Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My in-laws came to visit last week, and they were excited to give us a recommendation for a television show they’d been watching. Annie and I have neither the time nor the inclination to watch television (which they know, though it’s always sweet when they think they can convince us otherwise), and one of the benefits of this is that they can tell us what they liked about it without fear of “spoiling us” on the plot twists. Anyway, the program they had been watching is called “The Bear” and, as I understand it, it’s about an accomplished chef who inherits his family’s Chicago “Italian Beef” sandwich shop and attempts to transform in into a fine dining restaurant. One of the episodes they were telling us about was a “flashback” in which the protagonist’s mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is depicted trying to put together a family holiday meal. The kitchen is chaotic, family drama interrupts the delicate cooking procedure, everything must be perfect, and the mother remains on the edge of “losing it” throughout the entirety of the episode. At the end she pulls it off. The meal is executed perfectly and the table is set. At thus point, the mother calmly walks outside and a moment later, she drives her car through the front of the house.

I worry my in-laws might have been sharing the plot because it reminded them of observing me cook Christmas dinner every year. I don’t think I’ve ever visibly lost my cool, and I’ve certainly not threatened life and limb or intentionally damaged property. That said, all concerned have mostly learned that I do not require assistance in cooking any meal–that as nice as the offer is, it is in fact the opposite of helpful in practice–and least of all do I need additional bodies in our small kitchen while cooking a complicated meal where everything simply must happen at a particular moment for the whole thing to come together. Anyway, like Martha of Bethany, my attempts at hospitality have probably, ironically made me less hospitable in practice.

I think the tricky part of this story is that we can take it to an extreme and fail to see that Martha had the right intentions, just the wrong way of going about it. And note well, Jesus does not berate her for trying to provide hospitality in her way, but rather for her criticism of her sister, who was being hospitable in a different way. The point of the story, I think, is not that we should all be slugabeds. Rather, I think it is meant to remind us that service and companionship are two sides of the same coin, and neither should be taken to an extreme.

So Martha isn’t entirely wrong to be working hard to make her Lord and Master and houseguest comfortable and well-fed. That was not only her social obligation (hospitality in ancient cultures being far more codified and demanding than today), but for at least part of her, before she got carried away, it would have also been her joy. She just went overboard and, worse, started resenting Mary. You need to feed your guest, but maybe Jesus didn’t need or want a Michelin-starred seven course dining experience.

And then we have Mary. Just as with Martha, there is more to Mary than the caricature. She wasn’t just shirking obligations in an attempt to be relaxed. Jesus is not elevating the slothful over the conscientious. Quite to the contrary, Mary is being conscientious in entertaining her host rather than fretting obsessively about the outward show of hospitality. She is acing as the truly hospitable hostess by being with Jesus. She recognizes that her own obligation, and in fact, the sine-qua-non of her relationship with Jesus, is found not entirely in doing stuff for him but must include simply being with him.

When it comes to our relationship with God, it is entirely possible to lose one’s soul in a program of highly useful activity. As a priest, I can attest to this. I can spend all day accomplishing tasks which I believe benefit Christ’s Church. If I don’t take some time to simply converse with God, though, and render my thanks and express my deepest joys and fears, then all that stuff I do for the Church doesn’t get me a step closer to God. The same can be said for any of us. In our culture, which elevates action over contemplation much more than the culture of Jesus’ day, it can be more difficult, but no less critical, to stop and pray, to be still before the Lord our God, who made us and loves us and wants a relationship with us.

The result of taking such intentional pauses in our work for the Kingdom to be present before God, is that the work we do ultimately benefits. I mentioned earlier that Martha had likely gone overboard in her attempt to be hospitable, ironically making her less hospitable. When we take Mary’s approach, the result is not that we remain in inactivity forever, but that we are given new directions in our mission. When we stop working for a bit and pray, God will help us know how to do His work better. Perhaps God has some task for us which we’ll never know unless we stop frantically doing something else that we think we’re supposed to be doing but aren’t.

Taking an hour out on Sunday morning to be present before God in worship is a great help in this regard, but it is not enough. Only through daily, intentional, quality time with God (in prayer and in meditating on Holy Scripture) can our relationship with Him grow to its full potential. Only when we take time every day to sit with Mary at the feet of our Lord can we learn how to serve Him in our work for the Kingdom, how to be a bit more circumspect in our activity than was Martha. So, settle down, breathe, pray, and He’ll tell you how you can serve Him more effectively.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The typical sermon one might hear on the Parable of the Good Samaritan usually starts with the reminder that Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along particularly well. They had cultural and religious differences which separated them and created enmity despite all being Israelites. They weren’t neighborly, but they weren’t perfect strangers either. Samaritans were to Jews what Anthony Keddie called “proximate others” and we might think of this being a case of familiarity breeding contempt. So the divide isn’t like people from different planets. It’s more like Hindu vs. Buddhist or Christian vs. Mormon–they started from the same place but diverged enough to mean that you’re dealing with distinct though related religions. Anyway, this standard sermon ends with some lesson about how we might see God’s Grace expressed in the actions of those we least expect, and even if we have serious theological differences. I’ve preached that sermon before, and it’s true enough, but there’s actually something more interesting and challenging going on here, too.

Note the setting and the characters. The traveler is going down from Jerusalem. Why would he have gone up to Jerusalem in the first place? Almost certainly to sacrifice at the Temple as every able-bodied male Jew was required to do three times a year. We sometimes don’t realize how peripatetic both ancient and medieval people could be, but even so people tended not to “get away” to the city or the country on a frequent basis like some of us may do today. This isn’t like going down to Columbus or up to Ann Arbor several times a year for the “big game”–though sometimes those seem a bit too close for comfort to pilgrimages to ancient temples for the sacrifice.

Anyway, my suspicion is almost certainly confirmed by the fact that the first two who come upon the man are a priest and a Levite. These classes of men had particular roles in the sacrificial system of the Jews, and we needn’t get into all the particularities. Think of priests like the priests we still have, like me, who do the actual business of the sacrifice (albeit a “bloodless sacrifice” in the New Covenant), and of the Levites as a bit like the servers and Lay Eucharistic Ministers who assist at the altar and in the distribution of the Sacrament.

So why do they shirk their responsibility to help this man? We usually assume that they are simply heartless, and that perhaps their pride in their positions of religious authority have blinded them to the needs of lesser mortals, even those in extreme distress. No doubt there is an element of that, but there’s more. Notice that Jesus says the bandits left their victim “half dead.” The Greek here is ἡμιθανής. I’ll spare you the details of the lexical rabbit-hole I went down with this peculiar term, which is a hapax legomenon (a word that only appears once in the Bible) unless you count the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, which only appears in an appendix to the Greek Bible. If you really want me to regale you with details of Strabo, Diodorus, and Dionysius Halicarnassus, you can pigeon-hole me at coffee hour.

The upshot is that the victim by the roadside would not have immediately been clearly dead or alive. You’d have to get up close and personal to make a determination, feeling for a pulse or for breath. And if he turned out to be dead, the priest and the Levite would have been in a pickle. He would have been ritually unclean and thus unable to do his job until purifying himself. This is what Leviticus says, in the 21^st chapter, verses 1 through 3:

And the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them that none of them shall defile himself for the dead among his people, except for his nearest of kin, his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, his brother, or his virgin sister (who is near to him because she has had no husband; for her he may defile himself).”

These exceptions for touching close family members did not apply to the high priest, who couldn’t even do that. Lest you think this ritual concern died with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, I found an article this week published by Chabad, which is probably the largest Ultra-Orthodox group, and the one organization on that end of the Jewish spectrum that reaches outside the shtetl to engage with more reformed and secular Jews and even those of other religions. The article was about caring for the dead, and the upshot was that doing so was a mitzvah–a good work–but the kohanim (those descended from Moses’ brother Aaron who once served as the temple priests) must still avoid hospitals and nursing homes, and cemeteries lest they get too close to a corpse. They haven’t made sacrifices in nearly two thousand years; my understanding is that the only role they really still play is being given the first Torah reading at synagogue and blessing the congregation at the end of the service. (You’re not supposed to look at them when they do this, by the way, but famously when he was a child, Leonard Nimoy peaked one Sabbath morning, and thus, Mr. Spock got the inspiration for the Vulcan salute).

So, why couldn’t the priest and the Levite just take a chance knowing that they could purify yourself afterward. It’s inconvenient, but you might save a life. Well, the Book of Numbers outlines the purification ritual, which requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. More than an inconvenience, procuring said ashes from the Temple where a small supply would have been kept was somewhere between highly improbable and virtually impossible. Tradition holds that between the time of Moses in the 13^th Century B.C. And the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70 only nine spotless red heifers had been identified and sacrificed, so supplies were limited, to say the least.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a fun, summer read, I commend to you Michael Chabon’s funny, exhilarating novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It’s an alternative history, hard-boiled detective story whose premise is that after the Second World War the Jewish State was founded not in the Middle East but in Alaska. The book plunges the reader into the investigation of a murder which uncovers a group which believe it has found the long-anticipated Messiah and a spotless red heifer, promising the possibility of building a third Jerusalem Temple and reestablishing the sacrificial system. I say the book is funny, because it is, but it’s also a bit scary since there are both Ultra-Orthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Christian sects that have been pursuing just this sort of thing for the last several decades. (Note well, here, that I am not making a statement about the modern state of Israel one way or another. I’m just saying that strange, end-times theories are generally bad for both politics and–more importantly–mainstream religion, both Jewish and Christian). Anyway, read the book; you’ll love it!

Back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan… The point in all this is that the priest and the Levite didn’t ignore the wounded traveler just because they were heartless, though they may well have been. They ignored him because they put ritual purity and the outward exercise of religion above love of neighbor. The Samaritan had no such cause for scrupulosity. Despite being children of Abraham, Samaritans were not allowed inside the temple, much less could they participate in the sacrifices. The best they could do would be to hang out in the so-called “Court of the Gentiles” with the Greeks and Romans and money-changers. Most of them would have probably resented the Jewish temple elite enough not to even do that. We learn from the Book of Ezra that five centuries earlier, when the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon, the Samaritans had offered to help them rebuild the Temple. The answer? Thanks, but no thanks. In all events, it was the Samaritan’s lack of interest in and need to maintain purity that allowed him to love his neighbor, not just in word but in deed.

But how does this relate to us, you might justifiably ask? Unlike most if not all other religions, Christianity does not have a purity code. If some behavior is verboten it’s because it’s immoral, not because it makes approaching God impossible. The one pure sacrifice was already made by Christ on the Cross, and even if your priest is a great sinner (which he is) he can still administer a valid Sacrament to you, because sin, while serious and while we shouldn’t abide grave sin in the clergy, does not pollute in a ritual sense. This assurance, established by Ecumenical Council in the Fourth Century and termed Anti-Donatism, is your most important church insurance policy, and you don’t even have to pay for it.

Since food is often the first thing that comes to mind, because we remember that there are som many dietary restriction in the Old Testament, it’s nice to know that Christians get to eat and drink whatever they like in moderation. If the Church encourages (though not requires) avoiding something or another it’s either as a spiritual discipline to conform us to Christ’s own abstention–like when we are encouraged to abstain from meat and other delicacies on Fridays–or to avoid scandal–like not eating food sacrificed to an idol in from of a neophyte. It’s never because we thus become ritually impure and have to hose ourselves off before we can pray!

All that said, avoiding contamination is a very human tendency, and any anthropologist will tell you that our concern with it is preternatural. Maybe it’s not “unclean” food or dead bodies or a misogynistic monthly spousal separation for us. Maybe it’s the homeless person who hasn’t bathed in a while because she’s living on the streets. Maybe it’s the oleaginous business bro whose angle you haven’t ferreted out, but you know he’s got one. Maybe it’s the mentally disturbed or cognitively disabled person, because you’ve irrationally convinced yourself you’re gonna catch it. Maybe it’s the person whose sexual preferences you disagree with or that just give you “the ick.” Again, I assure you, whatever you think about those issues (and I know there’s a diversity of opinions here about that, which is fine), whatever “gay” is, it’s not an air-born infection.

And, sometimes, there is something in the environment which is literally infectious, but that doesn’t mean it has the capacity to make us ritually impure. Hear me when I say that I am not encouraging anybody in particular to put themselves in danger, here, but I am so grateful that among the handful of Episcopalian saints on our general calendar are the “Martyrs of Memphis.” When the Rt. Rev’d Charles Quintard, Bishop of Tennessee, invited the Sisterhood of Saint Mary to Memphis in 1873 it was to establish a girl’s school at the Cathedral. That school remains to this day, and stands as one of the best of its type in the country. Little did Bishop Quintard and the sister know that a terrible outbreak of yellow fever would strike Memphis five years later, in 1878. Most who could leave the city did. The sisters could have done, but they did not. They remained and ministered tirelessly, valiantly to the sick and dying. In the end four of them died in this humble service. So I thank God for Sr. Constance, Sr. Thecla, Sr. Ruth, and Sr. Francis for reminding me that Jesus is not just the Good Shepherd. He is also the Good Samaritan, and I pray to the Father and beg the intercessions of the Martyrs of Memphis that I might be prepared to do the same should the day of decision come.

The point here is that both the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd weren’t afraid of getting down in the dirt. They teach us that love of neighbor calls us to go where Christ has gone–among sinners, in the slums, sometimes in the sewers. Jesus didn’t just stop there. He went all the way into Hell. The one truly pure priest and victim did not thus become unclean. Rather, he cleansed the filthiest corners of every hovel and every heart simply with his presence. And when he abides in us, we are no longer separated, we are no longer soiled, we are, rather, saved from every spot of sin, having been washed clean with his most precious blood.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It being Independence Day weekend, I’m reminded of an exchange I witnessed back when I was in college. I can’t remember if I’ve ever shared this story in a sermon before or just in conversation, but it bears repeating anyway. We hosted a lecture by the noted pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, and after his talk there was a panel discussion featuring members of the faculty. One of the panelists was a political scientist who questioned Hauerwas quite appropriately, I thought, about the speaker’s apparent rejection of patriotism. “Should I not be permitted to be proud of my country?” the professor asked. The speaker, in his thick Texas accent (which struck my Yankee classmates as somehow at odds with his politics) replied “you know as well as I do, that pride is a sin, and it will send you straight to hell.”

Now, I would disagree with Hauerwas’ myopic denunciation of patriotism. I personally agreed with the professor who saw being “proud of his country” as a positive thing. I think it’s important to note that there are really two different sense in which we use the word “pride.” One simply expresses a sort of appreciation and gratitude for something laudable, whether that be a country and its values, one’s church, some other institution to which one belongs, a family member, &c. This seems to me something perfectly acceptable and even praiseworthy. The other sense of “pride” in which one believes oneself better than another because of either a personal quality or one connected to one’s country or whatever, is the bad, sinful one.

Even so, Hauerwas was on to something about the destructive nature of pride, because the former can sometimes transform into the latter, and often it can do so so gradually that we have trouble pinpointing the moment it became a sin. So, it is one thing to be proud of one’s country when such patriotism is still objective enough to see that she may have some faults. It is quite another to engage in unreflective nationalism, to see being American as somehow making one a better person than one who happened to be born in another land.

The same can be said with regard to religion, as this morning’s Epistle and Gospel point out. It is one thing to be a faithful Christian; it is quite another to be inordinately proud of one’s own faithfulness. One of the great occupational hazards of being a Christian is self-satisfaction. It is a hazard rife with irony. So many Christians can become so self-satisfied precisely because they are doing what they ought: reading the bible regularly, going to church, evangelizing, helping the poor and needy, &c.

The seventy men whom Jesus sent to evangelize the areas to which he himself would later travel got dangerously close to such pride:

The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.” And he said to them… “Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

The seventy had most certainly done great things for the sake of the Kingdom, and they were understandably proud of their efforts, and Jesus throws a bit of a damp rag on their pride. It’s as if he’s saying “don’t get too cocky. I’ve given you power, but it’s mine, not yours, and your joy should be based not on your own good works, but on the fact that you are mine.”

St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, puts it even more bluntly: “If anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.” Indeed, it is ultimately not we ourselves who effect the work of the Gospel, but Christ who is in us. Thus, as Paul says elsewhere, if we boast let it not be of ourselves but of Christ.

But too often we do take great pride in our efforts and merely coat that pride in a patina of false humility. There has always been a danger in the Church of spiritual elitism. That danger may be more evident in other corners of Christianity than our own, where having exactly the right kind of conversion experience or some particular spiritual gift or another can serve to separate the righteous from the reprobate. Even so, we are not immune to such pride. It is easy to get awfully chuffed because we’re especially faithful at prayer, or give sacrificially to the church, or donate our time and talents to some ministry or another. Like I said earlier, the great irony is that pride can rear its ugly head precisely because we’re doing what we ought to do. Thus, it is not actions but a spirit, the spirit of humility, real humility, which separates the saint from the Pharisee.

As difficult as this is, it’s remarkably liberating. We must make every effort to do God’s work, but when we fail not all is lost. When we place our joy and hope upon the foundation of God’s grace rather than our efforts we cannot suffer discouragement for too long when our plans don’t succeed.

Do you ever wonder why, in the first part of Gospel reading, Jesus advises the seventy to shake the dust off their feet if their message is not received someplace? I don’t think it’s to give offense to the rejecters, but to give hope to the rejected. It’s a reminder that failure happens, but that what we do isn’t so terribly important that the Kingdom will fall because we’ve failed. The seventy evangelists were counseled to accept the failure and move on, and that’s good advice for all of us. In fact, some bumps on the road, some times when we ourselves need to shake the dust off our feet, can be quite edifying, not just because we learn from our failures how to do better, but because we learn from our failures that it’s not all about us, and God’s plan will proceed apace regardless. As I’ve said before one of my favorite lines in our current Book of Common Prayer has us thanking God for are “those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on [Him] alone.” Failures save us from the kind of pride that we experience when we look in the mirror and think we see the model of sainthood. Unless we’re delusional, any of us can point to a failure or two or a dozen that have helped keep us from being too haughty. So, don’t be afraid to fail big time. It’ll probably happen in some aspect of your life at some point, and if we’ve not put all our stock in our own inherent saintliness, we’ll be able to survive. We’ll be able to kick the dust off our feet and go to whatever task God has for us next with more humility and grace than before.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.