Jonah was angry

 Jonah was angry.

Angry enough to die.

God had sent Jonah to preach repentance to Nineveh, and Jonah didn’t like it one bit.

Jonah said no. Jonah ran the other direction. And God drafted Jonah anyway.

And so reluctantly, against his will, Jonah preached God’s message to Nineveh: Repent, or God will destroy your city in forty days.

This most successful of prophets declared God’s word, and miraculously, Nineveh listened. Miraculously, Nineveh obeyed. Miraculously, Nineveh declared a fast, and asked for God’s forgiveness.

And miraculously, God forgave.

God forgave even Nineveh. God forgave even Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, the slaughterer of the lost tribes of Israel.

And Jonah was angry.

Angry enough to die.

How could God forgive Nineveh?

Nineveh! Forgiven? Impossible.

Jonah wasn’t frustrated.

Jonah wasn’t confused.

Jonah wasn’t petty.

Jonah was furious.

Jonah was livid.

Angry enough to die.

What good was a God that would forgive *Nineveh*?

Jonah was angry with the fury of the oppressed.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone who has been treated as less than human.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone whose family had been torn apart.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone whose loved ones had been killed or left to die.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone whose culture, whose people had been annihilated.

The fury Jonah had at the Assyrians was only matched by the fury Jonah had at God for suggesting that the Assyrians could be forgiven. The idea that Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire – Nineveh, inventor of tactics for imperial genocide – Nineveh, scourge of the Fertile Crescent – Nineveh, who killed and culturally erased the Kingdom of Israel, who singlehandedly caused the “lost tribes of Israel” to be Lost – the idea that Nineveh could repent – and be forgiven – this was too much for Jonah to bear.

What good is God’s justice if it doesn’t condemn a genocidal killer like Nineveh?

What good is God’s anger if it fails to be aroused against so thorough an evil?

What good is the wrath of God if it fails to smite this sadistic tormentor of an empire that slaughters God’s people and obliterates God’s chosen kingdom?

What good is such a God if in this moment of consequence, God fails to condemn the evildoer?

How could God’s presence be welcoming to the oppressed if God so willingly welcomes the oppressors?

The story of Jonah is set before the fall of the Northern Kingdom, but it was written afterward. God had planned, had promised to destroy Nineveh for its wickedness, but when Jonah begrudgingly preached repentance, Nineveh repented, and God turned aside the destruction planned for Nineveh.

What was the cost of Nineveh being spared? How many victims of genocide would have survived if Nineveh had been destroyed? Would the Northern Kingdom have not fallen? Would the lost tribes not be lost? Judaism is called Judaism today because of the twelve tribes, only the tribe of Judah remains. Nineveh caused the very name and identity of God’s chosen people to be altered to a tiny subset of where it started. What kind of God can truly forgive Nineveh? What does it mean to worship such a God? Can God hear the cries of the oppressed and still pardon the oppressor?

Jonah was angry with the fury of the oppressed at a God whose divine inclusiveness left Jonah out in the blazing heat, unwilling to embrace a God who could embrace evildoers and oppressors, even if they allegedly repented.

This is the story of how reconciliation begins.

This is the story of how redemption begins.

This is the story of how we begin to remember how to love.

This isn’t the end.

God’s wrath is turned back in this story, but this isn’t the fullness of salvation. Not for Nineveh. Not for Jonah. This story is only the beginning. The pause in wrath, the pause in judgment that opens the door for transformation.

Nineveh fasted. They acknowledged their evil. They turned to God.

God didn’t say all is well. God didn’t say the effects of their sin were taken away. What happened here is an opening. In acknowledging their guilt, in acknowledging the evil they were capable of, God finds a crack in the armor the Assyrians build around their hearts. The briefest of openings, a way in for God. The very beginning of transformation.

Enough for God to say that there is something to work with. Enough for God to conclude that Nineveh’s destruction is not the only possible solution. If Nineveh is capable of a moment of repentance, there is room for God to work. If Nineveh is capable of a moment of repentance, there is hope for even us.

Jonah is not wrong about Nineveh’s evil. The road to their sanctification is very very very long. All is not well because of this one decision by the King of Nineveh.

Neither Jonah nor the Assyrians were ready to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jonah needed healing. Jonah cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven until he can forgive, and he cannot forgive until he can heal. Until he can see himself as the fully human member of a family and culture and nation that the Assyrians denied he was. Jonah’s anger is his soul speaking the truth: the Assyrian degradation of their conquered peoples is wrong, and the core of our being ought to cry out in protest against the dehumanization led by Nineveh. That anger declares a truth: the marginalized, the dehumanized, the oppressed, the downtrodden are beloved children of God, and any empire that treats them as less than this is profoundly wrong, profoundly not okay. That anger has to speak its truth: when we dehumanize God’s beloved children, we rend the very fabric of the universe, and if these voices were silenced, the very stones would cry out. Jonah cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven until he can forgive, but expressing and not repressing this anger is a vital step on the road to forgiveness. Victims of violence and oppression must declare their angry truth that despite the empire treating them as if their lives count for nothing, the lives of each marginalized, discounted child of God matter.

Any healing, any reconciliation, any sanctification, any salvation for the oppressor must include a thorough conversion to affirm from the core of their being that those they discounted as acceptable collateral damage in maintaining the well-oiled cogs of the imperial machine are, in fact, lives that matter: beloved children of God and not inconvenient obstacles to wealth and order or means of expansion of wealth or power. Nineveh’s redemption and our own begins, not ends, with acknowledging that the carefully planned violence of their empire is supremely wicked and utterly foreign to the will of God, as every empire is. There is a long road ahead of us still if we are to turn from our wicked ways, and then to make amends. There is a long road ahead for the people of Nineveh if we are to convert to believe that the lives of conquered people matter. And it is an unlikely road for us to travel. Our power, their wealth, our existence as an empire depends on the people of Nineveh sharing widespread belief that the people they conquer are means to the end of the wealth and power and way of life of the city of Nineveh, and not fully human children of God whose lives count just as much as those of the imperial race. Accepting a conversion that threatens our very way of life is no easy task. But without it, Nineveh’s moment of repentance, their fast, their brief turn to God will all amount to nothing.

God longs to reconcile all people, to restore all creation to the presence of God. And yet within the chapters of this story, neither Jonah nor Nineveh are ready to dwell together in the new earth ruled from the new heaven that God is creating. Both Jonah and Nineveh, both trespassed and trespasser, both sinned against and sinner need conversion, transformation, and reconciliation before they can dwell together in the Kingdom of God.

We are both Jonah and Nineveh in this story, and the book of Jonah doesn’t give us a happy ending for either. Jonah did not forgive by the end of the book. Nineveh repented in the book but went on to persist in their destructive ways. 

Jonah’s anger is real and necessary, but it can’t be the end of the story if the story is to lead to redemption. Nineveh’s repentance is real and necessary, but it can’t be the end of the story if the story if to lead to redemption. Anger must be followed by truth, healing, and ultimately reconciliation, if not in this world then in the next to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Repentance must lead to amendment of life, penitence, atonement, and reconciliation, again, if not in this world then in the next, or we cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. But this story gives both the oppressor and the unforgiving the hope that no matter how much any of us are resistant to God’s redemptive project, no matter how much we resent those who have wronged us, no matter how much we persist in our sin and go on failing to recognize the full humanity of those we would write off as expendable – the only sign Jesus has to give us is the sign of Jonah, the sign that God is more persistent than we are stubborn. In the end, we put our hope in God’s steadfastness. Amen.

Well done, good and faithful servants

 Last week I told you about Ezekiel and I told you how terrifying it is to preach, because if God calls upon me to speak out against the demons and if I fail to do so then woe be unto me! My job as priest, terrifyingly, often calls upon me to speak on behalf of God. This is a fearsome thing to be called upon to do, to proclaim a message from God Almighty. And it's a role I'm still growing into. I had only been a priest for a few weeks when I was sent to you. One hard thing for me about this pandemic has been the fact that until March, I've had Bill by my side for almost every Eucharist I've ever celebrated. I had to learn quickly what to do without Bill and the rest of our amazing Altar Guild setting everything up and without Bill making sure everything appears in the right place at the right time. I'm still growing into my role as priest, as a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips, as Isaiah put it, who is nonetheless called upon to proclaim the word of God.

In our tradition, there are three messages from God we specifically reserve for priests to deliver, the ABCs of sacerdotal or priestly ministry. Absolution, blessing, and consecration. Absolution: your sins + are forgiven; go in peace. Blessing: the blessing of God Almighty, Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you always. And consecration: take, eat: this is my body, given for you. I don't forgive your sins; God does that. I don't bless you; God does that. I don't make bread and wine into the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; God does that. But as a priest, I'm called to speak on behalf of God from time to time: to declare to you the good news that God has wrought in our midst. God forgives you. God blesses you. God is present with you in flesh and blood. I don't make these happen. I'm not forgiving or blessing or consecrating. I'm just the messenger.

Our lessons today are powerful stories about forgiveness and its importance. Hear them. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. But unusually, today’s lessons are not what God is calling me to preach about today. 

Instead, I need to proclaim a different message today. Last week I had to talk about the false gods in our midst, the demons that can lead us astray. That warning is real, and the demons that turn us from love are real and dangerous. But today, on this rather dark anniversary, I have more cheerful news to proclaim to you. I stand before you as your priest to declare God's blessing: well done, good and faithful servants. Well done.

This is hard to believe, but it’s been half a year now since this crazy crisis began here and the world as we knew it stopped. It’s been an unimaginable six months that we have not been able to do almost ANYTHING in quite the way we’ve been accustomed to doing it as a church. Despite this, St. Paul’s has been able to continue its ministry through this Coronatide.  The world still needs our prayer and service, perhaps more than ever. These past six months have been a challenge, but this congregation has risen to the demands of our day and proclaimed the good news to a world that needs to hear it in ways that we might not have dreamt of a mere six months ago. I certainly hadn’t.

It wouldn’t have happened without a lot of people practicing their faith in all sorts of ways, some of them new and quite unanticipated, using their gifts to advance the kingdom of God. A lot of the people practicing their faith in all these varied ways don’t like attention called to them, so I’m not going to name names. But the canons call upon faithful Christians to work, pray, and give for the spread of the Kingdom of God, and we’ve seen so, so many examples of people stretching outside the bounds of the familiar to do just that. And I personally want to say think you, because your faith in action inspires me. The ways I see people in this church living our their faith teaches me what I can aspire to and hope for in my own life of faith. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and brothers and sisters, you are all among those witnesses.

First of all, people stepped up with praying. We’ve had a greater number of people at services in half a year since the pandemic hit than we have in many entire years. For a while we had daily services, praying for the sick, the dying, the dead, the front line workers, the mourning, the lonely, the fearful, those making decisions, and those in need. We’ve gathered electronically in ways none of us ever expected to try. We’ve had outdoor gatherings in person without our beloved music and worship space. We’ve tried to learn new technologies and new ways of gathering. People have stepped up as readers and offered their prayers. To everyone who has been praying, thank you.

Secondly, people found safe ways to keep up the physical work of maintaining our church and garden and grounds. Christians here have practiced their faith by tending to the lawn and the gardens and even the building. Plumbing has been fixed, surfaces have been sterilized, vegetables have been planted and watered and weeded and harvested and delivered, grass has been mowed, trees have been trimmed – and all of this has been done by people here practicing their faith. Thank you for showing me how trimming trees and mounding potatoes and wiping door handles and mowing grass is all prayer.

Third, people have found ways to continue our call to serve others. One spectacularly unrewarding but essential form of service is everything everyone has done to reduce the spread of disease. Staying home might not feel like a heroic act of love and service, but you do now know how many lives you may have saved by eliminating inessential contact. Difficultly, for many of you, that meant refraining even from ministries at the church that had to take a fallow season. That wasn’t what Milton had in mind when he said, “They also serve who only stand and wait,” but it is nonetheless true. Standing and waiting to slow the spread of disease has been a form of love of neighbor and service to the world. But your service did not stop there. When I’ve talked to people, I’ve heard stories about how people from this congregations have been checking in on people in need. How you’ve helped people move and get to appointments and stay connected. I know about your outreach to Grace House despite the fact that we couldn’t travel there this summer. I know that people have demonstrated to support people of color in our community. I know people have read and joined discussions to better inform themselves about issues afflicting the world, and some of you have recommended things for me to read too. I know what you’ve done to continue to serve Samaritan House. Your generosity in caring for each other and all people even at risk to your own health. I know some of what you’ve done to encourage one another. And I know how discreet so many of you try to be in this service, so I don’t even know how much I don’t know about. But God does. To everyone who has continued in our call to work in service to the world in so many ways during this pandemic, thank you for both your service and your example. Don’t hide your lamp under a bushel basket; let it shine.

And fourth, somehow through all this craziness, through loss of normal settings for employment and school and even friendship, through disruptions of every sort and turmoil in financial markets, the church bank account has remained solvent. That isn’t miraculous manna from heaven; that happened because of people’s diligence and generosity and commitment. People continued to send in their pledges and contributions, despite multiple changes in procedures. People stepped up when they could with new particularly generous donations to address particular crises. Your faithful stewardship of the money God has entrusted to you has enabled the church to continue to pay its bills and serve this community. Thank you for your stewardship. Thank you for enabling this parish to continue its work.

As your priest, my job here today is to look back on our ministry over the past half a year in exile from the usual shape of our beloved community and proclaim to you God's blessing: Well done, good and faithful servants. For six months, you have labored faithfully in exile from normalcy. For six months, you have bourn witness to God’s love in a wounded world. You have been faithful ministers of the Gospel in this troubled time. I am not a prophet, nor a prophet's son (I’m not even a herdsman or dresser of sycamore trees). I have no word from God about the things to come. There are no signs for us to see; there is no prophet left; there is not one among us who knows how long this will go on. But you have been faithful for the past six months, and we have found a way to sing the Lord’s song upon alien circumstances. Now I call upon you to be faithful again going forward into the unknown ministry to which God calls us in the next chapters.

And so with the Psalmist, we pray:

Restore us, O God of hosts; *

show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

You were once gracious to your land, O Lord, *

you restored the good fortune of Jacob. 

You forgave the iniquity of your people * 

and blotted out all their sins.

You withdrew all your fury *

and turned yourself from your wrathful indignation.

Restore **us** then, O God our Savior; * 

let your anger depart from us.

Will you be displeased with us for ever? *

will you prolong your anger from age to age?

Will you not give us life again, *

that your people may rejoice in you?

Show us your mercy, O Lord, * 

and grant us your salvation.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit

As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. 

Amen.

—

I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, * 

for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.

Truly, his salvation is very near to those who fear him, * 

that his glory may dwell in our land.

Mercy and truth have met together; * 

righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Truth shall spring up from the earth, *

and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

The Lord will indeed grant prosperity, * 

and our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness shall go before him, *

and peace shall be a pathway for his feet.

False Gods of the American pantheon

This was one of the most intimidating weeks to write a sermon, because this reading from Ezekiel is downright terrifying, where it says if God calls someone to preach the word, and I don't say all the things that I'm supposed to say, then it's going to be my fault if you aren't redeemed. So if I leave out important things that I'm supposed to preach about, and all of you aren't redeemed because of it, then God is going to hold me personally accountable for it.

So I went through a lot of drafts of the sermon this week, because this is just a downright terrifying reading. Before you think, "Well good, that's his problem not ours," I hate to break it to you, but God is calling all of us to proclaim the good news to the people in our lives. If any of us are failing to deliver the message that God has for us, then we're all on the hook for not doing what God is asking us to do and not proclaiming the good news.

I'm actually going to start with the bad news. You might think, "Why is he starting with bad news; this is supposed to be about the good news." I do have to start with the challenging part, but I want to tell you that this is going to end in a place that we've been before. This is going to end where, as Linda read for us in the second reading today, it's really all about loving one another. That's going to be where we end up, but it's going to take a little bit time before we get there, so just be patient, but know that I'm not leading youon a wild goose chase here. We are talking about God's love, and that's that's where we've been, and that's where we're going.

I do need to start by talking about the fact that Ezekiel was sent to Israel to warn the people of Israel that they were worshiping false gods. It's really a sad thing, but in our society today there are some false gods that we tend to worship, and what's even worse is we worship these false gods and we call them Jesus.

We worship these false gods and we call them Jesus, but they're really not Jesus. They're really demons. They're really things that lead us away from loving one another. In our American pantheon of the gods that we worship here in the United States, I've got five of them, and I made a list and because you know, thanks to Ezekiel, I'm terrified of leaving things off the list here. So I've got five of them that I've come up with that we need to be careful of: five false gods of the American pantheon. When we worship them, it turns us away from loving our neighbor as ourself.

As Saint Paul reminds us in the letter to the Romans, "the one who the one who loves neighbor as himself fulfills the law. Love does no wrong to the neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." So just keep that in mind here. We've got these five demons. There's probably others, but there are five that I that I came up with this week as we were praying over this that we need to make sure that we're not worshiping.

The first one on this list here is the demon of peace through strength. This is the Roman Empire in a nutshell: the world will be at peace when the powerful can crush anyone who would rise up against them. In the world, this can look like empire, and in our own country, this can come this can look like we're worshiping law and order. When we worship peace through strength, we're saying it's not love and service that is what leads us to salvation; it's crushing anybody who would disrupt things. Sometimes we call this "American Jesus" here. This is not really what Jesus was all about. Jesus died on the cross. Jesus was about vulnerability, and not peace through strength.

Now the second demon that we tend to worship is the demon of prosperity through wealth. How do we find our salvation? By making enough money. By saving enough money. And if we've stored up enough for ourselves, then we'll be okay. Then we can buy all the things that we need. This is the worship of mammon. Sometimes we call this "rich Jesus."  In this worldview, Jesus is smiling on us if we have wealth, and therefore we accumulate wealth, and then we know that we're in God's favor.

The third demon we need to watch out for is dominance through tribe. How do we make sure that we're okay? We make sure that our people are victorious. This could look like a particularly perverse form of patriotism. This could look like white supremacism. This demon claims that Jesus is one of our tribe, and not one of those people out there. We paint pictures of "White Jesus" and think they're the real thing. We've got to make sure that that's not what our faith leads us.

The fourth demon is demon of meaning through pleasure. Hedonism. If it feels good, do it. That's also something that can lead us astray from following Jesus, and it's all about just consuming things that make us happy, and not about service. Unfortunately (or fortunately, because it's real), love often involves doing things that don't make us immediately satisfied. Getting up in the middle of the night with somebody who's sick is not the most immediately satisfying and joyful thing in the world. It might be fulfilling. It's definitely an act of love, but it's not what most people would put on their list of, "What am I going to do on my ideal day? I think I'm going to get up in the middle of the night and help somebody who's not feeling well." Sometimes, though, that's exactly where love leads us. 

The fifth demon is the demon of salvation through our own efforts. We might call that "DIY Jesus" – Do it yourself Jesus. This is when we worship self-reliance, and we don't realize that we have to put our trust fully in God's grace.

So these five demons can lead us astray. These five demons are very present in our popular culture and, the problem with each of these five demons is that they turn us away from what Saint Paul tells us in the letter to the Romans: "Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another, for the one who loves has fulfilled the law."

To love one another could look like lots of different things, but ultimately what it really means to love someone is to deeply desire that that person thrives, and lives, and lives abundantly. To really desire good for someone is to love them. If we really desire good for someone, then that's not just an opinion we have – "oh yeah, I hope good things happen to you." If we really desire it, if we really long for it, then it's going to shape our actions. So not only do we say, "oh yeah, we want that," but we act to make it happen. We act to try to promote the well-being of other people. When we act out of love then, as Saint Paul said to the Romans, "Love does no wrong to someone." Love means that we never desire ill for somebody. Jesus starts by telling us that we're supposed to love our friends our neighbors, but then it gets harder when he tells us that we're supposed to love our enemies too. We're supposed to desire good for everyone. We're supposed to work for the good for everyone. There's no one we can push aside and say, "Well, we don't care about that person. Well, they're not one of ours. Well, they're not the ones that we care about." We really need to desire. and work for the good of all humankind.

God didn't create us to be at each other's throats. God created us to live in love with one another, and when we do that – when we put on our Lord Jesus Christ instead of quarreling and jealousy – what we put on is the full armor of light. What that means is we are transformed into people of love. We are transformed into people whose instinctive action is to act in the interest of everyone. To act out of love for one another.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not there yet. I'm working on it. There are some days I do a great job acting out of love for other people, and there are some days that I don't. But God has forgiven us for our sins, and God is actively working to transform us into people of the kingdom of heaven. Every time we do acts of service, we're practicing being a person of love. Every time we praise God, we're practicing being a person of love. Every time we practice singing, and sing our praise to God, we're practicing being a person of love. We're rehearsing for the kingdom of heaven, because we can't live in the new heaven and the new earth until we've been born anew in love. We can't live there as long as we are slave to sin. We can't live there as long as our actions and our desires aren't for the good of all others.

As long as we have a "them" in our mind that we don't want good for, there isn't room for us in the kingdom of heaven.

But the good news is, as Ezekiel, said the Lord God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked but wants the wicked to turn from their ways and live – and by live I don't just mean not physically die, because we're all going to physically die, but there's a resurrection coming. Death does not have the final word. When we're born anew in this resurrection, Jesus wants us to be resurrected so that we can live in the kingdom of heaven, and not resurrected but exiled from the kingdom of heaven: The resurrection of eternal death, where we're cast out. That's not what God wants for us. God wants us to be reconciled. To turn back from our evil ways, and embrace, as Saint Paul says to the Romans, love from one another. That is what we are called to be. That is what we are called to do.

God's grace gives us opportunity after opportunity to turn away from the demons that distract us from God and to embrace love. Tt takes practice, and then more practice, and then more practice, and maybe by the time we're done with this life we'll have it down. Maybe we'll still need even more practice in the afterlife. Our hope though is that God is far more patient than we are stubborn. Our hope is that God will not be done working on us until each of us is reconciled to God's love. Until each of us is made whole, so that we can live in the kingdom of heaven.

Our gospel today talks about conflict, and conflict is going to happen. It talks about all the different steps to resolve conflict, and then it says if after all that you still can't resolve conflict with someone, treat them as a tax collector and a Gentile. You might think that means write them off: have nothing to do with them anymore. But remember, this is Matthew's gospel. And what was Matthew's job before Jesus called him? He was a tax collector. So this is the gospel according to the former outcast. This is the gospel according to Saint Matthew. And so when Jesus says treat someone as a tax collector and a Gentile, he doesn't mean have nothing to do with them. He means maybe you need some temporary boundaries so that they don't bring you down, but this isn't writing them off. This is having some space. Ultimately, what does God want from tax collectors and Gentiles? God wants to redeem them! This may be someone that we're not currently reconciled to, but we still very much hope and long that God grant us reconciliation with.

The good news here is that even if we're not ready for the kingdom of heaven yet, God is still working on us. God is still transforming us, and helping us to put on the full armor of light, so that we, too, can be people who live so that our only rule is to love one another. Amen.

On Sainthood 

Wow. This is not what I thought would completely take over my mind today. But a train (of thought) left one city headed north at 25 miles per hour, and another train left another city headed east at 30 miles per hour, and they both arrived at the feast of William Porcher Dubose yesterday and now this is all I can think about this morning. So I’m going to write a few thoughts down.

This is a draft. People will point things out that they disagree with. Some of them I will not go along with, and they will strengthen my resolve. Others will point out things I’ve overlooked and I’ll change my thoughts accordingly. So I’ll probably take this down eventually and replace it with something that reflects my evolved thinking. But I need to set some thoughts down now to help sort out what I believe.

What are saints, and what is the role of the communion of saints in the life of the church?

In my understanding, we are now alive. We are an embodied soul, an ensouled body. This unified combination of body and soul is who we are whilst we inhabit the earth. But at some point, we die, and our bodies and souls are separated. Our bodies are laid to rest, whether in the earth, or at sea, or to the elements. Our souls go on without our bodies to the next stage, where there are three possibilities. If we are ready for the Kingdom of Heaven, if we have aligned our will to the will of God so that we delight in God’s will and walk in God’s ways, then our souls will be at rest in the presence of God awaiting the resurrection of the dead. If we have not aligned our will to the will of God but we desire to do so, then after we die, our souls will be in a time of growth and reconditioning under God’s guidance to transform us into people of the Kingdom of Heaven in preparation for the resurrection of the dead. If we have not aligned our will to the will of God and we resist doing so, then after we die our souls are apart from God and in torment until such a time that we might open ourselves to God’s efforts at reconciliation and rehabilitation. One might name these three possible states whist the body is separated from the soul: the first might be called heavenly rest, the second, purgatory (or heavenly growth), and the third, hell.

At the final judgment at the end of time, bodies are brought back to life and reunited with souls, and the reunified whole person, body and soul, having been prepared by rest, growth, or anguish (or perhaps some combination thereof), is then either welcomed to the reign of God, where those who live according to God’s vision for abundant life join in the perpetual feast in the new earth, ruled from the new heaven, while should any continue to reject living God’s abundant life, they would be cast into the outer darkness of either suffering or annihilation apart from the presence of God. I pray that no one come to that fate, and suspect that God’s desire for apocatastasis is stronger than any of our stubbornness in rejecting God, but obviously I cannot know that.

The saints, as I understand it, are those who are now in the nearer presence of God.

We thank God for the examples they have given us as to how we might live. We hope their example might inspire us to live our lives in a way that God might sanctify us also as we live. And because they are our companions in faith and are in the nearer presence of God, we ask for their prayers, just as we do with our companions in faith who are in this life with us.

Traditionally, one function of the communion of saints in the life of the church was that we, the church on earth, called upon the members of the church in the nearer presence of God to pray for us. This practice lamentably encountered resistance during the reformation. If people invoke the prayers of the saints instead of praying to God directly, then the practice of invoking the prayers of the saints is regrettable, because it discourages direct prayer. But if the practice of invoking the prayers of the saints is coupled with direct prayer, I would argue it is a good thing, and no different than asking people on earth to pray for us. The saints do not mediate between us and God; they intercede on our behalf, as we do on theirs if they are still growing, and as we do for one another on earth. St. Paul instructs us to pray without ceasing, and when one of our prayers is silent, we can hope that others of us are picking up the prayer where the first left off. The reformation’s encouragement of direct prayer is laudable, but deprecating the practice of invoking the prayers of the saints is a baby thrown out with the bathwater of an attitude of our unworthiness for direct prayer, something indeed well discarded. We should pray to God. We should pray for one another. And we should ask one another to pray for us. That one another should include the whole church, including those who have died.

The present absence of officially sanctioned communal invocation of the prayers of the communion of saints in the liturgies of the Episcopal Church is, in my mind, the single biggest defect in our mostly laudable liturgical practice.

When I say we should invoke the prayers of the whole church, including those who live and those have died, I really do mean the whole church. I specifically include those who are undergoing heavenly growth, the so-called “Church Penitent,” or the souls who might be said to be in purgatory. I would argue that both souls in heavenly rest and souls undergoing heavenly growth are in the presence of God, and thus could pray for us. Those who are still growing in God’s love until they see God as God is can benefit from our prayers for them also, while the souls at rest already have grown to the point where they see the fullness of God, and thus need no more prayers on their behalf. In fact, the process of praying for us could help the growth of the souls who are growing, just like we can grow in grace by praying for others. I would argue that only the souls who reject growth in God are in no position to pray for us, having cut themselves off from God.

So when it comes to invoking the prayers of the saints, I suspect that both those who have attained holiness and those who still aspire to holiness are in a position to pray for us.

Now a second function of the saints in the life of the church is as examples of Godly life. Like Wenceslas’s page, we find it easier to trudge through the snow of life when we have footprints to walk in. Certain individuals have lived in specific ways that might inspire us to copy portions of their life that might help bring us closer to God. These examples of conversion, faith, heroic virtue, and Godly life can be both a template and a motivation for how we live our own lives. The lives of the saints are worth studying so they can be a template and motivation for us.

What are feast days? What are ferial days and why do they matter?

Feast days are days that we rejoice and give thanks for a gift God gave us. We mark feast days by doing special things we do not do on ordinary days. Eating special food can be an example. The most distinguishing mark of a feast day in the Church is the celebration of Holy Eucharist, which is our great thanksgiving to God for the blessings we have received and a foretaste of the heavenly feast we hope to join in at the resurrection.

Ferial days, on the other hand, are “normal” days, days not marked by feasting. In this world, we are prone to viewing things through a lens of duality: the sacred is only sacred in contrast with the profane. The holy is only holy in contrast with the unholy. The good is only good in contrast with the bad. The people of God are only people of God in contrast with the people who are not of God. In the Kingdom to come, the feast is ongoing. In the Kingdom to come, all who are there are holy. The idea that feasts cannot exist without the ferial is one that will not hold eventually, but in this life, we certainly gain a deeper understanding of the feast through fasting, and in this broken world, days which are not feast days seem appropriate as we grow toward the eternal heavenly banquet.

As long as we are removed from the fullness of the heavenly feast, it seems meet and right that our calendar should be marked by days that are not feast days in addition to the feast days. So it seems to me that as we select from the wide array of saints whose feasts we could celebrate, it seems wise that there be some days to which we do not assign feasts.

What is the role of feast days of saints in the life of the church? What feast days should we celebrate?

It seems to me that there are three roles of the feast days of saints in the life of the church. First, we give thanks to God for the example and witness of a particular saint. Second, we examine how the life of the saint we celebrate might be template or motivation for our own, and pray that we too might grow in holiness. Third, and this is where the Episcopal Church drops the ball, we pray that the saint in question might pray for us.

Now we can, and perhaps should, do all three of these things any day, without it being the particular feast day of a particular saint. But the calendar gives us a way to make anamnestically present the template and motivation from the past that we might hope would shape our lives today.

If at the most basic level, saints are those who are more directly in God’s presence than we are here on earth, then it would seem that anyone who is both dead and not in a state of rejecting God is a saint. It does not follow from there, though, that all such people would be equally beneficial for the church to celebrate their feast days. It seems to me that the decision to celebrate a saint’s feast day should be related to first, the intensity of our desire to give thanks to God for providing the example and work of the saint in question; second, the likelihood that anamnestically contemplating the life and work of the saint in question would guide and inspire people to holiness; and third, the extent to which we long for the particular intercession of that saint’s prayers. Complicating this is the question of whether there are aspects of a person’s life that are *not* the footsteps in which we should be walking, or whether aspects of a person’s story might discourage rather than excite holiness in the lives of those who hear it. The decision about whether celebrating a particular saint’s feast would be spiritually beneficial for a particular congregation here on earth is, of course, in no way a judgment of the sanctity of the person in question; our decision to celebrate the feast of a saint surely cannot change the fact of whether that soul is in God’s presence.

Visions of the Economy

The Demonic Vision:

In the worship of wealth or Mammon, supreme dignity and rights belong to those who have. The owner of property is entitled to rights and control but also admiration. In the worship of Mammon, we seek salvation by amassing as much wealth as we can, knowing that what we can buy, be it food, health care, or whatever, is what will preserve our life and well-being. In the worship of Mammon, the greatest rule of ethics is the sanctity of property rights. The worship of Mammon says, "it's too bad people die because of police brutality, but looting and rioting has got to stop." Death is regrettable, but the destruction of property is the ultimate sin against the god Mammon. The worship of Mammon cherishes things and uses people, a perversion of our creator's intent.

This is the basis of our economy today.

The Beatific Vision (as I understand it):

God intends for all creatures to thrive.

Thus, each creature should expect from the community both the material and social conditions that promote their thriving and also the opportunity to do meaningful work, according to their gifts, to promote the wellbeing of the Kingdom of God. Each creature must also give an account for how they used all the gifts entrusted to them to build up the Kingdom of God.

In this worldview, personal property is real (both talents in the modern sense and talents in the ancient sense of wealth), but the idea of allodial private property that is one’s to dispose of as one sees fit is sinfully absurd. There is no wealth that does not belong to God. There is no human ownership, only stewardship. Any asset on a ledger sheet has a debit of accountability to God for how that gift was used to build up the Kingdom of God. The earth is the Lords, for he made it, as the antiphon goes; come let us adore him.

Any wealth or skill that is merely enjoyed and not used to build up others and promote the thriving of all creatures is wealth or skill misused.

The between-times

Scarcity is a function of people living according to the demonic vision and not the beatific vision. Both underproduction (hoarding the gifts of skill and labor) and overconsumption (hoarding the gifts of God and the fruits of human labor often alienated from the workers who made it) mean that many creatures live without what they need to thrive. This is sin.

The question is what the church’s role should be in these between-times. How should the church (and each of her members) use the gifts it has to help bring the world closer to the beatific vision and away from the demonic one.

Thoughts about personal and structural racism, and the impossibility of neutrality on a moving train

I am a racist. You are too. If you're uncomfortable with that, if I'm uncomfortable with that – good! The fact that we don't want to be racist is a good thing. But not wanting to be racist, and not trying to be racist doesn't change the fact that we are members of a society. There's no neutral. Anything we do that isn't an active effort to dismantle racism likely perpetuates it. And because our efforts often fail, many things we do that *are* an active effort to dismantle racism still likely perpetuate it.

I help perpetuate a system that treats people with white skin as somehow more human than those with dark skin. I help perpetuate that system because it's the same system that we get our food from, and we get a place to live, and we go to school, and we communicate with our friends, and we are entertained and we do our work. I'm a racist because I'm a contributing member of society, and our society is built on a deeply racist foundation. When I do my job, when I stop at a red light, when I feed my children dinner – in all these things, I help our society continue. And our society is racist, so in all these things, I perpetuate racism. I am complicit.

Racism isn't what makes me stop at red lights. Racism isn't why I feed my children. Racism isn't why I go to work. But every apparently-socially-responsible thing I do that allows our society to continue continues not only the good and admirable parts of our civilization, and there are many, but also the evil, destructive, exploitative parts.

White supremacism is woven deep into the structures of our society. Laws, customs, music, culture, and the economic arrangements that generate them all have deep roots in a system that was designed to privilege white people over black people. That is certainly not all there is to our society; if it were nothing but racism, it would be easy to throw it out and walk away. There is much that is good and noble and desirable about our social structures. And there is evil embedded in it, and one of those key evils embedded in the very structure of our economic base and social superstructure is racism.

This racism is inherent in the system itself. Whether or not we have racist intent, by participating in our economy and culture, we perpetuate a system that includes structures of white supremacism, which means that regardless of our intent, we are complicit in perpetuating white supremacism.

People can actively choose to promote racism, and some do. People can choose not to think about racism, but the default is to act within a racist system in ways that perpetuate the system. This is original sin: without choosing to engage in racism, we nonetheless act to perpetuate it. Without choosing to do evil, we are guilty of being complicit therein. Our very existence in a racist structure inevitably collaborates with racism.

The alternative is to acknowledge that we are formed by a racist culture and participate in a racist economy: to acknowledge that we are complicit in perpetuating racism. I am racist and you are racist and he is racist and she is racist and they are racist because we are all the product of a racist culture and participants in a racist economy. Then we look for how we can actively participate in dismantling it. We are all complicit; the question is how to become less complicit. We are all caught up in the mechanism of racism; the question is how to become less racist.

Gotta serve somebody

The great philosopher Bob Dylan observed that no matter what your station in life, you're going to have to serve somebody. But not every higher power that people worship is the Lord our God. Today, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, a feast that is so vitally important in identifying just who is the God we worship. And the God we worship is first and foremost a community of three distinct persons knit together in perfect love for one another.

But is the Holy Trinity really the God we worship? Do we worship the perfect community of love that we know through our Lord Jesus Christ, or do we really serve somebody else?

In polytheism, the gods are distinct persons, like the three persons of our Trinity. But those gods aren't knit together in perfect love. They want different things. They sometimes fight with each other. People can do things to please one god in a polytheistic system and make other gods upset. That's not the case with our God. The Holy Trinity has one divine will. One divine ethics. What the Father loves, the Son loves, and the Holy Spirit loves. Our God is not a single person, but the Holy Trinity shares a single sense of joy, and a single yearning for the good.

Our first lesson is one of my favorite in the Bible. It's not the creation story; it's a creation story, one of perhaps twenty times our holy scripture tells us about God creating the heavens and the earth. But this creation story is an act of resistance. This creation story was written down in Babylon, during the exile, to try to preserve the religious identity of God's people in the face of Babylonian assimilation. And so this creation story takes all the "facts" from the Babylonian creation story – the order in which things were created, the timing, and so on, and subverts the Babylonian creation story to assert the most important parts. The Babylonians taught that the gods were at war in a watery chaos that predated the heavens and the earth, and that over the course of seven key phases, as side effects of the gods fighting with each other, light was divided from darkness, sea from sky, land from water. Each of these realms were populated as a result of the war of the gods, and then finally one god triumphed over the others and there was rest. The god who won the war was, naturally, the god of the city of Babylon, Marduk, but the other gods, with their competing desires, could rise up at any time, and so there was a divine mandate to keep Babylon strong to triumph over anyone who might rise up against it.

The people of Judah in exile in Babylon came along and said, "if we're stuck here, and our children keep hearing this story, we have to teach them how to resist." They picked the most important parts and changed them, to subvert the story. They didn't fight with the supposition of a pre-creation watery chaos, although that doesn't appear in any of the other creation stories in the Bible. They didn't fight with the order in which creation happened, although that contradicts other scriptural accounts. What they said was important, the most important, the thing they had to resist, was the idea that creation happened because warring gods with clashing desires fought, and creation was the byproduct. No. There is one God, who willed that creation exist, and spoke, and it happened, and God saw that it was very good. Creation is not an accident. Creation is not a byproduct. Creation is not the result of conflict between divine forces, mandating perpetual war so that the right gods might win. The love of God overflowed, and the world came to be, and it was very, very good. This is our faith, the exiles of Judah told their children. This is what we believe. You are surrounded by people who worship different gods, but we worship the Lord. We do what we do because we are who we are because we serve the Lord God, the maker of heaven and earth. So said the exiles of Judah, and they taught their children to resist the narratives that surrounded them, to avoid assimilation into a toxic polytheism of conflict and oppression, and wrote their story down: in the beginning: Genesis.

We are like the exiles in Babylon. We, too, live in a culture that actively worships false gods of conflict, exploitation, and oppression. We, too, need to tell our stories of resistance to hold firm to our faith in the God who is a community of perfect love, in the face of a culture that would assimilate us to the worship of their false gods. The terrifying thing is that so many people identify as followers of the Holy Trinity, but in fact actually look for salvation to the false gods of our civic religion. Far too often I find myself in that trap too. Just like the exiles in Babylon, we have to ask ourselves again and again whom we serve: do we serve the Lord, or do we serve the false gods that surround us? You’re going to have to serve somebody. Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re going to have to serve somebody,

I believe we have three distinct false gods that we actively worship in the United States, and by false gods, I mean stories and sources of ultimate power to whom people honestly turn for salvation, and those three false gods are Tribalism, which includes white supremacy, Mammon or Wealth, and Empire.
Tribe, wealth, and empire are three gods that have seduced us into looking to them for our ultimate salvation. We say we worship God, but whenever you take the Gospel seriously, someone will take you aside and say, "but let's be practical," and appeal to one of these three idols.

It took me a while to realize that these three were all worshipped in our civic religion, because these three deities are fundamentally at odds with each other. Having been taught monotheism in my religion classes through my childhood and adulthood, I was unprepared to recognize that in the United States, the prevailing civic religion seems to be a polytheistic blend of the worship of all three. These three gods are at odds with each other because in the cult of each of these gods, and the ethics that flows from the worship of each of these gods, the source of dignity comes from a fundamentally different verb: to be, to have, to do.

In tribal ethics, dignity comes from being a member of the favored tribe; each one has dignity according to the relative worth of the tribe to which one belongs. White supremacism is deeply rooted here. The lives and deaths of favored ones matter over and above other lives and deaths. Some people have dignity and importance because of who they are; others do not, again because of who they are. For salvation, for protection from all ill, we work to advance the well-being of "our kind" and work to make sure "their kind" is kept down. The worship of the white tribal god leads people to call black demonstrators against police brutality "wild savages" and "barbarians" – less than human because they are not part the only "properly human" tribe. The worship of the false god of tribe insists that black lives don't matter. That only white people bear the proper image of the tribal god.

In the worship of wealth or Mammon, supreme dignity and rights belong to those who have. The owner of property is entitled to rights and control but also admiration. In the worship of Mammon, we seek salvation by amassing as much wealth as we can, knowing that what we can buy, be it food, health care, or whatever, is what will preserve our life and well-being. In the worship of Mammon, the greatest rule of ethics is the sanctity of property rights. The worship of Mammon says, "it's too bad people die because of police brutality, but looting and rioting has got to stop." Death is regrettable, but the destruction of property is the ultimate sin against the god Mammon. The worship of Mammon cherishes things and uses people, a perversion of our creator's intent.

In the worship of empire, stability and calm comes from what  the empire does: it dominates all who would rise up against it. Dignity and respect belong to those who wield power in the name of the empire and who dominate others. In the worship of empire, salvation comes from the powerful being able to keep the weak in line. We make sacrifices to the god of empire on the altars called "law" and "order." Our safety, in this system, depends on the rulers being able to keep people obedient and in line. The world will be at peace when the power of the empire extends both deep and wide: wide across the entire earth, so that no one is outside the rule of the empire, and deep, such that the empire can command obedience and proper behavior without question. In this system of worship, peace comes when people comply with the orders of the empire, and if that fails, when the empire can exert its strength, and totally dominate those who resist.

The three gods of tribe, wealth, empire each distribute their favor differently, as gods do in a polytheistic system, but the worship of all three constitutes the American civic religion. So closely bound to our culture is this polytheistic civic religion that when people protest its murderous implications, many wrongly think they are protesting against America itself.

This civic religion is fundamentally at odds with the worship of the holy and undivided Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When Jesus commands, in our gospel reading today, that we go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Jesus teaches us that, like the exiles of Judah in Babylon, we must resist the false gods of the culture that surrounds us. We ourselves must turn, and call others to turn away from the false gods that dehumanize and exploit and kill God's beloved, and embrace the Holy, Blessed, and undivided Trinity of perfect love.

How do we resist the demonic forces that say that some human lives don't matter and turn to the God who created and loves all people? The Gospel today tells us the answer: Step one is Baptism. Step two is to teach and practice the faith. And step three, when we get discouraged, is to remember that Jesus is with us always, even to the end of the age.

With God’s help, we renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, and all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God.
With God’s help, we turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as our Savior, put our whole trust in his grace and love, and promise to follow and obey him as our Lord.
With God’s help, we believe in the Most Holy, Glorious, and Undivided Trinity, One God.
With God’s help, we continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.
With God’s help, we persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
With God’s help, we proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
With God’s help, we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself.
With God’s help, we strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

This is what we promise in baptism. This is our faith. Every human being is created in God's image, and deserves justice and dignity. If the worshippers of false gods claim that only the rich, only the powerful, only the white are important, we who worship the Holy Trinity must object. This is why, as long as anyone’s actions leave any doubt, we must proclaim again and again and again that Black Lives Matter, and work to make it true. Amen.