What's so joyful about talking about sin?

Song before: Uncle Dave’s Grace by Lou and Peter Berryman

      Thanksgiving day Uncle Dave was our guest

      Who reads the Progressive which makes him depressed

      We asked Uncle Dave if he'd like to say grace

      A dark desolation crept over his face

 

      Thanks he began as he gazed at his knife

      To poor Mr. Turkey for living his life

      All crowded and cramped in a great metal shed

      Where life was a drag then they cut off his head

 

      Thanks he went on for the grapes in my wine

      Picked by sick women of seventy nine

      Scrambling all morning for bunch after bunch

      Then brushing the pesticide off of their lunch

 

      Thanks for the stuffing all heaped on my fork

      Shiny with sausage descended from pork

      I think of the trucks full of pigs that I see

      And can't help imagine what they think of me

 

      Continuing, I'd like to thank if you please

      Our salad bowl hacked out of tropical trees

      And for this mahogany table and chair

      We thank all the jungles that used to be there

 

      For cream in our coffee and milk in our mugs

      We thank all the cows full of hormones and drugs

      Whose calves are removed at a very young age

      And force-fed as veal in a minuscule cage

 

      Oh thanks for the furnace that heats up these rooms

      And thanks for the rich fossil fuel it consumes

      Corrupting the atmosphere ounce after ounce

      But we're warm and toasty and that is what counts

 

      I'm grateful he said for these clothes on my back

      Lovely and comfy and cheap off the rack

      Fashioned in warehouses noisy and cold

      In China by seamstresses seven years old

 

      And thanks for my silverware setting that shines

      In memory of miners who died in the mines

      Worn down by the shoveling of tailings in piles

      Whose runoff destroys all the rivers for miles

 

      We thank the reactors for our chandelier

      Although the plutonium won't disappear

      For hundreds of decades it still will be there

      But a few more Chernobyls and who's gonna care

 

      Sighed Uncle Dave though there's more to be told

      The wine's getting warm and the bird's getting cold

      And with that he sat down as he mumbled again

      Thank you for everything, amen

 

      We felt so guilty when he was all through

      It seemed there was one of two things we could do

      Live without food in the nude in a cave

      Or next year have someone say grace besides Dave

It’s the most wonderful time of year.

Now I know that isn’t a lot of people’s first reaction to Lent.

What’s so great about Lent? Lent is so wonderful because we finally get to talk about sin. Woo hoo. And... no one here is cheering along with me. We don’t like to talk about sin. And that’s a real tragedy, because the reality of sin is what makes the Good News so good. We live in a world broken by sin, where so so many things aren’t right, and that can make us feel powerless or guilty, but the Good News is that sin doesn’t have the final word. We need to acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, but once we do, it’s good news from there.

Getting to talk about sin, to focus on sin for a whole season should be a joyful thing. I know it isn’t for most of us, and there are two reasons for that:

For many of us, sin has been weaponized and we’ve been taught to believe many things are sinful that in fact are not things that impair our love of God and neighbor. For queer people in particular, but certainly not limited to queer people, so many of us have been taught that our sexuality, our identity, the way our God chose to create us and proclaim that our creation was very very good – too many of us have been taught that all of that sacred mystery was sinful. And that’s a stumbling block in the path of our rejoicing in talking about sin.

But the second problem we have with sin comes from a lack of understanding and internalizing and really believing what Jesus did to our sin. We are ashamed of our sin and afraid of being seen connected to our sin. But the truth is that Jesus set us free from the guilt of sin once for all. The guilt of sin – all of it, for all time – was wiped away on the cross almost 2000 years ago. But we don’t act like we believe that. We act like we know that we’re guilty of sin, but maybe if we hide it and don’t talk about it we won’t get blamed for it. But that’s not our situation. That’s not the problem with sin. We’ve been fully pardoned. We don’t need to hid our sin. We’re not going to be blamed for sin, because the blame of sin is completely wiped away.

The problem of sin isn’t guilt, even if we think so. Hear and believe the good news: Jesus has taken away all the guilt of sin. You are forgiven!

No, the problem of sin is not guilt but that it still has power over us. Bad things we’ve done in the past are a problem because we’re likely to do them again. I said it last week and I’ll say it again and again until maybe someday you believe it and even I believe it: God doesn’t care about what we’ve done. God cares about what we do.

We don’t need to fear because we’ve committed sinful acts in the past. But we do need to become people who are no longer slavishly following our sin. We do need to become people free from the grasp that sin has on us. And the only way we get there is by acknowledging sin openly, because that helps us escape from the power it has over us. It means a better life is possible. The brokenness we experience is not the fullness of what God dreams for us.

To me, that’s why I see confession as the most joyful of sacramental rites: when we admit that things and we are broken, it opens the door to hope for something better to emerge. Penitence is what affirms our hope that God has better things planned for us than what we currently do. It says that my sins are not me. The “me” that God created is very good, and the sins that encumber me are not a part of me, but something that God can free me from. To say that I now fall short of God’s vision for me is precisely to hope for the fullness of life God intends for me, and to acknowledge and bewail my manifold sins and wickedness is to express the hope that a better life is not only possible but God’s plan for us. If we say that we have no sin, we claim that our current life is as good as it gets. (and yes, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us). BUT if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness — which is what makes a better world possible.

In that awesome anthem I persuaded Julie to sing for us today from the modern prophets Lou and Peter Berryman, singer-songwriters from Wisconsin, we heard a great accounting of so much of what is wrong with the world through the lens of thanksgiving dinner. Oppression, animal cruelty, unsustainable use of resources, degradation of the environment we rely on to live – it all lurks behind even our joyful gatherings. Naming it and lamenting it is so necessary. But the speaker of the song shows us that naming and lamenting sin alone is not enough:

We felt so guilty when he was all through
It seemed there was one of two things we could do
Live without food in the nude in a cave
Or next year have someone say grace besides Dave

Sin is rampant. The evil we have done, the good we have left undone, and the evil done on our behalf. When we itemize the ways the world about us is broken, the ways it dehumanizes and mistreats God’s children, and the ways we are complicit in these systems of exploitation that sustain our own ways of life, it becomes overwhelming.

We face a dilemma. It seems like we have two choices: be trapped by sin’s guilt, or be trapped by sin’s power. To believe we must live without food in the nude in a cave is to acknowledge our contribution to the sinful social structures that oppress, to aspire to amend our lives, and to be utterly crushed by the guilt of sin. But is the alternative to silence the voice of the Uncle Daves? If so, we become slave to sin’s power. In denial, we continue to oppress others, and continue in our alienation from God. Denial is less unpleasant than constantly calling to mind all the ills of the world. As the prayer book so aptly describes our sins, “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.” But failing to acknowledge them increases the likelihood that we repeat them, over and over and over.

So we face this difficult position: remain enslaved to the power of sin by denying its role in our lives, or remain enslaved to the guilt of sin by wallowing in its immeasurable enormity.

My brothers and sisters and nonbinary siblings in Christ, we have a third choice. The good news is this: if we confess our sins to God, we are forgiven, healed, and empowered. The old hymn “Rock of Ages” says it well:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee
Let the water and the blood from thy wounded side that flowed
Be of sin the double cure: save me from its guilt and power.

The double cure: we are freed from both the guilt and the power of sin.

Now the guilt part we have to somehow take on faith. In the mysterious cosmic accounting scheme, the guilt of sin is wiped off of our accounts. We have done evil, we have benefited from evil, we are culpable. But God somehow erases our culpability. We are forgiven. God’s accounting system is a mystery, but somehow, and we don’t know how, our sin no longer “counts”. Thank you Jesus!

But the power of sin is no mystery. We see it all too clearly. Despite our desire to be good, to do good, we are trapped by sin. We go on oppressing and mistreating others despite our best intentions. How can we possibly break the power of sin? How can we possibly “go and sin no more” in a world where our daily bread comes from a system built on the backs of the poor? How can we go and sin no more when our own impatience or addiction or weakness or foolishness or flaws seem to have so much power over our good intentions?

We acknowledge our brokenness, and bring the pieces of our life as an offering to God. We offer what we are.

Which means that a sinner’s place is in the church. There’s no such thing as not being good enough for church. No one should ever feel like they shouldn’t come because they’re “doing it wrong.” We should never give anyone the impression that they somehow have to meet some standard to be “worthy” to come here before the Lord. None of us are worthy, but God calls us all.

If you want to sing praise to God but you’re not particularly good at carrying a tune, don’t let anyone convince you that you shouldn’t offer your voice in praise to the Lord. God wants you as you are.

If you want to worship the Lord but it’s one of those mornings where the alarm doesn’t go off, and the coffee spills and the garage door won’t open, don’t let anyone’s dirty looks convince you that you shouldn’t come to church for whatever portion of the service you can make it for. God wants you as you are.

If you know you care about issues of the day but you’re completely overwhelmed, and you feel like writing a single letter to a single leader about just one of the many topics that worry you seems too trivial, don’t let anyone tell you contribution is too tiny to matter. God wants you as you are.

There’s an old story about a rabbi who visits a remote congregation who don’t have anyone nearby to teach them or lead them in prayer. And the rabbi hears one old man praying, in Hebrew, because that’s the language God speaks, of course, and he’s humbly but passionately praying over and over again “Alef Bet Gimmel Dalet He Vav Zayin…” And after listening for a moment, the rabbi realizes that the man is reciting the alphabet over and over again in Hebrew. And the rabbi asks, “Why are you reciting the alphabet?” And the man says that it’s all the Hebrew he knows, but if he gives God the letters, God can put them together into words.

We are broken by the power of sin. But we offer God the broken pieces of our life, and God puts them together into something amazing. One doesn’t make a mosaic out of whole pottery. It’s the little broken shards that can become the beautiful new whole. We must not hesitate to offer our lives to God because they’re broken. It’s the broken pieces of our lives that God, the great artist, can assemble into the new creation.

As a broken people, we acknowledge our sin.

As a forgiven people, we experience God’s reconciling love.

And then we get to Lent.

Now, we make space to listen.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton prayed (and we prayed along with him last season):

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

In today’s epistle, Paul writes to the people of Philippi that “many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.” Paul is writing about people enslaved by sin. But he goes on: “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, [and I’m sure Paul includes our nonbinary siblings also], whom I love and long for, my joy and crown: stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.”

Lent is about sin, but it is not about wallowing in guilt. How could it be? Jesus, has cancelled all guilt. We acknowledge and confess our sins, and they are absolutely forgiven. Gone. Our sins are absolved. Lent isn’t about guilt; we have nothing more about which to feel guilty. God has taken that away. Our fasting and prayer isn’t to somehow make up for our sin – we couldn’t do that even if we wanted to, but God doesn’t ask us to. This beautiful season of quiet and prayer and fasting is so we can listen. So we can be transformed into something new. So we can hear what we are called to do as we step out of the power of sin and into the work of building God’s Reign.

The response to the prayers of the people that we’ve been using this Lent is emblematic of this transformation. We are powerless to fix all that is wrong in the world. So we offer the brokenness that grieves us to God, trusting that God has better things in store for it than we can even imagine. And also, we invite God to call us to respond to brokenness that is in our power to address. We can’t fix everything. But we aren’t called to fix everything. We can do the little things that we are called to do, and God can put those little things together into a big picture that restores all things. And that is how God sets us free from both the guilt and the power of sin. That is how we escape the false choice between living without food in the nude in a cave – crippling guilt at the vastness of sin – and silencing the voices that name the evil in the world, surrendering to the power of sin. The third way is to do what we God calls us to do, knowing that God calls others to do the rest.

We offer the broken pieces of our lives, and we pray and listen to learn how God wants us to use them. God invites us in all our brokenness, in all our sin, in all our despair, in all our self-perceived inadequacy to know love and healing and forgiveness, and to make room to listen for what we are called to do to spread God’s love. Have no guilt that what we do is not enough to break the power of sin. We are not alone. We are with God. So I invite us all to confess our sin, to know God’s forgiveness, and to listen for God’s call: in short, I invite us to observe a Holy Lent. Amen.

Where you've been fed

Bridge:

Every year you still go back

Social pressure? Force? The lack

of confidence to soldier through your pains?

Do you return by your free will

Hoping to find something still?

The places you've been fed your soul remains

--

Verse 1:

Hades doesn't own you 

Whatever that might mean

Yes people said he rules the dead

but now now they call you queen.

It's all a social construct.

The story is only true

If you choose to live out this tale.

the choice is up to you.

You linger where your soul's been fed

Verse 2:

Hades took you for a bride

that’s how the story went

the marriage rites among the gods

sure didn’t stress consent.

What tears you from the harvest

to the underworld each year

Why choose to go back down again?

My gut says it’s not fear.

You linger where your soul's been fed

Verse 3:

Each year you are stolen,

to hear your mom’s account.

Demeter versus Hades

Doesn’t ask what do you want

The first time was abduction

to death’s dread realm of black

But every year when you return

What keeps you coming back?

You linger where your soul's been fed

Verse 4:

Hades doesn't own you

Cause ownership's not real 

First we make private property 

Then to survive's to steal

Now he calls you his equal

the queen over the dead

No one can make you go back there

‘Cept voices in your head

You linger where your soul's been fed

Verse 5:

You ate the pomegranate

And so he staked his clam

Six months above six months below

And every year is the same

Once you taste what really feeds

You'll always look for more

What's lacking in the harvest

Might be found on Styx shore

You linger where your soul's been fed

Verse 6:

I'm haunted by the places

Where I've found crusts of bread

My weary feet go back to find 

if once again I'm fed

Is this where I'll sate the longing

That I must admit I feel?

Is it here perhaps where I found scraps

I'll finally eat a meal?

I linger where my soul's been fed

Bridge:

Every year you still go back

Social pressure? Force? The lack

of confidence to soldier through your pains?

Do you return by your free will

Hoping to find something still?

The places you've been fed your soul remains

A Sonnet On Sin

 

Caesar alone could put a man to death:

That pow'r to kill all states frugally hoard.

Personal sin took not away his breath.

The Roman Empire crucified our Lord.

The campaign of distraction thus begins,

Or else oppression might be what one blames.

They shift the focus to our separate sins.

"Look what he made us do," the state proclaims.

The principalities and pow'rs confuse,

So personal misconduct we berate,

And not the systems that exploit and use.

Our sin comes when we too participate.

Injustice cries out to the skies to be

Redressed: That is how Jesus sets us free. 

a sonnet from clergy conference

 sacramental imagination

they gave us time to read and make our notes

to contemplate the pictures we were shown

the fragments of the works of storied poets

the carriers of beauty, awe, renown.

the feathered thing confined within a cage

whom powers strive to silence still does yearn

with urge to sing, bursting in every age:

The spark of love can never fail to burn.

This much I know: art must beget more art

No listeners here; we all join in the song

Each joy in conversation takes its part

The awe of beauty draws us to belong.

When faced with beauty all that one can do

Is join, creating more, forever new.

theological hunger

I’m hungry for a theology of liberation that situates God’s salvific action in the world (no reliance on pie in the sky when you die), but also doesn’t denigrate the mystical and spiritual. I'm so beyond done with dialectical materialism. For we struggle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Transfiguration revisited

Bottoming out at 1,410 feet and ten inches below sea level, the Jordan River valley is literally the lowest elevation on the face of planet Earth. It was there that Jesus was baptized, a feast we celebrated last month, and a voice came from heaven, saying, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'

The precise identity of the Mount of the Transfiguration is not identified in the gospel accounts; scholars have variously identified it as Mount Tabor or Mount Hermon, which are not among the world's tallest peaks, but either is plenty tall that when God again speaks and says, 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!' it certainly communicates range and contrast: God's word extends from the depths to the heights.

This is a strange story! Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

If we think it's strange, imagine how strange it must have been to Peter and John and James! This teacher they've been following around has seemed special. He taught with confidence. He even performed miracles. But as far as they could tell, he was still definitely in "special teacher" territory, not something more unusual than that. And then, they go up a mountain with Jesus, and they see… this. And what are they supposed to do with it? They're overwhelmed, and Peter, God bless him, stammers out his incoherent response to what they saw, only to be met with nothing less than the voice of God themself, proclaiming about Jesus 'This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!'

But perhaps most disturbing, now that they know that they're in the presence of God's own son, is the subject of the conversation they overheard between Moses, bringer of the Law, and Elijah, greatest of the prophets: they were talking about Jesus's departure which was to be "accomplished" in Jerusalem.

Oh great, think Peter and John and James. We are finally in the presence of God, and what's he talking about? Leaving. The Messiah's job description might be muddled in many regards in terms of what people expect, but one thing is clear: he shall reign forever and ever. Whatever else the Messiah is or isn't, Jesus's followers expect that he will not be taken away. Not be betrayed into human hands and die. That can't be how the glory that was revealed on the mountain top ends up. God forbid!

This conflict of exceptions about what a Messiah is supposed to be and do lies at the heart of the clashing worldviews of God and Empire. What is glory? What is power? What is peace? The peace of God which passes all understanding doesn't look like the peace we come to expect when taught by the powers and principalities of this world.

And yet, at the end of today's Gospel, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, where these things are all going to play out. And that's where we stand today: at the beginning of a long march toward an ending the disciples are dreading and hoping is impossible. Messiahs are supposed to win. Messiahs are supposed to reign in glory. Messiahs who are transfigured in glory like Peter and John and James saw Jesus just can't suffer and die. 

It's a long walk. They have plenty of time to think about it. And that's where we find ourselves in this story: at the start of a long march.

The calendar even tells us that we are at the beginning of a 31 day March, but somehow today on the calendar seems to point to so many other days also. Today's story of the transfiguration points toward Palm Sunday, when Jesus's march that begins today ends when he arrives in Jerusalem. It points Good Friday and Easter. Every year, we hear the transfiguration story the Sunday before Lent begins, because this story marks the point in the Gospel where Jesus's ministry shifts gears from teaching and healing, and he sets his face for his journey toward Jerusalem, where he knows he will die. Despite this yearly reading of the Transfiguration story on Sunday, this is NOT the date the church has set aside as the Feast of the Transfiguration. 

The theological influences that most shaped my life so far have established August 6 as something of the moral axis about which the modern world revolves. That day is the feast of the Transfiguration, Jesus's transformation in dazzling light into a glorious preview of the splendor of the Reign of God. The day set apart to honor the particular Gospel we heard today. But 80 years ago on that day, in dazzling brightness accompanied by a towering mushroom cloud that reached up to the heights of the heavens, the city of Hiroshima was transfigured to oblivion in a radiant display of the apex of humankind's death-dealing powers.

So because of the accidents of the calendar this gospel has become inexorably intertwined with the contrast between Imperial Peace and Christian Peace. The Reign of God, that for which we pray for each time we pray the Lord's Prayer, always stands in contrast to the reign of the powers and principalities of this world. When we call Jesus King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Prince of Peace, we use titles that Caesar had claimed for himself. When the Angels proclaimed to the shepherds outside Bethlehem that they carried good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people, they drew on the formula used to announce the ascension of a new Roman Emperor. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey and the people waved branches and threw their coats on the ground to make a path for him, shouting "Hosanna to the King of Kings," the whole scene was a subversion of a Roman military procession that would have likely happened before passover each year.

The Pax Christi, the peace of Christ, stands in direct contrast to and subversion of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace carried out through the establishment of widespread fear across the known world of Rome's ability to dish out death to any who dare to defy them. The Roman peace through strength and fear is the polar opposite of the peace of God which passes all understanding and operates not through the fear of death but through the life-giving power of self-sacrificial love. Jesus is precisely the anti-Caesar (which is very much to say that Caesar, and his imperial successors today, are the anti-Christ).

When Christians make the sign of the cross to mark our lives as belonging to God, we subvert the greatest weapon in Caesar's arsenal of terror, a dreaded instrument of torture unto death the mere threat of which could cower peoples into line with the Roman dictates. When we make the sign of the cross, we proclaim that love is stronger than death, that hope is stronger than fear, and that the worst the powers and principalities of this world can do to us cannot break us nor destroy us, because Christ has beaten down death by victory, and death's sting is gone.

From the days of Moses, God has called heaven and earth to witness that humankind has been offered life and death, blessings and curses, and invited us to choose life so that we and our descendants may live. Do we seek to thrive by increasing our grasp on the mechanisms that can deal out death to those we would seek to control (the essence of idolatry), or do we seek to thrive by emptying ourself and submitting to a life of humble service and even to death -- death on a cross! -- for the wellbeing of all God's creation, even those who would call us enemies? Do we seek what Caesar calls "peace" through power over others, or do we seek the true peace of Christ through love and service? Does peace come from our capacity to nurture life, or from our capacity to dole out death?

From the theological perspective that shaped me, the feast of the Transfiguration is where these two worldviews collide: from the moment of the Transfiguration onward, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, toward the death on the cross that he knew was the destination ordained by the life of liberation he led, knowing that the powers and principalities of this world would not consent to coexist with his ministry that set the prisoner free and proclaimed good news to the poor. This feast marked Jesus' pivot from the gathering phase of his ministry to the final showdown with the forces of death, a showdown that could only lead to the resurrection, but could also only lead there through immense suffering. This feast marked Jesus embrace of the vulnerability that would lead to his ultimate triumph.

But also on that feast day, August 6, 1945 we marked a milestone in humankind's ability to kill one another, to transfigure our world into an uninhabitable hellscape of fire and brimstone beyond Dante's imagination with the added feature of deadly radiation bringing painful later death upon those who survived the first wave death or even visiting its devastation upon the children of survivors, themselves warped by the deadly impact of the bomb's radiation.

If Moses set before us the choice between life and death, the nuclear arms race marked humankind's fullest embrace of the capacity to kill -- to overkill with an arsenal whose lethal capacity numbers beyond the population of the world, with the ability to kill each person on the planet multiple times over and still have more bombs in reserve.

Given that the wages of sin are death, the embrace of nuclear arms is most firmly the fruit of the most capital of sins, the capacity to kill not a just single person, as Cain first did, bringing murder into the human story and God's curse upon himself, but the capacity to kill all of humankind and render the earth uninhabitable.

Thus, I was shaped to believe that as sin is equated to dealing in death, nuclear war is the ultimate sin and the chiefest moral problem of our age.

What people in the generations that have come after me have known almost instinctively but it took me much longer to figure out is that humankind's capacity to make choices that could render our world uninhabitable does not stop with the atom bomb. Climate change is the new atom bomb. Humanity's collective ability to kill off so much of life on earth no longer relies on someone deciding to pull the trigger, to launch the missiles, to fail to reach the conclusion that when it comes to nuclear confrontation, the only winning move is not to play. Every day that goes by without dramatic action to rein in greenhouse gasses is taking a step toward the equivalent of a nuclear missile launch that will someday (but we do not know when) become irreversible.

I hadn't seen it. I hadn't seen how the moral urgency behind preventing nuclear war is the precursor to the same moral urgency behind preventing catastrophic climate change. And as individuals, we feel powerless in both struggles, able to shape neither national policy about nuclear weapons nor global policies that shape the emissions that could be destroying our livable world. But in each case, God calls us to faithful resistance to the powers and principalities of death. In both cases, God calls us, as we make the Transfiguration present here and now through our storytelling, we who take and eat the Body of Christ in Eucharist are transformed into glowing agents of God's love and light, to resist the forces of death and denial that would deny our collective human descendants the chance to live in the glory for which God created us.

God has set before us life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that we and our descendants may live.

Amen.

Love your enemies: Inaugural sermon at St. Peters

Today's Gospel is simultaneously most difficult and most central to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. How can you tell if a place is heavenly? A place is heavenly to the extent that its inhabitants love their enemies, do good toward those who hate them, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who mistreat them. If that is how people act, then where such people dwell is heavenly. If that is not how people act, then we have not yet gotten to the point where "[t]he kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord."

Today's gospel starts with the central, defining message of what it means to follow Jesus, to dwell in the reign of God, to "be saved": 

Love your enemies. 

Love your enemies. 

Love your enemies. 

Now how in hell are we supposed to do that? 

Now I say that partly for shock value, but also I say that because it's literally the challenge. A world not driven by a love of enemies is, in fact, hellish. And our redemption is nothing more and nothing less that learning, practicing, living, being transformed, in such a hellish world, into people who do love their enemies. The world’s redemption, the apocatastasis or restoration of all things for which God longs – it is the same transformation of all dwellers in the world.

Our salvation and the salvation of the world is precisely living out an answer to the question "how *in hell* are we supposed to love our enemies?" 

And to answer that question, we need to define love. 

We can quote scripture, we can read theologians, we can open the dictionary, and all those things have shaped my understanding of what love is, but the definition I'm going to give you today is experiential. After 48 years as a human being, experiencing love as a child and a friend and a part of the church and communities and raising kids and caring for pets and holding people's hands while they die and being in and out of a marriage and teaching and leading parishes and being in relationship with parents and siblings and family and friends, and being in the presence of God in prayer and word and sacrament and in the world, this is what I've come up with. My working definition of love is that to love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. To love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. 

Love is giving the dog a bath in tomato juice after the skunk sprayed them when you were about to leave for church on Palm Sunday, it's holding someone's hand as they cry, it's changing a diaper in the middle of the night, it's singing to someone as they fall asleep and holding their hand as it turns cold and the beeping of the hospital heart monitor says they've left this world and gone on to whatever is beyond. To love someone is to have your actions shaped by a deep desire for what is truly good for them. 

If love is about warm fuzzy feelings, we likely can't summon that for our enemies. But Jesus doesn't tell us we have to like our enemies. We don't have to enjoy spending time with them, or smile when we see them. But if love is not feeling but action rooted in a genuine desire for someone's good, we just might be able to do that, even for those who have mistreated us and who continue to curse us. 

The current Vice President of the United States recently ventured into the realm of moral theology and claimed there's "a very Christian concept" that "You love your family and *then* you love your neighbor, and *then* you love your community, and *then* you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then *after that*, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world." When challenged by actual theologians, he doubled down and referred to the concept of the `ordo amoris`, which Augustine of Hippo and later Thomas Aquinas both discussed: the "order of love." The Vice President asserted that a person has a stronger moral duty to one's own children than to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away, and therefore, by analogy, the rest of his moral hierarchy also holds. And I would argue that he's not wrong that one does indeed have a stronger moral duty to one's own children than to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away. But not because of the sort of hierarchy of obligations he suggests. 

Dorothy Day wrote that "The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the _deserving_ and the _undeserving poor_." I would extend that further: the Gospel takes away our right to discriminate at all between those deserving and undeserving of our love. There is, in fact, a hierarchy of *urgency* in terms of the actions of our love, but it is not about to whom we owe care and service based on relationship nor past service they have rendered to us, nor what we hope to expect from them in the future,, nor tribe or any sort. Our obligation to desire someone's well-being is universal, but our obligation to have that desire direct our particular actions is focused not on bonds of kin or tribe or webs of past or future obligation, but on whom we are uniquely positioned to help. 

That aid that we are uniquely positioned to be able to offer is the aid that we are most obligated to undertake. We have a special obligation to feed our children not because we are related to them but because they are uniquely dependent on us. We have an obligation to provide consolation and support to our friends and partners because the life history we share enables us to understand and care for them in ways others cannot. The loving service that can only be given by us is the loving service we have the most particular obligation to undertake. This is how self care fits into this hierarchy: if there is love that we can show ourselves that others cannot do for us, we have a special obligation to act in pursuit of that love. 

We are called to desire what is good for everyone. Love is more than just desiring good for someone; it is acting, on the desire for good for a specific person in a particular place at a particular time. Vaguely wanting good for people is the baseline, but love-in-action is when that desire for people's good translates into specific decisions about how we act. 

Then today's Gospel reminds us that this prioritization of action might be differentiated by our ability to make an impact but Jesus calls us to **not** let how much we _like_ someone enter into the hierarchy of priorities. We may not let the ill that someone has done to us in the past, or even the ill that they are doing to us in the present change their place in the hierarchy of action. If we are well positioned to act for someone's true well being, we are obligated to act on it, regardless of how much we like that person, how they have treated us in the past or treat us in the present, regardless of any expectation that they will help us in the future. 

We often do have a greater obligation to act for the wellbeing of those whose lives are closely linked with ours. And sometimes those whose lives are closely linked with ours are, in fact, the ones who have done the most evil to us. The story of Joseph and his brothers that we heard the conclusion to as our first reading certainly illustrates that. 

But I need to make clear what love of enemies is **not**. Loving our enemies does **not** mean embracing their agenda. We are called to love persons. We are called to desire what is good for a person, and to act on that desire. But if their agenda is evil, loving them doesn't mean promoting their agenda. In fact, it might mean opposing it. If someone has power, and is using that power to hurt people, it may well be the case that removing that person from power is promoting what is good for them. Loving our enemies might well mean opposing them, working to frustrate their plans, working against what they might *think* their interests are. But it cannot mean wishing for them to suffer or hoping for their eternal doom. We cannot give up a genuine care for what is truly good for them, and we can never will their suffering as an end. 

We are called to oppose evil, but not to oppose the people who do evil. We must desire good even for evildoers. And this is good because far too often, we **are** evildoers. It's easy to sort the world into good guys and bad guys but each of us do evil. When we persevere in resisting evil, we live out our baptismal covenant. If we condemn evildoers, we condemn ourselves. Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (sole-jha-NEET-sin) wrote that "[t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either--but right through every human heart--and through all human hearts." When we love our enemies, we act in the hope that they, and we, and all people will turn away from evil and do good. We act confident that through God, _all_ creation is redeemable. No one and nothing exists beyond God's power to save. 

When I was a child, every night I would pray for the repose of the souls of Judas Iscariot and Adolf Hitler. I certainly wasn't condoning their actions. I picked them because they were the two most evil people I could then imagine. I prayed for them in part because I believed that if they could eventually be redeemed and enter the reign of God, we all would be likely to do the same. I prayed that in the end, hell be empty. To love our enemies must at a minimum mean to never give up the hope of their redemption, to write no one off as unforgivable, irredeemable, outside God's love, or ours. 

Which brings us back to the psalmist. 

Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; 

do not be jealous of those who do wrong. 

For they shall soon wither like the grass, 

and like the green grass fade away. 

I need to start with a disclaimer here. It's not so much that I practice what I preach but that I preach what I need to practice. I am spending a lot of time this month fretting myself because of evildoers. The evil being done right now by people in positions of power to hurt the vulnerable and to wield power with explicit cruelness is causing me to do a whole lot of fretting. I'm certainly not jealous of the harm they are doing, but I am jealous of the power they hold and the ability to change things that they seem to currently enjoy but are choosing to use to inflict suffering. I find myself going back to the well that is the psalms again and again to draw deep nourishment in trying times. Morning after morning, night after night, the psalmist has been offering the words I need to hear to sustain me through these trying times. It is not because I am good at this, but precisely because I am not that I keep coming back to this prayer:  Do not fret yourself because of evildoers.

But if we love our enemies, this takes on another layer of meaning: "do not fret yourself because of evildoers" means yes, do not worry that they will remain in power forever, but also, if we love them, do not fret that they are beyond redemption. To pray that wicked soon wither like the grass does not have to mean we fail to love them. To pray that the wicked soon wither like the grass does not mean we pray for their suffering or their destruction. We must indeed pray for their redemption. It is good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people to proclaim that God casts down the mighty from the throne and sends the rich away empty. When we are mighty ones on the throne, when we are rich ones who hoard what others need to survive -- accusations that cling to me all too closely -- it is a blessing indeed to be separated from our ability to do harm. It is the first step on our road to redemption to pull us away from the evil we do. Do not fret yourself because of evildoers -- do not fret that they are condemned to remain as evildoers forever. Do not fret that their hearts will forever be hardened. Their power will fade, their ability to do evil will wither like the grass. God is already at work in accomplishing their salvation, just as God is at work in accomplishing ours. 

Prayer is good, and stories are powerful. 

Love does not end with prayers and stories;

love is action rooted in those stories and prayers. 

We can pray that God will cast the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, but can we participate in God's action? Do we have opportunities to resist the evil in the world? The spiritual forces that Jesus's followers have turned to across the centuries to strengthen us in resisting evil have been prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I will talk more about those as we approach Lent, but there is a particular fasting opportunity we could join in this week to resist the evil at play right now. 

This coming Friday, February 28, is a day that various organizers have called for as an economic blackout. A day to fast from spending money, at all if possible, or only on those most urgent emergency needs if necessary. The followers of Jesus's way have long observed Fridays as a day to refrain from various forms of consumption to mark that it was on a Friday that the powers and principalities of the empire of this world put Jesus to death to try to assert their claim to relevance. It is meet and right that we prayerfully consider this invitation to fast from consumer spending this Friday so that our prayers that the world might change might turn to action in bringing to birth a gentler, more loving, more humane world fit for God's creatures. 

Amen.