PleaseGrace

“Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” …Jesus answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Matthew 15:21-28).

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I would like to take as my subject a single word, FAITH.

What is it?
   Where does it come from?
      Who can have it?
         How do you know you have it?

Saint Paul, arguably one of the greatest theological minds ever, said this about faith: it’s what saves us.  Martin Luther, writing some 1500 years after the time of Saint Paul, went a little farther to say, faith alone saves us.  When Paul said it, he was probably in a jail cell, locked up for preaching the Gospel, which, at that time, was equal to speaking out against the authorities.  Paul didn’t have anything against the authorities.  In his letter to the church at Rome, the same letter in which he wrote, faith saves us, Paul also wrote,

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval, for it is God’s agent for your good.”

Romans, chapter 13

Paul will go on to say that, for this same reason, everyone should pay their taxes, giving revenue to whom revenue is due, and honor to whom honor is due. 

It would be easy, I suppose, to take Paul’s words as blanket approval of government.  Many have taken Paul this way, as someone who equated being patriotic with being Christian.  But one need not look any farther than to what happened in Germany in the 1920s, or way down south in America in the 1960s, to see the atrocities that come from Christians confusing love of country with love of God.  When this happens, people who say they love Jesus, risk becoming complicit in killing people who are just like Jesus.  We’re not just talking about the fact that at the time of the Holocaust in Germany, Jews made up less than 1% of the population, while Catholics and Protestants, those who called themselves Christian, made up 99% of the population.[1]  Nor are we just talking about the fact that in Mississippi in 1964, members of the Klu Klux Klan, White Knights as they were called, responsible for lynching black people and burning crosses, met in the churches where their leaders attended on Sundays.  What we’re talking about is how easily we scare in a world where faith hardly ever seems like enough to save us.

What we’re talking about is how easily we scare in a world where faith hardly ever seems like enough to save us.

It must be one of the most burned-out phrases of all time, to hear someone say: You just have to believe.  It might be the first day of school, the first day on the new job, the first day without a job anymore, or the first day after the funeral, and you’re asking yourself, can I really do this?  And someone says, of course you can, you just have to believe.  You might be alone on the floor in your kitchen, alone in the hospital bed, alone in your car on some dark city street where you didn’t mean to go, or alone in your mind.  You’re asking yourself, what if no one comes to find me?  And someone says, they will, you just have to believe.  The circumstances might be as pithy as trying to figure out how to pay this month’s rent, how to kick an addiction, or how to keep from always thinking the worst about yourself, others, or God.  You tell yourself, things will never get better.  And someone says, they will, you just have to believe.        

Granted, it’s usually the person who is already standing on the other side of some rickety bridge that we ourselves have yet to cross who says this.  “What if it doesn’t hold me?” we yell on over.  “It will,” they yell on back.  “Yes, but what if it doesn’t?”  “It will, you just have to believe!”  And we say in reply, “That’s easy for you to say.  You’re 8, you weigh 50 pounds, and you’re already on the other side!”

We know this, faith isn’t the same for everyone.  It’s not the same for everyone out there.  Heck, it’s not even the same for everyone in here.  Despite the fact that we have all showed up at the same church this morning, to sing the same hymns, to pray the same prayers, and hear the same word from God, we are far from the same when it comes to a great many other things, including our faith.  I imagine some of us came here kicking and screaming this morning, if not on the outside than on the inside.  Quite possibly, the only reason we are here is because the person beside us made us come, or asked us to come, and loving them so much, we have.  For others, it’s all we can do to whisper the hymns and murmur the prayers.  Recovering Catholics, washed out Baptists, we grew tired a long time ago of being told, you just have to believe, and then being told what it is that we have to believe.  What does it mean to believe anyway?

When I was a child, I was taught it meant being a Christian, and that being a Christian meant having the faith of my grandparents and parents—a faith grown, kept, and passed on in tradition.  When I became an adolescent, I was taught that it meant taking that faith and making it my own.  So I chose to be baptized, and I prayed to ask Jesus to be my savior, which is what we did in the tradition of my family.  The lesson was, being a Christian meant having faith in Jesus to save me from going to hell when I died.  As a teenager, being a Christian was about showing the world through good behavior that I was a Christian.  So I didn’t drink, or kiss a girl (for too long), I went to church every week, and I tried to do my best to convince anyone who was gay, Muslim, or just not Christian, that they needed my kind of faith if they wanted to be saved, too.  Then, somewhere into my adult years, I woke up one day to realize my faith felt heavy to me, burdensome, without joy.  I started to think about what it meant to keep faith in a Jesus who would save me from hell, but only if I asked him to.  What kind of faith is that?  And what kind of savior is that?  And what does it mean for Christians to put their faith in someone like Jesus who was Jewish and never a Christian himself? 

I woke up one day to realize my faith felt heavy to me, burdensome, without joy.

There are three things I want to give us today.  The first is a word of warning, the second, a word of challenge, and the third, a word of blessing.  First, a word of warning.  The late Jonathan Saks, who served as Chief Rabbi of the United Jewish Congregations of Great Britain, once wrote, “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in the one who is not in our image.”  Because very often, what we believe about God—how we see God—comes from us having made it up.  I don’t mean to sound like I’m accusing anyone of committing idolatry, but you would not have to look far to see how I’ve done it.  Just check my Bible to see which pages I’ve dog-eared, and which pages are still stuck together, or check my purchases on Amazon, or survey my friends.  All will tell you that I stick close to sources that support my views and ideas.  And even when I do come across a new idea, I find myself trying to make it fit into an older, more comfortable idea.  I have never burned any crosses, but still, my ability to keep a lid on my world says a great deal about the privilege afforded me as a white, rich man in America.  None of this makes my faith better or worse than someone else’s, it’s just a reminder of how hard we must work to see God’s image in the one who is not in our image. 

“The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in the one who is not in our image.” 

Rabbi Jonathan Saks

Which brings me to the second word I want to give us, a word of challenge: a faith that turns away the hungry and hurting is no faith at all.  It does no good to tell someone who is hungry, don’t worry, things will get better, you just have to believe, while you’re sitting there munching on a sandwich.  Even Jesus had to learn this the hard way.  In our gospel lesson for today, he is traveling through the region of Tyre and Sidon when a Canaanite woman comes up to him asking—no, begging—for him to do something to heal her tormented daughter.   That she is a Canaanite is significant, for once upon a time her people were enemies with Jesus’ people.  When they looked at each other, neither side saw the image of God.  They saw only someone to be feared, hated, and eliminated.  The Canaanite woman knows this, that she is showing up to the clubhouse where she is never going to be let in.    And Jesus tells her just that.  “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  But she reminds him that he is a Jew, and his God has always been bigger than the one we imagine, bigger even than the one he imagines.  His God has never let anyone, not even the dogs, go hungry.        

The disciple named John, who wrote three separate letters, each of which appear towards the end of our Bible, said in his first letter: Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.  In her book, Holy Envy, Barbara Brown Taylor writes the following:

You will have your own interpretation of this teaching and others like it, but here is what it reveals to me: the same God who came to the world in the body of Jesus comes to [us] now in the bodies of [our] neighbors, because God knows that a body needs a body to make things real, and the real physical presence of [our] neighbors makes them much harder for [us] to romanticize, fantasize, demonize, or ignore than any of the ideas [we] have of them in [our] head.

If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute.  I could make them in my own image, [and then tell them how wonderful they are!].  But nine times out of ten these are not the neighbors I get.  Instead, I get neighbors who cancel my vote, burn trash in their yard, and shoot guns so close to my house that I have to wear an orange vest when I walk to the mailbox.  They put things on their church signs that make me embarrassed for all Christians everywhere.  They text while they drive, flipping me off when I pass their expensive pickup truck on the right, in spite of the fish symbol on their rear bumper. 

But if you stop and think about it, what better way could there be for me to love the God I cannot see than to try for even twelve seconds to love these brothers and sisters whom I can see?  What better way to shatter my custom-made image of God than to accept that these irritating and sometimes frightening people [we call neighbors] are also made in the image of God?

From her book, “Holy Envy,” (New York, NY: Harper One, 2019, pgs. 194-95) Words in bracket [ ] are mine.

Honest to God, with a faith like that, the world would not need saving, for it would be saved already.

I said I was going to give you a third word, a word of blessing.  Here it is: Be the kind of Christian, the kind of person, the kind of neighbor today who leaves a trail of crumbs that lead straight to your own door.  And should your neighbor ever do the same for you, don’t be afraid to follow the crumbs that lead straight to their door. For in so doing, you may discover a mercy beyond your wildest imaginations.   

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[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state

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“But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him… They said, “Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers agreed” (Genesis 37:4, 27).

Good morning again.  For those of you who may not know me, my name is David.  I am the pastor here.  At least that’s what the sign out on the front lawn tells me.  After being away on sabbatical the last eight weeks, it is good, and more than good, it is reviving, to be back here in this place with you today.  To know you’re home because your name is still on the mailbox or hanging somewhere on the wall with all the other brothers and sisters who have ever come here looking to be known.  What a gift.  But what a gift sabbatical is as well. 

For this is what sabbatical is, or at least what it’s supposed to be: gift.  From the word sabbath and the biblical story of Genesis, a sabbatical is what God took on the seventh day of creation.  After having worked for 6 days straight, Genesis 2 records, …and on the seventh day, God rested from all the work that he had done.  In that moment, I imagine God a painter, stepping back from the canvas to get a good look at his painting.  He steps back far so he can see how it all came together.  How the sky meets the ocean, turning plain old blue into turquoise.  How the sun and moon both manage to stay always perched in the sky, never trying to outshine each other.  How the elephant sits so calmly while a funny little bird sits on its back pecking at ticks hidden away in the tangly hairs of this great, gray, gentle beast.  How Adam and Eve seem to understand so easily and so well what it means to have been included last, and not first, in the painting.  Be fruitful and multiply, God told them.  Fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over everything you see.  Tricky words for our industrialized, American, 21^st century ears to take in, but not for Adam and Eve, who must have known that when God said to subdue, God didn’t mean for them to have their way with everything, without any consideration for what would happen to them or their fellow creatures if they were to mistreat, kill, or destroy the earth.

But there are a few things we need to recall, a few things we must recall, if we are to keep from being destroyed.  First, while there is no getting around the fact that in Hebrew, the word subdue does in fact mean to subdue, even to a point of getting hostile, in Genesis chapter one there is nothing worth getting hostile over.  There are no nations, no borders, nothing to fight about.  It’s just Adam and Eve, and short of some unruly weeds they might encounter in the back yard, they have no enemies, nothing to subdue.  What does it mean, then, that God uses this word to describe what Adam and Eve are to do?  Is God setting them up for things to come?  Does God already know that, for as good as things are now—in the beginning—it won’t take long for things to get bad, and Adam and Eve should prepare now for that day when they will need to subdue and dominate?  No, I don’t believe so. 

Read the whole of Genesis chapter one and what we see is that God is not the kind of painter who just throws paint on the wall willy-nilly.  Inventive, surprising, and unpredictable as God is, there is equal purpose and order to the way God goes about creating the world.  God begins with darkness, and then uses the darkness to call forth light, from which comes the day, from which comes the night.  On the second day of creation, God adds the sky, from which then comes the sun, moon, and stars.  On the third day, the earth appears, and from the earth, fruits and vegetables, which grow in seasons made possible only by the turning of the sun and moon.  Then there are the waters, which, along with the birds, come from the sky.  You see how it works?  Everything depends upon everything for its life, indeed for its very survival.  Nothing and no one can afford to fight for dominance, or to act with intolerance and indifference towards the earth or each other.  For God made us in such a way as to make it impossible for us to go it alone.  We need each other.  We are part of a great cosmic, holy order, what the late Frederick Buechner calls an alphabet of grace.  Each of us a letter that, on its own, can be meaningless, or can be part of great meaning.  This is us—an alphabet of grace, a holy order of love that must be honored, respected, and tended to as such. 

Of course, we know through painful experience that sometimes, most of the time, things get out of order—we forget our place in the world.  When this happens, order must be reestablished.  In a word, we must subdue, and be subdued ourselves. 

I thought about this and read for us a piece of the Joseph story from Genesis 37, a reminder of what can happen when things get out of order, and pride, jealousy, and fear are allowed to dominate at the front of the line.  In the Joseph story, Joseph, the second youngest of 12 sons born to his father Jacob, is sold into slavery by his brothers.  Here’s how it happened: Jacob, having two wives named Leah and Rachel, loved Rachel the most.  But for years, Rachel could not get pregnant, and pregnancy, being a badge of honor for a woman back then, made Rachel’s barrenness a point of disdain for her and her husband.  I have been cursed by God, is what Rachel told herself lying in bed each night.  

For better or for worse, however, ancient Mesopotamian society provided a back-up plan for women like Rachel.  If unable to become pregnant, she could give her slave woman to her husband to become pregnant for her.  Which is what Rachel does; she gives her slave Bilhah to Jacob. 

That Rachel even has Bilhah to give says a great deal about Jacob and Rachel.  They are people of economic means in this world, and Rachel, though feeling powerless in her role as a wife and woman, uses those means to prove she is still more powerful than some.  Who among us hasn’t, from time to time, done this very thing?  Standing at the back of the line, we cry, I don’t belong here!  Do we ever stop to think, though, about the fact that what the person directly in front of us hears in that moment is, I am better than you. 

In the case of Rachel, crying out from the back of the line will only get her so far.   For, in the end, any children Bilhah may have will belong to Bilhah and Jacob, not Rachel and Jacob.  You see, this is not a surrogacy situation between the two women.  It is simply a way for Rachel to save what little face she can.    

Bilhah will have children, two boys.  Much to everyone’s surprise, Rachel will wind up becoming a mother as well, giving birth to two boys of her own, Joseph and Benjamin.  All told, Jacob will have 12 sons by 4 women.  But here’s the rub, Rachel, whom he loves the most and only ever wanted to be with, will die first.  Leah, whom he had to marry but, really, never wanted to, will live on in the book of Genesis with barely a mention.  And Bilhah and Zilpah, Rachel and Leah’s slave women, they of course are never mentioned again.         

In the end, what will remain is Jacob and his 12 sons.  They and they alone make up the story line of 13 chapters in the book of Genesis, beginning in chapter 37 when 10 of the brothers decide to sell Joseph into slavery.  The only reasons we are given for this cruel move on their part is that they see how their father loves Joseph more than them, and they hate Joseph for it.  But a closer look at the story and we find, as always, there is more to it.  In verse two, Joseph is in the fields helping his brothers tend the family herd.  Specifically, he is said to be helping four of his brothers, the four who were born to Bilhah and Zilpah.  Boy, it must have torn Joseph up to hear his father say, go help those ones.  With Rachel dead, he, the favorite son of his father’s favorite wife is being made servant to the sons of the servants.  Bilhah had been brought in to do what Joseph’s own mother could not.  Do you think, while they were out tending the sheep, their father back in the house, the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah might have dug into Joseph about it.  You know, Joseph, our mothers might have been slaves, but at least they were masterful at being women.  Your mother, she wasn’t even a full woman.  And you think you’re better than us, Joseph?

Then, one day, Joseph, perhaps looking to put them in their place, snitches on them to their father.  What dirt Joseph had on them, we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.  The point is, in going to dad to rat out his brothers, Joseph is pushing back.  He knows his father will listen to what he has to say and believe it.  After all, he is the favorite son.  Better than me?   Ha!  I’ll show my brothers who’s better.    

It’s hard to say who’s to blame for the way things turn out.  If Joseph had just not acted so arrogant and privileged; if his brothers had just not given in to revenge and slavery; if their mothers had just been there to tell them all to knock it off; if their dad had just loved them all the same when they were young; if they could have all just stepped back in that moment to recall the way it’s supposed to be, the way God made us—an alphabet of grace, a cosmic, holy order of love, each of us a gift, no one better than another.

Ernest Hemingway, author of Old Man and the Sea, once said, “There is no nobility in being superior to others.  The only nobility is in being superior to our former self.”

In 2020, The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times.  As part of the project, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reminds us in her essay titled, Sugar, that when Africans started getting bought, sold, and shipped as slaves between Great Britain, the West Indies, and the American Colonies, it wasn’t just the southern colonies who were guilty of getting involved.  From 1709 to 1809, from what is now the stretch of land between Fox Point and India Point in Providence, Rhode Islanders made over a thousand voyages to Africa, procuring 106,544 enslaved persons.[1]

I’d like to think we have come a long way from our past, that we have learned the wisdom of Hemingway: “There is no nobility in being superior to others.  The only nobility is in being superior to our former self.”  But if you woke up today worried for a world still stuck in an old order, I offer you one final thought.

As part of my sabbatical, I spent five days back at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastic community of 11 brothers in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  On my last day there, a Sunday as it would so happen, Moira, Lillian, and Rowan drove into the city to go to church with me.  I think it’s safe to say, both kids were curious to see how monks live.  Everyone wearing the same black habit, tied off at the waist with a simple rope.  A pair of sandals on their feet.  All day long they walk about not in total silence but in a quietness so practiced it feels natural; gathering to pray 5 times per day, working only to give away what they make to the poor.  To the uncurious, their life together might appear boring, unproductive, irrelevant, pointless. 

On the day Moira and the kids came in to meet me, it was a sunny, unusually cool July day, perfect for gathering in the monastery gardens after church for a time of fellowship hosted by the brothers.  Over a glass of lemonade and a piece of zucchini bread, one of the brothers mentioned that they used to have a dog living at the monastery, a black lab who would roam about the hallways, greeting guests and stealing scraps from the kitchen.  “He was systemically starved,” Brother Curtis said with a laugh and a soft, far-off look in his eyes.  “Will you ever get another dog?” Rowan asked.  “Some of us would like to,” said Brother Curtis, “I want one very much, but not everyone does.”  Rowan was quick to make the connection.  “That sounds a lot like our family, except we do have a dog.  Why don’t you all just vote on getting a dog?”  “Well, sometimes that can work,” Brother Curtis said with a smile, “but there are certain things you need everyone to agree on.”  “You mean everyone has to say they want a dog before anyone can get one?  That seems like it will never happen,” Rowan exclaimed.  “No, we don’t all have to want a dog, but we do all have to agree that if we get one, we will all love the dog.”

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least,” said Dorothy Day once upon a time.

If the Bible begins in Genesis with these words, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth—an alphabet of grace, a cosmic, holy order born in love— it ends in Revelation with these words, And behold, I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

I heard someone ask a question not too long ago about why people go to church.  “Do you go to be with the people you love, or do you go to love the people you are with?”  Both can have their good points, and I don’t know your reason for being here today, but can we all agree that, in being here, we will all love? 

And behold, I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

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[1] Khalil Gibran Muhammad, from her essay, Sugar, (“The 1619 Project,” NY: The New York Times Company, 2021), p. 80, ref. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 212-13.

THREE weekends ago, Moira and I traveled to Washington, D.C.  On Saturday, we retreated from the humidity by touring the National Archives.  Neither of us had ever seen the original hallmark documents of our country before.  To stare at the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, both visibly faint from time, was mesmerizing.  It made me think about how hard we have had to squint at times to keep the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in view.  Ever since our founding, these have been hard for some to see their way to, and hardest of all, perhaps, for the powerful and privileged to see at all.  Despite all appearances, those who enslave another human being are enslaved themselves, for until we truly do unto others as we would have done unto us (and even better than that), we will never be free.  Chariots swing down into the low places, not the high ones, where everyone can get on board, the old spiritual tells us.    

In a room just down the hall from the Bill of Rights we found the Emancipation Proclamation.  Penned by President Lincoln in 1863, I remember reading once that Lincoln was not the great full-throated emancipator history often hails him as.  Though morally opposed to slavery, Lincoln campaigned on a promise not to interfere with slavery in the south.  For Old Abe, preservation of the Union was always his aim.  And, not believing it could be preserved without compromise, and seeing compromise as the prescribed way of the Constitution anyway, Lincoln never figured on freeing the slaves.  At best, he would work to form a more perfect union by keeping slavery from spreading into any new states and territories, all the while keeping faith, as he liked to say, that right would ultimately make might.  

It seemed like no coincidence at all to find on the opposite side of the same wall as the Emancipation Proclamation articles and pictures pertaining to a letter Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.  Lincoln may have said, “All persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof [being] in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” but it was MLK who, 101 years later, found himself saying,  

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed…. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see…that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”  We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights.”

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963.

Lincoln started out his presidency believing it better to preserve the Union than to force an end to slavery, even though Lincoln opposed slavery in every way.  I have often wondered if MLK would have accused Lincoln of being one of those white moderates more intent upon order than justice.  My guess is, Lincoln was a hopeless optimist holding out for those better angels to show up and do their thing down south.  In the end, when the southern states seceded from the Union anyway, firing upon federal troops at Fort Sumter and setting off the Civil War, Lincoln headed off to battle with a new aim in view: emancipation.  That he was acting as Commander-in-Chief to defend national honor, to force what he called southern rebels back into line, and to bring an end to war as quickly as possible, were all givens, but he also saw no reason now to wait any longer to do what should have been done all along, and which was not going to get done any other way.  For Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States, had already made this much clear:

“Our new government is founded upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

From a speech delivered on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, GA, called “The Corner Stone Speech.”

This view was nothing new, it had already been trumpeted a few years earlier by Chief Justice Roger Taney who, handing down the verdict in the infamous Dred Scott Case, stated that no member of the African race, no matter where they lived in the United States, would ever be considered a citizen.  In other words, if you are a slave, you can escape to freedom, but you will still not be a citizen.  And, if you have never been a slave, if you have always lived in a free state, and thought yourself to be a citizen, well, you are not. (For a full reading of the verdict, visit https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford).  More than a judicial verdict, Taney’s words revealed a sentiment—a sad truth—that was shared by millions of white people in the United States in 1858: to just be human is not enough, you must be white.  All others are mere property, ineligible for the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That night, we went to Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts to see Brandi Carlile perform.  We have been Brandi fans for many years.  We love her music, we love her voice, and we love that she uses both to tell a story—her own and that of the LGBTQIA+ community.  When we bought the tickets back in March, we didn’t notice, or simply didn’t look to see, that she was performing as part of a larger music festival, The Out and About Festival, the first of its kind being hosted by Wolf Trap to celebrate Pride Month.

At one point between songs, Brandi paused to catch her breath and, at the same time, to say thank you to Wolf Trap for stepping up at a crucial moment in time to provide a safe space for LGBTQIA+ people to gather in celebration of their lives.  “It is also good to see so many straight people here tonight,” she added.  “We all need allies.”  I hadn’t thought of myself as an ally.  Until we arrived there that night, Moira and I didn’t even know we were showing up at a Pride festival.  Plus, there was a time when I wasn’t an ally, I was an enemy.  

Growing up, I can’t say I remember ever meeting someone who was openly gay.  Then again, from church to home to friends, all my circles had been closed off by codes and labels that called being gay “wrong,” “bad,” “ungodly,” “sinful,” and “anti-human.”  I can’t imagine any gay person ever feeling safe enough to open-up to me.  On one hand, I had been taught that being gay was like being sick.  You didn’t want to catch whatever was going around.  On the other hand, you also had to help the person who was sick, because this too was part of the code.  “Hate the sin, not the sinner.”  I ate it up like baby food off the end of a spoon.  Conversion Therapy, it would come to be called; the idea that being gay was not natural, and so was also immoral.  But, like any chosen lifestyle, being gay could be un-chosen, and I, as someone who was straight, could and should help to convert the sinner.  Granted, I was not, nor am I now, trained to do any kind of therapy.  Of course, this never stopped me from thinking that if I ever did meet someone who was gay, I could do a job on them.

I don’t know where this idea came from, that being gay was just not the way a person was supposed to be. But I believed it was true, true as the words on the page of my Bible, which told me one should also not lie, murder, sleep around when married, or do any number of other things so worthy of damnation.  Never mind that my Bible also tells me snakes can talk, people can live inside fish for days on end, that it is okay to throw rocks at women (though not at men) who have slept around when married (and some of these I have actually met), or that what little holy writ there is on being gay is so contextualized, and has become so institutionalized, that lifting it straight off its page and applying it like a sticker reading Truth is a bit like telling a frog it’s really a tadpole and it ought to act accordingly.  Such treatment of another living creature is not therapy at all.  Nor is it “saving,” as some in their religious fervor have called it.  It is the opposite of saving.  It is cruel disdain for dignity, abject killing of the soul, a denial of this great truth: FOR JUST BEING HUMAN, YOU ARE WORTHY.  

A few years ago, a woman from the church I grew up in stopped by to see me in my office at the church where I now work.  She said she had fallen out of love with our beloved church and was looking for a new place to call home.  I could tell she was looking for some reassurances, namely that I hadn’t changed (she was about to be disappointed).  “You don’t let gay people be gay here, do you?”  Her angle of assumption was that she didn’t see a rainbow flag on the lawn, and this, “I know how you were raised.”  I didn’t know how to tell her that I was now grown up. “You and I still read the same Bible, and I know how much you love that book, because I do too, but I was wrong to let it make me fearful of another person.  I was wrong to let myself be convinced that God cares more about definitions for love than about how we love.”  She walked out of my office that day looking, I thought, sad.

What does it say about an individual, a people, a nation, if we say we care more about morality than mercy, but our morality causes us to hate and kill?  If we seek order and the preservation of union more than justice, but our union is exclusive, and therefore must be protected?  If we lay claim to being one nation under God, but our God is only big enough to cover some in love and care?  

I want to be like Moses, who climbed a mountain to see what light burned yonder, only to find it was God in a bush, burning yet never going out.  How unorthodox of God to appear in a manner that invites us to wonder, beckoning us to take off our shoes and draw near.  As if God might be no less obvious than a cool stream on a hot summer’s day, and no more obvious than the people and places we’ve written off and run away from.  “Go back to Egypt,” God tells Moses from out the bush.  Moses tells God he doesn’t want to, probably because it will mean having to return to his past to face his fears and misdeeds.    

In modern day Germany, they have a phrase for this—Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.  It means, working-off-the-past (thanks to Susan Neiman and her recent book, “Learning from the Germans, Race and theMemory of Evil” for introducing me to this phrase and its rich meaning).  For Germans, this work is specific to the atrocities committed by their people during the Holocaust, when they murdered millions of fellow humans for being Jews, gypsies, gays, disabled, or just unwanted.  Like slavery, or white supremacy, or genocide, or prejudice itself, one can choose to turn a blind eye, to say, that was then, this is now.  In other words, I am not responsible for what other people have done or continue to do. At the heart of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, however, is a commitment to seeing ourselves as belonging to each other.  Bound together maybe not by common place or time, but inheritors nonetheless of what our ancestors have left behind, destined to become ancestors ourselves someday.    

“An open reckoning with [the] past is a crucial step toward maturity that will allow us to envision a full-bodied future, for a grown-up relationship to one’s culture is like a grown-up relationship to your parents.  We all benefit from inheritances we did not choose and cannot change.  Growing up involves sifting through all the things you couldn’t help inheriting and figuring out what you want to claim as your own—and what you have to do to dispose of the rest of it.”  

“Learning from the Germans, Race and the Memory of Evil,” p. 39.

On the ride back to our hotel after the concert, I was thinking about the people who gave refuge to escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad in the mid 1800s in the United States.  Often moving under cover of darkness, the trip was fraught with danger for slaves.  You might come upon a home or church thinking you’d be taken in and protected, only to discover the people inside, though Christian in name, were Christian only in name, and they would just as soon turn you over to the law than to risk their own reputation and protection under the law.  So, it became necessary to have signals along the route–a light set in the window–to let slaves know they could come inside, no one was going to hurt you.  You are among friends, we are allies.    

The long road to freedom stretches out still today, and I have seventy times seven apologies to make to those who are left to travel upon it without any signals of hope from me.  But no longer.  For now is the time to put down our guns and take up our crosses, to run up our rainbow flags, light a fire and pass our peace pipes, to gather on our kneeling mats and face the sun together, to put a candle in the window of our homes and declare that God is Love and Love is God and if we have love for one another then all shall be well.      

When I was in college, I worked two summers as a swim instructor at a YMCA near my house.  Most of the people I taught those summers were kids, 8, 9, 10 years old, but on occasion I would also offer private lessons for adults.  These were rare, and not because most adults know how to swim, but because most adults think it’s too late, or too embarrassing, to learn. 

One morning I was sitting on the lifeguard stand when in walked a man who introduced himself to me as Jerry.  He had pure white hair, a pot belly, wrinkly skin, and his walk was more like a shuffle.  I figured he must have been about seventy years old.  “I would like to sign-up for a private swim lesson.  Would you be able to teach me?”  We talked for a few minutes about what exactly Jerry wanted to learn.  Do you know how to swim at all?  Can you swim on your back, your side, underwater?  Jerry said “yes,” “yes,” and “maybe,” and before leaving we settled on a day and time for him to come back for his first lesson. 

A couple days later he returned.  “Why don’t we start in the shallow end,” I suggested.  Jerry climbed down the ladder, while I sat down on the edge and slipped in. 

Once in the water, I asked Jerry the same question I’d asked him before. “Do you know how to swim at all?”  “Sure,” he said rather sheepishly, “I can swim.”  “Well, why don’t you show me what you can do.”  Jerry laid down on his stomach, put his face in the water, and took off like a bullet doing the crawl stroke.  “Wow!” I exclaimed. “That’s pretty good.  How about your back?  Can you swim on your back?”  Sure enough, Jerry could swim on his back…and his side…and underwater.  “Jerry, you’re a great swimmer.  What do you know that I don’t know?”  He leaned in close to whisper.  “I’m terrified of the deep end.”  That’s when I realized that, with every stroke Jerry had shown me in the pool, he had never gone into the deep end.  He always kept his feet where he could still touch.

I don’t know what made me think it would be a good idea in that moment to just push Jerry over the edge, but I had him get out of the pool and climb up onto a diving block, while I stood beside him on the deck.  As if the deep end wasn’t scary enough for Jerry, now he was standing four feet above it, his legs shaking like a wet leaf in a hurricane.

“Come on, Jerry, you can do this.  The hardest part is getting in the water.  Jump!” 

“But what if I go under and don’t come back up?” 

“Hold on a second,” I motioned to him, “I’ve got an idea.”  I jumped into the deep end myself.  My legs treading like an eggbeater beneath me, I held my arms out to him.  “Jump to me, I’ll catch you, I promise.”  I meant it, I wasn’t going to let him go under.  And yet, Jerry probably weighed about 200 pounds bone dry; I weighed about 120 pounds dripping wet.  I held up a hand like a stop sign.  “Hold on again.”  I got out of the pool and put on a lifejacket, and grabbing two others to tuck under each arm, jumped back in the pool again.  “Okay, I’m ready, Jerry.  1, 2, 3, jump.”  Jerry just stood there.  “Come on Jerry, you can do this, I believe in you.  Here we go, 1, 2, 3, jump.”  Nothing.  He was totally still in the eye of his storm.

Just then, from out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small child—couldn’t have been older than five—walking towards Jerry.  They stepped up onto the block with him and took his hand.  “Don’t be afraid, Mister.”

“But what if I go under and don’t come back up?”

“But if you don’t go under, you can’t come back up.”

Then, with a 1, 2, 3, the child jumped.  Jerry, of course, jumped too, because if he hadn’t there would have been a small child dangling from his hand four feet above the deep end!  But that’s not why Jerry jumped.  Jerry jumped because, for whatever else going under was going to mean, it meant he’d have a hand to hold on the way back up.    

Anne Lamott says, “courage is fear that has said its prayers.”  What we fail to remember, however, is that, concerning courage, it’s perfectly okay to beg, steal, and borrow from someone else.

The first time I met her was right here in this room.  It was a Sunday in mid-August.  The thing you have to know about Sundays in mid-August is that it’s the dog days of summer.  Churches might pack ‘em in on Christmas and Easter, but in August, only the faithful survive.  Now some might call the “faithful” crazy, foolish, like the remnant before the flood.  The sun is shining, there’s not a cloud in the sky, and everyone is heading to the beach, while the faithful stay home to build a boat.  And why?  Because God says it’s going to rain—hard, really hard.  You’re going to get drenched, and then you’re going to get drowned.  The world can be this way, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Frederick Buechner once described the world as the place where beautiful and terrible things happen, and sometimes all at once.  That God might play a hand in the beautiful is the easy part for us.  That God might also be in on the terrible, well, that’s a tougher pill to swallow.  Sending so much water that it destroys not only the unjust but also the just, not only the cockroaches but also the koala bear, not only the weeds in the garden but also the tulips, not only our enemies but also our loved ones. 

I can’t tell you why terrible things happen, or what hand God plays in it.  What I do know is that the faithful, believing in the goodness of God in all things, build boats and show up to church in the dog days of summer.  I find it’s their way of acknowledging that life is beautiful, but it can also be terrible, terrible hard.  So they do what must be done to store up hope and safeguard faith for the days when the rains come.  That way, no matter the hurt, no matter the pain, no matter how great the storm, when all is said and done, there will still be hope and faith. 

So here I was.  It was a Sunday in mid-August.  In a couple months, I would be hired as Minister, but on this particular day, I was just a fill-in preacher dressed in a suit and tie.  Arriving at the side-door, a woman stopped me.  “Good morning.  Are you new here today?”  “Actually, yes, I am.”  “Well, feel free to sit anywhere, just don’t sit there,” she said, pointing to a pew just inside the door, “that’s my seat.” 

I won’t lie, my first thought was, who is this woman?  If this is the Chair of the Welcoming Committee, she needs to work on her delivery.  Who tells a visitor, “sit anywhere, just not there?”

A couple months later, I was now the Minister, and  it was now mid-October.  Showing back up at the door, there she was again.  This time, she didn’t tell me where not to sit.  Instead she told me, “You sit up there.”  “Yes, thank you,” I replied, “that much I do know.”  She smirked and gave me a hug and a kiss.  It was only our second meeting, and my first thought was, who is this woman?  If this is the Chair of the Welcoming Committee, she needs to work on her delivery.  Who gives the new Minister a kiss and tells them where to sit?  Wrapping her arms around me, she disarmed me.  “I’m glad you came back, and that you’ve decided to stay,” she whispered in my ear.

It would take me some time before I would start to understand what she was doing there at the door every Sunday, greeting us, giving us hugs and kisses, telling us where to sit, and where not to.  To be frank, I’m not still not sure I understand it completely, but two things, I think, I have come to figure out.  One, she was being helpful.  Truly.  She was saying to us, “If you sit down and realize you forgot a bulletin, just come on back, I’ll be right here.  If you need some assistance with the elevator, come on back, I’ll be right here.  If you need to know where the bathrooms are, come on back, I’ll be right here.  If you can’t find a seat, or you don’t want to sit alone, come on back, I’ll help you find one.  You can’t have my seat, but you can sit beside me, I’ll be right here.  If you need a hug, or two, or three, come on back, I’ll be right here.”   

It is one of the great tragedies of our existence that we have given up on finding hope.  Author Wendell Berry once wrote, “I can’t give anybody hope.  Hope has to come out of you…  To find something worth hoping for is a very good place to start.  There are things worth hoping for, there are good people, this is a still a very beautiful world…  We all need to find things we love to do, and love them.  We’ve been talked out of love, mercy, kindness.  We’ve got to take those things back.” 

Which brings us to the second thing I believe she was doing at the door every Sunday: she was taking back hope…for herself.  You see, she walked in and out of a few doors of her own in her lifetime.  For as many of us who knew her as the woman at the door every Sunday, showing up even in mid-August, who knew where her own seat was, she—how shall I put this?—she seemed to struggle to find her own place in this world at times.  She chased after love a few times, caught it a couple times; got married twice; was a mother several times over; was widowed more than once; and after her final widowing admitted to me that she never quite knew how to live alone in this world.  But who does? 

For all of this, she could be restless, particular, unforgiving, and plain old hard to get along with at times.  For sure, she walked her way in and out of a few doors in her lifetime, searching for…what was she searching for?  Hope?  A boat to ride out the storm on?  A seat to call her own. 

I thought about this and read for us Psalm 84 and First Corinthians 13.  From Psalm 84, the song of a pilgrim looking for a home and finding one:

My soul longs, indeed it faints,
for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy
to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home
at your altars, O Lord of hosts. Happy are those who live in your house,
ever singing your praise. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than live in the tents of the wicked.

I said “Good morning,” and everyone quieted down.  Everyone that is except her.  She just kept right on working the room.  “Hold on,” she said to me, “I’m coming.”  We all waited while she hobbled her way over to her seat.  It was, of course, empty and waiting for her.  “Okay, you can start now.”

I honestly can’t explain what happened next.  It was something like the sound of laughter welling up from the masses, like a feeling of hope, of joy in knowing that an old woman had finally given up her place in the doorway.  She no longer had to play the doorkeeper.  She had found her way inside to that place where love is all there is and love is all we are.

It happened again a little over a month ago.  This time it was God who came to stand in the doorway.  “Good morning Helen.”  “Hold on,” she said even to God, “I’m coming.”  “No worries, no worries at all,” said God in reply, “I’ll wait.”  But no sooner had God said this and there she was, right in the doorway.  And God reached out and gave her the gentlest of embraces.

Rest easy, our friend.  Love remains.

Tonight, after picking my son up from his basketball practice, we stopped at the convenience store to buy a Gatorade. They were on sale 2/$5, so we bought 2. At the checkout counter we were third in line. The woman in front of us was buying a pack of cigarettes, a Snickers bar, and $20 worth of gas. In front of her was a mom and her daughter, who might have been 4. I couldn’t see what they were buying, but as they turned to walk away the little girl handed the woman behind her a $1 lottery ticket. Then she gave one to me, too. “Here you go, you win.” The ticket hadn’t been scratched. I win? How does she know that? “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” she replied giddily. Grabbing mom’s hand, she skipped out of the store.

I paid for my 2 Gatorades and headed out into the parking lot. A small black SUV was pulling out of the space beside me. As it turned to pull away it stopped suddenly. The same little girl hopped out of the backseat and did her same skip across the parking lot to where a man was pumping gas. “Here you go,” I heard her tell him, “you win.” I wondered how many $1 lottery tickets her mom had bought, just to give them away.

Maybe someone who got one of those tickets won some money. Enough to pay an overdue electric bill, or to buy their first meal of the day, or to pick up an unaffordable Christmas gift for their own little girl. I sure hope so.

My ticket didn’t turn out to be a winner, though I don’t suspect that possibility was on the mind of the little girl when she gave it to me. She probably doesn’t even know what a lottery ticket is, let alone how it works. She probably doesn’t know that winning is a matter of matching numbers. All she knows is that it’s a matter of “Here you go.” And that’s not bad. In fact, it’s pretty great.

O God, we wake each day unable

     to hide from ourselves or one another.

We acknowledge how beautiful

          and yet

               how fragile our lives are.

We come into this world as flesh

     and blood.

This is our only way—to travel this earth

  in bodies that will endure a thousand wounds,

       take a thousand blows,

       and give and receive love

                                               in a thousand ways.

We bless you here and now for the mysterious wonder of these

  dust breathing machines.

For the women who carried us the whole nine, and delivered us

  from life unto life.

  “You are very good!”

At least this is what we’ve been told, and try to remember.

We are more brilliant than 10,000 stars,

  just a half-rung lower than angels.

We are passion too big for hearts to hold.

We are a brotherhood and sisterhood

     peeking out from behind masks of reds, yellows,

     blacks, and whites.

We are artist and masterpiece,

  spotted with light,

          shadowed by pain.

With this body,

  we shoulder our better angels,

    kick at our worst demons,

       turn the other cheek and then turn back to see you still                                                                                               standing there.

   Tiptoe down the hall at midnight,

cross the street to find it doesn’t matter how green the grass is,

  grass is just ground,

    and the whole earth has but one.

With this body, we work to make the day honest.

  We feel the fire down

                                   below,

  we see it on the mountain—

  thirsting for righteousness—and

  we wonder at how it calls our name.

There is no other way, O God.

We come into this world as flesh

and blood.

We lay our hands

and hearts upon one another, we get blessed and                                                                                                                     cursed by it.

And in the end,

       Love who put us here, takes us back.

And this is very good.

And we say, from head to toe, Amen.