The Disreputable Kingdom

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez

Is it just me, or are you getting tired of parables too? Matthew’s Gospel contains the most parables of all the Gospels, but the fact is that most of them are the “B-side parables.” They’re not the ones you bought the record for. Those parables are all in Luke. Prodigal Son—Only in Luke. Lost Coin—Only in Luke. Rich Man and Lazarus—Only in Luke. Pharisee and the Tax Collector—Only in Luke. The Rich Fool—Only in Luke. What Matthew gives us is quantity, rather than quality. Like this morning, where we heard five short parables in rapid succession. It’s a little unnerving. Unlike the longer parables that we hear in Luke’s Gospel, these five parables, the last four of which are unique to Matthew, don’t tell a story. They don’t have an explanation attached. We’re just told, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” And it’s like so many things that it can be hard to see what they have in common, isn’t it?

There is a common thread between these five parables though, but it’s not one that you or I would easily identify, separated as we are from Jesus’ words by two thousand years. There’s some nuances that we’re missing.

To begin with, did you know that mustard was not valued as a spice in ancient Palestine? These mustard plants, which grow so quickly from such a small seed, were viewed as weeds by the people Jesus told that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. I know that some of you are avid gardeners, and you’d appreciate how Jesus’ first audience felt if I were to stand up before you this morning and begin my sermon, “The kingdom of heaven is like kudzu.” No one wants kudzu. No one wanted mustard. And the birds? Forget the birds. Just a few verses ago, when Jesus told the parable of the sower, the birds were stand-ins for the devil and his angels, snatching the word of God from people. Birds are not generally a reputable sign in the Bible.

Yeast is similarly disreputable. In fact, this is the only positive references to yeast in the Bible. Everywhere else it’s viewed as a contaminant—since you couldn’t just pick up a jar of Red Star Yeast from the corner store, you had to let old bread dough ferment to get yeast. Jesus has recently told his disciples to beware the yeast of the Pharisees, using yeast as a metaphor for false teaching. Now yeast is a metaphor for the kingdom of heaven!

The next two parables are just as bad. The parable of the treasure hidden in a field sounds good at first. The kingdom of heaven is a costly treasure, and we should sell everything we have to get it. That sounds nice. Respectable. The sort of thing you go to church to hear, right? But let’s read it again, carefully: The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells everything that he has and buys that field. What Jesus is actually describing is someone digging for buried treasure in his neighbor’s backyard. And when he finds treasure, he goes and buys the house, neglecting to tell his neighbor the property’s real value. This is a parable about someone practicing shady business, if not outright thievery.

The parable of the pearl of great price is similar. The piece we’re missing there is how Jesus audience would have viewed merchants. The merchant in this parable isn’t anything like the fine, upstanding businessman or woman of today. No, if Jesus were to tell us this parable using modern day language, he’d say something like, “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a used car salesman…” People used to assume that a rich merchant had gotten rich by cheating other people. And the kingdom of heaven is like that?

The final parable of the set is the least objectionable, and even it’s a bit fishy. There’s nothing dishonest about it, but no one really aspired to be a fisherman in those days. It was hard work, and you were at the mercy of fish. I can’t be sure about this, but there might have been a popular song back in those days, “Mommas, don’t let your boys grow up to be fishermen…”

So what are we to do with disreputable parables? What is Jesus trying to tell us? None of them describe the way that we typically imagine heaven: fluffy clouds, angels flying around strumming harps. Maybe that’s the point. Jesus isn’t talking about heaven, about some future state of bliss. Jesus is talking about the kingdom of heaven, God’s reign on earth. You know, the one we pray for: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Maybe we need that reminder that the kingdom of heaven is amongst us, here and now. It’s often in unexpected places. We should assume that it is. After all, its king was born in a manger, not a palace. Should we be surprised that we can find the kingdom among gardens and kitchens, in backyards and in used car lots, even at the end of a fishing pole? The kingdom of heaven is revealed among us, in the last places we’d choose to look. Anyone who’s served breakfast at Our Daily Bread or lunch at Paul’s Place knows that. We see Jesus in the least of these: the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The kingdom of heaven is a thoroughly disreputable place, at least by the world’s standards. But in this kingdom, all are free and all are loved, simply because all are made in God’s own image. Thank God for the disreputable kingdom of heaven, because, I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I’d make it into a thoroughly reputable one. May God give us eyes to see the kingdom of heaven already around us, and hands to help it come more fully on earth, as it already is in heaven. Amen.

Heaven is a Lot Like Summer Camp

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
Romans 8:12-25

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…

I have to wonder if Paul had summer camp in mind when he wrote those words. I’m only partly joking when I say that. I’ve just come back from a week at the Bishop Claggett Center, our diocesan camp and conference center, where I was the chaplain for the final session of camp. I’ve got the sunburn and the friendship bracelets to prove it. The Bishop Clagget Center, for those of you who haven’t been there, is a special, beautiful place any time of the year, but it really shines during the summer, when it is overrun by campers. Loud, rambunctious campers who are probably more interested,  at least at the beginning of the week, in tie dying and canoeing and the swimming pool than they are in chapel. But in spite of that, or maybe because of that, God shows up at camp in profound ways. I know that Paul wasn’t talking about summer camp when he wrote the words we heard this morning, words about how salvation is not just about a personal relationship with Jesus, something that, in other words, concerns only individual human  beings. But Paul’s vision of nature groaning for salvation does describe summer camp, and I can’t read it any other way this morning.

The theme for Camp Claggett this year was “Re-Creation: Making Things Happen with God.” All week, we focused on stories about how our God has helped God’s people begin anew, time and time again. We heard stories about how Jesus healed paralytics and the blind. We heard stories about God’s love for the children of Israel. We heard stories that invited us to become partners with God as God makes all things new, releasing creation from its bondage to decay.

That, of course, is the grand story of Scripture, a story that begins and ends in a garden. When Paul speaks of creation being subjected to futility, he is talking about Adam. When Adam sinned in Eden, God cursed the ground, subjecting it to futility, so that humanity would toil to bring forth food from the earth. Since then, Paul tells us, the very earth beneath our feet has been groaning for salvation, for a promise that the curse would be lifted. Creation has been waiting for the children of God to be revealed. Creation has been waiting for God to adopt humanity as daughters and sons. Creation has been waiting for Jesus Christ. That is why, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the Pharisees that if he silences the crowd cheering on his entrance to Jerusalem, the rocks will cry out. And still, creation waits, groaning in labor pains, for the consummation of our hope. In Christ, God has promised us that all will be made new, and yet, we wait. We wait for the end of God’s great story, which, again, will take place in a garden. In his Revelation, St. John records that the final vision he received was of a new heaven and a new earth. He saw the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, coming down from heaven. He saw God making a home with humanity in this city, in the midst of which was a garden. Through this garden runs the river of the water of life, and on the banks of this river grow twelve trees, the leaves of which are for the healing of nations. In this garden, John saw humanity once again dwelling in perfect relationship with God, just as our first parents did in Eden. And we wait, with inward groans, for the promised redemption of all creation, which will take place in this garden.

Until then, we have summer camp. At a staff meeting this past week, the camp director remarked that she was convinced that heaven is going to be like summer camp. I have to agree with her. There is something about summer camp that is special. In the midst of sunburns and homesickness, something profoundly spiritual happens. Campers begin to talk about God in beautiful and surprising ways. They request songs to be sung in chapel. They pray—oh! they pray. During a chapel service this past week, I invited the campers to write or draw their prayers on index cards, and we pasted the prayers all over the chapel walls. They were amazing prayers, the kind that only children can pray, prayers that God keep their families safe, prayers for pets, prayers for watermelon, prayers that they might be a support for parents with terminal illnesses, prayers that they might tell people about the Good News of God in Jesus Christ, prayers that God might, through them, make all things new.

We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Beloved, we do not know when that garden that John saw shall come down from heaven. We do know that we are called to work with God to make all things new. We do know that, from time to time, at places like summer camp, we catch glimpses of what heaven will be like. We do know that we are saved in hope, through Jesus Christ. The hard thing can be to remember this, to live in hope. And yet, after summer camp, everything seems a little bit more possible. During camp, one of the campers came up to me and said, “When I grow up, I am going to be a priest.” Now, I don’t know if she is going to be a priest when she grows up, but I do know that God was at work within her that moment, making all things new, beginning with her. And I know that the God who makes all things new is with us now, helping us to wait in hope, helping us to see things anew through the eyes of a child, just back from summer camp.

Amen.

When the Burden is too Heavy

Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Every year at the beginning of Lent, our preschoolers and I read Oh No, George! by Chris Haughton in chapel. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to read a bit of this story about a dog to you this morning.

Harry is going out. “Will you be good, George?” asks Harry. “Yes,” says George. “I’ll be very good.” I hope I’ll be good, George thinks. George sees something in the kitchen. It’s cake!  I said I’d be good, George thinks, but I LOVE cake. What will George do? (George eats the cake.) Oh no, George![1]

I think you can guess how the rest of the story goes. George sees Cat, who he loves to chase. George sees dirt, which he loves to dig in. George said he’d be good, but these temptations are just so tempting. And when Harry returns, George has ruined the house. George is sorry. George resolves to do better. George does do better, for a while, but the story ends with George, tempted to dig in a trash can. We don’t know what George does in the end. The book ends on a question: George?

           

We’ve all had moments in our lives that end with a similar question, haven’t we. We can will what is right, but we cannot do it. We are just like George the dog. This little children’s book is such a great illustration of exactly what St. Paul is talking about! And I get that. I understand exactly how St. Paul feels. Don’t you? Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from this body of death? Who will save George the dog from digging in the trash can?

I like to imagine that the first time Paul’s letter to the Romans was read in Rome, Pheobe, the deacon of the church in Cenchrae whom Paul identifies as the end of the letter as is bearer, whom Paul would have trained in how to read the letter, Pheobe paused at this point. Maybe she sat the scroll down. And I like to think that the depth of this question penetrated into the hearts of all of those who had gathered to hear this new letter from Paul.

Who will save me from this body of death? I ask myself this question on a regular basis. Don’t you? Now, I don’t use quite these words, but I’m still asking the same question. Sometimes I ask it without using words. One of those times occurred when I was doing my hospital chaplain internship. I was paged to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to sit with a mother as she took her newborn daughter off life support. It was awful. When you’re in a situation like that, there are no answers. The mother didn’t even ask me why God would let something like that happen. She just cried. I held her hand and cried with her. As we sat there, watching the heartbeats fade from the heart monitor, we were both crying out, with sighs too deep for words, Paul’s cry: Who will save me from this body of death?

That is the essential question of human life. Sometimes, it’s tempting to jump right over to the answer: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! But that’s not the way life works. And when we are confronted with our human frailty in a powerful way, the answer isn’t as simple as skipping right ahead to the next verse. When we are grieving as we are now over the death of John Burk, an answer is simple as “Jesus needed another angel in heaven” doesn’t satisfy. There is a real existential angst in that question, in our finite inability to do all the good we want, a finitude revealed to us in death. We don’t need pat answers. We need Jesus.

We need to hear our Gospel reading. We need to be reminded that we relate to God as children, not as adults. If we were adults, maybe we’d have this life thing figured out. Maybe we’d know how to do the good we will. Maybe we’d know the answers to give grieving people. But we aren’t, so we don’t. God has revealed these things—the Good News of God in Jesus Christ—to children. And we receive grace, the free gift of God, as children. We can’t run faster or beat our arms harder and somehow arrive at salvation. We need to be given it. And thank God, Jesus does give it to us.

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

We find rest for our weary souls when we stop trying to do it ourselves. That’s why Jesus’ yoke is easy, and his burden is light: he has shouldered it for us. Somehow, in the midst of that awful hospital room where I sat with that mother and her dying child, Jesus showed up. He showed up when I stopped trying to make things right, stopped trying to find something to say to the mother to make her feel better. I had nothing to do with Jesus showing up. He didn’t show up because someone called for a chaplain. He showed up because everyone in that room needed him, and we had stopped pretending otherwise. When that happened, it was like all the air in the room changed. It grew lighter. The mother sang “Jesus loves me” as she rocked her daughter for the last time. Somehow, in a way that I do not understand, Jesus gave us rest and comfort. Jesus let us set heavy burdens down. All there was left was a palpable sense of God’s love.

Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

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[1] Chris Haughton, Oh No, George! Somerville: Candlewick, 2012.

Finding by Losing

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez

Matthew 10:24-39

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

What are you willing to lose for Jesus? What are you afraid that Jesus will ask you to give up for his sake?

Those aren’t easy question to answer, are they? Our Gospel reading this morning isn’t an easy one to hear. It brings up disturbing questions, like: Do I love Jesus more than my mother or my father? What am I afraid of? This passage from Matthew’s Gospel is one of those bits of scripture that often gets referred to as a “hard saying of Jesus.” That’s a bit of an understatement, isn’t it? This is really challenging stuff, and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the sort of thing that you were hoping to hear when you came to church this morning. It’s certainly not what I want to hear Jesus say to me. But it is something we need to hear.

This section of Matthew’s Gospel is part of a much longer speech that Jesus gives to the twelve disciples before he sends them out on their own for the first time. Jesus is preparing them to go out to by two to preach that the “Kingdom of Heaven is near.” More specifically, he’s preparing them for their preaching to be rejected. He’s preparing them to be told that his miraculous powers come from the devil. He’s preparing them for death threats. He’s preparing them to be disowned by their families. He’s warning them: things are not going to be easy. And he’s giving them a chance to say, I’m sorry, Jesus, but you’re asking more than I can give. He wants them to know what they’re getting into.

           

You see, preaching that the Kingdom of God has drawn near often gets people into trouble, because it points out how fragile and transient human kingdoms are by comparison. Preaching the Kingdom of God, where self-sacrificial love is the basis for all authority, points out that human kingdoms are based on the domination of others. Preaching the Kingdom of God calls on people to change, and none of us like change.

These fears of being beaten, slandered, killed, or disowned were all too familiar to the community for which Matthew’s Gospel was written. They were excluded from daily life in their communities. They were shunned by their families. They were beaten and killed by the Roman authorities. The thought of losing their life for Jesus’ sake was a very real possibility.

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

It’s easy to look around today and think that Jesus’ words don’t also apply to us, not really. We’re not in any real danger of being beaten or killed for our faith. But still, when I read this passage from Matthew’s Gospel, I hear those questions at the back of my mind: What are you willing to lose for Jesus? What are you afraid that Jesus will ask you to give up for his sake? And there’s another one, one very similar to a question those first disciples had to have asked themselves: What injustice is Jesus calling me to confront?

These are still dangerous questions. In Canterbury Cathedral in England, there's a chapel dedicated to the martyrs of our own times. It’s easy to think of martyrs as people who lived long ago, people who the Romans fed to lions, but even today, people find themselves losing their own lives for the sake of Jesus. One of the martyrs honored in that chapel in Canterbury Cathedral is Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian who was martyred in Alabama in 1965. Daniels was participating in a Civil Rights protest, and he gave his own life to shield a young, unarmed African American girl from a gunman. Daniels found himself called to confront injustice in the name of Jesus Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, but in whose kingdom we are all children of one Father.

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

We’re called to live our lives with our eyes fixed upon Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith. The point isn’t to seek martyrdom, or alienate our parents, as if those things would somehow make us more lovable to God. The point is to call us to walk as Jesus walked. We know where that path ends. Jesus wants us to know that it will be difficult, but God will be with us. God whose eye is on the sparrow also watches over us. We are called to live lives that are not ruled by fear. We are called to call the powers and principalities of this present age to account, proclaiming that in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has drawn near. And, in losing our lives, we find life in Jesus. It’s a paradox. I can’t explain it. But we’ve all experienced it. We experience it in bread and wine that draw us together as one body in Jesus Christ. We experience it in water that proclaims that we are part of God’s family. We experience it in the work of this community, when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the sorrowful. In all of these things we are reminded that we do not live for ourselves. We live for one another, and for God. And once God leads us beyond concern for ourselves alone, concern for what we will eat or what we will wear, we find true freedom, true life in Jesus Christ. Amen.

God Would Like to Buy the World a Coke

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
Acts 2:1-21

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a new Coca-Cola commercial. It’s advertising Coke’s new “Friendly Twist” bottle. Coke debuted this bottle at a college in Colombia, and the commercial begins by showing freshmen on the first day of college. They’re sitting by themselves, not talking to each other. You remember how the first day of college was, don’t you? How you’re excited to be there, possibly away from home for the first time, and yet you’re also scared, because you’re so far away from all the people you know. That’s where this new Coke bottle comes in. It’s designed so that it can’t be opened on its own. Each bottle cap has two prongs that fit into another bottle cap. When you put two bottles together, you can twist off both caps. Once the college students figure it out, they are laughing, smiling, talking to one another, and drinking Coke. The commercial ends with the words, “Open a Coke, open a new friendship.” It is genius marketing. I also think it’s a pretty good analogy for Pentecost.

The typical metaphor for Pentecost that get used these days is the “Church’s Birthday.” And that’s not untrue, but our reading from the Acts of the Apostles doesn’t really sound like a birthday party to me. Does it to you? At the very least, it doesn’t sound like a good birthday party. It starts off well enough, with a small group of friends gathered in someone’s home. But then there’s this violent wind, and the next thing you know, all of the apostles and their companions are somehow out in the street in front of a huge crowd. This crowd is so big that we’re told later in chapter two of Acts, after our reading this morning ends, that three thousand people believed Peter’s preaching and were baptized. So there’s no way that it could have fit in someone’s house. But there’s no explanation of how the apostles got out into the street. There’s just the mention of the wind, with the implication that it was so powerful that it literally forced everyone out of the house.

That violent wind, which forced the apostles out of their comfortable home is, I think, the key to understanding Pentecost. There’s this understandable tendency to focus on the tongues of fire. They’re captivating and odd, and, even though it can at times be destructive, there is something comfortable about fire. Fire brings memories of summer camp bonfires, of chestnuts roasting on Christmas Eve, of birthday cakes. But wind, well, wind can’t be contained. Wind is a force beyond our control. “The wind,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, speaking of the Holy Spirit, “blows where it chooses.” (John 3:8) And that’s certainly true in West Texas, where I’m from. Every once in a while, we’ll get a wind advisory here in Maryland, and I’ll laugh a little to myself, because where I grew up, thirty or forty mile an hour gusts are normal. In West Texas, where there are no trees or hills to stop it, the wind routinely gets up to sixty or seventy miles an hour. I can remember a day where I was driving down a country road with my steering wheel turned almost all the way to the left, because if I didn’t, the wind was blowing so strong from the right that I would have ended up being blown off the road. Wind, when it is powerful, like a West Texas wind or the Wind of Pentecost, is really uncomfortable. It picks up dust and grit that pepper your skin. It can literally force you to go where it is blowing, rather than where you want to go, just like it blew the apostles out of their home.

And that discomfort brings us back to the first day of college, that uncomfortable time before we knew anyone. The genius of the new Coke bottle, the reason why the new commercial is so appealing, is because it forces us to get over the discomfort of meeting new people. It draws us into community. “Open a Coke, open a new friendship.” That is so appealing, isn’t it? And that’s what the Spirit did on Pentecost. It blew the apostles out of their comfort zone, ushering in a new thing in the history of the relationship between God and God’s people. That long list of hard to pronounce nationalities represents that new thing. Before Pentecost, the way to join God’s people was to become an Israelite. It involved a transition of nationality. You had to immigrate. But on Pentecost, as Peter proclaims, God pours the Holy Spirit out upon all people, all nations. The Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs all hear the Gospel, the story of God’s love for them, preached in their own language. They respond, and are baptized, becoming part of God’s family while still retaining their own nationality.

This is a world-changing thing. This is an uncomfortable thing. This is the Spirit ushering in new relationships, new ways of being with each other. And it is really hard for the apostles. The rest of the book of Acts is the story of these first disciples wrestling with the fact that God’s love is for everyone. God’s love is larger than any of our human divisions. God’s love transcends the four walls of this building, this beautiful space in which we gather to worship each week. And, let’s face it, that can be really uncomfortable. It would be so much easier if God’s love stopped at the door sometimes. But it doesn’t.

Pentecost can and should and must make us uncomfortable. God, through the Holy Spirit, is still calling us into new relationships, new ways of being the people of God. It is messy, and hard, and sometimes I need to be pushed out of the door by a violent wind. But thank God, each time the Spirit gives me that push that I need, God welcomes me into a greater, more inclusive way of experiencing God through the people around me. Pentecost, to borrow a phrase from another Coca-Cola ad, is a story that reminds us that God would like to buy the world a Coke. The whole world. And we’re invited to join God in this task, creating new relationships, extending the reach of our love, until the whole world is filled with the knowledge and love of God. Amen.

Grace in the Midst of a Trying Time

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

At first, it might seem as if these words from 1 Peter have little to do with us gathered here today. They were written to early Christians who were being persecuted by Rome. They were written to people who were practicing an illegal religion, who faced the threat of beating, imprisonment, torture and death. We face no such threats. We are not persecuted. We enjoy a great many privileges because we are Christians in a predominantly Christian nation. We can rest secure in the fact that whenever religion is invoked in public discourse, it will almost certainly be our religion. But, while we may not be persecuted, we do know something about suffering. Perhaps we don’t know as much as others might, but suffering is a universal fact of life. We all suffer.

And, this community has suffered in the past few months. We have had nine funerals at Good Shepherd already this year. That’s almost more funerals than we had during the entirety of last year. And that count doesn’t include the loved ones that members of this community have lost who were buried elsewhere. Our brothers and sisters in this parish are suffering and mourning. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to take Peter’s advice to rejoice in the midst of suffering.

This past week, I hit a point where I just had to come into the church to pray. Honestly, I thought that perhaps I might be coming in here to yell at God. I need to do that sometimes, and I believe that God is as able to hear my honest anger as my praise. But instead of shouting, as I knelt before the altar, I found myself singing: “Abide with me: fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord with me abide: when other helpers fail and comforts flee, help of the helpless, O abide with me.”[1] St. Augustine once said, “Singing is praying twice.” That was true for me last Thursday. Somehow those words expressed a pray I could not find the words to pray. And that prayer was an acting out of Peter’s words from our Epistle: “Cast all your anxiety on [God], because he cares for you.”

God cares for you. That’s an echo of Our Lord’s words from the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t it? “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin,yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” That is the important thing for us to remember at times like this: we are precious to God. Our suffering matters to God, no matter how little or much we may seem to suffer from some neutral, objective  perspective. It doesn’t matter if our suffering is from grief or from persecution. It is still suffering, and Christ is still suffering with us.

And that, perhaps, is why we should rejoice in suffering. Not because our suffering somehow makes us more pleasing to God, but because our suffering is Christ’s suffering, and Christ’s suffering is our suffering. We never suffer alone. Christ is with us in the midst of grief and pain, and our suffering is with Christ upon the cross. That is why Christ had to go to the hard wood of the cross, not to satisfy a blood-thirsty God, but to destroy the power that suffering and the grave have over us. Christ suffers to set us free from suffering, and Christ still suffers with us.

And we never suffer alone, because we share in the Body of Christ, the Church universal, across all time and space. The sufferings of our sisters and brothers in Christ are our sufferings. And even those of us here this morning who have not lost a loved one recently grieve for and with those who have.

As John Donne so eloquently wrote:

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all.  When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member.  And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another…

But we will not suffer forever. One day, with St. Paul, we shall cry: “O Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?” We shall see God face to face, and know that life is changed, not ended, at death. Peter promises us at, after a little while, God will restore, support, strengthen, and establish us. Our brothers and sisters in Christ will help us to bear our burdens, day by day, until we arrive one bright morning on that other shore, our earthly pilgrimage ended. Thank God for them. Thank God for the people of the Church of the Good Shepherd, in whom, in our grief, we see God and know the healing touch of God’s hand. Amen.

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[1] Henry Francis Lyte, “Abide with Me.”

[2] Matt 6:26, 28b-29

[3] John Donne, “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: Meditation XVII”

A Sermon about Unconditional Love

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
John 14:15-21
1 Peter 3:13-22

Jesus said to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”

Let’s just start out this morning by admitting that this was a terrible verse on which to begin our reading from John’s Gospel. Whenever someone begins a sentence with, “If you love me,” it never ends well. N e v e r. I am not always the smartest person when it comes to relationships, but even I know better than that. And to hear something so conditional from the lips of Jesus, something that makes it sound like the gift of the Holy Spirit is really a loan, because it’s contingent on my good behavior, well, hearing something like that could send any of us into a crisis of faith. One of those deep childhood fears that many of us still carry with us is that we will somehow do something that will make us unlovable.

This is a manufactured crises, though, because our reading this morning picks up in the middle of a very long conversation that Jesus has with his disciples after the Last Supper. Jesus isn’t dumb enough to start the conversation with “If you love me.” This week, pick up your Bible and begin with John 13 before you read John 14. It makes everything make much more sense. It makes everything sound much less panic attack inducing to me. In context, Jesus’ conversation with the disciples reduces the number of commandments from 612—the number of commandments in the Law of Moses—to one: “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” That sounds a lot more manageable, doesn’t it? Jesus isn’t telling us that we have to be perfect to love him. He’s telling us that we can’t claim to love him if we don’t love our neighbors.

Now, I’m not sure if that makes things better for me. I am going to do much better with one commandment than I am with 612, but it’s still a really hard commandment. It’s one that I struggle to keep. However, what the compilers of our lectionary got right was pairing our reading from John’s Gospel with our reading from 1 Peter. 1 Peter points us back to baptism, where our attempts at following at following Jesus began. At baptism, we either made a lot of promises to God, or we had them made on our behalf and affirmed them when we were confirmed. They’re big promises. We promised to continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship. We promised to persevere in resisting evil. We promised to proclaim the Gospel by our word and example. We promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself. We promised to strive for peace and justice among all people. But if you think back to the last baptism you attended, we don’t just say “I will” to these promises. We say, “I will, with God’s help.” We can’t keep the promises we make at our baptisms. Not by ourselves anyway. God knows this. God knows that this whole Christian life thing stretches us, that so often the thing that we know we’re supposed to do is just beyond our grasp. God knows this, and God accepts us anyway.

We don’t just do this at baptisms, for the record. We do it at ordinations, too. When Arianne and I were ordained priests, we made vows before God and the Church. We made really big commitments that we will never be able to keep perfectly on our own. That’s why, during our ordinations, the bishops who ordained us prayed that God would give us the grace we needed to keep our vows. We do this at weddings, too. After the couple has exchanged their vows, the congregation prays that God give everyone in the room the grace we need to keep the vows that each of us has made in our lives.

At each of these sacramental moments in our lives, we believe that God gives us grace. That’s what a sacrament is: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. God’s grace isn’t confined to the sacraments. It pervades every corner of our lives. The sacraments are moments when we are assured of grace, but there are other moments of grace in our lives. That grace in which we live and move and have our being is how we love Jesus. That’s how I manage to love my neighbor as myself in spite of myself. That grace is what assures us, as St. Paul says, that neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. That grace is the Holy Spirit, our Advocate, moving in our lives. That grace is the assurance that Jesus will not leave us as orphans.

In his novel, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo wrote, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” That’s why the new commandment Jesus gives us is to love one another. That’s why we will never be left orphaned, because we see God in the faces of those we love. At our baptisms, a priest dipped his or her finger into a vial of blessed oil and made the sign of the cross on our forehead. That priest spoke words of grace and promise, calling us by name and telling us that we were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as God’s own forever. Forever. At its heart, the Gospel is a story that tells us that God’s love for us is unconditional. That love, freely given, calls us to freely love. And, in doing so, we see God. Amen.