Sermons from Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

“You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1). Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2D2 2 Epiphany (Year A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 15 January 2023 Isaiah 49:1-7 Psalm 40:1-12 1 Cor. 1:1-9 John 1:29-42

The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17 Human beings are embarrassed because we are attached to our own notions of rank, order and decorum, and God, frankly, has other ideas and plans. John would have prevented Jesus from being baptized, but Jesus responded: no, "this is how we fulfill all righteousness." What God in Christ commends to us is not the exultation of stature, but service. Putting on the garments of baptism, together we can do and be a new thing to the glory of God, and for the good of all creation.

The Rev. Dr. Greg Kimura

The Rev. Dr. Greg Kimura

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C54 Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 11:00 p.m. Eucharist Saturday 24 December 2022 (also preached a L&C at 4:00 p.m.) Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-20 Imagine your existence as an hourglass, the bottom globe filling with sand until the time appointed for your life has ended. We do not know how much sand the top globe holds, how much time we have left. On this holy night when we do not have to pretend let me ask this. How are you doing? I am not talking about what you have accomplished, whether you met your expectations. I ask about your well-being.

The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C53 Christmas Eve (Proper 1) 4:00 p.m. Lessons and Carols Saturday 24 December 2022 Also preaching at 11 p.m. Mt. 2:1-1, Jn. 1:1-18 Lk. 2:1-7, Lk. 2:8-20 Isa. 7:10-14, Lk. 1:26-38 Gen. 1:1-5, Isa. 35:1-10 Merry Christmas! When I have to say something difficult or controversial from this pulpit I often look up and draw courage from this stained glass window of the warrior St. Martin. It reminds me of the people at St. Martin’s Church in Davis, California. Growing up as a boy they took me seriously. They taught me about God’s love in words and action. They gave me a chance to help and valued whatever contribution I made.

The Rev. Timothy Seamans

The Third Sunday in Advent Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Malcolm Clemens Young                                                                        Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA 2C51                                            2 Advent (Year A) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist                    Sunday 4 December 2022                                                                       Isaiah 11:1-10 Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 Romans 15:4-13 Matthew 3:1-12 Are There Reasons to Have Hope? An Introduction to the Gospel of Matthew “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that… by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15). Let me speak frankly. I see you might be the, “sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from sermons, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store.” “But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about [sermons]? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of [sermons], where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.”[1] The twentieth century novelist Italo Calvino (1923-1985) wrote these words about books and I begin here because it is human nature to be wary about hoping too much. We have been disappointed enough in the past to wonder, are there reasons to have hope? I have been reading several recently published books by authors who do not believe in God. I’m grateful to have this chance to walk with them and to try to see the world from their perspectives. Last week I finished reading Kieran Setiya’s book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. His last chapter describes hope as, “wishful thinking.” He goes on to say, “In the end, it seems, there is no hope: the lights go out.” And later in a slightly more positive vein he says, “We can hope that life has meaning: a slow, unsteady march towards a more just future.”[2] The other book is William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future about how we might try to prevent the collapse of human culture from threats like nuclear war, engineered pathogens, and runaway Artificial General Intelligence. He points out the massive amount of suffering among human beings and animals. He uses a scale from -100 to +100 to measure the lifetime suffering or happiness of an abstract person and wonders if, because of the total amount of suffering, life is even worth living. By the way the question “does life have meaning,” is not something that we see in ancient writings or even in the medieval or early modern period. The phrase, “the meaning of life” originates only 1834.[3] Before that time it did not occur to ask this question perhaps because most people assumed that we live in a world guided by its creator. Although these books might seem so different they share a common spirit. First, you may not know what to expect but it will be a human thing. There is no help for us beyond ourselves. Second, they exaggerate the extent to which human beings can comprehend and control the world. Third, they fail to recognize that there are different stories for understanding our place in the universe and that these have a huge influence on our fulfillment. Well-being is in part subjective: we have to decide whether to accept our life as an accident, or to accept it as a gift. Finally, these authors lack a sense that human beings have special dignity or that we might experience God as present with us. In my Forum conversation with Cornel West the other week he mentioned how much he loved Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book Truth and Method. It’s about the importance of interpretation in human consciousness and begins with a poem from the twentieth century Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). “Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; / but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball / thrown by an eternal partner / with accurate and measured swing / towards you, to your center, in an arch / from the great bridgebuilding of God: / why catching then becomes a power - / not yours, a world’s.”[4] How do we catch the world God is offering to us? This morning I am going to discuss an interpretation of the Book of Matthew by my friend the biblical scholar Herman Waetjen. I am not trying to communicate facts to you or to explain something. I long to open a door so that you might experience the truth of hope, the recognition that at the heart of all reality lies the love of God. Today is the second Sunday in the church calendar. Over the next twelve months during worship we will be reading through the Gospel of Matthew. Scholars say that 600 of the 1071 verses in it, along with half of its vocabulary come from the Gospel of Mark. An additional 225 verses come from a saying source and other oral traditions.[5] And yet this Gospel is utterly original. Although the first hearers are highly urban people living in the regional capital of Antioch, really Matthew speaks directly to us. In the year 70 CE a catastrophic event threatened to obliterate the entire religion of the Jews. Roman forces crushed an uprising in Jerusalem destroying God’s earthly residence, the temple, and many of the rituals and traditions that defined the Jewish religion. Without the temple a new way of being religious had to be constructed. Let me tell you about three alternative visions for the faith from that time. First there was the way of the Pharisees led by Yohanan ben Zakkai (50-80 CE). Legend held that he had been secreted out of Jerusalem during the destruction in a coffin. HE then made an arrangement with Roman authorities to remain subject to them but with limited powers of self-government. Zakkai asserted that the study of Torah was as sacred as the Temple sacrifices. “He substituted chesed (kindness or love) in place of the demolished temple.”[6] God can be at the center of people’s lives through “a reconciliation that is realizable through deeds of mercy that are fulfilled by observing the law.”[7] Waetjen asserts that the Gospel of Matthew criticizes this vision because it leads to a distinction between righteous (moral) people who are clean and sinful outsiders. A second solution to this religious crisis comes from apocalyptic literature about the end of the world, especially the Second Book of Baruch. This author writes about the Babylonian destruction of the Jewish Temple in 487 BCE. In his vision an angel descends to the Temple, removes all the holy things and says, “He who guarded the house has left it” (2 Baruch 8:2). The keys are thrown away almost as if it was de-sanctified. According to this view,“in the present the temple has no significance.” But in the future it will be renewed in glory through the power of God. So the people wait for God’s return. Although Matthew is aware of both these answers to the religious crisis he chooses a third way beyond a division between clean and unclean people, or simply waiting for a new Temple. Matthew writes that Jesus as Son of David comes out of a particular people, with its history, etc., but Jesus is also a new creation which Waetjen translates as the Son of the Human Being.[8] We see this dual anthropology in the Hebrew bible with its division of soul/self (or nephesh) and flesh (basar). In Greek this is soul/self (psyche) and body (soma). Jesus says, “Do not continue to fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the soul; but rather continue to fear the one who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Mt. 10:28). In a physical body Jesus is born in Bethlehem as part of the Jewish community where he teaches and heals those who come to him. Jesus also exists also as soul, as the divine breath that gives all creatures life, as the first human being of the new creation, as one who shows God’s love for every person. He teaches that at the heart of all things lies forgiveness and grace. There are no people defined by their righteousness or sinfulness. At the deepest level of our existence we are connected to each other and to God. The novelist Marilynne Robinson writes about how in modern times some people claim that science shows that there are no non-material things, that we do not have a soul. In contrast she writes about our shared intuition that the soul’s “non-physicality is no proof of its non-existence… [It is] the sacred and sanctifying aspect of human being. It is the self that stands apart from the self. It suffers injuries of a moral kind, when the self it is and is not lies or steals or murders but it is untouched by the accidents that maim the self or kill it.” She concludes writing, “I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.”[9] Can we have hope? Does life have meaning? Let me speak frankly. I see you might be the “sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.” But you have a soul. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. At the heart of all reality exists the love of God. The more thankful we are, the more we receive the gift of hope. My last words come from a poem by Mary Oliver called “The Gift.” “Be still, my soul, and steadfast. / Earth and heaven both are still watching / though time is draining from the clock / and your walk, that was confident and quick, / has become slow.// So, be slow if you must, but let / the heart still play its true part. / Love still as you once loved, deeply / and without patience. Let God and the world / know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.”[10] [1] Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller tr. William Weaver (London: Vintage Classics, 1981) 4. [2] Kieran Setiya, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (NY: Riverhead Books, 2022) 173, 179, 180. [3] “The meaning of life” first appears in Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus. Ibid., 153. [4] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (NY: Crossroad, 1992). [5] Herman Waetjen, Matthew’s Theology of Fulfillment, Its Universality and Its Ethnicity: God’s New Israel as the Pioneer of God’s New Humanity (NY: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017) 1-17. See also, https://www.biblememorygoal.com/how-many-chapters-verses-in-the-bible/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesed [7] Ibid., 2. [8] Ibid., 7. [9] Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (NY: Picador, 2015) 8-9. [10] https://wildandpreciouslife0.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/the-gift-by-mary-oliver/

The Rev. Mary Carter Greene

The Invisible Beauty “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Lk. 24). Forms of beauty exist that we are only dimly aware of. So much happens that we fail to notice. We never experience some of the most beautiful phenomena in nature. Have you ever been in the Pacific Ocean and seen the sun rise over the continent? The light creates a brilliant golden path over the water that seems to go right to you. Under certain conditions, when you are far out beyond the impact zone, air gets trapped in large exploding waves creating a brilliant, short-lived shower of spray and a rainbow. When you really know the water, the texture of the ocean surface reveals currents and eddies that help you to find safety. And on a few days in your lifetime the gray of the sky will perfectly match the gray of the water and the rain will fall in such a way that it seems like a million drops of water are frozen midair just above the surface. Surfing on certain fall days at Ocean Beach the wind blows offshore, the wave doubles up and pitches over your head so that you are encased in smooth walls of emerald green. As the wave collapses behind you spray engulfs you and you are spit out back into the regular world again. I wish so dearly that I could communicate what it feels like to be riding a wave and see a dolphin just below the surface doing the same thing. Because of grief the disciples fail to see the most beautiful thing of all. They fail to see God in the presence of their friend Jesus. Today I especially understand this feeling. Mike Lawler was one of my dearest friends, the one who helped me to see all of what I just described, the generous soul who taught me to surf. Two days ago I learned that he died. At surprising times I keep finding myself emotionally overwhelmed. Mike was a six foot five inch, 220 pound contrarian bull and the world was his China shop. He dropped out of college to pioneer surfing on the Northshore of Oahu. He was not shy about confronting over-educated people who were full of hot air. He was a literary roofing contractor. He said, “I used to write sermons when I was shingling roofs, alone with my thoughts and the rhythm of a hatchet whacking nails into cedar shakes.” We spent hundreds of hours together driving to the beach in his pickup truck. It smelled strongly of wetsuit neoprene, surf wax, and cigar that he later told me he smoked so that his car didn’t smell like marijuana. We talked about creativity, painting, science, Martin Heidegger, Werner Erhard and the sixties. He taught me about the culture, art, physics, meteorology, history, ethics, sociology and technique of surfing. He introduced me to the pleasure of old-fashioned donuts and that is what I crave now after every surf session. Each All Souls Requiem at Grace Cathedral feels so different, because nothing seems more particular, more specific than the loss of someone we love. And each year that loss feels different. Today we carry with us the joy of being together after the pandemic but also the weight of so many funerals we have been hosting this fall to honor the many people who died over the last three years. We have had so many more losses as a community I hesitate to even name anyone. Who can imagine life here after Dare’s death last week? On Wednesday Chris Keady and I talked about the feeling of Mozart’s requiem. Mozart (1756-1791) composed this as he himself was dying and the music conveys a sense of frustration and anger at our limits as human beings. It expresses anxiety about whether we will be forgiven for the damage that we have done. Mozart is not afraid to encourage us to face our sadness. And with the tension and disappointment we also encounter what is beautiful, what we have not yet noticed. The theologian David Bentley Hart writes that, “what is most mysterious and exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest to hand, and that which is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy… we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing…” The modern twentieth century French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) spent nine months in a World War II German prisoner of war camp composing “Quartet for the End of Time.” It uses the four musical instruments that were available there (Piano, Cello, Violin, Clarinet). He saw such suffering and had every reason to surrender to cynicism. But instead he was fond of paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) reminding us that, “God dazzles us by an excess of truth.” He writes, “Certain people are annoyed that I believe in God. But I want people to know that God is present in everything, in the concert hall, in the ocean, on a mountain, even on the underground.” The ancient theologian St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-339) believed that death and evil ultimately cannot hinder us in moving toward God. Hart summarizes his theology writing, “Creation is… a partaking in the inexhaustible goodness of God; and its ceaseless flow of light and shadow, constancy and change… while the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God’s glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite.” My tough, impermeable, sometimes obnoxious surfing friend Mike Lawler believed this. He was so proud of being a lifelong Episcopalian. The disciples walked many miles without recognizing Jesus and I did the same when I walked with Mike. A few years ago he wrote a December letter to me from his home in Hawaii about his own death. He said death used to seem so far off “to be no bother.” And then he quotes Joan Didion whom he describes as an Episcopalian (from her book The Year of Magical Thinking). Didion writes, "We are not idealized wild beings. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we are mourning, for better or worse, ourselves. As we were we are no longer. As we will one day be not at all… as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be." Mike closes his letter with these words, “My life has been partly molded by having lost a little sister when I was about thirteen. You are afraid to love [because those you] love will die. I wish there was a way to get over the fear… but this is not a conversation for Advent… The ocean was calm and glassy tonight as the spangled sun made you look and love the world. Your sermon touched me as no other. Love, Mike.” Forms of beauty exist that we are only dimly aware of. We are drawn beyond the world to the source of its beauty. Job 19:21-27a Canticle 9 Luke 24:13-35

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to [God] all of them are alive” (Lk. 20). Haggai 1:15b-2:9 Psalm 149 Luke 20:27-38 What happens after you die? Jesus cares so intensely about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death influences how we live.   As a freshman at Harvard College my old teacher Cornel West hung two pictures on his wall: Malcolm X and Albert Einstein. His roommate James Brown, (not the singer but the man who later became the famous sports journalist) asked him, “I thought you were more of a Martin Luther King type.” Cornel replied, “I am but one doesn’t cancel out the other. I’m loving them both, just the way they both loved us.”1   In his second year The Nation of Islam came to Harvard and black students packed the hall. “Hefty Fruit of Islam guards, the paramilitary wing of the Nation [were] stationed at all the doors.” It had only been six years since Malcolm X’s assassination and when the speaker referred to Malcolm as a dog, Cornel felt startled. The speech went on. When the speaker did it again, Cornel moved to stand up and reply but his friends restrained him.   Finally, the speaker called Malcolm X a dog one more time and Cornel leapt up. He said, “Who gives you the authority to call someone who loved black people so deeply a ‘dog’?” After a brief exchange the speaker said to the 18 year old Cornel. “Young brother, you’ll be lucky to get out of this building alive. And if you do manage to slip out, you’ll be gone in five days.” In his memoir Cornel writes, “from there, it got worse. The crowd went dead silent…” as everyone looked at him. Friends had to negotiate with the guards and then escort him out of the building.   For the next week Cornel went underground going from dorm room to dorm room, too afraid to attend class, hardly sleeping. Finally he went to talk to someone in the Nation. They began by arguing but then Cornel really began to listen, to listen from the heart. For hours they had a wonderful conversation because they gave each other “space to be heard.” His new friend told him he didn’t need to be afraid anymore.   Intense conflict, fear and looming death characterize the atmosphere as Jesus takes up a debate with leaders of the temple. After a long journey to the capitol Jesus arrives in triumph to cheering crowds who wave palm branches. Jesus weeps over the terrible future of Jerusalem. He angrily drives out people who are selling things in the temple. Then he returns there every day to share the good news with the “spellbound” crowds.   Behind the scenes the authorities, “[keep] looking for a way to kill him” (Lk. 19:47). But Jesus’ popularity protects him and so the religious leaders try to discredit his teaching. They want to embarrass him, to get him tangled up in his own words, to provoke him to say something offensive that they might use against him. They have three different debates, the first one about authority, the second on taxes and our story this morning about the resurrection.   Remember, Jesus is only days away from being killed on the cross. The tension and fear among his friends cannot be understated. Jesus wisely avoids the traps that his persecutors set for him. In fact he changes this antagonism into a chance for genuine learning to happen. He is teaching both the people who love him and those who hate him so that some of his enemies even say, “Teacher, you have spoken well” (Lk. 20).   In those days Sadducees were part of the upper class and had an influential role in the temple’s worship.2 They differ from the Pharisees, Jesus and the authors of the Gospels in two main ways. First, they do not believe in resurrection, or any life after we die.   And second, they were convinced that only the first five books of the Bible were authoritative scripture.3 I have known this for thirty years and do not completely understand what it means. I often wonder what did they make of the psalms and prophets, for instance? In any event apparently in those days it was commonly believed that the first five books did not include references to the resurrection in the way that the other biblical books did.   The question they use to entrap Jesus has to do with an ancient cultural practice described in the Book of Deuteronomy (Deut. 25:5-10) called “levirate marriage.” The word levir is Latin for a husband’s brother. The idea is that when a woman’s husband dies, his brother will marry her, they will have children and those children will carry on the deceased person’s name.   So in order to make Jesus stumble in his defense of resurrection, the Sadducees ask what would happen if each of seven brothers married one woman and all died childless. Whose wife would she be in the resurrection? It’s what a friend of mine who is a lawyer would call a gotcha question. Their goal is to make the idea of resurrection seem absurd and to expose Jesus as a fake.   But Jesus has a brilliant answer. He says in essence. “You mistakenly assume that the cultural conventions of our time will continue to determine our lives in the coming age of resurrection. Unlike today in that time beyond death we will neither marry nor be given in marriage. We will not be able to die anymore.”4   Why does Jesus refer to death here? Greek uses two different words for “to marry” and “to be given in marriage.” In that world of the Bible men marry and women are given in marriage. Jesus looks at the marriage arrangements of his time as a way of dealing with the insecurity that follows death, almost as a kind of insurance policy.   Since in the next world there will be no more death, a widow will no longer need a new husband or a child to provide for her. At that point she will not be someone’s wife, or someone’s property. She will simply be a child of God, a child of the resurrection.   Jesus declares that in the resurrection, we will not have power over other people. No one will have power over us. We will all be free. If this were not enough he even goes on to give the Sadducees a reason for why they might change their mind and experience the liberating influence of the resurrection. He gives them an idea taken from the portion of the Bible that they regard as authoritative.   When Moses experiences God after seeing a bush that is burning but not consumed by flame. God tells him, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6), not “I WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” In that time when Jesus was surrounded by death and the fear of death he says that God is, “God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive” (Lk. 20).   And so today we experience again the way of Jesus. He does not hate or attack his enemies. He listens from the heart. He firmly responds to their arguments in the way that my teacher Cornel west did as college sophomore. Jesus wins them over with love so that they say, “Teacher, you have spoken well.”   Jesus also warns us to be careful of expecting God to be limited by our cultural conventions and our intelligence. Even in our moments of greatest imagination, we cannot grasp the beautiful mystery of the holiness that is our deepest desire.   And yet we have these moments of insight. Do you ever feel as if someone you loved but has died is near? Your intuition may be right because, to God “all of them are alive.”   Today we celebrate All Saint’s Day by baptizing fifteen people into the church. They will join this mystical community of people who are liberated from the fear of death and straining to live in love. They will be joining you and me, and all the people of all times and places who are still alive in God.   What happens after you die? Jesus cares so much about the present moment that he does not say much about this, except that our fear of death does not have to constrain how we live and that one day we will be free of the social structures that diminish us. Jesus might ask, “Whose poster would you put up on your dorm room wall? Who would you be willing to stand up for and defend in public even at the risk of your life?”   Let us pray: You know our hearts O God, you see the challenges we face. Help us to listen from the heart and give us a space to be heard. And let us find our hope in the presence of those who have gone before us and in the love of your son Jesus. Amen. _______________ 1 There is so much more to this story and to Professor West’s connections with the Nation of Islam. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (New York: SmileyBooks, 2009) 63, 67-70. 2 I don’t know if it is true but the Wikipedia article claims that the Sadducees name was related to Zadok the High Priest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees 3 Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. 4 https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2019/11/5/whats-resurrection-for-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-second-week-after-pentecost  

Dolores Huerta Civil Rights Activist October 23, 2022 Grace Cathedral San Francisco, CA 

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31).                                                                    Jeremiah 31:27-34 Psalm 119:97-104 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 Luke 18:1-8 “When the Son of humanity comes will he find faith on earth” (Lk. 18)? These words from two thousand years ago are the defining question of our time. This week the House Committee on the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol concluded its hearings. We have seen indisputable evidence that politicians continue to use false claims of electoral fraud to secure their own power.[1] Last month the governors of Florida and Texas falsely promised jobs and resettlement help to asylum seekers who they sent to Washington, D.C. and Martha’s Vineyard. They used immigrants, including children, as part of a political stunt.[2] This action echoes the way that black southerners were bused out of the south by segregationist White Citizens’ Councils to cities with prominent integrationist leaders in 1962.[3] This week in Ukraine and Iran ordinary people were slaughtered because of a distant political agenda, because of an ideology. Here at home we see terrible poverty and neglect on our own streets. “When the Son of humanity comes, will he find faith on earth?” In the face of the heartbreaking cruelty and dishonesty of his own time Jesus tells his friends, “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk. 18). Jesus tells this story near the end of his own journey to Jerusalem, as he talks about the end of time when God’s realm of justice, peace and love will come. The Hebrew Bible frequently demands that the powerful have a special responsibility to widows, strangers and orphans. These groups are vulnerable because they have no male relatives to defend them. Although widows in the Bible (like in the stories of Ruth or Elijah and the widow of Zarephath) often model tenacity, resourcefulness and initiative, they represent vulnerability just as the judge symbolizes power. In several sections of Luke’s Gospel he uses a “how much more” argument. “If you then, who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Lk. 11:13).[4] This parable uses this same logic. A widow comes to a judge seeking justice. He does not believe in God. Nor does he respect people. He refuses to help her until he reasons that, “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out” (Lk. 18). Let me point out two ways in which the Greek version differs from the English translation. When the judge says that he does not want the widow to “wear him out” the Greek word for this is hupopiazē. It is an expression from boxing. It means to literally give someone a black eye. The judge doesn’t want the widow to embarrass him or injure his reputation. Second, the Greek more strongly conveys urgency, impatience and conviction. Greek uses double negatives to add emphasis. It’s almost as if Jesus raises his voice to underline what he means. A more literal version might be, “And will not God give vengeance to his chosen ones who are crying day and night? And be impatient to help them!”[5] The point is not that God resembles the unjust judge. In almost every respect Jesus describes God as the opposite. The judge is self-centered. He only uses people. But God is full of love, impatient for his children to thrive. Jesus is unafraid to be humiliated for our sake. The purpose of this “how much more” story is for us to trust God and to persist in prayer.[6] Today I want to give you one picture of a faithless world and then to consider how faith humanizes us. In college I knew a woman whose favorite story was Ernest Hemmingway's "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber." This always worried me about her partly because of the story's misogyny but mostly because of its position with regard to faith. We meet Francis Macomber as a thirty-five year old American business tycoon on safari in East Africa. As the story unfolds we gradually come to realize that he has committed the cardinal sin in the universe of Hemingway fiction. The day before he betrayed his manliness and ran in fear from a wounded lion who had been concealed in the tall grass. Margot, his wife, does not try to comfort him in his humiliation. Instead, she despises this act of cowardice and as a consequence she sleeps with the safari leader that night. Hemmingway also seems to hate his own fictitious character, because he wouldn't leave his wife, because "he would take anything" from her.[7] The next day the group goes in pursuit of a dangerous buffalo. Then, suddenly, in an almost religious conversion, Macomber changes. Hemmingway writes, that “[f]or the first time in his life he felt wholly without fear. Instead of fear he had a feeling of definite elation.” The safari leader admires this new courage. His wife fears it because she no longer has the power to make him ashamed of being afraid. Why is it called a "Short Happy Life"? Only moments later as Macomber tries to flush the buffalo out of the long grass, “he [feels] a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.” Although his wife claimed she was aiming at the buffalo, she shot him in the back of the head. When the son of man comes will he find faith on earth? In Hemmingway's universe there is no faith. Men can never depend on women, or on other men. Every person is either a conquest or an adversary. The individual can only rely on an elusive courage that comes miraculously from within, an irrational bravery which completely isolates each soul from all else. The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr emphasizes that faith means more than merely faith in God. Faith concerns all the ways that we are connected to and support and depend on each other. “We see this possibility – that human history will come to its end… in the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and “word of honor” is given and received in deception and distrust. If [human beings] can no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as [human beings]?”[8] What shall we do in this time before the second coming of Christ? We need to pray and not lose hope. We also need to strive to be people of honesty and integrity, to listen and care for others. To use the language of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) we need to treat people as ends rather than as means to our own goals. The heartbreaking sin of this judge was his inability to see the widow as a person. I have a friend named Sue Everson who is a world authority on hopelessness. As a medical researcher she studies the effect that hopelessness has on our health. One of her more startling statistics is that people who feel hopeless are twenty percent more likely to die in the next four years from a stroke. Hopelessness increases your chance of a stroke to the same degree that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day does.  Sue scientifically studies how religion seems to make people less hopeless.[9] Today with churches around the world we celebrate the Children’s Sabbath. A central part of what we do together involves our care for children and families. We teach children how to listen spiritually, how to pray and not lose heart. Professor Lisa Miller has been our guest on the forum twice. She argues that denying our spirituality is not just untrue but unhealthy for us and especially for children. Using new techniques ranging from twin studies to neuroimaging, scientists are coming to a new appreciation for just how important spirituality is for human flourishing. Miller claims that all children possess a kind of “natural spirituality.” This interest in the Holy, this, “direct sense of… the heartbeat of the living universe… precedes and transcends language, culture and religion.”[10] This spirituality protects us, but not completely, from depression, anxiety and the tendency to misuse alcohol and drugs. So what is the most important thing that we can do as adults for children? We can support their Sunday School teachers and the families who gather here. We can take their questions seriously. We can listen to them.[11] And so the conversation continues every week here. In life we are forever asking and being asked a simple question, “do you believe me?”[12] Do you? Seeing what is happening in the world, it is easy to struggle with a crisis of trust right now. I trust God but I don’t know if the Son will find faith on earth. And yet at the same time I feel remarkably supported by the life I find at Grace Cathedral. C.S. Lewis writes that, “Faith… is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of changing moods….” Because of this he says we need to pray and hold some of the Christian ideals in our mind for a period of time every day. We need to worship because, “We have to be continually reminded of what we believe… Belief has to be fed…” People do not cease to be Christian because of a good argument but because they simply drift away. Kathleen Norris writes, “prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.”[13] My friends pray always and do not lose heart. Be trustworthy and care for the children. When the Son of humanity comes may he find faith on earth. [1] Alan Feuer, Luke Broadwater, Maggie Haberman, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt, “Jan. 6: The Story So Far,” The New York Times, 14 October 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/politics/jan-6-timeline.html?name=styln-capitol-mob&region=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=show&is_new=false [2] Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eileen Sullivan, “Is That Legal: How Scores of Migrants Came to be Shipped North,” The New York Times, 16 September 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/us/politics/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis.html?name=styln-marthas-vineyard-immigrants&region=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=show&is_new=false and https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/us/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-texas.html [3] Jacey Fortin, “When Segregationists Offered One-Way Tickets to Black Southerners,” The New York Times, 14 October 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/us/migrants-marthas-vineyard-desantis-texas.html [4] See also, “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you – you of little faith!” (Lk. 12:28). [5] 22 Pent (10-16-16) 24C. [6] Ibid. [7]  Hemingway cynically writes, "They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him now." Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway (NY: Scribners/Macmillan, 1987) 18. See also, 20 Pent (10-21-01) 24C. [8] “We see this possibility – that human history will come to its end neither in a brotherhood of [humanity] nor in universal death under the blows of natural or man-made catastrophe, but in the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and “word of honor” is given and received in deception and distrust. If [human beings] can no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as [human beings]?” H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 1. [9] 20 Pent (10-17-04) 24C. [10] Lisa Miller, The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving (NY: Picador, 2015) 25. [11] Miller quotes a parent who says, “I didn’t realize for a long time that when my child asks a question and I say, “I don’t know,” and just leave it at that, I’m actually stopping the conversation.” Ibid., 47. [12] H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 22. [13] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (NY: Riverhead Books, 1998) 60-1.

The Rev. Dr. Greg Kimura

The Rev. Mary Carter Greene

"No slave can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and wealth.” Luke 16 Jeremiah 8:18--9:1 Psalm 79:1-9 1 Timothy 2:1-7 Luke 16:1-13 I have been dwelling on Jesus’ parable about the fired manager over the last few months. In an instant the shock of losing everything seizes him. A sense of inadequacy, worthlessness and humiliation confronts us when we do not have enough to provide for those we love. This terror may be completely foreign to you, it may have come and gone in different stages of your life – or  you may be in the grips of this fear now and have no idea how to ever escape from it. We often talk about inequality without spelling out what it really means. In our society we tolerate a greater amount of insecurity and fear than in other advanced democracies. Not having adequate healthcare, housing, food, education and leisure time creates terrible and unnecessary suffering for millions. In America racism has always been part of this story. Treating some people as less than fully human has made us callous to the pain of others. People often ask me a simple question that I never answer straightforwardly. “Why do your parents live in Florida?” The reason quite simply is that during the last years of his employment a younger woman was being abused by my father’s boss. My dad publicly stood up for her and as a result lost his job and the pension benefits that he desperately needed in his retirement. For every remaining year of his life he will continue to pay a substantial price for acting righteously. Their small Florida town is a cheap place to live. Jesus’ story is similarly about a turning point in someone’s life. It is about a man forced to look back at his past as he faces an uncertain future. A manager caught squandering his boss’ wealth gets fired. Afraid that he will fall into poverty, he acts quickly. Before the owner can get the word out, the manager cancels his clients’ debts in the hope that they may one day help him. It seems strange but the owner regards this behavior as clever. Jesus agrees. He says, “for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light” (Lk. 16).  Jesus goes on, “I tell you make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” Augustine, the fourth century African saint writes, “I can’t believe this story came from the lips of our Lord.” We agree and immediately set to work explaining it, justifying it, domesticating Jesus so that he won’t interrupt our life. But Jesus will not sit down and be silent. Perhaps we feel offended, because Jesus says, “be like that” manager when we believe we are better than that. If we were laid off, we would not walk out with the office furniture, or give away company property to win friends cheaply. We long for a simple explanation of this story that will not complicate our life. Jesus however does not care about this. He passionately desires that we will return to God. Scholars want the same kind of simple answer that we do. They explain the story away. Some call it hyperbole, a kind of exaggeration that Jesus uses to get our attention. Others suggest that the owner is a first century crime boss and that this manager robs the rich to give to the poor. One scholar writes that the steward gives away his regular commission. Each of these explanations might make us feel more comfortable, but I believe that Jesus is challenging us. Three things particularly stand out about his words this morning. Jesus speaks about how to treat money and the future. Jesus talks about money more than you and I do. I read somewhere that in the gospel of Luke one out of every seven of Jesus’ sayings has to do with money. Jesus seems consistently more concerned about it than about friendship, sex, marriage, politics, government, war, family values, truthfulness or church. Jesus more wisely than most of us recognizes the power of money. I wonder if people who believe only in material things, but do not believe in God, talk more about money that spiritual people. Jesus would say that both are wrong, both materialists and Christians underestimate the effect that money has on our soul. Materialists fail to recognize the existence of the ultimate. Christians fail to see how money is related to it. Jesus says some radical things about money. He understands the temptation to live for accumulating money and the things that it can buy. With regard to the gospel and money, there is one thing I am sure of and one that I am not. I’m not certain about this part, but it seems to me that money in the Gospel of Luke is always tainted. Luke calls it mammon. This word includes everything that you own that has cash value. There is something already corrupt about mammon. We all tell stories to justify why we have money and someone else does not. We all may be equal in God’s eyes, but money substantiates the difference between a person with power and a person without it. Part of me wants to resist this, to believe that money is simply neutral, that its goodness depends only on what we spend it on. But I think Luke’s point is that this view assumes that money has no history before we possess it. In our culture we have so many self-serving stories that justify our wealth. We often associate it with moral virtue (as if it mostly came from our hard work, intelligence, education, competence, etc.). By warning us about money, Luke reminds us of the truth. All we have and all we own and all we are comes from God. This is not at all to say that we should try to be poor. Money can solve problems. The vast majority of problems could be resolved by a particular amount of money. Unfortunately the solutions that money buys never last. Our problems traced back to their roots are ultimately spiritual problems. This brings me to the second point about money, the thing that I am more sure about. I believe that money connects the spiritual and the material. I know it is radical, but with Jesus, I am convinced that we can use our money to genuinely please God. Whether money is inevitably tainted as I believe Luke claims, or if it is neutral as my economics professors believed, money makes ministry possible. We can do God’s work with money. We can make an amazing difference in the lives of the poor, the sick, the lonely and the spiritually destitute through our use of money. True wealth comes not from what we receive or own but from what we give away. Grace Cathedral with its beauty, its history as one of the oldest churches in Western America may seem as close to permanent as you can get in this world of change. But this is a fragile institution. Every year a large number of people have to give a large amount of money in order for us to keep going. There are not many places that will make better use of your gift. Organized together we visit the sick, the lonely and the elderly. We teach children about God and introduce them to adults who they can depend on. God changes lives here. Maybe your money is honest, maybe it’s not, but it does do God’s work at Grace Cathedral. The final thing that I believe Jesus says to us through this story has to do with time. I think faith can make some people passive. They reason that since God has all the power, what they do doesn’t matter. Jesus emphasizes that this is a parable about a turning point. The manager feels the same kind of pressure that we feel here today. But instead of responding with nostalgia for a more stable past, or by wallowing in his present misery, the manager acts decisively. Jesus applauds this. The American poet Marie Howe wrote a poem about her brother dying of AIDS called “The Last Time.” “The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant / … he leaned forward // and took my two hands in his hands and said, / I’m going to die soon.  I want you to know that. // And I said, I think I do know. / And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t. // And I said, I do. And he said, What? / And I said, Know that you’re going to die. // And he said, No, I mean that you are.” When it comes to money, most of us act as if we don’t know that we will die.  Jesus’ story is not just about how we are spending our money, but how we are spending our lives.  Perhaps his deeper point is that this world, in which we spend ourselves to impress others or to protect our ego, is passing away.  In this life we have a singular opportunity to spend ourselves shrewdly for the sake of God’s Kingdom. The story of the unjust manager may not make complete sense to us yet. But this parable reminds us that a feeling of entitlement and superiority comes along with our money. This can isolate us from God, and make us blind to the needs of others. Jesus’ story also shows us the connection between the spiritual and the material, that God is more pleased by what we give than what we get. Finally it awakens us to the truth that Jesus’ promise is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. You cannot buy the future. It will never belong to you. But you can act confidently because the future belongs to God. I think this is what my father did when he helped his co-worker. I wonder what effect his simple sacrifice has had in her life over the years. This is what Jesus himself did. Even on the way to the cross he trusted God completely. No home on earth will ever feel completely comfortable or safe because we were made to always draw nearer to our creator. Another says that the manager expected the owner to check the books and that the owner is glad for the positive public relations that this debt relief would bring. The escaped slave Frederick Douglass writes that, “You may not get all that you pay for in this world but you pay for all that you get.” Quoted in Frederick Streets, “Accountability,” The Christian Century, 3/17/99. If you go to a therapist, they’ll help you find your strengths and adjust for your weaknesses. They’ll give you books to read and have conversations about how you feel. If you go to Jesus, he tells you something totally different. Jesus says trust in God, because the future belongs to him. Marie Howe What the Living Do (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

“Rejoice with me for I have found my sheep that was lost” (Lk. 15). Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 Psalm 14 1 Timothy 1:12-17 Luke 15:1-10 Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By is one of my favorite books. These authors point out that simple unexamined metaphors lie behind the very structure of our thought. The idea of “argument as war” is an example. We talk about winning an argument, an indefensible position, being right on target, shooting down an assumption, etc. We could imagine another culture regarding argument as being more like a kind of dance.[i] Today Jesus addresses two primal understandings of religion that deeply influenced the people of his society and our own. The first is the idea of a spiritual quest, a search for God. The second idea is that of church as a community of saints set apart from the world. Jesus upsets assumptions that lie so deep in our consciousness that we simply assume that this is just what life in God means. The spiritual quest. On December 24, 1915 Albert Einstein was drinking tea in his Berlin apartment when he received a crumpled, muddy, blood-stained letter from the trenches of World War I. It contained a message from the great genius and astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916). Let me quote the letter’s final words. “As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas.”[ii] The letter astounded Einstein not simply because one of the most respected scientists in Germany was commanding an artillery unit on the Russian front, or because of the author’s fear of a coming catastrophe. In tiny print on the back page, only legible through the use of a magnifying glass, Schwarzschild had sent him the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity. Schwarzschild’s approach worked well on a normal star which you might imagine as being like a bowling ball sitting on your bed and gently compressing the space around it. The problem arises when a large star exhausts its fuel and collapses. That star would keep compressing until the force of gravity grew to be so great that space would become infinitely curved and closed in on itself. The result would be, “an inescapable abyss permanently cut off from the rest of the universe.” Out of a sense of duty and perhaps also to show that a faithful Jew could be a good German, Schwarzschild volunteered to serve in the war. During a mustard gas attack he helped two of his men put on masks. Slow to put on his own, this exposure may have been what initiated an autoimmune disorder that painfully covered his body with sores and killed him months later. At first Schwarzschild dismissed his discovery as a kind of mathematical anomaly, but over time it began to really frighten him. In his last letter from Russia to his wife he wrote that this idea, “has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one that I can feel with the entirety of my soul.” A young man named Richard Courant stayed up talking with Schwarzschild on the night before he died. Schwarzschild told him that this concentration of mass would distort space and causality.[iii] The true horror was that since light would never escape from it, this singularity was unknowable, utterly unchanging, entirely isolated from everything else. Schwarzschild was one of the first people to contemplate the meaning of a black hole.[iv] But all of us are quite capable of imagining a place completely cut off from God. In fact most of us have been there. Isolation can feel terrifying. Perhaps you feel misunderstood, or set apart by a secret, or by experiences that makes you different from the people around you. Maybe you believe that something that you did in the past simply cannot be forgiven or that you have been harmed and cannot be healed. Perhaps just the busyness of your life, or the loneliness of it, makes real connection with another person impossible. Or maybe you just feel that you are missing something that others have, that you are cut off from God. The religious leaders of Jesus’ time see him sharing meals with deplorable, notoriously immoral people, with prostitutes and the tax collectors who collaborate with the Roman army. They often point out that these people haven’t really changed or repented. They wonder if Jesus is incurably naïve. They argue that someone who was from God would have the wisdom to realize how bad these people really are. In response Jesus tells three stories. One is about a wealthy shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one in the wilderness. “When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices” (Lk. 15). Another is about a woman sweeping the whole house to find a coin and concludes saying, “There is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents.” The last is the story of the Prodigal Son. In other words Jesus takes our dominant metaphor of a spiritual quest and turns it on its head. Religion is not about seeking God. It is about God’s persistence in finding us. It is about overcoming separation and the joy of reunion. As a young management consultant one of my closest friends in our Santa Monica office was a young engineer named Walid Iskandar. Walid had grown up in Lebanon during the 1970’s. He was a deeply sincere, thoughtful and fun person with a kind of mischievous smile that I can still see in my mind’s eye. In college I played rugby with a young freshman who was still trying to figure out the game. His name was Mark Bingham. What these two friends of mine share in common is that they both lost their lives twenty one years ago today when terrorists hijacked their airplanes. In my imagination they are perpetually young. In their last moments, despite the confusion and fear, I believe that God was with them. In 2018 twelve boys on a soccer team with their coach found themselves trapped deep below the earth in a labyrinthine network of flooded caves in Thailand. As the monsoon season progressed it seemed impossible to nearly everyone in the world that they would be saved. Cave divers from England talked about not being able to see their hands in front of their masks, of wriggling through impossibly narrow spaces again and again unsure of the way out. I will never forget that image of the diver emerging from the water and the amazement on the boys’ faces that they had been found. This joy at being discovered lies at the heart of faith. The second idea that Jesus overturns is that the church exists as a community of holy people set apart from the world. You see this in the conviction that you must first think, say, or do something before you can be acceptable to God. A few weeks ago a very close friend went to the funeral of her father. At the end of the service, the very last words that the pastor spoke went something like this. “Pat was a great husband, father, lawyer and community leader. But until Pat found Jesus and accepted him in his heart, he was a sinner. Only through the sacrifice of Jesus are we cleansed from sin. No matter how hard you might try to be good, until you have accepted Jesus you are a sinner.” Jesus completely overturns this picture of how to be in God. It’s not that you become good and then God helps you. Instead, God helps us so that we can be healed. The critics of Jesus feel offended by his connection to the people who break the rules. And Jesus tells them, “these are exactly the people I came to help. God’s love is abundant and overflowing. God will always persist in finding those who are lost.” The point is that God’s love and mercy always comes before anything else. We do not first accept Jesus in our heart and then become free from sin. The church is not a community of former sinners, but of actively sinning sinners. God does not reward us for living well or believing something, God makes living well and faith itself possible by loving us back to life. Today we celebrate Congregation Sunday and our calling as a unique people of God. There is no other community quite like this one and I love who we are. But let me be perfectly clear, we have not stopped screwing up. And yet we are loved by God anyway. Although we continue to slip up, we keep encountering God’s grace. This makes us a joyful community of people who against all odds God has found in the way that God is finding all people. Let me close with a poem by Denise Levertov about this peace that passes all understanding. It’s called “The Avowal.” “As swimmers dare / to lie face to the sky / and water bears them, / as hawks rest upon air / and air sustains them, / so would I learn to attain / freefall, and float / into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, / knowing no effort earns / that all-surrounding grace.”[v] In the face of isolation, everyday cruelty and sudden death what metaphor are we going to live by? Will we choose to see our life as a spiritual quest or as the experience of being found by God? Are we the holy ones or lost souls grateful every day to be found by God. My friends rejoice with me. [i] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 3-7. [ii] Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World tr. Adrian Nathan West (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2020) 34ff. See also “Karl Schwarzschild” on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schwarzschild [iii] A hypothetical traveler capable of surviving a journey into a black hole would receive light and information from the future. [iv] And the frightening question asked by this dying man was that if such a thing exists in nature, could there be something like this in the human psyche. Could a concentration of human will cause millions to be exploited so that the laws of human relations no longer held? Schwarzschild feared that this was already happening in Germany. [v] Denise Levertov, “The Avowal.” https://allpoetry.com/The-Avowal

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, 2C32 13 Pentecost (Proper 18C) 8:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. Eucharist Sunday 4 September 2022 Jeremiah 18:1-11 Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17 Philemon 1-21 Luke 14:25-33 We have a stained glass window with a larger than life image of the astronaut John Glenn in his spacesuit. Like him, this morning we will travel a great distance in a short time through three little sermons each based on a different reading. The first sermon is called, “Hating Your Life.” The world’s Anglican bishops met together at this summer’s Lambeth Conference in England. A group of bishops issued a press release condemning same sex marriage. It demands, “repentance by the revisionist provinces,” and goes on to state that we cannot all be in communion if we have two different opinions about marriage and sexuality.[i] We experience this kind of Christianity frequently here in North America. All of us encounter Christians who seem to have absolute confidence in knowing precisely who God is and that they are doing exactly what God wants them to do. Often they seem to believe that God hates people whose faith is different than their own. Let me point out that lacking this kind of confidence is not the same thing as lacking faith.