By The Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” St. Luke 14:27

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Last Sunday after the 8:00 service, Ralph Tildon came up to me and told me that my sermon had reminded him of a movie. “We’re No Angels,” was based on the passage about welcoming the stranger that I had taken as my text. I don’t expect you’ve ever heard of the movie either, as it never broke number 8 in the box office listing when it came out in 1989. But it was a slow Sunday evening, so Allison and I watched it together.

The movie tells the story of two bumbling convicts who escaped from a prison and were taken into a monastery, after being mistaken for famous Biblical scholars. The convicts are played by Sean Penn and Robert DeNiro, and for me it was worth the cost of the rental to see Robert DeNiro trotting around in an old fashioned priest’s cassock and biretta. The plot plays out as you would expect when two semi-illiterate, chain-smoking cons try to pose as holy men in the midst of a massive manhunt.

The climax of the film comes when Father Brown, aka Jim the convict, is spontaneously invited to give the sermon at the monastery’s annual festival. Jim is Sean Penn’s character, a relatively kind hearted fellow who looks about fourteen. By this point in the movie, you know to wince when he opens his mouth, but you’re also on his side.

Jim starts off the sermon by cribbing lines from a gun advertisement he’s slipped between the pages of his prayer book. He talks about how people live in fear, how they need a helper, how so many of the things we depend on really don’t do much good for us. As the background music swells, Jim’s remarks build up to this statement.

God good? I don’t know. All I know is something might give you comfort. And maybe you deserve it. If it comforts you to believe in God, you do it, that’s Your business…you want to go believe in something, well that’s not so bad.

And then Jim steps back from the microphone, and the priests behind him smile, and the people applaud. Not the finest oratory, we’re meant to think, but you know, the old boy has made a point.

He’s made, in fact, the one point about religion that’s supposed to bind all of us Americans together: “If it comforts you to believe in God, you do it, that’s your business.” Religious practices and feelings, whatever they might be, we assume, have a purpose, a recognizable social good—they help people get through things. Life is tough, and it’s nice to have God on your side.

A large crowd was following Jesus, most of them probably just looking for a little comfort. Jesus was a deeply compassionate and generous person, whose presence brought joy to so many of those He encountered. He spoke with wisdom and authority. Just before this, he had called out a leader of the Pharisees for his hypocrisy and spoke of the generous welcome God was extending to those so often scorned or ignored. Jesus also had real power. He healed people of diseases they had suffered from birth. He cast out demons and raised the dead.

But this day He wasn’t doing any miracles, and He was much more interested in challenging than comforting this curious crowd. He asks them to think about what they really want from him, what they really want out of life.

The line that probably sticks out for us is this one: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Now, in Jesus’ language there weren’t comparative adjectives, so hate here probably means “love less,” as in the clarifying phrase Jesus used in another place in the Gospels, “He who loves father or mother more than me cannot be my disciple.[1]”

So Jesus is not saying that you should hate your mother or your spouse, but He does mean that you shouldn’t put them first in your life. You should not seek in them for the meaning, the joy, the hope that compels you. Similarly, He is probably not requiring you give away all your possessions, though some have served Him by doing this in every age, and the Church’s witness has always been stronger for it. So, maybe not giving them all away, but not clinging to them for your security, your sense of dignity.

Jesus asks the crowd to tally up the things they put first in their life. A man who builds a tower wants to be sure he has enough to finish it. A king wants to make sure his army is strong enough to face the opponent before he sets out into battle. Ask yourself, He’s saying—is your bank balance really enough to give you what you need out of life? Your job, your set of hobbies, your friendships, the love in your family—will they provide you with enough to get by when you must give account for your life; on that day when, as He put it in another parable, “your soul is required of you?[2]”

Part of what Jesus is saying here is something that spiritual people have always said—you can’t take it with you, all good things come to an end. Detachment from worldly things will help you find the meaning you’ve been seeking. You’re a spiritual being, seek a spiritual foundation for your life. There’s nothing particularly original about this, though it certainly needs to be said. The wise men of the Old Testament said as much, and there are echoes of this in the teachings of most of the world’s religions.

It’s that other thing that Jesus said that would have given his listeners pause—not hating your mother, but carrying a cross. We think of the cross as a religious symbol, but to people of Jesus time it was an obscene horror. Death by crucifixion was the great unmentionable subject of the ancient world. Though we know it was very common, it’s almost completely absent from contemporary literature. Even after a Christian emperor outlawed crucifixion, it was centuries before someone could bring themselves to create a picture of Jesus suffering on a cross.[3] It was an almost unbelievably gruesome method of execution, reserved for slaves and rebels. Jews believed that the crucified were cursed by God, and Romans, by law, could not be subjected to it.

But of course, Jesus couldn’t stop talking about crucifixion. In fact, he was headed to Jerusalem to be crucified, as He seems to be telling anyone who would listen. And here he is, describing the kind of life he is holding out to His followers, the good life He was sent to reveal to them, as a crucifixion: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” You must come and die with me—hate your own life–and only then will you be free.

What Jesus is doing here is calling the whole way we ordinarily think about religion into question. If all we really needed was a little more spiritual insight, a little more health, a little comfort to perk us up when we’re down—well there’d be no need for anyone to be crucified. After all, God had sent wise men before and prophets who healed. But the problem goes deeper than that. As Stephen Westerholm has written in speaking of Jesus’ crucifixion, “so catastrophic a remedy demands a catastrophic predicament.[4]”

Jesus doesn’t say it here directly, but the truth is that we’re not doing nearly as well as we often assume. We are in fact, under the power of sin. The idea that we really control our lives is an unfortunate illusion, as our constant inability to control our desires shows us again and again. Death stands before us, ridiculing all our aspirations and projects. A deep and unbridgeable divide separates us from the God who loves us, but whose unflinching justice demands that we make answer for our sin. “There is never just one transgression,” says the wise preacher John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, “There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all.[5]” Count it up, Jesus is saying. How do you reckon yourself on that day when the books are opened and all stands revealed? Can you possibly measure up?

None of us can measure up. That’s why don’t just need a comforter, we need a Redeemer. We need one who will lay down His life in our place, and then come back from death to bind us to Himself forever. We don’t just need wisdom or strength, we need conversion, baptism—to be put to death, the old man cast behind us, and to be reborn by God’s grace to an entirely new way of life. We need Jesus as the master of our life, the One whose guidance we seek in all things, the One on whose grace we depend. Saint Paul described it perfectly, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.[6]”

Maybe a little comfort was all you really wanted from Jesus today, an assurance that the Big Guy would give you some help in that life you think you control. But what Jesus offers is the healing and renewal of your soul that you really need. But that’s the life that comes through taking up the cross, through surrendering control. Only then can we be open to receive the boundless joy and peace which Jesus shares.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Matt. 10:37.

[2] Lk. 12:20. C.f. Green, Joel. Luke. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, 565.

[3] Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 82.

[4] qtd.in Rutledge, 200.

[5] qtd. in Rutledge, 195.

[6] Gal. 2:20.

By The Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Hebrews 13:2

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Frank[1] drank his coffee strong and black, and he liked bacon hot from the pan. He was indifferent when it came to fried eggs and couldn’t quite see the point of buttered toast.

I learned the menu well for Frank’s annual visit when I was the rector in Cooperstown, New York. In Cooperstown, we had what we called “the August people,” who head out from New York and Boston to escape the late summer heat beside our shimmering lake. Frank was one of them, coming every year for a day or two when August turns into September. Unlike those other August people, who spent the night between the fine linen sheets of the Otesaga Hotel, Frank bedded down on the couch in Saint Agnes Chapel.

Frank, you see, was a hobo. I guess “transient” is the proper term, or “homeless person,” but hobo has more dignity to it, and that’s the one thing Frank had never lost. He was “king of the road,” planning his journeys to take in the best weather and the most interesting company. He still whistled and loved to tell stories and valued the freedom his way of life provided.

Saint Agnes Chapel had never been fitted with a lock, so we had hobos from time to time. By the time I came in to read Morning Prayer most were long gone, but Frank was a late riser and he joined in the prayers. The first time I asked if I could make him some breakfast, he politely refused, but eventually it became a routine. At first, Frank would eat his meal alone in the Chapel. But eventually, he trusted me enough to eat together at the picnic table on the Rectory porch.  Once you got him started, Frank was a fount of tales about the road, observations about society, slightly bizarre religious opinions.

Frank was wise to be wary of me, he’d been battered around enough by those in charge, but he came to trust me, I think. My hospitality grew from something offered up mostly because it was the right thing to do into a deeper kind of fellowship, a pleasure in each other’s company. We sometimes still fished around a bit to find an unaccustomed way of getting our point across. We each knew that we were reaching across a divide, and that’s never easy.

The last time I saw him, Frank came to the Rectory door, and I think he had something to tell me. But I was busy, not ready for a visitor. I don’t remember what it was now. Maybe I needed to pick up the children or finish a task around the house. There just wasn’t time to sit and chat. Did he need something, I asked, some food or some money for medicine again? Maybe we could talk in the morning, when things weren’t so pressing, I said.

Frank wasn’t in the Chapel the next morning, and I never saw him again. That conversation with him on the Rectory porch continues to haunt me. If some have entertained angels without knowing it, maybe some who were afraid or too busy have sent them packing? I saw Frank’s id card once—needed it for my records when I was covering his prescription. Interestingly, it didn’t say “Frank,” which didn’t surprise me that much. But it didn’t say “Gabriel, messenger of the Most High” either. But there was something odd about that encounter, and I wonder what I might have missed when I was too busy to welcome the stranger.

True Christian hospitality, hospitality shaped by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is radical and costly. These words from Hebrews, and Jesus’ call in today’s Gospel to spread a banquet for “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” are certainly prompting us to be kind, to look out for the less fortunate, to value diversity. But if we think that’s all that’s meant by them, we’re letting ourselves off far too easily.

Fellowship that crossed rigid social barriers had a central role in Jesus’ ministry. In today’s Gospel reading Jesus was breaking bread at the house of a prominent Pharisee, but He was more famous as One who “welcomes sinners, and eats with them.[2]” Jesus message was good news for the lowly, who found themselves blessed and honored in His kingdom. His grace is the answer to the universal problems of sin and death. So every person, no matter his social standing, race or language, is a potential follower of Jesus, someone to whom the Gospel message is addressed. As St. Peter summarized on that day when the first Gentiles were converted, “”I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him… All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.[3]”

In the second part of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus urges His followers to use the meals they host as parables of this new kingdom, occasions where there was “no partiality” for those esteemed in the world. The guests gathered in the Pharisees’ dining room knew that religious people often looked down on the poor as morally inferior, and that “the crippled, the lame, and the blind” had been banned from the priesthood and the temple’s ceremonies by the Old Testament law. Jesus was poor, but you can bet there were no crippled, lame or blind guests sharing the Pharisee’s table that day. But it should be different at the tables spread by Jesus’s followers—in the dining room and at the Eucharistic Altar. There all should be welcome, especially those whom no one else will claim. The church is truest to its Lord when it dismantles the barriers that keep people apart and cultivates trust and love between people who are dramatically different from one another.

And these are not easy tasks. A significant part of Saint Paul’s pastoral work was spent trying to help Jews and Gentiles learn how to get along with each other. The Epistle of James sharply rebukes a congregation that shows partiality to the rich while giving the poor the cold shoulder.[4] Most every church nowadays has a slogan about everyone being welcome, but there are few where deep friendships are forged across the barriers of race, education, class, political affiliation. We may kneel side by side at the Altar rail, but how often do we sit across one another’s kitchen tables?

My ultimately failed experiment with being a host to Frank reveals part of why this is difficult. People who have been battered around by our society are reasonably wary of trusting those who have power, afraid that someone might take advantage of their vulnerability, or just look on them as tokens of their own generosity. On the other hand, when we’re used to presenting a carefully controlled image of polished success to the world, it can feel threatening to reveal the messiness of how it really is: a sink full of dishes, children bouncing off the walls, fear and pain just below the surface. Hospitality also requires patience, a willingness to listen and flexibility in the face of the unpredictable. Trust takes time, and so often in the lives we lead, time is in such short supply.

Here at Saint Timothy’s, this part of Jesus’s message is very important to you. Your mission statement says that you aspire to be a congregation “that treasures all people” and that here we “open our doors to everyone.” The last time the Diocese of Virginia did a survey of such things, you ranked as the most racially diverse Episcopal congregation in Fairfax County. I know that many of you have formed deep friendships across major social barriers.

But we still have room to grow. Over the last five years you have fostered the growth of a Spanish-speaking congregation, beginning by offering warm hospitality to an outside prayer group with no place to worship. When the question was posed quite directly a few years ago, you decided that we would be “one Saint Timothy’s,” a congregation active in worshipping in two languages and ministering to two different cultures.

That’s a good slogan, and structurally speaking, it remains true. But as a description of our relationships with each other, it remains largely an aspiration. A few of you come to the Saturday evening service even though your Spanish is pretty rusty, and you sit down at parish events to chat with our Latino parishioners even though conversation is difficult. I’m grateful for that, and I know our Spanish-speaking parishioners are as well. But I wish there was more of it.

Because I believe that God is holding out an important opportunity to all of us in this invitation to become “one Saint Timothy’s.” Our Epistle reminds us that the strangers we welcome often bring unexpected blessings. Three mysterious visitors came unbidden to Abram’s tent, and the great patriarch had time for them, and spread a feast. They announced that his prayers had been answered and that God would send Him a son, the heir of the promise.

When I shared breakfast with Frank, I always felt that it was Frank who was enriching my life. I brought the bacon and the eggs. He brought the wisdom and the memorable stories. When I worship with our Saturday evening congregation, I’m reminded that my Spanish vocabulary comes up short. But I’m also moved by the joy in their singing, their reverence before the Holy Sacrament, their excitement about sharing the faith. People are going door to door in Herndon with brochures about what God is doing at Saint Timothy’s, and those brochures are in Spanish, not English.

When you make space at your tables and in your hearts for strangers, sometimes you give God space to do something truly wonderful. When you take up the patient work of breaking down social barriers, unexpected renewal often follows. Or you can be in a hurry, with plenty of guests to serve already, thank you very much. And the hidden angels will be on their way, knocking at another door, where someone else might have faith enough to welcome them.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Not his real name.

[2] Luke 15:2.

[3] Acts 10:34-35,43.

[4] James 2:1-7.

By The Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

“They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy.” Hebrews 11:37-38

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

They stared out from the frescoes on the walls that faced toward the large baptismal font, their eyes determined, confident, serene. The bodies of the saints, wrapped in the vestments of archbishops and abbots, were static and grand, timeless like the figures in most Orthodox ikons. But there was something unusual in their faces—an unexpected wrinkle here, a drooping eyelid there. Was that the mark of a scar?

I asked the guide about them. They were, in fact, portraits, he said. Father Cyprian, the master iconographer, had known these men. He’d done the faces himself. The saints were leaders of his own time. Some had been his friends. Perhaps he’d served alongside some of them at the Divine Liturgy, or they’d sat in the shade to share a glass together on a summer’s afternoon, back before the awful civil war and the ransacking of the monasteries, back when mother Russia was a land of monks and holy men.

They were the modern martyrs, the guide said, they’d given their lives for the Gospel in that bloodiest of centuries, the twentieth. The Communists had sent them to glory with the machine gun and the hand-grenade. Father Cyprian had escaped, and along with the scattered remnants of several other religious houses, he’d helped to found this monastery, Holy Trinity, in the wilds of central New York State.

In the majestic church they would eventually build, topped with golden domes, the interior walls had all been covered with frescoes in the classic Russian style—scenes from the life of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the apostles, ancient martyrs and the great holy helpers. Like so much else in the monastery, where some of the monks still converse in Russian, it was like a tiny piece of the old country planted afresh in this new world.

But the Monastery’s Baptistry was different. No church back in Russia could bear the images of these heroes, still counted as enemies of the state, their names erased from the pages of history. But the font is where new Christians are made. It’s where converts must weigh the full cost of discipleship before they pledge themselves to follow Jesus to the end. And Father Cyprian thought it was essential that they see just how much could be asked of them.

We are, all of us, “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses,” as the author of Hebrews recalls in today’s Epistle. And Father Cyprian was summoning the greatest saints he had known to stand alongside them, those who had been conformed to Christ in His death.

The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is sometimes referred to as the Bible’s “hall of fame.” It lists great athletes of the faith, raised up by God to advance His kingdom generation after generation. Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the conquering judges: the heroes of all those Old Testament Sunday School stories, they are all there. Some of those listed could easily be numbered among the winners in this world: those who “conquered kingdoms and administered justice…put foreign armies to flight.”

But almost without catching a breath, the author shifts his focus to a different kind of hero. “They were stoned to death,” he says of the faithful, “they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented.” And of them, he concludes, “the world was not worthy.” But in the eyes of God, it is otherwise. Those nameless and numberless saints are listed last, because in God’s eyes their witness is most precious.

Because in their deaths, they have become like Jesus. From the “destitute, persecuted, tormented,” the author turns directly to Him, “the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, disregarding its shame.” Jesus is the king of saints, the one whose glory is reflected in all the heroes. And He reveals His faith and fulfills His mission most clearly in suffering, losing His life out of love for God and the world.

We don’t know so much about the people for whom the Epistle to the Hebrews is written, but there are some clues in the letter. The author warns against forsaking the faith because it is hard. He says that God’s purpose can sometimes be revealed through suffering alongside Jesus. “You have not yet resisted to the point of blood,[1]” he announces at one point, but the suggestion is that this may still lay ahead for them.

The Epistle was written for people like the suffering Orthodox Christians of the Russian Civil War, like the Christians of today in Northern Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan and Syria, who live under constant threat from hostile regimes. It was written for people like the parishioners of Saint Etienne du Rouvray in France, whose priest was killed last month by Islamic terrorists, his throat slit at the Altar.

When the Islamic State beheaded 25 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya last year, each one cried out “Jesus is Lord” before the sword’s stroke. It’s the cry of a hundred thousand saints, in generation after generation. As Jesus himself said, His last and greatest beatitude, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.[2]”

Jesus assured His disciples that faithfulness to Him would bring the hostility of the world. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?,” he announced, “No, I tell you, but rather division!”

The division and hostility Jesus describes are not inevitable or accidental—a sort of generalization about what happens when people try to do good in cruel world. They flow directly from the kinds of claims that Jesus made about Himself and His mission. He did not only claim to speak the truth, He claimed to reveal God’s own mind and will. Jesus did not only offer advice about how to live, He claimed that the only way to God came by following after His footsteps. To pledge allegiance to Him was not just to find a fulfilling and meaningful approach to life, but to become a citizen of God’s true and final kingdom. Jesus doesn’t permit us to ride the fence on these matters. To choose Him is to reject all others.

When we are baptized, we promise to follow and obey Jesus as our Lord. If we are sincere about that commitment, and seriously consider it as we make choices each day about what we will do, we could well encounter this kind of hostility and division.   It’s not that Jesus is calling us to be troublemakers. Indeed, New Testament texts repeatedly urge believers to be at peace with their neighbors. But we have already made promises about what is first in our lives—not the market, or the state, or our overbearing mother or our boss—but Jesus Christ Himself, the Lord of heaven and earth.

For centuries now, it has been quite easy to make these promises and live pretty much like everyone else. In part, we’ve been surrounded by pretty mild sorts of unbelievers, at least in this country. But it’s also because we’ve been far too eager to compromise and prevaricate, to wrap the cross in the flag or to tie it up in a dollar bill.

Things may well change, perhaps in my lifetime, almost certainly in the lifetime of my sons. Cardinal George of Chicago said a few years ago that though he expected to die in his bed, his successor might well die in prison, and the archbishop after him a martyr in the public square. He was probably exaggerating, but only so much. Our social power may well continue to erode. No one will seek our votes. And a culture that has allowed us to stand with a foot in two worlds may well call us to make our choice.

If it comes to that for you, and I expect it will come in some form for most of us, may you look to the author and perfecter of our faith, and his company of brave and patient saints. Remain true to your promises, acclaim Jesus as Lord, and trust in God’s protection and deliverance. There is only one Lord. He is your master. Do not forsake Him.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Heb. 12:4.

[2] Matt. 5:12.

By The Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

“The Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.” St. Luke 10:41-42

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

As I was driving home on Tuesday evening, I was intrigued by the dark red car in front of me. The driver had obviously discovered my favorite shortcut to get around the lights on Baron Cameron, and he was pushing on at quite a clip. When I pulled up behind him at the stoplight, I took one glance at his vanity license plate and nodded to myself. It said IMNAHRY – the driver had taken out all the spaces and most of the vowels—rather appropriately—but it all fit.

IMNAHRY – some days I wonder if that’s not really the motto of Northern Virginia. The driver may just have been trying to keep people out of the left hand land – INAHRY, so you’d better get out of the way. Perhaps he liked to taunt policemen with speed guns. Maybe he was wearing his great list of responsibilities like a badge of honor, as we all sometimes do. “How are you?” “Very busy,” we sigh, as if so very much depended on us. Maybe the driver was just trying to be a comic, or a prophet, pointing out all the bustle and wondering what in the world it’s all worth.

My mind went back to a country song that’s almost 25 years old now, but whose words haven’t aged a bit.

“I’m in a hurry to get things done;” Alabama crooned. I rush and rush until life’s no fun. All I really gotta do is live and die. But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why.”

That’s the danger of being in a hurry, that somehow, as we rush from place to place, being so impressively productive, we lose track of why we’re about all of it in the first place.

Martha lived in a different time, when the general pace of life would have been slow enough to drive most of us crazy. But even then, there were surely some occasions that required masterful feats of organization and energy. She and her brother and sister were hosting Jesus and perhaps a large number of his disciples at their home.

Some commentators think it may also have been the season of the Feast of Tabernacles, when grand dinners were expected. There’s a genre of 17^th century Martha paintings that show her in the kitchen with an enormous spread of meat, fish and fowl needing to be skinned, plucked and seasoned.   The paintings are pure conjecture of course, artists’ excuses for pawning off kitchen still lives on pious buyers. But we might at least grant that Martha had good reason to be rushing about and more than a little peeved at her sister, who was sitting so attentively at the Master’s feet. The bread dough would not knead itself, and the vegetables simply had to be chopped now if they were to be soft enough to eat when the lamb came off the spit.

Jesus knew Martha well and cared deeply for her. Perhaps he was pointing to a tendency in Martha’s character to be rather anxious and abrupt. We can certainly glimpse some of this in Saint John’s account of her conversation with Jesus in later days, after her brother’s death. Jesus doesn’t say that kitchen work is worthless or that sometimes we don’t need to make a plan and stick to it until everything is finished.

He’s saying something deeper about the nature of life in the kingdom of God, pointing to a crucial balance between contemplation and action, hearing God’s word and putting it to work. Martha’s action is useful, but Mary’s attentiveness to Him is essential. Jesus has quite a bit for us to do. But if we haven’t gotten to know him first, if we haven’t heard the Word that he means for us to put into action, well then we’re just “in a hurry and don’t know why.”

Chapter divisions in the Bible are pretty recent additions, drawn up by an English archbishop in the thirteenth century, and they are sometimes placed more helpfully than others. But this time, old Archbishop Langton got it right. This story at the home of Martha and Mary closes the 10^th Chapter of Saint Luke, which up until this point was one of the most action-focused passages in the whole of the Bible. The chapter began with Jesus sending out the seventy—to preach and heal in villages all along the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. This great moment of action is followed by the Parable of the Good Samaritan, with its emphasis on loving our neighbor, whoever he or she may be.

The chapter is packed with calls to action, and without the corrective of the Martha and Mary story, we would be looking at an invitation to exhaustion. There is always one more person we could tell about the good news of the kingdom. There’s always one more suffering soul who needs God’s healing. How can we ever rest when there is always one more person in need, another opportunity to love and serve around every corner? Without this command to sit at the feet of Jesus, to choose the good portion of receiving God’s word and growing closer to Him in prayer, we could be left thinking that the best disciple was simply the busiest one.

Putting the Christian message into action is honorable and important. This week I was reminded of so many good things that so many of you are doing here at Saint Timothy’s. The Gifts to Glorify the Lord Committee presented a final report to the vestry that reflected years of planning, hours upon hours of research and discussion, and the generosity of scores of donors as renovate this sanctuary to glorify God and to enhance the ways we worship together. This was Bible School week, and dozens of volunteers brought together all kinds of gifts to put on a wonderful week of learning and fun for children from our congregation and the wider community. The Rector Search Committee reported to the vestry about all the discussions they have hosted and all the planning work they are doing to prepare for the call of a new permanent priest. Today we commission our youth, who will work with young people from other churches in our region to repair the homes of people struggling in Dunganon, Virginia.

Lots of action—lots of wonderful things to be busy about. But without being anchored in a response to God’s Word, without the insight that comes from contemplation and reflection, stepping back to gain some perspective, each one of those massive undertakings could go badly awry.

When we take time to pray together and seek guidance from the Scriptures about what is really important, committee work can be life giving, revealing new gifts and coming to wise decisions. But without these things, it can be deadly, full of bickering, jostling for power, arrogant claims about who has the knowledge really necessary to make a decision. When service to those in need comes as a humble respond to God’s generosity, it strengthens both the giver and the recipient, drawing them closer to each other. Apart from this, it can easily become patronizing. Even work with children can sometimes get out of hand when we forget the reasons behind all the colorful decorations and cute projects. Any of you familiar with the cutthroat politics of some PTA executive committees and Little League boards will know exactly how harmful busyness can be when it loses its connection to what is truly important and meaningful.

We are not called to devote our lives to a set list of tasks on some kingdom agenda. Busyness is not next to godliness. God wants us to respond with love to His loving purposes, to do His will as we have discerned it through prayer and reflection on His Word. If we’re merely in a hurry, there’s a good chance we will miss the point. The one thing needful is to listen to Him, to abide in His Presence, to receive what He has to give us. The rest of it will come through His work in us.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

By The Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” St. Luke 10:36-37

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

The book was called “The Casuist: Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology,” and because it was published in 1906, I was able to download it onto my Kindle for free. In the little town where I last served as rector, they gave free gym memberships to the local clergy, so I took my exercise on the elliptical machine, and for about six months, “The Casuist” kept my mind occupied as my arms and legs ran through the machine’s monotonous courses.

I don’t know if any of you read in the gym or not, but I’ve found that books with short chapters and relatively punchy content works best. And “The Casuist” filled the bill in spades. Over several volumes, it collected hundreds of “hard cases,” moral quandaries that had been sent to the author, a certain Stanislaus Woywod, OFM, by puzzled priests who ran across them while hearing confessions and giving spiritual advice.

Fr. Woywod’s cases tend toward the curious and the colorful. There’s Mary, who lays dying and would like to make her confession to the priest over the telephone because her antireligious husband forbids him from entering the house.[1] John, who becomes engaged to a (presumably different) Mary, and then breaks it off without any good reason and marries Martha in a civil ceremony needs to sort out what he owes to his jilted.[2]  And there’s a certain Father X, who because of his scandalous conduct, has been forbidden by his bishop to enter a saloon for a full year except to administer the last rites. If he is vacationing in another diocese, the good father wonders, does the prohibition still apply?[3]

Many of the book’s cases involve two laws or moral principles that seem to contradict each other, like the principle that one should avoid occasions of sin and the fact that a bishop’s jurisdiction necessarily has certain limits. Some involve moral problems created by new technology and social situations, where new principles need to be generated by looking back to similar situations in earlier times.

The book is fascinating for anyone interested in social history because it shows all the challenges present for Catholics leaving the monoreligious farming villages of the old world for a new land. America is full of new moral quandaries: insurance companies who one’s employer orders one to defraud;[4] morphine, which might be taken in some situations but not in others;[5] and legendary religious diversity. One can be sure that back in Sicilian villages, priests didn’t encounter many people like Titus, who “without the least scruple of conscience, has changed his religion a number of times, for the sake of worldly gain.”[6]

I did enjoy a chuckle or two as I read the book, but in many ways it was very helpful for me in my current work as a priest. Because people do ask priests hard questions. They find themselves in situations at work or in their relationships where two obligations seem to be in tension with each other. People wonder when they should insist on a higher standard and when it’s right to go along with the crowd. They worry about balancing different commitments they have made, and how they should think about the new moral and social situations that spring up around us every day. As an Episcopal priest in 2016 I don’t always agree with Fr. Woywod in 1906, but the manner in which he reasons his way to a conclusion can often be very valuable.

Casuistry is an ancient practice, and it arises from the best of intentions. People who love God and want to do His will inevitably find themselves in situations that are morally perplexing. The Law God gave to Israel clearly envisions unusual cases that may arise. Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians is pretty much one long exercise in casuistry, as the apostle works through a set of questions raised by the congregation there. Rabbis in Jesus’ time were principally casuists, responsible for helping people reason their way through how to apply the principles of the God’s law to particular situations. And Jesus shows himself a master of the art, and in some ways a critic of it, in today’s Gospel, the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus tells his famous story, which is really a moral case study, in an exchange with a teacher of the law. The exchange begins with consensus—Jesus and the teacher both agree that the best summary of God’s law comes from the combination of two Old Testament passages. To enter into eternal life, one must love God with one’s heart, mind and strength and one’s neighbor as one’s self. But then the lawyer asks a question: “and who is my neighbor?”

It’s possible that the man was trying to trap Jesus with the question, but it was also a perfectly reasonable thing to ask a rabbi. We know from Jewish texts of the time that different scholars gave different answers to the question. Because society was changing, and there were many more neighbors around than there used to be. Back when God gave the law to Moses, Jewish people were a monoreligious, family-linked, insular society. In Jesus’ time, they were spread around the known world, living alongside people who practiced diverse religions, spoke different languages, and kept unusual social practices. What if my neighbor is one of the despised Samaritan heretics? What if he’s a Roman legionary or a swindling Greek trader? I know God would want me to love as myself the person who sits beside me in synagogue, but surely there must be limits. The lawyer wants to know the boundaries Jesus puts around this term “your neighbor.”

And so to answer the question, Jesus sets out a case. It’s a case about “some guy”—the term is deliberately anonymous.[7] Even at the end of the story we don’t know anything about this opening figure. Is he a Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, pious or scoundrel? All we know him is that he is beset by bandits, robbed, stripped naked and left unconscious along the side of the road. He can’t speak. He’s not wearing the distinctive dress of any social group. He could be anybody. That’s exactly the point.

The first man to happen upon him is a priest, who is certainly socially prominent, probably wealthy, and hopefully pious.   Because he’s a priest, he’s also bound by a series of laws about ritual purity. If he touches a dead man, or steps in blood, maybe even if he touches an unbeliever, he will have violated his vows and until he has offered a sacrifice of atonement, he won’t be able to minister in the temple. Of course, he’s also obliged to help a man in trouble. But maybe he wanted to take the safest path, or maybe he was in a hurry, or maybe he couldn’t be bothered. But he rides on by, leaving the man half-dead in the ditch.

A Levite rides by next, and he gets a little closer to the man in the ditch. The purity laws are a little laxer in his case, but maybe he’s seen the priest ride by, and he thinks it would be disrespectful to question the holy man’s judgment. So the Levite rides on as well, and the man remains half-dead in the ditch.

But then a Samaritan comes, a trader in a foreign land. He, above all, was a man who could be excused for keeping his distance. The man in the ditch is almost certainly not one of his kind. He’s a stranger in a hostile land, where people recoil from his touch and avert their eyes in his presence.

But the Samaritan goes to “some guy,” the man in the ditch. He binds up his wounds, like God who binds up his broken people. He pours in oil and wine—antiseptic and balm, yes, but also the holy foods of the temple. He carries the man back to an inn, where he could well be suspected for the crime. One commentator I read compared it to an Indian riding into Dodge City with a scalped cowboy in the saddle.[8] The Samaritan probably doesn’t just put the man on his own horse, he also leads it like a servant. When he leaves the inn, he pays for two weeks’ lodging, and promises to make good on the rest when he comes back again.

Which of the three, Jesus asks, was neighbor to the man who fell among the thieves? He’s shifted the question, you see. He’s not asking about who discharged his carefully delimited duty properly. When “some guy” was nearly dead, Jesus means, who became God’s true child by extending the mercy that saved his life. The teacher of the law gives the proper answer. “The one who showed mercy,” he says. The true neighbor was the one who drew so near out of love, and risked his own life to save a man he never knew.

But Jesus has also problematized the teacher’s original question. As the great New Testament scholar T. W. Manson summarized, Jesus is suggesting that “love does not begin by defining its objects; it discovers them.”[9]

On the one hand, Jesus does give us a straightforward moral case with a number of clear conclusions. It’s more important to show mercy than to keep the laws for ritual purity. Helping a neighbor is more important than maintaining one’s social position. My neighbor is any person I discover who needs what I can give. Go and do likewise, Jesus says, and in these days of such great social division and violence, we need not look far to see many neighbors crying out for our attention and help.

But as so often in these parables, Jesus also gestures towards something even more beautiful and profound. This is casuistry, but it is also prophecy. In this unlikely figure, the Samaritan, Jesus points toward a God who loves all whom He has made, who is merciful and life-giving. He helps us imagine that all social barriers might one day fall, that when we looked at one another, we might see only “some guy”—or better, this person who God has made in His own image, this person who too is my brother or my sister. And Jesus suggests that this healing and reconciling work might come from a most unsuitable hero. The true Good Samaritan, He would be One who came as a servant and was despised and rejected. He would be One who drew near to a broken and dying human race. He would be One who risked His own life in a single gesture of costly love.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Woywod, Stanislaus. The Casuist: A Collection of Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology. New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1906, I.100ff.

[2] Ibid., I.128ff.

[3] Ibid., I.44ff.

[4] Ibid., I.261ff.

[5] Ibid., I.255ff.

[6] Ibid., I.79ff.

[7] Hoezee, Scott. Luke 10:25-37. Center for Excellence in Preaching. http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/proper-10c/?type=the_lectionary_gospel 8 Jul. 2016.

[8] Bailey, Kenneth. Through Peasant Eyes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980, 52.

[9] Qtd in Ibid., 41.

By The Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.” St. Luke 10:5-6

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Sally[1] was our most effective evangelist at a parish where I once served. She would warn me ahead of time when she was bringing another one with her.   I’d walk into the chancel Sunday morning and look back at her pew, on the aisle halfway down the right side, and see a new face. The newcomer might be slightly puzzled, a little uncertain; but also glad to be right next to someone who obviously knew what she was doing. Most every time the bishop came, Sally would present a candidate or two for confirmation, someone she’d walked alongside in the journey to faith, another person who had found peace with God and the gift of new life.

Sally had no advanced degrees in theology. I couldn’t even get her to come to Bible study. She was a humble woman, without great wealth or social power. She had what I secretly regarded as one of the most unpromising opening lines in the history of evangelism. I heard her use it at least twice, and winced a bit both times. She would look people right in the eye, sigh a bit, and simply say, “you need to get your butt in church.” You should know that this phrase is not from the New Testament, and I’m sure it’s not recommended by the Episcopal Church’s canon for evangelism. But over and over again, through the unseen work of the Holy Spirit, Sally said it and it worked.

Sally had more than her share of opportunities to use that line in her job. For much of my time as her rector, she was a waitress at Frank’s,[2] a diner much loved by locals, because it was about the only restaurant in our tourist town that stayed open all year round. When you suffer through an upstate New York winter, it’s not hard to become very loyal to the one place that serves bacon cheeseburgers the second week of February.

Waitresses see people in all sorts of situations. They overhear, and learn to observe.   When waitresses are warm and generous, as Sally was, they are often deeply trusted. People talked with Sally about their problems. They asked her for advice as she came to refill their coffee cups. Because they knew she was religious, they asked her for her prayers. And mostly Sally just listened and nodded. But sometimes, she would trot out that unpromising opening line, “you need to get your butt in church.”

To Sally’s mind, there were few existential crises that couldn’t be helped by an hour spent at the 8:00 Service on Sunday morning. Sally was sharing what worked for her, passing on a little of the peace she had received. “Whatever house you enter,” Jesus told the seventy, “first say, `Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.”

That’s what Sally meant by “you need to get your butt in church.” She had found so much there in that pew halfway back the aisle: a sense of God’s loving presence, guidance from the Scriptures for her own struggles, the renewing power of the Sacrament, the comfort of a caring community. Sally had met the One who, as our Psalm says “holds our souls in life and will not allow our feet to slip.” Who wouldn’t want to share that kind of discovery with a person in trouble?

Jesus entrusts the life-changing message of the Gospel to the hands of ordinary people. Evangelism is for amateurs. That’s one of the main themes of today’s Gospel lesson, the sending of the seventy. Saint Luke records that Jesus sent out two different groups of missionaries in his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. First, in chapter 9, He sends the apostles—his inner circle, the people who had been trained carefully and commissioned with supernatural power. And then a little further down the road, He sent out seventy more witnesses, the B team, people like you and me and Sally.

Saint Luke records at least part of the instructions that Jesus gave the seventy before they set out. It’s interesting that His instructions focus more closely on what the seventy should avoid than what they should actually do. Ancient Palestine was a world filled with wandering religious teachers, rabbis, and the seventy are specifically directed not to pretend to be rabbis. They are not to wear special clothing. Nor are they to carry a bag for collecting contributions from the pious. They are to depend on the hospitality of their hearers, but not to pass judgment on the foods presented to them. In other words, they’re supposed to look and sound like the amateurs they really are.

Jesus tells them that they are to announce to the people, “The Kingdom of God has come near you.” I don’t think he was telling the seventy to recite a bare formula. Jesus was saying they should talk about what they had discovered in Him, how they had come to believe that He was the long-promised redeemer, how meeting Jesus had changed their lives. They are to pray for the sick, keeping an eye out for the reality of suffering in the lives of those around them. And God, Jesus promised, would take care of the rest.

The key passage, I think, is this one: “If anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person.” Tell them about what you have discovered, He means, and leave the rest of it to God. No gimmicks, no fancy rhetoric, no tricks. In the memorable words of the great Indian mission theologian D. T. Niles: “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”[3]

Evangelism is God’s work. We’re just the messengers, the ones who speak the word that God is preparing others to hear and receive with faith. That’s true when the speaker is learned, experienced and polished. But we see it even more clearly in the words of ordinary people, spoken out of their own experience.

God was already at work in the lives of those Palestinian villagers long before the seventy reached them. God was already stirring up questions and longings in people’s hearts. The fields are white for harvest, Jesus says—planted and tended by God’s hand. “Indeed we also work,” wrote Saint Augustine, “but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. It has gone before us so that we may be healed, and follows us so that once healed, we may be given life; it goes before us so that we may be called, and follows us so that we may be glorified: for without him we can do nothing[4]”

And of course, what a harvest God has gone ahead to prepare for them. The seventy return rejoicing. The sick have been healed, the possessed have been delivered. Their message has been greeted with faith. They share in the joy of the harvest. Jesus looks to the distant horizon. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” He says. What God is doing here, in ordinary people who take the risk of sharing what they know, it marks a turn in the great epic struggle. As the Psalmist says, “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”[5]

So did everyone believe? Were the seventy received graciously in every village? I doubt it. Jesus gives plenty of warnings about how this call will be resisted. Human beings are made for relationship with God. The Gospel is the answer to humanity’s deepest questions. God opens doors in the heart that we cannot fathom. But He gives room for human freedom. People can say no, and they will say no. As Jane reminded us in her sermon last week, the stakes are too high for faith to come easily to everyone.

But there’s a mystery in the way people respond to the message as well. We don’t always see what will come of the words we say. The truth may sleep unseen in the heart for decades, only to spring to life at the most unexpected moment. One of the great wonders of the life of the world to come will be to see how God has used the little things we’ve said, the little kindnesses we’ve done; how He’s used them to change lives in ways we could never even imagine.

You already know enough to be a faithful witness. That’s not to say you couldn’t learn more, or that you shouldn’t try to consider a person’s situation carefully before you speak with them about Jesus. But I’m sure there’s someone in your life right now who is deeply longing for the kind of peace you know now in your life in Christ. I’m sure you know someone who would be blessed to be part of a loving community of faith like the one that gathers here every Sunday. There are people in your life that God wants to welcome into His kingdom through your faulty words, the story He has given you and you only to tell.

I guess you could just look them in the eye like Sally and say, “you need to get your butt in church.” It does work. I’ve seen the evidence. But I think you can probably do a little better than that. Commend your words to God, speak from the heart and just wait and see the harvest He prepared.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Not her real name.

[2] Not its real name.

[3] New York Times, May 11, 1986

[4] De natura et gratia, 31.

[5] Ps. 118:23.

By the Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked him to depart from them. St. Luke 8:37

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Our hearts have been broken this week, as we have read and watched coverage of the killing of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Saint Paul urges us to “weep with those who weep,”[1] and this has been a week for tears and prayers. So many people slain in the prime of life, hatred that is difficult for us to comprehend—the world seems a darker and more dangerous place.

Allison and I had been in Orlando the week before last for a theology conference. We had dinner a mile and a half from the nightclub the evening before the tragedy. “It could have been us,” we thought. If you are gay or Latino, I imagine you may be feeling much more threatened. Another unpredictable act of gun violence, another undetected terrorist, one of us turned against all of us. “How long will it last?” we ask ourselves. Is this just how it will be for us now?

Terrorists, and especially religious terrorists, claim to be acting on God’s behalf, to taking God’s sword of judgment into their own hands. The shooter, Omar Mateen claimed to be an Islamic State loyalist. I don’t expect we will ever know precisely why he did what he did. He may have just been a bitter, self-hating young man. But the official ideology of the Islamic State is very apocalyptic, looking ahead to the day of judgement when God rewards and punishes. Violent acts like this, these fanatics believe, clarify the lines, and hasten the final verdict.

But this is not the judgment of our God, this bloody carnage and arrogant presumption of a man who cannot see into the heart. God loves all whom He has made. All people bear the stamp of his image, no matter their race or sexual orientation. All people possess inherent dignity, and God has clearly forbidden murder.

It’s the Evil One who works through violence and sows division between groups of people. It’s the Evil One who hardens hearts and dulls the conscience, and awakens that which is most savage within us. I have no reason to suspect that Mr. Mateen was not fully responsible for what he did last Saturday night. But events like these also lay bare the deep but mostly unseen struggle between our good and gracious God and Satan, the prince of lies, that shapes the course of this world. We’re frightened by this event, and with good reason, because it’s more than we can handle.

The mass shooting in Orlando quickly brings to the surface several deep rooted and long term social conflicts. They’re all what strategic planners call “wicked problems”—issues that are very complicated and seem to persistently deny consensus or solution. There’s the problem of radical Islam, and our frustrating inability to predict and control terrorist events. There’s the continual escalation of gun violence in our country, especially mass shootings committed by young men. Our continuing hostility towards sexual and racial minorities is another deep problem, a hatred for those who are unlike us, those we can’t understand. And there’s the question of how keep culture wars civil, how to prevent our disagreements about fundamental questions of human identity and common life from becoming violent.

We can’t create machines that will solve these problems. No grand theory will work them out. Some of them are based in issues that have always been at the heart of our culture: tensions between individual rights and social equality, a need for common values and a deeply diverse population. Working through these problems must involve insights from across the ideological spectrum, consensus developed through respectful and gracious relationships.

These are also all spiritual problems to one extent or another. We can only work at them by looking inward and seeking God’s help. Problems like these demand deeper patience and humility, greater compassion for the sufferings of others, love that reaches across divides and establishes true communion. It may be right that we have problems to solve as a nation. But we also have wounds to be healed, evil to be cast out.

Jesus went to the country of the Gerasenes, and he found a tormented and miserable man, naked and raving among the tombs. His neighbors had cast him out, this man who frightened them with his unpredictability and his tendency to show them a side of themselves they would rather forget.

Jesus recognized that the man was in the grip of evil spirits. He had compassion on the man, and drove them out, in a dramatic show of power. Jesus restored the man’s freedom and dignity. His neighbors came to find him clothed and in his right mind, ready to work and make friends, someone they had thought lost forever now fully capable of taking a place in their community.

They saw this wonderful work of healing and they feared the One who had performed it. They begged Jesus to leave their land. They surely had others who were sick. There were people in their community who needed to be reconciled to each other. There was so much that Jesus could have taught them, so much wisdom He had to share.

But they begged Jesus to leave. He’d set one thing right in their community, and maybe they just couldn’t handle more restoration. His healing threatened them. It opened up questions about what else might need fixing in their community. And they were afraid of what His kind of change might demand of each of them. Jesus comes to bring the healing we need, you see, but He also unsettles the ways we cobble together to make this broken world work.

I don’t know how your Facebook feed has looked in the days since the shooting in Orlando, but mine has been fairly agonizing. There were some heartfelt and generous words for the victims of the attack and those who loved them in the first few days. But how much anger since then.

“We could solve this problem,” one person says, “if only we got rid of those crazy people who support the NRA.” Another voice opines: “If we could just get rid of this spineless president and find one who takes Islamic terrorism seriously.” “If we could one eliminate all those morons who continue to oppose gay marriage.” “Muslims are far too dangerous to let into our country.” On and on it goes, hundreds of voices all saying in some way: “this is someone else’s problem.” We can bring peace and unity to America, if only we get rid of him or her or them. Let’s cast out the demoniac, and then at last, we can be free.

And Jesus stands on the shore of our land, as he stood that day by Genessaret. He points to the evil in the life we share together, revealed so graphically in the events last Saturday night. He offers to bind up our wounds, to give us freedom, to help us live together in peace. But to be healed, we must recognize that this isn’t all someone else’s problem. Our anger, our harsh words, our arrogant impatience with those who we refuse to understand, they too have brought our nation to this dark and troubling time. He will heal us, but we must be willing to change. Will it be said of us, in this time: “Then all the people asked him to depart from them?”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Rom. 12:15.

By The Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

He cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity, even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” I Kings 17:20

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

For me, the biggest surprise of my trip to Zambia in April was having dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury. It wasn’t at all planned. I’d been given a banquet ticket at the last minute, and when the waiter went looking for a seat for me, it was the first one he spotted, right at the front, beside the spiritual head of the world’s 85 million Anglicans.

I was delighted, of course. I am a great admirer of Archbishop Welby’s. I pray for him every morning, and I believe that God has given him to us as the leader we need at this challenging time. Given a few days’ notice, I could have formulated any number of appropriate anecdotes for a casual evening or profound questions for an interview. But I was not prepared, on a few seconds’ notice to make small talk to him for an hour or so.

I wasn’t really afraid I would use the wrong fork or the wrong title. It was dark enough to conceal the flatware and the menu was traditional Zambian. I’m not sure that the archbishop knew how to spear pan-fried caterpillars any better than I did.

It was more the tone of conversation that had me worried. Should I just let him do the talking and nod politely? Was it appropriate to tell more about myself? Was it pious matters only or would a few jokes be in order?

I wanted to help the poor fellow relax a bit after what had been a rather grueling day of presentations and debates. But I wanted to be respectful as well, to show that I appreciated the honor of sharing the meal with him.

Well, as people usually say about these sorts of things, it turned out just fine in the end. I can’t say too much about our conversation, because I was in Zambia as a reporter, and the Archbishop’s press man came over to me soon after I was seated to make me swear it would all be “off the record.” The archbishop was as I would have hoped him to be: thoughtful and engaging, with lots of questions about my family and about interim ministry, which they are beginning, on a trial basis, in the Church of England. He laughed at my jokes. I left dinner just as impressed with him as I was at the beginning. There was no mistaking, throughout our time together, that I was a very ordinary parish priest and he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. But we were able to connect, to share. There was real communication across the gap.

In years of talking with people about their prayers, I know that many struggle with how to communicate across an even broader gap. We find it hard to know just what to say to God, what words we should use in our prayers, what tone we should take, what topics might be off limits. I’ve often been asked something like— “This sickness, this bereavement, this struggle to find a purpose in my life is really hard. Can I really talk to God about it?” “Is it disrespectful to complain?” “Does God really care about my trouble?” “Sometimes I feel really angry with God. Is it okay for me to feel this way, or even to say this when I pray?”

These are not foolish questions.   God is the Creator and Ruler of all things. He is the One to whom we must finally render an account. He is holy and we are not. We do well to know our place before God, to speak with God in a way that acknowledges His authority and wisdom. We call speech that is mindful of that existential gap between God and ourselves reverent.

The author of Ecclesiastes urged reverence in this way: “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore, let your words be few. For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.”[1]

What Ecclesiastes is saying is that we shouldn’t babble on aimlessly when we speak with God. We shouldn’t boss God about like our own personal lackey. God knows far more than we do about the meaning of the events in our lives and what is truly best for us.   To speak with God, and to know that He hears us is perhaps the highest privilege of a believer. We must choose our words carefully, recognizing that privilege and showing respect and gratitude.

But reverent speech should also be direct and honest, even about the things that are most difficult for us. I don’t think that God is like Emily Post or your tenth grade English teacher, waiting to catch you out for some error in what you say or how you say it. Jesus assured us that God delights to give good gifts to His children when they ask Him. God wants us to draw near to Him, and a profound relationship with God as with a human being requires that we be truthful about our struggles and our pain.

Today’s Old Testament lesson describes one of the most dramatic incidents in the story of Elijah. Elijah is the first and greatest of the Old Testament prophets, the one who was called simply “the man of God.” Like all Biblical prophets, Elijah revealed God’s Word. He also worked miracles, and through them God revealed that his message was true. Most of Elijah’s miracles, like this raising of the son of the widow of Zarephath, came through direct and honest prayer. The Book of James in the New Testament actually holds up Elijah as a model for the prayer of Christians, saying that his witness proves that “the prayer of a righteous man is mighty in its effects.”[2]

Elijah is called to prayer by the honest doubt of a faithful woman. Months before otherwise nameless widow of Zarephath had welcomed Elijah, a foreigner who was in her land fleeing the long arm of the law. In the midst of a severe famine, the widow made a cake for the man of God from her last bit of flour and oil. For her faithfulness, God had sent just a little more of each thing every day, so that the barrel was never emptied and the cruet never dry. She took the prophet into her home, made him a little room on the roof, and she grew to trust in His message.

But then, unexpectedly, her only son had died, leaving her without a provider, alone in the world. The widow comes to Elijah, in deep distress, angry at him and angry at God, desperately searching for an answer, as we all do at such times. “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!”

She doesn’t pray to God herself. Perhaps she doesn’t think she can, or that God wouldn’t be ready to hear what she’s feeling. But Elijah prays for her. He doesn’t correct anything she’s said, in fact his own words to God echo the widow’s almost exactly: “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” The great man of God is angry also, you see. He’s saddened by the death of the young man who he had also come to care for during his time in the widow’s home. Has God actually killed the boy? Elijah didn’t know why he had died, but at that moment, after such faith and sacrifice, it certainly felt that way. He didn’t hide this from God. He was honest, and then he was direct: “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.”

And in response to such honesty, such plain and direct speech, God acted directly. “The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.” It is the single greatest miracle of the Old Testament, a person brought back from death. It would happen just one more time, in the ministry of Elijah’s successor, Elisha;[3] until centuries later when the Promised One would come and bring back to life another widow’s son. “A great prophet has risen among us,” they would say then of Jesus, “God has looked favorably on his people.” That miracle at Nain would point ahead to the greatest wonder of all, yet to come, when this great prophet would Himself be risen from the dead, conquering sin and opening eternal life to all.

But remember where it all began, in a word spoken out of doubt and fear, an honest word, a direct request, out of just about the worst imaginable situation. I hope that none of you will never need to pray for the life of your own child or to ask for God’s help as you hold a loved one dead in your arms. But whenever you feel deeply frustrated, or fearful of the future’s hazards, know that you do not need to hide your feelings from God. God loves you. He wants you to turn to Him for help. We speak to God across a great divide, to be sure, but He is ever leaping across it to bless, heal and save.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Eccl. 5:2,7.

[2] Jas. 5:17.

[3] II Kings 4:18-37.

By the Rev Mark Michael, Interim Rector

“He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. St. John 16:14-15”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In the first year of seminary, my classmates and I were sent out a few Sundays to preach in local congregations. I drew the short straw, and was assigned to a Family Service in a rural Cotswolds village on Trinity Sunday. The assignment was to say something orthodox and meaningful in about five minutes, and the core audience was a dozen elementary school children. Well, I mustered my full energies, and most of what I was learning in my class on the church fathers, and put together a plan, which involved a circle dance and some half-digested fifth century Greek theology.

I was feeling rather confident about my impending oration, and on the Saturday before Trinity Sunday, over breakfast after Mass, I announced to the congregation at Pusey House Chapel that I’d happened upon a way to explain the Trinity to kids. Father Philip frowned over his teacup, looked me directly in the eyes and said bluntly: “If you think you have explained the Holy Trinity, young man, then clearly you’ve got it wrong.”

I take his point. This is the day when we confess together the mysterious truth that the One God is Three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What God is in Himself is a truth utterly beyond us. How God’s three Persons are related to one another is revealed to us in Holy Scripture, but some aspects of this lie beyond our powers as well. In a sense, there is no explanation of the Holy Trinity, either for eight year olds or the most seasoned and learned theologians. Even Archbishop Rowan Williams, the most gifted Anglican theologian of our time, cribbed a line from Churchill when he said that the doctrine of the Trinity is the “’least worst’ explanation we have found for talking about something very disturbing and inexhaustible.”[1]

The truth of the God who reveals Himself in the creation of the world, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit surpasses the limits our words can stake out. The most complete response to this truth about this God is adoration, obedience and love.

And yet, from the very beginning, for the sake of its public worship and teaching, its moral vision and systems of governance, the Church has found it necessary to speak of the Trinity. This remains the best way we can answer the questions people naturally ask about the “disturbing and inexhaustible God” who saves and renews us.

This doctrine is classically and most clearly expressed in the language of philosophy. The Creed speaks of one being or substance of God and of three persons, three distinct subjects. Strictly speaking, that is not Scriptural language, and that makes a certain kind of fundamentalist very grouchy. The Bible rarely uses philosophical terms, but it does say many things with philosophical significance.

This language of substance and persons expresses exactly what Jesus means in our Gospel lesson when He speaks of truth that He has been given by the Father and which the Spirit will declare to his disciples in the time after His departure. The truth is one, because it is expresses the single wisdom, purpose and will that the Father, Son and Spirit share. But it is shared by individual subjects, from the Father to the Son, and then to the Spirit. In our Epistle lesson, Saint Paul presumes a similar single unity of purpose and will when He speaks of how Jesus has uniquely reconciled us to God, giving us a share in the glory He shares with the Father. The sign of this reconciliation and glory is the Holy Spirit, who comes from the Father and the Son and lives within us.

When we ask how precisely the distinct Father, Son and Holy Spirit share this single truth, reflect this single glory, or cause this single work of salvation, we are asking a philosophical question. It’s a timeless philosophical question, the question of the one and the many. If you remember your Philosophy 101, you will know that it’s one of the original questions of Western philosophy, something Thales and Heraclitus were wrestling with long before Plato was a twinkle in His mother’s eye. The question of the one and the many asks about how we assign similarity and difference, how things can be grouped together in meaningful categories depending on the characteristics they do and do not share.

And the doctrine of the Trinity says that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are able to work so closely because, as the Scripture teaches, God is one. There is a single divine essence, that they all share. And yet they remain many: distinct, with roles that sometimes differ. They don’t change from one form to another to take on particular tasks, but are eternally distinct, so as the Creed says, the Son is “begotten of His Father before all worlds.” There is no time when they were not distinct.

This is most clearly illustrated by a simple diagram that Kevin has printed for me on the back of your bulletins. It shows how the Father, the Son and the Spirit are each God, but that the Father is not the Son, the Son not the Spirit, and the Spirit not the Father. You may have seen this diagram because it got some currency in the Middle Ages as God’s coat of arms, often picked out in white, blue and gold and emblazoned on stained glass windows.

The diagram is perfectly clear, and probably says about all that needs to be said on the subject. But people rarely find it satisfying. So they usually resort to illustrations and analogies that seem to make things clearer, but are unfortunately mostly wrong. While three-leaf clovers, and ice, water and steam are ways of explaining the one and the many, they fail to do justice to this One, the single, inexhaustible essence of God, and this many of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Church history abounds in many examples of these insufficient explanations. We call them heresies. They inevitably start out trying to simplify what seems unnecessarily complicated in the classical teaching. But they end up creating many more problems than they solve, and not just logical problems, or problems of Scriptural interpretation. Heresies create real problems that emerge in living out the faith they aim to reinvent.

Ideas, you see, really do matter, especially theological ones that aim to describe that truth on which everything else depends. The Church has always insisted that heresy needs to be called out, not just for the sake of consistency, but so the faithful would not be led off course by faulty guidance.

So on this day of explanations, better ones as well as worse ones, I think we would do well to look at just one heresy: perhaps the most common Trinitarian heresy of them all, modalism. Technically, we usually call it Sabellianism, after a third century North African priest who was the first to teach it.

Modalism or Sabellianism holds that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not distinct subjects, but modes or ways in which the one God chooses to do his work. The One God, modalism says, sometimes acts as father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as Holy Spirit. It’s a bit like how I am sometimes a priest, sometimes a husband, and sometimes a world-famous mountain-climber (at least in my daydreams).

You can see how this explanation came to be. Jesus ascended, and then ten days later, the Holy Spirit comes down. It’s a bit like Superman stepping into a phone booth, changing from one mode to another. And yet it doesn’t do justice to the full story of the Scriptures, which says that even as the Spirit is here, in our hearts, the Son also lives at the right hand of God and here on the Altars of His faithful people. Modalism also cannot make sense of moments like Jesus’ Baptism, when the Father speaks His word of approval just as the Spirit descends to rest upon the only Son.

But as retired Episcopal Bishop FitzSimons Allison says in his excellent book, The Cruelty of Heresy, there’s also a deeper problem of theological integrity within modalism.[2] We need to know that God is eternally consistent. When I stand at a deathbed, and assure a person burdened by guilt that Christ truly has died to set her free, it won’t do to tell her that the mercy revealed in Jesus was what God intended just at one particular time. We need the confidence that the Son is eternal, that He is the Alpha and the Omega, that was present at the beginning and will be forever. The modalist can say only that once upon a time God came to save the world, but God might have changed His mind since then. Perhaps God doesn’t intend to stand by the promises he made when He was in “Son mode” those many centuries ago.

And what would it mean to be people who worshipped a God who was always changing to fit the needs of the moment—a shape-shifter, a chameleon? I expect it would give us a certain amount of wiggle room in our own interactions with other people. We might be honest one day, but if God is always changing, it wouldn’t be so hard to persuade ourselves that a bit of embellishment was just what this new situation demanded. Heaven knows we are inconsistent enough when we’ve been plainly assured that the One who gave us the law will judge us by it in the end. But if God too were endlessly variable, what need would there be for us to have integrity?

Sound faith and upright living depend on a clear knowledge of the truth about God. There is great wisdom, at least one Sunday in the year, in returning to praise this truth of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, revealed in Scripture, taught by the Church. This doctrine is a life-giving truth, a welcome rule that helps us to know this inexhaustible God more clearly. It stands at the center of the life we share together in Christ, and we must defend it with conviction and care. It may be the “least worst” of explanations, but it reveals our God to us in ways that enrich our minds and uplift our spirits.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Rowan Williams, Living the Questions (the Converging Worlds of Rowan Williams), The Christian Century, Apr 24, 2002, David S. Cunningham (thanks to Bishop Matt Gunter’s blogpost “Quotes on the Trinity” at An Odd Work of Grace, http://anoddworkofgrace.blogspot.com/ 18 May 2016.

[2] The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy. Harrisburg: Morehouse, 1994, 73-79.

By the Rev. Mark A. Michael

“You know him, because he abides with you and will be in you.” St. John 14:17

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

My late father had a personality that could fill a room. We come from a family of storytellers, of gregarious men. But Dad was unusually gifted. He worked for years as a hardware salesman, which helped him learn to feel comfortable relating to many different kinds of people, and finding just the right topic for small talk. It made me smile to watch what would happen when he walked into a family reunion, a wedding reception or coffee hour after church. People would immediately walk in his direction, smiles would break out, the room would grow louder and more animated as people began to speak up.

Some people have this kind of social pull because they have to be center of attention. They dominate conversation and cultivate eccentricities that make them stand out. But aside from being able to tell a joke really well, there wasn’t much that stood out in the way dad presented himself to others. He didn’t interrupt or compel, but was genuinely interested in other people. He was able to draw them toward others, to bring out what was best in people. You might say that his presence lifted everyone else, that he infused a kind of power into gatherings that made them altogether different than they would be without him.

We noticed this more clearly after dad died, when his absence loomed much larger than I think any of us had expected. The family reunions were more subdued. People didn’t stick around as long. We decided to let go of a few events that had been part of our family’s social calendar because they just didn’t seem to work as well anymore without dad to pull everyone together. It wasn’t just that he was gone. The life he brought into our social interactions had faded away as well.

Today is the feast of Pentecost, when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out on the apostles fifty days after our Lord’s resurrection. While I’m sure that we are all deeply grateful for the gift of the Spirit, we sometimes find it very difficult to understand who the Spirit is and how He works in the Church and in our own souls. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the “forgotten person of the Holy Trinity,” because many Christians neglect to pray to the Spirit or to acknowledge his role in our spiritual lives.

I think in part that’s because the Holy Spirit is both a power and a presence, as Jesus clearly indicates in today’s Gospel. In some ways it’s difficult for us to relate these two ideas to each other. We might even see them as contradictory. But I think that we get a helpful glimpse of what this is like in people like my late father, who have dynamic personalities. Their social presence is weighted with power, and changes the lives of people they encounter. But let’s unpack this a bit.

First, the Holy Spirit is a power, changing people’s lives by infusing them with supernatural strength and new insight. When Jesus spoke to His disciples about sending His Spirit into them after His resurrection, this is probably where their understanding began. Indeed, Saint Luke records Jesus as pointing ahead to the day of Pentecost as the moment when “power from high” would come upon them[1]. In the Old Testament, this is almost always how the Holy Spirit is described, as a power coming from God to equip people for a particular task. The Spirit came upon Samson, and gave him strength to pull down the pagan temple onto the Philistines. Solomon’s wisdom came from the Spirit, and the prophets spoke God’s word through insight sent by the Spirit.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the apostles that they will do even greater works than he has done after He has returned to the Father and the Spirit has been sent on them. The Spirit will equip and sustain them to do far more than they were capable of accomplishing before.

And indeed, the Pentecost story shows the Spirit coming down and sending out power in unmistakably dramatic ways. The apostles are crowned with flames, and they speak in new languages. It becomes clear, in an instant, that the good news of Jesus Christ is not just meant for Palestinian Jews like Jesus and themselves, but all the citizens of the world. The apostles “do greater works,” just as Jesus had promised. Peter probably made more converts with his single sermon that day than Jesus had made in his entire ministry. It is clear that there’s a new power at work through them.

What would have been new for the apostles in Jesus’ message, and probably what we also find more difficult to understand, is that the Holy Spirit sent on them is also a Presence, God with them as a Person, in a relational way. In today’s Gospel, Jesus promises that the Spirit “will be with you forever.” “He will abide with you,” Jesus says, “and will be in you.” When God poured out His Spirit before the coming of Christ, it was almost always for a particular task, a limited time. The Spirit would stay while the work was being done, and then would vanish again.

But the Spirit rests on Jesus in a lasting, permanent way. The Holy Spirit is the bond of love that united Jesus with the Father, the Source of Jesus’ words and works. Jesus didn’t just use God’s power, God was present in Him and acted through Him. He was never apart from God the Father, because the Spirit filled Him completely.

And the same Spirit is sent on the apostles and on each of us in Holy Baptism. The Spirit that proceeds from the Father and the Son, abides in us and is in us, because He abode in Jesus and was in Jesus first. We receive God’s strength to do His work, yes; but not as a fuel that is spent and needs to be topped up again. God Himself has made His home within us. We are filled with His Presence by the Holy Spirit who lives in us. The strength to do His work flows out naturally from that Presence. It’s not a reservoir but a fountain, ever fresh, ever new, inexhaustible.

You just can’t separate the presence from the power. To go back to where we started, my dad’s social power had measurable effects. You could measure the way the volume in the room changed, the way people moved when he walked into a room. But that power was intimately connected to dad’s presence, his inimitable personality. When dad was gone, that power went with him.

The gifts of God, in the same way, cannot be separated from the Presence of God, by His Spirit, within us. We can ask God for specific gifts of course: deeper patience, greater insight, wider compassion. But what we are really asking for is more of the Spirit. We want the Spirit to reveal Himself to us more clearly, pushing past our own sinful desires and persistent bad habits, so that we come to feel and think and act as God does.   Spiritual growth means more of God and less of ourselves in our lives. The opposite is true as well. When we see God’s power working through us, we feel closer to God, we know Him better. That’s because the One who dwells within us is working through us.

Today, we rejoice that the Holy Spirit, who came down that first Pentecost, is among us, that He abides with us and in us. We pray that we would see His power revealed in what we think, say and do. And we ask that He would reveal His Presence to us more clearly each day, so we may know His joy, peace and love more fully.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

[1] Lk. 24:29.