As seems to happen over and over, Jesus begins with a mistake Peter makes. In his question to Jesus, Peter was irritated, but he was also pretty proud of himself. He was doubtless angry at James or Andrew or John or somebody and wanted to know how long he had to put up with their stuff. He guessed that Jesus would be more demanding of him than the Pharisees—and the Pharisees insisted that you had to forgive your brother three times. So, Peter took that number, doubled it and threw in one extra for good measure. "Must I forgive even seven times?" He probably figured he was being extraordinarily generous, and he certainly thought he was close. (Be honest, how many times have you really forgiven the same adult seven times for a really serious sin against you? Peter was trying; he was pushing himself.)

Jesus’ response is shattering. Jesus’ point was not that Peter’s arithmetic was wrong—that he missed the right answer by 70 or whatever. Jesus’ point was not that Peter was giving the wrong answer, but that he was asking the wrong question altogether. You see, what Peter was really asking was a question about himself, and about the Christian Community, about us. He was asking "When do I get to be a person who does not have to forgive?" He was asking, "How bad do they have to be, before I get to be like them?" And he was asking the same things about the Church.

In response to this, Jesus’ tries to teach his new language; and his answer grows from his love for Peter, and for everyone who asks Peter’s question. Jesus says that it is never good for Peter, or for you, or for anyone, to become a person, or to become a community, that does not forgive. Jesus is saying that there can be no limit to forgiveness, because of the harm such a limit would do to whomever used it. Jesus is saying that refusing to forgive is fundamentally wrong-headed—it’s like drinking poison and expecting that somebody else is going to die.

That’s why Jesus does not say we are to forgive primarily for the benefit of the people we forgive—so they will be impressed and so become better people—while this can sometimes happen, it usually doesn’t. Nor is forgiveness a way to ‘stick it to them’ by making them feel guilty or ashamed. That happens even less. Instead, the call to forgiveness is a command to the Church for the sake of the life, health, and witness of the Church and its members. It is given to us so we might discover our own lives; and live out our own ministry.

After all, Jesus’ words about forgiveness are a particular case of the general truth that whoever loses his life will find it. To forgive, to forgive really, this is to lose. It is to lose something that feels like it is rightfully ours, indeed that is rightfully ours. To forgive is to give up the debt of getting even, of hating back and of hurting back. To forgive is to give up the resentment, the pride, the self-pity, the nursed anger and the haughty self-righteousness that we hold so dear when we see ourselves, rightly or wrongly, as the victim of another’s misdeeds.

So, the issues with Jesus’ demands for forgiveness are not primarily issues of international policy, criminal law or civil liability—although these can become involved. And the point is neither that we should allow ourselves to be abused nor that it is just fine for people to hurt us or others.

The primary issue has to do with the choices we make, with whether we are willing to give up the malice, the smugness, the viciousness that are our natural response to being hurt. Frederick Buechner calls revenge "the sweetest, tastiest morsel ever barbecued over the fires of hell". It is that entire banquet we are asked to forego, to offer to God and the to the one who owes us—as a gift.

After all, the little debt of 100 denerai in the parable, (while 500 thousand times less than the one that the servant had been forgiven), was no doubt a real, legitimate, and legal debt. The first servant had every legal right in the world to throw the second into prison. To forgive the debt, that first servant would have to lose something that was his by right. Forgiveness always costs us something—it costs us our due, it costs us what we have coming in satisfaction for what happened to us. That’s one part of it.

Another part is that to forgive, to try to forgive, to pray for the grace to want to try to forgive, this changes us. It reshapes us; it shifts the center of our lives. One way to look at it is to imagine a door—a door within ourselves. It is a very important door. To forgive, to struggle to forgive—this opens that door within. And then it is possible to get rid of poisons like malice, resentment, and injured pride by taking them out that door and offering them to God. In this way, we can begin to become people whose lives are shaped, not by what others do to us, but by how we choose to respond to the presence and the love of God.

There is real struggle involved here. This door only opens from the inside. At the same time, we cannot open it all by ourselves—the grace and the help of God are necessary parts of doing that. But this Grace is real, and it is available.

By the way, this door is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." You know, that part of the Lord’s Prayer we lie our way through. What Jesus is saying here is that the primary way we make ourselves able to receive God’s forgiveness is not by wanting or needing or asking for that forgiveness; the primary way we make ourselves able to receive God’s forgiveness is by forgiving others. The point is not that God is up there keeping some sort of score on how often we forgive and how often we can be forgiven. The point is that God’s forgiveness is always there, but it to flows to us through that door we open as we try to forgive. So, we need to become forgiving people, people who know what forgiveness is, and what it costs, and so can both accept forgiveness and make some use of it.

Whoever loses his life will find it. To refuse to forgive is to close that door within us, and to step outside the arena of grace. It is to return to the other language, the other way of doing things, the way where, like the servant and his debt to the king, we get what we deserve-—both in small ways and in large. No one honestly wants that.

"How often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?" The answer has to do with who we are, and with what we choose to have opened or closed within ourselves. The answer has to do with death and with life.

What these two readings bring to mind this morning is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek saying by John Duns Scotus. Scotus was a 14^th century theologian, probably from Scotland; and one day, (I suspect he said it in part for the fun of it and in part sincerely; and for all I know, he had been reading the Big Spring Herald), anyway, one day Scotus proclaimed loudly and articulately that there was no hell.

Hell was just a metaphor. Everybody went to heaven. Everybody. Sinners went to heaven—even the worst sinners went straight to heaven. But when they got there, they hated it—it was awful for them, and they were miserable. That, Scotus said, is how God’s justice works. Even sinners went to heaven; but they found it a terrible place to be. ||And the more I think about this, the better I like it. Scotus was really on to something here—and probably the best way to see it is by looking at Jonah and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard.

We heard about Jonah just a few weeks back when, commanded by God to preach to Nineveh, which was far to the East, he grabs the first ship he can find going West and tries to avoid the whole enterprise. Then comes the unfortunate business of the storm and the great fish and, behold, Jonah reconsiders the matter and goes to Nineveh.

Once he gets there he (finally) does exactly what God tells him to do. He preaches doom and destruction. "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown". Stuff like that. Good stuff.

In fact, Jonah was such an unusually good preacher that people actually listened to him. The whole city repented. Everybody from the king right down to the cattle put on sackcloth and ashes and cried to the Lord for mercy.

And the Lord repented, too. God did not destroy Nineveh. That’s why Jonah was very displeased, and miserable, and very, very angry. He was angry because he felt that he had been cheated. He felt like he looked like a fool—the one thing he hated the most. Jonah had promised that God would destroy, and God simply did not deliver. It wasn’t fair. Jonah’s pride was hurt. So in his anger and in his arrogance he went up on a mountain to pout, (and to have a good view, just in case God came to his senses and destroyed the city like He was supposed to.)

Now, doubtless everybody else in Nineveh is having a party! Everybody else is celebrating, rejoicing at God’s mercy, tickled pink at not being destroyed even though they probably had it coming, and generally having a ball. Jonah would have been an honored guest. But Jonah chooses to miss the party. God’s mercy overflows, grace abounds, and Jonah insists on being unhappy. Remember Scotus.

Which leads pretty naturally to that infuriating parable about the laborers in the vineyard—actually, it’s more parable about the landowner than the laborers, but we’re stuck with the name. We know the parable, and we also know that there is something wrong with it. We know that there has been some sort of injustice here. We just know it isn’t fair that the folks who worked only an hour get a full day’s pay while the ones who really worked, and who really worked all day, get only the same. And the fact is, since most of us pretty much see ourselves as people who labor all day, or at least most of the day, then most of us see that the folks who are getting the short end of the stick are people like us.

So it seems wrong; it seems somehow unfair. And we understand the laborers who grumble, and who are angry and miserable at what has happened to them, and who feel like they have been cheated. Now, I know that it’s difficult to point clearly and precisely to what is wrong with this picture. The parable takes that on pretty directly; and in fact it is nearly impossible to spell out exactly why the situation is not fair to the workers who complained. Try it. If I worked all day, and you worked an hour, then why is paying you as much as I contracted to get unfair to me? To you maybe; but why to me? But that sort of rational exercise hardly helps at all. It’s still unfair.

That’s why I suspect that the most important thing here is not to understand why we feel that this parable is unfair. What’s at stake is too important for that. The most important thing here isn’t to understand. The most important thing is to repent.

I really suspect that there is no better way of seeing both clearly and quickly just how far we really are from the kingdom of God than by noticing both how much this parable bothers us, and, along the same lines, how easy it is for us to sympathize with Jonah’s anger and embarrassment. What feels fair, natural, and just plain right are turned against us in both of these stories.

But we’re stuck with it. Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like this. The kingdom of heaven is not like the Elysian Fields, or some cartoonist’s versions of clouds and harps and people floating around wearing bed sheets. It’s not some fantastic paradise where you get 15 of everything you want. It’s none of those. It’s like this. It’s like being Jonah on the mountaintop, watching the people of Nineveh rejoice and hoping it will rain fire. It is like the laborers, all of the laborers, as some rejoice over a wonderful gift and others, who are just as well off, complain about that same gift. This is what the kingdom of heaven is like—or almost, anyway.

But, to look just a tiny bit deeper: most of all, the kingdom of heaven is like the landowner, who keeps searching and searching and searching for people to invite into the vineyard, who keeps coming back and coming back, always hoping to find someone he has overlooked, always ready to bring in one more. The kingdom is like the Lord who spares Nineveh, even though Nineveh probably deserved it, even thought the decision embarrasses his reluctant but effective prophet. That’s what the kingdom is mostly like.

Both the Ninevites and Jonah were in the Kingdom. Both the laborers who worked all day and the ones who worked an hour were in the kingdom—and the landowner was probably still out there looking for more folks to invite. Some of these people in the kingdom were delighted, and some were miserable. Some rejoiced, and some complained. Some knew the language, and some did not.

Fair doesn’t have anything to do with it. You and I feeling right about the situation doesn’t have anything to do with it. In fact, the kingdom is so far from fair, and so far from what feels right to us most of the time, that we have to work at letting go of all of that, and realizing that what is important is that, like all the laborers in the vineyard, and like Jonah and all the people of Nineveh, we have been invited. The kingdom is going on all around us, and it will always be going on all around us—now and through all eternity. And, in some way or another, it will be like this. What we have to do is choose, we can complain, or we can rejoice.

Maybe old Scotus maybe was right after all.

So we want the larger community to know a little more about St. Mary’s and about the Episcopal Church. One of the ways we are going to try to do this is by beginning what amounts to a media blitz–a major advertising campaign the likes of which we have never seen or done before. Beginning October 7, and over the next two months, we will be sponsoring at least 160 radio ads, two newspaper ads a week, 800 TV spots, and fifty or sixty cable ads of one sort or another. They will all be about the Episcopal Church and St. Mary’s. Some are professionally done, some we will do ourselves.

Now, I’ll answer the first question right after I answer the second one. The idea to do this came out of our goal’s setting process—two of the discussion groups listed more advertizing as one, although not the first, of their goals. A sort of informal committee got together around this discussion and started looking at using that delightful series "Those Crazy Episcopalians" as the basis for this. We even came up with a budget, a good budget, a ‘boy are we dreaming’ budget. Which leads to the first question, "How are we going to pay for all this?"—and I gotta tell you this story.

Like I said, we had a tentative budget for this blitz—and one generous gift towards it. Then, I walked into my office one morning not long ago and there on my desk was a certified letter with a very surprising, a totally unexpected, and a most generous check in it.

It turns out the residual of Mary Gilmore’s gift to St. Mary’s in her will was not the couple hundred dollars we had expected to receive in December. Instead, it was exactly, almost to the dollar, the amount we needed for this program. That’s spooky—it’s a God thing. You hear about that sort of thing, but it really happens. ||The Vestry voted to use that windfall, less our usual tithe for outreach, for this program. We could never afford it out of the budget, but the funding came—literally out of the blue.

Now, for a larger perspective: All of this advertizing, is one part of larger program we are doing. The program is evangelism—Episcopal style. Episcopalians don’t do evangelism the way lots of other folks do—the ways that drove so many of us away, and that still drive us crazy. We don’t corner people and ask if they have been saved; we don’t threaten folks with hell; we don’t go door to door with speeches, we don’t do stuff like that. We have different beliefs, and these beliefs lead to different style and different actions.

For example, we believe that conversion is generally a gradual process that happens best in the midst of a prayerful and supportive community. So, for St. Mary’s, our evangelism focuses on this place and this time—on the church gathered.

So, intentional Anglican Evangelism, which we are doing, begins with two things:

Which, by the way, is how most of the present members of St. Mary’s got here.

This is what is behind our advertising blitz. As I said in the September Newsletter, the advertising by itself won’t bring people to St. Mary’s. You will. But getting the word out, and raising our visibility, and giving folks something to listen to and talk about, that will all help.

Okay, that’s point 1, inviting people to church. My promised sermon surprise is that we are going to pass the offertory plate right now—do that please—and when it comes to you, you need to take something out. In the plate is little business cards, I’ll call them invitation cards. They cards have with information about St. Mary’s on the front and a map and our mission statement on the back. They are in packets of 10, so take one or two of the packets as the plate goes by. We have plenty more.

Now, what I want you to do is hang on to these invitation cards and to think and to pray about people you might want to give them to–people you might want to invite to church. Look around. Think about folks you know who don’t have a regular church home. (We are not stealing sheep here, the kingdom is not increased numerically if active Presbyterians or Baptists become active Episcopalians. That’s not our goal.) Carry these invitation cards with you, and let them burn a hole in your pocket or your purse. Then invite–offer a ride; be sure to sit next to your guest and so on...But, first of all, think and pray about who you might share this with. Then share.

That’s the first part of Episcopal evangelism, inviting.

The second part is treating folks well when they show up. I’ll have more on this later, but I want to say a word or two now. We are truly a friendly parish, really. But don’t forget how it’s always easiest to be friendly to folks you know. If you don’t know someone, introduce yourself. I know, they might be (8:00 or) 10:30 folk who have been coming here for 30 years, and think you’re an idiot for not knowing them, so say something safe and true like, "Good morning, my name is so and so and I’m afraid I don’t know your name." Something like that. Try it.

Then invite them to coffee hour, introduce them around. We will soon have special packets for visitors, so you can be sure they get one. Invite them back. Then, pray for them. Pray that they find the Church God wants for them; and then keep an eye out for them. That will do just fine for a start.

(By the way, no program of evangelism will work unless it is based upon and surrounded by prayer; and I ask your prayers for every step of this one. In order to help that along, St. Mary’s will be beginning daily Morning or Evening Prayer (we haven’t decided which one yet, but we’ll know by next week) in the Chapel, Monday through Friday. The first day will be October 7—the day the ads start showing up. And we will continue for as long as we feel called to it. Everybody is invited.)

So, we are at the beginning a major project. The advertising will be fun, there is some good stuff in it and, as a result of the blitz, folks around town will be paying some special attention to us. You have your invitation cards and the request for prayerful consideration.

As to results, here are two points. On the one hand, if anything at all is to come of this—it is up to you—to inviting and welcoming. So, let us dig in and see what we can with these. On the other hand, (which is the big hand) anything at all that comes from this will be up to God. He is calling us to this experiment in reaching out; He is financing it for us, and He will make happen what needs to happen. We need to do what we are called to do, and then keep our eyes open for what God is up to.

First of all, this is one of those parables where the writer, here it is Matthew, takes a story of Jesus and re-works it for his own purposes. (You can see the original parable, the one Jesus told, in Luke.) What Matthew does is sort of soup up the story so it isn’t exactly a street-legal parable any more. Instead, it’s an allegory of salvation history—a way of telling what Matthew sees as the central movement of God’s actions and plans for all of human history. Since it’s an allegory and not a parable, we don’t need to bother too much about whether the details of the thing make sense the way they do with reguar parables. So you don’t need to worry about how the king keeps dinner warm while he makes war against the first set of invited guests, destroys their city, and then has the banquet in that same city pretty much on the same day. That sort of thing is no problem for an allegory.

That’s because the first guests stand for Israel, the first two sets of slaves who issue the invitation are the prophets of the old covenant, and the city that is destroyed is Jerusalem. So a little literary inconsistency is swallowed right up in the sweep of world history. The next time around, the slaves who are sent into the main streets to invite just anybody are the Apostles, the followers of Jesus after the resurrection, who brought together the Church. And the Church, Matthew well knew, was filled with both good and bad, righteous and unrighteous, deserving and undeserving. Did you notice how these slaves are told not to judge, not to distinguish, but to invite everyone. Everyone mean everyone, good, bad and indifferent. This is a very different crowd from the expected one. Still, the wedding hall filled with guests, all sorts of guests. This precise moment in the story is Matthew’s present—the world as he knew it. This was the Church.

Matthew believed that, in spite of the words of the prophets and of John the Baptist, Israel had repeatedly ignored God’s invitation to his great messianic banquet, the banquet for his son, for Jesus. So the Church is formed by the Apostles—those slaves who are sent to everybody else, to the lower classes, to the gentiles, to the ones who had been ignored—and they are told not to judge, but to invite. Judgment was reserved for later. That was the way things were when Matthew used this parable of Jesus to tell the story of salvation history.

What happens next is big. Real big. What happens next is the end of all things, the second coming, the final judgment—the King arrives; and the King comes, apparently for the first time, to see his guests; to see who has managed to stumble or to be dragged into the party.

Now, at this point, everybody becomes real interested in the poor schmuck who gets tossed out. All sorts of things have been written about why he gets the boot—which has to do with guessing what the reference to a wedding robe, or a wedding garment, meant back then. (In fact, nobody really knows, and also, in fact, it doesn’t matter—I’ll get to that second ‘in fact’ in a minute) Since nobody really knows what a wedding robe meant the guesses have run amuck, and have included everything from ordinary clean clothes to a robe everybody had hanging in their house if they would only take a second to pick it up, to the white garments often given to newly baptized Christians.

Some interpreters even say the problem is the guy’s silence, not his clothes, while others like to talk about an inner state or condition. Some say the wedding robe it is the ‘garment of good works’; while St. Augustine said that it was "love that springs from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a genuine faith". (In Augustine’s case, at least, it is easier to believe that this poor guy didn’t have it than it is to believe that everyone else did.)

Anyway, my favorite of all the theories is that the wedding garment was a was a robe that the host gave to the guests as they arrived, and that the guests then put on over whatever else they were wearing. There is some pretty good evidence for this understanding, and it fits with what Matthew is talking about.

Remember, what is happening here is not really an example of Palestinian social customs. Concern for accurate detail has gone out the window. This is the final judgment. Matthew is saying that even though the Church is filled with good and bad alike, and even though the Apostles who call people to the Church are not themselves to judge and are not themselves to exclude, and even though absolutely everyone is invited and absolutely everyone is handed all they need both to be properly dressed and to have a great time at the party, even though all of that, still—sooner or later, the King is going to arrive in person, and you gotta be able to say no.

You have to be able to reject the invitation, to ignore the robe—otherwise, you don’t really matter. The guy who refuses to put on the garment given him at the door becomes a symbol for everyone invited to the feast who none the less declines to participate. It’s about just saying no to God—not about some weird over-reaction to wearing the wrong outfit.

And it is important that we have this choice, that we have the freedom to say no, to refuse to put on the garment handed us at the door, and so take our chances on outer darkness. If we can’t do that, if we can’t say no, then we can’t really say yes, either, and we are just sheep rounded up into a gilded pen. Our humanity, our freedom, our very dignity, these demand that we have what the king gave that total idiot in the story—which is the opportunity to walk away from the greatest gift he could imagine, a gift he had in fact already been given; and the opportunity to be thrown out to the best place he could possibly be, the place he already was.

I’ll admit, he had to work at it—he was given all sorts of chances; but the King would not take away his chance to say no, the king would not treat him as someone whose actions did not matter, and whose choices did not matter.

Like I said, it’s the darndest parable. It is Matthew’s telling of the whole story, from the beginning of Israel to his guesses about the final judgment. So, of course, the story is mainly about invitations—about God’s constant, persistent, and repeated invitation to God’s great party. That’s what happens most. So, who knows about our stubborn friend hanging around in the outer darkness. The parable hints that the character of the King is such that, sooner or later, he just might send a slave or two out that direction to issue, as he did with his first set of guest, one more set of invitations.

And my hope is that there is a way these lessons can speak to these current realities. And perhaps there is; but how that can happen is neither easy nor clear. Sometimes, scripture can inform us pretty directly about what we are to do, about what is right. It can clarify ambiguities, simplify choices, and give us a clear path to follow. Sometimes it can do this; but not this time.

At other times, instead of giving us answers and directions, the Bible gives us something that is at least as valuable—sometimes it gives us questions, good questions, solid questions—the sort of questions we have to struggle through before we can ever hear answers, or see any path clearly. In fact, the Bible is generally better at giving us good questions than clear answers, especially for the complex things that are going on in our world and our lives. Sometimes that’s how the Bible helps, it gives us wonderful questions. But not this time.

What the Bible gives us this time, as we hear scriptures filled with politics and war and taxes and deception and hardship and malice during a time of politics and war and taxes and deception and hardship and malice, what the scriptures offer us is the best it has to offer: It gives us stories.

Today we hear two true stories about who God is and how God has treated his world, stories that can give us both a different perspective and a fresh view of the world. And, in subtle but real ways, this can matter, this can bring real light and real hope, to the things we face, and the choices we have to make.

The first story is the story of Cyrus. Here’s what was going on: The year was around 540 BC. Israel was in exile in Babylon, and things were grim, truly grim. There seemed only one possible hope—that God would raise up an anointed shepherd, a messiah (that’s what the word ‘anointed one’ means) who would destroy Babylon and lead Israel triumphantly back to Jerusalem. There was much speculation about this promised anointed one—but everyone agreed that he would be a Jew, of the house of David, and that his primary mission would be to serve Yahweh, the God of Israel, by redeeming his people. After all, Israel knew that its history was the only history that mattered—and whatever happened of any consequence had to be about Israel.

Then Isaiah says this remarkable thing. He says that Cyrus, a Persian, an alien, a pagan who has never heard of Yahweh and who is devoted to plenty of his own god’s—Cyrus, this great player on the world scene who is building his own empire for his own reasons, this barbarian is, Isaiah says, God’s anointed one, God’s messiah, the shepherd of Israel. He is the one who will restore Israel. ||And he does, as an apparent afterthought—once the wars were over and after the things Cyrus considered the most important were done, Israel was allowed to return to Jerusalem. Its greatest hope was made real in a way not only unpredictable, but actually antithetical to every idea Israel had about itself and about God.

It turned out that God was much bigger than Israel imagined, and was a whole lot less picky about who he would rely on, and who he would honor, than Israel had ever imagined.

What’s more, Israel wasn’t the only nation in the world that God was involved in. Still, whatever that involvement was, God always remained faithful to he chosen people—even in ways that Israel could neither imagine nor approve of. Things were just more complicated than they had seemed, and God wasn’t doing exactly what he was supposed to do. But it all worked out.

Then there is the familiar story of Jesus and the coin. Great story. The Herodians and the pharisees got together to double-team Jesus. It was a marriage of Montagues and Capulets. The Herodians were supporters of the King. They were in favor of his taxes and the emperors’ taxes and probably of anybody else’s taxes. They thought that religion was about spiritual matters, and the government should be the ones to take care of political issues like taxes and arrests and official appointments and wars and suchlike. (Needless to say, they also had a huge personal stake in this particular government.) They wanted Jesus to agree with them, and say that Caesar was the man, and that folks should listen to him and agree with him and do what he said.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, had two agendas going on here. First of all, they knew the taxes were both horribly unpopular with the common people and also that paying them required the use of Roman coins, which the pharisees considered religiously unclean—indeed blasphemous. So both the pharisees and the common people were violently opposed to the taxes, and both wanted Jesus to agree with them.

But even more, the pharisees knew that if Jesus said that paying the taxes was all right, he would be in deep trouble with the people;|| and if he said paying them was wrong, he would be in worse trouble with the Romans. (Lose/lose.) So, they figured, no matter what Jesus said, he was toast; and a pesky prophet from Galilee would be out of the picture. (It really was a good set-up.)

Jesus’ response—which hinges on the coin bearing the image or likeness of the emperor while human beings bear the image and likeness of God—is brilliant; not only because it gets Jesus out of an impossible situation, but also because it carefully avoids coming down completely on either side. Jesus insists that it is not enough to say, with the Herodians, that we must simply obey Caesar. Our primary identity, our primary image, our primary allegiance, is to God. No coin and no coercion can change that.

Still, perhaps the Lord had Cyrus in mind when he left open a loophole for paying the tax. Perhaps a pagan emperor could do more for God’s plan and God’s people than a bunch of self-righteous, power-hungry, self-satisfied, super-religious, xenophobic, pharisees and Herodians—who, for all of their piety and wit, were trying to destroy the son of God.

Things were just more complicated than they seemed, and none of the easy answers, none of the expected answers, whether of the religious leaders of Cyrus’s time, or of Jesus’, even came close. But still, in the midst of wars and rumors of wars, of foreign Kings, zealots, and the simply confused, in the midst of all of that, God was faithful, God’s promises were fulfilled, and God’s hand was moving in the most unlikely of places, and among the most unlikely of people.

Now, I don’t claim to know how these stories apply directly to the anxious complexities of the world we live in. They are neither answers nor are they allegories. But I do like being reminded that my little world, and my limited sense of God, are almost always way too small; and it is good to hear again that in spite of the very best that the worst folks can do, God’s purposes, and God’s promises, will always triumph. Always.

Also, it’s All Saints’ Sunday, the day we remember before God those who have gone before us, the great and the not so great, the remembered and the not so remembered—all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light. And so we are made especially aware of that great and invisible host that surrounds us and nurtures us, and prays with us, and, I am convinced, is closest to us as we gather around that Altar.

It’s also our very first Sunday with our very own Deacons—and we rejoice in that, and we ask your patient amusement as we work on the details and logistics of our somewhat transformed Eucharist.

Finally, and perhaps not without some connection, we have the Beatitudes, they are among the most difficult words in the New Testament; but they are also words that, none the less, are absolutely essential to understanding the faith of Jesus and the nature of God.

So we have, at least, deacons, religion, politics and money, all needing to be talked about— while the whole communion of saints is looking over my shoulder with special interest as I do it.|| I probably should have had the Deacons start preaching today, instead of the 24^th.

Anyway, let’s give it a stab.

I’ll start with the religion part. That’s the beatitudes. The beatitudes are a Biblical version of St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa. These two people are among the most admired human beings in history; and they are also among the least imitated. Everybody thinks they are swell folks, but nobody much sets out to live the life that either one of them lived.

In the same way, the Beatitudes are generally both very known and very much admired, but they are also very seldom followed or taken very seriously. They seem to be sort of the biblical version of working with the dying in the worst slums of Calcutta—admirable, but distant.

But there are some ways to begin to take them seriously. The first thing to notice about the beatitudes is that they don’t tell us what to do. There is not an imperative in there. No instructions, no orders, no commandments. Jesus doesn’t tell us to be poor in spirit or meek or merciful or a peacemaker or anything like that. He simply speaks for God. He tell us what God blesses, what God cares about, what is of real value in the Kingdom of God.

Think about this: there is no way we can know what God is like unless we are told. We can’t

figure it out from the world around us, and we can’t make it up out of our heads. We have to be told, to be shown. Jesus knew that. That’s why he gives us the beatitudes, so we can see who God considers blessed, what God thinks important. Otherwise, we just wouldn’t know. I can guarantee you, if Jesus hadn’t given it to us, we would never have come up with this particular list of what is blessed. (In fact, it might be interesting to think of what sort of list we would come up with.) So the beatitudes don’t give us orders, They give us perspective and vision; they show us the heart of God.

Who knows, maybe, just maybe, if we can see whom God blesses, we can know the way of blessedness ourselves. That’s the idea of the beatitudes, anyway. So when we start thinking about personal and ethical other issues and decisions, a good place to start is with what, and who, God sees as being blessed, as being fortunate, as being special.

So the beatitudes are handy to have around. Keep them in mind for the rest of the sermon (longer if possible; but at least that long.)

Then there is the election day after tomorrow. Now, it is not the task of the Christian Church or the Christian faith to rear up and tell you how to vote. Life is not that simple and preachers are not that smart. But the Christian Church and the Christian faith do have a couple of things to say about your vote.

The first is to use it. Christians are called to be deeply engaged in the common life of the larger community. There are no compelling Christian reasons for political apathy or sloth.

One of the truly wonderful thing about St. Mary’s is that we have such a high level of this engagement. This place has a wonderful history of involvement in the political life of our community and beyond—involvement not limited to any single party or issue or level of government. This is something we can all rejoice about, this is something we can all be proud of. In fact, it feels very strange to have an election without a candidate for something from our parish.

So the first thing about your vote is to use it. But that’s not enough. Don’t just use it, use it as an expression of your faith. Think about it, and pray about it, and look at the political choices you are called to make in the light of what you believe the Christian faith teaches and the Lord requires of you. I’m talking here about method, about the way you come at it, not about the conclusions you come to. We should all come at it the same way, prayerfully, faithfully, trying very hard to have our faith shape our decisions; and so we should all have reason to respect one another. We will not all come to the same conclusions, we will not all do the same thing, but we are all called make what we believe central to what we do. Doubtless, the beatitudes are well worth listening to here.

Almost exactly the same two things can be said about issues of Stewardship, about giving money. It is no more my job to tell you exactly what to give than it is to tell you exactly how to vote. But the Church does have pretty much the same things to say. The first, again, is do it.

Both the Holy Scriptures and our tradition insist that giving is an essential part of what it means to be religious people. There are no compelling Christian reasons for apathy or sloth when it come to this, either. Giving back to God out of gratitude for what we have received is simply one of our primary opportunities for spiritual growth. The first thing there is to say is to do it.

The second thing, as with voting, is to make what you do an expression of your faith. Think of what you believe the Christian faith teaches and the Lord requires of you. We should all come at this the same way, also, prayerfully, faithfully, trying very hard to have our faith shape our decisions. What your grandparents did, or what so-and-so over there did, or what you did once before does not cover all the bases in what to do with your vote or your pledge.

Once more, the beatitudes are handy to around, and they are well worth listening to here, as well.

Politics, money, religion—it all does go together. We are called to make decisions and to act—and to do so faithfully and with integrity—as expressions of what we believe. This is not always simple or easy; and we will not all do the same thing or agree with one another all the time. But that’s all right. We are seldom if ever called to be in some sort of lock-step total single mindedness in such matters. But we are always called to make decisions and to act—and to do so faithfully and with integrity. And we are also given some hints about God, about what God values, about whom God considers blessed, and about what God considers important. And that is part of the mix, too.

Renew Baptismal Vows.

Now, this is a little dicey, because in my sermon last week I said a word or two about the stewardship of our finances, and to say anything about that again today is to threaten to raise out of the depths the horrible specter, the great accusation, the unspeakable offence—the charge that the church talks about money all of the time. Ouch—how we preachers, and doubtless you hearers, shudder at that possibility.

Well, it isn’t true. We don’t talk about money all of the time. Do you want to know who talks about money all the time? I’ll tell you who: Wal-Mart, that’s who. Yeah, you can’t even get out of the place with anything they have to offer without somebody talking to you about money. Every time. And do you know who is even worse? The movie theaters—they won’t even let you in without talking about money, and talking about it pretty seriously. (Then there is the popcorn thing, but I won’t even go there. And let’s please not get started on taxes.) The Church doesn’t talk about money nearly as much as any of these folks do.

And furthermore, do you want to know who else talks about money all the time—Jesus, that’s who. Jesus talked about money over and over. Whether it’s the price of lamp oil or the business of the camel and the needle or the persistent insistence that where your treasure is, there your heart is also–Jesus is always in our face about the subject. In fact Jesus talked about money more than about any other subject except perhaps the kingdom of heaven, and he often talked about both at the same time. Now, I’m not certain he’s up to Wal-Mart standards, but Jesus sure talked about money more than the Church does.

So there are a bunch of places that talk about money lots more than we do; and I hope I can get away with saying just a bit about some of the same reasons that both Jesus and Wal-Mart have for bringing up the subject. I’ll talk about the less important reasons first, the ones that have to do with Wal-Mart. This is about running this place, and the simple fact is that our parish costs, roughly, $547.54 a day to operate, and well over 90% of that comes from our pledges and gifts.

Now, that really seems like a lot, but it’s actually pretty tight given, on the one hand, the size and complexity of our physical plant (ask Ed about tending 9 air conditioning and heating units, a Rectory, and a parish plumbing system that has more twists, turns, complications and problems with aging than three-week-old spaghetti) and, on the other hand, with our operations—the increases in postal rates, the mess with health and property insurance, and the decrease in interest rates have done the same things to us as they have to you. All of this is just about staying open day by day.

And we don’t exist just so we can exist, although I am convinced having St. Mary’s Church here—having the word preached and the sacraments administered, is a good thing, for us and for Big Spring. But as the Church we exist for more, we exist to fulfill our mission. That is a much bigger deal, and it involves much more than just keeping the doors open. In fact, as a part of all this, our Vestry has committed itself to the goal of using half of what we spend on ministry outside of ourselves. We are already well past half way to that goal, and we will do even better next year.

So we need your help to operate, and, while some of that operation is simply keeping the doors open, (as important as that is) much of it is also outreach into our community, our diocese, and beyond.

(By the way, the closing of St. Mary’s School will not free up any money for parish use. In fact, it may make parish resources necessary for many financial responsibilities that had been covered previously by the School itself; so there is no help there.)

Those are some of the Wal-Mart reasons for talking about money, reasons that have to do with paying bills and staying in operation—and for us that means doing ministry. These matter, but they are not the most important reasons to talk about money. The most important reasons are the ones Jesus gives—and the heart of this is that Jesus is convinced that our money, and what we do with our money, is nothing less than the gateway to our souls, to our character as Christian people.

Now, it’s easy to get this wrong. For example it can be tempting to use all these readings we just heard as some sort of ominous suggestion that the end is at hand and we had better get on the stick and buy our oil now before it’s too late (can you see how this could make a whiz-bang stewardship sermon?)

But that’s not the point at all. We don’t ever buy anything from God by how we use our money—we don’t buy favor or love or preference or forgiveness or the generous overlooking of a particular failing. We don’t buy anything like that from God. We already have all of that from God, and we already have a whole lot more. In fact, everything we have begins with God’s gifts to us, and flows from God’s gifts to us.

To be sure, our own hard work, insight, wisdom and the good sense to stay away from dot-coms all have something to do with what we have. But if we are honest and push it just a little, we can see that what we have comes to us as gift of God.

How we use the stuff we have will determine whether these gifts enrich us as human beings in the eyes and presence of God Almighty, or whether they impoverish us as human beings in the eyes and presence of God Almighty.

That’s why Jesus talks so much about money, and about giving, and about the dangers of riches. Jesus wants the disciplines we have about the things in our lives, including our money, to make us people whose central relationship to our stuff is a relationship of gratitude and thanksgiving, rather than one of anxiety and fear. In this way, our stuff, including our money, can help us become the person God created us to be.

That’s really why giving—disciplined, thoughtful and prayerful giving—is so important; why it’s good for us. It is behavior that reflects what we Christians believe—and so it helps shape us into the people God wants us to become.

Unlike Wal-Mart, God loves us, and wants for us the very best. Jesus talks a lot about money because he is passionately concerned that we celebrate and enjoy and respond thankfully to the Father for all the Father’s goodness. And Jesus wants our stuff to become a means for that thankful response, and not an impediment to it.

That’s really why the Church has to talk about money. We have to remember God’s great love and generosity to us, and we have to learn to respond to that love and generosity in ways that are good for us. So, remember the catered Stewardship dinner this Wednesday at 6:30 in the Parish Hall—Canon Magers is a wonderful speaker, and it will be a great time to get together. But even more, remember what God has given you, and seek prayerfully his leading in your response to our stewardship campaign this year.

Pentecost XXVI, November 17, 2002, Install Deacons

This is to the Deacons, (so the rest of you listen real close). Once upon a time the great Zen master Susa was standing with his friend at the top of a tall tower. In the distance, Susa’s friend saw a line of Saffron-robed monks walking toward them. "Look, he said to Susa, holy men". "Those aren’t holy men", Susa replied, "and I can prove it to you." So they waited in silence until the line of monks was directly below them, then Susa leaned over the tower and said "Hey, holy men!" and they all looked up at him. Susa turned to his friend and said, "See." (Yeah, it takes a second.)

Don’t look up. As one of you said your Ordination Examination, you are not going to look, feel or smell much different than you did before. Your ordination has not put you on some higher spiritual or theological level from the rest of the congregation. That’s not what it’s about at all. In fact, to repeat once more one of my most pastoral and nurturing points [hat, inside joke] it’s not about you. None of it is. Not the four years of discernment, study and preparation, not the cost in money and effort and time away from your family and your lives, not the compassionate formation of your directors, not the examinations and evaluations and book reports and doubts and additional examinations and the extra retreats and the surprise reading;|| and finally not even the glorious morning of your Ordinations and your subsequent assignment by our Bishop as Deacons for St. Mary’s parish, (under the gentle supervision of its learned Rector); none of that is about you. (Now, this is not to deny that things are different for you now, and that your lives will never be the same, they are and they won’t be. But that’s not the point.) The point is that none of this is fundamentally about you. Never forget that. That’s to the Deacons. Now to you.

Instead, all of that stuff I described and alluded to is really about you, it’s about us, about everybody else here, and it’s about the Church we belong to and the Lord whose very own we are.

All that these three did is about us, and for us, so that they can help us be who God will have us be.

You all know about Big Spring, about our community, and you all have a pretty good idea that there is a lot of hurting, and a lot of need, and a whole bunch of problems in and around this city of ours, and in and around the world we live in. We know about that, a little or a lot. But most of the time we either stay away from it, or we leave it outside the church door. It occurred to me the other day that I have been North of the tracks on official parish business fewer than a dozen times in the last nine years. I’m talking about all of us.

And the needs and the hurts in our community are not getting better. First of all, the demographics of the place continue to change dramatically. At the same time, the painful closing of St. Mary’s School, the recent lay-offs and other cuts at the refinery, the drought, the fact that Solitare still isn’t back in production, the levels of poverty, illiteracy, and real desperation in our community, all of these are signs to us of needs which the Lord calls his Church to confront in ways both physical and spiritual, both practical and visionary, both concrete and prayerful. All of that is real, and we, each and every one of us (not particularly them) we are called by God Almighty to be his servants to this community and to its needs.

We even got together a few months ago and discovered our mission statement. It is a splendid statement. It begins a way no other mission statement I have ever read begins, it begins by saying "Our mission is to reach out". We say of ourselves that, as a parish, we don’t start with ourselves, with our own stuff. As St. Mary’s, we begin with others. That’s who we say we are. And there is much truth to that; we do this. But we are not as good at this as we can be and as we should be and as we are called to be; and we are not as good at this as by the grace of God and through what is beginning today, we will be.

The choir has a wonderful anthem this morning, but I want to make it very clear that that anthem is not for or about our new Deacons. It is for and about us; about you and me.

Each of us is called by our Baptism to be servants, and today and throughout eternity each of us will stand before God with that call. No one, least of all a handful of beginner Deacons, can take away from us either that call, or the divine judgment that call to ministry will bring us. That’s to you all, to us.

This is to the Deacons: You see, guys, it’s all about them; it’s all about this parish and God’s Church, and their call to ministry and mission. All the work & struggle that has brought you here as our Deacons has brought you here for three reasons: first, to love us as the people of God you are called to work among; second, to serve us, humbly (really, humbly) as images, as icons, of Christ himself; and so, finally, to help lead us into that ministry of service the Lord has given us.

You are not here to make my life any easier, and I do not fear for a moment that you will. You are not here to do ministry in the name of, or for the sake of me, or of St. Mary’s. You are not here to do one single thing that I or the Vestry, or the congregation in general is doing, or is supposed to be doing. You are not cheap office help, you are not surrogates, and you are not hired guns.

Instead, you are here to make us more than we would be without you. You are here to make us more aware of the needs around us; more responsive to those needs, more alert to the presence of Christ in our neighbor, and more blessed by knowing and serving that Lord, than we would have been without you. You are to be leaders, and to find leaders, and to get out of the way of leaders—so that St. Mary’s can truly exist for the sake of those who are mostly outside those doors back there. You are to help us make the sign above those doors ever more true.

You are here as our Deacons, not because you are any better or any more holy or any smarter than you used to be or than we are; instead, you are here because we need you. We need the fulness of Apostolic ministry. We need your special gifts, to help us become the people we are called to be. And we need you to dance that line between the church and the world so the distance between them may be healed; and that God will be glorified in your dance. It’s not about you, it’s about us.

Now, it is customary at Ordinations and at Installations to give a charge, to have the central persons stand up and get told some things to do.

The Deacons got good and charged by the Bishop at Convention, and if you missed it, his sermon is on the Diocesan Web site. So you three stay seated.

I want the rest of us to stand, everybody, to receive a charge at the Installation of our new Deacons. So stand up: My charge to you is simply to let it happen. Let these people love you; and let them serve you; and above all, let them lead you, deeper into the lives of service we are called to live. They’re good. Watch them; listen to them carefully; consider prayerfully what they have to say; and remember the vows we are all going to renew in just a moment. Let it happen; and try to help. Do that; and I promise you that, over time, wonderful and exciting and new and troubling and difficult things are going to happen here. I promise. (Be seated).

One more thing, when the service is over, not just this one, but every Sunday Eucharist from now on, (at both 8 & 10:30) when the service is over the Deacon will walk down the aisle, carrying the Gospel book, as a sign of our call to carry the gospel into the world. And the Deacon will point toward that door, that sacred entry into the world, which is the place of service, and the Deacon will send us out that door to love and serve the Lord. When that happens, when the Cross and the Deacon and the rest of us walk out, I want you to turn around, to follow them with your bodies and with your eyes, so that we will all be looking outward as the service ends, and so be pointed in the right direction. (Just as, walking into church, we are facing inward, toward the Altar, and pointed in the right direction.) Let’s do that, let’s face our new Deacons, and give them the gift of our attention, as they begin their ministry among us.

Now, I’m through, but I do ask that you set the blue booklets aside for a moment and open the red Prayer Books to page 292, so we can, together, renew the most significant vows we or they have ever made. After all, it’s not about you, it’s about all of us.

Renew Baptismal Vows.

Telling the story, that is the most important. Somehow, in the doing of this, we connect, both with ourselves and with God, in the most powerful of ways. In doing this we establish who we are, and whose we are.

Today we begin Advent; the wise men have started their journey toward Bethlehem, and so have we. We begin one more time to tell our story as Christian people, and so to join ourselves ever more closely to that story.

During the course of the Liturgical year that begins today we will hear and talk about God’s wonderful gift of himself: first, of his coming among us in Jesus at Christmas; then we will hear about his Baptism and his ministry; and, beginning in Lent and Holy Week, we will hear again the great saving acts of his suffering, death and resurrection.

One way to look at it is that from Advent to Easter we will hear about Jesus, and shape our worship and our prayers around the details of his life. Then, in the long season after Pentecost, we hear from Jesus; we follow his words and his actions through the perspective of one of the Gospels.

In this way, over the course of the year, we once again tell our story—the story of God’s love. Now, that’s not all we do—we also light the fire, and we have the sacred space, and we know the ancient prayers. But all of that is extra, all of that is glorious, holy abundance, all of that is really here to help us do what we must do, and that is tell the story, and so let it sink slowly into our very bones.

After all, the whole goal of the Christian life is to join our lives, our story (and the story of our community), to the life, the story, of Jesus—to both his earthly life, for he is our model or what it looks like to be a human being—and to his eternal life, for he is also our savior.

Now, in a way, indeed in a very important way, that joining of our lives to his life has already happened to us at our baptism. But that great gift needs unwrapping, and we are called by God, and given His grace, so that we might live into the reality of our Baptism by bringing together these two stories

Advent, and the structure of the Christian year, is one way to help us do that, one way to tell the story. At the same time, within the context of this annual cycle, we also have times, week in and week out, where the same thing happens. In just a few minutes we will say the Creed, which (among other things) is the life story of God, and of what God has done, and what God will do and what God is doing, with us and with all creation.

And then, at the Altar, in the prayer of consecration, we again tell the same story—we again tell of God’s unfailing love, and of his unrelenting search for us, and of that sacrifice which is the greatest expression of His love. Over and over, week in and week out, year in and year out, we do what the great Rabbis in Wiesel’s story do in order to find the presence and gift of God, we tell the story.

Which brings us, in a funny sort of way, to the really weird readings we use to begin our year, the telling of our story. There is Isaiah who is really on a roll, talking about God tearing open the heavens and bringing himself and his Judgment to the people. Then there is Jesus, sounding pretty un-Jesus-like, talking about the end of all things and the stars falling from the sky and the whole creation being shaken and destroyed—of heaven and earth passing away.

If you think about it, these lessons hardly seem the most sensible way to begin our story. It seems that either the birth of Jesus, or even the creation story from the first chapters of Genesis, with words like "let there be light" would be a better choice for opening day than "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light". But actually they aren’t. This talk about the end, which is rich with mystery and allegory and hyperbole, this is really the way to begin.

Look at it this way, there are lots of folks who like to read mystery novels, and thrillers of whatever sort, by looking first at the last chapter or two, just to find out how it all turns out—who done it, and who survives, and what gets blown up and what doesn’t, and who marries whom and all of that. Such readers say, and I know it’s true, that knowing all about the ending in advance puts a whole different perspective on the book, and makes it, for them anyway, more enjoyable. Well, that’s what’s going on here.

We begin Advent, we begin telling our story, by reminding ourselves how it all turns out, how it all ends. And make no mistake about it, this is good news—because it all ends with God.|| We don’t have the last word, the world around us does not have the last word, the powerful and the great don’t have the last word, the government doesn’t have the last word.

God has the last word. And God loves us, and seeks us, and will not be content without us. So the last word, no matter how dramatically spoken, is always a word of love and of hope. Always. In interesting language, that’s what we heard today.

So we begin again this Advent—we light the fire, we come to the special place, we say the ancient prayers, and most of all, we tell the story. And we know how the story ends, it ends with God; and if we hear that, and let it sink into us, then it can give a different perspective to the other parts of the story—to the other parts of our own personal story, and to the different parts the story of our faith. So we can tell our story, and live our story, with confidence and with hope, for the last word is God’s, and God is love.

I love nativity scenes, and our house is full of them—and, like we do here, at home we put the pieces out gradually, through Advent, so that it is only tonight that the manger is filled, everyone is gathered around the infant, and this moment is complete.

This year I noticed something about these scenes, something that had not struck me before. The manger or the cradle is always a bit distant, set apart from everyone else, often the center of an adoring circle; the child is alone and everyone stares with wonder and reverence at the tiny miracle. And that makes sense. After all, we know, in ways as real as we are, that this is God we are looking at—really God—the creator, the sources of all value, and of all power. So we look from a distance, and, we wonder. Also, as we stand a few steps away from the manger God is pretty tame. Safely tucked away, this child can be both cute and benign; unthreatening and compelling—a question mark in swaddling cloths. He does nothing and asks nothing. He just lies there (and, if you believe the Christmas carol, no crying he makes; but we all know better than that).

The baby, just lying there, raises its own version of the question any and every baby raises—what will he be like when he grows up? What sort of person will this tiny bundle of potential become? But of course here there is more, because as we look at the manger we are also wondering "what sort of God will this be?" What is really happening here, what is being given, what is being revealed?

I want to talk about that for just a minute tonight using this icon, the Eleousa, or Virgin of Loving Kindness, and some of Archbishop Rowan Williams’ reflections on it, as places to begin. Even though this is sort of a Christmas picture—here are Mary and the baby Jesus—this icon is really all about what God is like when he grows up; and what we are like as Mary, as St. Mary’s, as we try to grow up with the child in the manger.

Like all icons, you gotta look at it, and look at it carefully, in a special way. Look first at what Jesus is doing—at what God is doing. He is all over her.

There is an abandon to Jesus’ affection that is almost disconcerting—in his love he is scrambling up on Mary’s lap, grabbing hands-full of her clothing, pulling himself toward her, and nuzzling his face against hers with that extraordinary hunger for sheer physical closeness that children will show for loving parents. Here is a child who cannot bear to be separated from his mother; and who reaches out with a love that is uncritical, unhesitating, and unbounded. There is a strong and pervasive sense of need in this picture, and one that seems oddly reversed.

Remember, we are Mary, St. Mary’s, and what we see in this icon, and in that manger, and in God, all of the time, is a startling, indeed an overwhelming, need and desire for us. Both this icon and the reality of Christmas are reminders to us that the love of God is all over us—as unselfconscious and undignified as the clinging child, as eager and as impulsive as the father in the parable of the prodigal son, as intense and as focused as the search for a lost coin, or the one strayed sheep.

If we keep this in mind we can almost see our own Christ child leap from the manger and reach out in loving desire toward his parents, the shepherds, the wise men, and all of creation that surround his crib and gaze at him with questioning wonder. What is this God going to be like when he grows up? He is going to be like this loving child, as desirous of us as a babe for its mother. That’s what tonight’s birth is really saying to us—it is saying that any distance between us and God is not a distance brought about by God, nor is it a distance that we create, it is only the distance we are from our own reality.

God has come to us. Like this, like this. Instead of some enormous effort to bridge the gap between our own sinful humanity and God, we have a movement—direct, intimate, and overwhelming, even embarrassing—from God to us. That movement continues, it is always there. It has much more to do with who God is than with what we do; and the opened-armed grasping of us we see in the manger and in the icon continues without interruption, and without exception. This is the way it is.

And we have to deal with it. The Shepherds and the Wise Men had it easy. They just looked and left, got back to business—still a not uncommon response when it comes to Jesus, come to think of it. But Mary, (and us, because we are Mary, St. Mary’s), Mary had to deal with what God is like when he grows up, and, again, this icon tells a bit of the theological truth about what that is like.

Take a good look at Mary now... what do you see? She is hardly radiant with joy—she is somber, questioning perhaps, with her gaze focused, not on the child, but toward us. It is almost as if Mary—so immediately and powerfully aware of the love that grasps for her and holds her in it’s arms, is herself burdened by the knowledge of this love. As in most such icons, Mary holds the Lord in such a way as she offers him, and the love he brings—to us. She is the Theotokos, the god-bearer, the one who holds the Lord, and yet does not possess him, but makes him present to us as well.

Mary asks us if we are willing to do what she is doing—she asks us to bear with her (and to offer with her) the gift and the weight of God’s love that has descended to the world in Jesus. She asks that we put ourselves in this picture, and that we join her as willing recipients of the love that the angels sing, and the others witness. She asks us to take the babe, who is God grown up, into our arms, and to allow ourselves to be open to his embrace, and in the doing of that, to reveal him to all who see us.

This is the challenge that Christmas brings us—to take the child and hold him as Mary does, to recognize and welcome in this person the presence of God’s unqualified love; to accept that love personally; and then to offer this person, and this love, to a world that is literally dying for not recognizing what is closer to it than it’s own self.

The good news of Christmas, the fact of God’s relentless love and his shameless humility in offering that love to us, this Good News becomes our good news as we begin to be St. Mary; as we begin, however tentatively, however delicately, to hold the one who reaches out for us, and to love back the full-grown God, who offers us himself, with all the abandon of a child, and all the power of creation itself.

Come, let us adore him.

I like it when we have two Sundays after Christmas—because we get to hear today’s Gospel, which gives us a pretty clear answer to that question. ||What happened to the baby Jesus? We just heard. He’s on the run down in Egypt or some such place, pretty well forgotten, waiting for a better time. King Herod tried to kill him, but he missed that and hurt a lot of innocent children instead. But he did run Jesus out of town. ||That’s what happened to the baby Jesus: that’s what happened then, that’s what’s happening now. And it makes sense—it made sense then and it makes sense now.

Herod the Great was quite a guy. He ruled Judea for over thirty years. He was ruthless, cunning, murderous, obsessive, cruel, somewhat mad (toward the end), and paranoid to the point of having his own children killed. But he wasn’t stupid.

He knew something the world and its rulers have always known. He knew that there could only be one king, he knew that there could only be one absolute ruler. He intended to be that King, and he would put up with no competition. Palestine wasn’t big enough for both of them, and Herod would stop at nothing to preserve his absolute rule over his turf. So he called out the troops and went to war. Against a child. That didn’t bother Herod either. He knew children grew up, and he did not want this one to do that. Let that baby out of the manger, Herod knew, and he will start making demands. (Besides, children always suffer when kings set out to insure their power.)

That is what happened then. It worked fairly well. For the rest of Herod’s life, (which, by the way, he did not enjoy very much) Jesus was a long way away and didn’t bother him. Business went on as usual, and it was just as if Christmas had never happened.

Now, the story of the flight into Egypt has many levels of meaning—and Matthew doubtless recorded it because he was very interested in showing how Jesus, in his own life, fulfilled the prophecies and re-lived the whole experience of the people of Israel. So Matthew pays a lot of attention to things like this parallel between our story today and Joseph’s the Patriarch’s flight into Egypt and Israel’s Exodus into the promised land. But there is more to this story than some similarities with Old Testament themes. This story also talks about why Christmas cards are now on sale for half-price, and why snowmen have replaced Bethlehem both on postage stamps and in store windows.

Just like Herod, we drive Jesus into Egypt, or someplace far away, and we do it for pretty much the same reasons. There is still only room for one king. Like Herod, we sense that it is dangerous to let this child grow up; it is dangerous to let him past infancy,; it is dangerous to keep him around much after Christmas Day. So we assign Jesus to a sort of theological never-never land where he and Peter Pan can play all of the time—and never grow up.

And we get Christmas over with fast. By noon on December 26 front lawns are cluttered with used trees and both radio and TV stations are back to their usual fare. (Actually, that part’s not too bad).

Like King Herod, we know that if we let this baby grow up he will start asking hard questions, and making difficult demands, and leading us into uncomfortable places. And, also like Herod, we want to rule absolutely.

While we don’t have kingdoms, we do have our turf—things like our future, and our time and our families, and our bodies, and our lives, and our money, and so on. These we want to rule, and rule absolutely. Any pretenders to our little thrones are as much a threat to us as they were to Herod. We know that, if we let Jesus grow up, then our local kingdoms are under siege, our power is challenged, and our future is not our own. So we try to insure that this does not happen.

We don’t have armies at our command—but we will muster what resources we do have, and set out to protect ourselves. These days our weapons tend to be indifference and ‘realism’ instead of swords; but they are still pretty effective. (Ever hear anybody say "Christmas is really for children"?—That’s one of our ways of keeping Jesus in never-never land.) And thus we drive him into some distant place—some out of sight Egypt where he won’t bother us and we can continue as if Christmas never really happened. The baby Jesus doesn’t grow up; he just vanishes like a nativity set stored in an attic.

And there are casualties. The Holy Innocents, those children slaughtered by Herod as he tried to get Jesus out of his life, are still with us. Consider this—the people we hurt, the people who suffer because of us (and we ourselves are often one of these) such people tend to be the casualties of the battles we fight to insure that we and no one else, are in charge of our lives, and of our turf.

Again, we are like Herod. While we cannot destroy the Lord, we can hurt a lot of folks as we try. And, also like Herod, we can keep him away, we can keep him in Egypt—on other roads, waiting for a time to return. We do have that power. He will appear to wait in the exile we impose, until word arrives that he is welcome to return.

It’s still Christmas, and we need to remember that. But we do not continue to celebrate Christmas if we do nothing but sit around and ogle the baby. We continue to keep Christmas by keeping him around, by letting him grow up, and by paying attention to who he is, and what that means. Herod felt Jesus would cost him his kingdom. In a way Herod never understood, he was right. A part of us—and a big part of our world—fears that Jesus will cost us our little kingdoms—our absolute rule over that which we call mine. We are right.

To continue to keep Christmas means to surrender to this strange king who demands our lives and promises us more; who comes with neither armies nor swords, but who cannot be destroyed; and who calls us to himself with a love we cannot believe until we experience it, and which we cannot experience fully until we trust. He may be in Egypt—but at a word from us, he will come home.

It’s Visitors’ Sunday, a day we have encouraged parishioners to invite their friends and neighbors to St. Mary’s, to share with us our worship this Sunday. The first thing I have to say is welcome, to all of you who are newcomers and visitors, and thank you for being our guests today. We are truly glad to have you with us.

Because it’s a different sort of day, I’m going to do a different sort of sermon—not really a sermon exactly, but a talk about us, about the Episcopal Church, about who we are and what we believe. As always on the first Sunday after Epiphany, the Gospel reading tells the story of the Baptism of Jesus—which is a story about identity, about who Jesus is, and who we are. At his Baptism Jesus is named the beloved child of the Father, and at our baptism we are named exactly the same thing. Now, I am totally convinced that if we really believe this, that we are the beloved of the Father, if we let it sink down into our bones and rise to the top of our consciousness, if we do that, our lives will be transformed. We are, you are, the beloved of the Father—and if you go away with nothing else from this not-quite-a-sermon, go away with this.

But what I will talk about the rest of the time is a handful of facts about the Episcopal Church. That is, I want to say five things about us as a church—enough to fill up a hand. (I tried to find a neat acronym for them, but there aren’t any vowels, and they only begin with three letters in all; so the best I could come up with was one for each finger. You can deal with that.) So, what is the Episcopal Church like?

First of all, we are a Biblical Church. We just heard four readings from the Bible, as we do every Sunday, (probably more than you would hear anywhere else in town this morning) and we are using a Prayer Book (or a worship booklet that is an exact copy of the Prayer Book) that is virtually all Scripture or paraphrase of Scripture. We believe that the Bible is the word of God and contains all things necessary to Salvation; and we insist that no Episcopalian be required to believe anything that cannot be established by