I have a two different things to say about Thomas’ story this morning. The first one is about the disciples and faith, the second is about doubt in general. |I want to start with Thomas’ unfortunate adjective. He is always called "doubting", as if the other disciples had more faith than he did, and that made Thomas a bit of a problem. But it didn’t work that way. The problem wasn’t with Thomas, it was with the others.

Remember what happened. For one reason or another, Thomas was not with the others on Easter morning; (I’m not sure, but I suspect had company that weekend) so he didn’t share their experience of the risen Lord. That meant they had something he didn’t have; and instead of their experience, what Thomas had was their word about what they had seen—and that wasn’t enough.

You see, Thomas never doubted Jesus; he doubted the other Apostles. The problem was not really Thomas—the problem was the credibility of the others. They had seen the risen Jesus, they had been given his peace and his spirit, and they had been sent by him to continue his work in the world. We heard all of that in the first part of the Gospel. It was now up to them to share the good news. That is what they were sent to do. And bless their hearts, their witness to the resurrection was not even compelling enough to convince Thomas; and Thomas wanted to believe; he was ready to believe.

It’s the same thing now. It’s easy to say that the problem is out there, with all of those unbelievers like Thomas—if they would only shape up and believe better, (preferably to the point of becoming Episcopalians) then things would improve considerably. It’s easier to do that, to complain about them, than it is to pay careful attention to the less-than-persuasive words and lives of today’s disciples—of those who are called to be witnesses to Jesus. It feels better to call Thomas "doubting" than to call the disciples—or to call ourselves— unconvincing.

But Thomas is here to make us uncomfortable, not smug. Remember, faith usually comes to people through the faith of others, through the life and ministry of the Church. Virtually everyone ‘out there’ is like Thomas. Virtually everyone ‘out there’, and that includes our children, depends upon people who already believe to point them toward belief. Virtually everyone ‘out there’, and that includes our children, depends upon us.

The other disciples told Thomas, "we have seen the Lord". But they were scared, and they were hiding behind locked doors, and they were only talking to each other. Just a week earlier, Jesus had stood among them, but you couldn’t tell it from them. They sure didn’t act like something wonderful had happened at Easter. So Thomas didn’t believe them; even though he wanted to. And that is the way it was; and, all too often, that’s the way it still is. Thomas was not the problem. Today’s doubting Thomases are not the problem. The problem is the authenticity, the power, and the persuasiveness of the Church. That’s the bad news.

But there is good news here as well—Good News to the disciples (and so to us, the Church). For Christ is risen, and He comes to us. Risen, He comes to the Church; even when the Church continues to huddle in fear behind locked doors.

And He brings to completion the work that a weak and sinful collection of disciples cannot do alone. That we cannot do alone. The good news is that Jesus continues to be with us, and He continues to be for us and He continues to speak to us his words of forgiveness, and of peace.

That doesn’t mean we are off the hook. It doesn’t mean we have no responsibilities and no vocation to service. It doesn’t mean that Jesus will do it all for us and we can take it easy. But it does mean that the Risen Lord is with us; so, we are able to continue in hope and in confidence. It does mean both that we are not alone; and that we do not need to be afraid. Sometimes we fail, as the disciples failed to share their faith effectively with Thomas. But we don’t stop, and we don’t give up, and we are free to do our best. While there is always room for improvement, there is never cause for despair. We continue to gather together, and Jesus continues to be found among us.

The heart of the story of doubting Thomas is not about doubt (Thomas’ or anyone else’s), it is about the call of the Church to witness to the resurrection. And the biggest piece of good news is not that Thomas comes to faith; the biggest bit of good news is that the Risen Lord still comes to his church. The good news is for us. We are called to be witnesses to the Resurrection, and our Lord is with us. That’s what I want to say about the disciples, and about faith.

At the same time, I can’t let Thomas get by us without saying something about doubt, personal doubt as to the truth or value of this whole religious enterprise. First of all, doubt is always a part of the life of faith. There is never authentic faith without doubt; it is something we all know about, and it is not at all a bad thing. Doubt happens. Faith grows with ups and downs, not in a straight line.

Anyway, I want to look at just one little thing about doubts, ours and his, that we can learn from Thomas’ story. Did you notice that Jesus did not come to Thomas while Thomas was on the way to work, or walking the dog or thinking things over? Jesus came to Thomas when Thomas with the disciples; when he was among the fellowship of believers. Thomas was smart; he didn’t believe the disciples, but he did stay with them. He knew that if his doubt was ever to be met, it would be met there—not somewhere else.

That’s usually the way it is with us. Our doubts are usually met as we stay within the community of faith, as we hang in there doing the sorts of things we would be doing if weren’t bothered with doubt. It was a good thing, and not a hypocritical thing, for Thomas to stay with the others even when he didn’t believe a single word they said. So it is for us. For there is a very real connection between hanging around this place and similar places, and the gift of meeting the Lord. That connection isn’t simple, and it isn’t exact, and it isn’t at all predictable, but you can depend on it. He will come to us, through whatever doors we lock, and whatever barriers we build.

Sometimes, as it must have been with Thomas, what turns out to be the greatest moment of faith does not feel like faith; it feels like doubt. Sometimes what turns out to be the greatest moment of faith feels like just hanging on and just showing up; it feels like waiting and going through the motions. But that’s all right; that’s the way it works. That was what Thomas needed to do, and that was all Thomas needed to do.

Jesus did the rest. It still works like that.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen. The Lord is Risen indeed.

And perhaps the central feature, the central characterization, of this life together was the Eucharist—the breaking of the bread. It was the last thing Jesus did with the disciples on Maundy Thursday. It was, Acts just told us, the first thing that newly baptized Christians did as they began their life in Christ; and it was the constant center of the Church’s life as it gathered, week after week, to celebrate the victory it had found in Jesus.

So it really isn’t surprising that the story of the road to Emmaus, which is a story about the resurrected Lord’s appearing to some disciples outside Jerusalem on Easter Day, that this is also a story of the shape and meaning of the Holy Eucharist. (The Church knew that these two were really the same story.) Each is modeled on the other.

I want to look for a bit at how they intertwine, and at what this might mean. Remember how the story in the Gospel goes. At the outset, there are a couple of pilgrims on the road who aren’t terribly aware of what’s going on. They are just dragging along, whining about their ignorance, until the guest shows up. Then things begin properly. The first part of this proper event is the time of Scripture (which matches up with the service of the Word in our Eucharist). This is where the travelers begin to ask and to talk about the Bible, and to find the Scriptures opened up to them more clearly than ever before—all because of Jesus. But this is not enough to show them what is really happening. They still don’t know the Lord. The Bible is not enough to make Jesus known, to make Him visible. That’s important.

This revelation doesn’t come until the next part of the story, (which corresponds, reasonable enough, to the second half of our Eucharist), the part about the table—the breaking of the bread. It is then, as Jesus repeats what He did at the Last Supper, what He had done innumerable times with the disciples and the crowds in small rooms, on hillside and plains, everywhere he went—it was as he took, and blessed, and broke the bread—it was then that He was known. It was then, and only then, that the disciples recognized the resurrected Lord. Only with this did the whole experience come together and the truth about the stranger on the road and the meaning of the scripture become clear. Only then was Jesus clearly there.

The early church knew all about this special gift of having their eyes opened, and of discovering—after the scripture had been heard and the bread broken—that the Lord was with them. Exactly this had happened to them, not only at the resurrection, but again and again as they gathered for Eucharist. That’s why they told those two stories as one story, together–the Eucharist and the Resurrection–just to make sure that we know about this vital part of what it is like to live in a world that is forever different because of Easter.

And then, the story of the road to Emmaus abruptly says, He vanished from their sight. Jesus just wasn’t there anymore. So, since it would look really silly for them just to sit there and stare at an empty chair, the disciples left there and went out to share with others what they had discovered about both Jesus and the breaking of the bread. That’s very important, the vanishing part—both with the Resurrection story, and with the Eucharist.

You see, one of the reason Jesus vanished at Emmaus was to show the disciples that, once they knew about Him, and about the Resurrection, then it was time for them to get out of there and get on with it. Jesus didn’t come back from the dead so the disciples could sit at a table and look at Him.

He came back to empower His church to carry on His work of love and service to the world. So, He had to vanish or they would probably never leave that table. Just like at the Transfiguration, the temptation would be to make shrines, to try to keep Him right there at the table for their convenience. (In fact, it is really correct to say that in the Emmaus story the presence of Jesus is found on the road, in the scriptures interpreted, in the bread broken, and then, finally, somewhere else out the door.)

We need to remember this same thing about our Eucharist. What we are all about here is the resurrected Lord–not the tamed or confined or located here Lord. In fact, as absolutely essential as what we do here is—and I remain convinced that this Eucharist is the most important thing any of us will do this week—as essential as it is, it is also really about out there, the rest of the world.

We have this holy space, this holy place, not because the rest of the world is profane, or evil, or somehow less than holy–but because we have to start somewhere if we are ever going to learn that every place is sacred, every space is a sanctuary, and every room is a place where God is.

In the same way, we gather for this sacred meal so that we can begin to discover that sharing food is always a holy action, and that all meals are sacred meals, and that if we really pay attention, well, there is no telling who will be with us whenever we break bread together.

And so on as we think of the real meaning of holy things, or holy people or holy times—they are all here to point us beyond themselves, to a greater holiness.

Jesus vanished from their sight in Emmaus, not because He had gone away from those folks in that place back at that time. Rather, he vanished then because He is really with us here, and now, wherever we may be.

Even though it may seem otherwise at first glance, the real issue is not dealing with Jesus’ absence, but with His presence.

As surprising as it may be, the vanishing part of the story really is another place the Emmaus story of the Resurrection and our Sunday Eucharist come together. We gather as pilgrims on the road who don’t know all the answers, we hear the Scriptures, we break the bread and share the cup. If we’re lucky, our eyes are opened a bit, and we can catch a glimpse of who is really here with us.

Then, the part located in this place is over, and the focus shifts from the Altar to the door. Our risen Lord vanishes from our sight so that we can go somewhere else to see him, so that we can go out of here, and discover Him and name Him, and proclaim Him, and serve Him.

But not this year. Let’s take a look at the situation. As we heard last week, the early Christian Church in Jerusalem was a sort of commune. Upon entering the Christian community, individuals and families sold everything they had and the proceeds were shared among everyone. Now, we don’t know if this arrangement occurred anywhere else in these early years, and we do know for sure there were several places where it not happen. But it did happen in Jerusalem, from about 33 to about 70 AD, and this special church structure made the issue of how things were distributed especially important.

Then there were the people. During these early years, all of the Christians in Jerusalem were Jews, as were pretty much all the Christians in the world at this time. But there were Jews and then there were Jews. Most of the Christians in Jerusalem were what Luke calls Hebrews. These were Jews from Judea, from what is now Israel. Jews from Judea were special (or at least they were convinced they were). They were pure of blood, no mingling with foreigners, they all spoke Aramaic, the descendant language of Hebrew, they read the Bible in Hebrew, and, as far as they were concerned, they were as good as it got as far a being a Jew was concerned. What’s more, they were the very first Christians—Jesus and all of the disciples were Hebrews in this sense. They all shared the same nationality, the same race, the same language, the same customs, the same culture. And, as the icing on the cake, they were in charge—remember, all the Apostles were Hebrews, and the Apostles, along with members of Jesus’ immediate family were in charge of the Church in Jerusalem.

Then there were Jews from other nations—Luke calls them Hellenists. The ancestors of the Hellenists had left Israel as much as 500 years earlier, and had moved to every corner of the civilized world—and a few even to Europe. Over the centuries, they had become ethnically and racially distinct from the Jews of Judah. For example, they spoke Greek, their Bible was written in Greek, not Hebrew, and some of them were even born as gentiles and converted to Judaism as adults. But they were most certainly Jews. They were also Christians. From the day of Pentecost onward, a significant minority of the Church in Jerusalem was made up of these Hellenists, or non-Judean Jews.

Remember, everything was in common, and was supposed to be distributed fairly. But the Hebrews were not being fair. They were cheating the poorest, the most vulnerable, of Hellenists—their widows. The reason was simply racism. They were different, they didn’t count as much as we do. It was an old story even then, and not even the brand-new, spirit-filled, Christ-Centered, apostle-led, rapidly growing, tongues-speaking, clean-living early Church was immune. They had to learn. Notice carefully how that happened.

When the problem come to light, the Hebrews didn’t apologize and promise never to do it again. The Hellenists didn’t forgive and forget. At least that is not all that they did. (They may well have done those things, but that’s not what made it to the New Testament.) What the Church did do to respond was to change its own structure and governance. It created a new office, that of Deacon, whose job it was to oversee the charity of the Church—it’s gifts to the poor; and to insure the justice of the Church—to be certain that things were done fairly. And every person the whole church chose to be a Deacon had a Greek name, a Hellenistic name. There was not one Hebrew among them. (Get it?) The nature of the Church demanded justice, and that justice had to be built in to the very foundation of the Church’s structure.

That’s the beginning of the Diaconate. It was about Justice, it was about charity, it was about service, and it was about taking care of the weakest. Notice that the Deacons were not created to be junior Apostles, to help the Apostles with their work. Instead, from the very beginning, the diaconate has had its own distinctive identity, and its own particular ministry.

Now, it is our intention to make this story, and its implications, a part of the ministry of the Diaconate both in our diocese and in our parish. John and Connie and Janice won’t be assistants to the Rector, helping me out around the office or doing some of the stuff I do during the week so I won’t have to do it. In fact, there will be very, very little that I do now that our Deacons will do— and almost all of that will happen on Sunday morning.

But outside of the liturgy, the ministry of the Deacons will, in many ways, reflect the story in Acts. For example, recalling that early business of being sure that no one gets left out of the Church’s distribution, the Deacons will share with me in bringing communion to the sick and shut ins of the parish.

But that’s not all. They will also, and primarily, be concerned with issues of Justice and charity, both within the Church and in the larger community. They will have a special role in modeling, developing, and leading St. Mary’s (and our diocese) into a larger and deeper servant ministry. By the way, they won’t do this instead of us doing it, but they will help us do it. Our Deacons will challenge us to see farther and deeper, and to act with even more courage and compassion than we have before. Since we are right now a very caring and involved parish, they will have to push us a bit.

And they will. It is their charge to bring the needs of the world to the Church—not doing this alone, but as leaders with a special responsibility; and it is their charge to pay special attention to the poor, the weak, the sick and the lonely.

Again, not so we don’t have to do that, but in order for all of us better to see what we are called to do, and more effectively to do it.

All that comes from the story in Acts, and the way the Church has grown to understand

that story. And there is one more thing here. One of those first Deacons, Stephen, starts right out preaching. He preaches to folks like him, to Hellenists. He preaches a whiz-bang sermon that is summarized in around 52 verses in Acts must have taken, in fact, at the very least an hour or so to finish. (We got the super abbreviated version today.) The next thing that happens, as a direct result of that long courageous sermon to his friends and kinfolk, is that Stephen is stoned to death and becomes, in fact, the first Christian martyr.

All of that is background to letting you know that our Deacons will indeed be preaching, fairly regularly. However, I have heard them preach and read their sermons in the formation program, and I want to let you all know that they have learned a thing or two from Stephen. Also, I want to let you know that they are good, they are really good preachers, and we all have something to look forward to there.

Once they are ordained this October, Janice and John and Connie won’t be any holier than they are now; but they will have a special ministry to us and for us. Like those first Deacons in Acts, that ministry will be about service, and it will be about Justice, and it will be about leading us where we need to go.

Talk with these folks about what they are doing and about what they will be doing. We all need to work at getting used to what their Ordinations are going to mean to us. But remember, those first seven Deacons were good for the Church, they strengthened it and built up and made it both more compassionate and more faithful. That same thing has been true throughout the last 19 centuries, and it will be true for us as St. Mary’s. This story in Acts gives our parish both some clarity about what will be happening, and real excitement about the way God is leading us.

It’s a question I know really well—I spent seven years of my life studying philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student—and I’ve taught it off and on since then. On top of that I had another three years in formal theological studies, and a quarter of a century gnawing at the edges of this stuff ever since.

I have had it out with all of them, from Plato and Socrates to Aquinas and Averroes to Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine, and all the glorious steps in between.

And through all that time, Pilate’s question was the question that mattered. I wanted to know what truth is, and all these folks were with me—virtually every part and person of the intellectual and religious traditions that I studied, those traditions that created and shaped our culture, they also wanted to know the answer to Pilate’s question. We were together on that, we all wanted to know the truth—the truth about our world, our nature, our universe, our destiny, our purpose. We wanted to know the truth about God and the cosmic order, the moral law, the possibility of hope, and the goal of our existence. From Plato and before him on, we all wanted to know.

And it is a magnificent quest, this search for truth, and it’s worth the effort.

I’ll never put those questions down, and anyone who is worth the dust that makes them up has heard these same question about truth and taken them on—if not in formal academic fashion, then, more importantly, in the silence of their soul.

Everyone worth the dust that makes them up has fought the fight that comes when the darkness and the noise those great and ancient questions churn up within us seem much stronger, and much more persistent, than any light we can find through them.

And, almost parenthetically, I truly despair that much of modern thought insists that these are really naive, or silly, or senseless questions. Postmodernism says that such questions are either meaningless or hopelessly confused. Common sense seems to have turned senseless, and is telling way too many of us that truth about values and truth about belief is really a question of what is true for you and what is true for me—and these can be so different and so relative and so personal that even to suggest that one of us has anything meaningful to say beyond our own autobiography is arrogant, oppressive, and, really, absurd.

Perhaps worst of all is the trivialization of this ancient and wonderful search for truth by turning it into a game, or a contest. Now, as far as I’m concerned, (and I have probably harped on this before) the greatest corruption of the classical search for truth is the modern "instant poll" where people who could not possibly know anything about what they are talking about are encouraged to give their opinion, and then the rest of us are led to believe that such opinions are of enough value to merit our listening to the results.

Television news stations with call-in polls on such issues as "Was Andrea Yates legally insane" and internet polls where you are encouraged to click yes or no on whether Colin Powell’s trip was worthwhile, or whether Cardinal Law should resign (and thousands of people actually do this, and the results are reported as news.) These, I am convinced, are among the greatest signs of the decline of our culture.

They assume that anyone’s ideas about anything are as good as anyone else’s, and that the only real standard for truth is what the majority of responders, whomever they may be, happen to think at the moment. Saints preserve us—it’s such nonsense.

But none the less, and in spite of this, the search continues. Pilate still asks; and so do we. As well we should. "What is truth?"

Then, in words we so often hear at funerals, (that we will hear tomorrow at Margaret’s), and words that we should probably hear just as often at Baptisms, Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." I am the truth. Pilate’s answer was standing right in front of him and he missed it. (Which is one reason nobody names their kid ‘Pontius’ anymore). But we can’t be too smug, after all, we usually miss it, too.

Listen. Jesus said, I am the truth. He did not say, ‘I know the truth’, or ‘I bring the truth’, or ‘I will tell you the truth’, or ‘the truth is what I say’, or anything like that. Instead, Jesus said, "I am the truth". Which suggests rather strongly, if you think about it, that in order to know the truth, the real truth, the ultimate truth that the great search is all about, as it is revealed to us in our faith, to know this, we have to come to know Jesus—not just know things about Jesus, but Jesus. We have to know him.

Now, this claim, when said in the Texas Bible belt, sounds like it means something very different from what it means. To come to know Jesus is not (or is not mainly or not mostly) to have some sort of solitary and personal religious experience. It isn’t to get zapped by God. To come to know Jesus is to do what we have been hearing about in the readings from Acts these last few weeks—it is to continue in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. It is about disciplined spirituality and study. Coming to know Jesus also has to do what Peter is talking about in the reading we just heard—to seek to live in such a way as our lives are given shape by the life of Jesus, and by the shape of the cross. To come to know Jesus involves seeking him in the face of the stranger and, especially, in the weakest and the most despised.

To come to know Jesus is to look for his mind, and his heart, in the basic, daily, earthly realities of our lives.

And to come to know Jesus means to know his body, and to love his body—to engage seriously the life of the Church, of that community that the Lord has created and redeemed for his service. ||To know Jesus is about coming to know a person, and that takes time, and effort, and love, and discipline, and a willingness to be frustrated, patient, and tolerant.

Because, you see, in all of the world’s search for truth, from Plato to Pilate to us, as important and, indeed, sacred as this search is, in all of it there will always be a sense in which you go out the same door you came in through. There’s not a brass ring on that particular carousel.

That is because final truth is not prepositional. Real truth, the sort that lies at the end of the great quest, is relational. This final truth is not about words, even the words of the Bible. It is not about rules, even good rules, even good moral rules. It is not about even the best of Creeds, doctrines and traditions. At their best, these might be partial truths, they may point us toward or reflect or for us the glory of the truth. They might even help us to find or to understand or to appreciate the truth. But none of them is the truth.

Jesus is the truth—a human being who is perfectly God for us is the truth. That’s what we have to face and celebrate and deal with. That is perhaps the great, distinctive religious insights of our tradition. It is a very good thing to seek the truth. But the final answer is not what we expect—the final truth is a person. To know the truth, we must come to know Jesus.

This is something we need to hear not only when people die. This is something we need to hear when we want to live.

Athens was a fascinating city in the first century; in its intellectual variety and energy it was unique in all the world. The place was full of philosophers and philosophies, and I want to take a minute to mention some of the most important of these—not just because they set a context for what Paul says—but also because they set a context for us, as well. Here are a few: First, there were the Aristotelians, the scientists of the day who believed that close and careful observation of nature could lead to all truth. Right beside them would be the Epicureans, the hedonists, who were convinced (1) the world consisted of nothing but atoms in motion, (2) death was the end of everything, and (3) the gods were irrelevant. So these folks set out to cultivate pleasure. They wanted the most sensible, and the most lasting, pleasures they could find. Watching from a slight distance would be the Stoics, who were certain that everything that happened was totally determined by fate, that human beings had no real choices, and that the very best one could do was learn to embrace all of life heroically and morally, without ever questioning or complaining.

Next there were the traditionalists—the ones who still followed the ancient gods of Homer’s epics—gods like Zeus and Hera and Hermes and the rest. What made the traditionalist special is that they both practiced the old sacrifices, and still believed in them. There weren’t many of these left, but they mattered—they were pretty much the folks in control.

Then there was a fairly fresh crop of mystics, who interpreted the ancient philosophers in new ways.

These folks saw the physical world as a vague shadow of hidden, eternal reality. For them, the goal of humanity was to enter that hidden reality and to ascend once again to the purely spiritual realm that was our beginning and that is our destiny. They liked to talk about how layer after layer of secret and ever more complex rituals and disciplines were necessary if we were to climb out of the pit we are in, and ever find salvation.

That’s just the beginning. There was amazing variety. Also, except for the traditionalists (who had killed Socrates a few centuries earlier and who still regretted stopping with just one philosopher), Athens was a tolerant place. All of these ideas competed and coexisted; and very different views got along quite well. By Paul’s day, this city had been the intellectual center of the world for a good 500 years.

This is the world Paul spoke to in Athens, and, on a smaller scale, it was the entire Greek world. And the first thing we need to notice today is that Athens is back. It is outside that front door. In Athens, the culture was not unified around any single intellectual, religious or philosophical beliefs—although the city still paid lip service to the old-time religion. Instead, everyone was very understanding, and what was important was that you cared, that you believed something, that you would discuss and listen, and that you were sincere. There were lots of alternatives, and no shared vision. Beginning to sound familiar?

For the first time in well over 1600 years, the Athens that Paul knew has become the norm for western civilization, for us. Christianity may receive lip service from many, but it is not the live and lively faith of our culture.

For better and for worse, Variety is the live and lively faith of our culture. When you walk out of that door, you are back in Athens—with many of the same beliefs. The mission field begins when we take that servants’ entrance into the world. Anyway, back to the lesson.

So there was Paul at the Areopagus, standing exactly (I mean physically exactly) where Socrates, Plato, and the rest had stood. It is his turn, it is time for the Jew from the East to make his contribution to the mix of beliefs all around him. Everyone is watching him, and he has to speak. We need to listen carefully to the words of our greatest preacher. After all, we need to know what to say to Athens. We need to know how to begin, and what approach to take.

The first thing to notice is what Paul does not say; he avoids two pitfalls. First of all, he does not say that the people of Athens are immoral fools, stupid, ignorant, wrong-headed, hell-bound secular humanists who are going to burn forever and who ought to burn forever. That’s not what Paul does. He does not say that they know nothing and that he knows everything. That’s the first thing he does not say. At the same time, he does not say that, since they are religious and sincere, then he, Paul, really doesn’t have anything to say to them. He doesn’t do that, either. Paul knew what vine he was grafted to. Paul knew where he must abide. So he doesn’t cop out, either.

What Paul says to the people of Athens is that they are very close. Using their language, and their images—Paul’s first few words, in Greek, are a direct quote from Plato—Paul says to the Athenians that their search is the human quest for God, and that they have come very close to the truth, to the goal of that quest; but they are missing one thing. One vital thing.

Listen to this: They are not missing a better philosophy, or a more useful morality. They are not missing a good tool for success or a better building to meet in or a more exciting form of worship. Paul says that their real problem is neither an ignorance of mystical secrets nor a lack of self-esteem. In fact, they are not missing anything they can find by themselves or within themselves; in fact, they are missing something they can only get from Paul.

They are missing Jesus, and the community Jesus creates. That’s what it all boils down to. The fullness of God, and of God’s love—these are what they are missing.

That is what Paul preached, finally. He did this without attacking, without histrionics, without self-righteousness and (for quite some time) without much success. But he offered what he had, and he said they were so close they could almost taste the truth.

I suspect that is what we have to say to Athens as it exists outside of that door. Our world, in all its silly, evil, and death-centered madness, is really quite close. Our world is seeking in a pathetic frenzy the same unknown god to whom Athens (having, if nothing else, better taste than we do) built statues. It is seeking the one whom we know, the one who rules us from a cross.

We don’t have to say much else, but we do have to say that. Somehow. Maybe even with words. Since we can’t give what we don’t have, we need to know him—know him better, know him more deeply. And we need to point the way, to invite and to welcome, to make space and to make time for a world desperate to know what Paul knew, and what we know. If we do anything other than this, we do something less. For we are part of one vine, and we must abide in that vine. That’s who we are, and that is part of the truth.

Athens is back, it is right out there. Our clever neighbors, like the crowd around Paul, are listening a little to what we have to say, and looking very closely at who we are and how we live. And, like Paul in the middle of the Areopagus, it is our time to say something.

The first thing to get clear about the Ascension is that it is not about gravity, or the physical location of heaven, or where "up" leads to, or anything like that. The language about being lifted up to heaven is metaphorical language, not literal language. Instead of being about any of this, the Ascension is really about God. In fact, even though it comes toward the end of Eastertide, the Ascension is most closely related in its meaning, to Christmas. At Christmas we celebrate the incarnation—the fact that God became flesh and lived among us. The divine becomes human in the person of Jesus. What we say today is that what was begun at Christmas is brought full circle, and described and celebrated again, with a different emphasis and perspective at the Ascension.

At the Incarnation, at Christmas, what it means to be God became fully a part of what it means to be a human being. In Jesus, the human and the divine become united in the person and life of one man. That’s Christmas. At the Ascension we insist that this human being—the person and the resurrected body of Jesus—became for all eternity a part of who God is.

The life of a single, individual human being is forever joined to the life of God the Father, the one who created the heavens and the earth.

Remember, it was not the spirit of Jesus, or the essence of Jesus, or the divine nature of Jesus, or the invisible part of Jesus, or the idea of Jesus, or the teachings of Jesus, or anything like that, that ascended to the Father. It was the resurrected body of Jesus: a body that the disciples touched, a body that ate and drank with them, a real, physical, but gloriously restored body; a body that still had the marks of nails and a spear. This is what ascended. This is what, now and forever, is a living, participating part of God. This whole business of Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension changed who God is. Things are different now.

Think about that, think about what that says about being human. We church folks are often pretty uncertain about the value of our humanity. We have a long and sometimes deserved reputation for being uncomfortable or even embarrassed about much that characterizes being human—things like the reality of our bodies and our appetites, the fact that we are finite, and limited, and that we are all going to die; the painful difficulty we have in relationships; the struggles and setbacks that always seem to be a part of our quest for God; and the power that our feelings and emotions have over us. All of these parts of being human, and so many others, we frequently treat as less than holy, as somehow divorced from our spiritual and religious lives, even as bad things we should not have. (A number of interesting, and rather juicy heresies have grown from our discomfort with our humanity; so has a lot of pain.)

The Ascension, along with the incarnation and the rest of our faith, is here to tell us that it is a good thing to be a human being; indeed it is a wonderful and an important and a holy thing to be a human being. It is such an important thing that God did it. Even more, the fulness of God now includes what it means to be a human being. The experience, the reality, and the stuff of being a person is so valuable to God that God has made it a part of his own life.

Here is a way at that: Imagine that we really believed that, say, all fish had been created in the image of God, and that one fish, one particular fish, had become a part of God. Well, how would that affect our attitude toward fish? We might not go fishing; Long John Silver might be in trouble, and, more than likely, we would treat fish differently than we do now.

Well, God did not become a fish. He created fish, but He did not become one. Of every genus and species under the sun, only one is now eternally a part of God. Imagine how you would treat that creature if it were a fish; and remember that it is a human being. This is to be taken very seriously.

I am not saying that everything about us as people is wonderful and holy; and I am certainly not saying that everything we human beings do is wonderful and holy. (We all know a whole lot better than that.) But I am saying that God has made it very clear that it is a wonderful and a holy thing to be a human being. This is one reason we should treat ourselves and one another with care and with great respect. The Ascension, the fact that God has brought into Himself one who is fully human, this can remind us that simply being a person, being a human being is a sacred thing, never to be abused or taken lightly.

Another thing the Ascension means is that God knows what it is like to be a person in a very different way than God knows what it means, for example, to be a fish, (or to be anything else.) God knows what it is like to be a human being because, and I can think of no better word, God remembers what it is like to be a person.

When we approach God, when we consider God, and when we try to share our lives with God; it is important to remember that we are dealing with one who remembers—and who does not just know abstractly—what our lives are like.

God remembers what it is like to hurt and to laugh, to pray and to hunger, to be lost and afraid, to celebrate and to mourn; God remembers what it is like to live and what it is like to die.

God knows this, and He knows this in the only way that really matters as far as relationship is concerned. He knows because he has been there.

So we are able to approach God, to reach out to God and to look for the presence and will of God, with confidence and with joy—for as we turn toward God we are not only dealing with the creator of the universe and the ruler of all time and of eternity; we are also turning toward the one who lived our life and who has shared our fate. We are coming near to one who knows us and who cares, and we are coming home.

Now, the first part of Mrs. Sitwell’s story that is useful is that it suggests what is the absolute first and fundamental religious insight—that is the notion that there is more to the world than there appears, there is more to the universe than there appears, and there is more to us than there appears. Non-religious people look at the world and see the surface level of everything, the flat level of everything, the obvious level of everything—for example, they see that there are all sorts of things a 110 pound woman just can’t lift.

While Religious people look at the world and see what everybody else sees; we also see more. We see levels of depth, of meaning, of complexity, and of power, levels that other people just don’t see. We see, (on a good day we see) the world alive and afire with the presence of God, and therefore rich with possibilities that would not be there otherwise, that could not be there otherwise.

Today, on the feast of Pentecost, we hear about the Holy Spirit—the active, lively, and powerful presence of God in creation.

We hear about the Spirit in those wonderful and perplexing readings from Luke and Paul and John—readings that all have this one thing in common: they all say that God is really just this close to us, and that this matters, it makes a difference—whether we know it or not, whether we can even imagine it or not.

The story of Pentecost, perhaps more than any story in the Bible, is truly our story; it is really about us. It is not mainly about what happened once a long time ago—it is mainly about us, and about what has happened to us, and what is happening to us now—whether we know it or not.

The simple fact is, Jesus has stood face to face with us and breathed on us. The simple fact is, the Spirit that moved the Apostles at the first Pentecost, the Spirit that Paul is talking about in First Corinthians, this Spirit is ours, and it has always been ours. The Spirit is our birthright, it is a gift we have received. It is not a strange thing for strange people or strange churches; it is not a secret or an embarrassment. The spirit is ours.

That’s what our Baptism is all about. That’s what is going on with the bread and this cup we are drawn back to week after week. That is what is behind our prayer and our study, our worship and our service. God is active and alive in all of these, God acts in all of these. We have been given the Spirit. It is ours.

Which brings us back to Mrs. Stilwell. We are, in some ways, just like she discovered herself to be.|| There she was, walking around just like folks, and yet she had within herself power and possibilities she didn’t dream of.

She never thought of herself as able to lift 4,000 cars; she didn’t look into a mirror, or into herself, and see that ability. In fact, once she stopped doing it, and tried to think about it, she was absolutely amazed at what had happened. And when she tried to do it again, not for real, but for the cameras, she couldn’t budge the thing. Not an inch. What she had was for the task at hand, and not for show.

In some ways we are like that. We have been given the Holy Spirit. We can do much more than we can imagine, and we have within ourselves, both as individuals and as a community, potentials and possibilities that can amaze and astonish us. Like Mrs. Stilwell, we don’t usually think of ourselves that way, but none the less, the power is there. It is who we are.

Now, while there is great hope and confidence in this reality, there is also much danger; and it’s really easy to get this whole business of having the Spirit quite wrong, dangerously wrong. (Maybe that’s why we Episcopalians don’t talk about it that much.) This is because it is also true that, in some very important ways, we are not like Mrs. Stilwell. We are not given the power to do whatever we want to do, or what we think we need to do, or what helps us, or what will make us look good. We are not given the spirit to make a scene or to make something of ourselves.

The gift of the Spirit is not about that, it is not about us. Instead, as Paul says most clearly, we are given the spirit to do two things—to build up the body, the community, and to serve the world. Unlike adrenaline, the spirit is given us for ministry, for service, and for the sake of community. It is when we reach out—way beyond our ability or our resources—to do this, that we discover that there is a lot more to us than we dared to imagine.

Richard Grein, who was my Bishop years ago in Kansas, was fond of pointing out that, when you get right down to it, God only ever says two things to us. God says "Come here", and God says "Go there". God calls us to himself, and God sends us out to the world as his eyes and his hands and his heart. Come here, go there.

When we hear this call—when we reach beyond our own ideas of who we are and what we can do, when we remember that there is more to creation, and to us, than meets the eye; when we remember that the spirit has been given us; and when we remember that we are people gifted with insight, and abilities, and with power—when this happens, then there is probably nothing that is so heavy that we can’t lift it; there is probably nothing that this call drives us to undertake that God will not transform, and bless, and bring to fulfillment beyond our imaginings.

Today is Pentecost, and we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit. On this day we are talking about our owns selves; about who God has made us to be, and about what God has called us to do, and about the reality that he will always be with us.

What has inspired all of this is that, in the last few weeks, I have had at least three people in the parish tell me one version or another of what amounts to the same story—and it goes like this: They are talking with friends or acquaintances, and issues of religion, and denominations, and belief come up—and in that discussion these parishioners all report hearing the same thing. In one form or another, they are told, "Well, you Episcopalians don’t really believe much of anything.", or in one case, "you Episcopalians aren’t really Christians, anyway." During my going on nine years in West Texas I’ve heard that opinion myself, and even from folks who ought to know better. And that...will, that irritates me. And, since I can’t crawl down the throats of whomever said it and correct them with all Christian charity, I’m at least going to say a word or two to you about that; just to make sure that none of us ever believe any of that nonsense.

Now, first of all—and what is behind this sort of silliness, is the very real fact that (in ways I heartily approve of) we Episcopalians are a little different from some of our Christian brothers and sisters—especially in this particular part of the world. Most notably, we are not fundamentalists, and we are not Biblical literalists. (Now, of course, nobody can speak for all Episcopalians; and there are some Episcopalians who are just about anything you can imagine—and there are some who are fundamentalists and Biblical literalists, just like there are some who are extreme modernists, and some who are just about anything else you can imagine. We’re like that, and that’s good.) But in general, and speaking for the Church overall, we’re not literalists or fundamentalist.

That doesn’t mean we don’t care about the Bible—we care very much about the Bible, and we take it very seriously as a guide to faith and practice.

We hear it and we read it and we study it and for look for how the word of Scripture continues to inform and to lead the church. We take the Bible seriously, but we don’t take it all literally. (This makes some things harder and more complex; it saves us from some really silly problems; and I am convinced that ours is the most responsible, respectful, and intellectually honest approach to scripture we can find—and nothing reminds us better of this than that glorious and powerful reading we just heard from Genesis.)

Another way we are different is that we do not claim to have the one and only really Christian answer to any each and every possible social, political, moral or cultural issue that might come up. We don’t say that, in order to be a Christian you have to have a particular opinion, for example, on cloning, or on affirmative action, or on who to vote for in the next election. We recognize that some questions are just hard and complex; that some answers are slow in coming; that ambiguity is a part of real life and real decision making; and that good, decent, well-intentioned, holy, and prayerful people are going to come up with radically different answers to some of these questions. And that’s all right, too. In fact, to put the name and authority of God behind any human social or political agenda is to tread on very dangerous ground both politically and religiously.

In the same way, this doesn’t mean that we don’t care about personal or social morality or about issue of justice. We do, very much. We don’t always agree with one another, but we do care deeply; and we are convinced that Christianity demands that each one of us connect our faith and our behavior, both publicly and privately, with honesty, with courage, and with integrity. It’s all part of a single whole, and we are responsible before God for who we become and for what we do.

A third difference is that Episcopalians traditionally find our common life and our religious unity expressed first of all in terms of the worship we share, and the faith that our worship proclaims and embodies—and not primarily in terms of a rigid set of imposed and detailed doctrines. Doctrine is not unimportant to us, but it usually proceeds from this prior sense of meeting God in worship.

We encourage people to share our worship, and, being grounded in this, to explore their faith, and to be responsible for what they believe. We give the foundations and the context for mature faith, rather than a one-size-fits-all set of demands. ||These are all ways we are a bit different from some of the religious culture around us—and they may account for some of the silly things folks sometimes say.

But as important as all of that is, it isn’t really the good stuff, when it comes to belief. That comes next, after the sermon—after every sermon. That’s when we stand, and, using words more than 1,000 years older than any denomination you can find in Big Spring, we say the Nicene Creed. We recite and we affirm this ancient statement of the faith of the early and undivided Christian Church. We insist, in language both literal and poetic, both historical and metaphysical, that we believe in God the Father, and we believe in Jesus Christ, his only son our Lord, and that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and giver of life.

This is the faith of our fathers, and of the first father’s of the Church. It is the faith of the Apostles, the martyrs, the first councils, and the earliest witness of Christianity. The words of this Creed were written a generation before the Church even got around to deciding what books were in the New Testament. It is the heart of formal Christian believing. We are about to stand up and say both that we believe this, and that the legacy of our faith goes all the way back to the beginning.

Notice both that the Creed says "We believe", and that we say the creed together, during worship. Our faith is not an isolated thing, something we hold to in personal isolation. Like our worship, our beliefs are ours together; they are something that we share and live with the whole of Christ’s Church.

That’s good to know, because we need one another to believe, just like we need one another to worship. After all, there are days when you or I, individually, may have a problem with one part of this Creed or another. Or we may be having problems with our faith in general. That happens, and that’s all right—because we are in it together. Some days you row and other folks just ride along; other days they row and you ride along on the strength of their faith. Then, after a while, it’s our turn again. We believe.

The truth of the matter is that we Episcopalians are Nicene Christians, and, to tell you the truth, when it come to the matter of ancient, classical, traditional, orthodox Christian belief, it just doesn’t get any better that this. We are a believing church. That’s the real heart of what I wanted to say this Trinity Sunday—just so you would be sure to know. And if you run into somebody who isn’t sure of this, then feel free to remind them for me—in all Christian charity.

Because that’s who we are—we believe.

The couple is sitting across from me, and they are nervous. She is sitting very straight and has on sunglasses and lots of make-up to cover at least some of the black eye and the bruises. She positions herself as far across the couch from him as possible, and her eyes are jumpy. He, on the other hand, has a sort of hang-dog look, and is full of real or pretended remorse and regret; he is sitting as close to her as she will let him. Then, a few minutes into our talk, the same thing always happens. Always, he turns to me with a heartfelt sigh, leans forward, and says "but I love my wife."

And there is something so very wrong, so terribly wrong with this claim, with this profession of love in the midst of such pain and abuse. What is wrong is not that there is all that love there and, tragically, he doesn’t know how to show it—what is wrong is that there is no love here. There might the dream of love, the hope of love and even the desire for love. (And these are not without value; and they can be a beginning.) But there is no love here because love does not do this.

It is a simple fact about real love that if you love someone there are some things that you do, and there are some things that you do not do. Otherwise, the word really doesn’t mean a thing. Otherwise, what you have is not love, it is something else, and it is something far less—otherwise, all of the impassioned protests to the contrary, it’s time to go back to the very beginning, and make some basic decisions about how you are going to live, and what that is going to mean.

If this guy honestly wants to love his wife, then the way for him to begin doing that is not to concentrate really hard on deepening or clarifying his feelings; and the way to begin doing that is not to look within himself to discover what is missing, or what is wrong.

If he wants honestly to love his wife, the way for him to begin is by changing his behavior—whatever that takes. He has to stop doing what love does not do; and he has to start to do what love does. Remember, this is not a way for him to show his love, this is a way for him to have some real love, love he can then begin to live, and to show.

This grim little scene is something to keep in mind whenever we hear Jesus say things like "Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven." And it can help us make sense out of all the busyness in the New Testament, and in the church ever since, about justification and salvation and faith and works.

To begin with, there are some words that mean—at the same time—both stuff about what goes on inside of us, and stuff about what we do, what our behavior is. Love is one of those words; so if faith. Faith is no more mainly about what you believe in your head than love is mainly about what you feel in your heart. Both of them are really and primarily about what you choose, and what you do.

If your behavior is really off the wall, then it doesn’t really matter what is in your heart, love isn’t there. In pretty much the same way, agreeing with the right beliefs, and thinking that Jesus is just swell, and saying all the right things, even saying them over and over again—all by themselves, this is not faith.

It might be the dream for faith, the hope for faith, even the desire for faith (and these are not without value; and they can be a good beginning). But, all by itself, that right belief can be exactly the chanting of "Lord, Lord" that Jesus says can so easily miss the point.

Now I am not saying that somehow belief doesn’t really matter and that all that matters is that we do the right things, the right works—it’s way too easy for sermons like this to end up sounding like the worst possible reading of the piece we just heard from Deuteronomy—you gotta do exactly the right things, by the rules, or you’re toast; and if you do the right thing then only good stuff will ever happen to you. That’s nonsense; we know better than that.

What I am trying to say is that God’s gift to us of faith, and God’s call to us to ever deepening and growing faith, this is a loving, and often a gentle, call that involves and moves every part of us, not just our minds and our hearts, but also our wills and our choices and our bodies. And if we stop short of all of that, then we have abandoned the best for the good, and we have impoverished ourselves.

Part of what that means is that for many of us, much of the time, discovering faith and growing in faith does not mean learning something more about the Bible or about our traditions, or our history. You can’t learn your way into genuine Christian faith. You can learn your way toward faith, and with faith you soon discover that there is a whole lot to learn.

Instead, as a rule, you act and live and you love your way into true and deeper faith. Then you have something to learn about.

So, for many of us, much of the time, growing in our faith really means deepening, not our religious knowledge, or out religious feelings, but our religious behavior. The call to faith we so often feel cannot be met fully without a commitment to action—first of all, perhaps, a commitment to stop doing those things which faith does not do; but also, and always, a commitment to do the things faith that does.

A tug from God toward more, toward going deeper, may well a tug, not to feel something or to study something, but to do something. It may be a tug toward more regular and more disciplined prayer, or toward the sort of service that makes it easier to discover the face of Lord in the face of our neighbor, or toward a new understanding of stewardship, or toward a careful re-examining of what it means for your job, or your family, or your retirement, to be your primary baptismal ministry. As always, while we can help with this, the details of such things you need to work out with God. But it will probably be about doing something, and it is really never true that we don’t know enough to do something.

Remember, what we choose and what we do are as much a part of the gift of faith as what we believe or how we feel. After all, there are some things that faith, like love, just doesn’t do; and there are some things it does.

Once upon a time, the great river had a huge flood. A large scorpion was trapped on the upper branches of a dead tree, and the waters were gradually rising over the tree and the scorpion seemed doomed. A monk was passing by the river; he witnessed the scene, and, grabbing on to a shrub at the edge of the path, reached over intending to pick up the scorpion and carry it to safety. The scorpion stung the monk. Still, the monk tried again and again—and each time he was stung. A little later, a passerby saw the monk, weak from venom, hand swollen, but nevertheless trying to rescue the insect. "Give it up old man", the passerby shouted, "or you’ll both drown." "Then so it will be", the monk shouted back, "it is the scorpion’s nature to sting, but it is my nature to save." Keep this in mind.

Back to the Bible and the story of Hosea—it’s a great story. What happens is that God sets out to do something very interesting; God sets out to show the prophet Hosea (and, through him, all of Israel) a little bit of what it is like to be God. He wants the prophet to share the life of God. That sounds like a good deal at first; but it quickly loses its charm.

The first thing God does is command Hosea to marry a prostitute—apparently a very popular and, well, famous, prostitute—which Hosea does. He is then told to be good to her, which he is. Now, God says, you can begin to get to get the picture.

However, Gomer, that’s Hosea’s wife’s name, is not particularly inspired by all of this pious matrimonial devotion and general goodness swelling up from Hosea. Before very long, Gomer is outa there, and immediately resumes her previous lifestyle with great publicity, vigor and enthusiasm. She makes Hosea and the kids look like fools. ||This, God says to Hosea and to all of Israel, is what it is like to be me. Are we having fun yet?

Guess what comes next. Right. God tells Hosea to take Gomer back; and Hosea does. He very publicly takes her back—even though everybody knows the whole story. ||Now, why does he do this—why does God have him do this? Think about that, it’s a good question. It’s certainly not because Gomer deserves it—deserving has nothing to do with it. Also, Gomer doesn’t have some secret virtue that taking her back will reveal (it doesn’t make her a better person); finally, it’s not because Hosea will somehow win friends, influence people and prosper in his business if he takes her back. None of that matters. Hosea is to take Gomer back because that’s what it is like to be God.

That’s who God is and that’s what God does. And nobody could have guessed. Nobody could have figured that out all by himself. The only way that Israel could know that this is the way God is, is if Hosea showed them. And the only way the rest of the world could know that God acts like this was if Israel showed them. That was the whole point.

Israel treated God the way Gomer treated Hosea—badly. God treated Israel the way Hosea treated Gomer. There is a word for it. (It isn’t ‘stupid’.) In Hebrew, the word is Hesed, or Chesed.

It is variously translated "mercy", "covenant faithfulness", "kindness", "loving kindness", "steadfast love"—it’s all the same word. It’s a good word for what it is like to be God. For it is the nature of God to deal with us mercifully—with loving kindness.

God stays in there. God does not treat Gomer, or Israel, or the Tax Collector in the Gospel, or us, the way God should, or the way we deserve, or the way that is just, or any such way as that. God treats us with Chesed, with faithfulness to the covenant, to the promise, that God has made with us.

Now, there are two things that need to be said about this before going on—they are very different, but related. The first is that God’s faithfulness really has no limits. Gomer and the Tax Collectors were not secretly nice people with hearts of gold who were misunderstood victims of an uncaring society. These are people who have intentionally chosen to crawl just about as low as they can get—and for the sake of nothing but their own profit. That’s the first thing, God’s faithfulness extends not just to fallen robins, but to real scum. And it does not end. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that God is not indifferent to our behavior. God cares very much about how we act and what we do. Our behavior has consequences; it matters—it matters to God and it matters to us. It is a whole lot better, for a lot of reasons, not to be like Gomer and the tax collector than it is to be like them. There is no doubt about that, and God makes that clear over and over again. Still and none the less, it is God’s nature, first and foremost, to treat us the way Hosea treated Gomer, the way Jesus treated the tax collectors.

But this business of Hesed, of loving kindness, is not just about how God acts. After all, central to what is going on in both Hosea and Matthew is the command of God that we are to act to other people the way God acts toward us.

God says to Israel, and Jesus, carefully quoting Hosea so everyone will get the point, says the same thing to us, "I desire steadfast love (that’s Hesed) and not sacrifice." God desires of us what God reveals to us. He wants us to be like Him, to act like He does. God wants us to treat one another, even (if not especially) the worst of one another, the way God treats us.

Deserving has nothing to do with this; bringing out the best in other people has nothing to do with this, being fair has nothing to do with this, winning friends and influencing people has nothing to do with this. None of that matters. What matters is acting like God acts—because God wants us to, and we decide to do it.

It is the nature of the scorpion to sting. It is the nature of God to reach out to us with steadfast love, with covenant faithfulness.

It is of our nature to choose. We really don’t have any excuses. God will help, and the question is not about who other people are. The question is about who we are.

And there’s one more thing. Remember, God treats us the way Hosea treated Gomer, the way Jesus treated the tax collectors. And nobody could have guessed. Nobody could have figured that out by himself. The only way that the world around us, the only way a world desperately without mercy, can ever know that this is the way God is, is if we show them. Otherwise, the world will never know. We know what God desires. This is about our identity, but it is also about our mission. We are the only way the world will know.

And it is our nature to choose.

The lessons today, in different ways, point to some of those things—to some of our particular insights, some of our special perspectives on the Christian faith. Now, the stuff here isn’t all there is to say about us, not by a long shot, but it is true and it is important. It has to do with law and grace, with love and fear, and, always, with mission.

Let’s begin with the section from Exodus that we just heard. What’s happening here is that God is getting ready to give Israel the law. God is just about to haul Moses up Mount Sinai so Moses can bring down the ten commandments. Notice what God says, and what God does not say, to prepare the people for that.

First of all, God does not lay the groundwork for the Law by saying that He is bigger and stronger than Israel is, so Israel had better get ready to obey. And God does not say that that He is really mad at Israel and that the only way Israel can stay out of deep trouble is to pay close attention and obey. None of that.

Instead, God starts out by reminding Israel what God has done for them. God starts out by making it very clear that God cares about His people and that He has great plans for them. God does not give the law so that by it God will save Israel. God has already saved Israel. God does not give Israel the law so that, by obeying it, Israel will make God love her. God already loves Israel. Israel is not called to believe and obey because if they don’t God will get them. Israel is called to believe and obey because of the wonderful things God has already done for them; and because of the great things God has planned for them. God does not give the law so that Israel can go from being bad to being good, but rather so that Israel can be a servant to the world.

Now, there are all sorts of ways to read the Bible, and there are all sorts of ways to understand God, but I am convinced that both the Biblical story and the Orthodox faith of the Church insist that our faith and our behavior, what we believe and what we do, are a response to what God has already done for us, and not a way to earn God’s favor. We begin with God, and with God’s love. The point is never that we have to be good so that God will decide not to destroy us. The point is always that God knows us and loves us and calls us to Himself.

You see, grace always comes before law, and the basis of what we do is love and not fear. So, before God gives Israel the ten commandments or any other commandments, God does not threaten Israel. Instead, God loves Israel, and God saves Israel, and God takes care of Israel. The Psalmist is right,

... the LORD is good;

his mercy is everlasting; *

and his faithfulness endures from age to age.

We need to remember this—it can make a big difference.

This is what Paul is talking about in today’s section of Romans when he says "While we were still weak...Christ died for the ungodly". Before we did anything right, before there was any response or any goodness from us, before there was one single earthly reason to care about us, Christ died for the ungodly. Again, the deal was not "If you are good enough, then I will take care of you." or "If you are worthy then I will love you." The deal today is not, "If we can just clean up our act, God will love us". None of that. Grace always comes before law; and we are called, first, by love to love, and never by fear to a cringing obedience.

Our faith begins, always, with love—not with God out to get us, because God is not out to get us—but with the reality that God has already seen us, and known us, and reached out for us, and saved us. We have to decide what to do about that, but we do not need to make that happen.

The business of ethics, of how we behave, is part of this invitation to love God back. We are invited, and called, and challenged, to allow our own heart to beat with the love which quietly fills the heart of creation. In Jesus we are given a vision of what it means to be fully human and fully alive, and we are given the chance to respond to what we have received.

Israel was not to be "a priestly kingdom and a holy nation" for Israel’s own sake, so Israel could somehow maintain its privileged status with God. Israel already had that. Instead, Israel was called to be "a priestly kingdom and a holy nation" for the sake of mission—for the sake of a world that desperately needed to know what God had shown Israel.

In the same way, in the Gospel, Jesus sends out the disciples (and this part is not just about Bishops or clergy, this part is about everybody). He tells the disciples to do what he has done, to teach, to heal, to live the kingdom of God.

Jesus doesn’t tell them to do this or else. Jesus doesn’t tell them to become servant to the world in order to save their own souls—their souls are not at stake here.

Instead, Jesus says "You received without payment; give without payment." The love we have been given is to be shared—and in sharing it, we are to reveal the true nature of God to the world. We don’t do this because God will nail us if we don’t, we don’t do this to maintain ourselves; we do this because it is our big chance to love God back; and God is counting on us to do that.

There are all sorts of ways to read the Bible, and there are all sorts of ways to understand God, and to approach God, and to come at this peculiar business of the Christian faith. But we Anglicans begin here. We insist that grace comes before law, and that the driving power behind our faith is love and not fear, and that we are called to lives of holiness and service in response both to what God has done for us, and to what God is doing for us. That’s a good place to begin—and it’s the truth.

To get at this, the section from Jeremiah we heard this morning needs to be placed in context. Jeremiah had had a bad week. Because of his prophesy against Judah and Jerusalem, he had been arrested, beaten, and publicly humiliated by officers of the temple. The day he was released from prison, Jeremiah begin to let off some steam. He prophesied a number of very unpleasant things for the fellow who arrested him, he again promised disaster for both Judah and Jerusalem, and, then he had some choice words for God.

What we just heard, especially the first part, is a form of prayer called a lament—in it Jeremiah shouts his anger at God for calling Jeremiah to be a prophet, for making it hard to be a prophet, and for making it impossible not to be a prophet. In his lament, Jeremiah is both mad at God and terribly frustrated by the constant opposition he discovers when he tries to do what he is convinced God wants him to do.

Things were hard for Jeremiah, and they are hard because he has set out to be faithful with integrity. In the same way, Jesus is promising hard times to the disciples. He is instructing them on what it will be like for them to carry out their ministry. He is telling them that there is going to be opposition, conflict, betrayal, and even death for those who try to follow him with fidelity and with integrity. At the same time, Jesus promises them the presence, strength, and direction of his Spirit, and he assures them of their final victory.

Jesus was pretty much right. Legend has it that all of the 12 Apostle suffered a martyr’s death except John, who died an exile. And the history of the faith is, among other things, a chronicle of hardships, persecutions, and martyrdom for the faithful. Still today, in many parts of the world, most notably the Sudan and China but, surprisingly, in many, many other places as well, persecution is the rule for Christians. There are still millions of disciples for whom Jeremiah’s example and Jesus’ words about the real, personal dangers of faithfulness are accurate, immediate, and very pressing.

But what about us—those of us here, now? The Biblical promises, and the historical and present realities, of persecution and suffering for the faith all seem a bit quaint, and oddly out of place for us. There is an attractive heroic quality to it, as well—and the sort of introspection that always comes when viewing such actions: "Could I do that? Would I do that?" But real persecutions like theirs are not our issue. We almost certainly will not be faced with anything like that. Does this mean that Jesus’ promises of trouble and hard choices have are not about us? And if they do mean anything, what might that be?

What I want to suggest is that Jesus is talking to us—although in ways that, for better or for worse, look very different. And while we are indeed blessed by the personal safety and religious freedoms we enjoy, we are not exempted from the need for courage, for sacrifice, or for integrity.

One way to get at this is to ask how your life is different, or how you believe your life should be different, because of your faith. Who are you—or who do believe you should be—because you are a Christian instead of a non-Christian? Does your faith cost you anything—in resources, time, energy, or prospects?

Are there things you do not do now that you would do if you were not a Christian, and are there things you do that you would not do? Are there things you do not have, or do not say, or do not seek. because of your faith?

And, part of the same question—what difference should the faith make? How do we see ourselves falling short; how do we see our faith calling us to be more, and to do more? Where is the tug, the push for growth?

For us, today, the challenge of living faithfully, and with integrity, the demands of our faith, paying the price it calls from us—as small as that may seem, as easily compromised, as nicely and neatly rationalized, and as almost invisible to everyone else as this price may be, for us, today, this is our persecution, this is our struggle. It isn’t as dramatic as being flogged, or thrown into prison, or dragged before governors and Kings, but there it is.

To call our little obstacles and difficulties ‘persecutions’ seems almost to make trivial the word—especially in light of the extreme sacrifices that so many heroes of the faith have been called to make before, and are in fact making now. But the point is not to compare. The point is to live with faithful integrity the lives we are given, to walk fully the road that is ours to walk.

Because as gentle as our circumstances may seem by simple comparisons, I suspect that our lives are—or can be and should be—as much of a challenge, and require as much raw courage, faith, integrity, and risk from us, as those heroes’ lives, did for them. And I do know that our struggles and our commitments are as important to us, and they are as important to God, as the struggles and commitments of any generation, and of any place.

We are not Jeremiah in Jerusalem, or the disciples on the road in Judah. We are Christians in this place. And God will ask as much from us, in our ways, as he did from them in theirs—and God promises as much to us as he did to them. A gentler time does not call for softer commitments—it just gives us different challenges.

Perhaps all of this is to say, one more time, that our lives matter. We are give this time and this place. To embrace these, and to take our challenges as seriously as Jeremiah and the apostles took theirs, whatever it may be that we are asked to do—whether it is being embarrassed, or spending a few fewer bucks on our appetites, or taking the time to engage seriously what God is pushing us to do or to be—to take these as our spiritual challenges and our call to holiness—as the persecutions we are given in our age and place—to do this is to walk the same road that Jeremiah and the Apostles walked.

And the stakes are just as high now as then; the promises—promises of troubles and promises of help and victory— are just as true now as then. Our lives matter; our choices are important, and the more deeply we enter the fray, the more clear this all becomes.

Wow. Jesus is still sending out the disciples—he is still talking about what it is like to follow him. So this peculiar material in Matthew is still a part of Jesus’ marching orders to the Church. It’s about us.

Now, all of this had a very special meaning to the first generation of Christians that read Matthew’s Gospel. For them these words of Jesus were neither a surprise nor a problem, and everybody knew exactly what Jesus was talking about. After all, it was their experience that baptism sometimes meant the destruction of family relationships. It was not at all rare that, after you were baptized, your children or your parents or your in-laws would, at best, have nothing more to do with you. At worst, they might well turn you in to the authorities for being a felon.

So, becoming a part of the Christian community sometimes meant precisely and literally the conflict that Jesus is talking about here. The Church was more to be trusted than one’s own family; it fact, it often took the place of that family. Everybody knew that the water of Baptism was thicker than blood.

But things are different today. Today these words come as a surprise, and they are frankly a problem if we try to take them seriously, and we don’t automatically or easily see what they mean.

After all, families, and rhetoric about families, have moved to the absolute center of our cultural and political universe. Everybody agrees that families are dreadfully important things—and the idea that Jesus, of all people, could raise a problem for families is a disquieting, if not positively subversive, notion. So what’s going on here, for us?

What’s going on is that Jesus is absolutely convinced of the importance of families; and he is going one step further. He is insisting that families are not only important, they are downright dangerous. This is not because families are bad things; quite the contrary, it is because they are very good things. (Or at least they have the potential of being very good things.) And any good thing is dangerous because it is always very easy to confuse the good with the best.

As human beings, we are created by God to be complete and whole when, and only when, God as he is revealed in Jesus Christ is at the very center, the very heart, of our lives. That must come first. If anything else comes first, that other thing, no matter how good a thing it might otherwise be, will suffer in the process; and we will become distorted, and less than we can be. That’s one of the basic operating instruction for the human animal. (It’s in the manual) But it’s also easy to forget.

I want to talk about two ways we can get the business of our faith and our families wrong. The first way is to try to put our brother or sister, mother or father, husband or wife, son or daughter, in the place in our lives that God should rightfully occupy. We do that when we try to squeeze enough meaning and emotional satisfaction out of our relationship with another person to center and sustain our whole lives. Doing this is a doomed enterprise. To ask another human being to carry the weight of our life’s meaning and purpose is simply to ask too much; and it is to set everybody up for the frustration, pain, anger and bitterness that are too often the flip side of desperate or all-consuming relationships.

And I suspect that these misplaced expectations are also a part of our culture’s amazing fickleness. Sort of all together, as a society, we know that there is something more we need in our lives; we know that we are incomplete. But we don’t know what will fill that emptiness.

So there is this great search for people to do it—spouses, kids, presidents, Rectors, cult leaders, pop heroes, self-help gurus, whatever.

We get involved with these, and we expect to be fixed, to be made all right. But we aren’t. There is still something missing. So they have failed, we drop them, and we hustle out to whatever marketplace is at hand and get us a new one. And so on. This growing pattern of trading in one relationship or leader who will save us for another becomes as frenzied as it is futile.

And to all of that, Jesus insists that to love anyone, or any thing, more than we love Him is to be unworthy of Him. To place our final hope anywhere else than in Him is to be unworthy of Him. To do this is to doom both us and whomever we have tried to love and to trust as we are to love and trust God. That’s one of the ways we get faith and families mixed up. The second is like unto it.

That has to do with seeing God, or the Christian faith, or the Church, as a way of helping us to acquire and hold on to the really important parts of our lives. This is what happens when Christianity is presented as a way to improve our business, or cure our ills, or save our marriages, or get our kids out of trouble or us out of debt, or to otherwise manipulate the world as to arrange those good things we are convinced that we must have.

Well, our relationship with the Lord and His Church may or may not be a part of some or all or none of those things happening to us. That depends on a whole lot of things, including both our choices and what God thinks is best.

But the Lord and his church do not exist so that we can get or hold on to these or to any other good things. Instead, we exist to know, to love, and to serve the Lord—wherever that may lead. This is not a means to some other end we choose. Instead, this is itself the ultimate end and goal of human existence.

Confusing God Almighty with Santa Clause, seeing the faith as a way to get what we want, is as dangerous as trying to give another person the place in our lives that belongs to God.

To all of this Jesus and his Word come as a sword, cutting away or illusions, and insisting that he, and he alone, is the center, the one reality from which all else flows. When that happens, when we begin know the power of that sword, we will also begin to understand what it means to lose our lives for His sake.

Then we can also begin to discover the other part. Then we can begin to discover what it means to love: what it means to love our families, and our friends, even ourselves and our enemies, as they are best loved: Not instead of Christ, or along side of Christ, but through Christ and because of Christ. It is in that love, and only it that love, that we can find the true value, and the true joy of all these good things.

Then, today, just a few verses later, Jesus is all sweetness and light, promising rest and comfort, light burdens and easy yokes. This is more like it. Gentle masters are much more attractive; if we must have masters at all. None the less, I want to look at these words for a while this morning. This is all a little more complex than it looks.

First of all, the primary thrust of what Jesus is saying here is not directed toward people who have just any kind of difficulty. By "all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens" (I still prefer "who labor and are heavy laden"), anyway, here Jesus does not primarily mean folks with ordinary problems, like too many bills, or being unemployed, or sick, or having ungrateful kids, a hard life, or whatever. Jesus has something to say about things like this, but they are not what he is talking about here. Here, Jesus is talking specifically to and about those who are on a religious quest—those who are seeking God, and relationship with God. He is calling to himself the religiously exhausted—those who, like Paul, have tried all of the usual ways of finding some peace with the divine, and have achieved only frustration.

The real clue to this is the fact that a yoke was the common symbol for the law of Moses: especially for the details of the law and the minute, ever changing, demands of the legalism of the Pharisees. This is why Jesus says that the wise and intelligent (the religious leaders), have missed the point, and then adds that only the Son (and not those leaders or anyone else) knows the Father.

The yoke of the Pharisees—their demands that you have to do this and this and this exactly right in order to matter to God, in order to be a decent person, in order to be loved or counted significant—that yoke Jesus rejects—even though it was the yoke of the wise and intelligent. That yoke—the yoke of seeking God by keeping the rules, by doing what somebody (or anybody or everybody) else says is the thing to do—by trying to get it right all of the time and so living constantly in fear of getting it wrong; that yoke leads those who wear it to ‘labor and be heavy laden’. It leads to living in what Paul calls "this body of death." It leads to a religion and a life of fearful obedience to a multitude of petty dictates in which the spirit is deadened, and where some measure of success is more likely to lead you into self-righteousness than into the heart of God.

Look: To say to your child, or a friend, or a spouse, or to anyone, really, that "I will only love you if you do right," to say this is to insure a sick and twisted relationship. It is to hurt everybody involved. To teach that God says this is not only terrible theology, it can also be devastating. Yet the yoke of the law at its worst (not at its best, but at its worst, which is what Jesus is talking about here), did just that. Those who struggled under such a yoke discovered that it didn’t fit; that it did not bring them to God, and that it did not enrich their lives. Yokes like that never do.

To go scurrying about with the notion that if we could only figure out the right thing to do, the right way to act, the right words to say, then we would be all right, then we could conjure up God’s acceptance; to do this, regardless of how fine, exulted, and useful the rules may be—to do this is to skate on the edge of magic. It is to insure frustration and exhaustion. God’s presence with us, and God’s love for us, are never the results of our actions. He is in control, we are not.

In response to all of this, Jesus says "come to me." Not to a new law, not to a new teaching, not to a hidden interpretation or a legalistic loophole, or a book—but "to me"—to a person, to himself. Jesus is saying, "If you seek God, if you seek His love, if you seek a life that makes some sense, and a way of understanding the world that allows you to deal honestly with what happens and not be destroyed, if you want to be who you are created to be—come to me." It is a call to relationship—to relationship with Jesus and to relationship with the community that continues Jesus’ life and ministry. The alternatives, then and now, will fail. He will not. Remember today’s collect, where we are reminded that God has taught us that all the commandments are kept by loving God and our neighbor. Such is the yoke of Christ. And, since it does have to do with these commandments to love, folks who take that yoke upon themselves usually find that it is shaped very much like a cross.

One more thing, in our translation, Jesus calls that yoke "easy". Now, that’s an unfortunate English word: it makes it sound like everything is a snap, that very little effort or energy is required to do it. And, as anyone who has tried to live the life of Jesus knows, that’s just not true. The New English Bible’s translation is better; it reads, "My yoke is good to bear". The point is not that his yoke makes no difference or asks nothing of us—quite the contrary. The point is that it fits, it’s the right size, so it works—it leads to God, and it brings with it wholeness, and a peace that can be found nowhere else.

To come to him is to discover that what was so frantically and desperately sought—life with God—is not an earned reward, but a free gift. To come to him is to discover, as Paul discovered, that "there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." To come to him is to discover that the task of getting it all correct is replaced by the absolute gift of God’s grace.

All the strong stuff we have heard the past couple of weeks about discipleship is still there. But the yoke is good to bear. It leads to life. To submit to it is to be embraced by God’s mercy, to carry it fulfills both God’s will and our own deepest humanity.

We are called to a new yoke, not to a law, or a set of rules, but to a person and a community built around that person. And in these the religious quest, the greatest search of human existence, can find its richest fulfillment, and its deepest satisfaction.

Jesus said, Come to me, if you seek God, if you seek life, I will give you rest.

None the less, a good review of this, like the parable of the weeds, can be helpful. In this parable, Jesus speaks very clearly to the issue of the reality of sin and imperfection within the Christian community. The weeds in the parable are a specific plant called darnel, and it was a real bane to farmers. Darnel’s growing habits are virtually identical to wheat. At the early stages, there really is no way to distinguish between them, and by the time the two had headed out and it was possible to tell them apart, their roots had so grown together that to pull out one was to destroy other. (In fact, spreading Darnel seeds in another farmer’s field was common enough to be specifically prohibited by law.)

From the very earliest days, the church has understood that this parable is about us. It is a way of talking about the reality of sin and of sinners within its own self—something we have always know about. Let’s face it, not only is there no guarantee that the church generally, or any particular part of it, is going to be free from sin or from sinners, but we are pretty much promised otherwise. There is no magic spell cast over those doors that either keeps out the less than perfect (thanks be to God, or both the pews and the pulpit would always be empty) or that instantly transforms, and fixes, anyone who comes in. That’s the way it always has been, and that’s the way it is.

Instead of a perfect church, Jesus gives us this parable. I suspect that he picked this example because he knew that something the parable talks about, pulling weeds—passing judgement as to who is good enough to associate with the fine, fruitful wheat, and who really belongs out there in the fire—can be so much fun. Heaven only knows that enough time is spent in conversation doing exactly that. And it does feel good, in a furtive sort of way, to wander mentally through the field, yanking up a handful here and there.

At least it feels good as long as we don’t think very clearly about what we are doing. Once we do that, once we say things like "What I am doing is deciding that, with everything about me that only God and I know, I still belong here, while old so, (or some group or collection of people) whose inner life and struggles I can’t even imagine, don’t belong here, or at least they don’t belong here without some acerbic comment from me." When we start putting things that way, the glamour begins to fade.

It is interesting that in all of Jesus’ parables of judgment—and there are quite a few—in all of these, judgment is reserved to God—and judgment is reserved until the end. We are always forbidden to judge the soul of another person. Jesus really does want us to remember that we did not do the planting and we do not give the growth.

Besides, there is enough to do within ourselves to keep us occupied. Look at it this way, if we gotta pull weeds, we might as well work on those nearest at hand—those which are a part of who we are. It is strange how glibly we insist upon change in others while at the same time, both resisting and resenting any suggestions that we ourselves have areas in our lives that need some real work.

Even though each one of us knows, very personally, how terribly difficult getting to where we need to be can be for ourselves—still, we are strangely reluctant to give as much charity to others as we are accustomed to giving ourselves. We need to flip that around, and tighten up a bit on ourselves. We are the one we need to work on the hardest, and Lord knows we all have enough to do there.

And we need to do that in at least two ways. First of all, we are called to help God form us more nearly into the image of Christ—to grow in grace and holiness. At the same time, we also have another goal, the goal of community. The goal of growing together, and building up and supporting one another. We are in this together.

What God finally has in store for any of us at the end is not ours to predict. However, what God has in store for us now is both our personal call to growth and our corporate call to community and to service.

So here we are, living together in a situation very much like the field in our Lord’s parable. Some wheat and some weeds, some good and some bad–both among us and within us. And we are growing in such a way as our roots are intertwined, our lives are connected to each other in a basic and fundamental way. We are called to live together and to grow together in patience and in hope.

And there is one more thing. Unlike either wheat or weeds, we do have the power to change, to cooperate with God in becoming more than we are now. So we are also given time, as we are given one other, and we are told not to judge, but to grow; not to cast others down but to build up ourselves and the communities we are a part of, and to do it all with thanksgiving.

After all, it’s all a gift—the life, the field we live in, and the vast undeterminable variety of people who are growing along with us–it is all a gift. God has the end of things under control; an for right now, we have plenty to do.