Light amidst the Darkness: the paradox of Candlemas

The text of a sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout
at Mattins on the feast of Candlemas (tr.)
in Selwyn College Chapel, Cambridge

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.

In this morning’s gospel reading from Luke, we pick up the story just after the Christmas story. The shepherds have left the Holy Family, the angels’ choruses no longer ring in their ears, perhaps they’ve found more suitable accommodation. They’ve just begun settling down to life with a new child, for although Jesus is the Son of the Father, the Word of God, he is also at this stage of his earthly life a reasonably normal child, with all of a baby’s needs. And now here, when we might be considering having our child baptised, Mary and Joseph take him up to Jerusalem to have him presented at the Temple, to make a sacrifice for his purity and Mary’s as well.

This should have been a fairly routine, mundane – even perfunctory – task. In the event, it became anything but.

Simeon was pious, dedicated, devout. In his old age he has dedicated himself to worship and prayer, and to waiting for God’s anointed servant to appear. You can sort of imagine Mary and Joseph, holding Jesus, trudging through a rather slow-moving line in the temple precincts, bleary-eyed from the baby still not quite sleeping through the whole night. Simeon, a complete stranger, comes up to them, takes their child and begins praising God. According to this stranger, Jesus is the long-promised saviour who will be a light to the Gentiles and the glory of Israel. What had been a routine task – perhaps the first-century equivalent of popping round to the county council office for some paperwork – suddenly became anything but routine.

Continue reading Light amidst the Darkness

But what good news this was! Joseph and Mary were astonished: if what this fellow said was true, then this meant that God was finally going to act to deliver his people from oppression under the Romans and other Gentiles – no more exile; finally God would return to the Temple and his presence would be seen there again; finally things would be set to rights and the creation would be as it should. It would be the beginning of a new age. It would be a blessing to Jew and Gentile alike – and it was going to be their Son who would do this. How could a family be happier or prouder?

But no sooner has Simeon’s blessing faded from their ears than he next confides in Mary that not everything will be a bed of roses. His work will cause much turmoil in Israel, as it casts some down and lifts others up; he will stir up opposition among the members of God’s covenant people and the hidden things that he reveals will be telling. And rest assured, it will cause pain and division for Mary too.

If they were amazed and astounded at what Simeon had said at first, then surely this must nearly have rent them apart. How can it be that something so good, so right, could have this effect? How can things getting better cause such strife and turmoil? It seems paradoxical.

And yet I suspect we have all encountered this at some point too. We make a breakthrough of some kind, a change, a decision about the future, and what seems like clarity and wondrous goodness for us is not received well by those around us. Maybe it’s someone we’re dating or socialising with of whom our friends disapprove. Maybe we’ve chosen a subject to study or a career path which seems promising, almost as if we were made for it, but we find our parents shaking their heads in incomprehension. One can only imagine the response of George Augustus Selwyn’s parents when he announced he had been recommended to be consecrated bishop in a land on the other side of the world, back in 1841. I have no idea how they reacted, but it might have seemed almost like a death in the family as they realised they might never see their son again. What was good news to George and to the people of New Zealand might have seemed rather like bad news to his friends and family back here in England.

Or maybe we’ve found Christian faith for the first time here at university, or have just begun taking it seriously for the first time, and it seems like – life! – and everything has opened out to us in a way it never has before, and experiencing God’s grace puts everything in a whole new light – and what could be better than this? And yet we might find those around us not knowing what to make of us, or even despite our best efforts feeling a little threatened by these changes.

Or it’s even possible that we know this from the other side. Perhaps a friend of ours lands his dream job in another part of the country and is eager to launch out into his career – but this also means, inevitably, that your friendship will change, and what seems like such great good news for him feels like a difficult change for you.

This paradox, that what is good can be perceived as being bad, is brought into particularly sharp relief with Jesus, and I think it shows us some of how the world is out of whack, that things are not as they should be. For Jesus, the light that he brings to the Gentiles and to the Israelites will uncover not merely their suffering or oppression, but the ways in which they contribute to others’ suffering or oppression, perhaps even benefit from it. To put it simply, it uncovers sin. And it brings change. And both of these things, even change for the better, can be very uncomfortable. I suspect most of us can attest to that in one way or another.

And when the kingdom of God threatens the powers of the world by promising to put things right, the powers react badly. They nailed Jesus to a cross. You can imagine in light of this, the sword of grief piercing Mary’s soul as well. But of course in God what seems like an end is not an end, but only a beginning. In God’s great love he is not content to take our rejection of him; rather, in Christ, he says ‘no’ to our sin and the darkness we’ve brought into the world, and in Christ, he says ‘yes’ to us.

Through Christ’s resurrection and through the power of the Holy Spirit he makes us capable of being agents of God’s Kingdom in the world. This means being agents of change for good: working in whatever ways we are given to release others from suffering, oppression, and sin; seeking reconciliation and new life in the world around us; loving others with the love we ourselves have experienced. This is our call as Christians.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves. A mission like this is difficult, and we should expect to encounter resistance as this new way of doing things might feel a bit threatening to the world. We might even feel resistance in ourselves; after all, we’re never completely transformed in this life. But I think because God’s love for us in Christ cannot ever be lost, then there is nothing truly, ultimately worthwhile that can ever be taken from us.

At the end of our reading this morning, after these singular events at the Temple, Mary, Joseph and Jesus return to their hometown in Galilee, and no doubt return to the usual routine of everyday life. And soon we, too, will return to our usual Sunday routine, and prepare for the next week of term. Our reading closes by noting that, in that return to the routine, Jesus “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and that the favour of God was upon him”, as he looked ahead to the rest of his life and the mission God had given him. It’s my prayer, as we return to our routine, that the Lord would do the same for us. Amen.

Judgement Call: Sermon for Christ the King Sunday

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

During a certain prominent war of rebellion waged against His Royal Majesty King George the III, an odd tableau transpired among the king’s rebellious overseas colonists. Trying desperately to dig in and secure their position, a group of soldiers was trying to repair a small defensive barrier. A man in civilian clothes was riding by on his horse and as he drew near, he heard the soldiers’ leader shouting instructions to the men but making no attempt to help them. The rider paused and asked the leader why this was so. The leader shot back “Sir, I am a corporal!” At that, the stranger apologized and, dismounting, proceeded to help the exhausted soldiers.

The job done, the stranger turned to the corporal and said, “Mr. Corporal, next time you have a job like this and not enough men to do it, go to your commander-in-chief…and I will come and help you again.” Of course, the stranger was none other than general George Washington, commander-in-chief of the American forces.

Friends, I don’t seem to recall offhand just how the scurrilous rebellion played out, but I think we can agree at least that this was an edifying episode. And perhaps it is not entirely unlike the scenario which Jesus paints in today’s gospel lesson. In the one, the corporal doesn’t realise that it is his own general who is serving him; in the other all of those judged as either sheep or goats are surprised to find that all along they have been dealing with Christ.

We’ve no doubt heard this gospel story before, of Jesus, at the end of all time, separating people as a shepherd separates sheep and goats, setting things right. Perhaps you take great comfort in it; or perhaps you might take offence at it and the whole notion of judgement. Or maybe you’re somewhere in-between. Regardless of where you find yourself, I would ask you to lend me your ears this evening, as we look a little more closely at this rather odd story, and what it might tell us about the surprising nature the judgement of Christ, the King.

Continue reading Judgement Call

In America, there is a one liner joke going around on car stickers, which reads “Jesus is coming – look busy!” Joking aside, this episode from Matthew suggests that it is not merely looking busy, but being busy in a certain way which is important. The tableau portrays Jesus returning at some point in the future after being raised from the grave and exalted to the Father’s right hand, this return is what theologians have called the parousia. When he returns, Jesus – who turns out to be the king – serves as a shepherd, separating the sheep from the goats.

This separation, this judgement, turns out to be surprising, not least for those who are judged. But first it is worth noticing the basis of the judgement. There is no hint here that this judgement is based on peccadilloes, on obscure dictates that we are sometimes keen to observe. Jesus doesn’t seem to interrogate his sheep over whether they’ve ever smoked or danced or had a drink of whiskey; he doesn’t seem to care if they’ve voted Tory or Labour or Lib Dem or whatever. Jesus separates sheep from goats on the basis of what each has done for the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters.

Now some interpreters want to say that Jesus’ brothers and sisters – the Greek word just means ‘brothers’ – are the church, and that this passage deals with how the world will be judged for how it related to the church. But I think that the text wants to push against this easy categorisation some, and that there are good theological reasons that we might broaden this term and see Jesus as being a brother of all the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.

In any event, it is on the basis of their serving the ‘least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters’ that the sheep are recognised as sheep; it’s on the basis of their neglect of these brothers and sisters that the goats are recognised as goats. So there’s a sense that Jesus’ judgement and separation is not at all something alien imposed on those arrayed before his throne so much as recognising the reality of what is already present, and what has been shown in the whole of their lives through attending (or not) to the least of Jesus’ sisters and brothers.

Perhaps the most surprising element of this all is the surprise of the people judged. There is a keen sense that they had no idea whether they were sheep or goats; they didn’t know they were serving the Lord or not in what they did. This means that no one can toady up to the king, no one can curry favour with him in order to get in on his good graces by doing just enough of the right thing. The judgement is not on the basis of what one has done for the king as the king, but only what one has done for the king inadvertently as he is hidden in the most humble of his brothers and sisters.

This, in turn, implies that at its deepest, life is not about securing and establishing ourselves over against everyone else; life is not, in contemporary parlance, about looking out for number one. Rather, true life – in our story’s terms, the life that leads to life – is not self-centred, but is open to others. True life is not concerned how others can serve us, but is preoccupied with serving others, especially those others who Jesus calls ‘least’, and who usually hover on the margins of our consciousness.

So we see the sheep and the goats are judged based on how they have served the ‘least’, and they are surprised to find that they were serving Christ himself – or failing to serve him. There are many things we can take away from this but I would like to focus on one in particular this evening, and that is how the judgement of Christ the King subverts our own judgement.

How does our own judgement usually proceed? I’d like to suggest three common alternatives on offer, limiting myself to religious judgements, but of course this can be easily broadened into any number of arenas.

We are all familiar no doubt with some ways in which the Bible is put to use these days whether in national politics or in the affairs of the church. It is perhaps somewhat more prominent in my native land than it is here in Britain, but we find some of it here as well. The scenario is clear – take our choice of issue, there are any number of them on offer. Find some biblical verses to support our perspective, and then claim that those who disagree with us aren’t merely reading scripture differently, but are failing to take it seriously, or perhaps disregarding it altogether in order to follow the spirit of the age. We could accuse them of hurting the church or compromising the gospel. Never mind that it’s other Christians we’re attacking. Either way, it’s clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Or maybe we’d take a different tack. We might want to look at the spirit of the Bible as a whole, reasoning that otherwise we might miss the wood for the trees. Those people then, who select only particular verses are in danger of distorting the whole biblical message, no doubt to their own nefarious ends. Even if we can’t actually account for individual teachings of the bible, we might still be able to render some general more-or-less accurate account. Either way, it’s clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Or perhaps we’d simply be happy to cut the Gordian Knot altogether, and just dump the Bible as the source of intractable and vicious disputes. This would be the way of the secular critic who instead embraces one form or another of pure reason as the light of life. If we were to take this route, perhaps we might call ourselves ‘brights’, just to set ourselves apart. Granted, this avenue hasn’t given us much in the way of saints, but why worry? Either way it’s clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

No doubt we can think of recent, concrete examples which fit each of these types. In all of them, we find that judgement is based on establishing ourselves as righteous, as having gotten it right, and being beyond question, having some special status. In all of them we are the good guys, and the other are the bad guys. After having established ourselves as right, in all of them we can then point at the others as unacceptable, not merely mistaken but deeply and quite possibly irredeemably wrong. This kind of judgement never touches us, but builds walls, digs ditches, erects borders to keep us away from the unacceptable. This kind of judgement seeks to determine now, once and for all, who are the goats and who are the sheep.

Sisters and brothers, how radically different do we find the judgement of Christ the King than any of this! Neither the sheep nor the goats knew who they were nor what they were doing. And because it is the king’s judgement, not ours, and is at the end of all time, not now, then we have no grounds for insisting we are the sheep or that we’re pretty sure who the goats are. We can’t rest secure knowing that we are the good guys or that the other are the bad guys. This means that there is no boasting, no self-righteousness, no self-assurance; no needing to make ourselves acceptable; no needing to make sure that others are unacceptable. There are no boundaries across which we can gesture to the goats, there are only boundaries which we can cross to love and serve our neighbour as ourselves, hoping perhaps, unwittingly, to find there Christ himself.

This is the judgement of Christ the King. And friends, what is this, at bottom, but the grace of Christ? And therein lies the surprise, that this judgement is nothing but the grace of God, who is never content to let us rest in our own sham self-righteousness, but loves us unrelentingly, constantly calling us to himself, through his Son, in the Spirit. God loves us so much that he isn’t satisfied for us to remain centred on ourselves, but calls forth from us responding love – a love which, in the mysterious nature of things, is only fulfilled in loving our neighbour, even the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters, a love which is unafraid to cross boundaries of all kinds.

I’d like to close tonight by sharing with you a story which I am convinced is an example of such a boundary-crossing in the name of love. This is a story from a society that is quite intensely interested in borders and boundaries. It was originally told to Tony Campolo.

Peter Arnett, a former reporter for CNN, was in Israel in a small West Bank village one day when an explosion went off.

Bodies were laying everywhere; from every direction came the sounds of pain and fear. A man came up to Peter with a bloodied little girl in his arms and begged the reporter to take him, saying “Mister, I can’t get her to a hospital! The Israeli troops have sealed off the area. No one can get in or out. But you’re from the press. They’ll let you through. Please mister!…If you don’t help me, she’s going to die.”

Peter hides the man and the girl in his car under a blanket, they get through the sealed area and hurtle down the road to the hospital in Jerusalem, all the while the man praying and pleading for Peter to drive faster.

They finally get to the hospital, the girl is rushed to surgery, and the two men sit in exhausted silence. Eventually the physician comes out of the operating room and solemnly says, “I’m sorry, she died.”

The man collapses in tears and Peter put his arms around him to comfort him. Searching for words, Peter says, “I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. I’ve never lost a child.”

At that, the man looked at Peter in a startled manner and said, “Oh, mister! That Palestinian girl was not my daughter. I’m an Israeli settler. That Palestinian is not my child. But…there comes a time when each of us must realize that every child, regardless of…background, is a daughter or a son. There must come a time when we realize that we are all family.”

Sisters and brothers... at its depth we find that life is not about ourselves, not about establishing ourselves and ensuring that others are unacceptable. Rather, we find that it’s about crossing borders, loving and serving our neighbour as Christ himself; in this we hear the surprising, de-centring judgement of Christ the King, which is none other than the love and grace of God, the fullness of Christ’s Kingdom. Amen.

Lazarus, the rich man, and The Kingdom: a sermon for Proper 21 C

Text of a sermon preached at St. Mark's Church, Newnham, Cambridge
by the Rev. Jason A. Fout
on 30 September 2007

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.

Recently I had a very interesting experience. I was invited by a child – a prominent five year old in my family – to let her be the leader on our trip back home from school. Intrigued, I agreed. I then noticed that for the rest of our journey, her primary concern was making sure that I stayed behind her. I suppose this is natural from a child’s perspective. After all, if you’re going to lead, so the logic might go, then you need someone behind you to follow. Naturally, as adults, we know that leadership is a much more complicated proposition, and that there might well be times when what is needed is not to be out in front, but to linger behind and allow others freedom to explore and discover and even move ahead.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this child picked up this notion from her father and his distorted notions of leadership. Who knows? In fact, this put me in mind of some of the things I thought as a child which didn’t quite pan out. For example, growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I used to think it would be great fun to work downtown in the city, because I would get to ride a train everyday, and I quite liked trains. As I grew older, I realised there was a lot more to working as an executive than riding trains.

I’m sure we’ve all had these same sorts of childlike ideas when we were younger, trying to sort out the world and the way it works. We might remember them fondly, or with a bit of embarrassment, recalling the moment they were dispelled. There’s nothing wrong these ideas, of course, it’s just a part of growing up. The point at which we become concerned is when one fails to move on. There’s a point at which we learn more and our childlike ideas become a fuller, more mature understanding. If we were to cling to what went before, it would not be childlike, but childish.

I bring this up to give us a bit of a framework for thinking about today’s lessons, because it seems to me that they suggest to us that some of our attitudes towards life are childish.
Continue reading Lazarus, the rich man, and The Kingdom

Let’s turn first to the gospel lesson. Luke continues his tradition of giving us vibrant, memorable, well-known parables of Jesus. We heard from him a story about a rich man and a poor man and the dramatic reversals they had after death. There’s a great deal here and we won’t be able to touch on it all this morning, but for our purposes I’d like to call our attention to two particular elements of the parable.

The first thing worth noticing in the parable is the names. There are two principal characters: one is a poor man, named Lazarus; the other is a rich man…who doesn’t have a name. In fact, over the years, this has troubled people; so much in fact that tradition has given him a name, Dives. And so we have numerous representations in art of Dives and Lazarus. But even Dives isn’t a proper name, as it only means ‘rich man’ in Latin. So here’s a man so focused on his riches, so consumed that the story seems content to describe him simply as a rich man. That is, of course, he’s called a ‘rich man’ until he dies. After that, of course, he is no longer rich; he isn’t even called a man, and he doesn’t seem to have a name. It’s as if in being consumed by his selfishness he becomes virtually nothing at all.

Contrast this with Lazarus, the poor man who suffers who doesn’t even have a speaking partg and yet has the dignity of a name. He is named several times. While he is alive and suffering misery and neglect he is Lazarus. And when he is taken by the angels to the bosom of Abraham, he is still dignified as Lazarus. Here is someone the likes of whom we might encounter every day in Cambridge without even registering their presence – maybe sitting in a doorway, perhaps selling The Big Issue, possibly wasting in a bed in a nursing home or hospital – someone who, in conventional terms, is vulnerable and on the margin. And yet we see in this parable that the very person we might disregard or even, in a weak moment, look down on is precious to God and worthy of dignity. It is in this that we catch a glimpse of the radical nature of the Kingdom of God, which some have called an ‘upside down kingdom’, a Kingdom in which, in this parable’s terms, the rich dwell in obscurity while the poor have names which are remembered to this very day.

That’s the first thing to notice, the way names are used. The second thing I’d like us to notice is the poignant tableau which unfolds in Hades. It’s worth mentioning that this is a parable, and not a travelogue which is meant somehow to give us a detailed picture of the afterlife, that’s not Jesus’ intention. That said, the man finds himself in Hades and cries out for himself, to have his suffering lessened. Then, when Abraham says he can do nothing, the man then tries to act to save his brothers. It is rather touching, and it seems almost as if the man has finally grasped the enormity of it all and wants at least to save his brothers. Is it possible that the man has actually been moved to repentance, even after death?

It’s fairly easy, I think, to read this parable in a straightforward moralistic fashion. It might seem to say simply: if you do bad to other people in life, you will come to a bad end: you don’t want to come to a bad end, so do good. It would be easy to read it this way, but I don’t think that’s the right way to read it. And I’m not so sure that the man in Hades has really changed or repented much anyway. It’s true he doesn’t ignore Lazarus any more, but instead treats him like a servant, to be sent to relieve his suffering or warn his brothers. And, true, he’s no longer moved only by selfish concern for himself; but he replaces that with selfish concern for his brothers. He’s worried that they not join him in Hades; he’s not worried about them becoming piously observant of Moses and the prophets and therefore sacrificially generous to those around them. The man in Hades still doesn’t get it – he’s stuck in a moralistic world, rather than a world founded on grace

You see, the moralist’s question ends up being how much do I have to give to avoid Hades? The focus is on me, on me being good enough, on securing my place and status. And if the focus is on me, then other people aren’t on my radar screen, except when they stand in my way, or give me an opportunity to advance my own cause. ‘How can I use Lazarus to help me?’ ends up being the question in Hades. This really fails to grasp the nature of the situation: at bottom, it’s childish.

If the moralist’s question is ‘how much do I have to give to avoid Hades’, the better question, the one founded on the grace of Christ, is ‘how much can I give in order to love others well?’ To be gripped by God’s grace in this way doesn’t mean we don’t fall short: in fact, when we are no longer preoccupied with being good enough, when we’re no longer obsessed with ourselves, we can actually be more honest about our sin and our shortcomings. We’re able to come clean about ourselves because we realise that we aren’t here because we’re so great, but because God loves us. If the whole of our lives, and the whole of our life with God in Christ are a gift through God’s grace, then how can be so preoccupied with keeping accounts? How can we be so focused on ourselves and not open to the possibilities around us to love others well, and to let them love us? We have nothing to lose, for we have nothing that we have not been given as a gift and entrusted by God to use well.

This is reflected in the apostolic teaching from our epistle reading today, which reads ‘we brought nothing into the world so that we can take nothing out of it,’ therefore we are to use our resources, indeed our lives, so that we are wealthy not in money and status but in goodness and love towards others. This is an image of life in God in which all that we are given we are given for the sake of someone else. Friends, that’s not childish at all; that’s real life.

Naturally, realising this in our lives is a process of spiritual growth. We don’t arrive there immediately. We don’t grow out of deeply ingrained childish ways overnight. But as the Spirit works in our lives, by God’s grace we are able to repent, and we do see growth.

I’d like to share just one brief example. I served a parish in Michigan in the US for four years before coming here to Cambridge. While I was there, I learned about the fair trade movement, and the way that it worked with people in other lands to secure a fair price for their work and products, so that they were no longer locked in poverty. In this way, it short-circuited the powerful pressure for ever-lower prices – and lower wages - that larger distributors could bring to bear on their suppliers. I became convinced that this was a good way to use our resources to benefit others, and so I brought a proposal to a p.c.c. meeting that we change the coffee we used from conventionally traded coffee to fairly traded coffee. We had some good discussion around the issue, but we decided that it would end up being too expensive. So I let it drop. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. Then, about three weeks later, someone who had been a part of that discussion approached me. She said that she had been thinking about it, and realised that when she had said no to paying more for coffee, she had said yes to paying less than a living wage for workers. And that troubled her. These aren’t just nameless, faceless nobodies, but people who want to feed their families and send their children to school. So she brought it up at the next p.c.c. meeting, and we revisited the issue. This is just one example – no doubt you’ve got stories like this from your life, or from our life here at St. Mark’s – but in it we can see the Spirit bringing growth to move away from childishness. The question was no longer ‘how much can we get for as little as possible?’; now it was ‘how can I use the resources we’ve been entrusted with to love and serve others well?’

And this work of the Spirit is evidence of the coming Kingdom of God, seen in Moses and the Prophets, begun in Jesus Christ, growing today in the Spirit, but not yet fully arrived. It can feel a little topsy turvy, even upside down as it questions our usual way of doing things. It’s a kingdom where everyone has a face and a name, because everyone matters; it’s a kingdom where by grace we’re freed from being preoccupied with ourselves, and freed to love God and our neighbour; it’s a kingdom where we are freed to use what we have been given for the good of others. Sisters and brothers, we’re not there yet. But the Holy Spirit keeps working with us, challenging and empowering us to leave behind childish notions and embrace the life that is really life, of loving service for others in the name of Christ. And as we glimpse this work of God, how can we respond, but in childlike wonder, once again? Amen.

My Neighbour, My Self (Sermon for Proper 10c)

Text of a sermon preached at St. Mark's Church, Newnham, Cambridge

by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

on 15 July 2007

It’s always a sign of mixed success when a proper name becomes a common noun. In America, for example, we make photocopies on a Xerox machine; if we need a facial tissue, we will ask for a Kleenex. Here in the UK, I’ve noticed that when we tidy up, we’ll get out the Hoover. There are many other examples I imagine we could cite. I am led to believe that executives are wary of this tendency though, because as these proper names come to apply to all sorts of things then they end up not meaning very much and the specific benefits of, say, a Hoover vacuum, are lost in the shuffle.

It seems to me that the term ‘Samaritan’ is quite similar to this, and that the story that Jesus told in our gospel reading for this morning has become so popular and well-known that the very pressure of the story on the meaning of the word ‘Samaritan’ has caused it to mean something else. For example, do a web search for ‘Samaritan’ today and you will be linked with Samaritan’s Purse, Samaritan Ministries, Samaritan Hospital, and a confidential counselling service by the name of the Samaritans. This certainly speaks of a great success for this story. These are good organisations doing valuable work, and they have taken their name from the one who showed mercy in this morning’s reading.

But friends the risk is that if we just allow ‘Samaritan’ to mean ‘someone prone to helping another’ then we might miss hearing some of the surprise in this story. The story of the Good Samaritan has, for good reason, been so well loved over the last two millennia that our familiarity with it might stop us from also noticing its strangeness, and we might miss some of the depth and the challenge present here. So I propose this morning that we linger over a few of the details from this reading, to better grasp it, to better love it, and most of all, to be better grasped by the love we find in it.
Continue reading My Neighbour, My Self

Perhaps the first thing to notice is that, unlike in Matthew and Mark, it is not Jesus but the lawyer who says what we have come to know as the great commandment, to love God and love your neighbour as yourself. This is not altogether surprising: both elements of this come from the Old Testament, and indeed rough contemporaries of Jesus such as Rabbi Hillel said similar things. But the effect in this context then is to lay the emphasis not on the teaching to love as such, but on Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s second question: ‘who is my neighbour?’ This question becomes the overriding focus of this entire passage, and Jesus’ response to it sheds ample light on both loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself.

‘Who is my neighbour?’ the lawyer wants to vindicate himself to the teacher, wants to show his cleverness, wants to manage his responsibility. And who is my neighbour? The way the lawyer asks this question puts him in the driver’s seat. He is in control. He is the one who loves. He is the one who decides if another person is truly his neighbour or not. This is his game. With his question to Jesus, he’s just trying to estimate the size of the pitch and identify his teammates.

In answer to this question, then, Jesus’ story becomes quite odd indeed. One of the two main characters, the man set upon by robbers, is passive and unconscious for virtually all of the story, left half dead in a ditch. He doesn’t even have a speaking part. We know almost nothing about him other than that he is most likely an Israelite, like the lawyer. And we know that throughout this story he is passive, exposed, vulnerable. In answering the lawyer’s question, Jesus effectively turns it on its head: who is my neighbour? Is not a question that we answer out of our own power, by our own decision, through our own control. Determining who our neighbour is is not a matter of carefully vetting likely candidates and finding some who are really worth bothering with. No; in the event, our neighbour is who we are given.

And what a neighbour this man is given. A priest and a Levite both see the man, half-dead, and pass by on the other side of the road. These fellow Israelites are most likely afraid that this man is not half dead but all dead, and in that case coming into contact with him would render them unclean. So his countrymen and co-religionists pass him by. Instead, a Samaritan comes upon him and helps.

Now here is where we ought to be careful and try to bracket out our contemporary notions about Samaritans. To an Israelite of Jesus’ day, a Samaritan would have been repugnant. There had been hatred and animosity between the Jews and Samaritans for centuries, as the Israelites held the Samaritans to be idolaters and betrayers of the faith. And the Samaritans gave as good as they got. Roughly 25 years before Jesus would have told this parable, a group of Samaritans entered the Temple in Jerusalem and scattered human bones around, desecrating the place. In our story today, once the Samaritan comes on the scene, the lawyer most likely would have thought that he would come upon the half-dead Israelite and finish the job. To the lawyer, the Samaritan’s help would have been shocking, even scandalous. And that, of course, is just why Jesus used him in the story in the first place.

What’s more, the help that the Samaritan gives is extravagantly over the top. He doesn’t just give first aid, but takes him to an inn. He gives the innkeeper an amount of money that, at that time, would have sustained a person for three weeks. And he doesn’t even stick around for a thank you. In fact, there is no sense at all that this half-dead Israelite ever even knows who saved his life.

In response to the lawyer trying to screen who his neighbours are, Jesus tells a story of an Israelite who is exposed and vulnerable and who is helped, extravagantly, by someone who would normally be considered a mortal enemy. Our neighbour is not who we choose; our neighbour is who we are given. It is in light of this, then, that we can go back and understand the teaching about loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbour as ourselves.

Who is our neighbour? Suddenly, in the logic of the parable, we’re not calling the shots; we are not so sure just who our neighbour is. Suddenly we’re not so sure just who our self is. If I’m to love another as my ‘self’ then the upshot is that I’m not even totally familiar with who I am, as I seem constantly to find that self facing me in others. And here we find the most radical challenge, for in this we see that no boundary will finally stand in the way of us and our neighbour, if we are to love them as our self. There are certainly distinctions: yes; love doesn’t seek to make everything else the same. But boundaries? No. There are no boundaries to our neighbours, no limits to whom we are to find our very selves in, no restrictions to whom we are to love unstintingly in God.
Sisters and brothers, in this day of the internet, international travel, and globalisation the world seems to grow smaller; it is clearer now more than ever that any line we draw to limit our neighbours will simply be arbitrary. And so we discover that we have neighbours far and near: your family who sits at the dinner table with you, the young woman across the counter at Caffe Nero, the Baptist or the Muslim or the atheist who lives down the street, the unemployed young man who lives across town, the politician we disagree with so ardently, even the worker in a different country who picked the fruit you ate with breakfast or who sewed the shirt you’re wearing right now. Who is my neighbour, who I am to love? Who isn’t my neighbour?

We might even be surprised to find, in fact, that God is our neighbour. That’s not to parrot the words of that song from the nineties that God might be ‘one of us’. What I mean is that the story of the Good Samaritan is also a parable of God’s grace. The man who is half-dead and abandoned, who is unable to do anything on his own encounters a freely given and extravagant healing love from a surprising source, without conditions. This love gives him back his life and allows him to be a neighbour to others. This is the mercy and love of God that we meet through Christ, and that empowers us to love our neighbour. And so here we find that love of God and love of neighbour meet.

We don’t love God because it is a commandment. It is ‘written in the Law’ because God loves us first. God’s love elicits love from us. We respond to that love with love; and we find that even the love we respond with is a gift from God. This responding love is then worked out in loving our neighbour. Loving God and loving neighbour are not two different projects, for love begets love. The love we receive is the love that we love those around us with; and it is with that same love that we graciously receive from our neighbour, who is also beloved of God.

We know how the lawyer in today’s story answered Jesus’ question, but we don’t know what he did after that. Was his life changed? Did he ‘go and do likewise’? Or was he so turned off that he went and looked for a different venue to plead his case in? Or did he, perhaps like most of us, walk away convinced that Jesus was right, yet also knowing how far he was from it, nevertheless trying to love others with the love that he had found in Christ? Of course, we can only speculate about him. But I hope that as we go out in the wake of this story we will be both challenged and comforted by what we find here: by the surprising Samaritan, by the neighbour in our life we do not choose but are given by God, and most of all by the extravagant love and grace of God. In that way, may we better grasp this story, better love this story, and above all, be better grasped by the love we find in it. Amen.

On The Pentecost Parable

I wanted to say a few things about my sermon for Pentecost, to clarify and expand on it.

First, it is an adaptation of an adaptation. What happened was this: The Rev. Tim Schenck, an old friend from seminary, sent around via e-mail an adaptation of the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale. It followed the shape of the original story quite closely, ony with a bishop for the emperor. I found it quite humourous, but it also bothered me to some degree, and in reading it the ending as present in my adaptation occurred to me. I e-mailed Tim back, explained my changes, and asked to use his adaptation (with my adaptations) sometime in a sermon. He said 'fine'. I made numerous small changes throughout the body of the story, but it is essentially as Tim wrote, until the Pentecost service. From that point until the end is my contribution.

Second, what bothered me about the original story - and this is not a criticism of Tim so much as the use to which such stories are put these days - is that it was unapologetically moralistic, and served to do little more than reaffirm the hearers' self-righteousness. That is, the hearers are unlikely to be bishops or emperors, so that character will be to most hearers 'the other'. It is a tiresome commonplace - almost self-evident - that those in authority are out of touch, selfish, vain, conceited, trapped in systems of power which militate against recognising the truth. We've all heard the classic tale and have ingested it deeply, not least because we've also encountered it in real life as well. But this, as I say, only reinforces our own rightness and our low view of others, which is not (I think) a worthy goal in a sermon. So instead I wanted to stretch our imaginations a bit, and try to portray in a genuine way the work of the Spirit. The biblical trope of God using unlikely people on the margins is one way of doing this; I think that God using unlikely people not on the margins might be another way, especially to the extent that it might call our own presuppositions into question, expand our imaginations, and (especially) better know God.

Third, I did specifically include the choirboy - a feature of Tim's story - because for the bishop to realise what was happening on his own would not seem to render faithfully the work of the Spirit; in fact, it might have simply reinforced unthinking obedience and the sort of top-down authority, the apotheosising of bishops, emperors, etc. that Andersen's tale deflates. I don't think that is a worthy goal of preaching, either.

Fourth, I guess it comes down to this: Hans Christian Andersen describes human behaviour. I am trying to describe what God does. (In saying that, I'm not trying to make a value judgement; they both have value for different ends.) In trying to construct the alternate ending I tried to make it as realistic as possible, not mawkish or exaggerated. I also tried to show the difference the Spirit makes for people, portraying it in narrative form for Pentecost. The bishop: 1) is able to be honest about who he is in God - his dual status as unworthy-yet-worthy-because-of-God; 2) repents of his sin (publicly) and recommits himself to his position - as loving service, not worldly honour; 3) in repenting and recommiting himself publicly, he comes to realise that his position is not for himself, but is only established in relationship - he very specifically asks for forgiveness but does not demand that it be given; and 4) in the coda, we see that his renewal is real, for he has been given an imagination of grace beyond self-righteousness and law - he becomes reconciled with those who betrayed him and opens up for them the possibility of new life. (I didn't say what happened to them - 'a story for another time' - because it seemed to make the ending too pat. To leave it open-ended, I hoped, would stimulate our own imaginations not just about the clever robbers, but about others in our lives, and maybe even ourselves.) Grace and love begets grace and love, or so I tried to show.

Anyway, for this sermon especially I wanted to say a few extra words not just in the sermon but about it: about the funny triple-authorship, and about my intentions in modifying it as I did.

A Pentecost Parable

A Sermon by the Rev. Jason A. Fout,

(Being an adaptation of a tale by the Rev. Timothy Schenck*,

itself an adaptation of a classic tale by Hans Christian Andersen)

Delivered in Selwyn College Chapel,

Pentecost Sunday, 27 May 2007

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.

Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the time after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension when God sent the Holy Spirit to the disciples. We heard in the reading from Acts this morning how what seemed like tongues of fire rested on the heads of the disciples when they were filled with the Spirit. Historically, that tongue of fire has been symbolised in the bishop’s high pointed hat, called a mitre.

I remind you of that just as a bit of background for a story I would like to tell this morning. The story is adapted from a friend of mine, The Reverend Timothy Schenck, who in turn adapted it from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

+ + +

Many years ago there lived a Bishop. He was so enamoured with liturgical vestments that he spent all his time and all his discretionary funds in order to be well vested. He did not read much Scripture or theology and the only joy he took in parish visitations was in the ceremonial processions where he could show off his fine collection of copes, mitres and chasubles.

Between services, parishioners would ask, “Where is the Bishop?” Instead of answering, “He is meeting with the vestry” or “He is in consultation with the rector,” the Bishop’s Chaplain would reply, “The Bishop is admiring his vestments in the sacristy mirror.”

Time passed merrily in the cathedral city.

One day, two men arrived, saying they were expert makers of vestments, but they were, in fact, clever robbers. They pretended that they knew how to weave cloth of the most beautiful liturgical colours and magnificent patterns. Moreover, they said, the vestments woven from this magic cloth could not be seen by anyone who was unworthy of the office he held.

“These must be splendid vestments indeed!” thought the Bishop. “If I had a matching cope and mitre made of this magic cloth, I could find out at once what priests in my diocese are not good enough for the positions they hold. These vestments must be woven for me immediately.” And he ordered large sums from the diocesan treasury to be given to the weavers in order that they might begin their work at once.

So the two men who pretended to be makers of vestments set up two looms in the basement of the cathedral. They went about as though they were working busily, though in reality they did nothing at all.

After some little time passed, the Bishop said to himself, “I should like to know how the vestments are coming along. I am a little worried about going myself to look at the cloth because they said that a man unfit for his office would be unable to see the material. Surely I am quite safe - but all the same I think it best to send someone else first.”
After some thought the Bishop said, “I will send my faithful and trustworthy Canon to the Ordinary. He is a man of sense and no one can be more suitable for his office than he.”

So the old Canon to the Ordinary went into the cathedral basement where the wicked men were working. “What can be the meaning of this?” thought the old man, opening his eyes very wide. “I cannot see the least bit of thread on the looms!” However, he did not speak his thoughts out loud.

The men who were pretending to weave very politely asked him whether the design pleased him and whether the colours were not very beautiful. The poor Canon to the Ordinary looked but he could not see anything on the looms for the very good reason that there was nothing there. But, of course, he did not know this and thought only that he must be a foolish man unfit for the office of Canon to the Ordinary. “Dear me,” he said to himself, “I must never tell anyone that I could not see the cloth.”

“Well, Reverend Canon sir, does our work please you?” asked one of the weavers. Adjusting his spectacles, the Canon to the Ordinary said quickly, “Oh it is most beautiful. Yes, I will go the Bishop at once and tell him how very wonderful I think it is.”

The Bishop was pleased by the report brought by his Canon to the Ordinary and soon sent the Cathedral Dean to find out how soon the vestments would be ready. It was, of course, just the same with the Dean as it had been with the Canon to the Ordinary. He looked at the looms on all sides but could see nothing at all but the empty frames.

“Do not the vestments appear as beautiful to you, Very Reverend Dean, as they did to the Canon to the Ordinary?” asked the men.

“It must be that I am not fit for the very good and comfortable office I hold.” thought the Cathedral Dean. “However, no one shall ever know anything about it.” And at once he turned to the robbers and praised the material he could not see. He then returned at once to the Bishop and said, “Indeed, your Grace, the vestments which the weavers are making are extraordinarily magnificent. They will be ready by Pentecost.”

And now at last the Bishop himself wished to see the marvellous cope and mitre being fashioned for him. He took with him a few of his other canons, along with the Canon to the Ordinary and the Cathedral Dean. As soon as the false weavers heard the Bishop coming, they worked away harder than ever, though they still did not weave a single thread though the empty looms.

“Is not the cloth magnificent?” asked the Canon to the Ordinary and the Cathedral Dean as the party reached the cathedral basement.

“How is this?” said the Bishop to himself, “I can see nothing! This is indeed terrible! Am I unfit to be Bishop? Do I not deserve this position and these vestments?”

“Oh! The vestments are beautiful!” he cried out loud. “I am delighted with them.” And he smiled most charmingly for on no account would he say that he could not see what his Canon to the Ordinary and Cathedral Dean had praised so much.

All his entourage now strained their eyes hoping to see something in the looms but they could see no more than the others. Nevertheless, they all exclaimed, “How beautiful!” and advised the Bishop to wear them at the great Pentecost Day celebration at the Cathedral.

When the vestments were pronounced complete, the Bishop and the entire diocesan staff came to see the weavers’ work. The false weavers raised their arms as though they were holding up something to be seen and said, “Here is the chasuble! Here is the stole and cope and mitre! They are all light as a cobweb. When dressed in these vestments one might fancy that one has on nothing at all. That, however, is the wonderful thing about this delicate magic cloth.” And all the Bishop’s staff nodded enthusiastically, though not one of them could see anything at all.

On the Feast of Pentecost, before the great procession through the cathedral was to take place, the Bishop entered the sacristy to be vested by the rogue weavers. He put on his alb and the weavers pretended to help him into his vestments. The altar party all cried out, “How splendid the Bishop looks in his new vestments! What beautiful colours! What a design! They are indeed princely robes!”

The Verger announced to the Bishop that it was time for the great procession to begin. The Verger led the procession, followed by the thurifer, the crucifer, the acolytes, the choir of men and boys, various canons including the Canon to the Ordinary, the Sub-Deacon, the Deacon, the Cathedral Dean and finally the Bishop himself. The entire congregation turned to face the Bishop as he began his grand entrance through the nave.

“Oh, how beautiful are our Bishop’s new vestments!” the people cried. “How gracefully the cope sits upon his shoulders!” In fact, no one would admit that he or she could not see the vestments which everyone seemed to think so beautiful for fear of being called a simpleton or unfit for their office.

Suddenly, as the majestic opening hymn drew to a close and there was a moment of silence before the opening acclamation, a young chorister spoke. “But I can’t see anything – it’s like the Bishop has no vestments on at all!!” What had been meant as a hushed murmur had accidentally come out loudly and clearly, amplified by the cathedral’s acoustics. The chorister turned a deep red.

“Young man, what did you say!?” shouted the bishop indignantly.

At that very moment, the bishop was brought up short. He paused. He felt his face growing red from embarrassment, and there was a burning sensation on his scalp. And then he repeated his question to the boy, in an altogether different tone.

“Please, young man, did you say that you can’t see any vestments?”

The boy, scared, just nodded quietly.

The bishop stood there, silence filling the cathedral. Then, looking around at his clergy and parishioners, he said “I can’t see them, either.”

He went on, “From the beginning they have been invisible to me. For weeks I have been kept awake at night, anxious that I am not worthy of my position, and afraid that someone would find out. I would be ridiculed. Everyone would know I was unworthy. I would have to leave, in shame.”

The bishop went on, “But then, what this young man said hit me like a ray of light in utter darkness. I realised in an instant that it was true: I’m not worthy; on my own, I don’t merit this position. I’m only here – all of us are only here – because of the grace of God. We didn’t earn it. We don’t possess it. It’s a gift; it’s a gracious gift of God. It’s because of God’s love for all of us. I’m not here as your bishop because I deserve it.

“At the same time that I realised I am who I am as a gift from God, I also realised that that means I’m here not as an honour for myself but to serve you well. I haven’t done that. I’ve been vain and selfish and conceited. I hope that, in time, you will forgive me for that.”

“In the meantime, thank you young man for your brave words. Now, let us carry on celebrating the Feast of Pentecost, remembering how God sent the Spirit of his Son to the church, that we might serve one another and be a blessing to the world.” At that, the service went on.

And though everyone now admitted that they could see no vestments, still there were several people who later insisted that, in the darkness of the cathedral, they could make out the dim outlines of a mitre on the bishop’s head.

+ + +

As a postscript, I should say that the bishop actually realized not two but three things:
After the service, he caught up with the clever robbers. He explained to them that he knew they had deceived him and the people, but he had learned a valuable lesson from it. He wasn’t going to have them arrested; in fact, he was still willing to pay them their fee. Or instead, if they wanted, they could stay in the community, learn a legitimate trade, and become valued members of the church. It was up to them. And so they decided…well, that’s a story for another time.


*The material contributed by Tim Schenck has been used with his express permission.

Hopeful Signs: Sermon for Passiontide (Mark 15.1-39)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

at St. Mark's Church, Newnham, Cambridge

on Passion Sunday, 25 March 2007

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.

So here we are, five weeks into Lent, at the threshold of the passiontide. Normally we hear the reading of the passion account on Palm Sunday, and again on Good Friday. But this year we’ve been sojourning together with the gospel of Mark during Lent, and we’ve been focusing on the signs of the Kingdom in Jesus’ ministry. These signs of God’s Kingdom include deliverance, healing, detachment, and children. And today we hear about the final sign of the Kingdom in the gospel of Mark, the cross.

Mark is the shortest of the four canonical gospels, and many have remarked on how quickly the story moves. Unlike Matthew and Luke, there is nothing said about Jesus’ early life. It starts out abruptly, and without ceremony moves straightaway into Jesus’ ministry and teaching. There’s almost a breathless quality to it as we bound from one episode to the next. Mark often introduces a story with ‘Immediately’, ‘at once’, ‘straightaway’, ‘suddenly’; one gets a sense of urgency, as he dashes through his story.

But as the story unfolds, approaching its end, the pace gradually settles down. When we come to the cross, it is as if time were slowing, stretching out, lingering. . The almost frantic pace of the rest of the story has ebbed away. Mark has brought us through all of the preliminaries, important as they are, to bring us here, to show us these few precious hours in Jerusalem, to show us the Kingdom of God in the cross.

Continue reading Hopeful Signs

Looking at this story on one level, it is a story of massive, multiple failures. We begin with the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes. The night before our story begins, they are looking for some jumped-up charge on which to accuse Jesus so that he can be killed. Through the haze of false testimony and unfounded accusation, energised by jealousy, they abuse Jesus, bind him, and turn him over to Pilate. His own countrymen, who follow and serve the same Lord as him, betray him to the Gentiles.

The Gentile they hand him over to is Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect. Pilate, like many governors, is more concerned with keeping the peace than anything else. He could have, with a stroke, let the innocent man go free. Instead, he plays the game. Which would you have me release for you, the man guilty of insurrection or the innocent one? The crowd demanded the guilty Barabbas, and they got him. The governor, whose legitimacy is based on the ability to maintain peace by delivering justice, instead allows an injustice to go forward, if only to keep the peace.

Being delivered from chief priests to Roman governor, Jesus is now handed over to the soldiers. These men were well versed in brutality and are unstinting with Jesus, cruelly mocking and torturing him before they take him out to be killed. Rather than being an instrument of justice or stability, the soldiers simply continue the violence of society and perpetuate injustice. No doubt, they would say that they were just following orders.

These multiple failures are deeply troubling on their own, but perhaps even more troubling by their absence – the dog that doesn’t bark – are Jesus’ disciples. Surely, amidst the failures and betrayals of religion, government, justice, one can count on one’s closest friends to bear with one? Yet we find that the disciples are absent because in the reading immediately before ours, they have abandoned Jesus. Even Peter, perhaps the closest to Jesus, denies him three times.

Abandoned by his friends, handed on from priest to governor to solider, finally Jesus is handed over to the cross. Here, Mark’s awareness of time becomes acute. Jesus is crucified at nine o’clock. At twelve o’clock, darkness covers the land. And although the darkness lasts three hours, it seems that time stands still. It is as if all of the sin, the failure, the wickedness, the evil in the world has assembled over the cross. And it is here, in the place of deepest darkness that we find Jesus on the cross. His last words, not just on the cross, but indeed the last words he utters in the entire gospel of Mark[1], cry out in the words of the psalm, my God, why have you abandoned me?

It is with only a hint of irony that Jesus’ last words, as with so many of his other words, are misunderstood by his hearers who think he is calling for Elijah. This entire story unfolds a tableau of massive, multiple failures: abandonment by the disciples, betrayal by religious officials, injustice by the government, cruelty by the soldiers, misunderstanding by bystanders, and perhaps most striking, at the heart of darkness, the Son is abandoned by the Father.

But there is another level to this story. It is also possible to look at this from a rather different perspective, and to see, amidst all of the darkness and failures, the true Kingdom of God.

There is an oddness to this story that is worth noticing. Through all of the failure and wickedness, there is no sense that, if just one thing went the other way, things would have turned out differently. Jesus is never heard to curse under his breath that if the disciples had just hung in there this would never have happened. He doesn’t appeal to his fellow countrymen to spare his life rather than abetting the occupying empire. He doesn’t seize the opportunity in front of Pilate to mount a defence and escape what lies before him. He doesn’t answer the insults of passersby by saving himself.

Indeed, while the sin and the wickedness and the failure in this story are real, there is also very much a sense in which Jesus allows it all to unfold, as much in conversation with his Father as subjected to others. There is no point at which Jesus seems surprised by the actions of other people or particularly anxious to save himself. His life isn’t being taken from him: he’s laying it down. There lurks in our story the sense of the unfolding of a plan – a surprising plan, a costly plan to be sure, but a plan nevertheless.

This isn’t a tragic accident; this is what God planned and did. Despite our sin and failure, at the place of deepest darkness, we find God’s plan for the salvation of the world. In a profound irony, it is God’s Son, abandoned on the cross, that is actually God’s act of solidarity with us. On the cross, God bears the brunt of our sin and the force of death. In the cross God finally defeats evil and death, and begins to open the way of new life – although we will have to put off saying much more about this new life until Easter, two weeks from now.

That these two levels are present in this story is hardly accidental, for these two levels are present in life. That’s not to say that all is sin or darkness – certainly not. But I am fairly confident that each of us knows, first hand, the presence of sin and darkness in our lives. And we know on some deep level that the world is out of whack, that this isn’t how God intended it to be. But in the cross we also see God at work on another, deeper level, working to transform sin into righteousness, shame into honour, death into life. In the cross, we find the definitive sign of God’s kingdom, of God’s gracious loving power.

This sums up and fulfils all of Mark’s signs of the Kingdom: In the cross, we find God’s promise for deliverance from oppression, spiritual and otherwise. This is a particularly apt reminder today, when we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade in Britain. We find here God’s power for healing, and the strength to carry on in the face of suffering. We find here on the cross God’s transforming love, which enables us to so love him and love others that we can become detached from those less important things which threaten to dominate our lives. And here, we are allowed to trust God’s power, and so to become like children. In all of these ways, the cross is the fullest expression of God’s Kingdom.

And friends, when we find ourselves involved in massive betrayal, multiple failures, or shameful sin – whether as victim or as perpetrator – or when we find ourselves overshadowed by deep darkness, the Kingdom of God is there. Christ is there to heal and restore, in love.
Brothers and sisters, we find in the cross a bracing honesty about who we are, how we sin, how we suffer. It might be a bit uncomfortable. There is no room here, after all, for a sunny optimism. But there is ample room for hope. The cross is profoundly hopeful, for through it we find that even when we are in the depths of darkness, we are not beyond the grip of God’s grace. Amen.

[1] I take it that the longer ending of Mark, while perhaps genuine in some sense, is not in fact a part of ‘Mark’, and hence these would be the final direct quotation form Jesus – all the more striking in that they are recorded in Aramaic, and are thus the ipsissima verba.

Filled not with spirits but with the Spirit (Sermon for Proper 15B)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

20 August 2006, Proper 15 B

at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, 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.

It seems that there is no end of things to worry about these days. We hear of new threats of terrorism. Even as plots are foiled, we grow more suspicious of others and odd behavior can set us instantly on edge. Despite a tenuous peace, further combat in the Mid East seems imminent, with the inevitable cost in noncombatants and the impact it makes around the globe. The conflict in Iraq drags on as its costs, human and otherwise, soar. The five year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks looms. And keeping in mind the attack not far from here this summer, violence and racial tensions here in Chicago exert their influence on us, too, heightening our anxieties.

Or when we consider our church in the wake of general convention, there isn’t the same cost in terms of lives certainly, but some have felt our disagreements so deeply they have walked away from the table and might at times feel hesitant to name us as brothers and sisters in Christ. Although we might not agree with them, we still feel the loss of them and the distance between us.

And perhaps some of us find ourselves upset by the wedding last month of Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock – whether this upset is out of dashed personal hopes or fear that they might reproduce, I refuse to speculate.

But seriously, it seems that there is no end of things in the world to cause us worry, anxiety, and fear. And a big part of what makes these events so worrying is a feature common to them all: we have no control over them.

Continue reading Filled not with spirits but with the Spirit

When we find ourselves in situations which have such a high cost, and we have no control over them, there are two common responses. One is to withdraw from the situation by giving up, by just losing all control and trying to escape. The other response, especially when the anxiety is as close as a family member or a situation at work, is to use as much power as possible to try to reassert control. We might say that we are caught between losing ourselves on the one hand and using ourselves to dominate on the other, between losing control and clinging to control at all costs.

Interestingly, the readings we heard for today give us some resources, as Christians, for how to deal with this bind.

First, let’s turn to something Paul says in his letter to the church at Ephesus. He says ‘Do not get drunk with wine…but be filled with the Holy Spirit.’ Again, as I said last week, it might be easy to read Paul here as engaged in cheap moralizing, as if he were saying ‘shame on you! Drinking is bad! You should stop.’ But Paul isn’t just giving free advice; he is suggesting something far deeper and more important than that.

Drinking to excess can be a way of escape. I think Paul isn’t just saying that getting drunk is a bad thing. I think because it is a way of losing or giving up control, a way of escaping, that Paul is saying that it’s important that we don’t take ourselves out of action; that we don’t despair or give up. That’s not how we are to live as Christians.

So what does he say in response? I think this is the intriguing part. He doesn’t say ‘you people need to avoid demon drink’. This is important, because we can often be tempted in these situations to a kind of moral earnestness, what some would call ‘Puritanism’. We could be tempted to go to some lengths to avoid all drinking, and would work really hard to walk the straight and narrow. But sisters and brothers this would just be seizing control ourselves. Instead of giving up control, we would just be re-asserting it. But these are just two sides of the same coin in what should be a devalued currency. The issue is not, after all, whether we have too much or too little control.

To this dilemma, Paul suggests something quite different. He says, in effect, ‘do not be filled with spirits, but be filled with the Spirit.’

The real irony here is that, to outside observers, at first glance, there might not seem much difference. In the book of Acts, when the Spirit descended at Pentecost and filled the disciples, bystanders poked fun at them, saying that these people were drunk on wine. And Peter had to say to them, ‘No, no. We never drink before noon. This is the Spirit of God poured out. God is here, doing something amazing.’

Or if we return to what Paul is saying, we find that being filled with the Spirit brings joyous singing and effusive gratitude to God. The Spirit doesn’t bring stick-in-the-mud sobriety but joy, pleasure, delight. Being filled with the Spirit, we are no longer left to focus on ourselves and our control – or being out of control. We are drawn into the overflowing love, wisdom and joy of God. And in that, we are transformed. We grow in love for God and others. We grow in wisdom and joy. And how can we help but sing our gratitude to God, who made and sustains each one of us: everything we have and everything we are is pure gift. Being filled with the Holy Spirit changes us, frees us in just these ways.

It would be fairly easy to stop there. But the truth is, when we are no longer preoccupied with ourselves and our control but are freed to love others, we are also freed to bear the burdens and costs of that love.

We simply don’t have the time this morning to do justice to the richness of what Jesus says in the gospel reading about being the bread of life. But I will take a moment to mark one significant aspect. All that he says about being the bread of life, about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, all of this is sacrificial language, about him laying down his life in a way which is able to sustain his followers. This giving of himself gives life to others, but in the process he is consumed.

Friends, he was not blithely unaware of the cost of this process, but he undertook it willingly, for us and for the world, out of a deep and abiding love. And I think as we are filled with the Spirit, we too are able not only to feel the joy and gratitude of that love, but to bear its burdens and costs, too.

Oscar Romero knew something about this.

As Oscar Romero studied for the priesthood in El Salvador, he self-consciously separated himself from other seminarians that were interested in the liberation of the poor and oppressed. It is said that for years he distanced himself from any such activities, quashing “community-based pastoral projects that he felt were too radical” and he unwaveringly defended the status quo. This continued even after he became archbishop of San Salvador, turning a blind eye to state-sponsored terrorism and brutality against the people of that country.* But one day, an activist priest named Rutilio Grande was murdered, along with a little boy and a 72 year-old layman. This was the turning point. Gradually Romero realized that his call as archbishop was not just to protect himself, but to be a shepherd to his people. He was taken up with a passionate, selfless love for them. This meant working for justice, resisting state violence, and publicly denouncing the atrocities committed against the Salvadorans. Romero had started off with certain expectations about a comfortable and conventional life. But in seeing the bodies of these three slain people, seeing Christ there in them, it was as if he was filled with the Holy Spirit for the first time. His expectations, his episcopacy, his life had been shaken up and changed by the Spirit.

In this experience, he was given what must have seemed like new life. Not only that, in his love and passionate commitment to his people, he also gave his life. For his speaking out, he was shot by assailants on March 24, 1980, while he celebrated mass at an altar near his home.

Archbishop Romero knew what it was, in Paul’s terms, to be ‘filled with the Spirit’. He was filled with passionate love for God and others. He no longer needed to be in control, or worried about not being in control. He grew in wisdom, joy, and gratitude. The Holy Spirit freed him from being preoccupied with himself and his own safety. And the Spirit also freed him to bear the burdens and costs of that love.

For Romero, it led him to give his life.

But of course for us, who knows where it will lead? Perhaps as we continue to grow in being filled with the Spirit, it will mean overcoming our fear and becoming a friend to a neighbour or a stranger. Perhaps it will mean talking to someone else about why we sing our gratitude to God, and what Christ means to us. Possibly it would be something like being a blood marrow donor. Or maybe it will be sharing some of our gifts with someone else: tutoring a child or being a companion to someone who is alone. Just where it leads brothers and sisters is not something that I can answer for you, but something we discern in prayer and worship. It might be quite surprising. It will certainly be glorious.

I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I can tell you this much: in being filled with the Holy Spirit, we will be freed from our worries, our anxieties and our fear. We will no longer obsess about the need to control, or else the desire to run away. We will grow in love, wisdom, and joy, and we will be taken up in gratitude to God, and freed to love others deeply. And we will be freed to bear the burdens and costs of this love, sometimes in quite surprising ways. All of this won’t take away those things in our world which inspire fear, worry and anxiety; but it will give them all a new meaning, as we are filled with God’s love – a love which casts out fear. Amen.

* From “The Reluctant Conversion of Oscar Romero” in the Mar/Apr issue of Sojourners Magazine. Online at http://www.sojo.net/magazine/index.cfm/action/sojourners/issue/Soj0003/article/000312.html

Renaming, Realigning, Recreating (Sermon for Proper 14B)

A sermon preached by the Rev. Jason A. Fout

at the Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Chicago, IL

on 13 August 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 new rector was fresh out of seminary and he felt a bit awkward around children. Still, he felt he should get to know the kids of the parish better, so he asked the usual Sunday School teacher to step aside for the day so that he could lead a class of third graders. The children sat on the floor, while the priest nervously towered over them at the front of the class.

He planned to start with what he thought was an easy question. “Children, where is God?”

Of course, he thought they would say “God is everywhere” so that he could launch into his carefully prepared lesson, but the question met with bemused silence.

Trying again, the priest asked, “Class, can you tell me where God is?”

Again, the students offered only stares in return, the anxiety quietly building.

Taking a different tack, the priest called on a youngster near the back, “You there, can you tell me where I might find God?”

At that, the child made a frenzied dash from the room and found his mother at coffee hour: “Oh mommy, there’s big trouble…it seems that God is missing…and they think we’ve got something to do with it!!”*

Continue reading Renaming, Realigning, Recreating

The little boy thought that somehow God had been stolen and he worried that he was going to get fingered for it. Theft – whether real or, in this case, imagined – has a way of heightening fear and hurting community. The church in the ancient city of Ephesus knew about this, because they had a problem with stealing, too.

In the reading from the letter to the Ephesians that we heard this morning, Paul** addresses this problem. He says, briefly, “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.”

It might be easy to hear this and dismiss it simply as moralizing, as if Paul were saying ‘shame on you for stealing, why not go out and get a job like the rest of us?’ But there is much more depth to what Paul is saying here, a depth into which each of us are invited. Let’s take a few minutes to look at just what he says.

First, Paul addresses what he says to ‘thieves’. He doesn’t say ‘Bob and Susan’, he doesn’t call them ‘those people who are stealing’. He says ‘thieves’: these are people who are known entirely by the negative thing that they do. There’s no name or description of them beyond saying they steal. That’s where Paul starts; but it’s where he moves on from there that is most significant.

Paul says that these people are to ‘give up stealing’. So these people who are known for stealing are to give it up. But Paul isn’t just saying ‘cut it out’; he’s suggesting a total reorientation for these people. This is like being given a new name, or a new identity. Those people who before were simply known as ‘thieves’ are now to be known as something entirely different.

And note here what Paul does not say. Paul does not say to the community that they are to separate themselves from the people who are stealing. The church in Ephesus isn’t to cast out these people as beneath them or of no consequence. And Paul doesn’t say that they need to work on these people, and make them stop stealing. In fact, everything that Paul says here is calculated not to separate these people from the community, but to restore them to the community.

What Paul does say is that these people should work so that they have something to share with those in need. Think about it: this isn’t Paul just callously saying ‘look, get a job’. He isn’t just saying they should work to provide for themselves, so that they don’t bother the church any more. He is actually re-identifying these people. They are no longer to be known only for their anti-social behavior; they are no longer people who only take. They are full members of the community, with responsibility for themselves and others. They are no longer known as those who only take, but as those who are able to give and receive.

In short, Paul renames them. They are no longer ‘thieves’, known only for the negative things that do, but they are full members of the community, and as he says later in the letter, ‘beloved children of God’. That is a radical realignment.

And just in case you think he or I are only talking about thieves, let me assure you that this applies to all in the church. We are given all sorts of names by the world, or even sometimes by each other. But the Holy Spirit is at work in this community, re-naming us, re-identifying us not as the negative things we’ve done, or the negative images others have given us, but as beloved children of God. And each of us then becomes an integral part of this community, able to care for others and allow others to care for us, able to become all that God intends us to be.

Fred Craddock, a professor of homiletics, tells a story that I think illustrates this nicely.***

At the time, Fred taught in Oklahoma, and he and his wife got away to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a short vacation. One night they went out for dinner, eagerly hoping for a quiet, private meal together.

As they sat waiting for their dinner, they noticed a distinguished looking white haired man working the room, moving from table to table greeting folks. To their dismay, he made his way over to them and started to make small talk. He asked Fred what he did for a living. When he heard that Fred taught preachers, the man replied “well, I’ve got a story I want to tell you,” and pulled up a chair and sat with Fred and his wife. Craddock groaned inwardly.

The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Ben Hooper. I was born not far from here across the mountains. My mother wasn’t married when I was born so I had a hard time. When I started to school my classmates had a name for me, and it wasn’t a very nice name. I used to go off by myself at recess and during lunchtime because the taunts of my playmates [hurt so much]. When I’d walk around town, I could feel people staring at me, wondering just who my father was.”

Hooper went on to describe in some detail how he felt like an outcast in his own town, and even in his own church. When he was 12, a new preacher came. One day, leaving the church, he felt a big hand on his shoulder. It was the preacher.

He looked right at Ben and said “Who are you, son? Whose boy are you?’

Hooper explained, “I felt the old weight come on me. It was like a big black cloud. Even the preacher was putting me down.”

“But as he looked down at me, studying my face, he began to smile a big smile of recognition. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I know who you are. I see the family resemblance. You are a son of God.”

With that he slapped Ben across the [back] and said, “Boy you’ve got a great inheritance. Go and claim it.”

The old man looked across the table at Fred Craddock and said, “That was the most important single sentence ever said to me.” With that he smiled, shook the hands of Craddock and his wife, and moved on to another table to greet old friends.

Then Craddock remembered. On two occasions the people of Tennessee had elected a fatherless man to be their governor. One of them was Ben Hooper.

In the simple act of this anonymous old Tennessee preacher, we see the power of the Holy Spirit at work. It is the power of God opening us up so that we are more than what we do or what we have done or what has been done to us. We are set free and empowered to become whom God intends us to be; to be radically realigned; to realize ourselves as beloved children of God. Amen.

* I’m not sure where I first heard this story, but it’s not original to me.
** As in a previous sermon on Ephesians, I am not completely staked to the critical position that Paul was the author of this letter, although I think it’s likely. But these critical judgements, in the context of a sermon, seem rather beside the point, because they call attention to peripheral detail. If someone other than Paul wrote it, it doesn’t change the teaching on theft.
*** Jamie Buckingham told the story in his book, Power for Living, and I found it online at sermonillustrations.com

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.