To Guide Our Feet into the Way of Peace

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

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate

The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 2015

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85; Acts 13:14b-26; Luke 1:57-80

Jacopo Pontormo, Nativity of St. John the Baptist

The last time I preached on John the Baptist, it was the season of Advent, a time when John is featured prominently in our Sunday lectionary for two weeks in a row. Now here we are at the opposite end of the year, celebrating John’s birth. Why do we celebrate John’s birth on June 24? Simply this: Mary found out she was pregnant, and she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was six months pregnant. That would make John six months older than Jesus. Christmas Eve is December 24, so naturally, we observe John’s birthday on June 24.

Today’s readings play well together, giving us a broad perspective on John’s place in our faith. You may have come away from the Isaiah reading with one or more melodies from Handel’s Messiah running through your head. Isaiah speaks to the Jews in exile in Babylon: the exile is over, and the Persian king Cyrus has given them permission to return to their homeland and rebuild Jerusalem and their temple. This motif of exile and return features prominently as a precursor of the liberation Jesus brings us from sin and death. So in the same way that John prefigures Jesus, the return from exile prefigures eternal salvation.

Likewise, the psalmist looks to times in the past when God has liberated the people, and he prays for another restoration as soon as possible. From whatever situation he is writing—probably the Babylonian exile—the psalmist’s perception is that God is punishing the people for their sins. God has every right to do so, but could it please end soon? Yes: there is a quiet confidence that justice and mercy will win the day, because this is how God’s world works. As it says in another psalm, “Weeping may spend the night, but there is joy in the morning.” And Paul, in the Acts of the Apostles, lays out a very brief version of salvation history and announces that the descendants of Abraham living in his day are beneficiaries of God’s salvation in Jesus.

Finally, we have the Song of Zechariah. You may remember that John’s father Zechariah, when he first heard that his wife was pregnant, did not believe it, so he was struck dumb for the duration of the pregnancy. We hear today the first words he speaks once his lips are loosened—a canticle of praise to God for continually delivering God’s people. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

And so there is the biblical history into which all these pieces fit. But who are those who “sit in darkness and the shadow of death”? And how will our feet be guided “into the way of peace”?

The last time I preached on John the Baptist, it was the season of Advent, and a grand jury had just decided not to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. I preached about racism and white privilege, and while my sermon was generally well received, there were those who felt that politics are best left out of the pulpit. Others felt I was just wrong about some things, and that led to some good, respectful conversation.

But here are we again. It’s a different situation in a different state, but once again the focus of attention can be summed up in three words: “Black Lives Matter.” And once again, to say “all lives matter,” while well intentioned, is merely a distraction from what we need to be talking about.

This week I pray especially for the members of Mother Emmanuel AME Church, and for all other predominantly black churches. I pray for those whose skin color makes them targets for the rage of irrational people, people who were raised with a twisted view of the world. These black churchgoers may indeed feel that they are sitting “in darkness and the shadow of death.” I cannot fully understand what this is like.

This past Sunday, Marsha preached an incredible sermon about the shootings in Charleston. It is on our website, and I commend it to you. But racism cannot be preached away. We each have to address it ourselves. When I look back on my life, I find all sorts of times when I could have spoken out against racism but chickened out, when I could have educated myself, but found other things to do instead. As I have matured, I have become more forthright in this matter, speaking up against injustice and going out of my way to learn from those whose experiences I cannot ever share.

Many voices in our country are calling for white people to be idle no longer in the face of racism. The disease cannot be ignored away. It needs to be talked about, and those of us who are white have a duty to listen humbly, not to rush to conclusions or to explain away the experiences of others. We need to educate ourselves on our own history. We need to know about the shameful actions of our ancestors and our contemporaries. This does not mean crippling ourselves with guilt. It means opening our eyes to a wider reality, and then moving through that reality bearing and receiving the merciful love of Christ.

This can happen through books, and websites, and movies, and conversation. It can happen in little ways, like by removing the Confederate flag from all public spaces. It can happen through public action, as it did several days ago when hundreds of white people marched near the Confederate Museum in Charleston to protest racist terrorism. It can also happen around the dinner table with extended family, by stepping into the discomfort with words of truth.

Friends, nine of our brothers and sisters in Christ were murdered last week because of the color of their skin. Many white people want to do something about it. We want to fix the situation. But here’s the thing: very often, because of our limited experience, our efforts to fix things are misguided. The number one action we can take is to listen to the voices of black Americans, to spread their words around, and not to remain stuck in a white people’s echo chamber. That means that my preaching and your listening to me don’t count, because a white man is preaching. It’s up to each of you to seek out black stories, black experiences, black perspectives.

As for me, I’m reading a book right now by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s a work of fiction called Americanah, and its two main characters are Nigerians, one of whom moves to the U.S., and the other to London. The experience of having black skin, but not sharing a common history with other black-skinned folks around them, is one the author clearly understands and communicates beautifully and heartbreakingly, and it explores the scourge of racism in a number of enlightening ways.

This week, how will you honor the lives of Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, and Susie Jackson? Please pray for them. Please pray for the man who killed them. And please, together, let’s find new ways to listen and to learn, and to speak out boldly against the evil of racism.

This is our work to do; God cannot do it for us. We have the prophets of old, including John the Baptist, to teach us what justice is. Let us listen to them. Let us follow Jesus our Savior in giving our very souls to the work of reconciliation. And all the while, let us trust that God can and will guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen.

Chaos in the Midst of Order

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

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5B, June 7, 2015

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Dove of the Holy Spirit

Do you find it a little unsettling that, to many of those around him and even to members of his own family, Jesus appeared to be insane? Never mind that his very presence could heal lifelong diseases. Never mind that his quick wit kept turning his critics’ judgments back on themselves. It just didn’t compute. How could this regular guy from Galilee be doing these things?

In the past 2000 years, we have seen the followers of Jesus do some pretty amazing things. We also have seen Christians behaving badly. But look at the ripple effect that Christianity has brought to our world. Among other things, once the Roman Empire got hold of it, Christianity set about ordering the world, for better or worse. And many of us here are old enough to remember a time when Christianity and the very best of life in the United States seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Today, many Americans long for a simpler time, a time when Christianity was the assumed religion.

It’s very different now. No longer can we assume that the person coming into St. Paul’s from off the street has had any exposure to the most basic teachings of Jesus. I don’t know about you, but I find this pretty exciting, because it means that the people who are here really want to be here! But we are also in uncharted waters, and that will require both patience and imagination.

I imagine that every period in history seemed bizarre and unsettling to the people living in it. And I do think we live in a time more unsettling than many others. But if so, then Jesus’ time was another of these. Around the year 30, Greek, Roman, and Jewish influences were about to collide in Galilee to create a new kind of chaos in the midst of a very uneasy order.

In this passage we have Jesus’ family coming to take him home, to remove the embarrassment and shame of this crazy person from the marketplace, this favorite son now rumored to be possessed by a demon. But Jesus’ wit and stories win the day here, as usual. Jesus tells us that a house cannot be plundered until the strong man living there is tied up. So if Jesus’ power to heal comes from a demonic source, then the demons are now doing good things, and Satan’s army has switched sides!

From this story Jesus goes on to assure people of the forgiveness of their sins, but the big fat asterisk that follows is just as shocking as the breadth of his assurance. First, “people will be forgiven” is not a great translation. The Greek word here is actually “all.” So Jesus states that ALL sins and blasphemies will be forgiven—and then comes the asterisk. All sins and blasphemies will be forgiven, except for “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”

If the universality of Jesus’ forgiveness shocked us, we might think, “At last! Here is an unforgivable sin. It’s good to know that Jesus has at least some standards. After all, he can’t just forgive everyone of everything! There can’t be a get-out-of-consequences-free card! Now then … what is it exactly that can’t be forgiven, so I can demonstrate that it’s something only other people do?” Hmmm. What exactly is “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”?

Well, as usual, Jesus puts the burden of interpretation on us, to move us beyond individualistic rules and into relationships with each other and with the living God. If we really want to know what “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” means, we have to entertain the notion that we might just be the guilty ones. We need to let that worry us, and we need to wonder how any sin that hasn’t been defined for us or of which we’re not aware can possibly be unforgivable.

Now, when dealing with this passage, it’s all too easy to get caught up in our preconceived notions of what words like “demon,” “Beelzebub,” and “Satan” mean. Much of our unease with these terms comes through the filter of a century of bad horror movies. So I want to invite you to let go of the image of a man in a red jumpsuit, with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. We tend to make Satan either too tame or too terrifying. On the one hand, we might recruit the little red man to be our scapegoat, as in, “the devil made me do it.” On the other, we might come to think of Satan as a sort of anti-God—all-powerful and locked in an eternal struggle we don’t know who will win.

I don’t believe either of these things to be true. Rather, my experiences and knowledge lead me to understand Satan as whatever force in the world causes real destruction of human lives and relationships, but which is ultimately powerless in the face of love. Someone said to me once, “We know that evil is a real force, because it takes energy to resist it.” Amen to that. Even people who don’t believe in God are forced to acknowledge the reality of evil.

But the Christian counterclaim is that whatever war evil was waging, it has already lost. It takes audacity to look at all the evil in the real world—executions, molestations, natural disasters, greed, hoarding, terror, neglect, disease—and to claim that there’s an even realer world, sitting right on top of the one we usually see, in which all of these horrible, painful things actually come to nothing on the scales!

The force working against evil in the world is what we call the Holy Spirit. She doesn’t get much press. Her holiday, Pentecost, has yet to be discovered by marketers. Sometimes she leaps out from behind a bend in the road and shows us unimaginable beauty. At other times she puts people in our path and urges us to show them compassion and human connection. At times she brings us healing, comfort, or reassurance, against all evidence to the contrary. And sometimes she holds a mirror up to our actions and reveals them to be inexcusable, even when we thought we were carrying out some necessary evil for the sake of the greater good.

Grace is her artistic medium. Surprise is her secret weapon. She exposes what is evil and shouts it from the housetops. And, like it or not, chaos is her fertilizer.

Yes, chaos—not order—is the ground from which the Holy Spirit usually springs. Ever since that Day of Pentecost when many languages were heard and understood, as if the Tower of Babel had come crashing down and etymology were working in reverse, the Holy Spirit has thrilled to be at work in the wreckage of our lives. She shatters our carefully constructed categories.

Did you happen to catch the news story last week out of Phoenix? Hundreds of angry demonstrators carrying lots and lots of guns surrounded a mosque just before weekly worship—Christians behaving badly yet again!* So what did the Muslim worshippers do in response? They invited the protestors in to worship with them. Some of protestors took the Muslims up on their offer, too. One man told the press afterward: “They made me feel welcome, you know. I just think everybody’s points are getting misconstrued, saying things out of emotion, saying things they don’t believe.” Another demonstrator, who had been wearing a deeply offensive T-shirt, was seen after worship shaking the hand of a Muslim and saying, “I promise, the next time you see me, I won’t be wearing this shirt. I won’t wear it again.” These two men, at least, were open to the Holy Spirit, and boy, is she sneaky!

I believe it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit to look at the situation in Phoenix and say, “What we call the Holy Spirit cannot be at work in Islam. Therefore, no reconciliation actually happened there.” To say this is to limit the scope of God’s action, simply because we fear the consequences of not possessing the entire truth.

But it’s not fair to call out other people’s blasphemy and leave it at that. At this point I have to stop and ask, “Have I ever stood in the way of other people’s grace, comfort, and healing—ridiculed them instead of honoring them, simply because they worked against my limited understanding of the way the world works? Have I ever been guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?” And I can barely finish the sentence before knowing that I have, of course I have, many times in my life. So what are the consequences?

Jesus tells us that such blasphemy is eternal and cannot be forgiven. But I don’t attribute that to God’s unwillingness to forgive. I think it’s about getting ourselves stuck. If we would rather ridicule the Holy Spirit than honor her work, how can we possibly accept forgiveness when she extends it to us? Yet such blasphemies do not define our entire lives. I may be guilty of an eternal sin, but I am also the recipient of so much love and forgiveness I don’t know what to do with it all. When I choose to rest in that love and forgiveness, instead of in the guilt of my past, I find that the Holy Spirit really is at work in me. And so I pray that my favorite sins, the ones I shield from God’s forgiveness, may be placed alongside God’s mercy. In short, I trust that there may yet be grace, because in my best moments I know that’s how God works!

If you have ever experienced the chaotic force that brings good out of evil, the Holy Spirit has brought grace to you. If you have ever been healed of an illness, the Holy Spirit has healed you. If you have ever been called up short, forced to acknowledge that you were wrong, and thus found your worldview expanded, like that tiny minority of protestors in Phoenix … that’s the Holy Spirit! The Holy Spirit is not safe, but she is good. She is not bound by the church, yet wherever she goes, she invites the church to be.

Wherever Satan sets up shop, the Holy Spirit breaks in and ties him up. She invades our homes, too, calling us beyond mere tribal loyalty into compassion for those to whom we bear no obvious obligation. She sees our urge for a monarchy, for a recognizable nation like other nations, for a king who will fight our wars for us, and she invites us beyond it into the mess of democracy. Then she sees the disintegration of our democracy through greed and anemic self-interest, and she calls us even beyond that into worlds we don’t yet understand. She throws conventional wisdom out the window and adopts a new blueprint, plans for building the Kingdom of God out of the ruins of over-functioning religion and human tragedy.

The Holy Spirit is holy trouble, trouble that may well leave our lives in a shambles. But then we will see that our carefully ordered lives were always a sham, that we have never been in control, and that we can breathe a little easier knowing that God’s vision is much larger.

I hope you hear today that the Holy Spirit really is at work in you, too, that God loves you more than you can possibly imagine, and that chaos and disorder do not contradict that basic fact. Satan’s house is plundered. The prison doors are open, and we are set free to follow the Holy Spirit wherever she may lead us. Amen.

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* For the record, somebody did take me to task about this line. Were these Christians really behaving badly? They were operating within the bounds of the first and the second amendments of the Constitution. To which I reply, yes, I bet they were. But I would point out that there’s a huge difference between what is legal and what is moral. And it seems to me that showing up armed to the teeth and threatening worshippers of any religious community is just plain evil. That’s why the Holy Spirit went to work there.

On Being Pruned

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

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2015

Compline at JYC, May 1, 2015

It has been quite a weekend. I have slept on the floor for two nights—something I don’t recommend for the faint of back. Many of you may think I’m young, but I’m not as young as I used to be!

This weekend at St. Paul’s, we have welcomed sixth to ninth graders from Episcopal churches all over Western Washington. This is the twice-annual JYC (Junior High Youth Conference), which rotates from one congregation to another and has been going on in our diocese for decades. (You may also have heard of the high school equivalent, HYC. A little trivia, to show you how long this has been going on: before HYC stood for “High School Youth Conference,” it stood for “House of Young Churchmen.” Yes, times have changed!)

Our theme for the weekend was this: “Are You There, God? It’s Me, ________.” If you have ever been able to put your own name into that blank, you know the longing that comes with a life of prayer. We wanted to impart that longing to the young people who have spent the weekend here at St. Paul’s. And we wanted to give them tools to engage that longing as fully as possible, in many different ways.

We also wanted to get across to the youth that prayer should never be a matter of guilt or shame. This is important, since I know that I myself have often fallen into bemoaning, “Ah, God! Forgive me for not praying enough.” But berating ourselves is never the point of prayer. God wants a relationship with us, and every time we drift away, that’s a fresh opportunity to return. In other words, there is no such thing as a bad prayer session.

Furthermore, we wouldn’t pray if God weren’t already calling us. Prayer isn’t about going to the divine vending machine and inserting a holy quarter. And it isn’t about going to a divine Santa Claus and asking for what we want. God is our creator—not just in the past tense, but in the present. God is creating us. And a vital part of that process is God seeking us out, chasing us down, sometimes having to shout, “Hey! What does it take to show you I love you?” Once we understand this love, then we can truly ask for what we want, knowing that it comes from a deeper place than our own selfishness. And Jesus assures us that our wishes, coming from a place of union with God, will indeed be granted.

But in prayer, as in so many things, it helps to have a teacher, and so we have been teaching methods of prayer this weekend. Like the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, any one of us might ask, “How can I know how to pray without someone to guide me?” We have tried to be guides to our middle school youth this weekend. And of course, as it predictably turns out yet never fails to surprise us, the youth have been teaching the adults how to pray as well.

I have staffed a lot of these diocesan conferences—probably 60 or 70 of them over the past 20 years. Our gospel reading today reminds me of a high school event many years ago in which we gave the youth various gospel readings and invited them to present skits about them. One group performed a skit on the gospel reading we just heard. Unfortunately, the end result went something like this:

Girl pretends to be a tree. Another girl comes up behind her, pretends to chop off her branches. Narrator: “If you go far away from God, you’ll get pruned. If you stay close to God, you won’t get pruned. So always stay close to God. Don’t get pruned!”

I remember wincing and wishing there were some discreet way, in that moment, to set these kids straight without shaming them. Oh, well—we learn by our mistakes and misinterpretations. I learned from this skit that we can’t assume that all young people, or even all adults, know what pruning is. But pruning is not punishment! And according to Jesus, not only is pruning inevitable, but we can also look forward to the growth that will come from it. Pruning may even be one of the ways God shouts at us to get our attention.

I’ve been pruned many times in my life, and it has usually come through someone calling me up short. A painful breakup shortly after college gave me space to meet and fall in love with my wife. When I was laid off from my dream job, I found my way into church employment and eventually, through the pruning of seminary, into ordination as a priest. And in lots of little ways, even since my ordination last summer, I have had humbling experiences, and gratifying experiences, too—all sorts of experiences that have helped deepen my understanding that God loves me, is always with me, and wants me to keep becoming more like the man I was made to be.

Yesterday afternoon, through the wonder of the internet, Bishop Greg met with us on the big screen in the Great Hall. Traffic had prevented him from coming to see us in person, but he was just as warm and receptive as always, despite the distance. He talked about his own prayer life, and the youth peppered him with questions: What prayers have been especially helpful to you? Are there prayers that just haven’t worked for you at all? What do you pray when you feel down and depressed? Is singing a form of prayer? There were many more fabulous questions like these, and I greatly enjoyed watching the transfer of wisdom from one generation to another, from one order of ministry to another.

We also split into various workshops to explore different methods of prayer: the labyrinth, journaling, prayer beads, active prayer with our bodies, musical prayer, prayer through art, and centering prayer. I hope every youth with us this weekend learned some new prayer practice to take home and … well, practice. (Of course, we also found lots of time as well just to play games and enjoy each other’s company.)

Pruning vines -- image from
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/32/04/320499_c97bd612.jpg

When I take the experiences of prayer that I witnessed this weekend and set them alongside this gospel reading about pruning, what jumps out at me most of all is that adolescence is a distinct form of pruning. We all have to go through it—losing the branches of our childhood so that adult branches can grow. There’s no avoiding it, even when it hurts. God will cut off all of our branches that do not bear fruit, and those that do, God will prune to make them even more fruitful—but God will never destroy us. And most of the time, a habit of prayer makes the pruning easier.

God prunes all sorts of things from our lives: not just unhealthy relationships and dead-end jobs, but also things inside us, like selfishness, insensitivity, coldness of heart, and meanness. Most often, pruning means finding out we were wrong and living with the consequences. This is true not just in adolescence, but at other stages of life, too, and perhaps most of all in old age. The pruning that happens in our final years means letting go not just of unhealthy branches, but of literally all our branches, trusting nevertheless that God will graft us onto the eternal vine and preserve us forever.

When we abide in Jesus, we can rest easy. And what does it mean to abide in Jesus? To be. That’s it: just to be. No agenda. No expectations. No guilt, no pressure. Just presence. In the method called centering prayer, the only goal is to show up and be still. Although you can keep getting better at it, you can never do it wrong.

But Christianity, by definition, can never be a mere individual exercise, as if Jesus and I were the only people in the universe. To abide in Jesus also means to love our neighbors. We don’t love out of fear of pruning, but out of the experience of having been pruned to bear good fruit. We reach out to people who are in pain because they are going through their own pruning experience. We can’t rush them through it, but we can love them through it.

On Friday night, the youth having just assembled, we shared a modified service of Compline by candlelight. One by one, seven youth came to the altar and lit candles as a prayer for friendship. They prayed for friendship with people who are different from us in age, in wealth, in color, in ability, in the ways they pray, and in the ways they love. Finally, one youth prayed in the spirit of uniqueness, since each of us is an individual in need of prayer and friendship.

Because Jesus has taught us how to love, whenever we come to God in prayer, we bring others with us. We bring our concerns for the world. We’re about to do that now: to stand up and share ancient words defining our faith, and then to pray.

And whenever we ask, “Are you there, God? It’s me, Josh,” we must know that we can also expect to hear, from time to time, “Are you there, Josh? It’s me, God.” Amen.