As I Have Loved You

Here's today's homily. The readings are Acts 10:44-48 and John 15:9-17.

*

Christianity has a PR problem, and today’s readings throw it
into stark relief. In the Gospel, Jesus commands us to love
one another as he has loved us. In Acts,  Peter says, “Can
anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who
have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” These
Scriptures tell us that God loves everyone, even or
especially the other and the outcast. In that spirit, St. Paul’s
bills itself as a place of belonging for all people.

I probably don’t need to tell any of you that historically,
Christianity has not always practiced such radical
welcome. Too many Christian churches still don’t. Some
of the groups that define themselves by whom they lock
out are very loud and have made themselves very visible.
Is it any wonder that many of our neighbors fear and
avoid Christianity?

As some of you know, I converted in my late thirties.
Most of my family and friends are secular rationalists
who consider religion the realm of credulous superstition,
if not outright bigotry. When I started going to church,
many of the people who loved me were horrified. A
close friend called from Europe to ask if I needed to be
kidnapped and deprogrammed. My father had left the
Catholic Church when he was thirteen; he spent the rest
of his life as “a fundamentalist atheist,” to borrow my
sister’s memorable phrase. He was so distraught at my
conversion that a family friend tried to comfort him by

saying, “Alan, it could be worse.  She could be selling
drugs.”

I got it. A lot of churches make me squirm, too. I knew
it would take a long time to convince my loved ones
that I hadn’t been brainwashed by televangelists, that
I hadn’t suddenly become a fan of the Crusades or the
Salem Witch Trials or the Westboro Baptist Church,
and that I don’t leave my critical-thinking skills in the
offering plate every Sunday.

Because I was a professor when I started going to
church, I was especially aware of the popular

misconception that faith and intellect don’t mix. For a
long time I had a bumper sticker on my car that
read, “Christian, not Closed-Minded.” One day
I returned to my car, parked in a UNR garage, to find
that someone had used a black marker to blot out the
“not.” The sticker now read, “Christian,
Closed-Minded.” That hurt, but again, I knew
exactly where it came from. All of us have heard of
closed-minded churches. Some of us, and many of
our relatives and friends, carry the scars of having
been closed out of them.

In my role as a hospital volunteer offering spiritual
care to ER patients, I once visited a cheerful, friendly

couple who assured me that they were devout
followers of Jesus. They asked for a prayer, and
thanked me graciously for offering it. And then, as
I left the room, they said, “Wait, we want to give
you this,” and handed me a pamphlet. It was a
comic book about how gay people were an
abomination against God and were going to hell.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the teeth, and I
grieved for the couple who had handed me that
piece of hatred. I kept thinking of a story from
Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor.
During a Martin Luther King Day march in
Atlanta, she and other clergy walked past a
group of demonstrators from the Ku Klux

Klan, carrying signs that proclaimed, “Christ is
our King.” Meditating on the Body of Christ,
Taylor wrote, “I had just walked past some
members of my own body, who were as hard
for me to accept as a cancer or a blocked artery.  
And yet if I did not accept them -- if I let them
remain separate from me the way they wanted
to -- then I became one of them, one of the people
who insist that there are some people who cannot
belong to the body.”  Taylor’s words confirm one
of my deepest beliefs: when we shut out other
people, any people, we shut out God.

But how do we love the unloving? How do we
tolerate the intolerant? Is it possible to live without
any fences or walls? What do we do when our
emotional or physical survival demands that we
shut out a destructive friend or an abusive relative?

Even if we’re lucky enough to be spared those
challenges, how do we show our neighbors that
it’s possible to be Christian without being either a
bigot or a saint? I am not a patient person. I have a
temper. I can be sarcastic, and I often rub people
the wrong way. Some of those people have called
me a hypocrite. One of my deepest fears is that in
the heat of some moment, I’ll offend someone
who’ll nod and say, “Uh-huh. That’s what you
Christians are really like. I knew it!” Learning to
embody God’s love can take years, and we can
destroy all our hard work in a moment.

“Preach the Gospel without ceasing,” St. Francis
said. “Use words when necessary.” In a world
where too many churches preach judgment and
exclusion, it’s easy to fear that our small, quiet
efforts to be loving will go unnoticed. But I do
the best I can, like most of us, and over the years,
I’ve seen my family’s attitudes towards my faith
soften. My parents never believed in God or
prayer, but they approved of the work I did at St.
Stephen’s with Family Promise, helping homeless
parents and children. They approved

of my volunteer work at the hospital.

A few weeks before he died, my father was in
the VA hospital here in Reno, in a shared room. He
had the bed next to the window. I was visiting
one day when a doctor came to talk to Dad’s
roommate, who had stomach cancer. The doctor
drew the flimsy cotton curtain between the beds
for privacy, but it provided none. For half an hour,
Dad and I listened to her telling the other patient
-- very, very gently -- that he was going to die:  
very, very soon, maybe tomorrow by lunch. The
patient and his wife couldn’t hear this. They
kept changing the subject. The doctor kept
circling back to it. After at least three attempts,

she left.

When she was gone, Dad tapped my arm and
whispered, “You go talk to those people.”

“What?”

“You’re a chaplain! You go talk to those people!”

“Dad, this isn’t my hospital. I’m not authorized
to talk to patients here.”

My fundamentalist-atheist father glared at me.
“You go talk to those people!”

I desperately had to use the bathroom, which was
next to the dying patient’s bed. On my way back, I

stopped and introduced myself to him and his wife.
“My father and I couldn’t help but overhear what
your doctor said. We’re so sorry.”

They laughed and waved their hands. “We’re fine!”
We chatted a bit, and I learned that they had a

daughter in California. I asked if they’d spoken to
her recently.

The dying patient shrugged. “Oh, we’ll probably
call her next week.”

I swallowed. “If I were your daughter, I think I’d
want to hear from you tonight.”

That family needed more than their doctor, and
certainly more than I, could give them. No words of

sorrow or comfort would reach them until they could
hear and accept what was happening.  Sometimes
our efforts to help fall on stony ground, just as Jesus’
did. But to me, this is still a story about a small,
quiet miracle. After decades of railing against
religion, criticizing the church, and mocking my
faith, my father learned to trust that I was one of
the people who tried to be loving, even when
there was nothing I could do.

“Love one another as I have loved you.” This isn’t
easy.  It’s the work of a lifetime, and none of us is

perfect at it. But it’s the work we’ve been given,
and we owe our loving God nothing less.

Amen.

Necessary, but not Sufficient

Here's today's homily.  The readings are Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 and Matthew 14:22-33. *

I hate suspense stories, because I don't like being scared. Bad luck for me, then, that today's readings are suspense stories. Joseph's been sold into slavery by his own brothers. The disciples are in a small boat in a bad storm. These stories aren’t suspenseful for us; we know they have happy endings. The people inside them, though, can't know that everything will be all right.

We aren’t told anything about Joseph's emotional state, but his circumstances are horrible. His own kin have conspired against him; they decided not to murder him only because they raelized they could make money by selling him. He has no way of knowing that wonderful things will come of these hideous events. He has to feel betrayed, abandoned, and terrified for his life.

In the Gospel story, meanwhile, we're told outright, several times, that the disciples are terrified. For one thing, Jesus sent them away. He "made" them get into the boat so he could be alone to pray, and then the weather got bad. If you've ever been in a small boat in a storm, you know how dangerous it is. People die in storms like this, which may be why the disciples, seeing a figure strolling towards them over the water, assume that it's a ghost. What else could it be, out here? They're probably about to become ghosts, too.

Then the ghost speaks. "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid."  

"Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." Peter’s doing that thing we're always told not to do, testing God. I imagine him thinking, "Don't be afraid?  The waves are much higher than the boat, and I have no idea how we're going to survive them, and a ghost is walking on top of them saying it's Jesus -- which is impossible, because Jesus has a body and bodies can't walk on water -- and I probably imagined Jesus saying ‘do not be afraid’ because I’m so scared and the wind’s howling. It had to be wishful thinking. I need proof."

That’s how Peter finds himself doing that impossible thing, walking on water. He's actually managing it -- placing his feet very carefully, no doubt wobbling a little, or a lot, riding the waves like surfboards -- until he realizes that the storm isn't lettting up. The wind's as strong as ever.  That's when his fear takes over again, because no one can do the impossible forever. He starts to sink. He cries out for help.

Luckily, it really is Jesus. He  reaches out and catches Peter, giving us our happy ending. But he also scolds Peter.  "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

I can think of many possible answers "Why did I doubt, Lord? I doubted because we're in a storm in a small boat, and fishermen die in storms.  I doubted because people can't walk on water. If we could walk on water, we wouldn't need boats. I doubted because when I felt the wind, I was afraid all over again. Maybe I'd already died in the storm. Maybe I was a ghost, too. Maybe that's why I could walk on water. I doubted because you’d sent me away, and I felt abandoned. I doubted because I could see you when I was on top of a wave, but when I sank into the trough of the wave, all I could see was water. If you were me, you’d have been scared, too."

This story, like Joseph's, has a happy ending, and it gets there more quickly than Joseph's did. Jesus brings Peter back into the boat. The wind stops. Everyone in the boat is appropriately reverent. But every time I hear this story, it bothers me.

I'm about to admit something scandalous: there are a few moments in the Gospels when I don't actually like Jesus very much. One is when he curses the fig tree for the crime of being on the wrong growing schedule. One is when he denies healing to the Canaanite woman, telling her, "It is not right to take the children's food and give it to the dogs," although he changes his mind and does the right thing when she stands up to him. And one is when he asks Peter -- who’s terrified, probably seasick, and performing a physically impossible task to the best of his ability -- "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

We doubt because we're human. We doubt because, living inside our own stories, we have no way to know how they will end. We doubt because no one can do the impossible forever. We doubt because no matter how much faith we have in God, the ways other people use their free will can be terrifying and dangerous. Doubting doesn't mean that we lack faith; it means that we can't immediately see how our faith can get us out of the storm or out of the pit. And even when we trust that rescue will eventually arrive, waiting for it can be very scary.

I'm a worrier, which is one reason I don't like suspense stories. I find plenty of things to fret about, both in my own life and in the news; I don't need my entertainment to give me more. Frankly, I tend to suspect that people who aren’t worried aren’t paying attention. But when I'm stewing about something, my friends -- usually those outside the church -- sometimes say heartily, "Now, Susan, where's your faith?"

Thank you. That makes me feel so much better. Because now, in addition to my original worry, I feel judged for being spiritually deficient. I'm always tempted to paraphrase C.S. Lewis: "If you think I worry too much as a Christian, you should see how much more I'd worry if I weren't one."

In therapy circles, phrases like "don't worry" are called invalidation. Although often well-intended, they're a subtle form of emotional abuse. The message they send is, "Your feelings aren't real or important, so stop bothering us with them." Such messages also don't work.  No one in the history of the world has ever worried less after being told, "Don't worry."

I hope that when Jesus said, "You of little faith," he was teasing Peter instead of scolding him.  I hope his voice was gentle, comforting, affectionate. I take heart from the fact that he says the words after he's rescued Peter, instead of when Peter's still sinking into the water. Even so, the admonition still sounds too much like, "What's wrong with you? Can't you see the future, like the rest of us? How could you not have known that everything would be all right?"

When we're in trouble, faith is necessary, but not sufficient. Jesus reached out and rescued Peter. Joseph’s brothers lifted him out of the pit, although not out of kindness. People in trouble don't need to be scolded for their fear or doubt. They need help.  

Our faith calls us to be Christ’s hands in the world. And yet a recent news story, which some of you may have seen, reported that Christians are twice as likely as nonbelievers to think that poverty is a result of individual failings. If you're poor, it must be your own fault. You didn't try hard enough. You made bad choices. You didn't have enough faith.

Joseph winds up in a very bad way through no fault of his own, except maybe the failing of being his father's favorite. It’s easier to blame Peter; he did, after all, challenge Jesus. Jesus saves him anyway. Jesus doesn't say, "You're the one who wanted to walk on water, buddy, so tough luck." Jesus doesn't say, “You made bad choices.” He doesn’t say, "If you had more faith, you wouldn't be drowning." Jesus reaches out to help his friend, just as we're called to help ours.

It's not always easy to know how to do that. I suspect onlookers fall back on the "where's your faith?" line when they don’t know what else to do, when there’s no obvious assistance to render. But when we can’t see a way out either, we need to listen. We need to let people who are frightened know that they've been heard. Instead of dismissing their fears, we need to assure them that -- like God himself, like Jesus who said, "I am with you until the end of the age" -- we’ll walk with them.  We’ll stay with them through whatever comes, and search unceasingly for rescue, and rejoice with them when, at last -- just as we’ve reached our limit, just when we can no longer do the impossible -- it arrives.

Amen.

Dear Ann Landers

Here's today's homily. The readings are Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Matthew 28:16-20.

* * *

Today is Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday in the lectionary devoted to a doctrine, rather than a story in Scripture.  As a rule, preachers dislike Trinity Sunday. The Trinity isn’t an exciting narrative about loaves and fishes, or miraculous healings, or a tragic trial. The Trinity is a Being:  the three-in-one combination of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. When we talk about Scripture, we’re interpreting the Word of God, recorded by humans. When we talk about the Trinity, we’re interpreting God Himself, Herself, and/or Itself, a much more difficult proposition.  

Over the centuries, a lot of ink -- and blood -- has been spilled on the subject. Most of these commentaries agree,  appropriately enough,  on three points.  First, the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery. Second, it’s best approached through metaphor, which explains things we don’t understand by comparing them to things we do. And third, it’s fundamentally about relationship.

The mystery part is reassuring, because it means that our limited human minds can’t expect to understand the infinite nature of God. The Athanasian Creed famously describes the Trinity as “the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.”  Well, all right, then!  We might as well just cheerfully admit that we’re unequal to the task.

But that’s not how people work:  at least, not people who bother to go to church in the first place. We hunger for God. We yearn to draw closer to God. We want to understand God. And so we resort to metaphor, trying to understand the infinite and incomprehensible by comparing it to finite, familiar things we can touch and see. How can God the Father, who created the universe, also be God the Son, the carpenter who lived in first-century Judea, and also be God the Spirit, who descended on the disciples at Pentecost?  How does this three-in-one thing work? Well, think about ice, water, and steam:  the same chemical substance in three different states. Or consider your own, human nature,  a three-fold combination of body, mind, and spirit. Or ponder the example of the little girl who likened God to her grandmother. The old woman was “Grandma” to the child,  but she was also “Mom” to her children and “Margaret” to her husband. She was one person with three different aspects.

That brings us to the third point, that the Trinity is fundamentally about relationship. God the Creator is our Father, who made the galaxies, who shapes us out of star-stuff. That’s the aspect of God we heard about it today’s majestic reading from Genesis. God the Redeemer is our Friend and Teacher, who wears a human body and walks beside us; this is the God who went with the disciples to Galilee and commanded them to baptize and teach. God the Sustainer is our Muse, as close as the wind on our cheeks, the spirit who enables us to do things we never believed possible.  This is the aspect of God who descended at Pentecost, and is with us always, “to the end of the age.” God takes different forms to find different ways to reach us.

That very fact may incline us to dismiss the Trinity. After all, to the extent that we understand this bewildering three-in-one business at all, it means that God’s a package deal. If I pray to Jesus, I’m praying to the Father and the Spirit at the same time, right? So why bother with the Trinity at all? Why does it have to be so mysterious and complicated?

When you think about it, relationships are always a mystery, and they’re usually complicated. We never fully understand other people, even the ones we love the most. We watch them in their different aspects – at home, at work, with friends -- and wonder what they’re thinking that we’ll never know. We marvel at the fact that those we know the best can still surprise us, and that strangers sometimes offer perfect words of comfort. But when we love people, we try to learn as much about them as we can. If we ignore some important part of who they are, they notice.

When I was in college, majoring in creative writing and yearning to be a published author, I dated a guy who claimed to love me but was very dismissive of my writing. It’s true that I wasn’t very good back then, but the fact that he pooh-poohed something I considered the core of my identity hurt, a lot. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last.

People who have been hurt this way sometimes ask experts for advice. They bring their relationship problems to their therapists, their clergy, and even to newspaper columnists. We’re used to hearing humans do this. But if God baffles us, we must baffle God sometimes, too. At the risk of diminishing God, of recasting God into our own image, what might it sound like if God asked for relationship advice?

“Dear Ann Landers: I have a very big family. I love all of my children, but I can’t seem to make some of them believe it. They think I only want to punish them. They never write or call unless they’re desperate for money, or a meal, or medicine. Once they have what they need,  they shut me out again. They say I live too far away, even though my sunsets and butterflies and other beloved children are right under their noses. They claim I have nothing to do with their everyday lives: but Ann, how can I, when they won’t let me in?”

If that’s a letter that God the Father might write, here’s another, from God the Son.

“Dear Ann Landers:  I have a friend who loves me like a brother. He tells me everything, and every day he thanks me for helping him. But Ann, he acts like I’m his private property; he even calls me his ‘Personal Savior.’ Everything’s about him! He doesn’t want to hear about world politics, or art or music, or the galaxy I made last week. He talks so much about my flesh and blood that sometimes I think he only loves me for my body. Ann, how can I get him to see how much more I am than that?”

And of course there’s a third letter, from God the Spirit.

“Dear Ann Landers: I’m in this really passionate relationship with somebody I love a lot. We talk for hours, in all kinds of different languages, and we sing and dance and heal people and cast out demons. There’s just one problem. Things are wonderful as long as it’s all about rushing winds and tongues of flame, but the minute normal life sets in, she’s out the door. She says our love is on a higher plane, but Ann, I could use a hug sometimes, and I can’t do all the housework by myself.  How can I get her to stick around to do the dishes?”

If Ann Landers is paying attention, she’ll probably notice that these three letters are in the same handwriting. She’ll probably say something like, “You must be a remarkable person, to mean so many things to so many different people. I can tell how much you love all of them. Of course you want all of them to love you fully in return.” And she’ll probably say what therapists and advice columnists always say:  that relationships take work, and that both sides have to be willing to communicate. That means talking honestly, but it also means listening.

Most of us talk to God a lot, and we try to trust that God – in any of God’s guises – will always listen to us.  The doctrine of the Trinity is so important because it teaches us to listen to God, and to do so everywhere. God isn’t just in the awesome immensity of the heavens. God isn’t just in the hungry neighbor whose face shows us Christ, and God isn’t just in the breeze which stirs our hope and imagination. God is in all of these things, waiting and wanting to be found and known. Loving  us fully, even at our most baffling, God seeks to be fully loved. God offers us everything: the vast expanses of interstellar space, the comfort and kinship of a human body, and the mystery and excitement of rushing winds and tongues of flame. But we have to stay open to all of those aspects. We have to be willing to let God in; we have to be willing to let God be God -- even when we can’t comprehend the mystery -- and we have to be willing to do some dishes.

Amen.

Beloved Communities

Here's today's homily. The Gospel is Luke 7:1-10. I wish everyone a happy and peaceful Memorial Day.

*

Years ago, my husband and I had a friend recently retired from an Army career. I remember him telling us about the psychological effects of military hierarchy. "You're obeying orders from your own commanding officers and giving orders to the people under you. Ideally, that chain of command keeps you humble and flexible. You're responsible to your superiors and responsible for your subordinates. The fact that there are people over you means you can't exaggerate your own importance, but the fact that there are people under you means that you can't minimize it, either."

I think of our friend every time I read about the Roman centurion in this morning's Gospel. "For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me." We've all heard far too many stories about people who use their authority -- privilege or power or money -- to exploit anyone lower on the ladder. But the Roman centurion cares for the people under him. I suspect that his own position as a subordinate plays into his compassion. If he were ill, he would want his commanding officers to seek healing for him; therefore, he will do the same for his slave. Without even meeting Jesus in person, he is already loving his neighbor as he loves himself.  

It's worth remembering that Roman centurions would not have been considered friends by many people in first-century Palestine. Yes, Jews were allowed to maintain their religion, but Romans were still the agents of oppression, occupation, and taxation, a situation that ultimately led to three major Jewish rebellions beginning in the year 66. And yet this centurion not only cares lovingly for his household slave, but has forged remarkable alliances with the Jewish community.  "He loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us," they tell Jesus.

In a setting deeply divided by military, political and religious conflict, the Roman centurion has created a taste of what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., many years later, would call "the Beloved Community," where discrimination is “replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.” In the Beloved Community, Dr. King said, disputes will be resolved peacefully, by conflict resolution and reconciliation rather than military power, and “love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred."

This Utopian vision arose from Dr. King's principles of nonviolence. We aren't there yet, and the rare glimpses we get of this ideal world generally don't last. The Roman centurion's model of love and social harmony didn't sweep first-century Palestine; if it had, the rebellions wouldn't have happened. But the centurion proves that someone entrusted with military power and posted to occupied territory can still act in the service of love and reconciliation.  

On Memorial Day, we remember those who have served, and especially those who have been lost in military conflicts, including occupations. Our country has occupied many countries over the years. All of those occupations have produced stories both of compassionate soldiers -- who loved and served the people among whom they lived -- and others who ruled, and were ruled, by fear and force. Even at its worst, though, occupation offers a chance for people from very different backgrounds to form relationships. If that Roman centurion had been a drone operator, he never would have learned to love the Jewish community.

My nephew is in the Navy, serving on an aircraft carrier. The Navy has announced that his ship will soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf. Before he enlisted, he researched military jobs and decided that being on a carrier is one of the safest, because carriers are protected by cruisers and destroyers far from combat fronts. I'm very relieved that he'll be in a relatively secure position, but I'm also troubled that he'll be surrounded by what he already knows, living in a bubble of other American military personnel. He is far less likely to die than he would be in the Marines or the Army, but he's also less likely to change his mind about other people, or have the chance to change their minds about him. All of us seek safety and familiarity, but they can become barriers to relationship, preventing the Beloved Community Dr. King described.

In fact, I learned about the Beloved Community from a book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell, about the unexpected moments of social utopia that often arise after disasters like 9/11 or Katrina. Our media and entertainment teach us to view such events as unleashing the worst in human nature, rampaging mobs that loot and pillage, but that's rarely what actually happens. Instead, people extend helping hands and work together, often overcoming preconceptions about one another in the process.

During Katrina, my father lived four blocks from the water in Ocean Springs, a hard-hit section of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. When I visited him that Christmas, three months after the storm, everyone had a story. One of my favorites is from our friend Darlene, an art teacher in an at-risk school.  The Friday before the storm, she'd gone to school to get her classroom ready for the start of school the following week. She decorated the room with old students' artwork, to inspire her new students, and left a to-do list on one corner of her desk.

That weekend, the storm hit, and Darlene’s school became a National Guard barracks. A few weeks later, Darlene went to look at her classroom. "I thought it would be a mess," she told me.  "After all those young military guys had been staying there, I was sure the place would be trashed." Instead, everything was immaculate. The floor was swept. Darlene’s to-do list was in the same spot she had put it before the storm. And the National Guardsmen had covered the blackboard with notes telling the students how beautiful their artwork was. That occupying force, feared even though it wasn’t foreign,  truly had come to love and serve.

What does any of this have to do with us, here, today?  And what does it have to do with God?  As Christians, all of us are -- as the old Hebrew National commercial put it -- subject to a higher authority. Our service to that higher authority takes the form of loving and serving our neighbors, including anyone over whom we have real or perceived power:  our employees, our children, anyone who performs work for us in any capacity.  

Because we have not yet achieved Dr. King's Beloved Community, we also live and work in places divided by highly contested differences:  between religions, ethnicities, political beliefs, levels of income and education.  All of us are parts of chains, if not of command, then of privilege and prestige. It can be tempting to retreat into bubbles, spots of safety where everyone's like us, to try to protect ourselves from conflict. But when we do that, we shortcut the possibility of achieving, even for a fleeting moment, the Beloved Community.

Here's one last example for you, more explicitly about God. Eric Heidecker, whom many of you know, told me this story. Most of us remember the controversy surrounding the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as the Bishop of New Hampshire. At the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in 2003, the gathering where that election was ratified, Gene Robinson needed bodyguards, because he'd received death threats.

One day during the convention, Eric arrived at the convention center in Minneapolis and saw an ambulance parked outside. He immediately feared that someone had acted on the threats to hurt Gene Robinson. But Robinson was fine. The patient was one of his bodyguards, who was having heart-attack symptoms triggered by the stress of his job. Bishop Robinson sat with the bodyguard during the ambulance ride, and stayed with him at the hospital, and held his hand, and prayed with him.  The threat to Robinson’s safety became a chance for him to embody the love of God by serving the man who was being paid to serve him.  

I wonder if Robinson thought of the Roman centurion during that ambulance journey. May all of us think of him the next time we feel a conflict between being responsible to the authorities we serve, and being responsible for the fellow humans who serve us.

Amen.

God's Reentry Program

Here's today's homily. The readings are Acts 9:1-20 and John 21:1-19.

*

I’ve never seen a completely convincing explanation for why we humans love the number three so much. Everyone acknowledges that we do, though. Three winds its way through history and across cultures; we find it in our legends, our riddles, and our theology. It shows up in the three Fates, the three little pigs, and the Christian trinity. Fairy-tale swineherds can’t win the hand of the princess without completing three tasks. No joke is complete unless three people, rather than only two, walk into a bar. Three strikes in baseball and you’re out. We can’t have blood and sweat without tears, and we can’t have friends and Romans without countrymen.  

And, according to today’s readings, we can’t have Peter and Paul, two of our most important church ancestors, without lots of threes. Saul, who will take his new name of Paul any minute now, is blind for three days after his conversion on the road to Damascus, a calamity echoing the three days Jesus spent in the tomb. The resurrection story in the Gospel is the third time the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, and his conversation with Peter is a set of three questions. Jesus’ thrice-repeated “Do you love me?” is an explicit undoing of the three times Peter denied Jesus after his arrest by the Romans. Even the 153 fish are divisible by three, and then by three again, seventeen groups of nine. We’re drowning in trinities here.

Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Brown Taylor has suggested that the number three has been lodged in our imaginations ever since the earliest humans studied the sky and realized that the dark of the moon lasts three nights. People who study writing note, more simply, that lists of three make points both more forceful and easier to remember. Whatever the explanation, it’s undeniable that three means business. If something comes in threes, we sit up and pay attention. Whatever this three-part sequence is, it’s important.

Today’s Scripture stories would probably get our attention even without all these threes. They’re about two of the most important leaders of the early church, and they’re both about crucial turning points, moments of repentance and conversion. Saul has been actively persecuting Christians. Peter, the most zealous of the disciples before the events of Holy Week, betrayed Jesus and his own sense of himself by running away, by denying Jesus rather than remaining loyal to his Lord. Both men must feel acute shame. Indeed, Peter is so deeply ashamed that when he realizes who’s on the beach, he covers himself -- as Adam and Eve did in the Garden after their own transgression -- and jumps into the water to get away from Jesus. At least, that’s how I read this passage. Maybe he’s rebaptizing himself. Maybe he’s just really clumsy. But if I were Peter, confronted with the person I’d denied three times, I’d run away.

We all know that there’s no running away from God, though:  not from God’s wrath, and not from the love, healing and mercy we see in today’s lessons. God sends Ananias to heal Saul, who regains his sight and feels much better after a meal. Jesus fries up some fish for his friends, including the sopping, bedraggled Peter. God gives both men food for the journey. I wonder if Peter, chewing his fried fish as he dripped dry on the beach, remembered that Jesus also fed Judas -- the ultimate betrayer -- at the last supper. If Peter did remember that, I wonder if he felt more hopeful, or only more ashamed.  

And I wonder what he felt during that chat with Jesus. “Do you love me? Do you love me? No, really, Peter, do you love me?” Maybe at first Peter was happy to assure Jesus of his love after his previous shameful behavior. But by the third time we know, because the text tells us, that he’s hurt at having to answer the question again. He just wants to be forgiven. He just wants to put that whole horrible episode in the past. Why does Jesus keep harping on it?

Jesus keeps harping on it because he has a job for Peter: “Feed my sheep.” That gets repeated three times, too. “Hey, Peter, are you enjoying that fish I cooked up for you? Feed others as I have fed you.” Paul will receive a similar commission.

 

All of us have done wrong. All of us, at some point, have betrayed ourselves and those we love. All of us long for forgiveness. But in these two stories, Jesus does more than say, “You’re forgiven.” He says to both men, “I have work for you.  I’m giving you a job.” And he tells Peter, in effect, “I’m saying it three times so you’ll get it.  This is important.  Pay attention.”

Being forgiven means that we’re accepted: that we’re loved again, or still. But being given work means that we’re trusted, even when we don’t quite trust ourselves yet. “I have a really important job for you. I know you can do this. I know you won’t let me down.”

There’s another layer here, beyond the personal healing of Saul and Peter. People who’ve done terrible things themselves will be that much more likely to forgive others with shady pasts. Saul and Peter can be counted on to be compassionate to wrongdoers. They’ve done wrong, too. They know what guilt feels like, and they know that loving their neighbors -- loving others as God has loved them -- means offering second chances, including meaningful work. Having lain in their own tombs of shame and darkness, having been restored to love and light, they are the best possible choices to spread the Good News of resurrection.

That’s as true now as it was two thousand years ago. Let me introduce you to a woman named Rhonda Bear. Rhonda lives in Oklahoma. In 2000, in her mid-twenties, she was a single mother of three children. She didn’t have a job or an education. She did have a meth habit. She couldn’t even see her children because she was wanted on multiple drug charges, and she knew the police would catch her if she visited her kids. Desperate to be a mother again, she turned herself in, promising her children that she was going to change.

In prison, Rhonda attended a Kairos weekend, the prison ministry you’ve heard Mike talk about. She was amazed by the unconditional love of the Kairos volunteers. “They didn’t say ‘Why are you here?’ or ‘Shame on you.’ They said, ‘Come on in. Let’s love you with the love of God and let the love of God impact your life.’”

Rhonda was released nineteen months into her ten-year sentence. Three years later, she too became a Kairos volunteer. She also ran halfway houses for former inmates, but she wanted to help with employment opportunities. "In order to stay out of prison," she says, "you have to have safe housing. You have to have a job. You have go have community support." So, starting with $300 and a flea-market booth, she opened a coffeeshop called She Brews. She has employed twenty-four women, all former offenders, all of whom are currently working, although most have moved on from the coffeeshop. Three of them are now in college. “We help them with employment,” Bear says. “We help them with education. We help them set goals so that their lives and their children’s lives can be different.” Bear mentors these women because it was transformative for her to have someone believe in her.  Being trusted changed her life. Today, reunited with her children and grandchildren, she helps others reach that same state of grace.

The number three runs through Rhonda Bear’s story, too. Sit up. Pay attention. This is important. When we accept not just God’s love and forgiveness but the work God gives us, we find new life both for ourselves and others. Feeding others as we have been fed, transforming our shame into compassion, and offering the healing balm of trust, we embody resurrection.

  

Let us behold Christ in his redeeming work, and let us do likewise. Amen.