4th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8A

4th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8A June 28, 2020 How on earth do we know who to listen to? We find ourselves in the midst of a world of competing claims which we as a society are now confronted with — everything from how to be safe in the midst of a global pandemic to the issues of race and how police function in our society. How on earth do we know who to listen to? This is not a new question for the people of God, and this Sunday’s Old Testament reading has been a helpful one for me to ponder and reflect upon during this unsettled season. We find ourselves reading a later portion in the book of Jeremiah. You will recall last week that we read Jeremiah’s lament about how God continues to call him to preach an unpopular message to the people of Jerusalem, calling them to repent or to face the coming destruction of Jerusalem at the hand of the Babylonians. Jeremiah feels that God’s call to preach this has made him a laughingstock, and he protests this treatment from God even as he proclaims God’s faithfulness and how God will vindicate him. This week, we have a tale of two prophets who are proclaiming conflicting messages to the people of Jerusalem. Since our reading from last week, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon has conquered Jerusalem, deposed and deport the rightful king and replaced him with a puppet king for Babylon. God has told Jeremiah to start wearing a yoke around town as a symbol of the yoke that Babylon has put on the people of Jerusalem, so we have dour, old Jeremiah, wearing his yoke, and preaching about how Jerusalem needs to repent and prepare to bear the punishment of God as represented in the yoke of the Babylonian oppression. But then a group of their neighbors comes to Jerusalem with a plot to overthrow the Babylonians, and our reading from today picks up. The prophet Hananiah speaks to Jeremiah in the temple in the presence of the priests and the people, and he tells Jeremiah, “‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. I will also bring back to this place King Jeconiah son of Jehoiakim of Judah, and all the exiles from Judah who went to Babylon, says the Lord, for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’” This sounds like good news for the people who have been oppressed and longing to throw off the yoke of their oppressor. God’s going to take care of it. But then, as our reading for today picks up, Jeremiah replies, ““Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfill the words that you have prophesied, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord, and all the exiles. But listen now to this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.” We’ll know that you are a true prophet, Jeremiah tells Hananiah, when the words of your prophecy come true. “The proof of a prophet is in the pudding.” I bet you can’t guess what happens next! At that point in the story, the prophet Hananiah seizes the yoke around Jeremiah’s neck (in front of all the priests and people), and he breaks it. And not long after that, God sends Jeremiah with a prophecy to Hananiah, that Hananiah has broken the wooden yoke, but he will find it replaced with a yoke of iron. Jeremiah tells Hananiah that Hananiah is not a true prophet of Yahweh, and that Hananiah has made the people believe a lie. And then, the book of Jeremiah tells us, Hananiah dies. Eventually King Zedekiah joins with his neighbors to try to overthrow the Babylonians which ends with a siege and destruction of Jerusalem, including the temple, all of Zedekiah’s sons being slain by Nebuchadnezzar and Zedekiah being blinded and led away in chains to Babylon. We see in these two prophets two competing calls. The siren song of the call of Hananiah is a call to comfort, that God will take care of them and will remove the yoke of their oppressors. The call of Jeremiah is one that is much more difficult to follow. It is the call to peace and justice; it is the call of atonement; the call of living in a difficult place as a result of the faithlessness of the people. Jeremiah’s call is the call to the people of God to adapt to a changing world. How on earth do we know who to listen to right now? If this story is any indication, then we, the people of God, need to remember that the one we need to listen to is probably the one we don’t want to hear. One of the writers of the commentary that I read weekly shared this: “Several years ago, in a national urban ministry conference, one of the keynote speakers made this unforgettable statement, which seemed almost like a sidebar: ‘There are two great pathologies in our culture today. One of them is denial. The only antidote for denial is radical truth-telling. The other great pathology is despair. The only antidote for despair is radical hope, grounded in community.”i We need to be people of radical hope, grounded in radical truth-telling and rooted in community. We need each other more than ever to help us discern who we listen to and how we move forward. But the good news is that we have gifts and our gifts are adaptable. So this week, I invite you to ponder on a few things. 1. What truth might be found in the voice that you don’t want to listen to right now? 2. What are the gifts of this community? And how is God calling us to adapt to a changing world? 3. How might you, as an individual, be inspired to help us adapt the gifts of St. Thomas for use in the world in which we find ourselves? And as a part of your invitation this week, I invite you to consider joining Rev. Aimee and me in watching two videos that we have carefully selected and then joining us in a conversation on Zoom on Wednesday night at 6 about the videos, about race, and about what we are learning about ourselves while listening for truth in voices we are not always so comfortable listening to. We’ve both wrestled with this together and individually. We think it is an important conversation to have as a community of faith, even as we recognize the trust and the vulnerability that this conversation may require of us as leaders and of you as participants. All are invited to join us, and none are required. But know that the conversations will be conducted with respect, candor, no judgement and great care for every one. i. Bailey, Douglass M. Homiletical Perspective Proper 8. Feasting on the Word. Year A Vol. 3. Ed. Bartlett and Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox: 2011, p 175.

3rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7A

3rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7A June 21, 2020 When I do premarital counseling with couples who are preparing to be married, I spend a whole session with them on expectations. Unvoiced or unmet expectations are often sources for conflict in marriages as well as in other relationships, including churches. Folks in 12 steps programs often say that an unspoken expectation is a resentment in waiting, and resentments are deadly for people in recovery. Our two scripture readings today are actually both, in some ways, about expectations. Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah is a study in what unmet expectations can do to a relationship as Jeremiah rails against God. And Jesus, in his 2nd of 5 major teachings in Matthew’s gospel is trying to debunk some of his disciples unrealistic expectations of what life will be like as his disciple before he sends them out to do mission work on his behalf. While the two readings are complementary, it is Jeremiah that has caught my attention this week. Jeremiah, who lives in a chaotic time and who has been preaching about the coming destruction to Jerusalem, is finding his audience to be more hostile than he would like. And so he rails against God, accusing God that God has enticed him and overpowered him, saying that God has compelled him to proclaim the coming ruin and destruction of Jerusalem, and as a result, Jeremiah has become a laughingstock. Jeremiah’s rage and his grief are palpable even across the centuries, and I find this passage is often difficult for me to read because it is just so raw, so real. But it can be helpful for us, too, as an invitation to sit with our own unmet expectations in our relationship with God. In fact, this portion of Jeremiah falls into a genre of biblical literature that is known as the lament. There is a large portion of Psalms that fall into this category of lament and, of course, the book Lamentations. The classical biblical lament follows a standard pattern that we see unfolding here in this passage from Jeremiah (specifically in verses 7-13): “(i.) a brief opening address, directed to God (v. 7 ‘O Lord’) followed by (ii.) the complaint (vv 7-10), in which the lamenter’s affliction and isolation are vividly described and the enemies are portrayed and quoted; followed by the most characteristic feature, usually introduced by an adversative (‘but’ or ‘nevertheless’), in which the lamenter gives (iii.) a strong confession of trust in God (v 11) and directly petitions God (v12, ‘let me see your retribution upon them’). Finally, laments usually conclude with an element of praise, present or in prospect, directed to the larger community, to whom testimony of God’s deliverance is directed.”i (We can see a similar structure at work in the Psalm appointed for today, as well.) So, what’s that got to do with us? This past week, I listened to a podcast titled Pivot that comes out of Luther Seminary, and the episode for this week was on lament. The hosts talk about how lament helps us give voice to our anger, our grief, our frustration, our powerlessness, our feeling that we are all alone, surrounded by enemies; and it is an important way of being with God, basically naming before God our unmet expectations so that they do not come between us and God. One of the hosts tells a story about how leaning into lament has change and reshaped his relationship with God. He tells the story of an Old Testament professor he had named John Goldengay, who describes lament as “shaking your fist at God and saying, ‘You promised things wouldn’t be this way.’” And he tells a story of when Goldengay’s wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and overtime she became unable to speak and was confined to a wheelchair. John would take his wife everywhere with him, to meetings, to class, and then every night, he would pray lament on her behalf because she could no longer do it herself. He would cry out to God and say, “Things are not supposed to be this way. This is not what you promised.” Eventually, John’s wife died, and years later, he remarried. The daughter of his new wife was working in the refugee camps in Darfur with people who were in immense suffering, and every evening, John and his wife would pray lament on behalf of the people of Darfur. These two powerful examples in the life of this one man show that lament is both deeply personal as well as communal; lament can be prayed on our own behalf, on the behalf of others, or on behalf of our entire society. I don’t know about y’all, but I need lament right now because it gives me a place to be candid with God, and it gives me a place to put all of the longings and losses and disappointments and grief of this season of our common life. Candor, with God and with each other, is a statement of trust and vulnerability, and in that spirit, lament can be an act of courage. It is an invitation to us to give voice to our expectations of who God is in order to release those expectations; because as Jesus teaches, God will consistently defy all expectations and refuses to be limited by them. So, your invitation this week is to write or pray a lament, either for yourself, for society, or for someone else. And as you practice lament, be mindful that lamenting connects us across time and across the world to all others who have cried out to God in lament. Even in our individuality, lament is always communal. In order to do this, I have a form you can use, and I want to challenge you to be as candid in this as possible because, as Jeremiah shows us, God can handle our honesty. This lament form is comprised of 4 statements: 1. God, I don’t understand _____. 2. God, please, fix _________. 3. God, I trust you with my future even if__________. 4. God, I will praise you even when___________. Lament can change the way that we talk to God, and in this season of chaos and isolation, it may be exactly what we all need. i. Butler, James T. Exegetical Perspective (for Proper 7A) from Feasting on the Word Year A Vol 3. Ed. Bartlett and Taylor. Westminster John Knox: 2011, p 149.

1st Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday

The First Sunday after Pentecost-Trinity Sunday June 7, 2020 When I was growing up in Mississippi, there was a question that people I knew would often ask. I wonder if it’s a question that most Southerners ask each other? They would say to me or to others, “How’s ya’ mamma and them?” Sometimes, it was said as a greeting; others, it was asked as a legitimate question. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to think about this question and what it really means. “How’s ya’ mamma and them” is a question about connection. It connects the one asking with the one being asked through a person or other people being asked about, creating a sort of trinity of connection. The question draws connection and meaning through kinship, lifting up the relationships that are most dear and showing a desire for connection even there. Today is the 1st Sunday after Pentecost, the day every year in our church calendar when we celebrate Trinity Sunday, the mystery of a God who is unified in three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are together, One. On this Sunday, desperate preachers often resort to quoting the church fathers who hammered out the doctrine of the Trinity, or we draw on imperfect metaphors or language. I even once heard a desperate preacher use one of those fidget spinners to try to illustrate the Trinity. The temptation for preachers when faced with the Trinity is to try to appeal to our intellect, but our intellects fail us in the face of the mystery that is a Triune God who is completely unified. So, instead, on Trinity Sunday, I think the invitation is really to engage our hearts: “how’s ya’ mamma and them?” The trinity, at its most pure essence, its deepest truth, is about relationship. It is the relationship of God which inspires God to create-to bring order out of chaos, to invite us into the part of being co-creators with God in our relationship with all of creation and in our relationships with each other. In addition to its being Trinity Sunday, over a week ago (but man, does it seem longer), our Presiding Bishop invited us to pray prayers of lament and remembrance for the over 100,000 people who have died of Covid-19 in our country, and if possible, to participate in ecumenical prayers for all those who have died and continued to die. In just a few minutes, we’ll pray those prayers together in lament and in remembrance and to remind us that, even if we do not personally know someone who has died from Covid-19, we are all connected, related, and the deaths of so many diminish all of us. And yet, even so much more has happened this week, last week: the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis which was videoed and shared around the world; protests; riots; stories of police doing harm; stories of police doing good; political machinations on all sides….In some ways, it feels as if we have descended into utter chaos. Many of us just want things to get back to “normal,” but it is hard to imagine or picture what that would even mean at this point. In the midst of our chaos, we have Trinity Sunday, the invitation of God to co-creation, to relationship; we have the reminder from our Genesis reading that each and every person has been made in the image and likeness of God and the kinship that creates among us. And we have in our gospel reading for today Jesus’s parting words to his disciples, the end of Matthew’s gospel, what is known as the “Great Commission.” In the last line of this passage, we have what another preacher has said is the summary of the Trinity: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” If we really believe this, how does this affect how we are in the world? It is the promise of the abiding, relational presence of God in our lives and in our world, always connecting, always creating order and goodness out of chaos and disorder and inviting us to participate in that. So, what does that even mean to us in our current moment? How can we, people of faith, respond to the invitation of the Triune God to be in relationship in this time of isolation, fragmentation? How can we become, even now, co-creators with God, in the face of such chaos, disorder, upheaval? I think the first step has to be to remember the roots of our kinship and delving into what that means. This past week, Richard Rohr quoted the Jesuit priest, Greogry Boyle, who founded the transformation community of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, “to assist individuals and families affected by the cycle of poverty, drugs, gangs, and incarceration. Along with many Homeboys and Homegirls, he believes the healing process can only happen when we are in relationship with one another.” Boyle writes, “Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just ‘forgotten that we belong to each other.’ Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen. With kinship as the goal, other essential things fall into place; without it, no justice, no peace. I suspect that were kinship our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it.”i Kinship is the remembering that we belong to each other that is rooted in our creation in the image and likeness of God. It is strengthened in recognizing that each one of us is vulnerable in these mortal bodies, vulnerable to violence, vulnerable to the sickness of this global pandemic, even as we continue to try to protect the most vulnerable among us. It is found in recognizing that kinship can never be remembered when one person has his knee on the neck of another child of God, even as we recognize that deep within each of us dwells the potential for that decision for violence and harm in that situation. Kinship, for those of us who are white, means dwelling in our own discomfort during this season. Kinship means beginning to do our own inner work of learning and of peeling back the layers of systems from which we have consistently benefitted for our entire lives, even for generations. Kinship means us listening to people of color who have consistently been oppressed and persecuted by those systems simply because they were not white. Kinship means that we stand and look and bear witness, albeit uncomfortably, in the face of the chaos of shame and rage that is pouring forth now that those things which have happened for hundreds of years in the darkness have had the light shone upon them. Maybe the first step for us in the kinship the Trinity invites us into is not flinching from our discomfort, not judging, not allowing ourselves to be distracted by politics or Netflix or shopping or fill in the blank here, not saying “yes, but” or arguing or justifying. The invitation to kinship for us in this moment is to continue to be uncomfortable in this present moment and to listen. This past week, I started reading a book titled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. I’ll confess that even the title makes me squirm with discomfort. It’s written by Robin Diangelo, a white woman who is a sociologist and a long-time trainer in anti-racism. I’m only a few chapters in, but I’m struck by how she says that part of the problem is that we, white people, have an overly simplified understanding of racism. We think that racism talks about a person who is racist, and we know that is bad, and we do not think that we ourselves are bad, or racist, so we reject talking or thinking about it because we don’t think we need to. She goes on to distinguish racism from prejudice writing, “Prejudice is pre-judgement about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs. Prejudice consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalizations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected onto everyone from that group. Our prejudices tend to be shared because we swim in the same cultural water and absorb the same messages. All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it.”ii She continues, “When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors… ‘Racism is a structure, not an event’.”iii Our invitation for this week is to spend some time with our discomfort around issues of prejudice and racism in the light of the kinship we are invited into in and through the Trinity. One way to do this, which is the path I’m going to take, is to reflect on some questions Diangelo poses in her book, and I’ll share those with you in a moment. Another way is to read a book or an article or to watch a movie or program or listen to a podcast. We can help you with a list if that is something that you would like. Just ask. A good place to start is by reading the book or watching the movie Just Mercy, the book we read for our Lenten study a couple of years ago. The movie has recently been made free to watch on a number of streaming platforms, and it is another way to dwell with your discomfort as you discern what more you need to do. Here’s are the questions Diangelo offers, to help us dwell with and reflect on our discomfort: “The racial status quo is comfortable for white people, and we will not move forward in race relations if we remain comfortable. The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out—blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, ‘Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true? How does this lens change my understanding of racial dynamics? How can my unease help reveal the unexamined assumptions I have been making? Is it possible that because I am white, there are some racial dynamics that I can’t see? Am I willing to consider that possibility? If I am not willing to do so, then why not?’”iv Friends, I know that what I am asking of you is difficult and challenging work. Know that it is work that I’ll be doing alongside you, and I hope that there will be a way for us to continue this work in person when circumstances allow. In doing this difficult work to live more deeply and fully into the kinship of God, we have the promise of Jesus and the Trinity: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” i. Richard Rohr’s daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation: Being One with the Other Thursday,  June 4, 2020. ii.Diangelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Kindle page 19. iii.Ibid Kindle page 20 iv. Ibid Kindle page 13