for the world.

When God says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” God is assuring us that we don’t – and we can’t – and we never will, fight for God’s justice alone.

I wonder what St. Paul would say to the women in our first reading. Just verses after the ones we hear today from Romans, Paul infamously tells us: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed.” Tell that to our women from Exodus. It’s striking that Pharaoh says to let the girls live; it’s the women in this story who resist him. Their civil disobedience helps to bring about a new birth of freedom. So, who’s calling the right play here?

Let’s start with Exodus. We have Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives who break the law set by Pharaoh, who refuse to kill the Hebrew boys. They fear (or reverence) God more than they fear what their government could do to them, so they break an unjust law to preserve life. But they’re not the only ones who resist authority to keep Moses alive. Moses’ mother and sister are part of the resistance too, as is Pharaoh’s own daughter. All of them partner across “enemy” lines to make sure this child who will one day lead his people out of slavery survives.

What do we conclude from this? Maybe Paul is simply wrong. How dare we equate the voice of the emperor with the voice of God? We know what would have happened if Pharaoh was followed without resistance. Is Paul just sucking up to the empire? Perhaps he is saying what they want to hear, hoping that he and his followers might be left alone to practice their faith in peace. Except… he wasn’t afraid to challenge the powers that be. He skirted the edges of any law that would prevent him from preaching about Jesus. He’s not naïve about the government’s potential to abuse power and, in fact, was beaten and imprisoned repeatedly. The last we hear from him, he’s under house arrest. So then, whose call do we follow here? What might a faithful response to an unjust government look like?

By now, it should be clear that the Bible does not speak with a single voice. We can’t take one passage in isolation and base our actions on that alone. It’s the conversation within and beyond the text that is holy and inspired – the wrestling with what God would have us do across times and cultures, across all forms of government. The truth is – we cannot simply recast the biblical roles with our heroes and villains and assume we’re not being self-serving in the casting. We all like to assume that God is on our side and ours alone. Discerning the next right step is more complicated than that, as Paul points out in today’s reading from Romans.

He begins by telling us to “present (our) bodies as a living sacrifice.” Given the number of vigilantes and insurrectionists who think they’re doing just that, it’s worth unpacking this a bit. Note that it’s a “living” sacrifice. The call is not necessarily to get ourselves killed, although that may happen when we stand with the vulnerable as Jesus did. Perhaps it means that whatever risks we take for justice – they’re meant to be taken wisely and in the interests of preserving life.

Note also that we’re presenting our bodies, as well as renewing our minds. It’s not about lobbing verbal grenades from the safety of our computer screens. Some action is required. It might be protest. It might also be taking our lead from those most affected by the injustice and working more quietly behind the scenes to change things. Both choices can be faithful.

To assume otherwise goes against Paul’s next piece of advice – i.e. not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought. I know, it’s funny hearing that from Paul – a first-class tooter of his own horn. But there are lots of ways to think too highly of ourselves. There’s boastful pride, but there’s also the trap of thinking that we’re the only ones smart enough or committed enough to respond appropriately. Paul counters with the image of a body. By being part of the body of Christ, by definition, we are not all meant to have the same role. We need others to help us see what we can’t – whether that’s opportunities for courage or our own blinding prejudices. We have partners in this work; we’d do well to value them.

Exodus tells us something else though, too. If fear is what’s driving us, then we’re probably headed in the wrong direction. Pharaoh’s fear leads him to actions that are not only evil, but against his own best interest. He ends up trying to kill the very people he’s afraid of losing. The ones who do right here are not controlled by fear. The midwives, Moses’ mother and sister, Pharaoh’s own daughter – they are all moved more by mercy than by fear and so end up being part of God’s salvation – even it if takes another 40 years to see much return on that investment.

That might be the most important thing to remember as we consider our own resistance to unjust authority. Whatever we see now – it is not all there is. God wants so much more for us all. The arc of the moral universe is still bent toward justice. Just because we can’t see past the next bend does not mean we’re on the wrong path. When we stand with the vulnerable and act with courage alongside them, when we let others point out our blind spots and respond with humility, and when we let mercy drive us instead of fear, we are exactly where we need to be to let God guide our next play. In the Name of the One who gives us eyes to see, ears to hear, and the minds and bodies to follow – Amen.

Have you noticed how tribalistic we have become in modernity?

Wanting to move from just being frustrated by endless news cycles offering cascades of despairing reports, I’ve been digging down into the neurobiological and historical roots of our tribal tendencies, trying to better understand our current predicament. I’ve even been dipping into the astrobiological question, what defines “life” (more on that in the footnotes).

It is fascinating reading, prompting reflection that honestly has helped me take a few steps back from my impulse to jump on the “us versus them” wagon without regard for another’s perspective.

In light of today’s gospel, when we get a Jesus who, on engagement with the Canaanite woman, does not seem to be the Jesus we’ve come to know and love, or even really like, I’d like to share some of my gleanings.

Jesus is trekking to the borderlands of familiarity, presumably to teach his disciples some important lessons, we being his disciples, too. He leaves Gennesaret, which is already on the outskirts of social comfort zone, across the Sea of Galilee, where Jews and non-Jews intermingle, far flung from the hallowed halls of Jerusalem.

He moves north into the region of Tyre and Sidon, present-day Lebanon, where few, if any, Jews live. We don’t know why he goes there, but he does, and he is now thoroughly in the land of the Canaanites, Israel’s bitter enemy. It was decided long before that they could not live together. He could not have known the Canaanite woman as anything but the despised and distrusted “other.” His apparent disdain for her would have made political and social sense in his day.

If we go further back in human history, the neurobiology of tribalism runs deep in our veins. We humans are social creatures, ill-equipped to survive on our own. It turns out we have a very effective evolutionary adaptation that orients to tribal instincts: we hang with those aligned with ourselves; we inherently distrust those who don’t. Much of this is subconscious. There is actually a “coefficient of relationship” which guides the notion of kinship—the more genes we share, the more likely we are to orient to them, and draw them closer. Over time, this orbit of kinship led to living together, eating together, and eventually helped establish agriculture, shared goods and services, forged political alliances and what we now call “civilization.”

The term tribe is from the Latin tribus—literally, the ancient Roman administrative precinct in which voting cohorts were held. There was no value judgment invested in the term.

Centuries later, as European countries embraced the expansionist sprint to colonize the globe, the word was applied indiscriminately and pejoratively to any clan or collective of people the colonizers judged to be “barbarians.”

From there, the binaries of moral superiority between “us and them” set us up for the modern zero-sum game we see sweeping all aspects of our social constructs. For me to win, you must lose. And you deserve to lose. The dogs under the table are not worthy to eat my children’s crumbs.

Neurobiology made it easy to do.

But the derivative effects informed by it are disastrous—echo chambers, isolation and loneliness, manufactured fear…these translate fairly readily to justification for racism and xenophobia, mass deportations, indentured slavery, trafficking, pogroms, wars, even genocides. Humans have always had capacity for this range of evil, but we now play the zero-sum game on a global level, with a scale of catastrophic proportion.

Which brings me to the second aspect of neurobiology that factors into this: our brains do not do well with large collections. We naturally create taxonomies, divisions, and boundaries to establish some sense of order.

We don’t know what to do with a global population of 8 billion, but how many people live in your home or in your building or on your block?

We have a hard time conjuring that we have 4 million people living in metropolitan Seattle, but can you rally around a sports team that represents the region and feel some connection with all those others as you do?

We can’t comprehend that more than 100 million people have died in wars in the past century, but do you somehow remember that 49 people died a decade ago in the Pulse nightclub shooting?

Again, neurobiology made it easy to do. We categorize and create boundaries to make sense of our world.

We do it in the natural order of things as well. There are some 8.7 million species of living things on earth, but we can’t really make any sense of that number, so do you remember what we did: we created a taxonomy of living things: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. Nothing inherently bad in that, but the results have been ruinous. By seeing homo sapiens as distinct from plants and animals, we convinced ourselves that we were separate from the rest of the creatures of this world, and somehow superior.

And if we take this one step further, this is where it really gets interesting…

Political theorist Jane Bennett has written a book entitled Vibrant Matter in which she critiques the traditional ordering of creation into “vibrant life” (comprised of living beings) and dull matter (lifeless things like rocks, rivers, even the vegetable or fruit you might eat at lunch).[1]

But a river isn’t really “lifeless,” is it? Well, it depends on how you define what is living.[2]

Bennett would have us move away from the binary of vibrant life and dull matter and call it instead an “assemblage of vibrant matter” where water and rock create the environment for teeming life. Electrons and electromagnetic fields have bearing on it all as well.

Can we see trees as part of our whole? Can the granite rock in my garden hold the potential energy of its hot lava origin and share that energy with me? Can the fruit on my plate speak its sacrificial beauty into my being, thereby changing me? I want to be part of such assemblages of vibrant matter!

Last week, we heard that Jesus came to the disciples walking on water, and Canon Rich gave a fine sermon in which he proposed for our consideration that Jesus is always coming toward us. God is always coming toward us, even when we can’t see it.
I don’t know what Jesus was thinking when he went to Canaanite territory, but if he was teaching his disciples an important lesson, perhaps even with a bit of unsettling discourse with the Canaanite woman, maybe we can say he went toward her, toward her land of otherness, across the boundary of us versus them, and what came of it was good.

A border crossed, a child healed, an aggrieved mother affirmed, a teacher humbled. Not a bad parable for us to consider today.

FEAR. I want to talk about it today. I grew up in a home where I felt secure, stable, and safe. However, as I got older and I encountered the outside world, I became fearful. I was especially fearful of my peers. I was constantly concerned about what they thought of me. I was sensitive and spiritual, more interested in music and theater than sports. I knew I was gay, but no one else did. This was the 1960’s and I couldn’t imagine ever sharing that with anyone else. I had never met anyone like me, and I was afraid that I would be found out.

This continued until at age 25 I had a profound spiritual experience in prayer. I encountered the complete and unconditional love of God through a mystical experience. This fed my desire to become a priest, and I was no longer afraid. Sure, I would get scared especially if something was threatening. My fear would remove me from the threat and ensure my survival, but I no longer lived with a sense of constant fear and dread. However, something happened this week in my life that re-stoked that irrational fear. I had to grapple with the reality that, as I age, I am afraid of a future that I cannot control. I’m working through it, but I must tell you, this week I was afraid. Really afraid.

Thank God that the church offers us the Gospel that we just heard today. In it the disciples contend with deep, primal fear. Fear like I felt this week. Fear of the unknown. Fear of suffering. Fear of sickness and death. Fear of oblivion. Unfortunately, I have heard many sermons on this passage that suggest that if we have enough faith and trust in God, we will not be afraid. For example, in our Gospel when Peter exercises bold, fearless faith in Jesus, he does the impossible. His faith empowers him to walk on water – just like Jesus! But as soon as Peter gives in to fear, he nearly drowns.

I think simplistic interpretations like this are dangerous. Nowhere in the Gospels are we called to prove our faith by taking pointless risks that threaten our lives. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus teach us that bad things happen to us because we’re too frightened to earn God’s protective care. Whether we’re talking about respecting the power of the sea during a vicious storm, or heeding expert medical advice during a global pandemic, the same caution applies. Recklessness is not faith. Stupidity is not courage.

Notice the timeline of events as Matthew relates them. The disciples are frightened because they are in a small boat in a storm. When they see Jesus walking on the water, they’re terrified. They don’t recognize him; they think they’re seeing a ghost. Naturally, they cry out in fear. “Immediately” Jesus offers them comfort and reassurance. He tells them exactly who he is. “Take courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.”

And then Peter tempts Jesus. He gives Jesus an identity test. “Lord, if it’s you...” When else did we hear those words? Remember the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel? Can you hear the echoes of another famous identity test in Peter’s words? The identity test Jesus faced in the wilderness, forty days after his baptism? They came from the devil, “If you are the Son of God…”

This is not about the morality or immorality of human fear. This is about how we respond to God’s presence when we’re afraid. It’s about what we say and think and feel and do when the divine comes to us in guises we don’t recognize.

The disciples are not wrong to be afraid. Of course they’re afraid! They're afraid because they aren't keen on drowning. They’re afraid because gigantic waves in the middle of the night are scary. They’re afraid because they lack the tools with which to process what they’re seeing; human beings don’t have the ability to walk on water.

If we extend the meaning of "drowning" to include all the ways in which we human beings find ourselves in over our heads in this world, then of course we experience fear. Of course, we feel afraid amid political brokenness, rampant social injustice, struggling economies, and escalating international warfare. Of course, we feel afraid when unhealthy marriages, sick children, unfriendly neighbors, grinding jobs, and financial uncertainty threaten our lives. Of course, we feel afraid when our basic biology betrays us into anxiety, panic, and depression.

The issue is not fear; the issue is where fear leads. Notice the first place that Peter’s fear leads him. His fear leads him straight to suspicion and distrust. His fear leads him to test and question Jesus’s identity, instead of taking Jesus’s self-disclosure at face value. “If it’s you, enable me to do the impossible. If it’s you, reorder reality and prove to me that you’re God.”

Interestingly, Peter’s test fails. Despite his initial boldness, he cannot prove who Jesus is by walking on water. He fails within seconds. Why? Because Jesus doesn’t calm the sea for Peter’s convenience. Even though Peter steps out of the boat, his circumstances remain wild and turbulent and dangerous. If Peter thinks he can manipulate Jesus into making faith easy, he learns otherwise fast.

To truly trust Jesus is to hold two pictures of God’s kingdom in productive tension. Yes, sometimes Jesus demonstrates his power in miraculous ways. But most often, we need to trust that his Incarnation – his quiet, abiding presence in our wild, untamed lives – is sufficient for the circumstances we face. Usually, Jesus's power is paradoxical; it comes to us in what looks like vulnerability, like weakness, like strangeness. The image of Jesus’ power is a beaten man on a cross. The wildness of the sea is no proof of God’s absence.

In my mind, the power of this Gospel story doesn’t lie in Peter’s faith, doubt, courage or fear. Peter’s trajectory is not the point of the reading. Jesus’s trajectory is the point, because unlike Peter’s, it never changes. It is constant, focused, relentless, and directed. Did you notice? From the very beginning of the story, Jesus moves towards his disciples. He moves towards them when they’re struggling at sea. He moves towards them when they decide he’s a menacing ghost. He moves towards them when they’re terrified by his approach. He moves towards them when they’re reckless enough to give him a dare. He moves towards them when they begin to drown. He moves towards them when they cry out for help. He moves towards them when they’re shivering and sorry for their rashness. He moves towards them when they realize, for a beautiful, flickering instant, who he is and what he is. He moves towards them when they worship him.

In other words, Jesus never stops moving towards the ones he loves. He never stops crossing the dark water to come to where we are. Neither our fearfulness nor our faithlessness ever alters his steady approach. We are the ones he’s bound for. Our flailing bodies are the ones he pulls out of the water. Ours is the boat he climbs into. It is for us that he calls out across the terrifying waves, again and again and again:

Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.