Pass the Peace, part 2

Sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021
Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17

OK, let’s start with some congregational participation:  Raise your hand if you feel authorized and prepared to speak on behalf of God.

That’s sort of what I thought.  You may notice that I didn’t raise my hand, either. 

Today is a good day to be suspicious of our ability to speak for God.  In fact, it’s a good day to be suspicious of our ability to understand God, which might be a prerequisite for speaking on the deity’s behalf.  Today is Trinity Sunday, when we try to wrap our minds around the mystery of God being simultaneously both unity and diversity, Three in One and One in Three – Father, Son, and Spirit in constant relationship, eternally creating and redeeming and sustaining together.

We got some stirring glimpses of God’s mystery in our readings this morning.  The first one gave us more than a glimpse, actually.  Isaiah gets up one morning, planning to do whatever he did as a court official and perhaps a temple priest.  But instead, he encounters the Lord, up close and personal.  Yahweh’s presence is overwhelming, the hem of the deity’s robe filling the temple.  Seated on the throne, God is attended by seraphs.  We may hear that and think of angels, but artistic representations of seraphs show them as giant flying cobras.¹  No wonder Isaiah said, “Woe is me!  I am lost!” (6:5).  My language might have been a bit more colorful that that.  In Isaiah’s tradition, mortals who saw God face to face didn’t live to tell about it; so, Isaiah was sure that his profaneness, in the presence of God’s absolute holiness, was a chemical reaction he wouldn’t survive.  But one of the giant flying cobras takes a hot ember off the altar, touches it to Isaiah’s lips, and cleanses him of his impurity.  Then Isaiah hears the voice of the Almighty ringing in his ears:  “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”  And Isaiah – despite how ill-prepared he is to speak for God – Isaiah says, “Here am I.  Send me.” (6:8)

You may have noticed that pronoun at the end of God’s one line in this reading: the word us: “Who will go for us?”  That’s a glimpse of divine mystery all by itself, potentially even more stunning than giant flying cobras.  Now, the people of Isaiah’s time would have heard this plural pronoun referring to the heavenly court – the royal attendants, and angels, and maybe even demigods over whom Yahweh ruled.  For us, we hear it differently, much like we hear that line in Genesis, in the first story of humanity’s creation, where God says, “Let us create humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” (1:26).  For Christians, it’s a glimpse of the reality we name as the Trinity, which to me is all about relationship.  God is relationship, and a model of “three in one, and one in three” tries to capture that – though maybe about as effectively as a two-dimensional character trying to describe the concept of “up.” 

Then, the Gospel reading fleshes out God’s mystery a bit more.  Jesus is talking with Nicodemus – a Pharisee, supposedly a religious expert.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus because he’s seen miraculous signs.  He knows that Jesus “has come from God; for no one can do these signs … apart from the presence of God,” he says (John 3:2).  On some level, Nicodemus understands that, when he looks at Jesus, he’s seeing divinity itself.  And I think that gives Jesus a chance to open up this deepest of mysteries.  He tells Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (3:3) – in effect saying, You’re right.  And just as I have come to earth from the realm of God’s reign and rule, so those who see God’s reign and rule must be born from above, too.  If you see the signs of the kingdom, Nicodemus, then you’re more than halfway there already.  Just believe it and connect the dots, and eternal life is yours, now and forever.

In this present chapter of eternal life, we’re not going to be able to explain the nature of God.  The best we can do is describe and reflect on some divine attributes.  Here are some I feel pretty sure about.  First, love – in fact, scripture tells us, love isn’t just something God does; it’s what God is (1 John 4:16).  Here’s another: relationship.  The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that this is how God functions, partners who together form a living, dynamic entity that’s both greater than, and reliant on, each individual.  Here’s another: movement, both in terms of how God works and in terms of what God seeks from us.  Our God does not sit still, impervious to the joys and the suffering of creation.  Instead, our God is a deity who goes, who comes, who whispers and cajoles and reproves and inspires.  And who sends.

Fundamentally, God wants two things from us, I believe.  As Jesus tries to explain to Nicodemus, God wants relationship with us: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).  And that means not just existing forever but living in God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.  So, that’s number 1: God wants relationship with us.  And then, number 2: God wants relationship from us, asking us to care for our neighbors and for one another.  Our God is Love that sends us out to love.

We know that, right?  I’m convinced we know it because, over the past several months, I’ve heard it over and over again, from you – the people of this church family.

The story begins with a Vestry resolution, of all things – not typically the source of deep reflection on our relationships with God and one another.  Many of you have heard this before, but here’s the short version.  Last summer, a resolution came to Vestry that we should fly the LGBTQ pride flag from the church’s flagpole.  St. Andrew’s is not a place with a history of wearing social advocacy on its sleeve, so we created a process for gathering input to discern what to do when questions like this arise.  That involved creating an Advocacy Discernment Committee made up of progressive, conservative, and radical-middle parishioners, and that committee put together several opportunities for us to learn to talk about divisive issues.  We had a Lenten study of our presiding bishop’s book Love Is the Way, which drew on his personal history, as well as our nation’s history of the struggle between exclusion and embrace.  We offered a class on how to do civil discourse – how to share and listen in love when different perspectives are guaranteed.  Now, we’re offering a class called, “What’s the Role of Our Church In….”  I actually made a mistake with the name; the class is really, “What Should Be the Role of Our Church In…” because that’s what we’ve been talking about over the past four weeks.  And one of those topics was the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the Church and the question of flying a Pride flag.

As Jesus observed to Nicodemus, the Holy Spirit often moves in ways we can’t predict and maybe can’t even see directly, like watching the wind blowing through the trees.  In the April Vestry meeting, we were discussing the issues before us – not just the Pride-flag resolution but how we’re learning to have civil discourse on hard topics.  And I had a Holy Spirit moment.  I know this because I felt the urge to sketch something.  Now, my artistic abilities pretty much stop at stick figures; so, if I felt the urge to sketch, it wasn’t coming from me.  Listening to the Vestry members talking about just how hard it is these days to share our passions without cutting ourselves off from each other, I sketched a set of three banners.  Not banners to go inside the church but to go outside, banners to share with the neighbors we’re called to love.  Lauren Richardson, our communications manager, who has much more artistic ability than I do, took my ugly idea and turned it into something.  If you’re here in person this morning, you’ll find these images on the next-to-last page of the bulletin.  You’ll also find them hanging on the front and the back of HJ’s, and they’ll be there for the foreseeable future.

For those of you at home, here they are: “God loves all.  All means all.  Pass the peace.”

            This is us, right?  The God we worship is the God scripture names as Love.  That divine love knows no restrictions.  God doesn’t love everybody except … fill in the blank.  God just loves all – no exceptions.  Whoever feels excluded or embraced – whether people on the right or the left, whether LGBTQ or straight, whether white or people of color – all means all.

And then, God sends us out in love.  In our tradition, we practice this during worship every Sunday, training ourselves in the way God wants us to live the other 99 percent of the week.  We call it passing the peace.  We learn it here so that, when we go forth in the name of Christ at the end of the service, passing the peace just becomes what we do.

These banners came from discussions about social advocacy, but I’d say they’re about something else.  I’d call it divine advocacy.  I’d call it following the heart of the God who loves all, and welcomes all, and sends us out to do the same. 

So, some of you will be looking for the rest of the story.  That Vestry resolution from last summer was about putting something new on the church’s flagpole.  So, let’s close that loop.  The church’s rules, our canons, indicate that the rector has final say in matters of the buildings and grounds.  So, here’s what’s going up on the church’s flagpole.  You’re looking at them – the flag of our nation and the flag of our church.  And, I guess, we could put the flag of our state up there, too, if we want to thumb Missouri’s nose at the half of us whose hearts and taxes belong to the other side of the state line.  But that’s it in terms of what goes on our flagpole – nation, maybe state, and church.

Even though God is deeply mysterious, God’s call to us is not.  We worship a God who is love and who sends us out to love.  Let that be our fundamental understanding, our litmus test.  As our presiding bishop likes to say, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.  That God looks to people even such as you and me and says, “Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?”  And like the prophet Isaiah, despite our failings and our fears, we come back with, “Here am I; send me.” 

Well, consider this your deployment:  God loves all.  All means all.  So, pass the peace.

 
1.      The HarperCollins Study Bible.  New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 1022 (note).

Learn Something, Love Somebody, Have a Good Time

Sermon for May 9, 2021 (Mother's Day)
John 15:9-17

It may not shock you to know that, as a boy, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go play.  I can see myself one evening in particular, when I was about 9 years old, running to the sliding glass door leading to our backyard, about to make my break to meet up with friends in the twilight.  I was already later than I wanted to be because I’d had to do the dishes before dashing outside.  But as I reached the door, my mother called out and said, “Wait a minute.”  She always did this when I would leave.  Impatient, with my hand already on the door handle, I said, “What?”  And she said, “You know:  Learn something; love somebody; have a good time.”  I rolled my eyes and, finally, I was free.

You may have heard me share that line before.  It was my mother’s favorite line; she said it to my sisters and me all the time.  It drove me crazy, too, and I know my mother enjoyed that.  But she wasn’t just fiddling with me.  She was taking the opportunity to reinforce her prime directive, the mission statement she’d created for the four of us kids:  “Learn something; love somebody; have a good time.”

That line isn’t exactly what Jesus is saying to his friends here in today’s Gospel reading.  But I think my mother was onto something that Jesus was teaching, too. 

 Now, my parents were both educators, so “learn something” was always going to be part of their deepest desire for their children.  In their eyes, everything was a learning opportunity, and especially so for my mother.  Whether it was a big family trip, or a Saturday outing to the zoo, or an afternoon in the backyard watching ants walking in a line, every moment was a teaching moment. She just couldn’t help herself.    

I don’t necessarily hear Jesus saying “learn something” in today’s reading.  But the other two imperatives in my mother’s prime directive I think are pretty much right on point with Jesus’ message to his friends. 

Now, let’s hit “pause” just a minute.  Sometimes in Scripture, what Jesus is trying say gets a little hazy.  I think that’s especially true in John’s Gospel.  The book’s flow feels like it was written by a committee, and Jesus seems chronically unwilling to give a straight answer to any question, even from his friends.  So, sometimes you hear a reading from John, and it leaves you thinking, “Well, that was beautiful.  I wonder what it meant.” 

Not so much today.  Today, Jesus cuts to the chase.  He says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12).  And how has he loved them?  By laying down his life for them, for his “friends” (15:13) – or, as the Greek says literally, by laying down his life for his “loved ones.”¹  By this point in the story, that’s who his disciples have become to him, and him to them – “loved ones.”  They share the same kind of relationship as Jesus and the Father share.  His followers are no longer servants, or students, or disciples, or whatever word we might feel more comfortable using for them and for us.  Instead – as they experienced earlier that night at the Last Supper, when Jesus took off his robe and stooped down and washed their feet – these men and women around him have become his friends, sharing with him nothing less than divine love.  You are my friends, Jesus tells them, and I lay down my life for you.

I don’t know how that sounds to you, but to me, that’s both the best and the least comfortable thing in the world to hear – that God befriends us.  One of the hallmarks of Christianity is this crazy claim that God stooped down to us and stoops down to us still, taking on humanity fully in the person of Jesus and continuing to take on our nature, dwelling with us and among us, as well as reigning supreme as the Lord of all creation.  I encounter Jesus in you, and you, and you.  Together, we comprise the Body of Christ in this place, filled by him in the Eucharist so we might be him with one another and for this broken world.  “The fullness of God was pleased to dwell” among us in Jesus (Colossians 1:19), and he’s still here, day by day.  “You did not choose me, but I chose you,” he says (John 15:16).  That’s tremendously empowering – and deeply humbling.  The sovereign of the universe knows your name and is calling you to walk along, side by side, promising to be there with you regardless how rough the path becomes.  That’s an offer we’d best not ignore. 

And neither should we ignore the call that comes from it.  “I appointed you to go and bear fruit,” Jesus says – “fruit that will last” (John 15:16).  I’ve washed your feet, Jesus says, so you’ll know how to wash the feet of others.  This is less rocket science and more Nike swoosh:  Love one another – just do it.

Well, it’s Mother’s Day.  So, if we’re looking for an example of the kind of love that washes feet, the kind of love that gives itself away, many of us have been blessed to find it in our relationships with mothers by biology or mothers by choice – women who’ve shown us what it looks like to lay down their lives for the people they love.

I was blessed to grow up with a mom like that.  Of course, on Mother’s Day, it’s tempting to turn your mother into someone who nearly walks on water.  That’s not my mother, and she’d be the first to say it; she’s much more real than that.  But still, she earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, and taught English and speech, all the while also raising four kids.  But more significant than the endurance of her parenting was its quality.  She was there for us.  And with the same intention that she put into bandaging skinned knees and reading bedtime stories, she also trained us to wash feet – to deflate our egos, to put others first, and to live in the joy that comes from service.  One time, my sister and I nearly burned the house down; but even then, I didn’t get in as much trouble as when I sought the spotlight for myself. 

We see this love that stoops down from heaven in a million other normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill stories of sacrifice – love so deep, so broad, so high that it can only be divine.  I think of the mothers of kids at Banneker School, working more than one job and still getting their children to class, or on the Zoom call, every day.  I think of the mothers of kids at our partner school in Haiti, spending resources they barely have to send their kids to class in the dignity of perfectly washed uniforms.  I think of mothers here, in this crazy time, showing up for their kids through the emotional and educational roller coaster of COVID, coping with family stress that the parenting guides never imagined.  And I think of mothers in their later years who, like Jesus, can call their children “friends,” still showing up as sources of the holy Wisdom that Scripture names with feminine pronouns.  It turns out, at least in the books of Wisdom and Proverbs, that holy Wisdom is a “she.”²

God still speaks that wisdom and love to us, just as Jesus spoke it to his friends.  So, I want to leave you with a question, something to chew on this week:  When you’re blessed to hear the voice of God, what voice is it? 

Of course, there’s no right answer to that question.  But for me, when I hear God’s voice through the chaos or the fog of daily life, it’s basically my mother’s voice I’m hearing.  And the message is often some facet of her own trinity of hope for her kids: “Learn something; love somebody; have a good time.” 

Now, that last one may seem an odd instruction to hear from God – to “have a good time.”  But I think, deep down, my mother wished that her kids would “have a good time” in much the same way Jesus expresses his desire for us in today’s reading:  “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11).  God wants us to know joy – not just happiness, for we all know how fleeting that is, like candy that just leaves you hungry a few minutes later.  Instead, God’s deep desire for us is the joy that springs from loving people– the counterintuitive richness and satisfaction that comes only from washing other people’s feet, from laying down your life in love for others.  That’s what I heard my mother calling us to find, as she sent us out the back door on our life’s mission.

So, as you think about the voice of God that you hear, let me end with a prayer: that the voice we too often ascribe to God, the voice of an angry, dissatisfied taskmaster – the dismissive, scolding voice of our own worst judgments – that this voice might finally fall quiet; and that instead we might hear the still, small voice of God whispering, “You are my beloved.  Learn something, love somebody, and live in the joy that only love can bring.”  

1.      The New Interpreter’s Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. Nashville, Abingdon, 2003. 1939 (note).
2.      See, for example, Proverbs 8:1–9:12, as well as the Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-8:1 in the Apocrypha.