The Gospel of the Long Game

Sermon for Feb. 28, 2021
Genesis 17:1-7,15-16; Mark 8:31-38

Welcome to week 2 of our sermon series on the book Love is the Way, by our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.  Today, we’re considering chapters 4 through 6, where his reflection on the power of love gets a little more personal for us.  Bishop Curry moves from asking “can love really change the world?” to asking “I’m just a regular person – can my love have an impact?” 

Well, you know, if we ask ourselves, “What can I do to change the world,” most of us will stop dead in our tracks.  But if we ask ourselves, “Who can I be for the people around me?” – well, maybe we can live into an answer to that one.  I think Bishop Curry would say we are nothing less than God’s conduits, delivering the power of Love that gives itself away.

Going down that road, we’re following in the footsteps of some unlikely world-changers.  In our first reading today, we eavesdrop on Abram and God, who’ve already talked twice before this story.  Earlier, God promised children to Abram, and a woman he held in slavery had borne their son, Ishmael.  Well, that was one way to make good on the promise of descendants, but it wasn’t the answer Abram was looking for.  Now, God formalizes that promise by making a covenant with Abram and his wife, Sarai.  God says, “You shall be” not just the ancestor of a nation, Abram; “you shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:4).  And to mark this pivot point in history, God gives them new names – Abram, the “exalted ancestor,” becomes Abraham, the “ancestor of a multitude.”¹  And Sarai becomes Sarah, meaning “princess.”²  The new names mark a turn in the lives of these characters:  They won’t just change the future for their nation; they’ll change the future for peoples yet to come.

Then, of course, we hear from Jesus in the Gospel reading, the Son of God taking a path that even his chief lieutenant thinks is crazy.  After a section of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus has been healing people, and walking on water, and confronting the religious leaders, and feeding thousands, Jesus now drops the news his followers least expected:  His path to bringing in the reign and rule of God goes through Calvary.  There’s a cross awaiting him … and not just him.  “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me” (8:34).  And Peter says, wait a minute, Jesus.  We thought we were heading to glory.  We thought we were changing the world.  Now you’re telling us that we’re giving up everything, giving up our lives, in the hope that things will get better later?

Abraham and Jesus are both playing the long game.  They’re both practitioners of the spirituality of tomorrow.  They’re both seed planters, as Bishop Curry says.  Abraham is never going to see the nations that will rise as his descendants.  Jesus is willing to be the seed himself, the grain of wheat that dies in order to bear the fruit of eternal life (John 12:24).  His followers, like Peter and Andrew, then take the promise of the kingdom on the road, to the Roman world and beyond, dying themselves without seeing the end of the story they’re preaching. 

Well, let me tell you about some other practitioners of the spirituality of tomorrow – other folks who play the long game of God’s kingdom.

As you know, we’ve begun a Lenten class in civil discourse.  Our leader, Ann Rainey, asked the 25 people on the Zoom call to say briefly why they were there.  Many of the responses reflected frustration with conversations, social media, and culture now, as well as class members’ grief that they just can’t stay in relationship with friends or family who say objectionable things.  But along with this frustration and grief, I heard shared faith that the act of offering themselves for this experience might be
the start of a change.  As any educator knows, learning, by definition, is change; and applying what we learn can change the world around us.  In Bishop Curry’s book, he quotes a Jewish proverb that says, “Before every person, there marches an angel proclaiming, ‘Behold, the image of God’” (95-96).  Archbishop Desmond Tutu has asked what we would do if we took seriously that notion that every person is made in God’s image and likeness.  What would we do?  We would bow to every person we meet³ – even those whose points of view we can’t abide.  In trying to build that skill, I think the folks in the civil-discourse class are playing the long game, practicing the spirituality of tomorrow.

Here's another example, a community leader profiled in last Sunday’s Kansas City Star: Alvin Brooks.  If you’ve been around Kansas City any length of time, you know that name.  Alvin Brooks grew up in here in the 1930s and ’40s in a world of strict segregation – something he learned directly as a boy when he and some white friends walked into a drug store on the border between a black and white neighborhood and ordered themselves cherry Cokes.  The White druggist made him take his Coke in a paper cup out on the sidewalk.⁴  Since then, Brooks has made it his life’s work to bring people together to confront and upend injustice. 

           He did that as one of a handful of Black police officers here in the 1960s.  Once, he was hanged in effigy, called the N-word, and told to go home.  Fellow police officers cut down the effigy, took it back to the station, and set it at a desk, thinking that was funny.  Brooks’ father asked him why he would want to be a police officer here, saying, “You know how they treat us.”  But, Brooks said, his thought was that he would show them how to “be a better cop.”  From there, Brooks served with the school district, served as the city’s director of human relations and assistant city manager, served on the Board of Police Commissioners, served on the City Council, and became mayor pro tem.  And maybe most significantly, he founded the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, which for decades has provided crisis intervention and crime prevention, supporting families affected by violence.⁵  

In all this, he’s pushed against seemingly immovable forces, but he’s done it Jesus-style.  Here’s how one of our city’s greatest religious leaders, the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield, described Brooks:  He said, “Alvin deliberately takes up the pain of others.  He doesn’t have to do that.  He has his own pain.  But he has surrendered his life for others, and that is the secret to his strength.”⁵  Alvin Brooks has spent decades changing the world one life at a time.

        Here’s another example, a Kansas City leader from a younger generation: Natasha Kirsch.  You know her work if, like me, you take your dog to The Grooming Project.  Natasha created The Grooming Project and the organization behind it, Empower the Parent to Empower the Child, or EPEC.  Most of you have heard about EPEC and its training program, where single moms can learn a profession that actually pays a living wage.  It’s worked so well that its dog-grooming facility is now expanding, and EPEC is building apartments for students who need housing as they go through the program.

Natasha’s gift – one of her gifts, at least – is that she figured out how to use the world as she found it to change women’s lives.  Yes, many people in our culture probably care more about their dogs than they care about hungry people on the street, or about moms who don’t earn a living wage.  That’s not good, and we need to keep moving away from our “our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice…,” as we prayed on Ash Wednesday (BCP 268).  And, at the same time, Natasha looked at the fact that I’m willing to pay $40 to get Petey groomed, and she figured out how to use that to train a mom for a job that will pay her a living wage.  Natasha is changing the world, one life at a time.

Here's a final example of someone playing the long game and practicing the spirituality of tomorrow.  I know a businessman here at St. Andrew’s who, politically, has a pretty conservative bent; he finds that this approach to public policy works best for his small business.  He also invests himself in the people who work for him.  In fact, he intentionally hires people of color and people with sketchy histories.  And then, he takes the time to get to know them –  learning their stories, learning their gifts, guiding them when he can.  I don’t know whether he’d frame it like this, but I’d say that by taking his employees so seriously, he’s seeing in each worker the image and likeness of God.  As a result, their lives improve – and, by the way, his business benefits because his workers know he’s invested in them.  That’s changing the world, one life at a time.

So, what do these examples have in common?  They flesh out our story.  As Bishop Curry says, “To pray and to work for the way things could be ….  That’s the hard way of love.” (79)  Their story also can be your story, a narrative any of us can step into.  In fact, it’s a narrative we’re each called to step into, in our own ways. 

You can change the world because you have the two fundamental capacities required for it.  First, you are made in the image and likeness of God, filled with power to accomplish God’s purposes.  And second, you can make the choice to recognize that divinity in everyone else around you.  You can invest yourself in real, live human beings who also bear God’s image and likeness.  For a few of us, that happens by leading a movement or starting a nonprofit.  But it also happens by putting yourself out there to serve someone who needs justice or who needs a second chance.  And, I’d say, it happens through your engagement in our democracy – when the way you vote seeks solutions, progressive or conservative solutions, that share this priority: putting first the well-being of the folks who get the short end of the stick.  That’s the test.

I guarantee you that you can change the world by being the person you are, living into the identity, the new name, God gave you in baptism.  If you’ve come through those baptismal waters, you share in the Spirit of the incarnate God who changed the world by giving his life for the people around him, even the ones who didn’t deserve it … which is all of us.  You have the capacity to “[set] your mind on divine things [not] on human things” (Mark 8:33), practicing the love that gives itself away by changing one life at a time.  

It’s the Gospel of the long game.  You may not see the harvest, but you’re called to plant the seeds.  And, as Bishop Curry says, even though the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is now (120). 

1.       The HarperCollins Study Bible.  Text note on Genesis 17:5.  New York: Harper Collins, 1993. 26.

2.       Speiser, E.A. Genesis.  In The Anchor Bible, volume 1.  Text note on Genesis 17:15.  New York: Doubleday, 1964. 123.

3.       Tutu, Desmond.  In God's Hands: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2015.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.  22.

4.       Schirmer, Sherry Lamb.  A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002.  179.

5.       Williams, Mara Rose.  “Alvin Brooks and Kansas City: A love story imperiled by racism, saved by service.”  The Kansas City Star, Feb. 21, 2021.  Available at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article249015770.html. Accessed Feb. 26, 2021.

 

Look Satan in the Eye

Sermon for Feb. 21, 2021
Mark 1:9-15

We’re beginning a preaching series today on the book Love is the Way by the presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church, Michael Curry.¹  And in this season of Lent, when many of us are giving up something we enjoy that’s really tasty, it seems almost unkind that Michael Curry spends much of Chapter 3 of his book describing his grandmother’s cooking. 

            Now, what do I know about soul food?  From direct experience? – not much, other than to say that soul food is what you find down at Niece’s, just south of Meyer and Troost, which also has maybe the best breakfast in Kansas City.  Of course, as Bishop Curry describes, this wonderfully rich and satisfying food originated from the scraps that kept the slaves alive, trash more fit for hogs than humans.  After emancipation and the abolition of slavery, these scraps were the food most Black people could afford, given that what they had was “nothing but freedom,” as historian Eric Foner describes it.²  But, as Bishop Curry says, his ancestors made those scraps into something new and wonderful, seasoning them richly and cooking them with an artist’s touch.  “My ancestors took a little and made a lot,” Curry writes.  “They took what was left over and made sure no one was left out. … That’s a miracle.  That’s taking what is old and making something new.” (55)    

Curry describes soul food to help us see what he means by “making do,” which is how he answers what I think is the most compelling question in these first three chapters of his book.  Here it is:  “How do I find the energy to keep loving when the world seems to be going the other way?” (50).  Well, we find the capacity for that by “making do” – living in what Curry calls the “miraculous mixture of hardship and hope” (50); “making garbage gourmet.” (56) 

            The Black experience in America, and here in Kansas City, is certainly a study in that.  But we also heard about a “making do” experience in today’s Gospel reading.  This is one of those readings that we hear and then, piously and politely, we try to ignore the elephant in the living room.  Well, here’s the elephant:  When Jesus is baptized, a voice comes from heaven pronouncing, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).  But then, one breath later, we hear this:  “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan.” (1:12-13)  Really?  This is what you get when you’re God’s Son, the “beloved”?  That’s what God’s love looks like – being driven into the wilderness?

Well, Bishop Curry’s book might help us with this.  When he says his ancestors were “making do,” that doesn’t mean what it might mean for most of us – getting by, in a holding pattern, making it through a rough patch.  For Bishop Curry’s ancestors, and for many people of color today, “making do” means “figuring out how to both survive and thrive” in circumstances that history has put upon you (55).  It’s figuring out how to make soul food from the master’s scraps.  It’s figuring out how to live in the wilderness.

In today’s Gospel reading, I think that’s what Jesus is doing out there in the wilderness – “making do.”  Does he want to go spend 40 days in a wasteland, being tempted by Satan.  I imagine not.  In fact, the situation is imposed on him.  In our English text, the verb is “drove” – “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (1:12).  In Greek, the sense is the same – the verb is ekballei, and in this usage it means, “to lead one … somewhere with a force which he cannot resist.”³  I get the sense Jesus was not going quietly … much like Bishop Curry’s ancestors.  So, there he is, out in the wilderness, being tested by Satan.  And he has to make do.

In Mark’s Gospel, so short on details, we don’t learn what that looks like.  So, I’m now going to commit one of the cardinal sins of preaching and look to one of the other Gospels – Matthew, in this case (4:1-11).  Matthew tells quite a story of Jesus and Satan out in the wilderness.  There, we learn Jesus has been going without food, which may not be too surprising, given the landscape.  And once he’s seriously hungry, that’s when Satan shows up for the test.  

Satan says, if you’re God’s Son, filled with power, turn the stones into bread, and eat up.  Jesus’ response is important – what he says, but also where it comes from.  Quoting the Law of Moses, he says, “One does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Deut 8:3).

Then, in an instant, Satan transports Jesus to Jerusalem, setting him on the pinnacle of the Temple and trying to get his goat.  Satan says, if you’re God’s beloved Son, throw yourself off this place, because after all, this Father who supposedly loves you “will command his angels concerning you,” and “on their hands they will bear you up so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”  Now it’s Satan getting in on the act and quoting Scripture, this time Psalm 91 (91:11-12).  But Jesus shows what Scripture’s for – not for proof-texting but for guiding your life – and he says, quoting Moses, “Again, it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Deut 6:16). 

Then Satan goes for the spiritual jugular and offers Jesus the easy way to royal power and dominion.  He transports Jesus high above the kingdoms of the world and says, Look, “all these I will give you, if you fall down and worship me” (Matt 4:9).  But again, Jesus stands on God’s Word instead, the Word that empowers him even though it’s also God who drove him into the wilderness in the first place.  So, Jesus goes to the Law of Moses once again, snarling, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him’” (Deut 6:13).  And Satan disappears, defeated.

Wait.  Defeated? 

That’s right.  The war isn’t over yet – in fact, it’s just begun – but Jesus has won this battle.  Let’s see … in Scripture, when has Satan been defeated before?  Well, really, he hasn’t.  Job stood up to the test, but he didn’t send Satan packing.

In this time in the wilderness, Jesus has proven something I’m not sure we knew before: Satan can be conquered.  The power of evil, overwhelming as it is, does not get the last word.  And “making do” has proven it – proven the power of Love over the power of evil.

How does that happen?  And more to the point, how do we tap into it?  Well, in his book, Bishop Curry talks about a process for it, a “recipe” or a “methodology,” whereby the power of Love takes “an old reality and [creates] a new possibility.”  It’s about overcoming evil with good, as St. Paul wrote (Romans 12:21).  It’s like soul food: “Making garbage gourmet.” (56) 

Here’s how that recipe goes.  First, lean on tradition – not in the sense of “the way it’s always been” but in the sense of the stories and wisdom and direction that have guided God’s people for millennia.  That’s what Jesus is doing out there in the wilderness.  Driven out on his own, away from his community, seemingly away from the Father who loves him, Jesus remembers – and the Word of God flows from his heart.  So, first, learn and remember the tradition that sustains us.

Then, second: Practice imagination.  Jesus was a Jew in first-century Palestine, living under the thumb of the Romans.  Now, defying Rome was something his people did all the time, in quietly subversive ways, as people everywhere do in the face of oppressive power.  But defeating that power was something else.  There wasn’t a lot of precedent for that in the experience of Jesus’ contemporaries.  Revolts didn’t go so well.  But Jesus imagined a different future.  He called into being a future that others literally couldn’t imagine – a world where Love overcomes oppression, where good defeats evil, where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where peace rules.  Scripture has a name for what he was imagining – “the kingdom of God” (Mark 1:15), the reign and rule of God.  It’s what we ask for every time we offer the Lord’s Prayer – “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  We can name it, but Jesus could see it and imagine it into being.  So, Bishop Curry would say, the second step in the recipe of “turning the problem of reality into possibility” is to imagine it (56).

And the third step in the recipe is this: Add God to the equation.  This was the core of Jesus’ answer to his test out there in the wilderness.  Satan was offering him lots of things.  He invited Jesus to draw on his individual power.  He asked Jesus to lean on the assumption that, if we back ourselves into a corner, God will bail us out.  He offered Jesus the power of the world as tycoons and kings live it.  But Jesus changed the outcome by adding God to Satan’s equation.  As Bishop Curry says, when you change the variables of an equation, the outcome must change, too; and when you factor God into the equation, the outcome must change for good.

Well, here we are, beginning the season of Lent once again, walking with Jesus out into the wilderness.  So, let me ask you the other elephant-in-the-living-room question today:  What do you fear you can’t change?  What do you fear you can’t overcome?  What do you fear might be so powerful that you can’t conquer it? 

This Lent, take a cue from Jesus in the wilderness, and look Satan in the eye.  Remember the tradition that upholds you.  Imagine a liberated reality.  And add God to the equation.  Then, get ready.  Because when you do that, in the ancient words of the Great Litany, you will “finally beat down Satan under [y]our feet” (BCP 152).

1.  Curry, Michael.  Love Is the Way.  New York: Avery, 2020.
2.  Foner, Eric.  Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
3.  Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, electronic database, 2011, quoted at Bible Hub.  “1544. ekballo.”  Available at: https://biblehub.com/greek/1544.htm#.  Accessed Feb. 18, 2021.

Stepping Up to Heaven

Sermon for Feb. 14, 2021
2 Kings 2:1-12; Mark 9:2-9

Preaching about the story of the Transfiguration sometimes feels like analyzing a dream.  No matter which Gospel writer tells this story, it’s an otherworldly experience.  In Luke’s Gospel (not what we heard today), the text even states that Peter, James, and John were “weighed down with sleep” there on the mountain; so, they themselves weren’t sure whether they might not be dreaming (9:32). 

Today’s account from Mark is different, more straightforward.  There are no sleepy disciples here; the story just happens.  But still – what exactly is it that’s happening?  Even if Peter, James, and John are wide awake, they just thought they were taking a little hike with Jesus up the mountain.  They hadn’t planned to meet God up close and personal.

You get a similar sense from today’s Old Testament reading, too.  Elijah had been Israel’s most important prophet – battling the priests of other gods, anointing kings, and talking with God on Mt. Sinai when a corrupt king was trying to kill him.  Now Elijah’s come to the end of his ministry, and God has told him to call Elisha as his successor.  Elisha says “yes” to the prophet and follows along; but soon after, we come to today’s reading. 

Elisha is loyal and refuses to abandon his master, even though something highly dramatic and probably terrifying is about to happen.  Realizing Elijah is about to be taken away, Elisha asks for a “double share of his [prophetic] spirit,” fully embracing his call (2 Kings 2:9).  But then, I wonder if he regrets it immediately, as “a chariot of fire and horses of fire” take Elijah off to heaven (2 Kings 2:11).  Elisha cries out and tears his clothes as a sign of mourning – grief that his master is gone, sure; but maybe some second thoughts about what Elisha has signed up for, too.

Elisha knows that Elijah will be taken from him.  Peter, James, and John know that Jesus is the messiah, God’s anointed king.  They know these things are true – at least they know it intellectually.  But did they know what those truths would mean for them before they crossed their boundaries and followed along to find God revealed in frightening majesty?

Now, the evidence was there to tip them off as to what was coming.  Elisha had seen Elijah call down heavenly fire on a royal army and condemn the king to death – not a move likely to endear the prophets to the next king (2 Kings 1).  For Peter, James, and John, the testimony was straight from the mouth of Jesus himself.  Just six days before their hike up the mountain into heaven, Peter had said out loud that Jesus was the messiah; he got the answer right.  But then Jesus had pushed him – do you know what lies ahead for God’s anointed king?  “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering,” Jesus had said, “and be rejected by the [religious authorities], and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).  But that’s not all.  When Peter had protested that Jesus got it wrong, Jesus had raised the stakes:  It’s not just the messiah who will take that hike up the mount of Calvary.  “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus had said, “let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me” (8:34).  The servant is not greater than the master, after all. 

I wonder what the disciples made of that.  I mean, they’d seen Jesus healing people.  They’d witnessed him walking on water and stilling a storm.  They’d watched him feeding thousands from five loaves and two fish.  They’d heard him challenging the authorities and calling them hypocrites for choosing law over love.  Now, the disciples heard Jesus name the cost that love would carry.  Their head knowledge told them they were following God’s anointed king.  But it took them a while to realize the cost that call would carry for them.  It’s one thing to know a truth intellectually.  It’s something else entirely to step across the boundaries of our experience and make that truth our own. 

I spoke to you a few weeks ago about the boundaries we’ll seek to beat this year as we follow Jesus together.  One of those is the boundary of difference – the boundary that says, you and I are not enough alike to take the risk of connection.  Some of those differences are real and active among us – differences of politics and policy, and to what extent a church should address them.  We’ll have some opportunities to talk about that as we read our presiding bishop’s book Love is the Way and as we learn about the practice of civil discourse during Lent.

Other boundaries of difference lie outside our parish family – but they’re not so far away, just a mile or so to the east.  We saw a powerful example of crossing that boundary last weekend, as people here took part in the sixth installment of our Andie’s Pantry ministry with families at Benjamin Banneker Elementary.  Through these months of pandemic, Andie’s Pantry has morphed from an anonymous food-distribution event into an opportunity whereby some of us are stepping into difference.  There are lots of ways to help Andie’s Pantry get food to hungry families, including contributing funds or buying groceries.  But some of us are going one step further – stepping onto a family’s front porch or meeting up at the store to buy groceries.  

There’s a wonderful write-up about it in this weekend’s Messenger and bulletin – parishioners delivering shopping bags to someone’s home, or meeting someone in a grocery store, and having a conversation.  These conversations aren’t about delving into the divisions that plague our metro area.  They aren’t interviews about “what it’s like to be black in Kansas City,” as if one person would want to speak for a community’s experience.  They’re just conversations about what we have in common:  kids, grandkids, frustration with COVID, frustration with the Chiefs, staying warm in such abominable cold.  There is some risk in having these conversations, as Jesus said would come when we set aside our fears and follow him.  But as we take those steps across the boundaries before us – steps of faith, steps of love – we find that we’re stepping up the mountain into heaven itself.

Maybe that’s a way to think about the time that’s coming next for us.  This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.  The Church calls us to a season of “self-examination and repentance”; of “prayer, fasting, and self-denial”; of “reading and meditating on God’s holy Word” (BCP 265).  All that is right.  But here’s another way to think about it.  We could see Lent as a time to cross boundaries, a time look and listen and learn from what we find.  It’s a time to follow Jesus through experience – to hold love in our hearts, not just in our heads. 

That’s why spiritual practice makes a difference.  It doesn’t matter whether you give something up or take something on; but I think it does matter that we do something as we make our way through Lent.  Spiritual practice matters because habits form us.  Actions change us.  When we deny ourselves something we lean on, it trains our hearts to beat first for others and not first for ourselves.  When we make time to pray or read Scripture daily, it opens our hearts to God’s astonishing love for us, despite all the reasons we don’t deserve it.  When we meet a stranger in a store and buy some groceries, it turns our hearts to understand, helping us see how we’re bound together with people whose lives we don’t know.  Lent is about beating boundaries between us and others, between us and God, to help us practice in our lives what we carry in our heads – the truth that relationships are what life is all about.

We know that – in our heads and in our bones.  But if you need to hear it from a higher authority, we have that, too.  As God called out to the disciples on the heavenly mountaintop, so God calls to us now:  “This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him!”