No Shame

homily preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate

Wednesday in Holy Week, April 1, 2015

“And it was night.” Night has fallen on Jesus. Betrayal has been set into motion, and nothing now will stop it. This week is steeped in frightening inevitability.

A friend of mine mused this week, “It’s surprising that we don’t hear about crucifixions happening in our world today.”

I replied, “I think we do—every single day. They just don’t tend to involve actual crosses.”

Aberdeen is a city in Washington with a 25% poverty rate, in a county in which 46% of residents rely on social services. The Rev. Sarah Monroe, our diocesan missioner with Chaplains on the Harbor in Aberdeen, Grays Harbor, and Westport, says, “In the face of dismal statistics, and in the face of a sense of communal despair, we seek to live in the light of the Gospel.”

A few weeks ago, a group of citizens in Aberdeen who have no homes were ordered to disband the largest homeless encampment in town. They have been evicted before. The city’s long-term goal is the development of a waterfront park—something that might be good for tourism and some eventual economic recovery, but which to date has been carried out with no consideration of the fate of today’s homeless citizens. At least once in the past, the city has burned their camp. The message from the city rings loud and clear: “We do not recognize your right to exist.”

What can we do? Can we quote today’s collect to these, our fellow citizens, and ask them “to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time”? I wouldn’t dare. But I would certainly question what this prayer we pray today might mean.

Earlier this week, along with many other concerned people, I emailed the mayor of Aberdeen, Bill Simpson, urging him to give his citizens more time and asking him to work on creative solutions. He wrote me back and asked me for my ideas, and then he said, “In my solutions to most situations like this, I ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’”

But before I could reply, I found out from Sarah Monroe that the mayor had already given his decision: no more time. No reprieve. The eviction would go forward as scheduled.

Aaron Scott works for Chaplains on the Harbor. I told her what the mayor had told me. “What would Jesus do?” she wondered. “Jesus would die for the people in this encampment.”

Indeed, he would. Indeed, that’s why we’re all in church this week.

I bet that the people living in this encampment in Aberdeen are feeling betrayed: betrayed by their government and their society. Jesus knows something about betrayal. What did Jesus do? As we hear in the letter to the Hebrews, “For the sake of the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross, disregarding its shame.”

Those who have been homeless know far more about shame than I have ever known. And, by the way, shame is not the same thing as guilt. Episcopal author and TED Talk veteran Brené Brown has come to this conclusion in her fourteen years of research, which centers on vulnerability and shame. She defines guilt as an appropriate feeling that comes when you know you have done something wrong. God sometimes points our guilt out to us so that we can benefit from it. If our hearts are open, guilt leads naturally to confession, learning, and self-correction.

Shame, on the other hand, is never God-given. Shame is imposed on us from outside by fearful voices. While guilt admits, “I did something bad,” shame insists, “I am something bad.” It’s all too easy to wonder whether a person has brought homelessness on himself through his bad decisions. Maybe we’ll feel less bad about a person’s misfortune if we can lead ourselves to believe the person deserves it. Funny thing about Jesus, though—he favored mercy, and mercy can only come to those who don’t deserve it. Mercy comes because we are God’s good creations.

And so the shameful cross was imposed on Jesus. Shameful eviction is imposed on the homeless in Aberdeen. Shame hides behind a cloak of respectability and tells us that we must always get what we deserve. Shame tells us, “You don’t get it, and you never will.” Shame can never lead to joy, because it has already written an ending in which joy can never again be possible. Shame is a liar, because it has given up on what God has created. It tries to rob us of our right to exist. In the end, shame did this to Judas.

But Jesus endured the shame that was imposed on him. He endured it in order to expose it for the lie that it is. Shame cannot win, because in God’s reality, shame has no power to destroy us—even when it takes our very lives.

It is for this reason that Jesus could say, at the moment of his betrayal, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” Even on the cross, Jesus was already reigning victoriously. What does victory look like, or royalty, or glory? We should know by now that our ability to identify these things is severely impaired. Somehow, Jesus’ betrayal by Judas spelled the beginning of the end for the forces of darkness.

We might ask, “If Jesus suffered so that we wouldn’t have to suffer, then why is there still so much suffering?” But Jesus didn’t suffer so that we wouldn’t have to suffer. Jesus suffered in order to show us how to suffer. And so we do pray, “Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed.” Despite all appearances to the contrary, suffering will lead to glory.

But woe to those by whom suffering comes!

Why? Those who oppress others, who dismiss others, who give up on people, who impose shame on them … does God shame and condemn these people?

No. Because shame never comes from God. And that’s a good thing, because I’ve been one of those by whom suffering comes, and I bet you have, too. I have been a part of systems that perpetuate injustice. I have personally shamed other people, giving up on them. I have said to people some form of, “You don’t get it, and you never will.” Have you?

Imperfect creatures just tend to shame each other. Woe to those by whom suffering comes, because we have so much painful growing still to do. And may God bless us, and may God give us the grace to accept our guilt and to begin to grow.

This is why we need Jesus. We need Jesus to go ahead of us to the cross, to show us how it’s done, so that we can bear our crucifixions, tiny and great, without bitterness, without rage, without losing our souls. We can suffer without shame. And maybe Jesus will also stoke compassion and self-awareness in us: compassion to keep us from rushing to the judgment of others, and self-awareness to keep us from crucifying others.

To whatever degree that can happen—to whatever degree we can free ourselves and others from the cycle of shame—the Kingdom of God comes. Indeed, it is already here! We just need to decide to participate in it. We need to decide to be citizens of the society where there is no shame, no withdrawal of necessities for supposed lack of deserving, no crucifixion of those who are inconvenient to us.

To accept suffering joyfully does not mean to accept it cheerfully. It means to accept in our hearts what we may not yet fully believe with our minds—that suffering will always lead to glory. That there is no death without resurrection. This is joy!

It is from this perspective that the prophet Isaiah can proclaim, in the voice of the suffering servant:

The Lord GOD helps me;

therefore I have not been disgraced;

therefore I have set my face like flint,

and I know that I shall not be put to shame;

he who vindicates me is near.

Who will contend with me?

Let us stand up together.

Who are my adversaries?

Let them confront me.

It is the Lord GOD who helps me;

who will declare me guilty?

This is holy work: to be disgraced, and then to stand there and insist that we are not actually disgraced … to endure the hostility of those who are afraid of us … to stand there, to all appearances completely broken, and to name ourselves as beloved of God and completely whole. There is NO SHAME in God.

Yesterday clergy and citizens gathered with the homeless in Aberdeen to advocate, to strategize, and to make sure that all those affected know their civil and human rights. Then today I read this update from Aaron Scott:

For everybody keeping watch on the situation of our friends at the river encampment in Aberdeen: no eviction has taken place. The mayor has indicated that a no-trespass order will be in effect for April 13. Campers are considering their options, service providers are stepping up with offers for support, community members are engaged in the ongoing discussion about real solutions, but no decisions have been made yet. What we DO know: any true progress that happens here will come from the leadership of camp residents themselves. Nothing about us without us!

So you can see that God, and God’s people, are hard at work in Aberdeen. Today there is a beam of hope. And if tomorrow brings the kiss of betrayal, may it lead without delay to God’s glory, in some way we cannot yet see.

Night has fallen on Jesus. Betrayal has been set into motion, and nothing now will stop it. This week is steeped in glorious inevitability. Tomorrow night we will observe Jesus’ new commandment: “Love one another.” This command was also given to Judas—a love that bears no shame, but calls out guilt, all the while offering a generous invitation to grow. Amen.

Holy Week and Easter Are Countercultural

This article was supposed to be published in the April 2015 issue of The Messenger, the newsletter for St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Bellingham, WA. It was inadvertently left out, so I am publishing it here.

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In the 1970s and ’80s, I was raised in two Christianities at once: the Christian-ish, civil religion of our dominant culture, and the Christianity of my local congregation. At a young age, most of what I considered the most attractive features of religion came from the dominant culture: Christmas trees, the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, and the idea that Christianity basically meant being nice to people.

Meanwhile, in my local congregation I learned the more central features of Christianity: the stories of Jesus and about Jesus, the thrilling Old Testament adventure stories, the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, loving our enemies, death and resurrection. My faith was fed week in and week out by story and communal prayer and liturgy. I didn’t notice any difference between these two Christianities until I was an adult, and that realization was slow in coming.

Since then, Christianity in our context has changed. Fewer people have been baptized into the Church, and fewer still have grown up as members of a congregation. Unfortunately, a record number have experienced religion as a hostile force, or at least as a feature of society one can choose to ignore. On the other hand, Christian-ish, civic religion permeates our nation’s politics and self-image, and many of the societal structures we take for granted were originally built on it.

But Holy Week and Easter are countercultural. They are not generally understood by civil religion, despite long predating it. (If they were understood, we wouldn’t see secular organizations scheduling Easter egg hunts on Holy Saturday!) They are ancient, deep rituals steeped in power: power to expand our understanding of ourselves as human beings who seek clarity and meaning in a mysterious universe full of danger and joy.

I’d like to invite you to attend church with us on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil. On Thursday, April 2 at 7:00 p.m., bring an offering of nonperishable food. Come have your feet washed, and wash the feet of others. Watch as the altar is stripped. On Friday, pray in the darkness and touch the Cross. On Saturday, come to the bonfire and light a candle. Hear the stories of our faith. Be sprinkled with water and smell the anointing oil. Ring bells and sing loudly with the first “Alleluias.” Bring friends. Bring children in pajamas, with pillows and blankets, and camp out. Bring anyone and everyone who could use some Good News.

Then, experience Easter as a season lasting for fifty days. As we tell the kids in Godly Play: Easter “is so great that it keeps on going. You can’t keep it in one Sunday. It overflows and goes on for six more Sundays. It makes a whole season!” We are Christians. This is our story. Help us tell the story!

God Who Does Stuff

homily preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate

Thursday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 26, 2015

Genesis 17:1-8; Psalm 105:4-11; John 8:51-59

I’m fond of saying that the most radical claim we make as people of faith—and by this, I mean all monotheists, not just Christians—is that the God who created everything is God who actually does stuff. None of this deistic, set-the-world-spinning-and-walk-away belief for us! The more deeply you immerse yourself in the life of a worshiping congregation, hopefully, the more you find this to ring true in your life—the easier it is to see evidence of God at work in you.

Meanwhile, many who claim to be believers will settle for a vague belief that “something created all this.” That is profound and wonderful, and it’s a very good start. But that’s not all we’re about here. In the church, we understand God to make promises and then to follow through.

all art by Gertrud Mueller Nelson

For thousands of years, we have believed this. We are the descendants of those who believe that God makes and keeps promises. Today’s readings are about God keeping promises. But though God promises to Abraham a land to call home and descendants to populate it, Abraham catches only a glimpse of it during his lifetime. We may wonder, “What was the point, then? Can’t God promise and deliver something that is more immediately satisfying? And if the promise is going to take so many generations to come, can’t we call into question our own understanding of what has been promised?”

Well, yes, we can. And while we may choose to assert that God doesn’t change over time—something I don’t think we can be sure about, by the way—we can certainly observe that our understanding of God continues to change and to deepen. This very fact can be very difficult for people to accept. In a world so given to uncertainty and tragedy, we want something certain and understandable to hang our beliefs on. How can we keep our belief in God steady if people’s beliefs about God keep changing?

Yet I wouldn’t want to go back. I wouldn’t want to live in a time before the scientific method, because the scientific method shows us how God actually does stuff in ways we can apprehend and measure. I wouldn’t want to live in a time when we settled for existing in separate tribes that were all terrified of each other—something we still have in many places in the world today, though perhaps now we can begin to see beyond it! I wouldn’t want to go back to a time when we assumed that men and women were relegated to specific roles in society, and when we assumed that God wanted it this way. I look forward to more freedom in the world, and also for people to gain a greater sense of our responsibility to each other. Jesus commanded us to “love one another,” and we still have so much work to do as we learn how to love. I pray that God will continue to show us how all the new things we learn from each other are actually a part of God’s long-range plans.

Now, about the gospel passage: I would be remiss if I didn’t clarify that the situation in it is not quite as portrayed. This is not actually a showdown between Jesus and “the Jews.” Jesus, obviously, was a Jew, as were all of his earliest followers. When we hear, in John’s gospel, the phrase “the Jews,” we need to imagine ourselves standing with them. Jesus is talking to us—not to members of some other religion, but people who share his own faith.

In today’s gospel passage, those who are challenging Jesus—the Jews, or rather, those of us who share Jesus’ faith—revisit the promise to Abraham. This turns into a teaching moment, and Jesus folds time back on itself to announce that Abraham saw Jesus coming and was glad. Here we have a key piece of Christology—Jesus claiming that he existed before Abraham. Yet it’s deeper than that. He doesn’t say, “Before Abraham was, I was.” He says, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” The verb tense transcends our ability to pin Jesus down to a specific timeline. Not only this, but Jesus also references the very name of God given to Moses in the wilderness: “I AM.” Centuries later, the theologian Arius insisted that Jesus was the first of God’s creations and was not to be equated precisely with God. No doubt Arius’s opponents quoted this piece of scripture in their quest to condemn Arius as a heretic.

So what do you think of all this? Better yet, what do you feel about all this? Did Abraham experience Jesus from two thousand years away? Have you experienced Jesus in your own life, two thousand years removed on the other side? If we can, perhaps Abraham did, too, even if he never imagined the name Jesus.

This is the project of religion: not just to cogitate and to wonder, but to experience a transcendent reality. If God is all in our heads, God might be a figment of our imaginations. But when we get out of our heads and down into our hearts, we find Jesus there waiting for us. He smiles and says, “I’ve been here all along. Welcome.” We find that, in him, we are home. He sets a table for us, and the table is called Wisdom. In preparing a home for us, he is our host, and when we invite him into our new home, we find that he is also the guest. But better yet, we don’t even have to provide for our guest, because Jesus is also the meal. Jesus is host, guest, and meal, and he invites us to relax into his hospitality. Jesus promises us a home, just as God promised Abraham a home—not an immediate place to lay our heads, but a legacy for the future and also an image of being taken care of that transcends every timeline.

We are deep into Lent. Next week we will revisit the events in the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. It will be almost like we are there ourselves. Don’t just think about it. Experience it. Settle into the mystery in which Jesus suffers for us and then goes ahead of us into death to prepare a home for us. Like Abraham, we can see that home from afar, and this will allow us to fall deeply in love with God all over again. Amen.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One. A Man Goes to a Well ...

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Third Sunday in Lent (Year A), March 8, 2015

I can’t help but think that much of what happens in Jesus’ exchange with the woman at the well is not abundantly clear in print. Words by themselves cannot possibly tell an entire story, so the words of the Bible serve as a script for performance. And so when we read the Bible we cannot avoid putting ourselves into it. This story is a great example, and if I take this story in a direction that doesn’t work for you, I invite you yourself to read the story out loud sometime and see what you come up with. It might be something very different.

Map (8th century BCE) from Wikipedia

Jesus and his disciples are passing through foreign territory. And here’s where a little history will be helpful. A thousand years before Jesus, the original, short-lived nation of Israel suffered a political split. Samaria became the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, while Jerusalem, the “city of David,” remained the capital of the southern kingdom of Judah. Naturally, Jerusalem not being a part of the northern kingdom, David’s city did not remain important to the northern people of Israel, so they moved the focus of their worship to Mount Gerizim. Israel in the north was eventually conquered by the Assyrians. One hundred fifty years later the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by a newer superpower, the Babylonians.

Many of the northern Jews intermarried with Assyrians but retained their Jewish faith and practice as best they could. They became known as the Samaritans, and they are still around to this day, though only a few hundred remain. In Jesus’ time, Samaria was yet another occupied province of the Roman Empire. Despite the Samaritans and the Judean Jews being under the same occupation, the ancient rivalries about the proper place of worship had not abated. The other big difference is that the northern tribes never received any formal permission to repopulate their homeland in their own way, while the Judeans had been given express permission several centuries before, by King Cyrus of Persia, to reclaim their land and their worship practices and to rebuild their temple.

And so we have two peoples with common ancestors, nursing grudges and suffering from a great deal of animosity towards each other—like Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or like Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq. The excuse for the breach is religious, but mostly it plays out in politics and especially in social norms. No doubt the children on both sides are told simply that if you want to remain safe and untainted, you stay away from “those people.”

unknown African artist;image from beggarsbread,org

At a well in Samaria, Jesus throws this systemic racism out the window. I imagine the woman is startled to see a Jew at the well. Jesus is “tired out by his journey” and thirsty, and he has no bucket with which to get water. He uses his physical needs to make himself vulnerable, but this vulnerability is not immediately apparent. Jesus’ opening line to the woman is, “Give me a drink.”

I’ve heard this story many times, but this is the first time it has occurred to me that this is a pick-up line—in reverse! It’s the opposite of, “Let me buy you a drink.” It’s also historically related to ancient stories of men and women and wells—stories their two religions share. Abraham’s servant met Isaac’s future wife Rebecca at a well, and he asked her for a drink.  Jacob met Rachel, the love of his life, when she came to the well and he helped her remove the heavy cover from it. Moses met his wife Zipporah at a well. It’s a trope of ancient Semitic storytelling, as familiar to them as “a man walks into a bar.” When I was at seminary, the water cooler in one of our common areas had a sign next to it that read: “Ladies, beware of meeting men at the well.”

The woman points out the impropriety of a Jew talking to an unrelated woman at all, let alone a Samaritan woman. And this is when things get interesting. Jesus says, “If you had any idea who I am, you’d be asking me for a drink of living water.” Now, living water is not just an obscure mystical metaphor. Living water can also mean running water—flowing water—something you’ll never find in a well.

But there’s also the possibility of some innuendo here—like, “I’m not just any man. You don’t know what you’re missing.” So it should come as no surprise that the woman replies, in essence, “This well is deep, buddy, and you have no way into it. How great a man do you think you are?” She dares him to compare himself to Jacob, the great common ancestor of Jews and Samaritans. Referring to Jacob may also be an attempt to transcend their differences. Is she picking up on Jesus’ advances? Is she rationalizing the possibilities that might emerge with this foreigner? What is going on inside her?

Jesus keeps up the banter: “Lady, I’ll give you water that will quench your thirst so much you’ll never be thirsty again—and it will lead to eternal life.”

“Hah!” she retorts. “You do think you’re good!” A pause. “It would be great never to have to come here to draw water again.” And so the woman drops her guard by letting on that this public place stokes her public shame. She waits until noon to draw water, in the heat of the day, long after the other women have gone. She may speak this line with sarcasm, but is it also full of longing? Jesus knows it. The woman is thirsty for human connection without judgment. She wants to be known and loved for who she really is, but there is so much stuff in the way!

So Jesus calls out the stuff. He acts as if he has suddenly remembered that he shouldn’t be seen talking to a woman. “Go, call your husband, and come back.”

The woman’s story is not private; among her people, everybody knows about it. But it is, for her and for her people, shameful. If she is such a difficult wife that five men have rejected and divorced her, society scorns her willfulness. On the other hand, if she has outlived five husbands, would you want to marry her? She must have sinned in some way to earn this curse, so she is to be feared and shunned. The fact that this foreigner already knows her story is a little bit strange, though. Thus her reply: “Sir, I see that you are a prophet!” She may say it sarcastically, but … how does he know?

Now the woman shifts the conversation. Perhaps she’s never met a Jew before; she has only grown up hearing about their unforgivable flaws. Now she finally has a chance to understand one first hand, while nobody else is looking. And she is beginning to trust that he is, indeed, not like other men. So she starts talking theology: “OK, So the main difference between Samaritans and Jews is the place where we worship God. You say it has to be in Jerusalem, while we worship here. Just how different are we? What do you say?”

In reply, Jesus first claims that Jews are more theologically correct than Samaritans; perhaps there’s still an element of their banter. But he also states unequivocally that a unifying force will come out of Judaism and reunite the two clans. He says that very soon the mark of true worship will not depend on location or ancestral homeland, for anybody. Everyone will be invited just to love God.

“Yes,” says the woman. “Our two sects agree that our savior is coming.”

“Indeed,” says Jesus. “And you are speaking with him right now.”

The sexually charged banter has given way to true affection, the sarcasm to earnestness, and the woman feels herself being transformed. Over the next two days, she will serve as a magnet to draw many of her fellow Samaritans to this man’s presence.

What attractive reason does she give for meeting Jesus? “Come see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” On the surface, it may sound like she’s shilling for a fortune teller. So we must presume that the rest of the message comes in her face, in her bearing, in her total transformation before the town’s eyes, in the fact that her fear and shame have evaporated completely.

This is why Jesus is able to explain to his disciples, “Look! The field is ripe for harvesting all around you.” It’s true for us, too. We don’t have to look far to find someone who needs a human connection with God. Just go out of your way to seek out the people who are invisible, or who have been made invisible. There we will find the thirsty ones who crave the living water of a connection with God. There the church will, as Chris Hoke preached a few weeks ago, “storm the gates of Hades.”

Brené Brown, social scientist, professor, writer, Episcopalian, says that the message the church needs to send is not, “Show up, act like us, be seen.” Rather, our message should be simply, “Show up, be seen.” And then we need to do whatever it takes to act out the truth of that message. This is what frees people to move from shame to safety and hope.

When the other Samaritans come to Jesus, they find that the woman’s words are true, but they also find that they are able to understand the words in a new way through direct experience. It’s true in our world, too. You can study Christianity all you want academically and never make a spiritual connection with it. Faith can only be properly explored and understood experientially—from the inside. The further in you go, the larger it becomes.

Furthermore, our solitude holds no answer to our loneliness. Faith—the kind of faith that sustains us for the long haul—comes from within community. Most especially, it comes in the shift from shunned isolation to true belonging. And that’s why those who have been marginalized and cast out are the ones who understand Jesus best of all. Jesus restores them to their communities. It’s like they are born again.

God had to become one of us in order for us to relate to God at all. You can’t have a human connection with an all-transcendent deity. Yet human connection is what we need and are made for, so God saw fit to give that to us. The Savior of the world is God among us, God who knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. Even today he brings us living water and says, “You are my beloved—no matter what.” Amen.

The Rubble or Our Sins

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2015

“Oh, where do we begin: the rubble, or our sins?” That’s a lyric from one of my favorite popular songs of the past couple years: “Pompeii,” by the band Bastille. “Oh, where do we begin: the rubble, or our sins?” And that’s a really great question at the beginning of  Lent. We live in a beautiful world, but we’ve made a mess of it. So now what do we do? Do we start by sifting through the rubble and making repairs? Or do we first need to fix ourselves so that we don’t cause further damage?

It seems to me that this question—“Where do we begin?”—is the source of some of the great theological and political divides in our nation. Is it up to our governments, businesses, religions, schools, and other organizations to clear away the rubble and start constructing a better world? Certainly large groups of people are capable of effecting good change if they can act somewhat in tandem—God help us! Or must we depend on each individual to reform and to stop sinning? Again, God help us, because individuals will always mess things up. So how will we ever make any progress towards a healthier, less self-destructive society?

Let’s ask the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah urged the nation of Judea, as a political entity, to shape up and to begin to work for justice. We can hear within this Isaiah reading the roots of the popular protest slogan, “No Justice, No Peace.” He taught that the exile in Babylon came as a result of the nation’s sins. When we project Isaiah forward into our context, it strikes me that the prophet would likely be very concerned about many things: predatory lenders, labor contracts, the military industrial complex. He would be shocked at our cruelty to immigrants. He would marvel at our stubborn refusal to address climate change with any sort of urgency. Isaiah rails against hypocrites who make a show of doing something religious—maybe printing slogans on their merchandise that seem to honor God—while at the same time engaging in business practices that oppress fellow human beings. Look at the income inequity in our country, and the poverty and misery that result. These would be of special concern to Isaiah.

But then Isaiah prescribes, as a remedy for our corporate sin, practices that any individual can do on any day: “share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house.” He speaks of removing the heavy yoke from workers, of no longer pointing fingers and speaking evil. Oh, where does Isaiah begin: the rubble, or our sins? Isaiah makes no distinction. When our organizations change and our individual hearts change, preaches Isaiah: “Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” Certainly our nation is at its best when it is known as one that repairs breaches and restores streets. And we are at our best when this is work we all do together—not work that we count on other people to accomplish for us.

Isaiah makes no distinction between individual and national behavior because our modern concept of individual rights and responsibilities has developed over millennia. Not nearly as many people today would affirm that God punishes nations for corporate sins. Do you remember when Pat Robertson insisted that God allowed 9/11 to happen in order to punish America for secularizing our public schools? Naturally, most of us were deeply offended. And we would be just as offended if someone were to suggest that God has sent ISIS to punish the West. This doesn’t fly for us, because we know too many innocent people. We have absorbed the later biblical principle that asserts that innocent people do not suffer divine punishment on behalf of the guilty. (Well, maybe once!) Laying aside the question of what is sinful in the first place, we’re more likely to say that individuals sin, and that those sins working together cause bigger and bigger problems, and so we bring our doom upon ourselves.

If that’s the case, then how exactly does God relate to nations on the world stage? When we turn to the Gospels, we find that Jesus doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other about the Roman Empire. It is his context, but it need not stand in the way of us loving God and loving each other. Borders and principalities are human constructions, and they will continue to change, but God does not. Oh, where does Jesus begin: the rubble, or our sins? Jesus’ answer to us today is very quiet and patient. We are to choose carefully where to put our attention and our energy. We are to be God’s people wherever we are, and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.

Do good things, says Jesus, but see if you can get away with doing them secretly. Don’t do good things in the hope of a reward. Jesus also rails against hypocrites who make a show of doing something religious—maybe wearing a sandwich board on a street corner and screaming at sinners—as if they could strong-arm God into dispensing some sort of vending machine blessing. I can’t tell whether Jesus is being tongue-in-cheek, or sincere, when he tells us that those hypocrites who make a show of their good deeds will receive their reward. It may be that he’s saying their efforts are not futile. But Jesus calls his followers to a higher standard. Feasts can be public, but fasting is private. Worship can be corporate, but our deepest prayerful longings are personal. Our faith proceeds from our one-on-one relationship with God and spreads outward to our community and the world.

But above all, says Jesus, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” What do we value most, and why do we value it? We need look no further than our check registers or credit card statements to find our hearts. (A priest I know once commented, “I guess my heart is in lunch.”) If Lent is a time for self-examination, then we could do worse than to examine our finances—and Isaiah would certainly say the same, whether we are individuals, churches, or nations! How much do we insist on maintaining control of our material wealth? When we give a gift, do we really give a gift, or is it more like a contract? If even in giving gifts we want to control what happens to them, then that may suggest that our possessions own us.

Instead, says Jesus, “store up for yourselves treasure in heaven.” Do good deeds because they’re good. And in the meantime, above all, stay in relationship with God.

One year when I was a youth group leader, I told the high school kids, “You know, Lent is a great time to work on things about yourself that need to change.”

“Or,” added a 14-year-old named Adam, “you could let God work on changing you.”

I was totally undone. Adam schooled me that day, and I will always be grateful. “Oh, where do we begin: the rubble, or our sins?” Maybe that turns out to be a false dichotomy. Maybe it wasn’t that great a sermon illustration! We see the rubble of our world all around us. We see the rubble within us as we examine ourselves and find ourselves to be sinful people. These things are painfully real. But “where do we begin”? We don’t. God does.

So here we are, about to receive the mark of ashes on our foreheads. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Our lives and our world are rubble and dust, yet God looks at it all and sees beauty. God sees us healthy and whole, and God holds out Jesus to us—an image of what we may yet become. In the Garden of Eden, we made the ill-advised decision to become like God. And God said, “Well, if you insist. This is going to be harder than you think, but nevertheless, let’s get started.”

So whatever you do with your Lent, don’t make it depend completely on your willpower versus some bad habit. Sure, you can go on a diet, or stop biting your nails, or give up chocolate or alcohol. These are good things to do, because it’s always good to come to a deeper understanding of what outside forces have control over us. The best thing I ever gave up for Lent was complaining, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t complained since!

So if and when your willpower fails, don’t believe for a second that you have failed God. God loves you infinitely. Do you believe that? As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “God has begun a good work in you.” And no matter how much rubble piles up in us or in the world around us, God will see that work through to completion. This is the Christian story: that God has acted in the world and will continue to act in the world. It’s not all up to us to get it right, because Jesus took care of that part. Now our job is simply to relax into Jesus, to be grateful for the gift of eternal life, and in response to it, to love more and more deeply. Amen.

You Don't Need to See My Identification

You know the scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan uses a Jedi mind trick to fool the weak-minded stormtroopers into letting his group pass through the checkpoint? The other day that happened to me, only I'm not aware of any particular kinship with The Force, at least not as George Lucas imagined it. In my case, I experienced a big fat case of unearned privilege. It happened when I arrived at my bank, feeling frustrated after being foiled at the Rite Aid’s Western Union kiosk.

Now, the first evidence of unearned privilege is the fact that I’ve gone 42 years without ever having sent money via Western Union. You know the stereotype: Western Union is for sending bail money, or money to the family members back home who didn’t cross the border illegally, or money to that cousin who’s always making bad decisions, but to whom I'm going to give a break just one more time. Indeed, when I picked up the phone at the kiosk to dial in my order, the phone literally smelled like homelessness. And I thought, “Wow, I’m in a totally new situation here.”

I was using Western Union to send money to a seminary colleague, a priest in Burundi who is raising money for a truck that will be very helpful to his congregation. After some research, I was sure I had all the tools I needed to transfer money from my clergy discretionary fund all the way to Africa. I had established a security question and an answer, and I had messaged those to my friend. I got off the phone at Rite Aid and brought my ten-digit code to the register to pay the money.

Now, I’m a new priest. I had written checks from my discretionary fund before. But this was the first time I’d used my debit card, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember my four-digit PIN. This was frustrating and more than a little embarrassing. As a line formed behind me, I inputted several different possibilities, but none of them was correct. So I had to admit defeat and cancel the transaction.

But I wasn’t totally foiled yet. It was Friday at 4:00, and dadgummit, I was going to finish this before the weekend. So I drove to the bank where I have my discretionary fund, walked in with good humor, and admitted I didn’t know my PIN.

I was immediately directed to a desk where a woman greeted me with, “No problem! Let’s take care of this for you.” She asked me to swipe my card. She asked me to input my new desired PIN. And then she said, “You’re all set! Thanks for coming in.”

I paused. “Um,” I said, “shouldn’t you check my ID or something?”

For an instant the woman looked like a deer in the headlights. Then she regained her composure, smiled broadly, and said, “Normally I should, but I decided to take you on good faith.”

Good faith. So I should be grateful, right? I should be glad that my bank loves me, right? No, not at all. Because, number one, anyone could bring my wallet in there. And number two, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Whom would you not take on good faith? What is it about me that makes you inherently trust me?”

"No, it's OK. I'm a white Jedi."

Bear in mind that I did not wave my hand vaguely and murmur, "You don't need to see my identification." And no, I was not wearing my collar. And I wasn’t especially well dressed. This was supposed to be my day off.

Now, if I say, “It’s because I’m white,” doubtless many will respond, “You can’t prove her intent.” No, I can’t. I could say, “It’s because I wasn’t smelly.” But it’s no use. Because no matter how you look at it, I gave off some sort of vibe that told the woman, “He can be trusted completely.” Subconsciously at least, this bank clerk believed her radar for trustworthiness to be infallible. And that radar was triggered by something about my physical appearance and demeanor.

And that, my friends, is what is known as unearned privilege.

And I fell right into it and left, so baffled that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to tell her how little I appreciated her “good faith.”

Opening the Door

homily preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate

Feast of Cornelius the Centurion, February 4, 2015

What a confusing pairing of readings we have today! On the one hand, we are celebrating the feast day of Cornelius the Centurion, the first uncircumcised man to become a Christian, and the first one not to follow the Jewish dietary laws. We are reveling in the understanding that salvation is not just for the insiders, but for the entire world.

On the other hand, we have Jesus of all people telling us that there will be many who are shut out of the Kingdom—those to whom God says, “Go away from me, all you evildoers!” And these will be the very people who thought they were God’s favored ones.

Peter Baptizing the Centurion Cornelius
Francesco Trevisani, 1709
from Wikipedia

In one story, we have Peter going to the home of Cornelius. A Jew enters the narrow door of a Gentile, in the process opening his own narrow heart much wider to welcome Gentiles into a Jewish faith. In the other story, we have a door that is shut to keep the insiders out. The insiders try to go in the door, but they are not able. They try to come in only to be thrown out.

Whom is this door shutting out? “Many,” says Jesus. Yes, but which many? Well, these many seem to come from among those who ate and drank with Jesus, and whose streets Jesus taught in. They are the ones who feel most strongly that Jesus is one of them. Now, it would be far too easy—and lazy!—to say that Jesus is shutting out “the Jews.” Obviously he’s not, because the church will be built, initially, by Jews. No, because this is the way Scripture is, it addresses the immediate situation of Jesus’ time and place, and it also speaks to us in our own time and place.

So who are the ones in our world who feel most strongly that Jesus is one of them? Yikes: I think he means us. We are the ones who are in danger of being shut out, even as we see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets going in. And it’s not just the heroes of our faith assembled here, either—people from every corner of the earth will go in. But it may well be that we won’t.

Now, I don’t set out to frighten a congregation. I’m supposed to stand here and speak good news. But I always try to meet the text where it is, gloss over none of it, and then look for the good news in it. It seems to me that if it’s not good news for everyone, then it’s not good news at all. We know from other parts of Scripture that God wants wholeness and healing for everybody—no exceptions. So why are there exceptions here? And why does it seem that “church people” may well be among them?

When I look for commonalities between these two stories, the first thing I notice is that the question of “who’s in” and “who’s out” has nothing to do with one’s religious affiliation. You thought Jesus was just for Jews? Well, guess what, church: God has just changed the rules to let everybody in. Can you accept that? And if we then thought that Jesus was just for Christians, then we, like those in the story who thought they had the right credentials, may be in for a rude awakening. God loves outsiders and outcasts! Jesus demonstrated it time and time again.

But what of the insiders? What might cause those of us who consider ourselves insiders to be thrown out? Here and in other places in Scripture, there seems to be a theme of whether God knows us. I remember a passage from one of the Chronicles of Narnia in which someone asks one of the children, “Do you know Aslan?” And he responds carefully, “Well … Aslan knows me.” And that’s what counts. It is more important for God to know us than for us to know God. No matter how much we say, “I know you, Lord!,” that counts for nothing.

What might cause God not to know us? Well, instead of asking whether God’s door is open to us, maybe we need to ask whether our door is open to God. And where is God to be found in our world? In each other. In the people we encounter every day. Most of all, we’re likely to find God in those who are inconvenient or bothersome to us, and even in our enemies. Is our door open to them?

Peter was faced with a decision: either to open his door to a new understanding of God’s expansive grace, or to shut it in God’s face. Likewise, Cornelius had to decide whether to open his own door to welcome Peter in. When they both decided the door should be open, amazing things began to happen. But it didn’t happen all at once. It took another few years for Peter to convince the church in Jerusalem that this was OK—that this new understanding of the universal extent of God’s favor wasn’t a total betrayal of the faith of their ancestors. Discerning God’s will is not easy, and it’s not to be taken lightly. But in this story, we see that God’s will is to include, not to exclude.

So what about those many whom Jesus says will be shut out? What if the narrow door is actually their own? God’s door is very wide; our door, by comparison, is narrow. It may be that in looking diligently for God’s door to be open, they refused to open their own door. And God can’t possibly know us if we never open our own narrow door. And so the outsiders become the insiders in Jesus’ topsy-turvy description of the kingdom, upending all our assumptions and never allowing us to rest on our laurels. We have no credentials, save our openness to God’s invitation to love. We can consent to be loved, or we can shut God out. And when it comes down to it, aren’t we all, every one of us, outsiders and outcasts? Now that’s some good news. Amen.