Sermons from Grace Cathedral

Acts 10:44-48

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E26

5 Easter (Year B) 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 28 April 2024 | Earth Day

Acts 8:26-40

Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21

John 15:1-8

“Mysterious God we have lost our home. We are wandering. Help us to hear your call and find ourselves again in you. Amen."

1. In wild places I have heard the voice of God... From the time beyond human remembering there existed an island called by the first people Limuw. Every spring fantastic cumulous clouds raced over orange and yellow flower-covered mountain slopes. The fast moving streams, canyons, prairies, oak woodlands, cobbled beaches, tidepools and white foamy waters teamed with life. Thousands of birds nested on the cliffs among the waterfalls. But something was missing. And so Hutash, the name for the Spirit of the Earth, planted a new kind of seed. From these, the ground put forth the first people and the island was complete. Thus begins a story perhaps older than human writing told by people known today as the Chumash. You may know this place as Santa Cruz Island. It is the largest island in California and lies in the archipelago off the coast of Santa Barbara. “The Rainbow Bridge” story goes on. Hutash taught the people how to take care of themselves and their island home. For many years they thrived and multiplied until Limuw became too crowded. Then Kakanupmawa, the mystery behind the sun, conferred with Hutash and they agreed that the people needed a bigger place. So they gathered them on the mountain peak and caused a rainbow to stretch over the sea to a broader land. Some of the people easily crossed over. But others became distracted and dizzied by the waters far below them. They fell from the rainbow bridge into the ocean waters where they were transformed into dolphins. In wild places I have heard the voice of God. When dolphins join me as I surf at Ocean Beach my heart expands with ecstatic joy. It always feels like such a holy encounter. But not only does the story concern the deep kinship between dolphins and humans, some believe it might even be about sea level changes that are part of the geologic record. At the end of the last ice age when the sea level was about 400 feet lower the four channel islands were joined together. As the seas rose, the population that the four separate islands could support decreased forcing people to move to the mainland. Rosanna Xia tells this story in her book California Against the Sea because she hopes that the massive rise in the sea level could be an opportunity for human beings to mend their relationship with the ocean and the rest of the earth. During the last one hundred years the sea has risen by nine inches. Before the end of our century in the lifetime of the youngest people here, the sea will probably rise by six to seven feet. Human beings caused and continue to produce a catastrophic change in the composition of our atmosphere. Almost one third of the carbon dioxide released by human beings since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90% of the resulting heat has been absorbed by our oceans. Carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water causes a chemical reaction that increases the acidity of the seas. The oceans are absorbing the heat equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs detonating every second. We are the first generation to experience the effects of climate change and the last generation that can make a substantially different course possible. We know this but don’t really comprehend it. It’s hard to be continuously conscious of such a danger, and of such a grave responsibility.

2. In the face of our situation Jesus gives us very good news. During the last weeks of Easter our readings show us how to live in intimacy with God. Today’s gospel comes from the last meal Jesus shares with his friends before being killed. Imagine the tangible fear in that room as he prepares them for his departure from this world. It must have been like a last meal at San Quentin Prison before a prisoner is executed. Thomas says, “How can we know the way?” Jesus responds with the last of seven “I am” statements. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am…” “the bread of life” (6:35), “the light of the world” (8:12), “the door” (10:7), “the Good Shepherd” (10:11). And today he says, “I am the true vine and my father is the vinegrower” (Jn. 15). Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” He uses the image of the vine, organic and integrally connected, to prepare his friends for his death. “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he says. It is almost as if he is reassuring them, “Death will not separate us. I will not be leaving you. We will become even more intimately connected. Do not be afraid.” Jesus goes on. “You will see evidence of our connection. Look at your life and the lives of those who follow me and see the richness of this fruit.” I do not read this as a threat. It is not “stay with me or you will wither and perish.” It is the promise that we do not need to worry, that we are in this together. Jesus is saying our companionship will be even closer than we can imagine. We walk side by side today. In the future we will be abide in Jesus and bring good news to the world. Other examples of this persist in the Bible. In Genesis, God breathes spirit into us and sustains our life. In Galatians, Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me.” The Book of Acts describes God as the one, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” One might even say that the culmination of Jesus’ teaching is about abiding in God. Our goal is not simply to follow Jesus, or to convince others to, or even primarily to obey what he taught. We live in Jesus as he lives in us. This experience of intimacy lies at the heart of my faith and of my understanding of the earth. In wild places I have heard the voice of God.

3. As a student of religion I carefully studied the connection between the spirit of God and the natural world. Many of us here have experienced a kind of transcendence in nature, a moment when everything changes, when the cosmos seems clear. These encounters show that our picture of God is too small. When we begin to glimpse how interrelated all life is, we cannot go back to pretending that one individual, or group, or nation, or species can thrive alone. Religion stops being another form of tribalism and becomes an opening in our hearts to wonder and gratitude and love. Let me talk about two people whose lives were changed in this way by meeting God in nature. As a young man Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) served as the minister of the Second Church of Boston (Unitarian). It was founded in 1650, almost exactly 200 years before Grace Cathedral. He would make pastoral visits to Revolutionary War veterans and just did not know what to say. The prospect of writing a sermon every week for the rest of his life scared him. Philosophically he was not sure what it meant to consecrate bread and wine during communion services. Then the wife who he simply adored died at the age of twenty from tuberculosis and his life fell apart. He was inconsolable. He resigned his pastorate, sold all his household furniture and departed on Christmas Day across the gray expanse of the North Atlantic with the hope that he might find himself. In 1836 Emerson published what he discovered in a short book called Nature. Feeling confined and limited by tradition and the past, Emerson stopped believing in them. He gave up faith in the promise that we could learn about what really matters from someone else. Instead he believed that we should experience God firsthand and that “Nature is a symbol of spirit. He writes, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear… In the woods, we return to reason and faith… all mean egotism vanishes… the currents of Universal Being circulate though me; I am part or parcel of God.” Later he writes, “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present… the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.” Emerson encouraged his young friend Henry David Thoreau to begin keeping a journal and later allowed him to build a cabin on his land by the shore of Walden Pond. Generations later in 1975 a 29 year old woman after finishing her master’s thesis on Thoreau won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in a book recording her own encounter of nature and spirit. Her name was Annie Dillard and the memoir about living along a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains was called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Without flinching Dillard sees the frightening vastness of the void, the uncountable number of swarming insects. She writes about the water bug injecting poison that liquifies its prey. Quoting Pascal and Einstein, Annie Dillard wonders if our modern understanding of God has spread, “as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way that we can only feel blindly of its hem.” In this theological and liturgical book (it follows the Christian year into Advent), Dillard regards the great beauty of this world as grace, as a gift from God. At the end she concludes, “Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no... You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked… You see the creatures die, and you know that you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life… I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.” The seas are rising. How can we know the way? God speaks to us through nature – often in ways that we do not expect, sometimes in ways that are not altogether comfortable for us. But we will not hear if we do not listen. Let us mend our relation to the earth, and build a bridge to a more humane civilization. Jesus, the true vine, reminds us that at the core of every being is the power to love. We will never be truly isolated or alone. He will always abide in us. In wild places I have heard the voice of God.

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E23

4 Easter (Year B) 8:30 a.m. & 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 21 April 2024 Good Shepherd Sunday

Acts 4:5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3:16-24

John 10:11-18

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want” (Psalm 23).

When I was at Harvard, on the advice of a friend who is a nun, I decided to take a leadership course at the Kennedy School of Government. My fellow classmates came from twenty-six countries and included CEO’s, a judge, a District Attorney, an army general, a state senator, the founder of an investment bank, the co-founder of a Political Action Committee, an ambassador, a university dean, the head administrator for airports in Israel, etc.

Our teacher Ronald Heifetz changed who I am. He spoke with uncanny and absolutely non-defensive frankness. He had an MD, practiced as a surgeon, and had previously taught at Harvard Medical School. He was a cello virtuoso who had studied under Gregor Piatagorsky and music was central to his understanding of leadership.[i]

This week I read all my class notes – everything from doodles that spelled my wife’s Hawaiian name in Greek letters to quotes with three stars in the margin (such as, “in disagreements the first value we lose sight of is the ability to be curious”).[ii] The syllabus says directly that the course’s goal is, “to increase one’s capacity to sustain the demands of leadership.” It was perfect preparation for the rest of my life.

On the first day Heifetz said, “if you are going through a difficult time I strongly urge you not to take this course.” He was right. This was not an ordinary lecture class but a seemingly entirely improvised discussion. Heifetz would start by saying something like, “What do we want to address today?” It felt strangely dangerous. Nothing was going to come easy or be handed to us on a silver platter. We talked about the feeling in class and agreed it was tense.

At one point in the early lectures Heifetz just stopped being an authority figure for a while. In the resulting chaos we learned how much we all crave authority and guiding norms. It felt more like a Werner Erhard seminar than a Harvard lecture. Heifetz might not always say it directly but he regards leadership above all as a spiritual practice. The motivations for good leadership are spiritual. The character and the skills that we need to develop for leadership are spiritual. To be effective we have to recognize forces that were previously invisible to us and experience the world with intuition and based on a real understanding of ourselves. Leadership success requires curiosity, compassion, wisdom, honesty, courage, humility, self-knowledge and the right balance between detachment and passion.

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus faces accusers who seek to kill him. He uses the metaphor of a leader as a good shepherd. This idea was already ancient in his time and mentioned in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Psalms. You might be thinking, “No one listens to me since I retired,” or, “I’m at the lowest level in my company, or I’m just a kid, what could leadership possibly have to do with me?”

Heifetz makes a central distinction between authority and leadership. Authority comes from one’s institutional standing and involves managing people’s expectations.[iii] Jesus was not the Roman governor or the high priest. He did not have this authority.

Leadership on the other hand means mobilizing resources to make progress on difficult problems.[iv] In many instances people exercise more powerful leadership without having formal authority than with it. Jesus did. And make no mistake Jesus expects each of us to act as leaders regardless of our formal or informal authority. We exist to glorify God and to help solve the problems we encounter. For homework I invite you this week to consciously exercise leadership that is inspired by Jesus.

1. Adaptive Challenges. This morning I am going to do the opposite of what my teacher did, I am going to speak directly and briefly about three of his observations concerning leadership.[v] One of Heifetz’s primary ideas concerns the difference between a technical problem and an adaptive challenge. A technical problem is one that we already know how to respond to; best practices, if you will, already exist. It may be simple like setting a broken bone or incredibly complicated like putting a person on the moon, but an expert, a mechanic, surgeon or rocket scientist, already knows how to handle it.[vi]

An adaptive challenge is different. No adequate response has been developed for it. I have in mind our terrible problem of people without housing, racial prejudice, addiction, education, misinformation, poverty, war, white Christian nationalism, election denial, despair, isolation, etc. It is tempting to treat an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical problem, to look to an authority to solve that problem for us. But problems like this require cooperation among groups of people who are seeking solutions, not pretending to already know all the answers.

What was Jesus’ adaptive challenge? His disciples thought it was overthrowing the Roman Empire or enthroning a king who shared their identity. But this was not it. Instead Jesus was what the theologian Paul Tillich calls “the New Being.” Jesus inaugurated a new way of being human which he called “the realm of God” in which all people would be healed, cared for and treated with dignity. It is a realm of spiritual well-being in which we experience God as a kind of loving father such as the father in the Prodigal Son story. This is what Jesus means when he says, “the Father knows me and I know the Father” (Jn. 10).

As a spiritual community Grace Cathedral shares this adaptive challenge of working for the realm of God. And in a society where Christianity is justifiably associated with misogyny, homophobia and unkindness we offer a vision of community in which anyone can belong before they believe. On the basis of our conviction that every person without exception is beloved by God we have taken on the adaptive challenge of transforming Christianity, of reimagining church with courage, joy and wonder.[vii]

2. Strategic Principles. Heifetz speaks a great deal about the practical work of leadership. He describes this as creating a kind of holding container for people working on the problem and then paying attention to one’s own feelings to understand the mind of the group.

Leadership involves uncovering and articulating the adaptive challenge. A leader also needs to manage the anxiety of the group. People have to be concerned enough to want to act but not so afraid that they will give up in hopelessness. Because human beings tend to avoid hard challenges, a leader needs to keep the group focused on the problem not just on trying to relieve the stress the group is feeling. This involves giving the work back to people at a rate they can assimilate. He also points out how important it is to protect leaders who do not have authority so that they can contribute to the solution.[viii]

3. Values. Heifetz taught us that the best leaders have such a deep feeling for their mission they will, if necessary, sacrifice themselves for the higher purpose. Heifetz refers to the leaders getting (metaphorically, mostly I hope) assassinated. This happens when the stress a leader generates in order to solve a problem becomes so great that the leader gets expelled. This is how I understand Jesus’ life. Jesus talks about this.

In today’s gospel the Greek the word kalos which we translate as good, as in Good Shepherd, probably means something more like real or genuine. Jesus says that the hired hand is there for the transaction, for the payment, but the real shepherd has the power (ezousian often translated as authority) to lay down his life (the Greek word is psuxēn or soul) for the sake of the sheep. Many leaders at some point have to decide whether to keep pushing for uncomfortable change even when they know it might mean they will be forced to leave.

Before closing I want to briefly tell you about a leader who shaped us, our first dean, J. Wilmer Gresham. Dean Gresham moved to San Jose California for health reasons. In 1910 at the age of 39 when he was asked to become the first Dean of Grace Cathedral he hesitated wondering if the damp cold of San Francisco would kill him. Almost immediately after moving here to this block, he discerned his adaptive challenges: to build this Cathedral and to begin a ministry of healing that involved organizing groups to gather for prayer that gradually became an national movement. He helped so many people privately, financially. Trusting God he gave all of himself.[ix]

After serving almost 30 years Dean Gresham retired and a year later his wife Emily Cooke Graham died. Many evenings he would stand on the sidewalk in front of their old home weeping for her. He found so much comfort in Jesus, the Good Shepherd, that he gave a stained glass window in the South Transept in her memory. He did this so that we would know that like the sheep in the arms of Jesus we are loved by God.

At the end of our leadership course Ronald Heifetz reminded us that he had told us at the beginning that he would disappoint us. He talked about how at times the teaching staff too had felt that we were wandering in the desert, that some students might have felt hurt or misrepresented. But most of all he taught us how to say goodbye.

Heifetz promised that we could shed light in our life even when there is no light around us. He said that the God of the Greek philosopher Archimedes was called “the unmoved mover.” But Heifetz said that he believed much more in Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s idea of God as “the most moved mover.”

My dear ones, we are all called to lay down our lives for the sake of God’s realm. But we are not left without comfort. We have each other and we always have the Good Shepherd. Jesus teaches that God loves us the way that a faithful teacher loves her students or a father treasures his lost child.

The Rev. Jim Wallis

The inaugural holder of the Chair in Faith and Justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy and founding Director of the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice

Acts 4:323-35

1 John 1:1-2:2

John 20:19-31

Acts 10:34-43

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Mark 16:1-8

Exodus 12:1-14

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Mk. 11)!

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E17

Palm and Passion Sunday (Year B) 11 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 24 March 2024

Mark 11:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Philippians 2:5-11

Mark 14:1—15:47

“[T]here is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” We saw this in COVID misinformation and today in political speeches about “white replacement,” the “Deep State” and the “stolen election.” Directly confronting people who hold mistaken beliefs only makes them more defensive and resistant. It only strengthens their self-deception. The eighteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) points out that, “It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence.”

What about the illusions that we hold? Is there hope that we might see the truth? For many years I resisted the impulse behind celebrating Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday in the same worship service. I rebelled against participating in the joyful palm procession, singing Hosanna in the highest on the same day that we walk with Jesus through his abandonment, suffering and death. For me these two moods could not reasonably occupy the same space at the same time. Today I see that the purpose of Palm Sunday is to remove our illusions.

In our Cathedral’s north “Theological Reform Window” we have a delightful image of Kierkegaard sitting in his purple suit reading a book. He was born in 1813 and his biographer suggests that he was perhaps one of the first philosophers to write about “the experience of living in a recognizably modern world of newspapers, trains, [buses] window-shopping, amusement parks, and great stores of knowledge and information.”

 Numbers 21:4-9

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

For what would we give our lives? Peter fumbles this spectacularly in today's gospel. Jesus was teaching openly that he was going to suffer, it was a matter of fact, a condition of his — and our — living, The response of the Spirit to suffering is compassion, or presence and companionship with the one who suffers. Instead, Peter does something that may be intimately familiar to us: he tries to "fix" it. He wants to make it go away. He clings to his own ideas of what ought to be, and rather than ease Jesus' suffering, it actually increases Peter's own. The Way of the Cross shows us a more loving way of living and giving our lives.  

Lent 2B: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

“We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying and see – we are alive; as punished and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything (2 Cor. 5)."

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E11                                        

Ash Wednesday (Year B) 6:00 p.m. Eucharist                                  2 

Wednesday 14 February 2024 | Valentine’s Day       

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

Psalm 103:8-14

Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E10                                         Last Epiphany (Year B) 8:30 a.m. & 11:00 a.m. Eucharist                  Sunday 11 February 2024 | Quinquagesima                                            

2 Kings 2:1-12

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40).

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2E8, P5

5 Epiphany (Year B) 11:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Eucharist

Sunday 4 February 2024

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-12

1 Cor. 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

The Rev. John Dear is an internationally recognized voice and leader for peace and nonviolence. A priest, activist, and author, he served for years as the director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The author of forty books, including They Will Inherit the Earth and Lazarus, Come Forth!, Father John is founder and director of The Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus, where he hosts and offers virtual workshops on Jesus and nonviolence. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, including by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He lives in Cayucos, CA.   

The Rev. Dr. Laurie Garrett-Cobbina

Dean of the San Francisco Theological Seminary,

Shaw Chair for CPE Program, and Professor of Pastoral Care and Education at San Francisco Theological Seminary/University of Redlands, San Anselmo, CA.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King legacy we gather to celebrate today matters. Just as Jesus revealed the power and glory of God through how he acted, what he said, who he befriended, who he included, Martin Luther King’s prophetic ministry reveals something powerful to society, the religious world in general, and the Christian Church in particular. Our gathering today is God, again, breaking into our self-interests and telling us to hear the sound of freedom, and see today as an original moment to strive for justice and freedom, not just as a figment of fond remembrance.

A Christmas story of solidarity and eternity

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA

Christmas Eve 11:00pm Choral Eucharist

Sunday 24 December 2023

Malcolm Clemens Young

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D87

Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 7:30 p.m. Eucharist

Sunday 24 December 2023

Isaiah 9:2-7

Psalm 96:1-4, 11-13

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-20

“Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Lk. 2)

“We stand with one hand on the door looking into another world, / That is this world.” The farmer poet Wendell Berry (1934-) wrote these words about Christmas in a poem called “Remembering that It Happened Once.”[1] Here’s the whole poem.

“Remembering that it happened once, / We cannot turn away the thought, / As we go out, cold, to our barns / Toward the long night’s end, that we / Ourselves are living in the world / It happened in when it first happened, / That we ourselves, opening a stall / (A latch thrown open countless times / Before), might find them breathing there, /”

“Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw, / The mother kneeling over Him, / The husband standing in belief / He scarcely can believe, in light / That lights them from no source we see, / An April morning’s light, the air / Around them joyful as a choir. / We stand with one hand on the door, / Looking into another world / That is this world, the pale daylight / Coming just as before, our chores / To do, the cattle all awake, / Our own white frozen breath hanging / In front of us; and we are here / As we have never been before, / Sighted as not before, our place / Holy, although we knew it not.”[2]

On Christmas Eve we stand between worlds. And for a moment, if we pay attention, we see our place as holy. We do not always experience our life this way. We inhabit a confusing world full of terror and distraction. These days wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Africa cast a long shadow over the human family. Every year we become even more aware that our indifference is endangering the planet itself.

Other forms of sadness threaten to overcome us. Perhaps you have been lying awake at night because you have a child who is in serious trouble. Or perhaps, you have suddenly found yourself alone in the world to face the storms of life without someone to lean on. Or perhaps some kind of addiction holds you in its grip, or you are looking back to brighter years that you know are gone forever and will never come back.[3]

To the shepherds, to all of us tonight the angel announces a sign. A young woman is having a baby called Emmanuel which means God with us. This is the message: we are not alone or abandoned. The sign shows that joy is at the heart of being alive. Because of this baby, the world is being turned upside down. Violence is not at the center of reality, love is.[4]

Seeing the world like this may sound easy, but there is a catch. In order to experience this joy we have to be satisfied with living in a mystery. This does not mean that we have to believe what is unbelievable, that we have to give up critical thinking, or that we are not allowed to have doubts. It’s just that the infinite will not fit into our finite minds. And so our existence is made strange by the kind of creatures we are. We long for the infinite but can never really control or comprehend it.

In the way that a mother gives birth to her child, we become who we are by giving ourselves away. For me this is what makes being a parent such a transcendent experience. Taking care of our children, walking in the oak woodlands, reading stories at sunset after a warm bath, all this made joy an even more central part of my life. Joy is that experience of being called into existence as a kind of creature who is different than God and yet who has a share in the mystery of God. We are made for this delight.[5]

Our friend and Dean Emeritus Alan Jones used to remind us that in Christianity the, “things of God can be handled and held.” In fact, “[T]he things of God can be kissed and caressed.” He talks about how strange it is that Christ enters into history in order to offer us the gift of peace. And that for this reason the true Christ can never assume the shape of violence. The baby and her child are a sign of three great truths. First, the world is a gift. Second the nature of the gift is communion (for all people and the world). Third, this true communion celebrates diversity and difference. Let me say only a little more about each of these.[6]

1. The Gift. Ninety-nine years ago this week the astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of the first galaxy outside our own Milky Way. By 2019 we believed that there were 200 billion galaxies. Now after the New Horizon space probe we think there are 2 trillion galaxies.[7] This is the world we inhabit. This is the generosity of God.

One of my favorite Christmas moments happened years ago, after everyone went home from the midnight service. I turned off the lights and closed up my old church. In the cold, alone on that holy night with the stars, with trillions of worlds stretching across the heavens, I felt God with me, overwhelmed by the miracle that we exist. All of this beauty, everything that is good, is a gift from God.[8]

And this is the peculiarity and the scandal of our faith. It is not chiefly about big ideas or philosophical principles but a God who is particular. At Christmas we celebrate and take delight in the God who can be touched, who can be held as a baby.[9]

At the Christmas pageant this morning we asked children what they wanted to pray for. A boy said, “For the fighting to stop.” Loud applause followed. A girl announced that she wanted her neutered cat to have kittens. Another prayed that a particular candidate would not be elected as president (also to enthusiastic applause). But the most beautiful thing of all was Sinclair our baby Jesus sitting on her father’s lap giving us such joy.

2. Communion. I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s book These Truths, a one volume history of America. American history always fascinated me but there is so much that I missed.[10] She writes about the Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved Americans and what it felt like for them. “In South Carolina the proclamation was read out to the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of former slaves. At its final lines, the soldiers began to sing, quietly at first, and then louder: My country ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!”

She goes on, “American slavery had lasted for centuries. It had stolen the lives of millions and crushed the lives of millions more... It had poisoned a people and a nation. It had turned hearts to stone… The American odyssey had barely begun. From cabins and fields they left. Freed men and women didn’t always head north.”

“They often went south or west, traveling hundreds of miles by foot, on horseback, by stage and by train, searching. They were husbands in search of wives, wives in search of children, mothers and fathers looking for children, children looking for parents, chasing word and rumors about where their loved ones had been sold, sale after sale, across the country. Some of their wanderings lasted years. They sought their own union, a union of their beloved.” This year at Christmas as I’m imagining the joy of those reunions, I’m reminded how we are made for communion.

3. Diversity. Finally let me say a short word about diversity. The two largest religious denominations in America do not permit women to be ordained as leaders of churches. This week Pope Francis gave permission for Roman Catholic priests to give same sex couples blessings in private. He said that these should not in any way look like marriage ceremonies.[11] In our church we have women, trans, gay and lesbian people serving at every level of ordained ministry. We believe that God is present when same sex couples get married here in church. I have experienced such a deep sense of joy at their ordinations and weddings. I wish every person could see it.

We are all different from each other. But this is not a problem. We should not feel threatened by this. We are not competing. There is not one of us that has gotten it all right. Our diversity is part of God’s gift to us. We are one human family.

What happens when we do not receive the world, communion with each other and diversity as a gift? The theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) says that we become incurvatus se, that is curved in on ourself. We refuse to be fully alive. We are cut off from each other and the very sources of what should be our greatest happiness. We become distanced from our true self. This is a kind of hell that we all experience in varying degrees. In this condition we become walled off from joy.

But tonight is holy. It is time to make peace with the mystery and come back home. For many years the famous religion scholar Huston Smith was a member of my grandfather’s congregation in Massachusetts. He said that churches waiting for Christmas are like a child with her face pressed against the window on a cold winter night. Then she runs through the household saying, “Daddy’s home. Daddy’s home.”

Tonight we share this joy in our Christmas carols and in stories whose meaning can never be exhausted. The world is not made of atoms but of stories. Our stories are imperfect ways of expressing an unsayable encounter with the infinite God. Tonight we are here as we never have been before. There is joy at the very heart of being alive. As a mother gives birth to her child let us become who we are by giving our self away.

Because in these 2 trillion galaxies, the things of God can be kissed and caressed. The world is a gift. The nature of that gift is communion. True communion celebrates diversity and difference. We stand with one hand on the door looking into another world…”

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA

Christmas Eve 4:00pm Festival of Lessons & Carols

Sunday 24 December 2023

40: 1-11

2 Peter 3: 8-15a

Mark 1: 1-8

“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1).

Isaiah 64:1-9

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

1 Advent (Year B)  8:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 3 December 2023 | After the Episcopal Election

1. ‘A hui hou. Stay awake. Stay awake. In 2004 my best friend was an opera singer named Jennifer Lopez. Jenn is not the famous actor known as J. Lo (although the two were born a year apart). In her early forties doctors diagnosed Jenn with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. She returned to her parent’s house in California to die.

I visited her every Wednesday. The first question she would always ask was, “How is your family?” and the second question would be about a sick person in the congregation or my dissertation. She understood what mattered to me. Jenn was the perfect confidante. I could speak honestly to her about my frustrations with my dissertation advisor or the church leadership without worrying that she might think less of me. Jenn always gave people the benefit of the doubt.[i]

Jenn learned to sing in our church and I can imagine her as a girl first beginning to realize her great talent. On some visits we would watch videotapes of her operas. I loved watching her sweep down the stage in a flowing dress singing so powerfully. Her face in those performances showed so much emotion and sensitivity.

Once I confided to her that sometimes when I watched an opera singer or listened to a musician like a cellist, I almost secretly fell in love with the performer and tried to imagine what their life was like offstage. “Well this is it!” she joked as she gestured to her wheelchair. We spent hours laughing together.

Strangely enough my favorite images of Jenn come from her family photograph albums. Because the colors in those pictures seemed brighter than real life they were particularly appropriate for her spirit. Images from band trips, graduations, summer parties and family gatherings were a wonderful collage expressing her youthfulness, energy and all-around zaniness.

Over time Jenn lost the ability to speak, but because we spent so much time together I could understand her. More than most Jenn loved life and there were times, as it was withdrawn from her, that she despaired. Sometimes I still can hear the moaning sound that at the end of her life was the only way she could express this disappointment. But Jenn never complained, never lost interest.

Above all the two of us loved Jesus. Before she got sick she had begun the process of getting ordained as a priest. If only we could have had a long career together serving God’s people! When I think back to those Wednesdays I realize that we talked a lot about death. But my overwhelming memory is how awake we were – awake to the simplest joys of life and to tragedy. We were awake to the way God’s invisible love surrounds us like a thick blanket on a winter night.

2. The darkness we experienced together is the darkness of Advent. Today we celebrate the first Sunday of the new year. The church calendar could have started with the joy of Easter, or the newness and vulnerability of Christmas, or the fiery energy of Pentecost. But instead we begin in the shadow of war, hatred and sorrow. We begin in darkness: waiting, singing and praying for new light. Yesterday hundreds were killed as war returned to Gaza. We pray for the end of violence in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine. We refuse to turn our eyes away from the suffering.

In America as the secular world prepares for a consumer Christmas, Christians could hardly be more out of step. We are awake, waiting for Christ to come in glory at the end of time. The older I get the more I treasure our Advent hymns. We sing, “Zion hears the watchman singing; her heart with joyful hope is springing, she wakes and hurries through the night…” (Hymn 61).[ii]

On this first Sunday of the church year, as we await the advent of Christ, we begin a new story about Jesus. The principle way we know about Jesus is through the four gospels. The word gospel means good news. Because three of the four gospels share so much in common and look so similar we call them the synoptic gospels. Each of our three year cycle of Sunday readings is based on one of them (with the Gospel of John filling out the rest of each year).

Matthew uses five sections (like the Torah or the five books of Moses) to show that Jesus is a new Moses. Luke describes Jesus as the Lord’s royal servant who brings God’s light to the nations of the world. John explains how Jesus reunites us with God in a way that we could never accomplish on our own.

3. Today we are entering the year of Mark. Mark explains how humanity comes to have a new start. He writes about how a new reality called the Kingdom of God comes into history and transforms it. Mark uses a simpler vocabulary and grammar to form powerful, compact sentences. His favorite word in Greek is euthus. It means immediately. It comes up so often that sometimes translators just leave it out.

Mark presents the hearer or reader with a choice about who Jesus is. The only time Mark is really direct about his own position is in the first sentence of the gospel when he writes, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk. 1).

The Gospel of Mark has three sections. The first takes place in Galilee and the last in Jerusalem. The middle section occurs as Jesus travels between the two places. In the first section the world wonders who Jesus is. Mark quotes Malachi (3:1) and Isaiah (40:3) describing Jesus as a kind of messenger from God. At Jesus’ baptism a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved” (Mk. 1). Jesus heals people, casts out their demons and forgives their sins. He tells them about God’s kingdom using stories about a sower casting seeds, and about a tiny mustard seed that grows into a great plant.

In the second section of Mark, Jesus’ friends are struggling to understand who he is. Jesus asks, “but who do you say I am.” Peter boldly calls Jesus the Messiah (Mk. 8). At the time Peter still has in mind a conquering military hero who will overthrow the Roman authorities. Jesus subverts the whole idea of a messiah. He teaches them that the Son of Man did not come to be served but to be serve others. On the mountain two of Jesus’ friends see him talking with Elijah and Moses. From an overshadowing cloud a voice says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him” (Mk. 9).

The final section of Mark shows how Jesus becomes king. A royal procession takes Jesus into Jerusalem where he teaches in the temple. Mark writes, “a large crowd was listening to him with delight” (Mk. 12:37). Later sitting on the Mount of Olives four of his friends ask him when the end will come. Jesus answers with the words we just heard. No one, not the angels nor even the Son of Humanity will know the time. He says literally, “keep on being awake.”[iii] Mark uses the word grēgoreō like the name Gregory. It means to be alert or awake, literally woke.

Jesus becomes the Messiah or king by being crucified. A Roman centurion seems to be the only one who understands. He says, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Mk. 15). When the women go to the tomb an angelic young man in white tells them that Jesus has been raised. The gospel ends abruptly as they flee, “… for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Mark confronts every person with this question. Who will Jesus be for you? The twentieth century monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) writes, “This is the most complete revolution that has ever been preached: in fact, it is the only true revolution, because all others demand the extermination of somebody else, but this one means the death of the [person] who, for all practical purposes, you have come to think of as your own self.”[iv]

4. In this season of Advent we have the chance to prepare a place in ourselves and in the world to receive Christ. There is so much in the Divine plan that we cannot understand, dark places, unmapped territories and worlds to discover. I invite you to encounter Jesus in our present moment. Let me close with a poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes called “Longing.”

“Unsuspecting at first, of course, / you only gradually begin to feel / an urge, a leaning, / slow to become a promise, / a yearning that will become / its own gift, given from beyond. / It grows from a tiny seed, / a grace that is not your doing, / a single cell: / a change of season, / a subtle turning of the heart, / until by some grace you will know. / But now you do not yet, / you are still longing. / But know this, you are Mary, / and Gabriel is near.”[v]

On my very last visit with Jennifer before going out of town, we both knew that we probably would not see each other again in this world. I prayed so hard for a miracle that would instantly make her whole and healthy again. What I discovered was someone who was truly awake - who loved Jesus. That night in a dream her grandmother Margaret, who had died when she was eight years old, kept pulling her hand.

At the end of our visit, I asked if there was anything she wanted to say before I unplugged her laser pointer for the last time. She pointed out the letters for “Mahalo,” or thank you in Hawaiian. I told her ‘a hui hou which means until we meet again. She was so tired and she shut her eyes as I read evening prayer with the Song of Simeon. It goes, “Lord you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised.” I closed my prayerbook, looked into her face and said goodbye. She opened her eyes, smiled back at me and mouthed the words ‘a hui hou.

‘A hui hou. Stay awake. Stay awake. Come Lord Jesus.

[i] We spent those mornings talking about our families, dreams and worries. We talked about the most ordinary things and the profoundest. We talked about politics, art and our love of Jesus. Her commentary on the family and friends in those photographs was priceless. She was smart enough to recognize all of our crazy inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies and frailties, but kind enough to love us even more because of them. Above all Jenn forgave the people around her for the rough edges that make us human. I like to think that she cared for us oddballs more than the normal people.

“I pray that… God… may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation… so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…” (Eph. 1).

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 

Psalm 100

Ephesians 1:15-23

Matthew 25:31-46

Having grown up in the military, packing up and moving every few years was part of my life as early as I could remember.  

Our move to Illinois, though, the year I started third grade, wasn’t like the ones before it.  

My mother didn’t stand in the rooms with the moving company ensuring that her china was wrapped just so, that the teak table and chairs remained unscratched, that her piano was moved gently.  

And our things, she didn’t hear my stories about my stuffed animals and dolls, my books -- the explanations for why they most certainly needed to make the trip north.  

Instead, without thought or selection, without narrative history, or biography, everything from my drawers, closet, and every surface in my room, was unceremoniously picked up and dumped into boxes, which, when filled up, were sealed closed, headed for burial in a moving truck. 

One box left me deeply troubled. The woman from the moving company’s fleshy arms hurled more than held my treasures into the cold darkness of a box, and while popping a cigarette in her mouth and casting her eyes about the room for what must have been her lighter, sealed the box and got up with a harrumph. 

She didn’t seem to like her job, I thought.  

And then it hit me. Squee! Oh no! I dashed around the room looking for my favorite stuffed animal, Squee the mouse.  

Squee had been my companion from an early age. And since my mother had died a few months before, he had come back into my life as a great comfort.  

But he was not on my bed. He was not under it or anywhere to be found. I was in a panic!  

Squee was in the box! 

I was terrified for him.   

You OK honey? The moving lady said when she came back in. But I couldn’t speak. And I sat down, with my back to the box, legs curled into the hug of my arms. 

After dinner My dad helped me unseal the box and dig through it, until we found him, Squee. A book had been pressing into his snout and left a triangular imprint, so I gave him extra love there. 

Many weeks later, after our long drive north in our convertible VW, the moving truck arrived at our new quarters, and we began unpacking.  

In one of the boxes marked “girl’s room” I unearthed a jar with coins and a note in it . . .  “I owe you” the note said. “On June 1, 1973. I owe Mary Carter Greene $2.35 and will pay one dime every day after June 10 if not paid by then. Signed, Alan Greene.”  

Wait a minute! I had hit the jack pot! This was January and my brother never HAD paid this back. His debt was more than 200 days overdue. That buried promise had made me rich!  

Joy and Woe are woven fine, William Blake wrote. 

“It is right it should be so; Man was made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know, Thro' the world we safely go.  Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine. 

I couldn’t have been happier, but there was much weeping and gashing of teeth, when I brought the credit slip to my brother. 

It wasn’t long before our dad had to get involved. 

14 ‘For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them;   

19 After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. 

Matthew’s parable is most often read one of two ways – each as contradictory to the other as the story of my young self – able to love so fiercely I would stop the world for a stuffed animal, and equally able to extort my only brother’s last penny, if I thought it were owed me.   

Although sometimes read this way, Matthew’s story does not point to a Kingdom where some are denied because they fail to participate.  

The story draws attention to an unjust system. 

The parable would have been heard in its day as a description of the times– when peasants were extorted and their land was taken by those who held the concentrated wealth of powerful families and influence as city officials;  

The parable reflects how the early followers of Jesus struggled in difficult times to know how to best wait for his return and how to live in the meantime. 

Should they play into the social demands to do the dirty work of the system or live in a radically different way that might realize the Kingdom Jesus described earlier in Matthew?  

An act of subversion and resistance, those who heard Matthew’s Gospel were then and are now invited to exercise the same. 

Unjust social systems, accumulation of wealth by the few, and greed of the many, as described in the parable, persist to this day, of course. 

Andy Knox at his reimaginingthefuture blog1 retells the parable for our global economy this way . . . 

For it will be like the CEO of a big chocolate company, who went to the Ivory Coast to ensure a good flow of chocolate into the West and ever expand his chocolate empire.  

He called three of his most entrusted leaders to himself and asked them to ensure more chocolate at a lower price. He set one of them, with the most experience over 5 factories, the next one over 3 factories and the last one over 1 factory.  

The first two . . .knew if they did well, they would secure their own future in the company and good income for their families. . . they came up with a cunning plan. They decided the best way would be to get cheap or even free labor.  

So, they enslaved children from the surrounding area . .  . (from) families who were too poor to keep them. (They) . . . put them to work in the fields, picking the cocoa, or . . . at the grinding machines, under terrible . . . conditions, in which many of the children died or were abused by hard task masters.   

The third manager saw what the other two were up to . . . He refused to enslave children and couldn’t understand the motivation of the CEO.  

He chose to pay people a fair wage, keep their working conditions good and have strong morale amongst his team.  

The CEO returned. He was . . . full of praise for the ‘business acumen’ of the first two. He paid them well, ensuring his ‘fair trade’ logo and set them up for even more . . .  

The third guy was out . . . sacked from the company with no right of appeal. Confused and dismayed . . . (he) continued try to live a life that restored people’s humanity and hoped for “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible”.  

Andy Knox’s retelling of the parable demonstrates how Woe and joy are woven fine.  

It is hard to do the right thing in systems that demand and oppress at worst and enthrall and distract at best. But it is possible. 

It can be hard to see into supply chains like the one described in parable of the chocolate magnate, but to act justly in a problematic system, we can consider our consumption in the first place and be intentional about how we spend our money. 

As someone who loves shopping, I’ll be the first to admit that making changes can feel overwhelming. Fortunately, there is research to support next steps. 

A Nature article, “Scientists’ warning on affluence,”2 for instance, lays out a strong correlation between affluence and the growing climate crisis.  

The research doesn’t stop at gloom and doom; It offers steps to correct for our part in the system. 

“For over half a century,” the article says, “worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology.  

“The affluent citizens of the world.” The article continues, “are responsible for most environmental impacts and are . . .” (here’s the parable at play) “central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions.”  

The research-based article lays out some clear, if not easy, behavioral changes we can make in the U.S. including avoiding . . . oversized, unnecessary and duplicate goods and services; shifting from animal to plant-based food sources; sharing and repairing before replacing goods; and pushing for regulation that reflects concerns for people and the planet.  

These may be new habits, even counter cultural to the clarion call for the new, new thing in the days leading up to Black Friday and the biggest shopping season of the year.  

But this is what our Gospel teaches us. The Kingdom of God will be brought by the courageous, even the radical. These sorts of changes are necessary, and they are possible. 

This sort of faith brings us here today where our shared communion unites us with God and as the Grace Cathedral community. 

Our shared commitment to stand up for God’s creation and all of humanity, and against systems that oppress, degrade, and injure, means we do not have to be the alone in metaphorically burying the talent.  

In the radical presence of the church still standing, still growing, still thriving, we respond the crises of our time as a community.  

We have not yet been a community to stand back and watch God’s people get boxed up and sealed away from hope, and I know we won’t allow God’s creation to suffer that either. 

Have courage and meet our time – this is the message of our parable today. The third man in the parable does not sow despair by planting that talent, he seeds hope. 

Woe and joy are knit together.  

God is our source of this joy and the presence that will provide all we need to meet the times. 

So, this week, which we mark as Ingathering Sunday, we give thanks for all who have pledged to support the cathedral financially,  

and we nudge those who are waiting, to invest your gifts and treasures in this cathedral community. 

With courage, together, we are 100% Grace. 

In the midst of loss, there is a kernel of hope, even the hope of hope that brings us together. We might hope for a reunion for those who have gone before us, but our modern minds chafe at the idea. It's beautiful, but is it, or how is it true? Jesus' teaching opens our hearts to prayers for the dead, the trust that they are being perfected in God's sight. It also welcomes us to the Eucharistic feast, where we taste in part what we will taste fully at the end of time. Everything is waiting for you to begin.

All Faithful Departed:

Psalm 130,

Wisdom 3:1-9,

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18,

John 5:24-27 

“I sought the Lord, who answered me and delivered me out of all my terror" (Ps. 34).

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D79

All Saint’s Day 11:00 a.m. Baptism

Sunday 5 November 2023

Revelation 7:9-17

Psalm 34:1-10, 22

1 John 3:1-3

Inspired by Charles Dicken’s novel David Copperfield, Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. In the book she describes rural poverty, the effects of the opioid crisis and a scene that is so upsetting that both my wife and I independently had to stop reading and look away.

The main character and narrator Demon is born in the aftermath of the collapse of coal-mining as an industry in his Virginia town. He longs to see the ocean but wonders if he will ever get there. His father died before he was even born. Demon’s mom marries an abusive step-father and herself dies of an OxyContin overdose on his 11th birthday.

Demon lives and works (without being paid) with foster children on a tobacco farm. For a brief while he is taken in by the McCobb family with four small children under the age of seven. They too take most of the pay check he earns sorting garbage at a local convenience store.

When their car gets repossessed and they have to move, the family abandons him. He takes to the road with his backpack and his life savings in a peanut butter jar and tries to find a distant grandmother he has never met. It is terrifying to read about a twelve year old hitching rides with strangers.

At a truck stop he tries to escape a prostitute by going into the men’s room. He doesn’t realize it but she follows him in and sees him sitting in the stall. When he comes out she accuses him of stealing her money. The store clerk searches his backpack and gives every cent he has to the woman. The boy runs out into the night with nothing.

Intense misery, injustice and cruelty make us want to look away. Think of the way we sometimes respond to people with horrifying sores who we encounter on the streets here in San Francisco, or the families whose loved ones were murdered or kidnapped by Hamas, or the near total destruction of Gaza. Suffering like this can feel like a threat to our innermost self because we know how vulnerable we are too (becoming a parent exposes us to a radically new vulnerability). When we see too much suffering we cannot look anymore.

“Those who trust in [the Lord] will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love…” (Wisdom 3).

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D77                                        

All Souls / All Faithful Departed (LFF 2022) Evensong 50   

Thursday 2 November 2023 Bishop Candidates Visit   

Wisdom 3:1-9

Psalm 130

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

John 5:24-27

At the Bishop’s Ranch for my first clergy retreat I remember the late afternoon heat and that September smell of dust, chaparral and Bay Tree (with a hint of campfire smoke). I knew hardly anyone there as I walked up the Ranch House driveway. The first person to greet me was sixty-eight year old David Forbes. He was fit and trim, wearing a t-shirt and short cut-off jeans. He called me by name. He knew that I had graduated from Cal, that I played rugby there and that we were the national champions.

In those days everyone confused me for Bruce O’Neill and for what seems like years David was the only senior clergy person other than the bishop who actually knew my name. David had grown up in San Francisco. He served here for years as we finished constructing this building’s four walls and as the modern cathedral came into being.

David was involved in building the back half of the Cathedral, installing the human endeavor windows in the clerestory, the East lancet windows and the rose window. He was intimately involved in choosing vestments that we still use, making this granite and redwood altar at the center of the crossing, the governance structures of the cathedral and even the design of our worship services. It was his idea to engrave on our pulpit “In the Beginning” in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.

David founded the Cathedral School for Boys (1961) and St. Paul’s School in Oakland (1965), and later the National Association of Episcopal Schools. He helped me a great deal twenty years ago when our church started our own school in the South Bay. When I joined Grace Cathedral, David served as a chaplain to our staff and especially to me. The two of us would have monthly lunches on Polk Street. Sometimes we would drive around town and he would describe his childhood memories of different neighborhoods.

Although David died in April 2022, I think of him nearly every day when I bike past the restaurant where we used to talk. As we celebrate All Souls Day together we remember the people who have died but who seem almost tangibly near to us. David was the most youthful person in his nineties who you will ever meet. He loved new beginnings. He was always oriented toward the future and cared passionately about the Cathedral.

I want to talk briefly about the message David would share with us. We served together on the board for the Cathedral School for Boys almost to his death. David was active on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion taskforce. For him the purpose of the school is to give students from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance. As a gay man and a passionate advocate for justice David would be alarmed by our national politics. He would insist that Grace Cathedral more eloquently speak out on behalf of the dignity of all LGBTQ+ people.

Today we are not just celebrating All Souls Day, we are also welcoming our three candidates (with their spouses) who will be in the election for a new bishop on December 2. You may be wondering what David would have to say more specifically in this setting. And I would be too if it were not for a surprise gift I received.

A month ago the Postal Service delivered to my office an old weathered manila envelope with David’s handwriting on the outside. David didn’t use notes when he preached, but this folder contained five typewritten manuscripts for sermons preached at Grace Cathedral in the 1950’s. It also included a stole that his daughter said was given to him by his parents at his ordination here at Grace Cathedral.

The first sentence of his sermon on February 2nd 1958 begins with these words. “Churchmen throughout our Diocese will all testify, I believe, that the topic of the moment is the coming election of the Bishop, who… will succeed Bishop Block.”[1] The whole sermon is about the 1958 bishop election! Let me share with you three things I especially noticed.

First, the sermon addresses a pervasive sense of worry in the Diocese. Up until that point there had only been four diocesan bishops in the history of the whole diocese. In previous cases the new bishop had for all practical purposes been chosen before the balloting. To make matters worse the newspapers were carrying quotes from different candidates. David uses words like perplexity, confusion, disillusionment, smear, inuendo. And phrases like, “battle royale,” and, “less than Christian tactics.” Reading the sermon made me feel so grateful for the civility and graciousness that I have been experiencing through our process.

Second, the sermon points out just what high expectations we have for bishops. A bishop must have the “purest and noblest motives” and spend much time in prayer. The bishop should have the tongue of Chrysostom to stir people to action. The bishop should have color and personality to show the relevance and power of the gospel. This person should have breadth of vision to solve vexing problems and be a capable administrator in managing a “financial empire.” David points out that of course the clergy above all want a sympathetic and discerning pastor. In my experience I do not think this has changed. We still want to be seen for who we are and helped when we feel defeated.

Finally, after considering who we are looking for, David asks us to look at ourselves, that is the ones who are doing the looking. He reminds us that we are fallible and sinful people, that we are liable to error and then to persist in it. The church forgives us from sin but cannot completely stop us from sinning. For this reason we have to depend on the Holy Spirit.

“Those who trust in [the Lord] will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love…” (Wisdom 3). On this day when we remember friends and family members who we love and who have died, I pray that their words will come easily to you, if not by postal service as in my case, then through the theater of your memory. I pray that they will feel so tangibly near that you will hear them call you by name.

No one knows for sure what happens when you die. But when I think of seeing David again I always imagine the two of us greeting each other at the Ranch House, walking down the grape arbor to the swimming pool on a warm fall day. There is so much that I would want to share with him. His childlike embrace of new beginnings would make him love what we are doing today. He would want to know all about our candidates for bishop and the upcoming election. He would laugh at how much and how little has changed.

David finishes that sermon from 1958 with these words, “God does have a purpose for this diocese. It is a simple one, although its execution is not so easy. The purpose is to have us grow in zeal and effectiveness, witness powerfully to the love of God for all [people]… Yes, God is with us now and will be with us at Convention… let us ask that He guide us to a knowledge of His will and that he give us the courage to stand for it. May God grant us wisdom and understanding, faithfulness and charity.”

[1] David Forbes, “Sermon Preached in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, February 2, 1958 (Prior to the Election of the Bishop Coadjutor).”

“Lord you have been our refuge from one generation to another" (Ps. 90).

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D74

21 Pentecost (Proper 24A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 22 October 2023

Exodus 33:12-23

Psalm 99

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

Matthew 22:15-22

1. Where is God hidden? Beth and Jonathan Singer, the senior rabbis at Temple Emmanuel feel like big siblings to me. This is the ninth year we have been friends and I admire them very much. On Thursday for lunch they convened a group of 13 religious leaders (half Jewish and half not Jewish) to talk about the recent violence in the Middle East. They opened the conversation by sharing their deep concern for the people who live in Gaza, and their support for a two state solution to the diplomatic crisis.

They also talked about the terrible pain they are feeling, about friends with family members who are being held hostage in tunnels under the ground. I heard about many funerals, some for young people. Beth said that she hoped that together we would really speak from the heart, even if this lead us into uncomfortable places.

All the Jewish leaders spoke, then most of the others except me. Jonathan said, “what do you have to say Malcolm?” Frankly I did not want to say anything. I have never been to the Middle East and did not feel I had much to add. It is difficult to talk about how horrifying and inhumane the terrorist attacks by Hamas are and yet at the same time to recognize that the situation for ordinary people in Gaza seems impossible. I told them that our community is connected to Jewish people and Palestinians too, that every day we pray for peace, that we long for peace.

This seemed to understandably upset one of the other rabbis who I don’t know as well. She said that peace is not enough. After the terrible violence, after the innocent people who have been murdered, something has to be done immediately to make things right. I think all of us felt the tension, the anger and despair, as she emphatically said that prayers are not enough. We say that here too – when we talk about the epidemic of gun violence in America.

It felt like we had moved far away from the Hebrew prayer of blessing before the meal. God is not just hidden in violence and inhumanity. God can seem hidden to us in our personal pain and fear, and in our humiliation when we have said the wrong thing.

Today is a day of invitations and explorations.  

Throughout the day, during the service and beyond, we are invited to observe the Children’s Sabbath, a day inspired by the Children’s Defense Fund, when faith groups celebrate childhood and tune into the concerns of children, youth, and families. 

We will celebrate our children in a few ways: 

To begin, we remember the children of the previous generation in this altar frontal made by Grace Cathedral’s young people ~25 years ago. 

And we celebrate our own childhood by tapping that quiet compass within us. 

Later, during the offertory, some of our young people will present their Creation-tide-artwork. 

And at coffee hour today, our youth program welcomes you to a screening of the film of their social justice youth pilgrimage to the American South last summer.  

Today’s invitation in the children’s sabbath is about more than demonstrations though;  

like a wedding banquet, this invitation is to witness and to welcome new life in love. 

Walter Brueggemann wrote, in the presence of God, (we) are visited, “with the freedom of God, so that we are unafraid to live in the world, able to live differently, not needing to control, not needing to dominate, not needing to accumulate, not driven by anxiety.”1  

This is the joy described of childhood, but also the life possible when we are present to God. 

It’s the sort of freedom of perspective and grounded joy found in TS Eliot’s poetic imagery. 

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling, TS Eliot wrote, We shall not cease from exploration. 

And the end of all our exploring  Will be to arrive where we started  And know the place for the first time.  

Through the unknown, unremembered gate  When the last of earth left to discover  Is that which was the beginning.  

At the source of the longest river  The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree . . .  

Not known, because not looked for  But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. 

Quick now, here, now, always--  A condition of complete simplicity 

Today, when we mark the children’s sabbath, we take this day of rest and restoration, of union with God . . . to realize the divine in our youngest . . . to focus on children, and to find the simplicity of the Great Commandment, to love them as ourselves . . . 

In a time of anxiety . . . this stillness . . . to climb the apple tree, to stand between the waves, to find the center point, can seem as out of reach as our own childhood. 

Yet, in a time of brutal war, amid cascading atrocities, of unrelenting bad news and the seeming disintegration of the ground beneath us, we need this stillness, this union with God, more than ever.  

Our practice and our readings today show us a way forward. 

“When the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” 

With Moses gone a moment too long, God’s people decided to count on a more expedient deity . . .   

This part of the Exodus story with its sense of remove from God, is the story of our search for easy replacements and is evidently as old as human history . . .  

We look for easy idols of course, and we become, as TS Eliot wrote, distracted from distraction by distraction.2 

Between the Israelites distraction and God’s response, Moses stood in the breach . . . between what is wrong and what is just, we too are called, to enter the gap and to speak for those who cannot – to find a way to make things right.  

Today’s children’s sabbath serves as an alternative to the Golden calf distractions that take us away from the life we are called to join.  

The sabbath invites us to begin listening for God’s guidance for the nurture of children, to understand their challenges, and to discern actions to empower, protect, and seek justice for all children, youth, and families.     

Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of The Children’s Defense Fund made our call as Christians clear, writing this, 

Let the little children come unto me and forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said. 

He did not say let only rich or middle-class white children come. 

He did not say let only the strapping boys but not the girls come. 

He did not say let only the able-bodied children come. 

All the children He bade come. 

He did not say let all my children or your children or our friends’ children or those in our families and neighborhoods and who look and act and speak like us come. 

He did not say let only the well-behaved nice children come or those who conform to society’s norms. 

He did not say let a few, a third, half, or three fourths come – but all. 

Jesus said let the little children come and forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of heaven. 

The Kingdom of Heaven. 

We have been hearing a lot about it in Matthew these past few weeks, and the parable today takes what seems a heavy turn. 

There was conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders of the time, and a growing threat from Rome. 

But Matthew’s Gospel points to a much higher order conflict as well— humanity’s most vexing tension – seen in Exodus and again in Matthew today – our default to try to live without God.  

In this parable of invitations-ignored-and- scorned, Jesus refers to our invitation to life with God together, especially in these most challenging times.  

Another part of the TS Eliot poem Little Gidding reminds us why we do this in a faith community:  

If you came this way,  Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season,  It would always be the same: you would have to put off sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity  Or carry report. You are here to kneel. 

We came here to kneel, and on this Children’s Sabbath, the creaks our bodies feel when we lower ourselves, may be become aches not for the needs of our own bodies, but those of children and youth in this country and around the world.  

We pray for the underrepresented, the marginalized, orphans, the overlooked, the undervalued and underserved, the misunderstood children of our time.  

We pray for the immediate cessation of violence on all children around the world, at and within our borders as well, and we pray for policies that ensure children’s security and safety, for their wellbeing, hope and joy, for their part in God’s creation, their part in the building of God’s vision for the world. 

And finally, we pray that from God’s invitation we might open our hearts further to discern the needs of the children in our community and beyond. 

“When God wants an important thing done in this world or a wrong righted, Edmond McDonald wrote, “God goes about it in a very singular way.  God doesn’t release thunderbolts or stir up earthquakes.  God simply has a tiny baby born, perhaps of a very humble home, perhaps of a very humble mother.  And God puts the idea or purpose into the mother’s heart.  And she puts it in the baby’s mind, and then – God waits.  The great events of the world are not battles and elections and earthquakes and thunderbolts.  The great events are babies, for each child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged with humanity but is still expecting goodwill to become incarnate in each human life.” 

Children remind us of the goodness and hope promised in our faith life, and our faith life w God gives us all we need to bring about the world our children need and deserve. 

United with God, fed at this table, we have all we need to change the world beyond these walls. 

And then . . . our invitation tells us,  

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring  Will be to arrive where we started  And know the place for the first time.  

Amen. 

“Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3).

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D70

19 Pentecost (Proper 23A) 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 8 October 2023 | Indigenous People's Weekend

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus… for it is God who is at work in you” (Phil. 2).

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA | 2D68 | St. Francis Day - 18 Pentecost (Proper 21A) 11:00 a.m. Eucharist | St. Francis Day Pet Blessing                          

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 148:7-14

Philippians 2:1-13

Matthew 21:23-32

How do you listen to your soul? How can you hear God’s invitation to change your mind? Brené Brown writes about the difference between fitting in and belonging. All of us know what it means to fit in, to try to change essential parts of ourselves so that we will be accepted by others.

Belonging refers to a very different experience. It means learning to “be present with people without sacrificing who we are.”[i] It requires vulnerability and it happens in those rare places where we can really be who we are without pretending. It’s one of our highest ideals at Grace Cathedral. Regardless of where we came from, what we may have done in the past, or whatever we believe now, we belong here.

Last Sunday the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hōkūle’a, arrived at Aquatic Park in San Francisco after a dangerous journey. In the overflowing amphitheater we saw musicians and dancers; we heard prayers and proclamations from Native peoples from across the vast Pacific Ocean. I wish I could express the feeling of joy and celebration that we all shared together.

People describe Nainoa Thompson, the president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society as a Native Hawaiian master navigator but far more importantly he is one of the most significant storytellers of our time. On Tuesday night he talked about the world he was born into. In 1926 the Hawaiian culture and language were outlawed. By the 1970’s there were fewer than one hundred people who could speak Hawaiian fluently and they were mostly advanced in age.

Hawaiians had lost so much – their land, sovereignty, language, religion, culture, music, art and even sports and pastimes. It no longer felt like they belonged in their own homeland. In 1948 the Norwegian writer Thor Heyerdahl published a book called The Kontiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas. For many Hawaiians the book’s unspoken thesis was that Pacific Islanders could never have had the skill to build canoes and navigate them at will through the Pacific, but instead only arrived in Hawaii by luck on giant rafts setting out from South America.

And so in the 1970’s a group of Hawaiians sought out the last remaining navigators (Mau Pialug) and re-learned the practices of their ancestors. They built the Hōkūle’a and in 1976 they successfully traveled to Tahiti. They were utterly surprised when 17,000 people met them on their arrival in Papeete. The mood was ecstatic. The world began to see how they belonged.

But then came the fateful voyage of 1978. Unprotected in a massive storm, stacking waves overturned the canoe. One of the hulls had filled water and the entire crew sat on the remaining upturned hull at midnight getting periodically washed off by waves barely able to hear the next person over because the winds.

The legendary lifeguard Eddie Aikau began to paddle his surfboard for help into the white water of the gale. Nainoa swam over and was the last person ever to speak to him. Later the rest of the crew was miraculously rescued. Back onshore Nainoa witnessed the terrible grief of Eddie’s parents. He heard Eddie’s mother wailing. After all hope was lost he saw Eddie’s father implore everyone to call off the search for his son. For a while fear overtook him and Nainoa lost faith in his calling.

In the most pivotal moment of his life Nainoa’s father came to meet with him. They talked about values, about supporting the community and most of all about the destination – not of a particular voyage, or even of his own life, but of the Hawaiian people. Nainoa had to ask himself if he was ready to be changed.

2. When the religious authorities fault Jesus for befriending tax collectors and prostitutes, he tells the story of a father who independently asks each of his two sons to work in the vineyard. The first says no, but changes his mind later and works. The second says, yes but does not follow through. The strict answer is that neither fully did the will of his father (that would have been to say yes and go). But the one who comes closest is the one who actually does the work. And for Jesus that means the sinners will enter heaven before religious leaders.

We may be familiar with the Greek word metanoia which means changing one’s mind and is frequently translated as repentance. But this is different. The word here is metamelomai. More literally it means to change one’s “cares,” to change what we consider important. It implies a kind of regret or remorse. Jesus says that obvious sinners have this in a way that the religious leaders do not. Understanding how we have fallen short makes us more willing to change our minds.

Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Francis. Living off the riches of his father Francis had a reputation as spoiled but also for putting on great parties. For a while he tried to be a soldier. A serious illnesses in his early twenties made him wonder if he had to change. He dragged his feet, but then began spending time in the ruined church of San Damiano. One day he heard a voice coming from the cross. It said, “Go hence, now, Francis, and build my church, for it is nearly falling down.” He took this instruction literally and within two years had rebuilt three churches that had been falling apart.

Francis cared for impoverished people and became poor himself. He founded a movement of monks. He wrote songs. He attained notoriety for preaching to birds and to human beings. Some say that in the eight centuries since his death no one has more closely approximated the ideal that Jesus teaches.

The twentieth century writer G.K. Chesterton writes that one could never anticipate what Francis would do next. But once Francis did something, all you could say was, “Ah, how like him!” Brother Masseo once approached Francis and asked why the world followed him so ardently, when he didn’t seem especially smart, beautiful or wealthy. A friend of mine thinks it is because that while Francis chose, “a life of intense and prayerful austerity,” unlike many other saints he made being a child of God seem fun.[ii] He said, “rejoice always,” both in words and how he lived.[iii]

The most famous prayer attributed to Francis is “Oh Lord let me be an instrument of thy will.” Francis lived by emptying himself out so that God could be a continually growing part of his life. Francis told Masseo that God had chosen him precisely because he was the greatest sinner and that this reminded everyone that all good comes only from God.[iv] Emptying out his ego Francis saw a world filled with God. All people, all animals and birds, even the sun, moon, water and fire became his family. When we empty ourselves of ego nothing lies outside of the spiritual life.

So today we remember and celebrate this remarkable figure by blessing the animals we love. Over the years I have blessed dogs, cats, turtles, geese, chickens, lizards, gerbils, hamsters, mice, etc. We will also pray for the wild animals around us: the pelicans, coyotes, whales, seals, dolphins, sea lions, salmon, hammer-head sharks, red-tailed hawks, racoons, squirrels, and butterflies too.

It is a wonderful to live in a city dedicated to a person who we remember by trying to be particularly kind to animals, by in our awkward way blessing them and recognizing all the ways that they bless us. In our lifetime an uncountable number of species will be lost forever because of human activity. I have a dream that one day we will truly care for the other creatures and learn to better understand them.

Nainoa says that all storms come in pairs. When the storm hits, take your place at the helm and face into it. Be humble, pay respect, and stay with it. The second storm is the one inside of us. It is the storm of emotions. In that storm when we are tempted by hopelessness we can choose the way of faith. With God’s grace we can decide to be courageous. That is what Nainoa Thompson did.

By the end of the 1960’s after generations of being forced to fit in, a Hawaiian Renaissance in politics, art and culture began to truly unfold. We see many signs of its success. Today there are 22,500 fluent speakers of the Hawaiian language. The Hōkūle’a has been an indispensable part of an extraordinary transformation.

In the beginning I imagine Nainoa may have thought he was just building a canoe, but really what he was doing was building up a culture, a people, a promise that we can all belong. And this has grown into something even more powerful. Today the Hōkūle’a sails to unify all native peoples and to share a message, that human beings will never thrive unless the oceans do too.

How do you listen to your soul? How can you hear God’s invitation to change your mind? Nainoa Thompson and St. Francis were open to being changed by God. They learned to be humble. They dared to imagine a future when all species will be valued and preserved. May each of us conquer our ego and become an instrument of God. May we belong and our life be a blessing to the whole family of God’s creatures.

“[H]e who loves is he who has been touched by the freedom of God” Karl Barth (Romans, 498)

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D60, O25 15 Pentecost (Proper 18A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 10 September 2023 Congregation Sunday

Exodus 12:1-14

Psalm 149

Romans 13:8-14

Matthew 18:15-20

Matthew uses the Greek word for church (“ekklesia”) in only two places. One of them occurs in our gospel reading today. He concludes this passage about Christian community with one of my favorite lines in the Bible. Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18).

“Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer” (Rom. 12).

Exodus 3:1-15

Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

1. Where is God to be found? About a hundred years ago the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote these words, “I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all / my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life; as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small / and in the vast you vastly yield yourself. // The wondrous game that power plays with Things / is to move in such submission through the world: / groping in roots and growing thick in trunks / and in treeptops like a rising from the dead.”[1]

Yesterday I came across an old journal from October 2000 when our son was one year old. I wrote, “Micah is drinking bathwater now. He downs it like a pot-belly’d Monday night football fan at the local tavern, stands up and then coughs.” I go on to describe finding him under the microwave eating through a plastic bag of russet potatoes (and one eighth of a potato). A page later he had learned to climb by pushing his chair against the couch and walking along the back of it tightrope style.[2]

It was a pleasure to have these moments brought back to me. God seemed so present in those days of discovery, for me as a new parent, and for Micah as a new human being. James Finley offers a vision for what he calls a “contemplative way of life,” a form of existence that recognizes God as our true center. Contemplation means really looking and paying close attention. Perhaps I had more of a chance to do this when I took care of small children.[3]

Most of what we experience we notice only in passing as we are on our way to something else. But every so often we find a reason to pause. Something catches our eye. Then suddenly we find ourselves immersed in a deeper reality. We really encounter what is in front of us: a field of spring Presidio wildflowers, the billions of worlds in the summer night sky, the seemingly infinite calm dark September waters off Point Bonita, the unexpected sound of a cricket in our city or the joy of children playing.

Although these are absolutely ordinary phenomena, in each case something has broken us out of the web of worries and judgments that usually dominate our inner lives. These moments of openness almost seem to come before thought. Suddenly we become conscious, in Finley’s words that, “we are the cosmic dance of God.” The fullness of being completely in God surprises us.

We might find ourselves wondering, what do I do now? Often nothing. Our cell phone summons us or a new version of an old worry occurs to us. But when we look back on times like these, we know that they felt like a kind of homecoming, like we belong there. Finley says that, “[W]hen you start understanding your life in light of these moments, you realize this feeling that you’re skimming over the surface of the depths of your own life. It’s all the more unfortunate because God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we are skimming.”[4]

In our disappointment, “[W]e say to ourselves, “I don’t like living this way.””[5] I don’t want to be separated from the place where I most experience God’s love. I want to abide with God always.

2. Moses lived in an untenable political situation. The Pharaoh had ordered his people to murder all male children of the Hebrews. Moses’ parents abandoned him in a basket of reeds. The royal princess found him and raised him as her child. When Moses saw his people being brutalized he murdered a man and had to escape as a refugee. While tending his father-in-law’s sheep, a sight caught Moses’ attention.

An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a bush that was blazing and yet not consumed (Ex. 3). Moses said to himself, ”I must turn aside and look at this great sight” (Ex. 3). God describes a plan of liberation for the Israelites. Moses comically comes up with five excuses for why he thinks God has chosen the wrong person.

God reassures him, “I will be with you.” You will have what you need when you go to Pharoah. This is not enough for Moses. Finally Moses says, what if the Israelites ask your name. And God replies, tell them “I AM has sent me to you” (Ex. 3). Some interpreters suggest this is some kind of humor or a clever way that God avoids the question.

But for me this refers to that experience I described earlier, when our ego drops away and we feel united to our creator. It is the gratitude we feel for just being alive and to the one who brought us forth out of nothing. Where is God to be found? In the “I,” the “I AM,” beyond thought, deep within both our self and the world.

3. I spent the first part of the summer, basically in heaven, carefully reading Volume One of Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology. The experience of Moses on Mount Horeb lies at the heart of her understanding of God. She begins with the idea that God is one, God is absolutely unique. Nothing is like God. We cannot think something that is absolutely unique. She writes, “God is concrete, superabundantly particular.”[6]

Sonderegger also points out that for this reason, the reality of God, especially for us in modern times, is hidden. She uses the word “omnipresence” to describe God. It does not just mean that God is everywhere but that, most often, we fail to perceive God. She says that nature in a sense hides God. And that in our time atheists help us to more deeply appreciate God’s hiddenness, that “even in indifference and defiance” they in a sense glorify God.[7]

It is not just that modern universities fail to teach about God, their methods have become fully secularized. She calls this “Methodological atheism” and defines it as, “the conviction that God cannot be a reality or dimension in the principled means of knowledge in the modern intellectual world.”[8] Indeed, I would not want my rheumatologist or a Federal Reserve Bank economist appealing to God in their academic papers.

Mostly this is because, “God is not an object of our thought the way that an apple is… “God does not “stand open” and static in that way to our faculties… Yet… God will stand open to our knowledge of him as Truth.”[9]

How does this happen you might ask? At this point Sonderegger compares our experience of God with our relationships to each other. Unlike inanimate objects human beings disclose themselves to us. We know that the people we meet have an inner life. They show it to us in their words and actions. Sonderegger writes, ”We must speak or give ourselves away, in gesture or act of kindness or savage cruelty or deep intimacy.”[10]

Sonderegger writes God is lord of our knowledge of him, that in humility and like human beings, God chooses to share himself with us. One of her favorite ideas is that God is compatible with the world and us. This is part of the importance of Moses’ Burning Bush for Sonderegger. God is with us.

We do not experience all of God. But God gives us a hint of transcendence in the way that the bush is burned but not consumed. God draws near and his creatures are not destroyed. God is invisible and mysterious, utterly “other” than us and yet in our midst. We know God in our inner experience.

3. In all our time together I have never shared a poem that I wrote myself. This is about a walk Micah and I took when he was a one year old. It’s called “Swamp Maples.”

“In the sorrowing rain / Together we walk / Through wet autumn grass / From New England meadows / Into silent woods / And the brooding dark. // With each spongy step / I feel your weight / Shift further over / In the backpack / Until I know / You sleep.//  I worry that / The damp mist / Will make you cold. / In the corner of my eye / I see your soft angel / Face under the  navy hood. / Your tiny hand touches / My back just beneath the shoulder. / I listen for your breath / And want to wake you / From all death.”

“The fog brings / Everything closer in. / The yellowed ferns and / Ancient bark. / A million / Diamond drops / On the hemlock needles. / Until we leave the grasping roots / Of Pine Hill / For the burning colors of the lowlands. // We step through the swamp / On a thin crimson carpet / Of maple leaves / The gold leaf / ceiling above our heads / Burns with perfect brightness / Through the gray day. / The light illuminating / These trees / Seems to come from inside. // I stop to pray / My boots sinking / In black mud. / Thank you God / For all you have given / Us that we / Never could see before.”[11]

There is only one reason I am speaking to you today. There is only one thing I need to remind you. Seek God. Do not just skim over the surface of the depths of your own life. “Turn aside and look at this great sight.” “I Am” has sent you. So step away from the web of worries and judgments into a deeper reality, into the cosmic dance of God.

Help us find you Lord, “in all things and in all [our] fellow creatures pulsing with your life.”

“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven…” (Mt. 16).

Exodus 1:8-2:10

Psalm 124

Romans 12:1-8

Matthew 16:13-20

1. Who is Jesus and what are the keys of the kingdom? Yesterday on Market Street a man wearing worn clothes and just socks on his feet walked along pushing people at random as they waited in a security line to enter Ross’ clothing store. Another man crouched in the corner of a bus stop bent over with his head at knee height repeatedly wailing from the heart as a police officer stood five feet away with a loudly barking German shepherd on tight leash. Another man was lying on the ground at Eddy and Mason his hair full of litter.

Drugs and mental illness touch nearly every person you encounter just down the hill from here. Most of the stores have left and the world seems like it is ending. This kind of feeling pervades the beginning of J.T. Alexander’s book I Am Sophia.

His science fiction novel describes a not so distant future as climate change makes the planet uninhabitable. The center of gravity for human culture seems to have shifted into outer space as investors in places like Mars support companies here in the Bay Area doing gene engineering and carbon sequestration.

San Francisco has been renamed Sanef and is one of several independent nations formed after the collapse of America. Like narcotics in our time, many people of the future have become addicted to Stims (this acronym which stands for “Sensory-Targetted Immersive Mindtech”). It is a kind of virtual reality that destroys souls. Horrifying and dehumanizing levels of inequality have become commonplace. Poor people are shunned and called lowcontributors. Sometimes they will have their minds effectively erased by the government.

Nihilistic terrorists frequently kill ordinary people with bombs. There is almost no religion of any kind. People call it metaphysics (or metafiz) and respond to it with a mixture of disdain, suspicion and fear (as many do around us today). In this anti-religious world of the future there is only one remaining Christian church in the universe. It has ten worshipers and a doubting twenty-nine year old bishop named Peter Halabi. That church is in the ruins of Grace Cathedral.

In that future time this very building has holes in the ceiling and the stained glass windows have long been boarded up. But the eleven worship faithfully every Sunday in the Chapel of Nativity. Peter worries that he will have to shepherd the church to extinction. He looks up to that same mural and the image of Mary and says, “I’m not asking… for a big miracle… Just something to let me know [God’s] still up there.”[i]

Soon a tent appears in front of the Ghiberti Doors. The homeless woman sheltered there enters the church just as Peter is about to read the lesson. She takes the book from him to read and her first words are “I am.” This seems to refer to God’s self-description at the burning bush. It is the way the gospels often describe Jesus. It is the meaning of the letters in the corners of icons. This young woman with a scar on her face walks like a dancer. She calls herself Sophia (a biblical word for the divine feminine) and for most of the book we wonder about her. Is she God, the second coming of Jesus Christ? Or is she sick, unstable and deranged. Or is she just a fraud manipulating the gullible Christians for the sake of her own agenda?

2. This feels like the Gospel of Matthew. When Jesus walks on water and then rescues faltering Peter the disciples say, “what sort of man is this” (Mt. 8:27)? The crowds seem to be wondering the same thing when Jesus asks his friends, “Who do people say the Son of Man is” (Mt. 16)?

Although we have to answer this question in our lives, as readers of this gospel we stand outside the experience of those depicted in Matthew. We see what they do not. The Gospel begins with these words, “An account of the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah…” (Mt. 1:1). As we read we wonder when, and which one of them, will realize who Jesus is.

This exchange between Jesus and Peter happens in Caesarea Philippi, the capital of the Tetrarchy of Philip son of Herod the Great. Herod dedicated the famous Temple there to Rome and to Emperor Augustus, whose statue stood there. He was the first emperor to add to his title: “Divi Filius” or “Son of the Divine.”

Jesus asks his friends who they say he is and Peter says, “You are the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16). Soon we see that Peter does not yet really understand what he is saying. All of us have trouble with this. We think of Jesus as simply a more powerful version of Emperor Augustus when Jesus is really overthrowing that whole way of being.

Jesus shows that the way of domination and self-aggrandizement although it seems stable and powerful on the surface is like sand. In contrast we have the path of Peter with his imperfections, his courage and fear, his insight and foolishness, but above all his faith. This improbable foundation is the rock upon which our lives can be founded. This is faith which is a kind of pursuit rather than an accomplishment.

Going on Jesus says, “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven” (Mt. 16). Through history this sentence has been used to justify the church in those moments when we have been more like the Emperor Augustus than like Jesus, as if some institutional authority in Rome or Canterbury could have power over whether a person can be saved.

This could not be further from the truth. The Biblical scholar Herman Waetjen points out several other ancient examples that clarify what Matthew means. The power of the keys has to do more with things and policies than people. For instance, the historian Josephus writes about Queen Alexandra who ruled the Hasmonean Kingdom from 78-69 BCE. She deputized Pharisees as the administrators of the state and gave them the power, “to loose and to bind.” For Herman this power is about determining what practices are permitted or forbidden.[ii]

We all have a role in this. We all in our way preach the gospel through what we say and how we live. We contribute to the picture of what is acceptable. And we have a responsibility for creating the kind of society which is humane in its care for the people I saw on the streets yesterday.

The puritan theologian John Calvin (1509-1564) writes that the reason for this passage about the keys is that over history it has been dangerous to speak Jesus’ truth and it is important for us to know both that we are doing God’s work and that God stands beside us as we do.[iii]

The twentieth century theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) writes that the thought of God will always disturb the world. Our relations with each other, will never be perfectly clear. We will never adequately understand our situation in the world. That is the reason we need to orient ourselves toward the Eternal, to God. Barth says, “For the vast ambiguity of our life is at once its deepest truth… We know that our thinking of the thought of eternity is never a thing completed in time...”[iv] Our attention to Jesus, our prayer, is how we avoid being conformed to the world. It is how, instead, we are transformed by the renewing of our minds in Christ (Rom. 12).

About half of I Am Sophia takes place at Grace Cathedral and half on Mars. In the book, Sophia was terribly abused as a child but she found nourishment in the Bible and other Christian books. This made her a kind of theologian. Was Sophia the Christ? I do not want to spoil the book for you. As he finds himself falling in love with her, Sophia has a great deal to teach the young bishop, and perhaps us also.

She says, “You are the guardian of a great treasure. It is your tradition, and it has an incredible spiritual value, an almost miraculous capacity to change lives for the better. But you misplaced the keys to the treasure chest… when scripture and religion became primarily about trying to determine who was right and who was wrong.”[v]

Later she gives a kind of invocation, “May your soul have deep roots and strong wings.”[vi] This means that followers of Jesus need to have a foundation, a stable identity, but we also need room to evolve. Changes in technology and society leave modern people less rooted and more focused on wings. You see this in their emphasis on individual freedom, innovation and progress.

In contrast, many Christians regard the secular world as destructive and offtrack. This leads them to become so backward looking that they are all roots and no wings. The living, loving God of the gospel became to them static and oppressive. What does not evolve dies.

This summer’s survey and our town hall meeting this morning address consider this issue. The idea lies at the heart of our mission statement to “reimagine church with courage, joy and wisdom.” For generations Grace Cathedral has been known for this. But it is up to us if we will continue to have roots and wings.

Near the end of the novel, Sophia says to Peter, “You think strength means being untouched by the suffering we are approaching. You still do not know me…”[vii] Will San Francisco as we know it die as people self-centeredly and obsessively seek to save themselves? Will the future Grace Cathedral lie in ruins? Will the world know who Jesus is?

At the center of Grace Cathedral is not a statue of the emperor or a belief in domination and self-assertion. At the heart of our being is a living person, the living child of God. He calls us by name and offers the keys to a deeper, more humane and faithful life. Come let us follow Jesus.[viii]

[i] J.F. Alexander, I am Sophia: A Novel (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2021) 7.

[ii] Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury, 2017) 185-7.

[iii] “It was important for the apostles to have constant and perfect assurance in their preaching, which they were not only to carry out in infinite labors, cares, troubles, and dangers, but at last to seal with their own blood. In order that they might know, I say, that this assurance was not vain or empty, but full of power and strength, it was important for them to be convinced that in such anxiety, difficulty and danger they were doing God’s work; also for them to recognize that God stood beside them while the whole world opposed and attached them; for them, not having Christ, the Author of their doctrine before their eyes on earth, to know that he, in heaven, confirms the truth of the doctrine which he had delivered to them…”

John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion ed. John T. McNeill, Tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960) 1213 (4.11.1).

[iv] “There is – and this is what we mean – a thinking of the thought of grace, of resurrection, of forgiveness, and of eternity. Such thinking is congruous with our affirmation of the full ambiguity of our temporal existence. When once we realize that the final meaning of our temporal existence lies in our questioning as to its meaning, then it is that we think of eternity – in our most utter collapse. For the vast ambiguity of our life is at once its deepest truth. And moreover, when we think this thought, our thinking is renewed; for such rethinking is repentance. We know too that our thinking of the thought of eternity is never a thing completed in time, for it is full of promise. As an act of thinking it dissolves itself; it participates in the pure thought of God, and is there an accepted sacrifice, living, holy, acceptable to God.” Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th Edition tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975) 437.

[v] J.F. Alexander, I am Sophia: A Novel (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2021) 60.

[vi] Ibid., 95.

[vii] Ibid., 168.

[viii] Matthew Boulton, “Who do you say that I am…”, SALT, 21 August 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/8/18/who-do-you-say-that-i-am-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twelfth-week-after-pentecost

August 20th, 2023

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Sunday 13 August, 2023

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Genesis 37: 1-4, 12-28

Romans 10:5-15

Matthew 14: 22-33

The Rev. Joe C. Williams, Succentor

6 August 2023

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco CA

Exodus 34:29-35

Luke 9:28-36

“… [N]either death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else… will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus…” (Mt. 13).

Genesis 29:15-28

Psalm 105:1-11, 45b

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Genesis 28:10-19a

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Genesis 25:19-34

Romans 8:1-11

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Romans 7:15-25a

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

In worship, God asks something of us: our time, our presence, our material resources; our imagination, our heart, our gifts, our loves. God calls to Abraham, who says "here I am." Abraham is not responding with GPS coordinates, but with self-offering — "Yes, you have me; all of me."

Proper 8A: Genesis 22:1-14, Psalm 13, Romans 6: 12-23, Matthew 10:40-42

July 2nd, 2023

“Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well” (Mt. 9).

Genesis 12:1-9                                   

Psalm 33:1-12

Rome 4:13-25

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

1. What is faith? This may be the most important question of our time. This week the indictment of our former president reminds us how questions of trust underlie every human relationship and institution.[i]

In 1996 Mary Doria Russell published a science fiction novel called The Sparrow. It imagines a near future in 2019 when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the Arecibo Observatory discovers sung music coming from near Alpha Centauri. Jesuit priests led by the linguistics scholar Father Emilio Sandoz organize a mission to that world. They travel to Rakhat via newly invented technologies developed from mining asteroids.

With the turn of a page it is suddenly the year 2060. Sandoz seems to be the only survivor and returns to earth. Damaged physically, psychologically and spiritually he tries to answer his superior’s accusations. The reader experiences the story in parallel in two temporal settings both as Sandoz and his friends encounter a whole new form of human-like life, and much later as he explains what went wrong. It is an anthropological pleasure to imagine the language and society of the inhabitants of Rakhat. One almost wants to stop reading there before the inevitable disaster.

Emilio Sandoz grew up surrounded by drug crime in Puerto Rico and first began to be educated by the Jesuits as a teenager. He has always struggled with doubt. As the story unfolds he begins to see the circumstances that brought the team together as more than a coincidence. As he finds his place among the far more social, even herdlike, inhabitants of Rakhat they physically touch him and he discovers a new conviction about God, a kind of ecstasy that fulfills him.

This makes his disappointment so much worse when through his actions everything falls apart and he causes the death of his old friends and new ones. Near the end of the story two priests talk about Sandoz’s struggle with faith. The Father General says, “There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So he breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

“’So God just leaves?’ John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. ‘Abandons creation?’ ‘No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.’ ‘Matthew 10:29… “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’ ‘But the sparrow still falls.’”[ii]

These are two different pictures of faith. First, as a kind of disposition which is a grateful response to good things in our life. This attitude is nonetheless vulnerable to suffering that leaves us wondering whether the good outbalances the pain. Or second, faith can be regarded as the knowledge of a silent watcher, a loving but invisible companion who is with us, but constrained in the help that can be provided.

2. If someone asked us to describe our faith we might say something like that. But today Matthew offers a very different and surprising kind of answer to the question “what is faith.”

My friend Matt Boulton likes to describe the Christian year as divided in half. There are six months of holidays from Advent through Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Then six months of ordinary time which begins now. He says this rhythm is like inhaling and exhaling or like the tide coming in and going out again. Ordinary, does not mean commonplace, it means ordinal as in part of a series. In this case it means a series of episodes from the Bible that teach us how to live and give us a framework for interpreting our experience.[iii]

The first eight chapters of the Gospel of Matthew describe Jesus’ birth, his later baptism, temptation in the wilderness, the calling of his followers (the fisherman on the sea of Galilee), then his first sermon and stories of healing. In chapter nine Jesus invites the one who seems to be the last of the twelve disciples, a tax collector named Matthew.

Imagine Matthew’s daily life charging taxes on goods going to market. The author of the gospel uses the word tax collector as a synonym for sinner. People hate tax collectors for three reasons. First, taxes were cripplingly high. Second, these taxes were levied by, and to pay, an occupying army that punished and crucified the local people. Tax collectors are collaborators in this oppression. Finally, tax collectors extorted more money than required and did this for the sake of enriching themselves.

Jesus immediately befriends and shares a meal with Matthew and “many tax collectors and sinners” (Mt. 9). I wonder what the other disciples thought about this. The pharisees, a group seeking to purify the religion of the time, deride Jesus for the company he keeps. Jesus does not make the argument that these people are not really sinners. Instead he says that like a physician he has come not to heal the healthy but the sick.

The first readers of this story would know about the purity rules in the books of Leviticus and Numbers in the Old Testament. It says that menstruating women were regarded as unclean and corpses were too. Anyone and anything, including furniture like beds or chairs, that a bleeding woman touched would also become unclean.[iv]

Jesus in the very act of responding to criticisms of the sinners attracted to him, is interrupted by a leader of the synagogue. This man kneels before him and begs for him to heal his daughter saying, “lay your hand on her, and she will live” (Mt. 9). As Jesus  goes with all of his disciples following him a woman touches his clothes. It’s amazing that there are words spoken in the Bible that we still use today. Haimorreow is our word for hemorrhage and means to bleed. For twelve years this woman has been bleeding. For twelve years she has been unclean, isolated and literally untouchable.

We hear a little of her internal dialogue. She says to herself, “If only I touch his cloak, I will be made well” (Mt. 9). The word for “made well” is sōzō related to the word sōtēr for savior. It does not just mean to be physically healed. It means to save, preserve, heal or rescue.

Imagine the drama of this situation. An unclean woman goes through a crowd surrounding a great and holy teacher without permission, past his disciples, through the law that forbids it, and in effect desecrates him. The disciples must have been stunned and wondered what Jesus would say. Jesus does not rebuke her or criticize her actions. He loves her. He commends her boldness. Not only that but rather than taking credit for his healing power, he emphasizes her role in this miraculous healing. He says, “Take heart daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mt. 9).

When Jesus arrives at the synagogue leader’s house everyone knows that touching a dead body makes you unclean. But Jesus takes her by the hand and she gets up. The tax collector, the hemorrhaging woman and the synagogue leader come from entirely different stations of life but they teach us that faith is boldness. It is the conviction that our more daring efforts will be met by a loving God.

During Pride Month it is especially important to linger for a moment here. We also need to recognize the way that Jesus interprets scripture. Jesus is not a prisoner to a simplistic and literalist reading of ancient texts. Jesus uses one text, “I desire mercy not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6) to interpret other texts, for instance those having to do with sinners, menstruating women and corpses. In our time we need to be more diligent in reading the Bible in ways that nurture and love LGBTQ+ and all people.

So for Matthew faith means more than just gratitude for the goodness of our existence. It refers to more than just a silent but compassionate watcher in our lives. Faith is a boldness in trusting God even when we cannot perfectly understand what is happening to us.

The theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) writes, “This is Abraham’s faith: Faith which, in hope against hope, steps out beyond human capacity across the chasm which separates God and man, beyond the visibility of the seen and the invisibility of the unseen, beyond subjective and objective possibility… to the place where he is supported only by the Word of God.”[v]

This week I received a letter from a dear friend who has been going through four terrible family tragedies this year. During the last of these tragedies he describes time moving so slowly, that his mind became his own worst enemy. He writes about being unable to pray, about screaming a bad word at the top of his lungs when he was home or in the car alone.

He says that because he has faith in God, Jesus, the church he kept coming to this place, even though it brought up a tidal wave of feeling and grief. But then he heard a setting of “Ave Maria” sung by a visiting choir. He began stopping by “Our Lady of Flowers” the photographic image of Mary, and for instant had a kind of vision in which Mary held his family member on her lap. Then in a sermon he was reminded about a dream that the Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich had. In it she held a hazelnut in her hand which represented everything God had created. She worried about its destruction. But God reassured her saying that he would draw all things to himself. My friend concluded saying, “Mary seems to be my path back to mending my relationship with God.”

What is faith? This may be the most important question of our time. May there always be the faith of gratitude for our existence. May we begin to experience God as the quiet, compassionate witness to our life. But above all, my dear ones, let us be audacious and bold in the places where we are supported only by the Word of God.

In the beginning God was everywhere and everything. Lay your hand on us and we will live. Take heart daughter your faith has made you well.

[i] Answers surround us about faith and trustworthiness, in the Senate, newspapers, laboratories and our closest relationships. In his book Faith on Earth Richard R. Niebuhr studies Luke’s question “When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth.” Will human life end when no one can any longer be expected to keep their word? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/world/australia/trump-indictment-world-reactions.html

[ii] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (NY: Villard, 1996) 478.

[iii] Matthew Boulton, “Go: SALT’s Commentary for the Second Sunday after Pentecost,” SALT 5 June 2023. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2023/6/3/go-salts-commentary-on-second-sunday-after-pentecost

[iv] Leviticus 12:1-8; 15:19-30 and Numbers 19:11-13.

[v] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans translated from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskins (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975) 142.

Jesus says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt. 28).

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D35

Trinity Sunday (Year A) 8:30 a.m. & 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 4 June 2023

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Chaplain, Cathedral School for Boys

“Your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3).

Acts 10:34-43

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Colossians 3:1-4

Matthew 28:1-10

When are you most fully alive? My friend Rhonda Magee felt fully alive when she was sixteen years old. The world was opening up, college was around the corner. Life had not been easy but she had reason to hope. Rhonda and a boy named Jake were head over heels in love. Then just before she left town for a summer university course, he told her over the phone, “My father kicked me out of the house.” She asked him why. He said, “You know why… I told you how he is. It's because of us. He said no son of his is going to be dating a black girl…”[1]

Rhonda felt gripped by pain. She was an A student and about to be chosen as the town’s Teenager of the Year. Yet her race – a category created by others and that she felt did not capture much of who she really was – made her unacceptable to Jake’s parents. They had never met her. And yet they were willing to hurt their own son, and therefore themselves, all to teach him, Rhonda and anyone else a lesson. They believed in white supremacy so strongly that they were ready to throw their own son out like garbage.

We all have beliefs like this. They diminish us and damage the people around us. The social theorist bell hooks asserts that racism in America is a crisis of “lovelessness.” Certainly the current anti-LGBTQ+ legislation illustrates the terrible lovelessness that has this country in its grip. The poverty in this city does too. But these are just a few of many stories we carry that poison our life, that prevent us from ever being fully alive.

The stories we tell about ourselves as individuals also can harm us. Even as a child the psychologist Brené Brown knew that, “People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power.” She realized that, “very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming or shutting down.” As a result, “Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnected from each other.”[2]

We feel alive when we come home to ourselves and to God, when we can become connected in a new way to our past and to each other. This encounter, the forgiveness we experience in Jesus, lies at the heart of the resurrection. Easter is the chance for a new story to take hold in our life. It is the beginning of a new era when everyone will belong and have the chance to thrive. God’s love dares to include those who do not fit, the ones who the powerful cannot abide.[3] Through God we can be free of the hold that fear and death have on us.

No one really knows what happened at dawn that morning before Mary Magdalene and the other Mary felt the earth shaking. They saw the guards frozen like dead men by fear, watched an angel who looked like lightning come down from heaven and roll back the stone at the tomb. There is no way to make Easter fully understandable.

This does not mean it is illogical. Matt Fitzgerald remembers the Easter when his daughter was in kindergarten and the church sent each child home with a plastic purple Easter egg. Inside was not chocolate but a little slip of paper. His daughter was learning to read and so she sounded out the three word message. “He is… raisins?”  “He is raisins is illogical. He is risen is merely incomprehensible.” When we speak about God we have to “distinguish between things that do not make sense and things we cannot make sense of.”[4] God cannot be contained, confined, described or defined. But we can meet God in the person of Jesus on Easter morning.

The Gospels of Mark and Luke mention anointing, but in the Gospel of Matthew the women come simply “to see” the tomb. The Greek word theōrēsai means to observe, analyze, discern with the connotation that one is involved and committed. It is related to our words theory, theoretical and theater, that onstage action which helps us to better understand human life.

After meeting the angel, the two women leave the tomb quickly with fear and great joy. Jesus greets them with a word (xairete) that means both hello and rejoice (like the word aloha means hello and love). He says, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Mt. 28). He offers this message of comfort and forgiveness to friends who abandoned him.

In the second century Irenaeus said that the Glory of God is the human being fully alive. Feeling fully alive often involves an experience of joy. What is joy?

Greek has the word makarios for happiness or blessedness. It is the word repeated frequently in the beatitudes as in, “blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt. 5). The ancient Greeks regarded this kind of happiness as the freedom that rich people might have from normal cares and worries. These are the people who have good fortune, health and money.[5]

On the other hand the Greek word for joy is xara. It is related to our word Grace. It means to be fulfilled. The perfect version of xara can only found in God. The Greeks thought that this experience does not surprise us haphazardly. Rather this joy naturally comes with wisdom and virtue. To use more modern language it is the pleasure that comes with spiritual connection. We do not lose ourselves in joy – we become more deeply ourselves in it.[6]

Joy is surprisingly difficult for us. Part of the reason for this is that joy as an emotion requires us to be vulnerable. Last winter I came across a new expression for a feeling I recognize. It is “foreboding joy.”[7] It refers to that sense of hesitation we feel when it comes to joy. We don’t want to be too joyful because we are irrationally afraid that this will somehow cause something bad to happen.

Psychologists who study this say that 95 percent of parents interviewed have experienced this with their children. We hold back because we think it will make us hurt less later.

One man in his sixties said, “I used to think that the best way to go through life was to expect the worst. That way, if it happened you were prepared, and if it didn’t happen you would be pleasantly surprised. Then I was in a car accident and my wife was killed. Needless to say, expecting the worst didn’t prepare me at all. And worse, I still grieve for all of those wonderful moments we shared and that I didn’t fully enjoy. My commitment to her is to fully enjoy every moment... I just wish she was here, now that I know how to do that.”[8]

Experiencing joy means being vulnerable in love. So how do we cultivate a propensity for joy in our ordinary lives beyond a willingness to really feel joy and to let others see our weakness? The simple answer is to practice gratitude. Gratitude is not an attitude, it is not a feeling. It is something we do over and over, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. For me gratitude lies at the heart of my prayer life and what we do here.

Last week I was giving a tour of the archives when I found a sermon Alan Jones preached at Grace Cathedral in 1990. It moved me so deeply that I wanted just to read the entire manuscript to you. Alan refers to a French priest named Jean Sulivan who describes Western cultures as spiritually impoverished and undeveloped, as unawake and unaware of the miracle right in front of our noses.[9]

That miracle is the miracle of being. It is the miracle that we are. If you want a miracle look at yourself. Our life is the love story of God trying to reach us, to help us.

Have you ever wanted to meet a famous person? I always wished that I could spend a day with the nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman. He wrote a poem called “Miracles.”

“… As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge / of the water, / Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, / Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, / Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, / Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon… Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars / shining so quiet and bright, / Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; / These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place…”[10]

When are you most fully alive? In the face of overwhelming lovelessness, and the pain that causes more pain, there is a new story. Jesus calls us to come home to ourselves and to God. So in gratitude let us see the world with a new intent. Let us leave behind our foreboding joy and know nothing else but miracles. The Lord is risen.

[1] Rhonda V. Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (NY: Penguin Random House, 2019) 11-13.

[2] Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart (NY: Random House, 2021) xx.

[3] Alan Jones, “Easter Day: Take Time for Paradise,” Grace Cathedral Sermons, 15 April 1990.

[4] Matt Fitzgerald, “Thunderous Yes: Preaching to the Easter Crowds, “The Christian Century, 10 April 2014. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-03/thunderous-yes?utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dcce86669b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2023-04-03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b00cd618da-dcce86669b-86237307

[5] Ibid., 204ff.

[6] Ibid., 205.

[7] Ibid., 215.

[8] Ibid., 50.

[9] This paragraph and the next come from: Alan Jones, “Easter Day: Take Time for Paradise,” Grace Cathedral Sermons, 15 April 1990

[10] “Why, who makes much of a miracle? / As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, / Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, / Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, / Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge / of the water, / Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, / Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, / Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, / Or watch honey-bees around the hive of a summer forenoon / Or animals feeding in the fields, / Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, / Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars / shining so quiet and bright, / Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; / These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. // To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, / Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, / Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread / with the same, // To me the sea is a continual miracle, / The fishes that swim – the rocks – the motion of the / waves – the ships with men in them, / What stranger miracles are there?”

Walt Whitman, “Miracles,” Leaves of Grass. https://poets.org/poem/miracles

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil asking, ‘Who is this?’” Mt. 21

Matthew 21:1-11

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Philippians 2:5-11

Matthew 26:14-27:66

What is God like? And how will we respond? Give me your hand and we will see. In December 1945, halfway up the Egyptian portion of the Nile River, a farmer named Muhammad ‘Alī al-Sammān made an extraordinary archaeological discovery. Thirty years later he told his story. Not long before he and his brothers avenged their father’s murder, they were digging for soil to fertilize their crops when they found a three foot high red, earthenware jar. Wondering if it contained an evil spirit, at first they hesitated to break it open. Then he had the idea that it might contain gold, so he smashed it with his axe and discovered thirteen papyrus books bound in leather.[i]

At home he dropped the books on a pile of straw by the oven. His mother used much of the papyrus along with the straw to kindle fire. A few weeks later, after killing their father’s enemy ‘Alī worried that the police might search the house, so he left the books with a local priest. For years experts tried to collect the manuscripts.

In the end they discovered fifty-two texts at Nag Hammadi. Carbon dating of the papyrus used in the bindings places these Coptic translations sometime between the years 350-400 CE. Some scholars, including my New Testament professor Helmut Koester, believe that these are translations of Greek manuscripts that may be even older than the gospels of the New Testament.

One of the first European scholars to discover the texts was startled to read the following line, “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin Judas Thomas, wrote down.”[ii] This is the opening of the first complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas ever discovered. We had fragments of it in Greek but suddenly we had the whole thing along with pages of other sources we had never dreamed of.

My favorite quotes from the Gospel of Thomas describes the kingdom of God as a “state of self-discovery.” That ancient papyrus says, “Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father.” It says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”[iii]

For years all we knew about the Gnostic Christians in the first centuries after Jesus’ death came from the orthodox Christians who called them heretics. Now finally, to some degree, we can hear them speak for themselves. I first encountered these ideas at the age of twenty-one when I read Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic Gospels. I am attracted to their thought primarily because Jesus has changed my life and I long to learn more about what people in the first centuries thought of him. I am also sympathetic to the Gnostics’ respect for wisdom. We are often trapped in stories that make us miserable. Great thinkers can lift us into a truth that frees us.

The Greek word gnosis means a kind of knowing by experience that differs from rational or scientific knowing.[iv] It also describes an ancient faith, a family of religious convictions that shaped what we believe today. This year on Palm Sunday as we enter Holy Week rather than trying to tell the whole story of Jesus’ passion, I want to talk about this ancient faith.

We cannot be a Gnostic in the way that third century people could. But studying these ideas give us a way of talking about our tradition’s value and how we experience God in our own lives. On this Palm Sunday I am going to talk about three central gnostic ideas. But first I need to say a little more about what Gnostics believed.

Gnostic groups differed from each other but mostly they believed in a kind of dualism between the spiritual which they regarded as good and the evil material world. They held that the spiritual human soul is part of the Divine and is imprisoned in physical existence. They believed that the soul could be saved by coming to realize its greatness, its origin in a superior spiritual world. For Gnostics an inferior god or demiurge (sometimes called the god of the Old Testament) made the material world. In their upside down interpretation of the Genesis creation story, the snake was the hero. Many Gnostic Christians (the Docetists) believed that it only seemed as if Jesus suffered, or was mortal.

1. The first idea that I would like to criticize is the Gnostic belief that there are secret teachings for the elite that are not available to everyone else. The Gnostic believed that, in the words of an ancient manuscript, he was, “one out of a thousand, or two out of ten thousand.”[v] This contrasts with Christians who believe that everything we need to know about God and Jesus is public. There is no hierarchy of secret knowledge, or spiritual wisdom. We can all read the Bible and with help, draw our own conclusions.

Christians go further than this. In Paul’s Letter to the Galatians he writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). This may be one of the most difficult ideas for us to assimilate. It is the basis for our democracy. We are all equal before God, and before the law. As humans we naturally form groups and are drawn into conflict based on our identity. For instance, it is very difficult to avoid the culture war tension between liberals and conservatives.

The philosopher Agnes Callard spoke about this recently at Harvard. She pointed out that the science journal Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It’s editors wanted to speak out for science and objective truth. She pointed out that in a world where everything becomes ideological this had the unintended outcome of making some people distrust science as political.

Callard said that people on the left use the same tactics as those on the right. “We bully people without knowing it. Not bullying people is harder than it appears.” Her answer is to take a Socratic approach. We should ask people to explain their position rather than trying to beat them in an argument. She says that Socrates is, “not trying to win. He’s trying to find out.”[vi]

2. A second Gnostic belief is that we should focus on overcoming illusion through introspection rather than worrying about sin or morality. The important thing for the Gnostic is a relation with our true self not our neighbors. In the second century Irenaeus rejected the idea that knowledge is enough to save us. He insisted that participating and growing in Christ is a “practical, daily form of salvation.”[vii]

In the third century Clement of Alexandria writes that God became human so that humans can become God. Every day we improve. He writes about choosing to live joyously so that, “all our life is a festival; being persuaded that God is everywhere present on all sides we praise him as we till the ground, we sing hymns as we sail the sea, we feel God’s inspiration in all that we do.”[viii]

3. Finally, Gnostics taught that the material world is evil. In contrast, Christians believe that God created the world and that it is good. We have a responsibility for nature. We see God through the material world. It gives us opportunities to care for each other.

Over the next seven days we will experience the implications of this belief. We will follow Jesus through the exultant crowds, witness his poignant goodbye at his last meal with friends. We will see his betrayal, abandonment death and finally his triumphant resurrection and reunion with his loved ones.

My friend Matt Boulton says that we cannot take all of this in at once. These events require time and space for us to adequately feel and understand them.[ix] Last night I received an email from one of our readers who feels overwhelmed by the passion narrative. My friend writes, “the most powerful moment that stands out for me is Jesus’ response to Judas’ kiss.” Jesus says, “Friend do what you are here to do” with no blame or shame, just a sense of love and grief.

This idea that God is present to us in the material world gives us the hope that we can change some things for the better. In an interview the poet Maya Angelou said that believing in God gave her courage. “I dared to do anything that was a good thing. I dared to do things distant from what seemed to be in my future. When I was asked to do something good, I often said, yes, I’ll try, yes, I’ll do my best. And part of that is believing, if God loves me, if God made everything from leaves to seals and oak trees, then what is it I can’t do?”[x]

What is God like? And how will we respond? There is no secret religious knowledge or a spiritual elite. Introspection will not bring us as close to God as care for those around us. The material world matters and the presence of Jesus in this world then and now is a message of hope and salvation. All our life is a festival, so bring forth what is within you and may God bless you as you walk with Jesus this week.

I would like to close with these lines from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). “God speaks to each of us as he makes us / then walks with us silently out of the night.//These are the words we dimly hear. // You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing / embody me. //Flare up like flame / and make big shadows I can move in. // Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final. / Don’t let yourself lose me. // Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. // Give me your hand.”[xi]

[i] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979) xiff.

[ii] “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” The Gospel of Thomas, translated by Thomas O. Lambdin. https://www.marquette.edu/maqom/Gospel%20of%20Thomas%20Lambdin.pdf

[iii] And later, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one… then you will enter [the Kingdom].” Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979) 152, 154-5.

[iv] Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979) xvii.

[v] Ibid., 176.

[vi] Clea Simon, “In an era of bitter division, what would Socrates do?” The Harvard Gazette, 27 March 2023. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/in-era-of-bitter-division-what-would-socrates-do/

[vii] Margaret Ruth Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 33.

[viii] Ibid., 38.

[ix] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/3/29/palms-and-passion-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-palmpassion-sunday

[x] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/2/6/maya-angelou-on-being-christian

[xi] Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (NY: Riverhead, 2005) 119.

“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done” (Jn. 4)!

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young, Dean

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D17

3 Lent (Year A) 11:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.

Eucharist Sunday 12 March 2023

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95:1-2, 6-11

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-42

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA

5 March 2023

Genesis 12:1-4a

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

John 3:1-17

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D14

1 Lent (Year A) 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 26 February 2023

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7

Psalm 32

Romans 5:12-19

Matthew 4:1-11

Often I start with a question but today I want to finish with one. Sixty years ago President John F. Kennedy, full of confidence in modern science, made two predictions. First, that within a decade a human being would walk on the moon. And second, that science would, “make the remote reaches of the human mind accessible.” At that time few people might have guessed that traveling 239,000 miles through oxygen-less -455 degree Fahrenheit outer space would be far, far easier than discovering psychiatric cures for mental illness.

In David Bergner’s book The Mind and the Moon, he shares the story of his younger brother Bob who was diagnosed with bi-polar at age twenty-one, institutionalized and medicated with drugs that had debilitating side-effects. Bergner also follows Caroline a woman from Indiana who started hearing voices as a child and whose drug treatments, starting in elementary school, led to obesity and losing control of her forearms and hands. He introduces us to a civil rights lawyer named David whose severe depression during the Trump administration could not be mitigated by either the drugs his doctor prescribed or the psychedelics he turned to afterwards.

Bergner points out how little we understand the mind. He writes about the damage that can be caused by a psychological diagnosis (which puts us in a kind of box and separates us from other people) and of many drug treatments which have questionable efficacy. Forty million American adults and millions more children are on psychiatric drugs. In one ten year period the number of children diagnosed with bi-polar increased fortyfold. Thirty to forty percent of our students are treated with psychiatric medication at some point in their college years.

I’m not trying to make a point about how we treat mental illness. I just want to remind us how much we are a mystery to ourselves. Perhaps the saddest part of Bergner’s book for me came when he quoted the prominent neuroscientist Eric Nestler. Nestler said that unquestionably fewer Americans should be on psychotropics for depression and anxiety. He went on, “Exercise. Better sleep. Mindfulness. The belief in something bigger than yourself. Religion if you are religious.” Nestler said, “People with religious beliefs benefit greatly from them.” He wondered if they fostered a, “capacity to bring order and meaning into one’s life.”

And then the sad part. He said that religion was not part of his own life. He tragically explained, “The thing about religion is, I can’t know whether Jesus is the Son of God or whether Allah rose to heaven on a winged horse. Those are not scientifically knowable.” This is an insurmountable barrier for him, and many others. Theology has failed our generation when ordinary people think that they have to believe something contrary to science in order to be religious. Christians like us have a lot of work to do in explaining this to the people around us.

The stakes are high. On Tuesday one of our daughters’ friends took his own life only months before graduating from college. From his social media posts you would never have realized that there was anything wrong. Did he understand that he is a child of God? There is no way for us to know.

This morning, the first Sunday in Lent, we have before us central biblical texts: the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness and the Garden of Eden. How do these ancient stories help modern people to understand God? How do we interpret them? What meaning should they have in our life?

For Matthew wilderness is equivocal. On the one hand it has no structure and is void. On the other hand it represents limitless possibility, a context for encountering God. In ancient scripture the number forty represents a long time. This connects Jesus with other figures who persevered over time.

My friend Matt Boulton proposes an alternative to the way we usually interpret this story. For him it is not about a hero bravely resisting temptations to comfort, security and glory with admirable self-control. It is not about the devil offering something that Jesus deeply desires and Jesus gritting his teeth and responding like someone on a diet knowing that he should not have another plate of cookies. This is not about sacrifice but about trust.

Similarly the story of Eden’s forbidden fruit is not primarily about sin and disobedience or temptation, but rather about fear, and the failure to trust. Let’s begin by seeing the connection between Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness and Moses.

“And Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid…” (Mt. 17).

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D12

Last Epiphany (Year A) 11:00 a.m.

Sunday 19 February 2023

Exodus 24:12-18

Psalm 99:1-8

2 Peter 1:16-21

Matthew 17:1-9

Last week in an email my friend Hugh Morgan observed that when it comes to social justice the Old Testament prophets sound strikingly modern to him. He wonders if the Old Testament has a stronger social justice message than the New Testament.[1] Today we consider this question.

But first let’s define social justice as equality in wealth, political influence, cultural impact, respect… in opportunities to make a difference, to love and serve others. It involves creating a society in which every person is treated with dignity as a child of God, as bearing God’s image. Jesus calls this the realm of God. Martin Luther King calls it “the beloved community.”

Today we celebrate the Last Sunday of Epiphany. Epiphany means a shining forth. You might call it a realization that utterly transforms us. The culminating story of this season occurs on a mountain top when Jesus’ friends experience a mystical encounter with God.

In a recent conversation the law professor Patricia Williams spoke about two epiphanies that she had had.[2] For her whole life she had taken at face value family stories she had heard about her great-great-grandmother. These described her as a lazy person who was constantly fishing, as someone that no one liked. Then when Williams was in her twenties her sister discovered the bill of sale for their great-great-grandmother.

In an instant she realized the truth. At the age of eleven her great-great-grandmother had been sold away from all that she had ever known. Two years later she was pregnant with the child of the dissatisfied thirty-five year old man who had bought her. She was traumatized so alienated from his children, who were taught to look down on her, that the only thing they chose to tell her descendants was that she was unpopular. To get to the truth Patricia Williams had to interpret those two stories together and to have empathy for someone’s suffering. We have to do the same thing in order to understand the Bible.

Getting back to our question, Hugh makes a wise observation about the importance of social justice in the Old Testament. The deceased Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah (1927-2013) wrote a book called Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. He asks about how religious belief makes large human societies possible. He notes that Israel first appears in Egyptian records in the year 1208 BCE, long before anything written in the Bible.

He points out two notable features about the social world that produced the Old Testament. First, that this it attempts to establish a society not on the role of one man as a divine king (like most Egyptian pharaohs) but rather on a covenant between God and the people. Moses is a prophet not a divine king.

The second thing he notices is that the prophets, for instance, Amos does not just condemn failures of religious ritual but the mistreatment of the weak and poor. Amos criticizes both foreigners and his own people. He writes, “Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes” (Amos 2).[3]

At this point I feel compelled to tell you more about the Old Testament. It will be a long time before Chat GPT can write an accurate sermon. I am totally astonished by how incorrect search engine results are when it comes to some of the most basic issues in religion. This includes how we determine when these books were written. There was no journalist taking notes in the Garden of Eden or the court of David. The books of the Bible were not written in the order in which the events they record happened, or in the order in which they are presented.

One way to look at it is to see them growing up around the two ideas I just mentioned from the prophet Amos – that there is one God for all people and that God cares how the poor are treated. Scholars believe that the words of the prophet Amos were among the first in the entire Bible. So it is not as if the world was created, Noah built an ark, Abraham met God, God chose the Tribes of Israel, David’s kingdom was established, many other kings reigned and then social justice became important. Social justice, this idea of God’s universality and the dignity of every person, comes first. The other stories are ancient but put together by writers with this conviction in mind.

So the twentieth century rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the prophets, “the most disturbing people who ever lived” and “the [ones] who brought the Bible into being.” They “ceaseless[ly] shatter our indifference.” They interpret our existence from the perspective of God. Heschel writes that the prophets have assimilated their emotional life to that of the Divine so that the prophet, “lives not only his personal life but also the life of God. The prophet hears God’s voice and feels His heart.”[4]

The Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew with three main types of literature the Torah (instruction or) the law, the Nevi’im or prophets, and the Ketuvim or the writings. The New Testament was written in Greek under Roman occupation and includes totally different genres: gospels, epistles or letters, and John’s apocalyptic conclusion the Book of Revelation.

As Jesus alludes to in the Book of Matthew, the New Testament is built on the foundation of the old – that there is one God for all the nations who cares about human dignity. It has a different feeling because it is composed at a different time, under different social circumstances for a different audience. But for me it is not less focused on social justice. Christians do not worship the Bible, but the person of Jesus. Jesus is how we understand our lives and our connection to God.

We see this in today’s gospel. The story of the Transfiguration is not so much about a private mystical experience, but a meditation on Christ’s passion. It exists to shape our response to Jesus’ death on the cross. Imagine the Book of Matthew. We climb up one side through Jesus’ teaching and healing until we finally hear Jesus describe how his death will be. The disciples cannot take it in. We go down the other side to Jerusalem where Jesus will be killed. And for a reassuring moment we linger at the mountaintop.

Let me briefly tell you three things about the Greek text. Matthew uses the emphatic word idou or “Behold! Look!” three times. First, before the appearance of Moses who represents the law, and Elijah who stands for the prophets. Then again when a shining cloud appears and yet again when God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” (Mt. 17).

Jesus’ friends feel so afraid they fall down like dead people. Jesus tells his friends to rise up and uses the same word he does when he says that the Son of Man will be raised from the dead. Jesus touches them in a reassuring way. The Greek word hapsamenos means to touch, hold or grasp. But it also can be translated as to light or ignite a flame.

What does it mean for social justice, to have at the heart of our religion a man who gives up his life and is executed? It is not just what Jesus says that matters. He gives his life to help make real this idea that God loves every human being, that each life has innate dignity. This includes the truth that death is not the end.

Although Christians often get lost in the belief that faith is about an isolated individual’s personal salvation, there is a deep tradition of meditating on the way Jesus’ death reverses the overwhelming evil all around us. I do not have time for more examples but I would like to mention Basil of Caesarea (330-379).

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus tells the story about a rich man who has so much property that he decides to build a bigger barn to hold it all so that he can “eat, drink and be merry” (Lk. 12). That night the foolish man dies. So the fourth century Basil wrote a sermon about this. He says that what we think we need constantly changes. We are metaphorically building smaller and bigger barns all the time. When we think we need too much we cannot be generous to others.

Basil says, “How can I bring the sufferings of the poverty-stricken to your attention? When they look around inside their hovels… [and] find clothes and furnishings so miserable… worth only a few cents. What then? They turn their gaze to their own children, thinking that perhaps by bringing them to the slave-market they might find some respite from death. Consider now the violent struggle that takes place between the desperation arising from famine and a parent’s fundamental instincts. Starvation on the one side threatens horrible death, while nature resists, convincing the parents rather to die with their children. Time and again they vacillate, but in the end they succumb, driven by want and cruel necessity.”[5] The Christian tradition in every generation is filled with appeals like this. They beg us to recognize the full humanity of every person.

Let me tell you the second of Patricia Williams’ two epiphanies. When she was a child there were very few women or Black people who were judges, law professors, law partners, attorney generals, etc. Virtually all law had been written by white men. Because of this there were blind spots, basic failures to understand society that had crucial legal ramifications.[6]

Professor Williams and other intellectuals invented Critical Race Theory to address this, to help the law work for all people, not just those in power. These debates were largely for people in universities until about ten years ago. In our conversation Professor Williams expressed her surprise when she heard a powerful political consultant talk about how he had made millions of Americans fear and hate this social justice project. He had successfully convinced them to regard Critical Race Theory as divisive and dangerous to white people. He explicitly stated that increasing their anger was a means of getting their votes.[7]

The great twentieth century Jewish expert in building healthy religious congregations Edwin Friedman frequently repeats this warning. “Expect sabotage.”[8] When we are working for good, to change how things are, we will be opposed. Those who care about social justice need to understand that there will be people who actively seek to thwart it.

Patricia Williams is a prophet for me, shattering my indifference. Many here this morning are prophets to me also. Behold. Be ignited. Shine forth. Let the realization of Jesus’ love utterly transform us.

[1] Hugh Morgan, 9 February 2023. “In reading Isaiah and the minor prophets, I am struck by how modern they sound, when calling out issues of social justice.  Of course, our thinking has been influenced by the enlightenment and all that came after it, so my brain may be predisposed to see these threads in the text.  But they are there.

You do not see the same strength of views on social justice in the New Testament, certainly little about upsetting the then current order.  And I do not think you see similar messages supporting the oppressed in Greek or Roman writings (I have a super limited sense of what these are.)

And, you do not see "social justice thought" - a very modern thing - called out, developed, emphasized from the OT texts in the early church, nor through the reformation, not even in the revivals in America and England in the late 1800s.

Two questions to ponder

1. Where did the social justice message in the OT come from?

2.  Are there strains of this message in church history that I / we are not aware of?”

[2] Patricia J. Williams on the Grace Cathedral Forum, 1 February 2023. https://youtu.be/8h-xHY7OIuY . Also see Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 17-19.

[3] Robert Bellay, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Quoting Michael Walzer and David Malo on a covenant between the people and God (310f). Amos’ ethical statements (302).

[4] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction, Volume One (NY: Harper, 1962) ix-26.

[5] “How can I bring the sufferings of the poverty-stricken to your attention? When they look around inside their hovels… [and] find clothes and furnishings so miserable… worth only a few cents. What then? They turn their gaze to their own children, thinking that perhaps by bringing them to the slave-market they might find some respite from death. Consider now the violent struggle that takes place between the desperation arising from famine and a parent’s fundamental instincts. Starvation on the one side threatens horrible death, while nature resists, convincing the parents rather to die with their children. Time and again they vacillate, but in the end they succumb, driven by want and cruel necessity.” Basil of Caesarea, “I Will Tear Down My Barns.” Tr. Paul Shroeder. Cited in Logismoi. http://logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-social-justice-by-st-basil-great.html

[6] Professor Patricia J. Williams and I talked about “stand your ground” laws that result in much higher rates of death among Black men, because white people are more likely to be afraid of them.

[7] In an online interaction I heard from someone who is monomaniacally focused on the idea that Critical Race Theory must necessarily involve government forced discrimination against white people. He did not have the time to see the Patricia Williams interview. He had already made up his mind.

[8] “Sabotage is part and parcel of the systemic process of leadership.” Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (NY: Church Publishing, 2017 revised).

Grace Cathedral is honored to welcome the Rt. Rev. Deon K. Johnson, the 11th Bishop of Missouri, and the first Black gay bishop in The Episcopal Church, to the pulpit. Bishop Johnson is passionate about justice and human dignity and reflecting those commitments in the church’s liturgy. Bishop Johnson has been a fierce advocate for LGBTQ inclusion and led nonviolent protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Most recently, he is among the 13 faith leaders to sue the State of Missouri to challenge its abortion ban.

“[N]ow we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit that is from God” (2 Cor. 2:1).

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D9 

5 Epiphany (Year A) 11:00 a.m. 

Sunday 5 February 2023                                      

Isaiah 58:1-9a

Psalm 112:1-9

2 Corinthians 2:1-12

Matthew 5:13-20   

You are the salt of the earth. At 6:00 p.m., at the height of the century’s worst winter storm, I put on waterproof biking pants and a jacket to go walking in the darkness. Rain poured down in sheets. In the Presidio forest, along the ridge, 60 knot gusts of wind tore through the Monterey Cypress and Eucalyptus trees. It sounded like a deafening freight train. As debris landed all around I felt nagging fear but also awe in the face of such power and beauty, in the presence of God. I could see no sign of another living soul except for a single light far offshore in thirty foot swells outside the Golden Gate.

This week I gradually began to understand the news. Our seminary, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific will be closing its classrooms for in person learning and most likely selling their property (which lies across the street from the University of California, Berkeley).[i] The university motto Fiat Lux, means “let there be light.” And today I want to begin by expressing what a great light our seminary has been for me during my whole adult life.

I remember going to Thursday evening community eucharists there during the ferocious El Nino storms of my first year in college. As an eighteen year old I loved the Episcopal Church. Berkeley with its four Episcopal churches, two break-away churches, a university chaplaincy, a kind of Anglican newspaper (called the New Oxford Review) and seminary seemed like heaven to me. I have fond memories of studying in the Graduate Theological Library from the time it first opened.

My college chaplain Peter Haynes had us meet in the seminary parking lot to drive together for my first retreat at the Bishop’s Ranch. The people in this setting profoundly shaped my faith as a guide to a compassionate, generous, beautiful, uniting, and thoughtful way of being. This faith opened me to the experiences of people of different backgrounds, even of different religions and of no religion. This faith also grounded me in traditions that connect us to our deepest humanity.

Before long I was kneeling on the warm red carpet at St. Clement’s Church in Berkeley and getting ordained as a priest. Soon after that I began participating in monthly Faculty Clergy lunches. John Kater first introduced the idea of online learning to us a year after the invention of the world wide web.

For twenty years I participated in Pacific Coast Theological Society meetings at the seminary with Owen Thomas, Patricia Codron, Huston Smith, Herman Waetjen.[ii] I cherish my clergy colleagues who were educated there and their teachers. I can see in my mind’s eye the busy brick refectory at lunchtime with students and teachers from across the country engaged in friendly talk on a fall day as the liquid amber tree leaves outside the windows burst into an impossibly beautiful redness.

You may be getting a sense for the heartbreak I feel about our seminary, that with others I am mourning its loss. This brings us to one of Jesus’ most important lessons about how to live, known in the Gospel of Matthew as the Sermon on the Mount. Let me briefly talk about the central elements of Jesus’ teaching and then introduce a psychologist and two theologians who give us further insights into its meaning.

Today we hear the second part of the Sermon on the Mount. It begins with Jesus saying “blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers” (Mt. 5). Jesus does not say that one thing leads to the other as if we should somehow try to be poor in spirit in order that we might be blessed. No, Jesus speaks to US. We are the people who mourn, the humble ones frustrated by injustice, longing for goodness and mercy.

Indeed Jesus says to us this morning, “YOU are the salt of the earth… YOU are the light of the world.” The Greek word “you” is plural. It involves all of us. It is imperative to notice that Jesus is not asking us to change who we are. We are already what we need to be. We do not have to become something entirely new. We just need to learn how to magnify the goodness we already possess.

For this metaphor Jesus chooses things that in small quantities have a massive effect. A tiny bit of salt brings out the flavor of a large meal. You are that salt, enriching the banquet for everyone. A single candle flame can be seen from 1.6 miles away. It takes half an hour to walk the distance to that tiny light that might guide someone home.

So again Jesus is not saying that this is a cause and effect relationship, that by doing something good you become blessed. This is not a matter of punishment or reward. You already are blessed, so make the most of it! In an often cited passage Marianne Williamson writes, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?” “You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”[iii]

In 2009 I attended a training in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communications. It changed my life.[iv] Rosenberg asserts that we all have a kind of light or energy or life that animates us. We have needs that we often do not understand for food, safety and love. Instead of trying to compel others, to force them to do we want, we should instead learn to state our need and then ask them for help. We do this knowing that all human beings have a deep longing to be of service to others.

This all begins with seeing that light in other people. And this requires that we learn to quiet the critical voice that judges others and ourselves (Rosenberg calls the jackal). He recommends that instead of using judgment words (like “you are always late”) or presuming that we know what another person is thinking, we should learn the gift of the question. We need to learn how to simply ask what another person needs. Instead of an inner life in which we criticize ourselves we need to ask ourselves what we need.

Today at the Forum I talked with my favorite teacher Margaret Miles about her newest book on how the third century theologian St. Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE) changed in his old age. Quite often we quote his words when we invite everyone to the communion table saying, “Be what you see. Receive what you are.”[v] This is almost a riddle with the answer – the body of Christ. It reminds us that we are God’s children. We are salt and light, even when we may not feel very close to God.

Augustine talks about the difficulty of believing in miracles and what our bodies will be like in the resurrection. He says that these ideas matter only as much as they influence how we live now. In his prayer addressed to God he says that we are not only, “instructed so as to see you… but also so as to grow strong enough to hold you, and the one who cannot see you for the distance, may yet walk along the road by which he will arrive and see you and hold you…” To us he says, ”Walk without fear, run, but stay on the road… do not stand still, do not turn back, do not get sidetracked… Any who find that they may have gone astray must return to the road and walk on it, and any who find they are on the road must go on walking until they arrive.”[vi]

One of my favorite writers of our generation is the gay English Roman Catholic theologian James Allison. The Stanford University professor René Girard (1923-2015) deeply influenced him. Girard taught that all human societies have what he calls the scapegoat mechanism. We covet, that is we want what other people have, this leads to instabilities and social tensions. These in turn are resolved by punishing or banishing an individual or group. We fix our social problems by blaming others. According to Allison and Girard, Jesus overturns the scapegoat mechanism and makes possible the realm of God in which all people are loved.

In my clergy group I heard the following story about James Alison. For many years he lived in Brazil. But not long after moving to Spain, a Brazilian bishop began a long and ultimately successful process of removing Alison from the priesthood. This was heartbreaking new for Alison. Then one day he received a phone call. The voice on the other end of the line told him that it was Francis, Pope Francis. Alison felt sure that it had to be a friend playing a trick on him until a number of questions fully established that this was the actual pope and that he was giving him the “power of the keys” and effectively reinstating him as a priest.[vii]

As a gay man Alison was himself scapegoated but his light shines too brightly to be diminished. He does not hide. I give thanks for Augustine’s reminder to stay on the road to God even when our father seems so far off. I give thanks for Marshall Rosenberg’s reminder that our critical inner voice makes it hard to see the light in others. Above all, I am so grateful for the compassionate, generous and thoughtful light of the people associated with our seminary. They contributed to the faith that has guided me to this day.

That night a few weeks ago out in the storm. I encountered God. Looking at that lonely light on the ocean reminded me of one of the kids named William Hoyt who came to my ordination at St. Clement’s Church in Berkeley. His dad was a nuclear physicist and his mom a partner in a prestigious law firm. William grew up to be the captain of a tugboat. I wondered if he was out there in the storm, if it was his light that was going to guide someone home that night.

In the deafening freight train storm that surrounds us your light shines in this way also. Give the gift of the question. Do not turn back. Be what you see, receive who you are. You are the salt of the earth.

[i] “CDSP Announces Shift to Fully Hybrid Education Model.” CDSP 31 January 2023. https://cdsp.edu/2023/01/cdsp-announces-shift-to-fully-hybrid-education-model/

[ii] I first met Norman Gottwald, Bob Russell, Ted Peters, Durwood Foster, Philip Clayton, Mark Graves, Darren Erisman, Sharon Burch, Scott MacDougall and dozens of other friends at Pacific Coast Theological Society.

[iii] Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/928-our-deepest-fear-is-not-that-we-are-inadequate-our

[iv] Ursula, “Nonviolent Communications Workshop,” Christ Episcopal Church, Los Altos,  29 April 2009. Notebook page 134. See also Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communications: Create Your Life, Your Relationships, Your World in Harmony with Your Values. Audiobook. https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S93C2415756

[v] St. Augustine. “If you are Christ’s body and members, it is your mystery that is placed on the table of the Lord, it is your mystery that you receive… Be what you see and receive what you are.” Catholic Digest. https://www.catholicdigest.com/from-the-magazine/quiet-moment/st-augustine-if-you-are-christs-body-and-members-it-is-your-mystery/ Mary Carter Greene’s translation: "Behold what you are. Become what you receive.”

[vi] From Margaret Ruth Miles, Beautiful Bodies (Forthcoming). Augustine, Confessions 7:21 and En ps. 31, tr. Maria Boulding, Essential Expositions of the Psalms (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2015) 319-20.

[vii] I heard this story on different occasions from Donald Schell and Pat Kiefert. Some clarifying elements might be found in James Alison’s Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Alison

“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear” (Ps. 27)?

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D6

3 Epiphany (Year A) 11:00 a.m. & 6:00 p.m. Eucharist

Sunday 22 January 2023

Isaiah 9:1-4

Psalm 27:1, 4-9

1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Matthew 4:12-23

What new season of life are you entering? How will you need to change? What relationship will you have with God?

“You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1).

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D2

2 Epiphany (Year A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist

Sunday 15 January 2023

Isaiah 49:1-7

Psalm 40:1-12

1 Cor. 1:1-9

John 1:29-42

The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ

Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17

Human beings are embarrassed because we are attached to our own notions of rank, order and decorum, and God, frankly, has other ideas and plans. John would have prevented Jesus from being baptized, but Jesus responded: no, "this is how we fulfill all righteousness." What God in Christ commends to us is not the exultation of stature, but service. Putting on the garments of baptism, together we can do and be a new thing to the glory of God, and for the good of all creation.

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C54

Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 11:00 p.m. Eucharist

Saturday 24 December 2022 (also preached a L&C at 4:00 p.m.)

Isaiah 9:2-7

Psalm 96

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-20

Imagine your existence as an hourglass, the bottom globe filling with sand until the time appointed for your life has ended. We do not know how much sand the top globe holds, how much time we have left. On this holy night when we do not have to pretend let me ask this. How are you doing? I am not talking about what you have accomplished, whether you met your expectations. I ask about your well-being.

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C53

Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 4:00 p.m. Lessons and Carols

Saturday 24 December 2022 Also preaching at 11 p.m.

Mt. 2:1-1, Jn. 1:1-18

Lk. 2:1-7, Lk. 2:8-20

Isa. 7:10-14, Lk. 1:26-38

Gen. 1:1-5, Isa. 35:1-10

Merry Christmas! When I have to say something difficult or controversial from this pulpit I often look up and draw courage from this stained glass window of the warrior St. Martin. It reminds me of the people at St. Martin’s Church in Davis, California. Growing up as a boy they took me seriously. They taught me about God’s love in words and action. They gave me a chance to help and valued whatever contribution I made.

The Third Sunday in Advent

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Malcolm Clemens Young                                                                        Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C51                                            2 Advent (Year A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist                    Sunday 4 December 2022                                                                      

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

Are There Reasons to Have Hope? An Introduction to the Gospel of Matthew

“Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that… by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15).

Let me speak frankly. I see you might be the, “sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from sermons, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store.”

“But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about [sermons]? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of [sermons], where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.”[1]

The twentieth century novelist Italo Calvino (1923-1985) wrote these words about books and I begin here because it is human nature to be wary about hoping too much. We have been disappointed enough in the past to wonder, are there reasons to have hope?

I have been reading several recently published books by authors who do not believe in God. I’m grateful to have this chance to walk with them and to try to see the world from their perspectives. Last week I finished reading Kieran Setiya’s book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. His last chapter describes hope as, “wishful thinking.” He goes on to say, “In the end, it seems, there is no hope: the lights go out.” And later in a slightly more positive vein he says, “We can hope that life has meaning: a slow, unsteady march towards a more just future.”[2]

The other book is William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future about how we might try to prevent the collapse of human culture from threats like nuclear war, engineered pathogens, and runaway Artificial General Intelligence. He points out the massive amount of suffering among human beings and animals. He uses a scale from -100 to +100 to measure the lifetime suffering or happiness of an abstract person and wonders if, because of the total amount of suffering, life is even worth living.

By the way the question “does life have meaning,” is not something that we see in ancient writings or even in the medieval or early modern period. The phrase, “the meaning of life” originates only 1834.[3] Before that time it did not occur to ask this question perhaps because most people assumed that we live in a world guided by its creator.

Although these books might seem so different they share a common spirit. First, you may not know what to expect but it will be a human thing. There is no help for us beyond ourselves. Second, they exaggerate the extent to which human beings can comprehend and control the world. Third, they fail to recognize that there are different stories for understanding our place in the universe and that these have a huge influence on our fulfillment. Well-being is in part subjective: we have to decide whether to accept our life as an accident, or to accept it as a gift. Finally, these authors lack a sense that human beings have special dignity or that we might experience God as present with us.

In my Forum conversation with Cornel West the other week he mentioned how much he loved Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book Truth and Method. It’s about the importance of interpretation in human consciousness and begins with a poem from the twentieth century Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). “Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; / but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball / thrown by an eternal partner / with accurate and measured swing / towards you, to your center, in an arch / from the great bridgebuilding of God: / why catching then becomes a power - / not yours, a world’s.”[4]

How do we catch the world God is offering to us? This morning I am going to discuss an interpretation of the Book of Matthew by my friend the biblical scholar Herman Waetjen. I am not trying to communicate facts to you or to explain something. I long to open a door so that you might experience the truth of hope, the recognition that at the heart of all reality lies the love of God.

Today is the second Sunday in the church calendar. Over the next twelve months during worship we will be reading through the Gospel of Matthew. Scholars say that 600 of the 1071 verses in it, along with half of its vocabulary come from the Gospel of Mark. An additional 225 verses come from a saying source and other oral traditions.[5] And yet this Gospel is utterly original. Although the first hearers are highly urban people living in the regional capital of Antioch, really Matthew speaks directly to us.

In the year 70 CE a catastrophic event threatened to obliterate the entire religion of the Jews. Roman forces crushed an uprising in Jerusalem destroying God’s earthly residence, the temple, and many of the rituals and traditions that defined the Jewish religion. Without the temple a new way of being religious had to be constructed. Let me tell you about three alternative visions for the faith from that time.

First there was the way of the Pharisees led by Yohanan ben Zakkai (50-80 CE). Legend held that he had been secreted out of Jerusalem during the destruction in a coffin. HE then made an arrangement with Roman authorities to remain subject to them but with limited powers of self-government.

Zakkai asserted that the study of Torah was as sacred as the Temple sacrifices. “He substituted chesed (kindness or love) in place of the demolished temple.”[6] God can be at the center of people’s lives through “a reconciliation that is realizable through deeds of mercy that are fulfilled by observing the law.”[7] Waetjen asserts that the Gospel of Matthew criticizes this vision because it leads to a distinction between righteous (moral) people who are clean and sinful outsiders.

A second solution to this religious crisis comes from apocalyptic literature about the end of the world, especially the Second Book of Baruch. This author writes about the Babylonian destruction of the Jewish Temple in 487 BCE. In his vision an angel descends to the Temple, removes all the holy things and says, “He who guarded the house has left it” (2 Baruch 8:2). The keys are thrown away almost as if it was de-sanctified. According to this view,“in the present the temple has no significance.” But in the future it will be renewed in glory through the power of God. So the people wait for God’s return.

Although Matthew is aware of both these answers to the religious crisis he chooses a third way beyond a division between clean and unclean people, or simply waiting for a new Temple. Matthew writes that Jesus as Son of David comes out of a particular people, with its history, etc., but Jesus is also a new creation which Waetjen translates as the Son of the Human Being.[8]

We see this dual anthropology in the Hebrew bible with its division of soul/self (or nephesh) and flesh (basar). In Greek this is soul/self (psyche) and body (soma). Jesus says, “Do not continue to fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the soul; but rather continue to fear the one who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Mt. 10:28).

In a physical body Jesus is born in Bethlehem as part of the Jewish community where he teaches and heals those who come to him. Jesus also exists also as soul, as the divine breath that gives all creatures life, as the first human being of the new creation, as one who shows God’s love for every person. He teaches that at the heart of all things lies forgiveness and grace. There are no people defined by their righteousness or sinfulness. At the deepest level of our existence we are connected to each other and to God.

The novelist Marilynne Robinson writes about how in modern times some people claim that science shows that there are no non-material things, that we do not have a soul. In contrast she writes about our shared intuition that the soul’s “non-physicality is no proof of its non-existence… [It is] the sacred and sanctifying aspect of human being. It is the self that stands apart from the self. It suffers injuries of a moral kind, when the self it is and is not lies or steals or murders but it is untouched by the accidents that maim the self or kill it.”

She concludes writing, “I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.”[9]

Can we have hope? Does life have meaning? Let me speak frankly. I see you might be the “sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.” But you have a soul. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. At the heart of all reality exists the love of God. The more thankful we are, the more we receive the gift of hope.

My last words come from a poem by Mary Oliver called “The Gift.”

“Be still, my soul, and steadfast. / Earth and heaven both are still watching / though time is draining from the clock / and your walk, that was confident and quick, / has become slow.// So, be slow if you must, but let / the heart still play its true part. / Love still as you once loved, deeply / and without patience. Let God and the world / know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.”[10]

[1] Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller tr. William Weaver (London: Vintage Classics, 1981) 4.

[2] Kieran Setiya, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (NY: Riverhead Books, 2022) 173, 179, 180.

[3] “The meaning of life” first appears in Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus. Ibid., 153.

[4] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (NY: Crossroad, 1992).

[5] Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017) 1-17. See also, https://www.biblememorygoal.com/how-many-chapters-verses-in-the-bible/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesed

[7] Ibid., 2.

[8] Ibid., 7.

[9] Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (NY: Picador, 2015) 8-9.

[10] https://wildandpreciouslife0.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/the-gift-by-mary-oliver/

The Invisible Beauty

“Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Lk. 24).

Forms of beauty exist that we are only dimly aware of. So much happens that we fail to notice. We never experience some of the most beautiful phenomena in nature.

Have you ever been in the Pacific Ocean and seen the sun rise over the continent? The light creates a brilliant golden path over the water that seems to go right to you. Under certain conditions, when you are far out beyond the impact zone, air gets trapped in large exploding waves creating a brilliant, short-lived shower of spray and a rainbow.

When you really know the water, the texture of the ocean surface reveals currents and eddies that help you to find safety. And on a few days in your lifetime the gray of the sky will perfectly match the gray of the water and the rain will fall in such a way that it seems like a million drops of water are frozen midair just above the surface.

Surfing on certain fall days at Ocean Beach the wind blows offshore, the wave doubles up and pitches over your head so that you are encased in smooth walls of emerald green. As the wave collapses behind you spray engulfs you and you are spit out back into the regular world again. I wish so dearly that I could communicate what it feels like to be riding a wave and see a dolphin just below the surface doing the same thing.

Because of grief the disciples fail to see the most beautiful thing of all. They fail to see God in the presence of their friend Jesus. Today I especially understand this feeling. Mike Lawler was one of my dearest friends, the one who helped me to see all of what I just described, the generous soul who taught me to surf. Two days ago I learned that he died. At surprising times I keep finding myself emotionally overwhelmed.

Mike was a six foot five inch, 220 pound contrarian bull and the world was his China shop. He dropped out of college to pioneer surfing on the Northshore of Oahu. He was not shy about confronting over-educated people who were full of hot air. He was a literary roofing contractor. He said, “I used to write sermons when I was shingling roofs, alone with my thoughts and the rhythm of a hatchet whacking nails into cedar shakes.”

We spent hundreds of hours together driving to the beach in his pickup truck. It smelled strongly of wetsuit neoprene, surf wax, and cigar that he later told me he smoked so that his car didn’t smell like marijuana. We talked about creativity, painting, science, Martin Heidegger, Werner Erhard and the sixties. He taught me about the culture, art, physics, meteorology, history, ethics, sociology and technique of surfing. He introduced me to the pleasure of old-fashioned donuts and that is what I crave now after every surf session.

Each All Souls Requiem at Grace Cathedral feels so different, because nothing seems more particular, more specific than the loss of someone we love. And each year that loss feels different.

Today we carry with us the joy of being together after the pandemic but also the weight of so many funerals we have been hosting this fall to honor the many people who died over the last three years. We have had so many more losses as a community I hesitate to even name anyone. Who can imagine life here after Dare’s death last week?

On Wednesday Chris Keady and I talked about the feeling of Mozart’s requiem. Mozart (1756-1791) composed this as he himself was dying and the music conveys a sense of frustration and anger at our limits as human beings. It expresses anxiety about whether we will be forgiven for the damage that we have done. Mozart is not afraid to encourage us to face our sadness. And with the tension and disappointment we also encounter what is beautiful, what we have not yet noticed.

The theologian David Bentley Hart writes that, “what is most mysterious and exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest to hand, and that which is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy… we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing…”

The modern twentieth century French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) spent nine months in a World War II German prisoner of war camp composing “Quartet for the End of Time.” It uses the four musical instruments that were available there (Piano, Cello, Violin, Clarinet). He saw such suffering and had every reason to surrender to cynicism. But instead he was fond of paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) reminding us that, “God dazzles us by an excess of truth.” He writes, “Certain people are annoyed that I believe in God. But I want people to know that God is present in everything, in the concert hall, in the ocean, on a mountain, even on the underground.”

The ancient theologian St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-339) believed that death and evil ultimately cannot hinder us in moving toward God. Hart summarizes his theology writing, “Creation is… a partaking in the inexhaustible goodness of God; and its ceaseless flow of light and shadow, constancy and change… while the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God’s glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite.”

My tough, impermeable, sometimes obnoxious surfing friend Mike Lawler believed this. He was so proud of being a lifelong Episcopalian. The disciples walked many miles without recognizing Jesus and I did the same when I walked with Mike.

A few years ago he wrote a December letter to me from his home in Hawaii about his own death. He said death used to seem so far off “to be no bother.” And then he quotes Joan Didion whom he describes as an Episcopalian (from her book The Year of Magical Thinking).

Didion writes, "We are not idealized wild beings. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we are mourning, for better or worse, ourselves. As we were we are no longer. As we will one day be not at all… as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be."

Mike closes his letter with these words, “My life has been partly molded by having lost a little sister when I was about thirteen. You are afraid to love [because those you] love will die. I wish there was a way to get over the fear… but this is not a conversation for Advent… The ocean was calm and glassy tonight as the spangled sun made you look and love the world. Your sermon touched me as no other. Love, Mike.”

Forms of beauty exist that we are only dimly aware of. We are drawn beyond the world to the source of its beauty.

Job 19:21-27a

Canticle 9

Luke 24:13-35

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive” (Lk. 20).

Haggai 1:15b-2:9

Psalm 149

Luke 20:27-38

What happens after you die? Jesus cares so intensely about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death influences how we live.

As a freshman at Harvard College my old teacher Cornel West hung two pictures on his wall: Malcolm X and Albert Einstein. His roommate James Brown, (not the singer but the man who later became the famous sports journalist) asked him, “I thought you were more of a Martin Luther King type.” Cornel replied, “I am but one doesn’t cancel out the other. I’m loving them both, just the way they both loved us.”1

In his second year The Nation of Islam came to Harvard and black students packed the hall. “Hefty Fruit of Islam guards, the paramilitary wing of the Nation [were] stationed at all the doors.” It had only been six years since Malcolm X’s assassination and when the speaker referred to Malcolm as a dog, Cornel felt startled. The speech went on. When the speaker did it again, Cornel moved to stand up and reply but his friends restrained him.

Finally, the speaker called Malcolm X a dog one more time and Cornel leapt up. He said, “Who gives you the authority to call someone who loved black people so deeply a ‘dog’?” After a brief exchange the speaker said to the 18 year old Cornel. “Young brother, you’ll be lucky to get out of this building alive. And if you do manage to slip out, you’ll be gone in five days.” In his memoir Cornel writes, “from there, it got worse. The crowd went dead silent…” as everyone looked at him. Friends had to negotiate with the guards and then escort him out of the building.

For the next week Cornel went underground going from dorm room to dorm room, too afraid to attend class, hardly sleeping. Finally he went to talk to someone in the Nation. They began by arguing but then Cornel really began to listen, to listen from the heart. For hours they had a wonderful conversation because they gave each other “space to be heard.” His new friend told him he didn’t need to be afraid anymore.

Intense conflict, fear and looming death characterize the atmosphere as Jesus takes up a debate with leaders of the temple. After a long journey to the capitol Jesus arrives in triumph to cheering crowds who wave palm branches. Jesus weeps over the terrible future of Jerusalem. He angrily drives out people who are selling things in the temple. Then he returns there every day to share the good news with the “spellbound” crowds.

Behind the scenes the authorities, “[keep] looking for a way to kill him” (Lk. 19:47). But Jesus’ popularity protects him and so the religious leaders try to discredit his teaching. They want to embarrass him, to get him tangled up in his own words, to provoke him to say something offensive that they might use against him. They have three different debates, the first one about authority, the second on taxes and our story this morning about the resurrection.

Remember, Jesus is only days away from being killed on the cross. The tension and fear among his friends cannot be understated. Jesus wisely avoids the traps that his persecutors set for him. In fact he changes this antagonism into a chance for genuine learning to happen. He is teaching both the people who love him and those who hate him so that some of his enemies even say, “Teacher, you have spoken well” (Lk. 20).

In those days Sadducees were part of the upper class and had an influential role in the temple’s worship.2 They differ from the Pharisees, Jesus and the authors of the Gospels in two main ways. First, they do not believe in resurrection, or any life after we die.

And second, they were convinced that only the first five books of the Bible were authoritative scripture.3 I have known this for thirty years and do not completely understand what it means. I often wonder what did they make of the psalms and prophets, for instance? In any event apparently in those days it was commonly believed that the first five books did not include references to the resurrection in the way that the other biblical books did.

The question they use to entrap Jesus has to do with an ancient cultural practice described in the Book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 25:5-10) called “levirate marriage.” The word levir is Latin for a husband’s brother. The idea is that when a woman’s husband dies, his brother will marry her, they will have children and those children will carry on the deceased person’s name.

So in order to make Jesus stumble in his defense of resurrection, the Sadducees ask what would happen if each of seven brothers married one woman and all died childless. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection? It’s what a friend of mine who is a lawyer

would call a gotcha question. Their goal is to make the idea of resurrection seem absurd and to expose Jesus as a fake.

But Jesus has a brilliant answer. He says in essence. “You mistakenly assume that the cultural conventions of our time will continue to determine our lives in the coming age of resurrection. Unlike today in that time beyond death we will neither marry nor be given in marriage. We will not be able to die anymore.”4

Why does Jesus refer to death here? Greek uses two different words for “to marry” and “to be given in marriage.” In that world of the Bible men marry and women are given in marriage. Jesus looks at the marriage arrangements of his time as a way of dealing with the insecurity that follows death, almost as a kind of insurance policy.

Since in the next world there will be no more death, a widow will no longer need a new husband or a child to provide for her. At that point she will not be someone’s wife, or someone’s property. She will simply be a child of God, a child of the resurrection.

Jesus declares that in the resurrection, we will not have power over other people. No one will have power over us. We will all be free. If this were not enough he even goes on to give the Sadducees a reason for why they might change their mind and experience the liberating influence of the resurrection. He gives them an idea taken from the portion of the Bible that they regard as authoritative.

When Moses experiences God after seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed by flame. God tells him, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6), not “I WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” In that time when Jesus was surrounded by death and the fear of death he says that God is, “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive” (Lk. 20).

And so today we experience again the way of Jesus. He does not hate or attack his enemies. He listens from the heart. He firmly responds to their arguments in the way that my teacher Cornel west did as college sophomore. Jesus wins them over with love so that they say, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”

Jesus also warns us to be careful of expecting God to be limited by our cultural conventions and our intelligence. Even in our moments of greatest imagination, we cannot grasp the beautiful mystery of the holiness that is our deepest desire.

And yet we have these moments of insight. Do you ever feel as if someone you loved but has died is near? Your intuition may be right because, to God “all of them are alive.”

Today we celebrate All Saint’s Day by baptizing fifteen people into the church. They will join this mystical community of people who are liberated from the fear of death and straining to live in love. They will be joining you and me, and all the people of all times and places who are still alive in God.

What happens after you die? Jesus cares so much about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death does not have to constrain how we live and that one day we will be free of the social structures that diminish us. Jesus might ask, “Whose poster would you put up on your dorm room wall? Who would you be willing to stand up for and defend in public even at the risk of your life?”

Let us pray: You know our hearts O God, you see the challenges we face. Help us to listen from the heart and give us a space to be heard. And let us find our hope in the presence of those who have gone before us and in the love of your son Jesus. Amen.

_______________

1 There is so much more to this story and to Professor West’s connections with the Nation of Islam. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (New York: SmileyBooks, 2009) 63, 67-70.

2 I don’t know if it is true but the Wikipedia article claims that the Sadducees name was related to Zadok the High Priest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees

3 Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

4 https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/11/5/whats-resurrection-for-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-second-week-after-pentecost

Dolores Huerta

Civil Rights Activist

October 23, 2022

Grace Cathedral

San Francisco, CA 

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31).                                                                   

Jeremiah 31:27-34

Psalm 119:97-104

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

Luke 18:1-8

“When the Son of humanity comes will he find faith on earth” (Lk. 18)? These words from two thousand years ago are the defining question of our time. This week the House Committee on the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol concluded its hearings. We have seen indisputable evidence that politicians continue to use false claims of electoral fraud to secure their own power.[1]

Last month the governors of Florida and Texas falsely promised jobs and resettlement help to asylum seekers who they sent to Washington, D.C. and Martha’s Vineyard. They used immigrants, including children, as part of a political stunt.[2] This action echoes the way that black southerners were bused out of the south by segregationist White Citizens’ Councils to cities with prominent integrationist leaders in 1962.[3]

This week in Ukraine and Iran ordinary people were slaughtered because of a distant political agenda, because of an ideology. Here at home we see terrible poverty and neglect on our own streets. “When the Son of humanity comes, will he find faith on earth?”

In the face of the heartbreaking cruelty and dishonesty of his own time Jesus tells his friends, “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk. 18). Jesus tells this story near the end of his own journey to Jerusalem, as he talks about the end of time when God’s realm of justice, peace and love will come.

The Hebrew Bible frequently demands that the powerful have a special responsibility to widows, strangers and orphans. These groups are vulnerable because they have no male relatives to defend them. Although widows in the Bible (like in the stories of Ruth or Elijah and the widow of Zarephath) often model tenacity, resourcefulness and initiative, they represent vulnerability just as the judge symbolizes power.

In several sections of Luke’s Gospel he uses a “how much more” argument. “If you then, who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk. 11:13).[4] This parable uses this same logic.

A widow comes to a judge seeking justice. He does not believe in God. Nor does he respect people. He refuses to help her until he reasons that, “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out” (Lk. 18). Let me point out two ways in which the Greek version differs from the English translation. When the judge says that he does not want the widow to “wear him out” the Greek word for this is hupopiazē. It is an expression from boxing. It means to literally give someone a black eye. The judge doesn’t want the widow to embarrass him or injure his reputation.

Second, the Greek more strongly conveys urgency, impatience and conviction. Greek uses double negatives to add emphasis. It’s almost as if Jesus raises his voice to underline what he means. A more literal version might be, “And will not God give vengeance to his chosen ones who are crying day and night? And be impatient to help them!”[5]

The point is not that God resembles the unjust judge. In almost every respect Jesus describes God as the opposite. The judge is self-centered. He only uses people. But God is full of love, impatient for his children to thrive. Jesus is unafraid to be humiliated for our sake. The purpose of this “how much more” story is for us to trust God and to persist in prayer.[6]

Today I want to give you one picture of a faithless world and then to consider how faith humanizes us.

In college I knew a woman whose favorite story was Ernest Hemmingway's "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber." This always worried me about her partly because of the story's misogyny but mostly because of its position with regard to faith.

We meet Francis Macomber as a thirty-five year old American business tycoon on safari in East Africa. As the story unfolds we gradually come to realize that he has committed the cardinal sin in the universe of Hemingway fiction. The day before he betrayed his manliness and ran in fear from a wounded lion who had been concealed in the tall grass.

Margot, his wife, does not try to comfort him in his humiliation. Instead, she despises this act of cowardice and as a consequence she sleeps with the safari leader that night. Hemmingway also seems to hate his own fictitious character, because he wouldn't leave his wife, because "he would take anything" from her.[7]

The next day the group goes in pursuit of a dangerous buffalo. Then, suddenly, in an almost religious conversion, Macomber changes. Hemmingway writes, that “[f]or the first time in his life he felt wholly without fear. Instead of fear he had a feeling of definite elation.” The safari leader admires this new courage. His wife fears it because she no longer has the power to make him ashamed of being afraid.

Why is it called a "Short Happy Life"? Only moments later as Macomber tries to flush the buffalo out of the long grass, “he [feels] a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.” Although his wife claimed she was aiming at the buffalo, she shot him in the back of the head.

When the son of man comes will he find faith on earth? In Hemmingway's universe there is no faith. Men can never depend on women, or on other men. Every person is either a conquest or an adversary. The individual can only rely on an elusive courage that comes miraculously from within, an irrational bravery which completely isolates each soul from all else.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr emphasizes that faith means more than merely faith in God. Faith concerns all the ways that we are connected to and support and depend on each other. “We see this possibility – that human history will come to its end… in the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and “word of honor” is given and received in deception and distrust. If [human beings] can no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as [human beings]?”[8]

What shall we do in this time before the second coming of Christ? We need to pray and not lose hope. We also need to strive to be people of honesty and integrity, to listen and care for others. To use the language of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) we need to treat people as ends rather than as means to our own goals. The heartbreaking sin of this judge was his inability to see the widow as a person.

I have a friend named Sue Everson who is a world authority on hopelessness. As a medical researcher she studies the effect that hopelessness has on our health. One of her more startling statistics is that people who feel hopeless are twenty percent more likely to die in the next four years from a stroke. Hopelessness increases your chance of a stroke to the same degree that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day does.  Sue scientifically studies how religion seems to make people less hopeless.[9]

Today with churches around the world we celebrate the Children’s Sabbath. A central part of what we do together involves our care for children and families. We teach children how to listen spiritually, how to pray and not lose heart. Professor Lisa Miller has been our guest on the forum twice. She argues that denying our spirituality is not just untrue but unhealthy for us and especially for children.

Using new techniques ranging from twin studies to neuroimaging, scientists are coming to a new appreciation for just how important spirituality is for human flourishing. Miller claims that all children possess a kind of “natural spirituality.” This interest in the Holy, this, “direct sense of… the heartbeat of the living universe… precedes and transcends language, culture and religion.”[10] This spirituality protects us, but not completely, from depression, anxiety and the tendency to misuse alcohol and drugs.

So what is the most important thing that we can do as adults for children? We can support their Sunday School teachers and the families who gather here. We can take their questions seriously. We can listen to them.[11]

And so the conversation continues every week here. In life we are forever asking and being asked a simple question, “do you believe me?”[12] Do you? Seeing what is happening in the world, it is easy to struggle with a crisis of trust right now. I trust God but I don’t know if the Son will find faith on earth. And yet at the same time I feel remarkably supported by the life I find at Grace Cathedral.

C.S. Lewis writes that, “Faith… is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of changing moods….” Because of this he says we need to pray and hold some of the Christian ideals in our mind for a period of time every day. We need to worship because, “We have to be continually reminded of what we believe… Belief has to be fed…” People do not cease to be Christian because of a good argument but because they simply drift away.

Kathleen Norris writes, “prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.”[13]

My friends pray always and do not lose heart. Be trustworthy and care for the children. When the Son of humanity comes may he find faith on earth.

[1] Alan Feuer, Luke Broadwater, Maggie Haberman, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt, “Jan. 6: The Story So Far,” The New York Times, 14 October 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/politics/jan-6-timeline.html?name=styln-capitol-mob&region=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=show&is_new=false

[2] Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eileen Sullivan, “Is That Legal: How Scores of Migrants Came to be Shipped North,” The New York Times, 16 September 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/us/politics/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis.html?name=styln-marthas-vineyard-immigrants&region=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=show&is_new=false and https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/us/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-texas.html

[3] Jacey Fortin, “When Segregationists Offered One-Way Tickets to Black Southerners,” The New York Times, 14 October 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/us/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-texas.html

[4] See also, “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you – you of little faith!” (Lk. 12:28).

[5] 22 Pent (10-16-16) 24C.

[6] Ibid.

[7]  Hemingway cynically writes, "They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him now." Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway (NY: Scribners/Macmillan, 1987) 18. See also, 20 Pent (10-21-01) 24C.

[8] “We see this possibility – that human history will come to its end neither in a brotherhood of [humanity] nor in universal death under the blows of natural or man-made catastrophe, but in the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and “word of honor” is given and received in deception and distrust. If [human beings] can no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as [human beings]?”

H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 1.

[9] 20 Pent (10-17-04) 24C.

[10] Lisa Miller, The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving (NY: Picador, 2015) 25.

[11] Miller quotes a parent who says, “I didn’t realize for a long time that when my child asks a question and I say, “I don’t know,” and just leave it at that, I’m actually stopping the conversation.” Ibid., 47.

[12] H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 22.

[13] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (NY: Riverhead Books, 1998) 60-1.

"No slave can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and wealth.” Luke 16

Jeremiah 8:18--9:1

Psalm 79:1-9

1 Timothy 2:1-7

Luke 16:1-13

I have been dwelling on Jesus’ parable about the fired manager over the last few months. In an instant the shock of losing everything seizes him. A sense of inadequacy, worthlessness and humiliation confronts us when we do not have enough to provide for those we love. This terror may be completely foreign to you, it may have come and gone in different stages of your life – or  you may be in the grips of this fear now and have no idea how to ever escape from it.

We often talk about inequality without spelling out what it really means. In our society we tolerate a greater amount of insecurity and fear than in other advanced democracies. Not having adequate healthcare, housing, food, education and leisure time creates terrible and unnecessary suffering for millions. In America racism has always been part of this story. Treating some people as less than fully human has made us callous to the pain of others.

People often ask me a simple question that I never answer straightforwardly. “Why do your parents live in Florida?” The reason quite simply is that during the last years of his employment a younger woman was being abused by my father’s boss. My dad publicly stood up for her and as a result lost his job and the pension benefits that he desperately needed in his retirement. For every remaining year of his life he will continue to pay a substantial price for acting righteously. Their small Florida town is a cheap place to live.

Jesus’ story is similarly about a turning point in someone’s life. It is about a man forced to look back at his past as he faces an uncertain future. A manager caught squandering his boss’ wealth gets fired. Afraid that he will fall into poverty, he acts quickly. Before the owner can get the word out, the manager cancels his clients’ debts in the hope that they may one day help him.

It seems strange but the owner regards this behavior as clever. Jesus agrees. He says, “for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light” (Lk. 16).  Jesus goes on, “I tell you make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.”

Augustine, the fourth century African saint writes, “I can’t believe this story came from the lips of our Lord.” We agree and immediately set to work explaining it, justifying it, domesticating Jesus so that he won’t interrupt our life. But Jesus will not sit down and be silent.

Perhaps we feel offended, because Jesus says, “be like that” manager when we believe we are better than that. If we were laid off, we would not walk out with the office furniture, or give away company property to win friends cheaply. We long for a simple explanation of this story that will not complicate our life. Jesus however does not care about this. He passionately desires that we will return to God.

Scholars want the same kind of simple answer that we do. They explain the story away. Some call it hyperbole, a kind of exaggeration that Jesus uses to get our attention. Others suggest that the owner is a first century crime boss and that this manager robs the rich to give to the poor. One scholar writes that the steward gives away his regular commission.

Each of these explanations might make us feel more comfortable, but I believe that Jesus is challenging us. Three things particularly stand out about his words this morning. Jesus speaks about how to treat money and the future.

Jesus talks about money more than you and I do. I read somewhere that in the gospel of Luke one out of every seven of Jesus’ sayings has to do with money. Jesus seems consistently more concerned about it than about friendship, sex, marriage, politics, government, war, family values, truthfulness or church. Jesus more wisely than most of us recognizes the power of money. I wonder if people who believe only in material things, but do not believe in God, talk more about money that spiritual people.

Jesus would say that both are wrong, both materialists and Christians underestimate the effect that money has on our soul. Materialists fail to recognize the existence of the ultimate. Christians fail to see how money is related to it. Jesus says some radical things about money. He understands the temptation to live for accumulating money and the things that it can buy.

With regard to the gospel and money, there is one thing I am sure of and one that I am not. I’m not certain about this part, but it seems to me that money in the Gospel of Luke is always tainted. Luke calls it mammon. This word includes everything that you own that has cash value. There is something already corrupt about mammon. We all tell stories to justify why we have money and someone else does not. We all may be equal in God’s eyes, but money substantiates the difference between a person with power and a person without it.

Part of me wants to resist this, to believe that money is simply neutral, that its goodness depends only on what we spend it on. But I think Luke’s point is that this view assumes that money has no history before we possess it. In our culture we have so many self-serving stories that justify our wealth. We often associate it with moral virtue (as if it mostly came from our hard work, intelligence, education, competence, etc.). By warning us about money, Luke reminds us of the truth. All we have and all we own and all we are comes from God.

This is not at all to say that we should try to be poor. Money can solve problems. The vast majority of problems could be resolved by a particular amount of money. Unfortunately the solutions that money buys never last. Our problems traced back to their roots are ultimately spiritual problems.

This brings me to the second point about money, the thing that I am more sure about. I believe that money connects the spiritual and the material. I know it is radical, but with Jesus, I am convinced that we can use our money to genuinely please God. Whether money is inevitably tainted as I believe Luke claims, or if it is neutral as my economics professors believed, money makes ministry possible. We can do God’s work with money. We can make an amazing difference in the lives of the poor, the sick, the lonely and the spiritually destitute through our use of money.

True wealth comes not from what we receive or own but from what we give away. Grace Cathedral with its beauty, its history as one of the oldest churches in Western America may seem as close to permanent as you can get in this world of change.

But this is a fragile institution. Every year a large number of people have to give a large amount of money in order for us to keep going. There are not many places that will make better use of your gift. Organized together we visit the sick, the lonely and the elderly. We teach children about God and introduce them to adults who they can depend on. God changes lives here. Maybe your money is honest, maybe it’s not, but it does do God’s work at Grace Cathedral.

The final thing that I believe Jesus says to us through this story has to do with time. I think faith can make some people passive. They reason that since God has all the power, what they do doesn’t matter. Jesus emphasizes that this is a parable about a turning point. The manager feels the same kind of pressure that we feel here today. But instead of responding with nostalgia for a more stable past, or by wallowing in his present misery, the manager acts decisively. Jesus applauds this.

The American poet Marie Howe wrote a poem about her brother dying of AIDS called “The Last Time.” “The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant / … he leaned forward // and took my two hands in his hands and said, / I’m going to die soon.  I want you to know that. // And I said, I think I do know. / And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t. // And I said, I do. And he said, What? / And I said, Know that you’re going to die. // And he said, No, I mean that you are.”

When it comes to money, most of us act as if we don’t know that we will die.  Jesus’ story is not just about how we are spending our money, but how we are spending our lives.  Perhaps his deeper point is that this world, in which we spend ourselves to impress others or to protect our ego, is passing away.  In this life we have a singular opportunity to spend ourselves shrewdly for the sake of God’s Kingdom.

The story of the unjust manager may not make complete sense to us yet. But this parable reminds us that a feeling of entitlement and superiority comes along with our money. This can isolate us from God, and make us blind to the needs of others. Jesus’ story also shows us the connection between the spiritual and the material, that God is more pleased by what we give than what we get.

Finally it awakens us to the truth that Jesus’ promise is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. You cannot buy the future. It will never belong to you. But you can act confidently because the future belongs to God. I think this is what my father did when he helped his co-worker. I wonder what effect his simple sacrifice has had in her life over the years. This is what Jesus himself did. Even on the way to the cross he trusted God completely. No home on earth will ever feel completely comfortable or safe because we were made to always draw nearer to our creator.

Another says that the manager expected the owner to check the books and that the owner is glad for the positive public relations that this debt relief would bring.

The escaped slave Frederick Douglass writes that, “You may not get all that you pay for in this world but you pay for all that you get.” Quoted in Frederick Streets, “Accountability,” The Christian Century, 3/17/99.

If you go to a therapist, they’ll help you find your strengths and adjust for your weaknesses. They’ll give you books to read and have conversations about how you feel. If you go to Jesus, he tells you something totally different. Jesus says trust in God, because the future belongs to him.

Marie Howe What the Living Do (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

“Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost” (Lk. 15).

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28

Psalm 14

1 Timothy 1:12-17

Luke 15:1-10

Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By is one of my favorite books. These authors point out that simple unexamined metaphors lie behind the very structure of our thought. The idea of “argument as war” is an example. We talk about winning an argument, an indefensible position, being right on target, shooting down an assumption, etc. We could imagine another culture regarding argument as being more like a kind of dance.[i]

Today Jesus addresses two primal understandings of religion that deeply influenced the people of his society and our own. The first is the idea of a spiritual quest, a search for God. The second idea is that of church as a community of saints set apart from the world. Jesus upsets assumptions that lie so deep in our consciousness that we simply assume that this is just what life in God means.

The spiritual quest. On December 24, 1915 Albert Einstein was drinking tea in his Berlin apartment when he received a crumpled, muddy, blood-stained letter from the trenches of World War I. It contained a message from the great genius and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916). Let me quote the letter’s final words. “As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas.”[ii]

The letter astounded Einstein not simply because one of the most respected scientists in Germany was commanding an artillery unit on the Russian front, or because of the author’s fear of a coming catastrophe. In tiny print on the back page, only legible through the use of a magnifying glass, Schwarzschild had sent him the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity.

Schwarzschild’s approach worked well on a normal star which you might imagine as being like a bowling ball sitting on your bed and gently compressing the space around it. The problem arises when a large star exhausts its fuel and collapses. That star would keep compressing until the force of gravity grew to be so great that space would become infinitely curved and closed in on itself. The result would be, “an inescapable abyss permanently cut off from the rest of the universe.”

Out of a sense of duty and perhaps also to show that a faithful Jew could be a good German, Schwarzschild volunteered to serve in the war. During a mustard gas attack he helped two of his men put on masks. Slow to put on his own, this exposure may have been what initiated an autoimmune disorder that painfully covered his body with sores and killed him months later.

At first Schwarzschild dismissed his discovery as a kind of mathematical anomaly, but over time it began to really frighten him. In his last letter from Russia to his wife he wrote that this idea, “has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.”

A young man named Richard Courant stayed up talking with Schwarzschild on the night before he died. Schwarzschild told him that this concentration of mass would distort space and causality.[iii] The true horror was that since light would never escape from it, this singularity was unknowable, utterly unchanging, entirely isolated from everything else. Schwarzschild was one of the first people to contemplate the meaning of a black hole.[iv] But all of us are quite capable of imagining a place completely cut off from God. In fact most of us have been there.

Isolation can feel terrifying. Perhaps you feel misunderstood, or set apart by a secret, or by experiences that makes you different from the people around you. Maybe you believe that something that you did in the past simply cannot be forgiven or that you have been harmed and cannot be healed. Perhaps just the busyness of your life, or the loneliness of it, makes real connection with another person impossible. Or maybe you just feel that you are missing something that others have, that you are cut off from God.

The religious leaders of Jesus’ time see him sharing meals with deplorable, notoriously immoral people, with prostitutes and the tax collectors who collaborate with the Roman army. They often point out that these people haven’t really changed or repented. They wonder if Jesus is incurably naïve. They argue that someone who was from God would have the wisdom to realize how bad these people really are.

In response Jesus tells three stories. One is about a wealthy shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one in the wilderness. “When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices” (Lk. 15). Another is about a woman sweeping the whole house to find a coin and concludes saying, “There is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents.” The last is the story of the Prodigal Son.

In other words Jesus takes our dominant metaphor of a spiritual quest and turns it on its head. Religion is not about seeking God. It is about God’s persistence in finding us. It is about overcoming separation and the joy of reunion.

As a young management consultant one of my closest friends in our Santa Monica office was a young engineer named Walid Iskandar. Walid had grown up in Lebanon during the 1970’s. He was a deeply sincere, thoughtful and fun person with a kind of mischievous smile that I can still see in my mind’s eye.

In college I played rugby with a young freshman who was still trying to figure out the game. His name was Mark Bingham. What these two friends of mine share in common is that they both lost their lives twenty one years ago today when terrorists hijacked their airplanes. In my imagination they are perpetually young. In their last moments, despite the confusion and fear, I believe that God was with them.

In 2018 twelve boys on a soccer team with their coach found themselves trapped deep below the earth in a labyrinthine network of flooded caves in Thailand. As the monsoon season progressed it seemed impossible to nearly everyone in the world that they would be saved. Cave divers from England talked about not being able to see their hands in front of their masks, of wriggling through impossibly narrow spaces again and again unsure of the way out. I will never forget that image of the diver emerging from the water and the amazement on the boys’ faces that they had been found. This joy at being discovered lies at the heart of faith.

The second idea that Jesus overturns is that the church exists as a community of holy people set apart from the world. You see this in the conviction that you must first think, say, or do something before you can be acceptable to God.

A few weeks ago a very close friend went to the funeral of her father. At the end of the service, the very last words that the pastor spoke went something like this. “Pat was a great husband, father, lawyer and community leader. But until Pat found Jesus and accepted him in his heart, he was a sinner. Only through the sacrifice of Jesus are we cleansed from sin. No matter how hard you might try to be good, until you have accepted Jesus you are a sinner.”

Jesus completely overturns this picture of how to be in God. It’s not that you become good and then God helps you. Instead, God helps us so that we can be healed. The critics of Jesus feel offended by his connection to the people who break the rules. And Jesus tells them, “these are exactly the people I came to help. God’s love is abundant and overflowing. God will always persist in finding those who are lost.”

The point is that God’s love and mercy always comes before anything else. We do not first accept Jesus in our heart and then become free from sin. The church is not a community of former sinners, but of actively sinning sinners. God does not reward us for living well or believing something, God makes living well and faith itself possible by loving us back to life.

Today we celebrate Congregation Sunday and our calling as a unique people of God. There is no other community quite like this one and I love who we are. But let me be perfectly clear, we have not stopped screwing up. And yet we are loved by God anyway. Although we continue to slip up, we keep encountering God’s grace. This makes us a joyful community of people who against all odds God has found in the way that God is finding all people.

Let me close with a poem by Denise Levertov about this peace that passes all understanding. It’s called “The Avowal.”

“As swimmers dare / to lie face to the sky / and water bears them, / as hawks rest upon air / and air sustains them, / so would I learn to attain / freefall, and float / into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, / knowing no effort earns / that all-surrounding grace.”[v]

In the face of isolation, everyday cruelty and sudden death what metaphor are we going to live by? Will we choose to see our life as a spiritual quest or as the experience of being found by God? Are we the holy ones or lost souls grateful every day to be found by God. My friends rejoice with me.

[i] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 3-7.

[ii] Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World tr. Adrian Nathan West (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2020) 34ff. See also “Karl Schwarzschild” on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schwarzschild

[iii] A hypothetical traveler capable of surviving a journey into a black hole would receive light and information from the future.

[iv] And the frightening question asked by this dying man was that if such a thing exists in nature, could there be something like this in the human psyche. Could a concentration of human will cause millions to be exploited so that the laws of human relations no longer held? Schwarzschild feared that this was already happening in Germany.

[v] Denise Levertov, “The Avowal.” https://allpoetry.com/The-Avowal