Clay in the Potter's Hands

Sermon for the 16^th Sunday after Pentecost, September 4, 2016

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, ND

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

Texts:  Jeremiah 18:1-11; Philemon

The children will be making and squishing teeny tiny pots, I’m sure, through the rest of today’s service. What are we to make of the object lesson that God presented Jeremiah with? 

God asks Jeremiah to watch as the potter makes a vessel on his wheel, decides it isn’t what he had in mind, and smushes it so he can make something better. 

There are beautiful songs about this.  We’ve sung “Change my heart, O God…make me be like you.  You are the Potter, I am the clay.  Remold me, make me, this is what I pray.”  We will sing later this morning: “Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way. Thou art the Potter, I am the clay.” 

How do we move beyond the trivial with this image?  What can we learn that might deepen our understanding?  Here are some things to think about:

1.  God is speaking about the politics and behavior of nations in this passage in Jeremiah’s prophecy.  Do we even have a right to apply this metaphor to ourselves as individuals, or is this really about the fates of kingdoms and nations?

Here’s what I think: often the images we see in the Old Testament apply at BOTH the macro and the micro level.  Nations rise and fall;  and while cruel and powerful nations rise quickly, they also often fall just as quickly, wreaking terrible havoc in their wake, to be sure.  But they don’t last.   The nations that aspire to be just and to treat their weakest members with compassion may go through terrible times, but they endure.  The United States has broadened its understanding over 2 and a half centuries of what it means for all people to be equal.  Men AND women vote. Slavery is illegal.  We have a very long way to go to offer equal opportunity to every baby born, but we are working on it.  God can take nations and permit them to break down.  God can also raise up nations.    That was Jeremiah’s point.  Yet I don’t believe it is wrong to think on a personal scale, too.  I do know that God can bring enormous pressure to bear on the clay of our lives and remold those lives into something better. 

2.  God sent Jeremiah to the Potter’s house because clay has some important properties that we need to pay attention to.  Clay  (not the stuff I made from corn starch and Elmer’s glue, but the real stuff that pottery is made of) comes from the ground, the earth.  If we are clay in God’s hands, then perhaps we can remember our humble origins, our fundamental relationship to the earth.  God made human beings out of the dust of the earth.  God breathed into human nostrils the breath of life, says our Genesis origin story.  And the prophet Jeremiah told us last Sunday that God is the source of living water.  What is clay but a special kind of dust mixed with water?    Who are we as human beings in the Potter’s hands but clay made from dust and living water?  We human beings live our lives in a matrix of materials that we share with the planet. Plus God’s breath of life.  We are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as one translation of the psalm we read this morning puts it.

3.  God is speaking of nations and people as clay.  God is asking, through the entire prophetic scroll of Jeremiah, for people to repent, to return again to God, to receive God’s gracious invitation, God’s deep and lasting love.  Yet the metaphor of clay is problematic in that it doesn’t give much agency to the clay.  It doesn’t give ANY agency to the clay!  Let’s remember that this is a METAPHOR, a way of speaking about things.  It is not the only metaphor.  A metaphor brings one aspect of the truth into focus.  It is not the only way of seeing things.  Every metaphor by itself becomes a lie.  But in the context of the many symbols and metaphors for our relationship with God, it opens truth to us by giving us new insights. 

4.  And one of the most important insights of Jeremiah’s trip to the Potter’s House was that Clay is flexible.  The potter can re-work it for hours if he or she chooses.  This image of us as clay and God as the Potter means that we can remember that God is still working on us. God is still changing us, shaping us.  What we are right now (whether it is pretty fine or whether we are really unsatisfied) is not what we will ultimately become.  God can still make us useful.

And that brings us to the Letter that Paul wrote to Philemon.  Paul is under house arrest as he writes.  He may receive visitors but his own movements are restricted.  A slave named Onesimus, who had been part of Philemon’s household has made his way to Paul.  His name, more than coincidentally, means “Useful.”  While there with Paul, Onesimus becomes a follower of Jesus.  And that changes everything.  If we hear this letter in the context of the image we carry from Jeremiah, God is taking the social structure of Paul’s and Philemon’s and Onesimus’s day and smashing it all together in order to make something new and more beautiful and useful, something that more closely reflects on an earthly plane the values of the Kingdom of Heaven. Once Onesimus was useful to Philemon, and then, by being un-trustworthy and running away, he became Useless.  Now Paul is proposing to Philemon that Onesimus is no longer useless.  In fact, Paul would like Philemon to stop seeing Onesimus as a commodity at all.  Onesimus has become Paul’s spiritual child, and Onesimus has become Philemon’s brother.    In this context, to talk of one human enslaving another human is simply monstrous.   This is the New Testament letter that really speaks most strongly to the abolition of slavery.  And divine transformation (clay-smooshing) occurs in the hearts of both Philemon and Onesimus, and must be reflected in the behavior of both. 

A small change—making Onesimus useful by restoring him again to being an obedient and trustworthy slave—that’s not how the Potter works.  The change God had in mind was far greater.  It required change in Paul.  Paul could say that he (a free Roman citizen) was a slave and a prisoner of Christ Jesus.  Paul could say that slaves were to rejoice in the freedom to which Christ set them free even if the political situation did not yet reflect that great reality.  Philemon and Onesimus were to regard one another as brothers. Onesimus was no longer to regard Philemon as an employer to whom he owed the least he could get away with.    Philemon was no longer to regard Onesimus—or any other human being--as a commodity.  Paul doesn’t actually write this, but I believe that if Philemon had other slaves in his household, it was time to grant them their freedom, as well.  It was not the fact that Onesimus had become a Christian that obligated Philemon to make a change.  Rather, the occasion of Onesimus’ return forced Philemon to see the reality of God re-shaping the clay of the human heart and human society. 

Jesus wasn’t interested, either, in seeing people just put their toe in the pool of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Today’s reading shows us Jesus speaking in hyperbole.  “Unless you hate your family, you cannot be my disciple.”  “Unless you give away everything you have, you cannot be my disciple.”  You can’t order any of your other loves correctly unless your love of God is utter and absolute.  But once you recognize the absolute and infinite extent of the reign of God, you find that the vessel of your social relationships is being collapsed and re-shaped in the hands of God the Potter.   No human being may any longer be regarded as a resource or a commodity.  The elements of the earth itself have clothed the Son of God in the clay of flesh.  We see how God the Creator has knit our flesh together out of the elements of this earth.  We can’t dishonor God by allowing the pillaging of the earth for profit.  We can’t put at risk the waters that we depend on for our life.  For leaders of the Episcopal Church, the decision to support the Standing Rock Dakota in their efforts to protect their ancestral lands and the Missouri River from the Dakota Access Pipeline came directly from this realization. 

I’m sure that, in a few weeks we’ll sing the song again:  “Change my heart, O God. Make it ever true.  Change my heart, O God.  May I be like you.  You are the Potter; I am the clay.  Mold me and make me.  This is what I pray.”  But in light of the reading we had from Luke this morning, I remind you that being clay in the hands of the Potter can sometimes feel brutal and disorienting.  The Divine Hands are gentle and persevering.  When God molds us the outcome is often quite different from what we might expect.  It is  always more than we can ask or imagine. 

God Makes us One (4th Sermon in a series on Galatians)

Text: Galatians 3:23-29.

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot North Dakota

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

A very famous preacher and theologian, Karl Barth, who addressed his Christian sisters and brothers during one of the darkest times in the history of our world—that is, during the Second World War—taught seminarians that they should preach with a Bible in one hand and the day’s newspaper in the other.    He believed that people in the pews had the right to expect that what they heard on Sunday morning would help them gain perspective on what was going on in the world. 

Today’s sermon is the fourth in a series based on St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in the region of Galatia, in what is now Turkey.  There’s a danger in planning such a series that the newspaper will drop out of our hand while we’re considering the Bible, chapter after chapter, passage after passage.   But there’s also a magnificent challenge to us as readers of the Bible and servants of the God that that Bible reveals.  It’s the challenge of seeing that God speaks to us today, through a sacred book that is two thousand years old, about events that are endlessly on the news, on the internet, in the newspaper. 

Somebody said to me earlier this week that they were just sick of hearing about the shootings of a hundred people in Orlando at the Pulse Nightclub a week ago this morning, resulting in the deaths of about half of those shot.   We have all heard and seen commentary on the shooter, his background, his troubled past, the sexual orientation he struggled to come to terms with.  We’ve heard the arguments about how his religious background played into his behaviors; we’ve heard arguments about how the easy availability of semi-automatic weapons and the Florida law that forbids concealed carry of handguns into bars and clubs may have affected the outcome.   We all know that this horrific event took place within a week of the anniversary of another terrible, awful mass shooting at a Bible study at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Most directly relevant to the news cycle, certainly, is the story we heard read this morning from St. Luke’s Gospel of the man with the unquiet mind, who met Jesus and the disciples when they were traveling through the wilderness in the region of Galilee.  This man was deeply troubled; he was crazy; he was dangerous.  He could no longer live in civilization; houses didn’t feel like home.  Something inside him was so dead that he felt more at home in the silence of the tombs of a cemetery, with neighbors who would not look askance at him.  He was so miserable in his skin that clothing felt too confining, too defining, perhaps.  The local residents knew him and feared him, kept him under guard, shackled him with chains.  What a nightmare life!  (That is what the artist Tissot tried to communicate about this man’s life in the painting on the bulletin cover: its utter hopelessness, the man’s sense that he did not fit in the community, the sense that he was trapped and chained in his misery.)    In our civilization, in our day, there are also people whose mental suffering is so severe that they, too, feel utterly trapped, whether there are physical restraints or not.  And when the frustration reaches a boiling point, something snaps.  And when guns are easily available, if the rhetoric of hate comes pre-mixed from white supremacist groups, from a homophobic culture or religion, or even if the inner voices of self-hatred can’t be silenced—there is terrible danger, and unspeakable tragedy can result.  It is significant that the man in Luke’s Gospel told Jesus his name was Legion.  The voices, the influences in his head, were many and confusing and terrifying. 

Jesus set the man free; he drove the demons out of the man.  When he was well, he sat at Jesus’ feet, he put on clothes, he was ready to return to the community that had feared and rejected him, and encouraged to share the news of what God had done for him, to tell the story of how God had set him free. He was not set free to be a loner, but free to enter into community, as a now useful, appreciated, and trustworthy member. 

After the clamor of all those voices inside the man called Legion, the presence of God, loving him, welcoming him back home, must have sounded like the blessed sound of sheer silence.  That was where Elijah the Prophet knew God’s presence.  Not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in the “sound of sheer silence.”  And Elijah stood at the entrance of the cave where he had been hiding, clothed, with his mantle, the garment that symbolized his prophetic call throughout the stories about him in the Books of Kings,  wrapping him as safely as cloth could do.  He heard God ask: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  It was a moment of divine re-orientation. Then God sent him back on the mission to proclaim God’s truth in the dangerous and troubled civilization of his day. 

So here in the reading from the book of Galatians that we heard this week, we also hear about clothing.  It’s a stunning metaphor that St. Paul uses.  He says we have put on Christ as a garment; we are, by virtue of our baptism, wearing God.  The essayist and Episcopal priest, Lauren Winner, recently wrote a book by that title: Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God.

Clothes come between us and the world.  They protect us, keep us warm, they cover the most secret parts so we are not so directly vulnerable or threatening.  (That’s what the man, Legion, lost or cast off in his madness.) Winner talks about how what we wear tells others who we are.  When I wear a clergy collar, it changes how people relate to me.  When you wear a suit people treat you differently than if you’re wearing jeans and a t-shirt.  What I wear is at least a little bit about how I define myself.  What if our understanding of God’s presence in our lives was like that, so that people could see Jesus?  What if we understand that Jesus’ presence in our lives, like Elijah’s mantle, clothes us with God’s power and strength and protection and love?  It is a magnificent way of thinking about that boundary place between our skin and the world’s pain, the world’s ability to hurt us.  If we have been baptized, Paul says, we are wearing Jesus.  Ideally, the world looks at us and sees us clothed in Jesus.  When we are clothed in Jesus, the world sees in us the truth of Jesus, the justice of God, the love of God, the mercy of God.  

When you and I consider the terrible pain and suffering of last Saturday night at Pulse, I wonder what we can do to prevent another attack like this from happening.  We can teach our children, clothed in Jesus, to take the enormous risk of loving others, knowing that we are so safe, clothed in Jesus, that no amount of pain inflicted by one with a shackled and unquiet mind, not even a lethal bullet, can separate us from God’s love.  

These two paragraphs from Paul’s letter to the Galatians contain another truth that we need always to remember.   The very next thing that Paul writes, after this stunning metaphor about wearing Jesus is this:  “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” (Galatians 3:28).  The divisions we human beings create, and deploy as we draw circles with People Like Us safely on the inside and the enemies on the outside?  Paul says that because of Jesus, they don’t exist!  The tribal differences, the gender differences, the differences in wealth and power and social class—they aren’t there in God’s eyes.  We are one in Christ Jesus.  Jesus died, Jesus gave his life for all!

One word summaries each of the first three sermons in this series: 

·      Week one: Freedom… Paul said God through Jesus Christ sets us free from our sins, sets us free to serve others in Christ’s name. 

·      Week Two: Conversion… God takes us and our plans and turns us around, to become who he calls us to be.  Sometimes it is slow, sometimes it is a Damascus Road experience.  But it is authentic when we love better, when others praise God because they see God at work in us. 

·      Week Three: Grace…God freely enters our lives and transforms us, not because we deserve it, or are even looking for it, but because God is God, and God is Love. 

·      This week I would add:  Unity.  We are all converted by God’s grace into this new life of freedom to serve.  We are in this new Christ-clothed life united, together.  The old divisions aren’t there as fences to keep our tribe (People Like Us) inside and their tribe (THOSE people) out.  God is at work and can transform us all. 

We are called to share in the birthing of a People of God, a people whose rhetoric is not governed by hate and exclusion.   There is no place for hatred of Muslims.  There is no place for homophobia.  There is no need to carry an AK-47 for self-protection or the protection of personal property. (We will talk about the possibility of Christians participating in a just war and the defense of their country another time.)  There is nobody out there for whom Jesus did not die.  

We who are baptized wear Jesus as a garment: a garment of protection, and a garment of identity with one who gave his life for our sake. 

Today is Father’s Day.  Fathers, in the very fiber of their being, at their noblest and best, love and protect their families.  We are so deeply grateful for the day in, day out everyday love of the fathers in our lives.  We appreciate their hard work, their affection and love, their way of teaching us to fish and hunt, to play ball, to barbecue, to hold a howling toddler with patience.  We are thankful; we are in awe at the joyful mystery of fatherhood.  We are thankful that, at their best, fathers love in ways that reflect and channel the love of God.   It pains me terribly to have needed to consider the horrible twistedness of one father’s actions early last Sunday morning, and the devastation they brought about—the shooting of a hundred people!  In some confused way, Omar Mateen thought he was protecting his child against danger.  It seems likely that Omar Mateen was angry and conflicted about his own sexuality, and he conveniently hid behind the intolerance of the religion of his family tradition as he sought a way to justify his self-hatred.   How sad that he never learned that Jesus lived and then gave his life to show us that God loves everyone—no exceptions.    Gay and straight, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian; good and wicked, young and old, Republican and Democrat, lazy and hardworking, male and female; white or of color, Native American and immigrant.  God loves everyone—no exceptions.   

Famlies, Story-telling, and a Mandate to Love

Homily for Maundy Thursday, March 24, 2016

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, North Dakota

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

Nine years ago, during Lent, my mother, Grace McSkimming Peterson, almost 92 years old, died very suddenly, and I made the trip to Kansas for her funeral.  It was a sad time, but as the family gathered, there was a lot of light- hearted reminiscence and laughter, too.  One of the best and funniest times was at the supper after the funeral, when my aunt, Wilma Peterson, commandeered a huge chalk board in the church basement where we’d gathered. Wilma is a dedicated amateur genealogist and so she and a couple of relatives: Kevin Larson and Jean Anderson Johnson, also genealogy buffs, created an enormous complex annotated chart to show how the Larsons and the Andersons were related to each other through our family, the Petersons.   It didn’t matter a bit that my mother was a Canadian of Scottish descent.  Wilma made the chart; Kevin and Jean added stories that put some flesh and blood on all those names.  We learned about the uncle who played poker and who let the kids play cards, and about the uncle who burned even the Rook cards the children had received as a Christmas gift from the teacher in their one-room school.  We learned who was considered “simple minded” and who first went to college.  We learned who generously married a pregnant woman abandoned by her ne’er do well boyfriend, and accepted the child who was born as his own.  We heard who was buried in which church cemetery, and why. 

We were remembering.  We were telling the stories that made us who we are today.  We were honoring the values and virtues that we want to pass on to our children’s children.  We were connecting ourselves into a family tree that extended far into the past.

Tonight’s liturgy and the Bible readings that accompany it are about remembering, about receiving a precious, sacred, life-giving story, and holding it in trust, and then in our turn, passing it on to our children’s children.

We heard the story of the first Passover. When Moses hands on God’s commands about how the Israelites are to depart from Egypt, where they have been slaves for centuries, he says: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.  You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance” (Exodus 12:14).  Jews to this very day retell the story of God’s great deliverance of his people. Each generation becomes the repository, and, still more, the conduit, for the Great Story. 

St. Paul was the earliest Christian to set down in writing an account of the Supper that Jesus ate with his disciples in the Upper Room.  Paul was not there himself, and only began to walk on the Way of Jesus years afterwards, but nevertheless he wrote:

         I received from the Lord [Jesus] what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  or as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Cor. 11:23-26).

Every time we gather for the Eucharist, we re-tell the central elements of the story of Jesus and how his life, death, and resurrection bring life to us, and give us resurrection hope.  “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death—until he comes,” Paul writes.  And, like Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who wrote a couple of decades after Paul, Paul records Jesus saying: “Do this in remembrance of me.”  In the interim between the “already,” the facts about Jesus during his lifetime, and the “not yet,” when he comes again, we have this story.  We have this Meal.  And in the story and in the meal, Jesus is present.  And until his fuller coming, he comes anew whenever we gather, remember, and celebrate the Eucharist together. 

The Gospel writers aren’t clear and unanimous about the occasion of this Supper.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to regard it as a Passover meal.  John, who wanted to emphasize that Jesus was the archetypal Passover Lamb, places the Supper in the Upper Room on the night before Passover would have begun.  But in any case there is a very close association between this meal and the meal that Jews still eat to commemorate the Passover.  The Passover meal calls Israel to remember the great deliverance from Egypt that God accomplished on their behalf.  The Lord’s Supper calls Christians to remember our great deliverance from sin and death. 

Re-living the Great Story of God’s involvement with the human race is a relational activity.  At Passover, the youngest child in a Jewish household asks questions that invite the re-telling of the story of the Exodus.  This act of remembrance takes place in community.  When we Christians worship, the central act whenever we gather is an act of remembrance that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, brings us into the presence of Jesus.  He is present; we remember; we take Him into our very selves, and we say “Thank you.”

But as central as this act of remembrance and thanksgiving is, one Gospel writer, John, does not mention it explicitly.  Tonight we heard part of John’s account of this meal as our Gospel reading.  And it begins in the middle of the meal with an act that would normally have taken place before the meal.  It begins with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.  John makes it clear that Jesus interrupts the normal flow of the meal when he does this.  It makes the actions that Jesus takes not only practical, given the dusty roads of Jerusalem, but also highly symbolic. 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke record many parables that Jesus told.  In the Gospel of John, however, rather than telling these parables, Jesus seems to act them out.  Before proclaiming that he is the Light of the World, Jesus healed a blind man.  Before proclaiming that he was the Bread of life, he fed the crowds in the wilderness.  Here, in his last meal with his disciples before he is betrayed and killed, he acts out the great Reversal Rule of the Kingdom of God: The last shall be first and the first shall be last.  The greatest are the servants.

Peter, the Everyman of the disciples, asks: “Lord are you going to wash my feet?”  And it is vey important that we hear Jesus’ reply.

“You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

Later, when they hear Jesus command them to love one another.

Later, when Jesus is summarily condemned to death.

Later, when Jesus is crucified and dies at the time (as John tells the story) when the Passover lambs were being slain.

Later, when, on the day after the Sabbath, some of them find an empty tomb.

Later, when Jesus appears to them alive.

The washing of feet was a lowly act that usually a household servant would do as the Paterfamilias extended hospitality to a guest.  Jesus, extending his hospitality and his welcome on this solemn occasion, did himself what a servant would do.  Jesus says: “Do you know what I have done for you?” (You can hear the silence as the questions sort of just hangs out there on the air.)  “You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am.  So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” 

Jesus washed feet.  This is surely high-touch, relational activity.  Just as surely, it is low-status.  Yet it is in this context that Jesus says: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”  By saying this, I believe that Jesus puts the whole story together.  The crucifixion is not to be understood apart from the Meal or from the radical act of servanthood that the foot-washing represents.  The glory comes in the Great Reversal.  It is the Great Reversal—the Lord of All becoming the Servant of All—that is the Glorious Thing.  The resurrection is a necessary—and equally glorious—consequence.  And it is all about love.

This night is called Maundy Thursday.  “Maundy” comes from the Latin word that gives us our English word “mandate” or “Commandment.”  The Great Reversal sets us all on a new footing, and the principle for life on this new footing is the commandment that Jesus gave that night soon after he hung up his towel: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

And so we remember, we retell the story of the Lord of Life.  And in the telling, in the washing of the feet, or the dishes, or the laundry, we make a community that has a whole new set of rules based on love.  And, just as Jesus is glorified as he washes feet, there is glory in this new way of life. 

And there is power, power to turn the world upside down.  Power to turn back even that last great enemy, Death.

Love one another!

750 Bottles of Wine

Sermon for the 2^nd Sunday of Epiphany, January 17, 2016

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, North Dakota

Let’s turn to the Gospel reading and let’s do some math. (In church?  on a Sunday morning?  Yes, why not???)  Jesus, along with his mother and his disciples, was attending a wedding feast at the groom’s home in the village of Cana.  John, the Gospel Writer, says there were six stone jars there holding water so that the wedding guests could do the Jewish rites of purification.  Each jar held about 25 gallons--about 150 gallons in all.  And Jesus had the servants fill all six jars—quite a feat in the days before fork lifts, running water and electric well pumps.  Another way to picture the quantity of liquid is to multiply 150 gallons by 5—the approximate number of 750 mL bottles of wine per gallon.  750 bottles!  When the steward tasted the contents of the jars, he found that he was drinking the best wine he’d ever tasted.  He commented, perhaps disparagingly, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk.  But you have kept the good wine until now.”

750 bottles of wine!  Surely that was far more than the host needed to satisfy the guests at his party. This is a ridiculous amount of wine.  And what a waste, to “save” it, to hold it back, until the guests were too far gone to appreciate it!

John calls this act “the first of [Jesus’] signs.”  John’s Gospel is not full of healings and miracles, event after event, the way Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels are.  Instead, in his gospel, John picks several representative and important acts of Jesus and highlights them as “signs” pointing the way to an understanding of who Jesus really is, and what his mission was, signs by which Jesus pointed to God, whom he called “my Father.”  These signs are often coupled with teachings: the feeding of the 5000 with Jesus’ teaching about being the bread of the world; the healing of a man born blind coupled with Jesus’ teaching about being the Light of the World.

And John presents Jesus’ teachings a little differently than the other Gospel writers do.  The other three Gospel writers record many of Jesus’ parables, the little stories that pack a big punch and leave none of us un-judged and un-reached by God’s power, God’s mercy, and God’s love.  But John’s Gospel doesn’t have those stories.  Instead, it seems that in John’s Gospel, Jesus is a living parable.  The other Gospels have parables about wedding feasts; John shows us Jesus at a wedding feast. 

Here are some things we may learn from this story about how Jesus reveals God to us:

1.  Jesus attended parties.  This may seem trivial, but it does show him as delighting in community, and blessing the joys of married love.  God created us to experience joy in relationships, to be reconciled with God and each other, to experience unity.  Marriage and feasting are themselves important Jewish metaphors of the joys of God’s ultimate reign, what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God.  We see this in the reading we had this morning from the prophet Isaiah, in which the redeemed people of Israel are called “married” to God.  And this closeness is a thing of delight!

2.  Jesus did not make a big, flashy show of solving the host’s problem of running out of wine.  His mother obviously expected him to do something when she told her Son: “They’re out of wine.”  Jesus almost seems to be giving his mother the brush-off with his response: “What concern is that to you and to me?”  And he makes it even more pointed by calling her, “Woman,” not “Mother.”  Some thoughtful commentators[1] have suggested that John, who absolutely packs his Gospel with allusions and metaphors, is helping us to see ties between Mary and the first Woman, Eve; between the first creation and the love of Adam and Eve, our First Parents on the one hand, and the New Creation that Mary participated in when giving birth to Jesus on the other. 

What concern IS it to Jesus and Mary that a family at a wedding underestimated the amount of wine they’d need?  It’s not, after all, like people would go hungry out in the wilderness, which was a concern of Jesus when he fed the 5000.  Here in Cana, Jesus says to his mother, “My hour has not yet come.”  This is his way of saying that he wants to remain focused on his mission of being the Savior of the World, of proclaiming the Kingdom of God, of calling his followers to Everlasting Life.   Yet Jesus’ mother clearly expects that he will do something about the predicament of the wedding couple.  So she tells the waiters: “Do whatever he tells you.”  (And how many sermons have pointed out that this very obviously is good advice for us, too?  Do whatever Jesus tells you to do!)

This is really quite astonishing!  Think about it: John is the Gospel writer who is concerned from the very beginning with showing Jesus, the Son of God, as fully human and fully divine.  In the poetic prologue to his Gospel, he says of Jesus, whom he calls the Word of God: “The Word became flesh”—[very traditional liturgies expect people to stop in awe and to bow or genuflect at this phrase!] “The word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the Father’s only Son.”  It turns out that God in human flesh can’t stay all abstract and religious.  Jesus’ mission is to bring eternal life, but being the Savior of humankind means caring about the details of human community and life.  And, in fact, as Jesus addresses the needs of this one very specific family, he lives a parable that can’t help but show us what God is like!  He can’t help but reveal God’s glory in this amazing show of abundance.  (And what about us?  Let’s be sure that we’re not so busy being religious that we don’t have time to be kind and generous in our dealings with the people God puts in our path.)

3. The wine that Jesus provided was excellent, better than what the host had started out with, and we may be fairly sure that the host provided the best he could afford for his wedding guests.  But it was not until the man’s resources ran out that Jesus stepped int.  This often seems to the way that God operates in our lives.  When we have nothing more, when we’re through pretending that we can do everything by ourselves, then we are in a position to ask for, and to receive God’s help.  And it is help beyond all we can ask or imagine.  Those of you who read Morning or Evening Prayer regularly know that, quoting Ephesians, we often end those services with a prayer that gives “glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”

4.  That leads us to one more central truth that this “living parable” teaches about God’s ways with us.  We learn something from the sheer audacious excess of wine—not just a couple of extra wineskins, but vats and bathtubs full of wine! God is the God of More than Enough.  I’ve been around here long enough that you’ve all heard me say this before:  God is the God of More than Enough!

God is not stingy with his provision for those he loves.  And, like the wine, God’s love is the best, finest love we’ve ever experienced.  John has said that in this provision of wine for the guests of an anonymous couple at their wedding, Jesus revealed his glory.  God is the God of More than Enough, and that truth is indeed glorious, something to be delighted about!

It is in John’s Gospel that we hear Jesus say that he has come to bring abundant life.  It is in the last book of the Bible, Revelations, also connected with John, that John shares a vision that God gave him.  It is not a vision to “scare the hell” out of the readers.  Rather, its goal is to offer the readers encouragement and hope.  It culminates in a great wedding feast, called the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

The imagery comes full circle.  At the beginning of John’s Gospel, in the first chapter, right after John’s amazing hymn to Jesus as the Word of God made flesh, the other John, John the Baptist, points Jesus out as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  So in the Gospel of John we have “Lamb of God,” “wedding feast,” “glory.”  And in the end of the Book of Revelation, we have again an image of Jesus, the Lamb of God, at a wedding feast, in everlasting glory and light.

In turning water to wine, Jesus gave us a sign that points us to truth about God.  This is the kind of God we worship, a God who cares about a very human bridegroom who runs out of wine at his wedding: a God of glory and holiness; and a God who cares about one person at a time and pours out his abundant love on each of us.

According to St. Paul, this is the God to whom we are giving our undivided loyalty when, by the power of God’s Spirit, we say “Jesus is Lord.”  This is the God who provides for our life together as the Church with the same kind of glorious, excessive abundance that characterized the wine at the wedding feast in Cana.  And it’s a good thing, because if, by the power of the Spirit, we say “Jesus is Lord,” we are implying that nothing else is Lord.  The state is not Lord, whether Rome or Washington.  The Dollar is not Almighty.  No political leader can be our savior. We ourselves individually are not God.  Jesus is Lord.

Tomorrow’s federal holiday celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.  God gave him a gift of prophetic vision, and he spoke words we really need to hear in this time when it is becoming increasingly important for followers of Jesus to assert that Black Lives Matter.  God gave Martin Luther King a sense of the Lordship of Jesus, and a sense of the implications of that Lordship for our political life here in the United States.  Dr. King once wrote a letter to the white leaders of the churches in the USA.  He wrote from jail in Birmingham.  In that letter he says:

         There was a time when the church was very powerful—in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed.  In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat [my emphasis] that transformed the mores of society.  Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”  But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven” called to obey God rather than Man.  Small in number, they were big in commitment.

Dr. King knew that when we say “Jesus is Lord,” we become disturbers of false peace, agitators from outside the inner circles of worldly power, agitators for justice.  We may do this work with confidence and in hope, knowing that God has put us in a community of love and hope, equipped with every necessary spiritual gift. God’s way of giving is characterized by glorious, joyous excess.  We don’t need to be afraid that there won’t be enough.  God invites us to a Great Feast, and God is the God of More than Enough!

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[1] Brendan Byrne, in Life Abounding (2014), quoting Raymond Brown.

Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son!

Sermon for the 11^th Sunday after Pentecost, August 9, 2015

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, North Dakota

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

Readings: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51.

“Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Marc Chagall has a beautiful painting of David at the moment he hears the news of the death of his beloved son.   This is one of those biblical passages where we realize that there may be 3000 years between us and David, the King of Israel.  But that deep grief of a father who must absorb the news of the death of a child: we understand that grief.  3000 years haven’t changed a parent’s response to that kind of tragic news. 

David didn’t have access to his son’s body.  A heap of stones had been placed on top of the body to mark its whereabouts and to keep it safe from predators.  So there was no body for David to caress.  But look at David’s face—the love and the grief.   Parents are just about undone by this kind of news.

Absalom and his father King David had had a very complicated relationship.   David had many sons, and those boys had different mothers.  One of the eldest, by the name of Amnon, once lured and sexually assaulted Absalom’s sister, Tamar.  King David heard about Amnon’s deed, but he did nothing about it.  So Absalom took matters into his own hands a few years later and threw a party for his brothers where he had Amnon killed. Word reached the King that Absalom had murdered all David’s sons.  David was so relieved when that rumor turned out to be wrong that he didn’t do much about Absalom’s act of revenge. Absalom went into exile.   David’s trusted advisor, Joab, could see how Absalom’s absence was affecting him.  It was like having lost two sons.  Joab cleverly succeeded in getting David to invite Absalom to move back to Jerusalem.  But over the course of several years, the father-son relationship remained broken.  David never invited Absalom to appear in court. 

Absalom had been one of those golden boys who seem to have everything going for them.  He was rich; his mother was beloved of the King; he was tall and strong and skilled in battle, incredibly vital and incredibly handsome.  Even his hair grew so thick and full that it was legendary.  Even his sons were handsome and his daughter beautiful.  But the relationship with his father never healed. As David aged, Absalom seized the opportunity to bring about a coup d’etat.  So David  found himself involved in a civil war, with his own favorite son on the other side; and David and the rest of his family fled Jerusalem with his military guard.  Absalom, to demonstrate his dominance over his father’s kingdom and his father’s possessions, erected a tent on the rooftop of the palace and took all ten of his father’s concubines and violated them.  Finally, David mustered his loyal troops and sent them off to fight Israel.  But before they left, he made sure that Joab, his commander, heard him say: “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom.”  The rest of the army heard this exchange and they weren’t quite sure what to make of it.  But they went off to battle.

And in the midst of what turned out to be a very terrible and ugly battle, that ranged into the forests on the mountain slopes, Absalom, tall in the saddle, with his full head of hair, somehow got himself caught in the branches of a great oak.  The narrator said, “he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.” 

Absalom was not dead.  But when David’s men came upon him, one reported it to Joab.  “What!?!” said Joab.  “You saw him but you didn’t kill him?”  The soldier replied that he’d heard David’s words and he would not betray Absalom.  Joab, though, was a tough realist.  He knew Absalom must be killed if David’s kingdom was to survive; and so Joab stabbed him but left him living, gathering ten men, who surrounded Absalom and killed him dead.   This act left no individual with the responsibility for having dealt the final death blow.  Then they raised a cairn of stones over his body. 

The battle was over.  Joab had won the day for David.  But at what a cost!  Now somebody needed to tell David.  Joab sent a foreign soldier, not an Israelite, to give him the terrible news.  But one of David’s trusted advisors, Ahimaaz, also insisted on running to David.  David, watching from the hills, could see two men running along the plains.  He knew they had news for him about the battle.  Ahimaaz got there first.  He brought the good news that David’s forces had prevailed.  Then he started to stammer and prevaricate as David asked about Absalom.  The Cushite soldier finally arrived; King David asked him the fateful question; and, perhaps naively, the unnamed foreign soldier announced: “May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man” (2 Samuel 18:32).

Now David’s heart was broken. 

There is no way for David to explain or justify how he got to the place where he was, this place of death, this place that the psalmist, perhaps David himself, called “the Depths.”   “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!” says the psalm.  David cried out to God from

•          The tawdry mess with Bathsheba;
• The secret his commander knew about the death of Uriah the Hittite;
• The vengeful murder of one son, Amnon, by another,  Absalom, because he (David) didn’t     or couldn’t do anything about Tamar’s violation by his son Amnon.  
• The loneliness of the broken relationship between himself and  Absalom, this strong, handsome son, a natural born leader.
• The humiliation of departing, mourning and barefoot, from Jerusalem, the city he had made the capital of his kingdom, as angry citizens hurled rocks and curses…

It had all ended somehow in a vision that David would never get out of his head: the picture of Absalom hanging, in a tree, between heaven and earth.  That beautiful mighty body hanging there with stab wounds, beaten and broken.  That sweet boy grown into a man still loved despite their estrangement, now buried under a pile of stones and boulders. 

Christians read this story and can’t help but see it as a powerful foreshadowing of the events of Christ’s crucifixion. David crying, in the voice of the Psalm: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!”  God understanding and consoling David because God one day would see his own Son hanging between heaven and earth, a sacrifice that would bring about the reconciliation of heaven and earth.

We’re exactly a year past the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Like Absalom, some might say that Michael Brown was on the wrong side of the law.  And they might be right.  But an encounter with the police, certainly for someone suspected of petty theft, is not supposed to be a death sentence.  That is not justice.  That is some kind of terrible vigilantism.  Someone had to bring the news to Michael Brown’s parents.  Michael Brown’s parents could look at their son’s high school graduation picture, and remember his plans to start college and all the hopes they’d had for his future.  And you could imagine them wondering what they could have done differently to keep their beloved son safe and out of trouble.  They also were, like King David, unable to hold his bullet-ridden body.  This has also been the year when, to name a few:  Dontre Hamilton,

         Eric Garner,

                  John Crawford,

                           Ezell Ford,

                                    Dante Parker,

                                             Tanisha Anderson,

                                    Akai Gurley,

                           Twelve year old Tamir Rice, 

                  Rumain Brisbane,

         Jerame Reid,

Tony Robinson,

         Phillip White,

                  Eric Harris,

                           Walter Scott,

                                    and Freddie Gray,

all unarmed, were killed by police, or died in police custody.  Somebody had to bring the news to parents each time. 

         Each time, there was no body to cradle. (In fact, Tamir Rice’s older sister was wrestled to the ground by the very police that had killed her brother when she tried to run to his assistance.)  

         Each time, loved ones grieved that their children were in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

         Each time, someone asked, could I have done something different?  Could I have made different decisions that would have kept my child safe and out of a criminal justice system that has proved so gratuitously lethal to black lives? 

         Each time, somebody prayed and wept: 

“Michael, Michael, my son, my son!”

“Eric, Eric!  Would that I had died in your place!”

Tamir,

         Walter,

                  Freddie, my son, my son!

These are the children of our nation, they are part of our richest inheritance, our future, wantonly slaughtered.    Something is terribly wrong.  How do we as a nation move forward toward a more authentic kind of justice? 

1. We begin by grieving the loss of each precious child, created in God’s image. 

2.  We remember that each life story is complex in ways that David’s life was complex.  Motives are mixed; sinful, careless, and un-considered acts (and sinful inaction!) that may not seem too serious at the time can bring about terrible results.  As Sir Walter Scott said: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”  

3.  And we must practice telling the truth about what happens.  King David was no saint.  And the Court history of the Kings of Israel does not hold back in showing him as courageous sometimes but passive, unwise, and ineffective at other times; as generous and justice oriented sometimes but at other times temperamental and vindictive. 

4.  We must practice telling the truth about our own country.  We are part of a nation that was founded on the terrible sin of human slavery.  Though 150 years have passed since slaves were emancipated, our nation still has a lot to answer for.  Our nation must repent, must begin to function as if “black lives matter” as much as white lives do.   Individually, we may also need to repent of the ways we who are white have taken advantage of the privileges we are hardly aware that we are accorded.  We who are white don’t fear for our life when we are stopped for a traffic violation.  We don’t fear for our children’s lives when they are caught after making the foolish choices that so many kids make in adolescence, choices that in no obvious way reflect on their prospects for the future. 

5. Finally, we remember that the justice system of the Roman Empire failed entirely to protect Jesus. It left him hanging between heaven and earth, stretching out his arms of love on the hard wood of the Cross, giving his life.  Jesus himself said, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

David wept  “Absalom, Absalom! My son, my son!”

—and he prayed,

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!

Perhaps in the words of the psalm we may begin to find a way forward. 

Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;

LORD, hear my voice;

         let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.

If you, LORD, were to note what is done amiss,

         O LORD, who could stand?  (Not David, not I!)

For there is forgiveness with you;

         therefore you shall be feared.

I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for him;

         in his word is my hope.

The story of David and Absalom resonates in the heart of every parent who has news of a child’s death. It resonates in the heart of every person who has watched their child suffer. 

The Psalm we read today begins in “the depths.”  But it ends in hope and trust that even in the most terrible circumstances, God is present.  Night ends and morning comes. 

The God whose own Son would hang between earth and heaven brings hope and consolation to each person who cries from out of the depths.   After Jesus was buried in a cave, something happened.  On the third day, God raised Jesus from the dead. And somehow that resurrection brings about the reconciliation and healing of the broken world. 

And from this place of hope and forgiveness, let us heed the advice of the writer of the letter to the Ephesian Christians in our behavior towards one another.   It’s all summed up in the command to walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.