A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

l preached this morning at Christ and St. Luke's in Norfolk, VA, on Romans 12. 

According to the Dictionary of Human Geography, imperial power is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationship, usually between states...based on domination and subordination." Got it? There will be a quiz at the door when this liturgy ends! 

The key words, there, I think, are domination and subordination. To achieve their goals, empires demand unwavering conformity to their laws, norms, and values.  Empires suppress dissent and debate.

When St. Paul appeals to those Christians living in first-century imperial Rome and says to them: “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” he isn’t making an abstract theological statement. He is saying something very radical and countercultural and quite pointed in a very specific place and time, as he makes his appeal to these brothers and sisters in Christ who are living in the “belly of the beast.” He reminds them that even though they may own homes in Rome, they reside “in Christ.” Like Jesus himself, they are called to be in, but not of, this world. They answer to a higher authority than Caesar.

As they seek to live their faith and love their neighbors, Paul says that they need to resist the dominating and subordinating power of conformity by opening themselves up to the liberating and freeing transformational power of love that is God’s Holy Spirit. A love that, as the former Presiding Bishop liked to say, will transform this world from the nightmare it is for so many, into the dream that God has for us.

Paul appeals to those first- century Christians in Rome to keep Christ, not Caesar, at the center of their lives. He implores them to remember that when they say  “Jesus is Lord” that they are making a political statement. All of the dominant cultural messages of the imperial Roman world insisted that Caesar was lord. If you wanted to get ahead and to fit in, you needed to play by Caesar’s rules. You could do what you wanted on the weekends, say your prayers to whichever god you wanted to, if it turned out that you had a little bit left over at the end of the week. Just be sure to keep it private and spiritual and compartmentalized. Just be sure you knew who really mattered: Caesar.

What exactly is it that Paul hopes these Christians in Rome will be transformed into?  Into people who can discern the will of God. Into people who know the truth so that truth will set them free. Into people who can figure out to whom they really belong and for what purpose; and then to live into that reality not just on Sunday mornings but 24:7, 365 days a year, one day at a time.  Paul wants those followers of Jesus, in Rome, to grow into the full stature of Christ. And ditto with us.

Each new generation of Christians must ask the very same hard questions that Paul raises in Romans 12: Where does your allegiance really lie? Where do you put your trust, not when you are sitting in this room, but as you live your wild and precious lives? In money? Nation? The Democratic Party. The Republican Party? Who shapes your values? Fox News? MSNow? Who wants you to conform and fit in? And how can you resist to stay focused on Jesus?

“I appeal to you brothers and sisters…do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds…”

Paul doesn’t coerce us because, unlike imperial power, authentic faith is never coercive. When faith does become manipulative and demands conformity, it is no longer faith; it’s a cult. So Paul invites those Christians in Rome and us as we gather here today of our own free will, to present our bodies to God. Not just some segmented part of our spiritual selves, not that little piece of us that we bring to Church. Not just our brains, but our whole selves, our souls and our bodies.  Present yourself as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God…

Sacrifice. What a strange word to our ears! It makes us think of Old Testament people cutting birds in half and offering dead animals to be burned as if burning flesh could atone for sin, as if God could be made happy with a slaughtered lamb. It seems so distant from our lives and frankly so bizarre. We do well to remember that the prophets wrestled with this notion, too. They said that the sacrifice God really wanted was a broken and contrite heart. They said, in the Old Testament itself, that God didn’t want animal sacrifices or beautiful liturgy but justice that flows like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Sacrifice may also remind us of the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world by dying on a cross. And we speak of soldiers who lay down their lives for others. More metaphorically, we speak of parents who make sacrifices so that their kids can go off to college. And sometimes, the reverse happens, as kids are sacrificed on the various altars of parents who probably never should have had kids in the first place.

The word sacrifice comes from two old English words that mean “to make holy.” The word sacrament, of course, is closely related to sacrifice linguistically. A sacrament is an outward and visible sign that signifies an inward and spiritual grace. We take everyday things like bread and wine, oil and water, but they mean something much more: they signify the love of God. In the same way, sacrifice suggests taking what is ordinary and making it holy.

Most days, without even being conscious of it, we are conformed to this world little by little. We mirror what we learned in business school or at the naval academy or dare I say in divinity school as well. We parcel ourselves out, bit by bit, as we render ourselves to “Caesar.” We may not even be aware that this is happening. In fact conformity works best when we are not aware of making any conscious choices at all; when we are on autopilot. The empire likes us numb and mindless and obedient.

And then we come to this holy place. And it isn’t just Paul or the preacher who makes his appeal to us; it is Christ himself. It is God the Holy Trinity, through the words of our liturgy, our prayers, our bread-breaking and cup-sharing who invites (not coerces) us to present ourselves, of our own free volition, to present our souls and bodies, as a living sacrifice to God. And then to allow ourselves to be transformed, rather than conformed. Transformed into what?

There are some core truths that Paul holds to and they come up again and again, whether he is speaking to the Christians in Rome, or Corinth, or Galatia, or Thessalonica or Norfolk. One of Paul’s favorite metaphors is that the Church is like a Body. Not just any body, but Christ’s own body. It has many different parts that have different roles. But the goal is for the whole thing to be working together so that eyes see and ears hear and noses smell. He tells the Corinthians that. He tells the Galatians that. And today we hear him telling the Romans that. It’s such a familiar image to us, part of the faith we profess and sing about two thousand years later that we may fail to see the power within it, the power of what it suggests about the Christian faith and our life in Christ.

One bread, one body, one Lord of all,
one cup of blessing which we bless.                     
And we, though many, throughout the earth,
we are one body in this one Lord.

In Holy Baptism we have been claimed and marked and sealed as Christ’s own. We have been re-branded, called away from imperial power and claimed for Jesus Christ, because there is room for only one lord in our lives. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. Paul goes on to say that we all have gifts, given to us by a generous God: gifts that are different and unique to us. We are meant to use those gifts to make the Body stronger, to build it up, so that we might bear witness to the world.

None of us can be the Church on our own. But together, we have what we need to do the work God has given us to do in Christ’s name. We can only do this work, however to the extent that we refuse to be conformed to this world, to the extent that we allow ourselves to transformed and become a living sacrifice to God: for only then can we truly see our way forward. Only then can we discern what is holy and of God, and only then begin to live the prayer with which this day’s worship began—live it not just as words on our lips but as that which defines who we are called to become, with God’s help:

Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.    

May God grant you wisdom and courage for the living of these days.

Joseph and His Brothers: Part 2

I am, again, at Emmanuel Church in Manchester-by-the Sea. This is the second sermon in a two-part series; the first of which can be found here. Today's reading can be found here.

If you were here last Sunday, you might recall that I mentioned that there are two different Old Testament tracks available to us during these summer months. Here at Emmanuel you’ve been on Track 2 while Track 1 has been rolling along with Genesis since Trinity Sunday. Luther was gracious to let us jump over during my two weeks which means I preached part one of a preaching series and today, on my last Sunday with you, we will tackle part two.

 

If you were not able to be here last Sunday, here is the executive summary of that sermon: Jacob and Sons were a hot mess. 

 

The sordid saga of Joseph and his brothers began back in the 37^th chapter of Genesis. There we saw Joseph as a seventeen-year old spoiled brat whose most favorite thing in the world was to report back to daddy whenever his shepherd brothers messed up! So Joseph’s brothers are not very fond of him. In fact the Bible uses a word that most of us who are parents forbid our kids to use. It says his brothers “hated” him. In fact, that they hated him enough to want to kill him. This is sibling rivalry on steroids. In the end, they settle for throwing him into a pit and then selling him off as a slave to some foreign traders. This is bad stuff.

 

And that is where we left Joseph last weekend: sold to those Midianite traders for twenty pieces of silver. (Genesis 37:28). The brothers return home and tell their father that a wild animal has killed their brother. As evidence of Joseph’s death, in a world before DNA testing, they present Jacob with that “amazing technicolor Dreamcoat” smeared in animal blood. Jacob is a mess, as any parent who loses a child naturally would be. Except that in this case, it is all an elaborate and horrible lie. Joseph is not really dead.

 

What happened between last week and this week, in the eight chapters that the lectionary skips over? The narrator takes us to Egypt, where Joseph has been sold to a man named Potiphar, a captain in Pharaoh’s guard. The two get along quite well. The narrator tells us that Joseph was “handsome and good-looking.” (Genesis 39:6b) To be honest I am not certain what the difference is between “handsome” and “good looking”—it sounds a little redundant to me. But maybe that’s the point. Joseph is very easy on the eyes.

 

Joseph ends up in an Egyptian prison for a crime he did not commit. He’s set up by Potiphar’s wife. But remember, Joseph is not only a dreamer but a dream interpreter. The way he gets out of jail free is to interpret a very strange dream of Pharaoh’s about seven fat cows and seven skinny cows and another one about and seven full ears of corn and then seven skinny ears. No one seems to be able to understand what it all means, except for Joseph. It comes easily to him, but to be honest, this particular dream is more about sound economic policy than an advanced seminar in Karl Jung. The dream means that there will be seven years of good crops followed by seven years of an economic downturn. So if Egypt is smart they will save up during the good years in order to be prepared for the lean ones. Joseph is promoted to become Secretary of Agriculture under Pharaoh to oversee that process and that is what they do.

 

In the meantime, Jacob and sons move on with their lives as best they can. But they have now hit upon tough times back in Canaan because it’s the seven lean years and no one told them to save up during the seven fat years. So Jacob sends his sons to Egypt looking to see if there is an economic stimulus package in the works coming out of Cairo. And that brings us to where we are today. 

 

Joseph recognizes his brothers immediately. But remember that when they last saw him he was just a kid. Now he is a successful and powerful political appointee in the Egyptian cabinet, and they simply do not recognize the man before them as their brother. If he has harbored bitter resentments toward them for all these years, now is his chance to get his pound of flesh. Now is his opportunity to have them thrown into a dark pit and left for dead and see how they like it. Revenge! So sweet!

 

But Joseph doesn’t do that. Instead he weeps so loudly that Pharaoh’s whole household hears him. And then he embraces his brothers.

 

Forgiveness. Can you imagine?

 

The late Walter Brueggemann said that this story is about the challenge to live our lives “between the hint of the dream, and the doxology of disclosure.” That’s good Old Testament theology but let’s break it down into plain English. We get these hints and guesses of God’s dream for this world, and we hope for the Kingdom of God to break in on earth as it is in heaven so we can one day sing praise God from whom all blessings flow! We pray for that Kingdom to come every time we gather for worship. Yet we live our lives between those two realities: between the already and the not yet, between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure.

 

When someone suffers a trauma, as Joseph did, it’s easy to understand how that person’s nightmares will win out, and that person will be left embittered and blaming the world. Or blaming themselves. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop and feel there is no future. But if one is able to live “between the hint of the dream, and the doxology of disclosure,” one is already seeing that the story doesn’t end in that pit. The process of claiming new life, for Joseph, began long before that day his brothers appeared before him. As Andy Dufrasne puts it in The Shawshank Redemption, “you can get busy living or get busy dying.”  

 

Joseph has gotten busy living. And because of that, he has let go of the need to seek revenge on his brothers or for that matter to let them live rent free in his head. Instead, he wants to hug them. He wants to find out how his father is doing. He wants to get busy living.

 

So this Joseph story is an Easter story. It is about redemption and healing and new life and just as importantly it is about trusting that God is with us in the pit or a prison cell and in the depths of our deepest fears and pain, and even unto death on a cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

 

We, too, live between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure. As St. Paul did, when he was sitting in a prison cell nearly two thousand years ago, yet hardly able to contain himself, writing to the Church in Philippi:

 

I thank God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now…I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel. (Philippians 1:3,4,12)

 

From prison, Paul writes that! He faced that same choice that Joseph faced: to get busy living or to get busy dying. He chose life. He chose to see God at work in his life even on the hardest of days and to find purpose and meaning in his imprisonment. He chose to live between the hint of the dream and toward the doxology of disclosure.

 

You and I are invited to follow these good examples. It’s hard, for sure. But praising God always leads to love of neighbor. Even those who have so terribly hurt us. I think of Don Henley’s words from “The Heart of the Matter.” I won’t sing them for you – it’s too early in the day for that. But perhaps you know them and you can sing them on your way home:

 

I’ve been tryin’ to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter. But I think it’s about forgiveness. Forgiveness.

 

And of course I think of Eliza Hamilton, when it’s quiet uptown and she has been so hurt by Alexander’s infidelity and by the death of their son, Philip. And yet, she also chooses to live between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure. As a faithful Christian woman, an Episcopalian in fact, she knows how to unlock the future. Forgiveness. Can you imagine?

 

By God’s grace, it happens in our lives from time to time, in small and sometimes in large ways. And when it does, it unleashes the power of God and it opens up grace upon grace and new possibilities. We need these old Bible stories, I think, because in our very real twenty-first century lives we, too, live “between the hint of the dream and the doxology of disclosure.”

 

So here is the thing I want to say to you today, friends: trusting that hint of the dream is what makes the doxology of disclosure possible. Acting on the hints and guesses that lead us to risk healing and reconciliation opens up, again and again invitations for us to see the living God at work in our lives. This is the work the Church is called to in this time and place: to not lose heart, to be agents of healing and reconciliation in a polarized world.

Before I leave you, Emmanuel, a book recommendation. A challenging one by one of my favorite theologians, Miroslav Volf, a Croatian born theologian who directs the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Last I heard, Volf was worshiping in the Episcopal Church in Guilford, Connecticut. In his book, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Volf slows down the drama of an embrace as the key to reconciliation. The drama needs to be mirrored by the other. Simply put you cannot force someone to hug you. That’s not an embrace. You open, and you wait. They need to open, and wait, before an embrace can happen. We can practice this but it’s hard. Embrace is a dance, and reconciliation that leads to healing requires a partner.

 

What is happening in today’s Old Testament reading is a miracle and by God’s grace it happens for us every once in a while: old hurts are put aside and the future becomes possible. Forgiveness. Can you imagine?

May this Joseph story empower and equip us to be more hopeful and more courageous agents of healing and reconciliation, for the living of these days. Keep practicing doxology, so that from the hint of the dream we can open our own arms and lean into it, by God’s grace. 

Praise God. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise God, all creatures here below. Praise God the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. Amen. 

Joseph and His Brothers: Part 1

On Sunday, August 9 and Sunday, August 16 I am serving at Emmanuel Church in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a summer chapel. I decided to preach the Joseph story in two parts, this Sunday being the first of those. The reading can be found here.

Good morning, Emmanuel! I am with you this weekend and next and so I thought I might do a mini-preaching series on the Genesis readings that come up today and then again next weekend. 

Congregations and their preachers have options during the summer months for the Old Testament readings, Track 1 or Track 2. Although you have been on Track 2 here, your very kind priest, Luther, was gracious enough to accommodate my request to switch over to Track 1 and the readings from Genesis for these two Sundays that I’m with you. So let's go...

Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. This is the story of the family of Jacob.

Jacob is one of the few people in the Bible who gets almost as much attention as his grandfather, Abraham. Abraham may well be the “father of faith.” But he really enters the Biblical stage as an adult. Only Moses and Jesus come to my mind as getting more attention than Jacob does from birth to death. That is fitting, for in the reading immediately before today’s, Jacob wrestles with the angel of God and is given a new name: Israel. He is the archetype of this people God has claimed as “chosen.”

Contrast the amount of time the narrator spends on Jacob with Abraham’s son/Jacob’s father, Isaac. We see Isaac at birth and then climbing Mount Moriah with his father and then near death and then mistakenly giving the blessing to Jacob who tricks him into it, rather than to Esau. That’s about it.

After reconciling with his brother Esau, we are told that Jacob settled down to live in the land where his father had lived as an alien. With all his kids, it is now looking like the promise made by God to his grandfather is secure: the land is given and descendants (while not yet as many as the stars) are quite numerous. It’s a complicated blended family with thirteen kids: twelve sons and one daughter by four different mothers. Joseph, his youngest, is now seventeen and is his favorite – not only because he’s the baby in the family but also because Joseph’s mother is the one Jacob truly loves.

Now I don’t want to be overly anachronistic here. But think about a big family with lots of kids and the youngest one turns seventeen. The empty nest that follows can be both a liberating and a frightening experience. There is a real generational shift as that “baby” begins to grow up. I don’t want to overemphasize that, but I think it’s the kind of detail it can be fun to ponder a bit. Most families I know experience some amount of tension—of conflict, and even of crisis—through such transitional periods. As older siblings start to marry and have kids of their own and then the last of the kids goes off to college or a job, sometimes people end up in therapy, trying to figure it all out and how they ended up where they are, and so forth. And in this family it is quite clear that dad played favorites.

I’m an oldest child, so I know that I am the favorite. Number one! Just don’t tell my three younger siblings…

But seriously, families struggle with these issues, don’t they, and maybe big families struggle even more so. Is there enough love to go around? I love the old story about Erma Bombeck who wrote letters to each of her three kids explaining why each one was her “favorite” and I think that’s something to aspire as a parent or grandparent: you love each one as a favorite. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that, and the conflicts, the sibling rivalry, the betrayal, the anger, the hurt all result from people not feeling loved enough.

In the case of this family, it seems all are agreed that Joseph is Jacob’s favorite son. Remember that amazing technicolor dream coat? Maybe it is because Jacob so loved Rachel and because this boy was given “in his old age.” Maybe it’s because he was the spitting image of his mother. Maybe because the other kids were just brats or boring. Maybe Jacob just had more resources in life as the kids grew up: he could afford expensive tailoring for Joseph that he couldn’t when the other ones were growing up. We can’t know for sure but as in our own families, perception can become reality. The stories we tell about where we have been shape the people we are becoming.

In the midst of it all, though, God is at work. That is the theological point of the entire Joseph narrative. I don’t want to give away too much of next week’s punchline, but Joseph ends up in Egypt for a reason according to the narrative. These brothers succumb to their worst angels by selling Joseph into slavery but God brings good from that. God is ever bringing good from ill, as one of the church’s great hymns puts it. So in the short term, this all looks really bad. But the text as part of the larger narrative wants us to see—as the listening community—that God is underneath it all, working for good.

Joseph can see that after the famine, after he is promoted to become Secretary of Agriculture in Pharaoh’s cabinet, after his brothers and he are reconciled. Hold that thought until next Sunday.

This point still has significance for our lives, especially when God’s ways seem hidden from us, when we feel like we are in the pit, and perhaps even that someone who is supposed to love us has hurt and betrayed us and put us in that pit. Here (as with great-grandpa Abraham) Joseph is called upon to put his trust in God. What is different is that Joseph doesn’t seem to have direct access to God that Abraham had. God tells Abram to “go” and Abram listens. But with Joseph, God speaks to him through his subconscious life, through dreams. The dreams are never direct revelations. They need to be interpreted.

Recall that it was one of these dreams that got Joseph into trouble with his brothers in the first place: he told them a dream that suggested he was the most special one. But it will also be his dreams that get Joseph out of trouble when he lands in an Egyptian jail cell. Isn’t it that way with us as well: our gifts can bring both blessings and challenges along the way.

I suspect that most of us experience God more as Joseph did than as Abraham did: we get hints and guesses, dreams, images, stories. We need to keep walking by faith even when it feels like we’ve been abandoned and we learn to trust that God is with us even when it is not altogether obvious to us or to those around us.

The second insight I want to share about this text is for us to notice and even embrace the fact that this family is, to say the least, far from perfect. That should give us hope. It should help us to see that dysfunction isn’t a disqualification for the people of God: maybe it is even a pre-requisite.

Some of you may know from what Luther has shared that I served in a diocesan ministry for almost a dozen years, as Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts, which is all of the parishes west of 495 in this Commonwealth save for Southborough. It put me on the road a lot, but before that I’d served as the rector of St. Francis in Holden for fifteen years. While there I did some adjunct teaching of a required undergraduate course at Assumption College in Worcester. We spent a fair amount of time on Genesis which for most of these young Roman Catholic kids was eye-opening. They’d been taught about the pastel-colored figures in Bible-land but what we explored were these human beings who were kind of mess, like us. The same truth carries over to the New Testament. God doesn’t look for perfect people to call; God uses imperfect people to do the work that God has given us to do.

We’ll come back to it next week but think for a moment of how scary it must have been for Joseph to be in that pit and then sold into slavery. I wonder if at least some of his brothers felt guilty or ashamed of what they’d done. It feels like the end of the story: a terribly abusive one. But stay tuned because there is more to come, not only for this family but for God’s people.

We might also notice that in spite of political rhetoric in American Christianity to the contrary, the Bible isn’t primarily about families, but about God forming a covenant community of wounded people who come from families. Sometimes we talk about the Church as a family. I heard that a lot from vestries and search committees when I served as Canon to the Ordinary. I used to push that metaphor a bit and ask people to unpack that, because it is tempting to romanticize and sentimentalize that notion, forgetting the sibling rivalries and petty jealousies and old wounds are a part of every family. Sometimes one of the wardens in a congregation would say to me, “we’re just like a family here at St. Swithin’s” and I’d say, “oh boy, you’re a real mess, eh?” Sometimes they laughed and sometimes they looked like I’d kicked them in the gut!

Jesus says: whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, my family. He says the first loyalty is to love God and the second is to love neighbor. What we see coming out of Genesis is an exploration of what that community is called to be: first Israel and then the Church. Both living branches of God’s holy people, warts and all, from the same Source.

That is the story that emerges from Genesis as I read it: in Exodus we get the Torah which shapes Israel, and in the New Testament Jesus comes not to negate but to fulfill that covenant. In Genesis we get this cast of real characters, including Jacob and Sons – including Joseph, the little brother whose story we will continue to unpack next Sunday. Stay tuned. It doesn’t end with betrayal and slavery because God isn’t finished yet – not with Joseph, or with any of us. Stay tuned...