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.

Journeys to Resurrection

I've preached this homily twice before, years apart, with different examples. I reread it this year wondering if the beginning would seem stale, if I'd need to rewrite it, but I still like it. I hope other people will, too. The readings are Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 11:1-45. *

“How could God let this happen?”

We hear this question all the time: after shootings, after tragic car accidents and plane crashes, after typhoons and mudslides and earthquakes. In my volunteer work in the ER, I’ve heard it often. It is the agonized cry of faith in the face of tragedy, and it’s at the heart of this morning’s Gospel.

The raising of Lazarus is a dress rehearsal for Holy Week. Eleven verses before the beginning of this passage, the religious establishment of Judea threatens to stone Jesus for blasphemy, for claiming to be God. After Jesus escapes that threat, he learns that his beloved friend Lazarus is dying. So Jesus — knowing that a return to Judea will seal his death sentence — decides to go back, but only after he’s dawdled a few days, to make sure that Lazarus will be dead before he gets there. An ordinary healing won’t be enough this time. The stakes have been raised; the chips are down. Jesus is about to perform nothing less than a resurrection.

As a dress rehearsal for Holy Week, this story contains many familiar elements: an all-powerful God refusing, for seemingly inexplicable reasons, to prevent the death of a beloved; weeping women; a tomb sealed by a stone; and, finally, the death-shattering miracle of resurrection. The biggest difference is that Lazarus dies of natural causes, not by execution.

Or does he? If Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’ death and refuses to do so, isn’t it somehow his fault? Mary and Martha think so: both of them say, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Some of the mourners agree: “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” How could God let this happen?

Jesus has earlier told his disciples, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” But belief isn’t the main issue here. Mary and Martha, the other mourners, and the disciples already believe in Jesus. The issue is anger. If we believe in God, if we know that God can act to prevent suffering and forestall untimely death, we may become more angry at these things than non-believers would. People who don’t believe in God don’t wonder where God is in the middle of earthquakes and famines and tidal waves. They don’t rage at God when their loved ones die too soon or after too much pain. They don’t demand, “How could God let this happen?” For non-believers, such events constitute compelling -- indeed, crushing -- proof that there is no God.

It’s believers who rail at God. “We know you can fix this. We’ve seen you do it before. Where were you this time? If you really love us as much as you say you do, how can you just sit there, cooling your heels, while our brother’s body is growing cold in his tomb? How could you let this happen?”

Jesus wept. This is, famously, the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus weeps when he sees Mary and the mourners weeping. “He was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” the Gospel says.   I always want to ask, “What did you expect, Jesus? Did you think the people who loved Lazarus wouldn't weep at his death? Did you think they’d tell each other, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Jesus will show up one of these days, when he gets around to it, so let’s have a party?’”

Any way you look at it, the situation stinks, just like Lazarus’ body stinks after four days in a hot Middle-Eastern tomb. And yet, having finally shown up, Jesus does indeed make everything right.  He calls Lazarus out of the tomb, and he instructs Lazarus’ family and friends to unbind the burial cloths, to help Lazarus readjust to his new life. Any mourners who didn’t believe in Jesus before that little demonstration certainly believe in him afterwards.

Their belief is about to be tested yet again. The dress rehearsal is over. Holy Week is almost here.  This time, even Jesus will cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Once again, there will be weeping women and a tomb sealed by a stone, a tomb from which God impossibly, miraculously, will call forth new life.

The story of Lazarus offers us at least three lessons. The first is that there are no shortcuts to resurrection, even for those who believe. The most steadfast faith will not protect us against grief and doubt and bitter trials. The most serene acceptance of God’s will cannot shield us from feeling, at times, as if God has abandoned us. All of that is human and holy. It is human and holy to get angry when we feel forsaken; it is human and holy to question God, to rail at God, to weep at God’s apparent absence. It is human and holy to mourn our dead. God weeps with us, and when the time comes, God will show us how to unbind what has been resurrected.

The second lesson is that resurrection is a process, even for those who believe.  Look at today’s reading from Ezekiel, the famous Valley of Dry Bones. That’s a resurrection story, too, but it happens in stages.  First you need breath; then you need muscle, sinews, skin. It’s like peeling an onion, but in reverse. Resurrection happens from the inside out, and it takes time.

That is why, every year, we make the long slow journey through Lent, walking through those forty days just as Jesus walked through the desert, just as he walked back into Judea to Lazarus’ tomb. We make such journeys at other times, too: whenever we have suffered grief or betrayal, whenever we feel abandoned by God or other people, whenever we gag at the stench of death in a place where we had prayed for rebirth. Rebirth can still happen. God’s time is not ours. Even as we weep and pray, God journeys towards us, step by step, bringing resurrection.

But God needs our help. The third lesson of the Lazarus story is that resurrection is a community project. “Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus tells the onlookers. Those who have been resurrected need to be helped by their neighbors and welcomed back into community. They need to be loved. They need to know that they matter.  

This makes resurrection inescapably political. People desperate for new life can’t achieve it if they’re deported back to their tombs. They can’t achieve it if the communities to which they have journeyed put them in handcuffs instead of unbinding them. They can’t achieve it if other people’s fear of who they are, or where they came from, overcomes willingness to love.   

Here, courtesy of CNN, is a story about what that kind of love looks like. In January, an Illinois woman named Nancy Swabb learned about a baby girl in Cote D’Ivoire, the Ivory Coast in Africa, who needed emergency life-saving surgery in the United States. Baby Dominique also needed foster care during her treatment. Swabb and her family, who live near the hospital that donated the surgery, opened their home to Dominique and asked their neighbors to help out with supplies. Within two days, a pile taller than Swabb herself filled the house. Neighbors donated diapers, formula, wipes, clothes, a stroller, a car seat and a playpen. Swabb's daily walks with Dominique in the stroller stretched to an hour as neighbors stopped to greet the baby they had helped welcome. "She has become the community baby, and everyone has been really interested in her story," Swabb said.

Dominque’s story ends as happily as Lazarus’ did. Her long, complicated, risky surgery was more successful than the doctors had dared hope. She is recovering well and will return to her African birth family in April. "I can't wait for her parents to see her," says Swabb, who hopes that the two families can meet someday.

Here in Reno, St. Paul’s -- along with other churches -- has welcomed our local family of Syrian refugees just this warmly. But having kids in the picture makes that easier. Dominique is ten months old and adorable. The Syrian family has small children, too. Kids remind us of innocence, of birth, of Christmas. Lazarus, four days dead and reeking, probably wasn’t adorable, but he was welcomed back into the world by people who’d known him his entire life, who already loved him.

Our challenge as a country right now is to remember that everyone alive is someone’s child: both God’s child and the child of human parents. Everyone alive was a baby once, as lovely as Dominique, as the Syrian children, as the infant Jesus on Christmas morning. Our challenge is to help yesterday’s Christmases become tomorrow’s Easters. We are called to unbind, not just the innocent and adorable, but the adults such children become, people whose unlovely tombs and journeys have left them shattered and smelly and scarred. We may well demand to know how God, or other people, could let this happen to them. But even if we never learn the answers, we can still welcome them into new and abundant life.  

Amen.

Promised Lands

Here's tomorrow's homily. I can't believe that I haven't preached since last May, and I'm very happy to be doing so again, but Matthew 5:21-37 is a bear. The other reading I talk about here is Deuteronomy 30:15-20, a much smaller bear.

*

A few weeks ago, my friend Shira asked her friends on Facebook if they’d help her teenaged daughter Valerie by buying containers of chili. Valerie is raising money to visit detainee camps on the Texas-Mexican border with a Methodist youth group. The group will meet with agencies to discuss how to help families released from the detention center. They’ll be bringing things like craft supplies and soccer balls to help them make friends with the children of these families.

This is a wonderful project, but I was a little confused. Shira and her family are Jewish. How had they gotten involved with the Methodist church? “Valerie's part of the group even though we're not members,” Shira told me. “She went with them to build in Appalachia. She went on a civil rights trip last spring break. She went to Washington to advocate for the SNAP program.” After noting that she doesn’t see any other faith organizations, Jewish or Christian, doing similar work in her area, Shira added, “It's maybe the only church I've been to where I actually feel welcome. Plus they say you can replace Jesus with love in prayers.”

This conversation reminded me of Kirk, last week, wondering what might happen if we replaced our crosses -- symbols of execution -- with glow sticks, symbols of God’s light. Would wearing glow sticks make people outside the church feel  more welcome?  

Welcome, something our own parish has been emphasizing for several years now, makes all the difference for people searching for a faith community. All of us want to find the place that welcomes us and feels like home. It’s worth noting, though, that welcome isn’t the same thing as comfort. Shira and Valerie feel welcome at the Methodist Church not because they’re being coddled or sheltered, but because they’re being challenged: to house the homeless, feed the hungry, and visit the imprisoned. Confronting and relieving suffering, our own or others’, is rarely comfortable. It involves sacrifices of time, money, and privilege. It involves looking at things we’d rather not see. In the short term, it may make us more unhappy, rather than less. That was certainly the experience of the Isrealites, whose flight from oppression involved forty years of hardship. No one reaches the promised land overnight.  

Promised lands take many forms: geographical, cultural, personal, political, vocational. Setting out for any promised land requires courage, planning, and the ability to persist without guarantees. Not all of the Isrealites crossed the Jordan. Moses himself didn’t, although his work made the journey possible for others. His exhortation in Deuteronomy -- “Choose life, that you and your descendants may live” -- reminds us that our actions affect future generations. Even when we won’t see the results ourselves, we work for a better world for those who will come after us.  

Choosing life is also, less obviously, at the heart of this morning’s Gospel, another in our continuing series from the Sermon on the Mount.  Among the “hard sayings” of Jesus, today’s are among the most difficult. I don’t know anyone who’s never been angry, but Jesus equates anger with murder.  I don’t know anyone who’s never been attracted, however briefly, to someone outside a primary relationship, but Jesus equates fantasy with literal cheating. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t sinned, but Jesus commands us to perform self-mutilation rather than continue to do wrong.  

Jesus is telling us to take God’s law to heart, to police ourselves rather than relying on other people to do it for us. He is telling us to address problems at their source. Everyone knows we aren’t supposed to murder, but Jesus’ followers also need to root out hatred and anger. Everyone knows that cheating is a terrible betrayal, but Jesus’ followers need to be as faithful in thoughts as in actions, because unchecked thoughts ultimately express themselves in action. We have to be willing to confront our darkest selves, the impulses that polite, respectable society would prefer to ignore.  

Fair enough. The problem, though, is that the lord of love and forgiveness seems neither loving nor forgiving here. I can’t imagine my friend Shira being comfortable hearing this passage in church. I’m not comfortable hearing this passage in church. There are no glow-sitcks anywhere in the vicinity. This is desert territory, hard and stony and parched. Jesus may be drawing us a map about how to reach the promised land, but getting there involves a lot of forced marching under a merciless sun.  

Next week, in the next section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus will command us to love our enemies. That’s hard, uncomfortable work too, but at least we’ll be back to talking about love.  Next week, Jesus will once again say things that sound at least somewhat comforting. But that’s not much help to us today.  This Sunday is a kind of mini-Lent, practice for the real thing coming up in three weeks. This Sunday, Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms to confront our sins -- our disconnections from God, from other people, and from ourselves -- and to do whatever we need to do, no matter how difficult, to make those relationships healthy again.  

Sometimes becoming healthy involves the agonizing process of cutting away diseased tissue. Sometimes it involves sacrificing things that mean a great deal to us, things that polite, respectable society tells us should make us happy. I suspect that everyone in this room has a story about doing that. Here’s mine. Please be assured that this story has a happy ending.

Almost exactly six years ago -- just before Valentine’s Day in 2011 -- I went through a very dark time. For fourteen years, I’d been an English professor at UNR.  I’d worked very hard to get the job, which paid nicely and gave me good benefits. I had tenure, which meant that at least in theory I had lifetime job security. I worked with lovely colleagues and taught excellent students, people I really cared about. By the standards of polite society, I should have been happy, and for ten years or so after starting the job, I had been.

But by 2011, I was miserable. I didn’t enjoy teaching anymore. I wasn’t doing the kind of service work my department wanted me to, which made me feel incredibly guilty, but thinking about doing that work made me feel like I was being crushed by boulders. My husband had given up his own lucrative job in New York to follow me to Reno, where he couldn’t do what he’d been doing before. I was supporting both of us. If I stopped doing that, we’d both be miserable, and I’d have broken my word. I felt trapped. I couldn’t see a way out.

For about five days that February, I seriously considered suicide. I had a plan, one that could have worked. That very week, the same plan did work for someone else. I saw the story in the newspaper and was instantly shaken, completely horrified. I felt sick for the person who’d died, sick for that person’s family and friends, sick that I’d been contemplating the same departure. My thoughts had almost led to a catastrophic action.

The good news is that they didn’t. Remembering that week, I’m still horrified at how close I came. But as scary as the episode was, it was also a major wake-up call: a summons not to death, but to new life. I obviously had to find another career, however difficult that seemed. After considering several other options, I hit on the idea of medical social work. For financial reasons, it’s taken me a while to translate that thought into action, but I’m now on my way. With my husband’s blessing, I’m in my last semester of teaching at UNR. I’m already taking classes in UNR’s Masters of Social Work program; this fall, I’ll enroll full time. I’m glad that getting here took only six years, not forty. And I’m grateful that my dark thoughts six years ago will help me understand clients who are struggling with their own. That terrifying time of darkness and disconnection will connect me to people who are suffering.

But while this absolutely feels like the right move, it also involves a lot of scary sacrifices. For at least the next two years, I’ll be cutting our family income by at least two-thirds. I’m trading job security and seniority to go back to square one in a poorly paid profession, in an era when healthcare and social services are on newly precarious ground. I’ll be giving up tenure, summer vacations, and quite a bit of social prestige. To a lot of people in polite, respectable society, this would look crazy.

I don’t think it’s crazy. I think I’ve chosen life. I can breathe again. So far, I feel very welcome in my new profession. I hope I reach my promised land, and I hope my journey allows me to help other people. But the process isn’t comfortable.

I’m being called to something new, and I’m on a long, uncertain road to get there. Maybe some of you are, too. In one way or another, all of us are. We can’t take comfort in any guarantee of earthly safety on these journeys, for there is none. Our comfort is in the one who walks beside us and ahead of us, showing the way:  the one who endured his own trials in the desert, and who reminds us that our true job is to find our own path to loving God, and others, and ourselves. Our comfort lies in knowing that even when our road takes us to the foot of the cross, there will still be life beyond it.

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.  

Welcome, Child

Here's today's homily. The readings are Proverbs 31:10-31 and Mark 9:30-37.

*

Dear child:

There you are in Jesus’ arms. We don’t know how old you are; we don’t even know your gender.  We don’t know if you were a cherished heir, a beloved child of the family who owned that house in Capernaum, or a slave. Whatever your status, you would have been considered the legal property of your parents, not yet a person in your own right.

 

That’s also true of your mother, whether she was a servant or the “capable wife” celebrated in today’s reading from Proverbs, who acts almost entirely for the good of her husband and family.  It sounds like this wife loves her husband, and we have to hope he loves her back, because she’s his legal property too. That’s going to last a long time. Where I live, in the United States -- a country that doesn’t exist yet, in your time -- the law saying that a wife is her husband’s property won’t be declared fully unconstitutional until 1981. Where I live, so far in your future you couldn’t even imagine it, women still don’t get equal pay for equal work. My country has never had a female President. In some quarters, the view that women are people too is still controversial.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? You don’t know about any of that, don’t care about it. You’re in Jesus’ arms, enjoying the attention from his friends. They’ve just been arguing about who’s the greatest -- the most famous, the most influential -- and Jesus is using you to make a point. He’s telling them that if they really want to be great, they have to take care of you. They have to welcome you. They have to treat you like a person. He’s telling them that if they really want to be great, they have to treat you as if you’re him:  the Messiah, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace.

Jesus knows about being a child. Jesus came to Earth as a child, a baby, and even though he was a cherished heir, he was also poor. His mother wasn’t like that ideal wife in Proverbs, with her servants and vineyards. He was born in a stable because no one would give his parents a room. Some poor shepherds knew who he was, and so did some rich kings, but a lot of other people didn’t, and still don’t. The Messiah is supposed to be great and powerful. Children aren’t. A lot of what Jesus does looks upside-down to everyone else, even his closest friends. He wants them to use their power to give, not to take, but he has to keep reminding them how it works.  That’s why he’s holding you, now, and telling them to welcome you.

What do they do, I wonder? The story doesn’t tell us. Do they ask your name? Do they play with you? When Jesus puts you down again, what happens? Will you ever see these men again? What does your future look like?

Child -- boy or girl, slave or free, EveryChild -- I wish I didn’t know as much about your future as I do. Where I live, here in the United States in 2015, we still haven’t fully learned what Jesus was trying to teach his friends. We welcome some children, our cherished heirs. As I write this, my niece is about to deliver her first child, a little boy named Charlie, and our family and friends can’t wait to welcome him. But yesterday in the news I read about a five year old refugee who drowned trying to reach safety in Europe. In my own country, more than 21% of children live in poverty. That’s the highest poverty rate of any age group. In my country, the average age of a homeless person is 11, and one in thirty children is homeless. Poor children are often hungry, and hungry children can’t learn, and that puts them at risk for other problems, terrible problems happening right here within our own borders, like the sex trafficking we hear about on the news that makes us shudder and hug our own kids more tightly and thank God they’re safe.

 

Remember when I talked about women, about equal pay for equal work?  These things are connected. Women and their children bear the brunt of poverty, and income inequality is part of the reason why.  

I’m talking about politics now, and there are people who say it’s impolite to talk about politics to anyone, let alone children. In my country, we believe in the separation of church and state. But Jesus was a political figure. He’s just told his followers that he’ll die a political death, although they don’t want to believe it. He’s trying to teach them about the proper uses of power, and you can’t get much more political than that. If we’re going to welcome you, child, it can’t just be in our own families. It has to be in the rest of the world, too:  in stables and homeless shelters and hospitals, in refugee camps and war zones, and in poor and struggling neighborhoods here at home. We say we care about children in my country, but we don’t fund education the way we should.  We don’t respect teachers or pay them as if they’re important. We don’t have universal daycare to make it easier for parents to work and feed their kids, or universal healthcare to keep children and their parents healthy. Two years ago, the United States ranked 34th out of 35 countries in child welfare; only Romania ranked lower.

Please don’t get me wrong. A lot of us do try to welcome you. We donate money and volunteer and support programs and agencies that help kids. When we see a child right in front of us -- a child who’s hurt or hungry or frightened or poor -- we offer every comfort we can.

I remember a child I met in the ER where I volunteer. The little boy was a year old, maybe. A foster-care caseworker had brought him in for an evaluation. X-rays showed signs of earlier abuse:  multiple healed fractures of the long bones of his arms. A tech who had to start an IV on him asked for my help, because the baby liked women. He lay quietly on his gurney, but when he saw me, he smiled and reached out his arms to be picked up.  He played with my hair, my glasses, my ID badge. He never cried, not even when the tech started the IV.  Most children scream during that procedure. They buck and bite and kick. They have to be held down by five adults. Somewhere, this baby had learned to stay completely still and quiet.  His silence haunts me. How much pain do we never hear, because the children and adults suffering it have learned that if they cry, no one will come? How many have learned that if they cry, anyone who answers will only hurt them more?

Child, we help you when we can see you, but so often you’re invisible to us. A lot of that is political, too. Some of our leaders want us to care more about some children than about others. We need to learn to look out for all, and to act for all. We need to vote for school bonds even if we have no children in those schools. We need to support political initiatives that will help parents and children. We need to resist the lie that children from other families or neighborhoods, countries or religions, matter less than our children.  

All children are our children. That’s what Jesus was trying to teach us. All children are his children. All children are him.

Child, we don’t know your name, your gender, your parentage.  We don’t know what your life was like before Jesus picked you up, or what it will be like after he puts you down.  We don’t know if you’ll remember him when you grow up. But we know that right now, you are safe and loved, cherished and nurtured, held in the warmth of Jesus’ arms while his friends smile at you.  And for his sake, we promise to do our very best to offer that same love and welcome to every child we meet.

Amen.