Pride Sunday 2025

 A sermon in three Acts. Act I: Kings

My imposter syndrome has many layers. 

As someone who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church and ordained in the Episcopal Church, the nagging voice in my head (or the actual voice of my grandmother) -- but are you a _real_ priest? As a trans woman who has transitioned socially but not yet medically, am I trans enough? Am I feminine enough? As someone who has been in awe of the Catholic Worker movement all my life but makes my living as an economics professor in the suburbs, am I radical enough, am I liberation-oriented enough to belong at St. Peter's? As someone who got a perfect score on my PSAT but haven't really built any of the humane institutions I aspired to see built in the world, have I done enough with the potential God gave me? The worries that I'm an imposter, the doubts that I'm not enough to belong here -- they're constant. 

By contrast, me as the speaker here today for Pride Sunday is totally different sort of fear that I don't belong. I'm definitely queer. As a trans person in 2025, no one would say "oh, you're just mainstream." I'm just so new at this -- at being out, at publicly acknowledging my queerness -- at seeing Pride month not as an occasion for fear that people might figure out that I'm not straight, but as an occasion to embrace, dare I even say celebrate the way God created me -- Pride Month is definitely for me, but I am just so new at this that I wonder if some other speaker today might have more to offer. But here we go: 

In our first lesson, Elijah said to Elisha, "Tell me what I may do for you before I am taken from you." Elisha said, "Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit." He responded, "You have asked a hard thing, yet if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not."

Legends have gone before us, whose mantles have struck the waters, parting them that we might pass through on dry ground.

We are enough. We are not the great ones of old who went before us, but we are God's people for our own day. But we stand where we stand because of those who went before us, because of those whose spirit we inherit. Our struggles for justice, for liberation, for life carry on because we inherit the spirit, perhaps even a double share, from those who struggled before us.

Yesterday, we celebrated a wedding here at Saint Peter's. Two beloved members of this congregation are now married, and both the church and the state recognize that union. Hallelujah! It has not always been thus.

On July 22, 1997, three same-sex couples in the State of Vermont filed a lawsuit claiming that their local communities' refusal to issue them marriage licenses violated the Vermont Constitution's equal protection clause. While six people filed the suit against the state and three municipalities within the state, the suit became known as Baker et alii (a Latin phrase meaning "and others") versus Vermont et alii, or more commonly, Baker v. Vermont.

On December 20, 1999, after a lengthy journey through the state court system, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the denial of marriage benefits to same-sex partners was a violation of the state constitution. The creation of civil partnerships in Vermont was a massive step toward marriage equality in this country. This week marked the ten year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges. Why then am I talking about Baker v. Vermont, which only applied to the state of Vermont, and didn't go all the way to allowing same sex partnerships to call themselves marriage?

Our struggles for justice, for liberation, for life carry on because we inherit the spirit, perhaps even a double share, from those who struggled before us.

This past Monday, The Ven. J. Stannard Baker, deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont serving at the cathedral in Burlington died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 79. I met Stan at General Convention last year. He chaired the liturgy and music committee, and I attended all the committee meetings. As I attended day after day of the 7am meetings, he started to recognize me there in the gallery and we got to talking. I can't say we were close friends, but we got to work together, and when he ran for a seat on the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, I spend a good part of the week talking up his candidacy to anyone who would listen, and he was indeed elected. We remained in touch via Facebook since then. Other friends of mine had been in a zoom meeting with him hours before his sudden death. We are all shocked. Stan was a tireless advocate for the "all the sacraments for all the people" movement, striving for marriage equality within the church. And Stan Baker was the lead plaintiff in the case Baker v. Vermont filed 29 years ago that got the ball rolling. Few people can claim to have done as much both for inclusive marriage rights r-i-g-h-t-s and inclusive marriage rites r-i-t-e-s than Stan. May we inherit a double share of his spirit.

Our struggles for justice, for liberation, for life carry on because we inherit the spirit, perhaps even a double share, from those who struggled before us. Rest in peace, Stan. We carry on your struggle.

Act II: Galatians

I was slightly amused when I saw that this reading from Galatians was prescribed by the lectionary for the day we had selected as Pride Sunday. While not one of the core six "clobber passages" of scripture often weaponized against queer folx, it's certainly "clobber-adjacent." It makes no direct reference to queerness or homosexuality. But it does say that the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, et cetera.

Even the notorious Revised Standard Version didn't translate any of these words as "homosexuality," a word that hadn't appeared in a bible translation before 1952. It takes a certain circular logic to make this a condemnation of queerness: If queerness is inherently sexual immorality or impurity, then in this passage, queerness is condemned as one of the works of the flesh, as opposed to the works of the spirit.

Without that circular reasoning, though, this passage from Galatians, with its commandment to love one another, and not devour one another, isn't anti-queer in any meaningful sense. If we start from the premise that anything described as unclean in Leviticus is inherently immoral, this passage would be telling us that having Pride Sunday -- a Sunday where we celebrate that we are proud of how God chose to create each of us -- is a bad thing. But if we take seriously the revelation to Peter in Acts 10 that distinguishes Levitical prohibitions against evil from Levitical prohibitions against uncleanliness, and commands us to not call anything impure that which God has made clean -- in that moral framework, non-hegemonic sexuality is no longer by definition "sexual immorality," and queer folx can be guided by this letter to the Galatians just as much as straight people.

So if we're not going to just say that sexual immorality is whatever it is that those icky queer people do, wink wink nudge nudge, then what _is_ this sexual immorality that is a work of flesh, and how is it different from loving one another, which is a fruit of the spirit? What is "gratifying the desires of the flesh" and what is "love, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and gentleness?"

Human sexuality, be it queer or straight, seems to have a lot to do with both the very real desires of the flesh, but also with loving one another in a way that can involve kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and gentleness. How do we, both queer and straight folx, deal with this distinction if we throw out the overly simplistic and harmful answer that "when married straight folx do it, it's holy, but for everybody else it's icky"?

Certainly consent is a beginning of the line between moral and immoral sexuality. Unless someone freely and enthusiastically consents, it is immoral to conscript them into someone else's sexual activity.

But that isn't the only line. That which is not enthusiastically consensual is immoral, but not everything that is consensual automatically becomes moral. A second piece that perhaps ironically is more relevant to people in heterosexual goings-on than many queer pairings is about the moral weight of creating human life.

Children deserve love and support. Sexual activity that doesn't take into account the serious responsibility of loving and caring for the children it may produce can be a failure to love -- not love of one's partner, but love for one's children. Queer activity that is erotic but not reproductive doesn't have this particular moral barrier, which means that despite the traditional presumption that "when married straight folx do it, it's holy, but for everybody else it's icky," queer sexuality might be actually less likely to be immoral than straight sexuality for this reason.

But there's a third dimension as well. Sexuality might be consensual, and not creating babies who don't get the love they deserve, and loving and faithful and generous and gentle and all that, but still be problematic for the same reason that any other good, pleasurable, enjoyable thing in creation can be problematic: it is always possible for one good thing to happen to the detriment of other good things. Just because something is good doesn't mean it is our calling. The cornerstone of this building is inscribed with a Latin phrase I learned well from my time teaching among the Jesuits: "ad majoram dei gloriam" -- to the _greater_ glory of God. Too much of one good thing can take away from our call to another greater good thing. If we spend too much time focusing on enjoying good food, or watching good television shows, or getting good rest, or, yes, engaging in good erotic activity, all these things are good, but they cease to be good if they distract us from other, perhaps higher good that we are called to do. Pleasures of the flesh -- be they culinary, erotic, sensual, artistic, material, or whatever -- are not inherently bad -- indeed, they can be very, very good, but not when the passions of the flesh become an obsession with that which is enjoyable to the extent that we are distracted and prevented from the other service God calls us to do in the world. Very few people have trouble choosing between good and bad. The challenge is to choose between two things that both have a component of good to them.

Which bring us to Act III: The Gospel

This following Jesus thing is serious business.

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the reign of God. No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the reign of God.

This whole "Pride in being the person God created me to be" thing is urgent because the Gospel takes everything we've got. And this is where I feel not an imposter but rather uniquely **qualified** to preach on an occasion like this, because I know from experience all too well that if we're not at peace with who we are, if we aren't ready to celebrate how God created us, if we're not proud of being whom God made -- it's a distraction from the work God has for us. If even a year or two ago someone told me I'd voluntarily preach a section of a sermon about sexual immorality when curling up in a hole and dying instead was an alternative, I would not have believed them. We can't talk about scripture authentically until we are at peace with whom God made us to be.

We need to be proud of God's creation because proclaiming the Good News will take nothing less than our whole authentic being. When we're afraid that people might see our authentic selves, we don't bring our whole authentic selves to God's work. We've got our hand on the plow, but we're always looking back over our shoulder, afraid that if we do this or that in service to the Gospel, people might find out who we really are.

I know this. I've lived this.

When I was afraid that people would figure out that the person God made that was me wasn't a straight, cis-heterosexual male, I was less able to proclaim the Good News with all my being. Because I needed to hide my being -- from others and from myself. If I didn't believe that God loved me -- just as God created me -- how can I authentically tell everyone else that God loves them too, just as they are. Now is God calling me to transform? Of course. God loves us as we are, and God calls us to grow to new things. Is God calling me to sexuality? Is God calling me to be a nun? What does God have in store for me? I have no idea. Discernment is ongoing, thanks be to God. But I can only commit to the journey when I can be proud of what God has created in me.

We celebrate Pride Sunday not because we indulge the desires of the flesh and exalt ourselves, as some critics of Pride events seem to think. We are proud not of our own works, but of our God, who created each of us, from the malest male to the femalest female and everything in between. The God who separated light from darkness and made the dawn and dusk sing for joy looked at this beautiful, diverse creation, with all sorts of genders and all sorts of sexualities, and all sorts of diversity of every imaginable dimension, and says that it is very, very good. We celebrate that today. We are proud to be a part of what God hath wrought: we are each a beloved part of this creation, so dearly loved and cherished by our creator God. Amen.

If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly

 

Easter 4

At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. Usually we translate things to make them clearer to us. But today we might have a better idea what was going on if we didn’t translate the title of this feast. The Hebrew word for “Dedication” is Hanukkah. At that time, the festival of Hanukkah took place in Jerusalem. In this Hanukkah story, Jesus is contrasting the actions of the temple leaders in his day with the actions of the Maccabees almost 200 years earlier.

It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. And the religious leaders in the temple gathered around Jesus and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

And Jesus answers them: “You ask if I am the messiah, as if you were part of my messianic project: to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners. The works that I do in the name of God testify to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. You’re not working on the same project that I am.

The temple was the site of offerings to God: grain and fruit and animals. Of that which was offered to God, some of it was burnt entirely, to symbolize a total offering to God but that's not how most offerings worked. Some of the things that were offered on the altar then went to the priests, so that their families could eat, because we didn't want a bunch of starving Levites. But the overwhelming majority of offerings in the temple, both Judaism, and in other ancient religions that involved animal sacrifice, the animal was sacrificed, then prepared as a feast for all the faithful. The practice here at Saint Peter's that any religious celebration should involve a community potluck is an ancient one.

But in Jesus's time, a fourth destination for the food had crept into the list, one that literally took food off the table from the community feasts that hungry folks rely on. The temple offerings were also how the Roman tribute was paid. The temple served as a storehouse for wealth extracted from the Judean peasants to be taken to Rome. It was literally the site from which the spoils of empire were seized, a willing player in the enrichment of Rome at the cost of the Judaeans.

When Jesus says “The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.” Jesus is saying “you are harvesting people’s offerings and letting the empire extract a tribute from what is given to the temple. I am proclaiming an end to oppression, exploitation, and empire. We are not the same!”

The religious leaders presumed they were on the same side as Jesus because they all were in the temple purporting to praise the Holy One. But not everyone who embraces the trappings of religion – not even those who use our holy language and metaphor and history and tradition and scripture – not everyone who embraces these things is actually on the side of good. Jesus told the religious leaders of his age, “if you were part of the Messianic flock, you’d already know I’m the Messiah.” Not everyone who comes to Jesus saying “Lord, Lord” actually seeks to follow the Jesus who sets us free. Not everyone who claims to be religious is actually worshipping our God of liberation. There’s a good chance that most of us who call ourselves “Christians” aren’t, most of the time!

It is no coincidence this dialogue happened at the feast of Hanukkah. In the year 164 BCE, the Seleucid empire tried to eradicate Judaism from The Land. They desecrated the temple with unclean offerings and tried to co-opt it to the worship of foreign gods and the exploitation of the people. But the Maccabee brothers recaptured the temple and wanted to rededicate it to the Holy One. They only had enough oil for a single night, but the rededication ceremony was supposed to last for eight nights to purify a space that had been desecrated. And when they tried to re-sanctify the space for the Holy One, a Great Miracle Happened There. The oil, only enough to burn for a single night, lasted the whole eight nights needed to purify the temple, re-dedicating it to the One who sets us free.

When Jesus called out the temple leaders on the feast of Hanukkah, the contrast between the Maccabees’ resistance to empire and the temple leaders of his day’s collaboration with empire stood in sharp contrast. Sometimes we hunger for a better world and sometimes we want to draw a crude forgery of God's stamp of approval on the inhumane systems we have in place. Sometimes we try to worship a God who hungers for justice and sometimes we want to adopt a domesticated version of God as the mascot for our empires. Sometimes the stories we tell about God are the caffeine that excites us to action and sometimes religion is the opiate of the masses. And I'm not even talking about different people; these tendencies are at war within each of us. Sometimes it's the same folx who shout "Hosannah" and "Crucify him!" They are both us. We are them.

When we’re part of the messiah's flock, we’re doing the messiah's work, not inflicting the damage that the messiah is coming to undo. But we are all complicit in the structures that terrorize God's beloved people. As Daniel Berrigan says, the goal is to find ways to be less complicit. We have all in one way or another made our peace with the powers and principalities that Jesus has come to upend. We are fighting for a place at tables Jesus came to flip over. We can’t stop doing that altogether, but how can we do that less? How can our life as Church be an ongoing project to find ways together to live less exploitatively?

The Revelation to St. John tells us: I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God. One of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "Sir, you are the one who knows." Then he said to me, "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal. For this reason they are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

This passage follows the accounts of a series of cataclysmic disasters, including the four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. The survivors of these great ordeals are the ones described in this passage. After the gut-wrenching accounts of devastation, this passage marks a respite: the survivors of the horrors described in the book worship the lamb on the throne, their shepherd, who will protect them from harm, wipe away their tears and ensure they will no longer hunger nor thirst.

John, the author of this particular Book of Revelation, lived in the time that the Roman emperor Domitian actively persecuted followers of the Way of Jesus for their beliefs. John was exiled to the Island of Patmos – exile is when a government takes someone and forcibly removes them from the land where they live – and there he experienced this revelation, but many others were tortured and killed. John had these visions revealed to him there. The Greek word for vision or revelation is “apocalypse”.

Apocalypse is a particular genre of religious writing. Apocalypse in its original context, as I said, means revelation or vision in general; it doesn’t specifically refer to disasters or the end of the world. The word took on that meaning because of the contents of the most famous work in that genre: the very one we’re reading from today. The genre is generally written by and for people in disturbing times. The message to people in the midst of times when it feels like the world is falling apart is this: you’re not wrong. The world is indeed falling apart. But God is in charge, and even in the midst of unspeakable horrors, good will ultimately triumph over evil, so persevere in faith.

When I was younger, I was grateful that apocalyptic literature didn’t make sense to me. Not having lived through anything resembling the tumult and horrors described in the book, I couldn’t imagine how such disturbing stories could be comforting words in the right context. I was grateful the genre existed for people who needed it, but prayed that I never would. But here we are…

As we look about us now, the literature of apocalypse is very much a part of the full armor of light by which we might retain our sanity and our faith to resist the current horrors. O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down. Even so, Lord Jesus quickly come! As the leaders of empire – the ones who are anti-Christ –commit new abominations daily that were previously unimaginable, we, like the faithful of old, are encouraged to take heart: though it may seem that the forces of evil are rampant, they cannot win, even though they appear to triumph.

This passage ends by assuring the listeners that the lamb will be the shepherd. The Incarnation means that the one to care for the wounded, traumatized survivors of the horrors of empire is not another ruler over them, but literally one of their fellow sheep. The is the word to the hurting people of John’s day. This is the word to the people who need to hear it today: Your shepherd isn’t yet another outside force trying to exploit you, but a God who has become one of you.

The Lamb on the center of the throne will be your shepherd. Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!

Conventional shepherds take care of their sheep – but why do shepherds take care of their sheep? Shepherds take care of their sheep so that they can fleece them, breed them, and ultimately, slaughter them. Shepherds tend to their sheep, but the sheep are a means, and not an end. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is ultimately an exploitative one. There’s a reason shepherd’s pie is made with lamb meat.

But what Jesus is proposing is different. When Jesus says “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand,” he’s not talking about the exploitative shepherd sheep relationship. He’s certainly not talking about the relationship the temple leaders have with their flock, where they take offerings and then turn them over to the Romans as tribute.

The shepherd indeed cares for the sheep and the shepherd indeed extracts from the sheep, but Jesus promises that we traumatized sheep will have a different relationship with our shepherd than that of the temple leaders, and sadly, that of too many religious leaders today. When the church cares for the flock to bring us to eternal life, to the life and life abundant that Jesus longs that we have, we are indeed Jesus’s flock. We indeed participate in that messianic ministry. But when we tend the sheep so we can feed them to the insatiable appetite of empire, when we raise the sheep up not to liberation but to exploitation, and slap the stamp of God’s approval on the filthy rotten systems of oppression, we do not know Jesus, and we do not belong to his sheep.

The commoditization of care relationships vs care as the basis for liberation comes to light in a different dimension in the contrasting observations of the feast day American Civic Religion celebrates today. Mother’s Day began through the work of peace activists Ann Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe as a campaign by mothers that their sons and husbands not be sent away to die in wars killing other mothers’ sons and husbands. Efforts to atomize the day into separate isolated households sentimentally using mass consumption to celebrate an alienated, individualized ideal of motherhood fly in the face of the communitarian collective action that marks the day’s origins. In civic religion just as in the worship of God, we face a choice between ritual as numbing analgesic to make us content with the pain of inhumanity or ritual as empowerment to collective action toward liberation.

Our false worship of God can seduce us by the siren song of empire, or our authentic worship of God can be the trumpet in the morning, the clarion call that wakes us up to strive for justice. There are flocks on their way to being fleeced and slaughtered, numbed into tranquil acquiescence by the promise of pie in the sky when they die, and there are flocks that are healed and pastured so they have the strength to build a better world. Both flocks are plentiful, but only one of these flocks is what Jesus is calling us to be. The works Jesus does in the name of God testify to him; if we are of Jesus’s flock, we will see and be drawn to participate in God’s work of liberation, and believe in Christ who sets us free.

Jesus’s sheep hear his voice. He knows them, and they follow him. He gives them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of his hand. They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

May we never forget whom we follow. May we never be seduced by the apologists for empire, but follow the banner of the lamb who leads us to life, and life abundant. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen!

Hosanna

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

Back when we were slaves to Pharaoh

it was God who freedom bought us

All the chariots sent to harry us 

Cast into the Red Sea waters.

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

When the Philistines great champion

Made our armies quake with dread

It was God's great truth a shepherd youth

Could strike Goliath dead.

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

My soul magnifies you savior God, 

my spirit sings your praise.

They'll confess how you have blessed 

me from now 'till the end of days.

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

For me you, whose name is holy,

Have done great and wondrous things

And in every year all those who fear

you know what mercy brings.

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

Your strong arm has scattered proud ones

from their hearts’ imagined height,

Raised the humble but you tumble

mighty rulers in your sight.

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

In you hungry ones find good things

Rich ones leave and do not dine

You do not forget your promise yet

To Abraham’s long line

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory

 

Next year in the holy city

we will gather in your sight

and at this great feast even the least

shall know your saving might

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory 

 

You have been our liberation

From the ancients ‘till our days

Our great Holy One lifts lowly ones

Therefore we sing your praise.

 

Shout Hosanna shout Hosanna

It is you who set us free

And by your design from David's line

Will come our victory

Detroit Lorica

 I'm obviously drawing inspiration from other translations of St. Patrick's Lorica, but I kind of like this, at least for a first draft:

At Waawiyatanong in this hour
I name the Three-In-One and bind
unto myself the heavenly power
that in our God alone we find.

Unto myself I bind today
the power of Word made Flesh, baptized,
killed on the cross, in the tomb laid
raised from the dead, raised to the skies,

Who comes to judge the quick and dead,
whose life gives hope and sets us free,
whose reign breaks forth just as he said:
This power today I bind to me.

I bind unto myself today
the power that comes when Seraphs love,
Archangels serve, Angels obey,
and Cherubs worship God above,

The power gained from our forebears' prayers,
the prophets' words, the apostles' preaching
the witness each confessor bears
the righteous' actions, pure souls' teaching.

I place the power of heaven today,
all fire's strength, the sun's bright glow,
the swift wind blowing on its way,
the flashing lightning, whitest snow,

By God's strong help, aided by grace
The sea's great depth, the hard rocks' starkness,
Even the stable earth I place
Between myself and present darkness.

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.