Christopher L. Webber's Blog, page 8

That God

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on November 20, 2016, at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco.

A long time ago there was a young man who lived in Israel who worked many years as a carpenter and then began to preach. For maybe three years he wandered around the countryside teaching people and drawing quite a following, but then he made the mistake of going to Jerusalem and upsetting the authorities. so he was arrested and tortured and killed.

It’s not, by and large, a very unusual story, similar stories might be told about the Greek philosopher Socrates or Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, or George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. But while the Gospel today tells us something about events surrounding the death of Jesus of Nazareth, the epistle we read this morning, written only twenty years later at the most, makes the most extraordinary claims about this crucified Jewish carpenter. It says:

“He is (not “He was” but “He is”) the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together, He is the head of the body, the church he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything, For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

Now that’s the most amazing claim that ever was made for any human being. No such claims were ever made for Joseph Smith or George Fox or Plato or Socrates or even Mohammad or Buddha. But stranger still, it comes from a Jew, Paul of Tarsus, who was educated in the best Jewish schools in a faith that had for at least fifteen hundred years been drawing a wider and wider line of separation between human beings and God.

In the early chapters of Genesis God is a kind of friendly neighbor who drops by occasionally to see how things are going. Early in the Book of Genesis you find God walking in the garden and looking for Adam, and a little later on you find God stopping in to have dinner with Abraham, but God gets more and more remote as the story goes on. God appears in a burning bush to Moses and then in a cloud to give the him the Ten Commandments while the people stand terrified at a distance. That early sense of closeness gradually disappears. Isaiah, centuries later, pictures God as being so high above the earth that the people appear like grasshoppers – but that’s the kind of view we ourselves might have these days as we come into any airport and look down at nearby suburban streets But the sense of distance continued to grow and not long after Isaiah, Ezekiel had a vision in which he could only speak of “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God.” In his vision, he couldn’t see God, of course, or even the glory of God or the likeness of the glory of God but only the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God: a third-hand relationship.

Finally, Judaism became the religion in which there could be no image or likeness of God at all and in which the Name of God could not even be spoken. When they came to the four letters that represented the name of God it was never pronounced, instead the reader would say “Adonai” – “the Lord.” You know, it wouldn’t be a bad thing at all if people today would regain that respect for the name of God, for the Third Commandment and not use God’s name so freely. Sometimes people do use the modern equivalent of the four sacred letters – except it’s now three – OMG. But more often not – and lightening doesn’t strike but the sense of reverence and holiness in the world is cheapened, diminished, lost. I’ve occasionally suggested that we could get just as much satisfaction by substituting the name of a department store for OMG. How about “Gimbels” or “Abercrombie and Fitch?”

Judaism took the 3rd commandment seriously and the distance between the creator and the created became so great it seemed impassable and that’s not necessarily good either. It seems to me there’s a lot in common between that understanding of God and the vision of contemporary science which also pictures a universe so immense that a God who created it and stayed outside it would be so remote as to be beyond all knowing. When Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem he prayed saying, Behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built.”

I wonder whether some of you have been to Japan and have seen those red painted gates – torii – a simple frame opening maybe into a shrine compound in the cities but out in the countryside more often framing a view of a lake or a mountain or just a scene whose beauty seemed to contain some evidence of “kami” of the holiness in creation that can’t be contained in any very specific thing but can only be hinted at, pointed toward. And yet, you know, almost two thousand years ago one small group of Jews began to claim that indeed one human life had contained “all the fullness of God.”

Now, if that were a claim made by people who hadn’t known him, or if that were a claim developed by theologians centuries later, I would reject it out of hand. But it wasn’t. It was said by people who knew him, It was said by people who were there. They were there when he was arrested and crucified and buried, and they went out saying, “This is what we ourselves saw.” “What our eyes have witnessed and our hands have handled” wrote St. John, “we declare to you.” Now, is that at all reasonable? Is it reasonable to believe that: that one human life could contain the fullness of God?

You know, that’s the quintessentiaI Anglican question, the kind of question mostly only Episcopalians ask: Is it reasonable? You can go to some churches your whole life and never hear anyone talk about reason. But we do. Is it reasonable to think that the creator of quarks and spiral nebulae and black holes and infinite distance would be present in one brief human life? I’m talking about the God of the scientists who tell us that there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy. But then, that’s just our galaxy and there are said to be 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe; (I didn’t do the math to figure out 170 billion times 400 billion but it’s a lot. I remember reading about an Eskimo language whose counting system goes: “One, two, many.”) That’s the number of stars and galaxies: many. 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars stretching out into space 13.8 billion light-years in all directions. That’s definitely “many” and probably that says it better than million and billion and trillion – which all sound alike to me. The only other time we need numbers like that is to talk about the national debt or Wall Street salaries.

So if you travel at the speed of light for 13.8 billion years you might – might, but who knows because no one has been there – you might come to the edge of the universe and then what? Then what? What would you see beyond that? But it’s that God, that Creator of that universe, we are talking about, that God who was present in Jesus. ls it reasonable to believe that? Yes, Yes, it is. For why would a creator indulge himself or herself with the creation of infinite space if it were all one vast impersonal swirl of power but empty of love, empty of response, empty of any intelligence able to understand – at least in part – and respond in “wonder, love, and praise?” In fact, it seems to me, it’s less unlikely that that Creator should be present in one specific human life than that that Creator should be vaguely present in all human life and it seems reasonable to me that that one human life, the life of Jesus, should be not totally different from any other but rather a summing up, a clarification, a simultaneous showing of all that God is and all that we – everyone of us – might be.

To say that all the fullness of God dwelt in Jesus is to say something about ourselves also: it’s a way of saying that all human life has that capacity for God-ness, for relationship, for wholeness and holiness, and therefore for that God to dwell in us. And that’s wonderful, isn’t it? That’s wonderful. And it’s also frightening. It would be much more comfortable to settle for something less, a remote, unknowable God basically indifferent to us and uninvolved in our lives: “The Force,” as they said in Star Wars. I’ve had young couples planning marriage tell me that they didn’t really know about God but they thought there was a sort of Force out there.

But that’s not what the gospel offers. What the gospel offers is a God beyond all knowing indeed, but somehow nevertheless “personal” truly known in human life, especially, uniquely, in Jesus, but also to some degree in Peter and Paul and John and Francis of Assisi and Thomas Cranmer and Samuel Seabury and Darren Minor and you and you and you. This is a God who could not possibly be contained in any human building, yet who can be present in this building yes, and in the very small piece of bread you receive this morning at the altar – think of that when the wafer is placed in your hand – the infinite God, present there, and, yes, even in you, even in me.

And then, you see, that relationship gives a purpose to the whole of creation. The Creator is a God who loves, who seeks a response, and who made us for that purpose. And all of this brings us around by a rather long route to the subject of Harvest and Thanksgiving coming to a table near you this Thursday. I told someone I was thinking of dealing with themes like that this morning and they said, “You need to remember that this is a city parish and pretty far removed from any ideas about Harvest.” Really? Does Thanksgiving bring to mind only the shelves full of canned and frozen food at Safeway? Do we never get far enough south to see the endless fields of Brussel Sprouts? Or appreciate how much the economy of this state and this nation depends on the harvest of fruits and vegetables in fields up and down the state?

But, you know, there’s a potential danger in any harvest festival because it’s a part of a natural rhythm of seed time and harvest, part of an annual circular pattern that goes around and comes around, unchanging year after year after year – well, except that we’re all a little older each time it comes around and around and around. And there’s nothing more deadly than a circle nothing more deadening than the same thing over and over again. Seen one turkey, you’ve seen ’em all.

You know, when the Hebrew people came into the land of Canaan they found people there who were fixated on harvests. They worshiped gods who could bring them a good harvest and nothing more, gods without any purpose greater than a good crop this autumn, and a great deal of the Old Testament is the story of the conflict between the God of the Bible and the gods of Canaan: the God who works in history versus the gods who work in nature. And the people were constantly tempted to settle for something that small: just a good harvest, food enough for another year. And the prophets were constantly threatening, urging, warning, that these gods were too small and basically not worth the trouble.

But out of the process the Jews did nevertheless acquire some harvest festivals which they still celebrate and which we inherited from them. Passover and therefore Easter itself was closely connected to the first spring harvest and Pentecost too was a harvest festival. But Passover remained rooted in history: an event – an historic event – in which God had been clearly at work, and the prophets continued to point toward a future, a future fulfillment of God’s purpose in history a Messiah and a Messianic age and a harvest of a very different sort a once and for ever harvest of human lives brought into an eternal kingdom. That’s the beauty of harvest festival, of Thanksgiving, coming at the end of the Christian year. Yes, Christmas is coming and all that, one more time, but the tragedy of the department stores and all those who skip Advent and move right on from Thanksgiving to Christmas is that they leave out the weeks that put it in perspective, that remind us that this Jesus I’ve been talking about, this incarnation of the eternal Creator. not only came once but will come again, just once more at the end of time, and bring in a final harvest and sort out the good grain from the bad.

So, yes, the world goes around and around, winter and summer and planting and harvest, but the Judaeo-Christian insight is that far more importantly it is going somewhere also going forward in a straight line with a beginning, a middle, and an end. One eternal beginning and one eternal everlasting end. The Creator beyond all knowing has come here to be known and to call us to a life as far beyond this as the Creator is beyond the creation. The Epistle and Gospel today go together and tell us about that God, that Creator God beyond all imagining that God who was fully present in Jesus of Nazareth that God who died for us on a cross and that God in whom we also find the meaning and purpose of life.

Celebration

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on October 30, 2016, at All Saints Church, San Francisco.

I was ordained on October 20, sixty years ago, but on October 20 this year I was flying east to take part in a special program and couldn’t celebrate anything, so I’m very grateful to Fr. Schmidt and All Saints Church – all of you – for making it possible for me to celebrate my anniversary belatedly here today at this altar. Thank you.

October 20 is not a red letter day or even a black letter day in the Prayer Book. It is simply the first date that was available 60 years ago when the Bishop of my diocese decided he wasn’t well and reluctantly would have to delegate the ordinations that year for the first time to his suffragan. Many years later I looked beyond the Prayer Book calendar to see whether October 20 had anything at all to recommend it. And therefore I learned from a google search – not available 60 years ago – that it’s the birthday of Christopher Wren, John Dewey, Mickey Mantle, and Jelly Roll Morton. I kept looking, and I did finally find one name associated with October 20 more significant in terms of faith. That name is James W. C. Pennington who died on that date in 1870. October 20, as they put it in the early church, is his birthday in heaven and he is part of that great cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints, that we will celebrate on Tuesday and next Sunday, All Saints Day, your special day.

Now, James W. C. Pennington is a wonderfully Anglican name, a name like one of those great English missionaries who went out to Africa in the 19th century, but Pennington was not English, he was American, and he was not a bishop but a fugitive slave and maybe you know that because I spoke about him here a while ago. If you were here that day, you may remember that Pennington was a fugitive slave who decided at the age of 20 that he had been beaten too many times and so he escaped, running for his life, until he got into Pennsylvania and came to the home of William Wright, a Quaker, and another member of the communion of saints – (not all saints are Anglican). William Wright took Pennington in and gave him work to do and paid him for it for the first time in his life. And Wright began also to teach Pennington reading and writing. Eventually Pennington made his way to New York City and found schools to continue his education. Eventually he went to New Haven where they let him audit courses at Yale Divinity School, To make a long story short, Pennington was ordained in 1838 and became pastor of a Congregational church in Hartford, Connecticut. Meanwhile he had been a delegate to the first full-fledged national black convention. He wrote a textbook on black origins to prove that all human beings have the same descent and intellect and are subject to a common law. He wrote an essay on prejudice and recommended methods for dealing with it. He became deeply involved in the Underground Railroad and efforts to prevent escaped slaves from being returned to the south. He traveled to England and Scotland and Germany and he was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Heidelberg. He helped integrate the NY City trolley car system and he continued to write and preach and work for civil rights until his death on October 20, 1870, exactly 88 years before I was ordained.

James W. C. Pennington died and in spite of my best efforts is not remembered. That doesn’t matter. None of us will be either. I’ve talked occasionally with priests frustrated because they serve so small a parish and I ask them a question: Who was Archbishop of Canterbury when George Herbert was Vicar of Bemington? I looked it up once, but I can’t remember the name. George Herbert was Vicar of Bemington for three years and died at the age of 39. He wrote hymns that we still sing and his book on pastoral ministry is still read. But he died unknown in a tiny community that is known now only because George Herbert was there because faithfulness matters; not fame. Faithfulness is what matters and ministry where we are.

James Pennington once said, “When you have made of man a slave by a seven-fold process of selling, bartering and chaining, and garnished him with that rough and bloody brush, the cart-whip, and set him to the full by blowing into the eyes of his mind cloud after cloud of moral darkness, his own immortality still remains. Subtract from him what you can, immortality still remains; and this is a weapon in the bosom of the slave which is more terrible and terrifying to the slaveholder than the thunder of triumphal artillery in the ears of a retreating army.” “Immortality still remains.” Whatever may happen to us, “immortality still remains.” This life, wherever we live it, is the prelude to eternity. We measure that prelude in years and decades and celebrate the passage of this time with anniversaries and looking back but I suggest – and I’ll come back to this – that we should also look forward. We are here for an eternal purpose, whether we are Archbishop of Cantervbury or Vicar of Bemerton or a fugitve slave – here for a purpose, every one of us – point one – and point two: priesthood gives that purpose a focus.

But what is priesthood? Why is a priest a priest? I served as an Examining Chaplain a lot of years in several dioceses. Examining Chaplains are to priests as the state board is to doctors and the bar exam is to lawyers. So there are canonical exams for seminary graduates and after passing my own I got put on the board myself to test others and spent maybe forty years in that position in three different dioceses. Some of those exams are oral and I would often find myself asking simple questions like, “Why do you want to be a priest?” And the answers were often not about priesthood. Candidates would say, “Well, I like to counsel people or I like to teach or I want to provide leadership in a congregation.” And then I would ask, “How is that different from being a social worker or a therapist or a teacher?” If that’s what it’s all about, it’s no wonder so many Episcopalians refer to the clergy as “ministers.” But that misses the meaning not only of the priest’s ministry, but of yours.

Why do we use the word “priest”? When I asked a candidate for ordination that question, I was looking for some reference to sacrifice, making holy, something about sacraments, something about the gift of grace, indeed, the very concept of gift: priesthood as gift, priesthood as related to God’s gift of grace, a free gift as they say in the ads – It’s redundant – ads often are – but it makes a point: the free gift of grace.

So today is the heavenly birthday as they say of James Pennington. And it’s the anniversary of an ordination. But it’s also an ordinary Sunday – which brings up a third point: we ought to look at the readings we heard a few minutes ago. We should always consider the readings, so I looked up the assigned readings weeks ago to see what connections might be there and I found first of all a reading from the prophet Isaiah with the phrase, “incense is an abomination to me.” My first thought was, “Maybe I’d better have my celebration somewhere else!” But that’s not the Bible’s last word on incense, fortunately! Text is important, but so is context. We need to notice that one of the psalms says: “In every place incense shall be offered to me and a pure offering for my name will be great among the Gentiles.”

So we look again at Isaiah and realize that it’s not the incense that concerns him but the people offering it: “Cease to do evil,” he tells them; “learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Hold the incense till you’ve got the justice piece in place. Incense is only a symbol – it’s a symbol of prayers ascending, but it’s a false symbol if those offering it live lives of evil, fail to seek justice for God’s people. To paraphrase Shakespeare:

“Incense flies up, our prayers remain below;

prayers without deeds will ne’er to heaven go.”

I think we would be justified in adding a word to Isaiah’s words and read it as “Your incense is an abomination. Learn to do justice first and then, only then, offer incense. Priesthood is representational. Who does the priest represent? The oppressor or the oppressed?

Priesthood has to do with justice. Priesthood is representational. The worst flaw in the Book of Common Prayer is in the Eucharist where it speaks again and again of the priest as “the Celebrant” as if the priest alone were celebrating the liturgy. But no priest can stand at the altar without a congregation. If I came here on Friday to take my turn at the altar and there was no congregation, I would say Evening Prayer and go home. No congregation; no celebration. Priesthood is shared. I can’t represent you at the altar, if you are not there in the pew. Celebrating the eucharist is a corporate function. We do it together or not at all. We do it as a community or not at all. We do it as a community involved in ministry or not at all. The oldest records speak of the priest at the eucharist as “the presider” or “the president.” The priest is empowered to preside, to represent, to act for the congregation as the President represents and acts for the people of this country. But the President is not “the American” and the priest is not the Celebrant.

The congregation together celebrates the Eucharist and we act out our common priesthood as a congregation that takes Isaiah’s advice: “

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. And I would add: vote – vote ten days from now for the candidates who understand that priority and will act on our behalf, candidates who will represent us and all Americans to seek justice in concern for the poor and the oppressed. Then – and only then – our prayers can be like the bowls of incense in the Book of Revelation that are the prayers of the saints rising up before the throne of God.

Priesthood has to do with sacrifice and offering. The priest stands at the altar to represent a priestly congregation, a congregation that goes out into the world to do justice and comes here to offer ourselves with Christ as a living sacrifice and be renewed for our common ministry. And in that offering each of us has a role to play. Someone will be the organist – and I’m jealous of the ability the organist has to produce such great sounds, but it’s not my role. Nor is it my role to sing in the choir or do the Old Testament reading or lead the intercessory prayer or bring up the offering or prepare meals for the soup kitchen or keep the books. Those are all necessary roles in our shared priesthood – some I could probably do myself if it were my role, others not. Sometime I’ll tell you about my brief career as an organist. But together these various roles enable us to fulfill our shared priesthood and celebrate – celebrate – the liturgy. Point four.

A purpose, a focus, a concern for justice, a shared ministry.

Let me end by returning to point one: an eternal purpose.

The church I attended until I was seventeen had an altar in the basement – undercroft is the fancy term but it wasn’t fancy – and behind the altar was a picture of a priest at an altar and an acolyte – probably there was a congregation behind them but you didn’t see the congregation because your viewpoint was close up to the altar. What you saw was a larger congregation behind and above the altar, an immense host in shades of red and blue and gold, some with angelic wings and some in martyrs robes and some in ordinary dresses and suits – and it reminded us of that unseen infinite congregation that no one can number that surrounds and upholds us – “all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are for ever one.”

I remember a celebration of the eucharist I was involved in early in my priestly ministry in Brooklyn. Once a month I would go to a fourth floor walk-up apartment – the home of a retired truck driver and his wife who was confined to the apartment with multiple sclerosis. Several neighbors would come and we would gather around the kitchen table and celebrate the eucharist and I was never more aware of the words of the preface that we sing or say whenever we celebrate the eucharist: “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we praise and magnify thy glorious name . . .” There we were, with angels and archangels, and sometimes in the midst of it all the cuckoo clock would go off. It’s the real world and our most pious thoughts can be brought suddenly to ground. So that’s a favorite memory and there are many more.

Sixty years is a lot of years and I could keep you here a long time with the memories – but it’s not so long in the light of eternity. As children we look forward to what we might be as grown ups – be a fireman or a policeman or president of the United States – and when we leave college we narrow it down to a career with microsoft or as a psychiatrist or plumber or astronaut or priest. And all too suddenly we retire and begin to look back – but why do we do that when the greater part of life still lies ahead? Immortality still remains. Eternity still remains. And those other faces beyond the altar may be more familiar now – parents and friends, the bishops who ordained me, priest colleagues, Asian, African, and Anglo in Long Island and England and Japan and Australia – there’s a one-time fugitive slave and a truck driver in Brooklyn and a botanist’s wife in Westchester – and many more surrounding us at the altar in the communion of saints. And gathered with them, knowing more of them every year, we can look ahead with more clarity and with a sense of more familiarity. But here or there, there will be worship – the Bible is clear about that – music and worship and priestly offering – yes, and incense, and thanksgiving, great thanksgiving for the shared gift of priesthood, for the gift of life, for the gift of love, and the promise of life and love and joy here and now and forever.

The picture of a church is of the Cathedral of the Incarnation, Garden City, where I was ordained.
The picture of a priest and others at an altar was taken a few weeks ago at All Saints, not today, and the priest is not I – but the service today looked a lot like this.

Divisions and Unity

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on October 9, 2016, by Christopher L. Webber.

A dozen years ago my wife and I went on a cruise along the Dalmatian coast, the coast of what used to be Yugoslavia, a part of Europe I hadn’t seen before, and perhaps the most striking aspect of it was the fact that almost every day we were in a different country. Up until ten years ago there was a country there called Yugoslavia. Like Iraq and Jordan and Syria, it was created after World War I by people who had no idea what they were doing, who put lines on a map and created countries without much reference to the population. It didn’t work. What had been one rather small country, about the size of Oregon, is now eight tiny countries, the smallest not much bigger than Massachusetts. Serbia, one of the biggest, is maybe 100 miles across maybe 150 miles north to south – and Bosnia and Croatia and Montenegro are all smaller yet they fought each other, and terrible things happened. So we were visiting people who not that long ago were trying to kill each other even though they have economies that depend heavily on tourism.

That behavior makes no sense – but human behavior often lacks much good sense. Maybe you’ve been following news about the election. I was pondering all that because the Gospel today centers on issues of ethnicity and the way we human beings divide ourselves. Why do we do it? Why can’t we, as someone asked years ago, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The gospel today raises, I think, that kind of question.

We read a story about ten men who were lepers and who were healed by Jesus. Being healed, one of them turned back to offer thanks and praise, and that one was a Samaritan. Now Samaritans and Jews were about as different as Slovenes and Croatians. The Samaritans were Jews with a difference. They were the Jews who stayed behind when the rest went into exile and when the exiled Jews came back with new ideas and new customs they never could get back together. They lived apart for maybe 70 years and five hundred years later were still apart and had learned to hate each other. That’s why Luke comments on the fact that the grateful leper was a Samaritan. It’s why Jesus’ parable about “my neighbor” – who is “my neighbor” – puts the Samaritan in that role. It was the Samaritans who were the hated minority and Jesus puts the hated outsider in the role of the good guy to make his point.

What would we have today, I wonder. Would it be the parable of the Good Mexican or maybe the Good Syrian? Perhaps in Bosnia they would need to hear about the Good Serbian. It’s sadly easy to update the story. But then it was Jews and Samaritans, like the people who lived in Yugoslavia, who were divided in some ways and united in others. Like the Yugoslavs, they lived very close together, separately, but in the same country. Like the Yugoslavs, they had a common ancestry and faith with strong common elements but also significant differences. And like the Yugoslavs, they had learned to hate and fear those others who shared their country with them who were so much like themselves and yet so different. Some of the former Yugoslav countries today are predominantly Moslem, others are Orthodox, and still others are Roman Catholic. But all three of these faith groups believe in one God, two of the three hold all the essential elements of the Christian faith: ministry, sacraments, Bible, and Creeds. They have a lot in common. And basic to the Christian faith at least is the summons to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So why were they killing each other? Why have there been these wars and why have these boundaries been created, and why are international peace keepers needed? Why can’t we human beings live together? Why can’t we all just get along?

This isn’t, of course, a question that involves only remote areas of the world. The divisions in the Anglican Communion in recent years seem to me angrier than ever and then there are the cultural divisions in this country, increasingly reflected in our politics, that seem to be deeper and angrier than in a long time.

Just before moving here, I was serving a parish in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut where there are half a dozen small towns, each with its own character. I was in Canaan, a blue collar sort of place but next door was Salisbury where there were lots of wealthy summer people and retired people. I wondered whether the Episcopal Churches in Salisbury and Canaan might have a joint youth group and mentioned the possibility one day in the Christ Church Canaan confirmation class and I was told “but kids from Canaan and Salisbury hate each other.” These were mostly Christians, living just a few miles apart. How is it possible? But ask what divides families; ask what leads to divorce; ask what puts us at odds with people, maybe even living next door and down the street. Does the story of the ten lepers throw some light on that?

Well, look at the story again. The one who came back was a Samaritan so presumably the others were not. Presumably the others were Jews and they should have hated the Samaritan. But these ten lepers seem to have been living together, in spite of that difference. So what made it possible for them to live with people who would normally have been their enemies? Was it, I wonder, the fact that the things that divided them were suddenly less important than what they had in common? Was it leprosy that brought them together: the fact that they all had this terrible, incurable disease? Certainly their neighbors no longer saw them as Jews or Samaritans. They were lepers, and that was all that mattered. The same disease that divided them from their neighbors brought them together.

Sometimes the things that divide us fade into unimportance compared to other issues that matter more. That’s not hard to understand, is it? If you were dying of cancer and heard of a doctor with a remarkable ability to cure your disease, would it matter if you heard that he or she was Mexican or Moslem? Would a difference of faith or language or ethnicity hold you back from seeking his or her help? There are things, in other words, more important than our differences and when they come up, our divisions fall into a different perspective, fall into place, and maybe aren’t as important as we thought. There are aspects of our human life that divide and there are aspects that unify. And it sometimes seems as if we want to be divided, as if we manage to find ways to use any excuse at all as a tool of division and thus even our faith becomes a means to divide when it ought to be a means to unite. But I think it’s because, like the nine other lepers we are so focused on ourselves and our problems that even a miracle of God can’t break through, can’t overcome that self-centeredness that divides us, so that instead of saying, “We all believe in one God, we have much in common,” we say “You are a Methodist and I am an Episcopalian; or you are a Roman Catholic and obey the Bishop of Rome – which I could never do; or you are a Moslem and call God “Allah” and that’s not a name I recognize.’ And we emphasize the differences rather than the commonalities.

If we human beings can’t work together in a common cause; we are all too likely to be suspicious and hostile and fight and kill and destroy. Is there anything sadder than that, anything more tragic: that we let ourselves be so divided when we could accomplish so much more together? But that divisiveness can only happen if the faith we profess is a living lie, if we have never really understood its meaning. Because, you see, if God is indeed the center of my life, I cannot hate. I simply can’t. To do so would make my faith false. I am commanded to love. I cannot hate. The Epistle of John is very clear about it: “If anyone says I love God and hates his brother or sister, he or she is a liar.”

What, after all, is the Christian faith all about? Isn’t it the proclamation that God so loved the world that he sent Jesus Christ to open the way of life to the whole human race, to break down our divisions, to unite us in a new community? How could anyone imagine that you can believe that and hate your neighbor? Well, you can if you have never really understood or accepted the faith we proclaim, if it’s just one more thing like belonging to the Audubon Society or the National Rifle Association – if it’s just a cause we believe in and contribute to but that doesn’t really change my life. I’m afraid there are, in fact, many what I would call “social Christians” whose commitment is no deeper than that. For many of us, our church has about the same importance as the Audubon Society, maybe less. We get the monthly mailing we may go to meetings if it’s convenient, we may send in an occasional contribution and then we get angry and fearful about the way the world is falling apart. The world is falling apart, but we leave it to others to make a difference. And then, on the other hand, when it comes to life and death decisions, if my country is attacked or critical decisions are being made, I won’t be any more influenced by the fact that I belong to the church than I will by my membership in the Audubon Society. I will side with people who seem to be like me against people who seem to be different and what will unite me with someone else will be color or accent or the superficial things that I can see at a glance rather than the deep things of the heart.

Governors of several states, many of them deeply committed Christians by their own account, have announced that they will accept no Syrian refugees. It takes an average of two years to pass the government’s vetting process, but these governors have let themselves be made captive to fear. Love is stronger than fear. I guess they don’t know that. They call themselves Christians but don’t know that love is stronger than fear and that’s very sad. We could be showing the world the power of love, and instead we are cringing in fear. It’s very sad. We come here today to remember who we are: we are a new people whose life is in Christ, whose lives are formed and shaped by grace and by this food we share at the altar. We share one life. We are members of one body. And so are many Syrians and so are many who will vote differently next month. If we go out from here and make decisions or take actions based on fear or anger or jealousy or status or party affiliation or national pride or any such thing as that, we’ve missed the point entirely.

Christ’s love unites us, and it does that not to divide us from others but to enable us to serve others, to serve without fear. And then I think you can see how all three readings today have a common theme. Faith breaks down divisions. The Old Testament passage tells us the story of a non-Hebrew general who has leprosy and almost rejects the chance for a cure if he has to go to Israel for it. No wonder St. Paul in the second reading says, “Avoid wrangling over words.” We don’t change minds by wrangling; we change hearts by love. Look to the things you have in common, not the things that divide. These are readings we need to hear as Episcopalians, as Christians, as Americans, – not just hear, but take to heart. Faith unites, love unites, look to the things we have in common, and turn back to give thanks as the Samaritan did to the God who is able to transform all life through faith and the power of love.

“In a very nice way . . .”

I’m reading a book, “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” that traces the history of a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, through the late nineteenth century and up through the rise of Hitler and the Second World War and its aftermath. In 1922, at a point when Austria was grappling with the problems of change from what had been a great empire to what was now a small and insecure country, there was a novel published that imagined a country without Jews. Hitler was still unknown, Mein Kampf not yet published, when Hugo Bettauer wrote a book called The City Without Jews: a Novel about the Day after Tomorrow.

Bettauer imagined an edict that all Jews must leave Austria: “All of them, including the children of mixed marriages, will be deported in orderly ways on trains.”

“In orderly ways . . .”

I couldn’t help remembering Donald Trump’s interview with Scott Pelley in which he talked about his plan for undocumented Mexicans: “There’s going to be a deportation force. . . We’re rounding them up in a very humane way, in a very nice way . . .”

As if racism can be “humane . . and nice.”

Three years after Bettauer’s book, Hitler published “Mein Kampf.”

After Trump’s “very humane” deportation force, what would be next?

Known by Name

A sermon preached at St. Luke’s Church, San Francisco, on September 25, 2016, by Christopher L. Webber.

Years ago I was Rector of St Alban’s Church, Tokyo, Japan, which is the one parish in the Diocese of Tokyo that provides services in English They do that for the benefit of Anglicans and others who speak English better than Japanese. So it was my job to speak English which I am much better at than Japanese. So I was sitting in the church office one morning when a family of three appeared at the door: a man, a woman, and a child, a boy of 8 or 9. They were Australians and they told me they were hitch-hiking around the world (don’t ask!) and they were being delayed by a visa problem with the Russian embassy that couldn’t quite get the picture. So they were stuck in Tokyo and they wondered, could I maybe help them find a place to stay until the Russian embassy figured out what to do.

Well, we had church school rooms only used on Sunday and they had sleeping bags so we worked it out and they wound up staying several weeks. And after they had been there a while they came to me and asked whether I would be willing to baptize their son. He had never been baptized, they told me, because they thought he should make that decision himself when he was old enough, but then, after leaving Australia, they had trekked through southeast Asia and they had seen a lot of religious stuff going on that kinda turned them off so they thought maybe they would, after all, make a decision for their son while they had the chance. So we had a baptism.

And why not? We’re making a decision for Isabel here this morning and she has no idea! And it’s only one of a great many decisions made for her already. None of us get to choose our parents or place of birth or national origin and a number of other things, some basic and some trivial but parents do the best they can for us And there may come a day when we want to disown some of it – or all of it and some of it we can disown, we can move to Russia or Texas or go to a different church or none but we can’t change the DNA – not yet anyway – some of it we are stuck with, like it or not, and psychiatrists make a lot of money helping people sort these things out. No one asked Isabel whether she wants to grow up in a foggy city where it never snows nor will she be asked whether she wants to go to the school her parents choose without consulting her or whether she wants to learn the Star-spangled banner whether she can hit the high notes or not.

Nobody asks the Hispanic kids in this country either – documented or undocumented – whether they wanted to grow up here or whether they want to learn American history or be taught about the war with Mexico. If they live in Texas no one asks whether they want to remember the Alamo. We make decisions for our children on the basis of our own beliefs and they can reject them later if they want, but we give them what we believe will be good for them and we may make dreadful mistakes – you don’t get to rehearse being parents – and no one really warns you what may happen – but that’s why you also make this decision: to have her baptized. You come here and you place the child in God’s hands. There will be days when you may not know what to do but God does – and you ask God to share some responsibility.

The previous edition of the Prayer Book when it got to the moment of baptism had a rubric – a direction printed in italics – that said, “Here the minister shall take the child into his arms (and it was always “his” in those long ago days) and shall say to the parents and godparents, ‘Name this child’.” “Here the minister shall take the child into his arms . . .” But if you looked closely, you might have noticed that there was no rubric that said, “Here he shall give the child back.” Now that was very deliberate. The Prayer Book can sometimes be quite subtle, and maybe this was too subtle, but it was making a point: You give the child to God and God keeps her. God keeps her. I always used to point that out to parents and sometimes it worried them, but I think they liked it when they thought about it a bit.

There will be days when you don’t know what to do. Isabel is howling and you don’t know why. Is it a pin in the wrong place? Is she hungry? Is she tired? Who knows? And it only gets more complicated. “Everybody else is doing it.” “But you aren’t everybody.” You can say that, and up to a point you can enforce it. But there will be days . . . But you can always console yourselves with the thought that you put her in God’s hands and it’s God’s problem as well as yours. She is also God’s child, and God may be able to do the things that you can’t do. God can work within us in ways we are seldom aware of. And if things somehow work out in spite of our blunders, you can put it down to chance or coincidence or luck – but it might be grace. It might be grace: “the free gift of God that enables us to serve God and to please God.” It might be grace. And you are acting today to put Isabel in a place where grace happens, in a relationship in which grace happens. Point one.

Point Two. Baptisms are always individual. Oh, there may be several children and even adults baptized at the same time but always one by one and by name. The giving of a name is a symbol of that. You are baptized by name because God knows you by name: first name, given name or names; Isabel Wyler, Donald James, Hillary Diane. I didn’t know that last name until I looked it up, but God does; a personal God knows you as an individual person.

Two weeks ago, the gospel gave us the story of the good shepherd who goes in search of one lost sheep – there may be ninety-nine in the fold but he goes in search of that one. I was preaching elsewhere that morning and I talked about the importance of one, each one, in God’s sight. But it was only afterwards that I realized an important point: the shepherd didn’t count the sheep, One, two, three . . . ninety-eight, ninety-nine – oops, one missing. No, that’s not how it goes. The shepherd doesn’t count to ninety-nine to know one is missing. You can’t be counting sheep all the time; it’ll put you to sleep. We know that. But the good shepherd doesn’t need to count. No, sheep may look all alike to you but not to the shepherd – he knows each one – he knows the one with one black ear, and the one with a funny white mark on her face, – you don’t need to count because you know your sheep, every one of them – and you know if one is missing. God knows you, knows Isabel Wyler, knows each of us by name, by name, knows us by name. Knows who’s here this morning and knows who’s missing. Probably Dana does too.

You know, there are lots of people missing in the churches these days – falling membership in all the churches, main line, Roman, evangelical – makes no difference – we all feel it, see it, worry about it. And I wonder sometimes whether we know too much. I mean, how long have we known about black holes and spiral nebulae and the billions of light years that measure this universe and how small the earth is in all this limitless space. We didn’t used to know that. It’s only in the last hundred years or less that scientists got to talking about black holes and spiral nebulae and all that and less than that that such ideas have come into common use and begun to raise fundamental questions and reshape our understanding of our environs and don’t you sometimes wonder yourself, “How can we possibly imagine that there could be a Creator who cares about this speck of star dust and the short-lived, bi-pedal species that inhabits it?”

One sheep in a hundred is one thing – one planet in a small solar system matters – but a tiny planet in a galaxy that is a hundred thousand light years across and may contain billions of inhabitable planets – that’s something else. They tell us there may be billions of inhabitable planets in our galaxy – and there are approximately 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe – and who knows what’s beyond that and whether there are other universes – if that’s not a contradiction in terms! The numbers blow the mind. Can you still conceive a Creator who knows and cares about you? I will only say that a God not capable of that would not be a God worth worshiping. But it is hard to conceive a God who could create all that and still care about each speck of dust.

Micro-managing has a bad name these days; none of us wants to micro-manage. But God does. Would you create something this beautiful – the fog over the Golden Gate, the sea lions pulling themselves up on a lonely beach, the giant red woods, children in the school playground at lunch time – would you create all that and not care? But it’s hard. It’s very hard to imagine a God of this immeasurable universe whose eye is also on the sparrow. Human beings have lived most of their existence in a very small universe with gods on Mt Olympus or a nearby cloud: not that far away. And suddenly we are in this vast space and feeling very lonely, perhaps, and needing to reconceptualize a God who may seem unimaginably distant, but it would be a very small God who was unable to bridge the gaps – and it would not be the God we worship, who is here this morning, who fills the heavens – yes, all those billions of light years and, yes, this tiny, blue earth – and is here, here for each of us, and cares more for each small child than the child’s own parents.

Belief may be hard these days, but Dag Hammarskjold once said, “God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.” That’s point two.

Point three brings me around at last to the gospel for today: the story of Dives and Lazarus. And notice first of all that Lazarus gets named in the story, but not the rich man. Names matter. I was just saying that. And the poor man got no recognition from the rich man – but Jesus only names Lazarus. The rich man is just another rich man: met one, you’ve met them all. Somewhere later on they began calling the rich man “Dives” – rich. God, I believe, knows the rich man also by name but Jesus doesn’t give him a name. He’s just “a certain rich man who fared sumptuously every day.” As I do; as most of us do; although there are homeless men and women lying not far from our doors. But Lazarus is given a name to make the point: the Good Shepherd knows his sheep whether the world does or not.

It’s good that we have this story this morning because baptism is the beginning of a journey that has an end, a destiny, and it’s good to be reminded also of that this morning. We’re all on a journey here that gets longer all the time – the odds are good that Isabel will live to be ninety maybe more, the journey gets longer. We celebrated a 95th birthday here last Sunday because 95 is still uncommon, but it’s getting less so all the time. But whether it’s three score years and ten or ninety-five, or one hundred and ten, it still has an ending and this morning’s parable puts that ending in graphic terms: Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham and Dives in flames. The translation we used this morning, btw, says Lazarus is “by his side” – by Abraham’s side. That’s what happens when you put a committee in charge of translations and somebody is squeamish. No: in his bosom, “in his close embrace.” Side by side, you might picture them up there looking down at Dives, but no; they’re not interested in Dives. They’re getting acquainted, getting close. But the point is that there is a destiny, we’re going somewhere. We’re here for a purpose. And there is a loving God who gives us that purpose and into whose hands we have placed Isabel.

I don’t know that there are flames down below but I do know that I don’t want to face my creator with blood on my hands. Notice that nothing is said about who went to church or synagogue or mosque – only one thing: Dives had the good things all his life and never shared so much as the crumbs with the poor man at his gate. And that settles it. That’s all that matters. How do you and I measure up? Did I – did you do something about the needs around you while we had time or did we not? What charities do you support? How will you vote in this election? Will you ask what’s in it for me or are you asking, “How can we as a country do most for those with the most needs whoever and wherever they may be?” Are we asking which candidate will lower my taxes most or which candidate shares my values most fully in terms of human need? This country perhaps is Dives and perhaps Syria is Lazarus. How should we respond? “Stay away from my door?”

I don’t expect the scene painted in the gospel to play out in real time – or at the end of time – I think pearly gates and raging fire – or, perhaps, as Dante saw it, a place of terrible cold – are useful images, perhaps, but I know perfectly well that whatever comes next is beyond picturing, beyond imagining, because my imagination is so narrowly limited by the familiar things. The Bible pictures heaven as Jerusalem – only better. You might think of it as an infinite golf course or an endless Mozart concert. You might see it as a choice between Tahoe and Arizona. Our imaginations are too small. But the picture the gospel gives us, I think, is a useful reminder all the same that how we live matters. It matters.

We come here, and we baptize children and adults here, to form a community and to support each other in this brief pilgrimage and do what we can to reach out to Lazarus while we have time. To reach out as members of this church have done just recently in Central America and last year in the Philippines and regularly through the ministry of River Sims to people in need right here in this city. That’s what the gospel today tells us. That’s why a bunch of busy people take time over a tiny baby. In this vast universe, Isabel matters. You matter. We need to be in a place where grace happens, where the individual matters, where life has a meaning and purpose. We need to be here.

The Value of One

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on September 11, 2016, by Christopher L. Webber.

On a crystal clear September morning fifteen years ago today, two airplanes full of people like you and me plunged into the Trade Towers in lower Manhattan where nearly 20,000 people were at work. Another plane hit the Pentagon and a fourth plane plunged into a field in Pennsylvania. When the day was over some 3,000 people were dead.

So 9-11 has become a date to remember and this year it falls on a Sunday when the Gospel reading talks about the value of a single life. Jesus asks, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? . . . Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, `Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

God places such value on one.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of a tragedy we still can barely comprehend. In a matter of only two or three hours, nearly three thousand people died. Some were simply passengers on a plane as most of us have been at one time or another, some were pilots and stewards, some were ordinary people who were just beginning another day’s work, some were police and fire fighters, and some, of course, were people we label “terrorists” – people whose thought processes we can’t begin to understand. Over the next number of months after 9/11 the New York Times ran a series of biographies of those who had died. One by one, the pictures were printed and a short paragraph describing something of who they were: people, human beings like us, who died suddenly, unexpectedly, because they happened to have a particular job and work in a particular place.

The Times series served the valuable purpose of reminding us that it was not an anonymous 3000 who died but individuals, each one with a life that had value not only to them, but to friends and family. The Times didn’t say so, but we believe those lives had value to God. And I wonder whether a non-Judaeo-Christian society newspaper would have done such a thing.

I learned from reading the 9/11 Commission Report that there were some 16,000 to 18,000 civilians in the Twin Towers that morning and that of the over 2,000 civilians who died almost all were at or above the impact zone, only 110 of those who died worked below the impact zone while some 14 or 15 thousand on those levels escaped. Therefore, the report says, “the evacuation was a success for civilians below the impact zone.” It was a success because only 110 died.

If you put it that way, it sounds good. But if, apart from everything else, you heard of an accident that killed 110 people, I think your first thought would be “how awful.” No recent terrorist attack in the United States comes close: 14 in San Bernadino. 49 in Orlando – small numbers – but not “numbers” to their friends and families. Every one of them valued as one. If you knew only one of those 110, those 14, those 49, if you were related to one or married to one, I’m pretty sure you would not be impressed by the ratio of success to failure. Terms like success and failure somehow wouldn’t have much meaning, if one person you cared for had died. There are statistics on the one hand and human lives on the other.

When Jesus talks in the gospel today about one missing sheep, I think we know what he means. Jesus is not looking for statistical success but human souls. And yet, how much of our world operates on statistics? And why is it that somehow statistics lack the urgency of personal, individual knowledge? 35 million Americans live in households at risk for hunger. That’s a statistic. But in parishes I have served, I have known a few of those 35 million and they are not statistics, they are real people, human beings like yourself trying to make their way in a world that seems to be harder on some than others. You and I can’t do much about the 35 million but perhaps we can do something about one or two, the people who live in San Francisco or the Sunset. When I had a garden, I would sometimes take some vegetables from my garden to a nearby food pantry. Statistically it made no difference, but one or two people got a bit of help.

Politicians debate the role of government and whether it should do more or less. I happen to think it’s our government and it ought to do what we want it to do and I want it to do all it can; I want it to be more help to more people. Why else is it there? I believe that our government ought to work harder to meet human needs. But governments deal in statistics: 3 million jobs lost, 1 million new jobs created. That kind of thing. You aren’t likely to find a government agency that sees you as an individual human being. Maybe not even a church agency.

I got a mailing a while back from the Episcopal Relief and Development Fund, which does excellent work relieving poverty and hunger. But this mailing talked about “IDPs.” What’s that? I wondered. I went back and read the document more carefully and learned that an IDP is an “internally displaced person.” In other words, a refugee who hasn’t crossed a border. Someone uprooted by famine or violence or natural disaster who is now homeless in their own country is an “IDP.” Think of the Sudanese people of Darfur; think maybe of the people of New Orleans after the hurricane. But an IDP? The minute you use terms like that for human beings you’ve forgotten what it’s all about. It’s about John; it’s about Mary; It’s about Muhammed and Amina; it’s about real people with real names and precious in the sight of God; not statistics, not categories, not numbers, and not, for heaven’s sake, IDPs!

When Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd concerned for even one lost sheep in a flock of a hundred, he’s giving us an insight into the nature of the God we worship here. He’s telling us that in this huge, impersonal world where candidates vie for votes by talking about unemployment and creating jobs and so on and all our experience tells us it’s smoke and mirrors, he’s telling us that there is a heart at the heart of the universe, a God who cares about each and every human being: the hopeless refugee in a makeshift shelter in the deserts of western Sudan, the single parent trying to stay above the poverty line, the young American soldier who volunteered to serve his or her country and became a statistic in an Afghan province none of us had heard of before, the office worker struggling down a smoke filled staircase in the North Tower, yes, and the hijackers who thought that somehow they were serving God by killing others. They, too, are not statistics but human beings whom God loves for themselves, not for their actions.

Each human life matters to God; God is the good shepherd who cares about each human life, including yours and mine. That’s the first point: God is a God who values each one.

The second point is very similar, maybe just a different way of saying the same thing. God values each one in part at least because each one is unique. If you go to the post office to buy a first class stamp you don’t ask to see a sheet of a hundred identical stamps so you can select the particular one you want. It makes no difference. They’re all the same. Human beings are not like that. We have unique fingerprints and irises and DNA. They say no two snowflakes are alike and certainly no two human beings are, not even so-called identical twins. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “God must have loved the common people; he made so many of them.” I disagree. Lincoln was wrong. God must have loved uncommon people; because it’s the only kind God made.

You are uncommon. For better or worse, there is no one in the world quite like you. I’ve heard priests say, “I was in a parish where the people were X or Y” as if you could sum up a parish with a label. I’ve never known a parish like that myself. I’ve never known a parish with two people alike or one person who didn’t have a unique story. But I don’t think we live in a world that really understands that. Candidates hone their message for groups: soccer moms, race car enthusiasts, NRA members, bleeding heart liberals, stony hearted conservatives. Do you know one person summed up by such a label? I don’t.

We live in a world dominated by science because science works so well at identifying commonalities. Science works with groups, things in common. It makes rules: all water boils at 212 degrees, all type-A flu bugs can be prevented by serum B, all hurricanes blow clockwise above the equator, all plants need water, but science is helpless when confronted with something or someone unique. There are no rules for one. You can’t say, “All Linda McMahons think this way” or “All John Malloys think that way.” You can’t make rules like that for one. How can you tell until there’s a group to compare? The scientist’s area of expertise is groups, classes, phila, and genera. But God’s area of expertise is different. God specializes in one: caring for one, knowing one, loving one.

And come to think of it, when the Bible says we are made in the image of God it’s that kind of thing it’s talking about. God is one and so is each of us. We are like God in the unscientific ability to love one, to care about one, to respond to what’s unique and wonderful about the human beings we encounter. It’s what churches ought to be about. It’s what we try to do here: to care about one, to value each one for who they are, for the qualities, needs, and abilities that we will never meet in anyone else.

Anywhere else, you will find people sorted out by what isn’t unique: we start out by putting all the five year olds in the same kindergarten, and then we put the musically inclined in the band and the athletic types on teams and we send the academically advantaged on to colleges and we put uniforms on policemen and soldiers and put salesmen in used car lots and financial manipulators on Wall Street and senior citizens in assisted living facilities and so on. Birds of a feather and human beings with similar interests or characteristics flock together and church is maybe the one place in our world that pays no attention to any of that – ideally anyway – that brings us together with people with whom we have nothing in common except the same Creator and the fact of baptism and the life we share first at the altar and then, as much as possible, in our common life.

Again, it’s the value of one that God is trying to teach us. And the uniqueness of one. Faith challenges us to deal with difference, uniqueness, the things science can’t account for and doesn’t understand. I’ve heard it said that 23 children die every minute from malnutrition. That’s a scientific fact and I think we express it that way because we can’t cope with the enormity of it, to know and care for and weep for each single one of those children, each single soul, precious in God’s sight. But God can and God does. It’s why the Times found a story to tell about every one of those individuals who died fifteen years ago. It’s why our police departments need to be trained to see individuals and to understand that the use of a gun to kill an individual human being, to destroy a human life precious in the eyes of God, is always a last resort, and a dreadful failure.

I want to take a few minutes at the end to read you a remarkable document that came my way last week. I get regular e-mails from Senator Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut for whom I made phone calls and house calls a couple of times when I wasn’t in charge of a parish. He doesn;t write often, but when he does it’s always worth reading. Senator Murphy improved the end of his summer by setting out to walk east to west across Connecticut in a week, averaging 30-35 miles a day. How he did that and still had time to talk to people, I don’t know, but he told some stories, and he did what I’ve been talking about: he met and responded to individuals, one by one.

Senator Murphy wrote this: “Upon arriving in Clinton, I meet one of the most memorable people from the entire walk. At a gas station I introduce myself to James, and after exchanging pleasantries, he starts telling me his story. He is a drywaller, and though he has lots of experience, he still makes ‘as much money per hour as I made when I was fifteen years old.’ He works as many hours as he can get, often more than 50 hours a week. But life has thrown James a few curve balls which means that expenses usually exceed his salary on a weekly basis. James has four great kids, but one is blind due to cerebral palsy and another has been diagnosed with autism. The expenses for these kids add up and often, James says, he can’t afford enough food for his family to eat. Other months, he puts off paying the rent in order to fill the kids’ lunch boxes, but that just makes matters worse when he has to later pay interest on the overdue rent. Food stamps help, but they are inconsistent due to his fluctuating income. James is frustrated – he doesn’t understand why his children go hungry when he is playing by the rules, working his tail off, and staying out of trouble. ‘What is wrong with this country,’ he asks me, ‘when I do everything I am supposed to, and I still can’t pay my bills?’ In fact, the working poor are a silent crisis in Connecticut and across the country. And during this walk, I meet them, almost every hour of every day. They are everywhere — and they want to tell me their stories. Cindy in West Haven who works the overnight shift at a grocery store but still has her electricity shut off. Ed in Bridgeport who travels hours to a moving company job in New Haven that doesn’t even pay enough for him to live on. Several years ago, I spent a full day with a homeless man in New Haven, so I have some sense of what they are going through. They are caught in a vicious catch-22: they can’t get a job without an address, and they can’t get a home without a job.”

Politicians tend to talk about policies and programs, and some policies and programs are certainly better than others, but a politician needs to be thinking first about people, James and Cindy and Ed, and how they can help each one, each one whom God values. That’s what Jesus is reminding us of today. That God cares that much for each one, each single, wonderful one, and also, very much, for you.

Sharing Food

A sermon preached at All Saints, San Francisco, on August 28, 2016, by Christopher L. Webber.

Let’s think about food.

The Gospel this morning is only one of many that gets us thinking about food. In fact, it’s a major theme of the Bible: there from beginning to end.

The Bible story begins with food and it ends with food. It begins, actually, with a meal Adam and Eve were not supposed to eat but it ends with an invitation to a feast in heaven. So the movement is in a good direction, and in between there’s also a lot about food. Take the five books of the law, to begin with. A lot of the law has to do with food: what you can eat and what you can’t eat and how to prepare it. You can’t eat vultures or eels or pigs or bats.

And then in the New Testament, the Gospel begins with John the Baptist, who had a low carb diet: locusts and wild honey. And how much time did Jesus spend sharing meals – with publicans and sinners, with crowds of thousands, with Mary and Martha, with the disciples at the Last Supper, with the disciples after his resurrection in the upper room, on the lake shore in Galilee, and in the Gospel this morning, with “a leading Pharisee”?

Meals. Jesus shared our lives and our lives are shaped by what we eat – for better or worse. What is more central to your waking hours than food – except for breathing. Well, of course, you may have a job that takes some of your time – lots of people do – but a lot of jobs these days have to do with food: growing it, transporting it, preparing it, serving it. There’s everything from MacDonald’s to the exotic high-end, latest fad elegance. And how many places of work have food available – everything from the machines that dispense snacks to the exotic in-house restaurants of Silicon Valley.

We have to eat. So it’s a necessity, but it’s also a celebration. There’s hardly ever a wedding or birthday or anniversary or even a funeral without a meal. You can’t celebrate Thanksgiving Day or Christmas without a meal or Easter or probably not the 4th of July.

I spent a summer years ago as a camp counselor in Connecticut where kids came from the lower east side of Manhattan and I heard about families – hard for me to imagine – that never shared meals. There’d be a pot of something on the stove and you helped yourself when you got hungry. I felt sorry for these poor deprived kids, growing up without that basic experience of being a family. And then I became Rector of a church in a very wealthy community where the men – mosty the men in those days – took the train to Manhattan at 6:49 and got home after 8 and those families too seldom shared meals and it showed. Kids who don’t get attention find ways to get it anyhow. Families who don’t share meals probably don’t share much else either.

So we spend a lot of time with food. I live in the Sunset and I can walk down Irving or Noriega or Ninth Avenue and there’s Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Siamese, Manchurian, Ethiopian – even the inevitable MacDonald’s. There are a dozen restaurants within a very short walk of this church.

Restaurants everywhere; food everywhere. And our problem is that evolution left us well-adapted to deal with famine, but not so much with a MacDonalds on every corner. Our bodies are designed to store up energy in the form of fat and science hasn’t yet discovered a fool-proof way to help us cope with a society that only knows about famine by reading about it somewhere else.

I found reports on-line that show a third of American adults are obese and two-thirds are over weight and the expectation is that those rates will continue to grow. All the concern for fitness and diet is not solving the problem. So let me suggest you look to the Bible for help. Why not? There’s more about eating in the Bible than there is about sin, more about eating than there is about love, and half as much about eating as there is even about God. So why not start with the Bible? And why not start with today’s readings which have a lot to say on the subject if you stop to look.

The Bible does have some answers when we’re thinking about food. And the first advice is to share. “Do not neglect to show hospitality,” says the second reading: “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have . . .” And the Gospel gives very specific, practical advice: “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” And don’t tell me you don’t know anyone who is poor, crippled, lame, or blind. We see them every night on the news, and some of them not that far away.

Some of you, I know, help with a soup kitchen. There are dozens of food pantries and soup kitchen in San Francisco – and it isn’t enough because at bottom we’re facing a problem we don’t know how to solve because we’re dealing with people and we don’t know how to “fix” people. People are people; not machines. If we’re looking for solutions, solving problems, we may be doing it wrong. Even in marital relationships, you know, we can’t fix the other person – they’re going to be who they’re goinmg to be – but we can love them. And that’s all we’re commanded to do. And love is expressed by sharing.

One reason, you know, that Americans are eating too much is that we don’t share enough what we have. And not just with people elsewhere. More children in this country live in poverty than in any other developed country – one out of every five and up to a third in the District of Columbia. Can you believe it? In Washington D.C. a third of the children live in poverty.

Franklin Roosevelt in his second inaugural address said, “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed.” Eighty years later our representatives can look out their windows and see it now. A third of the children in Washington ill housed, ill clothed, ill fed. In this country, the last survey I saw by the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that nearly 32 million Americans live in homes at risk of hunger, 15.3 million children lived in food-insecure households in 2014. 20% are ineligible for government assistance because we tightened up the welfare rules and children suffer. But world-wide, millions of children die of malnutrition every year. That figure is sometimes publicized as saying that so many children die of hunger every few seconds – but that’s not exactly right. It’s not starvation but malnutrition that’s the deadly enemy. Mal-nourished children die of all sorts of things. And it’s not necessary. There’s food enough for all. It’s just not in the right places. You might say that Americans also are dying of malnutrition – but for many of us it’s too much, not too little.

There was a time when they thought that the world couldn’t feed any more people, but since then the world population has doubled and tripled, and the rich nations have more than is good for us and there is more than enough for all – if it’s shared. Forty-two years ago, in 1974, world leaders at a World Food Summit committed themselves to end hunger in ten years. That was forty-two years ago. It was agreed that the means were available; only the will was lacking. So, in 1996, 22 years later and twenty years ago, world leaders committed themselves to cutting hunger in half in twenty years – they would do half as much in twice as long and time is up. Did you ever have children in the back seat asking “Are we there yet?” Well, we’re not. Not there. No. A long way from it.

But why should our leaders push when we followers don’t care? Have you ever written your Congressional representatives on the subject? Have you asked what the candidates this year plan to do on the subject? Have you looked at web sites for the two parties to see what they say about food and hunger – or don’t say? I could go into detail – but I think it’s enough to say that one document has a lot to say on the subject and the other says nothing at all. But then I looked up our member of Congress and her web site highlights seventeen issues she’s concerned about. Food isn’t on the list.

The point is simple: where there is enough food for everyone and some have too much and some are starving, the obvious thing to do is share: contribute to the Episcopal Relief and Development Fund or any other, take part in a Crop Walk or sponsor someone in it, vote for candidates who understand the issue – if you can find one. And cut back on your own food intake so you can share more. Some people set an extra place at the table and put something into a box or jar at each meal to contribute. That’s one way of inviting the poor and hungry to your table; one very simple and practical way of sharing what we have. Episcopal Relief and Development is also a good way to go. Look it up on line. They’re into fixing the problem: Providing chickens, not egg salad; seed and fertilizer, not sandwiches. Solutions, not bandages. And it starts with sharing.

Sharing does two things: it helps keep us from over-eating and it keeps others from dying. Jesus provides the solution in today’s gospel. The program has been in place for 2000 years. But sharing is more than just feeding others. Sharing is also about our own lives. Sharing food brings us together in all sorts of ways: as a family, as a congregation. It’s no coincidence that what we do here on Sunday is to share a meal. It’s what Jesus did so often with his disciples; not just at the Last Supper. And it’s not just about bringing us together with each other; it’s about uniting our lives with those of our Risen Lord. It’s Jesus’ life we share in this meal, his life that renews and strengthens ours.

I served for a number of years in churches that always brought food to the altar at the Offertory, not just bread and wine but food to share with others, cans and boxes for the nearest food pantry. They set the basket down in front of the altar and took it off the next day to a food pantry. It made an important point: this meal – what we are doing here this morning – is about sharing.

And maybe it’s also worth noticing that the food we share here comes in very small portions. When I go out to eat with family we almost always come home with enough for another meal. But not here. Here, one small piece of bread, one sip of wine, is food enough to renew us and strengthen us. That probably won’t do for your evening meal but it is, I think, a reminder that we don’t need to stuff ourselves to have enough. This simple sharing unites us and renews us and there’s more than enough for all. Compare serving sizes here and at your favorite restaurant and your own table and think about it. What does that tell us? How much do we really need? In the second reading we are told to show hospitality to strangers. Share with others. In the Gospel, Jesus tells us what to do: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor . . .” If we can’t do it in practice, we can certainly do it symbolically and practically and this central act of worship provides the example.

Here’s a table where all are welcome. So what is it all about? It’s about unity, first of all: It’s about unity. It’s about sharing our lives with others. It’s about God sharing life with us. It’s about coming together at every level. Second, it’s about renewal. We eat to live, we eat to renew our strength. But we need more than vitamins and minerals. Jesus said, “We do not live by bread alone but by the word of God.” And the word is made flesh and the word is made bread. So here, as in every meal, we are renewed inwardly and outwardly. Did you ever learn the catechism definition of a sacrament: “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual gift.”

One of the great tragedies of Christian history is that this meal was so misunderstood that some churches gave it up almost entirely. Still today there are churches where it is seldom provided. But we need more than sermons and hymns; just as we need more from our parents than good advice. We need to share food. We need the Eucharist. We need it for unity, we need it for renewal, and we need it for joy.

Joy: my last point. The prophets and the Book of Revelation both describe heaven as the sharing of a great feast. How could it not be? It’s the joy of coming home at last, the joy of being loved completely and powerfully, the joy of being united with God and all God’s saints. It’s the joy of victory. And what we do today is a foretaste of all that, a reminder of what will be and what could be now if we only learn to do better such a simple, instinctive thing: share. Share what we have with others who are still in need. Share our food. Share this meal. Share the love of God. Share the joy.

Divisions and Peace

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on August 18, 2016, at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco.

Jesus said, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you but rather division.”

Is Jesus talking about American politics.

He said, “From now on five in one household will be divided three against two and two against three; father against son and son against father. Mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother in law against daughter-in-law and daughter in law against mother in law.”

We should always be trying to make connections between the Gospel and the world around us.

I have always liked the story of the nineteenth century evangelist who was upset by the latest in women’s hair style and went around preaching sermons on the text: “topknot come down.”

But finally someone asked him where to find that text in the Bible and he told them it was Mark 13:15. So they looked it up and, sure enough, it said “In that day, let him who is on the house

top not come down . . .”

I’ve told that story more than once because it’s the perfect illustration of how not to apply the Gospel to the world around us. So is this morning’s gospel about American politics? Yes and No.

Jesus said, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in a household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

So If we are being faithful and take the Bible literally we need divided families; right? And if your family isn’t divided that way, maybe it’s evidence that God Is not at work In your family.

But then you have to look at last week’s gospel that said, “Do not fear, little flock; It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. . .” So God will give us the kingdom and divide our families? Is this good news? But then why did Jesus also say, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you,” and why did St. Paul write, “Be at peace among yourselves? (l Th. 5:3)

If today Jesus says he came to bring division, not peace, why did the angels proclaim “Peace on earth” at his birth and why did he tell the disciples that peace was his parting gift?

Thomas Jefferson, you know, went through the Bible and chose the passages he liked and cut the rest and produced a Bible with no problems. It’s very tempting sometimes to do that; to read only our favorite passages and skip the parts we don’t understand or don’t like. And I would certainly skip this morning’s passage.

But Luke gives us a picture of Jesus moving slowly toward Jerusalem preaching a gospel of peace and well aware that the very attractiveness of that gospel was leading some to conspire against him. The bigger the crowds he drew, the more threatening his presence was to some. The more people listened to his words of peace, the more likely it was that there would be conflict. And the awareness of that danger had led his own mother and brothers and sisters to try to get him to stop and led him to say, in effect, that they were no longer his family.  The peace he proclaimed divided his own family and certainly divided others.

What did James’ and John’s parents think when their sons put down the nets and went off following this new preacher? What happened when Jesus sat down to speak of peace in the home of Mary and Martha and one listened and the other complained?  There was a message of peace but again and again that message produced conflict.

Now, Jesus knew that, of course, and had to be honest enough to tell his disciples, “I’m bringing conflict, not peace.” And how realistic would we be if we were to proclaim a gospel without problems and without conflict?

When Anglican bishops got together a few years ago the news was all focused on matters of sexuality and the conflicts between the bishops. But suppose bishops had come together from California and Texas and Rwanda and Pakistan and the Middle East and had no differences at all, found themselves in perfect agreement on everything. Wouldn’t you wonder what they’d been smoking?

They say that when the first general conference of bishops was held in Nicaea back in 325 to try to agree on what became the Nicene Creed they were so badly divided that they actually threw bricks at each other.

Well, why not? They had been persecuted for their faith; how could they not be angry to find that other bishops were not on the same page? And that was in the “good old days” when the church was still young and filled with the Spirit and deeply faithful. Maybe it’s a sign of unfaithfulness when we have a conference and come away saying everything is just fine. Maybe we don’t care as much as we should about things that matter.

Jesus was heading for Jerusalem. He could have stayed in Galilee and tried to avoid the crowds and the conflict but he headed straight for Jerusalem and he knew what the consequences would be and he tried to prepare the disciples for it. Faithfulness meant death. But that faithfulness would also bring peace and a unity beyond what any avoiding of conflict could ever have done.  What except that divisive gospel could possibly have planted churches in every continent and in every racial group and every language and enabled us to say one Creed and work together on common projects?

At the so-called United Nations the bottom line is always “What’s in it for us?” When the United States fails to pay its dues to the UN it’s because some members of Congress ask that same question: “What’s in it for us?” I’ve known Vestry members to question our share of the diocesan budget because they don’t see what we get in return. But that’s the wrong question. This church and every Episcopal church sends money off to help others we will never meet or see and who can never possibly help us except by their prayers because it’s a way we have of taking our part in the work and mission of the church. And, yes, maybe the United Nations doesn’t do much for us but it does quite a lot for others and isn’t that what Jesus commanded?

It’s because Jesus faced the conflict and died for us that there is a world wide church working and praying for a peace beyond what the United Nations will ever be able to create.  And it may well be because of that church and those prayers that the world has not destroyed itself over the last seventy years.

What could have been harder for Jesus to face than the dividing of his own family? But his goal was far greater and could endure the immediate division for the sake of the greater peace.  And I would imagine that every one of us faces that same conflict in some form or other sooner or later. lf we live with others in a household we will not all have the same agenda and there will be times when our sense of faithfulness will cause conflict: “How come you have to go to that meeting, that service; seems like you care more about the church than about me or the rest of us.” There will be times when someone we care about is going to want to read the paper rather than go with us to one more service or meeting. And it may be that only by facing that conflict will we gain the inner serenity that will enable us to keep the greater unity and lasting peace.

l’ve always liked the blunt realism with which Saint Paul wrote to the Romans: “If it is possible,” he wrote, “so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with everyone.” “If it is possible . . . so far as it depends on you . . .” There will be times when it isn’t possible and there’s nothing we can do except remain faithful and say our prayers and do what God calls us to do. And it may cause conflict and that may have to be faced. But the peace we might gain by avoiding the issue is no real Peace and will rob us of the strength and inner peace we need to overcome the immediate conflict and receive the lasting gift of God’s peace.

Now let me be very specific. I suggested the text was straight out of this year’s election. Yes.

Read today’s New York Times and you will find an article about the increase in teen-age bullying of Muslims given permission by Donald Trump and that sounds like more conflict.  But you will also find the story of a Baptist congregation in Georgia that rallied around a local Muslim convenience store owner. “Let’s shower our neighbor with love,” said the Baptist pastor and the congregation did, going out of their way to patronize the store and support its owner.

So, yes, there are new divisions but also I think a clarification of values that’s surprising.  When I was growing up there were annual attempts in Congress to make lynching a federal crime. I think you would have trouble finding a politician anywhere in the south who would take that stand today. So, yes, there is division – but the divisions are different than they used to be  and they give evidence of a deeper commitment to a wider and more inclusive peace and what used to be three against two – is now more like nine against one. The standards move – and I think they move toward greater understanding and unity.

Last week we came to church and heard reassurance: “Fear not . . .” This week it’s the same message in a different form: Yes, fear not, but there will be conflict. We can’t change the world without stirring things up but an unchanged world is bad news for everyone. So, yes, there will be conflict – don’t be surprised and don’t be afraid. There’s no way to the kingdom except by way of the cross but we know it’s the way to the kingdom and the way we need to go because Jesus faced it and conquered it and brought us the peace that not only lies ahead but can be here already filling and changing human hearts.

The ACTS of Prayer

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on July 20, 2016.

Years ago we had a quiet day at the church where I was serving. We had a member of the Order of the Holy Cross to lead us and her theme was prayer and she told us a story I still remember. She said she had been re-assigned at some point by her order to another convent and it was quite a while before she saw some of her friends again. Then she happened to be at a meeting where there was one member of the order whom she hadn’t seen in quite a while and they greeted each other warmly and the nun who was telling the story said, she began by saying: “Oh, it’s so good to see you you look wonderful, I’m sorry I haven’t made more of an effort to keep in touch but I do appreciate the Christmas card you sent. And listen, now that you’re here, I wonder whether you can do something for me . . .” And she told us that she stopped at that point because she suddenly realized that she was going through the basic forms of prayer.

One handy way of remembering the various forms of prayer is a mnemonic device: the word ACTS – a-c-t-s – ACTS. There are four basic types of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. She had used them all: Adoration: “You look wonderful.” Confession: “I’m sorry I haven’t kept in touch.” Thanksgiving: “Thanks for the card. And Supplication: “Could you do something for me.?”

So that’s a full life of prayer and I wonder how many Christians have that full a prayer life. I’m sure lots of people get the “S” word taken care of: supplicating, asking God for things. We get in a mess and we cry for help. And that’s OK, that’s the S word, supplication, and we ought to use it. We need help, we know God can help, so we pray.

But I wonder how many ever get beyond supplication: asking for something for ourselves or for others. Prayer often does begin that way and that’s alright, but it’s only a beginning and it’s not a very complete relationship. We all begin there. We begin there with all our relationships. A baby is hungry and cries for milk. That’s basic. But as we grow, we get more sophisticated in our inter-personal relationships. We learn about the C word: confession. Somewhere along the line, we get taught to “Tell your brother you’re sorry you kicked him.” So we learn, reluctantly, about confession.

I saw a story in the paper last week about the Treasurer of a Little League somewhere who had managed to milk the Little League fund for $300,000, but she confessed and they forgave her and agreed on a schedule of repayments. Now that’s a sequence we need to look for: Confession, absolution, renewal. Maybe we haven’t defrauded the Little League lately, but what have we done to overcome the divisions in our country? Have we even prayed about them? One thing we could have learned from the Republican convention last week was the need for prayer. If we share that vision of America, we should be praying night and day for help, and if we don’t share their vision we should be praying night and day for help – to God, not the candidate. And if we haven’t been doing that night and day we have sins to confess and we know it. So I don’t think I need to spend more time on that. So there’s the S word and the C word Supplication and Confession.

The T word, Thanksgiving, oddly doesn’t come up in the Lord’s Prayer or in Jesus’ teaching about prayer in the gospel today, but it’s right there in the Epistle where Paul describes a Christian life as one “abounding in thanksgiving.” So that’s also a basic aspect of life and a basic aspect of prayer, really an instinctive act of prayer: “Thank God.” Even people who think they don’t believe in God say it.

So that gives us the CT and S which you can’t pronounce without a vowel. Which gets me way off the subject, but do you remember “the owl without a vowel”? Temple University in Philadelphia has the owl for a mascot and one year long ago their basketball team was led by a man whose last name was spelled MLKVY so he was known as “the owl without a vowel.” He scored 73 points in a single game, led the nation in scoring, was drafted #1 by the Philadelphia Warriors (remember the Philadelphia Warriors?), played in 31 NBA games the next season, averaged 6 points a game, and went off to dental school. But I digress. My point is that you need a vowel to make a useful acronym: CTS is incomplete without A and our prayers are incomplete without adoration.

The nun’s little story is striking in reminding us what is so normal and natural in our daily life. We see someone we like that we haven’t seen in a while and we instinctively begin with adoration: “Good to see you! You look great!” Shouldn’t we say that to God? What we don’t do often enough in life or in prayer is move on to more sophisticated relationships in which we enjoy other people for their own sakes and not just because we need them or because we hurt them. Sooner or later unless we are complete narcissists – and we’ve learning a lot about narcissism lately – sooner or later we reach a point (most of us do) where we recognize our need for other people, recognize that we need their help, that we are not the center of the world, not self-sufficient, that we need other people and need God. But that also is not enough, and beyond the need for others, the need for God, we ought to grow to the point where we enjoy other people for themselves, not for what they can give us but for being who they are. That takes some growing up and we probably don’t often get to the point where we appreciate another person because they make us a better person, because they bring out the best in us, bring out aspects of ourselves that we may not even have recognized, but we go away from time spent with them feeling better about ourselves.

So go back to the nun’s story: she began with “It’s so good to see you. You’re looking well. That’s great.” In prayer it’s called adoration. It’s what we do, really, at this service when we begin with what is called “The Salutation:” “Blessed be God, Father Son and Holy Spirit” – It’s recognizing another Person and their importance to us and being grateful for who they are: “It’s good to see you; you look wonderful. . .” Do we take the time in our own prayers to consider who God is, and how wonderful? “How great thou art” is not in our hymnal but it should be – it’s a hymn of adoration The A of the ACTS of prayer is adoration. “You’re wonderful, Lord God; It’s good to see you again.” Today’s psalm is perfect for the purpose:

I will give thanks to you, O Lord, with my whole heart; *

before the gods I will sing your praise.

2 I will bow down toward your holy temple and praise your Name, *

because of your love and faithfulness . . . .

A full life of prayer begins there: giving thanks to God for being God. So those are the forms of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Now let me focus all this on the Gospel today: Luke’s story of how Jesus taught the disciples to pray. It’s all there and it begins with adoration: “Father – Hallowed be your name . . .” Or we might say: “Blessed are you You’re wonderful.” You know, we don’t establish good relationships with other people if we don’t show them our appreciation of them from time to time: “You’re wonderful. I love you.”

Get the basics in first. Then move on in one of two directions. I think confession comes next but Jesus disagrees and moves on to “your kingdom come.” Maybe that’s still adoration: Your priorities, not mine. What do you want to do? Maybe, like the nun, when we get together with someone after a long time apart we’ll suggest we do something together, but what would you like to do? Your choice: “Your kingdom come.”

Notice how telegraphic Luke is in his version of the Lord’s Prayer in today’s gospel: “Father” – not “Our Father who art in heaven,” just “Father” and he goes on to “Your kingdom come” – just that – not “your will be done on earth as in heaven” Luke’s version is brief. But Luke and Matthew both give a higher priority to petition than I would do – “Give us each day our daily bread” Well, no doubt we do have physical needs and no doubt we are more aware of them than of our need to praise God, so maybe we do need to get that taken care of. Some people, I’m sure, start right there and finish there to. Their relationship with God is all about me: my hunger, my thirst, my anxiety. And all those needs do have to be dealt with, no question. We do have needs and God can supply those needs, and Jesus is willing to give them priority. But we need to keep them in perspective. It’s probably our needs that bring us to God most often but it really shouldn’t be first priority. We don’t respond well to the new acquaintance who asks right away for a loan and I’m sure God is hopeful for a deeper relationship than just “Gimme.” But it is a part of our relationship: we need to have daily food and without God we won’t. But God understands how dependent we are and therefore how dominant our needs will be in all our relationships. When it comes time for the prayers of the people we have a long list of needs and not many thanksgivings. Maybe it’s the needs that bring us here in the first place – the needs we have for daily bread, the basics, on up to the joy of God’s presence because that also is a need. When we make a list of our needs the need for prayer should be high on the list, never more so than when our society seems to have lost its way and thy kingdom come – not my kingdom come – is a higher priority than ever.

I’m going to skip “confession” because I’m running out of time and only a total narcissist would imagine he or she had no need for forgiveness. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive others.” So the Lord’s Prayer is inclusive – adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication It’s all there. And the fundamental message of today’s Gospel, of Jesus’ teaching about prayer, is persistence. Be persistent. Keep after it. Be like the widow who wore the judge out by coming and coming until she got what she wanted. Be like that, Jesus tells us; be like that. Be persistent. Wear God out! Keep after it. Make prayer a full part of your life, and you will grow into a deeper and fuller relationship with God and your prayers will be answered, often in ways beyond your expectation, And you will be changed.

Dallas On My Mind

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on July 10, 2016.

I have Dallas on my mind this morning and a powerful gospel story, The Good Samaritan, to deal with, so let me tell you some stories of my own and see whether they come together.

Many years ago I set out with a friend to drive from Long Island where we lived to Wichita, Kansas, to attend a conference. You may ask, “Why did you drive? Were there no airplanes?” Well, yes, there were airplanes, but I guess they were less commonly used, or maybe we thought driving was cheaper. Whatever the reason, we drove. We stayed overnight in a motel in Pennsylvania and got to Wichita about dinner time the next day – or was it the third day? I don’t remember. Dinner was in the hotel dining room and we were late but we found a table and we sat a long while before we were served. My friend, a black priest, said, “Seems like everyone else is being served first.” It did seem that way, but sometimes it does seem that way in a restaurant so I thought nothing of it. So we went to the conference and afterwards we set out to drive home. We were somewhere in Missouri when we stopped at a motel for the night. I went in first with my friend just behind and I asked about a room for two. “Sorry,” said the manager, “but we’re full. Maybe you can find a place down the road.” Well, we did find a place down the road, but I’ve stayed in a lot of motels before and since and never, before or since, been told they were full. Maybe they were full, but I realized I had no way of knowing and I realized my friend lived with that uncertainty daily.

I remember another day when my friend stopped at my house to visit and arrived irate because he had been ticketed by a policeman on the short drive from his house to mine essentially for driving while black.

When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor,” he told a story. As I think about the events of this last week in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and Dallas, I find myself telling stories and reflecting on how hard it is to know my neighbor, to understand my neighbor, to walk in my neighbor’s shoes, or drive in my neighbor’s car and know that I may wind up dead if I have a broken tail light.

Let me tell you another story. Much more recently, a new black member of the small congregation I was serving in Connecticut set out to follow other parish members to a meeting in a nearby town. They were driving a pickup truck but he was driving behind them in a beat-up, old black Cadillac that belonged to his mother. They were driving at the same speed on an open, country road when a state trooper stopped him, not the vehicle he was following. He had his license and fortunately nothing came of it, but why was he stopped and not the people he was following? These things happen in America – frequently if you are black; seldom if you are white. Our neighbors often experience this country differently than we do.

Another story: Many years ago, I was rector of a parish on the South Shore of Long Island: Christ Church Lynbrook in Nassau County, a suburban parish about a half-hour out from Penn Station. It was a very middle-class community and people had worked hard to get there. Some of the men held two jobs to help pay the mortgage. They worked hard to own a home in a good community with a good school that would be a good place to raise children. To the north of Lynbrook was the village of Malverne, a wealthier community, and to the northeast was West Hempstead, a primarily black community, formed long ago as a place where the servants could live who worked for the wealthy people in Malverne and Garden City. Now, school district lines on Long Island bear little relationship to the village borders. The “Lynbrook school district,” so-called, included two-thirds of Lynbrook but not all of it. There was another school district called School District 12,  carelessly referred to as the “Malverne school district,” which included the northeast corner of Lynbrook, which was in the parish I served, as well as most of Malverne and West Hempstead. About one third of the parish I served was in school District 12 but not the church or Rectory.  So School District 12 contained parts of three communities and, as a result, there were three elementary schools, one in each neighborhood, but there was only one high school serving the whole district. Now what that meant, of course, was that there were two elementary schools in which children were white and one in which they were black, but they all went to the same high school.

About 10 years before I was called to be Rector of Christ Church Lynbrook the Supreme Court handed down its famous decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education which said that segregated education is inherently unequal and that schools designated specifically for black children prevented them from gaining an equal education and that could not continue. It wasn’t long before parents in West Hempstead began thinking about their own situation and brought a suit against the Malverne Board of Education in which they said, “Our children are not receiving an education equal to that in the two other schools and therefore when they get to high school they can’t keep up with the white children.” It was not segregation by law, de jure, as in the South, but segregation de facto. No law established it, but it was there and the result was equally unfair. The local school boards refused to change so the black parents appealed eventually to the state courts which agreed with them and established for the first time in New York State the principle that a segregated education is an inferior education even if, as was the case here, the segregation was not established intentionally. The court ruled that the school district would have to assign children on a random basis to the three elementary schools and provide buses to get them from their neighborhoods to their assigned schools.

The result of that was a series of challenges and counter challenges that went to the courts. White parents and black parents formed groups and hired lawyers and year after year one side or the other side would win or lose and first one side and then the other would protest and appeal and boycott. Now all this had begun before I got there, but I was there when the white parents had won the latest appeal and the black parents had called a boycott. They said that their children would not go to school at all until something was done and meanwhile they were calling on local institutions to provide space where their children could be cared for during the day with temporary classes and programs. I remember suggesting to the vestry that our parish hall space might be available and I remember that the most support I got for that idea during the ensuing discussion was from the senior warden who didn’t speak at all.

I remember going to protest meetings as an observer and sitting with a parishioner who had worked and saved to buy a house a block from the school for his three children and was now understandably upset to think that his children might have to ride a bus to a school in another neighborhood. Why should he ask his children to sacrifice their convenience to overcome a housing pattern they had nothing to do with? Why should they inconvenience themselves for their neighbors.

It was during this time that the Sunday gospel was the one we read today: the story of the Good Samaritan who stopped beside the road at risk to himself to help a man of another ethnic group who was lying there wounded. He sacrificed his convenience to deal with a situation he had nothing to do with. I remember preaching that day about that parable without any specific reference to the issue at hand but hoping that somewhere in that story was the way forward, hoping that somehow all those involved, black and white alike, could find the courage to stop considering their own advantage and see the humanity of the others. There was no way everyone could win, but perhaps there was a way that all those involved could begin to risk their own security and welfare for the sake of the broader needs of the human community. I hoped we could overcome our fears sufficiently to try to listen to our neighbors.

Well, I spent six years in that community and they were still fighting it out when I left. But the more I tried to be helpful the more it seemed to me that what the Gospel had to offer – what the Bible could give us – was not specific solutions to specific problems but stories like the story of the good Samaritan that held the potential to become our story, held the potential to reshape a community not by laws and orders and coercion, but from inside human hearts.

Here’s another story:  a number of years after the events in Long Island I went to a conference in Hawaii. It was a conference of Episcopalians engaged in ministry with people of Asian background, priests and people from congregations in this country of people from Japan and Korea and the Philippines and Vietnam and China and India. I was involved tangentially in a ministry to Japanese people in the New York area and that was my excuse for a trip to Hawaii. One night during the conference each ethnic group was asked to produce a skit based on one of the parables and a group from Karala State in India did a skit about the good Samaritan. In their skit a man was set upon by robbers and left to die beside the road. A school teacher came by and a lawyer and a Christian priest and they all walked quickly past on the other side of the road, afraid that the same robbers might also attack them. But then, as they acted out their skit, a communist came by and the communist stopped and picked the man up and took him to the next village and cared for him.

When the skits were over each group was asked to discuss their performance and the reasons for it. So the group from Karala State explained that for a very long time the Christian church had stood there and preached compassion and help for the poor, but people had continued to be poor and hungry and very little had changed. But then, they said, the Communists were elected to govern and things at last began to change. The poor were given land and the hungry were fed and human needs were being met. Just as the Jews of Jesus’ time saw no good in the Samaritans, so the Christians in Karala State saw no good in the Communists, but when there was need it wasn’t the Christians who responded but the despised and rejected Communists. Perhaps, they said, we need to see beyond labels and understand that God can work through many agencies to help those in need. Perhaps even a communist can be my neighbor.

I remember on another occasion visiting Manila in the Philippines and seeing in the oldest part of the city signs describing what happened there during the Japanese occupation: prisoners were sometimes put in cells that had been designed by the Spaniards centuries before in such a way that the water would come into them at high tide and drown the prisoners and carry out the bodies when the tide went down. I remember hearing somewhere that the Japanese military administration of Singapore in those years was very different because the Japanese general in charge was a Christian and had learned to see even the enemy as his neighbor. I remember discussions with our Filipino hosts about the difference between a society formed by Christian ethics and one formed by Confucian ethics because the one is an open system that has a principle about the other, the outsider, the neighbor, and the other is a closed system prescribing duty towards those within the system but saying nothing about those outside.

Back at the earliest level of the biblical story there is a command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. In the Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Bible, we read that, “there shall be both for you and the resident alien a single statute . . . you and the alien who resides among you shall have the same law.” For Jews and Christians it is one of the most fundamental principles. But what a difference there is between a principle and a story. The principle applies to every human situation: school districts on Long Island, poor people in Karala State, the homeless and hungry in Syria and in San Francisco. If we act on it, it makes a difference. The Gospel is supposed to make a difference, and it may impact our convenience. It may impact the taxes we pay and the candidates we vote for. But a law or principal is a wooden thing: stiff and unwieldy and hard to bring to bear when my interests are at stake. A story is different: often I can see myself in the story and think about how I might act in a similar situation.

Black Americans and white Americans are neighbors living all too often in the same community but in different worlds, with many of the same hopes, but very different fears. I’ve been thinking about the policemen who shoot black people and wondering what fears they have, what would lead them to murder someone they had never met. What life experience, what fears, what terrible insecurity, what unresolved anger, would lead anyone to shoot another human being in cold blood?  But the police who act violently are also our neighbors and further evidence of how hard it is to understand our neighbor, reach out to our neighbor, break down the walls that separate us from our neighbors.

I’ve been telling stories because I think the gospel story gives us a way to begin. On the one hand there are principles and on the other hand there is a story, a story familiar to every Christian and many non-Christians as well. I wonder if any single story ever told has had as powerful an impact on Western civilization as the story of the good Samaritan. Hospitals are named for him, laws are passed on the subject, and news reports tell us frequently about good Samaritans who helped beyond the call of duty.

I went on line yesterday and found a story filed in the last 24 hours: “LAWRENCE, Kan. — A heartbreaking story of survival is unfolding after a Good Samaritan discovered an infant abandoned inside of a Lawrence trash compactor early Thursday morning.” The newspaper automatically called the man a “Good Samaritan;” everyone knows what that means.

This is a story that has the power to bring a principle to life and shape who we are. It’s a story that needs to be our story. It’s a story that needs to be something we live out in our lives. It’s a story that needs to be a command we have heard so clearly that we ourselves will go and do likewise.