retreat address on the Song of Songs


Readings from the Song:
Woman: 1:5-6 (don’t despise me because I am black)
Man: 4:9-16 (you are beautiful and you smell sexy)
Woman: 5:2-8 (ready for “bed” and can’t find lover)
Man: 7:1-9 (you’re beautiful, this time with food)

I joked with my students in describing this retreat
that it was going to be about the sexy, sexy Bible. Was I kidding?
For centuries, we’ve tried to figure out this poem.
Some see it as a kind of performance art,
reenacting a fertility rite to bring good fortune to crops.
Others as an allegory
—a one-to-one metaphor for God’s love for recalcitrant Israel.
It’s read on Passover in many Jewish households because,
in the words of my friend Rabbi Yitz,
“Passover is the dating process
of the just-born Jewish nation with G-d,
culminating in the Marriage Ceremony
under the canopy of Clouds at Mount Sinai.”
For many Christians, it’s been God dating the Church instead.
Others see it as a celebration of physical and romantic love, God-given.
Still others wonder why it’s in our Scriptures at all
—God’s not mentioned once.
Do we ever read it in church? Not much.
And then only the least racy parts.
Like, not the bits with dripping nard or channels or bellies
and breasts and lips.
That stuff is best kept far away from Sunday morning.
Only, why? Are we embarrassed?
We are certainly embarrassing as a Christian people
to non-Christians who don’t understand why
we’re so embarrassed about our bodies and what they do.
The Song of Songs is, at least a little bit, all these things.
The woman who wrote the Song
and the men who included it in the canon of scripture
and the millions of Jews and Christians who have read it
across the centuries have already voted.
This Song is scandalously specific and ambiguous.
It is almost pornographic and deeply spiritual.
The Song of Songs is about sustaining relationships
and about constantly striving
and it is about the love which is the ground of all our being
in one way or another.
First, it’s poetry. Some of your eyes are lighting up at the thought,
others are bracing yourselves for a long, boring lecture
and ultimately not understanding any more than when you began.
Don’t worry, I only mean that it means more than it seems to mean.
Like the TV show Lost. Or whatever your favorite pop song is. Only better.
So, The Song of Songs is about a woman
who is deeply in love and lust with her beloved
who may or may not be King Solomon. Probably not.  
And they have frequent trysts but apparently don’t live together.
Or maybe they’re married,
though the text doesn’t offer much support for that.
Or maybe their relationship is scandalous somehow
since she gets beaten at one point for trying to find him.
It’s not a straightforward story-poem
with a beginning, middle, and end,
nor is it entirely clear who the characters are.
It reads a bit like a series of monologues
between the man and the woman
but they don’t always flow from one to another.
The language, as you might expect, is heightened, is metaphorical;
“your teeth are like a flock of goats,”
“your neck is like a tower, all it’s stones in courses.”
It’s like saying, “your skin is as soft as a kitten’s fur”
or “your hips are as curvaceous as the Guggenheim Museum
and truly, they don’t lie.”
Her neck is not a tower, not really,
and her teeth aren’t hairy like a flock of goats.
It’s about taking inspiration
from the natural and human-made world
—what’s beautiful to you?
That’s what you compare your love to.
“Your body,” she says in one place, “is like ivory.”
Which, it turns out, is a lot like other places in scripture
when someone sees someone else’s “feet,” meaning genitals.
The Hebrew word translated “body”
means a man’s midsection,
so the woman is speaking of the man’s penis as like ivory,
like an elephant’s tusk.
Yes, in a lovely, poetic way, she’s saying,
“my beloved is well-hung.”[1]
Second, the Song of Songs is part of a theology called “Bridal mysticism,”
the theology derived poetically
that Jesus is our collective and individual boyfriend.  
If you think of it literally, it’s a bit creepy.
But also beautiful and has a long history in the church.
We see married people all the time
—certainly we see broken marriages,
but also connectedness and reliance and mutual giving.
Of course we’d use it as a metaphor for our relationship with God.
Bridal mysticism takes Jesus as the boyfriend to its logical extreme
and puts the mystic or the reader in the place of the bride
—when we read these passages, when we pray,
we can experience the great hope a bride feels,
the anticipation of new life,
the excitement of being with the one our heart most desires
—you know this feeling.
Not just the heart palpitations of a crush,
but the deep connectedness to someone we truly love
and who loves us back.
For some of you, that might be a romantic or married partner,
for others it might be a deep soulfriend,
for others it could be the relationship you have
with a parent or sibling.
These are beautiful experiences and we ought to want them—
but they require a certain vulnerability on our end.
We have to be able to be vulnerable to God.
Bridal mysticism requires us to present ourselves
exactly as we are to our bridegroom Jesus.
Third, and maybe most important,
“the protagonist in the Song is the only unmediated female voice in scripture.”[2]
Meaning, every other woman’s story is told by someone else,
either by another character in a story or by the writer of the book.
Here, the woman speaks in the first person,
she is a woman in touch with her own heart and mind,
a woman in touch with her sensuality,
a woman empowered.
And so, because her story needs to be heard, I’ll tell it to you,
at least, an imagined story of how she came to write this poem.
I was told I had to work in my brothers’ vineyards.
I was told I had dark, ugly, black skin.
I was told I’d never amount to anything, that I was unloveable.
I was told I would have babies and that would make me valuable.
I was told to be quiet in church, to submit to my husband, to lie back and think of England.
I was told it was all in my head, that it was my fault.
I was told.
And now I will tell.

When I saw him the first time, I came over all giddy.
I was talking to my friend and suddenly I was stammering
and my hands were shaking and my nipples were hard
and I couldn’t stop staring.
When he talked to me the first time,
I looked down at my shaking knees,
knowing he couldn’t possibly find me pleasant to look at,
but he lifted my chin with a finger and looked at me
like no one else ever had.
He really saw me—what did he see?
He said that I was more beautiful than a flock of goats on the hillside,
more sweet than persimmons dipped in honey,
more elegant the Temple Mount itself.
He said, “she’s a brick house!”
He compared my breasts to round baby sheep
nursing at their mother’s side.
He said my heart was bigger than the Jerusalem marketplace,
that my mind was sharper than the rocks at the shore
which tear up the hulls of boats,
that my ass was as round as melons
and how he wanted to take a bite.
How could he see this when I am, at best, average?
He saw me and he loved me.
And I saw him and I loved him.
We devour each other with our eyes.
When we see each other around town, from yards and yards away,
we cannot resist seeing, we cannot resist knowing.
I know that last night we spoke of philosophy and the nature of God,
we spoke of politics and farming and birds and bees,
we spoke of our fears and of our darkest fantasies.
And we touched each other
—we removed each other’s clothes slowly, achingly slowly,
fingers tracing the hollow of the throat,
like the curve of a spoon dipped in custard,
fingers circling wrists vulnerable as newborn puppies,
fingers caressing inner thighs,
open like a book revealing its secrets.
And today, when we see each other,
we know, deeply, what the other looks like under their clothes,
how they respond to kisses and challenges.
We devour each other with more than our eyes.
Yet I cannot see him now.
And so often, I cannot find him.
He doesn’t respond when I text and our friends have not seen him.
I run across sidewalks and fields,
through the autumn trees smelling of wet leaves and death
and I weep.
I meet people as I wander and they look at me in disgust.
They speak harshly, telling me no one could love me as he does,
telling me I’m making a fool of myself,
telling me to not to speak up for myself,
telling me to go home.
And so I return to my bed, to my empty apartment
which still smells of his soap and his skin and sex.
I return to my shower and wash away my tears in hot water.
I rub lotion into my skin and put on my pajamas,
giving in to exhaustion.
I tell myself it will be better tomorrow.
I tell myself he will return.
I tell myself to fall asleep.
I give in memories and touch myself.
And just on the edge of sleep, I think I hear him next to me,
his hand on my belly, his lips at my ear.
I wake with a jolt but he is not here.
I run to the door,
my hands still slick with lotion and my own moisture,
my feet bare,
but he is not there.
And later we have carved out time to lie on the grass,
feeling the warm sun on our skin,
seeing the red glow of it through our eyelids,
smelling burning leaves and each other’s familiar scent.
Cloves and eucalypus and nard filling my nose and my heart.
His hand in mine, our only touchpoint, yet containing multitudes.
I bask in my beloved’s presence and he in mine.
And tell him,
Many haters cannot quench your love for me.
Many insults will not quench my joy in my own body
nor the want I feel for you, my beloved.
Many sorrows and arguments will not quench our commitment.
Many wars cannot quench the spark of the divine and the hope of peace.
Many waters cannot quench the fire of my love,
neither can floods drown it.

For the holiness of all that is love, hear me tell you my story and know this same love.


[2] Women’s Bible Commentary, “Song of Songs” by Renita J Weems, 164

sermon on Romans 12:9-21, conversation, and jerks on campus

This past week at UC has been crazy. A week and a half ago, the students returned to campus and the university put on a ton of events to welcome them, to help them make friends, to encourage them to join extracurriculars, to encourage them to do things other than drink themselves silly. It’s called Welcome Weekend and they say, if you’re not completely wiped out by the end of it, you’re not doing it right.

Check out some of the people who came to the-Edge-House-sponsored Board Game Extravaganza—I stopped counting at 200.

















And here’s a shot of our Giant-Sized Settlers of Catan—it’s a strategy board game from Germany, very fun. We just made it bigger fun.


















We took our espresso set-up onto campus to give out free iced lattes and we had some great conversations with some of the 150 folks who partook.

Earlier in the week I got to speak again to a roomful of technical theatre students at CCM about spiritual wellness. I don’t have a picture of that, I’m afraid, but it was all about how, just like a play needs actors and costumers and set-builders and stage managers and lighting designers and all the people to make it work, so do our lives. Don’t do it alone.

And so it goes. Days on end of deeply emotional and draining events. Ya’ll should come next year, it’s great!

One of my students has been working for a year on a collaboration between DAAP design students and both the Women’s Center and the UC counseling services called #consentculture. It’s in response to the statistic that 1 in 4 collegiate women are sexually assaulted in their college careers. And that first couple weeks of the school year is what they call the “red zone”—more of the assaults happen when folks are new and vulnerable. So my student Heather and others have created this amazing brand and set-up where people can come over and learn about it and pledge to support consent—verbal, ongoing consent. Beautiful. Wednesday, I went to sign the board. As I turned to speak to the woman staffing the table, a young man came up and said, “consent culture? I believe in consent to rape.” Yeah. I figured he was a freshman, didn’t know how offensive he was, so I said, “that’s not funny. Please don’t say that.” And he proceeded to spout a lot of garbage—and that’s the nicest way I can say it—garbage about men and women and our place and men’s right to receive something back. When I noticed aloud that his argument wasn’t logical, he insulted us by saying that lesser minds wouldn’t understand his argument nor his entitlement. Maybe you’re familiar with some of the rhetoric another young man in California spoke before he shot up a sorority house recently? It was like that. And. It was…alarming. And disgusting. And we who were there at the booth did an admirable job of not flying off the handle but I’m going to be honest with y’all: I was angry. I was furious that he and anyone else could believe that women were objects who owed him something. And I was furious that there is a culture that would teach him this. And, weirdly, of all the things in that moment, what was the most frustrating was his unwillingness to allow anyone else to speak. He approached alone, looking for a fight; he left alone, having gotten one.

I’m not offering a treatise on feminism today, nor a travelogue on the Edge House’s Welcome Weekend adventures. But I am going to insist that we talk to and listen to one another.

Paul’s words in his letter to the church in Rome have been bouncing around in my brain all week. Paul says a lot of things about how to live in Christian community—look back at that in your bulletin [on the screen]. “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”
This may seem to be a kind of grocery list of virtues that we want to do but know with that sinking feeling that we can’t hope to live up to. And we Lutherans—ahem, y’all Lutherans…—might even go so far as to get comfy with that. You might think that since there’s no way we can check off all that blessing and persevering and living peaceably with everyone, and since we are saved by God’s grace, let’s just not worry so much about it. Our everyday failures to be kind and forgiving aren’t such a big deal in the end.
Yes and no. I mean, yeah, it’s good not to be so nitpicky of ourselves and others—we don’t want to become micromanagers of other people’s lives—it’s exhausting for one thing. And we don’t want to end up hating ourselves for our failures. But. But.
What this is about is how much we need each other. How much we can’t do it alone. Paul is talking about being present, about showing up to our relationships and working to release our own self-interest. He’s talking about reflecting back grace and love and forgiveness rather than our normal, easily-justifiable rejection and annoyance. I won’t go so far as to say that we’re hateful people—seems like our day-to-day sin is annoyance, it’s eye-rolls and unwillingness to engage with the humanity of those around us. None of us here want to destroy the people we meet, but neither do we want others to disrupt our comfortable routine. And Paul’s all about disrupting that comfortable routine and requiring the believers to engage day-to-day kindness. He wants them, basically, to recognize that they need each other, like those theatre students need each other to produce a play and to, you know, live their lives well. Paul’s not saying, “go out there, team, and save the entire world!” He’s saying, “next time you meet that one lady you don’t care for so much, try to be a little gentler, know she’s struggling as well.” He’s saying, “next time you find yourself knowing you’re right, maybe allow for the possibility that you’re not, know that the other person has a story to tell.”

This storytelling and, maybe more importantly, story-listening, might be the thing that saves us. And really listening to someone else’s story is not easy. You might hear something that makes you uncomfortable or something you want to combat. You might hear something that resonates with your own deepest truth and it makes you weep. You might hear something ­­­­­­­­­­that opens your brain or heart to something unexpected and transforming.

For us to be able to do what Paul’s saying, to love with mutual affection, rejoice, be patient, persevere, extend hospitality, and live in harmony, we have to be vulnerable with each other. We have to be willing to actually talk to each other about more than the weather and the budget and our children and grandchildren. All good things, all good things. But we have to be willing to disagree about how to live out this divine love we’ve been given and still sit down to worship together.

So I want you to partner up. Turn to someone near you and if you need to add a third person because of where folks are sitting, great. Pulling from Paul’s letter to Rome, I invite you to share with your partners when was the last time you extended hospitality to a stranger? What difference did it make? I’ll give you 4 minutes to talk…

…friends, I invite you to turn your faces and hearts forward again.
Without sharing confidences, what was that like for you? What did you learn?

Now, that was only 4 minutes. Imagine if our lives were shaped by listening to each other and to looking for the ways in which we need each other?  Imagine if we weren’t so concerned with looking for big burning-bush signs and looked for the signs in each moment of God’s action? If a single smile from your mother suggested God’s toothy grin. If the bubbling laughter of a vacation reminded you of God’s playfulness in creating us in the first place. If a frown or a tear reminded us of God’s brokenheartedness at our self-centeredness. If doing the dishes reminded you of your baptism.
Friends, the church only functions because we have musicians and readers and ushers and offering counters and council members and Habitat for Humanity volunteers and students and teachers and prophets and apostles. It doesn’t function because we’ve all got it figured out. Just like how this place runs, so are our lives. Don’t do it alone. Know that no matter what things look like in any given moment, you are not alone. You are welcomed into the Kingdom. And the people who annoy you or you roll your eyes at or you avoid, they’re not alone either. Because they have you. We are a people of welcome. Let’s offer that welcome in the ordinary moments of our lives.


sermon on Israel/Palestine, BS, and Romans 8



I bring you greetings, friends,
from the students at The Edge House campus ministry at UC
—we are always grateful for you
and your continued ministry here at Prince of Peace.
Alas, my students could not be here
because of work and classes and not-being-in-Ohio,
but they send their love.
They also send me as an emissary
to share with you a little of our pilgrimage
to the Rocky Mountains at Spring Break this past year.
Each year we offer our Spring Break as a tithe of sorts
—time away from our normal schedules and busy-ness
to observe God’s action in the world
and to give back what we have been given.
This year, we restructured our trip as a pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage is a journey to a place of special spiritual significance.
There’s a fine line between that and being a tourist
—the idea is that we’re going somewhere
to see something powerful with our own eyes,
not just taking pictures and moving on.
Used to be, folks walked hundreds of miles
to a cathedral or even the Holy Land,
others have needed to go to Ground Zero or to Auschwitz
to see it with their own eyes
—for us, it was the Rocky Mountains.
We were able to worship with our friends at HFASS,
to spend retreat time in the deeply snow-covered mountains,
to work with the Boulder parks department,
and to walk several labyrinths.
For me, the most beautiful moment came
when we were walking our second labyrinth
—our work had been cancelled for the day due to high winds,
so we were at loose ends.
I admit to being angry about the loss of a workday
—aren’t we here to help out?
We searched out a labyrinth in the very public lobby
of a large office building.
It was laid out in the stonework of the floor
—a life-sized recreation
of the 11-circuit labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral.
After walking it, we explored the art gallery
just off the lobby where the building’s developer
had donated his and his wife’s art collection.
It was beautiful.
Sculpture and watercolors and furniture
—just amazing to have it there in a public space
for the folks who came in and out of the office building.
A security guard came over and told me
that the old lady who had just come in was the developer’s wife
and that she had dementia.
Her husband pays for a pianist to play for her in the lobby
twice a week and she sits there,
a look of delight on her face as she dances in her chair.
Beautiful.
And then. And then.
On my way out of the gallery, I saw a small painting
of a boy in tall grass next to some large text.
It was a quotation from the developer
saying that their collection had many critically-praised pieces
worth millions of dollars.
And that when one critic visited, he stood still,
taking in a wall of this magnificent art and then said,
“I really love this small one here, the boy in the tall grass.”
And the developer said, “That’s one of my favorites as well.
My wife painted it.”
His wife, who was right there, unaware.
I wept for their life together and for the gift he had given her.
If we had not had our work called off,
we would never have experienced that love.
Dementia cannot separate us from the love of God.
Anger with plans changing cannot separate us from the love of God.

Last week, I helped celebrate at the funeral
of a young adult from Good Shepherd.
Jackie died of a heart attack at 34.
She was a lovely, committed, active woman and she just suddenly died.
At her funeral, I did what I expect most of us do,
grieve her loss but also wonder what I was doing with my life
—what risks am I taking for the Kingdom? Am I?
And then I stood up to read the lessons,
including one of my most favorite passages, Romans 8:
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God
in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
And I thought, “yes, yes. Nothing can separate us.
This is our hope, this is my experience.
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.”
Death cannot separate us from the love of God.
Misery and grief and even anger at such a young person dying
cannot separate us from the love of God.
And then. And then.

Thursday this past week, I got a call from my hair salon
saying that the man who has been doing my hair for years,
J who was 49 and snarky and lovely, had died.
I couldn’t process it. I still can’t.
And then I was at the gym on the elliptical,
what’s on the morning show on the TV right in front of me?
A grainy video of a man in India beating a small child.
Played on repeat as the commentators discussed how terrible it was.
And then another video of a nanny doing the same thing.
I couldn’t look away—it was right in front of me and I couldn’t look away.
We know these things happen,
maybe we even try to stop them in a vague kind of way,
but to see it with our own eyes, to really see it…
And then to hear of the death tolls in the current version
of the Israel/Palestine conflict
—yesterday, the BBC reported that of the more than 800 people
who have died so far,
at least 278 are Palestinian women and children.
The UN says 73% of the Palestinian dead are civilians.
I’m very aware that talking about this is going to make someone mad.
I imagine at least one of you out there right now is seething already.
One of the reporters I heard talking about it said that
reporting on anything at all related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
will get you death threats
                  Israel is not a superhero. Palestine is not just a victim.
—it’s so fraught, so complicated,
so emotional for everyone involved,
and even for us who aren’t involved.
What are we supposed to think as Christians
—not as a religious sect or as Christian Americans,
but as followers of Jesus Christ
who preached peace
and also preached not letting oppressors get away with oppression?
What are we supposed to think
when Israel accuses Hamas of using human shields
and Hamas accuses Israel of firing first
and intentionally attacking civilian targets?
And both sides have been fighting over the same tiny plot of land
since at least 539 BCE.
I remember hearing a WW2 vet speaking brokenly
of the invasion of Normandy when the Germans
had put women and children on the tops of the gun turrets
along the beach so the Allies would have to shoot them.
Can you imagine? Who would do that?
If we stop to think about it at all,
if we do any research (and not in the comments section of news articles), we know it’s so very complicated and so very tragic.
So many people are dying and being displaced
there and Syria and Sudan and everywhere over what?
Really, though, over what?
I’m calling BS.
Because it sure looks like something can separate us from the love of God.
Is it easy for us here in safe middle-America
to say nothing can separate us from the love of God
when children all over the Middle East
and even here in our inner cities grow up with PTSD?
Is it ridiculous for us to say that neither things present nor things to come
nor powers can separate us from the love of God?
When our own savior Jesus Christ hung on the cross and cried out
“eloi eloi lama sabacthani
—my god, my god, why have you forgotten me?”
What the hell are we doing to ourselves as human beings? There and here?
What is keeping us from recognizing God in each other?
What is allowing us to insist on our own way
like toddlers refusing to share toys
when those toys are basic nutrition and access to health care
and, I don’t know, not living in fear for your life,
whether it’s in Gaza or Sandy Hook?
This is a difficult time to preach grace. And, really, it always is.
The problem is that grace is staring us in the face.
These moments, these years when we are destroying each other
and ignoring how we’re destroying each other,
this is when Jesus is all up in our business,
refusing to break eye-contact,
standing in front of us awkwardly and saying,
“Please” and “It’s ok.”
And then. And then.
We see with our own eyes, even for only a moment,
that this is not how it has to be.
This is not how it always is.
There’s a moment at the wedding of an Edge House alum
when he blushes at the loving things his best man is saying to him,
and their friendship,
the friendship between an atheist and a Christian,
is the shape of the Kingdom.
There’s a moment when your child snuggles into your bed with you
when you are not annoyed because she’s out of bed
but overwhelmed with love simply by the smell of her sweaty hair.
There’s a moment when slaves in the American South
jumped the broom and got married
because they found love in the midst of terror.
There’s the moment when a mother whose son was murdered
takes the murderer into her life
and they grow to love and forgive one another.
There’s a moment when women in concentration camps
wrote down recipes for foods they would never eat again
because doing so was their resistance, their way of saying,
“this is not the end of our story. You cannot destroy our hope.”
It’s not that Gaza and Sudan and my friend’s death don’t matter
because they really do—but that something else is going on.
We are fooling ourselves if we think we can define it completely
and we are fools if we can define it by what we value here in America,
but our great hope, the good news that Jesus brought and still brings,
is that something else is going on,
something better,
something life-giving and creative
and that God is doing something with our suffering.
Not that God planned our suffering or somehow wills it,
but that God can make something beautiful
with even the worst parts of our lives.
And we can participate in that.
And then. And then.
Paul says “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height,
nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Terror cannot separate us from the love of God.
Entitlement and complacency cannot separate us from the love of God.
Liberalism or conservatism, patriotism and protest,
rejection and retaliation cannot separate us from the love of God.
Nothing, nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of God.

sermon on Matthew 7:15-29 on hypocrites and fruit

You guys, those hypocrites! Jesus is totally right.
Arent’ they terrible, not practicing what they preach—
why can’t they be consistent, why can’t they not be jerks?
What are people hypocritical about?
What do you see out there that gets your goat?
[wait for responses]
So, out of curiosity, I Googled the phrase “Christians are hypocrites”
and the very first hit contained this quote:
“Christians, they love to talk about how loving, dutiful and compassionate they are, yet I have yet to meet ONE who does not practice hypocrisy to the highest degree.  Their willful ignorance of the Bible combined with their two faced idealism to preach it, has made us sick, hasn’t it?  For nearly two thousand years Biblicists have been lecturing people on the importance of adhering to the Bible’s teachings on ethics, manners, and morality.  They quote Jesus and Paul profusely, with a liberal sprinkling of Old Testament moralism.  The problem with their approach lies not only in an oft- noted failure to practice what they preach, but an equally pronounced tendency to ignore what the Bible itself, preaches.  Christians practice what can only be described as “selective morality”.  What they like, they cling to and shove down other’s throats; what they don’t like, they ignore vehemently.  That which is palatable and acceptable is supposedly applicable to all; while that which is obnoxious, inconvenient, or self-denying is only applicable to those addressed 2,000 years ago.  Their hypocrisy is so rampant that even the validity of calling oneself “Christian” is in question. I see so many people enjoy quoting the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and some of Paul’s sermons, but don’t even PRETEND to heed other, equally valid, maxims.”[1]

Not surprising, maybe, but still painful, right?
This is how a lot of people see us, and for good reason.

As others have noted before,
we are much more often admirers of Jesus than followers.
For people who claim to follow a peaceful, loving man,
we have for years been experts at finding folks
to hurt and exclude.
The Jews who we said “killed Jesus,” we destroyed in the Inquisition
native peoples who were inconveniently living on land we wanted
we said weren’t human anyway
and took what we wanted
and the ways now that we make people victims,
whether we’re aware of them or not
Muslims, gays, poor people, other Christians…
We are human, so we make mistakes and hurt each other
and aren’t aware of our motivations.
It’s not just other people but us.
If we take Jesus seriously when he says to the rich young man
“sell everything you have and give the money to the poor,”
what does that look like in our lives?
If we take Jesus seriously when he hangs out with prostitutes
and predatory lenders and AIDS patients,
what does that mean for our lives?
If we take the prophets seriously when they condemn institutional power
at the expense of the masses,
what does that mean?
We’re not talking about making ourselves miserable here,
we’re talking about doing what we say we think is important.
In other words, what difference does our belief in Jesus make?
Consider this thought from Stephen Colbert
specifically about helping the poor:
[assistant 1]
“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”

it’s easy for us to explain away the difficult things Jesus calls us to.
Maybe it’s true that Jesus isn’t telling every person in this room
to sell everything we have and give the money to the poor.
But let’s not kid ourselves that Jesus is saying
keep all the comfy houses and clothes and 401ks
and don’t worry so much about the people
who don’t have those things.
Our comfort is nice but not the point.
You know this as well as I do.
How often do we let ourselves get uncomfortable
because of what scripture says?
It comes down to what Jesus says about hypocrites:
that we’ll know them by their fruit.
There’s the fruit of hypocrisy [take cardboard apple from assistant 2]
of successfulness.
And there’s the fruit of truth and vulnerability
[take basket of fruit from assistant 3].
Thank you lovely assistants.
This is politicians having affairs and covering it up with public money
and saying “mistakes were made.”
And this is Amish families taking care of the widow of the man
who shot eight of their daughters and then himself.
Here’s what one of my favorite theologians Henri Nouwen says:
[assistant 4]
“There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.”

Hypocrisy, it seems to me, comes from the need to be successful,
the need to be seen in a particular way
rather than as who we were created to be.
I personally need to be seen as overly-competent, perfect even
(which is ridiculous since I fail at that on a daily basis).
In the middle of writing this very sermon
I got angry with my 5-year-old
For interrupting me to find her Barbie’s shoes.
It seems like an impossible task to live up to Jesus’ teachings.
So I construct a cardboard cut-out to hold up for folks to see
and I spend a lot of time maintaining it but that’s not my fruit.
It has been noticed by many folks that the louder we protest something
the more likely it is that we practice it ourselves—
how many pastors have railed against homosexuality
only to be cheating on their wives with men?
How many of us here speak out of both sides of our mouths
trying to hide the brokenness we don’t want each other to see? Do you see where I’m going here?
Be honest—what do you do that you know is not Jesus-like?
Or even that others might see that way?
What are you hiding in your own hypocrisy?
And what is your fruit?
Friends, the beauty, the joy, the grace is this:
we are made for love and relationship and sharing and compassion
all these cardboard cutouts are bad habits, not who we really are
and yes, we are all broken, but we’re trying to mend.
And we’re forgiven.
 But when we throw away our cardboard cut-outs,
when we speak honestly about our wounds and our dreams
and really listen to one another,
when we use our gifts and resist our self-interest,
we become flowering fruit trees.
Metaphorically, of course.
When we take that risk to say “I was wrong” or “I’m sorry”
or “that hurts” or “I love you”,
we become gardens of delight.
[juggle the fruit]
We are doing what we were created to do.
This dance, this riot of color, this vulnerability and truth, this is the Kingdom of God.

sermon on Matthew 2, magi, and being an outsider


Happy Epiphany! The season of light, we call it. We are a city on a hill, a lamp on a lampstand that no one covers. We are those hundreds of little flames that made our faces glow on Christmas Eve while we sang Silent Night. We are streetlamps set out to light the path for our neighbors. Epiphany is the season of light and it’s about light illuminating everything, not just pretty twinkly lights on the tree. It’s the kind of light CS Lewis spoke of, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

Epiphany is a kind of revealing of Jesus, about what difference this birth makes, kind of like Pentecost after Easter. After Easter, we’re basking in the glow of a kind of second birth and then Pentecost rolls around and the Holy Spirit says, “and…?” “Your turn!” and expects us to talk to other people about it all. After Christmas, we’re basking in the glow of the baby Jesus, and then Epiphany and these crazy magi from the East come and say, “and…?” What’s next? What difference does Jesus being born make? What light are we carrying out of the Christmas season this year?

Sharing that light can be really hard, especially when we feel like we’re stuck in the dark, on the outside. Or even when we don’t realize we’re stuck outside in the dark. When I was in junior high school, I was not popular. I was the weird kid. Big surprise, I know. I wore combat boots with girly skirts and read science fiction and talked about complicated English currency. Which, because I can’t keep my mouth shut, meant I was an outsider most of the time. And it was obvious who the popular girls were—they had more money than we had, mostly, and they had perfect hair and skin and dressed on-trend, and knew how to flirt with boys. All I know how to do with boys was argue and be awkward. This might not have bothered me because I did have friends. Nerds and skaters and punks. But when I had a Halloween party one year and my mom and I made up a scavenger hunt and had lots of tasty food, only five people came. I invited 20. Now, you might be rational here and say that 20 was a lot of people for a 12-year-old in a very small town to expect at a party. Of course, but to me it was a huge rejection. I knew I was weird, but I thought people would still like me, would still want to come to a party.

Fast-forward a few years, and I was having a birthday party. I’d invited all my friends, and most of them were coming. One friend who had not yet RSVP’d called up a few days before to ask who all was coming to the party. Surely you know how rude that is, right? “I’m not going to commit to coming until I know who’s going to be there and if I don’t like someone, I’m not coming.” Yikes.

Maybe you’ve had similar experiences. Or maybe someone at school not-so-subtly stage-whispers about how terrible your class presentation always is or how ugly your clothes are. Or someone at work is often conspicuously absent from your meetings. Or shows up and doesn’t pay any attention, which might be worse. It’s all still this question of who’s inside and who’s out. Who gets to stand in the light? Maybe popularity isn’t the standard, but we all find ourselves on one side or the other of the line. I suspect we’ve all been on both sides of the insider/outsider line at some point in our lives. What was that like for you? Who was it who was the outsider when you drew the line? Who was it who was the insider who drew the line against you?

I understand from other clergy I know that sometimes members of their congregations don’t want to hear them preach. They walk out of the sanctuary to avoid it, even. And I understand that happens even here at Good Shepherd, to Pastor Larry when he was here, to me, though I’m not observant enough to have noticed it myself. And it grieves me to know it. Not because I or my words are so amazing or because I need to be liked, but because it ends up making outsiders again. Because it means we’re not listening to each other, not really. Perhaps if you or someone you know leaves when I preach or Pastor Pat or Pastor Jess preaches, it’s because you feel like an outsider. Or maybe you don’t want to listen to whatever claptrap we’ve prepared. I don’t know why and neither do my clergy friends outside this church because no one tells us. Sometimes someone tells us but it ends up only being an ultimatum, not a real conversation about differences. And it’s not just an issue with whether y’all agree with our preaching—out there in the world, we don’t talk to each other. Politicians seem to only be about the sound-byte and the party platform. Maybe they’re having substantive conversation behind closed doors, but we certainly don’t see it. Neighbors in dispute often don’t really listen to each other, preferring to listen to the negative narrative on our heads instead. “He says he tried to get in touch with me about that tree limb, but he didn’t really. He’s a jerk.” Friday afternoon, some guys across the street from my house were not listening to each other…very loudly. Enough that my daughter began crying. Not listening to each other enough that one of them got out a gun. He didn’t use it and they left soon after, but that’s not the point. They could not understand each other, like so many people before them, and resorted to anger and violence. Thank goodness y’all don’t threaten us clergy with weapons when you don’t like our preaching, but nothing will change in any of us if we don’t really talk to one another. We don’t spend a lot of time listening to one another as a congregation when it comes to difficult issues like gay marriage or whether war is justified—are we afraid of hurting someone’s feelings? Or of being transformed by hearing someone’s story?

Listening doesn’t mean agreeing, mind you. Listening is affirming that the other is a human being with legitimate reasons for thinking the way they do. They might be wrong. We might be wrong. Listening is about seeing the light of God in the other person. When we don’t listen to each other, whether we agree with each other or not, we are, in effect, choosing to sit in darkness and reject the Kingdom of God in all its variety. To ignore another person is to put them on the outside. And it’s the opposite of what Jesus did.
It’s exactly what Herod did. King Herod met with the mysterious magi from the East and was terrified to hear that a new king of the Jews had been born. Wasn’t he the rightful king? What would happen to him if he weren’t? Wouldn’t this new king kill him to get to the throne? So, just in case, he planned to put this “newborn king” far on the outside, he planned to kill him. Now you remember from last week, he didn’t just try to kill Jesus, he killed all the kids younger than 2 years, so the story goes.

These magi who show up following a star, who are they if not outsiders? Who knows if they’re insiders back home—maybe wealthy, learned, powerful people, maybe not. We don’t even know how many of them there were or if any women were part of the group. They were, to the ancient Jews, definitively outsiders. From Persia, so not Jewish, which is outsider enough, but also sorcerers. Scripture only uses the word magi which means magicians, sorcerers, wise in astrology. They didn’t know about Messiahs and Bethlehem and Emmanuel, yet they were prompted somehow to follow the star and worship king Jesus. Matthew’s story tells us that the circle that defines who’s inside and who’s outside is much bigger than we think. Maybe much bigger than we’d feel comfortable with. Look at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians—the church in Ephesus was made up of Gentiles, non-Jews, and Paul kind of made his name on sharing the good news of Jesus with non-Jews. He says that in the past, people didn’t know of this great mystery, the mystery that God was present to all people, not just the chosen, the Jews. He says “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus.” Fellow heirs, meaning these outsider Gentiles were brothers and sisters of the Jews. Members of the same body, he says, meaning even closer than brothers and sisters, of the same flesh, necessary to functioning. And even more, sharers in the promise of Christ—these outsiders who may have hurt us and who are, at the least, strange to us in how they do things, these outsiders are part of the great Kingdom of God. God who created all things, Paul says—all things. Not just the bits we like.
We here today would have been the outsiders of the early church—we who are now the dominant religion in America, we had to be invited in.

And what do we do once we’ve been invited? We turn and invite someone else. Narcotics Anonymous folks will recognize one of their principles here: “The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, because we can only keep what we have by giving it away.” We can only keep what we have by giving it away. If that’s not church, I don’t know what is. Do you remember Christmas Eve, here and probably at lots of other churches, we lit candles from the Christ candle up here and then spread the light out among all our candles? The room was radiant with light and heat because we gave away what we were given.

Who is the outsider to you, personally? Who is outside the circle of who you think is appropriate or saved or polite? Who is the outsider to this church? How could we just begin to see them as brothers and sisters? Be honest with yourself—that truth can set you free.
What difference does Jesus make to our lives? Who needs to hear of our love for them? What light will you give away? That truth can set someone else free.
I want to leave you with a song that we sing at the Edge campus ministry house. It’s directly from our Isaiah reading this morning.

Teach “Arise, Shine.”

sermon on Matthew 2:13-23, the slaughter of the innocents and flight to Egypt


This is a sermon about dead baby boys. Maybe not what you wanted here on the first Sunday after Christmas. In the Episcopal Church it’s John chapter 1: in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god. Cosmic and poetical and beautiful. And we have Herod killing baby boys. A story that, scholars tell us, probably didn’t happen. Goodness, so why read it? Why believe this stuff in the first place—that’s likely what some of my new friends on campus would say. The Edge House has recently embarked on a relationship with the Secular Student Alliance—atheists, agnostics, doubters, they call themselves many things. But not Christian, not believers. “What difference does this stuff make?” is a question they’re offering as a prompt for an upcoming conversation. What difference does this stuff make? Particularly when it’s about dead babies?

I want to offer one possible answer, and it’s a bit unorthodox. I want to read you a book. It’s called Press Here and it’s one of my 5-year-old daughter’s favorites. I want you to imagine we’re all snuggled up in the bed—yes, all of us—and we’re all in our jim-jams and we’re settled in to hear a story before bed. The book will be up on the screen, but just pretend it’s right in front of you. Feel free to follow the directions.

[read book (2min, 40sec)]

I don’t know if Abby actually thinks pressing the colors makes things happen, but she does it all the time. And she giggles…
Now, maybe there are a few folks out there who are thinking, “yeah, that was cute, teaches kids cause and effect, but whatever, when’s lunch?” Fair, I often think that during church… [grimace]
Only, here’s the funny thing: every adult who has picked it up in my house and a few I’ve seen reading it in the bookstore, follow the directions and look up with a big smile when they’re finished. Every single one says something like “what a great book! I blew across the page and the dots moved! I turned the lights on and off! Brilliant!”
I’m fairly certain that my adult friends don’t really think they caused those changes. The illustrator painted those static images years ago, it doesn’t change on a second reading. Come on.

This is a wonderful example of what theologian Marcus Borg describes as the pre-critical, critical, and post-critical stages of faith development.
Pre-critical is basically us as kids: Stories about Cinderella and Jesus and Batman and the President of the United States are all equally truthful. Batman is an eccentric billionaire who became a superhero to avenge his parents’ death—totally! And Jesus was born under a moving star and magicians from the far East came to worship him--absolutely. They’re both truthful and factual. And yes, there is a difference—facts generally show us truth, but things that are true, deeply true that you feel in your gut, sometimes aren’t factual. Think of you’re most favorite movie or novel that changed how you see things in the world—true, maybe not factual.
Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with this stage except when we get stuck in it—things we understand as meaningful have to be literally, historically factual and we go to great lengths to make them so. Consider the seasonally-appropriate film Polar Express and its take on belief.

The critical stage is all about understanding the stories we tell intellectually. How much of them are historically-accurate? Why did people tell them? Were any of them codes for freedom like African-American spirituals in the pre-Civil War South? Spoiler: yes, the books of Daniel and Revelation. Which stories were several stories stitched together to make one like the story of the great Flood in Genesis? What is the history of how we got the Hebrew Scriptures and how were they edited over the centuries? In scholarly circles this might be called the Historical-Critical Method and its main point is to understand on a deeper level the Word passed down to us through the centuries using historical resources outside of the Bible itself. They ask questions about how different Hebrew or Greek words were used elsewhere or what events were happening around the Jews that made them write different things. It’s good, helpful stuff and pretty much all mainline denominations teach it in our seminaries. But we can get stuck here as well.
Some theologians like John Shelby Spong go to great lengths to disprove miracles and the more epic stories of the Bible, encouraging believers to see the meaning behind the myths. But Spong and others lose the poetry of scripture—it’s not just a list of dates and names but people’s lives and their attempts to make sense of seeing God in action. If you “disprove” that stuff, you lose much of the point. And many folks get so stuck in this critical stage that God ceases to be real at all for them. If these events were recorded and some invented by humans, where is the divine? It’s the reason so some Christians push so hard against non-literal reading of scripture—folks think that if any part of the Bible is not factual, it must not be true. And therefore all of it is suspect. Again, not a good place to be stuck.

Luckily, Marcus Borg offers a third stage which many of us dip in and out of when it comes to our faith.  The post-critical stage takes both the wide-eyed belief in the stories as told and the scholarly, perhaps cynical understanding and holds them next to one another at the same time. The story in Matthew about Jesus and his folks fleeing to Egypt is a literary device to remind readers of both the Exodus led by Moses and the later Exile when thousands were killed and displaced by invading Babylon. There is no historical evidence and no other mention in the Bible that Herod had any children killed, because of Jesus or not. But Matthew recalls the prophet Jeremiah speaking of Rachel weeping over her children Israel. Matthew is making past grief new again to make Jesus’ miraculous birth and miraculous life even more miraculous. AND this story about a family becoming refugees to avoid terrible death at the hands of a despotic leader is deeply true. We have only to consider Syria and the 2,000,000 people, 1,000,000 of them children, who have fled the war there. Or mothers escaping abusive relationships with their children. Or students fleeing a school-shooter. Post-critical reading of scripture doesn’t take away from the beauty and authority of the Word, it adds to it, deepens it. Like nostalgia or parenthood adding flavor to the reading of Press Here, even more do history, literary criticism, and our own life-experiences add to the reading of scripture.

Now, there’s good news here beyond this lecture on how to read scripture, I promise. It’s good news in itself that we don’t have to check our brains at the door here,
BUT ALSO in the midst of this horrific account of the slaughter of baby boys, Matthew recalls for us Jeremiah’s words, not only of Rachel’s weeping for her children, but what follows: “Return, O virgin Israel, return to these your cities. How long will you waver, O faithless daughter? For the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: a woman encircles a man.
“God has created a new thing” is spoken by Jeremiah and Isaiah and Matthew and John of Patmos in the book of Revelation. God is always doing a new thing. And “By quoting this small bit…of Jeremiah,…Mathew…implies the rest of the rest of it: it is Mary…being called back from exile, Mary, as virgin Israel, that returns salvation to God’s people through the new thing on earth which the Lord has done, through the man she encircles in her womb.”[1]
I just read a wonderful article in which a prostitute who is also a junkie and a mom of 5 said, “you know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.”[2]

how could we not draw parallels to school shootings or mass graves in Sudan and WWII Germany? And we’re meant to. Herod’s evil, Babylon’s evil, Pharoah’s evil are not unique nor is our mourning. We cry for our own children—we cry when we lose them, we cry when they’re happy because the world isn’t good enough for them, we cry because the same story seems to keep happening. And then Jesus comes and, to the critical eye, the story is the same and it doesn’t make any difference.
And to the post-critical eye, Jesus comes and there’s something else going on. It’s the same story, but the themes are different, it’s meaning is different, how we react to it is different.
It’s the same story, “A decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed…” and the no room at the inn, and the shepherds, and the flight to Egypt to avoid the slaughter of the innocents.
It’s the same story, and with a post-critical eye, with the eye that knows and embraces the traditional words and also knows how Matthew has carefully crafted his account,
we see hope. We see that God is doing a new thing. God is writing a new book and taking our crappy lives and memories and actions and making something else, something unexpected with them.
There are people out there fighting against the world’s brokenness and hurtfulness.
People inspired by Jesus and people who’ve never heard of him.
People who will not just accept Herod and Babylon and Pharoah.
May we be those people. May we see the hurt, may we stop and ask if we can help. May we offer love in the place of judgment and embrace in the place of fear.