Standing Under the Good News (Proper 9B sermon)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

at the Episcopal Church of the Mediator, Chicago, IL

on July 9, 2006 (Proper 9B)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Misunderstandings can sometimes seem like our lot in life.

Take, for example, Yogi Berra, the hall of fame catcher for the New York Yankees. Yogi is known for his odd witticisms and general mangling of the English language. One day in the Berra household, they were having trouble with one of their window treatments, and so they called in a repairman. Later, his son came up and told his father that the man was here to collect for the Venetian blind. Yogi replied, “Well, go into my wallet and give him a few bucks for the blind kids just to get rid of him."*

I’m sure that the blind citizens of Venice were grateful.

Or consider a teacher I had in high school. She described the time she was on a student exchange program in Spain and wanted to explain to her hosts that she was embarrassed. Choosing what seemed the most likely word, her embarrassment increased substantially when she realized that she had just mistakenly told everyone that she was pregnant!

Of course we’re not the only ones beset by misunderstandings. This morning we come across a scene of misunderstanding in the gospel reading.


Continue reading Standing Under the Good News

This might seem odd on the face of it. Here’s Jesus, he returns to his hometown and teaches in the synagogue. But this isn’t just a homecoming, local-boy-makes-good story. His teaching astonishes people. He teaches with words of wisdom and deeds of power. And he seems to say surprising things.

The other gospels that tell this story, especially Luke, make clearer just what Jesus said. He was proclaiming good news for the poor, and God’s favour for people outside the power structure – outside the power structure of the synagogue, outside of the village, outside of Israel, outside even of the Roman Empire itself. In Jesus’ teaching, God was not merely a partisan, lining up on this side or that, respecting the way we divided up the world. Rather, God through Jesus Christ was reconciling the whole world to himself and bringing new life, new priorities, new relationships. On the face of it, this seems like very good news indeed. And yet his hearers couldn’t grasp it and they took offense at him.

It’s a strange thing to hear good news and misunderstand it. We can imagine the doctor in the waiting room saying to us your child came through the surgery ok. Or we can – perhaps – envision an IRS agent saying we made a mistake in our tax return and paid too much, here’s a refund check. As good as these bits of news are, they’re pretty easy to grasp. So what happened back in that synagogue so long ago?

Well the fact is successful surgery or a tax refund hardly touch the good news of the kingdom. If you will, imagine instead a doctor who comes into the waiting room and tells you that your child didn’t need surgery after all because he is immune to all disease. Not only that, his immunity is itself communicable and whoever comes into contact with him becomes immune to all disease. That would rock our world. Or think of an IRS agent on your doorstep – not to give you a refund, but to give you a checkbook. These checks, he explains, can be written for any amount, for any purpose, so long as they go to help someone else. The account the checks draw on can never be exhausted, and they’ll send you new checks when you run out. Again, the only condition is that they can only be used to help other people.

Good news? Friends, that’s great news. News like that would turn the world upside down. And that’s why these people had such a hard time hearing what Jesus said.

The sort of good news that he brought, wisdom from God accompanied by deeds of power – it made their heads swim. Like my examples, Jesus seemed normal enough. Doctor, accountant, carpenter: Okay, we know what to expect. But this kind of good news: peace, freedom, justice, deliverance, resurrection, new life, self-sacrifice, serving others, love – this turns the world upside down! It changes everything.

If we were to put ourselves in these stories, we might imagine how we would respond: keep our child’s power quiet, so he’s not picked on and we don’t become the center of attention. Hide the checks away so we don’t have to worry about the responsibility of deciding who to give them to and how much to write them for. And if we were there in Jesus’ hometown, and heard what he had to say – well, you can see how it would be a lot easier to shake your head and walk away. Who is this, really? He’s just a carpenter; we know his family. Maybe it sounds good, but that’s just not how things work.

And so it’s easy, at least for them, to take offense at Jesus. It’s easy to seek refuge in the bland pieties and certainties that they’re familiar with and that protect them from the unknown and from each other. Better the misery they know than this good news that they don’t – at least it’s secure. And so Jesus says that prophets are without honour in their own home.

That’s what happened back then in the Galilean Synagogue. But what about us? Are we destined to misunderstand Jesus? Should we just chalk it up as our lot in life?

I wouldn’t be so quick to say no.

We shouldn’t assume that because we’ve heard all the stories before, or have heard sermons – even a sermon like this one – for years on end that we’ve heard it all, much less grasped it all. As a priest and someone doing graduate work in theology, I often turn to Scripture. And I never fail to be amazed at the depth I find there. It’s the same with prayer or worship. I find that they are never done, that’s it always possible to go deeper – because there is no end to the depths of God.

I mention these things – Scripture, prayer, and worship, together with the sacraments – because these are the ways that we are apprenticed to Jesus. These practices are how we tune our ears to hear his voice and see God at work in the world. These are the animating center of our life in Christ, which is then worked out through action in the world. In short, these are how we learn to understand and believe the good news which turns the world upside-down, rather than just shaking our heads and walking away.

Friends, these practices don’t hide away or cover up questions or doubts. After all, doubting isn’t the problem; ceasing to wrestle with doubts is. We don’t so much understand the good news as stand under it. And sometimes we are blessed enough to be given different questions.

For example, perhaps instead of worrying about the question of our death and wondering about life after death, we might instead grasp that new life here and now. Perhaps then we might be freed from being preoccupied with ourselves and instead focus on loving God and loving others well.

Or maybe instead of losing sleep about our parish and what might happen to us, we might instead ask ‘What is God’s mission, here and now?’ Beyond all the busyness and anxiety, what is God doing? And how can we grasp and live that good news that turns the world upside down, instead of walking away or missing it?

Sisters and brothers, we hope in God for that time beyond time when all will be clear and everything will be made new: the lame will walk, the blind – yes, even the Venetian blind – will see, and that long-promised new life will not be an embarrassment but will be good news to all people. But in the meantime, we apprentice ourselves to Jesus through prayer, worship, Scripture and the sacraments so that, by God’s grace, we might not misunderstand, nor even fully understand, but rather stand under the good news. Amen.


* I seem to have lost the reference.

The Seaside, Post-Card (Proper 6B sermon)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

at St. Mark's Church, Newnham,

on Proper 6b (First Sunday after Trinity)

18 June 2006

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The author C. S. Lewis once wrote that there is all the difference in the world between reading a map of the coastline and feeling the spray of the ocean upon your face. People come to church, he said, not to be taught to read maps [about God], but to feel the spray.*

There’s all the difference in the world between a map and what it describes. We might apply the same idea to parables, such as we heard this morning from Mark. On one level, parables aren’t meant to be analyzed and interpreted. They are evocative little word-pictures that work on an intuitive, gut level. And so to scrutinize a parable in too much detail risks turning a trip to the seaside into mere map-gazing.

But on the other hand, parables ache to be engaged. It can be all too easy to encounter a parable, like the Good Samaritan for example, and feel certain that we know what it’s all about. In these cases we can fail to truly hear the parable and miss out on its true depth and power. In these cases we can find, to our embarrassment, not that we have spent all our time looking at maps, but that we have settled for a picture postcard of the sea, rather than actually traveling to the seaside in all its three dimensional glory.

So we have a tricky task at hand this morning. When we’re done, will we find ourselves basking in the sun at Bournemouth, or merely staring at a map of Dorset? Well, friends, it’s worth the risk, because to encounter the true depth of a parable can make all the difference in the world.

Continue reading The Seaside, Post-Card
I’m going to focus on the first of the two parables we heard today. In four verses, we hear of a sower scattering seed. The earth helps the seed to grow, and after a time the sower harvests the mature grain.

It might be easy to see ourselves in this parable. We are the sower who spreads the seed of the good news throughout the world. The seed grows, people come to faith, and then the benefits are reaped at the end of the age, the harvest. The parable tells us we and what we do are important to the growth of the Kingdom.

I think there might be something to this. It’s true that we need to be invested in the good news and keen to see the Kingdom spread in all its forms. But I think we ought to be suspicious of any interpretation which places us and our effort at the centre of importance.

Moreover, we know our own sin and brokenness, how far we fall short. If we too easily profess our own importance without also coming clean about our failure, then we set ourselves up to become hypocrites, not at all something we want.

But perhaps in approaching this parable we could see ourselves in the seed. The seed of the gospel is spread, and we accept that seed. We grow in grace. We grow in the depth of our own faith. We mature in our life with God. But, as with a growing plant, we don’t cause the growth ourselves, but depend on the strength of God to grow. So as we see growth in ourselves, this isn’t a cause for our own boasting or self-congratulation. This isn’t an opportunity for us to feel better than someone else, but to love and serve them better than we have in the past. After all, the grain that the stalk bears is not for the sake of the seed or the stalk, but for the sake of the harvest, the kingdom.

Friends, there is much to recommend this reading, too. But again, I wonder if by starting with ourselves and placing ourselves in the centre we might risk missing just what this parable has for us. And this is important, because who is at the centre makes all the difference in the world.

So perhaps instead we might start with God. We might make God first and foremost the subject of the parable, and only afterwards turn to ourselves. More precisely, I wonder if we can see the Trinity at work here in this parable – and if so, what difference it might make to us.** I would like to suggest that looking at the parable this way changes everything.

Let’s return to the text of the parable. A man scatters seed on the ground. The seed goes into the ground and then grows into a plant which bears fruit. The growth in the plant comes through the earth. Eventually, the grain from the plant, nourished by the earth, is returned to the planter at harvest.

It is not too much of a stretch to see the one who plants as God the Father. The Father creates and gives life. In fact, the sower of seed here in this parable does not just plant the seed: he scatters it. The image isn’t at all of someone carefully parceling out seed by seed, making sure that each is nestled in its own place in a well-hoed row. No, he flings it around, chucking it any which way he can. There’s no concern for the bottom line or maximizing return. He’s concerned to sow these seeds of life wherever he can. In this scattershot sower, we can see the grace and love of the Father. He just keeps giving generously, unconditionally, prodigally – we might even be tempted to say wastefully. He’s willing to give and give and give some more, slinging the seed of life wherever he can.

The oddness of the Father’s farming doesn’t end there, though. First he throws the seed around everywhere. Then he lets things take their course. He isn’t out there every other day vigilantly weeding or fertilizing. The parable uses its language to set a pace, showing that the sower steps aside and lets the seed develop. In this alongside the Father’s gracious generosity, we can also see the Father’s exquisite patience. He’s not concerned to ration seeds, and he’s in no hurry to harvest, at least until it’s the right time.

If the Father sows, and he sows life, then the seed that he sends into the world is his Son. Seed is placed in the earth and dies, and new life emerges. So also the Son is sent into the world by the Father, dies, is placed in the ground and emerges with new life. That death and new life is itself the beginning of a richly abundant harvest, because it’s the beginning of new life not just for Jesus but for the world.

So the Father in his love sends the Son into the world so that it may have new life. Alongside that, God sends the Spirit into the world to produce the growth and fruit of the Son. In this parable, we see this in the Earth, which produces the growth and fruit of the seed. The Spirit rested on Jesus in his baptism, calling him and empowering him to the ministry he had been given. The Spirit’s presence nourishes, grows, and encourages that new life.

So the Father sows generously and reaps abundantly. The Son dies and rises to new life, raising a great harvest. And the Spirit empowers the Son, nourishing him to bear this fruit and return to the Father. Within this agricultural parable, we can see the movement of God in the world, working out his kingdom in the world with grace, love, generosity, sacrifice, without concern for the cost, and in great patience, sure that his plan will come to fruition. This, in brief span, is what God is like; and this is what God’s kingdom, God’s will, is like.

Where then do we find ourselves within this? Oddly enough, we find ourselves within God. And that makes all the difference in the world.

When we’re baptized, we are buried with Christ in his death, so that we might live in newness of life. So we grow, having been scattered by God to what might appear to be surprising places. We are like the seed, the Son, for through him we become sons and daughters of God. And it is the Holy Spirit, the earth, which gives us this growth: this is none other than God working in and through us. In this parable we see a God who is three and one, who comes to us, loves us, patiently calls us, and works through us to bring growth, so that we might bear fruit for him. And as God draws us in, he empowers us to invite others into the centre as well.

Friends, we are not the centre. God is the centre. And when we allow God to be the centre – not just in the parable, but in our lives – that is when all of the maps, travel brochures, and picture postcards suddenly just seem like so much paper. And that is when we begin to hear the roar of the surf, to taste the tang of the salt air, to see the blue-green swell of the waves. When we allow God to be the centre – behold! We’ve arrived at the seaside in all its incomparable glory. Sisters and brothers, just as there is all the difference in the world between a postcard and the sea, so also there is all the difference in the world between putting ourselves in the centre, then trying to find a place for God, and letting God be the centre, then finding ourselves in him.

This, then, is the parable of the growing seed. And even if the sermon hasn’t transported us this morning to the seaside at Bournemouth, I do pray that we have at least been able to hear, in the distance, the crashing of the waves of this deep, powerful and utterly glorious Sea. Amen.

* Found in TAD, Pentecost 2003, in an article by Rev. Virginia L. Bennett
** I am not interested in claiming (or defending the claim) that ‘the Trinity’ is what the author of this parable intended.

Confession II (Proper 17A)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout
August 28, 2005 (Proper 17A)
at Church of the Mediator, Chicago, IL

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As I mentioned last week, the story in our gospel lesson has been divided up into two halves. Considered from one perspective, that’s great, because it lets us spend a little longer with a very rich story. But looked at in another way, it’s too bad because we might miss connections between the two halves.

Last week we heard Peter confess that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. And he was right, but he couldn’t know all that that would mean, because Jesus is a surprising savior.

This week, Jesus continues to meet with his disciples on the down low in a remote place, and he explains his mission to them. As the details unfold, I imagine that the disciples may have felt rather like Alice through the Looking-Glass, having fallen into a world where everything seems absurd.

They expected a messiah who would triumph militarily, who would kick out the Roman oppressors and who would restore God’s presence to the Temple in Jerusalem. This was the kind of savior you could get behind and really root for as he cleaned house. But Jesus explains that wasn’t how it was going to go down. Instead, he would go up to Jerusalem where he will suffer at the hands of his countrymen, and be killed by the Romans, and on the third day be raised. As Alice said, “Curiouser and curiouser.”

Suddenly the world seemed upside down to the disciples. This is the Messiah? He’ll be hated by those he is meant to deliver? He’ll be killed by those he is supposed to vanquish? And what’s this about being raised on the third day? Just how far down does this rabbit hole go, anyway?

We can understand the disciples’ perplexity, I think. So much of our world is oriented towards conventional success: money, fame, power over others. It’s hard to imagine the world any differently. For example if a Fortune 500 company is looking for a CEO, they would probably not take seriously an application from someone despised by his peers, who appeared to fail at the task set before him, and who gave a vague promise about “being raised.” On conventional lines, Jesus would be drummed out of the business world as a failure.

I don’t mean to single out the business world, here. We haven’t done much better in the church, and we of all people ought to know better. If you survey the scene right now, it becomes clear that we believe that bigger is better, as more and more big box worship centers are raised alongside highways, awash in a sea of parking. These places boast about the number of people who attend, the number of services they have throughout the week, the size of their budgets, and how quickly their trained traffic squad can empty their parking lots at peak hours. But these are conventional boasts of conventional success. They’re not, at bottom, any different from Amway, AARP, or any other number of organizations which are worthwhile and sometimes important and not to be confused with the Kingdom of God.

By calling these marks of success into question, I don’t mean that we endorse futility. In the Kingdom we have different standards by which we success and failure, and they’re not the conventional marks of success.

And why would they be? After all, Jesus is unconventional, and so is his Kingdom—so much so that it might seem quite opposed to our usual way of doing business. For example, Peter in his usual exuberance rebukes Jesus: “No, wait, Jesus – if you’re the Messiah, it doesn’t happen like that!” In response to this Jesus rebukes Peter even more harshly. But where in our society we would expect Jesus to echo the words of Donald Trump “Peter, you’re fired!”, Jesus says no such thing. Peter is set right; he remains a disciple; and Jesus doesn’t rescind the promises he made to Peter because of his failure. Peter, the other disciples – and even we ourselves – are included in this kingdom not because we’ve somehow got it all together and are prime specimens of our species. No, it’s because of God’s grace, and the depths of God’s love.

And where we see God’s love and grace most clearly, and where we see the nature of power in Jesus’ unconventional kingdom, is in the cross. There, we believe that God suffered the worst that we could do, so that through Christ we might become the best that we might be. It’s there that Jesus willingly suffered and embraced what seemed like failure for the good of the world.

As it turns out, in Jesus’ teaching, cross-bearing isn’t a spectator sport, it’s participatory. He says that his followers, like him, pick up their crosses. Some have taken this to mean that suffering and pain are good things and we ought to welcome them, but I think that’s mistaken. It’s not a matter of hurting enough, but of single-mindedly pursuing the salvation, the health, the good for the world around us, so much so that we end up denying ourselves, and maybe even suffering when we run up against those who like the status quo.

Clarence Jordan knew about this. You might not recognize the name, but he was brilliant: he had two Ph.D.s, one in Agriculture and another for good measure in Classical Languages. He was so gifted it was said he could have done whatever he chose: he chose to serve the poor. “ In the 1940s, he founded a farm in Americus, Georgia, and called it Koinonia Farm. It was a community for poor whites and poor blacks. As you might guess, such an idea did not go over well in the Deep South of the '40s…. The town people tried everything to stop Clarence. They tried boycotting him, and slashing workers' tires when they came to town. Over and over, for fourteen years, they tried to stop him.”

Eventually, the Klan had enough of him and came out with guns and torches to put an end to it all. They burned every building to the ground except for his house, which they riddled with bullets.

One of the members of the Klan there that night was a local newspaper reporter, who came out the next day to write a story. He was surprised to find Clarence out in the field, hoeing and planting.

"I heard the awful news," he called to Clarence, "and I came out to do a story on the tragedy of your farm closing." Clarence just kept on hoeing and planting. The reporter kept prodding, kept poking, trying to get a rise from this quietly determined man who seemed to be planting instead of packing his bags. So, finally, the reporter said in a haughty voice, "Well, Dr. Jordan, you got two of them Ph.D.s and you've put fourteen years into this farm, and there's nothing left of it at all. Just how successful do you think you've been?"

Clarence stopped hoeing, turned toward the reporter with his penetrating blue eyes, and said quietly but firmly, "About as successful as the cross. Sir, I don't think you understand us. What we are about is not success but faithfulness. We're staying. Good day." Beginning that day, Clarence and his companions rebuilt Koinonia. The farm is still going strong today. Clarence Jordan knew well what it meant to pick up the cross and follow Jesus.

And we all do, to some extent. But I know it can be hard, too. And not every story has a neat, scripted ending. When we feel we see the handwriting on the wall, we are tempted to scramble around and do whatever we can just to survive. That’s when we’re most likely to batten the hatches and just try to hold on and maintain what we’ve got, if we can even do that. It’s just as easy when you feel at the end of your rope to buy into the conventional measures of success and failure as when you are at the top.

But embracing the cross gives us a different standard, and challenges us to realign our thinking. The question for us is not how big or small are we? The question is not are we going to live or die – friends, everything dies, eventually. The question is what difference does it make to the world around us that we are here, now? How do we reflect to those around us the deep love and transforming grace of the triune God, in whatever time we’ve got? How are we living faithful to the upside-down kingdom of the unconventional savior Jesus? Because the secret is this: this upside-down kingdom isn’t Alice’s fictional Wonderland at all – but the very real world that we all live in and that God loves. Amen.

Confession I (Proper 16A)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout
August 21, 2005 (Proper 16A)
at Church of the Mediator, Chicago, IL

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I still remember back in the summer of 1975, eagerly awaiting the birth of my younger brother. I felt like I had been an only child long enough, and that it was about time I had someone more my own age around. I wanted a companion, a friend -- and more. I would finally have someone to play with every day, someone who would do what I wanted him to do. He would be a patsy who would take orders from me, he’d do my dirty work. If need be, he could even take the rap for me. It would be great.

You can imagine my disappointment that October when he arrived and I realized he was more than just a clone, another me. He actually had a mind and will of his own, and wanted to do his own thing. And believe me friends – growing up together, he never took the rap for me. No, at the tender age of six, I was tempted to agree with the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: indeed, Hell is other people.

But seriously, as time wore on, it turned out I was right. Not that he would be my patsy, but that he would become a companion and friend. In fact, I didn’t know just how right I was. But before I could truly grasp this I had to realize the world didn’t revolve around me, and give up my cherished notions of how things worked.

In this way, it’s not so different from what Peter experienced in today’s gospel reading. Here, too, Peter’s right in what he says – in fact he doesn’t know how right he is. But the truth is so strange that to grasp it he will have to give up his cherished notions of how things work.

The story we heard from the gospel this morning is often called “the confession of Peter” because in it Simon Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah. Unfortunately, the way we have divided up the lessons, we really only hear half of it this week; we hear the rest next week. In that part of the story, Peter rebukes Jesus when Jesus says he must suffer and die in Jerusalem. We’ll look at that passage in more detail next week, but it’s good to keep it in mind while we consider this one.

There are a couple of odd features in our story this morning, one in particular which might be easy to miss: It takes place in the district of Caesarea Philippi. This is in the far north of Israel, about two days’ walk from the Sea of Galilee, where most of Jesus’ ministry had taken place up to that point. It would be as if we were doing some community organizing here in Beverly and Morgan Park and decided to have a working meeting in Evanston. It’s what you’d do if you were working on something sensitive. And, in a sense, Jesus was.

So they met in a remote location. The other odd thing about the story is at the end: Jesus swears the disciples to secrecy. You can imagine their confusion. Jesus admits that he is the long-awaited Messiah, and he tells them to keep a lid on it? This is the kind of news that should be shouted from the hills and rooftops! So what’s with all the secrecy?

In part, the secrecy has to do with the sensitive and dangerous nature of being the Messiah. Increasingly, historical scholarship is coming to see many of the Jewish movements of the first century as concerned with God’s deliverance of Israel from the clutches of the Roman Empire. Many of the people were waiting for God’s Messiah to come. He would be a true king, a mighty warrior who would throw off the Roman yoke of slavery, purify the Temple, and signal God’s return to his people Israel. So anyone popularly known as the Messiah would be expected to lead an open battle against the Romans, storming the ramparts, humiliating the enemy, and taking control of the land. When Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, this is a good bit of what he had in mind. So was Peter wrong, then, after all?

It might be tempting to us, hearing this story, to shake our heads over Peter. Why was he so caught up in politics and the affairs of this world? Isn’t the Christian life about the soul and the spiritual world, about heaven and the hereafter?

Well, no. Peter was right, but he didn’t know just how right he was. Rather like me with my brother, Peter needed to give up his cherished notions of how things really worked. He couldn’t grasp all that it meant, in fact none of the disciples did until much later. And that is the other reason for Jesus’ secrecy about who he is: he couldn’t just tell the disciples, he had to show them. And in the event, he showed them by suffering and dying on the cross.

But Jesus’ kingdom is about real people with real lives in the real world. It isn’t only about life after death, although it has some important things to say about that as well. It isn’t just about there and then, but also about here and now. It’s not about escaping from a world gone awry, it’s about God redeeming and restoring that world which has gone out of whack. Peter actually understood this remarkably well.

What he missed is that Jesus is a surprising, unconventional Messiah. He missed that God’s power working through Jesus does not humiliate or kill the way the people expected. Jesus is a mighty king, but he allows himself to be humbled and killed. Jesus does bring God’s kingdom, certainly a very political term, but it is not about destruction and vengeance but about new life, restored relationships, and hope for the future. That’s the same kingdom that Jesus entrusts to Peter, and the same kingdom that is passed on to us today in the church.

As modern-day disciples of Jesus, we are entrusted not only with this kingdom, but with Peter’s confession, too. We are given the great good news that Jesus is the savior, the son of the living God. This proclamation of ours is right – although this is in no way an occasion for smugness or self-righteousness, but rather humility. And sometimes we might not know just how right we are, or fully grasp the life this calls us to. To really lay hold of this, we need to see it as those first disciples did, holding fast to Jesus Christ in Word, in sacrament, in prayer, and in the gathered community. In doing so, we may well find that have to give up some cherished notions of how things work. And certainly we will continue to embrace the cross and the life and love which are at the heart of the triune God. In this way, we will continue to be transformed into the image of Christ, which is important – because we can’t just tell others, we have to show them too. Amen.

The Able Canaanite Woman (Proper 15A sermon)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout
on August 14, 2005 (proper 15A)
at St. John's Episcopal Church, Mount Pleasant, MI

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

After a long day the house had finally settled down. The kids were in bed and the wife and husband, exhausted, sat down to enjoy a few well-earned minutes of relaxation. But no sooner had they sat down when their seven-year old son called from his room, “Daddy, can I have a glass of water?”

Familiar with this delaying tactic, the father called back, “No, it’s time to sleep.”

After a few minutes, the child cried out again, “Daddy, can I please have a glass of water?”

The father, exasperated, replied “No, it’s time to sleep! If you ask me again, I’m coming up there to punish you!”

There was a pause, and then the child called out “Daddy, when you come up to punish me, could you bring me a glass of water?”

We see in this story the same kind of surprising, clever persistence about a cup of cold water that we encounter in today’s gospel lesson about crumbs of bread.

That gospel reading is an odd little story; truth be told, it might even seem a bit embarrassing. A Gentile woman approaches Jesus, which presents all sorts of difficulties for a Jewish man of that time. Is she unclean? Will she touch him? What does she want, anyway? Yet she strides right up to Jesus and the disciples, imploring Jesus to help her daughter. One imagines the disciples almost visibly recoiling as she comes near.

And here is perhaps the oddest and most embarrassing thing about it all: despite her insistent shouting, Jesus stands mute. Why not just heal her daughter and be done with it? Why all this temporizing about Jew and Gentile, about his mission to Israel, about children and dogs? Isn’t Jesus’ mission to everyone anyway?

To address this embarrassment we would do well to remind ourselves that throughout the panorama of Scripture, God always uses particular and concrete means for the good of the whole. The particular nation Israel, as God’s covenant people, was called as a blessing to many nations. The particular person Jesus, as God’s Messiah, is the unique mediator of God to God’s larger creation. The particular body known as the church, as the people of the new covenant, is called as a witness to the world about new life in Christ. And so, at least for Israel and the church, their unique status is not due to any superiority on their part, but due to being used by God for the good of the world.

And so Jesus’ insisting that his mission is to Israel is not in conflict with his mission to the larger world; it is part and parcel of it. And yet we should also be immensely thankful for this woman’s dogged persistence. For as catholic theology reckons Mary to be the mother of the church, so this nameless woman ought to be considered the mother of the Gentile mission. Mary replies to the angel “Let it be with me as you have said.” The Canaanite woman says “Why not me, too?” And I imagine most of us here at St. John’s are descendents of Gentiles rather than Jews, and so this Canaanite woman is then the mother of us all. In a sense, it is here in this woman that we may best find ourselves in this odd, slightly embarrassing story.

I say “in a sense” because there is another sense in which we ought to allow this clever, nameless, foreign woman to confront and question us, too. Two thousand years later, the success of the mission to the Gentiles can hardly be in dispute. We Christians are nearly all Gentiles, and there is a healthy debate about whether or not one can even be both a Jew and a Christian. Add to that the power and riches of the West that many of us Gentile Christians lay claim to, and we should be very careful not to find ourselves too easily in this powerless, persistent, outsider woman.

Perhaps we might also find ourselves in the disciples, who are so concerned to have her shuffle off, who are upset by this woman’s temerity, and who prove themselves to be not half so clever as she is. At least as Matthew tells the story, this little encounter comes between miraculous feedings. It comes after 5,000 people were fed with five loaves and two fish. After everyone ate and was filled, there were twelve baskets of leftovers. And it comes before Jesus feeds 4,000 people from seven loaves and a few fish, leaving seven baskets of leftovers. With leftovers like that, it’s only natural this woman would think there were a few crumbs left for the dogs. And so at last we see just how clever this Gentile woman is: she knows that at God’s table there is always enough to go around. She believes that God’s gracious abundance pours forth so fully that everyone at table may eat and be satisfied, that even the crumbs and leftovers might nourish the world. This is the kind of faith she answers Jesus with, and that Jesus praises. Although the text doesn’t register the disciples’ reaction, I can only imagine they were caught flat-footed and slack-jawed.

Even as she kept after Jesus and the disciples in her time, she continues to pester us today as the heirs of the disciples. In the face of the other, she confronts us and asks us to make good on our promise that as the church, we exist for the health and salvation of the world. She continues to ask “Why not me, too?” She comes to us in the face of the widows of Chile, Kosovo, and Darfur. We see her in the faces of people in our nation forced to the margins and caught in generations of despair and poverty. And she comes to us in the faces of the men, women and children who daily populate the tableau of life lived in Mount Pleasant and the university. She is in all these people, in their integrity, their brokenness, their dignity.

And so the challenge for us as the church is how do we respond? How do we keep in mind that there is enough of the feast to go around? How do we make room for the Canaanite women of our day?

There are some who might suggest we answer this question by, say, removing crosses, or putting up a projection screen, or installing a coffee bar, so as to be more welcoming. Or perhaps they would advise updating musical or liturgical styles to be more in tune with contemporary tastes. There is indeed something to be said for making discerning changes at appropriate times, although careless, thoughtless change can be worse than beside the point.

But it seems to me that the far more profound meditation for us as Episcopalians in Western Michigan is this: Are the things that we are doing in the parish and the diocese intended to bring health and salvation to the world? Or are they more focused on ourselves, on mere survival, on holding on to what we’ve got? If it is the former, then we may confidently hope our sails will be filled with the wind of the Spirit of God, for we have grasped that there is enough for everyone. But if we are only focused on ourselves, then what will we say to the next clever Canaanite woman who comes along, desperate for Jesus’ help? Or what will we say to those many speechless others, desperate for help, who would never even dream of approaching Jesus or the church in the first place?

Of course the nature of things is that we are always oriented towards both health and sickness, life and death, God and ourselves. We are always in-between, living in the odd and sometimes slightly embarrassing contemporary story of the church. But perhaps as we wrestle with these questions and seek life, health, and God, we might keep in mind this clever, outsider woman who is at once our mother in the faith, and also the persistent stranger who confronts us, asking “why not me, too?” Amen.

Adieu

A sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church,
St. Joseph Michigan
Proper 11 A,
17 July 2005
by the Rev. Jason A. Fout
on the occasion of his farewell to St. Paul's

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Different languages can be quite fascinating. Sometimes learning an expression in another tongue will make you look at something in a new way. For example, in Ancient Greek they had at least three different words for love. So they could talk about the bonds of affection in three different ways, whereas we only have the one word. Knowing this, it might prompt us to pause and think about just what kind of love we are talking about when we use the single word.

Or sometimes cultures have a certain preoccupation with something, and so they have numerous words to describe that one thing in great detail. The classic example of this is the Inuit language: Eskimos are said to have many different words for snow and ice. Rather surprisingly, though, no one seems to know just how many words they have for it. Depending on which linguist you consult, Eskimos have either 9, 12, 23, 46, 50, 52, or over one hundred words for snow and ice. This is rather more confusion than you would expect! One thing has been established with certainty, however: the Inuit do have 20 different words for trout.[1]

It’s also interesting to see how one says farewell in different languages. A lot of the time, it translates simply as “best wishes” or “see you later”. But sometimes there can be surprising depth behind this simple sentiment. In English, for example we say “good-bye”. Even though we say it everyday, it might seem like an odd expression when you think about it. It comes from the phrase “God be with you”. And just like in the holy day of Good Friday, somehow an extra “o” migrated into God, and “God be with you” became “good-bye”. This seems a fitting way to say farewell to someone, to wish him well through asking for God’s presence to be with him. And as the two go their separate ways, they go knowing that although they may not be together, nevertheless God is with each of them.

God figures into other farewells, too. In French, they say “adieu”, which simply means “to God”. It’s the same in Spanish, when they say “adios”, it translates literally as “to God”. I think this is very rich and suggestive, and like “good bye” perhaps it’s an everyday profundity that native speakers might miss.

But what might this mean?

I would like to suggest that we might say “to God” as a farewell to remind ourselves of the total context of our lives. We live our lives to God, we are grateful to God, we are headed to God, we give our trust and faith to God. In this simple send-off we are reminded of the orientation and trajectory of our entire lives as being “to God”. This is not just a matter of an hour or so on a Sunday and a committee meeting during the week, but the whole of our lives is lived “to God”: the highs and the lows, the glamourous and the mundane, at work, school, or home, among family, friends, strangers and enemies.

Our entire lives are lived, wittingly or no, as a witness to God, in mute reference to God. In fact, the whole world – the very world that Paul in today’s epistle describes as subjected to futility and in bondage to decay – this whole world lives “to God”. True, sometimes this living “to God” is rather more hidden or mysterious than we would like, either in the world around us, or in our own lives, and this can cause us great pain. But as Christians we believe that it is there in that relationship between the triune God and the creation that we learn who we most truly are, there that we discover our destiny as human beings, there that we find our hope.

Indeed, as Paul also says, those pains that we feel are not just meaningless suffering, but are the beginnings of birth pains. God through Christ is bringing life into light, bringing his Kingdom in its fullness into the world which he created, loves, and is intent on restoring in its fullness. And so living in this hope, seeing in our lives not just pains but birth pangs of something new and wonderful, this is very much a way of living “to God”.

And this plays in directly with what we find in the gospel reading for today. As I mentioned last week, in these parables God seems a rather foolish gardener. This morning, the Master is fully aware that there are weeds in his field, he even knows where they come from, but he isn’t going to worry about them now. Unlike most gardeners, God seems content to let the whole motley patch grow willy-nilly, perhaps while he lies in a hammock sipping a mint julep.

But notice the slaves. They spot the weeds. “Why would there be weeds in the Master’s field?” they might ask. Why wouldn’t it be one, pure, holy, catholic field? Friends, this is a mystery; why would there be any weeds in the master’s field? But faced with this mystery, the slaves try to take over for the Master, offering to weed his garden for him. They are still thinking like slaves.

But God, the Master, takes the long view. Having such an untidy garden is no sacrifice of God’s honor – but someone else weeding out for him what he himself has planted: God is not willing to risk that. And so the Master counsels patience. And the slaves need to learn to no longer be slaves but to be more like the Master.

This is a parable intended for all who would be disciples of Jesus, all who would live a life “to God”. This is elaborated on in the gospel of John, where Jesus says to his disciples “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends…” And so we are invited to become God’s friends, and so to grow to be like the Master, and to be drawn into the glory and the love which are at the heart of the triune God and which pour forth into the world.

We find all of this and a lifetime more in plumbing the depths of God and in living a life “to God”.

Brothers and sisters, I have been blessed and privileged over these last four years to sojourn here with you, together living our lives “to God”. We have worshiped together, learned from each other, and mapped new territory as a parish. It has been exquisite and I am thankful for every minute of it. As we go, we carry each of you in our hearts. And now, dear friends, adieu…adios…God be with you. Amen.

* I have established this through rigorous research on the internet. Sources include http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297.html and http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22eskimos+have%22%2B%22different+words+for+snow%22 and http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~pullum/eskimo_quotes.html

The Revolution Is Being Broadcast (sermon for Proper 10A)

A sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church,

St. Joseph, Michigan

on July 10, 2005

by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

One of the joys of living here for the last four years has been learning to garden. Ironically, when we lived in the Chicago area, we had a larger yard – but I couldn’t have cared less about the lawn and the garden. But once we arrived here, for some reason I warmed up to the task of trying to coax life out of the sandy soil.

And so in late winter, I would go out and dutifully purchase seeds. Longing for spring, I would nourish them with a grow light in my basement until the tender shoots arose and turned their faces to the light. Soon after, inevitably, they died. After all, I said I enjoyed gardening, not that I was good at it. I’m not a green thumb: I’m all thumbs. And so I would dutifully troop out again and then buy seedlings: tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, strawberries: whatever caught my fancy.

Although there is a certain generosity of spirit to gardening, to giving life to something, I also learned that there are certain guidelines you must follow to have even a modicum of success. With seeds, you plant a bunch but then thin them out: it’s easy to have too many. Each kind of plant needs a certain amount of room around it in the garden. Learn to recognize weeds. And use the right kind of soil. These are the virtues of a good gardener.

At the heart of these gardeners’ virtues is a certain kind of prudent caution: be careful with your resources. There are only so many seeds, only so much of the right kind of soil, only so much water and fertilizer to go around, only so much space. And so you want to be wise in how you use these resources. All of which leads me to believe, in light of the gospel reading this morning, that God is a pretty foolish gardener.*

Jesus told a parable about a sower, and what happened to the seed after it had been planted. It would be easy to turn this into a simple morality tale: make sure that you live your lives as good soil so that you can receive the word of God. And I guess we do want to be open to God, but this interpretation misses the true point of the story.

Biblical scholars tend to agree that the main character in a parable is the first one who is mentioned: in this case, it’s the sower. So then the true focus here is the one who is scattering seeds all over: this isn’t really a story about different kinds of soil, but about a goofy gardener, who is none other than God.

This gardener is not willing to be so cautious as to only plant in the right place. He doesn’t carefully parcel out just enough seeds for each plot of land. He doesn’t calculate how much water and fertilizer he has. God scatters this seed, which Jesus interprets as the word of God’s kingdom, on the path, on the rocky ground, among thorns. It seems that he loves the land enough to sow seed everywhere with joyful abandon. Who knows what unlikely place it will crop up next? In next week’s gospel reading, we will even hear that God isn’t too concerned to keep this motley garden properly weeded.

Before we thought in terms of radio and television, “broadcast” was a word reserved for farmers. In planting, if you broadcast seed, it means that you scatter it all over the ground in broad, sweeping motions. So in this parable of the sower, we see God at work broadcasting the word of his Kingdom all over the world, rather than in just a few choice locations. 47 years ago, Black musician Gil Scott Heron declared: “The revolution will not be broadcast, the revolution will be live.” But I think in this context, talking of God’s inbreaking Kingdom through Jesus, we may confidently say that the revolution is being broadcast, and that revolution brings life.

This might raise a question in our minds, then. If God is so lovingly generous that he’s flinging seed everywhere, then why does Jesus say this in a parable? It’s only later, on the down low, that he explains this parable to his disciples. Wouldn’t it be better if, say, he scaled the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem, or a high mountain where he could survey the kingdoms of the world and openly declare God’s shoddy gardening?

As I mentioned in a previous sermon, we ought to understand Jesus’ movement as one of several Jewish political factions focused on the liberation of Israel from the oppression of the Roman Empire. There’s more to it, of course, but that will be sufficient for our purposes this morning. So part of the reason that Jesus seems so cryptic is that what he is saying is subversive. In fact, when he ends his parable saying “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear!” it is equivalent to a wink and a nod, a sign that he is saying something important but that would be dangerous to proclaim openly.**

But what could be so dangerous and subversive about this? Well, for one, part of Jesus’ message was that God is Lord, not merely the creator but the master of all there is. And this means that Caesar, the Roman Empire, or even the modern nation-state, is not. This radically de-centers and upsets our notions about such things as power and politics and sacrifice. If Jesus was right, and God is so wanton as to cast his seed so broadly, not merely in the backwater that was first century Israel, but across the Roman Empire, indeed all across the world, then that meant that the Empire’s pretensions of being universal or eternal or its claim of people’s ultimate allegiance or its power over life and death: all of this was called starkly into question. You can see why Jesus spoke in code.

What Jesus’ message did for his day, it does for ours too. It certainly calls into question our own contemporary Empires which claim our allegiances. If Jesus Christ is Lord then that means there is a whole host of other pretenders which aren’t.

But more than that, I suspect that the great prodigal generosity of God might be quite a challenge to us. That’s not to say that we aren’t quite generous with our resources, personally, but that we live in a system which positively thrives on scarcity. Our entire economic system revolves around scarce resources: that’s how things are valued. Many fortunes have been made on this basis. And as much as we have already, there are people employed to persuade us that we still don’t have enough.

As an example, let me return to gardening for just one moment. I have been amazed at hybrid plants. When I was just starting to garden, a friend informed me that hybrid plants are designed to not reproduce. The reason was because if such plants reproduced on their own, then people wouldn’t have to buy new ones every year. Well, at least other people wouldn’t – I’d probably find some new and creative way to harm them. There might well be other biological factors at work that I don’t fully understand, but at least one thing is certain: Apparently, only God was willing to make a plant for free.

But if it’s true that the revolution is being broadcast, that the Word of God’s Kingdom is being scattered all over the world with a loving carelessness, then maybe there’s hope. Hope that our imaginations might be changed from seeing everything in terms of scarcity to seeing God’s abundance. Hope that we might not be as attached to those things we do have – or do they have us? – and grow in generosity and contentment. Hope that, renewed and refocused, we might make a start at addressing, creatively and cooperatively, the debt and poverty of Third World nations. Hope that we might learn through the triune God, to be foolish gardeners, too.

Friends, the revolution is being broadcast: if anyone has ears to hear, let him hear. Amen.

* Although I am not directly borrowing this phrase from her, Sarah Dylan Breuer used a similar phrase, “God is a foolish farmer”, in the text of a Proper 10A farewell sermon on her blog: http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2005/07/proper_10_year_.html
**I am indebted to N.T. Wright for this point.